An Interview with The Great Escape

As part of research for a Kusamarian Episode, I interviewed Co-Founder Mr. Tin both in video and written formats prior to presentation, the full version which can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhmUvxmdDMw

As additional material, I’m publishing the full interview with permission on Polkaverse.

Could you give me a summary of what your open gov proposal is, and what it enables, and why it should be funded as a public good through treasury?

The open gov proposal published by the Great Escape is called “Promoting the adoption of Polkadot through gaming.

As the name indicates, we intend to ask for retro funding for building a concrete application of the XCM tech to GameFi with our game (the Great Escape), thus effectively promoting the adoption of Polkadot for gaming purposes.

This proposal aims to retroactively fund:

• The creation of an accessible Polkadot-based game
• The design and improvement of a smooth gaming experience
• The creation of a fun game with a stable and secure infrastructure
• Showcasing the unique possibilities offered by the Polkadot technical stack with the creation of an original cross-chain deposit/rewards system
• Driving the adoption of the Polkadot tech stack with an open-source toolkit to help other builders adopt and adapt our cross-chain funding/withdraw solution
• Creating a fun hub for Parachains to join forces and raise awareness about their own tech

The idea is that the Great Escape was able to leverage on the unique possibilities offered by the Polkadot/Moonbeam stack to build a game that solves the main issues faced by players and builders alike when it comes to Web3 gaming: the high entry barriers.

We’ve interviewed dozens of players to understand the main barriers for web3 players:

• The fragmentation of the games offer around more than a dozen of active chains
• The research required to discover a new ecosystem (where to get the token, what wallet to use, what is the cost of the gas etc…)
• The upfront investment required to join a new game ( to acquire/rent an avatar + gas)
• The lack of trust in an unfamiliar ecosystem.

And buit the Great Escape to be a hyper-casual platformer game leveraging the Polkadot and Moonbeam tech stack, creating a new generation of Web 3 game with a new model:

• Free-to-play
• Gas-less
• Wallet-less (players can join without a wallet, they create one when they off-ramp)
• Chain-agnostic (players can join the game from any chain)
• Offers rewards in any token (players can claim rewards in their preferred token).

We believe that it should be funded by the Treasury as we not only show a great example of what can be achieved in terms of gaming solutions thanks to the Polkadot tech’ but also because we are actively promoting the XCM use and created a Jungle EVM/XCM Toolkit that can easily be used by other builders to deploy their games and even DeFi dApps on Polkadot.

As such, we consider that our work benefits the whole ecosystem as it makes Polkadot more attractive for builders while also making it super easy for dApp users to interact with Polkadot-based Dapps without even having to realize it.

It seems like you've had a lot of growth in activity towards your game, at least based on Twitter. Where do you feel like that has come from, mostly? I've seen a number of campaigns and partnerships appear, and I know you've always incentivized playing, but I'm curious what your perspective is--and do you have analytics on these? Do you feel like you'd have enough of a player base to continue playing and growing even without incentives?

Yes, our player base grew out a lot over the past 6 months. We went from 500-ish players on the closed beta in June 2023 to over 1075 now (mid-December) - and more than 1800 players have tried our game at least once.

This big increase in number can be linked to two major shifts in strategy that we adopted around May/June 2023.

First, we gradually transitioned away from a token-gated game, requiring a NFT + the game token to play to a free-to-play game model. Players can now join without any upfront investment in seconds thanks to our fast on-boarding process relying on homemade player’s account custodial solution.

Second, we started to work on a new player’s acquisition strategy that aimed at on-boarding hundreds of players at once through the organization of large open tournaments with attractive prize pools.

We organized 3 tournaments on our own, targeting mainly countries with a great Web3 player base like the Philippines and Vietnam or emerging countries with an interesting profile when it comes to casual gaming like Turkey.

These open tournaments relied on local influencers to bring new players in and managed to attract over 1000 players in total, most of them having never heard of Polkadot nor Moonbeam.

We also established some partnerships with the AGG guild that has an arabic-speaking crowd and managed to attract dozens of new regular players through that partnership.

We now boast about 150 to 220 players on a weekly basis, making the Great Escape the TOP 1 non-DeFi Dapp on Moonbeam in terms of EOA.

* Please take note that only the players on the V2 contract (listed 7 or 8 months ago) are accounted for in the Alltime section of the analytics leaderboard (hence the discrepancy in numbers -> 771 vs actually over 1800 players)

Source: Moonbeam Analytix

This active base of players keeps on growing steadily and boasts about 1000 daily game sessions, a number that has been growing steadily since last May.

The other factor of growth has come from the organization of branded tournaments for BiFrost and Apillon in Q3 2023 to respectively promote the launch of LST and of Apillon’s services.

These tournaments both had turnouts of over 280 players, who enjoyed playing the game with a specially designed character on a fun Bifrost/Apillon themed-map.

We’re proud to have managed to double our player base in just 6 months in the middle of the bear market, and are really looking forward to keep on growing our player base.

One of the great strengths of a hyper-casual game like the Great Escape is that it can quickly become self-sustainable once a certain threshold of players is reached.

We currently boast above 40.6% of player’s retention after 30 days, where on average traditional (Web 2) top-tier hyper casual games barely reach 1.75% to 2% of retention in the same period of time.

As Ads revenues account for between 80% and 90% of hyper-casual games incomes, this exceptionally high retention rate is great news in terms of the game profitability over the long run.

That’s why, we are confident in the sustainability of our economic model, given also that we managed to generate revenues even during the bear and with a game in closed beta through NFT upgrades, consumables sales and the sale of our game as a community-building and brand awareness service solution (to Apillon and BiFrost).

Basically, everything needs to be easy for players to want to participate. I assume most of your upcoming changes in regards to UI/UX are around that, as well as chain agnostic and wallet-less gaming. Could you give me some specifics around the plans you have here, as well as helping convey how you perceive going chain agnostic? As you probably know, a number of projects have "left" the ecosystem, as more participation often (sadly) can be found elsewhere, but this leaves ecosystem supporters feeling a bit betrayed. Would love your optics here.

When it comes to our perception of going chain-agnostic, we believe that it’s great news for Polkadot.

We managed to greatly lower the entry barrier for potential GameFi players, and that in itself is excellent news. But to go even further, the cross-chain/deposit system that we built for our game could NOT be built anywhere else than on Polkadot.

We basically see our cross-chain deposit/rewards mechanism as a net converter of new Polkadot-based dApps users. Indeed, thanks to that solution, you can imagine having a bitcoin maxi or a ETH lover joining, playing and enjoying our game without even realizing that it’s all powered thanks to Polkadot and Moonbeam. We basically help bring in new users.

Players can do everything directly from the chains they are familiar with, thus focusing on the gaming part of the experience rather than on the technical part.

Imagine if people had to have a deep understanding of Internet protocols just in order to access Google or X/Twitter. That would just not work!

If we want Polkadot to become successful over the long run, we need to first showcase how great it is to create simple dApps that can be used by the many without any specific knowledge about the blockchain.

We see the Great Escape as good way to convey the following message:

The future is definitely multi-chain and Polkadot has a great deal to offer when it comes to that.

I'm sure there's stuff I'm unaware of, but since we have done a feature on GLMR apes in the past, I'd love to see if I can sneak in some alpha. Is there anything you'd be willing to share?

The GLMR APES (GLMA) were integrated into the Great Escape game on September 21st, 2023 and can now enjoy the game along the Gibbons and GLMR Jungle NFTs.

The GLMA are now the strongest in-game avatar, possessing great speed, HP and jump abilities. They compete for both the classic and for a GLMA-only section of the weekly prize pool in GLMB (the game test token).

These NFTs can now be rented/leased using both GLMR and GLMB on Double Protocol (one of the OG landing platforms).

When it comes to the alpha news, the GLMR APES are about to open some very serious discussions over the coming weeks concerning the reward system and the tokenomics of the game token that will be implemented once the game goes public (ETA - end of Q2 2024).

The most important decisions concerning the Great Escape game mechanics, new items, rewards systems and tokenomics are taken by GLMR APES DAO. The Jungle Council, the DAO’s governance body formed of 3 permanent core team members and 4 elected members of the community, is in charge of writing weekly proposals on which GLMR APES holders vote on.

Based on the votes results, changes are made to the game accordingly. Given the importance of the new tokenomics, we expect the discussions to be quite intense and definitely exciting for the GLMR APES over the next 4-6 weeks.

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