Is P2A dead?

What insights can we gain from the current state of Play-to-Act (P2A) campaigns? What are the successful strategies being employed, and what areas need improvement

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To revitalize the Wolves DAO Substack and continue a regular cadence of knowledge shares, we will experiment with this new format.

Something shorter, a bit more rough on the edges, but still with the same level of insights coming from the Wolves. Hope you like it ~Memento

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Not Dead, but Misused

• Is P2A dead? In short, the answer is no, but that doesn’t mean P2A is functioning as intended. The main issues with the current state of these campaigns are:

  • Driving users into “nothing”

    • The experiences offered by these campaigns often lack sufficient content to retain users after the initial incentives. Most of these “minigames” lack sustainable entertainment value.

      • Minigames, like those on Telegram, can serve as a great top-of-the-funnel strategy to attract users into a game ecosystem. However, many projects rush to bring “something” to market without offering anything beyond the initial mini experience, leading to high user churn.

  • A lack of community

    • The rush to launch also leads studios to overlook the importance of building a community beforehand. Creating a community that cares about your game pre-launch takes months or even years.

      • A community that isn’t prepared and ready to engage in a P2A campaign results in poor utilization of the campaign’s potential.

      • The community is the core user base that contributes the most value to the success of your P2A campaign, converting them into long-term players, spenders, and evangelists.

  • Rewarding extracting behaviour

    • Many P2A campaigns are designed in a way that makes it easy for farmers to join, farm rewards, and leave. Several factors contribute to this issue:

      • Lack of multi-account measures, inadequate tools for efficiently identifying value-adding users, rushed campaigns, and poor reward distribution.

      • As P2As develop, it's believed that more resources will be allocated to solving these issues, particularly in identifying the right users. This is expected because there’s much more upside to be gained.

We switched who were our main targets between season 1 and season 2, and used season 1 data plus rolling data whilst season 2 was live - to target the people we wanted to stay active with the game long term.

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P2A and P2E are Cousins

• P2A and P2E share the goal of incentivizing players to play your game by offering assets (NFTs/tokens) and are quite similar.

  • P2A is essentially a precursor to P2E, offering a different method of distributing game assets that occurs pre-TGE and delays the payout of rewards. Once a live game starts distributing token rewards, it essentially transitions back into P2E.

• The main issue with P2A campaigns today is their repetability. The experience of these events often becomes cookie-cutter, with campaigns converging into the same format of quests, points, and tokens.

  • This problem largely stems from projects rushing to launch their P2A campaigns, in an attempt (or desperation) to catch the attention.

    Experience itself is important (mainly the interface and overall feel and interactions of the campaign) , crafting this takes time

  • Despite these challenges, there have been a few standout examples like Pirate Nation and The Beacon, which have demonstrated effective tactics. However, these remain outliers with little overall evolution of the P2A meta.

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The Future of UA Spend

• The concepts of P2A and P2E, where game assets are traded in exchange for player attention and acquisition, are increasingly appealing given the rising costs of UA in Web2. As achieving profitability becomes more challenging, these strategies offer intriguing alternatives.

  • When executed effectively, P2A/P2E could become more cost-effective UA tactics compared to traditional Web2 methods. However, they are not yet scalable marketing solutions.

I think of P2A as more of an initial awareness/UA move, analogous to how web2 games would spend a TON on marketing to draw gamers to try the game

• Significant progress is still needed in terms of infrastructure, market penetration, and the practical application of Web3. Only then will studios be able to leverage their game assets for marketing to an audience of tens of millions of potential players.

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Contributors

Thanks to Gaspode, Arto, Slayer, Diego, and Kiefer Zang for actively contributing to the discussion and providing valuable insights.

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