A new path for Unicorn Party (UnicornParty.com)

Draft Proposals
1

Abstract

Surf Labs, the developers of Unicorn Party (UP), propose the transformation of UP into a standalone real-money (Fiat + Crypto) skill-based arcade. This initiative aims to enhance the game’s accessibility to players unfamiliar with web3 and expand the influence of the Crypto Unicorns IP.

Motivation

In July 2021, we unveiled our ambitious ecosystem roadmap in collaboration with several second-party game developers. Our initial strategy was to utilize these efforts as a platform for ideation and experimentation. The overarching vision was to cultivate a dynamic third-party ecosystem, attracting skilled developers to the CU DAO, eager to capitalize on our IP. Our journey with the inaugural batch of developers has been enlightening. We are thrilled at the prospect of transitioning UP to a third-party game, bestowing Surf Labs with greater autonomy and accountability. We are confident that a title in this realm will serve as a magnet, enticing a plethora of developers to innovate using the Crypto Unicorns IP.

Details

For an in-depth understanding of the product and the associated opportunities, kindly refer to the pitch deck.

In essence, the CU DAO will assume the role of publisher for Unicornparty.com and its corresponding mobile titles.

The operational framework is straightforward:

  • All expenses (Development & Marketing) are recouped 100% prior to any profit share.
  • Once recoup is achieved Surf Labs and the CU DAO will split the profit 50/50.

These publishing terms are designed to optimally motivate Surf Labs. Their profitability is directly proportional to the game’s success. Their mission is to produce a title that is not only profitable but also scalable. Failing to do so will result in no earnings.

Timeline:

  • November 2023 -
    • Bumper Corn and Mob Run Apple App Store and Google Play Store submission with improvements
  • December 2023 -
    • UnicornParty.com launch (Web & APK, and Apple app store submission) with Unicorn Bingo including;
      • RBW and fiat payments
      • Player incentive economy with bonus cash and soft to hard currency conversion rooms
      • RBW Token and Crypto Unicorn NFT holder benefits
  • January 2024 -
    • Bumper Corns hard currency relaunch under UnicornParty.com (web + mobile APK + app store submission)
  • February 2024 -
    • Mob Run hard currency relaunch under UnicornParty.com (web + mobile APK + app store submission)
  • March 2024 -
    • Unicorn Solitaire launch and introduction of multi cryptocurrency (allow use of e.g. Ethereum, Matic, other major currencies)
  • Q2 2024 -
    • Two more game launches (e.g. 21, Pool, or Trivia) and further meta features around events, leaderboards

Throughout the partnership, all game, marketing and revenue data will be accessible real-time by CU DAO alongside Surf Labs team members for both on-chain and off-chain data sources. This will be done via proven 3rd party reporting platforms and will be auditable by CU DAO on demand.

Proposal Cost

By introducing various cost-saving strategies, we can manage the monthly expense of $50k without increasing the quarterly withdrawals from the DAO treasury. Consequently, our quarterly expenditures will remain unchanged.

Surf Labs is requesting a launch marketing budget of $200k which they believe will be enough to validate early ROI and scale potential and start bringing in a considerable baseline of players to overcome the initial payer liquidity threshold. After this initial period, we will know what is required to scale further profitably and will work out marketing budgets periodically with a clear view on ROI.

Conclusion

This proposal presents a strategic opportunity to elevate UP while expanding the overall reach of the Crypto Unicorns IP. With a clear financial structure and a vision to inspire more developers, this initiative can be a win-win situation for both Surf Labs and the CU DAO. With the support and funding from the Game DAO, we believe this initiative can achieve both commercial success and industry recognition.

7 Likes
2

I’ll be the first to chime in here…

I really like the intention and motivation here behind this proposal, specifically:

  • building on the success of bumpercorns
  • intention to extend runway and grow treasury
  • exposure of CU to many more peoples

That said, I have many questions which are unclear to me from this proposal before I could get behind it. Here we go:

  1. Who is Surf Labs? What is the team size and composition? What is the track record and what have they built? Have they previously scaled any games to the size of what we’re talking about here?
  2. Is Surf Labs the one’s building Mob Run? The proposal states that Mob Run will be submitted to the App and Play stores in November. If that’s the case and Surf Labs is behind Mob Run, can we get an update on what’s happening here?
  3. Does Surf Labs have experience with successfully marketing f2p games to profitability? Do they have case studies or examples that they can point us to of them managing a marketing budget of this size?
  4. Is the $50k / month being considered in this proposal or is that a given from the LG operating expenses?
  5. Is the $200k being requested from the ecosystem development fund or another funding source? What is the milestones tied to the release of these funds?
  6. What does the math look like on profitability? To get to break even, I assume we are needing to reach $50k / month for each month of development + $200k marketing + on-going costs. Let’s just say 3 months of development for this example. What does it take to generate $350,000 in revenue from a f2p game? How many users do we need? What are the profit projections?

There are other questions about the profit sharing, the risk / reward for the DAO and others, but this feels like a good start.

Edit: just want to add a note that we know nothing of the working relationship between LG and Surf Labs. It could be that LG has been working deeply with them for years and is fully confident that these are the people to take us to the promised land. Without that knowledge (and even with it to an extent) all of these questions feel important.

1 Like
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Hi, what does “hard currency relaunch” means and represent :thinking:

4

Hello!

This is Sekip, one of the founders of Surf Labs.

Thank you for the thoughtful questions. Great to see we’re aligned on the goals.

I’ll address your questions below:

  1. We are the team behind Unicorn Party. We’ve been working with LG since the early days of the thought process. We’re a team of 15 people, composing of mainly engineers, product managers and a couple of marketing folks. We’re growing and expect to be around 20 by end of the year. Our product and engineering people have their roots in Peak Games (acq’d by Zynga for $1.9B), Dream Games (makers of Royal Match, currently #3 US iOS top grossing) and GJG (flagship title Zen Match acq’d by Moon Active for $150m). Our team have a very strong background in casual products. We’re confident we can build the games and infrastructure we outlined in the deck.
  2. Yes, we are. The game is ready for release with current UX flow that Bumper Corn has but we made the decision to skip a web and APK only launch and invest in improving the UX that will allow us to both increase our chances of approval in the platform stores and once we are there, convert installs to players. A release now would mean further dilution of our player base across two games and given the real time multiplayer nature of the games, we believe it’s better to make the improvements for both games and secure presence in the stores. The data we have from marketing activity so far shows that the biggest drop-off is the APK download/install step and second biggest is the path from install to gameplay due to many steps between app open to game play. We will simplify these and aim for a submission in November, then restart marketing at a low scale. This will be effectively our soft launch in the stores. Following this, with the launch of the new platform we will also have further improvements around deposits, matches etc. We will release these versions of BC and MR in Jan and Feb respectively, which should lead to improvement of conversions and start impacting hard currency deposits, and hence revenue.
  3. Yes, in our most recent previous business some of our team members including myself managed over $30m in UA spent over 9 to 10 quarters and generated $40m+ in revenue. This was in the hypercasual space. We have a senior advisor who’s run 10x these types of budgets profitably at a large US based skill-based RMG business who has been and will continue to support us with our UA activity. As we scale, we will hire more in-house team members with background in RMG marketing.
  4. I’ll defer to Aron for the specifics as this is CU DAO internal business if I understand your question correctly. Our understanding is that this is a cost neutral initiative as it’s being paired with other cost saving measures.
  5. Again, for the source of funds, I’ll let LG team comment. The discussion on milestones and release so far is that the $200k would be used in the first three months, hence released at launch of the platform in December. All plans and expenditure will be reviewed by LG. We will not scale the spend to levels where we’d deplete $200k in 3 months unless we see a path to at least gross margin breakeven.
  6. There is no scaled example of this game type in web3 so far, so we’re basing our assumptions on web2 examples. Skillz is one of the larger players and the only one with public numbers. Comparing this with other info we have on global or regional players, we are assuming ~30% margin after marketing when we get to product maturity at scale. We might see better margins earlier, but our aim is to get to $1m+ marketing scale per month within first 12 months. Which would translate to about $1.5m in revenues, which would translate to $7.5m per month in wagers with an average 20% take rate. Just as an example, average Skillz paying player generates $550 in play volume per month. We don’t know if this will be low or high for us, but that is public benchmark we have. Finally, this would translate to 13.5k paying MAU. With an average 15% payer conversion (low end of industry range), we’d be talking about 100k MAU. Not small for crypto, but fairly small for casual web2 RMG. In this scenario, we’d be generating $500k in monthly cohort gross profit. Not a small feat but we’re confident of this as a first milestone to reach. All of these are high level numbers based on various assumptions that are yet to be validated and we will likely see a wide spread initially because we will operate in web3 where there might be more whales but lower DAU. We will likely need to reestablish these benchmarks with real data once we hit the market. Hence we’d like to take an iterative approach and carefully work our way up.

Hope these were helpful and happy to expand on any of the points.

5

Hi!

We will overhaul the stamp system to make it easier to use players’ existing RBW, credit card and eventually other cryptocurrencies. Hard currency stands for use of any of these real world currencies (as opposed to soft currency being unicorn shoes that have no real world value). Jan and Feb BC/MR relaunches will include this new system of depositing.

Hope this clarifies, let me know if there are any further questions.

6

Appreciate the thorough and timely response :beers:

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Any concern with launching Unicorn Party title on app stores when there is already a few other titles with this name. Including a Unicorn Party game focused in crypto. Thanks. I simply don’t know the copyright laws on this subject.

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Hi, current plan is to have individual apps for each UP game so there won’t -at least initially- be a standalone Unicorn Party app.

That said, we will explore this too and test conversion and cross marketing benefits, but not likely to happen within first 6 months.

If we want to launch that multi-game app, we can still use Unicorn Party name unless there is significant other similarities with existing apps with that name and/or those brands have significant value in public eye. Had a quick look and there is nothing on the Apple App Store, and the one on Play Store seems to have very low downloads (~100) and no updates in over 2 years so I wouldn’t expect an issue. To be clear, this is not based on thorough research as UP multi-game app is not part of the plan in the immediate term.

On a related note, the web presence will be a multiple games under one domain approach and the domain has been secured. Reason for going with this on the web is that this is best practice in web-based RMG.

9

Thank you. I wasn’t sure if it meant creating a new onchain token.

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There is one with 5k downloads. Not sure if this is a lot by industry standard

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top center in photo
Thanks for the responses :+1:

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We will not give any % of the revenue from the platform to any other company.

90% of the revenue from the platform will be used to buy and burn RBW, the other 10% will be used to buy RBW and will be sent to our DAO treasury.

We will not give anyone $200k for marketing with 0 transparency on how it will be used.

12

Another question I have is would all games and minigames in this proposal be found on the main CU game website. Or would we go the Unicorn party website to enter to play games in proposal. Or find and download and enter the games through the app stores.
Thanks

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What happened to your Twitter account?

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Would it be better to focus on Bumpercorns and Mob Run currently. Is there demand or desire for the other proposed minigames. What makes these proposed minigames Unique. Would proposal cost less if DAO simply wanted to focus on BC and MR for the time being. With option of proposed minigames in this proposal being offered again in future when we see results of how app stores and users embrace the currently funded games of BC and MR. Thanks

15

Hello jbp3,

Great questions! I see Sekip has answered most of them but I’ll comment on 4 & 5.

  1. The $50k/mo is being considered in this proposal. Essentially, LG has been able to cut costs by $50k/mo and thus this proposal will not be an increase in the Operational Quarterly Treasury draws. If the DAO chooses not to pass this proposal then we’ll simply see $150k less per quarter in operational expenses. Given much deeper cuts would be necessary to meaningfully extend our runway I’m of the mind that we fund this opportunity given its strong revenue generation potential.

  2. I recommend that we simply pull this from the treasury (instead of selling Ecosystem RBW). As Sekip mentioned they won’t scale the spend unless they are seeing a path to gross margin breakeven. This approach makes sense to me.

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16

We’d have links like we do today on the main CU game website. You’ll be one click away from playing the games. Clicking on the game will redirect to the site (www.unicornparty.com) which I recently purchased. From there you could play any of the games on web or download from the stores from mobile play.

This ties them directly into our web experience as part of our ecosystem of titles while also allowing Team Surf to directly market Unicorn Party (www.unicornparty.com) which I also think has merit.

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17

Hi,

the marketing budget will be spent with 100% transparency and in close coordination with LG. It will largely be put towards player incentives and performance marketing (all in-house and 100% visible/auditable by LG).

The twitter account doesn’t belong to Surf. We don’t have social media accounts as we’re B2B only hence our desire to partner with CU.

18

Proposed new titles are the largest scale RMG casual games. Reason they work really well is because they allow for async game (as opposed to real time where everybody needs to be online at the same time which makes player liquidity a significant issue) and they appeal to a very broad base of players globally. This is why we want to explore these games as we believe it will increase our chance for success.

1 Like
19

Hey Aron,

Since the CU team has experience working with Surf with Unicorn Party and Mob Run, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts re: the team and on their ability to deliver what they have outlined.

20

I’d like to check from another angle…

  1. What is CU/DAO plan for other games creation: a) just few which are stated in recent proposal OR b) open for everyone, encouraging devs to join CU world and build on top of it?
  2. What is CU/DAO strategy on third party partners which will build the games: a) Surf Labs is known, good partner for long-term future OR b) we are open for good devs to join CU world and build on top of it?

If both answers are “b”, then before letting any third party build on top, we need to have guidelines and usable modules prepared:

  1. Economy (description of RBW, UNIM usage, burning mechanics, class and stats deeper meanings, connection to main farming/ crafting loop…)
  2. UI (components prepared to be used by other devs easily)
  3. Technical (common parts for all devs, like log in, corns check and loooots of other stuff that should be added constantly when new stuff is done)

When we have pretty good guidelines, any new development will need less effort (devs love that shit), we would be having common look and feel even across totally different third parties/ games…