UnicornParty.com - revised proposal

Draft Proposals
1

Abstract

Surf Labs, the developers of Unicorn Party (UP), founded by industry veterans in gaming, ad-tech and crypto, 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, the LG team unveiled their ambitious ecosystem roadmap in collaboration with several second-party game developers, including us. The 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 the CU IP. Our journey with the inaugural batch of developers has been enlightening.

Surf Labs is incredibly excited about the opportunity to move UP to an external game, which will grant us increased independence and responsibility. We have strong belief that venturing into this new territory will establish CU as the trailblazers with a strong, high mass market appeal presence and act as a powerful attractor, inspiring numerous developers to explore fresh avenues of creativity utilizing the Crypto Unicorns intellectual property.

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 for new games, and [NEW] 70/30 (favoring CU DAO) for Bumper Corn and Mob Run.

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 2023 -
    • 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

Per LG’s note in the prior proposal - by introducing various cost-saving strategies, we can manage the monthly expense of $50k without increasing the quarterly withdrawals from the DAO treasury. Consequently, the quarterly expenditures will remain unchanged.

We are requesting a launch marketing budget of $200k which we 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. This budget will be spent transparently and under the supervision of LG teams. 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.

FAQ

  • Who is Surf Labs and what is the relationship with Coda?
    • Surf Labs 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.
    • I’m one of the founders of Coda which is the company I ran actively during early parts of UP discussions, but as it happens in startup life (similar to how Beyond Games became Laguna Games), in our effort to survive the crash last year and the ongoing bear market, we decided to make changes to the team, restructure and rebrand as Surf Labs. We delivered BC and are ready to deliver MR and if we can agree on this proposal, we’d like to deliver UnicornParty.com too. Coda is focused on web2 and is a publisher, Surf is focused on web2/web3 crossover and is a B2B service/tech provider.
    • Prior to Coda, I started an ad network called Mobilike, acquired by Opera which later rebranded to AdColony and ultimately got sold for $400MM. I served as COO of the 500 people company in the period prior to the sale. I’ve been in tech and gaming since the early 2000’s, in crypto since 2014, investor, advisor, board member in over 20 companies and funds.
  • Marketing transparency and track record
    • As mentioned above, my previous business experience is largely in mobile performance marketing where I founded/led/sold businesses at a very large scale and am confident we can run any budget with efficiency or stop burning quickly if we don’t get what we want out of any marketing activity.
    • At Coda, we’ve run marketing for 20 games we launched and these games have eventually been acquired by larger companies. We’ve generated over 100 million installs in the company’s lifetime and generated over $40m in revenues. The performance of the business can be tracked on tools like AppAnnie or SensorTower for those who have access. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any free tool that can show you historical performance on mobile games.
    • We’ve worked with Facebook, Google, Unity and other tech and distribution partners like these to scale and measure these campaigns the same way Laguna Games does for CU. We will provide direct access to marketing data and work in close partnership with LG teams to ensure no money is spent without their knowledge and blessing. We’re happy to formalize these commitments contractually as it would be customary in any such relationship.
  • State of Mob Run
    • Mob Run is ready and has been prepared for launch in August. Here’s a video from the latest internal play tests. However, together with LG, we decided not to launch until we’re ready for the App Store as we are concerned with player liquidity. These games survive and grow if there are enough real currency players, and for that to happen we need to improve user experience, introduce the right incentive and conversion loops and most importantly, have scalable distribution. That’s why we’ve decided to put it on the App Store alongside UX improvements and that is scheduled for November.
    • Both MR and BC are full feature, playable games and we believe they are both very fun. But without further investment into monetization and conversion features, it will be difficult to scale beyond the core CU community. This is why we believe we should expand the partnership and include them in there so they also benefit from added features that will motivate more players to convert to paying players. This is how we can ultimately scale these games and the CU IP to 10’s and 100’s of thousands of players.
  • Why Web2 / Fiat / App Store / Other Games?
    • The underlying reasoning behind expansion into web2 with use of fiat, via the Apple App Store, with more accessible and simple games is ultimately the same. We want as many people to be able to come and play games that utilize and add value to the CU ecosystem and IP. We believe the web3 community is strong and very valuable to kickstart UP and that strength is precisely why we think we can successfully go after web2 market share as we’ll have better unit economics in web3. But it will be at a limited scale without web2 users. To attract them, we need to allow use of credit cards, distribute our games on the app store and provide games that are very easy to play and very easy to learn. The new phase of UP is designed with these goals in mind.
    • Bingo, Solitaire and other such games are asynchronous - meaning we won’t need as many online players as BC/MR to create a great experience for players in the early days. They are also highly retentive games with a very large player base globally. Our goal is to fish where the fish are, ideally in the largest ponds possible so that we don’t run into liquidity problems.
    • Each credit card transaction will ultimately translate to more buy pressure on RBW, and more people spending time with CU IP that will allow for opportunities to upsell them into deeper experiences in the CU universe which will also create demand for CU NFT’s.
  • Deal terms
    • There have been questions and comments around the deal terms, risk/reward profile and specifically revenue share on Mob Run and Bumper Corn.
    • Having been on either side of similar deals in the past, a certain amount of developer funding and marketing commitment from a publisher (in this case CU DAO) is very common. The difference here is that we’re taking more responsibility than a developer would in a classic developer-publisher relationship. We will also put our manpower and know-how behind the marketing operations to give UP the best chance possible.
    • We cover only ⅓ of our costs with the fee, so we’re taking a meaningful financial risk here, as well as a big opportunity cost by dedicating our entire team to this project. We are willing and keen on doing this as we believe in this strategy and believe there is upside. We will only see profits if the games scale and after all costs are paid. CU is incurring financial cost, we’re incurring financial and opportunity cost. A 50/50 for new games is a fair approach here in our view and we’re aligned on this with LG.
    • On existing games BC and MR, we heard your feedback and want to offer a change to the DAO’s favor by moving the revenue share to 70/30 (CU taking the majority). I hope this is seen as both a sign of our goodwill and our conviction that the project will do well.
    • This means we will continue working on improving and operating the games, -not entirely but mostly- at our own cost until the games pay back CU’s new investment entirely and start returning a profit.
4 Likes
2

I like the idea very much, but until we have new DAU and some kind of event where we see a larger influx of DAU or a big marketing campaign revolving around some of the stuff y’all would produce, its hard for me to justify spending the money on further development. Will this game or the next get us to 10k DAU? It didn’t seem to move the needle much with bumpercorns so I can’t see how spending all this money to do another type of bumpercorn/party type game will help us that much. I do really like the plan to deliver and take a portion of proceeds only once investment has been recouped and I think y’all did a great job with bumpercorns. If y’all have any type of marketing experience or pull to get more DAU that would be worth more money IMO vs. expanding the offering (unless that offering is supposed to get us to more DAU significantly more than previous similar offerings)

3

Thank you so much for the revised proposal. It did answer a lot more questions I had. One last question I had relates to how the DAO can check these reports. With movement of payments leaving the chain and moving to fiat. I think it is important that DAO is able to see how and where money moves off the chain. In moving to on and off chain i think transparency will be good. Thanks for your time.

3 Likes
4

Hi TT,

I can answer this one. Effectively LG will have real-time access to ad platform and store data. We can then compile summary reports to go along with the quarterly treasury reports. Should be a pretty streamlined process and insure there’s absolute transparency around how UP.com and it’s associated app store titles are performing.

5

There may be a slight misunderstanding here. The $200k in marketing requested is what Team Surf feels is necessary to prove out the unit economics. From there we’d be in a position to scale the games profitably.

Don’t discount the changes they are making in the lead up to unicornparty.com launching as they will improve the ability to scale the game. Their deck provides a great reference.

When we leave behind the need to have a wallet + nft + RBW and go to a paradigm where you simply login with email and purchase with fiat / crypto more frictionlessly we suddenly have a stronger opportunity to market the title via F2P acquisition channels. This is what the $200k requested is for and from there we’ll be able to scale spend knowing it’s profitable.

I highly encourage you to join the AMA with Sekip if possible.

8

EDITED post: CU ecosystem extraction relies on selling corns for ETH. Any other extraction via UNIM or RBW hurts the CU economy through token price deprciation and has been villified in many Town Halls. We need to shift extractors away from dumping RBW and increase extraction opportunities to ETH / WETH.

So what are the implications of non-NFT gameplay? Will NFT Unicorn Party gameplay still be available? Will there be advantages to using NFTs vs not using an NFT / wallet? How will free to play impact positively on NFT floor prices? Is there anyway we could introduce ‘burn to play’?

In short, I’m not sure this proposal helps NFT sales which should be the driving indicator for long term sustainable development of the whole CU ecosystem as it helps keep RBW token prices high due to more favourable extraction opportunities in ETH.

3 Likes
9

i agree on the front of not taking into account the shift in where most players spend their time currently. i feel like a lot of these great ideas are throwing away currently how the game works and what a lot of people have been grinding to maintain. I’d like to hear more about how these games will mesh well with our current offerings, as it seems like these will take away from how the game is currently played. I’m worried that everything people have been grinding for will begin to shift, so its hard to get excited for what was once profitable becoming complete mute and having to start over the grind. Not saying the two can’t co-exist, but I’d like to hear feedback from the team on their thoughts about this.

10

Thank you @TheTruth @timetraveler and @TeacherSteve for the comments and questions.

@timetraveler Aron already covered transparency and reporting on marketing, but to add a smaller point - we will use the same 3rd party tracking and measurement services as LG so the units and methods of measurement will be the same.

@TheTruth I think it’s very fair to question why we would not double down on marketing and product market fit and instead add more products. And as Aron mentioned, the product expansion is more than just adding new games. There are three lanes here: 1) New monetization and engagement features that sit on top of the games, 2) Removing friction and 3) New games. In truth, more of the effort will be spent on the first two. Both MR and BC are fully playable, nicely polished games - but we need more features on top of the core gameplay to engage players more regularly and convert them to deposit RBW and other real currencies in the future. Which is the only way to generate revenues and buy pressure on RBW with these games at a meaningful scale.

These features include things like seasonal offers and events that are continuously updated, incentives for token/NFT holders to make it more interesting for loyal CU players to come and participate (more on this below), rooms where one can enter with Shoes (soft currency) and earn Bonus RBW, the concept of Bonus RBW itself (a RBW equivalent that can’t be cashed out unless re-used once in a game) etc. Rolling out these features will help us move players along the funnel of first time player to first time deposit and then repeat depositor. Once built, we will also need to optimize and operate them. So we definitely need to invest more time and resource into making sure these features are in place. Removing friction and making games more accessible will be as important, already covered with Aron above.

Adding games is also critical but will be the smaller part of the work. It will allow us to capitalize on these features and the strong CU IP with a broader audience with proven, relatively low marketing cost games like Solitaire or Bingo, hence making our chance much higher to reach larger audiences.

As we build towards this multi game, low friction, highly engaging and high conversion end state, we want to of course do tests and incrementally grow our existing products to the extend possible. Hence our desire to release existing games in the App Store as soon as in November and continue running tests without having to wait for all the features mentioned to come.

Hope this clarifies a bit and happy to discuss further tomorrow on the AMA or here if you have more questions on this.

@TeacherSteve @TheTruth Impact on current game and NFT’s - This is a wider CU discussion but I’ll chime in with my perspective specifically in the UP.com context.

I see it in three parts:

  1. How will UP games recognize and reward CU community members?
  2. How can UP impact CU economy directly?
  3. How can UP impact CU economy indirectly?

On 1) the idea is to design an incentive system for CU NFT or token holders that is aligned with the way core CU economy works (whilst staying casual and mass audience friendly) and is designed to make UP more interesting for these players/members. These incentives can be as simple as X% bonus on every win or deposit, or it can go as far as specific member only leaderboards or rooms or a version of burn to play as you suggested. So there will always be an added benefit for CU members and we aim to work closely with the DAO and LG to figure out the details.

Item 2) is where I see a bigger opportunity as @TheTruth rightly pointed out we want more DAU and there is a theoretical 1000x upside from where the CU DAU is right now given mobile casual players make up about 2 billion people worldwide. Of course, this is the theoretical limit. :slight_smile: Skill-based real money is a smaller subset in means of DAU, but it does make up a $16B a year game vertical as of today and growing fast. We want to bring this massive pool of every day depositors to the CU ecosystem and the most direct path to that is providing them the very same user experience they are used to when it comes to depositing money to games - and that is credit cards, Apple Pay etc. Not non-custodial wallets, multiple steps to having the currency or buying an on-chain asset before they get hooked on the game itself.

We do have a path (discussions with payment providers in progress) to turning USD credit card deposits to an RBW buy without having to make the user go through any additional steps. And this is in my mind the shortest path to how UP can contribute to the CU economy. We know from competitors that a vast majority (90%+ according to some people in the industry) of the deposits in these kinds of games never leave the system. We don’t know what this number will be for UP, but even if we get to half of that - this would mean a new and big exogenous RBW buyer source that is entirely decoupled from cryptocurrency market sentiment.

Finally, 3) is the combination of the first two points. If and when we get to larger user scale, we then have a new windowfront to promote the wider CU products including the NFT’s, with the primary argument being their benefits within UP and potentially wider CU ecosystem. In addition to this, the increasing RBW price will mean the ETH value of the NFT’s will also increase which should attract other web3 players to CU too. As bullish as I am on UP and CU, I want to clarify that for these things to happen, we need a very strong player base in UP and this will take time.

So I think it’s fair to think in terms of how CU NFT’s and current game benefits from UP, but I think we need to think more broadly here and the benefit to the NFT side of the economy comes slightly later. The NFT market is in a major retraction (see below OpenSea August '23 volume at 4% of its peak in January '22) and the LG team have been working hard to combat that, UP is just another iron in the fire that is more of a hedge instead of investing more in the exact same direction.

Screenshot 2023-09-12 at 11.36.46
Screenshot 2023-09-12 at 11.36.461756×774 34.9 KB

Hope these were useful and apologies for the long post.

1 Like
11

Is Surf Labs planning on implementing the Rainbow Market Place (RMP) into UP and have missions for the Web2 players with requirements of certain materials? This will actually benefit the players who are playing the farm sim a lot since it will push the prices up of everything in the RMP. It will create demand for crafting and farming and it will be directly connected to the in-game economy.

12

Maybe i’m dense, but is UP a single app or is each game its own app? It seems like we would like to consolidate every game mode in to a singel ecosystem app to increase odds of people having it installed over a longer period of time.

My biggest concern is that I personally would never ever install an app in this genre that feels a little bit scammy on a surface level. But I know that’s just me and I’m not like most mobile users. Hopefully it could at least be mitigated a bit by having a feeling of a larger ecosyustem of games and that if I against all odds I did install it, I’d probably give each game mode a whirl assuming it doesn’t feel predatory with pop ups and whatever in the app.

Good with the bonus RBW. There needs to be a f2p path for players too imo.

Random thought, what’s you guys stance on p2w? I get it from a monetary standpoint but imo it’s a sign of not being confident in your product being a quality product and immediately reducing my perception of the app as “one of those” apps. Probably everyone in the community has a different stance on this but I feel it would be nice to know what you guys values are as to not get surprised by any moves that might be made in the future.

All in all, I like the proposal. Why not. Just please don’t make it feel predatory, spammy or like a scam. CU should be a seal of quality and solid values if we’re ever hoping to expand the IP.

13

I see your point. This is outside the core game experience our current base of players have been grinding going on 16+ months now. This is roughly 2400 players.

Unicornparty.com has an opportunity to expose the IP to millions in a way that also puts revenue in the treasury. Even if you apply a 1% conversion rate to the core game experience you have a massive increase in players than what we have today.

I would consider looking at this from the above angle.

2 Likes
14

I think you are too focused on the current core game. The original goal for UP was to expose our IP to more players. We already saw via our marketing efforts (which failed) that the friction of needing to purchase an NFT and then RBW for higher tier rooms was too much.

This proposal represents an opportunity based on what we’ve already seen not work. It’s an opportunity to reposition the IP and drive revenue into the treasury. This revenue will be used to further develop the core game and ecosystem. We could also point it at QE and purchasing NFTs for further marketing campaigns. This would help support collection prices as you suggest.

All good feedback but like TheTruth I think you need to think about this from another angle.

3 Likes
15

No, this is not the intent or focus of these games.

16

I like this angle better, and definitely agree about the potential reach of this initiative.

1 Like
17

hey @Bahis - thank you for your support and the questions.

The initial plan is to have standalone apps for each game on mobile and a multi-game destination (aka unicornparty.com) on web. The reason is that single game apps are the best practice for 99% of top scale games. Once we have multiple games, we will explore a multi game app but this will be down the line.

Assuming p2w stands for pay to win - UP games have to will 100% steer clear of this. Real money skill-based games will just not work if we let people have a way of paying to buy advantage over others as nobody will wager on a game if they know the opponent can simply buy more boosters/abilities etc to beat them. It just won’t work hence we won’t have these types of features. All games will always be played on 100% equal grounds, otherwise it stops being skill-based in the most strict sense. Hope this clarifies.

18

Community already asked most of the pertinent questions and I’m happy with the answers we received and the revised proposal.
We have a great opportunity to go outside and scale this IP to a broader target and support core game in the process.
After listening the yesterday AMA I’m even more confident they can deliver on that.
YES from my side.

2 Likes
19

What is the company registration number of surf labs?

When did coda labs stop working on unicorn party? How much was coda labs paid?

When did SurfLabs start working on Unicorn Party? How much has surf labs been paid so far?

1 Like
20

Lets hurry up and do this. CU to the masses. Stop going to the dao for every little thing ffs. LFG

21

That’s the whole point of being a DAO. What’s the utility of RBW as a governance token if not to vote on key decision like these. I appreciate your enthusiasm. No offense, but the rest of the comment seem off TBH.
There are a lot of valid questions to make sure we are not just trowing our capital at “Last stand” idea left and right. (no saying this one isn’t a good one, tho).

22

Business registration number of surf labs.?

When did coda labs stop working on unicorn party and how much were they paid ?

when did surf labs start working on UP and how much have they been paid so far?

And this surf lab don’t even have a legitimate twitter account as well.

1 Like