In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Voya Games’ CEO Oliver Loeffler about Craft World, its fully onchain resource management idle game that’s just gone live on the Ronin blockchain.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Thanks for coming on the podcast for a third time. And congratulations on finally launching the game on Ronin.
Oliver Loeffler: We’ve been working on this game for one and a half years. We thought it’s now a good time to go to mainnet. I think it’s good to be anti-cyclic. Web3 gaming isn’t so popular anymore. There’s been a lot of gaming studios shutting down recently. But I think this is a free space. There’s a lot of mindshare and more attention. We also don’t want to jump on hype trains. We want to build something very sustainable and we’re now ready with Craft World.
We want to look forward and be very long term, not chasing the hype, not launching financial tokens. It’s a product focus with a good go-to-market strategy. That is also something we can continue doing in the future. And we are in a lucky position where we don’t need to launch a token. We are very careful how we spend our money. We have around two years where we can experiment and develop and make the game even more fun without raising new money.
You’re still a pretty small team, I think?
We are 11 people right now, mostly based in Berlin and in Hamburg with one guy in London. We try to keep the headcount small, to see how we can be efficient, how we can use AI more in our workflow. AI is a huge productivity booster. Even with a small team, you can get much more done than than two years ago.
What sort of players are you attracting?
I’m a degen. Most of our teams are degens. I think it’s a whole new audience that we can attract, and I think we should tap into that because that’s what makes web3 unique. We shouldn’t shy away of doing these things, actually double down on them as we did with our Project Voyager. We see it as more than a play-to-airdrop system. It’s an actual game where you can complete quests inside Craft World but then you have a meta game around it. We see it as a game in our ecosystem and we also want to reuse it. It will probably be used for new seasons, for distributing more rewards.
We are also thinking about launching an NFT collection soon, then we could utilize Project Voyager to farm for allowlist spots or discounts. So even with this, we think more long-term. It’s never a one-off thing. Although it is degen in focus, we can repeat the same thing over again in the future.
It was interesting to see that the top player from Project Voyager was CattanSettler, who I think was one of your early fans?
That’s my favorite story, because it’s exactly what we want to replicate more often. It’s our mission as Voya Games. We have web3 degens. It’s a really good crowd. Of course, there are a lot of bots, but there’s a lot of cool people just having fun. However, it’s still a very niche audience. If we want to make sustainable games, and make them really big, then we need to onboard more people to web3. That’s our goal. That’s how we designed our game. We made onboarding super easy. You don’t need to create an account. No wallet. We do everything for you in the background. You get the gameplay first and later learn about the blockchain technologies.
We are also tapping into user acquisition on more the traditional web2 side of things, and that’s how we got CatanSettler. He never had anything to do with web3, no wallet, nothing. He saw an ad. He started playing the game. He was hooked. Then he unlocked a few of the blockchain-y features, joined our Discord, and the community welcomed him and explained to him how these things work.
He really went down the rabbit hole and now he’s our most engaged user. He’s playing the game like crazy. He’s creating content. He’s helping people. He lives in the US. He’d never left the US until we did a community event in Berlin last year. It was the first time he left the US, just to join the event. He’s super excited and now he’s tapping into other Ronin communities. I think he bought some Ronke NFTs and a few others. That’s exactly what we want to establish. There are a few more of these examples we’re aware of, but we definitely want to scale it even further.
You’re going live on Ronin. Why Ronin?
Axie Infinity was the first web3 game I tried. I always followed them because I don’t think anyone did what they did with Axie Infinity, onboarding so many new users. I got to know Jihoz, one of the co-founders, and the rest of the team. They’re super smart. They’re also very long-term oriented.
The Ronin blockchain has been live for quite some time. They’ve built a great community of players. There’s not any airdrop farming incentive, at least direct airdrop farming incentives as with other blockchains that haven’t released a token. Ronin survived the $600 million hack and the community still stayed. That all aligns very well with what we want to do. We are not here to jump chains every six months. We want to have a partner on the infrastructure side, but also on the growth and go-to-market side. Ronin is really excelling and that’s why we went there.
Craft World will be a good addition to the Ronin portfolio too.
For us, it’s a partnership and I think we should support each other. We’re trying to bring more people to Ronin through the onboarding experience. We try to bring cool games where people can have fun to Ronin. We want to build a whole ecosystem later on and bring more games even to Ronin.
And on the other hand, they’re supporting us a lot with go-to-market and strategic ideas on how to continue developing the game. We definitely see it as a partnership and I think it’s something where both sides can profit a lot.
What are your plans post-launch?
We are planning to do a Ronin mega event with some of the communities on Ronin. We want to do more like this in the future. I think that’s what keeps games alive and where games can survive for a very long time is live operations, live ops. It’s a term more from the web2 world but it’s even more important in web3 because you have such an engaged community. They want to consume new content, want to try new things, even if they’re a little bit different. Events are always a bit different, but they’re not totally new gameplay, right?
I think web3 offers way more interesting options. In Craft World, we have more than 25 resources, which are tokens, and they’re all tradable for a central currency called DynoCoin. This opens up a whole new level of depth, I would say it’s almost infinite depth because people could start giving out loans, people could use it to give to other players, to onboard new players, and so on and so forth. Of course, there’s all the trading arbitrage, DeFi stuff too. It just opens up a whole new world, and I think that’s so interesting about the web3 integration.
You’ve been very clear that DynoCoin is a utility token. It’s designed to be transactional, not speculative.
We’ve been very transparent. We don’t want to launch a token that’s there for pure speculation. People qualified for DynoCoin through Project Voyager, but we only pay out when Craft World goes live on mainnet, so we’ll have instant utility. That’s already different from a lot of other tokens. Of course, there will be selling pressure but we also believe there will be buying pressure, people actually acquiring DynoCoin in order to buy more resources in-game.
We always want to establish this equilibrium between the buyers and sellers. We know there will always be farmers who just sell things, so we are very focused on finding ways for people to spend DynoCoin to have fun in the game. And DynoCoin has benefits over a lot of other tokens. There’s no insider allocation. The team doesn’t have any DynoCoin. The investors don’t have any DynoCoin. We didn’t do any KOL distribution of DynoCoin. So it’s purely distributed through Project Voyager. It’s all community-owned.
Over time, we will create more DynoCoin, but we don’t want to commit to any tokenomics yet because we need the flexibility to learn how everything works out but DynoCoin should be more or less like a medium of exchange in order to trade the resources and nothing else.
I assume there won’t be any centralized exchange listings or deep DEX liquidity either.
Exactly. We probably won’t have a lot of liquidity on the DEX. That’s not the goal here. And we’re saving a lot. Launching a token through a centralized exchange, that’s a lot of effort. There’s a lot of negotiations, a lot of different partners involved. It’s almost impossible to not do it without any insider allocations. It’s also very, very expensive.
We’d rather go out there with DynoCoin, give it to the community, let them have fun with it, let them play the game and then see where this gets us, instead of building up $100 million FDV and trying to pump it as much as possible. That’s not our DNA.
One new project in the ecosystem is Dynogotchi. Can you explain what that is?
I think that Tamagotchi-type of games are well fitting to the recent AI hype and also to blockchain and web3 in general. I could give an AI agent a wallet, and it needs to consume some food regularly, and then produces some other resource that we can use in Craft World. That’s the idea.
It will be very experimental. It will be very low scale in the beginning. We want to just see if it works. How it works from a technical standpoint. But basically, it’s an AI agent which you can interact with on X. It operates a wallet. You can send resources to that wallet in order to keep it alive. At the same time, it generates some other resources. We are thinking of a shit coin, which we want to plug into the player-owned economy that connects all of the games in our ecosystem. Then you can maybe use the shit coin to create fertilizer so you can farm crops and fruits and berries, which you feed to the Dynogotchi.
Craft World also has a land map that you haven’t really used yet.
We have a lot of plans for the world map. We started with it, but then we thought we’d rather first go live on mainnet so we spent more time developing Project Voyager and put all our resources there. But we have many great ideas and I’m personally super excited about what we’re building.
It will be the next big chapter of Craft World, and we will continue to develop after the main release. So we’re thinking that you can own land plots as NFTs. They have special resources on them. It depends where on the world map you have your land plots. So maybe a land plot is close to a volcano, so your fire production on these land plots is higher and you can then trade them with others. It ties into the specialization of resources, which we think is very interesting so that you’re not trying to be the master of all resource production, but only a subset so you need to trade more with other players. That’s what we want to encourage.
Play Craft World here.