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How to position yourself on InfiniGods (potential) airdrop

How to position yourself on InfiniGods (potential) airdrop

AIRDROP SEASON 01

November 23, 2023

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Who?

Infinigods is an ecosystem of casual and midcore web3 games, founded by Owen O’Donoghue and Damon Gura. The project is backed by Pantera Capital and raised $9 million in a funding round in 2022. With three games that have been released so far and multiple other games in the production pipeline, the project is well positioned to fill the need for playable, mobile web3 gaming content. All games are themed around mythology and cover diverse genres like puzzles, tower defense and luck battle. The team hinted at intertwining the different parts of the ecosystem via a token that would serve as the means to earn and transact value for players. Their strategy aims at using the proven framework of web2 monetization, while adding a web3 layer on top, giving players more control over their time and energy spent.

The Assets

There are two different NFT collections in the Infinigods ecosystem so far. Both come with distinct value propositions that complement each other.

InfiniPasses:

Collection of 3,448 NFTs, with 2 tiers. The ultimate pass was sold at a x20 price vs. the common one.
Early Membership pass that gives the holder access to subsequent mints, early access to new releases and a direct line of communication to the team.
If there was an airdrop (speculative even though the team hinted at it), the infinipass would probably be the asset that qualifies holders for that airdrop.
Infinipasses qualify holders for a FATE airdrop, the premium currency of King of Destiny
Infinipasses give players perks across different titles (Ex: You get +1 play per day in Infinimerge per infinipass you own)

Elder Gods:

Collection of 4,488 NFTs.
Free airdrop for infinipass holders in June 2022.
Each Elder God NFT comes from a pool of 20 different gods from 4 different cultural backgrounds, 5 of each culture.
Elder Gods allow you to complete quests to advance and get in-game currency in return.
They qualify also for a FATE airdrop.
Elder Gods grant gameplay advantages in all titles of the Infinigods ecosystem. Holding one or more Elder Gods will be necessary if the player wants to compete for the top leaderboard ranks that yield the best rewards, as the player holding them has big advantages vs. free to play users. There also is a cooldown after usage, which puts additional pressure on the asset.
Owning sets of Elder Gods will comes with additional utility.

Value accrual is a very important factor in crypto, especially when looking at gaming NFTs. It is crucial to ask oneself where the true value of the asset lies and how it will scale with the project. With Infinigods, there are essentially two different angles to look at it. You can bet on the success of their games and go for Elder Gods, who embody pay to win. The rather low supply and the numerous in-game advantage they provide across all their titles, make them valuable to players that want to compete for top spots and fight for rewards. The second way of looking at things is more narrative driven. The infinipasses grant you more daily plays, qualify you for future WL spots, allow you to be in close contact to the team, give early access to new titles (playtesters are usually rewarded) and most importantly, potentially qualify you for an airdrop of their ecosystem token. This isn’t confirmed, but the team heavily hinted at a future airdrop. And infinipasses are the logical asset if there would be an airdrop to holders.

Team & Funding

The Infinigods project was founded by Damon Gura and Owen O’Donoghue in 2022. They managed to raise $9M in a seed round led by Pantera Capital, joined by Framework Adventures and Animoca. They have 33 team members listed on LinkedIn. Down below a list of a few key team members:

Damon Gura, helped scale DGN Games from a small business to a multi-million-dollar company with over 150 employees. Damon worked there as CEO for 7 years.

Owen O’Donoghue, worked for and later led Facebook gaming for years. Started as an executive for global gaming and left as director of gaming. Responsible for 10 figures in dollar revenue for Facebook/Meta, led multiple teams on the way.

Matt Jackson as COO, has a 20+ year track record of working multiple positions in tech, his last being Vice President, Global PMO & Product compliance at OpenBet, a company with about 750+ employees.

Trung Trinh as Head of Product, previously Senior Director of Product & Head of Liveops at Scopely, a company that has about 2000 employees.

Current State of Infinigods

Infinigods has released 3 games since their company inception in 2022. They aim for a regular releases, while focusing on casual and midcore mobile games that are quick and not resource intensive to build. After launch, they improve the good ones and reiterate on the bad ones. This allows them to ship very quickly and adapt to player feedback without losing time polishing a game loop that isn’t worth polishing. The founders have+ a long track record and vast amounts of experience in delivering games and it is palpable. The three games currently out are:

Infinimerge, a casual merge puzzle game, where the player can “merge his way to fortune and fame”. Game is out, free to play and offers 100+ levels ready to be played.

Immortal Siege, a Tower defense game with a fresh take. They introduce a card draw mechanic that makes the tower defense gameplay more dynamic. This game is also free to play and 20 levels are out and ready to be played.

The third on the list is Kings of Destiny. This “luck battle” game (works like a slot machine but with more depth) is currently in Alpha and out in the AppStore and PlayStore in the US, Canada, Australia and in the Philipines. This game will significantly gain in depth over the next months.

All games are constantly being updated, new levels are being introduced, leaderboard placements are regularly rewarded and feedback is being implemented. Their newest game King of Destiny has amassed almost 10,000 downloads within 7 weeks of launching in only 4 countries with a minimal marketing budget. Owen O’Donoghue has led the Facebook gaming branch and has been responsible for over 10B in advertisement, this gives the team a unique position from which they can leverage his deep knowledge about user acquisition and how to use a marketing budget most effectively.

Key Statistics

InfiniGods:

$9M in funding led by Pantera Capital.
30+ team members.
2 years of development, 3 games shipped.
Close to 10k downloads on their third game while it being deployed in only 4 countries.
Elder Gods collection FP at 0.1 ETH, 0.3% listed, 4,488 supply with 146 ETH traded since December 2022.
Infinipass collection FP at 0.055 ETH, 0.8% listed, 3,448 supply with 308 ETH traded since June 2022.
The combined market cap of both Infingods collections is just under $1,300,000.

Casual Gaming Market:

The casual gaming market expects $12.98B in revenue for 2023.
For 2025 $16.48B in revenue are expected, for 2027 $19.12B.
In-app purchase revenue is projected to be $5.12B and advertisement revenue is projected to be $7.64B in 2023.
Total downloads in 2022 were about 20.78B.
Casual mobile web2 games usually cost between $20k and $150k to make, depending on complexity.
The time it takes to make a new casual mobile game varies depending on complexity, funding, team size and company structure but usually a team will spend between 3 and 9 months.
The average person spends about 24.2min per day on casual games, the only app category surpassing that number are social apps with 55.5min per day in 2022. Hyper casual games accounted for 7.4min of activity per day.
The target demographic is very broad, nearly all age groups had around 20min of casual game activity per day in 2021. Surprisingly, the 20–37 year old bracket had the lowest activity time vs the 45-62 year old bracket having the highest.
The US is the biggest casual games market with about $5.463B dollar of revenue in 2022.

Additional Insights

Infinigods has put in place an intertwined ecosystem, bridging the gap between web2 and web3 without letting it impact the gaming experience. You sign in via a simple login, can use your socials and skip the wallet linking process if you want. Those with assets can easily link their wallets to use them in the various games and for the shipwright feature (more on that later).

There are a few key advantages when building an ecosystem with many different games with a mobile focus:

First off, it keeps your burn rate low. Mobile games are much easier, faster and cheaper to build. Having the freedom of being able to iterate through many titles without relying on one fixed game design to succeed, gives the team a lot of flexibility.

Then, the entire ecosystem profits from the success of one single title. This minimizes risk and leverages the network effect of an interconnected ecosystem.

From a value accrual perspective, having assets that come with in-game utility across many different titles, is one of the clearest value proposals you can get. The cooldown the Elder God NFTs get after being used (24h), puts additional pressure on the asset. More players competing for leaderboards and prizes -> higher ecosystem value -> higher reward value -> higher asset value. This loop benefits from the success of each game in the ecosystem.

Having so many games that you can slowly polish also allows the project to target a very broad userbase. Infingods has a puzzle game, a tower defense game and a luck battle game, all three very different genres that target different users. But the success of one, helps all other games as more potential users onboard the ecosystem while the team gets additional funds to create more games and further develop existing ones.

Infinigods has introduced the “shipwright” system, which aims at driving back value towards free to play users that put their time and effort into the game. Each user can acquire followers when completing levels within their first 5 tries of the day. These work like powerups and can be used for various in-game advantages (ex: 1 more try). Those followers can be minted into Arks on Polygon (low gas fees) and sold on the open market to players looking for extra power ups.

A new mechanic soon to be introduced is the “Piggy Bank” system. When playing Kings of Destiny, you can earn FATE, a currency you will be able to use for accessing tournaments for example. “Mobile players will be able to use fiat via credit card, with an auto-provisioned wallet and sponsored gas (no signing visible) to buy”. On their upcoming marketplace, players will be able to sell their FATE after they put it into a Piggy Bank, giving users control over their premium currency earnings and the in-app purchases associated with FATE. Infinigods won’t sell FATE, meaning the entire supply and the associated market is in the hands of the playerbase.

Their IP concept has been chosen very carefully in order to appeal to a wide audience. Everyone knows myths, they represent stories and morals that didn’t survive hundreds if not thousands of years by accident. They are relatable and recognizable, while offering an excellent fundament on which Infinigods can craft their ecosystem upon. The team purposefully chose 4 different cultures, giving players something they can relate to wherever they come from. This gives them a vast pool of diverse storytelling they can tap into and allows the team to complement small mechanics with relatable lore. One good example comes from King of Destiny, where a player can summon Heracles to protect their village from outside attacks. The art style reflects the mythological setting across all of their games.

Outlook

The biggest focus is on successfully launching King of Destiny globally, while polishing it and deepening the gameplay loop. They will introduce “more progression systems, more rewards, special tournaments, all the web3 pieces, economy (fate <> piggy bank), more content, more game modes and mini games (boss battles for one)”.

The other big focus is to launch Infinimerge and Immortal Siege on mobile. For now, the games both run on desktop within your browser, but as mobile is the market Infinigods is targeting, introducing a seamless mobile onboarding process is a big priority.

Budget wise, a good portion is reserved for marketing and the team is committed to push user acquisition next. The intermediary goal is to onboard 100,000 users, which seems like an achievable feat. They reached 10,000 downloads in less than 7 weeks with the early build of one game they released. And it is only out in 4 countries. Their approach is easily scalable and once the core features are in place, they plan to “hit the gas”. Paired with their expertise in UA and marketing, they are set up very well.