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I finally did it...

I found "the metaverse"

The Milk Road x Decentral Games paid partnership.

You guys… I did it. I finally did it.

I found… THE METAVERSE 😱

Until now, the metaverse just felt like a random buzzword.

Facebook changed its name to Meta. Investors are pounding millions into metaverse companies.... 

Whenever someone tells me about the metaverse, I imagine some future where we all wear VR goggles and slurp Soylent thru a straw. 

Where is this metaverse? Can I see it? Is it real?

But last month, someone told me about a virtual world that runs on the blockchain, that makes millions of dollars on NFTs and has thousands of daily active users. 

Wait. That sounds a little meta-verse-y. 

Introducing…. *drumroll please*... Decentral Games.

It has:

  • 6k daily active players
  • $36M+ in revenue. It’s the highest grossing NFT project on Polygon
  • $22M+ in their treasury balance
  • And most importantly. It exists now.. Not tomorrow. Not next week

That’s why this month’s sponsored ROAD TRIP is to Decentral Games.

Road trips are in our manual, right under Milk Road Rule #81: Burn the manual, go out and do the damn thing.

Instead of boring you with technical details, we’re gonna show you the cool stuff & give you our 2 cents…

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Inside the metaverse...

Stop 1: Decentral Games' Marketplace

Playing DG is like going bowling. To play, you gotta have the right shoes.

Except, in this case, it’s an NFT wearable for your avatar. Aka your swag in the DG metaverse that other users will see.

You either buy one from DG’s marketplace / Opensea or rent one from another owner.

Of course, we wanted to look fresh on our first metaverse experience, so this is the sick-ass bomber jacket I got.

If you’d also like to get your hands on a wearable for free, read to the end! ;)

Stop 2: Decentral Games’ Arena (aka the metaverse)

Most crypto gaming companies spend years trying to build a game (and usually the game sucks). 

The smart thing about DG is that they took a game that’s already proven to be fun and played by ~100m people: Poker

Here's a lil sneak peak of their virtual poker world...

Stop 3: ICE Poker Tables

Decentral Games has a pretty cool setup too. Rather than having to pay to play every day, DG gives you 3,000 free chips.

That's ~7 free games, every day. So even if you strike out, you can still come back the next day to try again. And of course, you can load up on more tokens if you want to pay.

DG has daily challenges (i.e get a straight 2 times, win the hand 10 times, etc).

Every time you complete the challenges you earn $ICE tokens (DG's in-game currency).

Think you're a good poker player? Prove it on the DG leaderboard. It shows the best performing players in all the DG metaverse.

The higher you finish, the more your rewards get multiplied.

Stop 4: Cashing out

Plus once you have enough $ICE, you can buy upgrades for even more bonuses or just cash out to a stablecoin like USDC.

Now I know what you’re thinking…

How does DG make money to sustain this?

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How Decentral Games makes money

DG has 6 sources of revenue:

And they're putting up numbers too. In total, they've made ~$36m.

90% of it comes from 3 main sources: Mints, Upgrades, and Activations.

1/ Mints: Players buying wearables directly from the DG marketplace 

2/ Upgrades: Players upgrading their wearables (in order to increase their potential $ICE rewards)

3/ Activations: Players paying to activate a wearable they've bought on a secondary sale

And I spy with my little eyes....a new source of revenue - Ads! Wow. I wonder what Mastercard paid...

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The billion dollar question...

Yes, DG has made tens of millions of dollars. But is this sustainable?

The "S" word has been a killer for play-to-earn games…

  • Axie Infinity took off…then crashed
  • StepN sprinted away… then cramped up and collapsed

Will this just be a repeat? 

We talked to the DG team and they gave us some alpha. They have 2 big updates coming out soon:

1/ Play-to-earn -> Play-to-own  

  • Currently, the utility for $ICE is a bit limited– you can either upgrade your wearable for added bonuses or just cash out
  • After the update, players can use $ICE to as an in-game currency to buy more wearables. Keeping more $$ in the ecosystem

2/ Tournament Mode

  • This new game mode will require players to burn $ICE to play
  • Reducing the supply of $ICE will increase its value, allowing DG to continue paying out winners without devaluing $ICE down to 0 

Any game (whether it’s Candy Crush or Farmville) needs sources (ways to get virtual currency) and sinks (ways to spend virtual currency) to be balanced so that the game is sustainable. 

I’ve seen tons of games fail at balancing sinks vs. sources. But the best teams pull it off. 

Jury is out if DG can pull it off. But if they do, this will be huge. 

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The Milk Road's take

I don’t know if Decentral Games is the future of the metaverse. That’s for their founders and Mark Zuckerberg to duel to death about. 

What I do know is that DG is a fun way to actually use a metaverse rather than just talking about it. 

The game is fun, there’s real people playing it everyday, and they keep improving it. 

Our philosophy is that the most fun and learning comes from being an early adopter. Trying things out, playing with this stuff is way more fun than just reading about it in the news. 

For me, this was my first real “metaverse” experience

  • Buying in-game NFTs
  • Playing with thousands of active players
  • Making money while playing a game 
  • Dripping in swag with my new bomber jacket wearable

If you enjoyed this “Road Trip”, let us know what other projects you’d like us to partner with for the next one!

This Deep Dive is a paid partnership between Decentral Games and The Milk Road