Breaking Into the Web3 World
The Promises and Perils of Making Blockchain Games
As a game designer, I've always been fascinated by the challenge of creating games that can stand the test of time. My deckbuilding game, Ascension, will celebrate its 15th anniversary next year, and Richard Garfield’s Magic: The Gathering has been a legendary game for over 30 years. For the past 14 years, we’ve been collaborating on SolForge Fusion, and last week, we launched its Web3 features, introducing unique tradable decks (NFTs) and an airdrop (free giveaway) of our new SolForge Token ($SFG). We're building an entire ecosystem that bridges the gap between traditional tabletop gaming and the world of Web3. Many have asked why we chose to make this jump and what the benefits are to the game and our community. Today, I want to share insights into our design process, along with both the benefits and challenges of our approach to airdrops and unique NFTs.
The Cold Start Problem and Aligning Incentives
Great gameplay is essential, but it alone doesn’t mean success. Games thrive on having a vibrant, engaged community. This core community will naturally spread the word about your game and, in the case of multiplayer games, ensure that there are always people to play with. Organic player recommendations and user-generated content are the best ways to grow a gaming community—nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.
However, in an increasingly saturated market with endless new games and content, how do you get those initial core users to kickstart a community? This is the critical problem every game creator has faced, referred to as the cold start problem. A few strategies have emerged over time:
MARKETING SOLUTIONS
Paid Marketing: Buying users is the go-to strategy for major game companies that can afford to spend millions on user acquisition. While paid marketing should be part of every creator's toolbox, it has become increasingly expensive and challenging as top games drive the cost per acquisition (CPA) higher. We’ve seen the effects of this most strongly in mobile gaming, where the top 10 games have stayed largely the same for many years, stifling competition and discovery. In our experience as a small developer, paid marketing cannot be the primary answer for user acquisition. For SolForge Fusion, we keep our paid marketing budget small—a small daily spend helps bring in new users, but we aren’t trying to compete with the big companies with deeper pockets.
Paid Influencers: Paid influencers are an offshoot of paid marketing. Spending money on influencers can be effective, as you're essentially leveraging their community to jumpstart your own. Often, however, the incentives are not aligned between a creator, an influencer, and their community. However, the incentives between creators, influencers, and their audiences often don’t align. Influencers usually benefit most from sticking to their most popular games (where they get the most views) and will only switch to your game if the pay is enough. Audiences, too, are naturally—and rightly—skeptical of sponsored content unless the influencer is genuinely interested in the game.
Social Media: Social media posting is the cheapest and most time-consuming marketing strategy. With bots and AI-generated posts flooding platforms, breaking through the noise is difficult. We’ve experimented with many approaches and haven’t fully cracked the code. Staying responsive to trends and posting consistently helps. What has worked best for my team is sharing behind-the-scenes content and valuable insights. However, producing this type of content takes hours and is tough to sustain at a pace that makes a real impact. A side effect of social media management is its role as an informal customer service channel, which can boost sales and enhance customer engagement.
PR / News: Earning free media coverage through newsworthy events or press releases can deliver big results, but only if your news is genuinely interesting. Major sites rarely cover new launch announcements unless it’s from a well-known team or something particularly unique about your offering. We’ve had several news sites cover SolForge Fusion, but these hits are few and far between, and the results are nearly impossible to track. Plan your media hits well in advance and build relationships with sites and platforms so they are more inclined to listen when you have something to say.
GAME DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Collectible / Expandable games: Magic: the Gathering changed the face of gaming forever by introducing randomized collectible cards to gaming. This made buying fun and gave the players some potential upside in owning a collection they could trade and sell. In fact, if you invested in the original Alpha set of Magic, you would have outperformed the S&P 500 and almost every other asset class.
Freemium games: Freemium games were a major (and controversial) addition to the gaming world. They reduce the barrier to entry, making it easier for players to discover new games. When done responsibly, freemium games let players choose to spend time or money to advance, allowing them to decide how much they want to invest. When done poorly, however, these games become pay-to-win schemes, where developers constantly introduce harder challenges and pricier items to keep players spending. My experience with freemium games is that you need to deliver an enormous amount of free value before expecting anyone to pay; you also need to avoid (or at least minimize) the pay to win trap. Freemium is now the dominant gaming business model, which has flooded the market, making it hard for gamers to know which games are worth their time—in today’s gaming environment, even free can be too expensive.
Airdrops: Airdrops are a Web3 marketing strategy where free tokens or assets are distributed to users' wallets, often as a reward or incentive to try a new game or platform. One of the reasons we were so excited about Web3 is that it allowed us not only to make SolForge Fusion free to play but also to reward players for trying the game. The tokens, called SFG, have utility, enabling players to mint decks and unlock other upcoming features. We used this strategy to reward our existing SolForge Fusion players for their early participation and extended the airdrop to other gaming communities we believed would enjoy the game. Since every Web3 wallet is public, we were able to specifically target high-spending players from similar games in our genre, such as Axie Infinity, Parallel, and Gods Unchained.
NFTs and Ownable Objects: As mentioned earlier, our game’s tokens, called SFG, have utility, allowing players to mint decks and unlock additional features. These decks are NFTs, or non-fungible tokens—unique digital assets that can be owned, traded, or sold on public marketplaces. While player ownership and trading of digital items isn’t new—games like Magic Online and Second Life introduced similar concepts decades ago—big gaming companies often lock these assets within their ecosystems, capturing the value for themselves. NFTs simplify the process for those of us who believe in player ownership, allowing players to benefit from the increasing value of their collections and trade on public marketplaces, just as they would with physical trading cards.
SolForge Fusion’s Airdrop Strategy
One of the first major hurdles we faced was designing our airdrop strategy. In the Web3 space, airdrops are a powerful tool for building community and rewarding early adopters, but they can be a double-edged sword. Drop too many tokens, and you risk devaluing your ecosystem. Drop too few, and you might fail to generate the buzz and engagement needed for growth.
We decided to allocate 22% of our total SFG token supply for community airdrops, to be distributed over the course of 2024. The first airdrop has already happened (click here to see if you are eligible). After three months, any unclaimed airdrops from the first round will be reclaimed and redistributed in a second airdrop, this time primarily targeting active players.
Current SolForge Fusion Players: We rewarded players based on the number of decks in their account and the amount of in-game XP they earned. This rewarded players for playing as well as for past purchases- reinforcing our goal behaviors of engagement and monetization.
Original SolForge Players: The first version of SolForge was launched in mobile and PC in 2012. When we shut the servers down five years later, players lost access to their collections. It felt right to reward these players in proportion to their time and money spent on the original game. This was one of our motivations for wanting the new version of SolForge to live both physically and on the blockchain- ensuring players can keep their collection forever.
Over 180,000 Eligible Solana holders: Anyone holding at least 25 SOL or more at the time of the snapshot is eligible to claim an airdrop (must be in the first 60,000 addresses to claim). SolForge Fusion is based on the Solana blockchain so we felt anyone deeply invested in Solana would be a good target market to come try our game.
Web 3 (gaming) communities: Finally, we targeted key gaming communities that we felt had similar target markets as SolForge Fusion. Axie Infinity, Parallel, Gods Unchained, and Star Atlas players are all eligible to claim based on token holdings. This felt like one of the easiest ways to supercharge our audience- giving immediate value to those who are already invested in similar web 3 games.
The key insight here was to treat the airdrop not just as a token distribution event, but as a strategic onboarding tool. We believe the quality of our game play and our continued roadmap of new content and features will keep those acquired users and turn them into superfans. In addition, we’ve built a very attractive liquidity mining system to give players more reason to hold tokens. Future planned airdrops will be timed to bring new players in as we launch major new features like our community governance. It's not just about giving away tokens; it's about educating and engaging a growing community, using the “better than free” model to encourage engagement in a crowded marketplace. Success means bringing new players in who see the value in what we are building and become evangelists who help spread the word further.
Challenges of Web 3 Development
Web 3 offers unique tools and access to new communities that are exciting for small teams and developers. Web 3 also comes with many challenges that it is important to be transparent about. Here are some that we have encountered:
UI / UX Challenges
Our team spent months designing a clean and user-friendly system for claiming airdrops and minting decks. You can see our efforts at solforgefusion.com. However, many aspects of Web3 UI/UX are beyond our control. Explaining to non-Web3 users how to purchase $SFG or participate in Liquidity Mining was so complex that I had to create a complete video walkthrough. This level of complexity, of course, creates a significant barrier to entry and slows adoption.
On Chain Transaction Costs
We chose Solana as our launch platform due to its efficiency and low transaction costs. However, minting NFTs on Solana still incurs rent fees, which can add up to several dollars per mint, discouraging user engagement. Additionally, there's a counterproductive effect as the value of our SFG token increases: since minting a deck requires burning 100 SFG, the higher the token's value, the more expensive minting becomes. Minimizing friction and making the process as seamless as possible is critical to driving broader adoption.
Assessing the value of an NFT
Web2 audiences have (rightly) dismissed the cash grab of NFTs that serve no purpose in-game or are merely cosmetic. For SolForge Fusion, we aimed to build NFTs that were not only useful in game, but that also represented ownership in a way that made each one feel worth creating and collecting. Perhaps the most exciting—and challenging—aspect of our design has been the creation of unique, 1-of-1 NFTs for our decks.
Trading card games, while promising infinite variety, usually just end up with the best players copying the same decks and chasing after the same few rare cards. SolForge Fusion solves this by making each deck one of a kind. You can customize, but you can’t copy. In a world where digital assets are infinitely replicable, we wanted to create something truly scarce and valuable.
Each NFT in SolForge Fusion represents a unique deck—no two decks are exactly alike. This creates an interesting dynamic where every player's collection is truly unique. However, it also presents a challenge: how do we help players understand and value these unique assets.
Our solution was to implement a rarity score between 1 and 100, making it easier for players to gauge how unique their deck truly is. Players can search for decks based on card composition, rarity, and specific card interactions. This system helps players discover the unique strengths of their decks and compare them within the ecosystem. We’ve also made data for each deck publicly available, so fans can create their own ranking and rating systems, allowing the community to independently assess the power level of decks. You can find one of those systems on solforgefusiondecks.com.
Ownership isn’t just about buying, trading, and selling—it’s also about customizing and making something uniquely your own. That’s why we’ve provided players with more robust ways to permanently improve and modify their decks. Players can earn XP and level up their decks, unlocking new powers for use in our single-player campaign mode. We also host regular storyline tournaments where players can influence the lore of SolForge and determine which cards and effects will be available in future sets. Decks that perform well in tournaments can increase in rank from Bronze to Silver to Gold, enhancing their perceived value and unlocking access to higher-tier events.
My favorite way to customize is through our storyline events—one of the rarest features a deck can have. When a player participates in a storyline event and makes an impact, we create a custom story for the deck they used, elevating it to Legendary status and linking it to its NFT. You can see some of those stories here. These events are designed to reward casual players with quirky rules and variations, reminding everyone that games are meant to be fun and immersive, not just competitive (though, as a former Magic: The Gathering U.S. National Champion, I still appreciate a good competitive event).
Looking Ahead
As we continue to develop SolForge Fusion, we're constantly learning and adapting. The Web3 space evolves quickly, and what works today might not work tomorrow. By staying true to our core design principles, listening to our community, and continually innovating, we're building a game that we believe will stand the test of time.
The journey from traditional gaming to Web3 is not without its challenges, but it's also incredibly exciting. We're not just designing a game; we're designing an entire economic ecosystem where players participate in the upsides of a growing community. With every challenge we overcome, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in gaming.
To all the game designers out there considering the leap into Web3: embrace the complexity, listen to your community, and never stop innovating. The future of gaming is being written right now, and it's more exciting than ever.