Liam Bacon has overseen multiple milestones on the Aradena platform, including over $1.7 million in revenue, 80,000 community members, 25,000 game accounts, and over a million games played on their first game title.
In this exclusive, he talks about the inspiration behind Aradena, the competition, and their plans, including an upcoming token event! The interview also offers insights and an insider look at the journey behind Web3 games.
About Aradena
Could you please briefly overview your skills and how they correspond to your position at Aradena?
As a founder and CEO of a startup, you have to step into a variety of roles, but the five most important responsibilities are probably setting the direction (vision), setting and communicating the strategy, raising capital to allocate resources to deliver on the vision and strategy; building the right team and aligning them to deliver on the strategy; and helping to drive execution.
I have done very well at Aradena finding and aligning elite, intelligent, and highly driven people to join our team and advisory board. Your company is a byproduct of the people building it, and I am incredibly fortunate to have amazing people around me who drive things forward daily.
Before Aradena, I built a gamified e-learning startup that leveraged Web3 tech and aimed to help young people build key life skills undervalued in traditional education. I learned a lot from this experience, which has helped build Aradena. My main skill set is understanding what it takes to build and scale a startup, setting the strategy accordingly, and aligning teams to the priorities and KPIs that matter most. Additionally, I deeply understand how Web3 technologies can genuinely improve the user experience in gaming, which informs our strategy and strategic decisions.
What is the motivation behind building Aradena?
Aradena is really about building the next generation of gaming. Web3 and blockchain technologies offer a significant step forward in the evolution of gaming as long as we remain intensely focused on users and improving the user experience rather than just focusing on the technology itself. Focus on user benefits, not tech features. For users, it can offer a huge amount of value. Web3 gaming is about sharing the value that accrues to the ecosystem with the users and creators that help create that value.
At Aradena, we’re focused on scaling to reach mass gamers. Our top-line mission is to onboard 1 million users to Web3 gaming. Once we achieve that, we’ll look at how to grow beyond that milestone.
Right now, we have three vital pillars to that mission:
- Offer new, innovative, and better gameplay experiences than traditional Web2 games.
- Further improving user experiences by utilizing Web3, focusing on the user and their real pain points and wants, not on the tech.
- Offer users no barriers to entry and seamless, optimized onboarding experiences.
What aspects of decentralization are you incorporating into Aradena?
We’re offering users real ownership of game assets and the ability to trade and sell assets to other players. Additionally, we provide an ecosystem token that users can own, giving them a real financial stake in the game ecosystem and any success it has. This includes richer, verifiable player profiles and much more.
This greater economic alignment with users will offer us distinct competitive advantages compared to traditional gaming studios. For instance, because users can own a financial stake in our ecosystem, this drives stronger evangelism for users to share and promote us. This leads to lower CPA (customer acquisition costs) and more opportunities for viral growth.
What major milestones have you achieved so far?
Our first game title has already had over 1 million games played, generating over $1.7 million in revenue. We’ve built a community of around 80,000 gamers across Discord and Twitter, and we’ve raised capital and received backing from leaders in the space, including Animoca Brands and Jump Crypto. Our upcoming AAA title was the #1 most-played game on Elixir during closed beta in 2023 (Public launch will take place in Q3 2024 before our ecosystem token launch)
Competition and Partnerships
Who are your competitors, and how is Aradena different?
Our ‘competitors’ as such would be other Web3 gaming studios, particularly TCGs, as our upcoming flagship game title is a tactical trading card game. Our title’s key unique selling points are that we spent years reworking and testing a new game design, introducing a new element of tactical combat, new card mechanics, and a much more immersive and visually engaging experience in our 3D battlefield environment.
That said, other Web3 TCGs are not ‘competitors’ in the traditional sense of the word, where you are competing for market share. This is because the Web2 TCG space is still much larger than the Web3 space, but this will soon change drastically. If other Web3 TCGs start to onboard millions of players in the traditional gaming space, it would likely be easier for us to acquire and onboard them once they are accustomed to Web3 principles.
Partnerships play an important role within Aradena. Please tell us about them.
Partnerships are indeed very important to us. As I mentioned, we have some of the leading backers in the space, including Animoca Brands and Jump Crypto. Additionally, we have partnerships with several gaming guilds, such as PathDAO, Avocado Guild, and Good Games Guild, which help with user acquisition. We also collaborate with other gaming studios and industry influencers, allowing us to reach a wider audience.
Future Plans and Projections
You have three more games in the pipeline. Could you provide us with a sneak preview?
For sure, our upcoming gaming launch in Summer 2024 has been our flagship title in design and development for the last three years.
This is Aradena: Battlegrounds, our tactical trading card game that combines proven card game dynamics with fresh 3D gameplay and tactical combat.
The next title we will launch at the end of 2024 will be Aradena: Mobile, which offers players the same tactical combat mode on mobile and a new auto battler mode tailored towards hyper-casual gamers.
The third upcoming game in the pipeline is Aradena: Kingdoms, best described as a new and innovative base-builder game on mobile, similar to games like Clash of Clans or Mobile Legends, but with our unique combat systems.
Critics argue that medieval games may perpetuate outdated and potentially harmful stereotypes. What is your response to these concerns?
This is not a concern that I’ve heard much about before, but we are very committed to creating a diverse and inclusive gaming environment. Our medieval fantasy setting serves as a backdrop for complex, engaging narratives that, if anything, challenge traditional stereotypes. We put a modern twist on the genre and portray characters and stories that reflect a range of diverse perspectives and experiences.
You also have an upcoming token launch.
Correct, we’ll be looking to launch our ecosystem token in 2024. This token will be the premium game currency across all upcoming game titles. It has many use cases, including purchasing game assets and season passes, various in-game features and boosts, and some innovative staking mechanics. We also plan to build a governance framework for our ecosystem, of which this token will be the basis. The token will truly be the main representation of value accrual within the Aradena ecosystem across all titles in the studio.
What’s the end game? How do you visualize Aradena at its peak?
I could go on for a while in answer to this… but I’ll limit it to two main points.
First, we are incredibly focused on being ‘the’ gaming studio to introduce web3 gaming to the masses. In doing so, we aim to impact the gaming industry and play our part in building the next era of the internet, where people who support and add value to the ecosystems they participate in share in the value created by it.
Second, post-2025, we are excited to dive into facilitating user-generated content (UGC) in a decentralized manner. For example, we will give users the tools to create and monetize their cosmetics and, in the ultimate end-game, offer the tools for people to build their minigames within our ecosystem and monetize them using our ecosystem token.
Last words?
Join us! Whether you’re not sure about Web3 gaming yet or you are, join us and follow the journey. Jump into Discord, ask any questions, and find out more. We believe we are building upon a huge opportunity here and want to share the value we create with everyone who is an early adopter and follower. At this point, we’re still at that stage. You can check out our website, follow us on Twitter, or join our Discord. We have a bunch of friendly faces who would be happy to welcome you, tell you more, and show you around!
Cryptopolitan reporting by Brian Koome.