MMG Discord Arcade - DAO

MMG Arcade Cabinet

Inspiration

Our inspiration for creating MMG's Discord Arcade was old school 90s arcades, and places like ESPN Zone, Dave and Busters, NickleWorld, and AnthersLadder (a matchmaking system for smash bros players).

For those that missed these glory days of gaming, these were arcades where you could go, play various games, and earn arcade points (physical tickets, or digital credits) for your performance playing games solo, or against, - or with friends. Different games would produce different amounts of tickets, but one thing was consistent across all these models. Playing games meant you could earn some measure of value, and being good at games meant that you could earn that much more than your friends, thus earning better prizes when those points were turned in. That's every competitors dream.

We first got the idea to create this model when we joined the Steem blockchain in 2017, being introduced to bots, staking, and the lending and borrowing of crypto to produce returns.

What it does

MMG is creating the modern arcade model. Our goal is to bring the concept often referred to as play-to-earn to any competitive game or blockchain, using peer-to-peer engagement and smart contracts.

Our Discord Arcade utilizes blockchain technology to not just verify assets and rewards, but also to fund the creation of a bigger pool of assets, that can generate yield from DeFi protocols. By doing so, we create a way for our arcade to continually produce some level of rewards, regardless of whether or not we receive things like donations and sponsorships, which many tournaments, online or off-line, rely on to hold esports events with prizes.

For competitors, our arcade helps facilitates what are often referred to as "money matches", and our own invention Ticket Tournaments, but instead of using fiat or crypto as a reward for these matches, we use our points and rewards system "tickets". Our bot ("Git Gud bot") helps users call one another out and participate in 1v1 matches, or signup for Ticket Tournaments where the winners in each match earn tickets.

Other than 1v1 matches, tickets have a few other uses at MMG, which help to keep them moving in circulation from player-to-player, and also be deflationary. For one, players can also use tickets to rank-up, by defeating more skilled opponents in matchmaking channels. To challenge a higher skill level requires that a user burn tickets to get a "pending" role and access to the higher skill level's channel. Once a user has gained access to by burning tickets, they must defeat a player of this channel's skill level. Losing a match means being pushed back to the users previous rank and removal of pending role, however winning would dent the armor of the higher skilled player, and give the pending player full access to the higher skill channel. Users would want to rank-up not just for clout, but to be able to 1v1 for higher values of tickets, and to earn more tickets when competing in their second biggest use case, Ticket Tournaments.

At MMG tickets are used the same way they are in old school arcades. They can be turned in at our counter for prizes, however, instead of a physical counter top with prizes behind it, we have a bot which calls upon smart contracts, or users can ping admins for special prizes.

How we built it

Our project is mostly constructed from integrations with our custom Discord bot, and various social, gaming, and blockchain applications.

We started to build out our project on a website, but quickly realized two things: one, websites with chatrooms can get expensive, and two, our community was already on Discord, so we decided to start there, thus the name Discord Arcade. Shifting the project to Discord we would be able to make the project more of a community effort than if it were on a website, and -- it would be within our budget.

Our project was then built by first creating a way to put value behind user engagement (our first use case being the donation of Lemons on Dlive.tv) and allowing users to compete with this earned value, which we refer to as tickets. This meant that we needed to connect Discord with Dlive.tv to register Discord users with a Dlive blockchain username (immutable username), and record whenever a user would donate Lemons (Lemons have a stable platform value of 1.2 cents USD) to MMG, converting the sum of their donation into some number of tickets.

Once our integration with Dlive was complete, we developed a matchmaking module, which allows for users to challenge one another for some value of tickets (depending on skill level). In this way we would create not just a challenge system, but one with rank and incentives for ranking up.

Our next module, Ticket Tournaments, meant that we needed to integrate with popular esports tournament website, Start.gg (then Smash.gg). Ticket Tournaments were created as a way for MMG to fix the issue in esports where the majority of players competing in an event never win anything. Instead, each win during Ticket Tournaments earns a user tickets, just like at an arcade where a solid performance, though maybe not the best, can still earn tickets, and help users build toward a prize.

The ticket tournament module also allows for us to put more deflationary pressure on Tickets, by having access to this feature cost the user tickets, with higher skilled players needing to burn more tickets for access to a Ticket Tournament, and in turn they earn more tickets per win.

Our latest integrations with our Discord Arcade involve NFTs. Users can now collect NFTs to complete "Quests" and earn tickets. To do so, a user must first purchase a non-transferable NFT, which links their Discord account to a specific wallet. For this integration we chose the WAX blockchain to start, due to it's maturity with NFTs and ease of onboarding new users.

Challenges we ran into

The other biggest stalwart is the time it takes us to create new modules (updates). With each blockchain we have to suggest new code and features for our devs to work on. Our devs had never worked on solidity until we asked them to. This meant that we had to learn some solidity ourselves so that we knew how to direct our dev correctly.

Onboarding also has it's challenges with a project like this, given the learning curve for anyone, and skepticism gamers have developed for blockchain technology. Though most gamers are used to the concept of digital (in-game) currencies they have consistently been skeptical about cryptocurrency, and now NFTs too, making the learning curve that much wider for those willing to convert to new tech and those holding onto our more traditional prize offerings (cash or gift card).

Luckily for pioneers, Web3 Gaming is emerging, and with it Web3 Esports. The challenge with Web3 gaming is that the Esports scene is mostly non-existent, and the majority of play-to-earn games struggle to maintain a successful earnings model. However, MMG has enabled play-to-earn (via esports) on games both blockchain and traditional, and a 1v1 matchmaking system for over two years now by leveraging DeFi protocols and building a basket of yield bearing assets. While play-to-earn is a challenge for most games, by wrapping games under our arcade model, MMG can offer a layer of rewards to any game's community and help bridge the gap between blockchain and traditional online games and esports.

On top of all of those challenges, there is still budget. Though our crypto earnings from yields is now enough for us to pay for most tournaments we host, the cost of bot development for our arcade means that we are still paying out of pocket, which provides it's own challenges when it comes to speed of development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Five years into our blockchain and play-to-earn journey we're proud to have been a play to earn community since 2018 and doing what we felt was right.

I believe that we were one of if not the first online esports gaming community (definitely in Smash Bros.) that utilized blockchain to reward players on a public ledger(LINO) and use staking protocols to generate the rewards. Whether we were first or not, I'm proud we were here when it started.

In 2019 we developed our Discord matchmaking system after realizing that we could not manually keep up with the demand of users wishing to hold money matches or competitive events with LINO as a reward. At the same time, we decided to shift our rewards away from LINO to our tickets system as not to be constricted by any one blockchain or token. Instead, or tickets would be used to redeem tokens on any blockchain that we decide to integrate with for rewards or other technologies.

We envisioned an ecosystem where all blockchains would be connected and faced some backlash in the Steemit community for our opinions. Flashforward to today, and bridges and networks like BTT Chain are becoming common place, helping us fulfill our dream of an online arcade that can connect to any game or blockchain.

What we learned

An important lesson has been how to maneuver and maximize funds in DeFi. I feel like this alone has been a big part of these last few years. Thought it hasn't been all.

We've also learned a lot about who our audiences are, and how different niches react to our type of product. While traditional gamers are slow to interact with our model, the majority of Web3 Gamers that cross our path compliment our innovation, however, we're not expansive and sharp enough to entice every competitive gamer on the blockchain to join - yet, but we're headed in the right direction.

What's next for MMG Discord Arcade - DAO

For competitors, currently in development is the ability for NFT holders to create teams / crews / clans or guilds, and distribute NFTs to players to prove membership, allowing teams to compete for tickets in new ways.

Supporters, collectors and competitors alike may also be interested in our upcoming NFT project for MMG's Esports DAO. Members of the Esports DAO will be able to vote on proposals.

After these project are finished we will begin to integrate more blockchains to our Arcade, so that users can accept rewards on a choice of multiple blockchains.