Gamefi RPG Guild of Guardians (GOG) Analyzed
Researching The First Mobile RPG That Lets Players Own In-Game Content As NFTs.
A few weeks ago, my Twitter followers asked me to research gamefi project Guild of Guardians. After sharing my findings on Twitter I also want to share them here and add a couple of things that I had to leave out in the original thread.
Let’s begin with some stats.
- Guild of Guardians is a mobile RPG (role play game) that will go live in early 2022.
- The project has over 150.000 pre-registered players.
- 50+ developers with experience in AAA titles are working on the game.
- GOG raised over $5.3 million through sales of their token GOG Gems.
As these numbers show, this is an exciting gaming project with a lot of potentials. What else can we find out?
2 important things before we continue:
- Please note that this is NOT financial advice. I wrote this article for educational purposes.
- For my research of this project, I followed the process as described in my big crypto research guide. You should check it out, it’s really good.
Website
I started my research process with GOG’s website.
And I have to say, it looks very nice! You can see right away that a lot of time and money went into making this. There are some neat animations. The structuring is clear.
There are no broken elements. Spelling & grammar are flawless. Checking it on urlvoid.com shows that there are no obvious security problems.
They have an FAQ on their site covering some basic questions. You can easily find the whitepaper. There is also a store showing several sold-out NFTs.
All of this gives the important first impression of a legit project.
Moving on.
The site covers a lot of information, giving you a good idea of what this is all about.
“Turn your gaming passion into NFTs”
So anyone visiting this site will immediately understand that this is a gamefi project giving players the opportunity to earn money by playing and trading NFTs inside the game.
However, there are three things which I don’t like so much about GOG’s website:
- The copy’s focus is a little bit too much on the whole NFT-functionality and how players benefit. Don’t get me wrong. The NFT-integration in the game is great and their main selling point. But there is little information about the actual game and the gameplay mechanics. For someone who wants to understand more about the game itself, the content is too light.
- This brings me to the next point. The only good look we get at the actual game is through a video showing in-game scenes close to the bottom. This should be somewhere on the top! Also, the current video is very short. Show me more! Not only some random fighting in a dungeon but also the NFT-functionality in action.
- What’s also missing on the site: detailed information about the people & company behind GOG. I had to look these up elsewhere. More on this below.
Team & Partners
To find out more about the people behind Guild of Guardians, I had to look in other places.
GOG is developed by Stepico, a mobile game studio from Ukraine. They have worked on multiple mobile games since their founding in 2014 which is important as you don’t want this to be in the hands of someone without a lot of experience in the industry.
There’s also a company involved in the project called Leonis Pty Ltd. which is registered in New South Wales. According to the whitepaper, they contribute development services in building the game. They also own the official website. Apart from that, I wasn’t able to find any other information on them, which I found very strange.
As a nice person on Twitter explained to me, the reason for this lack of transparency probably lies with strict regulations in Australia.
The game’s publisher is Immutable, a layer 2 solution for NFTs on Ethereum. There’s a lot of information on them available on the internet which adds a lot to the credibility of the whole project. Just one piece of info: Immutable raised $60 million in a Series B round. Stuff like this doesn’t happen when your company is crap.
Then there are the partners.
There are some big names here. I don’t want to go into details too much and just pick one: French gaming heavyweight Ubisoft.
As a game developer, having someone like this on board is pretty big. Ubisoft also lists the partnership on their website. Easily verifiable for a researcher and a good sign!
Whitepaper
Digging deeper, GOG’s whitepaper offers a lot of information on the project’s plans.
It gives an overview of the mobile gaming market’s state and the chances they are seeing for their project.
As becomes clear, Guild of Guardians aims for a new niche in an established & growing market. The project wants to be at the forefront of combining NFTs with mobile gaming. Both sectors are growing very fast so there’s a lot of potentials.
The gaming industry is quick to pick up new ideas and trends. So GOG is not the only one doing this. But the project is targeting a major pain point for players: to switch pay to win for play to earn.
A big problem for many players these days is that they have to spend money on a lot of games in order to reach higher levels or be competitive. GOG wants to change that by paying players for things they do in the game and by giving them ownership of in-game content.
Why is this so great?
Because this is a gaming model with higher gamer retention. This translates into people spending more time & money on the platform.
But how do people spend money on the platform and how does the platform generate revenue?
There are 3 ways how GOG will earn money:
- Players buy seasonal content as NFTs such as heroes, pets, and boosters.
- Secondary transactions of NFTs (players selling in-game stuff to other players). This will be the main source of revenue in the long term.
- In-app purchases (this will be a minor stream of income for the platform).
What other things can we find in the whitepaper?
There are several pages of information on basic gameplay mechanics and important game features. We learn about what players can do in the game. Players can visit dungeons with their heroes where they look for some juicy loot. Typical RPG-stuff, basically. But this is the kind of information which I would like to see more of on the homepage.
Token Use Cases & Distribution
Let’s take a look at GOG’s token next.
The game’s token GOG Gems is an ERC-20 token used as in-game currency. Players can earn gems for free by playing. But the token is also used as an incentive for user growth and for governance. For example, users can earn gems by doing certain things outside of the game and when they participate in voting in which direction the game should develop.
Certain actions in-game will only be possible through using gems.
What use cases are there for the gems token?
- Minting game NFTs.
- Buying in-game assets and covering fees of secondary sales.
- Staking.
- Governance & voting.
All gems being used are added to a rewards pool. Stakers get gems from this pool as a reward for playing & voting.
What’s interesting here is that the tokens are being created, issued, and distributed by a company called Guardians Corporation. According to Guild of Guardian’s Medium channel, this entity is not affiliated with Guild of Guardians.
Don’t ask me why. I wasn’t able to find out more about this. But I assume that this strange set-up probably also has something to do with the strict Australian regulations mentioned above.
Anyways.
In total there are 1 billion GOG gems or tokens. You can see the distribution and circulation schedule in the charts above.
There are a couple of things which I’d like to add here.
The whitepaper says that 20% of tokens will go to the developers which it specifies as Leonis (not Stepico). As mentioned above, there’s no information about what Leonis is.
Another 6% will go to Guardians Corporation, about which there also is no further information.
That means that 26% of the total token supply will be held by companies about which there isn’t much information available. However, the whitepaper says that Leonis’ tokens will unlock over 48 months. So I assume that Leonis must be their own team/developers.
For me, this is a weak point in this whitepaper.
As a researcher and potential investor, I’d like to have more information on who these entities are. I have a rough idea. But I’d like GOG to be a little bit more transparent about this.
What else can we find out about the token?
Etherscan lists that the current number of token holders is a little over 2.100. This makes sense as the game hasn’t gone live and only went through pre-sale and public sale so far.
Individual buyers of the token (pre-sale & public sale) and exchanges don’t hold (too) large quantities.
The GOG token is traded on multiple exchanges with a reasonable daily trading volume and a total market cap of ~$25 M USD.
What about the roadmap?
Half of the milestones have already been reached.
In early 2022, the alpha will go live including integration of Gems. Additional features will follow over the year until the full release takes place sometime in early 2023.
Not much else to say here.
Social Media
Now, let’s take a look at their social media channels.
Their Discord follower count with 120k is huge and very active. They have guides, faqs, channels for community content, rewards, and so on. Their Twitter account with 113k followers is also very active and shows a lot of user engagement.
They also have a YouTube channel (2.4k, only 4 vids so far) and a Medium channel (5.7k).
This shows me a couple of things:
- They have a dedicated fan base (great for future growth)
- They interact with their fans and offer a lot of feedback and information.
Well done!
Final Words
Time to wrap things up.
Guild of Guardians is a legit gamefi project with a well-defined use case for the mobile gaming market.
They are backed by renowned companies and they have a huge following. Both are very important for future growth. On top of that, they will benefit from being one of the first in the space to integrate NFTs into mobile gaming.
So all is set for a big success?
I believe so.
But the big unknown is the game itself.
To be a hit the game needs to be one thing: fun. From the footage that we’ve seen so far only little can be told. It sure looks nice. But will the gameplay actually live up to the expectations? What people don’t want is just another dungeon grinder. So there are still a lot of open questions.
But If Guild of Guardians delivers what it promises, then it will become a money-printing machine. In any case, we should know more soon when the Alpha comes out.
