The gaming industry is the biggest entertainment market in the world: bigger than the music and film industries combined. In 2019 Prota Games saw the opportunity to create gaming content for players and enthusiasts and, in less than two years, the company created a community with 10 million unique users and more than 65 million views per month. Now, they are launching Heroes of Metaverse, a game with a tokenized economy that seeks to combine gameplay with the ownership concept of Web3 through rewards in NFTs.
See below Santiago's vision about games and crypto assets in general.
Prota started as a content channel. Where did the motivation for creating the game itself come from?
In less than two years, we have created a large gamer community in Brazil, with more than 65 million videos watched per month and 10 million unique users. We navigated through several different games, understanding what each audience liked and identified with. In the last year, we have noticed an evolution in the gaming market. Crypto-based games have grown at an alarming rate, moving billions of dollars. With the tokenized economy, users can be the real holders of the items they earn during gameplay. However, we realized that there was a lack of quality games that focused on the players’ fun, and not the gains itself. Being in contact with the community, we knew the market well and saw that there was an opportunity to launch a different initiative leveraging the audience we had already built.
How is Heroes of Metaverse different from other NFT games? What characteristics do you believe justify the success (or not) of projects in this environment?
The vast majority of other crypto based games are low quality productions compared to traditional games. The goal focused on the appreciation of assets in the short term creates unsustainable systems. Therefore, although the market is very promising, it is necessary that the game has high added value, which goes beyond the irrational valuation of assets. This has been our sole focus: creating a high quality experience, similar to the traditional games industry, but with Web 3.0 innovations and ownership that make the product even better for the consumer. We know what the user is looking for, and we want to offer what is almost not available on the market today, a high quality game, with good playability, in which the tokenized economy is an additional incentive, not the main focus.
How does the in-game economy works?
We will basically have two currencies within the game, one used for traditional game progress and another cryptocurrency, which will serve for transactions. If the user wants to sell a certain item, he can set the value in cryptocurrency himself, making the exchange through the MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet. The game is free and you can buy assets with a credit card, without the need for a MetaMask account. Only the monetization of the items will need this step, to have the liquidity of the transaction.
What is your view on the main opportunities within web3?
There are thousands of opportunities in Web 3.0, as the technology is still being validated. Overall, I believe that the best opportunities are in consolidated markets, which benefit from the implementation of blockchain technology to provide an even better experience to users, such as social networks, music, games and finance.
The crypto market has been experiencing significant asset price drops recently, and some even highly capitalized projects have crashed. What is your view on this topic? Which projects do you see most enthusiastically?
I believe this is a very necessary drop and very similar to what happened in the 2000s with technology companies. Many projects were receiving a disproportionate amount of capital because of excess market liquidity. This adjustment ensures that adventurers lose ground to those who are working really seriously and with a long-term vision, as capital ends up choosing only the most solid and sustainable projects. In the long term, I think this current shock will not have much influence on the asset class.
What are the plans for Prota Games in the short and long term? What is the end game?
In the short term, our goal (next 3 months) is to launch the best game with blockchain technology in Latin America. In the long term, it is to be positioned as a top 5 global company in the blockchain games industry.
