"We will allow to monetize the departed players": Zhanna Goranskaya about The Abyss platform

With the support of the Russian publisher Destiny.Games, an MMO platform is currently being developed on The Abyss blockchain. The project is already making progress. In May, he raised $15 million for development as part of a DAICO campaign (an ICO analogue). We talked with Zhanna Goranskaya, Director of platform Development, about what The Abyss will be like.

Zhanna Goranskaya, Platform Development Director

Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru : You are making a game store with a crypt. What was primary? “Are we doing a store” or “Are we doing something about the crypt”?

Zhanna Goranskaya, Development Director of The Abyss: Absolutely, we are making a product. I have been hatching the idea of creating a single platform for MMO for years. And when we met the guys from Destiny, and Volodya (Vladimir Kurochkin, president of The Abyss) told us about their concept, it became clear that the guys were trying to implement something very close, but much more ambitious.

It is based on the idea of a referral network: every player who starts playing on the platform becomes a member of the referral program, can invite his friends and receive remuneration for all their transactions. If your referral also invites friends, they become second-level referrals for you, and you get a reward for their payments too. In total, there are five levels of the referral system and the platform spends 10% of its revenue share on its provision.

Let’s talk about the specifics later. Returning to the topic of “stor” and “crypt”, is there no feeling that one topic compromises the other?

Jeanne: It so happened that the announcement of the platform coincided with a wave of hype around the growth of the cryptocurrency exchange rate, which is both good and bad at the same time. On the one hand, on the wave of insane interest in blockchain projects, the guys managed to stake out the status of pioneers and raise the necessary funds. On the other hand, the presence of a blockchain puts us on a par with a million incomprehensible projects that issue their tokens. Given the crisis that the cryptocurrency market is currently in, we have to act very carefully to explain what the platform is and what tokens are used for there.

Does the work on the platform mean that Destiny.Games is leaving the MMO operation? Is it not such an interesting market from a commercial point of view?

Zhanna: Destiny.Games was and remains a developer and publisher – the activities of this company have not changed. The Abyss is a separate project for which a completely different team is going. Of course, we are friends and help each other. And, of course, the first projects launched on The Abyss will be Destiny.Games games – it will be much easier for us to run all the integration on our own projects.

Now let’s talk in detail about the product and its place on the market. You have decided to offer another store to the market. Does the market really need it today?

Jeanne: Let’s agree on the concepts right away – The Abyss is not a store, it is a global platform for operating. The task of the store is to sell as many units of goods as possible to each specific player. That is why there is an endless carousel of new products and sales on Steam and other stores. It does not matter to the store whether the player plays the purchased game or has never launched it. This is the fundamental difference of our platform – we want players to play one game, and play for a long time. Because multiplayer games can be played for years, and the main revenue is not always generated at the start.

If you look at the MMO client PC market, now developers have depressingly few distribution opportunities. Most are forced to give their games to the publisher (and watch the publisher take the lion’s share of the income). And if the developer decides to distribute the game independently, then apart from the notorious stores, he has no special options.

The situation is slightly better with browser games and applications for social networks – there developers can operate the game themselves, and there are an order of magnitude more platforms for browser games.

Major publishers are developing their platforms – Origin, the app Battle.net from Blizzard, etc., but these are closed systems and no third-party developer can get on them. This is where we see our main task – to create a platform specifically tailored for multiplayer games, where developers will be able to directly control the game and receive a significant part of the income.

The Abyss

Here, we have come to the most burning. To buns and money. If an MMO company does decide to post a project on The Abyss, what will the platform be ready to offer it?

Jeanne: Developers are very specific people. They need good financial conditions, traffic and ease of operation from the platform. Moreover, for the sake of the first two points, they are often ready to sacrifice the third. Therefore, we have several suggestions that may be of interest.

First, financial conditions. We already offer a traditional 30/70 profit-sharing system, but at the same time 10% of our share goes to the service of the referral program. For example, the share of payments from players who are referrals of the developer will be 74%, plus additional payments from player referrals (70 in traditional currency and 4% in tokens from the referral system). Secondly, when a player leaves the project and starts playing another game on the platform, the developer continues to receive all the referral contributions of the player (and percentages from the transactions of his referral network).

We think it’s fair. After all, it was the game of this developer that brought a new user to the platform. Few of the existing platforms make it possible to monetize the departed players. Thanks to this system, it will be beneficial for developers to recommend The Abyss as the main platform for their game.

We are ready to provide traffic guarantees for each project. We have a marketing budget and we intend to spend it not on branded advertising of the platform, but on advertising a specific game hosted on the platform. At the conclusion of the contract, we will discuss the conditions that will suit both parties. And, of course, everything will depend on the terms of cooperation: if we believe in the project, if the developer is ready to launch it on The Abyss earlier than in other stores, we are ready to consider all conditions: advance payments, guaranteed volume of marketing investments, etc. At the same time, we will never rigidly demand exclusivity: the developer must decide for himself what to do with his game.

And the most important thing for us: we want to make a platform convenient for operating. So that integration takes a minimum of effort and time. So that developers can see all the necessary analytics in their office. They had the opportunity to directly buy additional traffic to their games from the platform. They could convert all the tokens received for the referral program into traditional currency. I want to implement a lot of useful things, it’s clear that it’s not right away – but we will strive to make the platform the most convenient place to operate.

Let’s talk from the player’s position. Why would a gamer come to the playground, why not play on any other?

Zhanna: Usually players don’t care which platform to play on – they go to where there is a game they are interested in. Therefore, the most serious challenge for us is to make the platform interesting primarily for developers.

Hardcore players of MMO games are forced to use additional services during the game. In addition to voice communication, players use DKP systems, DPS trackers, guild sites and forums. We want to embed these services directly into the platform. So that the guild could get a convenient tool for management, treasury management, DKP accounting and auctions at the platform level. We also plan to fasten dynamic downloading into games so that the player can start the game as quickly as possible without waiting for the client to be fully installed. Many of these functions exist as separate services, and we are negotiating with them, offering integration into the platform.

And, of course, the referral system. And it’s not about spamming a referral link on social networks. You can build a referral network in various ways, including making content based on your favorite game. Look at the videos of popular gaming bloggers – most of them use referral links from social networks and thus monetize their content. On The Abyss platform, any streamer or blogger can create their own referral network and earn money from it for a long time, as long as the players they brought stay on the platform.

The Abyss

You are introducing elements of network marketing here. How ethical is it?

Jeanne: I use the example of network marketing to clearly explain how the platform works. The first players and developers who come to The Abyss have more chances to build a large referral network and earn money from other people’s payments. In this way, the platform really resembles network marketing companies. And we still need to distinguish between network marketing and financial pyramids. Both of them use a similar principle of forming a client network, but the similarity ends there.

There is another slippery point here: the fact is that the attitude to referral systems in different countries is different. In Russia, for example, referrals are not liked in games, and after any announcement of the referral system, you can find mountains of comments: “I’m not going to get my friends hooked on your game.” At the same time, referral codes are very common in the service sector and everyone is willing to use them. Uber, SkyEng – there are a lot of examples where the referral system has proven itself perfectly.

Now, in general terms, the image of the platform has been lined up for me. But I don’t understand why The Abyss needed a crypt theme?

Zhanna: The very idea of the existence of an internal currency on the platform is not new, it is actively used by many gaming platforms and online stores. The same OZON bonuses or loyalty program bonuses at any gas station are essentially the same currency that can be spent to pay for any product in the store. And now imagine that bonuses can be sold through a special exchange – and here’s a ready-made cryptocurrency model for you.

A single currency is needed for many things: you can give a reward for completing tasks, a bonus to the first payment, or a reward for watching a video. The platform can even pay players compensation for technical problems or the closure of the game.

But its main purpose is to serve the referral network. I have already written how it works: for each payment, no matter in which game, the player receives his share in Abyss tokens. And now imagine, is it possible to implement such a system without an internal currency? And what kind of contracts for the movement of funds need to be issued? And on what basis to make a payment to developers? And how to declare the income received for referral charges? In this regard, it is much easier to work with the domestic currency. And the fact that Abyss tokens are already being listed on many exchanges adds interest. Just for reference: we have the best result in the world since the beginning of this year – 15 exchanges and 19 currency pairs are connected.

You did not raise money through the ICO, through its, let’s say, analogue. How did you come to the conclusion that you need to use DAICO?

Jeanne: The team has been working on the idea of the platform since the end of 2017, and even then they considered ICO as a fundraising option. At the same time, the existing ICO options did not suit at all, primarily due to the large number of fraud. A lot of companies that went to the ICO with great ideas quickly lost motivation to make a good product after fundraising. Or they just disappeared with the collected money.

We wanted to come up with a system that would allow us to stand out among the standard token sales and preserve the trust of investors. At the beginning of this year, Vitalik Buterin voiced the idea of how to make a smart contract with fully transparent conditions. Its main difference is that all the conditions of the token sale are public, written in a smart contract that does not depend on the developers and cannot be changed.

It turns out an honest decentralized system:

• it is impossible to issue more tokens than stated;
• it is impossible to withdraw all funds at the same time – developers have only a small monthly withdrawal limit available;
• there are no hidden token holders;
• once a quarter, any of the token holders can initiate a vote for a full refund. If the vote is successful, the remaining funds will be returned to the investors;
• once a month, the team can initiate a vote to increase the withdrawal limit.

All this not only keeps the team in good shape, but also makes them constantly report to the community.

Platform Development Office

How much more willing to invest in a project if they know that the money will be frozen for you for the first time?

Jeanne: For investors, the main thing is faith in the project and in the team that makes it. ICO or DAICO, not so important. When we talk about the idea of an “honest ICO”, very few people take our word for it. But the contract is public, it contains all the conditions, so it does not take long to convince.

Another thing is that in a crisis of distrust of the blockchain, words are not enough – you need to do a project and constantly show the process and results. We do development reports every two weeks. Our team of community managers works with the audience in 16 languages. We have 18 telegram channels (15 with regional languages and 3 common ones, in English). Transparency must be complete.

What were you not ready for when working with this type of financing?

Zhanna: It cannot be said that we were not ready for something – many already had experience working with the crypto market. But perhaps the most unexpected thing is the degree of intensity and the amount of work that falls on you during the token sale process. This is a powerful acceleration, both for the team as a whole and for each employee.

There are still a number of “surprises” that are related to the crypto market itself. All funds frozen by the smart contract are stored in the Ethereum currency, the volatility of the cryptocurrency is huge. And this affects the amount of funds that you have to finance the project.

But there were also pleasant surprises: we did not expect that we would get such a close-knit community of interested people even at the stage of developing the platform. During the token sale, people from 110 countries became our investors. And now we get their support, they help us, advise us. Those who have invested large sums in the platform are really interested in the success of the project. In fact, they become not only brand lawyers, but also “remote employees”.

Another point concerns the behavior of people on the platform. In our test game, which is currently running on The Abyss, the average check turned out to be 10 times higher than on the Facebook version.

If we return to the b2c side of the question. Won’t the need to work with tokens be a high entry threshold for the target audience?

Jeanne: For most of our players, The Abyss will be just a gaming platform, and Abyss tokens are bonuses that can be spent in the game. Therefore, the entry threshold will be the same as in any other game: register and play. For those who will use tokens and sell them on exchanges, additional authorization will be required, up to confirmation of their ID. However, for participants of the cryptocurrency market, this is a familiar procedure.

What time is the launch site scheduled for?

Zhanna: The platform will be launched in the 1st quarter of 2019. First, we will conduct a softlonch, let’s see how the referral system works. After launching in English-speaking territories, we will move towards Asia: already among our first players there is a very large percentage from Asia (Vietnam, Japan, South Korea). Now you can download the pre-alpha version – our MusicWar browser game is connected there in test mode. Most of the functionality is not there, but the referral system is already working (and will remain after the release), and all game purchases can be paid for with Abyss tokens.

How much audience do you plan to attract at the launch of the platform?

Zhanna: First of all, we synchronize our own games with the platform: this is about 20 million accounts, mainly from Russia and CIS countries. We expect to attract about one hundred thousand more English-speaking users on the softlonch. But in general, our plans are the most ambitious.

I see. Good luck and thanks for the interview.