WildCard Alliance - Deep Dive

• Project Outline
• Team
• Roadmap
• Token Economics and NFT
• Investment Information
• Social Media / Actual Gameplay
• Supporter / Partner / Advisor
• Competitors
• Conclusion (pros and cons)

Project Outline

What kind of game is it?

• Wildcard Alliance is a AAA, third-person, PVP game that combines RTS (real-time strategy), MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), and CCG (collectible card game) elements. Imagine a game like Clash Royale. In addition to summoning Summons to the field, players can also control a main character to affect the game by casting skills, attacks, tricks, and other elements. The summoned beast is presented in the form of a card. By collecting the card of the summoned beast, the player can summon him in the game. The battle is held in the arena, and it is divided into three lanes to reach the opponent's nexus. Players have to think about offensive and defensive strategies, and how to allocate resources on three lanes.
• Players can freely choose summoned beast cards to form a deck for use in the game and use operations and strategies to attack the opponent's nexus in the game. The player who first reduces the life value of the opponent's nexus to zero wins.

What is the Game Loop?

• The team is expected to hold a large-scale event live game on 23.FEB.2023. The details have not yet been released, but it is conceivable that the official will increase its publicity at that time. In addition, the first NFT minting will also start in the near future. For details, please visit the official Discord.

• The team's goal is to make this game an "easy to learn, lifetime to master" game, and to create a game experience that is as good as watching the game as playing it in person. Fans watching the game will be able to get airdrops from the organizer during the game. Collectible items, which may be NFTs related to players or teams (similar to the atmosphere of fans getting signed balls thrown by players).
• The team will hold the IP part of the game but will hand over the business model of the game league to the players. The team will establish a competitive platform in the future. In addition to the basic functions of match matching, data tracking, and leaderboards, the team will initially assist players in creating game content on the platform, or establish competition alliances and teams. The eSports ecosystem from the WEB2 world will be moved to the WEB3 world. At that time, players can join as a part of the league or team, take up positions such as management, players, referees, marketing, finance, etc., and can raise prize pools by themselves, find advertisers, etc., and sell tickets to allow spectators to participate in the event. The income will be given back to the players who host and participate in the event.

What problems does the game want to solve?

• To solve the current lack of tools for content creators to increase audiences, interact more directly with fans, and even commercialized.
• To solve the current predicament that content creators' income is drawn too much by the centralized platform, the amount of fans' economic feedback to content creators is very limited.
• At present, e-sports events are all organized by officials. WCA hopes that by decentralizing the business model of the game league to players, different types of players will have more ways to participate in the game, and the income generated by fans' economy will be able to give more back to players.

How big is the potential market? (TAM, Total Addressable Market)

• The market size of the game industry has grown from $8B in 2006 to $160B in 2020.
• The scale of the game industry in 2021 is about $192.7B, which is larger than the sum of the film industry ($99.7B) and the music industry ($25.9B).
• There are more than 3 billion game players in the world, and the number continues to increase.

On which blockchain? What technology is used?

• Polygon.
• Unreal Engine 5.
• There are no NFTs yet.

TEAM

Who are the team members?

• WCA was founded by Playful Studio and is headquartered in McKinney, Texas, USA. Before WCA, the company successively developed the Super Lucky Tale series of games (3D adventure) and Creativerse (sandbox). LinkedIn shows that the company has 11-50 employees.
• According to MOD, there are currently 100 employees in charge of the WCA project (should include full-time and part-time), but only 15 employees of Playful Studio can be found on LinkedIn. The following is the introduction of the main personnel.
• CEO (Managing Director): Paul Bettner - Co-Founder and Co-CEO. Engineer by training, earlier in his career he worked at Ensemble Studios, the makers of Age of Empires, which they also worked on before Microsoft bought that company. In addition, Paul has also participated in the development of Halo Wars.
• Paul and his wife Katy founded New Toy in 2008. They developed the still-popular Scrabble game Words With Friends, which was acquired by Zynga in 2010 for $53.3 million. Paul founded VR game studio Playful Studio in 2013.
• CO - CEO (Managing Director): Katy Drake Bettner - Co-founder and co-CEO, with little background information, only co-founded an image design company BetRed Stories in 2018.
• CTO (Technology Lead): Jeff Smith - Chief Engineer, LinkedIn is not public, Twitter account also has no way to know past experience and other information.
• CFO (Financial Manager): None found on LinkedIn.

• CMO (Marketing Manager): David Calkins - has been working in the community and marketing of Playful Studio for nearly 9 years. He is the head of the company's external communication and cooperation and community growth. He has experience in cooperation with companies such as Nintendo and Microsoft in the past. Worked in the well-known game developer Zynga for nearly 3 years.
• BD (Business Development / Strategy): Mark Stanley - has been a BD at Playful for 3 years, and is currently a member of the board of directors and a Microsoft game BD. duty.
• VP of Creative: Jeff Simpson - creative manager. He has worked in Playful Studio for nearly 10 years. In addition, he established a Day6 creative company in 2005 and has cooperated with Disney and Warner Bros.
• VP of Production: Wally Wachi - Product Manager, has been working at Playful Studio for 11 years and has been a producer at Full Effect Studio (developer of Century Empire) for 7 years since 2002.
• Robert Atkins - Freelance illustrator and professor of comic strip art at Savannah College of Art and Design. He has been in charge of character/worldview design at Playful Studio for 9 years and has participated in the production of comics such as Spider-Man, Venom, X-Men, Marvel 4 Superman, and Star Trek.
• Quinn Johnson - Comic book, video game story writer. His past works include Kung Fu Panda comics, Castlevania, Ninja Turtles: Generations of Mutants, etc. He has worked at Disney Interactive for more than 2 years.

Does the team familiar with cryptocurrency / Web3 culture?

• Judging from what the founder Paul said in Discord, he is a developer who understands blockchain and has a good vision. However, judging from other information such as LinkedIn, no specific member has a WEB3 background.

Roadmap

Is there a roadmap? What are the Milestones?

• WCA has no roadmap at this stage, only Lite Paper mentions its decentralized platform under construction and the ideal economic cycle map.
• WCA has been developed for about 5 years, and its degree of completion is much higher than that of most AAA games. However, since there are no milestones and no roadmap, the team's future development progress still needs to be tracked continuously.

Is there a record of not completing or delaying any milestones?

• The first NFT minting has been confirmed to be postponed, and the date is undecided (the original date is 26.Jan.2023). The reason is that the team hopes to charge for the minting of the first NFT (unlike most chain game projects in the market, which are free to mint), and this NFT is a ticket for an official event held in February. According to the team, charged mint is a demonstration of the future vision of the project (see the project outline for details), the purpose is to tell holders that they can do the same in the future, so as to achieve the ultimate goal of a decentralized autonomous platform.
• However, there was a lot of backlash from the community, and the team decided to delay minting and re-design NFT utility. The event was changed to free participation, and the follow-up update will be announce in the near future.

Token Economics and NFT

What are tokens or NFTs? where to buy ?

• The first NFT series minting date is undecided and is expected to be on Polygon. There is currently no token information released.

What is the total token or NFT supply? How are tokens distributed? What are the token release rules?

• Details will be announced shortly. According to the founder Paul, there are 2,500 whitelists, and the total number is 5,000-7,000, which is not free mint.

What are the functions of the token or NFT? What benefits do holders get?

• Details will be announced shortly.

What are the factors that will cause demand/supply changes for tokens or NFTs now?

• The community has a lot of opposition to not free minting and believes that in the present market condition, if it is not free mint, it is very likely that the mint will not be completed. There are far fewer people who think that mint should be charged. The team said that they will listen to their opinions and announce more details in the near future.

Investment Information

Any VCs supporting them?

• According to GameBeat, WCA raised $23 million in 2019 from numerous individual investors. Another 46 million US dollars was raised in 2022 and this time Paradigm led the investment, and Griffin Gaming Partners, Polygon, etc. also participated in the investment.
• Paradigm is a well-known investment institution focusing on the field of cryptocurrency, and its co-founder Fred Ehrsam is also the co-founder of Coinbase. Other investment targets include Coinbase, BlockFi, Maker, Uniswap, Sky Mavis, OpenSea, and Fractal, among others.
• Griffin Gaming Partners is a venture capital institution focusing on the game field. It became the largest venture capital institution in the game field in 2022, and its investment share in the WEB3 field has accounted for more than half of the total.

Social Media / Actual Gameplay

What social media do they use? How many followers each? How active are they?

• Official website
• Notion
• Twitter followers: 17.7K
• Number of Discord members: 31023
• Number of Reddit members: 322
• Youtube followers: 278
• Perhaps because their token or NFT has not yet been issued, the number of Twitter or Discord is not very high. The interaction on Twitter is active, and it can be seen that most of them are living people. Discord has less discussion because the game has not been officially launched, but there are many members who provide constructive suggestions to the team.

Are there regular AMAs or blog updates?

• In the past 7 months, there have been five 1-hour Town Halls that included AMA sessions, and all of them were recorded, which is a good frequency. The project does not have Medium to do regular updates, and Notion has also stopped updating for several months. It is easier for new participants to quickly grasp the development progress and activities of the project if there is a blog that is updated regularly. This is an area that can be improved.

Are social media accounts managed by professionals?

• On average, there are about 4 posts on Twitter in a week. The quality and number of interactions are both excellent, and it can be seen that there are dedicated people managing them. Discord has 24-hour MOD. The founder and CM talk and answer questions from time to time. From the quality and length of the reply, you can realize they are listening to the opinions of the community.

What community activities have they done? What is the marketing strategy?

• WCA has done personality shaping for each character and Summoned, simulated what they will say, introduced their background, etc., to make the characters more vivid, which can be seen from Twitter posts and the official website. In addition, the official website also publishes related short comics, and the Youtube channel introduces the characters in the form of news station comedy broadcasts, which is a good feature.
• Discord activities are relatively common. Recently, only whitelist events like quizzes or Twitter activities. There are no other activities to unite the community.
• The team recently announced that they are open for collab, game testing, and content creators' application. It is conceivable that the team will start to strengthen publicity.

Gameplay

Supporter / Partner / Advisor

Any current partners?

• The team has recently begun to increase marketing. In addition to the official release of applications for external cooperation in the Discord group recently, it also cooperates with well-known Web3 game live broadcasters such as @CryptoStache and @Brycent, and also plans to airdrop Royal. io music NFT.

Competitors

Any similar genre competitors?

• MOBA：Thetan Arena、Revoland、Spider Tanks
• CCG：Splinterlands、Skyweaver、Axie Infinity

Conclusion (pros and cons)

There are a few things that I personally appreciate about the Wildcard Alliance:

• From the media reports on them, it can be seen that they know very well what is the most important thing in a game-fun.
• The game comes out first, followed by NFT and token issuance.
• Their vision for a decentralized platform allows ordinary players to gain fun and income from this ecosystem as long as they are willing to invest a little more time, and it is a diverse way of participation. In all the roadmap I have seen, I think it is very feasible, as long as the game is fun enough.
• The team has a strong background and VC funding.
• The game is more complete than others.
• The special CCG+MOBA+RTS gameplay is easy to learn and makes the game suitable for competition, and each battle has a time limit, which is in line with the game habits of modern people.

There are a few points to note:

• The white paper is not out yet (only Lite Paper).
• The team does not have a native WEB3 "DEGEN", and it can be seen from the Discord interaction that they are still learning WEB3 culture.
• Continuing from the above, if there is no WEB3 consultant, the future issuance of coins and NFT will have a long communication process with the community. The team must find a balance between the long-term vision and the short-term needs of the community.
• There is no clear roadmap or milestones to refer to.
• The team was recruiting Lead Game Designers on LinkedIn two months ago (now closed).