[DAO:6fbd283] Continued Development of Soul Magic

Governance
1

by 0xd91db432d98d80e9467206cab3b9c46081795f0d (Mazzak)

Should the following $50,000 grant in the In-World Content category be approved?

Abstract

Soul Magic is a popular role play game in Decentraland and it is consistently one of the top 10 scenes in DCL most of the time since its alpha launch in Oct 2022. The current number of DAU is between 100-300 and it reached 439 on 23rd June 2023 (10% share of global visitors), the first day of our Admission Carnival. Previous DCL grant ([Updated] Soul Magic Game Development Proposal) allowed us to expand the user base from ~3,000 in mid Dec 2022 to over 10,000 users as of 29th June, 2023. With the requested grant our objective is to accelerate the development of more game functions, enhance playability, so as to grow our user base as well as on board more users to Decentraland through collaborations.

Grant size

50,000 USD in DAI

Project duration

5 months

Beneficiary address

0xd91dB432D98D80e9467206cab3B9C46081795f0d

Email address

hello@soulmagic.io

Description

Soul Magic is a popular RPG in Decentraland and consistently one of the top 10 scenes in Decentraland most of the time. With the previous grant funded by Decentraland DAO, our user base has grown to over 10k as of 29th June 2023. The followings are the highlights that have been developed over the last 6 months:
-Addition of new game plays in Soul Magic, including Meditation, Alchemy, Crafting, Discovery and Trading
-Established 2 new locations of Soul Magic in Decentraland - Angkor Temple (111, -102) where Trinity Crown quest and Discovery takes place and Treehouse (99, -112) exchange centre where players can trade resources with each other
-Participated in MVFW 23 and launched a collab store in Dragon City with fashion web3 project Poppy NFT
-Launched PvP game play with a new scene Black Forest, which is a battle royale like game for players to combat with each other using magic spells
-Launched Admission Carnival, which is a big event in Soul Magic that admits magic school students after passing the admission quiz. 30 wearable collections were distributed to players during the carnival event collaborating with 11 creators
-Language switching function allowing users to switch into 10 languages including English, Chinese, Spanish, Portugese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Russian
-Created 24 Decentraland wearables with a total trading volume of around 10k MANA
-Introduced a number of projects to Decentraland, including Kikitrade, Chain Challenger, Poppy, Meta Temple and Goldeneye
-Over 17k Discord community and 4k followers on Twitter

Roadmap and milestones

Admission Carnival event was hosted on 23rd June 2023 with a number of sponsors, including Wonderzone, Metatrekkers, Polygonal Mind, Meta Gamimall, Babydolls, Golfcraft, Kikitrade and Chain Challenger, as well as creators like Edolena, Metatiger, Tounne. With the requested grant, we plan to develop and expand our game functions of the following areas:
-Enhancement of existing farming game play, adding magic plants and merchandise shop for players to earn in-game currency Gold Midas
-Launching two mini-games of Soul Magic - fishing and potion crafting with new scenes
-Launching a new magic card game containing creature, character and item cards
-Development of “Space”, private virtual space that allows users to build and customise their house and garden
-Implementation of game token that can be earned through playing the game and participation in activities
-Improvement on user experience including wearable bonus, onboarding and players objectives
-Upgrade and integration with Decentraland SDK7 to enhance performance
-Host monthly events and one large scale event like Admission Carnival, in collaboration with DCL and external communities

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2

Recognition of Decentraland DAO’s Support by Grant Recipients

Has Soul Magic implemented any of the mechanisms mentioned in the governance proposal to recognise the DAO’s support?

3

Hello @3Point1Four, we have implemented several acknowledge options mentioned in the draft proposal, even though the acknowledge points are for future grants. In our previous grant proposal it was announced in our Discord that the DCL grant was approved: Discord. In our Twitter we tagged Decentraland in the Bio section so that users recognize that Soul Magic is a DCL game: https://twitter.com/soulmagicnft and posted Tweets about our DCL events. We also have regular meetings with GGS to update our development throughout the previous grant and present to DCL community in Townhall on 13th April 2023 about the update and development plan.

4

Ok thanks. Does Soul Magic have a path to self sustainability? Any recurring income that will reduce the reliance on grants down the line.

5

Hi @3Point1Four Understood that we cannot rely on DCL grant forever. There are several possible ways for us to have income or cash flow to support the development in the future, including 1. selling game items and royalty income, 2. subscription model, 3. raise funds from issuing tokens, 4. advertisement and event hosting fee. However our focus at this moment is to establish a bigger community and increase user stickiness so that the above cash flow streams will make sense. Prior to achieving sustainability, the team will deploy our own capital, seek for investors as well as applying for grants in order to support the development. In addition, the grant not only allows us to build new game functions, it also attract new users to DCL and our game, as well as retaining existing users.

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6

I have the same question as 3Point1Four. The first proposal was granted with $60K and this is another request for $50K yet there seems to be no strategy to self sustain. This, in my opinion, is concerning as there seems to be a big reliance on the grant to be able to move forward.

7

Hello @MetaRyuk, our strategy to achieve self sustainability is that first step we target to expand our user base by double within the next 6 months. With a bigger community, we will sell game assets in order to have cash flow for our further development, so that the reliance on DCL grant will be reduced. Also in our development plan mentioned in the proposal, we are looking to implement a game token, that allows players to earn or purchase. There will be incentives including in-game items and unlocking exclusive content so that players are encouraged to purchase the token. However, we need to balance the monetization vs playability carefully in order to make players engaged with us. Players and community are the core of our game.

8

Game’s require users to be sustainable.

DCL does not have users.

DCL needs content for users to want to stay and invest time and energy into the platform.

If DCL does not fund the creation of content for people to play no one else is going to do it out of the goodness of their own heart.

There is no one actually building in Decentraland who doesn’t understand why it is impractical to expect anyone making content in world to be able to explain to you a plan for sustainability.

It is a fundamentally flawed expectation and making it every grant requesters responsibility to explain to you the nature of reality and how to scale a successful product seems unreasonable.

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9

DCL does have users.
DCL does have content.
DCL does fund creators.
It is not a fundamentally flawed expectation.
How many more thousands needed to get more users and to finally be self sustainable?

10

The question about investment and sustainability really depends on different projects, what achievements they are aiming for and how the metaverse will become. Currently metaverse is still in its early stage of user engagement, the number of daily active users of DCL is only at around 4,000. In comparison, VR Chat, a web2 virtual world platform, currently has a DAU of around 400k users, which is roughly 100x of DCL’s DAU. That said, with the increment of both quality content as well as general interests in web3 and metaverse, it is expected the user base and active users of DCL will grow rapidly. When the user base gets big and engaged enough, the project will be able to be fully self sustainable.

1 Like
11

I’m glad that you said that DCL DAU is around 4000 instead of not having users at all as someone here claimed. The question of a sustainability strategy is something that i asked in proposals that seek for grants above 100K either individually or collectively. I took the time to visit your scene and personally, i’m impressed with the overall design. I like the Angkor Wat scene as I’ve been there and being someone located in Southeast Asia, it is nice to see a UNESCO heritage building being “rebuilt” in Decentraland. I would suggest, perhaps something to consider, is putting historical facts around the temple for people to learn about the historical monument while playing or whenever a user visit the scene.

Given that your mission is to get more users, have you

  1. attempt to reach/engage/market audience and potential users in Southeast Asia
  2. the only close to marketing method in this strategy is the “Host monthly events…”. Hopefully, should this grant be successful, you could stretch your budget to market users in Asia.

By the way, do you have any articles written associating with the Angkor Wat scene? I would like to share them to the Southeast Asian community and get them to visit potentially increasing or diversifying your audience and visitors from the far south east.

Also, i visited your site soulmagic.io and i couldnt find any links that talks about your presence and game in Decentraland. I had to visit your twitter and your pinned tweet to access it.

Hit me up on Discord.

12

Do you know how many users just one game needs to monetize sustainably with the free-to-play model demanded of all games that apply for grants?

Because if you did, I think you would agree that while I may have been slightly hyperbolic, it was certainly not so unreasonable it warranted such a petty level of passive-aggressive derision.

13

Thanks for visiting our scene and your comments! It is a good suggestion that we add content about Angkor Temple so that people will learn more about the history of it. FYI some of our team members are based in Cambodia in South East Asia. We have plans to include events to promote the culture of SE Asia in the future. In addition, we participated in NFTAsia event in Dec 2022 and DCL is a partner of the event as well. It is an indirect way of marketing our project and networking with others. As for marketing in SE Asia, local gamers there are mainly playing mobile games, as not many of them afford to purchase a computer at home. But certainly the potential there is huge given the population and economic growth. For website, we are going to add a section and link to DCL in order to show our presence in DCL. Will DM you on Discord to connect :slight_smile:

14

Voted Yes for this as the plan is sound and it’s great to hear that you have an international team. Thanks for approaching my questions maturely with facts and figures.

15

Big YES from me! Very beautiful looking game in Decentraland that as far as I can tell the community loves. Great work Soul Magic team! I look forward to seeing further developments.

16

Soul Magic is a well developed game with a unique style. I really like how they are catering to so many different languages. I had the pleasure of working with Soul Magic recently on an event collaboration and found the team to be professional, creative and very enthusiastic about collaborating with the community. I will vote yes on this propopsal because I think it’s a great team with a solid idea. I’d love to see them do more marketing promoting Decentraland, and I look forward to seeing them do more community events and inititaives!

17

Soul magjic, What an amazing project! Bring so many users and creates so much value in DCL!

18

Continued Development of Soul Magic

This proposal is now in status: PASSED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 76% 7,470,702 VP (110 votes)
  • No 23% 2,264,378 VP (12 votes)
  • Abstain 1% 564 VP (4 votes)
19

Continued Development of Soul Magic

This proposal has been ENACTED by a DAO Committee Member (0x88013d7ed946dd8292268a6ff69165a97a89a639)

Vesting Contract Address: 0xd25Bd0f2aed50ccadaB5C8Dd2516E1DFEE2eb8f9

20

Hi! DAO Committee (@HPrivakos @Tobik @rizk) we would like to request a pause for the vesting contract on Soul Magic grant. After our discussion with GSS, it has been determined that we require an additional 2-4 weeks to finalize because extra time was spent on land restructuring given the pause of land access, establish partnerships on our card game launch and translation issue during SDK7 migration. Once it’s ready, we will request to activate the vesting contract in order to release the remaining funds. Thank you very much.

1 Like