Game Design Lessons from VBA: The NBA of the Metaverse
Research Memo for Blockcrunch VIP members
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I didn’t grow up with fantasy sports. The concept of pretend-drafting real athletes always seemed…creepy to me.
However, like many kids my age then, I did have a baseball card (or at least, the soccer equivalent of baseball cards) collecting phase that lasted a good few years. I still have a few Ronaldo (no, not the one you’re thinking of) cards that I can probably sell for a quick buck to last through this bear market when Bitcoin revisits $100 should the pundits have their way.
What I didn’t know at the time - being a pre-teen and all - was that both the fantasy sports market and the trading card market would grow into $20 billion markets EACH.
A few smart teams have already realized that NFTs - by allowing users to truly own their in-game characters - offered a natural way to combine two $20 billion market. However, adoption for Web 3 fantasy sports remains inexplicably lukewarm: today, one of the more well known fantasy sports games in Web 3, Sorare, has a meager ~150,000 unique players (edit: previously we cited a 17,000 number from NFTstats.com)
This has not stopped investors from betting on the space - and not just crypto natives who have already pledged to live and die by the proverbial, non-fungible Web 3 sword, but NBA team owners and executives at gaming household names.
Fast Break Labs is the latest team to court money from a coterie of power players behind names such as Brooklyn Nets (owner Joe Tsai’s Family Office), Sacramento Kings (co-owner Aneel Ranadive), Riot Games (co-founder Marc meril) plus the clear odd one out, yours truly.
On June 23rd, Fast Break Labs launched the test run version (season0) of VBA to a small community. With one of the stronger teams and backers, VBA’s curious game design choices are worth exploring for those keen on building - or investing in - sustainable Web 3 games.