Now that our technology has been refined, and game developers are starting to join our community and create games for our protocols, we are facing a new problem: how to get new players?
Video game marketing is a famously hard problem, especially if you don’t have a huge budget. Add to this the specificity of our project — not really a game but a contest involving many games, taking place only once a week — and also the fact that our players must be familiar with crypto, and the task becomes (almost) insurmountable.
After pondering on this problem for a couple of weeks, we realized the best way would be to simply let this to our community: it is existing players that should bring new players. Once this is accepted, since every contribution to the Interlude project should be fairly rewarded, the solution became clear: we needed to build an efficient referral system, which will reward players fairly for inviting their friends to join our community.
Referral and affiliate marketing can be a great way to grow a community, but they are difficult to design securely without a reliable identity system, because then they can be gamed easily with bots and scripts. As a result it’s very difficult to build such a system in crypto, where we don’t have access to players bank account or phone number, but only to wallet addresses that can be created at will.
Luckily we can use the “proof-of-gaming” characteristic inherent to the Interlude concept: since it’s impossible to create a bot to play the Interlude scavenger hunt, we can be sure that any wallet playing and finishing a hunt is associated to a real player (that actually spent time to play). In this way we can build an incentive system that will actually result in growing the community, and not be gamed by fraudulent actors with bots.
How does it work?
The Affiliate League is a classical multi-level referral program with a gaming twist: the only way to sponsor a new player (eg a new Affiliate) is by playing and finishing one of our scavenger hunt. This means that to join the League being a (good) gamer is necessary. In essence this create a core gamer community for Interlude — as opposed to the more general crypto investor community. It also makes this more fair on a p2e game play viewpoint: the only way to recruit new players and increases one’s earning is to actually play the game, and therefore really be part of the community. That wouldn’t be the case with a referral scheme that would be open to every investors, even non players: then you could have some investors specializing in recruiting new players, which would create a two-class system of “capitalist” recruiters on one hand and “worker” players on the other, which would go against the project’s spirit.
The only way to recruit new players and increases one’s earning is to actually play the game.
In practice:
- a player must first find a sponsor that is already in the League, and request his sponsorship to become his Affiliate
- once he is in the League, every week the player can participate to our scavenger hunts by paying the TSH fee. If he is a finisher he will earn:
1) a reward in ISH
2) an Affiliate Slot, which can be used to recruit new Affiliates.
How does this translate into more earning? Very simply: each player earns 1/2 of every rewards earned by their affiliates (level 1 rewards), 1/4 of the rewards earned by their affiliates’ affiliates (level 2 rewards), and 1/8 for the level 3.
A drawing is worth thousands of words:
Of course the real reward depends on the actual results of the affiliates. If you sponsor good players, that earn higher rewards, the total earning could be much higher.
This creates an incentive for players to recruit the best players possible as affiliates. One could say Interlude thus becomes an incentive algorithm that recruits the best players possible. And since gaming is a good proxy for general intelligence, that means Interlude is an algorithm for building the smartest community possible.
Economics
Even though the most important is to play, participate, and support the project, this is crypto and it is understandable that potential players would be interested in the real, financial numbers behind this. So here are two potential earning profile, for one player in the League and one that is not.
1) Playing the scavenger hunt without Affiliates
Player A pays a fee in TSH to play the hunt, and receives an unlocked ISH reward depending on its rank. If he gets a sufficiently high rank (eg ~10% top player), the reward is higher than the ISH locked to pay the TSH fee. If not, then the reward is lower, and more ISH has been locked than earned. However, after the locking period is passed, the locked ISH are released and can be sold.
2) Playing the scavenger hunt with Affiliates
Player B pays a fee in TSH to play the hunt, and receives an unlocked ISH reward depending on its rank. If he gets a sufficiently high rank (eg ~10% top player), the reward is higher than the ISH locked to pay the TSH fee. If not, then the reward is lower, and more ISH has been locked than earned. However, Player B also earns an Affiliate slot and can sponsor a new player. The reward earned is therefore increased by the rewards of the affiliates. After a given number of week, the reward earned from affiliates is higher than the amount of ISH staked to participate, and player B becomes staking-positive.
Income from affiliate can keep increasing exponentially, as shown in the following table (assuming every players earns the minimal reward each week and sponsors a new affiliate).
What now?
The Affiliate system is already operational and integrated to the scavenger hunt protocol. This means that any player can earn an Affiliate slots every week by participating and being a finisher in one of our hunt, and that at each hunt a wallet in the League will automatically earns the rewards from its affiliates.
To earn the Affiliate Slots you must first join the Affiliate League yourself by being sponsored by someone already in the League. For a short while we have an open program reserved to players that have finished one of our event. Any player that has participated to one of our previous scavenger hunt can contact us to get directly sponsored and receive a few Affiliate Slots to recruit their friends. Once we get a sufficient number of player we will close this program, and the only way to invite new players will be to play the hunts to earn Affiliate Slots.
Our next event will take place on Sunday 20 March at 4pm UTC. If you intend to participate, you can already contact us to join the League and start sponsoring your friends!
Don’t forget to follow our new Twitter account dedicated to our scavenger hunt events!
