GAMEE's Bozena Rezab: NFT game characters will travel across 80+ casual games

Ashton Addison: What is GAMEE, and what is it focused on?▶ 00:22

Bozena Rezab: GAMEE is a mobile entertainment platform where we connect people across multiple casual-style games. We have over 80 games on the platform, and our mission is to recognize and reward gamers' skill, effort and loyalty. We've been working on it for almost seven years and have a community of 25 million users globally. We're excited about stepping into the crypto and blockchain space, coming from a free-to-play mobile background.

Ashton: What are the main problems in casual gaming, and how do blockchain and NFTs help?▶ 01:10

Bozena: Casual games bring gaming to a mass audience. Anybody with a mobile phone can be considered a gamer. The challenge for developers is that it's very easy to get into a casual game and just as easy to leave, so the issue is retention. How do you build a community and keep it engaged over a long period? We believe casual games will stay popular because you can jump in and out of them. To address retention, we first built a platform with 80-plus games, so people can move freely from one to another, and we're constantly adding new content. Second, last year we introduced a play-to-earn experiment into our free-to-play mobile game, which takes part of the revenue we make and gives it back to gamers as prizes. If you give people the choice of playing games and earning rewards while they do it, they absolutely love it.

Ashton: How are you introducing NFTs into the platform, and how will they help with retention?▶ 04:00

Bozena: We design our NFTs as game characters, which for us is really revolutionary. Gamers are used to owning and buying digital characters inside games, but they could never trade them or take them from one game to another. That's not how mobile gaming works. With NFTs we can do that, and it addresses ownership: do I really own what I bought or earned, and can I decide what to do with it? It also addresses retention, because the NFTs are an additional factor that connects our games together. By owning one game character, you'll be able to use it across multiple games, and our roadmap will keep adding more. Imagine a robot with various stats and powers. Every NFT is different and unique, and those stats and powers translate differently into different features in different games. So the NFT has a long life and extended utility across every game we add.

Ashton: How does the Game Parcel NFT let third-party creators publish games on GAMEE?▶ 06:02

Bozena: First, the NFT robots and Game Parcel are launching this year. You can already play all of our games, and the community is live right now. Many creators have pitched us their games, and in the past we ran creator contests with a jury, but that was very centralized because we had the deciding power. So we approached it from a different angle and introduced Game Parcel and the GAMEE token. The token is a utility currency based on Ethereum, and we will add governance features so people can vote on what type of content comes to GAMEE. Creators who want to launch a game on our platform can do so through the Game Parcel NFT. By owning it, they own space on our platform and can use it for any game they decide.

Ashton: What partnerships will help drive adoption early on?▶ 08:34

Bozena: We've done game collaborations with big global brands such as NASA and Manchester City football club. These brands have broad fanbases, and the games helped make GAMEE famous among different communities. We'll certainly keep doing that, and we recently launched a game with Atari. Last year we also joined Animoca Brands, a leader in blockchain gaming with multiple famous IPs available to companies in its family. A big part of our focus is how to take stories and characters people love and introduce them on our platform.

Ashton: What else is on the roadmap for this year?▶ 09:50

Bozena: This year is quite game-changing for us. We've been building GAMEE for years as a free-to-play mobile game, and we have a community of 25 million. Now we see a tremendous opportunity to take GAMEE to another level with blockchain, and this year is all about building the second generation of GAMEE. We've already launched the GAMEE token, and very soon we'll launch the second generation, where you'll be able to use that token. All the years after this will be about extending utility.

Ashton: Looking five or ten years out, what is the key to widespread adoption?▶ 11:25

Bozena: One of the biggest opportunities and challenges combined is showcasing the value of crypto and blockchain to gamers without having to teach them details they don't need. What we've learned is that if you showcase the value, people onboard. They appreciate owning a game character, play-to-earn and a game currency they truly own. But most of our users know nothing about blockchain or crypto. The challenge is showcasing the value without being boring and educational, because gamers probably wouldn't like that, and still onboarding a big chunk of our audience. That's done through smart UX and the value you offer in the product. You can't achieve it in one month. It's an iterative process of adding more and more value over time, and that is probably the key to our success.