Key Takeaways
- The Creta Alpha opportunity allows you to invest in a promising crypto gaming platform projects and receive an exclusive price on CRETA tokens.
- Creta is building at the intersection of two narratives: Metaverse and GameFi . This means it has a substantial market opportunity, capitalising on the growing interest in virtual experiences and blockchain-driven gaming economies.
- Creta is not just one specific product. It is an entire web3 gaming ecosystem that integrates various elements like a gaming storefront, platform, creation tools, asset marketplace, and metaverse development, encompassing a wide array of gaming experiences.
- This project is built on a new generation blockchain: Locus chain . This technology aims to revolutionise gaming by creating a serverless online game where each player node functions as part of the server.
- Creta’s tokenomics is attractive and incentivises long-term commitment from the team to make its vision a reality.
- The team behind the project is solid and has much experience in the gaming industry. This is probably one of the biggest assets of Creta.
- Creta's intellectual property (IP) base is strong, with franchises such as “Kingdom Under Fire” or “Fortress.”
The Intersection of Two Growing Trends
Creta is a Web3 gaming project well positioned in the middle of two booming trends: Metaverse and GameFi. It combines these realms and aims to create an immersive and interconnected gaming experience, offering a glimpse into the future of entertainment.
Metaverse: A New Secular Trend
History has no shortage of revolutionary ideas, and the metaverse is one of them. This sector represents a paradigm shift in the way users and creators interact and participate in virtual experiences. Its potential is yet to be grasped, but interest in this field has boomed in the last few years.
There are many elements to suggest that this trend is here to stay. Firstly, a 2022 survey from McKinsey reported that around 60% of consumers welcome the transition of activities into the digital realm.
Further, McKinsey estimates that the metaverse could generate $4 to 5 trillion across consumer and enterprise use cases by 2030. While we think this forecast may be too optimistic, it, nonetheless, implies that this sector is doomed to attract significant investment in the new years.
The Gaming industry & Market
Before even diving into the crypto gaming industry, let’s have a quick overview of the gaming industry as a whole.
According to a report by SuperData Research, the gaming industry is 3 times bigger than the movie industry + music industry combined, estimated at 249 billion USD, gathering up to >3BN gamers, which is nearly half the entire world!
Speaking of half, as you can see in the chart below, half of the gaming market is currently dominated by mobile games:
In 2023, the video games market is projected to reach a revenue of US$249.60 billion. It is expected to grow at an annual rate of 9.32% between 2023 and 2028, resulting in a projected market volume of US$389.70bn by 2028. To give additional perspective, these figures would allow the gaming sector to surpass all of Apple’s products/services sales combined.
Within that major secular trend, crypto gaming is still nascent, with much room to evolve.
GameFi: A Growing Sector
Crypto gaming started to boom in 2021, especially with the NFT mania (check out our articles on some of the most popular gaming projects such as STEPN , Beam network , Gensokishi , Illuvium , APE , Gala Games , Decentraland , Sandbox , Ultra , Axie Infinity , Yield Guild Games ). But let’s face it. In 2021, the limited design of games and the questionable tokenomics were unsustainable. During the last bear market, this entire ecosystem was hit hard.
Like all things in life, the ups and downs are cyclical , and we have witnessed first-hand the shift of the pendulum and the reemergence of this narrative in 2023, with a shift from quantity to quality. Many projects have been building games on a completely different scale of gameplay compared to those we played 2 years ago.
After infrastructure, gaming is the sector that attracts the highest funding, with cumulative investment amounts of $16.3 billion from 2021 to 2023.
Moreover, this industry has grown at an annual average rate of 58%, and this trend will likely continue as more and more investors understand the mass adoption potential of the crypto-gaming industry.
Crypto gaming is based on the promise that blockchain technology can empower gamers to have true ownership of their gaming assets and participate in new digital economies. While GameFi has yet to witness its groundbreaking moment with a true killer game, it is one of the most trending narratives in crypto. We observe that within the Dapp ecosystem, gaming has been the most popular theme by the number of users in recent months.
Creta: An Overview of the Project
Product
Creta is not just one specific product. It is an entire web3 gaming ecosystem with the ambitious goal to be the building ground for the next generation of web3 games. It is a nexus of the following:
- A video game storefront: Creta enters the market with two high-quality games: Kingdom of The Fire: The Rise and Fortress NFT. Further, an integral part of their strategy is to build gaming IPs in-house and acquire them from third-party developers, both blockchain and non-blockchain, that fit three distinct genres: Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Anima.
- A gaming platform: Creta aims to be the go-to platform for a seamless user experience. The core element of the platform is a launcher, providing access to Creta’s games.
- Video games creation tool: Another objective of Creta is to lower the barrier for game creators by building a web3 game creation studio.
- An asset marketplace is where gamers list, buy and trade their different in-game NFTs.
- Metaverse: Creta is developing two worlds: public and private. Its public world aims to be a large virtual space where users can meet and interact, while the private world will be at the users' discretion.
Locus Chain
A standout feature of Creta is its use of its own blockchain, Locus Chain. This layer-one public blockchain has been in development for six years and is designed to be superfast, highly scalable, and secure.
The strategic choice of developing Locus Chain underscores Creta's commitment to showcasing the blockchain's potential in the gaming industry.
The ultimate goal is to create a serverless online game in which each player node becomes a piece of the server. This has the potential to revolutionise the way games are hosted and experienced.
Business Model
Creta's business model will offer no barriers to entry for new users. Instead of focusing on just the play-to-earn (P2E) model, Creta delivers a blend of P2E, free-to-play (F2P), and win-to-earn (W2E) activities for the users.
This means users can access the metaverse and its content for free and enjoy the games. However, there is a certain degree of gatekeeping with regard to the in-game activities that offer opportunities to earn.
In addition, Creta aims to foster user engagement through in-game events, tournaments, and other growing retention activities. Unlike traditional free-to-play models, users can extract value by selling the NFTs found in the game, questing, or participating in contests. All these monetisation mechanics will also be available to the creators via the Creta Studio.
Users also have the pay-to-play model, which unlocks extended content, enriches gameplay, and provides better earning opportunities. These include player-vs-player (PvP) games via betting, PvP championships, player-vs-environment (PvE) qualifiers, in-game ratings, battle passes, and drafts.
Ultimately, Creta’s revenue will revolve around commissions from the cash flow from its games, transaction fees on the internal marketplace, and revenue share from win-2-earn activities.
Tokenomics
Token allocation
10,000,000, 000 Creta have been created and allocated in the following way:
As a comparison, this is the average tokenomics of three projects in the metaverse/gaming sector: Mana, Sand, and ILV.
We note that Creta’s allocation to community reward (shown as business incentive and marketing promotion) is bigger than the average of its sector and that allocation to fundraising is lower. Those are both positive signals. Further, we note that allocation to team and advisor is more or less in line with its peers. However, allocation to DAO & Treasury is, on average, lower than its peers, which is somehow negative.
Vesting period
One of the most positive things about Creta tokenomics is the team and founder vesting period. On average, it is two times bigger than its peers, with a total unlock time of 8 years. This strengthens the fact that Creta is not a typical crypto project. Instead, its roadmap is long and disruptive, and its vesting schedule incentivises the team's long-term commitment to make its vision a reality.
Compared to peers, Creta's allocation and vesting schedule are healthy and positive.
Token utility
The CRETA token is used for transacting within the Creta World ecosystem. You can use CRETA to buy NFTs, participate in the in-game economies, and represent ownership rights within the ecosystem.
Why Creta is a Unique Investment Opportunity
AAA gaming studios, employee background and many other buzzwords are being overused and even highly exaggerated when going deep into the due diligence of GameFi projects. How do we identify the REAL gaming projects? The two key themes when qualifying and quantifying a project are team and intellectual property.
A Tier 1 Team
When analysing a team, we cannot just rely on studio name-dropping because, ultimately, it doesn’t mean much: Was this person working as an Intern or as the Producer or Director of a major game title? Did he work on blockbusters or lower-budget and less successful games?
When analysing Creta, we concluded that its strong team is one of its biggest assets. It includes industry giants with over a century of experience in the gaming industry and crypto between them.
Ray Nakazato: Chief Creative Officer (+35 years in the gaming industry)
He has vast experience in gaming and worked as senior manager at Microsoft Japan Game Studios and vice president of Electronic Arts Japan Studio. He also worked at Capcom, THQ and EA.
Arben Kane: Chief Strategy Officer (+10 years in the blockchain industry)
Arben is an entrepreneur currently serving as the CEO of Kontur, a Hawaii-based company specialising in geospatial data and real-time risk management. He is also supporting the development of the Locus Chain.
Hyungoo Lee: Chief Technology Officer (+25 years in the gaming industry)
He started his career as a gaming developer in 1997 and climbed to positions of CTO and Lead developer at JC Entertainment, Jamie System and Blueside.
Joohyung Jang: Game Design & Monetization Director (+25 years in the gaming industry)
Joohyung had similar responsibilities in his previous post, working on games like Lineage and Aion, which had over $1 billion in cumulative sales.
Kay Yoon: Chief Producer (+30 years in the gaming industry)
He is the founder and current CEO of CCR, Creta’s affiliate company that developed the casual strategy game Fortress, which has over 24 million paying users.
Alexander Harutyunyan: Chief Publishing Officer (+15 years in the gaming industry)
Alexander is the previous CEO of Innova, one of the leading publishers of online games in Europe, Russia, and Latin America. In his time there, he has successfully led more than 300 people and built lasting relationships with major international game development companies.
In addition to this strong core team, Creta currently employs around 300 people, each with an average gaming industry experience of over 20 years.
Last but not least, Creta has also successfully partnered with incredible talent from different established games. The first one is Thomas Vu, the producer of “League of Legends,” which has 150 million users globally and has generated more than $30 billion so far. Another partner is Okamoto San, which has only generated $15 billion from “Monster Strike”.
Broad Intellectual Property Base
Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, and brand names used in commerce. Because developers invest significant effort, time and money into their projects, and it can often take them several years to design and launch a new game, strong IPs are a net benefit for gaming platforms. It protects developers' creations, fosters brand recognition, and saves costs in developing new projects.
Creta's multiverse platform includes games like Dayroot, Tokyo Wars, and Fantasy Lore. It also has the partner IP of the Kingdom under Fire franchise and subsidiaries' IP in Fortress.
Kingdom under Fire: This franchise is more than 20 years old and currently has a 3 million user base. In 2004, its gameplay, “The Crusaders,” was a massive hit on Xbox and won an award in Action Strategy. Now, “The Rise” is the sixth version of this franchise, and the traction is still here.
Fortress: This shooting-action game is played by more than 24 million users throughout Asia and has been considered one of the most community-centric casual games ever built. The new version of the game will be exclusively on Creta.
While Creta is still a nascent project, this solid IP base reinforces its disruptive potential and is another positive element adding to the investment case.
Sources
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