B3, an open gaming ecosystem built by Coinbase veterans, has partnered with Chris DeWolfe’s startup Reach Labs to deploy a user acquisition (UA) platform.
B3’s Layer 3 blockchain platform harnesses social network effects and financial incentives to drive users to discover experiences.
Reach Labs will also publish first-party and third-party game titles on its own custom GameChain. Founded by leaders from acclaimed game publishers Jam City, Ubisoft, and Gameloft, Reach Labs is the latest flagship partner to launch within B3’s Open Gaming framework, giving developers access to growth tools previously unavailable in the onchain gaming space.
Reach Labs is helmed by a team with deep experience across games, consumer tech, and digital entertainment. Chris DeWolfe, former CEO of MySpace and cofounder of Jam City, and Jeremy Horn, former vice president of strategy at Jam City, lead the Reach Labs team.
“We’re really excited about this partnership with B3,” said DeWolfe, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Our fundamental thesis right now is that game discovery and user acquisition is is broken. We’re building a platform with Reach to solve that problem in two different ways.”
One of them is through Reach Labs, which merged with Jeremy Horn’s company Overworld. The idea is to offer rewards to people who spread the word about a game on social networks.
“We’re creating this social networking master referral program. And said in a more simple way, it’s allowing players to bring other players into their game and become an army of marketers or gaming companies,” DeWolfe said. “This can help the promise of Web3 games, where players would have a huge input on the direction of the game creatively, but you also have a big direction on user acquisition, marketing, community, all those kinds of things. So we’re we’re creating that.”
That’s a combination of social networks with tools where Reach Labs onboards social networks that people can build with videos around their own games, gameplay, etc. When they push those videos out to their socials, they get rewards.
“So instead of a gaming company, Google or Facebook, getting $20 for a new player, the player will be getting that money for introducing their network of friends into the game so they pay revenue streams for themselves,” DeWolfe said. “Those transactions will be on the B3 ledger. We think that this is really the next level of user acquisition, and it’s going to fundamentally change user acquisition for all games on both Web2 and Web3.”
DeWolfe said his company has about 100 games signed up on Web2 right now. And it’s a natural evolution from Web2 games to Web3 games, because players are going to be paid out, if they so choose, in Reach’s token. They can also get paid out in USDC.
Reach Labs is designed to provide developers with end-to-end user acquisition support, including performance-based marketing and attribution tools; full-stack social network and marketing layer; onchain referral and reward mechanics; and developer dashboards with deep engagement analytics.
“This is what open gaming looks like in action,” said Daryl Xu, core contributor to B3 and CEO of NPC Labs, in a statement. “We’re building a developer-first ecosystem at B3 and the Reach Labs team brings deep expertise and distribution infrastructure that’s purpose-built for the challenges of onchain and offchain growth. We believe our partnership will be a game changer in how developers approach game-building.”
Reach Labs’ dedicated GameChain on B3 will be used to host the UA platform as well as games. By launching both a platform and a GameChain, Reach becomes a key infrastructure partner in the Open Gaming movement, connecting developers, tooling, and GameChains into a composable, interoperable network. By launching on B3, Reach Labs gains access to scalable, gaming-focused infrastructure while providing network-wide growth benefits to the ecosystem.
“Distribution is the biggest challenge for software, who increasingly battle high acquisition costs and market saturation,” said Chris DeWolfe, cofounder of Reach Labs, in a statement. “With B3, we saw an opportunity to build the next-gen user acquisition layer — one that gives brands and developers full control, full transparency, and real economic alignment with their users.”
DeWolfe added, “Building onchain allows us to offer true transparency to users and developers and prevent the significant amount of fraud that the user acquisition space has faced – such as fake installs that skew performance and waste spend. With Reach’s custom GameChain, software on B3 will have access to a comprehensive solution that pairs them with likely participants. Studios are equipped with the insights and technology needed to identify, engage, and retain players in today’s dynamic environment.”
As a flagship application on B3, the deployment of REACH marks a major milestone for B3’s Open Gaming framework. Since launch, the ecosystem has demonstrated unprecedented traction, having onboarded over six million wallets and processed over 200 million transactions.
B3’s Open Gaming has already attracted major studios who are building B3 GameChains, including Infinigods and the Echelon Prime Ecosystem. The Open Gaming model creates a unified experience where games can thrive together. When players discover and move between games in the ecosystem, both the original and new GameChains receive ongoing benefits through a revenue share.
Learn more about B3’s Open Gaming Manifesto here. B3 has around 15 employees, while Reach Labs has about 20.
DeWolfe said the company is going to release its app in the coming months, where the app will have a social network that recommends favorite games. More than 100 game companies are signed up to be part of Reach Labs network on the publishing side. That will be done in the coming months and DeWolfe said his company is still looking for new games that are available to sign.
I noted that some of these features sound similar to what Discord has been doing late. DeWolfe thinks Discord is awesome, but it has a hardcore player focus, while DeWolfe is looking for a more general audience that likes a wider variety of games, including mobile games.
“We wanted to be very video driven. We want people, and we’re going to provide tools for people to be able to create and clip videos that are super interesting,” said DeWolfe.
Getting past complexity
Xu added that his chain can do transactions with minimal latency and minimal cost. But he thinks many Web3 platforms were built with a crypto-native approach, with complexities like seed phrases to recover a forgotten password. That user experience is too complex and not very desirable, Xu said. Xu thinks that Web3 apps need to be so simple anyone can figure out how to use them.
As for Web3 gaming, DeWolfe said that it is eventually going to penetrate a lot of Web3 games in the long run. Some devs and players will use Web3 without knowing it, he said.
Xu said, “I think the industry is at a inflection point, especially in Web3. Very quickly here, we’ll see a divergence. We’ll see established game developers like Chris’ team; they’re going to bring on actually fun games, they’re going to scale profitably, and they’re going to take full advantage of the technology,” Xu said. “We could call them crypto indie teams. They built some fun experiments, but they’re going to fail to build a real gaming business.”
Over the long term, Xu believes more Web3 wallets will debut with easier features.
And DeWolfe said the second big thing that the partners will address is discoverability. With so many games coming out on all platforms, it’s easy for a developer’s game to get lost in the shuffle.
“We’re creating a game publishing fund because there is less and less money going into earlier stage gaming companies,” DeWolfe said. “We are finding all of those folks and looking for those with promising games, and we’re going to be publishing those games. And what that means is we’re going to be giving them a cash infusion to use the Reach platform to get them players into the game. They can jumpstart the game and get the flywheel growing for them.”
He said that Reach will give them basic tools like analytics, platform and localization — all the things that publishers do to operate a game. Reach Labs is in the midst of raising money for the Reach platform. Everything will use the B3 chain, Xu said in an interview with GamesBeat.
“In some cases, the cost of acquiring users this way is about a fifth of the cost per transaction versus some other solutions that we looked at,” DeWolfe said. “They have six million wallets, which is huge.”
“We believe similarly, that distribution is absolutely the biggest problem, not only in crypto but in gaming overall. I think the Reach platform is perfectly built to solve the distribution problem,” Xu said. “The B3 community is actually very eager to not only play games, but to post achievements of those games and talk to their friends about what crypto games they’re playing.”
“If I think about the crypto industry more broadly, there aren’t that many applications that have found product-market fit today,” Xu said.
Many platforms have millions of users, but the problem is they are low-quality users who may or may not make purchases in games.
“With the platform that Chris and team have built, it’s it’s actually going to solve all those issues,” Xu said. “I think the scale is just going to be tremendous, right. Chris has obviously built one of the largest social networks of all time. And so I think this is one of those few bets, shots on goal that will help us get beyond just six million users.”
