MetaGame is dead, long live MetaGame!

How MetaGame died, what impact it had, and what comes next?

Oct 03, 2024

As you might know, MetaGame underwent a year long UX/UI revamp.

As you might not know, it hasn‘t helped at all 🤣

We tried to re-awake the beast after a long slumber and we got a bunch of new people to test the platform, but it still failed to retain any or gain any traction.

For all intents & purposes, MetaGame the platform is dead.

This post is about:

Why MetaGame the platform died
MetaGame‘s impact
What comes next

Why MetaGame died

We failed for several reasons - here are the main ones:

I was religiously anti fundraising early on
We over-indexed on egalitarianism & democracy
We were kind of building blindly
We were too early

1. No funding

Being scarred from the ICO era, I was convinced the right way to build was by attracting only intrinsically driven people (its not, you need both).

This resulted in high impact contributors generally churning quickly as opportunities are abundant to them. Meanwhile, low skill contributors stuck around, probably due to lack of other opportunities more than "intrinsic motivation".

This might have been fine if I was a developer myself, but I wasn‘t. And no sane competent developer was willing to dedicate to MetaGame full time for close to free. Shout out to dysbulic, Alec and other skilled devs who actually stuck around.

2. Too democratic

Instead of having a small number of big contributors, we thought we could do better with a big community of small contributors. We also thought it would be nice to have fully democratic 1 person 1 vote governance rather than token-weighted voting, and that its a good idea to let anyone evaluate contributions.

This resulted in newbies with no skin in the game participating in decision making, and having the same amount of voting power as any member of the founding team. Likewise, not everyone knew how to, or even cared about properly evaluating contributions based on their merit vs. for example, how funny a meme is.

3. Building blindly

Partially due to the above two, and partially due to my own lack of experience in building projects, we were always kind of just pushing ahead and building new things, instead of talking to users and making sure that we are solving their/real problems.

Lesson here is to always spend more time talking to users than brainstorming and to only build features that users are actually requesting, rather than features that seem cool to you personally. Also to build products rather than “platforms”.

4. Too early!

We were also just too early, which screwed us for several reasons. Firstly, it was a struggle even explaining MetaGame. We started before the first DeFi wave, before crypto was called “a giant mmo-rpg”, before Balaji published The Network State. There were barely a few semi-functional DAOs.

On the technical side - building “MetaOS” while all of the underlying infrastructure undergoing rapid iterations &/or dying. Every few months the ground was literally shifting beneath our feet and the people who had the knowledge and patience to use these nascent pieces were few.

Not to mention the tooling & practices around DAOs… Barely good, even today. 😂

End result…

This is ofc an oversimplification of all that happened over 4 years. Other factors include lack of focus & over-experimentation (untested governance, reward systems & tokenomics while building too many sub-projects all at the same time)

In short, MetaGame was headed through the roads unpaved. As cool as it sounds to be a pioneer on the wagons to the future of work (DAOs), most don‘t make it.

In our case, result was a massive spaghetti codebase built by dozens of people of varying skill levels & varying interest in cutting corners. With lackluster feedback gathering practices, infinite scope creep and ultimately, a buggy platform with 0 users.

MetaGame‘s lifecycle & impact

As all living things, MetaGame went through a process of birth, growth, decline and death. As all living things, it gave birth and nutrients to others.

Could it have went on to grow 100x? Yes, it could have. But it didn‘t, and that‘s fine. We built a DAO network state before Balaji wrote the book about network states - that‘s gotta count for something! 🤷‍♂️

During its 4 years of life, MetaGame:

Pioneered a contributor rewards system w/ continuous airdrop
Were the first fully democratic DAO (for better or worse 😂)
First DAO network state (with 35 member DAOs at peak)
Organized 5 conferences & a hackathon
Onboarded at least 100 people working full-time in web3
Organized over 100 community calls with guests from other projects
Shipped over 100 newsletters, grew to 12k subscribers
Produced over 50 podcast episodes, got 180k listens
Built a platform with decentralized profiles, an onboarding game, a questing system, an educational protocol, a modular dashboard and dozens of other piece
Given birth to, and supported a bunch of other projects
Bootstrapped a token from $0 to $80 - and back 😂

I met dozens of people who told me MetaGame was the first DAO they joined, where they got their first NFT, and similar things. I met founders who told me MetaGame influenced the way they built their project.

Tl;dr impact was made - dozens of lives were impacted by MetaGame and we all learned a literal shitton from participating in this crazy experiment.

Life goes on!

MetaGame had at least 8 children - 4 of which live on!

In fact, some of them already have multiple sub-projects!

Anyhow, they are:

More about all of them in the next issue!

Over & out

Much love to everyone who came around and helped us push forward this crazy experiment, even if just a little bit! Much love to all the guilds, all patrons, and all players who put up with our crappy project.

I‘m sorry to anyone I have disappointed, and a special big apology to all the most impactful players whom I wish we could have paid better.

Also screw you to all who came to MG to farm our token! 😂

❤️,
peth