A16z-backed Spekter Games founder shares Telegram gaming ethos

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I chatted with Spekter Games founder and CEO Taehoon Kim about crypto gaming and where things go from here. The a16z-backed studio’s flagship game is called Spekter Agency, a mobile-first roguelite battler with crypto elements playable via Telegram.

But big-picture first. This slice of our chat was also edited and condensed for clarity:

Taehoon Kim: Web3 gaming, you know, is not going that well at the moment. A lot of the projects overpromised and under-delivered, and they were only able to kind of attract the point farmers, because the gameplay wasn’t very good, right?

So we saw this scenario over and over again, where people play because they want to earn the tokens that they’re going to launch. After TGE, [it] always goes up and kind of fizzles away, and then everybody leaves because they’re not really there because of the game. They’re attached more to the reward. So it was the same movie playing over and over again.

So what I think needs to happen next is that we need games that are excellent.

Kate Irwin: Telegram has been a huge platform. More broadly, we’re seeing a lot of companies try to do the “Superapp” and “Mini apps” dynamic. What do you make of that and its possible impact on crypto gaming and crypto app developers?

Yeah, so this is the main reason why I founded Spekter Games late last year: Because I saw such a big potential with Telegram and these chat-based super apps that enable both the free-to-play Web2 model as well as the Web3 model. Telegram especially — with the mini apps, it makes it super easy for people to invite and accept, and so the viral distribution just becomes super frictionless. Second, the easy payments using Telegram Stars.

And with Spekter Games, there’s plans for one unified token, as opposed to multiple tokens per game. Can you speak a little bit to the strategy behind that?

We don’t want any complications; our strategy is a little different. We don’t want everything to be onchain. We actually want most things to be offchain, except the reward system. And we want the rewards to also be mainly status items, like vanity items, like skins and PFPs and things that don’t impact your stats or gameplay. So our games are just like Web2 free-to-play games that aren’t token-gated.

So if you do well in the game, and if you invite people, then you get Sparks, which are our reward points. And then you can convert the Sparks into our token, which will launch later on. We want that to be mainly all about status, like, think of it as more of like a credit card point system or airline model system.