Eternal Dragons’ Final Chapter

Dear Dragoneers,

It’s now almost exactly two years since we first announced Eternal Dragons. Our mission was to write the next chapter in gaming, by unlocking the value of ownership in gaming and making it accessible for everyone. And it still is.

We envisioned Eternal Dragons as an awesome fantasy world full of wonder, where owning and managing a powerful team of dragons was the most exciting gaming experience ever. Eternal Dragons is our very personal dream, and we have been continuously inspired and humbled by you, the amazing community that joined us in this journey.

We knew this was a journey full of risks and unknowns. But we signed up for that. We built a stellar team with unmatched experience. We invested heavily and went all-in to make this dream come true — and we learned so much along the way.

We discovered the power of community which helped us capture new perspectives, iterate faster and inform our plans — all while having fun along the way.

But we also learned that web3 brings a multitude of additional challenges to game design, game UX, game development and distribution, increasing costs and risks, in an era where making successful, scalable and ROI positive games is already harder than ever.

The challenges of web3 in gaming

As the web3 gaming industry evolved during the past couple of years, we identified significant challenges in the space — which we described in more detail in an earlier post.

In summary, from our perspective:

• Web3 makes game design iteration difficult: its immutability and unrestricted trading are often at odds with the dynamic control and flexibility required to design sustainable game economies.
• The perceived value of web3 items may lead to abuse: some users may resort to speculation, wash trading, automation and other unfair practices with the goal of extracting value from the system, destabilizing the economy and negatively affecting the experience of genuine players.
• The regulatory uncertainty negatively affects growth and innovation: innovative features, mechanics and economic models may not be compliant in key markets, preventing growth and adding risk to consumers and developers alike.

Successful games begin with the design of a player experience that resonates with its target audience and has the potential to scale and attract a global audience. The technology selected must be the best suited to power that experience, and not the other way around.

Our journey to building fun, sustainable and compliant web3 games

But as we learned, we adapted. After releasing the alpha version of Eternal Dragons on the browser, we focused on delivering an esports experience that would see the combined effort of gaming talent supercharged by a supporting team providing valuable in-game items.

Along with it we launched Player Cards, an exciting innovation in the space that combined collectible personalized achievements, web3 and esports. While relatively successful, it was challenging to reach the scale it needed to succeed, and it was not ROI positive.

A ground truth in game design is that a game needs traditional players that actually spend in the economy in order to be sustainable. So with that in mind, we moved from the focus on webGL for browsers, to focus on mobile in order to reach a much broader, scalable and familiar market where games already thrive.

The focus on a scalable web2 player experience, combined with regulatory and policy restrictions, meant that we had to completely redesign the core game mechanics, the game economy and the relationship with pre-existing in-game items.

We successfully created an abstraction layer we called Super Content that let us focus on the game experience, while enabling a flexible integration with pre-existing in-game items. But at that point, there was already too much legacy and compromise in the design, resulting in a product that was simply not competitive enough in the hyper-competitive world of mobile games.

We tested and improved Eternal Dragons beta on mobile for 6 months, across several geographies. We explored innovative UA approaches, including a seamlessly integrated ad-to-game experience. We delivered two major core mechanics updates along with continued feature and UX updates.

The data showed steady progress in the right direction, which was encouraging. However, it also delivered a clear signal: the performance baseline achieved during these months was not strong enough to continue investing in this game. And we had invested a lot in it already.

The cost of making games

To bring Eternal Dragons to life we spent over 8 times the amount obtained through the sale of the Eternal Dragons: Genesis collection. This was only possible thanks to being venture-capital backed, which allowed us to sufficiently fund the creation of this game throughout these years. It would have been impossible to rely solely on the revenues from the NFT sale to build this game.

At this point however, we have come to a conclusion: the Eternal Dragons saga has reached its end. We can’t in good faith continue to sink more resources when the data tells us that we are not on a trajectory in line with our ambitions. We explored multiple other avenues to somehow allow Eternal Dragons to live on, but none of them were viable nor realistic.

It is a regrettable decision. We are passionate about Eternal Dragons, and we have given everything we have. But we need to be realistic and follow the data.

Eternal Dragons is shutting down

As a result of the above, effective immediately, we have made the difficult decision to stop all development on Eternal Dragons. This includes the game development as well as any surrounding efforts related to the wider ecosystem. We will be sunsetting the game servers, Discord, website and any related services in orderly fashion over the coming weeks. Exact dates will be communicated in due course, so there is still some time to enjoy playing Eternal Dragons and challenging your friends in the Arena. We have also kicked off a final Challenge for you to enjoy this last week of being live.

A token of appreciation

We’d like to thank our loyal community for their commitment, and for being there with us during both the fun and the challenging times.

Building Eternal Dragons required a team of ~23 people for over two years. This was a significant financial effort, costing multiple times the revenues coming from the NFT sale.

However, we still have some funds left in the treasury from the NFT sale, which, thanks to the generous support of our board, we have decided to use to buy back Genesis Dragon and Genesis Egg NFTs as a gesture of goodwill.

For the sake of clarity and simplicity, we have decided to distribute these funds across Genesis Eggs, and Dragons according to their rarity, at the following prices:

As an example: If you own a Genesis Egg, and one legendary Genesis Dragon, and send them to us during the claim window, you should receive 150 USDC after the claim period closes.

Note that this buyback only applies to Eternal Dragons: Genesis NFTs. Eternium, Descendant Eggs and Players Cards or any other similar resources or NFTs are not included. We have also disabled the ability to hatch eggs for compliance reasons and to not encourage further speculation, which is also why eggs are included separately in the table above.

We aim to share the exact details of how to send your NFT to us, so that we can send you the USDC, during next week, as the implementation of this system is deployed. After that there will be a short claim period, to be announced, to take the opportunity to participate in this goodwill buyback program.

With this, we’d like to thank you all for your continuous support, your passion and dedication, and for making this journey so exciting, fun and memorable. It’s something we’ll treasure eternally.

Thank you all, Dragoneers.

The Founders.