Executive summary

The top dapps in the Harmony ecosystem are well-made, elegant products appealing to specific demographics, including people most likely to have adopted web3 already. However, to expand out the ecosystem, we will need to reach new people - and GenX and late Boomers are a fertile market. As this demographic has different needs and tastes than much of what is being developed on our chain, we should to create a central product manager to ensure that products' design, gameplay, music, marketing, security, and messaging are tailored to their needs, rather than leaving it to individual product developers.

The problem: Our ecosystem lacks gamefi products aimed at older people. Many of our top projects - including Defira and DeFi Kingdoms and Xanagea - are geared toward fantasy/scifi themes, and the demographics of fantasy players skew widely male (81%) and millennial. The age group of most people interested in NFTs and NFT games is 18-24, as is borne out by the fact that 65% of Axie players are under 30. This is also true of most blockchain games in general, which currently are played largely by males (over 77%), with over half geared to people under 35 (56.6%)

The opportunity

1. Financial

Although our products are created by and geared toward people who are mostly young and mostly male, there is a fertile market in other demographics. The average GenX household earns more than any other (at $113,455), or 33.5% more than millennial households. They also have more to spend, holding 28.6% of total US household wealth - over half of the 51.4% held by Boomers. And not only do they have more money to spend, they spend more. Web3 companies are taking notice, spending over $5.6M on 30-second spots during the Super Bowl specifically with actors and nostalgic themes specifically targeting GenX viewers.

2. Platform-market fit

Compared with GenZ and Millennials, GenX and Boomers play a slightly higher of percentage of games on PC/moble than they do on consoles - which represents an excellent opportunity for blockchain games. A healthy percentage of older people play PC games (over 40%), which is only 8% less than Millennials and GenZ; 77% of GenXers play moble games daily.

But while there is platform market fit, there is not product market fit. Rather than fantasy play-to-earn NFT games, older players are playing games that are similar to what influenced them in their formative years; they have less time to play and therefore tend toward casual action, puzzle, building, and casino games like Candy Crush and The Sims, and even favor arcade, sports games, and violent action games (Call of Duty, Doom, Counter-Strike), none of which have young-adult fantasy themes.

Purpose and role of Xoomer product lead

Metaverses full of code have not produced blockchain games that take the needs and utilities of older players into account - unlike the non-blockchain games which are doing so well in these markets. Whether it is because of games being inspired by the success of other blockchain games creating a feedback loop, or because blockchain games are created by and for people in younger demographics, there is a fertile market to be reached. The issue is not only friction of adoption - it is gameplay. As such, we need to actively encourage the development of games that will reach people who have money to invest, who already play games on laptops, and who are currently underserved by web3 products. We need a Xoomer product lead.

The role of the product lead is not to emulate the efforts of other companies like crypto.com to use FOMO to try to convince later-adopters to jump into web3, nor is it to teach older people the economics of staking or how to do more complex web3 transactions. This product lead would spearhead the design of products that attract older gamers to web3 in the following ways:

Encourage development of games and products that would appeal to older demographics, primarily through launch grants
Grants to port over existing games and certain game categories to Harmony
Work with marketing team on creative and web2 marketing (including programmatic ad campaigns) to reach older demographics who are gamers
Partnerships and cross-promotions (such as with Kim Komando) pushing a message of safety, security, fun, wealth and nostalgia
Music licensing to get blanket licenses for older musical styles, and a metaverse performance of a classic rock artist
Work with product teams (like 1wallet) and investment dapps to create limited forks / product skins to highlight functions geared toward simple onboarding

6-week deliverables and budget

6-week Summary: $130k budget, Brian, 1 f/t hire; 1 portal + 2 iTokens + 1 AMA + 1 hackathon

Deliverables: Within 6 weeks, post for and hire someone with product manager experience at rolling out these categories of video games, who also has intersecting business development and web2 marketing knowledge. First tasks before marketing would be to encourage development of games and products in ecosystem that would appeal to older demographics, primarily through launch grants, and outreach for ports.