why emotes?

proven value, definitionally interoperable, NFT vibes

we’ve been deep in the web3 weeds for a while now. one of the paraphrased mantras of web3 is: “on chain assets represent opportunity for interoperability.” but as we’ve watched the industry grow, there is a clear disconnect between this vision and reality. developers make assets for their game or their world as NFTs, which means they CAN be interoperable; however, there is little motivation or incentive for developers to integrate the NFTs of other collections into their experience

this is especially true for complex items like skins or characters within games. these have the potential to be carried across games, but what is the motivation of publisher X to integrate the skins + characters from game Y? it’s possible that developers would do this in the best interest of their users, except for the glaring issue of the technical nightmare that would be customizing and rendering these assets natively into their game

this got us thinking: what’s a thing that is by nature interoperable across games? after lots of soul searching, the epiphany struck that emotes are a perfect example of this kind of asset!

we then set out to research current emote systems, and while other systems are good, Clash Royale remains a personal favorite example of emotes done right. to date, they have created 261 of them. they utilize rarity (with “legendary” emotes flexing with rainbow borders). they come out in unofficial “seasons,” with themes relating to time of year or new content featured in the game. some are extremely scarce, only being released once or only able to be earned at the highest levels of competition. by our estimate, Supercell has made ~$285m in revenue off of emotes in Clash Royale alone. and most importantly, these emotes have an undeniable “fun factor”

the game does not allow you to converse with your opponent via text or voice, so you’re only able to communicate with these emotes (and six canned phrases seen in the screen grab here). you’ll notice that many of them don’t represent an emotion in the way you’d expect from an emoji; many are the equivalent of in-game gifs. this is an exciting realization – that even when text or voice is not an option, both emotion-based and unclear-emotion emotes still “speak” to users – both the sender and the receiver

this part is harder to quantify, but web2 emotes already have NFT vibes. users collect+own them. they are visually interesting and quirky. they have elements of uniqueness and scarcity. they let users flex and carry social equity

so, that’s why emotes. but we think emotes are just the first piece of a comprehensive cross-game, cross-platform ecosystem where collectors can utilize their assets wherever they go. stay tuned…