I’m someone who works in the mobile game industry and I’ve been looking into the GameCredits store and MobileGo as a possible token to invest. It looks very suspicious to me. I’ll go on to explain some of things that alert me.
Where is the product?
I have not seen a working product anywhere. The store was supposed to launch in April (it sys so on the white paper and still says so on the webpage) and has not launched. It’s supposed to have “over 300 games to start”, really? Which games are those? Will it have any popular games in it or just indie stuff no one wants to play? They are including games in their screenshots like ‘Cut the Rope’ to make it look legit, but I seriously doubt that they have the permission to use that game. A couple of screenshots that not mean that any of this is actually working.
I have seen videos of the Android app where it is not clear that what they are showing is anything more than a shallow shell of an app which anyone can build over the weekend. The latest video where they show the chat features and game invites is shown very briefly with clearly fake games and no real functionality. They include Clash Royale as one of the games in their video, when it will clearly be impossible to create a Clash Royale game between players from a third party app.
MobileGo looks like a cash grab
The MobileGo ICO was explained basically as a means to get more money to buy users for the platform. The new token doesn’t seem to have any real need to exists other than to create the ICO - the utility that the token will supposedly have could have been done with the previous GAME token. And isn’t it suspicious that they create a new ICO for more money before they show any working products?
They say that 50% of this money will be spent on “marketing” including user acquisition, and money spent on these things is very hard to track or audit. They could say that each acquired users costs X or says that it costs 3x and pocket the difference, no one will know. I’ve worked with user acquisition for mobile games and the prices for acquired users varies greatly from one company to another, and heavily depends on which game you are promoting. Anything they make up could actually be true, there is no way to tell.
Dubious Math and Unbacked claims
Let’s check on some of the things they say on the MobileGo whitepaper.
we expect to make around $5.13 of annual commissions per gamer on our platform
Where did they get than number from? Out of thin air, no math or data behind it.
Subtracting the cost to acquire a gamer ($1.50) our annual profit per gamer would be $3.81
Where did they get that cost? Out of thin air. The cost to acquire an Android user for a game ranges from $2.5 to $7 in the US (you can check CPI costs provided by ChartBoost here). The thing is, that is the cost to acquire a user for a single game, not for a Game Store like what you would need for GameCredits. It would be much harder (costlier) to convince a user to switch to a different store. If I had to take a guess I would say way over $15.
In addition, industry platform averages show that for every one gamer acquired for a popular game you can expect two referrals.
Another claimed not backed by any sources. I can also tell you from my experience that this is blatantly false, if it were true it would be a lot easier to have a successful game. Even then they are talking about virality in games and not a game store.
If we adjust for a 10% monthly attrition rate, the total annual platform revenue would be $53.16
Attrition in mobile game is usually measured as part of a metric called Retention. Most games have a day 1 retention below 50% - which means that 50% of players do not come back after the first day they play the game, and retention on day 30 below 10% - 90% of gamers don’t come back after day 30. The claimed 10% monthly attrition rate is unheard of and ridiculous.
You can google about mobile game retention rates and read more about it, this is one of the first results.
Load-wise, we have successfully tested 7,000 transactions per second in a test environment
And then they show a screenshot of an excel file with a bunch of numbers. Really? Those is your test results?
I could go on dissecting the mess that the white paper is, but it would take too long.
What is their market?
In the white paper they cite numbers for both Android stores and the App Store, but they definitely can’t do anything on iOS since apple doesn’t allow third party app stores. They still include some of the iOS numbers on their charts and don’t clearly state that their store will not work on iOS. When they mention markets they talk about “Asia, North America and Western Europe”. Android users in both North America and Europe are not accustomed to using any other store than Google Play, why would they switch? They don’t even know they can install a different store, it is really entrenched in the ecosystem.
Players in china do have different stores, but the competition of stores in china might actually be another hurdle for this project to surpass. So it looks like it is just Android, mostly in China and only if they can out compete the other stores (some of which are owned by the carriers and many of them have ties with the government). It doesn’t look good.
Overall lack of professionalism
This might not seem like much to some of you, but everything these guys do looks unprofessional. The website design is atrocious, and website data is outdated. The white paper seems to have been written in Word (most other ICO white papers at least look good), doesn’t explain anything in much detail, doesn’t cite any sources, doesn’t show any math. When they have to show results of their transactions tests they link to a screenshot of an excel file. These guy can’t make a website right, can’t create a white paper right, and you think they can create and market a game store/platform?
Conclusion
Looking at everything I think there are either two options:
- This is a scam
- These people are WAY over their heads and they don’t know it. I find this option unlikely.
Either way it doesn’t look good.
I'm only doing this as a warning for the people who have invested or were looking to buy these tokens and have a high probability of losing their money. I think ICOs like this one will only hurt the ecosystem and the projects that are bringing real value to the community.
I welcome a civil discussion on corrections and different points of view.