An ambitious project project with backing from 300+ private investors, initial Mcap of $500 Million managed by a team of 50+ people.
Key points of the IDO
1. Breaking Blockchain World Records
2. 30 Launchpads
3. Explosive social media growth in 7 days
4. 328 private investors
5. $20M fund raised in Private Round at $400M Mcap
6. Extensive partnerships
We’ll break down this project in 9 parameters and analyze how strong the overall project stands out.
Idea
The website claims that Solchicks wants to be the leading Play to Earn game on Solana Blockchain. Thus, Solchicks comes in competition with other gaming projects on Solana like Cryowar, Mixmob and projects on other Blockchains like Decentraland, Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Wax, etc. The game idea is not any new, it’s similar to other traditional games in the market. If large game publishers would adopt crypto economics into their games, then there wouldn’t be need of such new projects for the gamers. But as long the existing game publishers stay shy from the Crypto market, mostly due to the regulations, new projects have the opportunity to establish themselves among the global gamers community.
Website
The project website is of quite high quality. It has an impressive Hero section retaining the feel of a game project. The planning behind the website design and content clearly seems to be done by an experienced team in web development. By showing snippets of the live game actions on the website, they have done a good job to gain trust from the website visitors. The website is well detailed, fast loading, informative, trust worthy and most important of all, its user friendly.
Professionalism
After checking every123 collaterals of the projects viz. Website, Whitepaper, Game Demo, Guides, Social Media etc, it’s clear that all the tasks have been performed by professionals, under the supervision of experienced managers. That’s not very common in the crypto market, most of the projects lack even the minimum professionalism levels.
Token Feasibility
Since this is a play to earn game, so it’s not feasible to integrate with any currently listed crypto. For play to earn games to be fair and accessible by the young gamers, the game should have it’s own tokens. Also in P2E games it is necessary that the maximum token percentage should be reserved for players to earn by playing the game.
In case of Solchicks, 37.7% tokens have been allocated for P2E, Airdrops and Staking combined. That’s an unfair allocation for a token that has a very general utility. In my opinion, the team should have lesser allocation, between 10 to 15% because the project has a good chance to moon, so even that much allocation would be worth a lot. Besides, 9.4% tokens have been proudly sold to the private investors for $20M. Instead of this, they should have either distributed some of that to the public sale investors or better would have been to raise money from private investors against equity.
The allocation for exchange liquidity is 5% which is fine, considering that Chicks would be conveniently listed on many Centralized exchanges.
Market Fit
If we look at the ease of adoption in the market, then Solchicks is going to have a tough time, because so many similar games are already present in the market. The adoption of this game by the gamers is going to be a two stage event. To go deeper into those two stages, let’s first understand who are the potential user of Solchicks game.
The gamers who play similar games to Solchicks, have already few great options at their disposal. The main user demography of such gamers is around 13 to 24 years. Although people outside that age group hold some percentage too. If Solchicks doesn’t grab the market in the first year of it’s launch, i.e. starting from Q4 2022, then we won’t be surprised. If the team continues to penetrate the market by understanding user’s demands, then there’s a possible chance that this game could be picked up by the gamers due to it’s crypto incentives.
There are other challenges hovering around the market adoption for this game. If the craze of NFT drops due to the bear market, then there won’t be much hype around a game offering NFTs which would have little to no value.
Team
The team of 50+ members looks very attractive from the investment point of view. They have smartly mentioned most the team members as gamers. This strategy definitely helps others to relate with the team members. Most of the core team members have finance professional background, linked to big corporate houses and Ivy league Universities. For the game development, developers have been hired from other popular game studios. Marketing team has proven it’s mettle during the IDO promotions by taking over the whole IDO investors community. Team looks strong and of high caliber. If this founding team would have started a fintech company, then they would have been more successful compared to a gaming project.
Partners
Solchicks administration has appointed 6 people only for the role of handling partnerships. And the partnership guys mean their job seriously. They didn’t leave any stone untouched in the IDO market. This project has onboarded almost everyone as partners. So we can’t be sure of the quality of partners or the need of a particular partner, but they are there. It will be a tough journey of coordinating with each of them, but that will depend upon the initial contracts between the partners and Solchicks. Nevertheless, this partnership saga has worked out for the IDO promotions.
Whitepaper
As the founding team comes from a finance and business background, they couldn’t have done this any better. The whitepaper has everything that an investor would want to know about a project. The design of the whitepaper is equally good. This team knows it very well how a project should look from outside, and they have mastered over every such things.
Marketing
One word for their marketing- Mind blowing. They didn’t leave any stone unturned in the marketing of their IDO. The marketing team is undoubtedly highly skilled at their job. They didn’t even mind to exaggerate the community numbers. The website shows 500k community members, but when we dived deeper then we found that they had simply added the followers count on each social media and reached to a figure of 500k. That was insane! They don’t think any followers intersect on multiple social medias. Besides even those followers do not count much, as all of them have been brought by offering airdrops and giveaways. Anyway what could have been expected by anyone in merely 7 days! They can definitely pull it off the next time they get opportunity to do the same. There are 6 people in the marketing department, which is more than most of the other projects.
Conclusion
With an experienced and exhaustive team, the project looks good and has potential to fit in the market in the long term. But investors should be cautious about the fact that whatever the team has shown till date were the result of the past experience. Doing such tasks are not tough having such a large team, although the coordination of the tasks is not easy, which this team has excelled at. But for the project to be successful, the most important thing to matter is the game adoption among the gamers. So we should keep an open eye on the strategies being applied on that front.
Any suggestions are welcome on this review.
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