Fight Club
Pixel apes were meant to fight each other from the very beginning and rivalry between competing gangs in Ape City is an integral part of our lore.
Our first game was Gang Wars where Gangs of 50 apes fought against each other for free mints of Jaguars. Initially, Jaguars were meant to be a paid mint but we ended up changing our minds for the sake of great pixel art and making them rewards for participation in Gang Wars.
We then planned to launch Season 2 of Gang Wars as a mobile game and faced several issues reworking the game engine to add new game features. In the meantime the general NFT interest started dropping, so we decided to drop a sole player “Fight Club” game.
Fight Club came with its own issues in terms of balancing stats & passives, adding potions, off chain Ganganite, weekly themes etc.
Unfortunately, we kept facing dropping numbers of active players, which was very hard to handle because we were ultimately here to drop cool pixel art and have a little fun with a unique Gang Wars game.
As we are Ape Gang for life, we don’t want to disappoint our gang, so we started working on a new version of Fight Club including more visuals and features like weapons, artifacts, gems etc.
We also want to expand Fight Club to other communities, which requires a ton of work to be able to seamlessly onboard new collections.
It’s not easy being a small team working on a game without big budgets but we’re making it work and the next version of Fight Club is coming along nicely.
Gang Token
Our $GANG tokenomics are pretty simple at the moment. In order to make Fight Club exciting again we will cut yielding before the new version of Fight Club launches. There is already enough $GANG supply to ensure a sustainable token economy and reducing future supply will bring more value to weekly prizes.
Also, we are working on a way to get more prizes for Fight Club.
Think art, sponsorships, partnerships etc.
Ensuring attractive prizes adds to the development time.
Look at my Raccoon (LAMR)
Look at my Raccoon was a promising cool project that we pushed through announcements in Ape Gang’s Discord. This was clearly a mistake because the project ultimately failed.
To make it up to our Gang, we managed to get control of the contract and all the IP with the help of BGB and Web3Rugged. Just to name a few.
When Fight Club is ready to launch, all current LAMR holders will have their Raccoons converted to Pixel Raccoons complete with Fight Club stats.
Yes, Raccoons will fight in Fight Club.
And yes, this is more FREE pixel art for our holders.
We will always have your back and try our best to make good on our mistakes.
Back to the origins and what we love the most
When we started Ape Gang the market was driven by delivery and endless roadmaps. With a new version of Fight Club being developed we have delivered more than we originally set out to do and now we’re returning to what we love the most — dropping great pixel art.
Moving forward we will therefore start exploring art-only directions on other chains.
“Fragments” is a phygital pixel art genesis collection marking the return to Ape Gang’s roots after more than 2.5 years of developing an ecosystem for our PFP collections.
The inspiration came from zooming in on Ape Gang’s pixel ape PFPs to generate 4x5 pixel frames.
Jokong then started experimenting with code and ended up with a nifty generator that produces beautiful minimalistic 16 x 16 squares.
With the art in place, we needed to decide on a chain. After much deliberation we decided we had to eternalise “Fragments” on the mother of all chains, BTC (Bitcoin).
“Fragments” are meant for display, so we’re adding a phygital experience where holders receive a framed print included in the minting price.
We might very well launch other collections prior to “Fragments”.
All for the love of pixel art. And because every chain deserves great pixel PFPs.
Marketing
We will likely never again pay for influencer marketing because the ROI — in our experience — is always negative.
Successful projects are successful because of their communities.
Just to mention an example, we tried hiring a French marketing agency in the past which cost us tens of thousands of dollars without any results. They promised us more exposure but ultimately they didn’t understand Web3 and nothing happened.
Through Ape Gang we made good connections to famous sportsmen but influencer marketing is not how collections gain traction these days. We believe a better strategy is to explore an art-only direction across multiple chains capitalizing on great pixel art to bring eyes on Ape Gang.
Bringing eyes to Ape Gang is also why Mepusica founded Bridgr, a growth collective incorporated in Singapore with the aim of helping Web3 projects grow. We are therefore partnering with Bridgr to help market and launch our future collections.