New Opportunities in the Gaming Industry: How KGeN is Reshaping User Acquisition

1. Introduction

In recent years, the gaming industry has surpassed the film and music industries in scale, but it is facing severe challenges. From 2023 to 2024, the industry is experiencing a wave of layoffs and consolidation, skyrocketing development costs, and significant reductions in investment. The distribution and dissemination of games have also become more difficult, making it hard for new projects to stand out.

Nevertheless, there are still huge opportunities in the industry. The purchasing power of the digital native generation will continue to drive market expansion. At the same time, the long-neglected global South market is experiencing explosive growth and will become an important incremental market for the gaming industry in the next decade.

This report will explore the latest challenges in game publishing, analyze high-growth opportunities in the Global South, and focus on KGeN, a blockchain-based gaming platform, assessing its potential to reshape the incentive mechanisms between publishers and players.

2. Challenges Faced by Issuance

One of the biggest challenges in the current gaming industry is distribution. Various factors make it more difficult than ever to successfully launch a game to millions of users:

• Players tend to spend most of their time on familiar games.
• The adjustments to the privacy policy of mobile advertising networks have impacted user acquisition strategies.
• AI has lowered the market entry barrier, intensifying content saturation.
• Web3 games face additional policy restrictions

The Web3 gaming market is relatively small, with about 6 to 7 million active wallet addresses interacting with over 3,000 on-chain gaming protocols. The surge of emerging networks and ecosystems has further intensified the competition for player liquidity.

Amidst numerous challenges, a group of Web3 companies is exploring new user acquisition models based on blockchain. Innovative incentive mechanisms and on-chain reputation systems may become potential avenues for these companies to gain a competitive advantage.

3. Opportunities in the Global South Market

The Global South is often seen as an underdeveloped yet highly potential gaming market. The region is characterized by:

• Huge player base
• Mainly rely on mobile devices for gaming
• Overall willingness to pay is relatively low
• The younger generation has a strong preference for game content.

The following are some characteristics of key markets:

India

• The game revenue in 2024 is expected to reach $943 million, with a 5-year CAGR of 11.1%.
• Mobile games dominate, contributing 77.9% of total revenue.
• Rapid development of 5G and digital payment infrastructure
• Real money gaming is the largest market segment, with an annual revenue of $2 billion.

Southeast Asia

• Game revenue reached $5.1 billion in 2023, expected to increase to $7.1 billion by 2028.
• Indonesia has the highest mobile game downloads, while Thailand has the highest IAP revenue.
• Community and competitive culture are common characteristics.
• The smartphone penetration rate will reach 90.1% by 2026.

Latin America

• Brazil is the largest market, with 101 million players in 2022, generating $2.7 billion in revenue.
• 60% of players have played mobile games at least once in the past six months.
• 43% of players have in-game spending behavior
• Cultivating the local gaming industry through education and policy support.

Africa

• Revenue is expected to exceed $1 billion in 2024.
• Mobile games account for nearly 90% of the market share.
• 92% of players use mobile phones to play games
• High data costs are the biggest obstacle.

Middle East and North Africa

• Revenue increased by 4.7% in 2023, reaching 7.1 billion USD.
• CAGR is expected to reach 9.4% from 2024 to 2030.
• Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt are core markets.
• A high proportion of the young population, with a significant increase in internet penetration rate.

4. Introduction to the KGeN Platform

KGeN is a blockchain-based gaming platform that promotes user engagement between different games by utilizing on-chain and off-chain data, an incentivized task platform, and a decentralized reputation system.

The core of the platform is a decentralized player data network, using "Player Proof" ( PoG ) engine to create a cross-chain player reputation layer, providing publishers with a highly engaged target user group.

Main features of KGeN:

• The total number of registered accounts has increased by over 700%
• Monthly active users increased by 1333%
• The total amount of data attributes has increased by 992%

4.1 Grassroots Growth

The core of KGeN's growth lies in its grassroots tribes and the network of tribal leaders:

• As of December 2024, there are 2,525 tribes, with 152 tribes having more than 100 members.
• Approximately 1.7 million KYC-verified accounts were obtained through the tribe.
• India is the largest market, but over 30% of active wallets are on Kaia (LINE's blockchain ).

4.2 KGeN Play Incentive Participation

KGeN Play is the main interactive interface for users, providing reward tasks:

• Users can earn K-Points, achievements, K-Cash, or token rewards by completing tasks.
• K-Drops are automatically verified through API, while K-Quests are manually verified.

4.3 PoG engine

The PoG engine is a decentralized player rating system composed of five core pillars:

• PoH( Proof of Humanity ): Reducing the likelihood of robots, segmenting user groups
• PoP( Game Proof ): Measuring Platform Engagement and Game Preferences
• PoS( Skill Proof ): Assessing player abilities and achievements
• PoC( Commercial Proof ): Identifying the monetization potential of users
• PoSN( Social Network Proof ): Mapping Users' Social Influence

The current PoG engine contains over 270 million data attributes, covering more than 13 million registered accounts.

4.4 Token Economy

The KGeN economy consists of two core assets:

• KCash: Off-chain reward currency, can be used for purchases in KStore
• KGEN Token: A utility token that drives the ecosystem, with 40% allocated to the community.

The oracle network will be an important component of the token economy, responsible for storing PoG data, calculating PoG scores, and submitting them to the blockchain.

5. Competitive Landscape Analysis

5.1 Web2 Advertising Technology Giants

• Facebook: Utilize user data for precise ad targeting
• Applovin: End-to-end data integration to optimize advertising effectiveness
• Mystplay: Reward-based UA platform, AI-driven recommendation engine

5.2 Web3 Competitors

• Publisher Ecosystem: such as Ronin, Immutable, etc.
• Task platforms: such as Zentry, YGG, Carv, etc.

The advantages of KGeN are:

• The most registered accounts and 30 days of independent active wallets
• PoH and PoP are unique measurement metrics.
• 40% of the tokens are allocated to the community, which is at a high level in the industry.

6. Future Opportunities

The key directions for the future development of KGeN:

• Use external rewards to incentivize users to complete specific tasks.
• Enhance the PoC dimension and build a unique dataset
• Expand the scale of KGeN Store, promote on-chain transactions
• Improve attribution and AI technology stack, build data barriers
• Continue to expand in the Global South market

7. Conclusion

KGeN has established a competitive growth flywheel, with a first-mover advantage in the Global South market. Future needs:

• Maintain growth momentum after token issuance
• Optimize UA model to enhance ROAS calculation capability
• Accelerate the development of AI and data tools
• Improve monetization capability

If the above goals can be achieved, KGeN is expected to become the preferred UA solution in the global South market and maintain long-term competitiveness in the Web3 UA field.