NFTY is a newsletter about the latest of crypto & gaming and how the two will converge. Each week, I analyze the latest trends and happenings of how the story is unfolding.
I made the comparison of Figma fueling game worlds in last week’s newsletter and had some readers who wanted me to go deeper on this topic. And it’s good timing too. Some of the biggest news of the week happened to do with both Figma and Fortnite:
Both these pieces of news are significant. With Figma’s new financing, they can explore new modes of visual communication. With Fortnite’s new mode, it can start to branch off in a new vertical of becoming a virtual hangout spot that isn’t about competition.
Today I’ll deep dive and explore why these two companies have a very similar goal: to become the backbone for creators and fuel the digital world.
Figma
In a16z’s investment thesis for Figma, Peter Levine mentioned that similarly to how the 2010s were the decade of programming, the 2020s will be the decade of design.
When a system has this kind of “composability”, it creates new building blocks, new combinations, and new kinds of creators who can all now communicate visually with each other both within and across organizations. —Peter Levine of a16z
Figma has created the ultimate open ecosystem. With community plugins and frictionless sharing, it’s never been easier to start designing.
Figma is already blending work and play, something many blockchain games have tried to do.
There’s a joke in the product design community that goes something like this.
9AM: -opens work Figma-
5PM -closes work Figma-
5:01PM -opens personal Figma-
Pushing pixels is not only starting to get addicting, but it’s also starting to become a place to hang out.
You can create real games and play them inside of Figma. Someone created Pong. Others created trivia games. A VC built Silicon Valley inside of their Figma. And with Figma Links, you can link to other Figma boards to create an entire game world.
Figma is the single point of creation origination for any designer
Figma is about to get more powerful. With Figma’s plugin open ecosystem, more designers are creating components that can be re-used in different React applications. With Framer integration, designers can now go from design-to-React code in less than a few minutes. That means if React continues to become the standard for development, Figma would be the best place of origination for a new coding project. Imagine being able to design an entire Minecraft Server with just Figma. That’s the trajectory that it’s going on.
On the other end is Fortnite.
Epic Games wants Fortnite to be the MetaVerse with weekly virtual concerts, a sandbox for creators, and more. With the introduction of Party Royale, Fortnite is hoping to create the best place to hang out with friends. In Party Royale, there are no guns. It’s just plain old fun and discovery.
If Fortnite can become a dominant distribution platform for creators, than many streamers & entertainers will start to use Fortnite. And just like how Instagram and YouTube created new influencers, so can Fortnite in a synchronous environment.
Fortnite and UGC tools are only good enough as the developer’s creativity
In order to create a platform for creators, a game must have good tooling. There’s usually some UGC (user-generated content) toolbox to give users the resources they need to build their own worlds for players to try. In the short term, I fully expect producers to use Fortnite’s creator mode to setup their own concerts for the artists in order to scale the IP business.
The problem, however, is that in most cases like Fortnite, these UGC tools are only good enough as the developers’ creativity. There are rules and constraints to what can be created.
What can crypto learn from Figma and Fortnite?
Figma is like Ethereum: it starts off very half-baked but eventually becomes the de-facto standard for designing applications because of the network effect of the Plugin ecosystem. Fortnite on the other hand is like Libra: a high distribution but with a less permissionless ecosystem due to the rules of the instilled by the creators.
By studying the trajectory of both Figma and Fortnite, crypto projects can learn what makes for a valuable platform network effect. Figma’s community of creators are fueling the next-generation of creators while Fortnite is trying to figure out how to scale its IP business and appeal to less competitive gamers.
The general lesson here is that you don’t want to create too many rules too early on. Create something useful and playful, then build a community of evangelists.
Figma is doing that right now.
If you are working on trying to get more people using crypto applications, I would love to talk about how I can help. Reach out to me on twitter @flynnjamm, my DMs are always open.