Super Snappy aims to make Web3 games on social messaging platforms

Social game startup Super Snappy is taking Web3 games into cross-platform social messaging platforms, enabling players to join games with friends using just a link.

Super Snappy is a cross-platform HTML5-based messaging app to play games, a games portal, and a persistent social network with 3D avatars, pets, spaces, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The private launch is set for July 15 for the holders of the First Citizens NFT collection, and the official launch is set for September 15. You can grab your first citizen VIP access at this link.

Super Snappy is producing the first few dozen games for its platform in-house. It is partnering with Voodoo and getting ready to target three billion mobile game players. Super Snappy is going this route of making its own platform because it has been kicked off of too many platforms in the past.

Yohami Zerpa, CEO of Super Snappy, remembers the time when the “social gaming dinosaurs” ran the world. These included Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, and Facebook Canvas (remember Farmville?). There were games on Skype — gaming on messenger apps and social networks was the hype, and the world was increasingly being connected through games.

Then the app stores surged, the Flash Player died and Facebook pulled the plug on their own Canvas platform. Social gaming didn’t die. Instead, it became fragmented, with each social game forced to develop its own social graph and ecosystem, Zerpa said.

Then, in the natural continuous process of birth and death of games, all those social connections, all those friendships, were lost. Super Snappy is a platform that wants to bring that back.

“For players, we’re removing friction from playing games,” Zerpa said. “When you’re on the platform, all you need to do is press a button. We give easy access to play with friends. For developers, your game can just go viral.”

A web platform with native builds for PC, mobile and consoles

Super Snappy is the long-awaited, inevitable evolution that social gaming has been slouching toward, Zerpa said.

It keeps user profiles, friend lists, feeds, achievements and digital assets as players hop from game to game. And, the Super Snappy application programming interface (API) can be added to any game to give them social features and blockchain integration.

Super Snappy will launch on all platforms, including web, mobile (iOS & Android), desktop (PC, Mac, Linux), and consoles (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo). That makes it a good destination for anyone who wants to play with friends, Zerpa said.

“You just click on a game and you play it,” Zerpa said. “You send an invite link and your friends are in.”

There no need to browse app stores, install or buy games and ask friends to do the same. No more having to rely on external apps for chats and comms. With seamless communication, you can easily share, invite, ping, text, voice, video and avatar chat. You can engage in a poke, send challenges or gifts, join clans, play in tournaments and more. Super Snappy encourages players to interact, collaborate, and build lasting friendships.

The games are hypercasual in nature, and they’re snappy in terms of being responsive, Zerpa said.

“We’re going to have all type of games,” he said. “We’re building about 100 games. Most of them are what you would call white label games, everything from chess to match-3 to checkers to war games.”

Voodoo Games is expected to provide a lot of games for the platform.

The NFT connection

What’s unusual about the social gaming plan is that it’s built around Web3.

“There is a lot of noise around Web3. We like how people can buy NFTs and sell them elsewhere. We like the tech. Whatever is going on with Ethereum and Matic and all the scandals and corruption,” Zerpa said. “But we’ve seen that it eventually is going to be normal that you can buy a skin for a character and then even after the game has long gone, you still have it and you can go and sell it and it becomes a collectible.”

When people join the platform, Super Snappy gives them a crypto wallet. Players may not even know they have it as this is in the platform’s backend. Players can also pay for items with credit cards.

“We don’t force people to sign up to Metamask. And then we have a shop where they can buy digital assets, and some of them are NFTs. They can sell them wherever they want to,” Zerpa said.

The company plans to sell its own Super token in the future in order to fund company operations. Zerpa anticipates it will take a couple of years to get good penetration of the market. With HTML5, he believes the market will get better and the quality of the games on it will get much better.

Web3 without the hassle

Zerpa said the platform provides Web3 capability without the hassle. The advantages of Web3 for gaming include owning digital assets that can be collected, sold and traded. These are desirable features that Zerpa said will become mainstream in the next few years.

Super Snappy moves the tech out of the way so players enjoy the benefits of Web3 and have none of the hassles. Registered players get a custodial crypto wallet. That makes it easy to manage.

Super Snappy’s hard currency $SUPR is an ERC-20 token that lives on the open market and can integrate with third-party ecosystems.

The built-in marketplace trades both regular digital assets and NFTs. In addition, players earn rewards in the form of NFTs and $SUPR by participating in tournaments, engaging in positive actions for the community and selling user-generated content.

A safe haven for game developers

With its sole “Play With Friends” purpose, Super Snappy succeeds when the games succeed, Zerpa said. Super Snappy empowers developers with direct access to the social graph and its players. By using the Super Snappy platform, developers gain the ability to have their games go viral on merit, quality and via word of mouth, as opposed to having to buy users.

Need to release a game off-platform? Developers can integrate the Super Snappy API and deploy anywhere. If they’re releasing a new game, developers can ping existing players with a push notification and ask them to try it out and to bring their friends in.

As novel as Super Snappy is as a platform, it relies on an industry tried-and-tested revenue model. These include subscriptions, where players subscribe to get extra benefits, discounted in-game currency, digital goods, Season Passes and special rewards.

It also has in-app purchases, where players use in-game currency to enhance their gaming experience, and unlock special items, power-ups, or cosmetics. It has rewarded ads, but no interstitial ads nor banners. Players choose to watch ads for in-game rewards or to skip them completely.

And it has an NFT marketplace. It has seasonal, limited collections of avatars, pets, spaces and special items that can be collected and traded outside of the platform. Third-party developers get a generous 95% cut and the platform only takes 5%. Normally, platforms take 30%.

Super Snappy was making games for Playco, the social gaming firm started by Michael Carter and Justin Waldron. Zerpa asked if they were going to make a platform to run social games. When he didn’t get a positive answer, he decided to build his own.

Super Snappy is built on proprietary tech, dubbed the TOY Engine — a super fast HTML5 game engine deployed on top of PlayCanvas; and the ConquerOS backend which takes care of data, blockchain integration, multiplayer servers, analytics and more.

Super Snappy will have native clients on mobile, desktop and consoles — but also exist as a website, facilitating virality and the ability to invite friends and share content through regular web links. Zerpa believes that the best of both worlds.

And, with WebGPU just around the corner, the range, variety and quality of games that can be played anywhere is set to explode, Zerpa believes.

That seems like a lot of work for a small game studio in Liechtenstein. But Zerpa said the team managed to come up with an all-in-one package solution. Before Super Snappy, NOWWA/Gamebop was a work-for-hire studio and the No. 1 games provider for Snapchat.

“The Super Snappy team understands better than anyone how to leverage web technologies to take social gaming to new heights,” said Will Eastcott, PlayCanvas CEO, in a statement. “After developing high quality PlayCanvas games played by millions on Snapchat, they’re taking all those learnings and forging fun new experiences for the whole global web community.”

Origins

Zerpa was a Flash game developer 20 years ago. Then I went to Facebook Canvas. There were a lot of startups doing social games. Then, of course, Facebook killed Facebook Canvas. Then I was doing Unity games. In 2018, he switched to making games on Snapchat, where his team was the No. 1 developer on Snapchat.

Zerpa has been a big part of the social gaming ecosystem since 2008, with hundreds of games shipped and having worked with FRVR, Buster Games, Miniclip, Kongregate, Voodoo and others. As the creator of the innovative TOY Engine and ConquerOS, Zerpa is driving the evolution of Super Snappy.

“There’s an immense potential for social gaming. And as soon as any of those platforms see social gaming explodes, they need to start suppressing virality because there is a big chance it will become way too spammy,” Zerpa said. “If you remember Farmville, back in 2010, you would come to Facebook and you would have 50 notifications, or people asking you for carrots.”

The conclusion that Zerpa came to is that the social platform has to be focused on gaming.

“So you’re looking at the platform when you want to play. And when your friends are asking you to play with them, you play on this platform with your friends,” he said.

CTO Joe Wilcox is an Unreal Engine game developer with 30 years of experience including leading roles at Epic Games. They are joined by a team of more than 25 professional artists and developers.

Advisers include Andy Kleinman (Zynga, Scopely, Disney, Wonder), growth hacker Nikita Bier (Gas, TBH) and investor Lane Merrifield (Club Penguin). The company has about 15 people.