Level Up: DeHub Arcade Launches with 5 Games & Predictions
By DeHub Team — 2022-01-01
The DeHub Arcade launched in Q1 2022 with five games, including Super Robin Hood and Tomb Runner, alongside the prediction games we had introduced the previous quarter.
Why an arcade and not a game
We could have built one game well. An arcade was the harder choice and the right one, because the thing we actually needed to prove was not that we could make a game — plenty of projects can — but that we could run a platform where games plug in, share an account, share a wallet and share a leaderboard.
One game is a product. An arcade is an argument about architecture. If the second game costs as much to add as the first, you do not have a platform, you have a folder.
By the time five titles were live it was clear which one we had. Adding a game meant adding a game, not rebuilding the surrounding machinery each time. That is the property that later let us drop new titles in without a release cycle around each one.
What the five had to have in common
The constraint we set was that every title had to work with the same primitives:
- One identity. Your DeHub account is your arcade account. No per-game signup, no separate balance.
- One wallet path. Whatever a game needs to do with tokens, it does through the same route, so a user learns it once.
- One leaderboard model. Scores land somewhere shared, which is what made on-chain leaderboards and rewards possible in the same quarter rather than as a per-game feature.
That sounds obvious written down. It is also the part most projects skip, because the first game ships faster without it and the cost only appears at the third.
Predictions sitting alongside
Keeping predictions in the arcade rather than in their own section was deliberate. Both are things you do in a short session, both have an outcome, and both live or die on whether the outcome is verifiable — which we had already committed to with provably fair randomisation the previous quarter.
Splitting them across the app would have meant two places to check, two mental models, and two sets of rules for the same trust question.
What it did for the app
The arcade turned out to be the best answer we had to a hard problem: what does someone do in the app on a day when there is no announcement, nothing to claim and nothing new to watch?
Feeds need content. Streams need a creator to be live. Games need neither. They work at 2am on a quiet Tuesday, which is why monthly active gamers passed 5,000 in the same quarter the arcade opened.
Where it went
Later titles followed, including Street Slayer, which we ended up rebalancing before running competitive tournaments on stream — a nerf to some overpowered combos that the community had been vocal about for months.
The arcade is still on DeHub today and the model has not changed: one account, one wallet path, shared leaderboards, and new titles that arrive as content rather than as engineering projects. Of the decisions made in early 2022, this is the one that has needed the least revisiting.
What we got wrong about it
We expected the arcade to be a feature and treated it as one internally for far too long — resourced as a section of the app rather than as a product with its own audience.
The 5,000 monthly active gamers it reached in the same quarter were, to a significant extent, people whose entire relationship with DeHub was the games. They were not holders. Many had no interest in the token at all.
That is the hardest audience in this industry to reach and we had reached it almost by accident, then spent a year not building for it properly. The correction came later, and the games that followed — including Street Slayer, which we rebalanced before running competitive tournaments on stream — were planned as titles rather than as content drops.