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You might say that Yuga Labs\u2019 Dookey Dash was a success<\/a>. At least, that\u2019s what the hundreds of thousands of hours people spent playing the game and the nearly 37,000 ETH in Sewer Pass trading volume on the secondary market would indicate. <\/p>\n When the game\u2019s two-week run ended on February 16, few in the Web3 space were particularly surprised by the achievements of this latest gamified minting mechanism of the Bored Ape Yacht Club<\/a> ecosystem. But that near-blas\u00e9 response to Dookey Dash\u2019s smooth execution is compelling evidence of Yuga\u2019s increasing ability to pivot to the play-to-earn (P2E) gaming sector via its projects. It also hints at what\u2019s to come for the company.<\/p>\n Yuga has been headed in this direction for some time now. When the company announced at the end of last year that Activision Blizzard\u2019s President Daniel Alegre would succeed Nicole Muniz as Yuga Labs\u2019 CEO<\/a>, it indicated that they were gunning for the P2E world in a big way. Just a few months prior, the team had announced Spencer Tucker<\/a> as its new Chief Gaming Officer to aid in this push. <\/p>\n It was a telling move; Tucker \u2014 who previously served as President of Games at Scopely \u2014 specializes in game development, design, and, most crucially, Web3. Now that Dookey Dash has concluded, nft now spoke with Tucker about the game\u2019s results, lessons Yuga learned from its run, and how the company is positioning itself to bring Web3 gaming to the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n On February 16, Yuga announced the winner<\/a> of Dookey Dash and the recipient of its coveted prize, The Key: Kyle Jackson, a Fortnite player who goes by the moniker \u201cMongraal\u201d in the eSports world. Jackson obtained a high score of 928,522 after more than ten minutes of gameplay and has since listed his Sewer Pass for a healthy 2,222 ETH on OpenSea<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Rounding out the top three spots on Dookey Dash\u2019s leaderboard are second place at 876,679 (also Jackson) and 875,242, courtesy of Web3 denizen ohhjar_warm<\/a>. Of course, the fervor surrounding the attempts to land on the leaderboard was intimately tied to the BAYC\u2019s new and ongoing minting mechanic, in which holders of higher-scoring Sewer Passes will be more advantageously placed as it continues to unfold.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe concept of a skill-based mint is just the beginning of how we innovate blockchain technology,\u201d Tucker explained to nft now. \u201cMint mechanics are ripe for disruption. The methods of getting NFTs into the wallets of the burgeoning Web3 industry cannot remain predictable, in our opinion. [\u2026] It needs to be exciting and weird and get people\u2019s attention.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Dookey Dash grabbed and held that attention for two solid weeks. The numbers the Yuga team has gathered since the game\u2019s wrap are worth appreciating: 25,525 Sewer Pass holders accumulated 7.5 million Dookey Dash runs (amounting to roughly 80 years\u2019 worth of play time), averaging nearly 28 hours per Sewer Pass. The game helped expand the BAYC universe<\/a> significantly, growing the ecosystem by 40 percent, according to Yuga\u2019s estimates. The game\u2019s ApeCoin incentivization worked a charm, too: roughly one-third (9,026) of the game\u2019s active players used the token (a total of $424,566 $APE) to purchase boosts to help them achieve a higher score.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dookey Dash wasn\u2019t without its fair share of controversy, however. Responding to concerns that bad actors might try to cheat the game, Yuga co-founder Greg Solano put the Web3 community on notice<\/a> when he explained that the team was collecting plenty of data on Dookey Dash runs and that those who engaged in foul play would have their scores disqualified. This didn\u2019t satisfy a number of Web3 observers<\/a> who claimed there was a possibility that the game might be vulnerable to bots in a way that Yuga hadn\u2019t accounted for. Such bots, they argued, could use code to \u201clook ahead\u201d in the run and automatically move the player into a safe position to avoid obstacles.\u00a0<\/p>\nDookey Dash, by the numbers<\/h2>\n
The Bored Ape in the room<\/h2>\n