Earn Alliance hires mobile veteran Jeff Drobick as COO for Web3 gaming discovery

Earn Alliance, a Web3 game aggregator and discovery platform, announced it has appointed mobile ad platform veteran Jeff Drobick as its COO.

The appointment also reinforces a trend that we’ve seen before from mobile gaming. Back in the day, mobile games took off on the iPhone. But after a while, the huge volume of millions of games made it hard for games to be discovered. So startups emerged to help with user acquisition and discovery. I saw similar cycles with other new markets such as virtual reality games.

The same trend is starting to happen for Web3 games, and so it makes sense to bring in someone like Drobick, who is the former CEO of Tapjoy. Drobick brings his expertise in gaming engagement services that will be instrumental in advancing Earn Alliance’s mission to revolutionize the gaming landscape through blockchain technology, the company said.

“That’s exactly right. Earn Alliance was perfectly predictable [as a business to serve the Web3 gaming industry],” Drobick said in an interview with GamesBeat.

The announcement arrives at a pivotal time for Earn Alliance, building on a recent string of successes around their newly launched Ally Pass and introduction of the Magic Muffins lore to their ever-growing ecosystem. The news comes ahead of their highly anticipated token generation event (TGE) slated for October 10.

Drobick’s tenure at Tapjoy, as a pioneer of the mobile gaming ecosystem, has long been a source of inspiration for Earn Alliance CEO, Joseph “Coop” Cooper. Tapjoy pioneered reward-based engagement incentives that set the standard for free-to-play gaming, establishing a wildly successful business model that generated meaningful revenue and adoption in the gaming industry, and ultimately led to the company’s acquisition by IronSource for $400 million.

“After Tapjoy, which was a decade of doing mobile, deep in game economies and delivering awards to users, we did the transition to IronSource,” Drobick said.

Cooper, a long-time admirer of Tapjoy’s 1.6 billion monthly active gamer offerwall network, sees Drobick’s decision to join Earn Alliance as a strong signal of the company’s potential to continue their evolution as influential leaders of the web3 gaming revolution.

“Jeff’s successful track record at Tapjoy and his deep understanding of gaming engagement make him the perfect fit for Earn Alliance as we continue our growth,” said Cooper, in a statement. “Tapjoy is literally the inventor of rewarded advertising that the web3 industry calls ‘questing.’ We have expanded Tapjoy’s novel approach to user acquisition with blockchain technology, enabling a transparent, safe and secure reward ecosystem.”

Cooper added, “Jeff’s decision to join our team is a pivotal moment not only to our growth trajectory, but adding paramount experience to the mindshare of the industry itself – underscoring our commitment to leading this transformation in the gaming landscape.”

In his new role, Drobick will leverage his experience and network with the traditional gaming community to introduce Earn Alliance’s capabilities and scale the business. His strategic insight will be crucial as Earn Alliance continues to experience rapid growth, with the platform gaining an average of 50,000 users month over month, with over 650,000 registered users.

“Effective user acquisition and monetization continue to be top priorities for all game developers, from indie to the largest publishers. By embracing blockchain technology and open virtual economies, Earn Alliance is bringing solutions to market that allow the industry to progress forward,” said Drobick. “I’m incredibly excited to join the team that is at the forefront of this transition; pioneering a rewarding new ecosystem and industry-wide solutions for gamers and publishers alike. The opportunities to amplify the benefits of free-to-play gaming, using blockchain technology, are massive. I look forward to great things ahead with Coop and his awesome team.”

While gaming developers are spending billions of dollars on user acquisition, with a massive 65% user drop off, Earn Alliance is offering a competitive, far less expensive model to draw in highly-engaged gamers that keep coming back daily to play because of the platform’s reward-based ecosystem.

In most recent news, with the launch of Ally Pass, the number of users on the Earn Alliance platform is up 23%, with a 226% increase in new user sign-ups. Meanwhile Earn Alliance’s social media impressions are up to one million and their followers on X have crossed the 200K mark. In just under two years, Earn Alliance has quickly established a dedicated community that is building the future of gaming together.

As Earn Alliance continues to attract significant attention from the gaming community, Drobick’s addition to the leadership team marks a new chapter in the company’s journey as the go-to platform for Web3 game discovery and engagement.

The attraction of Web3 games

After selling Tapjoy to IronSource, Drobick took a year off to see where the next wave of gaming would emerge. He noticed Web3 games, but didn’t think they would be destinations on their own.

“I looked at blockchain as a DeFi, as enablers to move those economies forward,” he said. “If you’re looking at the best of Web2 mobile gaming, the micro-content unlocks and the engagement around it, the way performance advertising comes into play in a strong and healthy way for publishers to monetize, then you can see it evolve further.”

He continued, You can ask yourself, ‘What could you do if the economy wasn’t locked in? What could you do, actually, if there’s a fungible token that you can take elsewhere, or that you could bring in from elsewhere, right? What could be possible in the virtual economy?’”

The same is true for digital in-game assets, where you could trade them through a marketplace. It reminds him of the early web in that respect. Drobick said he looked at the opportunity in terms of all of the Web2 money that isn’t yet diving into Web3.

“I looked at Earn Alliance. I’m coming at it from Web2 mobile, with a decade of experience and knowing what publishers need, and then they were coming at it from a Web3, crypto-heavy angle. We’re meeting in the middle. That’s why Cooper and I are a good match. And I think he’s awesome,” Drobick said. “You bring those two perspectives together, and I think we’re gonna do some great things.”

The classic problem is about how the company can get good players who care about the content and want to engage in it for the right reasons. The task is to get true gamers to notice good games and get engaged with them.

“I think phase one of this business is all about game discovery, news and rewards. That’s the simple way to sort of frame it. And we’ve got a good start. We’ve got 700,000 registered users on the platform,” Drobick said. “We just hit a really significant milestone, with 10 million completed missions. In the Web3 and blockchain world, we don’t really call them multi-reward engagements. They’re actually quests andmissions. The communities have completed 10 million of those engagements.”

There are about 2,700 games in the catalog now and Drobick believes there are high-quality games in the Web3 mix. It’s a more mature market than a couple of years ago when the hype was the most heavy. One thing that has to happen is more alignment of the various fragmented platforms in Web3, where there are too many types of wallets or blockchains.

Drobick agrees with that, but he notes there were huge hurdles on the same front in the history of mobile, with many difference advertising formats and devices.

“That makes it harder. So now you go to Web3 and blockchain, and it’s even maybe more complicated,” he said. “That’s starting to change as well. You’re starting to see simplification, where you have an abstracted wallet where someone can come in and join and it’s just a matter of tracking your earnings and your game game history.”

While there are ups and downs with cryptocurrencies that affect the Web3 gaming market, Drobick said he is interested in the fundamentals.

“The noise about crypto or tokens up or down, I don’t really care about that,” he said. “I actually look at the tech powering it and say, ‘If you look at the broad gaming population, the types of games we’re talking about, everything from hardcore, midcore, casual, hypercasual — these economies and the UI, UX in those games. How could you make those better? How could you move that direction? And would it make sense to have a way to bring in some assets.”

Drobick hopes to expand the company’s product surface area and set up a roadmap of new additions. He eventually thinks Web3 games will reach the mass market.