Looking Back on Naavik’s 2021

Happy Holidays! It’s that time of family, celebration, and reflection. In our final issue of the year, we want to quickly run through our content and business highlights of 2021, as well as share some of our goals for next year.

During 2019, both Naavik and Master the Meta (MTM) started off as one-man games industry consulting and content operations, respectively. In 2020, paths crossed and MTM joined forces with Naavik to provide the best content and consulting services to professionals in and around the games industry. With 2021 now coming to a close, we can confidently say that this was the year of becoming a “real” business. Some key highlights:

Naavik’s consulting business quadrupled over 2021 and we’re partnering with more clients than ever before.
MTM published 69 issues over the year, doubled its weekly content cadence, 2x’d its subscriber base, and we rolled out the first iteration of our writer payment program.
Our podcast, The Metacast, launched mid-2021, released 30+ episodes, and experienced a 10x growth in downloads during its first 6 months.
We also set the foundation for premium research, launched our first institutional reports on Axie Infinity (free) and Zed Run ($), and onboarded our first cohort of subscribers.

None of this “just happens,” so we want to extend a HUGE thank you to all of our amazing customers, readers and listeners for continuing to blow wind in our sails. Further, we’re grateful to be working with an incredible crew of 25+ contributors, who form the backbone of everything we do. Open learning — bringing talented people together and sharing our collective learnings in public — is central to our DNA, and we can’t wait to ramp this up further in 2022.

Honing in on our content efforts, our top 10 most read pieces over 2021 were:

Axie Infinity: Infinite Opportunity or Infinite Peril? (Link)
Aurory: Solana’s Next Big Hit? (Link)
Into The Void: Where Crypto Meets The Metaverse (Link)
Star Atlas: The Most Ambitious Blockchain Game? (Link)
The 9 Types of Blockchain Gamers (Link)
Gaming Industry Nearly Twice as Large As Reported, at $336B (Link)
Javier Ferreira: Building the Definitive Free-to-Play Games Company (Link)
The Present & Future State of Gaming Venture Capital (Link)
IP, Games, and the Future of Transmedia (Link)
The Future of Merge Games (Link)

Our content curation efforts resulted in the following top 5 most clicked links:

Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer (Link)
Mark Zuckerberg is Betting Facebook’s Future on The Metaverse (Link)
The Rise Of The Systemic Game (Link)
Land Speculators Will Kill Your Game’s Growth (Link)
How Virtual Worlds Work, The Series (Link)

And our top 5 most downloaded podcast episodes were:

A deep dive into Axie Infinity (Link)
Are sustainable P2E economies possible? (Link)
Interviewing Michael Wagner, CEO of Star Atlas (Link)
How we’re getting to the next 100M blockchain gamers (Link)
Loot, the Hyperverse & the future of human collaboration (Link)

You’ll notice a flurry of crypto content flooding our top charts, which is because crypto gaming was the mega-trend of 2021. All of us were (and are) trying to figure out what it means, what’s legit, and where it’s going. Crypto aside, it was also a big year of game launches, company building, financial activity, and other trends across all corners of the industry. Gaming, as a whole, is more relevant than ever before, and we remain steadfast in our mission to enable you to master the business of gaming (in its entirety).

Looking into 2022, there’s a lot more we want to accomplish! Our plans to further build out the Naavik ecosystem in the most beneficial fashion for our customers, audience, contributors, and teammates include:

Content: Our mission is to be the go-to gaming industry newsletter + podcast. To make that happen - improving the newsletter experience, scaling our deep dive efforts, adding more segments to the podcast, and strengthening our community efforts are all on the roadmap.
Premium Research: Our goal is to build the premier research offering for the entire games industry. That means expanding beyond blockchain games and adding key verticals like F2P, PC/Console, and company analysis.
Consulting: We can serve more companies in more ways. Therefore, we’ll continue providing companies access to a growing squad of top consulting minds, and deliver a wider array of productized solutions and best-in-class consulting services, at scale.
New Initiatives: We have a couple of exciting ideas up our sleeve that we’re excited to share next year!

Of course, we can’t do any of this alone. If you’re interested in working with us in any capacity, please reach out here. We’d also love to hear any MTM-specific feedback you might have!

If you read this far, thank you for your support! Enabling you the master the business of gaming is what motivates us every day. There is much more to come, and we can’t wait to continue leveling up with all of you in 2022.

Game on,

The Naavik Team