Executive Summary

Tower of Fantasy (ToF) is a new F2P, open world MMORPG developed by Perfect World’s subsidiary, Hotta Studio, and published by Perfect World in China and Level Infinite (Tencent’s publishing brand) worldwide.
The game is heavily inspired by MiHoYo’s Genshin Impact (which we’ll refer to as “Genshin” for short), with the key differentiator being a social, ‘shared world’ MMO experience in which players on the same server can interact while exploring the open world.
Innovating on a Genshin-like experience with a social PvP focus, ToF shows a strong early performance in terms of RPD (Revenue Per Download) development in its first 6 months. Its RPD is comparable with Genshin in China and significantly higher in Japan (1.4x) and the US (3.3x). This is likely due to ToF’s focus on PvP power progression and the core gacha having more spend depth than Genshin.
ToF pales in comparison to Genshin in terms of total downloads. The latter’s large-scale marketing tactics brought over 10 million pre-registrations compared to ToF’s 4 million and 10x the volume of downloads during launch.
Tencent’s more cautious approach to scaling ToF is due to the unsteady Chinese launch of the game: the controversies surrounding stealing assets, server and maintenance issues, game-breaking bugs, and unstable power creep of new characters.
The team has continued to stabilize the game for worldwide release, increased efforts in anti-cheat technology, improved the balancing of content, and is gearing up to launch version 2.0 this fall, potentially creating an avenue for scaling downloads.

Tower of Ambition

Tower of Fantasy (ToF) is a new F2P, open world MMORPG developed by Hotta Studio (a subsidiary of Perfect World) and published by Perfect World in China and Level Infinite (a publishing brand of Tencent Games) worldwide. The game takes place in an anime-inspired, post-apocalyptic world that players can explore together. The parallels to MiHoYo’s Genshin Impact (which we deconstructed here) are substantial, with the key differentiator being ToF’s MMO ‘shared world’ experience. In ToF, players on the same server coexist and encounter each other.

Since its announcement, Tower of Fantasy has been declared by some media as a potential ‘Genshin killer’ because of its comparable high-budget aesthetics and being a project affiliated with Tencent. Genshin Impact recently celebrated its 2-year anniversary, bringing in $3.7B in mobile lifetime revenue for MiHoYo (link), ranking the third most profitable mobile game globally behind Tencent’s two titles: Honor of Kings ($5.5B in the last 2 years) and PUBG Mobile ($4.9B). On paper, Tower of Fantasy, which takes the open world, gacha RPG foundation of Genshin Impact and innovates on one key pillar — ‘Social’ — is a strong candidate for a ‘Genshin killer’ or at least a meaningful competitor. Of course, the devil is in the details of execution.

Unlike Genshin Impact, which had a same-day global release, Tower of Fantasy staggered its release — starting with China (Dec 15th, 2021) and 8 months later being released worldwide (Aug 10th, 2022). Tower of Fantasy has generated $107M in revenue from 6.79M downloads, with China accounting for 59% of total revenue ($60.8M) and 38% of total downloads (2.17M) nine months after its release there. Japan comes in second by revenue, generating $14M from 570K downloads, and the US is third with $8.64M and 780K downloads, 6 weeks after the game’s worldwide release (outside China). This regional split is also in line with Genshin Impact’s 2-year performance, with China leading by revenue (33% of total revenue), Japan coming in second (24%), and the US third (17%).

Looking at RPD development in the first 6 weeks (aligned by launch), Tower of Fantasy is off to a strong start with a comparable RPD (of $16.75) in China to that of Genshin Impact ($18.10, +8%) and Diablo Immortal ($15.72, -6%). Tower of Fantasy is dominating in Japan with a RPD of $25.85 while Genshin Impact’s is $18.48 (-28.5%) and Diablo Immortal’s is $7.89 (-70%). US shows a similar performance for Tower of Fantasy with a RPD of $9.97, Diablo Immortal’s being $9.37 (-6%), and Genshin Impact: $3.01 (-70%). Since all three games are available on PC as well, it should also be noted that these mobile/tablet numbers are lacking a holistic view.

Where Tower of Fantasy pales in comparison is downloads: Genshin Impact generated 36M downloads in its first 6 weeks, but Tower of Fantasy only generated a low 1.4M. Considering that Tencent/Perfect World have access to large reserves of marketing money, and given ToF’s successful early RPD development, it looks like the team skipped on investing heavily in scaling the game.

Tower of Controversy

To address some of ToF’s launch and early performance decisions, we have to unpack the disputes and shortcomings that disrupted the game’s public image:

The promotional video released just prior to the game’s launch in China showed a weapon asset from another MiHoYo game, Honkai Impact 3rd, which sparked fan criticism on Chinese social media platform Weibo. Perfect World later apologized for the error, citing that the outsourced company developing the PV made the mistake (link).
Within weeks of that debacle, another promotional video for the game was caught blatantly plagiarizing a concept video from a smaller animation company, which further drew the ire of fans (link). Yet again, Perfect World apologized, citing third-party outsourcing, but by then Chinese players had nicknamed the game Tower of Theft (a play on the Chinese characters in the title) when discussing it online.
While these problems were occurring outside the game, with third-party companies to blame, it launched with a monetization-breaking bug in its core character collection gacha. In short, players were able to duplicate pulls by disconnecting from the internet when pulling from the gacha (link). As soon as this was noticed, the developer shut down the game for emergency maintenance and brought it back with a compensation equivalent of 10 pulls — which promptly was exploited for the same bug, with players able to duplicate the compensation (link).
These bugs in the core gacha monetization rightly angered the ToF community, especially the players who had spent money in-game on the exploitable gacha, bringing down the App Store rating from 4+ to almost 3, a danger to any game looking to get featured. As if right on cue following the previous scandals, ToF was promptly caught for using bots to fake 5-star App Store reviews to get the rating back to 4+, stealing 5-star reviews from Genshin Impact that even contained names of characters that only appear in that game (link).

ToF’s animations, visual effects, weapons, and other art assets were constantly cited as being identical to MiHoYo’s games in public discourse. This combined with the game’s server issues at launch in China and daily maintenance breaks made the so-called ‘Genshin killer’ nearly kill its own reputation instead. These issues were mostly fixed for the game’s global release, and its initial performance has been strong in its second and third biggest markets: Japan and the US.

In this essay, we’ll cover the game’s potential upside and staying power, especially compared to Genshin. We’ll dig into:

The state of the RPG market that ToF launched into
Gameplay and feature deep-dives highlighting the similarities and differences between ToF and Genshin
Gacha design, monetization drivers, and comparing spend depths
Improvement suggestions and future predictions for version 2.0

Can ToF really become a Genshin killer? Let’s find out.

The RPG Market, Six Weeks Into the Launch of ToF

The market size for RPGs over the last 12 months (October ‘21 – September ‘22) accounts for 1.52B downloads (2.61% of total downloads) and $17.9B in revenue (31.06% of total revenue) with an average RPD of $11.74. The category is led by Genshin Impact with 53.5M downloads and $1.15B in revenue, followed by Pokémon GO with 44.4M downloads and $641M in revenue.

In the six weeks since ToF launched, the worldwide RPG market has been dominated by Genshin Impact, an action RPG with a focus on single-player exploration and PvE content. Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal — an action RPG with a hugely popular IP and a MMO with a focus on PvP/Clan mechanics that saw a recent release in China — ranks second. Tower of Fantasy — an action MMORPG that mixes elements of both Diablo Immortal and Genshin Impact — ranks #11 by revenue.

Looking at the subgenres of MMORPGs and open world RPGs, ToF ranks 5th by revenue, performing well in the realm of action RPG games. Notably, besides Genshin and ToF, there are no games in these charts that match their scale of fully realized open worlds with high production values.

Open World (MMO) RPG

Tower of Fantasy is an open world action MMORPG, making it a game that contains the following genre conventions (given data.ai classifications): an RPG with a focus on stateful progression of character skills and abilities; an action RPG with a focus on controlling the direct movement of a primary character; an open world RPG where players traverse an open world relatively freely; and a MMORPG featuring worlds or servers with hundreds or thousands of players online simultaneously.

In ToF, players control a deeply customizable character avatar that can run, jump, swim, and use various vehicles to explore a vast open world in a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi setting on the alien planet Aida. Players fight enemies in an action, hack-and-slash combat system, switching between three equipped weapons and using powerful supplementary skills. Battling, exploring, and completing assorted tasks and quests earn players experience points and items which are used to increase their levels and advance their equipment and character stats. ToF ends up playing like a game that does a lot of things but none of them extremely well.

For MMO open world games, the world setting plays a crucial role in engaging players both via exploration and bringing characters’ personalities and stories to the forefront. Most MMOs don’t have a deeply compelling story, opting instead to stick to universal hero’s journey or anime tropes.

Genshin Impact does a good job at immersing the player into its world via distinct characters whose charm and personality supplement the role they play in the world at large. Characters belong to different regions and cultures, and players interact with them as they explore the world and advance the story. There are also mini-event stories in which players get to try characters out for limited amounts of time, playing through their story prologues. All of this helps advertise the characters to players, nudging them towards the core gacha every time new characters are released.

ToF has a more modular approach when it comes to building the player character. Since this is a MMO with a PvP focus, the game allows players to customize their builds and appearances to showcase unique identities. The characters take a backseat in the world setting, their stories are relegated to past memories, and most of them no longer exist in the game world. This works in favor of customizable power progression, but it does take away from the ‘gotta collect them all’ nature of Genshin. To make every new release of characters more compelling, ToF relies on power creep, with new characters outperforming old ones in power and dominating the PvP meta. This power creep has been somewhat problematic on the Chinese servers (which get access to new characters first) as some characters have broken the balance of the meta altogether by being too powerful.

ToF contains all the standard features expected of a game in this genre: a main story quest that takes players through all the game’s locations, key lore and characters, daily and weekly side activities, plus co-op and PvP content to play together with other people. The game features a deluge of resources that help advance various vectors of character, weapon, and stats progression, as well as recipes for cooking and crafting. ToF also adds a variety of vehicles for exploring the open world — motorbikes, jetpacks, hoverboards, and drones. Additionally, players can use different mounts, replacing their motorbikes with robot horses, mechanical birds, and hover pods that look straight out of Star Wars.

The MMO part of ToF creates a single instance of the game world on a server shared between players who can team up to explore the open world, battle enemies, complete quests, and challenge each other in PvP duels, all in order to advance up a leaderboard for rewards, aiming to be the strongest player/team on the server. Genshin has all that except the MMO part, making it a single-player-focused open world action RPG in which players take on the role of a traveler journeying in the fantasy world of Teyvat in search of their lost kin.

ToF also gives players an abundant of endgame content: a weekly resetting single-player dungeon with multiple floors to clear for gear upgrades (called Bygone Phantasm), a multiplayer boss raid available three times a week (Mon, Wed, Fri) for weapon chips (Void Rifts), and a multiplayer time attack mode to clear as many waves of enemies as possible within a time limit for rewards of higher rarity gear available three times a week (Tue, Thu, Sat), called Frontier Clash. Additionally, there are single-player and multiplayer features whose rewards are capped by a regenerating energy, like Joint Operations, Dimensional Trials, and Interstellar Exploration, that can be repeated endlessly for resources.

Player loadouts feature the player avatar and their gear (three weapons, each containing four chips with gear). The primary sources of power are the weapons and chips that drive the core gacha, gear being mostly grindable. Player loadouts in Genshin Impact, by contrast, feature a four-character party, with each character wielding one weapon and five artifacts. The primary sources of power are the characters and weapons that drive the core gacha, artifacts being mostly grindable. Both games have a focus on gacha RPG character collection as the primary monetization driver, with one key difference: in ToF, the characters pulled from the gacha are the weapons. Let’s dig into how that works.

Characters of Gacha RPGs

In ToF, since players are primarily controlling their customized avatar, they pull weapons from the core gacha to equip onto their character’s three weapon slots. Weapons come in increasing rarity of R (Rare), SR (Super Rare), and SSR (Super Super Rare). Weapons of rarities SR and SSR are pulled from the gacha as ‘Simulacra’ — cosmetic characters complete with 3D models, animations, personalities, and backstories. In the example image above, the character Crow is the ‘Simulacra’ of the dual-bladed Thunderblades weapon, and the character Ene is the ‘Simulacra’ of the great-hammer-like Pummeler weapon.

Each weapon has its own stats/level progression and one of three roles (offense, defense, or support) that dictates how it works in battle, like damage or heal. Weapons also have one of four elemental attack types (flame, ice, volt, or physical) that gives them bonuses when used against opposing elements, like flame weapons versus ice. Each weapon has a shatter value, which is its effectiveness against destroying Shields (a barrier used by most enemies to reduce damage). The charge stat of a weapon shows how fast its powerful discharge skill can be built up.

Weapons can be upgraded to improve their stats and passive abilities, augmented with materials to increase their upgrade level caps, and up to 6 duplicates of the same weapon can be combined to advance it from 0 to 6 stars. Upgrading SR and SSR weapons unlocks lore content that sheds light on the story of individual characters. There are also weapon resonance buffs that can be activated by equipping weapons of certain roles or element combinations.

The SR and SSR weapon characters are reduced to their weapon representations when equipped on the player character, but players have the option to ‘enable’ the ‘simulacra,’ effectively replacing the player avatar with the weapon’s cosmetic character. This is not the ideal feature for an MMO game, where players frequently cross paths and wish to express their individualities through deep customization of their avatars. Though these characters look great when pulled from the gacha alongside common, character-less weapons, their role in the gameplay is heavily diminished to just being cosmetic when compared to the likes of Genshin Impact.

Genshin Impact employs a four-character party setup for players to switch between instantly when exploring or in combat. Characters belong to one of seven elements and have their own equipment, stats, and skills. Switching between them allows players to use a combination of different character skills, attacks, and elemental reactions. For example, following a water element skill that ‘wets’ an enemy with an ice element skill from another character causes a ‘freeze’ reaction, dealing bonus damage. Certain characters’ elemental abilities are required to solve puzzles or more effectively traverse the open world, like freezing water bodies to walk across them.

Each element in Genshin Impact has a different negative effect on enemies, like Fire that continuously inflicts damage or Water that increases skill cooldown durations. Combining different elements in combat causes elemental reactions on enemies which can multiply damage, decrease resistances, create shields, and even damage the environment, putting everyone around in danger. Compared to the rock-paper-scissors-like advantage triangle of ToF, the element reaction system of Genshin creates a lot more design space to continually deliver new heroes that are valuable to players without resorting to power creep.

These characters are highly detailed with rich 3D models, animations, voice lines, and lore that integrate them in the game world. The main story quest, together with the side stories and events, puts these characters front and center. Being the main driver of the game’s core gacha collection, this adds to its ‘gotta collect them all’ allure. Genshin Impact’s gacha has a similar rarity system when pulling characters, ranging from 3 to 5 Stars, where 3 Stars are only weapons, and 4-5 Stars can be either weapons or characters. This is more clearly explained with comparisons when looking at the drop rates of the gacha below.

Core Gacha Monetization

The “Choice Weapons” banner is ToF’s standard gacha machine that uses Gold Nucleuses to make rolls, featuring a collection of R, SR, and SSR weapons, as well as R weapon batteries used to level up weapons. This banner has a pity system guaranteeing a SR at 10 rolls and a SSR at 80 rolls. A good thing about ToF’s pity system is that it does not reset when players acquire weapons of SR/SSR rarity before the pity roll kicks in. The drop probabilities are as follows:

Considering 10 pulls to be the equivalent of $25, the max cost of obtaining a character of the highest rarity (SSR) is $200 (80 pulls).

Gacha RPGs rotate characters (mostly new ones) on a limited-time featured banner, which gives players the best possible avenue of obtaining that particular character. This follows the standard banner rules with the addition of a 50% chance to pull the featured character on a highest rarity pull (SSR). If the first SSR pull does not drop the featured character, this probability is increased to 100% for the next SSR pull.

In the example image above, if players were to chase acquiring SSR Claudia, they are guaranteed a SSR drop every 80 pulls and a SSR Claudia drop on the second SSR pull, making the max cost of acquiring her to be $400 (160 pulls). Since 6 duplicates are required to max her out, the max cost of acquiring and fully advancing a featured character is $2,800 (1,120 pulls).

Considering the 50% chance of this drop, we can assume a spend of somewhere between $1,400-2,800 (average $2,100) to acquire and max out a highest rarity character in ToF. This is obviously a lot of money, but it’s actually cheaper compared to Genshin when looking at a similar breakdown below.

As stated earlier, Genshin’s standard banner drops 3-5-Star items, with 3-Star items being weapons only, and 4-5-Star items being weapons or characters. The pity system in Genshin comes into effect if players do not pull an item of certain rarity, with a 4-Star item guaranteed every 10 pulls and 5-Star item guaranteed every 90 pulls. This is a common way of implementing the pity system where it resets if players get lucky pulling a rarer item before the pity drop kicks in. The drop probabilities are as follows:

Since 4-5-Star items can be characters or weapons (50% chance), the chances of a character drop are:

5★ character = 0.3% (0.8% including pity)
5★ character = 2.55% (6.5% including pity)

Considering 10 pulls to be the equivalent of $25, the max cost of obtaining an item of highest rarity (5★) is $225 (90 pulls). Since there is a 50% chance of getting a 5★ weapon instead of a character, doubling this means the max cost of obtaining a character of highest rarity (5★) in Genshin is $450 (180 pulls).

Genshin Impact follows the same additional rules as ToF for its limited-time featured banner dropping a 5★ character. In the example image above, if players were chasing to acquire Cyno, they are guaranteed a 5★ item drop every 90 pulls and a Cyno character drop on the second 5★ item pull, making the max cost of acquiring him to be $450 (180 pulls). Since 7 duplicates are required to max him out, the max cost of acquiring and fully advancing a featured 5★ character is $3,600 (or 1,440 pulls).

Considering the 50% chance of this drop, we can assume a spend of somewhere between $1,800-3,600 (average $2,700) to acquire and max out a highest rarity character in Genshin. This max spend is 28.57% higher than ToF, yet ToF has a comparable RPD to Genshin Impact. To account for this, let’s look at the secondary gacha in ToF and its role in impacting the game’s MMO PvP focus.

Enter the Matrice

Similar to Diablo Immortals’ legendary gems core gacha that we covered in a previous essay, each weapon in ToF has four slots to equip different Matrices (chips) which increase the stats of the weapon and provide some special effects. Each of the four slots (Emotion, Mind, Belief, and Memory) gives slightly different passive stats. Matrices, like weapons, can be upgraded, and up to three duplicates can be used to further advance them. They come in four rarities in descending order: SSR, SR, R, and N (Normal).

Matrices have a large impact on the overall combined stats of the weapon to which they are equipped. In the example image above, the SSR weapon Royal Edge (Meryl) is equipped with similar SSR Meryl Matrices, resulting in the following:

Attack 15 +23 (+153%)
Resistance 7 +12 (+171%)
HP 1165 +1941 (167%)

This shows that the combined matrices have a much higher starting stat than the base weapon itself, being the major portion of the overall stats and hence combat rating of the weapon in battle.

The Matrices have their own gacha machines with standard and featured banners. The SSR pity is improved for Matrices, guaranteeing a SSR drop every 40 pulls (instead of 80 for weapons) while costing the same $25 for 10 pulls. Using a similar math as the one above, to acquire and max out a SSR Matrice from a featured banner requires $800 (320 pulls). Repeating this 4 times in order to fill all the slots on a single weapon requires $3,200 (1280 pulls)

Considering the 50% chance of this drop, we can assume a spend of somewhere between $1,600-3,200 (average $2400) to acquire and max out 4 SSR matrices for a SSR weapon in ToF. The combined cost of a SSR weapon with 4 SSR matrices equipped from the featured banners comes to a total of $6,000 (2,400 pulls).

Considering the 50% chance of weapon and matrice drops, we can assume a spend of somewhere between $3,000-6,000 (average $4,500) to acquire and max out a SSR character and 4 SSR matrices, bringing the spend depth to 1.7x Genshin’s $1,800-3,600 (average $2,700). The reason why this works for ToF lies in the game being more MMO-PvP-driven and power-progression-focused than Genshin, with players making constant social comparisons with each other on the server every session.

With the primary goal of dominating the server in combat value, players in ToF are more likely to chase power progression through gacha than the more single-player progression experience in Genshin. The featured banners rotating every three weeks and new characters being added monthly shake up ToF’s endgame PvP meta and create a potential for long-term engagement and monetization.

Secondary Monetization

Outside of the core gacha monetization, ToF has a battle pass with two premium tiers similar to Genshin’s pricing:

$9.99 Premium Pass that unlocks the premium tier rewards on the battle pass which include among other resources currency for 10 pulls of the standard weapon gacha and 5 pulls of the matrice gacha.
$19.99 Collector’s Edition Pass that unlocks the Premium Pass rewards, instantly advances 30 levels on pass, and rewards players with social bonuses like an avatar icon, an avatar frame, and a premium chat bubble. This tier primarily adds currency for 10 pulls of the featured gacha.

This is the best value/$ to obtain currency to pull from the gacha, though the rewards need to be earned and unlocked in a limited 40-day period by engaging in the game activities or purchasing progress outright (which reduces their value/$). The game also offers bundles of resources, from $0.99 to $4.99 price points, as well as a $4.99 monthly pass, that can be purchased up to 6 times for a monthly subscription of gaining 100 hard currency/day.

Tower of Frustrations

ToF is a game developed by a small Chinese studio, Hotta Games, part of the larger Perfect World Games company that developed PC MMORPGs like Perfect World 1 and 2, Jade Dynasty, and distributed Valve’s Dota 2 and CS:GO in China. These PC games are an example of why ToF plays like a game built for PC and later ported to mobile. The UI, for starters, is just about functional, with tiny text and buttons which are hard to read and interact with on mobile. The example image above shows the comparison between ToF’s and Genshin’s UI components on an iPhone.

ToF looks AAA and plays without hiccups on PC, but when it comes to mobile, the default settings are kept low even on the most powerful Apple devices on the market. When graphics and frame rate settings are increased to match the PC experience, the game struggles to deliver with constant frame drops, clipping issues, and unacceptable battery drain. The game has been optimizing performance with every update, showing that the development team has an interest in making the game more mobile-friendly.

It’s also worth mentioning that some parts of the gameplay require players to have precise platforming skills when navigating the game world and completing certain quests. These are easier to perform on PC, but when reduced to virtual buttons on a mobile screen, they are a near constant source of frustration. There’s even a gun that can create temporary platforms to jump on and fast-moving obstacles like lasers that can kill players in a few hits, requiring quick reaction skills that are hard to execute on mobile.

Despite the game supporting multi-platform accounts to transfer between PC or mobile devices, the superior controls, load times, and graphical fidelity hugely favor the PC platform. This is not the case for Genshin whose gameplay experience remains closely comparable between PC and mobile. ToF needs to take a leaf out of Genshin’s book and bridge the gap between its mobile and PC gameplay experience.

Dawn of 2.0

ToF is clearly not the Genshin killer that Tencent was hoping it to be, but stealing some market share is doable and sustainable if it further improves, key to which are a better balance of characters and content, avoiding huge variance in power creep, and expanding on social events and features. ToF’s lack of mobile experience needs to be revised in order to match the high bar set by Genshin and Diablo through gameplay improvements and polish.

Given the game’s troubled launch in China, the controversies, server and maintenance issues, game-breaking bugs, and unstable power creep of new characters, Hotta Studio has had a more stable worldwide launch, thereby learning from its past missteps. The global version does lag behind the Chinese one in terms of content but is more stable and balanced. The instances of cheating, hacking, and acquiring in-game resources through illegal means have been near eliminated in the global release via patches and a tighter anti-cheat focus from the development team.

Before launching globally, ToF received 4M pre-registrations, showing a good appetite for Genshin-like games. In comparison, Genshin had over 10M pre-registrations prior to its launch 2 years ago. With access to Tencent’s large marketing budget, the publishing company seems to be playing it safe (so far) when it comes to scaling downloads for ToF globally given its rocky Chinese release. Game balance and exploits also become more serious when ToF depends on PvP and fair play across leaderboards to drive the core monetization.

A 2.0 update is scheduled to release this fall with a new desert region and a cyberpunk city in the sky, more PvP and co-op content, weapons, and characters. This aligns with Genshin’s yearly release of a new region, but ToF has had slower character releases than Genshin’s which happen every three weeks. This is mostly due to the imbalance issues as China got new characters in ToF at a similar cadence, but 9 out of 12 characters available in China are still waiting to be rebalanced and released globally.

Genshin has maintained steady downloads of 1M/week since its massive push at launch while Diablo is trending towards 200K/week. ToF, on the other hand, is seeing more like 100K/week. With ToF’s technical stability increasing with every update and its evergreen PvP focus driving long-term performance, it can start closing in on Genshin’s market by cautiously scaling its downloads and going for a strong marketing push this fall with the release of 2.0. It’s not guaranteed to be a success — after all, the team made several blunders the first time around — but it’s ToF’s best chance at becoming an even larger competitor. We can’t wait to see what happens.

A big thanks to Harshal Karvande for writing this essay! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.