Behind the Brand: Treasure DAO 🎮
Behind the Brand: Treasure DAO 🎮
My interview with the Head of Marketing at Treasure, Sam Udeschini
Welcome back to MINDS AT PLAY,
In our latest edition, I caught up with Sam, The Head of Marketing at Treasure DAO, the community-driven gaming ecosystem. We discussed the power of play, the secret behind Treasure's community-driven growth and the importance of marketing to inspire, educate and convey the value of web3 to all.
The meaning of play and its importance in gaming.
Cynthia: What does play mean to you?
Sam: 'Play,' to me, shouldn't have a very prescriptive definition. In the essay by Colleen Sullivan titled "It's All a Game,” she discusses that sense of flow, like when you're playing a basketball game, for example. Games contain all the right ingredients to create flow, but we can experience this sense of flow and play in and out of a game if there’s continuity in things like community and participation. In web3, play can extend to things like trading, collecting, and creating content.
Treasure’s community driven approach to gaming.
Cynthia: How would you describe Treasure to me if I was a five year old?
Sam: Treasure is a place where play knows no bounds, where you can contribute without any creation being considered too small or unacceptable. That’s something our community is all about — participating and playing in whatever way you're most comfortable with. While many people enjoy playing games, and we're actively building a great roster of them, there are other ways to engage. You can simply be an active community member or a creator, expressing yourself through storytelling or art.
Lore and narrative are central to Treasure. Through these co-created stories, you can experience a sense of wonder across all the games and communities. It's like going to Disney World; you become so immersed in the experience. And you kind of forget that you are just on Discord or in a game and you feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself.
Sam’s Journey to Joining Treasure + Web3 vs. Web2 Marketing
Cynthia: Tell me about your journey and how you ended up at Treasure.
Sam: So before Web3, I worked in early-stage and Series A startups. I focused a lot on content, product, and community-driven marketing. But given how small the teams were, I ended up wearing a lot of hats . And that's something that I've always enjoyed—having that sense of ownership in my role and contributing to the broader mission.
I was compelled by this thesis of Web3 redefining the rules of the internet and people rallying around this vision and idea, and the culture around it. So, I decided to jump in headfirst and immerse myself in Web3.
From a gaming perspective, recognizing the potential that Web3 unlocks with true digital ownership and user-generated content (UGC) was exciting. Here, everyone is a creator. While the trend was already moving in that direction, I saw it as offering far greater opportunities within Web3. With Treasure embracing a bottom-up approach, interoperability to build the decentralized game console and pushing games beyond traditional boundaries to reimagine them, it opens up new forms of play. All of this was incredibly intriguing to me. There's a vast expanse of unexplored territory here, allowing us to redefine how we approach game development. This is ultimately why I chose to join Treasure.
Creating opportunities for creators in the gaming industry
Cynthia: Can you explain the Creator Program and how Treasure fosters community engagement and loyalty within its decentralized ecosystem, especially considering the importance of narrative and immersive experiences?
Sam: Our creator program was launched last year and has become one of the leading programs in web3. We initially launched with only 10 creators, many of whom have since flourished. Our creator program is now well known in the space and we’ve scaled this up to over 50 creators and expanded into web2 creators as well. We wanted to create an opportunity for creators to get involved with our games, have early access, and earn $MAGIC and other assets while creating content for our games. It's a publishing offering for our games, but also an opportunity for creators to be a part of our community across Treasure and our games.
If you want to get involved, there's the general program called Treasure Create. If you're interested in creating gaming content, videos, or threads, you can apply on our website. If you're already creating content for Treasure games, that’s a plus! We’re now employing a hyperlocal approach to bring on creators in Latin America and APAC. We recently launched the A-list, an extension of our creator program, targeted at traditional gaming creators and larger creators. We launched that with Alliestrasza, Canetelope,, and Juicy J. If you're an influential traditional creator who doesn't know much about Web3 but wants to learn more, this is an opportunity to have access to games and paid activations. This is one of a few ways we plan to broaden our scope and give our games exposure to traditional audiences as well.
Loyalty at Treasure is formed by giving our community an active role and voice in collectively building our decentralized game console. We’re transparent and open to feedback, and our team is always in the Discord building relationships and working in tandem with our community. It’s also formed by rallying around this vision together, and watching ideas turn into reality as our games and products come to life.
Game development and collaboration in the Treasure ecosystem
Cynthia: So what if you're a game designer or a game developer? Is there a way for game developers to collaborate with Treasure to build on-chain gaming?
Sam: For sure! We get a lot of inbounds and many of our games came through word of mouth. One notable difference about Treasure compared to others in the space is that we're curated. We look for game builders who are highly aligned with our vision, are interested in experimenting, and interested in collaborating with other game builders across Treasure, because that's really a core ethos of what we're doing.
We want all of our games to succeed together, collaborate, and find interesting ways of creating new gaming experiences. So these are some important things that we look for when we're actually assessing if a game would suit our ecosystem and our community. We also obviously look for game builders who have previous experience building games, or are already building a great game that would fit in our ecosystem. If anyone is interested in building with Treasure, definitely reach out to our BD and partnerships team.
Cynthia: There's not a specific gaming genre you look for when vetting a game dev team, more so the team themselves and their willingness to be a part of this open, integrated collaborative ecosystem?
Sam: Definitely. We have 10+ games, building with Treasure and just to give you some context, we have The Beacon which is a roguelike dungeon crawler, we have ZeeVerse which is a monster-tamer MMORPG. We have Bitmates, which is an MMO. And we have Kaiju Cards, which is a deck builder.
So we have a wide variety of genres. But when you look at like the builders behind those games, they share similar values. They're also very excited and optimistic about Web3, and about what that really unlocks, and they're not afraid to experiment. We even have monthly community calls where all of the game devs get together and connect and our partners are known to publicly support each other.
Ultimately that's the kind of environment we want to continue to foster in Web3 gaming and at Treasure.
Until next time
Thanks for reading. A special thank you to Sam for sharing your time and insights! And a thank you to the Treasure ecosystem for the work you are doing in Web3 gaming.
— Cynthia ౨ৎ ⊹ ‧ ♱