Organic Growth vs Performance Marketing

Organic Growth

Organic growth is essentially free. You use your community to spread the word, actively or passively encouraging players to invite others. When done well, organic growth can quickly lead to many new users. However, achieving real virality involves hidden costs like experimentation and time spent on various strategies. Purely organic growth often isn’t sustainable, as interest fades when excitement decreases.

Incentivized Growth

Incentivized growth involves offering rewards to attract new players. This can rapidly boost user numbers, but often results in lower-quality users who play primarily for financial incentives. Additionally, incentivized channels frequently attract bots. Some web3 games are experimenting with strategies focused on "Return on Rewards Spent," rewarding mainly users who also contribute revenue back into the ecosystem.

Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is more predictable but carries ongoing costs. The goal is simple: revenue from new users must exceed their acquisition costs (CAC). Once this is achieved, scaling is straightforward—you just spend more on marketing.

Combining All Three

Most web3 games rely heavily on organic or incentivized growth, which often doesn’t lead to sustainable user acquisition. Craft World is uniquely positioned to acquire players through traditional performance marketing as well, enabling more stable and scalable growth in the long term.

We believe a balanced combination of these strategies, leveraging occasional virality, cautious incentivization, and consistent performance marketing, delivers the best results for sustainable user growth.