What happens when a meme-driven NFT project dives headfirst into one of the world's most popular gaming platforms? For the team behind Sappy Seals, entering Roblox is less a transformation and more a natural extension of their DNA.
With a background in competitive gaming and a love for internet culture, the team quietly launched hit games like Surf on a Seal and Sappy Coloring - achieving millions of views and attracting a passionate new player base in the process.
We interviewed wab.eth and stormr.eth from the Sappy Seals team to discuss their stealth-first game development approach, games designed for seal enthusiasts, and how they are building community bridges across NFT, Roblox, and beyond.
OpenSea: What inspired you to expand Sappy Seals into the gaming realm? Why specifically choose Roblox?
Sappy Seals: Games have always been the lifeblood of our team. All of us have spent most of our spare time delving into various types of games since childhood. Many of our co-founders also have backgrounds in competitive esports and have made significant contributions to popular games. Our resident creative director/game designer/game developer/doctor/lawyer/teacher/plumber/astronaut Diakou is even a world champion in fighting games.
I believe gaming is the greatest use case for cryptocurrency, far surpassing other use cases - blockchain is specifically designed for virtual economies, capable of coordinating players, creating a team-valuing ecosystem, and allowing out-of-the-box open-source mods. These are the main issues the gaming industry has faced for years: a) players feel cheated by companies that ask for more than they give; b) losing access to games and related identities/inventory, as seen in the recent SKG movement.
We chose to enter Roblox because it is currently the closest place to a true "metaverse" and is the "game" version experienced by the younger generation (Alpha generation and lower-end Zoomers). One particularly interesting thing about Roblox is that it has its own distribution engine that primarily promotes games that users find fun, drawing them back continuously. Our team's strengths lie in game design and creating novel systems/mechanisms, which means we can easily promote games to the more than 400 million users Roblox has.
OpenSea: Surf on a Seal and Sappy Coloring seem to have been born naturally without a large-scale launch. Was the choice to release them quietly part of your brand-building philosophy?
Sappy Seals: Building a stealth mode is the ultimate test of our true beliefs. We want to build naturally through gameplay and experience before the community grows, establishing trust and scaling from the bottom up. Our goal is to attract players early in this way and send a strong signal to eliminate the distractions caused by typical CT model discussions and bag preferences.
OpenSea: You mentioned that this effort is part of a broader strategy of "seal enthusiasts" and sealtwt. How did you initially discover or join this seal-loving network community?
Sappy Seals: There is a massive audience on sealtwt and sealtok, who possess an incredibly deep knowledge base and are home to thousands of excellent artists and meme creators, many of whom are giant autistic individuals. The audience of the Sappy community is exactly like that, so theoretically, there is a massive overlap, which I think is perfect.
Interestingly, the service experience on sealtwt and sealtok is extremely lacking, with not many games or experiences tailored for them, which is precisely the gap we can fill. Once they have the opportunity to engage with new games, they will go crazy buying, which also explains why our Roblox games can go viral.
Actually, I discovered them after posting a cute seal video, and suddenly this video received thousands of likes/shares. Since then, I've been following this community and gradually learned about its depth.
People who love seals are just different in nature (and seals are becoming a competitor to cats and dogs on social media, especially for the alpha generation/zoomers).
OpenSea: How do you define the cross-platform (NFT, games, culture) success of Sappy Seals, and how do they connect with each other?
Sappy Seals: To be honest, my only standard for personal success is how many hearts we capture. We should touch people's souls with the stories we write and the experiences we accumulate. If we can't do that, we have to start over. I don't care if a project is zero profit, as long as it creates memories and has a personal impact on the beneficiaries. Kindness is priceless.
That said, we clearly have our own internal success metrics regarding growth, revenue, overall DAU/MAU, and we are developing our own center that will house all the traffic we have, regardless of the medium through which it is directly accessed (to be determined).
The way we connect everything is through the spread of this face. The more people trust and love this face (the sentimental face), the stronger the network effect will be. The stronger the network effect, the more users we can directly reach.
OpenSea: Surf on a Seal has become one of the top 20 games in the Roblox "obby" category, with 2 million monthly active users. What factors do you think contributed to this growth?
Sappy Seals: Ultimately, it comes down to two things: a) creating an extremely fun game that provides new experiences you can't get elsewhere; b) leveraging intellectual property and humor to make the gaming experience memorable and shareable.
We also cleverly referenced and paid homage to some jokes within the sealtwt/tok community that caused quite a stir on social media. Marketing is not just about paying users to post about your game; it provides a reason for them to willingly make posts intentionally.
OpenSea: Game design is full of fun - random theme courses, fish enhancements, feature unlocks, etc. What are some core principles when designing the game loop?
Sappy Seals: Mainly because we can completely subvert the "Obby" game prototype (Obby is short for "obstacle course"). There are many timed race games on the market, but our principle is to give it an arcade-style Mario Kart feel (who doesn't love power-ups and zooming past opponents?).
We also want to create a feeling of "just one game away," so that there is always a reward at the end of each game, motivating players to try again and strive for success. This is one of the reasons why players find it hard to resist: the exciting arcade-style loop combined with reasons to persist.
OpenSea: The rhythm of Sappy Coloring is different - relaxed, full of musicality, and highly creative. What is the design philosophy behind launching such a unique experience?
Sappy Seals: We noticed a trend on Roblox for relaxed experiences, with a slower pace more suited for children or those just wanting to unwind.
This is just an interesting concept utilizing our existing resources. Over the years, we have accumulated hundreds or even thousands of high-quality sketches and artworks that have never been released, along with a large number of similar sketches from the community. Thus, it makes sense to bring them to life. With Nesha's help, Stormr developed this piece in just a few days.
OpenSea: You mentioned you spent $0 on marketing - what were the most surprising or effective organic growth moments on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms?
Sappy Seals: We created a new account for seal surfing, and interestingly, the most viewed viral content (about a million views) was just a post of us doing silly things, like stacking hundreds of 3D seals and letting them fall.
The biggest growth is attributed to the use of Roblox's algorithm, which recommends games to players based on various metrics such as first-day retention rates and seven-day retention rates, as well as average game duration. By building a solid core loop, our core metrics have exceeded 90%, and the weekly exposure of the game has also surpassed 20 million, combined with meme thumbnails, allowing us to convert a significant portion of exposure into visits and repeat customers.
OpenSea: Many kids, virtual streamers, and content creators are naturally posting game-related content now. How do you support or interact with these creator ecosystems?
Sappy Seals: The main way is actually just to interact with them through comments or by saying something funny (it sounds minimal, but surprisingly, almost no developers do this).
We will also post videos to solicit everyone's thoughts, map ideas, or new features that can be added, and respond to most replies (some videos contain hundreds of suggestions). If their ideas are incorporated into the game, we will give in-game rewards. We are even considering granting Robux for their contributions.
OpenSea: What has surprised you the most about Roblox as an onboarding and community-building platform?
Sappy Seals: It is a social network in itself, with built-in announcement channels and update pages, making it easy for you to communicate directly with all subscribers.
OpenSea: Is there an intentional overlap between your Roblox player community and your NFT community, or do you currently view them as separate worlds?
Sappy Seals: Currently, I think they are different audiences, but many seal NFT holders do enjoy surfing with seals in their spare time. The Roblox community has been urging us to create a Discord, but we are still researching how to guide them correctly to avoid cultural clashes with our main cryptocurrency audience.
It's a difficult balance, as many players are very disdainful of cryptocurrency/NFTs, and there is a significant age gap among players, so it must be handled with care. The first step is to make these players believe we are not the bad guys, and that work is ongoing.
OpenSea: What does the roadmap for your Roblox games look like? What upcoming features, new experiences, or collaborations are you excited about?
Sappy Seals: Our Roblox team currently consists of only 2 people (stormr + 1 developer), but by leveraging AI for rapid development, we have achieved significant growth.
Currently, we are trying different concepts and ideas to better assess Roblox's algorithm and understand which games are the most profitable, thus worthy of greater investment in this ecosystem. You can expect us to continually update existing games.
We are seriously considering launching "streamlined" versions of our internally developed games (i.e., Omnia and Project Fury) to attract a large audience/fanbase, and then guide those viewers/fans to actual games with more substantive content and long-term value for consumer experience.
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