RealGo Co-Founder Parker Zhai on Fixing Web3 Gaming With AR

Introduction

Parker Zhai, Co-Founder of RealGo, appeared in an interview at BlockchainReporter. He discussed how RealGo platform is redefining Web3 gaming. Interview session unfolded why early play-to-earn models failed and how RealGo’s “meaning-first” philosophy is changing player retention. In addition to that, Parker Zhai also elaborated that why meme culture and AR-driven real-world interactions are considered as the future of community building in Web3 gaming.

Interview Session

Why did former Web3 games remain ineffective in achieving long-term consumer retention despite solid token incentives?

The short answer is that most of them built economies first and games second. Tokens gave people a reason to show up, but they never gave anyone a reason to stay. The moment earnings dropped below what players considered worth their time, they left.

We saw this play out clearly with the play-to-earn wave. At its peak, projects like Axie Infinity had millions of daily users. But research showed that players were staying largely driven by incentives. Players were behaving more like workers clocking in for a shift than gamers invested in a fantasy world. So, when token values declined, engagement dropped significantly.

The deeper problem was that these projects treated financial incentives as a substitute for gameplay, identity, and community. In traditional gaming, players return because of status, competition, social bonds, and emotional investment.

Early Web3 games often over-weighted token incentives as a primary engagement driver. In many cases, engagement proved difficult to sustain once incentives normalized, and there was nothing underneath to hold players once attention shifted.

What is RealGo’s role in revolutionizing the Web3 gaming framework with the shift from the early “earn-first” approach to the exclusive “meaning-first” experience?

We started from the opposite end, compared to most Web3 projects. Instead of designing a token and building a game around it, we built a game first and let blockchain work quietly in the background.

The game brings meme characters into your actual environment through AR. Players open the app, walk around their neighborhood, and catch meme characters they can upgrade and battle. You can be five minutes in before you even realize there’s a blockchain layer involved.

The blockchain handles ownership and rewards in the background. Players never have to think about it unless they want to.

That design philosophy shaped everything. We prioritized the experience over the economy and made sure the game worked as a game before layering in any Web3 elements. So far, that approach has brought us over 220,000 registered users and 55,000 weekly active players from 49,000 verified real devices. Many of those users came in with zero crypto background. They stayed because the gameplay held up on its own terms, and the on-chain elements added value with no additional friction to the user.

How does purpose-led engagement outcompete token-centered rewards when it comes to retaining players?

Financial incentives tend to attract users quickly but hold them loosely.

Purpose-driven engagement works differently. It takes longer to build, but players who connect with the experience tend to stay through market cycles, content gaps, and shifts in external sentiment.

In some cases, across Web3 gaming, a portion of projects that relied heavily on token-driven retention saw engagement decline once incentives stabilized. Players naturally shifted attention when the core experience wasn’t strong enough on its own.

The projects that retained stronger communities tended to have built something players actually cared about – status, competition, identity, or social connection.

At RealGo, the benchmark is simple: the experience has to stand on its own. The AR gameplay, meme characters, competition, and exploration form the core loop. Tokens sit on top as a layer of ownership and reward, not the reason to play.

What is the top misconception regarding player engagement within Web3 gaming networks?

That you can buy engagement with rewards.

You can buy attention with incentives, but engagement is fundamentally behavioral. It comes from the experience itself – how the game makes you feel, who you play with, and what progression means over time.

Ownership is important in Web3, but ownership only creates engagement when what you own carries meaning. A character you’ve upgraded over time and competed with in a leaderboard has weight. A token acquired purely for price speculation does not.

What role do digital ownership and identity play in contributing to emotional connections in cutting-edge Web3 games?

Identity is one of the most underestimated layers in Web3 gaming. Many projects focus on ownership as an asset class, while underestimating its role as a social signal.

In multiplayer environments, players constantly signal achievement, style, and progression. These signals form reputation, and reputation is what turns users into communities.

RealGo extends this through AR and location-based mechanics. When you compete at a specific real-world location and appear on a local leaderboard, your identity becomes anchored to place as well as progression.

This creates a stronger social loop – players recognize each other, develop rivalries, and form alliances around shared spaces.

The ownership layer makes this persistent. Your characters, achievements, and competitive history remain with you on-chain, independent of platform shifts or ecosystem changes.

How does meme culture improve player engagement and community building in RealGo?

Memes are one of the most universal cultural languages on the internet. They move across geographies, demographics, and communities faster than almost any other form of content, which makes them a natural foundation for shared identity.

In RealGo, we use memes as cultural infrastructure that immediately creates familiarity between players. People don’t need onboarding to understand a meme character – they already bring meaning with them. That shared context becomes the starting point for interaction.

As players engage with the game, that familiarity naturally turns into participation. They talk about characters, compete over favorites, and form opinions about upgrades and strategy. The conversation emerges organically because the IP is already part of how they communicate online.

What’s important is that memes aren’t static in this model. They’ve evolved over time – from simple content to financialized assets in the last cycle – and now into something more interactive. In RealGo, memes become playable characters inside an AR-driven environment where they can be collected, upgraded, and used in competition.

We see this as the next phase of Meme 3.0 infrastructure, where culture isn’t just consumed or traded, but actively experienced. RealGo didn’t have to manufacture a community around that idea. The culture already existed; we simply built a system where it becomes playable in real-world contexts.

If tokens cannot create engagement, how should they ideally contribute to Web3 games such as RealGo?

Honestly, tokens should be boring. The best comparison is currency in any functioning economy. Nobody goes to a store because the currency is interesting. They go because they want something, and the currency is just a means for a transaction to happen. Web3 games should work the same way.

Players show up because the game is worth playing. The token lets them own what they’ve built and trade with other players if they want to. The moment you flip that order and use the token as the reason to attract people, you’ve built something that only survives as long as the price goes up.

At RealGo, many of our most active users went weeks before they engaged with any on-chain element at all. They were too busy actually playing. To me, that is the biggest indicator that the economy should just be there to serve the players, not the other way around.

What risks does over-financialization of gameplay bring in Web3, and what are the tips for developers to avoid them?

Over-financialization turns your game into a job board. And job boards only work when the pay is competitive. 

The downstream effects go beyond just losing players. When the dominant conversation around your game is about earnings, you never build the organic culture that sustains long-term projects. 

Nobody is making fan content, forming rivalries, or sharing memorable gameplay moments. Every discussion is about APY and floor prices, and that’s a toxic foundation for anything that’s supposed to last years.

Developers who want to avoid this need to be honest with themselves early. Build the game, test it without any financial incentive, and see if people come back. If they do, you have something worth building an economy around. If they don’t, no token model in the world will save you. The game has to earn its audience before the economy can reward them.

Q9. How does a “meaning-first” approach work in Web3 gaming, especially for those playing RealGo?

Meaning-first is less of a strategy and more of a filter for every decision we make. 

When we’re designing a new feature, the first question is always whether it would matter to a player who has never heard of blockchain. If the answer is no, we rethink it. That test has killed a lot of ideas that would have been easy to build but would have attracted the wrong kind of attention.

It also changes how we measure success internally. Most Web3 projects obsess over TVL, token price, and wallet count. 

We pay attention to how long people play per session, how often they come back without being prompted, and whether they’re bringing friends. 

When a significant portion of your player base has never used a crypto product before, and they’re still active weeks later, you know the meaning-first filter is working. You’ve built something that stands on its own, and that’s the only foundation worth scaling on.

What is the impact of AR-driven real-world interactions on player engagement and retention?

There’s something about physical movement that changes how a player connects with a game. When you actually walk somewhere to play, the experience sticks with you in a way that tapping a screen on your couch never will. 

We see that reflected clearly in our retention and session length data.

We have players who detour through specific parks and streets because they’ve learned what shows up there. That level of integration into someone’s daily routine is what every app developer dreams about, and AR produces it organically.

The market seems to agree with the direction. AR gaming grew from roughly $14 billion in 2024 to over $18 billion last year, with projections pushing toward $24 billion in 2026. 

We think that growth has a lot of runway left, particularly when you combine location-based mechanics with cultural IP and Web3 ownership.

Concluding Remarks

The futuristic vision of Parker Zhai for RealGo goes far beyond building another Web3 game. It is more about creating a meaningful experience that stands on its own before any token ever enters the picture. With over 220,000 registered users, 55,000 weekly active players, and a rapidly growing AR gaming market projected to hit $24 billion in 2026, RealGo appears to be proving that meaning-first design is not just a philosophy, rather it is a strategy that works. As Parker puts it, the game has to earn its audience before the economy can reward them.