Dear Streamheroes Community,

we have a lot of news for you. The community often asked us to report more transparently about Streamheroes and also show the way into the future. That's what we would like to do today:

1. An important message from the Streamheroes team
2. Streamheroes as a company
3. Reached goals
4. Financing
5. Physical cards
6. October Release 1 (12th of October)
7. NEW: The Streamheroes Marketplace
8. NEW: Gems
9. NEW: Streamheroes card collections
10. Update: Faster card crafts & changed drop chances
11. October Release 2 (late October)
12. NEW: The Streamheroes Supporter Subscription
13. Outlook

An important message from the Streamheroes team

Streamheroes as a company

In the summer of 2019, just over 3 years ago, the founding team at StreamTV Media came up with the idea of creating a collectible/trading card game for Twitch communities. As fans of trading cards and Twitch streams, it seemed like a great way to connect communities closer to streamers, create an excellent collecting experience with competitive elements, and give streamers another way to fund their streams through physical card sales. For us, the following points were important:

• Real, valuable collectible cards, digital and physical
• A fair collectible system, without pay-to-win elements
• No use of blockchain- or NFT technology for fast monetization
• A marketplace, to be able to trade collected cards
• To give streamers the opportunity to additionally finance their passion of streaming through a valuable product. Streamheroes is a unique combination of loyalty tool, monetization, merch and trading card game for streamers.
• To give viewers the opportunity to define themselves as an important part of the community through their card collection set. In other words, to create a value that shows that a viewer spends a lot of time in a stream in order to give him/her the value that he/she deserves.
• to create official game cards for popular games

Reached goals

To achieve these goals, we founded the Streamheroes GmbH in Germany and assembled a great team from the areas of development, partnerships, design / illustration, UI, community management, support, project management, logistics, finance, gaming / esports, and more. In the local office, we have built a proper print shop to be able to print and ship physical trading cards ourselves, and "on-demand", in the highest possible quality worldwide. With this team, we have achieved the following milestones to date:

• A full-featured digital and physical trading card system for Twitch communities
• Hundreds of active Twitch communities, ranging from small to large, collectively collecting up to 100,000 digital cards every day.
• More than 50.000.000 collected digital Streamheroes trading cards
• More than 100,000 unique physical trading cards shipped
• Streamheroes was part of the biggest German-speaking Twitch events around Knossi, Sido, Manni Marc and UnsympathischTV with more than 300.000 concurrent viewers and accompanied many bigger events of our partners like TrilluXe and Dhalucard

In September 2022, more than 50.000 streaming fans collected over 2.000.000 digital trading cards and we were once again able to settle great real events with physical trading cards. In addition, the feedback from the community is mostly very positive and motivating, at the same time we are happy about constructive, or critical feedback, because this allows us to further improve and grow the product.

We see how much some of you are behind the product every day through all kinds of channels, and we're very grateful for that.

https://twitter.com/BeastlyWeasel/status/1576239368909385729

Financing

In addition to all the positive developments at Streamheroes, an external source was necessary to finance the project from the very beginning. I.e. the costs of the project were covered either by our other StreamTV Media projects or by investments from business angels. This is quite normal at the beginning of a new project, but sooner or later a project/company has to "grow up" and also support itself financially. Unfortunately, we have not yet achieved this with Streamheroes. I.e. Streamheroes has been mostly externally financed for 3 years now. The physical ticket sales generate revenue, but after deducting taxes, production costs and the share to the streamers, there is not enough left to finance the whole project. It would take significantly more communities and significantly more ticket sales to be able to finance Streamheroes through this model in the future.

After this bad news, which unfortunately also led to the fact that we had to reduce our team significantly this year, there is also very important and good news: Our team, the business angels, many streamers and also you as a community, continue to believe in Streamheroes. It goes on. But: all employees have always received a fair salary and deserve a secure job also in the future. For this very reason, we as a company must also find a way to let Streamheroes grow profitably. However, it is not about profit or profit, but profitability. This means that the Streamheroes project must be able to cover its own costs and invest any profits in its own growth. For this reason, we must and will very soon try to generate revenue for streamers, and for the project, through additional avenues. This includes, among other things, the introduction of a digital currency and advertisements.

We know that ads or other monetization models are always a critical part of projects, and would like to ask you to give us some time to find the right balancing of these new areas. Our goal from the beginning was, and still is, that Streamheroes should provide a great user experience for streamers and their communities, which we don't want to jeopardize by doing so. This means that features that will be implemented in the coming weeks can be improved or changed afterwards, and we will try to incorporate your voices as much as possible. Don't take new features as set in stone. But the fact remains that Streamheroes needs monetization sources to be able to continue to operate and develop in the long term.

Physical Cards

Since the operation and shipping of physical cards are also cost-intensive and not profitable at this volume, we have temporarily discontinued the possibility to order cards at the end of September. This does not mean that the cards will never be available again. But it also means that we are currently evaluating whether and how we can ensure more cost-efficient production in the future so that we can continue to offer physical cards.

At this point, I would like to personally thank the tens of thousands of community members who have supported Streamers and Streamheroes over the past years by collecting and buying an album or cards. Because of your support Streamheroes could develop into a great product and great projects like the events of Dhalucard, TrilluXe and Knossi could be made possible or financially supported. Currently, we plan that the purchase of the cards will be possible again later this year. Until then there will be some new features at Streamheroes, which we have been working on for a long time and which we would like to present to you with pleasure:

October Release 1 - 12th of October

NEW: The Streamheroes Marketplace

The marketplace was already one of the most important features when we first thought about Streamheroes. Collectible cards should be traded by the collectors to give away duplicate cards and to get missing cards from other collectors. We are very proud to present you the new Streamheroes marketplace in its first form live in the next few days:

In order to be able to trade cards in the marketplace at all, a new digital currency is needed, which we will introduce alongside coins: Gems.

Marketplace mechanics:

• To be able to advertise a card in the marketplace a fee of 5 Gems per card has to be paid. The card will then be available in the marketplace for a maximum of 30 days. This is to prevent the flooding of the marketplace with low value cards. However, every active Streamheroes account will get the opportunity to put 20 cards on the marketplace for free with the release of the marketplace.
• A card has a stated minimum price of 20 Gems.
• If a card is purchased by a buyer, the seller will receive 80% of the Gems. 20% of the Gems will be retained by Streamheroes as a brokerage fee.
• In the beginning, there will only be the option to buy now in the marketplace. An auction option is being considered, but will not be possible at the beginning.
  

NEW: Gems

Gems can be purchased for real money, but there will also be various ways to get gems for free.

Gems will initially be available for purchase in the following packages:

Gems will be able to be used to buy cards in the marketplace, or to support (donate) streamers.

NEW: Streamheroes card collections

The new Streamheroes card collections allow you to get a better overview of your collected cards. A usual Streamheroes card can reach a quality from 1% to 100%. A card collection divides these 100 quality levels into 20 subsections (1-5% = 1/20, 6-10% = 2/20 ... 96%-100% = 20/20).  Completing a card collection gives you rewards (such as Gems).

Update: Fast card crafts & better drop chances

In addition to the major new features, there will be two other adjustments that should improve the user experience of Streamheroes:

• Basic cards will only cost 300 energy in the future instead of the current 600. This means that twice as many cards can be collected at the same time as before.
• The drop chances of Unique and Legendary cards have been increased to improve the possibility of completing card collections in these areas.
  

Oktober Release 2

NEW: The Streamheroes Supporter Subscription

The second release in October will be primarily dedicated to the monetization of Streamheroes. As mentioned above in our article, it is necessary to generate revenue with Streamheroes to ensure the continuity of the project. Therefore, we will focus on classic ways to monetize online projects. This includes the Streamheroes Supporter Subscription (a classic freemium model) and advertisements. It is important to us that Streamheroes does not contain any "pay-to-win" elements. Therefore, there are no opportunities to gain a big advantage over others through Gems.

Streamheroes uses a so-called freemium model (free for all to use without restriction. To pay is only on a voluntary basis, or only for special elements that do not offer an "unfair advantage" over free users. In the past, the only affordable product was the physical card). We want to expand this in the future. Furthermore, users who use Streamheroes for free should have the same mechanics and opportunities in Streamheroes as users who pay real money for Gems. Therefore, map purchases and trading in the store will not affect leaderboards.

Those who decide to sign up for a Streamheroes Supporter Subscription to monetarily support the continuation of the project will receive the following benefits:

• 300 Gems per month
• Possibility to open multiple maps at the same time (currently free, later only as part of the subscription)
• Streamheroes will remain ad-free for users with the Supporter Subscription as in the past. Users without subscription will see different ads in different areas.
• Receiving a "Supporter Badge". The longer a user is a supporter, the higher the quality of the badge.

Streamheroes Supporter Subscription will offer the following payment options:

In order to ensure the future financing of Streamheroes, it will also require consent to advertisements in order to use Streamheroes.

Outlook

We are very proud of how far Streamheroes has come in the last few years with all the streamers and communities. Nevertheless, we see what we have achieved so far as just the beginning. We are already working on the next plans and concepts for the next releases and continue to work on the vision of Streamheroes to provide streamers and viewers with a great collection and streaming tool. Some ideas that are on our list:

• A community-system including battles, guilds and teams
• Other ways to get involved in the community, or to duel
• Competitive elements
• More ways to farm / collect elements / skills / items
• Easier ways to extend the collecting fun to all streamer communities on Twitch, not just those who have already decitively created cards.
• A playable, digital (& physical?) Streamheroes card game.
• Interactive elements

Dear community, and dear streamers, thank you for your dedication, perseverance, your crafting, collecting, your card purchases, social shares, the constructive feedback! We see it and hear it and appreciate it very much.

We are looking forward to our joint journey!

Your Streamheroes team:

Alex (Socials), Alexei (Dev), Andy (Design), Bianca (Illustration), Christoph (Finance), Florian (Dev), Jasmin (Support), Laurin (UI/UX), Lukas (CTO & Product), Luke (Dev), Marco (Support), Nina (HR), Olli (Dev), Sebastian (Partnerships), Stephanie (Accounting); written by Tom (CEO)