Great to see a gaming proposal on Arbitrum! I’ve been following this proposal for a little while now and it seems that it has overwhelmingly been created by publishers and there is not yet enough input from existing games in the ecosystem. Three things I immediately notice from this proposal:
- The grant for games in Alpha/Closed Beta is much lower than the grant for games in early development or post-launch. I think this is a mistake. A game’s beta is often when it needs to do the most refinement to find product market fit, and ensure that the game loop is enjoyable to play and there are no issues with the game logic. Many games are in their Alpha/Beta stage for multiple years as they refine to a product that is capable of being scaled to the masses.
The following games all had an Alpha/Beta stage longer than a year:
a. Minecraft
b. FortNite
c. PubG Battlegrounds
d. Rust
e. DayZ
f. many, many more
I suggest this grant amount be increased to 1-1.5M. It should also be considered if the Phase 1 should be decreased, as it often takes games much less time to get an alpha phase together than it does to polish the game for full release. Again, see the examples above. The complete game loop for each game is usually completed in the first ~6 months. The Alpha/Beta phase take the longest to get right.
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The proposal seems to have a large focus on the importance of Game Ecosystems and Publishers, but it does not make any note as to how much should be given to Ecosystems/Publishers vs. Games themselves. I think this should be made clear in the proposal so Arbitrum users know what they are agreeing to in advance. Also, there seems to be no mention of how much Publishers would be given per game under their ecosystem, and how much of this grant would be expected to be passed on to the game, or any timeframe thereof.
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I think the Arbitrum DAO needs to be very careful about giving a very open grant to Game Ecosystems/Publishers, without ensuring a few follow-ups.
As the proposal currently stands, it seems that these grants could be very extractive to the DAO in favor of publishers/ecosystems. This is because the current proposal makes no mention of how much of the grants given to publishers/ecosystems will be required to given to games within their ecosystem or how much of it will be used to grow games on Arbitrum. In addition, there seems to be no lock-in period, meaning these ecosystems/publishers could easily take the growth from this grant and leave Arbitrum to become a competitor to Arbitrum’s existing gaming ecosystem.
We should be very careful to ensure we are incentivizing publishers/ecosystems only to build and grow exceptional games within the Arbitrum ecosystem. In addition, we should be very prudent about making sure the money given to these publishers/ecosystems makes its way to the games in their ecosystem in a timely and efficient manner, such that the grant is actually used to grow the games within Arbitrum rather than just grow the pocketbooks of publishers.
I suggest the following:
a. Any Ecosystem/Publisher and all future games under their ecosystem that receives a grant be required to stay within the Arbitrum ecosystem for 1-2 years, depending on grant size
b. Publishers/Ecosystems receiving a grant must hit specific milestones in terms of passing on the grants they are given to games within their ecosystems. The milestones should have both time and size requirements, based on the original grant size.
c. There should be multiple Phases for Ecosystems/Publishers (and likely Infrastructure), as there are for games. This way Arbitrum can incentivize new Publishers to join the ecosystem and scope the requirements/grants based on the size and Phase of the publisher/ecosystem.
If we can make sure that these things happen, we can guarantee that Arbitrum will become the leading gaming ecosystem for web3. Otherwise, we are mixing incentives and likely to cause future problems between publishers/ecosystems and Arbitrum itself.