Giving money to startups isn’t the only option, though. As I understand the proposal, any team can decide to apply for a grant regardless of what stage their project is in. Then it’s up to the Catalyst Team to accept it or not.
And in the above, whether it’s indie, AA or AAA doesn’t matter because whatever team(s) decide to apply for a grant, they can present their game pitch. Also, your exact query is why I had constructed my suggestions the way I did over here in the education thread, and which took into account games of different stages.
As to "use existing and successful games to implement them into web3" that’s easier said than done. If a game is already pre-existing and successful, why would it want to migrate over to ARB from wherever they are currently deployed?
I will give you an example.
Remember that MMORPG game which I had bought, and foolishly tried to run through my ApeCoin DAO in order to get those guys on board with gaming, and which I referenced over here in the education thread?
That’s a $26MM (base game, improvements, two expansion packs etc) MMO game since it was first developed some years back (btw Everquest just turned 25 yrs old). A 100% completed Web2 game with almost 400K unique accounts, large community, on Steam etc. when it was running.
Implementing Web3 features (blockchain, wallet, tokenomics etc) and 100% visual reskin, has been in dev since 2022 when I created a startup for that Web3 project. That entire exercise - start to finish - is over $3MM+ for which the visual improvements alone are about 75% of the costs.
That game’s closest competitors (Domi, Avalon, MIR4, Mirandus, WorldShards, and possible Nine Chronicles) aren’t even close in terms of gameplay, feature set etc. And some of these are still many years away from release. You know the main thing about those RPG games? They’re all on different chains. NONE of them are on ARB.
I haven’t taken any funding from chains because, metrics aside, money won’t get you an “organic Web3 community”. In the case of my MMORPG game which I am talking about, most especially as the game is likely to lose a large portion of its Web2 install base due to gaming’s general resistance to Web3 games, there has to be a good reason to migrate over to ARB. And the cautionary tale is that when you’ve front-loaded all the risk, you get to call the shots. That’s different from a team with a smaller game looking for funds to complete the game; or a team looking for funds to start a game.
Now for my point.
A lot of people don’t really understand how much games cost to make, how long they take - and the inherent risks of that investment. I have dedicated over 40 yrs of my life to this industry and there is absolutely nothing about gaming or game dev that I am not familiar with. To me, Web3 gaming will continue to decline because [Web3] gamers are treating gaming the say way that they treat the next cash-grab airdrop; in that they want it now, they want to fill bags - and nobody really cares about the game.
Most people in this thread don’t even realize that by the time GCP is even up and running, and even finds the first good game to fund, won’t happen until YE24. And depending on the viability of the game, more likely nothing will deploy on ARB before H2/25.
And so, setting GCP aside for a moment, the reason nobody much cares about gaming on ARB isn’t because of the community (most of them are parked on Treasure - and for good reason), it’s because there hasn’t been a reason to come here for that. A dev like me - and others like me - have zero interest in micro-grants (sub $50K) when we’re talking about millions and larger games by experienced teams.
Right now, I see votes of 45MM ARB in favor of @Djinn GCP. The numbers don’t lie, the interest is there. But that’s just one iota of the battle ahead. Any decent game - such as mine - that’s currently on track to deploy within the next 12 months isn’t going to wait around for the GCP to get formed, get up and running, put up grant apps, wait for submissions, run through them, approve them, fund them etc. That’s a long - long - process akin to a standard game funding/distribution/publishing process. So, those games would already have their deployment track ready and rolling, including maybe taking funding from the chains they are going on etc. and so, they can’t exactly migrate even if they wanted to.
For a game - of any kind - of good quality and gameplay mechanics (including good tokenomics) to deploy on ARB - assuming they don’t go on Treasure which already has a large built-in gaming community - by YE24, needs to already be in the process and ready to deploy right now.
As I said before, I don’t have any immediate plans to deploy either of my two Web3 games on ARB because, [eager + excited] community aside, migration has associated planning, costs, refactoring etc. That’s going to be the same boat that any game that’s ready to deploy within 12-18 months is going to be in. Guaranteed. And those teams absolutely do not have the time to be messing around with DAO grants and the like because they already know the associated risks as well as the ramifications of running through a DAO gauntlet, wasting all that time, effort, and energy only to probably see it ultimately fail because at the end of the day, no matter how much the community likes the game, it’s up to the voting wallets to make the financial decision.
I wish things were different, but this is the warning that I was giving over in the education thread that what GCP is building is basically a full-blown op that’s not going to be as fast as most would like; and is likely to fund games the community likes and those it doesn’t like because that decision is down to the Catalyst group because it’s faster, more efficient - and is basically how it’s done in the industry whereby it’s just a handful of people at an investor/publisher/distributor group who get to green light games.
ps. Any ARB whale who understands all of this and is interested in talking to me (or my friends) about our games for deployment on ARB, feel free to msg me on Telegram (thedereksmart).