As a broad response to the entire proposal, the elephant in the room has to be that this is a relatively large ask - 5.67% of the entire treasury and nearly double what we’ve already spent thus far. For a period of 2 years. That’s not to say I’m immediately opposed to the idea, but with that kind of ask should come a lot of scrutiny.
I read through the gaming educational post and providing that is appreciated. As I must admit I’m having a ‘head in the sand’ moment with the gaming space. I was surprised to see such a robust community tbh, and it’s put into perspective the fund ask. I’ll also acknowledge to those who may have missed it since there are a lot of replies — a great post by @karelvuong above. It brought a lot of good insight and suggestions to this conversation. Of which I’ll highlight the budget discussion. I don’t want to quote block half the post so just read it, but I’ll say I think the proposed changes should be taken into consideration. Especially a few items we learned from the STIPP/LTIPP
- Arbitrary division of capital based on over/under 500k grants I’m a little torn. I do like the thought in practice to make sure ‘little guys’ have funding, but it creates a situation where one group might be fully funded before the other. And it seems silly to stop funding one group even though funds are available (and arguably that is an indicator they need more funding!) I also think Questbook fills the ‘small developer’ niche already.
- All that said about over/under 500k, I think the better solution is a cap on each proposal. This was a huge problem IMO with the STIPP round 1 - a few large projects sucked up a big percentage of the total grant amount.
- Spreading out spend I think is important too. Not only do I think we need to limit spend amounts so there is an even distribution over the window, I also would feel more comfortable if this was a greater then 2 year project.
- As a general concept, I really like the idea of finding ways to get profits back into the gaming ecosystem so it is self-sustaining. The spend is a lot easier to swallow if it’s an expected one time, and not something that is being asked for again come 2026.
Other thoughts (@Djinn):
- Is there a more detailed breakdown of why there is 2.250M ARB ask for legal costs?
- Can we also get more details on the “Fund Manager / Venture Lead” role, as they are getting possibly 2m ARB tokens a year.
- (Note: I’m not just dismissing this cost outright, but it seems like a big ask at face value so wanted to be more understanding of what this is and what I may be missing)
- Apologies if I just missed it, but all the informational material gives a good sense of scope and scale of gaming in the space… but are there metrics on actual revenues of this space? i.e., what makes gaming specifically worth chasing after a piece of this pie with 5% of DAO Treasury funds?
- And aligned with that, I saw where other projects have started their gaming ecosystem funding in 2022 - what have you seen with those projects as presumably they are well into their funding at this point? Just high level thoughts.
As for a vote, still deciding at the moment. It’s been made clear the gaming is a huge space and Arbitrum is falling behind, I’m also worried though we too far behind the curve at this point (it looks like a lot of other chains pushed hard in 2022 and are really well aligned for this resurgence of the market). So while the spend is large I’m seeing the reason why, given we are behind and probably need to spend a little more to catch up.