Can you explain how you see the potential for growth and traction being significant under the GCP?
From my perspective and experience, I have always found that access to money isn’t a litmus test of success or failure. Most especially in gaming. The GCP is merely a funding vehicle which has no involvement in the viability, let alone the success or failure of a game project. I brought up this comparison before, in that a traditional publisher tends to do a lot more than just provide funding. It’s why indies self-publishing on Steam or EGS tend to have to do all the things - including marketing - that publishers would otherwise do. And yet still, it’s a hit or miss.
My view of the success of the GCP is transient to that of the games funded by it because at the end of the day, even those that don’t have an ROI requirement, won’t succeed by just their mere presence on ARB.
Indeed. But herein lies the rub. ARB doesn’t [yet] have a [cohesive] gaming ecosystem. At least not in the traditional sense. And most of the games and their associated communities, are parked on Treasure; and soon others will do the same on XAI. And so, games being funded through the GCP aren’t going to somehow automagically create a gaming presence other than be featured among a list of slew of games on something on like Arbitrum Arcade.
There are quite a few fun games (e.g. Pirate Nation comes to mind) already within the ARB gaming ecosystem; but most of them aren’t being played. And as I said before, it’s not because they aren’t fun games, nor is it visibility a problem due to the small amount of games on the ecosystem. I believe that the primary issue is one of exposure, not discovery. Marketing and/or promoting a game to a bubble of degens isn’t a plan that yields the expected results. Especially given that that [degen] bubble primarily cares more about making money than about the games themselves. And so, if you have a game that’s not terribly fun and which doesn’t have decent tokenomics, no degen is going to touch it. Similarly, a fun game without decent tokenomics will suffer the same fate - every time. And even the degens who do end up checking out such games, are likely to bail in search of the next thing. This is the reality of Web3 gaming - and which cannot be ignored. And it’s specifically why the games with the larger budgets - not even AA or AAA - reach out beyond the degen bubble due to extensive marketing and promo activities. For example, games like Shrapnel, the aforementioned Off The Grid, and a few others.
My point being, the GCP can provide as much funding to a team as is required, but there are several factors that go into how that game performs, and whether or not it is a “win” for the ARB community proper.
What Treasure seems to have achieved on ARB, and which I believe XAI is also on track to do, is create an AIO (All-In-One) on-boarding solution. This is similar to the Steam and EGS model whereby you get all the tools that you need to deploy/publish on the platform; but when it comes to marketing and promo, you’re [mostly] on your own. All that aside from the discovery problem because such an easy on-board system tends to also create a glut of games.
As I mentioned in the education thread, these are some of the things that the Catalyst Team needs to make a priority in funding grants or venture deals. A team needs to not only show how much of the funds are going toward dev, but also their marketing plans. And since some of these things have KPIs and similar activities which cannot be tracked - at least not without periodic reporting to the GCP team - there has to be a way to show that when you said 10% of funding when to marketing, that 10% of funding did in fact go to marketing. There are entire teams (Upptic, Windwalk etc) that do dedicated Web3 marketing activities as well as community building.
Anyone who believes that just throwing $400MM at this challenge is going to somehow yield expected results, really doesn’t understand how any of this works. I know that I already sound like a broken record in this regard, but it’s something that I am hoping sinks in as things move forward.
Indeed. And that’s the part of the challenge of expanding the [degen] bubble from the outside. But that’s what everyone else is currently doing anyway; and honestly, ARB doesn’t have an edge that I can see thus far. We’re not talking about a Steam vs EGS vs Green Man Gaming vs Everyone Else. We’re talking about ARB competing with other “game-centric” chains which already have a major lead, even in the face of Treasure and the growth of XAI. And the end result is going to be that without [gamer] eyeballs being on the GCP funded games, it’s an insurmountable challenge.
Today, I saw David Taylor’s analysis of the revenue paid out to Fortnite creators. It’s all kinds of crazy. A total of $320MM (!) paid out - in the past 12 (!) months. Most of those gamers are neither making nor playing Web3 games. And you’re not going to attract them without a compelling game and a reason to even take a look, let alone play it.
In my view, besides a $400MM play, ARB needs something else that gives it the edge that other game centric chains don’t have; and which, much like the noise of the GCP funding, makes gamers and builders take notice.
I couldn’t agree more. But the challenge is going to be in not only identifying and reaching out to those builders like me who see the vision, but also to convince them that coming to ARB is a win-win. I will say this again, just throwing money at the challenge in a bid to see what sticks, will not yield the expected results.
Related to this, I was recently pondering something that @karelvuong pointed out in his missive in his Minimum Viable Catalyst suggestion due to the time it’s going to take for GCP to get up an running. While I had already pointed out that the GCP wasn’t going to be a thing for several months, and that even games currently in production aren’t likely to deploy inside of 12 months, finding ways to reach those devs in the interim, is probably a good idea. But here’s the thing:
The ARB grant appears to only go up to $150K; and that’s if you apply directly and within a specific funding cycle.
That hasn’t - thus far - yielded the expected results because only one game, Into The Dungeons, went that route for 180K ARB. And it failed to pass.
One. Single. Game.
When you consider that the budgets of large teams tends to eclipse that of the average indie, offers of $150K to “large teams” isn’t the sort of thing that those teams even consider; regardless of the fact that grants aren’t designed to fund games to any meaningful degree. So, what would such a team do with $150K that’s worth going through the trouble of deploying on ARB? e.g. If I were to migrate my in-progress Web3 game to ARB from the chain we’re currently on, it would cost me in excess of $200K to do it. And so, of what use is even a $200K grant to me if that’s just going to go towards my migration/deployment costs? What else is there in the ARB ecosystem that warrants the migration?
That is a personal example of why I keep saying that this is a lot more than just money. And these are some of the questions and metrics that any builder who knows what he’s doing, and who isn’t just looking for money without any guarantee of performance, is going to be asking themselves.
That said, any builder that decides to go through the MVC via the voting process, is not only more likely to fail - even based on the merits of the game - but once that happens, they’re not coming back.
And so, to me, despite the best intentions there, I believe that to try and “jump start” GCP via such an MVC, aside from adding another layer of work and a risky barrier of entry, will also - in one fell swoop - yield results which GCP naysayers will be quick to highlight at some point because the process would be seen as being rushed (something that I have advocated against).
And speaking of GDC, the announcement of King of Destiny, a preexisting game, and XAI’s announcements (e.g. Crypto Unicorns), were the only notable ARB gaming news. And speaking of migration costs, the CU teams also pointed out how major it is for them to migrate from Polygon to XAI.
It’s clear from the recent proposal vote that the voting population realizes the need to on-board gaming to ARB - in a big, albeit expensive, way. However, it’s up to the foundation itself to start making moves now, ahead of the GCP, or we’re all just going to be having this very same discussion +6 months from now. I remain confident that the GCP is a blue ocean opportunity, and so, I will try to help in whatever way that I can.