Judging by the responses both private and the views to the now-hidden original post, it appears that some people did find value in the post - despite it’s length and copious amounts of snark.
Below is a revised version sans the snark and the tongue-in-cheek humor. I still have the original which I will be converting to a Medium article. So, if anyone is interested in it, do feel free to send me a DM or ping me on Telegram.
=======
I don’t even know where to begin, but since no-one is likely to say the quiet part out loud because God forbid someone wants something from someone who is in the [Web3] mix, here goes…
First, I have been involved in the gaming industry for over four decades now, made - and survived - many partnerships, trends, downturns etc. All while being an indie who just loves building games and tech. So, needless to say, I know a thing or two about, you know, gaming and game dev.
My foray into Web3 started back in 2021 when I deduced that Web3 represented a blue ocean opportunity for gaming. I have written tomes (1, 2, 3) about what I see - and believe - will be the failure of Web3 gaming - and why. While very few paid attention (Even though I’m a well-known legacy white hat dev, I’m not a AAA game dev - so who cares what I think, right?) to the alarm that myself and other legacy game devs were sounding,
I supported - and still support - the idea of the GCP since day one and continue to follow it’s progress mostly because @Djinn is one of the most accessible and forthcoming people in the space. Bar none. I can never imagine a time whereby I would show up in the GCP spaces or pinged him on TG about a material update, without him responding.
When the GCP first appeared - even as my own ApeChain DAO was on the verge of it’s own collapse (which it incidentally came to mere months later) - I made my opinions and suggestions known here. And in those I outlined everything that I personally knew and have experienced in my 40 yr track record as a gamer (first) and a game dev (second) - and why I believe that the GCP is doomed to fail if lessons learned as well as tried and proven methods weren’t adhered to. Key to those are this missive.
Then there was this excerpt from another post.
Note that in that post above, I provided an outline of the legacy steps that us devs, publishers, and distributors take in making a determination on how to go from funding a game to GTM to release.
While they didn’t have to take this level of advice, from what I can tell this past year - and 9 months into the GCP kick-off - none have been adhered to. Instead we have this:
While I realize that’s a more high-level list - and btw I have had discussions with Djinn about specifically this - the fact remains that even at a macro level, industry best-practices are to be followed. To the extent that projects still fail, at the very least, adhering to such practices tends to not only de-risk but also allows outside-the-box thinking which then augments such processes in order to find what fits, what works, and what’s less risk.
The GCP has thus far failed to yield tangible results in this regard - but not for the reasons pointing to any one person or reason but because, by nature of being related to games and game funding, it was doomed to fail from the start. Why? Because, guess what - who else here thinks that it’s a good idea to not make priority hires people who have:
- Designed, developed, managed, marketed or shipped a game
or
- Managed a game dev team or game dev studio
Yes - Greg is moonlighting - and he’s awesome; but you literally need people with the aforementioned experience and expertise in a full-time role because despite what Web3 will have you believe, the role of a [gaming] BD person means that person has a track record of experience and skills which encompass gaming. That person is able to talk to devs at a peer-to-peer level, understand the project, the process, the tools etc. This issue is precisely how Web3 ended up with so many failed gaming ventures - failures which eclipse even the failures of trad gaming as a whole. And all because most Web3 BD people have zero or near zero actual gaming or game dev experience.
Another peeve. The Gaming Catalyst website isn’t reflective of the aspirations - and not even in a funny ha-ha kind of way. Go look at it. An $85M fund with copious amounts of disposable cash, paid for what doesn’t appear to look like a game-centric funding initiative.
My cursory observations:
- No mission statement (no, the two linked docs aren’t that)
- Nothing that even remotely says “Oy! We’re totally attracting the cream of the gaming crop”
- Literally NO information about WTAF the GCP is. What it does have are the usual talking point fluff words that are rife in Web3 because apparently we’re all idiots now who don’t read anything
- No links back to this discussion forum which contains a lot more data/info on GCP than a barebones website
- Not a single - not one - image, link or ref that says “This is about gaming! Go call mom!”.
- No links to pertinent program data such as the transparency report
- No team links, bios, expertise, tasking etc. Which goes back to the same transparency issues that all have been complaining about for months now. An $85M fund operating in the shadows with no “point man” (no - that’s not Djinn) is absolutely why everyone should be asking the questions now being posed. NOTE: This was Jan 13th when someone else asked.
To me, that website doesn’t say “We’re totally serious about gaming!”.
Let me rewind a bit. How did the GCP program lose someone like Andrew Green? NOTE: While I know how/when/why this happened, being old school I have always respected the boundaries of confidentiality. And so, my original comment wasn’t designed to point the finger at the GCP as being responsible for his departure nor to delve into anything that would cause me to divulge private & confidential material. All that I can say to this - in the interest of clarity for those inquiring - is that Karel leaving and then Andrew - who he nominated - later following him to that venture, made sense. Especially since the GCP was obviously not up and running, and its scope and premise likely didn’t fit with what Karel envisioned for his platform. It happens
Read the entire GCP update thread, then accept this challenge: List the names, bios, and GCP tasking for everyone associated with the program. No cheating.
It’s not on the website or in this forum. But it’s in the transparency report which, at a glance, still appears to be incomplete.
From what I’ve observed, most questions asked of the GCP receive a resounding “Yes”. Then mostly nothing happens which is what leads to all the calls for transparency and such.
Thus far, the DAO hasn’t gained anything by way of funding the GCP. There have been far too many issues - all of which go back to my original points: they’re seemingly over their heads because setting up something like this is no small feat.
And when it comes to DAOs, they tend to [consistently] fail because most people would never support the idea that voting on important and financially material things should be down to the size of your bags rather than the merits of the proposal. Even in corporations, the number of shares held tend not to have any material effect on the number of votes which can be used.
The GCP has a rumored “66” deals in the pipeline, yet still there hasn’t been a single - not one - announcement about any deal, team, product, project or even the tooth fairy. And no list. I can almost guarantee that if/when that list is ever made public, that there would be even more questions and arguments because all involved would have their own opinions about what is a good or bad deal. That despite the fact that the success and failure of a project - as we all know - has very little to do with the team or the project, but more to do with the PMF. And timing. And luck. That’s why even the best and well-funded teams with the best products continue to fail. Especially in gaming. Mostly in Web3.
Not to mention that, despite the intent and best efforts, the first transparency report isn’t all that transparent because to me it just reads like pages of words and phrases on a road to: “Thus far we haven’t achieved much anything impactful”.
I challenge anyone to change my mind. I’m the guy who writes design docs, technical specs, engineering frameworks - and manages teams of engineers who, more than anything else, hate documenting anything and will avoid it like the plague if they could. And so, it is easy for me to decipher what constitutes an informative data-driven report. Yes - of course anyone of us can ping Djinn or Chris about anything, and immediately get a response. But why go through all that trouble when most of the inquiries are better served in either an FAQ (e.g. on the website) or in such a report? Plus, it saves time while reducing drama.
When gaming teams can go deploy on other chains - including ARB - without having to wait around for months on end to get an answer let alone funding for their project, guess what happens when word gets around. Serious teams don’t have time to wait around or wade through a convoluted process when they have projects to build and require the funding to do so.
While I still support the idea of the GCP - as I always have - I can no longer support it in it’s current form because, on-going [gaming] trends aside, I have come to believe that the odds of success aren’t currently in its favor.
Giving money to the deserving few shouldn’t be a challenge. But for too long and too often, Web3 has routinely funded the wrong teams. And so, Web3 needs to stop rewarding failure after failure because the end result is that programs like GCP will not only find it challenging to curate worthy projects and teams but will also have an uphill battle in achieving success. Gaming is hard. Very hard. And that’s why gaming routinely requires specialist handling and expertise for any team and/or project to break out, let alone be a success.
At this point, my recommendation is for the GCP to wind down and let the ARB Foundation put those funds into gaming via already established processes and procedures which are doing a lot better and have thus far served the ARB [gaming] community (I’m not in it and I don’t hold any tokens) in more ways that one. Why mess with what already works? Why take the risk and the additional costs to setup a new fund when - as most of us said from the start - it could have been done within the scope of pre-existing ARB programs? Though the foundation doles out game funding in grants and not investments, I don’t think it would have taken a year for them to retro-fit that program with an investment option. To be honest, having followed GCP from the start, never in my wildest dreams did I think that over a year later not only would there not be a single funded project but also not a single word about the curation of said projects. To the extent that most of us just moved on to other chains, similar to what Treasure ended up doing.
Djinn, Karel and co had a dream, and Djinn has done his utmost, put his best foot forward and stuck to what he wanted to build as per his vision. But in a world where even the best laid plans of mice and men tend to fall apart at first contact with reality, the unfortunate result is one of timing and opportunity.
To try and to fail is no disgrace. What matters is whether or not you are brave enough to get up and do it again - differently. I would know. I’ve been there, done that - got the scars and the derision that comes with the territory.
Since this is really up to the voting whales, if the GCP is to continue - I feel that radical changes need to be made. What those are, I don’t know because most of what’s done and pending still need clarity in order for outsiders like us to make an informed determination.
With any such radical changes, Djinn, alongside his stellar cohort, Rick, can then build an operating team of full-time people who have GAMING AND GAME DEV EXPERIENCE.
I also feel that there is no need for a council because despite best intentions imo it’s really just there to give whale bags some degree of comfort while spending money with currently zero ROI. Too many cooks and all that.
Follow some - if not all - of the guidelines that I outlined before.
Put the whole GCP program on chain alongside a robust project in-take web form - complete with a counter showing the number of intake, the status, a brief description etc. But if that’s going to be done, why not just roll it back into the pre-existing ARB grants program?
Anyway, the goal is to build a lean, mean GCP program, with complete transparency - and which operates in an efficient manner.
Seeing as it’s gaming related, though it still stands a 90% chance of failure, all it takes is one or two hits to see a meaningful ROI. Then again, due to gaming and current game funding trends, that’s just saying when the whales voted for an $85M (originally $200M) fund that’s likely to lose 90% of its funding due to how gaming metrics tend to play out, they basically voted to set $76.5M on fire. They could very well have just bought $ARB and burned it. Same end result.
That is all. Please don’t hate me.
ps…
-
In the past three months alone, game studios and projects that raised over $300M in an avg of 14 months, have failed and shutdown. And the recent GDC - regardless of all the nonsense you see online by the usual larping suspects - is a wakeup call that says gaming will continue to decline and that Web3 gaming - for all intent and purposes - is on life support. Anyone who believes - even for a minute - that the general failure of trad gaming means those devs and projects are going to spill over to Web3 - is a fool.
-
The Konvoy Q4/24 Gaming Report states that “Gaming VC Funding is down -47% QoQ”
Their website PDF functionality is broken atm, but Game7 has a great synopsis. -
You should probably read InvestGames’ Games Investment Review Q4 2024 Executive Summary Report and their 2025 Gaming Industry Report