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posted 4 years ago
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On a high level, what problem is Rupie trying to solve?
As a kid and into my teenage years, I was affiliated with several video game modding communities,
I was very passionate about creating digital works and spent a lot of time scripting, decompiling and
3d modeling all the things. I got sucked in the web world of tech, but wanted so badly to be a video game
developer "someday". However, as an avid player and community member, the scene is really in a difficult place.
Large AAA games are being boycotted and the community has a hard time swallowing the cut-throat means that game developers
use to pay their bills. Early access and funding via kickstarter and the like, are two are the primary ways game developers raise money for their projects and the track record for success is very low. For me personally, this is my contribution back into the game scene in inspiring a whole new generation of developers and players in fixing some of the more glaring difficulties in the industry today.
My biggest motivators are helping makers succeed, and expanding exciting new things to a broader audience. I think what most excites me about Rupie is it hits both of those. Having been an artist and programmer in game development at University of Maryland, Google, Lolapps, and my own small projects, I can appreciate how tough game development is, so helping game developers succeed is something I'd gladly jump out of bed for every day. On top of that, I can't wait to see all the apps that'll get built once developers can build on top of Milestone Escrow via API.
Great question Michael!
There have been many attempts at improving this process, but they've been half-measures, manual, and error prone.
In terms "why just now", there are several reasons why something exactly like Rupie doesn't quite exist. At the moment, the majority of the procedure for funding, building and managing games comes from the game publishers actively
spending large sums of dollars educating teams, project managing by setting milestones manually, tracking funds etc.
All of this with a reported success rate of less than 25% per project.
There have been many attempts at automating this process more holistically. Steam Greenlight as an
example, the community could vote and a game could get "Greenlit" and receive the resources it needed to develop.
Greenlight has since been deprecated, and the truth is that teams need a lot more hand holding.
Simply funding a game is recipe for disaster, and this is shown in the large number of failure-to-deliver situations that exist in crowdfunded games.
With Rupie, we've compiled a number of these edge cases to create a transparent means of building games collaboratively using the flexibility of the blockchain. Working with developers, publishers and players, the convention
we're procuring leverages a plethora of existing software building techniques to address the disparate issues that have been individually attempted to resolve by other platforms.
In response, tackling game crowdsourcing is a huge priority. The future of Rupie includes a sophisticated bounty system, rentable game assets in a rich marketplace, and potentially distribution. Imagine being a single game developer and being able to easily leverage the community for custom assets, bug fixes, and low overhead rentable assets. We believe all of this align with our north star: helping creators achieve the realization of their vision, while leveraging the community in a constructive way. Additionally, we've gotten a lot of interest in extracting our milestone funding mechanism and using it to solve many of the same funding challenges that
exist in other large industries.
- A friend bought into BTC at $20, sold at $200, and took our friend group to Vegas to celebrate (now surely the most expensive Vegas trip in history)
- I mined Doge and LTC c.2013 because my last startup's lease came with free electricity.
- I remember long chats with @dmgrossblatt about the nature of money
- Being in the alpha of CryptoKitties made me realize just how far crypto had come, and how far it had to go
- It's still SO difficult to get a node up and running. I open sourced a Node/Infura Hello World so anyone can explore ETH blockchain development in 5 minutes.
- From there, I wanted to learn more about applications and ICOs. I just fell in love with the Rupie vision and team. In the immediate term, we have a shot at making a step-function increase in how many game developers successfully ship their dream game. That makes such a huge difference in those people's lives. As we know from being makers ourselves, the difference between "working on something" and "shipping to real users" can change the course of your career. Same applies to all projects where the maker needs money up front.
- Then in terms of Big Vision, moving escrow away from the domain of banks has huge implications
As project milestones are hit and community members are actually rewarded for their contributions, it is our hope that news of the improved developer/gamer relationship will continue to spread organically, encouraging more makers and players to join and further contribute to the Rupie Network.
From a *technical* perspective for game developers, everything can work exactly the same. It's the funding campaign, project management, and community tools that will change. And because backers know their tokens are escrowed until milestones are achieved, we think that increases trust in a huge way. Increased trust means the barrier to *launch* a project can be lowered, and backers will get more money, more quickly, from more people.
Our goal is to support every platform including PC, console, and mobile games. Our final list for initial product release will be published in the near future, so stay tuned!