I have the same questions. In fact, I don’t see how this is that much different from this suggestion of aquiring NFTs - for a museum. By general consensus, that one was just plain awful.
Here’s a long-winded synopsis that’s going to run around the race track at least once before getting to the point. I like to be thorough, so please bear with me…
@yatsiu You recently said this in a recent interview about Animoca being still bullish on blockchain games.
"They’re built by people who know how to make games whereas maybe three years ago, a lot of games came out built by excited blockchain guys, but who knew very little about what it takes to make a game,”
There are currently only about 127K $Ape holders. That’s it.
This Ape bubble isn’t getting larger. In fact, according to mapped trends, the hodlers count literally hasn’t grown by more than a decimal point (3 sig places) since the Mar 2022 launch. And, from that initial value of @ $7.26, it’s currently trading at $1.87.
This idea isn’t a dynamic one that’s going to spurt interest, let alone growth. We might as well spend $1.5m on a marketing blitz because then, at the very least, we’d get more eyeballs looking at the APE ecosystem. And yes, someone already had an idea for specifically that - and the reception wasn’t that great. Better yet, we could throw $1.5m worth of advertising into any game and still not yield the desired results - because that’s how marketing works.
Having NFTs in a vault isn’t going to yield any tangible results outside of lining the pockets of the owners with money from the DAO. How does that help us - exactly?
Yuga, with all its might and funding, hasn’t even cracked outside the APE bubble of 127K, despite their best efforts and across two games. And those are dynamic engagements that get written about far and wide, and with much publicity, fanfare and the occassional derision.
I have been doing this for a very - very - long time; probably (intro) a lot longer than anyone in this DAO. As such, in my opinion, dynamic engagement is the only way to do this. Not the static engagement model akin to putting up posters in a subway station - which is what this idea appears to be.
Dynamic engagement means one thing, and one thing only. GAMES. There’s seemingly no other practical way forward. And if the falling APE price and ecosysten are any indication, unless a rapid change in direction is made - before it’s too late - we’re heading for $0. Nobody wants to hear this, let alone speak up in the wind against the herd, but this is what it is.
The problem is that games - good ones, that is - take a long time to make, and cost a LOT of money. And the risk of failure is still there. In the last tracked metrics, less than 5% of games will actually get completed. And of the ones that do make it into production and sales, less than 20% will ever turn a profit, let alone recoup costs. If you ran a transposed track against those metrics (I used AI for this), you will see that there is a direct correlation to the rapidly crashing NFT ecosystem. Most have hit the floor and gone negative.
There isn’t a single game dev that is running metrics for a game to sell 127K units to turn a profit. Yet, there’s that one NFT person looking to buy and sell - quickly - because the only way (staking is just as dead - go look) the churn is now the practical thesis.
So, investing money into NFTs that people can go “look at and feel good about” is going to be as ineffective as putting up posters in a subway station where you actually have NO way of tracking the effectiveness of that campaign. Instead, you’re just spending ad money because you happen to have a budget for it.
We need to promote games. We need to find [experienced] builders to make games, or incentivise them to support APE in their games (Web2 & Web3). We need to incentivize those builders to make games that use APE. And in doing so, it can be mandated that such DAO funded games - just like we do with licensed IP in gamedev - should promote the APE logo prominently (e.g. in startup screens, marketing materials) etc. And if the game supports ads, then it should also have spots for prominently promoting APE. And it should most definitely offer $APE as an exclusive token alongside fiat currency.
Since the advent of the Internet as we know it, games have always been at the forefront of most emerging consumable media. It’s why audio and video card manufactures, console makers etc all promote and build businesses around games. It’s why VC and and chains spent the last 3+ years giving out micro-investments, grants etc to any blockchain team who claimed they could make a game. Then didn’t. The end result? A flood of badly made, rug pull, cash grabs. Here we are.
From what I have seen of this DAO - long before officially joining and putting my name into it - nobody wants to ack the realities that even the most intrinsic of ideas that would further the culture, fail in AIP. Too many cooks and all that. From my research, it appears to me that this is because nobody wants to buck the trend, say the quiet part out loud - let alone spend money that’s going to affect the floor price of their $Ape holdings - even as the whole thing continues to decline and crash straight through the floor.
To that end, ideas like this are for another time when there’s more stability - and time. We don’t have the luxury of time. And that’s specifically why I believe that we should wait for the Metaverse Working Group to take form - eventually, and hopefully in this decade. And then, that group (which I hope to be in) will determine the direction that we need to take in actively promoting APE in a dynamic way by curating experienced builders (outside of the 127K bubble) who can help build beyond the 127K bubble. And no, we’re never - ever - going to achieve that in a glorified Metaverse chat room. Ever.
Thanks for reading.