I wanted to ask the Harmony community about creating a Games Publishing Organization for Harmony.
WHY?
In my experience, there has been surprisingly unreasonable push back from many existing Game Developers businesses and individual professionals alike.
From Indie Developers needing to avoid getting ratio’d by their fans who’ve read an article about how crypto is all a scam and/or terrible for the environment.
To larger Developers whose fans push back on Blockchain because they see this as a kind of cash grab from these larger organizations.
There is a real gap in the market for there to be an organization (DAO or not) that can help establish an effective business and funding model for small to medium game developers to receive funding for their blockchain enabled projects.
Has this been asked before?
I figured I would raise my hand and ask if there have ever been any discussions or thoughts about Harmony creating an organization similar what Polygon has built with Polygon Studio?
What would this entail?
This ONE Harmony Games publishing organization could aim to fund, publish and promote games as well as help selected development teams collaborate on Harmony/blockchain like no other games publisher can.
This kind of organization could create a reasonable framework which could outline stipulations like staying on Harmony for a set amount of time after launch, paying a dividend of revenue, a repayment process of their funding over an agreed amount of time, or even just offering marketing services which could be shared by all the games planning to release on Harmony.
I believe this could be done in a number of ways but I just wanted to start the conversation about the subject…
A gaming studio toolset would be legit. Something to counter the “nft’s bad”, “crypto is a scam” “play to earn is actually pay to win” narrative would be even better.
Consulting and publishing games on harmony is what I thought gmfrens was doing.
I like the idea of having the ability for the Harmony DAO’s to have some kind of ownership of the game for the communities bennifit. As an investor of a songle project in harmony, its hard to diversify across all the games.
Id rather invest in harmony knowing that the publications are benefiting the underlining asset support them.
I like how you think. Becoming a publisher though isn’t trivial - it 99% marketing, influencer relationships, public relations - the best games with the worst marketing tend to lose. And marketing these games isn’t exactly exactly in our wheelhouse yet.
But, we can partner with studios who can become publishers of games and they have Existing relationships with influencers and the right distribution channels.
There’s definitely a need for some kind of organization that can focus on marketing because Game Developers aren’t Game Publishers, we face all of the same pit falls that Harmony faces when it comes to marketing.
I’m currently speaking with the existing game developers on Harmony about pooling our resources together to be more effective with our marketing… hoping to build our own form of Publisher… but wanted to make sure Harmony wasn’t already leading some kind of initiative or perhaps a partnership with larger business gamedev entities; which might eventually partner with our homegrown initiative.
In some sense, this post is aimed to create a conversation about how we NEED to solve a major problem in our gaming space.
Basically that the pre-existing gaming businesses and the large scale issue of abuse/scams which is leaving many of those pre-existing game developers and publisher avoiding involvement with the crypto gaming space…
We need to bridge the gap between perception and actual use case… which is making it hard to attract talent into our wonderful space.
I think that’s a structural issue with chains like Harmony though. It’s much harder to get away with rugs on Polkadot – you need to be elected to have a parachain… elections can take months… staking is time-locked… etc. etc.
With Harmony; the issue of near zero fees essentially incentivises the cheapest, low-grade projects to come. It costs nothing for them to set up shop. There’s no barrier to entry. I don’t really see anyway around it. Plus, they don’t pay for their validation power either.
Either it has to be “verified” by the core team like in Algorand, or use a Polkadot-like solution where you pay for your own sub-net via an election, or an AVAX solution where you are in a sub-net, or something else.
Excellent point (as usual) @GeorgeofEmmaInterest !
Perhaps, in part, that is what this kind of publisher can provide; a level of trust and authority over projects to say:
We will sue these people if they do X, Y or Z …
We’re all tired of the abuse of people’s trust, and what it is doing to our space.
This seems like a really interesting offering! For some projects I can imagine it would be a life saver.
I’m not sure how their funding request would work for a project which doesn’t issue their developer’s their own token…
FishFight for instance has had no pre-mint, and only generates revenue from people actively playing our game, so we can’t really off a simple % of our project.
We could offer a kind of percentage of our percentage but it would either require redeployment of our minting/fishing/breeding contracts or some kind quarterly review of our revenues.
I am going to reach out and see what their team thinks about basically working with us and other games on harmony…
Any thoughts on essentially forming our own GameDev DAO?
Which would require some kind of buy in but would effectively give our community a way to build our own standards for how and why our users should support our projects? As well as a pool of funds to build marketing campaigns which leverages 5 project’s marketing budgets instead of 1?
I like this idea very much! Joined the first informal discussion, was informative! Dunno if a DAO is needed, but certainly a group/community is (and if a DAO structure helps that, hell yea!)
all in on helping to form a Game DAO. This is exactly where DAO’s excel at this point, in my mind. A narrow, clear, sustainable scope.