Focus Decentral Games Development and Branding Entirely on Play & Earn, End Crypto Gameplay & Licensing of Crypto Games

Background

In January, we paused crypto-gameplay in Tominoya and Chateau Satoshi. At the time, crypto gameplay accounted for 1.3% ($200k) of the DG Treasury’s total January revenue ($15.3M) and required significant support from the DG support team to frequently refund players for Polygon transaction delays and reverts. (See ‘Additional Details’ section below for an overview of the Polygon issues.)

Since launching ICE Poker last October, it has become clear that its product-market fit, daily active engagement, level of industry-leading innovation, and the future growth potential dwarfs that of our prior crypto games – so we’ve focused all development and support efforts there. Chateau Satoshi has already been converted into an ICE Poker venue, and we also stopped providing support for crypto-gameplay in partner venues The Flamingos and The Aquarium in Vegas City.

Since the launch of ICE Poker, our discord community has increased from 8k to 57k users and our daily active player count has increased from 1k to 10k. At any time of day, you can hop into one of our ICE Poker venues and join 1,200 - 1,500 other concurrent players in the metaverse. ICE Poker accounts for 4 of the top 6 most visited venues in Decentraland, the leading Open Metaverse platform. We’ve found great product-market fit in the metaverse, and we’re coming soon to mobile where our value proposition will stack up incredibly well against freemium-model poker games (e.g. Zynga) with millions of players.

Decentral Games does not offer, nor provide any support for, crypto gameplay. Our core product offering is ICE Poker, a free-to-play (no buy-in required) and played with non-transferrable CHIPs which have no monetary value.

Proposal

Focus development and branding of Decentral Games entirely on Play & Earn (ICE Poker - Metaverse and Mobile) to onboard the next 1M users to Web3/The Open Metaverse, and solidify Decentral Games as a household brand and pioneer in the space.

Officially and permanently shut down the operational support and licensing of blackjack, roulette with crypto-gameplay.

Rationale

Decentral Games has become an industry leader as the first community-governed, play & earn ecosystem and the first play & earn game live in the open metaverse. With crypto-gameplay shut down and ICE Poker interest and adoption growing exponentially, we have an opportunity to officially allocate our branding and development efforts entirely on the offering that has achieved the best product-market fit, daily active engagement, level of industry-leading innovation, and the future growth potential. This undivided focus will position Decentral Games for maximum growth and community engagement in 2022 and beyond.

Continuing to provide operational support and development resources for crypto gameplay does not make economic sense given the amount of time and funds required to do so. Furthermore, even with ICE wagers in blackjack and roulette shut down, we can still deliver additional ICE utility and burning with arcade and tournament style ICE Poker gameplay that will positively contribute to the ICE burn-to-earn ratio.

Additional Details

Polygon Issues:

Increasing Polygon Transaction costs: As of December, we were paying the majority of house profits to cover gas fees as average transaction costs increased ~100x YoY. This is before considering the $DG-mined component, and the games were unprofitable taking [house profits] vs. [Matic costs + $DG costs].

Polygon Network unreliability: RPC downtime and high unpredictability in gas price led to an unacceptable number of gameplay transactions getting stuck in the mempool for extended periods of time or even dropped. This results in frustrating gameplay with long lags between hands/spins, but it was also resulting in transactions getting stuck on the payout; this meant we were manually issuing 50 - 100 refund transactions / day.

We expect the Polygon issues to get worse rather than better as network adoption increases. In order to profitably support these games, one would need an off-chain solution involving taking custody of funds (something we’ve never done), and it doesn’t make sense for us to invest in this area. Firstly, there are significant regulatory and licensing concerns with this approach; secondly, our development focus should remain on ICE Poker where we’ve found better product-market fit.

ICE Poker gameplay does not require a Polygon transaction submission and confirmation for each hand (as CHIPs are off-chain). ICE Poker only requires Polygon for wearable ownership and end-of-day payouts, which is much more cost-efficient and unaffected by spikes in gas or minor delays in data retrieval.