Enabling a Gaming Creator Economy

The "Gaming Creator Economy" is an example of how a vibrant ecosystem can be unlocked by applying principles behind trustless, tokenized "incentive machines"

Understanding the Players

Although this is a small subset of the overall gaming industry, I believe the existing behavior could become the future of all games. It has the potential to introduce a new class of gaming creators.

Who are these key personas?

Game Developers of "Moddable" Games

Within Game Developers are multiple personas.

That being said, I believe that the persona of the developer who builds "moddable" games will grow from a small niche to a dominant characteristic of nearly every game.

So what are moddable games?

These are games that the developer has enabled a way for motivated players to modify the game.

The poster child for this is Minecraft. The game has been designed for private server admins to modify these servers with user generated content.

Another game, Space Engineers, has a similar construct to Minecraft, but does so in a world with physics that makes sense to represents worlds in outerspace, like different planets.

But they don't host the games themselves. Their primary market are players who directly install the games themselves.

There's a sub-market, however, of the next persona: private server hosts.

Private Server Hosts

Private Server Hosts decide to not just be players of these "moddable" games.

Instead, they want to effectively "fork" the main game and create a private version that they run and operate on their own server.

For many, the "fork" is really a clone with a whitelist of their friends. It's like taking a game that may have lots of strangers and, instead, cloning that game with people they know.

However, some the enterprising private server hosts "mod" the game.

They do so by adding new levels, challenges, maps, or in-game assets.

These hosts work with two main players in the ecosystem: mod.io and game server hosts

Game Server Providers

These providers, like Shockbyte, make it easy for someone to become a private server host.

From their site, a player can select which game they want. The player then selects the type of private server they want, typically based on the number of concurrent players and the type of game.

Then Shockbyte takes care of the rest, providing the DevOps to the server host so the server host focuses on two things: building community and creating a distinct and valuable private instance of the game.

The way they do that is by creating the assets themselves, empowering their community to create the assets, or going to a marketplace, mod.io

Mod.io

Mod.io is the general store for the universe of "moddable" games.

The primary shoppers are private server hosts who can find user generated content that they can add to their private server.

Mod.io serves as a valuable connection point between Game Developers, Private Server Hosts, and Mods (see below).

This marketplace enables better integration within the games, which simplifies the experience for Private Servers hosts to deploy and for Mods to create.

Mods

Mods can either contribute directly to a game as a core contributor of a given private server, or they can "freelance" by posting to Mod.io.

Players

Players choose amongst a few options: playing on their own server locally, playing on an "official server" if offered by the game, or playing on a private server set up by a Private Server Host.

These are the ultimate customers in this ecosystem.

Game developers want more players.

Game server hosts also want more players which, hopefully, also drives demand for private servers.

If private game servers drives more players and grows the community, game developers want more private game servers.

Private server hosts want more players on their own private servers.

And mods want more players who interact with their mods across a growing number of private server hosts.

This is an ecosystem that is inherently interconnected, but there seems to be potential for accelerating the virtuous cycle described above.

So here's where we are beginning to explore how to create stronger value chains.

Value Chain Opportunities

This is the area which we don't know for sure and are exploring the areas, but it felt taking a first pass of what the incentives and drivers might be and, ultimately, a good integration point as a platform to increase the value for everybody.

Game Developers

One of the biggest drives is to increase demand and streamline the ability for game developers to offer moddable games.

Right now, a game like Space Engineers, values the growth of the community. They do not charge special license fees to the Private Server Hosts.

Because their core value proposition is empowering players to create environments in space, a growing community is enough to drive their business which is a one-time license for individual players.

However, if their community of players and private server hosts saw a virtuous cycle where Space Engineers could earn royalties while private server hosts earned fees (more likely in-game versus entrance fees), everyone benefits:

However, part of making the ecosystem thrive is to have incentivized for creating value and disincentives for free riders.

In other words, we want an objective function for the "incentive machine."

What drives the incentive machine?

In the same way that Bitcoin's price drive different stakeholders to seek self-serving goals to meet the objective function, which was the security of the network, a similar objective function can be defined to engage all of the players.

This means introducing potentially additional stakeholders into the market to drive the engine or to be cautious of.

Speculators

In a down market Speculators aren't typically active. But knowledgeable investors add liquidity and capital into the ecosystem. The timing md constraints matter to prevent harmful effects.

Now let's break down conceptually the individual objective functions of the players:

Game Developers

Goals

Increase total recurring revenue for each game
Value to Network:

Game Server Providers
Goals:

Value to Network:

Mod.io

Goals:

Value to Network:

Incentive Mechanisms:

Private Server Hosts

Goals

Incentives

Disincentives:

Players

Value to Network:

Incentives: