Thanks for the well-thought through proposal and the lovely cute Bonksie!
I love gaming very much; although I don’t have time to game much nowadays, I still follow new game releases very closely, and to be an indie game developer was a dream of mine for a very long time. Maybe after Sanctum… haha. So I love to see proposals about gaming.
With that said, here are some of my doubts and questions. Please don’t take this the wrong way: the objective is not to tear the proposal down, but to strengthen it.
We have seen many play-to-earn games before, and many of them don’t succeed, for several reasons. The first is that it’s really hard to build a fun game, and I feel like the game has got to stand on its own merits. That means being a game that’s fun to play, financials aside. In this case, I would ask: how can we differentiate this game from other casual rhythm games, of which there are many?
More fundamentally, there’s a great GDC talk called “Cursed Problems in Game Design”. I recommend everyone watch it. “Cursed problems” are “unsolvable” game design problems rooted in a fundamental conflict between core design philosophies or promises to players.
There are two “cursed problems” I can see in this proposal, and in Play-to-Earn games more generally.
- Cursed problem #1: playing game for fun vs. playing game for money. When people play a game, they play it because it is fun. They don’t expect anything – it is a consumption good. But introducing a financial reward almost makes it feel like a job. It can even be very demotivating seeing that your earnings are equivalent to few cents per hour.
- Cursed problem #2: casual gaming but prizes for leaderboards. This proposal mentioned that rewards will be distributed based on your ranking. This might work for a competitive game. However, this seems to fit poorly with the casual and accessible nature of the game. The vast majority of players will earn less than they would have if they’d just bought another LST.
In general, my big question would be: how will we convince people to deposit their SOL to play this game when other (free or low-cost) rhythm game alternatives exist? I would worry less about the exact mechanics of getting the yield (liquid staking, jito restaking etc), leave the “platform play” aside for now, and double down on figuring out the highest-order bit: how to 1) build a damn good game 2) get people to park their SOL with Windfall.
One final question to the team: what do you, in your heart of hearts, want to do? Do you want to demystify staking? Or do you want to build a cool game? If the latter, focus on that (building a good game first and foremost), and figure out how Sanctum and the rest of Solana can support you in that endeavour. This may be of interest to you: