Our Investment in The Sandbox
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Last year, we invested in The Sandbox with our thesis on blockchain gaming. We foresaw the potential of blockchain gaming when a strong incentive scheme is combined with the User Generated Content(UGC). Recently, in the gaming sector, the significance of UGC is getting acknowledged. Game companies have been focusing on making AAA quality contents, yet, regardless of the size, the companies are struggling to create diverse and colorful contents. For instance, in 2012, a Korean gamer cleared the final boss of Diablo in just 6 hours after Diablo3 was launched. Taking into account that it took more than 4 years for Activision Blizzard to develop Diablo3, this story illustrates that gaming companies just cannot catch up with the enormous speed of content consumption by consumers. And, this is why UGC games could become successful because they can meet various gamer demands.
Games like Minecraft and Roblox demonstrate the importance of ‘Game as a Platform’ concept in terms of content generation. Indeed, the logic of these games are quite simple: users can play with blocks very much like Lego blocks. Thanks to this feature, Minecraft could enjoy a very unique game scheme. As part of the gameplay, users can generate characters, creatures, and land, and can add game logic. By giving toolset and freedom, Minecraft allowed users to create their own worlds inside the game. After its 2009 launch, Minecraft indeed has become a mega hit — selling 176 million titles and recording 91 million MAUs as of now.
Although Minecraft’s success is mainly due to UGC, Minecraft has started quite recently giving rewards to the content creators through marketplace as incentives. And yet, rewards and digital assets that content creators possess are limited to the Minecraft world solely. Could you imagine where you could borrow/lend game assets such as lands and creatures of Minecraft? What if the digital game assets tied to the smart contracts are open to the third party devs so that they may add more creative features to the assets? These exciting goals are what TSB aims to achieve eventually. To make incentive schemes and governance structures transparent to the gamers, it is crucial to choose a decentralized platform that cannot be controlled by a single company. By doing so, gamers can enjoy complete ownership of the game assets regardless of their choices to stay or leave the game. This is when games built on top of blockchain and smart contract could reach their full potential.
We, Hashed, believe blockchain and decentralized technology will become backbones of the digital economy. And, sooner or later, we will be witnessing more games that employ decentralized technology. Stronger incentive schemes will allow more content generators to participate in a more proactive manner to create abundant high quality digital game assets. As a team of experienced game developers, The Sandbox plans to launch TSB game by the end of this year. We are excited to see what the team will bring to the world soon. Please check how The Sandbox is making its progress via Youtube and stay tuned!
