This December, it will be more than 10 months since we introduced our project to the world. What began as an idea in the minds of an ex-game developer and a long-time decentralization enthusiast has now resulted in a completed SDK, early alpha testers of our platform, in-depth research into Plasma and scalability solutions that will benefit the whole of the Ethereum community and research into user experience and usability that will benefit all game developers looking to enter the blockchain space.
To round off this year, we’d like to share with you a little story that demonstrates why we’re building what we’re building…
Youtopia
The year is 2035. The majority of people now spend the bulk of their waking hours in a virtual world called Youtopia.
It all happened so quickly. It began when the unemployment rate in the United States skyrocketed due to advances in AI technology that eliminated nearly 90% of customer service jobs. It wasn’t long before people could order coffees without speaking to a human, rarely stepped out of their homes to purchase groceries and almost never, except in highly escalated cases, spoke to a non-robot when calling into customer service helplines. It seemed as though overnight, millions of students, part-time workers, and low-skilled employees were out of a job.
Then came Youtopia. It was developed by the massive games studio, Playtendo. Its gameplay was kind of ironic. It was a virtual cities game with lots of opportunities for players to participate in ‘work’, consisting mainly of menial tasks like making hamburgers for the in-game restaurant and ensuring that customers received their food on time, or driving in-game passengers to where they needed to go within certain timeframes. The ‘customers’ or ‘passengers’, as well as the ‘managers’ you worked for were non-player characters, created by the game developers in order to generate challenges.
You leveled up by accomplishing the goals set by the game and collecting the in-game currency that you were rewarded in. After leveling up, you could use your money to set up your own business and create challenges for other players, such as by recruiting new gamers as cooks in your virtual restaurant or hiring restaurant managers to oversee your business. Soon, ‘richer’ players were creating value by building businesses and hiring workers to produce things that other players wanted in-game, like homes, cars and other cosmetic items in order to make more money.
It wasn’t long before a large proportion of the population, not just those who had lost their jobs, were regular players of Youtopia. Playtendo earned a lot of money from the subscription fees and sales of in-game items and reinvested that into the latest technologies to make Youtopia an even more immersive experience. By this time, virtual reality was the norm and good quality headsets were cheap and owned by everyone. They had truly created a metaverse.
However, Playtendo insisted that Youtopia was just a game. This meant all the traditional rules applied. You couldn’t trade your in-game currency or assets for real-world money, and you were most definitely prohibited by the rules of play from re-selling these assets on third party marketplaces. Players who were found doing so were suspended or permanently banned. Further, according to the game’s policies, if the game’s internal economic team, tasked with maintaining a stable game economy, thought that someone was upsetting the balance too much, ie. by owning too much in-game property, assets or creating businesses they did not approve of, they were at liberty to simply remove some of those assets, suspend these players’ accounts for a period of time or remove them entirely. This has happened a few times, however, the game developers always contended that the removal of assets or suspension of the players’ accounts were due to other reasons.
Further, Youtopia was harvesting the huge amounts of player data generated by real players to create hyperrealistic non-player characters, which they could use to get over the ‘cold start’ problem in future games — an issue that social games face when they are yet acquire an optimal amount of users for the game to be interesting to people.
This didn’t stop the players from trying to eke out a living by playing the game. This was risky as, if you were found out, your assets and account were at risk of being shut down. Players continued to do, this, however, and developed better and better ways to outsmart the game company. Soon, Youtopia had more than a billion players from all over the world and an economy worth more than most countries in the real world. One day, Playtendo’s chief financial controller came to its CEO with the statistics: Youtopia was no longer profitable for Playtendo as the majority of in-game assets that players found valuable were generated by players themselves, and they were trading them with each other for real money on external marketplaces.
The decision was made. One day, millions of players realized that they could no longer log into their accounts. Items vanished from the external marketplaces as they no longer existed anymore. Players who had spent a fortune on building their in-game worlds had lost it all, and players who made a living from the trade that occurred in Youtopia no longer had a source of income.
Whilst some of the people trying to make a living from the game were opportunists who saw the potential and decided to quit their real-world jobs, the majority of players were the displaced workers who had limited opportunities to make a living for themselves in the ‘real’ world.
At Hoard, we believe that the above scenario will be the future unless we do something about it. There is no doubt that as technology develops and virtual experiences mature and improve, there will be a mass migration into virtual worlds. It’s likely that these virtual worlds will be owned by the existing large entertainment and gaming corporations.
Our goal is that future game worlds are as free and fair for their participants as possible. Whilst there is a long way to go before games become fully decentralized, there is something that we can do to shift some of the power and value back into the hands of the masses: True ownership of virtual assets so that players can, at the least, benefit from their investments of time and skill within them.
So what are we building?
We’re really looking forward to sharing more of our vision with you in 2019 and bringing you on our journey of building this freer and fairer future. Make sure you follow us on Twitter and sign up for our updates to stay posted.
Find out more about Hoard:
💻 Check out our website
👨👩 Learn more about our team and advisors
🎮 Play our game, the first proof-of-concept of Plasma MVP — Plasma Dog.
👫 Join us on Twitter, Telegram, reddit and Facebook
🎬 Watch our introductory video
📝 Go to our blog
👩🎓 Read our knowledge base
📃 Read our crowdfunding paper
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