If you don’t charge game developers on game sales, how do you make a profit?
tl;dr:
The Lotus Core team is bullish in using the raised funds from the ICO to completely develop the Lotus Protocol and make it massively adopted. Our business model will not depend upon taking profits away from developers and we will focus on the massive adoption of the Lotus Protocol. These two elements set Lotus Core apart from centralized models and other platforms. Some revenue avenues envisioned for the Lotus Store include marketplace promotions, in-house investment on new games, paid memberships for developers.
Once we develop the protocol, its massive adoption by game developers will help the gaming community be more free, more open and better as a whole, then we will be proud to call our efforts a success.
Long answer:
This is a question we receive often by different people, so we felt the need to answer it in detail. Let’s begin.
First of all, the motivation to create Lotus Core was to solve problems in the centralized distribution model of digital games. Our main goal is to provide a decentralized solution by bringing the Lotus Protocol into the hands of as many game developers as we can.
But before we tell you how Lotus Core will be a sustainable business, we need to describe what the Lotus Protocol is. It is an open distribution protocol embedded as a code into digital games that will provide more freedom to players and better profits for game developers.
The Lotus Protocol creates a digital cartridge through a Smart Contract with a digital signature and records it in the blockchain, allowing the game developer to guarantee the authenticity of each copy of software and giving players access to their game, even when they are offline. Also, players will be able to use their digital games like if they were physical copies, meaning they could exchange or sell them to other players if they wanted.
These trades will be made up by Smart Contract rules to protect digital games from piracy while also giving benefits to game developers, through the use of Lotus Tokens (LTS).
So, in order to give more freedom and better ownership to players, better profits for game developers, and deliver a protocol for massive adoption, we needed to create a truly decentralized platform without a middle-man between transactions.
In technical jargon, we want Lotus Core to be the ERC20 of digital games. This means anyone can integrate the Lotus Protocol into their games without requesting it to the Lotus Core team, so it could outlive the Lotus Store as it an open protocol that does not depend on anything else to be functional or useful.
The Lotus Token (LTS) is an ERC20 token that allows:
- Players to trade, lend or sell their digital games to other players.
- Game developers to get revenue from transactions involving tokens (direct sales or trades between players)
- Funding game projects
The LTS will become more useful as more and more people use it to buy and exchange digital games.
Thus, holding a % in reserves of Lotus Tokens (LTS) makes sense for Lotus Core because we are creating a disruptive distribution model that aims for massive adoption of the LTS in the market of digital games.
With the funds we get from our contributors, we will be able to build a functional version of the protocol to solve important problems found in the centralized distribution model of digital games. Once we develop this protocol, its massive adoption by game developers will help the gaming community be more free, more open and better as a whole, then we will be proud to call our efforts a success. The Lotus Protocol is our contribution to the gaming industry.
That aside, we will be able to create opportunities by letting game developers promote their games within the Store, investing in new game projects, selling Lotus Partners Program memberships to developers for exclusive benefits, and many other opportunities created by this new ecosystem yet to come.
We understand that you want to know how exactly Lotus Core will make profits. But as has been proven by marketplace plays in the past, the critical factor to achieve sustainability of our business model is to drive massive adoption. And that’s exactly what we’ll write about in our next text piece.
