Overview
For the past three months, building the platform was our team’s main focus. With the help of 1200+ Alpha testers, we have been testing a variety of features, big or small, doing enhancement based on the community’s feedback, and successfully hosted the first Dota 2 tournament on Plair. Here we have listed the team’s achievement in the previous three-month period and our prospect in 2019.
Summary of April
- Officially launched Alpha, Alpha testers received UAT links and started testing out the platform.
- Released Alpha 0.1–0.4.
- Connected with the community at VeChain Summit 2019 in San Francisco. Themed #CreatingValuableTXs, VeChain Summit 2019 was the first summit hosted by the VeChain Foundation in San Francisco on April 18, 2019.
- Plair CEO, Patrick, was a guest speaker in the panel discussion and featured in several live streams and interviews.
- Our team members interacted with the community from day to night at VeChain Summit 2019. Plair’s booth was always packed with guests who showed a lot of interest in our work. We gave away lots of souvenirs and gifts, including customized T-shirt/Hoodies, esports keychains, and a complete Razer Gaming Set.
- Celebrating the long-term partnership with Totient, we also gave out customized Comet x Plair Golden Headset to the fans to decorate their comet avatars.
- We have a few new team members that have been added to replace some former ones. For those of you that attended the VeChain Summit you may have met some of them. You can read about them below.
Alpha was launched with weekly/biweekly updates in April
Plair CEO at VeChain Summit 2019 in Fort Mason, San Francisco CA
Plair’s Booth at VeChain Summit 2019 in Fort Mason, San Francisco CA
Winner of the lucky draw who went home with a complete Razer Gaming Set
Summary of May
- Released Alpha 0.5 (Gameplay + Tournaments).
- Overcame certain publisher bottleneck in product development and rolled out gameplay feature.
- Hosted the first tournament on the platform. Great feedback was received in the Dota2 5v5 match.
- Reached over 3K followers on Twitter while expanding our influence on other social media networks.
- PLA/BTC pairing was available on OceanEx based on the community’s vote. The pair was available since May 31st, 2019.
Plair’s first tournament — shared by Alpha Tester (1)
Plair’s first tournament — shared by Alpha Tester (2)
Plair’s first tournament — shared by Alpha Tester (2)
PLA/BTC Pairing was listed on OceanEx back in May
Summary of June
- Released Alpha 0.6 & 0.7.
- UI revamp and features enhancement based on the community’s feedback.
- Established a partnership with Hong Kong Dota 2 Team — Team Eazy
- Hosted Dota 2 Tournament marathon — an array of 1v1 and 5v5 matches available on the platform for Alpha testers to enjoy.
- Confirmed our future marketing strategy.
- Targeting esports insiders by writing blogs and news of the industry and on-boarding our partners.
- Announced CS:GO as the next game on Platform.
- Celebrating the long-term partnership with Comet, Avatar Jazz Icon is integrated into our wallet feature.
Integration of Comet Avatar
Alpha testers enjoying Dota 2 tournament
Partnering with Dota 2 Team — Team Eazy
CS:GO Tournaments will soon be available in July 2019
Plan For The Next Quarter and Beyond
During the stage of product development, Plair’s Development Team took a leading role while the marketing team was in supporting role in the past few months. Our CTO is now leading the team for a sprint finish and the public beta is going to be released within the next quarter with full feature such as PLA stake-in, tournaments of more popular game titles, and more. Marketing Team is now taking a more active role to execute the marketing strategy, which includes but not limited to on boarding the partners and contacting esports team for online tournaments once Beta is out. With the connections we built over the past year, we can target the gamers precisely and expect to gain a lot of exposure within the esports community.
Cyber Cafes
We have been actively speaking to our cyber cafe partners on how they would like to integrate Plair into their physical locations. These partnerships and integrations do not happen overnight as adding something as large as a platform can be disruptive to a traditional business in a good way. It is Plair’s job to make sure this transition is as seamless as possible.. The likely outcome will be that we integrate into a few cybercafes first to test for a few months. Once the use case is proven we will then start to integrate down into the the rest of the cyber cafes one by one.
Streaming
Our team has begun to look into adding streaming to the Plair family of products. We are pushing forward with this and hope to bring this to reality faster then originally anticipated. Plair understands that streaming is a vital part of the gaming ecosystems and is also vital to our players as well as users within the Plair ecosystem. We use 1 platform to solve the fragmentation that is happening in the industry now. So stay tuned as we move closer to this reality of allowing gamers to instantly stream and earn a new revenue source all in one platform, Plair.
Introducing Our Team Members
We would like to share more about our team members so the community will have a better understanding of what each of us does specifically to help the company grow. In this article, we are featuring three teammates.
Paul Lau — CTO
We wanted to formally introduce you to our newest CTO which has been working with us over the last 8 months. Paul has been the one pushing hard with our team of developers to get Beta done. With over 10 years of software engineering experience, Paul is the master of a variety of programming languages. He built countless websites, games, and software products throughout his career. Being also a Blockchain Engineer, he fully utilizes his cryptography computing skills in Plair. He is now monitoring the process to make sure Beta will be launched within the upcoming months.
Simon Chan — Product Lead
Simon has a profound background in Digital and Web Design. He has been involved in UI/UX design for many E-commerce platforms including A.S Watson Group, the largest health and beauty retail group in the world. He conducts research and usability tests for Plair. Working closely with the development team, he always presents and discusses ideas with the team on how to improve the platform. He is currently working on analyzing the data we collect through surveys and bug reports to improve the User Experience.
Shadow Chan — Content Lead
Shadow is a social media savvy who specializes in content marketing. Worked as a bilingual content strategist in a listed digital marketing company, she has good knowledge of utilizing different channels to maximize ROI. She is well-trained for working at a fast pace environment, which explains her love for Overcooked. She is now responsible for building Plair’s brand identity and online presence as well as drafting and approving marketing content for the company.
New Advisor
We want to welcome Josh Galloway, Plair’s newest advisor. Josh has been in the gaming industry for over 10 years. He has built games, advised for games and also had a stint working for a VC that invested in games. Josh’s gaming network is vast. Having worked with China’s 4th largest game publisher as well as a GOD Games, Josh will help take Plair to the next level. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuagalloway/
A Note from the CEO, Patrick Tang
“We remain confident in the ability of our team to deliver sustainable long-term performance. In the remaining of 2019, we will continue to put mission into action, build a user-friendly decentralized esports platform, and start onboarding our partners. The future of gaming is right here. ” — Patrick Tang, Plair CEO
Updated Timeline for Development for 2019 and Early 2020
This is an updated timeline for this year. We believe updating a timeline out for the next 3 years is not feasible to do for a business so our plan going forward is to update this every 3–6 months if needed, to give the community more transparency in our progress.
July 2019
Mid-July: CS:GO Tournaments — Alpha Release
End of July: Smart Contract (Testnet)
Aug 2019
End of Aug: Public Beta
Full featured tournaments across all supported games in Beta (Testnet)
Sep 2019
Public Beta (Mainnet)
3rd Game Tournaments (Details will be announced soon)
Q4 2019 — Q1 2020 (Oct-Mar)
Streaming Platform Alpha Release
Chat Feature
Esports Team Online Tournament
Personal Points system to help fight fraud
