(POP!) Dot Play Quarterly Review
Bits of Signum | 5.17.25
Executive Summary - Between the Milestones
When insights come, they are almost never on a check list, but rather, between the lines. While we continue to execute on short term milestones, we remain focused on the long term, even if it will be a windy path. We believe the shortest path to onboarding the masses to web3 gaming will be to onboard the game developers with massive audiences - audiences who will follow.
We have seen the way it can play out through the lens of the cornerstone of Polkadot gaming - Mythical. Sticking to their North Star of building truly fun and engaging experiences for people, not token trading, has meant that the game mechanics are driving engagement. Therefore, long-term media value, while attracting the likes of Pudgy Penguins, the FIFA League (one month from today the FIFA Club World Cup launches in the US!), Romain Schneider and his stellar team at Spectarium, coming soon to Mythical Marketplace, along with several others. As Arron Goolsbey, COO/CTO of Mythical, and Advisor to Dot Play, stated last week, “Mythical Marketplace for games hit #1 in global volumes, ahead of Ethereum. Proof that high quality videogames are the hero use-case for the application of web3 technology, especially when it comes to empowering gamers and creators with true ownership and advanced marketplaces.” My sidenote: the below chart is before the launch of Pudgy Party and FIFA Rivals in a few weeks!
Back in 2016, we were already in a crisis of authenticity (awakened by Cambridge Analytica) and we already needed to break the blockades that false, purchased narratives were building between people.
A national security level crisis might wake us, but why not fix this now? The original vision and ethos of web3 is that a new version of the internet, upon which decentralized applications may be built, is needed to fix this crisis of inauthenticity. In short, Polkadot empowers us - we no longer need to trust the platforms or the centralized orchestrators. This is the meaning of Less Trust | More Truth. Ultimately, we envision a new version of the internet that will allow game developers to create authentic experiences, stay connected to their audiences, maintain their sovereignty, and ‘click in’ to the truth.
Community is the Secret Sauce
The Dot Play team remains confident in our ability to build the pivotal hub for gaming in Polkadot. However, before throwing a party, one must prepare the house. To hone this analogy, we are preparing the playground. While we were previously speaking about building an “Experience Exchange for Gaming” we are now calling this space a playground, where many experiences in Polkadot, even outside of gaming, may be accessed and where shared experiences can happen.
This quarter, we made significant progress in tools and tools providers. First, both Unreal and Unity SDKs for Polkadot are now available, with the Unreal SDK having recently been added by Cedric Decoster from Ajuna. However, the availability of these SDKs is insufficient for mass adoption. More important will be our ability to provide a playground where players can stop in to socialize and find out what is happening in the Polkadot community. A tool that goes beyond the game engine, which provides much easier onboarding to game developers, is required. We are now in the process of understanding and testing S.A.G.E., also built by Cedric, because it offers the ability to build games quickly that tap into blockchain mechanics immediately, regardless of which game engine is chosen. This is music to our ears as we aim to onboard millions of developers, or at least a certain number of developers, each of whom have millions in their audiences. What is next? A sound marketing and distribution strategy, which will include - yes - hackathons for game developers to learn how to build games in Polkadot! Stay tuned.
The purpose of one of our favorite quotes, “Trust the Process” by Sam Hinke is to remind us that we are laying a long term foundation for onboarding the masses to Polkadot gaming. We are not aiming for near term volume that we have seen with other protocols. While this may have delivered a steady drumbeat of flashy blockchain game headlines in the short term, it has also proven to be fruitless labor, as most of these efforts round to zero. These “blockchain games” have been nothing more than short-lived, centralized money grabs wrapped in nice graphics. Learning from others’ past failures in Web3 Gaming, along with our own experiences over two decades in gaming and esports, demands us to look beyond the horizon to build a long term vibrant Polkadot gaming community.
In fact, building an engaged and authentic community is the hard part, and it is everything. Mobile game marketing continues to be challenged, both due to known regulatory challenges, and also due to a strong supply of content. Therefore, game devs scramble to create a community, aware that this is the only hack. Oh, and we only have so much time in the day!
Our team has made a lot of progress in building relationships with indie developers on other platforms. Since they share our ethos, we believe they could create a steady stream of onboarding. However, this depends on our ability to prepare a nice landing spot for them.
While the first two quarters of Dot Play were spent in the trenches with indie developers building a games publisher for Polkadot, this last quarter has been about preparing the playground. Playground prep includes the launch of Polkadot Hub, the launch of Mythical Pulse, the user bridge between Mythical and Frequency, and our desire to build an Experience Exchange with “Dot Pops” as our reward points.
None of these practical plans will matter if we are not nice. “Play nice on the playground” can sometimes seem anathema to our culture when the search for truth can veer into “gotcha” culture. We should be vigilant in making sure that this doesn’t alienate outsiders coming in; it may be a challenge to overcome in our journey if we hope to build a healthy and collaborative ecosystem.
We have been getting to know the Gavun Wud community, and we love these guys! Our livestream with the team, along with JAMTON and Jay at the Kus drew almost 800 live viewers. We had no idea that this was purely a community-driven effort of people, like us, who were inspired by the Dr. Gavin Wood, as the main character in their community. The engagement has been building in advance of the upcoming Wud Universe, teased on the show, along with a tournament series. Also, JAMTON described the rollout of Wud on Telegram as the first application on Polkadot that will be accessible by Telegram users - as of March 2025, Telegram surpassed 1 billion MAUs, a significant milestone that caught our attention. It is not that Wud accessed the Telegram community that excites us. We have seen many meteoric Telegram games, only to drop like a stone when users are on to the next token hunt. What excites us about Wud is more the fact that we are seeing real community engagement so it has a shot of not only building real media value in Polkadot, but of bringing people outside of Polkadot into the ecosystem.
Gavun Wud Livestream
Gaming & Social Media are Blending - Mythical Pulse X Frequency
Also this quarter, alongside Advisor Arron Goolsbey, CTO/COO of Mythical, we are getting excited about a new Mythical gaming offering, coming soon, called Pulse. We believe it will pull together games that are inside and outside of Mythical, such as our favorite Polkadot-native team, EVRLOOT, and supercharge other ecosystems in Polkadot. Since we care deeply about fixing the current crisis of internet inauthenticity, it goes without saying that Frequency, as the first implementation of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), i.e., user-controlled social media platforms, is of tantamount importance. Over many brainstorming sessions, we have come to the realization that we need a foundational community layer for Polkadot gaming. If we can get this right, we will be able to replace the difficult-mountain-to-climb, Polkadot onboarding, with a Delorean Time Machine - an instant onboard to fun!
In this effort, we are pulling together a handful of promising candidates to build this, and we aim to keep the UX Bounty/Braille team up to date as we go. One epiphany is the tremendous synergy between Mythical and Frequency. They both see it, and, well, they are both understandably really busy! According to press reports, Frequency’s Frank McCourt has raised $20 billion to bid on TikTok and, as we said in our 2025 preview, we do not believe they will stop there. Meanwhile, see above on what Mythical has been doing. Stay tuned - Dot Play is pushing through and aims to convert some exciting strategy sessions to action.
Esports & Sponsorship Deals - Our Community Service Hat
Having served as the Head of the Audit Committee on the public corporate board of FaZe Clan, prior to its sale to Gamesquare, I have been advocating to create a committee for each industry vertical to pre-negotiate deals before they become fully-baked Treasury proposals. Sponsorship-oriented proposals continue to face negative sentiment from the Polkadot community, and the Faze x Vitality - Unifying ecosystem efforts through Esport - Metaproposal - Referenda 1533 is no exception.
Its rationale is explained up front as, “this Metaproposal is the result of a collective effort by more than 11 ecosystem agents from complementary backgrounds [names] and 7 partners (Airlyft, Braille, Nyvium Labs, ElevateCore, LeNexus, FaZe and Vitality) united by the same conviction: ‘Polkadot needs a clear, coordinated and operational interface to structure its public actions.’ Millions are spent each year on various initiatives to promote the Polkadot brand to consumers and professionals. However, we don't really have the internal tools we need to maximise and make the most of this spend. In fact, much of this money is wasted…”
Despite the fact that this proposal is failing, we are proud of the fact that both companies' proposals were pre-negotiated significantly, and that this team of ecosystem agents brought together two competitors, in collaboration for Polkadot.
Side note - we were one of the voices of concern at the height of spending. We even took on Bill Laboon’s challenge to create a sustainable model that would flow money back to the Treasury - voila, the Dot Play games publisher! The idea is that games publishing is a high cash flow business, and if we can provide expert services in exchange for a revenue share, while acting in a Business Development capacity, we can shepherd indie game developers with large audiences to Polkadot, and at the same time, pay the Treasury back.
The Game Souk - Please Join Us!
As a reminder, Dot Play kicks off each day with an internal meeting at 6am ET, dedicated to longer term projects like the Experience Exchange for Gaming, aka the Playground. We also host our daily community call, The Game Souk, from 9am - 930am ET. A goal that we set for ourselves this quarter was to livestream The Game Souk for the Polkadot community and for the broader gaming community once per week. Update - it is happening! We meet every day from 9:00am ET - 9:30am ET, and we are now livestreaming the Game Souk on Thursdays straight from our X and LinkedIn accounts. Here is the regular crew.
