PLAY Backgrounder
Mission and Vision
Last updated
Mission and Vision
Last updated
PLAY (former READYgg) aims to bring the first billion web2 game players into web3, by super serving game publishers and game players with all the necessary methods to make migration to web3 gaming from web2 gaming, simple, seamless, and financially rewarding for all participants.
This is achieved through two innovations:
Layer3 Software as a Service (Saas) experience for game developers, enabling them to implement all the necessary elements to bring games on-chain, without players having to exit the game at any point to complete their web3 onboarding. These solutions include Unity and Unreal SDKs to simplify developer integration with the blockchain. Details on the methods and parameters provided by PLAY’s SDK and Layer3 services can be found in the company’s technical documentation.
Layer0 interoperability: Enabling complete “account abstraction” for players and publishers, so that game assets, player identities and inventories, can easily migrate between Layer1 and Layer2 blockchain providers, without any friction in the publisher or player game experience. This includes interoperability of smart contracts between blockchains.
With an initial focus on mobile-first technology, PLAY’s tools and solutions reduce barriers of adoption with an untapped “mobile gaming” demographic for blockchain-based gaming.
By simplifying accessibility to small dev teams, allowing creation tools to work on low-end mobile devices, and innovating regulatory in-app store transactions - be it in Indonesia, Philippines, USA or Brazil- using PLAY, anyone can play, create, sell and buy on the blockchain, even from their low-end devices.
The use case and design for PLAY emphasized characteristics that are naturally compatible with the Web 3 philosophy of a distributed, cross-platform, interoperable ecosystem of games. Notably, PLAY set out to solve core problems found by many dev teams and studios:
Managing Social Game Economies: Enabling the rapid deployment of casual PvP multiplayer games, with all the necessary infrastructure to manage players and the components of a mature social game economy. (See “Ecosystem Features” below for details.)
Cross game interoperability: The ability of a player to move across games, with the same player identity, friends lists, and acquired assets, such as “cosmetics” (skins, accessories, clothing) and “achievements”, unified in one persistent profile. At the discretion of the developer, the player’s avatar and cosmetics acquired in other games can be loaded in their game.
Enabling a User Generated Content marketplace (UGC): Central to the success of many “free to play” games is the deployment of a thriving UGC marketplace- from modding game levels and game items, to creating avatar cosmetics, with creators being rewarded for the effort by putting the items up for sale, with the host game receiving a portion of proceeds. The more inter-operable, cross-platform, cross-game the marketplace, the more it benefits all participants: developers hosting the market in their games with marketplace commissions, creators generating sellable content maximizing their reach, and players who purchase unique items finding an ever wider variety of virtual goods, with the option of re-selling them to other players in the future.
Rapid deployment of backend game services: A persistent pain point for dev teams is deployment of gaming backend services (aka “dev ops”) and the ongoing maintenance of these services. The cost in terms of time and/or money raises a material barrier to access for smaller dev teams in deploying multi-player game experiences bound to an in-game virtual goods economy. PLAY’s services can be deployed in under 10 working days, and require minimal ongoing dev ops support. Approximately 80% of mobile dev teams are under 3 people, representing 90% of games in production, who with PLAY’s services are now unblocked from creating and maintaining complex social game economies. Even for larger dev teams and publishers, building new in-house technologies and infrastructure presents significant operational challenges and costs. Having an established infrastructure such as PLAY, simplifies integration, onboarding and launch, leaving internal teams to concentrate on building and scaling games in production.
This "sizzle reel" provides an overview of core PLAY functions:
By lowering the barrier to adoption, PLAY aligned its technical IP with the company’s core mission of democratizing access to game creation. Moreover, the company’s technical path aligned with a philosophy of cooperation.
By enabling interoperability across games, PLAY advances the notion that building an ecosystem of compatible games will, overall, benefit all the participants in the ecosystem:
For Developers: More revenue and better retention and acquisition through collaboration:
Players are more likely to purchase in-game content knowing that NFTs can transport across titles, increasing ARPPU for the dev teams. In early tests with NFT-backed game objects, purchasable with in-game currency, participating games saw a lift in ARPPU from $4 to $23. This reflects the shift in spending behavior when a player sees a game object as ownable property (an “investment”) versus a consumable that has no resale value.
Players are more likely to try new games, knowing their profile, player identity, friends list, and inventory can be accessed across participating games, reducing “CPIs” for dev teams. These dynamics fall under the rubric of “network effects”: The value of any one game increases the more games are cooperating.
For Players:
Hopping into a new game, and playing with existing friends is made much easier by having a transportable profile and friends list. Investing in a universal player profile rewards the effort, as the same profile appears game to game, enabling longer-term rewards and achievements across the ecosystem. And as noted above, for players, the incentive to own game objects- as opposed to consuming or “renting” them- opens a pathway to myriad “play to earn” mechanics.
For Creators:
Simple to use authoring tools, a quick path to selling created items, across a marketplace that goes from game to game, with a mechanism to fairly reward all the stakeholders in the ecosystem for the effort that’s easy to use and understand.
When a creator can bind an object to a property right through an NFT, this dramatically raises the perceived value of the item- and increases the probability that creators can be fairly remunerated for their efforts, broadening and deepening the marketplace of virtual goods.
These principles in PLAY, and the technical IP supporting them, exist independent of blockchain-based protocols. The promise of “Web 3” is an existential transition from “Web 2”, notably a shift from walled gardens with proprietary protocols (aka “platforms”) to environments with shared ownership over the underlying protocols (aka “ecosystems”).