Developer teams and studios can apply for”up front” token grants prior to a game’s release, which in turn can be used to fund their internal game mechanics:
Minting NFTs, and creating their own relevant “play to earn” and “create to earn” mechanics with incentives, in each title.
Create branded game currency derived from the $PLAY token to be used to reward players in their specific game
For example, a PvP golf game that qualifies could use the token grant to fund achievement rewards by players and golf leagues; fund loyalty programs, rewarding players for inviting high-quality friends to the game; even fund IP tie-ins with golf themed “merch” by giving the IP holder an advance against future cosmetic sales in the game.
The dev team can also decide, at their discretion, to hold their tokens, to fund investment into the game, by covering engineering costs.
Additionally, PLAY may opt to to provide “backend grants”- these are token issuances to dev teams whose games have met certain performance benchmarks, deemed markers of a valuable ecosystem contribution:
Games with retention metrics in the top decile of the ecosystem.
Games with relatively high ARPDAU/ARPPU in the ecosystem.
Games with highly efficient customer acquisition costs.
Games with high install rates.
Dev teams building software solutions, more broadly, which are then shared with the ecosystem may also qualify for “up front” and “backend” grants. For example:
A dev team building a conversion tool to allow avatar content to be exported from the PLAY ecosystem to third-party ecosystems (e.g. Roblox, Minecraft).
A team working on more efficient “off chain” transaction processing, which reduces “gas fees” system wide.