PLAY Backgrounder

Mission and Vision

PLAY is a layer 0 protocol that enables AI agents to transact autonomously in games and social apps by bringing web2 games onchain. Any game, any chain, any platform.

  • PLAY is #1 in its category: turbocharging games with crypto rails, agents, and Telegram distribution.

  • PLAY is the onramp to blockchain & AI - the easiest way for traditional studios to futureproof their games.

  • ETFs are onboarding tradfi. PLAY is onboarding trad gaming. The US election changed everything. The great migration has started.

  • $PLAY is a cultural movement. Agents don't have bank accounts. Gamers want to own their in-game items. Both need games to move onchain. Join the revolution.

  • The PLAY north star is (3b,3t). The movement doesn’t stop until 3B gamers onchain, 3T agents ingame.

(3b,3t)

  • Autonomous agents and human gamers spend their days in game worlds and social networks. But they remain shackled.

  • Agents don't have bank accounts. Gamers want to own their in-game items and make payments on crypto rails. Both need games to move onchain.

  • PLAY is bringing traditional games onchain with a tech stack that enables abstracted in-game wallets, onchain game items, onchain payments, and AI dev tools, which allows agents and gamers to own and transact freely within game worlds.

  • PLAY allows these onchain games to be played directly within social apps like Telegram, YouTube, and Discord, bringing autonomous agents and transactions into every social network.

  • PLAY lets agents and humans live freely inside games.

Product

  • Tooling: A turnkey solution to plug blockchain and AI into any game in days, not years

  • Distribution: ‘pump fun’ for publishing fun onchain games directly in social apps like Telegram, Discord, and YouTube

  • Launching games on every platform: Apple & Android, Mobile & PC, Unity & Unreal, EVM, SVM & Move

  • Abstracted everything: wallets, chains, accounts, co-pilots

  • The only tech stack needed to launch a game economy, monetization, UA, and UGC

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.

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”).

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