Etherplay 2018 Update

Hello All!

It has been a while and it is time for an update.

Some of you might not have even experienced it but after a year live on the Ethereum mainnet we paused the competitions in November 2017 as the player volume was too low to sustain the platform. We decided to make a relaunch mid 2018 by first finding third party game developers to build on our platform to provide a wide selection of quality games. We released our sdk (still available here: http://etherplay.io/documentation/) and attended GDC 2018 with that objective in mind.

Unfortunately this turned out to be more difficult than we thought and around May we started to think on what Etherplay should bring next. We experimented on various front and explored among other the idea of blockchain game economies minted by central servers. While this sounds out of the ethos of crypto in general and a different direction than the original transparent skill game platform we were building, it brings fundamental benefits to players that should not be ignored. So much that we believe it will be one of the way the new generation will have their feet wet in crypto waters. We will not go in details here but the idea is simply to reward players with tokens redeemable on the blockchain with all the interoperability and other benefits that it entails… Such simple solution allows players to freely exchange such tokens and allow game developers like us to use different revenue mechanisms without having a central role in the in-game items economy.

We started to design how such game would work but with our experience with skill games it will come at no surprise that skill will play an important role. We are still in the prototyping phase and so we will not be announcing dates here.

We just wanted to remind all of you that Etherplay is still alive and continue to explore the blockchain gaming frontier. We also did not stop thinking on the original Etherplay concept of weekly competitions and have plan to bring that back in the future. The crypto (and especially crypto game) market has evolved significantly in the last 2 years and it might make sense to still wait a bit before launching again.

In any case we will let you know, so stay tuned! (For those not subscribed yet, register your email at http://etherplay.io)

By the way, for those who participated in our live competition during 2017, we will make sure to reward you in some ways to thank you for participating in one of the earliest crypto-gaming platform. Hopefully you still have access to your account as we have no other ways to identify you :)

We hope you had a great Christmas (if that is your thing) and wish you an happy 2019 Gregorian year!

The Etherplay Team.