March Update

After our successful launch on January 3rd we kept getting busier and busier. As a result we did not share any info on our launch and beyond. We would like here to correct that and offer you an update of what we have been doing and where Etherplay is heading to.

The Last 2 months

In the last 2 months we learned a lot by looking at and interacting with our players. We published several updates to our first game to keep player engaged and gathered feedback from all of you. We would like to thank all our players who participated and played our games. This was so great to see all these transactions and game replays!

During its non stop operation the platform ran a total of 10 competitions which rewarded the best players with more than 55 ether. In total we had 514 unique addresses of which 265 have registered a nickname that played more than 5000 game sessions totalizing almost 8000 transactions. The number of active players declined significantly from launch but this was expected as we did not run any marketing campaign nor did we artificially increased the jackpot.

Instead we focused on improving our platform and bringing more games to it. We have updated our website where you will soon see a selection of games : http://etherplay.io

More Games

We also started to open our platform to third party game developers. We are working on streamlining the process of adding new games so it become easy to integrate with our system without the need to know about Ethereum.

We are now reaching out to existing game developers. If you are one of them do not hesitate to contact us. We think the design space of skill games has not be explored much and there is opportunity to innovate here. Games on Etherplay allows and even benefits from regular updates similar to the freemium model so episodic or level based games are welcome.

We are still building our own games and plan to continue doing so. To not make you wait any longer we already launched “catchme”, an updated version of our game available during the beta. You can play it there : http://etherplay.io/game/catchme. We are also working on another game and it should come very soon. Stay tuned!

Mobile Games

We have also shifted our focus on mobile compatible games. These will come later as we did not expect to see Ethereum on mobile so soon but the work by Status (https://status.im) and Leth (http://leth.inzhoop.com) is promising. We have been experimenting with them and we look forward to the time when our games will be played from anywhere via mobile phones!

Behind The Scenes

Apart from working on games we have also improved our platform so it is easier to inspect and to work with on our side.

In order to analyse the transaction data, we have been working on a simple tool to facilitate gathering and querying the transaction data from the Ethereum blockchain inspired by Ethslurp (http://www.ethslurp.com/). We will opensource it when ready.

We also reported few bugs on Metamask thanks to our players. We might be one of the most demanding dapp out there and we are glad to contribute this way. On that note we are grateful to all the ethereum browser out there without which Etherplay would not exist. Thanks to them!

We are also thinking of new features for our platform to add more depth to what players can do. The idea of an Etherplay token that would provide players perks and creating a market for replays are among these ideas. Nothing concrete yet though.

Growth

As all of this take time and resources we are also thinking at our company growth. On that side we just recently been accepted to the Elevator UK accelerator programme. See more details here : http://www.elevatoruk.com/accelerator/global-domination-accelerator-application/ . This is a really great opportunity for us and we look forward to start working with them. This will hopefully help us to grow and reach a more mature state.

EDCON

We presented Etherplay at one of the meetup in Paris during Edcon weekend and we were thrilled by the positive response. While many were intrigued by the use case, they understood the idea and benefits behind a transparent skill game platform. We also had few suggestions. One from Vitalik regarding a potential method to incentivize bots to let us and our players know whether bots managed to beat human players. We are investigating its possibility among the other anti-bot technique with have in mind.

The Future

The last 2 months were very exciting for us and we are even more excited for the future. We look forward to see how Etherplay is going to grow!

You are welcome to join our slack to know more and get in contact with us : http://slack.etherplay.io