Sincere apologies as I have just seen this reply - will need to figure out notifications. Let me write a full response and post by EOD!

Hello, See below answers to your questions -

Are these titles being co-developed or supported directly by Mythical or by Signum Growth and do those entities hold stakes within those games?

• UGC - SpongeBob Tower Defense (Roblox)
  • Dot Play; no stakes from others. Caveat: $60,000 in funding was provided by the CTO / lead game developer of the studio, as requested by the CEO and board of the studio. The CTO provided cash funding of $60,000 for the game, and provides game developer services and services Dot Play with game data and analysis.
• UGC - Building Blox (Six Indies on Roblox)
  • Dot Play; no stakes from others
• Web3 Mobile - CM Games: Nitro Nations World Tour (on Mythos Platform)
  • Dot Play completed a credit facility with CM Games. Dot Play is the only holder of this credit facility. It is a tri-party agreement between Dot Play, CM Games (creator of Nitro Nation), and Mythical (publisher of Nitro Nation), ensuring that Dot Play /the Treasury will be in the first-position for payback from revenue generated from the game.
• Evrloot Dark Fantasy RPG (Polkadot Native)
  • Dot Play; no stakes from others
• Is there any institutional backing or strategic publishing relationship involved from the Dot Play side or other Polkadot-aligned entities?
  • Dot Play is acting as the sole games publisher for all of these Polkadot-aligned entities, except CM Games’ Nitro Nation, published by Mythical. Dot Play holds a credit facility with CM Games as described above. There may be other institutional investors behind these studios but they are unrelated to Dot Play. For CM Games, after finalizing the credit facility, which included $100,000, or a 20% allocation of the total for User Acquisition, we reached out to other potential institutional investors, e.g., Scytale, and made introductions to CM Games. We pre-negotiated a $500,000 “corridor” of User Acquisition financing, under our terms, so that others might have access to provide User Acquisition (marketing) financing under the same terms. UA funding is incredibly important for the success of mobile games. So far, a few investors are still evaluating it. We feel that we pre-negotiated attractive terms so if you happen to know investors who might be interested in financing game marketing, please send any potential investors our way.

Polkadot Integration Pathways

Additionally, for games like SpongeBob Tower Defense and the Building Blox indies on Roblox, as well as Nitro Nation on the Mythos platform — how are these projects expected to connect with the Polkadot tech stack in the future?

Thanks for this question as I receive it quite often! First Roblox - the answer is the same for all games. As we have discussed, the traditional gaming market is shrinking, with ~100,000 layoffs since COVID, while Roblox is 17 years old and is doubling every three years, with almost 100 million daily active users. It is important to understand that Roblox is a platform, not a game. In the same way that Instagram does not create any of the content on their platform (we do!) Roblox players have created 40 million games as content on the platform. Roblox players now spend 2.5x the amount of “time spent” that users spend on TikTok on a per user basis, which dwarfs other social media. Effectively, Roblox and other platforms like it are displacing what we think of as social media. Roblox is also larger than all of AAA gaming combined on a Monthly Active User basis - 2x Steam, 3x Playstation, 3x Nintendo Switch, 5x number of Xbox Consoles sold in the last decade.

And when people ask, ‘aren’t these just kids’ the answer is no. 40% of the platform’s players are over 18. The SpongeBob developer team, now in their 30s, is led by Zach Letter, Zach’s wife Megan, and Wesley Leviton, a well-established developer across genres and platforms. They are all passionate about Roblox, having grown up on the game, and Megan happens to be one of the top influencers on the platform (follow her! @meganplays). We are a part of the Roblox community and have spent years researching it. The developers with whom Dot Play aims to partner share a common ethos with Polkadot, and we believe that there is a real shot at convincing them to build in our ecosystem. At the very least, they will participate in building out our Experience Exchange for gaming in Polkadot. And if we can find the Venn diagram of developers who share our ethos with developers who are creating highly engaging games with large audiences, we can attract them to Polkadot and their large player bases will follow.

Dot Play is doing two main activities: 1) top of funnel games BD; 2) evaluating pitches by developers, both in and outside of the Polkadot community, with the goal of pulling together a set of tools that will make it easy to onboard game developers (special thanks to our Advisors); 3) building a games publisher for certain games, which is really a different form of BD that ideally pays the Treasury back as we progress.

On point #3, the structure of Dot Play as a games publisher is a bit of an experiment. Bill Laboon inspired us greatly when he pointed out that Treasury spending was occurring too quickly, facing risk of depletion. He challenged the community to find ways to make the Treasury sustainable, and we took on the challenge! In one of our team brainstorms, Eliza, a long time content creator and games developer, Keshav, an Analyst in the space, and I realized that the games publishing model could be adapted to the bounty. We can target game developers with large audiences, serve as their publisher, and create a cash flow stream that could pay the Treasury back over time, while at the same time, convincing them to come to Polkadot. Effectively, it is a self-funding BD effort.

The other ah-ha moment was our experience in bringing Mythical to Polkadot. After completing the regulatory process for Polkadot, I shifted by sights to my area of expertise - gaming companies and bringing them to Polkadot. For many reasons, bringing a large gaming company to Polkadot, unless that company is in trouble or needs capital, is very competitive and takes a long time. It took years to convince Mythical to leave Ethereum for Polkadot because many other chains wanted them, and offered them a lot more money! Then it took even more time to onboard them, as Gautam from Blockdeep, who led this technical process for Mythical, can attest.

Roblox-developed games are very different because the time to market is much shorter. While it will take time to educate these developers on Polkadot, at least they are already independent-minded with a Polkadot ethos, even if they don’t realize it yet. Also, Polkadot can already solve some of their challenges, and their time to market is shorter. We don’t want to pretend that this will happen overnight, but we have been making a lot of positive progress with the developers.

Our game publisher’s highest expense as a percentage of revenues is legal fees. This might be obvious but just to explain, each deal that we negotiate with a studio for a particular game is different, requiring a lot of legal back and forth. There will be some scale benefits as we build a “stable” of contract types. All in, we estimate that roughly 15% of the bounty will be allocated to legal fees. The smaller independent games (Building Blox) have the additional cost of developer renovations that we need to make to the games to improve them. We have mitigated this by working with Building Blox who pays for these upgrades. However, this is a benefit that we cant count on receiving longer term. So far, CM Games’ Nitro Nation has been the most expensive contract to service - it is a tri-party agreement, and also the company has run into some snags in getting the game to market, all of which require legal involvement.

Again this is an experiment, and while the model appears to be tracking with strong revenues out of the gate from SpongeBob making up for slower revenues from CM Games and Building Blox, we have not determined whether we will continue the games publisher program for the Treasury.

First, we have not had a lot of support from the community on the concept. In fact, we have had mostly negative responses. We believe this is likely due to the fact that we are attempting something that we have built high conviction in over years, but is understandably new to the Polkadot community. Also, crypto investing generally occurs over a short time frame, which doesn’t match up with the longer time frame of the gaming industry, business development generally, or of a long-term investor. Full disclosure - I have had success as a long-term builder/investor, while I am generally untrained in short term investing and uninterested in trading. It’s always good to know who you are and who you are not!

Still, we are laser-focused on creating an easy onboarding experience for game developers to Polkadot. There are many capable parties who can help us inside and outside of Polkadot, and we always prefer to work with Polkadot-native developers - DMs are open! Even though we admittedly need a better way to manage the number of inbound requests, the overwhelming interest is a high class problem to have. We will continue to shepherd the game bets we have already made in the games publisher, and on the tools side, we are getting closer to solving the jigsaw puzzle so that Polkadot can present a simple, comprehensive, go-to-market package to indie game developers, alongside a collaborative and fun landing playground of games and experiences for people when they arrive. If you are still with me, thanks for reading and let us know if anything is unclear.

AD / Dot Play Team

Agree 100% re AAA - in the deck we have a slide on not going after them. In Asia and Japan they mostly launched their own and in US/Europe, they have been burned or watched others get burned. If anything they could come toward Mythical!

Re Unreal, I know where you are coming from but the tide is shifting and Unreal has been gaining share fast with indies, due to better and better tools, which are more ubiquitous. I would advise on having both!

Web3 games haven’t really worked in our view because they attract individual players. The incentives are misaligned with long term media value, which is measured by time spent and individuals typically come to flip a token and leave. This is the reason that industry reports show that most of the tokens have gone to zero.

We instead are focusing on several ways to bring independent developers who have large audiences that they can bring with them! For example, the developer of the SpongeBob game has 9.6 million DAUs and he is now Polkadot curious, and excited to participate in our experience exchange. Another way we are focusing on bringing big games led by indies is through the pipeline of games that are coming to us because they are interested in Mythical. Bottom line is that it takes some time to lay the groundwork but the steady drumbeat is getting louder in Polkadot gaming.

Thanks so much for your comments!