Cartridge-Swap

Demo

About

The problem it solves # Current game marketplaces are permissioned and impose hefty taxes Developers today need to rely on centralized game marketplaces for distribution and convenience. Most of these platforms are permissioned and impose heavy taxes (the industry average is 30%) on game sales. Indie game developers are particularly impacted by these platforms as they lack the capital and don’t have the necessary bargaining power. We believe these platforms greatly restrict creative freedom across the game industry # Cartridge-Swap aims to democratize game development and foster aligned game communities Cartridge-Swap allows developers to permissionlessly submit their game to the platform and sell cartridges to players. Game developers can select their preferred sales models such as selling cartridges on a bonding curve. A developer can thus allocate upside to cartridge owners, benefiting early users and incentivizing discovery. Furthermore, fees from trading can be split between the game creator, and a treasury governed by a game's cartridge owners (e.g. can fund game jams). This enables the bootstrapping of early game communities (reduces the cold start problem), and can incentivize player contribution (core game development, modding, etc). We believe this can help blur the lines between game developers and players, enabling frictionless creativity # Cartridge-Swap is built on top of RIVES, an onchain fantasy console By owning cartridges, players can prove their game scores (using Rives.io) and enshrine their scores on an onchain leaderboard. For example, if I speedrun DOOM I can now prove to the world that I was the first to achieve a certain score. RIVES is built on top of Cartesi's reproducible RISC-V VM, making it compatible with existing games/traditional languages. It has a well-defined environment that enables the rapid onboarding of Indie developers. Now, Cartridge Swap enables anyone to frictionlessly build and monetize a game on top of RIVES without needing permission

How it's made

Challenges we ran into The project was really interesting to build, but the way we implemented it was ambitious and tough to get done even considering it's a week-long hackathon. One day we tried reaching sponsors at the venue and couldn't find most of them. It would be nice to have sponsor booths or tables in which we could reach a devad to discuss if our idea makes sense, give tips on how to implement, better understand their tech, etc. Wifi at the venue wasn't great but it was good that switches were provided. Other projects such as XMTP and Story protocol were difficult to integrate, so we ended up skipping these. We ran into a lot of issues along the way but came out persistent!