The Defold Foundation receives a generous donation from OP Games

Announcements
#1

We have received a very generous donation from OP Games to fund development of the Defold game engine. The donation was raised by OP Games through the Arcadians NFT community of gamers and collectors.

More info here: The Defold Foundation receives a generous donation from OP Games

There are concerns about NFTs and crypto currencies and we’d like to take this opportunity to address these and share our view on the matter:

When it comes to NFTs there’s been a lot of bad examples of quick cash grabs and digital theft and we do not support this in any shape or form. This is not one of those situations. OP Games is giving a substantial amount of the funds raised from the sale to open game engines (Defold, Godot and Phaser), game dev communities (JS13KGames among others) and Web 3 accelerators programs. The donation is significant and it will be of great help to the Defold Foundation as we continue to work on Defold in the years to come.

The environmental impact of crypto currency mining is a concern we share with many others, but there is a shift happening where some crypto currencies such as Ethereum are moving from “proof of work” with high energy consumption to “proof of stake” with a much lower energy consumption. Ethereum is moving to this new model in 2022 so it’s a welcome change that is happening soon.

Setting aside the concerns of NFT art theft and costly crypto mining and looking ahead to a future where these problems have been greatly reduced, we do believe in and support the vision of a much more decentralised web where power is shifted in favour of creators and players and away from big tech companies and other gatekeepers. The underlying technology, “the blockchain”, is one way to help facilitate this.

One popular means of funding development of games is through crowd funding. It is common for such crowd funding campaigns to also include different physical or digital perks given to those supporting the project at different tiers. This whole process of funding development of your next game could be moved to the blockchain and the digital perks could be sold and stored as NFTs. Your supporters can use their digital perks in the game and eventually sell them to other players.

A potential expansion of this concept, and since the digital items and other perks are on the blockchain and not in a central database that goes offline when the developer loses interest, is that the items may be used in sequels or in games created by other developers. This possibility of NFTs used as building blocks for new games can open up many exciting new possibilities for game developers. Not to mention the benefit to players that are able to bring their purchased digital items to other games.

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#3

Is there some kind of confidential contract involved, or can you go into detail about the strings attached to the donation?

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#4

It’s Great!

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#5

There are no strings attached. No contract has been signed. The money is in our account and we are free to do whatever we want with it. With that said, we (read: me) will spend time experimenting with some of the blockchain tech itself as we have very little experience ourselves. The outcome of our experiments will be shared openly. When we know a bit more I see potential for running a game jam or similar activity.

Also, once we have some results, there are probably opportunities for you guys to get involved through the OP Games game accelerator program to fund your games or in other ways get help integrating blockchain tech.

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#6

at the cost of the planet

Here you can see costs related to various ways of exchanging value.

Blockchain and everything built on top of it is inevitable. So if you do care about the planet you should educate people about the real information and which options are the best as far as things like energy consumption goes. Not saying you’re doing this but just the general atmosphere of people who are critical of blockchain tech: in general it is damaging to spread emotional misinformation for quick wins when people figure out they’ve been lied to about something / misled they may end up less sympathetic to your reasoning. All of this tech is not equal, not all the same thing (like it may make more sense to ban the far too wasteful options than to try and ban them all), do not have hard associations even if the terms often get mixed up. Things like NFTs may seem silly to many of us (and we could joke that we can just right click and save as) but fact is that they will be adopted by big game developers and will become normalized with normal consumers. It will be a multi billion dollar industry all on its own with many secondary markets showing up to support it. So again I think if the aim is conservatism toward the planet the aim should be guiding toward the best options and not futility trying to put a full stop to it/FUDing it up like some are.

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#7

Well it’s not like the planet is doing well or starting from 0 carbon footprint, so adding more fire only because it’s the new toy in the store doesn’t really seem like a smart move to me.

I do agree that education is needed though and I hope the best tech for the planet will pave the way rather than the more exploited.

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#8

I think you are right, but really, only time can tell. With concern about global warning ever growing, more and more potential users might be put off and so at least hamper the growth of this technology unless it manages to drastically reduce its footprint. Also, NTFs did take a dive recently, so, at least if it comes to the art market, investors and collectors aren’t convinced yet.
But it would be mad to ignore a technology that has the potential of really lifting off in the future, so Defold looking into it is a good thing.
@bryanrieger, you have changed your name, haven’t you? Because of this issue? It is none of my business, but it would be sad if you did what your new name indicates.

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#9

AMAZING!
So happy I’m investing my time in Defold when I see news like that.

You’re doing the right move with embracing “web3” (I don’t like this buzzword, but at the moment it stands for crypto and decentralisation). It will bring new and better opportunities for game devs to fund and structure games.

Future is bright!

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