As you might know, my day job is game localization so it's a great pleasure to review for the first time a game-related blockchain project. The gaming industry has already surpassed Hollywood in terms of revenue, yet there are problems that need to be solved. And this is the purpose of EON that stands for Entertainment Open Network.
The Idea
EON seeks to create a decentralized digital game distribution protocol that will help developers to spend their marketing budgets more efficiently and attract new users more easily. Currently, game developers have to give a large share of their revenue to game publishing platforms that take care of user acquisition and placing advertising. Blockchain is capable of removing these middlemen, thus empowering the developers to spend their funds on further development. Moreover, developers often face problems when they access various local markets because sometimes they need to integrate with the existing local providers, which only adds up to their costs. All of these leads to problems with user acquisition.
EON want to enable developers to accept payments in cryptocurrencies and provide them with the availability to exchange crypto for fiat. Another advantage that EON is offering is the ability to attract new gamers easily. Since all users on EON will have unique addresses, their behavior will be traceable and the developers will have an opportunity to promote their games to players who have similar tastes, while players will benefit from an opportunity to discover more new games.
EON Protocol for decentralized games (dgames) will help run games on public blockchains, support in-game payments in various cryptocurrencies and exchange in-game digital assets (like unique items). The latter will be possible though the use of non-fungible tokens (which I mentioned in one of my latest posts and which are believed to be "the future" of tokens by some crypto visionaries).
The Technology
EON will use an alloy of on-chain and off-chain architecture. Only the data that needs to be audited will be stored on the blockchain, while the rest will be stored on a centralized server. EON can be deployed on numerous blockchains, so it can easily run on Ethereum or EOS. Developers will be able to integrate into EON using an SDK. It will also help to adjust rewards and introduce support for cryptocurrency payments. Initially, EON will support blockchain and indie games with the idea to start supporting PC and mobile games in future.
The Token
EON token will be called EOT (the EON project will also be rebranded to EOT to avoid confusion with another EON token on EOS). Developers will be able to stake EOT to use EON protocol, gamers will use it as payment and protocol users will use the token to vote for decisions within the EON ecosystem.
The total EOT token supply is 2.1bn and it will be distributed as follows:
Thirty per cent of tokens will be sold to the public. EON's hard cap is $15m, with $5m already collected during the private pre-sale.
The Team and Advisors
EON is yet another project with a young but ambitious team with experience at major companies. Founder Aron Lyu is a Stanford and University of Southern California (USC) graduate and worked for Pebble Tech (first smartwatch company in the world) and one of the best VCs in China Morningside Venture Capital. Co-Founder Tao Hu spend almost two years with Facebook-owned Oculus VR. Another Co-Founder Yu Sun spent two years as Software Engineer in Facebook. The team has also been behind CryptoAlpaca, number 2 blockchain game, lesser-known than CryptoKitties but still having more than 200k registered users.
The team is advised by Dr. Mike Zyda, Director at USC GamePipe Laboratory, Anshul Dhawan, former executive at one of the largest game developers Zynga, and Feng Li, a partner at Chinese investment company IDG Capital.
The Product
EON Protocol is expected to be integrated with CryptoAlpaca in Q2-Q3 2018, with the full version expected in 2019.
EON has already partnered with Merculet, a recent project in the user attention sector that successfully collected its hardcap within minutes. According to EON's website, the team also partnered with QuarkChain, though there are no additional information about this partnership.
Conclusion
Although, game projects are believed to be less profitable than blockchains, EON is actually an infrastructure project that aims to create a universal protocol for blockchain games that start to emerge on the surface. The team looks capable and enthusiastic about what they do, and advisors qualified enough to make the project develop in the right direction. EON has been able to grow a huge community of over 100k members (for which they had to create two Telegram channels) and successfully completed the seed round of investment. If the team manages to onboard dgame developers successfully, EON can become the first platform for dgame developers and dgamers. Future partnerships will also play an important role in creating more publicity for EON Protocol. All in all, it's good to see such projects as EON emerging as game companies will inevitably start paying attention to blockchain very soon, with Machine Zone having already announced their own blockchain project.
More info about EON:
EON website: http://eontoken.io
EON Twitter: https://twitter.com/EonToken
EON Whitepaper: http://eontoken.io/EON-Whitepaper.pdf
This article is not a buy/sell recommendation. I am not a financial adviser and you should do your own research before investing in any project.
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for other reviews and feel free to upvote, resteem and follow me!