A few days ago we did a review on Chimaera, a blockchain gaming platform. That perked my interest in blockchain gaming projects and I went on a search to see if there were any interesting blockchain gaming projects on the horizon and I found one that I want to introduce to you guys, that is Bountie.
There is a video link at the bottom for those who prefer an audio version
As a gamer, have you ever dreamt of being a professional gamer? Or even if you didn’t think you didn’t think you were good enough to be professional, have you ever dreamt of being paid for a game that you’re really good at? To earn some money from being good at a game? Bountie is the project that aims to fulfil that dream and help gamers to make a living while playing their favourite games. To find out how Bountie does that, keep reading this post!
Currently online gaming is raking in an annual revenue of $108.9 billion. And it’s increasing by $7.8 billion every year, so about 8% growth. Asia makes up 47% of the world’s revenue, with Asia Pacific and China accounting for about half of Asia’s revenue.
The main problems that gaming industry faces are:
1 Lack of monetisation. So only professionals can make a living and the rest of gamers who spend hundred of hours getting good at the game, are unable to get any sort of monetary gains for their skills.
2 Currently the top 3% of the gaming community receives 90% of the investment and prize money in esports.
3 There is no gamer search engine, meaning no data base e.g. linkedin for professional bodies to find new and talented gamers.
4 There are also not enough competitions held for people to participate in most games end up having short life spans of 3-6 months before people move on to a new game.
5 Lastly, due to increase automation and AI in the gaming field, there is less career opportunities for those with a passion for gaming.
Bountie project was created in Singapore in July 2017 to try and solve all these problems and already they have two partnerships, one with MSI the big gaming PC and laptop brand, as well as DXRacer.
Bountie has quite a few different ways to help gamers earn money.
The first is of course tournaments. They will be organising a lot of tournaments basically weekly tournaments. These will be:
Buy in tournaments where teams have to pay a nominal fee to participate and this goes to a pool which will be the prize money.
There will also be product tournaments e.g. a Logitech Cup etc… where winners are rewarded with sponsored products.
And there will be a free to play tournament with no buy-in or fee needed. Winners of these tournaments will be rewarded Bountie token and enter a ladder to compete with winners from other regions etc..
There will also a way for teams made up of friends, to challenge other pre-made teams out of a tournament, in just a once-off match and earn Bountie tokens when they win.
Individual players and teams can also participate in leaderboard rankings and quests for additional rewards. There will be multiple leader boards e.g. monthly leaderboards, tournament leaderboards etc…
There will also be daily quests (e.g. getting 50 kills, or winning a game daily etc…) to earn Bountie tokens easily.
If a gamer wanted to take a break and not play, but just watch other people’s games and learn, they can also sign up to a referee. Referees are the curators of the match and will earn between 1-3% of the pot money. And some games will have more than one referees depending on the pot size, MMR of players, as well as match type, so basically the higher level games with bigger stakes will likely have more than one referee.
The referees are like nodes in a blockchain project who help to promote decentralisation and fairness. For that reason, referees cannot choose which game they want to referee, it is a random selection.
Another feature they have which is similar to many blockchain projects is the reputation system. So you know how in games like DOTA e.g. you have players who rage and are toxic in speech, or they troll or intentionally feed? Every game has tried to put measures in place to stop raging and trolling, but no game has succeeded. But Bountie will very likely succeed because your reputation will potentially affect the amount of money you get. And every game that matters will have a referee on board observing the entire game, the chat everything. So for the first time in gaming history, we might actually achieve a troll free environment and all gamers would go hallelujah to that!
If you do things that earn you bad reputation points, firstly it will be publicly viewed by everyone, and also some bounties like tournament participation (which is where the bulk of money is earned by gamers) as well as special promotion packages.
In contrary, players with good reputation level will have access to special promotions with monetary gains.
If you’re interested in trying to be a pro, Bounty will be opening their very own registrations for their own gaming teams this year, in DOTA 2 as well as Counterstrike Global Offensive. And they plan to have more gaming teams in the future.
The last thing to say about gaming rewards is all rewards from games will be paid out immediately after the match ends through the means of smart contracts. This is the only platform that offers lay gamers a chance to earn money and even be a pro. This is going to so popular amongst gamers. Il be using this platform myself!
- Besides the actual, game there are a few other ways that a gamers can earn money, and that is through being a content creator.
Gamers can upload videos to Bountie platform who will reward them with Bountie tokens and merchandise in return for their time and effort.
Video content doesn’t just have to be gameplay like twitchTV, they will accept any content that is education, entertaining, inspiring, creative and positive.
- And there will also be a referral program to share Bountie with your friends.
Finally there are a couple of other positive features not token related:
There will be a gaming profile datapool. Think of this like the Linkedin for Gamers, where gamers with good scores will be recorded and teams or professional bodies can find potential talent from this data pool.
The ping zapping support. Bounty recognises that poor ping can affect game play, and they will be partnered with providers such as (WTFast, Ping Zapper, Battle Ping etc..) to provide pinging solutions, but this service will costs a some Bountie tokens. The cost will not be high, only a fraction of what the player could win.
So this project isn’t just monetising gaming, it is actually trying to improve the gaming experience by incentivising a positive environment with the reward system and helping with poor ping.
Team
This is the team behind the project.
They have 3 co-founders:
The first one who is also the CEO is Lex Na, who is also co-founder of a boutique Digital Agency and a couple of e-commerce businesses. He has experience in the tech industry for the past 10 years and he himself is an avid gamer and previously ranked top 10 in Warcraft 3 ladder games.
Darren lee is another co-founder and their COO, he heads Fixx digital, one of Singapore’s leading Digital Agencies and has spear headed projects for Clients such as DBS Bank, Changi Airport and Singapore Airlines.
The third co-founder is Jose He who is also their CPO. He has founded a pet technology startup, has more than 10 years experience as a senior business development strategist.
You can go through the other profiles on the website in your own time. It’s a very big team, that’s well balanced. Very Singaporean based team, generally young and not much blockchain experience or international ties. However, they definitely know the gaming scene and are successful in their own resumes.
Advisors
These are their advisors. It’s an impressive team.
There is Peter Sin, who is a frequent speaker and panellist on forums and seminars on cryptocurrencies. He is also the co-head of digital currency subcommittee of Singapore Cryptocurrency and blockchain industry association and the co-founder of Singapore Bitcoin Club, the country’s largest crypto trading educational community.
Ferdinand Gutierrez is the director of marketing, S.E.Asian for Twitch. He is also a previous general manager at Ogilvy.
And you can go through the rest of the resumes, but they do provide blockchain oversight and potentially some good industry connections.
Roadmap
This is their roadmap. It shows 2 things, their plans for expansion and their platform development.
Their first MVP (minimum viable product) is due in June/ July, so that’s actually before their ICO even finishes and quite soon. So that’s good. That will be Bountie v 1.0. And Bountie 2.0 is expected to be completed by Q2 of 2019.
In terms of region expansion, they plan to launch in Singapore and Malaysia in this quarter, Q2 of 2018. And expand to Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines (so the rest of S.E.Asia) by Q3 and then head to China, India and Korea by Q4. So they are pretty much planning to cover the whole Asia by 2018 which is the next 7 months, if they do manage to keep on track, that should be a lot of announcements and momentum for the project.
Finally we come to the token sale.
They have 200 million tokens in cap, of which 150million (75%) will be sold throughout the ICO. This is quite high. Usually it is around 40-50% with the rest distributed among the team, the advisors, and community and project reserves. In this case, there is no reserves and the remaining 25% is split 10% to the team and 15% to the advisors.
The team have announced in their whitepaper that their share of tokens will be locked for 12 months, so that’s always a good sign that they are confident of success. Because if the project was to fail before that, they would get nothing.
There will be 3 phases to the pre-ICO which begins on the 11th of June which is 19 days away. Each phase will have 15%, 10% and 5% discount each. So that’s a bit small of a discount, but at least it will prevent or discourage token dump when the coins hit exchange.
The pre-ICO phases will end by mid July and be immediately followed by public ICO with no time lag which is unusual and the whole thing will end by the end of July.
The reason why there is usually a lag between pre-ICO and ICO is because some of the pre-ICO funds are usually used for marketing before the ICO. And that extra marketing as we saw in Blue Whale ICO recently can really help to bolster awareness. Blue Whale telegram group grew almost 20x with the additional marketing between pre-ICO and ICO. So it’ll be interesting to see how Bounties go with their ICO.
That being said, Bounties already has a telegram group of over 23k members which is honestly very big for this stage of the project. An average new blockchain project at this stage would usually be sitting around 3k members only.
Now, in terms of token price, 4000 tokens are worth 1 Eth which at the current price of ETH USD $695, that works out to be $0.17 and a total hard cap of $26 million. That is a very acheievable hard cap, in fact I would say that is a very low marketcap and would make this project very attractive. Play2Live another mainstream gaming blockchain project recently raised a $30 million hardcap ICO, so I think there is the demand for such projects and Bounties can certainly raise $26 million. Also I think in the short-long term moving forward, there is no way this project will just be worth $26 million. I think it will be worth a whole lot more, potentially even a billion dollar project. That would mean close to 40x gains if it ever got there.
In conclusion, I really like this project. I think Bountie is not working around current mainstream gaming systems, it is actually inventing a whole new economy for mainstream gaming that will monetise and decentralise gaming profits to distribute it to the average player. That’s actually the spirit of Decentralisation, which is to remove middle man and share the profits with the regular people so that regular people have a chance to gain wealth too. So I really like that aspect of bountie. Also I think it will be very popular amongst Asian gamers when it comes out, I mean, if you’re already spending hundreds of hours playing gaming, you have nothing to lose by joining bounty and earning some crypto. In fact, as the market themselves, you may even end up earning enough to make a living! So I think many gamers will give it a go, myself included.
That’s it for this review of Bountie. I hope you found this video helpful. Always remember that crypto investing is high risk and investing in ICOs especially pre-ICOs is super high risk. None of this is professional advice, so always do your own homework and make your own decisions.
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