PLAYKEY — ICO Analysis

OVERVIEW

• Name: Playkey
• Ticker symbol: PKT
• Project type: Blockchain based cloud gaming.
• Company: Playkey, moscow, Russia. 2,8 M$ in previous funding.
• Website: https://playkey.io/
• Whitepaper:https://cdn.playkey.net/img/playkeynet/ico/Whitepaper.pdf
• ICO: Pre-sale: 26 September-October 25 ; ICO: 1st November-30th November
• Hard cap: 40.000 ETH
• Hard cap: 240.000 ETH
• Token: PKT, ERC20
• Pre-sales Bonus structure: 60–150 ETH: 25% ; 151–500 ETH: 30% ; 501 ETH and more: 35%
• Bonus structure: <10%sold +15% ; <20%sold +12% ; ❤0%sold +10% ; <40%sold +7.5% ; <50%sold +5% ; <60%sold +3.8% ; <70%sold +2.5% ; <80%sold +1.3% ;
• Open source: yes
• Team size: 6 Core / 42 Overall
• Developer team active: Not available
• Telegram: +315 users
• Twitter: +512 followers
• Reddit: +24 redditors
• Facebook: +2172 likes

Industry Metrics

The Gaming industry is a huge market accounting for about to 2.2 Billion gamers around the world. As of 2017, The industry is valuated at 109 Billion dollars.The actual challenge is the growing need for more computational power to follow up with the fast paced games development. As a matter of fact, an estimate of 81% of gamers can’t play new PC titles.Industry leaders such as Electronic arts and Ubisoft already consider streaming / Cloud gaming as the next step in the industry.

Concept

Playkey is a game virtualization service that shares the powerful home computers of blockchain enthusiast (miners) with gamers around the world. The service caters for gamers who are not able to launch the latest AAA PC game titles due to their low end and/or old computers.

Use cases

The primary usage of Playkey is to provide a decentralized infrastructure for miners (more effective, stable and less risky than crypto mining) and gamers (no need to spend excessive amounts of money on PC/console — this solution is one tenth of the price, plus it is plug and play).This said, the team plans on implementing it in other use cases such as :

GAME DEVELOPMENT AND PUBLISHING : Support of initiatives for game developers and publishers to incentivize the creation of new games with the direct support of the gaming community.

MARKETING DECENTRALIZATION : It will provide a wide range of tools for miners to attract users to their GPU-powered machines (for example, a web service, a mobile application).

E-SPORTS AND LIVE STREAMS : Will develop cybersports initiatives, providing gamers and teams with a wide range of fair and engaging competitions. Additionally, the team will develop services to support and enhance the game streaming experience for both gamers and streamers.

Competitors

There are several players in the industry already providing cloud gaming services but none have yet announced the adoption of a blockchain protocol to do so. Among these competitors : Nvidia Geoforce Now, Shadow, Playstation Now, LiquidSky, … .

Financial analysis

The company was founded in 2012, counts around 42 employees and recently raised 2.8 Million dollars from Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF).By the autumn of 2017 Playkey has about 60,000 paying customers per month. Subscription is about $10, so their monthly income is about $600,000 a month. That is, the team already has a well-functioning business that brings money. They need ICO because they want to scale at a fast pace, and this requires large funds. More specifically, Playkey is very ambitious and intends to raise $150 million.

Tokens

PKT is a cryptocurrency that will be used to buy and sell cloud gaming subscriptions as well as other Playkey services and future products. It will be the unit of account for all economic transactions within the Playkey Ecosystem, and will be used as a basis for interaction with other digital services.PKT is a fixed-supply cryptocurrency. It is fractionally divisible and long-term non-inflationary. Units of PKT are fungible and transferable, and they are expected to trade on cryptocurrency exchanges. PKT will be implemented on the public Ethereum blockchain in accordance with the ERC20 (Ethereum Token Standard).

Distribution

In its ICO, PLAYKEY is going to distribute 100.000.000 PKT Tokens as following : PKT Tokens sold 60% — 60.000.000 ; PKT Tokens for the Team 20% — 20.000.000 ; PKT Tokens for the Foundation 12,5 % — 12.500.000 ; PKT Tokens for the advisers 6% — 6.000.000 ; PKT Tokens for bounty — 1.5 % — 1.500.000.

Budget Allocation

The ICO Funds will be distributed as following : 35% PLAYKEY expanding team, 25% marketing, 20% technology Infrastructure, 15% PLAYKEY current team, 5% operational costs.

Team

Playkey has spent 4 years on developing gaming technology that is already available in EMEA, Eastern US and CIS countries on PLAYKEY.NET and used by 1M gamers every month on 100+ GPU powered Servers in London, Frankfurt and Moscow.The core team is composed of the 6 following profiles :

EGOR GURJEV : Co-founder, CEO. Previously Founder at City service (+10 years) and Enaza (+7 years).

ALEXEY LYKOV : Co-founder, CTO. previously CTO at Enaza (1.5 years)

VADIM ANDREEV : Co-founder, Director of Game Strategy. Previously Head of licensing departement (+7 years), former R&D and sales Experiences.

ROMAN EPISHIN : Marketing Director. previously PM at Enaza, PR & Advertisement at Elyland investement, Chief marketing officer at AlternativaPlatform.

MAKSIM KUDYMOV : Product Manager. Previously Lead developer at Playkey and Lead developer at Enaza.

VLADIMIR SHESTAKOV : Development Team Leader. previously developer at Enaza.

Conclusion

Pros :

• The project is solving a pressing problem. All indicators show a futur shift to cloud gaming. By making it decentralized, playkey team makes it possible to everyone worldwide to access AAA games on any computer.
• The team behind is highly experienced, has been operating in the field for more than 5 years and raised funds. The revenue stream of the company is steady, making it stable to undertake such projects.

Cons :

• The team has no former experience in Blockchain development and will have to hire and onboard a lead and a team to support the project.
• The competitors of Playkey are billion dollars companies. Once they decide to shift their Cloud gaming solutions to Blockchain technology they can deploy considerable amounts and expertise to reach that goal.

Investment rating :

Investment Rating : 7/10

Investment Risk : Low

Please feel free to send me your feedback or any Crypto Project you want me to dig into : omar.madi1@gmail.com . You can also follow me on Hive account@madiocci for new reports.

Disclaimer : This analysis framework is inspired from @VerthagOG’s work that I admire.