I know I've been gone for over a year. No announcements, no updates, nothing. You deserve to know why.

I burned out. Hard.

For a long time, I couldn't even open the Discord. Every decision I made upset someone. Every feature I shipped, someone was angry about it. I was getting messages daily from people telling me I owed them something. And on top of all that, I watched the value of everything I'd built, everything I'd invested back into this thing, slowly bleed out.

At some point I just couldn't do it anymore. I had to step away completely or I was going to lose it. I started a new job, focused on other projects, and honestly tried not to think about GO for a while.

I can understand that it is very hard seeing that happen.

Look at Splinterlands. They sell you your possible fortune and the only ones getting rich off it are people already in the loop, people who are already wealthy, or the company itself. They sell you your dream, but 99% of the people I've talked to got burned on Splinterlands. Most of them just stick around because they're in too deep to walk away. Sunk cost fallacy running the whole show.

And I know I'm not innocent of that either. I sold stuff that I knew probably wouldn't land the way I hoped. I just didn't know what else to do. I tried, but I think the P2E foundation is so broken that I personally have no idea how to fix it. Putting another bandaid on it isn't an option anymore. If I do this again, it has to be done right. Because I can't be the guy that hundreds of people are ranting about because I couldn't fix something that might not even be fixable in that model.

And yeah, maybe I'm just not good enough for it. Maybe someone smarter could have figured it out. But that's where I am right now. I kept selling my own principles just to keep things running a little longer and I noticed way too late that I should have pushed back harder.

For the last stretch when I was still active, everything felt like bandaid on top of bandaid. No matter what I added, the same problems were still there. The economy. The runaway leaders at the top. The midgame grind that made people quit. I was patching holes instead of building something solid.

Personally, now with the experience I have, to fix P2E you need to divorce the game currencies from the market. People shouldn't earn through game currencies, that is a losing proposition. People should earn through rewards, for playing the game. Game currencies should only be for facilitating gameplay.

As an example from Hive, money that goes into the game could be put into HBD savings, and the some of interest earned from that could be used to reward players. Of course you can do this with IRL investments that have yields as well. But legally I think that would be harder to setup.

Would you be into a fresh start like this? Or would you rather I keep building on what's here?
I don't really care what I have on GO, I don't treat these games as investments that I should whale in. I only stopped playing because I didn't even have time to check in twice a day.

If we did a space rebrand, does that kill it for you or do you not care about the theme?

I don't really care about the theme.

And be honest with me. Is there even enough of you left to make this worth it?

I would at least check it out, but I don't know if there are enough of players left that would give it a try.

Wish you all the best