There was an interview with our founder Gadji Makhtiev in Entrepreneur recently where he said how RAWG originated from his previous project, Kanobu. The thought to focus on a database of games occured to Gadji and his partner Alexey Gornostaev and it had been around for some time until in November 2016 they finally got a chance to launch development. And while most of the crypto startups come into the market with just an idea and based on the ICORating research, 46.6% of projects in the first quarter of 2018 didn’t even start any development before the announcement, RAWG was already shining through with the usable service, which came out in beta this February. So what have we achieved so far?
This is how RAWG started. Left to right: the main page, user profile page, and game page
In the beginning, RAWG used to be simple, but it already boasted 20,000 games, the user activity feed and profiles. Game pages had descriptions, but no content aside from images. Users were already able to create collections but they were simple in their design with no descriptions. This was a closed pre-alpha version and in May of 2017 we invited 2,000 users to check and play around with RAWG. They imported more than 470,000 games from their game profiles during the test — an average of 184 unique games per person. Over 2 weeks of the test, users independently set up statuses (marked the game as beaten or being currently played, etc.) for more than 50,000 games — an average of 20 games per user. This showed us that there was certain interest and drove us to improve the project.
In June of 2017 RAWG implemented its original system of reviews and ratings with more than 50,000 games gathered already in the database. Next month users were given tools to edit their own games in the library and in August we’ve added showcases focusing on most popular games, release dates, user reviews and other charts.
By September we were ready to open our alpha version to the public with the last update touching upon user profiles with full details of their game experience (owned games on which platforms, release years, time spent, etc).
We launched it and it was beautiful, we’ve received a lot of feedback that pushed us to upgrade what we had and make some quality-of-life changes. The first of these changes was a UGC (User generated content) tools update. Game reviews, discussions and collections received new ways to be enriched with videos, images and even more text.
By February this year RAWG started to take shape of what users can see right now. We made an advanced search so that users were able to find not only games but collections, users and most importantly game creators and developers. Our game pages were now full of YouTube videos, Twitch streams, Reddit threads beyond images, user reviews and collections.
Furthermore, RAWG now fully honored the game devs and creators by implementing content-rich profiles of people who are responsible for hours of entertainment.
From that point on and up until now we’ve been doing small updates to the website that included faster loading speed, better user activity feed and release calendar.
Our next step in terms of RAWG project is personalizing recommendations. By taking into account all of the data we want to give the user an opportunity to find the next game they will play. It’s a huge task ahead which is why we’re also focusing on opening up our website and granting tools to the most respected members to edit our database. Think of Wikipedia when we’re talking about community-editable database.
Users’ data doesn’t come free as blockchain enters our view. RAWG announced its blockchain solution in April with trackable achievements across multiple platforms that will grant our users an opportunity to earn while playing. We’ve presented our tokenomics that you can check out in our previous WP bit. Nowadays we are approaching the crowdsale that will take place in September and the launch of the token reward system in October.
While the road has been full of changes, updates, improvements we can say that RAWG is only in the beta version. There are many things to come that we think will elevate our project to the heights both in terms of blockchain and gaming utility.
RAWG presale is already open, join and be among the first holders of RAWG tokens.
Website
https://rawg.io
Telegram group
https://t.me/RAWGeng
White paper
https://token.rawg.io/docs/rawg-whitepaper-en.pdf