After looking at 32 token announcements, we’re picking BitGuild as our ICO of the Day. Bitguild is a blockchain gaming platform.
Premise
The current gaming industry and mobile gaming industry in particular is shifting towards free-to-play games. These games are ostensibly free, but require players to buy in-game items or upgrades in order to progress. This gaming model is often also dubbed “pay-to-win”.
But pay-to-win games often leave players feeling jilt. Their in-game assets or upgrades cannot be carried over to other games. If the game stops being supported, the player’s assets are completely lost. Often, the assets players buy don’t legally belong to them, and the games publishers also prohibit players from trading in-game assets with each other, meaning assets a player has paid real money for can be seized or destroyed at anytime.
The success of Cryptokitties, an incredibly popular game on the Ethereum network, has been in part because of its promise of true ownership. Players who buy kitties truly own them, as a non-fungible digital token in their Ethereum wallets. They can trade them, sell them, or simply hodl them. Even if AximoZen, the company behind cryptokitties, goes under, the cryptokitty token still exists and could be revived by another company, or even incorporated into third party games or companies.
BitGuild aims to take this idea of crypo assets for gaming and run with it. It is a comprehensive blockchain platform for gaming, with a wallet, crypto-asset exchange, community, and design house.
BitGuild will start with its core game BitGuild built on its platform, and then move on to developing and hosting other games. The wallet will be used to hold and show gaming assets, and the exchange will allow players to trade them. The Design house is where designers can propose new blockchain games and community members can stake tokens to help fund development.
Team
The BitGuild team has an all-start team which consists of seasoned game developers who have designed and developed successful online and mobile games in the past. Their CTO has worked at Facebook, and their VP of business development was in that same position for a game publisher.
Bitguild claims its advisors include Brock Pierce and Justin Sun from Tron, although its difficult to verify these claims or how involved they are in the project as neither of them list Bitguild on their LinkedIn profiles.
Token
The PLAT token will be used on Bitguild to pay for in game assets and stake in proposed games.
45% of the tokens will be sold in the token sale, with a hard cap of 14,000 ETH. This is a relatively low hard cap, which is good for growth.
Risks
The main risks with BitGuild we see are not with execution – as the team seems experienced enough to pull off game development, but possibly with the success of the game. While the team seems quite strong, the project so far gives little detail into the BitGuild game that they are developing.
On the one hand, since BitGuild is the first, and premier game that will be built on the platform, its success will be a huge boost for the project. On the other hand, there are other games planned to be developed on the platform, which helps mitigate this risk somewhat.
Summary
BitGuild is a promising project with some great ideas and a very strong execution team with good technical and business talent. With Cryptokitties proving the demand for true ownership of in-game assets, we feel this project can be a big success.
However it should be noted that the crypto asset game space is getting competitive – BitGuild is not the only player in the game, so the success of this project will also depend heavily on how popular the games Bitguild will publish are.
Bitcointalk | Whitepaper | Website | Telegram | Twitter
Related ICOs
All Logos and Images property of their respective companies.
Disclaimer: ICOBriefing does extremely early-stage research of token offerings. As the project progresses, details may change significantly or completely. Always do your own research and do not invest more than you can afford to lose.
ICOBriefing does not claim to provide financial advice or endorse any particular token. Investing in ICOs is very high risk and you may lose most or all of your investment. We are not responsible for any of your investment losses.