The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
I like projects that use blockchain on-point and not just to attract investments. Finding where such a specific technology is needed is really cool. Even if the product never becomes a hit, it deserves applause.
Immortal Player Characters, the startup of the day, builds a platform for exchanging characters between games. Its target audience is 80-level elves and trolls who already got bored with WoW but feel lazy to start everything anew in SkyForge. If both games support IPC, then one of them will record the character’s achievements into the blockchain, and the other one will read it and give the player a boosted start. Aside from the current level and the gear, it suggests keeping some sort of a DNA with in-born features, the dwarf will be short and less vulnerable to magic in any game, and the knight will enjoy the princesses’ affection. Ultimately, the role play part of the MMORPG lasts a whole lifetime of a person. Well, it will also be easier to resell maxed-out accounts, so there’s that.
Yes, it’s naturally easy to criticize the concept, the idea has many evident problems. Games are different, and sharing characters isn’t always appropriate, it’s absolutely unclear what’s a starship trooper to do in the Middle Ages. A potential 80-level start will break the balance for some developers, it will make more difficult for some to keep the newcomers in the game. It is absolutely not apparent that the flow of new users will compensate for these losses.
But many today’s leaders looked craze at the start, let’s wait a year or so before the funeral. Today I’d like to repeat – this is a most rare instance of blockchain’s potential usefulness: IPC offers a platform that nobody owns and everybody trusts. Usually, nobody except for blockchain fanatics wants the combination of these two factor, the core base copes just as well, but here the central hub would actually complicate things. Way to go authors, even though it won’t rocket. And, of course, they don’t do ICO.
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This is a rerun from 2018. In 4 years, the project didn’t rocket and didn’t die, there hasn’t been sufficient success, but the founders still hope for something.
Translation: Kostiantyn Tupikov
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
