Drawn by DALL-E
I wanted to take a moment to have a serious discussion about the failure of the soulkeep project and the future of splinterlands. I know many of you look down on any negativity towards the team, but I feel it is necessary to face these issues to grow our community.
I only ask that you try to keep things civil.
The story in brief
In September of 2021 a presale was held for a new tower defense game called soulkeep. Approximately 379k packs were sold for somewhere well north of 1 million dollars. This project was to be the first new game developed outside Steemmonsters Inc. within the splinterlands ecosystem. The game was contracted to be developed by the studio Double Coconut and a project development roadmap was provided showing a fast project timeline.
To date well over a year later not a single line item has been completed. Only a partial tech demo was released for a period of time.
After the recent restructuring @yabapmatt gave us a much needed update on the project.
In townhall update for 12/18 the following was posted.
## Soulkeep
- Difficult situation
- Launching will take an entire team
- The code is mostly built
- We just don't have the resources to launch right now
- Trying to do what is best for the community
- Plan is to have a 3rd party launch and run the game
- It would still be part of the Splinterlands ecosystem
- Idea is to create an ecosystem where third parties can build and operate their games but use the Splinterland's ecosystem
- Would be a more scalable option
- Currently in talks with a game company to launch Soulkeep
- This way we can focus our limited resources on continuing to build Splinterlands
What happened?
It's easy to point fingers from the outside but the fact is we the people don't know. We can only speculate as to what happened.
My opinion
While the deal with Double Coconut is unknown I think they used their funds to develop the tech demo that was delivered and when the money ran out development halted. The rest of the funds in my opinion were spent by splinterlands on land or thier massive overhead. I feel that some of the statements made during town halls were not accurate and since town halls have been the only source of information that puts the team in a dangerous place where people make financial decisions based on bad information. I won't use the words I would normally use to describe this because I know it would set some people off and I don't want this discussion to be about that. I only mention it in the hopes that the flow of information will be done in a more delicate way moving forward and I believe Matt is probably the best person to make this happen.
How to prevent this in the future
Much like when building a house funds should only be delivered as features are completed and inspected. This helps prevent the contractor from running off with all the funds and delivering sub par work. Public community updates should be a part of this. I also feel that perhaps the dao should shoulder the financial risk of new projects like this. The DAO pays the contractor based on milestones delivered and then a presale pays the DAO back plus a little after the product is finished. This prevents us from burning prospective players by failing to deliver products and ensures that only projects the community cares about get developed.
What now?
I believe soulkeep is the textbook definition of a sunken cost fallacy and should be officially ended. The time and effort spent to build this project is too high and it has left a bad taste in many people's minds. We need to put this failure behind us and grow from the experience.
Splinterlands should open source the code and retain the rights to the soulkeep name.
Splinterlands still needs to make things right and spending another period of unknown time and trusting another contractor to deliver results isn't it.
A refund is simply out of the question as the money has been spent.
Here is what I would suggest.
Splinterlands creates a neutral summoner that is based on the hero shown in soulkeep. It should have good stats and come as max level only.
Anyone who purchased a pack from splinterlands has a 1 in 500 chance of getting one with a guaranteed drop every 500.
Title released to those who purchased 500 packs or more.
Nightmare packs become burnable and when you do you get a 1/500 chance for the summoner (guarantee if burning 500) and an immediate distribution of the packs sps reward pool value paid in locked sps. Releasing this large amount of sps will drive the price of sps down short term but it will make up for the projects failure.
Having that value locked away only serves to punish those that chose to support the presale.
The hero card would have a printing of around 1500 copies this shouldn't be too much for splinterlands to bear.
I would put in a proposal but most of this is not within the scope of the DAO and unless the team fully supports such an idea its not worth it.
I wish the team the best of luck whatever happens and I hope that everyone can keep things civil in the comments.