In the first of two CoinGeek Conversations about gaming and Bitcoin SV, we talk to Gu Lu, the founder of Satoplay. Next week, we hear about Kronoverse from the company’s Chief Architect, David Case.
Gu Lu is an entrepreneur with an impressive track record in the gaming industry, having worked as a game developer for more than a decade, for the likes of UBISoft, the French game publisher, and CCP Games, an Icelandic company.
Since 2018, he’s been immersing himself in blockchain technology, and then, as he says “I found BSV, so I’m here. That’s it!”
The idea behind his start-up, SatoPlay, named after Satoshi Nakamoto of course, is to develop games that are different from the existing betting and gambling businesses that are using blockchain technologies.
“We want something more widely adopted,” he says, “more casual, more child-friendly. That’s why we don’t do betting or gambling. SatoPlay should be game-centric, not money-centric.”
By making SatoPlay a platform, rather than releasing individual games, Gu Lu says he’ll be able to provide continuity for players, because they’ll be able to maintain their gaming records and resources on the platform even as particular games go in and out of popularity.
Having initially experimented with EOS, Gu Lu is impressed by his BSV experience. Already transaction fees have fallen: “when we first used BSV transactions to save players’ game data on chain a few months ago, it cost us 1000 Satoshis per transaction. Now, with Merchant API, the cost is reduced to 50.”
And he has high hopes for the Metanet as “a natural for structuring an expressive and flexible layout of a lot of game data.”
As BSV develops, so will SatoPlay, with an ambition, eventually, to be creating open worlds as part of a “large scale, in-game virtual economy”. For that, Gu Lu will be drawing on some of his experience in the more conventional parts of the games industry, where he was a 3D game programmer and “happened to know some VR traits as well”.
It’s still early days for SatoPlay, but Gu Lu already has his own in-house game tester - in the form of his nine-year old son. His feedback? “The games are enjoyable, but he doesn’t know how to use BSV.” And he already wants to create his own game for SatoPlay.