# Dalore: What Can Go Wrong?

> For Orange DAO Fellowship readers: This was submitted as fundraising material which I loosely interpreted as "dump other stuff you have". Feel free to ignore if you're not interested in this.

In this document, we list potential failure scenarios, analyze them, and give some handwavy potential solutions. All of this is done at a high level as predictions are always difficult and solutions depend on specifics. The goal is to better understand the project's risk profile and to prepare for or altogether avoid future problems.

#### Failure to develop game mechanics

We might fail to develop sufficiently good game mechanics quickly enough. This will make it hard to attract the first wave of community content contributors and players alike.

However, the risk that this happens is small. The mechanics of most story or lore driven games are secondary and usually quite basic. We do not have to innovate here and just copy what works.

As the founding team does not have a lot of specific experience in game development, we might lack the required skills and fail to learn them quickly enough. While this appears unlikely, if necessary we can always fall back and hire a supporting freelance game developer on a short-term basis for relatively cheap (there are many game developers out there).

#### Failure to attract contributions

Despite creating viable game mechanics, we might be unable to attract contact contributors

- in sufficient numbers
- of sufficient quality
- with sufficient retention.

The resulting lack of quality content would make the game feel empty, small, and boring. This would make it difficult to attract both players and future contributors.

Attracting contributors will be especially difficult in the beginning of the development phase when

- game mechanics are basic and potentially buggy
- tooling is immature
- the number of players is small
- the future of the project is uncertain.

To counteract, we can use seed investment funds to hire quality core contributors, or to actively reach out to motivated individuals who might do it for free or for governance tokens (students, gamers, existing modding communities).

#### Failure to coordinate contributions

The more contributors we have, the harder it will be to create a coherent but interesting universe. To prevent this, we should try to establish processes how changes should be proposed, discussed, evolved, accepted, and reverted. The processes should be continuously evaluated and modified to match the state of development and the vibe of the community. This will likely be the key challenge of the project.

Note that coherence is much more important in the beginning than in later phases of development. The core of the lore, to be created first, requires a relatively high amount of coherence. In later phases, there will be many more loose ends that contributors can work on much more independently. For this reason, it will likely be beneficial to start out with a small set of highly engaged contributors, and start growing only later.

#### Failure to attract players

Even if we create a great game, we might be unable to attract enough players. This should be solvable using conventional marketing.

#### Failure to monetize

Even if we create a game that lots of players play, the project might fail commercially if we are unable to monetize it. Traditionally, neither games nor DAO projects have been difficult to monetize, so this scenario can be considered unlikely.