# Dalore: Orange DAO Fellowship Application [shared with Dina]

## Required Questions

> The following 10 questions are mandatory. The remaining questions are optional but may improve your chance of being accepted into the Orange DAO Fellowship.

### 1. Describe what your company does in one sentence

> Describe your idea in 144 characters.

We democratize story-telling.

### 2. What is your company going to make?

> Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We build Dalore: An open-world fantasy action role playing video game (think: The Elder Scrolls, Diablo). While our game mechanics are traditional, we radically innovate on development process and business model compared to both indie and AAA games: We create a barebones, minimum viable version with only the seed of story, map, and universe.

In the next phase, we focus on fostering a strong and engaged community that fills the game with life. It is emotionally and financially incentivized to provide quests, items, new game mechanics, map features, characters, dialogue options, background stories, etc. The community itself is in charge of accepting or rejecting proposed changes: The game is theirs, its lore is a commons.

The desired result is a development process that can draw on a much larger and more diverse set of creative minds, be them writers, level designers, artists, or programmers. This enables us to hugely scale the game's universe, both in sheer physical size of the map and in depth of the lore. Since the upfront development costs are small and unpopular modifications can easily be removed, a lot of risks can be taken, enabling a more interesting game to be created. Players will feel a strong connection to the ever-evolving game world that they actively participate in shaping.

### 3. What do you know about your product that the market or competitors don’t know?

Our main competing products are video games developed in the traditional industry, which can be roughly classified as high-budget AAA games and low-budget indie games.

AAA studios are victims of their own success: They are established businesses with established processes and established funding models that have been proven to generate profits with high probability. Any divergence from their ways would be a risky move and thus be undesirable, especially in light of the high upfront costs required to build blockbuster titles. This does not only apply to their business model but also to the content they produce. Evidence for this claim is the prevalence of "sequelitis", the phenomenon of many games just being uninspired sequels of former hits, also common in the movie industry. As the saying goes, no one will be fired for producing FIFA 2058.

Indie game developers are able to experiment much more but are typically driven by a strong creative vision. They have a specific experience in mind that they want to conjure. Handing creative control over to a community goes against this goal. Furthermore, they usually operate under a very limited budget, build smaller titles, and can only expect to attract large communities if the game is eventually successful -- not at the beginning of the development cycle.

Though not a competitor, community projects and in particular game mods act as valuable case studies for us. A few extremely successful and influential examples, such as Counter Strike, DoTa, and DayZ, clearly demonstrate that there is potential in our proposed development model. However, these examples are rare and usually only involve individuals or small teams. We claim that blockchains are the missing puzzle piece: They provide a coordination and incentivization layer that makes community projects scale.

We do not consider the contemporary web3 gaming scene as a competitor as so far they have only captured a negligible share of the full video game market ($250B in revenue): There is enough pie for all of us. Nevertheless, for a brief comparison, the majority of web3 games explore novel game designs or mechanics (e.g., fully on-chain games or tradable in-game items). Our thesis -- that the medium video game is already great but is unable to achieve its full potential due to the constraints of the surrounding economic model -- is orthogonal to the motivations for typical web3 gaming projects.

Lastly, note that opposed to many other markets, the video game market is not winner takes all and not particularly rivalrous: As long as we Dalore is a game that players enjoy, it does not matter if there are other amazing games out there.

### 4. Why does your product need crypto?

> What components require crypto?

Dalore is not an on-chain game. We use the blockchain only as a platform to coordinate and incentivize development. From day one on, a DAO is in charge of accepting or rejecting proposed modifications to the game, even if they come from the core team. In addition, it uses its treasury to incentivize development via grants, prizes, retroactive funding, etc.

A possibly interesting mechanic is that the DAO could fork over disagreements in the development of the game: In case of strong conflicts between two subsets of the community, each group could decide to continue development on their own, resulting, e.g., in "Dalore Earthquake" and "Dalore Tsunami".

### 5. Why are you the right founders to build this product?

> What's the most impressive thing you have done? Why did you pick this idea?

I am the tech lead and protocol designer at Shutter Network, a project using encrypted mempools to make L1s and L2s more secure on the protocol level. In addition, we partner with Snapshot to provide an encrypted voting solution for DAOs.

In the past six years, I have been working full time in a few blockchain related research and development positions. Most notably, I was an external contributor to the research team at the Ethereum Foundation. I also designed a novel application-specific L1 for Trustlines, a mutual credit network. My crypto journey began in 2015 working on one of the three original Ethereum clients as an intern at the Ethereum Foundation.

Over the years, I have built numerous side-projects and participated in a few hackathons, ranging from base layer protocols, over provoking crypto artworks, to experimental cross-chain games. Since I often worked on these on my own, I got experience in many parts of launching (albeit small) products, including frontend, backend, and smart contract development as well as tokenomics, marketing, and even hardware design and painting.

Pinning down on where ideas come from is difficult but one theme that I have been exploring and that applies to Dalore is the following: Instead of solving our own self-imposed challenges in the crypto community, we should try to apply the tools we develop to problems other people have. Gaming is a prime candidate for this, because the market is big, stakes are low, the traditional industry is failing, and players are more than happy to experiment with new and challenging concepts. This makes a project such as Dalore a great mechanism to export crypto's values and reach a lot of people.

That said, I am aware that Dalore requires additional skills that I'm lacking, in particular community building and management. To fill these gaps, I am in the process of finding a suitable co-founder.

### 6. Do you have any cofounders?

Possibly.

### 7. If accepted, will you commit to working on this project full-time?

> You can refer to the FAQ section.

No

### 8. What is the one metric you will focus on during the Fellowship? How far along are you on this metric?

> Please share any metrics you have so far such as TVL, DAU, number of unique wallet addresses, etc...

We will monitor three core metrics:

1. number of players
2. community engagement (e.g. number of users discussing lore and game mechanics)
3. number, size, and quality of game contributions

We expect a circular positive feedback loop between those: More contributions lead to more players lead to more engagement lead to more contributions. To kick this flywheel off, we will start by pushing metric 3.

### 9. Have you raised capital before?

> Include capital raised from VCs, accelerators, grants, or hackathons

No.

### 10. How will your startup reach 100M users?

Video games are proven business models. Three games and twenty game franchises have reached 100M+ players. Therefore, while the goal is ambitious, it is not unrealistic if we are able to create a great game. Our plan to achieve this is by building an engaged community and leveraging its creative strengths.

## OPTIONAL Questions

> The remaining questions are optional but will improve your chance of being accepted into the Orange DAO Fellowship.

### One-minute video

> Please record a one-minute video introducing the founders and the company.

### Please include your fundraising materials (i.e., pitch deck)

> Link to DocSend/Slide/Notion/anything.

- Not fundraising material but a WIP document of potential failure scenarios: https://hackmd.io/UXksyn36TVec8i18wgJ4ag

### How do you make money?

> What is your business model? Who are your customers? Are you B2B or B2C?

The most apparent business model is to sell copies of the game to players. This is an option but at least in the beginning likely not a good strategy, as the game will be far from complete. Also, it would hamper growing the community.

The better option is to sell or rent out DAO membership. DAO members decide on the content of the game, which is a rewarding position. If legally possible, the DAO could also share revenue with its members.

Lastly, we could sell in-game "real estate", e.g., the right to decide on the furniture of a house or a dungeon, on the appearance of a single character, the name and location of a unique collectible, etc.

### LinkedIn Profile of all founders

> Name: link to the LinkedIn profile.

lol

### Have you or your co-founders been backed by YC?

No

### Who does the coding in your company?

> Please share your GitHub repo/profile

github.com/jannikluhn

### What is your wallet address?

jannikluhn.eth

### Where are you based?

> City/Country

Berlin, Germany (mostly)

### How did you find us?

Farcaster