Can games industry veteran Brian Fargo overthrow digital distribution king Steam?
When you’ve got a pitch which investors greet with a string of yesses – you know you’ve got something good. That’s how Brian Fargo, American video game designer, producer, programmer and executive, and founder of Interplay Entertainment and inXile Entertainment, described his digital PC games platform, Robot Cache.
Actually, the man to thank for the inspiration behind Robot Cache is none other than Steve Jobs. If Apple hadn’t taken a 30 percent cut of every iTunes transaction since its inception, movie games industries and standard digital models wouldn’t have charged a 30 percent retailer’s cut, and Robot Cache couldn’t hook you with its huge price reduction.
It charges only a five percent retail cost.
“If publishers and developers sell a million units of a game, allowing them to retain up to 95% of the sales proceeds, this means they have a $6 million margin in pocket,” Fargo explained. “For a small game developer who sells far less than one million units, the extra margin could be the difference between life and death.”
Robot Cache confers the lowest transaction fees of any digital PC video game distribution platform. That’s one huge candy. Another is the platform’s security.
“We tell publishers and developers that they receive 95% of the price, and they say, ‘Hell, yes!’ We tell them we are going to allow gamers to resale the game, and they say, ‘Hell, no!’ We explain they control the controls and receive the same 70% as other platforms, and they say, ‘You’re a genius!’”
Robot Cache is built on Ethereum, which means it provides a secure robust platform that allows game distributors and publishers a piece of the action every step of the way. Consumers can resell or relicense the product. The unhackable security of the platform and its resilience to double-selling promotes a strong chain of ownership.
Additionally, gamers could only resell physical retail copies of a video game, but now they can resell digital games purchased on the Robot Cache platform using the blockchain and retain 25% of the proceeds from the resale.
“Earning any money on the video game resale market is unheard of for game publishers, and earning up to 70%, which is equivalent to the best margins publishers and developers currently receive on today’s most popular digital distributions platforms, is unheard of.”
Gamemakers control the parameters of resales, maintain secure ownership rights (due to decentralized blockchain management), and have a full suite of sales and marketing tools at their disposal.
History of Robot Cache
Fargo came to frontline video game publishing when he was just 19 years old, “using a floppy disk, copying it by hand and mailing it out myself.” The internet craze hit him in the mid-’90s (“I always loved technology”). It was blockchain that later helped him slot the pieces together. All this time, Fargo collected a strong network of industry veterans who worked at companies like Universal Studios, Warner Bros and Atari. Blockchain venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, Brock Pierce, joined his list, too.
“Six months ago, Pierce told me he had a lot of proposals from video games people and that he’d trust no one but me. He challenged me to come up with an idea. I read white papers till my eyes bled. Two themes stuck out: how the blockchain diminishes the need for the middleman and how the security of the blockchain protects assets.”
“I’ve been a video games publisher my whole life, selling these games and paying people 30 percent in the digital world. This is the type of model I would have loved to see.”
Additionally, Robot Cache offers the gamifying incentive, where participants receive cryptocurrency (IRON) when they mine or when they resell their digital games. Users can keep the IRON to purchase games, or they can cash out the resale IRON for fiat currency.
When either certain individual or community milestones are reached, Robot Cache rewards additional IRON to the gamers using the platform. A click-box with a robot hacking his pickaxe to mine IRON shows gamers they’re getting their rewards.
Most people, naturally, leave their computers running overnight and use high-end rigs. In this way, Robot Cache enables its members to passively earn 3-4 games a year while they sleep.
Just a handful of companies – most notably Valve’s Steam platform – dominate the multi-billion dollar digital download PC video games market. Robot Cache revolutionizes the industry by slashing prices, giving away games for free, and encrypting its games for resales so publishers and developers can gain more profits.
“As a publisher, my whole life,” concluded Fargo, “I’m used to hearing my pitches rejected: ‘No’ ‘no’, ‘no’… This time? The ‘yes’ ratio is astounding. Publishers and developers tend to say ‘The idea is genius!’”
Details
Robot Cache will be a full-featured live platform with the latest and greatest video games for gamers’ immediate enjoyment. The platform will create IRON based on the ERC-20 standard upon launch of the platform which will take place in Q2, 2018. The solicitation, offer, and sale of IRON will be conducted in a manner that is compliant with applicable securities laws and regulations, including Rule 506(c) of Regulation D. Only verified accredited investors will be eligible to purchase the tokens. For more information and to sign up for product updates, please visit www.robotcache.com.
