Welcome to our 150th newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, focuses entirely on the development of this ambitious game. Here, we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits revealed [mainly by the team] throughout the past week.
We had another quiet post-IMPACT week regarding Star Atlas news. We received a new Economic Report for Q3 of 2024, and an interesting Economic Forum session followed up on that this past Thursday. The DAO Council elections are also going strong, with the voting deadline coming up this Friday! Finally, we wrap this issue up with a follow-up of last week’s dialogue regarding community concerns. This time, Michael (CEO) stepped in to shed some light on the various topics. Though it’s a long read, we feel it is worth sharing with you!
Let’s dive in!
Econ Report Q3 2024 – Star Atlas GDP [x 1000 USDC]
Economic Report – Q3 2024
This past Tuesday, the team published the Economic Report for the 3rd quarter 2024. We copied the key highlights from the report below for your convenience:
- Daily ATLAS emissions are the most stable in history, with a current quarterly emissions rate of 3%.
- Faction participants are re-circulating over 66% of ATLAS emissions back into the ecosystem.
- The citizen group saw a resurgence in membership of 10% due to renewed interest in the Star Atlas DAO due to voting activation.
- The Star Atlas GDP fell significantly due to a combination of a sharp decrease in ATLAS/USDC, alongside decreases in primary purchases as a result of the ATLAS rebase.
- The Star Atlas DAO passed PIP-1 and PIP-2 proposals. USTUR became the first faction to disapprove of a proposal in Star Atlas history.
- The MUD faction was able to fill 99% of Starbased ships with the minted Crew, while MUD and ONI sought to make up for the difference through secondary trading.
Star Atlas Economic Forum – Golden Tickets and RFRs
Econ Forum
Chris kicked off the Economic Forum by sharing his thoughts on on-chain gaming after having visited Breakpoint in Singapore. Next, he shared some parts of the Economic Report, primarily focusing on the GDP.
Golden Tickets
Then he got into Golden Tickets and the return of RFRs. The old Golden Tickets SFTs have been renamed Golden Ticket 2023 to accommodate the new Ticket SFTs (likely called Golden Ticket 2024).
The current plan is to have 8 different drawings spread out over 16 weeks, with a drawing occurring every two weeks. Like last time, you will craft the tickets in Starbased, then need to pull them out of the game and submit them into the Carnival.
The prize pool for this Carnival will consist entirely of ships and crew.
Chris is contemplating using multiple different recipes to craft these tickets. He is still figuring out the input ingredients and wants to finalize the recipe by the end of next week. Once that is done, the team wants to roll the carnival out as soon as possible. It may still take a few weeks, though.
Request for Resources (RFRs) & Local Markets
The plan is to launch RFRs later this year after the Golden Carnival. Their introduction will coincide with the addition of Local Markets to Starbased. This will result in every Starbase having its own marketplace that is disconnected from the Galactic Marketplace and every other local market.
The team’s goal is to release this as soon as possible. The blockchain programs are complete, but the front end still needs to be implemented. Chris believes this is “one of the single most important economic updates to the game.” He continued that he sees this as being as important as Combat and Crafting; it is a vital component of the game.
It provides the opportunity to have RFRs craftable at one Starbase and sellable [red: redeemable] at another one. People can choose to sell them to other players at the local market, so others have to transport them to redeem them for ATLAS. This should make Freighting a career and provide more arbitrage opportunities.
This will also help create more Marketplace transactions, which will, in turn, result in more fees flowing to ATMTA and the DAO.
Goods bought at a Local Market do not magically appear in your wallet or the CSS. They will be added to your local storage in that Starbase, so you will have to pick stuff up there.
The latter half of the forum was mostly Q&A, but there was a lot of other interesting information shared. Definitely consider listening to the recording!
Star Atlas DAO – Council Election Round 2 – Intermediate Results [at the time of publication]
DAO Council Elections
The second round of voting for the DAO Council has been open for a little over a week, and you have until Friday to cast your vote and make your voice heard! The deadline is Friday, 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST / 12:00 PM EST). The margins between numbers 2-6 are very small, so your vote, no matter how small, could tip the scales!
At the time of publication, 121 million PVP was used in the voting process, which equals 22.82% of the total PVP available. Round 1 saw a 33% participation rate, so this election can still introduce some surprises!
This Wednesday, the Community Team is organizing a Council Candidate debate during the Atlas Brew. All candidates are invited to attend.
Newsbits
Here are some other small bits of news that we feel worth sharing:
- The team rolled out a few fixes regarding Crew cards failing to appear in Starbased. If you missed some before, you may want to check up on your crew there.
- Last Wednesday, the Community Team went over all the Naabathon submissions during their extended Atlas Brew. This is definitely worth watching; the community is building awesome things!
- The Community Team has been uploading some video clips from IMPACT to their YouTube account, such as the Keynote, Founder’s Panel, and Director’s Panel.
Concerns Answered – Part 2
Last week, we shared Danny’s (CPO) response to some concerns raised by community members (compiled by Mandalorian) in the Foundation Room. This week, we bring you part 2, in which Michael (CEO) responds to these concerns (some of which Danny left for him). As last week, we are sharing these with permission from all quoted parties.
Q (Mandalorian): What are your strategic plans for the current bull market, and what approach will you take regarding the liquidation of POLIS and ATLAS to secure funds for development over the next few years as we approach the bear market?
A (Michael): I wouldn’t necessarily say our plans are influenced entirely by the market cycle. At least not from the development perspective. As I demonstrated on the keynote Rewind section, this team is shipping regularly. We had 8 major product launches over the course of a year. That’s pretty remarkable. And we will continue shipping iteratively and relatively fast paced, at least until we feel we have a suitable foundational product(or features) that can sustain engagement. It would be at that point that we decide on whether or not we have the luxury of more time with a more comprehensive release of the game. We’re not there yet, but I do feel we’re turning the corner on that moment, and I do have confidence next year is the year we get there. Everything, from my viewpoint, is moving 100% in the appropriate direction. We stay the course. We win.
I think it’s pretty important to emphasize that the game is not our only product. The economy is very much a product we manage. It’s actually the most active “product” we have live at the moment. SAGE isn’t popular for the graphical fidelity, as we know. It’s because of the comprehensive economy and earnings potential. We can very much play into this dynamic, and I’d argue it’s actually more appropriate to ensure the economy performs well in a bull market, given crypto native users are still our primary target market. As a quick recap of broad user profiles we consider, these are the three:
- Traditional Gamer (we will focus on this a bit later, as game reaches a deeper state of maturity)
- Economic-centric: These could be “investor” mentalities, or emerging market P2E demand
- Trader/Speculator: People that won’t ever play the game but take interest in the assets for monetary gain potential. And while we don’t necessarily target this last group, having features like Fleet Rentals out there could create considerable demand for assets for people who see the potential in passive cash flows by renting them out to active users
The diehard group here with us today, the golden cohort, predominantly fall into the second category. And I fully appreciate we all want to see the full vision come to life. But the 1200 daily actives in SAGE aren’t there for thrilling gameplay and stunning visuals (though I do think the UI/UX are quite good – just not UE5). There are a lot of people in crypto that are attracted to this dynamic of web3 gaming. And they will certainly result in higher spend per user than the traditional audience. What kind of degen gamer buys a $100,000 video game space ship? (I know I know, there are some expensive bundles in Star Citizen).
And so, you’re starting to see us roll out additional economic mechanics as the market also warms up. Adding back Golden Tickets, regional RFRs, localized markets, metacrafting recipes, new ship crafting(redeeming) recipes and the Fleet Rental and potential for a pay-over-time option in the future. These are features you all have wanted to see, and timing is appropriate to get them prioritized in the pipeline. Earnings (aka yield) is an amazing drug. Funny enough, our highest revenue generating release of all time was SCORE. That resulted in about $75M in a single month. Hardly a game.
Finally, while I won’t speculate on token prices, what I can confidently say is that price action will inevitably attract people to Star Atlas. Especially if we’re in an up market and income potential increases dramatically. And just to note, I’m using the term “product” here very loosely. Everything being worked on across SA is effectively a feature of the open world MMO. Danny has made this statement many times. So these features which appear to be separate projects are really just components or subsystems of the larger universe vision.
Separately, Francesca [Head of Marketing] was very much a tactical hire at the right time. She’s an absolute rock star at marketing, understands the gaming industry exceptionally well, and has come in now to ramp up for both products that are in fact reaching that deeper state of maturity, but also ensuring we’re maximizing our exposure and amplifying our releases as loudly as possible. In a deeply strategic and coordinated fashion. Expect to see a major ramp up in marketing efforts over the next 15 months (and beyond – but for the sake of “bull market’). Our decision to go big on Breakpoint, Impact Summit, and additional SG activations directly ties into our plans of accelerating marketing with tactical timing.
On the token front, I absolutely intend to capture cash flows from token sales, as we have been doing for the last 20 months or so. And I don’t think it would be unreasonable to accelerate sales at particular moments to build up funding in the treasury. We were faced with major reputational risk in 2021/2022 had we started selling tokens. Particularly given the marketplace was literally the only token sink for ATLAS. I think we’ve proven ourselves time and again to be here to build this thing. People know we aren’t a rug. And selling tokens to ensure we have all of the funding necessary to bring Star Atlas to completion is perfectly rational, though some won’t like it. The short term pump and dump people will hate it. But we’re here to build something that can stand the test of time. The value created is already immense. But with that said, I have high confidence in our ability generate strong revenues beyond token sales. I don’t think a single project out there has been as successful as us at consistently producing revenue, without taking outside capital (and influence) onto the balance sheet. Which is of great thanks to the strong believers and supporters we have here in this community.
So, in terms of strategy, we’re in a great place. If the question, however, is “Is ATMTA going to make enough money in the bull market to survive,” I would also answer that with a resounding yes. There are no guarantees, but I think our track record largely speaks for itself here.
Q (Mandalorian): How confident are you in the current development pipeline, and where is the team focusing its efforts? There appears to be sentiment within the community and internal teams suggesting a lack of focus, with the project seemingly drifting away from its original vision. Could you clarify this?
[Note: Danny answered this question previously, but Michael chose to further elaborate]
A (Michael): I am extremely confident in the roadmap, and Danny’s and Jacob’s ability to manage their team resources appropriately. There is zero misalignment across the cofounders, and my sense is that the team is largely aligned as well. We did also just have the opportunity for a leadership offsite following the Summit, which we hadn’t really been able to do for a while. We were largely managing quarter by quarter and shipping quickly. So I’m confident that the offsite also helped clear up any outstanding confusion internally given the pace we were moving at.
But as Danny noted, everything we’re working on is prioritized, and strategically coordinated to excruciating detail. Not everyone has the full context for how resources are being allocated, and they shouldn’t really need to. Of course we want everyone to have a high level understanding of our path, but you can’t have too many people getting down into the weeds on every decision. We have the best people in the right place at the right time. And we don’t have idle time from people on the team. Managing a company is like playing an RTS game. You want to be maximizing all of your resources at all times. What I appreciate is that that dynamic can be chaotic for the guys/gals in the trenches. It can be a lot of context switching. Which does drain people. But externally people need to realize that we have highly specialized departments. It’s not like we can just drop everything and build one segment of the game. There would be a lot of people doing nothing. So we have concurrent projects across UE/web/infra/etc.
I’d also perhaps touch on a variety of releases over time that actually detract from game development. Specifically referring to the DAC Platform, the DAO and DAO updates, and other items that drive tokenomics. These are all part of the commitments that we made at inception. I often consider them liabilities, just in the sense that they need to be built, whether timing is great or not. There is very much a yin and yang to our release strategy. And that relies on us being capable of understanding where the community is at, how happy they are with current features, and whether or not we have time to rotate a team in on something like the DAO or DAC platform. Though, in fairness, in 2022 we had separate teams for pretty much all of these verticals.
Ironically, it was specifically because of this structure that we ended up with DAO voting. Yves had just finished up a task on Starbased, didn’t have anything immediately to tackle, and just took on implementing voting. (kudos to Brett too for coming up with an alternative implementation plan, and Cain kick starting discussions with a third party)
I don’t think I’ve ever communicated my philosophy is this way, but I largely think of community goodwill as a balance sheet item. We do something people love, it buys us favor. That results in “time”. Time we can use to prioritize something like the DAO, or the lockers, or the DAC platform. Not because it benefits us personally, but because it removes another arrow from the quiver of a fudder, and helps meet some of the expectations of people with different desires out of Star Atlas. Those decisions might lose us favor because other people would prefer something else is prioritized. I never want to burn goodwill, but sometimes we have to in order to meet an expectation. The goal is to get to the big comprehensive thing that people are deeply engaged in, and very satisfied with. That buys us a lot of time and favor to really spend the extra time for the next big thing. It’s an incremental process though.
I’ve already spent way too much time on this response, but wanted to share some internal thinking. But I can assure you no decision is recklessly entered in to. Danny, Jacob and I directly discuss objectives and strategy about 5 hours a week. Which then cycles into project leads and information dissemination, and feedback sessions. And then additional planning and execution.
Q (Mandalorian): What are your thoughts on the quality control on the project? Do you see his high standards as a bottleneck in the release schedule?
A (Michael): Have kind of a funny anecdote here. Because it was something I had been thinking about. Whether or not we really needed to go full high fidelity on everything coming out before getting more core systems online. And I’ve been monitoring what a other web3 games are doing. Often times launching in a very rough state on art. And they seemingly had success with their launches. But I discovered later that their hands were essentially forced to launch in that state not because they wanted to, but out of necessity. I won’t go in depth here, but it was enlightening to me in the sense that I was questioning if we were taking the right approach. And I also realized again how important it is to go heads down, focus on what we are doing, and avoid benchmarking against others at this stage. The high quality content we put out now impresses people. It impresses people in traditional gaming too. It’s that first impression. They’ll see glimpses of Star Atlas here and there and always come away impressed with what they see. And those people will still be open to joining and playing Star Atlas in the future when we get the feature set dialed in. Again, soon ™. At the end of the day, we are moving at an exceptional pace as a studio. And the payoff is when all of these seemingly uncoordinated stuff all comes together.
Q (Mandalorian): If I may, I’d like to seek further clarification on a couple of points. Specifically, regarding the new ship crafting (redeeming) recipes and the Fleet Rental, along with the potential for a pay-over-time option in the future.
Could you provide more insight into what we can expect from these features? For instance, will we see the availability of highly desirable ships, such as capital ships or even commanders? Additionally, with the pay-over-time option, are there certain ship classes that will be excluded? Furthermore, will players be able to leverage this option for crew, allowing them to enhance their productivity? I believe this would be an incredibly impactful feature, especially for small-to-mid-sized players.
A (Michael): In terms of release rollout, you’re likely to see the economic enhancements come out in the following order:
- Golden Tickets
- Regional RFRs + Localized Markets
- Fleet Rentals (possibly at the same time as #2)
- Advanced financing options, like pay over time (this could take 6+ months after Fleet Rentals release)
Starting with some of the high level questions that I can’t really dive deep into at this time… Pay over time in particular is going to require heavy economic analysis to prevent exploitation of these systems. We need to ensure things like, minimum guarantee on financing period so people can’t just short term “POT” for maximum profits in periods of prosperity. We’re also heavily considering collateral requirements on both standard rentals and POT. Going to be a delicate balance to ensure they’re still approachable, but not exploitable.
Ideally we have the Council Rank system in place by the time we have financing options. Can’t just have 10x inflation in game assets with little up front capital requirements. And it likely means we even need to hold POT back for Council Rank. Under Council Rank, ship classes of all sizes could be accessible, and players need to progress through the ranks to get access to them, starting with the smallest and moving up. Alternatively, we could offer only smaller class ships, and in limited quantities (quantities would be restricted in any case).
Otherwise, the initial MVP is going to include a marketplace for P2P renter/rentee relationships. So any assets in circulation (within the player base) would be eligible to participate in the rental marketplace. This will live on Portal. It’s possible we also seed some quantity ships into the market from ATMTA inventory to bootstrap everything.
Crew is a nice to have. We’re going to face some complexity given different technical structure. Ships are SFTs, crew are cNFTs. And as we’ve already seen, we’re pushing the current technical limits of what cNFTs can do (an issue I believe will resolve over time).
Otherwise, I see no reason we can’t have rental markets for every asset class in the game given a long enough time horizon.
Let me contextualize Fleet Command this way for you…and you might already be interpreting it this way.
But you know how in most MMOs when you hit “M” or some other hotkey, it pulls up the minimap so you can see where you’re at in the world? And then you exit back out to F/3PS view to keep moving? Fleet Command is effectively that minimap, but with extended options to play the game RTS style. So it’s all interconnected. Anything you’re doing in FC will be reflected in the Galia game mode, and vice versa. And it should be very easy to “embody” a crew member on any of your fleets anywhere in the universe.
Your real time movement in Galia is still subject to the constraints of the current on-chain movement and coordinate system. You just have finer granularity. But subwarping, etc. a specific distance in Galia will be likely subject to the same costs as when you’re playing SAGE. We have an early model for this now, but I’m quite sure it’s going to require substantial revision over time to fully reconcile the game modes. With respect to real-time combat engagement and other combat systems, still much work to be done there. But when you’re within sector, you aren’t constrained by blockchain at all.
Fleet command is effectively the movement, inventory, fleet configuration, mining, and crafting logic from SAGE, brought into UE5 in RTS game modes. These same functions would be available in 3PS as well, just a different style of playing. So the current SAGE economy live in UE5.
With that as a foundation, and without getting ahead of myself as there is still a ton for Chris (and myself) to work through on the econ mechanics for other gameplay modalities I would add that we have a strong partner lined up for skill based betting that I would want to initially roll out into our competitive game modes like hover racing and arena shooter modes. I love this mechanic because it rewards skill, and is zero inflationary. They’re effectively just betting pools between users. ATMTA and the DAO would capture some rev share off of all of those pools. We could also quite easily implement some exotic item drops that are exclusive to those modes. Either based on placement in an instance, randomly throughout the map, extraction style, or just purely randomly dropped.
Otherwise, I’d largely say we have the foundation for the MMO economy today, live in SAGE. There will be a lot more to come on ship crafting, megastructure construction, various ways to engage and earn, a deeper P2P economy and specialization… but we’re actually in an awesome spot right now.
That’s it for this week’s issue! Thanks for reading!