🐋Why Everyworld

Why now?

Steam is the most widely used video game distribution platform in the world, and controls around 75% of the global video gaming market. Steam generates revenue of more than $8 billion each year and profits in the hundreds of millions for its owners. It is a privately-held company with ownership concentrated in the hands of a few individuals who set its rules and reap most of its rewards.

Steam has about 120 million monthly active users who log billions of hours of playtime each year. Steam’s catalog includes more than 90,000 games, with only 31 of those games developed by Steam itself. As a marketplace designed to connect players and game-makers to each other, the company’s value is rooted in the size and interconnectedness of its network. The players and game-makers are its most valuable components. And yet, neither the players nor the game-makers share in the fees that Steam earns.

Steam, like so many other marketplaces and social networks, is a massive gatekeeper to the industry it serves. As developers and publishers of indie video games, we are completely beholden to the Steam platform and therefore subject to a fickle algorithm that can singlehandedly dictate the success or failure of our products.

Imagine the power of a network like Steam’s–but designed for this millennium–owned by the players and the content creators and governed by software where every rule pertaining to content, engagement, and monetization is encoded in smart contracts, visible to all, and immune to arbitrary change.

We envision a not-so-distant future where transparent networks with distributed ownership flourish, and we believe that blockchain networks have the power to take us there. This vision is neither new nor uniquely ours. In fact, many attempts have been made to unseat incumbents using blockchains. Unfortunately, nearly all have yielded unimpressive results. Everyworld stands on the shoulders of its predecessors and builds upon their learnings. By combining well-established principals with familiar technologies in an innovative way, Everyworld is designed to disrupt the most voracious (and potentially nefarious) social network of our time: TikTok.

Here’s how:

Blockchains can unite diffuse communities through a common token and a set of common objectives, a system of distributed and decentralized ownership. These economies can incentivize individuals to participate in nascent social networks that lack developed network effects or creator economies. But blockchains alone are not enough to win at this admittedly uphill battle.

To harness the strength of blockchains while mitigating their known challenges, Everyworld’s design incorporates three additional, essential elements.

1. The psychological effect of gamification. Score-keeping metrics like points, likes, views, and subscribers are the universal currencies of our time, and therefore possess a singular ability to incentivize and align motives without requiring additional explanation. These dopamine hits are hallmarks of video games and a prerequisite for any consumer-facing product designed for the digitally-native generation. These mechanics have been incorporated into Everyworld to form the basis of a game loop.

2. An open admission that humans are motivated primarily by personal gain. By explicitly and transparently embracing the desire for personal gain through an on-chain reward system, Everyworld is designed to provide the satisfaction of unpredictable payouts while mitigating the rampant “casino culture” endemic to the crypto ecosystem.

3. A widely-shared and non-controversial belief in saving the planet. The next generation views stewardship of the planet as a fundamental human responsibility, and so we have embedded this charitable component into Everyworld’s design, to counterbalance the potential for selfish motives with a vessel to capture the desire to contribute effortlessly to charitable giving and an even stronger desire for donations to be meaningfully large.

Each of these three components is integral to Everyworld’s design, all part of a self-sustaining cycle.

Our vision embraces the principle of collective ownership, acknowledging that true decentralization is a journey. The audacious goal of building a system of meaningfully-sized community-controlled grants, undergirded by a self-sustaining economy consisting of free-to-play games, ad sales, and collective governance are designed to demonstrate that blockchains can penetrate corporate fortresses that seem impenetrable.

Centralized control has long dictated the rules and revenues of social media. We propose a radical shift towards community-driven governance. Through blockchains, we can build platforms where policy decisions, content regulation, and revenue distribution are not unilaterally imposed but collectively decided by the community.

In his 2018 writing, “A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods”, Vitalik Buterin outlines a new method for funding charitable projects that lets holders vote on which projects to endow by purchasing increasingly expensive votes, so that the absolute number of people who care about a project determine whether it gets funded rather than the total amount of donations it receives. This mechanism prevents large interest groups from assuming too much control. This outline for a new product funding system has inspired the design of the Everyworld charitable funding mechanism.

In Hegelian philosophy, all of reality is seen as dynamic and constantly evolving through these stages of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The process is continuous, with each synthesis leading to a new thesis, as ideas and reality develop progressively. Blockchains represent the synthesis phase of the Hegelian dialectic, challenging traditional centralized systems (antithesis) and gradually leading to the development of new models of digital interaction, finance, and governance.

The vision of Web3 is clear: a shift from the centralized, internet controlled by a few extremely large corporations to a decentralized internet governed by many. Everyworld is the embodiment of that vision.