Building Bridges
Strand Gaming
Before its launch, Hideo Kojima described his mysterious new title Death Stranding as the first “strand game.” Similar to older Kojima-isms — perhaps you remember “transfarring?”— no one was sure to make of it. As always, the auteur developer was ahead of his time.Death Stranding turned out to be a game about reconnecting an inhospitable world of isolated people after a cataclysmic event that kept everyone huddled in their homes and reliant on deliverymen.
It released in November 2019.
The core gameplay mechanic focused on forging a path through uncertain territory and … turning on a new kind of internet. Connecting to this “Chiral Network” allowed you to deploy new structures for transport and safety in the game environment.
That infrastructure would not only appear in your own game, but in instances of other players online. The “strand” feature was revealed to be a connected gameplay experience.
The novel gameplay loop planted the seed of an idea in our minds. What if game development itself was a connected experience?
One year later, we began work on Rensa Games.
We hope to be the bridge between the blockchain ecosystem and the planet’s 3 billion gamers, powering the first real-time payment distribution system for game developers and content creators.
The Rope…
“Rensa Games is a new video game development and publishing platform.”Or, “Rensa Games is an intellectual property and licensing management tool.”
Or, “Rensa Games is a real-time payment distribution system that connects developers to asset creators.”
Or, “Rensa Games is a crowdfunding platform for independent studios that bridges the gap between fan and creator.”
The truth is, Rensa Games is all of these things. And the connective tissue tying these seemingly disparate elements together is blockchain.
The Chiral Network
In Death Stranding, the Chiral Network is a system that enables instant communication and data transfer across distances using the “Beach”— an underworld of sorts. Blockchain functions much the same way … a new kind of internet. Though this one uses nodes on a decentralized network instead of an undead void as a medium.
For Rensa Games, our precious cargo is payments. Real-time, transparent payments to creators.
Using autonomously-executing code on a blockchain known as a “smart contract,” our platform can instantly distribute funds every time a game sells to any number of contributors.
The beauty of blockchain is that you don’t need to take my word for it. It’s live, and it’s visible for everyone to see.
- Our Ethereum smart contract lives at 0x6e9969A6EdBbdB4B4fFe8ea848ca691d886535c2
- Our Polygon smart contract lives at 0x8A2EE75319Cd2655e52C5daBd4A0F296Af46473d
You can view every transaction that goes through our platform at those two addresses.
Strand-Type Development
In brief, the creation flow is as follows for Developers:- Join Rensa Games using your digital wallet — no username, password, email address, or personal information required
- Upload your game to Rensa Games via our publishing tool
- Set a price; we’ll handle the currency conversions
- List the digital wallet addresses of your collaborators and the percentage of revenue / royalty each is due
- Hit “Publish”
Our smart contract will first mint a “Game Owner Token,” which is sent directly to the Developer’s digital wallet to mark that Developer as the owner of the intellectual property. Then, the smart contract will mint and hold “Game License Tokens” that Players can buy in the Rensa Games marketplace.
Holding these GLTs in a digital wallet allows the Player to launch games in-browser. More on the Player flow here.
The end result of a GLT purchase looks something like this:
Lots of small numbers will never look sexy, but that’s a dozen different content creators — developers, artists, musicians — getting paid within a minute of purchasing a Game License Token on Ethereum.
No more waiting two months. No more fuzzy back office accounting. No more bank interference in the middle of a war.
THAT is the power of blockchain.
In time, an analogous asset upload process will connect to the game marketplace. This will allow us to automate royalty entry and facilitate seamless agreements between developers and content creators.
We’re here to help connect the strands.
Chiral Bandwidth
In Death Stranding, the Player is capped in the number of structures they can build by “Chiral Bandwidth.” This limiting reagent prevents the Player from ever conquering the entire game environment.You may have already heard of similar issues in the blockchain space around transaction throughput, scalability, and storage capacity. These limits absolutely exist as a hurdle to adoption. While it’ll take some time for those pipes to open, we have faith in Moore’s Law.
The biggest impediment we face now is understanding. While most crypto-enthusiasts are gamers, the converse is certainly not true. Gamers are understandably skeptical. It’s incumbent on us to put out a product that showcases the best of what blockchain can do, minimizes the trade-offs, and has a comfortable user experience.
…and The Stick
If you’re here from the gaming side — we hear you. The modern zeitgeist depicts blockchain and crypto as a hellish scamscape of pricey primate pngs and environmental destruction.
As a team that has been building behind the scenes for years, we agree with a majority of feedback from the gaming community. Blockchain gaming deployments to date have pushed more people away than they’ve brought in.
In short, this technology should be used to create efficiencies and constructive relationships. Not to create artificial rarity and nickel-and-dime players who just want to have fun.
Details about how we’ve minimized energy utilization through our tech stack are here.
Activate It
The Public Alpha for Rensa Games is live.You can head to Rensa Games, connect with a MetaMask digital wallet, and buy your first Game Token. It represents your license to Play.
You own it. It lives in your digital wallet. You can trade and resell it. And the people who made it get paid then and there.
Let us know what you think on Twitter and ask us questions on Discord. It’s a new platform and stuff will probably go wrong. We’re here to help, so don’t be afraid to touch base.
“From Sapiens to Ludens”
When Kojima left Konami to take Kojima Productions independent, he unveiled the astronaut Ludens as their mascot. Homo Ludens are “Those who Play;” the astronaut is a symbol of being on the vanguard of the next frontier.It’s exactly what we hope to build with Rensa Games — a way for Homo Ludens and Homo Faber (“Those Who Create”) to co-exist and build together.
We’ll be on the vanguard for a while. There will be an incredible amount of challenges to overcome, and always another mountain to climb.
But isn’t that the fun?
