Short
- Luda is a Web3 startup co-founded by a former PlayStation and Google AI lead.
- The firm plans to launch franchises that could be owned and shaped by Solana DAO communities, starting with Neo Fairies.
For nearly two decades in total, Shannon Studstill was part of the PlayStation juggernaut as a co-founder of Sony’s Santa Monica studio. She was the lead producer on the 2005 smash “God of War” and worked on several other titles, and later served as an executive producer on the acclaimed 2018 “God of War” reboot.
But after that time largely overseeing development teams working on AAA video games — plus a brief stint on Google’s Stadia team — he now aims to work with thousands or potentially millions of people. in order to develop new entertainment franchises. decentralized autonomous organization ,DAO) Feather solana,
“What if we turn [IP creation] A little bit in over its head and allow the community to own and build on that,” Studstil told decrypt“And find the path they want to take, with some support from visionaries etc?”
is the co-founder of studstill web3 Startup Luda, which she co-founded last summer with fellow co-founder and CEO Vijay Sundaram, whom she met at Google. Sundaram started the Interactive Entertainment R&D Group at Google AI, and was exploring ways of machine learning and other emerging technology to influence gameplay experiences.
1/ “When I was younger, I used to warehouse-race the Avispa SC50 with a piece of junk that I had somehow patched together. This once in Pasadena, during a hard turn an aileron broke and I flew into a pile of pieces of metal. Trust me, it wasn’t pretty. pic.twitter.com/debjucNgWm
— Neo Fairies (@neofairies) April 19, 2022
After joining the Google Stadia team in 2020 as director of Studstil’s Playa Vista studio, the two aligned on the possibilities around user-generated content (UGC)—but they wanted to move away from construction games that didn’t allow players to play the game. made on the back. create value. For example, roblox, Takes 71% Deduction of content sold by users and external developers.
“As the DAO and NFT Flying away, we were like: ‘Wait, how fucked is it that these guys make all these things—they build in Minecraft and Roblox—and still have no ownership of what they made?'” Sundaram said. Said. “When you look at what can happen with these technologies, we can now fix what we feel is wrong.”
“hidden”
neo fairies The project is the first to come out of Luda’s DAO-based collaborative creation initiative, but it isn’t being built as a video game from the start. It could potentially become – or a TV show, or books, etc. It is first being built as a franchise, with Luda planning to eventually lead its way through The DAO to the ultimate community of creators.
Luda aims to feed nuggets of lore and world to budding creators from the start and then allow them to develop their own characters. Neo Fairy focuses on a scenario in which fairies have always been around, but were previously hidden by humans.
However, it is a new era for the fairies, and they are emerging back into the world. As a collaborative world-building experience, Neo Fairies will allow players to create and define a place in their own fairy tale and “fantasy-punk” world.
“It is our turn to right the wrong, welcome them here and tell their stories,” Sundaram explained. “That’s imagination. What we want is a story world that we build together with the community—but we’ll give the community a lot of tools to make that happen.”
Users will be able to choose a location on a real-world map and mint as the Solana NFT, as well as create a unique angel and an NFT mint to prove origin and ownership. Minting will be free, in addition transaction fee (which is usually a fraction of a penny on Solana), and the goal is to give participants something they can claim as their own.
Luda will open the Neo Fairies Discord community later this month and let people claim a place on the world map before launching the Fairy Creations platform later this year. Neo Fairies imagery shows a fairy-themed social app – such as a role-playing Facebook in which people can shape their characters within a community.
Luda is also building for the public, there is no limit on how many fairies can be created and molded as NFTs. This is a key reason why the startup chose Solana, Sundaram said, due to its lower fees and higher throughput than platforms like Ethereum, Scarcity is not the goal.
“We are looking at UGC projects where there are lakhs of people – not 10,000 people,” Sundaram explained. “People go to Minecraft and get paid to build a structure, or they build a thing because they want to flip it for money. They build it because they’re really creatively inspired.”
Neo Fairies hopes to ignite the same spark in users, but initially to build stories that can eventually be delivered across media platforms. But as Sundaram indicated, the goal is not to flip super-valued NFTs – a notion that holds back against the speculative frenzy that dominates the conversation around NFTs.
regenerate nfts
Neo Fairies is built on Web3 technology, but Sundaram said NFTs are “a way for people to understand what they have.” NFTs are blockchain tokens that convey ownership in an item, and in this case, Solana NFTs will link each imaginary angel to the creator’s wallet.
high value ethereum nfts like Bored Ape Yacht Club And cryptopunks—which have sold for millions of dollars-are not representative of LUDA’s objectives.
“It’s the exact opposite of what you want for UGC, isn’t it? The high price, they are rare or limited, and you can’t move them around,” said Sundaram of Price NFT Projects. The team at Luda is now “even more optimistic” about how NFTs can be remodeled around “user-owned content,” which is how they are describing the Neo Fairies token.
But conveying that message can be a challenging one. In the traditional gaming space, Studstil’s old stomping ground, many gamers vociferously push back against NFTs In the form of a cash grab—another alleged way for money-making publishers to extract value from players. And the scams and wildly fluctuating market sentiment of the crypto world doesn’t help.
“I think they have to show what they don’t know,” Studstill said of core gamers. She described NFT’s ownership of in-game items as “a real game-changer,” but many gamers remain deeply passionate about their hobby. They can also be defensive about changes in business models, as seen in the past with free-to-play games and downloadable content (DLC).
“They’re deep into technology. They get it, and they understand what’s going on,” she added. “They want to make sure it’s the right move for them.”
The DAO decides
Like some of the other Web3 IP creation projects that have come up recently—such as Terrible Pets, and The NFT Project From the Producers Behind HBO’s “Silicon Valley”What turns out to be Neo Fairy in the end, it’s not quite sure yet. But Luda has a plan for how the project can transform from initial seeds into a potentially bountiful entertainment franchise that grows over time.
As mentioned, it will revolve around a DAO. A DAO is a way for people to collaborate and engage with a common cause or purpose, and membership and governance rights are often conveyed through crypto tokens. In this case, creating the free Neo Fairies NFT will give creators access to the DAO community to participate in story and franchise development.
Sundaram said that Luda is actively developing a legal framework to hand over the Neo Fairies IP rights to the DAO and enable the community to collectively control the growth of the franchise. It’s an ongoing process, he said, and one they’re approaching carefully. Future value in the franchise will build up in the DAO, which can determine how it is distributed.
Sundaram acknowledged that your free, created fairy NFTs—potentially one in a million, if Neo Fairies catch on—most likely won’t see a huge increase in value. But if the character you create becomes an important part of community-developed lore and is tapped for future movies, games, and other media, perhaps NFTs will become desirable.
This seems like a far cry from any sort of promise that Luda can, or wants to make. As described by Sundaram, the focus here is on “create-to-own”—participants can create an angel, own the rights to that creation, use it in future Neo Fairy platforms, and Might help shape potential other use cases. This is a proof of ownership and origin, and an access pass.
Luda envisions this framework being used by all kinds of creative Web 3 projects. Neo Fairies is the first IP powered by decentralized, Solana based Wonder ProtocolTo which Luda is contributing and designed to enable community building of an entertainment franchise through collective NFT mining, DAO governance and other tools.
Sundaram believes that the next Marvel-like franchise or Roblox-esque sensation may be developed by a community rather than a company, with potential benefits flowing back to the contributors who bring it to life. The Neo Fairies are Luda’s first attempt at facilitating that process.
“Let’s get people interested creatively. Let’s not ask a lot of them, but we will give them the tools. We will make it playful,” he confirmed. If I succeed, it will be counterproductive for everyone.”
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