An update on zkGame [zkPoker & PurePoker]

Community SNS Project Governance
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Hello everyone,

It is with a heavy heart that we are writing to announce the closure of zkPoker and PurePoker. As many of you know, we were incredibly passionate about building these platforms. They were the first fully on-chain Poker platforms to ever exist. We had strong faith in the vision and potential of trustless and provably fair poker platforms and we are immensely proud of what we built.

Over the past few months, we have been exploring various avenues to secure the funding necessary to continue development, cover operational costs, and navigate the complex legal landscape of online Poker. Our primary plan was to launch an SNS to allow our community to become stakeholders in the project and raise capital for licensing and further development.

Unfortunately, our proposal for the SNS launchpad sale was not accepted. Without the funding this would have provided, and with the significant legal challenges and costs associated with operating a licensed online poker platform, we have found ourselves in an untenable position. We planned to keep them operational until we secured the necessary funding but have encountered legal concerns, as we suspected may be on the horizon, and have therefore made the difficult decision to shut down them down.

We believe that the rejection of our SNS proposal, which was our last viable option for securing the necessary funds to stay operational, was a key factor in how this played out. While we understand the reasoning for Dfinity’s rejection of this proposal, we are disappointed that we could not see this through. We believe it’ll be for the best though as we’re excited about our new path.

This is not the end of our journey. We are a skilled team and we are shifting our focus to games that do not involve gambling. Without wagering elements they will not require a license or create the same legal concerns. We are currently working on a suite of single-player games and eventually materialize our long-term vision for “PunkScape,” a MMO inspired by RuneScape and built on the IC.

We still aim to create zkGame DAO and will aim to raise the funds for developing in this new direction. We also want to thank everyone who supported us on this journey thus far. Your enthusiasm, feedback, and participation meant the world to us. We hope you will continue to follow our progress and join us on this new adventure.

We will provide more updates on our new games and our SNS plans, and in the coming days.

Thank you,

zkGame team

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Sad to hear, but super understand the reasons.

Interesting move onto games, but be aware of the problem of distribution. Without joining and being within a platform that already has ongoing players and great marketing, it’s difficult to sustain the development of new games :roll_eyes:

I have shared this idea with a startup of the WCHL, would also share with you. I think Caffeine (albeit young, and currently impratical), is capable of building simple (but super customized) games, in Three.js or Phaser, and literally any kid in the world (speaking on their Natural Language) will be able to clone games in the App Market, and customize quickly and share between friends, etc.

It’s a hyper casual, ephemeral gaming, that has started with Minecraft and Roblox and is only going to get more volume.

Therefore, the first movers to create rails and make it easier to launch, integrate with payments, etc. could be onto something pretty interesting :thinking:

Just some food for thought, wish you the best of luck, think you have worked pretty hard :+1:

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It’s interesting you say this as we actually planned for this very thing. Details will be announced soon but we intend to not only make an avenue for external games to have a platform but also intend to allow for support for games made by caffeine. These will indeed have monetization aspects as well! We plan to vet games for our official list but have a section for other games which are unrestricted.

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