The Format #019

We’ve been thinking a lot about our model over the past few weeks, from a high level all the way down to the nitty gritty technical details. Thinking about it from all these different angles brought up discussions around ownership, wealth inequality, the position of the user and the strength of an empowered community.

Here are some of the articles we’ve found over the past week that link to those discussions, and how we’re thinking about the world:

The State of UGC Games (2024)

User Generated Content is nothing new, but with Roblox (a UGC platform) having more players than Xbox and Playstation combined, UGC is becoming serious. This piece looks at the meteoric rise in popularity of these games, and when reading it, it feels that the UGC trend might even transcend gaming, since gaming trends so often reflect the culture of the upcoming generation. Maybe tools and platforms that empower the users and community to build and make a sustainable income will be the next tech giants? 🤔

Ubisoft Says It Out Loud: We Want People To Get Used To Not Owning What They’ve Bought

Music and TV shifted to a streaming model a long time ago, but gaming has been more resilient. Ubisoft are trying to change that though… It’s always concerning when a major company (with industry shaping power) talks about shifting ownership rights by introducing a new business model that favours them over the user, but hey, at least Ubisoft are being open and honest about what they want to do.

The Trajectory of NFT’s Is Shifting to Build Real-World Applications

In 2023 ‘NFT’ was a word to avoid at ALL costs, synonymous with scams, worthless (and often awful) digital animal art collections and an unwarranted hype. That’s not at all a fair representation of what NFT’s offer though. At their core they’re simply a technology that enables digital ownership, and they offer a whole host of applications across almost every industry. This article dives into those real world applications and why they could be responsible for revolutionising many sectors. It isn’t new news, but it’s good to hear that this narrative is getting more airtime in 2024.

So far it's a grand decade for billionaires, says new report. As for the masses ...

We talk a LOT about games, and a lot about technology, but deep under all that, our no.1 goal has always been to redistribute wealth - it’s why we built our Social Conscience Layer. This Oxfam report looks into the growing disparity between the ultra-rich and the masses, the systems that are facilitating this inequality, and why its such a hard problem to solve - a worthwhile read.

OPENFORMAT News

Over the past few weeks we’ve really started to notice that people are building and thinking in new ways, and they are using OPENFORMAT as the framework to do so…

Building a No-Code Web3 Application in 5 Hours Using BuildShip and OPENFORMAT

BuildShip, a platform recently awarded the ‘Best NoCode Tool of 2023’, have shared a case study showcasing a project I built in just a few hours. As a non-developer, I used OPENFORMAT to build a Web3 workout tracker app with a variety of social and reward based features. This also marks the start of an ecosystem of apps built by the community - there has already been interest from people wanting to build interconnected fitness apps using the same reward system.

We have a post of our own coming about this next week, covering the project in a bit more detail.

Hyper Wordle is a new way of thinking about building…

On Wednesday our CEO, Sarah, gave a talk at YouGetWhatYouGet (YGWYG) in Bristol discussing a new way of looking at apps, and using Wordle (the app everyone was playing back in 2021) as an example.

It imagined a world where Wordle was an ecosystem of connected apps made by the community… Sweardle, Absurdle, Dordle, Wordle 3D, and who knows what else. Most importantly it discussed why this makes so much sense as a model for app building.

To read a bit more about what Sarah was referring to, check out this post.

A Happy Mistake

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been handing out access keys to our Launchpad, and another batch of keys have been sent out today. That being said, a couple of weeks ago we made a little mistake - a script error when we were sending access keys to the devs meant that an extra 2 keys were sent to some people who already have access.

All this means is more opportunity to share the love and give a friend access to what we’re building, but given our principles around transparency we had to share what happened. 🌞

And that’s all for this week.

Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽

Prompt (generated using Dalle-3): “The image now prominently features well-known symbols of video gaming: game controllers, recognizable game characters, and iconic game consoles, all disintegrating into digital particles and fading away. The background is a digital landscape, with pixelated patterns and binary code elements, clearly indicating a digital realm. Above, the cloud representing cloud gaming and digital streaming is more defined, with visible streaming data lines connecting it to the disintegrating gaming elements. The scene is a clear representation of the transition from physical video game ownership to a digital, streaming-dominated world.”