It’s Raini in The Bay Area — an Epic GDC Recap

Last month, our co-head honchos Chris and J.J. hopped across the pond with Marty, Danny and Johnny for the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA — and way too much happened for a subheading. Let’s dive in!

Chris, Marty and the guys right before meeting the cast of Full House.

Attending GDC, the biggest game developer convention globally, was a no-brainer.

For those unfamiliar (from Wikipedia):

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.

To say this was somewhere we wanted to be is an understatement — as we look to thrust Raini: The Lords of Light into the mainstream spotlight, an event like GDC would be inexcusable to miss. Especially in 2023, with a record-setting 25,000+ people in attendance!

GDC2023 was a great opportunity to spread the Rainiverse to the masses!

We had the privilege, and honour, of being at the Avalanche booth 🔺and had literally thousands of people check out RTLOL on the expo floor. We even had mainstream media coverage of the studio and the game, such as this article by Decrypt!

In no way shape or form was this photo staged…

In addition, the team was featured at Stardust’s Loot Drop event, and our lead designer Marty spoke at the Homebrew Crypto Club and outlined our web5 strategy for success.

This is what happens when you annoy the photographer and they decide to cut you out of the photo…

Speaking of RTLOL — don’t want to bury the lede here:

Raini Studios x Epic Games

As we announced on Twitter at the conclusion of GDC, Raini Studios will be collaborating with the Epic Games Store (EGS), giving us the ability to bring any/all future titles, including Raini: The Lords of Light, to their storefront, and to the millions of gamers who use EGS every single day! So, let's break it down :)

So, starting with the all-important question… who cares?

Great question! And it turns out, quite a few people care about this one, including the 230 million+ gamers who use the PC/Mac version of the Epic Games store, and the 68 million+ gamers who log in every single month! In 2022, those gamers spent over a Quarter of a Billion Dollars on third-party games on EGS.

The Epic Games Store had an absolutely massive 2022!

In addition, the response that we’ve seen from our community, and the web3 gaming community as a whole, has been amazing. Having a game (and the entire studio) accepted into one of the largest digital gaming storefronts in the world took a lot of effort to make happen, but we’re confident that this will be a cornerstone moment for the entire web3 gaming ecosystem :)

But wait, what does that mean for the web3 RTLOL community?

Short answer? Not much, besides shorter queue times and more players to take down Huncho in the next tournament. Our vision and plans for the game haven’t changed, we’ve always intended to launch RTLOL as a free-to-play game, to allow us to get RTLOL into the hands of as many gamers as possible.
We’re designing a true, industry-first, web5 economy, which will enable traditional gamers to enjoy the game, while rewarding players who choose to embrace and utilise our web3 assets, tokens, and systems on top of that.

Think of it as choosing to have your cake, and eat it too!

The team was clearly happy to be outside in the cold celebrating this news!

What’s this “web5” thing you keep talking about? Did I miss web4 somewhere?

Nope, we skipped 4 completely! We see web5 as “web2 + web3”, bringing the best aspects of traditional, web2 gaming and combining them with the amazing new opportunities presented by our web3 expertise. tl;dr:

• Games should be free to play, and not need a wallet or an understanding of crypto.
• We build games, not “web3 games”, which means that they should be fun, enjoyable experiences, regardless of any economy/tokenomics/NFTs etc.
• By extension, these games should be enhanced by the opportunities presented by web3 tools and technologies, and they should be part of the core design, not simply slapped on

yep, the math checks out…

So, how can I find out more about this, ask questions, post memes etc?

Well, there’s a video here from the GDC show floor…

and make sure you follow us on all our socials, especially the Raini Studios YouTube channel, where we host a weekly AMA answering questions live from g̶e̶o̶r̶g̶e̶ the community.

Happy 20/4 Day!

To celebrate April 20th (you know, 4/20 for our American frens), come tune in to the Off-The-Chain AMA, where lead designer AlCaTrAzz will be chatting about Unlocking the Future of Gaming with NFT Technology.

4/20, get it?

🕘: 9 PM EST, 4/20
🔔: Set a reminder: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1MnxnpZzzAMGO

And finally…

As we head towards the full launch of RTLOL, a big thank you as always to our amazing community for their support, launching RTLOL is just the first step in a long journey as we continue to build, support and grow the Rainiverse 🌈

—

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