Holiday Fun + jae5086 Investing in a Video Game (Club 100)

Greetings everyone! I hope you had a great holiday. While it kept me away from steemit for longer than I anticipated, we had a great time. It still felt too short though, especially for @jae5086, who had to get right back to work with some rugged days that have his back smarting pretty good. Poor lil' fella. I'm lucky that my work is fun. I also got a few new toys to play with!

First off, I got a gift certificate to Michael's - my primary place to shop for arts and crafts supplies...especially slices of wood to burn. That will last me for quite some time! In fact, I actually got a second smaller one from @jae5086's mother. This gal won't be running out of supplies anytime soon, that's for sure.

Next up, it's time to add some new tools to the toolbelt, both literally and figuratively. I got 2 portable engravers (redundancy) from jae and his mother. These work on wood but also metal, glass, and likely other surfaces as well. I've already started toying around with it in some of the new stuff I've been working on, though it may be awhile before I try really carving something with it. Practice makes perfect and such...

Speaking of practice, I have long wanted to get into digital art to an extent. This doesn't mean I am going to stop wood burning. Far from it. In fact, I am interested in being able to create a digital version of my pyrography because it is hard to create nice prints of my work. Plus, it would be easier to make things like stickers and I could also use it to create the template for a wood-burned piece that I would be able to better scale to different sizes of wood. To that end, my mother got me a Picasso Tablet geared for these things so once I get my inventory bolstered, I'll be quite busy learning new skills.

Now, on the @jae5086's next venture...

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Howdy folks, jae here. I've been speculative investing as a hobby for 5 years or so now. With the stock market in the dumps and too many question marks surrounding my positions, I decided to only add very slowly and instead save up to eventually own our own home/studio. That doesn't mean I am done investing though, just that I am mainly just saving money. I recently found a speculative investment that I just can't say no to.

I've always been an avid gamer and I've been seeing this Pokémon-esque game pop up recently. I was never personally interested in Pokémon but I did play with Erika for awhile since she and her sister were into it. This game - Gate of Abyss - is similarly a location/GPS based mobile game and sports a similar look as well but clearly plays differently. This one is an RPG, which is much more up my ally.

The investment aspect comes from the fact that the game runs on the blockchain (at least to some extent) and will sport it's own cryptocurrency GIN. Players earn this token by completing quests, killing monsters, and more. It is used in game for functions like building certain buildings, purchasing items/services from those buildings, but also will be tradeable on exchanges (no word on which ones yet).

This is where things get interesting to me. Like Pokémon Go, the game world is a 1:1 mirror of the real world. This is, obviously, how a location-based game would work. In Gate of Abyss (GOA), the world is segmented into 400m x 400m parcels. This land will be purchasable as a "soft-NFT", in which once purchase, you own it, but would have to pay the Ethereum gas fee to convert to a real NFT to exchange on a secondary marketplace. They plan to add their own in-house marketplace eventually that likely would not require this route.

In the meantime, simply by owning this virtual land, you will earn a transaction fee every time GIN is spent in any building within the boundaries of your land. Actually, the building owner get's a transaction fee and the land owner get's their cut. This leads to two possible avenues for revenue. "Rent" from buildings on the land and appreciation of the land itself. This is not including the fees you acquire when people use your buildings, because anyone can build on your land so you could theoretically purchase land in the game but not play the game itself at all.

Source

Land sale is in a couple weeks and got in on the early bird pricing, which I assume is still available. The game is to go live next quarter and the land will be implemented the following quarter, at which time the price will double from $50 for one parcel to $100. This is assuming you are only purchasing a single plot of virtual real estate. Currently, in the early bird pricing, if you buy 100 plots, you get them for $10 per. So, which a minimum investment of $1000, I am going to buy 100 plots of virtual land.

The lots are claimable on a first come first serve basis in a couple of weeks so it will probably be a mad rush to claim areas that are densely populated, as those are the valuable ones. I could buy parcels in the ocean or in a desert but they would be worthless because no one would be playing the game there. Of course, the game could be a bust and attract few players which would mean my investment would fall apart, but I enjoy speculating! I don't spend much money so I don't have an issue with these kinds of risks.

Wish me luck and if you know of any areas of dense population in your countries that may lead to plenty of people playing this sort of game, let me know in the comments and I will look into it. I have a feeling I will need to be prepared with lots of locations to try to claim when the land claim event begins!

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Be sure to check out my last post: Jackalope X-mas Tree

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