inye

The Loadout Playbook: Capture Everything Day one is nearly in the bag, I’ve barely slept, and I can see where this thing is going more clearly than ever. We’ve spent 18 months building Loadout, and during that time the opportunity has become considerably bigger than the one we started with. Obviously, it would have been nice if the website had stayed up while we introduced everyone to that opportunity. The launch had issues. The outage pissed me off, liquidity was too thin, and the verification problems made us look like something I probably wouldn’t touch without doing a substantial amount of research. I said that in the AMA because it’s true. I trade these things myself, and I know how quickly I move on when something looks wrong. We need to fix that. We also need to keep moving, because today we launched solana:8sWe4GzK1YqG3vyzKHf8ZyB1WB5asofw2o6TqgFePtPo and tomorrow we launch our first game. Most of what this platform exists to do is still ahead of us. When I first started thinking about a token launcher for games, AI couldn’t build games efficiently or particularly well. The idea was to give mainstream developers access to the kind of funding that crypto had made possible. Experienced teams, great products, and an industry where even people who had already shipped successful games were struggling to fund their next one. That was already a massive opportunity. I’ve spent years on the other side of that. When we first raised for Illuvium, we had a pitch deck, and there were VCs on calls telling me they wanted to take the entire round. I hadn’t built a gaming studio before. Meanwhile, people who had spent their careers making games were trying to work out how to pay their teams. You can understand why some of them looked at crypto gaming and thought, who the fuck are these people? I get it now. Over the past six months, we’ve engaged with more than 500 games, and I’ve personally had hundreds of conversations with developers. Some of these teams have shipped games people love. They’ve got playable builds, experienced developers and thousands of players waiting for what they’re making. And funding is still a nightmare. Publishers serve a purpose, but the terms can be borderline criminal. You can build a successful game, generate millions in revenue, and still find yourself back asking for money to make the next one. VC funding is difficult to get, and Kickstarter, which I still think was an incredible innovation for gaming, has become something you often need a serious budget to do properly. Having to raise money so you can afford to raise money feels like something we should have figured out by now. Loadout gives those developers another option. They launch a token, traders can buy and sell from day one, and fees from that activity help fund the game. The studio keeps its equity and IP. It can continue building for Steam or consoles, and the people playing don’t need to change anything about how they play. I’ve spent years trying to convince mainstream audiences to give crypto games a chance. Being able to sit down with a developer and explain that their game can stay exactly as they intended, while accessing a new source of funding, is a very different conversation. They don’t have to agree with everything I believe about crypto. They just have to see a useful way to fund their game. That is why we started with curated launches. We wanted teams we could speak to, products we could assess, and games traders could actually research. People with something substantial already built, who could use the funding to take it further. But fast-forward 18 months, and now you’ve got people building games and mods with AI that are getting serious attention. Some of them are rough, some are ridiculous, but people are playing them and enjoying them. I’ve been trading a bunch of them myself, and watching how quickly this is moving has changed how I think about our ceiling. Over the next five to ten years, I think almost every studio in the world will use AI in some part of its development process. Even plenty of the ones that currently want nothing to do with it. The pressure to build faster and bring costs down is going to be too significant. I can already hear some of my Illuviums devs getting annoyed at me for writing that, but I believe it. Mainstream development and AI development will converge. Experienced teams will be able to do more with less. Smaller teams will attempt games they could never previously have afforded to build. And people who have never made a game in their lives will be able to put something playable in front of an audience and potentially turn it into a hit. Some of those people will turn out to be very fucking good at it. That changes the potential size of Loadout by orders of magnitude. We started building a funding platform for an existing industry, and now the number of people capable of participating in that industry could increase dramatically. Those developers will still need money. They’ll still need attention. Making the first version of a game cheaper doesn’t automatically give you the ability to turn it into a successful product, support it, market it and build a team around it. The more games there are, the harder it is for anyone to notice yours. I want developers to look at Loadout because we have an audience that understands games, enjoys trading early, and can help fund what comes next. Whether that developer has spent five years building with a team or a weekend making something that suddenly goes viral, we should have a way for them to launch. Which is why we need two paths. The first is the curated catalogue we’ve spent months putting together. We have 40+ games in the pipeline, starting with The Signal: Stranded on Sirenis, which launches its token through Loadout tomorrow. We’ve been talking to the team for months. They’re building a survival-crafting game with nearly 50,000 Steam wishlists, and you can check out the gameplay, the trailer, and the people making it. The success of these first launches is critical because it's how we keep bringing in more studios. We’ve been speaking to some of them for months. They understand the proposition, but they want to see whether it actually generates meaningful traction. That’s fair. If I’d spent years building a studio outside crypto, I’d be skeptical of me too. Once we can show those teams another studio successfully funding development through Loadout, those conversations change. A game they recognise, with developers they respect, using this model and getting somewhere with it. That gives the next studio a reason to take it seriously. And each one that comes through makes the next conversation easier. But we also have hundreds of smaller games and developers who want to launch. Some are solo builders, some are using AI, and some simply won’t fit the criteria for our curated catalogue. We can’t make every one of them wait for our team to verify them. So we’ll soon be opening up permissionless launches, where developers can launch within minutes. That side will be the Wild West. The launches will be clearly marked as unverified, and traders will need to research what they’re buying. Some games will be dog shit. Some teams won’t deliver. Some things will get an enormous amount of attention and disappear just as quickly. Trust me, I’ve spent enough time trading instant viral games that end up speedrunning to ground zero. The curated games can fail too, btw. Doing proper diligence helps people assess what they’re looking at. It doesn’t let us predict every successful game. But I’m very comfortable with the idea that something launched by a solo developer could do more volume than a game we spent months reviewing. That’s part of why permissionless launches matter. We shouldn’t need to personally understand or approve every idea before the market gets to look at it. Of course, taking market share from Pump is hard. I love Pump, I use it, and I’m well aware of how difficult it is to pull attention away from a platform that already has so much of it. Virtuals was a big reference point for me. They focused on AI agents and infrastructure and became the place people associated with that category. If you were building there, you knew where to find an audience that understood what you were doing. I believe we can do that for gaming. Mainstream, AI, crypto, whatever combination of those things a developer wants to build. We will keep improving the platform, bringing games in and building the audience until launching on Loadout becomes the obvious decision. That’s what I mean by capture everything. I want us to own gaming launches. For that to happen, we need inventory, attention and a clear reason for people to choose us. The curated games give traders teams and products they can properly dig into. Permissionless launches let us move at the speed new games are being created. Both can generate activity that feeds back into solana:8sWe4GzK1YqG3vyzKHf8ZyB1WB5asofw2o6TqgFePtPo. That last part is central to how I think about the protocol. Every launch gives us another opportunity to generate fees and feed value back into the network token. We can have games that develop an audience over months alongside something that gets discovered and traded heavily in a single afternoon. And over time, some studios may choose to put a portion of their game revenue into buybacks of their own tokens. That’s optional, and something we’ll work through with developers, but the potential there is enormous. A breakout game funds its early development through Loadout, then becomes successful enough to start buying its token back from the market. That's the goal. You can see why I lose my mind thinking about this. But we need the infrastructure to support it. Getting proper liquidity for solana:8sWe4GzK1YqG3vyzKHf8ZyB1WB5asofw2o6TqgFePtPo is critical, and eventually we’ll need to do the same for the larger games that launch through us. Traders need to take meaningful positions without getting destroyed by slippage, and we need to capture the fees that make this funding model work. We can’t spend all this effort bringing games and traders onto Loadout and then let the activity leak into other pools. Rewards, referral payouts and XP will only apply to trades through Loadout’s native liquidity pools. If we’re paying incentives, they need to support the protocol. The next four to six weeks involve a lot of work. We need to polish the platform, get staking live, increase liquidity, improve integrations and build partnerships that bring more people in. We’ll keep launching the games already in our catalogue while opening the platform to developers who want to move faster. And I’ll do what I’ve always done: talk about this to anyone willing to listen. One of the more humbling parts of building Loadout was realising how much the audience had changed. When Illuvium first took off, I could get almost anyone in crypto on a call. A few years later, you’re reaching out to traders and realising they have absolutely no reason to care who you are or what you built before. Probably healthy. But deeply crushing. So I got back into trading, started using the products they were using, and spent time understanding what they actually wanted. We need to earn that attention again. The partnerships, the AMAs, the conversations with developers, getting games in front of the right people, all of that is work I know well and intend to do a lot of. And we’ll keep people updated. Projects going dark is one of my pet hates, especially when there are issues everyone is waiting to hear about. I keep thinking about what happens when a mainstream studio tells its community it can finish its game because Loadout funding made it possible. People who have spent years hating crypto suddenly have a game they care about that benefited from it. Other developers see a team getting funded while keeping control of what they’re building. That is a powerful way to change how this industry looks at crypto. We don’t need every developer to come around at once. We need the first games to work, then use that evidence to bring in more. At the same time, we need to make it ridiculously easy for the next wave of developers to launch here, because AI is going to produce far more of them than any team could ever curate. I’ve believed for years that gaming would become one of the largest categories in crypto. I still do. Building Illuvium taught me how difficult it is to make a game people love, and how much capital and attention this industry can generate when something catches on. Loadout gives us a way to take those lessons and apply them across thousands of games. We launched the network token today. We have our first game tomorrow, a catalogue behind it, hundreds of developers we’ve already engaged, and an entirely new wave of game creation starting to emerge around us. There is so much here to go after. I feel it in my bones. Deep in my plums. Onwards.