New Beginnings

Hello and welcome back to Dark Tunnels, a newsletter dedicated to exploring the emerging ecosystem of fully onchain games.

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New Beginnings

Hi friends,

Things have been quiet lately at Always Scheming HQ. I apologize for not publishing something sooner, but as you’ll soon learn, I’ve been a bit preoccupied.

According to my records, the last edition of Dark Tunnels came out more than two months ago, around the time of the annual Game Developers Conference. After an amazing, endlessly busy, insanely exhausting, and ultimately productive GDC trip to San Francisco, I took a two week sojourn to Greece, spent another week in Costa Rica, completed my contract with Game7, and somehow managed to publish a few Naavik articles along the way, for good measure.

The biggest development, though, was one that you may have already read about on Twitter: I’ve finally, properly broken into the fully onchain games ecosystem with a new role at Cartridge.

If you’re unfamiliar with Cartridge, the company is building the tech and tooling to enable provable games and autonomous worlds. Founded by Tarrence and Calvin, who initially met through the Dope Wars onchain gaming ecosystem, Cartridge is also a core contributor to Dojo: an open-source provable games engine and toolset, which I first wrote about all the way back in DT #2 (The Inevitability of the Format).

Naturally, I’m super excited by everything that’s currently taking place in and around the Dojo ecosystem. Studios are launching, partnerships are forming, and games are constantly popping up.

Part of my responsibilities with Cartridge will be to help support these game teams in creating amazing experiences. Another part of my role will be helping aspiring Dojo developers create new games and, eventually, launch their own studios.

The final part of my new role with Cartridge will be to aid the company in telling its story…which is where Dark Tunnels comes in. Or rather, does not come in.

Dark Tunnels has been and always will be an ecosystem agnostic newsletter. I’ve always tried to focus on explaining the benefits of fully onchain games to a broad audience and truly believe that a “rising tide lifts all boats” approach is what’s needed — particularly at this early stage.

With that said, taking this position at Cartridge represents a very specific, opinionated bet on how fully onchain gaming will develop. While I certainly have long-term conviction in that bet, it does not reflect the content strategy of this newsletter.

Going forward, I will be publishing Dark Tunnels less frequently — at least, until I am fully ramped up with Cartridge and have the bandwidth to return to a more regular cadence. Even then, I will be sure to maintain an objective approach in these digital pages and continue to cover the entire ecosystem.

When I first started this newsletter, one of my goals was the simply get involved in the fully onchain games space. Back when I kicked things off in July of 2023, there were very few paths available to non-engineers. Few onchain gaming companies had raised venture dollars and even fewer were hiring for product or business roles.

While we certainly have a long way to go, I’m extremely proud of the impact that this newsletter has had in helping to grow the fully onchain games ecosystem. I’m looking forward to furthering that impact here when time allows, so this is not goodbye! It’s more of an “I’ll see you around.”

Of course, I will still be writing elsewhere, too. You’ll be able to read more of my writing over at my Always Scheming blog, where I currently have a few interesting collaborations in the works and even more independent research coming up after that.

You can also read my writing for Naavik Digest, where I contribute to the world’s best games industry newsletter roughly once a month.

For now though, all of my writing efforts relating to fully onchain games will be devoted to telling the story of Cartridge and Dojo. You can be certain that I’ll have a lot to say there.

Give us a follow on Twitter to track all the latest developments (Cartridge; Dojo). We’ve got a lot of exciting news on the horizon.

I’ll also be in Brussels in July (for StarknetCC) and NYC in August (for bagels and pizza), so hit me up if you’re in either of those locales and want to connect.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Until next time.

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Get in touch: [email protected].