I am proud of the development team of @steemsports; led by our CTO, @furion, with the help of @pkaterra on front-end design and new dev team member Fred, a React specialist recently on-boarded to help us improve on our web-app. The team has worked hard to provide us with a beta product that is good enough to take to market as a showcase of things to come.
We "kick-off" our debut media exposure with a magazine intro and interview on coremedia.info and have several other media coverage opportunities in the pipeline.
Not only are we advertising SteemSports, but in doing so we are also being ambassadors for the Steem blockchain and community.
Loss of Support and Writer's Content during this Crucial Public Exposure Period
Unfortunately, at the time of release of the media article and prior to our announcement thereof to the community, the @steemsports project suffered a radical decline in whale support due to community division, with certain factions putting pressure on them to pull their support, causing our innovative FREE PLAYS model to come under fire.
Our post rewards have dropped significantly to around 20$ per post which rendered FREE PLAYS useless and a public embarrassment due to the low FREE rewards pool. Furthermore, our writers have been reluctant to write games due to the lower rewards and potentially being targetted the same way as the whale supporters.
FREE PLAYS are only effective if post rewards are around 200$ per post in future, but we still run the risk of negative community perception of high rewards if the current market sentiment carries through into the future.
We have thus had no choice but to suspend FREE PLAYS and you will notice our posts and web-app indicate "PAY PLAYS" only. The liquid post rewards have been amended internally to 60% editor and 40% writer in an attempt to stimulate further games being published to keep our web-app populated. As of right now we have maybe one game on the web-app at any given time and sometimes none at all since the media article has been running.
This model may be better supported by the community as writers and editors will be rewarded directly with the liquid reward, and keeping with the standard use-case of the Steem rewards model. It will also be easier to onboard new external players without the complexity of having to explain the Steem Power free rewards. In addition, since a majority of the liquid rewards will automatically be paid mainly to writers, it will be a good incentive to onboard external sports writers who may bring their social communities with them to take part in Steem and SteemSports PAY PLAYS.
For the success of the new model, we still need to maintain games within the rewards range of approx 80$ per post to stimulate writers and editors to be involved and to have some visibility on the main page to attract further writers.
The development team has been working on version 2.0 of the web-app which will be ready for deployment very shortly, this version will be more efficient as we have cleaned up most of the sharded code. The new version however, no longer supports the "FREE PLAYS" model. There has been some call for the return of "FREE PLAYS" in recent comments from the community, and we can hypothetically re-introduce them again in a future version depending on sentiment and future sustainability of such a model.
Note: The outcomes are currently still in the comments because the web-app pulls them in to create the game on the front-end, required for both free and paid games. I noticed there was some confusion in this regard, even though the game title indicated "PAY PLAYS" only, comments will be removed in version 2 of the web-app along with stats and game loading delay fixes between the blockchain and webapp which can currently take up to 18 minutes
We hope you enjoy the read of the first media exposure we have procured for our project and for the greater Steem community.
Sincerely,
SteemSports In the Media Thumbnail - by @cryptoiskey
Please note: Our website is currently down for upgrade, it will be up very shortly.