Chandler Thomlison

HELLO COMPETITIVE GAMERS Organized teamplay with comms in a tournament format is more fun (and less toxic) than solo queue. That's why we created our weekly "SCOUTING GROUNDS" event where you'll play alongside other high-skill players. Even if you've never played before, we've got coaches and existing pros to help you git gud ASAP! Top 4 players from each week get to play in our $200 weekly pro tournament! If you're Platinum or higher in games like LoL, CS, OW, DotA, Valo, or Supervive, you're going to love Sparkball. ⚡️Simply share a screenshot of your rank in our Discord and we'll grant you access to the event. ⚡️ See you on Friday at 11 AM PST/7 PM UTC

I'd normally let this go, but this is my life's work that I have poured my soul into that you are both disrespecting and making uninformed claims about. Our marketing and dev budget is <5% of our competitors. We've spent a whopping ~$50k on streamers this year and that was only done because this deal for the next year of runway was all already agreed to and only fell apart at the last moment. We have never left Web3 and we have purposefully avoided any additional NFT or token sales because haven't been runway stable in 3 years. We have a total of about $100k in NFT sales from 2022 that we had plans for still, but at this point, will at least do our best to give some value back as part our wind down. We don't bot or even exaggerate numbers and we've been extremely transparent about our journey every step of the way, often to our own detriment. Though I don't expect you to have followed every update we've ever made Once you've spent a bit more time being a game dev yourself, I'm happy to chat with you or even try to help save you from some of our mistakes. Hopefully that time will help you understand what it's actually like versus being an armchair critic.

@playSparkball You guys have "come back" to web3 to solicit funds multiple times and then left when the market downturned You spent how much money on streamers this year without planned runway allocated to game development? Give the rest of the money to the PR guy at this point.

SPARKBALL UPDATE: We've been a bit quiet post Next Fest as we were finalizing an investment deal that would guarantee us a full year to finish development on Sparkball and release next year. Unfortunately, we learned a couple days ago that that deal was no longer happening. Given we've been building the last couple months with the assumption that we were clear for another year, we're obviously in a VERY difficult spot now. It's an incredibly backbreaking to build a competitive multiplayer game like Sparkball on a limited and uncertain budget. While we certainly made a lot of mistakes, I'm still proud of what we've been able to accomplish and how magical of a game Sparkball is. Gaming is obviously in a terrible spot right now and we just made a few too many mistakes to overcome our position. But we wouldn't be very OPTI if we threw in the towel before we gave absolutely everything we had to make this a success. We're shifting down to a super small team and spending the next couple months building out what we hope will show that the world NEEDS Sparkball to be finished and fully released. With resources even more limited than they already were, we will be going largely silent until we're prepared to launch Phase 1 of our Save Sparkball plan. We expect this to happen in ~1.5 months. In the meantime, we wanted to at least get this announcement out in the interest of transparency and promise 2 things: 1. We will be using a portion of our last bit of budget to consolidate former incentives (NFTs, badges, Friendship, etc.) and ensure our supporters get something tangible. We'll be launching that Rewards Consolidation and Sweepstakes once Phase 1 Launches., 2. We will not be attempting to sell anything or directly raise money from our community. We need at least ~$2M to reliably launch Sparkball so any money we take from players (including a token launch) feels unethical until we're confident we can actually deliver long-term., The only thing we'll be asking from our players is simply kind words on the internet and showing up to our events - it's you who will help us create that proof that Sparkball is worth saving. We're very.... very down right now, but not out quite yet. We'll see you in a few weeks with the Phase 1 Launch and we promise to keep shouting LETS PLAY SPARKBALL! until we can't anymore.

The @playSparkball giveaway on @raijin_games has just reached 7.5K participants (and growing) and there's still 5 days left to go. They've unlocked the full $10K prize up for grabs. People love this game and it's not too late to get into the mix. This team has built something truly special. Wishing them all of the success in the future.

Hi everyone! @OPTI_Chandler here to write this one directly. I thought about writing this as a corpo press release format but that just doesn’t feel very personal or very Sparkball. Nearly a year ago, we held our first game night with the Monad Community. Since then, our community has substantially grown solely by so many of those same Nads being our backbone day in and day out – including our own internal CM team! While we are deeply appreciative of both Monad and its community, we have made the difficult decision to no longer build primarily on Monad moving forward. Our vision for Sparkball has significantly evolved as we’ve grown closer to launch, especially as it pertains to our role in the future of Web3 gaming. And if you’ve listened to me rant in Spaces the last few months, you know that we’re getting REAL philosophical about what Web3 gaming actually is and how we want to change it. As both of our visions have grown, they started to misalign. It’s that simple. We still love the Monad team and I personally will never forget the support they provided when we really needed it last year. Sparkball is undisputedly what it is today thanks to their help. We 100% still have some in-game Monad goodies planned and will do our best to repay the community that has been so great to us!

A week packed with gaming, did you make the most of it? Here's everything that a real gamer needs to know. 💚 New to the GAM3S platform • Steam games now count for XP on the platform • Portal pay is live, so you can now spend in your favourite tokens on GAM3S.GG • Unlock Virgen points by Staking $G3 🧭 Quests you can start right now • Sparkball - Everyone Loves Max • GAM3S - Expedition 14 - win a GAM3RS NFT • GAM3S - Enter the Igloo • GAM3S - One Hundo $G3 - win a Elder Gods • Khugaverse - Khuga Power - starting soon 👥 Games our Discord played this week • Sparkball • Tollan Worlds 🎮How gamers are doing on the battle pass • 500 players crossed tier 2 and unlocking skins, NFTs and Mystery boxes. ❓Mystery boxes for you to open • Pokemon Starter Box - win a Legendary Pack $90+ plus other prizes • Igloo Box - win a Lil Pudgy plus other prizes • Ronin World - win a Fishing Frenzy Founders Pass plus other prizes 🕹️Game Launches and Updates • Anichess Season 4 Offers $10k Prize Pool • Pirate Nation “The Legend of Darkness” 2million $PIRATE prizepool • Tollan Survivors Season 1 with a growing Prize Pool • OnchainHeroes tease Season 2 • Epic Games Add Final Free Games for May • New Games Added to XBox Game Pass 😢 Game shutdowns • Wonder Wars • Realms of Alurya How are you spending your weekend?

Anyone interested in some free money? The Sparkball wishlist giveaway is live on Raijin.gg starting NOW! Up to $10,000 in prizes are available, and all you have to do is wishlist this puppy. A wishlist gets you 1 entry BUT if you watch the Sparkball trailer on YouTube, you earn an additional entry…giving you up to 2 total entries if you complete both steps. Winners are drawn randomly from the pool of entries. The earlier you're drawn, the bigger your payday. Up to 400 players will walk away with a prize… The giveaway ends June 16th, removing your wishlist removes your entry. Good luck! You’ll need to balance both ballin' and brawlin' to score…

@playSparkball IM A FAN OF THIS GAME

Preseason is finally here and it's time to make... FRIENDS! Earn rewards and get a head start for Season Zero later this Summer by stacking Friendship: - Enter code 'SPARKS' after creating your account, this one is free! - Participate in Game Nights and Community Events! - Play in Open Matchmaking Events like Steam Next Fest from June 9th - 16th! - Be kind to everyone! LET'S PLAY SPARKBALLLLLL (with friends!)

VERY IMPORTANT SPARKBALL UPDATE

Dub has been there for us since pretty much day 1 of us entering Web3 so I'm pumped that the timing is finally right and we get to make this official!

@liveSparkadia The very near future

Gspark. I see you ballin' and brawlin' in the near future.

@jonahblake @rork GLORY TO ARSTOTZKA

I built the framework for a mobile AI game using @rork in 3 hours. You play as a gang of corrupt border patrol officers in a post Trump tariff era. The rules are simple: 1. Check for goods and tax them. 2. Get away with being corrupt before other officers catch you. 3. Detain criminals if you think you can’t accept their bribe. It’s a rough draft that’s inspired by an old indie game called “papers,please” How it uses AI to enhance experience? It could use a finance api to track real time prices and tariffs It can use dynamic speech or text so the ai can keep interaction fresh. Future ai could make the actions dynamic for corruption Speed to develop. Am I a mobile game designer now?

@inhuman How does the lock/unlock work? You said you can't sell right now, do you have to play more to unlock them or is it just a cliff/vesting schedule?

Rare L for me in gaming here (financially, not by fun) with Ravenquest I knew the token would crash, and expected to lose money even on my land mints 200~ hours of gameplay, and my tokens are locked while the token price continues to freefall At current price, 890$ airdrop total for $500 in and 200 hours of time. Will be worth burgers by the time I can sell it Very big L, and I believe it will continue to go down. At least had fun playing the game, which is why I minted land + grinded to begin with

We heard you guys missed ballin' and brawlin' so we're here to help! Join us in the @monad_xyz Discord at 6:30 PM UTC/10:30 AM PST as we host our first Sparkball game night in 2025! LETS PLAY SPARKBALL!

@BlakeWaddington @SquiddyNFT @StormingWeb3 +1 for Storming

@SquiddyNFT I would put @StormingWeb3 up against the best of em.

Are there any good examples of web3 gaming content creators bringing real value to games in which they sign deals with?

@SamSteffanina @Farcade_AI THIS IS AWESOME CONGRATS SAM!

my name is Sam but you can call me Chief. SO stoked to announce I'm the new CMO of @Farcade_AI! I know what you're thinking - why now? why this? what about everything else? lets go over everything 👇 the last 2 years have been the best of my life, and it's been the result of constantly challenging my self the shows have challenged me, the Wolves have challenged me, the live events have challenged me. before that I was more focused on finding a sense of nebulous comfort that never fully satisfied me. I don't plan on revisiting that strategy. why this challenge? I believe Farcade is building something really really special on top of that I think I'm the perfect person to make it the Zynga of this cycle (shoutout to @paulbettner's $180m exit serving as inspiration) Farcade's vision is the 'TikTok of creating and playing games' - creators make games in minutes using AI prompts - consumers scroll through an (eventually) endless library of games - builders get rewarded for their games based on popularity this excites me because I'm growing disenchanted with the AAA 4-8 year game dev cycle so many marketers are hamstrung by development timelines doing "coming soon!!!" marketing for years, not months. don't get me wrong, the Farcade still needs a lot of work, but with the insane development pace of AI and their pre-existing product and market traction, I'm really enthusiastic about how quickly I get to hit the ground running. with my professional background in social media and 30+ year love affair with gaming, I really think I was made for this role. I talk often about being obsessed with World of Warcraft and attemping to be a Starcraft 2 pro, but I also was so obsessed with Tetris that it was the only thing I dreamt about for months, or how I played Words With Friends for a decade (and now play the equivalent on Farcade with my mom every day) casual gaming is something I respect very much, it just hasn't been very innovative since like... 2009. until now. so, what about everything else? WolvesDAO, WolvesDEN, Woof, Gamified, Simplified? first off, let me say I'm incredibly inspired by overachievers like @0xDith who I DM'd before taking this role I believe the best way to do a lot of things well at the same time is to find alignment between those things (and yourself) here's some of how I see that alignment here Gamified + Simplified: - I want to keep hosting my shows - WolvesDAO wants me to keep hosting my shows - Farcade wants me to keep hosting my shows easy. aligned. Gamified and Simplified still on the menu WolvesDAO: - Farcade co-founder Charlie ( @0xChuckstock) has been a WolvesDAO member since shortly after we met 2 years ago at GDC - Charlie and his brother Bobby @0xBlackstock understand the intrinsic value that the WolvesDAO and WolvesDEN events bring to those that participate in them - WolvesDAO founder @paytkaleiwahea is an advisor to Farcade - the WolvesDAO has been, and continues to be, a catalyst for my growth as a marketer (helps both orgs) aligned. WolvesDAO still on the menu. Woof: - both Woof and Farcade are AI x Gaming x Web3 products - I'm mostly focused on partnerships and branding with Woof which doesn't require me full time. technicals and product development are with @sparkcsays, @paytkaleiwahea, @GamesLabAI, and other team members. - as much as i'd love to overstate my impact on a product, WOOF will be fine with me having slightly less time. - going through the building, raising, and launching process with Woof has been one of the most informative experiences of my career (and will continue to be) aligned. Woof still on the menu despite the alignment on the above, I do have to give up some stuff. the three main reductions will be - consulting contracts (none) - advisory roles (less) - content deals outside of my shows (less/none) for my existing advisory clients I remain dedicated to giving them the best insights and guidance I can and believe that each one helps inform the whole (alignment). a lot of people have asked me how I feel about taking a job again being an entrepreneur has always been my preference and part of me is nervous about giving up perceived freedom but man my life is amazing I get to work on the cutting edge of technology, marketing a gaming product, with one of my best friends (Farcade) I get to work on a one of a kind organization with a BUNCH of my best friends making events, content and products (WolvesDAO) I get to meet, learn from, and laugh with a bunch of my favorite people in the world twice a week ( @gamifiedshow and Simplified) also, selfishly very excited to not pay for my own travel when going to conferences... it's expensive damn. ya boy trying to buy land at some point. all that is to say, I'm pretty sure I'm the luckiest dude on earth okay you made it this far indulge me while I share one last thing as a person who commentates and hosts shows about web3... I'm haunted by The Man in the Arena "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” see you in the arena

@iceyyy_gaming @GamingDailyx Thank god Adin is such a good economy designer to be able to pull such a feat off.

Gaming Daily beating Dexerto to the news WAS on my bingo card 😉 Wen Dexerto numbers tho?

@WolvesDAO MONAD

If you were launching a token soon, what chain would you launch on? Asking for a friend.

@itsGnoc please travel back in time and yell this in our faces 2 years ago

Some TERRIBLE advice being given to Web3 games. If you're building in this space, build for the space that exists today or die. Seeing a lot of posts about the idyllic way to launch - that world does not exist today. If you do not have 5+ years of runway to build your game without ever going to market before, why would you come to Web3 and not play the speculative game? If you do have that amount of runway and can launch without ever taking more cash in - why are you playing the speculative game at all? How do we keep rehashing this every week?