Introducing S.MG - The Ministry of Games.

What : New asset on MPEx.

Who : Me.

When : Starting today, closing Monday the 10th.

Details : The Ministry of Games (or MiniGameⁱ for short) is intended to collect under one single umbrella a number of disparate game development and publishing efforts.

This is the way to go for a number of very good reasons :

1. Good management is integral to the success of any sort of venture, but it is especially important for "soft" businessesⁱⁱ. As experience has shown so far, there exists exactly one entity with managerial abilities in Bitcoin. Since success outside of good management is impossible (in the same way vegetal gestation is impossible) everyone aiming for success rather than cabbage labour will have to acquire management services. Since the need is great and the supply exceptionally limited it makes sense to concentrate rather than disperse the efforts, leverage standardisation scl.
2. For good operational reasons it makes sense to consolidate the efforts of game development and distribution. Important economies of scale in marketing, product management and so forth make this a no brainer.
3. From a financial point of view, it makes sense to have one larger asset that smooths out the ups and downs of individual profit centers, more easily distributes capital and more effectually maintains reporting standards and best practices across the board. This is true in any market, but doubly so in Bitcoinⁱⁱⁱ.

This is also not the way to go, for one very very good reason : executive meddling, also known informally as the Pointy Haired Boss. I promise to not ever do my hair in a pointy fashion.

In practice, The Ministry of Games will use three ways to develop games :

1. In house. We will maintain a permanent staff drawing a salary (payable in the form of Bitcoin or S.MG stock warrants exclusively).
2. By working with external contractors. The contracts entered will be made public. All payments in the form of Bitcoin exclusively.
3. Partnerships and licensing deals. Revenue sharing and Bitcoin payments exclusively.

It obviously goes without saying that absolutely all games will use a Bitcoin payment system exclusively.

This asset is an important step forward in that it introduces a number of novel ideas :

1. Fiat style IPO. To date all MPEx IPOs consisted of sales by the owner, for a minimum price fixed by the owner^iv. S.MG will be run as an actual IPO, which is to say at the time of closing^v all bids meeting the specified par value will be accepted, and the number of shares sold will become the total shares.
2. Limited voting^vi. Management alone may call for a vote, by making a statement indicating a number of clear alternatives for which shareholders are to vote and a cutoff date. The shareholders, prior to that date, post in the indicated venue their vote, signed with their GPG key as registered on MPEx. On the cutoff date the votes are tallied according to shares held and the result published. This vote is only consultative for the management.
3. Open contracts. Bitcoin itself is a very open system. People building on top of it have been creating very closed outgrowths^vii. The idea is for S.MG to take transparency as far as at all possible, which will include a lot of published contracts and so forth.

Historically, the deployment of novel ideas in Bitcoin has turned out poorly, and so you are very well advised to bear in mind that this is alpha stage Bitcoin finance and things may very well not turn out as you expect them to, or think you have reason to expect them to.

1. mircea_popescu So what I got S.BGDP.
   Onomastics Consultant ...what.

   mircea_popescu Bitcoin Games Development & Publishing.
   Onomastics Consultant Awful, because acronym sucks, and spelled out it looks like a dept of the USSR or something.

   mircea_popescu Yup.
   Onomastics Consultant Bittygames is pretty cute.

   mircea_popescu It may be not wasted upon you that I am going for huge evil empire rather than cute.
   Onomastics Consultant Department for the Overseeing and Execution of Diverting Activities Involving Bitcoin. DOEDAIB!

   mircea_popescu Lol.
   Onomastics Consultant I guess your acronym above at least rhymes. There's always the 1984 spooky route, call it DevPub.
   mircea_popescu S.MG. MiniGame, Ministry of Games. [↩]

2. More specifically, uncommodified makers of non physical goods. Commodification brings with it a certain implicit level of management, at least in the sense that a large catalogue of already made mistakes stands available to anyone marginally capable of paying attention. Physical goods bring with them a certain implicit level of management, due to the fact that in the million year history of monkeys manipulating rocks said monkeys have more or less acquired some basic ease of interaction with the rocks. Fields such as movie, music and game making are particularly vulnerable to poor management (which includes without exception all cases of self management by the authors) as the experience of cartoon production under Fred Quimby and after his retirement definitively shows. [↩]
3. Because Bitcoin - at least the English speaking section thereof - consists principally (by headcount) of poor people who aim to turn whatever change they had left over from their latest McDonalds visit into a fortune of the future (where "the future" is understood in the sort of terms you'd expect from this underclass : before their favourite show's current season ends, the furthest future there can possibly exist). This approach tends to inflate bubbles and is generally both counterproductive and damaging to Bitcoin and Bitcoin finance particularly. [↩]
4. The BitBet IPO was the same fundamental concept, even if the layered offering created some interesting price discovery. [↩]
5. Monday, 10th of June, just before midnight GMT. [↩]
6. The problem of shareholders' votes in Bitcoin is a thorny one. On one hand it's natural for the shareholders to have a say in the management of their company. On the other hand it's pointless (or even counterproductive) to create rights which can't be in practice enforced, and in the case of Bitcoin at least historically there never existed a means to enforce a shareholder vote (nor did there ever exist a shareholder vote outside of MPEx, contrary to baseless pretense to the contrary by various websites). [↩]
7. Much akin to how people keep making centralised stuff on top of the very decentralised Bitcoin. [↩]