MiniGame (S.MG), June 2015 Statement

S.MG has a total of 88`096`605 authorised shares outstanding. The total assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009974 BTC. The cash+tangible assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009896 BTC.

S.MG operated at a loss this period, as such there is no computable P/E value as of yet.

S.MG has Special Stock Warrants outstanding, as follows :

Provisional statement, will be considered accepted within 24 hours. Make any observations or corrections below.

This was the heaviest expenditure month for S.MG since inception, and makes up a significant portion of that total. The larger part of this expenditure was the feeding of the game loot pools. This was both to be expected and perfectly reasonable, and an expense I do not in the slightest begrudge. As the game population scales, I expect to make further disbursements on this account. I am curious if a player gets sufficiently lucky to actually significantly drain any of the pools^ix. Should that occur, they will be refilled.

A smaller but still significant contributor to the outgoings was my attempt to advertise the game. I was satisfied before, from my own business experience, that advertising is a stupid endeavour on par with hiring clairvoyants and other similar fraudsters. In light of the appalling quality of workmanship in the field that this exercise has unearthed, as well as the unabashedly poor RoI I believe any investor should be satisfied that if we don't spend further Bitcoin on this account it is because we mean to succeed as a business, rather than go to Davos. Needless to say we will engage in very little of this sort of stotting in the future.

To close, some perhaps interesting datapoints :

• Since the release of the game, players have racked an aggregate 2`682`832 seconds of gameplay, coming to an average server utilization of 1.027.
• Since the release of the game, players have expended 0.11158603 Bitcoin. The expected revenue for S.MG from this is 0 Bitcoin, which puts the value to us per average second of gameplay at 0 Bitcoin.^x
• Eulora is known from experience to run on AMD Radeon HD 5800 / HD 6700 / HD 7790 ; ASUS EAH6450 ; Intel HD 4000 ; nVidia GeForce GT 520 / GTX 580 / GT 630 / 9600M GT / GTX 970 / NV98. The most popular operating systems are Unix-x86(64)-GCC (9) ; Unix-x86(32)-GCC (4) ; Win32-X86(32)-VisualC (4).

1. An informal auction was held in game during the Sunday event, through which Grundin Goldskull has won the appointment as the official game gold agent with a bid of 10`000`000 coppers. This means that he can buy as much as he wants directly from me, and so you can reliably depend on him to supply you, should you need any. As the game grows, or should he become unavailable, further auctions will be held.

   I've also sold myself 222`661`832 coppers, because apparently I'm a baller. [↩]

2. As per the Jobs Board entry, jurov has undertaken maintenance of Eulora binaries for OS X 10.10, Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. [↩]
3. Eulora has had its loot pools seeded. Think of it as an ice breaker.

   If you're worried about it, I shall point out that players have so far managed to realise < 0.1% of this sum, and while it is entirely possible someone strikes a multi-BTC jackpot, it is not altogether very likely - and each try costs a little. If that notwithstanding you're still worried about it - which I guess is understandable, seeing the history of unreliability software has built up for itself in the modern age - the client download is over here. [↩]

4. As follows :
   • 5.7647 BTC (via Coinbase - eugh) to BuySellAds network (this is one of the top 5 outfits, as nearly as Intel could tell), for a total of 1`230`000 impressions on blenderartists.org, cryptoblox.com, gameslikefinder.com, freebitcoinwin.com, gamefromscratch.com and bitcoinaliens.com (sorted by expenditure). Here's a current stat :

     

     Nine days later they had delivered 366`296 of the contracted 1`230`000 impressions. The appaling 0.19% CTR rate (which I hear is not actually bad these days) is probably representative if not overshooting due to fatigue. This means I am paying 5.7647 / 1230 / 1.9 = 0.0024667 PER CLICK.

     It is altogether possible that these clicks have yielded as many as one cvasi-events in total so far, but it's incontrovertible they resulted in no installs and no registration. So the ROI is through the roof, or as alf put it, I think I like uber more.

     To round out this very promising thread, since these people are running ads on scum like

     

     straight from their "cryptocurrency" section, I figured an inquiry's never a mistake and asked them about running either Qntra or BitBet. The response came back as

     Thank you for your interest in selling ads with BuySellAds. Unfortunately, we are not able to approve your website at this time.

     Due to the volume of submissions, we are not able to provide the reasons for denial or feedback for improvements, although we use several factors to determine whether a site is a great match for our network. The topic of a site, its ad sizes, traffic, etc. are all a piece of the puzzle, but in the end it all comes down to our
     advertiser demand. We know what our advertisers are looking for, and we know what we're best at selling. We only want to work with sites we know we're the perfect choice for, and that's not the case here.

     As BuySellAds continues to expand, so does our advertiser base. Hit us up again in 6 months and maybe we'll be able to welcome you into the fold with confidence. In the meantime, we know there are a ton of ad networks to choose from, and we appreciate you thinking of us.

     Which is nice and conveys a feeling of care and attention to detail - in a word, the muchly vaunted professionalism. Except,

     Subject: Re: I'm an Advertiser, and I need assistance
     From: "Angela"
     Date: Wed, June 24, 2015 9:03 am

     Hello Mircea,

     I am sorry about this. I contacted the publisher about this issue and will let you
     know as soon as I hear from them to resolve this.

     Sometimes Publishers respond quickly to issues like this, and sometimes it takes
     them longer to respond. We usually like to allow at least 1-2 business days for a
     response and resolution. Although if more time passes that we have not yet heard
     from the publisher, and if you do not want to wait any longer for a resolution,
     please respond to this email to let us know.

     Thanks,
     Angela

     --
     Angela

     Mircea Popescu on June 23, 2015 at 5:04pm wrote:

     I ordered a 728x90 spot on http://www.cryptoblox.com/

     As you can see * , the site covers about a third of the ad with a spurious overlay.
     This is not what I'm paying for - they want to sell 728x50 let them advertise the
     spots as such.

     ---
     * For instance :
     https://archive.is/8wKHO
     http://browsershots.org/screenshots/bb88555bcafb640450af9252fa8a7dbe
     http://browsershots.org/screenshots/c3626b810d7c75712767a5c729d568ee
     http://browsershots.org/screenshots/89e93f6ca24604324f3a347fdf383f12
     http://browsershots.org/screenshots/a4a6821b939c707b19952791e096b00a
     etc.

     And that's the last I heard on the matter. An entire world built on first impressions delivered JIT, how do you like that ?

   • 1.05 BTC were paid to gametracker.com, in exchange for the promise of 51`020 impressions of 728x90 banners on their "tier 2" (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway etc) line. This turned out to be a complete scam : for most of the campaign, they failed to actually display the banner. Otherwise, the results were nothing short of appalling :
     

     $ grep -c "Z2FtZXR" trilema.com-Jun-2015.txt
     16
     $ wc -l trilema.com-Jun-2015.txt
     6236082 trilema.com-Jun-2015.txt

     Not a single one those 16 hits was actually in any sense a valid click, either. Obviously the rep was confronted with this sad state of affairs, to which the response came, and I quote,

     We are confident that all 52000 impressions you purchased were successfully delivered on the Gametracker.com website.

     The Doubleclick platform is showing 23 clicks with a click through rate of 0.06%. This is low compared to the CTR we typically see for Adsense and other ad campaign we have run. I can talk with my manager about running some extra impressions for this campaign but would highly recommend you update the banner image you submitted to be more effective (perhaps with a brief text description of the service/product you are trying to sell).

     Please attach an updated banner image in your response and I will work to get some more impressions added to this ad campaign.

     -Don

     In conclusion : "Don" is a lying scumbag, and gametracker.com pretty much a scam through and through. Not even an intelligent one, at that. I've filed a complaint with the BBB against Clan Servers Hosting LLC of 100 Matawan Rd Ste 420 Matawan, New Jersey, and adding the name of David Aninowsky, the head gonzo of the gametracker.com / vultr.com/ choopa scamring here for my own records.

   • 1.0 BTC to Daniel Barron has been running like a dog trying to get an ample list of - broadly speaking - idiots to advertise Eulora (here's a small sample). His efforts were, as per my instructions, dedicated to the linux webspace in the May 8th - June 6th interval. Their useful result was exactly zero - not a single website misrepresenting itself as dealing with linux software managed to pick up as much as a single satoshi off of this table. That I should even be expending my own resources at all for this is already ridiculous, but reality goes deeper into the ridicule pond than that. We've seen a lot of "80 dollar CPM" bullshit as if it's 2004 or something, we've seen a lot of aferations of self-importance from an assortment of clueless idiots who think they're worth anyone's time by merely existing, we've seen, basically speaking, reddit and tardstalk. They will not be getting any money, obviously. More importantly - the only possible summation of this failure of the "community" is that the community in question is dirt and will go away.

     His efforts were redirected, also per my instructions, towards commercial gaming portals etc on June 9th. Three weeks later, the useful results were actually worse : we wasted some Bitcoin for exactly the same sort of exposure as received from the previous set. At this point, the decision seems to be : either "hire an expert" ; or else sink money into the social media platforms (yeah, I'm totally going to give FaceBook money) ; or else just forget about "advertising" altogether. Honestly, if I am going to throw Bitcoin away, I'd much rather throw it at the playerbase than at the various "Internet Businessmen" out there.

     In any case : he's done his job and he is getting paid - irrespective of the aggregated failure of the world outside to amount to as much as a hill of beans.

   [↩]

5. A number of six magic bags were given out to players. These produce 1337 satoshi per day each, and so consequently 0.00192528 will be charged against this month's accounts, and then 0.00244002 against the accounts of every subsequent month after that. [↩]
6. This one consisted of high quality tools. [↩]
7. This will be a monthly recurring expense, made unavoidable by the fact that Minigame tech loves Blender.

   The idiots managed to... reject it. Fancy that! I left a note on some forum where their representative had pasted one of those lengthy vapid turds a certain sort of person keeps spouting these days. It read like so :

   Originally Posted by m9105826
   Hey everyone,

   In an effort to reach out to the community more effectively,

   [...]

   The main goal here is honesty and transparency.

   In the spirit of that same honesty and transparency referenced in the original post, I will recount the unhappy story of my trying to support Blender.

   It started on irc (as you may or may not know, Blender has a #blender channel on Freenone ; as you also may or may not know, there's a lot more to the world than the web, and most important people doing important things can not be found on any webforum) :

   Jun 23 07:34:51 JA12 incidentally, what's the best way to support the blender foundation ?
   mircea_popescu: buy blender related products and services, some of that money finds its way back to blender development fund. direct donation is also an option if you prefer
   didn't see anything on the website
   i'm not too keen on this entire merchandising front
   mircea_popescu: blendercloud is one service/product directly related to foundation but partners also sponsor it
   mircea_popescu: it, as in blender development
   https://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/
   mircea_popescu I just paypal to the dev fund on a monthly basis as JA12 said
   The most important thing you must understand about PayPal is that using it is worse than wearing baby otter fur while kicking around footballs made by five year old concentration camp prisoners hanging a foot above ground from steel meathools stuck in their eye sockets.

   Yes, it is really that bad. PayPal is the enemy, declared and avowed, of everything that is good and right with the world, and especially ~ ESPECIALLY ~ any sort of creativity of any kind whatsoever. I won't rehash their outrageous history of rape and pillage directed against the human spirit, suffice it to say I won't ever use it, and the notion of anyone ~ ANYONE ~ involved in a creative endeavour of any kind, to any degree, using them is, again, beyond scandalous. Stop promoting your sworn enemies, yo!

   That said, I am not a fanatic, and I understand that sometimes you have to drink water out of a dirty garden hose. So I asked a friend to pay the foundation on my behalf : http://btcbase.org/log/?date=23-06-2015#1173438

   This was done plainly, publicly, on the Bitcoin irc channel (also on Freenode). And yes, chief among the benefits of Bitcoin is that I can do this : I can send payments from anywhere to anywhere, and any aspiring "government" can shove their aspirations. (The other chief benefit being that lo! BuySellAds takes Bitcoin, which is why there's an ad for Eulora, MiniGame's Bitcoin-based MMORPG right here on this forum!)

   The result ?

   Hi,
   I mail with someone calling self Riccardo, claiming to own websites from Mircea Popescu, and paying me via a South African PayPal account that doesn't show a website.
   I'm sorry, but I don't want to get involved with this. I will refund the donation.
   -Ton-

   Now, to be clear : I don't begrudge the man the right to refuse help, from anyone, for any reason (Ricky does, but that's another story). Heck, if he feels like taking it to the extreme he can even outright decide to refuse help from anyone, and finance the whole kaboodle out of his own pocket - I know I do exactly that, for plenty of things.

   Nevertheless, a few things have to be pointed out :

   1. Merchandising is a very 80s (that is to say, atechnical, demeaning and very, very wasteful) method to support anything. I don't want to force the irrigation of another acre of South American forrest so the cotton can be grown so the shirt can be made so I can spend ten dollars, throw away ten and support you for forty-five cents if you get even that much. There's no need for further keychains and coffee mugs in the world. For that matter, I don't wear tshirts, I don't carry keychains and I the very little coffee I actually drink comes out of actual porcelain.

   2. PayPal is a very stupid way to do payments online in 2015. Yes, I get it, last you felt like expending any thought on the topic was 1995, and hey, they were a hip new thing then. Sure, they were, back then. Meanwhile it sold out, to be merged with Hot Topic to create the USG MiniTruth. Stop using fucking PayPal, there are much better alternatives. It's been 20 years, after all. Time to get with the times ?

   3. A poor reaction to strange is the best predictor of low intelligence. Everything worth doing, everything important, everything you will enjoy, and remember, and be in the end ready to die for will come to you as a surprise originally. This is a given. There are two kinds of people in the world, the sort that react with curiosity to surprise, and the sort that start flailing their arms, stuffing their ears and yelling. The thing is that we have a name for each kind. The name for the first is creative, and the name for the other set is whatever you wish to call them.

   So on that note : I tried to support this thing, and didn't manage to. I'm sure you don't need it, but even without needing it - consider what you can do for the other people that in the future might want to support this thing, so they actually manage. And no, it's not just about money, by the time this sort of discord shows up in the bottom line, it's been going on in the creative spheres far, far longer, and probably poisoned them thoroughly.

   Yet, none of this is actually my problem. So... cheers!

   It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, disappeared by the website in question. Such is the fate of transparency and honesty among English speakers these days.

   I've since had it pointed out that yes there's an unadvertised Bitcoin option. I think I'll exercise my very advertised option to refrain from supporting this particular group until after such a time PayPal becomes the unadvertised option. [↩]

8. The nominal (ie, what merchant pays) of all owned items plus cash held. The value of skills is nominally 0. [↩]
9. Currently the possible results of player actions do not have an upper bound. It is perfectly possible to start work trying to make Coarse Thread out of three clumps of Dry Grass worth a coupla hundred satoshi together and end up with ten Bitcoin in finished products. Yours truly has had occasion to verify this on two separate occasions - once when a fortunate Tiny Dry Grass claim turned one Little Bit O' Nothing into 34 bits of grass (from 11 satoshi to ~ 2500 satoshi) and another time when a lucky click on Indistinct Treebark Shavings yielded 2`665 units of the finished product (a value of 0.00775 BTC) out of ~300 coppers' (0.00000300 BTC) worth of ingredients. [↩]
10. This is intentional, Eulora is not intended to run a rake. Instead, Eulora will finance itself through the sale of food and drink - which is to be implemented at a later point. [↩]