Let’s focus on one of the most fundamental features that Ultra has– our developer center. We’ll explore the major pain points facing video game developers and explain how the Ultra platform is addressing them. A robust developer back-end combined with blockchain technology makes it possible for developers to have an unprecedented level of control over their digital distribution options.

Through Ultra’s UI, developers are able to upload their game builds and create the rules through which these games are sold and distributed. The flexibility of this system allows developers to distribute their games in the most effective way for their communities, their companies, and their long-term growth.

For Ultra, attracting game developers has been mission critical from day one, with a fully dedicated team going to games shows around the world for the past several years, including E3, ChinaJoy, GDC, Gamescom, etc. Over 150 game developers have signed up to try our beta.

The development focus of our Developer Center revolves around a simple ethos: Without games, there are no players…

To understand Ultra’s decisions in building this platform, it’s key to understand the pain points developers face in the current digital distribution landscape. Long wait times until revenue is remitted back to the developer, poor discoverability making it difficult to gain players, limited options for monetization and undercutting of games due to unscrupulous reselling all create a difficult landscape for selling games.

Publishers and developers continue to look for solutions to these issues, but all of the current options have their own limitations. At Ultra, we realized early on that transparency and having a seamless transaction process helps ameliorate a large number of these problems and allow for some impressive new features and revenue models as well. So let’s jump into some of these issues and how Ultra addresses them.

First, let’s look at some of the financial issues. Currently, on all of the digital distribution platforms (GOG, Steam, Epic Store, Kongregate, etc.) developers have a necessary waiting period to get paid, as traditional accounting mechanisms require a review process prior to releasing funds. Often, to ensure the success of a good title, early marketing budgets must match or exceed development budgets. Combine that with platform fees and development costs, making money from games quickly becomes a daunting task. If the platform a developer chooses isn’t able to help bring players to their titles, it quickly creates an unsustainable ecosystem. Developers are limited in their publishing options, and there has been little innovation in creating new revenue streams that have been introduced in years.

The reselling of keys on the secondary market poses another challenge for developers. Resellers often take advantage of things like regional price differences, sales or quantity-based purchase incentives to buy a plethora of keys at a discounted price. They then dump the keys on the secondary market and make a profit resulting in the developer being unable to sell the same game at a profitable margin. Because we’re gamers and game developers, we’ve been thinking about how to solve these types of problems. We think that it boils down to the underlying technologies.

Ultra Solves This By Giving Developers Options They Can’t Find Anywhere Else.

The key to our platform, is that each and every game on Ultra can be tokenized via a friendly front-end interface.

Developers can customize various parameters like whether or not to allow reselling and secondary market trading of their game. Developers also have the power to decide when to allow resell, for how long, and how much of the revenue share they want to receive. In the image below you can see some examples of those customization options.