The Slime Client, and all core functionality we release is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License
Anyone can use, modify, and redistribute Slime as they see fit, as long as they follow the terms of the license.
Slime does not, and cannot charge a fee for creation and trading of assets using Slime This is a key design decision, and is not something that we can change our minds about, even if we wanted to.
We will likely add options to voluntarily support Slime's development, but being open source, any attempts by us to force users to pay fees could easily be bypassed.
The Slime network has been designed to be as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) as possible with centralized servers only being used where absolutely necessary or for optional, non-critical features. The core functionality of Slime, (being able to publish, distribute, sell, buy, download, and consume digital content, primarily PC Games) is fully P2P and cannot be stopped or limited by anyone, including us.
Slime only uses centralized servers for filtering out spam/scams, ensuring uptime, and for additional features that require a centralized authority. That being said, all centralized parts of Slime are open source and designed so that any person, or organization can, and should launch their own alternative servers that users can seamlessly switch between if they do not agree with our actions.
Slime gives creators complete control over their own work. You do not need to be a big publisher to use Slime In fact, Slime was created to empower small and independent creators like us to reject corporate power.
With the Slime client, publishers can easily create and manage their own digital assets (copies of their game) on their own computer using their own software. No third party, (including us) is involved in managing assets or handling transactions.
Only the publishers themselves can create new copies and manage the store page of their product.
The Slime Client has been built from the ground up to be modular, and to allow additional apps to be added and removed by the user at will.
We hope a community of like minded developers will build apps for additional markets like video, music, social media, journalism, that can benefit from the underlying functionality of the Slime Client.
We plan to implement a Slime "App Store" along side our video game marketplace as our next product.
Most creatives are skeptical of blockchain related projects, and for good reason. Other existing crypto projects focus on exotic (often morally dubious) monetization schemes, make promises that are too good to be true, and preach about revolutionizing YOUR industry, all while taking the same fees and operating in the same way as any other platform.
Slime's goal is to give creators the tools to monetize their own products themselves, the way they want, without relying on a centralized marketplace. Starting with the most basic one-time payment model that we are used to.
Slime does not have a token, or anything for users to invest in. It is purely an open source, community supported project.
Slime is effectively free to use. No investment of money is required by publishers, or end users to use Slime. There are no platform fees, and transactions happen directly between publisher and customer.
Other monetization schemes, such as subscriptions, and micro transactions are possible, and are in our development roadmap, but are not yet supported.
Slime is Built on...
It is impossible to make a decentralized platform monetizable without a blockchain. Introducing payment processors like PayPal and Stripe adds a critical flaw that censorship advocates can exploit. A properly decentralized blockchain cannot be censored by anyone, even governments.
As well as being the most decentralized blockchain, Chia uses a new consensus algorithm called Proof of Space & Time (PoST) which uses a tiny fraction of the energy of Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains like Bitcoin for equal, or better security.
The whole Chia Blockchain even uses significantly less energy than large banks and conventional payment processors like PayPal.
BitTorrent was the original P2P network. Before the era of streaming, the BitTorrent protocol accounted for over 60% of internet traffic. Even now it is still widely used, not only for piracy, which many people associate it with, but for many legitimate use cases by large companies for its efficiency, speed and security.
Slime uses BitTorrent to distribute content and provide fast and efficient and downloads across the network.
Nostr is an innovative decentralized social media protocol that is growing in popularity. Nostr is one of our biggest inspirations. The name Slime (Games and Other Stuff Traded without Intermediaries) is an homage to Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays).
While it isn't our #1 priority at the moment, building social features into the Slime client for product reviews, and connecting with your friends and other gamers will be critical for the success for Slime. Nostr is the obvious choice for this.
Slime needs help!
Slime is an extremely ambitious project, and we can use all the help we can get. We need...
We need passionate developers who share our vision for an unstoppable platform for digital content publishing, and to support freedom of expression world wide.
We would like to recruit developers to work with us directly on Slime. As we are still a very young project, so we can't promise any meaningful compensation at this time. For the right candidates, of course we can talk about equity and/or payment in the future when we acquire proper funding.
We also would love to support any developers who want to create their own projects, or integrate existing projects with Slime. The Slime Client is designed to be modular and extensible. Our video game marketplace is just one potential application of Slime's underlying technology. Video, music, journalism, etc. There are countless markets that can benefit from censorship resistant publishing. We can't build it all alone, but we would love to help you help us. (Slime apps are simply compiled React.js apps, or any website that can run on an Electron.js client)
Funding open source software development is notoriously difficult. This project is certainly no exception.
Our project sits in a weird place between the worlds of crypto currency, and the largely crypto skeptical gaming industry. We do not wish to release a token, or NFTs, and have already been rejected by several fundraising sites including kickstarter and indiegogo due to our use of blockchain technology.
Slime has the potential to save the gaming industry a LOT of money. If Slime's success would benefit you or your business, please consider sponsoring our development. We would benefit immensely from any support, both financially, and in helping us gain legitimacy in the gaming community.
With the release of our beta, we want to reach out to as many game developers and publishers as possible not only to work out any bugs in the system, but also to better understand the concerns and needs of our potential users. Please join our Discord to learn more!
We are under no illusion that Slime is a small project, likely full of bugs, has no financially backing, and has no user base. However, everything has to start somewhere.
We want Slime to be a platform for creators, by creators. The main purpose of this Beta is to catch and address the concerns of game devs early and build as much trust as we can with the game dev community. As a game developer myself (the founder) I understand the stigma around blockchain among creators and players alike. I know it is a big ask, but please take this project as a serious, and good faith effort to make a real next-gen marketplace technology the right way.
Please follow us on social media, tell your friends, help get the word about about this project.
If you are interested in assisting us in our mission, or if you have questions, please contact us at gaerax@gmail.com or on our Discord
FAQ
While we can't take a greedy 30% cut like some of our competitors, Slime still has plenty of ways to bring in money, including...
Sponsors - We believe that if we are successful, some of the 30% of gaming revenue (billions of dollars per year) that would have gone to platform fees will find its way to us from publishers wanting to show gratitude and support development.
Paid Promotion - Big games spend big bucks on promotion. If the AAA titles want to show up on the front page of our marketplace, that's not going to be free.
Consulting - If we manage to catch the eyes of the big dogs, they are going to want help integrating Slime into their workflows and products.
Tips & Donations - We can't force users to give us money, but we can ask nicely!😊
Spending Less - A penny saved == a penny earned. Running a peer-to-peer network is way, way cheaper than a centralized service. We don't need to pay big money for bandwidth and a fancy data center. Slime grows more powerful with every new user!
Overall, we believe that there is more than enough money to be made, without treating struggling game developers as our cash cows.
Transactions happen via Offer files. Offers are a technology created by Chia Network that allows for secure and trustless, native p2p exchange.
If that sounds confusing, don't worry, it is actually incredibly easy to use and understand once you first experience it. You don't need a deep understanding of the underlying technology to use them, the purchasing and trading experience is very user friendly. The software handles it all for you.
Offer files are simple and secure text files that can be shared safely in any way. They look like this. 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
Offer files can be visualized by this popular meme format. For every copy of a game a publisher creates, they can create offer file(s) with specified prices and conditions that must be met for each offer to be valid. The offers files are then uploaded to marketplaces where customers can find them.
+ = ✅ Valid Transaction
If a customer wants to accept one of these offers, (buy a game) they do it by creating their own offer, which is a mirrored version of the original. The two offers can then be merged together, the values equal out, and with some cryptographic magic, it becomes a valid transaction.
If a publisher wishes to run promotional sales, or offer discounts, they can at any point create and post additional offer files with a lower prices. These can be limited in quantity and/or with a built in time limit that will make them expire after a given date.
Assets are anything that would be bought and sold using Slime Primarily, that would be copies of games, or other media. These assets need to be created using a standard, so that they all work the same way.
Currently, all Slime Assets are created using the NFT1 standard created by Chia Network. In the future we plan to create our own asset standard(s) to better suit the wants and needs of content publishers. NFT1 has a lot of good features, but it isn't a perfect fit for Slime's use cases.
That said it is a great place to start, and provides a lot of interesting features that we want to explore to see what works and what doesn't before we consider implementing our own main asset standard. So let's describe how Slime assets currently works using NFT1.
Minting - "Minting" or creating new copies of a game, is the largest issue with NFT1. NFT1 was made for NFTs, which are supposed to be unique, and "Non-Fungible". Copies of games don't need to be unique. That uniqueness adds a lot of overhead. NFT's need to be minted one at a time, or in small groups of ~25. This means it would take 7+ hours just to mint 10,000 copies. Not ideal, but is good enough for a beta. With our own standard, we should be able to mint any number of copies in seconds with a single transaction.
Selling - Regardless of asset standard, offer files can be used.
Royalties - NFT1s best feature is their Royalties. NFTs can be resold, making it possible to resell your old games. This is cool, but it raises some issues for publishers. Fortunately, NFT1 allows publishers to set a % royalty that must be paid to the creator every time it is sold. There are pros and cons to this as both a publisher and customer, and it is one of the most interesting features that Slime wants to experiment with. A percentage, or fixed transfer fee (or a combination of both) could be a great way to get people to buy and try out more games. Knowing that you can recoup some, or most of the cost of a game, if you don't like it would make people more likely to take risks with games they are unsure of.
Transfers - You can transfer NFTs freely, which means you could gift and share games between friends.
We are working to create our own asset standard, or set of standards for Slime. Supporting a variety of different business models may require several different types of assets, each with their own features. We want to be able to give publishers the ability to chose what business model(s) works best for them, including...
One time purchase
Subscription / Membership
Micro transactions
Freemium
DLC
Creating these standards will be an ongoing process that must be done carefully and thoroughly to ensure we don't create security issues, and give people time to audit and accept our standards.
Our first, and main standard will based on Chia's CAT2 (Chia Asset Token) standard. We hope that it will not only solve the minting issues with NFT1, but will allow the minter to specify criteria to limit resale and transfer, and possibly address other key concerns.
Not right away, but possibly in the future.
We have a few options for how to support fiat payments that we are considering. However, accepting fiat payments adds a lot of organizational challenges that we are not ready for.
The biggest barrier to Slime as a business supporting fiat payments is that we actually have no control over the assets that users create. We cannot sell assets that we do not own! Slime would need a process to privately acquire a bulk amount of a product from each publisher prior to launch in order to properly support fiat payments. This may show up at some point as an optional premium feature that allows Slime to make a profit, and publishers to secure something of a "minimum guarantee".
It would also be possible for publishers to set up their own services were they can accept payment directly via PayPal, or another platform in return for the asset. This would require more work from each individual publisher to set up, so it is likely not something that we will create ourselves. At least not at this time.
Another obvious option that we will pursue is to partner with stable coin providers to provide a simple and fast onramp for customers to load their wallets.
+ 
= ✅ Valid Transaction