Frustrations in building projects without grant assistance on Algorand

General
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This text is a venting expression from someone who builds on Algorand without financial assistance from the foundation.

I’ve heard more than a thousand times, ‘Dude, why don’t you do this project on Solana? your platform is good, the graphics are solid, and there trading volume is higher – the chances of success are greater.’ But no, I prefer to build on Algorand and lose money doing it. LOL. As I mentioned, SealsToken is a portfolio for projects, especially since not everyone is willing to work for free as I do and try to bring volume here to Algorand.

If I were to create the SealsVerse game on Solana or BNB, for example, there would be a lot more content and assets available for us to work with and develop the game. This is obvious when you look at the projects that have undertaken to build (WITHOUT HELP FROM GRANTS) on Algorand, and there is no similar project that did not receive financial assistance from Algorand, at least not that I am aware of. There are many things that frustrate me about this chain, and to be honest, SealsVerse is only here because I truly believe in a better future for Algorand.

Something needs to be done so that the community knows which projects receive financial assistance from Algorand and which ones do not. Because what is the advantage of trying to build something sustainable independently here on Algorand? There is none. The project that receives $10 million is treated the same way as the project that receives nothing and works hard for free to build.

With all due respect to projects that resort to grants, I believe it may be necessary for some cases, but what motivation is the chain providing for new projects thinking about building here? Or does the foundation really intend to fund all of them? And I don’t just mean financially, but also in terms of publicity.

In the end, the only thing I received from the foundation was a block from Staci when I posted a meme joking about her recovering Twitter. Discouraging, isn’t it? LOL. But it’s okay because SealsToken is a portfolio of work, both for me as a designer and web developer, and for our devs. I just wish for a little more recognition for something we’re building without dipping into the Algorand Foundation’s wallet.

sorry for my English; it’s not my native language, and I used a translator to help me with this text.

SealsToken.

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I definitely empathize but unfortunately the only formal process to mediate funding from the foundation to any project is through the xGov proposal process and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

The alternative is catching one of these community reward programs but sadly those are not too inclusive for smaller projects, not impossible to win but not likely.

Huge fan of your work and endeavors on Algorand so far Hash :people_hugging:

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Thank you, Foodie. You are one of the hardest-working individuals in this chain, a true enthusiast, and I respect that. Proud to have you on my team. However, what I meant is that unfortunately, there are no incentives for projects to build without financial aid. And when I say incentives, I’m not just talking about monetary ones, but incentives like publicity, solutions, etc. You, being part of the SealsVerse development, know how we struggle with issues and lack of connectivity in the SDK, having to find workarounds. I believe that if Algorand allocated a small portion of those funds to improve the connectivity of certain SDKs and provide more content on these matters, it would greatly enhance development.

Investing in new tools and making them increasingly accessible is like the saying goes, Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime

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Understand your concern, very valid points. In my opinion based on other grant recipients lack of results its harder for more support for higher amounts of money. I do believe things will loosen up as xGov continues to get better and more people are watching. Keep grinding as we need people like you to point at when people are not working hard and receiving grant funds

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Rich, thank you for your comment. I really don’t want to get into the point of who deserves to be benefited or not; I don’t think it’s up to me to decide or point fingers.

However, as an independent developer, I would love for a portion of this money to be invested directly in improving our tools. I saw some posts about the creation of an SDK in Unreal Engine, but our SDK in Unity is not complete. We don’t have any games that utilize this SDK, so investing in another SDK in a different graphics engine that is much more complex in terms of WebGL doesn’t make sense.

Especially since making a game where the user has to download a .exe file to play won’t work in Web3 for obvious reasons. I don’t know who is in charge of the gaming aspect at Algorand, but I would love for them to come into this post and reply these concerns.

Additionally, there are currently no tutorials or presentations on gaming development on Algorand.

But again, Rich, I want to thank you for your comment. You have an active voice in the community, and knowing that you agree with my points makes me more at ease knowing that more people think this way.

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I’ll just say, you can get frustrated as much as you want - funding is sparse and there is no short-term solution to it otehr than xgov, its the reality of Algo space atm.

For an example we’ve built one of the biggest and most advanced games on algo and we barely get even recognized by the AF, we struck some luck by John Woods noticing a thread that got lots of exposure, to finally get added to AF ecosystem “gaming” page (after 2+ years) :slight_smile:

As for grants/investments from AF - i can tell you we tried to get eitehr for past year without success…

So as you can see xgov is also our “only” chance to get some funds out of AF. I feel really bad for smaller projects trying to get funds to kickstart their journey, but when i see funds being thrown left and right pretty much aimlessly, especially in defi sector, i can’t in good conscience not apply for xgov myself.

As for gaming, there is no-one at AF in charge of it(they used to have head of gaming, he’s gone now), that should tell you enough about how they value gaming… while there is dozens of literaly “gaming-oriented” chains popping up in EVM space, with grant programs.

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