SaruTobi retirement and new Sarutobi Lightning game
Original SaruTobi Game
First of all a massive thank you to the sarutobi players who have supported the game these past few years, SaruTobi was first launched back in late 2013 and initially was a way for me to play around with bitcoin in gaming. Initially my first intention was to allow the user to buy game items with bitcoin however due to Apple’s restriction on allowed payment methods it switched to sending the player small bitcoin tips.
Initially the tips were supplied by donation and paid out around $0.1 -$0.10 now and then to players. However donations eventually slowed down and the liquidity of tips switched to using a bitcoin miner that would payout the days mining rewards as tips to the users. However as the mining industry become competitive our miner was unable to supply bitcoin and SaruTobi switched to an ad revenue model. In this model as the users played the game ad revenue was earned and the game kept track of how much a user played based on the number of coins they received. At the end of each month the generated ad revenue would be distributed between players based on their coin submissions. However the ad revenue model is no longer feasible due to restrictions from the ad revenue companies, basically the ad revenue system is no longer supplying the revenue due to the nature of how the ads are used in the game (using ads to generate revenue cause users to click or view ads they were not interested in an understandably was not interpreted as real ad traffic causing blacklisting of the game). In fact ad revenue has not being received by us since January and we have been paying the earnings out of our own pocket. Furthermore I am happily working full time with a couple of other projects in the space (Everdreamsoft, Indiesquare, Book of Orbs and Counterparty, Takara, SaruTobi Island) and have limited time to maintain the current Sarutobi and work on the new lightning version. One last factor is currently for low payments of $0.01 -$0.10 the game sent them via coinbase which I don’t feel 100% comfortable promoting to new users as a wallet.
For these reasons SaruTobi will currently cease players being able to earn bitcoin and you will not be able to submit coins in the apps, current earnings for the current month will be sent out.
SaruTobi Lightning
However we are currently working on a new model using the lightning network, the basis of the game is that users will be able to purchase power ups and items via bitcoin over the lightning network, the profits from these purchases will be used as tips also sent over the lightning network.
There is no release date for mobile version but a web based prototype is almost ready however we will be working on a mobile alternative. The lightning network is still new and receiving bitcoin over it is not yet usable for most users so it will be a while before fully functional tips/rewards are active, however I have no doubt that the receiving bitcoin function will only improve in the coming months and years and hope to help develop this model with the new sarutobi lightning games and SaruTobi Island. Along with Lightning network the new refresh of the game will contain more utility for SaruTobi and other Counterparty tokens.
