Quick take:
- The startup’s first IP franchise is Neo Fairies.
- The path of Neo Fairies will be determined via Luda’s DAO-based initiative.
- Luda will open up the Neo Fairies Discord community later this month.
Gaming industry veteran Shannon Studstill and former group product manager, Google Research, Vijay Sundaram have co-founded Web3 startup, Luda. Luda will create and release IP franchises shaped by its DAO communities.
Studstill has almost two decades of experience in the gaming industry, starting out as an executive producer/director of internal production at Playstation, where she co-founded Sony’s Santa Monica Studio and managed internal production for the God of War franchise.
She later spent a year as executive producer at computer games company Electronic Arts and then another eight years at Playstation as senior director of product development before being promoted to VP. After that, she joined Google as the studio director of Stadia Games and Entertainment.
It was at Google where she met her co-founder and CEO Vijay Sundaram, with whom she established Luda.
Luda was founded on the idea of turning IP creation on its head and allowing the community to own and build it. Luda’s first project is Neo Fairies, which has yet to take its final form. It could potentially be a video game, TV show, or books. As it was created as a franchise first, Luda plans to let its eventual community of creators steer its path forward via a Solana-based DAO.
The startup’s goal is to feed snippets of lore and world-building content to budding creators and then allow them to create the characters. The premise of Neo Fairies is built on a scenario where fairies have been driven into hiding by humans after having existed since the beginning of time, but the fairies are emerging back into the world in a new era.
As a collaborative world-building experience, players can create and define the backstory of their very own Neo Fairy and give it a place in the “fantasy punk” world. Users will be able to pick a spot on a map of the real world and mint it as a Solana NFT, and also create and mint their fairy as an NFT to prove provenance and ownership. The NFT will tie each fairy to the creator’s wallet.
Besides transaction fees, minting will be free. Luda will open up its Discord server later this month and let participants claim their spot on the world map ahead of launching the fairy creation platform later this year.
Those who mint a Neo Fairy NFT can gain access to the DAO community and participate in franchise and story development. Sundaram said that Luda is developing a legal framework to assign IP rights to the DAO in order to enable the community to govern the franchise’s development.
Running on a “create-to-own” model, Luda sees this framework being used by all types of Web3 projects and believes that the next Marvel or Roblox could be developed by a community instead of a company.
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