Future of Gaming: Combining Gamers With The Web3 Community - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

hello my name is Caitlin Ken people call me TK I'm the co-founder and CEO of NY I'm super excited to talk to you guys about how we look at gaming and mod free and what the future lies ahead of us so just a quick background to myself I've been in the game industry for about 20 years starting with uh uh my extended Samsung Electronics where I was part of the new business development team we were starting the smartphone business at that time as well as a mobile gaming business and I quickly moved over to the gaming development world uh starting with real-time world where we developed Crackdown in APB um and and since then I've been starting my own companies started uh pixelberry neurian software and endway about 11 years ago so anyway I started anyway in 2011 with the goal of creating console quality competitive multiplayer games that run on multiple devices so at the time I was focusing on making sure that the games run on the emerging platforms which at the time were mobile Smart TV browsers as well as the gaming devices um and now it's kind of commonplace with Minecraft and fortnite running on all devices but at that time we had to create our own technology to make that happen so starting with a Kona blade it was our first action RPG game that ran on on browsers and mobile at the same time where you can kind of play together in real time and since then we've developed Power Rangers Legacy Wars which is the first fighting game where it's PVP only meaning you're always playing with another human being it has about 80 million downloads it was a one of the biggest success for the Power Rangers IP uh and then we moved on to Power Rangers battle for the grid which was the first fighting game that ran on all platforms uh Playstation Xbox Nintendo switch Google stadia uh PC you know um every platform there is uh everyone known for our back backend code that ran on you know ran with low latency without the async issues um which was great for us since then we've developed battle palooza which is a web 3 mobile game Olympic Games Jam uh which is an Olympics themed game that also run on multiple devices as well as WWE undefeated which is another mobile fighting game we're mainly known for our m a deal so we were acquired by animal kind back in 2020 and also for creating a review Ranger and tuning Rangers so we worked with both Capcom and Hasbro who owned the street fighter IP and Hasbro owns the Power Rangers IP to kind of fuse them together to create the Power Ranger versions of the Street Fighter characters which got a lot of attention for our mobile game as well as the uh the console version uh of our part of this game and then uh more recently we were kind of chosen as the official video game partner for the ioc um video game and nft partners so we've created these NFD pins um which already had this tradition of you know trading in the physical world we made them into nfts for people to trade as nfts and also gave utility in Olympic Games and which is a party multiple games that we that I kind of showed you on the previous slide so this is what we're mainly known for so enough of us we want to also actually the recent announcements uh these are interesting as well so we announced food truck coin Club um which is another web 3 game that we're developing um in partnership with animoka uh we have another Power Rangers game called Power Rangers Morphin Legend which is on South soft launch and then also we made a big uh Splash when we announced the the partnership with uh with board a man yoga Labs For an upcoming fighting game that we're developing um so moving on to kind of how we look at the web 3 and gaming world we think that you know when people complete a game or they quit a game there's an empty feeling where like you you put in hundreds of hours into a game but you know there's nothing really left right so we think that by adding um digital ownership into real games that we can create more meaningful entertainment and we can Infuse meaning into the games at uh great games that we we develop and what third-party developers develop a lot of people ask us like so what do you mean by real games and how we Define that as like if the majority of your player player base are actual Gamers right that's a real game so by Gamers I mean they have Gamers who are playing for the game Gamers who have real attachment to the game um the community and the items in the game uh games that are maybe you know disguises games and not really um a real game or maybe the game is where majority of players are people who are playing as speculators or people who are playing just to as a job right if the player base is only kind of treating the game or the job then they have little interest in the game and the game items on their own sake and then the game kind of becomes a bubble because when things are going up it's good but when things are going down because they have no like kind of intrinsic interest in the in the game itself the bubble pops so these are kind of more like a fintech with a skin of a fintech app with the skin of a game um so this is how we Define kind of the game so in terms of the infusing web 3 systems we want to make sure that you know we do it in a way that doesn't really damage the game right so we want to integrate ownership nfts and tokens and whatnot to the systems around around the game in a way that doesn't really turn off the gamers so you can have the majority of Gamers I believe the players or actual actual gamers um and developing that symbiotic balance between about three and three to play systems so how do you kind of make that balance work right and in these games that we call real games um first of all I think the game needs to be full blown the free to play games and preferably a mobile PC cosplay game and I can explain why that is later but uh yeah like we have to have proven free play gameplay cover Loop uh for us that's like you know we do the battle you get the rewards get the rewards you upgrade make progress and battle and repeat um you think that also should have proven free to play monetization accordingly meaning that players are able to accumulate their resources and currencies to level up your items and they can actually purchase them in a regular in-app purchase systems that's available on on mobile and PC so the business model needs to be a hybrid between free to play and web3 and I will explain more of how we kind of look at that uh in the next couple of slides but before we get into that I think in order to create a hybrid uh that a business model and have both nft slash book 3 related business model as well as IAP in a purchase model we need to kind of look at how these two are different nfts they have built-in scarcity so oftentimes there's only ten thousand only a hundred thousand cannot change and also they're expensive both at primary as well as secondary they provide true digital ownership which allows owners to trade and you know the owners also expect utility and benefits that continuously comes come their way that's what web3 community is all about for in-app purchase it's more inflationary they're developing it continuously add more and more into into the game uh it's it needs to be priced comparable to other free-to-play games you know it can't be like thousands of dollars it needs to be in that price range that makes sense for the gamers it's rental economy right really sell anything and the community is the free-to-play gamers so so then how do we differentiate the in-app purchase and the nft items in a way that satisfy both the web 3 and gamer communities right at the same time preventing the price of the nft items which needs to be high uh prevented from crashing or converging down to kind of the same price range of in-app purchase items which are like 20 50 each okay I think the first thing that's important is that the nfts and if CRM should not should not have powerful in-game advantages to justify the price because once you have that it turns up the gamers um and then you lose them with zero to Gamers you go back to you know being a not really a real game instead I think the nfts uh should have should be centered around uh ugc and kind of customization the customization creation can be the unique feature of the nft items and the owners are the ones that can kind of you know make make it unique into how they look at it and maybe that can influence you know what what can be purchased as enough in our purchase items so then the creators which are the basically the web3 community the consumers or Gamers right um can coexist in this symbiotic environment where the web three communities maybe less than 20 percent of the user base who are mainly there to to create and and modify things and the gamers are basically you know just playing a game it's no different in terms of how they play and consume and purchase items in any other game that they that they play so that they don't really have anything to kind of complain about or they don't feel that the web 3 systems have kind of ruined or tainted came to the game um and I think by having this you know uh ability to customize and also influence certain in-app purchase items that create also a powerful utility for the nft and owners and it's going to be great for the web 3 Community as well also for cryptocurrencies I think they should not exist in the game directly but we can provide opportunity for players to convert both hard and soft currencies that they usually expect in free-to-play games to be converted into cryptocurrencies and we've done that already with our Olympic Games Jam where we have you know gvtg which is occurrency in the game that can be converted into vtg and when you can have it both ways meaning the in-game can be in-game currency can be converted into cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency can be converted into in-game currency then what's interesting is that it can allow the players in the user base to use cryptocurrency to purchase the currency that is used to purchase in a in-app purchase items so I think that's a very interesting approach where players are able to use both Fiat and cryptocurrency to purchase in-app purchase items so um yeah what's like what's required like to kind of wrap up and kind of look at what's required to to have um to enable all the stuff I think comes down to four four different features uh you need both custodial and non-custodial Wall Systems so that players can just pick up and play like there can't be any kind of bears to entry it just needs to be a game right so just a game that Gamers discover um on app store or Google Play and display and then whatever they earn can be converted over to crypto later on which means that uh you need that both custodian and custodial law systems to work in harmony you need a game engine especially on the back-end side that's platform agnostic meaning it runs on mobile nphc and perhaps console so they work seamlessly between mobile browser and also PC so that you know you can kind of log in to a browser and then do a lot of things that you know that are related to web3 or or even play the game on PC and other devices and then players are able to kind of play together real time uh the third one is that you need a player account system for cosplay you know um but that you can have a social layer uh you can have a friend who's playing on Nintendo switch or somebody who's on mobile and I'm on PC to all playing the play together um and it also works together on the web website as well so you can do all those web 3 stuff that we talked about and then lastly this cross-platform Fiat and the field our system which enables players to kind of you know make you know purchase systems on one device and also see that item appear on another another device that uh without having to pay pay for it again and also a field hour system where you know if you're selling things to other players and you get that um get that amount in your balance system that you're able to figure out um with via a bank account or your CC via your wallet so we've kind of developed all these systems as our kind of publishing infrastructure we call NY play we're going to be we're currently using that this system for for our own games but we do have a mission to publish third-part develop games in the future that the developers can really shorten the development time to infuse web 3 features into into the game that they develop in the right way so that you can have sustainable long-term value with Gamers who really care about the items that they have so I think I'm right on time so yeah thank you so so much for listening to uh to our presentation you can find me on Twitter at samuru and also at NY play nft and my LinkedIn handle is khtkn as well thank you so much