AI + Web3 Meets Gaming

hey everybody uh thank you so much for joining us today we're going to talk about the emergent Technologies with web3 generative Ai and how that is going to impact game development as we know it and I'm really lucky for the panelists I have with us with me today um I'd love it if you could just go through your introduction briefly um we have 20 minutes so we gotta be quick yeah so really quickly I'm Miko I'm with Gumi cryptos Capital super early stage investor and uh you know we love stuff we we're early in Open Sea uh yield Guild games so we're very passionate about gaming as well as web3 blockchain I'm Andrew Boucher I'm with unity and my focus is to support our web 3 and blockchain customers so it's super exciting to be here at eth Denver I appreciate you guys coming to watch this panel I'm Scotty Fox ml research engineer I've worked with Intel Labs as well as a couple of others right now I've joined forces with blockade Labs where we look at the Deep code behind how we can get to the next level of what gaming is going to be I'm JJ the founder of Leonardo we're a generative asset production or creation platform for gaming both in the 2D and 3D space really excited to be here thanks amazing um so I want to start with you Andrew because Unity had a really big announcement this week do you want to talk about that yeah I guess uh Unity made an announcement that we're gonna be in what three so I think everyone's probably been waiting for that for quite a while um personally I'm an nft collector I'm an admin for an nft project so that's pretty exciting for someone that works at Unity to be able to participate in web3 with our customers um 13 new verified Solutions Partners on our web 3 asset store we're going to continue to grow that as you can probably imagine that was our third party announcement we'll also have our own Unity tools that we'll be bringing to the asset store that are unity based products as well so we're super excited about web 3 about web3 gaming and what's to come for creators amazing watching right now what are you looking for and also is going to ask do you think there's is this going to unblock some of these ambitious metaverse creators that have been wanting to make super ambitious games with web3 large large games lots of users is generative AI going to make that possible yeah so uh we're very interested in community generated ugc user generated content and one of the things that this AI does is it fills what I call the ugc uncanny valley right so it's different from VR uncanny valley which is that basically there's stuff that's easy to make and then there's stuff that looks good right and those two things have never been further apart right stuff that's easy to make and stuff that looks good have always been far apart right so we're super excited about stuff that's easy to make and looks good that's going to be so powerful for user-owned IP and Community generated content user generated content that's going to be I think a core of this entire metaverse experience amazing JJ with Leonardo AI I know that you're making game assets but you're doing more than just game assets so what kind of users are you seeing are these web3 Builders or more traditional builders um yeah so I guess the way that we're approaching the problem is really thinking about content Creation in general and that doesn't just mean gaming it means there's a whole range of I guess entertainment verticals or narrative verticals that that require um content and so we're really trying to like the way that we're thinking about the problem is about giving users more control with respect to generative AI allowing people to really drive the creative process and you know rather than it being a black box system where you put a text prompt you need to get something out actually be able to sort of almost art direct the creation and finesse and so I think that's really powerful across a whole range of use cases and so the users that we're seeing on the platform really um we've got a lot of Indie developers through to like a lot of web3 Studios that were playing playing with the platform at the moment and and you know as well as a whole range of AI enthusiasts which I think encompasses Indie developers or people who have sort of been developers but maybe not necessarily had the artistic skill or the maybe the the resources to to obtain visual assets to create games and so a lot of those people are now thinking hey I can build a game and that's that's really exciting thinking about the unlocking of sort of uh latent creative potential in a lot of people so yeah the new user that we're talking about do you have any projections not to put you on the spot but do you have any projections about what that might look like uh I I mean I see the growth curve looking like this so it looks great Scotty you've been developing in the VR space for the past year and a lot of the work you've done has done real-time Generations I'm really curious about that work you've done if you want to speak to it a little bit but also what do you think about the future of generative AI for real-time Generations during gameplay yeah I'd love to speak on that I'd have to agree with Mikko earlier about how users are going to demand a higher resolution and more crisp Graphics as time goes on but that is very far away from real time because I can produce an image like this but is it game ready not really so that's kind of where I specialize in is trying to get that to not an acceptable output but something that actually is mind-blowing that can not only keep up with modern games that are existing but also displace them I want to be able to look into different methods of getting that real-time integration by minimizing the footprint of what is needed in terms of technology to start making those games making assets for games or even re-skinning a game in such a way that it is rigged to actually make the user experience Flawless right now there's a lot of hiccups and a lot of discontinuity that is happening within the game Space and that's what we're here to improve on and we're doing it in a very short amount of time I believe that in September stable diffusion was able to become public and users were able to grab on to that within a couple of short months people looking at can we make this into a game or maybe a music video what can we really do and now that the dust is settled and the users are starting to emerge at what they can really get their hands on they're looking for these tools and that's exactly where we come in we're trying to provide those tools to keep up with that High Fidelity high quality that you would expect in games not for 2017 but for 2030. thank you so I know that Unity is looking at games that are interested in generative AI capabilities how do you plan to support these sort of new developers because it's hard to find these tools specifically for everyone's individual needs and use cases I think it's a good question so Unity is a company that's enabling creators and so a lot of our creators are making these tools so we have a pretty strong passion not to compete with our customers and so on this topic I think Unity is going to obviously explore our own Technologies but at the same time we're going to have really strong Partnerships with companies that provide these Technologies and I think what's interesting is we have to continue to think about what customer need is so not every AI solution is going to be aligned with that specific customer need so our Marketplace our asset store will continue to be a part of that story in addition to what Unity is developing in-house but again we're here to enable creators and companies that are creating this technology as well all right so this question of text to game and what what does that mean to you and then also what do you think the timeline is for that so uh you know I think text to game is absolutely going to happen right I think it's a really exciting right in a sense like there already is a text to game environment it's called Dungeons and Dragons right but I think what you're talking about is text to kind of fully realize like 3D rendered spectacular video game you know Elven ring style right so like you know obviously you've got a little ways to go before we get there right but I think the idea that comes out of Dungeons and Dragons is the idea of kind of like this collaborative creativity in this kind of incredibly Dynamic form of fun you know and as we know in the covid pandemic Dungeons and Dragons just like exploded right so people love this and they love the interaction and the dynamism so I think that you know in terms of when will it happen six seven years maybe so um I'm not a developer but I will give a point of view I guess so I I look at this um a little bit like an evolution maybe a visual scripting and so before we make video games you'd have to do all the coding and now we have tools that allow you to drag and drop a lot of those elements into place and I see text to game as an evolution of visual scripting candidly so I would have to say that text to game is probably a lot closer around the corner than what one might think if you look about a year back in time there's just silence within the last couple of months we're seeing all these people emerging that are experimenting with little mini games and assets that they can build and that's just from the user's first experience with getting something to text or idea or dream into game the future holds something like hey I want to play Super Mario but as a first person shooter type of type of Type n there it is it populates everything not only the images but maybe the way that the Dungeon Crawler is mapped out the very path finding maybe the RPG maybe even what kind of loot crates to put into your game it's not only restricted to imagery within this last month we've seen even more growth with this and the product that we just launched recently is actually getting into users hands very very rapidly so I would say that it's time to think about a three to five year plan not a 10-year you know I I would agree three to five year plan sounds sounds reasonable especially um considering just how rapidly the space is evolving I mean it was only what is it maybe a year ago that mid-journey came out and then from there we've just seen this this rapid rapid um movement but I think one one interesting point that maybe I want to touch on I think is thinking about the role of creators in the context of text to game and and maybe just to think about how do we how do we see that future do we want it to be entirely user driven or do we want to sort of think about maybe um sort of more curated experiences and then text a game within that sort of context or that framework because I don't think I don't think you know I I feel like if we really want to get broad-based adoption by creators we need to keep creators at the center of that sort of process um yeah so one more question we're getting low on time but for the web 3 developers in the audience we're what is one piece of advice you would give them if they have the ambition to make a game and what the existing tooling that we have available to us what's a creative idea of how to leverage them to create a game without spending years and resources on game development to achieve an idea so I'm a venture investor my partner actually did an IPO for a billion dollar game company in Japan so like if you're a web 3 developer uh from the lens of venture capital my advice to you would be don't make games except for fun right so in other words if you plan to make a mega hit game I think it's difficult like it's a super hard industry it's super brutal and so I would say run in the opposite direction you know spend the time you would have spent on that actually playing games and having an awesome time I don't know if I understood if there's a if there's an approach a web 3 developer could easily ship a game without having to have the traditional struggles that we see in like the traditional game Space developing with the emerging technology of web3 can be very difficult because it's like it's that it's still developing in real time so you're working with something that's moving under your feet yeah that's a difficult question to answer um I think let's take it back to the AI piece when I think it's not specific to web3 but it can certainly enable web 3 companies who are generally less resources available to them so this idea of using AI to ideate to get ideas to check code and these sorts of things I think that's a way to get to Market much more quickly with less resources obviously that can be web 2 or web3 but it seems like web3 resources are less so I believe that there's still a block in between where AI exists and what web3 developers would be seeking and that block happens to be what it is to collect data to use that data and to use it moving forward with AI some of the processes that are about to emerge very very shortly are actually on a combine a lot of community with the data set that you creators actually make which will improve the experience of what it is to be the developer so something for the first time that's going to happen is there's going to be an incredible amount of community influx and you're going to have a lot of adjacent neighbors also helping develop this one future goal yeah I think that um I mean web free studios tend to be more resource limited than than you know traditional web 2 and so I think leveraging generative AI obviously is is is sort of a great level of potentially in terms of democratizing asset production and creation um so I think that's you know one one aspect to it but also the other part is really user generated content and the ability to to Really open the doors to to to users creating sort of game-ready assets I think is really powerful for what for web 3 as well all right guys we're out of time you guys have the rest of a good rest of your eat Denver thank you [Applause]