Integrating NFTs into mobile games by Wombat Adrian Krion

so hello everyone I'm Adrian I'm from Berlin I'm the founder and CEO of Spiel Works we're a web 3 gaming studio and publisher and we also Run the game distribution platform that's called wombat um we're actually specialized on bringing web 2 Gamers into web 3 right so we work with a lot of web 2 game companies as well we have over 3 million users in our ecosystem and we also run the nft staking game that's called wombat dungeon master which has which is about ninth on depth radar rankings according to daily active wallets if you if you look at games so um yeah we we've been in the business for quite a while and I want to talk to you today about integrating how like patterns about how you can integrate nfts and blockchain into into mobile games specifically because we've been strong on mobile we've had a lot of Studios asking us so what can we do especially to to overcome the problems with apple and Apple Store listings when it comes to web3 right so we ended up actually creating a little framework for our partners and a lot of companies who want to get in the space it's not as technical as the talk before um but uh let's get to it so why do we even talk about mobile games right um You might think that mobile is just a small Niche whatever turns out actually Mobile gaming is providing for about 60 percent of the total gaming Market nowadays right it's been growing rapidly so it's the most relevant category in terms of overall platforms and it's been growing so fast it's basically Mobile gaming is responsible for basically all the major growth that we've seen in traditional gaming in web 3 gaming we obviously have these issues that mostly aren't like the bigger Spenders in traditional games on mobile are on iOS but web3 games have been struggling with iOS we with our app we are struggling with iOS and apple and Apple's weird policies it's all political so there's got to be a solution for this so obviously um you you know why web3 gaming is relevant why you would want to have web3 gaming I typically include that slide if I talk to non-wear three people because they might not really kind of fully understand it so I don't I don't think we have to talk to about us that in too much detail but what's important here is that when we speak about web speed gaming we typically always talk about two things ownership and interoperability right and we can talk we could we could talk for for hours about interoperability and what it means and how what we under what how we interpret that and a lot of people interpret that but for us it's really important because what you actually end up wanting if you build web 3 into mobile games is you obviously want to keep these things you want to keep these properties of web3 you don't want to just do it for a marketing push right and say hey we're doing nfts and then they're running somewhere in the background and you don't know when your key is in what right you don't want this because you would be losing out on those properties um so that's why I wanted to kind of remind ourselves about this so yeah now we're talking about web3 gaming what's web3 gaming do you have an idea of what the prototypical web3 game is like how it works how it integrates with wallets how you own your nfts or your your crypto assets there is no one kind of solution or no one pattern there right there's multiple patterns there's multiple ways of doing that there's terms like web 2.5 there's like all kinds of different things and we're trying to like dissect that a little bit and get into kind of a little bit more of a of an understanding of how it can be done and for us it's really the most important differentiating factors are in how much interoperability do you allow how much control do you have over your assets that you've issued as a game maker what are the technical limitations and what are your publishing possibilities and I've been talking about that apple apple issue here so essentially there's again there's multiple ways of of dealing with that and of looking at that so we could again look at that from an interoperability perspective what we typically try to do is look at it from kind of the where are the assets of the users stored where are they held and how do they interact with them where are your assets from this perspective we look at that right and they are the major kind of differentiating factors is whether you as a game you run your own wallet for the assets and obviously that can then be game specific or cross-game enabled so there's big Publishers like net marble um come to us and so on who run their own kind of wallet platforms that are like cross-game but only work within their ecosystem right or whether you allow for external wallets um like metamask whatever logins standardized wallet logins um where obviously it's kind of clear that this will enable more interpretability and we'll get to that in a second so I've basically put up four different types of Integrations and because when talking about this it always reminded me of chicken and how they're being held right and there's different types of like chicken and how you can buy eggs and chickens right so for us when the game actually operates their own wallet and you have a game specific wallet in each game we call that the Caged chicken right so you wouldn't sometimes even know that the game operator actually operates a wallet for you they would give you an address where you can deposit your assets right you would deposit your assets to your tokens and then you would be spending them and then you would have to request the withdrawal from from the game in order to get your assets back right so some of you may have seen that there's a bunch of examples for that it's not very popular anymore because that obviously doesn't solve the iOS problem right um and um from a from a pure web 3 perspective this is pretty much the worst that you can do that's why we call that cage chicken right because um the only thing that you get is basically on-chain traceability of the assets um that you transfer in and out of the of the of the wallet so you can prove that of a certain nft there only exists like a thousand things or so um but the game company is so long as the assets are deposited in that game specific wallet it's typically custodial so the the game developers or Publishers would retain control over all yes these assets and The Gamers wouldn't have that control so then we go to what we call the barn chicken so that's the kind of they get a little bit more space so the assets get get a little bit more space so it's kind of the publisher publisher wide um solution for running a wallet right it's not game specific but it's publisher specific it's very similar to the game specific wallet but some of these can be non-custodial many are many are still custodial right because they want to make it easier on the users so that's why they make them custodial they make web wallets and stuff but some of them actually also make them non-custodial so we would basically download an app for um when you when you are supposed to play a game by a certain publisher you would download their app so that's like the the marble X or whatever app right and then you can basically deal with your assets for all the games that they have that this publisher has integrated with web3 in the same way right you would have your assets and you would be able to interact with those and it's obvious that um there is some interoperability there because you can you could basically interoperate your your assets across all the games that you have as a publisher right but getting them in and out is obviously still this kind of deposit visiting withdrawal process then we have the free-range chicken so this is where this is some some people call that web 2.x right 2.2.5 um where you basically you keep the game clients as they are and then you have a separate website a web3 portal where you link your game account with your web your web free wallet with your metamask whatever your wombat and um then the game obviously knows that you that you hold these assets and sometimes you would have to stake them sometimes you could it's enough to just keep them in the wallet um but this is kind of we're getting the feel of web3 here right because you basically you hold you're responsible for your assets as a user which is sometimes scary for gamers right but this is actually where where we open up all the possibilities that that web3 offers and typically you would use a non-custore your wallet for this obviously right and you would retain full ownership for as long as you don't have to stake these assets and then we have the kind of direct login which we call the meta chicken um where you would basically directly log into the game client with your wallet right um so sometimes when there's when these are web-based games obviously you can just open them in the browser and log in with your metamask um sometimes they would have uh kind of they would be downloadable clients and you would have an SDK that you implement to actually um to actually log in with your wallet and the same thing would happen is for the free range right you would basically retain control over your assets as a player you would have full interoperability and you don't have to go somewhere else in order to actually link your account right so if we compare those those different types of models in terms of how well how easy will it be to get them listed on the App Store versus what the ux looks like right then typically the simplest possible ux is the Caged chicken right where the user doesn't even see that it they don't even have to understand sometimes that they are using a web 3 game and they would have the option of caching in eth or tokens or Bitcoin or whatever into a custodial wallet to spend in the game right so that's typically the most familiar ux but at the same time it may or may not have be easy to to list it in the apps listed in the App Store depending on how how many other payment options you have for the App Store like through the App Store and these kinds of things right and then we have the barn chicken where you have this um this uh publisher-specific wallet and these are typically these are typically traditional games that are being connected with a web 3 layer with this kind of publisher-specific wallet so like come to us and and net marble and so on we've done this so there's typically no issues with App Store listings there or not as many um whereas on the on the other side we have a slightly more complex user experience right where you have to where you have to onboard players into non-custodial wallets first before they can actually have the full web 3 experience of the game right so obviously the ux is more complex you first have to send them to a different products um they have to understand what they're doing they have to take care of their backups and so on right and at the same time these games typically struggle getting listed on the on the App Store maybe maybe this is not as not super accurate anymore so I I should probably move that move this one here up um a little bit because there's been more patterns of how that's successfully been been applied and then recently Apple have have been doing more of a back well pushback against web 3 in games so that's um that's a little bit of a problem and here we have another kind of evaluation in terms of how much control you keep as a game creator so this is from a game creator point of view and how much interoperability we actually get right and here it's kind of clear that the Caged chicken the one where you have game specific wallets you you retain you pretty much retain full control over your assets right because you they they're stored in your in your online wallet and we've recently like that was last week or the week before right when um Dapper Labs were punished or like at least it was a ruling by a court in New York saying that their nfts might actually be Securities because they retain full control over them and they've been marketing them as hey you can make a lot of money by investing in those NBA top shots things right um so this alone the fact that they've been holding them in a custodial wallet and and work came we're retaining full control over these assets and there's no other way than going through the Dapper Labs platform to get them out might it's not clear right but might actually constitute the nfts as Securities which is kind of crazy right so there's there's also the bad things to to having all the control um yeah but um you also lose out on the all the interoperability whereas on the on the free range and the and the meta chicken you obviously have all the interoperability that you want you can just you take your assets put them in another game stake them burn them like destroy them whatever you want right you sell them you can do whatever you want you don't have to ask anyone so that's obviously the full range of interoperability that we have that we that's that's possible with web3 and this is what yeah this is where we are going that's what we are trying to go with the kind of maximum of interoperability and the least amount of control for assets but obviously as we saw um it's not as easy to get these to get these apps listed on an app store for instance so that's that's me already um I hope you had a little bit of fun and hope you're all having fun at East Denver all together and if you have any questions we can have a bunch yes please is there anyone with a with a microphone here thank you uh so are you on the app stores like where where I guess you gave your four options I'm curious like your personal your company Journey where where has it led to you so far so for the the app store listing if you're uh kind of if you have a direct login for a wallet that's not going to work right because um the argument by Apple is always that you will be able to buy stuff somewhere else and there was this ruling I think last year the lawsuit with epic right where they had to allow that you can buy stuff on this on the third like on a separate website so this is the equivalent so that's why kind of the free range that should typically work and that's an arena and these kinds of games have done that so this is kind of the pattern that I would employ right now and that that's what we are looking for with the games that we're going to be launching awesome thank you thanks any more questions cool thanks a lot um we're a bit ahead of time but thanks a lot and see ya foreign