Exclusive Interview with CCP GAMES CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson | KBW2023

[Music] so um I think it's good to um split a little bit apart what blockchain can provide there is like a technology aspect there um for us it is a lot about third party development we have a lot of that already happening around our uh original game E online and there we use an API but a smart contract blockchain is actually quite a good way to organize sort of decentralized development then I think U it's important to understand what the core of the Innovation is um and it's really about the business model of the game it really is a business model Innovation and I want to disconnect business model and monetization because it's often intertwined so when you think about what really a blockchain and a blockchain decentralized ecosystem can provide it is more inclusive in including people that are playing the experience and contributing to the experience to be a part of the business model we see that a lot around our game online there's a lot of um a big part of the experience is organized by players themselves they're running corporations alliances they're streaming helping new players there's a lot of services and uh and frankly it's a big part of the experience what the players provide but it's quite clumsy to include that into the business this model of the game in a web two sense so I think the real Innovation is a business model Innovation to better include everyone that is contributing to the experience itself to be a part of the business model of the [Music] experience so yeah we announced earlier this year that we've raised $40 million to create this new experience we have been working on uh we actually announced Ed um about 18 months ago at our fun event in Iceland that we're going to have a team exploring this so I mean all in all we're almost two years uh into this exploration um and the team has uh achieved a lot and obviously it's also grown a lot we now have a very sizable team that is working on this it was important to us to finance this separately so that we're not using revenue for even online to finance this that mainly goes into improving imine and uh right now we have like built out um two very robust kind of prototypes of the experience which we have had a few thousand people play so uh and we're gearing off for another big play test in an internal sense at the end of the year so already what we have uh we're really happy with the team has done a great job and we're also getting like uh amazing amount of good feedback from the people we have play testing these experiences I think massively multiplayer online games which have a high degree of persistency to them uh are a great fit for blockchains already experiences which are like that they have to content with a lot of complicated economy Dynamics uh because when your world is persistent then your world is mainly built by the players themselves and that is kind of where the economy of the experience emerges from so um uh I believe those kind of experiences um are very adjacent to blockchains in fact I think vitalic has explained how ethereum came as a consequence of him playing an MMO so I think him and I agree that M multiplayer online games with persistency are a great fit so I think when it comes to uh transaction through put there are many tactics uh from games uh that are very useful to do that um games usually have a what should I say an unfair advantage in understanding the topology of interaction because I know for example in even line if I'm in one solar system then what happens in another solar system is not important to me in this solar system [Music] uh and that is because of the topology of the world the the world knows about how things are going to interact this Maps well onto many blockchain solutions be the Shing be the L3 to2 to one to zero rooll of strategies so games already have many techniques to understand causality relationships between transactions because they have un advantage in understanding the topology of the world so there are many scalable techniques that games have been using for decades we use a lot of these techniques in even line that are helpful to solve transaction through put in blockchains overall it's hard to predict what goes mainstream and I don't think it is a technology question really it really ultimately is is this a good game or not so any good game that is released and catches fire and becomes mainstream is usually about the experience you're providing not really about the technology you're using to do it so if great games are shipped next year and they use blockchain technology it will go mainstream but it's going to be about the experience not really about the tech