Web3 Gaming | European Blockchain Convention

[Music] yeah uh so just to introduce myself I'm n Baki I'm the general counsel at blockchain Founders fund uh we made like significant investments in the web 3 gaming space as well and you know like it's my pleasure to be here moderating uh the panel um I would like to start by uh you know introducing the panelist there's Sebastian who's the CEO and founder of sandbox Bay who's the head producer of D Central land and Pablo the brand manager at bingx uh would one of you like to like just speak a little bit about your like project and then from there we can like kick it off uh of the meat of the meet of the matter of the panel so Sebastian why don't you like start all right hello everyone quick poll in the room who is already familiar with sandbox raise your hand all right good good so for those of you who not familiar in a nutshell it's a decentralized virtual world where anyone can become a Creator and make 3D content asset food games or experiences and truly them thanks to the use of blockchain technology and nfcs can monetize them by selling them on a Marketplace publish them on their lands um we have now over 400 Major Brands and we've grown to 6 million users uh with a wallet on the platform and over 1,300 games live on the pl thanks Sebastian hey similar similar poll in the room who's been in Des centraland so yeah I'm ba I'm head producer at DES Central land I'm also the assistant professor of emerging Tech at Berkeley um I am working in Des centraland because of what it is it's a publicly owned good we're completely decentralized we're run by down and a foundation everything that we do is an nft so it's completely user owned and we position ourselves in terms of creativity exploration and social connection hello everyone my name is Pablo Monti I won't ask anything because I I don't work for a game H although I will be some kind of devil Devil's Advocate in a good way H I work for Bing X it's a crypto exchange many of you might know it h my background has a lot of gaming experience I work for a h TV station in Argentina where we developed Esports and gaming content which was pretty Innovative back in 2013 for a traditional media then I moved to Spain I work for an orts company for two years and H in a web3 gaming project called ficin that did something in the centraland with Kuno and some events so um now I'm working in within the crypto space H and always following the the the the gaming and web three gaming scenary thanks thanks Pablo so just to highlight right that uh for the longest time like as you know lot of the people who are in the room who've been playing games that web two games were always like closed off economies people spent hours and hours to earn certain skins certain Assets in the game but all they really represented was uh your dedication to the game or your skill level in the game the reason why web 3 gaming became uh you know became so popular over the years is because it allowed people to sort of uh Monet not only monetize but also like open up the entire closed ecosystem to interact with players across games uh across platforms and you know actually get some tangible benefit out of the time that they spend playing or or owning their skills in the game so just wanted to start off from there like from like you know one of the panelists can answer is said what do you describe the current state of web 3 gaming uh in the grander scheme of things B of is uh other verticals within the blockchain space like where do you think like web3 gaming lies in its terms of uh importance and development should I jump in okay all right uh well beside being the co-founder and Co of sandbox I'm also the president of the blockchain game Alliance that's an association that now counts over 600 members from the gaming industry every year we published this industry survey uh which is now entering the fourth year where we share a little bit the latest trends and like challenge and opportunities of the industry I would say like in 2024 like the industry has became much more mature in term of like the fun and the quality of the games that are being produced the onboarding and the overall like user experience that players that come from web 2 or existing players in web 3 can um encounter as they enter for the first time and start to interact with uh nfts and blockchain and um we're seeing games that it's actually very hard to like high quality game that are very fun and engaging so like people are no longer coming to web free gaming just for the incentive of like earning tokens and reward as we've seen in uh the 2021 play to ear movement they really come first for the fun and the passion that they can have for the game like those game like cross the edges parallel shrap nail sandbox as well they they have matured and like they gather communities of generally tens of thousand or hundred of thousand of players but still those game they also like don't forget where they come from and like what's the opportunity to have like two digital asset ownership and nft and so usually the first time even though you do not interact all the time with a blockchain those game try to get you to get your first nft to get your first crypto to get your wallet account where you start to learn about those key principle and you can have access to like the benefits behind what are those benefits so right now I think like not many games have leveraged that yet but I think Beyond true digital ownership like I think the main benefit that blockchain brings are around like uh one like leveraging and growing a community of players engaging them through token ownership through participating ahead either to the funding of the game or to some of like the decision of the game that leads to our like uh Dows so that's also like governance basically like people players owning asset of a game like avatars lands for example equipment and other nft or even the cryptocurrency the UT token of the platform can have a say in the future and vote in the future of like how the ecosystem of the game and those game might evolve I think also the supporting of the Creator economy so that's something that sandbox uh is L ranging a lot since we are you and sandbox both of us are user generated content platform we want to empower the people who participate to create and bring the value to our games like that's something that neither Roblox fortnite Minecraft to certain extent I've done well enough and I've capped to like okay you can earn 30% maximum whereas we go all the way to reward up to 90 something uh with the value that they bring to the growth of those ecosystem um exciting new business model as well so we see the traditional Web Two gaming industry being quite challenged right now like uh with the new privacy laws that been in place user acquisition is very hard targeting you can no longer Target users the way you do which has led to like the rise of CPI cost at the same time the general macroeconomic context hasn't been good in entertainment in in and in general in Tech and like the ltvs that you can gain from the players have lowered people spend less so higher acquisition cost lower spend many game business and the whole gaming industry have gone out of business there's been a lot of layoff in the industry which mean that there's a new opportunity to find new business model other than the freet toplay and then premium model and web free come to the rescue having think players like participate in like play to a drop play to earn St to earn assets or other way that their participation and engagement create value for not only the developer or the platform but the player themselves as well and I guess I I want to cut here so then I let other co-speaker share a bit of perspective as well I'm going to throw back your report at you so I've been reading a lot around web 3 gaming and it's been really interesting being here at this event everyone's so motivated by defi but if we actually look at the report that you got out with with uh Z radar uh the blockchain alliance last quarter so the latest data shows that where gaming in web 3 has held about 28 to 33% of all daily active users in terms of unique wallet addresses defi has fallen from let me get the original figure from last year so it's 30% in Q2 last year and it's only 70% now so there that's a drop so we're having all these conversations in this conference about adoption of blockchain and I feel like the elephant in the room is that web3 gaming has been holding at 30% of all active wallets in dabs and secretly kind of behind the scenes social so wallets being used for social use has increased from 9% just a couple of quarters ago to if I can find the figure 19 so we've got this massive use case switch right now in terms of daily active wallets and for me as a kind of futurist looking at where these Trends are going it means that what the sandbox and de centraland are doing we're creating this kind of user generated future in terms of social content so not only we fitting with this trend of web three adoption in wallet addresses but we're also fitting with this trend in this huge growth towards social content and social Connection in Virtual spaces and so I'm getting kind of excited about where this is going particularly in web 3 Because as as we say like we know that people enter our worlds and are motivated to start using things like nfts not because of them being an investment in terms of financial gain but in being an investment in terms of identity self-expression communication within virtual environments and as the mother of three boys so I have 14 13 and N my boys are absolute power users in these Virtual Worlds so fortnite is AB absolutely about their social expression and social connection and I think as us in the room we kind of have to start grasping this that this is the future this is where we're all going and at the moment we're trying to work out how that actually works in decentralized user owned environments with on a blockchain and I want to go back to what Sebastian said about the landscape being more mature right now I I agree with that h i I think for example I I've worked with Esports many times and now it's also mature but it took long for Esports to be mature H web three gaming is now more mature than before and what I like to think is that we are past the play to earn fever H in which people only search it for games to earn money and to invest and I mean gaming is one of the most popular activities in the world millions of people play video games and I like to think about web 3 gaming as a Service as a solution as a support for the gaming industry I don't like to talk about the niche of web 3 gaming H because I being so Universal h i i I understand we we we T we tend to limit the the power of of web3 gaming and and web 3 and blockchain technology has a lot to give to gaming as a whole I mean there are a lot of projects that are fully blockchain based and web three like sandbox and the Central and and they are doing a great job even changing a little bit the and allowing people to create their own games and earn money through those games but what I see is that the web three gaming space should be more supportive to the gaming industry as a whole h i mean we all know other games like League of Legends counter strike now CS2 and there you have some kind of Economics within those games that are like the the tokenomics of other web three examples why not to bring that to gaming to holistic gaming H I understand that we are in a much more mature phase with the web three gaming space but I'm I'm still waiting for that big solution for that really huge game that impacts everyone and makes everyone play and bring more people to the the the web three and blockchain space we are in an space that keeps adding layers of difficulty to users to on board blockchain so examples like like the Central and the sandbox and other games that allow people to enter the space are really good and I expect more to come and traditional gaming let's say to have more sources and more resources from from blockchain thanks thanks Pablo uh Sebastian you have anything to say one thing maybe I can add a bit more flavor like the the overall addressable audience of web free gaming has broaden a lot over the past three to four years and mainly because there are new ecosystem so there are different blockchains and ecosystem competing like when we started the central sunbox back in 2017 18 it was mostly etherum and then polygon as a leader today like it's more fragmented you have like immutable X avalan still polygon still eum also like Telegram network has been rising and in general like we're seeing immutable X as kind of like emerging as one of the gaming blockchain Avalanche as an order of the gaming blockchain they had a partnership with maple story which is a massive Korean game of like over 100 million players and telegram which has this 1 billion user or 900 million users as the main value of is like the ease of access of the wallet and the distribution Network it provides and we've seen rise of very simple I would call it hyper casual like tab game or E clicker game and a lot of game developers and web fre developer have jumped into that new market I wouldn't call it a niche but a new blockchain ecosystem to try to lure those players who are use who are using the telegram mostly as a chat and engage through gaming we don't have yet the statistic but I think it's interesting to witness also that change in 2024 but since we are discussing where where we are at now and how we are going to who we will win the attention game and how for how long yeah yeah just to add to that I mean the top performing game right now is pixels which is a hyper casual farming social connection game which is absolutely about small X every day connecting with people and as you say like Telegraph that's so Telegram and the the way that connection and chat has sort of segwayed once again I mean we saw this from the early days of Facebook when you had these variable games in Facebook coming out of that early door of of social connection and we're seeing that again with telegram um and we're also seeing it in the power of some of these social games that have come through I mean Ronin the blockchain just exploded last quarter because of pixels bringing out and bring bringing onto that chain so these games that can be really overlooked in terms of the the the game mechanics are actually really driving the industry right now yeah um so just just to pick up where you know Pablo sort of left the conversation right that that we're talking about like bringing troves and troves of people to to the blockchain on the web3 gaming space so like just wanted to get a view from the panelist that like what do you think drives or what do you think will like increase the adoption of web 3 games and like like what I've typically seen with my personal experience is that the that every single time like let's say I want to explore a new game it allow it it requires me to let's say connect my wallet it requires me to like do some sort of onboard which for somebody who tech savvy is fine but for somebody who's a day-to-day gamer or a Casual Gamer may not actually want to go through that experience and therefore like I believe that like the user experience becomes like a big part of like adoption and like do do you see like from like your experience that like uiux if it's improved could actually increase adoption uh multifold in the web3 gaming space absolutely yes like we are seeing in know technical Dron is called like account abstraction so basically players being onboarded just putting an email address a Google account Apple account and they don't even know they have a wallet anymore so they their first experience with all those different games you mention running running coms like 2 million dius now telegram as well it's very simple they don't feel like the complexity of like having a wallet and yet those game how they grow web free adoption like they basically uh beyond the core gaml and the fun they have they will introduce at some point an element that is effectively a blockchain transaction um and they will give you like three gas so you don't even have to worry anymore about like paying everything gas less sandbox we give like 20 gasless transaction running similarly as well and at sandbox what we do is we want everyone to have one nft for free so basically we want as soon as you you create your account you have your wallet instantly and like you complete the tutorial congratulations you have your first nft as a reward is a great equipment is a few scent token and we contributed to bring one more user to blockchain that can become then they can use that same wallet to play across all other games and so on I think that the rewarding aspect is important like in the free-to-play industry we've created that those dopamine moments every time you you you play there's always like a lot of effect of like hey congratulation you click the okay button now you have 100 coins for free and you're the best and so on so that we kind of like creates a lot of like wow I always feel like every anything I do is rewarding and in a way like I'm not surprised that web3 has ported that effect but we real tangible value behind because anything you received in web 2 was just virtual currency that had no value whatsoever outside of those game whereas the web free those token that we give are potentially wor worth nothing but could be potentially worth something and it's up to the players to decide if they're going to re injecton ofy of the game which usually 80% of the player when the game is good do like they do participate so being generous as a developer is important and the rest is your choice it's an Arbitrage between like I want to cash it out into crypto or buy other nfts or keep playing with it got question yeah I would second on account abstraction it's something we brought in last year it's been really important for on boarding you can sign up with an email address you don't have to start talking wallets I think above and beyond that is we haven't been very good as an industry of actually showing what's possible right now um we get a lot of feedback of people just being absolutely delighted with what is possible within Virtual Worlds combined with a blockchain so we just did a game Expo two months ago where we had web 3 games like Kayon avago uh defi kingdoms we brought everyone together everyone had a booth and on each Booth there's a dispenser so you run around doing a quest and if you do six booths you can press a dispenser get a ticket take it to a huge claw machine that claw machine then grabs an nft for you drops it into your wallet and you get that absolute wow moment of going I can do that I can have a quest grab wearables from avagi came on defi Kingdoms in the same environment where I'm running around I can then trade that for another Quest token and put it into a wearable machine and I'm talking to people at the same time that are doing the same thing and it becomes the shared moment of experience within a gaming environment um we if people are like Minds blown it's like this is available now it's it absolutely and as an industry we've been really bad at talking about that we had the kind of hype cycle of metaverse hype and then the Press kind of turning on us and saying you know this is not possible and meanwhile the devs have kind of been working to make make this possible and suddenly we're at this stage where you're finding it as well in the sandbox that you know this is it's working it's been it's it's delighting right now H I understand that gaming is community it's it's it's the same it's it's a synonymum I mean there are a lot of people that might play alone but most of the people play with friends or they make friends playing nowadays at least in Spain and Argentina also you get to see teenagers Gathering and playing roll stars like I was with my colleagues talking back in my days we we we didn't have mobile phones but the thing with this is I agree with what you mentioned about making this as transparent as possible I mean the the the the social login giving give give the the users the option to on board maybe without knowing between Go I mean you you need to let them know but for them that the process is completely transparent I mean h you're giving that person a wallet maybe that person doesn't need to know that you are giving him or her a wallet on on the on the small letters you will let them know but H maybe someone is overseen here um but making that transparent is the best way to and the the top and earn games that you mention in in telegram it's about that is the the the connection of gaming fun because gaming should be fun there sadly there are a lot of web 3 games in the past that weren't fun just to win money or to try to earn money so it's easy it's fun you have your friends you have the community you don't have tons of process for you to log in and that makes a success and that's what we are seeing with h com that and every tone game that it's around H it's lower the amount of problems that the user need finds when they need to on board when they are on boarding and in gaming even more I mean people wants to I my my son 11 years old he downloads the game he wants to play now now and if you have the the the the the tutorial and you log in and your parents log in O you lost him and and it's like that it's easy fun with friends for me for gaming that's and with with web three if you make that you you earn them thanks Pablo uh just just making just going a little bit into uh technical side of things right uh the fact that one we spoke about user experience right and like now I want to like talk about the fact that like let's say uh there are people who like playing different games they like experimenting uh but they would like to you know have some sort of uh Unison of their assets across multiple games so like where do you think web 3 gaming goes in terms of like uh interoperability between blockchains and like do you think like if we're truly able to achieve that in some manner or form you're able to uh let's say get a lot of people like uh over from web 2 to web 3 because web 2 you had the same problems right you had silos in each game and you could never really do anything except like yes there was an exception with the steam Store where all your game Assets in the steam store are on Steam but then again you're stuck to just steam like you're not able to like let's say take it take that to Epic right so in that kind of sense like do you think like interoperability of blockchains if uh it becomes a a reality uh web3 gaming would get a big Boost from just that kind of an event I think inability is very exciting as like technical possibilities that's offered by the technology here but is way underutilized at the moment and for a few reason the first one like well it requires to be creative and like a lot of implementation work there's no standard first of all across like inability of asset and how they should be represented across different games or application that's actually why uh an association called the open metaverse Alliance the Oma 3 was born two years ago and sunbox and many other uh games and virtual world are member of to try to solve those technical challenges yet I think like it's more importantly it should be thought from the content side like what do we want to offer as a user experience and who do we want to Target for me it's a user acquisition opportunity try to bring existing communities and audience from one game to another by adding some utility and that's what we've done done in sandbox we um we made over 50 pfp collection so they used to be like 2D profile picture like bab clonex cool cat uh and also we work with like meme coins so Sheba dog Pepe for example if you own that in your wallet automatically connecting that wallet to sandbox you get a 3D character that brings to life your coin or your pfp into a playable character at Avatar that then you can play with socialize complete Quest earn rewards earn more token Etc I think real utility um but that's not enough so recently actually end of August we announc a new program called the voer games program so we are co-producing with uh game studios so far too but we have a bigger lineup vool games that will be published on other platform than sandbox like app store Google Play Store epic team and so on game that can have like freet to-play monetization ads and so on but if you connect your wallet your sandbox wallet and you have an avatar or land you will be able to use that in that game meaning that we bring 6 million users with a wallet with a potentially a lot of sand on it we bring 400 Major Brands and IPS that we on boarded like B like rabbits Snoop dogs tii many more Attack on Titan which Just Launch to those existing game and people can play with them across different platform and games like in like unfortunately a lot of those NF and asset might end up dying without any value or any other ility but if you're smart as a developer a game developer you can tap into those even dead pools of audience to revive those nfts we've seen that with crypto punks and so on or you can use it to offer something also new and like we like to be Pioneers in the space at sandbox yeah yeah quick quickly I think for n users it's operability of identity identity is like the number one thing um so there are standards uh can we upload vrms into sandbox so your vxm so vxm okay so there's file standards vrm is the one that we support and hopefully we can interact um but vrm means that you can create your avatar download it as a vrm file so in 3D there's do glb for 3D assets which you can use in most metaverses most Virtual Worlds and there's vrm which you use as avatars so if you create an avatar in a world like the centraland you download as a vrm and then you can use it in on Cyber spatial hypy any other world that supports vrm so there are standards coming through um and then on the kind of second side of that absolutely it's about understanding what consumers want what users want and then just allowing them to play with their nfts so yes making quck because we are run out of time I I understand interoperability interoperability is probably the the the dream of Gamers and blockchain can give that to The Gaming Community I mean for example what what you've mentioned can start on the on the web three space uh for sure and should start in in terms of having your avatar and being able to I mean the project I used to work H was meant to try to be that a hub in which you had your avatar your skins your whatever and you can go whatever game you want to play with that Avatar with that identity okay that's tough to achieve but I I hope the blockchain industry will lead to that way and give that service to The Gaming Community imagine for example you play fc25 and you play Ultimate Team and you get a card from a player and you can take that car to s or the other way around or if you play CS2 and you have your skin you have your we your weapons and you can bring them to Boran and what if you can bring yourself to I mean for a gamer it's a dream come true so I hope that the blockchain industry will start the way and path the way for the Gaming Community as a whole to allow this to everyone that wants to have their their identity in multiple games they can if you don't want okay that's okay but if you have your avatar in the Central and in sand and you want to play with that character in any game maybe I mean maybe I'm Dreaming but that's the goal for in my opinion and and then for for traditional gaming but interoperability I hope that you guys lead the way and P the way for for for that Improvement thanks Pablo I think we're uh out of time at this point uh but you know it's been it's been great talking to uh the three of you and uh I think like at least what I've learned is like much like cryptocurrency I think web3 gaming is here to stay I don't think it's going anywhere uh we'll see the road ahead and how it how it plans out but no thanks thanks once again Sebastian Bay and and Pablo thanks thanks so much for uh the great discussions thank you up thank you everyone wonderful thank you so much Pablo B Sebastian and a wonderful moderator n