Road to Web3 Summit | Future of Gaming

[Music] [Applause] [Music] without further ado let's move on to our next talk so i'm super excited for this talk i'm going to bring on ryan pierce to talk about future gaming ryan recently just joined us c at polygon studios and piers heads gaming at delphi digital and uh these two have an amazing chemistry and so many amazing things to talk about here so i'll let peers kick this off and kind of take over and interview ryan and without further ado i'd like to welcome both of them here thank you for joining us thanks a lot kartik um yeah super excited to kick this one off uh ryan uh you've now officially joined the dark side of crypto so i'm excited to be able to chat on that side of things so um yep perhaps you could kick us off with just a sort of general intro a bit about you um and sort of what led you to where you are now yeah thanks uh so i'm the ceo of polygon studios i think this is actually the first time i've said it out loud in a formal setting so exciting to do that pierce um i'm in kind of a transition phase right now juggling both roles i'm making sure uh as the former head of gaming at youtube that i unwind and leave them in good hands and uh transitioning up working with the studios team and it's been great like what what a fun experience looking forward to diving in more and more with that team but that's what i'm up to and you're right um i've long wanted to jump in full time into the web 3 world and come to the dark side to your point so i'm excited uh excited to do it absolutely um yeah perhaps you could sort of like uh tell us a little bit about sort of why polygon um you know where the decision came from and kind of what what the whole process looked like yeah no it's a great question i spent um so i spent almost seven and a half years at youtube and i started the gaming vertical there right and so when i joined youtube we had we were just under a billion users on the platform gaming was this really you know emerging vertical and uh they didn't have a team to kind of work on it so i joined the organization as the head of gaming and started to build out the team build up the vision and build up the strategy and i loved it right because in the early days you know i was a esports player and commentator and broadcaster and streamer and a lot of people back then would be like look who wants to watch people play video games right and so i i kind of took that on as like uh i think people are going to enjoy this and so i spent the next 10 years of my life really focusing on that business growing the creator economy and so forth and so what happened was i started to spend you know i i i you know i i prided myself on knowing the gaming industry really well and then all of a sudden you know blockchain gaming comes up and it kind of hits me like a ton of bricks and i'm like wait what is what is this you know i was not leaned into d5 was not this like huge area of interest for me i wasn't like totally inundated with crypto and so i started sitting down and looking at this and i'm like wow you know this kind of like it really was uh very enlightening to say the least and so as i started to spend more time with people in the industry more time on it i was like this is such a fascinating space i feel like i really want to spend more time in it and it largely led me to spending more time you know back back in in early august with the uh the polygon team and just like spending time working with them and seeing what they're up to and you know such a hard-working group of individuals that have a chip on their shoulder that is buildings really something special uh on ethereum and so it really was like look like let's figure out how we can do more of this and how i can kind of join and one thing led to another and and now i'm i'm excited to jump in and lead our studios team super exciting yeah maybe you could talk to us a little bit about um you know what the sort of immediate objectives are for you and the team at polygon studios what's the next sort of six or 12 months look like for you guys yeah look there's a lot there's the the best part about kind of this industry is um it's you know it's fast paced it's growing there's no shortage of things to do i laugh you know some deep and i were talking the other day and he said yeah it's really easy to know crypto if you can spend 16 hours a day reading right and so you know a lot of what i want to do is get really acclimated with the organization first and foremost they've done a lot of great partnerships you saw us announced you know us doing stuff with uh you know nfl in ticketmaster you saw us doing something with 100 thieves the esports organization so that studios team has has been doing a really great job and a lot of work and so it's like how do we actually add fuel to the fire i think it'd be really great to to stand up our organization and hire for really key roles that we have so we want to continue to bring web to folks that are enlightened and have uh you know red pill if you will and are ready to come over and join this movement um and so i think what you'll start to see is a lot of like marquee hires come over to the studios team over the next couple months and then really it's us working as a collective group about what is our vision what do we want to accomplish what's our messaging externally and internally how do we make sure we have more operational and organizational rigor how do we make sure we're showing up big at events where you know gamers and game developers are coming together how are we making sure that we can better streamline and support non-gaming initiatives whether it's prada and adidas or so forth so it's really like you know you have this blank canvas because there's such a huge appetite and demand to already work and build on polygons network so how do we actually just add you know a really strong partnerships team to that and a really strong brand identity to it and make sure that as people come in they're excited to build on polygon they're choosing polygon because it's the best place to build on and uh that's what we're really focused on and we we definitely believe we're gonna accomplish that vision and more now it's super cool and very exciting to hear you know there's more red pilling of web 2 folks coming i'm going to bring them i'm bringing them over left and right believe me i think like you know the funny thing is um i think people like look they worry that you know they're interested in it but they don't know everything about it and i think a lot of uh people don't realize that there's a tremendous amount of humility in the web 3 industry of like we all don't know everything about it and everybody has different skill sets everybody is learning every day there's so much that's happening in this space to keep up on and so i think what you're starting to see is people naturally wanting to come over but not know how best to do it or what role they have to play in this world and so as you start to have these conversations with web 2 folks and you see what they've been able to build it's like no no that's exactly the skill set we need to bring over into web3 like make the jump it's going to be worth your while we as a collective industry are building something really special here um and i think i love just like the overall spirit you know i i'm working at you know former role in a in big tech highly competitive you know what what are we doing against amazon what are we doing against facebook and even though this there's competition that's happening in web 3 really the spirit of the community is like we're building something special together as a group here and so it just is much more like of collaborative and so i think people are not used to operating in an industry like that even in the games industry where it's hyper competitive between an activision blizzard and an ea and an ubisoft you see so much more collaboration and just like positive vibes and i think you know that is the spirit of like you know we're gonna make it and all of this you know and so i i think like people as as they get introduced from webtoon to web3 are naturally going to continue to lean in and i think we're going to get a lot of great talent from that industry to come over and build this thing absolutely i love it um and what would you say then i guess from your time at youtube and perhaps beyond like were some of the cool like learnings that you you feel like you're gonna be able to bring across and kind of you know sort of put to work over here curious how sort of that translates into this into this whole new world of web 3. there's a lot i think like at youtube um you know learning how to build apps that you know in products that scale across a variety of the creator economy so we built a lot of stuff that in at first was like made for gamers right and with gaming creators and gaming users in mind and what you find out a lot of that ends up being broadly applicable so standing up products and being able to scale them is a really important learning uh that i had over the last seven years um you know i think how basically how to set up a a world-class organization that generates billions in revenue for the company you know gaming being one of the the largest verticals at youtube um how we set our strategy how we market ourselves how we you know how you handle competition right you know youtube is no stranger to significant competition in the space with facebook and twitch and the deals that are being done there in the crater economy so i think there's a lot of actually um there's a lot that i learned at youtube that that that resembles what is needed in this field and and how we're going to continue to build out the organization at polygon studios and so i'm looking forward to kind of like taking a lot of those um those growing pains and learning lessons that we had uh and look it's a little bit different because like i said when we started when i started youtube we were just cracking a billion users and we're well over two billion now so a lot of what i've learned is how to how to take a platform from one billion to two billion but it'll be fun to figure out how we take it from you know uh uh you know 50 million to 100 million to a billion and that's actually what gets me really excited about this space is i think that one billion to two billion was quite quite the quest in in in path and i think those learnings will actually really help us accelerate our timeline to how do we just get a billion people you know on crypto and and you know working on the ethereum network and all of that so i'm excited i love it you heard it here first polygon for a billion users not too long they're lucky to have you um yeah that's that's the dream you know that's where we're to get to and i think everybody is everybody is um certainly aligned and and running in the right direction and everybody has a role to play in that you know from the developers themselves to the to the people that are working every day at polygon and then curious for your thoughts at sort of a higher level about where we're at in the evolution of these um you know the intersection of sort of blockchain and gaming um how do you reflect how do you think about uh you know is this really a new sort of genre of game a new type of game like what are the sort of uh you know differences what are the things that jump out to you about you know blockchain gaming versus what came before is this like yeah i want to rip one of you because i i i want to hear also i'm going to like i want to hear kind of your your perspective on it i look at it this way look at the end of the day when you're developing a game no matter what like take the idea of blockchain outside of it you have to make a really good game like first and foremost there is so much capital being deployed into the gaming ecosystem you are seeing a lot of these big macro level acquisitions that are happening across take two and microsoft and so forth so there's just a lot of money being put into game development and so because of that there's like a lot more optionality for gamers to go play any kind of game that you could ever imagine and it's great that's why you have two and a half billion people on this planet that are playing games in some way shape or form and obviously across that spectrum it can be super casual of like my mom playing candy crush at the airport all the way to like me being a hardcore like tactical shooter player right and everything in between um the great thing about the gaming industry is there's something for everybody and i think that opens up this aperture of users participating in it and it's almost like gaming is going to just be like synonymous with entertainment and culture everybody's going to do it in some way shape or form and i don't know if we'll even call it video games long term so when i think of like what's unique about like blockchain gaming it's like making a really great game first and foremost is important and then i think opening up this economy where you can play and earn and you can do all of these things with inside of it you can have a governance token you can own your actual and have like true genuine digital ownership you have resale value there there's like you're really democratizing development in a lot of different ways and so i think yes it's like a little bit of a cop-out but it's like yes it is it's a new subsection and a lot of the counter arguments you always hear is like yeah you could do it with you know a centralized sql database and these things that kind of already exist look at diablo 3 auction house yada yada right but the the fact of the matter is there's really not a lot of games that are plugging into what does it look like when you have these free open economies in marketplaces and so it's becoming really easy to build those you know uh uh in web3 and so i think what you're going to see is people yes they're going to make these high quality games first and foremost but they're really going to start to think about okay i have another tool at my disposal to make a great game because i'm building on the blockchain what what does that actually mean for me and like what can i actually do with that so i'm interested to see i think you're going to see a convergence of a lot of these different things and the other thing to you know be mindful of is over time like people take it takes time to make high polished aaa games you're seeing a lot of these projects of really talented developers leaving activision blizzard leaving raya leaving ea leaving ubi to start their own companies and they're getting funded to do it and they are at you know their aspirations are to build these like beautiful high polish games and those are on the horizon we haven't even seen them yet and so i do think there will be a pretty meaningful shift of players moving into games uh you know blockchain based games and you're gonna see that over the next three to four years i i i look i'd love to see you know you yourself are like at such a great intersection of this of what you're doing between bitcraft and delphia like what's your thoughts on what this unlocks in the gaming space yeah i mean i think the part that excites me the most still is definitely obviously this whole thing is a spectrum right degree of integration of these technologies we're going to see a lot of very high polished games that are exciting that do like pretty vanilla nft integrations for you know pure cosmetic non-balance impacting stuff cool fine new way to monetize new way for people to engage that stuff super exciting but i think this whole new like you know further out to the right end of the spectrum this whole new sort of um it's like what is like uniquely enabled by you know leveraging these technologies for the first time right i think the way you can like sort of start to build things where there's this kind of emergent gameplay in a really interesting way and like literally the community picks up some kind of you know base that's been built around these things and like just runs with them in such interesting ways so a lot of the stuff i've seen around on chain gaming things like dark forest and all the stuff that ox park is doing um that kind of stuff excites me enormously um it's like you know the community is um playing a material like front seat role in the world building itself after the developers kind of define the parameters and like primitives for those game worlds and whilst we're like you know probably a decade away from those things like the concept of one chain gaming reaching the stage where you know you can do it with any kind of graphical complexity or anything like that that stuff's really exciting to me um and i do think you know the the when we can build ecosystems where there's like meaningful community governance and uh you know people can actually like help drive the game in interesting ways and contribute to it that stuff's really exciting to me because we just don't really see a great equivalent um you know in terms of what came before so we'll see it'll take time i'm here for it though i'm most excited about things you know trying to ask the question like what can we do now that we couldn't before like in a very meaningful way so we'll see what comes with that we'll see and it's kind of like you know what what we see now is is simply just scratching the surface of the possibilities and i feel like you know when you look at conversations publicly are happening where there's like strong kind of um it's very polarizing on just the topic of nfts right for a variety of reasons and i think as we're able to as a collective industry illustrate more complex examples of what like nfts can do and what blockchain gaming can do and point to those examples publicly and say like this is it like this is why we were excited because i think right now it's very hard for those that are not really in the industry it's very hard to articulate that vision in a way that makes sense and is coherent you know to somebody that like is not you know that might be like very foreign to this concept um and there's obviously a lot of things that are going to happen between now and then we'll address some of the more macro issues environmental concerns and carbon footprint and so forth but i agree with you i think like game development takes on a whole life of its own uh when you start to look out four five six years from now i do think to your point it's like right now when when when developers are looking at like how how do we really harness our community they're doing it like via twitter or reddit posts when you can actually make genuine product decisions and game decisions at a macro level because of governance like that's a really cool participation or to your point like games that evolve because you're like able to democratize development of a game and really you just are kind of setting the parameters to your point and letting letting the community run free this changes the way games are inherently played right now in a whole different way i also think too these shifts and user bases that will be coming over and participating in these you know ecosystems and games is going to materially change the way free to play is looked at right because i do think you're going to see a shift of you know for better for lack of better terms you know whales that are participating and really hold up free-to-play games right it's like a combination of people with money and a combination of people with time when you start to see the player base that is actually investing heavily into these games start to find equivalent games that are blockchain based that is really going to change like the the the entire industry and i think it will require then aaa publishers to really reevaluate what kind of games are they making how are they making them and how they should be participating the other thing too is like not every game needs to be a blockchain based game so we don't have to deal with like absolutes on these conversations it's like i you know i don't want my son to have to worry about like you know buying ethereum and playing you know playing in a like a volatile economy or anything of that nature when he's like seven years old right like there are games that are going to be much more well designed and so i think the other thing in these conversations are people too largely are dealing in absolutes when having these conversations it's okay to like have a unique subsection of the gaming industry where this is happening 100 and like you know we often hear pushback around even just the notion of governance and games right like the community's never going to make good decisions like you know handing over the parts of the development roadmap to them is going to be a car crash like again that's not binary it's not like one or the other there's like this intermediate scenario where you know you have things like delegated governance right there are people that emerge from the community which other players recognize as really dial into what's happening in terms of direction of travel how the economy's evolving and they might be willing to basically you know delegate their votes to these people who act as like representatives of the player base to you know help coordinate these decisions and stuff i totally agree it's not about absolutes it's like everyone assumes it's always binary when it's not i think we'll uh i think we'll find a healthy middle ground on it um and that stuff takes time and like even a democratic approach to like what you're talking about like almost like elected officials within communities that are the ones i mean like i love that right i think that's like a great like that is you could never have something like that in today's environment and these are the things that are going to come up and i feel the more that we can kind of talk about these really unique opportunities the more it like it creates really interesting thought processes for developers and then in turn they make great products that users are going to be able to like you know genuinely enjoy and love and and i feel we are just cracking the surface of that yep totally and it's super exciting to think about because obviously all these different games over the years like mainly ceramic rpgs and whatnot have these legendary players that emerge right you had zesman runescape and whatnot like everyone loved that dude they still do all these years on including me um if he you know he was so dialed into how the game was evolving and whatnot obviously was grinding maximum all the first levels like that's exactly the kind of person that can meaningfully contribute to the world building that's going on right and people will be willing to support again almost like an elected official so anyway lots of fun design design space there um i wanted to double click a bit though on uh you know the current state of things the current lay of the land in terms of the absolutely shocking backlash that we've seen in so many scenarios around um you know just sort of broader game of populations i wonder you know where you think it comes from and how we get past this because it definitely seems to be a major obstacle currently yeah look i obviously have spent a lot of time on it you know like i you know made this jump from youtube over to polygon knowing that you know there is a lot of controversy around the topic of nfts i think there's a there's a lot to unpack there i think one um sometimes it's like i question how much of it is a like you know vocal minority for one like two i'll give you an example the hundred thieves drop was yesterday they did it they did it on polygon they came out with communication they didn't use it even nfc as a term they came out with communications that like the carbon footprint for a redemption is like the equivalent of two emails right that they had a quarter in the time window was only a couple hours it was open to redeem it it was free right so like that you know take that with a grain of salt but they had a quarter of a million people redeem it right so it's like okay there's something here i think there's a little bit of like web 3 maximalism speaking past hardcore gamers hardcore gamers are notoriously known for digging in they have done it on a variety of things like i even think of when i first started at youtube gaming it was like you'll never be able to be in like gaming video like twitch is supreme and rules all right now i think the messaging has changed a little bit on that right and so people come along look at like the resistance against free to play there's a lot of misunderstanding around you know like look you think about like mining right people still remember when they couldn't get a a graphics card because of bitcoin miners so there's understandably a sour taste in gamer's mouth for what some of the behaviors have happened you can look at nft projects that you're getting rugged or you're getting scammed on those definitely exist right you can look at like you're not in the nft space and you see like an ape going for a half million dollars you're like what is this right and so i think there's a lot of understandable uncertainty and misinformation that is kind of fueling this like strong resistance behind it right um a lot of this isn't going to be solved in dialogue and communications right like i can talk to people to on blue and face about this and talk about opportunity if you don't want to listen to it or you're so strongly adamant against it it's not going to make much progress the one thing that is tried and true and over time always wins is if you have a really great product and users want to and want to play in that product that will prevail and so i think a lot of what we as an industry need to do is worry less about that that you know one we should be listening have empathy for the counterpoint of view but i think a lot of is develop great products and people will come to them over time um and i do think it's a little bit of marketing and messaging like i think we do need to understand like i i i go back to that 100 thieves example because they nailed it right they threaded the needle there they get ahead of this conversation it's about how you land that messaging that's really important the other thing too it's like you have had people that are just jamming this like idea of nfc into like a game right and i don't think that works well either right it's like people want to be able to play the game that they've been playing because they've enjoyed it you don't need to just throw over and like put that game on the blockchain like people care about these open economies and marketplaces people care about governance some people just want to play a chill video game and that's cool too right so i think over time some of this stuff will will settle itself out and i'll be honest with you like i really i'm like zero bothered by it like i do not i listen i have a really i feel like a really good understanding of the counterpoints i'm empathetic to that i think there's a lot of work as an industry we need to do because they're valid counterpoints we shouldn't be dismissive of it we shouldn't be elitist about whatever we're building but i think it's really important to like keep your head down and build and and hear some of those concerns adjust your adjust accordingly but keep building it and show great examples no love that love that um yeah wanted to touch on before we before we got to wrap up sort of where your heads at i mean i'm always skeptical of predictions but to the extent you might be willing to share some thought just on you know both the intersection of crypto and gaming and just gaming more broadly like sort of where we're headed um how you're viewing that trajectory obviously you've had pretty unique insight into it after your sort of uh you know youtube career and now uh and now digging in on the web three sides so curious where your head's at yeah i mean i would say anybody that says they know where we're going i would not trust and would call him a liar flat out i think the beauty of all of this is we're building the plane that's already in flight and we're going to figure out where it takes us and where we land and i think that's the excitement about why we're in this industry um it's it's anyone's best guess i do think though you're going to see like i said like kind of touching on this point like your people are going to continue to be shown great examples and you're going to start to usher in more people into this space you have a lot of gen like gen z is kind of ruling the world right now and they look at gaming as their number one form of entertainment they look at gaming as their number one form of social community a lot of them are purchasing crypto it's becoming really easier to do uh as far as access i think regulation is going to be more than welcomed right like obviously we all have opinions on what does that mean but it takes away like the ambiguity of it right and provides much more clear guidelines i think you're going to start to see that and this convergence over the next like 24 to 36 months is going to lead to like just more people being crypto native right they're going to be really familiar they're going to come into these games and these apps and experiences and totally get it right now it's like dude you know trying to explain to somebody that doesn't get like you know how you have a metamask like what is all of this like what is this versus this right like what's a l1 versus l2 explaining that to people that are not spending time in that space you know it's the moon to them right but all of that like the education and evangelizing is going to change and so i think where you're going to see is in two or three years we are going to stop having these like conversations about onboarding and educating and i think there's going to be so many like crypto native people it'll be such common knowledge in this net this younger generation of gen z that are going to be you know inevitably in five to ten years will be key decision makers at big companies and and be leading big roles and i think a lot of it will become abundantly more clear i also think you you look at from a regulation perspective it's a lot of you know i don't want to say boomers but it is that that this is a while this is wild to wrap their head around right and so you're going to also see millennials start to come into powers and positions politically that understand a lot of this much much better and much and can articulate it much more clearly and so i think a lot of them there's a lot of really positive long-term tailwinds that are starting to happen and i just think it's not easy for everybody to see it but i think we're starting to see like a great convergence and we have really great leaders across the web 3 industry that are able to articulate and help bring these people along so yeah my prediction is like it will not feel like the wild wild west in just two or three years time and there will be a lot more like certainty around the space much more appreciation around the sp space and much more understanding absolutely yeah i know couldn't agree more on the uh you know the web 3 sort of um proponents who are very articulate and concise around this stuff i think they're doing a great job but sort of a you know laying down a potential playbook for regulators etc um that's still one of the things that keeps me up at night uh you know obviously i firmly believe the vast majority of economic activity is still going to happen in regulated markets but i'm i'm still concerned that maybe they'll be in like an over extension right because that tends to happen when people feel when regulators feel like things are getting away from them a bit so we'll see how that evolves uh my fingers are crossed um you and me i'm i'm cautiously optimistic my friend yeah yeah absolutely um so yeah before we wrap wanted to wanted to also um basically give you the opportunity to sort of share any advice i guess you give people coming into the space uh whether that's developers people personally professionally um you know idle curiosity you uh you tell me yeah uh look i think now is a great time to jump in you know again don't be afraid that you don't know everything right like a lot of people like we are all learning things are changing every single day this industry is you know rapidly evolving um if you're sitting on the sidelines and you're looking for an opportune or perfect time to jump in it never does exist right so make the jump there are so many jobs open across web3 i mean it is absurd like polygon studios we've got like 15 or 20 rolls open right now across polygon there's like probably over a hundred you know so no better time to build there's a lot of capital no better time to raise money to start a company so if you're an entrepreneur go start it you you know there's a lot of funding coming out into this space if you want to be a builder and and just like you know work in this industry there's a ton of job openings we need all the help we can get across web 3 there's so many different opportunities you will learn as you go and so don't be afraid to build don't be afraid to join the initiative and i think like there's never been a better time than now to do so so i i give everybody as much encouragement i personally have made the jump and like i can tell you only even a couple days into it i couldn't be happier that i did and i'm like ecstatic that i made the jump over and honestly i can't imagine a world where i didn't at this point already so uh come come come we'll take everybody i love it how's that from call to action to wrap on um brian it's always a pleasure chatting i'm super excited that you're uh you know diving in uh full time in the space now and um yeah i'm super excited to see how this whole sort of landscape evolves how polygon involves with you at the helm so um thanks thanks a lot for making the time yeah likewise thanks everybody take care ryan pierce thanks so much and it was a perfect note to end on [Music] [Applause] [Music]