How to Make Web3 Games That Don't Suck | European Blockchain Convention 9

3 2 [music] 1 Perfect. Mic on. Thank you very much for that beautiful introduction and welcome everyone to this afternoon session about the topic of web free gaming which I am personally very excited about. Thanks for you guys being here. I would say just as a little intro, the web free gaming ecosystem is about three things.

You can later say if you agree or not, but for me it's three things. It's making in-game assets in transfer them into ownership through NFTts, making platforms interoperable, not just games, but platforms and hardware as well. So, it's all about interoperability, which is typical for blockchain. And the last thing is to include the community. So, community-led co-creation of game development.

What would you say? Is this a good summary of web web free gaming or what is web free gaming in core for you guys? Let's start with Robbie. Okay, I I'll I'll jump in first. Um, I think we need to think about it first as gaming and then we need to think about web 3 as infrastructure in games that allow us to have new kinds of tools and new kinds of engagement with audiences that might be outside of, you know, traditional web 2 gaming audiences because we now have all these great new features.

So I think the best way to think about it is not really as a different kind of gaming but an evolution of existing gaming in the same way that mobile was an exist an evolution of console and PC gaming. So it's a new platform and it gives you more tools which hopefully can broaden the feature set and adoption of users. Very good. What's your take? So let me just build on what Robbie just said.

That's the exact same challenge that we're trying to solve. So it's new infrastructure, new technologies, uh new user base that is coming in. So we are a gamefy project. So uh on traditional gaming uh when you're playing on consoles whether it's visav PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, right? Uh it's just not possible.

So the infrastructure is not there. Again to what what he just said, uh it's bringing on new user base and bringing on new technologies. That's where why we're building on web 3. It's just not that oh we just one day woke up and we said hey let's just build a great game. the the the dynamics the game dynamics is just not there.

The infrastructure is not there. So you have to be very cognizant of the fact that what type of layer one you're selecting and why you're building on that infrastructure because your audience is different. The audience is demanding a little bit more, right? So the you love the game but the game doesn't love you back. So that means it's a good one.

Yeah. So so what I mean by that is I spend uh thousands of hours on playing a game but is it going to you know love me back or pay me for that time? So for example uh I have a passion for gaming. I've been gaming pretty much my entire life. When I'm done with this conference, I go back and play Assassin's Creed on my PS5.

I I don't hate. I don't discriminate. I play like any game that's out there, but I know I'm going to end up spending like 12, 13, 15, maybe 20 hours playing that game, but that's just time wasted and no no money earned for me, right? So, that's that's what we're changing with our game. So, that's that's like the economical aspect.

That's the economical aspect. Yeah. So, fair fair play for everyone and you know where you're monetizing your time. Okay, cool. Um, let me build on it and I'll give you a feedback from the community of the blockchain gaming alliance.

They recently published a report where they say there is two problems, two main problems with web free gaming. It's user unfriendliness and also gameplay development which lacks a bit behind. Is this fair to say or why would this conference choose such a let's call it funny title for this panel? Why do web 3 games suck for some people? May maybe I'll take that on first and then and then you can go for it.

Uh web three games suck. They do suck. I mean they're about like 1,500 to 2,000 games out there. Uh it's just the infrastructure is horrible. Uh layer ones are not that great in terms of building what you know what we uh deserve from a AAA rated game and that's what we're doing.

So our challenge is very big. We we set out there to build a AAA rated game. That's why we partnered with studios like Warner Brother Studios who are great game makers. They understand web 2. They make great games.

They just don't make movies. They're they're an entertainment company and we've exclusively partnered with them to bring that type of infrastructure uh to a AAA rated game when it comes to uh web 3. But again, bottom line is it's just the infrastructure is just not there and it will take time. Uh I see some some faces here. Maybe you guys played Pong back in the you know late '7s or you know ' 80s.

Uh it was just like one hand over there. Yeah, you played Pong. There you go. So you you know what I'm saying? The user There you go.

Another one. So So um uh the user experience was horrible, right? So it's just basically two uh two lines and just you know you're playing Pong. Uh that was the infrastructure of that time at that point. And uh lo and behold, it just got better and better and better.

And so our industry will take time for us to get there. Today it will be impossible to compete that if you tell me put a production quality level like an Assassin's Creed or something else from Ubisoft out there, today it's not possible. But uh give us a couple of years and and we're basically we're we're getting there. Okay. Can I throw in a follow-up question for you, Robbie, on that?

Uh infrastructure. There's a lack of infrastructure. If I can take this as a takeway takeaway, do you think there's a lack of funding or where where are the catalysts that have to be pushed through? Sure. Um so I think first in defense of Pong, [laughter] as a millennial, you wouldn't understand how good it was at the time.

Um, but I think I think most importantly we need to think about and and you know the title of this talk I think you could easily remove the word web 3 and just you know have a discussion on how to make games that don't suck because frankly it's very hard. Um, but I think one of the key things is thinking about what kind of games are appropriate for the medium because the world of games is so diverse. And when you think about the difference between, you know, Angry Birds and Assassin's Creed and Pong, these are all mega hit games on different platforms that cater to different kind of kinds of audiences with different experiences. So, it's about finding the content. Welcome Sarah.

Sorry. No problem. Hey, Sarah. I was here ages ago, but I didn't realize. Um, sorry.

No worries at all. We get you right back in. So, it's about making those kind of games that resonate with audiences based on the medium. So, to answer your question, I think it's about finding what are the tools that we can offer to game builders with web 3 that allow them to make games that give new kinds of experiences that people really like. Part of that, as Leo said, is making games that love you because there's maybe economic fairness involved in the game.

Um, and I think from a funding standpoint, yes, as soon as we start to be able to make these products that resonate with users, the money becomes easy to find. What's disappeared over the last year is what I kind of call R&D money, which is here, I'll give you $5 million to try some ideas out, but you have no idea whether they're going to work or not. That was possible a couple of years ago but it's not at the moment. Just to give the audience some like numbers to what you just said like in 2020 2020 21 billions have flowed into web free gaming. How is this money being used right now?

I think the most important thing is that it's being used to make better well for gaming it's being used to make better games. not focusing on blockchain, focusing on gameplay. Uh both both because it is part of the infrastructure just like we focused a lot on multiplayer for many years up until now and now you know the industry's gotten pretty good at multiplayer. I think it's about um when you think about all the money that was raised back in 2020 and 2021 that's leading into the games that are starting to come out now. So, I think people will actually see a big title shift in the quality of the games and the depth of the gameplay that they perceive in games that use web 3 just because it takes a while to make good games.

You know, generally a couple of years. All right. Thank you very much for that question. Welcome Sarah here on stage. Um, I can proudly say that you managed to produce a game out of your DAO, which is Alien Worlds that has weekly unique active wallets addressed of like 150K, which is on top of that radar.

So, congrats on that. Um, how did you get there and what was the crucial part of getting to an audience that plays your game? Yeah, I think for us actually it started with technology. Um, each team I think had a different way of doing it. Some of them were pre-existing gaming teams, others were pre-existing blockchain teams.

In our case, we were a blockchain company. Um, and we especially built DAO technology and we had a successful DAO already in which we ourselves were working. It was a block producer on numerous chains and a minor. And so we had this code that we knew worked really well, was very secure and robust, could be transactionally stressed and would still perform. [snorts] Um, and around the same time, this was when NFTTS were just kind of beginning to enter the frey.

And so we thought, well, Dows are an onchain way that you can represent groups of people. And NFTTS are an onchain way that you can represent unique items. Um, and a fungeible token represents an interesting gaming concept, which is like power or status or your stake, you know, in a fungeible sense, how much power you can express within that system. And so all of these different blockchain tokens concepts kind of came together to be able to create a gaming environment. And then because we were thinking in terms of Dows, we already knew that we wanted the community to have a lot of control within that.

So we would provide certain foundational things like the tokens themselves, the way that inflation would flow in the system and so on. But actually and and also certain narrative components like foundational lore and certain like rules around how the universe would work. But apart from that, we wanted the community to step up and they did so and that beca and and the how quickly they did so I think was testament to the power of ownership. You know the power of other people having a real stake in in the system and um that's a fast track to scaling. Very good.

Thank you very much. Let me follow up with a question on community building but also on team building in a web free gaming company. We have the privilege here of we can shed light on it from different angles from a VC perspective maybe Robbie but also from game developers themselves like what is the a good composition of a web free gaming team like where would you say what's a good mix and what's a like a best-in-class approach to go to the community and include them by not giving them too much responsibility maybe. Yeah. So in our case, the way that we do that is through these competing Dows.

So we have six Dows that are like teams. They're competing against each other within the system. They have a lot of power and control and also resources because they're playing to earn collectively as a team. So they get resources into their account every day. Um for us that's kind of the main conduit through which they get control.

But actually we also have a grant program. Um the community is able to be on certain multi-IGs and so on. in terms of um and actually we have a a a really important feature in development which is where the community as a DAO will be voting on how AI is able then to direct the lore. So we think it's a really important part of the conversation to think about how decentralized communities can leverage AI in a way that serves them. Uh this is of course part of the broader societal conversation about AI and how we potentially as a human race need to control it.

Um but our small contribution to that story is how communities can control it. In terms of teams and how to how to build teams um for us actually having community members be part of the team was always as soon as we gained any type of scale we started to hire community members. That was literally like one of the first things that we did. That's been really they've turned out to be really great and valuable team members. They care so much.

Um I think it's you know there's plenty of challenges around being a globally distributed team um and how to make that work. Um, having great developers on board means that you probably do need to be distributed. And then of course having game balancing and game dynamics and designers. It's really the full normal suite of what you would have in a gaming company plus all the the blockchain technology and the community angle. Thanks for the insights.

Now from the investment perspective, Robbie, what would you say like as a VC company, how in this sea of opportunities, how do you find the the pearls? I think like any in investment proposition, I think it's about finding a a mix of the right kind of passionate team um with the right kind of skill sets, but also a product idea that you think really as product market fit. So now that we're in a sort of crypto winter and a and an economic downturn, from the investor perspective, we can afford to be quite choosy because obviously capital is scarce. And so the kind of projects that we look at most of the time the stage of development of those projects is a little bit more mature than the types that we would have been investing in a couple of years ago. And we can afford to wait and see um as people get make more progress and as they're they they kind of find some product market fit.

So I think um from an investeee standpoint you know investors are much more demanding at being able to see tangible progress now. So that's very important. you know, you have to have an alpha build. Ideally, you have some kind of user testing out there when you first go out and look for external capital. Um, it's very difficult to raise just on the basis of a business plan um in this market.

Um, but the bright spot is that companies are raising money, deals are getting done, the market is not, you know, the second half of this year is not the first half of this year. It has improved a lot, but there has been a flight to quality. Thanks for citing Larry Frink here. So maybe maybe two cents on uh what these what these guys build on. Developers by nature are gamers.

That's just that's just what they're doing, right? They're coding and they're de-stressing uh and and they're playing games. Uh if you have a good game, that's another tactic to actually uh acquire a lot of talent. You ask about the talent. Uh if they like the game, they want to, you know, contribute and build on it and so forth.

So that's one way that we were able to attract talent. uh not to say I mean it's a more of a vanity metric if you will but but that's the community to touch on like you know the community is really important because those are the ones who are engaging with your product and you know they're they're the ones who are giving you constant feedback so the voice of the customer is very important to build what the next generation game you're building. So, Discord, we have about like almost 60,000 uh people over there. Uh half of them are probably developers that kind of like what we're looking at the data and some of them they reached out to us. They said, "Hey, we'd love to work on your project and so forth."

We interviewed, we hired some people from from there. So, very nice. But how do you do it like practically this feedback loop? How do you get out there and meet your audience, your community? How does that work?

I mean, this is part of the process. That's why I'm here. You're on the road and you're meeting people. You get constant feedback. But we also do a lot of AMAs.

Uh that's that's one way of doing it. Um, so I'm pretty much doing an AMA every other week. Uh, that's that's where we're getting constant feedback and and they're keeping us honest that what they really want in the game. Uh, but then again, sometimes, uh, I don't want to say that you always don't want to listen to the customer or, you know, to the people because they they come up with great ideas and sometimes they come up with whack ideas which is just not technically possible to build into the game. Uh, it's it's it's a wish list, right?

Uh, so everything's just not going to make it to the wish list. So uh that's why you go back to our devs and we say okay what's what's tangible what's going to work in the game uh and what can we provide and what features can we roll out uh in our next release and our build and so forth. Uh so that's kind of like how we keep each ourselves honest but yeah without the feedback uh our game is not going to improve. So that is absolutely important to us that's why we do a lot of AMAs and and do a lot of road shows. Very good.

Thank you very much. So I brought the next question with which is about the different types of games in web 3. um I found or let's say there's like three categories. One is those play to earn games from the early days like Axi Infiniti. Then we have the next category of those visually very appealing games that want to compete with the large publishers, the AAA games, so-called AAA games.

And last but not least, this activity apps where you can earn to do whatever, sing, dance, run. Uh where do you think those go hand in hand or where do you think which ones of them will come up successful and which one will struggle over time? Leo I I don't think so there's a winner take all mentality. There are different type of gamers and there different audiences right so all the way from kids to grandpas and grandmas playing playing games uh whatever bakes you noodle I mean that's fine and that's why you need uh a lot of diversity within within the game set as well. So, I don't think so there's a winner take all.

There are different genres. Some people like role playing games, some people don't. Some people like much more uh first-person shooters, right? Call of Duty, they want to play with your friends and so forth. I mean, again, AAA rated games and they've been going on for what uh 15 20 years now.

Uh they're still playing the same games uh over and over again. Uh so, I don't think so there's a winner uh take all mentality like one game is going to come on top. Uh that's why you have different genres within within the gaming industry. So, I it's it's very hard for me to pick one and say, "Well, this is the one that's going to basically, you know, one game to rule them all." I don't think so.

There's there there's a game like that because it's just user behavior. Uh, some people like chess, some people like checkers. So, they're both board games, right? Uh, that's that's that's what I would say. I don't know.

Maybe maybe you have a pick. Yeah, Robbie, as an investy, like I I think it's actually more about distribution than it is about game genre. Because one of the challenges we have with games that have web 3 infrastructure in them is that we've historically been unwelcome in most traditional gaming distribution platforms, whether that's, you know, mobile app stores or Steam or or console platforms. Um, and so as a result, most games have struggled to acquire users because they tend to just, you know, they have websites and they broadcast to their own community and they use socials. Why are they not opening their gates to you guys?

Because I think that they don't understand um really what the implications of including web 3 infrastructure are. And because they haven't I there was a knee-jerk reaction at the beginning I think that the idea of putting web 3 infrastructure in was basically to bypass their business models as in the fees that they take for distribution. Um and I think that that was a basically a conclusion they came to that prevented them from sort of learning more about what was possible and engaging with the web 3 community to find solutions that work for everybody. Um we're getting there. Obviously, mobile platforms are now starting to make some concrete decisions about how they want to deal with web 3, but it's baby steps for the moment.

C can I build on that a little bit? So, me and Robbie were having this discussion backstage. Um, the problem is when you're trying to get influencers to promote the game, uh, some traditional companies, whether we the Twitches of the world and so forth, uh, they tell their influencers not to promote any web 3 games. So, it's very hard distri Yes, he's right. distribution.

That is part of the problem like where are you distributing your game but also evangelizing where are you putting the word out there. So if you're not allowed to even mention the word remotely web 3 or crypto or blockchain uh they will get instantly banned and these folks are basically making an earning like you know that's that's that's that's their bread and butter. Uh if they're not allowed to do that then it makes it very very hard. So, I think going back to what Robbie said initially, you just need to maybe stop saying, "Oh, this is a web two or this is a web three." Like, you know, we don't need to discriminate and say, uh, you know, us versus them and stuff like that.

It's a game at the end of the day, right? It's it's all about the dynamics and it's what you're going to do with the game. Uh, some platforms uh enable you with a technology set like you said, play to earn uh and some don't. So, that's I I think that's that's kind of like what the what the difference is. Okay, got it.

So, we got to work together more on the on that side. Definitely. Uh Sarah, let me ask you um another question and let me make a comparison here to the the music industry, the so-called Spotify moment. I mean, they were also not opening their gates to Spotify because they thought their whole business model is going to be disrupted. They maybe lose their jobs or their revenues, whatever.

What do you what do you think about a Spotify moment in gaming like for web 3? when would you what what needs to happen for this Spotify moment? I mean I think web 3's greatest strength which is decentralization is also then a little bit difficult to scale because it creates a slightly disjointed user experience and it also at least right now creates some hurdles that it's hard for users to get over like getting a wallet and if you need to have crypto in that wallet and so on. So really I think we're at a phase of the technical development of what amount to complex DAPs decentralized applications like running on chains um that it's still a little clunky and so but that's just a function of the technical technical development that we're on. Um I think the other thing that's important to remember is that most games traditional games are not actually profitable right so but then breakout successes are.

So in a portfolio of games, there will be some that are profitable, but each individual bet that a game studio places is unlikely to be profitable. And so that that's why you have these large gaming companies that are able to distribute that risk. And then once they find a franchise that works, they just completely double down on that for 20 years, right? Um the the the trajectory in the web 3 gaming space is still such that we're having to deploy capital very carefully. We're still a small industry.

capital rises and falls according to the market cycle. So, as Robbie was saying, you know, you you could raise money on a business plan two years ago, you can't today. There's no money for R&D right now. But this is on an overall upward cycle. And how that maps then on to how you can actually build a game is means that, you know, as the industry stabilizes and matures and access to capital becomes more regular and so on, we will be able to place more of those bets and have more of those successes.

It's really just an early industry right now. Thank you very much for that vibrant discussion. Um I would say we give we pass the ball on to the audience. Thanks for being here and please don't be shy. Um do you have any questions to our experts here on stage with regards to gaming?

I'm Dr. Leonard Anderson uh Convex Foundation. My question is what performance is required for decentralized ledger and solving your scalability problem. So three answers please. What finality do you want on the ledger in terms of seconds or subseconds?

What scalability in thousands of transactions per second? And what cost per transaction in fractions of a cent? You want to take that one? Who wants to take that one? [clears throat] So I mean I think what this question is getting to which is a really worthwhile thing is that blockchain technology has been getting a lot better and we actually I mean I'll answer from our perspective.

We were the first decentralized application to be able to get to historic levels of scale precisely because of the chain that we were running on. So most of our logic runs on the WAX blockchain which is a deep chain. I actually don't know all the stats off the top of my head but we can transact. So we're the most called smart contract in the world is our is our mining um game. So we are able to sort of transact that throughput for years and years on end and have no downtime um because of those features of the blockchain technology that we're able to to encode on.

Now that's actually why we've we're even talking about blockchain gaming is because the underlying protocol level technology got to the point that we were able to build blockchain games. So I would say look at you know chains like ours which have proven to be able to um and in fact what upland runs on is a similar chain you know able to transact those kinds of um throughput. I I also think that the issue is not necessarily specifically the scaling of the blockchain itself because there are lots of like L2 scaling solutions available now. I think it's one problem that we're grappling with alongside several other problems like user acquisition and ease of onboarding. And so these are all being worked in parallel.

Um but I' I'd actually say that particular problem is less difficult than the other ones to be honest. I before you start can you also include in your answer account abstraction because that could help in onboarding right I mean I mean yeah but but I think that that's kind of like a afterthought for uh at least business leaders more of a CTO question and uh you know my VP of dev who's actually looking into that uh our problem would be like selecting the right chain uh which I think we did. We went from Ethereum to immutable. Uh they're good. I let them deal with those problems.

What the layer ones are doing and what Robbie just said like you know there are a lot of scalable L2 solutions out there. Uh but I think that's not what's keeping up at night is basically keeping the lights on and you got to be revenue focused. You got to focus on where is the money coming from like which gamers and what feature sets you're building on so forth. So I think that's much more of an afterthought. Uh maybe a bad strategy.

Uh but then again, I mean that's just uh I just don't live in that world where I'm losing sleep on uh how many per transactions do I need to keep the cost down and so forth. So that's just an honest honest honest answer. So I wish I could give you a better answer. Thank you guys. Um next one, front row with the beautiful mustache.

Hey guys. Yeah, I was just wondering when it comes to community management uh at what step of it do you think it's really important to identify your target audience because I work in that area and I see lots of projects end up failing because of it because they end up targeting let's say Dens or or traders or people just trying to gain a profit instead of actual gamers and then when it comes to getting the support of the community and trying to hire community members like you were saying so they don't have them because they're not there for that. So I'm wondering at what stage of your project do you focus on that? Yeah, [snorts] one of the things that I think is really nice about these um environments that we've built especially like so in our case we have numerous different communities interacting with the same set of tokens within a single environment. Those are kind of the perfect conditions essentially to run experiments, right?

Because you can see who's responding to what types of things. the community themselves is are generating their own NFTTS, their own games, and they're part of that experiment too. And what everyone is trying to do really is to figure out where the business models are because they're not classical business models because there are very few proprietary kind of moes involved, right? Um so you're having instead of relying on something proprietary you're having to rely on basically community is ultimately what it comes down to forming you know figuring out which community kind of coaleses around itself and is and and actually has an identity and wants to spend money on certain things and what they want to spend money on. So I think it's a really diff I think personally I think it's quite difficult actually to map other business models into these environments that could just be particular to the way Alien Worlds is built but um our people do make money in Alien Worlds.

Dooku makes money but also communities make money and they've done it really through trial and error whether or not they specifically know that that's what they were doing. They were they were finding their way to NFT drops or promotions or other types of activities that ended up making them money. So, it's I think it's we're in an experimental phase is what it amounts to. Thanks for the question. Um, any last remarks that we want to give our audience on their way where they can engage more with web free games, maybe try out one.

What's the easiest way to do that? Uh, so I'm going to plug our Formula E high voltage just because we launched it this past week. So, if anybody likes racing games, Formula E high voltage, please check it out. Shamelessly. Yes.

That's [laughter] what we do in this business. Michelle. Uh well uh I'll be shameless as well. Try undeads.com.

Go there, sign up. I mean, I'm sure you have a wallet, connect. Uh see if you like the game. There's uh we sold out our mint. So uh number third, I think tradable asset on OpenC.

It was pretty good. So yeah, and try other games. I mean, it's about killing zombies, right? It's about killing zombies. Yeah.

Or or killing humans. You can play both ways. So uh you can be a zombie as well. You can be a zombie, you can be a human. Yeah.

So So they're cool. They're cool games, man. So Sarah, yeah. So what I would say actually is run to be a custodian on one of our Dows. Um this is the biggest implementation of Dows in the world today in terms of the number of users.

Um you can run to be a custodian play.alalienworlds.io. You can choose a planet. Uh there's six planets each of which is a DAO.

And then you will govern that treasury and you'll have to work with four other custodians. Every week there's a new set of custodians. Um, and you'll work with them to figure out how you want to spend the resources that are in the treasury. We've had Dows create their own games, put up billboards in cities, um, do all kinds of things with their treasuries. Um, and you can also, if you're a pre-existing community from somewhere else, you can come and take over a DAO, and then that gives you a place to be.

It gives you resources and it gives you some voting mechanisms. So, come and be a custodian. play.alenworlds.io.

Right on time. We're ending this panel. Thank you very much,