How we can 10x the web3 gaming experience with Gregory Markou

Um, thanks for coming out. My name is Greg Marco and uh, today I'm gonna be talking about how we can 10x the web 3 gaming experience. Uh, format's going to kind of be in the uh, where we are today and then some predictions about kind of like where we might see things go in gaming uh, 2023 and kind of like what we're going to need to achieve kind of on a technical perspective and a product perspective uh, to get us there. Um, I'm Greg. Um, co one of the co-founders and CPO at Chainsafe.

That's me eating a Snickers bar after a nice long hike. If you haven't done that before, it's amazing. It's very rewarding. Um, quickly about Chainsafe and uh, you know, we're we're a blockchain R&D firm, been around since 2017. Uh, we do engineering consulting services as well as a plethora of open source work that I'll touch on shortly um, within the web3 space.

Um and specifically for today we have a part of gaming called a piece part of chain safe called chainsafe gaming. Um that is a large tool set for web3 developers to build their products and services on top of. Um some of these stuff include web 3 unity which is one of the top SDKs for connecting to the blockchain as Unity developer. Uh NFT based minting tools as well as uh white labelled market places for people to developers to integrate directly into their games. Um, as I said some of these, so one of the biggest things with us is, you know, since day one, we've been a team that's believed in multi-chain.

We believed that there shouldn't be walled gardens when you build stuff. So when I talk about our uni ACK works everywhere, um, you know, you're not hitting an API, we have just released our latest version that mirrors something that you'd be used to like web3js or ethers. Uh, we're the maintainers of Web3JS, so we've built it like that. So there's no API service that you're hitting. you're going right to the blockchain, whether that's your own RPC node or a different provider.

Um, similarly with some of other stuff we do, our mentor marketplace, you know, it's white labelled, so you can drop it in, use it however you want. It's all open sourced. Um, and our R&D and consulting, you know, we do a bunch of stuff from security audits to helping with your game design and infrastructure. Um, and just quickly like why are we qualified to do this? Um, as I said, we maintain webjs, web3 Unity, bridging a lot of P2P libraries.

Um, some of the things we're most notable from, you might know us, is from our node implementations. So, we have the JavaScript consensus client for Ethereum. Uh, same thing for Polka Dot, Filecoin, and Mina. Um, so let's just talk quickly about gaming, web 3 gaming, kind of where we're at. Um, and I'll dive into kind of where we're going next.

You know, as of today, um, we've had a lot of people in the last two days talk about kind of like the state of stuff. uh you know last year was a pretty big explosion. We saw play to earn kind of take over and crash that that's not like a sustainable practice. Um we've seen NFT teams launch with the promise of games get a lot of hype but like really not bringing value back to those NFTs. Um one of the biggest problems which was noted by somebody earlier was you know a lot of projects in the gaming space are doing with attention.

They're trying to like acquire your users rather than actually retain. Um, and right now we are seeing a lot of great games. If you haven't actually gone over the game seven section over there, there's like some cool stuff happening. Um, generally speaking though, like it's still early. Um, because we're still talking about web 3 gaming as like this new paradigm for gaming when in reality like we're really just bringing new technology to the gaming space for them to adopt.

That might mean NFTs. That might mean crypto. that might just mean simply adopting a networking library to like make their games more efficient or whatever or make their servers work easier. Um, until we kind of break away from web 3 gaming as this like new thing that you have to learn and gaming teams need to like adopt into and more into, hey, this is tech that's like usable by people the same way that big companies are using, you know, blockchain networking libraries on their edge computing, you know, to to speed things up. Um, we we're not quite there yet, but we're we're getting really close.

I think we really are. Um, so like my TLDDR of kind of like where we're at today is that it's still ridiculously early. We're still trying to figure out game economies. Um, and as I said, like the biggest like hurdle in the game economy side is really that we're still on the acquisition side. Um, and not really like looking at how we can retain players.

And some teams are doing that well right now. And we're starting to see it as they're launching in 2023. Um, but we won't be seeing that in the play to earn way as we used to, I believe. At least not just the raw. Here's tokens.

Um, so this next part I'm going to kind of talk about some predictions that I see for 2023. Some of these are quotes from other some like one some notable people in the space as well as just kind of like my own stuff. Uh, and then I'll dive into like how you know kind of what's missing behind the scenes for us to get there. Um, so one of the first on all the Okay, because I can't get presenter mode, you're going to see all the like default stuff. Apologies.

Um, so my like main first one is like we're going to see it's I kind of hinted on this already. It's like we're going to see like web two companies start adopting blockchain gaming, blockchain solutions and the tech, not just like, hey, we're going to go and launch NFTs. And what I mean by this is like let's talk about like on the server layer. you know, you might, you know, right now you join a game lobby and game lobbies are like if you're in like a MMORPG, first-person FPS, whatever it is, you're gonna like join that game lobby and you're like constraint to region-based servers. There's definitely a future and there's people doing this where you can where where you can start doing like peer-to-peer like peer-to-peer communication to try and strengthen that so that you're not stuck in Virginia West uh when you're in the UK or in Australia trying to like go and queue up at like in the middle of the night.

Um, and so like it's it's like tech like that we're going to see that's going to start really playing a big factor. Um, I have a huge bet on this this year. Um, we're building tooling and info for this to help people because I think this is going to be big. It's also like good for games. Their server costs can go down, you know, especially when you started looking at like the peer-to-peer side of networking.

Um, this quote's from Nico Ver from Bitcraft or uh Fogd Future of Gaming podcast if anybody's familiar with it. Really good podcast. Um, communities will be very productive in IP creation. So, what does that mean? Uh, we've seen a lot of like Dows NFT projects come out where they have these like large communities TCO um, and that they're, you know, adapting it and moving and like kind of building things with it.

Um, and I think what we've seen so far is we've seen people try to leverage these NFTs in a certain and like grow and build on top of them, but have really been constrained by the fact that like again most of the people like the reason why people come to collect these NFTs is simply because they are looking either for like value acrruel on a short-term basis or they're simply it's just like again an acquisition model. It's not that retention. Um I think somebody that's like when if we look at somewhere what this means is basically it's like people are coming in to like actually build on top of really good like non- tech example uh if you guys heard about the Mickey Mouse horror movie show that came out that movie that is because Mickey Mouse lost they like Disney lost its license to actually like it expired the patent or the trademark on it so like anybody can produce content for it. I think we're going to see the same way where the community starts to produce content by leveraging NFTTS. I think a really good example of like something that like the parallel guys, they're down in the base section, you know, like they launched a huge like trading card game, had a huge community build up and people started building and spinning out products around it simply to like get that because they knew and they saw the value and what the game was going to provide users.

Um, and I think they've done a good job and like so IP creation is going to be huge. Um, I think Nico hit this one on big and I think we're going to start seeing people really iterate on that. Uh, and finally, this is a bit ambitious, uh, but I think it's I I think we can see it happening. Um, yeah, ref I'm sorry the reference was me on this one, but template. Um, we're going to see a top 10 game, whether that's like mobile, iOS, Android, or desktop, like hit top 10 in a respective store, but it's going to be using like just like raw blockchain primitives.

I don't necessarily see like sign in with Ethereum. That might not even be a thing. I'm talking like this could be a fully peer-to-peer game. They run zero servers, but it's going to go in their distribution channels might be Steam, it might be the App Store, it might be an Google Play. Um, but it'll be like a completely distributed game where they might not even need to like bootstrap with digital assets or anything like that.

Um, I think if this does happen this year, that will be the paradigm event like that big event where we see the entire gaming space start to adopt the tech because they see where the value is in it. Um I think like really we have won in terms of the gaming space in web 3 once we have something like this happen where people can adopt it the technology see the value in it and say like okay like you can build games with our tech you just don't necessarily have to launch an ICO or like a giant NFT project just to do that and to make money. Um I think this is probably like the biggest one. Um, and if we can do that this year, then I think we can say that like we've successfully like we could probably drop what I was saying before and not just be like web 3 gaming, but like blockchain has a huge impact and web 3 is a huge impact in the gaming ecosystem. Um, and we'll bring it more mainstream.

Um, and to kind of finish off and close it out here, um, I've got like two kind of quotes that for you guys for people and kind of things to think on, which is like when we're going to build solutions, let's make sure that like what we're building is forward-looking and future proof. That kind of goes back to my idea. It's like we're not here, you know, I didn't join the space to like build a walled garden so that like, hey, you, you know, I bring you and I attract you into my platform, my ecosystem, and that's it. You're stuck. you should be able to build a solution that allows your people allows your users to like adapt as everything moves.

Um, and build something that's like worth people, you know, something that's like of value and like good for people. Uh, and finally, this big one, you know, this kind of ties back to that second prediction, but it's like build communities and not just games. Like it's great to like build a really awesome game that you think it'll be it, but if like people are just consuming it and like leaving and they're not actually talking about it, they're not like interacting, there's no like real like community behind it, um you're, you know, you won't have that like strong retention factor. And if you look at some of the top games in the world, you know, that have like somehow managed to outlive like the time and the test of time, uh it's because of that. I mean, one of the biggest ones is probably which was talked about earlier, which is like Runescape.

Somehow that game with its garbage graphics has like lasted to the point where at like 20 years, they've rebooted the old version and strictly because their community is so strong that people want to keep coming back to it. Um, and people are the biggest one about like building a community is it'll help you act better iterate your game. You know, if you actually have a strong community that you can like rebound, go back, collect their ideas and integrate their ideas, that's how you're going to get that like vibrant community. And you know, at the end of the day, building for your community means that and like building it so that people can build in it. It's like the DeFi ecosystem.

It's a giant game of Lego bricks. And you know, as long as it's composability and as long as we can like make sure you're bringing that composability to your community so they can continue to iterate, you're going to get that IP creation. you're going to get people sticking around and staying and not just like for their quick pump or get a quick buck. Um, so that's my kind of final one there. It's like make sure to be building communities, not just your games.

It's the most important thing. Um, I mean even our SDK, we have a huge community just around a Unity SDK and it's amazing and it's like amazing to see them build their games and I think that's the most important thing. Um, that's it for me today. I just want to kind of like a quick one. Um, at Chain Safe, we are hiring.

So if you're interested in that, Chainsafe.io careers. Um, you can follow us Chain Safe Gaming. Uh, we've got a ton of YouTube tutorials. Like if you Google Ethereum Unity, you can probably find us like really easy in the top hits.

We got help you go from like hello world all the way to importing our prefabs, game assets, interacting on chain. Tons of demos we have. Um, and you can also check us out at web3.unity on GitHub. That's where you'll find the repos called.

You'll be able to find like all of our the main repo there. Fully open sourced. Um, so you can play around, hop right in. Um, you as long as you have an RPC endpoint, you can do it for free. Um, and it'll be free forever.

We don't want to charge for you to just build a game. Um, finally, if you want help or whatever, join our Discord. You can find here. You'll be able to find all of our stuff, um, gaming related and non-gaming related. Um, and I believe, yeah, that's it.

Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.