Spawn Camping Old-School Gaming - Eric Schiermeyer & Jason Brink Gala Games

up next we have jason brinkman so we're going to add you into the stream hello jason how are you doing i'm doing well jason brink by the way i'm sorry i'm sorry and it looks like we have uh we have eric schermeier as well our founder and i just realized i have a bunch of stuff going on in the background so let me kill that okay there we go my name is jason brink i'm from gala games and we are working to give ownership of in-game assets back to people eric schermeyer who's going to be dropping in in just a moment here is the founder of gala games he's the co-founder of zynga and has been involved in all sorts of interesting tech things in over the past hey and here he is hey everybody hey how's it going eric it's going really this morning oh just we just finished the family and i just finished skiing so feeling really nice nice very good so what i wanted to what i what i think we should do here today and that looks like uh john has dropped off and left us to our own devices um i'm actually going to uh what i would like to do is kind of uh do a little this in a somewhat of an interview format so that we can kind of dig into the ethos behind gala games and why it is uh what it is and what we're trying to do and where we plan on having this go in the future how does that sound that sounds great are you live streaming this on theta so that um well no if i was unfortunately it would only be me talking on theta which is cool and people like to listen to that but you know um we'll we'll we'll have to uh pick this up and pick up one of their recordings and broadcast that again later cool so uh tell us a little bit about yourself and where you where you began this journey and uh where it's taking you thus taking you thus far sure so i would say the some of the most interesting things that are relevant to this community is that i've been in the technology space since 1999 as an entrepreneur and so i've started a lot of companies two of them well three now actually so three of them have been quite successful uh the first two one of them was um the parent company of myspace which was eventually called intermix media and it was sold to fox uh back in 2003 i think it was for several hundred million and um then i took a break and i ended up starting a zynga uh back in 2007 which was it's still going it's it's still doing fantastically well um at ipo back in 2012 that's about when i left and then um then most recently you know in between all of these you know i would have little projects that weren't really worth mentioning because they didn't go anywhere but um now most recently we started gala games and it's just killing it it kind of reminds me of the old zynga days so i'm really excited about that um you know there's there's other things to know about me but i think those are the you know the most relevant uh okay for now awesome um when it comes to when it comes to gaming i mean coming from your your deep experience in the gaming space uh what what do you see as being the future of gaming okay that's that's a softball jason um that's easy have harder ones i have harder questions i'll just pull up the discord right now we'll throw it on the stream and we'll get some harder questions let's do that let's get some harder questions we know they have them there um that so obviously it's blockchain you know people used to think it was going to be vr i just think that's nonsense who's going to who's going to put on their dumb little vr headset and like be by themselves in the room with a bunch of people no one no one no one's going to do that you know even like how are you going to do that with your family it just doesn't make sense to me i don't really see the use case yet you know maybe in the future i just don't see it but what's clear to me clear as day to me is that people want to own their stuff that if you buy something you should own it and you know what i like to say the story i like to tell people is like imagine you went to go buy a toy for your son or your niece or nephew or whatever or daughter and you went to the toy store you bought a toy they may first before you even buy the toy they make you sign a terms of service agreement that basically said that whenever they wanted to they can come to your house and they take the toy back and you can't do anything about it um that's that's kind of where we are now with the app stores so you know you would never accept that if you went to a physical toy store and you bought something and then they showed up to your house one day and they said no you know we don't really like what the toy company is really doing anymore um so we're gonna take the toy back because we don't like them anymore so sorry you can't actually play we're no longer offering support for legos yeah we no longer offer support for epic games because we just don't like them and you know we can't screw them over with the 30 tax on all their earnings um so yeah that's that's that's that's so obvious to me that if you have two comparable games one of them lets you own stuff the other one doesn't you know people are smart they're not gonna make a dumb choice they're gonna they're gonna make the choice that that benefits them the most and so that's that's what's gonna happen all games eventually in three to five years i think are going to be offering some form of true actual ownership you know the only thing that i could see stopping that would be some form of you know regulatory burden that's been put that could be put onto this um so all you crypto scammers you gotta stop stop screwing it up for us um okay so uh i'm i as as you requested i have now gone into discord i'm pulling up some questions from people uh siddhartha um who you are very very familiar with uh wants to know the the second citadel reveal and when that might be coming um it's a background on that we recently uh negotiated an arrangement to sell a citadel in miranda's which is our mmorpg that we're working on uh for 1.6 million dollars um and that is the terms of that deal are currently uh sealed so so what do you what sort of thoughts do you have on that about when something might be revealed there well okay i can say a couple things about it one is it's a lot of money and very rationally very appropriately they are organizing themselves in a way that makes sense for them financially so the the delay in the actual transfer of the nft has been primarily due to you know they're just getting their together um you know as far as like revealing the identity of that person i would say that's up to them yeah well it is up to them and the way i feel about it is look we know who they are we've done our homework we've kyc them we're confident and comfortable that we can do business with these people now it's it's really their privacy and it's not um it's not on not me to you know i'm not obligated to break trust with these people just to satisfy somebody's curiosity um it's it's you know look the the blockchain is public so you're going to know what address this thing goes to but it's not you know it's not it's not up to me to like out somebody to out somebody yeah i agree i 100 agree um dx para is uh curious about how you envision gala working with larger studios um to release uh additional titles in the future do you have anything that you would like to say on that yeah well we're already talking to some very very very large game studios about it i my personal belief is that if i can convince them to come join the party the party's just gonna get even better um and you you you can be you can be certain that they are watching this everyone everyone who's who's in these large companies is aware of what's going on and they see the you know to see what's that's happening it's a really complicated space to be a part of and so you know companies like ours who've been doing this for the last two years are just you know astronomically ahead of everybody else um in other companies like us um and so there's going to be a little bit of catch-up and i you know i hope we can help them catch up because it's just going to make um it's just going to make everything better for everyone else do you think that in terms of some of these really really large studios that there's a degree of risk aversion when it comes to the concept of integrating blockchain which has a i don't want to say that blockchain itself has a spotty reputation but it has a lot of things attached to it that are somewhat spotty from a large corporate perspective having come from the you know the the world in which you understand these things um what sort of impact does that have on the way that people think about uh you know blockchain and what we're doing in general do you think um i'm reading some of the comments here people are objecting to me about vr yeah i don't know i don't buy it i mean i i see i see people saying that but i just don't believe it i've tried it i even have oh there's the comments oh dear yeah well you know i could be wrong i've been wrong a lot so you know i if vr was going to be a huge hit it would have been a huge hit by now so i think i think history has shown that my my um my perspective here is probably the correct one um now about your question here's here's what i think it is what it ultimately boils down to when you get these really large companies you end up getting a bureaucracy built into the the whole thing and that's what that's why i'm not still at zynga you know like you know it's kind of crazy to think that why would somebody start a 10 billion dollar company and then leave it well i'm an entrepreneur and i can't stand bureaucracy it's the whole reason i'm an entrepreneur in the first place so one of the things that happens in these big companies is um besides it becoming somewhat political is that the um the compensation structures become very solid and very clearly defined and i guarantee you nobody right now at some of these larger companies is thinking i'm going to risk everything all of my bonuses all of all of the like the the money that i could potentially earn here for my family on a completely speculative play that may or may not work um when i go to my finance department and try to explain to them why we need to do a blockchain game they're going to be like nope show us some real world data you know we're not going to take a 10 million risk on this and i guarantee you there's no way that these guys are going to be like uh you know i'm gonna risk my family's vacation over the holidays uh on on something that might i might spend two years doing that that just isn't you know isn't gonna pan it may not pan out right or or there's some regulatory risk or i guarantee you you know lawyers love to get paid right so they're going to tell you all the reasons why you can't do this you know there's all so much uncertainty and there's all this difference and you know so you're going to be sitting in these corporate board rooms and they're going to be like assistant makes sense i'm not going to do this so that's that's kind of what i think is is happening and you have you have some game companies that are that have been you know beaten over the head repeatedly by not moving into the next the next iteration of gaming and so there's institutional sort of reactions to the next thing and and those companies they're going to do something they're they're going to you know they've learned from their mix and they're going to they're going to make a move um but a lot of the other ones you know they're making tons of money on mobile why should they take a risk on something that is so uncertain right now one of the things i had a long conversation with jonathan uh the other day about the entire east denver ethos and you know some of the hackathons and things like that that they're doing and how they're working to uh support developer education um would you be interested at some point in time and i'm totally springing this on you right now um in potentially hosting uh some sort of hackathon where we could kind of reach out uh to the ethereum developer community and uh crowdsource some solutions uh to some of the challenges that we see when we're uh building out into all of these different uh products that we're working on internally oh that's another softball jason i mean i appreciate the softballs but that's an easy one that's a yes a resounding absolutely of course like you know we should make it fun you know i think how you know how can we make a hackathon there's you know it i think it's more fun to do it in person than to do it virtually but uh yes um yes 100 yes and we should we should we should make it make it something that's like you know let's let's step up the idea of a hackathon you know uh you know i don't know if you want to call it a hackathon that's that's a little weird but but we can level it up you know hackathon 2.0 so so something cool you know besides just you know frantically coding right right right we had a new comment show up galactus gemini of miranda's is here oh interesting oh that's gemini just bought one of the the paulient uh banks um was it just one shows up was it was it more than one well it's at least it's at least uh at least one i don't i don't recall if he won one of the second auctions or not um i think he might have i think he might have um i i'm totally just assuming that he i don't i don't actually oh there he is yeah he tried he tried for three of them yeah tried for three okay um awesome tried for three galacon let's talk about gallicon for a second i think sure that's that's fun so actually today you and i um and my son and michael are gonna do um a dungeons and dragons campaign and that's gonna be part of our galacon so besides revealing some really cool stuff about mirandis and townstar and you know hopefully some other games um we're gonna be doing um we're gonna be doing things like hosting civilization six games right we're gonna be doing dungeons and dragons games we're gonna we're gonna be trying to make it more interesting and more fun for people you know i know everyone loves watching people flip through powerpoint presentations but um you know maybe we can bore you with a really really fun dungeons dragons game so so here's an interesting thing i'm gonna can i can i click on this does that do anything no it doesn't do anything i was gonna say something test account one two three four five says virtually is more inclusive and this actually kind of zeros in on something that i wanted to talk about um gala has basically been built the entire company has essentially been built in quarantine for the most part um you know i joined uh obviously i've known you for a few years but i joined the company i've never personally met most of the people on the team i talk to them 20 hours a day in slack but you know i've never met most of them what challenges uh do you do you experience building a business that is this scale uh virtually and and remotely the way that we're doing it um and how can we bring that over and make make things you know what lessons can we learn that we can apply to making bid bigger better businesses okay i kind of like the question but i kind of don't almost sounds like a business school question i might change it on you halfway through the answer let me let me first respond to the testicles another list of softballs here that i was going to ask you but you kept getting angry at those so okay test account i agree with you um i want to be able to include everybody we have a guy working with us right now uh as a moderator who is um a quadriplegic i believe yeah jason yeah he plays town star with his face the technical definition is yes he plays with his face ask a capper here ask a capper is getting another shout out he will be very happy okay camper is a total freaking stud um and you know our view is that we want everyone to be able to participate and we don't want to think that we discriminate but whenever if we ever do we want to be called out on it kind of like you just did test account um and you know we'll take a look at it and and to be really serious about it but to get your your softball again um jason i don't see any challenges yet i mean we still have a relatively small company and it's been a blast doing it from uh home really so i could spend time with my family i could go take you know important meetings on hikes i even attended your birthday party uh while skiing we'll ski um i personally think it's been fantastic i actually think i work maybe twice as much than i would normally work if i was going into an office sure for sure um i just don't i think i work and i sleep that's pretty much all i do right now um which is which is f you know i started to think about maybe that there was something i needed to do about that you know like a psychological thing but i just i just gave up um and just accepted it so here's here's what i perceive you know when we add 50 more people to the team i suspect like any time you add 50 more people to a team there's going to be you know difficulties there um so we'll have to figure it out we'll come up with unique strategies that don't exactly work doing it in person um right so you know we just haven't we haven't encountered that yet i'm sure it'll happen it always does you know as you scale you start not knowing everybody personally and you have to come up with ways to to work around that yeah yeah it's you know oh pint-sized porcupine hey pint-sized porcupine um yeah one of the things that that you know when we talk about scaling and we talk about uh you know what we uh what we at gala games want to do and one of the reasons that we're here uh supporting uh eat denver um is we're looking to scale rapidly um what sort of things do you anticipate encountering in the future as we scale other than some of the remote things like what sort of challenges did you run into it at zynga when you started that from you know day one honestly the one of the biggest ones is the people um seems like an obvious one but so when you go from five to ten to like 25 to 50 to hundred fifty five hundred over a thousand three thousand employees each time you do that you have different i think you know different strategies to manage organizations of that size and as you get higher and higher and higher those strategies become lamer and lamer and lamer and um really kind of just they just suck um so so do you do you want to maintain that small team agility as we grow and as we scale as much as possible yeah so keeping the team sizes sub 100 i think it's even better if it's like 50 or less um you know i think i think that you know it's as soon as you start hiring people whose job is to just manage people who are managing people you know you know you've hit a scale that is just i don't know you could probably put a calendar on the wall when is eric going to leave and do something else good times good times um okay um so when when we look at uh when we look at sorry i just saw another message pop up here um looking at some of those those scaling solutions um and sort of the direction that we want to sorry remove that question um the the direction that we at gala games want to move going forward uh beyond scaling i mean obviously we're trying to do all sorts of um very interesting interesting technical things when it comes to integrating blockchains into games uh you know we're working obviously right now uh on ethereum you know the erc 1155 is what we have all of our nfts based on we're looking at a you know various second level uh scaling solutions and i stopped in and saw some of those uh people that we've been talking to in their booths in the uh in the conference yesterday um when it comes to sort of changing the way that that gamers when we look at the the way that gamers perceive gaming right now okay and sort of the stuff that they've put up with from aaa gaming for a long period of time how do you see how difficult will it be to onboard these millions and millions and millions of gamers that exist globally uh to something that is blockchain based given that there's a little tiny bit of a a technical lift that they personally have to do at this point in time well i can tell you right now it's not going to happen on ethereum unless this dumpster fire of gas prices gets taken care of hopefully ethereum 2.0 will will help with that to a certain extent that's that's the hope right so you know until we until we figure it out it's just not going to happen so um you know we see it already you know we're doing our best to try to promote the blockchain inside of gala and you know we're on our discord constantly teaching people how to acquire enough you know ethereum to manage their gas fees and then all of a sudden gas prices shoot up they're confused by it they blame us for that um you know so it's it's a huge problem and just to be totally honest and frank about it it's not going to happen on ethereum until it's fixed it's good for defy i guess it's good for speculators but it's not good for you know consumer adoption at this point what about what about the you know aside from the gas you know the concept of uh mnemonic phrases and and wallets and keys and managing your own passwords and things like that um you know we for example when we look at the mnemonic phrase anytime anyone sets up a new wallet they're given access to a mnemonic phrase because we don't store their wallet for them and we well you know the reason we don't install the store the wallet for them right is a regulatory reason because we don't want to be considered a money transmitter we don't want to trigger any issues with vincent or finra so we have to do this like ridiculous like hoop jumping for our users and you know it would be much much better if we could just manage it for them and but right but you know with all this regulatory uncertainty we can't do that we have to you know we have to force our users to you know uh be their own custodian of their assets which is you know i'm i would say i'm more on the libertarian side of things anyway and i think you should do that you shouldn't rely on some third party to to do that for you but um you know just facing the realities of our our kind of consumer world today we're not going to convince hundreds of millions of people to do that right right i mean given how many times we we ask people to to protect that key and how frequently people lose it um it's it's uh yeah it's it's interesting i i have a there's lots of scaling that we have to do in a lot of consumer education that i think is a big problem okay so we've got just a couple more minutes um and you i asked you a whole bunch of softballs what is one question that uh is not a softball that you feel like answering um ah here's a good one i like this what happens to these blockchain games if we decide to stop development um okay yeah that's a really good one okay so they completely melt down and explode and turn into a ball of you know molten you know slag um that's that's the unfortunate problem of the the blockchain games right now is that if you're gonna make a real blockchain game not a fake one right like i think you guys know what i'm talking about like that's a game right but but really what it is just some sort of speculative asset that you're buying if you're talking about like a real game there's no blockchain right out there right now that can handle the kind of load there's no one there's no blockchain that's going to rival mongodb for the kinds of back-end processing that you need to get done for these things so um until that is there you're going to need cert a certain amount of centralized services and you know i think i think the the risk that everyone takes when they invest in nft is in in like a real game not not some kind of speculative nonsense but a real game um then you have to you have to trust that you know these people are in it for the long haul and everybody i'm working with has been in games for 20 years so um you know we don't around guys like when we make when we say we're gonna make a game we're gonna make a game and it's gonna be around for a long time the only reason farmville ever went away is because uh flash was no longer being supported but that thing was around for years so so it just went away this year they just they just closed it like a month ago right yeah you know i i'd like to like to completely decentralize a game but that sounds to me like on some level it's just going to be a total disaster can you imagine having a dao manage the the next iteration of you know world of warcraft kind of like insanity that would be but you know yeah like i think you could decentralize a whole lot of it now the key to that is you want to decentralize the assets and if you get the assets out of the centralized control of the game developer and you force the game developer to actually take a serious look at what they're making and hold them accountable to things like the the number of quantities of items in the game and things like that it's going to totally change everything um you know and someone smarter than me will probably come up with a great idea on how to decentralize game development itself um but yeah i hope that answers your question i i think well i thought it was a decent answer um okay so i think that uh let's just wrap up here uh thank you guys i wanna answer his next question i wanna ask this guy's question we have two more three more minutes the copyrights yes there are there are copyrights behind these things um and i think that's gonna be some there's gonna be some resistance to the people who really care about stuff like that um but when you get into blockchain games you have to just let that go you know like like we we fully expect someone to take some of our assets and put it into their next game and you know what when that happens i'm going to turn it on i'm going to be super stoked about it like i i keep talking to team like hey we should have crypto kitties walking around inside of town star um i think that'd be super fun uh let's see okay i don't i don't know about um this next one but we we do need we do need to wrap it up though um i know that that uh jonathan needs to get the rest of the things ready for the next one and i do want to hey how you doing john hey guys how'd you like our uh our uh our thing jason you gotta work on that curveball man the softballs are just getting brushed out of the park bro no so the original plan was is i wanted to bring in the community and discord and have this live ama thing where they could talk and we could answer questions um but but the uh the whole stream yard uh gating did not permit me to put my fully nicely crafted beautiful feed through um so so it became this such yeah well that's okay so by the way on the the gaba show dumpster fire eip1559 that was just mentioned in the chat yeah i just saw that that's that's the thing and then there's uh you know layer two solutions like check out matic network we are actually we're talking we're talking to matic we're talking to a few different people yeah there's i mean there's a ton and we there's about there's a bunch of them that are here right so yeah oh yeah no i saw them pretty much everybody here so um it's interesting because i think you guys are talking about and end game solutions and like where we are in the in the mix of things is we're still building infrastructure like we still haven't solved like how to do certain things just under the hood so once this is the time to do it though like this is when infrastructure is still being built that's the best time to get into the video well i'm doing the same thing i mean my day job project is employment right so we've built it basically a digital employment platform that allows it acts like a public utility but most of the components under our hood is things that people are working on here we're just gluing them together right in context so yeah it's exactly right like this is the time to be involved because once it does sprint out the back end of this it's going to go real fast oh yeah super fast everyone's going to want to be a part of it and it's you know and by then it's almost too late it's like it's like you know oh bitcoins 40 000. now well oh man yeah it's gonna be too late yeah it's gonna be too late you're right yeah agreed well thanks guys we appreciate the support um everybody come check out gala games in their booth and the virtu in the virtual castle space at three to five pm this afternoon um they've got some other things to check out they're also doing some hiring and if you want to go check out the the outdoor patio and do a little bit of fishing or roast the marshmallows they're also sponsors of that particular area so come and do your collectibles come get their nfts we've got 60 some odd nfts put out through the entire ecosystem and it's gonna be a ton of fun thanks guys thanks john thank you john appreciate it