AI Livestream: Remixing Everything: AI, Games, Web3 and the Future of Play

Unknown: Music

Jon Radoff: Welcome back everybody. You are watching the artificial intelligence live stream. What an exciting week. What an exciting like 48 hours we've had actually like so first of all we learned that Amazon is actually the internet because when I'm And that a situation near and dear to me because that's what we're trying to solve with the mobile by creating a deep in for compute for the game industry that isn't relying upon one particular provider. And I love Amazon by the way great great company like it doesn't things right and there and like stuff does break we can't expect 100% perfection but there is an opportunity to improve things I'll talk about that later but you know we're here to talk about artificial intelligence we're here to talk about gaming. I'm going to have to say something about the imminent TGE of beamable itself but this show isn't really about me it's about Chuck stock here we brought in. Let's start with you and your own walk out share with our audience like what you've done before and then we're going to talk about remix but like let's start like what brought you to this point in time and space.

Guest: It's a great question pretty pretty full of soft vocals well we all got here but I think a lot of it started a little over a decade ago. I was graduated from school finance and accounting was doing you know public accounting for a while and for those of you to have never done public accounting in the states. I was a junior year in April known as busy season and during that time you work about 80 to 100 hours a week it's absolutely grueling my numbing work and it's just really not that enjoyable and I was in the middle of busy season and I remember walking home at like 11 o'clock at night and just like really wishing I was doing something different with my career and I'd always been super excited by coding and tech and I really just felt like I admired Silicon Valley from afar. I was just like how can I get into tech and at that point I used to walk past this like coding bootcamp school and they had to sign outside that was like apply to galvanize and go to boat coding boots boot camp. Learn to code for six months and get a job where you can guarantee you making $70,000 a year right out of school or right after the six months and I thought it was fake. I thought it was fake I was like there's no way like there's no way I can go code for six months then be getting a job so just like thought it was a scam for a while and then my older brother ended up going to the boot camp and he kind of just tested the waters and turned out it was real turned out there was a desperate need for more developers and so I ended up taking the plunge into coding and I just like fell in love with it from that moment.

Unknown: And while I coding boot camp I met some guys who are super into Bitcoin and really into Ethereum because Ethereum had just come out so they convinced me to put the rest of my savings into Bitcoin and the exchange I put it on got hacked that very same night.

Guest: No, no, this was after my guys this was a bit the next. Okay, yeah remember that yeah, so I think it was a 2015 and so yeah point on not gox. Oh yeah, that I mean that was brutal but I think weren't they repained people for now weren't they extending.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, I had to take a haircut I wasn't willing to like wait and see how things played out so yeah when they started when they started taking like a couple weeks to wire me my money back as I guess something's going on here all about I take a 20% haircut and move it over to Bitstamp.

Guest: Yeah, I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I I went to the theory and meet up about six months after that and once I learned about program will smart contracts I just felt like it that like totally clicked for my accounting background my finance background and I just felt like I really felt like it was going to change the internet and so I really went on all in on Ethereum back then but there's really hard to find a job in blockchain technology in 2016 and so I ended up finding

Unknown: So I ended up working at an indie video game studio in Boulder, Colorado. I did that for a little bit. But then I wanted to go work at shape shifts with Eric Voorhees and built that product out and you know,

Guest: you know, a big ship just one of the exchanges kind of like the original almost decks. So build that for a while, build a product called Coincap, which was the number two pricing service behind CoinMarketcap for a long time and then but while the shape shift I just was really obsessed with the intersection of what you're in gaming and so that's when I launched my first company called gamer, which was trying to help creators monetize their audiences better. I felt like this 2019 and felt like Twitch and all this stuff was getting bigger but I still felt like it was crazy that these like BT or streamers still weren't making enough money to like have do it full time and so we were pretty early to the questing and those types of platforms. But we got a lot of traction in Web 2 and then after the NFT craze in 2021, Web 2 kind of turned against crypto and like it's still kind of working at the market. So that was like this weird moment time where we had all these users and we didn't know what to do with them because we couldn't really build the project because every time we tried to turn on crypto, all of our creators basically be like, I can't talk about this platform like my community will eat me alive if I say there's like an NFT platform. So we ended up some setting that like a little over a year ago, almost almost two years ago. And on the back of that, that's when we started my newest company called Farworld and I'm happy that we can dive into that. But basically where far world started as like an on shame Pokemon game, but then it up leading us down this rabbit hole of like AI and gaming, which led us to launching remix, which is really trying to be the tick tock for game here to this really infinite hyper casual social feed where all the games are built by the users on the platform.

Jon Radoff: Cool. I mean, funny story. A couple of years ago, we just put out a piece of example code, a beamable called Genomon. And on use generative AI to create. I don't know, I guess you could say Pokemon inspired. We definitely want to say they were. Random collectible creatures and you could move around to 2D map. We're just showing people how you could do two things super easily with the beamable platform.

Unknown: One is sit down in front of Unity, have a multiplayer game, have an on chain game, because we minted these creatures and put them right on chain.

Jon Radoff: We did it with both polygon and salana. So we had example code versions for both. And also that you could invoke generative AI APIs in the gameplay cycle of the game. So not just in the production of the game, but using it in like the gameplay experience. So you never know what they're going to look like. Yes, just cool little thing that Ali or CTO went together and put online a couple of years ago now. So it's still out there. It's search on Genomon and you'll find it. All right. So fast forward to today. And so you went from doing really, really hard, long work for four months of the year to decide and hang up. Let's do it 12 months of the year and I'll do a crypto startup. That's yeah, you described like accounting. I mean, I'm sure I don't want to take away from like how crazy that period of time is. But I can't think of anything crazier than working on a crypto startup where the environment is constantly changing. There's always something to learn. Definitely a world. Anyway, I'm going to have you invite you to comment on remix and what you're doing today. But before we jump into that, I also just want to remind our audience who's tuning in here. This is awesome. We get a couple hundred people watching live already. Thank you all of you for coming here and being part of the live conversation. There's a reason why we do this live instead of just recording a YouTube video. Now if we did a YouTube video, we could do really cool like motion graphics and all kinds of stuff. But we would miss out on this piece, which is you the community participating and asking questions. And I already see some questions coming in. So thanks, Sumon. We're going to get to your question.

Unknown: We'll definitely address it, but I want to encourage all of you to come in here and ask questions. And for those who don't know me who are tuning in for the first time, my name is Jon Radoff.

Jon Radoff: I am one of the founders and CEO of beamable. We are a game infrastructure company. And if you want game infrastructure that doesn't go down because the biggest hyperscaler in the world decides to go down. I don't want to take anything away from Amazon. Amazon. Amazon's a supplier to us too. But if you want access to something that's lower cost that is built for game development that has an ecosystem emerging around it that has multiple service providers. You can always just reprovision elsewhere. That's what we're doing at beamable. And we're doing a token launch. So stay tuned. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more. But if you want to preview on my ex, my ex is Jon Radoff, just go there. The very top post on my feed right now is a little link into some of what we've got planned with the token pre sale. You're going to hear so much more in the coming next couple of days. We're going to announce our partners and all that. Right. Enough about me for now. Although I'm going to I'm going to talk about myself a little bit for the for the next hour. Chuck Sock tell us about remix.

Guest: Yeah. So when you shut down my last company. So a lot of why we built the previous company too was we really wanted to be in a gaming and similar to trying to get into Cody and was. We didn't know really how to get into gaming. It kind of felt like my brother and I who's my co founder like we weren't allowed to make games because we didn't work at Blizzard or work in Nintendo. We didn't have the pedigree to make our own game. And so we try to be gaming adjacent work with creators and do all that stuff. And then when that didn't work out. It kind of was this moment where like man, we spent three years trying to do something make something work because. We felt like we weren't allowed to make games, but like, you know, let's just make our own game now. Now that we got nothing to lose. There's no company like this is try to make something. So. The first thing that we did was we launched a new technology called frames, which allowed you just to build games inside a social media feed and it just felt like a really cool technology in a way to get distribution. And so we launched a product called far world, which was like an on chain creature collection game where you would train and level them up and it all happened within a social media feed. That ended up getting a ton of traction and did really well. We had a lot of five of our first packs and then introduced battling is a lot of like auto battling and creature collection and we're using AI to generate all the packs and all that stuff, which was really, really fun. And it is we just kind of this moment that we just felt like that was like the most fun we had had in our professional career and it was like the most success we had had with like any of our startups just by like doing something that we thought was fun. And as we are building this far world, one of the other big ideas we had was an idea called the farcade, which we ended up rebranding to remix, which was what would it be like to create in our cave, kind of like a mini clip around AI generated games and originally we thought is just going to be our AI generated games. And we're just going to have our own way for our team just to build games really fast because we didn't think LLMs would get there as fast as they have at helping people write code. We thought like they would need a lot more hand holding from engineers. So we ended up building remix almost about a year ago we were working on our first MVP of it. And when we were doing it, we had about four or five games and we were building out this AI game studio to help us build games better. And I remember just one of the days I like wrote a prompt because I think it was chat GPT for or cloud one of the versions had just come out and I remember trying to be like, OK, can you build me Tetris. And it one shot Tetris like an amazing looking version of Tetris that just worked. And it just kind of was this moment that I was like, shit, LLMs are here, AI is here. Like this really feels like this is going to be the future for hyper casual mobile gaming is like anybody taking their idea and bringing it to life with AI. And so we almost inverted remix a little bit, which is like, why would we just have it the our games? Why don't we let it be everybody's games and why can't we just be the distribution discovery hub for this like next genre of gaming.

Unknown: So one of the things that I think is really compelling about your kind of startup is that as a you kind of almost touch on this by saying you didn't think LLMs would be there in time for what you're trying to do.

Jon Radoff: But as LLMs continue to improve and do more like you automatically get better as a business to like all these other people are innovating on LLMs. And it's not like you're in competition with LLMs. They just sort of transform your business at the rate that LLMs just keep improving. Do you think about that and like what the future looks like as you look out over the next 12 months.

Guest: Yeah, that was that was like a huge thing when we were looking at it when we saw I think that moment where you see like an LLM right software you're like, what am I going to do? Like, where's my job going to go? I've been learning to code for 10 years and now this thing just did better than me. And so we wanted to think of what we thought about remakes. We really wanted to make sure the product took advantage of LLMs getting better and wasn't dependent. And it didn't feel like it was something that LMs or AI was going to gobble up.

Unknown: And so something that's really cool about remakes like you said, John is the games we launched our AI games studio about six months ago.

Guest: And you can actually just like see the games and the quality just like getting better and better over the six months.

Unknown: And a lot of that's because people are getting better with the technology, but like LLMs just keep getting better and it like the floor for the games just like it's crazy how much faster.

Guest: This the floor for these games is improving. It's almost hard to put my make bad games with some of these modern LLMs like yeah, it can be bad, but like it's just getting to the point where. They're just getting such great stuff just for free out of the box. And so we do think about that a lot and something I do love about a lot about remix and where we're positioned, which is a lot of times it's just switching. You know, use chat to be the five or use cloud four or five on it now and like we just have to change one line of code and now users have much better games.

Jon Radoff: Cool. So have you thought about social and multiplayer aspects to your games and how does that play out?

Guest: Yeah, yeah, so. The interesting part of the LMs that we learned quickly, which was the games actually become like one of the easier parts of the process for people have never written code, but if you want a game a lot of times you want some standard stuff, which is like I want authentication and the social graph and achievements. And so we try to streamline all that for the games where you can just vibe code the game, it really just an index HTML file with just an SDK, our SDK wrapping it, but then we add like authentication achievements points like all that stuff for the players and one of the things we did add is multiplayer and saving state. So having persistence with your games. And so we're really focusing on a sync turn player or turn based games as opposed to live multiplayer. We found a live multiplayer just has an incredible amount of complexity. You can actually see this like Farlead game that someone made that's playing against an AI. This is like a little car racing game that someone made we actually prototype that out with like live, like a live multiplayer, so people would play real time. And you just always run into like player liquidity issues and if we have this platform, oh, sorry, I was going to be loud. No, that's my fault. But we also just have this vision of like the platform where there's just tons of games and tons of things to do and we don't really want to like cause an issue with like our own player base and like fragmenting them. And if we're encouraging everyone to make live player games and just makes it harder and harder for new creators to get people to play their games. So we're really excited by the async turn based stuff. And so anyone can come to our platform and actually make turn based games. So we have like a lot of one on one games. But I'm really excited for people to explore things more like civilization and games that potentially have hundreds of not thousands of gamers all taking turns in these same games. And so that's where we're thinking about multiplayer is the live stuff is really competitive. I think player liquidity is a really big issue. And so we really feel like async turn based fits really well. I'm like our model and what is appealing for our gamers.

Jon Radoff: Well, when you want to add a lot more multiplayer functions, I know a company.

Guest: And no, I know.

Jon Radoff: Even if you stick with async, which is by the way, our heritage was back at disruptor beam when I ran a studio. It was all async games, game of thrones and start track and whatnot.

Guest: Yeah, I mean, I remember we we talked for a quick second at a in San Francisco. And I remember because as the first I was really learning about it, I was really impressed with honestly how far along you guys are. I felt like you guys are making it sound like you're just getting started. But you guys have some very impressive technology. So yes, I think beamables a very good place for for what we're trying to offer for for our developers. Right. It's like the same thing for you. It's like infrastructure is very complicated. And I don't see that getting any less complicated any time soon. So it's really good. Have good partners.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, we'd love to help with let's have that conversation and figure out how we can help. And we have the web SDK now too, which might make it a little bit. Oh, that's perfect. He started with unity. Then we added Unreal Engine. And really it's only a few weeks old. We added the HTML5 JavaScript SDK for beamable. So hopefully we've got a lot of bases covered. So we got some questions coming in. So Sumon's asking, how does remix plan to keep players engaged long term instead of treating games like short firm content. Sumon, thank you for your question. We really appreciate that. I think it kind of relates to what you were just saying about like you were focused on async games. And it sounds like if I kind of read from that or understood what you said. It's almost like people could be involved in a bunch of async games and like pop between them so that they're you're not really married to just one or like you've got a universe of things that you can get hooked on. Did I kind of get that right? And if there's pieces of missing to please.

Guest: That was John, you know, which is that's why I love the async turn based games is this kind of like your friend notifies you to come back to remix as opposed to like our platform having to get you to come back and play. And I think a real testament testament to that is my mom has played remix every single day since we've launched it. She has like a 250 day streak or something. Because she plays our like the words games she plays words with friends basically like our version of it with my sisters my brother and then she plays like all the word word puzzle games. And I think just like that social aspect keeps you coming back and she likes just finding the new games that are enjoyable to her because every time she comes back to the app. And there's always new games there like we basically are launching four or five games a day at this point in time. So you know our goal is to get to one game a day by the end of the year and we're kind of like five X that at the at this point in time. And so and we only think that's getting that's going to go more and more we just kind of feel like this can go parabolic honestly. I think for us it's a really good question because no one's really done this before we don't really know what a platform like this can really look like over the long term so we're really trying to find the right balance of keeping the platform pretty vanilla so that it almost feels like a tick tock or YouTube where it's not so much about the platform giving you a bunch of rewards but it's much more about just the there's a ton of content there that you find very interesting. And then there's also like but we do want to have like streaks and achievements and things that like make it fun for you to build this game or profile on remix we're trying to find the marriage of those two ideas which is we don't want to overshadow the games but we definitely want you to feel like you're getting something on the platform.

Jon Radoff: So talk to me about that process of launching a game when I think of a tick tock like format I think of like a zillion users spamming content and you just let the algorithm figure it out like it sounds like you're more curated than that can you talk to me about like the thought process that went into that and how you're approaching it today and maybe that I think that evolves.

Guest: Yeah, I think the main pro my see with a lot of this happens a lot with crypto products and man Johnny price in a slow gaming products is I think they go like wide too quickly they build this like YouTube competitor and they're like anyone can post games on this platform. As a new user I go to that platform and I just have a terrible user experience I'm like half the games don't work somewhere no fun. And that was that was one of our first versions of the product was it was built off the farcaster like centralize social graph and basically all you had to do was post your game and it would automatically get pulled into the far game. And and all the sudden like you can even find a good game and I was like it just felt like such a bad user experience and so we basically took this other approach where we manually review every single game every game has to work it has to work on all the platforms. It has to like we don't we try not to make judgment on quality but if it's really bad we we won't let it through like sometimes there's just like the gameplay is like way too simple or like won't do so like it's just not going to be compelling for users. So we definitely went very narrow at the start because we just felt like it was so important for our users to have fun and until we felt like we were having you know tens of not hundreds of games being launched every day where now you can actually use like community filtration. Like you would any social network until we got to that point we felt like curation was going to be a huge huge thing that we needed to do and and we feel like that's been the right answer so far because we feel like people have a much better first user experience they're very excited to like play those first games because they've all been curated they're much more likely to share with their friends because they had fun. And so we really wanted to start narrow then go wide as opposed to I think protocols and crypto really want to go wide first and then narrow but it's it's hardly ever the case, especially like web too and like a lot of games like you just need to be very polished now because there's so much fighting for your attention.

Jon Radoff: Yeah so one of the one of the real takeaways from what you just said is the quality bar and how that's changed over time and I think one of the false assumptions actually to critique web three games is like there was just built an assumption of oh it's a new platform therefore we can have a pretty low quality level and people play it so yeah and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that share my own thoughts first. Which is just first of all that was just the wrong way to think of it like Web 3 isn't a new platform per se it's a new business model for a game. The places it's deployed or places people are already playing games so I can download a web I can play a Web 3 game on the web I can also there's someone's on the traditional platforms not quite steam anymore but like Epic games or these people doing the steam version that doesn't work. And then you discover that there's a crypto and you download the other version that has crypto so like that's the current state of shitty distribution. But the point is if you're downloading a game off steam or Epic games store you used to really good games like if you play a bad one you don't care what the business model is you're just not going to play it same for the web like there's actually good games on the web like I shipped a gate my first web game was game of thrones that we shipped in 2013 so like games already had to be reasonably good then yeah. Now they have to be really fucking hard so no one wants to play the rough edges of your alpha there that maybe your friends and family will but like you get beyond that it gets tough.

Guest: Yeah 100% I mean that's I think we there there was some naivety towards the situation and I largely felt like there was this discovery process where we are trying to determine whether if you just took world of warcraft and put it in the game. And the warcraft and put it on chain would that on chain thing be compelling enough to make people move over or if you just took XYZ game and put it on chain would people prefer the on chain version because the rewards are programmatic it's all verifiable like there's kind of this discovery as an industry whether that was real and it kind of feels like it's not like it kind of feels like that wasn't really enough to get gamers to want to switch over that said I think there's still needs to be a lot more polish is a lot like the reality was the game is really good and it's really good and it's not going to be a lot more fun and fun. Like the reality was we weren't doing world warcraft on chain we were doing like pong on chain we were doing like you know early 2000s games on chain we were the quality of games was a nearly up to par with where these triple A games are and the things that really do exist and in what gamers are playing. So I think there's a process to figure that out and I think I think trying to figure out where crypto fits into the web through game and I think there's tends to be kind of an all or nothing thing and I don't I we're kind of sit a little bit more in the middle where it's like I think you can kind of use things where it feels like it makes sense and everything doesn't need to be on chain I think there's a lot of on chain for on chain sake and we're trying to always find the ways and like to use it more effectively and find things that just make it fun for the use of the game. It's not just fun because it's fun to talk about. Do you think that you think that a lot of the people we spoke into over the last year, especially when we start delving into the chain and into perhaps crypto that the realization has been that the game should come first and that any discussion about crypto should be either superfluous or separate from like the act like the whole front end of like Web 3 scene that it was like yeah it's a crypto game and then the game was described after. The crypto was the emphasis but now it seems that everyone that we spoke into or most of people it's like they are proponents of crypto and Web 3 but.

Unknown: That's not the barrier to entry to actually enjoy yourself I think that's what I've been here consistently now.