Play to Earn games with Mitch Zamara and Jon: designs, opportunities, misconceptions

Mitch Zamara: Taking stuff off chain and being willing to trust in the project and the creators can afford to remove so much friction and provide a much better experience. And like there's multiple examples of this, the most obvious is the move to Ronin Chain for Axi, you move that friction, you trust the devs that they're going to do it right, and now that experience is so much better. And it is more centralized, it's a custodial system that they are managing and they're building bridges to get out of it and things like that. But what that is, afforded people has been a much better quality of life inside of that ecosystem. And that's the name of the game as far as I'm concerned is right now it's not about pure decentralization, it's about growth. And when I talk about growth, it's not for a project, it's for the entire, entire ecosystem. The most important thing is not about how much, how good any one project is doing, it's about how good the entire ecosystem is doing.

Mitch Zamara: In this episode of Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff, he sits down with Mitch Zamara.

Mitch Zamara: Mitch has over 12 years of experience working in the game industry, leading product and design on million on Mars Land Rush.

Mitch Zamara: Let's jump into this exciting chat about gaming and the Metaverse.

Jon Radoff: All right, welcome back to Building the Metaverse. Today we've got an episode that I think you're going to find super interesting because it's about play to earn. But I promise you that we're going to get into real depth of play to earn. We're not going to go through the same stuff you can see in about a thousand YouTube videos at this point that just tell you over and over and over again what it is and Axi infinity and all the use cases. We'll probably talk about Axi at some point for sure. But we're going to really try to get into depth here and I want to thank Mitch for joining me because he is a free to play designer and now a play to earn designer who actually is in the business of working on these kind of games. So we're going to talk about design, we're going to talk about the economics, we're going to talk about games that are emerging and look really interesting. So a brief definition of play to earn their games that are on the blockchain that you can earn money from that you can own the assets in. So that's all I think we're going to do in terms of background because there's so many other videos where you can get the whole long explanation. I want to get into depth. Mitch, what do you think the biggest misconception is that we can fix right up front though on play to earn?

Mitch Zamara: I think there's the one that I hear a lot of and it's just a generalized assumption in which like a lot of play to earn games have to be winner take all or that there has to be a loser in order for other people to win. And I think that a lot of these misconceptions are just aligned with very sort of narrow views of reality. And to me like in a game economy, you get the advantage of especially in a play to earn economy rather you get the advantages of being able to model things. It feel like real life, but being able to change the scales of balance and changing the alignments of incentives to change the result in the actual experience for everybody. And so you can sort of deliberately rob and hood things if you want. You can spread the wealth around if you choose to and that's like what the fundamental is of most of these economies. And when you talk about these play to earn a driven economies is that they put a lot of they take a little bit of money out from everyone slowly and they put it into a piece. And then they redistributed it in sort of this same kind of fashion. And it's just a matter of aligning these things in ways that make everyone feel like they're they're getting a return for their amount of time that they invest the amount of energy they invest the amount of money they may invest the amount of social capital from referring friends or spreading the word on their networks. You know the amount of you know those are those kind of things all have various returns based on the mechanics or what the game is about and it's it's just a matter of figuring out the right sort of combination that you prefer.

Jon Radoff: So I want to make a statement kind of put a stake in the ground on a couple of things though which is when we talk about play to earn. We're talking about blockchain based games today where that's going to be the focus but I just want to point out that play to earn is not new the idea of earning money from playing a game. Now the first thing people tend to go to is oh yeah I know about the gold farmers who used to play World of Warcraft they were making money. Yes definitely this is a legitimization in some ways of that it's legitimate in that the game economy is built from the ground up with that in mind as opposed to it being sort of titious but outside of that like play to earn has been live streaming play to earn has been e-sports there's always been this piece of it even back to like speculators and traders and Pokemon and magic the gathering so.

Mitch Zamara: Oh yeah definitely.

Jon Radoff: Yeah so to me and this I want to kind of return to later is just play to earn has a lot of opportunity to grow beyond all these mechanics that people are sort of focused on today. We'll get to that but that said what are you learning about the design of these games because I would love people to come away from this with hey I'm either building a play to earn game or I'm thinking about it or I just want to understand like what makes these games tick. What are some of the nuggets of wisdom you've picked up as a play to earn designer on million on Mars.

Mitch Zamara: Sure I'll try to think of a couple of easy ones off the top that are that are fun to discuss so the most basic one and I mean okay I this one feels really basic to me just because game economies or what I spend my time doing all the time and that this the fundamental rules of economics or supply and demand it's not a very special idea here it's not it's been around for a very long time. And yet for some reason so many projects that claim to be play to earn that claim to be a blockchain game or be in this space have no issue with coming up with how to create supply they create token printers they create liquidity pools they create staking they do all these different things that can make tokens can print you know things or earn things passively and all you know across a broad spectrum and many of these things they're called now game by or it's sort of like a game game. It's a game game game game of I defy but at the end of the day most of these things have no idea about consumption or demand and they just continue to deal with inflation and artificial scarcity and creating artificial demand but they aren't actually creating an experience that actually satisfies the need of demand that doesn't burn things out with a reason that people want to there isn't a organic persistence that happens to be there and nights at the end of the day I mean it's it's does it's not a good thing. That's what you get when you actually build the game and so like I'm kind of just like where's that part like and I feel silly having to ask this because we're I mean we're game makers so like obviously this is like kind of our this is our thing we've we've done this enough times to to know that you can't just like build an you have your game has to have balance or your game isn't fun and your game becomes boring and your retention drops like it's like these are the basic principles of like every kind of app or data driven app right you need to maintain retention you need to maintain engagement you need to drive long lifetime value and you need to have some kind of positive return on investment for what it costs you to acquire users now with crypto we don't have as much cost for acquisition because there's a massive amount of organic interest and drive so you don't have to worry about that but at the end of the day you still need to retain people you still need to engage them you still need to keep them putting more money or time or social capital into your into your game or into your ecosystem or it will just decline that's just those things don't change and it's the supply and demand of of your users in the same way that you need to satisfy the supply and demand of your game economics and they have to be those those things are they're not exactly the same in free to play as they are now with blockchain and you have to think about them differently and you have to kind of think about every everything differently you kind of have to I've used this phrase before and I say that like the old rule book of free to play still works but you have to take it with a brand new lens and reevaluate every single rule that you've learned and be like okay how does this work in play to earn how does this work differently how do I add NFTs to this literally is the question you just ask yourself on everything can I just sprinkle some NFTs on this does it make it better and it's so many places it does it does I'll give you an example traditionally in free to play games one thing that's really popular things like titles and achievements because they're really cheap to build you just unlocking lines of text for people to show above their head or above their name or something but if a title and achievement is is rare and scarce and it's also an NFT that you could earn and acquire and other players could buy it from you and they can have that title. The achievement system becomes way cooler and it's like a nifty different system that feels dramatically different and you can still have non-tradable titles that are meant for specific prestige but you could have these like rare titles you could have holiday titles that are built in you can give away titles in loot boxes like you could do so much with them and it costs you basically nothing but everyone loves the value that it provides because they get cool titles and it every gets win across the board.

Jon Radoff: I love this idea of selling your title because actually there's a historical precedent for that like like noble lords in the medieval period who are going broke sometimes they would sell off their title to pay off deaths.

Mitch Zamara: So your lordship exactly.

Jon Radoff: So it actually is like why don't we have a game that came in the next turn?

Mitch Zamara: Yeah exactly and the other one the other phrase I often use is that the only rule is that the rules don't matter meaning that like so much of what has been convention in free to play games for the last 12 15 years those rules have evolved and honed and refined in each of the sort of errors in which free to play games have transformed so we know they started in the free to play MMO space roughly. Then they largely translated into sort of social free to play games on the browser and then in the free to play mobile and sort of everywhere else since. And in the early days like they were there was a lot of things that were really popular in commonplace in the free to play MMO stuff that nowadays no one does there was stuff that was really commonplace in popular in the browser social game stuff that no one does anymore but nowadays all that old shit all just works again you can just you can bring it back. So on the old Facebook game days when we were doing you know the wars games in the and whether you were at Zingha or any of the other companies that were doing browser strategy war games like everyone.

Jon Radoff: Talk about your war and things like that.

Mitch Zamara: Yeah I'm off your wars or any of those other things or any of the bill games for that matter the stuff that Zingha is really known for all of their success was built around energy based mechanics in limited scarcity in which you had a set amount of energy every day and you can do a set amount of actions. Now in the traditional free to play model if as the business you just sell more energy right you just print more you just make more and it's just great you just make more you just make money it's great. The only you can still do energy systems and in fact the game that I'm leading on is an energy system based game because it's actually the perfect model of scarcity in order to try to keep your balance of your game economy and check. And so for us we just don't sell energy you just have a set amount every day you set amount of actions and that's it and for us what we do instead is allow players to if they need more energy than they have we give them a means to hire other players in the game and get their energy and so that's the difference of the sort of traditional free to play model moving into play to earn it's this what's been referred to as a decentralized economy. And so even your energy and your core resources as a player is a valuable asset that other people will pay for and that is the pure magic of what this is all about that's the coolest part is like and when you take away when you when you sort of translate back into real sort of a really tangible feeling of scarcity you aren't just sort of money printing your energy endlessly for the people that need it. Suddenly everything feels way different inside of the game and it says subtle simple change from a mechanics perspective but when you say you everyone has finite energy every day and then if you make it even a little bit more harsh and you say oh also that energy you only get it when it's provided by resources that other people are making inside of your game economy. Now you have not only scarcity but you have player driven scarcity where everyone has to eat everyone has to drink or whatever and everyone has to make the things that everyone else needs and so there's a constant demand every day and then now you have a baseline of your actual demand curve that you can work against and you can leverage and it's just the fundamental thing that we never had in free to play games was this real like we just had to sink the energy out of the players individual balance we didn't have to think about it at a global scale we didn't think about resources at a global scale as much as either as long as things were relatively balanced so you have to look at it with a finer tooth comb but a lot of those old lessons really really reply really well in this new space.

Jon Radoff: Yeah so there's just so much to unpack from what you just said but I would return a moment to like the idea of sinks and faucets into the economy. There's a parallel first of all with for those of you who are watching this who are used to blockchain project and what they call decentralized finance or defy you've seen all those projects where the tokenomics are terrible. And you can put some tokens into a pool of some kind stake them and then like they give you hundreds of percent interest or something ridiculous but there's nothing for these newly minted tokens to do it's just a money printer right there's no way to burn tokens there's no interesting way to stake them and if you're smart these are the exact projects you would avoid as a defy person for the most part so games it's interesting that they're going through the same really good. So the realization which is you can't just mint supply you have to give people stuff to do tokens to burn NFD even NFTs to burn or utilize within the game experience. Oh yeah absolutely. So what's the difference though between if we get you mentioned one difference versus free to play which is the fact that the players are trading with each other. That is an important point to make not only on gameplay but business model because in a free to play game the game maker is everything you are the monopoly supplier you are the central bank you are the regulator you do you're the federal reserve you get to do everything right so the only way I can make money in a free to play game is to keep giving people more stuff to do more stuff to buy to essentially have in continuous inflation. To create the need to buy stuff to meet whatever the power requirements are to give in time and I mean what we call the content treadmill yeah and I'm the only one who can sell you that right and this is and by the way this is totally fun a lot of the time if the game is well well well design so not anything wrong with that but it is a really important distinction to make from this play to earn economy where the players are going to trade with each other and the take the game. And the take rate typically is going to be a lot lower like an axiomfinity for example which I said we wouldn't we wouldn't spend a whole lot of time talking about axi other than the interesting stuff about axi but one of the interesting things about it is the take rate is 5% right so they only are earning money when people are trading with each other and it's really a player generated economy.

Mitch Zamara: Yep yep and then in those situations the creators are facilitating profit from secondary market fees in which they earn a commission they're also creating new items and resources for supplies into the market and you're from a business perspective you look at multiple areas you're looking at the token supply the circulating supply of resources the burn rate of your NFTs and how many of those are active and not your or. Still minted or still burned it becomes all new economic layers and levers both inside the game and outside of the game.

Jon Radoff: The interesting thing here is it seems to me that the that there's definitely a speculator economy obviously around these games but there's also big areas where the speculator and the game player are actually aligned because what you want as a player who's having fun with it is cool stuff to do with the resources and the items. And just use it within the experience of the game which is what the speculator wants because that's what's going to drive scarcity and demand and utility value and all these things that that they would actually care about. So I guess the message is the same what if you're looking at one of these games to play or you're looking at one to maybe invest or buy the token in or whatever you're thinking of look for that look for what like all this cool stuff people are buying what do they do with it and are they going to want to keep using it.

Mitch Zamara: Yeah, you don't have to be a game economist to really understand how well put together the actual economy of a play to earn game is like you can follow the well the cliche phrase follow the money works really well like look at the tokenomics look at the breakdown of the token and how it actually best look at how much the team gets up front like look at how much they stand to earn over the period of time you think they're actually going to support the project. The most obvious signal and red flag that I think a lot of people miss is that some projects will build very, very large token pools of insanely large numbers and well into the billions well well in or trillions if you're really going hard on some of these insane projects. And what they design is that they say, oh, we're going to we're going to invest over four or five years, but we get 10% upfront on month one and it's like if you don't realize that they're planning to walk away after a set amount of time and that they're front loading themselves like there's probably probably there's a lot of people who are paying attention, like there's there's some very clear things to stand out, but when you look at the total numbers, but it's scaled to a percentage of what you think is this pool that's going to be meant, you know, done over five years, it's it's it's a very big, they're burying the lead like in a very key way, but it's hard to see it if you aren't looking for it. The other side if you don't want to look at tokenomics, which is understandable because they're very new and confusing for a lot of people is to just look at the team. If you can't tell who's making the game, how confident are you that they can actually balance the economy and the tokenomics and succeed on growing the value of what you're investing in, like the amount of projects and teams that have no transparency or visibility into who's behind them or like what they're actually trying to build, what their roadmap is, what their white paper is. Like these things are some of these things are really basic, but they're missing in a lot of places and if you're trying to make a decision, just look for those simple things like what experience do they actually have building these sort of things and what is what is where does the money go at the end of the day, like those two questions are going to get you probably 80% of like your, you know, do your own research like from ever having even boot deep.

Jon Radoff: So tell us more about the audience for these games, like how big is the whale effect in this game versus the whale effect we saw in free to play games, so in free to play games for people that aren't super familiar with it. You know, there's lots of outliers across the spectrum, but a reasonably good free to play game is one that could monetize 2% to 3% of the audience, meaning 2% or 3% of your players are giving you essentially all of your revenue and you might get a little bit of long tail revenue from advertising or something that that's kind of pennies on top of the in-app purchase economy. How does that look in play to earn?

Mitch Zamara: I think the percentage of people spending money are, well, the percentage of payers to non-payers is going to depend largely on how you've actually structured and designed your game. So if you don't have a means of like a free play to earn mechanism, your growth is hamstrung significantly. You can only grow if your model for access into the game requires resources or assets that are scarce, your ability to grow is hamstrung. So Axi, we'll talk about one more time, their ability to grow is only based on how many Axi are bred actively. They have a scarcity driven model for value creation, meaning that their growth rate is pretty much hard defined by the amount of Axi's that are purchasable and playable by anyone else who wants to come into the market. And the creators don't create new Axi's just the players do. If you're designing a game in which anyone can play, if you just have a wallet and you just create an account, you can come right in, you can start earning, you're just opening the doors to bots and you're going to have a lot of players that are players. But there's a happy medium, I think, that we're still trying to figure out in this space largely due to this issue of like-bottling and abuse when real money is involved. And I think that we're likely going to see things gravitate towards a paid, either a paid entry, a paid subscription, or some type of hybrid model in which there are sort of like dues or fees associated with what you're eventually pulling out, even if it's free to play or has a small gateway. And I think that what that will mean is that your actual payer numbers are stupidly high just because you have a requirement in that regard. But also because every single person in this space has no predisposed assumption that everything is free. So we in the free to play space, like if we remember on iOS and Android before the launch of the App Store or with the beginning of the App Store, there was no such thing as free games on App Store. So everything started out as a paid game and then it was 99 cent games dropped and it was like, Trism was like the first million dollar game, it was 99 cents and it was raised to the bottom to a dollar real fast. And then it was like, well, how do you do better than a dollar? It's free. So then it went to the free games and we came free to play, like, took over on Apple. And now there's just this assumption that everything is free. You have to just get it for free. And I think that that predisposed nature has, it hasn't really, it hasn't caught on in on the blockchain, played our in crypto space. So everyone comes wallet in hand, money in hand, ready to spend. And that's just the norm. And so what is more important is that you deliver adequately designed value offerings. You have to respect people's wallet because everyone has it. But the more interesting thing is that everyone's wallet is open and transparent. Everyone knows who's wallet is who, how much is inside of it? Like the amount of inside baseball you have on the play or blockchain space is vastly different than what we're used to in free to play.

Jon Radoff: Now that's an interesting problem to though from a design standpoint because when you have total transparency and I can know what everyone's say inventory is in terms of like their characters, their powers and whatnot, I lose a part of some game designs which is asymmetric knowledge. How do you think about that problem? Does that limit the type of games you can create? Or do you just take it off chain part of the time and deal with it that way?

Mitch Zamara: Yeah, I'm a strong proponent and this will be counter to the maybe some of people who come to pay me for this. I don't think we're ready for fully decentralized games yet, especially in fully decentralized economies yet. We're just not there. It's so much in the infancies. We're not there with Dow either and I know what a totally tangent but it's the same kind of thing where we want to get ahead of ourselves. We want to think that we're already there but we're just getting our feet wet. It feels like in so many ways. And so I feel like especially when we haven't settled layer one problems when gas is an issue that persists on so many other chains like taking stuff off chain and being willing to trust in the project and the creators can afford to remove so much friction and provide a much better experience. And like there's multiple examples of this. The most obvious is the move to Ronin chain for Axi. You move that friction. You trust the devs that they're going to do it right. And now that experience is so much better and it is more centralized. They it's a custodial system that they are managing and they're building bridges to get out of it and things like that. But what that is afforded people has been a much better quality of life inside of that ecosystem. And that's the name of the game as far as I'm concerned is right now it's it's not about pure decentralization. It's about growth. And when I talk about growth it's not for a project. It's for the entire entire ecosystem. The most important thing is not about how much how good any one project is doing. It's about how good the entire ecosystem is doing. It's about how much it's about how much the Metcalfs law you know how much the Metcalfs value is rising on the blockchain right. It's how many connections are moving forward. How many new people are making these connections are trading are doing things. And that that is that rule work is the same on social networks. It's the same on blockchains. I don't think anything is different than that.

Jon Radoff: All right, so we have to unpack so much from what you just said and also just there's there's folks out there listening. They're coming up to speed on this there be dazzled by all this there. They're gripped by how interesting this is, but they just heard maybe some things that they're not familiar with. So a fully decentralized game versus the opposite of that. Well, a completely non decentralized game is what we have before blockchain games came along. A fairly decentralized game is one where you could exchange the assets that you own. So I own a card, I own a character and I have a wallet that stores that and that's on the chain. But maybe all the other gameplay is out on centralized servers and rules and all that stuff. It's it happens in some computer owned by a company for the most part. I think that's how most games are right now at the at the most extreme example of this. You could have this idea of a completely on chain game, meaning all the rules, all the data, literally everything is discoverable on chain. And even the gameplay servers to the extent it requires them beyond the chain. It's decentralized like anybody could operate a node like decentralized actually operates more or less this way where if you want to contribute a node to decentralized, you can run a node for like 100 users and you know essentially provide compute for the environment. That's a completely decentralized game. So everything exists in that continuum and some games may do more than others. Some may put a little bit more on chain than others. There's very few examples right now of fully decentralized games, meaning no servers, no company, no, no just findable entity controls it.

Mitch Zamara: Yeah, definitely. We haven't fully gone on the spectrum, but people certainly keep there's I mean, there's just a polarizing pull on both sides. People and it's it's going to be the maximum list that want just ultimate freedom, ultimate decentralization and anonymity more than anything. There's a big pull on that feeling, but at the other, but opposite to that is the exact is truly opposite is this desire for what is what we're just used to, which is customer service. It's like the normal basics like low friction, handholding security recovery, like support reimbursement, like all the things that only happen when you're centralized. And like I don't know how basically you have to I think you just have to make the choice where you're going to where you're going to be where you are on that alignment in your development. And I think it's not a finite thing. You don't have to stay fixed on it. You can move along that spectrum. You can move things eventually on all on chain. If it becomes more effective, I think that I think inevitably we will see maybe it's layer three. Maybe it's layer five. You know, eventually things will evolve enough in which the amount of like available infrastructure and services and tokens and libraries and things are just so pro V. A. W. S. the Google clouds of the blockchain will become so prolific that you would be kind of stupid to not leverage those into your infrastructure because they're just cost effective and they've already been stood up enough that like using like everyone already does them. And that's I think those feel like inevitabilities and I mean you're kind of probably building half of that stuff. I bet imagine.

Jon Radoff: So yeah, I mean, could you do not recommending this for a lot of people in parts of the world, but could you do a poker game fully on chain? Right.

Mitch Zamara: Oh, could you. Yes, a smart contract poker game. Absolutely. With absolutely. You can while maintaining the secrecy of the whole card and stuff like that.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, I think, oh, interesting while maintaining the secrecy. That's a fun one. That we might have to hold separate episode about that one. Right. Yeah. Okay. We're going to come back to that one. I you know what? I guarantee that's that a number of people in the audience were like, you can do that. And I know how and I'm working on that. And if you're one of those people come talk to me. We'll bring you on because I think that raises a lot of really interesting questions of how you bring down of asymmetric knowledge. Knowledge to this because so many games are asymmetric knowledge. Like how do I play an RTS game? For example, if I know exactly what my opponent is doing for every move, any strategy game really take a lot of the fun out of it. So what do you think people? So people that are coming at this from a free to play direction. What are the mistakes that they're making when they're approaching play to earn because they know that you have to have sinks on currency. The people I'm assuming making the currency sink problems are coming out of defy and something and now they're demifying it and kind of redoing some of the tokenomics mistakes that have been made in defy. But free to play people know about sinks and faucets. So what are they getting wrong in the economy or the game design?

Mitch Zamara: Oh, I see. So there's a few directions I see teams going and I'm going to speak in generalities because I really I don't want to like I don't want to single out anything and I want to talk and show them more broad terms. But I really don't like I don't want to disparage anything individually because it's really not my intent here, but we just want to help people. There's an next design. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's really about like there's a perception in the way things are done depending on what you do. And like the two big sort of emos that I keep seeing are like either in almost every single situation. It's that everyone is selling promises and not selling product and this really frustrates me. And as game makers, I feel like especially in the free to play space, we know how long it takes to make a game. And we know how long it takes to build an MVP and no one seems capable of like building something fast. Everyone wants to build the moon. And I feel like there's a big and in order to build the moon on the blockchain, you have to basically raise a boatload of money, make a bunch of crazy promises and hope that everyone will stick will hold your bags for a year when you are ready when you're expected to deliver it. And I don't personally believe or align with that approach. I feel very strongly. I mean, we cut our teeth on the lean startup style approach of building products. And I feel like that still holds true in this space. And it's what everyone should be doing because there is not enough knowledge defined yet in this area that it's like it just feels to me like everyone. It's just it draws back to that basic point of everyone creating money printers, but they're creating gift wrapped money printers before they even made the game that uses them. And they're just selling those and then they're promising that there'll be a amazing experience for it in the future. But it's it's a it's a very big pill to swallow for a lot of people and I personally don't buy into it. I I want to see a game before I want anything else. I want to see a game demonstrated. I don't see enough of this. And I feel like the bar is demonstrably low that this is the easiest opportunity for so many people that can get over the technical hurdles to demonstrate basic competence and get a lot of like attention. Because no one else is doing that.

Jon Radoff: We lived through a version of this once before with Kickstarter right so a lot a lot of some games shipped and were great. But a lot of games got underfunded. They didn't know what they were trying to pull off or they didn't fully appreciate the difficulty of it and the need to iterate, which is sort of the thing that's always missed in game development budgets. The real 90% yeah exactly like it's not like you have this game design document. Here's another because so many different people are going to be watching this video. Some people who are thinking about backing a game investing in an NFT that's going to fund a game maybe investors. Maybe people even thinking of joining a team for a game. But like almost all of game design is what I call shots on goal. It's about you have a certain amount of runway with the capital that you've got. And then it's about trying a lot of things in that it's not the game design document that's beautiful with a bow on it that then you just handed off to the programmers and the artists and they just start cranking it out. And then at the end you've got this beautiful and amazing game. If game design was that easy like we wouldn't have whatever it is the 80% failure rate to turn a profit on games, which is kind of industry standard. So games is really really hard. You've got to have room for iteration within your game systems and your concepts and. And that's what I think going back to the kickstarter point they didn't bake that additional time and money into the iteration process. And I think I hear you saying at least partly that people aren't accounting for this kind of stuff when they roll out these roadmaps right that's that that's the way all crypto. Yeah, it's transparent white paper in my road map.

Mitch Zamara: Yeah, I have a white paper in a road map. You better believe it. I come prepared as well because it's the old and that's like your that's the only way that people have that's the only thing people have to believe is your word your white paper in your road map. And then you're going to basically say like I'm your it is very much like you know it's those old frontier days you basically have a claim that you're sticking out you have your you're going to get a bunch of people to fund your effort to go to the new frontier you're going to like go adventure out. You're going to go do some stuff and then hopefully everyone will get to share in the rewards of that. And it's like here's my here's my game plan and here's my here's my sort of expertise on what I have to do and my game plan but like. Yeah, it doesn't always work out especially when you have non-seasoned game making adventurers going out into this frontier who are just familiar with you know what the what the weather looks like but not what the actual pitfalls and traps that actually exist in the process are.

Jon Radoff: So going back to free to play games and and sort of the lessons as well as maybe the blind spots that exist in that as people try to enter play to earn it isn't one of the biggest issues though comes down to this idea that in free to play you might you basically have to design a game that continuously sells the player something right that's. That's that's how you monetize that two to three percent because once that two to three percent stop buying and you're in the elder game and the elder game isn't monetizing anymore you no longer have financial viability so all these games are designed to continuously inflate the power curve and keep offering new things to buy. Whereas in play to earn I think that certainly inflation curves are going to exist and stuff like that certain kinds of game designs but it just seems fundamentally different that what you seem to be designing for a lot of the time is increasing the value of the overall economy of that game so that players are transacting with each other and helping each other and trading and building things that's much different than. Me the game maker has to sell you something continuously because now me the game maker gets a little piece of the sales and the transactions between the players.

Mitch Zamara: Yeah I think it does it does move things a little bit differently like you certainly are incentivized to want to drive market activity whether it's inside your games outside of your games you want to really like you're much more. Responsible for driving behaviors into specific places so from my perspective it's like I want you to buy stuff on a secondary market because we get a percentage of the market fee sales and also because of percentage of those sales also go into the treasury which helps fund the player and economy for everybody. I want you to buy things on the in game economy because there's market fees also that's taken out of our inflationary token which helps everybody and it also puts a percentage of that burns a percentage of it out and also puts a percentage of it into the treasury and so for me it's it's I kind of just want to like direct the hoses in the right kind of way and make sure things are moving in those right directions. But the traditional models of free to play largely still work I think like you could take almost any play to earn game that is modeling the traditional stuff of like free to play and you can still do live ops on top of it you still limited time events you still do season all events and holidays and content and make scarce rewards that are just in time available meaning you weren't there at Christmas event you don't get the Christmas drops and the mint number is based on how many people were there at Christmas free to play and you can still do live ops on top of it you still limited time events you can still do season all events and holidays and content and make scarce rewards that are just in time available meaning you weren't there at Christmas event you don't get the Christmas drops and the mint number is based on how many people were there at Christmas free to play and you can still do live ops on top of it you still limited time events you still do season all events and holidays and content and make scarce rewards that are just in time available meaning you weren't there at Christmas event you don't get the Christmas for Christmas 2021 for those drops right like you don't have to define the actual numbers for anything you just can make them relative to the amount of people there that participated for other things you can define much harsher scarcity based on your players populations I think that the types of games that you make certainly depend or define the relationships of your assets that players expect so for example if you have an action RPG game selling items and soaring or items and you aren't picky and theoretically on the shelves or selling items and you aren't picky on eggs and 저녁 local items, so here you will certainly be working hard enough for game events generate ads that areBookacious feeds of edges that are legends to play as part of Hutor's books? got a lot of sleep at my lunch the last few days.

Jon Radoff: All right, so you're saying pleader in companies have not solved the problem of game developer overwork.

Mitch Zamara: Oh no, new new frontier and is does not solve does not excuse you from, you know, the challenges and the tribulations of working out kind of on the limb. But I think the, the notion of having something to sell everyone every week as a, as a core priority is something that you can kind of decide whether you want that to be part of your game's design or your core economic model. It's, I think it's really, it's a design choice at that point. Because if you want to not have to worry about that and you want to just have things on rails, then you put value creation in the hands of your player instead. And you let them do the selling every week and the creation and all you need to control is the levers of supply and demand on the value creation. So, for example, if you don't have to be the one that sells the legendary swords every single week, you instead have a set number of, you know, legendary items that are so that are able to be minted every week by players. So the difference between the traditional models of free to play where you're going to be selling everything to everyone directly every single week is you really just get to choose whether you want to do that in your design or not. You don't really have to. It's you really have the option. And to me, the way that you make that choice is where value creation comes from. So, you can allow people to make new items that are required to play the game and have that be your cost of entry, like we talked about earlier with Axi in the breeding. You can allow players to become the blacksmiths inside of your game and they're the ones in charge of making all the swords for every single person in the game. And you literally make a fee on everyone that they sell to the other players and you sort of are indirectly making money. Or you can facilitate just a general game ecosystem in which value creation doesn't really happen at all. And people just consume and just enjoy and have a set amount of scarcity or limited products. And they're just going to transact on marketplaces. And you also don't have to worry about it. So a card game like God's Unchained is a good example of that. They're, you know, they're going to sell new packs and additions, but they're not selling new things every single week. They're not trying to do sales yet. They could when they choose to do live ops, they can have limited addition cosmetics and visuals and other things that make the game look cool, but doesn't actually change the gameplay. And they'll do fine. They'll do fine, but they don't think they get to choose what they need to. I think it's like it's just a matter of your design choices at that point.

Jon Radoff: And a classic free to play live up strategy would be to provide an event system. Say every week where you're all give a kind of a silly example this week we're going to make fire attack weapons do twice as much damage. And by the way, we're going to sell item packs this week that offer fire defense. Right. Right. And whoever gets to the top of this leaderboard is going to get something highly relevant to the event. We're going to run next week. So it becomes immediately desirable. So that would be like a template of many, many successful templates in free to play.

Mitch Zamara: So you could apply that same kind of methodology on top of a play to earn economy. Basically exactly what I said could could be applied to it.

Jon Radoff: The interesting idea that I just that just occurred to me for the first time though is, is there is there an opening in play to earn where players actually get involved in event design causing events to happen. Like they could have a bigger stake in that.

Mitch Zamara: Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's that you know inherent beauty of smart contracts and the way that they can be designed is that you can start to create open ended means for people to do different things. You can create modability. You can create extendability in certain ways and you can kind of create unique experiences. So for for me, like that's that those are the those are the stepping stones of building the metaverse. Right. That's.

Jon Radoff: I use you're on building the building the universe. I use but I but what you just said was music to my ears because you're talking about modding extensibility. Let's talk about where this market goes from here because this is where I really try to advise everybody who's thinking about this space. This is where a little bit of humility imagination curiosity comes in because power leveling is a thing just as it was a thing in world of warcraft and actually infinity is basically a power leveling game. And that's that'll be a thing for a certain number of games. It's not limited to that though like we're going to start seeing economies that add a lot more to it. I have some ideas on some of those things but sounds like you do too. What where do you think this market goes from here in terms of more economic inputs more earning potential or even blurring the distinction between who's a player. Who's a designer like that ability to put an event in for example.

Mitch Zamara: Yeah, I think those things will certainly get to in the in the longer term. I think the idea. I think we're going to see interoperability between projects between tokens between chains between everything start to just pop up more and more and more and more. And I think the theme. You know, I think last year was sort of the year of defy in a lot of ways this year feels like the year of NFTs and I feel like next year maybe I'll be right. I feel like next year is going to be a real big notion of interoperability. I think this notion of connecting and bridging things is really going to become more and more critical. And it's something that is certainly at the forefront of my mind. It's and when we talk about like sort of the differences between free to play and and play to earn. The thing that comes to my mind is always when you're in a new space. The thing that is always the most ripe are opportunities for growth hacking. Right. It's because there is an undefined space and no one has figured out the rules yet. You can find you can find diamond opportunities that know that are in plain sight that no one else is looking at. And I feel that blockchain gives you that gives you a entire ocean full of diamonds that you can just pull up at any time if you were paying enough attention because the information is in plain sight and all you need to do is connect the dots. So that's that's what comes back to interoperability. Like if you recognize if you can if you can prove that someone is something somewhere else and you know that they are there. You know what their value is worth. And you that information is more or more than anything we've ever been able to have in free to play games. We know where the most important valuable people actually are and we can create bridges to reach them directly without having to pay every single person along the way for that right.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. So in so just a few ideas that come right out of what you just said. So first of all modding again always has been a thing in games or is almost as old as as any kind of digital game. Certainly the original modding was like dungeons and dragons like everybody knows it right. So we already know all players want a mod or most players want a mod. Some people might not want to be a dungeon master all the time. But a lot of people want to play around with it and see what that's like. So the idea of designing levels adding content, mashing things up. Like to me, this is what sort of really compelling about the business models and play to earn as it's this new unbundling and rebundling phase. Like just like we had with music like we had the album and then songs came off and you bought them individually and then people started putting together playlists that were really cool for themselves or for their friends. Like that's kind of what we're talking about here like avatars are a form of rebundling of like costumes and stuff from different experiences and mods are ways of rebundling content from a particular game. And play to earn has the potential to provide a monetization mechanism for that which is not actually there in the vast majority of game experiences.

Mitch Zamara: Absolutely. Yeah. And like I we're already seeing some of this stuff in some interesting places. So a game on the on the wax block chain that I've seen is this game. There's a game called our planet, which has been around for about a year and a half, I think now. And they they've got a token called aether that has a hyper inflated supply that is in the hundreds of billions in terms of like where it's reaching and in my opinion, there's it's a challenge to keep that token under. You know, to keep it actually deflated properly, it's a hyper I call it a hyper inflated token, but if you're used to building idle games like you can see what the trends look like on these things when you start log scaling all your graphs and you recognize what's going on. But what I would have happened organically was another game launched called our land, which is a fan driven game that uses aether as its actual currency and has their own set of NFTs that they are selling.

Mitch Zamara: But they're using another games token and they just did it without permission. They just spun it up and launched it and are doing well.

Mitch Zamara: And like this is like the actual real crystallize example of exactly what we're talking about that you can say, hey, we don't need to make a token. We're just going to recognize a token and we'll make our own NFTs that work with that token because you already have a supply and we're not going to worry about the existing like, you know, and of course, if you're smart, you also bought a ton. While it's stupidly cheap and on the floor and you're basically going to create the demand and the consumption for this token that someone else has, but because you own enough of it, you're not worried about it because you're just going to make them enough money on what you're driving. Like that is a very viable way for communities to sort of take to divine their own success to say, I want this to succeed. It's you're not doing enough of it as the creators. We're going to take over and drive more value ourselves.

Jon Radoff: We basically open source the game design to their community, which is, which is really not like I knew. Well, they didn't need to though. They didn't have a choice. Yeah, but a really compelling idea. It's been done intentionally as well like loot project basically just created all of these essentially loot boxes with cool sounding gear in it. And you know, I've heard design issues with it like it doesn't really have a really concrete metadata structure or something that makes things challenging. Alright, yeah, those of us who've built RPG games with dynamically generated item systems, which I have done on Game of Thrones Ascent, we can geek out on like the right or wrong ways to do that. I don't actually care about that aspect of it though. I think what was interesting is this idea that they created an economy for the items and then said, hey community, like now it's yours. Like build an RPG, build a war game, do whatever you want with it. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. Exactly. But it's a really, really cool idea to create the economy and the content and then give your community the ability to go and run with it. Yeah, which it sounds like ether did unintentionally.

Mitch Zamara: Right. Yeah, in a lot of ways. Yeah, it's it's it's a fascinating thing. And I think we're going to see more and more examples of this. Like we will see projects get lauded or like is especially what we'll see is if all if most of your game is run through a very thin client that drives almost all of your logic from either a centralized server or a decentralized blockchain, then your IP value of your thin clients is relatively low. Why do you even need to protect it? Why are you not with the source? Why have you not made it available? And what I think is that's the national direction. We're going to see a lot of this stuff lead is that the thin the thin print with what I've heard referred to as the presentation layer. Like that becomes like it's just another aspect of like yeah, we will we'll build as the game maker will build the first presentation layer. But like that doesn't necessarily it's open source then like are you in control of it? Like why not? I just let the community build alongside you could what I think what will see happen is collections will become collaborative. So you will be able to submit to a collection NFT designs or code submissions to a smart contract or things like this and you will get a smart contract representational share of earnings that are derived from your contribution.

Jon Radoff: You'll you'll have a Dow to govern the economy of the game and you'll have a GitHub open source project for the game clients and people can go down unity download unity or whatever and they're in business. Now you're building a game client and you can make changes to it and fork it and do whatever you want. But the economy will have integrity because it's being managed by a group. That's just one idea. There's a lot of different ways to approach that. Yeah, there's just that's the best part. There's no rules. Yeah, well, there's no rules. This is a domain of imagination and and just like pure creativity right now. It's funny how in the game industry like all the big breakthroughs in new business models and even new categories of games. They always begin with these domains where there's this sort of passionate creativity around something completely new coupled with enormous cynicism in the market. And everything that I've ever seen in video gaming has always had that undercurrent more than an undercurrent a ocean of cynicism right whether it was free to play you and I were both there at the dawn of free to play where everybody told us these were not real games and they were even that they were scams and whatever. I mean I even heard the same thing for like e-sports like people are like e-sports you can't play pay people to play a video game. Because they like to play a video game you wouldn't pay them money because that changes everything about the game. Well guess what lots of people play Overwatch and some people make a hell of a lot of money playing Overwatch and it co-exist. So this is just completely new and like the rules are not even written yet people are just figuring it out.

Mitch Zamara: Yep, I completely agree which is why it's the most exciting thing I've worked on my entire career because like I have I mean I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of experience now in having making games for a long time but because it's we're at a new paradigm everything is so fresh and I literally feel like I'm like in the very beginnings of my career again like I feel like blue or green I'm just green to this whole thing in so many ways because there's just so much knowledge I have to soak up. And if you talk to anyone that makes these games they probably all have bags under the eyes of like nine because you just there's only so many hours to just consume before you have to pass out.

Jon Radoff: Awesome. Well I hope this is inspiration to everybody if you are thinking about play to earn hopefully this gave you a little bit of a road map of some things you might want to learn a little bit more about. If you're cynical or if you're maybe skeptical is the better word hopefully this is maybe open your eyes up to to a few aspects of this that could be come interesting in the future but there is a lot to learn I would just encourage everybody to be learning about this whether it's for game development entertainment what we call the metaverse all these other experiences that are going to happen. And just want to thank you Mitch for participating in this conversation today because this is what helps bring people more knowledge about the space and what you're going to be able to do with all of this.

Mitch Zamara: And by the way if you're watching this and you have enjoyed this conversation with Mitch and you want to hear from more thought leaders subscribe down below because I'm bringing you one of these every week and we'll also put a link to million on Mars and Mitch and his Twitter feed so you can find Mitch and ask him more questions about play.

Jon Radoff: And all the stuff that he's working on as well so thanks so much Mitch for being part of this.

Mitch Zamara: Thank you so much it's been an awesome time talking with you and I just can't wait to continue talking because every month this thing everything is just moving so fast and I can't wait to catch up with you because I feel like you and I are we're running at the front of this and it's been an awesome journey so far.

Jon Radoff: Alright until next time thanks Mitch.

Mitch Zamara: you