Rebroadcast : Web3 Game Dev Livestream: Wildcard and the Evolution of Competitive Play

Unknown: Music 字幕 字幕

Jon Radoff: Welcome back everybody to the are three three game development livestream. I am so excited for this episode because we have a true legend with us today that is Paul Bettner. He's been at the center of multiple business models types of games, gameplay, platforms. You will know him from Age of Empires. You'll know him from Words with Friends. Now he is the man to go after Web 3 gaming because he just loves new stuff apparently. But we're going to hear his story. We're going to hear all about him. We're going to hear about what he's building at Wildcard Alliance. We're going to hear about Web 3. We're going to hear about tokens. We're going to hear about aligned incentives and communities. We're going to hear about the new evolution of competitive play. Maybe we'll even talk a little bit about beamable and what role we play in the game launch that's underway. But let me tell you what we're doing here. I am Jon Radoff. I am the CEO of a company called Beamable. Beamable builds live services infrastructure. All that server stuff you need for a game. That's what we do. We help with it all. Everything from the blockchain to multiplayer. I'm accompanied here by Oscar, who is our producer for the live show. He's going to keep us on track. He's going to queue videos. He's going to pay attention to you, the live community. There's a reason why we do this as a live show. I used to do YouTube videos. YouTube is great. We still transmit on YouTube. But what you can't really do with a pre-recorded video is bring you the community in here. In fact, we're going to talk about community so much today. Big part of what I love to do is hear the questions from the audience. Have those questions come on to the screen. We're crazy enough to even bring you in live. If you've got a camera, Oscar can send you a link to StreamYard. We'll bring you right in. We are fearless on this show. Most of you who show up here, you're interested in Web 3 or your game developers yourself. So a really great opportunity is to learn from Paul about game design, the game industry, his history and the game business, and what you should be doing if you're trying to build a game.

Unknown: If you're crazy enough to try to build a game, like let's face it, I've built a lot of games.

Jon Radoff: It's partly, it's definitely very creative. It's partly a mental illness if you want to be in this business. You cannot, you literally just can't do anything else. That's my experience. I can't speak for Paul. But Paul, let's move the conversation over to you. I gave you a little bit of a preview of you, but tell our audience here what you've done before and where you're going.

Guest: Oh, you're absolutely right. It's definitely a disease. I like to say every ship's game is a miracle and every game developer is a miracle worker. I definitely have, I'm surrounded by

Unknown: incredible miracle workers that I've been working with now for. Oh my gosh, 25 years. So I came

Guest: out here and by the way, shout out to Jonah, if you're listening, Jonah launched his first game on Web 3 or I don't know, as far as I know, it's his first game he's ever launched. It's been fun watching him go through that process today and learning so much and you've never learned more than just by shipping things. So anyway, I came out here to Dallas, who's where I'm at right now,

Unknown: as a 19 year old, 30 20 kid. There's a longer story about how I was able to secure a job at

Guest: Ensemble Studios right at the end of when we were shipping age vampires one. The studio was, I don't know, 15, 16 people or something when I joined it. I fast become, became close friends with the founder and CEO of that studio, Tony Goodman, who's a dear friend of mine. And now all those friends that I met at that studio, I have kind of grown up with in the industry and I work with today. So I worked on all the age vampires games. At some point in there, we sold the company to Microsoft and became Microsoft Games Studios out here in Dallas. I worked on age one, age of mythology, all the expansion packs, age two, rise of Rome, you know, age of kings, and age three. And then we worked on Halo Wars. We worked on a giant unannounced Halo massively multiplayer game called Project Titan. That's actually out there like it leaps so people can go look up, you know, videos and screenshots of that game, which consumed several years of my life and then never shipped. I just so you know, I think you knew this John because we already connected on this a lot, but I was a multiplayer engineer. That was my background. So I was in charge of all the multiplayer stuff on the age vampires games and then worked on, if you guys remember, Microsoft's own, you remember that back in the day playing multiplayer games on that and and and create something called Ensemble Studios Online, which ended up becoming part of Xbox Live and really the multiplayer infrastructure for all that. And yeah, so during that, I kind of transitioned from engineer to kind of game creative director ish. I mean, not really. I never shipped any games directly that I was in charge of, worked on several prototypes. And then I left with my brother and my wife and started one of the very early iPhone game studios way back before that seemed like a good idea. Most of my, most of my peers at

Unknown: age vampires and non-subtle studios thought it was like a midlife crisis, I think at that point.

Guest: Although I was only like 20, like in my late 20s, so I don't know, but anyway, I just when I first saw the iPhone, at that point, you know, having worked on age vampires, then Halo Wars, we were kind of on this trajectory of trying to have RTSs and the games were working on somehow reach new audiences. You know, I mean, Halo Wars was all about bringing RTSs to a controller. And and age vampires even going back to then, like it was, it was always for me at least, and I think for Tony and some of the folks there, this opportunity to bring games to people who weren't traditionally gamers. You know, that that's why age vampires is about history. That's why it has

Unknown: this bright and colorful look to it. And, and it sort of feels, you know, like it's maybe designed,

Guest: not just for your typical hardcore gamer. And back then, these are like the days of doom and quake, and every game looked like browns and grays and whatever. This was like, you know, a big deal.

Unknown: And I kind of just fell in love with this idea of making games for more people, like trying to

Guest: reach new audiences and make our games somehow simultaneously even more hardcore, like even more competitive with higher skill ceiling. And at the same time, more casual and more accessible to even more of an audience. I mean, I think it's just that we had this saying in Ensemble,

Unknown: easy to learn, should take a lifetime to master. And I just like want to take that to the extreme.

Guest: I think that's the most brilliant way to design a game. And so I've just been pursuing that since then. And as you said, that iPhone game studio went on to create a game called Words of Friends that was made. Age of Empires looked like a drop in the bucket, just a little Winnie Flare. It seems literally a cultural phenomenon, which I've never gone through. And I always dreamed games could be that kind of thing. And then I got to live through it with John Mayer tweeting about the game. And then Alec Baldwin getting thrown off a plane for playing the game, just all these crazy cultural moments. I was driving in a limo with Kelsey Grammer at one point, pitching a Words of Friends game show in Hollywood that turns out Kelsey Graham all he wants to do is be a game show host. Like Alex Treck, that's like his dream or whatever. So maybe someday I'll get to do it. But anyway, so that was a wild ride. And now here I am working on a game called Wild Card on a new frontier in Web3. Sorry for that long intro, but you know, it's been an old guy.

Jon Radoff: You deserve the long intro because it's an incredible list of titles that you've been involved with and targeting the core gaming audience with something like with like Age of Empires and then going for a mask. There's just not a lot of people who have done that. And you're making yet another leap into Web3 with Wild Card Alliance, which I want to talk about. Now we're going to definitely talk about community as part of this because that's a huge part of what everything's all about. That's I think what we saw in Web3 is one of the big opportunities. And it's something that frankly we, a beamable, are living ourselves. We launched this community hub platform as part of a future air drop that we'd be doing when we do our TGE a few months from now. And I thought it was going to just be for the TGE, but I'm learning that we have this incredible superpower to start to channel our community out to other games that are launching on our platform. And we're actually suddenly in the user acquisition business that I had absolutely no intention of doing. I don't even want to charge for it. I just want our customers to be like super successful because if you're successful and you got a sustainable game, guess what? That's great for us. Like I don't need another piece. So we want to keep leveraging that. But the thing I'll say as the first couple of

Unknown: hundred people come in and are watching live, we are going to have a little giveaway ourselves at

Jon Radoff: beamable. We're trying something for the first time. You're going to have to stick around and watch. But later in this episode, I'm going to mention a secret word that if you use that word, you're going to be able to redeem it for something really cool on the community hub. So stay tuned,

Unknown: listen in, and that'll come up later. So Paul, I kind of preempted a little bit, which is sort of

Jon Radoff: the community aspect of Web 3. But I'm curious like what led you to go from those two totally different sort of domains of game development? And you're like, let's roll the dice a third time and go after something completely new. And frankly, just really improving at this point as a G as a market. Like, what are your thoughts? You know me, John, I'm a bit of a storyteller. So

Guest: sorry for the hell. I have to tell a story to get us there. So I actually have to go back before Ensemble. And why the hell did this studio, you know, that was adults and professionals and other game developers, people like Bruce Shelley and Tony, you had these amazing careers already. Why did they hire this 19 year old kid from Florida onto their team? And it's because I, in high school, and then out of high school and in the college, I never finished college, but while I wasn't going to college, I started a bulletin board system or BBS. Probably only like. I wrote it. Yeah. Okay, so I know John knows this. And I think Oscar does, but not a lot of people that I work with these days can still understand what that was. But anyway, it was like the internet before the internet, you called up dialed up with your computer and you joined, you know, other people. And that BBS, which is called the playing fields, grew to be South Florida's largest BBS. I'm 17, 18 years old and running this wild business and had 200 modems on my wall in my apartment. And like just crazy stuff. And I, that was my first true exposure to community. And you know, we have thousands of people who would call in and this was like a big part of their lives was the community that they found on my BBS, on our BBS and the friends they made and the relationships and everything else. And I was in there every day and every night. I mean, I literally roll out of my mattress because I didn't even have a bed up into my chair on my computer. There's 50 people online. Some of them are arguing. Some of them are fighting about something. Some drama is going on or whatever. And that was my day. It was just interacting with that community and managing it and trying to keep everybody happy and sane and healthy and safe. And did that during these four minute years of my life. And because of that, it turns out some folks at Ensemble had actually utilized the multiplayer stuff that I wrote for that BBS. And that's why they hired me. That's why they were willing to take this, this shot on this 19 year old kick because they're like, wait, you wrote that thing. It was like a BBS plugin called Sir IPX that let people play multiplayer games on their modems and emulated an IPX network, a LAN network. It was wild. But anyway. And I, I think that if I really look at my own career, it's a combination of a couple of things that I have always been in love with. And that is probably my deepest, most long-lived love and desire as a game developer. And I think it's probably because I grew up in Florida. I went to Disney World. A lot as a kid. I was really lucky. So like, all I wanted to be a part of is like an environment where I can build something and then I can hang out together with the folks who are experiencing that thing that I built and see that it's bringing them joy and connection. And like, you know, it's like that picture we have in our head of Walt Disney walking down the park, the boulevard of the parking built and watching like a family holding hands or whatever it was like, that's all I would want in life is to be that person in that moment experiencing that. And hanging out with the communities and spending time with communities that have enjoyed the games that I build and have

Unknown: been brought together with those games has absolutely replicated that moment for me. So,

Guest: so I'm obsessed with that. I'm obsessed with the power of games to connect people and to grow communities. And I always find myself back in that same place every time. And to complete that story, I think really Web 3 is the ultimate tool and technology that I have encountered for that

Jon Radoff: yet. Paul, so there's probably a lot of Web 3 game developers that are going to see this. What have you learned about Web 3 game development? How is it different and what should a founder know if they're going to be crazy enough to make any game, of course, but like a Web 3 game in particular?

Guest: So I skipped over a couple things that we worked on between Age Vampires, Words and Friends, and Wildcard. We also worked on another game called Lucky Sale that was the game that shipped in the box with the Oculus Rift. So I met Palmer because of John Carmack who's out here in Dallas, who is at Doom and and it and he connected me with this kid that was duct taping circuit boards together and making his VR headset because he thought it was awesome and thought I should we should be and I ended up getting involved with that Kickstarter and then ended up that just happened to be after we'd sold Words of Friends and I was like looking for something to do and I was like, yeah, we should make a VR game because I'm not allowed to make mobile games. I have a non-compete with Zinga. So I guess it's just like, the whole game, let's make VR games. And so we worked on this game and the reason I mention that is I have now and the people that I work with, the specific set of groups who follow each other from Age Vampires all the way through all this journey we've been on, we have this other disease besides being addicted to community and building games that connects people. We also think and this has just happened now several times that building games on some frontier, some new technology, is like the most fertile soil. Like it's the place where you can plant new ideas and if you get it right, you're just, it's just going to blossom in this incredible thing and we got to experience that with Words of Friends. I mean, actually with Age Vampires, then with Halo Wars, then with Words of Friends, then with Lucky's Tale because even that game of VR game ended up having millions of players and being this hit on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation, everything else. And so when we started working on Wild Card, it was actually with this idea in mind of creating a game that was as much about the community that came together around the game as the players down on the field. So we would say that simply it's like this is the game that's as much fun to watch and attend as it is to play. That's like a shorthand way of saying it's the community that hangs out like here with us right now is as important as if we were watching someone compete down in the field. Like we value those equally and we wanted to Wild Card to be the game that somehow elevated that experience so that watching wasn't just this like passive like I'm just a ghost in a channel and I'm not really and really made it feel like as almost as much fun as joining the game itself.

Unknown: So on the journey of building that, we were seeking all these different ways to do it. These

Guest: technologies, these, you know, we were working with Twitch for a long time with Discord and could it, I mean, candidly, just couldn't really get those companies to take that next step or those next steps that we needed to get their platforms to meet us where we wanted to go. And along that journey, I just happened to get introduced to a person who's now a dear friend, he's a developer and designer and partner, not he's not his partner, he's a research analyst at paradigm and then he introduced us to the partner at paradigm. And three weeks later, we had a term sheet and it was like I think Wild Card is a web 3 game now. I don't even know that means yet. I had this inclination and this is why it worked out and why we ended up signing a deal and getting and sort of going through that transition for Wild Card so quickly is because what I had experienced a web 3 at that point, I felt like this technology is actually all about community. It's about aligning incentives amongst multiple different users who wanting to come together and sort of become a new community and this technology allows them to take that reality, that identity that they are as a community and like encode it into the technology, like literally write their community identity onto a blockchain and have that thing, that technology weave their connections together in code. And I was like, that's so cool, that's what we're looking for with Wild Card, like maybe this is what we need. That was two and a half years ago and that was just hopes and dreams. And since then, I got to say I'm really happy and

Unknown: proud that it has turned out to be that. Web 3 I think and you said you know you've been discovering

Guest: this too with Beamable, it's the same thing that we discovered. It's the most magical thing to like have this hope and this idea and this dream and then to be a couple years later and watching it come to life and be like wow, this really is the most powerful technology I've ever encountered for being able to build community and to like weave these different parts of who participates in a game together into one cohesive whole. So that's where we're at now. There's still a lot for us to prove we haven't even shipped the game yet, but it is shipping this year. But I can say definitively that you know despite all the skepticism and people thinking Web 3 is for this or that and it's mercenary and you know whatever. Yeah, it's the dream is still very much alive. It hasn't, I don't even think Web 3 has actually really gotten its start yet, but it will and it is and especially over the next couple of years, I think we'll all look back on it as not this like thing, this divisive thing where some people feel bad about something. It'll just be like well there's this great technology. Yeah, it can be used for good and bad, but at the end of the day it's very powerful and it lets us

Jon Radoff: build wonderful things. Yeah, so here's one interesting comment from our community. So Remepi-Sum, you're a little hopeless in the project because you're 80,000 in the leaderboard. We do have a lot of people competing for this. I will say don't lose hope. Listen for that secret code later in this. That'll help you out. Keep competing on it. We're also going to have multiple seasons. So if you came in a little late, you were kind of getting a lay of the land. There's going to be lots of other opportunities because we have discovered that in our community. There's so much power in the community coming from folks like you. So we're going to keep doing this stuff even after like an initial air drop. So we see this as being something that we're going to keep doing over the long term because we can help not only ourselves, but all of the people who are building on top of the platform. And that's going to be an important part of what we do. Let's maybe talk a little bit more about this community aspect, but maybe even the broader subject of like composability. A lot of the focus on blockchain tends to be around like the financialization aspects of it, but really there's so much more that you can do with it like around community and allowing community ownership of parts of what you're doing. I'm just curious how much you thought about that,

Guest: I think about this all the time because I think it is the, as you've heard me say, I think it is the most important fundamental sort of superpower of this technology, like the whole point of using this technology. And I think, you know, when we think about what, we get, we get this a little backwards because we think about it as, we tend to think about it as its most defining use case so far, which like you said is financialization and financial aspects. But there's a reason for

Unknown: that. It's not that Web 3 is built for financial things. It's that financial things require this,

Guest: to build, especially like a trustless financial network, you need this thing that didn't exist in the world before blockchains. You need the power of aligning incentives across different people, different communities who have nothing to do with each other and no reason to trust each other. And this technology suddenly allows those people to join together and have shared goals and shared purpose and it can, and they can enforce the rules of that community in code. That's what a blockchain is. That's what a smart contract is. That's what it allows for. And it turns out, first of all, that's an incredibly powerful concept that never existed in the world before blockchain. And I think that's why so many people get excited about it because you could build everything a blockchain is, but you always had to do that in a way where it was owned and controlled by one or more centralized entities or at least governed by the powers of law and things like that. And blockchain allows those things to exist in code. It allows that to be the aspects of those alignment, to not just be something you have to trust someone else for, but something that you can just, everybody can take their hands off and be like, hey, look, we set the rules up and the rules are working this way. And there's no way to change it because it's all in code and we can trust that. That power is what financial networks need to run securely. It's also, though, the one of them, I mean, to me, it's like one of the most powerful forces I have ever encountered in my journey of developing products in writing code and being an engineer. And I was like, this is a fundamental, like, force of nature kind of concept that suddenly code and technology has brought to life. And I think that we have just barely begun to scratch the surface of how to apply those concepts. And I talk about it a lot as incentive alignment because that's what it is. This analogy, when you were talking about the person who's like, I'm 80,000 on the leaderboard. Okay. So the way I always think about that is like, look, we're having a party in this house. And somebody else just knocked on the door and was like, can I come in? I'm like, yeah, of course you can come in. That's what we're here for. Like, you want to have fun? What's that fun? And then they look around. They're like, oh my gosh, I'm like the last person here and like, everybody else is already having fun and whatever. And it's like, but you have to think about it as, yeah,

Unknown: dude, just wait. Next week, when that 400,000 person comes in, you'll be the veteran that's like,

Guest: oh, come on in. Let me tell you how things are out in the area. Yeah, maybe thousands on the leaderboard, but like you're 400,000. But like, you know, we're good. It's all good. This is a welcoming community.

Unknown: We help each other. We all, you know, and what these technologies do, what blockchain

Guest: Web3Duke does, I think fundamentally, is it lets us take those aspects of how community governs itself, how it manages itself, what those rules are, and encode them and put them into like the most powerful form of like back in those BTS days, we would have like a charter, you know, it's like just this text, this anti text that you would see when you logged in that was like, this is how you need to behave. These are the rules. Paul's watching. He'll kick you off. You don't do these things. And blockchain lets me turn, let's us turn those things into, in like encode them in a way that is like woven into the fabric of this community that we belong to, is like part of the network we're interacting with. And you know, again, I think we're just barely scratching the surface of that. But I, to me, it's maybe the most exciting frontier in video games right now, even though I still feel like a crazy pioneer. And, but, you know, to you and me, like, that's all news. Like I had to spend two years telling people that mobile and iPhone gaming was going to be a big thing. And all my friends thought I was crazy and I was just making like solitaire and bowling games and ripping off Scrabble and, you know, whatever. It's like, that's fine, but I just, I see something here that I think is going to, you know, you know, maybe I'm wrong or whatever. I'm sure. But that's how I feel about this. Same way I felt about mobile. Like, this is a force of nature. And we're going to figure it out. And when we do, it, you know,

Jon Radoff: every, it'll look obvious in hindsight. Okay, Paul. So we've, we've got over 500 live viewers here. I think it's a good point in time to just do a little segue back to wild card alliance and the

Unknown: game you're building and share that with people. So tell everybody about the game. And then let's

Jon Radoff: take a moment to show the trailer here because that's going to tell the story. Okay, so

Guest: brief for them before wild card is a real time strategy action collectible card game or what our team calls a collectible card action game a CC AG. It is a game where you place champions. You have a deck of creatures. You summon those in an arena and you fight in a sports like environment with your alongside your summons to take down the opponent's goal. You score the goal. You're surrounded by live spectators and fans. So if and when we do this someday on our new platform that we built together with wild cards, you talk about later, it's 1000s, then the people, those 500 people would actually show up here. They would be in the stands in the arena around us. And just by tuning into watch, they would actually show up in the game. They would materialize in the game. They could take actions. They can interact with the game. They can receive assets and air drops. They can actually interact call smart contract functions like all sorts of cool stuff they can do as viewers. And so we've been building these two parts of the game at the same time, which is this beloved game. So I don't think any of this works if we don't end up creating a game that is maybe if we're lucky, like as good as some of the ones we worked on in our career, like a game

Unknown: you could see yourself playing 10, 20 years from now. And would be one of your favorites in your

Guest: steam library. Like that's our bar is really high. We've worked on great stuff before. And we all have that bar for ourselves. And I, you know, worth the beginning of that journey, the game is not out, but it is coming out in early access right now. We're doing alpha plates us every week. We've begun to gather our community over the last couple years. We have I think 100,000 people on our discord. And we have big giant Twitter communities, everything else. And we have this incredible new web3 community, which is really what makes up the heart of that. And are here for that journey. So let's, let's take a look at the game. You can kind of see what it looks like. I think it does a

Jon Radoff: better job explaining itself in this video. Oscar, can we fire that up? Yes, sir. By the way,

Unknown: where are you? Here we go. Welcome to Wow. A third person to be to collectible card action game

Guest: that seamlessly blends fast paced arena combat with strategic deck building. You're first going to choose your champion. Then use your debt to cast powerful summons to fight alongside you. Each champion has unique abilities that make them who they are. These range from movement mechanics, sidekicks, specials, and ultimates. Each summon has a mana cost. mana is gained over time. So keep your eye on it and always be using

Unknown: your summons to change the tides on the field. Now that we know what we're playing with,

Guest: let's talk a little bit more about how to win a match in wild card. The first step is to take down the goalie. The goalie has two mechanics. The first being that when you get close, your mana gain is less. The second is each time they are KO'd or spawn, they will clear out opposing summons in the area. Goleys have health or respawn time and each time they respawn, they'll come back with less health.

Unknown: The second step is to break the shield. Once the goalie is down, use your champion and summons to

Guest: break the shield. And the third and final step is to score. Hold the interact button to score and end the game. Oh man, I almost forgot about the wild cards. Wild cards are powerups that spawn on the map. Make sure to fight over them and claim yours to enhance your champions and summons. Well, that's it for me. We'll see you on the field and may the cards be in your favor. So that's Chris that's Chris Woff at the art director. He's got a great voice. We just made that internally ourselves that kind of like welcome to wild card video. Yeah, that's that's awesome. I

Jon Radoff: mean, so you were commenting that your bar is super high. I mean, I think that's the one of the lessons though, right? Like if you're going to be in Web 3, it's not really like Web 3 is its own category. It's not like mobile, which it's driven by the hardware and just everyone's going to be on the same mobile device. So maybe the first games that ever shipped on mobile were not at the level of production values that we would have been familiar with from AAA gaming at the time. Web 3 is a little bit different. Like we're playing on the same platform. So people have seen great games before. There was 19,000 games on Steam last year. There's no shortage of games. So the bar is going to have to be super high to just succeed. Yeah, and we were talking about this earlier, but

Guest: you know, it's I get it. Like there's folks in Web 3 who have been you know, here longer than I have and have been waiting patiently, I would say like, you know, like going all the way back to before Axi infinity, right? We're talking four or five years now like ancient history and the speed the world moves today. And I think these folks have been hearing about this dream for a while now that that gaming is what some people believe going to be the thing that finally becomes the true consumer use for Web 3 and really brings in the tens hundreds of millions of people into this technology. And everybody who's been in Web 3 knows what that can mean for their bags. And also that can mean like that's exciting. That's that's that's great. That's what we want. And and yet they've been waiting for that for a while, you know, four years and starting to feel like, is it ever going to happen? And now for me, who every age of Empire's game was like a six year ordeal, I'm like, I'm like four years man, we still got like, you know, I'm worried about yeah, like and and you know, the way that I I really try to connect with people on this, especially if they're like, you know, some people that they feel like they've been grinding in the space forever and like, maybe it's never going to happen or whatever it is. Look, we all agree that great games exist. We agree that we all as as whether we're Web 3 gamers, just gamers doesn't matter. We already have a Steam library and we have our favorite games and it's not like those are all games over May 20 years ago. There are new amazing games come out all the time. So so we have established great games can be created and they exist and they come to life. Web 3 is a technology that's akin to any other technologies we've already worked with in games forever. You could call it a network technology. You could call it a database technology whatever it's just a technology. There's nothing magical or special or like specifically about it that makes it somehow harder to make games or incompatible with making great games. It's just a technology. The reason that we don't yet have a League of Legends or a Counter Strike or a Minecraft of Web 3 is just because it takes a while to make those kind of things happen. And and so when I'm trying to give people hope about this, I'm like, I'm like, look, you can't really talk about whether Web 3 gaming is alive or dead when it hasn't happened yet. When we can point to one at just one game, just one that we are all playing in our Steam library more than our favorite Web 2 games and it happens to be a Web 3 game, then let's see what happens. Let's see when there is a game that good that you would all play it, you don't even care if it's a Web 3 game. You're just playing it because it's great. And that game happens to have Web 3 in it. What then? Because I personally believe that nothing about that game being Web 3 is going to stop you from playing it if it's as good as Overwatch or League or whatever is your favorite game is. And we can't have a conversation about Web 3 is is right or wrong or alive or dead until at least one of those games has arrived. So I know it takes a long time. I'm frustrated too. I get it. I've always been frustrated waiting for one of our games to ship, but but don't worry it's coming. I hope Wild Card is one of them. We've been working super hard as a team that has that high bar to deliver a game that is as good as some of the other games we worked on. But we're not the only team out there doing that. And your patience will be rewarded because ultimately eventually those games are showing up. I think they're showing up in the next 12 to 24 months from what I can see. And it will end the argument forever. We won't be having that conversation of whether Web 3 gave you it. It'll just be like saying is games with a database? Is it going to work or not? Like, wait, we're just talking about is it a great game or not? That's it.

Jon Radoff: I'm sorry. It's not that Web 3 gaming is dead. It's not even the right question. Web 3 games being born. But like, yeah, it's actually what it has a bit more yet. No, I'm sorry. Go back to the

Unknown: waiting room that we'll tell you when it's ready. All right. We're going to come back to Web 3 in a

Jon Radoff: little bit. But like, let's talk about a little bit more about the game and like, what's going into making this a great game? Like, we got a flavor for it. Just watching. You're doing some really hard things, by the way. Like, you're not just building a word three game. It's also like, no, we're insane. John rebending at the same time. You're combining collectible card games. You're at

Unknown: combining MOBA kind of mechanics. Like, first of all, what's the most fun that you've had building

Guest: this game? And what's really hard? Well, I already told you, the most fun is when I get to watch someone enjoy the game for the first time. And I had no idea what they're coming into. And then they're just like smiling and they're having the time of their life. And they're like, this might be my new favorite game or whatever. Like, I live for that moment. I never get tired of that moment of a doing this for 30 years. Every single time feels like the first time. I just went to DreamHack here in Dallas. And again, we got to show off wild card to a bunch of new creators. We were in the streamer hub. I was in the BYOC area and the free play area. And I just walked in and I was like, I'm home. I've been doing this for 30. I've been going to QuakeCon since I don't even know. And it still feels as wonderful. So for me, that's the best part. But what we're trying to do with wild card is really no different than the journey I've been on with these specific developers going all the way back to age one. We had this saying that that guided the development of every one of the games worked out on Sombal, which was it should be easy to learn and it should take a lifetime to master. And you know, working on different games like the formula is very different. If you're working on a single player game, I don't think you would say that. It would be a very different thing. Like I'm trying to bring a world to life or I want people to meet the characters or whatever it is. But working on competitive games like this that are ideally aiming to be something that can be played forever. Like decades into the future, people are still discovering new new strategies. And I I think age vampires had its biggest year last year in terms of number of players, right? So it's still in that place. Building a game like that is just this relentless process of trying to make the game more accessible while at the same time making it more hardcore. And so what I mean by more accessible is it should be something that anyone can jump in and without even someone explaining to them, they're just clicking around or they're pressing buttons and their stuff happening and it's fun and they get it and it's appealing. And like that moment in age vampires for me was the first time a hunter throws a spear and he catches a deer and he's carrying the giant hunk of meat back. And I'm like, I was hooked from that moment. I was like, oh my god, these little guys, I'm making them do stuff. It's great. And so that's that like easy to learn. Like anyone who could use a mouse and could use windows could play age vampires. And for the for wild card, we're trying to

Unknown: push that even further like we did with Halo Wars where even if you don't know how to use a

Guest: computer, wow, so keyboard, you don't have a gaming PC, even if you just pick up a controller, you can have a good time. And we can measure this by putting like an eight year old in front of the game. And if they think it's the best thing ever, then yeah, we're kind of hitting that goal. And at the same time, the hardest core players, the ones who who are playing professionally or and or have done that before or whatever and like for them, they require the game to have a certain skill ceiling like a like like basically an unlimited skill ceiling so that they can continue to get better so that there's not really a limit to that competitive landscape and how deep and involved it can get. And so for wild card from the beginning, that has been the same mantra that's been guiding us is like basically can we take this thing we've done? Can we take the joy and the strategy of a real time strategy game and like you guys saw in that video, controlling units and where do I spawn my units and how do they move across the field and how do I balance this? And can we combine that with the accessibility of an action game? You know, I saw in one of the in one of the comments on the thread like it looks kind of like a like a child of League of Legends and Rocket League and hero shooters. And we're like I'm like, oh, I love hearing that. You missed like hardstone magic gathering, but that's because that video doesn't show that a lot, but it's also mixes in those elements. But it has that immediate pickup and play accessibility. But the depth of the collectibility of building decks and the meta and then the like skill, the real time skill of controlling your champion down on the field. It's you know, if I if I had a time machine, I would go back in time and punch myself in the face for trying to weave three totally disparate genres together action strategy and collectible game genre. But I've gone through all that pain we have. And here we are six, seven years later and it finally works and it's fun. And now we get to enjoy the fact that this isn't just a clone. This isn't just, you know, another extraction shooter or another whatever. Like we have genuinely made something new that doesn't feel quite like anything else out there. There are other great games that have similar elements, something like Smite. But this is I think the first game that is an arena collectible battle action strategy game. And and that's why we made it because when we were first started working on

Unknown: it, we we imagined a game like this could exist and we couldn't find it. We're like we basically

Guest: wanted to play a game where I was summoning cards in an arena and fighting alongside kind of like

Unknown: a real time version of Clash Royale. And we just couldn't find that game. So we're like, you know

Guest: what? Let's make it. That's we really wish that game existed. And now we get to play that and

Unknown: it's our own game and it's amazing. Is that challenging to think about how you merged

Jon Radoff: together as genres? Because I'm thinking about the mindset like I was a huge. I said I would punch myself in the face. I was a huge magic the gathering player and loved it. Didn't have it really kept up with the current meta anymore. But yeah, like I get it love love that genre. Played RTS games, including age. I think age was the first for sure of the that I played. Have played mobo's never really gotten to league personally, but I get what why people love it and why it's so repeatable with the character collecting and whatnot. But like when you start putting these elements together, like is that challenging to think about how you get that hearthstone player to I don't know not get frustrated that he has to do some action sequence to execute in the game. And by the same token, does that action player want to think about deck building?

Guest: It is the most challenging thing. That's what I was trying to get across is like, you know, it's you said earlier to disease, right? I don't know. We do hard things because we do hard things. But I think that it has been the hardest part of this journey. We during age vampires, we would call it finding the fun. But clearly after age one, we sort of had the core formula and you would think, well, finding the fun of age two would have been easy. It was still brutally difficult. Every single age game, it felt like we forgot how to make RTSs and we had to relearn it again. But every game I've ever worked on has this element of discovery and these dark moments where you feel like you're wandering in the woods and you know, I don't even know how to make a game. What am I doing? I don't deserve to do this job. And when we're in those moments,

Unknown: what we're doing is we're like channeling the joy that we know exists, that we know we're searching

Guest: for. We haven't seen it yet. We're like in the dark with a flashlight. But we know what it looks like when we find it because we can remember. We're like, wait, hold on. What did the joy I get from playing Magic the Gathering and Hard stuff? What does that feel like? And then we'll like channel those moments like, oh, well, it's so great when you open up hack and there's a new card and that new card blossoms immediately into opportunities to create new things in your head. You're like, oh my gosh, this card is perfect. If I could buy it with this other card, I could create this little mini engine factory thing and I can't wait to try that in the next game. Okay, hold on. I got to go rebuild my deck and then we got to play again so I could do this. And so and that's super unique to to CCGs like that type of joy I'm describing doesn't exist in other types of genres. Similarly, I could tell you stories about those same feelings in an RTS and how it feels to be like, oh, I just put those units and I set this other thing up and then they combine together into this wave that pushed the enemy back. It was so satisfying. And of course, for action games, you know, I was in the right place at the right time. I took the actions exactly the right moments and I dominated my opponent. So for us, we never really start with like, how do we mix these genres? Instead, we're like, look, can we just identify the set of feelings? And in the case of Wildcard, it was a lot. It was a long list. But we never lost sight of those things and we would just not we would sort of be unsatisfied with ourselves if one of them was dominating the other. So like we had all these moments early on in Wildcard where the game would just feel like you're playing in CCG and you would kind of ignore the fact and we knew this because people would just like stop moving. Like there's chavian would stop and we'd be like, what are you doing? They're like, well, I'm looking through my cards. And we're like, okay, this isn't working. Like, it's supposed to be running around while you do that. And in those cases, it was like, oh, there's too many cards or there's too many choices or whatever. And then sometimes we go in the other direction and they would just be punching things nonstop and they would just be ignoring their cards barely even

Unknown: summoning things. And then you'd be like, okay, well, I'm glad you're having fun with the action

Guest: part of this game. But this isn't working because we're not we're trying to make this blend. And the answer to your question, John, as you know, is it just takes time, you know, like you hold those things that that they're up on the wall. They're they're in our slack. They're in our discord. They're like these things that we know we want our players to feel. That's how we define the word vision, by the way, internally. Vision is just how we want someone to feel when they experience the product. So when we define what those feelings are, then it's just relentless play test driven development, which is all any of the age vampires games were. They were like, we know the game sucks. But let's go back in the play test area and let's play it again because the designers tried to make it suck a little bit less today. And let's give them our feedback or whatever. And you just go through that for years. And you would think again, coming off like age one to age two, you would think, oh, well, age two must have been fun right out of the gate. No, there were so many moments where I would get done. And this wasn't me. Everybody's doing this. We get done playing age vampires. And we are done working on age vampires too during the day. And then go back and play age one at night because that was how we wanted to relax. And I remember us looking at each other being like, we can't ship this yet. If we're all going and playing age one instead of the game, we're working on clearly. We can't ship the second the sequel because it's like, come on. And that that was by the way, like one year when we were supposed to ship. And then we took another year to ship the game because we told Microsoft just not good enough yet. But anyway, every game, every game is like that there's not a magic bullet. There's just here's what we want the game to be. This is the feelings that we imagine it can create. Now let's just go beg our heads against the wall and play test relentlessly. At least now we get to deal with our community. And that I think does help us get

Jon Radoff: there faster. Yeah, like that's some important words of wisdom for game developers as well. I wonder how many web three game developers in particular are out there building a game, but not really playing the game. You gotta actually play the game. Every day. Actually, I mean, this is not limited to web three. In any way, I don't want to make it sound like it's a web three problem. Like I've met a lot of game teams who they basically don't really like the genre of the game that they're building. And they're not playing the game either. And it's in their wire they're there. I guess because it was a game industry job. And and a lot of people will work on anything if they get to say that they're a game developer and sort of has this weird vicious cycle associated with it.

Guest: And a lot of teams even the best jobs unfortunately can have people in them that are just doing it

Jon Radoff: because it's a job. You know, so we're getting super close to the magic word, the word that we're going to release that's going to allow you to participate in today's reward. And we're doing this for the very first time. I'm going to I promise I will say it before the idea, but I will

Guest: speed up when I say it. If someone really it's not a word that I can like accidentally say it's like accidentally in a sentence. I'm going to say it. We're going to put it on a screen too. There

Jon Radoff: will be no other word. But I'll speed it up a little bit if someone asks Paul a really great question about what he's working on or anything he's worked on in the past because we've got 800 plus people here. You're all live. I know a lot of you are lining up for the reward today. But ask a question because you've got a true legend of game development here across multiples. And actually I was wrong when I opened the up the intro. I treated it like there were two big buckets. I missed out the whole VR bucket that sat in there. Well, like and there's probably more than three.

Guest: That's you know when we were first talking to paradigm when they were I mean they the thing they got throw some love to paradigm here for a second. They you know they invested $46 million. Well 40 million of the 46 the other six was Griffin and some of our other existing investors. But they came in with this giant check and this huge belief and they did that literally because they played the game and they loved it. There was no other reason like they they saw something very special in the game which which we also thought was special and and they they were able to like

Unknown: evaluate it from the quality of the game's perspective and that and that was that's just a great

Guest: thing. And I you know it's in this space it's sort of easy to be skeptical because whether he's still waiting to find those kind of mass market consumer things. And so people can

Unknown: just kind of run to the negative and but I everyone that I meet in this community and that we've

Guest: brought around us is here for the reasons we are and and that's what building communities about right like I bet that the people who aren't there for those reasons they've already left they they're like yeah this guy he's too happy I don't want to be part of this community or whatever but but it you know it has this power to bring together people to align their interests and their incentives and to get them as excited about building this as we are and it's it's you know use this word earlier John it's a superpower that's not the word but it is a superpower to harness that man I wish I had back in age vampires days like with if we wanted to play test the game I could get 10 people together from the studio by picking up the conference call thing and being like I guys it's

Unknown: time for applied test play test let's all go and here we can snap our fingers and have 800 people

Guest: ready to to join us with with whatever we're doing and like that alone is an example of that

Unknown: superpower and when studios like you're saying when they if they're willing to embrace that it is

Guest: in my opinion how all games will be made in the future they will all be made with this community first get your community involved early get them play testing with you on a constant basis because it's just that source of feedback like at least to say you know there's no amount of money that can make that go faster we used to say that to Microsoft when they're like can you please ship this game like you need to ship it we've been working out for four years we can't do another year or whatever it's like it's like that joke about you can't make a baby in one month with nine women same same idea you you really can't force that find the fun process with money like we can't just somehow hire more engineers and make the game more fun more faster it doesn't work that way but what does happen is the earlier and more frequently we can engage and involve the community in the process of making the game better and asking them what do you hate what do you love about it how we do that actually is the only thing I've ever found in my career that can get us to that place of of wild success sooner than later and that's all we're doing all day right now it's just uh it is like this interacting with folks meeting them having them go you know that game looks cool I didn't even hear about this yet you know I'm gonna go join that discord I'm gonna go wishlist that game on steam and by the way if you do we our steam pages up please go wish list because it's get you access to the alpha test right now and you will play the game before anyone else you will be there in our discord you'll be giving us feedback every week our developers

Unknown: and our designers are playing with the community and some of those folks have become heroes of the game now and I will tell you guys that some of the best developers I've ever worked with started as just

Guest: folks I met in the community and then they were so good at the game that we hired them and then they ended up being the lead designers on the game like that's just how it happens like especially when people find the game and they're like this is the game I've been waiting for you know okay so we

Jon Radoff: we got a bunch of people here they're clamoring for the coach what do you what do you think Paul should we give them the code Oscar I think you've been long enough you got to know when to deliver the goods you know I think it's time right so the code for all of you have been waiting for the code is the word fusion f us i o n that is the magic word and Oscar you're going to get that on the screen too I know not everyone here reads or writes English as a first language so yep there we go fusion fusion is the word you got two minutes you got two minutes to go you and those of you who are watching this in replay I'm sorry this is why you got to watch live the cool shit on this show happens live

Guest: whether it's things like that that is what we most believe in you know we didn't get a chance to talk about it that much but I know you guys are building on this on these ideas and so are we we have a you know because of the vision of wildcard bringing together not just the players but the community and our frustration with trying to get other platforms to get to sort of be what we needed we ended up building it ourselves it's a brand new network called thousands it's built on top of technologies from beamable as well as our game so like you got you got to know like John and everything at beamble is like the foundation for everything we're building and it lets us not have to build that stuff that I have built ten times in my career in the past because I get to work with John and this amazing team and they build all those things so I don't have to worry about it and we could just focus on the game and on the on the things that we build on top of it but

Unknown: that you don't want to build the stuff yourself no it's not I'm so grateful for the folks who do want to build these things so that I don't have to because they are they're key technologies that

Guest: every game needs every product needs and anyway I just wanted to I just had to say at the end here that how how grateful I am that you guys are doing such a good job of that and that we get to be your partners hopefully we make you look good with our use of of all the technologies

Unknown: you're building but I love that that we're and we sort of have reached the same conclusion like we

Guest: were talking about before the show the thing that I have discovered from web 3 that is just this beloved it's like oh my gosh this is the best way to build community that we've ever encountered as a technology and you've you've kind of stumbled into the same thing just like I stumbled into it I didn't really I thought in beginning like web 3 maybe it's about coins maybe it's about smart contracts I don't know but it's actually about the power of community about building community and the tools to do that and and I love that you guys are building those those things too Paul what

Jon Radoff: have you learned about your community you have a you've had for a while actually a pretty substantial community like I wanted your discord there's a bazillion people in there are they crypto native

Guest: people are they just like what what is both there's not never an either or but yes they're very crypto native and they call themselves web 3 gamers to underline the web 3 part because I mean come on we're all gamers at this point everybody that is a certain age loves and plays games like I don't

Jon Radoff: have to think about that anymore but three million people in the world yes and everyone under a certain

Guest: age basically like mine is well just it's like I used to make this joke like you don't walk around going are you a movie goer everybody just watches movies why you don't ask that question finally getting to the point we're asking someone whether a gamer not is going to be kind of silly but we're still about there there's plenty of people that are alive that don't play games but they're all old people and not everybody young does and to your answer your question what I've learned is when folks self identify as web 3 gamer they're actually talking about the web they're saying the way I define fun is the things that web 3 brings to games that are unique which is the ability to get involved as a community to participate in contributing value and and actually like sharing in that value that we're all building together that's unique right if you're just in games and you're not putting on the web 3 gamer hat that's not a conversation you would normally have like in a discord you wouldn't be talking about hey how can we share the rewards of this game that we're creating together but that's very important to web 3 gamers and that's awesome like that's great there's so many parts of games that have been already about sharing the rewards so for instance being a pro gamer being a streamer being like there's all these ways in which play to earn existed far before or web 3 right so this isn't like some foreign or bad thing this is fine this is another group of gamers that have a way they define fun so for me I've learned oh these folks are those type of gamers okay let's build for them and that's

Jon Radoff: yeah that's what we're trying to do so Oscar Red my mind which is sort of the call to action here so that you can be put on part of this community and what I heard you say earlier was go wish was on steam like that's what you can people do that's what every game developer needs everybody who's watching this who's a gamer the game is on steam it's all about the list list yeah I wish

Guest: for three people understood that more like that's one of the best ways you can help that a product or project if they have a steam page go just jam into those wish lists show the steam algorithm that this is a game you're excited about because that grows the value of that game

Unknown: more than anything you can do in this phase yeah what else should they know what what are the places

Guest: well just yeah after you wish list get on the discord join the playtest on a weekly basis and or join the live streams are doing on thousands just by connecting a wallet and tuning into watch you will actually become part of the game you'll be eligible to receive air drops just by being there people are getting air drop the wild card token on a constant basis every that we run three of these events a week and just by showing up in the stands of the arena and cheering their support they get air drops of the wild card token right now it's the coolest thing

Jon Radoff: that is so cool Paul where we burned through an hour here so thank you so much for your time I know that you're you got important things to do like build a game that everybody's waiting for and you took out an hour to talk to us about what you're doing was really grateful and by the way grateful for all of you who showed up and spent an hour with us we've got that's what I was going to say

Guest: those are the real superstars everybody's listening to us and it's is willing and and interested in becoming part of these communities absolutely and we got what we just passed a thousand so we got

Jon Radoff: over a thousand people watching live who who are really curious about the game and what you're doing with being able but I think more importantly interested in you Paul and your background and what you've learned about game development well thank you thank you so much for introducing me

Guest: to your community I'd love to meet you in our community any of you are listening I just want you to know too that wild card is intentionally specifically a global game we have many more players outside the US that don't speak English as we do people in the US and I love that we always envisioned wild card as being a a international sensation our hope and dream so even if you can barely understand what I'm saying don't worry I will translate what I'm saying when we meet on the

Unknown: discord so I'll speak in your language and please join us yeah and for that matter join us weekly

Jon Radoff: on this program at noon eastern time that's when we meet with really talented very experienced game developers like Paul who are entering web 3 I also do talks with people who are not web 3 I told talks with people who are in artificial intelligence I do another one on decentralized tech I'm crazy enough to want to do this four days out of the week which is a lot in my schedule but it's really fun conversations and I learned so much and I hope that I get to share some of that learning with you so grateful for the thousand plus of you who've decided to spend an hour with us we couldn't do this without you it would be a very lonely conversation between me and Paul if we get it and Paul will probably tell me that he has more important things to do so thank you so much

Guest: so much thank you I want to say the same thing too first of all John thank you for having me Oscar thank you for for helping us produce this and everyone who showed up thank you so much for

Jon Radoff: being here perfect end to the program until next time everybody it's been a blast