Rebroadcast : Web3 GameDev Livestream: "Remember POGs? They’re back… in Web3 form."

Unknown: All right, welcome back everybody. You are back at the Web 3 game development live stream.

Jon Radoff: I am Jon Radoff. Don't be misled by the fact that I'm sitting in a corner of the screen, which apparently is not going to change at any point today. Being yard thank you, you had one job that's controlling our cameras on the internet. You couldn't do it today. We are going to work with what we have. More importantly, we've got Tyler Frisbee here from Pog Digital. You're going to meet him in a moment. He is building an amazing game on an amazing IP on the B-Mobile platform. We're going to talk all about what they're doing. His journey through Web 3, the many chains he's had experience with, the game design ideas, the future of Web 3. We're going to get to all of that. We're going to talk to Tyler about his background, like what brought him to all of this. I am just going to be here in the corner doing what we get B-Mobile love to do, which is supporting, shepherding, kind of being in the background, so to speak. Today, I guess I'm not in the background. I'm off to the side. It's fine. I'm happy to be here, but Streamyard fix your shit. All right. Tyler, let's meet you here. Tyler, introduce yourself first. What did you do before this crazy Web 3 game development journey?

Guest: I was, let's go way back. I was a pro snowboarder before I got into business. I grew up here in Montana and then- Everyone's tough in this.

Jon Radoff: Exactly.

Guest: Special athletics. My body takes, it definitely lets me know I shouldn't be sitting too long. But got into banking and then found Bitcoin when I moved to Seattle. This super smart. He was 19 years old. Computational neuroscience bachelor's degree going for his masters at UW. And taught me about Bitcoin. So I left banking immediately, went to tech, and ended up doing the stint from like Google, Unity, Rivian, IPOs, through a few companies in acquisition by Apple, and really just wanted to get back into crypto. My big passion has always been decentralization. When I was at the bank, I watched little old ladies get drained by the bank for hundreds of dollars because they had one overdraft fee that they didn't know about and the bank would take their entire welfare check. And so watched happen a number of times, people left with zero money, negative balances to survive for a month, and it was heartbreaking. And I would just refund fees until they took the ability away. But I found Bitcoin and saw the ability to transfer money without an intermediary, the ability to really control your finances and to not be at risk of somebody, stealing or manipulating your funds. And then I found out about kind of like the ownership of

Unknown: blockchain and so forth and really fell in love. Awesome. So I want to talk about all those cool

Jon Radoff: objects that are in your background. And I want to talk about my logs. It's possible that some of our audience does not even know what a Pog is. And we're going to have to fix that first to get started. So if you weren't grown up, then I guess the 90s will forgive you for not knowing this really important part of our culture. But I've also made my own career a lot of it within licensed IP. So when I was building games, as opposed to building technology, to build games, back at Disruptor being, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Star Trek, Archers. So the world of IP is one that I know well, Kyler, before we get into the game that you're building, let's talk about Pogs. And also that room, like I just, I want to know all about that room behind you there, but share with people what they should know about this market and the IP you're working with. Absolutely. You know, for those who

Guest: are 28 to 45, which stats say is 50% of crypto, there's a very good chance you grew up with Pogs. It is the number one collectible of our childhood sold 10 billion collectibles to 200 million people around the world and partnered with everybody from Marvel and everybody in between Barbie, Star Wars, the NHL. And it really sparked the collectors itch, I think, for a lot of us. And the gambling degeneracy that would later maybe become a problem for many of us and fuel this entire industry. So what you see behind me is just my endeavor into my childhood and I'm so lucky to get to collect and play with Pogs for a living. But Pog was originally from Hawaii. It was a milk cap game, a teacher named Blath, who I actually know her granddaughter, brought it to the kids and even like the rock and who else, TJ Miller, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and all these people collecting Pogs, and so it was a cultural phenomenon. And we're super lucky to use the same brand partnered with the actual owners of the IP to create a subsidiary. And Pog is taking shape both on the physical side and on the digital side today. A global playground as we like to say, but trying to rekindle them in the stahlja and that childhood feeling for a lot of adults who maybe stare at

Jon Radoff: screens too long. Cool. And I should also mention that if you're collecting beamable points, and we've got a leaderboard for that towards the air drop, we're going to be doing pretty soon. We're not announcing the day quite yet, but beyond beamable.network, if you want to track that, we're going to have a secret word later in this episode. So if you want to collect those beamable points, speaking of collectibles, stay on. I'm not going to give it at six minutes and 20 seconds into this episode. No, you're going to actually have to listen to this conversation. And hopefully ask a lot of questions too, which brings me to the second point. I used to do this on YouTube,

Unknown: and pre-record, and we did all this post editing and stuff like that. We don't do any of the post

Jon Radoff: editing anymore. We just go live, and there's a reason why we do it as a live conversation. And it's so that you can ask questions. And I already see some really interesting and even some contrary and questions coming in. We're going to post your question here. We're going to post it. You'll get to ask your questions. So keep the questions coming through this conversation. We're happy to talk about it. We're happy to engage with everything that you want to cover. So definitely ask those questions. And in fact, if you want to join live and you've got a camera, we can even do that. Although, I don't know, StreamYard, I have no idea what's going on with cameras on StreamYard today. But in theory, we can bring you on live on StreamYard. And Oscar will get you a link into the conversation here. But we love it when the community engages with us. We've got a couple

Unknown: hundred people live and online watching this right now. Often we get many hundreds, even a thousand plus here watching this. We love that you take an hour of your time to sit down and listen to the conversation. But we love it even more when you put part of the conversation. Please do that.

Jon Radoff: All right. Kind of. Let's go back to the game though. So that's Pogs. Tell us about the game.

Guest: Well, I've got to do one. I've got to do my do Gillard diligence. If you're on, if we're streaming on Twitter, I should probably retweet this space. So I'm looking for that link. But yeah,

Unknown: you want to talk about the game? Is that what you said? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, you know,

Guest: it's been a number of different iterations. When we kind of came together in 2021, we brought my co-founders from, you know, one of them is the head of collectibles at eBay. Another is the head of technologies at Solano Labs, the other one created the network for Shrapnel. And, you know, part of our team helped build Unity for seven years. And so we had a demo game before we even had a white paper. And we really wanted to create this like classic casual game where people could own their assets and play for keeps the same way we did on a playground with phenomenal art and our favorite brands. And it's really taken a long time to make that a reality. Web 3 is extremely hard to build in as you know. And we had three different development partners before we met you. The Solana team, Matt Sorg, introduced us to you probably two years ago after we had been spinning our wheels with a number of different developers, been rugged by developers who promised they could get it done. And, you know, some of them got really close. One of them really got us on like the Solana saga. And that game still works. And it's a phenomenal experience for hyper casual mobile. But the on-chain mechanics of autonomous transactions, settlement layers, ownership inventories and all of these things that could be transferred across different experiences was nowhere close to being done. And we'd spent a lot of money. And so the game is just, you know, an experience and an expression of our childhood. And what the beamable team has done with kind of our foundation is incredible. And we're so excited to share it later this month.

Jon Radoff: So Kyler, I'd love to go a little bit deeper on this journey you've had through a lot of different blockchains. I mean, strangely enough, it relates to almost a Dan Felder's question here, which is thanks Dan for showing up and asking kind of the contrary in question, which is sort of leaping to an assumption here that blockchain hasn't yet revolutionized industries the way other revolutionary tech has. The comparison of World of Warcraft. I mean, of course, the first blockchain you're referring to is Bitcoin, which has over a trillion dollar market cap. And that's significantly greater than all of Activision's market value as acquired by Microsoft. But so I think that it's probably fair to say it has been a super important financial asset in the financial industry. But maybe it's true to say that Web 3, as we kind of move forward to smart contract chains starting with Ethereum, which is 11 years ago, 10 years ago with Ethereum has struggled to be a foundational tech for, I don't think we're in a position to talk about every industry. But let's talk about games like because that's what we can talk about today. It's totally fair to say, Web 3 gaming remains a really tiny portion of the overall game industry. And why do you think that is? And tell us a little bit more about, you were one of the few game developers that has

Unknown: gotten through, as you said, several really significant blockchains. And we're not talking about

Jon Radoff: minor chains that were just throwing grant funds around. These were really big chains. Our big chains, I should say, like Salana is where Bimibal is launching our deep end. They're totally relevant. What hasn't hasn't happened so far in the game industry?

Guest: You know, yeah, it's a huge question on pack. And I love it. Each blockchain that we've experienced has had its own utility and its own shortcomings. And I think the issue with Web 3 adoption for the games industry has really just been the experiences that have been created. It's very hard. If you're going organic Web 3, you're going to have a very small pool of users. And you have to be extremely good at what you do. Get everybody's attention to break out of that kind of craft as you would call it. And to be able to really escape and be seen as a leader and have high valuations. And it's very few of those businesses that launch that are able to do that where on the counter. Web 2, if you just build a phenomenally fun game, people may play. But how long will they play? Is there a hook? And I think the biggest issue with Web 2 games is we see it with Grand Theft Auto. We see it with every new iteration of new experience, a new version of that same game that you have to start over. You don't get to carry any of your progress, any of your equipment, any of your supplies into this new experience, typically. And some of them are getting better at it. But the ability for you to actually own your assets is something I think that all Web 2 users want. The ability for them to be able to sell their experience or to sell their progress, to sell the things that they have found in these games, that's something that is extremely critical for Web 2 users. And I don't know if we have to use the terms, but they will appreciate that. And I think they do appreciate that ownership. But where it's been soured is the hype trains, the influencers that pump and dump the people who are disingenuous and the people who are only trying to capitalize on the greater full theory that some greater full is going to buy this for more money at a later date. And that has really heard our credibility as a business where a lot of us who are trying to provide that ownership experience to gamers and to gamers so that they can have a continuous journey in their gaming experience and actually create value that they can experience in the real world. It's very hard to decipher. And then you have the biggest games Axiophini and so forth. A lot of these weren't maybe built with the longest term model we saw with like the NBA Top Shot and so forth and Crypto Kitties, the oversaturation of game mechanics without a burning mechanism without a way to remove those assets from an ecosystem will eventually lead to the elimination of all value in your ecosystem. And so you know, it's a very, very hard thing to tackle and let alone creating the infrastructure for that. And Beamable is the greatest infrastructure layer for Web 3 gamers that exist today. Forte, a number of these other businesses have gone after the same problem, but you've been building games for a long time. And you have been building this infrastructure for Web 2 gamers and the fact that you were able to implement smart contracts and autonomous settlements and ownership in true ownership for players was the perfect transition. And now game developers can build the exact same way they build in Web 2, but build with that player owned gaming mentality is what and that's our digital subsidiary of Pog is player owned gaming and what we believe in completely. So it will take time, but there are companies that will do it. And that's why I believe the Pog brand is so amazing because we've already had 35 years, 60 years of a brand development. We already have a quarter of a billion people who recognize this brand worldwide. And so we create this gaming experience that people are already used to gambling. They're already used to play your own ownership. They're already used to collectibility. And so all of these like user behaviors are already built into our business. And now we get to just build that experience digitally. So I'm very, very excited to see how this is all, you know, adopted in the as we roll out, but beamable is given us the greatest shot at capturing that massive layer of users who

Unknown: aren't digital native yet. So yeah, thanks for the very kind words about beamable.

Jon Radoff: We try to help never stop. We try to step in and back around and just help get people to market with a game that's fun to play by allowing you to focus on the fun. Like I'd love to spend a little bit of time on that just in the pure game development journey. You put just some of the

Unknown: a lot of the complexity out of Web 3, which is, you know, the economies themselves are a complex part

Jon Radoff: of building these kind of games. But what has been important for you as a game developer, like what have you learned in that journey that you could pass on to other game developers even, you know, let's just start generally whether whether or not they're building a Web 3 game. What are your what's your advice to anyone who's going to start a studio or a game project today?

Guest: And that's so hard. And I just realized I didn't touch on the blockchains that you'd ask. So maybe we go back to that question. You know, game development is extremely hard. And it starts when I was at Unity. The difference between a Unity engineer and a Unity developer is extremely vast. The engineer who's building the shaders and the engine and all of the things that the game developer is utilizing to create that experience. Those skill sets are completely different. You might not be a visionary or an imaginative person that's creative and can create games. But you might be the engineering mentality who creates that fundamental underpin that those game developers rely on. And you might have a great idea for a game. But if you don't have the infrastructure, there's never it's never coming to market and it will never scale. And so it is, that's why we were able to create this hyper casual game within three months of going after it, utilizing fiber developers and then to create like the very basic mechanics and then, you know, giving it to our Unity engineers who could really make it something. And still, we could never bring that to the blockchain. It took us three and a half years to get an iteration out. And it took you guys to be able to actually create that. So I think as hard as it is and as unsexy as it, you have to align your creativity with the infrastructure that you have at your fingertips. You almost have to be a very, very tech-centric person to understand how you could express your game in the communication language or the infrastructure you have. And so, me as a person who did not code a ton, I was my experience was in building out the engineering teams working with VCs, VPs and so forth to scale their departments. I wasn't, I'm not an in-depth coder. And I didn't necessarily know how hard all of these pieces were. If you asked my co-founder, Michael, and even Ali, your co-founder, how did you, you know, like, how did the experience go? It was me always being like, I love this idea. Let's go do this. And then being like, well, dude, you have no idea how we can implement that. That is extremely heavy lifting. And so, it's easy to get really frustrated. It's easy to get deflated because going from a V1 or a V0 prototype all the way to an actual publicly playable game is a much longer experience than, then maybe a lot of us realize, flappy birds and a lot of these other games that were hyper casual could come out quickly because there's not a lot that has to go into it. But to build a real game that scales like what we've built, it is very hard and you have to have the right partners and you have to have the right buy-in from those partners. And if it wasn't for Mad at Solana Labs, we never would have met Bimable. If it wasn't for Bimable, we never would have gotten to where we are now. And what we have now, I really believe, could be the staple for what Web 3 Gaming is, the Marvel Snap or the Pokemon Go of the Web 3 Space. So, it's not inspiring. It's not sexy, probably, but I do believe that, you know, if you have a great idea, then the right people will wrap around that. Your team, we only had an idea. We didn't have the infrastructure, but you guys really saw the vision. You saw what was possible and you put so much resource behind what we were doing because you saw the vision. And even at points where we weren't able to compensate you for the efforts, you guys donated and dug in in so many different aspects to where we really have something that can, I think, cross those boundaries that Dan is talking about.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Well, again, thanks for those really kind words. I hope that there are some game developers out there who are listening. And if you're building a Web 3 game, we can certainly help. If you're building a Web 2 game, by the way, we help as well. Most our customers are Web 2. So, we're totally blockchain agnostic. If you want to build an on-chain game, we support about 10 chains. So, one of the things Kyler experienced with us is if as you evolve with your game or your studio or your business and you find it's necessary to shift your thinking about what chain you want to be on, we really future-proof that decision in that you can move around without a lot of kind of

Unknown: legacy tech tie-ins that stuck on one thing. Same for Web 2, by the way, Web 2 is just, you don't

Jon Radoff: have to have a chain. And if you want to change around many of the technologies, we just make that a much more fluid system, login systems, all this stuff that comes up. Dan kind of shot back with, hey, the .com bubble happened too, but it didn't stop the genuine use cases either. This isn't a

Unknown: defend blockchain live stream. It's a game development about Kyler's project. So, I think we'll

Jon Radoff: get back in a moment to some of those different chains you worked with and what you learned along the way. But just one comment, Dan, is it's actually not at all true. There's now trillions of transactions of stablecoins, for example, happening on smart contract chains. In fact, the stablecoin transactions on chain have now exceeded Visa Mastercard. So, really significant use case right there that is in fact revolutionizing the financial industries. A lot of the big revolution at this point has happened in infrastructure layers like that that are kind of more of the plumbing layer. A lot of the blockchains in terms of their suitability for game applications that are very high speed, micro transactions, small transactions. Really, we're only two or three years in to even there being blockchains that support that. Because before then, we had a lot of gas fees and you had to be dealing with very large transactions. And finality was slow. You could have quit the game by the time you get the item in your wallet. So, there's a lot of things that were certainly holding up the technology because it wasn't performant and it wasn't fast and it wasn't inexpensive to use. All of which has become more or less a solved problem in the last couple of years, even the last year in particular. So, you know, those aspects opened up more use cases just as stablecoins became a really, really dominant use case within the financial ecosystem. But Kyler, what have you discovered about some of the chains you've worked with along the way? Like, and you know, feel free to throw a punch or pull a punch at appropriate, but like, you are here to help game developers. So, you know, help game developers maybe think about how they select a chain. Yeah, I have so many questions about it actually. Let's just start with your journey

Unknown: and then maybe I'd love to shift the conversation to rather than like, pimp a particular chain or throw

Jon Radoff: any chain under the bus. Like, let's help game developers think through what is important when they do select a chain. But start with your journey. I love that. When you try some other things, you're going somewhere else. Yeah. What's the journey looked like? You know, and we have never

Guest: gotten a Web 3 grant to build anywhere. We have literally only gone there for technical reasons and maybe expanded for limitations. So, our whole journey started on Solana. We absolutely fast iteration, a lot of support through our co-founder met a tremendous amount of wonderful companies and brands. And at the 2021-2022 vibe, Solana was just like coming into their wave and there were a lot of fun NFT projects and a lot of great people to collaborate with the ideas were heavy and it was working great. So, we created a game, launched on Solana, saw that playable, you know, you can wager your pogs. It works. It's phenomenal experience. And we could have absolutely just stayed there on Solana. But once we realized, and then, you know, the number of collectors, though, the the serious NFT collectors at that time were on Ethereum. They they had it was every day a new major influencer, a new major NFT collector would move to Solana and it'd be big news. And so, creating a native collection for Ethereum was a natural thing. And the mint was so popular, it broke our site. There was issues with phantom and metamask and, you know, we had we had some problems and we didn't know how to handle that. We should just ponsument. But anyways, we're on Ethereum. And then there was some opportunities where we could token gate merchandise on our shop. So, we used Ethereum and manifold and through those technologies because at that time Ethereum had far more utilities created for them than Solana did. So, the ability for us to token gate a Shopify product was there with with Ethereum. And so people could use their NFT, claim their their thing. And, you know, the database would show that that NFT had claimed its thing on Shopify. And so, that was awesome. And then Bitcoin ordinals came along. And so, we launched an ordinal. We were the first brand to ever launch an ordinal 160,000 or 126,000. And that was a community led project. And, and it is probably one of our highest floor collections to date. And it's very historic and absolutely something we're proud of. And then we had to figure out where is the best place for us to build our game. And we had a relationship with a company called Data Labs. And Theta Network had all of these different entertainment moguls from Sony and Samsung and CAA and these relationships in Hollywood, which we wanted to create this not just PogTV, but this gaming access element. And they had some really interesting tech around IP protection and token gated video. And we wanted to take advantage of that. The limitations of that were that the infrastructure for gaming wasn't created. We had a not so great outcome with one of the executives at the company. A lot of mistrust in how they handled our coin. But still, every single other person we absolutely love. And, and they blossomed our company and our community tremendously. And so, every single time we've gone to a new chain, there has been this explosion of community. And there are people who are native to their chain. They're passionate about their chain and they want to be able to access those collectibles of their childhood on their chain. And so for a brand like Pog, just like we're in Barbie and we're in Disney and we're in NHL and everywhere else, we can be on all of these different chains. We get a request every single day to come do a new chain. And kind of we, as we're expanding this game and launching it into production, unfortunately, our public test net or our public network, Pog chain on theta labs on theta network was not viable. You still can't see your NFTs on their floor. There isn't an explorer. There's a number of different things that would have been just as hard to build as the game if we were trying to use that chain. And so we started to search again for a chain to launch the full version. We even bridged to base being that like Coinbase is the first onboard ramp for web 3 for users who've never collected and the ability to transition directly from a Coinbase wallet to collecting Pogs is still available. By the coin, we left our coin, we've bridged it to every chain we've been on, but the high gas fees for base even wouldn't allow us to run the game the way that we've created it. And so we had to keep looking. We met with a number of different blockchains from B3 to scale to abstract and and and others. And it just the one we landed on was ape chain. And ape chain has something unique. They have a 30 to 45 year old core demographic that is the majority of people on that chain and they are true, true collectors. They've gone through the $500,000 NFT floor all the way down to the $8,000 NFT floor. And they those that are still there believe in collectability. They believe in what is being created on ape chain. And and so with Bimable and Pog and partnership with Arbitram and ape chain were super excited about launching this game to real collectors. But what Bimable and Pog have created is something that new users will never see the web 3th side. The the core Web 3 users can transition it. They can transfer their assets that they win in games to their Meta Mask and sell them on Magic Eden. But for those that you know, just want to play the game and collect maybe they'll collect their Starbucks Pog and they'll be able to get their you know discounted Starbucks. We have these golden slammers where you'll flip a golden slammer inside of the game and you'll be able to redeem it for a 24 karat gold slammer from your favorite different brands. And there's all this utility hidden inside of this game. And then as we transition to maybe Meta Versus we have the other side building on ape chain and the opportunity for us to hide collectibles there and the gaming experiences. Not to mention we have a number of other games. That doesn't mean that that that our opportunity to support Solana in our arcade isn't there because it's already wired up through Bimable. There's a number of different things that we can do long term. But that is kind of the perfect home for us to launch this game. There's not as many wallets or liquidity as on Solana. But that's okay because the people that are there we believe are full collectors. They're nostalgic. They have experienced the Pog craze already and so it's easy to capture all of those folks with the nostalgic feel and then we can expand from

Jon Radoff: there. All right so we got an important collection question from the audience speaking of collectibility. I think I know the answer. Naksu says is that a skateboard collection? I think we

Guest: know the answer is it's snowboards right? These are our skateboards. So yeah actually it's because you're talking about you being a pro snowboarder. That's true. So luckily through a lot of my experiences in LA and through athletics I was able to meet some really great people. And Nijie Houston, probably one of the greatest skaters of all time. He's our executive marketing director. He's a partner and has helped create a program where we have a bunch of autographed skateboards from his new collections, his new skateboard company including like this one signed from his Olympic first Olympics 2021 I think. And just really really cool and you can win these actually in the Pog arcade and in the Pog hub. You'll win these Pogs and you'll burn them and redeem these autographed skateboards. But we just Pog is so universal that a lot of folks even Napoleon Dynamite has launched his own on either his launch his own collection on Pogs and you can play them in the arcade. So yes that is a skateboard collection. We have five times this many in the warehouse ready for anybody who is active in the game. That's amazing. Well that also proves that I don't know

Jon Radoff: anything about snowboards either for me to. But on a skier so I'm back to skiing. It's easier.

Guest: Difference between snowboarding after a day of snowboarding. All you can think about is a hot tub and bed after skiing. I'm ready to go dance. I'm ready for a steak dinner. I'm ready to go have some fun and I've had a great time on the slope. So I feel yeah. All right. Well we got to back to

Jon Radoff: collecting from H chain and you thought that that's where there's this concentration of like the true collectors as you put it. So that's right for your game. But like let's talk to the Web 3 game developers out there for a moment. What are some of the criteria that everybody should consider in partnering with a particular chain? And by the way I think it probably varies according to your particular case, right? Like you've actually identified one which is where sort of where does the liquidity on that network come from and who are the people who are right there on that chain with wallets with assets where they can trade. And for you it was a demographic crossover with people that were really into collecting which makes a lot of sense for everything that you see in the room behind you and and Pogs and everything you're trying to do at the game. What are some of

Unknown: those other criteria that you look at both composition of the people using the network, the

Jon Radoff: technicals of the network, the people that you work with at the network, grant funding,

Unknown: how important does that today like all that stuff? You know it really exactly comes down to the

Guest: game you're building. I think speed of transactions and cost of transactions is probably the number one barrier for most game developers. Are you building a game that's going to have a high volume of transactions on chain? If so you're going to need to find something that is massively scalable like a salana or you know hyper EVM or even scale it sounds like and especially ape chain for us. But there's a number of other chains out there that may be able to offer that and for us you know we've just picked the partners like salana and ape chain and those have been great for us. But if you're trying to hold a high floor price and have exclusivity on your games like maybe you're dropping characters that are going to be enhanced and you want them to hold as much value as possible across all of those supplies maybe in a theory you know or even though you're willing to have your players pay higher gas fees. You know that the value of those may stay over longer periods whereas like when you see a salana the transactions are so easy and so quick that a lot of these folks will quote unquote flip their assets for small profits on these chains because there is no demand for a higher gas fee. And then same thing if like you're building a Bitcoin game like we did old days those are the highest transaction fees but they also are the highest stable value where you're actually feels like playing with digital gold. So you have to figure out where on the value chain are your assets going to be held and how are your players going to value those do you want which tier do you want and and for a lot of us who are trying to create multiplayer games or high number of user games you're probably going to pick a hyper fast you know massively scalable chain like a salana or an ape chain abstract arbitrage so forth.

Jon Radoff: All right we this is the most fun conversation ever in terms of the non-secwitters that keep coming up in collection. Jay surfer wants to know do you have Nijah Shukh collection?

Guest: I do have a Nijah Shukh collection in the garage. I was wondering if I was wearing them now. For a long time there were the only shoe that I skated in but Nijah has the perfect literally the perfect technique. He uses the exact part of his toe when he awli's and when he kick flips. He's been doing it since he was tiny and so he had to have the perfect techniques as he grew up and I don't have that technique and so the part of the shoe that is like built for allying and for kick flips is not where I needed to be so I would be leaving blood stains on my skateboard after one or two sessions and you probably find my DNA laying across LA streets because I was into it man and I actually have a massive callus on the top of my left toe like from allying without any leather or shoe there because I just could not I didn't want to skate anything but not dude you got to realize like when we were skating back in 20 like 1998 2005 around there when I was a kid I grew up in high school. Nijah was like 10 years old, 7 to 10 12 years old and he was the biggest phenomenon we'd ever seen like Bash and Salabonzi with flip came out later but Nijah was winning like the Tampa and the Tampa Pro at the age like doing kick with back lips that we'd never seen before so I could go crazy on why Nijah is like the goat and why I'm so lucky I feel lucky to have partnered with him but yeah dude I have probably have like 10 to 12 different pairs of Nijah shoes and I've skated through another like 5 to 10 so great

Jon Radoff: question bro. Do you have a favorite object in that worm there behind you or am I asking you to

Guest: choose your favorite child? Dude that is so hard I probably would have to boil it down to like two or three favorite objects like on the pog side I love this like Donkey Kong thing and the Marvel stuff on my personal like this Nijah skateboard his last deck he ever did with element he signed it for me and then he's obviously I've got to sign US skateboard but then these are probably realistically my very favorite items these are the exact size of the 90 slammers exactly but they're gold and they're collector and they're for the adults and even the kids love them because they're like so oh dude you hit it just barely in the whole stack flip um but this is like the brands that we meet with are so interested in the collectibility uh what's so unique about pog is that we can brush off your old IP put it on a slamer or on a set of pogs and it has a whole revitalized meaning to 30 to 45 year olds and comes right back into collectibility so um those are like this dish of gold slammers is is probably my favorite thing. All right there we go. All right

Jon Radoff: that back to um the world of chains so because I think this is a really helpful part for your game developers. You talked about the technicals liquidity access to the right kind of user much earlier you you touched upon another element that seems critical for who you partner with as well which is just the people on that team and like they're and like how aware are they of the part of the market that you're going after. That is the most

Guest: critical piece. We have only we've made it a rule to only work with people who remember the pog brand and it's not because we're gating or because we want to be agious in any way it's because if you didn't experience pogs in the 90s it's very likely you don't understand how much it means to us. This was the core collectible for a whole generation and if you ask somebody who's you know 30 to 45 if they collected pogs you're a 90% chance that yes they collect pogs it happens in spaces every single day happens everywhere I go anytime I talk to people I love pogs I had pogs and going to my mom's house to get them out of the club you know and it it is so critical to work with people who understand your mission who understand your brand who understand your vision and believe in that exact same thing because with Ali and Trapper and you John you you guys really understood it and Ali played these and collected these as a kid just the way Matzor did over at Solana it is everything to pick people to work with who know what you're doing believe in what you're doing and value what you're doing because every single time that we've worked with somebody who doesn't know pogs one they don't give us the respect as a brand that it deserves they have to go read up on it they call them pigs or pogs or or paws or whatever like they if you missed if you type of pogs or say it wrong like instantly we know like you didn't grow up with this this isn't your core thing but at any brand Sony music you know all these great places like now those of the people who are starting to become the decision makers and the founders of these great companies and they are so excited about pogs and obviously there's people who are older than 45 who remember the brand who understand the craze who knew it and they are like yes dude that totally makes sense even still if you had pogs in your hand if you had these little tubes if you had collectables then it was your childhood for a number of years and that passion of collecting that early element of like this was our currency this was made directly for us as kids and nobody else understands it but on the playground it could get you a bike the right slamer could get you a game boy right like it it was crazy what we were trading for these things and so just in our experience picking the right people who know what you're doing and believe in what you're doing has been absolutely critical and that starts at your founder level that starts at your partnership level and it expands into your customer level on salana we're we're a small fish in a big pond and we know that there's a core demographic of people who love pogs but there's also the younger demographic absolutely could give a shit about pogs don't know what the hell it is are confused whenever they see us and and that just it didn't it wasn't where we needed to be at that time we'll come back to that essentially but ape chain it it is almost like every person we meet is like I had pogs I love pogs and though it's a smaller chain and an early new chain it just the feeling and that vibe is so much different we got it when it first came into the space on salana faded a little bit because of kind of the demographic or or the way that NFTs had gone on salana and we expanded but I really think we found the perfect home with ape chain and now we can always expand and bring more people into the arcade through different chains but as a core user-based core customer-based for this new game this new collectibles experience they they they absolutely already have the the user behavior because they remember and experienced our brand previously

Jon Radoff: so for us on with game with the game developer side of what we're doing at BMable we support like 10 different chains it's totally agnostic and and we just find that every developer chooses a chain that's right for them and we just want to enable them all we often are aware of what kinds of projects a particular team is looking for what one comment on that is like in addition to the 10 that we support interacted I think with most of them at this point at some level and it's always astonishing to me how so many chains want to target games as a target application because they think of it as just hey this is a way to drive transaction volume and a lot of the ways chains look at their value creation is just drive transactions drive transactions that's how we're gonna actually increase our own value um despite going after games it's kind of shocking sometimes how little they actually understand about games sometimes it's

Unknown: finance bro idea of like what a game should be is one side our experience with salon has been

Jon Radoff: been great through the whole experience we are launching our deep pen and salon for us of course the deep inside is a capability for game developers it is in itself a game and we were attracted almost in a similar way that you were for why you're going to ape chain for collectibles there's a massive concentration of deep in projects on salon announced so helium is there you know for example probably the best known of them at all they're like this Wi-Fi network where you can earn helium token by running a Wi-Fi router um so yeah many other really really great projects and salon as well for that so we went there because that's where a lot of the people who care about deep in also are and in addition to that a lot of tech ecosystem presence so a lot of things we could tap into very readily that would apply to our own deep in launch and for those who aren't familiar with it we're

Unknown: taking the game server technology that has helped Kyler build the game at Pog Digital we are taking

Jon Radoff: that game server and basically creating a community on network around it so it's kind of like a Airbnb but for game servers so we want to own those game servers the community will own and operate those game servers and be able to earn rewards from from operating them what is what is your own experience of like that game expertise like clearly it's pretty good at both Salana and ape chain frankly like they they have people that have worked in game tech or game industry for a long time you probably talked to a lot of these other guys right like they want games for the financial

Guest: metrics they think it'll bring it's crazy man new chains will launch and they're like oh we want this game as an anchor game and then they find out that like we didn't take a massive investment from VCs and that we don't have you know $100 million to throw at their chain development and they're like oh yeah it's probably not a good fit it's it's it is so disingenuous to see so many of these chains just like try and you know bring bring that just so that they can launch their chain right it and and it hurts it's it's recently with you guys we got into a conversation with a chain that we were interested in three you know like being able and pog we're like hey maybe this is the place where we should launch it and they had hit us up for months like hey we want you to be and then we told them like look dude like we've I have bootstacked this from my Rivian IPO equity funds that I cashed out right away and put it all in here and so like and then they're not ready to grow with you they're not ready to expand but Solana Solana saw pogs and Matzorg and gave us everything we could have asked for front row seating at all of these events made make sure that we had the introductions and got us to where we are essentially and so as much as like we're launching our game on ape chain our founding pogs are on Solana you know like you still can stay you'll be able to stake those for the pog coin that you can then bridge to any of the five chains so it it has been wonderful and some conversations horrible right and and it does come down to again like to people understand your value do they understand your vision do they understand what you're bringing to the table Solana and ape chain really did and some of the other other chains base really did some of these other chains just wanted us because they saw 200 million collectors globally they saw you know like through you guys we have you have like three and a half million accounts ready to play our game when it launches and people see these numbers then they just start frothy and they're like oh my god I want it but then they find out oh there's some heavy lifting that we might have to do or we might have to provide some support or we might have to get our hands dirty and it's like oh it's not just as easy as like bringing your game and getting three and a half million accounts my mom

Unknown: you know I'll go off in a tangent really quick my mom used to read me this book and it was like a

Guest: hen and her baby were gonna bake bread and so they had to go like harvest the gray and they had to break it down they had to make the flower they had to roll the dough and they had to like you know bake it and they had to do all of these things along the way and every step of the process they would ask hey do you want to help us hey do you want to help us you want to help us and every single farm animal was like no no take too much time and doing my thing and all of a sudden the bed is bread is break and it smells so good and it's out there and every single farm animal that was like asked if they would help and said no is it standing in line with their hands out ready to get some

Unknown: bread and that mother hen was just like pretty much fuck you like there is no way you're getting to taste

Guest: this delicious like concoction that we and and that's how I feel about Pog in in so many ways I really think what we're about to release is something that scales far beyond web 3 has the best opportunity to bring these web to folks I'm going to Philippine blockchain week I was invited by the founder of bivot to come out and launch this coin into the Philippines because the Philippines were our third biggest market and there's such demand for Pog there that like YGG will likely be ready to play this game as it comes out and I promise you if we become one of the top games in the world for web 3 it will be very it will be all because of our partnerships with you and with Solana and ape chain and all of the folks who have helped us along the way and those people that come with their hands out come to our chain hey can we create collectibles with you can we do all these things I remember every single DM every single conversation every person who faded us after the the initial call or who like we're got to the finish line on creating collectibles and they're like I just ghosted us or whatever it doesn't happen but I remember every single person they had and they've already started to come back asking for attention asking for partnership so that long way of being said like go where you wanted grow where you're at watered and you know still old saying like only stay where you're valued if people don't value what you're bringing to the table there's no reason for you to fight and in Solana in web 3 we came in as a brand and at that time they had just been rugged by dozens of brands prior and so a lot of people were had sour taste on their lips but a lot of people loved Pogs and so it was like fighting henna wins the long way and and last thing I would say as a founder the amount of information and my capacity and my understanding of the space and my love for it has grown so much I can take 900 times more you know conflict flood you want to throw negativity at me and I'll use it as a stepping stone to get better and to make our project better whereas in the very beginning of Solana days people would even make one small critical remark and I just spent a year and a half trying to get this out and I took offense to every little negativity and I turned a lot of people off and I think for founder if you're coming into the space and you're looking for attention don't come in beating your chest saying I've got the brand or I've got this or this is my experience people want to know like why are you here how are you going to contribute to this space what do you have in store for them and that's they don't want to know what your credentials are and I led with like look our teams amazing look our IP's amazing trust us jump on like we're the biggest in the baddest and it was not the right way to go about it I would do so many things differently to optimize and cultivate those relationships but I think we're in a place where you know knowing what I know now it's happening how I want it to but if you're watching this and I offended you I

Unknown: apologize we've got Huckleberry NFT with the comment that he's a little nostalgic remembering

Jon Radoff: playing pog during his childhood I think you're you got some of your customers right here

Guest: that's why we do it John you know like when we announced that eight partnership the comments have been flooding and nonstop and we're lucky that they have such a big platform that they can showcase pogs and you know what we're bringing with you guys is going to blow them away and gives them all an opportunity to mix their IP's and be discovered it's it really is such a great system but you know this is the exact reason we're doing it right in a moment we're going to be

Jon Radoff: given that secret word out by the way so if you've been through this waiting for this it's coming up really soon one more fun question Jair surfer wants to know Tony Hawk I don't know if you're asking if you've skated with him or if you haven't one of his skates have skate with Tony Hawk I my first

Guest: boards were bird house I had like a Willie Santos skateboard which was a bird house I absolutely Tony Hawk's the goat Tony I've never met him I have literally no affiliation with him I would love to make pogs with him hit up Activision John for me let him know yeah let's make that happen oh good okay well if you can introduce me I would love to I would love to meet him I don't know

Jon Radoff: Jair surfer you know I'm gonna scan the Fox Lambers would go higher so you you touched on something about earlier but it was actually discovery for beamable as well which is as we've been growing this massive community for our own deep-in launch we're launching a token in a few months through the foundation to support this whole community infrastructure project the deep-in project we're doing we started accumulating these millions of people in the community and then we started scratching our head and thinking well is there something else we can do with this I mean they're after an air drop and they're helping us kind of amplify signal and we're super grateful for everyone participating in that could they amplify the signal for some of our customers because that's a virtuous cycle if we can kind of harness that community not only to promote ourselves but to promote the games on top of beamable then guess what that's good for our business that's good for all of our customers and we all kind of grow together so we did a few experiments recently where we channeled that fire hose of a community towards some of the games being built on us and you are one of those Kyler can you just share that experience like

Guest: what happened? Dude I'm getting chills honestly because you guys helped in so many ways that I'll never really fully be able to tell the story we've gone through some dark days where we've run out of money and where you know the game wasn't ready and beamable stepped in and donated their time and then you raised this massive round and I was able to like talk with some of your investors beforehand and share my experience which was such an honor because this really has changed our business and thus changed my life my career in a sense and when you were at GDC and just that the very beginning of kind of like maybe the very first iteration of this questing for companies or for your you know customers we were lucky to be that and within four days of that GDC announcement and first quest we had 135,000 people collect a pog inside of our arcade and it was not easy you had to create account you had to register you had to do a bunch of different things to jump through the hoops now all of a sudden we went from like you know a hundred people playing our beta to a hundred and thirty five people ready and asking for more where do I buy more pogs where do I get more content how do I get more involved and that was so early on our account went from like 55,000 to three hundred and fifty thousand followers these people weren't just checking a box like okay I signed up for game they still engage no these are people who are like yeah literally real customers who are trying to be a part of pogs and that was what two months ago now three and a half million people we haven't done it again because like as this game opens and as we open the flood gates it's going to be crazy we will be the single I think John you and I will be responsible for the single biggest onboarding into ape chain that has ever happened we will be the reason I mean

Jon Radoff: it don't quote me on that but we need to get someone from ape chain on this stream by the way so if you're watching from ape chain and we know who you are we're going to find you but if you're watching right now ping the first in telegram you know where I am we'll get you on the stream because we'd love to have you on to just talk about what you're doing and other projects like islands

Guest: we'll have the chief strategy officer for ape chain joining in here with you one of these days

Jon Radoff: all right i'm i'm we're running down on the clock here i've got to give it i think we have to

Unknown: give the word out at this point right Oscar because you only have two minutes to enter it into the

Jon Radoff: system yep it's collect c-o-l-l-e-c-t you might have been able to even guess that word coming away so if you guessed it before we put it up more power to you we should give you ten x or something but go get your bnb points and play pog by the way and next time we do a big community activation for one of the games on the platform hope you'll check it out the one thing you know from beamable is everyone building on beamable they're like a real game they're not just like some kind of NFT flip like they're building games with mechanics and cool content like no one chooses beamable because you're gonna just build like a smart contract in a in a web game like you're on us because you've got multiplayer and interesting things and a meta and asynchronous functionality and met or matchmaking i mean it could be any number of those things that's just hard of what we do but collect c-o-l-l-e-c-t it's along the bottom there english is not your first language just look at those letters copy it in go claim your points all right we're at the top of the hour in the dwindling moments here coller what would you like to share we've got people in the beamable community we've got web three game developers here too we've got some of our other

Unknown: customers hanging out trying to learn what you're working on i would say jump in like we we have

Guest: our own pog hub where we're giving away a mutant ape yacht club where we've got hundreds of thousands of dollars in coins eight coin pog coins available nfts from salana ordinals ethereum nfts and so forth we've put together a prize pool of about quarter million dollars available for people to just for free integrate and and rip packs but get ready for our game powered by beamable we couldn't be more proud of the partnership and you know more honored by what you guys have put into this allie will you know be a namesake for my next child and john maybe you'll have to be the godfather uh and trapper can uh trapper is going to be the coolest uncle ever uh the the fishing uncle so you know i just i couldn't say more uh nice things about or i could go on forever uh but i couldn't say enough nice things about you guys uh as partners and innovators and it's so cool to see what you're doing on salana all of the successes absolutely uh deserved and more um so thank you for everything you've done for us with us and we are so excited for the next few

Jon Radoff: years building with you thank you so much and and downies comment here as he's waiting for beamable pog merch i don't we're we're not really cool enough to be you are you're already on a pod beard

Guest: we got you on a pod uh let me see if i can find it real quick hold on

Jon Radoff: spoke to see he's like let me go through my collection of pods

Guest: i'm just gonna make a mess because i love you all so much uh yes if you right here

Unknown: if you look here is your logo right are you probably can't see it uh i'll have to send you one

Guest: john but yeah you're uh you've got your own pogs you're on a pod you're already there all right but we need some hoodies we probably need a pod uh beamable hoodie

Jon Radoff: we definitely need a pod beamable hoodie let's make that happen i'm in okay all right thank you so

Unknown: much thank you for all of you who tuned in today i hope all of you had opportunity to

Jon Radoff: intercollect into the beamable.network hub if you haven't signed up for our hub by the way don't wait like we've been doing this for the last week we're doing giveaway codes and this is a big part of what we want to do is just keep engaging our community not just for like farm the air drop but like get a chance to try out new games register for things see cool things that no one else has known about yet like and the community out there has been amazing for this like i've never seen a community activate the way the beamable one has so we're gonna keep doing this and it's not gonna stop at tge either like it's not like hey we did tge we're done cool community activations no now we realize that we've got this superpower that we're gonna keep deploying and this is gonna go on well into the future because it's something that we can do for kyler and companies like pog that i just haven't seen anyone else do like a hundred thousand signups for your game like anyone who's in game development knows like that is not easy at all short of like i don't know i hate to say it like the last time i saw that was when i was featured in like apples app store take to get games like in their in their feature page and features aren't even really a thing anymore like they mess that up like so that doesn't work that great anymore i'm talking about like 10 years ago when they feature things it was actually really good to have so hope we can keep doing it we will keep doing it so but again thanks for tuning in thanks kyler oscar thanks for keeping this shit together even though i don't know i hope you've been just spamming stream yard every minute with like that is we're a camera control platform that that streams like it's one of like two things you just need to get right uh you just lost the customer i'm going back to google now we're gonna stick with we we haven't abandoned you yet stream stream yard we like you uh but uh yeah just fix it we'll be we'll be even happier all right next time it's gonna be fixed that's my sense that i have an intuition about it so

Unknown: oh you just muted you just muted yourself john

Jon Radoff: i don't know i did not touch the mute button i did not touch it but i just

Unknown: thanks for being here until next time everybody thanks guys