Web3 Game Development Livestream

Jon Radoff: Hey everybody, welcome back again to the Web 3 game development live stream. We are here this morning, my time, but we're global. We are in Asia, we're in the Middle East, we're in Europe, we're on the West Coast, we're everywhere. We picked this time to try to reach everybody. But what we're going to be talking about today is design development for people who are designing and developing Web 3 games. So on this show, we talk about what goes into making a real game in this ecosystem. And that includes the game itself, as well as those economic components about tokens and whatnot. So my name is Jon Radoff, I'm the CEO of a company called Bemable. We build game infrastructure. I talked to tons of game studios all day long, both Web 2 and Web 3. I'm joined by my co-host Jack. Hey, Jack, give yourself a quick intro here.

Guest: Thanks, Ron. I'm a founder of an advisor firm called Winwin. We advise games on tokenomics, token, go to market, very much token market partners to game founders. Very excited to be here.

Jon Radoff: Awesome. We are accompanied by our intrepid producer Oscar, who's going to keep things moving here. He's going to watch all the comments on all of the different channels that we're on. We're on Facebook, we're on X, we're on LinkedIn, we're on YouTube. So we're broadcasting on all of those channels. You can post comments and any of them will pay attention to it. Because the most important thing for this show is that it isn't just me and Jack and our guests talking at you. It's you participating in this conversation. You can actually join in. So in addition to the comments, if you want to join the stage, you think you have something to add, you've got a video camera, then Oscar will bring you right on stage. So let us know that you have something to add and we'll send you a Streamyard link. You can join in the conversation. This is your show, not our show. So I want to make that super clear. This is about the community. Hey, we're joined today by David, our first special guest on Web 3 game development livestream. David introduced yourself. Tell us briefly kind of your background. We're going to get to your project in a moment, but let's just kind of start there. Like why join us today on Web 3 game development livestream?

Guest: Yeah, me first off, thanks don't for having me. I'm a good friend of Jack and it's really exciting to be here at the start of this podcast. Definitely we need more, more better space for game developers here in Web 3. So about me, I'm based in Europe, living here in Sweden, grew up all over Europe, went to film school in the US, worked in Hollywood a few years, ended up in China kind of randomly and that's when I got into gaming. So I've been making games for over 10 years now. Mostly Facebook games, a few PC games. My biggest game probably was Crusader Kings that I worked on here in Sweden. And yeah, got into crypto in 2017. First as a retail trader, once I heard in detail about Bitcoin and then figured out how it worked, I was just sold. And then the summer 2017 was spent trading a lot of different stuff and really just enjoying it. And pretty quickly because I was already a game dev, I felt, well, we have to combine this with gaming. The gaming is the future of entertainment, crypto is the future of finance, gaming has a finance element into it. And we've been building Web 3 games since 2017. 2018 I could say is when we officially started the company. And yeah, I'll be talking more about our key game blocklers soon, but I'm very happy to

Unknown: be here. Nice.

Jon Radoff: Okay, David, we're going to definitely talk about your project. We want to learn all about it. But maybe let's spend a little bit of time though, kind of catching up with the last week of what's been going on in the blockchain land in terms of game development specifically. So we keep seeing more TGEs. What's happening there, Jack? Like what's your thoughts?

Guest: Yeah, I think the most recent one this week has been the launch of B3. It's fun to have David here. David's project is actually on base. He has a token on, David, you got a token on Coinbase as well. B3 for those unaware is essentially the gaming vertical specific app chain on base. They launched the token this week. It has been one of the best performers that we've seen in the last few weeks. Gaming has been in this log period where every single gaming launch just doesn't capture any interest. But this one in particular has been very performing very, very well. Dave, I don't know what your experience is like with Coinbase. What do you think about B3, the team over there? Yeah, I mean, B3, I've known of the team for a long time. Darryl, who's, I don't know if he's a founder or one of the co-founders. I think there are a few founders. Great guy who used to lead the gaming ecosystem at Coinbase. We obviously do have a relationship with Coinbase. We're one of the main games on there. We were listed on Coinbase. So we've been working with a lot of different people in the Coinbase ecosystem for many years. Darryl was always a great guy, really supportive of game projects building on base. And yeah, it was kind of a surprise when he left Coinbase. I think it was last year or maybe it was even two years ago. And announced the 20, I think it was 21 to $25 million their raise. Coinbase Ventures was in the round. I know Hashed was in the round. Maybe we have a list of who was in the really top names. So I think it was always a selling point from the investors. They're really close to the Coinbase ecosystem. What I know about V3, we are partnered with them. We're listed on their store. There's actually trying to create the ML3 ecosystem directly tied to base. And I think in terms of the launch, it was a textbook launch. Launched on Bybit first, had good volume on Bybit, went down a bit, and then morning U.S. time, noon, new U.S. time, Coinbase, and else to launch. I think the reception was a bit mild at first and an overnight when Asia woke up is when it really took off. Jack, you know, you can go a bit deeper into the price action. All I can say is textbook launch, right? They did things really well and it's a solid project.

Jon Radoff: Can we bring up that chart again? Oscar, while we're talking about price.

Unknown: So, let's go look at chart.

Guest: I think if we're not going to spend time on every other token that's launched on the game in the last few weeks, but everything else has been incredibly underperforming. I mean, you think about 2024, there's a few different game token launches. What happens is a project that eventually gets listed on Coinbase, starts off, getting listed on whatever other exchanges. And then what is it David? They Coinbase usually launches the... If you've got Coinbase, listening, you usually get listed maybe 11. I think it's what? 11 a.m. ET when Coinbase actually in New York wakes up or something like that, right? Yeah, usually the first day of any token launch is going to be the day with the most volume, right? And so, as we had to coinbase listing, there's a lot of work coordinating when and how you're going to list on each exchange. The more Asia-focused exchanges like Biobits, KuKorn Gates, they will always prefer that you launch around 11 or 12 UTC time, which is late afternoon evening in Asia. Kind of start building volume there, gets the retail traders in there, and then a Coinbase obviously they're not going to start working at 3 a.m. or 6 a.m. Eastern time. So usually they're going to prefer something around midday, Asia time. That works out really well. You know, I mean, for our launch, we had about $10, $15 million in volume until we went on Coinbase and then we hit 40 million pretty soon after, right? I think the number looked pretty much crazier for B3, but you can see here that $400 million in volume almost $380. And I'm sure that about 10x, right, after they went on Coinbase. So it's usually a good model to start on these exchanges, kind of have some price discovery, and then we go into Coinbase and kind of go to the next level. I've had a lot of people in my network talking about the fact that this chart is like incredible. What's really interesting is I think there was some drama initially with the claims pages as well. There was B3 launched on Bybit. There were a series of adrops for users who were playing games in the B3 ecosystem like

Unknown: Go Gaming, Prime.

Guest: There was a bit of drama initially, but when your price actually goes up, it's always always helpful. I think what's really interesting on the top line though is Coinbase in the US obviously Post Trump has become much more aggressive in terms of listing main coins in January. Today B3 is representative of their gaming vertical. Oh, that's a lot of 7 days. Yeah, go to 7 days. I think that's the best. Just one there, right? Yeah, exactly. Do we have any insights on the size of their gaming, on their air drop to users?

Unknown: That's a great question. Okay.

Jon Radoff: I appreciate it. This opens up a lot of really interesting pieces though, because I think for game developers who are launching blockchain games and they're going to be on chain, there's two big pieces to that TGE, right? So one is what chain are you going to be on? I'd like to kind of peel back that question a little bit. And then there's all this whole question of like exchanges and who's most interested in

Unknown: gaming related tokens.

Jon Radoff: That's a whole other piece that is in addition to that. So I think it would be really informative for the developers out there to maybe dig into that a little bit. Let's start with chain selection first. So David, you're in development with a game. So first of all, why did we need another chain? There's been chain after chain, all of which have focused on being the quote unquote gaming chain over the last few years, everything from IMMX to now B3 base. We've got other non ERC20 kind of chains, like stuff like sweet, salana, all of that are also very focused on the gaming market. Like let's just start there.

Unknown: Like why was there a need for a new chain?

Jon Radoff: And also what should developers think about when choosing a chain? It used to be frankly, what chain gave you the biggest grant? Kind of got people to choose a chain. Grants aren't really a thing anymore. Like no one's getting big checks from any of these guys. So now we're bound down to fundamentals, right? Like what chain is actually going to be best to launch on. So take, run with that question, David.

Guest: No, this is a great topic and it is one that I have a lot of experience with. I mean, having started in 2018, we were all bootstrapped in the beginning, right? So the only funding we had in making was grants from chains. So definitely have a special place in my hard for grants. I do think they're an important thing for ecosystems to focus on. So I think there are three main considerations, right? When you're looking at a chain, first off is the tech, right? Like is it actually usable? Is it fast? Is it reliable? Is there enough wallet infrastructure on there? Basically, is it going to work with your game? And for the longest time in 2018, I could tell you the answer was no for all of those questions. There was nothing workable. Test nets would go down all the time. I mean, smart contracts were a very new thing. NFTs had just been invented, but there were none of that mass produced NFTs that we can see now. Or the ERC721C that gave at the limit break is developing. You know, there was none of that fancy NFTs stuff. It was just NFTs. And tokens, right? And we got into 2021, 2022, and just, I mean, since then, it's really exploded now. So I'd say now we're finally getting to a point where there is a lot of tech available. There are a lot of smart contracts available. There are a lot of smart wallets available. There's so many solutions that you can work with that the tech is mostly solved, right? Obviously, there's many ways to refine it, but you can now make a pretty smooth experience with a game that's tokenized. So not what's the other problem or what's the thing that you want from a chain? Why I'd say there's two things. One is users. You want a chain that already has users because something that we've experienced, having built, I mean, we built on over 15 chains at this point, and we're now building our own layer three. The biggest problem is we usually, as a game, have to bring users to the chain, right?

Unknown: And that's not really, I mean, there's a debate here, right?

Guest: Like our chains platforms, or are they, so, sorry, yeah, our devs like, sorry, our chains dev tools, or are they platform distribution platforms, right? I think the jury's still out and a few different chains are positioning themselves different ways. But essentially, I have always had the idea or the feeling that if a chain can't really bring you users, it's not necessarily the right chain for us. And then the third thing that you really need to consider is liquidity. Does the chain have liquidity? Are people trading on your chain on that chain? Are people holding assets on their chain? Is there a D5? So people can actually take loans on that chain to speculate in assets. So I think those are the three main things to consider. And grants do play a part, right? Because if you do offer grants, there's going to be more choices available.

Unknown: That said, I do think a lot of chains have made the mistake of offering small grants to too many devs.

Guest: And as we know, game development is really difficult. It takes a lot of time. And a $50,000 to $100,000 grant isn't going to produce a game. So it just ends up being a lot of money wasted.

Jon Radoff: All right. So the technicals solved problem in terms of performance. And I'm not quite so convinced it's solved from a wallet standpoint. I want to come back to that. But at least in terms of underlying performance, you know, time to finality, all of that kind of stuff on these networks, it's pretty solved for quite a few chains at this point. So really look at users and liquidity. So like, let's stack rank a little bit. Like who's got the users? And who's got the liquidity?

Guest: I'll let Jack start on that one. I definitely got the opinion. I think the consensus that we hear nowadays, especially in the last quarter or so, especially today, Ronan announced that they fully, on permissionless, Ronan is the L2 that's being built by the Axi Infinity team.

Unknown: That's been their main focus now for the last two years.

Guest: This is as successful as possible. And so Axi Infinity, obviously, was the game which really brought mass market attention in 2021. They then launched the Ronan network, which has had its ups and downs that got hacked in 2022. That was obviously tough in 23 design pixel,

Unknown: which is really the second flagship game on the platform.

Guest: They have now entered, I think, the final chapter for Ronan, which is to make it completely open for games to develop what usually happens historically is on a chain. They run very concentrated, which is they try to limit the amount of games on the platform to optimize for quality of games. Since then, Ronan has obviously come out with a few flagship hits, pixels, favorable, and as well. Cambridge, these are all very much tier one backed projects, which the community has admiration for. And so Ronan is quite interesting. I think off the back of B3, I think Dave is going to say that bass is very solid as well for a similar reason, which is there's just a lot of users on bass. What's really interesting off the back of bass though is you think about someone like Salana. Salana has a lot of retail users, but actually most games, there's not that many games on the platform that garners any attention in what's regaming. And so apart from running a bass, I don't really think that there's anything of real contention. What do you think Dave? Yeah, I think this goes in cycle, right? It's very hard to predict where the liquidity and the users are going to go. If you look at 2018, it was ETH only in Bitcoin. You look at 2021, BSC came on board, Salana came towards the end, Pauligan had a bit, at least users, but not a lot of liquidity and not a lot of trader activity. And then now we're kind of, you know, let's say we're mid cycle right now, definitely in terms of users, Ronan has been the winner. Big Souls was obviously like the best use case, right? I mean, they were able to build this amazing community with Axi. They took that to crazy heights in 2021. Big Souls came out last year, it was a massive hit. We're seeing some good quality games, you know, FableBorn definitely one of them a few more. But also we have seen, I think the excitement from their own user base slipping. I'm not too deep in the Ronan community, so I can't say what, if it's just too much, or if the game quality has been low, but I think we've definitely seen like a lowering of excitement for new Ronan projects. And that's my worry is only as they go. Why? Missionless.

Jon Radoff: Well, I don't know, John, maybe you guys have a side for that. Well, I mean, so first of all, we had, so Bimibol is a development platform for the online components of games, for the back end of games. So we ended up, we ended up working with all kinds of game developers, and we sport a lot, a lot of chains. Like we just had someone launch on base, we support Solana from the very beginning, we support Swee, we just announced more support for that,

Unknown: a whole bunch of Ethereum, DriveChains, like Wax, like we've been there for the whole journey

Jon Radoff: of this, we sport a lot of these guys. And game developers choose different chains for different reasons, sometimes it's grants, sometimes it's because they know the people there, and the team as well respected, mutually. So like there's a lot of factors that go in. Our job as an infrastructure company is always just to support the developer in their choice, not to like get them to be on a particular chain. So I just, I still see it being a very competitive ecosystem, where there's absolutely no clear winner, like every single game that's building on Web 3 using Bimibol, like we're still hearing about like people are building on a new chain, and like we didn't hear about it, and like, oh, you're gonna need to help you support that. If it's Ethereum, it's pretty easy. That's like we open source that code, you can just fork it, support more or less anything. New stuff keeps coming along, and I'm not always clear why people choose one particular chain over another. I guess part of it is that despite what I said earlier on grants, like newer chains, that's their leverage. They do open up some capital to help people at least get started. Now that was different with base. I'm not aware of too many or any grants that were made there, they were pretty much just leveraging the fact that, hey, we're Coinbase. So this is going to be the chain that you're going to want to be on if you want to be in North America, for example, with your Web 3 game. So I think that's an interesting perspective, which is that that's a chain backed by a company that has all of this regulatory infrastructure to comply with US law, whether or not you're bullish on how that might now change with the new administration. A lot of people want to be able to access North America and not have to tell people to sort of with the week in and odd, like go onto your VPN and get the token somewhere else, and pretend you're not North America. That's whatever it's been doing. It's be serious. So it provides a lot of validation for the market to have someone like Coinbase backing something like this that game developers can use. But yeah, I mean, this is where I always want to ask developers like you, David, like what drives your choices? Yeah.

Guest: Well, I mean, we did we did end up going with base. So we've gone through all of the, you know, if I walk you through the journey, we started on Neo, which was the Chinese Ethereum back in 2017. Then we went on Tron, which was, you could say, Ethereum clone, a bit faster, a bit easier to work with, works with solidity. Then we worked on Polygon back when they were

Unknown: medic. This is 2019 now 2020. Then the Binance invested in our early infra work. So we went on

Guest: we were one of the first tokens to bridge on this is before blocklers would see scape. We were one of the first projects to bridge from east to Binance, Marche, did a lot of work there, did a lot of smaller games there. Then we go into the 22 bear market, we did some work with Sui, and then eventually I am X Polygon again, and now base where we landed, right? So I'm definitely a chain hopper. I've been called that in a not so kind way, but some people. But what really attracted me about base on a few things, first off it was we were built, we built a relationship with the Coinbase team for a long time in the base team, and just the professionalism, the adherence to regulation, which I know people value less now, but it was definitely a very important step, you know, in our journey. It made me think that here we have kind of a blueprint for a winning strategy, while also still embracing things like meme coins and DeFi, and not being scared to at least welcome projects like that, because I think that could have been a choice that base considered was like in the beginning when they were permissioned, was okay, let's not have meme coins, let's not have DeFi, let's keep it just gaming, but that would have killed the chain. So the fact that they did embrace meme coins, they embraced DeFi, they embraced gaming, and then what they did different from a lot of other chains is they didn't over promise, they didn't promise a bunch of grants, they didn't promise a bunch of marketing, it's a very difficult process to get based to retweet or to to be dimension in a press release, but what they actually did promise, they always delivered, right, which is different from many other chains where they usually get a lot of promises in the beginning when you sign, but then actually no follow up at all, and you know they're working with 300 projects now, and they don't really care about that. So I think for me it was those two things, right, like they showed very early, they had legitimacy, they had the ability to drive users, they had the ability to drive liquidity, and it created really an ecosystem that had all of those things, like good tech users and liquidity, and I think that is what you need to look for as a game.

Unknown: To bring it back to substance though, in my experience with some of these chains,

Jon Radoff: they really just want games because they see them as transaction volume, and then there are a few chains that actually have been able to put together pretty reasonably strong game teams where they have sourced people with a game industry background, like they actually know it goes into a good game, for example, and that's a more of a rarity than you would expect. You know a lot of people are just chasing projects that they think are going to drive volume without even considering whether the game can be any good. What's your sense that David there of like which I think base probably, right, but like what are some of the teams that you respect? Just setting aside all this other stuff about liquidity and users, like who really actually understands games? Because if I'm thinking, if I'm playing the long game, right, like your decision might be one thing today, but if you're building

Unknown: a game that's going to launch in two to three years, I might even suggest that like you focus a little

Jon Radoff: bit less on like the current metrics, because we've all seen the metrics change two or three years in and all of these things. The only way to de-risk that longer term is like a combination of commitment to games as a market and real fundamental substance behind them from a team's point. What do you see

Guest: out there? Well, to answer your question, I think the chain with the most professional and most experience in games team so far is Sui, I think. They really put together a top-notch ecosystem team. Anthony Leeds Gaming there used to be a Griffin game partner. So like lots of experience looking at game projects. James was at NC Soft, I believe. So really just solid team, I'd say overall. And the tech they are building, I'd say, is the most suitable for game depths, right? I think we didn't go too deep into it, but we released a few smaller products on there and then did some few tests. We liked the tech a lot. So yeah, I think right now, if you ask me that question, I would say Sui has one of the most game-friendly and game-focused teams out there. But again, users and liquidity is key if you do want to launch assets, if you want to launch the token. Yeah, it's so easy to just ignore that. I like this is the tech we need and this is the tech we want for our game and we're going to make the best game possible. But then reality hits and you launch a token and the token doesn't have any liquidity. You do end up with a lot of problems. But there's nothing you can jack discuss a lot. So I kind of want to hear your remarks, check. Yeah, I think what's really interesting is chains are, as John said, they're looking for breakout applications. They're looking for the things that's going to bring them a whole bunch of users and make the chain worth existing, to be honest. And so what's really interesting, maybe I then go down a different direction is we're seeing a lot of games now launch their own chains and actually not rely on the major chain providers. You go on option orbit, use the optimism stack. Every chain now has some type of layer two type solutions so you can own your own unit economics, have your token via gas currency within the game. That's so really interesting. I mean, John, I'm sure it's the same for you, but the whole job on the infrastructure side is to enable the developer to actually take control of their own fate versus, oh gosh, Ronin doesn't want me. I guess my game isn't going to see the light of day. I kind of think that's the end outcome we won.

Jon Radoff: Is it John? Blockchain should be permissionless. I mean, there's good reasons why that has to be a progressive process because there are legitimate reasons to sort of have a little bit more control

Unknown: on the early days to kind of set things up consistent with your vision for it, but ultimately you

Jon Radoff: got to converge towards something that's much more permissionless that's open for all developers. Sweet I think is definitely doing a lot of interesting things.

Guest: Sorry, John, do you think that's the case also if a game releases their own app chain? Do you

Unknown: think it needs to be permissionless in that case? Well, I think that's a little bit different

Jon Radoff: when it's a game specific app chain. I'd love you to actually talk about the business case for that, David. Why do that as opposed to just having a token on whatever chain you choose?

Guest: Why do you need that? Yeah, well, so we're actually building our own layer three. We're partnering with the base team for that and we're announcing something very soon about it. And it's essentially that because our experience is we will bring a lot of users to any chain that we work with and we felt always that it would be better to actually have tech that we have more control over and I know controls about working with Pee at times, but essentially where we can use our token as the gas token. So the user doesn't have to pay ease to play our game. They have to pay a little bit of our token. And even base has very cheap fees. It's like three to five cents for each transaction, but when we ended up getting over a million unique wallets back in July ahead of our token on for our dynasty mini-game, which was fully on chain, we still end up and we sponsored gas for our users. We still end up spending I think over $100,000 that month on gas. So even the cheap chain like base or salona was you really do scale it up to real numbers. It becomes too heavy of a cost. So having your own app chain allows you to have a better user experience lower the costs and also kind of own the users that you bring to your product, which usually is going to come out of our marketing budget. Yeah, that's a jackass. I got a question. David, can you give the audience a preview on what blockwise actually is? And so just to recap, your journey in crypto started pretty early in 2017-18. Why are you guys building a game in the first place? What got you guys started in this business? Yeah, so I've been a game developer for for our 10 years now very much into RPG games and strategy games because I was working in China, I got pretty deep into free-to-play gaming models, which I saw tons of potential with. And then they've been proven to be very profitable, but also some problems because you created these games where users would spend thousands of hours and grind these resources on Facebook or on mobile or on PC, it doesn't matter. And then at the end of it, you would own nothing. And then our boss would be like, oh, let's change all the rules in the server or let's cancel the game and then you're like, oh, well, I have nothing. So I think I was kind of burned out with that system and I worked on quite a few successful games that were very profitable, but I was just not liking it. I love making games, but I didn't like the models that I was working on. And as soon as I discovered crypto, that's the solution. You grind for resources, but you can actually trade those resources. You can actually convert those resources into NFT, so you can essentially monetize your time. And then what I thought, what led to the model of Locklords was you can have different kinds of players, right? Because if you look at a free-to-play game, only one to five percent of users actually spend money. Most people spend nothing at all and those you do spend spend very little and then you end up with like one or less than one percent of users who are actually whales who spend thousands of dollars inside the game, right? And as a free-to-play gamer, as a free-to-play game developer, all you're doing is attracting whales into your game at the expense of the other 99 percent of users who are essentially just cannon fodder for those whales, right? Like the idea is to keep as many people playing as possible so that the whales are as happy as possible and then you monetize the whales as much as possible. So it's a cool system. It works. It's very profitable when it works, right? But the problem ends up being and you guys all work in gaming, you know this, you end up spending so much to acquire the users, right? You end up spending three to five to ten dollars. I mean, at the most, you know, we spend over sixty dollars for your user and only one percent of them is going to spend money and they have to spend enough to make the whole thing go around. So what's what really attracted me when crypto in the first place is how about we create a system where the whales are still there and they still spend a lot but some of that money will go to the users who are working for the whales and essentially it's a feudal economy. It started emerging in my mind, right? Where you have the kings and you have the lords and the ladies and you had the farmers and the warriors that started just building this crazy economy and I don't know if the name blocklers came first or the this this economic system that I've been thinking about for a while. But that's what started their journey. So we had the idea in 2018, uh, wrote a white paper uh 2018 to 2020 where you had an early version of blocklores that was kind of on all these different chains. Then we realized the info wasn't ready. So we started the C-Scape in 2020 built a lot of infrastructure to make more scalable with three gaming. Uh, Binance invested in that. We learned a lot. We released a lot of games with other devs and kind of went full circle because in late 21 we realized we had this really cool info. We had these scalable smart contracts and technical solutions but there's no users because the games are not that good, right? The games are still very early web web 2 level games, right? Or you know like a flash game, essentially. And we went back and we raised $15 million from, you know, some top names in the space back in 22. And since then our mission has really been let's use the Web 3 tech we have to create the best strategy gaming experience in the world. That's kind of our mission.

Jon Radoff: And David, you have a new trailer out. We should we should take a look at that. Let's let's see what you've been working on as Oscar if you can cue that up at any moment. Yeah, so I'll

Guest: I'll pre-lead that a little bit. So essentially we've been working on a lot of AI stuff recently. We're doing so we have three pillars, two blockboards. We have the main game, which is you can say a grand strategy game. Imagine Crusader King, civilization with the Web 3 economy as I describe. That's the main game. Then we have Lord Chin which is our own layer three infrastructure that we're building with base. That's going live very soon. And then we have the Ferrod Element which is AI and essentially what we want to do is give users different tools by our AI agents so that you can essentially outsource some of your playing time to these agents. So this is our AI roadmap that we announced yesterday. I'm happy to share with you guys. Let's take a look Oscar. What a soundtrack. Look at that. Yeah, that looks amazing and it's a real game. It is the game on the Epic Game Store. So that's the place to play and we do have our battle update coming out in March. That's the target. It can always be delayed. But we're super excited about it. We think that's what puts us at the level of total war civilization and age of empire. And that's always been my dream. That's why I'm so excited. Even though the markets, the markets rocky and everything, I'm still just so excited about the game and the tech we're building. Have you found that Epic has been more amenable to blockchain-based gaming as opposed to say Steam? I think I've heard that they've been the ones who've been really welcoming to that. 100% 100%. So Steam came out in 21 during the NFT craze, right? And they were very cautious. I think they've always been cautious as a company. But they weren't very clear. They were just like, yeah, if you're going to be an NFT game, you're going to be banned, right? And so still a lot of games have taken the risk and haven't been banned. That said, they've been, I'll say, the quality of the Steam games have come out. There's some better stuff coming out since last year. But there hasn't really been a game on Steam yet that's got a huge traction. And the fear for me and for most the Web 3 game devs was, yeah, what if we launch a game on Steam? It gets a lot of traction. And then Steam decides to take it down, right? That would be worse than not launching on Steam at all. So our approach, I think the approach of many other games that was, let's go where we're welcome. Let's build out the game and improve because it takes several years to make a game to truly realize its potential. So what Epic Games Store did, which was very smart, is, these are very clearly the rules. You can't urge people to buy your token. I don't remember off the top of my head exactly the rules. I was very deep into it when we launched the 23 on Epic Games Store, but they had at least very clear rules. And that's been great for us, because we've launched our game on Epic. We've had over 250,000 downloads. Our user acquisition cost went down. I think it was 80%. Because in the beginning, when we did the first closed beta, you had to download the game from our client. We're doing another close beta now where you have to do that, but we're not really marketing that so much. But if you compare the user acquisition cost from direct download on website to Epic Games Store, the price went down 80% to require a new user. So there's a huge difference in the trust from users. And it's been great. And

Unknown: actually I have some pretty good alphan this. Kind of out of the blue a few weeks ago, I did receive

Guest: an email from Steam. They're essentially Dave now gone more towards a route of Epic Games Store, where they have now clarified guidelines for us. So we now feel confident that we can actually release on Steam. As long as we follow the guidelines that they gave us and that email, I got a few weeks ago, we wouldn't get banned. And so that's a huge step. So I think you're going to see a lot of Web 3 launches on Steam this year. And I think that's exactly what the market means. More distribution channels with real users. It's like the chain. Who has the most users? That's probably where you want to go or at least support. And Steam has by far the most users.

Jon Radoff: So David, I love that you mentioned Crusader Kings earlier. I want to dig into that some of the design concepts around that a little bit more with respect to your game. And I also want to dig in more to your ideas around AI and AI agents and stuff. I mean, I had had this idea over the last couple of years that because I'd been a big Crusader Kings player, actually it's kind of a table flip game for me because like that game you get so deep in and you're like 30, 40 hours into it. And it's like the fuck like now I hate this game. But so I actually just had to stop playing it for my mental health. But that said, it has this really interesting aspect of it where you have the families and like the genetics of the family tree and I blend together. And I always thought that wow, that's an interesting trading economy there like to have characters that you can sort of nurture and build over time. And if they're really interesting, you can kind of bring them into a trading economy of some sort. And then when generative AI happened, I was thinking, wow, you could like like all the art for the characters and stuff like you could see the art for the characters from generative AI. And like really actually start to leverage these technologies and interesting ways that add new dimensions to gameplay and experience as opposed to, yeah, I don't know, just using Gen AI to make 2D art that everybody sees or yeah, you know, having a trading economy on the same old sort of item system. Like so that's my idea. But I'd love you to just run without a little bit more like when you mentioned Crusader Kings, what were you thinking? And your AI agents do something a little bit different than what I've just been talking about.

Unknown: So I'd like to drill into that as well. No, I mean, the mechanics are talking about our huge

Guest: inspiration behind the game, right? So you start with one character that you get married, then you have kids and your character dies and then your air takes over the region. And that is the core of our game. We've always had in mind that your heroes will eventually die. So you need to get married, you need to have kids, you need to pass your legacy down. And essentially, if you don't play the game, if you don't interact with the economy and the token of the game, your heroes will die. And then you'll, yeah, you'll kind of lose your progress, right? So that's always been a core design philosophy of blockboards is that you can get married, you can have kids and your hero will die. That's it. We've taken a lot of time developing that because you have to also think in the web 3, the drawback of that is people are actually paying sometimes quite a lot of money for other assets. I think our top sale, you know, it wasn't even our sale to us. It was a PVP trade. I think it was around $25,000 for a hero NFT. That was like the highest price NFT. So you can imagine if you have a hero like that. And when we turn on the aging, which we will do eventually, but we want to be very careful about how we do it in the mechanics and place to protect people's assets. But yeah, imagine you have a $25,000 asset that immediately dies and then you're like, oh, sorry, you know, try again. So we're very careful about that. But this idea of hero per death and the sake of NFTs and its ability to create new NFTs, I think that's a huge, huge boost to a web 3 economy and something where we're definitely exploring.

Jon Radoff: So I was a huge Diablo 2 hardcore player. I had some of the highest level characters in hardcore

Unknown: mode on D2. So like level 97, 98. I would have made it up to 99. It was just such a grind at that

Jon Radoff: point. Frankly, I just got bored. So I started a new character at that point. But it wasn't

Unknown: harder. Like you were just doing the same thing over and over again. But like the scarcity of

Jon Radoff: like high level characters in hardcore was its own interesting thing. I hear what you're saying on the hero perma death. Like you wouldn't want to spend crazy amounts of money to a quieter character. And then they die. And by the way, like if you're not used to playing that character, the likelihood that they're going to die fast goes way up. Like you just acquired this thing. It's one thing. If getting that character to level 90 plus in Diablo 2, I had it, I mean, I don't know how many hundreds of hours that was at that point. But like you're

Unknown: locked in at that point. You know how to play that character exactly. Like if I handed that character

Jon Radoff: to someone else who didn't know what the hell they're doing, they'd be dead in like the first 10 seconds of going on the map. So it's an interesting dynamic to think about though that you have

Unknown: a scarcity economy due to the survival aspect. And like the high level character could have value

Jon Radoff: because of that scarcity that's manifested in the trading economy. What do you think of that versus just sort of like the like that devastating moment of loss when you because I had that too by the way. Like I also lost yeah, like I got characters up there and I screwed up and lost characters.

Guest: But that's lost hundreds of hours. So that's the balance we're trying to find. And I think we're putting a lot of time like a few safeguards. So like if you're not playing for a long time, maybe the FT goes on ice, that's something we've been considering a lot. Or that even after the NFT dies, you might not get the same exact character. But you can trade in that dead character for something of equal at least in game value. That's something that we consider a lot also. But I think I mean, it's such a cool concept. Like imagine you have this really cool character. And then we actually because we already have death happening in the game, but they can only die in battles for now. Right? Like they can't die of old dates. But the long term goal is that the devil that we've made this really cool art when they die. So they turn into a statue. Right? And then later on, you'll be able to have a doll of the dead where you stake your dead NFTs and you kind of walk around and see all the statues of your forefathers. So there's just so much cool stuff we can do that from a story perspective is just such an extremely complicated system because then you start adding in your marriage and how the how the stats breed between these marriages and the kids they have. And who's going to be nobility versus farmers because we all have very many different classes of users. But yeah, overall, it's just such an exciting system and we've spent years iterating on it. I think we'll launch the first version of it this year and we'll start having the time-based permadev. But definitely, you have to be careful because even if you look at Web 2 gaming, games like Don't Star, which I put a lot of hours into, the permadev is really upsetting. You know, when you spent like 50, 100 hours on a world and then your character dies, it's just it's a really miserable feeling.

Unknown: Hi, there is a. David, how do you feel about? No, of course. David, how do you feel about

Guest: the game's huge scope? How have you financed the company so far? How do we keep this production going?

Unknown: Wanting a game should be expensive? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing we've raised, right? So we

Guest: raised 15 million back in 2021, late 21-1, early 2022. We did another raise last year. At the end of the day, you know, we have to build a product that is profitable and that benefits the game devs, right? And also, we need to develop an economy that benefits the stakeholders, right? Which is the asset owners, the token holders, and the investors, right? So it is tricky, and I think this is a new economy, and that's why it's taking a lot of time for game devs like us, right? Or infrastructure providers like us to really figure it out. I think at the end of the day, it is going to come down to sustainable economics. And I don't mean

Unknown: just a profitable game, but a whole profitable or sustainable, maybe a better word, because it

Guest: doesn't necessarily need to make a profit, it just needs to be able to pay everyone's salaries and have benefits to the community and have benefits to the investor. But what I foresee as a world where user acquisition is not just spending money on Google, not Google ad networks and Facebook, you know, I met who takes all the ad money basically in the world. We want to build this really an economy where tokens can be used as a user acquisition tool without devaluing token holders. And it's a long experiment. There's no clear answer. I'd love to hear your thoughts

Unknown: on that as well. Yeah, we, I find it incredibly frustrating that game developers are almost chasing a

Guest: dream. I mean, I'm not as smart as you and John on game design and creating these like wonderful worlds that people participate in. Not a very creative type in the first place, but I do find it upsetting that a lot of the stuff takes time and the market encrypt those, does not care how line makes it builds something with I think this is gaming is very much an artistic expression and you're trying to, as you described, your dream was to build this intricate storyline and economic system underpinning this virtual world. And it's so tough to, like you're trying to buy us of time

Unknown: to do that. I think what is really interesting is there's this new generation of developers who are

Guest: looking at crypto as consumers are looking at digital ownership over time increasingly users will expect that they own their own digital assets. And if anything happens to their game that they're not completely rugged, I know in 2023, MapleStory was in a bunch of shit because they were suppressing like drop rates of their most rarest items. And I think they got fined for that as well. And it's like the world, game developers will have to follow this expectation of digital ownership primarily because players will. And it will be very much a concern of led revolution. And so yet today it is still so hard for a game shooter to enter crypto because it's such a, you can't

Unknown: get fined as to experiment crypto. It's like venture. Yeah. How many investors are there? There's no grant money. We said that as well. And so it's a tough situation for sure.

Jon Radoff: So to me, one of the original NFT games was actually magic the gathering. So if we look back to and it came out and I think 91 or 92 or maybe even a little bit earlier than that. Since it's been around forever, it just so happened that the NFT was a piece of cardboard that you would trade with your friends or sell back to the store or put on eBay. Like that was the trading economy around the original NFT, magic the gathering cards. Somehow it struck the right balance between the percentage of people that just earnestly wanted to play the game didn't really care about card values that much versus the hardcore players who would buy a card if they wanted it for their collection to play with it. And then there was a small percentage of people that you'd call them just speculators like they buy the card and hold it for years and hope to profit on it and the people who bought Black Lotus cards back in the day and held on to it definitely did quite well. Like it's actually Black Lotus return is up there with Bitcoin depending on when you bought your Black Lotus. I bought a Black Lotus, got it as part of a pack and I sold it for 200 bucks now. I don't know. I think they regularly sell for 50,000,

Guest: 100,000 dollars now. But John, you're allergic to the gains. You're perfect. You're joined by me

Jon Radoff: and David. We are. I made a bet. Well, it was a massive return at the time. It was like just like some insane like hold on to this thing. Why do I want to keep it? I didn't know where my wildest dreams was going to become tens of thousands of dollars. But the point though is that like there wasn't a huge percentage of speculators and I think one of the hardest problems to solve for here in Web 3 is there's just still this very large speculation economy around things like the people often that are buying the objects in the game have no intention of even participating in the game. They're just really looking at it as an opportunity to flip or hold for quote-unquote investment purposes like a collectible. I just,

Unknown: what are your thoughts on that David? Like what is the right balance? What percentage of

Jon Radoff: players do you need in a game for it to be a sustainable game as opposed to just a place where

Unknown: the speculators move in, mess around, and then they're onto the next thing?

Guest: Yeah, I think it's an impossible question because there's no right way to do it. There's no wrong way to do it, especially with this new type of tech. I think, I mean, okay, so if you're starting a game, you want to make a game and you're interested in Web 3 tech. What are your options? The option one is to self-funded. That's hard for most project teams to do. Most of us have their families. Most of us like to eat decent food. We don't want to starve. We were bootstrapping and getting that. Those are two of the toughest years of our life. Three years that we were entirely self-funded. I lived on a thousand dollars. All of us, all of us on the team lived on a thousand dollars a month for three years. That was brutal and I don't recommend that to anyone. But also that gave us a lot of freedom. Also in the early days, what really gave us a lot

Unknown: of freedom was not launching token because there are a lot of pros and cons with launching a token,

Guest: but I can tell you the public pressure you get after launching a token is pretty ridiculous and definitely takes time away from the game. I think that's a mistake a lot of games that do if they launch a token, not realizing that it's a product. The token itself is a product that takes at least as much time as the game itself. You're always juggling these different priorities as a game developer, as a startup leader, as a team member, and as an artist. I know it sounds pretentious, but I do think gaming is the ultimate art form. You do need an artistic creative force in your team to really drive the project. The problem with money and the crypto is the ultimate form of money and capitalism. Money is usually the enemy of art.

Unknown: So you have got these different things to focus on. I'm trying to put that into useful advice.

Guest: I think you really do need to look at your projects when you're early on. And decide, how achievable is this vision? How many funds am I going to need? If I need to raise money, how much money do I really need to raise? I think what many teams have seen now in the last three to four years is many kind of raised probably more than they needed and ended up compromising the health of their token or the sustainability of their companies. I think those are some things to think about when you're starting early. Try to keep it as small scale as possible. Then go up with your users and with your revenue

Jon Radoff: if that makes sense. The problem that I've seen in Studio After Studio, David, frankly, is that the token is its own product. But for a lot of studios, it then becomes the only product. They become so focused on it and so overwhelmed by that. They can only pay attention to it. The problem in games is that it can't be the only product. It's going to have to coexist with a good game because we had 18,000 games launched on Steam last year, plus all the other ones that launch on Epic and consoles and mobile. There's a lot of games out there. People don't need mediocre games. They need great games. They need amazing gameplay, or else the game is fundamentally not going to be sustainable. That's just a really hard team problem to solve, David. How do you thread that needle? It's so hard to be obsessed about one thing. The obsession of making a great game

Unknown: is just all consuming on its own. What's your advice to studios who are about to face this problem?

Jon Radoff: Launch a TGE or they're going to have a set of NFTs or whatever it is that they're going to do to try to start monetizing or even using it as a source of capital for their game.

Guest: It's really hard to say. We've made a lot of mistakes. We've done a lot of things. I'd say first thing is get as far as you can with your game before you launch the token. Try to drive as much utility as possible. I know utilities are bad word. Right now, you know, in this meme people, the craze that's happening right now.

Unknown: But at the end of the day, if we're looking long-term, you do need to give your users a reason to buy

Guest: a token. That's not just price goes up. I think it's exactly like you say, John, is the more utility you can find for your token within the game. That's something that's really hard to do and takes a lot of time. I think the advice is wait as long as possible to raise capital, wait as long as possible to launch your token, develop as good of a product as you can. This is the hardest part to do. We struggle with it at times too. Sometimes you do have to just ignore the

Unknown: quote even Swedish, the squirrel wheel. What do you call that?

Guest: Always narrative chasing. It's very difficult to do because there is a lot of pressure from the market to do that. But I think at the end of the day, you do have to believe in your product.

Jon Radoff: What you're describing is not unique to crypto, actually, David, when we talk about delay the capital raise as long as you can. It's the same in venture capital. A lot of people have an idea for a game. Sometimes if they have a very strong team, frankly, I see them raising capital sooner than they should before they even truly know what the game is. Let's face it in

Unknown: game development, you might have an idea for a game. But until you actually start building that game and

Jon Radoff: people are interacting with it, you don't really have that feedback loop about how good the ideas are that you can then cycle back into the game development. Sometimes people go after the venture capital too early to their detriment because more often than not, venture capital isn't really patient enough. It doesn't understand the random chaoticness of game development. I think, frankly, a lot of those funds have underperformed in the last couple of years because of a lack of that understanding. That's sage advice to anybody building a game, which is, I know it's super hard because, yes, we all like to have food on the table and our families don't starve. But the longer you can delay the capital raise and bring the game itself into greater focus, ideally through an actual game that's playable. It doesn't have to be super polished or anything, but something you can interact and play with. I think that's one of the most important things that developers should understand about their game. We've just got one minute left, David. I wanted to talk about AI a little bit. Just share with us a little bit about the AI agent aspect of your game and how you're thinking about that

Guest: before we close. Yeah, I mean, essentially with block floors, we've been using AI internally as a team for over two years now. I mean, even longer in some ways. We're really starting to put that into the whole fabric of the game. Our farming, which is live on Epic Games for now, is very clicky. There's a lot of grinding involved. That's going to be entirely automated if you have the right agents. The fighting, which is coming out next month or two, you're going to be able to do battles with AI generals who command the squad for you. All the way up to the kingdom level, where you'll be able to issue currencies using AI agents. I think we have an article out on CoinTelegraph about it. We have the trailer joined the community. I'm happy to come on another time

Jon Radoff: on the podcast and talk a bit more about that. Yeah, I'd love to. It's almost the evolution of idle games, which I think at the beginning of idle games, no one thought was going to be a big thing, but then idle games actually took off with really hardcore gamers who liked to think in terms of how they do resource allocation as opposed to clicking all the pieces. An AI agent becoming the successor to the idle game is maybe something we need to spend another hour about. This is really awesome. I think everybody gains some real wisdom from this, whether you're a web two or a web three game developer, web three developers, especially. Would love to have you back anytime you want. And by the way, for those of you in the audience, this is your show. Like I said, at the outset, you can join us. You can be on the stage. You could even be on the stage in the course of one of these, but we're at the end of our hour this time around. So I just want to thank you, David, for taking part. I want to thank my co-host, Jack, for being here again and Oscar for keeping the trains on the tracks as we go through this. Thanks, everybody. This has been awesome.

Unknown: Thank you.

Jon Radoff: All right. Thanks. We'll see you next time. Same time, same place. Wednesdays at 9 a.m. Eastern time. Until then, we'll see you online.