Web3 Game Development Livestream - Kevin Lambert - Koin Games

Kevin Lambert: Welcome back everybody to the Web 3 game development livestream.

Jon Radoff: I am John Radoth and the CEO of a company called Beamable. We build live services and for structure for games of all kinds. I'm accompanied by Oscar, our intrepid producer, who keeps this thing on track every week after week. And I'm so excited today because I've got one of my absolute favorite developers in this space, also a Beamable customer, Kevin Lambert, the one and only, from Coin Games, Building Project O. And if you have been watching Web 3 gaming, if you don't know about Project O, then I don't know where you've been for the last few weeks and months. You have not been paying attention. So if that's one of you, apologies for that. This is your chance now to learn about a very, very important game in this space. If you already are aware of Project O, this is your chance to get deep, learn some alpha here, but also if you're a game developer, learn about what went into the thinking of this product. Because I think that's what we bring week after week to this program is real developers, real designers, thinking about the hard problems of building a product in Web 3. And you're not getting that anywhere else. You're hearing about token speculation and when moon and when TGE. That is not this program. This program is like when amazing game. So that's what we do here. So, Kevin, I'd love you to just introduce yourself. Talk a little bit about how you came to Web 3, what you did before all this and just give us a little preview of Project O and what you're hoping to build here. Sure, thanks so much for having

Kevin Lambert: me and I'm stealing when amazing game. I love it. We need that to replace when Lambo for sure. So let's see, I've been in games going on 30. This will be my 30th year in professional game development. I started out as a programmer, but only as a means to an end to get into game design, which is what I really wanted to do. But they didn't have schools when I was growing up. So, they didn't have things like DigiPan and Full Sail. So now there are a lot of those. So if you're out there and you're like, I'd love to get into game development. There are many ways to do that now when I was growing up, not so much. You kind of had to know somebody. So I went the programming route because my folks understood it and they were like, we're worried about this game thing. What if it doesn't work out? So my first five years were at a company that I'm sure you remember John called Monolith. I was one of the first hires there as a programmer worked on some games there. Like No One Lips Forever and Shogo and Traum 2.0 and some 2D games like Grunts and Claw. And then got my first full-time game design job at Gaspowered Games working with Chris Taylor on Dungeon Siege 2. So I led the design team on that 40 people. Our big RPG. That was awesome. I love RPGs. I still love them today. And for those of you who are new, Dungeon Siege was like

Kevin Lambert: Diablo, but with a party back in the PC days. So worked on that. Then did a little startup.

Kevin Lambert: It got acquired by Activision and branded Sierra Online. So if that name rings it bell, worked on some games for Sierra. Then I got into casual games for a little while and explored this weird area of like games for grandma that I didn't really understand at the time. Worked for big fish games, made some games there like drawn the paint to tower. And then I co-founded the Microsoft casual game studio, which was a casual game studio inside of Microsoft. And we got to redesign Solitaire and Mind Sweeper and Majong. All of these games that used to come with windows back in the day. And they were like good time-waisters, but they didn't have any sticky retention features and they weren't making any revenue. And now those games are bringing in like nine figures of revenue and a billion players and a studio of like 35 to 40 people. It was incredible. I love that team. I honestly could have stayed there and retired there. It was just such a great business. But I got really excited about the Web 3 intersection back in 2016, 2017. My tech background helped me understand it. I read the white paper for Bitcoin and Ethereum. And I'm like, this isn't going to be insane for gaming. Like the gaming intersection, the experiences, the digital property ownership, the monetization models, the business models, owning parts of the games themselves, building with the community. Like there are all these things

Kevin Lambert: that you can do that you really couldn't do. It would be really hard to do if not impossible without

Kevin Lambert: being on, you know, with blockchain involvement. So I just got really excited about exploring that. And this was at a time when the narrative was like, bro, drug dealers, money launders, you're going to encourage me. And you know, and if you were looking at this, John, in 2017, you know, like everybody was like, don't go do that. You're going to, you're going to like torpedo your career if you do that. And I'm like, no way. There is no way. Like this, this, this sounds to me like the beginning of mobile in the 90s where everybody is like free to play mobile. Like, like those games will never be as good as a 49, 99 boxed product because why the games will suck the monetization will be predatory, the quality, like you just will not be able to make a good game. These are going to be gone in like five years and look what happened, right? Now there's amazing free to play mobile games. So like I see a rhyme with the web 3 attitude because there's a lot of crap over there that we don't like. And I'm sorry, I'm getting off topic. But

Jon Radoff: anyway, this is this is the topic because this is a game industry audience for sure. So yeah, yeah, I lived exactly what you're describing because I launched games based on Game of Thrones and Walking Dead and Star Trek. And when I did Game of Thrones, it was 2012 that I started working on this game. And our target platform was Facebook. If you remember when Facebook games were thing. Yeah, yeah, of course. And then mobile to follow that. But you know, everyone was like, why would you why are you like that's not even really games like they call themselves games, but they're not actually games like I've got low. That's a game call of duty. That's a game. These aren't games. So I had to like endure that for years and years. And of course now mobile is more than half of the game industry. It's it's very significant. Yeah. Yeah. So I knew that my next career

Kevin Lambert: move was going to be a Web 3 game studio way back in 2017. And I just I had the luxury of waiting and finding that the right time. And you know, like developers were the first people over into this space. And they're doing cool things with tech. And I'm looking at it nodding and going, that is cool. But like where the games people and people are like, you should check out crypto kitties. And I'm like, that's not really a game. You know, bring it down Ethereum in 2018. Like I was I was there. But you know, but it was really cool. Like, okay, digital collectibles. That's interesting. Neat. It's kind of like the beginning of NFTs before NFTs were cool. And then they're like, all right, if you like games, you got to check out Axi infinity. Like this is 2020 time frame. And I'm like, okay, now that is more of a game. Although to me, it looked like a game built by business and finance people who like hired game, game folks. Because the DNA of that game was like, played earn money. And isn't that exciting? And look what you can do. And you know, not as much like isn't this an amazing game experience. It was leading with, you know, play to earn, which was really cool. It's like one of the things that you can do with blockchain. And it really blew open the door as far as possibility space. And got people interested in Web 3 gaming the category. And I'm really thankful for that. Because after 2020, a lot of people started talking about blockchain games. And I probably talked to all of them. Like I was minting thousands of NFTs in 2021 and 2022. And any of these founders who said, we're making a game. I'm in their DMs. I'm like, how can I help? What are you building? Do you want to work together? And just really not finding the right fit. Like a lot of these guys were very traditional crypto people who were like, when Lambo and if number ain't going up, then let's go do something else. And I'm a product DNA guy. I'm like, where are the experiences that are really unique here? And let's do those monetization will come. And I just couldn't find many like-minded people that wanted to be here for 15 years and make great games. And then I ran into Tim, CEO of now coin, who had just launched an NFT in September 2021 called the Coin Games Development Squad. And it was just him, an artist and a dev. And they're not game developers, right? Tim comes from tech sales. He's a gamer and he loves games. But he's not a game developer. Neither was the lead artist and neither was the developer at the time. And the promise being made was very low bar for that time. If you were minting NFTs in 2021, you remember people saying, we're going to make an MMO and it'll be done in six months, mint our NFT. And as a game developer, and I know you know this, John, you're like, right, like good luck with that. MMOs are one of the most intimidating genres, light alone. You're going to do it at six months.

Jon Radoff: First, we're hard to build a successful game in the space. And people take five years, seven years, 10 years to build an MMO. Some of them are still- some of them got launched on Kickstarter 10 years ago and are still not out, right? Like so. Exactly. Really a hard category. So the promise for the

Kevin Lambert: coin games NFTs was just like, look, we're three guys. This is Tim and artist and a developer. We want to build a game together with the community because we think that's exciting and we don't have a game team yet, right? But if you guys, you know, buy these NFTs and you'll be able to join us on the journey to build a game together. That was it. That was the only thing that was promised. And so I looked at that and I'm like, okay, we're not in the over-promise and under-deliver category. There that seems achievable. And when Tim and I met, we clicked right away because I, you know,

Kevin Lambert: I asked him a very direct question. I'm like, Tim, do you want someone on your executive leadership

Kevin Lambert: team that will fight for a user experience sometimes against the revenue opportunity to balance those? And he said, you know, I would like three of you. Do you know anymore? And I'm like, oh my God, this is going to be an amazing match. Like the DNA of our studio could be so strong with a product and business, you know, executive team. And so, you know, the rest is history. We we set off to make a game and we're building project. Oh, we took a little while to decide on that. But, you know, we can talk about that as we go forward a bit.

Kevin Lambert: But I do want to drill down into that. And specifically, I want to maybe go right after that

Jon Radoff: elephant in the room. So five years ago, I wrote an article about NFT-based games and digital collectibles. And my use case for why this would be a thing was I talked about the original NFT game, which wasn't even digital. It was a physical paper card game. And that's magic, the gathering, which I thought had all of these elements of composability and creativity and trading. Like it was already there. I wasn't the only person who noticed the relationship between collectible card games and the applicability to web 3. And then a ton of people started working on this idea because it was kind of like the obvious thing. But it's really, really hard to build good games in this space, especially those with staying power. So Kevin, I want you to just think about your thoughts on that in a moment. Before you answer, I also just want to say to the audience who's showing up here. We've got over a couple hundred people that have already shown up.

Kevin Lambert: There's a reason why we do this is a live program. I used to do YouTube videos and do all this

Jon Radoff: editing afterwards and post it online with people. And that was great. I love doing it. But you don't have the community engaging with a YouTube video the way you can with a live video. So if you're here and showing up for this conversation, you've got an expert who has had three decades of game development experience who's basically worked in a ton of genres, a ton of platforms. And now he's doing web 3 and is one of the most interesting and I think going to be very successful in this space. Like use this opportunity to post your questions so that we can get Kevin to talk about all your hard questions. And we can even put you on camera by the way. So if you've got a camera, we'll bring you right on screen yard and you can talk with us, Oscar will make that happen. Just post in the comments that you'd like to do that. But do post your comments. I know that people are still trickling in here. We're going to give you lots of opportunities for it. But let's go to my first one, Kevin. So collectible hard games. You said you would go after probably the genre that's even though it's like the obvious one, the hardest to succeed in in my opinion. So like, talk about that.

Kevin Lambert: Well, there are a few no-brain. When I first got into web 3, I'm like, you know, what are the games that make a lot of sense? Because like, why would you do web 3? You do, you know, you only reason to do web 3 is to do something interesting with digital property ownership in my opinion. Like, don't use the blockchain if you don't need it. You know, so I wanted to do something that you couldn't do without it. And the no-brainer genres were training card game, loot extraction shooter, massively multiplayer game, and cozy game like a Stardew Valley or an Animal Crossing could be really interesting there. And then there's a bunch of adjacent games. And so when we first started, I actually didn't want to go right into the dragon's den of one of those four obvious ones. So our first game was actually adjacent. We wanted to try an auto-badler like a TFT, a Dota kind of game, you know, but with a really interesting ownership experience. But those games were very historically hardcore and niche. And we wanted to go really, really wide rather than a niche game. So, you know, imagine like TFT for your kids. Like, anyone could play not children, but like, for anyone rather than a hardcore niche. And that's what we set off to do first. And we had a product that was shaping up to be a supercell was working on this too. They had a game in development called Clash Mini. It never got to launch. It got in beta for like a year. It was actually pretty good. And so we were like, hey, if supercell sees something in this area, we're on to the right track because they're really, they have a good sense and radar of, you know, what will be good in games. So I like that they're doing what we're doing. And we all see something. But we, you know, we were running into problems while developing that because one of our product goals

Kevin Lambert: is that the game had to be fun to watch. And that it's a goal you don't often hear in Web 3

Kevin Lambert: game development and even Web 2 game development, honestly, for that, for that matter. Because I think the assumption is, hey, if the game is amazing, then everybody will play it. Everybody will stream it on Twitch and there'll be a ton of viewers, right? But that is not always the case. So that actually is part of a product goal that we have. And there are features in our design that are more for viewers than players in some cases because of that. We just, we just feel that that flywheel is a virtuous

Kevin Lambert: cycle of amazing things. If you get, you know, the game is amazing to watch. People will want to

Kevin Lambert: stream it. People will want to play it. And we weren't able to get that with the auto-baddler design that we had. It was just too hard to watch. It wasn't, you know, the game was fun, but it

Kevin Lambert: wasn't hitting on all cylinders. So we were like, man, I think we need to scrap it and pivot. So,

Kevin Lambert: you know, we took the best from that design, which was like the pacing and the simultaneous turns that auto-baddlers have. And we pivoted that over to TCG, which was much more natural, right? But the end now, the challenge is like, my God, everybody's building a TCG. Does the

Kevin Lambert: world really want another one of those? Like, our first question is going to be, why would I play

Kevin Lambert: your game when hearthstone exists? And so we have to have a slam dunk answer to that question immediately. I like at the screenshot level, you know, which is, which was really ambitious, and really hard, but we're like, we've made games that hit, you know, a hundred million, you know, up to a billion players before in Web 2. We could do this. And I think a lot of people were waiting for a new TCG. Like, look at the TCGs that have been successful digitally in traditional games. There's like, hearthstone, which has been there since 2013. And you got a few other little indie games like Slade of the Spire and stuff like that, but like, nothing has knocked hearthstone off of its perch until, you know, Marvel Snap came around and like shook it, but didn't really knock it off. And so we aimed, so we saw a sweet spot in collectible card games on the complexity spectrum between hardstone Marvel Snap. There was really nothing there, you know, simpler than hardstone, which was only theorized before Marvel Snap came out. You can't make a game simpler than hardstone. It'll be a children's card game, you know, but now that snap came out, they went too far. Something with more depth and competitive feel than Marvel Snap. And that was a spot we didn't see occupied in the spectrum of card games. So that's where we wanted to land. We want to be mobile. We want to be PC. Probably mobile first. And there's an opportunity there for people who really liked Marvel Snap, but want a little more meat. So that's why we landed

Kevin Lambert: on TCG and then we're going to fund to watch product go. I want to double click a little bit more

Jon Radoff: of the design aspects of the game that you're leaning into, but I think there's also an interesting business story around what you just described because you talked about starting with something else and then pivoting to something quite different. Like I had that same experience with most of the games that I built. Like when I built a Star Trek game, we built like four versions of a game, including by the way a CCGS game. I was like, this is not, this is not going to be it. And then we had like an RPG incarnation of it and a couple of other weird things that didn't quite work. And it was only after the like the fifth version of the game, which took us like a year to get to, we probably should have done it in six months and not a year, this may be another story out of that because we maybe spend too much time on ideas that weren't quite working, but we spent a year kind of finding not really even finding the fun, just finding the game. Like and then we had to spend another year on that game

Kevin Lambert: before it was good enough to even show to other people. But to me, this is one of the most important

Jon Radoff: things for a game studio is velocity of development, shots on goal, trying things, not being married to your original idea, maybe being really married to an audience or someone that you want to go after,

Kevin Lambert: you want to like understand better than anybody else. And then once we were in the game, we also had

Jon Radoff: to like iterate a lot within the game and and perfect it. But yeah, talk about that. Like what's your what's your business story that you take away from the experience so far that you think other

Kevin Lambert: game developers would be able to benefit from? Yeah, you have to be, I mean, it helps like

Kevin Lambert: playing games every day for 30 plus years gives you a pretty good radar if a game could be good or not. And it's much harder to be introspective about that. When it's your game, you're like, that's our baby. And no one wants to acknowledge the possibility that maybe their baby is ugly, but you have to be able to do that. And I don't think our baby was ugly, but you know, when like if you wouldn't say, God, there's something amazing, I will actually want to go home and play this when I'm done with work. Like if you're not saying that and it's your genre, there's something there's Darby Dragons there. And we were just not feeling that it was it was going to be that that good, you know, when we take our hey, we're working on this game off and put ourselves in the minds of players, we're like, it's good, but not great. And I think going into a web 3 game, the stakes are higher because not only are you, you know, trying to make a sustainable game that people want to play, but there's all this baggage and uphill battles that you're going to have to face because there are people who are anti web 3 in traditional games and they just hear the words web 3 and they're like, up crypto scams, NFTs, Ponzi scams, out one star, I haven't even played the game. It's probably a scam. Like you have to overcome that. And so your game actually has to not only be a good traditional game, but it has to be one step better than that to fight the uphill climb of the perception of people who just really don't understand web 3 and don't want to under or not in a place where they're willing to do that right now.

Jon Radoff: So part of your story is to try to find the sweet spot in the market that makes it more accessible, but with that oversimplifying things. What else is hard about building a CCG?

Kevin Lambert: I think, you know, getting mechanics that are familiar and the hardest thing about building a CCG is not building a clone of another CCG, right? There are so many designs out there and so many indie games that I've tried on Steam or physicals and I'm like, hey, this game's kind of cool, but why would I play that when there's magic? Or why would I play that when there's

Kevin Lambert: hearts though, right? They're just too similar to these other games. So the hardest thing about

Kevin Lambert: building one is getting off of that and not being so unfamiliar that it takes an hour to learn how to play your game. And that's the sweet spot that we've tried to hit. You know, we took, if you look at our game and you've seen our demo, you'll recognize a lot of familiar pieces within board games and card games. You'll say, like, oh, that part looks inspired by snap. That part looks inspired by hearstone. That part looks inspired by some other game that I've played or a board game. And so having those familiar pieces makes it really easy to learn. You're like, okay, that number is probably hell. Okay, it is. You know, that will probably do damage. Okay, it does. And so once you are able to learn it really quick, then you'll see the mechanics that are different, you know, and it becomes easy to learn. When people see videos of our gameplay or when we were doing the pitch deck, the initial impression is they're like, oh, it looks a lot like Marvel snap. But once you play it, you'll say, well, this doesn't play anything like Marvel snap. There's combat, right? They're positioning matters. Like you just don't have any of that. But, you know, it helps to just be like, oh, it looks like something I know. I'll try it. So, you know, that's that was honestly the biggest challenge. But we we solved that really early back in paper prototyping where like, this isn't going to play anything like, you know, well, it's not going to be a heartstone clone. And it's not going to feel like a Marvel snap clone. But, you know, the similarities

Jon Radoff: will help. So, you've carved out sort of this space that you saw as unique between a heartstone and a Marvel snap. You have identified sort of this need for like the novel game mechanics, the novel experiences you're going to have in the card game that makes you not want to just go back to heartstone or Marvel snap or magic the gathering or Pokemon or whatever your default game is. Where does Web 3 come into this though? Why not have just been another mobile game like Marvel

Kevin Lambert: snap? Why not be on steam? Yeah. This is my favorite part, honestly. And the whole reason why I left my comfy career at Microsoft, where I could have retired and decided to do this, was to explore the Web 3 intersection and having watched all of the games, all of the Web 3 games that are out there and kind of seeing all these shots on goal, my story was that, you know, there needed to be, you know, there needed to be something around digital property ownership and I like to call it experiential ownership. The experience of ownership needed to be unique and interesting to blockchain. And the way that I, the analog that I used to that comes from physical ownership. Like I have things that I own that I collect and I could show them to you and I could tell you these really cool stories of how I got them or what they mean and some of those are entertaining to people who also like the things that I have or whatever. But, but those are all like in my head and think of a world where the items themselves could tell these stories. Like, look what this thing has been through. Look, press play on the item and watch this cool video of the things that this item has done. Like you pick up a knife and like it projects a video of the things that the people who have carried it and all of the kills that it's had. Like digital can do that kind of thing, but people aren't exploring the stories of those. And when you have items that you've owned and have interesting provenance that are experiential and stories, like is your first inclination going to be to go sell that thing for profit? I mean, maybe because like collectors will really want it, but also it's going to have a lot of emotional value to the people who created those stories with those items. And they're like, you know, these are like people you use magic to gathering, which is a really good example, because there are people who have ship boxes of those cards on their shelves and their closet. And other people might say, you know how much that collection is worth. And they're like, yeah, I don't care. I might play again. The cards, I have stories. The cards are meaningful to me. Right. And there are people who play magic to gathering, you know, and for fun. And there are also people who like, you know, throw away the commons, leave the rares, flip them on eBay. Like it's a really good analog to a sustainable market place and, you know, a secondary market and also great game. And you can kind of be either one of those personas or both of those personas. And so, you know, that's the thing that got me excited. I'm like, you know, card games can offer a world where the cards can tell your stories, right? You're like, I put blood, sweat, and tears into this card. I won this amazing match with it. And how cool would it be to have that on the card where the card could show the story, like show the final match by clicking a link on the card, you know, and then if I give that to you, that's imprinted on that card forever. Like that's such that's just so cool to me. And so we're going to try to light some of those stories up with our collecting experience, which will be on the Web 3 side.

Jon Radoff: You talked a lot about Providence, which I love that. Like I, it's literally one of the things I wrote about five years ago in this article that I referenced, we'll have to surface it. I think it's actually still pretty current today because so many people who started in 2020 were just flipping NFTs and flipping tokens and weren't really going to build anything or couldn't build things. It's nice to see some of those ideas coming back to life. I love the idea that provenance and the history of an item brings more value to the collector economy on it. We also sort of touched on another aspect, which is composability and the idea that items can also change and kind of have these inherent combinations and that becomes part of the credible content. So can you, can you maybe explore this idea of composability in your game or maybe Web 3 in general that seems still seems a little underutilized even though it's one of the inherent advantages of blockchain.

Kevin Lambert: Yeah, I know you're going to remember this, but in 2021 and 2022, do you remember either the story was like, hey man, you can own your items and have them on blockchain. And even if the game studio shuts down, you still got your sword and that's awesome. And I remember thinking that's not awesome. Like that's terrible. Like what are you going to do with your sword if the game studio shuts down? Come on. Like that's a that is not that cool. And furthermore, you know, if you do have a sword with a cool function in a story, what other game developer is going to be like, yeah, I want to put all of those in my game and use the economy that someone else developed. Like that's not how game development works, right? We want to make our own economy and our own items and our own stories. We don't just want to grab somebody else's stuff. So that whole thing that was going around 2021, 22 timeframe about interoperability and it doesn't matter if the studio shuts down was complete crap from my my perspective. You know, but there is a there is a version of that that I think echoes and rhymes and it is in the the provenance and composability story. It's like, you know, and so I'll tell you how it works for us. So we will have these cards in our game and I also think the on boarding into Web 3 is being missed right now. So our on boarding into Web 3 story is one that has zero friction. It is completely invisible and it's completely seamless. You don't even know it's there unless you're looking for it. That's what that's how it's going to need to be in my opinion. If you're if you see a Web 3 game and has connect wallet on the front page of the experience, they have already failed in my in my opinion. I have strong opinions about this though. So, you know, maybe that's a little archival. But you know, our our experience is completely invisible and I'll tell you what I mean in all roll the story. So you'll be able to collect cards in our game. They will be off chain. You'll open packs. You'll get exciting cards. You'll go on journeys with those cards. You'll you'll level up those cards as you're your your game plan your account gets more mature, not functionally but cosmetically. You'll you the card will get prettier. It will get more dimensional or more 3D. Visual effects will start appearing on it and they will diverge from other people who have the same card. So your card and my card will look different and that's cool. They'll start to be you know become unique as you level them up. And when you get them to the top level in our game, we're still working out exactly what that looks like. You'll have the option of getting the card graded. And that's a throwback to physical collectibles where what do you do when you have an amazing card you throw it in a case and you send it off to PSA to get graded. In physical cards grading means how scratched is it? How's the quality? You know, is it centered? And and in our game, grading means you know how what what is the quality of the traits you rolled as you were upgrading it and you know how rare are those and you know what has the card done. So it's it's a neat analog to physical collectibles that we're putting in. And when you get a card graded which costs soft current you know some currency in our in our game off you know off chain. You will be able to unlock a couple of experiences because the card has been graded and and and players will want to do that. You know one of those experiences wadering the card the other one is getting all the matches stored on it like that I mentioned that you that you can share with friends and replay forever. So people are going to want to be like oh yeah I want a graded card and it only costs you know like 50 gold to do that or whatever I we don't know yet. But secretly what we did when you graded it is we minted it on chain and threw it into a wallet that we made for you and didn't tell you and you don't even know like as a web two person you don't even know. And these are people who think like what do you mean I don't own my items in world of warcraft don't I? And you know you have to be like well technically no blizzard don'ts those but and you can't take them out of the game. You know in our game you will own them and we just totally trojan horse to that because we didn't let make you click anything we didn't ask you to connect the wallet we didn't say put your Metamask in here we didn't cut your car you sure you want to confirm this transaction none of that crap we literally threw it into wallet and it's you know for your perspective it just now says graded it's in a case it has a QR code and you're like oh that's really cool and it does all these cool things but a web three person's going to be like oh sweet it's on chain so can I withdraw it and the answer is of course if you link a self custody wallet to your account you can take you know do whatever you want but to web too it's it's completely invisible and seamless and I'm really excited that I just don't see a lot of games doing it that way like they're still all hitting connect wallet break the frame of the app transaction to prove and that's just garbage right like a billion gamers are not going to accept a UX that that that's that's got that much friction

Jon Radoff: you know I mean we already know that all you have to do is add like a hundred milliseconds of latency to a purchase transaction and you probably have you you've already table flipped right yeah like you've already fucked up your whole game economy just from that so go from a hundred milliseconds to now the now the way you do it is establish a coin base account buy some currency then get a MetaMask account set up wait the week or two before coin base will let you move your coins out put it in your MetaMask figure out what this click to connect wallet thing is the a million wallets on there not know the heck what's going on like am I using MetaMask by using

Kevin Lambert: phantom what the hell is a chain anyway like and then event like that sounds like a lot worse than

Jon Radoff: a hundred milliseconds you are focusing on a top of funnel experience that's really the same as any other game so people love the game just like they love a marvel game they don't even know

Kevin Lambert: there are going to be players in our game who have NFTs that don't know they have NFTs right and that's really cool because they'll be like officer I swear I did not put that NFT in that wallet I didn't know you know like I have no idea how that got there because it was seamless right and that's what we want the experience to be and we want you to want it not because it's an NFT but because you want the experience that it unlocks in our game and there will be people who are like but then I can sell it that's fine like you can do that that's one of the things that you can do with things that you own but I don't feel like we needed to put that on the back of the box it's just like obviously ownership comes with that I think the more interesting things are what else can I do with it because I own it and we've got some neat stories like like sharing replays and things like that and you know following the provenance of what happened to the item and you know you've won 700 matches with a 100% win rate with that card that's insane I would love to have that like will you sell it to me you know so I think the only thing that traditional web three folks are going to be you know looking at here is like from a web 2 player perspective the only surface area they will get of the traditional web 3 side is occasionally there will be a collector who like knocks on their door and says hey I would love to trade for your card because it's rare and it has something I want you know because we have the collector ecosystem and that's where we put the the majority of our web 3 experience is on the other side of a very small fence where collectors can collect and you know it's very similar to physicals like magic the gathering or Pokemon or you go where collectability is sustainable and even people who want to resell those for profit like you can sustain a you know a percentage of people who like to do that and it's in the collector ecosystem it's been proven from games like Pokemon and magic that that can exist at scale

Kevin Lambert: and so that's where we decided to put the web 3 native experiences over there so that people can

Kevin Lambert: either play for fun or they can play they can collect or they can do both of those things but neither pollute each other with like a play to earn experience that you can't sustain for years

Jon Radoff: so Kevin we just have this question that came in from LinkedIn the question sorry I guess you were anonymized by LinkedIn but what if they like their own wall and I guess the inherent question in that is what about that crypto-native guy who's wants to be his own bank and you know all the all the personal sovereignty stuff from like is that did you just get the answer for that person or are they do you feel like that's even your customer?

Kevin Lambert: Totally yeah absolutely you can do that so the nice thing about web 3 people is that we are used to horrible UX we're used to bridging for God's sake if anybody has done bridging then

Jon Radoff: then you are level 10 you know I wish Bitcoin into Ethereum that was fun oh yeah you swap yeah you swap wrap wrapped wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum is probably the craziest thing you can actually do

Kevin Lambert: exactly yeah exactly so we don't have so yes of course the web 3 native is going to say how can I link my own wallet and you go into account settings wallets to do that right like it's where you think it was and we don't have to put it on the front so you'll link a self-custody wallet to your account as many as as you want and we delegate wallets whatever and then you know if you have an item and your web 3 native and you understand what that means and we put it in the wallet for you

Kevin Lambert: you can withdraw it to your own wallet and do whatever you want with it so we've been talking

Jon Radoff: about a lot of the design issues and now you've touched on the business issues but what's what's hard about making a web 3 game that's different than any of the other game categories that

Kevin Lambert: you've worked on before for for for me it comes down to how you're going to serve the different personas so I wrote an article on my Twitter it's pinned to my Twitter profile on on the personas that are around in web 3 gaming and I really tried to just make it it's like a six minute read I tried to make it really casual and we see web 3 as three personas and hybrids of those personas and we all know who they are like you know the elephant in the room is this when we named them you know right so we named them Billy Vinnie and Chad and so like in our world you know Billy is a web 2 gamer like a traditional gamer who loves games plays them for fun doesn't even know what a metamasker web 3 is and if he plays your game it's going to be for fun then our then our second persona we call Vinnie and that is the profit motivated individual when Lambo when moon you know I will I need to see number go up and that is my primary motivation even if I also like games I'm here for the for the for the money and then the third persona which I think is actually

Kevin Lambert: the most interesting is is an evolution of of our Billy named Chad and Billy or sorry and Chad is a

Kevin Lambert: web 3 aware gamer who still has fun as a primary motivation and there's a there's a whole spectrum it's not just three there's a hybrids of all of them you know most of the people in web 3 gaming are some flavor of Vinnie Chad hybrids right I myself in the Vinnie Chad hybrid but there are pure Chad's who would just who just like the ownership experience and there aren't many of those people so to roll this back to your question what's what's interesting and hard about web 3 game development I think it's choosing how it's acknowledging these personas and deciding how you want to serve them and we decided that we wanted to serve all three of these personas we want to serve the fun motivated gamer we want to serve the the Vinnie who's that little more speculative you know kind of individual and and the way we decided to serve all those needed to be in a way that didn't cross the streams in a non sustainable way and that was the hardest part was you know coming up with our fence that I mentioned that those two experiences on are on either side of you know and and I don't see a lot of web 3 game studios doing that most of them are still blending everything they're either making a fully on chain game which is fine right like we're the gambling speculative experience is the game you know and then I see people who are just like let's just make a web 2 game and put NFTs in it and there really is no experience for that you know speculative persona and so you know we acknowledge that all three of those personas are here in large numbers and we and we wanted to make sure and hit all of them in our with some experience loop

Jon Radoff: there's an interesting comparison to some of the economic conversation that I had with SINGEN on on last week's program which by the way everybody should check out this is he came from this background in like literal online gaming like poker exactly and he made this interesting point which is like if you if you're just catering to the value extractors which you could say in web 3 are really the people who have no intention of playing the game they're going to buy NFTs at a value point hoping to resell it to somebody else later then you're kind of like building a poker game but just for sharks and the problem is if it's just for sharks like they're not going to stick around because actually there's no value to extract from and that was sort of a I think he would admit kind of evil but very you know sober realization of like what some of the underlying economics of web 3 might look like you're going to have extractors and you're going to have people that can be extracted from the issue is the people that are going to have value extracted from them have to be having fun they have to be there for reason like they have to be able to aspire to a great experience and I'm not saying that you're exactly that form but I'm just reminded of it which is everybody and well I don't want to say everybody but the vast majority of games that I saw were quote-unquote games that I saw proposed for web 3 over the last few years they were really just for these whales and speculators and they're effectively a Ponzi game where you just hope to not be the last speculator out yeah it's like it's like

Kevin Lambert: musical chairs and that's what you see in the play to earn genre that we you know that we that we remember from 2021 and 2022 is like remember that every transaction has someone on the other side of it right so if someone sells something there has to be a buyer and if everybody wants to grow up to be a seller then you're going to run out of buyers unless you're doubling your new users every period right and that's just impossible to do so you know the way I look at it is you know and look at magic the gathering they have sellers they have people that sell the cards but when you look at how big the slice of that pie is relative to their entire user base it's very small it's like a one to three percent of people are out there on eBay flippant cards making a business out of it extracting value whereas the 90 x percent of it are the people who are by are paying customers and leaving the boxes of clouds on their shelf in the closet so you need you need more of those

Jon Radoff: people by a factor of almost a hundred you know and so yeah totally agreed with and engines great

Kevin Lambert: by the way um he gets it as well he's been in game development for a while and you know poker is a really interesting case study because you could say like most people play isn't poker a play to earn game and it is right but what's really interesting about poker is that the social contract of how the game works and who can earn is on right up front it's just like only the top tables are going to make money and if you decide to play poker you are accepting that knowing that that's how the game works and if you're just like I'm not really that good at poker I probably can't make any money then you get to make that decision up front which is very different from how play to earn games or advertise where you're like everybody can quit their job and make money playing games where that's

Kevin Lambert: not really true and it's not sustainable so there's a transparency and you know um expectations

Jon Radoff: problem with that too when I when I show up at the poker tournament at the casino and I put my $200 in I pretty much know I'm gonna lose that $200 but I'm gonna have I don't know depending on how I do that night two three four hours of pretty solid entertainment and I get to see some really good players hopefully you show me how to really play this game and and maybe you get lucky and have

Kevin Lambert: some great emotional moments and yeah that you're okay with that contrast right like you're accepting

Jon Radoff: that up front yeah and there's there's a little bit of maybe um a slight of hand at work and

Kevin Lambert: web three gaming around this this idea of play to earn I guess yeah yeah so we talked about web three

Jon Radoff: like from a design standpoint what's hard what's hard about the technical aspects of it like

Kevin Lambert: games are always technically complex because of how much engineering that it's like the only form

Jon Radoff: of entertainment that requires that much engineering as well as that much design what is there a hard technology aspect to this as well because it seems like a lot of people just like struggle to even launch they can't figure out how to get the basic mechanics working beyond like connect your wallet

Kevin Lambert: in a web page it depends what your web three experiences is gonna be I mean fully on chain games with game state store on the blockchain and all of that are gonna have bigger technical requirements our game is mostly almost an exclusively run off chain and it has you know web three experiences a a jace a j almost a jason to it like I don't even know if we're gonna have any direct web three calls in our game client I don't think we do I think all of them kind of go out to a service that does the web three stuff for us and you know the amount of web three calls per minute are extremely low for us because we don't need the blockchain all the time we only need it for very discrete you know moments in our experience loop so you know that's very light and I think you know you

Kevin Lambert: have things like what chain do you want to use and you know what what you x do on and because we

Kevin Lambert: wanted it invisible seamless and frictionless that that made our hunt for like who to partner with on the web's three side kind of a tough journey because everybody's like yeah you know use our wallet and pops up this thing and you have to confirm it and you have to input a seed phrase and don't store that online and I'm like nobody wants to go through that like we we want to just have like a non custody wallet that you know is seamless and it was and it's been really hard to find that but I think now more people are starting to get it so there are more product offerings that that do that you know we you know we you know we wanted a good back end that could bridge the gap between traditional game database stuff and web three and we found beamable that that you guys did and thank you Kevin and that and yeah and and it was awesome and we looked at a lot right we looked at play and we looked there so many SDKs out there that put you know offer to do the same thing and a lot of them are just you know we you know what if you know what you're doing you look at those and be like yeah that's not really going to be in our needs so we're very happy and excited you work with beamable and you know because it offers us the seamless frictionless experience that

Kevin Lambert: we believe players are going to want so Ryan has a fun question here and by the way be like Ryan

Jon Radoff: ask a question here in the feed we've got about 10 minutes left so I want to hopefully use that time to get more questions from the audience but Ryan's question is kind of like what I was hearing from the early days of web three game and even before we heard this term web three gaming like when we were just calling it like blockchain games like there were some people who are like as soon as people realize you can own your own assets like you would never want to play a free to play game you'd never want to be in an MMO where where Blizzard actually owns your favorite sword and they could take it away at any moment or change everything so so Ryan's question that almost harkens back to those early people that you know I'll hold off and saying they missed the overhyped it but like there was a lot of over promising in the early days of web three gaming that it was just going to take over like a flood and it obviously hasn't done that yet because web three games are still sort of

Kevin Lambert: really and getting off the ground it's sort of like I think we are with web three games where mobile

Jon Radoff: games were before the smartphone caused it to be a real category what do you think of this though like where do you side with this idea of web three will it do you think it ultimately replaces everything even if we forget for a moment the speed at which that will happen no I don't think it

Kevin Lambert: replaces everything I think it becomes a style of game like mobile free to play didn't replace everything it's just a style of game and a lot of people like that style of game and I think it will be

Kevin Lambert: the style of game it's just like okay games where um you know digital property ownership offers

Kevin Lambert: entering interesting experiences that you couldn't get in traditional games there's some interoperability there's some composability you know perhaps these are more transparent like I can't see web two doing transparent development with the community as much I mean you can do that and when I was at Microsoft we actually did a little bit of that we we made an inner circle and we let our beta testers you know find out about the games we were making before we were making them but we could do that because we were making like solitary and mine super so it wasn't like we got a million it's you have five million dollar deal that could fall through if the NDA was broken Riley's solitaire so the reason why a lot of web two games studios can't talk about the games that they're building which is frustrating for players and it's actually frustrating for the developers who would love to tell you what we're working on but what you can is because of those deals and the IP and you know you can't let someone come in and steal your ideas and bring it to market faster than you and I think web three at the moment is a little more grassroots in that category it's a little more let's develop with everybody else with the community with other founders and I love that so much I don't know if that will be around in 10 years when it gets more competitive but I love that we're there now and so you know the promise of web three is it's just a different kind of game it's a style of game it's a style of game development that's not going to take over it's not going to replace web two it's not going to replace you know your your you know last of us is in your great console games or your great sweaty PC games it's just going to be if you want these kind of experiences which

Kevin Lambert: are nascent today and in two years will be there'll be some really nice shots on goal you know you'll you'll look for that web three tag in steam yeah I think for certain things like last of us great great

Jon Radoff: game one of my favorite games of all time actually I love storytelling based games like you wouldn't want to reveal too you want to reveal just enough to get people enticed it's kind of like making a movie like I hate the trailer that basically is like I guess I watched the movie already from my friends trailer because I think I saw all the interesting things about it you don't want to you don't want to give away too much because you want the story to unfold and to you to have that joy of that experience there's other kinds of games that are more socially oriented where the structure of the play or even the IP of the game is going to be important to it where even in web two though I I feel like there's a little bit of a Stockholm syndrome even within web two or you you just believe that you have to have this keep it all super close when in fact they're they're hurting themselves by doing that and even with IP there's no hard rules on that like when I built a Star Trek game I brought an alpha build of that game to Penny Arcadex bow and had thousands of people play this game in a really super early version in fact we we we measured people's we met actually measured KPIs as people came into the booth and played it on iPads to see how deep into the tutorial they got and then we shipped a different build in the second half of Penny Arcadex bow just so we could do an av test with thousands of people I don't know start CBS was they didn't really care or they think they took the attitude of hey you were you're the game developer you do whatever you think we want the game to be successful and that and that one was so I don't I mean this whole build in public idea is sort of words more associated with web three for whatever reason the build in public is something that could apply to anybody I don't I don't I don't I don't know why more people don't do it in game development when it's so hard to capture a community you've got 19,000 games on Steam last year like it's just so hard to to stand out like unless you're building that community earlier in your development process it's going to be hard to break through yeah I

Kevin Lambert: totally agree and you know I said this on gamified last week on the podcast that I I hope to see more build in public make its way into web too because like you said there are you wouldn't want to do it with a story game where spoilers like you do it's a really good point but there are a lot of games that you could do it with and I believe there should be more of that too and hopefully web three will kind of shock you know if they with people see value in building that way then perhaps more

Kevin Lambert: traditional game studios will do it as well that would be awesome Kevin we're getting to the last

Jon Radoff: couple of minutes here so in that time I want you to share with everybody like what what's your vision for web three here or what do you what do you want people to know about project O or all of the above like what are those parting comments that the audience here who's going to be a lot of people just looking for alpha as usual but also game developers what do game developers need to know about this market that maybe they don't know already or that they're misinformed on I mean the

Kevin Lambert: best thing I can say is look for you know it's it's about the good teams there are a lot more of them now than there were in 2021 and there will be more in 2027 than there are now so try to find good teams look look like John is doing a pretty great job here trying to curate them so to help you find them and you know it's all about finding good teams and good products and look for teams that are aiming to compete with traditional games not people who are looking to compete with web three games that's how that's our approach is like look we need we need to if we can't go up against the best in web two what what are we doing how are we going to hope to win in this space right you can't just say let's be the best in web three because that's that's not very challenging

Kevin Lambert: right now but also I don't know that it's sustainable long term so our you know our game is a

Kevin Lambert: it's going to be mobile first it will be PC as well it's going to be a traditional card game we are ambitious we're aiming to go up against the best card games in web two we're going to we're going to go up against hard Marvel snap we're going to go up against hardstone and we welcome that that comparison and you know and we're we're attempting to bring a web three experience that is very unique I don't see anybody else in in the entirety of the web three space right now that that is mirroring our web three experience so if you will be unique it's a hypothesis right there's no textbook on what the right way to do it is so everybody's got their own shot on goal but if you are interested in our approach you know follow us on discord you can follow me I use my real name Kevin Lambert you can follow our game project oh it's a letter oh not a zero we chose a bad font

Kevin Lambert: and that's not the actual name of the game we're only calling it project oh because our trade

Kevin Lambert: market is still an application our our game name will begin with an oh so the oh is relevant but so we have that it's a project oh so hop in our discord get in with our play test we're doing play test for our NFT holders and we're not selling anything right now so we're not you know we're not showing we're just you know we're raising we're funding raising funding to finish the game and then you can get in with play tests that are coming up if you're one of our NFT holders or if you want to join join us in discord we're we're there every day you can ask us questions on the game

Jon Radoff: awesome yes absolutely everybody check out project oh follow Kevin on Twitter well we'll will include that in the links in case it's not already there just you can find these guys it is an awesome team that to me is the most encouraging thing about the web three teams that I've seen or at least the ones that beamable works with they're they're working on beamable probably because they're building a real game if I do say something myself um next week speaking of great teams we have Paul Bettner on age of empires words with friends like these are very memorable well-known games and a couple different genres he's taking on web free so see that uh episode next week or week from today it's going to be another eye opener I think but for today this has been an awesome conversation Kevin thank you so much for taking time out time is the most valuable resource of any game developer you could have just been building a game instead you're talking to us about it I hope everyone learns something from this and that at the very least you go download the game and try it and get get into the community and see what's being built there thanks Kevin so much thanks John

Kevin Lambert: all right take care everybody until next time