Web3 Game Development Livestream

Unknown: Welcome back everybody to the Web 3 game development live stream.

Guest: This is the live stream where we talk about game development from a game developers perspective. We talk to game designers, studio heads, technologists, people who are actually working on games with the idea that if you're building a game, there's going to always be something for you to learn here. Hopefully I learn things every single time. So it's good for me as well. A couple of details about our program. So we continue this every week. It's at 9 AM Eastern time on Wednesday mornings. Next week we'll be broadcasting live from South by Southwest. That's going to be exciting. The week after that we're going to broadcast live from GDC. And yes, we're going to keep the same time, the same schedule every time so that we can reach the Asian audience, European audience, and everything in between. So the other piece that you need to know about this live stream. We always bring on guests, but it's not just a conversation between me and our guest. It is also a conversation that you can be involved in. So we love it when you post comments and our intrepid producer Oscar is going to be monitoring across all these channels. So Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, X, YouTube. We're on a whole bunch of different stream formats. And if you post a question, we will bring that into the chat. Beyond that, we'll even bring you onto the channel. So if you would like to join live, this is an open platform. You can join me and be part of the conversation here. Whether it's pertinent to the exact conversation we're having. Or if you have something that you think is really pressing and Web 3 game development, we'd love to have you on. So without further ado, I'm again, Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable, where a game infrastructure company for Web 2 and Web 3. But we are joined today by Zlatko. Did I get your name? Did I say your name correctly, first of all? Yes, John. You did. Thank you. Why don't you take a moment just to introduce yourself and tell us about the game you're working on? Sure. So my name is Latko Stepanovich, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Lusah. We're building not only a game, but a platform. We started as a game, but pivoted into a platform to help other game developers build games. So initially, we, the game we will ship first is a first person shooter. Space theme, very fast pace, vertical combat. Very fast. My background started playing games when I was four years old on the Super Nintendo ecosystem. We had like Donkey Kong, Yoshi's Island, and so on. I played ours and ours, and got into PC gaming in the early 2000s. I started with Need for Speed Underground, where I managed to be top-twent in the world, underground two top ten in the world. And then I was number one in the world, the Need for Speed most wanted for six months. Until my parents cut off my internet because my grades were so bad. Yeah, I told them that you were working on your future career. Try to explain that in the 2000s when the price pool was like 500 bucks when you win a major tournament. You couldn't make other living of that. So I still managed somehow to earn money. I dropped out of school, started playing Warcraft, World of Warcraft. And then I got into top 25 World PvG Guild. Started with League of Legends, Heartstack them and one played Heartstone, top five Europe, top 20 World. Many games play everything competitively, got also into blockchain. Searching and investing into Bitcoin in 2016 went all in during the COVID crash, which was a very good decision, I would say. And yeah, since then, 2022 full time in building LUSA, our project. So it is quick and short intro about myself. Thank you. So Zlaka, you worked on a lot of, or you played rather a lot of what we think of as core traditional MMOs, Heartstone, World of Warcraft, things like that. Why did you, when you decided you wanted to also be a game maker, why Web 3, why a token based platform essentially? Yeah, so we've seen like in the 2020, 2021 frenzy, all of this Web 3 games starting, raising a lot of money, not shipping games and being economy first. Like everything was about play to earn, how do I earn during playing games? And I think this was doomed to fail. We see it in the token price, the value that was ejected by VC capital and what is worth now is down 99%. This is also why the VC funding dropped 80% in the past years from 2021 to, and we decided to use what blockchain is good for. Through asset ownership and using the blockchain to verify the assets you own, you can take them to another game. So cross game asset composability, cross game asset exchange, like you play an FPS and you want to play now on RPG. You can swap your item from the FPS, let's say it's an assault rifle, to a sword in the RPG game, with an AI finding the same value so you don't make a bad trade. Like people have a hurdle changing their game because they spend money and a lot of time into a game, but maybe their friends switched the game and you don't want because you spend a lot of money. And this reduces the hurdle for switching to another game as well and you can switch back and forth how much you want. And obviously incentivizing also the creators with user generated content, putting it on chain, governance model, like you can vote as a community to implement an asset that someone created into the main game. If the majority votes for yes, it comes in, maybe it needs to be a little bit balanced, fit into the game. And the user who generated this asset will have a lifetime revenue and as long as this item is being traded. And also on the secondary market, which is blockchain again good for. Right now no one can sell their skins in the web soon industry. With enabling that there's a huge secondary market opportunity as well. And yeah, basically also I was heavily generating content in work craft three with which became later on Dota started basically the tower defense then became into the MOBA and at the point Blizzard shut down the servers of work craft three and thousands of my creations and hours were lost. So we have the approach to put everything we develop on chain and if we decide to shut down the servers, people can rent and spin up their own server and start the game on their own. So it's on chain it's open source everyone can use it. Okay, so there's a whole bunch of there's a whole bunch of things there that we're going to unpack now but really interesting stuff. Let me let's start with me. So let me list some of the things that I heard there that I think we are going to want to explore in this program and we've got over a hundred people here watching already just in the live audience. So I just also want to repeat that this is your opportunity to ask questions about all of these things and also join the live stream. So if you want to join live and you've got a camera, we can add you in just post a message that you're interested in taking part, hospital, the stream yard link. But if you just want to ask a question, that's awesome to just post it in any of the channels were on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, X. All right, Zalco, so here are some of the things I heard. So first of all, the portability thesis of being able to take content in one game to another.

Unknown: Something that sort of Roblox does in its closed metaverse, not yet something that exists really at scale in Web 3.

Guest: So I want to talk about that in more of like the business case for it. Again, we're talking to game development audience. I really want people to understand like as game developers, why do we care about these things? Why do we find them compelling? We'll save the pitch to the player maybe for another day, although happy to talk about it. I guess if you want to go there, but it's really more for game developers like why do you care about this? So I think we've just mentioned AI-enabled portability. So the really interesting idea of using AI to what I understood to be essentially mapping sort of item from one environment to another. So I want to drill into that and understand both the mapping concept as well as the AI concept, how AI plays into that. I think we've said on this program that we weren't going to talk about AI every single time, but Oscar, what's our failure rate on that at zero? Like we are to talk about AI every single episode.

Jon Radoff: I think that we avoid talking about AI as much as the media, as much as your best friend, as much as your grandmother. AI is part of the conversation now. I'm sorry, universe. I'm sorry, audience. I think we can use a crowbar the way it was intended to be used.

Guest: And Oscar and Zlatko, I guess the other question here is like why blockchain? Right? Because we talked about some things there, like portable assets. I'd like to just kind of come back to that whole question again of like why blockchain is the technology enabler for this and probe this notion that well, there's other ways you could do it that doesn't necessarily work. And just kind of understand again, like how is the technology facilitating it? So let's actually start there a little bit. In fact, just side question from one of our users on LinkedIn, they're asking what blockchain you're on. So we haven't yet decided our home chain, but we will be EVM compatible. We have already wallet abstraction, which supports 13 EVM chains.

Unknown: So it will be a full web to experience joining the game and to come back to why blockchain. Yeah.

Guest: So the thing was the asset composability. Second one is true asset ownership. Very viable asset ownership. And also everything is handled transparently and publicly through smart contracts. You cannot like, you know, there's the gray market with a counter strike roulette, where you, of course, yeah, all the way back to world of warcraft. Yes, yes. So in fact, some people don't even realize that Steve Van and the guy that the cycle of Trump got his start in IGE, which was a, which was a gray market sales website for world of warcraft items.

Unknown: So there you go. It's just a little fact joined to throw out there without without, without opinion, say, but yes, there's been gray market activities for a while.

Guest: So instead of like spinning up those gray markets, why not put it on chain and transparent for everyone. So imagine what valve could have earned or steam by having this gray market integrated into the main game. What kind of fees they could have earned to develop the game further. Those gray markets are only benefiting those people that are like running the gray market. And I think developers should use that also as a revenue to keep developing their game. As mentioned, the VC funding is down 80% from 2022. And many Web 2 studios are shutting down just a few weeks ago. Warner Bros Games announced closing monolith, which was developing two years, the Wonder Woman game. And massive layoffs in the past two to three years, over 30,000 people lost their jobs because the funding is very low at the moment. So we should use any revenue possible out there to keep the indie studios or normal game studios alive to build the games and blockchain again, enables that with the secondary market with the gray market. The gray market we spoke about people trading their skins, et cetera, et cetera, or selling accounts. It's forbidden in world of work, I'm sitting on a massive account with some achievements and items that are probably worth a lot, but I can't sell them because the count will get banned. If you put that on chain, you could sell those items, you could sell those accounts. Blizzard could earn on that. Hey, it's my item. It's a smart contract. I've put a 5% or 10% royalty fee on secondary market transfers. This is a whole new income source for every game developer. And I'm not understanding why the Web 2 industry isn't using that. Imagine having an OG skin from the early days of Fortnite. It's not available anywhere and it's worth a lot. And Epic Games could earn on the secondary market with that. There are people that are just in a game collecting all the skins, for example.

Unknown: And yeah.

Guest: Well, let's probe that a little bit more. So you just made the business case for why these games could generate revenue more if they allowed a more open economy around trading items. And some of them, many of them, maybe even practically all of them would argue that that financializing the trading system kind of undermines the ultimate player experience and the community experience in the game and that having the like they, they kind of tolerate slash forbid the game, but they're aware that they exist, but the fact that their gray markets isn't quite enough to create a totally financialized economy. But once you bring it front and center in the game, that it can undermine it. So I'm just going to throw out a couple of other things and then invite you to sort of share your thoughts on it. So I think that that's a fairly accurate stance that a lot of these developers would have.

Unknown: And also point to things like the Diablo for that, sorry, the Diablo three trading system.

Guest: I have my own thoughts on this. I'm going to let you think on it first is Diablo three, the trading system, at least in the early years of the product was in fact brought forward into the game system. And it kind of stands as a is a example that a lot of game developers from traditional game development go back to and they say, well, look at what happens once you, once you do that, they actually had to remove it from the game. Now there's a whole other side of this though that I that I'll just inject, which is there's a little bit of a mindset shift that can occur when you think about having an open economy, not as a gray market or not as simply an add on to a traditional game system. But when you actually build the game system with the whole idea that a trading economy will be integral to the game. And the one that I always go back to precedes any kind of digital version of this, which is magic, the gathering. So magic, the gathering was a game where collectability was built in. They knew that people would be trading cards. They knew that there would be a scarcity economy and some cards would be much more demanded than others. And in that example, you could almost think of it as an exam as a early case of composability to in that you collect the cards, but you're not just collecting for the sake of collecting, you're collecting them so that you can assemble them into decks, which means that there's this interesting intersection between the creative aspects of playing the deck building, the thinking through how I want to play.

Unknown: And that collection economy and in magic, the gathering, of course, it worked really well.

Guest: And then that gave inspiration to Pokemon and a few other games, but that's kind of where it worked. Right. So I just covered a whole bunch of things. So maybe games that are built and premised upon an open economy versus ones where it's simply an add on gray market or otherwise, the Diablo three case. Yes, add to that. However, you think it was a lot of great, great points. I was playing Diablo three and actually the trading and auction house was kind of broken, I would say. You need to balance it somehow. There's people with big pockets, which can scoop up all the items and put them very expensive on there. So you will need to put some barriers there to not get the whales scooping up everything and the casual players are looking, oh shit, this guy got everything, we can afford it now. But on the other aspect, this was maybe too early or not too well thought through. So economies are very complex. We've seen many attempts in play to earn to make an economy work. We've seen the attempt of the trading in Diablo three, which were great attempts where we could learn where we could learn off. When I love to make this analogy, when Microsoft had their first tablet in 1998 or seven or six, I don't know, no one was using it. And then Apple came out with the iPad and everyone was, wow. So timing is also something. And I think we are in a very good time right now to start introducing that because you could collaborate also with streamers for revenue for them, like creating special skins, limited skins for them, which they could sell to their community, for example. And everyone's looking for such stuff, especially if you look at the streamers, they are also struggling. Some of many of them, not some of them, but many of them to get more viewers or to get their play time being paid somehow through the donations they get. So the whole industry is changing. I think Web 2 has very huge struggles at the moment with the layoffs, business models that worked for years stopped working.

Unknown: Content is getting cheaper and cheaper and AI coming in with with asset creation. So you can save on developers.

Guest: But again, those people will need another job and we could leverage this through blockchain. They could create their own asset and or assets, characters, environments, sounds, composing music, whatever, and offer it through blockchain for everyone to use. And there are game developers who can buy it, rent it, test it out, whatever. And this is also again a new revenue income for them. If they can find a job, I think there are every day hundreds of new indie studios, like two or three developers coming out because they got fired because of no budget anymore for developing the game. And we are a head of everyone developing their own game. We should open a community code development with what does the community want and what can the developer provide. For example, we take this approach. We will offer all the things we developed in the past three years open source, our code base, our assets, templates, tools, everything we developed will be open source and developers can use it to have a faster time to market. And we are inviting all game developers to come to us to collaborate on that. They can offer it for free as we do or they can charge something. It's up to them. And like for this again blockchain is good, open economy is good for such for such a process. We need an open economy. And there's like also a problem like the content treadmill. If you go as a game developer in AI, I want new content, new content, you will never be able to produce so much content. How fast the community can consume it. So you want the community user-generating user-generated content. If I remember back to early days of Halo when they started with the UGC, it's still alive today. It started, I don't know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago. And it's still there. Halo forge. And it's being used. So overwolf with over 175,000 creators. We should leverage all of that with an open economy. So everyone can trade their assets. It benefits first of all content creation. And then we have also to come back to the composability, cross-marketing opportunities. Imagine you can take your sniper rifle from Counter Strike into Valorant. It looks different but has the same stats. And the people are like, wow, where did you get the skin from? And then you say, from Counter Strike. And then the people can go and buy their skin. And it's also cross-marketing opportunity. For example, I don't know, Valorant Dragon, Elder Flame skin with you shoot, Dragon comes up, shoots fire down. It just looks amazing. And you probably would like that to have in another shooter. So with the blockchain and smart contracts, you can enable that. So users can change their assets across games. Even if it's only skins, it doesn't need to be stats, just the cosmetics, but it enables cross-marketing opportunities. So on the Diablo 3 example that we talked about, you described it as maybe not a well implemented auction house. I think there was a, personally, I think there was a deeper problem there, which is when you build a game franchise, the community, the business model expectations, a lot of the things that the bones of that game are going to be present from the outset. And you're going to kind of live with those in all of your sequels. So there's other counter examples from other AAA games that have made the wrong choices. Like I think the comparable would be like in star, there was a Star Wars Battlefront game where they added a lot of heavy free to play and loot box components. And that failed and they ended up having to pull it out of the game. Now, the fact that it failed in Battlefront doesn't mean free to play as dead quite the contrary, like free to play as more than half of the game industry today. So like it would be silly to claim that it doesn't work, but it definitely didn't work in that game because those players were not going to accept free to play as the business model for the game that they were already accustomed to. They perceived it as just having revenue extracted from them in addition to buying the game, which they were used to. So I think there's, I think that is probably to me, the bigger lesson to be learned from this, which is think about the business model and the relationship with that you're going to have with your community in a game over time. Pivoting to a completely different business model is really, really hard. Now I can think of cases where it's been done. So for example, Lord of the Rings online, I mean, we're now going back 10, 15 years or something, but Lord of the Rings online had a fair, which was a very popular MMO RPG at the time, kind of started as a subscription based service trying to compete with World of Warcraft and couldn't really get enough scale with that business model. And they pivoted to free to play and they're at work. Okay, so there's another lesson there, which is if your business model isn't working and your choices survivor die, well, you try to do the exploration to find something that works, right? So they succeeded there, not because it was tacked on, but because they really had to find a better model that provided sustainability for the game. Pablo three tried to introduce open market trading in a game where, at best, it was a gray market economy. I was a huge Diablo 2 player, by the way, I played hardcore mode. I was up at level 98 characters and hardcore across the board and all the classes. I never wanted to do level 99 because it was such a relentless grind and I get bored. But if you make 98, it's no harder to get 99. You just keep doing that same level. You just keep killing Dale over and over again at the end. But yeah, I was a top player in that and I was well aware that there was a lot of players who were trading their SOJs for things and getting, which was the unofficial currency of the game and there was gray market trading, but it wasn't central to the game and players like me didn't do that. We just kind of grinded it out. And then you have the battlefront example where they tried to drop free to play on top of a AAA game franchise where they rejected it. So when you build a game, you make a lot of important decisions about the game economy from the beginning. And once your game starts getting scaled out, you better believe that you are kind of stuck with that business model played out again, by the way, again with Diablo, like I think Diablo Immortal, the free to play game, they shipped on mobile. Personally, I thought it was a great game. It was, I think it was financially successful. I don't know if it was financially successful enough from a blizzard standpoint. Because they have really high, really high bar in terms of the revenue they have to make on any effort. But I thought it was a great game. Everybody complained about the free to play mechanics. Guess what? Those were like the lightest free to play mechanics you can imagine. It barely was free to play.

Unknown: Like you didn't have, I think I spent $20 on it and I could never find a reason to spend the currency that I bought in the game.

Guest: So, yeah, people like thought it was terrible. Again, that's the community backlash in introducing an old franchise to something that pivots to a new business model. It does successfully and call a duty though. So obviously there's there's ways that it can be done. I feel like I've said enough about like the brand failure, the brand issue there. I do want to kind of re-explore though this idea of composability. I think composability is something I want to spend a bunch more time on in this conversation. Because you raise some really interesting ideas there, not only cross game composability, but also the idea of UGC and how composability provides more of a business model around UGC content. It's really interesting to talk about that some more. But let's talk about where there is kind of a version of it that exists already. And that is Roblox. So I just think again, we're talking to a game developer audience, not necessarily just investors or game players, but game developers. So if I'm a game developer with like one or two talented people, I can go and build a Roblox game that can be as good as it can be in Roblox, frankly.

Unknown: You can attract an audience. Yes, your revenue is capped. Yes, they take 70 or 80% of the cash. Those are sort of the negatives. On the other hand, they've got a massive audience.

Guest: And there is kind of a proto composability where items can move between worlds. Why would I do speak to game developers here? Why would you do that in web three, which still a little bit needs a lot more development before the scale is there from a user standpoint compared to just Roblox. And I throw something in front of the kids there and they all play it. So one reason why web three again, true asset ownership. Second, it's not that hard anymore. There are so many templates of smart contracts, open source stuff you can use. It doesn't take you three months to build the market place as it did in 2020. You just go in white label something that's free available. So to come back to the composability.

Unknown: So you mentioned something very great. Roblox is taking 70 to 80% and it's centralized. You can't change anything about that. You have to live with that.

Guest: And while on blockchain, you decide how much fees you put in on your on the assets you create. You can do all the 80, you can do 20, you can do zero, you can do whatever you want. And it's transparent. You can change it. And you are not depending on a centralized instance. So with blockchain, you have all the governance. So if the majority of let's say the loose token holders when we launch says, hey guys, your fees of 5% are too high. Let's reduce it to 2.5. If the business allows it and the community comes up and says yes, we would love that.

Unknown: If everyone is aligned with that, then let's do it. So we're not taking 80, but 5 or 10 or 2.5 or whatever. And on top of that, all the game developers can top it up. They can do a special deal for us. Let's say Roblox comes to us and says, hey, we want to use your platform for everything we do.

Guest: We don't want to give you any fee. We want 0%, but we'll bring a ton of users to your platform. Obviously that would also be something interesting to increase the people that are building stuff. And like Roblox is very basic. As you said, two talented people can build a whole world very fast. We're trying to achieve that with Unreal Engine. So imagine having a plugin in Unreal Engine. You write a prompt and a game ready asset is created in Unreal Engine, like 80% of it done. You need to polish it just. And you could offer that to other people as well. We can offer this tool to other people. We can offer the assets, whatever, like anyone can become a game developer. First of all of that. Obviously you will meet someone with a code knowledge. I mean, OK, Claude and then Grok 3 are doing crazy things right now. So I was able to compile a game in Unreal Engine and I'm not a developer. And I built the game and started it. So I think in a year or two anyone will be easily who has interest in that will become the possibility to be a game developer. So for the composability, I think it's great for people that are grinding heavily, like you know Diablo 2. You were grinding like crazy as I was to achieve the stuff we want to achieve, same with World of Warcraft, like you had to grind and farm those resources to build your items. And it just takes time. And when you spend so much time, and then the game is not anymore good for you, you don't like it. Like after Wrath of the Lich King, it got boring for me. It was too easy. And I couldn't take my assets with me and I have one on one character, my main character, 500 days played time. And this is lost. And if I could take these assets into another RPG, not the stats, just the skin. This would be awesome. Some mounts like, I don't know, with a drop chance of 0.01% like Ashess of Valar from Burning Crusade. I have it on my account. I would love to use it somewhere else, but I can't. So for this, I heavily want cross-game asset composability. So people can take their skins, they love the characters, they love whatever to another game and play with it. And it's something that is sticky to a game. Like you love the game, maybe just because of the nice graphics it has, or you love it because you're in love with the character from the game. You should have the possibility to take it with you if you ask me. And it's like a big hurdle for people to leave a game because they spend money, time, and emotions on something. Well, the portability of assets actually is the feature of Roblox that I think is the existence proof for why people would want this. It works partly works in Roblox because of the massive scale that they bring to the table. But there used to be this argument made, which is players don't want this. And anyone who's saying players don't want this should just go play Roblox or more likely watch what their kids are doing at Roblox because their kids will show you what they're doing at Roblox and why there's a business case for it. There's another thing you sort of briefly touched on, which is why web, why a web 3 more open ecosystem future versus something like Roblox. And I think everybody can agree Roblox is a tremendous success. It has huge number of players. It proves a lot of the quote unquote metaverse business models around portable players, portable assets, things like that. Now, if you're part of it comes down to what is your creative vision for the kind of product you want to make too. So most of the game industry to date has been fueled by people having an idea and then using the things that they that are available to them to build that creative vision. And that might mean using unity or unreal or various asset packs or building it from scratch and all kinds of other tools. The game industry is like a whole collaborative ecosystem of components that you assemble together into the kind of game that realizes the experience that you want to ship to players. What is the story that you want to tell players now Roblox gives you a lot of creative expression, but you're not going to choose your 3d engine. So the client server capabilities are kind of what you see is what you get. So like there are really significant technical constraints. Sometimes constraints are good, by the way, like constraints can sometimes just force you to work within that environment and make something that works really well. And I think people have been super, super successful in Roblox and I just really admire both the platform they've created as well as people who have built successful products there.

Unknown: But you're not going to build an Unreal Engine style game, you're not going to build a 2d strategy game, for example, you're not going to build a card game.

Guest: You can kind of do it in Roblox. I've short the examples and the counter examples could pour in of someone being like, well, you can kind of do it. You can kind of do a lot of things almost everything in Roblox, but it's not the same as I want to build a game. So I'm going to pull together the components that I want. And that's the composability case here, right? It's not just composability between games, but it's composability from a technology standpoint. It's being able to bring in the parts that enable the artistic expression you want. That's the idea we had with Beamable. We were actually very inspired by Roblox when we started Beamable five years ago. I was thinking, well, there's this whole problem, which is online infrastructure, the things you need to enable social systems and online economies and game servers and game rules, all the things that essentially end up having to be up on the internet and the cloud to provide multiplayer game experiences was either locked into a tech stack like a Roblox. Or it was just phenomenally complex. If you were building a unity or unreal game, you just have to kind of build it yourself or just use a few little APIs from like a play fab, but you'd still be building out whole game servers and it would still be really complicated. We wanted to deliver people all of those capabilities of say Roblox, but in a game engine like unity or unreal, frankly, anything they wanted. So to me, that was real decentralization, real composability. You're also building a platform. I'd love you to talk a little bit more about what you touched on earlier, the open source projects that you're working on.

Unknown: That's also the beamable approach. We're taking our whole tech stack that a lot of game developers, both Web 2 and Web 3, by the way, have built on open sourcing it. We put it into a foundation now, which is going to build a hill open network, deep in network decentralized physical infrastructure.

Guest: Network based on this open tech stack, which we think is going to fuel a whole new generation of game development around openness and sharing and also an embedded business model. What is your plan? What are some of the problems you've solved in your platform that you're hoping to share with other developers? So I love what you said about building the server. So hard it is in Unreal. We've been building the game since years and we know all the struggles you go through. So we will provide the documentation from the struggles we went through, tutorials and videos, everything and a mod editor on Unreal. So you watch a video and you can like change the game core elements of our game and produce a whole new mod like Counter Strike came out of house life.

Unknown: So you will be able to instead of shooting someone, you can be a dragon and flying around and spitting fire. So you can change anything you want.

Guest: We want to provide these tools for people to create mods that don't have knowledge with developing games. This is one aspect. The other aspect is for game developers. We will offer all the tool sets, code basis, templates, assets, everything we developed for you to create your own stuff. And also we will, for server infrastructure, we will offer on the platform everything in one place. Blockchain abstraction, game development tools, plus servers. So you can come up and spin up your own server very cheap. It's per metal machines based in Europe, US, Southeast Asia, wherever you want. And spin them up for a very low amount of money per month. And so you have basically everything you need, a one stop shop to enable them all. Web 2, Web 3, AI. We have our technical co-founder is he has a PhD in AI machine learning and trust networks. Huge knowledge in AI. And basically on the platform, you will be able as a person with no experience, go into the platform, type in a game title, type in one sentence about what the game is about. And what's called pick a genre is it an FPS, TPS, RPG, battle royale, whatever you want. And there's a pre-trained AI from us.

Unknown: It's not a chat you can hear something. And then you press generate narrative. It comes out with game modes, characters, like a very, very base game design document.

Guest: You start, you can start from it and you can keep going through that. And then you can launch your game like in virtual IO you launch agents, you can launch your game, use our tools to build the game out. The community can be co-developing with you. And the platform will also offer a smart contract for game asset rentals and game asset financing. So let's say you were grinding 20 hours for XP or 30 hours to unlock a new character. And then you don't know which character you want to pick first. You could go to the marketplace and borrow peer-to-peer rent the characters you want to test before you buy them from other people. So the person that is offline has passive income, the person that wants to buy a character can test it first. It's a win-win situation for everyone. And also in terms of AI, we are working on a text to 3D mesh tool with a plug-in into blender, unity and unrele engine. So you write your prompt and you get the asset created directly in the engine you are using. So our goal is to reduce time and development costs by 50% for game developers. I want to return a little bit more to the AI and both the creative piece with graphics that you're just referring to. But also the blockchain part where you're talking about the portability of assets between games using an AI system to unlock that, which I think is a really interesting idea for people to think about. Before we get to those, I'll just let you think for a moment. We have over 300 people in the live audience. So this is a very popular episode. Thanks for joining us. Lockcoe people are really, really interested in what you're working on here. I want to remind everyone this is your program. This is your community here. So post questions in the channel and we'll bring it online and discuss it. We want to join us live. We still get another 12 minutes left. So if you've got a camera, we'd be delighted to just bring you on the channel and you can hang out with us here and discuss all any of these issues. So just a couple of things that folks are mentoring. Les is bringing up the $50 million game fund of the horizon worlds just announced. I think it was just a few days ago actually. The horizon worlds is I kind of see it as meta's VR answer to Roblox. It's a creative kind of UGC environment where people can build worlds and build content and assemble things into experiences. And I think that's one thought on it. Les, and Les, thanks so much for your question for being part of the community and posting that question. Have you heard of this? And if not, it doesn't really matter. What do you think of meta throwing $50 million at the community to go build content and horizon worlds? Awesome. Awesome. It's great. I think many more people should do that. There are many creative people out there that especially students that are studying game development. It will be happy to start working on such things. So I think this is a great approach for meta and obviously makes totally sense to get creators on your platform. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit what so I have I have only positive thoughts about them doing it. Yeah, that said, I wonder about why it's needed, right? Because you have the Unity asset store. They don't need to pay anybody. People create Unity assets all day long because you know you can if you make a good asset for Unity, you can earn a lot of money on it. Same for Unreal Marketplace, Worldblocks, obviously, Web 3, the version of this that exists is the many, many grant funds that have been created on many chains to sort of foster games, tech integrations, new assets. If horizon worlds is putting $50 million out, it kind of suggests that they're having a little bit of trouble at just attracting people to the platform that said it's still early and they're trying to accelerate past people like Roblox who've been added for two decades. So so I get it makes sense and I certainly will not underestimate Zuckerberg for a second. I think he's got a really good handle on what this future potentially looks like and he's investing in it.

Unknown: So really grateful for all the investments meta has made in VR and metaverse and things like that.

Guest: What are your thoughts on like grant funds and blockchain and how this compares there? Like let's face it, a lot of people just chase blockchain grants and they do it, they do it for the money that they can get paid and then they're onto the next grant and it could be any other chain they don't care about the community. They don't really realize upside beyond the grant. Sounds like you're thinking about it a little bit differently like your grant so to speak is the open source you're just putting it out there and you're saying go build with this stuff and hopefully you get value from it. Is that an accurate take? Yes it is and also once the platform is live we want to speak also we're speaking already with the blockchains to come to the platform and offer grants for the most valuable games being built on the platform. So we're not taking the grant for us but distributing the grant to the most promising projects that are being built and we will be able to audit that by with our own developers how the game is progressing how involved is the community and if there's a hype train or not basically so we're definitely our grant will be the open source and the other grants. If the blockchains are open to offer the grants to the most valuable projects we're happy to distribute them and again not taking it for us but giving it to the best. Let's go back to this idea you had of mapping items between worlds with the assistance of AI. So first of all it solves one of the problems that people were kind of complaining about early on when people were thinking about metaverse and this kind of interoperability it would be common to hear things like one of the reasons it won't work is like NFT is essentially just a you know in ownership record. But representing that item in a different world is a whole other problem so even if it was exactly equivalent like it's a sword in this world and it's a sword in the other well swords can look completely different between two different games that might not even be the same 3d engine so feels like AI can help with a lot of that both on the visual side maybe also with the stats side can you can use AI to kind of look at the game. So we're going to look at what the item database looks like on both sides understand how to map things together so that you get something relatively value equivalent something fundamentally based on the stats and what they might mean between worlds because otherwise you're having to go through this huge like semantic web process where like everybody has to agree on some kind of metadata standard and declare it within their game and then all the games have to share this metadata. And then it fails for all the reasons that the quote unquote semantic web did despite Tim Berners-Lee being the guy who's pushed it forever it's just because it's so hard to get that level of coordination between companies but I think you're saying AI kind of fixes this AI can fix this 100% like it will be hard right now it is hard to port like if you're developing on go dot. It will be hard to go to unreal or from unreal to unity with your assets but if you're building on unreal five and you have another game building on unreal five it will be kind of very easy to do that and especially if the game genre is similar and so there's a few aspects where AI can help the first one is if you don't know the value of your asset. And with whom are you exchanging what the value of his asset is so there will be analytics from the AI telling you hey your item is more worse than his this is the average price this is the floor price whatever and it can tell you this deal is not good this deal is good it can tell you if you really like this item you could change it but you're making a not so good financial deal. So in first of all in this way and in the second way if you're playing obviously are developing a triple a game and another game is barely an a one a the graphics will be dramatically different so you could use AI to polish the graphics to get it into the triple a game in the same look for example. And it's already possible to do that there's none real five renderer from Nvidia that helps you polish items very good and in an efficient way so this is the second aspect and the third aspect is again triple a normal game triple a game has usually some physics integrated into the assets as well so when they are destroyed or something. So you could use a I to replicate that another game or another engine as well so code writing etc is something where AI is extremely helpful. Really interesting you know so we run both a web three as well as a we'll call it traditional game development live stream the traditional game development live stream runs tomorrow at one p.m. Eastern time but a few weeks back we had Jason booth on and he's a he's just a one of the greatest engineers in the world frankly on procedural AI system procedural and AI systems but primarily procedural systems to help create content in games he's made it up. He's made like I don't know two dozen plus made I'm probably actually under counting assets on the unity asset store for doing things like world creation and things like that so if this is something that's interesting to anybody definitely check out the previous conversation we have with Jason booth if we can't pull it up fast enough here in the last couple of minutes we'll throw it in the comments and people can track it down after this but this has been a really really interesting. And interesting conversations like I think we could have spoken for three or four hours because between you GC web three composability why blockchain. Design ideas open source ideas decentralization generally like we covered a lot of ground so no wonder we've got nearly 400 people here in the live audience for this talk and no doubt thousands and thousands are going to be watching this in replay this has been a great conversation you're welcome back to join us anytime slot co this this was really cool. I want to let all our viewers know we will be back 9 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday next week will be live from South by Southwest i'm going to have a guest with me together in an impromptu studio that we're going to set up maybe on the sidewalk of Austin Texas. But we're going to make it happen next week and continue this chat with web three game developers I want to thank everybody for joining into this chat to because your time is super valuable there's unlimited content online we believe we've cut out a really special place which is a talk about web three game development. Not to hype a token not to tell help you speculate not to just pump player hype out there why because there's frankly plenty of other options like lots of people are doing that but there is not enough information for developers to talk to developers game developers talk about design technology all the things that you need to think of when actually building a product and that's what we do here now if you're speculator you want to get some alpha out of this you will because you're going to hear us talking about. What's happening next in game development so it's worth you tuning in but this is a talk for game developers to learn and I always learn and want to just thank you is lot for go for being part of this. Thank you very much john was a pleasure to speak with you and as he said I think we can go on for hours easily. It's always the same with people that are into gaming once in the gaming industry you'll never leave. Awesome okay thanks lot go until next time everybody take care thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time. Thanks bye bye.