Web3 Game Development: TON and Telgram Gaming

Jon Radoff: Hey, welcome back everybody. This is another episode of the Web 3 game development live stream. We are live today with my intrepid producer Oscar Oscar thanks for supporting me. And Jack from win win is on a secret mission in Asia so he cannot make it today, but he will be back next week when we broadcast live from ETH Denver. Today I am joined by Tom Copera. I hope I pronounced your name right? Yeah, correct sir. Thanks Tom. Tom is with eLympics. We're going to be talking about a few things that I think are top of mind for anybody who is in Web 3 game development right now. So number one, the competitive gaming ecosystem in Web 3 gaming to telegram games, probably the most significant thing that's driven user adoption just in the last few months. And then we're going to talk about the chain ton and everything happening there. We'll even talk about some of the newsworthy events around which chain or chains you're allowed to use on telegram games. We're going to cover it all. So if you're a Web 3 game developer, you are watching the right live stream right now because this is the place where you come to learn about the trends that affect you as a developer building games, building products that are going to penetrate this ecosystem. I'm Jon Radoff. I'm the CEO of a company called beamable. We are a back end live infrastructure company. We help you build and scale your game in the cloud. So let's get started and dive right in Tom. Let's begin with competitive gaming, but let's learn a little bit about yourself first Tom. Can you just kind of introduce yourself to the audience here? How do you get into this?

Guest: Oh, yeah, Dan, I can do it. Obviously. So just you know briefly about myself, prior to joining crypto, I've been building in infrastructure projects in more like multi level and multi level marketing environment on the global scale more than 40 different countries. I've been builder by heart, you know, my entire life. And then at some point I joined crypto those 2020 and then again jumped into building built out one of the biggest conference format in centuries to new called next block expo. And that's how I actually met the founders of limepaces how we embarked on the on the journey together. And that's how we're building again infrastructure projects, but for the different domain, which is a competitive gaming or in overall gaming. I will cover that how competitive gaming is booming and becoming a driving force for the future of gaming, but that's for the latest part called the show, but that's me myself and I briefly.

Jon Radoff: Well, let's drill in a little bit more to competitive gaming. So if I think about the overall gaming ecosystem and I use the term competitive gaming, I think of everything from esports esports leagues that side of things. There's also a whole skill based gaming market within traditional game gaming.

Guest: Let's hear your definition. Yeah. So I think I think I will start even like way, way more in the past. So let's look at their arcade bars. Let's imagine, you know, we are these social community that is getting into the bar and observing you know the leader bars and all these machines. That's the early days of competitive games that's divide and it does just reason why I'm starting there because actually these type of experience was competitive gaming in its pure form, which is not only about competition itself, but also about the social experience that bringing people together and actually focusing on, you know, on the fun within that game. And there is a competitive aspect that is inherited in our human nature. We are competitive pipe design. But that's how it all started. And then it got digitalized so to say right. So, so we have this first competitive games like in a pong and so ever. And then we accelerated and with the like the raising born of the game and just like unity as an example, these experiences getting more and more advanced so to say, then eventually let creation of multiplayer games and then it all evolve and get professionalized around esports. But then this kind of experience was accessible and rewarding basically like top 00.1% of people that trained their skills to the maximum level. It's more about, you know, few people competing in the rest watching them so to say. And then you know, we obviously got into the skill gaming overall as a type of gaming and then we started to understand that the skill gaming might be even, you know, twisted with the with the wagering with the real money gaming as kind of a branch here. That stands for a really cool monetization model by the way for game developers. I can elaborate on that for hours and I will a bit at least during the show. And then we ended up I'll call it today and today starting from today in the future where the exact experience between overlap of esports and the emotions given with the arcade bars is supercharged with blockchain technology is like, you know, democratize and given to people in the silver platter and served through the social messaging apps like for example telegram. This yes, where the future of competitive gaming is getting bored in the front of our eyes and this is a massive opportunity.

Jon Radoff: Okay, there's so much done path there. I think we could spend multiple hours just. Okay, you just said, but let's start with this from a game developer standpoint. So imagine I'm a studio making a new game. And I want to bring competitive gaming into my game. Historically, the challenge has been things like getting enough scale, getting enough people really interested in that aspect of things sometimes game studios get kind of obsessed with the element of the sort of native esports aspect of the game. Before making the game itself fun enough to attract those audiences. So in traditional gaming, it has been really challenging. I'd love to hear from your standpoint again, thinking from a standpoint of game developers. Why would you want to incorporate a competitive gaming aspect into your game and then how do you do it? How can you be successful at it? And then the third part, if you can remember this deep of an unpack is like, but then what with why web three why is web three potentially an ecosystem where this could be even more successful than it was in the past.

Guest: That's for sure. I yeah for sure, that's my favorite topic, frankly speaking. And let me start like if you were to ask me about the elevator pitch about the Olympics, I would say we are an infrastructure that is obstructing away all the complexity of building multiplayer games. And blockchain transaction in gaming and you know, we do it in a kind of a we roll it up those complexities into set of simple to use SDKs that are enabling the creation of a transparent very viable environment for competitive gaming with these blocks here, right. And based on that developers can start building the completely new economic models for gaming. I know it sounds pretty complex, but that's the reason why I started with that because if I were to unpack now what I meant. And like you break it down around you know all these complexities and then responding to the questions why it's even worth to do it. I will start with the end in mind. So let's start with why even to top into the opportunity. That's absolutely the first question even prior to the fact, hey, I decide to do it. I need to have like solid answer to why. So the landscape today is following like there are hundreds of thousands of millions. I would say estimated two million at least you need to gain developers right out there in the market. And like most of these guys, especially in mobile games domain, they are sitting on the sidelines of hey, we can no longer effectively monetize our gears at least in the flip to play an out base monetization due to different changes in regulation is getting harder and harder to actually effectively run a business. And there's a reason why you have like a lot of layoffs in public and public whatsoever. So the industries in a sort of say maybe I wouldn't use the word crisis by the transformation period right. So there's a search mode for the new monetization models. And then when you study carefully the real money gaming. So just for the definition, it has kill based schemes with the with the money weight during between people. So to say like you imagine a parking room between us and we are right with friends and we have a competition anyone can jump in pay into the game. There's a dynamic, you know, a priceful that is distributed towards the winners. It is nothing to do with gambling is skilled games only then you know, this part of being financially involved makes it even more engaging et cetera. So so when you study the results in a couple of platforms, I can quote some numbers from skills.com is a very much web to platform. I can refer to that in a second how that's translated to the opportunity web three. And if you look at this, it clearly understand that it's at least an expation monetization on base gaming. You know, monthly active user is worth like more than $10 for paying the user more than $60. It's crazy. I mean, never you know you haven't seen that numbers other than here. So it's clearly like very lucrative opportunity for game developers, but here is the trick like in order to build on a multiplayer game and think of like, hey, you're in this studio, couple of people. First of all, you do not have the resources to do it because it's very complicated things starting with the network, enough environment synchronizing all of that antifold, antichid systems running the server authority like all of that stuff. If you want to do it properly, you're not able to do it. Like, I mean, there is no money that is just not doable. So it's not accessible to majority of the students is for a reason why these these percent games are built for bigger studios, right. And here's the first thing that we resolved like we focus on simplifying the process without to compromise on security on quality of that, you know, every single game built on our SDK is like a fully functional multiplayer. Security is first level is having all these antifrust altitudes system much making all streamlined in the one infrastructure on SDK. And then and then it's run on a decent trust game hosting network is a lot of beauty here. I mean, I'm excited for it, but just it just slice the value that is unlocking the opportunity on building these games towards like, you know, millions of developers to any developer on planet Earth without the much experience in multiplayer gaming at all. And we tested it. It's not like I'm having like a bold statement. Let's see if it works. Now we tested it. We run through it. It works. We have it like we have a success stories whatsoever.

Unknown: And that's first thing, right. And then imagine again, you are a studio and someone is pitching, but hey, this is the motivation opportunity. And by the way, to use it, you need to do in a blockchain thing related. Oh my god, like most of the developers out there are no blockchain NFTs. Come on guys, like, let's drop it.

Guest: So first to understand what blockchain brings as the enabler as that and value are actually, you know, really making this opportunity prominent. Alternatives are without the blockchain. Even if you build such a game, you need to go through centralized platforms. They may want to allow you to publish or with they may not to allow you. That's one thing. Then these ones for some having, you know, this whole onboarding genius users creating the account on burning fias with throwing is horrible. Right. So it's like a this type of experience for game developers is out called it sub optimal. But frankly speaking, he's leaving a lot of developers out there on the side with the use of blockchain as the payment rails or distributing these rewards and payments in paying payouts. I'm blockchain a transparent way, very viable, very fast, very reliable. Without the need of building this financial infrastructure. So as developer, this suddenly becomes an opportunity for everyone. And that's where the big farm begins because that's what is empowering like millions of builders in this studios to start building experiences that are. And now I'm making a loop to the arcade bars that are designed with the pure fun in mind and are not disturbing players with these annoying ads. Right. And are not these type of experiences that are extracting value from blockchain ecosystems. They're not talking about plate to earn stop to earths. Everything that is related to the, you know, all of these puns, dynamics and all of these like rewards driven thing you're working a sense of, you know, extracting value for the ecosystem. So it's a solid business sustainable revenue model. It's like accessible for everyone with user blockchain. Everyone can jump to the opportunity. And then if you add to the mix of distribution channels, live telegram, like all of a sudden, you have a completely new segment of gaining accessible within one click for everyone for players is beautiful design distributed on mobiles via social messaging apps. It is an amazing thing, I believe.

Jon Radoff: Okay, I want to come back to telegram in particular, but before I come to that and I also have other questions about Web 3 or blockchain generally is a implementation technology for competitive gaming. I want to remind our audience and it's growing here a whole bunch of people are showing up watching the stream. That's awesome. Thank you for taking some time out of your day to join us today. We're talking about competitive gaming, Web 3 protocol for implementing competitive gaming. We're also going to talk about telegram and ton and new distribution mechanisms for games of all kinds. That's the topic, but I want to remind you all that this is your live stream. You can join this as well. So if you've got a question posted in the comments, we're monitoring linked in an X and YouTube and Facebook.

Unknown: So we're on multiple platforms here. You can post a comment and Tom and I can discuss it. But in addition to that, you could even join the live stream. So if you've got a camera and you have a topic that you think would be interesting to game developers, this is actually a live dynamic studio environment where we can bring you right in.

Jon Radoff: So Oscar can send you the link to join us on stream yard. If you'd like to join us, just post a comment, let Oscar know he'll bring you right in. You can join in the conversation. It could be about any of the topics we're covering today. It could be any other topic that you think is important to cover today. So as long as it's Web 3 because this is the Web 3 game development live stream. So, Tom, you were just going through a few reasons why blockchain is the right platform for competitive gaming. So I heard a few things from you. I heard, first of all, the permissionlessness of it. So a lot of the platforms that currently do game distribution, have varying opinions on things like skill base gaming, for example, where they may or may not let you participate or for that matter, they might allow it today and they could change it tomorrow. You never really know what happens with a centralized platform. So you pointed at the permissionlessness of it. You pointed at another one as well, which I think is often a very underestimated piece, which is, yes, there are other technically feasible solutions to this problem. If you're going to invest millions of millions of millions of dollars building up your whole financial ecosystem to even enable this. It's not really practical for a startup company. It's not even that practical for scaled out game publishers. Why do that when the technology exists to do it. There's one thing you didn't get to, though, which I'm curious about, which is also with competitive gaming. The ability for the audience to trust it depends on really knowing what's going on and accurate records and transparency. And of course, blockchain gives us totally transparent records into everything that's ever happened in terms of every competitive result. I would think that is sort of to me that's a killer.

Guest: It is there are a couple of more. So if you want me to pull out some more use cases here, I will comment on that. That for sure, like transparency of variability of these things is crucial and it's important. I think that we came out with this technology that we call in game Oracle. So to say that think of it as because we do all, you know, the several authority hosting. There is like a referee to every single match that happens on our network that is hosting these game sessions. And as tracing every single intent of every single move because the game started the deterministic. And then in the end is delivering in a safe way, a secure way. The result of the game is like we call it proof of game is going to roll up of the entire game session cryptographically has delivered to blockchain. And then that's what is what triggers actually the element of payments, right. But it allows us to build different use cases. We have the Olympics are the open data protocols. So it means that different point in time either us or someone else want to build like the explorer of all the game sessions that happen from the UI perspective is, you know, perfectly usable. Right. So the traceability thing is important because you can you can you know you can track all the matches of your opponent or someone your friend whatsoever is blinking like the ultimate level of transparency. And then this is something that is highly important and it's finally underestimated. That's one of these cases. But let me expand your imagination even further like one of these ideas around competitive gaming is that. Hey, we want to enable the competitions at scale like myself being here in Warsaw. I want to you know compete with you at your location, right. What is important here are obviously latency, things all of that stuff, right. So it may think that the sense of providers of hosting are covering the entire world. It's not the case. Like, you know, people in a lot of different destinations. So to say and locations are cut off from this experience. And what we are bringing together here is like in the latest stages of the project is we are building, I believe like the biggest decentralized game hosting network. I will be aggregating, you know, multiple different providers of decentralized GPUs for the sake of building this verifiable hosting for competitive gaming. And it's important because with the use of blockchain, you can properly reward node operators, you can aggregate like smaller hosting in a company is to deploy there. There are used resources. And this is like a very tangible use case that is increasing the accessibility within players, right. And so we will be covering like more than it is covered globally in terms of the world has covered my in case of the accident experience. And if that's not enough for blockchain use cases here, let me open like another one. So there is this entire AI hype and people are thinking, hey, what AI can bring to gaming. So a lot of use cases out there around tailored experiences generated by AI is a lot of stuff to be said, but let's refocus on competitive gaming. So what we are building since we are the network. And we start like a lot of data about everything we intend of everything will move on players with every single game at game sessions. We can create this environment for agents. Let's call it like cyber arena for agents to start competing against each other. They cannot be mixed in much with humans. That's why I'm saying it's separate. But then agents can start generating revenue out of competitive gaming. They can start being trained with the amount of data that is out there being fueled for training purposes. That's what we can, you know, generate as additional revenue for no operators in an entire network. Another feature here is that we are building a spectator mold for game sessions again. So you can think of it in the future that there will be like two interfaces, one that we all know for humans. And then there's another one for bots and that can be a foundation for the agent economy. I'm just saying, right, it's probably something like that will happen and we are, you know, designed for that to accelerate.

Unknown: Tom, tell me about the agent economy. Like are we just going to be like, we'll be off the internet in the future and our bots will just be doing everything on the internet.

Guest: No, you see, just just just to stay aligned, just to stay aligned within some level of sanity is, you know, there will be a space for humans, right, and there will be a space for agents and now let's think of it this way. Like our role is to really quickly learn who the agent is and absolutely flag and remove any attempts of, you know, agents joining the human space for competitions. Marked to that by agents competitions, our algorithms are getting trained more and more into the detection of frouze, even that might be needed by humans. But then, you know, think of it this way on the top level perspective, participants of competitions be like, you know, leaderboard based tournaments, they can earn money. So then this way agents can earn money. That's one thing. But then, you know, we are implementing now these, we call it a tournament royalties where the creator of the tournament, which is for the record. Anyone can tap into any game build on our SDK, do it through telegram or browser whatsoever. And they can easily create like a tournament at any point in time and any currency as a token can be implemented as gaming currency inside. So it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's really like a huge enabler here. So if we start to be wording that with the creators of the tournament with the, with the fee being a percentage of the total price pool. Then agents can start organizing tournaments for other agents, you know, where I'm heading like this, you know, this entire economy based competitive gaming with the use of blockchain technology, we do use all of that that would build out. It can be reality anytime soon.

Jon Radoff: I love what you were just talking about though in terms of people can launch their own tournaments. Essentially, you're talking about a form of composability. So take your platform and the ability to create tournament structures. What you're doing is you're making it so that in addition to game studios and say an esports organization operating their own tournament structures, you can actually make it community on so a guild. It's really helpful to operate their own tournament, right? That's, that's really interesting. I'll tell you one of my own personal experiences. So between two startups that I was running when I was when I was basically taking a few years doing nothing but playing online games all day every day. I was playing guild, guild wars. So now there's guild wars to I was playing the original build wars and I became a very competitive gamer in that. And they would only run a tournament like every few months and we were like that's not enough. We just have to organize our own tournaments. So we actually did this and it was a lot of work to organize our own tournaments. We had to do everything from like figuring out the matchmaking and the hierarchy. There weren't any prizes or anything we're just doing it for fun, by the way. But you're talking about maybe if you existed at the time that I was doing that and if guild wars had adopted the protocol, I could have just kind of launched my own tournament series online.

Guest: We didn't want to click. Right. This is the thing. So basically in practice how it works is like you were accepting any of these games built out in protocol. And then you hit like you know create a challenge and you may select between casual or competitive casual is without any money competition competitive means there is a stake into it. And you are defining like how long does it take is an hour, three hours, six hours, 12 or 24. And what's the sort of entry fee in what coin, what amount, et cetera. And then what's the distribution of rewards, scheme works like they either like win or takes all is it like you know the podium or top 10. This is like just just to begin with because there's so many different ways how we can implement the variation of it. We believe it's just the beginning is we believe we are like empowering team ecosystem. Similarly the way how you know apple empowered within the in a purchases and then who knows how it can evolve right it's going to be a lot of. So you know, there's a lot of applications here and there within these monetization models but getting back to this example and then you start inviting friends right so you start sending out the links and that's how you can do it and then there are multiple different use cases like yes it is a foundation of community driven gaining so that's how you can build relationships as a developer with your community. So you're empowering them to start having fun the way they want you know it's tailored to their needs so you know they can configure that. Same time if you decided to develop or that these tournaments run on your team could be the revenue out of it could be split it with the tournament organizer they have additional incentives like financially the set is that is sell at the end of the game session on the tournament. So they can profit from that business like you know it has it hasn't been you know available before it's not what's going without I mean maybe it's possible but it's not so easy to do it without blockchain technology so this is an innovation of we're bringing to the market at a large scale. And you know and it's just just to give you a glimpse of understanding how it can evolve it's not only about users doing it but then publishers they can easily test out a game prior to like you know full publishing hey let's just organize a tournament or. To see how it goes I'll give you a beautiful example from this week like so we unborder to the collaboration a platform called on ton which is an event platform on tonic system and telegram that might lead our discussion to ton and telegrams to say but but you know on ton yes are so far up today. There has been serving the entire ecosystem with the platform or organizing events booking tickets like all of these side events all these major events that don't exist and we're around through it so it's a lot of people actually interacting with the platform. But here's the problem you know how to monetize the platform and then they started to think like hey maybe we're going to can evolve a little bit and start using the community that everything that we built out to hosting and online events what could be on the event. Basically anything so you can link something there so why not hosting tournaments boom they started to do it from Monday and then you know some of these tournaments they collect like almost 400 people at the time right can you believe it so so this is like another perspective and use case of this freedom of this permissionless approach not only to building games but also to throwing tournaments we are as open as possible.

Jon Radoff: Let's let's grow on the conversation to telegram because I think that's a good segue and we told everyone we're going to talk about telegram today so we've been talking about competitive gaming once again if you want to join this conversation post a comment will bring in live right to the platform you can be about telegram ton competitive gaming anything in web 3 game development really join us or just post your comments and we'll talk about those. But telegram so people have been talking about telegram for months now around web 3 gaming. For a moment there it felt like almost like I don't know some of our audience may not have been around quite so long but like the Facebook gaming moment where like web based gaming was very niche. And then all of a sudden Facebook had canvas games and almost overnight it was hundreds of millions of players playing games on Facebook and they opened up this whole new audience people were kind of talking about telegram gaming as being almost that Facebook moment around web 3. What for so what's your thoughts on that wide telegram was it the Facebook moment like what's happening here.

Guest: Yeah it's how should say it's still happening but let me give you my perspective here so first of all like white telegram you know as much as maybe upstairs is of this world are like a kind of bad actor in terms of being friendly with blockchain telegram is obviously friendly so is it an environment where web 3 games can thrive easily right. So that's like a primary example plus you know the user base is large enough for the industry to believe in the story right so that's it can hype substantial amount of people at the end of the day there's like a decent distribution channel that is on top so far but it's publisher that's one thing to emphasize that you know it's like both good and bar situation like bad is because you know it's not enough skill professionals to drive. Traffic meaningful way but good it's like because this opportunity is still in front of us that's sort of you know is approached but let's chase like what actually happened with the telegram and gaming there so they basically leverage the concept of idle games we had a bombing gaming for idle games like you know eight nine years ago and and they just revamped it a little bit and they leveraged these characteristics of web 3 audience that are driven by the vision of being rewarded right so what happened eventually and you know we anticipated that we were very loud and about it we even had some internal discussion hey shall we now build a clicker game just for the sake of marketing and then we said no let's not do it. I was like a really strong voice inside a team and then we kept building so you know what ended up in a story is idle games became a vehicle to let's say on board people to the three gaming but most of these games were not even transaction within blockchain right they were only a gateway to get people's attention that was all about attention marketing and these people eventually go to the vehicle eventually got you know so to say disappointed with the amount of time that they traded for the amount of money got from the air jobs but look again what happened like from the moment of not coin and and hamster combat and then a cut isn't an all others that followed what I like to see there is that there was these you know not so to copy following the person person of success. So a lot of bills jumped in so there was an example and then others jumped in the end game was as it was but we were almost smiling as you John just a couple of seconds ago because we knew that the moment for PVP comments because it's obvious I mean you know what what is what people want in a long run they want to have sustainability if they want if the even if they don't express it they want to have like this environment where they can jump in at any point in time get rewarded without you know this fake promises right. Plus what changed one they want transaction they want volumes they want you all it's they want you they want real adoption competitive gaming is a perfect fit it's not easy to do though the text site that's our mission to enable that and and now we land as I believe you know the core gaming infrastructure for the next wave of gaming on telegram that is actually coming and it's coming strong I can tell you that I know it's from multiple you know different angles even talking to you all of these builders like not coins can. I remember my discussions back then you know year ago. As by you know asking them for the retention was not a right question but then now I know that they are rebuilding their strategies and frankly speaking I'll be bold about it they have no choice right and it's a self it needs to get the attention into something meaningful to kind of you know bring back the liquidity to bring back this spotlight there has been the client in the sentiment how will they do that. The very politically correct here in the same time they announced these exclusivity so what is needed now is like you know when there is a dark someone needs to spark the fire right and this fire is about to be commonly in a pvp gaming and competitive gaming and I can talk about it for hours but this is the time to shine and this is a perfect setup for people to access it through telegram this is a perfect setup to start building because it's so easy. You know two four weeks and you've got a game and you've got it secure you've got it up and running it's so easy like with our infront you don't even need to understand how to build your own telegram bot you just deployed a game and bot is automatic generated for you and that is that easy I know it's hard to believe is that easy yeah sorry I'm just getting excited.

Jon Radoff: Yeah so hot hamster combat is I mean if you were around at the time of Facebook gaming it will really kind of remind you of those early days because of course if you're like hardcore gamer meaning like I don't know you played Diablo or or you know call of duty or something you'll be like what is this crap like this makes this makes no sense to me it it's helpful at that point in time to remember a few things one gaming is a huge huge market we're talking about billions of people it isn't only like called that. of duty playing. Second, like, yeah, it's similar to Facebook in that these gains are kind of simple, lighthearted, very socially engaging. So there is a, there's just sort of a fun

Unknown: factor there in being part of it. And yeah, they're not like super graphically immersive

Jon Radoff: 3D shooters or anything like that. But people are playing them. And the other similarity to Facebook is some of these things are getting to scale and they're making money. So like, they're no longer the gains that are just sort of like, hey, waiting for a big audience and waiting for monetization to occur. Like, some of these games have actually made fairly significant revenue in a short period of time. So that shouldn't be forgotten either. So if you're a game developer and like you were, Tom was just saying, like, you want to make a game in a few weeks, like telegram is not a bad place to launch a game that you've put a few weeks of your life into. I mean, some of those games have made like over $100 million of cash. So like, it's been significant in terms of the outside.

Guest: I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll need a comment on that properly just to put it in perspective because like the cash that was made on these games, obviously, they could have been some streams around ad based could have been, but what happened in between, you know, when it started and now was a lot of reselling of the traffic to other games. So primary business model was organizing campaigns to all sorts of different protocols and apps and other games that needed the attention. So the one that attracted a lot of attention could resell substantial amount of traffic. And a, you know, I, I think I don't like basically this kind of approach here because it created a bubble. And, you know, just at some point, just to give you well, because you see my, your phone is, yeah, good. Yeah, and so what it, what it, what happened is that people got so hyped to an extent that even VC funds started to kind of outbeat each other with these questions of how millions of community you have on your telegram chat. Hey, come on. Like everyone knew it's not like a real community like lots of that were bots, just, you know, I mean, both about it. And, and you know, making money out of reselling is like, it is what it is, but it's not just sustainable business. And what I'm, what I'm proposing and talking about is as a game builder, jumping into PVP opportunity is where you make like a real cash and not a short term, a long term. And you can build the entire, you know, business out of it, start with one game, another game, and just, you know, track how skills to perform or not 100 million out dollars of revenues per year. So this is something that can be really significant.

Jon Radoff: But just wanted to make a distinction. Yeah, I think there is a similarity again to early Facebook gaming there, though, too. And that is one of the business models that did emerge at the time was what then I'll eventually evolved into for better or worse, the modern ad networks on social media, which is a lot of the early games that launched on Facebook monetized by essentially running install networks. And it was largely install networks to other games that hit her. How much you could make on a Facebook game. I guess the question with telegram now in Facebook, it was fairly sustainable, though, people were playing these games. They would do an install and stick with it. Eventually, Facebook based really imploded their own audience by introducing Facebook credits and locking it down. And maybe there's some bit of a story here to be applied to telegram gaming as well. We should return to sort of the exclusivities and things like that. But in Facebook gaming, it was very hot platform. The company Zingo

Unknown: was basically made on top of Facebook. A lot of the revenue there general was like install

Jon Radoff: networks as well, of course, in that purchase. What's coming, John? I think what's coming,

Guest: Johnny, is the new generation of Zingo. That's basically the thing. What's coming? That's it. Right. And these models that you mentioned is possible on telegram. And it's going to happen. The more professional players will jump in. So that's going to happen. I can even see a future where, hey, this up-based monetization model is actually pouring people to skill games for the sake of getting them familiar with this opportunity to create the tournaments that are then driving the real revenue within the game. That might be combined. Who knows? But obviously, there are already up-networks on telegram. It's just a matter of how professional they are, how well they can target the audiences, whether they're the results, whether they're the KPS, whether they're the click-through rates, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm pretty sure that is going to get into the direction where it's going to be more and more and more reliable for more and more credible people. Builders, I mean here. And yeah, this is the direction that is not like a competitive gaming study, not excluding the growth of ad networks around telegram. That's for sure.

Jon Radoff: What I'm here you kind of say, though, is that unless you were one of those lucky few that generated a big community of your own that you could then install to kind of mist that market. Yes. You're not going to create a game that makes money from doing installs. Not at that point in school, as those early guys need to actually find the more sustainable business model. I think install networks will work when you can actually prove the RWA eye on them, which is what ended up happening in a lot of social and then ultimately mobile gaming became very performance-driven network that has a lot, a lot of anti-bot protection. But you're saying that competitive gaming is one of the categories of monetization that could emerge in this environment because of the inherent advantages that telegram blockchain gaming, Web 3, generally has in that market where maybe it becomes a center of gravity from monetization.

Guest: My turn. That's what I'm saying. I see a cool question here. If I may read it, exactly how is PVP driving all the profits, most gamers I know aren't even interested in PVP? Can I comment on that? Yeah, absolutely. That's why you're here. Yeah, cool. So, you know, when I ask you about the question, have you ever played a poker? Is that a good, like, then we start a type of a game, but it's the game at least you've ever played? And most of the people say, I'll just try it in the room full of people and there's a lot of handrails. And then I ask a similar question, have you ever tried to play poker with your friends with some sort of stakes that you generate off the chain, let's say? And again, most of them say, yeah, we did it. And I always observe and say, like, guys, you know the difference about the engagement between being financially involved in the gameplay and just playing the game. And that's like a major difference. And you know it, if you're at least once played

Unknown: poker with your friends, that's one thing. So, if you think of, if there are gamers that are so

Guest: interested in esports, and that's how they define PVP, oh, well, maybe in your environment, there's not so many gamers, oh, that kind. But if I were to ask you, like, maybe you play like, no, floppy bird back then, 2014, right? If I were to tell you that, hey, now floppy bird is available on Telegram with the PVP mode, so that you can challenge your friends, and it can have fun. And what happened back then, people were screenshoting, you know, the results and say, oh, how many pipes did you jump through? And all three, and I 10, whatever, if I were to tell you that such example now exists in the reality of Telegram, of blockchain, and it's enabling, you know, the competition with money involved, almost like in the poker room, so to say, and I'm pretty sure that you will find like 20 people immediately wanting to jump in. And I know it by heart, because, you know, it's happening. We have these tournaments, sorts of games, and just, you know, floppy bird is just an example. I'm giving that not for without reason, I can see that floppy bird is out there already on Telegram, you know, there might be some problems potentially out there in the future. But, you know, this is the thing, right? This is the, this is my sort of response. And what profits are they bring? Well, anybody in time you can jump in and win the prize, the reward that is out there if you are top score at the leaderboard, and then as a tournament organizer, you can get a percentage of the prize pool within your tournament that you're hosting. So it's a profit opportunity for everyone.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, thanks a lot, my for your question. I guess what I'd add to it is PVP can mean a lot of things in gaming. So sometimes when you say PVP specifically around things like a massively multiplayer online game, you think of like, hey, you want to play the game and just adventure and have fun, and then some guy comes along and like, ganks you and like, it's really inconvenient because you're needing to do a corpse run or in the earlier, even more hardcore game, maybe a drop all your items and they're robbing you like that's kind of the runescape experience. Like, so that is a form of PVP for sure. Another would be like, Call of Duty, where you're, if you're not in story mode, you're playing with other people. That's an example. But you, Tom, you were mentioning poker, poker is a PVP game, but so are lots of other, I mean, almost all games prior to digital games were PVP, right? They were all competitive games in one way or another. Yeah, travel is a PVP game, for example. We paid play for stakes, but certainly there's a winner or a loser in the game, like almost all board games, you can imagine, are all PVP. So I challenged the premise of the question a little bit in that so many games are inherently about competition between players. It really is with the

Unknown: advent of digital gaming that you also have the cooperative modes, which is actually the newer thing

Jon Radoff: in gaming, where you just are helping each other and then go into a story. And those things are not mutually exclusive. You can now with digital gaming have both at once and experience different modes of play. I think PVP, where people don't like it is where PVP is forced upon you in a game experience where you thought you were going to be playing something story mode or cooperative, and then you get surprised with a PVP game. Yeah, sure. That wasn't, that wasn't welcome to you at the time. So that's something where I think you have to be careful as a game designer to incorporate that in. But PVP is kind of like all games and there's different ways you can incorporate everything from a leaderboard to competitive tournaments. Like this is something we do at being able in our platform is we try to counsel game developers to think in terms of ways of adding more engagement to the game. And there's very light mechanisms for driving social engagement, and lighthearted competition without that feeling of like visceral adrenaline that not every gamer wants to get out of a gaming experience where it's just fun and it's more about discovering ways to play the game and show off what you're doing in the game to other people. Good. Tom, or let's return again to telegram though. So the exclusivity thing, we got to kind of have a focus conversation

Unknown: on this. So I forget exactly one. A few weeks back, telegram kind of surprised everyone saying,

Jon Radoff: okay, if you want to launch a game on telegram, you're now going to have to be on ton. And this really I know specific game developers who were like it threw even that like their fundraising process into the lurch suddenly they had to be a spot level. What's your thoughts on this permission and I'm going to say that you had three approached to blockchain gaming that they're now requiring.

Guest: Yeah, so you know, it's been a story between the relationship behind telegram and ton, you know, for the record is like officially say like strategic collaboration here and there.

Unknown: And many people as builders, they they solve like way bigger opportunity in telegram being a distribution channel for the services rather than ton as a blockchain of its own, right? The

Guest: ton needs to get polished, get matured with multiple different use cases applied there. Looking back a little bit for a while to the either to the clickers, what they did and contributed, they stressed test the infrastructure by a lot, which is great contribution to the ecosystem. Getting back on track today's exclusivity. At some point it led to the situation where builders from the other chains were actually sourcing like you know users slash players liquidity through telegram and to their chains is I saw the cases where multiple different chains in their grants programs were receiving and actually approving applications where builders were building stuff on telegram. And they were basically you know connecting other chains and ton within these mini apps and that's what was claimed as a marketing tools whatsoever, right? So that's you know, I understand that thing of claiming these exclusivity that makes sense. So that's one. Then the other thing is you know well you want to keep the community on ton happy so to say not not being robbed in a way, right? So okay let's have enforcing more people building on ton if they want to be on telegram that should theoretically throw you know a value or get value back to the todico system. But when you look at it from the like the broader perspective, it's always like the judgment of is it better to have like a way bigger cake and get a piece out of that cake or do you want to have a cake only for your own and growing to some you know sellers, the saleings are so to say. So it's like really depends on the approach and then what happened next is they started to announce this different cross chain collaboration like you know, the recent one, the layer zero. So definitely it looks like the cross chain liquidity should be there and that's what they're after, right? It looks to me as it's more leaning towards the defy use cases, right? It's not helping too much with gimmick I guess. But I'm not even sure if this decision will be something that will last forever is a temporary. No idea like you know my personal stand if you ask me, I would rather prefer to enable you know these experiences using also other chains over telegram maybe with some value look to the tonico system. I would be creative so that you know, time we get some value out of it as a chain even though the other transactions will be processed I would be thinking of it somehow this way. I'm not talking about hey I know how to implement ethically but that would be my directional thing. So we'll still see if there is going to be any development around it or not but for the time being does the status code that we have?

Jon Radoff: It's the dilemma that a lot of these platforms have had which is how do they get a piece of the action to make it wild for them? So the proven model is take 30% of all the revenue passing through. That's multiple platforms that steam that Facebook credits. Now the interesting thing with Facebook is that they were kind of first market with that idea Facebook credits was this was the first of the 30% take rate platforms and virtually overnight they destroyed the entire ecosystem for Facebook gaming. Now there are other things that play like they went from this totally unregulated ecosystem of spam which was benefiting the games but probably was definitely breaking Facebook so cannot blame Zuckerberg for what I'm going to do next that and kind of preserve the integrity of the platform. But you know the one thing came from the level one small network essentially.

Guest: When you compare the Facebook and Telegram there is a revenue model behind Telegram there was like premium Telegram premium and some other couple of adults here and there so the more people you adopt and the more you push through the funnel so that they buy premium account on Telegram generate revenue that's one thing and when you look at TAN as a chain they generate revenue out of the transactions and they should not be able to build applications and infrastructures that facilitate that transaction on the chain and then using a distribution channel to attract builders and to attract users and users that are generating the transactions this is a perfect scenario as long as we are knowing our business models well and for that to happen you need to create an opportunity for builders to make money as well. As an example our enterprise is getting a cut out of the price price right so if all of us say that Telegram sits on the cut of the price that we have it kills the entire business right so it's like you know it's not the it's not the way to go

Unknown: in a sustainable environment I would say. So quick games is commenting here with something similar

Jon Radoff: what you were saying earlier Tom about other chains stealing liquidity over and you know yeah moving people over to base or Salana or other chains what quick games is kind of pointing to here is that maybe what the complaint wasn't just coming from you know top down Telegram teams laying down the law he's saying this is this was coming from developers complaining about the

Guest: situation for them yeah I mean I am just I'm not so I'm sorry with that it's I absolutely understand this is just the thing on how to how to incentivize builders on Tom more than others without refraining from you know without restricting the other chains to be applied of Telegram that would be my way of thinking but I understand getting the competition from other chains were basically killing the business on the side of condes and there's tend to I mean I understand

Jon Radoff: that reasoning come to percent I can see the varying perspectives here and I'm also very sympathetic the idea of like what does it take to build a sustainable ecosystem which I think is what they want to do I have seen a general trend towards some chains kind of implementing almost like console like strategies where they're trying to build more lock-in to their system even talking about Telegram but like immutable for example I've seen the same thing where like immutable you got to use their user ID system yeah it's it's all and they you got to use their SDKs and they're kind of outright hostile to SDKs for any kind of technology that comes out of there because I'm curious if you've seen the same thing actually as a as a developer Tom like we have a beamable like they really want people to use their own SDKs even for building games even if they're terribly inefficient so it's a hard path to to be on for some of these platforms because it forces them to have to be all things to all people which is very contrary to the idea of not only the permissionlessness of Web 3 but the composability like your front responsibility out the window and saying well we'll just give you everything right but already we have a Microsoft and a steam and the you know those can't give you absolutely everything like they have even benefited from their version of composability and open SDKs and things like that like what's your thoughts on this cut this sort of this push and pull between permissionlessness composability the openness that was the early mantra of Web 3 versus yeah or like the business imperative to lock in people preserve and retain profits so it can be reinvested well I should say it's not

Guest: oftentimes that I have this particular question which I enjoy even more for that reason so let's say I'm a big fan of permissionless approach here and I'm a big believer of the fact that if we do it permissionless that's of its own that is a killing body proposition that can bring more build that's a very natural thing right and in terms of composability in general terms yes let's just support the composability that it's partially creativity of developers they can connect with multiple different other concepts and create an innovation so in our case well we are going to say hey this is the only type of monetization or the experience that it can apply in a game no we say we are as an infrastructure can power you to build this type of experience as a core experience with improvement monetization model with the top level of security with the fast speed of building these games and we accessibility of our telegram and if you want to add with other providers maybe like you know entities to the game some cookies whatsoever you want to add some more layers to complexity not a problem so that says we are composable right but there is like another angle uh to that well we enforce using power as decay on these games built on on the unity so far because we're compatible unity but we will be extending the other game engines so if you are for example like building on unity and other type of multiplayer solution we need to replace it and and why is that because we are aware of how security is important is a requirement for all other things that happen within competitive unity you need to have a control as a provider of that kind of infrastructure over the security to enable creation of economic models and financial flows any type of providers of tournament platforms that are simply being like an escrow it's so much vulnerable it's the approach that is like easier to develop but this is very short-lived and short-sighted right so so we are not we are not being composable to that extent that we allow other game like multiplayer engines to be applied because this is hard to power value proportional security side so there needs to be like a common sense and kind of sense of what can be compromised and what shouldn't be that's my thing

Jon Radoff: about it Tom we're reaching the top of the hour so I want to just bring it back to telegram and again we're we're a game developer audience here so and this is even a question that's bigger than web 3 frankly like web 2 game developers can be on telegram right like telegram is not actually just a crypto platform although all the crypto grows ended up on telegram for reasons that will forever escape me and that's how I ended up on on telegram but I mean it's a messaging platform anybody can use it you don't have to know anything about crypto it's you know perfectly fine messaging system but it's now becoming a game platform and a game distribution platform if you're a game developer web 2 or web 3 what are the most important things you should know about that as a platform launching and distributing your game because it is one of the newest ways to reach pretty large audiences

Guest: yeah so like first of all it's estimated one billion multi-act accusers so that's a large user base that's what you need to understand and second of all all of these games that you can see these are essentially browser based games there's no special specific technology up there is just think of it like you know browser game embedded into the bot on telegram

Unknown: what I should say you should know is that as a developer sorry to say that with Olympics you don't

Guest: need to know anything about telegram bot development and anything about making it very specific game tailored to telegram because you just focus on the gameplay that's what you love to do you build it in the unity and with our infra you're having like all this blockchain component as an SDG part abstract in a way nothing to worry about then also game bot you have it automatically you can extend it if you like right so the barrier of entry as a game developer onto telegram gaming is reduced to an absolute minimum even you do have monetization templates

Unknown: that are designed on the level of infrastructure more to that we did it in a way that

Guest: any upgrades in our infra let's say like we are planning to add like theater on rents the very moment we do it we added on the infra level this magical we call it island that is added on top of your game that is enabling users to kind of you know interact with this competitive aspect of the game you don't need to think about it you don't need to design it and you don't need to upgrade it we add via on ramping it's getting added there so we are making your lives your developer like really extremely easy right so that's right and then there are more and more publishers that are jumping in so we will have support there are existing out base platforms so you can you can get some traffic out of it in a very traditional way and then again I want GM for size John is like it's not only about web 3 games you can design a game that is having like in our case frankly speaking like all of these games I had two modes that I mentioned casual and competitive so for casual games no wallet is required it's just a real web 2 game you can train you can invite your friends in a fun so any game you build this way it's casual and then there's only like a switch on to the next level of entertainment wow that's a slow the next level of entertainment where there is a like a different type of reward it's more fun on short but the wallet is required for now because we are making them developing that towards a complete wallet abstraction and our goal is basic to empower entire gaming both web 2 web 3 game developers and web 2 and web 3 gamers

Unknown: so to make it one big beautiful world that's it all right well thanks you so much Tom for that

Jon Radoff: so we've reached the top of the hour if you're a game developer of any kind web 2 web 3 doesn't matter kind of like beamable by the way we support web 2 and web 3 game developers if you need an online game that's what we do we we help you build your back end really really easily built into the

Unknown: game engines that you love like unity and unreal but telegram could be the new distribution platform

Jon Radoff: for you a billion mau so it is not to be ignored definitely learn about it if you don't know about it already if you're a web 3 game developer you probably have already heard about it because your friends are talking about it if you haven't done the deep dive yet this is your opportunity to do so I hope you learned a lot from this episode thanks for spending the last hour with us we've brought a great studio audience today online across multiple platforms xlinked in facebook youtube Tom you're welcome to join us anytime you're so knowledgeable about all these aspects of web 3 game development and game development generally we'd love to have you back any time on on the channel but for now yeah tomorrow we'll be back for the web 2 game talk at one p.m. eastern time we've got raff costor he is a legend in the mmo game development so he's going to talk about us everything from ultimatline through star wars galaxies to his latest game project and then next week we'll be broadcasting live from eith denver so don't miss that because i'm going to be hanging out with some of my friends in the web 3 gaming ecosystem right in denver until then thanks everybody

Unknown: and build those games thank you