Web3 GameDev Livestream- Shaping Onchain Worlds: Gigaverse, Tokens, Tech & Culture

Unknown: And we're live. Go ahead, John.

Jon Radoff: Hey, welcome back, everybody. This is the Web 3 game development live stream. This is the show where we talk about game development from the trenches, really from the standpoint of Web 3 builders, game developers, people who are actually building things. So this isn't the show for speculation and token launches and all that stuff. It's actually more about the games, the fun, the experience of them. If tokens plan to the economy, that's great. We talk all about that. But this is about builders. And a lot of you come here because you yourself are builders. Some of you have come here because you're on the B-Mobile platform. So I'm the co-founder and CEO of B-Mobile. We're a game services infrastructure company. So we make game servers, technology, all the cloud-based infrastructure so that you can build your live service game. In both Web 2 and Web 3, by the way, like we support any kind of game

Unknown: anywhere that needs multiplayer online systems. Today, we're going to be focused on Web 3

Jon Radoff: gaming, though. And we're going to talk to a really awesome project in this space, which is Gigiverse. And we've got Dith, the man himself, to talk to us about this project. So why don't we just kind of kick things off with an intro of Dith? What can you tell us about you and how you came to this before we just dive into Gigiverse itself?

Guest: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us on, John. Appreciate it. And we're going to share about myself. I've been a startup founder most of my life. I caught the bug early when I was still a student and I was bored one summer. And I had an idea that ended up becoming essentially my first startup. So ever since I was 20, I've kind of been tinkering around, mostly in tech, building tech startups. And I've been a gamer in my whole life as well, grew up gaming. But I think, you know, I just kind of like resigned, like, I probably never get to build a game. It's like, I how do you even break into the games industry? I don't know any developers or build games and so on. So that was the story of my 20s. Go into my 30s, you know, when when COVID hit, I just exited one of my startups, I joined a payments company called Stripe. At Stripe, they teach you everything that you need to know about payments. And one of the first things that you learn is like, oh, this shit's like a million middlemen here. And why does it take so long for a payment to like cross borders? And so I started, I basically got crypto-pilled at that point. So I'm going down the crypto rabbit hole, spending more time trading, messing around in the space. And long story short, I end up leading Stripe to join a venture backed blockchain gaming company called Proof of Play. And so crypto ended up being the the answer to how I would eventually work in gaming. And I had a blast there. I was leading go-to-market. We built and scaled the largest fully on chain game called Piranation. And then like in the meantime, as I do, out of hours still tinkering and just building stuff for fun, that's how I ended up sort of, starting what eventually became gigaverse. And I was very, very organic. We just wanted like my co-founder, I, we just wanted to build a game that we ourselves love. And we had fun building. But ever since we sort of announced and unveiled it in January, the response was like really good from the get-go. And then we launched the game late February and the metrics were great from the get-go. And yeah, a couple of weeks later we both put our jobs to a focus full-time on gigaverse. And it's been going great. We've been having a lot of fun with it. And yeah, we had a real community come together over the game as well. So we're very, very happy with how this kind of old came together in the most sort of serendipitous way. And yeah,

Unknown: we're just excited for what we can do next. So, Dith, you just gave us a great template for a lot

Jon Radoff: of the subjects to cover today. I'm really curious about your experiences in fully on-chain gaming and what the learning experiences are from that. We definitely want to dive into gigaverse. So, in a moment, I'd love to just queue up any video or screens or anything we can talk about, because maybe a lot of our audiences just discovering gigaverse for the first time. And I want people to understand more about the games that we can spend a bunch of our time also talking about that. I want to talk about the experience of building gigaverse specifically. I know you're on abstract. So I'd love to talk about that chain and kind of the choice of abstract and building around that ecosystem where you've discovered there. So there's a whole wide range of things we can get to. While we're thinking about the content that we can share on the screen here in Oscar, I don't know if you're going to share the content or Dith whether you'd want to present it directly. But I also just want to remind our audience that we do this as a live show. Say, you can come in and ask your questions. And unlike an X space, we can look at actual content on the internet and gameplay and all of that live and in real time. So we love your questions. A lot of you have shown up here for the code as well. So the Binalveau leaderboard code where a lot of you are competing for that air drop. You are going to get the code today. Don't you worry. It's going to come along. But we never tell you in advance when it happens because we don't want people to open in for two minutes just to get a code. So that'll come a little bit later. In the meantime, get those questions ready. We're going to cover a lot. Dith is very well known in X and the space generally. So here's your chance to interface with him. Ask your questions. Learn more about gigaverse and his views of this whole market. And you know, I'd love to just again start with gigaverse. So Dith, you said you've built a game that you yourself wanted to play. So let's maybe even start there. Like tell us about the game.

Guest: Or show us about the show us the game too. Yeah. So first and foremost, you're all into the game and the first thing that you'll kind of see is like a very nostalgic sort of look and feel to the game.

Unknown: Like a lot of love and care into the, just into the art style, the aesthetic and the pixel

Guest: styling of the game. We're big, big believers in AI. I actually built some AI tools myself back in the early days of GBT's of 2020. So there's not a slight on AI, but when it comes to like the art of gigaverse, that's all handmade by full-time artists on our team. So yeah, the first thing that you'll notice is just like I think the game looks really good and is a throwback to like, you know, what I think is like the golden era of gaming, right? The 90s where gameplay, just like with movies, right? The storyline had to be good. The acting had to be good. You couldn't just like lean into like CGI to kind of like just excite the audience, right? So I think the game feels like a love letter to that era of gaming. And then okay, like from design principles perspective, oh yeah, thanks for bringing this up. Design principles perspective, we just want to make it like easy enough for you to figure out what you need to do by what you see on the screen and like clicking buttons. The game has grown, there's like multiple features and different things to do in the game. So now there are docs, there are guides, there's like depth to some of this stuff. But if you just want to click your way through like the basics, you absolutely can. And yeah, so at this core, it's an RPG where you see a little bit of the story unfolding. You have your character, this little noob who starts off all sort of like naked and innocent. And as you progress through the game, you can earn items, you can equip yourself, you can kind of level up, improve your skills and so on. But the longer term vision for gigaverse is to grow into a social animal where there's a lot you can do in the game. It's kind of like a Disneyland or a carnival vibe to it. Lots of different features. Some of them are easier, some are harder, some require less time, some more time, some require more spends, some require less spend. And I think the thing that makes it really fun for us and fun for an on-chain audience is that we have a lot of like risk and reward mechanics where, you know, for example, there's a combat dungeon where I want you to defeat your enemy. If you're low on health, you can approach this fountain. And at the fountain, you have a 60% chance of, if you interact with it, you have a 60% chance that you can harm yourself, but a 40% chance that you can replenish your health. So the odds are kind of against you, but if you're desperate for health and it's the only place that you can get it, you may run that risk. And I think like, you know, in an on-chain setting, people love risk-taking and sort of, you know, the gamification of like just seeing like, does your decision pay off or not? Where I think a lot of on-chain experiences are very punishing as they do that with like a lot of money. Like meme coins are kind of an example of this, but like a lot of money is on the line. So, you know, we strip this down into like a very, yeah, these are kind of like peppered throughout the game. And the consequences are like kind of, I mean, ultimately it's, you know, it's not a huge deal if you die. It's not like you've blown $10,000, like I have on meme coins. So, you know, this is a very key design principle of ours, which is like, have the feeling of risk and reward, where you can get those little moments of payoff, little moments of dopamine. And yeah, so far, you're just still fishing there. So far, there's like two core gameplay modes, but we'll add more and more as time goes on. And as I say, like social MMO is a vision. So, it'll be a time in the near future that you can see other players in the game and you can do more

Jon Radoff: stuff with them. We got questions coming in from the audience already, and this is already proving to be a super popular stream, by the way. We've got, we just passed 666 viewers. I don't know

Guest: what's with that, but the number of the beast. We've got a question from third here. What types of rewards can players earn in gigaverse? Yeah, so as soon as you hop into the combat dungeon, which you can do like, as soon as you get into the game, you can go up to this teleportation pad at the top and you can get into the dungeon. And once you're in the dungeon, you come up against the enemy. You defeat that enemy, they will drop items that you can collect. And as you progress through the dungeon, you're playing harder and harder enemies, they're dropping more and more items and items that are like rare and potentially more valuable. We built an in-game marketplace where you can trade the items that you find in the game. And we actually pull prices from that marketplace to show you as the items are dropping. We actually show you this, oh, this is like this item's worth like $5. This one is worth like $0.10. And so on. And it's ultimately like the player. Market value immediately as items dropped to you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, if I can, do you guys want me to present here? I can actually show you the works. Of course.

Unknown: Yeah, let me let's see here. Yeah, you should be good to go on the presentation on your end.

Guest: All right. Let's see.

Unknown: Yeah.

Jon Radoff: We're just waiting for the for death to get the content up. Okay, I think we're streaming it now, right? Yeah. Yes, sir. There we go. Awesome. All right. So I'll show you exactly what I just

Unknown: mentioned. This is my little character here. I have some like good gear. So as you can see,

Guest: I don't look like the default character anymore. So when I go to that dungeon that I mentioned,

Unknown: I get my character can run because I've... It's what we call like giga juice, which is kind of like

Guest: a the premium subscription to the game. You consume giga juice and then you like you get powered up and access cool stuff. So I'll show you this dungeon that I just mentioned and the mechanic where is your playing through. So that's my opponent. He's countered my move here. It is core like this very simple system of space. You rock paper scissors, right? Sword shield and spell or one of these counters the other. But we've like layered in some like additional stuff on top. So you have a health bar. You have an armor bar. It's telling me here what extra stats I get because of the gear I have. And then I've leveled up my skill. So I have 26 attack, seven defense, nine attack, ten. And I can see the same for my enemy, right? So some of these moves are going to do more damage or less damage depending who counters who here. But I'm just going to blitz through this to just all great. He's kind of always the case, right? He's just hard countering me here. Okay, there we go. So you'll see these items drop. All right, so these items here are soul bounds. So there's no value. This little guy down here, this is a bolt. So when I pick this up, it should say it's like, yes, like one cent. But bolts are like a very, very cheap item. There's like tens of thousands of them on the marketplace. And now when I progress, I get to pick a like a level up that I take with me. This is essentially like a rogue light here, right? So now I've got, yeah, so those stack points added to my shield. I'm putting my shield now. I'm just see how I do against this dude. Okay, I'm getting countered. But as soon as I land one of these hits, I should one shot him. And let's see what I get items wise. It's probably just going to be, all right, I didn't get anything this time. I only get scrap. Yeah, you get the idea. So as I progress through this dungeon, I'm facing tougher and tougher enemies. They have stronger attacks. They have stronger stack points. And there's obviously like lower drop chances, but you get some like pretty rare stuff,

Unknown: skins and so on as you progress through this. And now that I'm on the fourth floor, this is a boss. The boss is a bit tougher. How I'm very high level, so I choose the right move at one shot him.

Guest: This is the core game mode. I'm just going to like refresh here and go back. There's an escape mechanism that you can use when you want to abandon or run. So this is like the main sort of dungeon area in the game, which we've been expanding over time and adding more and more features. So here's the second gameplay feature, which is Fischer. And this has like a very different gameplay mechanic. It's essentially sort of like battleship inspired. So the fish is here in this grid. This is my mana bar, and this is like the catch meter. The what my goal here is to try to get the catch meter full, and then I capture the fish. And I have cards that I can play. What I'm trying to do is predict where this fish is going to move. This card here on the left gives me like the most coverage. If you move to any of these high-light squares, I kind of score a hit on the fish, and that will like start filling up this catch meter. The only missing square here is the center one. So if you move to the center, then I actually lose the catch meter actually goes down. I don't play this and just see. All right, so I went up a little bit. These aren't great cards, so I'll just slim, but I'm going to play it anyway. So I'm not doing well. I'm probably not going to catch this guy. It's down to like two out of

Jon Radoff: 21. I love that you have a fishing mechanic, though, that isn't this typical sort of action-game mechanic where I have to time things perfectly to do. We haven't made it a while, but I love Stardew Valley, but the one part of Stardew Valley that I

Unknown: think is super tedious is the fishing for that reason. Yeah, we obviously, yeah, we all played a

Guest: lot of like fishing games through the ages, and we just wanted one that's like a kind of like a proper feature. There's like an actual mechanic and not just like, oh, you just idle on this feature. And then like I can visit my fish vendor here. And there's kind of a whole back system to this where you like level up your fishing skills. There's a fin decks, like a fish, like a polka decks, where you can see stuff that you've caught. Here, like the catch rates for the different fish. And then every day there's like different deals for your fish, so I have a trout. Today, I get plus 25% value if I sell my trout. Some of them are bad. Like, carp deal today is bad. It's like a minus 50% value, so probably don't want to sell my carp today. I'll wait for a better deal. We sell your fish. You get seaweed, and use your seaweed to level up your skills, which is you get better at fishing. And that's kind of like, yeah, I'm just not the thing about our features that like you play the feature. You get better at it. You can level up. And then this other mechanic that players like right now, you go to this guy, he gets he's like a traveling merchant. And every day he gives you like certain deals where if you firm certain items, you can turn in your, you basically turn in the items, you get these abstract stubs. And the abstract stubs determine how much abstract XP you get every week from abstract. So it basically like gamified the process of like collecting items, trading them in, and then collecting these stubs. And then at the end of the week you get XP from abstract, which is something that like, you know, on-chain people are very interested in these kind of systems, right? Collecting XP and being on leaderboards. And we literally just launched this like an hour ago. It's a leaderboard for you to see how you're doing on the stubs relative to other players. And if you, yeah, if you kind of rank in the top somewhere here in position, 61 to 100. So that's highlighted and I've got like a copper medal. So yeah, we're always adding more stuff to the game. There's more stuff I haven't shown you guys. Like here, you can actually like craft things as a, sorry, this is like the crafting station. And then once you have items you can go here and like, just RPG style, you can like equip items. I can equip this like a party hat if I want my character. I'll equip this like hooded head. Or whatever. So yeah, we ship it like every week. So the game, the game is going to look very different in the future than it does today. But this gives you like a just of, you know, where it is as it stands. And the same one who's playing the game will just see every week is like new, new stuff coming.

Jon Radoff: So death, a couple quick observations of this because I'd love to just dig into a little bit of like how you think about building a game. So first of all, like mad props for shipping every week. Like I tell every game developer, you can just kind of ship constantly and be pretty easy. And learning and what I also see in some of the mechanics you've revealed is just real, deeply engaging stuff. So like the decision to show market value of item rewards is you collect them in a web 3 game. It's almost sort of obvious. And I wonder why I haven't seen more of that, frankly, because if you're going to be having essentially a slot machine mechanic, you want to know what the slot machine was worth if you want to engage a lot of users. And the other is that leaderboard is a great idea and tying it back to abstract and all that really, really clever mechanic around competition, kind of friendly competition between players to get them engaged in things. So can you talk a little bit more about like what drives that weekly cadence of shipping, how do you decide what goes into it? Like where do things get stack ranked up as you make product

Guest: decisions? Yeah. So I think it's just, as you know, on shipping, it's just like a muscle, right? Just kind of got to keep it in motion. I think it works particularly, I mean, in tech startups where you kind of have, there's a couple of important things, right? Like one of which internally is just like it keeps the team motivated because everyone has a continuous sense of progress. And you have a continuous like feedback, like good feedback loop, like you don't stuff, you get players love it, great, it's motivating, they don't, you get information, you can make it better really, really quickly. But then externally as well, like I think there's a meme where like crypto is a little bit like that planet in interstellar, right? Where time moves, it feels a lot faster because this is like a constant stream of like new shiny objects, cool things happening, announcements, this partnership, that legislation, this and that. So attention is very scarce and it's fleeting. So I think it's also kind of a powerful dynamic in that respect because you've always got something new to like re-engage people. There's always a, you've essentially got your own shiny new objects coming out all the time. So we really like it for like a number of reasons. But also because you know, I have seen teams where nothing's ever good enough, so it never gets shipped. And then you know, you find that like two years later, you're still building in a black box. And it's just like, you don't have much information, there's no flywheel there and so on. So we really like it. And you know, I think it also gets like the community at a real chance like leaning, like impact what we prioritize and what we fix or change based on their input. And so yeah, I mean, I think when the game launched by the way, it was like kind of embarrassingly early that wasn't much to do. So we got criticized like, you know, people's, the meme was like, oh, is this game just

Unknown: like rock paper scissors? Like is that is that it? But then like, yeah, people realized we have to be like, oh, okay, there's more and more and more coming. And I would rather that be our story where we can like surprise and delight, right? And almost have something new to show people.

Jon Radoff: So one of the questions from the audience, I think I can answer it, but feel free to add to the questions, when is the game, when is it going to be available? It's available now. You can go play

Unknown: it. Like that's kind of the point of what we're just covering here, which is this game is live,

Jon Radoff: it's shipping every week. So I think I don't just Google for gigaverse abstract and you're going to

Guest: find it. Yeah, exactly. It's live, you can get started like immediately. There's like a small install fee, it's like 10 bucks to like essentially mint your character, get into the game. We launched that system early for like a number of reasons. So you'll need a little bit of ethon abstract. But then you're in, you have your character, you can play as much as you want. And what often happens is players decide they like it, they're like, hey, okay, I'm going to play more and more. And then over time, you may shop on the marketplace or you may get the juice, but you can get by just fine. I want to have your character. So I think you just answered

Jon Radoff: FV Doll's question from chat as well, which is, is there a fee? And it sounds like, I mean, that's the nature of an on-chain game. And I guess that's sort of part and parcel of the pros and cons of the FV Doll's on-chain game, which is you're going to have to mint a character or have some amount of gas to power the experience because you're paying for a lot of this logic to be on-chain. Is there anything you would add to that, or but also just generally like, what are you, for the builders out there who are thinking about a FV Doll on-chain game? What are your big learning

Guest: experiences from going fully on-chain? So, yeah, there's a lot. That's a great question. I think, so yeah, the previous game that we worked on, Pirate Nation was fully on-chain and it was like, honestly, insane, like, very, very impressive under the hood. At peak times, that game was generating millions of transactions every day. I think peak day was like three or four million transactions in the game, which is pretty insane. There's full L2s that have gone and raised hundreds of millions of dollars that don't have that many transactions daily. We took a different approach with Gavers where we didn't put everything on-chain. We were very selective in deciding what we want to have on-chain. We really tried to be thoughtful with every decision. Does it need to be on-chain? What's the benefit or what's the trade-off there? We just thought, what are players really looking to do? They're ownership, they're trading. It's also, yeah, to the earlier point, it's also just a a payment option. If people are, like, if you're building for on-chain people, they it's easier for them to pay with stuff as crypto than with Fiat sometimes. So, yeah, Gavers is partially on-chain and we're just very intentional around what we put on-chain,

Unknown: what we put off-chain. How do you find that data effects conversions

Jon Radoff: into Gavers? I think a lot of people have this common criticism of just Web 3 generally, which is there's a lot of speed bumps in the process of downloading and installing the game, having a funded wallet, being able to just get in. I guess it's partly a question of how have you looked at the funnel for your game, but also how are you thinking of where Gavers fits into the overall ecosystem? Is this for a crypto native person already, or is it the intention to

Unknown: try to grab more of that mainstream gamer? Yeah, definitely affects conversion. We see the data,

Guest: people come to the homepage and you can decide to essentially pay this small fee and get in the game where you can decide not to and then you never enter. So, it's a very opinionated choice. The reason that we made it early on was, well, first of all, our way of monetizing the game,

Unknown: like we bootstrap the launch, so we're like, we need a way to feed ourselves here.

Guest: The second is that, like, you know, we've been looking at on-chain games for a very long time and we do have a live item economy and, you know, there are folks out there who will just simply want to, hey, if you let everyone create a free account, well, why don't I create 10,000 accounts today? There's people with the means and interest to do that, solely to seek out a greater number of items in a faster manner. And that's not because they don't really love the game, it's because there's an economic incentive for them to do so. So, it's a little bit of a civil deterrent as well. It's obviously very imperfect, somewhat crude, someone still really wants to civil they can, but it just kind of like increases the sunk cost there. You have to think about the sort of commitment that you're putting towards the game and honestly, like many sort of design decisions, sometimes just keeping it very simple and left curve can be quite effective. So, that was our thinking around that decision and we were just simply willing to sacrifice conversions or like, hey, wait, you know, instead of having a million players, we're happy like, having much less. But it's also a reflection of the fact that like the on-chain gaming audience is it's not massive, you're talking about tens of thousands of people or maybe low hundreds of thousands, like the on-chain native gaming audiences is much smaller than the web to a sort of normy gamer sort of market. So, to your next question, like, yeah, if you want to build a really

Unknown: big game, eventually you have to, you know, the question is like, well, how do you end up

Guest: trying to serve those players? And I think we can get there. Like, we're building gigaverse with enough sort of, I think, entertainment value that the game can be of interest to someone who literally just wants to entertain themselves. Play a fun game. They don't care that the items have value. They're not looking to try to make 50 bucks every day or every week, whatever. It's much more important that they care about the story and they care about character customization and so on. But as you know, building like a great game that has that kind of appeal, it just takes time. Like, how long has League of Legends been in development or Puggy or any of these? It's literally over a decade, right? Gigaverse has been here four months, so we're under no illusion that like, you know, next week will be in like the app store and will be number one.

Unknown: No, it's gonna, you know, this is gonna happen over, this journey takes quarter, is measured in

Guest: quarters and years, really. But for anyone that like plays the game now, at least what you see are those weekly shipping improvements and you get to see the thing evolve. And I think in time, we can get to a place where we stand a legitimate shot in the very tough and crowded sort of

Jon Radoff: market that like goes after the Web 2 gamers. Well, it also strikes me that the overall game architecture that you've optimized around, which is 3D graphics, road like, provides that very modular structure where with this weekly shipping schedule that you've described, adding new concepts to the game is something that you can do rapidly versus being marred in like one of these 3D graphics metaverses like vast, you know, and kind of vague game systems that people talked about a couple years ago. This is very specific. Like you can just keep dropping more and more features like when I see something like the Fishing Mechanic, for example, that you've got in there, like you could be, you could do a hundred more things like that. It's it's it's a structure that is really given

Unknown: towards a very rapid shipping process. We think so, right? It's about like, I mean, you know, Giga

Guest: vs was built by my co-founder who's just an incredible developer and engineer. Basie soloed the first build of Giga vs. And as I say, we have an incredible artist as well working with us full time. So the two of them put together the first version of the game. Now we have another engineer working with us. We have another artist part time as well. The team is still like incredibly small. And we bootstrapped all this to date. So yeah, it's been very much, you know, to your point about

Unknown: how can we design a game that, you know, that that keeps that in mind and actually we have a

Guest: chance at succeeding with rather than, you know, if you make bloated design decisions or you're like overly ambitious and we're going to, you know, build the next 5D metaverse like we would just never be able to do it. We'll try it all these things and they never ship and they all end up

Jon Radoff: being rugpulls. So like congratulations for shipping a product that you can just start shipping and building on top of every week even if the initial release was somewhat modest because frankly, the even the start the starting point is what 99% of teams in this space don't even get to.

Guest: It's kind of crazy. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we see that. We see that often. And I mean, that's just my advice to founders all the time. They show me a product. And I'm like, great, looks kind of, looks good enough to me. Like, when are you getting out there and they're like, no, we need to add like this feature and that feature, you really don't. I mean, just get it out there.

Jon Radoff: You can always improve it. Get out of the analysis paralysis and start getting feedback from your customers. I mean, that's kind of my thesis around game development. It's so hard to be successful at game development anyway. So building block boxes is actually just setting yourself up for failure.

Unknown: I mean, unless you're a AAA game like, I don't know, any of these guys out there that have seven

Jon Radoff: to 10 years to build their game and apparently infinite money with teams of a thousand people. And they still get shuttered. Yeah, they as we saw at Microsoft the other day, they shut down a bunch of them because guess what? A lot of the time, these are just teams that might be building a lot of pretty cool things, but whether they've actually built a deeply engaging game and how many more years they'll need to get there is always a question. So I think for a startup founder, you aren't clearly not in that category anyway. So it's about shipping and kind of pushing innovation and things like that. And the best way to do that is ship regularly increase the velocity of shipping and building and then have some mechanism where you're learning constantly about what works, what doesn't so that you can invest your time towards the things that

Guest: actually make a difference for your players. Yeah, can I unpack that? I literally just had a huge argument with a bunch of people about this in a large game developer group. People need to focus on figuring out what the fun is as quickly as possible and being able to iterate on that to be able to engage with their audience and also shape the experience that is going to be the you know the final form of the thing. So if you have an opportunity to drop a game and then drop features every 10 days, every 21 days, every month like but something that summatively makes the experience whaler, you'll be way better off than trying to build something. It's going to take you three years before anybody can actually get a playable experience in their hands even being able to walk around this room without any gameplay other than like you know some flavor text. It's more compelling than the people that have ambitions that are going to take 1500 days and stall out at a thousand. That's just my opinion and it's because I've been yelling at people

Jon Radoff: a lot for a while. I agree. I mean there's there's an infinity number of ways to build a game obviously but if you want to sort of organize around the most likely to succeed, I think it just involves customer feedback and rapid velocity. So there there are so many questions on this today. We're almost up to two thousand live viewers, so people are super curious about what you're building. That's awesome. We got a couple of kind of interrelated questions here around essentially the Aiden economy within the game. So we've got Prickdo has a comment about is it like CSGO skins but everything's on chain. I expose for the aesthetic aspect of your character that seems to be the case.

Guest: I'm going to show you real quick here actually. So this guy here is like the auctioneer, it's like this monopoly, that looking guy. You can approach him and yeah so there's like some flavor tech stuff here. Conduct business, this opens up the in-game marketplace. I can see the prices in dollars or in Ethereum and we can filter by types of items. I'm screen sharing so the pop-up won't be great but we have an embedded sort of wallet experience here so you when you buy one of these is like a pop-up it's like literally one click to buy the item. So you know we can look at what this thing is. The floor is like 27 cents. This little number here tells me how many of these I own can buy multiples and one go if I want. So yeah I mean we decided very early on to put the marketplace into the game because like what it does make sense to go like a third party site to do this. I'm actually going to hop over to a community built site. Let me switch my screen, share this time instead. Yeah so this is a site built by one of our players who's also a developer and so he built kind of like an analytics site where every day you can see the 24 hour change in certain items. So yeah these these skins here. These are the in-game prices that've spiked in the last 24 hours. Part of why these items spike in prices like this is because they may have a a they may just be scarce in general. There's not there's not many of them so if you get one of these items it's a great drop. It's like an exciting moment. But then you know going back for a second to gigaverse some of these items will be on a daily turn in quests with hugus. I had done this one already. Fuller body. I turned it in to get 85 stubs but yeah so people will sink the items to get their stubs and that creates this price action. So yeah people are definitely playing this game like the trading game in gigaverse where they're like looking for what they kind of trying to guess what tomorrow's deal may be. They're tracking prices. They might buy something today and try to plug it on someone tomorrow. And then there's also like you know you keep some of these items because we're building in the utility or the use for them. Someone will be like crafted into like other things that you need in the game. Others may like this Ruby key hasn't been revealed what it's used for yet. It's used to unlock a mechanism. We're not telling players what.

Jon Radoff: So at some point. But they're speculating that it'll be worth it. It's funny. Yeah. Yeah.

Guest: And we tend to over time obviously for all items to have uses and not for you know we don't want things that just sit in the speculation zone for a long period of time or forever but you know we've dropped them you know you find them in the game today and then it's like it's again just part of the the game that people like to play with. They don't know when we're going to drop the utility for it. And as you can see here some of the rare skins these are super super rare valuable ones are actually going at sort of much like point I think that's point five teeth isn't it? Yeah. So yeah this is the the gigamarket. When you showed that third party site you didn't

Jon Radoff: say this specifically but you also demonstrated one of the advantages of having an on-chain economy for a game which is the composability of that and the fact that people can then just build their own interfaces and analytics and other ways of interacting with the on-chain experience if they want to and they could present that information in new context or or however they want and it kind of opens up another way that the community of players can get involved in a game like this by actually adding their own capabilities built around the core.

Guest: Yeah I mean this is this is like one of the huge things in that like as you know in like traditional game development you as a player or as a builder is around the you know in the community you kind of have to wait for the developer to like oh you're gonna like launch an SDK or an API or or whatever whereas on-chain we have that for let me just share this. So this is this is still very early this is actually one of my my team members is compiling this this is just meant to be like a directory of third-party tools that people build around gigaverse. So yeah there's already like I mean the six things here I'm aware of at least a couple other teams who aren't listed here. So yeah I mean the game is you know just a few months it's been live for just a few months and yet there's like a handful of and some of these teams are like super talented some of them are like venture backed right that like building stuff around gigaverse so really really awesome and like it's a big edge of like building on-chain and opening up your data and letting you know letting letting like a third-party builder just have accesses information they can build really cool tools and one of them I think it's this chat. So I think this is a dev name Chris and he launched this like literally a week ago but he's shipping daily now too and he's actually really is adding some extra information on to the marketplace view and some people are actually buying items through his interface here he charged an extra fee which I think he's able to do because he's like adding in it's just like built a different you know interface here is adding his own value, his own analytics yeah here you can see sales in real time two minutes ago one minute ago just now so super super cool I mean this is ultimately how we've become like an ecosystem right with like builders creating stuff around the game and I maybe someone creates a better marketplace experience than we do that would be awesome yeah exactly so I'm sweeping stuff here so we are getting

Jon Radoff: so many questions and comments on gigaverse today death it's it's pretty exciting I mean I have to take overwhelming yeah I keep up with all the questions that are flooding into the chat actually but I do I do have to respond to this that I see my team is prodding me for the for the secret code today because we also have a leaderboard on beamable network where people are competing for our leaderboard speaking of civils by the way we've had an incredible project of just controlling the civils for the people that are trying to game our system and sorry to anybody who's used a VPN entirely legitimately and then you got locked but VPNs were out of control using them to create thousands of accounts in some cases so we just had to put a stop to that but it's time to give out the code and the code today get ready for a drumroll we do we still need that drumroll I'm working on a soundboard I'm working on the soundboard so the code today is GLHF and that is the name of death studio too so if you want to look up the studio that's what it is GLHF we all know I hope what that stands for so you go to our discord you type slash claim GLHF and that's your proof of attendance for this you got two minutes to do it and that'll earn you some BMV points towards our leaderboard and love that so many of you have shown up today 2000 or so of you have kind of tuned in to watch this and there was this question asked earlier like how is gigaverse connected to the BMV network well the answer is it isn't really but you don't have to be I'm always just interested in talking to people who are building games and all like our authentic creators like my job is to learn from people that are building things and to share those learnings with the community hey if there's ways BMV can help death or gigaverse at some point we'd be delighted to do that or abstract chain for that matter of course we would but my number one priority is always help people who are actually building games learn to build better games so if I can do that mission accomplished and that can be the connection to BMV on network for today and I think a lot of you are asking for a gigaverse to come on the show and share what they've learned so let's dig into a few other things on this like gotta find some of these questions here what do we got Oscar help me out

Unknown: oh my all right hang on let me um all right let's go for oh yeah the abstract question yeah

Jon Radoff: there were a bunch of questions about abstract so if take us through abstract abstract network as your choice of chains for this and like it looks like you've done some really deep integration with abstract as well based on what we're showing earlier tell us about abstract why should more people

Guest: be on abstract what have you learned from it so we made the decision to launch an abstract like late last year before abstract was even live um we met the team and they impressed us they were hungry super responsive um I mean this is like one of the things that I find with like B2B partners or Infra or vendors is like the experience like the responsiveness and like level of giving a shit never gets better like after you've committed or after you've been sold like it you know it's always a strong signal and we met some other chains who were just kind of like sluggish or you know like the dude there seemed like half asleep or whatever um the abstract weren't they were like super responsive very hungry very sort of like solution oriented um and they actually had a clear vision they're like hey we want to build a chain that has like an app store experience and we drive like traffic to great apps great like a very very clear like value proposition and I think a lot of other chains just aren't just clear or uh with others or with themselves around what they're actually trying to do and what they're trying to offer and how they stand out it's very tough for like a general purpose being now very very competitive so we like the team a lot we like the vision a lot um and uh and yeah I think like being sort of the the the chain that from the outset was very anchored to pudgy penguins the reality is that's just one of the best communities in crypto that's been has the lore and that's been through the the modern the bloods with the history of that collection community and um it is really the leading NFT community there's a very heavy overlap between NFT holders and gaming enthusiasts on chain um so we thought that was uh kind of a like a nice bonus sort of um going for abstracts as well and then proofing was in the pudding right we launched early on abstracts and um yeah we started to see like good good metrics pretty much from day one um and it's basically not only ever since

Jon Radoff: I've got some other questions that is sort of about target platforms for the game there was a question asked earlier like what kind of PC do I need to play the game you've got a question here are you going to bring web 3 to ps5 i mean hey plate Sony invested in sonyum which is a which is a blockchain so i don't think there are posed to web 3 there was an earlier question yep you found it oscar the android and ios questions so i guess the broad question is platforms where are you

Unknown: today where do you think you might be in the future so we launched in like web browser just because

Guest: it was like kind of easy and quick um but yeah like we're building the game in mind with a um yeah we essentially want to take out those individual gameplay experiences like the the dungeon and the um fishing and whatever comes next turn those into mobile experiences so you can play on a mobile device um and eventually at some point we may have like a give your first classic which is a uh you know be great to have like a desktop client that you can install and play via like you know

Unknown: the launchers right if you can launch via steam um we're no rush to get there we'd like to build the

Guest: game out a lot more first um and we're also working on a solution that enables this kind of like cross-platform gameplay we we think we have a way that we can do that and and that will be really fun for someone's to play on browser grade you can actually like is actually still like a shared

Unknown: world experience with players from other platforms what so we've got a question here from sage

Jon Radoff: cororo I don't know if you want to answer it although it's about DAU and mau but the interesting

Unknown: thing there is if you're fully on shame people could kind of figure this out for themselves couldn't they?

Guest: yep it's all on chain what our enemies is on chain yeah at this point we've made we we sold an FTE collection uh to launch the game those are like the wrongs uh the quality diverse wrongs so we made um good million it depends on the price of e-thripe if take like roughly the the current price we made about a million us from the NFT sale made a couple million from game revenue since launch as well um it's really important like monetizing the game early um and like building a high quality community and um for that community to have like skin in the game um and for us to have like a real business it's like honestly it's a better long-term outcome for everyone um I think a lot of games don't think about monetization early enough and that's just like a recipe for disaster um it's better for your your players from day one to understand like hey this is like a high quality uh uh you know we're trying to build a high quality experience and you know monetization is kind of part of that um I think it's a lot easier to take that approach than to kick the can like a year down the road and then like surprise everyone when you ask them to pay 10 bucks um and I win the second grade position right now because we have a you know we have tens of thousands of of of DAU and weekly players and they um I saw there's an existing culture of like

Unknown: players who like the game and um who aren't afraid to spend it hey Diff um your your communities

Guest: culture where does that congregate where does your community live besides their experience in the game are they all in discord do they like exist in discord and x like where does your community and its culture um you know percolate most of the the day-to-day chatter is in discord um pretty vocal community on on x as well um who like to share the means share the content around the game um and they're like yeah just like creating great content every day we also have like an awesome network of creators who are just incredible like I always creating like guides and infographics and funny videos and stuff and um you know we run a program to kind of engage them and support them and um there there are some non non monetary incentives there as well kind of recognizing their effort um so yeah that that creates a bunch of noise on on x as well you have a question from

Jon Radoff: deko here like are we gonna have abstract on beamable so first of all there's nothing formal between beamable and abstract today we're in touch with those folks and they know where we are and we'd love to support abstract but i'll say abstract is an evm and game developers on beamable frequently just fork the ethereum sdk and find that it's pretty trivial to get the evm any evm compatible chain like that like literally the first game that ended up on base that's how it happened we didn't formally support it someone just did it uh same thing with ape chain someone recently built a game on ape chain and they just forked the ethereum code again so we're always happy to do that but it like we would also love to have the partnership with abstract where we go to market together and and hopefully we figure that out in the future but no there's there's nothing yet um if you think we should in your kind of closed abstract just tag them and say hey beamable and abstract should

Unknown: be working together we're always happy to do that um we're getting close to the end of our hour

Jon Radoff: death i i feel like i could talk to you for hours about just like game design and some of the decisions in this product but it's really a delight to see a game that is playable in web 3 and is a good foundation for continuing to build with this once a week cadence i think that's fantastic so i want to first just thank you for for participating with us today but in the last couple of minutes as we wind down the hour what do you want to share with the audience here we've got a couple thousand people who showed up to learn what you're building death what should they know about gigaverse other than hey go to gigaverse.io and play this game we saw a lot of questions like how do i play it like go to gigaverse.io you can play it right now but what should people know about what you're working on and maybe even a little bit about the future if you're willing to share anything

Guest: well first we thanks again guys likewise um you know appreciate the the recall backing graphic i feel like um it's a shame that the game is overlaying but that's really cool and um yeah just the general um for those questions and so on um i want you to know about gigaverse i mean yeah i think the main cool to action is like like what you heard like try try the game out um it will keep getting better um we we enjoy shipping so we're always gonna continue doing that and um and we also want to win we think gaming is very off meta right now and so for for people to believe in gaming again it's only gonna happen through like you're gonna take some big swings um for it to be different this time like it actually has to be different and so we think a lot about how we can do that and what are some of the big swings we can take as we grow the game in

Jon Radoff: company um so yeah my last question for you death before we wrap it up is like it used to be that the business model for crypto gaming at least if we go back four or five years was launch that NFT collection use it as a funding event and use that capital will start actually building the game fortunately so many people rug pulled that or or even if it wasn't intentional like so many people did that and then they discovered game development is hard and they couldn't pull it off most people haven't been able to do that um it sounds like you succeeded in that process more recently though when you say gaming is off meta like way way off meta is the NFT collection funding event for a game yeah yeah what now the final moments like is that something that other people can consider or were you just sort of someone with a huge competitive advantage in in the ability to pull that

Guest: off should people consider it again is will that change yeah um being intellectually honest and i guess it's a bit of a humble brag but i do have an advantage launching collections like i've done this for years so um someone who's never done it before i think the advice is mainly around like you there's gonna be a good story and it has to be convincing and has to be authentic um people in this space now i think are like we haven't really had like uh like a large influx of new naive people so the people who are here are very astute very experienced somewhat cynical now they've seen bad endings more often than they've seen good ones um and so you can't bullshit these people you can't do the whole like yeah this shit's gonna go to the moon you're gonna be real and you have to like aim to deliver actual value um and i also think like if you're building a game in a in a way like we are where you don't have to sit in a black box for two years then yeah build the game before you sell the NFTs um so that like you know those people don't get wrecked meant to be an NFT and then they have to wait a year or two to see something that's then disappointing we launched the game

Unknown: I think like 10 days after the NFTs were sold so i think that's a good approach and then uh and

Guest: then yeah like why did the NFTs need to exist you see we answered to that like in our case we we gave them a bunch of in-game utility it didn't show this but like you see your NFTs here and you can like collect items from them you get more energy so you can take more more actions see how

Jon Radoff: you're like claiming this stuff and it's and the fact alone that you went from NFT meant to had a game to launch 10 days later says something as well which is that NFTs were sold more i would say for the to take you into the future but you had a starting point you were you had already been working on something that people could kind of take a look at and you you had something from the beginning it's not like the problem of like teams that tried to sell these collections or did sell these collections and they had absolutely no idea how they're going to get from point A to point B sometimes they had no programming or game development experience whatsoever and had wildly unrealistic expectations but you kind of had the starting point already underway at the point that

Unknown: you put that out there yes yeah similar in some ways frankly to like the experience on Kickstarter

Jon Radoff: like people blame web 3 like as if it's uniquely like bad at those but actually it's the same thing on Kickstarter which played this out years earlier where everybody did the Kickstarter they were really good at video trailers and really have a thing other than a video trailer and no game so people kind of got wise to that over time and it remains really difficult to fund a game on Kickstarter today unless you more or less have a game that's most of the way done that you can show like we had RAFCoster on to talk about his web 2 game a couple months back where the game's pretty much done he has a 10-year plan I think for what he wants to add to it but you could already play the game people are having fun with it like and then they did a Kickstarter almost more as a marketing event and I feel like NFTs kind of have trended that way where they can help you build on top of a solid foundation where the game is demonstrable and you've kind of demonstrated that here yes all right well we've gone three minutes over so that just points to how much there is to talk about this but thank you so much death for taking time with us today I think there's so much that people are gonna have to learn from this I hope people review this if he came in part way watch from the beginning there's so much alpha so much wisdom and actually frankly just practical game developer experience like if you want to know how you can succeed at game development there's a lot of nuggets along the way here whether it's funding game mechanics shipping fast like this is a master class for a lot of people so thanks if this has been great and I look forward to hopefully

Unknown: having you back at some point where we talk about the update yeah thanks so much guys a lot of fun and yeah we'll definitely stay in touch all right take care everybody