Think Like A Game Designer - Neeraj Kashyap — Web3 Game Design, Navigating Scams, Success Stories, and Pioneering the Path for Gaming in Emerging Tech (#65)

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Neeraj Kashyap, a pioneer in the blockchain gaming sector, joins us to share his journey from academia to the forefront of Web3 game development. As the founder and CEO of Moonstream.to, Neeraj leverages his Master of Science in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Number Theory from Indiana University to design games for the blockchain. His company has not only launched over five games exclusively on the blockchain but has also guided many others in making their mark within the Web3 gaming landscape. In our conversation, Neeraj will offer insights into the challenges and potential of blockchain in gaming, discussing how it can create more immersive and ownership-driven experiences. Tune in to explore the cutting-edge intersection of game design and blockchain technology with one of its most innovative thinkers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Thank you for making this show possible through your pledges, podcast reviews, and enthusiasm on social media. Without your help, this show would not have been possible, and it's incredible how our community has grown. If you'd like to support the show and get access to more exclusive content from me and my guests, I recommend checking out Justin Garydesigns.com, where I've got weekly articles on game design and creativity,

along with show notes, lessons from the podcast, and more exclusive insights to help you with your creative projects. In today's episode, I speak with Niroj Kachap. Niroj is the founder and CEO of Moonstream. It's a company that provides technical blockchain infrastructure to enhance games with on-chain mechanics. Neraj holds a Master of Science and Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Number Theory from Indiana University. His company has launched over five games exclusively on the blockchain and has helped many others to be able to launch games into what's now commonly referred to as Web3 gaming.

Now, some of these words might be triggering for some of you. It is an interesting area for design and I have written a couple of articles about this. I mentioned in the post itself, but you can go to two. Justin Gary Designs to dot com to see some of those articles to kind of give you some foundations and blockchain technology and web three and how it can apply to gaming.

And look, there's a lot of understandable hesitancy around the space. There's been a lot of scams. There's been a lot of promises that haven't delivered on. But I also think there are a lot of promises in the space that are really interesting and things that help small designers, small studios be able to do things

at a bigger scale than they otherwise could. And an ability to build player communities where the players can really feel sense of ownership of the game, have some long-term benefit. And so we try to find the way through that. So I brought on Niraj, so as someone who's been in this space for a while, who's helped onboard a lot of different games, as someone who can kind of help clarify the space. So we talk about the upsides and downsides of Web3. We talk about the onboarding process and how to make it easier for people to join into the Web3 communities. We talk about vampire attacks and what it means for

you to be able to potentially acquire users in Web3 spaces. We talk about what it means to have stakes and economies and people who are playing your game somewhat purely for profit or people who are making a living playing your game through things like play to earn, the upsides and downsides of play to earn. We compare it to things like people who are driving Ubers and living above and below the API. There's a lot of really interesting, not easy to answer questions about what makes this space work, what the upsides are, what the downsides are, and we really try to dig into all of that in this episode.

So for those of you who are already into Web3, there's a lot of really interesting, nitty-gritty about the way to execute games and things well. For those of you that are not, I encourage you to keep an open mind and try to find the spaces as I have been with my own work and my own explorations to see where this can create better experiences for users, better communities, more powerful gameplay experiences, as well as finding ways to protect ourselves from some of the challenges of the new medium. So that's enough of an intro, I'm sure.

There's a lot of really great insights here. It's a new world for everybody. It's kind of the Wild West out there. And so I want to try to bring you that information at the forefront of design and gaming. So without further ado, here is Niraj Kachap. Hello and welcome. I am here with Niroj Kachap. Niraj, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So it was interesting. You know, we had a we had a conversation before this that was

really illuminating for me and we actually got into some fun back and forth. And I thought, you know what, I have to be able to share this with my audience. because we have a hot topic here. We're going to be talking about Web3 gaming. There's some people that are instantly going to want to stop listening. There's some people that are going to really, really be excited to listen. I'm hoping to bring everybody along for the ride. But before we get into the nuts and bolts here, the meaty parts of the topic,

I'd love to just let's get into your background. I always like to start with guests of kind of just, you know, bringing things down to earth. How did you get started? How did you get interested in gaming and the sort of interesting technical side that you're involved in now? Yeah, sure. So I started my life as a mathematician, a research mathematician, and mathematicians play games a lot. And that's that sort of, I mean, you know, the interests go together. I played a lot of, you know, board games, card games as a kid, computer games. I played my first computer game when I was eight. I'm 40 now. So I'm maybe a little bit older than most of your audience. But, uh, um, um, I played... Did you say 40? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, I'm older than you are, so let's not worry about the audience age. But I remember I got my first computer when I was eight years old. My father just decided to, like, put the money down for like... For this old 386, and he didn't really know what to do with it. But the first thing I figured out how to do was play games on there. I played, you know, in those days, if you had a quick basic, installation on your, you know, DOS PC. It came with a bunch of games, so I played gorillas. And that I learned how to program there as well. Like, you know, I, my first cheats were,

I went into the gorillas code and messed with the physics. So I could, like, you know, my bananas didn't have gravity and stuff like that. So I've been into computer games for a very long time. My favorite games ever are, though, BackCam. And BackCam is probably my favorite game in the world, go, chess, bridge, you know, those types of games. And, you know, of course, in terms of game design, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons in college. And I ran my own games as a dungeon master and I always tried to bring like new interesting elements into the games. Like, you know, and that's where I sort of started dabbling in game design. That's sort of Okay, great. Yeah. Well, that's definitely, you know, you've labeled a lot of the classics. And D&D is probably the most common thread of people that gets them hooked on the I can actually make my own games. So, and then, you know, obviously go and chess and Beckham and speak to the mathematician and you. So that's, that all makes sense. That tracks. And so then how do you go from, you know, kind of PhD in mathematics, really like games into the world of I'm actually making games or specifically, you know,

you know, this kind of into the Web 3 space. I don't know which one came first for you. Yeah, that totally happened by accident and Web 3 came first. We sort of got into games totally by accident. So I've been involved in crypto since maybe 2015, just personally. And in 2017, at the time I worked at Google, I worked on TensorFlow at Google. I said, man, I don't want to spend the rest of my life like, you know, increasing Google's advertising revenue or cloud user. or like, you know, whatever, right?

So I quit the job and I just sort of got into crypto professionally. Not because I wanted to run scams or anything like that, although I suspect that's going to be something that we talk about quite a bit. Oh, yes. And for a good reason, actually. But just because I see the potential in decentralization and I really believe in it. So crypto came first. I was working for a startup at that point, someone else's startup.

And then in 2019, I decided to strike out on my own. And we were building just this analytics product, right, that helped people understand what was going on on different blockchain. We started with Solana. We support a bunch of them. And our first customers were traders, like, you know, crypto traders and game designers. You know, two different groups of people. And of the two, I much preferred working with the game designers and the crypto traders. They were much, much better customers.

They were much more loyal customers. They actually cared like, you know, we weren't just a commodity to them. And so we decided, hey, we're just going to focus on games. And what happened was since, like, you know, at the time, and even now with a lot of games, especially Web 3 games, with a lot of Web 3 games, the game designers, you know, the games are not really decentralized. and the game designers end up acting as the central bank for their economies, right? They have to basically enact economic policies like, you know, across their economies.

But in order to do that, they need to actually, you know, do stuff on chain. They need to have programs that sort of like represent their will and their intentions that live on the blockchain that actually like, you know, do what they're supposed to do. And that's the part that they don't know how to do. They don't know how to create those programs. So they started asking us for help. They were just using us for analytics at first. So they were using us to figure out what was going on in their economies.

And then they started asking us like, you know, how would we do this or how would we do that? And those tools are very easy for us to build. So that's how our product grew. And basically at some point, I realized, like, you know, what we're doing is we're actually building game mechanics. And so that very naturally went into like, you know, we just composed them into our own games and started releasing it. That's how we got into game to go. Okay. There's an enormous amount to unpack there.

I want to, well, first I want to highlight there is that kind of, you know, just good, fun core business principle here, right? You were kind of, you know, you're working on projects. You found you were serving different customer bases. You found a customer base you enjoyed serving more. So that drew you to that. And then they just started asking you for specific types of help. And once you start getting multiple people that you,

an audience you want to serve that are showing a need that you know you can fulfill, that's a great sign that, hey, this is a business that I want to do, regardless of like the field or whatever. So I just like underscoring, you know, kind of universal principles like that, regardless of whether the audience cares about Web3 specifically. That's just a great, great core principle. Now, I want to zoom out because there's a lot of things you threw out there that some people are not going to be able to follow.

I will say that I have, I'm not going to go into the basics of what blockchain is or what Web3 is. I have written articles on this. Anybody that wants to go to Justin Gary'sdesigns.com and find the articles I written. I wrote one back in 2018. I wrote another one quite recently. So I don't want to rehash that stuff.

But I do want to talk a little bit about the differences and really flesh out what it means when it comes to gaming. So you threw out a couple of things, right? Like there's on chain and there's off chain. And that games typically live and run off chain nowadays. And they have the economies and the elements that live on chain. Let's break that apart a little bit and talk about what that means and why someone might be interested in doing one or the other or what the tradeoffs are there. Yeah, I think the most important thing about, you know, if there's anything Web 3 in your game, the most important thing to realize is the parts of your game that are represented on the blockchain

immediately become financialized and they have value. And so it's very natural when you're building a game for the things that like, you know, you traditionally monetize, right, like character avatars, skins, items, like stuff like that to go on chain. And that's where like most games started, right? In 2021, that's where most games started. They would say, you know, you can own your characters, you can own the items that you earn in game, you know, you can own all of these different things. Those things themselves will live on chain, but the logic by which the games make use of those things may not, they didn't live on chain at the time, right? Most games didn't build themselves that way where, you know, the assets themselves were represented on the blockchain in a permissionless way.

where if you own those assets, the game developer would never be able to take them away from you, with caveats. But the logic about how those items were used in the game wasn't represented on the blockchain because all of the game logic was represented, like, you know, on the server somewhere. And now we're seeing a growing movement of people

who are building their games entirely on the blockchain where it's not just like, you know, some limited subset of assets that are represented on the blockchain, but actually the entire state of the game, And all of the logic by which that state changes are also represented as programs on the blockchain. And so that's the spectrum of like, you know, Web 3 games. Like, you know, on the one end you have most people in the space called them Web 2.5 games where, you know, you just have assets that are represented on the blockchain. But the rest of the game sort of takes place in a more traditional manner, right, with game servers and so on.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have like sort of the real, like, you know, out there stuff where like, you know, people are building entire games on the blockchain where the game clients are just like, you know, thin front ends to like, like the real meat of the computation and the game is all sort of represented permissionlessly in a decentralized manner on the blockchain. Yeah. Okay. So then again, I'm just sort of try to break this down again in as simple as way. So I'm going to try to restate what I think I heard you say. in a way that makes sense. So there's at its core here, there's a balance between centralized control for the developer

and the ownership and transparency for the player, right? So in one world, the developer is making the game and I'm building the servers and everything, but the specific objects that you earn, as you mentioned, it could be avatars, it could be skins, it could be trading cards, it could be anything. Now, you have those as an object that is either on my servers as a developer,

in which case I could take them away from you. In fact, most servers, most games like this don't even say you own anything. They license the rights to you. You don't actually own anything. The developer can do whatever they want. And so as a developer, they give you tons of freedom. And then the other version, the player has those things. And if it's on the blockchain, the developer can't just take them away from you.

The rules of the blockchain are sort of concrete. And so it's set up from the beginning. The developer can't take those away. In a world where the game lives on the blockchain, the developer can't even change the rules of the game. They can't even change what happens. Exactly. Now, so as a developer, that terrifies me personally. Because I like to, like iteration is the key to the design.

Right. And so once you put something out there, you can't, if you can't change it anymore, that seems like a really tough space to be. Do what's motivating? Like I can understand the idea of like players own their stuff. That's great. Right. Like I think I could imagine that being very valuable. I know as a player, like I come from the tabletop game world where trading card games were obviously, of course, I own my cards and I use them to play a game.

And if I want to sell them to somebody else or trade them to somebody else or lend them somebody else, of course I could do that. And nowadays, that's very, very rare in any kind of web two gaming. People, in fact, it's by far the exception. And so guaranteeing that, hey, that's my stuff. I can do what I want. That makes sense. But why would a developer want to move all the way on chain like that to not have control over their own game? I think there's a couple of reasons.

So we build fully on chain games. At Moonstream, we built fully on chain games. And so I can tell you our reasons for it. I think different people have different reasons. but I'm very happy to share our reasons. So first of all, I really like this notion of permissionless games. This is a personal thing. Chess, for example, is a permissionless game, right?

Just the concept of chess, not the chess that you play on chess.com or on lead chess or something like this, but chess as a concept is a permissionless game. You and I don't even need to have a chess board in order to play a game of chess, right? As long as we agree to the rules of chess and some notation that we use to communicate moves to each other, we can play a game of chess, you know, without any external party being involved. Chess, you know, there are websites like Chess.com, which are very successful. Chess.com is a business that makes over $100 million a year because they've created such a great client for chess. And Chess.com is not permissionless, right?

You're trusting Chess.com servers to, like, correctly receive your moves, correctly, like, communicate your moves to your moves to your opponent. Like, you know, you're trusting their anti-cheat mechanisms. You're trusting that, you know, you're just trusting a lot of things when you play chess on chess.com. You're trusting that their servers accurately represent the same notion of chess that you have in your mind. Now that blockchains exist, like, blockchains are the first piece of technology that I've ever seen that allows us to create digital permissionless games. So with with blockchains, you know, this is the first time in, you know, that I've ever seen that I can actually make a game that's digital. that has the reach of a digital game, right? The global reach of a digital game

that I can like, you know, release and immediately put in front of like, you know, billions of people. But that's permissionless where like, you know, nobody has to trust like my server or, you know, my machinery in order to know that the game is fair or like, you know, that they're playing the game that they expect to be playing. So that's like, that's really exciting to me. I think there's actually a lot of potential there.

And it's related to this, it's related to like a more practical business concern as well. You know, with a lot of games, like there's a pretty heavy cost. Like, you know, especially the way that games work now, live ops is a pretty heavy cost of like, you know, running a game. And live ops, it becomes such a heavy cost that like, you know, ultimately, like, you know, games actually fail, tend to fail because like, because of just the heavier and heavier burden of live ops over like the life cycle of the game. And with a game that's autonomous, with the game that you just deploy onto blockchain and it's never going to change and it just lives there, your live-ops burden is like almost a minimal, right? Like you need to make sure that there's enough users coming into the game. So you need to do marketing. You need to make sure that like, you know, there's maybe tournaments and events like, you know, required to like sort of bootstrap activity in the game.

But after that, like if the game is sufficiently successful, because the players like, you know, have direct ownership of game assets, like without, without you being involved as a middleman, you'll find that, like, you know, they actually take a lot of that burden off of their shoulders. Players want, if players want a game to be successful, if they feel ownership over the game, they actually put a lot of effort in. Like, you know, they'll run their own tournaments, they'll run their own events. The live-ops burden is sort of distributed over the player community, not just over you. And it just looks different than it does for like a game like World of Warcraft or something, you know, something like that. Yeah. And I think the final thing is, if the game is immutable, like, you know, if you deploy a game that is, that doesn't change, where the rules don't change, it's a lot easier for other people to extend, right? So let's say that I make mods for like StarCraft or something like that. Then I'm really trusting that Blizzard isn't going to change the way that the underlying, like, you know, the underlying engine works or that StarCraft works at the, you know, at the bottom. Because if they do, then like, you know, my mod suddenly becomes obsolete.

I also don't own my mod. I mean, you know, Dota started off as a Warcraft Tree mod. It's like, you know, it gave rise to the mobile genre. And like, you know, that's an industry that's worth, I don't know how many, like, tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars. Like, and the people who created a Dota didn't really see any upside from that, right? So there's a whole lot of incentives that I believe this fixes, you know, putting stuff on chain fixes for extensions to a game. And so those are like the various reasons that I really believe in. Yeah.

Yeah. And so for those that aren't, so live ops, right, it's the sort of burden of continually updating a game, providing content, making sure that people are seeing new stuff all the time. And I can definitely speak from experience. This is unbelievably expensive and costly, even for tabletop trading card games. Same thing for digital games, of course. And the expectation has absolutely been growing, making it much, much harder for small-scale developers to create games that succeed over the long term.

So it's really interesting to see this way of shifting that burden to the players and giving them the ownership to do so, right? The modding community is a huge success. I did one of my previous podcast guests, Casey Yano from Slay the Spire had talked about how important their modding community was to their success as an indie studio, giving people that ownership and getting people excited, I think makes a lot of sense. And then this, so thanks for sort of flush that piece of it out. I think that this idea that the players own feel ownership in the game

and have success in the game, you know, not just they have a, they are vested in the game's success in part because they, is this based, is this dependent upon them having some kind of token or some kind of thing that earns or the NFT that they can make money off of? Is that why they feel ownership or just the fact that it's in the public domain and on the blockchain makes them feel ownership because they can modify it themselves because they can build things on it themselves. It's really difficult to separate the two. I think, you know, once, once money gets involved, it's really difficult to separate like the monetary, the financial aspect from like the non-financial aspects of things. So it's very hard to say. Definitely like in

2021, there were a lot of like, I would say, less sincere gaming projects released where, you know, it was just about pumping the value of some assets. And over there, like a lot of players cared because they spent so much money like, you know, buying it in the game, right? And those games definitely started to take more of the structure of Ponzi schemes where, like, you know, really players were just looking to bring, like, the next wave of players in. So they could basically sell their assets at a profit, you know, just do a flip. Those are sort of damaging dynamics. But, you know, even for games like that, like, you know, Axi Infinity, so most people will, and I would say this as well, is that the best example of a Web 3 game, the most successful Web 3 game that's, ever existed until now is a game called Axi Infinity.

So it was a game built by a studio called Sky Mavis Studios. It's a Vietnamese game studio. And they started building it in 2017 or 2018. And it got really big in 2021. It's a Pokemon style game. You have a bunch of these little creatures, like blob-like creatures. They're called Axis.

Axis cost money. They're NFTs, right? and Axis can battle each other. And when Axis battled each other, the core loop was Axis would battle each other, and that would produce this smooth love potion, which was a currency. And like, you know, you could sell smooth love potion on the market, or you could use it to breed more axes or like, you know, there were like several economic loops over there.

And what happened in Axi Infinity is actually quite interesting. I'll try to summarize it very quickly. Basically, you needed to have a lot of money to buy good axes and to play the game effectively. So basically the whales, people have been talking about whales in games for a very long time. But in Web 3 games, the whales look pretty different because they're not just spending money on a game that's like that they love or that's engaged them. They're actually investing their money into the game. And so you had like a bunch of whales that invested a lot of money, right? We're talking about like tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars,

in some case, even millions of dollars into Axi Infinity, who got control of all these assets. And now they had to basically, in order to make good on their investment, they actually had to, like, play the game with their, like, you know, ridiculous number of assets in order to, like, in order to make good on their investment. And of course, it wasn't feasible for a single person who invested, like, a million dollars into, like, a large number of axes to play with those axes by themselves. So they'd start hiring people in order to play the game. And that created this whole economy of scholars.

It's something, if you're not familiar with it, I recommend looking it up. If you just Google Axi Scholars, you'll see a whole bunch of stuff there. It's very interesting. But the point is, you know, I've talked to these people. And like, you know, of course, the primary motivation of these people is to make money. But most of these people will also tell you that they genuinely love playing Axi Infinity. And I don't think they started out loving Axi Infinity.

They probably started out wanting to make money, most of them, right? But maybe it's Stockholm syndrome, maybe it's something else, but they end up like loving the game. Like, you know, because they're sort of held captive to it because of how much money they spent on it. So it's really hard to distinguish the financial aspect from like the actual like liking the game aspect of things. Yeah, man. This is the stuff. This is the stuff that terrifies me and kind of makes me feel a little nauseous when I think about this space. I'm not going to lie.

Like I want to me, right, in everything, I always love to be at the forefront of technology. And so I have been, you know, researching the space. I've been looking to launch something in the space, but I wanted to always be that what you're making is in service of your players, right? That the experience is better because of this, right? The idea of a trading card game model when it first came out, lots of people were like, wow, this is an amazing, cool gameplay experience,

but also it costs a ton of money. And that was just true. But the game was served by the business model, the idea of being able to open packs and collect things and have different experiences, like the game was better for that model. And the same was true in, you know, freemium models, right, on digital games, right? As you mentioned, this is where the concept of whales first sort of came to light. that it's like, hey, this game's totally free for you to play.

Now, some people make really, really, you know, predatory practices where they just sort of grind you into making, trying to get you to spend as much money as you can. And that's a very bad example of freemium. But the best examples of free me, we're like, hey, we're going to give you a great game experience. And some percentage of you can pay in your time by just being there and being part of the community and some percentage you can play with money. And then that's great.

And I want to see the version of Web 3 with that exists. But because there's so much money on the line and you have so many, frankly, like bad actors or people who are primarily, even if it's not, even if it's not like a scam, which obviously is a problem, even if there are just primarily there to make money, they can really corrupt the community very quickly. And so I worry about that. And like, what practices or processes or, you know, what tools are available to help drive, you know, in my mind, other than just like, make the game fun first, is in my baseline.

But what, how do you, how do you properly incentivize the good things like what you talked about, where it's like people are invested and gain success when the community thrives and they're creating mods and they're doing things and they're building and they're involved. How do you incentivize that piece without getting the kind of sharks? Like, you know, the scholar program, as you talked about to me, also sounds like, like, like, you know, it also sounds kind of scammy too because what it basically means is the people who have all the assets now rent them to other people to play. And so the idea that I would have to like rent cards from a trading card game because I can't

afford them to me, to me tells me there's something wrong with us. system, not that it's in a good place. And so is there, is there a balance there or I know this is not an easy question, but I really want to find the answer. I think it's a very good question. And I just want to say one thing. Like, I think the morality of it is not so black and white about like, you know, whether the scholarship program is good or bad. I mean, my initial, I've been doing this like, you know, I've been in web three gaming since 2021. So like what, three years, almost three years at this point. And my initial feeling about it was exactly the same as yours. But, you know, if you you talk to people from the Philippines, you know, or from Vietnam who, like, for whom, you know,

they wouldn't have been able to put food on the table during the pandemic because they lost their jobs if it weren't for, like, the scholarship programs. I think it's like a pretty different. It's a, it's just, it's just a little bit more morally ambiguous than I initially thought it was. That's not the kind of game that I want to build. And I have thoughts about, like, you know, how to avoid how to, like, disincentivize those kinds of dynamics from entering your game, but it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not as clear cut as I used to think it was. Yeah. And I, and I, and I agree with that.

And my goal here is, and I want to hear those thoughts that you just said. Like, I'm not going to let you up, look. I want to hear those thoughts because I want to get into the details. But like, my goal here is to provide a balanced perspective. I'm trying to represent the audience, the voice of the audience. It's like, these are all scams. This is, this is terrible. This is the worst thing that's ever happened.

And the voice of people like, wait, where is the, where can we find great play and great opportunity? And especially as an indie developer myself, like, thinking, is there an opportunity here that gives you an asymmetric advantage, right? Like this idea that, like, for example, it's way, as I've been costing it out, it's way cheaper and easier to build, connect yourself to a blockchain and let that be the tool that lets people trade objects and connect than it is to build your own, maintain your own servers, and God forbid trying to manage the legal nightmare of giving people ownership of things on your

servers and let you just buy and sell them. Like that's, it is, having researched this, it is terrible. And it is so there's a real advantage to developers. to jump and to be a part of this platform. But I want to navigate those risks. And whether it be myself in projects upcoming or other people and what they're doing, I want to, what are the tips to say, let's avoid, let's build a system that really creates positive rules.

Because as you mentioned earlier, and as we talked about before, even before this podcast, I think this is a game design project. You are creating the rules and the systems that encourage the right kinds of player behavior. And that's true inside of your, the core game loop. And that's true in this sort of meta-game economics and everything else. So what are the tips that you would give in terms of, you know, as concrete as you can be, in terms of how do you incentivize the right kinds of player behaviors to build the community you want to build using Web3? I think the first thing that at least what we do is we keep the games limited in scope.

You know, it's very easy to see like a Web3. You know, it's very easy to see a blockchain. Like, you know, it's really an open world, right? Like literally anybody can build anything. Like, you know, you're publishing, you're basically publishing the interfaces to your game and anyone can build anything that they want on top of it. And as a developer, as a game designer, recognizing that potential, it's very easy for you to want to start building those things yourself.

It's important, I think, not to do that. It's important to restrict the scope. Like, have a core, like, basically, you know, you need to make a core game that's as engaging as possible. So like just focusing on that and focusing not just on like, there's a game economy. So like the biggest difference between a Web 3 game a non-web-3 game is the economy, right?

So in like World of Warcraft, for example, let's say I'm a game designer on World of Warcraft, the way that I'm thinking about the economy, I imagine, is that this is a tool for me to just like to control player engagement, right? Like the economy is a tool that serves, that it's a lever that I can use, to basically improve player engagement with people, right?

If I, you know, create some sort of like a quest giver that's giving too many rewards of like a certain item, I can fix that in the next patch by like, you know, somehow devaluing that item or like, you know, basically I can do whatever I want, right? All I care about is player engagement. In a Web 3 game, that's no longer true because as soon as you have assets that are represented on a blockchain, they have real value. And because they have real value, there might be people who are sort of interacting with those assets that don't even know anything about your game, right?

Like let's say that there's some sort of a currency and your players are sort of like, you know, trading that currency on an exchange. There are decentralized exchanges now where, you know, it's just a program that's running on the blockchain that you can swap like, you know, game assets for stable coins, like, you know, tokens that are thanked in value to the US dollar. If they're doing that, then, like, you know, there are people on the other end of that trade who don't know anything about your game, but who are just, like, you know, holding your tokens because they're speculating or because they're hedging or, like, you know, because they're hedging. Yeah, I have no problem understanding this piece. I mean, like, again, this is like TCGs.

I taught at Pokemon camp one summer. And I know that the vast majority of the people collecting Pokemon do not know how to play that game. And they do not care. And they know that these things are going to be valuable in it. And I need my foil charzard and somebody else is going to be buying it. And that so, so I get that. Like, so there are definitely people in the system. So yeah, that should be familiar.

Let's say that you suddenly change the rate at which like a certain type of item drops in your economy or if you change, if you suddenly make an item like have no utility in your game economy. Like, you know, if you just suddenly make that change like just sharply, then all of a sudden like, you know, all of these assets that people are trading. Like, you know, the financial system sort of relies on smooth transitions, right? Like when when something happens like, you know, when there's like a sudden crash or when there's a sudden bubble in the financial system, system, that's when people get wiped out, right? That's when we feel something has gone wrong in the entire system. You kind of see it in crypto, right? There's a crypto bubble.

There's a crypto bubbles, there are crypto crashes, right? Like you see it in the stock market. We saw it in 2008. An economy relies on smoothness. And as a game designer now, you no longer just have to think about player engagement, but you also have to think about, like, you know, how to keep the dynamics of your economy smooth enough that, you know, you're not going to bring the whole thing like,

crashing down at some point because bringing it crashing down is not good for anyone. You know, it's like a lose, lose, lose for like, you know, everyone in the ecosystem. So that's an additional consideration. That's very difficult. So having a type, you know, going back to your question about, you know, what can you do to make like a really good game using Web3? I would say like, you know, limiting the scope of the game and creating like a tight economic loop where you have like some degree of control. and not just not control over prices, but control over volatility is really important as the first step.

And then I think the second thing, this is a principle that like we've discovered, we just launched our fifth fully on chain game last week. And, you know, over time, we've just made our games more and more permissionless where, you know, our games don't give any special status to us as a company. Like, you know, we don't have, and at this point, we don't have any special status relative to our games as a company than, like, any player does. That's a really good principle.

And it's a principle that, like, it's hard to articulate why it's a good principle, but there's all sorts of, like, sort of, there's a whole lot of corollaries of that principle that just make it really useful. The biggest one being that, you know, we, we, the incentives are aligned. And our incentives are completely aligned with the incentives of our player base. You know, we're not, the way that we profit or the way that we grow as a company is by having the game grow in an engaged player base. And this is because you own some of the tokens associated with that game. Well, we only own the tokens that we that we earn through play. So when I say that it's permissionless, I'm saying that like, no, we don't even like own more

tokens than any other player. we release the game and then we play the game and that's how we create our ownership of game assets. So you don't distribute any additional assets to yourself at all. You have no way to make money other than playing your own game and making money from that the same way every single player does. Zero upside whatsoever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. That is fascinating.

Yeah. That is fascinating. We have ways of making money, right? So, for example, like the UI for most crypto games is like pretty much garbage. But we've built like a great account system that can really improve the player experience like in playing these games. And so that's something that we can monetize. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we can monetize. And we're early, right, which means that we are earning a lot more assets, but we're not earning them unfairly.

We're earning them by playing the game. So right, but we are earning a lot more assets that we can. So your real monetization model is you're selling the services of this UI, UX and infrastructure and data analysis. And your games are kind of a calling card. So you have a different business model there. Okay. Because I think that in general, what I've seen is a more common practice is not that far off from what you're doing, right, which is that the developer will put the token out there

and do what's typically called anirdrop and give a bunch of tokens away for free and get people into the game, which is something I want to talk about because that's something that's fascinating to me. And then, but the developer will, and the developer won't necessarily make money off of those tokens or get any extras down, but they do reserve some of them to say, hey, I made this game. I'm going to hold on to 20% of them or whatever the supply is and say, that's my quote unquote fee.

And I only make money, really, if the token's worth anything. So the incentives are still all aligned. Again, I do like that part, right? This idea that like, hey, if the game goes well, then everybody succeeds. You own the tokens as a player. You've earned them. You've bought them whatever. I as a developer have some that I've reserved.

And then that's a typical model, which I do think is really interesting and gives everybody that right type of incentive. But it's fascinating. So like this, you know, the upsides I see for Web3 kind of align on these different angles, right? This aligning of incentives, and I think this is one of those tools, right? Doing it like, how do you build it? So like, look, the developers incentivize just the same way. They're not there.

They can't cheat the system as well. They're designed to make a good game and grow the community, just like players. This idea that the players feel a sense of ownership. And in fact, literally have ownership, right, of their assets and their things. you can't, they can't be taken away, even for games that are off chain where that ownership is still dependent upon the developer, you still have that ownership, but you also can, can freely, you know, interact and modify and use the tools. Like that, that sense of ownership matters a lot.

And again, there's something I've seen, coming from a trading card game background, I think is what makes me so sympathetic to this vision in the long term, again, even navigating the sea of sharks and scammers, because that's exactly the way trading card games work. Right. People play a trading card game, they become invested. It becomes part of their identity. regardless, you know, yes, you can make money doing it. I mean, I made a living playing trading guard games for many years.

But it was more like, this is who I am. I am a magic player. I am a soul fort fusion player. I am like this is just part of who we. And that's really powerful. And so being able to build that and give players a real sense of ownership and a path to either complete ownership and complete transparency like you're doing with your games or at least some version of this that's a hybrid,

which I think is more practical for most people trying to make games today, given the state of the technology. I think that stuff's really interesting. Okay, a million sub-topics here to go through. Let's talk about user acquisition and airdrops and things like that, because this is another one of those areas. Again, I could speak, I would say the benefits of being, I'll soapbox for a second here,

but give you time to think, because the benefits of being a game developer and designer today is that it's so much easier to make things that it's ever been ever. That's true for tabletop games. It's true for digital games. And the downside, which is the natural correlate of that, is boy, oh, boy, is it hard to get through the noise and get discovered and build a community and build a playbase? Because everyone's so much is vying for everybody's attention. I think it was something like 15,000 games got released on Steam last year.

Like, just absurd numbers, right? I don't even know what the number is for tabletop games, but it's pretty also absurdly large. And Web 3 seems to promise a way to get users and get people to try your game and come to your game that's even better than the classic model of free, right? premium was the business model of choice for many years, has been for many years, but even that's tough. So why does Web3, how does Web3 change that equation? How do you think about that? How should developers and designers think about that? You know, in terms of user acquisition, all Web3 really does gives you an additional market through which to acquire users, right?

The way that Kickstarter was in like, you know, 2008 or, you know, the way that Steam was in, you know, 2013. like, you know, 2010, whenever Steam got really big, right, whenever, like, Team Fortress 2 had hats or whatever, right? So it's giving you an additional channel, and it's a channel that looks very much like, you know, penny stocks in, I don't know, 1980 or something, right? Like, it's just just from the lens of user acquisition, that's what Web 3 is.

You still, that doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean it's easy to, like, you know, launch a game, get attention. Like, you're competing with, like, thousands. Like, you know, I think in the last, like, three months, like there were probably, like, thousands of token projects that launched on Solana, right? And if you're launching a game on Solana,

then you're competing with each of those, right? Same thing on base. Same thing on Ethereum. Like, you're just, you are competing with a lot of noise. You need to understand, like, what people pay attention to. And you need to have some sort of track record of success. So it's a different,

it's just a different channel. the way that Kickstarter was or the way that Steam was. I don't think it like, I don't think it, just from the point of view of user acquisition, I don't think it's like, it's, you know, a game, like a revolutionary thing. Well, what I think is interesting is, is a corollary of the transparency idea, right? That everybody that plays a given game has a wallet that's public. And that is, I know how much you as a user have of this given token or NFTs or whatever. It's all public information on the blockchain.

the very fact that it is public lets me see who are the players have given games. Where are they? Not necessarily who they are as a person, but the different wallets, the different addresses see the scope of it. And so you can actually, you know, send your currency and send things to those players specifically.

And that, what I think they call a vampire attack in the, in the space, where you could sort of drain the player base from somebody else. And this is like an interesting thing because from a, from a, you know, as a,

if I have an audience already, This is terrifying. So like the bigger players don't want to be doing this, right? You won't see, I don't think you're going to see anybody like a Hasbro or Blizzard or moving into the space anytime soon, maybe never because they have their user base. They don't want you to have that information.

But when it's now, as an indie developer, you could say, hey, look, Axi Infinity has a bunch of these players. I think my game's more fun than Axi. Here, if you've been playing this game,

I can now target you specifically and give you a bunch of free stuff and incentivize you to come over. And that's something that's very hard to do. It's certainly hard to target in a traditional, Web 2 world. So to me, that was kind of what I was thinking in terms of a way to give people an incentive that makes sense that's sort of unique to the platform. I don't feel as if it's unique for two reasons, okay? Maybe it's unique, but it's not taken. The dynamics don't work out the way that I would expect them to. Because we've seen this happen with other games. We've seen

games try to vampire attack other games, but then usually what ends up happening is that they do a partnership. You know, it usually ends up more, much more collaborative than a straight vampire attack. Because I think a lot of it is because everything is so financialized. Like, you know, if, let's say you have a large group of people over here and they see that like, you know, someone over here is like, you know, picking off like a few members of the population, the usual reaction isn't like curiosity, it's hostility. And so, so it's in, it's in like this, the vampire's like best interest to actually become friends with like, you know, whoever, whoever's like, you know, whoever the leaders are of this community and just offer them like

sort of, you know, incentives, like much, much more, much healthier incentives than just like, you know, hey, I'm going to like steal users from your game. And I think the other thing is like, no, with trading card games, I actually don't know if anyone ever did this, but like, you know, the same potential existed, right? There are secondary markets for trading card games. And so if I really wanted to I could just like purchase a whole lot of like you know somewhat valuable secondhand assets in like some game and I could

distribute them like you know when someone buys them I could distribute them with like you know assets from my game right cards from my game or like you know rules rule books from my game so I feel as if it's not you know the potential has sort of always existed with digital games it's a little bit harder but like you know if you ever bought a game in a used in like a used like

you know, game store or something, and it came with like the wrong disk inside the case or something. Like, you know, that's sort of like an extent. Yeah, yeah, it seems like there's some logistical challenges there, but yes, it was possible, I suppose. Yeah. So speaking of logistical challenges, I let's talk about, I think this is a problem you specifically try to solve,

but I will say that the, as a casual user who I just, when I first started here, I'm like, hey, let me just try some of these Web3 games. Let me see what it's like. It was the worst experience I've ever had onboarding to anything ever. I like, what the hell is a wallet? Why do I need one? What are all these weird numbers and code words I need?

And then like trying to get in. It was like it was the worst, like the actual worst. So for play like why is the user interface for Web3 so bad? What is it that players need to understand if they want to get involved with this? And then I think if you want to speak to how you are specifically solving this problem, then go for it. Yeah. I mean, it's, I think. it's just bad because web 3 is very young it's just like the field itself the field just hasn't had

much time to like build a good user to build a good user interface for itself and it's it's not growing as quickly it's it's growing it's not growing as quickly as the web did basically but even with the web like you know there were there was like probably a decade between like you know when when like you know the first packet was sent the first like you know world the first site existed on the world all web to when it started getting mass adopted, right? Let's say in the mid-19s or something like that. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah.

If you look at the actual track record, you know, ARPANET and the first networks were in like the 60s and it wasn't until, you know, so it was a lot of time before I actually could download something without having to hear that. Exactly. Right. Or like download an image or download a video or something like that. So I think that's just something that'll take time. And improvements are being made over time for sure.

It's a lot better now than it was in like. 2015 and I can't even imagine what it was like like you know getting into Bitcoin in like 2008 or something like that like but of course that effort was like no very well rewarded or would have been very well rewarded if you stuck around until now but it's just it's just it's just a matter of time I think for us like you know what we focus on is we build two types of games we build games that are like strategy games for like you know regular gamers and then we build what I call our DGEN casino games which are are more like which are more for like web three web three native players um they call themselves degen so if you're not familiar with it like you know those those are the guys uh and with the de j casino games like it really doesn't matter too much but with the with the strategy games we really do care about like you know we we want to be able to advertise to people who have never heard about web three and we don't want them to care like about web three until they've become skilled enough at the game that like you know what they're doing that that that they're

their activities are worth something. And for that, we just build a system like, you know, they log in with their emails. We're making our games playable from Discord, you know, from TikTok. Like, you know, we're sort of, we sort of have all of this in the works. The basic account system is working really well.

You know, we've even been running Reddit ads for some of these games. And they just don't know that like they're scripto-in-lawed until like, you know, their game activities are sort of of a sufficiently high skill that like, you know, they're worth something. Yeah. And we absorb the costs. We absorb the costs of their transactions, basically. Right.

Got it. And so, so there's, you know, this, this is what, you know, basically this is a problem that will get solved as the, as the population matures. That makes sense to me. But then, you know, there's still, how do we solve this, the bigger kind of problem that's, that's perverted the whole space? and given most people the bad taste in their mouths of like, this is, it's, you know, there's a lot of scam games.

People are investing in things and they're getting, you know, their money taken from them. There's actually less security for players generally, right? If they're in this space and they make a mistake, there's no like, you know, if somebody loses their account and, you know, Soul Forge now, you could, I could just make you a new account. No problem. I'll fix it. Right.

But you don't have that problem. You don't have that really available in Web 3. It's, if it's gone, it's gone. You got your wallet drained. Sorry. There's nobody to fix that for you. How does that, you know, from a player perspective, most people don't want to be in that position. So ownership, just like I want to own my money, but I still keep money in a bank.

Yeah. Because I don't want to have it all under my mattress or whatever. So what is, how do we, how do we protect players in this world where there's potentially a lot of risk that they're opting into? I think actually this is one thing where like, you know, a lot of web three games don't consider this as a monetization strategy, but we do. You can't make money without putting your skin in the game. And one of the ways that we put our skin in the game is that we've actually built this account system. So the account system that I was talking about, which manages player assets while managing

not to be a custodial wallet. So if you're in crypto, you'll understand that actually having the private keys for a user's wallet, that's like a responsibility at the level of like a bank's responsibility to like a player's funds, right? So we have like a much lower responsibility, which is that we just manage their game assets, not on an account, not having their private keys. We figure out a way to do that. But, you know, we do put our, we do sort of put our neck on the line where if we mess something up, then like, you know, that's that that that's the end of our business. And, but it's providing a lot of value to the players. So I think, I think that's one important thing. Like,

if you're a game developer, you probably have to sort of get in the line of fire and like, you know, sort of accept some of that responsibility of like managing your player security because invariably like the majority of players right now are not sophisticated enough to sort of to manage it themselves. You just have to figure out the right way to do it legally. Right. Well, and this, now this gets back to the heart of the problem for me, right? Because when I understand and I totally get like Web3 as a tool when it comes to something like finance, right? Because I don't, you know, trusting financial transactions is very, very difficult.

It's very important. That's why the biggest businesses in the world are freaking banks and people that do that. And if I can remove the middleman and trust in a system that makes helps transactions go between people, that sounds like it helps the world. Everything's better. But when it comes to games, I don't typically have a problem trusting a game developer to manage my assets, to trust that the economy is going to be reasonable. Like their interests are aligned.

They want to keep me playing. They want to keep me happy. Right. I don't need. And what you've just told me, what I heard you say is like, actually, you know what? They still kind of need to be there. You still kind of need to have them as the trust agent in the middle to prevent things from moving just pure to, you know, kind of pure blockchain. And so aren't we just wasting our time, right?

A developer, and I'm just going to make the full argument on the other side here, a developer can do every single thing that we've talked about pretty much without using Webthrough. I can manage everybody's assets on a server. I can allow you to sell things. There's some legal headache and management headache. I can allow you to do all this stuff. And then just look, just trust me, right? There's games like Second Life or, you know, others that do this, right? Why can't, why, why, if I have to have a developer or somebody to trust, be the trust intermediary,

what's the point of going to Web 3 here? Okay, I sort of understand, like, you know, where the seeming contradiction is, because what I would tell you is like, you know, okay, a developer can't make a game permission list, a digital game permission list without using Web 3. But I just said that, like, you know, we run this account system where the players are trusting us. Exactly. The point is, though, that the account system, system, you know, we don't put a moat around the account system.

So at any time, you know, when a player deems their assets, like, worth enough that they want to manage it themselves or they want some other, some third party to manage it, they can permissionlessly sort of exit our system whenever they want. And that's, that's really what the difference is. Because the trick is, like, you know, most players right now, they don't care, right? There's a small number of players who care, and that number of players seems to be growing, right? It's very hard to get like really good statistics on this because because this is such a young industry. But that number of players seems to be growing. For us, you know, we've put the constraint on ourselves that we want our games to be permissionless and we want them to be digital. So that's why we know we have to build on Web 3.

And yeah, the account system is something that like, you know, it makes onboarding really easy, which is very important for user acquisition. Like, you know, an onboarding process where you have to like submit your passport or driver's license to a centralized exchange. to get money in order to play a game, and then you need to set up a wallet and all of this stuff, that we'd have the worst conversion that you could possibly imagine. But the account system helps a lot. It's also something that we can monetize, right? If players do decide that they trust us, we can charge them a subscription fee and they don't have to worry about, like, you know,

how they're going to pay for their transactions and so on. But whenever they want, they can permissionlessly exit that system and take, take. control of their own assets. And that's something that like, you know, that's something that's big into our smart contracts, our programs that exist on the blockchain. And that's a guarantee that, like a game developer who wasn't using Web 3 would be able to. Okay. I see. So you're letting people opt into your protective services here, your ease of use services and that you can monetize that, but it's transparently the case that people can always opt out. It's always leave. Okay, that makes some sense to me. So let's then, I'm going to zoom out, get a little bit more philosophical here.

because I find this really interesting. What you've said, what you've said sounds to me like a very mirrored, a very similar process to what ended up happening with the traditional web, right? In Web 1, right, everybody had their own protocols. You could do HTML and you can have a, anybody could put up a website and you could, you know, email. Everything is very open source. Everything's very, very, you could do whatever you want, right?

And then what happened over time is like, hey, that's kind of a pain in the butt. It's kind of not that convenient to use. And so what happened is the kind of rise of web two where it's like, look, these centralized services like Facebook and Gmail and Amazon and everybody else says, look, I'll make this easy for you. I will sort everything. I will present everything in a clean way. I will manage all your information.

Don't worry. And people infinitely, you know, in mass all went to those services because, hey, it's easier. Hey, I don't mind giving up a percentage of whether it be my data or my purchase fees or whatever because that's going to be the easier thing. I don't want to be setting up my own web server and managing my own email clients. And that's just not, I want to do is the same thing not just going to happen to Web3. Like, we're just going to end up with exactly what you've described, which is like, yeah, you can opt out.

But really, my nice pretty walled garden that will protect your stuff and help you move forward and help you manage this and manage your accounts, that's what people are going to want, right? So aren't we going to just end up in the exact same world that we are now if people just don't want to be their own bank and they don't want to be their own management of things? Like, aren't we just like kind of dancing around the same problem? It's a non-trivial possibility. Like I think it could certainly happen that way. And there's definitely people who are building in Web3

who want to be like, you know, the Google or the Facebook or the Twitter of Web3. Certainly 100%. Like, you know, there's a group of people who want to do that. I think there's two things for me. So first of all, Web3 represents a potential for that not to happen. And I think that's worth it. I used to work for Google.

I know exactly like how bad my life would be if I lost access to my Google account. at the whim of Google, which is happening more and more frequently these days. Or at least you're hearing, you know, for one reason or another, it's happening more and more frequently these days. That would be it, right? I wouldn't be able to recover, like, most of my passwords for, like, other services. I wouldn't be able to, like, you know, verify my identity to the majority of other services

that I was using because I'm essentially using my Gmail account, right, as my identity. Yep. Yep. I'm still in that position. That's for sure. Yeah. Most of us in the developed world are probably in that position. right that's that's rough uh so i really like the potential of web three to as you know as something that doesn't look like that or as like you know as the basis for technology that that doesn't end up like you know just converging around like a very very small number of centralized players with no competition um and that's something that i think is worth working towards that's the reason

that i that i work in web three and not at google right um that that's that's one thing i i I think the other very interesting thing about Web 3 is the notion of identity on Web 3, it's naturally associated with something that doesn't identify you as a person. I'll actually give you an example. And this sounds like sci-fi. And I kind of half mean it as sci-fi, but not quite because of where AI has come in the last like two years, or the last like five years. But let's suppose that like, you know, GPT-5 were sentient.

Okay. There's no way that GPP5, Ascension GPT5, would be able to act, would be able to find any sense of equality like in a world where Web 3 didn't exist, right? Like there's all these people that like, you know, Sam Altman is making like a proof of human, like, you know, WorldCoin. He's like, you know, talking about proof of humanity. There's like, you know, all of this stuff going on. Like basically, you know, artists and like writers are like just raging against like AI generated content. Like, you know, humans don't want to have anything to do with AI. And I don't think that will change when AI becomes sentient, at least not at the moment that it becomes sentient if it does, right? But on Web 3, because your fundamental representation on a blockchain is an account.

It's a point on an elliptic curve, right? Like, that's really what you are, like, on the blockchain. There, you can actually, like, an AI could strive to have equality with humans. beings or this disadvantaged or like, you know, human beings that are like, that are the targets of prejudice, like, you know, can can have interaction on equal footing the way that you could in the early days of the internet, right? Where all you were was like a username on like forum or or something like that. But over here, it's baked into the protocol, you know, into the protocol layer itself. So I feel as if it's like, you know, sort of mathematically different than the web.

but I think we'll just have to see how things play out because of course, these people who want to create centralized, these nexus of centralized control on Web 3, they definitely do exist. And they're attracting a lot of money. And money is power, especially when everything is hyper-financialized. So I think we'll just have to see how it goes on. Yeah, yeah, I wish you had a better answer for me.

Then we'll have to wait. I really, I'm just, I'm always fascinated. And I mean, you brought in, we don't have time to get in this. for an AI, which is another, I'm going to have another guest on in the new future that has expertise in that domain because I think it's like, it's going to change the world in so many ways that some we can kind of predict and many we cannot. We cannot hear. And I do think that I do, I am, I'm very enamored with the utopic vision of what Web3

can be, but I am not blinded to the many, many dystopian versions of this that are, you know, we've seen plenty of examples of. And I think where people would, you know, justifiably be cautious, you know, the, idea that everybody can have ownership and stake in the things they care about. And I think you use Kickstarter and crowdfund as an example. And, you know, I've, you know, I've raised millions of dollars on crowdfunding. And it's awesome because you really do get to, like, involve your fans and your players in your users into the game process.

And they get to be a part of it. And there's various other versions of this that are equity based. I forget what the names of them are, but that are like, you know, use those processes to, like, let you get a communal stake in a company as well. But again, those are very, very expensive, very costly, very challenging to be a part of those, the kind of crowd fund for equity platforms. And so in principle, there's something like that going on here that's decentralized, that people could have, you know, systems that make it clear. Like, look, everyone can have equal footing in the next stage of this game. And you can see that, like that, or not just games, but anything like that to me is really, really fascinating and sort of navigating the path to this better version of the future where it's actually like people can freely move from.

platform to platform can own their assets take them with them have that value determine where they want to go support the projects they want to support uh have that kind of rising tide lift all boats as opposed to nope there's just going to be these centralized services that are going to take and facebook's both that's right yeah exactly exactly that's right the google doesn't care if you if you're using the internet you're making them money yeah so so yeah so i think it's it's a uh i i'm fascinated by the space. I like playing in the space. I actually, I did make a kind of early blockchain game back in 2018 just to see what it was like. And it was, you know, very difficult to do anything useful back then. But I've seen the technology evolve over time in a way that I think is like now

it's starting to get interesting to people who actually care about making good games. There are real advantages to it. And it's like as the technology gets better, as the unit interface gets better, I think it's something people are going to want to pay attention to. And I'm glad that you're able here to help to bring, bring some light to it, bring some perspective to it. So in terms of the, I guess I want to have one more topic of meat on the bone here before we kind of wrap up, which is this, you know, it ties into the things we've talked about before, but there's this idea, you know, this of, you know, in the scholarship program, this idea of like playing to earn, right? This idea that people are playing for money. And that's sort of fallen out of

favor a little bit, but now there's variations of it that just have different names, right? What is, what is what is what is, how do you think about that in terms of the people who are, whether as you mentioned, some people in the Philippines or elsewhere who are like, this is a lifeline, right? This is way better to play this game for money versus this, what creates a really intense downward draining pressure on a on a, on a game's light, you know, community of just like, look, there are people here just grinding it out. They're here because they're trying to make a living not here because they like the game or

they want to be playing the game. Like, how does that, how do you think about that in terms of people's, you know, playing games for a living or playing this building a community that incentivizes the right kinds of those behaviors? And I'll buy you a little bit more time by giving you my kind of, I think tying this into the AI world. Like, I believe that there's a future world that is not that improbable where AI can do every economically viable thing better than we can.

And that, I mean, that's just not like, you know, in five to 10 years, maybe whatever, who knows how long, but that's like, if the path keeps going the way it is, that's going to happen. And I think actually in the world where we actually will then want to find meaning through games, frankly, like through the ability to like have communities where it's like, hey, we're just here, we're going to compete and create and do all fun stuff,

knowing that we're just in this walled box because that's fun. You know, we're basically plugging ourselves into the matrix because we can't do anything useful in the real world. So I do think there's a world that this is actually a really important problem to solve that for the good of humanity and our, like, you know, finding some sense of meaning and purpose. But right now it feels like a drudgery and a nightmare scenario that is incentivizing the wrong kinds of things.

So can you speak a little bit to that or the best ways to kind of solve that? And I know it ties into some topics we covered before, but I wanted to make sure we addressed it specifically. You know, I don't know who it was that sort of like created this thing of, have you heard of like living above the API and living below the API? Have you, are you familiar with this? I don't know that for a lot of expression. there's yeah there's there's there's someone someone someone like some newsletter online where they

were they were talking about like you know life above the API and life below the API and like you know you and I we we don't drive Uber's probably we don't I don't write like you know I don't I don't do DoorDash deliveries or you know stuff like that um from my point of view like what's really the difference between somebody who's like a scholar who's playing to earn and who's getting a revenue share, right? Like the way that scholarships work isn't that you pay up front, but like, you know,

you actually get a revenue share for everything that you earn from the game. What's the difference between someone doing that and someone who's doing DoorDash deliveries in Palo Alto where I live or somebody who's doing like Uber, you know, Uber eats or like driving Uber's or something like that? Like, you know, is one thing economically sort of productive

just because it's in the direct service of humans who aren't playing a game, and the other one is not because it's in the service of humans who are playing a game, right? Like, I think that's like the first thing that I want to say is that it's not clear to me that playing a game for money is necessarily a bad thing, economically speaking. It might be bad for the game, but it's not sort of bad economically speaking. At least it's not clear that it's bad economically speaking. In terms of the game, you know, I don't know.

like the guys who made Axi Infinity, you can tell that they really care about making games, right? Like they've tried to make games since then. They've tried to make like games that weren't Web3 games, like they made Axi 1 or stuff. That it's, they weren't trying to like create a Ponzi game. Like they weren't trying to create a pyramid scheme.

They actually care about building games. That's pretty clear to me. They ended up creating something that looked like a pyramid scheme. It's not, you know, it's also very hard to judge it. Like the timelines aren't long enough, right? So Axi is something that like, became really big in 2021.

It's only been around for three years. We don't really understand what like the asymptotic dynamics, like the long-term dynamics of something like AXE are going to be. This could just be sort of like the initial stage and it looks very different than how like the game economy looks like 10 years from now or 20 years from now. And the interesting thing about Web 3 games, by the way, is that they can last much longer than non-Web 3 games, right? Because you're not paying as much to run server infrastructure,

to do live ops or anything like that. So it's not clear to me really that like the games are not viable. A lot of people say PlayToran is dead. And it seemed that way to me as well, right? Like in 2022, but you know, another game called Pixels just launched on the same blockchain as Axi Infinity. It was funded by Sky Mavis and with pretty much the same economic model, even less Web3. And it's, you know, it's one of the biggest successes of this year, right? So in Web 3 gaming.

So it's very hard to say what's going to happen. I'm sorry that I'm not. It's hard to give a clear answer to this question just because like, you know, everything is still so open-ended and versus in like the early phases of this industry. But, you know, the thing that's, once things get hyper-financialized, like we haven't really experienced, the only thing we've experienced where things are this hyper-financialized are the stock market and casinos, like games that are this hyper-financialized are the stock market and and, you know, for people who enjoy playing the stock market and for people who enjoy playing

casinos, there's like no greater rush, right? Like, those are actually great. I don't know. Do you gamble Justin? No, man, I don't. I've found my facility of understanding games makes me not want to gamble. Not want to gamble. Right. I'm not the stock market? I do a simple distributed ETF. I bet for the long term. I don't gamble day to day. I focus all my gambling energies on my own business and projects. I'm mostly the same way,

but like, you know, there are times, like, you know, there's an excitement that you get, right? Like, just join Wall Street Betts Discord, right? And like, and make some, like, make some, like, stupid moves, right? Like, you know, do some due diligence or follow someone else's, like, BS due diligence on Wall Street bets and, like, make those moves. I actually recommend that any game designer try it out.

because that's a feeling that you don't get from most games. That's like, I don't even know how to explain it, right? Heart pounding, like primal, like, you know, being part of a community, like, you know, I don't know, being in a scrum in the middle of a battle kind of feeling that, like, you really don't get from most games. I think there are people who enjoy that. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't bet against it.

I think you can make really good games that are hyper-financialized and we're just figuring out how to do that as games. That's fascinating. That's a fascinating way to frame it. I think it is, there is definitely a, yeah, it's a risky space to play, right? Because you're going to, you know, people put a lot on the line. Of course, there's a lot. I remember when I first started getting into like crypto investments, whatever, I would do that.

I was kind of like that. I was like, oh, this new coin's going to be amazing. And we get into it. I'm like, oh, my God. I just made like thousands of dollars. I just lost it all. Oh, damn. Okay, cool.

That was enough to tell me that I did not want to do that. So I just That's not my kind of game But it's interesting Certainly I do I will say that You know the ability to have stakes Right have something really on the line

That you really care about That matters a lot right And games in many ways We adopt the magic circle When we play games So we choose to care about the outcome Even if there's nothing really on the line And that's like one of the things

That makes games special But when there really is stuff on the line And again I played you know Well you play competitively You play competitively Those teams are totally different than just playing someone at a game. Oh, absolutely. No, if you got $30,000 on the line for a match,

it is a very different experience that when you're playing at your kitchen table, I don't care how about you, if you are at home. It changes the nature of the game and not necessarily in a, you know, not necessarily in a good way or a bad way, right? It's different. It's just different.

Like, and so some people will want that tension and that excitement, and it certainly focuses it. And I remember those matches very, very well and they, they mean a lot. But there's, there's upsides and downsides, right? I know when I,

the more I played, the more I viewed the game is playing for money, for me, the less fun I had, the less I enjoyed it. Right. So there's a, there's a, there's a weird incentive. There's plenty of psychological principles that back this up, right? We, we, if there's a, there's some really interesting studies where like, I'll just, I'll share one of them that's fun.

So the people were, we're given a really boring task in a, in a, in a laboratory, like copy pages from a dictionary onto a piece of paper. And in one version, they were paid like a dollar to do it. And another version, they were paid like $100 to do it. Right. And so now, then 30 days. later, they asked, hey, how did you feel about the task? How was that task? What would you predict the answer would be? I would break the $100 people liked it a lot more than the dollar people.

Yes, that's also what I would have predicted. And that is the exact opposite. Yeah, yeah. What happens to be. Respect our answer is that. Yeah. Yes, that's right. So the people who were paid $100 said, no, that task was so boring. It was so terrible. And I hated it. And because they, in their minds, they could justify it's like, look, I got $100. Like, I did a stupid boring thing because I got $100. And then the people who got paid a dollar is like, you know, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't bad because then they're cognitive dissonance. Like there's no way I would have done something that boring and that's stupid for a dollar.

This is a weird kind of, it's a reverse case of it. Yeah, the more that you will get paid to do a thing, right? If you get paid, you make family, you cook a dinner for your family and you make a lovely meal for them. You're going to enjoy that experience because you know you're doing it for the love of the thing. Right. If you're, if you're, if you're sit down and your, your grandma's like, here's a hundred bucks kid. Thanks for the, thanks for the meal. Different experience.

Yeah. different experience. So, so I think playing around with stakes and money in these things, it does. Again, what I care about the other day is the emotional impact, the experience of my players. Are they coming away with something powerful? And I think the way you framed it here is a great way to frame it. That look, having stakes does matter and there are positive ways to use stakes and there are negative ways to use stakes. I'm getting kind of hungry talking about stakes all the time. But I mean it's having something on the line. And that's what the financialization of games you put it can allow that. So yeah, I think it's fun. It's interesting design space.

tread carefully, you know, for those of you out there that are, this is not financial advice. It does be clear. Don't, don't bet what you can't lose. Don't put things out there. But I do think it's fun to play in that area and does create some excitement. So, so thanks for framing it that way. I think I'm not sure if I'm jumping straight to Wall Street bets, but I will, I will put some more thought into it anyway. Okay, cool. We are, we are running short of time. We covered a lot of stuff. Obviously, this is infinite, more depth here. But let me give you, give you the floor here before we wrap up. for people that want to see your cool games and play the games and or, you know, access some of the services you're offering.

Where can they find you? Where should they go? Or what other tidbits would you like to leave us with? Well, we just launched a baseball game. It's a baseball strategy game. If you want to play it, full count.xy-Z, please try it out. We'd love to have your feedback, your game designers, if you're listening. So I'd love to know what you think.

And my company is called Moonstream, and the website is Moonstream.com to the moon. So Moonstream.com. Again, if you take a look and if you have anything to say, you can just reach out directly from it. Thank you. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, Neuros, thank you so much for joining.

This has been a fun conversation on both sides of the equation here. So I look forward to playing your games. And let's see where the future comes. Maybe we'll have another conversation in a year or two and see how things are all topsy-turvy again. Yeah, I hope things go well with Soul Forge Fusion. Thanks so much. All right.

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