In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Foonie Magus CEO Frank Cheng about the inspirations behind deck-building dungeon battle RTS Apeiron, which is currently available via Epic Games Store.

The game is expected to go live via mobile app stores before the end of 2024, while its meta-level god gameplay is due to be added in 2025.

BlockchainGamer: Can you tell us a bit about your career so far?

Frank Chen: I founded this company eight years ago. Before that I was a management consultant and a private equity investor, but I’ve loved games throughout my life and it’s been a childhood dream to create my own game. So after many, many years I decided to pursue my dream. It’s been quite a bumpy journey, I’ve found out that game development is actually a lot tougher than playing the game. 

Apeiron was the dream game I wanted to create. After gathering a lot of experience and prototyping, it finally went to production and became a blockchain game three years ago. Nowadays it’s actually more than a blockchain game, it’s a full IP franchise that involves merchandise, animations, and a plushie collection. It’s been a wild journey.

Witnessing the potential that Axie Infinity and CryptoKitties had changed what I believed to be a perfect mobile game into a fully fledged blockchain game. The first six years flew by, but I have learned even more in the three short years I’ve been into blockchain. 

Foonie Magus is the developer behind the game. Does the name have a meaning, or is it just a random name?

The core development team in Hong Kong is called Aither Entertainment, but Foonie Magus is our publishing entity in Singapore. The name comes from Foonie, which is my son’s nickname, and Magus is one of my favorite characters from Square Enix’s Chrono Trigger, one of the best RPGs in the world.

How would you explain Apeiron as a concept? It has hybrid game synergies and a lot going on, so how did that vision come about?

The genre I would call it nowadays would be a hybrid RTS because the core gameplay is a combination of two unique real-time strategy games. One is a god game simulation, while the other is like a card-based battle. So, I wanted to try something new, to find a gameplay element that I sorely miss, and that’s the card game simulation.

Many developers and of course, my co-founders, are the ones with actual development experience who come up with many other parts of the games and elements. Battle being one of those because for mobile, monetization, PvP, marketability are definitely needed. The card-based elements also came quite late. After witnessing Axie Infinity. 

If we can utilize NFTs and onchain elements, card collection is very powerful and shares a lot of synergy with what game business and collectible models are like. 

Then you also have this god game element. How does that come into play?

The whole theme of Apeiron is that you play God, in a universe of gods and dudes. Dudes are these yellow, chubby creatures. I wanted to recreate something like Black & White and Spore. 

It’s a story in the game, you’re a god, you have your own planets. Your planets are populated by the dudes, and it’s your job to take care of them. How you manage your planets, how you answer their prayers will translate to different types of buildings that they build for you and even good and evil elements such as heaven or hell will be implemented. All these are translated into stats that you have in battle. 

Currently you’ve got a PC version which is the dungeon battle gameplay. The god element still isn’t playable. Is that correct?

Yep. Right now, Apeiron consists of three main gameplay elements. There’s the god game simulation, which is the planet simulation. The other two are the roguelike dungeon and the PvP arena, which make the battle side of the equation. 

In the current PC version, you can play the dungeon, PvP arena, and the story mode, but the god game sim will come after the mobile release. We created the battle version first because the whole token economy revolves around the PVP arena and daily leaderboards. 

Do you think Apeiron’s different game elements will appeal to different sorts of behaviour?

Ultimately, an app around different types of gameplay elements generate different types of resources that’s tradable. So in a guild of players, if you want to focus on the simulation and just build a planet, you can get that and trade that with other players who dedicate themselves to the PvP arena but don’t want to spend too much time in the dungeon or in the card game. I think that’s how we get different groups of players.

The card game simulation is a unique proposition of gameplay and graphics, which will attract a lot of users. Ultimately, in terms of longevity and sustainability, what attracts users in the first place versus what really sustains the economy and keeps the marketability going will be rather different. 

It was a tough decision, but my team told me we had to do the battle gameplay first instead of the card game. And I believe they are right, otherwise it would just be a simulation game that keeps grinding NFTs and tokens without much need to really compete and burn stuff.

For building an audience, the battle side is the more immediately appealing element for players. How have you found having that demo live? 

Indeed. It first came out as a dungeon mode with basic run features and then we incorporated multiple bosses, a roguelike structure to it. Then earlier this year we launched the PvP arena, which is when it really started picking up, especially coupled with our migration to Ronin. 

That attracted a lot of competitive players from Axie Infinity, who have contributed a lot in terms of balancing blockchain features and reward structures. Now that we have combined the dungeon, the PvP, and the story elements, we’re just a stone’s throw away from launching a much more complete version of the mobile game. That’s coming in a few months. 

We will also have features like the battle pass and the shop, which will help players journey their way into the Apeiron game.

Originally you were running on Polygon. You mentioned Axie Infinity as something that was inspirational for the project, so was it an obvious decision to move to Ronin? 

Indeed migrating to another chain, even if it’s EVM to EVM, often takes several months of efforts and a new auditing. But the way we view chains is sort of like a publisher on a console. 

We were looking for a more game-focused chain. Initially, Polygon was a game-focused chain as well, but I think they gradually grew in size and started diverting resources, so they couldn’t spend too much time with individual projects. 

Naturally, it came down to Ronin and Immutable, both really good gaming chains. We chose Ronin for many reasons. One is that we play a lot of Axie Infinity ourselves, so we’re familiar with the Ronin wallet. They have a good mobile wallet, especially for gamers and with their experience, their crowd, and the way our game is structured, it’s easy to find a similar audience there even in bad times. 

The decision was finalised after meeting Ronin’s management team. They’re very picky and I like that. A lot of investors typically just look at valuations and then decide without really looking into the game, the viability, the marketability. But they did their due diligence. They looked into every aspect of the game and its potential before making that decision. 

At the moment it seems Ronin is the one chain where you can launch a game and get around a hundred thousand daily wallets. It’s not like you get that for free, but the choice of chain seems to matter.

Indeed. Well, the Ronin crowd is large and noisy. But at the same time, they are also veterans in the space, they know what’s up, they’ve survived the waves. 

But to be honest, in web3, there’s a lot of grinders, even multi-accounts. I don’t think that’s just Ronin. Everywhere there’s a lot of bloated numbers. But as you can see in terms of retention and gameplay numbers, Ronin has a strong and sizeable crowd compared to most. 

Your demo is live on Epic Game Store, and you’re looking to get the mobile game out before the end of the year. Do you see that as a big lever for growth? 

Getting on Google Play and Apple App Store is the most important thing a browser game can do in order to reach the mainstream audience. Getting on all the platforms first, at least abiding by the rules of making sure that we can be published and be accessible is extremely important. Once we have that, it comes down to a lot of marketing.

Having experienced two years of up and down in the blockchain and gaming industry, I think there’s two things we can do. We can conserve all our capital for a bull market. But one of the main problems of crypto is that for the past two years at least, there’s really not that many new retail gamers or users. Trying to fight for the attention or the revenue from this group, at least from Apeiron’s perspective, is not really worth it. There will always be more casual and hyper casual games coming out with airdrops. 

Apeiron, being a micro game with much longer development and iterative cycles, should not be competing for the next hype and airdrop. We should focus on mainstream gamers and a mobile launch is definitely one of the biggest opportunities we will focus on. 

After that, we have our god game launch, but that’s more on the Steam side of things. 

So far there hasn’t really been much interest from general game publishers in publishing web3 games. What’s your view on that?

Yes, there’s yet to be a really successful game out there, even with big publishers, but I think it’s only a matter of time before they get more involved. But at the same time, publishing blockchain games is rather controversial. They would like to test it in small bytes and digestible versions. 

Well, I don’t see web3 as a very strong marketability in terms of mainstream audience. It adds a different layer of gameplay and revenue source. But going with the same gameplay mechanics in a different wrapper by saying there’s blockchain elements, should not, and will not, be enough to gain a lot of users. 

We’ve put a lot of effort into improving and innovating new types of gameplay, artwork, the story, and features to attract users in traditional gaming. The blockchain element is there. It’s not needed for players to play, but if they want to, they will discover better ways to pay for in-game currencies, and other ways to engage with the game. 

You mentioned the rules of the app stores. Apart from with Steam, on the PC side you can do whatever you want, within certain constraints, I guess…?

Not really. In terms of these large distribution platforms, the one rule is that the game that’s downloaded cannot drop NFTs or tokens directly. 

The actual minting and claiming token rewards must be off Google Store or Steam or a web store. But these policies change all the time and hopefully we can steer clear of everything and remain there.

What do you think about the Apeiron IP and the opportunities it provides?

From an Asian perspective, developing an IP typically revolves around ACG – animation, cartoons, comics and games. 

Hong Kong developers are very much like Japanese developers, they really like animation, so that’s something we’ll work on. In terms of the IP franchise, I think it works well with blockchain, because having a recognizable brand and digital ownership fit well together. 

Alos, we’re not tied to just a single game. We can develop other mobile games, which is actually one of our plans down the line. We’ll do a mini game with shorter iteration cycles when there is a good hype running. 

In terms of acquiring users, the main thing we want to do is animation. That’s where you can reach more audiences and bring them into multiple parts of the game. 

Find out more about Apeiron via its website or get playing the PC version on Epic Games Store.

In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Tarrence Von As, the CEO of fully onchain game tech company Cartridge.

On the heels of announcing a $7.5 million series A funding round at the beginning of August 2024, Cartridge is leveraging Starknet to build its Dojo game engine and other tech in order to help developers deploy their games fully onchain and accelerate the industry.

It’s also completing a two-month residency for 15 dev studios using its Dojo tools in New York that will demonstrate the fruits of their labor on 25th September.

BlockchainGamer: Can you give us a bit of history about how you’ve ended up the CEO of a fully onchain game tech company?

Tarrence von As: To take you back to the beginning, I got into software development and game development at a very young age when I was playing around with computers. I continued pursuing that throughout my career. I studied computer science engineering at the University of Michigan and got introduced to Bitcoin in 2013. 

I’ve been involved in the industry in various capacities ever since. I purchased my first Bitcoin in 2013, and built some Bitcoin wallet stuff very early on. I got involved in the Ethereum ecosystem in 2015 and built a bunch of smart contract stuff.

In parallel to that I had a more traditional software engineering career and did some game development at university. I then joined software-as-a-service company Box out of college and then Magic Leap and worked there on mixed reality, pushing these types of interactive experiences. I did deep learning research on 3D world reconstruction from egocentric cameras. 

About three years ago, those worlds all collided when a couple friends and I worked on releasing the Dope Wars ecosystem, which was an NFT. It was released very shortly after the Loot NFT, actually the next day. The focus was more on street culture, and it was heavily inspired by this classic game called Drug Wars, which was an early MS-DOS game and has existed on different platforms since then. 

A lot of people have a shared experience of playing it on TI-83 calculator, and the game itself is very well suited for the blockchain. It’s basically an arbitrage game. You go between different locations. You buy low, sell high – like a gamified version of a lot of the different things we see onchain already. So we set out to build a fully onchain version of this game, simple enough to be on the blockchain.

It fits well into the existing audience of types of applications that people are interested in playing on the blockchain, but complex enough that it didn’t fit neatly on an L1 like Ethereum at the time. So someone came to the ecosystem and shared Starknet and this interesting technology with zero-knowledge proofs, and their ability to scale the amount of computation possible onchain that would make it practically possible for us to do a game fully onchain.

That was our entry point into Cartridge, this realization that there were technologies coming down the pipeline that fundamentally changed this dynamic and increased the amount of computation and expanded the design space of what was possible onchain. 

But there was a lot to do to be able to put it in the hands of developers and players, so we founded Cartridge. 

It’s always interesting when game developers come across a problem and make the switch from building a game to making an engine or other tech. The business models are not the same. Did that change seem obvious to you? 

We started out focusing very much on content and the technologies necessary to enable them with the Dope Wars game, and we have continuously used that game to dog food a lot of our technology. 

We set out building this game like two and a half, three years ago now and have a new version of it using all the latest Dojo tooling and Cartridge tooling. And it’s a significantly better user experience. But at this point, from an organizational perspective, we have so many teams building on top of the toolchain and the technology that we built initially to enable ecosystems like Dope Wars and Realms. 

It makes more sense for us right now to service the needs of all of those teams building. That’s why our focus has shifted.

As you mentioned, you’re building on StarkWare. How did that decision come about? 

Most other games in the blockchain space are blockchain light, they only have assets onchain and all the complex stuff happens offchain. For them, it doesn’t really matter which blockchain they’re using, just primarily EVM blockchains. 

Our decision to build on top of StarkWare was informed by different requirements. Building fully onchain games and bringing this level of computation onchain requires technology that only StarkWare provided at the time. It was the only horse in town.

Since then it’s become more consensus that their approach to zero-knowledge, Starks with hashing-based approaches, is ultimately the best approach to enable this exponential increase of computation onchain. 

In terms of games, which are the most complex types of applications, you want specifically tailored languages around the properties of zero-knowledge Starks, where for example, they can be much more expensive to prove computations than traditional computation to enable these things to live fully onchain. 

They’ve demonstrated time and time again that they can, as necessary, push the frontier of what’s possible with this new technology and then ship it into production. Recently they’ve shown this with CircleStarks, the most efficient prover that exists right now and is going to be a huge unlock for the type of experiences we can bring onchain.

So, from a technology perspective, we decided that the technology StarkWare is building with StarkNet, with Cairo, and zero-knowledge proofs is the right thing to try. 

Why do these games have to be fully onchain? 

A lot of it is about the removal of platform risk. I think there’s a few different value propositions and hypotheses, and multiple of them can be true. 

From a developer experience, what we’ve seen is that the blockchain, as a shared infrastructure provider, can significantly reduce the amount of resources necessary to bring a game to market. 

For example, in traditional game development, you have to manage your own back-end services, you have to figure out payment rails, and a bunch of other operational things that distract from the content creation. We’ve seen a similar analog in DeFi.

If you want to bring a traditional financial application to market you have a ton of compliance and banking and all kinds of other things that you have to focus on that detract from the core product that you’re trying to build. In DeFi, it’s different. You can just write a smart contract overnight. You can inherit the trust of the blockchain, the infrastructure it runs on, the payment rails it runs on, and you can take something from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in a very short duration of time. It’s unheard of in the traditional financial space. 

And I think the same is true as far as a some of the affordances that the blockchain brings to game developers, the ability to focus on interesting core game loops and content experiences, and to deploy them as smart contracts, and let them scale up very quickly and be able to atomically capture the value that you’re creating through the native payment rails in the blockchain, without all these additional resources. From a developer experience perspective, I think it provides a ton of leverage to game developers. 

Another thing is this idea of removing platformers that we traditionally have in centralized published games. The players, but also developers, have a very different type of relationship with the entity creating the content. From a developer perspective, you can’t really build an organization on top of an existing game because there’s just too much platform risk. It’s almost impossible to raise money for a mod on top of a game. It’s better to take a mod and spawn an entirely new franchise or IP around it than to try and build it sustainably on top of an existing franchise. 

Because the mandate of centrally published titles is to capture that value. Most recently we saw this with hardcore mode in World of Warcraft. As soon as someone creates something on top of it that creates value, they need to internalize that value capture. They can’t let it leak outside of their ecosystem. 

And blockchains let you make a very credible commitment that you won’t do this. It’s very transparent and legible to all the participants, especially the developers, of what is the process to change some fundamental building block. Or maybe it can’t change, maybe it’s immutable. Or if the original person who created the game decides that they don’t want to continue publishing it, and someone who built something on top of it actually has created a successful new experience on top of it, they can choose to operate the underlying infrastructure for this gaming ecosystem. 

Removing platform risk also massively alters the relationship that players have with the digital worlds they interact with. Today, people spend a ton of time and resources in these worlds, but they basically don’t have any say in how they’re operated and how they evolve over time.

From what we’ve seen, people are willing to spend significantly more time and resources in a game where they have concrete guarantees around their relationship with the core content and how it might evolve and how their participation in it affects the whole and might change over time.

At the moment, fully onchain games are sort of like a niche within a niche though. One of the criticisms is that it works really well for a certain genre of games, those with lots of resources, crafting and resource trading, which tends to be grindy RPGs. Do you think those are valid criticisms? 

Yeah, we’re very early on in the technology development. Cartridge is one of the few teams pushing on enabling more of these types of genres to come onchain. I would say already today, there’s some priors that people have from what was possible on Ethereum, especially with zero-konwledge proofs. This has improved significantly since then.

Taking advantage of zero-knowledge proofs, we can do deployments close to users for lowly NC. We have basically instant transaction inclusion. From a user experience and the developer experience perspective, it starts to look much more similar to traditional game development. 

So we’re massively expanding the design space of what is possible onchain. We’re still not at the point where you could put an FPS and have every bullet onchain, that’s still too computationally expensive. But it’s not a fundamental limitation around what is technically possible.

Tell us more about Cartridge and the tech it offers

We’re focused on bringing this new medium to life, and it’s really like a zero-to-one type of moment, and we’ve had to execute in a bunch of different dimensions to make this possible. 

• We have Dojo, which is a fully open source, community-driven tool chain for building onchain games. It incorporates a few different components. One is the Dojo Syntax itself and the architecture, like the onchain representation of worlds where you get modularity, extensibility, composability, persistence by default, by just building with Dojo. It primarily focuses on the backend logic of a game. 

• Then we have Soza, which is essentially a migration manager. It takes care of creating a representation of the world that you have locally and then diffing that with the world onchain and applying the migrations and the access control and everything necessary to deploy that world onto a blockchain. 

• We have Katana, which is the sequencer that we’ve developed specifically focused on the gaming use case and this idea of execution sharding of providing dedicated execution context for a particular session of a game that is low latency, high throughput. 

• We have Tori, an automatic indexer, that’ll take the world you’ve deployed onchain and generate a gRPC and GraphQL API that provides realtime bindings to the onchain state. So you can get all the state changes from the blockchain with very low latency into the client. 

• We have binding generation. So you can generate, for example, an SDK for Unity or JavaScript or TypeScript or whatever that is fully typed with respect to the models that exist onchain. 

• We have SIA, which is a settlement orchestrator. SIA is responsible for taking some execution, like a dungeon run, and generating what’s called an execution trace and a zero-knowledge proof of the correctness of its execution. So you can do a multicore run or whatever, prove that you defeated Ragnaros, and then settle that onchain and unlock the loot from that battle. But everyone else in the blockchain doesn’t need to know that of every single sequence of events that happen for you to defeat the boss, which itself is a kind of cool property to keep strategy hidden. 

Those are the components of the Dojo toolchain.

Then the tooling that we’ve developed, a cartridge essentially, is focused on taking those games that people have developed locally and bringing them into production, scaling them to large audiences.

Then we have Controller, which is an account or self-custodial wallet specifically for the onchain gaming use case. Again, that abstracts a lot of the complexity of the backend infrastructure. 

So you can build a game with Dojo, deploy it with Slot, and people can start playing it with Controller. Those are the big components of the stack that we’re focused on right now.

In terms of the ecosystem, who’s using it and what games are being made at the moment?

We have quite a growing developer ecosystem at this point. We’ve reached an inflection point where there’s new games showing up on Twitter that are building with Dojo, and I had no idea. That’s very exciting. 

We’re actually hosting a residency program in New York right now where we have 30 of the top developers in the ecosystem here over the next two months working on their games. 

We have a bunch of different teams building in the Realms ecosystem, which is spawned out of the Loot universe. There’s Pistols at 10 Blocks, a turn-based game which is more of an RPG resource management type game. There’s Loot Survivor, a dungeon crawler. There’s Blobber’s Arena, which is an auto-battler type game, and then there’s Force Prime outside of the Realms ecosystem. 

There’s Dope Wars, of course. There’s just so many games to say off the top of my head…

What’s the case for these games having 10,000 or 100,000 players? When can we expect fully onchain games to move from interesting tech to just great games? 

There’s still a cohort of users that we’ve yet to win in the onchain gaming space. In the short term, it will be important for us to demonstrate that we can at least capture the blockchain native audience with more immersive, more gamified experiences. 

More broadly, you can build games that are more compelling, in a more competitive ecosystem on top of the blockchain by inheriting it, by being able to focus on these core content loops and being able to remove a lot of the overhead. Especially in the indie scene we’ve seen so many developers struggling to bring games to market. There’s a lot of interesting distribution innovations that are possible with the blockchain that will help bridge that gap. 

With tokenization, you have this ability to solve cold start problems. The problem is we’ve seen a lot of teams focus only on innovating in that dimension and basically issuing NFTs way before a game is ready and then failing or struggling to convert that initial activation energy into actual players.

I think we will see a lot more of those types of techniques, but when a game is actually ready and you can use that as user acquisition and convert a lot of this initial speculative audience to bypass this cold start problem.

Then, again, I think UGC has a lot of potential, but it’s going to take some time to lay the foundations for it. If you think about the way that developers in UGC ecosystems, like Roblox and Fortnite Creator and Minecraft, interact with these ecosystems and the significant amount of platformers they take on, and the large fees they’re taking, they’re inaccessible for a large number of developers.

The amount of success you need to have to even be able to start to earn money in those ecosystems and the way that the monetization models work, they are very shoehorned into the existing model. The interesting things that you can do with a blockchain where you have the ability to innovate on how content creators are rewarded for their contributions, I think we’ll start to see a lot more innovations in that realm. 

Discover more about Cartridge via its website, and stay up-to-date via its X channel.

In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Justin Gary, who’s the CEO of Stoneblade Entertainment.

A long-term player and designer of card games, Gary is the co-creator alongside Magic The Gathering‘s Richard Garfield of TCG SolForge – now advanced into SolForged Fusion.

Primarily, Gary explains why this hybrid deck builder is using assets on Solana, how its NFTs are generated, and what makes SolForge Fusion a refreshing addition to the TCG genre.

BlockchainGamer: Can you tell us more about yourself and give us some background to SolForge?

Gary: I’ve been working on the original version of SolForge for 13 years. Prior to that, I got into the gaming world as a Magic the Gathering US National Champion. I was the youngest champion, aged 17. I paid my way through college playing Magic, and traveling around the world. It transformed my life.

Eventually, after an ill-advised stint at law school, I dropped out and moved across the country to become a game designer. I started working on games for Marvel, DC, World of Warcraft, and a whole variety of really great brands before starting my own company. 

I launched a building game called Ascension, which was a big hit. It’s available on mobile and PC, and even a VR version, believe it or not.

Because of that game I got an opportunity to go to a developer conference in 2011, where Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic the Gathering, was giving a talk. At the end of the talk there was a Q&A and somebody asked him, “what’s your favourite game right now?”, and he said my game Ascension, and I literally jump up in the back of the room like a kid.

After that we talked for about three hours and we were in sync on exactly the game we wanted to make, which was the original version of SolForge. It’s one of the first digital TCGs that was designed to be native before Magic Arena or Hearthstone or anything like that. 

And now we’ve been able to reimagine that game and the new version of SolForge Fusion, which is what we’re calling the world’s first hybrid deck game. It exists on tabletop, in web2, and now in web3. 

TCG is a much loved genre that appeals strongly to a certain group of people. They don’t necessarily go enormously wide. Why does that appeal to you? 

I think there’s something magical about TCGs. I’ll also point out there are some subtle differences between like Ascension, which is a deck-builder without tradable collectible cards, and SolForge Fusion, which is a hybrid game where you are collecting the cards. But they’re not the same cards that everybody has, your deck is unique. 

In a sense, what I’ve tried to do with SolForge Fusion is recreate the magic that I felt from my early days of playing Magic when I would open up a pack of cards and I would see cards I’d never seen before. Nowadays that magic is gone, like every spoiler is out before the sets are released. But with SolForge Fusion that’s not possible because every single pack you open is unique to you. And you have to make the strategies with what you have. 

That experience is what drew me to TCGs in the first place and what Richard and I have tried to reimagine and bring into the modern era.

What is algorithmically generated decks and how is the uniqueness created?

Imagine if in a normal TCG, you have a typical set of 300 cards. What you do is you take those sets of cards, say it’s a 60 or 30 card deck, and build the deck you want.

With an algorithmically generated game like SolForge Fusion, we build the deck of cards for you and we algorithmically create those cards. So in our very first set alone, we already had more cards than Magic had in 30 years and we’ve had three card releases. We have what we like to say more deck permutations than there are atoms in the universe, so you will never have the same deck twice. 

The way you customize your deck is unlike a traditional TCG where you take a set and pick the cards used most often. You’re just gonna copy what other people did. In SolForge Fusion you’re gonna use any of the two decks we give you, shuffle them together and you’re ready to go. So you still get to customize, but the difference is you can’t copy. 

We use technology that didn’t even exist a decade ago to be able to create these unique concepts and unique cards. It’s the fun of collectible games without all the work of having to build a custom deck or look up the exact thing online. You just find the ones you have, shuffle, smash them together and you’re good to go.

That means there’s much more possibilities because you need some broad skills, but there’s an element of surprise in your deck, and certainly in your opponent’s deck.

Yeah, and it’s really fun to play. All the cool technology, algorithmic generation, and web3 aside, the basic gameplay itself is just a really fun, simple experience. 

You draw a hand and five cards. You and your opponent alternate playing cards. Creatures get played in five lanes. At the end of the turn, creatures attack whatever’s across from them. They’ll either kill each other or do damage to the opponent. Pretty standard stuff for a TCG.

What’s interesting is that whenever you play a card, that card levels up. The levelled-up version goes into your discard pile, then every three turns you shuffle your deck. When you play cards in this game, there’s no mana or cost to the cards. They’re all balanced and they evolve through play. 

And you actually discover your game, your own deck, even just playing your own deck over and over again. You’ll learn a lot because which card you choose to play early will choose which cards are available to you later.

An important part for us is that at the heart, SolForge Fusion is a great game. All of the bells and whistles and web3, why does that stuff exist? It has to serve the gameplay experience.

When I started playing Hearthstone, I found it was a bit interesting, but suddenly I got overwhelmed. There’s so many cards and I’m getting bashed all the time. Does this make it easier for me as a newbie or not really?

Yeah, that’s the idea. On one level, you don’t have to look at the whole set of cards and figure out which ones to build. You just pick any two decks that seem appealing to you, shuffle them and play. Now, is this game still gonna be skill testing? Are you still gonna get stomped if you’re not good? Yeah, you are.

But we also do a couple of things to make the game more fun for people like you who maybe want to dabble and have a good time but don’t necessarily want to go swimming with the sharks right away. 

We created an algorithmically generated campaign mode inside the game so you can take your decks and battle against bosses, gain XP and level up your deck, get custom upgrades and powers and have this deep experience that’s very evolved, without worrying about getting beaten. 

In addition, every player gets what we call Phantom Decks, which are new decks that refresh every month. So you get the experience of playing and trying out new strategies. We’re working on what we’re calling Phantom Deck queues, where you’ll be able to just paddle against people, so everybody’s trying out new decks all the time. It’s constantly refreshing. 

We’ve tried to build a wide tent to appeal to people who want to just have a cool solo experience, and the people who are super competitive. We also do storyline events both online and at events and conventions where you will influence the lore. 

We have our writers writing custom stories that gets permanently connected to the NFT of your deck. So your deck has the lore status to it, and you can evolve and be a part of our world. Some people think that’s the coolest thing ever, while others don’t care about that at all. 

Now you talk about NFTs, were they always there from the start or something that came in later? 

So I’ve been interested in blockchain technology for quite a while now, at least since 2017/18. I actually designed a web3 game called Block Brawlers just for fun. The ability to create systems that allow communities to come together, collaborate and share resources in ways that are fair and don’t require a middleman and having trust in a centralized authority, I think that is the future. 

So there was definitely talk of blockchain and using NFTs from the beginning, but it was not a definitive. It comes down to what serves the players best. I started researching what it would take if we wanted to provide all the services that we’re doing now through Solana. Having that infrastructure and having all that done, would have cost me as a developer way more than using the technology that already exists on blockchain. 

As a developer, there was a clear question of what can I build? How can I offer more to my players? Then as a player, I was thinking, what would I want? And I would want to have complete ownership of my game. And over the long-term, not only do I want to allow people to trade their decks, but I want to be able to transfer more and more ownership to the community. 

SolForge Fusion has not really been promoted as a crypto game or blockchain game. Some people would have been interested in it just as a web2 game. Did you get any feedback on your instigation of web3?

Some feedback is a polite way to put it. There’s a lot of ill-will and distrust of blockchain in the gaming community, and to be blunt, it’s well-deserved. Rug pulls and people who would make a lot of promises and start selling a token and not have a game at all, right? And then there were those that had a game, but they would just shoehorn in NFTs just trying to get cash out of the players.

You need to have something that actually demonstrates real value to the players, so when we announced that we were doing web3 and NFTs, we got a lot of hatred. My strategy from the beginning was to be very upfront. I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and built a reputation. I’m not about to destroy it for some quick buck. 

I was doing AMAs, I was active in our Discord, I was posting articles about it etc, and I think I was able to allay a lot of the fears. Like it’s bad for the environment. I’m like, nope, Solana is very good for the environment. It doesn’t make any sense. 

We educate them about security and how you opt in and opt out. We made it so web3 is entirely opt in for players. If you don’t want to turn your decks into NFTs, you do not have to. And you never have to scan your decks into your online account, you don’t have to play a digital game, you can play it as a tabletop.

Also, with the way we’re doing our tokens and deck collections, we’re just airdropping the token to everybody. Not just to our players, but to people in the Solana community, to players of other games like Axie Infinity and Parallel and a variety of places. We’re just giving the token away so you get a chance to try the game for free. 

When it comes to the NFTs, we thought about exactly the way we built the physical game. So if I have a physical deck of SolForge Fusion, I scan it into my account, it’s locked in my account, and I can play it in tournaments or whatever. If I want to trade it, I can unlock it from my account, I hand you the physical deck, you scan it into your account and it’s yours. 

We did the exact same thing for the NFTs. You can take your digital deck and use the token to mint it into an NFT. You can unlock it from your account, give it to somebody else who locks it into their account, and now it’s their deck. 

A lot of games have used NFTs and blockchain in a way that makes no sense whatsoever, but this makes perfect sense. 

What have you thought about the financial value? One of the big problems is someone selling an NFT for $1,000 and it goes down to $10. That’s an immediate pinch point for the audience. 

First of all, this is the kind of thing that is not in my hands and I don’t want it to be in my hands. Players choose what they want to value, just like they did with Magic cards. 

A couple of things that have happened that I think are really interesting, because every deck is unique, it can be a little harder to evaluate than a traditional TCG. And so what we’ve done is the individual cards have rarity scores, and we give you a deck rarity score to help people evaluate the decks. But we’re not telling you about the power level or how you should value it. 

In fact, what’s been really cool is even before the web 3 element launched, a fan ranked the decks’ power level based on how they perceived it in their own scoring system. So you can log in with your account and plug in your collection and they’ll score your collection for you.

Then of course we have our tournaments, if your deck succeeds in a tournament, it gains rankings, or go from bronze to silver to gold to platinum. 

So we give you the tools to evaluate decks however you want. Maybe you just want a deck with a bunch of zombies in it because you love zombies, then that’s valuable to you. It’s about the players being able to make those decisions. All we want to do is give them the freedom and information. 

So the cards are not NFTs, it’s the deck that’s tradable, but would all the cards be unique?

No, so many cards will get repeated. Because we algorithmically generate the cards, there’s around 50,000 unique possible cards you could get. But the common ones will show up all the time. If every card was a one-of-a-kind all the time, it would just be too hard to process.

Whereas a super rare card like a Scorchman Dragon, you hope to get it, and it could show up in your deck, but you have to evaluate it in the context of the deck. You can’t just evaluate it as its own card. It might pair really well with another deck that has a card that lets you level up a card for free, so you can level up the egg part and not have to play it, and that way get yourself faster to the dragon part. There’ll be different combos and strategies you can do based on how the decks all pair together.

You’ve currently got a PC version on Steam. How are you dealing with Steam not officially allowing NFT enabled games? 

Yeah, we’re live on PC and Mac now, and plan to move to mobile next year. We’ve been very attentive to what the rules and regulations are and we’re abiding by those rules. So in the Steam game itself, you can’t sell or buy NFTs or the tokens or anything like that. 

On our website, you can connect the NFTs to your account and then we give you the digital version in the game. If you take your digital deck in the game, you can mint it to an NFT on the website.

NFTs are a long-term core part of the game, but would it have been much easier if you had just done it as a tabletop web2 game? Because you’ve not raised money off the back of selling NFTs or tokens or anything like that.

Well, we’re recording this in an interesting window, right before the launch of the token. So we’re going to learn very soon whether or not I’m right or wrong about where this value is going to be. I think that there’s a community of people that will be very passionate about this kind of game, that we’ll see returns from it in the growth of our player base. I could be totally wrong. 

If I wanted to do something easy, I would have just made another basic tabletop game. We advanced algorithmic printing technology. We are the only game that does this kind of one-to-one correlation between your physical collection and your digital collection and then bringing it all to web3. 

The original version of SolForge wasn’t easy to make for mobile TCG. This is the first hybrid TCG that lives on all those things, that’s not easy to make. I like to push the boundaries of what technology allows us to do to make great games and build great communities. 

That’s the heart of what I’m passionate about. 

Finally, in terms of your roadmap, you’ve got a token going live, you’ve got the NFTs going live, you mentioned tournaments too. What’s the plan towards the end of the year in terms of features and community?

We’ll be running tournaments both in the app as well as through our Discord with token prizes and a bunch of cool exclusives. We have an in-person event coming to PAX Unplugged, which will be in Philadelphia in early December. We have storyline events and a bunch of cool celebrations there. 

We also have new content coming. These kinds of collectible games live and die on content, so we just released our last set, called The Last Winter. In June, we have new card releases coming. 

More features are launching for the game itself, including a mobile version. We’re gonna allow the ability for you to print cards on demand, so your digital assets can be turned into physical assets.

We’re also working on leaderboards and more advanced encounters that can happen in the campaign mode. 

Find out more at the SolForge Fusion website.

In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to MetaKing Studios CEO David Johansson about the conception of fully onchain idle RPG Dynasty, its problem with bots, and the long-term vision for deeper medieval strategy game Blocklords, including the permadeath of NFT heroes and the ability to create long term metagame with family lineage.

Jon Jordan: How would you explain Dynasty? What was the vision?

David Johansson: Dynasty is a companion game, or side game. It’s our first foray into a mobile version of Blocklords, which is eventually planned. But Blocklords is still the main game. 

The idea with Dynasty was always to remove as much friction as possible from the game experience as we didn’t want users to get bogged down with wallet creation or blockchain transaction times. In terms of the onboarding process, I think we’ve achieved that. At the same time, we are maximalists, and we do believe in onchain gaming. Our first conversation about Blocklords was back in 2019 or 2020, so we’ve really gone full circle in that we started as a fully onchain game before there was any infrastructure in place. 

Then we kind of went the opposite route, and wanted to remove the friction completely and add the onchain elements as a side note. But a lot of feedback we were getting early on in the year from a variety of partners, especially as we were bracing for the token launch, was that we didn’t have that many actual NFT transactions. 

We were like, that’s the point. It’s optional, right? We got a lot of users. They don’t all have to be onchain. But we keep getting this feedback that we need more onchain transactions, because that’s how people measure traction in this space. That’s definitely not the only factor, but it was one factor behind Dynasty.

We had two choices, either put the main game fully onchain or partially onchain, although we believed that would make the experience slower and hurt the experience of the main game. 

We also had another issue, which was that our NFT heroes had a lot of in-game utility, but not enough. We are planning a lot of features for heroes in the main game, but those are very related to battles, and the battle system is still in development. We didn’t want to rush out the battle systems just to add hero utility.

So how do we do a side game that’s fully onchain with as little friction as possible, that puts the hero and hero utility at the core? That’s where Dynasty came from.

Of course we still wanted the onboarding to be as easy as possible so we ended up going with Base for its low transaction costs and fast transaction times. 

We also started partnering with Privy, so if you play the game, you notice that users don’t have to worry about seed phrases, they just use their email for logins. And because Base has a new product called Paymaster we are able to sponsor users’ gas fees and that’s really a game changer. I think a big reason for the growth we had is that a new user in Dynasty doesn’t have to pay its own gas as we sponsor five transactions and give them a free NFT. 

What do you think about bots?

It’s definitely challenging, and for us, bots are a cost stride because we’d have to pay for their gas, at least partially. Essentially, bots are a problem in this industry. At the same time, the industry values user numbers and transaction numbers. It’s hard to exactly say the ratio. We have been fighting against it. I believe we blocked 25,000 accounts so far that had either bought too much or abused the systems. As a web3 game dev, you’re always at war with a certain part of your player base, which does make it difficult. 

But overall we wanted to show that it’s possible to make onchain games that can scale. And I think we proved that.

It was interesting because the point system was on right away but the user acquisition wasn’t instant. It was definitely a growth phase. In the beginning, it was only a couple of thousand users daily. What kicked things off was when we launched the Orb system a couple weeks in. That’s when NFT token rewards came in, where your NFT hero fights against other heroes. 

The problem with that is that you’re playing against the OGs, the best heroes, so it’s extremely cutthroat. There’s an element where only the best players are going to win, which obviously a lot of players don’t like, but I think that’s important to have these kinds of systems. 

Some systems are developed for mass appeal, where everybody has a chance. Some are more skill-based or asset-based, where you need the right hero and the right strategy to win. And actually it’s funny, because some of the players who got to the higher ranks, didn’t have the best heroes, but they were tenacious or played the right way. 

When the users really started popping up was when we gave out the referral system. Also, we saw a lot of user acquisition success with partnerships. Moccaverse for example, and a token airdrop to their community, I believe we got 90,000 users just from that. Our friends at Carv also brought in 30,000 users or so. 

Currently around 30,000 DAUWs are playing Dynasty for the game, and not the airdrop

Correct, 30,000 has been around our stable DAUs since May. Last time we spoke, I think we were at 1,000 daily actives, so it’s definitely grown. What is interesting is that there’s really not a lot of rewards other than Renown in the game, but we are working on season two for Dynasty, which is coming in the next few months. 

We are working with Paymaster – which is the Coinbase-led team that handles gas payments for users – on ERC20 payments for gas, so users will be able to pay for gas in Dynasty using the LRDS token. That’s going to add a lot of utility to your token and also increase our ability to give rewards. 

It’s hard to give rewards when you know they’re going to be sold. It’s a different thing to give rewards when they’re going to be given back to the community via gas payments. 

Now that the token is live, we’re working on token utility, different ways you can use the tokens to accelerate your progression, and of course a few surprises as well for the second season.

What’s your reaction to the LRDS token launch?

We’re quite happy. I mean, for how the market is, it’s kind of strange because had we launched in January, it probably would have worked out five times more, but it’s hard to predict these things. 

Obviously being on Coinbase has been an amazing experience. We feel that’s a seal of approval that we think the project deserves. Not sure how familiar you are with the listing process across all the exchanges. It’s extremely long and unclear. But overall, it’s been an amazing launch in terms of token excitement, and in terms of users and influencers that covered us. 

I think the volume was over $40 million, which is insane for a one day volume. It’s a huge weight off our shoulders to have it live now.

Obviously the market’s not the best. Gaming especially has been quite bearish with a lot of the retail traders and the web3 community in general. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of excitement for Telegram games, and the potential of web3 to bring in users. 

I think it’s all about just getting to work and keep creating a good game.

How frustrated are you that the fact you’ve been running a game for a year isn’t reflected in the token price?

At the end of the day, the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent. So obviously we’re solvent. Our focus is on building a strong team and keeping creating really cool products. 

Valuations are extremely tricky in this business. I think we’re all trying to figure it out together and it does get frustrating at times, but you just have to embrace it. This is a great market.

Why did you want to build your own L3?

I want the main game to be onchain and for users to be able to verify, because when you send an NFT to the game, we actually burn it. We transfer the metadata into the game. 

We looked at doing it with Base, but at the end of the day, the gas costs get expensive, and it is too slow for us. What we’ve been looking at with Lordchain is how do we create something that we have a bit more control over, that’s secure, and open-source? 

That’s why we’re working with Optimism on this, and we’re also working closely with the Base team. Lordchain is going to be a Base layer-3.

Essentially, the ideological reason behind launching Lordchain is that we want to be able to verify quickly, easily, cheaply what’s going on inside of the game. And having our own infrastructure adds a ton of utility to the token on top of the game. 

What about permadeath of NFTs?

It’s always been the core concept and was very popular with VCs when we first started pitching Blocklords. Obviously asset inflation is something a lot of users care about. I’m saying that we just minted 1 million NFTs on Base, so the key is it’s important to get a lot of users free assets. But it’s equally important to have ways for those assets to disappear over time. Otherwise you end up with this thing where anybody can get one, or, why would I get one? 

The idea has always been that every hero is going to die. So I’m just warning you, that is going to happen. 

For now, Dynasty launched, that was a test, and that’s where dynasty comes from. You start with a hero, and you build out a family legacy.

The next step will be family lineage. You’ll be able to marry your heroes, have kids, pass down your skills. Obviously that becomes a lot of fun. I don’t know if you remember CryptoKitties, when you were trying to get the perfect cat. We’re going to play a lot with that. There’ll be negative and positive traits. 

Over time, we want to make it matter. Your heroes are important and they’re valuable and you got to be careful with them. Long term, there’s a lot of cool utility we can add to that hero. 

We’re also going to be exploring things like where the more dead heroes you have, the more powerful your legacy and our dynasty is. 

So what’s next?

We’ve always wanted the game to be a hybrid of grand strategy games like Crusader Kings, Civilization, and RTS games like Age of Empires and Total War. I’d say we’re still in the experimentation phase. This is a very rough alpha. Over the last six months, we’ve been extremely focused on Dynasty, on the token launch, and the web3 part of things.

Now with Lordchain, we finally have the bandwidth to be able to really go deep into the battle system. We’re going to be showing it to the press and a few selected investors. 

It won’t be the full features, but we’re trying to ship something this year. And definitely next year is when you’ll start seeing a lot more battle features coming into the game.

Find out more at the Blocklords website.

With much of the blockchain game sector lacking in momentum, many studios are now looking to Telegram and its integrated TON blockchain for salvation.

If nothing else, with a quoted userbase of 950 million users, Telegram currently offers the best opportunity for rapidly scaling simple games and launching tokens; just witness the user numbers thrown around by projects such as Hamster Kombat and Catizen.

But does this playbook work for more serious blockchain game companies?

In last week’s podcast, I spoke to Mighty Bear Games’ CEO Simon Davis, which is launching its Goat Gaming PVP wagering platform on Telegram. In this week’s podcast, I continue on the theme, talking to Gamee chairman Bozena Rezeb about the company’s WAT Protocol.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Rezab was that Gamee was one of the original companies launching games on Telegram back in 2016. A smaller platform without blockchain, Telegram didn’t offer the same potential back then so Gamee moved on, launching its blockchain-based Arc8 app.

The new version of Telegram has seen it return to the platform, however, launching its meme-based WAT Protocol earlier in 2024.

Originally a simple point mining experience, it’s since built out more functionality, including the Watbird Racer, as well as the ability for holders of the GMEE token and various NFTs including Pudgy Penguins and Mocaverse to soft-stake them to also build up their Wat points. Of course, these will be converted into an allocation of the WAT token when it launches later in 2024.

What was particularly interesting to learn was how the new Telegram has allowed Gamee to scale. Previously, it had around 300,000 daily active users playing its mini-games. Now, however, it’s seen 55 million users of which around 4 million have interacted with the Wat Protocol using their TON wallet.

So even if the majority of activity is driven by bots, Telegram still offers the most dynamic channel in terms of onboarding games to blockchain, Rezab argues.

Check out the full interview including timestamps on YouTube.

And find out more yourself at the WAT Protocol.

In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Mighty Bear Games’ CEO Simon Davis about its blockchain gaming ecosystem Goat Gaming.

In particular, the pair discuss the value of Telegram, which is gaining much exposure for crypto gaming in terms of simple tap-to-play games.

Questions asked include can Telegram work well for more engaging games, should we trust the audience metrics on Telegram, and how does Goat Gaming expect to leverage this audience with its 1v1 PVP wagering experiences?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast via the Fountain app and earn Bitcoin.

BlockchainGamer.biz: Can you explain the thinking behind Goat Gaming?

Simon Davis: We released a mode in Mighty Actions Heroes called 1 versus 1 Showdown. The way it works is that both players pay a small entry fee in hard currency to participate, and then the rewards are variable. So it can be anything from 1.3x the amount you paid in to say 10x. And with those variable rewards, players went nuts for it. We realized there’s a lot of pent-up appetite for mini-game experiences in web3 where you can play and win prizes.

In web2 we see the analog with skill gaming platforms. This has been proven out for over 20 years. Within web3, there’s a strong product market fit for a platform where players can play and win prizes. And so the vision for Goat Gaming is hundreds of mini-games, almost like the Miniclip of web3 gaming running in Telegram.

So we’re building out hundreds of these micro-experiences, as well as working with external studios. We’ve already also onboarded two external studios. There’s a game called Waifu Clash and Mighty Action Heroes is also part of that ecosystem.

Telegram is currently the big platform for crypto gaming. Why is that the case?

I don’t think there’s anything new. What we see with Telegram today is basically Facebook gaming circa 2008. You have this platform where you have nearly a billion people that have nothing better to do than send each other pictures and messages. Why not provide them with a bit of entertainment, a way to engage with each other socially? A lot of the hooks or the designs we’re using are lifted from games that were made nearly 20 years ago.

If my thesis is right, that this is essentially a Facebook gaming version two – hopefully without the platform killing it – then this is a potentially huge business. We’re building these games in WebGL and HTML5 and exporting them straight into Telegram.

This means we can run these games on iMessage or WeChat or any other platform that supports this. I think looking just at Telegram is probably a bit too narrow because if these apps within Telegram start to take off, then I expect that both Apple and WhatsApp will have to start improving their app infrastructure as well. And then we can go across multiple different messaging services.

I’m more skeptical about the very high numbers provided for Telegram gaming.

I fully understand why some people are skeptical because there naturally would be questions as to how well some of these games are going to retain when the financial incentives drop away. But if you’re streaming WebGL, HTML5 into it, you can basically build any game you want in Telegram. That means you can build something that’s comparable to any mobile game from the last few years. That’s an incredibly broad canvas to work with.

Are you worried about bots?

It’s an interesting dilemma because as a developer, on the one hand, you don’t really want bots because they’ll devalue your token in the long run. In the short term, actually, you could argue there is an incentive for developers to make botting easy, right? Because then you get these inflated numbers that you can then use to hype up your ecosystem where you start appearing higher in the onchain activity rankings. We’ve taken the opposite approach where it’s not something we really want.

There is probably a high ratio of bots on these Telegram games, but nonetheless, when you’re talking about 200 million players, even if 90% are bots, there’s still 20 million real users. It’s an order of magnitude bigger than anything we could have envisioned in web3 this year. So it’s massive numbers. And in terms of revenues, you can see via onchain data how much some of these games are making. Some of these games are making real money, like real web2 revenue money. I think any studio would be happy with those kind of figures.

What games do you think are going to work well?

We think there’s an opportunity for many different gameplay types and different themes. Not everyone is going to engage with the retro action movie vibe of Mighty Action Heroes. Some people will want … we have a Waifu battler coming out. We have a runner coming out. We’ll find different things that work for different audiences.

I think the other kind of unique angle is that the studio is based in southeast Asia so I think we can create some really interesting content, which is more localized and a better fit for the audience.

How quickly can you open up Goat Gaming for other developers?

We already have onboarded external devs to work with us but right now it’s very much hands-on. We have to help a lot because it’s running on our infrastructure. We’ve been building it for seven years, but it was never built to be used by external parties so we have work to do. Realistically it would take probably close to a year to be a point where it can be self-serve.

Why do you think it’s been so hard for blockchain games to attract sustainable players?

In web2, you have the developer and the player. And as a dev, you have to optimize for both yourself and the player, which is not easy. It’s really hard. But in web3, you throw speculators into the mix. Unfortunately, the speculators are the loudest voice. And so I think as a dev, how do you develop a compelling experience that works for you as a developer, that delivers value to speculators and is still fun to play?

I think that is fundamentally something that very few people have really solved, if really anyone, if I’m totally frank.

Where can people find out more about Goat Gaming?

Check out our website or search for GoatGamingBot in Telegram.

In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Stardust CEO Canaan Linder about his entry into blockchain gaming, how Stardust is helping developers build and scale their games and why he thinks billion blockchain gamers is inevitable.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast via the Fountain app and earn Bitcoin.

BlockchainGamer: So how did you get into the industry?

Canaan Linder: I’m based in and grew up in Palo Alto, California. Before that I was a software engineer in New York City at Bloomberg. Really enjoyed it. But like everybody in crypto, I came across CryptoKitties in 2017. And I said, ‘These are incredible digital collectibles, true ownership. We need these in games’. As an engineer, I tried to build a little game with them and realized it’s a really difficult experience.

Fast forward to today, six years later, Stardust helps some of the largest games in web3 scale to millions of players – Shrapnel, Midnight Society, some web2 properties like Habbo. That’s our mission, to make sure every game developer who leverages this new technology has everything they need to make them successful in this new era of gaming.

It’s interesting how CryptoKitties sparked the interest of so many people in blockchain gaming. Why do you think that was the case?

It’s actually interesting because it’s why we’re named Stardust. I was a competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! player in high school and my favorite card was the Stardust Dragon. I was a collectible card enthusiast and collector for quite a few years and still am to this day. I understood the background of physical ownership, but CryptoKitties opened my eyes to the concept of digital ownership, which is not something … you know, I don’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying that I don’t own my digital collectibles in Fortnite. 

But this concept of having the digital ownership of this silly cat that I could take around the internet, that was connected to me, that eventually I could verifiably post that I owned on Twitter, these were the things that I was like, ‘My gosh, I can get Ninja to sign my Fortnite skin’. So our company was built around this concept of true ownership and came from my love of collectible cards. I wanted to give everybody else this ability too through the games they were playing on blockchain.

So how come you didn’t end up making games and made tools instead?

I’m very attuned to where our core competencies are. There are great game developers who’ve been making some of the greatest games. I love creating, building, seeing games, but I’m not the best creator. But we can give the tools to the biggest and best creators to build the best games they can build. And so that’s what we’ve been on a mission to do since six years ago.

What sort of trends have you seen in the sector?

For want of a better term gaming is a very copypasta industry. Something works and then they stamp it out 15 times. You got your Flappy Bird tappers, right? You got your left, right swipers like Fruit Ninja. There are these concepts of human behavior that games take advantage of, not in a bad way, but to give experiences and enjoyment over and over and over.

In blockchain, when it’s a bull market, everybody wants to take what’s working, Axie Infinity, Pixels, whatever it is, and they come and they say, ‘Give me this as fast as possible. Don’t care what chain it’s on. Don’t care why it’s on this chain. I want this game, I want the players’. And in a bull market that works well, because everybody’s doing well.

Now, if you go into a bear market, that’s when a little bit more of the experimentation happens. You see game developers starting to say, ‘This chain is better for my technologies, this chain has a better community’. They take time and effort and make a lot of custom choices about where they want to build.

This has really informed our product in a couple of key ways, keeping it extremely modular so the game developers in times of expansion and need something fast can put all those Lego blocks together really quickly versus when it’s a little bit more of a builder’s market through the bear. Then they have the ability to fit into their stack what works best for them.

More specifically, what actually is Stardust?

We have two core products. We have our infrastructure product, which is wallets-as-a-service, so that helps game developers to create millions of wallets for their game. We work with everyone from the biggest games like Shrapnel and Midnight Society, all the way to web2 publishers, such as Tilting Point and Stillfront. This allows game developers to scale with the technology they need. 

Through building this we realized that scaling in gaming is not easy. Whether it’s web3 or web2, user acquisition is really difficult. So the other product we have is Stardust UA. That’s actually a programmatic DSP that allows game developers to bring millions of players to their game. 

It’s a very web2 product but applied with web3 technology and web3 data. We know a lot more about who are the correct players to bring to your game, especially in web 3 because there is so much blockchain data we can use to really understand who the best players are in your game and how to bring them into your ecosystem. So between infrastructure and UA, we support game developers with the ability on the infra side to support millions of players, with the ability on the UA side to acquire millions of players.

Can you explain wallet-as-a-service in more detail?

It’s a bit similar to Stripe. I’ll use that as an example. When you open your phone and your DoorDash account, you don’t set up a bank account, but in the backend, you have a whole economic system that DoorDash has not built themselves. They’re leveraging Stripe. The way to send payments from yourself to the restaurant, the way for the restaurant to hold money, for them to get it into their bank accounts. All of the liability is in the backend and that plumbing is done by Stripe so DoorDash focuses on creating a consumer app. That’s true about Shopify. That’s true about Uber. They’re all using the plumbing that Stripe has created. 

On the wallet side, there’s security and there’s legal and regulatory risk. These are things that game developers don’t want to focus on. They just want to build great games. When my grandmother plays Candy Crush, she opens her phone and she plays Candy Crush. She does not set up a Metamask wallet. 

With wallets-as-a-service, when someone opens a web3 game, they have no idea what blockchain is but behind the scenes they can have a blockchain wallet set up for them, secured in a compliant manner and they can just play the game as it was intended to be played. For games, this is exactly what we do. We allow players to have that incredible in -game experience. We allow game developers to have that incredible experience of building games without worrying about backend infrastructure. That’s where Stardust fits in to complement the whole gaming industry and the next billion players on web3.

How much of that legal and regulatory risk do you want to solve yourselves or do you plug into other providers?

There are two verticals of licensing, especially in the US and even worldwide, that are extremely important. In the US we have businesses that register as a money services business and that just means they deal with money and other people’s money. And then we have money transmitters and this means that you are regulated to hold and transmit money on others’ behalf. So if you look at Coinbase, if you look at Stripe, if you look at any bank, they have this huge framework of money transmitter licenses 

These are not easy to get. We’re on our path. We’ve acquired well over half of the needed prerequisites to get money transmitter licenses in all 50 states. I believe we’re at about 27 today and we’re tracking very well to be at 50 sooner rather than later. We’ve been doing this for two and a half years.

Recently the FBI has shut down multiple wallet providers. You see different service providers trying to get around this through things like key delegation and MPC (Multi-Party Computation) and it doesn’t work. You need the regulatory backing to hold money and transmit it on behalf of others, not only for the SEC but for FinCEN and the FTC as well because the Federal Trade Commission really does care. We’re also starting to see this proliferate globally with laws like VASP in Korea and MiCA in Europe. 

It’s interesting that you feel it’s core to your business to get all these licenses.

I will clarify that we’re not trying to build everything internally. We are going to use other service providers, the Stripes and Personas of the world. But we want to take the highest leverage point, which is those money transmitter licenses and make sure we own them

Moving to UA, what’s the hardest thing about scaling it?

When you look generally at ad networks, our one goal is to have a billion players playing games. The billion player mark or the billion user mark is really how these ecosystems have enough quality of data to become more valuable. Facebook is the perfect example, their first KPI was a billion people leveraging Facebook. That’s really our focus. You hear it again and again – a billion players playing blockchain-based games. That’s a vision we buy into. 

In addition, blockchain data is incredibly valuable from the perspective of knowing what the expected values of users are and how much money they have to actually spend in-game when you’re bidding.

Currently when you’re trying to acquire users for a web2 game, it’s all probabilistic. This person lives in the US, in a nice area code. They must be a whale. They should come play my game. But there’s no real understanding of who that person is. This person is in India. They must want to play my hypercasual game because they don’t buy a lot of things in-game, they typically watch ads. You get these generalities. Blockchain lifts the lid, providing an understanding of who this person is and gives us back some of the granularity that Apple took away from the ecosystem. 

We’re early on in that path but the data that exists on blockchain is so much more granular, so much better. We believe that the identifier that people will be tagged with is a wallet address, whether they know it or not, because that is their identity. Whether it’s a wallet through Metamask or a wallet through a service product like ours, we firmly believe that a wallet address is going to be your unique tag as you move around the internet which defines you, so that game developers and other app developers and even stores understand more about who you are.

Does this mean users will get back value for providing their data?

This has been tried before in the web3 space. Brave browser and the Basic Attention Token, it was an early way for people to get compensated for their time and attention on the internet, But for better or worse, it didn’t fully capture the value people thought it would because individuals think their data is worth a lot of money. The unfortunate point is only in aggregates of millions of data points is data worth something tangible. If you’re getting compensated 50 cents for your data or 10 cents for your data, it doesn’t really hit the same way. 

I think it will be that the value you get by providing more data about yourself to applications on the internet will be passed down in kind. Something like ‘You connect your Twitter in-game, you get extra XP or a free skin. You connect your wallet address, you may level up five levels and get no ads for the next 30 days.

This matters more to you than pennies on the dollar and that’s really important because people don’t want to feel nor should they feel it’s just arbitrage – give me your data. I give you five cents and I get six. We should be providing players with value for telling the games more about themselves so that the games can give them a better experience within the game and better enjoyment and the games will compensate them justly for that.

You’re talking about one billion web3 gamers, but at the moment we’re struggling to get a couple of millions.

It’s hard for our minds to conceptualize exponential growth. We always think linearly. We think if there’s a million this year, how can there be a billion next year? It can happen. I think we can get there. I can’t ascribe a time period to it but what I will say is we can get there at any point because all it takes is somebody to find a better model. 

I love going back to mobile because everything we do in gaming, especially in blockchain today with incentivized engagement, questing platforms, play-to-earn is just app store optimization and incentivized downloads in 2009. It’s the same thing packaged in a different way. 

If you look at Facebook, Mafia Wars was number one, and then Zynga came out with FarmVille. Dapper Labs did CryptoKitties and then NBA Top Shot. Now we have Axie Infinity and Pixels on Ronin. We see the exact same trend in blockchain today that we saw in gaming. Close our eyes and wake up, tomorrow there’ll be four more Pixels and a billion players in blockchain. I can’t tell you when but what I can tell you is that as soon as that formula is figured out, everybody’s ready to pour fuel on the fire, right from from your smallest indie developer, all the way up to the Scopely and the EAs of the world. They’re all waiting on the sidelines to see what works. 

Do you think the infrastructure problems are solved in terms of currently being able to support games with 50 million DAUWs?

Of course. Blockchain scaling is getting better. If you had said in the days of CryptoKitties, could you imagine a game with 5,000 players, I would have said ‘No way’. 

When game developers come to us, we like to have them create games that are the true embodiment of what they think a great game can be, not being constrained by what the technology is today. We’ve seen so many people clip their wings and fit into a box of what the technology allows today rather than understanding that the technological growth curve especially in blockchain is so quick and so fast, faster now than it’s ever been.

I do believe blockchain can support a billion players. In what topology it will be, whether that’s thousands of L2s, whether it’s Sui, Aptos and Solana together, I can’t tell you. I don’t know. I don’t have a crystal ball. But we will get there. It’s not an ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Find out more about Stardust via its website.

In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Chris Clay, who’s the game director of Immutable’s Guild of Guardians mobile RPG which has just gone live via app stores.

They talk about the relatively smooth launch of the game, how crypto fans are leaning into the experience, how players who know nothing about blockchain can create NFTs, and plans for the game as it leaves launch and starts to roll out live operations, and new modes including guilds.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast via the Fountain app and earn Bitcoin.

BlockchainGamer: From my point of view, the launch seemed to go well. There was a small wobble where you took the server down for an hour, but otherwise it seemed smooth.

Chris Clay: Essentially, we launched and pretty quickly hit about 10x compared to our regional test launch in terms of concurrent users, and anytime you’re 10x-ing, something’s going to go wrong. We kept having the weirdest crashes. It really wasn’t making sense, but we worked out there was an issue with the databases so we did have to take the servers down to do a little bit of maintenance and to split out a database. After that, luckily, nobody woke me up during the little bit of sleep I got last night. Things have been pretty stable since.

We had one more little wobble about 20 minutes ago. We did a major update and during that we saw some players drop. One of the great things about Guild of Guardians is we can update live without taking the servers down. We’ve been catching bugs nonstop and fixing them really quickly. There will be some that we’ll wait for a maintenance window to do so. But it’s gone well.

I guess there’s only so much you can simulate without real players?

Yes, and the regional test was read-only so this is the first time in the wild on production that we’re seeing some of those things come through. But as you say, as much load testing as you do, bot accounts are never quite the same as real people but I think we’re in a pretty good place now. We’ve started to turn on more of the advertising, starting to pull more players in. From here on out, it is just a scaling challenge in terms of user acquisition and continuing to make sure that the services and everything scale smoothly.

It looks like the players are having fun. We saw our first 15-star enlightenment character way faster than I expected. A lot of people had prepped with their Cracked Hearts (NFTs).

It’s always one of those slightly terrifying things when a game goes live and within three hours someone’s done everything, which is really hard to do in a game that’s energy capped to some extent. Also expensive in terms of the NFTs.

Yes, that was not cheap but it’s important to have those people. It’s one of the wonderful things about our community, they do care a lot. That really comes through too, at launch. There were a lot of questions and people spent a fair amount of time in Discord, fielding issues. It’s one of the things that I love about this space, the amount of players who spend a lot of time in Discord helping new players get onboarded through some of the web3 stuff, answering problems. Having that extra community support really helps. 

It’s about getting a balance between web3 and web2 players over time?

It’s crypto so there’s always FOMO and FUD. One thing is some people think that because there are already these high level players, there’s no reason for me to play. Yes, the elite of the elite are playing in their own rarefied air, but the way the systems are set up, you can win in your tier on the leaderboards. Not everyone in any sort of competitive game is up at the top echelon. They are competing economically, but it doesn’t mean you can’t get through the game free-to-play. 

That’s something that’s a little bit hard for people to wrap their heads around. I do think as we get through these first couple of weeks, people who are playing free-to-play will start getting some of those leaderboard rewards. We have been seeing some people are starting to mint the characters they’re getting from the free summons and this has reduced the price of those guardians. It’s taken the floor price down a lot, partly because they were previously in limited supply. Now the supply is more open. You’ve got bonding curves to balance it out. Did we get it right? Time’s gonna tell pretty quickly.

But for these people who are coming into the game, being able to mint a guardian, go to Token Trove and sell it and get a return. That’s why a lot of people crypto. Get more back than you spent. And some of my job is to make sure that the dream stays alive.

It’s interesting that you don’t use the term blockchain and instead of NFT, you call them Radiant Guardians.

That’s some of the hope, actually. One of the ways that I put it is a decade ago, you’d see ads on TV going ‘Is your company in the cloud?’ Now we’re all in the cloud, nobody cares, because it just does what we want. There are no more ads for being ‘in the cloud’. It’s just expected. And this is some of our pitch. Do players need to know that it’s on a blockchain or can you set up the systems to do good things for them and the technology doesn’t necessarily matter? Being able to ascend guardians and keep that language fantastical for a fantasy game, it’s a little bit more fun to go by ascension seals than minting energy. We’re not trying to trick people. We’re just trying to make it easy. 

Another aspect is the Immutable Passport. It’s easy to log into the game. It’s pretty straightforward and smooth. That’s been a lot of work. It was really, really hard to make it that easy. Of course, the next part is going to the marketplace to sell an NFT. That’s still a little bit scarier than I’d like, but I think it’s a good first step. 

Guild of Guardians sits in the web2.5 space where we’re trying to straddle web2 and web3. It’s difficult. I don’t think we’ve necessarily gotten it perfect, but in terms of guiding people into web 3 smoothly, I think we’re doing the mission we set out when we first started talking about the economy in earnest about 15 months ago. It’s really cool to see that realized.

It’s worth pointing out that Guild of Guardians is one of the first games to launch on the Immutable zkEVM blockchain, which must have been another worry for you – will that work at scale?

Yes, having been in the blockchain space for quite a long time now, from ETH to ImmutableX to now Immutable zkEVM, some of my worry has often been ‘How is the blockchain side going to perform?’ I have often been disappointed in the past in terms of how that component worked into the mix, but it’s been really good so far. It’s been rock solid, stable. 

The actions have been quick. It really makes a difference in the client when you do something like an ascension and the little hourglass spins. It takes a little bit of time, but it’s very clean. Compared to a pop-up on the web and waiting for the transaction to load. 

As a game designer, one of the things you note is the dopamine. Even though there’s that little bit of delay, when it finally comes through, there is this moment of ‘I got it’. It feels good. I’ve bought my ascension seals, I’m ascending guardians and it’s just fun. It’s even fun to sacrifice them, which I was a little bit concerned about. But it still feels kind of powerful. 

Yes, I was surprised how smooth everything was, even sacrificing your NFTs.

Game designers always talk about sources and sinks. Guild of Guardians was built with a whole bunch of sinks in place. Anytime you’re making NFTs more scarce, it’s a good thing. Obviously we’ve got minting, so we’re making more of them too. You need to have those two things balanced out, but it’s going well. Definitely we have some things that we’re gonna be watching closely in terms of abuse. Anytime you have a game like this, there’s always the potential there.

One thing I wanted to ask on the NFT minting side, it looked like you have dynamic pricing?

Yes, the price goes up or down based on the circulating supply so if more get burned, the price goes down. 

So now the game’s live, I guess you switch into live ops mode?

We’re set up well for that. We’ve got the adventure mode that people are playing through. That’s where you’re leveling your characters and everything. Then there are three big competitive modes. So you’ve got the endless dungeon, you’ve got boss rush, which we’ll unlock in a week and you’ve got PVP, which people are already playing. Really, live ops is about how can we keep people entertained and keep it interesting? Some of it is going to be on the economy, can we make the rewards exciting for people to keep participating. 

The other side is new content. We’ve got a whole suite of new guardians that are going to come into the mix, shake up the meta, all of those things. These are going to be more limited than the core guardians. That’s going to be for the hardcore crypto degens. I think that’s one of the next big beats in terms of noise, like ‘Did you get in?’ ‘Did you get the sale?’ I’m pretty confident our math is right, but we will see. 

And then the other part is continuing to build the game. Right now it’s launch, it’s bug fixing, it’s stabilizing, it’s polishing, it’s improving systems that people are finding a little bit clunky. And then it’s guilds. Guilds are in right now, but it’s very basic. We’ve got our roadmap to get guilds really up and running, and then further down the line, we’ve got pets coming into the mix. Most people love pets. Pets are cute. Pets are fun. 

One thing I’m pretty confident about is that we can move really quickly and get new content into the game. We’ve just got to go and execute. This project, from the reboot to shipping was 15 months. We’ve just been executing. That’s the only way you get it done. Now we’ve got to keep doing it. 

You can download Guild of Guardians now via Apple and Google app stores.

In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Yield Guild Games’ co-founder Gabby Dizon and its recent strategic investor Shi Khai Wei from LongHash Ventures about the future of the gaming guild model.

From the scholarship model at the height of the Axie Infinity play-to-earn movement, YGG has now evolved into what Dizon calls a Guild as Protocol model; something also cited by LongHash in its investment thesis.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast via the Fountain app and earn Bitcoin.

BlockchainGamer.biz: Shi Kai, can you give us some background on yourself and LongHash?

Shi Khai: LongHash started in 2017, as an accelerator. Now we run two funds. We specialize in bootstrapping ecosystems. Over the years, our thesis has been adapting based on what we feel that the space needs to push forward. So we started with the application wave and then looking at DeFi Summer, and throughout the bear market, we looked at a lot of infrastructure that’s needed to adapt, to scale, to improve user experience. Now the focus has now shifted back to consumer and user adoption and what is going to bring forth the next wave. And, of course, that’s why we’re here to discuss games and guilds.

Why did you invest in YGG?

Shi Khai: So when we start to move from infrastructure back to consumer adoption, one of the first questions is, where are the users going to come from? And what are they going to do onchain? What’s going to bring them into the ecosystem? And if we look at the breakout applications over the last year or so, I think it’s very clearly gaming and social. 

How do you invest in this trend if you believe that these two verticals will bring on board a lot of users? Sure, you can go to specific game studios and titles. You can go to various social apps. But it’s actually much harder to invest in those if you are not deep in the weeds. I myself am a hardcore gamer, be it from casual all the way to PC and console, but it is still very difficult for us to pick out those individual titles, while we have some very high conviction bets there. 

It is much easier to actually work with a player that is almost like the social layer, almost like the index of the entire vertical of gaming social. So when we started looking into YGG, we realized that, hey, we’re not just talking about a gaming guild, we’re talking about the social layer for consumer crypto. And YGG has been one of the few players that has persisted through the bear market and continued to nurture community, build out quests, integrate directly into games, platforms, and that has laid a very strong foundation to capture this explosive growth, which we predict will come this year.

For you Gabby, how much has your thesis changed since 2021?

Gabby Dizon: To go back to the original thesis, we wanted to aggregate communities to be able to play together and have ownerships in these crypto networks. If you look at a lot of these games that have ownership represented in either tokens or NFTs, the idea is that you could bootstrap and grow these networks via tokens. And what we do, aggregating people, helping them play together, helping them to own these tokens, has still very much remained the same. 

So what’s changed? One of the things that the market has missed especially in the last two years was that they conflated the guild model with the scholarship model which was very popular and explosive back then. But even in 2021 we were moving into the next phase of our vision. We released the first soulbound token for YGG in July 2021, even before we released the YGG token. We had started working on our questing system, the Guild Advancement Program. The idea was that you wanted people to build reputation by doing things in different games, in different crypto networks. And that reputation could be represented in non-tradable soulbound tokens. So that as someone contributes to a network, whether you’re doing it in a game, in a DAO, in a guild like YGG, people could note what your contributions are and your value to the network. And you would be able to get an opportunity accordingly whether it’s early access to a game or being able to earn better or maybe a game offering you more rewards because you’re a top player in a certain genre right.

And this is what you mean by ‘guild as a protocol’?

Gabby Dizon: A guild protocol specifically for what we’re doing is that we’re aggregating people, players, and putting their group identity onchain, allowing them to have group treasury, group reputation, and allowing them to do actions or go on quests together as a group, and then be recognized or get rewards from our group level. So if you think about having a World of Warcraft guild and then putting that structure onchain, that is where we’re headed with everything that we’re building for the last few years.

Does ‘guild as a protocol’ mean YGG launches its own blockchain?

Gabby Dizon: Honestly, I think it’s really stupid that everyone is looking to pivot to their own L2 or L3. Everyone is trying to sell their own block space. We’re not selling any block space. We’re looking to fill up block space with people and with actions going onchain. So no, we’re not making our own game and no, we don’t have our own blockchain. What we do is we bring the human layer, the social, the group layer onchain. We get people to form groups together and then do things, do actions together, play games together onchain.

As an investor, how does LongHash see YGG’s growth in the coming years?

Shi Khai: First I’ll talk about the positioning and how that sets us up to scale and then paint a longer term vision of where we might be headed. So the first thing on the positioning, it is very difficult if you are trying to form your own social group. I think the traditional concept of I bring all these friends together and we play games together inside our own little community, it’s very hard to scale that social connection, right? Just because of things like Dunbar’s number, needing to have these relationships with everybody. That’s why I think every single guild is trying to figure out how do we move down the stack or expand the scope?

Of course, many of them have transitioned to become L2s, L3s. I think where YGG is going is really interesting with the guild protocol. It’s not a guild, it’s the guild of guilds. We want to onboard each regional localized community to come and build on the YGG guild protocol. That already unlocks the skill potential. And secondly, this interesting strategic choice to not have our own chain keeps us agnostic to all of the games and to all of the chains.

The moment you launch your own chain, sure, there’s a repricing or a markup in terms of your valuation, but there’s also the trade-off that you’re locking in your own ecosystem. Your token will likely need to live on your chain as well. As we see with YGG, we can be on Ethereum and then we have a very good relationship with Ronin and we can be on Ronin too. And if there’s a good chain that comes on, then we can go ahead and expand there. If there’s a good gamewe can go there as well and we can activate the local communities, be it like the more hardcore players, let’s say in the very competitive games or more mass adoption for a casual game. We can form localized or specialized guilds for those games and for those regions. 

I think that sets us up to scale across the entire ecosystem and also expand into web2 as well. What’s the scale for that? If you think one blockchain, maybe you’re thinking of 100,000s, millions of users. But if you can think about a social layer that spans across all of the chains and all of the games, that’s when I can start to imagine tens of millions, hundreds of millions, maybe a billion users because you’re not constrained by things like block space and what kind of applications are on there.

Gabby Dizon: To add to what Shi Khai said, it’s always been one of our principles that we want to bring players to where the best games are, no matter what chain. We’ve been on Ronin for a long time. There are games on Base; Parallel for example, something that we’ve supported heavily. We’re starting to work with games on Immutable like Guild of Guardians. So we have the ability to match players’ interests with the games that interest them and then create the incentive structure for groups to come together, do quests, tournaments and just play with the games that they like. 

Lots of guilds are very active in Pixels, which we’ve been working with very closely. We have the number one guild in Axie Infinity with YGG Esports, and YGG Esports is also very active in Parallel. So there is definitely a matching between what players like and what games they’re playing.

YGG’s regional subDAOs were a big thing in 2022. Have you moved away from that now?

Gabby Dizon: When we did the SubDAO model, rather than create country versions of YGG, we thought that we would invest in founders who were local and then figure out what the best way to evolve the YGG model was. That turned out to be a good approach because the bear market was really hard and everyone had to find a way to survive and evolve the model.  So YGG Southeast Asia has now evolved to WeGG, IndiGG is now KGen (Kratos Generation), OlaGG is still very strong with a very strong esports focus in Latam so it was us saying we didn’t really know what the best way to approach those markets was and investing in strong local founders with high alignment to YGG’s mission was the best way for us to do it. I think it’s still a very early innings. They’re still around. They’re still bringing players to these games with maybe a different kind of focus in terms of which games or how they’re going to market or how they’re reaching local communities. But the thesis still stands strong, although of course we’ve really yet to see what they can do at scale.

Can YGG itself go global?

Gabby Dizon: I absolutely have massive confidence in the growth of not only guilds, but web3 gaming as well. What I look at is how free-to-play grew first in Asia. The model was invented in Korea and then extended to southeast Asia. It didn’t really catch on in the west until you started seeing on the PC side League of Legends and then on the mobile side, more western native free-to-play titles like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush. 

I think the same thing is going to happen. Some of the best web3 games right now are being created in places like South Korea and Vietnam, though we do have very strong game developers from the west as well, right? Like some of them, like Gabe Leydon, one of the pioneers of free-to-play. Some of them are coming from a more crypto native background like Pixels. So I do think it will catch on maybe later in the west because western gamers are more resistant to changes in business models and they want to see a game that is attuned for western markets succeed first before accepting it. But I do think that apart from southeast Asia, it’ll grow in the rest of Asia in the next couple of years.

How is what you’re doing with the Guild Achievement Model different to social farming and engagement activity we’re seeing from the likes of Mon Protocol, Mocaverse, Forge, Carv etc?

Shi Khai: I know Gabby has a lot of thoughts here, but I’ll start off. We have been seeing more and more people trying to tackle the problem of distribution. There are many kinds of ways to spin it, so firstly, that’s great validation that this problem is a huge pain point. And we definitely need people to come and address it.  What YYG has done, and this is from the culture that Gabby has set, is one that’s inclusive and welcoming and generous. I see sometimes that certain founders can be quite competitive and they’d be like, no, no, we’re the best. But from what I can see with YGG and Gabby, it’s let’s work together and find a way to grow the pie. Web3 has a certain culture of this composability and openness, right? It is the players who build the strongest goodwill, reputation, branding that will succeed in the space.

There’s also a certain kind of Lindy effect for founders who have persisted through the cycles. Whereas hey, there’s this new distribution platform, you can farm these many points, get this many airdrops. How sustainable is that? How do you know what the motives of these founders are? Whereas you can see that YYG has persisted, has been working alongside the games, the communities, and will continue to build throughout the years, so there’s a certain kind of comfort and stability there. 

Gabby Dizon: I can talk about this all day. First of all, I’m an investor in Forge, in Mocaverse, and Mon Protocol, and a few others like that, so I have a lot of thoughts on these. One of the core principles that I’ve been tracking is that quests are web3-native ad networks. That’s a very basic thesis, which you can see not just in the YGG, not just in these three protocols that you mentioned, but a lot of other kinds of engagement networks as well.

If you think about what the core web2 ads are, you have the display ad. You have the Facebook install ad or a search ad is basically a blurb or an image and then click something and then get to install. In crypto, the native ad unit is you do something and you get a reward – you do X, get Y.  That means everyone has to do some kind of engagement network to get distribution. 

There’s going to be different ways in which these networks will do distribution. For example, YGG wants to aggregate groups and then bring them to games together and then specialize in different types of work or tasks and then note that into reputation. Someone like Forge is trying to aggregate what your web2 gamer data looks like and then try to match that with web3 games. So there’s a different approach and the beauty of what all of these do in aggregate and what Shi Khai was saying is the interoperability. This is why we’re a big believer of soulbound tokens. 

We think of soulbound tokens as the web3 cookies. It’s players putting their things that they’ve done onchain, in a wallet that they own and showing the reputation they want to show. It’s not just your reputation with YGG that matters. You can take a look at the reputation from different games. You can take a look at reputation in DAOs in different protocols. That gives a very good overview of what kind of player you are in the web3 space. That also gives other protocols, whether it’s games or others a picture of who you are. Do we want to acquire you as a user? What do we want to offer you to go into our protocol? 

I think this is where the space is heading, reputation starts to matter more, especially if you’ve seen different types of airdrop campaigns with different quality, different success rates. What’s been lacking is reputation. Now you can see airdrops being targeted towards certain communities. I think you’ll be seeing them targeted towards more specific actions, more specific reputation.

If I put my VC hat on, don’t I then say YGG is an ad network pretending to be a guild, so maybe we should get rid of some of the guild stuff and just become a social ad network?

Gabby Dizon: There’s something you touch upon there – an ad network pretending to be a guild. I would like to think of ourselves as a very human-centric ad network, someone who values individuals and cares about them not as a faceless daily active user, but someone who has a reputation, who’s part of a group, who likes something, who has certain skills. I think that’s what the future of ad networks should be, is valuing people for who they are and what they’ve done. Maybe the term ad network is the incorrect one and all ad networks will want to become guilds because guilds are the self-owned decentralized ad network, the future of ad networks.

Isn’t that the problem with web2 in particular, that they’ve reduced humans to faceless metrics? If you’re thinking about Facebook or Google, you’re only thinking about cohorts or even whole countries as an aggregate. A person is reduced to what’s your retention? What’s your LTV? What’s your car? In web3, what we’d like to do is bring back some of that face by asking what have you done? What have you accomplished? What skills do you have? And then matching that to your interests. 

The value exchange is still the same business model as an ad network. An ad network is basically matching someone who wants to do something and someone who wants to pay for it. And that’s the guild’s business model as well. But now we’re grouping people into interests, into skills, into reputation sets, and then bringing that into places where they can use it because people are willing to pay for it.

Can you talk a bit about how YGG has worked with Pixels?

Gabby Dizon: We started engaging with Pixels when they were still on the Polygon network. The way we identified them was because our players constantly mention Pixels as a game that they want to put in our Guild Advancement Program. We worked with them and brought some quests over for two seasons of GAP. Our guilds were already active in Pixels around maybe six to eight months before the move to Ronin. 

The guilds that were working with us had an advantage because they were already familiar with the game. They had some built-in reputation and assets and that enabled them to speed up the process once it was on Ronin. A lot of our communities already had Ronin wallets. Once Pixels got on Ronin, the usage really lined up. There’s a high fit between its gameplay and the community base of Ronin, which is strong in emerging markets. The game is highly accessible and easy-to-play. You don’t need any complicated tutorials to get started. Second, you don’t need to download an app. You can play from a mobile browser. It’s also a very social game. Pixels recently released their guilds and YGG is featured, teaching people to join Pixels’ guilds. We collaborated with them to teach people the value of guilds within Pixels. I think it will probably be one of the leading, but not the only game that’s leading web3 adoption in this cycle.

Shi Khai: If I may add to that, I think there’s more to the secret of the success of Pixels. They are one of the most crypto-native and also actively composable games out there. They actively integrated dozens of PFPs, be it on Ronin, outside Ronin, other games like Treeverse, PFPs like CyberKongz. Mocaverse is there as well. You can use meme tokens like PEPE to buy stuff in-game. When other games launch, they have these little side quests, so Mocaverse had their own little side quests, CyberKongz had their own map. Pixels is actively embracing the ecosystem of web3. It’s not like, I’m building my own little game on my own little island. It almost makes Pixels feel like the hangout space of all the other games and crypto and I think we’re missing that kind of casual MMO hangout space. Pixels might start to become that.

Find out what YGG gets up to via its website.

In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Steve Wade, the CEO of Midnight.

From a career ranging from gold farming in Ultima Online to building communities for F2P PC games, building payment systems, and working in investment banking, Wade came up with the concept for the Evergreen multiverse in 2021 because “I wanted to think of something that was so ridiculously hard and challenging that no-one would pitch it to investors”.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast via the Fountain app and earn Bitcoin.

BlockchainGamer.biz: Can you tell us a bit about your career so far?

Steve Wade: Anyone who takes a look at my Twitter, I have one message pinned; it’s the August 1997 issue of PC Gamer Magazine, where this game Ultima Online attracted me. 

You could live in a fantasy world and fight dragons. I got the game at release, I jumped into it, got pretty good at it. I started joining esports tournaments and making some money. But I eventually realized that while esports is fun, and as much as fun as it was back in the day to log around massive desktops to all these esports tournaments, it was way easier just to set up a bot on my computer to farm gold.

And that’s what I did when I was 15 to 19. I paid for university by farming gold in 26, 27 different MMOs. It was fantastic. I love the idea that people could pay time for money. The whole idea was digital currency, digital real estate. One of the funnest things was that I was selling houses. I would buy a house or build a house in MMO and flip it after I added some fun decorations. I’ve always loved the idea of digital ownership.

Totally against the EULAs of course. How many accounts did you get shut down?

Many, many accounts. The final nail in that coffin was in 2002 when eBay shut us down. It was fine to open accounts on the various MMOs because you would always make your money back. But eBay said, no more gold selling, so we had to go to these grey markets. I did run one. I had the third largest gray market in North America for a time. But it was difficult.I was just starting university and so I thought we have to figure out how do we legitimize ourselves? We had like 75,000 members in our forums, our IRC chat, ICQ chat. We had a large community, what can we do with this community? We ended up signing Guild Wars and World of Warcraft as our first two legitimate clients. We built communities for them and left the gold farming behind us. 

I wish I hadn’t because people became billionaires at that and we slugged it out by actually working. But it ended up working well. We did some of the first free-to-play games in the US working with Aeria Games. They acquired my gold farming business because they wanted the community and I guess some of my expertise. But what we realized early on is that a pure marketplace allowing players to trade items with each other isn’t enough to support a company. You still had to have the games make money. Taking 2 to 5% on transactions wasn’t enough. 

I pivoted into investment banking for about five and a half years, closed 20 deals, and ended up working with Shrapnel, and I thought I’m going to jump back in. So in December 2021, we started Midnight.

What was the concept for Midnight?

It took me a good two months to come up with the concept, because I wanted to think of something that was so ridiculously hard and challenging that no-one would pitch it to investors. I think what you have in the VC community – and I’m fairly public about this: my investors are great, but for all the other investors who have never invested in Midnight – I think you have this really bad focus group.

If you go to the VC community, they’re gonna cut a lot of bad ideas, but they’re also going to cut a lot of good ideas. What you’ve left with is this middle great mush of gaming ideas. I wanted to take something that was believable to fit into that great mush but also something that no-one else has done. Everything that we’ve started building over the past two years, we’re either the first mover or we’re a category leader. So I feel pretty good that we identified what the problems were and we’re starting to see that now. 

At GDC, we saw triple-A games have been dying for a while, free-to-play is difficult, especially on mobile. What is becoming a trend – which we’ve been pushing for the last two years – is small premium titles. Games that cost anywhere from one to say 10 million. Two games came out that have done this quite well. Palworld and Helldivers 2.  And that’s the space in which we’ve been building games for the last two years. The goal for us is to get a game out a month. and you can’t do that if you’re doing triple-A.

Releasing one game a month is a lot. How parallel is your development?

We’ll probably do a couple of games every quarter until we can get to one game a month. But it’s happening now with companies like Team17, right? They did 26 games last year. I think Curve Digital did like 16. Yes, they’re publishers, so we’re looking for what I would call first to second party titles for one game a month, and we will do third party publishing too. The first and second party games, they’re like experiences. They’re more integrated into the overall story and then the third party games will be rides. They’re still part of the story but they’re not as in depth. 

One thing that’s unique to Midnight is every game is their own walled garden. Every game should be able to stand on its own, every game should be profitable on its own. Most premium games have a three-to-six month lifespan. We believe our model is going to increase that to nine-to-12 months, but games die every once in a while. An evergreen will last two, three, 10 years. We’re not going to run away from those. We’ll chase success but we came into this fully knowing that games will die. Games are a hard business. To get eyeballs for a game, discoverability is still a massive, massive issue that not very many people have figured out to solve. We like a challenge.

So some games will be tightly coupled. Some more diverse. What holds everything together?

I use the term multiverse just because I like the way the Midnight multiverse sounds. I don’t like metaverses, but I like multiverses. 

We want to figure out, how can we lean into web3? How can we bring utility items? How can we create a marketplace between games? My background in selling items and having the trading platform, the amount of users trading is fairly small, right? You have a subset of a subset of users that actually want to trade. I think that subset can be increased if it’s at the forefront and it’s not in a grey market. I don’t think it’s enough to support a game studio. You still have to have a business. You still have to have a game business. 

What we like about doing multiple games is players are willing to spend in their primary game. Once a user has a game they like, they’re gonna stay. You probably don’t want to move them out. But say they want a black t-shirt and the only way to get that black t-shirt is by playing a fishing game. They don’t like fishing games but the people who do like fishing games can sell black t-shirts to those who want them. That’s what we’re thinking. How do we make a circular ecosystem for games?

We have a fairly neat system we call our interoperable item keys. That’s why the Evergreen logo is a keyhole. Keys for us are very much like GameSharks of the past. They are game mods, right? We love what Overwolf does with game mods. They’re an investor. We love the idea that you can change things. This is one of the things we think is going to let our games go past those three-to-six months. Users can come and bring their mods and change the game. 

At the base level, what we call semantic interoperability, is just a simple tag system where a game developer could come in and say This item is blue, so it’ll have a blue tag on it. Maybe it makes things fast, it’ll have a fast tag on it. Then other game developers can see that list of our first 42 tags and they’re like, I like strength or I like speed or I like the color blue, so let’s bring that in. Maybe it unlocks quests. Maybe it’s cosmetics. IP holders seem to like this because you can’t license Shrek to every single game but if you go to the IP holder, and say I want Shrek, but he’s only going to be in two games. Here’s a Shrek item. If someone destroys it, because we have the crafting system, then they get all the parts that make up Shrek. Green, strength, smells bad. Take your pick. But then that item can move around the games. The dev teams seem to like it because it’s a fairly light lift. We’re not asking them to change their game. We’re asking them to look inside of our drop-down menu. Those are the rides. I think the experiences are a little more in depth.

We have a mobile companion app that links everything together. So there is an overall story that moves forward, but the story is secondary to the first game. We’re saying 75% of users are going to play a game, just that game. They’re not going to care about the secondary market of item sales or the secondary story that is Evergreen. 

They’re like I like 2D pixel brawlers, or I like fishing games, or I like Barbie dress-up games. They’re going to come, they’re going to play that game. We’re making niche games for niche users but eventually 30-some percent will have to intermingle. And that’s always been the fun in MMOs for me, you get people interacting with each other that normally wouldn’t.

So you’re going to have a lot of niche games but is there enough to draw these players into the central hub?

Water always finds the path of least resistance. As we build games, we’re going to figure out what that is and how to support users the best way we can. But when we looked at this, we looked at these different web3 companies building metaverses that essentially were empty shopping malls. I think it’s very difficult to build an MMO. It’s three plus years and a hundred million dollars. Whereas a double-A game is less than a year, sometimes a couple of hundred grand, maybe a couple of years and five million for the big ones. On the flip side, a successful MMO can return an entire fund’s investment. So we’re looking for the upside of an MMO without the downside of the development cost. 

That’s how we came to our idea of a deconstructed MMO. There’s only a finite amount of users for any MMO. It’s actually difficult to find new users. But we have these niche games with niche users who actually widen the funnel. We say that with Midnight, there’s something for everybody. Our goal isn’t to get everyone to play every game. Ideally, we have 12 games a year. A user might like two, three, maybe four of those games max.

We don’t expect them to play all of the games. But it does help us get down to that lower funnel. The cost for user acquisition is much lower too. Niche games for niche users, but you’ll get a bunch of them. Maybe one game only has a TAM of a hundred million dollars, but then you get 10 of those, then you have a billion dollar product with 10 games. That’s the idea. But we don’t want to push web3. It should never feel forced, only that we’re offering benefits. 

How many games are you developing now?

We have four games in development and we’re looking at buying others. Traditional web 2 is in trouble. A lot of studios are shutting down. I was an M&A investment banker, in special circumstances, so I wasn’t coming into companies when everything was great, so that’s what I’m looking at. We’ve got two offers out now for five to six additional games so we can have a strong portfolio. We’re looking at publishing deals, we’re looking at studio acquisitions, we’re happy to look at team acquisitions. I’ve got to assume there’s teams coming out of Riot or Bungie or some other studio that can knock something out, especially with AI and these tools. We look at a new AI tool every day. I’m just amazed by the speed. It’s going to make some massive changes in the next couple of years.

How is blockchain fundamental to what you’re doing?

I think what we’re doing is more interesting for blockchains because we’re working with a bunch of different studios so we have to have a shared database to get everyone talking. For something like Roblox or Fortnite, you don’t need a blockchain. They’re their own walled ecosystems, but we’re linking multiple games, multiple developers, hopefully across chains at some point. We’re not trying to find a problem to solve. There is a problem which blockchain solves. Let’s use it.

To me, it sounds like you’ve come up with a business model but how can you be sure any of the games are going to attract an audience?

I think that’s a compliment because the way that we looked at this was every month there’s a new web3 game being announced but I sat down and thought where’s blockchain going to be in the next five years. Let’s build a business model from what we know has been around for five years already. If we have sustainable revenue. Cash is king. As long as we have a revenue source, we can do things and we want to be very excited about what we’re doing. We’re making real games that people can have fun with. And from that approach we can do fun things with web3, where web3 is not our business model, where it’s not required to keep the studio’s lights on. 

And in that model, we hope to find the next Shrapnel or the next big game, because hits still make moves in the game industry. I don’t think anyone could deny that. So maybe one game in 30 has a chance of being a hit. One in a hundred will be a blockbuster. We’re very conservative in our model.

Where are you now in terms of roadmap?

We’re going to announce our chain partner in the next two weeks. Ideally, it’s a cross -chain community, so even if we just pick one chain, we can still do things with other chains. Our mobile companion app is live on iOS and Android. People can start farming for NFTs in our airdrops. We’re looking at June for our TGE. We’re lining up with exchanges. Exchanges are incredibly busy. There’s something like 60 game tokens coming out this summer.

For me, tokens are just another asset class. Just another way for me to make more games. Whether it’s a token or maybe I’ll do a SPAC, whatever cash gets through the door, I can make games. 

And we’re looking at October right now to release the first couple of games. 

Find out about what Midnight is building via its website and check out the Evergreen whitepaper here.