Hello and good morning. Good afternoon and good evening wherever you are. Thank you so much for joining our X space today about action oriented gaming on suite with Amber Studio and block us.
We will get started in just a couple minutes. We'll give people just a little bit more time to hop into the space and we'll get kicked off soon. Thanks all for being here.
Thank you so much for joining us today. We will get started in just a few minutes.
Hi everyone, I'm Wayne Cunningham from SWE and welcome to our X space. Today we're talking competitive gaming on SWE and just a quick plug. If you're going to be in San Francisco for GDC, the game developer conference come to our suite gaming summit on Tuesday, March 19th, you can sign up for the SWE website at www.swe.com.
You can sign up at go.swe.io slash SWE dash gaming dash summit. That's go.swe.io slash SWE dash gaming dash summit. Now on to competitive gaming. Multiplayer online battle arena games are very popular and very fun. They're fast paced and give players a chance to test their skills against people from around the world.
Modern game engines deliver remarkable gameplay and physics and they need a platform that can keep up. The SWE network scales and delivers an industry leading throughput. Joining me today to talk about this competitive gaming, our game builder, Andras Studio and game infrastructure provider Blockus.
And we also have representatives from Mr Labs with the founders of SWE. So let's start out with introductions. First we have Johnson from Ambrus studios. Can you tell us a little bit about Ambrus and your role there?
Of course. Well, hi, my name is Johnson. I'm the founder and CEO for Ambrus studio. I'll do a quick intro of myself. I spent most of my career with McKinsey, the consulting firm before gained in the gaming industry in 2015.
So I started as the head of East Force for Riot Games in China and then literally, you know, was able to work together with the team to make League of Legends eSports China's largest sport.
We end up broadcasting 6 billion hours every year, making us larger than the local basketball and soccer league as well as NBA in China.
So I know I became all the way to became Asia CEO for Riot with that capacity. And then I left in 2019, did a passion project on the environment before starting Ambrus studio at the end of 2021.
So I started Ambrus with the vision to build the bridge between Web 2 to Web 3. So what is a genre that can really get a lot of audience from Web 2 to really come into Web 3?
So I decided to build in my comfort zone, which is the MOBA genre. So I'm building E4C Final Salvation, free to play, not pay for power MOBA in mobile.
And, you know, I definitely want to talk more about what we're doing more today.
Thank you, Johnson. And let's go to Blockas studio represented here by Michael and Yen. Michael, can you tell us a little about Blockas?
Hey, yeah. So quick background about myself. I'm one of the co-founders here at Blockas.
I started a career out in Silicon Valley and started my crypto career at a company called Takomi, which was bridging the gap between traditional finance and Web 3 finance and crypto finance.
So I found my way to Coinbase and found that a lot of the issues that players were having and bringing them into the Web 3 space is onboarding.
And how do you get integrated without dealing with all of the problems that the Web 3 world and the U.S. issues that kind of plague the entire ecosystem?
So that was kind of the genesis for Blockas. And our goal here is to make it as easy as possible for game studios to make their dreams come true and implement something that's engaging
and brings new experiences to players and also for players to be able to onboard without having to go through a million steps.
And all of us here know about the pretty atrocious user flows and high drop off rates that result from it. So trying to get rid of all of that.
Great. Thank you, Michael. And we also have Dee and James from Mystic Labs. Dee, can you talk a little bit about what Mystic Labs does with Ambrose and Blockas?
Of course. Yeah. So my name is Dee and my partner in Prime James and I are both from the Mystic Partnerships team.
I came from a big tech background. DevRel on the Apple App Store side, BD Partnerships from ByteDance and Facebook Gaming.
Android Web 3 have been here with Mystic for about a year now. It's been a wonderful ride.
We're working with amazing partners like Blockas, like Amber Studio, on launching some of the most amazing technologies as well as user experiences.
So on the partnership side, we have been just working step by step and along with the development teams on how to help these games go to market, how to help them find additional growth experience.
Once the product has reached the audiences. And also we all carry the same goal of reaching the masses, bringing quality gaming content, bringing quality developer tooling to the mass of the general communities.
Great. Thank you, Dee. Johnson, I want to go back to you to talk about E4C Final Salvation. You described it as a MOBA. Can you get into the gameplay, what a player is going to experience in this game?
Of course. So first of all, people will feel like the MOBA space is very heavily competed. That's true, especially on the PC side, as League of Legends is still by far the most dominant player there.
But on mobile MOBA, actually, there's only four big incumbents, Honor of Kings, AOV, MLBB, and WoW Rift.
And they're actually only strong in China, Southeast Asia, Latin, Russia. But there's still a lot of empty space.
So I decided that, yes, there's empty space in the US, in Europe, Japan, Korea, but there's also a lot of empty space in all the low tier emerging markets.
But in order to tap into those markets, these guys have never played like a medium core game. So we need it to be very, very different.
So we decided that E4C Final Salvation, yes, it's going to be on mobile. Yes, it's going to be natively billed for low tier emerging markets, so that it will run on 150 dollar phones.
But more importantly, it needs to be shorter and faster. So each game of ours is just 10 to 12 minutes.
It needs to be easier to get into and harder to master at the same time so that we can more easily attract people to come into the game, but still have long term retention for our users and for our user to be able to still have fun after one game, 10 games, a thousand, 10,000 games.
So we've changed the gameplay significantly from Like a Wild Rift or Honor of Kings to allow for that. Just a few highlights. For example, we made our game 3v3 instead of the traditional 5v5. It's now two lanes.
We took out all the difficult things to understand, high barrier things like summoner spell, like runes, like the weapon system.
But we've designed a very, very unique two champion system to make the game a lot more fun, to give you infinite combinations possible, many ways to outmaneuver your opponent, many personal highlight moments that you can achieve.
So that's the big innovation that we put into our game and how we think we can really differentiate ourselves from these traditional MOBA incumbent players while being really, really tailored to the target audience that we are trying to get to.
People develop a lot of, I guess, ownership over their characters or identification with their characters. How much customization can a player do with their character in E4C?
First of all, it will be a journey. It will continue to evolve more and more. But our vision is that we can almost call it as an infinite personalization of skins.
So traditional League of Legends, Honor of Kings, they sell skins. But then there's not that much customization, right? These are all mass market skins that everyone can buy. Yes, it does. There's a lot of them. There's like thousands of them and you can pick from any of them.
But these are not unique. These are not time limited with fleeting availability. These are not verifiable rare. Most of the time, they don't have specific emotional attachment to it.
So we decided that we're going to sell skins much more like a CSGO, much more like a Dota 2. We're going to do it in a way that's making our skins really verifiably unique, making it more infinitely personalized, making it really attached to something, making them really something that can represent yourself, your own experience.
Something that you care about, a memory about someone that you really are a big fan of. And then we decided to create a skin system like that. It's not like we're going to get there on the first day, but we will eventually get there.
And we hope that this model of more decentralized, more personalized skin customization will really be able to tailor to player needs in these markets.
Great, thanks, Johnson. And let's quickly get into technology. What game engine are you building on and what sweet technologies are you leveraging?
So we are building on Unity. And then the sweet technology that we're leveraging is pretty much everything. We're leveraging the full sweet development suite. And then our game is actually mainly on a centralized server, but we are putting a lot of our assets on chain.
So we are leveraging pretty much all the tools that's really providing us.
Great, thanks, Johnson. And I want to go to James from Mistin on this to talk a little bit about this type of gaming in particular. James, can you comment on the type of customization that Johnson was talking about and how that would influence your adoption of games such as this?
Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everyone. I'm James. I've been playing mobile MOBA since Vainglory and tried every single one, maybe then some that Johnson already mentioned, so thrilled to be talking about.
I actually think that progression and customization or player expression is one thing that MOBA has perhaps underperformed on in, well, perhaps all the time.
It's part of the reason they're so exciting to partner with Ambre Studio because of what they're doing, both on chain, but also just cosmetically reflected in game and also being able to turn those cosmetics into something that will eventually affect gameplay or abilities and things like that.
All of that's really, really exciting and in many ways sort of a first of its kind. So the ability to progress and see the trials that you've been through reflected on your characters that you're so invested in.
In my case, it's Garen, but this new methodology of showing how far you've come in a game, particularly in this genre, is super exciting. So yeah, it's going to be a boon, I think, to any player.
And James, in playing these games, do you look to items to give you a competitive edge or do you just want it to be all about your skills?
That usually it can boil down more to... That's a great question. It's kind of match to match. It depends on things like team composition and how that's going to factor into the overall session.
Personally, I do a lot just regarding skills. That kind of is because I play certain champions that don't use mana or things like that. So it's all sort of personal strategy.
But what's really interesting that Johnson's introducing are some other mechanics that I'll probably let him speak to when it's appropriate.
Or some other mechanics outside of team composition or abilities. He already mentioned things like summoner spells. But there's different ways to tap into control of your in-game avatar that haven't just genuinely have not been explored within this genre.
And if anyone can do it, it's certainly them.
Cool. Yeah, thanks. And I do want to come back to some more of the more game mechanics of E4C and the stuff that Ambrose is working on.
But I want to get Blockos in here to talk a little bit about... First of all, Michael, can you talk about the specific services that Blockos offers to game builders?
Michael, we're not hearing you. I don't know if you're...
I think Michael may have crashed.
Oh, okay. Yan, can you talk a little bit to the subject?
Yeah, for sure. Hi, I'm Yan. I'm a founding engineer from Blockos.
So Blockos, we mainly help game studio with issues that have played Web3 Gaming both on the implementation side and the player experience side.
So Web3 needs to be at least as easy to use as Web2.
So we help game studios onboard their existing users from Web2 background to adopt the Web3 experience seamlessly.
So yeah, offer them a new smooth onboarding and also allow them to interact with NFT without learning about Web3 mechanics or fumble with wallets and exchange.
And Yan, I'd like you to go a little further into explaining maybe what Web3 offers games that can't be done in Web2.
Yeah, for sure. I think the main thing is NFTs. In Web2, the game assets, they're not owned by the players, but in Web3, Web3 technology truly enables the player to be the person that owns the assets.
And they can own the assets and then kind of rewarded by the games, or they invest the time in playing the games. So they're kind of rewarded with gaming assets.
And if they want to leave the game, they also can trade the NFTs elsewhere.
And Michael, it looks like Michael's logged back in. Michael, I just want to see if you have anything to add for what Yan said about the Blockuses services for game builders.
Yeah, sorry about that. Technical difficulties. But yeah, so exactly what Yan was saying about adding another layer to what gaming means to somebody.
And I think one of the problems right now with anything that we deal with in the digital world is that we don't really feel like we truly own it.
And if we don't really feel like we truly own it, we don't feel like it's a part of us. And so Web3 really enables people to do that.
It's something that's yours, that's truly yours. And like Johnson was saying, you can customize it. You have the ability to do things that not only in game, but out of the game as well.
And we've seen this really become powerful in the most primitive form, which is PFPs. Not trying to say anything bad about PFPs, but it's a preview into what can be done with gaming, which is building a real personality and identity around something because you own it, because you're part of this community, and because you can take it out of just your wallet and really make it a part of you.
Yeah, and personally as an RPG fan, I totally get that. You do identify your character, you want to play it through a lot of different things.
I want to go back to Yan for a minute here and talk specifically about the work you've done from Blockhouse with Ambrus Studio.
Yeah, for sure. So first of all, so Blockhouse, we offer like an out of box product for Game Studio to use. So Game Studio, we offer like a wallet solution onboarding user seamlessly and a portal for them to manage NFTs. We also offer a suite of APIs to perform on-chain solutions.
Yeah, and besides that, we're very excited to collaborate with Ambrus Studio. We work closely with their product team to actually offer solutions customized to their in-game kind of interactions and economy.
Yeah, we've been working pretty closely.
Great, thank you, Yan. And I want to get a little bigger picture look here. So I want to bring in Dee for this to talk about, and Johnson actually talked a little bit about this, about how you can reach a lot of people with mobile gaming.
So can you talk about how important it is to offer mobile versus PC games in the Web3 world?
Yeah, I think many of us in the Web3 space share the same vision of reaching the masses. And a sign of, you know, Web3 adoption maturing is when the Web3 technologies stays absolutely agnostic in the background.
Like we, you know, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, consumers don't need to be aware of that. But before we get there, I think a lot of the trailblazers right now in the space have been constantly asking themselves, you know, what's the product market fit? Why Web3?
And, you know, one recurring theme that I've been constantly hearing and I personally believe is that, you know, as the secret sauce is player ownership of assets.
So when I look at games, when we considering the entire gaming genre and what platform, what medium works well for Web3, I mean, PC and console naturally, really, they have more titles that are, you know, more perfect for asset ownership and trading.
But also in the meantime, when you look at where the players are, it is undoubtedly mobile, which has almost twice the player count as both, I believe, PC and console combined.
So the accessibility and retention are also just undeniably higher.
But I think that's one of the main reasons why we have to invest in all three of them, right? There has to be that diversity when it comes to content, but mobile just undeniably is such an effective lever when it comes to reaching the masses, reaching the broader gamers.
The audiences, it is such an easy kind of behavioral building, behavioral pattern building for them as well. It's easier for them to engage, to access, to be part of the community.
So we're also I think another interesting sign is that we're also seeing more and more quality games coming, you know, to mobile and more and more cross play titles coming to mobile.
So the lines are blurring more and more as well, like take Genshin Impact as an example. I'm a big player myself.
I play it on both PS5 and mobile. At the end of day, I think mobile is a great opportunity for me to just stay close to the game and just really be more engaging and be able to come back easily to the community.
Yeah, and you got me thinking, too. Well, Johnson also mentioned that a phone can be a lot cheaper than a PC. And also, we always have our phones with us. So if you want to stop and play your game anywhere, you can do it. You probably don't have your PC with you all the time.
I want to keep you on the line here. What are the biggest challenges for Web 3 game builders, do you see?
I think one of the biggest learning curve there is the development language. I work with many, many of our gaming partners. And a lot of them do tell me that, hey, I just don't have a move developer. I don't know how to get started.
I don't really know what are the tools necessary, who I should get connected. Maybe there are services, but there are a little decentralized. I need to talk to this person and that person, and the bills racks up quickly.
So I think for some developers, it's really one, you just can't invest in the deeper kind of having a deeper knowledge or having a dedicated web 3 developer on the team, which is understandable, which is why that teams like Blockas is really helpful in terms of helping our developer communities throughout the world.
Helping our developer community bring their product to Web 3 without really having to go too deep onto the technicality of the move language, for example.
So I think that could be one of the hurdles that is one of the hurdles that we hear about from our builders.
Great, thanks Dee. And Michael, I want to get your opinion on this. When you're working with game developers, how do you show them what they can do on Web 3 that they may not be aware of?
Yeah, good question. It's a new paradigm in a lot of ways, so there's a lot to learn. It's a fast-moving industry, as everybody knows. And so it's a lot to learn, it's a lot to keep up with.
And so kind of similar to what Dee was saying, there's a lot of new things to learn, and that's both on the technical side as well as on how you deal with tokenomics and in-game economies.
On the technical side, before you kind of had a pretty limited or a pretty set framework to do things. You have a game engine, you have a game server, you have a database, and that's kind of the scope that you're working with.
Now you kind of expand that out to what are you doing on-chain versus off-chain, you have accounts and wallets, you have these new standards and new capabilities, so it's a lot to take in.
And the best way to look at it is still, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to build? Working with Johnson and his team, they come in with a vision on this kind of customization for skins, and we just talk through what can you build, what can you do with this, what would be awesome that you can do before, and we try to find a way to make that happen.
On the economy side, it's difficult because, again, before it was a fairly closed ecosystem, and now if you want to open it up and pull in a much larger economy and be able to trade outside of the game, there's a lot that you have to worry about.
And I think a lot of early games kind of both benefited from it and then fell from that as well, like Axie Infinity, you saw their ridiculous rise and prices go up, but eventually that deflated and it's a downward spiral from there.
So I have to consider how you design your tokenomics properly to avoid that from happening. So yeah, it's definitely a team effort here, and it's working together to see what we can create.
And Dee touched on something too about move developers, and move being a fairly recent language, I think move developers are in kind of short supply. Michael, can you describe the move expertise on your team?
Yeah, so we've worked with SWE for quite some time. We were connected with the team very early on, and we're kind of intrigued by the things that you could do, and all the extra capabilities that were either impossible or hard to do with EVM.
On the EVM side, they're making a lot of improvements. So you see a lot of EIPs being proposed, a lot of new capabilities coming out, but on one hand, you need some of those in order to make things happen.
And also you need to kind of wait for those to happen if they aren't possible right now. Whereas SWE, when you dive into it, you can do a lot of that from scratch from the beginning.
So being able to have that flexibility, being able to treat it like an object-oriented programming language makes things a lot easier to work with.
Thanks, Michael. And Johnson, I want to go back to you, because James mentioned some interesting things about playing in a MOBA-style game. Can you talk about that skills versus items question?
Sure. So skills is, I think, everyone goes into a competitive MOBA game wanting to prove that they have strong skills.
But many of these competitive games end up being pay-for-power games where items are super important. But in order for these games to become really high DAU, to have massive option, to have an e-sport, to have a real huge community, these needs to be non-pay-for-power games.
So that's what we're doing. We are making the game very much based on skills. We're making each game so that they have no pay-for-power. And then the items you can get is really just the skins, which is purely aesthetics, making you cooler, making you more customized.
So then for the item part, what we want to do then, at the end of the day, skins, it's exactly like clothing that you wear onto the street. So what we want to do is you have the ability to internally personalize whatever you want to wear.
Whether it's your jacket, whether it's your earring, whether it's which pants you're wearing, you can decide what you want to wear. And we want to get to a stage where you can do that literally in-game and represent you as a personality, however you want yourself to look and look cool in front of your friends, in front of people who play with you, in front of people that you care about.
So that's the item within these MOBA games. And when you play so many hours, League of Legends players, for example, on average, play 25 hours per month in our game. So we want to make sure that you have the ability to internally personalize how you look in our game.
Cool. And without getting into any, any stuff you might not be ready to reveal, Johnson, can you talk about like the roadmap for Amber Studios and the E4C game?
Of course. We have a lot of very exciting roadmap coming up. So just as a quick recap, we started the studio at the end of 2021. But it took us a while to find. We tried different directions.
And we started building on the current game core gameplay loop in November, 2022. So now it's 15 months into development. We finished our alpha test in January, which got extremely strong numbers, both in terms of number of participants, as well as retention numbers.
We had over 170,000 people attending our alpha. And then now we're in a phase where we're full of actions. Next big milestone is that just in a couple of weeks, we are launching a mini mode within our game called E4C Fallen Arena.
It is, it is just the offshoot of our game, a three minute brawler game to allow players to enjoy the E4C ecosystem. So, you know, treat it as almost like the ARAM to summoners rift. It is going to be our way to engage our web3 audience in the short run.
And then we planned to launch Final Salvation by end of May. So we have a lot of things going on. And that's why, you know, working very, very closely with Mr. Labs and with Blockas is so important to us.
And can you tell us what platforms? I mean, as far as mobile platforms, are you on Android, iOS?
Yes, we are. So, you know, Final Salvation for now is only on Android, but when we full launch, we're going to be on iOS as well. And then Fallen Arena, because it is just a mini game that we're launching, for now we're only on PC.
But we are fully planning for it to be on mobile. So stay tuned. We'll need to keep iterating. But, you know, we will make sure that our game is going to be platform agnostic and allow different players to engage.
Great. Thank you so much, Johnson. We're just about at time here. So I want to give you all a chance to give some final thoughts about competitive gaming and on web3 and web3 gaming in general. So Johnson, do you want to lead us off talking about your final thoughts here?
Of course. My goal is to make web3 mainstream. And I think I've seen so much arbitrage opportunity between web2 to web3. So I really hope that with whatever we are doing in E4C with what many other studios are doing, enabled by players like Blockas,
enabled by protocols like Sweet, we can together make web3 real mainstream. We can prove to the world that we can get even enhanced better player experience and get hundreds of millions of players to get into the web3 space, immerse themselves, and then realize that it is actually a better experience compared to the experience that they used to have.
And that's my goal. And I have full confidence that we will get there. And thanks a lot to the help of both of my partners here. It would not be possible without you. And of course, to our listeners, our community, it would not be possible without you.
Thank you, Johnson. And Michael, let's turn to you for any final thoughts about Blockas's work or web3 gaming.
Yeah, it's hard to follow up Johnson there. I spoke definitely in agreement with him on all aspects there about, this is really, web3 is a natural evolution of how things should be. Web1, web2, those were just kind of the first versions with the technology that we had to work with.
And chains like Sweet are unlocking new capabilities. And this is the direction that things are going. And we're super excited to see how this plays out. And yeah, very excited to work with Johnson and Misson Labs. And yeah, excited for the future.
Great. Thank you, Michael. And I want to go to Dee, finally, for our final thoughts here.
I'll let James chime in as well. James, is there anything that you want to add to?
Sure, I can go. Thanks, Dee. Yeah, no, I mean, just, it's really remarkable what Ambrus has built here, making all the correct small decisions here from everything from accessibility to short session like gameplay variety, progression, player expression, and then also making really bold decisions in terms of changing up a very tried and true formula in ways that I think will really resonate to gamers.
You know, anything from, you know, appearance to tooling format, and some other really exciting things. It's great. So, and also, you know, in terms of the decisions partnering with SWE and best in class partners like Blockus, we have, we're unbelievably excited for everyone to get their hands on this and can't wait for you all to play.
Cool. Thank you very much, James. And with that, let's end this space. Thank you all for joining. Thank you for participating. And thank you all for listening.
And thank you all for listening. And I just want to plug one more time. We're doing the SWE Gaming Summit during GDC in San Francisco on March 19. So if you want to join us there, check out the register at go.swe.io slash SWE dash gaming dash summit, that's go.swe.io slash SWE dash gaming dash summit.
All right. Thank you very much.