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Portal Panel 01: Helping Web3 Games Solve Distribution
Recorded: Nov. 21, 2023 Duration: 0:49:31Space Recording
Full Transcription
I don't know.
You can think about it, one, as vampire attack.
So if you're trying to grow your particular ecosystem or your app chain or your project,
you want to attract more users that are familiar with their native chains.
So, for example, Solana users are very tribalistic and they're just very familiar with their gas token and with their wallets and the community of applications there.
Again, if you're trying to overcome friction, the last thing you want to do is to try and force or win a user over to hard migrating to some other ecosystem.
So how do you meet them where they are?
And if you expand chain compatibility or you build in a more chain agnostic way, you can extend the pathways into your application to other networks.
So that's just like of the existing pot, how do you attract more users and more communities?
Another interesting example of this was DeFi Kingdoms, which is a very legacy on chain gain, used layer zero to expand to Clayton.
And Clayton is a somewhat lesser known chain in North America, but in South Korea is one of the most prominent chains.
Many of the most widely adopted games are built on Clayton and it's sort of like the South Korea chain.
So for them, expanding geographically was part of their or interoperability was part of their strategy for expanding geographically.
And then I think in terms of onboarding net new users, integrating infrastructure so that what your assets in game, like in game currency, in game artwork, accessories, all of this, having that be truly chain agnostic is just important for onboarding web to or non crypto native users.
What I said before, can you abstract away some of this complexity and need for esoteric knowledge, the concept of interoperability is really just ensuring that enabling information to have meaning in disparate systems and with interoperability, you can then build things that are composable elsewhere.
So for you all in the portal ecosystem, it's now possible for there to be things that have meaning in one game and also the same meaning in some other game.
The portal coin is a great instance of this.
Coolin, JC, do you have anything to add there?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I love interoperability and it's very compatible with the gaming business itself.
So I want to introduce the game named Rumble Racing Star.
So we invest the company named D-Labs and they are making this Mario Kart-like game.
So this is a, so it includes BAYC and Goblin Town characters in the game and which generate a lot of interest and engagement from the community.
And they have to do what's just purchasing this PFP on the market.
So they don't need to have a call with Yuga Labs.
They don't need to have a MOU and have some contract with that group.
So we can do some permissionless collaboration by buying these NFTs.
So this type of permissionless collaboration will play a key role in games success.
Yeah, really interesting.
And Kuli, how are you thinking about interoperability from a chain perspective as well?
Yeah, this is something I think about.
It's actually part of the reason that Solana is sort of the ecosystem that I spent at least the last few years of my career supporting is because I'm a huge believer in the power of having, like, if you think about what is a blockchain sort of at some fundamental level, it's sort of like a slow database.
But why do people care so much about a slow database? Because, well, it has some interesting properties.
You get some sort of decentralization benefits and security benefits.
Arguably, most gamers don't care about those at all.
So the thing that the slow database that is a blockchain gives you is some openness.
It gives you a sort of shared standard in which the game's assets and maybe the game's logic are encoded.
And that openness means that other people can build on top of it and permissionless way.
So JC sort of gave one really cool example, which is sort of like I think what Irene was mentioning earlier around like vampire attacking.
Like one way you can a game developer can leverage interoperability is you can basically give assets that other people have created value in your game.
So you can give Bored Apes or you can give like, you know, DGEN Apes or pick your favorite sort of monkey JPEG project.
They can be skins in your game or they can give you some sort of, you know, XP boost in your game.
And that's a way for you to do user acquisition to the crypto native audience that has assets.
So that's sort of one direction, which I think is really awesome.
And the good thing about this one is that like, to JC's point, you don't have to ask anyone.
You don't have to do a bunch of work to like get people to agree to it.
You just do stuff.
And both sides should be happy.
If you sort of like created Bored Apes, you're like, wow, like this other project is creating value for my NFTs for free.
This is great.
And then the other project, right, it's like it's a target user acquisition thing.
So that's a really cool use case.
The other one I'd say is it's lesser on assets and more on logic.
So one of the things actually that we at the foundation are trying to cultivate more of is experimentation with on-chain games.
And the reason for that is that, and when I say on-chain games, what I mean is games where the state and logic are also on-chain.
So it's not just the assets.
And this is sort of a pretty experimental thing, but the reason I'm going on this tangent is because this is sort of like interoperability, I think that's at its best, is where gamers can take some of the core logic of the game and actually tweak it to their liking.
Because that's already what gamers do.
Like if you look at some of the most successful games today, they are not the original games that game developers created, they're mods.
So whether it was sort of Dota 2 that spawned League of Legends or actually a number of other Dota mods have also, or sorry, Warcraft mods have also been pretty successful.
Another example of this would be like with World of Warcraft, this sort of one of the most popular modes of the game now is a game where the Blizzard copied after they realized that a ton of people were playing them on private servers.
So today there's this thing called World of Warcraft Classic, which is basically Blizzard relaunching the original game from like 20 years ago to new servers.
And the reason they did this is because they realized that a bunch of private servers were doing this because like a lot of gamers like the nostalgia factor.
And so they did that.
And then what they realized is that, oh, not only do people like playing sort of classic WoW from 20 years ago, they actually like playing classic WoW in which you have permadeath, where the game logic is actually that you can't respawn.
Because that makes everything very high stakes, like everything you do like matters a ton.
Because if you mess up once you're dead and that's over and your character is gone, you start over.
And so anyways, the reason I'm going on this whole long thing is that this is an example where you sort of a game developer launched a game.
And then the community looked at the game like, yeah, this is great. Actually, what we like is like this sort of iteration of it, this remix of it.
And, you know, in the case of Blizzard, the way they remixed it is they sort of did private servers and it wasn't really legitimate and Blizzard copied it.
But with on-chain games, you have the ability to maybe make this like a permissible thing where people can experiment and actually go ham and we see what happens.
So that's the other piece of interoperability that I'm pretty excited about and hopefully we'll see more of in the coming months and years.
Amazing. Thank you so much for that perspective.
I suppose one final question to wrap up here.
I know, Irene, you've got a jump.
So I'd like to kind of firstly, just before we kind of go through this final question, just thank the fellow speakers here.
Irene from layer zero clean from Solana and JC from planetarium.
I think it's it's been really interesting for everybody to hear about how others are approaching interoperability and cross chain and distribution in general.
And I think it's going to be really interesting to see how our four way partnerships work together in the future.
To kind of close it off, just just one final question.
We'd love to kind of if we can just keep it short, snappy answer as well.
We'd love to just kind of get each of yours and starting with you, Irene, your your predictions for how the next influx of mainstream games are going to be onboarded.
Oh, that's a great question.
And hi, I'm thinking back to the two weeks or three weeks I spent in Asia this September, Korea and Singapore.
I think the most exciting games that we have yet to hear about will be coming out of some of the really large gaming studios in Korea.
They are way more risk tolerant than I thought are actually funding large development teams are quite sophisticated and thinking about interoperability and understand that thesis around using different chains like different microservices or programming languages and care about selecting their infrastructure from a a like true technology and security first perspective rather than pure commercials.
And I think for the last two years, we've been seeing a lot of large gaming deals be purely driven by like cash or grants.
So I'm so, so excited about that.
I will be teasing a few titles in particular I'm excited about.
And of course, Nine Chronicles is a team that we've been bullish on just for so long.
And that title is incredibly impressive.
Thank you, Irene.
Colleen, do you want to add to that?
Yeah, I actually think so.
I don't have one answer.
One of my few rules of crypto is you never say never and like my ability to predict the future is very poor.
So I try not to do it.
But a few of my guesses.
Absolutely.
Asia is one of them.
Like I think the Korea and other parts of Asia have always been like leaders in sort of the where gaming is headed.
And I think in Web3, that's likely to be the case again.
We're already seeing it.
Some other potential, maybe slightly lower probability outcomes.
One is sports betting slash like real money games.
This is sort of a very different type of games.
But if there's one thing crypto is very good for, it's things that are gambling or gambling adjacent.
So I think that could actually be one way we actually get a ton of people to play games, even if not exactly the kinds of games that casual gamers play.
And then the last answer I'll give is on chain games, as I mentioned.
And then the last thing I'll say to the audience is I'm truly sorry for the barking.
It's not my dog.
My dog is much better trained than that.
It's my parents, 12 year old deaf dog who's barking at the people cutting the grass outside.
So sorry.
And thank you for bearing with me.
Your dog wants portal outfit, clearly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks so much, Colleen.
And JC, over to you for the final remark.
Your prediction on how mainstream games will be will be will be brought into.
I'm happy to.
So since I'm Korean, I fully agree with Irene's take.
So I'm also working with lots of Korean giants gaming company.
And the interesting thing is that as all of the public listed Korean gaming company that they have,
they have their own.
So actually gaming project.
And I don't not only starting their rest of your project as a experimental level.
They also using their core IP to to their new extra gaming project right now.
So I think the contents can lead this semester adoption first.
And if even if the app store and Google Play stores that the existing distribution platform.
So denied to working with them.
So they can they can drive the another distribution platform to to expand their best gaming experience to their gamers.
I think that would be it would be happened in less than one or two years.
So it's very near term right now.
Amazing.
Well, thank you so much, JC, for the closing remark again.
Just wanted to show our appreciation and thank the speakers again.
It's been a really great chat.
As I said, this this is the first of hopefully many portal panels to keep your eyes peeled there.
A little bit of info to share as well.
So from tomorrow, we will be beginning to reward our community for their devotion.
So keep tuned.
Keep your eyes peeled.
I know you're also looking for alpha.
And I can assure you that the moment is coming much sooner than you think.
Have a good evening and a good day.
We're gonna have a good evening.
Take a look.
Let's take a look.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
