everyone just bringing people up. We'll get started in maybe two or three minutes.
Also, if you are on the speakers list, please request to speak.
All right. Well, we have shrapnel appear. Avalanche hopefully you can come up.
There we go. Maria, looks like we have almost everyone. Hopefully the speakers got their
invites. Hey Kingsley, just wanted to say hello. Thanks for having us up. Looks like
there's a few folks who've requested down below add in a few others. So excited for this space
today and welcome to all the gamers and web three enthusiasts and excited to hear more
from all of our games today. Absolutely. Thanks for being here. All right. Providence or did
you get your invite? All right. Well, I think it's about time to start.
And then we can start bringing people on as they come up. So I'll kick things off. Hi, welcome
everyone to the fourth episode of the tie builder series where we explore the developing
state of different blockchain ecosystems and narratives. I'm your host Kingsley and I'm
an analyst at the tie. For those of you who don't know the tie is leading information
service provider of digital assets, most known for our flagship product, the tie terminal,
which provides a breadth and depth of proprietary data and a consolidated workflow. Disclaimer,
the space is for informational purposes only and is not investment or trading advice. So
you are fully responsible for any decisions you make. This is meant to be a free flowing
conversation. So panelists, please feel free to interject at any time. And depending
on time, there may be room for community Q&A. So please feel free to tweet your questions
during the space. And yes. Could you add Ed Chang as a speaker? Yes. Maybe try Providence
one more time. I'm gonna have to I'm gonna drop the first 15 minutes, but I'll be back.
Let's let me see. Ed Chang. Yeah, his accounts currently, it looks like it's connecting right
now. So it should go through here soon. Okay, so I got confirmation that Ed Chang is
at his speaker then Providence. Can we get Sonatosturk to the stage rather than our official
account? He's our CPU and he's gonna be joined. Yes. Which which account did you say? At
sonti82 Sonatosturk. All right. Okay, I think the Twitter UI is not particularly
helpful. Yeah, I'm looking to yeah, if you're on the Providence team and just request up to be
speaker, we can add you up. All right. Well, I think I think we can jump into it. So I kick
things off. Would the panelists that are up, please introduce yourselves and give a brief
introduction of your project? Certainly, I'll I'll jump things off real quick. Hey, everybody,
my name is Kix or Nick, if you don't like internet names. And we're the team behind tilt yard. So
we're launching our avalanche subnet early next month, early to mid next month. And essentially
what we're building is an ecosystem for fully on chain games that are solely focused on competitive
PvP. So if anyone out there, if you've played fantasy sports, or you've played poker, that
kind of, you know, tournament style, you're putting money on the table, you're competing against other
people. But it's in this in this video game environment. So Midnight Heist is a is like
an auto battle or sort of like a teamfight tactics, tactics based strategy game. So yeah,
we're launching middle of next month. And next week, we'll be doing a public play test. So we'd
love for people to come by and, you know, play the game for free, check it out, see if you like it.
But yeah, that's what we're up to.
I suppose I'll go next. Hi, I'm Maria, I am product director at Pixion Games. We're building
fableborn. It's a mobile free to play game and it blends like strategic, the strategic depth of
face building with like action packed ARPG combat. So like if you imagine Clash of Clans, but then
you can actually jump in and do the raid and control the characters yourself with like
Diablo abilities. And yeah, it's PvP games. So each player builds their own base, and then they're
reading each other. Very cool. And we'll we'll kind of dig into each one of your projects in
a little bit, right right after, you know, introductions and general questions.
Shrapnel, would you would you like to go?
Yeah, hey, thanks for the invite Kingsley. This is Sneaky Che Alex behind the shrapnel account.
We're a triple A first person extraction shooter built on the avalanche, our own avalanche subnet.
We have early access coming out very, very soon, excited to be here with so many great
panelists and so many great games up here. Shout out to fableborn shout out to Providence, like
great, great products. And if you guys aren't following them, if you aren't seeing, you know,
what's going on, they both have, I believe, playable products that you can go check out.
So very exciting to be on this panel with everyone.
Yeah, sure. Can you guys hear me? So I managed to join at the very last minute.
Yes, perfect. So hi, everyone. I'm Sono Dosturk. I'm the head of studio and chief product officer
here at Dynasty. Here to talk about Providence. Excited to be here.
Well, I can I can round it out. Thanks for having me. I'm Ed Chang,
I lead gaming here at Avalanche, and I have the pleasure of working with all of these
amazing teams. So very excited to hear them share their wisdom and knowledge and thanks
Perfect. So I just want to kick things off, kind of level set with everyone,
and then kind of spur some some conversations. So what is GameFi,
and how and why is it set to disrupt the gaming industry?
I can I can get this kicked off. I know everybody has probably has
a lot of opinions as well. But I think GameFi is like this loose term,
mainly around like part of the last bull run around Playdear, but just in general,
like web three gaming is this area that we all work in, right? And I think there's a few areas
that we at Avalanche are particularly interested in. I think number one is this concept of like
truly owning your assets, right? So having this ownership over your in-game items,
being able to have liquidity on them, not being subject to kind of the walled
gardens of traditional app stores, or, you know, certain rules and regulations of a centralized
authority. I think you also can introduce the concept of in-game and open economies,
right? Where there's speculation, there's a lot of metagame that you can build on top of
these economies, sometimes with tokens, sometimes with stablecoins, all that good stuff. And the
last part that's been really interesting for us is kind of the transaction and execution layer
that blockchain can unlock, right? So, you know, everybody knows kind of this innovation of
stablecoins and being able to transmit money seamlessly across borders. You can do similar
things across, you think about games as countries, like so, composability in terms of assets and
being able to truly, you know, play whatever you want, whenever you want, and having that
liquidity and ownership over that. So yeah, I'll kick it off. Please, please fast follow any of
the games. I don't understand what's the problem with the app stores. Now we only have to pay 27%
of the fee instead of 30%. So that's a win. Something that actually I'll touch upon
probably a few times during this space today is I think there's unexplored design space
with blockchain gaming. And it quickly got hammered into like game financialization, value accrual,
ownership of assets. But like we saw with the Ubisoft exec who, you know, maybe you shouldn't
have used the words that that use being so transparent, but consumer patterns are changing
and like is ownership really a mass market interest with the usage of this of this technology. And
so I believe that the disruption will partially come from game five, but there is disruption that
has not been explored because the games haven't developed into those new design spaces. And
that's why I'm really excited for this year, because I think we'll see like games launching,
soft launching, having live ops, having like more social feature sets, and we're going to see a lot
of innovation there. Can you expand a little bit on kind of what this design space might look like?
I'm not sure how much I can share. Because like some of them are our thesis and our hypotheses
of how we're building Fableborn. We do have those areas that we're aiming to explore and like we're
starting to explore with the core design of the game. But like there's so much more that you can
do than you know, you look at MMOs and that whole open economy, and that's like a more,
how do I like a more obvious use case for this kind of technology. But I think there's a lot of
unexplored space in terms of ownership and gameplay loops that are more about economic
play and economic control, distribution of power, social play, group play, where it goes further
than you know, a leaderboard with your clan is a whole other level of depth that you can have
in the game by utilizing the technology. I will keep it there. Okay, yeah, that sounds cool. And
I think I think one of the things that I've been thinking about when it comes to game fight is kind
of like distribution of wealth or value or items or whatever over groups of people. So I think that's
a pretty cool thread that I'm excited to see how games kind of play into that going forward.
So in what ways, if any, is Gamefly distinct from other verticals of crypto? So Ed kind of mentioned
you know, composability of games. So what does this mean? And where is Gamefly different?
Yeah, great question. I mean, I think that there's, of course, there can be some
overlap between other areas, but also, you know, lots of differences. I think what's interesting
is where certain companies in this space are building towards, has huge synergies with what
we're doing in the crypto gaming space. Like when you think about like Chainlink, for example,
right? And you know, Chainlink has built this whole Oracle infrastructure. And one of the
most important things for lots of games and Gamefly experiences, right, is this concept of
on-chain randomness, right. And in the amounts that crypto games will need as we continue to expand
is like so synergistic with a company like Chainlink. And then you see other companies doing stuff with
like trying to like decentralize GPU, right, and computing power like that. And when you,
I'm in the on-chain gaming space, when you look far ahead to that, like there's
there's these wild synergies with other spaces. But I mean, I do think that we're distinct
and different, certainly from things like DeFi, right. But then there's also overlap there. When
you look at certain gaming protocols, like DeFi Kingdoms, and they have their own decks, right,
and they have this complex tokenomics structure. NFT, same thing, we have differences, right,
like people that hold profile pick projects aren't necessarily interested in,
interested in games, right. And there's plenty of people that are just focused on,
they want to buy gaming NFTs, they want to play Web3 games, that's the only thing they care about.
But even with NFTs, right, we have lots of overlap, because the whole NFT economy powers a lot of
these games. So I think like where we land is really interesting, where we're different from all
these different verticals, but we also tie in to so much of what Web3 is. And so I think those
synergies is why gaming is going to be such a powerful part of the overall crypto narrative,
or I think, you know, decades to come because of that, it just fits so perfectly into a lot of what
has been built over the past decade in crypto.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think you make a lot of great points. And I've kind of heard this tagline of
game five being the on ramp for, you know, potentially, you know, millions of users for,
you know, crypto in general, why do you think gaming is the place to focus attention? And why
do you think gaming makes such a great on ramp?
Yeah, I mean, I guess I can quickly jump in on this one, too. I mean, I think that
one of the one of the tropes of like crypto are things that, you know,
people say is that, you know, we've built so much infrastructure, right? But where are the people
coming to actually use the infrastructure? And once again, I think the gaming use case is where we
get a bunch of players that want to tap into that, that digital asset ownership, right, and are
actually going to be users of all these protocols. And like, when we think about some of the
biggest runs, like one of the primary ways that I got into NFT gaming was through Zed run,
right? And I didn't even make money on it. I think I may have lost money on it. But I had
an absolute blast playing it, right? When we look at Axie infinity, and how much that permeated
into like outside of the web three space, and there's like normal people talking about Axie
infinity, one of my good friends from the e commerce space, he barely touched NFTs. And then
I talked to him in like April of 2022. And he's like all in on an Axie infinity farm,
and he has spreadsheets, right? And he has all of these people like playing underneath
them on his accounts using his assets. So yeah, I just I just think the and I think the onboarding
is is much easier to in, in the sense of like, you know, how do you explain to someone like
Uniswap, you know what I mean? And get them to be like a user of Uniswap or like, hey, you can
load money on here, and then you can loan it to someone else using this lending protocol,
right? Like these are very, a lot of these things are like B2B. Whereas when you when you look at,
you know, you can you can pitch someone on saying, hey, you love card games, like why
don't you look into, you know, parallel, or hey, you love playing escape from Tarkov,
like imagine escape from Tarkov, but you own the gear that drops that you extract with,
and you actually own that you can trade that with people. And it has monetary value like
Counter Strike Go skins have, right? And that's that shrapnel, though, I think those kinds of things
are powerful. And I mean, when you just look at the market cap of in the players in normal gaming,
it's just such an addressable market. It's, it's, it's insane.
Yeah, sorry, I was using Oh, you go.
Oh, yeah, I was gonna riff off of what Nick was saying, which is Yeah, it just it makes total
sense. Because if you think about traditional gaming, like all of these concepts are so native
to game players, right? Like the concept of tokens, you have the parallel with soft currencies for,
you know, 1020 years in games, right? And it just translates to having true liquidity and
speculation on them. And then, of course, in game items, like the best example of web three gaming
is actually a web two game, right? Everyone uses Counter Strike as the best in class, where,
you know, you can buy a dragon more for six figures and things like that. But the difference
is, you can get your account band sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons,
but not having ownership over that. So I think it just, it resonates really well. And then,
you know, from the chain perspective, of course, all these chains are aping into games
and want games and want to be the next gaming chain, because they see this as, you know,
the opportunity to truly bring in hundreds of millions of new people into the ecosystem,
not just airdrop farming, not bots, not bot activity, but actual people who are learning
how to use crypto, like Nick was saying. On to you, Maria.
Yeah, I'm, you know, coming from products, I love coming with numbers. And when we talk about
onboarding a user base, like there's user base, and then there's user base. And if we look at
gaming, I think the world's population hit a billion this year. And in terms of number of
players, there's like 3.5 billion players in the world. And around half the world population
has smartphones. And so there and then as we're looking at the evolution of the culture shift,
gaming is taking over entertainment, gaming is just going to grow and grow. We're going to see more
of this world population getting smartphones getting platform onto other gaming platforms,
getting more interest into gaming. And so it has this incredible trajectory of growth over time.
And I think that's a really powerful mix with the value that gaming can bring to game fi because
what gaming brings that other entertainment doesn't bring, or for example, like PFP projects or
whatever, is that live ops, you can have a game and you can have a game fi ecosystem that through
the design of live ops, you don't just have game five for, you know, a month, two months,
you're going to have game five for five years, 10 years, the players are going to stay retained,
you have a live ops calendar, and you're just going to see that ecosystem of players generate
like revenue for the game generate value for the game finance of the game over time. And I think
that is something that other verticals of crypto will struggle to deliver. Can you define the term
live ops? And kind of what would you mean by that? Oh, yes. So live ops is, let's say you're
developing your game, and it's not been launched yet. And so you're developing your features and
everything and then you launch it live ops is when you utilize the existing features and content of
the game to generate more revenue, more engagement from the players, like you're delivering
content, using the content that you have. And so that's why PVP games are really good tools for live
ops, because you could have, for example, tournaments, leaderboards, the leaderboards have
different requirements, different game modes. And so with the same game, the same core loop,
the same content, the same things that you're selling, you can create daily, weekly, monthly
opportunities and motivations for players to want to buy something or like come back to your
game every day. And that's not costing the studio money to create like more content. Of course,
you're creating content to keep the game fresh, and be able to have that live ops like month over
month and keep the players retained and happy. But that's the power of live ops is like you're
able to use what you invested in developing to create revenue opportunities that are multiples on
that investment. Gotcha. Gotcha. Very cool. So each one of you, you know, we just kind of talked
about web two gaming a little bit. Each one of you kind of approached differently, whether you made
a fully on chain game or a partially on chain game or a mobile game. So what are the advantages
of kind of these different approaches? And why did you ultimately decide to choose the path that you chose?
Yeah, great question. So for us, we've had like a long journey building games, we started
with crypto Raiders, a dungeon crawling RPG, we launched that back in May 2021. It's still alive
today. And in with that game, it we had just like the traditional kind of model where we had NFTs,
and we did everything on the server. And then we started to try to put more of the economy on chain
and we're interested in on chain. But I'd say like late 2022, early 2023, we saw a lot more
people talking about it and kind of laying out the use cases for fully on chain games,
it's definitely very niche. Now, like there's, there's plenty of games, like you could you
can't make shrapnel an on chain game, nor would you want to, you know what I mean? Like,
and so there's so many different like gaming areas out there. And I'm bullish on all of them.
For us, we wanted to build towards this idea of people being able to play on chain games,
like chess or poker, right, just as examples of games, right, and be able to play against each other,
like permissionlessly and decentralized, meaning that they're not having to go,
like, you know, load money into a company, right, where they like in playing on this,
this outside portal. So like, we're very focused on this concept of, of on chain games,
specifically around PvP, there's other people doing interesting things with like autonomous worlds and
trying to build these whole complex on chain economies. But we really just got into this
specific niche, just because it really fascinated us. And we, and we, we think that there's some
really interesting potential that will come from the arena, especially when you look at
other developers being able to like fork games and mod games, right? A lot of cool
gaming genres came out of Warcraft three, right? That's where we got Dota. That's where we got
auto chess, which is my favorite genre, my favorite game to play right now is teamfight tactics. And
so I just think that there's a lot of exciting potential. A way that I kind of look at it,
right, is that like, there's centralized exchanges, right, like Coinbase, right, and then there's like
decentralized exchanges that are on chain, like uni swap, and they're both essential to the
success of crypto. And they have very similar use cases, but also some different use cases, right.
And I think, you know, Coinbase will always have a bigger addressable market than uni swap, right,
and uni swap will have a little bit of a smaller addressable market, but still has a very
interesting use case for the space. That's how I look at web three gaming, which is like,
you know, all of the games on this panel, and even games not on this panel that are doing
great things, like, are going to be like the coin basis, right, of the web three, you know,
gaming movement. And we're building towards trying to be more like, you know, the uni swap,
or like the compound, right, which is, you know, maybe a little bit smaller, you know,
total addressable market, but doing similar things, but like, also like really trying to
tap into the on chain side of things. So yeah, and it's, it's an exciting space for sure.
And I'm just excited to be building in it. Also, the reason why we went to avalanche, because
I think when, as the fully on chain gaming space matures, they're going to realize that the two
biggest issues is user experience. And then also like user fees, right? No one's going to like
playing an on chain game for a year and just getting chopped alive by gas fees. When you run
the numbers, it's insane. And that's why I think things like avalanche subnets, and right, you see
people doing like l3 roll ups and stuff like that. That's where I think you're going to see the on
chain gaming space really go where you can really customize the user experience and manage the in
abstract away the gas and make it a much more like playable experience. No one has fun spamming
50 minute mass transactions an hour to play a game. Let me tell you that because people did
that during our last play test. Yeah, I was actually going to riff on this a little bit,
if you don't mind was is, you know, no Nick for a little bit now and kind of this movement towards
like fully on chain gaming is really interesting, right? You've got like tilt yard, you've got like
pirate pirate nation, I think, right? And there's a couple other like dark forest back in the day,
like, can you and I think you talked about this a little bit, but can you elaborate on like what
the potential and the future vision of fully on chain gaming is because it's like, I get it,
you put all the transactions on chain, hey, that's great for me, because you're going to do a bunch
transactions and get more wallets. That's awesome. But like, what is the ultimate vision that it
unlocks similar to what we're saying, it's like, you know, truly owning your assets for web through
gaming in general, or having like composability, like you expand a little bit on why you're so
geeked out about fully on chain gaming, because you being bullish makes us bullish, but maybe share a
little bit. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think the composability and like modability is a is a really
big part, right? Because like we see there's there's all sorts of like interesting interactions
in the NFT space, right, where you have like lending protocols, and you have marketplace,
and they're all able to just permissionously, you know, interact with each other. And I think
that's a great like premise of fully on chain games, especially people trying to build like
autonomous worlds where, you know, people are creating their own assets that can flow into
the game or creating their own, you know, modded versions of something in the game, for us
particularly, like where we find it interesting. So like how tilt yard works is very similar to
like a like a draft Kings daily fantasy sports, or like a poker where people are playing in
tournaments, and then there's this 10% fee, right? And part of that fee, the the biggest
part of that fee goes to the game developer, right to encourage people to build games and,
and scale them. But like, what's really interesting is like with our game Midnight
Heist, someone can take that game and just fork the smart contract code, right and make their own
version of the game, they could take grenades out, right, they could add make changes to the
operators, they could add a new operator in, they could change the format of how combat works,
right. And then having all of that value accrual go to the modder, like permissionlessly is like
really powerful, right? Like if you think about Warcraft three, and how like Dota came out of
Warcraft three, right, it like started as a mod, right. And then like, League of Legends started
working on their, you know, version of it, and then steam came out or right came out with Dota.
And then we had like, Blizzard do Heroes of the Storm, right? But like, what was interesting is
that like, Dota came out of Warcraft three. Now, like some of those original modders got hired by
those companies to like, go, you know, build and play, right. But like, what happens when like,
instead of the web to conglomerate, you know, massive gaming studios, basically, they just
get to cherry pick these interesting mods, right, once they've proven market fit, and then just
make hundreds of millions of dollars off of them, right? Same thing happened with Battle Royale,
it's the biggest first person shooter genre. Out there, it started as an Arma 2 mod, right,
and then like, PUBG and H1Z1 came out, right, then the blockbuster guys came in and did it.
And I think it's really interesting if there's value accrual that can come to the modders,
right, and basically create this, this monetary incentive for people to come and create these
new game experiences, without having to like, create their own game from scratch, where they
can really just focus on like, the game design, right, and like the assets. And so I think that's
that's very powerful and interesting. And also just like the permissionless nature of it. So meaning
that like, if Ed, if you wanted to run like an avalanche community tournament, right, you could
permissionlessly just create your own tournament on the platform, set the payout structures and
everything like that. And like, we're never touching the money, right? Like that money is
living in a smart contract, right? And then it's automatically getting distributed out to the
players. Similarly, with, with like the, like the kind of poker style element of our game,
we're like, that we're, our server never knows that you have pocket aces, right? And then I have
pocket kings, right? It's all on chain, and it's all like, hashed and then revealed. And I just
think that like permissionless decentralized infrastructure is like really interesting,
because then when other people can build on top, they can build their own experiences.
And they don't have to come and like, you know, ask for permission. And then that value, like,
just naturally flowing to those those different parties. Yeah, I just think it's a really
interesting space to be building in. Yeah. Yeah, I want to riff on the two of you.
And Nick, good on you. I have a lot of respect to play TFT, because that game is tough. I can't
get out of gold. I can't get out of gold, man. I live vicariously through is it David Aylor from
Playmend and Tim Cotton from scripted and their startups working in the autonomous world space.
And it was just amazing as all Playmend was building. And I guess the game's there,
and then you can just go and code and now it exists in the world. And permissionlessly,
you're going to receive the value from having added to that world. And it's just it's like
modding taken to a completely other level. And in terms of the UGC, I was a fabled one is a
partially on chain game, not a fully on chain game. And the reason why we're building Pixion
League is exactly to have like this PvP League system that is autonomous, like it's trustworthy,
everything is on chain, you can run your own tournaments, we're going to have, you know,
like UGC type tournaments, and all of that is going to be controlled through this trust
trustworthy. I always forget the verb in English. Sorry, I'm my first language.
Like, so you don't have to you don't have to trust another person or whatever.
Exactly. And so not only so for partially on chain games, there's that value that you
can tap into to create a better experience for in UGC, and also for content creators,
who are working with your game, like you're building together in a fair, in a fair,
collaborative way. And then I completely forgot where I was going with this. I don't know where I
was going. I was going somewhere else. But I'll stop here. Because now I can't remember. I got
too excited thinking about autonomous worlds. No worries. Happy to happy to jump in as well
and share a different perspective from here, trap know where where you, you know, taking
the approach really to abstract away the blockchain experience itself and really just
highlight the features that that blockchain technology enables. So just exactly like what
Nick was saying, right, that idea about immutability, having everything codified by
smart contracts on the back end, but then giving a UX and UI to an experience, a retail experience
that, you know, gamers are used to. And so what that looks like at the shrapnel end, right,
is you can go download us right from the Epic game store, jump right into gameplay without
having to know about wallets, tokens or anything about the blockchain, right? But when you create
an account with us, we're creating a wallet on our avalanche subnet, right? That's just called your
player inventory. When you buy a skin, that's actually your first NFT purchase ever potentially
as a gamer. That's an NFT. But you just think of it as a skin in my inventory. If you go ahead
and pull out that credit card to buy shrapnel in game through our moon pay integration,
you're actually buying a cryptocurrency, you're not buying an in-game asset, right? So we're trying
to like, almost disguise that we're a blockchain game at all. And that if you just want to play
us as a gamer, right, you're able to do so. And then in terms of like, the modability as well,
right, we agree that UGC is going to play a huge part DOTA coming out of Blizzard. We honestly
all believe that Blizzard would have loved to keep ice frog within the Blizzard umbrella,
but they weren't able to do so because incentives weren't aligned, right? And so it might be
difficult for someone to go ahead and fork Uniswap to go create something like a sushi swap or a
pancake or some, you know, one of the one of the many derivatives there. So what we're doing right
is we're actually creating a map editing tool where we're giving our players different prefabs,
frameworks, buildings, so that they can actually go ahead and use our AAA first person game as a
platform to express their creativity. So if they want to create a moddable experience, recreate,
you know, PUBG, Battle Royale type thing within shrapnel, they could do so. If they want to
create team deathmatch, CSGO five on five type of map, they can do so within shrapnel and
ultimately be rewarded for that contribution to our ecosystem. So that if they create that
next genre defining map that on that ultimately becomes, you know, more popular and played more
than the main shrapnel game mode, right? They're going to be rewarded in trap token based on that
playability. So what game five really allows us to do, I think it gives us an opportunity to
really onboard retail, because I remember last cycle, right? It's all about how does retail get
onboard and it was still, I think, sticky in terms of friction with UI and UX, right? I try to get
people to use DeFi, get on Uniswap, get on Av and they're like, Alex, my head's going to explode.
I don't want to have to deal with like clicking buttons and doing all this on-chain stuff.
And so in terms of our approach, and I think a lot of other games you're seeing as well,
they're able to really just use blockchain technology to be able to enable a better
gameplay experience, right? Enable that player ownership of digital assets. So they're like,
oh, hey, I can now go sell the skin that I bought, or I can go send it to a friend so that he can
play with it. And so then now I think you're going to be seeing this onboarding of retail
who aren't necessarily here because they're excited about web three, or they're here
because of any sort of financial speculation, but they're ultimately just going to be here
because there's fun games to play that give them a better gameplay and player experience as well.
I remembered what I was going to add, and it's a slightly different
value to building on chain. Is anyone replying to Tony?
Before I slightly I was just going to say, I definitely, you know, echo what he says,
and I love that he looks at the onboarding experience for normal gamers of like not
slapping all of these, you know, confusing terms in their face, like ERC 20 token, NFT,
you know, all of these different things and said getting them in and playing the game and enjoying
the game. And then guess what, when they like extract with like a super rare, you know, weapon,
right? And then their buddy's like, Hey, do you know that thing's worth 100 bucks?
Like, what are you talking about? That's worth 100 bucks, right? And then they start to
understand the ownership aspect and Oh, I can list this on a marketplace now and I can get money,
that kind of like warming up to the experience is how I think, you know, we get a ton of people
into this space. So I'm totally with that. Like the onboard, the, like seamless onboarding is,
is so critical because we're not going to onboard very many gamers if like, it's like, Hey,
so you need to load money into Coinbase and then create this browser extension Metamask wallet,
but bridge money over there. Okay. Now you got to get it over to my chain. Okay. Now you got to convert
it into this. Now you got to buy your first NFT. Now you can play the game. It's a,
there's a little bit of friction there back over to you.
Yeah. And I alongside the UX friction reduction, I think there's another really important element
that needs to be solved, which is player safety, because to know how to manage the scams and
then you have your seat phrase, but then you're never going to see it again. And now you have to
engrave it because you can't just have it on a paper because the paper might disappear and
then you lose your assets. And so then you click on a link and now everything is gone.
And that experience, you just need one bad experience of losing something that you love
without even like you're just scammed. You couldn't prevent it really. I think that's the,
that's something that needs to be thought about. I don't have any great solutions right now in mind,
but us as a whole team, like market builders building in this space and with platforms,
I think that's something additional to like the UX friction that needs to be addressed.
And then the point I was originally going to make was just to answer to the question of
the advantages of building on chain games versus web two games is that a game development nowadays
is a numbers game and it's a brand awareness flywheel game. And so year on year, the incumbents,
and this is also on mobile. It's right now in all the gaming platforms,
there are incumbents who have these massive marketing budgets. And if you're a startup
trying to compete with them, like it's extremely hard and just making a good game, making a
better game than the game that they have, making a game that is different. If you don't have that
marketing budget to compete with them, then you're probably, probably not going to succeed.
And so that's why I'm particularly interested in blockchain gaming. That's why Pixion is in
blockchain gaming is to have that unique advantage against the incumbents. There's
innovation space here to be explored. There's completely new experiences that can
potentially go beyond the marketing, the IP, the brand awareness of these incumbent studios.
And so that's who we're truly competing against. It's not for the time of like blockchain gaming,
we're competing against the incumbents in gaming. And that's what I believe, and that's why I'm here,
is that on chain gives us that advantage to be able to compete toe to toe with these really
popular IPs and brands. Yeah, I think that all makes a ton of sense.
Is blood loop up here? I know there were some, I just want to make sure that we kind of get
everyone. But while we're figuring that out, I do want to give each one of you just like a chance
to kind of talk about your game a little bit and kind of why you're excited and
and what kind of market that you're trying to address and kind of battle from the incumbents.
So Tildiard, Kix, do you want to talk about how you mentioned that it's kind of like a poker game
and do you want to talk about how it's different, what makes Midnight Heist kind of unique and
something to look forward to? Yeah, definitely. I mean, like my whole life, like I've been a massive
gamer. One summer I didn't see the sun playing World of Warcraft in high school,
you know, that kind of gamer. And I've always just gravitated towards PPP games and competitive
games of skill, right. And when I was in college, I played online poker so much, and it was an
absolute blast. And then and then, you know, even the energy that I get in the, you know,
the crypto markets, and I got into this space as an NFT trader, right. And there's just,
there's just something, you know, so thrilling about like, competition and risk and reward
to me. And I think it synergizes very well with the blockchain. And additionally,
I think it synergizes well with just like where people are at in the world, like, you know,
when you see the amount of people interested in daily fantasy sports, right, or interested in
in crypto and stuff like that, where people want to have fun, but they also want, you know,
this opportunity to, to, you know, make some money. And so, yeah, we're just excited, because
with our kind of game, it's, you know, it's a, it's a, it has a lot of skill in it, right,
but it also has like this, this awesome element of randomness to it and, and variability where,
you know, even a player that's, you know, not a massive winner can can be in our Friday night,
10k guaranteed, right, you know, put 10 bucks in, they just want to hang out, have fun,
compete a little bit. And they end up getting an awesome role, right. And, you know, they stack up
one of their operators with four APBs, and they just go absolutely off, right. And they make it
to the semi finals and tweak up their lineup, right, and get a win. How I got into poker was,
I think I loaded like 50 bucks into full tiller poker star was one of those. And I wasn't very
good. But I got into this big $2, like, you know, 5000 man pool or whatever like that. And I made it
all the way to the final table. My girlfriend at the time, we're supposed to hang out that day. And
I literally like waited, there was five minute breaks at the end of each hour to like drive
over to her house. And I kept playing there. And she was so mad. But then I said I won like
$4,000 because I split like, I split like third place or whatever. And that like just thrilling
experience is like what got me like, you know, hooked on poker. And then I started researching
and learning how to be a better player. But I've always been like itching for like that kind of,
you know, feeling and energy. And I think that's why I got into NFT so heavily. And so that's what
we're really trying to, to build is just like awesome, you know, competitive element where
people are having fun, they're putting some money on the line, they can score some big wins,
and, and, you know, try to get better at the game. And then there's there's interesting things
that we want to try to even build on top, not to leak or get too far ahead of my skis. But like,
you know, ways that people that aren't players can can also participate in the, you know,
the ecosystem, right? So maybe you, instead of, you know, being the best player, you you like
to find great underdog players out there, right? And stake them so they can play in bigger
tournaments, right? Take the person winning in the dollar tournaments and stake them so they can play
the $50, $100 tournaments. So yeah, a little bit of a rant there. But yeah, it's, it's kind of selfish,
I guess, build a building this because this is something that I would, I want to play at a Friday
night, you know what I mean, when I'm sitting on my couch, load up some midnight heist games and
put some money on the line. Those, those are the best kinds of products, the ones that you want
to use yourself. So I mean, that sounds great. Providence, Sanat, do you want to talk about,
you know, how would you describe Providence? And why are you excited about kind of building this game?
Yeah, sure. So I would say Providence is a sci fi survival action game. And I call it survival
action, because we are combining elements from both survival games and extraction shooters,
and a little bit of rock light genres to, to try to provide a unique progression and an emerging
gameplay experience. That is hopefully fun and exciting every game session. Because internally,
we call this survival on a loop. Since as a player, you have to keep getting into these
dangerous situations in collapsing worlds in order to successfully extract things back to
your home base, in order to build craft and basically advance further. And you have to
keep doing this loop. And that's the kind of main gameplay. And this excites us immensely,
because not only are we building this flagship title at Dynasty, but we're also building,
establishing this brand new universe. And it really gets us create, lets us get creative in
ways many of us developers didn't have the opportunity to do so in our previous
projects we worked on. And by that, I mean, mainly the core team at Dynasty in the past, we,
we worked on multiple turn based tactical RPG games that were kind of quite historical.
So jumping on to this sci fi survival action game is such a fresh breath, breath of fresh air for,
for us both in terms of genre, but also the setting. So that's why we're very excited to
work on Providence. Perfect. So Providence is actually the only one that I've tried of the
group up here. And one thing I noticed is that there is like a player versus environment element,
which, you know, in crypto gaming, I think it's mostly player versus player. So kind of what,
what considerations and kind of design, or how does player versus, you know, environment
really affect the player experience? Yeah, I mean, since we're survival, first, I mean,
you might have experienced mostly combat and PvP, because those are some of the
mechanics we were kind of play testing, specifically, but we are survival first.
So it is a in general, PvP, basically both environment and PvP in the same world.
So design wise, obviously, we want to make sure that there is a perfect balance so that there's no,
no unfairness between different classes and load us and it takes a lot of work trial and error,
hence all the play tests we have to do. But even now we are kind of thinking about,
for example, loadouts, which is which is the domain thing you're decking out in order to
advance in the world, basically, your character is nothing without your loadout. And we have to
make sure that you feel the power progression, you feel powerful as you progress in the PvE
world by, you know, being able to beat harder challenges and defeat bigger bosses. At the same
time, we want the PvP to be balanced, because if you don't want people to win just by having
higher end gear, for example, so we're trying to find ways to normalize things so that on PvP,
it's more skill based, and not so gear based, for example. So those are some of the challenges
we're still kind of working on on the design side. Gotcha. Very cool. And I did notice that
on your website, Dynasty Studios kind of emphasizes a player driven experience. And we talked about
modability earlier. Is modability going to play a role? And what does a player driven experience
mean? Yeah, it depends on what you mean by modability. This could be a long answer,
but stop me if it gets too long, because this can be broken down into, I guess, multiple aspects.
And the main, the first aspect would be just the vast amount of customization,
we intend to offer players, both when it comes to building and customizing their home base,
we call homesteads. Because you're not just placing a building, we're letting you basically
build it wall by wall by creating modular building systems so that you can really customize it
in a way that you want so you can get really creative with it.
Another aspect is, as I mentioned just before, is the loadouts.
That's where you're taking out your combat suit, your gear and your abilities. And you can
basically customize these both in terms of cosmetics and gameplay, which is quite important because
you want to basically let players assemble a loadout based on the style of game they want to
play, whether they want to be support, a bit more tanky, or if they want to just focus on
damage, for example. And on top of that, just vast amount of options to express themselves visually.
Another element would be just choice in gameplay. Basically, the player can't play the way they
choose to at their own pace. For example, they can drop onto the world just to mine some
resources and get out within minutes. They don't have to play the whole session.
Or they can focus on PVP and get their loot by hunting or ambushing others,
or they can just focus on downing big boss creatures, raid alien vaults, just to name a few.
Basically, ultimately, we're creating action-filled sandboxes for them to play the way they want.
Just when you combine all of these, the game becomes quite player-driven.
And lastly, it's quite important. It's the economy. And it's also the most blockchain
relevant aspect of it, I guess. And obviously, our intention is to have what we call a true
player-driven economy. And by that, I mean, we really do not intend to sell items ourselves.
We don't want to have microtransactions, for example, except maybe some cosmetics
on certain events. And we don't want to drop items ourselves. We want basically the players to
create all the items. So everything, whatever you see in the Providence universe, in the circulation,
would have been extracted or created by the players. So ultimately, they decide what has value
and they drive the economy, which is a big part of the experience as well.
Perfect. Shooting it over to Maria, how would you describe Fableborn, and how does Web 3 mobile
development differ from Web 2 mobile development?
Yeah, so apart from the genre blend and the mobile free-to-play descriptions that I gave
earlier on, I really like this blend of genres because it's a mixture of lean-in and lean-back
experience. And especially on mobile, we should build a game that fits around players' lives and
not the other way around if we want to be able to attract the widest market possible. And so
we're building an action pack, like PvP experience, that if you want to, you can have a session of
one to two hours and enjoy it. Or if you have five minutes, like you're waiting for your food
to come, or you're in the traffic, well, hopefully a passenger, you know, not driving,
that any time you have five minutes, you can pick up, play a raid, do something, and then continue
with your life. And yeah, I really like that because like my game, I play a lot of mobile games,
and I have like two core games always. I have a core game for when I have two hands,
and I have a core game when I have one hand, and I can only tap. So like,
if I'm eating breakfast or something. And so I think it's really important for Fableborn to
provide things to do and have fun whenever you're in either of those times in your life. And then
in terms of like, the differences of building in web three compared to web two, I would say
it's a lot of fun. That's, yeah, that's where I start. It's really, really fun, like crazy fun.
I feel like I'm not a very public person. So I never go on a reality TV show. I feel like
building in web three is sort of being part of one. There's just like this drama roller coaster
every day and really tight new community and like up and ups and downs. And so I joining this market
and building here really rekindled my like daily passion of building games because it is meant
to be fun. It is meant to be crazy. And so yeah, let's break free and do some crazy stuff
together. And then I get more serious. A more serious answer is, I say for now, the biggest
difference is like the risk of splitting your focus. Because if you're building, you know,
a mobile free to play on web two, you generally don't have like a community and consumers pregame
launch. You don't really need to get that brand awareness and the marketing going until
you're ready. You're getting ready to soft launch and like doing your go to market plan. And so
the teams are bigger than usual. You have more attention drains that you have to be managing,
like making a game that has like the depth, the scalability, the replayability,
the monetization depth, the lightbox depth. Players will continue playing it for years on end.
And you're going to be able to grow it financially year on year. Like that is so freaking hard.
I mean, like trying to do that, plus everything else that you generally only have to do
close to game launch or like post scaling and soft launch. There's Yeah, there's a higher focus
drain and like people, those team size that needs to be managed. Because then instead of you being
I don't know, like a 10 people team, you're now a 20 person team. And so now you need more processes,
more alignments. Not everyone's community communicating organically. And yeah, I think
as a main difference, apart from like the Wild West reality TV show.
Perfect. And I think we're coming up on the hour. How what is the best way people can
follow your projects? What do you have coming up that that's, you know, exciting? And
and what what's the best way for people to follow you guys?
Yeah, be sure to be following obviously our Twitter and our Discord inside of our Discord,
at least a trap. No, we're hosting live play sessions, typically on Thursdays
with our development team. And so that's the opportunity for our community to interact
directly with our game team, ask questions, get a peek into early access before it comes out
later in a few weeks to a month, maybe potentially. So be sure to be on the lookout
for those extraction pack codes. We're doing a ton of giveaways on the timeline,
also selling those on our website. So definitely be following both our Twitter
and our Discord so that when that gate comes out, you're ready to jump into some shrapnel gameplay.
I am ready to play some shrapnel. I've been ready since I entered this space,
so I'm hoping I'll get a seat. And for Fableborn, yeah, you can follow our Twitter page. Also
follow Tyler who's NFT catch who's here listening in. He's Fableborn's community social media
manager. You can join our cozy Discord. We've actually been building a major update to the game,
and that should be coming out in the next couple of months. And so it's a good time to join,
get to know some people and be ready there for when we do the next public play tests.
And yeah, look forward to seeing you there. Yeah, I guess I can go next. So you guys can
follow us at Play Providence on Twitter. You're welcome to join us on Discord,
already on any other social media, which you can find at playprovidence.io.
Very soon we intend to have another closed play test with our community. We're kind of
going a bit slow. We're pacing things because we're testing a lot of stuff at the back end
infrastructure and whatnot. But do join the community. You might get a chance to partake
in the play test. And then around March or towards the end of March, perhaps at GDC,
we'll also be there to kind of showcase what we are working on. And hopefully,
we also intend to have an early access later this year. So yeah,
be sure to just follow us on Twitter to find out more soon.
And yeah, for all things in the Avalanche ecosystem, especially on gaming,
please follow Gaming on Avax. It is also a speaker here, the pixelated Avalanche logo.
So we've got amazing games like these teams on stage. Got a lot more exciting announcements
coming up this year. GDC is the next big event we're going to be at. Hope to see some of you
in person. Thank you guys for hosting. I got a jump, but it's been great. Thank you so much.
And thank you all for coming on. And it was wonderful talking to you and everyone have
a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you for the great hosting.