Blockchain Gaming: dead or alive?

Transcript

okay this works yeah cool hey everyone my name is Matias I think some of you already know me for from the last 8cc and also the previous one this is experimental we do blockchain games have you heard of crypto Wars raise your hand yeah okay cool anyway so I'm gonna try to not focus that much on the game itself because many of you know it and last time I did like a status update this time I think I'll focus more on the on the industry itself thank you for coming with all the coronavirus stuff we're in a group with many other speakers and many didn't come so that's

called that you hear only rule note given it's nice just as as a bit of context of myself if you don't know me already I'm an entrepreneur and investor I'm mostly focused on biotech and med tech nothing to do with blockchain but then in 2017 we founded experimental which is blockchain gaming this is a team behind crypto Wars and experimental it's a pretty cool team in Buenos Aires Argentina alright and this is the topic for today blockchain gaming Dead or Alive there are some folks are still super bullish on the industry some of

them are more bearish I think I'm in the middle so I'm not quite sure but I'll give my at least my view of what's going on and what might go what might happen and might happen in the future all right this is crypto Wars if you don't know it it's an RTS game that runs fully on the blockchain we run on loop network which is a layer 2 solution for aetherium if you don't try if you didn't try it you can try it online now a creators JP and this is what I'm I want to talk about basically we had like a peek right on the blockchain gaming industry maybe in 2018 or at the end of 2017 with crypto

kiddies this made a lot of kinda join the wave of blockchain gaming not only like developers and you know gamers and stuff but also some really interesting folks in Silicon Valley like andreessen horowitz Union Square Ventures Google Ventures and some other VCS this to me was you know being being in the VC industry myself was a good sign positive sign a link to say it in a way when you see people who are like so savvy into consumer products joining an industry like this it made me feel that in the short or mid term we should be seeing some adoption for wachting gaming

we still haven't it's been probably 2 2 years and a half or something like this there's still a lot to be done but there was a lot done until this day that date as well but right now it looks more like this like the you know the rolling plant on the movies where nothing happens this is currently the 5 top games on aetherium so all of them together they don't reach like what 5k users or something like this and this is not even unique users like it could be the same guys you know playing all ultim so this is not too exciting right so the question is you know should this you

know what's what's gonna happen will it go you know up again like we will see adoption again of these games or it will just die off one thing we saw which is kinda cool to me is that all the shitty projects and all the scam projects and all the stuff kind of died off when when they don't see like a lot of volume or a lot of ether going here and there they just stopped working many many games announced that they're not gonna keep going and many others just disappeared so we'll see what what goes on what happens this was like at the peak when everyone was getting good news and stuff we were you know just making a few news

as well this was one of our best tournaments when we had like two thousand or two five hundred players in a single tournament all running on the blockchain we crushed the loom network which was like a cool thing to do because the loom network got a lot better on our game got a lot more optimized so as this was really cool but what I mean is all these were like hype news you know in the moment and then like everything kind of died this is another you know like thing that happened in the hype like people would buy a sword for 600 bucks or like an axe for 600 bucks you know like I

don't know people really valued the fact that all these assets are unique and that you're the you know the real owner of the set and stuff but still everything was like so inflated inflated so what's in a future I don't I don't know if you watch Vikings but this is this year you know the guy who does all the the prophecies and stuff so this is gonna be my prophecy or at least my my view on what's gonna happen in the next year maybe I feel like eSports and blockchain are meant to be together are meant to be coupled they make a lot of sense together so in our case we're

gonna kind of be what or move towards move to move more towards a platform for short eSport tournaments so basically like one be one where you steak that you stake ether you stake Bitcoin and you do whatever you want but you stake it so I let's say I put ten diets and I we play at or we play a tournament or a game and then whoever wins gets the pot I think that's what we're gonna see a lot more it just makes sense to you know to couple eSports and blockchain for obviously you know safety a transparency reasons but also it's it's just more natural to play with crypto where you can just take the balance of the game to

your wallet and spend it in anything else also I don't know if you play the games for money online but they they usually take peace so if you want to take one door out of the game you just can't because if he is one point five dollars for example with PayPal or whatever so I think it makes a lot of sense this is the why now and why do I think in the in the in the next couple years we'll start seeing stuff like this first because people like us you know we're now like old enough to play for money while a couple years ago we were not maybe we are but like new generations you know

they're just starting to be able to play for money this is another thing which is pretty cool which means millennial son's intelligence they don't like randomness our games are not random are all skill based so we have no RNG whatsoever so yeah traditional gambling is nothing we are a fan of but you know eSports are this is also a thing about like the the right timing casinos in Las Vegas are starting to test no not random machines like you know deterministic machines which is pretty cool and makes a point as well and then obviously you know the size of the market itself eSports you

know are blowing up or already blew up this is huge and then obviously the gambling the online gambling market is huge as well actually one of the only the only dubs making money or making real revenue are the casinos so people kind of wanna play for money our thesis is that a lot more people will want to play for money if it is not random and if you can actually sorry if you can actually you know think and make Anna strata make a strategy to make a living so yeah anyways that's that's our thesis one thing we really like and I think it's like a success case that

never happened before but it's it's starting to happen this year and the last one is a company called skills have you heard of skills no okay what this is this was named by the ink magazine the most like the the fastest growing company in the in the US what they basically do is they created an SDK that you can use in any game and you can turn any game into a competitive game so you can play for money you know in whatever like candy crush or like Angry Birds or whatever and I think that's pretty cool and they raced 131 million dollars last year they made four hundred million dollars in revenue so they're

doing pretty well but the games you know the games they have or they currently have are mostly like super casual and they also don't take crypto they just do PayPal and you know like the withdraw experience is pretty shitty actually but the concept itself has proven to work and I think this kind of thing will kind of work in the crypto world anyways this is what I just said we want experimental to be more like a skills platform where we will start with crypto Wars but I think the cool thing about this new

ideas that we can also onboard other blocks and games anything that that is that has no randomness and it's one be one could be you know onboarding into this new platform in the case of crypto Wars you basically have to create a village you know to build buildings and then someone an army and go attack your opponent's at first for the ones that already played it or know it this was we had like one tournament each week in the weekend it will be like a three-hour tournament so let's say at 3:00 at 3:00 p.m. you had to you know to join the server and play basically the problem with this I mean we had several problems

in the last version but one of them was that you had to join a tree right at 3 p.m. independent of the part of the world where you are so if it was let's say 3 P 3 p.m. EST and you were in Japan you were you had to play like to a.m. or something so we decided to have this new platform in which you can just play 1v1 with whoever is connected you know whoever is online so that's not a problem anymore and at the same time with the last tournaments we had like 2000 people playing at the same time and only 10 would win so then you know 1,000 and 990 would go home really sad because they didn't win and they spent three

hours so this you know in this new model you it's one big one so you know one of the two is gonna be happy at least this is regarding monetization for blockchain games I think defi is gonna be really really important and this is really cool and and smart as well other than traditional you know than traditional monetization strategies that you probably know from traditional games I think defi is gonna is gonna you know have like a huge participation in in monetization because now we game developers who the you know can do new stuff like give loans to our users we can put users money to work instead of actually charging them so for example

let's say you wanna play crypto Wars 1v1 and you wanna I don't know you you pay a hundred I you know you you buy like 100 credits or a hundred die and you use those hundred die maybe like two months in several different tournaments we can use while you don't use that money we can use it and put it in BitFenix or like DSR or whatever other rating interest service we find and we can get maybe like 20 dollars a year from your 100 you know from from your hundred so we don't have a need to charge you as a user we can just use that money to

generate into interest and the other cool really cool thing is taking you're probably heard about this but I think it makes a lot of sense in games you could just for example if you want to have a premium subscription in your game you could just tell a user to stake a hundred died instead of paying and all the time he take those die he will be a premium user or he will have like a special character or a special whatever gun or short or whatever and whenever he wants to recoup his money he just take it takes it away and he lose Lucy's obviously the the benefit but he never paid for that benefit and we obviously make money with you know dy/dx

or compound or DSR or BitFenix or whatever I think this is gonna we're gonna see like pretty smart things coming out of this about the tech three years ago when we came to the first a theorem community conference I mean three or two yeah whatever the first one it was a sheet show to run our game it was you know almost impossible like yeah it was not scalable so every time we have like a hundred users again we would go down so now you know games can actually run on the blockchain and everything is fine you can have like maybe 5,000 users on a game running on

the blockchain at the same time and it will work obviously 5,000 users is nothing and it's compared to the traditional gaming industry but you know at least it's like a step forward whenever we get one game that can get whatever 1 million users or something like this will be and we have will we'll need to find a new solution but I think it's it's on the on the right path at least the first again in the first conference there was no way to play crypto Wars in mobile now you can play it from any browser web to browser it doesn't need to be web 3 so that's that's pretty cool as well now there is gas abstraction so

you don't really have to pay Gus I mean as a user which makes the whole experience much better and now regarding scalability and infrastructure we're pretty excited about Rob seem optimistic roll-ups we're making a test now we're interstate so this could be potentially yeah a good solution as well that's it so if you have any questions I I think we have some time so you can ask them and if not you can just find me on Twitter or email questions hi thank you for your talk I just want to know like since I

bought some loom network you know some tokens like I want to know like what's your experience with it and if you it's working well for companies that are using it and also with regards to the implementation of communication with other blockchains if they're really doing what they're saying on the newsletter yeah well it's working what I can tell you it's is it is working much better than before it took a lot of time for for them to actually work properly now you can launch you know a decent game on their network and it will work without a problem which is great I'm not so bullish in in what you just just said

you know like connecting different networks and stuff and I think that was a priority I think it makes more sense to focus on scalability because again what I what I just said like now that we have whatever ten thousand users are twelve thousand users we're fine but whenever this grows it will not be a solution anymore so that's why we're testing other things right and yeah the other thing is let's see what happened with we're assuming optimistic rollouts and how it competes with solutions like loom hey yeah so I yes I think this may be issues with you having to be over 18 I

guess to buy crypto in the first place yeah what's the point of incorporating tokens into a game yeah no there the idea is at least with these kind of games it's not for definitely not for like under 18 for example skills the company just said with four hundred million four hundred million in revenues like sixty percent of of their customers are like women on their 40s to 50s and then the rest yeah exactly then it's also men you know but but also in that age range so we're gonna focus more on on the on the eSports crowd and not so much on the mobile gaming crowd alright I thanks for the talk my

question goes more around that it seems that we're not really understanding what the addressable market is really for gaming because it seems that everything that we're generally talking about in the space is only addressed towards people who are either knowledgeable in the blockchain or have tokens and everybody else is excluded so for things like eSports the reason probably why eSports is as hot as it is right now is because eventually games came out which they had zero zero barrier to entry I can play pub whatever on any device on any platform without tokens or fees so how do we move how do you think that we move past this sort of cloud which is called blockchain which at the end of the day and then user doesn't care as

they don't care how I built my my mobile my mobile app on iPhone using whatever technology how do we get past that perfect question because we're actually facing that issue right now like it we obviously don't want to be in this like super small market we don't give a about it like no one gives a our investors you know we have like top Silicon Valley investors as well so they don't give a about our 10,000 users so one of the one of the main issues with this for example what I just said that people will stake for example in the interface you will have no idea yours taking that which is which is talked about die here because you know this is crypto people but in the industry that's re in the game it

will be just like your balance your credits you will you know just like a normal game the prom' we're facing right now is that we want people to be able to pay with credit cards and debit cards and also with crypto to you know to keep our fanbase happy for now but the problem with this is if you want to integrate that you know payment gateway solution for credit and debit they don't want you to use crypto and if you use crypto you know you can use the other one so right now we're gonna test we're gonna start with dye and the idea is to add you know credit under it as soon as possible but even with that you have no need you know at first to have you like a lot of knowledge it's you know you you have to definitely be able to buy in the

website and everything but it's not that much what we need to figure out ASAP is how to add credit cards and just be a normal game that runs on the blockchain but you don't really need to know it runs on the blockchain so yeah that's our I would say in our in the in the next like three months we have to figure out how to do that properly you know with a American corporation and not get fat thank you for the talk I also used to work for a gaming company and we always had problems with cheaters basically and especially if you're playing against

someone and you feel like this person is cheating how are you dealing with this right now are there some game design decisions that you made to prevent this and how could I report for example yes absolutely actually the whole redesign of crypto Wars now I mean it had many reasons but one of them was that that there were many users doing multi accounting and all this stuff to cheat because of maybe the pricing a single tournament was like 1,000 dice so it's a lot of money to you know in 3 hours so it makes sense to cheat and this is also what why we changed many things about the game I think most of the solution for that is changing the game changing the features

for example we had like a trading system that changed like just like uni swap and that would change so many users would you know be working to there to change the rates of stuff and get more of one stuff that they needed you know to buy an army or whatever so we kind of changed the training system then the battle system had also like a problem where you can all target the same user and I've used this system ok we change the you know so we we're trying to to fix you know everything related to to user abuse or whatever by actually creating features that make sense and are not abusable but then in the in the case of boats for example it's much more

complicated in the first version which was like a multiplayer with thousands of users what we did was basically have like a low points so if you are a bot you play with other BOTS and if you're a user you play with users but in this one be one we have just to flag users whenever we think they're cheating or other users thing with their cheating and just look at the blockchain and see what they did everything is recorded in the blockchain so thank you time is over sorry thank you [Applause]