AI Makes Game Creation More Accessible

Welcome to the Navit Gaming Podcast, where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games. We bring together the industry's brightest builders, investors, and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events, dissect emerging trends and games, share lessons learned, and have a great time. This podcast is also part of Navik's growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to consulting and advisory services. For more information, visit www.navic.co. This episode is brought to you by Overwolf. With over 1,500 games supported, 178,000 creators, and 113 million monthly active users, Overwolf is the guild for in-game creators. Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC into

games. For game studios, Overwolf offers Curse Forge for studios, a white label solution that lets game makers and publishers easily integrate mods safely and seamlessly into their games, both existing and new, at zero cost. It's battle tested by AAA studios and games including Craftton with Enzo, Studio Wildcard with Ark, Take Interactive, and others. Alongside this, Overwolf is the all-in-one platform that enables creators to build, distribute, and monetize in-game apps, mods, and game servers. In 2024, Overwolf paid over $240 million to in-game creators, proving that they truly value the talents and contributions of the gaming community. You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at overwolf.com or simply check out the link in the show notes. Now, let's jump into the episode. Hello everyone. I'm your host Deon Becker and today I'm delighted to be joined by Robbie Young, CEO of investments at Animoka Brands as well as a little more recently the CEO of the

Sandbox. Sandbox recently announced Sandbox Studio, an AI native game engine and publishing pipeline specifically built to take creators from ideas to live multiplayer games in ours. Today we're going to discuss some things around that. Uh multiplatform UGC and what AI actually changes for creators. So, just to catch people up who aren't familiar, could you just give a quick overview of your background and how you ended up CEO of the Sandbox?
Sure, no problem. Hi, Devin. Thanks for having me. Um, and hello to everybody. Um, and so my name is Robbie Jung. Uh, I'm the CEO of investments at, uh, Animoka Brands. Um, and as you said, more recently, I've taken on responsibilities at Sandbox, too, which has been, um, you know, our largest, uh, sort of subsidiary for many years. Um, and you know, I have, I guess, um, a reasonably long background in web 3, um, as as far as those things go. It's been almost 10 years now. Um, and a bit longer in gaming. So, I came into gaming at at the beginning kind of early days of the mobile era. Um, around 20 2011, I

believe it was, um, 2012. And, uh, and before that, I was in media. Uh, and before that, I was in web one. Um and so I've kind of you know um seen many cycles of different sorts. Um and most recently I've taken over the responsibilities for overseeing uh sandbox as I mentioned. So I a lot of the focus these days is really on this sort of intersection of what AI is allowing people to build and develop particularly in interactive entertainment um but also how that works together with what we're doing in web 3.
Perfect. Well, uh, let's get into Samok Studio a little bit then since this is kind of the latest and greatest thing you guys have announced. Uh, so first off, kind of what it is and then what was or wasn't working about the original Game Maker to kind of understand the context for this.
Sure. Um, so the original I think the best way to give you the context is Sandbox was a 2D mobile game originally.

It launched um you know back in 2011 um at the in the early days of the mobile app stores and it was inspired by Minecraft. It was inspired by the idea that you know u everybody could be a creator and it was great to have an open world environment where people could come and play or create or both right and that's hence the name. And so when we acquired the business um in 2019 and started building a web 3 product um together with the team um the idea was also around not just creation at the at the heart but ownership of those creations and thinking how web 3 and tokenization can really revolutionize your ability to own your own assets. So own your own characters or weapons or or assets in-game assets. Um, but also, uh, how you can tokenize in-game currency so that you can have value coming in and out of the game, um, you know, in and

out of of of the so-called walled garden because the garden's no longer walled anymore because it's it's web 3 compliant. And so that was the vision. Now, fast forward uh, what is it 7 years now, we created an open world metaverse. We had a game client um and we implemented the game in seasons over the years um to sort of harness people's focused play time over several month intervals um each uh a couple of times a year. And uh the game maker was a client PC client that allowed you to create game experiences. Um and I would say it was basically the best we could do with the tools that were available. circa 2019 to 2024. Um, and then AI came along, LLMs specifically, and changed all that because one of the things, as we've all seen, that LLMs are specifically great at is writing code. I mean, that's really, you know, it's kind of like made

by people who write code to make writing code easier for them. And so, um, it works really well for that. and but they are general purpose um tools. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to create uh very specific tools meaning we wanted to not just code coding tools but things for making games and coding games. And so we developed Sandbox Studio as the successor to the original Sandbox game client but now with this sort of superpowered brain of of LLMs behind it. And so what what that does is it actually unleashes the ability of what you can create with the tool because ultimately the sandbox uh uh game creator tool originally had limitations because it could only do what we as the developers um enabled the tool to create, right? And so we had to make a tool for you to make an endless

runner game, a tool to make a match three puzzle game, etc. And if we had not thought about the tools, you couldn't necessarily make it because you couldn't just use the tools to make anything. But now with Sandbox Studio actually and the power of LLMs, that's you know that that's that's history.
Nice. Well, it's good to open that up. Uh I am kind of curious about like the sort of target user and stuff. This is you've said in some previous discussion that uh this isn't really meant to be a vibe coding tool necessarily, but the alpha criteria specifically asks for like vibe coding experience. So I'm kind of curious like where that line is for you between some vibe croing and using this as a power user and what you're looking for in this audience.
Sure. So I think what we're looking for is we're looking for people who um have some familiarity with making games because making games is a specific discipline. Um and you know and it's not just enough to be you know a huge fan and player of games. Um and there are many of those. Um, but I think in terms of vibe coding, what we think of is vibe

coding style interaction, right? So natural language is one of the main ways that creators work with Sandbox Studio. Um, and so people who already have had a lot of experience collaborating with um, coding agents were some of the best people in our alpha uh, launch of Sandbox Studio because they totally understood how to iterate with AI. you're you're used to sort of speaking the language of AI. Um, but that's largely vibe coding because it's not necessarily, you know, a system prompt and and coding anymore. Um, but the distinction is that Sandbox Studio is not just an LLM pointed at a codebase, right? Underneath is an agent, a purpose-built game engine with an editor, scene systems, gameplay components, physics, you know, the whole nine yards. So the agent can operate those systems directly through tools and MCP instead of just writing piles of files and hoping that the result works. And ultimately the output is a real

structured game project so that the creator can inspect it, you can edit it visually, you can change the code, you can run it, you can debug it, you know, and then you can publish it. So unlike, you know, working with a with a traditional vibe code like I'm going to oneshot Fable and and make a, you know, make an extraction shooter. Um, this is actually literally, you know, doing the development work for you and providing you with a game codebase that then for those who are familiar with it can go back in and tweak and edit and everything like that.
Cool. That sounds pretty good. I mean, it obviously that experience helps and and I'm sure it's evolving too in terms of how that uh will actually work. Um, when it comes to LLMs though, uh, especially in coding, uh, they can be a little bit random, right? You have that sort of blackbox randomness. I mean, some of that randomness is intentional, right? The way AI work to not be repetitive and get caught in loops and all that stuff. Uh, but when it comes to coding, then that starts to become like obviously the code is reproducible and

stays consistent, but the AI is not necessarily, especially as the context grows, uh, and that's just become maybe a little unpredictable, overwriting, past variables, things like that. How do you make it produce more predictable replicable game output especially as a project iterates over time?
Okay. Um so I think one of the things here is that we don't try to make the LLM itself deterministic. Um what we try to do is we try to reduce the amount of the game um that the LLM has to invent. Um, and so the core functionality lives in those deterministic systems, right? Like physics and input and multiplayer, scene structure, um, engine APIs, that kind of stuff. Um, but the agent is usually composing and configuring those systems, um, rather than rebuilding them from scratch every time. Um, the agent can also inspect the actual state of the project. Um, so it can see what objects exist, what components are attached,

what assets are available, um, and what errors are occurring most importantly because obviously debugging is something LLMs are great at. Um, and then it can run the game. It can inspect the result, debug it, you know, and and help to iterate, right? Make changes. Um, and so templates um, and known architectural patterns um, give it the reliable starting points as well. So most importantly once something is built the game exists as actual code which I mentioned before right project data assets configuration um and so the LLM is not regenerating the whole game every time somebody launches it um and that way the creation process can be probabilistic while the resulting game is a normal deterministic piece of software. Does that make sense?
Right. So is it then is it then that there's essentially like a game engine and then it's this is scripting for that engine essentially like pre-built.
Correct. Correct. And and so what you're doing is you're using the LLM for essentially um to assist you to do all

those things that we as game developers people used to do right so that you can make a single human much much more powerful. Um, but you're not actually asking the AI, the LLM to bypass steps and therefore obfiscate the the work that's going on underneath.
So, is it the the LLM already kind of preloaded with knowledge about the engine like how to properly execute things, how to actually go about it, what, you know, maybe what functions to call those kinds of things.
Correct. Correct. And so that's that's where we talked about it as as essentially like an orchestration layer because what we're doing is we're creating um structures and patterns to help help it to understand how to interact with the assets and and and the logic.
If uh if you did happen to change the engine over time, then would you just be able to have the LLM sort of patch people's code to adapt to the changes in the engine? Like let's say you changed a function name or how it worked. It would then be able to potentially patch

everyone's game
in theory. Yes. Which is pretty cool.
I just think of you know because you talk about like the you see stuff like Unreal Engine go through these big upgrades and then everyone has trouble trying to adapt to it and that's a situation where it's like well we're just kind of stuck locked on this engine now because you can't really upgrade. So I think that's an interesting
thing to deal with that you may not have to in in a more AI native engine. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Um, but again, I think the important part is these are tools that help you to make all of the building blocks of a game in a better whole hopefully better, faster, cheaper kind of way. Um, but not just, you know, oversimplify the task to the point where you don't actually know what happened,
right? Um, and you've said you you've encoded like a whole bunch of knowledge from hundreds of studios, thousands of shipped games. Uh and how does that like first off how how does it actually kind of remember know all that stuff? Is that just you know like some system uh prompt

kind of things like or files or like knowledge base? Uh and how does that really sort of reach the creator? Like is it is it guiding sort of how it does things you know outside of just the engine guidance but how it actually like designs it? Is it providing any like you know best practices those sorts of things?
So I guess it um it affects it in two ways. Um, one is that obviously um, over the years the the studios and creators in Zambox have built a huge number of games and experiences using the existing game maker, right? Um, and so that gives us a huge body of practical knowledge about what people try to build. Um, obviously Sam Box itself has a particular vauil visual art style which affects you know what types of things people tend to make. Um, but also we understand where they struggle and what systems get reused and what workflows work, what breaks and and what creators at different skill levels need. And so that's frankly institutional knowledge more than anything else. Um, but it

helps us to really understand I think how to make a better tool set to cater to the um the audience because we have such a huge sample size and so much experience which is great. Um but the important part is that we turn that knowledge into the the platform itself, right? It it shows up in the engine architecture, in the templates, in the reusable systems, um in the defaults and the um um and the tools that are exposed to the agent. Um and it it affects really the way that the agent is taught to solve um common game development problems, right? So for example, if a if a creator asks for multiplayer, the goal is not for the model to invent a networking stack, right? From first principles, it should understand and and use the multiplayer systems that are already provided by Sandbox Studio, right? The same logic applies to asset handling, publishing, performance, everything, right?
Is uh is AI used to help improve that engine at all, or is it more just

handcoded so you can kind of tune it? It's a little bit of both to be honest because you know these while we've been working on this you know sandbox studio for a couple of years already um the tools are still very much evolving in real time and so we're continually using them and using their sort of evol evolvements um to uh to improve our own tools. Um so it's a it's a living organism of sorts. That's how all software is going to end up at this point with that with that sort of ability and capability constantly shifting.
Yes. And I think that's where that's where we bring up that that uh word guard rails,
right? Yeah. Is that a thing? So is there some level of guardrails happening in the sense of like first off there's there's the guardrails in terms of like making sure it correctly implements things and doesn't create bugs and all that stuff, but then there's also the guardrails of like is there any kind of guardrails related to content? And obviously that begs the question of like censorship of content or like even

variable names can be offensive, right? Like there's yes like a lot of potential for uh guardrails or censorship to mess with what you're doing. Is what what does that look like so far?
So I think um we do think about that and we do think that you know um it is important to have a you know a fun experience for everybody. Um, I think in our case, we don't have such an issue with that necessarily because we don't have a product that's overtly um geared towards children um and and family content. Um, so being more of a I was going to say an adult platform, but that has an odd connotation.
Yeah, it does.
But as opposed to say roadblocks, for example.
Yeah. But as opposed to say Roblox where you're going to have the average demographic is seven, right? Um, so I think in our case we don't we don't quite have the same constraints because to be honest there are a lot of games that you know are about violence. People like shooting games. It's a big part of action role playing games, right? We like to conquest and reenact uh battles

on mass massive scale in RPGs and and that's you know that that's a part of gameplay. So I think we don't have much problem with that. I think when it comes to things like hate speech and all that, of course, we, you know, we have we have little tolerance for that.
Cool. Well, hopefully that'll work consistently. I know that's an a constant ongoing problem, especially when it comes to LLMs because like they do have the advantage of understanding context better than hard-coded things like just keyword block lists and stuff like that. But at the same time, you know, there's always some variability there.
Yes. Um but in related to that, one of the supposed advantages here of uh this Sandbox Studio versus the Game Maker from before is the ability to publish multiplatform outside of just the sandbox. Obviously, that's where guard rails may be a little more helpful. Uh just because they tend to be more restrictive than the sandbox. Um
I guess the biggest question is I mean obviously like there's some potential advantages to that, but then that does allow people to then start to move off the platform that you're building. Yes.

Why kind of give up that exclusivity or kind of open those gates? What's the what's the main benefit to you and like why do you see that as uh a good thing to be doing for the the creators and players?
Um I guess the simplest answer is we're game developers and every game developer has always wanted this, right? The one thing game developers hate the most is the fact that you get locked into platforms, right? And you you do that often because there is a publishing deal and it's an economic trade-off, right? Often a platform may uh may help to publish your game and and give you development capital. So in exchange they have exclusivity which is fair enough, right? You you decided to make that relationship. But in the case particularly of indie developers who are not able to have publishing deals like that, then you end up going to a platform that takes 30% off the top of your business um for ostensibly services

of payment processing and distribution and visibility. Um but the problem is that sometimes on platforms where there is a huge amount of competition, you know, let's cherrypick and take, you know, the Android store and the Apple App Store. um they're massive. When you have tens of millions of titles, you know, as a developer, is that fee you're paying for visibility in a store with 10 million competitors? Not really. I mean, it was back in 2010. Yes, that was worth it. Um but it's become incrementally less worth it over time, and yet the fees remain the same. And so I think from our perspective, we wanted to create a place that recognized that indie developers are the ones that drive creativity and the game industry largely. Um, and we ourselves, you know, we're not Roblox. We're not Steam. Um, we don't have a massive massive audience in the same way that those web two platforms do. And so what we want is we

want people to come and create content on Sandbox. Um, but we don't want to restrict them to sandbox. We want to recognize the fact that AI creation tools will now allow you to essentially make one game but publish it in multiple locations as opposed to having to actually make multiple versions of your game. And because of that cost savings and that ease of use, we hope everybody will by default publish to Sandbox, but then also publish somewhere else. Because as an indie, you need to make a living. And if you can bring together revenue from several diverse platforms that allow you to make a living with a fun quirky game that has, you know, small audiences on on a several different platforms, that's awesome because actually that's really in the spirit of what makes games great. So I mean I guess in that vein then when it comes to maybe treating the sandbox as a primary platform for this now the other maybe a secondary uh two questions then one is is there any kind of like fee uh and two like related to that is

there a way to make money like how how's monetizing off of sandbox games work if there is that how does that look is that is that only a web 3 aspect is there normal payment rails like how does all that look for the creator? So again, what we want is we want the um we want the creators to have as much optionality as possible, but in true web 3 fashion, we want to incentivize them. Um and so uh with Sandbox Studio, you're welcome to use, you know, the SAND token or other web 3 tokens. Um you're welcome to use fiat, um or stable coins if you want a hybrid, right? Um we welcome we welcome all all all denominations of currencies. Um, but I think what we've tried to do is we've tried to say, look, um, if you're a web two developer, you know, you're from the 3JS community, for example, and you just want to make cool stuff with Sandbox Studio and have people come with their credit cards and their and their, you know, OAS login, have at it, you know, have a great time,

publish to Steam, make a great game. Um and and there will be you know there we will there will be a fee associated with your game creation process because obviously there is you know uh there are uh token fees in the AI sense of the word token um in order to use the underlying compute etc. Um but uh we also hope that you will consider publishing to sandbox and consider buying land and using sand and if you do there will be benefits to do so. So for example, you will have you know as a land owner you will have increased monetization. You will have increased visibility in terms of um you know the the sandbox map and the way in which game discovery is is done through the sandbox platform. Um, and obviously you will have benefits um to using SAND um because we want to encourage and incentivize people to use sand as the native currency and because there's a knock-on benefit which is the cost of

the web 3 transactional infrastructure is much lower for us too. So we can pass some of that on as a benefit to incentivize uh developers and players.
Awesome. And you kind of headed off a little bit with my next question too, which was where kind of the land ownership fits in. Um,
for the especially for people who may not be familiar, I mean, I know like longtime,
you know, regions of Navic stuff and viewers probably are a little more familiar just because we've done a lot of web 3 stuff in the past, but
yes,
like what is what is the concept of land in the sandbox? How does it fit into all this ecosystem? Uh, especially like from not just the monetization, but also like discovery, curation, publishing, uh those sorts of things. How does all that fit in and how does it work especially now that it's been a while since that started?
Sure. So the original conceit of Sandbox was that it was a 3D metaverse. So it was a 3D you know visualization of a physical world and so we created a map of land and um and creators and developers and people own parcels of

land and they have physical adjacency to each other. You can look at the map and it's fixed. um and you know exactly where your land is and who your neighbors are and some of the land value um was influenced by that just like it is in the physical world. So if you're neighbors with Snoop Dogg or Gucci or HSBC that might have an impact on the value of your land. Um and I think one of the things that um has been challenging obviously has been that uh you know the the the interest in in the idea of meta of a metaverse um was very much intertwined with the fate of a large social networking company unfortunately and the public uh attention um and so I think that uh was something that um faded from people's minds in terms of interest despite the fact that there are plenty of game industry success stories of actual metaverses because most people don't think of things like Eve Online as a

metaverse, but it very much is. Um, and uh, I think that what we have now is essentially a way um, to help bring the spirit of that ownership and that physical adjacency of land, but to something that is a a little bit more amorphous because what we want to do is we want to use Sandbox Studio and Sandbox.game as a publishing platform. Um, and we want for people to come to who want to either find and play great fun games or uh create them. And so because it's a destination for game making and game play, obviously we will be curating, you know, what people see um and we will be featuring you know things that are really cool and fun and and they can find them elsewhere via social media but also on our platform. And so as a land owner um you will have prime positioning um to have your

products and your games promoted because we want to encourage you know benefits to owning land. There will be increased monetization as a result of being a land owner. So you will actually um be able to earn from your game at a different rate than others because we want to encourage land to be used. Um and and then over time um the slightly more ambitious uh feature which we hope to launch um later in the year will be um to be able to have land owners be able to rent their land to other people to be able to create and use for monetization so that you can benefit from the ownership of your land without necessarily having to be the primary builder.
That makes sense. I mean we we have the whole concept of the internet of just hosting as a thing, right? like so.
Yes,
I think it translates for the most part.
Um, and something you kind of touched on a little bit that I I just wanted to make sure that it gets covered as well is around web 3 in general is that a bit of a low point in general. Like I mean obviously it kind of goes up and down depending on how what angle you're

looking at it from. Uh but in in general it's not exactly like the hottest thing at the moment. Yes. Um, and you mentioned like monetization can be fiat or whatever you want to use, but uh do you consider the token layer whether that be sand or any other web 3 token to be like an asset or friction point for creators? Like obviously you could see it as maybe some advantages for being a creator or some big disadvantages like especially when it comes to turning off or on a particular audience.
Sure. Um, so I think it's I mean personally I think it's an asset. I think though it it depends the manner in which you deploy it. So I think one of the things that turned people off of web 3 games um in the earlier days was when we put up front the UIUX of onboarding to web 3 and make made that a prerequisite to engaging in the game. That turned a lot of people off at the door because it's a little bit like saying oh you know this is a members club. You have to go and sign up and join first before you can come inside.

Oh but can I even look? No, you have to go and sign up, right? And and that's a turnoff in in any kind of situation. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to create an environment where you can come in, you can be involved in web 3 if you want, but you don't have to, right? You can just come in and use your Google sign up or your Facebook login or whatever you want, right? Sign up with your email. Um, and you can ignore that web 3 exists altogether if that's what you want to do. That's fine, right? Um, but if you want to use the web 3 rails, then you should be able to reap all the benefits of that. You should be able to have lower fees, faster transactions, and more flexibility because those web 3 rails exist. And in my personal opinion, they're better than the fiat rails. Um and I think also as a platform one of the things you know that we will benefit from here is frankly that core concept of web 3 which is tokens help engender

network effects. And so here we have an opportunity to reach out to token communities across web 3 and say look we're building something really cool here in sandbox and guess what you know you have an audience of token holders there who are feeling you know a little bit bored or maybe the core product that they've been you know part of the community for is languishing. um why don't you come and spend those tokens in Sandbox and create something cool with those tokens in Sandbox and that's a network effect because it it means we can go out and reach out to that token community and onboard them to Sandbox just by accepting their token essentially
and so how when you say they'll be able to spend that in sandbox how does that work what do you mean exactly in terms of so obviously that's a foreign monetization in a way coming in how does that integrate
sure so that integrates in the same way same way as any other um uh what would I say any other currency in in that

respect. So it would be a currency just like if you were spending credit card or fiat for cognition credits because what we would do is we would charge you in your native token for at the prevailing exchange rate for usage of sandbox studio you know cognition credit.
So you then as a company are accepting these uh correct tokens. Okay. Interesting.
Correct.
And then just taking them at the just current market value.
Yeah. Exactly. So come and bring your, you know, bring your ape, bring your gala, whatever it is.
Cool. Um, and so I mean with this scaling up, you're talking about like bringing all these communities and things like that. There's obviously the web 3 side and then I assume your hope is to get a much broader audience especially with the ability to uh publish to these other platforms, things like that. If everyone could do that and scale up the amount of content that they make in theory, right? Because the the the engine part is handled. they they're just then
hitting content. Uh what's kind of the bottleneck for these creators? And then on the flip side of that, how are you handling sort of the discovery aspects

of that?
Sure. Um so the bottleneck I would say is most likely going to be what we don't know at the moment because when you build a platform like this scaling it always inc you always encounter unexpected you know roadblocks right scaling problems hosting problems throughput problems you know you name it and so I suspect that the main bottlenecks are going to be things that frankly we can't yet anticipate um and that just you know these things happen. Um I think in terms of discovery um one of the things that we're thinking a lot about is how we build that sort of discovery platform. Um fortunately I have a colleague um you know with with app store background um who has a lot of experience in in working on discovery and working with studios. Um, I think that, um, discovery is a really important part and that's going to be driven not just by, um,

gameplay on on Sandbox Studio, but also paying attention to signals, right? Paying attention to um, you know, if we have creators, cuz I expect that we will have creators making games who come from other creator venues. They may be primarily known as YouTubers or, you know, people on Twitch or other places. Um and so there will be other social signals that will tell us um their you know how much interest level there is in their content and engagement and things like that. And so the beauty of having um AI agents also involved is that we can now monitor all these things whereas in the past we were just thinking about curation from a human standpoint and you know and nobody can sit and monitor nine different platforms and channels for every every product. Um but we can do that now. So we can come up with I think a much more educated idea of how to surface content that we think people will like.
Are you then taking any approach like uh

the way probably not as extreme but like the way that uh for example Unreal uh with the Fortnite islands and things like that are tend to pay out based off engagement. They're looking at trying to incentivize engagement. Obviously they have the the monetization going towards Fortnite as a whole. So it makes sense from that. But I mean even just from like uh your own curation or the things you have all those signals are you looking to then at least do some level of promotion but are you looking at doing incentivized promotion? How are you looking at kind of having your hands in that pie?
So I think um it's a little bit too early to say frankly um because we're only just planning to launch this autumn um sort of in for the for the public launch. Um but I think one of the things that we've learned um you know based on all our web 3 experience which you know was heavily geared around incentivization um is it does work um and it is a call to action and and people come right when there is an incentive and so you have to think very carefully about how you structure those incentives because you

will get what you ask for. you know, when you run a game jam and put a bounty that is significant enough, people will come because they want to win, right? There's a reward at the end of it. Um, and so you have to decide carefully about what you're trying to incentivize and and that's um I I dare say the basically the subject of tokconomics really. Um and and so we think a lot about that and we do think it's a very very good tool. Um we will actively use it. Um, and the point will be, I think, more to think how we can use incentivization to build community. And as game makers, one of the things we understand is that retention is always the northstar metric. That's the most important thing. And as long as we have people who are coming back and playing, everything else will follow. I suppose you also have like the ability to then uh use use sand tokens and potentially even land as incentivization because it's one that does build towards your own retention, right? In theory, right?

Obviously assuming people don't just cash out whatever it is and then peace out, but in general that helps kind of similar to what Fortnite's doing which is trying to keep them kind of close as you can when you're incentivizing the creators.
Yes. Siri.
Yes. Well, and also if you think about it from a tokconomics standpoint, um the interesting thing is that if you actually have uh a large distributed community, um you don't actually have the same tokconomics challenges that you often had with lowflat high FDV tokens in the past because you don't have the same level of whale activity. Meaning when in Sandbox Studio when we have individual developers making games, the transactions that are coming back and forth for cognition and in-game purchases are not significant enough to move token prices, for example. And so it actually then just functions as underlying liquidity, which is what it's supposed to do,
right? Yeah. I mean, the liquidity aspect is always great for your your whole platform, I imagine. Uh then in that case, having those players kind of

flowing in and out. Obviously, you do have the situation where like uh people that are then playing the game on other platforms are not necessarily going to be provided that same level of liquidity and economics because they're I don't think uh Apple's going to be taking, you know, the SAND token as part of their payment rails. That I'm not ruling that out. I'm just saying not anytime soon, right? Like that that does there doesn't seem to be a lot of motivation for them to go that direction. So that is kind of that sort of thing is limited a bit more towards your platform and and out of curious just because I don't think it's really been stated it might not be clear for people out there this platform itself is it something that you're playing via the web via downloaded PC client Mac compatible and Linux compatible as well is this playable on consoles or mobile just to kind of give a broad idea where where this impacts for staying sandbox native.
Sure. So ultimately the answer is yes to all of those. Um, but we're starting out with we're starting out with web and and client first. TC client first.
Cool.
And and mobile, sorry.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, so is there already a mobile client?
Uh, no. It will be out shortly. We're

testing it at the moment.
Awesome.
It's uh it is depending on how much you like bugs.
So, when people go to publish uh for these other platforms, are they publishing as part of like something within Sandbox or is this you're talking about they're publishing as standalone games? They've got to set up their own like publisher stuff, deal with all the legal stuff and then all that.
Correct. And we're we're essentially the e the engine behind that helps them output to publish to those platforms in the same way that you might use an Unreal.
Yeah, I guess that's closer to what they're doing. Obviously, uh Unity is not doing something like that, but but they're trying to it sounds like merge a bit more of UFN into the main engine kind of stuff and back and forth. So, I guess yeah, probably closer in that respect.
Yeah.
Cool. Um, when it comes to uh like you're you're trying to target more like sort of that that upper indie maybe even up to double A sort of publisher like people like you said people with that experienced game developing things like that that's probably going to be a little on the higher end of indie stuff like that
or people who are accomplished vibe coders and really know how to use AI

tools right
accomplished vibe coders you know what I mean I should I I should say experienced people who've been doing it for a while and understand how to get the best out of an LLA. It absolutely takes experience. Like you're not just going to be like, "Oh, I'm just going to type, you know, whatever and then it's going to work." It definitely
It's a different kind of coding to be honest.
Yeah.
How to talk to it like it own language, ironically enough. um when it comes to that sort of thing like how do you see all this this even this trend in general not necessarily just what you're doing with the LLMs and like maybe building on top of engines and stuff how do you see that affecting sort of the broader at the the double A and lower level when it comes like engines publishers platforms like maybe your vision or what you just see happening on that
Sure I mean I think um this is probably the biggest change to the game industry since the advent of mobile as a platform um And and I think mobile as a platform for developers really just enabled

indies to have access to big audiences and just you know it obviously made the game industry massive because it used to be much smaller in terms of audience size. Um but it didn't change the way developers work in the same way that this will. Um so that really big you know AAA you u mobile titles still required big studios big budgets etc. Um, and I think one of the things that's happening now thanks to LLMs and the coding tools is that studios will just frankly be much much more productive. And that increased productivity will mean that studios will be smaller because one of the challenges of running any big business is literally just managing the people. Uh, as anybody who's worked in a big organization knows and it's easier to manage 20 people than it is 200. And as a result, you can

spend more time focused on the product and the customers than the management task. And so I think a lot of studios will tend towards smaller, you know, um, sort of levels of staffing um because the tools allow them to be as productive as they were when they had higher levels of staffing.
Well, yeah, hopefully that's the case, right? Because the staffing seems to be kind of part of the big problem where we're running into as games industry right now when it comes to costs.
Um, so hopefully this will help with that. I mean, assuming obviously LLM's costs don't somehow start to catch up to uh labor cost, then that becomes its own repeated.
No, no, they they definitely they definitely won't. And and if you have concerns about that, you know, download an open open source Chinese model. I I recommend it.
Certainly keeping the prices lower in that, right?
Yes. But I think the interesting thing though when we think about the the structural issues like for the labor force um I don't see us having massive game industry layoffs where essentially lots of people have to go and find other jobs outside of gaming. The 200 person

studio I was talking about in my opinion just then becomes 10 indies of 20 people, right? It's a different it's a different kind of thing. We will organize ourselves into smaller group groupings rather than bigger groupings. But it doesn't mean you need to leave gaming just because there's no longer a place for a 200 person studio. I mean that suits game development just in the way that it's a very cyclical thing where generally people work at a big company for a while that or one that grows into a big company for a while and then leave and start their own company. In fact, in the wake of you know like obviously a lot of the layoffs we're I'm just hearing you know every other day an announcement of a new studio for veterans of a previous studio where it's seems to be a cyclical thing. So I mean hopefully this helps accelerate that or improve that the conditions of that the viability of people staying within the industry instead of leaving and just starting a new company.
Yes. Well and it also means that when you start your own indie um you don't need to land a big publishing deal in order to survive. Right.
Right.

Uh on that topic like something we actually didn't touch on we talked about code and all those things. Uh when it comes to assets we're talking like you know art, sound, all that stuff. Even even game design like how much is this is the tooling involved in anything outside of code?
Uh yes in terms that you can kind of uh bob of sorts. So you can bring your own assets. Um so there are two aspects to assets. One is we have substantial asset libraries already from uh the seven years of sandbox as a web 3 metaverse platform. And I think that gives us um a great head start because once we open live to the public, you'll see that we have, you know, lots and lots of libraries of voxil assets that players can use to create cool stuff in the sandbox art style. And that's already there. You can plug and play, right? Um, but also it's important for us to work with all of the tools that everybody

else is using for the um uh the uh LLM creation of whether they're video assets or their um art assets, sound assets, etc. Um because what we want to do is to be able to ingest those seamlessly.
That makes sense. So that way you're not necessarily replacing tools they might already be well accustomed to or getting good value out of or already paying for at that point.
Exactly. Exactly. Cuz we at the end of the day we just want to be that sort of Swiss Army knife where you can bring everything else and we're just enabling all that stuff to come together in one place.
That makes sense. Um so in general then like looking at all this uh where it's at where it's going especially what you guys are trying to do.
Yeah. What do you see as kind of the future of especially multiplatform UGC looking like given AI given the current state of the game industry given what you guys are trying to do as well as not only that but even just like the way uh Microsoft was talking about

Minecraft as one of their big pillars now so over the next say three to five years maybe that's even too long maybe the next three years might be better scoped where do you see the future of this going uh and what do you think it'll take to kind of get there
so I think that Um actually digital identity is kind of at the heart of all of this. Um and that digital identity is is going to be something that is either you know in kind of a um immutable web 3 form that um can be used in lots and lots of different venues or um as part of one of the big existing web 2 platforms like the OOTH stuff I was talking about earlier whether it's Google or Facebook or Twitter you know um uh being the provider of the identity that you prefer to log in to use but I think it's those identities um that will allow for content portability or for you know the recollection of of game state across different platforms in the case of gaming. Um and I think that's a really important feature because ultimately

just between say mobile and desktop people are starting to as players um have an expectation that they can pick up where they left off. you know, when I pause my Netflix movie, I expect that I can pick it up at home after I've been watching it on my phone on the train back from work or something like that, right? Um, and so this kind of stuff, um, is taken as a matter of course. Um, I, you know, I I have to reflect my bias here. I hope that the solution to this is a web 3 um you know tokenized identity because I think that um a tokenized identity um is the best way for u players and users creators to own their identity and I think sovereign ownership of that identity yourself is really important going forward in how we all interact on the internet but I get it using Google or Apple login is much easier um and there is a there is an ease of use and convenience factor to

that that is difficult to ignore. Um but you know we ourselves are trying to accommodate all of the above frankly because it's not our job to tell our customers and you know what platforms they should be using. Yeah, I mean that's a great point. Like I I do think identity is probably the biggest strength of blockchain stuff because that's literally basically all it is, right? It's a decentralized management of you know transactions or whatever it might be signed using an identity and that identity is the core to that. Uh but I do I do think there is obviously like that debate that you bring up about something like Google or something like that in that people are pretty bad at managing their own identity. So like there's there's absolutely benefits to it, but there's absolutely downsides. Uh that it's not just convenient to use Google, it's also their security is probably a lot better than mine. Uh so in theory, assuming I'm not the the cause of a breach, uh it's a situation where yeah, that could be definitely a thing. Uh and I'm sure you guys have had to deal with some of that level of u identity stuff uh on on the platform when it comes to uh anything

you might have to deal with with the financial aspects of SAM or land and stuff like that. So, of course, there's that there. Um, but I'm kind of curious the that you mentioned about like cloud synchronization kind of things like that. Uh, obviously if you were talking about people um publishing outside of the sandbox, that's sort of its own thing, but are you looking at some ways to be able to provide some level of that uh cloud like for example the way Steam provides their cloud saves and things like that? is is good
reason why so many indies can then facilitate that because indies are generally not going to have the availability to set up their own cloud services if you're providing multiplayer if you're providing
potential for cloud saving is that something you guys are going to do or looking at? Um, we would love to I think one of the challenges always of working with any of let's just call them world garden platforms is going to be how much data we can access you know from the game state and identity that they've uh that they manage um and what they're willing to share in order to facilitate

the ease of use of the customer. Um we are more than happy to help with that. Um, but of course, you know, for the reasons of one of your original questions, they may be reluctant because they're trying to keep people in their platform,
right? I mean, that's a good point, and I do think probably something looking at something like the way uh Steam does cloud saves might be a good model for like that that portability that they're kind of managing, but you're facilitating the sort of like hands-off way to look at it, I suppose, so you're not thinking about like privacy so much, perhaps.
Yes. But I I do you do bring up an important point about the uh the owning the customer thing is a big aspect currently of these other app stores and things like that is your lack of ability to sort of be able to talk directly to your players, communicate with them like sort of own the customer so to speak is a big issue and big part of the reason why web shops are important and things like that. Do you guys provide any like level of that for just normal sandbox games? If I'm making it for sandbox, not publishing it outside of that, is there a way then for me to have a more deeper

relationship with my players rather than just they can play my game?
Yeah, of course. Absolutely. And and especially if you're willing to jump all the way down the rabbit hole and and go into the web 3 aspect, for sure. Because then you have the ability to have your own sovereign identity system in there. You'll have your own monetization. Um, and frankly, I mean, you can build up your own token treasury and I we we can help you with treasury management.
Is the game able to then see like who the the players like actual like wallet identity?
Uh, yes.
Okay. Because then obviously the rest of that technically public right at that point uh on the blockchain. So that is that is definitely a big differentiator versus uh more platforms. I think it's worth highlighting
as as I said it's it's our bias. I I think as a game maker, I think that would be the best way to be able to make your game and to interact with your players, but that's a particular audience who wants to interact in that way,
right? I think it's an important one

given the state of indie games and where the successes are often found is usually in community building and that's something I would say is very native to web 3 gaming.
It's very community bound, especially around things like Discord or whatever it might be. Uh kind of building those communities. So, I think I don't know. I just feel like maybe you could highlight that feature even more if that's something that you know people could do just because that's such a current problem uh when it comes to thinking about platforms to use because I don't think you get anywhere like that sort of thing on Roblox even uh or or Fortnite where you can really like yeah you're you're take advantage of the platform but you're not really gaining a community or relationship outside of going like I know Roblox will try and do was like hey go like go to our discord and and link it and then you can like get bonus things where they have to over incentivize it whereas it's a little or native to what you're doing. So, worth noting.
Yes. Well, and and our hope is that as long as as long as we're the easiest or most interesting or most fun place to make your games, then you will continue to come back and make them and update

them there.
I always hope Merit wins, but the the economy and the market are are never fully rational in that aspect. So,
Well, that's that's why we have that's why we have incentives also,
right? Exactly. That's where that's where those come in. Uh, cool. Cool. Just few last rapid fire questions just kind of uh you know what whatever you think. Uh some opinionated stuff for fun. No problem. You know as as a CEO it's always fun to to get the opinions.
Let's do it.
So uh just first off biggest lie or this could just be a little bit more misunderstanding if you want to go a little softer. Uh kind of currently being told about AI game development as someone who's now really working in that.
Sure. I think the biggest lie is when you go on Twitter and you see people who create incredible looking games um from oneshot prompts and are like here you could try this prompt and you know to me that's that's it is cool. You can do that but it's not actually a game. It just looks like a game for the first two minutes of watching the trailer. Um and it's amazing. Don't get

me wrong. It's amazing but it's not a game. And so, you know, I think um making games is much easier than it used to be, but it's still a job and it's why game developers have a job.
Takes more than one prompt usually.
Exactly.
I I actually did see that recently where there was that uh I think it might have been around Fable or one of the other ones. There was like a Call of Duty thing published. go. Like I basically made it, but then like he actually didn't share the prompt in the uh GitHub as I went to look at I'm like, "Yeah, this is way too simplistic of a prompt to be anything remotely uh usable long term outside of just like a fun thing to share on Twitter, right? So just don't trust
and and you can have you can have you can have fun with it for 15 or 20 minutes and it's amazing, right? Great to learn. Something Yeah, it's it's something that would have taken you weeks and weeks before to that you can literally do in one shot, but that's all it is,
right? Well, then uh obviously with all this AI stuff pretty much hitting everything when it comes to platforms, when it comes to engines, all this stuff, which

UD UGC platform do you think is the most risk from all this? And and maybe even as a bonus, which one do you think will benefit the most from this? Outside of your own personal bias for the sand?
Sure.
Sure. Um, I actually think that the most successful platforms often are the ones that have the most to risk because they're kind of in the winner's seat. And at this moment in time, um, that would be Roblox. Um, and I think actually Roblox has a has a problem that is not related to all the things we've been talking about,
right? It's not a technology problem technically.
Yeah. Because Roblox's problem, and and and I'm also not talking about safety and security, which is actually their current biggest problem,
right?
Their problem is just a fundamental problem of making games for kids,
right?
Because it's a natural fact of time that you lose your audience,
right?
They don't get bored, they grow up. Um, and so how do you keep building that audience and bringing them on early?

Like if you look at a company like Lego, Lego has pulled off the most amazing trick where there are huge communities of adults that come into Lego who might not have even played with Lego as a kid, right? And that's amazing because at the end of the day, it was invented as a toy, an educational toy. Um, and and so I think that Roblox has a fundamental problem where their players age out by the time they hit 15. And do they then start to have the platform cater to older or adult players or do they just stick and focus with the core demographic which is we get them in when they're five and hold on to them till they're 15 and that's good enough and then we'll run the cycle again. And the problem is when you get too big you have to start going outside your core demographic because you already own that demographic which they've done very successfully.
Exactly.
Exactly. Um and so and so I think that's probably um why I think they face the

biggest challenges because it's the challenge of success. They've been so phenomenally successful.
Yeah, that's the problem with being public, right? I guess I guess we'll see then. Uh it'll be really interesting to watch what happens with EA because they are suddenly going to not be in theory subject to that same pressure of obviously different pressures with different owners now, but like not that same public. We have to keep growing. although I'm sure their new owners would love that. Uh but that's not not exactly the same, right? So that is uh yeah interesting take on that that it's not the the usual take just the and I'm sure that's a question Epic's been trying to answer for a while too is can we get them when they're done with that?
Yes. Well, and also Fortnite for example is a little bit different because the gameplay style started with something that was of course popular with pre-teen and teens but is actually very popular with adults as well,
right? as opposed to Minecraft which is kind of like in a similar boat but a different version of that sort of thing.
Yes. Yes.
I guess closely related to Legos then as

well.
Exactly.
Um so uh last one just a little spicier one I suppose here is web 3 gaming dead dormant or just early.
Uh so first first let me preface that by saying we're always early uh and and generally too early. Um but I actually think um I think the interesting thing will be that what we will find is that as we predicted many years ago all gaming will become web 3 gaming. Um however I think that what's going to happen now is that most players aren't going to be aware that it's actually web 3 gaming. Um, and I think what you're going to find is the first bits of web 3 that are going to seep into all games are going to be through the people that you don't expect it from. Meaning that your Visa card transactions will start and your Stripe transactions and all of these things will run on blockchain infrastructure. Just like every docuign that you've signed for the last 5 years

has been run on blockchain and you didn't know it.
Oh, I did not know that. Mhm.
So that's learn something new
cuz it's the it's the best way to run cheap secure infrastructure period, right? So why wouldn't the web 2 companies all use it to their advantage for their own cost benefit? And and so I think now
you're going to see all of these web 2 games are actually going to be, you know, the payment methods that they're implementing and stuff will be running on web 3 anyway. Uh it's just depends on whether you um you use indie web 3, let's call it,
right? Right. with with native tokens and things like that.
Are we going to start saying big web 3 versus little web two?
Exactly. Well, because obviously look at stable coins. I mean, stable coin volumes are, you know, Tether is like the largest purchaser of US treasuries in the world. Um, and
they got to keep at it at this, right?
Well, yeah, there's there's there's that, too. Somebody somebody's got to support the US economy. Um, but I think um I think you know that ship has

sailed. Web 3 is very much here to stay and um and the institutional side of web 3 as financial infrastructure um is part of the firmament already. So it just depends on on the way in which it comes into gaming. But that part is inevitable.
Interesting. So, we just basically had to trick the big corporate finance uh underneath the payment rails to do it. And then then the Trojan horses in and then everyone goes, "Well, if I already have a bank account, I might as well turn that into a wallet. It's already on blockchain and so on and so forth to kind of exactly
drive that wedge in there." Interesting. Yeah. Interesting approach. I didn't I didn't realize how far it gotten on the underlying technology. So, that is a great thing to keep an eye out for, especially when it comes to looking for like news or anything around blockchain uh around infrastructure that's already in use in gaming. Yes. And if you want to see a great example of it in um sort of the blending of traditional web one, web two, and web 3, uh then keep an eye on our friends at um uh uh Eve Eve.

I had a feeling you were going to say that exactly. Yeah, that's uh that's been a very interesting platform and in that approach and it seems to be I don't know if I'd say successful or not because it's hard to tell from like the the outside, but it seems to have gotten it's it's not canceled and it's continuing to push forward. So I think that's And also watch
it's I mean they know how to make games. They're a game maker game maker.
I mean they're pretty much supporting a whole country alone. So
yes.
So someone's got to do it there. So that's yeah it's good good way to think about it as well. So definitely good things to keep an eye on. I think that's a great way to end this is like hey some stuff you could actually look for as signals and things to keep an eye on. So
outside the sandbox of course
to answer your question web 3 is alive and well. It just, you know, you might not know everything is web 3, but it actually is
sneakier. So, it just changes clothes and we're like, ah, it's dead. I know.
Exactly.
All right, cool. Well, thanks for uh for for joining today. Like a lot of great I think insight on this as well as for people who aren't familiar with what

you're doing. I know there was an announcement, but like
uh not everyone was watching as much before just because it's been quieter. So, it's good to know continuing to push forward doing some cool things. um a lot of stuff happening still in that environment and in the the hot UGC and AI multiplatform environment here that we're driving, you know, straightforward into in the future. So, thanks for
Yeah. And and I would definitely encourage everybody to come to our website because we do have we've had an alpha creators program and now a beta creators program uh in place for the last couple of months and people have been making really cool stuff. So, you should just come and check it out and and see see what you like because you can already get on there and play some of the games already.
At the very least, see what kinds of things are being built on this platform and see I guess you could kind of gauge how well uh the tools are working by by the outputs over time.
Yes. So,
totally.
Awesome. Well, thanks again, Robbie. Look forward to seeing where that goes. I'm a big fan of uh these all these different platforms. The more competitors Roblox, the better, I think, at this point uh when it comes to just

accessibility and discovery and and fun things to happen. So, look forward to seeing where that goes as it sounds like a lot of it is is still relatively early. So,
it is it is. Thanks so much, Devin. Really appreciate you taking the time today.
Thank you. And thanks everyone for listening. I will catch you guys on the next one.
If you enjoyed today's episode, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a fivestar review. And if you want to reach out or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] co or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you want to learn more about what Navic has to offer, make sure to check out our website, www.navic.co. There you can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Navic Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services. Again, that is www.navic.co. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.