Blocklords Deep Dive with CEO David Johansson - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] gm friends and welcome to the metacast crypto corner brought to you by navic i'm your host nicola freyko or nico for short and today i'm joined by david johansson ceo and co-founder of meta king studios um they're the creator of block lords and block lords is one of the most ambitious strategy games of our age and as a die-hard age of empires and skyrim fan i personally consider block lords to be one of the most interesting games in the blockchain gaming space today i consider it one of the new generation of games that are significant upgrade over the last um and so in this conversation with david i plan to go a little bit a little bit deeper into some of the design decisions made around you know how to use this new set of technologies to gaming david welcome to the metacast thank you nico good to see you again and uh thanks for having me really excited to be here

talking about blockboards and future web free gaming me too man me too but before we kick things off i would like to remind your listener that if you like content like this please subscribe to the navic digest newsletter and you can also like uh join the navic discord where me and others hang out and you can we can have conversations about podcasts like this and then finally if you want to have some really really deep insights you can subscribe to the navic pro newsletter and if you use the code metacast there you'll get 10 off all right david before we start could you give us some background about yourself what were you doing before you uh started building block lords yes i've been uh making games for the last 10 years that's really been uh the core focus of everything i do uh i can give you a bit of info about myself uh born in sweden uh grew up in uh france and sweden so kind of grew up all over europe ended up in the u.s where i started studying film so i've always kind of had this creative bone in my in my body got into film worked in hollywood a few

years and kind of learned a lot about how what it takes to get nd movies independent films made uh kind of randomly ended up in china in china i kind of moved from film to uh game development and just fell in love with it you know it was kind of rediscovering my old flame that i hadn't seen for many years because i didn't play games throughout all of college as i was so into the film thing but yeah once i got back into game there was really no stopping was part of the early 2010s free to play gaming wave where i really got familiar with how a lot of asian studios were uh taking this concept of free gaming and finding ways to make it quite profitable for the studios and as i was getting into that i was i was uh seeing a lot of potential in free gaming but also seeing a lot of issues with how these games were actually monetizing so when i discovered bitcoin in 2017 a lot of things just clicked to me about digital ownership about monetizing

attention about incentivizing gameplay things that i thought were brewing and free to play uh but hadn't quite really reached a level of uh where it totally made sense to me so yeah in 2017 i kind of just decided hey let let's go full time crypto and let's uh let's find ways to implement gaming with uh crypto uh that's actually when i had the first idea for block loads it was around that time i think early 2018 is when i started putting thoughts into paper uh we worked on blockboards me and the small team of my co-founders for several years and got pretty experienced at blockchain development to the point where we decided hey let's take this knowledge we have in blockchain game development and let's create a game platform and a set of sdk tools that is going to make nft game development you know crypto game development uh d5 game development easier for other game developers and that was the seascape network and the team grew from five people to 40 people uh thanks to the csga network and as the

seascape network work was growing we got better at game development we got better at nft integration into games uh we kind of went back to our old baby blog floors and decided last year as everything was kind of blowing up with game five to create meta king studios with the sole aim of making the ultimate web 3 grand strategy game right so you had the idea for block lords you started working on it and then used that knowledge and know-how to help other games get developed and then now you're you're saying screw the others i'm gonna you know finish my baby and this this beautiful thing that i had in my head definitely not screw the others definitely the other so seascape is still supporting over a half a dozen projects that are in development right now a few of them have been released and the idea is really to build on what seascape has been doing creating back-end infrastructure for nft gaming and then using that knowledge to create a triple a grand strategy game that will really serve as the ultimate text case of what is possible with nft

gaming right so if you're working with seascape network no worries david still got your back um good i'm curious did some of the learnings from working on other games influence some of the design decisions around block lords pre you know or around 2018 where you had the initial ideas and now oh absolutely i mean it's a huge part of it and our history and our experience with chain i'd say it's uh it's some of the uh more advanced in the industry and it's definitely informed a lot of decisions and also how we approach uh on-chain and off-chain uh asset handling quite quite a lot so as we uh the version two version one of blockboards which was uh quite simple compared to the current one it was a 2d game it was top down it was much more focused on the hero nfts and less so on battles compared to the the new version of blackboard uh we we used to do everything on chain right uh the early versions of blockboards had uh every battle was a transaction every item was a transaction

every hero was an nft every you know literally everything was on chain for version one and we realized that that caused a huge amount of ux issues um it was uh it was really hard for to acquire new users because they they essentially had to be crypto experts to be able to play a game right and this is still something that gamefly as a whole is finding but we're really i'd say we're at the forefront of exploring what should be on the chain what should be off the chain uh and of course talking to the community and seeing based on what the community do in all these different versions of the game and all these different games that we've worked on through the years uh we're able to really try to uh find the the the golden rule right between on chain and option fascinating before we go into that because i'm curious like what changed could you tell us a bit more about you know block clear lords as a game so we can you know build on that in in exploring you know what what lives on and what levels of change yeah so at the uh so block lords is really

i would say it's a medieval uh it's an mmo online strategy game right that's built entirely around the blockchain economy so the the core that that were still the core in 2018 and it's still the core today is you have a hero that hero is an nft that nft has a certain amount of stats has a special appearance and has basically a place in the block lord universe uh as a new hero you probably start off with pretty low stats and you're gonna have to work your way up so as you work your way up you could start off as a farmer then you build your way up to having an army and being a warrior if you conquer enough territory if you conquer enough cities enough villages you're able to maybe earn enough resources to take over a city once you're taking over city you're actually a lord as a lord you're you're responsible for controlling your city upgrading your city but as a bonus you also start earning taxes from everybody who's farming in your land anybody who's trading in your land and anybody who's kind of fighting on your behalf in your

land meaning that there's actually an incentive within the game to become as powerful as possible and once you're powerful it's also more problems right so you got to start dealing with contenders you gotta go to war against other people and you gotta prepare yourself to get attacked all the time so uh that's that's really the core idea of blockboards uh it was in 2018 and it still is today and we've just been able to add a lot more ideas and features and concepts around those original ideas that's fascinating and as i say more money more problems i guess that still counts on the blockchain oh yeah oh yeah all right um that's great and could you so you said you have your character which is a hero which is an nft could you quickly run me through the assets that you have and and which one exists on the blockchain what what types of you know fungible and non-fungible tokens you have yeah so in in blocklords we are really running with the concept that the hero is your nft and the rest is really things that you require that are linked to your nft but each asset is not uh it's not an nft or an asset of its own

right so your hero is really the embodiment as your digital avatar it's like you are the mft right your family is the nft so i'd say the core way we're using these digital assets in blockboards is you start off with your hero if you're new to the game you register for free and you you get started and the game will mint an nft to you for you for free this will be your character there will be some customization options uh but overall probably not that many as a new player especially early on as you start playing the game you start as a farmer you start amassing more resources those resources can be used to expand your farm as you expand your farm you start earning more resources right you play edge of empires right it's like your farm eventually it's pretty productive uh towards it towards the the middle of a session and as your farm increases you can start you have a choice right you can take the resources you have and you can invest in an army or you can take the resources you have and invest in need and me there's a really important resource that's going to be

used to have children in essence and children is a is a very important part of blockboards uh if you uh like in many other nft games such as axis such as crypto cryptokitties uh you can get married and a marriage contract and then you can have children right now i'd say where block lords is quite unique is that we're introducing the concept of nft permadeath right so your hero you're this guy you've been you've been uh growing you know you've grown farms together you've gone to battle together maybe you even became a lord well you're nft he's gonna die you know like like people he's gonna die so who are you gonna pass on your legacy to right because if you die without an heir uh nobody inherits your farm nobody inherits your army nobody inherits your kingdom so it's very important and it's a core part of the game is to get married and to have children and it really is the driving factor of the entire economy this idea of perma-death how does the death mechanic work do

heroes have an h and do they age automatically and then at a certain point they die how does that work correct so they have an age and we have a time progression inside the game so over time they get they get older and older and uh once they've gone very old basically every day of the game play uh there's an increased chance of dying right so so the older you get the higher the chances there are there is also some if you get very unlucky you could die early although that's going to be very rare uh and the more risk the user takes in the game the more that chance increases right so if you go off and fight you probably won't die after one battle but if you fight and you get injured boom you're increasing your chances of dying with each a battle quite by quite a lot so it's all about the players decision like if you choose to stay inside your castle never go outside yeah you're probably going to be fine for the total lifespan right but if you go out and start raiding everyone you're going to increase your chance of dying interesting and um how does the aging mechanism work is

this if you don't touch the game does your character still die or is it you know every time you look in daily then it ages how does that work no the nft does age all the time once we activate the dynasty system the dynasty system won't be active for the very first part of the of the game's existence as we want to test to make sure everything is balanced and good but in essence once the game is full uh the the nft will age and this is also a way for our nft holders for nft users to be engaged with the game we we're not we've seen a lot of issues with other player games or game fight games where basically whales just buy a huge amount of nfts then just sit on them or just lease them to other people to to to play which is a great concept i love the guild and i like this idea of using these stable assets but we definitely don't want a system where people just buy all the best heroes lock them away and hope they go up in value in two or three years we we want the best heroes to be used inside the game to get married to have children and if you have really good heroes you're basically wasting their potential if you're not having children with them okay and can you explain me a bit more

about how marriage works so if you mint if you start your adventure you create a hero out of nowhere you mint your first hero do you choose a gender gender and then you need a man and a woman to to have kids yeah that's correct so so we are using uh male and female gender yeah we are doing that uh this is a medieval game and uh yes exactly so you actually won't be able to choose your gender for the free heroes you will be assigned you will be so basically your first character that you get when you play the bl in black lives universe will be randomly assigned to you uh you can kind of refresh a few times if you'd like but overall you're kind of stuck with the choices you uh that the randomized uh option you get uh as you start playing the game you start improving your stats and getting better and better at certain things so let's say you're you're raising cows a lot so in the game now your your stats are kind of boosting with each level so that you get really good at raising cows and now it's time to get married right you're of marriage age you have some resources you have enough so then you can go to the church right in the city and you can see okay who's

available for marriage and these would in essence be nfts from other players right that are up for uh well up for marriage right we would call it but essentially they're up for sale as nfts uh of course some will be low price because again nfts are generated by the users it's up to a user if they want to generate an nft a basic nft and give it away or you know sell it sure they can do that they're going to maybe get some resources for it not a whole lot i would imagine if it's an unskilled you know untrained nft it's not going to get very much or you can maybe choose to spend more resources or spend some tokens and then you could maybe marry someone who's also very good at raising cows and then all of a sudden you two have a child and your child you better believe is going to start off with a better stat uh stat attributes of raising cows right and this is how through the generations of the game you can actually start getting uh better and better inheritance uh who are hopefully going to take your legacy to the next level

extremely good cow breeders i like it fascinating do you and this is just me out of curiosity do you intend to there to be a trade-off where you know if you decide you're gonna increase your level of cow breeding and but that means that you can never become a master at you know smithing or like any other skills does it work like that yeah definitely i mean our game economists are working really hard on how these stats are passed through generations and we also don't want to end up with you know after five generations uh everybody has like you know level 100 heroes and everything right so there is a lot of balancing involved there is luck involved there you still even if you're born with someone who has a good potential if you don't use that potential well throughout the gameplay that's not going to live up to the maximum amount so in essence there is a give and take and there's a maximum amount of stats that each hero can have and at the end of the day it's all about game balance right is we want to make sure we don't end up with an army of super super nfts that are just going to take over everything all at once

i really like the mechanism of death and then you know especially it allows you some flexibility where you know the moment you have a child you know you can actually as a game developer probably have some flexibility around you know the stats and how much they inherit and that way you can probably more easily balance these things yeah it's really cool what are you sorry go ahead no no i just one little bonus i'll add in as well is that some people i'm sure will end up getting married having kind of these uh these higher skills uh kids and then sell them off which is fine that's encouraged you know for some types of players that said if you do that for example if you have two children and you you sell one of them you know because you want to monetize essentially if your second son died and you don't have an heir whoever bought your nft would have a claim to inherit your stuff when you die right not all of it but essentially the farms the armies and the kingdoms would be able to be

inherited so it's it's it really closely replicates you know whatever happened a thousand years ago that's extremely cool that's really that's the inspiration right yeah look at that okay what kind of player archetypes are do you envision within you know the end state of your game i can imagine there will be you know breeders maybe specialized in in certain type of skill and then you know they will flood the market with children that have that are or great prospects in in cow breeding or whatever um are you thinking about that yeah i mean that's a core thought and as we're developing the game we're definitely putting a lot of emphasis on the different archetypes of gamers so as the core foundation of the game we are making the game for four different types of gamers right one is the farming so farming is the entry level gameplay you can imagine compare age of empires farming but that's very rts based so but i would say kind of the mechanics of click and place that's very similar to uh empires but then you have a stardew valley and farmville is pretty good references for the farming experience it's a bit more casual it's a bit more

just you know log in do your daily uh farming stuff and then you know log out come back in a few hours uh this is a more casual gaming experience this is going to be perfectly suited for free to play gamers and also for guild members who are just kind of looking into grinding and getting out the resources and then turning those resources into what they want uh the second level of gameplay it's more the hardcore gamer right more probably you and me we like to go to battle we like to we like to go a bit deeper into our stats we like to we like to risk it a bit but if we win we want to kind of have a better reward that's the warrior archetype right once you've built up your farm you have enough to invest in an army boom you have your army you leave your farm behind that's a conscious choice you have to make right you can't play it safe stay with your farm and go raiding you got to leave your farm behind once you do that you can steal stuff from other farmers and kind of become like the evil side or you can take a salaried knight position with the lord and protect farmers right so you can kind of be an evil warrior or a good warrior both are fairly high risk but

higher reward than being a farmer and then so that's more of the adventure strategy gamer who likes battles then we've got the third level third level lords lords actually are the nfts that control the different regions of the map uh it becomes much more about resource management it becomes much more about city building it becomes about tax management economic policy about incentivizing knights to fight for you about putting in systems that will deter raiders from invading your land and most importantly it becomes about getting as many farmers as possible to join your region because you're going to be essentially competing with other lords for the best region on the map and so that's more for the you know the resource city building type player and maybe the more crypto savvy i think the crypto savvy crowd is going to love really the lord position and then at the top we have the king not everybody can be the king i see it for a lot of guild leaders i see it for those who are really really degens in the in the d5 space and who like to mint their own currencies who like to invest in banking and insurance tech for their kingdoms

and they're essentially responsible for the entire health of their nation so those are the four primary types of players we're aiming for with block force and that's a as you hinted there's going to be a lot of like smaller roles that are going to prop up in the economy to fill out a need right breeding definitely we're working with breeder doll i mean they're they're kind of specialized and just the breeding of nft they love the game concept i'm sure they're going to have a lot of interesting models for how to maximize the output of heroes traders you know who buy items who buy resources who sell them in different parts of the map that's going to be huge and to be honest i'm sure we're going to have a lot more that we're not even seeing at this point yeah that's really cool okay i think i have a pretty decent overview of what the game entails and what it will look like um i was wondering you talked about land and cities is there a limited amount of land and kingdoms and how are you thinking about that yeah correct so in the uh initial early access version there's only going to be 200 regions

so it's going to be quite limited there's only going to be 200 lords and ladies and thousands of farmers right who are working for these lords and ladies that's the initial the way we've designed the map right now we have a really cool paper style map for the whole blackboard continent the whole land mass of clockworks currently that has 3 500 regions in it so that's the capacity we have at this point is for 3 500 lords for the total game and then the way the game's gonna work we're still balancing we're still looking at the exact numbers but it's going to take around three to five lords to vote for a king because taking inspiration from history right the king if he didn't have the lords on his side they were kind of not able to do anything right so the lords are really the backbone of the economy and the kings in many ways are figurehead that are going to have a lot of pressure but that also get to be get to get all the glory if they go to war right so that's kind of how we're designing it are you thinking about around pay to win where someone you know who got lucky on some going and you know made a lot of money and just comes in that decides

to buy a bunch of nfts and set themselves up to dominate the whole game yeah i mean absolutely we're thinking about it and we've with our experience in and gaming and free to play gaming we've seen it happen a lot so i'd say we're definitely leaning into that in how we're building up the game right and actually we're trying to rephrase that from pay to win to pay the share and this is really at the core of the game is these asymmetrical incentives right the farmers they provide the tax revenue the warriors they kind of either they hurt the farmers or they hurt or they help the farmers uh who does that benefit the lord's right the lord's earned taxes from all the farmers and then in essence if you take a powerful position whether it be a lord or a king you are going to be incentivized to invest more in the economy the more you invest in the economy of the game the more you invest in the infrastructure of the game the more not only you benefit but everyone in your kingdom benefits right so a whale essentially is going to be

incentivized to invest as much as possible in the region yes they will benefit from it but that's because everyone else is benefiting from it right and that's really how we're approaching the pay to win scenario is like yes you can pay to win against other people who are paying to win but essentially you're paying to share the wealth of your region with all the farmers and all the knights who fight with you super interesting um makes a lot of sense okay now you know we we started this conversation um you you saying that you've actually worked with bunch of games uh crypto games and i think there are maybe 100 people that have actually built a bunch of crypto games before they're actually you know working on their their magnum opus um like you are let's talk a bit more about your learnings there so you initially said that you you initially had a lot of more of your game happening on chain and now a bunch of stuff happens on chain could you give us some details um and some specific decisions and designs in your game that you changed because of that

yeah so uh i i'd say you know early on it was very very unchained it was uh it caused a lot of issues basically making every game decision a transaction based on the current tech was just not sustainable i think we're getting better and better but we're still a good five to 10 years away from from that actually being possible of everything being on chain right which you could say is the dream right because then you can talk about truly decentralized game which in my humble opinion is not quite we're not there yet as an industry but certainly that's the ideal um going more into 2020 when we started building seascape network and we started doing uh a more um a more scalable approach to how nft games would be developed that's when we started looking at okay how can we really mass mint a lot of nfts while keeping the things secure right because what would happen is because of this disconnect between uh well you could say this before i start rambling too much in regular gaming which is already very difficult right

making even a non-web3 game it's really difficult uh you have the server interacting with the client right and you need to make sure that the server and the client are in tune all the time and whereas in web3 you have also the blockchain layer and if you're cross chain you have the cross chain blockchain layer right and so really what we spent almost 50 to 60 of the time on is how do you make this communication between the server the client and the blockchain layer not only secure which is hugely difficult i mean you saw recently with the ronin hack this is just an example of what happens very often in game fight is that hackers are able to kind of cross these signals before uh as as you're kind of sending something to the contract or you're sending it to the server uh it's it's easy to manipulate so i'd say we've kind of shifted our focus from uh just the game or just the server to really security first then game and then then server and sorry i'm kind of rambling a bit but

overall i'd say that's what we've learned is that it's incredibly difficult to manage this relationship and the more we can streamline it while keeping the user experience as friendly as possible that's the route we always keep exploring it's really good to know um how is this represented in in the people you're hiring because most of the teams i'm playing i'm speaking to a lot of web 2 game developers they have you know their full team set up that know how to make games and then they plan on hiring one or two maybe three blockchain developers solid developers to implement the blockchain part what you're telling me if i understand you correctly is that you know these things are actually where most of the risk happens especially once we transact in value over the internet um and so can you tell me more about you know how your team is set up in that way you say that 60 of your effort and thoughts go towards that does that also mean that you have hired a lot of cyber security people yeah so uh so we did it the other way around right so a lot of teams they start they have a solid game team and then they learn about the blockchain

part and then they figure out actually the blockchain part is way more difficult than it seemed like so we did it the other way right we started with a team of five people uh back in 2018 early 2018 and we we decided to get good at the blockchain part and we realized it's extremely extremely difficult and that is a warning i'll give to all these aaa studios that are coming into the space it's actually way harder than its own uh and and so that's where seascape comes in right with seascape we have already five years of experience almost now not for four years of experience of making scalable smart contract solutions uh and then implementing those into games in a secure way and it's been tried and tested and this is why with meta kings now we were able to do what we've always wanted to do is now we're setting up this aaa game studio so actually what was nice with setting up medicine studio is we didn't have to hire all the blockchain knowledge we didn't have to hire all those you know one million of their one million yearly salary uh smart contract developer we have a whole system with seascape to

train smart contract developers from scratch and we've we've done it several times and also just writing smart contracts is not very useful in the context of a game you need someone who not only knows smart contracts but knows how to handle client tools wallet integration you know server and back-end interaction so in essence a good blockchain developer is a full stack developer and i think just hiring smart contract developers is actually not quite enough to to do the types of games we want to make that said security is a big focus and while we do have internal security testing and internal qa to make sure that everything's secure that's not enough so we we are partnered with halborne who's one of the top cyber security firms in the industry and hal bourne is in essence they have a security as a service model where every time we have a new product every time we have a new concept every time we have a new prototype we send it their way they they test it and they try to hack it and uh usually they're not successful but when they are you know we fix it and so that's how we approach security

that's really cool yeah it's something that i don't think a lot of teams think that deeply about so uh it's really really informative thanks um you have been building a lot of games um on the blockchain you've have a lot of experience with smart contract developments with cyber security you just said and i found this very painful that you know purely on chain games are still five or ten years away um i get really excited when thinking about you know the possibilities of these types of games um so okay maybe i have to readjust my my expectations and hopes what are what blockchain are you currently working on and what are your thoughts about the current you know blockchain landscape where have you had do you have high hopes for um given the experience that you already have yes so in terms of uh for block course specifically we do believe in a cross-chain future uh that said we for the initial nft mint we really wanted to work with the with the best platform or protocol to really be able to meant tens of thousands of nfts in one go and

so the uh the platform we landed on was imx immutable x they obviously like us have have a lot of experience they've been in the space since 2017 uh they they've battled tested god's unchained and they've they've created this really simple uh set of tools that we're able to implement into the initial math the amass mint of blackboard so imx is definitely uh the one we're going for for the initial mint and we think there's a lot of potential there uh and and how how it can be easier for game devs to really use nfts within their games without having to you know to pay crazy gas fees or or ask too much from their users also chains i'm interested in overall i like the moon beam and moon river ecosystem a lot they're building an evm on polka dot i see a lot of potential with polka dot uh in general how flexible it is and how customizable it is for for enterprise and gaming solutions specifically uh obviously what

axe infiniti and ronin has done is quite impressive as well and uh they have the user base in this space right so i think there's going to be a lot of great things coming from ronin in the next in the future and also with the recent security breach i think they've learned from that and they've been able to patch up quite a bit uh yeah but honestly there's so many chains to choose from you know polygon doing great things harmony good doing great things bsc doing great things being b chain as it's called now so i think overall the future is cross chain and just committing to only one protocol is problematic and not in the interest of our users in my opinion for example being able to take your nft and let them travel around the chain and maybe get gamifying that experience for me that's going to be more the future of blockchain game development and the id and the idea is really it doesn't matter where your asset is as long as it's liquid and as long as you can use it in the game for me that's the most important so are you saying that we could see a

world where if you want to travel from one region within block lords to the next that actually means that you're going from let's say ethereum layer two to um polygon or something that's possible that's not really in the scope we're trying to keep the map it's blocked you're traveling at the block wars universe but in essence your block lords could get on a boat and maybe go visit solana or go visit ethereum but that's that's more for the next few versions yeah of course that's really interesting um when talking about scaling i'm curious um how do you plan on getting your first 10 000 players and then how do you plan on the 100 x8 x it to one million players after that yeah so the initial the initial uh white listing phase which is what we're going to enter quite soon actually uh where the initial farmers and lords and ladies of the blockboard universe are going to be minted that's really going to be the process with which we we get our first 10 000 users uh it's going to be pretty focused on the web 3 community it's all about

getting the game fi users and obviously previous partners and then we have so many uh supporters such as yourself you know in the block ford's ecosystem so it's all about getting getting all of you in in in the blackboard's initial nft mint uh which is going to be focused on banners and these banners are really the one uh exactly 60 the 60 great families of the block lords universe right so as you get these banners you can uh kind of get your piece of the block floor system you can claim heroes you can claim farmers with this we have a pretty uh we haven't announced the details yet we're pretty interesting nftc that's going to come up on imax uh so that's the initial set of user we want to attract it is the web 3 community it is the nft community uh for the second phase when the game is launched when the game is uh when the game is uh balanced and when when really the traction can start building the game is going to be free to play right and anybody who joins will not need a wallet they will just need to register the game will have a wallet for you as

you register your account we're using similar system to magic wallet and nifty wallets to create your so we don't have to do the private keys or anything you'll you'll have your own little uh free hero nft in your wallet and as you play the game as you build your farm you won't necessarily have to deal with the fact that you have an nft because the nft is just that it's it's a digital asset it's something it's you playing the game right and as you play the game your nft builds up in value now what that value is it's maybe not money maybe it's in-game resources maybe it's battle potential maybe it's uh potential taxes if you become a lawyer right and as you kind of build up the value of your nft you will slowly be introduced to ways to monetize that right whether it's sell your inft to someone else renter nft someone else go fight for someone else do something that provides value to the ecosystem and for us that's that's really the uh mainstream adoption moment even if it's not us that makes it

happen it's gonna be one game one or the other that's smooth enough fun enough to attract millions of users uh and then when they start playing they'll realize oh this is actually something i can do something with right whether it's take it in the platform or sell it or or do something right and then then they're in crypto do you see a future where you know people in the short term let's say like within the next five years actually like significantly make a living by by playing a game it could be block lords or another one i think i think making a living is a loaded suggestion i mean i think people are already making living playing games right not even outside of crypto whether it's streaming whether it's esports uh i i think most importantly it's it's the shift the shift is not so much about guaranteeing an income for everyone although people will always find a way to get an income so i think that's already happening right uh i i think really for me the goal with blackboard is uh showing users that their time in game is worth something even if it's not you

know guaranteed income even though it's not you know like uh like uh crazy rich riches it's like okay you're spending your time you're devoting to this ecosystem you're contributing value which is something missing in game five right it's a lot about value extraction it's not so much about contributing so that's really what we're trying to do with blockchairs is every class kind of contributes something to the overall economy uh but most importantly what you're doing in game has value uh to someone else than yourself so this specific question i have one asked a lot talked a lot about and this was probably the best and most nuanced response i've ever had so um that was really good thanks for that uh david that was that was good um great all right um this was all very fascinating i like to you know end these interviews with a bold prediction so you know david i'll you have like a wide range of bold predictions you could make but um can you give me one focused on on blockchain and games and and yeah maybe

the future or something man that's a tricky one that's a trigger one i think uh i think in five years all web two massive game publishers whether it's ea whether it's amazon whether it's uh steam they're all gonna have a web three component a hundred percent of them that's my production okay five years relatively safe but i'll accept it what is let's make it three okay good good that's better um one last question what is um currently the your your major major hurdle that you have in building out block lords like what are you working on the heart the hardest yeah i'd say uh making games is really really hard so so it's all it's all the major hurdle but it's all very exciting as well whether it comes from 3d developments network programming obviously the blockchain security components i'd say our biggest hurdle which is also a challenge that we enjoy is driving a remote team of 100 people

you know it's a i think uh most of us uh i'd say we're a slightly older team than most other blockchain teams in many ways uh you know we we come from a web to background many of us and uh not having that routine of going to the office and uh and meeting and you know getting to know each other on a more personal basis i do think a lot of us miss that but also we all realize that the fact that we are remote and that we are we have people in shanghai you know us europe we're everywhere it's allowed us to really get together a unique group of uh team members who are very talented all of them so i'd say the remote lifestyle even though it's brought a lot of benefits that's probably our biggest challenge as well feels like that that opens up a discussion around dao's and and their function because you guys have experience working together or working in a web to building games and now there are a lot of decentralized teams who aim to do it with untrained voting etc um curious to see how that will play us out

yeah in terms of dolls and gaming i'm uh maybe i'm a bit old i'm a little skeptical for that in the current standing because at the end of the day like filmmaking i believe game development is a hugely creative endeavor and to make a good game it doesn't take 10 decisions it doesn't take 100 votes it takes thousands or even millions of decisions on every you know on a very regular basis and for me dials are not at the point yet but they're efficient enough to make something as complex as its aaa strategy game but i know it will happen when i don't know but it will happen and i look forward to that day yeah yeah i think the the more nuanced view that people have tends to be that you know community will have some votes limited in scope you know what color do you want our background to be and stuff like that that doesn't have like any major impacts on the game yeah we definitely i mean we do want to have a treasury uh where where some of the fees from the games goes to that the the community will have some voting over so we definitely want to have some impactful choices without you know

saying oh the dow will control everything because that's also not sustainable so we're trying to find a good balance for those things fantastic all right so when can people expect something to play oh i'm very cautious to give dates uh that that's in general something i want to avoid for us really quality is the key and making a game like this is quite complicated we're really aiming to have something else for users to try this year the nft sale will be taking place this summer so people can get a piece of the blackboard ecosystem uh and definitely 2023 will be the major year for block force to start seeing some real traction and gameplay all right we'll be patient then very exciting finally where can people stay up to date on what where block loads is yeah so blockfloors.com is really the place where adblock floors on twitter i'd say our discord server if you want to get in on the blockboard's lore there's actually already a farming and lord management game up on discord so discord blockboards.com nice fantastic all right well david this was fantastic super insightful um i'm

personally i'm very excited with all my age of empires experience to uh to maybe become a lord or get really good into cow breeding um i still have to think you know what my farmer alter ego would be um but i guess you know with butlers i'll be able to figure it out perfect thanks nico and thanks for everything you do for the space hey um this is my pleasure you know i get to talk to intelligent and well-spoken people like yourself and and dream about these games and then you know at some point try them out and give my honest feedback so um yeah this was amazing uh david thank you listener thank you as well um i hope you enjoyed this and it's with this we're out and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers [Music]

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