Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable

hello john and welcome to the podcast hey michael so for folks who don't know you you're a ceo of beamable previously disruptor beam and for folks who don't remember disruptor beam star trek timelines walking dead march to war i actually remember that game in artistic art you got a game of thrones ascent and archer danger phone so a lot of really cool games a lot of ip based games and you are a true og in the industry so can you tell people a little bit about your career before we we start talking about really crazy stuff sure i started building games when i was a kid i really had two twin passions as a kid games and programming so as far back as i can remember i was into computers my father worked at a company out here called digital equipment core piece to plot me down in these big computer labs with like mini computers and terminals and stuff so i was learning how to make like text based games and things like that but the other twin love was dungeons and dragons my

mother got me a dungeons and dragons basic set when i was like nine years old and then i was all in on games at that point so that's where i got started had a couple of shareware games by the time i was a teenager but then when i was 19 i was in college i met my future wife in an online game and we decided to start a game studio together so one of the first game companies really on the internet we made this game called legends future past that was like text-based role-playing game people played for like 10 years but then i've done stuff outside of making games as well i started a software company called eprise we made content management software which is basically stuff to make it easy for non-technical people to publish on the web and then i started an ad network called gamer dna so i've been on the demand gen side of the game industry as well worked with a guy named trapper markels who's the ceo of beamable now and we built an ad network that reached like 20 million people on pc gaming websites and stuff like that

then i got the crazy idea of going back into making games as you were talking about earlier so started disrupter beam with the idea of really creating story based games it actually wasn't started as a company to build like these licensed ip games why did we end up with that though well i really wanted to make story-driven games but i wanted to have story in mobile and social network games and here was the kind of a quick realization of that kind of game it's that you get like 30 seconds to prove to someone that that they should stick with the game so bringing them into the story is really really hard in that format so it dawned on us hey like there are worlds that people are already in love with and we started with game of thrones had to talk to i mean back then it was literally go and meet george rr martin and spend time with him and his agent and it took like two years before

i was able to persuade him to do this deal with us but eventually did it and at the time nobody else was doing license games but the benefit was people already loved game of thrones they could understand the world of westeros and we could build that relationship with them through the game more immediately so that's kind of the whirlwind tour of my my background and then you know beamable today is a company that's building cloud-based infrastructure so that you can take that game idea and really build a business around it focus all your time on creativity and doing the fun stuff while we enable you to do the stuff with you know you know purchases and social structure and operations and rules and all the stuff that you need servers for so we've got a couple of questions first of all legends of the future past that's a fantastic name oh yeah how do we come up with the name my wife is a huge moody blues fan and and it was kind of inspired by a song that they wrote a similar name and

we were we just were inspired by that and came up with it but it was it was set in this sort of like post-apocalyptic world but it had regained like fantasy and magic and all this stuff so it was like a blend of sci-fi fantasy i love it the name tells already everything about the game so it's such a cool name and the second question um when did you get like what was the year when you're going through making a deal on game of thrones and how like how many how many times did you read the books that had come out by that time like can you can you tell me a little bit about getting that ip because it must have been really difficult well i think one of the differentiators was that i had read the books frankly like there were all these people going after the game of thrones license at the time so it was it was a funny time the when i first started talking to george r martin the show had actually not aired on hbo yet so my familiarity was with it

from having read the books and i loved the world and i thought it would be a perfect setting for the kind of game i wanted to create which was about story and social interactions diplomacy or anti-social interactions george had just created this marvelous world for that so i was going to do it whether the tv show came out or not now in the course of talking to him you know of course the show was made the first season came out i remember you know george was nervous like is anybody even gonna like it of course it became this runaway success huge numbers of people watched it but you know when was this i mean the game this is a long time ago now the game came out like 2012 so quite some time ago and then the first season kind of came out at the same time as we were building the game and then we're like wow this this is actually going to be really big we're onto something here it was a stroke of

luck frankly that the show was as successful as it did after we made that yeah yeah i read all the books i you the point back to your original question like there are other people going after george and no one understood his book like people didn't have me were trying to license it who hadn't even read it and didn't really understand what his world was all about and i think the reason we got it as i was able to make this authentic connection around what game of thrones was about what the world was like and how we would actually bring that to life through the story of the game yeah that makes all the sense i was asking because i think during the past decade i've been twice in a situation pitching to i believe hbo no i don't believe i know hbo to get that ip not that i was driving to get that ip but i've been in the meetings because i'm watch the game of thrones i can't say i'm that a big of a fan but but it's kind of confusing to be pitching on something that you're not maybe that much interested in

and it's clear that you got the ip because yeah you showed the passion so i think that's the that's crucial the the world of licensing has changed a lot since the time i did it like i at the time we licensed game of thrones and then later star trek it made a lot of business sense to do at the time and we had a lot of creative freedom about how to express the game it has changed a lot like at that time there were you know very senior executives in both of those licensing organizations who saw it as more than a license they saw it really as an opportunity to build the franchise bring in new audiences connect with their fans in ways that they couldn't through the television shows alone and kind of build that community around the ip and i won't say that those people don't exist today certainly they do they tend to be you know very senior executives in some of these companies but by and large like the licensed game

thing is you know business dev execs who are compensated for getting deals done and bringing cash in the door as fast as they can it's not necessarily as long-term oriented and it's difficult to align the interests of a game company with some of those business constraints i think that's the hardest thing about licenses right now is just really having that alignment because games take a while to build they get a they take a while to build really well sometimes the first things that you do while you're trying to explore the creative space of a licensed game they're not all that great and you need that runway to iterate and learn from the fans and show it to fans and and really just learn i mean that's kind of my biggest thesis on game dev in general not just licenses which is games is really about shots on goal whether it's the individual game and being able to try a lot of things in that game and actually connect with a

fan base connect with a kind of player that you feel you can understand and try features iterate with them and then more broadly at like a studio level even be able to try different kinds of games and have that runway to really experiment and the need of experimentation that i think is really necessary to effective game building this shots on goal kind of concept doesn't always align with the schedules media release plans etc the financial incentives that exist in licensing organizations yeah that's why that's why it usually helps to focus on one specific genre so that everything you do in one game not everything but 70 is transferable to the next shot so you're able to make those shot shots much faster and with more certainty because you've tried certain things they work now you're trying with the same type of elements so but anyways let's not talk about shots let's talk about why did disrupter be moved away from

making games since you i mean walking dead game of thrones archer star trek how did you move from from that to to becoming a platform yeah well part of it was me you know i i looked at what i had done in my life and i've done a bunch of things first of all i love making games yeah clearly the passion i have going back to being a kid but i've also done things beyond making games i've built an enterprise software company i've been in the demand gen side of games and i felt like my unique calling in life was to try to bring a lot of those experiences together to help the world and help millions of game developers and i wouldn't really be able to do that building one game after another at disruptor beam as much as i love that so you know over a year ago i made the decision that we would take the games that we had that were really sustainable and were doing really well star trek timelines in particular tilting point took that game over so it continues to run today the game has a

really great fan base it's in good hands there the people who worked on the game are continuing to move it forward the other game that we had that was in mid development at the time archer danger phone we worked with east side games they brought it to market they finished it and it's continuing to operate today again really successful game what that then allowed me to do is really focus on this platform problem because i the problem in the industry goes back to this shots on goal thing which is like how can i help more game developers get more shots on goal you mentioned like you should bring more of your prior tech and capability over from you know by focusing on a particular genre that's that's i think good advice for a lot of studios because that's a way that they can get to market more rapidly iterate make it more of a learning process and advice based on my prior mistakes so let's be clear not something that i did something that i learned so

yeah and by the way the the journey of any game developer involves a lot of mistakes if anyone doesn't admit that then they haven't actually built too many games i think so we've all made mistakes my my mistakes you know have been largely about what i just said though not enough shots on goal like like our march to war game uh really good engaging game for a lot of people didn't have enough runway in there to try enough things in the development process we did off a little more than we could chew frankly versus star trek timelines we actually tried five completely different games in prototype and then once we got the game built we brought it to a penny arcade expo and had a thousand people come through our booth and test it and we took notes on how people were playing it and we like even did a different build the second day and like that had already learned like that was a really good way to build a product whereas just sort of like the more deterministic you know development process in a box i think is

often doomed to failure because you don't get to try enough things and react which we did in that particular game but for me like as i looked at what we had invested in along the way a lot of what we had to build to ship our games was infrastructure and the shopping system and you know social systems guilds the whole content management workflow one of the things we had to perfect being a story based game with tv shows coming out every single week was just the authoring pipeline how do you make it super easy through forms and and things like that to just get the content into the game very regularly without it being like this overly complicated devops process just as one other example so we had done that and i knew that so many other game developers suffered from the same problems and and i just didn't think it was sustainable in the long term for every game studio to be like re-learning those problems and

rebuilding all that technology because it takes millions of dollars to actually build that infrastructure and i bet you know like i said my background comes from some other spaces i i saw these exact same problems in game development that i had seen all the way back to web development right so in web development it was originally much more technical updating things making dynamic websites was very complex required a lot of engineering and then came along blogs and wikis and all these more pattern-based content management systems today of course we have things like wix and squarespace same thing in e-commerce right like once upon a time you'd have to get an app server stack and build your entire ecommerce site now you have shopify so there's no shopify for games or at least there isn't until i think we've been working on it but you know that's that's what we want to do is really just give creative leaders the the opportunity to not constrain their vision for their game really be able to take a big swing

take a lot of swings along the way iterate try stuff and just be supported by all of this learning and technology and infrastructure that empowers them to build a business around the game idea that they've got i like that beamable is the shopify for developers i'll quote you on that that's a that's a very easy to understand value proposition and a lot of the things that you build like i mean you said you worked with tilting point and now they've taken over one of your games and the other one was eastside games a lot of the tools that you're building is something that some are the tools that the publishers are are actually offering so is it also yeah like like i don't know i don't know where i'm leading with that just making a just making an observation yeah well i think it you saw the same thing happen in games with 3d engines for example and so if you go back 10 years ago it used to be that people would program

to directx and they'd have to know a lot about matrix math and took real graphics programmers to figure out how to do you know basic animations and stuff on the screen and i think there was this phase where like you know publishers had their own versions of toolboxes and everyone had their kind of ways to approach this problem you know and then comes unity and of course unreal that had been there all along but their approach was well at the graphics api level that's not actually the productive use of your time what you need is a visual studio environment that lets you manipulate things more readily and then think of the language or the programming aspect more almost as a way to script and control that so like in unity you know you see sharp which is very familiar to a lot of developers so you know we've been through that pattern before ultimately i think for any creatively

led process ultimately you need a tool chain that is geared towards the creative people in an organization meaning it's got to be more visual no code hopefully low code you know at worst and just really makes it simple and fits into their daily life so in in other words makes it so that as you're you know building your game and then managing and operating your game later the technology supports the way your studio really works as opposed to your studio having to adapt to a whole bunch of new processes and learning new devops techniques and having specialists that kind of turn the crank in the background just to get things to run so you know that's how we thought about it publishers i think do try to put some effort into this but ultimately just like with 3d engines it's very difficult to do it in the limited space of even the number of

publisher creates you know there's a huge number of developers out there it does take software companies to look out and do the pattern recognition and figure out the consistent patterns and and make those r d investments that scale out to markets of millions of developers this is like unity alone there's five million plus developers on unity right now that's a lot of people that you have to actually build patterns for that they can use and listen up we're here to talk about meta verses but before we jump in one more question just one advice you would give for developers working with big ips like you have worked what you know not doesn't have to be one advice but what you should keep in mind when working with an ips like that so well so much of it is going to be based on the deal that you do and i would i would just make sure that the deal is structured in a way that truly aligns both sides from the get-go you don't want to have to unravel things and renegotiate things

later because that's always a mess yes so what that usually means is on the one hand games is very much dominated by the whole user acquisition and discovery aspect these days so make sure that you're aligned with an ip holder who recognizes that a big part of the operational cost structure of running that game is actually going to be user acquisition and that any royalty structure that you come up with really has to be net of all this ua costs i think there's some ip holders that don't want to think about that but it's just a reality of alignment again like you gotta go to market with the ways you're gonna pull in the customers and no matter what they tell you they can't promise you that the ip alone is gonna carry the day from a user acquisition standpoint you're gonna most likely be investing a lot of the incoming revenue from the game back into it but also make sure along the same lines of alignment make sure you've got enough

runway in there if things aren't going to go perfectly give yourself added time don't make it so that the whole deal implodes or unravels because you need more time i would be very cautious of anyone who feels like you've got to get to market on a particular schedule or that they've got a whole portfolio of different ip that's all that they're trying to kind of have some master plan it doesn't really work that well so alignment make sure it's there in the deal from day one and and things can go reasonably well yeah more importantly that especially with working with publishers like you have worked with like the the alignment especially what does good look like and how do we make sure that both parties win like the winning scenario for both parties is the same that's that's alignment and and that's the chat that the challenge by the way everything and this is the thing i think people sometimes forget it always comes down to individual people and individual incentives and if you're a studio head

building an ip based game in your mind this game is going to be five ten years you're going to keep building it like this is going to be like a really key thing for your studio for a long time five to ten year plan is not necessarily what's in the head of a lot of the people who sign licensing deals right they don't know if they're gonna be at that company in five years let alone one year right so that's the that's the trick is how do you align that need for a short-term payoff that a lot of those folks have versus the big vision that you the game creator has for long-term success so i would i would put some effort into making sure you're also kind of talking to people at the right level of strategic alignment in the counterparty organization definitely a lot of a lot of great learnings especially you know in my day today but others as well but

anyways we're here to talk about metaverse and this is another thing that i want to learn from you what is the definition of meta work out of metaverse even a hard word and and why is everybody talking about it right now like every funding news is about metaverse so yeah i guess people are talking about it increasingly now because tim sweeney was talking about it a bunch but now mark zuckerberg was talking about it now since mark said it like everybody's going to pay attention i guess but you know the the word metaverse goes back to a book called snow crash which neil stephenson wrote you know years ago when the internet was really just in its infancy and it was this idea of a 3d immersive space where everyone could participate his vision of it was like there would be like one metaverse where everybody would connect and and we'd all go there and that would be sort of the one metaverse to rule at all there wouldn't be like all kinds of different environments now of course it's playing out a much different way the way i think of the metaverse way i define it is it's

really just the next generation of the internet and what's different about this generation well in the past the internet has been largely transactional you go to a web page you buy something it's not as real time whereas the metaverse is really about real-time activity real-time engagement between people now along the same lines it's also powered by a huge amount of creators and creativity so you know prior versions of the internet we've seen that in the web huge huge number of people creating content for websites for social media and whatnot there's a huge creative aspect of the internet but we're going to now see the creativity extend into this sphere of real-time content as well so for people who listen to the podcast here we're all game makers i think games is the thing that's been doing this all along right so that's what i think is very relevant to people in the game industry in terms of bridging over to

the metaverse because i think the metaverse is going to be 100 percent defined and informed by games and game technology so everything that we've been working on in games for the last 10 20 plus years you know the metaverse is going to learn from that whether it's the 3d technology whether it's the real-time interactivity the way we've created social structures and guilds and all these kind of i hate the word gamification but like the things that kind of engage people in experiences that are deeply meaningful and convey stories that's what's going to be brought by the metaverse and it will the metaverse today is almost entirely mostly games but we're going to next see you know immersive social experiences collaborative spaces even far out things like you'll be doing telepresence travel in the metaverse so you'll explore places in reality but through the

metaverse there's the augmented reality aspect of it where we're gonna tag and add information and richness to the physical world but the other thing is the metaverse is here right now the metaverse is not a future thing we're going to build that mark zuckerberg is going to build for us and then we're going to go into the metaverse the metaverse is here already and it's not going to be one metaverse it's going to be this whole multiverse of meta verses you know roblox is a metaverse facebook they're welcome to build one too i'm more interested in like how you take the creative space of something like a roblox and make game development that easy for the whole world but then you have the freedom to publish and bring your game anywhere you want so instead of thinking of these as walled gardens where everybody has to go to build things it's like how do you enable creators to do this everywhere and that's the uh the sort of existential battle between between epic and apple with apple being

like the perfect walled garden or ecosystem and with tim pushing towards more like freedom everywhere am i correct well i i certainly can't read tim's mind either tim's mind so you know i think apple certainly has a huge portion of their revenue that comes from ieps and they want to control the experience and control the content and gate it in and out and and take a toll for coming coming through it and that is a huge downside because any time you create these highly permissioned ecosystems where you have to ask to get on the platform and then you're subject to review and the party who reviews you also gets to take a huge chunk of your revenue that's a tax on innovation for number number one and also it's just going to reduce the creativity and the number of things that we're going to see out there versus

stay like pc gaming or pc software development in general is you know i mean it's not perfectly open but it's it's almost completely wild and that you can get a pc you can build a piece of software on it you don't have to go to any company microsoft the pc manufacturer whoever it was that was part of that value chain you don't have to ask permission to build your pc software you just make it and you ship it and as long as you can connect with an audience you can build a software company around it that's just not the case for ios today and it's it's you know android kind of sits a little bit more in between but you know there is a dominant store which is google play but you know i when i said i can't read tim's mind you know i don't know what his long-term plan there is either because i think in some ways he would like to see something like fortnite be the hub of the metaverse too and you see that with bringing in all these licensed

characters from all these different universes and playing in there like there's something going on there where it's like hey is fortnite the place that's the grand junction between different experiences and worlds and avatar representations and whatnot i don't know but i i think that certainly they're going to build again their metaverse and nvidia is creating an omniverse which isn't even for games it's for like engineers and architects and stuff there's roblox there's core but then there's the whole open internet that's actually what i'm interested in i really want to give people the freedom to build in the metaverse without asking for permission so that's kind of that's kind of the connection between metaverse and gaming and so far as beamable my company is concerned it's just the idea that games are the use case for the metaverse right this second right like if you want to build in the metaverse it's going to probably be a game right now

and people need this infrastructure that enables them to launch this game wherever they want and if you want to be on ios that's fine we we're not in the business of telling people not to do that that makes a lot of sense for a huge number of people i've built games for ios but also have the freedom to do it on pc or the the open web use open standards ultimately we just want to help game developers be successful and ship anywhere but then longer term you know i see games informing all these other kinds of applications where a lot of the infrastructure requirements around you know real time participation real time you know relating back to data store and store fronts and all that stuff is going to be relevant across a whole new class of applications so a lot of the times when you talk about metaverse the first image that i see in my head is ready player one how wrong is that oh totally wrong don't kill me i need experience

i need you to kind of like this yes no it's good um i think that's just another to me ready player one oasis is like another evolution of the neil stevenson vision just really awesome like i don't want to take anything away from either of those authors they are brilliant like they inspired so many people they couldn't see everything obviously but one of the things that is in ready player one is the oasis is like this i don't know trillion dollar mega corporation that basically owns they don't they don't call it the metaverse there they just call it the oasis but they own that mediversy kind of environment in fact the whole plot revolves around like the ceo you know wanting to leave a legacy to someone who's going to control the whole thing so to me that's the opposite of the metaverse anyone would want we we shouldn't we should not want to have nor will i think we will have one company controlling the metaverse because that's like saying

one company controls the whole internet like we would you have a few powerful companies right now that are doing that not one but we do have a handful of very powerful companies that are doing that but open standards and open technology open source development blockchain even it's all alive and well you can build open things that are permissionless that you do have freedom with and that's going to continue as well i think there is sort of you know if we look at some of the mega trends driving the metaverse like there is this idea of open standards is sort of one big mega trend that's continuing and there's the power of the centralized platforms like facebook and apple and so forth that's not changing either so we're going to see those evolving in parallel i don't know that they're necessarily in opposition to each other sometimes they actually help each other because open software development can

be used within weld gardens as well but where the power lies nobody really can know that at this stage of the game but there probably will be some other emergent platforms but you know i for one i'm just excited about you know the freedom that the metaverse ought to get a lot of developers to build whatever they want wherever they want monetize it you know whatever makes sense for their business all right so while why you're more of like a wild west type of a metaverse versus a super controlled one i don't know if i caught the wild west any more than then the internet is already the wild west and [Music] you know open source software development is is kind of the wild west it's just really the idea that i i don't think the internet should be defined by a few gatekeepers who control both who is able to publish and then who is able to access and also define all the business models that are required within that ecosystem so john do you

think that the latest trends in privacy as well as how would i put it like this whole misinformation and and shutting down certain conversations and like what i mean by government oversight or regulatory oversight is this something that could add could act against the the formulation of these free metaverses so you're kind of asking like what you know based on what's going on with say facebook and twitter and whatnot wanting to control more of not uh i wouldn't even say necessarily like the facebooks and twitters but more that there seems to be happening more push towards oversight in the internet as a whole and and does that you know does that harm the evolution of the metaverse or it's just a non-factor well i mean it's going to be it's it's relevant because so many billions of people are on the internet today and so much of our our identities

is actually based on our digital identity now like if you go back 20 years ago like how much of people's lives were defined by what they do online compare that to today and look at the trajectory where it's heading like today whether you're actively involved in social media a lot or you're in esports or you play an mmorpg you play a game like there's all these manifestations of our identity in the digital world and that's why you're seeing these things happen so the this kind of mainstreaming of one's digital identity the increasing importance of it is another of those mega trends that's kind of powering the metaverse and it's only going to be more so like if i look out another 10 years like i bet you know there's going to be billions of people in the world who are going to be mostly known for their digital existence more so than their physical existence so that's kind of what's driving a lot of these things

because then when you have very powerful companies out there whether it's companies that control who can publish a game or an app or a piece of content or companies that find themselves becoming responsible for regulating to some degree even the conversations and the content you know such as social media you know that's why that's happening because this is so important to people and it's such a big part of our lives so i think for the most powerful companies with great power comes a lot of responsibility so you're going to continue to see that do i think that small scrappy startups are necessarily going to be saddled with the same level of regulatory control no because they're gonna they're not really going they're not gonna be as prominent as a facebook they're not gonna receive that much scrutiny i do think it's important for

people to be able to control their own meta verses their own spaces their own applications and games and decide the right way for them like i i think actually in the right kind of game for example control of the community in terms of what standards are acceptable is a feature not a bug like i don't believe in just sort of wild free-form games of spaces where the players come in and do whatever like that's usually not fun for people like when we've seen examples of like really toxic game environments where that hasn't worked well where the game company didn't have enough responsibility for it it's not only bad for the game it's bad for their business too it's not a sustainable model but i think companies should determine that for themselves because i can see a role for some games being less censored less constrained more of an open environment and i can see much more tightly controlled games i can see meta verses for kids where you

really have to be much more careful about how you allow interactions to take place so it's going to vary and i don't think that you can expect that one company be it an apple or a facebook or whatever is the company that's going to be that either you can trust to do that comprehensively or really allow the maximum expression of creativity that's going to be required for all these different games and applications in the metaphors so so you know you mentioned multiple times like apple and facebook and we talked about epic like who are the sort of biggest players in the metaverse world at the moment in your opinion well maybe i i would probably be inclined to almost take a step back first and think of it like what is the structure of the industry there's a there's a lot of participants in the industry all the big companies that we've been talking about certainly are really important to how it's going to

evolve i on my blog building the metaverse i i actually have this this graphic that i call the market map of the metaverse so i'd encourage anyone listening just check that out because it's got like 160 companies on it but the way i think of it is it all starts with experience first of all like all the stuff that we're talking about it really doesn't matter unless you're actually delivering experiences and things that you can actually do that a consumer me and you in our daily life are going to care about and a lot of those are game companies today right so you have you know epic with fortnite and roblox and you know virtually any mmorpg any multiplayer game experience all of them in my view are building for the metaverse but then you go kind of you know down the value chain of you know what is delivering those experiences well it's everybody involved in discovery right so you have to find the experience somehow

it's not going to just land in front of your computer at least not until we got some ai agent on my computer i say hey find me something that's exactly this built just for me and it finds it for me i think that's actually coming that's a kind of discovery that will come down the road but certainly discovery includes everything from you know chat systems like discord to advertising networks like unity and facebook and google and whatnot then you've got the creator economy which is like all the tools that make it possible to create this content that people are finding so that's the 3d engines the graphics design tools the infrastructure company saw like my own company beamable i would put in that category but certainly companies like unity are very important there adobe is very important there unreal engine from epec again like epic plays with a lot of these bigger companies have you know investments across multiple areas of this of this value chain

you've got the whole spatial computing architecture which is you know not just the creative environment but actually the delivery of immersive 3d graphics and also bringing 3d graphics into our experience of the world through things like augmented reality you've got people that are building the blockchain systems and the decentralized technologies so a lot of what i was talking about earlier open source decentralization is one of these words it's used a lot and like crypto and blockchain but decentralization it's important to note is bigger than blockchain it's also the internet itself is a decentralized technology the domain name system is decentralization so all these decentralization technologies which does include blockchain domain name system open source etc you've got the human interface companies building the actual hardware so vr ar your computing devices wearables mobile

phones and then ultimately it all comes down to the infrastructure so cloud computing edge computing the cloud is getting closer and closer to uh us so that we can cut down on latency and have more concurrency you've got semiconductors sensors cameras so like that's the metaverse like this is a multi-trillion dollar industry all about delivering those experiences we were talking about so you can imagine a lot of computing companies in there check out my list of 160 of them yeah so we will have a link to the to your blog building the metaverse in the description of this podcast but that's a really good point that you made because when i was thinking more about metaverse my questions were around like who's going to execute the best what do you think epic versus facebook versus nvidia and all these different players but the way you're portraying it and actually you know i've seen the image on your blog it's really taking a step back and thinking more holistically like what does it take to build the whole metaverse because it's

just like i don't know just like the app store the app store is not apple the app store is hundreds of thousands of developers who are all working on it and what do what do those developers need to succeed and so forth and so forth and that kind of builds the whole ecosystem around it in the same way we have to think about the metaverse it's just not one company that designs it and executes against it but it's more like the ecosystem of different players uh that together need to succeed in in their individual strive to to make the metaverse happen is that more correct thinking yes there's a huge number of companies there now certain companies i think have their own vision for the metaverse and there are some companies that own a significant number of those chunks up and down the value chain like certainly apple these days has something in virtually everything i just mentioned right so they've got semiconductors all the way up through discovery and creator tools and whatnot

networks and not a whole lot of experiences they're letting everybody else do that and they're happy to just take a chunk of everything else that everybody does but yeah they they play a huge role there and and facebook google you know all these microsoft huge number of investments across the whole thing so the big tech companies are seeing the metaverse com coming a lot of them have been building parts of it for many years now because even before we were talking about the metaverse these things served other masters via just game development or graphic desktop publishing or website content creation but it's now all converging together i think is another way to think of it which is the metaverse is informed by all this graphics creativity real-time technology publishing systems that let you get things out there the discovery networks that allow people to find the things that are of interest to them like all of that's coming together around stuff that's more

real time in nature and driven by a huge population people just making stuff so i mean i'm learning a ton now when you're having these conversations and you talk to lots of executives most likely and some of these executives might be in the companies that are making the metaverse like how many people do really understand the metaverse or how many people are kind of portraying that they do am i the only one who didn't get the metaverse before we started conversation well so i you know i i think it's funny i think a lot of if you talk to people in the game industry people like what's the big deal like we've been doing this already yeah and that's kind of an interesting way to think of it which is which is yes we have been building it like games has been the source of innovation for virtually all this stuff that's why i think you know it's important to look at the metaverse and and think of it as games informing all these other kinds of

applications and i said i hated the word gamification earlier because gamification is usually when people use it they're like hey i have this application i'm going to put a point system on it and now it's going to be like a game and of course none of those things ever work because games are like more than a point system they're about the whole experience to me the metaverse is actually like real gamification it's actually about the experience the immersiveness the emotion the social connection that we feel through these kind of spaces and bringing that to a wider range of things so so when game people look at it they're like yeah we've been doing mmorpgs since like the late 90s like what's new about this well what's new is the culture change that's going on number one which is although we've been working on some of this for a while it was historically a lot nichir but now because of you know largely i credit mobile computing more than anything else with popularizing

games it's just an activity that the whole world enjoys but games over the last decade is something everybody's been doing the whole idea of the mainstreaming of one's digital identity the importance of your digital identity that has really changed a lot over the last decade like when i mentioned like i met my wife in my future that was very weird back then today that's that's not weird or even unusual at this point right like people meet each other online all the time in fact i have a main way to chat in clubhouse like two people just met my clubhouse game industry club the other day and have met in in real life and and that's sort of like you look at that and you're like awesome but also that's not strange anymore or is it strange for me when when i first did that so there's a lot of culture change going on there's technology change that's making building game like things and game experiences a lot more accessible to a larger number of people and that's what's changing in the background so when i talk to people i

think that there's game developers where like the metaverse is just a new word for what we've been doing all along maybe it involves aspects of interoperability or common avatar systems and things like that maybe an aspect of this creator economy where you can add stuff i find that outside of games people are just trying to figure out what it means to bring 3d graphics immersive spaces real-time interactivity more social structure more creativity [Music] who the people who really get it frankly are our youngest generations like my kids my my i have twins they're 10 years old to them metaverse is just a word for what they're doing already because they're in minecraft they're in roblox like to them they're already in the creator economy where they can go into these building

environments and make stuff and invite their friends to participate in it and now we're just sort of labeling that kind of stuff so yeah there's a certain amount of education that happens with people that maybe historically haven't been as exposed to games but so many people are getting games at this point it's like to me i remember it used to be that we talk about like a person who's a gamer versus someone who isn't a gamer and and to me that's such a bizarre thing to even think about now because that would be like okay half the planet versus the other half of the planet it's it's most people who have access to technology play games at least a little bit of the time yeah of course so in the end the answer to the question do you feel that the executives that you discuss are all pretty much all on the same page when it comes to metaverse or do you feel that no everyone's trying to figure out how to define it well like i think that's that's what i was kind of leaning in yeah no i i think that people are still trying to define my definition is is the

one that i use that i find when i use it people like it it's you know this idea is the next generation the internet driven by creativity and real-time interactivity people seem to like that and get it but yeah the the industry has yet to truly coalesce on a specific meaning because for some people the metaverse is ready player one or the metaverse of snow crash and it's more about the war for who gets to be the metaverse that everyone's going to use oasis yeah well i suspect that's sort of like why people are listening to you know to facebook for example like okay so facebook is going to compete to be the metaphors and mark is going to own the oasis well to their credit they actually they've done some things that are actually encouraging from an open standard standpoint like they did have all these

proprietary apis for the oculus for example but just a couple weeks ago announced that they're deprecating those they're going to adopt open xr they're going to pursue a concert that's actually very interesting i have no idea what's going on again i'm not a mind reader i don't know it's hard to pre to know exactly what's going on in mark's head although you can kind of back into the incentives that exist they're an advertising company first and foremost maybe they think that the opportunity isn't to just be another application like a facebook but to actually be the operating system more like a google where you can supply advertising to everybody whether they're inside your wild garden or not i kind of suspect that's where he's going with this which is and if that's true then he then those kind of businesses benefit from open standards because you just want everyone to build lots of stuff so that you can help people discover it yeah i mean with

facebook you know it's growth of the industry is growth of facebook and and that's why their goal if we're talking about goal alignment is is well aligned with the growth of the industry so so in that sense you know it's it's less about the control but more like fueling the growth one thing that he mentioned multiple times was creator economy so what do you what does that mean for the metaverse in general and game development in particular yeah well so i guess at a fundamental level the creator economy is just about giving creative people both the tools to build what they want and the access to audiences and communities where they'll end up having a much more of a direct relationship with the communities that they're building for so games of course i again like we're gonna learn a lot we the collective we of the world are gonna learn a lot from games over the coming decade because games have figured

out parts of this puzzle all along like games certain games have always had a creator economy like minecraft has a thriving creator economy there's been modding in games in fact there as i think many people listening here would know there's some games that are like humongous games that just started out as mods right so you know dota and so forth so you know that's an example of the creator economy and what we're going to see over the coming decade is more and more tools that make it less and less technical to build games real-time immersive experiences whether you call it metaverse or not really doesn't matter so much for this notion of a creator economy it's just that if you look at what's happened historically over time to just broaden it outside of games for a moment like look at what happened with you know desktop publishing it started out as postscript essentially programming language but now it's visual tools that anybody can use

to create graphics and adobe built a tremendous business around that when i look at a company like unity it feels like you know adobe for 3d graphics all over again it's like how do we go from the techy stuff like directx and needing to know matrix math and all these things that you used to have to do to build animation in a 3d space now it's a creative studio environment that empowers you the creator just to make stuff you've got companies like shopify where we went from an e-commerce creativity and e-commerce used to mean sitting down with an app server and you know coding databases from the ground up no one would do that no one sane should do that now you can sign up you know relatively inexpensively with shopify and several of their competitors and just go into business and e-commerce right away so the challenge with the metaverse and games is

it's so much more complex we're not talking about web pages and just transactions and displaying a page and then making a purchase or posting some text we're talking about immersive worlds in 3d graphic spaces games and outside of games things like vr chat immersive social experiences telepresence and travel and kind of the far out stuff i was talking about earlier so the complexity level is way up so it means that the creator tools are going to have to step up to enable that both not only just in the immersive like 3d space construction side of things but you know all of that infrastructure to enable the interactivity and unless that and kind of my mission of beamable is to make sure that the option is there to have access to all of that kind of creativity around social structures and real-time interactivity where so that you don't have to

set up within someone else's wild garden like you will be able to as an independent game developer today and a metaverse creator in the future you'll have that flexibility to do it however you want so the creator economy is just about breaking down those barriers and there's another aspect too which is every metaverse every game can also be its own creator economy i mentioned minecraft like i think a huge opportunity for game makers is think from the beginning about how to empower your community to participate in how that game will evolve how do they mod it how do they add to it how do they add content and costumes and all this stuff so the creator economy is really about empowering individual people to be creative and express themselves in this universe and make a living from it yeah and then exactly rewarding them for being creative in this so we've been talking about metaverse and i'm gonna throw in a lot of a second very difficult term that is nft

so first of all what is nft and how does that fit into this creator economy that you were talking about yeah there's a hilarious saturday night live video what the hell is an nft everybody should just look at that combines it pretty surprisingly well nft is just a non-fungible token why is it interesting i guess take a step back from the term nft and think about a feature of blockchain technology called a smart contract so a smart contract is a way that two anonymous parties can have a financial transaction with each other without requiring a centralized authority to control and administer it so you don't have to trust each other and you don't have to trust a central authority to do it so if you have smart contracts what are some things that it allows you to do well an nft is essentially just the idea of a digital asset that you can

own and anyone who's played an mmorpg or practically any you know mobile game gets the idea of like a digital item or a digital collectible like you're buying currencies or buying items all the time an nft is a way to do that on the blockchain in a way that's independent of the technology of any particular game so what has it enabled you to do well first and foremost if you have a game that is going to have a complex economy with like auctions and marketplaces and exchanges between players and pricing systems around goods first of all if you were going to build that on your own it takes an awful lot of people to build up that kind of infrastructure like game mmo rpgs for example that have that kind of stuff like that's many many people for many years have worked on building those systems so one neat thing about the advent of nfts and smart contracts and the emergence of these nft

marketplaces is now a developer can build a game that benefits from all of this open infrastructure for player-to-player exchanges you don't have to build all that so you could envision building a game with that kind of economy so to me the interesting thing about nfts is sort of a combination of just sort of what it enables but the disruptiveness of it because going back to this notion of the creator economy the creator economy is disruptive just it's disruptive in the sense that you know you've got companies out there with teams of hundreds of people and hundreds of people have built sort of these proprietary versions of this and the value of having these massive teams and massive technology investments is now going to go way down because you as a small developer can just tap into the open versions of that without having to build it yourself so that means that we'll have a lot more variety in experiences and i kind of

look at like something like roblox for example now roblox has nothing to do with nfts but what's interesting about roblox and something that i would really encourage any game developer just to spend some time on looking at it not necessarily because you're going to want to end up building inside roblox although you might you might look at it you're like this this is pretty cool i actually want to build a game here what's interesting about it is to sort of to see the spectacular variety of experiences and things that have come up there because when you make it possible to to create games and experiences with far fewer people like in one in many cases one person made a lot of these experiences you just get a lot more experimentation because you don't have to like go prove to someone that you need a big budget to build your whole idea and then roll it out it takes forever and ever and ever so like like adopt me which is one of the most popular things in roblox it's this game where like you

one person plays a character that's adopted by the other character that's basically the game like i don't know that that would have been a commercially viable game concept outside of roblox and that's what i so to bring it back to nfts what's interesting here is i think we'll see a lot of game experiences that were not previously commercially viable now are viable because that small team can build games around complex economies without having to build it now there's other reasons for nfts which i think are interesting too like my original model for nfts is magic the gathering actually so obviously didn't even start as a digital game star as a paper game but you actually own the cards and you can trade the cards with other people but in addition to that the gaming community around magic the gathering actually invented a lot of the play formats so it started as a dueling game but like the multiplayer format came because people were sitting around with their friends and they wanted everybody a little play as a group and the community

invented it well nfts gives you the ability to own the individual digital assets and in a sense the community if it's made open enough can discover new ways to play with those assets it's always going to be up to the developer or usually will be up to the developer depending on the blockchain you use whether you want to enable your community to do that but you start to have that potential to have what i think of as like a new kind of game company which is like a digital collectibles first game company where they're in the business more of making the play pieces and you let the community figure out many of the ways that they will actually play with that content so so you know i'm having a hard time understanding one thing like we're talking about collectibles and then when magic at the gathering is a great example because you have rare cards and those are physical cards and there's a set amount of those physical cards and hence the high price is because of how rare they are and how

powerful they are kind of like the two things and usually those two things were you know work hand in hand now with digital assets is there like how are they able to set these prices and we've seen some outrageous prices when it's something that can be you know can be just made more of them like it's not a physical object i know the same thing can be said with a dollar like it is a physical object but hey we just printed a couple of trillions more and now we have more of them but i'm trying to understand in the case of like collectibles like how does it work when it's so easy to to replicate those those collectibles well so that's actually one of the really interesting things about placing it on the blockchain because so the blockchain is i think the easiest way to imagine it is it's just a replicated public ledger of transactions so lots of people have copies of all the

transactions that happen on the blockchain versus what normally happens which is there's a private database sitting on someone's server and some central authority that only they have direct access to you and if they want to expose it you kind of have to trust them that they're showing you the accurate information with the blockchain what people say is it's trustless because that cop the copies exist out there there's nobody to trust you just can see into the blockchain and see all the transactions that ever happened so the relevance to the question you just asked is scarcity and understanding what the actual scarcity of an asset is is part of the blockchain so you have provable scarcity you have provable providence even you have the ability to see how an asset changed hands over time in a way that really isn't available in a trustless way through any central authority so yeah i think there will be some bad

actors out there who might suggest to people that an asset that they're publishing is now going to be is going to be unique and then they turn around and they just publish a whole bunch more copies of it certainly there's nothing in the technology that really prevents a person from doing that but all that they would then be doing is undermining the value of that asset and then no one's going to want to buy more assets from that source in the future because they're now known to to be someone who misbehaves so i think a lot of the value for assets are going to come from good custodians good caretakers who publish things and keep to their word and you'll be able to show that they kept their word right on the blockchain so if someone in fact does make additional copies everybody will know instead right so that's the nice thing about it so essentially like currency like dollar like if you print too much inflation is gonna hit

yep that's that's that's the general theory although who knows but with respect to blockchain like you know exactly what's happening in the economy and that's another opera disruptive opportunity though for game developers right so building a complex economy into a game does require building a lot of trust with your customer base and making sure that you're true to your word and the scarcity that you're talking about of these rare things are in fact rare the nice thing now is with a blockchain based economy there should be although there is still going to be a certain amount of trust building because people want to know that dealing with a legit source you can at least prove it and people can look for themselves and so there's less of that trust building which means that there's more access to the market by smaller companies who want to try to get into the business of the really super interesting business of games with complex economies that are really

challenging to build ordinarily so john let's say you know a bunch of smaller studios are listening to this and they're totally buying the metaverse and they're buying the blockchain based nf nfts what you know what does the future near future look like for for these smaller developers and what should they be focusing on to kind of catch the wave of the metaverse well i mean i think first and foremost don't actually chase fads like there's like there is some some quote unquote easy money to be had right now around funding like nft based games or whatever like because there's just a lot of people sitting on a lot of blockchain based wealth on ethereum and whatnot and they're happy to buy some of these crypto assets like i've bought some of these just for fun to see what these games are like go back to game development 101 focus on the experience what's going to be fun about it i think that the production value expectations the fun

factor the engagement all of that stuff is going to be just as true as it ever was and and just make sure you're building something fun and that defines what you're building as opposed to the technologies that you're using to enable it all of these things for a game developer though like look at these things as a combination of you know labor saving systems so that you can then also have more creativity and focus on the storytelling the graphics the features of the game the actual experiential qualities of the game i see a lot of money flowing into game studios right a very exciting time to be a game maker and actually have access to capital which is unprecedented like it used to be very very hard to get access to capital outside of like the traditional publishing

systems now there's you know 2 billion plus just sitting out there in bank accounts ready to flow into game studios and it seems to be still growing right so one thing i worry about is that the capital is getting deployed rapidly but a lot of these folks are going to take capital and build very inefficient processes because they're all not updating their approaches to what's available technologically or tapping into these aspects of the creator economy i'd hate to see like someone raise a couple million dollars for their studio and a million dollars goes into tool chain development and they should spend like you know nearly 2 million on just building a great game so so what is what is your advice to the to to the funds and fund managers and all these people who are who are being you know you know who are cloud-chasing with this and then everybody's investing

nfts and crypto and metaverses and like what they should be looking at when they're making these investments with these buzzwords yeah growing up well so first anybody putting capital into games first of all thank you you you're awesome probably play games and and you're a different kind of human than has historically invested in games like like that's great you should certainly know that games is a brutally hard business that it's hard enough first of all it's hard enough to even ship a game right like a lot of games just don't even get shipped like most of those eyes for whatever reason yeah so it's hard enough to ship a game then it's hard enough it's even harder to ship a game that's fun that's super hard and then it's super hard to ship a game that's fun that connects with a large enough audience that that actually becomes a sustainable business that then gets big enough with enough

scale to return capital to you as an investor to get an roi on the capital deployed so so okay so i just scared off a bunch of investors and that's fine because frankly if they don't know that they shouldn't be investing games they'll just do a lot of destructive things to game studios if they put capital behind if they don't understand that i think the most important area of alignment for sources of capital in game studios goes back to i think one of the very earliest things i said in this conversation which is shots on goal you really have to understand that most game studios are not successful simply because they have the one brilliant idea and they pursue their development plan exactly to the blueprint ship and then it just takes off very very rare won't say it hasn't happened but that's uncommon much more common is you know a super cell who slogged it out

with two three games that that weren't all that great before heyday and you know then clash comes along and it's huge or rovio for goodness sakes making i don't know how many dozen game ideas before it worked out like so that's actually the normal situation so i would make sure that where the capital is getting deployed is getting deployed in a very capital efficient way in which the studio gets shots on goal whether it's taking the core concept that they're working on and really giving them the space and the runway to try a lot of things in it and to really test the hell out of it experiment try it with audiences and get it right before they roll that game out into release because otherwise all that capital is going to be wasted or give them lots of shots on goal in the form of getting a really super creative team that also knows how to just build and

execute and make stuff and just give them the opportunity to try even different games like try to really experiment within the capabilities of that team just forget the idea that you're going to put x dollars of capital into the one winning game idea and then you make your 100x return yeah usually is way harder than that so good teams that can be capital efficient with good shot with lots of shots on goal i think is how you can make money in game investing yeah i know i would i would still kind of double down on the fact of like keeping in a certain genre because it allows you to take to be more effective with the shots you take because there are studios that are fast at making different types of games but if you're trying to make all kinds of different type of games going from puzzle to merge to bubble shooter to i don't know whatever is easy to make

today that you can make relatively fast then i think that's also challenging because you're not building anything you know consistent nothing nothing tangible you're not building your you know your tool sets and and and what not elements that would allow you to iterate and and take multiple shots with with similar type of of approach so yeah so there's something that i think can often be even harder than iterating within the genre though and that's understanding particular audiences so i think it's really hard for most game studios although i've seen exception by the way everything we've talked about there's always the counter example oh the exception that proves the rule so like like supercell is a good idea i'm sure we'll see a bunch of comments like what about these guys right they proved the rule they're what they're the exception exactly the it's difficult for a team

who really understands in a particular audience really really well to then build for a completely different audience right so i think audience iteration and super deep understanding of players and what motivates them is even more important than the genre because you can have subtle shifts within the genre if the audience is somewhat transportable to a different kind of game but i think that's why like if you look back like you know why didn't too many triple a game studios successfully build free-to-play mobile games even though a bunch tried they a bunch tried to do it very few successes that you can point to mostly because like that audience insight the real visceral understanding of the player really wasn't there so what they were trying to do was take a lot of that triple a game building experience and like just transport it to a different

platform but where the audience expectations and the player was really a different kind of customer and i think that's super hard i think that it's okay to like vary your genre a little bit because i i also think that genre can also get a little bit ossifying like you you can kind of get locked into patterns that everybody's seen before and i think a real opportunity for game studios is try to bring innovation to the market as well and create new things that people haven't experienced before so give yourself some space within the genre if you want to be genre experts to try to bring innovation in as well don't just necessarily clone again counter examples of plenty amongst fast followers who just clone and and that sometimes works at least to me what's interesting is innovation sustainable audiences who really love certain kinds of things but

understand the players first and foremost is the is is i think the the big message there because if you understand a player and their motivation and really what they dig about an experience like that's going to give you a lot more staying power i think as a studio than almost anything else i have to agree with you you know i was like when you were going through this i was kind of imagining the blizzard in my head because they've gone through multiple different genres but they cater to pretty much the same audience and and you know for decades so and we all wish we could be blizzard and work on a game for like 12 years and then finally ship it and get big big audiences i guess like like the reality of just sort of the pragmatic reality of the way game studios are funded is yeah you're not going to get the runway of a blizzard to figure things out exactly and when i'm thinking more about genres i'm thinking more like in my head i'm thinking about you know the uh the respawns of the world where they they can go from various type of

games whether it's a titanfall whether it's the the jedi game or that it's the apex legends is they kind of use the same core the same expertise the same proven methods of of making a shooter game but then they diversified maybe for slightly different audience groups actually but are kind of in the same genre and that allows them to move relatively fast and take different types of bets on the goal so yeah so i think exactly so i think you can build a studio for example around hey we really understand competitive twitchy players who want to dominate and there will maybe be any if we're super successful it'll be a company sport where people even want to watch it like that like that i think takes you out of the realm of hey i'm going to build a moba where i'm going to build a first person shooter game and more too here's this audience here's what they like here's what really drives them gets them excited

and maybe we'll build a moba but hey we because we understand this audience we see some things that are missing that this audience actually this audience gets something else out of say a first person shooter and we want to import that i'm just making stuff up by the way no no no no i hired a game studio but like it's it's kind of understanding those gaps in what they really would love about something like when we build game thrones ascent the gap that i saw it was like you have all these social gamers like at the time it was actually even almost early stages of mobile but like social network games like farmville etc i remember facebook at the time like and i saw these very social people online like they really wanted to talk to each other help each other send each other nails to build their barns and farmville like so there was a lot of social interaction but it was kind of shallow and i think there's maybe an assumption there that

they only wanted a shell experience but i felt like i really understood that audience and what they really wanted to get emotionally out of the experience was actually deepening those social ties that they were experiencing through the games so with game of thrones ascent we put a whole lot of effort into like you could marry another character in the game and have kids and like a lot of skullduggery and backstabbing and like all that stuff was sort of what i felt the gap was for this audience it was hungry for social interaction and we built from there and we built a very unique game that didn't really have a lot of precedent in terms of like the patterns or the genre around it so you understood the audience because you read the books and you understood what the audience was looking yeah and i understood a lot about like what game of thrones readers and then later viewers liked about the show that's why i'm kind of confused that the people really i mean the game was really successful the game of thrones the game of thrones via the 4x game

which doesn't you know seem to answer any of those longings coming in from the books or i haven't read all the books but for at least from the from the show it's just kind of like your run-of-the-mill 4x game with with game of thrones skin and still did well so anyway but that's a different topic and i i think i think we've overall kind of like went to to all all the different sides so i feel like we can we can continue discussing on anything for a long time and i would propose that we discuss in other matters for the next podcast so we can for that we can better serve a certain audience who's not interested in meta versus but more interested in how to run successful game studios yeah so i just wanted to kind of end this conversation on on so that you can let people know how to reach to you of course building the metaverse is the blog and there's a link in the description below so everybody should check it out but yeah like what's the best way to to to reach you whether it's to talk about metaverses nfts and creator economy or

or whether it's to talk about how beamable can help game studios to speed up to metaverse and just not even speed up to metaphors but just take more shots on the goal yeah so first of all thank you for giving me the space to talk about all the stuff i love be it metaverse and game development and all these worlds that we've been talking about i i could talk for hours and hours and hours about all this stuff you know twitter jradoff on twitter is a great place to connect with me because i publish there my blog on medium building the metaverse and of course if you're a game developer who just wants to focus on creativity and build a great game and you want a super effective infrastructure that lets you realize your dreams beamable is my company and that's what we're in the business to do there so you can connect with me at beamable.com as well so link in description as well with that but beamable.com come on guys you can you can type it and check it out and i'm sure many of many of your clients are already listening to this one john

pleasure and i will say in the after the next episode i will say always a pleasure because i'm sure we'll record a couple of more ones i'm especially interested to talk more about how to build a successful game studio that's something that is still kind of i'm chasing that so that's that's the step between you know maybe the next step is metaverse but for now the successful game studio is really something that i'm i'm keen on discussing but that will be probably the topic for the next part that would be a blast happy to help anytime really enjoy the conversation all right we'll conclude this one and then we'll get back to everybody and and thanks for everyone for listening yeah and thank you john thanks pleasure