Fireside Chat: The Future of Web3 Gaming - Aneta Mrozek, Steel Media Michael Lee, Com2uS USA

[Music] thank you [Music] right let's get things started we got three great sessions for you today and the first one is a fireside chat about the future of web3 gaming and uh it's with Michael Lee have come to us USA who'll be uh quizzed on stage by annetta from steel media my colleague so a round of applause for them and um we'll get things going it's a literal fire literal fire good afternoon my name is Anita and I'm part of PG connects team and I will be talking today with Michael Lee from come to us USA and we will be talking about the future of web 3 gaming

so before we start with questioning Michael could you introduce yourself and talk about your company a little bit hey everyone my name is Michael I'm the director of corporate development at come to USA um yeah I guess uh before we kind of kick off I'll do a little intro about come to us and then how we got into web3 and how we kind of think about the space and then of course you know questions can come uh come to us started in 1998 as a mobile gaming developer on the future phones when the App Store came around that's when our business really started taking off we have a hit title called Summoners War sky Arena which some of you may know um and so that's been in service for nine years and um you know has done three billion over three billion in Revenue uh and you know we're really happy of course with the success of that um we you know we have have uh published and developed over 500 games and we we've been one of the first to kind

of go into Mobile kind of go into the App Store and free to play and our step into web 3 was when we saw what was going on with of course axi Infinity NBA Top Shot and we kind of studied the space and we've really reaped the benefit of being first movers into these space and we saw that there was an immediate connection to gaming with as it related to the blockchain and web3 and so the the reason why I come to us as a company has been able to mobilize so quickly and be one of the first I guess companies to go all in on web3 is because we saw that and uh the kind of the initiative and mandate came from the top our chairman and CEO said moving forward all of our games uh of course except for the licensed games we'll have some sort of a web free element to it the the way we went about that was we built a blockchain gaming platform called c2x originally um unfortunately that was built on Terra

and um if you guys are aware uh Tara had had an unfortunate demise and so you know we ended up kind of pivoting and becoming the Genesis contributor and the master content provider for what we call explode which is another layer one um all of the games moving forward will be on xpla and they'll have some sort of a web 3 element to it what we're excited about and we can talk a little deeper is um kind of our our way into web3 and what we're our approach we we have we've announced that we are going to add a web through element to our newest hit called Summoners War Chronicles this game was is a is a cross-platform MMORPG using the same IPS Summers or sky Arena and it's done it's gotten up to top five grossing Global on Steam uh number one in about nine different countries around the world iOS Android and yeah we're really excited to kind of be the first

to have a AAA title with already a user base that's over a million Dau uh to educate the users and kind of um convert them into web3 and yeah and so so that's that's kind of where we are right now we have a slate of games we're going to do about 20 to 10 20 games uh a year and uh we're really committed to this space and it hadn't hold very high conviction thank you the first question for you will be what challenges does the web3 gaming industry face and do you believe these challenges are being addressed properly uh there's a lot of course there's a lot of Skeptics rightfully so uh web3 Community is it can be loud and can be you know siled and a lot of the people outside looking in see it as a speculative play Traders you know d-gens um but from a from our perspective we do

see the benefits of adding blockchain and adding web 3 elements to games um of course the narrative that you know it makes it difficult for incumbents and you know more traditional Gamers to to accept web3 given the loud noise um but again you know just as free to play matured over time we believe that web3 gaming will also mature over time and it's just going to take a lot of time and a lot of iterations and you know there were a lot of critics to free to play just as there's a lot of critics right now to web3 and we kind of see that as like a similar kind of growing pains um so there's that that's hard to overcome of course and that's going to take time another difficulty we think is of course the regulatory side of things um and so this one you know it's out of the control of a lot of the studios but of course there are a lot of people finding the good fight and in different geographies things are starting to shape up I think in the United States we'll kind of see

what's going to happen this year this coming year with the SEC but other countries I think Europe just announced some sort of regulatory uh kind of uh standard and we'll start to see how Studios and Publishers are going to go about like that um another difficulty in my opinion is just the experience on the on the on the gaming side you know I think there was a lot of noise this past year there was a lot of money spent spread around there was a lot of people who really didn't know games that thought it was just an easy way to the fundraise and and say Hey you know add a web free element and everything would be good but um yeah you know we saw a lot of that kind of die down and I think now you're starting to see the real players the serious players kind of come up and you're starting to see the the quality Games come out so yeah lots of you know there's lots of struggles lots of uh

hurdles but um I think the space is here to persevere yeah okay so blockchain is loved and hated in equal fractions which can impose a barrier for developers to jump into web 3 gaming how does blockchain technology play a role in web 3 gaming and what benefit does it offer yeah at a high level which I'm sure every one of you guys know and have heard and has been beaten down you know your shoved down your throat is uh you know the digital asset ownership aspect of it at a theoretical level that that obviously makes a lot of sense but if you really kind of peel back and kind of go deeper I think um what really if that unlocks the blockchain set unlocks is the ability to have a trustless system to trade these assets uh you know in Korea with lineage and and websites like item Bay that have been around since web2 people have been using it was basically web3 within the web 2 space and of course items that go

for exorbitant amount of prices um you know on lineage like those can be verified and those are traded but anything else kind of you're unsure but with web3 I think there is a lot of uh it's it's trustless and everything can be verified and so I think that's one of the aspects that will really benefit and enhance the user experience and again which will make the experience stickier in our opinion yeah so about opinions in your opinion what are some examples of web 3 gaming platforms that are currently in development and that we should keep an eye on yeah there's there's actually a lot that's um coming out you know you see I think I think the person speaking after me is Stardust they have a platform that makes it uh easier for for uh web 2 developers to add web 3 elements to it using their SDK ourselves as well um you know we have Hive that is a web 2 SDK

um you know traditional login you know notifications but we've also added web3 elements to it and since we're the the master content provider and Genesis contributor to explore we're opening that up to the developers and Studios that are interested in coming into the ecosystem and uh you know that's going to really make it easy for these Studios that aren't as big as you know globally recognized Studios that that are maybe 40 50 person you know teams that really don't have the bandwidth to unders like go through the legal hurdles of blockchain and the you know um just the development aspect of that to Plug and Play basically using using our SDK so there are a lot of um Solutions out there I think there's uh of course you know you guys of course are immutable X um and yeah so those those are I would think are the ones that are kind of I'll push the space to make it easier for Studios to develop okay perfect so what

impact might web3 gaming have on the wider gaming industry and how are established players adapting to these changes we are seeing now so can you can you repeat that again yeah so what impact might web3 gaming have on the wider gaming industry and how our established players were already in it adapting to these changes I was talking to Dave earlier um and I think this kind of uh applies to that conversation you know it's it's hard it's getting harder and harder to to make hit titles to make games in general there's so much content out there um and so you know Dave was asking like what given that it's harder for the industry and and the industry is kind of resetting to a certain degree what's the future of the industry and I think that's where I think web3 kind of comes in again and you know enhancing the user experience via the ability to own your assets and be via the ability

to trade seamlessly of course the user experience isn't quite there yet but I in my opinion as the years go by that that will be solved um being able to do those those kinds of things I think will allow users to or will help retain users and create experiences that are a lot stickier which then will of course impact the industry the gaming industry as a whole where users will continue to play these games rather than spend time on other uh other mediums so I think web3 as a whole is definitely going to enhance the industry the the the experience of the users within the industry and and kind of grow the pie okay so I have one more question how could web3 gaming help to Foster new forms of collaboration and Community Building among the players so um I think one of the benefits with web3 is is that is the building of the community side I think there's a lot of

uh organic community building that's happening within within these uh web 3 games now the caveat is like how what percent of those communities are there for being fans of the game itself versus hey there's an nft drop or hey there's a token can I get in early can I flip it can I speculate on this um but you know given our kind of research and being in the space you know it is it is pretty exciting to see the engagement that these communities have um have fostered and I think this is a new form of really acquiring users of course it's so early to tell and and as we all know user acquisition costs are so high so I think this is another way to kind of experience to to bypass that but again we'll learn we'll iterate we'll see if this is actual you know acquiring new users through the means of community and because there's a strong Community behind it what does it do with the experience of the game and how does

that impact the the roadmap of the game itself um I'm I'm personally not a fan of like doing governance of a game and having the the community decide how to develop the game because there have been talks like that but um you know I think that the community definitely plays an important role in in of the game of course okay thank you so we are um do we have any questions from the audience hi so you said that you were educating users in web3 through your latest Summoners War Game how exactly are you going about that yeah so we we don't want to shove it down their throats you know there's of course a lot of uh pushback within um the traditional Gamers you know a lot of people think it's exploitive um so first of all if you don't want to experience it you don't have to as a

user as a player um but if you want to experience the the different economy that we're we're providing within the game Summoners War then um you know we'll have a we have a separate experience for that and and and the way that we're we're doing it going about it with Summer's war is that you have to you have to be a core gamer so we're introducing a very high play gate and you know if of course once they get to that point and they realize that they're able to sell their item for a different kind of currency which then they could trade into explo or swap into xpla we think that's going to be the organic and natural way for them to start learning more about web3 now that that being said the the experience you know isn't quite there yet no one has the right answer yet um and I think we're all in the uh the mission of trying to find that out and so yeah like that that's that's our approach to kind of kind of doing that we have another question

hi my name is Tyler bubin I'm head of client success at Stardust and I was curious what types of uh uh things that you guys consider when you decided on the L1 solution with uh is it Explorer so sorry what did you consider when identifying which web 3 uh platform to develop on so so we're the Genesis contributor to X Plus so we helped develop expla so yeah so we're behind it in developing it um when we decided to do that before we decided to do that of course we evaluated all the other layer ones as well um and we just kind of felt like they didn't quite understand gaming and of course given the experience that we had with Tara you know we we wanted to hold the keys to to you know to our destiny right and so um that's that's when we decided we're

going to be contributors to this and help build it out thank you do we have another question we have two so I had a question regarding security um one thing especially with the past experience on the previous blockchain where there's potentially situations where there's hacks or like a smart contract vulnerability that sort of thing um going forward what can we do to kind of build trust with the customers to make sure that they have the trust that when they buy an asset that they'll be able to hold on to that yeah there have been a lot of breaches and a lot of hacks definitely um you know I think come to us being a public company we we take those matters very seriously and so this is why our approach to it is very iterative and we're not we're not going fully on chain we're

adding little elements we're learning we're making tweaks here and there um on a technical level I can't I can't really answer that question so I'm sorry we'll have to get back to the tech team but I think on a on a on a more high level you know I think the right answer in my opinion is that given that we are pretty large players in the space any sort of negative experience is just going to carry a long way and so I think we're gonna be extra careful not to be not to have those those exploits and and another thing is that we've we've been in the industry for so long and we've experienced you know hacks and Bots and all of that stuff and and I think it kind of to a certain degree it it correlates to what is what's happened and I think I think security to a certain degree is is assumed and like we have to have some sort of security as table stakes and so so yeah so I I I my answer to you I

might not be a good answer but it's it's um where we have to take this very seriously and um uh we're going to make small iterative state steps so that we don't experience large kinds of mishaps hi um uh so my question was um you spoke about how uh with someone's War Chronicles and and your other games the um about the play gate and making sure that and also the fact that it's not essential that people experience the web free side of things that's I'm sure I'm just going to ask you about um how you plan to make it easy to onboard players who do want to do that because I think one of the perhaps the barriers to uh traditional Gamers getting into web 3 was all the Hoops they have to jump through and setting up a wallet and metamask and discovering about gas prices for the first time in that kind of thing how are you smoothing the pro the the onboarding of traditional Gamers yes so we are continuing to evaluate that full transparency it is a broken experience and I don't think anyone has figured that out yet

um and that is very important to us that experience is very important to us it's very important to the whole gaming industry right the whole gaming industry is founded on great user experience and making sure less churn throughout the the funnel um and so you know there are some solutions out there that that are that we've we are looking into that make the the setting of the wallet you know setting up of the wallet seamless back end um that being said our our approach right now is is to have a self-custody wallet for now but at the same time we are looking into those kinds of solutions to make the experience uh seamless um but again like as I mentioned like these are iterative steps we're gonna try what we're doing now learn from that see where the where the you know we're in the funnel you know people drop off uh and if there aren't enough conversions and of course we're doing something wrong and so we'll iterate on that and and try to figure out the answer

we have two minutes so one more question okay no the last thing we can end here thank you very much for joining us [Applause] so coming out next uh we have a star studded panel uh which is going to be talking about uh the metaverse and distinguishing the buzz from the Real Deals so I'd like to invite Jason fazri David Linda and Andy to the stage and uh they can take it away thank you