Guild of Guardians, Immutable’s Next Web3 Flagship Game?

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novic gaming podcast I'm your host Nick oori we have a great episode for you today we are talking again with one of the Undisputed leaders in the web through space and that is of course immutable as longtime listeners will know we've spoken with immutable a few times now uh and for good reason they continue to innovate on both the technology and platform side to drive broader web through adoption while simultaneously continuing to ship both first party and third party new games at an impressive rate uh today we're here to talk about immutable upcoming major new release their biggest one yet called Guild of Guardians it's a web 3 fantasy RPG and it has a global launch date very soon May 15th which is just over a week away as of this recording the team has high hopes and expectations for this title and so we wanted to dig into it further as well as discuss immutables road map and how it has evolved since we had Robbie Ferguson immutables co-founder on the show back in January of this year so today we welcome back Justin Rog Chief Studio officer mutable

he was last here about a year and a half ago we were just talking about that before we started when he gave us his web 3 gaming predictions for 2023 way back in December 2022 when conditions were quite different than they are today so let's see how accurate you were Justin welcome to the pod great Nico gr glad to be back fantastic and we also have uh Chris Clay or just clay who's the VP and game director at immutable who was responsible for one of the early success stories in web 3 and that is the trading card game Gods Unchained he has also been one of the driving forces behind Guild of Guardians and we are delighted to have Chris on the Pod to talk about that Chris so very happy to be here yeah fantastic all right so with that out of the way let's get right into this this episode here so Justin Chris we always start with backgrounds uh Justin we've covered yours but a year and a half ago so let's let's uh kind of hear from that again but clay why don't we start with you as a First Time guest at least on this podcast um you've actually been at immutable since summer of 2019 which is quite a bit longer than most web 3 developers have been developing so you're one of the kind of ogs in the

space and you were of course the game director on gods and chain which is arguably one of the biggest web 3 games still to this day certainly was back when it launched it was a Hu huge deal uh so tell us more about how you ended up at immutable and um just your background in general yeah uh so from my background I've been making games for 24 years now and uh prior to mutable I was at Wizards of the Coast as game director of Magic Gathering Arena and uh yeah joined IM mutable uh for the same reason many people did back in the day in that uh Robbie Ferguson reached out and he's like we need chat uh I need to tell you about this game that we're building and uh after an hourlong call with Robbie I had to talk to James Ferguson and after an hourlong call with James Ferguson I had to fly to Australia to meet the team and it was much much smaller back then about 15 people but um very much a shared passion for gaming uh that uh I really appreciated and and they had the

the cryptotech uh down pat and they needed somebody who had built and shipped games uh that last and that's kind of one of the things my games do uh build build things to last and God gods and chain at this point has stood the test of time you know five years in crypto years is is a lot of years um and you know looking to do the same with Guild of Guardians just building upon everything we've learned in that time and it was a lot fantastic and we're going to get into a lot of those learnings and and some kind of more background on gods and chain I'm very curious to hear about some of the backstory uh eager to take advantage of the fact that you're here Clay on this pod and share some of your wisdom and insights and of course Magic the Gathering gosh like is there a bigger uh game out there that has stood the test of time I mean certainly up there in the top 10 so very excited uh to have you in web 3 and of of course very excited to have you on the Pod uh Justin I know you you covered this a year and a half ago but obviously things change quite rapidly but in crypto in particular tell me a little bit more more about uh you

know refresh our memory on how you got to immutable and then what have you been doing in the kind of 16 months or so since we last had you on the Pod I mean my story is not that different from from Clay's which is that tldr I was tricked by Robbie ferbus to you know and basically I was at a company called Riot games you know which makes like League of Legends little games little games yeah tiny games things nobody's heard of yeah and we had just finished launching arcade and I was very happily settled in Singapore my family and I were like ready to you know we had just bought a house like all those kinds of things that imply you're going to settle in a place and um I was doing basically this special project which was like the web 3 strategy or some research for Riot which got me sent to nft NYC the very very first one ran into Robbie Ferguson at a party had a chat with him and then somehow like three and a half months later found myself living in Sydney um you know like whisked away basically and and you know have been here for the past I guess it's almost been like two two

and a half years um and and what I've been doing is basically taking the immutable game studio and really starting to think through like how we can create strong games that can last test of time that have strong core game Loops that you know are ready for Mass market adoption and and so that's basically what I've been doing is building up the teams both here in Sydney Singapore um the us and then you know we also have an external Studio that working with pretty closely in Shanghai um and it's been it's been been a wild and exciting ride I bet I bet yeah I mean Robbie Ferguson is a force of nature he's not tried to whisk me to Sydney yet at Le yet um but he be careful you'll be swept out of your pedmont Palace suddenly in Sydney yeah no no but he's been on the podcast a couple of times most recently in January of this year and it was actually great having him on because he kind of laid out it's a very similar episode actually to to yours Justin from 2020 you know early 2023 late 2022 looking forward into the year ahead uh Robbie did kind of the same thing for us and so if our listen haven't checked out his episode

it's a really good one uh a lot of great insights a lot of great details more detail than we're going to get here this episode is more about Guild of Guardians in the gaming side but Robbie gave us the whole vision for what immutable is trying to do for the ecosystem not just in the in the gaming space okay so as I said clay I'm gonna I'm gonna pick on you here a little bit because it's great to have you on this pod to talk a little bit about gods and chain which as I mentioned is definitely one of the OG web 3 games standing the test of time 5 years as you mentioned is an eternity in web 3 it's still going strong so why didn't you tell a little bit about how that came to be um a little bit about the history of the game what were the design principles that you were bringing to it from your background with magic the Gathering um and you know web two and not even web 2 but analog games literally card playing games like physical games um and so how did that all come to be and how does it compare to where we are today versus what you guys got to start with like what were the tools you had and where are you today yeah I mean when we we started uh you know Gods on chain was already in

Flight when I joined uh they had done uh the start of the Genesis sale it was still ongoing going when I joined the company and it's a very similar story to so many uh whip through gains you know they sold a bunch of nfts and then uh went and figured out a way to make them work and uh that was a lot of the initial job for me it's how do we take uh the the client for the game which was built in unity and uh make everything that we had uh you know sold work and uh it was a big task uh there were a lot of cards um but the foundations were there uh the art was really good uh the World building a little bit less so and I think that's something that Justin and I have uh shared a love of like continuing to expand on but you know in those early days uh it was you know making sense of uh everything in the world and yeah really working on the the core of the client and back then it was built on eum and it was in the days where you

know maybe we would stop minting if things got up to like five or six Quay you know it's like it's getting a little pricey so we're going to slow down uh but it was just creating that Foundation of tools to make everything work in that ecosystem and ultimately gods and chained is what led to the creation of immutable x uh because it what became very obvious early on with the Genesis sale uh that uh ethereum as a foundation wasn't going to work with what we were building at this point you know Gods on chain has like 80 million nfts and that just wasn't scalable on ethereum so uh you know the core team started working on uh ler two and I would say that you know throughout its history uh Gods and chain was like a split purpose on one end you know my goal with it was to build a game that players would play in web 2 uh it just happens to have the web

three components and with a card game it just makes so much obvious sense like everyone you who talks about card gaming it's like yes owning the card like I do in real life um and that made it easy in some ways uh and you know harder in others uh you know it it saw many Evolutions throughout its history from you know basically tokenization uh with Gods uh and then integrating that through that whole uh ecosystem and it's been a really important test bed for so many ideas and con steps we've tried many different you know sales uh We've brought you know sealed in which has been huge recently uh for the product um but in many ways you know an evolving test bed you on the gameplay side of it you know it's a digital card game um you the the most direct comparison is with Hearthstone yeah uh but with you know putting our own spin on it um you know being able to choose your God Powers uh trying to solve that like sideboarding um you know problem as well uh with other systems and it

just continuing to evolve but I think the biggest shift that we made especially when you and I started working together was you know Guild of Guardians and and and gods Unchained at first were two separatech separate worlds and I remember coming in and being like wow it's already difficult enough to manage one IP let alone try to do two well so one of the first things we did was to combine the IP so that we could focus on a single world and then when we started thinking Guild of Guardians and how we could you know get it ready essentially for for the launch that's coming up very soon one of the things that we really thought about was like where is the gap in the market right now just from a pure gameplay perspective like what kind of games fit into people's lives and so ended up making a game that's quite casual compared to the experience that you know was originally sort of put forward um and then second really thinking about that web 2 onramp to make it easier to kind of go into web 3 because one of the biggest gaps from a

from at least the my perspective in terms of thinking about mainstream adoption was the idea that you actually had to buy the nfts or have the nfts in hand first it create the and all that stuff before you could actually get into the game versus the flow of GG is very much game first and then as you start getting invested it then pushes you more and more into you know web 3 Ascension mechanics to to develop sure and that's quite different to uh C and chain in the sense that gods and chain you do need to own the card set you have to have cards to play otherwise you can't really play yeah to be fair go Gods and chain you get free packs to start for sure but it's it's all it is about ownership first and foremost whether you get them for free or you have to buy them like you have to have this notion of I have to own these things and I can either you know grind for them or get them for free or you know or or buy them right which which is what you exactly what you do in in the analog case but here I think you're you're taking a very different approach which it's it's almost like you know it's always game first but if

you'll excuse the slightly strained analogy it's it's game first ownership second as opposed to ownership first game second however you define the ownership or how you get to the ownership is that would that be a fair description yeah I I think so I I think that it's one where you know we really want to make sure that the players who get into the ownership mechanics do so of their own after they have the chance to try the core product and make sure that it's the right product for them yeah yeah and it really is uh a continued ution of so much that we learned on gods Unchained so uh there was the forge where you could basically combine cards together to initially bring them on to uh the blockchain but also increase their uh their shine on them and we've gone from that to now uh we've been using uh the alter inside of Guild of Guardians to create more complex recipes so it's also allowed us to solve problems that we couldn't necessarily solve without it um in just like the web like web two space to web 3

with all of the founder Guardians there's actually a limited number of them there's only you know a little over a thousand leas out there in the world and part of the Mechanics for the gr of Guardians as you power up your Guardians as you basically combine them similar to you know cards back in the day except they gain power other rather than just shine but with that limited Supply it meant that if you got to the top tier Lea at you know that 15 Enlightenment you'd only have about 120 of them in exist and the alter with crafting has basically let us solve that problem through um wait what day is today tomorrow tomorrow the recipes for cracked Hearts is going to go live and there'll be a replacement for using duplicates for those Founders and you can basically take you know uh core gen one uh Guardians that people have acquired or even founder Guardians use the recipes to create these cracked Hearts uh and like having that tool to solve these problems in web 3 allow

people to craft allow people to also just game in the market of like buy the the Guardians that are low to like go solve this need all of that sort of economic interoperability is something that I've had in my mind since we started really pushing on this new path for Guild of Guardians too like how do we make this economy flow uh Beyond just ownership like that was the foundation but it's like it's so much more than that now yeah yeah no that makes total sense and actually leads me nicely to a kind of a more Market SL technical question when we had Robbie on the show in January he was talking a lot about how excited he was for a mutable passport um which you know Justin you just mentioned earlier that we only have so much time in our hands you know players are just looking to play and they don't want to spend a whole bunch of time setting up their wallets and you know I mean this still to this day in 2024 we've been talking about this for years now ever since you know 2018 2019 I mean going back all the way to crypto kitties like nobody has time to do all that stuff and jump through all those hoops and despite so many companies coming and

promising that they're going to make it frictionless and seamless and easy to onboard and what have you nobody really has succeeded in that and I know Robbie was extremely excited about mutable passport but it wasn't quite like you know there was still a bunch of stuff to to be done so I'm curious to hear where is the mutable passport now actually maybe Justin you take this like what does it do what is your mutable passport for listeners um where are you guys at with it and how does it address this big question mark around we only have so much time I want to get into the game I don't want to be messing around with all this other stuff yeah so um the the the pr bullet points right that that that to describe passport is that it's a non-custodial wallet an authentication solution that streamlines user onboarding and allows you to play it across multiple games and access all of the different marketplaces across immutable but but the tldr is that it makes it incredibly easy to log in and and I know this because I've worked with Alex conell who's our CTO

through almost every step of this process right like passport and goog and zkm are all kind of tied together because we test each other's products and this is how we sort of dog food it out of uable part of why Gog is so important is because it was the game that was that zkm was sort of designed for with the idea that if we got it right for Gog we could get it right for everywhere else and and if you think about like what the past used to look like where when you had to create a wallet you had to collect your seed phrase and if you didn't understand what that meant you were not quite sure where you put your seed phrase and all of a sudden you'd have all these assets and they get lost or stolen or whatever like passport means that when you're on your mobile device and you're logging in it's just as easy to log in as an Apple ID if not easier right and so especially when you're thinking about how that works on mobile if it's that easy on mobile it makes it much easier on desktop and then allows you to connect everything that you're doing with that one login across all of the other games that you play on immutable from my perspective and you

know the test case that I always use because like when you're working on a game and when you're working at a at a tech company it's too easy to get into the weeds of your own work you know so yeah I actually tested on my sister who doesn't really enjoy any of the blockchain stuff and so I'm like hey just make a passport like test this see how easy this is to log in and she's like oh she clicks on the link right then there's a code that gets sent to her email she types in that code which you know shows up as a notification that auto Pops in she's in the game she's able to do all the stuff and then doesn't feel like she's doing all these complicated blockchain transactions for me the user experience is incredibly easy to to connect and and what we're starting to see is that prior to gog's launch which is in about a week right we've seen 500,000 new passport signups and the data that we're looking at is starting to show that these are like real people who are using their Google accounts to log in because they're excited to start claiming some of the early rewards start excited to start minting some of the new guard that to me shows that like when you have

users and and and for my own personal Network I get pings from my friends who are excited to try to play the game who are like hey I just signed up for my passport when I go to this altar what's the recipe for XYZ which you know is an anecdotal um is is an anecdote and not exactly data but it's really helpful for me to kind of see how people are are finding it much easier to start accessing the web 3 elements and how it's starting to become much more seamless in terms of how they start integrating for games yeah I mean that that's the vision uh obviously you guys are immutable so for you to having passport work with air quotes just immutable uh is is sufficient if you guys are the big winners of course in the space um but you know my next question is kind of about the promise of web 3 more broadly and I'm curious to hear your guys's thoughts as immutable as one of the leaders in the space um you know we had a exceptional guy called Max Fu on the on the show a couple weeks ago I don't know if you're familiar with him Max I think Max is great yeah fantastic like crazy crazy background

like he was a a gastrointestinal surgeon or something like that in a previous life and he had you know very strict uh Chinese parents who he was he could only be a doctor or a lawyer and then he became a game developer and you know they almost disowned him but anyway really fascinating episode it was that was two weeks ago if you guys haven't listened to that I highly recommend it but he's the founder of game called nion Heroes which is cats controlling mechs but it's on salana um they have 1.3 million pre-registrations big numbers uh they seem to have had a very successful kind of alpha launch close that down and they're kind of working on the on the next one um but the question I have for you guys is like the promise of web 3 is that it's so simple to play any game that has ownership of some sort or has you know nfts integrated or or any of the web 3 technologies that we've come to embrace um but as of right now passport you you can't play a salana game through passport and and vice versa if I'm on salana I can't go and play an immutable game and I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that I mean Robbie had some philosophical thoughts on this uh but it's all very well good to have philosophical thoughts there need to be practical implementation pieces behind

it so what are your responses to that how do we actually solve the wall Garden problem which is ultimately a big promise of blockchain a big promise of blockchain is that there are no wall Gardens anymore anything is possible have had this asset here I can use it over there there is you know composability take this create something new you know which is mod modding from from web 2 so long question here really but here it is again that interoperability question which is if immutable winds big great you're the apple of of web 3 and everything else is smaller but if web 3's ethos wins which is it's a completely open ecosystem that anybody can play in and it's frictionless then we're going to have to solve this interoperability problem somehow so long question but I'm going to throw that to both of you guys um to think about a little bit and say okay passport is great for immutable is it great for the ecosystem yeah and I think this is like this is a question that has a lot of

different parts because there's one question about passport right and there and sort of the ability to log in across different stores and and I think generally speaking you know passport is not necessarily locked to zbm if there's another chain that emerges as like a large chain where there's a lot of content it it it's really easy for us you know to work with that chain to integrate passport and so that people could kind of go back and forth between different chains and even right now there's connection points to do metamask for example at passport which makes it easy for to do those connection points right so that's point one around the login right I think though that the reality around is is that players are going to go where there's great content so our first priority at immutable is to make really really good content you know we have over 200 games that are building on us you know the criteria for how we look at those games is not so dissimilar from the way that you know that at least I used to look at games at other companies that I used to work at when we were thinking about acquiring it we just looking at core game with strong retention that are actually fun first

and then thinking about sort of like how the blockchain elements can be built on top of it um and what I think is going to happen is that there's going to be a convergence of a smaller number of chains because right now it feels like like if you would ask me who are competitors were two years ago I would give you an different answer from a year ago from a different answer from today yeah right and all of that stuff constantly is Shifting and moving and for us we're just very very focused on get good cont content get different genres of games make sure those games are actually fun you know and fun without the blockchain elements on top because the blockchain elements artificially or not artificially but they they inflate like your D1 your D7 your D30 right um and then you know once we figure out where the majority of that content works we can then start thinking about how how we can kind of do those Integrations with those winners once the dust settles the other and the third point which is something that clay and I have been talking a lot is that one of the things that's really interesting about nfts and games is that it used to be

that the Assets in your game were the the Assets in your game and they couldn't move but the reality now is that as game designers we can think about the longevity of the asset and the longevity of the original game experience that they're in as two separate parts and we can start thinking about how we can design with other people's assets with or without their permission which also becomes really interesting so you know for for without saying too much for Gog right now we're already talking to sort of other other developers and other projects about how we can integrate their assets into our game and that's with permission the reality though and what's so interesting is that we don't necessarily need their permission to create utility for those assets inside our game and I'm not sure I've even fully thought through the ramifications of that but that becomes a really really interesting tool to think about how designers think we should start thinking about you know franch not

just games but you know FR multiple games within a franchise about how those experiences build out I think we're just at the beginning of that which is what to me is so exciting is this kind of unknown Frontier of how you can start thinking about about games and game design generally you know yeah I think the thing I would add on to that is I've been pretty consistent in saying that uh my take on like the the web 3 sort of interoperability I was never uh a big proponent of it and uh when it comes to like having a single nft that you can play across any game the technical challenge of that is huge uh is it theoretically possible yes but like as a game developer I can tell you like my desire to integrate somebody else's nft at a base level isn't necessarily very high um on the other side of it though when I look at the ecosystem like economic interoperability has always been where I've seen the the most potential and this is where solving a problem like

this uh is where an expanded like Ultra could be where right now the recipes are based off of nfts on zkm but depending on where you know passport integrates you could expand that out so you can take you know pieces from you know bass pieces from salana nfts Combine them uh through the alter you performing actions on different chains to get a new output uh you know through that experience again economic interoperability you're transforming nfts uh but you can solve some of those problems I think the other side of it is as much as you know web 3 has you had narratives throughout its time and I've seen them come and go um we are on a path right now in gaming where you're going to have a chain that wins you're going to have a second place chain and maybe even a third but this Mass proliferation of gaming chains is going to come down and you're going to find winners and I believe immutable is playing to

win you know uh working with polygon uh one of at one time a strong competitor of ours uh uh you know has helped us consolidate uh more and like that's that's a big part of like where it also helps Gamers like if you're just on passport on immutable zvm uh we can make that experience pretty darn seamless uh and that's been big inside of you know just Guild of Guardians testing the web PR functionality now um it's at the point where we're like I can take this and have my 15-year-old son run through and perform the actions and he's like yep it's just a little bit slow Dad I'm like yeah that's blockchain sorry son like sometimes blocks take a little bit of time to solve um so much faster than the early days uh and I'll keep getting better um but like solving it for everyone we're not quite there yet yeah and I think both of you had great answers that you know my next question was was going to be about the fact that we have uh we had this uh this an alpha called game s they do a lot of great

research uh in the web 3 space and they had one of the very first kind of super comprehensive 30,000 foot level reports that wasn't like sponsored by any particular chain or didn't have any particular agenda and when I had them on the show they they were telling me that there was over 2 different blockchains and most of them are catering towards gaming and it's just not feasible for there to be 200 epic game stores there's not 200 steams possible on the planet so to your point Justin about consolidation to your point uh clay about there needs to be some winning happening here um I'm 100% there and I think we are entering that phase personally thinking about okay like some of these smaller chains are just not going to succeed like developers don't want to build on chains that aren't going to have any kind of traction even if they're interoperable with with immutable and passport and all these other things right so I think I think I think you guys have spot on and I think we're going to see maybe your prediction this is my prediction at least for 2024 or maybe it'll take into 2025 when some of the funding runs out

but uh yeah there's going to be a bunch of consolidation and I think that 200 is going to get whittel down to a much smaller number and if you think about where there's been like no one for example by the way much as I love love sort of infrastructure you know there's very few Gamers who are like oh my God this game is on AWS I can't wait to play it right like that's that's not it it's it's it's it's the content that that gets them excited about it and then what ends up happening is you as a developer you end up building on the content that makes it easier for you to real or on the chains that help you realize your vision so I think to a certain extent in the same way that we've seen the consolidation of like C Cloud infrastructure right like there will be something similar that will happen to blockchains and it's really going to be about the content you know where the best content is are the chains that are going to win you know yeah totally what a phenomenal segue into content because I was goingon to switch gears anyway and start talking about uh Guild of Guardians um so just to give

the slight Preamble her uh I've been reading up a lot about it um very excited to see it looks great so Kudos there obviously how it plays is the key thing um but you've you've gone out on the record and called it your Flagship game right and so that's a that's put you know and that's quotes um that's putting a lot of pressure on yourselves I think um and putting a lot of expectations out there and you know obviously we hope it lives up to it but I want to get a sense of why you guys especially like clay maybe this is for you um tell us about the game itself so what is it how does it play um how long's been development all the all the stuff that are you know our audience is interested in hearing and then talk a little bit about how come you guys are so confident uh you're calling it your Flagship game I like the confidence but uh I want to hear the root of that confidence yeah I mean from my end uh if you go back uh about 17 months in time uh was still focused primarily on gu uh but uh Justin had asked me like hey can

you spend a day a week on Guild of Guardians and one of my core competencies is combat like making combat look and feel good I'm like great I'll I'll pop in and uh I can do that and after about a month of uh getting in the game uh working with uh our partner uh had a very uncomfortable conversation with Justin where I was like hey Justin like this is is in trouble um like I've built games for a long time and we're not you know two months from launch we're probably 3 to 4 years uh and that that's not something you want to tell your boss necessarily when a game is supposed to be really close um and the boss doesn't want to hear that that um definitely not um but yeah I'm like I I could be wrong let's pull in some other uh people uh from Tech to you know look at it in more depth but um did a bit of a deep dive and it was like we really need to uh reboot the project and

basically at uh the start of last year it was working with the team on like analyzing the mobile space and looking at places where we thought we could win um obviously going up against uh Diablo Immortal is challenging uh there's a lot of foundation there uh and you one of the core Loops that we were looking at uh was in this sort of like Squad you know idle Auto RPG space and you know even to the today there's still a lot of room to win there so I think we made the right call and it's like got a core Loop if we can find the right partner you know I think we can deliver on this uh pretty quickly and here we are you 15 months later uh from signing with my letterer and we know a week away from launch and a lot of it was you know we want to have a game that uh is smooth on mobile that's visually stunning uh and that was a companion app and this was

sort of coming from just my experience as a gamer who's a father and like L of my game time is when I'm with my family and I need to I I've got something on the side and Guild of Guardians was kind of built to be something I can play full focus on but it's also something I can run on the side and uh we went really hard uh for like the first was it just for months yeah to beautiful corner where it's like okay I'm going to get four hours of gameplay like my goal is to get people to play Beyond an hour because back for the original Guild of Guardians you know what we saw with one hour play tests people were done after about 20 minutes and that's never where you want to be with a play test and as the beautiful Corner build came together for Guild of Guardians it's like we're getting to the end of the hour and it's 15 minutes passed and we haven't even finished typing up our feedback notes yet we're still playing through and you took it out to the community

community had a really positive response to it uh followed that up with you know friends and family again for months later and it's been just building on that core Loop of you know get in spend your energy running your Guardians through dungeons leveling them up you know acquiring additional resources going to crafting which is the other side of it uh generating crafting materials with your factories crafting a bunch of gear which Powers up your Guardians and kind of rinse for competing and at its base it's it's a pretty straightforward game um but there's a lot of depth in that with you know at this point 90 plus Guardians uh with all of the different runes all of the different monsters and bosses you face uh you know it's simple yet you take it into that next stage of depth you add some uh competition into the mix uh so beyond like the story dungeons that you run through we have the endless dungeon which is where competition uh uh really comes together uh and essentially

in the endless dungeon it's your goal is to get as deep as you can into the dungeon uh before your Guardians fail and you get more points the deeper you go as you're going down you're choosing which which room sander some are easier some some are harder depending on like how healthy your Guardians are do you go through some easy rooms hopefully you know hit some uh additional healing for lesser points or do you go you hit more Elite rooms and it's all about choice and each run is going to be different you're going to have different runes that you you select which powered up your Guardians which sometimes may let you go deeper than others the rooms you you pick the paths the guardian combinations uh it takes something that it's core is very simple and makes it hard to solve and in my long time in gaming like that possibility Space is really important to a game's overall longevity and you know some of those it's like in card games there's so much possibility Faith because you can use so many different cards in your decks and

like how they come out combine out uh makes them really sustainable and in Guild of Guardians it's just that combination of you the different Guardians and their different power levels the different challenges that you face uh that sort of gives it it's it's oomph um and for the record by the way I was not actually mad when you told no you wasn't I was I was terrified was not actually he wasn't mad at me but I was was not mad at all like for what it's worth I I'm actually very into it when clay tells me oh yeah there's a problem you have to fix because I'm like wow I'm finally useful let me jump in and help but but like I do think that like there's for for me it's actually quite simple video games are 50% art and 50% science and from the science perspective you know you know when I talk to the board about why we're excited of a guild of Guardians I point to sort of the retention numbers right which our latest test that we did which was out in the wild in Indonesia was 28% D1 right and then our friends and family test was

48% D1 oh way higher it was golden CED oh yeah like 70 plus all right so I discounted that but the main point is when you look at those tolerances those those D1 numbers are more than you know within the range that you expect to see for what like a hit game looks like right and then our our D30 goes between like six to 13 depending on what the cohort looks like which also is really good from the art perspective some of my favorite games which is kind of so so I think I told you before nio that I'm like Filipino and American as it like I'm I literally spent half my life in the Philippines and been half my life in the US and play both Asian and Like Us games like I love love like fake Grand order and epic 7 and you know genjin impact and so much of what this game has just started to take is like some of the best elements of those games which is the collection element the ability to play it on the Fly and much as I think that so many

people in the web 3 space are like you know and keep in mind I worked out some of these games are like oh my God we're gonna make the next like League of Legends or like the web 3 valorant and and you know I actually know a lot of those people that think that's great I think that like for the lives that we have right now games that you can play when you're waiting for your Uber when you're in between sets at the gym which is honestly where I test GG um when you are stuck watching a Netflix show that you didn't pick that your partner is forcing you to watch for an hour and a half like those are the games that can fit kind of easily and seamlessly into your life and that's what Guild of Guardians is trying to Target and we found that people who play this game for an hour are play it all the time for just from a purely anecdotal perspective I knew that we had a good core loop on our in our hands but you know I have my test device and then I I use my partner as as the other tester I woke up one morning and my partner was double fisting go not making breakfast and I

was like oh okay like this is this is ready to this is ready to start putting into production we could get out of pre-prod and go into prod you know so so I think that there's a lot of things to be said about you know both the the hard facts that we're seeing around what will make this game successful but also just the fact that the game is pretty fun you know and like that that that last part of it is you know we've we've had gild of Guardians live in a web two only sents since January uh in Canada and uh just in a web two sense uh it's done well that's where you're you're seeing the numbers Justin is talking about um but my experience you over the last five years in the web 3 space is as people get into that web free side of gaming and Guild of Guardians guides people there very smoothly uh the retention particularly long-term retention is just so much higher and I think that combination at launch of a solid Web Two game um with

the web 3 is going to be really strong um which yeah I'm looking forward to and then I think the other really thing important thing like from Gods on chain from my experience with mtga like going back to mm RPGs it's uh building the game from the start to evolve and I don't know of like I've I've done a lot but like particular with Guild of Guardians like we've built it to evolve and you we can do so much uh fixing modding of the game just remotely once it's launched so we get a buildup on uh you know iOS uh Google Play Store and we can just change so much of it from the back end and that sort of mutability of the product makes it so much easier to add new content and it's one of the things that I guess gives me tons of confidence as a likeit game like mind loader like I made any

one good bid partner like like mind loader is our partner uh and uh they have been such a fantastic partner to work with on the product and you know their ability to just ship new features is like impressive so like as we go into launch and Beyond game is definitely not complete it's not going to be complete for some time to come uh uh which is is a very much a good thing I think um because there's so much room left to evolve it uh and I know that working with mind loer we can you know continue that road map through 202 God what year what year is it now 2024 uh beond but but I think I think you go this is one of the things that I I you know because I also in my in my role talk to other game companies that are are building on immutable right not necessarily games that totally fall within my preview but other games building like I give them advice on how they should think about building their

games and one of the things that we did with Gog that I think is is actually pretty important is test the game in a market where no one knows that it's going to be web 3 to make sure the core Loop is actually fun independently like that's what we do normally in web 2 right is like you you you take your game and you put it out in the wild you see how it works when it's not Juiced up with people who are super excited about that game and that actually helps you to make choices that like in a control group that make sure that the base game is fun so that when you inject the web three elements on top which kind of Acts a little bit like a a you know retention steroid right it it gives you a higher chance that your game is actually G to be successful in the long term so yeah I mean actually that's been great yeah I mean so congratulations it sounds like some of the metrics are are you know at or beyond what you were hoping for so that's all very good it's very impressive built it in 15 months kind of after a retool um so you I've I've never had a harder I was going to say that's a that's a that's a tough tough deadline to hit so

you guys are probably burning the midnight oil a little bit here um I I have some questions on the web3 elements so you talked a lot about and and as you should by the way it's game first you know web 2 doesn't need the web 3 stuff doesn't need nfts doesn't need ownership like it just needs be fun right um too many like over the last few years too many developers were like oh it's gonna have all this own I mean I was guilty of the exactly the same thing going back to 2020 when we you know started our company um so we were guilty of a lot of the the kind of same sins which was like oh the ownership is like oh it's it's a whale game and then we're going to figure out the web to fund part later and like it's on its head right so I like how you're thinking about it Web Two first launching it purely as a web two game no web 3 knowledge even in some of these markets leads to the next question though which is you've sounds like you've designed a very good game that's easy to play relatively casually right like I mean you can't play a really hard game double fisting it like your partner was playing and so that kind of leads to a question is like how compatible is that web 3 component tell

tell us actually a little bit about what are the web 3 components that you're you're planning to introducing what do you think are the big ones that you're you're putting in there that are going to be the biggest hit so to speak with the players why would they be the retention um you know steroid uh and then secondly are they fully compatible with a what sounds like a kind of an auto RPG mode that perhaps if I'm reading between the lines many or most players are playing it more casually than they are playing Super like hardcore so once again a long question but but uh you know you guys had a a long answer that was good I don't want dig into that a little bit I'm gonna take some credit for this one because it was like one of the things that we were looking at in part of our research which was also driven by some of my experiences you know games like fake ran order games like genin impact games like epic 7 are games that actually have a thriving Black Market underneath them right like these are games where people will pay to train up and Level Up characters these

are games where people will pay for accounts through like shady Discord and like WeChat deals to get the specific you know like an FGL like I really want that saber or I really want that rare character so that I can put them into my squad these are games where you know getting dup you know rolling for the for the duplicate so that you can level up the character you know where games where where whales will spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in order to capture this market so to a certain extent we were trying to find genres where some of the like Behavior was incredibly compatible with with web3 and and I say this as someone who is very guilty of at least in Asia like mildly dolphining out and at least in Australia is Hardcore wh dolphing dolphining out all right you may have coined that term here dolphining out I compared to some so when I moved here from Singapore my friends were like oh you're such a like you're not whale like a dolphin I moov to Australia every like

oh my God you're totally a whale right um but like it you know the the the thing that becomes really interesting about it is that if you like these types of games where you have to collect and level up and have duplicate characters and you are used to the web two path where all of those assets are locked to a single account where you where you can't really get them from external markets unless you're breaking the terms of of service in order to take accounts from Shady places and defin can't combine the assets from those accounts in order to get what you want right web 3 actually offers an incredibly easy and natural solution for you to be able to get those assets collect those assets in a way that's much more efficient than you would normally in web 2 and so one of the things that we were thinking about here is I was thinking about like not just real problems that players have from you know the market research we were doing but thinking about genres of games where I wish that I actually was able to go buy duplicates of my you know fake ground order for example my saber right or for my Merlin and be able to kind of collect them out the market

instead of just rolling and rolling and rolling on a single account so at a base level just in terms of just that pure functionality goog solves that problem for players who love these kinds of collector gacha games where you're trying to build up these super powerful characters in order to do that you need to roll and Roll and Roll you can now Roll and Roll and Roll on web to we haven't closed that path off if you want to do it the normal way you can but it's much more efficient and actually cheap for you if you engage with the web 3 portion of it to be able to level up those characters in a way that makes sense so for my from my perspective you know there's a lot of other web3 features that we're putting on top of that to make it easier things like leaderboards things like the ability to earn tokens things like the ability to share you know affiliate links but the core functionality is that if you are actually someone who loves these kind of collector Squad gotcha RPG games I think that this has the best potential value out of any of the games out there and as someone who loves a lot of those games and has accounts on those games that are

worth thousands and thousands of dollars which I can no longer trade easily you know to me I think that that actually solves the problem really quite elegantly you know so all right so you you are both boldly putting for you know G both gameplay reasons and for you know Market researchmarket fit uh reasons I's just say I'm also collecting characters now all right you're get you're getting ready for the cell for real yes I hear I did buy myself an energy token after the last I was like now it's like what it was going to do it was like and then like like just so you know guys I'm buying mine after this one there you go there you go love it love there other yeah nfts in the mix you know another big one on the nft side being guilds and guilds are just going to be in their infancy and Guild of Guardians at launch um but like longterm uh actually even not that long-term looking at the road map uh that's going to be some of what we're evolving uh next adding those additional layers into how guilds interact with all of this uh and what

they can uh do to sort of enhance uh their Guild me Members power and crafting some uh powerful artifacts in the mix uh but maybe that'll be a future podcast nice nice well you're always welcome back anytime this is a very exciting uh topic and very interesting to hear and you're saying Flagship game and you're you know standing behind it at at least at this moment in time so May 15th is when it's coming out um you teased a little bit clay already about what the of post launch road map looks like uh obviously games are never done great to hear that your partner is good at liveops because live Ops in web 3 is by no means guaranteed and and many developers are not that great at it uh so you got to have all the yeah you're nodding your headed laughing a little bit here yes I've done I've done 24 years of uh basically live games I've always worked in MMORPGs uh or like mtga and it's like it's kind of in my blood uh if you make me make a single player game I'm just like wait how do you do that yeah um

totally I mean I'm actually sidebar here I'm a massive Civ 6 civilization 6 fan and that game I mean yes they do a certain level of live Ops with like their their content packs but it is so frustrating that the game sits still for a year two years at a time and and you know it's just anyway don't get me started um that um and as an ex Zinga PM GM like you know that was you know live offs was in our blood too there so uh yeah very contrasting right brain left brain thing going on here um okay so talk a little bit more about uh what's what's in the the post-launch road map post May 15th like what are you looking to accomplish this is a full public you know worldwide launch so it's a big deal you're clearly confident that you've got the metrics to to back it up um how long is it going to sit how long you going to collect data do you go to live Ops right away and it's feature after feature like here we go do you ramp up the team there are a lot of considerations when you launch a game especially a big public launch um you can either scale up or you can sit back and wait and watch the the

numbers come in where do you go from here this is one of those things where Alyssa called me and she was like you have to make sure that you're careful okayo much media training well clay clay he had the right media training uh at the start of pod react I mean at its most basic like with any launch uh you know a big part of the team is just going to be responding to uh what we learn and uh we've got new AB testing functionality we've got a number of things in the mix particularly with early onboarding um mostly because we we found that if people hit 50 minutes of gameplay uh they retain way better than than Market but if they don't uh not not not quite as well so it's like getting people to that magic moment trying to pull that that that time in so some of it is just going to be optimizing what is there but in terms of live operations uh I cannot oil marketings uh fund too much but a lot of it is going to come

down to those leaderboards and you know this is this is web 3 and making it really appealing for people to come try out Guild of Guardians to compete uh for some of those leaderboard rewards uh so like in that like the live operations of uh endlesss leaderboards we've got a new Mode called Boss Rush uh which has much quicker engagement uh so for the whales out there they don't want to spend the time doing the Deep endless runs they can get more in Boss Rush we've got PVP and that live off schedule of each of those uh running uh and then getting special events into the mix uh we also sold a bunch of Esports Guardians and you having rules where you've got to have those Guardians to play in the mix uh is part of like that special Eventing Beyond just you know uh holidays and the mix um so we've got that laid out we've got our path of additional Guardian releases which I think is going to be big getting these new Guardians into the

mix to expand out that possibility space of Guardian combinations uh and then it's going to be the additional features and you know our road map there is not yet done there's a lot of work to do on the guild side of things uh there is additional just handholding when it comes to like flushing out just web 3 onboarding um I think that's going to be a big area that uh initially the discoverability is not quite where I want it so we'll be having you know external guides by getting that into the game itself um and then yeah things like pets um in the mix and it's just going to be getting these features out sort of like one by one uh we've got a really good high level road map at the moment launch destroys all plans so uh you know we'll see you know in the the the chaos that is any launch period exactly where they shift um but yeah like when it comes to like that high level Road pretty confident at the the moment and definitely dead set on the live

operations not worried but TLD or n what we can tell you also is that all of those things will be broken into roughly three acts over launch starting on May 15th ending around August 1ce and each of those different phases will reflect different sort of progressions of this like mythical enemy called The Dread which will coincide with major feature releases in those three reacts so lot of it's a lore driven act launch thing which is also tied to the road map they Clay is putting together nice I have this worked out well Justin's Justin loves uh the storytelling uh World buing side of it it's not that I don't I just like making things work yeah uh and you get those two in combination like I can't wait for the world to see the launch trailer uh it makes good stuff well this this episode is slated to air on the 14th so uh even though we're recording it uh

just over a week Plus in advance what a great time for our listeners who happen to be listening on the day this episode drops uh get out there and get yourself into Guild of Guardians May 15th is the uh the global public launch um I had so many more questions I know you guys have a hard stop and I'm going to respect that but I do have to ask my final question that I ask all my guests and you can power through these real fast Web Two web 3 analog games doesn't matter what are your favorite three games you're playing right now um or are most excited by and you can't pick your own um do I have to do three yeah I don't have time I'm watching a game I don't have time for three games in my life we were just talking about this yesterday which is that like we were talking so I I really love like Paradox games I think we talked about this on the last podcast um and I have not allowed myself to play anything new until this launch basically but that I'm excited about I'm excited about manner Lords I'm excited to actually like try out manner Lords after G 15th and then games that I play to like relax that are not me testing go are essentially

replaying TFT which was a game that I used to work on right and playing um Stellaris which is just the game that I've been playing for years you know and I'm only playing those just because I cannot start a new game right now while I'm finishing GG so yeah I mean for me uh my game time is down a lot right now uh but uh I spend a fair amount of time just trying to play obscure games on Steam um and uh you games that are sort of just a little bit different uh one of the big ones right now is uh songs of six uh it's a little like dwarf fory Style game that uh it's very meditative uh and in a little bit of time I have to like hop on that and playing that manner Lords is high on my list post launch when things calm down I love to play mans yeah I know I have not I I have not like I I wanted to I wanted to this weekend but I resisted um uh and yeah some of it is like going back to the old

uh Classics too right now so like uh uh griftlands is one that I've been playing can get through a run in just a couple of hours uh and yeah well that's a good list there good list there yeah i' I've been getting kind of nostalgic for old games as well but we don't have time to get into all of those so uh just wanted to say a huge thank you uh to both of you Justin uh clay thank you so much for coming on the Pod today real pleasure best of luck with the launch May 15th Guild of Guardians a lot of other stuff going on that we didn't get to talk about with the meable uh Robbie teased a 100 plus games launching in 2024 or mostly launching in 2024 uh Justin I think you mentioned 200 games under development probably not all launching this year I know you got have a hard stop so I'm gonna stop it here Justin thank you clay thank you thank you so much and of course as always a big thank you to all of our listeners we'll be back next week with more interviews more insights and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web 3 so until next time

friends stay crypto curious and feel free to send questions guest recommendations and comments to me my email is novic nov. if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin Plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu [Music]