MILEs as a Bridge to the Metaverse

[Music] [Music] i'd like to welcome to the stage our next guest is chris hamilton from general to talk about miles as a bridge to the metaverse chris come on up i welcome this presentation on uh massively interactive live events as a bridge to the metaverse um i'll cover a little bit about genvid technologies i'll talk about massively interactive live events or what we call miles and then i'll jump into case studies of pac-man community and rival peak which were multi-million dollar projects that we had with facebook um genvin technologies was founded in 2016 by some square enix veterans they worked at shinra technologies which was square enix's cloud division cloud computing division and they were looking

at new forms of gameplay that could happen with distributed processing power um genvid is a us-based startup we've got offices in new york montreal la tokyo london and berlin we raised 166 million dollars to date you can see our investors on the bottom of the slide i'll point out galaxy interactive and makers fund because we have people from both of those funds on our board and we also have amazing advisors that are thrilled to work with like x square enix ceo at chiwara digital media executives matt ball and andrew schneider on a suite who is instrumental in building valve and steam into what they are today she's also the head of studio bad robot games um cindy holland who is vp for original content at netflix and jt gleason who was at twitch for more than eight years leading uh both partner and developer relations and these are great people that are sort of helping us move things forward um our mission is to power the future of interactive media and we believe that people love shared experiences particularly when their participation and their input matters so be it gaming sports reality tv these are those moments that become those water cooler

moments in the office are basically what we've been chatting about on the random channel in slack the last two years we are already working with top tier platforms leagues and events to create these amazing experiences we believe that interactive media will double the market size of the game industry this chart by super data shows the market growth in orange for games and then the interactive media market in pink and pink is growing faster until recently game developers really didn't have a way to um use interactive streams other than as a marketing tool hoping that users would kind of go from those streams into their games where they could monetize them with genvid you can actually be part of both of those markets and you can sort of monetize them in both of them and here game developers can offer more immersive interesting viewing experiences interactivity is the future of mass media content and massively interactive live events again what we call miles are the next step in this evolution um we're turning passive viewers into active participants and disrupting traditional

broadcast experiences by offering increased interactivity and better viewing experiences for a wider possible audience all through our genvid miles sdk and support services and i quite love the example in this slide it gives you kind of an example of the direction we're going and this is like a nature documentary where people in the audience can be um engaging and maybe controlling the weather or maybe somehow impacting predators um it could be a rock concert where people are engaging with that music and it could be booing that band off the stage or kind of cheering things up or winding things up and kind of pushing up the tempo for for events that are happening so miles are cloud-powered highly engaging interactive live broadcast events that allow anyone to be part of a larger audience while directly participating in a meaningful way miles combine the best of lean forward gaming lean back tv in the thrill of entertainment and here the audience will matter and each individual can decide their level of input you can just kind of lean back and watch it like it's tv and chill or you can lean forward and actually give inputs and shape the narrative and shape the story and shape

the event that you're watching so you decide your own level of involvement or influence what we're doing is new and we're often confused with other trends so i find that it's actually very helpful to explain what genvid is not um we're not a streamer tool we're very much focused on creating viewer uh experiences so we want to work with developers to create viewer-centric experiences and new forms of gameplay and entertainment we're not cloud computing we are native cloud streaming we scale more cheaply than multiplayer servers um cloud computing is expensive google is the king of giving away for free things for free they cannot give stadia away for free they have to charge people to use it we're also not a platform we're not competing with twitch we are a twitch preferred partner we have been working with them since 2016 when the company was started we helped them create their extension program we also have games on youtube we have games on facebook all of these platforms have different audiences

and we feel it's important for to give developers the opportunity to get their game on the platform that best fits their game so how do we do this um people go to stadiums they go to live events because they want to enjoy a richer experience and they get that through understanding what they are watching um there's a level of competency that people have um so what we're trying to do is create these experiences and give people competency so if you're watching sort of video games and this is why we don't really believe in streamers streamers just give you the player perspective um if you're watching a game on twitch if you don't play that game yourself you honestly really don't have an idea what's going on game developers are in a position to actually put cameras in different angles give people a bigger perspective of what's going on we have an html5 overlay on top of that video stream that allows people to pull up various information information on the players that are in the game things that could be in their inventory real-time maps that show where players are so you can see how players are interacting with one another and working as a team so suddenly

all of the strategy and tactics that you wouldn't see from a street streamer you can get from from our um sdk and what we're building here jumping to the middle games were are constantly evolving they're in a state of live ops they're changing um and so by letting the fans letting the people know what's going on they have an understanding of what's going on and this is really super important for onboarding sort of new users and then finally on the screen to the right this is what game developers normally think of first and that is reaching out actually touching the game where you can throw a player a lifeline by giving them extra health or um setting traps or somehow getting in their way so pac-man community launched on december 6 2021 it's a collaboration between gentin technologies bandai and amco entertainment and facebook gaming there's a qr code here that you can scan with your phone and jump right in um mark zuckerberg at launch said quote you'll be able to play this classic game with friends watch creators play build

your own mazes gaming is a big part of the metaverse and i'm looking forward to seeing games like this become more interactive and more immersive he also added that the technology that powers these experiences namely genvid is serving as a bridge to the metaverse facebook games is bringing the pillars of play watch connect together which bridges playing games watching gaming video and connecting with others around games to create a richer experience between people and build community um everybody knows pac-man gameplay so i'm not gonna show that but here's a quick peek at the maze creator colors tools um all the things that people can use as of last friday we had over 11 000 mazes that were made this is in three months um this just gives you a little bit of the creativity that people are using on the mazes i think it's pretty cool this is the the watch mode here this is basically an experience where hundreds or thousands of user viewers are interacting with an ai pac-man at this point they can kind of boost the pac-man or boost the ghosts and kind of

determine which side might have an advantage many more features are coming think of various things that can get dropped into this or other interactions what we're doing is we're creating an interplay between the people in the watch mode and the people in the create mode so the more people that engage with watch will unlock more features for the the creators and then as more mazes are created they will in turn unlock more features in the watch section um so we've had a lot of player viewer engagements as of friday we had 3.7 million unique users this has generated a lot of interest and a lot of other japanese companies that have classic video game ips actually reached out to us with a spreadsheet saying hey we have other games um maybe you want to work with us um and this is really um us being a bridge to the metaverse it's really about creating immersive interactive engagements that build community most importantly it's about accessibility here everybody knows pac-man there's nothing to learn this is a co-op version

of pac-man even if you're really not good at pac-man there are three other players in that multiplayer mode that will help you clear levels create and watch don't actually require any skill this is all cross-platform it works on pc or mobile it works on really any screen with an internet because this is all streaming from the cloud so fortnite will talk about having amazing experiences and concerts and everything in that but if you do not have a computer powerful enough to run unreal engine you cannot actually be in that experience because this works on low-end android devices we're very powerful in emerging markets we've got high audiences in mexico brazil india places that developers have wanted to get into but can't places that like people that have video game ip um basically haven't been able to reach those audiences because these are audiences that don't have consoles this is all proven technology and it works today so rival peak and i've done talks specifically on rival peak in the past it ran from december 2nd 2020 to march 3rd 2021

this is a massive interactive live event that is more along the lines of community driven narrative it basically has three components which is a facebook instant game it is a persistent world this world is similar to the reality show big brother where the audience can watch and follow all the contestants in this case sophisticated 12 ais and this was all developed by a studio called pipe work studios and the audience votes for these characters by audience participation events what we call apes and these are various interactions that that player that viewers can have with the live stream um the contestant ai with the least number of interactions or the lowest score at the end of the week was eliminated um so the audience actually votes by engaging with the instant game rival speak was a facebook watch original companion show that was hosted by will wheaton and this section of it was more like lost it had a very crazy insane storyline a lot of um conspiracy theories

this was more like more than just a wrap-up show this was an opportunity for will to sort of interview some of these ai characters bring more of the backstory into everything and kind of talk about what a lot of the audience participation meant during that week and where the the show was going in the future um then there was also the facebook platform itself rival peak had its own page all the individual characters had their own page lots of users were engaging with those pages themselves there used to be a time when people would sort of live tweet what was going on with game of thrones and this sort of thing this was all happening right on facebook's platform again the project ran for 13 weeks december 2nd 2020 to march 3rd more than 100 million minutes being watched um 55 times the amount of minutes between weeks one and week three probably better to look at week four because from weeks one to three we were not really doing marketing so much as just testing for stability and bugs um and these are the types of audience uh

engagement that people could have so you'd have dialogues where people could sort of follow asynchronously what was going on with everything at the same time there were events in various votes you could vote on what the daily weather was going to be you could vote should these two ais have some sort of romance go on or should somebody divulge some sort of deep secret and build the drama behold behind the whole story so all the users were giving input that would shape the whole story um and then there were contestant votes where you'd have these participant ai standing on the screen kind of looking off like hmm what should i do next and then all the audience could like sort of engage with that and vote and give them a direction and that sort of moved all these characters through the world and and helped the narrative unfold um there were project power ups which are basically like little idol tapping games match three games and memory games were ways that the audience would actually also participate and uh get involved in these uh audience participation events and then we added things to help gamify the experience as the weeks progressed maps to help the fans understand the world that they were living in

achievements and leaderboards to sort of nudge some partic some audience behavior and then people love match three so we created these tribute challenges so people could just keep playing the match three and playing the match three and then offering tribute in the form of tools or food to the contestants or maybe some evil surprises um so here's some basic demographics top five countries where the u.s mexico brazil india and the philippines again streaming from the cloud works on very well works very well on the android devices um this experience was much more like a casual game similar to the hidden object puzzle adventure games i used to work on at navasoft so i was very surprised that men edged out women and then also i was personally surprised that so few people are actually using facebook on pc i'll note here that ios support wasn't added until halfway through um this whole experience uh in part um facebook knew that this was going to go to mostly android devices in some of these countries but there was such an outcry from the audience that facebook had to put developers on it and add it

and that sort of moved the u.s into the number one spot again it's important that you kind of reach out to these people because your voice matters and your vote matters that's really important mr genvin a little inspiration for everybody in the audience rival peak was born out of this r d project by pipe work studio um they made a this demo here it was basically 10 ai that would sort of battle each other out and over about 20 minutes they would kill each other and leave one person standing and all the people the developers in their office were sort of transfixed watching this thing play out over and over and over again we're the people that make watch experience so they reached out to us and they made this demo for us where basically you could play god and launch various things in to help the contestants and maybe nudge the storyline one way or the other determine which character is going to win this was intriguing enough to facebook to pick picked it up and then it evolved into this multi-million dollar project um the companies and the teams that are most interested in this tech are basically people that are working on narrative design community driven narrative design people that are entering from the film industry because it really resonates with anybody

that's worked with film i've got developers in norway uh that and they basically were looking at us and they were looking at things that they could do with their game and they talked to their advisors and their advisor was like have you thought of applying for a norwegian innovation fund grant and um they ended up getting a grant unlocking 50 000 euros and they're building prototypes for us now um and then if you're an ip holder now you have access to sort of countries and markets that have been difficult to get in the past so again a lot of ip holders or people that have worked with ip or that have access to ip are reaching out to us now and then this is the the project raven concept trailer this uh we're working with the well-known ip for this that is about to get announced sometime in march [Music]

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[Music] [Applause] [Music] um the audience watching live streams is growing faster today than the games market this is an expanding blue ocean again we're platform agnostic so pick the platform that best suits your audience for your mile via twitch youtube or facebook um native cloud streaming reduces friction there's absolutely nothing for the user to download or install just jump right into the game

it's all highly accessible thank you there's a qr code here feel free to scan it it's a feedback form i'd like to iterate on this and get better at these talks i'm still working still working on not being so nervous no no that was great chris that was fantastic thank you very much we've um uh we've got a minute or two before our our next uh speaker so yeah are you happy to take a question from us sure we've also got a booth downstairs if there are questions do feel free to come talk to us happy to show you some other things that we've got i joined a bit late so maybe you've covered this at the beginning how would you create something that is continuous rather than something that runs for a certain number of weeks or days or weeks uh it's depends on the gameplay you know do you want to have an ending do you need to have some sort of conflict resolution um we have projects that aren't going to be running uh 24 7 they could be running for a certain period of time during the day so it really is more like appointment television

um it really depends on the the style of play that you want to have so how many different endings the project raven actually has because like you could go left right and just so many combinations it's difficult to say and i'm not super involved in the project raven concept itself i know with um rival peak there were a number of possible endings that the conclusion could sort of come to but how that was going to go and ultimately there were 12 different characters all of which had a chance to become sort of the winner at the end um it was a very interesting challenging process actually because when a character was eliminated that we usually found that out on friday and then started this crazy development process for um the the rival speak program because they would then remove all that character's dialogue out of the tree and everything then sort of take all the inputs that all the users gave to understand where it was going and script things for the rival speak show they would then shoot will on mondays post production on

tuesdays and then we'd have the half an hour program to show while we basically took the game offline and uploaded the next week's content into it so it was a crazy production schedule uh maybe we have time for perhaps one more question oh brian there we go thank you so you've been mentioning uh a lot about you know the game developers behind us have you had a lot of interest from the production companies the big media companies the maybe even this video streaming services out there um we've working with hollywood companies on a couple ip projects that i can't talk about now are any of the mouse beast thank you well look let's let's leave it there chris hamilton thank you very much [Music]

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