Tokenomics #3 How to Build a Blockchain Gaming Studio from Scratch

welcome welcome everybody to tokenomics episode number three we got the crew here anton bachman principal at play ventures ethan levy legendary free-to-play game developer reincarnated as an executive producer at network studios making a blockchain based legendary heroes unchained is that a good uh intro for mgm yeah that's a lot you're a gm now no good morning good morning get up on your lingo i thought you got promoted i guess it's gngn for you guys because you're in helsinki right now right it's late in helsinki yeah and i wanted to do that oh yeah michigan golf a free-to-play game developer also a legendary free-to-play game developer i wouldn't say that i would say wanna be legendary for you to play game developer uh known sadly more for bullshitting or if we're talking on the podcast than making a game but i've been trying i've been trying hard for 13 years all right some good games i would say there's there were some good games but um big ups army

attack no legendary game you literally have shipped legendary i took legendary and dragon age legends and every game i work on has the tagline be legendary tetris be legendary that's it i think i think that's the uh that's the thing anyways i got like you two are the best ones to talk about today's topics we're going to talk about building a blockchain gaming studio from scratch now ethan has built one and anton has funded several so i'm curious to hear uh to ask my questions and then depending on how ethan answers them anthony will either say he would never get funding right or we'll get funded yeah let's find out how full of ish i am today ethan you can't can you talk about this like you're part of forte right no no so okay to briefly touch on the network forte news which is quite complex

the studio i used to work for network incorporated has split into it had a publishing business and a games business the executives and the publishing business was all acquired by forte the first party game development is now its own new studio called network studios so i am at network studios uh where i am making a game called legendary heroes unchained that game is being built in partnership with forte they're helping provide the funds and we're using them as our blockchain uh platform so heavily connected to forte but i myself and my game team we do not work for forte yeah because forte can't have gaming studios because they are essentially like a support platform for blockchain gaming studio so them making uh having a gaming studio would be a conflict of interest i beats me i don't know i i have no i don't even know well i mean i don't even know what fortnite is

it wouldn't be the first time we're seeing platforms aggregating content anyway but it seems they wanna they wanna puzzle together something on the infrastructure side first before before any first party content or they just didn't want ethan's uh many people do not probably no matter how much they're too legendary for them anyway yeah exactly exactly uh anyway no we're not talking about forte network or any of that we're going to talk about how to yeah i think i said it how to build a blockchain gaming studio from scratch we might talk about the central land in this episode or if we don't have time we'll talk about the next one we'll talk about it in the future all of my insights will still hold from there the market cap for man is 4 trillion now let's see what it is when we talk about it in two weeks and then you guys are playing bunch of bunch of different game um what's the uh what's the arena what was it called

i'm really excited javier barnes are working on uh our first collaboration uh be careful with javier um he uh he he might write 30 pages you know i'm only writing 500 words and i'm gonna tell him to he said he wanted shorts yeah and he we wrote a couple of things and they were short and we wrote them over a weekend and then then they were started writing the clash mini part and i kind of didn't have the time to jump on it yeah and then they ended up writing for two months straight so i was like that's crazy anyways are you going to introduce the right to right to earn program for the instructor i'm actually so so i've been okay i don't know like i don't know the the crypto world who's cool or who's not but i've listened to a podcast i don't know full cent um and then um

i think it's called fulsome garyvee was on it and he was talking about his tokens and his his stuff in the crypto land and you know he's an entertaining talker um so there were some things that that inspired me to think about like what could be a sort of a uh token for the constructor of fun now that we have events coming in and all kinds of stuff let's talk after after we finish recording yeah yeah so correct so yeah so you know i know ethan is inspired by gary vee as well yes you are don't be like that you are i can honestly say i do not i have never consumed any garyvee content so this was the first podcast that i saw anthon what were you saying no i was making a bad pun about taking that stuff off chain and then i don't know why people hate gary vee i don't understand like you know he doesn't he's a bmi is too low i can't trust him oh you have a

separate episode on the on the garyvee nft okay yeah yeah that's a it's an interesting one but yeah he's made uh he i i don't remember what the numbers that that his nfts made but they were outrageous yeah not nfts uh that took um the other tokens but he's all into that and he just had interesting ideas of of building and how it's it's kind of like it's almost like a stock in what he's doing anyways enough about garyvee if you were interested in that podcast i think it's full send uh they have a lot of very radical content not radical but just it's kind of like a jersey shore of podcast so now you know what i listen to um anyway i wanted to ask so um i haven't heard much about like i haven't gotten into this piece of news but since you you guys are in in twitter all the time like what was this twitter launching nft profile pic verification thing um if currently if you are a twitter blue subscriber so you pay three dollars for whatever twitter blue does for you i

think it's like a creator mode basically i'm not really sure but if you are a subscriber you can link an ethereum based wallet and choose one of your nfts from if you that are on ethereum and use that as your profile pic and as opposed to giving you a circle it'll give you a hex so that people know that you are the verified owner of that uh nft and that is a way of of having a verified nft instead of doing what i'm doing right now where i just took a screenshot of old man crypto and i made him my um twitter profile in a couple weeks right um so you know it's a it's a it's kind of like the blue check mark um but i i actually i i actually prefer old man crypto the way he is right now compared to if he would be in a hex honestly okay he looks better in a circle i think he's sleeping in a circle

was there some kind of a a backlash about something where were people kind of screenshotting or because that's that's a lot well i would say not not not necessarily a backlash just that the the counterpoint is that nothing about this prevents you from there's there's nothing that would prevent me from pretending i own a bay area yacht club and i'm just not willing to chill out more than dollars for twitter club but yes why do i keep saying that through the base the abbreviation yeah yeah sorry there's there's nothing preventing other people from pretending they own a board ape yacht club on on twitter um but to get the verified hex you need to be a payer so there's there's still a workaround where you can right click and save but yeah are you guys on twitter yes sir i'm on twitter all the time

okay um i'm not paying for their subscription service yet yeah i'm just a little bit out of it i every time i come back and because we have the deconstructor fun part like yeah uh page apparently there that i made some some time ago and i forgot this one morning routine that yeah every morning you log on twitter you post you post tweet saying gm yeah and then yeah and then rinse and repeat yeah and then and then get into some some um culture war conversations yeah i mean the thing i think is smart is that it is a status symbol to make a crypto punk or a board ape your profile pic there are a lot of people who put dot ether dot soul at the end of the name i don't that doesn't mean they own the dot eth website which is pretty expensive i'm not buying famousaspec.eth anytime soon but like

there are a number of ways of showing your status in the nft and crypto community and i think it's smart of twitter to embrace it and i expect other social media platforms will do the same and some people will embrace it and some people will hate it it's just just not anything else so to summarize it's a way to verify that you own the nft that is your avatar yes okay got it and did famous aspect cover this so famous aspect ethan's blog i got covered last week so famous aspect hasn't been covering anything that's not enough that's no excuse no no blogging i'm focusing on the game and the podcasting and hopefully i'll write some more articles uh next week too all right my new year's resolution on blogging was a little ambitious it was like you went from it was a typical new year as a resolution it's like people who start going to the gym they're like i'm going to go seven days a week let's start with seven you know it's february soon so we can drop the new year's resolutions yeah that's true

um uh yeah so uh any other news uh with elitium announcing pve closed beta yeah so this is from the elluvium um uh discord alluvium is announced their pve closed beta it's an upcoming auto battler a pretty smooth sign up process registration process on their website um i haven't been following alluvium too much but it's one of those names that keeps popping up because it's pretty successful ilv their token uh when i checked this morning had a 571 dollar price and a 362 million dollar market cap so alluvium is doing really well and i think you know just one of the recurring themes is that there is a lot of people generating value and revenue or funds to develop their game ahead of game launches so they have the token they have many nfts and uh soon it'll be playable it's not playable yet and they've already you

know generated uh substantial funds to to build their game in their uh universe essentially so how much i'm just curious how much they've they've uh they've i i mean i i don't know how much they've raised personally from the uh token i'd have to do do some research to see if that's available but like a token price of 571 a token and a 362 million dollar market cap is is nothing to sneeze at so they could probably sell you know any any money they needed to fund their game they could sell treasury holdings just to to get fiat um with those sorts of prices or you know they're they've also been successful at selling nft so far and i'm curious like since cryptocurrencies are going down with this you know the um essentially the way i understand it is that the interest rates could be will be going up you know the central bank the fed kind of informed early on that we're going to do it so that caused naturally

the reaction so no more free money for for folks who have a lot of money so they are pulling out from more riskier investments uh and doing everything on the berkway berkshire hathaway or any blue chip company but of course crypto being one of those riskier investments that that especially folks uh who kind of invested into everything probably put in you know the ten percent in in some crazy stuff which is crypto does the price drop that we're seeing now with bitcoin ethereum and others does that affect blockchain gaming companies especially since um it's a lot of the uh the sort of uh money they raised are in tokens um i think yeah i think you're right that it's it's obvious there's been this idea that bitcoin and other other major tokens could be seen as kind of inflation hedges but but i think the truth is closer to what you said that it's kind of

the riskier part of your portfolio and if you need to start covering your other your other positions you're going to get rid of those reader those first both probably from a retail option institutional level in terms of how it has impacted the gaming or the blockchain gaming market um obviously any of the other major tokens out there on the gaming side or or or the wider metaverse side if you will have have sort of taken up taking a beat as well if i look close at least based on my observation looking at the startups i think not what's now different compared to 2017 even though so from an outside perspective it's very similar in terms of how many projects are getting funded and how many games are apparently going to come out in the next coming years i think the difference is there's a there's a lot more institutional capital committed to funds right now that are specifically focused on funding startups in this space

so we're likely to see that committed capital still being deployed in in the next coming in the next coming years and at least based at least the teams i've been working with uh and and and the teams we look to work with i think this is something that hasn't really slowed them down maybe delaying a token launch or so with a few months or a major listing to to make better use of of market timing but kind of delivering the game and and building out uh building of the ecosystem building the community i think the best teams are still laser focused on those that aren't aren't stopping because of changes in the market yeah this isn't and this isn't affecting anything we're doing and i wouldn't uh you know this doesn't deter me from kind of my long-term hypothesis on on why crypto gaming is so alluring and why i think it's going to eat free to play in its entirety and and something that we'll talk about i'm sure over and over again is how treasury management becomes

a new concern for game studios that like you know maybe that mattered to ea but not to like a little indie developer before um whereas i saw a tweet from crypto raiders right where they said hey guys don't worry we have built up a sizeable position of stable coins and we have four million dollars in stable coins and we have everything we need to make this game regardless of the price of ethereum and bitcoin and so like one that was like oh that's cool now we know that crypto raiders has done at least four million in net revenue um but it's a really smart move from them right they have taken in a lot of ether and as we're all seeing the price of ether is very volatile and they converted that ether to stable stablecoin so that's a coin pegged to the value of of usd and so now they have essentially four million dollars or the equivalent of four million dollars that they can use to

fund development and they don't have to worry like oh no we can't make payroll this month because our ether is down right yeah exactly and also in the wider the wider crypto market i think there's been a very similar sort of larger movement also around that that some are clearing clearing some of their winnings but moving those from maybe blue chip defy tokens or bitcoin and ethereum into into stable coins so so the capital isn't necessarily moving out of the crypto ecosystem but it's just it's just uh moving between assets new new steam indie hit token treasury simulator i'm just saying i'm looking at elv elv so being the token in ilv yeah anyway uh in one month it went from one thousand one hundred dollars to one thousand sixty seven dollars to today's 550 so we're looking at 50

percent slice and the uh in the value of this token inside a month so i'm just curiou because we talk about treasury we talk about management but this is 50 in a month of the value of your treasury is um nothing to sneeze at but it's magic internet money right like would you rather have zero dollars or 300 million dollars right it didn't i'm looking at it as a stock price you know yeah you shouldn't look at it don't don't think about it like you think about stocks imagine imagine putting uh imagine putting a real-time price feed on your own game studio at this point to production people don't like this week's hero savage game studio value tanks by 25 though i do have to say that savage coin sounds pretty good yeah there's got to be a savage coin already

all right um okay all right all right um so uh and then loop game invest hundred million oh yeah this was a really interesting story so loop games made match 3d and if like match 3d is brilliant right like it is it is to me just perfection of game design you know it's fun you see a five-second video you understand it completely it's just like i mean it's very pure and simple and fun and and well done all the success is deserved to them uh they released that they are going to invest 100 million dollars to expand their ethereum dot io blockchain metaverse and so far i i joined their discord i looked at their web page it looks like an axi visual style um you know what game we can assume you're collecting and breeding axi type creatures and owning land and battling them um and it'll be interesting to see what this big investment um turns into but

just you know you can't argue with the design pedigree you know match three t's i it's one of those games i look at and i'm just super jealous right this is ethan you make rpg games why are you getting subject like it's just pure fun like they they got it so i mean i i kind of have a theory i think too many people are indexing on axi style cute visuals i think the early adopter audience for blockchain games is not this cute like i think axi is a head fake for a lot of people and i personally would not pursue this visual style i feel like everybody's building neopets and like farmville and um i i mean obviously i'm i'm indexing on mid-core high fantasy and even if i wasn't at network that's still what i would be doing i would still be going more towards a mid core hardcore audience because that's who i believe lines up with the um crypto rich early adopters you need

to build your community around that's what i think is is a bit surprising about this this one given that i understand that approach when looking at teams that maybe don't don't come from gaming and they're looking to make incremental improvements into what actually was doing and largely follow follow the same pattern but um but if it's if it's kind of a team with pedigree from mobile that that um i think presumably at least and uh obviously i presume they have a very strong understanding of of of their audience and sort of who they wanna who they wanna cater to but but um but it's again interesting to see where this where this one will go but how many copycats of axi like do you see on a daily basis i don't see them as much as i did during summer and fall last year luckily um i think that that landscape has also changed a lot uh

from from that time i think i saw studios getting funded left and right that that did did their axi versions on polygon they did their actual versions on on avalanche solana et cetera only with a pitch deck but um i think we're we're moving towards to our situation where a lot of these crypto funds that mainly were funding uh these studios and another vcs as well and they are they seem to be a bit more hungry now to move into invest investing into infrastructure uh and um if you're not gonna pitch a game i think you're gonna need to start showing up a prototype or demo of some sort in order to to start winning the capital over uh mainly mainly due to seeing that a lot of these actually copies aren't aren't really going anywhere even even though they might have found some small scale success mainly on binary smart chain where most of most of these games are what what what kind of what's the what's

the new hotness and and pitches uh that are coming in like is it skewing more towards uh ethan's hardcore legendary type of stuff like like you know real game development guys coming in and taking space from crypto bros or is it is it you know it isn't but um i'm i'm very kind of aligned with my own analysis also on on kind of ethan's approach here and i find that audience really compelling uh to go out and even even something 8-bit style like ether orcs or crypto raiders i think is more aligned with the natural early adopter audience than um axi right but still i think i think very very typical pitch in the space to revolve around really kind of large-scale project like mmos like most large fps titles and and often from teams that

either don't bring much experience from gaming or then they bring experience from from very different games uh but obviously i think now i'm speaking speaking on playventures behalf and on my own behalf but but um i would assume also that at least at least the gaming vcs that are that are investing into this market as well want to see some some sort of uh founder dna match with what they're what they're about to build in from from a gameplay perspective interesting okay well that's a that's a nice segue to what we're talking about today so building a blockchain gaming studio from scratch so if i can kind of pre-face this by talking about on a very very high level of starting a free-to-play studio and then i have just endless amount of questions uh to to both of you so when it when it comes to a free-to-play gaming studio like you know we we know it's it's about one to three months that are sort of a

kickoff time where you kick off the other project kick off the studio that the team size might be anywhere from two to four people you're sketching you're testing marketability you're doing your audience research you're really outlining the design what is the game about what's what's the story this and that you're making production plans for the pre-production you're building a prototype and of course that leads to usually this is the stage that you're in a precede or you might be even even bootstrapping at this stage and then you're going for your pre-seed round or a seed round afterwards or if it's uh if it's a part of a larger company you basically just open up a hiring pipeline afterwards after kind of figuring out what is it that you're doing and prototyping a little bit around it and kind of seeing some some early success now then the next six months are about reproduction so you're going for what you could call how generous six months the blood i would give for a six month pre-production really that's uh

well these are just average numbers like it really depends on the scope of a game yeah the more casual the more simple it is yeah what you're saying is the higher the scope the quicker you move straight into full production right yeah exactly exactly exactly no no it's like the smaller the game of course the faster it goes and some games don't even do pre-production they kind of do everything in the from the first part it really depends so i'm just kind of throwing out this is like a the most in the middle and then then use q two different directions but with pre-production it's like your target is really the vertical slice and then people always want to misconstrue what the vertical slice is and free to play game it's the core loop build the core loop allow people to play the core loop that's a vertical slice uh the playable has to be enough for at least couple of days so that you can put it out in google beta for example just get some early metrics validation basically validating um validating the engagement validating the uh you know the first part of the retention validating the cpis because you're actually

not testing marketability through platforms like gcloud but you're actually acquiring players so at that point app size has become more important app store pages your different creatives uh not that you're scaling testing at large scale but but still those will play a role uh in pre-production you're you're testing your outsources if you haven't worked with with ones before uh with your content production uh you're getting your target art in you're you're playing testing and iterating through platforms like playtest cloud friends and family so forth uh but most importantly this is the stage of kind of preparing for full-on production but even more importantly it's validating with the real players that what you're doing makes sense and you should go forward and get into that more expensive production phase in the production phase ethan this is this might be even 12 months it depends again on the game um you know you can put in whatever numbers but in the end it's really two years to launch a game like however you want to put it like a normal game is about two years

um you know content balancing polish for two e's qa that's your production boring time this is the time where product people set up podcasts and and blogs and stuff like that because they can't add features it's uh it's it's you know it's play test and it's the boring time it's the appropriate it's like the uh it's the it's the long time before the war for product managers and then it's the busy time for everybody else building the game so um i hate production phase uh anyways uh no actually thanks for production for being so many times in production i have a deconstructor of fun uh so you and i are on our team very differently no it's like it's it's everything is like being backlogged and you can't add anything it's just like focused on on on you know just yeah i'm just fine sorry i'm just going yeah yeah the one i mean the one thing i would um this is this is kind that you've laid

out kind of a road map for standard free to play um i do think in our current market which is very saturated and where cpi is you know unless you've got a brand that you know is going to bring downloads guaranteed your success is very largely about your cpi and then the ltv you're able to create on the other side so um me personally i i'm doing marketing and cpi tests um in that pre-production phase i'm not setting an art style until i have one that comes with a cpi on on static images that i um believe will lead to success and that's just that's not something we've done that was you know that wasn't necessarily the case seven years ago that would have been like a next level practice whereas now i think it's a required practice due to the maturity of the market and the cost of industries and i'll do one better like i mentioned that you do it already in the uh concepting phase yeah like at that point

because you can't yeah i think i think we've moved to pre-production we've had our portfolio companies at least on free the play site using stuff like geek lab and and so forth so it seems that doesn't be quite quite yeah i think i think uh play also has some some stuff with uh with 12 traits now soulstone uh so they we we kind of used both uh because the other one gives you the uh the genre like you can purchase from them direct like genre packages so let's say you're making a vehicular battle game and not too many are making but you are and then you can purchase actually that whole pack where you can uh study the audience of currently players who are playing vehicular battles so they they have a pretty like deep text anime of all kinds of games and then through that you get the audience and then you start running your tests with key club so you are all in my opinion in the concepting phase where you're doing your positioning of the product and only then you move into pre-production when when you're actually making the art based on the audience that you've made as well as the first marketability test so ethan absolutely right and you have to do that

even before any art is being done yeah yeah i would even like uh if you can make your prototype a playable ad that's that's the to me the next level well right there you know let's be honest not playable ads don't work for all kinds of games but that's a different story and yeah and different partners of this of the podcast might have a different different opinion but i've seen i've seen that i prefer to use fungals plater with mongol shout out to my friend oliver who is there oh okay i've never heard of them uh not not the deepest friends of the podcast we don't know them uh anyway but if you'd like to sponsor us i will talk about your company yeah ethan is for sale uh then soft launch up to 12 months up to 12 months like we've seen self launching been almost two years now with different games

yeah i've been in a multi i've been added to the end phase of a multi-year soft launch that um just you know sometimes you give you give a product too many leases on life we can say which which product was that well it never made it to a worldwide launch so was that uh from network yeah yeah was it the ellen degeneres game no no no there was no why did had a game nor with ellen degeneres that's i don't know but i would love to great great idea yeah strong you could yeah you could you could it could it could be you can't get nasty that game anyways maybe maybe uh maybe a 3d merge game and then soft launch 12 months cpi

retention monetization then hard launch and then you're in the content treadmill anyway that's the free to play model and i was kind of wondering like okay i have this model in my mind and this is this is the only model that i've actually worked in whether making games for for facebook canvas google plus back in the days um you know native uh on on face on web or mobile but this is this is kind of the model around which the studio is being built and i'm very clear on what expertise are needed at different levels and how how long different stages should be taking etc etc uh but with free to play you have a lot of requirements so let's go step by step some of these and then uh i want to ask questions like i i don't like you i'd like to pre face though by by saying that that even though maybe the intricacies of building a gaming crypto now it's a bit different also because of this the investor base of this media the the the kind of uh like capital available for early stage

pre-product teams is also very different from free to play at this point but i would still say i would still argue that in time if and when we see more kind of game first teams going into this space uh i think a lot of the same product philosophy that that has been developing in free-to-play for the past 10 years will also be be very visible in this i mean there's an abundance of data yeah obviously all of that is still a mess in terms of of kind of figuring out building the proper ua stack uh for what three because we have the wallet addresses out there we have services like nansen where you can you can go today and check all the transaction and transactions and recent made today with their with their wallets uh but but all of that and you can just choose random wallets to airdrop some nfts if you want uh obviously some of them or maybe go to market is super interesting and and they're there are

many options and many that have never been explored even yet about how you start your community exactly but uh but there's there's plenty of open question marks there but maybe let's jump into into your points and well actually i i like this is interesting one so so the way i've seen these blockchain games soft launch or launch or however you want to put it is that they don't have anything else except maybe a video i'm like this is what the game will be here's where you can put in five hundred dollars to get an nft that you'll be able to play and i would say i would say that's the first step but there's i think we've already seen a couple of interesting alternatives to that i don't know if you guys saw ethan probably saw it uh the near startup by by uh kevin lynn so one of the twitch co-founders i think they i think they were building a game called dusk oh no we're talking

which one are you talking about uh their game is called dust breakers uh and um what what they did initially is that they released this super simple uh single player roguelike that they had sort of people competing for who's going to complete the level with the best score and then they ran this this leaderboard on their website and based on your performance and based on your your rankings in in that sort of demo of the game you were allowed to mint mint and nft then uh and that was kind of also i think an interesting way to to create some early uh early buzz around it and get giving something into the hands of players but but um it seems that because we have maybe we have a better way to reward users early because um it's not super complex to for example spin out a

simple token that can be rewarded or or a set of a set of nfts um that we can or i think developers can put out really rudimentary builds of the games or even just parts of the game early to the hands of the players just so there's something to play with and something to obviously something to earn also uh at this point even though it kind of wouldn't it wouldn't have any utility yet or or the the game is still years away but but teams are experimenting with different things and only dropping the nfts and tying some kind of early early stuff to it a bit like you would so you're using a really sort of tech and broken second buggy version of your initial 3d titles so i'm looking at dust breakers so that they have this dust breakers plate to mint arcade mini games so essentially this looks like a unity prototype yeah you know super super simple just uh but they had yeah they had a bunch of people

playing yeah and what does it mean play to mint like you played it and then just to be clear you meant do you spend any money to mint uh depends i i don't know dust breakers specifically it kind of depends what chain you're using and how they want to so norm you know for instance they could have actually the company can pre-mint everything for you and actually just airdrop for you if they want to be the most delightful or they can put it on a website where you do press a button and you do have to pay the gas fee associated with minting you know there's a lot of options there um and i recall that for dust breakers it was so you got the right to basically mint it because um if you airdrop directly i think there's a risk that you you're just air dropping to people who are never going to claim it or who are never going to use it but um by having the main thing in place the ones who want went the extra step and paid the gas fee and maybe it could be argued that you get more or at least maybe not more engaged

users but at least users that are willing to at least speculate on the future success of your game [Music] um yes i think uh what's interesting well one one thing that i would as you were going through your like how to start a studio um that it made me think of also was um when i think about one my own journey yeah talk about that one and then other people's um you know who i'm talking to who are experienced devs so like most the deconstructor fun audience has probably experienced free to play devs i think that you cannot possibly over index on the research phase of understanding um the blockchain space and i would encourage you to do as much don't just listen to us talk and read our articles and and

read the stuff we share on twitter like i i think you really have to join discord communities swap for tokens join staking pools buy nfts you know follow projects be part of play some of these games figure out what playing these games mean and really understand what i mean when i say hey the game software is one part of a much larger picture and that whole picture is your game you know i'll i'll be totally honest i've been doing this for about it was about a year ago that i first started researching um nba top shot and it's not like i've been spending a year full time doing nothing but figuring out blockchain games but i honestly only feel like i started to get my sea legs under me and really understand the space in in the past month or two right and that's come from the hands-on work of understanding what other people are doing and how they're finding

success with their products and so now now that i do know all those things or some of those things when i talk to another developer who's like yeah i'm gonna we've got this live game and we're gonna talk to so and so and we're gonna add some nfts to it and we're gonna get some 22 year old who understands discord and give him a big budget and then we're just gonna something something something money like i you can kind of feel it that they don't authentically understand the space yet and i definitely don't as much as you know when you know someone who's been doing this stuff since 2017 they know a lot more than me but like i think there's a lot of humbleness you need to bring to it and a lot of learning you need to do so that you can then go and form your marketing your product strategy for what you think will be successful for your studio um okay join discord swap tokens stake and pools follow projects play these games

basically you're saying what garyvee said just you know is that like attractive gary vee is the legitimate hero sunshine discord already up and running yeah no it is not um and when it is running it will be very cool um so so if you if you go if you go to our website you'll see that we've already pre-registered over 100 000 people that's a real number um i have some go to market strategy that i'm very excited about um we're gonna do some cool and that cool is only enabled uh because of web three really okay so jump in i'll jump in and ask in the general chat when token now now of course over indexing and understanding the blockchain space that makes all the sense and you should be focusing on that and you should be doing that but but in the meanwhile let's say you were starting the studio so ethan

when when you got into this they're like ethan we get you you you've been converted into blockchain gaming uh on the uh on on the uh that was the top shop and you were talking to some dad in south carolina or north carolina you live in south carolina south carolina yeah rally valley that's where epic is that's that's something again this is this is totally not exciting for the audience no that's not exciting but still quickly underlying yeah or sort of adding to to ethan's comment i also can can emphasize enough the time time that needs to be spent or not not not not time but kind of repeatedly sort of revisiting sort of why i think i think uh crypto came kind of overnight into gaming sometime last year uh and um developers went direct to questions like you know how do i build an nft marketplace how how do i how do i do an nft drop how to

build a discord community without spending too much time on what it actually means that we'll potentially have a new suite of internet protocols uh that are going to replace a lot potentially replace a lot of the existing private database structures that we have out there with proprietary apis uh and and what that what the composability aspect of of of this tech means and actually making making all of these developer interfaces open open for everyone uh but but let's say let's say you know play came in anthony was like team is looking good you know here's two million euros for you to kick off the project now i can't say to anthony like okay cool story dude i'm going to disappear to discord for about eight months right now and i'll get back to you i would i would imagine that that eight months of discord happened before

he wrote maybe maybe sometimes the team is so cool so let's let's assume you have your funding and you've got a traditional free-to-play group of people exactly i think there there are a couple really key projects to orient your studio road map around okay so one is going to be um what tech your what platform you're building on essentially it's going to be really important are you on solana are you directly on aetherium are you on um forte are you on polka dot or avalanche or wax like this is a there there are a lot of options out there um they have their own trade-offs you could build your own you could use a stark net to build your own version of it um i that's a very serious technical question you kind of have to have a general idea of what the game you want to build is probably to make that

um decision but that's going to be one of your critical projects and probably in the course of making that as an informed decision your engineers if you're kind of converting people over will learn a lot along the way that will make them much more web-free type people and this is maybe most important like in the go to market phase on on choosing kind of because it's it's also about it's not only about what tech you're choosing but it's also about kind of what what's the community you're getting that that exists in other projects and other games on top of that channel whether it be a layer one or layer two solution uh down the line i think it's or when the company grows uh and the game grows it's gonna be of less importance because what these intend to do is that they usually choose one chain for for their go to market but then over time bridge to other chains as well and then are able to tap into the the user and player rig and the other product ecosystems on on those chains as well

but from a go to market perspective i think those are the main questions you want to be thinking about so does it fit kind of the type of game you're building uh and then seeing that is their audience match with with the users on other games being built on that on that channel and then yeah and that go to market strategy i think is your other big project right like what is your game is actually a subset question of your go to market strategy and go to market is all about um how are you building your community who is your community how are you going to build that community how are you going to keep them engaged and then what are you selling or pre-selling or you know like how are you doing your tokenomics um how do you make sure your art's appealing all of that to me is in that go to market strategy right so like um this isn't you know obviously i'm building a second legendary game so this isn't what we did but if i was building a new game um let's say i knew my genre

um and i knew relatively what my core loot was going to be to go back to that market testing right i would start making stills still ads and different art styles different themes you know is this a sexy vampire game is it a hardcore dudes with abs game is it a robot game is it 3d 2d i record dudes with abs game yeah no i know that's what you play small patrol perform well in those free-to-play ads musical will come and do the motion capture for it yeah it sounds like jersey shore anyway anyway so but so i would be measuring which one of these art styles is most efficient at getting people to sign up into a different way that would be cpis right yeah testing basically cpi to community to discord but yeah

discord or telegram or you know maybe you want to do something else but like so how you're building and engaging your community is a core part of your go to market and you will be orienting you should be orienting your entire company around that community roadmap if if you're thinking that way you're thinking properly about how to build a web food game right so like you may have um like this idea of having the first touch of the software as you said with dust breakers being a mini game that you play and by engaging with that game you then earn the nfts like that's a brilliant community building strategy to seed your audience uh and and and build up your fans for your game and hopefully they've built something that they can use to keep those people playing for a couple months while they're building the next thing right and that ties into their pre-sale and their token

launches so like there's there's a whole lot of choices to make um and and and really i think like you need to understand the tech you need to understand who the early adopters of crypto games are and you need to understand who the audience you want to build is and how you will orient everything you do around them that's a that's a fascinating thing because we were talking with this uh we recorded a podcast with joakim this week actually we're talking about fundraising in 2022 and we were actually talking about blockchain gaming and he kind of said that he you know mentioned that in his perception or opinion the studios that have a hyper casual background are strong here because they are so quick attesting and i was like i don't i don't buy that because they are never they don't do live ops they don't do communities they don't do all these aspects that that even you just described they do prototypes

and i don't think the making a prototype is the most important part i think as you said building a community in a web 3 game is the most important aspect so i would argue on the other hand that that teams that have experience in community building and and strong community focused approach are actually the ones that that stand out but couldn't it be argued that if we look at teams that are predominantly free to play the probably the only known sort of way to grow the games for them have been performance marketing so there hasn't really been that kind of a grassroots community movement so i think if you're coming for free to play you're anyways on the genre though huh it really depends on the genre that there are some games some some genres that are incredibly community driven social casino is actually incredibly community driven like the vips some you know mid-core hardcore games are very community driven whether you were talking about the mobas or the certain shooters or any sort of a guild-based

games like i remember even back in the days clash of clans had incredibly strong community and for example supercell has always invested very heavily into community management with their games and and that has paid off in very long lifetime values among among of course other things so i wouldn't say that that you know match three games don't have strong communities it's because you know it's a different thing but but there are genres that are very community driven so um and then so you know what another thing another big project i mean this goes under to me community building but your token i mean this this ties to both the everything i've said your tokenomics model and really having a good handle on what your intentions are there what your sinks and taps are and how you're gonna build a long-term stable economy um through different gameplay systems is like again a critical project of that

first pre-production phase right because you know like the example i talked about on twig this week already like axe infinity my axes are worth the quarter what i paid for them and the axs token is down and the slp token is down and both those things happen before the um crypto market crash and that you know i i said on that on that episode like the axi game economy was set to bust um because the only thing you do in that game that the price of all of those things is the reason people want them is so they can use them to breed more axes which increased like the whole point of the game is to increase the supply of axes in the system and so that means there's going to be a natural point where everybody who's joining the game is joining the game to breed axes to sell axes to other people who are joining the game and eventually you're going to get over supplied on axes and the price is going to crash as

they have the price of the tokens that whose only utility is for breeding axes is also going to crash and so my guess is that uh anton and others like him are asking much more pointed questions nowadays about your long-term economy design um and how you're going to keep things stable and growing over time um and that's you know that's a subset of your your game design and your community plan but that's that's a new and very fun and very challenge difficult challenge this is also where i think that developers with a free-to-play background also have an edge in terms of being able to think more broadly about sinks uh and obviously currency generators as well i do think that during this year already we're gonna start seeing some hybrid models i think up until now obviously it's quite clear-cut if it's if it's kind of purely free to play or if it's kind of purely purely a blockchain game

uh with with the economy running on running on either one but as more free-to-play teams are coming to space i think we'll see them experimenting with with sort of um parallel economies what do you mean by a hybrid model and parallel economy can you give an example uh so i will be looking at a game that that has or in in in that scenario you would have a game that kind of has a traditional iap economy as well if you want to be distributing through the app store and um you want to be uh sort of you also want to cater to those if you talk about me or you want to be you want to be catering to those whale users as well uh without sort of forcing them to to sort of set up their wallets and doing that typical free to play from that perspective and obviously start tapping into the direct sales of what you're doing with those players but uh and that's useful maybe from a targeting perspective and sort of getting

utilizing a lot of the existing infrastructure on social platforms to get the more kind of mainstream free-to-play users into the loop but then potentially introducing kind of a side loop in the game that uh that sort of if you if you want to play the game 100 you would tap into that side loop as well but if you only remain to play the free to play loop you might only get 80 out of that game and 80 percent out of the progression of it uh and usually using using using existing taxes to retain uh obviously paired with with now the new ones with all the community tactics as well but pairing kind of the old and the new uh using known tactics to retain people and this gradually sort of moving them also to the nft and the player side and then the next step then be that each subsequent game that comes from that studio would increase that on-chain element constantly i i think i think if there's an opportunity it's likely because of um if

there's going to be onboarding issues or or or sort of challenges in in in kinda having the lucrative free to play audience moving over to to kind of on chain because i think it's also probably an educational matter matter as well yeah there's also it sounds very difficult sounds like you're making essentially two games you're making a blockchain game and a free-to-play game but if if we think about if we think about play we would use an on-chain clash of clans for example where you would have that main loop of building the main village would be a free-to-play one but i recall they introduced the side loop with the island where you also started building a new base but think about that base and that gameplay being run with nfts in play to earn so it doesn't affect that sort of one progression curve you're doing with your main base but it is the gameplay uh of the kind of second progression curve you know yeah yeah so you kind of honey

dick players into playing a totally different game it's like a forex strategy like like they they do the top battle is another one where they kind of show you uh a merged game with battle it's it's a 4x strategy you're like hey this is not a 4x game relax just match these units it's going to be fun and then you zoom out of the map you're like oh my god another way to think i mean i i won't go too deep into the economy design for the game i haven't launched yet and i'm still building but um there are elements of the game that there are currencies that you get some amount for free daily and if you want more you just have to buy them with iap that you can't buy them from other players right so like smooth love potion and axey when i want them i can grind for them or i can buy them from other players that's because it's based on on a token um in in this new game there will be some things that work like that and some things where i want to have a very

direct control over its use in the economy and basically i want to say like if player wants to do this many minutes of activity x and i know exactly the reward payout for activity x they need to give me dollars right like i am i'm they get a certain amount of free every day and the rest of it is a traditional uh free to play economy and and in that way you know trying to wall off certain parts of your power economy from being able to spoil other parts because i think there's still there is that if if everything of that is is kind of tied to or before we can figure out ways to keep it stable but there's a chance that similar with actually the whole economy goes down if something goes bad but if you're still as a developer able to control some of the levers it might still provide for better gameplay experience at least at least before that token design comes around where where so that could be solved completely

by by the user it is it is definitely very complex and nobody has any answers yet and that's actually what i find very exciting about it like it's it has energized me in a way that free to play game design really hasn't for the past couple years where i realized like hey i've been downloading a bunch of games to my phone and i'll go oh i mean to play my hero academia like i'm sure there's some lessons in here and i'm just not excited about opening up any of those games and and checking them out and trying to learn from them because i feel like i felt like a lot of things were kind of known or stale or really easy to understand and this whole new world of wild west craziness is as a designer is extremely exciting for me right now okay so that's that's clear that the tokenomics model designing that it's like uh it's like a it's it's like a

well it's like a core loop it's like economy loop essentially that you're doing but but with uh well equally not equally actually um you can't really fix it on the fly that's the difference with uh with the with the economy loop you can kind of add more sinks you can add more elements to it and kind of patch it up a little bit but with the with your tokenomics model it's harder right but you're good it's harder but i think but you could you could you could decide obviously you would decide the parameters of how how much that currency is worth in your game it's different what is worth in a dollar value out there on the open market but obviously you can adjust adjust the cost within your game but then that could lead to community backlash because there's there's not too much transparency around it um which is also what happened with axi as well when they introduced the kind of new rules of how much you earn and who is able to earn and they and they're doing this hybrid approach by a lot by you know considering to launch a mobile game that essentially would be the um the sort of

a uh you know the lead product that that people would have high accessibility and they would through that be more incentivized to come into the blockchain version um i don't think actually is doing it no i think they announced that a mobile game they have a mobile game you can sideload it the majority of players side loaded and play on android and that is the blockchain powered version of it but i think they they they talked about making a free-to-play game i don't know often we talked about it on twitch i remember suffering was going crazy about it yeah but i i think i think i think they're still going to keep very much similar elements to the existing game but what they want to introduce is players being able to try out the game before they need to purchase the or to not be not have to purchase the axis up front but having these screens yeah similar to what panzer dogs is doing with their game as well uh and that's but you can't really play it that's why they form a hyper casual team as well that's gone into the space that have a free version of that you can try with and then obviously the nft version as

well let me kind of summarize it and then let's try to build the studio out of this so first of all over index understanding the blockchain space and all the elements there then on the side you have to have your technical person your cto your technical director uh really searching and and you know understanding what platform you should be building i would widen that out everybody i mean everybody every product everybody i'm never gonna know as much as my lead engineer but i have to understand that understanding those things helped me to make product decisions too so so you're so before that you're already thinking about what kind of game you're making you're already ideating so you have that ideation loop going on and you're doing your marketability testing you're probably using different platforms but but you're essentially you're driving players to discord or what will you just testing images just testing images yeah i i am i would be if you're ready to run discord i'd drive a discord if not i'd be driving them to a pre-reg website

got it okay so initially you're just testing what kind of art styles that that's your first stage uh really looking into the whole space looking into different platforms um testing traditional free-to-play way what your game would be looking at but at this point you already know let's say you're building an rpg you already know it it's going to be like it's going to be like axi infinity but with dragons uh and then you're testing that and you're running adventure tests and you're showing you know core battle gameplay that could be a different type of battle that is happening uh but but essentially that's your face at the same is it at the same time you're thinking about how good your go to market strategy yeah yeah i think i mean if you've got enough people you've got somebody you're figuring out your tech you're figuring out your go to market community strategy you're figuring out your audience appeal and you're figuring out your tokenomics that's that's how big how what's what's my what's my starting team looking at

looking like here so so typically how uh so i can chime in here but i think the typical themes that we have not been seeing if they have a free to play they're very similar to any other free to play team that is out there but um i think some of the early key hires they're looking for is obviously an art director for the team to start creating a look and the feel of what they're gonna build and actually very early on also someone on the community side who's gonna take the lead on on the discord and the twitter on the telegram and just start sort of posting posting there and it's pretty putting in the right discord integration right 22 year old garyvee that's the 23 year old garyvee yeah i i have a job i need to write um this week i'm i'm hoping to create a new job category i want a product manager whose product is the community and i want a coaching manager i want a product manager for the community that's just live ops on the community that's a nice

way to frame it i like it yeah maybe that's that's one thing that's like the young gary i'll take the young garyvee the hustler uh anyway so community is important are directly important what else um if if there isn't kind of in-house smart counter development um experience i wouldn't say it's kind of an immediate need uh if if you don't have that i think it's good for the game designer to get acquainted with token design and try to build some of that understanding in-house there's a lot of stuff to benchmark to right now because everything is public everyone posts their white papers around it but still emphasizing that also on that front everything is still very much a blank slate there is no kind of gold standard of doing things it was easy to get kind of trapped in thinking that the axi dual token model is the way to go which was the mimicked by a lot of other studios as well and um that worked for axi initially it remains

to be seen if it works for them long term but but emphasizing that there isn't there is currently no correct way of doing this uh and um and uh developers still there and designers are free to just kind of design what could make for an interesting interesting token design uh and fair talk economics that that sort of the community gets excited about in the field that they actually are part owners and in what's happening because all in all i'd say these game teams my prediction is that the these game themes are going to be looking quite similar a couple of additions uh to to your typical uh to your typical free-to-play team if eva's prediction goes or happens that sort of this will eat free to play or at least evolve free to play in in into something different then um it's likely designers are going to look pretty similar but there there's a couple of extra muscle you're going to need need to your team but the mindset the

philosophy uh about kind of creating the product being data-driven about it listening to your users you're just listening to them from different channels right now in the get-go when you're bootstrapping the community i don't think performance marketing is going to disappear completely i think when when these communities start to mature they probably represent your your golden cohorts or something when you start when you want to start scaling outside of those those really engaged communities want to hang out hang out with you on discord uh then probably or most likely some form of performance marketing will kick in but a lot of that stack from a web 3 standpoint is is still yet to be built interesting so so very similar but still some of the differences and and how much would you would you still approach the early development in the same way like do i have to prove out a good game or is it just it doesn't matter i think it's going to change over time i

think it's going to change as investors get smarter there's probably a bunch of investors that are going to burn their hands and they're not going to be investing in blockchain gaming in a couple of years time yeah and uh it's probably going to look similar to us kind of finding a free-to-play studio looks like right now if you're a super experienced and successful team you're likely going to have an easier time raising your pre pre-revenue uh from sort of fundraising pre-kpi fundraise uh and then it's more of a and then it's more of a spectrum of where you fall in with your experience and previous traction and how well your current prototype is doing um because um at the end of the day we will i think we're gonna have to see investors want to see some proof points other than yeah of course i i really like like i've been listening to others than garyvee let's be honest but on the uh on really on not on blockchain gaming but on blockchain talks and and some other people have even garyvee i i have to forget garyvee

like it was just the podcast i listened yesterday so it's in my head and he's like i said can i get you a garyvee poster for the next episode that's good that'd be really good that would be really good but but um but even a lot of people who are very bullish on blockchains and nfts are essentially saying that 98 of what we're seeing right now will go to zero and that looks like so yeah because it's so um short-sighted um you know in there for a quick buck and and i think that's that's you know that's a lot of the stuff that we're seeing and that's why a lot of existing developers are essentially saying like you know it's yeah we don't believe in this and and i think everybody's right like both the side that is saying that this is the future as well as the side that's saying all of this will burn to the ground real quick yeah i mean i i it wasn't announced yet that i was working on a blockchain game

but my gdc talk last year was called building a 10-year game economy and the reason it was is because i was thinking about how to build a game with 10-year retention and that's because i think the key to success to building the next mega franchises of web 3 are not about slash and burn pump and dump tactics that are giving you know that is the reason why 98 is going to go to zero i think you know the the the game teams that build the forever franchises with the 10-year plus retention on web 3 those are going to be the next zynga's and that in 10 cents of of the world hey guys so eventually microsoft will own them all yeah we're a bit over time and i need to of course yes on that note let's wrap up needs to be giving away money for for top developers so thank you everybody for listening uh if you want to get funded talk to anthon for your blockchain gaming

thank you ethan for for doing this i'm i kind of i kind of want to like summarize it so keep keep your head in the business over index on understanding both the blockchain space as well as the different platforms think about go to market experience go to markets that's what you're doing you're you're in all of this all of these like you're looking what works what doesn't and that's why we're we're talking about like having the community person to give you the go you don't have if you don't have 300 in your red dot on discord you're not you're not in enough channels that's that's you're not in enough servers anyways do that do that join them and see kind of how how it feels the problem is like it takes time it takes time to really get it it's like with a free-to-play game it takes time before you know it's like with any big game it takes time before you understand it think of it as as world of warcraft like you can come in and after one day you'd be like i don't know what the talk is about

i mean exactly like it it is going to take time a long time if i really think about being a free-to-play designer i don't think i really understood how to monetize a free-to-play game successfully until i was five years in really i got it on the first year yeah that's that's why you're the master anyway uh so no no it's absolutely right it's um it's really getting into it and kind of like understanding that this will take time you won't you want to and and i i believe that that people are reluctant i'm one of them people are reluctant to believe that this is the next thing yeah because they don't want to invest the time yeah it was the same thing with everything like i wish this burns down so i don't have to go on discord channels and figure this out yeah but this is my lazy side thinking of it my logical side like you study now the more you're gonna have to pay me as a consultant three years from now when

you're in exactly so that's why yeah that's what i'm watching that's why i have ethan on every second week here talking cents and um you you have your go to market plan and that basically i think you you can get your go to market plan by just experiencing enough go to market so when you hire that community person you'd be like hey man this is what happened it made me feel really good i want that same thing plus that thing to feed it and and the real the real insight here is to think about er like if you're doing if you're doing a free to play game right now building a new studio you could frame every choice you make in under the frame of cpi versus ltv right how do i go from where i am today to the point where my cost per install is lower than my day 120 ltv right and that that can give you the framing and and my theory here is that uh you should build you can build your

go to market plan and therefore your entire company roadmap within the frame of how am i building my community how am i attracting them how am i retaining them how am i growing them over time and that that is that is the the mental frame with which to lay out the key beats for your game studio and your key hires yes yes and then and then you just go and just put stuff into the market i like the uh the dusk rider stuff where you just put in a little demo out and let people play it and they can mint afterwards i don't know how important that is but at least it feels more tangible we can do we we could do a whole maybe a follow-up episode on airdrops and and community bootstrapping strategies to get into that further that would be fun okay well ethan that's it it's getting closer to

midnight here i need to sleep on this yeah let me just close you with my new hotness because i got i bought a new one just for today uh my my new hotness today to close it out is zug the etherworks token uh i saw a twitter thread from them about their first hundred days of development and how much success and momentum they have and i was impressed by just the the community focus and the constant shipping and the momentum and so i traded a little bit of heath for some zug today so gives my new hotness and i look forward to uh digging more into etherworks how much are you losing currently with your crypto wallet it's it's all uh it's all learning it's it's less than getting another college degree that well they're free in finland so so on that note on that now shout out for my free master's degree in international business management shout outs interest rates

uh anyways good uh thanks everybody for listening we tried to make this in 45 minutes i think we ran for one hour we ran for it we but here's here's how you should approach it double the content double the value it's um and no tokens asked but uh but stay tuned for the constructor fun token ethan levy is the other coin master on that one so we'll figure out what to do with it on that note goodbye everybody thanks for listening