Tokenomics #9 - Understanding the WAX blockchain with gaming veteran Michael Rubinelli

welcome friends it's another uh tokenomics podcast episode and i'm here today no mishka no anton a very special guest i've got mike rubinelli the chief gaming officer at wax welcome to the podcast mike ethan thank you for having me it's great to be here thanks so much yeah uh so i'm really excited to have you on uh to have on anybody with a career as illustrious as yours uh who's red pilled on crypto gaming um before you give a little bit of an introduction i mean just going through some of the places that you've been ea midway thq take two disney platoon and kicks eye so your career has spanned console it spanned facebook canvas gaming mobile gaming and now crypto uh midway uh being from chicago is very near and dear to my heart like dearly departed midway

my only goal in crypto gaming is to somehow make enough money to figure out who owns smash tv and buy the rights from them so um anyways we've had completely unnecessary diversion why don't you tell us a little bit uh about your background and uh some of the places you've been and games you've worked on you know i can answer that question about who owns smash tv and i have all kinds of insider stories about the creation of that game in the history it's mark trammell eugene jarvis like that whole thing if you ever want to rattle on i do so much arcade lore and all the kind of the behind the scenes stuff yeah it is fascinating to a certain sect of people i know i'm always riveted by it as well um including if you take smackdown you look at the the the precursor to it robotron yeah eugene jars talked about in a real simple terms as to why the game works like you came and imagined and then when he said that to me it was just like it's so struck a chord like it's so obvious the compulsion loop that he's built yeah like and just like they're they're

brilliant people let's we can talk about that at another time so yeah so you know i hearing you talk about all the places i've worked i'm like either i don't have job security and i hop around a lot or i'm super old i hope neither of those are true but i like the label accomplished and i think it's part of the industry it's part of the industry to move no one no one stays at one company forever yeah we're not a work 35 years at ibm and then retire kind of generation anymore are we it's it's very much kind of you know on to the next bigger and better opportunity and you know i ironically that's actually i saw that a lot at ea in my early days where people were super accomplished but the people that they worked for for the jobs that they would want to take were also super accomplished so it wasn't like you know oh there's obvious career progression from here for me here at ea they had to leave and go work at sega or you know another kind of you know publishing group and then you realize like wow that person was really good let's get them back here and so the the running joke at ea was you want to get promoted you need to quit right because they'll bring you back at more money at a higher level

you know and that's how you get a promotion ea and so i think that is true a lot of companies and people kind of job op to find that next bigger better opportunity and sometimes it's at the place they were but they had to leave it for the other people to realize that you don't know what you got till it's gone yeah um all right so you you've recently made this move to wax um why don't we you know i think i'm part of what i'm doing with this podcast series is i think a lot of the colleagues in in this this audience are free to play primarily free-to-play developers maybe crypto curious and not as tapped into crypto gaming as as you and i are so why don't you uh first tell us what uh what wax is and what your role there is so as you said i'm the chief gaming officer at wax studios wax wax is is a block chain we do not own wax necessarily it's like saying we don't own the internet we are we are a layer one solution and

we utilize the wax which is built on the eosio standard um and and and the reason why i think that matters right because people say well gee what's the difference between polygon and avax and you know dapper labs and avalanche and you know on and on and on like those are all ethereum layer tubes and so they're always going to be constrained by what ethereum can do and ethereum is great for collections right it's it's but you know a lot of crypto whales live there so people like oh let's build an ethereum because that's right ethereum is actually not great for gaming it's actually terrible for gaming and so when you hear about people like oh i'm going to support avalanche or polygons like good luck if you want to scale and this is not meant to disparage but we've seen this right we've seen sunflower farmers we've seen kind of problems with the board api club when they did their land sale you know a couple weekends ago that the ethereum fees the gas fees excuse me we're through the roof uh it's it's not a chain that scales it's not a chain that has really kind of expeditious transactions but wax does so the great things about waxes relates to gaming and this is what really kind of you know makes me feel like you know our heart is in the right

place and we're really building on the right technology is that the wax blockchain can support up to 8000 transactions per second and consistently for the last kind of year plus it's done over 20 million transactions a day which is more than every other blockchain in the world combined like it's all about high levels of transactions right it's it's expeditious it's it's very rapid to resolve um when you have surge pricing and you have limitations it's fine if you're if you've bought a crypto punk you'll get it in three days like okay it doesn't matter if i have a table but in gaming right you know if you just lost you know a match valera you know what you know pick your you know head to head or or player versus player versus player game of choice and you want to win the the natural gaming instinct is i'm going to go out and buy the bfg 9000 right now i'm going to jump back in right now and i'm going to blow somebody's head off right now like it's all about now like i bought this i want to upgrade i want to progress i want to win i want to do whatever and so you know wax we have fairly instantaneous you know

resolutions because like i said to transactions because we can process it up to 8 000 transactions a second i think most other chains are kind of 500 to 1 000 transactions per second and when we say transaction we mean really kind of an update to the ledger right memory and that's what we do we don't can't count a server to server handshake as a transaction so real meaningful things that we can do and it's really like wax is purpose-built for gaming and the impulse nature the compulsion the gamers have wax can service those entities and we can scale we have 13 million wax cloud wallet owners we can scale you know a gamer experience you know we think you know a really really long way and not kind of melt down at 100 000 dau right and so to give kind of a tangible so wax is an alternate it's a different layer one right ethereum is a layer one salon is a layer one wax is a layer one and it's purpose-built for gaming and high transaction volume and scalability and so what that might mean on on a practical

level is let's say i'm doing my i have my game and my game has heroes and health potions and health potions are a token and so if i want to heal my hero i have to spend a token to do it um if i'm on um uh ethereum one that transaction's gonna be really expensive in terms of the gas fee just to heal my hero but two in game so let's say i've even moved to polygon um which in in game i'm gonna have to do something to mask the transaction time right so someone will say um we'll tap a button and it'll say healing hero and like there'll be a spinner and maybe you'll fictionalize it like they're going to the hospital or you know the spell is casting and then some number of seconds or minutes later the transaction will complete right and they would be at their full health and

and having a layer one with higher transaction volume transaction speeds more more processing power and capability you're saying if if you're on wax it'll behave like a game that you're used to which is like press the button and the thing happens right and you're not doing i know that on on the game that i'm working on on legendary heroes unchained we do a lot of we have a lot of thought into and this isn't that different than um than just thinking about the normal client server interactions of a mobile game right you have to do this sort of stuff and in some way anyways but we do it is amplified and we do think about well how how do i design my game so that as little as possible is happening on chain right and if i understand what you're you're telling me you'd say well you know ethan if you were building on wax you wouldn't have to make those compromises right yeah that's exactly what i'm saying and and we we advise people again traditional gamer game developers like look do as much stuff in

the client as you possibly can set up your own back end but when you want to go and you want to update the ledger you know when you want to change that memory footprint be smart about it but also understand that you know that is where the kind of classic gaming experience can fall down right so the way that this space wins is that if you have an experience that is better than what they're currently doing right we always say we want to build the best games possible that just happen to utilize parts of the blockchain the best parts of blockchain we don't say hey come play our game on the blockchain and compare to other blockchain games it's really good because that's not going to get mass adoption right that's going to get you you know adoption of people that are playing existing pay to earn experiences but that's not what you want you actually want to speak to the 3 billion gamers in the world not call it 50 to 100 million you know p2e gamers right and so you want things that look and act and function like uh a traditional experience so if we take your health potion example like in a in

a free to play game or a mobile-based game you're like you go to the quote-unquote store you click buy health potion because you want to use it and but on the blockchain if the free-to-play potion is a fungible token or non-fungible token like i want to go to a secondary market or an exchange and buy it and maybe you get it right away or maybe you get it in three days and it costs you a dollar to buy it but it costs you fifty dollars in gas fees to actually purchase it like like that's just non-starters those are things that just don't work and because gas fees are surge pricing like uber is um you never really know and on wax and another benefit of the wax that i watching that i didn't illustrate which i clearly should have because it's a huge value is we never charge any gas fees it's always what the sale is like it's two percent on a million dollars or on a dollar it really doesn't matter it's always two percent all the time so everything you're buying and selling is that is that a a margin that you can calculate you don't have to go well i hope i hope there's the chain isn't congested right i hope the surge price thing isn't surging

against me right like there's all these things that are when you go to transact on these other chains that are ethereum based you just don't know whereas wax you always do know and you bring up a great point in terms of you know when you talk to the traditional gamer you don't want to educate them like oh you need to learn what withdrawal means and deposits and you need to understand block emissions and you need to understand deflationary measures you understand tokenomics and icos and ideos and igos and ieos like right away you're like wait a minute i'm lost yeah i just want to show up and play and you're telling me i have to hold on this whole new lexicon that is basically five terms right if you will because that's we're guilty as a sector of this audit of this of this gaming world of speaking to ourselves and that on blockchain brawler is something we very much did like we don't talk about wallet we don't talk about withdrawal we don't talk about deposit we don't talk about any of these five things even though blockchain brawlers is just very highly optimized gamification and decentralized finance moving towards a pvp based uh experience

we very intentionally said we want to talk to people if they're gamers in a language that they're comfortable with because when i played all these d5 games when i first got into the space for all these blockchain games what got it it's really tough it's really hard that's a high bar i'm like i was going onto youtube watching videos of how to set up my wallet and what does a wallet mean in in this term like don't i have in-game inventory where you really don't but but wait a minute i'm so used to like it was it was it was like i was it's really tough the the the i was going into the very high bar of a new orleans parish trying to learn cajun for the first time i know i speak english but i don't speak this english right and so yeah you things that are easy to explain are easy to understand if they're easy to understand then people are going to adopt it and that's why if you look at the wax cloud wall as an example to set up a wax cloud wall it's really simple we use all single sign-ons like like oh this is web too i just click facebook connect or google oauth or my discord uh you know credentials like

and i'm in like yep you're in like oh wow that was so easy okay and because of that we've gotten like i said 13 million users using the wax cloud wallet because it was just so simple and that kind of simplification and easy to digest is super important if we're going to bring traditional gamers from free to play into the p2e space yeah this this all i mean the way that you're describing wax it it plays very much into what my hypothesis is on the space why i read pilled is that having come from free to play and having a very uh successful mid-core uh free-to-play game and legendary game heroes that i was a part of um i saw what it's like inside of a game that's doing many many millions of dollars per year you know that game uh did over 250 million dollars in revenue is the public figure from three years ago at this point yeah like um my hypothesis is

well legendary game of war uh all these free-to-play games are um lords mobile state of survival any of them they're digital economies with currencies and assets and when the technology gets to the point where i can have an equally frictionless experience playing a web 2 free to play game and a web 3 free to play game but in a web 3 game if i play afk arena for six months and i spend a hundred dollars and then i'm like i'm done playing afk arena i can sell my assets to someone else for eighty dollars like i'm gonna of course i'm gonna play that game where i can resell my stuff instead of the equivalent experience where i don't because the number of times where i personally don't spend money because i'm like ethan i lit i pep talk myself like i'm like looking at a battle pass and i go ethan you are a monetization designer

you know what is happening you know you someone like you engineered these emotions inside of you like don't you know you're gonna regret this right don't spend the money and and i think that i would spend the money if i knew that i owned the assets and so it sounds like it sounds to me like wax has a very similar philosophy underpinning its its design which is uh to enable people not only the design of the system but then at wax studios the design of the games that you're doing that it's just like this should just be a normal gaming experience basically yeah look i think the thing that you know people say well why did you get into the you know the p2e space and i said you know there's so many valuable lessons that we learned but history is kind of perfectly consistent on these platform transitions or business model transitions business model evolutions it's like there's always going to be a winner and the winners are the groups that are native in that space so if you look at the most recent kind of big cosmic shift in the industry in terms of

business model it's going from kind of you know console based or downloadable content dlc is to free to play right you started with the facebook canvas then that moved into mobile and mobile there's still a little bit of a freemium if you will kind of model or a kind of a low end kind of 4.99 and you get all the content there's no real live ops it's kind of this this experience it's in this it's in this it's in a silo there's no but the people who are really making apple their revenue are the lords mobiles and state of survival exactly exactly right and what's really interesting is that that i always that i felt back in 2010 when i first started learning about that and doing that first i realized i'm future proofing myself right because you're working off of analytics which you're going to look at player behaviors and math you're no longer saying well you need a focus group of 40 people in a room and get them to vote yes or no i would buy this like you can just put this out to 20 000 people and say please download this and we can look at how they behave provided all the monitoring reports in place and you can get a clear signal on retention engagement time on site like there's all these things that that

matter that you can that and then the real the realization there was oh the sooner i get something for people to respond to the sooner i can fix the things that are obviously that i didn't see because i have my perspective of one right i am an arcade action gamer and i'm kind of very aggressive and i'm very pvp focused but i'm building something for women in centerville ohio that are 45 and up and so it's not my wheelhouse but i i have comfort as a designer knowing that i have this paradigm in place and i can see how they consume and how they behave and then i can adjust that and that's super liberating in the free-to-play space so the whole the clarion call there was okay let's make sure that free to play is the business model because that's mass adoption because there's no friction answer and then we knew that ea wasn't going to do it we knew that riot was kind of going to be a leader in the space because they were new there we knew that supercell was going to do it because they were a leader in the space like all these people that were native free-to-play companies yeah they were the ones who shifted the landscape and forced you know 10 cent ea warner brothers interactive at that time midway

they all forced them to shift their thinking because there's no like this is so obviously better but it took a north star experience to show them that they're like wait a minute how did this company make you know 10 billion in revenue and we can't sell any more than a million cartridges whatever that you know they were saying yeah so pay to earn the exact same way so the question that we have and our foundational thinking again as we always talk about we have to find a cause greater than ourselves that allows us to live a meaningful life because we're doing meaningful work that causes exactly what you said giving the players agency giving them ownership over what that so so we don't classify this as p we are play to earn i very much think about this as play and own right yeah because i think when you talk about play to earn the focus is on earn but it needs to be on play more play let's earn the earn will come like like revenue is a result it's not a goal and that's a really important thing to point out is that we don't ever look at player revenue as our goal they're like how are you making me more money i'm like my goal isn't to make you more

money my goal is to give you a game you want to play for two three four five years yeah money will come if we do our job making a really fun engaging title and that's what drives us the the earn part will be the result but it's earned because you're owning what you have and you said i think a really important distinction is you said well i want to quit i know i can sell myself for 80 cents on the dollar what we're saying is when you outgrow things and you no longer need them you can still keep playing and now the bottom of your inventory levels you're you're you're you're you're you're putting into a market or you're giving to a friend of yours that now it took you three months to earn whatever that kind of starting level weapon is i'm making it up and now you're six months in but your friend wants to play and they're six months behind you you're like no i'll help you catch up by three months i'll just give this to you because i own it i can do with it whatever i want i can trade it i can sell it i can you know disassemble i can break it down materials i can sell them like but i own those things i have agency i have ownership and that is in creating a player-to-player economy or a participation economy as we refer to it as is so unbelievably powerful and we know

that this is the way the world is going and we at last want to lead that change that is our charge that's our inspiration you know in giving back to the players that's the cause that is greater than ourselves and that's what really drives us and that's how we think about you know that's how we're wired and again sort of the last comment on all this is that we want to build games that are really fun to play that just so happen to have those things in them because what you have to do is you have to convince all those people to stop doing what they're doing and you're going to have a play experience that's just as good but now there's this whole economic consideration that actually puts it over the top and then that's how you tip the behaviors in your favor yeah yeah i can't i can't remember if i i if i've said it on on this podcast series before but like the way i think about the difference between uh play to earn play to earn and play play a note is the or play and earn is the one i'm i'm using yeah like clearly that's right um basketball as a sport is a play to earn game right

there are some portion of people involved in the basketball ecosystem who make their living at it some of those people are the stars who are making millions and millions of dollars some of those people work in management in the clubs some of those people do laundry for the team some of those people sell concessions there is a portion of people who make their living from the sport of basketball but if you look at all people who are involved in playing basketball or any sport it is much much bigger than the people who are making any money let alone superstar money on it right yeah it's people playing it in recrea rec leagues it's playing in an uh a pickup game during lunch at work it's playing it at school during during recess like the game of basketball is much bigger than the economy of basketball and i think in you know league of legends is the same there are very few people who make their living

from league of legends compared to the number of people who play it for fun and i think that playing on games or plane earned games are going to be the same thing just because a game has the um capacity for people to generate revenue from it doesn't mean that the uh that the majority of people who are playing it are going to like you have to make a game that's fun first and that people want to play and like you know i feel like i can't shout at my free to play colleagues enough like we know how to make digital economies that is that is what we do why are you so resistant to these ideas it's so powerful and it's so hard and i'll tell you so i'm really active in the discord community on blockchain brawlers because first of all i want to connect to the community because i'm a very social person in that regard but the overarching comment when say maybe the token or the nft values go down is there one to do because they yo-yo all over the place yeah um we made a big kind of balance change where there was an exploit in the economy that we didn't

see that we had hoped was gonna kind of rear it's like we hadn't did and people come in like oh now i'm losing money and you know what do you need to fix this i'm like i'm actually not going to do anything to fix it because my job isn't your money they're like but i've lost money i'm like well how have you sold it at a loss like no like so you're actually not making money as fast you're like right so your roi went from 15 days to 40 days for you to right and that's like two and a half times as long like right but what other like like whatever you know kind of vehicle do you have you get all your money back in 40 days well none right that's the point the point is you made it worse so what are you gonna do like the whole conversation revolves around the monetization aspect and the and the income piece because that's what those paradigms have conditioned players to focus on and that is so wrong and that is so backwards and it is super unhealthy because when you have players all of them show up to do the same thing every day for the same reason with the same expected outcome then all you've done is create this optimized race to the bottom and so

people go why is this cratered it's like well there's nothing else to do and everybody does the same thing for the same reason with the same expected outcome so you have to give them deep meaningful gameplay choices you have to give them things that are interesting that are unknown like uncertainty drives us forward in life and in gaming particularly uncertainty as a game design construct is very well known is very powerful but actually these players of these games are gamblers and speculators they're not gamers and so uncertainty actually works against you they're like nope i want to know what my roi is i'm going to know how to optimize my my return i want to make as much money as as quickly as i can now the money and the d5 stuff is all well and good the problem that pay to earn games have those there's been so many projects that have been just disasters and people have got absolutely fleeced on that the ones that are really good you say okay trust us we're really good hold the token hold the nfts watch them appreciating value because if nobody sells then demand is really high supply is really low and the you know the powers of

supply and demand economy is your friend but what's happened is people have so gotten their clock clean on their project as soon as they're a little bit in in you know a little bit of currency accumulation they sell sell sell sell themselves so when there's massive cell pressure there's nothing there's the economies of the sinks and the faucets aren't in alignment then things go down they go oh look everything is going down it's like well right you're not holding you're selling as fast as you can well i'm selling as fast as i can because these four other projects i got my ass kicked it's like all right that's not this project like right but i have to make up for those other products so there's this whole downstream effect that and again because the focus is singularly on making money which is super super unhealthy yeah um so we've we've mentioned blockchain brawlers a couple times you said you're there's wax the blockchain and then there's wax studios and it sounds like wax studios is the game development and publishing arm of wax is that correct that's correct that's correct got it so tell us i know you guys have had

yeah yeah i'm sorry go ahead i i know that wax has had a big success recently i saw some a big success headline on uh blockchain brawler's minting and the release of the token um and that's actually how we got connected i made kind of a not a snarky as much like a pho well a little snark i'll say it was a little snarky of a of a commentary and someone was like oh mike what do you think of this um but why don't why don't you tell us what did i say oh no someone just tagged you and then uh and i i messaged you and said hey come come on the podcast i want to talk to you of course um why don't you tell us a little bit about uh what blockchain brawlers is which sounds like it's an internally developed title it is it's first party all the way got it so what is blockchain brawlers and what if the tell us about the success you've had so far can we start can we start with what your snarky comment was because i always like to learn i don't i don't look right when people disagree with me i take it as a moment for me to understand why i

don't feel attacked i'm like oh i approach disagreement with a healthy curiosity which means that i either didn't get to you or message something correctly and so i always like how can i get better i'd love to know what that comment was if you remember i'd love to know too let's see if i was a total jerk or if i was uh kind of nice okay i said this is what i said anyone playing blockchain brawlers looks like they're putting up impressive figures on the game five side and this was based on a headline of uh 357 million dollars in volume in the first week i've only looked at one video so far but this looks like right now it's not that different from an early due quest style facebook canvas game circa 2012 but with tokens as a reward is there more here than meets the eye right so that was that was my commentary was like really impressive launch great trading volume um the game looks very early am i missing something should i buy in and play this game and discover more

or is that where they are in their development cycle and they're going to keep adding features over time and in the year i'll look at it yeah by the way first of all i think your comments were very fair and maybe a little bit complementary like i don't even think this holds up to an early facebook game in 2012 like i put out avengers alliance in 2012 and it was an incredibly deep and sophisticated game with a ton of design and just monetization loops for days and days and really well done like i don't think we were even up to that standards the fact that i got my year wrong i should have been i'm trying to think of like when was it when i was super poke and you know my friends and parking whatever the parking wars parking wars ride and on and on yeah so look um the thing that we've said from like so i started doing press on blockchain brawlers in kind of mid-january and i said day one you're going to have a game that looks very very familiar to you right and your your flawed thinking will be is that all this is going to be it's not but it is what

it's going to be today like we were very clear you're going to get into the standard kind of mining and collection loops that exist but we're building a deep meaningful kind of pvp based game that's going to run for five years kind of know that we have this aggressive road map and no and and why can i say that because i'm unboxing myself i'm michael rubinelli i'm 25 plus years in game development here's all the things that i built know that like what you're going to get on day one is going to be better than what other games give you on day one because there's going to be really deep and really slick ui there's going to be contextualized menus there's going to be you know exchange support there's going to be really you know clear kind of upgrades to questing there's going to be all these things there's going to be a sound track there's going to be a new user flow like it's going to feel like this really robust thing but it's what what you're going to do is going to be this very much this mining activity which you know but if you have faith in us the worst version of this game you'll play is on day one but day 31 will be better day 60 will be better and you know at some point we'll get meaningful pvp and like oh great tell us about pvp i can't yet but you just got to ride with us and like well why should i trust you first of all because i'm undocumented we're

wax we're a billion dollar company we're not a group of developers that have never done this with no money like we didn't do an ico because we didn't have to you're asking for tokenomics reports because you want to see how many of those tokens are going to go to the development team zero we don't need to we're not self-interested so we're not going to get tokens that we're dumping on the market because we need to get paid that way like everything about us is very different we demonstrate things differently we operate differently you're going to have no need to up your cpu you know on blockchain problems even though a lot of titles on wax have cpu constraints because they write their smart contracts in inefficient ways and we have the power of the platform there's just all these things that we just tried to lay out to convey confidence integrity and and and make the unknowns known right and so as an example in february we put out a communications calendar which nobody does the game's not even out here but we're going to tell you every two days of the month and then march we're going to come out the end of march but in march every two days like just consistent consistent consistent consistent

i'm in channel every day like wow this game means you have these developers on the channel all goddamn day yeah again building credibility building equity and so we had richard garfield in our back pocket but we couldn't talk about it but we said there's a deep and meaningful pvp game here and people like i don't know just looks like a mining game like right we know what you see on the screen today you have to have this vision you have to trust us and we're trying to build this trust by communicating and by showing you who we are we're trying to show you how we operate we're sharing screenshots with you we understand what it is but this is not what it's going to be we have this very long lens kind of perspective and before the game came out we said here's literally one year of feature development like oh my god so much cool stuff pay-per-view massive global tournaments you know female brawlers you know potential you know action figures based on the brawlers that you own that you can have in real life like there's all these things it's not just like you know trust us cool new stuff is coming and you know these really thinly veiled features on a quarter by quarter basis like we went into a lot of depth because

again this is internally developed and this is our first project it has to work wax has to be seen as a winner we have to give a better better experience but all the while we also have to learn about what does that paradigm want to be and so everything that we do is all learning based like we have you know 30 different kind of reports that we look at in terms of player behaviors we're trying to make sure that we're always dying those things in we're not just hoping that google analytics gets the you know data right and we can kind of tease out the signal that we want like there's a ton of effort that goes in like this is a team of you know kind of 20 plus people you know and we're all really accomplished game developers and and what's really funny is the game came out on day one they're like one guy literally said oh my god you pulled it off you delivered everything you said better than we thought i'm like well what i was going to give you a pos that didn't work like yeah anyway you're so used to it so so let me let me go back to something really quick because i did see the uh the headline on it but i wanna uh underline it uh legendary game designer richard garfield creator of magic the

gathering and and thief of my adolescence he's designing blockchain brawl yeah he's designing the pvp system designing the pvp system that's awesome yeah and he's by the way i'm like you it it's you know i've met a lot of famous people in my life and celebrity doesn't really affect me and that's not me saying like i look at them as people are people but when i got on that first call with richard it was so hard not to fanboy but you know what i do can i tell you about my dick richard like it's so hard that's your instinct because again he'd such a seminal moment an impact on your childhood and your adolescence you're an as an economy designer in my place as a game designer like there's so many lessons that you take away from that whether it's conscious or subconscious it's hard not to get swept up in the romantic notion of here's one of my heroes and please don't be an yeah and he has a sweetheart of a guy he's so smart and he's so thoughtful and we originally engaged with him he said look richard i'd love this to build a kind of a really light you know trading card game you know in

the spirit of magic if you will he's like yeah i understand that's obvious he said but you have to understand the math on balancing magic he said it's in any kind of trade trading card game is really really complicated he said forget designing the cards forget what the kind of the the play turns and the resolving the stack he said just the balance of all those things is so exponentially difficult it's probably a year after your game is built that it'll take a year just to balance it all and having harmony said and as you add a different like if you go with a sort of a three color construct versus four every time you add a new color he said you're just exponentially upping the the balance he said but what i do have is he said you know i have a kind of a living deck or a single deck card game that's really fun and interesting that could work really really well with braless he said i've been designing it and prototyping it for about 10 months he said and it's not out anywhere he said you can have it not exclusively but you can have it and have it be the first time this game goes live is it your world with your you know your aesthetics and i said tell me about that because by the way the thing you're gonna

appreciate ethan is the first thing he says he's like okay well you know what kind of game would you like me to design for you i'm like what what kind of game do you want me to design for you i'm like like that's like prince coming to me or pick your shape i said what kind of song can i write from like no you just do what you do right make sure that you love what you do i will make it work for me i promise you he's like he's like i've got this super fun idea i'm like whatever that is that's what i want yeah it really is it is um that's it people because we know people like richard garfield and we know how to how to combine these things and like give us some time have a little faith we are going to get there and don't judge us by what you see on the first day other than relative to other games like that you saw on the first day how do we compare oh you're much better it works it's super smooth it's highly transacted it's really robust i'm not getting a fail to fetch here every two minutes i'm not getting out of resources there i'm not getting you know the sights down like and and now we have a 25 song soundtrack with the music player we've got all this going on

that people like whoa okay it's a real game it's a real game yeah in a couple weeks we've been introducing you know leaderboards and creating your own pfp and and naming your account i've seen so many leaderboards that are a series of wallets i'm like yeah that's unemotional and not fun like let me call myself you know big brawler you know one two three and have a really cool you know like make me feel like i'm playing a game and all of a sudden as these things start to land a little bit every single week boom pvp hits you're like yeah of course this is incredible this is so much fun what i think is really smart and echoes some of the conversations we're we're having internally about the game and about about the game the rpg i'm i'm working on and go to market strategy is like my early analysis on the market was that the gamers who are here for crypto games right now their uh expectations for interaction and for what a game is are super low uh relative to what we're used to

especially if you've been working in mobile for the past five or ten years as the ocean's gotten redder and redder right right right right if i think about the feature set of the soft launch for legendary game heroes versus the feature set for soft launch of what i would launch today before putting my first marketing dollar in like the game today would look like three years of development in right to legendary right and at least at minimum before i would bring it to the philippines with no monetization it's just a very mature market exactly and i think that if you took that same mindset if i started a crypto game today and i spent three years building it before releasing the soft launch like i'm gonna lose to someone who's doing what you're doing which is launch early uh with like very little there launch with with something of quality and with

the road map and then set your expectations and hit your expectations over and over and over again what your community is going to respond to yes obviously they would love a 3d brawling game that looks like bayonetta that plays on in the web browser with blockchain like who wouldn't want that today but guess what you can build a great business if you start here and you like crypto raiders is is not the last time i played the battle game the battle game isn't up to the quality the future depth of final fantasy one on the nes but it is a very successful crypto game and what they're doing is saying hey community here's a new feature here's a new feature here's a new feature here's a new feature and that's what you you're saying you're doing is like here's our roadmap and guess what consistency consistency consistency like yeah forward start small and prove your intentions and

improve your forward momentum and i i think that's where success lies for crypto game development i think it does too and i ironically you know i appreciate those comments a lot i i would tell you that in hindsight i would have launched knowing what i know today would have launched later with more with more the mvp was a really lower case m and maybe even like in a six-point font like i would release an mvp with a capital m that had more gameplay and had more choices and was more uh anti-botting if you will like because lots will kill your game and if you don't have measures in place to stop them on the one hand you think oh bots are good because they generate currencies and they generate things that happen in reality they're actually not good they're they're lecherous and they take away from your game and they they find exploits and they do automated things that regular players can't do and you have to really fight that fight every day in earnest because as soon as the players feel like they're disadvantaged the real players then they're going to churn out yeah and one of the ways that we said we're going to combat that on day one is well don't worry the pvp game you know it can't be

botted it's all about you know human decisions are you a better gamer than me do you take more risk or do you take lower risk are you do you play like a turtle strategy are you a glass can like how do you serve what is your mentality of playing a head-to-head match up and are you how much are you reading the man versus reading your hand kind of like all these things are like really interesting dynamic choices that the humans haven't bots won't win but the game they're playing today is all about how much of the currency can i accumulate quickly right and so i would have launched kind of 90 days later than i probably did with more anti-bot measures more human control more deeper gameplay with interesting choices again we think that if your game has depth if your game has interesting choices then people will come and they'll engage for more than an roi because they really enjoy actually playing especially the other thing that we weren't as deeper as robust on us we needed more token utility yeah like token utility matters and the problem that we had and the trap that we fell into was oh

crafting everybody's going to want to up their roster because the higher roster the more rares the more epics the more legendaries you have the better token accumulation you're gonna have so everybody will want to try to get to that roster as soon as possible so you're spending your token to get the ability to make more tokens and that kind of makes a ton of sense like sync sync sync sync in reality people found an optimization flow and then they just drilled that kind of that output and never upgraded and so and without other means of utilization of the token like that massive kind of output of the token it's like we'll just turn the faucet down like right you can always do that but the answer is give them more gameplay right give them more ways to spend on things that they care about right opposed to just like we'll just you know tune the tuning the economy down is a terrible way to balance your game sometimes you have to because there's an exploit that will kill your title and that's a tourniquet that you don't want to apply it's a terrible remedy but sometimes you have to because you've missed something and people like yeah that's your fault like yeah it is our fault like we're not going to get us to

hide from right like no no it's your fault not ours like no things are our fault we own that uh a lot of that is just kind of being honest and and owning your mistakes to the community it's a good look and it's the right thing to do but also it's kind of a maturation of this is how live ops works and sometimes you put an a b test it gives you a signal sometimes you don't a b test and you make a product call that's the wrong one and when you when you miss it own it fix it and move on you're going to get a lot more credibility and a lot more kind of equity with your community when you're very transparent and authentic with them yeah um you've already just in in that last answer given us a lot of great insights um on what i'm about to ask but like what do you think are um some of the uh challenges you see experienced game devs make when they move into blockchain gaming right i think one like one you highlight is just like oh i you know i i launched

too early i didn't do enough to think about bots right we were now experienced how painful it is like the the monetary aspect of it amplifies the the pain in the audience and tuning down the economy these are already great lessons for us and i'm wondering what some of the other uh challenges you know other uh game devs will make as they face as they move into blockchain gaming well i think so i believe in the kind of the power of crowdsourcing so the more great developers we have kind of you know you know trying to figure out what is that north star the better i think the first mistake they make is that this world isn't about to go to crypto based gaming or nfc based gaming it absolutely is like i've done this for a long time i think my instincts are really really good i've lived through a zillion transitions like you know i told the story a lot i played world of warcraft i played final fantasy 11 for seven years i played world of warcraft like 10 years like i'm a long range gamer right clash royale for six

years there's usually and there's not in clash thank god but there's usually a in-game kind of counter how many hours have you played this game and obviously when it spills over 24 it's like how many days have you played this game right and then when it spills over 30 it's like how many months have you played this game into is like it's a terrifying thing yeah but once you realize the power of that's now a representation of my engagement my time my time has not been wasted my time is actually being monetized my free time is a modernization level for me to pull like that's really empowering like oh wow i bet you this game has really served me well because of all these things i now own as my engagement grows so that is where this world was going and there's no denying that and we are the sea change that is about to take place and a lot of companies developers to answer your question they make the mistake of building a bulwark around um you know kind of an indefensible outdated business model and they will die on that hill

right and the kodak problem the kodak film problem exactly and sometimes it when they realize that they they're on the wrong side of history it's too late to change and so the first mistake they actually make is deciding not to get into it so let's start with that like it is going that way and like well you know crypto is echo unfriendly well it's actually not and kind of proof of stake will show that if you look at our dedicated proof of stake our chain even though we do 20 plus million transactions a day of course the entire year you know we produce the same amount of energy we use the same amount of energy during our cryptocurrency it's five households or five americans in a singular household like it's nothing ethereum's moving to proof of stake like the the echo and argument is going to go away i think it's largely false because bitcoin is the real problem nobody builds games on bitcoin nobody does damage bitcoin is terrible proof of work is is an awful awful thing yeah but the way the world of crypto gaming and nft based initiatives work now on wax and will work on ethereum once they get their their act together on the proof of stake like that's going to be a

non-star so you can't say well our audience doesn't like it fine educate your audience on the truth you know be an educator don't be a salesperson be an educator there's a real powerful sort of notion thinking about my job is to educate you it's not to sell to you it's like hey we're the biggest one of the best we're the fastest you make the most money here it's like no no no look don't you want to own your stuff don't you want to have complete controller but don't you want to move outside of the walled garden that everything goes to the developer everything goes to the publisher you do like you're engaged you're spending time you're spending money you're bringing people in you're actually helping them with acquisition costs which are really high this is the way the world's going so that's the first thing don't look down your nose at nfts based gaming because it's reality in kind of three to four years and there's there's just there's just too much data to suggest that's the way the world is going then this the next mistake that people make is just assuming that the audience that play these games today is the exact same audience who plays you know they're free to play games they're not it's very different and very few of them are gamers um and then you sit there and go okay well then the games that they're playing you

know we might be able to build a better game or not but i think we will like no no the people building these games aren't actual game developers today yet like in mass it's opportunistic people who know how to build a website who know how to write a smart contract they're not like classic game developers so the more people like yourself you think are coming in that have a classic game development background that's the thing that needs to happen right because that's this crowd sourcing kind of real movement that we're going to see in the next i've seen projects being developed by there's a game called metropolis origins that's being developed on the wax block chain it's it's a trading card game built by graham devine and austin grossman you know graham devine like 7th guest 11th hour uh quake quake 3 arena like real development chops he's gotten religion he's built this super deep really compelling world with tons of narrative like when gamers come in and look at those ad sets and they look at the artwork and they look at all the set pieces and they look at the game design they're like oh this is the game right yeah like yeah it's not a pun it's a

model only for ponzi schemes exactly that's exactly right and deposits people look i think maybe there is some legitimacy to that i mean the more you feed the bottom of the pyramid and the everything kind of moons at some point somebody gets left holding the bag but if you're playing a game that has a self-sustaining economy where deflationary measures are in place and it can run for a really really long time and it's not boughtable and like there's really interesting choices then players are going to stay for longer than an roi because that's not what they care about anymore they care about community they care about i own these things these things have helped me win battles these things have helped me you know beat my rivals or progress up to the the highest echelons of of a global leader board like that's what gamers want and so giving things that gamers want which are very different than what the current players want because the current players aren't gamers right understand that bifurcation and then by the way i think you can take these crypto gamblers and speculators and play these things today and convert them into full-time gamers because gaming is unbelievably fun there is no doubt like it is objectively fun and you can find your flavor of fun across any

genre whether it's match three it's hidden object games it's pvp based kind of squad based combat it's a moba it's whatever it is like fun lives in gaming and that's that's what you should care about and so it's a matter of converting those players but then then showing the existing audience this is a safe space for you like it's a better experience but you get to own all your stuff who doesn't want to do that i love playing this game and i have to know everything that i that i earn or that i craft or that drops me on a crate whatever like that's so powerful there's no denying this is where this is where we're we're going without question and the sooner we get there the better and the more developers help us kind of filter that north star is the better so i'm happy for this to be done immediately i think it's probably like i said aggressively two years away but probably more like three or four years away yeah but you know even alex ohanian to put a final point on all this alex ohanian said about three or four months ago because he's big into nft based gaming you know alex o'han the kind of the creator of reddit in five years there's not going to be a single interactive gaming experience that comes out that does not have some version of of kind of blockchain or web

3 in it and he's 100 correct i actually don't think it's going to take five years it may take less but he's right like the biggest smartest people in the world think this and they see it and i everybody else should embrace that thinking because don't try to defend a business model that's outdated you need to have the courage to take the risk to go into this world and you will be rewarded all right that's a great uh a flag of evangelism to plant um i i uh we've talked about we know wax studios is doing first party game development with uh blockchain brawlers and and i assume you probably have some other games in the pipes um is there publishing is there developer support are there grants how you know is there a role in developing the wax ecosystem or is it just about building those uh shining lights of like what a great game on wax looks like to attract other game developers terrific question i almost feel like that was a plant that i said make sure you ask me about this so the easiest way for us to tell people

when we speak to traditional gamers like what how do i think of wax are you just a dev shop like you think of wax as sony third party or microsoft third party like we're all about or i'm sorry publishing on third party we're all about getting content onto our platform so we do first party games like epic does fortnite yeah but epic doesn't just build fortnite epic actually has an engine lighting business that really generates a ton of revenue for them but how do they show you the value of their engine is by putting out content build their own dog food exactly right so they're eating their own dog food we're the same way so blockchain brawlers we've got kind of four or five first-party games in development that we haven't announced kind of the other ones but they're all very different and i'll try to solve a different problem or answer a different set of questions um but we also have second party deals where we invest in developers we invest in their ip we invest in their studio so that's second party similar to kind of nintendo and um my friends at niantic in terms of how they do with the pokemon uh you know ip and then we have third-party publishing deals where somebody's like look i just need kind of you know promotional support i need to understand how to

integrate into the blockchain or i need this do i need that or i need all the above i need some of the above none of the above like we have a bunch of different ways to enter into the wax ecosystem and we have grants available we have advice available we have digital real estate available to help sort of serve whatever business needs uh an individual or a company has so great and and just to close out this uh fantastic interview how should how can people reach out to you what's uh if if they want to build games on the best wax to start yeah it's it's super easy you just contact partnerships at wax.io and we will get you into the the funnel so to speak and we'll meet with you we'll talk to you about what you're doing we'll ask you questions the thing that we don't do is we don't lean into any just quote-unquote pure collections for the sake of funding a game like we have to make sure there's a real game there because again the wax field of approval is something that we're really you're going to see us talk a lot about over the next 90 days is

projects that we have vetted that we have endorsed and sometimes we're the publisher of record and sometimes we're not sometimes we're just saying look this is something worth spending your time and energy on because we feel like you know providing again a safe haven for players is really really important so this wax seal of approval if you will is something that we're going to put on a lot of titles that we've kind of personally vetted developers real the game's a ton of fun there's real thoughtfulness in the economy and the depth and gameplay choices these guys have incredible vision for this once over the next two years like you have our blessing feel safe and we want that to be a bit of a beacon if you don't see that you should maybe question whether you want to invest your time which is your most valuable commodity in your life whether you want to invest your time and or your money in this project absolutely awesome well if you're out there and you've been inspired by uh mike's message reach out there and learn more about how you can develop great games that are not scams but have real deep gameplay fun choices and sustainable economies

let's let's do this again sometime absolutely uh i would love to thank you so much for uh coming on the podcast i've really enjoyed the past hour thank you for having me it was great