[ad_1]
Blockchain and games have an attractive future. Companies are setting up a $ 100 million fund to encourage developers to create games with Blockchain, the secure and transparent decentralized accounting technology that powers Bitcoin and other encrypted currencies.
But many people in the gaming industry are skeptical, considering the decline in value of cryptocurrency over the past year. A handful of them jump and test the waters. At the recent Tron Summit in January, I moderated a panel with three of these experimenters: Taehoon Kim, CEO of Power Rangers nWay mobile gaming maker; Dan Chao, head of startup Rogue Nations Games and creator of Crypto Assault; and Jared Psigoda, CEO of BitGuild.
"To be honest, our biggest problem at the moment is that most blockchain games are designed to be void," Psigoda said.
Once again, there was a day when most mobile games were dismal, but entrepreneurs such as Chao were successful in doing so when they sold their startups to larger gaming companies. Ubisoft has become active in blockchain games, but many large companies stay away. If they stay too long, they may have to pay a lot to acquire the blockchain game startups. Or these startups will acquire them, said Psigoda, tongue in cheek.
I'm going to lead a fireside discussion with Tron CEO Justin Sun next week at the Pocket Gamer Blockchain Games, the next event on March 19th at 2pm. at Bespoke in San Francisco. I will also lead a panel with Taehoon Kim at PAX East in Boston on March 28th. Roy Liu of Tron will also be speaking at our next GamesBeat Summit 2019 event in Los Angeles on April 23 and 24.
Here is a revised transcript of our panel.
Above: Tron game board (from left to right): Dean Takahashi, Kim Taehoon, Dan Chao and Jared Psigoda.
Image credit: James Zhang
Taehoon Kim: I'm calling Taehoon Kim. People call me TK. I am the CEO of nWay. We make real games for emerging platforms, and the emerging platform is now a blockchain, so that's what we're doing now.
Dan Chao: I have a small team just a step away from here. We are working on a blockchain game called Crypto Assault, which is a kind of strategic MMO where hundreds of thousands of players live in a world that deploys tanks and jets and badbadinates.
Jared Psigoda: I am the CEO of BitGuild. We are a blockchain gaming company. We initially started creating games on Ethereum and then migrated to Tron. We also have a guild chat, our social messaging, which allows you to swap crypto, get crypto tokens. We are working on several other projects.
GamesBeat: Can you tell us what you are doing in the field of blockchain, games and crypto? Why are you here? What interested you in the blockchain?
Kim: I'll step back and talk about the game ecosystem at the blockchain right away. Right now, I think it's mostly people who already have crypto. These are the people who have all these crypto-currencies and who are all trying to make money. This is not necessarily the players' audience at the moment. Of course, you see games that are more game-oriented, pyramid schemes, games that look like lotteries. The real games have not yet arrived on blockchain.
We are working closely with Tron to find a way to more broadly embrace the mbad market. How to get players into games that have blockchain elements for trading and real value in game objects? We are currently doing research and development, and we are also working on a separate game that offers a whole new experience for that kind of genre.
Chao: Like many people, CryptoKitties appeared on the screen and really interested me. I've always liked to go on a new platform to see if there is anything relevant. When the Facebook games, and subsequently the mobile games, came out, it was very interesting. I like to solve new problems and see: what is the added value of the blockchain in games? Is there really something there? It may be this past April that we started to consider creating blockchain games, to see if we could bring something a little different from what we already saw.
Above: Dean Takahashi from GamesBeat (left) and Taehoon Kim from nWay.
Image Credit: Tron
Psigoda: I have been a hardcore player for as long as I can remember. I've played just about every MMO you can think of, from Ultima Online to EverQuest to World of Warcraft. All Diablos, just like that. One of the interesting things I saw in these games was one of the most fun things to do was to exchange items with other players. If I play Diablo as a mage and you are a barbarian, if I choose a really cool object, these games were all designed to be able to trade items and currencies. In addition, one of my first businesses was a World of Warcraft gold mine in China. The concept of virtual money worth real money is an obvious concept for me since the age of 12.
Once I saw the blockchain come out, with the possibility for these virtual tokens to have real value and to be able to swap them without friction through the blockchain, it was that moment Eureka. Hey, we can create really cool games that give us the impression that we had in the 90s, when there was trading. It's not like in today's mobile games, where you keep spending money yourself, but you can never trade your items with another player. It's a pretty fascinating area that's just beginning. We wanted to be part of it.
GamesBeat: In three or five years from now, the definition of success here could be that the CEOs of Electronic Arts and Activision, as well as Ubisoft, are discussing blockchain games. What will lead us to this kind of outcome, to that kind of future, where it fulfills its full potential?
Kim: It reminds me of the free business model. A long time ago, the big publishers were laughing about it, saying that it would never work, and now they are everywhere. It's only a matter of time before they understand that.
Chao: What really brings us is the game design that actually works with blockchain. I am not convinced that we have seen it before. What I've always told people is that I have a depressing view of the blockchain in the future – if it's just used to create a cosmetic skin in Fortnite, it's probably not the thing the more exciting to do. But also, finding a game design that is not just a game or a CCG, something like that, is the real thing that's leading the way. Whether it's something like Roblox, there are a lot of things to think about. It will take this game design is really effective.
Above: Bitizens from BitGuild
Image Credit: Bitguild
Psigoda: I agree. To be honest, our biggest problem right now is that most of the blockchain games made are void. 2018 was not too big a year for blockchain games. It will take time. As you mentioned, 10 years ago, when we were at the Game Developers Conference, we were talking about this new thing called free games, where instead of going to Best Buy and spending $ 60 to buy a game, the game would be totally free. and you can just buy those items in the game for 99 cents or a few dollars – if you were talking to Blizzard, Activision or EA or any of those companies at the time, they'd say, "C & # 39; is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. We will never do anything like it. "
But if you look now at the entire mobile gaming sector, and a lot of the PC gaming industry, just about all the most popular games are free to play with microtransactions. We discovered that it was more profitable to create a free game than to make people spend money to play it. Fortnite makes $ 10 million in revenue a day, something like that? When EA and these guys come back to talk in three years, new generations of game designers are still entrusted to start-up startups. They are not made by the big ones. The big players, if we are lucky, will buy us in a few years. Or we will buy them. [laughs]
Kim: The term "blockchain games" will disappear. Once we have adopted the mbad market, they will be just games and they will have blockchain elements.
GamesBeat: What do you think of the choices you need to make now? Which platform do you choose, be it Tron, EOS or others? What are the important things you need to decide in the beginning? What decisions do you need to make right now to know what to support?
Kim: If you create an application or a game that looks exactly like what exists, you will obviously go to Ethereum. But we work with Tron because they are very forward thinking. They work closely with us to make changes to the platform and create new experiences, thus reducing the barrier to entry for regular players. This is the main reason we work with Tron.
Above: Cryptographic Assault
Image Credit: Rogue Nations Games
Chao: When we started, we came to market capitalization and users. You wanted to choose the blockchain with the largest number of users. But now, it changes a little. Obviously, there are Tron and EOS, which support games in an excellent way. They really help with marketing and visibility. On the technical side, second-hand transactions are a big problem, as are gas prices. It is extremely important to really optimize for gas prices to go down.
But we must take into account the fact that users really want the whole game to be in a chain. For example, our game is in fact predominantly – 99% is off-line. It's like playing a normal game, with a centralized server. The units, the map, all the commands, all these elements are on the server when they move. But the purchase of units is done in a chain. Whenever a new unit is created, this is also done in a chain.
At first, I was a little worried that users would not agree with that, but in the end it does not really seem to interest them. They just want to play a fun game, and then they want to take some of their investment away. This is a way of saying for a long time: is the speed of transactions important? Once the transaction speed is less than one second, can you start doing everything in a chain, and is this really the right choice? Obviously, the cost of gas is there. There is also a lot to do with start-up funding. Some of the ecosystems such as Tron help in the same way. This can be very important when you start a new business.
Above: BitGuild Ecosystem
Image Credit: BitGuild
Psigoda: For us, I will summarize it in two points. The first point, as mentioned, is the question of centralization versus decentralization. I think that CryptoKitties had an interesting data point, that 99% of their traffic or something like that left their website when they realized that they had to install MetaMask to play this game. All things must absolutely be decentralized, because in the long run, what matters to players is to play a good game. This is not our big vision of decentralized products.
Number two, again, is the choice of your blockchain. As I mentioned, we started with Ethereum. We have launched seven or eight games on Ethereum. For us, it was not acceptable to spend a dollar in transaction fees to buy an item costing 50 cents, and then wait five minutes for the transaction to be executed. The decision was made to know which blockchain would really support the games. EOS was one of them. Tron was one of them. We thought about them very hard. They are both fast. They both have little or no transaction fees.
Above: Justin Sun is the founder of Tron. He has also started Peiwo and is on Forbes 30 under 30 list for Asia and China.
Image credit: Dean Takahashi
The main factor that motivated our move to Tron was the community. There are many blockchains where you can say that they are technically capable of running a game at blockchain. They have fast transaction speeds and so on. But the big question is who will play these games? These games are played with the token of this blockchain. Tron games are played with TRX. If you have another blockchain that technically solves your problem, but have 200 chip holders, you do not have a community to play your game.
We discovered with Tron that we had the greatest support from the Tron Foundation and the community. Many members of the Tron community really want to find more ways to use their chips. The game is one of the most obvious ways to do it.
GamesBeat: We all remember the importance of whales in the free game space, for mobile games and social games. The community with a lot of whales, perhaps, is the one you want to be attracted to.
Psigoda: Tron has whales, yes.
GamesBeat: If you apply your imagination, what could happen with blockchain games? I did not think much about blockchain and crypto before talking to Tim Sweeney about Epic Games. He said that this could be the way we will reach the metaverse, the virtual world of virtual worlds that comes in stories like Snow Crash or Ready Player One. Is this one of the end goals that you think is possible?
Psigoda: Again, most people have probably already seen Ready Player One. If it is not the case, I would recommend it. When we talk about metaverse, we think almost of a future life where we spend a lot of our time inside virtual worlds. I would almost say we are partially there. The reason I say this is that sometimes, if we stop to think how much we are stuck on our screen every day, be it your cell phone, your computer or your tablet, take the subway around you. When 99% of people in a room look at the screen of a cell phone, are they really here or are they somewhere else?
In addition, in the future, we will discuss topics such as artificial intelligence will significantly reduce the number of jobs in some industries, such as manufacturing. Even doctors, in the future, could be replaced by AI. By adding virtual reality to this, how virtual reality has evolved over the years, we envision a possible image in the future where all of us, or a significant portion of the population, spend a lot of time inside of virtual reality, or within these virtual worlds.
What will happen is that there will be people who will make a living in virtual spaces. People have been doing this in games like Second Life or Entropia Universe or EVE Online for years. In my opinion, the blockchain will activate the badets you acquire in these video games or virtual worlds. You will be able to convert them directly into a hamburger at your local McDonald's. The objects you acquire in these metavers or virtual worlds, thanks to the power of the blockchain, will be translated into real money in the real world. Nothing else than the blockchain can not do it.
Above: Kobe Bryant and Tron founder Justin Sun participated in the NiTron Summit.
Image credit: Dean Takahashi
Chao: I would say maybe do not look at Ready Player One. Save maybe two hours there. [laughs] But that's not what I mean. My point is, I am a player first. I am not a utopian thinker of blockchain. I do not think that will solve everything. What poses the most questions to me, namely the elements of the blockchain, so that they have value, we can not give them for free. The acquisition of these objects must have an initial cost.
We currently have games – whether you're sitting there in ARK or Minecraft or whatever, punching a tree for wood, that wood is free, right? If this eventually becomes an element, it will be difficult for this element to have value, because all this wood comes from a non-zero sum economy. That's where I think, whether it's metaverse or whatever, it's going to be the hardest part to solve. I think it works really well with cosmetic items, but it's struggling to work with functional items, at least from a business perspective.
Source link
