 joining it, but we should probably get started. Great. You were live. And I'll drop the link to the YouTube live stream and the Zoom chat because sometimes people ask questions there too. So just if you want to keep an eye on both places. Oh yeah, that'd be helpful. Thank you. Okay. Okay. It's getting started, I guess. So all right. Well, not with live here. Well, welcome everybody. Hi, this is Sandy Youngwall. I'd like to welcome you all on behalf of the Hyperlator Gaming Subgroup. So Hyperlator Gaming Subgroup is basically, as you would have guessed by the name, is an open source community of folks who are interested in the intersection of blockchain and gaming. And we are specifically interested in basically coming up with the best practices and architectural framework for use of blockchains in the gaming industry where applicable in a practical way, hoping to stay away from the hype. And as part of this, we basically have a learn and do approach where basically we really want to learn from the industry exports like a file. And that's why we invited the file here. And by going to detail use cases and by doing experimentation with an iterative approach. So what we're going to have in the series of discussions with different history exports starting with the file. And that brings us to Rafael. So Rafael, I'll just say a couple of kick words about him. And then of course you'll see what kind of work they've done, you know, some of the slides. So Rafael is actually an industry veteran of more than 25 or 26 years. He's been in the gaming industry and game design development. And he's worked across multiple studios, very prominent ones, including Looking Glass, ID Software, working with John Kamak at the Genesis of VR back in 2011, I guess. And Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, and Nintendo, just to name a few. Currently, file is the founder and CEO of Symbols.io. And they specialize in producing virtual concerts for likes of Roblox. And Prominent One, the Little Lance X concert, was actually the second largest virtual concert by audience. So without much further delay, I'll give you a file. A file, thank you. All right. Good, good. So hello, everybody. I'm going to be looking at the intersection of blockchain and gaming. It's a hot topic today. Especially kind of where we are in the news with the NFT bubble. There's a lot of activity. And frankly, this is an area that the game industry itself is trying to make sense of. So I guess I'll start by saying that there's no easy answers. And these are my perspectives coming at this. But I'm trying to look at this not just from the moment, but from a historical perspective. So I'll dive into some of that. First, let's start this sharing again. Let's see here. Okay. Let's make sure we can see this. Perfect. Good. So the intersection of blockchain and gaming. There we go. Okay. Yeah, there's a little bit of lag. Not too much. Good, good. Okay. So who am I? I'm a traditional game designer. I've done some consulting on casual, but a lot of my experience is kind of core games across PC, console, mobile. And then more recently, my group has been diving into things with Roblox, probably the two biggest of which are the Little Nas X concert and the 21 in 2020 and the 21 pilots concert in 2021. Now, we're the kind of primary high res concert provider for Roblox are going to be continuing to do things with them. And we're using that as a jumping off point to find our own space and pacing in virtual events as everybody begins to talk about the metaverse. I will say that I'm not going to intentionally talk about the metaverse here. It's a thing that I could wax poetic on for hours. It's sadly ironic because we're still so far from it. But there's a lot of ground to get to it. And I really want to talk more about the ground going towards it rather than the ill defined inspiration that comes out of film and books that we will eventually get to if we're lucky. So I want to start first with this. Technology is not a religion Bitcoin or otherwise. We are in a space now where quite a number of people are treating treating Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and NFTs as a religion. But I think that we can all come from the perspective that there's a lot of really interesting technology there. And we need to put it into perspective. I come from kind of a training that I can remember sitting down with my former Boston mentor, John Carmack, and he was always very clear about the notion that when we were building, we were platform and device agnostic, that we were building first and foremost for whatever devices were in front of us. And we're optimizing for those that we would use a mixture of what was local on device and what could support that online. And the important thing was to take what was there, whether we were working at that point for PC, for console, for mobile, experimenting with bits of VR. This was effectively a little bit more than 10 years ago, but the notion that these were all computing devices. And the most important thing was to make them sing. It was not to put one above the other, but to know that these were just different user interfaces for getting it computing. So with that in mind, I'm going to balance this with some text heavy bits. I'm not going to read those out and some graphics, but I want to just have us think about some of the key aspects of things that are game technology. Consoles to PC that start to then get balanced out with this thread of online from ARPANET to BitNet to the internet. Optical storage changed things drastically. The GPU is kind of the other big thing. But then there's been this interesting mixture of mobile and cloud that took a while to sort out where they fit and blockchain in that is something that is still trying to find its pacing specifically within this overall channel of game technology. So this isn't really here to dive into the bits, but to just give you kind of a top line perspective. There have been this interesting range of PC and console and handheld technology flowing back and forth over a fairly long period. But what does that really mean? Going to revenue. And I want to try to give a few different perspectives on this, but things started off really with arcade games. Then console comes in, then handheld, then PC and mobile and then VR. And these things are all moving and growing at different paces. The sense that we go from kind of one computing paradigm to another and that most of these have been device, at least to our current understanding, where other things play a supporting role because of the primacy of basically running 3D where possible on the device. So just going back here for a second, I just want to note that this kind of wraps up in the roughly 2018-2019 period. And what's interesting there, if you look at the end of it, is that this was starting to get up, I think it crests at about $139 billion for the total size of this gaming market. And then in 2020 and 2021, it grows drastically under the pandemic. Basically, everybody goes online, everybody buys devices. And that's what's led to our semiconductor and supply chain shortage in a large part, is this notion that everyone's at home, everyone's on Zoom calls, everyone is buying devices, everyone is trying to deal with the pandemic in different ways, but using similar tools and processes and computing for it. And so we go to $159 billion and $180 billion with a massive amount of growth that is starting to even out, but is not stopping. It's just slowing its acceleration a little bit. So monetization, again, just kind of for this overall perspective, from arcades to consoles to personal computers, bulletin boards, PC shareware, PC MMOs, console online, mobile free to play. You'll see this shortly in terms of specific timeline, but PC console online games as a service actually coming into play coherently in the last decade. And then this experiment with blockchain just in the last really year to kind of year and a half that we're trying to make sense of. And a little bit before that, the rise and then crash of ICOs and now the bubble of NFTs. So what that has meant is that we have this timeline where you can see arcades grow and peak and trail off and basically die for the most part during the pandemic. Console has had its crash in the 80s and came back effectively in simplifying it from Atari to Nintendo. And then we've had PC start in the 80s and be fairly consistent, but handheld grow and then technically really kind of fold into console and then the rise of mobile as we get into effectively the aughts and then the teams and then mobile take off to where it's become the largest part of game monetization. Really effectively by kind of subsuming the beginnings of what we're first in PC of web gaming. And then there's this tiny sliver of VR and effectively it's a thing that's always changing because there's this mixture of what are the delivery mechanisms and those change over time as we shift our computing paradigms from one to the next and also as we widen the market we bring more people in. So with these I'm just going to kind of show you show all of you a handful of different things for comparison. I'll be frank, I'm going to bypass PC even though we're on that and it's frankly near and dear to my heart. It's where I started in this industry but the PC has been kind of a steady lifeline because it is frankly the most open. The PC is a consistent thing and then all these others have kind of moved around but there have been many notions of the death knell of PC computing and that's not going away anytime soon. So the PC has been steady, it has grown but it's kind of leveled and it's interesting then for seeing these other ones come around it. So this is showing seven or I should say from gen two to gen seven we're now in gen nine of console but console has seen this steady really mathematical linear non-exponential curve of slow kind of plotting but very consistent growth as the console market gets a little bit bigger a little bit faster each time. So mobile the interesting thing about mobile here is that and Qualcomm is very good about explaining this. Mobile is a really good illustration of the hardware computing industry moving in 30-year cycles. Qualcomm and NVIDIA talk about this but really the semiconductor folks as a whole they understand that they are building devices across generally speaking 30-year cycles and what that means is that mobile is really reaching a peak in you know 2022 that effectively goes back to about 1992 and that first 15 years of mobile was just kind of getting it set up and really it's been the last you know the last let's say 15 years of smartphones and effectively if you think about it about five years or so feature phones before that but that's why when we look at mobile and it looks like it has you know this you know the end of a hockey stick it's because the full hockey stick is there the first 15 years is growing to where we can get to that tip of the hockey stick and so you look at the iPhone curve and you see it you know in that period from 2007 to 2012 and it starts to grow quickly and you get from you know from effectively 1 million to 10 you know like a 10 to 20 to 40 to 75 to 125 it's this very quick growth and that's because it's built on the backs of 15 years of growth before that and if you go from just iPhone then over to Android and you stick iPhone into Android and you look at the overall smartphone mobile space that it's even more pronounced because of the additional volume of Android and so mobile computing basically took off in that 15 years figuring out what it needed to do and then growing exponentially at the end of that but oftentimes when people are talking about mobile and you know I was at id software in that 2000 you know that 2010 2012 period where mobile went from okay we kind of have something interesting like and I you know bought my first iPod touch going it's a computer I need to mess around with this and then going oh everyone's getting this at first it's just a handful of us going this isn't a thing I need to figure out how to play with and make sure I understand what it's doing and gradually learn how to make it sing and then you go you know effectively effectively you know you have this thing that started in 1990 and didn't have much of an impact and I can remember my father who was traveling for research getting a satellite phone and going oh you know in the 90s and going what the hell is this thing going from that to you know having a you know a Motorola feature phone and bypassing the room space but you know I can remember at EA every producer had a had a blackberry they were all glued to it but it was just the producers you know effectively the you know quote-unquote business side folks and then going oh this thing with the screen comes out I can use that and then going from that to everyone has them and then not just everyone has them but everyone globally has them and it becomes you know it grows to the point where now no one has their phone far from them and everyone has their phone in their pockets in their hands on their desks as I do right now everyone has it and it becomes your second brain and so computing goes through this in these 30-year cycles the internet right now is mirroring mobile in that they both started in 1990 neither one of them is permanent the internet will probably eventually get replaced just as Arpanet and BitNet work before the internet if we can get to a metaverse thing down the road we're at peak internet we are also at peak mobile we're seeing experiments into the next phase of both of those things with AR glasses and with metaverse and they're still very early and they're still probably about 10 to 15 to 20 years away but they need to be because the early folks are the ones who are you know in phones in the 90s and then even in the early teens before the smartphone in the future phone days and that's kind of where we are right now with blockchain I'm aware of when it started but for the impact on folks gaming has been around effectively and depending on how you want to count it since the 60s to the 70s VR actually even predates that with sensorama back in in the 50s but blockchain is still trying to figure out its impact as it is in relation to gaming so with that we're going to touch on cloud for a second because cloud is something that goes back to back to the odds and effectively AWS in 2003 and azure in 2009 and others coming off of that you know amazon is frankly the big dog in the space I can remember a point where amazon was you know 80 percent of the market now it's 33 percent there's more diversity and there's more space and this is just tracking here a few of amazon to azure to gcloud to ibm cloud alibaba cloud sales force but you know you can you can map out just the chinese cloud because it's its own thing and it's largely behind the great firewall of china this is interesting because you can you can basically see that microsoft for the most part started to make money revenue off of cloud in you know this period of roughly 2013 to 2015 tracking here from the beginning of 2015 but then it starts to take off really steadily 2016 2017 28 and and now it's become a major part of of their revenue going from microsoft to to amazon with one on the right here and this is tracking a wider range again this is tracking if you look at 2009 that's when azure started and that's when when azure started is when amazon really started to make money in cloud but you look at that that range and the period from again up to about 2013 is still very small and it's effectively the period from then around 2013 2014 up to now where it's it started to grow you know you know almost exponentially the the impact is is huge where it was not before and then the other thing i want to highlight is is that especially in the enterprise space cloud is is is basically taking over that and and what this is tracking is the amount of overall software to to the amount of cloud where to be fair this is going up to 2032 but what this is saying is that there's an expectation that around about 2024 2025 that half the software globally will be running on cloud that there's this assumption um you know whether it happens or not that more and more software is is growing i i actually believe that a good amount will stay on device but that there's going to be this mixture of cloud and edge and blockchain and we're still finding the balance and we're still finding the hybridization because in my mind nothing absolutely nothing ever replaces a certain amount of code execution on the device side but we're learning to support and right now we're mostly learning from cloud because cloud has this history going back to AWS in 2003 and so this is you know we're now going to kind of transition into blockchain but i i wanted folks to understand that looking at this especially as it comes into games but in a lot of other fields as well um the interesting thing is going how did mobile impact how did cloud impact what lessons do you take from each because mobile and cloud have both drastically affected games so now we're going to dump heavily into games and blockchain but i wanted that that grounding for everybody and i hope that was helpful so this was a survey that came out just a few weeks ago this is a survey that i believe was taken in the period of December to January of this year and this is setting up for the game developers conference which happens out every march in san francisco and this is asking game developers who are connected into gdc and the igda the game developers conference and the international game developers association what is your interest in cryptocurrency as a as a payment tool most are not interested what is your studio's interest in nfts most are not interested that can change but i wanted to highlight that because the biggest thing that's impacting that is the current state of the nft bubble and the amount of negative press because of how people are going into it and because of what is being announced and it's not a fundamental view of the technology it's where we right now what's going on right now and how is that impacting people and when they're reading industry news what are they looking at and how is that shaping their perspective and and frankly when they're reading mainstream news and they're hearing about things how is that affecting what they're what they're going to develop on and and the reason is because the reaction to this very loose range of web 3 nft blockchain cryptocurrency that are mashed together and they're different things but the reaction to that as a whole is fundamentally different than the reaction to mobile and fundamentally different to the reaction to cloud because with mobile some people immediately loved it and a lot of other folks were like ah i don't quite know what that is but the monetization for mobile happened slower than people believe i remember it really well and it took four to five years the interesting thing about that with mobile is that where it changed is everyone got smartphones and when everyone got smartphones no one really hated mobile some people were like i want to i want to develop on i don't want to develop on it but no one said i don't want it to exist because everyone's like well i've got a smartphone and all the game developers got smartphones faster than just about anyone else other than other technology folks everyone in technology adopted first and so that's the thing to think about is nobody hated on mobile because everyone had one no one hated on cloud because people started using it behind the scenes at id software we were using cloud you know going back to about 2009 we were baking mega textures in aws and gpu early g you know kind of rough gpu clouds so cloud became an early foundational tech mobile became an ubiquitous everyone's got one blockchain still needs to kind of find its pacing and find its path and that's going to determine what people think of it so i'll try to keep this going quickly because i know i'm going through a lot here and i'm a little bit behind schedule so zip through these the ico phase the simplest thing to say about the ico phase is that there's a point especially here in san francisco where everyone was talking icos they took over from from vr they became the new big thing everyone went into them everyone was doing them everyone started to love them or hate them and there was and they were polarizing and then they all started to crash and coming out of them there were a lot of people who lost a lot of money in them and it failed and it failed really fast so i'll i'll just leave it at that everyone has different kind of feelings on them but some of those icos that succeeded that did not fail that continued they still they went into the current nft phase so it's important to keep that in context because a bunch of the negative feeling around ico sorry around nfts comes from memory of the icos that were really just a few years ago and that affected the development community i would say more than anything else so how has blockchain interacted with games most coherently not only but most coherently it is now this nft phase where you've got a bunch of folks going from very different perspectives going why don't gamers understand nfts and it's because it's a bubble it's too quick too soon it's got people piling in that are not the technologists it's taking a thing where even this notion of nfts has been around for about 10 years and there have been nft growth before that but it has not gone into effectively this range of fine arts and pop culture arts and a little bit of affecting the hollywood range of kind of the passive arts of film tv music and animation and then coming over into games and games is where it has been most negatively received and i think in some ways it's because people are still sore about icos but also the people going into it who have a financial background or financial stake are coming into a thing thinking that it's the easiest thing for nfts to go into when games are going but we already kind of do 95 percent of this we don't have a thing up on a blockchain but all of these concepts came out of us and now you're pushing them back to us with a twist telling us to do these things that we already kind of do but now we have to do them while somebody is trying to make a fast buck on them and the financial aspect is the trickiest because we are concerned about our consumers and this is what gamers see this is a hilarious bit from the most recent south park but this is what gamers see gamers are terrified right now because they believe they're being set up to be exploited i mean i've literally seen you're trying to turn us all into whales and then you want to carve us up there's this feeling that in this bubble yeah it's a bit of the dot-com bubble but there's this feeling of you're trying to set us up to gut us and it's an existential fear and the market is not helping and so coming out of that it's trying to get away from that and go to something more positive that is not exploitation so how can blockchain interact with games mostly i would say it's repeat the path of cloud but also look at the practicalities of mobile because the reality is that cloud went in and brought in useful things and showed that they're useful and got adopted just behind the scenes we all started using cloud first just in our development processes and then to roll stuff out and have it used more widely and to reach more folks and go hey this is actually better than bare metal we've got to run a thing online and we'll spin up this cloud instance and it will sit there and it's and cloud enabled us to go to better platforms and to go cross device and so that's the thing to keep in mind is that cloud has been adopted because we just kind of went well we kind of have to use it because it just does these things that we need and it's showing that there is stuff that you need and then going you know and it started with like oh i can dump my mega textures onto on onto the aws cloud and instead of having my machine churning for four hours i'll get something back from aws in 45 minutes that to us at id was magic i mean we knew exactly what it was doing we'd set it up but we're like this is perfect it's not tying up my machine i just have to go into this into this custom web browser and just look at how my thing is baking and we're like that's that's gold you make developers lives easier and they love you for it because they're like hey aws is just doing my thing and my machine isn't locked up that's great then microsoft came around and and the rise of asher started to fold into this notion of xbox and all of these useful and interesting features and services that they were trying to find ways to get connected into and demonstrate in microsoft game studios products and xbox and we're going oh i could actually use that that bit of machine learning that machine translation i could use these things so it's taking lessons from that and so how is blockchain interacting with games now game publishers and developers that are in the traditional space are getting burned by nfts for the most part not everybody but in some are just being very careful about language but there are a lot of high profile projects that or or developers or publishers they're talking about things and the public reaction is so negative that they are about facing things that they might have been planning for months or more for a year you know we'll tell you a year or so they're changing in 24 hours meanwhile and and it's happening because they have revenue they have products they have roadmaps and blockchain for the most part is an ancillary thing and nfts were a cherry on top but they're not going we're going to make all of our money from that startups on the other hand oftentimes are being driven entirely by investors and they and a lot of these blockchain let's say nft startups i think is really what we should call many of them at this point or nft game startups a lot of them do not have as their core staffing traditional folks from the pc console space even a lot of them don't have mobile they have some mobile developers they have web developers social media developers it's new folks coming in and that's okay but they are over promising and under delivering and they're selling a lot of nfts and they're doing it with no understanding of what is needed to actually make anything and so there's a certain amount of i hope they don't screw up and i hope they don't make us look bad and how much of their stuff is going to disappear and i honestly expect half of the nft game projects to to basically close up shop within the next year or two years regard like it's not about money yeah then they got some money and usually they don't have enough but in the game industry we've had lots and lots of projects that had enough money spent it the wrong way built the wrong things built multiple times over through away things it's never about the money and that's the thing that people who are pushing nfts need to understand it's about the intersection of art and technology to make something that you can't plan and that you can only iterate to achieve when you are trying to make games when you're trying to make vr virtual worlds anything in that space you can guess and how much experience and how much judgment is what gets you there but you can never put together a rock solid plan and you can never write a white paper ever so how does the game industry the nfts i'm not going to read all these i'm just going to kind of call them out you can dive into these i'll make my deck available a lot of these are in the news but i'll just start with tim's quote which i love for being um we are touching we aren't touching nfts as as the whole field is currently tangled up with an interactable mix of scams interesting decentralized tech foundation and scams now he changed this um but he changed it to spite uh his competitor valve steen he's not changing his core revenue but he's making space within egs for a thing because he knows that steen isn't and he's and they're still trying to figure what the hell they're actually going to do with it and they don't know um but everyone's guessing so why does the game industry care about about scams or about bad behavior in nfts that are reflected on blockchain and crypto because video games has a thing that's been around since the 60s um that started to really gain traction in the 70s and has been going for a good long while now effectively six you know depending on how you want to count either five or six decades we are still a new medium compared to tv animation music uh film um and we still have legislators especially in the eu the us the uk who think of games as being for children um and because of that gambling laws are very real um legislation around child endangerment data privacy in general child data privacy are very real and what we know is that we the video game or the game industry can get hit by legislation when parents go to legislators and go won't somebody please think of the children and it doesn't matter that most the people playing are now adults it just matters if children have access to your thing and they spend their parents money and the parents complain that is across that we the game industry have to bear and that anyone coming in has to bear with us so um there's a platform response which is that everyone's basically trying to fade into the background and go yeah we're not really ready to deal with this thing so nintendo microsoft sony apple google steam epic also a bit of like 10 cent and samson all these folks that have platforms they are one concerned about blockchain circumventing payment processing because that is where they get their cut they take 30 percent the developer publisher mix takes 70 percent so they are concerned they will only consistently allow the stuff on when they figure out how to get their let's say 20 to 30 percent maybe it is by having their own blockchains maybe it is by banning blockchains maybe it is by participating and having their own systems with their own nodes there's any number of solutions but they don't know fully yet and most of them are doing different bits of kind of censoring and soft bands and pulling things and being very quiet about it because everyone's still trying to figure out this thing that they don't quite know if they want to live with this so here again I won't go into all these we're just going to zip through these but EA is like yeah we're going to know we're not going to say it's like yeah we're kind of going to but unless it seems like money-making and then we're not going to take two is like yeah we're kind of already doing all this just not on the blockchain but we have everything that you have already and we have it in GTA. Ubisoft is like yeah we got this thing oh nobody loves it team 17 is like oh we're doing a thing 24 hours later we're not the the stalker folks at GSC oh we're doing a thing actually we're not Square Enix we're doing something we're using it we're not going to say anything about how but we've kind of got a thing Konami is basically going yeah so we're going to sell some stuff oh we made you know a hundred and forty thousand dollars great it doesn't really affect we're probably going to do more it doesn't affect our bottom line and epic going yeah we're really not going to use it definitely not going to use it fortnight oh steam just said they're definitely not going to use it we're going to use it but we're not going to say how we don't actually host any games we're going to review everything but we're not really going to say what we're going to do but it's going to be kind of there so it's this really confusing mess of things and how is this different from mobile mobile went in and the devices grew it was driven by the devices and nobody just said hey i'm putting up a medium blog or a white paper and we're doing this thing no they just went out and sold because the devices grew and the population grew and you saw this step like people talk about play to earn play to earn is bullshit i'm sorry but you can't just go hey we're talking about a thing we've mentioned it a handful of times on facebook and on linkedin therefore it exists free to play they just went out and did it and then you went okay there are about three variations on free on free to play and i can see like the appointment dynamics are here the consumable stuff is here the durable stuff is here they're finding this mix but a they're taking stuff that was kind of already in um facebook and web gaming and be they're putting it out and i can go on to phones and i can find 10 15 20 examples immediately and they're making money it's real when you're making money off of it not when you're talking about it talk is cheap and we all do it and i'm doing it right now but people go out in mobile and from 2012 to 2021 they took over a chunk of the game industry by expanding it and bringing new people in they didn't initially try to cannibalize they just went and said we're bringing all these other folks in so that's incredibly important so with that here's a really quick grounding and i won't go into the specifics of these but just this is a scale effectively triple i to single a to double a to triple a to quadruple a and then you got this blockchain thing over here that's kind of still almost being funded at least initially like oh yeah we raised a bunch of nfts now we can grow but the initial funding is kind of the scale of like building an expensive website not you know an enterprise website but like a expensive commercial website where it's smaller than building a mobile game and that's crazy especially because people are looking at it and going oh this is going to be amazing and you're seeing a bunch of concept art and some pre-rendered videos and people are raising a ton of money on nothing and so on the one hand kudos for raising money but on the other hand do they know what they're doing because those six guys in the middle that's my old boss on the left john karmak with kevin cloud adrian karmak tom hall john armiro and j wilbur six of those guys built wolfenstein and they knew what they were doing because they built the commander king games five or six of those before them and they went on after wolfenstein to doom they grew steadily and they grew along the scale and the recent reboot of doom that kevin cloud and john karmak were still on that was in that triple a phase and then you know and the next one will be in the quadruple they scaled all through this and they understood it games understand this range of experiences and everything is tied to money and time and people as you get through it so what is game development i'm not going to go into all this but basically just to say it's this range of specializations art and animation design programming and engineering audio production and then behind the scenes publishing which partially mirrors production all of these things are needed back in the day we just wore lots of hats but we did pretty much all this still back then with fewer people you get to more people and bigger teams and there's more specialization but this core notion of these art and animation design programming and engineering audio production these are consistent everything that we make needs this and so you've got folks going in with nft's going we've got some concept art we've got some economy design we've got a little bit of community management and we're putting together a roadmap great we can go write a white paper and we can put up a web page and we can and we can raise money and people in the game industry are going no you need to fucking make something like get something running like if you're going to raise money show us that you have a thing in motion or at least have at least have a production plan that looks realistic and have a deck you know maybe you don't have a gdv but like have a pitch deck that shows all the pieces of your thing and how it fits together white paper and like that that's where the game industry is struggling to understand the notions that nft's are trying to bring in because they look like nonsense and we're basically going you don't have a plan and you're not going to be able to make a thing and your thing's going to fall apart and you're going to burn everyone who goes in on it because you don't understand what you're making and that's scary because those of us in the game industry are in it mostly because we love it there are more and better things to do if you want to make money faster than make games yes it is the biggest industry in the world but game makers traditionally are not the wealthiest people in the world we do this because we love it and we understand what we're making and we share it and we'll talk about it but we want people to know what they're doing because everyone who's in it has battle scars everyone's been in the trenches everyone has lost sleep and and been in crunch because of the craziness that is the unpredictability of making games game development is hard i won't go into all this but there is this notion everyone in games knows this it comes out of traditional engineering but we took it on it's you get 90 percent of the way through you finally know what you have you're deep in the middle of the thing and then you get then you start up the other 90 percent and the remaining 10 percent is going to take another 90 percent of time and and i can remember both john karmic and tim sweeney individually saying this directly i'm taking it out of engineering then george basard going oh yeah like and george was literally you know he's um the founder of 3d realms going back to the duke newton jays and he was literally literally replying to tim sweeney and we're like you forgot the other the middle 90 percent um and then i think there's another person who's like oh and then there's there's another 90 percent in polishing there's this notion that like it's it's never done and it's always complex and it always takes more work than you think it will and that actually gets to my quote at the end um which i had said a while back which is that you can't make a great game the first time out no matter who you are you make a you make a good game with a great team figure out who you have what your pipeline is what your process is and then you're going to make a great game when you have a team that has previously made a good game together because you have to recognize how many 90 percent you have sitting in front of you so online games are doubly hard um remember that this is this is being shared out to everyone afterwards you can go through this raff coaster fantastic developer and and a great human being raff was the lead designer for ultima online um he was also the director for star wars galaxies and he's been involved at this point i think in like five or six large m mows at one point he went around the california and texas mmo community and he started collecting rules um his his rules of online world design if something can you know high roops loop a lot something can be abused it will be um there are a ton of these we're running out of time i won't go through all of them but what i want to stress is that there is this collective understanding of 30 years of online game design that it is harder more complex more curious and more mercurial than anyone realizes until they dive into it so anytime someone new is coming in we go you're about to get screwed we'll help you out as much as we can we'll show you a bunch of stuff but it's going to hurt and it does um and so there are a ton of these uh these rules players have higher expectations of the virtual world than the real one um the psychological disinhibition of if you have anonymity people will be jerks um the mass market problems of your administrative problems will increase exponentially and not linearly the notion that violence either direct or social psychological will be done if you allow people to interact in the world no matter what happens we do not as an industry believe that you can just let people go into utopia and they will treat each other well and they will self police and they can just set up a bunch of daos and run everything we know from historical fact that some portion of that that audience will always destabilize the rest and that the people who are paying expect a good experience you have to police you have to moderate you have to curate you have to deal with hackers you have to help people push and shape into a right thing and there can be a hybrid between even in a social order between centralization and decentralization but you cannot have pure decentralization because it is chaos in games so there's an identity crisis um do you want to let people have a speculative penny stock a unit of currency a functional utilitarian utilitarian tool you you know the typical triangle of good fast and cheap you can never have all three what we see here is that you can have two of these kind of you can have one of these really well you can try to do three and you'll tear yourself apart what does that mean that we don't really know what we're going into with blockchain gaming people hold up axie infinity axie infinity is an outlier and it's not really a game it's a gamified economy and it is the equivalent of pokemon go where for a few years people said hey this is just the the beginning of the tip of the iceberg of all these mobile AR games and then none of the other ones ever got um an audience and mobile AR as an overall industry trend crashed there's still mobile AR technology and there's still people messing around and it's going more local but there is no field of mobile AR gaming there is no revenue other than one thing axie infinity is currently that you cannot prove an industry through one thing so what do we have right now we have nft land sales which are basically so trying to sell the the the brooklyn bridge or trying to sell people that they own a star it's not that it can't become something but in the view of the game industry if you haven't made a thing before if you don't know what you're making you tell a bunch of people in the current market you can sell that and they will buy that but you are selling hot air and traditionally that is seen as criminal the person who tried to sell the brooklyn bridge was was put in jail you cannot sell a thing that is either in the public common or that is effectively that doesn't exist upland right now is trying to sell stuff that are effectively in the in the public common i'm hoping that they get knocked down because they should not be able to sell people's addresses that maps AR the notion of connecting to addresses great but speculating on that worries me selling things that don't exist is a lot of what the games and nft is doing right now because the people who are promising them have no idea the pain that they're going to have in adhering to the contract for the sale that they made before they've actually made anything virtual item sales and avatar sales are the other part and those are fraught with disaster because they run massive risks of changing the balance of the game and forcing you to re-change it and the biggest example that i can bring up is blizzard and diablo three they set up the real money auction house and that real money auction house broke diablo three and they had to close it down despite the fact that it was the most successful thing that they had ever put out it was causing new people to come in less and it was causing people to stop playing and to just purchase and they basically sat down and looked at it and said this kills our gameplay this kills our game do we only want the auction house and they said no and they shut it down the point is it's really hard to balance a game and an economy together and this gets to my question and i'm just about done here so we'll get wrapped up and we're on time or well we're cresting at that time is that do you want to make a game or do you want to make an economy anyone going into nft gaming is going to have to ask this question because you cannot have your your cake and eat it too and connected in with that is that play to earn and what i call pay to exploit p to e is an unproven guess it's a thing that we don't actually know it's a thing that has not yet been defined it has to be defined in practice and not in white papers and what we see right now is that you can't have your cake and eat it too and people are trying to do that and they don't know what they're going to come up against because you cannot coherently design play and work and have them have equal value they will push at each other and one will win and you have to prioritize in games when we're doing game development you always have to prioritize your features your service your design your plans your content you have to prioritize play and work also do you want an economy first or do you want a game first a game is about play and leisure activity a work product is about productivity and knowing that you did something consistently and you cannot have the thumb on the scale on the one hand and have balance and curation on the other so what can blockchain advocates do slow down let the bubble burst find experiments learn and listen understand the space help to build consortiums help to grow and figure out standards and fight scams because there's a lot of work that needs to be done the just pointing out the hardest thing in games is raising money at the start um game developers do want help with this every new person coming into games wants to figure this out but it has to be done without locking the people into a design that is not yet done that's the problem with NFTs right now is they're locking they're pre-selling and locking in a design where the people who are who are selling it do not know the design even even if they're experienced developers like Peter Molina's group who sold I think it was 54 million in in virtual land and and Peter's fantastic and he's a veteran with more experience than I do and if you sit down and talk to him honestly he's probably excited and terrified because he has a lot of people who've been sold a lot of stuff and they have to figure out what the hell their game is because you never actually know until you're making the game so what are the issues I'm not going to go into all these but my god they're complex I could do a lecture just on these and I'm actually going to be doing a panel discussion on all of these at the game developers conference next month there are a lot of problems every problem can be solved but the issue is there are now more problems than solutions and the people who are coming in are focused on making money and not solving and so talking to your group here figuring out how to work with enterprise figuring out how to provide experiments to evolving ideas to solutions because we want to make sure that we actually solve these because the game industry always takes in new technology but we never guarantee that it's going to be a hit in the first year and it takes time to figure things out and there's a lot of work to be done I had a whole thing on interoperability that I'm mostly going to bypass it's here in my notes I will just say that interoperability easy interoperability is a myth and without going into all the complexity of a few slides I'll just say take a socket wrench jam it in a chocolate cake that's interoperability in games because every group makes their game individually they use middleware engines in different ways lots of folks still build custom engines most of the games that make money do not use unreal or unity and probably never will every major developer frankly every publisher has multiple custom engines everybody rolls their own call a duty has three different custom engines for the three different groups that make sure that call duty comes out every year they cannot be interoperable just within call a duty across years a socket wrench has measurements it's used for automotive repair it is an artificial human construction a cake is also an artificial human construction a socket wrench is not tasty a cake is not great for automotive repair there are two things built by humans for different things trying to take assets from one game to another is the socket wrench and the chocolate cake and until people realize this and stop acting like it's easy we can't actually make file format standards that can allow us to eventually do it in the future because we could have a thing where we can go the socket wrench is part of this class and the cake is part of the consumables class and this tool class and consumer we can do all that and that's going to take 10 to 20 years to it's going to take 10 years to do it and another 10 years to get people on board it's absolutely doable if we want to get towards a metaverse and shared stuff it can happen but it does not happen easily and it's really not happening now so there's a whole lot of of what can and cannot be done with interoperability but i'm just going to come back to the blockchain trilemma you guys already understand this from the perspective of security scalability decentralization you can't have all of these perfectly in that same fashion going into games specifically there is a blockchain trilemma in games of a particular thing that you bring in cannot be a penny stock a currency and a utilitarian tool right now just about every group going in is doing that it needs to be like pick one first make one your primary choice what's the secondary let the third one fall away everything coming in has to choose that because games are about hard choices so i i know i've gone a little bit over thank you guys for being for for being patient i can stay on for questions if you have them but i you know i've been dealing with this i'm actually going to be bringing this to the game developers conference we are wrestling with this issue now we're trying to make sense of it now so it's it's not an it's not an easy issue and i think there we go thank you Rafael i think that was very i'll turn it over to you yeah i think it was very very informative thank you so much i think if anybody has any questions you know please feel free to put them in the q&a here and or you can just speak up you know please feel free to unmute yourself and have your question we can be here for another couple of minutes if not thank you very much for joining in and we'll be sharing the presentation and and the recording on the wiki on the hyper leisure wiki so thank you everybody thank you i'll probably wrap it up now excellent i'll just say you guys are welcome i i do need to spend my my twitter backup i still haven't done it i've been slammed with stuff but you can feel free to reach out to me on linkedin i'm active on both facebook and and linkedin in terms of of kind of community building um gradually finding my way back on the twitter and you know if you have questions feel free to reach out i think i included my email at at the end of this if you are trying to make sense of the space we all are and i'm happy to to provide what help and guidance i i can thank you for and i think just to just to wrap up on that i guess that's one of the things we have in the gaming exactly to to basically uh be learning by learn and do and and that's exactly what we're trying to do here like you uh indicated in your i think towards the end of the year slide i think one very important thing is to cut the hype out learn and do like like do some more experiments and uh don't don't just sort of wash in with the technology don't don't make technology the religion so i think that's a very very uh self point out there um actually there's one question and and i think you'd posted it it looked like it was pretty could post it a couple of times i think that the the biggest um let's see turning it back to that question i would just say that the the biggest thing that people can learn um or what would the advantages be of decentralization of records um it would be useful to start between games across a develop one developer first because but even going from like a within a franchise um there could be potential to start there because a developer can control its own stuff in order to do early experiments in interoperability and then potentially to go to other games within a publisher um we're probably going to need a metaverse to get to um decentralization of records to be useful across the board but we already do a lot of the things just not on a blockchain and it's like the core of your question is we need to find ways to start sharing in little ways a developer to share from one of their games to another game a developer to share from one game to a sister studio's game or from one of their games to another game within the same publisher baby steps are what we need and we need to basically prove out and show hey we did this and it didn't hurt too much and we actually got some benefit out of it so like again like think of it as like the early days of mobile and cloud we have to show little things that don't affect your revenue that much but that show that they effectively save a little bit of time because down the road that will save your revenue that will grow your revenue and eventually it will provide new paths but first we have to go this doesn't put us in jeopardy we did a thing it worked we learned something new and now we've got new ideas coming off of that that is great and i think uh well we are actually looking at these exact kind of questions in our gaming subgroups so you're more than looking at john n and uh we have this conversation going on in terms of i think one of the biggest points that will file also pointed out to you is that yes it's possible but there are two critical things for sharing assets across games is you've got to have shared standards uh you can't like like in profile specification you can't just take a wrench and slam into another game you know that being a chocolate cake in this case because it's not going to mean the same thing in the other game so unless you can have shared standards and unless those standards are available across not only from technology point of view but also from legal aspects also from the context part of you it's not going to be useful in the other game and those are some of the biggest challenges in terms of sharing NFTs even across the games or coming up with shareable games i think there's probably one more question here okay that's just a critique okay i think that should be the end of our presentation i think there's any questions but please do do feel free to reach out to either your file or myself on once again uh sandy agarwal and i'll be more than happy to have you as part of the the gaming subgroup and we'll most like to be building a file back for another panel uh in in some you know in a few weeks so reach out to us if you're interested thank you thanks very much for coming in thanks everybody and and thanks for having me i'm happy to come back and yeah let's let's figure out some standards absolutely thank you all right cheers thank you thanks everybody