Blockchain + Gaming: Dominating Game Developers Conference (GDC 2018)

Welcome to the Game Developer Conference. This is where all the games get made and I didn't know it was going to be like this epically huge this year. So these guys aren't just gamers but they're game developers. This is the perfect ground of all new games. It's where all the ideas kind of merge together, teams get formed, indie games get made and big games, big ideas get made too. And what I'm here to be excited to show you guys is what blockchain is doing in this space this year. What's in there? That's pretty cool. We used our Unity SDK and we made this little dungeon crawler sort of Diablo-like game where you can run around with this guy. This gold here is actually a cryptocurrency item. So you pick up a gold coin and this will actually get sent over to this wallet right here. The player has a wallet here and they have two items. They have an amulet and they have gold. So they show up in Minecraft with your gold and your amulet and stuff. Now what we can do is Pat can send a sword to the smaller one right? Yeah, I do. Address. Okay. Ready? Set now. Send it to the wrong address. I probably wouldn't. I'm going to go. I'm going to go. I'm going to go. There it is. Oh, somebody sent me gold. Someone did? Oh wait, someone sent me gold. Is that you? You got a sword! Matt just sent you gold. And I got it. Oh, Matt's got a sword? Okay. Can we get the sword to appear on Minecraft? Yes. I can do that. I can do that. Yeah? Boom! Boom! Whoa! Alright, so from there to there. To the blockchain to there. Oh, okay. From there to the blockchain to here. Yeah. And then to the blockchain to there. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the nerdiest shit ever. So we got like, I'm actually teaching people how to make video games. And like you can see that it's already packed. So this is for the Unreal Engine. And they're teaching people how to track shaders together to make better objects. Hey! Hey! Oh, it's CryptoKitties. It's CryptoKitties. Hey, look. Alright, alright. Oh, you're wearing this shirt. Wow. Yes, I'm wearing a CryptoKitties shirt. Yeah, I'm actually very surprised about the amount of blockchain games and platforms that are here. Yeah. It's my first GDC. Oh, right. Nice. So I don't know what I came in with expectations, but I thought, oh, maybe it's still very fresh. How's CryptoKitties doing? What's the best cat right now? The best cat? I'm not even too sure. I don't play the game because I'm not allowed to own the cat. Oh, you're not allowed to own cats? Yeah, I'm not allowed to own cats. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah, the core team, we're not allowed to own cats because of kitty inside trading. We don't want to have that. Oh, inside kitty trading. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How's new updates as all? Are you updating your cats as well? Yes. Yeah. We're here kind of in discussions of Korean and Japanese partners, publishing partners. And, you know, in about a month, a month and a half, maybe two, you'll see what we've been working on. Awesome. We can't talk too much about it yet, but beyond just using tokens as a replacement of virtual coins with digital assets and thinking even deeper than that, right? Yeah, it's been interesting to have these conversations of these game publishers and get some thinking about beyond like, oh, let's just create a token where you could use and play with all your games like the Tencent token, right? Yeah. Like, why don't you think about imagining these experiences, these worlds where then the objects, these items are on the blockchain as well and they can live for thousands of years. Exactly. So I think that blockchain opens up a whole new door for gaming styles. It's a completely different platform and deals with genuine asset ownership on top of the ability to really save history in a genuine owned way that hasn't been able to be done before. We'd love to develop some of our games in a way that we actually could use each other's assets because we see this as a group effort. We want to build a community that can, you know, have more than one game to play. So it's not an independent thing that they have to start over every single time. When it comes to Bitcoin or when it comes to other cryptocurrencies, what's the, you know, what's the killer app? Right. I think, I think gaming is kind of that next step to really, you know, bring it to, you know, bring it to a general awareness. And I think adding, adding blockchain capabilities and adding cryptocurrency into games is an important evolutionary step for cryptocurrency. So pineapple arcade is kind of like a retro 80s style arcade where we're taking all the old elements of our case that we loved as kids. Right. Right. We're trying to, not revolutionize, but reinvent it in a new medium. So we were contacted by the Pineapple Fund in order to build an arcade full of prizes. You know, we wanted to build on the puzzles that, you know, Margarita is famous for that we've been including in the on district and then expand upon that. Okay. Basically make this massive project, a platform in which you'll have puzzles hidden everywhere. People can win prizes as small as, you know, if you coin by playing coin man, or you can win a prize as big as 10 Bitcoin. Oh, really? You can win a prize as big as 10 Bitcoin. I think everyone wants to play that now. So I'll put a link down below for the Pineapple Arcade. How do you want to achieve no fees for a player? We're going to be using, we're building something called affinity, which is a technique of merging many transactions together, hashing that, and then whoever wants to commit it to the blockchain for proving fraud, they can do that. Right. The people who are doing those transactions will not need to actually pay transactions. Okay. So if I play a video game, I don't really need to do anything, right? No. Our goal here is to make it as seamless for players as possible. So they can just start playing a game, not even have a wallet. Right. They'll get their items into like a purgatory. Right. And then they can like get the wallet and then get their items whenever they feel like it. So we want the lowest barriers to adoption. Right. So once it can be purgatory, but once they get it on the wallet, then they can trade it or do anything you want. Exactly. Awesome.