Blockchain Gaming: Huge Opportunity for 2 Billion Gamers?

Hey guys, welcome to San Francisco and welcome to Game Developers Conference. This is the largest gathering of game developers, the guys who make the largest video games in the world. So we got like pretty much everyone with a yellow badge like this. They're a game developer here, so you can guess it's pretty big. So why the interest in gaming? Because there's 2.2 billion gamers in the world. Just look at this clip from E3 I took last year. The number of gamers just rushing up checking out the newest games. That's a hell of a lot of people. And if those people can get access to blockchain and crypto, that would be crazy. There's also a lot of money in play here. So $100 billion revenue globally for gaming market. And with that perspective, the movie industry is only $50 billion. So double off the movie industry. We're here at GDC to check out all the cool blockchain projects. Let's go take a look. And make sure you watch the entire video because somewhere in this video, there's going to be a free giveaway QR code. If you scan that QR code with your engine wallet, you get some special ERC-1155 items. So this is the expo floor. And it's getting bigger and bigger every year. Pretty much all the big companies are here trying to get game developers on board on their platform. Yeah, people are asking, like, you know, how do I attach metadata to an item? Is it all centralized? Are items going to be overpowered in one game and crappy in another game? And it's all game design questions. It was so cool. Much, much different than a year ago, even. And in many ways, gaming has always embraced the forefront of technology. So just behind me, that's a Google booth. They showed off cloud gaming this year. And honestly, it actually works really well. Okay. Ruthlessly, savagely kill everyone here. They had a live demo of Google Stadia, the live streaming platform. And I was so suspicious that this performance was being faked that I got the Google employee to show me that it's running on a Chromebook and it's real. And it's really exciting to see all of these pieces fit into place and have a deliverable product. We're seeing a lot of VR stuff and a lot of AR. Of course, there's going to be a lot of failures along the way. But at the end of the day, they delivered an actual product. And that's what I kind of want to see with blockchain gaming. To have it really shine out, have a new gameplay style that really fits this new piece of technology. And we really need to ask ourselves a question. With so many gamers, so many game developers, why aren't they picking up? Why are they jumping onto the blockchain space? In many ways, this could be summarized in one of the interactions I had here. When I just talked to a game developer and she instantly rolled her eyes when I said, oh, I'm interested in blockchain games. Unfortunately, for most of last year, there weren't very good deliverable products in the blockchain space. And coupled with a lot of ICO scams, people didn't really know how to talk about blockchain games and their benefits. This year, it's very different. A lot of that noise and dust and those scammy projects that can't deliver anything, that's gone. It's awesome. It's awesome. Like over here, like we have so much going on in the booth, right? Like we have our Unity SDK live, showing it off to people live. We have all these early adopter games, showing off their games. People can play them. I played some of them for the first time. It was really awesome. We have like Cats and Mechs, Age of Rust, Rebounce, Bitcoin Hodler. Bitcoin Hodler. Yeah. I love that game. It's so fun. I have the alpha on my phone and I've been playing it all night. It's awesome. Nice. So for you, it's just like seeing your baby in action, right? You've been like making this stuff in a space for a while and now people are actually using it. It's surreal because we had to build all these components before it could all work, right? So we had to build the wallet, the platform, the smart contracts, get the standard out there, get all these pieces together, make it easy to use. And now we're seeing like people creating stuff spontaneously. Even like, you know, Six Dragons posted some videos like a few days ago about them just making enchanted items. And like all these games are finally working and you can play them. It's amazing. You know, like the language they have in these terms of services, I feel is very unacceptable. In fact, some language used by these lawyers or whatever, like these companies, I feel like they essentially look down on the user, right? It's weird because, you know, when you have a multiplayer game and there's so much social interaction, each player essentially, they're spending their time. They're actually building on top of the game, right? Like it's not, it's not far fetched to say that, right? No. So yeah, I guess it makes sense then that players time put in, right? When they generate rewards like ones and zeros, right? Like they should be able to trade them and take them somewhere else. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having games in the blockchain? Immediately, what comes to mind is real item ownership. We have this idea of a non-fungible token and these tokens, you can own them exactly like how you own, say, an ERC-20 token. Just basically put that in your wallet and you have full control over that. Just like how there are exchanges for trading ERC-20 tokens, there's also trade platforms for trading non-fungible tokens like Opskins. And recently, there's so much excitement for crypto gaming as well. Tron announced a $100 million blockchain gaming fund. Ripple pretty much did the same thing. And during the course of the conference, I saw guys from both Seller Network and ZeroX there as well, just attending talks and trying to figure out how to fit into this whole ecosystem. In many ways, a blockchain video game has to be built from the ground up. Think of how cryptic kitties worked. At the essence, it put these kitties and immortalized them on a blockchain. It made use of the fact that the blockchain is forever and you can even breed past the blockchain. These ideas are novel and really not included in any other game that we see today. Another huge advantage of being a crypto is that value transfers are next to nothing and they're cross-borders. And that's exactly what we're doing on Player. We've been designing systems for value transfer between amateur esports enthusiasts to coach each other and create a platform for that. You can't just use blockchain like a simple database. Gaming already has databases designed for video games that are already sharded like the MonacoDB and can scale infinitely horizontally with free transaction costs for the game developer to provide. So you can't really compete directly with that stuff there. You must really capture what is valuable about blockchain. Being able to have that ownership, being able to transfer value across games, or simply break items apart using that reserve value system that we were talking about earlier. So all these factors need to be built into the game from the ground up. And that's it for GDC. Everything has just come and passed so quickly for me. It just felt like two hours. But I think that's what happens when you're surrounded by really good people and solid people that can deliver on technology. It's a very big stark contrast from a lot of the cryptocurrency conferences I go to where it's all about money. It's all about trying to raise the most amount of capital, cost the most amount of FOMO in the shortest amount of time possible. Here in the gaming space, it's very different. And I want to give you guys a big tip as well. So one of the questions I've always asked in this space is what can you do with blockchain that can't be done elsewhere? This is because a lot of people think that blockchain is a giant database and they just want to port a normal database on the blockchain. But why the hell would you do that? What's the additional advantages? That's not the right question to ask. The real question is what can you only do on a blockchain? What are the best parts of this project that can not be replicated by any other system? That is what's going to make this better than everything else because it can't be replicated. And it really bums me out when people don't ask those right questions. Guys, thank you all so much for watching this video. 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