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In this episode of Edge of NFT, host Josh Krieger interviews Leona Hioki, CEO of Intimax, discussing the strategic significance of Asia in the crypto space, stateless digital applications, and privacy mining. The conversation also features a panel of gaming industry experts exploring the challenges and strategies for bridging Web 2 and Web 3 gaming, emphasizing the importance of quality game development and player engagement.
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Key Topics Covered:
- Stateless Architecture and Scalability: The discussion highlights the innovative concept of stateless digital applications, emphasizing their potential for extreme scalability and privacy in blockchain technology.
- Bridging Web2 and Web3: Panelists stress the importance of creating engaging games that prioritize player experience, while also exploring strategies to transition traditional gamers into the Web3 space.
- Focus on Quality and Community Engagement: The conversation underscores the necessity of building high-quality games and fostering a dedicated community, as well as the value of incorporating player feedback to enhance game development.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@edgeofnft/
Episode Highlights:
- "Stateless means that everything happens on the client side. So basically, in the blockchain space, there are a lot of nodes and block producers... in a stateless architecture, part of it is block producers almost few jobs left for them." - Leona Hioki (00:03:04-00:03:15)
- If we really don't focus on what the players want, why are we doing this, right? And what they want is a good play experience." - Min-Shi Park (00:18:02-00:18:13)
- "We need a good balance between what is the narrative of the game and incentives.” - Min-Shi Park (00:30:12-00:30:22)
For the full transcript, see further below.
People and Resources Mentioned:
- Leona Hioki LinkedIn
- Intmax Website
- Michael Skrychevsky Website
- MinChi Park LinkedIn
- Hyperplay Website
- David Fried LinkedIn
- Engines of Fury Website
- Random Games Website
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About Our Guest 1:
- Bio: Leona is involved in the development of stateless digital applications and has a focus on enhancing privacy and scalability in the blockchain space. She has been recognized for her contributions to the Plasma project and is actively working on integrating privacy solutions within the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Website: Intmax
- Twitter: @HiokiLeona, @intmaxIO
- LinkedIn: Leona Hioki
About Our Guest 2:
- Bio: Michael leverages his extensive knowledge in blockchain technology and gaming to foster innovation within the industry. He has a deep-rooted passion for gaming and has cultivated a robust network of prominent companies in the Web3 space, including Gamefly, DeFi, and NFT projects.
- Website: Random Games
- Twitter: @RandomGamesCo
- LinkedIn: Michael Skrychevsky
About Our Guest 3:
- Bio: Min-Chi is instrumental in creating strategic collaborations aimed at reshaping the gaming landscape through innovative Web3 solutions. She has been actively involved in expanding Hyperplay's game distribution platform and fostering relationships with game studios.
- Website: Hyperplay
- Twitter: @minchi_p
- LinkedIn: MinChi Park
About Our Guest 4:
- Bio: David leads creative direction and strategy for game development projects. With a rich background in game design and user experience, he has contributed to numerous successful titles across various platforms and is focused on creating engaging gaming experiences.
- Website: Engines of Fury
- Twitter: @davidkfried
- LinkedIn: David Fried
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Full Episode Transcript:
Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Krieger, co-host of Edge of NFT, live in Bangkok. It's an exciting week full of side events. We're actually at the BGA meetup right now and I'm having another great conversation. Right now it's with Leona Hioki, the CEO and co-founder of Intimax. It's great to have you on the show. Yeah, nice to meet you. So tell us a little bit more about what brought you to Bangkok for this week of dev development and side events. What brings you here?
Leona Hioki: I was staying in Chiang Mai before coming to Bangkok. Edge City, it's like a Zuzaru-style conference, and the people relax to talk with each other without any kind of packed schedule or pressure. It was good. Yeah, really uncompressed.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But what's the strategic significance of Asia for your company?
Leona Hioki: So yeah, basically we were invited to move. I had a stage. I have a stage at DEVCON Bangkok. So yeah, I came here. And also, yeah, one of the biggest Thai investors, one of the biggest Thai banks in Bangkok, Thailand. So yeah, we are quite close to there. CYRAN ecosystem regarding crypto. So our ecosystems are distributed to many regions, but yeah, you know, Southeast Asia is a very hot place. Especially real usage of crypto, no gaming, maybe there are many gaming people here right now, right?
Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah, we're a gaming event, all gamers. Makes sense, and rumor has it that Vitalik brought you up quite a lot on stage at DEVCON talking about what you guys are doing. Why are you top of mind for Vitalik these days?
Leona Hioki: So, yeah, one year ago he understood and knew exactly what we were doing. It's a stateless digital app. And also, let's say, it's a kind of inheritance of Plasma. So basically it's like a Plasma, Plastic-K. Plasma is quite an ambitious project or genre to scale up Ethereum before rollout. And people abandoned Plasma because it had a lot of problems there. But now we found that Plasma is kind of possible. Yeah, we can complete the vision of Plasma, which was So, in the simplest language possible, define for me what statelessness means. So stateless means that everything happens on the client side. So basically, in the blockchain space, there are a lot of nodes and block producers. I don't say it's a huge power, but they can do many things, right? So in our architectures, in a stateless architecture, part of it is block producers with almost few jobs left for them. And basically, user side, for example, if you're joining this network, you can get your data, you can preserve your data, and you can compute your balance with ZKP by yourself while you can inherit the whole security from the layer one. So this is a completely new direction and a new area cut out for, it's quite cut out for doing the interoperability or, yeah, cross-chain stuff. Basically, it should be like L2 interoperability, of course, and, yeah, stateless architecture is quite cut out for that.
Josh Kriger: So, what are some of the early partnerships and integrations that you're working on?
Leona Hioki: So integration, for example, we have a credit card company, which has implemented our cashback program. And also we have our DX, stateless DX, which has marvelous scalability and privacy at the same time. So I forgot to say that in a nutshell, stateless is all about having more extreme scalability and privacy at the same time. So if you make a deck from that, it should be near ZELDA's cost and private at the same time. So it's a new kind of achievement on the academic level and the production level achievement to provide for the future, right? So with applications like DX and the, you know, real-world payments and also, yeah, of course, NFT and gaming and IoT, we can do that. So if you want extreme scalability for your application, this network is well-tuned for that.
Josh Kriger: Very cool. And you also mentioned Plasma. When I think about Plasma, I think about Ghostbusters. But we're talking about a different type of Plasma. Can you break down what that's all about, too?
Leona Hioki: So the concept of Plasma is quite similar to stateless. It's posting the minimum data on-chain. Everything happens on-chain to inherit the security from the server layer. Layer 2 definition is all about inheriting the security from layer 1 to scale up. In that sense, Plasma is one of the big categories and genres of Layer 2, which is more scalable than anything else. minimum data or constant data on-chain, scale up with off-chain computing and data availability. It means that no matter how many people come into this one network, there's no traffic jam or network jam or kind of fluctuation in gas fee or transaction fee, right? So there are many, many scalability solutions in this world. But basically, most of them have been fluctuating gas markets or free markets, right? So no matter how scalable they are, they have a limit to their number of users. But stateless architecture or plasma, they don't have this kind of limitation. So it scales without their fluctuating gas free or volatile gas market.
Josh Kriger: Wow, thanks for clarifying that and breaking down things so clearly for our audience. So it has a wide range of backgrounds in tactical for non-tactics, so I appreciate that. And then there was one other concept that I wanted to touch on, which is privacy mining, which I guess is something that we've launched and has some other significant implications for the industry. Maybe you can talk to that a little bit.
Leona Hioki: So right now, privacy on Ethereum is quite devastated. And so, yeah, account-based models or smart contract types or chains like Ethereum, Solana, have kind of less privacy than Bitcoin, for example. And also Bitcoin needs to have privacy, of course, but basically the most important part is bringing privacy on Ethereum as a whole ecosystem, not just having privacy inside Intimax. No, we need to provide privacy out of Intimax as well. So privacy mining is all about you deposit money into the Intimax contract and then withdraw money from there. Copying the link of their deposit address and the withdrawal address, right? So you can have full privacy and you can get a reward at the same time. So why don't you join that, right? So you have both privacy and reward and you basically lose nothing. So what you lose is just a tiny fee or two. So it's quiet. It's like a charity right now. You can get everything. We don't take anything. But yeah, we can enjoy that freely and punish him.
Josh Kriger: Makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think we have to rethink privacy these days. You know, I use the analogy, you go to a bar and you have to show your ID to get in. There's a lot of information on there that shouldn't be on there, right? Someone else shouldn't get to see. What they really need to know is like, yes, this person is over 21 and not a criminal. Let them in. Yeah, so it's about, it sounds like this enables more of the right amount of information at the right time. Is that fair to say?
Leona Hioki: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that on privacy, there are many types of privacy. So social privacy, like you said, and financial privacy, which has been a bit controversial for a couple of years recently. And of course, the physical privacy, like you stayed at the hotel, or you dropped the phone, or something like that. So there are many types of privacy, but we are focusing on financial privacy right now. And financial privacy, actually, this is the most important part of privacy, because it's a transaction. You pay money. It's one of the most important activities
Josh Kriger: And there's so many breaches of financial privacy happening every day, right? So, very cool. Great learning more about you and what you're doing at Intermax. For those that want to maybe follow you on Axe and follow your company, learn more, where do they go? Do you have an X handle? Are you on Twitter?
Leona Hioki: So yeah, please search with Intimax IO. This is their X handle. On their X profile page, you can find the Linktree link. You can find everything there. They're very good. this kind of explanation video and the blogs are, you know, explaining about our Intimax mechanism and how it bolts and also an invitation to privacy mining as well. So yeah, please, you know, follow Intimax.io.
Josh Kriger: All right, great. Thanks for hanging out with us today.
Leona Hioki: Yeah, excellency.
Richard Carthon: Thanks, everybody, for being here. So we live here in Bangkok, Thailand. And I'm very excited to be part of this first panel. And so I want to first introduce everybody on our panel very briefly. Then we're going to dive into the conversation because we have some really amazing panelists on here. So first, we have Michael, who is the Strategic Advisor at Random Games, where he leverages his extensive knowledge in watching technology and gaming to foster innovation within the industry. With a deep-rooted passion for gaming that spans several years, he has cultivated a robust network of over-prominent companies in the Web3 space, including Gamefly, DeFi, and NFT projects. Next, we have Min-Shi Park, who is the head of partnerships in this development at Hyperplay, where she is instrumental in creating strategic collaborations that aim to reshape the gaming landscape through innovative Web3 solutions. And then finally we have David who is the Chief Design at Engines of Fury where he leads creative direction and decides strategy for game development projects. He has a rich background in game design and user experience and contributed to numerous successful titles across various platforms. So thank you all for being here and Thank you all for being part of this discussion. So I want to kick this off. We are talking about next-gen player activation, and I don't think of a better way than first talking about our own journeys and how we have the different platforms that you've been able to be a part of and create and get some of those first users and have growth throughout the year. Minji, I had the ability to have a great conversation with what we know about here about some of the growth that you've had so far this year. So I'm going to kick it off to you first, and then we'll pass it around.
MinChi Park: I was actually bragging about our platform, so Hyperfly is actually a Win3 native game store. We are a distribution platform. We are here for more and more games, so if you're a game studio, please come and talk to me. We're happy to distribute your game. But I was basically bragging that if we met in GDC this year, early April, we had 64 games in our game store, and we have 150 games now. I'm very happy that we're able to carry all the games. We actually have the entire spectrum of all World Street games, so fully on-chain gaming all the way to 2.5 or even with two games that are thinking of doing anything World Street. We support all EVM chains, non-EVM chains as well, all the tech stacks, all wallet solutions, so yeah.
Michael S: Oh yeah, thank you everybody for coming to Bangkok. Happy to see you and the occasion is great. We have so much bullish news happening and I think gaming in general would be one of the major trends again. And yeah, I work, I advise random games currently on the strategic aspects like post-launch. They recently launched their Joven and They're building a AAA game. It's amazing. Their founders are great. They actually co-created Friends of Data Auto back in the days. So I'm very excited to work with his team. And we also found projects for his fundraising. And there is huge demand on the Any High side right now. And I know people, some people are really bearish and they say, like, Gideon doesn't work, doesn't stick with Rep3. But yeah, we are here to basically prove them wrong and say we can combine blockchain technology and gaming. So yeah, let's see how it goes and enjoy this cycle.
David K. Fried : Yeah, more importantly, it's critical to the future of all digital ownership. So, games are digital ownership. So, of course, that's where we come in, and that's why it's so important at Path of the Diego to have keys and various other things that are just representations of time and space that are there. So, uh, as to just dimensions of free, that's definitely what I'm looking at is how do I get web two players to come to web three? How do I convince them that this is the best place to spend the time? And therefore I calculated my tight ism. So, uh, that's, that's right. A little bit of my background, just to add on, you may know my word for board for a
free vote.
David K. Fried : Very much looking forward to everyone playing Notions of Fury as soon as possible.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, I want to throw this right back at you because I think it starts the conversation in a place where a lot of people have a lot of emphasis, which is how do you keep bridging that gap between Web 2 to Web 3? How do you keep getting these people that are coming in who care less about setting up a wallet, who could care less about all these other things on top that make blockchain awesome? It is a really awesome game. So what has been your focus to help address that challenge?
David K. Fried : The main thing is to make a good game. If your game is termed, who's going to stay around for
that? You might get people to play off any streaks of the muddy grass by the lawn, but they won't give up on it and move on to something else that makes more money. And inevitably, that burns out most of those games. Whereas with Engine Security, we're entirely focused on making a true AAA, if not in cost, a true AAA feeling game. that everyone was going to enjoy playing. So, the main thing that you have to do is have good game developers and develop a good game. And without that, what are you doing anyway? Why are you making gamers first?
MinChi Park: Right before coming into this room, I really liked basically the section where you said that you really want to focus on the players. And in the morning, I was in another side event, and we were all talking how it's funny how most of the time we're too focused building on the tech stack, or which tech stack to use, which chain to build on, like how am I going to make it composable, all of that stuff, like the token engineering part. And then you have something to go out there and actually meet the players, and it's too late. And everything has to be focused on the players. And I really like that statement. And I think going back to your question of how to bridge Web 2 and Web 3, it's really going back to the genesis, like why we're doing this. It's actually to make fun games. And if we really don't focus on what the players want, why are we doing this, right?
David K. Fried : And what they want is a good play experience. And all the web-free stuff can be an addendum to that. Like, I don't necessarily want people who come into our game initially, which will be a free-to-play game. So, you're a bearer. That's very cool. I want them to be surprised they're on and they're like, what is this web-free stuff? And they click on the button and they're like, oh my God, I faked a popsicle, this is amazing. I want that to be a pleasant surprise, rather than do it so frequently. That's the reason they come to us for money, competition, or a big game.
Michael S: Yeah, I also agree that building a high-quality project is essential, but also I would like to cover the myths that most people think. There's this sub-founder saying that building a Web3 game is easier, especially because of the last bull run. He's saying it's easier than building a traditional game. Well, it's not. It's actually way harder, because you have to spend two to four years to build a really good traditional game. Of course, you can go for an indie game, a minigame, or something like that. But even so, you have to get the foil, a blockchain layer, because it's the token economy, and plus you are fundraising, you're building a go-to market. So the idea of blockchain, by adding it into the game, originated from, it's like a marketing. So your token helps you with marketing. It brings you awareness. Well, probably it works for DeFi, AI, infrastructure, but for gaming it doesn't, because it will bring you only money from your people that will drain your liquidity, drain your treasury, and that's it. So when you are focusing on reading games, like gamers, and at the same time you have this blockchain underneath, you might just double up on your tech stack. Because traditional games, they are not talking to blockchain, right? So it's relatively easier on that side. No smart contract, no hacking, no financial security risks. So you just, well, it's so simple to build a traditional game, of course. but just for you founders to clarify it's actually way harder to build it that's why I think a lot of VCs are looking for back to experience founders who either ran gaming studios before or had a bit a part of the gaming project in a traditional space So I think that's essential also from our VC perspective, from our VC network. And that's what Random Games was originally about. Our CTO, Renfe, had been with the company for 10 years before joining Random Games. So probably that was the main thing that sold it to BCs in the first place, especially if it was an equity round, or easier. And then it was a token warrant, and at the end there was a pure trophy round, like right before QG, like combo lights before. So, yeah, it's harder to build a good game. It's way harder to build a good game on blockchain. So, I think in this cycle it's more mature already. The technology is more mature. We have back cases we can relate to and in general people are not that delusional about that you can create something stupid and raise 10 million for that. So the quality will definitely go up this cycle. And the VCs are also more experienced, which is good. So they'll divert capital, not into scammy projects to make 10x FTG and then the project dies. They will actually look for quality to stay longer. Probably this cycle will be longer, probably will be more sustainable. So you want proper vesting when your token economy doesn't influence the gaming side. Ideally, at all, or at least not so much.
David K. Fried : So yeah, that's probably what… Yeah, I can say VC's have a lot of money right now. Look for the game studios that were building through the bear market. If they were building through the bear market, they are absolutely devoted to making a good game. And if they weren't, then they're waiting and now here comes another big boom market. Be careful. That's all I'm saying.
Richard Carthon: No, definitely appreciate that. And just as a quick poll for the room, how many of y'all are building in the space right now, building a game in the space? Okay. And how many of you are raising right now to try to build that game? Okay. So you have this delicate balance of dealing with VCs as far as making sure you have some sort of tokenomics in place, but then also building a superior game. So you have this interesting I don't want to say conflict, but this synergy of making sure you have this really good core product, but also working on the tokenomic side of things. A lot of people as they think about growth going into 2025, you have this new wave of degens that are coming in, but then you also have, of course, your traditional Web 2.0 people that you're trying to get to convert over. There's a lot of paths that you can go to have success. Some people are deciding to build like on ton and grab some of those people. Some are deciding to just, you know, build a game from scratch. What are some of the strategies that you're either implementing right now or that you think people should consider as they go into 2025 to build out what they have? We'll start with you, Michael.
Michael S: Okay, so draws for a game is also a very sophisticated topic, but I think what works for random games right now, basically they have like we have tournaments, we do a lot of tournaments where there are more or less got three prizes. There are NFTs, there are tokens, and of course you use DTE as well. There are partnerships like collaborations with bigger projects or with relevant projects that work. Also, in future, there will be strategies to cap the KO outs from Web 2. I think that's very important. Actually, Red Dog Games, the project is called Universe. Universe is about regioning between Web 2 and Web 3. It's a traditional Web 2 game. What is cool about it is that you don't even know that you had a bullet, unless you really need to. You can buy NFTs, but you buy them as characters, you don't really know they are NFTs, but then you can by accident or intentionally discover that there is a marketplace on OpenSea you can actually sell your NFT. That revelation for the person who played for half a year and developed his character and then he sold it, he realized he can sell it at $800 on OpenSea, because it's super rare. It was amazing. And we are talking about the bear market right now. So he sold it at some kind of lower price, he didn't really know, like for $400, you could buy it instantly. And the next day, you know, that guy oversell it again, like again and again, people start flipping it. And the price was really high for that NFT. So these models are really working, but still getting back to user adoption, I think Rapture influencers and we need to look into marketing that traditional games are doing. We can work with Steam, with Epic. publish the games wherever, it's not Web3. And just build in mind who is going to play it, right? So Web3 space on its own is a very small space, but to those people who are ready to play games, guilds are not that effective right now. The model doesn't really work because you have to pay them to play. Which is like a death cycle. So yeah, talking about sustainability, I think I have to work on the adoption and negation of people. You can tournaments and with price coolers, which can probably go from the KOL side as well. You can incentivize people in a more traditional way, but still it can be financial prices involved or NFTs, which are financial prices. I think streamers and anything that can bring you online, bring you hype, bring you virality and to get attention towards your game has worked in Web 2. It will eventually, I mean it's already working in Web 3, right? Also your players, at least in the beginning, you have to build like a core base of evangelists players, right? that will go out there, they will share your content, they will promote your NFTs, they will show the spots on Twitch or how they play your game, they will do some Twitch streaming in their close communities. So they will be there for you, like maybe even 200 people originally who just do something for the game, like the core fan base. Same people are doing like on Steam, all the indie projects, they are trying to get people who will be posting on Reddit and X and everywhere about their game and if it works. So why don't I do that? So just quit using a limited amount of people who will be promoting your content for free and you can always reward them with some in-game items. Even just consumer versus cosmetics, it doesn't have to be… This is the beauty of having web 2.0 people. You don't have to pay them at every step. You can just provide good new content. And so we see the project is being developed. That could already be very popular.
MinChi Park: There's so many things to say about Grog. But I think one of the things that I really want to emphasize to all the game studios is that let's not reinvent the playbook. Please focus on the game itself rather than going out. Use the tools that we already have up there. If you built two cycles ago, unfortunately, you had to make everything from scratch, right? There was not a good wallet solution, so you had to actually make the wallet solution for yourself. There was not a good NFT marketplace that could plug into your gig. So you had to make the marketplace for yourself. But there are so many tools out there in the periphery of building in the gaming space that are here to support you. So please don't build everything from scratch. That would be like, yeah, or you're just like not here. And I think the second part is we need a good balance between what is the narrative of the game and incentives. In the previous cycle, we focused too much on the incentive side. So how can we actually incentivize KOLs so that they can read content? How do we incentivize players so that they can just, you know, come and play? And going back to the player topic that we were saying, it's not sustainable because if you're too focused on incentives, they're coming because of the incentives, not because of the game. then how do we come to that middle point where, yes, we need to be realistic, they are coming for the incentives, but then also make them stake for the merit. And that blend, it's the hardest part, but it is possible because now you can use all these two sides, all these tech sides, and you don't have to be spending time doing stuff from zero and focus on how you're going to be doing that balance between narrative and incentive. An example is, so Hyperplay, our game distribution, we actually created our in-app questing platform so that we support off-chain assets. So game studios can actually give out off-chain assets because we've realized, and a lot of our game studios were saying, we don't want to give out NFTs, we don't want to give out ERC-20s, 721s, Electrify, Players don't want that anymore. They actually want points to come back and use those points to potentially get the Amphitheaters in the future. And a lot of the questing platforms out there were too focused on the on-chain elements that you're basically just putting more gasoline under the fire and just making the entire game experience more unsustainable. So, yeah, that's like some of the tips and tricks I want to give to Game Studios, but I have like a long list.
David K. Fried : So, I come at it from the Gamazon perspective. So, when I designed 2 Economics for Engines of Fury, there were several things that I wanted to be absolutely certain of, which is that players who invest early are rewarded later, or at least evil. So we have a deflationary currency in that everything that gets spent into our game, some percentage of that gets burnt. Some percentage of that goes into our pools to fuel the tournaments. So our tournaments could go crazy if our games were popular. And in the meantime it's low-key, that's fine. They're still gonna play because those wolves are there. So you keep these cycles of incentivizing players to keep playing your game. With tokenomics. But more importantly, the narrative context all has to matter as well. What does the token do in the world? I know it seems like a strange question. In our case, the token we burn is part of the storyline about Angel itself. Which I won't go into because it's probably taking two hours. But I would encourage you guys to read our whitepaper where there's a lot of story elements about the game in there. But the big thing is simply to preserve as much value as you can for the players who come into your game early, and make sure that in the long run, that market is sustained. So in our Season 2, the duels can end, players can talk, can have bitches, and the NFTs themselves are things the players decided to turn into NFTs and spent fury on. Therefore, that bull market is not something that we have to worry about. We're not selling NFTs into that market. The players are, and they're deciding what's important. And because of that, we have to avoid the Diablo 3 auction house problem, which is that if you have a game that's well-built, why not have Microsweep? They could get infinite amounts, not everything. The market drops out because now it's easier to go buy it on the marketplace for a few dollars. And now we got that one where it doesn't care about playing in the air. So, what do you do? You have to have those things be seasonal. Those items come off the market, they don't drop anymore. So now they go up and down all the time. So these are all things that we've got our origins of free and we're planning to do because of the on-channel ones. And I encourage everyone to steal all that. Reflationary currency supports your player base. They want to buy your token because they know it's a good form of economic value.
Richard Carthon: Um, I think all these are really awesome examples and I know that they can fairly keep talking about all of these. So I encourage you if you have additional questions on the code piece to strike a conversation. But I think another part of the conversation I want to learn is this. There's this concept of if you build it, they will come. And in the bear market, a lot of people just come. That's just not the case. Right. So you have this option of being able to build all these really cool product features for your game, but it doesn't mean that people are going to come in and actually use them. So how have you in your own companies decided where do you lean into on what to build next? And eventually I'll ask you first.
MinChi Park: So. When I'm talking to game studios and board game studios, we always say we are a developer-first game distribution in Westford Natives. And when I say that, a lot of our A students are like, any other platform can say that, right? And I can give examples like, what do we mean by developer-first? I was telling right before I came to this room that we have 10 features in our roadmap right now and we're all building them and we had let's say 4 to 5 that we were going to watch in the queue for. We go and I interact with our game studio so we have 150 game studios. I always interact with them like if they have the tournament coming up, like a playtest coming up. And the more I interacted with game studios, the better I realized that a certain feature that was pushed back on like key two, like lower priority and was pushed back to Q1 next year or Q2 next year, and this is heavily demanded, and we will push it back up to Q4. And this is our way of showing to all our game studios that we will develop whichever feature is right for games, rather than us dictating what is right for the game studios, right? And we always try to emphasize this, because we want our game studios to also do that. I had a coffee chat in the morning, and he was saying, I wish to tell all game studios building a web story, because he also calls for tradition with two backgrounds. we need to be more like we need faster iterations and not sure why we don't have this playbook but we want to see more game studios giving out more updates on just just you know like you know the way to saying of see what sticks in the wall but I don't feel like a lot of game studios are like drawing it as often and I can see it because I like I can see 115 games like how many times they're updating their build but what I'm excited for 2005 is that we have this faster iteration. I do believe that the gold market just makes everyone more excited so we will have faster iterations, more builds, more you know so yeah like that's I'm excited because gang studios will just have more fuel to keep it going. So that's my last tip.
David K. Fried : If I'm an amateur, the reason why is because they're afraid. They're afraid of criticism. And that largely comes because they're not experienced hands like you with all of us. You have to get over the fear of negative feedback and just embrace it. You'll get a bunch of negative feedback. It's okay. You can improve. If you don't put that game out there and get that feedback, you can't do anything. You're frozen. So don't be afraid of feedback.
MinChi Park: And I think another reason why, going back to your point, it's so much harder to fill out the Westreak game, it's also because, to be realistic, a lot of our players out there are kind of betting for us to fail. Because a lot of them are just like anti-wix3, right? But we know the fact, just embrace the fact and prove them wrong, as we said. Like, if you're not launching something out there, you're delaying your pay test or you're delaying your games to go live, you will never know why your players won, right? So just don't hesitate, you know, throw things to the wall and see what sticks.
Michael S: So the universe is a bit different kind of game. The universe itself is not a game, it's kind of like Roblox, where people can also build and develop their own levels, their own puzzles, stuff like this. So when the team hosts approach you , should you be released first? Is it like this editor where you can create your levels? Or is it some kind of a game that will actually showcase how all that works? They started by creating a very good high quality level, just showing developers what they can build inside of the universe. And that was like a speedrun, basically like you're running it, you're playing it against the timer. Because it's a AAA shooting game, first-person shooter game, you have those NFTs, super high quality, super detailed, cut-through-tail characters, running on Unreal Engine 5, and they build this, like, you compete against each other, basically all the players compete against the clock, and there's a beater board. So every week just on this one level you I mean if you're doing it the first time you'll probably be like half an hour to pass it if you are an average gamer. But if you play like 10 times, 100 times, you can actually beat the clock much faster. So every week, about 10 players on the leaderboard were rewarded protons, which is our internal currency, basically in-game currency, not out. And those protons you can use to upgrade your character, and back then also to purchase NFTs. So, they built this level and this was like a proof of concept both for the game and also for the editor that developers could use to build. So the second lead was the editor that was released, but it was a simple version basically for players. Players can also use rebuilt enemy assets to build their own levels with this competitive mechanics involved. The cool part is that when you use your NFTs, like your characters inside the game, in every level that is created by the player, you can assign certain traits to NFTs. And those traits are unique for each level. So your NFT will have very unique characteristics if he or she obtains these traits. So these were the cool mechanics that brought people involved in playing even one level for half a year to beat against the clock to get new achievements and new traits for the NFT. And then we introduced the Hover and Ride game. Now our NFTs are also Hover and Ride. And this was like a racing challenge and also those hoverbikes shoot. And that's where the first tournaments like PDK tournaments started. And this was a new handset that influenced the editor. Because now players can create tournament type of arenas which will use hoverbikes. So, since you are already an NFG character, plus the horror bike character. So it's like a matrix and you're filling up both linear and edap sub-vertical parts of development. So that was a strategy that Rental Games used, but as I mentioned, it's not really like a game, it's also like a game environment where you can create stuff built for players and developers to be creative. And it's similar to Roblox, maybe a sandbox, but in a different way. So that was the strategy for us.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, we've got to the end of our discussion. This will be the final question. And we have about four minutes left. So about one minute for each of you. And what I want to pose is, as we go into 2025, what is the number one focus you have for not just yourself, but others should consider to continue to have growth and continue the gamification of getting people on board onto their platform and then close with how people can connect with you and learn more about what you have going on.
Michael S: So on Random Games, we launched an experiment. We launched a Telegram mini-app that is basically a streaming platform. So you can watch live streams of tournaments and stuff that is happening inside the game on a website, but you can also do this from Digital Arabia. And you also get 0 points reward for that. It was an interesting experience that yielded some good traffic. In general, I think that the Tone ecosystem and Colorgram Mini apps are a good channel for getting new, I would say, community members, I can say players, because it can be a bit of a hurdle. Like if you have an opportunity to get like 1 million to 10 million people through your sales funnel relatively cheap, Of course, they are not all of them on large PC gamers, right? If she's a PC game. All of them prefer mobile games. It's mobile here. So, of course, the funnel will probably kick 10%, 5% for that. But still, it's quite cheap. And it's a Web3 native. The thing that I like about Calibra is that now it's a Web3 native because it's a billion people in Calibra. And, well, it was like 500 million in Algebra. So at least 500 million people know what a wallet is because they all received airdrop, they wanted to sell their tokens so they're probably buying an exchange. They're probably using ConWallet which is built in Telegraph. So there are certain opportunities and the first we come into quests. We all know the quest platforms that people, I mean at gaming, that people were using. Probably not only in gaming, but an insecure thing for gaming where you have to, you know, subscribe to all the socials, buy NFTs or do some transactions on chain, which is very cool, but now it's in the Integrand as well. So those mini apps can be like the height of your funnel. And then you can try to build a strategy on how you can actually convert that flow of millions of users from Telegram to actually make them play your game. Is it just a great system that they fund coins or tokens and then they can go and name you, maybe connect with the Telegram account. I mean, how often do you see that you can register an account in a game with Stellar, right? So why not? So you can leverage the Romani apps in multiple ways to get to build that funnel. You can also use a lot of free router traffic for it. So yeah, just about experimenting. I think this could be a new channel of proficiency.
MinChi Park: I feel like Michael set up the stage for us because Hyper is actually launching a Takram Geek Sword. So, and the reason why we launched this is because our game studios is looking to launch a Telegram mini app, a telegram mini app using the main IP. And as you said, like, I think a lot of our game studios, so a lot of our game studios don't want to create a chapter again. They are more concerned about their fee. They are going to focus on their desktop and browser games. But they do want to use Telegram as an acquisition channel, as you said, on the pop-up funnel. But what we could provide in Hyperplay is that bridge between the Telegram game store and step-by-step app. So and because it's the number one question of how geeks are going to do that. So in a traditional sense, even if you had a successful desktop game, it doesn't mean that your mobile game is successful as well. And it's not going to be the same players. What we can do with the Telegram environment and the Mova environment is, with the off system that crypto has, or any off system to be honest, or the past platforms that you said, how can we be that bridge? And because we are a distribution platform, we are trying to be that bridge to all our game studios trying to launch something on Telegram. In our thesis, it's actually not 10%, we're like Even if we can help our gay studios bring 1% of 1 million, I think we'll be happy and that'll be Top of Funnel. But the important thing is not only Top of Funnel, it's actually helping our gay studios to Top of Funnel and help them retain them back. Because if you just focus on Top of Funnel, it's gonna be the same playbook that we had at that cycle where we just bring Oh, sorry, I almost forgot. Tons of players in Pavafunnel, and they leave once they get their census, right? They leave after they exchange their Love Coin or their Death Coin, etc. So that's what I'm super excited about with Chaos 35. We're also launching our Azure version of our Geyser. A lot of stuff to build, but I'm just generally excited because the bear has finally died.
David K. Fried : And I'm and I think the narrative has always been gaming consumer vertical has always been gaming and I'm excited to work of everyone Yeah, so For me at it from a little bit of a different direction The the main thing that I can advise everyone is to build something you love build something you care about build something that meets some time to be you if you're not building a game that you love How can anyone else like? So, all of the stuff that you might do with Web3 and stuff is tangential to the most important thing. You have to build the game that you want to build, that you will personally allow, and that everyone else will allow. That's awesome. It's the same for cooking, it's the same for everything else. It's built to do with love, it cooks on the wood, people can feel it. And the engines are very, it's a team in Lithuania, and they're at the top of the town over there. And they really love what they're doing, and I love working with them, and I love the narrative that I've got for this game. I'm so excited about this story that, I don't know, I wish this game had a little more story that I could talk about, but that's alright. So, for this coming year, whatever you do in terms of, like, bringing users in, make sure that the game you have ready for them. is something that you're going to be proud of and that they're not going to recall it because that's the only way to say it.
MinChi Park: And you can reach us by going to hyperplay xyz by going EOF.GG. It's just a furry as in hyperset. Yes.
Michael S: So you know where's their call for us.
Richard Carthon: All right, thank you, everybody. Appreciate it. You can follow us at edgeofentity.com. You can follow us on YouTube as well. We put a lot of content out there. So thank you, everyone here. Thank you, BGA. And I hope you enjoy your day.
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