The State of Web3 Native Games

Transcript

foreign [Music] [Music] hi everyone thank you so much for coming to my talk uh today I'm going to talk about web 3 native games after I introduce myself I'll give you three quick examples of what I mean by web3 native games and then I'll try to Define them but more importantly give you some intuition for how to find them for the majority of this talk I'll be presenting the biggest problems I see in the space that are preventing web3 native games from taking over the world I'll try and solve one of the problems

live for you and then I'll point you to the people at the end who are solving the rest of them so uh here's me uh I studied game design and game history for eight years I did a PhD in it I focused on mechanism design and the ways in which game makers tell stories through their rules but in 2017 I was red pilled to join crypto as given mastering Bitcoin and learned about crypto economics and the research there and so I just changed teams uh and I started studying blockchains uh and worrying about how they're secured and how they're not secured and ended up working for an

auditing firm audited crypto for three and a half years uh and fell in love with defy and worked diligently in defy and joined a company called defy Alliance today the alliance and uh was very excited to build a career as a crypto economic researcher until axi became successful and all of a sudden games started showing up in crypto and I wasn't allowed to do the other one I had to do both uh so today uh after two years of doing both which by the way is nothing like either one it's like one of those weird coincidences where the sum of these two parts is nothing uh like the separate parts uh I'm here to talk about what I've learned and give you the current

status so uh let me give you uh some quick mental model of like how I think about web 2 web 2.5 and web3 so Minecraft very successful web 2 game and the Hope was that one day we would get games like Minecraft and crypto where we would get to own crypto assets so the things you have in your game are yours and you can trade them uh and this was this promise that even if the game went away you'd be able to keep your assets with you uh and play them again and again and forever uh and that even if the game went bankrupt you know you could rebuild servers somehow and reconnect them to your assets and they'd be valuable again

but the problem is I didn't Jive too much with this value proposition as a player because I really wanted to not play the same game forever I like playing new in different games and so keeping my assets forever wasn't that stimulating an idea and also as someone who played a lot of Diablo 3 and then immediately churned after buying my first in-game item I realized that like selling my in-game items wasn't very interesting to me either as a player so I started thinking about this relationship and what a web 3 game would look like and if we could get some kind of value add from putting something fully on chain and the example that I found was this game called Dark Forest

Dark Forest came out in 2020 21 gets a little bit more popular it's about shooting people in outer space from one planet to another it's a inspired by the game galcon which is a classic web 2 game where you have a bunch of stars in outer space and you can send energy to attack other stars and then as you have new stars you can go attack more stars uh and uh your opponents eventually also have their stars and they can go and attack more stars and grow and eventually you exponentially grow until your borders overlap and you go to war trying to regain territory and the game was very interesting it didn't actually look like

this it looked like this but if I showed you this slide you'd have some kind of problem understanding what was going on but uh it's hard to imagine if you weren't there and to imagine why it was special and why anyone would care to play a game this disgusting so I'm going to build up your intuition about why I care about web 3 games and what they even are by giving some examples In from from normal crypto and normal web to land so the classic web 2 concept ahead for you is the US dollar and the US dollar is very successful goes around lots of front-ends really fun to use serves lots of purposes but it's got some problems uh it's it's censorable it's inflatable it's not permissionless

and it's not even um composable right it can't build on top of it because there's no like API for the US dollar right everybody's sort of faking their own apis um and so Bitcoin comes out is this fully web free product uh that gets all these great features censorship resistance uh composability to a certain extent permissionless uh and then we get this really exciting in between web 2.5 product right which is usdc so we don't keep all of the fun features of permissionlessness and all the fun features of being censorship resistance but we get composability the ability to build on top of it and to use it in smart contracts and as long as you accept some of these trade-offs it's

actually a really powerful tool and so there's nothing wrong with being web 2.5 or being web3 or web 2 it's just different flavors of powers um and if you think about this idea a little bit further in the sort of smart contract world uh you have NASDAQ which is this place where you can trade assets on a Marketplace and then in web 2.5 you have this amazing product called coinbase where you can trade web 3 assets on this Marketplace but once again it's not censorship resistant it's not permissionless you need to do kyc and so we build this cool new thing called uniswap and uniswap is this censorship resistant composable web 3 pure Marketplace and as a result we get cool new features that we were never sure were even possible like flash loans

in uniswap when you trade for something you for first get the thing you can then do a bunch of stuff and find the money you needed for that thing in the first place after doing all that stuff that's how flash loans work right and that's a magical element that comes out of putting a thing like coinbase fully on chain of course there then are a lot of problems it scales very badly you can't put a central limit order book on chain and you have to accept that you're gonna have to use an amm and that is going to be pretty nasty user experience as well you're going to need to know how wallets work and you're going to need to know how to do your own security and so very hard to get user adoption on uniswap compared to coinbase and so what I'm pitching you today is

this idea that the state of web3 native games is to try and build this uniswap of games and see how it's going to inherit the properties that uniswap and Bitcoin exhibit and not web 2.5 games which are great like axi but dominate The Narrative and it's hard for anybody to see what these truly web3 native games are doing so here's some examples that you can play today in case you were wondering Dark Forest Arena is a single player version of the game I was showing you before you can play it not on mobile play it on desktop but it is a fascinating game that was really uh just re-released today so you can be on The

Cutting Edge just go to arena.dfdo.xyz um and you can also try out primodium which recently closed around VCS are very excited it's growing in popularity but it's still very new and it's ported factorio a very nerdy web 2 game to web3 and is making a lot of sacrifices just like uniswap did in bringing coinbase to web3 or you can wait for what's coming out in the future which is playman's game Downstream Downstream is going to have much higher Fidelity graphics and it's got a bigger more robust team building it with a lot of gameplay experience these are teams that ship things like uh

fall guys sold for like half a billion dollars right so real gameplay people who are more game native trying to come into the space um and I mean if you're grumpy that I didn't include your slide here well I picked these games because one my nephew made Dark Forest Dow or Arena so I had to include him and I invested in primodium so that's another disclaimer and playment bought me a beer two nights ago so if you want to be on the slide next year you have to do the same one of them anyway uh okay so now that I've sort of sold you that there's this possibility to build a fully web3 game uh it's going to sit at the intersection of four major problems one ux UI same as unit swap it's just impossible to onboard web 2 users to a

place where uh you have to know a private key and sign for every transaction like imagine trying to play chess and pulling out your treasure for every move we're gonna need something better than that uh it's just like really garbage so okay then you're gonna have to worry about scale so even at its best dark forests could only have 800 players we just clogged the entire chain of gnosis chain when we were playing uh if you think about it just do some Mental Math if a chain has 40 TPS and each player has one very strategic move to make every 30 seconds uh you're gonna have like something close to 2000 players at most uh that's bad a successful game today on Steam is going

to have 500 000 concurrent players maybe if you're ready to go a little more Niche 50 000 concurrent players we're nowhere near that kind of scale and so new crypto is has to be invented or new game design has to be created um and then we have no standard design patterns no one's yet to make a successful fully Unchained game uh which means that there's no like Playbook to follow there's just uh New Frontier of discoverability to come through uh with no Frameworks for how to build it uh and then finally the biggest problem is we don't know what it's going to do or why it would be useful to do it at

all there's a sort of uncertainty of the value add that building a game fully Unchained will bring and so at least for this talk I'm going to try and tackle the first one uh because it I mean the top one because it seems the most important if we don't know why we're building it why bother solving these other problems in the first place um and if you were wondering this entire slide uh deck is Venn diagrams um so uh the hope is that blockchains would add new fun gameplay Loops right there'd be these web 3 affordances that when combined with like good game design there'd be these special kind of games uh that could only show up at the intersection of like using games and and

uh and blockchains so many people thought Dark Forest had this property like we can hide information using zero knowledge uh have true fog of War that's permissionless but after like doing quite a bit of exploration as long as you're ready to have some trust uh in your game developer there's really uh no new game design to build that blockchains provide like you're not going to get a new fun gameplay Loop uh out of this process so that's not that's not why I would recommend you build games fully on chain um some people like we talked about earlier with axi uh talk about quality of life benefits for players you're going to be able to keep your assets sell them yourself you're going to be able to keep

your assets and if we go bankrupt you can use them somewhere else another game might value your assets and include you in but we can kind of do this with web 2.5 and it's not clear that players you know actually benefit from these problems and so once again I don't think that there's this this match where there'll be value-add but I'll pitch you on one I think really does work uh and it's a new labor relationship for Builders uh if you think about defy you have thousands of independently working web3 developers who all get to work on the same computer sharing same open source code and leverage each

other's code in composing their smart contracts together this is a way where without coordination they can collaboratively build a new Financial system and the hope is that if people start putting their games fully trustlessly on chain running independently they act as these worlds where you get to build without actually knowing who you're building with and sure you could kind of do that in web 2 like we've had open source game development for a really long time but open source game development has actually failed to deliver anything of real significance for a really long time in web2 and that's because it's just really hard to coordinate running servers and sharing IP in this open source world so by having things be

fully Unchained and tracked fully Unchained and tokenized even fully Unchained I think a new kind of Labor can emerge that we see in defy and that we hope we can find here and to give you like an example in this circle I have like the design space for all possible games right so we haven't invented all possible games yet um but like arcade cabinets let us design some right as soon as we had pong uh show up in a bar or Pac-Man show up in a bar we had a powerful machine lots of people able to subsidize its cost and it was built to take quarters to subsidize its cost over time and this model this business model and this kind of technological product made for a

whole set of games that we'd never made before um and then we had home consoles the Atari 2600 comes out and it's strictly worse than these arcade cabinets it's such a bad computational system that doesn't even have video RAM the way it like projects on your screen is like the code has to Output as the laser is going uh hoping to catch and keep in track with it like to play chess on the Atari 2600 they had to black out the sides of the screen just to give the computer enough time to think before the Electron Beam got to the other side like truly garbage Tech but new games were built things we'd never seen before because there's a new business model you were able to all of a sudden make 60 games up front that were about adventures and not focus

exclusively on sucking down quarters new business models lead to new kinds of game designs it's like games depend on the physics of capitalism uh to change in order for them to evolve and home consoles obviously then the tech grew we got much better at making better home consoles and eclipse the space that arcade cabinets had provided the same happens again with mobile phones they're so much worse than desktop they're so much worse than PlayStation but we can find new gameplay loops and new monetization to create new kinds of games it's not that those games couldn't go back to home consoles like any game you can make on a phone like Flappy Birds you can put on an Xbox right it's not that the medium is truly novel it's that

the financial system around it is and so mobile phones grows and then you get this tiny spot blockchains right this this hope that this new technological stack will somehow allow developers to coordinate around building something we've never seen before but we don't know what it is right in the same way that when mobile phones come out game developers haven't imagined Angry Birds yet Angry Birds has to surprise us from this new means of production so uh I think or my hope at least is that can be sufficient enough like value add that we put these games fully Unchained and as a result we can be surprised by

what people build uh and find new games and maybe those new games will need to go back to web 2 to get some scaling maybe uh they'll be able to survive in web 3 as we come up with how to scale so uh when it comes to to scaling um there's some game companies I'd like to note these are people who are trying to do a bunch of different things to make games go faster sometimes they're helping to make the games through new Frameworks mud has a head start on most of these with a large player community uh Keystone also building a game design engine focused on adding ticks to blockchains it's like we take ticks for

granted in game design like your NPC is going to do something even if you don't but like if you don't tell the blockchain to keep Computing it doesn't keep Computing so you have to design an entire blockchain with the idea that the world will progress in time um Argus is building many things scaling Solutions but also different Frameworks for how to design games and and Dojo which is quite present here in France uh and it's like talks left and right uh and uh is quite fascinating the idea is to build not a game that's fully on chain but a game where all the logic can be provably executed off chain so think of it like a ZK roll up for just one player's game

like uh I'll play all my moves on my home computer and then I'll compress them into one giant proof uh that'll actually be not that big of proof because you're using Starks and snarks and push that proof back to chain and then the smart contract can see ah will did not cheat while playing this game I can trustlessly agree with the result of this proof that this is a valid end state and while this might seem weird it's basically how World of Warcraft works right World of Warcraft is this game where everybody got to play on this massive world but nobody played on that massive World they played in dungeons that were completely cut off from the rest of reality in these sort of single player instances they'd go in with their loot and they'd come back with more Loot and so you could imagine taking your

gameplay off a main chain uh into some proof system and then bringing it back and that's how even Diablo 4 which came out a month ago operates for its sort of system so I don't think it's too crazy to think that some of the on-chain compute would go off-chain and so this is like how I see the state of these kinds of tools which are helping us scale uh and helping us come up with more standard design patterns and then you know the remaining major problem that you might see is around ux and UI so it's really hard to get players to web3 right if you use web 2.5 all of a sudden they can you know log in with

Facebook you have all the information on the servers they can take back their assets on your chain whenever you want but uh until you you know solve that problem you have this huge user adoption issue and there are many people who are trying to solve this here's just three of them but it's it's way more um alembic which is made by the Commerce team and and Jerome de taichi who actually runs this entire conference that's his product and what he's building which helps players just like get in right away with a lot of account abstraction and if you haven't uh like heard of account abstraction that's basically what's going to save us as an entire industry and then you have cartridge which is on the

starkware ecosystem and they're not only helping with ux but with this discovery building a steam concept for web3 but also a common framework for these games to allow players to play them more reasonably um and there should be a kind of like recurring mental model that you might have which is there's an evm layer of games people working on like alembic and mud and dark forests and then there's this whole other starkware branch and maybe you don't give starkware much thought but they're the other hotbed of this fully Unchained gaming activity and so when you're thinking about which one or which chain or which Community to join I mean you should join both but

those are the two vibrant ones uh and uh to give credit where credits too I think the fully on chain Gaming Community really started not with ethereum but with uh gnosis chain or X die at the time right and so like this is this tradition I just want you to be aware of okay so then ethos which is not in either of these it's on sui right it's sort of like wild card that I thought I'd add in here where ethos is uh building a wallet uh that is itself like a dashboard to apps and they've recently just had a ton of success with a fully Unchained 2048 clone so if you ever play 24 it on your phone lots of little moves all the time they blew up the entire Chain by putting that on on chain and uh

so there might be you know people in the fringes uh building this kind of stuff outside the evm and the starkware ecosystems uh okay and so my hope is that that's where the ux UI problem is going to get handled is an account abstraction and letting people log in once again with Facebook by having all these fancy multi-party compute things happening in the background okay so that leaves us with web 3 games web three games uh fully Unchained native crypto projects that very few people are building less than less than maybe 500 serious builders in the space according to my telegram groups but I think a lot of

opportunity and there's a lot of venture opportunity if you're unaware so people do want to see more of this in the hopes that we can create category defining opportunities and games in this space look if you are building uh in this space I want to chat with you and if you want to try to build in this space but aren't sure how to get started I'd also love to chat with you so this is my my Twitter handle I left this only two minutes and 46 seconds for questions uh that's probably not enough time to be productive so why don't I just end it early and let uh people like catch me outside or in my DMs thank you very much [Music]