Imran and Qiao brought on Will Robinson to discuss fully on-chain games, the current state of it, why people want to put games on-chain, and more.
No BS crypto insight for founders.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro
00:53 Welcome to Good Game
01:23 Will's background on the history of games
01:57 How Will got into crypto
04:14 What are on-chain games?
08:35 Which game has the longest shelf life?
09:47 The importance of balancing games' meta
10:43 What is DOTA
12:15 Is CryptoKitties a game?
13:03 What is the definition of a fully on-chain game?
16:26 Can Counter-Strike be a fully on-chain game?
19:32 Can Civilization be a fully on-chain game?
21:54 Why do we want to put games fully on-chain?
26:09 What is Dark Forest? | Game modding
39:06 How would Warcraft III look like on-chain?
42:08 A DeFi analogy by Qiao
45:30 The definition of "games" people don't often think about
48:41 Financialization
52:11 "Speculation" in gaming | Words3 on-chain game
55:46 What makes people scared of fully on-chain games in the future? 
01:00:27 What's the TPS needed to build an on-chain game?
01:10:14 What kind of games can we actually build today?
01:14:48 What are the other major constraints on building on-chain games?
01:17:21 MUD (Multi-User Dungeon)
01:22:49 Jared from Subway (sandwich attacker) behavior in games?
01:29:04 Are there any fun games today?
01:29:13 The logic behind Primodium Game
01:32:33 We already have a fully on-chain game and that's DeFi
01:33:56 Any attack vectors on on-chain gaming?
01:36:39 Final thoughts

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3N675w3
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3snLsxU
Website: https://goodgamepod.xyz
Twitter: https://twitter.com/goodgamepodxyz

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed herein are personal to the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or entity. Discussions and answers to questions are intended as generalized, non-personalized information. Nothing herein should be construed or relied upon as investment, legal, tax, or other advice.

Welcome to Goodgame, your no-BS insights for crypto founders.

Most people you'll talk to have this thesis, which is the next billion users in crypto will probably come through Web 2.5 gaming.

The thought being that they have distribution, people are excited.

It rubs me the wrong way too, but I have to admit it's plausible, right?

What people forget is it takes 4 years to make a video game today.

And we haven't been making serious attempts at crypto video games for 4 years yet.

Looking for your next startup idea in crypto?

list and get inspired at alliance.xyz forward slash ideas.

Today, we're in Berlin, we brought on Will, who is our on-chain gaming expert.

And we thought today are, you know, we could dive deep into on-chain gaming especially given the fact that you know paradigm recently published an article and there's been a lot of new activities around on-chain gaming with like startups like primodium that came out of our recent batch and And so why did we bring Will here to speak about engine gaming?

And so maybe Will, you should give a quick background on your history of games.

I did 8 years master's and then and then PhD.

The focus was on mechanism design and games.

How do you design games and their rules specifically to get players to do the things you want them to do.

I fell in love with crypto and crypto had no place for games in

So It was a speakeasy in New York and my cousin Dan, who's at Paradigm handling the people who wrote that paper, he tells me about Bitcoin.

He's like, there's no future for you in games, Will.

Like I tried to go to Ubisoft for a job and they were like, would you like to do Q&A?

You could walk into a wall over and over again for 8 hours a day until you've paid your dues.

I thought I paid my dues with this stupid doctoral degree.

And so he starts explaining how SHA-256 works and ECDSA and I'm like oh boy.

And he's like some of these black boxes, Will, you don't want to open them.

I'm like, there's no way I'm going to pretend these things work.

I read it cover to cover 4 times because I'm non-technical.

So then I go to meetups, every meetup I can find in crypto and it's just like shit coin peddlers after Ponzi scheme artists.

And then this 1 meetup, I hear that catalaxy, a startup in Montreal that's helping auditors audit financial statements, is hiring someone to do marketing.

Someone to start like selling crypto to the masses and grow their funnel.

I'm like, well, I know how to say things.

And I like how I got my job with Alliance, the fact that I knew Dan, easy in.

Started working there, did 3 and a half years.

All my bosses were Bitcoin maxis, and it turns out that those don't play so nice in enterprise.

So I got promoted by default to head consultant researcher in crypto.

So your love of on-chain or sorry, gaming, right?

You did your PhD in gaming, got into crypto, and now there's this new convergence of gaming and crypto.

And we've seen many iterations of crypto gaming, right?

You have Max Infinity and others that are more web 2, web 2 and a half.

I think it was 1 of the first on-chain games.

And so the question is, what is on-chain games?

And then we can talk a bit about Forrest.

Yeah, so the big distinction that you want to make in the crypto world is between games that are partially on-chain and games that are fully on-chain.

So thinking about great successes, Stepin, Axie, these are games that really use crypto in interesting ways, but the logic of those games is off-chain.

It's run on a centralized server, which gives it massive scaling and the ability to build and update in interesting ways.

Sure, so like, in World of Warcraft, you play the game in these dungeons.

You bring your XP in the form of your level and your loot, and you fight the dragon, and everything happens on a centralized server, and at the end of the day, you can take your loot and you go to Ogremar, right?

Which is like the auction house for the Horde, and you can list the items you found, try and make some money off them, maybe buy things you needed.

And all of that happens on Blizzard servers, and as like Vitalik famously complained, you're at the mercy of Blizzard in this way.

So if they nerf the items you've bought, they no longer have the same value you had when you got them, you get rugged by, you know, Blizzard.

On the Axie front, that game part in the dungeon that's still in the central server, but Ogrimmar and all the trading that happens, the marketplace, the auction house, that's on-chain.

So The idea here is that you've taken away some of the power of the builders and the promise was that these items would be permanent, that these items would be owned by you and you could get all the financial benefit of any kind you wanted.

You could use them in DeFi to lend, you could borrow them, you could, you know, rent them.

And the idea was that we'd have a new financial paradigm for games.

And so far this seems like at least plausible.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like that's a great way to acquire users and you know scaling wise the logic is still on a centralized server right?

Yeah and most people you'll talk to have this thesis which is the next billion users in crypto will probably come through web

We've talked about this before, that the web

And we haven't been making serious attempts at crypto video games for 4 years yet, right?

Are there any, like, anyone that you could point to today that you could say, well, you know, maybe these guys?

I'm under NDA, so I can't, but like, for the ones I know about, And for the ones I don't know about, I mean, these video game studios are so tight-lipped because they actually understand how to market products a lot better than crypto games do.

Which is like, you have a very narrow window to hype up your game, a very narrow window to then sell it immediately after, and then it's long tail and you get almost nothing afterwards.

The shelf life for these games are very short.

Yeah, I mean Diablo 4, all the pump and hype happens like in a very narrow range.

Yeah, I mean, and it had its moment in the sun.

It didn't have the soul of Diablo 2 and I think that they haven't reinvented the system in

Side question, which game has the longest shelf life in the history of gaming?

Like, they keep re-upgrading the graphics a bit and relaunching on all the new platforms because that was such a great Zelda game.

But generally you should think about games like any other tech, right?

Where like this painting is timeless and will be a good painting forever.

We get better at making games every year.

And if you're playing an older game, you're playing with worse tech.

It's like saying, nah, I prefer MS-DOS to Windows 95.

You see the reason why Starcraft has lasted so long, Starcraft 1, lasted so long is they continuously improved.

Like every month they release a new version to balance the games.

And when Starcraft first came out the 3 races weren't balanced in terms of like attack, defense, etc.

But they spent like years to balance out the 3 races.

And once they're balanced, the games just becomes

And you have to keep rebalancing And this will be important for our conversation later.

And what you think is a balanced game isn't when someone discovers a new way to play it.

And this is actually really tough for StarCraft II, because on launch In North America, Protoss is considered OP, like overpowered.

But in Asia, Protoss is considered underpowered and that Zerg needs a nerf.

And because players have different player behaviors in these different micro-communities, the game was unbalanced for each 1 based on player preference.

Dota has the same problem with balance at different skill caps.

So like pro Dota players, the game needs to be balanced for them.

Dota is, okay, Dota is a MOBA, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena.

It spawned League of Legends and Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm and Heroes of Newerth and like several others in this genre.

And Dota, think of it as like an RPG that lasts 45 minutes and you play 5 vs 5.

So you're gonna level up, you're gonna buy items, it's gonna be super fun, you're gonna kill the enemy base, and then the game's over.

And like, there's 120 heroes, they all behave radically differently.

No 2 games are ever the same because of that various mix.

And the problem is just like it has to be balanced for pros and yet the vast majority of people are not pros.

And so a lot of heroes are just unplayable at a lower level because they're tuned to people who can click way faster than you and think way faster than you.

So what we talked about here was, you know, the shelf life of games and how games are resilient over time.

Certain games are, certain games aren't like Diablo.

And You know, I don't think that we have spent enough time in crypto on gaming, right?

You know, Axie Infinity maybe came out 2 years ago, right?

Yeah, and so let's say Axie was 1, you know There are a couple other web 2, 2.5 games, web 2.5 games.

But, and the vast majority of the game was on chain.

But the interesting part about breeding cats to get interesting visuals, the visuals engine was off chain.

But what was the game behind it outside of breeding and getting different types

Yeah, I take my cat, I fuck your cat, our new cat has a sailor hat.

Right, but then you try to Sell that cat for more money

put up my sailor cat hat for fucking, right?

But you only get a certain number of generations out of it.

And then it gets old and you have to put it out to pasture.

Okay, so there's a very fundamental question here.

What is the definition of a fully on-chain game?

Because in CryptoKitties you just said that the graphics is off-chain.

Yeah, let's define but you still consider CryptoKitties as a fully on-chain game.

Yeah, so We need to have the entire game state.

So all the relevant things to who is going to win on chain.

We have to have all the game logic on chain so that all the moves happen fairly and in a transparent way on chain.

That's the general view because we're after trustlessness as like a core principle.

The problem, so to speak, with a game like Axie is that Sky Mavis can mint unlimited Axies if it wanted because it controls the server that tells the blockchain what to mint and what to burn, right?

And CryptoKitties didn't have that power.

It couldn't change the nature of the smart contracts that were built, theoretically, assuming there was no admin controls.

The tricky part, though, is what made CryptoKitties interesting to play was that you didn't know how the genetics engine worked.

Well, you'd have this long string that would represent your crypto kitty.

And that string would be interpreted by some engine at Dapper and would push to a front end a kitty with a sailor hat if you were lucky.

And the logic of how that string turns into that hat was off-chain because they didn't want to let people reverse engineer it.

And so if the game is to breed sailor hats, that piece of game was sadly off-chain.

You could do it in maybe some ZK or some fully homomorphic encryption or some like enclave on a TEE.

See all Good Game Podcast transcripts on Youtube

Why On-Chain Gaming is the Future?