The Future is Indie | Martin Maurer ( September 2024)

all right um so second presentation of today this one is much less technical uh intentionally um I I put life hacks because um this is uh literally taken from the the pain that I learned during a couple of um trade shows recently with regards to games from game developers so first question would is anybody here a game developer or has anybody ever worked on games okay that's that's good um because otherwise there might be a a lot of content in here that is uh entirely alien so first of all I'm Martin I'm technical project manager at chains saafe um and I'm responsible for web through Unity which is our uh Flagship SDK for Unity developers making it um potentially trivial to add web three features to your game uh I've been working with that team for about a year now and um up to this point we always tried to make technology suit the the developers so that they can build their games and we thought that might might be enough to bring web 3 to gaming or game development to web 3 which is not the case so right now the gaming industry is broken I don't know if you know that but it's really broken um because studios are having trouble to acquire funds to build their games the market is potentially dry there is no funding available uh only to very few developers who just built uh copycat games of what you know and this is why every game pretty much looks the same nowadays and if any Indie hit makes it it will be copied like 20 times because the only thing that matters is revenue and that your game is like uh making Revenue in a predictable manner everything else does not really matter anymore and this is what got the the gaming Market into a really weird state that I would uh call broken um so that there's not even economic incentives for making Innovative games anymore this is not what you do as a as a developer what you what you really do is you you try to pitch to a publisher and make sure that you just write in that pitch what you think a publisher would be able to fund which is the most risk averse strategy that you can ever imagine so is this only a bad thing first I I thought yes because it's really hard for a lot of people who making a living from making games but but on the other hand harsh conditions can be a driver of change and um seems like this is uh is the case because today different angles to fund your development become an option up to this point uh nobody ever cared um but now people really start caring about web three or um uh blockchain development as a whole which has has been um not the case for the last couple of years that we've been building web 3 Unity um this is why I said we thought the technology is just not working whereas uh there was not a demand there right now this is changing and there more and more reasons for for collaboration between web3 developers and um game developers uh um arise the question I was asking myself is can we fix uh can we work together to fix that market we means uh uh web 3 development companies um maybe not the hardcore research uh corner of the industry but more the application facing it development companies and game developers is there a way to to fix that problem together similar to how um blockchain researchers and defi comp companies changed uh the the financial Market to a significant degree um the question is still not answered but I would like to figure it out because that's my job um first of all if this is supposed to work um if we want to get from a broken Market to something that can work again and uh bring good novel development along then obviously we would need to support Indie developers because they are the ones who bring the Innovative products to Market as gamer this is pretty easy because all you really need to do is buy indie games and there will be more Indie Games as a game Studio it's different because you need to do something really weird which is rejecting money if it's the wrong people uh uh who who want to give you money so basically rejecting foul money and start serving your community from day one is something that is not very common if you go to a to a game show I don't know GDC Gamescom or this month there's one in Brazil and you tell people to not take um Publishers money if it's not the the right kind they will they will think you're you're crazy um so this is a big one and it's hard to do um as web 3D developers uh there is something that we can really do easily on the application layer which is um helping them to integrate into social protocols that are open because this is where they will have a multitude of opportunities to find their customers um to promote their games to do a lot of things that cannot be controlled by big publishing companies for example and as as creatives you basically have to start monit izing your product before you even have one which sounds weird but with um with web 3 it's possible it's not that it wouldn't be possible it's just not something that is very common um and when I talk about it with with developers it slowly starts Dawning upon them that there is an option and it has been there for already a couple of years but nobody wanted to really um get their fingers dirty so one of the big drivers of change creating is uh creation is becoming too easy usually when you made a game there was a big upfront investment like hundreds of millions if you have a big title triple A1 a lot of risk because production was so expensive now this is changing like this little dwarf friend um took me 30 seconds to create and um that means if we can create that fast then we can validate a vision equally fast which is new that hasn't been the case up to this point you would have to invest to even build something it's similar to what we heard in the in the other talk you you you're creating uh a piece of software but then you don't know yet uh how the how the reception will be and all of a sudden if that gets big like really expensive then you you you need to validate your Market at some point otherwise the risk just gets too big and now imagine um the creative part for building this would get much much shorter this is what we see today and this opens up new opportunities to uh validate your ideas almost in real time now um the next thing that you need if you can like create really fast is you need you need people to figure out uh that you have something to show them and that's difficult as well or that used to be difficult as well um a simple way to to speed it up is to basically just give it away for free there was this guy Paul who who said it's more blessed to give than receive and um that's actually quite simple because if there's a place where you can gift people whatever you create as um usable objects in a future creation a game or experience then you can you can already flip uh the the the delivery around because people can come and pull you don't have to push and you don't have to rely on somebody who owns a lot of people that he can advertise to so if you do that as a as a game developer and this is kind of hard because nobody wants to give creation away for free um what you can do is you can convert non Crypton native audiences people without a wallet basically pretty fast and we we tested this like creating a lot of Wallets on the Fly um which is still one of the biggest problems for for web 3 in general that people just don't have wallets and they don't want one and everybody is uh abstracting away to the max but still the numbers tell us that people don't want to convert unless they are crypto natives anyways so this is a good way to put something in front of big audiences that they understand which is Gamers like really really many people to First Step just create a wallet so you can grab your stuff your free stuff um the other good thing about it is if you do this onchain you protect your your IP pretty much because you notorized that you created something at some specific block on some specific Network and it's not just giving it away it's not just giving giving it away for free but you get something in return that might not be overly obvious to many game developers from the traditional gaming industry and um what you do is you build a community from day one for your future IP which is going to pay off later uh in the process as we will see another good thing is it sets up your IP for easy analytics and and and validation because the more people do things with your with your assets um the more you can see in analytics and this is even like uh publicly available so you don't even need to to pay some some company to do the analytics for you you can just follow up on whatever you see on chain we built this middle piece for a a different trade shows and we tried it out and that worked really really well like converting people giving people something uh that they can um making sure that we see what happens but this is only half of the of the work what next this is the question that I I usually get isn't marketing that platform the hard and expensive part of course in uh former days that was the hard and expensive part because you just needed to promote it with I don't know money that you give uh Google or or somebody who has got the advertising power now it's different because the only thing that really matters is the creation of game developers fast early and a lot because this is the touch points by now it's not some store that will allow you to download a demo version of a game where you need to go and you need to know it but as long as people can come and own a part of of your future IP you have a lot more audience and a lot more visibility and another interesting uh mechanic is at play because you have people who are not even interested in your game they are just interested in your loot in your assets to trade it up to this point everybody kept telling me this is a a bad thing we don't want those dents we don't want Traders uh because they they are not interested in the game on the on the flip side these people have an A intrinsic motivation to make whatever they get from you as a game developer a valuable thing that they can promote to others so it's basically free marketing for a game it's it has been there all the time nothing has changed but the the perception of what we can do with it is slowly changing because as I said at the beginning the market conditions are so harsh that we need to think about it uh unless we want to end up in a situation where gaming is as dull and boring as for example going to Netflix or Amazon Prime or anything like that it's all the same and we we will we will see this but we don't have to as web three Community like developers maybe it's not on the on the protocol level because this wouldn't help but on the application Level there is is a lot room for for contribution especially when it comes to helping game developers to access audiences via um open social protocols it's the EAS easiest way to do it if you if you don't want to promote your stuff the traditional way well you need somebody to help you uh to do it on I don't know foraster for example and this is something that um doesn't happen we we can we can see this a lot that this connection just does not happen so we will always have a situation where people talk about something like web 3 gaming it's just gaming there is nothing like web 3 gaming there is either video games or not video games the technology that that powers them never mattered um it's not even a platform it's just uh from from my point of view after after quite some years in this it's a it's a problem that the communities don't have a joint incentive to work together and and there would be many um if that worked and a lot of game objects future game objects was out there for people to own them validation would turn into something trivial something that by now keeps people from building their games just because they can't validate them which means they can't provide the risk profile which means they can't find money to build it it would just go away um so simp simply by putting that uh loot out to the community we get a means of analytics um for oneself for people who just want to trade your stuff it doesn't really matter it's just a a way of thinking about this differently and of course community building is built in this is kind of this is kind of nice because um you don't even like if you don't have a game yet you don't a database to manage your players yet and you don't need to you can do this lazy you can do this later if people are interested in what you what you're about to build they will be interested when it is ready just like John Kack once said uh it's done when it's done okay and people will then have access or if they don't care they can they can already move on if everything fails and there is a community for for for your game that you never make you can still redirect a community to another game this would be if you multiply number of people that you send to another game times customer acquisition costs it would allow you to start all over again something that has never been possible before it's again as I said it has all been there all the time but it's just not applied because from what I can what I can tell the communities have never had the chance to talk to each other and see where they can really benefit from each other and this is what what makes it easy to come to a situation as we see today in the market where nothing can happen anymore now after a long uh presentation about giving everything away for free we end up in a situation where game developers now can monetize and they don't need anybody to do that which is only possible it's only possible with um with the technologies that we provide them with it's it's not possible any other way just because it would mean we would entirely Break um identity and access management for large scale systems from from uh gaming companies that are driven by shareholder value it just couldn't happen this way it can happen and um it is happening to very very few uh companies who have understood how how to do this more or less by accident not because they planned it but because they had no other way early on and found a community to sell to and um this is open pretty much to everybody in the current market conditions so if in in a half a year or a year's time I I look at the at the numbers of Studios that that uh went out of business um I hope the number will be lower because people start shifting to the to the opportunities that they've had for so long and on the other on the other site that developers purely from the from the web3 community start working with something as mundane as games I mean that's that's not not defi this is not uh banking this is not making the world a better place this is not Liberation this is not voting this is like it has nothing to do uh with what the the usual um topics would have been but it's a huge Market a huge Market in in in demand of tooling that allows allows a lot of people to sustain to basically survive this this dip uh that we're facing right now and it would be it would be nice if if the community that is usually very very helpful and U trying to make it a better place for everybody really saw this opportunity and reached out to help help game developers as well because I think it needs a lot more people to get the message out there that this doesn't have to mean it's the end of of of all Indie development but it's the opportunity to come together with folks who have the tools uh built already that's about it if there are any questions feel free to uh ask me you can just go ahead like first when we comment like my experience with web gaming is the problem is that games are just not really fun like yet yeah and other thing that you users or Gamers they don't really care about like owning things in in I mean they don't really see the value like guess really as you said you need to be D or you need to come from like investment kind of perspective to this but the thing like on the the good side what I see was was working or is working with let's call it traditional gaming is crowdfunding yeah so actually like from what your all your talk I see like just doing iOS for for for games that could actually work yes so something in in that direction so crowdfunding works works for games so you can just make a demo like Mak nice video and and yeah that's that's that's my my comment but that's that's exactly what what is the the direction this is this is all heading um but making this available super early in the process and giving giving people the opportunity to invest into the into the games themselves and not just hoping with some pre-order code that that things might or might not fall into place because this will only benefit the ones that have the um the power to do that I don't know big studios that say okay we do pre-order on Steam next try this as as an indie you will not even be allowed to do that just because of the risk that you might never deliver if you're Dice from Sweden and you make another battlefield of course you can cash in one billion overnight before ever having a game and this is exactly where we're going that we want to make sure as early as you can produce any asset put it out there and allow people to become become your community and W without owning that piece you cannot really become part because then you will you will uh basically fund some platform that is like Indiegogo or I don't know Kickstarter that will then have the money and um you're at the grace of them again so what you said is absolutely correct and we're going as Extreme as possible to the early produ ction stages to say hey if you want to put it in front of people like that slide that said you can if you can make it you can validate it if you can create something fast making it available to your community will allow you to validate your vision equally fast this is exactly where ownerships come ownership comes into play because if people want to own something that you created super early and they take it for free and then they uh are smart enough to sell it to somebody else you can see oh this has a value now I didn't do nothing Community actually validated what I gave to them and I can see that it has a value now it's not your money as a developer but you can see that it is worth moving in this direction and then you go to like to the last step where monetization gets easy and you do this with what really matters to the community you grow on the way so it's it's it's really a subtle difference but a powerful one what do you think how much because they are already existing games I find out some of them right and takes quite a long time after you have a certain amount and it's something valuable so I like idea to attract new people but um shouldn't it be a bit more than what is existing there right out now to attract more people um to get into the game first the the Productions that are out there are are not very good to be honest a lot of games that have been made um that that incorporated web 3 features they are not very good the the good ones that are being released right now or the ones that are coming in in a couple of month um will will have a a very different profile but they will still need to attract another community at first because you can't make games as we as we know them today uh like Real Time games that need to put a lot uh of of a computational throughput on the table you you cannot do this on a blockchain easily um and it's not it's not required so the the ownership part that you that you want to be part of in the future is there exists a a game entirely off chain and next to it there exists a a world onchain a persistent world onchain and parts of that game mainly the economic loop at first and then later um stuff like agreements or anything that you could potentially put into a smart contract will slowly find their way on chain so that the games can stay beautiful as they are today um but to get to this point to ever get to the point to build something like this you can apply what I just said you need to start early you need a community that wants to be invested into your game and then you need the infrastructure that they can even do that so I I fully agree what we see today as web 3 games is not overly convincing and the ones that will be convincing are currently in the in the early stages of their life life cycle they exist for example there's this one thing on Stark net called influence um this is something that I play for example and it is it bu it's built in a way that all you can really do right now is help building the world there's not much happening there it wants to turn into something as beautiful and big as if online but right now the community is invested and helping to Source minerals from the ground and build stuff so that the world even exists and this is how this is moving like really slow still it shows for example they did the exact same thing they could fund their entire development up to this point without any external money um but some Grant from Stark net Foundation um and they have a big Community by now which is what I'm trying to express to every game developer it's possible that's my my message or my my mission in all this okay what they did with they and better so they gave more away like um the the one you mentioned lately from stet they they got a grant from starnet they they didn't have to give anything away from their game they are still like it's it's it will be Community owned anyways so the the game ends up being entirely Community owned um it is like because every like it's a solar system you can own everything there and people do so by now it's a it's a circular economy already in the early stages yes to play need to pay yeah you need to buy some par start the par or something totally totally but very few lucky people who supported that Vision right from the start and said hey this is so good I want to do some Community work and they got their their Asteroids for free but yeah if you want to start playing you need to pay while you play just to pay for transaction costs I mean it's it's relatively cheap but still it it needs to happen yes please oh yeah so as a as a team building again I invite everybody was curious about casual gaming mobile gam also in the context of this to play game just come related to me and Le about this one question I would like to ask though because I see we talked a lot about ownership now and onboarding people and I think that's like an important part for sure but actually something that you realized is that there's mechanics uh that you can only make possible through this technology that other games cannot like bring on essentially and these mechanics are actually the part that then is fun and um yeah let's say I see more potential in disregard of like saying we we can build games that maybe were really hard to build before or even impossible essentially through enabled through a technology and so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this if you have any examples um uh about this like I mean I guess you have also followed like trends like the dark forest and primium and what these guys are doing or now uh try for labs here and go there if anybody knows them um starting out so uh I was just here is like if you found more of these use cases that are not focused about ownership because I think it's like one part of it sure but like I actually find the mechanics more interesting part yeah there are there are definitely things that couldn't have happened uh in any other way for example you mentioned Dark Forest I I remember one one thing where where people started selling uh information like a black market emerged alongside that game just to sell uh information that you couldn't have because of information asymmetry basically in the game which is which is pretty cool I don't have any mechanics right now that I personally would uh say are important enough to craft a game around this but this is due to the fact that I'm not a a a game designer who who thinks about this all day long I'm I'm totally sure there are game mechanics that will excite people a lot um that that you couldn't get built any other way so maybe you have a example for me not mechanics but thing that you can basically customization is also it's not a mechanic in a game it's also not an ownership but it's something that is unlocked by the um this more like self Sovereign games that have some just rules on on on chain uh some parts but then the front ends to those case games are like the clients some graphics can be different and so like the example with dark Forest is that since all of the rules or parts of the rules are on chain there are plenty of different front ends for this game like there is the original with the the asteroids and the space but there are also like some in in terminal some in uh other medium so I guess that's one interesting one but it is more related to the autonomous games yeah autonomous worlds in general and the the the property that they invite modding um is is really important uh from from my point of view it's just not something that is um o overly common um it is getting there like big games like Roblox there are even providers that that that want to make sure that user generated content is finding its way into games but it's usually moderated so it's not as extreme um as we would like to see this there's this one Studio from Berlin Clan games who are who came up with a proposal to do this in faces where it's moderated first and then it gets less moderated over time and in the end you can basically add whatever you want to that game um physics like physics for the for the game world that could be totally different different from what we expect but still you can rely on them is really interesting and then obviously the the fact that you can fully invest everything you've got into a game because you can be sure this game will be there as long as someone is willing to spin up a node um and run it uh that's different as well but this is all not game mechanics that that like Foster fun in gaml just because it happens uh on on a blockchain but they're important properties that that all all um make make this even more exciting uh the what I wanted to pretty much Express today was only because this is a very uh uh Tech sevy audience um like directly uh attached to the to the protocol level uh and and re search around there and um I think you have the the the the voice people will listen um and if you if you just take home that The Gaming Community um needs as as much help as they can get um in in terms of tooling that allows them to financially uh Sovereign build their build their games because if if we don't help I I I'm not sure who will uh be there to make sure that we don't end up in a situation where you don't want to play or don't even don't want to download a game anymore because it's just too boring well to why why do you what are the reasons that the market has declined I mean you yeah what the why it was hyperinflated during covid oh a lot of money for making games was there just because people needed to stay at home and we don't have that that situation anymore so I'm working with games that have already had 10 15 20 million production value and these are going down just be because the next 20 30 50 million don't come anymore and this is big teams 100 120 people um and they could this is this is what kind of makes me nervous about it they could sustain all they really need is a bit of of help from people who have seen the exact same transformation on the financial markets with with uh defi pretty much they could benefit from people who have this background knowledge a lot um and maybe you have friends who work at at game Studio Studios um yeah just keep it in the back of your mind that it can be very very like substantially helpful um if you share your expertise and they like game game developers are usually great at coming up with Solutions quick but a little bit of help to sustain will will get them a long way but before covid-19 there were games and there was obviously there're games where are people developing these games are institutions um is it I do do you think that we'll get back to the things they were there's something sort of fundamentally changed before with covid-19 no right now it's just a very easy play let's say you are a big publisher and you have hyper Deep Pockets then it's like in medieval times when you beseech a castle and the one who has most resources will just wait until there's nothing left to fight and this is kind of the situation right now we have these ginormous corporations that own 90% of the revenue of the entire Market it's like 50 50 games own 90% of the revenue and then there is like this 10% that 90% of the people making games need to share to do anything so it's kind of obvious how this how this plays out um and this is why I think the moment in time where people really need to find new ways is great to build Bridges between communities like the web3 community and game communities to work together like more effectively this time and maybe we end up in a in a self sustaining State at one point where where there is no need for intermediaries anymore and this could even because games is low stakes this is not like actual money this could work better than what we see with the transformation of the financial markets which is taking much longer than probably everybody coming to the ethereum meetups would have expected eight years ago um we we we still need to work to get there and this is potentially a easier Fe to show how this can really go all the way through okay all right then thank you very much [Applause]