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Benjamin Charbit Of Life Beyond Studios — Thrilling Online Gaming Experience Powered By Blockchain Technologies, Plus: Drew Coffman Of FWB, And More…
In this episode of the Edge of NFT podcast, the hosts delve into the world of web three gaming and the immersive metaverse with special guest Benjamin Charbit, the CEO and co-founder of Life Beyond Studios. Benjamin shares his journey from the banking industry to becoming a strategic leader in the game development world. He discusses the inspiration behind Life Beyond, a gaming metaverse where players where players shape their own roles in a tokenized economy with true ownership, and how it integrates blockchain technology and NFTs to offer true ownership and a player-driven economy. The episode explores the concept of agency and entrepreneurship within the game, the importance of community partnerships, and the roadmap for Life Beyond’s development. Tune in for more details!
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This is Benjamin Charbit of Life Beyond Studios, building the feeling of a game with the stakes of reality. I am here on the Edge of NFT, the only game in town to get real Web3 content.
Stay tuned for this episode to learn how the Game Director of Assassin’s Creed has in-game assets to serve the player through the Web3 gaming ecosystem, Life Beyond.
Plus, how Counter-Strike propelled our guests from eSports competitor to creator of one of the greatest gaming franchises of all time. Learn how a tokenized community-led platform can lead to better internet and an awesome fest in the woods to be Friends With Benefits.
Finally, hear about Denarii Labs‘ unique twelve-week accelerator focused on tokenomics design, offering teams up to $200,000 in funding.
Before we get started, we are launching a brand new show by August 2nd, 2023. Dive into the captivating world of artificial intelligence with the Edge of AI Podcast. Join us as we explore the frontiers of AI and its impact on our lives. You can subscribe now on your favorite platform. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for exciting updates and insights.
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In this episode, we spotlight Benjamin Charbit, the visionary CEO and Cofounder of Life Beyond Studios, a gaming platform offering unparalleled immersion. He transitioned from high-profile roles in banking and private equity to the game industry, making waves as a Strategic Leader at Ubisoft and Game Director of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.
Inspired by Neil Stephenson’s works, he became committed to creating an MMO that offers more than play. It offers Life. A subsidiary brand since 2022, Life Beyond Studios previously, Darewise Entertainment, comprises an international team of game development veterans. They leveraged the potential of online games to create social interactive experiences.
Life Beyond Studios’ flagship project Life Beyond is a gaming metaverse inviting players to establish a new civilization on Planet Dolos. This sci-fi world blends a player-driven tokenized economy with NFTs enabling players to shape their roles in its society. The game embraces the open metaverse philosophy, marrying immersive experiences with digital societies emphasizing true ownership and interoperability. Benjamin, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I enjoyed listening to everything you were saying.
It is like daily affirmations. It is like, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough.”
It sounds great because you are working every day on this project. You don’t take that much distance from it, especially for us. We have been hard at work since 2018. It is our daily grind. I hear all that, and I’m like, “This is what we are doing. This sounds exciting.” Thank you for that.
As Ethan was reading all that, I was reflecting on how different this is from what other folks refer to as the “metaverse.” The metaverse occasionally gets a bad rap for not being immersive, engaging in, and allowing people to have this type of unique experience that keeps them coming back. There are a lot of empty, dusty metaverses out there, but that is not going to be the case with Life Beyond. I’m excited to dive in here. Before we do that, let’s start at the beginning. How did this concept for Life Beyond come about? It is this interesting social tech society.
It is going to resonate with what you were saying already, which is, as you introduce, we are all game developers coming, most of us from Ubisoft, having worked on these blockbuster games, mostly focusing on open-world games like Assassin’s Creed and The Division. Back in 2014, I read my first book by Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash. Sorry to disappoint your audience.
First, it was Reamde. It was a fantastic thriller. Most of the book takes place in an MMO called Terrain. I read this book. I see the implication and the connection between the digital and the physical world. I’m 39. I was born, raised, and brought up in this digital space before it became such a mainstream thing. I was on RRC. I was playing online games when I was 12, 13, and 14. I made many friendships over there, real ones and meaningful ones. Navigating between these two layers of reality has always been my daily life.
Reading this book took me to the next level. I was like, “When I think of the MMO genre, that is the next step.” The next step is building these virtual worlds that impact our lives where we can come to play but where eventually expand our presence there. We stay for other reasons. Rather than constantly being the hero, we can also be any other member of this society.
That is how it started to grow in me. I’m sharing with the rest of my partners. Most of them come from the same generation, which is not Gen Z. It is more like an older Millennial type who were all big MMO players. If we could one day get to experience this, we would be happy. That is the crazy challenge we decided to tackle.
I’m over the line of what you defined as your generation, but I’m excited about it. I saw Richard nodding his head. He is excited about it too.
Assassin’s Creed is one of my favorite lineups of all time. Black Flag was the jump-off point where things started to go in the right direction. It aligns with everything you said about not necessarily needing to be the main character or being able to have some identity and do some things within that game.
Being the leader on that, I’m sure you had a lot of creative direction with that, which aligns perfectly, and I think that is cool. Shout-out to Jalen. This is your favorite game of all time. Be jealous. I will make sure to share this with you because this is sick. Web3 tech and blockchain allow you to define identities in Life Beyond. Do you delve more into how players can utilize these technologies to shape their endgame personas?
The idea of blockchain is the relationship between the game, developers, and community is radically different. Before, there was a completely unbalanced power of the developer. That could unilaterally make crazy decisions that sometimes you didn’t enjoy as a player. The bargaining power is completely different. The game has to serve the assets, and not the assets have to serve the game.
The game has to serve the assets and not so much the assets have to serve the game. Click To Tweet
As developers, we have to serve this community, which also means that now this gives many more opportunities for the players to enter this world to play other roles than the traditional or I’m going to walk around slaying dragons and monsters. Not that we want to dismiss this part because a lot of us come for this, but how many players, every year, buy farming simulators and all of these other games where they can do many different things, social, economic simulation, and management gameplay? That is what we wanted to do.
We wanted to create a world where we could bring all of these people together and offer them many different gameplays. These gameplays would be connected by this economic and social loop, which is the same thing as the physical world. You have a job, I have a job, and together, because of the free market economy, we can bring value to each other.
That is the same idea, which also means it is a crazy project. It is bigger than anything we have ever done before because it is many games together, and this is also where only Web3 development could allow you to do this because we can’t focus on building this thing behind closed doors for several years and eventually publish a game. Instead, we could onboard the communities, talk to early adopters and different types of persona who want different things, and start testing our assumptions on paper or sometimes prototypes. It is a radically different way of approaching it.
It sounds like a lot of fun, responsibility, and a big-level perspective. It is fascinating to consider a type of project to take on with your colleagues and friends. Within what you are doing, we have The Hub. It is touted as a place for innovation and interaction. It sounds like one of our events. Can you explain how this contributes to the player’s experience in Life Beyond?
The Hub is a good illustration of what I was introducing, which is rather than developing the game completely and getting to an alpha stage, we are building the game step-by-step. Every system is going to go through each of these stages of conception, pre-production, production, alpha, and beta of what we call gold master when it is ready to ship.
The Hub is this destination or the spaceship, where all the players are stuck and orbiting around the planet. In this lobby, we invite everybody together. It is a social space, but it is also the place where we are going to keep introducing whatever we are developing. Sometimes it is a piece of lore, partnership, or a prototype, but it is this central destination, hence The Hub, where you join. It is your gateway to the Life Beyond experience. It is simple, but it is going to expand over time into much more of a theme park because this is where you will be able to test and experience a bunch of things until you are finally able to get into the proper game.
My mind immediately moved toward the moment when I learned that Game of Thrones had multiple different directors and was similar to Mandalorian. I’m curious about The Hub and all these different subgames. If you cast different directors and producers for these things based on their personality, is there this ghoulish world where the person behind is a little bit darker but still a cool person?
The truth is every attempt we have tried in this industry to replicate the movie industry into the gaming industry has always been a disaster. We tried to have executive production houses that would ideate the game and work with a team of developers to make it. It never worked. It is interesting because the benefit of having multiple directors end up as a viewer to have multiple flavors still within the same lore. For us, game development is a different type of production that is usually closer to animation. I would not even know how to organize a development like that.
I was curious. That makes a lot of sense. It is part of my naivete, but I wanted to at least ask. At the same time, commuting partnerships and having a lot of those are pivotal to the metaverse, in particular, Life Beyond. I know you guys are leveraging community partnerships in some interesting ways. Could you talk about how they are enhancing the game environment?
There are many different aspects. The first one is we never wanted to build such a massive game in the shadow. Connecting with our community, getting feedback, and getting desire was an important part of the process. We have to be reasonable. It is not like we can address every single need, but we have built a unique relationship with what we call our founders. The founders are the holders of our founders key, which is our most premium NFT.
Every two weeks, we host a town hall with this community with the founders. It is not like we come here to present something. We go there to discuss topics. Not because we want to keep them updated but because with Life Beyond, we are building the playground and systems, but the life over there will be completely created by the individual players and player organizations. We are not building this game for ourselves but for the community. Engaging this way genuinely has always been an important part of the process.
The second reason is, especially when you have been a triple-A developer for some years, it is a little bit of a traumatizing experience because you are going to spend multiple years. It is never 1 or 2. Even in the press, when they say, “It takes 2 to 3 years to build like this.” This is never the true story. It is more than 5, 6, or even more. When it is a brand new IP, it can be 8 to 10 years.
Time is the most valuable resource that we have. You want to make sure you are not completely going off track. That is why we are building this relationship with the community. The next step for us is to have how we are engaging, onboarding, and bringing this community to start creating its own presence in the world.
I like that response, and it gives me a lot of hope for where Web3 gaming and the metaverse are headed. A lot of earlier versions of Web3 games, unfortunately, weren’t built for where your hardcore gamers are coming from. It does take years to build the type of games that a lot of these gamers come and play over and over again to have that stickiness.
The other part of it that you spoke about was the community side by having these town halls and feedback. If something sucks, tell me. You are open to that. If you like this thing, it was like, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s have this be a back-and-forth and not a one-way. Let me build this thing, and here is why you are going to like it.” Tell me why these features make the most sense and why you have been doing that. There is always a defining moment for a project. What has been that moment for Life Beyond? Why do you think it is significant?
The first moment for us was in 2019 when we opened the game for the first time to test something because it was out at the same time we opened a Discord server. We started having people coming in. It was small at that time. We had this strong connection with this small group of players who are still there several years later.
After many iterations and throwaways, what I was saying is we only see the last two years of development of a triple-A game, but you have no idea what happened before and how many times you threw out your art direction, creative direction, and narrative direction. You had this technical, technological obstacle. This was a strong moment, but there were several of these pivotal moments.
Another important one was when we decided to move to the blockchain. When we started Life Beyond, it was a Web2 project, but it was a project that was designed from the get-go for ownership. Whatever content you would have, whether it would be your vehicle or equipment, all of this was supposed for us to be your property and you were entitled to do whatever you wanted with it. We were building a completely traditional architecture to give you these rights.
When we pivoted to Web3, that was a big moment, especially with the defiance that some of our community members were experiencing at this time. We had a few movements in the community. There is not that much drama. The good level of transparency and communication helped us get even closer to some of our community members.
You mentioned a moment ago the promise of true ownership going on in here. Within a game, this idea of agency is important to the users. They want to feel like they can affect things and have a role or credit for contributing to things. Could you get dive a little bit deeper into what this entails and how it manifests into this reality within the game?
There cannot be any innovation if there is no entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is going to rely on you being able to do whatever you want in this world with the assets that you own. You can sell, rent, and provide services. The beauty of smart contracts is composability. We think of smart contracts and NFTs as digital property, which is an important part of the value proposition. Even the most appealing part is composability.
Our world is made of composability. Uber is an example of composability. If you have a car transportation service, you create Uber. It is the same in Life Beyond. The fact that you own this asset and it is not even hosted on a central database but on an architecture we don’t have any control over. It means that in a completely permissionless way, anyone can start building services on top of the experience.
Our world is made of composability. Click To Tweet
In the example of composability, let’s say you want a car rental service. You can do that. If you own a bunch of cars, you can create everything the front end, the back end, and the smart contract that is going to use your NFTs. Without even messaging us, you can run this whole service. This is a game changer, especially coming from the MMO world, where we were limited in what we were able to do with our assets.
I wanted to touch on the roadmap mainly for selfish reasons. When do I get to play this thing? What are the other collaborations, partnerships, and features that we should be on the lookout for?
The first question, which is burning everybody’s lips all the time. I like to ask the same question to the team sometimes. We are going to keep pushing it. You can join The Hub and play some of our prototypes, but as our community knows, we are rolling out a completely new art direction over the summer of 2023.
The original art direction was cartoony and Fortnity a little bit, but also something we could afford with the limited resources we had back then when the point was to prove the point. We were not, at this point, in the heavy development. When other brands arrived and we joined them, then we became able to completely deliver this level of quality, which we have been developing.
We are rolling out this art direction which also means that we have some interesting things coming out in September, October, and November 2023. You are going to be able to experience some parts of the game. It is not going to be massive, but it will give you a first flavor, and we are going to keep doing this. We are going to use the rest of 2023 and a big part of 2024 before we are able to get into beta stage work. You have the full open-world experience with a big focus on our power-first gameplay called pioneering, which is the arrival on the planet and now the first step before we can get to a sustainable settlement.
The second question you asked was about the partnerships. When you build a world like Life Beyond or GTA, you have two ways to do it. You can author everything or bring in partners and they can populate the world. There are content creators in the world. We are more interested in this opportunity rather than ourselves recreating every stakeholder and entity of this world that makes it in the whole world-building process.
We haven’t made these announcements yet, but we have some massive things coming out. There are some NFT communities onboarding. There are some famous brands from the physical world. We are playing on many different tracks now, steadily building this world. It takes a little bit more patience, but we are talking about a few months, and we will have some major announcements to make.
Drew Coffman. It is great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
I’m scared, but I’m ready.
It is from Mythical.
It is my daily struggle.
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