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Gala Gaming w Jason Brink and Neil Haran | The Edge of Gala

Gala Gaming w Jason Brink and Neil Haran | The Edge of Gala

Gala Games is a community uplifting powerhouse defining new frontiers of Web3 entertainment. To understand what this new creation brings to the table, Josh Kriger gets the latest scoop from BitBender Jason Brink and Rep CEO Neil Haran. This sponsored episode is recorded live in downtown LA. It’s the beginning of a new series called Edge of Gala, where we explore this unique and vast ecosystem crossing, gaming, music and film. In this conversation, Jason and Neil tell us how Gala Games is simplifying blockchain terminology to make it accessible to everyone, from tech enthusiasts to grandmothers. Learn how they’re creating a diverse range of content, including games, music, and film projects, to cater to a broad audience and drive mass adoption. Plus, catch up with the team at Mocaverse in our new special segment, MocaMoment. All these and more in this exciting episode of Edge of NFT!

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Gala Games

This sponsored episode is done in Downtown LA. It’s the beginning of a new series we’re calling Edge of Gala, where we explore this unique and vast ecosystem crossing gaming, music, and film. I’m joined by Jason Brink and Neil Haran. We’ll talk a little bit about these gentlemen and get into what they’re doing together.

Jason, AKA BitBender, is the President of Blockchain and boringspeak. Neil Haran is the CEO and Founder of Rep. They’re doing a lot of building in the metaverse with Plato Learn, Rawbots, planets, and other fun projects. If you don’t know already, Gala Games is a community-uplifting powerhouse defining new frontiers of Web3 entertainment. It’s great to have you here in person. Jason, I don’t know if we’ve had an IRL moment in a while.

We haven’t. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to connect face-to-face. It’s great to be here in beautiful Los Angeles. I always have a problem with Los Angeles. I grew up in California. Wheels are coming off a little bit, but it is nice to be back here to be hanging out with everybody.

The food scene keeps getting better. It still is an epicenter of creativity and culture across all the different areas of your ecosystem that you’ve been busy building. What’s been going on since we last got together?

There’s a lot that’s going on now in our space. Gala Games has been pushing the boundaries in everything we’ve done since day one. Some stuff that’s coming up that’s important to us is we’re in the process of bringing new people onto our L1 GalaChain. This is one of the reasons that Neil and I are here together. We’re pushing hard into music and film. We’ve got game launches that are stacked up throughout the end of 2023 and lots more coming to the platform. A few things are coming to the platform soon. Champions Arena is launching. We’ve got PokerGo launching in September 2023. We’ve got Q4 launches for a few different titles. Amazing stuff is coming out. I’m pleased to be part of it.

That’s why we wanted to do this series. There are not a lot of companies that are building so much now like you guys. There’s a lot to unpack.

It’s more than I can personally keep track of. Every time I turn around, we’re doing something else that I was unaware of. One of the reasons we wanted to do this with you is to sit down and drill into some of what’s going on in the ecosystem.

Hopefully, it’s a forcing function for you guys cataloging all this.

It would be nice.

Let’s cover some of the games you mentioned. We’ll go into more detail and why you guys have come together. Tell us a little bit more about Champions Arena and PokerGo.

Champions Arena is a fully mobile game that is launching. It is a Korean-style RPG battler. It is fun and has extremely high production values. It’s a gorgeous game if you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. OneUniverse is our development partner on that in Korea. I have honestly not been this excited about a game in a while. It’s worth checking out.

When you said the word fun, I heard the word addictive. You don’t know what’s going on in your company because you’re busy playing Champions Arena.

I wish that that was the case. I’ve been able to put 1 or 2 hours into Champions Arena. That’s all I’ve been able to put time into it. It is extremely fun. Do you ever play Final Fantasy VII?

I’ve played Final Fantasy. Not VII.

It has a battle system that is reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII, which is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s cool. It’s a lot of fun.

What’s unique about PokerGo? There have been other poker games out there. It’s a fun genre.

One of the things that are unique about PokerGo is that it has a sweepstakes-based system of earning built into it. You come in and play. By playing, you are earning spots in a leaderboard-based sweepstakes with actual Gala-based prizes. That’s a cool thing. Do you like watching poker?

I’ve watched the Final Table. There’s a lot on the line. It’s entertaining.

PokerGo is the company responsible for all of the global broadcast poker you see, the World Series of Poker, and all of that. They do all of the broadcasting of all of that. For many years, within all of those broadcasts, there have been advertisements for the World Series of Poker application. There is not any longer. There are now advertisements for PokerGo Live from Gala Games. That’s something cool. The PokerGo logo is going to be on the felt at the World Series of Poker. You can see some of this stuff on TV.

We talk about what it’s going to take for mass adoption, and partnerships like this are happening. It is coming to fruition.

We are getting actual players.

We’re talking millions of eyeballs here.

That’s something we’re excited about. It’s a fun poker game. A lot of people are going to enjoy that.

I’ve gotten to know Neil a little bit. The history of how you guys got together and what you all are building, we should go into. When did you first meet Neil?

I’ll give a brief introduction here. I met Neil because my boss, Eric Schiermeyer, who is the Founder of Gala and was one of the cofounders of Zynga, sent me an email that was a forward from Neil. Neil was saying, “We’ve got this thing. We’d like you to talk about it.” Eric forwards me a lot of these things. If you ever send Eric an email with some inbound request that you’re looking at something, it’s likely that I’m the one who will go through that and follow up on it. If you don’t hear back, it’s probably my fault. That’s how I met Neil. We were able to get together and start talking about things. We found that we were well aligned. How about you? You tell him a little bit about Rep, Neil.

We were aligned with how well our visions complement each other. I can briefly talk about Rep, the social network.

We’ll get into that. You started Rep, when?

Rep was started several months ago. It was done to help our game Rawbots have more engagement and create different kinds of users that could interact with the ecosystem. In Rawbots, you can build robots like Lego. You can explore space. Robot building is complicated. How do we add more variety of different players into that ecosystem? We decided to create a social network. Users can find robot parts in the real world. They can interact with each other by trading robot parts. Maybe they don’t want to play the game, but they want to trade robot parts for other types of NFTs or in-game items.

That’s going to be exciting as you merge those worlds together to touch on the synergy that you had with Jason and Gala a little bit more in-depth. How do you guys look at the creative process of building games? What’s different about adding the blockchain piece?

If I go back to Web2, you think of a social network and Web2. Your name, user ID, or account would be some entry in a database. Whereas in blockchain, all of that stuff is around a different way of thinking, your account, wallet, or wallet address. Everything is around that. Everything is centered around you owning your data. It does not have anything to do with the database anymore. That’s a fundamental shift between Web2 and Web3. We’re trying to take the best of what was working with Web2 and bring it to a period in which we believe people are ready to own their own data, data privacy, and different ways of thinking about censorship.

What got you excited to work with Gala? They’re a juggernaut. They’re building a lot of great games. They’re one of the leaders on that side of the space. What was it about the chemistry you felt with your background in gaming?

It is my pivot on gaming. Originally, I was building traditional types of games that you would expect from Xbox and PlayStation. I was interviewed by Eric at Zynga. Eric is the one who offered me my first job in this gaming, where you had to think about user experience and making Zynga stupid simple. The importance of creating stupid simple interfaces that lead to powerful experiences was drilled into me every day of working at Zynga.

Several years later, I didn’t have to go into that way of thinking with any of these guys. Eric is the one who was responsible for teaching me many of these ideologies to make things simple. That made me think a certain way for these several years. Everything I was focused on working on building has always been around user experience first. That’s primarily what we do.

I was talking to an investor and friend of another company in this space. He was saying he lost his tokens. He doesn’t know how to get to them. That might be an indication of why that company is struggling. We overcomplicate things a lot in Web3. Jason, we’ve talked about this before. One of the other keys to mass adoption is simplicity. That word means different things to different people and can be applied in many different ways. It is about boiling it down to simple.

The thing you always have to ask yourself in this space is when you say simple, do you mean simple for an engineer or my grandmother? A software engineer and my grandmother are going to have different levels of experience. The majority of people who use digital products tend towards my grandmother’s end of the spectrum. She can barely use a computer. It’s tragic to watch sometimes, but it’s that degree of simplicity that we have to design for.

One of the things we see about some social media networks is they have made it quite easy to go there, click on the post button, and say whatever ridiculous thing you want to say. This is interesting because Rep presents a new way to look at social media and experience without making it difficult for people to engage with, which is critical.

An analogy is I was helping my mom with getting on my Netflix account. They give you four ways to do that. You have the QR code, link, and password option. We figured it out. That was an achievement for my mom and me interacting with technology. She’s in Boston, and I’m here. That popped into my mind as you’re talking because that’s how simple it has to be when we’re talking about gaming and music. You mentioned this new social network, which you all are building together. Gala Friends is the name of it. It sounds exciting. I would love to dive into what that looks like a little bit more, Neil.

For phase one, the basic social network is going to be what you would already expect from social networks like Twitter.

I don’t know what to expect from Twitter.

Users will be able to create posts and interact with each other much in the way you already expect. The other component is the gamification and geocaching component. It’s centered around the map and treasure hunts. Being able to find treasure chess can have music, secret messages, or pictures, but it can also have NFTs inside them. Imagine a social network revolving around this treasure hunt component. It can facilitate a vision where all of the various aspects of the Gala ecosystem can be brought together in a seamless way. That’s the vision for Gala Friends.

With other social networks, you can get into a situation where people are DMing each other and interacting closely in real-time. There are opportunities to interact statically at different moments. I imagine there’ll be a little bit of both in this network where you can get together with your friends and do things, but you can also interact at different times as someone who happens to go to bed earlier.

I wish I could answer that question to the full depth because there’s so much being planned. Jason is well aware of some of the cool stuff we’re doing in terms of player interaction. Whatever you expect right now from multiplayer player interactions, we’re pushing the limit on many of those things. You’ll be able to see your friends online, play a Gala game with your friend, and explore treasure hunts or any of the things around geocaching. This higher level of engagement makes these mechanics you’ll be able to experience with your buddies online.

Whatever you expect right now from multiplayer player interactions, Gala Games is definitely pushing the limit on many of those things. Click To Tweet

It’s a bold decision to build a new social platform at this moment in time. I’m sure it’s not one you took lightly, Jason. Why are you building this platform?

We are not the ones building it. Neil is the one building it, which is one of the things I love about it because what it demonstrates is that GalaChain is growing up and is now ready to bring on external developers to connect with people and have other people build on the infrastructure we have created, which is profoundly impactful in ways that people don’t yet understand. Pay attention. This is important.

Gala Games: GalaChain is growing up. It is now ready to bring on external developers to connect with people and have other people build on the infrastructure that it has created.

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It still begs the question of why this is one of the early infrastructure projects you wanted to support. It seems a fundamental thing, but it has to be done the right way. What are some of your thoughts on that?

For me, it is the things that are most important. It’s funny because we were going to drop the announcement. The morning we were going to drop the announcement that we were partnering and working together, Threads launched that morning. We’re like, “Pump the brakes here for a second. I don’t feel like getting in the water with Zuckerberg when he’s trying a new thing.”

Let’s make sure you guys have your own moment.

Let that one slow down for a second, and did that slow down? It is still turgidly circling the bowl, but nobody uses Threads.

I jumped on the first week. We’re trying to figure out how much of a presence we need on it. It’s a question, but it reminds me a lot of Clubhouse.

The thing with it is it’s cool, but Threads only works in connection with Instagram. It’s the place you go to get long-form content about avocado toast. It’s like the picture you see on Instagram. I want to see this person’s long-form content. You go over to Threads. It’s this weird, disparate, disconnected experience. It’s strange. There has never been a better time to launch a new social media network because Facebook is weird. Few people in our industry, or even in our general age bracket, are heavy Facebook users. My wife uses it for Marketplace to buy kid’s toys.

Gala Games: There’s never been a better time to launch a new social media network.

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I’ve been locked out of my account for several months, and I don’t miss it.

It’s where my grandmother posts weird rants about things. Other than that, it’s not a thing that most people use. You use it for Marketplace. Maybe that’s it. Twitter, the bird app X, has its own unique issues. I’m a big fan. I love it. I use the hell out of it.

It’s been good for the industry.

I have a great deal of loyalty to it, but it doesn’t do everything. A great example of this is I would use the hell out of space if I could do it for my computer.

They changed that. You are in luck there. This happened a few weeks ago.

Good job, Elon.

Kudos on that one.

There isn’t your one-place stop for all of these things. There’s a tremendous marketplace for this. That’s where Rep comes in because it fills these needs and connects all of these different pieces together in a positive way while giving you data sovereignty and allowing you to control your own data and not be a product.

That’s one of the differentiating features between Web2 and Web3. Web1, back in the day, is this weird decentralized thing of a bunch of people running servers on their own. Web2 comes, and you have all of these Web2 companies that come doing the free to host your pictures and post social media content. Nobody pays for Twitter. People do, but that’s not to post. Anyone can do these things for free. Nobody pays for Facebook.

Facebook certainly pays the bills. How does Facebook pay the bills? The way that Facebook pays the bills is because, in Web2, you’re not using the product. You are the product. That product is using you. Web3 attempts to change this. The question is, how do we take information and concepts from Web2 that are viable, interesting concepts and bring those to Web3, where we take out the bad, keep the good, and continue building in a positive direction?

We’re all looking for that. Gaming is such an obvious lubricant for that type of social economy. You mentioned the treasure hunts. It sounds like this is a way for people to organically stumble on new experiences, new games, and things they would do, which is how people like to embrace new content. This is a thought I didn’t have until you shared that, but new ideas, brands, and concepts are not shoved in your face, but to naturally decide you like them.

If your friend has a pair of jeans and you see someone else wearing them, you’re like, “Those are cool jeans” As opposed to that jeans company saying, “Buy my jeans tomorrow.” It sounds like, in a lot of ways, there’s a social layer of eCommerce that’s naturally going to be embedded into a product like this. Not because it’s eCommerce forward but because that’s what people do as humans. They try new and experience new things together.

Primarily, where Rep stems from is trying to make things and discoveries a lot more organic. It’s not like I have to tell you about this particular game. You found this NFT in the park on your morning jog. You find this treasure chest, play this little game, and open it up, and there it is. You click it. You found a dinner for two coupon at the beach at a restaurant. You didn’t know about this restaurant before, but now you go there. They look at your phone. They have you sit down and do that. It doesn’t have to be games.

Life is a game in many aspects. If we start to think about organic interactions with people, we can bring that back into this social platform or network. We’re not trying to be like X, Twitter, Threads, or Facebook. What we’re trying to do is our own thing. We’re trying to bring gamification, improve user engagement, and make this connection between us much more synergistic in that space.

Life is a game in many aspects. Click To Tweet

Jason was talking about the disconnectedness. You’re having to shift different apps. You’re on Discord, Telegram, and YouTube. Our vision for Rep is to have as many of these experiences in one platform. Everyone is engaging in this platform. While you’re trying to share your opinion on something, you can also play a treasure hunt game, an actual mobile game, or all of these things together and still have it within that social network. You don’t have to keep bouncing around.

I’m excited to check it out and follow your progress. I’m sure we’ll have a lot of updates on what you guys are doing in that area. One of the key aspects of this broader adoption is the vocabulary that we use. We’re talking a little bit about that, Jason. Before the interview, you all are thinking about lexicon for a broader audience a little differently these days.

Fundamentally, it’s still confusing.

Differently than people in this space?

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David is amazing.

Let’s make it extra spicy. Should we do that?

I like spicy.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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I realized that you can’t dig with a chainsaw.

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