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Michael Rubinelli Of Tyranno Studios, The Premier Web3 Gaming Studio Building Blockchain Brawlers, Plus Jean-Charles (JC) Gaudechon Of OneFootball Labs, And More...
With the advent of web3 technology, end-users are now more able to have complete control over their own data, overcoming the monopoly by tech giants. What does this mean for the gaming industry and its future? Today, we have Michael Rubinelli of Tyranno Studios and Jean-Charles Gaudechon of OneFootball Labs to help look at what’s going on underneath the surface of web3 gaming - what’s being built, why they’re being built, and what they are doing at their gaming studios that is disrupting the gaming paradigms.
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Michael Rubinelli Of Tyranno Studios, The Premier Web3 Gaming Studio Building Blockchain Brawlers, Plus Jean-Charles (JC) Gaudechon Of OneFootball Labs, And More…
Stay tuned for this episode and find out how Tyranno is creating incredible blockchain-based gaming experiences that involve some of the most prestigious creators in gaming history, how our guest only fears maybe fear itself, and how OneFootball, as in soccer, is putting fans in the front seat with the blockchain foundation sitting quietly behind the scenes. All this and more on this episode.
Don’t forget that we put a gathering together at NFTLA and brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head over to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, better, and bolder but also just as an intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. We will see you there.
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This episode features Michael Rubinelli, Chief Gaming Officer at Tyranno, a rapidly growing studio that specializes in building best-in-class games, utility-based vIRL NFTs, and multi-chain Web3 products. Michael Rubinelli is a technology and gaming leader with fifteen-plus years of progressive experience in executive leadership, product development, and continued revenue growth and is renowned for his success at top corporations, including Disney, THQ, and Electronic Arts.
Michael has now turned his attention to blockchain games and spends most of his time expanding the Gaming Division of Tyranno Studios. Tyranno is a premier Web3 studio of uncompromising vision and unrivaled experience focused on disrupting the old paradigms of the gaming industry. With a proven track record of delivering wildly successful multi-chain games, tools, services, and digital assets to the mass market, the Tyranno team consists of Web3 pioneers and video game industry veterans responsible for billions of dollars in gross revenue. Michael, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
I’m not sure what else I would say after that. We’re done.
Mic drop.
That’s quite an introduction. I feel like you’ve gone over my whole career, my current steady state, and then my future. It makes my job here very easy.
We had to do something special for you because I don’t know how we got into the 170s in terms of episodes without featuring WAX, and now Tyranno is doing the space. This episode is long overdue, especially since we know William Quigley. He’s a busy guy and you’re a busy guy. I’m excited to dive into what you’ve been doing. I’m back in the states after a little tour of Asia. It’s all about gaming. This is an area of it we want to continue to peel back and look at what’s going on underneath the surface, what’s being built, why is it being built, and what you’re doing at Tyranno’s core to that conversation. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me. Here are a couple of points on what you said. First of all, when people learn about the WAX blockchain, and then what was WAX Studio is now Tyranno, people go, “I had no idea. Shame on me for not knowing more.” That’s our fault. We don’t do a great job of PRing. We don’t thump our chests and say, “Look at all this money we raised. Look at all these things we do. Cover me,” but once you hear the numbers and understand what the user experience is like, you’re like, “This is the best thing going.” That’s one.
Two, from a gaming standpoint, gaming has driven the massive adoption of so many popular trends besides technology and user experience. It’s all about gaming or the gamification of something. People love entertainment. That’s what games often provide sometimes begrudgingly. When we were at Playdom Corporation, which got bought by Walt Disney, we were driving so much revenue for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg hated gaming but saw this as an opportunity to come in, scrape the currencies that we were collecting, which were fiat at that time, and said, “I can make real money here.”
There were so many players playing games like FarmVille, Gardens of Time, and Marvel Avengers Alliance, that became a meaningful piece of business for them for a long period. That led to the advent of free-to-play gaming on mobile devices. You look at all the revenue that comes to Apple. People are like, “It’s phone sales.” It’s actual transactional scrapes or ad dollars tied to gaming initiatives. Gaming drives so many pieces of business for so many different platforms, technologies, and companies. There’s a reason why that is. It’s not some fad that’s going to go away. I’m happy to talk about that.
While I was in Singapore, I met the gentleman that was doing the endgame payment processing for Friendster. It got so prolific and successful that he bought Friendster from Friendster and then sold it to Facebook. That’s how Facebook acquired this gaming technology. I met the guy that pulled that off in Asia. I couldn’t agree with you more because I hear it straight from the source.
It’s incredible. If you look at the size and the growth of the users of the core gamer audience over the years, there are 7.5 or 8 billion people on the planet. In the last figure I saw, there are 3.1 or 3.2 billion gamers. We’re encroaching on 40% of the world playing games at some point during their week. That’s incredible penetration, “I have five minutes. What can I do? I can level up or beat this boss.”
Games bring this little respite to your life that is so welcoming, well-done, and thoughtful. The term gamer used to be looked down upon, “You’re a nerd.” Now, it’s a bit of a badge of pride, “I’m a gamer. I’m proud to be a gamer. I always have been.” I’m happy to give back to other gamers in the world and bring my thoughts. Hopefully, they like what we do and see value in it.
Let’s dive in there. Tyranno’s core conviction here is that players should have full control over the items they purchase in games. For a lot of folks, this is a contrarian perspective. This is regardless of the platform. In a sense, we’re talking about interoperability. How did this concept in this venture come to be?
Let’s talk about the concept first. The only people who are against it are the publishers and the game developers of the Web2 and console days space because they have this fear of the unknown. They don’t know how to embrace this new business model. The scary thing for them is that when you transition from one platform to another or from one business model to the next, those are extinction events for companies. It’s a very scary notion.
We were talking about EA a little bit. People at EA get paid well. They live a very comfortable life. If you’ve ever been to the EA campus on Redwood Shores, it’s incredible. It’s like going to Disneyland. You’re saying to somebody, “I want you to embrace something that may cause you to not perform well. Therefore, you may lose this.” They’re like, “Slow down a minute. I’m going to keep doing my job and be 5% better over the year. That’s enough to stay employed.”
There’s this whole notion that fear of loss is a great motivator for these people. That’s how they think because they’re not in the business of taking risks. You need to be in the business of creating the possibilities of greatness. At the core of creating greatness is a risk. You have to embrace that risk. These guys don’t want to do that. If you start with the notion that publishers don’t know how to build an economic model that gets them more money at the end of the day, they will never do it.
This is the same thing we saw play out in free-to-play mobile gaming. All those companies were all laggers. The innovators in free-to-play mobile were Zynga, Supercell, Scopely, and all these companies like Rovio. Angry Birds wasn’t EA-built and designed. It was Rovio. Chillingo was their publisher. EA did the distribution of that because they didn’t know how to do that. They didn’t know that it would work. They take these defensive positions. They go in until something becomes established.
There are a whole lot of stories I could go into that prove that point. That’s the reality. Like in free-to-play when none of the established companies were early adopters, the ones who won were native in the space. Web3 is going to see the same thing. The winners in Web3 are going to be companies that are native to Web3 like Tyranno. We think we’re going to win because we are in the business of taking risks. We have the courage of our convictions that we know that we’re doing the right things.
When you say, “How do we know this is the way forward?” Ironically, I’ll wind the clock back to 1996. That’s when we saw digital marketplaces existing. Players went to buy and sell assets from each other. Not to date me, but if you look up ltima Online, there was a house that sold on Ultima Online for $3,000 on eBay. They were completely like, “What?”
It was such an I-can’t believe-this-is-happening moment. I had an account. I built this thing and sold it to somebody else who wanted that. They didn’t want to spend the time and the currencies. They just wanted what I had. I sold it to them via eBay. The marketplace is tied to the gaming experience. Fast-forward six months later, you look at Diablo 1. It was all RNG. There were 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes. It was worth a ton of money.
To buy that though, you went to eBay and put a bid on something with Stones of Jordan, which is their in-game currency, which was this Plus 1 to All Stats ring. If you had enough of those, you could buy the stats so you would meet them in Diablo. Somewhere in the Diablo world, you would make this exchange. Players have been buying and selling from each other since the mid-’90s.
You look at endgame gold farming in RPGs. It’s the same thing. Somebody spent their time going out, mining all this gold or a fungible token back then, and then selling it to somebody else. Why did that happen? It’s because to get three million gold in World of Warcraft took eight hours. How much of your time is eight hours worth? The amount I make per hour is worth more than the $9.95 somebody wanted to charge me. I’ll pay $10 and get eight hours of my life back. I don’t have to focus on the grind. I just focus on playing the game and having fun running, raiding, and all that stuff that people like to do.
It is one of the reasons that currency works in general or even fiat. The idea is, “Why do I work hard at XYZ? It’s so in some other place, I can enjoy myself or make my life more efficient or not have to do something I don’t like to do.” It follows naturally. You talked a lot about being ahead of the curve and different people being resistant to change.
You closely work with WAX blockchain. We see a lot of that being ahead of the curve and predicting things way ahead of what people first saw. Give us some details on the WAX blockchain. What is it? A lot of people know about Ethereum and think of that as a very high-profile chain that’s a currency and so forth but WAX has been doing so much for so long and is so established. Tell us more about it.
Ethereum is very well-established and well-known. Vitalik is great and the whole notion of, “I wanted to build a blockchain because they changed a spell in World of Warcraft that nerfed my rogue.” For us gamers, he sits at the right hand of the Father. He’s great. That’s why his profile is so high. He’s a wonderful and super smart guy. WAX has been around for quite a while. When they first started building the WAX blockchain, the idea was, “Let’s build this blockchain where players can buy and sell NFTs to one another in volume with expeditious times to finality.”
As a gamer, I bought something because I lost. I want to win. I buy it, blow the guy’s head off, and go on to the next boss. That’s the gamer mentality. You have to have something immediate. You’ve got to be able to do it at scale. It has to be low-cost, super convenient, and high-usability. When William Quigley, the Founder of WAX, started building on the Ethereum blockchain. For about two months, they started doing all this tech skunkworks R&D and said, “This blockchain can’t support gaming-style NFTs. It doesn’t have the transactional velocity, the time to finality, and any of the things that we know that users want. Let’s build WAX on a standard that can serve the gamer.”
It was built with games in mind. First and foremost, bar none. WAX has a standard and built the WAX protocol. What you see with WAX is we can do a little over 8,000 transactions a second. The time to finality is less than three minutes. You compare that with the Ethereum Merge 30-minute time to finality. If you get something on WAX, the most you will wait is three minutes. With Ethereum and what they have gone through, it’s ten times that long.
We’ve got a nice tech change coming. That will be about four seconds. By the 15th of January, 2023, we’re switching up one of our limiters in that regard. That will be even more responsive, which is great. There are never any charges in terms of gas fees. In terms of transacting, there’s a tiny resource cost that the buyer pays. It doesn’t cost something to sell necessarily. It’s a great system. This sounds all well and good. I throw a lot of numbers, 10,000 or 8,000 transactions a second. A lot of people do that.
You can go to DappRadar, which is a third-party site that matches your transactional volume across all the blockchains. If you look at any given day, it doesn’t matter, you will see that on that specific day, the WAX blockchain has done over 50% of every single transaction across every single blockchain forever. It’s a third-party site. It’s not something that we control. That surprised a lot of people. Some people say, “We can do 60,000 transactions a second.” They count the service of a handshake as a transaction.
We’re talking about distributed ledger updates to the memory footprint. Depending on what’s hot in the market, we do between 18 and 30 million transactions a day. That is between 50% to 54%. Every single transaction on the blockchain is done on the WAX blockchain. It is incredible. That’s not us evangelizing. That’s us stating what third-party sites have shown. You can take any third-party site as long as they pay for the data to be collected. You will see that we’re at the top in that regard.
Web3 Gaming: Every single transaction done on the blockchain is done on the WAX Blockchain.
That’s impressive. We’re friends with the Bad Crypto Podcast guys. I know that they have been impressed with WAX from day one for some of the reasons that you’ve shared. One of your latest network activations is Blockchain Brawlers, which sounds like a fun play-to-earn Web3 game with an interesting cast of characters. Can you tell us a little bit more about that game and some of the utility that you’ve baked into it?
Blockchain Brawlers is interesting. It’s the first title that WAX Studios put out. We put it out on the last day of March. It came out. It was a click-mining game like all Web3 games at that point. The problem was we relate to the click-mining party. We knew that we wanted players to accumulate a currency but we knew that we wanted to build a real game. Everything that we do at WAX when you look at our roadmap and how we speak about things, there’s always learning at the core, “What do you want to learn? What is your expected outcome?” Everything we do tries to inform the next thing that we do. Blockchain Brawls was a litmus test. We knew people had nostalgic feelings for the ’80s to ‘90s-style wrestlers. Everybody loves Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, The Rock, The Big Show, and all those.
Speaking of wrestling, we had Chris Jericho. He’s a huge NFT fan and also a wrestling fan. If you’re going to be in the business of bodyslamming people, you’ve got to be a huge fan. He was on the show. You will have to check that one out.
I was a THQ when we made all the WCW and WWE games. When he made the transition from the NWA to the WWF at that time, that was a huge story. We put Y2J in as he was called. We’re fans of his. Wrestling has always been in my blood as a child, as a professional game maker, and now as a Web3 content creator. It lends itself so well because of the personalities. I started doing press for Blockchain Brawls in January 2022. I said, “Day one is going to be the worst experience anybody has in this game because it’s very modest.”
I built AAA titles my entire life. I knew what we were going to have on day one. I said, “You have to be patient with us because every day is going to be better than the previous.” We have delivered on that promise. We went through the mining phase when we had a limited number of tokens. We said, “You’ve got to buy these and hold them because there’s going to be a ton of utility but this is the endgame currency. There’s going to be no more after this mining phase.”
We have gone from wildly inflationary to wildly deflationary. That tokenomics is like, “You will get 80%. We will keep 20% not to pay the team but to do UA. That’s all you’re going to get. Here are all the ways that those tokens are going to work in the future in-game. You can use this to craft, sell, upgrade, and compete. You can use it as an entry fee. There are all these ways to use this fungible token.”
We said, “Trust us. This is the key point. At the end of the day, we’re building an incredible PvP experience that’s going to be revolutionary and unique. It’s going to be exclusive to us. It’s going to be so unbelievably fun. You’re going to want to be a part of it.” I was saying this to a crowd that was in the middle of about eighteen straight rug pulls from different games, companies, and projects. I’m like, “You’ve got to trust me.” They’re like, “We don’t know you,” but I’m like, “This is me. This is my LinkedIn profile. I’m legit.” They’re like, “Keep going.” I doxxed myself. There’s transparency and consistency.
We brought in Richard Garfield who is the designer and the creator of Magic: The Gathering. Richard said, “I’ve got this card game I’ve been building for a year. It doesn’t have a home. I built it because I’m Richard Garfield. I have engineers and prototypes at my disposal. I love the idea of this. If you think this will work for Blockchain Brawls, you can set up the arrangement. You can have it.” It was this weird moment. Richard Garfield who is one of my heroes says to me, “I have this thing that I’ve been building for a year that nobody knows about that you could have.”
Were you talking at the local coffee shop? How did that come to be?
There was a tremendous amount of trepidation, “I don’t know about NFTs because of what I’ve heard. I don’t know about Web3 because I’ve been taught these are predatory practices, scams, and rug pulls. It’s environmentally unfriendly.” It took a couple of meetings to get him over the hump of what we were all about and to build that trust but once he got it, he’s like, “I’m in. How can I help?” I said, “Let’s build a game together.” He says to me, “What kind of game do you want me to build for you?” I’m like, “You’re Richard Garfield.”
“Let’s roll the dice and see what the probabilities say. We will let it make our choice.”
Do you see the teeth spell out Tyranno?
How do you feel, Michael?
Give it some time.
That’s funny if you did a Carfax NFT.
The whole committee runs wild on you, brother.
I am.
I don’t remember it but it was probably candy.
I don’t.
Make up the first thing you remember.
I bought my wife dinner. Does that count?
Yeah. That sounds delicious.
At a restaurant or Uber Eats style?
It’s a deli sandwich.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
That’s very generous and educational of you.
Those are great choices.
What did you do before joining us on this show?
I’m good. Thank you so much.
Thanks so much.
I would love it as well.
Important Links
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Chris Jericho - Previous episode
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Aera by OneFootball - Discord
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Twitter - Aera by OneFootball
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@zaphodgjd - Twitter
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Spotify - Edge of NFT
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iTunes - Edge of NFT