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Outer Edge Live Twitter Space: Leveling Up Gaming: What To Consider When Building Web3 Gaming Products With Carlo Lorenzo García, Scott Mitchell, Jake Meany, And Ivan Alexander
Gaming products are a huge part of the entire playing experience. Acquiring tons of equipment, creating an extensive wardrobe, and customizing your in-game character is indeed an exciting journey. But isn’t it thrilling if you can transport these items even in real life? In this Outer Edge Live Twitter Space discussion, Daniel F of Howl and Zach Sekar of Outer Edge LA lead the conversation about leveling up gaming through Web3. Joining them are Actor and Director Carlo Lorenzo García, Scott Mitchell of Brawler Bearz, and Jake Meany and Ivan Alexander of Howl. Together, they discuss integrating dynamic NFTs, blockchain, and crypto when creating gaming products, allowing players to enjoy cross chain compatibility and solidify their digital identity both in-game and IRL. They also talk about why Web3 should adopt better terminologies when talking to traditional gamers, the regulatory challenges of Web3 integration, and which of the big companies right now would most likely lead the creation of a fully developed web stream space.
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Outer Edge Live Twitter Space: Leveling Up Gaming: What To Consider When Building Web3 Gaming Products With Carlo Lorenzo García, Scott Mitchell, Jake Meany, And Ivan Alexander
I hope everybody is doing okay. It’s another Twitter space and another amazing conversation on Web3 amazing topics. I have the pleasure of being joined by my usual anchor Zach Sekar Cofounder of NFT LA. How are you doing?
I’m doing great. Another lovely day. We are talking about games.
Do you know what’s funny about this? Right after this Twitter space, I’m going to see it and enjoy a little session of gaming myself. The perfect preempt for my lovely evening. Alongside Zach Sekar, we do have some amazing guests as well. Let’s give a warm welcome to Carlo from Brawler Bearz. How are you doing?
How is everyone doing? Thank you so much for having us. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about doing a little level-up on gaming, especially when it comes to the blockchain.
I thought we had some other people from Howl here. I think I saw Jake or it’s just Twitter being Twitter. Let’s kick off the conversation right now and let’s start talking about the future and how these two topics can intersect. Let’s start by talking and discussing how Web3 is changing the landscape of gaming. There are a lot of things going on in this topic in particular. I wanted to get over to you, Carlo, and see what you think about this. What do you think the future looks like?
We are only scratching the surface. We are seeing so many projects starting to explore the possibilities of what it means to utilize blockchain for on-chain gaming or in terms of decentralization of gaming assets. We got to talk about the advantages of doing this. We have a long road ahead of us in terms of reaching out to traditional gamers to introduce them to the benefits of utilizing blockchain for gaming activities.
It’s going to be an uphill battle. What’s exciting for me is the pioneering that’s happening right now across so many projects, ourselves included. We have started to explore what’s possible Scott Mitchell is the Dev and Founder of Brawler Bearz. He’s joining us here too. He’s been doing coding for a very long time. I will let him speak to it himself, but utilizing blockchain for even what we are doing with passive gaming is exciting to see, especially when people start utilizing and realizing the advantages of what it means to have things on the chain
The personalizations and customizations that you can do, having ownership over your evolvable character and your base character, and all the in-game assets that you have earned from playing within whatever ecosystem you are playing. I’m excited. We are just scratching the surface. We are right at the forefront of what’s to come in these spaces. We are building or laying the groundwork for what’s to come.
I agree with everything that you said. I want to use that as a cue to introduce two more people here. We have Ivan. He is the CEO and Cofounder to Howl. We have Jake who is the Marketing Director to Howl. Let’s start with you Ivan. How are you doing?
I’m doing well. I’m glad I could join the space mostly because my flight has been endlessly delayed. I’m in transit, but I wanted to be here even if only for a little bit, and get a chance to hear Carlos speak. Let’s do it. Also, I couldn’t miss out on talking about video games and NFTs.
We are one of a kind. I know Jake also couldn’t miss a good video game talk. How are you doing, Jake?
I’m good. I’m always up for a video game topic. You add Web3 to the mix and I will be there. I’m curious about how you all came about approaching the gameplay functionality because we have seen some backlash for Web3 gaming. It doesn’t always have the best taste in everyone’s mouth, and how did you approach how to make the game, and how to make it an enjoyable experience that leads to that generational gaming?
Scott, do you want to chime in on this too? I know that you have put a lot of thought into this from a dad’s side of things and not having a lot of time, and taking this card-based WoW-RuneScape approach to the whole gaming ecosystem.
I’m Scott. Nice to meet everyone here. I’m excited to see how we can talk about games and Web3. From Carlo’s point, I am a dad. I don’t have much time. I still get some time to play enough FPS games like Valorant. For me, it’s all about casual gaming and then being in my middle 30s is a lot of nostalgia with retro games and click-and-play adventure games on SES or just that retro theme.
Brawler Bearz spurs it out of that and a combination of that, leveraging and utilizing the core tenets of blockchain, which are the longevity of the permanence, providence, identity ownership, and all these core tenets that we are here on the blockchain for. We try to incorporate all of these aspects into our game. Some of the biggest backlashes with Web2 world and Web3 is the Web2 world sees us as a scam. There are unfortunately a lot of scammers and a lot of opportunists out there.
Gaming Products: Brawler Bearz leverages and utilizes the core tenets of blockchain: longevity of the permanence, providence, and identity ownership.
In our position at the gaming forefront, we are not a AAA Studio. We are not backed by a studio, but a lot of the concepts and technology that we have built could certainly be leveraged in a AAA game. Our dynamic composable NFTs offer that customization, and I think that every game will probably have one in the future.
We don’t care too much about the graphics on our side. For us, it’s more on the strategic side and it’s more casual gameplay. We are coming out with a Roguelike Card Game in phase two, Slay the Spire or Monster Train. There are a bunch of games in this class, but that’s where our ecosystem is heading. We have the NFT that represents your core asset.
We have this item economy that has spurred very RuneScape and WoW-esque. We are going to incorporate all that and put it into a card game and our future web-based for now. I’m a web developer. I have fifteen years of experience. I’m a principal engineer at PayPal previously. I have been in Web3 for five years building on ETH. Web-based, maybe we go down the unity track eventually. For now, we are sticking to a wheelhouse of ours that we can pivot quickly.
It all sounds so good and you touched base on a lot of very interesting points. I want to go back a little bit and talk about dynamic NFTs and how they can revolutionize in-game assets as we know them. Ivan has some very good topics or points of view. Can you elaborate a little bit more? I know you have some good insight into that.
For the most part, some of the stuff that I’m going to bring up, there’s nothing that we haven’t heard before. For those in the audience that maybe are not that familiar with games, especially in the past few years, there have been a lot of economies that have been created around individuals buying in-game assets. Whether it’s to upgrade the avatar character you are using or simply enhance your experience. As these are on close end-to-end systems, you can’t do much with them after you have paid the cash. There’s no way to monetize it and often, not even a way to resell it. Admittedly, I play some World of Warcraft and we can sell things off on the internet but not as common.
The biggest part of it is we create these gamer tags and we play online. Essentially, we are building this huge social or digital identity, but it doesn’t track our footprints as well as it should. One thing that I’m very excited about is the idea that you will be able to start creating a digital identity across every game and platform we create. You can start picking up all these data points about who you are, and the experiences that you have in the game themselves can be altered by this or experienced by this.
To me, that is something interesting. At the end of the day, we are all headed toward this world in which we are already seeing ourselves. We are going to be able to view ourselves as one that can have one life that’s not IRL and one that isn’t. I might have my own digital identity. I’m going to call it the self-sovereign identity that lives in all these virtual worlds. At the end of the day, they are all video games. This industry is bigger than the film industry at this point, and it’s only going to keep expanding. Hopefully, we are going to see a lot more cross-path compatibility or I’m going to call it cross-chain compatibility against games being built on top of the blockchain.
That will be dope to see cross-chain compatibility. I do have one question. This is a general question for everyone. When you were talking about how games should be treated in the future and all the owner-change traceability. How much have we spent in the last years on video games, whether buying video games or spending on add-ons, weapons, and all that good stuff? I myself lost track, to be honest. I hope my wife is not in this space, but I spent a good amount of money. I would like to see that evolve. Ivan, you were going to say.
I was going to say there is no way I’m giving away that number in this space. It’s embarrassing enough for me.
How about you, Carlo?
I will give away the number where I lost track. About $10,000, but that’s the benefit. How do we talk about the benefits of blockchain technology? This is what was like for us at Brawler Bearz. It’s so important to put a proof of concept out there that is now out on the blockchain and people are utilizing it.
It’s the same thing that Ivan mentioned. You have spent so much time evolving a character, training it, and increasing its stats. You have earned all these in-item assets, whether it’s weapons, armor, helmets, and things like that, and you can’t do anything with them. What Scott has built here with Brawler Bearz is exactly a solution for this. You have your base character that is evolving. You can train it, battle it, and send it on a quest to get items.
Those items are NFTs that you can then sell on the secondary market or equip onto your bear. That’s the composability aspect of it. These are dynamic NFTs. They are compostable. They are your gaming asset, and you have complete ownership of them. If you are tired of playing the game, you can sell it on secondary equipped. If someone buys it, they can leave it equipped or they can decompose it, take those items off the base NFT, turn those back into ERC-1155s, and piece it out on the secondary as all those additional items, especially if they are legendaries.
This is what has been built already. It is out there and people in our community are interacting with this. It has an emerging item economy that emerged earlier in 2023, where we are seeing legendary items that have been earned through questing. Got for 2 or 3 times the cost of the base NFT character. That is the benefit and that is where we are leading to. Being able to be right there on the front line of that is very exciting for me. Being able to support Scott in this is the reason why I’m here. Especially having spent so much money on in-game buys and things like that, I’m more than happy to explore an ecosystem and a technology that allows for that item economy to pull benefits out of the game without having to sell out of the game.
Before I shift the conversation a little bit and go back just a tiny bit, Zach and Jake, do you have anything you would like to say, interfere, or maybe ask?
I like both of these last two. Ivan was bringing up the persistence of digital identity. That’s particularly interesting because it seems more feasible to be implemented quickly and begins this journey. Gamer tag, for example, maybe it’s their ENS or something equivalent to that. It does start to be built and can be thought of as fairly permanent and persistent across the journey that they want to create and show publicly. Anytime we are talking about Ethereum, it’s a cliche now to even talk about how Vitalik tells the story of a large motivation for creating it.
It was what we have been talking about items and characters being stuck in this walled garden rather than being transferable and useful over time. This is why gaming still seems like one of the definite use cases and areas where there are going to be true new economies that are much more exciting in the token in the Web3 sense than they ever were before. Eventually, people stop caring about your Warcraft gold, but we have got these transferable items and tokens that exist in an immutable fashion but are also extensible across growing ecosystems that can become exponential and more complex and interesting over time. Gaming will lead the way in tech.
I want to sum out a little bit and go to the first value-add that the blockchain in general can add to gaming. I believe that might be player ownership. At this moment, Carlo is almost bankrupt because he has spent $10,000 on beta games. There’s no way that you can demonstrate that those $10,000 that you have spent on in-game assets or games is yours. If there’s a bug tomorrow and something ridiculous happens, all of the assets that you have in the game might be at risk. I want to circle back on these ownership elements and hear your thoughts.
You could also have all those assets. For example, I’m going to go back to World of Warcraft. I’m a nerd, but if you get your account hacked, someone could literally run away with the account and pretty much everything you have in there. We haven’t touched on security. We don’t need to go down that vertical right now, but it’s something we could at least touch on before we wrap because security is a major component of this.
Let’s put a pin on that because that’s part of the things that I have planned for this space, but let’s not go down that route as you said yet. Let’s go with you, Carlo. What do you think?
We have touched on the digital ownership aspect of it. There are some additional benefits here at play. It’s that extensibility factor that was mentioned before. We have eighteen smart contracts that Scott has built in-house that power this Brawler Bearz ecosystem. Scott is very forward-thinking and he built in extensibility to these smart contracts.
There’s this possibility of decentralization of dev where someone could create an additional UI or create their smart contract that wants to interact with the Brawler Bearz contract, whether it’s exp, questing, training, or battling, and expanding the ecosystem based on anybody else’s ideas. We can set a role to the original smart contract after their smart contract is audited, but it creates this extensibility. It grows a gaming ecosystem. It creates interoperability where you can then potentially port characters around.
That’s the cool thing that would be fun for a lot of people in the spaces, to take your base character into other games if possible. There are other ways that we can work together than utilizing these assets. The generational gaming aspect of it is also interesting to me because this is an opportunity to say that maybe down the road, your child might want to play this game.
Especially if the space leads in the direction it’s going to lead, there’s probably going to be a lot more handing down of these gaming assets. Hopefully, we will retain value if people are still interested in playing these games or finding new ways to interact with them. Security is going to be a component, and education is going to be a big thing that we will have to do. Being here in the space first, we have to make sure that we educate and protect those who are coming in after us. Ownership is huge. If I could make back what I spent on those Web2 games, I would jump at that.
I wonder about anyone’s thoughts on whether or not at some point we are going to call developers. Let’s talk about more consoles. Imagine Sony or even Microsoft putting us in a position where all the history of purchases can integrate in some way and someday monetize it. I like the idea that maybe somehow, we are going to be able to pick up that whole loot as opposed to starting from zero. I’m curious about what everyone else thinks about this.
That’s an interesting concept. Funnily enough, a few months ago, there was a little hubbub around Sony’s patent around NFTs. The first thought that crossed my mind was imagine if every gaming console that Sony put out for a PS6 or something was a node on a blockchain in their private blockchain node. I was thinking to myself, that’s millions of consoles powering the most decentralized network out there. It’s not decentralized because it’s owned by Sony. It would have the most nodes out there. It will have millions of nodes and you could get paid as an end user hosting a node on the PlayStation blockchain. Who knows? Maybe that will be a thing.
It’s an interesting idea with the longevity of identity. I don’t know how familiar you guys are with account-bound tokens, soulbound tokens, and positive reputation systems, and leveraging that technology. That’s a very interesting aspect that hasn’t yet been talked about much in gaming but I think it will come up.
Let’s go down that rabbit hole. I have been doing a lot of research on soulbound tokens for a while now. It’s something that blows my mind every single time. I venture into a new rabbit hole in research. Ivan, I’m going to pick your brain a little bit. What do you think of soulbound tokens and NFTfi and DeFi dynamics in the gaming industry?
A lot of what we have been discussing can be done or is most likely to happen through soulbound tokens. For anyone in the audience, these are pretty much digital identity tokens. It will represent who you are and your characteristics. There are a lot of ways we can look at it. Video games are interesting because we can track your avatar’s characteristics. We can look at the features that you might have accomplished or recruit traits and achievements. All of that can be put into a soulbound token.
The interesting thing here is that we are also looking at a place in which to me that’s the initiation of a digital identity. If we look beyond and we look at the capabilities of soulbound tokens and we want to get crazy with this, we might even be in a world where we can leverage and monetize not only by selling. Imagine that I have this huge history, a certain level of exp and ethera, and I don’t want to make some money out of this. I know someone who’s pretty much at zero, and they want to get a little ahead. They want to leverage what I have.
Carlo, do you want to take on this one?
Scott, what do you want to add?
How about you, Scott?
That’s not financial advice.
How about you, Jake? What do you think?
Axie Infinity.
Thank you so much for having us. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about Web3 and gaming. I’m excited to see where the future goes. I will be out at Outer Edge in March 2023 and looking forward to being a moderator on a panel out there. Scott and I will be out in New York as well. I’m excited to meet with some folks in IRL and talk more. Thank you so much.
Last but not the least, what about you, Jake?