Mitch Zamara: Million on Mars & Play to Own

Mitch Zamara is Lead Product Designer on Million on Mars: Land Rush! He has over a decade of experience as a game designer working in the free-to-play social/mobile game space at Zynga and other companies. He specializes in designing game economies.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's Getting2Alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. 

Amy: Mitch Zamara is a veteran game designer who helped create the economies of such iconic free-to-play games as Farmville when he was working at Zynga.

He recently teamed up with Zynga alum Eric Bethke to create Million on Mars: Land Rush!, an NFT game based on the fantasy of what it would be like to live and work in a colony on Mars. Mitch is very clear that the purpose of the NFTs in Land Rush is to make the game more enjoyable to play, not to lure players into striking it rich.

To prevent conflict of interest, the company does not profit from the NFTs directly. [00:01:00] 

Mitch: Our team doesn't actually own this token, meaning we don't take a percentage of it and hold that and drive value and then make that, like, our, our end of the day goal is to make it have utility and to make it matter for our players, not to matter for our wallets.

We only care about customer value. That's the mindset I think that's necessary. 

Amy: Let's listen to Mitch as he takes a deep dive into the design of a living game economy.

Welcome Mitch. So happy to have you here. 

Mitch: I'm excited to be here. 

Amy: So these are exciting times for you right now. 

Mitch: Definitely. Yeah. It feels so much like I'm back in 2009 in a lot of ways. 

Amy: How so? 

Mitch: It's the, the tipping off point of a new paradigm in our industry. Where back in 2009, free-to-play was making its transition from being largely part of the MMO space into sort of a more open-ended idea for [00:02:00] just games in general, and we started to see the emergence of social games on Facebook and on MySpace.

And I got a job at a company called Zynga back then, which is just a small little startup back in 2009 that just had a couple hundred employees. And it was a fresh new time in which anything was possible. There was very few rules. There was no real playbook for how to do anything. And we got to be really open and creative about how we grew the products in the games that we worked on.

And now over a decade later, we're at the start of play-to-earn being in its very early infancy. I have deja vu almost every week where I'm just remembering things that I did a decade ago, remembering things that people say now that I'm like, I've heard that before, I've heard this before and now more than ever, I feel like even though I have a lot more of a professional experience. 

I feel like I'm in my beginning days of my career all over again, because there is a no, there's no rule book for, for play-to-earn and on what the best practices are. We are [00:03:00] in the trenches learning in real time and trying to improve what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. 

Amy: I love that analogy. And I want to, let's just jump into it because this transition into free-to-play and everything around that, all the naysayers, all the, "What is this?", "Are these real gamers?", into what you're doing as lead designer of Million on Mars. 

Those transitions and really looking at them with your perspective, very few people in the industry can do that. Even more so because you're an economy designer, you've helped others as a consultant with economies, you've worked on bringing to life and balancing the economies of many games in your career.

First off, how did you get pulled in from doing other things? And certainly you could make a very lucrative living advising people on economies. How did you get pulled in to the Million on Mars project? What about that project is really [00:04:00] exciting for you? 

Mitch: Yeah, so I've been working largely in free-to-play games for the better part of the last decade.

I largely worked originally on Ville-style, Invest Express games. I did some of the sort of Wars-style games at Zynga before that. And eventually transitioned into making idle games on mobile as well and led on some of the top idle games for the last couple of years on mobile, on iOS and on Android and really started to go down this crypto rabbit hole, started to learn about different NFT play-to-earn related projects, went and played everything and really was disappointed with what I saw. 

I didn't really see anything initially that spoke to me as a hardcore gamer, as a game designer. The me today would be calling me then a hypocrite because my viewpoint back then was very dismissive of what was possible in this space, it took a while for me to really click through and understand the specific pieces necessary to see where the real potential is.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that these initial games and experiences [00:05:00] in, in the blockchain played or in space where largely developed by experienced people that understand blockchain, but not as much people that have experience building games. And so there is this disconnected feeling in a lot of these projects and experiences.

So fast forward a little bit more into me going down this rabbit hole. I'm deep on Clubhouse where it's starting to really pick up at in the early parts of this year, when everyone was still locked inside and had cabin fever from the pandemic for all of 2020. Clubhouse is exploding, NFTs, play-to-earn becomes like the most hot topic space that even MC Hammer is talking about it in Clubhouse.

And I eventually just reconnect with an old colleague of mine, Eric Bethke, who I used to work with at Zynga back in 2009. And he was the general manager of Mafia Wars, was also a GM on Farmville for a time. And I learned that he has a new startup and they're working on a lot of things. They're exploring the play-to-earn NFT space as well and want to either bridge the gap between their existing game they've been building on Steam or even potentially consider a new project.

And that's really where we got to [00:06:00] talking and found an ideal opportunity for me to come on board and lead on something new, given that there was possible risks or considerations on what Steam might do about NFTs and blockchain related projects. There was a big question mark early on this year about what was going to happen.

Of course, now we know. Very well where Steam sits on these sorts of things, or at least where they're drawing the lines on these things today. And I'm sure if someone watches this in a month or in six months, it might be a different rule. As of today, Steam's not a big fan of entities and blockchain games.

And so we, we planned against that basically, and where we really wanted to come up with something that could be unique, mass market, could reach a lot of people and can be playable on almost any device in the browser. So that's where our browser-based, play-to-earn game, Million on Mars: Land Rush!, has really come into play and I've been leading the efforts on for the last few months.

Amy: That is fascinating. Looking at the history of gaming, let's talk about the newness of play-to-earn. So, of course, play-to-earn in various forms, including gambling, [00:07:00] which is the most obvious form, has been around forever in gaming. World winner, there's all kinds of various forms of legalized gambling.

There's e-sports, right? And we've talked about this before. And there's also the arbitrage of gold farming in China in WoW, which is people with less means willing to do for someone with more means, something they value. 

Mitch: Yeah, I, the thing I like to use is it's democratizing time or it's decentralized time in an effort, really like the gig economy was born out of this same desire to really save as much time as possible.

And so we saw this birth of startups like Uber and Lyft and then followed by the TaskRabbits and basically, well, Uber and Lyft took over all those sort of gigs as well. And they realized that anyone with a driving a car could also move things around and help save people time. To me, this is the digital extension of the gig economy.

It's, [00:08:00] I don't want to spend 30, a hundred, 3,000 hours grinding something. People's relationship between time and money is going to be different depending on, uh, where you are in your career, in your life, and where you are in your position in the world, just as a matter of fact. And that relationship allows a, a degree of arbitrage between time and money that people are able to exchange in these environments.

And so I think that's really what it comes down to. 

Amy: It's really interesting. So, as an economy designer and a game designer, as you look at free-to-play. You looked at things and you didn't really like what you saw. Now you're getting the chance to do your own thing. So take us on that journey. Like when you first looked at a lot of what was going on with free-to-play, what was it you didn't like?

Was it sustainability? Sustainability is of course, The big question. 

Mitch: Absolutely. And I, I, I completely agree with you. That is the name of the game. It is sustainability. It's, I can, as soon [00:09:00] as I jump in, I have a snapshot feel of how the economy is designed. I have a sense of what the core game is or what the potential is.

And if there is no game, a lot of my disappointment comes from that pure fact that there's just very little to start with. Even reading the white paper, I should be able to get a sense of like, where is this going? Where is it headed? What could it be? Those are early signals that I was looking at back then for sure.

Amy: What did you see when you looked at Axie? In terms of the economy, you said, I jump in, I can see the economy. I know you played Axie. I know you played Mir. 

Mitch: Oh yeah. I play everything. 

Amy: Can I just summarize the dynamics? Cause I think very few people really see system dynamics, but someone like you can. 

Mitch: The basic way I look at Axie from like the sort of design view above is that it has a very well polished MVP.

The reason that I say that is that they don't have a fully fleshed out, top to bottom, first time user experience. They don't have long term [00:10:00] retention systems. They don't have live ops. If you were to say that Axie was a mobile only, free-to-play game and they have a test version on test flight and they're trying to make this happen.

But if you were to put this to the standards of already shipped, Triple A caliber, mobile free-to-play games, it's an MVP. It's got a great core battle game, a great PVE experience, some solid content and systems in place, but they're missing a lot of the basics that are really needed to round out that experience.

That's more as a product view. From the design perspective of their economy, to me, their biggest limiting factor is that their entire growth model is dependent on breeding. Meaning that the number of people that can join and become Axie players is solely dependent on how many Axies are being actively bred and sold inside of the secondary marketplace.

There is no active way for someone to get into the game if you don't acquire Axies that are bred by somebody. There is no free-to-play on ramp. There is no pay on ramp that the developer sells. You basically are solely reliant on the whims of the market and the [00:11:00] prices that are reflected on that. And so what that means is that if crypto is tanking, which we're seeing right now in December, that means that the cost of entry to Axie is relatively low.

I think the floor price is somewhere in the low 100-dollar range. So that means getting into the game could be as low as maybe $300, which for a lot of people is still a significant amount of money. But when crypto is pumping really high and the value of AXS is high or ETH is really high, then the entry point can be many multiples of this.

It could be as much as $1,500 to get into the game when the floor price is upwards of $300 to $500 for a decent Axie. To me, this is what has spurred the entire model of scholarships that has taken over the game in which people are facilitating the sort of investment costs of buying Axies and effectively leasing them out to other players.

They take out the, the required risk required to buy the Axies, build the teams, and then they lend them out to other players to play them and share them in the profits. To me, this still has significant [00:12:00] limitations because it creates massive overhead problems in which you have these external parties managing assets.

They have to build their own sort of management organizations. To me, it invites a lot of risk because the game itself isn't really managing the things that their community has had to stand up around it. I certainly think that the direction we will see these things head is that they will incorporate these things more natively and remove the externality of having to manage those sorts of things.

I think a more trustable system is really what the key to success is when it's also fueled with a low barrier to growth. 

Amy: Spoken like a free-to-play game designer. 

Mitch: Yeah, I'm very much about the low barrier entry. 

Amy: Like part of the amazing thing was like, what, this is free? 

Mitch: Absolutely. Yeah. And... 

Amy: Right. That was a big shift away from the 60-dollar or 40-dollar or different ways of monetizing in the games industry. 

Mitch: Yeah, definitely. Let's talk about this in another [00:13:00] interview with our good friend, John Radoff, and basically I talked about how when mobile games first came out on iOS, they were all paid only, there was no free section of the app store at all.

And it became an immediate race to the bottom to 99 cents. We saw the breakout, Darling Trism become the first game to make a million dollars. And it was like a 99-cent game. And then after that, it became free and then free became the new thing. In app purchases followed shortly after and a whole new section of the app store blossomed and the default expectation is always free now on mobile.

There's no way realistically to succeed in a paid game atmosphere on mobile, unless you are a complete exception to the rule. I think obviously exceptions, Minecraft, a few of the sort of standalone puzzle games, but if you're building something that's meant for a mass market, you aren't selling it. And that's just the way it's assumed just because that's what everyone on those platforms have been conditioned for.

In crypto and in blockchain, it's not the case. Those conditionings don't exist. So most [00:14:00] people have money in hands. Most people have a willingness to spend and invest and participate. So I think that has created these environments where there's this expectation to pay-to-play no matter what, basically, in order to get into things.

Games that can recognize the value of growth and the way that it works in free-to-play and can leverage those into the play-to-earn economies and into a blockchain game, I think stand out to gain the most. The key is to find the happy medium that doesn't invite pure exploitation. So it's like parallel examples.

Axie on that side is purely pay-to-play. You have to have axies in order to get in. MIR4, which we just referenced earlier, is 100 percent free-to-play as it gets. It's doesn't even have play-to-earn or blockchain components in some countries like South Korea. It's just a free-to-play game there. Or what would we would more professionally call a pay to win game that is solely built on aggressive monetization.

Their play-to-earn version is effectively the same thing. They have some of the [00:15:00] most, by our standards, some of the most aggressive monetization practices inside of their game that I've ever seen. And it is a sight to behold. That, that thing. 

Amy: Do tell, tell me. It's like... 

Mitch: I've been doing an entire interview with Joseph Kim on his GameMakers Channel 'bout MIR4, because of how deep it goes.

But this game effectively is designed to monopolize your time 24/7. Like, I literally have two copies of the game running on my other monitor right now playing passively because they have a built in like botting system in the game that grinds and and quests and and does the things for you when you're not actively playing the game. And, and that's...

Amy: Wait, where was it developed? 

Mitch: It's, uh, it's by a company called WeMade. It's out of South Korea. This is their, it's MIR4, so their fourth generation game. But it's the, it's, it largely is following suit from lineage revolution. If you're familiar with that title, it is a similar style of like systems and mechanics.

But they have the full, like when we would talk about like a live ops playbook that you would roll out over time with all the different little beats and [00:16:00] all that. They launched with the full playbook. Like there are like, 30 systems in here out of the gate that are just monetization driven that are upgrade driven that are and it's so deep, I, I, it's so deep that you can play multiple characters 24/7 and not remotely get close to hitting the ceiling.

It's so deep that the top people on the server that i'm on have put in tens of thousands of dollars into the game without question and they're not at the ceiling of their characters by any stretch.

And that's not even me getting into the governance, social politics, war, social side of things that are on top of this as well, in which there are massive alliances and political clans and battles across servers that are now happening in these, I could talk for four hours about what's going on in MIR and it's, it's, it's, not even fully cover what's, what is there.

If you've listened, I went on for five minutes about all the things in the game that make it amazing without even talking about the play-to-earn or the way to pull money outside of the game. And that to me is something that's worth observing because. [00:17:00] Most other projects I can't do this about. There's a game first here, and it's a game that is successful on its own without any play-to-earn components as it's seen in South Korea where they're not allowed.

It stands on its own as a successful, great game that has integrated these aspects in a way that compliments and doesn't feel like it is. hurts the experience. So inside the game, there's an important resource that you have to mine called dark steel. It's basically, you talk about gold farming and wow, this is a pretty close example of this because you literally need millions of dark steel to upgrade your character and to progress inside of this game, it's just tied into every single system in the game and they don't really drop and reward it in a capacity or quantity that you can only rely on it.

You have to go be mining it, or you have to go buy it and you buy it on the You can buy it from other players or. And in the way that they have set this up, you can buy their token, which is called Draco, and you can melt that down and get a hundred thousand right away. And so the play-to-earn component comes into effect in which players that are not as focused [00:18:00] on upgrading and progressing super fast and, and try to be the best in the game.

Those players can basically earn by mining dark steel inside of the game. And then they can convert that and smelt it into the Draco token inside of the game. And then they can sell that and earn, earn money, or they can exchange it for other cryptocurrencies and they can withdraw that to their wallet if they want.

And it creates this really nice ecosystem in which that sort of democratization of time really comes into effect. Basically, the players at the top have more of everything so they can afford to buy the things from the play for the players that are more rich in time than they are in those resources.

Amy: It's exactly analogous to gold farming. Yep. So that's, so where are these tokens listed? 

Mitch: So the way that the MIR4 system is designed is that they, they use a couple layers of abstraction. So it goes from the dark steel inside of the game to the Draco token, which sits inside of your WeMix wallet to the like WeMix token, which you can exchange it for, which is then have listed on all the public [00:19:00] exchanges.

And the reason why they do this is they create these gateways that allow them to control the flow of resources from one to the other so that there isn't a high level of volatility. They have a rebalancing algorithm design so that when you're, when you're basically smelting this Draco, it increases the costs for the next one.

So it's like a hundred thousand for the first Draco. Then the next guy pays a hundred thousand and a hundred thousand and 200. It goes up and up. It stacks up so that the more that comes out of the system, the more costs for the next person. And then when it's melted back down and reintroduced back into the system, that cost also goes back down.

So it creates this really nice level, auto balancer. 

Amy: Boy, I'd like to see a picture of that. 

Mitch: Yeah, they have a, it's actually on their website. You can go to mir4draco.com and they have this really nice gold, blinged out formula. It's more complex math than I have knowledge of, but I can understand the, the system and the mechanics behind it to get the way it's designed.

Amy: So MIR4 sounds pretty innovative. 

Mitch: I think so in a lot of ways. They've [00:20:00] taken some really innovative free-to-play mechanics, and they've integrated a compelling loop of play-to-earn need on top of it in a way that feels complimentary. And I think that's the standout thing that's worth observing is that it's a great game on its own for the people that are into it.

If you are new to autoplay MMOs, it feels very weird. And if you go look at the reviews on Steam and on iOS, they reflect that. There's a lot of people that think that this is a terrible game that don't understand how to play it. The reality is the tutorial of the game ends at level 40 when you've been playing for a week.

There's so many pieces and systems to catch you into the game that like you basically are on like autopilot for the first week Just learning the pieces and even four months into playing this game I'm still learning new things every week that I didn't know about this game. Like there is just Truly this much to learn inside of it. 

Amy: Is it browser-based? 

Mitch: All client based, it's...

Amy: Client-based. So it's MIR-4, and it was based on [00:21:00] Lineage Revolution. Is that correct? 

Mitch: It's not based on it. To me, the, the systems, the mechanics, and the gameplay within the fourth edition of MIR, to me are more modeled comparatively to Lineage Revolution. Like if you were to stand up those two games and look at their systems and economies, Revolution, I think has been out just a little bit longer and they set the baseline.

And this is what I think MIR4 likely drew a lot of inspiration from. I haven't played the other MIR games to know with certainty, but my understanding is that they had a different camera angle, different type of gameplay than what MIR4 has evolved into being more like the modern action RPG MMO that it is right now.

Amy: The politics sound a lot like EVE Online. 

Mitch: Yes, I think that they are comparable to those types of stories that you read about with the, the sort of multiple warring alliances, the things that sort of spread across with like multi month efforts, these kind of things are happening as well and they are so fascinating.

I am constantly thinking about Dan Cook's talk about governance and free-to-play games [00:22:00] that he gave a GDC a few years ago. Like I'm going back watching and listening to his words about this stuff when he did it in realm of the Mad god and the way that those players evolve those systems. 

And I very much see these same kind of emergent behaviors happening in play-to-earn. When you build the structures to facilitate it, people I think really gravitate towards it. 

Amy: So what was the gist of what you're getting from going back on his talk? What was his learning from Realm of the Mad God? 

Mitch: I think it's largely about how you can basically think that you know how they're going to react to the systems and the rules that you put in place, but the reality of the behaviors of your audience will never always marry what your expectations are.

That you need to learn to be adaptive. If you need to pay attention to what the structures they've already put in place are, those, those are some of the biggest takeaways that I had more recently. I've, I've really been going through the, the full back channel history of all the best talks. I remember from GDCs of years past, because to me, so much of these older lessons that we, we learned over the [00:23:00] last 10 years are perfectly ripe in play-to-earn in blockchain games.

They, they're coming right back. And I, everything that I'm watching these old talks, I'm like, yeah, that fits perfectly with what I'm doing because. Back then, when we were doing games on Facebook and on, on MySpace and it just the beginning of mobile, we actually built a lot of these things with scarcity built into them without even realizing it.

We set, there was only X number of these things for sale every week, or, you know, you needed to have 500 mafia wars, friends in your, in your mob in order to maximize things that way we put hard. Constraints and a lot of things without even thinking too much about those impacts. And then quickly realized that, Oh, we can just make them open ended and not really think about how much supply actually matters because they're all locked into these little free-to-play economies.

If you remember doing those things, it actually works perfectly again in this scarcity driven model. And so I'm like, just going back to my old Zynga days. That's why I feel so much deja vu is because it feels like those old things work better than ever. 

Amy: Yeah, and it's [00:24:00] tricky because you have to walk the line between great gameplay that's win win for everybody and hardcore manipulation where the house wins.

Mitch: Yep, absolutely. 

Amy: And I want to ask you how do you walk that line? I feel like that could be the next 30 minutes because it's it's so much of what's out there is it's, do we really all want to be gamblers with our heartbeat tied to what's happening in crypto? Is that how we want to live our gaming lives?

Mitch: No, I think that the way that you do it right is that you focus on delivering a great game first, not delivering profits to your token holders or your asset holders. If you decouple yourself from that responsibility, then you, you, I think you stand a greater chance to succeed. And so what I mean by this is like with our game, we have, we have a current, we have a token inside of the game, which you earn by playing the game.

It's, I call it a participatory inflationary token, which is a big fancy word of the saying it's like a [00:25:00] virtual gold inside of any other free-to-play games, you earn it by playing the game, really. We have a ridiculous supply of it. It's like a trillion and that's really designed because it's, you have to pick a number. 

But the thinking behind this is that my goal is to design and ensure that there is enough use for Dusk inside of our game as a player, not to design how to make Dusk worth the most amount of money possible. And so to me, if I make it so that it has a lot of use and a lot of utility, then everybody wins because it gets used.

It gets sunk out of the economy. It doesn't get largely inflated more than people are used to. And if it has a natural growth and a utility all along the way, the actual value should translate it automatically, but it's not my actual priority. It's not what I'm thinking about at the end of the day. And then also our team doesn't actually own this token, meaning we don't take a percentage of it and hold that and drive value.

And then our end of the day goal is to make it have utility and to make it matter for our players, not to matter for our wallets. [00:26:00] That I think is a really big distinction and it's how you can ensure you're able to walk that line more confidently. If you look at projects where they own 10 or 20 percent of the token, that's also part of the gameplay.

To me, they are much more incentivized to drive the token price than they are to drive the gain value. And the way in which publicly traded companies are more incentivized to sometimes manage and drive a stock price versus the actual customer value. This is like, you know, Before Amazon, where it was all about shareholder value.

And then Amazon was the, the big sort of, we don't care about the stock price. We only care about customer value. That's the mindset I think that's necessary. 

Amy: So Million to Mars is out now. Tell us about it. 

Mitch: Yeah. So we've been working on Million on Mars: Land Rush! for the better part of six months now. 

We started in the, the late or the early summer. And we've, we've finally gone live. We now have play-to-earn components where you can earn Dusk inside of the game. And you can actually withdraw that token to your [00:27:00] wallet. You're able to spend it inside of the game on lots of the different features and systems that we have stood up.

And to me, it's been really exciting to see a fully player driven economy come to life. This has been a huge, exciting opportunity to build something this fresh and unique. In which everything that you do inside of this game is fully player driven. We are truly trying to do our best to give as much autonomy for effort and value and work to the players themselves.

And we aren't just trying to recreate the wheel from the sort of old free-to-play days. So... 

Amy: Where does money come from? 

Mitch: So outside of the game, we sell packs of NFTs, which are blueprints and land. Those blueprints can be deposited inside of the game and can be turned into a developed piece of virtual Martian real estate.

So you deposit your land deeds into the game and you can claim a plot, you can deposit your building blueprints into the game [00:28:00] and install a greenhouse, some solar panels, a water filter and a CAD, and you basically have all the fundamentals needed to survive on Mars. You can grow food, you can filter water, you can process waste into soil, and you can collect energy from the sort of virtual sun and charge power cells to power all of your buildings.

What things get interesting about this is that. Anyone who owns land in the game has far more work they need to get done than they have the built in sort of stamina to do on a given day. And in our old days of doing free-to-play games, you would just sell people more energy or more stamina. And you'd just say, refill it for five bucks or whatever we would do.

But, even your stamina and your time inside of our game is also decentralized in our economy. Meaning that everyone has the same restrictions on their stamina and the amount of work that they can do per day. And this isn't a rule that is broken. And what instead you can do is that if you need more things done than you have stamina [00:29:00] for, you can hire players inside of the game to do the work for you instead.

And so we've built in an actual work system in which you can post jobs and players can take jobs and you pay them for the work and they do the work inside of the game and you get the actual resources. And so we are actually modeling real world economic systems inside of this game by having an actual player driven work economy in which there are employers and employees effectively like virtually simulating these experiences within the game.

You're not like sitting in the virtual coal mine having to work 20 hours a day or anything like that. You're really just pushing a button. But what happens is that the actual sort of unique live feeling of this economy really starts to manifest when this system came into place. And it's accelerated by the fact that all the stamina and all the work that players do only happen when the players are eating food and drinking water.

And all the food and water also has to be produced by the players in the economy. So. There is no free lunch, basically, the, you have to be [00:30:00] an, a participant in the game. You have to be part of the economy to really get the most out of it, or it will not thrive. We will continue moving on without you really.

So there, we don't like auto refill your energy every day. We don't, we break a lot of the conventions of, of free-to-play games. But, makesure that the game itself is still very accessible. 

So for example, we don't have a completely free-to-play game because when you leave the door wide open for anyone, you unfortunately are inviting a lot of exploitation and bad actors right now.

This is something that we've seen on The Wax Chain, it's something that we've seen in other games like MIR4. I think MIR4 said they banned on the order of several million accounts that were botting and automating behavior. And to me, this is what happens when you have a completely open ended entry right now.

So for me, I want to strive a low entry price floor of just needing to have a membership badge to get into the game. And that way the cost of botting and creating for bad actors. It becomes exponentially expensive over time, especially early [00:31:00] on when if they're trying to pull our token out of the game and make money, it's not going to be ROI positive because every account that we're banning is costing them $10.

Amy: So why are you breaking those free-to-play conventions? Because I follow you. Yeah. Isn't it because of the economy and the way you want to set up your flows and sinks and all that stuff? 

Mitch: Yeah. 

Amy: Or is it like, why break that convention? 

Mitch: Because if you keep all of your resources open ended, you just march down a path of hyperinflation.

Whatever path of least resistance exists, whatever minimal, maximal, optimizable path exists, the players will take advantage of it. Soren, Soren Johnson's old adage, players will optimize the fun out of their own game, very much rings true here. It's, if you provide those means to min max in any way, the player will make that the only way they play the game.

And so you have to basically put restrictions on everything. You have to assume that there's almost nothing you can leave uncapped or it will be exploited. 

Amy: So in your game, what can you [00:32:00] pay to get better at or get ahead at? 

Mitch: So right now, the way that you would pay to get ahead is you would become a landowner.

The landowners effectively have the stronger advantage in our meta. They are the sort of the more invested player inside of the game because you need to buy land plots. You need to develop that land based on the building metas and we're going to be releasing new buildings over time and new content over time.

It sort of evolves things and changes the game as it grows. Our overall goal will be to roll out a skill system so that there's actual room for specialization. And so it's not that everyone can do every type of work or task anymore. It'll be that everyone can do the basic tasks of growing food or filtering water because they're the basics.

But when it comes to mining and processings, forging, smelting, manufacturing, all these like advanced skills, we want to wrap all of this around a progression system so that players have to make choices and they have to specialize and that the quality and quantity of these, of players who can do these things actually becomes a lot [00:33:00] more scarce.

And so players who invest their time actually can really see a return on that investment of their time and their efforts playing inside of the game. 

Amy: How would they see that return? By getting paid to do stuff? By land? Absolutely. 

Mitch: Yeah. So it will be such that as the game progresses, you won't be able to just hire anyone to do a job task.

You might need a level five miner to go mine deep inside of your land and you might have to pay more. resources to have that done, but they're going to be able to get more rare resources in return for you as, as the person hiring them for the work. And so basically we're modeling real world economics.

So specialized labor commands a higher value, um, because there's less competition and a higher in demand. It always goes relative to demand. So if, if players are needing specific resources, they need a new blueprint, they need an upgrade, they need certain parts of the game. 

They're going to have to pay more to get that produced and they have to pay for the specialized labor inside of the game economy to have it made. So [00:34:00] our goal is to actually over time to sell less things directly to our players and instead put the value creation in the hands of our players. We want our players crafting NFTs, crafting items. And we would rather put a small fee on those efforts that we monetize from instead of being the ones selling primarily to our players.

To us, this ensures that supply and demand is self regulated and that the players drive that themselves. They make the things they need the most. They sell off the excess supplies to each other and they self regulate their own needs. And for us, our goal is to just stand up more and more systems, more and more loops, more and more ways to sync resources.

Amy: That's what Axie's doing is the players breed Axies. 

Mitch: The problem is that the only thing to spend your SLP on is breeding. And the only people that can spend SLP are people that own Axies for breeding more. Or people who have bought Axies that don't have any breeding slots. There is no other utility use for SLP other than breeding currently.

If you're a player and you have a bad hand on your draw, [00:35:00] you can't spend SLP to mulligan your hand. You can't spend 5 SLP to get an extra round in your PvE match when you've lost to the boss and you want that extra try like Candy Crush getting an extra life. Like, to me, I would add a hundred ways to spend SLP to draw down the inflation because there's hundreds of millions of SLP in circulation right now.

And there's only one use, it's breeding. And the only percentage of people that own Axies for breeding are a small fraction of the actual people earning SLP. So the utility value of it is low right now. And they're supposed to be adding to this land gameplay is supposed to do all that other things like what they've spoken to, or being able to spend them on parts and re rolling certain stats.

Or like they've talked about these things. So they're not like, they don't have any idea about it. But to me, that's the biggest thing that I questioned with Axie is like, how long will it take them to add more sinks? Because all I can think about are adding more sinks to my economy and more ways to spend the resources and the tokens that we have in our game. 

But that's my, that's like [00:36:00] how I tick, right? As, as an economy designer, game designer is that's always what my goal is that if there's a leaky faucet, it has to be turned. 

Amy: Depends on what your goal is right within the economy. But I think the takeaway is like economies are hard. 

Mitch: Oh yeah, absolutely. Free-to-play economies are hard.

Play-to-earn economies are an order of magnitude above this. It's incredibly challenging to get the, the sources and sinks correctly to understand or even estimate what your demand will be to deal with. And evolving and, and changing need on the player base and the marketplace and the ecosystems all changing in real time.

It's absolutely crazy. 

Amy: And the volatility of crypto adds. 

Mitch: Oh yeah. 

Amy: Steroids to the crazy because when everything's going up, there's certain things that work that completely don't work when everything's not going up. 

Mitch: Yep. 

Amy: And do you balance your game against that? Cause I know I see that they're doing a lot of game balancing.

I mean, I am rooting for [00:37:00] the Axie team. They're the pioneers. I just, I think there's so much. Interesting about that game, but just listening to you, it's like trying to do all the difficult things of ballet, but on slippery ice, which I guess is ice skating. So psychologically, you've talked about like the land game in, in a Million on Mars.

Yep. Then you tell, there's going to be all these people and they scale up and they get hired. Who are these people that have all this time and don't want to buy land? 

Mitch: So what's interesting is that our player base is very international and it has been from the get go. We've got people really all, all over the world are, are some of our bigger emerging markets are in Eastern Asia, South America, and, and in Russia, of course, we have a, we have an interesting sort of intersection because we're space because we're Mars because we're blockchain and play-to-earn.

We cover a very broad spectrum in different areas in which there's interest. So a lot of people who are into futurism and into space travel and being, being a multi planetary society, our civilization rather [00:38:00] is those things just echo in what we're building. One of our main characters in the game is named Leon Dust, who has nothing to, no relation to any other current known space, space traveling or space-faring billionaires, right? 

Just pure coincidence. So we very much are ears to the ground. We care a lot about being relatively close to being scientifically accurate, to feel like there's a high degree of realism in what we're building. We're still gamey. It's a certain lots of things are still gamey in a lot of sense.

Like you grow coffee in two days, not four years. There are certain things that I won't go hardcore on the realism, but. For the sake of, of the game, they still fit in well, and we want to really make this as a great way for people to learn about science and technology and then the future of where we're heading while also being able to play a really compelling and enjoyable game experience.

So for me, the people around the world that are playing this want something that's low friction, that's easy to play, that isn't high contact, that is really about making smart choices and not about just like you winning and someone losing. So the, there is no conflict in the game. There's no [00:39:00] fighting. You are basically taking jobs, doing work, scavenging for resources, buying and selling the things you need and don't need, and being part of this live breathing economy that everyone is participating in.

And as we add more to this over time, people will get ways to spend more time inside of the game, to have more expression, to have more advancement. We, we definitely want to make as much of the game and the systems as accessible to as many people as we can as it grows as well. 

Amy: It's a real life Mars colony stem.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is very much drawn to build economic simulations of settling on Mars. A hundred percent. Yeah. And like, when we talk about the, you know, the name Million on Mars is intentional. Like I really want to see this game grow to have millions of people in this virtual economy that we're building.

And there's enough room for all the systems and specializations and all the content that we're going to build to accommodate that, that kind of a player base. 

Amy: So this game sounds amazing. It's make it a great [00:40:00] game first. It's pulling in a very international audience that has something interesting that they share - this interest in Mars, interest in those possibilities. 

And it's a play-to-earn game. So walk me through. Somebody in Southeast Asia who's playing this play-to-earn, what does that look like? And are there like a couple of key personas there? 

Mitch: Yeah, I think the, the two sort of standout things that I've seen in the last just couple of weeks are simple, casual players that just play the game that are earning Dusk, that take it out and are able to convert it into Wax.

The other scenarios that I've seen are the players that have been earning Dusk and are able to then use it to supplement what it would cost to buy a land. And so we've seen players that are advancing from workers to landowners, and then they're able to then provide work for other players. The low barrier to entry in the game also allows players to get their friends in relatively easily as well.

And so we're seeing this sort of like, Hey, I sent [00:41:00] access badges to my friends and now they're playing and now they're becoming landowners and they're working together. That's really what we're seeing very organically is this sort of emergence of. I've, everyone's just like bringing each other in one by one and onboarding more friends, more communities and more groups.

And it really fits the spirit of what we're building. 

Amy: Sounds like you've got large scale co-op going on. 

Mitch: It is in a weird sort of indirect way. Everyone is still hiring each other and buying and selling things. But in our Discord community, it is an active live bazaar of people that are wheeling and dealing NFTs and in game resources that are trying to buy and sell different things.

It's there, watching the, the price trends changing in real time. They're talking about meta strategies. They're speculating about the future based on things that we've leaked. There's just, there's so much going on and it is super, super exciting. It's, it is a living ecosystem and a little microcosm of culture that is starting to really brew inside of this community.

They're coming up with their [00:42:00] own behaviors and they, yeah, it's, it's, it's self governing. 

Amy: In Discord you mean? 

Mitch: In Discord, absolutely. Yeah. And I'm seeing this in all kinds of play-to-earn communities. There's very similar things that I see happening in specific game communities and broader blockchain communities and bigger sort of play-to-earn stuff.

There's different community emergences that I see happening. 

Amy: I think we need another hour to go down that rabbit hole. I'll put a pin in it. Sure. But, oh boy do I want to hear those stories. Because I think in many ways, that's the story of NFT gaming and play-to-earn gaming is what it does to communities and the role that communities play and the kinds of communities that emerge.

Mitch: Oh, yeah, definitely. I think the, the big buzzwords are community-first development. That's been our mantra from the beginning. We have been open kimono about literally everything that we're building from the beginning. We've talked about what our plans are. We're very transparent about our roadmap, our progress, our [00:43:00] failures and everything.

And I think that it gives your players a level of trust that has not previously been seen in a space or even in games in general, we're very much used to being about. Big marketing tent poles and not really revealing dates or talking about what's in progress for the fear of what will change and what will be different on the time of release.

And we definitely change it up. We're very transparent. We're, we're open about things that are different. We're open about motivations and what the intent is behind decisions. And our audience loves this. They absolutely love this level of transparency and it builds more faith and confidence in what we're building as we continue to deliver and hold true to what we're saying. 

Amy: Do you have a governance token? 

Mitch: We do not. Right now we just have Dusk as a in game inflationary token. 

Amy: And when you say the price changes, what is that, what's determining that and where is it listed? 

Mitch: So the players themselves have the ability to withdraw Dusk to their WAX wallets.

And they themselves can [00:44:00] create liquidity pools on decentralized exchanges like Alcor and basically that will afford them to be able to buy and sell it on swap pools or deal with market book orders, similar to all other tokens that are on that decentralized exchange us ourselves. We don't operate any liquidity pools or hold that token for that kind of purpose.

It's really all driven by the players and the market that determine what the value of Dusk is outside of the game. We are solely focused on just making sure that it has utility and that it is not inflated from an in game economic perspective. 

Amy: So for those who are familiar, just a few basic terms. So liquidity pool is created by staked tokens, correct?

Mitch: Basically a liquidity pool is where you put in equal amounts of two different tokens, and then you earn a percentage of the fees that are earned when people are buying and selling those tokens within an exchange. There's additional things that happen on top of that, but that's the sort of the fundamental is that you say, [00:45:00] like, I put $10 of A, $10 of B in this spot.

And every time someone trades and I facilitate that trade, because I've got both, I take a small cut of that, that transaction. And then when I'm done, I take both of those out and they may have different values at the end of the day. That's really the sort of the basic. 

Amy: So you need WAX plus another token in order to create a utility.

Mitch: A pool or a pair. Liquidity pool. 

Mitch: A trading pool. Yeah. And this is specifically just the example of the way it would work on a site like Alcor. The other communities, projects, exchanges may be different. Some offer staking rewards, some do other things, but at its most basic level, this is how it works. Yeah.

Amy: So users are in the process of creating their own decentralized liquidity pools. 

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. They're, they already have, there's already, they're actively trading it on those exchanges right now. It has a value that goes up and down depending on, you know, the value of wax, where the market is headed. And it is completely independent of any of our, of our control.

We don't set that price. All we do is, make Dusk matter. That's [00:46:00] really our goal as game creators. 

Amy: Got it. The legal aspects of that and why that's such a good idea is again, another interesting conversation, but I'll just say that distinction seems really important in the conversations I've had of whether you are offering something and hosting transactions in some way.

Around very volatile assets. 

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. There's a lot of different ways that everyone does stuff and, and our goal is always focused around the game itself. 

Amy: You mentioned community first development and you have community first development without the incentive of a governance token. Which is what's called listening to your customer, right?

Be transparent, listen to your customer. You don't actually need a governance token to make that happen. Maybe you'll have one in the future. 

Mitch: Yeah. But I definitely can't say [00:47:00] anything too speculative about the future, that's for sure. 

Amy: I want to note that there are ways to do that that are very organic if you have a great product.

And so that's, I think, a testament to what you're doing. 

Mitch: Yeah. I mean, we still have a treasury, right? We still actually are taking out fees from our game economy. We are putting all of that into a place and we're going to actually build in a proper like this percentage goes into this system. This percentage goes into the system, but basically we want to be the stewards to set this up properly first.

And then in the future, maybe it makes sense that there's a governance driven solution that can make changes. To me, if you don't create the right working example, you can't have faith that like just handing it over to the people that hold the bag is going to be able to be the best judge of what should happen to it later.

We just, we want to set it up for success and then we'll figure out the other part. And then we've been trying, we've tried to be transparent about that. 

Amy: Which brings us to Loot Project. 

Mitch: I knew you were going to get to this one. 

Amy: But it's the perfect segue. I want to know, I really want to hear what [00:48:00] you really think.

Because what you just said is a core best practice that I learned from a lot of painful experience building gaming systems and social gaming systems in particular. If you don't show them what good behavior looks like, what value behavior looks like, what handling something looks like, you're not going to get that.

And it's an abdication of responsibility. So when you look at Loot Project, when it launched but also now, what do you see? 

Mitch: I see that literally nothing has happened since it launched and my entire speculative concerns have been like completely validated. So like, I, okay, look. I'm all for community first driven design.

I'm all for that sort of thing. And I think it makes a lot of sense, but you can't just dump a block of Legos in front of a public and ask for them to give you thousands of dollars for them and then also tell them to go build something amazing. Expect them to go build something [00:49:00] amazing out of it. 

Take it, it's like you thought to yourself. Oh, I can bring the mountain to Muhammad and then instead you blew the mountain up, put a bunch of sticky notes on what the different pieces of the mountain were, and then just dumped the bucket in front of Muhammad and said, here, go buy the pieces of the mountain and build it for us.

That Lego analogy is not a stretch. But in practice, it's also taking five steps backwards and, and it's democratizing or decentralizing to the design level where we haven't had enough examples of what good is yet. And so to me, it's just, it's way cart before the horse. It's so much like presumption about these tokens and what their future use could be without having any real working examples.

The demonstrate it to me, it created a lot of buzz. There's a lot of, I created a lot of dreaming blue sky. Oh, I could do this with it. I could do this with it, but those work well until reality is actually met. So the other challenge is that anyone with actual expertise in building products and games is going to look at this and say, so what do [00:50:00] I get out of it?

The obvious business case is that there's a bunch of crypto whales that own them. And you want to bring those people to your game by recognizing those tokens, which is an okay thing to do. But the amount of effort required to do this and to integrate this when you're also trying to build an actual game, it's like building another game on your game.

And we're not there yet. It's just, it's too early for everything. 

Amy: And if you've ever shipped a game, you know how hard it is. But I think it's fascinating that this really alluring dream, it's almost crypto performance art, right? None of it would have happened without a celebrity at the center of it. And all these people, including a lot of very smart people and VCs, dream together.

And it's very alluring that you wouldn't actually have to know how to design a game. It could somehow magically, because of the community, because of this, it could somehow magically come about. And there's a [00:51:00] lot of that dreaming in crypto. I think it's going to be so interesting to see how it plays out.

I'm thrilled that you of all people with your background is going out there to give us all an example of something. Like you said, we need examples of good design. You got a chance to play MIR4, and I'm sure that really influenced a lot of you.

Mitch: So much of what I've been building and the way I think about things is directly influenced on me playing everything.

In fact, I eat my own dog food as much as it can possibly be and by that I own a half a dozen AXI teams and I, my partners and I, we managed a few dozen in total in our scholarship program for our community I've put a close to a thousand dollars in MIR4. I've owned several thousands of dollars of items in Lost Relics that I bought early in the spring.

Like I've owned land in Alien Worlds, Dark Country, Our Planet, Prospectors, like everything. Like I, as deep as it can possibly be in every aspect so that I understand it from [00:52:00] every angle. And that's the other part I think a lot of people are missing is that they're just watching from the outside and they haven't Even played a game of Axie and they haven't managed a skull or they haven't finished the, they haven't like finished the tutorial of mirror or found a blockchain item in lost relics.

Like these are like important milestone things that as a, as someone who's going to create in this space, you need to experience for yourself to see how it feels. When I talked about how I was very critical and early on in the space, when I went down the rabbit hole, it was until I found the first blockchain item in Lost Relics.

When I started to play the game, I was like, Oh, this is actually feels like a game. And then I got an item that stayed with me permanently and I didn't lose everything when I died. And it all clicked. That was my big aha moment was like, Oh, there's okay. Now I get how the scarcity matters, how the permanence matters, how owning these assets and these items actually matters.

Until you get those aha moments for yourself, until you've felt it from the player or from the investing sort of perspective, [00:53:00] you may not have the full picture. And it's a challenge because basically you have to have a lot of money to do this and to validate it. And I've had to, I got lucky because I had a bunch of money left in my Coinbase account from 2013 that gave me a jump to literally 20 in an account that was worth a thousand now.

And that was the like starting money I used to get into crypto NFT blockchain stuff at the beginning of this year. Yeah. That's, I guess that's the big thing. It's just, it's all about like, you have, and there's new things coming out every week that you have to keep watching. That's the other thing is that it's just, it's evolving and moving 10 times faster than free-to-play did.

Amy: The speed is. 

Mitch: Easily. 

Amy: Why do you think that is? Why is it moving so fast? 

Mitch: Because crypto doesn't sleep. It's not tied to traditional market. So to me, the game industry was pegged to the stock industry, the stock market, because it's, and which is a Monday to Friday, nine to five, roughly. And startups push those bounds a little bit, but they're still mostly working towards, they're still largely tied [00:54:00] to that market activity of the quarterly calendar, fiscal delivery, the uh, shareholder value, all those likes typical like corporate things. 

But in crypto it's 24 hours a day exchanges don't turn off at 5 p. m. They're 24 hours a day. The, the cycle just never ends. And it's as international as it gets so that it's just. There is no time that is wrong for news because there's people around the world that are ready to listen to it.

And so things are just moving and the, there's just, yeah, there's, and it's just, there's just so much more room for growth. We are still, that's the other part. Like we are at the, I use, I still use the Facebook analogy. So we're at super poke on Facebook. Like we haven't even got to Mafia Wars, Farnville, Frontierville, Cityville, like those advanced level metas and deeper, like hyper, hyper growth things haven't happened yet.

Yeah. Um, we're, what I see is the rest of the world is going to come online to play-to-earn before the U. S. and the sort of tier one countries do. 

Amy: So like MIR4, would your game work [00:55:00] in South Korea without the, without the cash out? Or is it really going to work really more tightly with laptop? 

Mitch: Yeah, it would.

It's harder. It's hard to say. You basically just have to be a worker because we don't really, it's really dependent on their specific rules, but like the way that they've been structuring things really seems that they're going to just prevent it altogether. They're not going to allow NFT related games, blockchain games, play-to-earn tokens or anything like that, at least until they figure out the regulatory side. 

But very much not a lawyer, not sure of those things. And it's, literally just happening this last week. But we, putting updates and other stuff.

So it's so fresh that I don't even know what the current status is, to be honest. But the market is so big, um, yeah, the market is so big that I'm not even worried about it. That's the thing is that I, we're going to see massive growth out of, you know, Southeast Asia and South America and Africa. We didn't even see in free-to-play spaces.

Most of the time, those countries were, you Regulated as relegated as tier three [00:56:00] countries that we wouldn't even localize that we would not put much UA efforts into and the script will be flipped completely in, in blockchain player earned because those are the most. Like easily acquirable players that will participate inside of your game economies that you need to fuel the actual growth.

Amy: Wow. That's incredibly powerful. It's also a great vision you can feel good about. 

Mitch: Absolutely. That's what I'm all about that's that mission driven way of like driving real positive impact to people's lives. And to hear these stories already about like people that are paying their bills, that are getting value outside of the game, that are moving from being just a player or a worker to being a landowner, like that is the coolest stuff that I think is what makes this whole space really special.

Amy: So where can we go to learn more about this? 

Mitch: Sure. You can go to milliononmars.io. And you can just learn about the game there. We have a really rich player guide as well. It explains all the features and systems. We have a lot more coming out that will be added to that. 

You can also go to [00:57:00] milliononmars.com/discord and join our discord community, learn a ton about the game there as well. There's also lots of YouTube interviews and talks I've given and even players that are making videos now on YouTube on Land Rush as well that you can learn about. 

Amy: Fantastic. We'll share all those links in the show notes as well.

So I know a lot of people watching are really interested in building economies, their tuning economies, etc. You mentioned that not playing other games in the space. Is an anti pattern.

That's like, you have to play other games and I've noticed that among the very best game designers I've ever worked with, they play the space.

Mitch: You have to. 

Amy: So, are there other really common mistakes? That you see over and over again, that folks listening could say, yeah, I don't want to make that mistake in my economy. I'm excited about this smart people building games. What are the other than not playing the space and setting it, the super common mistakes that we can really learn from.

Mitch: Yeah. I'll give you a couple of [00:58:00] low, low hanging fruit, easy ones that I'm constantly reminding myself about. One, the easy thing is. It's very easy to create a source. It's much harder to create a good sync. And, and this is especially hard when there is value attached to a source. So if someone can earn something that you're creating a source for, whether it's a daily login bonus, whether it's do a task and earn a token, whether it's complete these jobs and these missions with your basic things.

If there isn't enough use for the actual things that they're getting, those sources will hyperinflate faster than you can realize. Like they, it is truly important that you understand the actual desires and needs of your players, and that you create enough stressors that facilitate the use and consumption of those resources.

What I mean by that is you need to be probably more aggressive and tighter in your tuning than you would normally be. Specifically on the consumption side, you should also be probably more conservative on the creation side as well, but you need to be [00:59:00] more vigilant on the consumption side and you need to almost always not allow open ended sources to exist.

You need to have a cost. You need to have a limit in some way. Or you risk that someone will just set up a computer or a bot or a script and they will run that 24/7 and get as much as they can for free. And that will be like, and they'll, or they'll, or if you need it to be really driven home, they will create a hundred or a thousand instances of a script doing this, not just one, because they run parallel processing and they do these things to get maximum exploitation while the time exists.

Like MIR4 had multiple millions of bots running in their game within 60 days. Multiple millions of instances of bots across all of their servers. 

Like The, so mistake two, prepare for bots, prepare for abuse, prepare for exploitation. And this is, this was top to bottom in your economy is that you need to prepare for the worst, that people will try to take advantage of every single exploitation and way that you [01:00:00] don't imagine.

And that's why the first thing is about watching your syncs, because this leads right into the second part. And then the third, I'll do one more. Those are two big ones. I don't know. I, if you listen to my other talks, come talk to me in Discord. I will keep giving you more. I do see questions in the chat here that if you want me to run through some quick lightning answers to them.

Amy: Yes. What do we see in the chat? 

Mitch: I've got a few, I think. Yes. From Adam and Amir. 

Amy: Awesome. 

Mitch: Sure. Again, I will lightning these out. If you want longer responses, come track me down on socials or anywhere. I'm happy to elaborate further. So trust is crucial to a successful economy. What do I recommend early on to build trust, especially when in many NFT games, ask you to invest now for future gameplay.

Easy, build a game first. That's what we did. Like we, we were, we didn't take anyone's money until there was a game to play. We, our founders token sale started the same day the game was playable in which you could log in with that token and play the game for yourself. In which we could demonstrate visually to other players that there was an [01:01:00] actual game experience here, and it wasn't promising for an actual experience a year from now and asking for a lot of money upfront, like that's, that is something that I actually am very, I get upset about when other projects, especially from well funded companies are then trying to get money out of like pre sales pre orders or non utility NFTs.

That's how you like, you start to ruin your trust relationship from the get go. 

Amy: Yeah. Sometimes there's a lot of pressure on people to do that. You're blessed that you didn't have that pressure, that you're in a project that's funded enough to do that. 

Mitch: And if you have to sell ahead, don't sell big, sell small.

So the, I, I, you'll have to track them down, but there's a game called ancient realms. I think they did the best job of selling small in recent history that I've watched. They're a very small indie team. They did pre sell things, but they've been consistently delivering and communicating. And that's the really important part is.

Yeah. Over communicate, over deliver, don't over promise and, and never, ever talk about money, never [01:02:00] talk about how much money making potential your project has. That's a kiss of death. I've never, if you look at any interview words I've written, I never once talk about it. I never will. It's, it's, you've, yeah, that's a big one and it's a red flag when I see a project do it.

Let's see. 

Amy: In other words, all the NFT projects. 

Mitch: Some, but there's the, Axie's a game, Mirror's a game, Lost Valleys is a game, they do exist, but. It's yeah, things that are like, give us up to 80, 000 now. And there'll be a game to it's in beta next year. I'm like, do you know what's going to happen in the next year?

Cause I know they're not making the games that are live right now. I couldn't, there's no way I could ask for a dollar next six months from now in exchange for. The hamburger today. I would just never, I would never do that. Or rather a dollar for today for a hamburger next, next year. I would just never do that.

Amy: So I think Adam had a followup, which was designing a game for players who aren't here for the crypto spectate speculator angle. And I think he answered that, [01:03:00] which is...

Mitch: Same rule, make a game that matter, make a game that the utility of the token matters, that there's actual use, there's syncs for it, make the NFTs matter.

Make the, make everything matter. So when we did like free drops and free giveaways as pre marketing leading up to stuff, every single thing we dropped and we gave away how to use at least once, whether it was a promo, a giveaway, it could be deposited, like I didn't give away useless NFTs and that's like my personal rules, it just, I make everything matter.

So that, that, to, so then that way the most amount of people care about it. Yeah. Does Axie have buying and selling between the experienced players or is it still a new player entry? It's definitely both, but it's all amongst the breeders that it most of these still happens. So there are metas that change within the game as the balance is evolving and they're moving into new spaces.

The meta also evolves in the way that it does on any traditional like card battle games. So there's just going to be shifting metas between the seasons that are more popular. It just moves more slowly in Axie because there's a cost and there's an effort required to breeding and it's not as predictable. So what I mean by, 

Amy: Shifting metas, do [01:04:00] you mean their event strategy? 

Mitch: No, in the battle game, so like in the same way there's a shifting meta between the Pokemon, uh, TCG, the Magic the Gathering TCG, like deck styles, the battle styles that you compose when you're actually playing competitively, those metas have ripples on the entire market.

So the reason why a black Lotus is worth so much is because of how powerful that card is and how much you can wield with it in a competitive sense. The same thing is the case in Axie. The Axie is with the best stats and the rarest traits that are part of the most powerful meta or command the most value.

And so that changes. And because the current meta is what people then build counter metas to. They build a whole set of Axies that are teams specifically designed to destroy the top most successful metas. And then that becomes the new meta. And this is, they all do this, like they, every couple of, and it just moves more slowly and actually because of the way value creation is tied to breeding.

So you need to, it takes, it takes time to process the meta shifts in, in, and it takes longer when they reset the balance or change a season or something like that. 

Amy: Are the [01:05:00] metas determined by the game creators? 

Mitch: Yes. They're a byproduct of the game balance that is set by the game creators. 

Amy: But it's sort of a back and forth between the game creators trying to rebalance a game that got out of balance.

Mitch: Yeah. This is the, the eternal push pull of design and player with live service games. But when you have a competitive driven thing, it's more. It's always an evolving meta that there's going to be things that are the favorites, things that are going to be less popular. And your goal is to always try to rotate those in the next time around.

So any competitive or progression driven live ops systems, even in the Triple A space, like, it's like how Diablo has to change their set rotations every season. And then they're changing the stats and they're trying to modify it. And then there's like new metas that sort of evolve out of this. Same thing with Axie.

It's just tied to breeding and everything else. 

Amy: Wow. I did not know that. Yeah. 

Mitch: Yeah, there's a lot of deep layers inside of it, for sure. 

Amy: Then Amir has a question as well, it looks like. 

Mitch: Sure. Your friend is working on an educational project using learn-to-earn. Do I think that [01:06:00] XYZ to Earn is a suitable way of designing and monetizing not only games, but other apps?

Man, that's a tricky one. I've heard people talk about learn-to-earn a few times. And the only working example I've seen is I know about a bunch of tokens that I didn't know about previously because I got paid to learn about them on crypto on Coinbase. So Coinbase to me is it's one working example. I know of personally that I can speak to that.

Like I earned by learning and I actually know about those tokens and I've used them as a result. And I would actually, it felt good getting paid to educate myself about something like I'm not going to lie. That's pretty cool. That was pretty neat. As a product maker, I see this largely as a means for, as, as a means for marketing.

I don't, mostly in like promotions of products and brands or whatever, they're trying to educate the masses. I don't know enough about it from an actual like educational standpoint for a longer, larger scale product to really be able to speak confidently beyond that though. 

Amy: The money has to come from somewhere, right?

Like [01:07:00] it comes from new players in Axie. It comes from, it comes from people with more money than time in the gold farming and Million on Mars model. The money always has to come from somewhere. 

Mitch: Sure. But it's not in a direct transactional manner because it's really not about money at that point, it's about value.

And so. What I usually see happen is money might go into a game or into an ecosystem, but what people are always getting out is value in a form of a token. And what people value that outside of the game experience is where money comes into play is that I've earned this piece of value in this form of a token.

You think it's worth this much, so I will take that much money in exchange for it. But to me, the, the sort of quote unquote, like who pays the player is the game itself. It's the game economy that prints and mints those tokens for participating in the game economy. That's me. There is a, uh, sort of an indirect exchange of value that goes into building the product that people buy the packs, that fulfill the business, that buy things in the secondary economy and the market that fulfills some of this [01:08:00] stuff in the greater sort of interworkings of the business model.

But at the end of the day, like the game is, you know, The game is, has its own sort of live thriving money, I hate to use the phrase money printer, but the, the tokens are created from nothing by the game itself. And it's on the game creators themselves to act like the federal reserve, just regulate the flow and the inflation levels of those tokens and currencies.

Amy: And so whether, how much you can earn is completely dependent on secondary markets. 

Mitch: It's indirectly, but it's, to me, it's a matter of what you're able to put into it and how good you understand the game and what is actually, like possible from within the balance and, and the constraints that exist. So it's largely situational. 

Some games have a very flat play-to-earn in which like your maximum potential is strongly limited and it's directly capped. And other games are more open ended where you can fly up a chain and get a big fat set of rewards at the end of the week or the end of the month. It's, there is no hard and fast rules yet.

Amy: We are at the beginning. 

Mitch: Yes. [01:09:00] Exactly. 

Amy: I think that's all the questions. It says, are Million on Mars workers able to take value out from the beginning? Adam also asks. 

Mitch: We have a two week gateway for our game. We want to ensure that players are encouraged to spend their earnings and their tokens inside of the game first.

And then basically make the choice later on. So we put in a mandatory gateway. It also allows us to catch bad behavior, bad actors, botters, all that other kind of stuff. And then one last question. What's so special about crypto? If basically what, could you just do this all on Facebook? Yeah, but you can't, it's the autonomy and the agency of owning what you've earned inside of the games that makes everything different. So if you've played Hearthstone for years in the way that I did, or me and my wife did, we spent thousands of dollars on Hearthstone packs and cards over the years, and that collection is worth nothing.

I've invested a ton of money and a ton of time. We both grinded to become skilled players. My wife has Multiple [01:10:00] 500 portrait wins. Like we invested insane amounts of time and effort, but at the end of the day, we get nothing for it. We don't own anything that we put into this. And if I had been playing, if we had just been playing magic, the gathering, the actual physical card game, we'd have a card collection that is worth money that we could have been selling out of the season that we could have got a return for our money and our time.

And in addition to the value, the good feelings of playing that game in any other way. That's the key difference is that you, you earn and you own what you put into it and you aren't just. Basically, renting your digital assets from the developer because that's what free-to-play games basically do is that you're buying rental licenses.

Amy: That was so well put. That was a really good explanation. There's so much more we could learn from you, Mitch, but you've given us so much of your time this morning. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much for joining us and explaining. What's going on behind the scenes at Million to Mars. We'll make sure we share all those URLs with everyone and we [01:11:00] will, I'm probably going to go out and play it right now.

And I'm sure I'll learn a lot by doing that as well. 

Mitch: Great. Looking forward to it. Yeah. I hope anyone that needs a. Access badge to play. Feel free to come, come on to our discord. We'll be happy to help you out. 

Amy: Fantastic. Thank you so much. This was mind blowing. Love it. All right. 

Mitch: Thanks. 

Amy: See you in discord.

Mitch: Definitely. 

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.Com. That's getting2alpha. com for more great resources and podcast [01:12:00] episodes.