Blockchain Gaming with Andrew Wagner

In episode 9 of Don’t Buy The Bull, Cassandra Toroian interviews Andrew Wagner, a prominent figure in the gaming technology industry, as they discuss the impact of blockchain on gaming, investment opportunities, and the future of decentralized gaming.

Tune in to learn more about the exciting intersection of blockchain and gaming!

TIMESTAMPS

[00:02:46] Blockchain gaming technology.

[00:07:32] Decentralized gaming on the rise.

[00:12:31] Blockchain gaming industry challenges.

[00:13:45] Blockchain gaming and adoption.

[00:19:28] Blockchain in the gaming industry.

[00:23:04] Play-to-earn model on blockchain.

QUOTES

• “People always argue about if you can afford that if you did pay for that, if the receipt was collected, payment was delivered, and at what time. And the blockchain is good at that because those are facts likely to be disputed.” - Andrew Wagner
• “I'm hoping we'll see more of that, I guess, innovations of that nature, because there have been a lot of instabilities with certain games here and there in the past, like Axie Infinity, for example. Everyone's heard of the spectacular collapse of that just because people were betting on the tier-one token, which players can earn directly. And that can be unsustainable in the long run. You have to be more careful than that.” - Andrew Wagner
• “I really appreciate learning more about how blockchain is affecting the entire gaming industry because it's a huge, huge economic powerhouse for investors, the entire gaming industry.” - Cassandra Toroian

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Cassandra Toroian

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CassandraToroian/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CassandraToroian1/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandra-toroian/

Andrew Wagner

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SirWagginston

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theandrewwagner/

WEBSITE

Cassandra Toroian: https://cassandratoroian.net/

FirstHand Research and Consulting LLC: https://1sthandresearch.com/

Don’t Buy The Bull: https://dontbuythebull.io/

Rising Star: https://risingstargame.com/

Transcript

Welcome to Don't Buy the Bull, a podcast dedicated to unmasking the truth behind how so-called trusted Wall Street institutions and the American government really work. I'm your host, Cassandra Taurian. You can call me Cass. I'm a seasoned former equity analyst, investment manager and former Wall Street Journal All-Star Analyst. And I'm passionate about helping people think for themselves by teaching them about things like investing, which may not be their forte. My only goal is to help you figure out how to use your own discernment and instinct to make good investment decisions for yourself. I have no skin in the game. And to do what I'd like to help you do, we have to look at the world around us, since the stock market does not operate in the bubble. So let's dive in. Hey, everybody, it's Cassandra Torian here at Don't Buy the Bull. And we're here today with a fellow by the name of Andrew Wagner. And Andrew is very heavily involved in gaming technology, specifically blockchain gaming technology, which I think is a really fascinating world particularly those of you that listened in to me in the past. You know, I went back to school, learned a little bit about what blockchain and crypto was all about because I felt like that's the way the world is moving. I better understand it. So I thought it'd be great to have have Andrew on. So welcome, Andrew.

Cassandra Toroian 

Great to be here.

Andrew Wagner

Yeah. So your website is called BlockchainGaming.com, right?

It's very informational right now.

OK, and so do you have any games that are up and running?

Well, for us, we have a hedge fund with an accelerator program, so we haven't yet made any games of our own, but there are several in our portfolio that we're invested in, some of which we provide closer ongoing advice and support to as per our accelerator program's goals to promote small games that we believe have potential and could use support.

OK, so when you talk about that, so in other words, you're investing in startup games, right? That's what we do on the blockchain. Correct. And can you just explain for folks out there who aren't really that familiar yet with what that means. Blockchain, what does that mean? As opposed to just the regular type of gaming, what's the difference between a regular game and a blockchain game?

Well, blockchain technology is used for anything to store data about which we're likely to argue. Any information or facts likely to be disputed have a usefulness the blockchain is useful for. So traditionally that's been money. People always argue about if you can afford that, if you did pay for that, if the receipt was collected, payment was delivered and at what time. And the blockchain is good at that because those are facts likely to be disputed. There are plenty of data and facts likely to be disputed in the world beyond our personal financial situations. And that could be voting, real estate, insurance, or gaming. In gaming, people argue about who won that match or what the high score was. Really? What items you have and what level your character is. And any game with attributes like this can have utility in blockchain.

Huh. So people take it that seriously that that it's better to be on a blockchain with some of these types of games.

Well, some people take gaming very seriously. I mean, I've been steeped in that age. I had a Sega Genesis since before I could read. I kind of learned to read from my Sega. And for some people, it's their ultimate hobby. Some people are even professionals at it in esports. in which context the high score and who won the match can have huge ramifications in a tournament scenario. Yeah. Yeah. Although I'm not an e-sports player myself, those people are really dedicated and practice every day. And I have a lot of money in it, right?

I mean, that's the bottom line.

Yeah, sports are sports. There's money in them. There's promotions to be made. And yeah, blockchain is useful for that. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can also take out the servers entirely and make a fully decentralized game in which mods and admins are not necessary from a technical point of view. Okay. That can have fascinating ramifications, in my opinion.

Yeah, that's where I think this is all going, is Web 3 sort of everything's decentralized, right? That, I think, really puts the whole, let's call it, internet infrastructure back in the hands of the people to control, right? So are there games right now up and running in those kinds of formats? You know, if somebody is listening right now, could they go to one of the to some website of a game that you guys are invested in or are they still not up and running yet? Like, where could people check these things out?

Well, it depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. If you're interested in fully decentralized games, like with no server or anything, I would recommend looking at the Zaya platform. They did have one game years ago called Huntercoin, an MMO with no mods, admins or servers. The technology that is still very nascent for a couple of reasons. One is scalability. The more decentralized the game is, the more it puts on chain and the more costs that occurs. That's a problem that's rapidly getting solved over time with side chains and other techniques. The other issue is we don't yet have a decentralized Turing test. So there is no way to prevent you from playing with a bot or AI in the game without an admin to watch. And that remains the case until we can have decentralized Turing tests, meaning a way of detecting whether the computer is human or not. Right. But games that are pseudo decentralized in which not the whole game, but only core aspects are on chain. Those have already proliferated quite a lot. And there's really more out there than I could name at this stage. Look on platforms like Immutable X to see some interesting examples. It's a lot on Polygon. And some of them are still under development. So gaming is a lot, games cost millions of dollars to make these days. And so any game that's really going to be good, what we call triple A, games with high budgets, large teams, those take years to make. And so most of them that started are not out yet. Games out so far tend to be smaller budget, and some of them are clearly cash grabs, which is what happens in any new industry. But there are some exciting games that look like real, you know, games like you'd see traditionally. Ember Sword is a cool example. We're invested in that one, for example. But there are lots of people doing games of that nature that we should expect to see on the market in the next couple of years.

Okay. So is this like electronic arts? Is this the kind of thing that they get involved in?

EA is a huge gaming company. Yeah. It's going to be a while before they start using blockchain for the reason that they have a huge monopolistic position in the industry already. They have no incentive to innovate in that regard.

Okay.

And that's just how it goes. We see that with traditional legacy companies, anytime a new technology enters, like Toyota and Honda are slow to adopt self-driving cars, for example, because their legacy production lines are, they're comfortable with. But there are definitely a lot of large companies. I'd say some of the largest companies doing games are around the immutable X ecosystem. That's where we see a lot of the big budget, high graphical quality games being made. And EA also, I guess it's risky. I don't know. Some of those larger corporations just tend to be slow moving.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, probably because they like you said, they don't have to be. that quick, they want to see kind of who shakes out probably first before they dump a whole bunch of money into something.

It was Ubisoft.

Ubisoft. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. Well known. Right. Absolutely. They're really well known. So then let me ask you another question related to what is it going to take? Right. For the gaming industry, right, to really start to, do you think there's going to be a migration over completely to the blockchain type of gaming or do you think there's always going to be, you know, sort of an off-chain and on-chain type of

of gaming industry? I think both will exist for. And inevitably, one thing we'll see is blockchain is better for some types of games than others. OK, and I'll give you an example. If you're playing a single player game, there's no one to have a dispute with. No one's going to argue about your item or who won the match in a single player game like Skyrim, for example. What need does Skyrim have for blockchain when there is nobody to have disputes with?

Right, right.

And there is going to be plenty of genres of games, some of which are more adept or more in need of tokenization than others. I would say some of the biggest ones are MMOs, massive multiplayer online games, especially massive multiplayer online RPGs are probably the most adept at being having blockchain technology integrated with them due to the sheer number of activity which occurs online between parties that might dispute with one another. Although we're still, you know, big ones like World of Warcraft and such still aren't doing that. A lot of that I'll say is regulatory confusion. For example, if the IRS decides that World of Warcraft gold has real value, they're going to want to put a sales tax on the in-game options. Yeah, Blizzard does not want that. And so questions like that have slowed adoption on some MMORPGs. But the interest is definitely there. I'd also say we've struggled with backlash from critical reviewers. in the gaming space, like from gaming magazines and online podcasts. And some of the main reason I'd say for that is just that we've had a lot of people in the blockchain space who've seen the potential and rushed in as bad actors, and they can kind of make us look bad and make all of us a little more suspicious in the eyes of legacy players. And that's something we have to work harder to fight against. I mean, personally, I consider games an art form. Um, you should make a game, you should make a game with an artistic concept first, and then later see if there's ways you can add blockchain to it for the purpose of making it sustainable or just better for players. But we've seen a lot of bad actors who do it in the reverse. They show up with a business plan and then try to make a game that fits their biggest business plan. And that's not how art works. And we have to outcompete and just keep building until those people and the reputational damage they cause is overridden, you know. And that's been the case with DeFi and other blockchain sectors as well.

Interesting. Wow. It's a whole it's a whole big world out there that I think the average person doesn't doesn't know anything about yet. So what would you say is a good way for people to just learn about more about this stuff? Because I feel like blockchain, you talked about it earlier. You know, there's so many uses for it. Right. I don't think that happens until the average consumer really understands what it is or even knows maybe they're even using it now and they don't even know. So where would be a couple of places you would point people to really get a basics on it and maybe give an example of how people might be using and they don't even know it yet.

Oh, well, our website's pretty informational. We don't really have right now blockchain gaming. And we do have more plans for the website later, like a marketplace and whatnot. But for now, if you just want to understand what is blockchain gaming, blockchaingaming.com has some good written content for explaining that to people. There's a lot of other websites out there that are promoting specific games themselves. IMX, Immutable X has a website where you can just go browse. all the games on their platform. But yeah, and also a lot of your standard crypto sources, Binance Academy. Gaming has become such a huge section of blockchain that any standard blockchain educational resource is going to talk about gaming now. It's kind of a low-hanging fruit, so to speak, for blockchain in that games are easier to tokenize than other things like real estate, for example.

Why is that? Why would a game be? See, to me, that would be the opposite, because with real estate, you know, there's a buyer, a seller, you know, a title or a deed to a house. Right. Like in my mind, like what is there in gaming that that is easier.

It's because the developer has full control over the rules of their game world. So if you want to put a house on the blockchain, you can do that. But will the courts respect that? If someone steals your house and you call the police and say, I have the deed right here on the Bitcoin blockchain, will the police care about that? Possibly not. Whereas in the video game world, it is entirely up to the developer of that world to decide whether blockchain ownership is respected or not. We don't require the cooperation of courts, police, real estate companies. Right. We ultimately can just decide all of those things ourselves. And that makes gaming sort of a low hanging fruit by avoiding a lot of the hardest parts of blockchain adoption in the real world.

And that's a great point, because there is this sort of that was sort of the whole point of Bitcoin when it first emerged, right, was to be this entirely separate currency and this blockchain that that it was built on away from normal, let's call it society and laws. Right. It was it was supposed to be completely separate. Of course, you know, the governments want to chip away at that other than taxation. Are there any ways that you think that's going to happen in gaming, given that you do right now have like full control over your own fiefdom, if you will. But how could they get in there? And is it through the NFT creation? Is it is that where they're going with it? Like people buying more tokens, things like that.

I mean, some of the standard regulations imposed upon the blockchain sector across all parts of the blockchain industry. Some of them still apply to gaming as well. On my hedge fund, we have to KYC people, for example. It doesn't matter that they're games. I have to know your identity or I'll get in trouble.

That's know your client.

Yes. Sorry. Know your client. And so we still adhere to some standard business regulations and gaming as required by law. And it's been fine. They haven't really said things. There's no one imposing how that looks inside the game world itself. Impositions are standard, like. No scamming people. And, you know, we have to know our client for running a hedge fund. Standard business practices apply, but within the game world, we have total artistic or design leeway for how blockchain looks in that game world at this point. It's the interactions with the real world where regulations come into play.

Yeah. Yeah, that's always the way, right?

Yep. And we have to be careful, of course. It depends. I mean, some games, it's the more I guess it can be bigger for games that are trying to be profit driven or play to earn games. Yeah. It really varies from game to game, I'd say. But I haven't seen that to be a huge issue so far affecting the way blockchain games are made.

Well, that's good. Well, this has been a really interesting discussion, and I really appreciate learning more about how blockchain is affecting the entire gaming industry, because it's a huge, huge economic powerhouse for investors, the entire gaming industry. What would be a way people could either get an investment in this space? I don't know if they can even go to your blockchaingaming.com and check you guys out or some other ways out there that they could get involved.

Well, our website's still very informational, but usually Discord's the way to go in the gaming industry. Discord's used by traditional game players for talking and finding co-ops or people to match with. That's always the way to go. We do have some games that we try to talk about a lot that we think have potential. Right now, we're super into Rising Star, for example, which is technically play to earn as a kind of new token economic model, which is designed to help avoid some of the standard pitfalls with play to earn games, basically inflation.

Ah, okay.

And it's pretty reminiscent, you know, with the standard play to earn game inflation occurs because the players keep making new tokens as they slay monsters and earn them and then sell them. A better model I've seen lately that Rising Star uses is a two tier token model, which is easier to explain if you've played a mobile game before. I don't have you on your phone. Yeah. Maybe it was a game that had a premium currency, like there's always some kind of like lower level gems that you can earn from missions and maybe diamonds or sapphires that you can pay through your phone bill to get.

Right.

Yeah. Now, in a game like Rising Star, it's the second tier ones an investor wants to buy because players can't constantly generate them through playing missions. And so far, token economically, that's been quite successful. StarPro is their tier two token. And if you were to see a chart of it, you'd see it's just done well over time. It's because players can't make it themselves in direct gameplay earning. They have to go through a much more competitive process to acquire them. And I'm hoping we'll see more of that, I guess, innovations of that nature, because there have been a lot of instabilities with certain games here and there in the past, like Axie Infinity, for example. Everyone's heard of the spectacular collapse of that just because people were betting on the tier one token, which players can earn directly. And that can be unsustainable in the long run. You have to be more careful than that.

right right that makes a lot of sense so is this rising star one that somebody could go check out right now you can go to risingstargame.com okay that one's on the hive blockchain okay and uh

So it's a works a little different from some others in that you can play without fees because in their scenario, when you want to pay a transaction fee, it's not a. you don't just send money to the miner. You have to have staked coins, and staking coins allows you a certain number of transactions per day, proportionate to how much you have staked. What I can do is, if I have enough coins staked, I can delegate transaction power to others. So if you play Rising Star and don't have coins of your own, I can delegate power to you, such that you can play without incurring fees. For Rising Star, it's been great. So many players speak Spanish, to the point that we just set up Spanish language channels on Discord. So many of them. I guess partially because of the no fee thing, and partially also because Play to earn. You often earn amounts that in Canada, where I live, are not very significant, but in Venezuela are definitely significant.

Yeah, yeah. That that that currency exchange is is big time for them. Yeah.

Makes sense. Yeah. Yes. But, you know, if anyone wants to get involved to find the discord of Rising Star, one of us will delegate you some transactional power.

Very cool. All right, well, this has been really, really fascinating, and I would love to check back in on you and see how things are going at some point in the next several months. See what kind of progress you're making on some of these.

Yeah, anytime. I love talking about blockchain gaming. It's my favorite thing these days, what I obsess over.

Well, that's good. That's important to be involved in something you love. So thank you once again. And again, that is blockchain gaming dot com. Thanks a lot, Andrew.

No problem. Great to be on your show.

All right. Take care. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. I really do appreciate it. Be sure to subscribe to the show, and that way you'll get updates about new episodes. Or if you really liked it, maybe you can share it to other folks you know. That I would really appreciate. So until next time, this is your reminder not to buy the bull. Ciao.