Latest / The Paul Barron Crypto Show / This Crypto Game Won't Die🏴☠️ Pirate Nation CEO INTERVIEW

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This Crypto Game Won't Die🏴☠️ Pirate Nation CEO INTERVIEW · The Paul Barron Crypto Show

• 0:05
  It's gonna be a good one. My name is Paul Baron. We'll come
• 0:07
  back into tech Path. This is gonna be good because we'll have a founder
• 0:11
  joining us. And this guy is coming over from Proof of Play. You
• 0:13
  probably recognize him from some of his other accolades out there. But great to
• 0:18
  have you on the show. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate
• 0:20
  it. So, I mean, let's let's learn a little bit more about
• 0:24
  what you have done in the past. Obviously, you know, you guys
• 0:28
  have had history with Farmville, so you've seen kind of the gaming you know,
• 0:32
  evolution, I think, the modern day gaming evolution. So kind of
• 0:37
  give me a little bit where you've been and what First of all, what
• 0:39
  got you into decentralized gaming and web three? Sure, yeah, I mean
• 0:44
  I actually was doing traditional gaming two before the social gaming. So I got
• 0:50
  my start at Epic Games, which was known for the Unreal Engine Fortnite,
• 0:56
  you know, these like really big triple A console games obviously for nights,
• 1:00
  a huge game now, but that I was there before that, and then
• 1:03
  I left that company because these social networks are starting to take off in the
• 1:07
  early two thousands, So went and basically worked on my first startup was this
• 1:15
  was some social games, and we got acquired by Zinga, and I was
• 1:19
  the lead developer and of the creators at the game farm built. But you
• 1:23
  know, it was the number one game on Facebook. It had three hundred
• 1:25
  million players, did over a billion dollars in revenue, and really kind of
• 1:30
  changed the landscape of gaming from being like, you know, just like very
• 1:34
  kind of niche thing to making it so that everyone could be a gamer,
• 1:38
  right, and so, you know, we really expanded the market with that
• 1:42
  game, and that then led to, you know, after the iPhone came
• 1:46
  out, that then led to kind of what you now see mobile games like
• 1:49
  Candy Crush and Angry Birds, and so a lot of those ideas were kind
• 1:53
  of formed in the in our days at Singa on social games on Facebook.
• 1:57
  I still believed that that Zinga may have been the birth of really how web
• 2:02
  three gaming began, because it has a lot of similarities in terms of culture
• 2:07
  and the way that you know, web three gaming has evolved, which was
• 2:10
  very in the early stages of social gaming. I remember when you know,
• 2:14
  Mark Pinkus first launched Zinga and really started moving out into the social game ecosystem,
• 2:20
  which really was the setting the stage for it. So I definitely see
• 2:24
  kind of the comparison between the two. Yeah. I mean, you know,
• 2:29
  if you think about these things, is like business innovations, right,
• 2:32
  like social gaming, you know, was There's two main things that made social
• 2:37
  gaming social gaming. The first was obviously, you know, you're playing with
• 2:39
  your friends, right, so the game, rather than be like a solo
• 2:43
  experience, is really kind of about connecting with other people through gameplay. And
• 2:47
  then the second was this idea of you know, like micro transactions, free
• 2:54
  to play gameplay that then you augment and you kind of ties through micro transactions,
• 3:00
  so you know, you're playing the game for free, you hit a
• 3:02
  wall, you want to play more. It's it's actually almost a return to
• 3:06
  our kid gaming where you put another quarter in, right. Yeah. Fundamentally,
• 3:10
  I think what through gaming is community first. And you know, when
• 3:15
  we think about like how this evolves the landscape of gaming, I think it's
• 3:20
  the idea that you're building together with your community. You know, your community
• 3:23
  is helping you steer the direction of the game. You know, we've we've
• 3:27
  lost game a year and a half ago and we've done like eighty updates to
• 3:31
  it every week, and so much of that is based on feedback from our
• 3:35
  players and them helping us figure out like what's what's important to work and what's
• 3:39
  not. And but ultimately, you know, it's it's about how do we
• 3:44
  create a sandbox like a Petri dish for people to get together and then see
• 3:50
  what comes out of it? Right, these connections, these are this,
• 3:53
  this is those emergent gameplay and like, how do we how do we just
• 3:57
  like create the conditions for people to connect with each other through gameplay and and
• 4:00
  so we're really pushing the boundaries on that and that to me is where web
• 4:02
  three is like, it's exciting, it's new, and that's the I think
• 4:06
  that's the opportunity in front of us is both you know, game designers and
• 4:11
  you know people are building something new. Obviously, you guys are talking about
• 4:14
  launching a chain with the apex change. That's a little bit of different challenge
• 4:18
  there. Why go that direction as opposed to maybe just joining into some of
• 4:21
  these other blockchains that have already been dominant in the gaming sector. So we
• 4:28
  tried that. So I think there's actually one major distinction between us versus almost
• 4:33
  every other Web three gaming company, which is our games are running entirely on
• 4:40
  the blockchain. So in a traditional game, you have, you know,
• 4:44
  your players download some software, they connect to one of your servers, right,
• 4:49
  and then they play on your servers. But you know, if you
• 4:53
  shut the servers down, if people, you know, the company goes away
• 4:56
  whatever it is, players can't access the game anymore. So this actually happened
• 5:00
  with with Farmville. Farmville again, you know, three hundred million players,
• 5:03
  it's a huge player database. The game you know, was shut down twenty
• 5:09
  twenty, it was sunset, and so those players can learn access that game,
• 5:13
  they can learn access the things they did in the game. And so
• 5:16
  with this company, we've actually gone and done something very difficult, very different,
• 5:21
  and very difficult, which is we've actually created the game itself on chain,
• 5:29
  which means that you know, we have no servers. Everything is running
• 5:32
  on you know, an Ethereum compatible network. So we started with Polygon,
• 5:39
  right, interesting, but in order to actually create a gameplay experience that was
• 5:44
  you know, like kind of easy to play, and maybe you guys hear
• 5:47
  us a lot, like you know, it's just what three is hard to
• 5:49
  use, right, So we want to solve that problem, right and so
• 5:54
  and so the way we did it was we basically paid the gas for everyone,
• 5:57
  So when players play our game, even though everything is happening on chain,
• 6:00
  they're never paying gas. So we very quickly started to get very high
• 6:05
  bills. I mean, we were spending three to four thousand dollars a day
• 6:09
  on Polygon and then we're like, okay, this is not going to work
• 6:12
  for us, so we migrated to Arbitram Nova and then that brought the costs
• 6:15
  down again. They have a different kind of consensus model and all this other
• 6:18
  stuff, and that that worked for us. And then again some other application
• 6:24
  got really popular on Nova, and then our gas costs increased again and we
• 6:28
  were spending ten to twenty thousand dollars a day. So it was just we
• 6:31
  had no choice. We had to actually launch our own chain exactly. Otherwise
• 6:36
  it's just like it wasn't like sustainable as a business. So well that's why
• 6:40
  we launched down. Yeah, it's so many of the studios that I mean,
• 6:44
  that's why we're seeing kind of musical chairs right now. It's just a
• 6:46
  constant it seems like it's a constant evolution of game studios that are seeming to
• 6:49
  try to find a home in terms of some of these blockchains within that,
• 6:54
  and I want to kind of follow on on the point you made, which
• 6:57
  is being on chain and what that means for games that do either. Especially
• 7:01
  in Web three, we'll most likely see a lot of games get sunset at
• 7:06
  and or abandoned. And to your point, a community, a player community
• 7:12
  is basically going to be left out on the cold. I'll talk about that
• 7:14
  in a second. I want to go further into your stats because I was
• 7:16
  looking at the Apex stats here active accounts still still growing, So I mean
• 7:23
  really for a fairly new project, you guys are continuing to grow here.
• 7:28
  Yeah, so this is not actually accurate. So basically what you're seeing here
• 7:32
  as accounts that are directly touching the chain. But what most players are doing
• 7:35
  is they're having their gas paid for them, so they're actually interacting with our
• 7:41
  like okay relayer, our transaction relayer. So you know, we're you know,
• 7:45
  like if we haven't revealed our DAU numbers, but you know, they're
• 7:49
  well north of fifty I would say they're they're they're well north of fifty thousand.
• 7:57
  Okay, So because I'm looking at account growth right now, it's up
• 8:00
  to around fifteen. So you're saying that could be a three X Wow.
• 8:03
  Okay, well that's good, good for you guys. The number of transactions
• 8:05
  per day, which we're doing about three million transactions per day, so like
• 8:09
  comparable to like Blast, I think we're just south of the base chain.
• 8:16
  And so like this is like real users playing the game. And a huge
• 8:20
  part of that is our strategy has always been build a fun game first.
• 8:24
  Sure, you know, build a fun game first, and then everything else
• 8:28
  will take care of itself, like build a product that people want to play.
• 8:31
  Is APEX chain an L two or is this more like an L three?
• 8:37
  Well explain, well, yeah, so it's from a technological perspective,
• 8:43
  it's actually their equivalent. The only question is is are you writing the transactions
• 8:50
  back to ethereum or you're writing them to an L two. So in our
• 8:56
  case, we're writing the transactions. If you click on it actually's funny if
• 8:58
  you click on the activity have on the side or you'll actually get the health
• 9:01
  threas. Yeah you'll see it. But long story short, yeah, long
• 9:05
  story short, there is proofably, so yeah, daily tps this is like
• 9:11
  really high and so so basically you know, with us, what you're seeing
• 9:18
  is instead of us, Like, people are taking actions on our chain,
• 9:24
  and then what we're doing is we're basically writing the results of those actions back
• 9:28
  to Arbitrum one instead of Ethereum. And the reason we're doing that is for
• 9:31
  costs and for speed, and so you know, we're built off the same
• 9:35
  technology as say like Arbitrum Nova or any of the other Arbitrum based al twos,
• 9:41
  but we just decide to to actually base ourselves off of Arbitrum one because
• 9:46
  it's faster, it's cheaper, and ultimately, I don't think players care.
• 9:50
  Do I have the ability to access my Yeah, this is this is a
• 9:54
  good and these these numbers are actually this looks this is an outdated image as
• 9:58
  well. If you should go to the site roll up at WTF you can
• 10:01
  see it. And those only after we moved to APEX were we able to
• 10:05
  actually get to Yeah, so this is real numbers, and you can see
• 10:09
  here that we're actually like you know, in terms of TPS, we're comparable
• 10:11
  currently to Arbitrum one, we're like right below base and so like you know,
• 10:16
  this is we're really pushing things to its limits here and the big number
• 10:20
  as it is right now. Oh so that's a great question, and so
• 10:26
  the answer is yes, up to a limit, right. And so you
• 10:31
  know, on Farville, we had sixty four databases because at some point you
• 10:35
  couldn't put all of the users on a single a single database, so we
• 10:39
  actually had to split our user base across multiple databases. The same thing is
• 10:43
  true of this, right, So we're starting to hit our limit in terms
• 10:48
  of the number of active users we can put on a single chain. And
• 10:52
  in order to do that, in order to actually like fix that problem,
• 10:56
  we have to start going, you know, start actually expanding horizontally. We
• 11:00
  mean, it means we need to add more chains and then sounds like one
• 11:03
  player could be on exactly. Yes, it's maybe similar to app so there's
• 11:09
  avalanche. Yeah, okay, yeah, all right, so multiplayer what's the
• 11:13
  what's the likelihood of getting that moving soon? So we already have PvP in
• 11:16
  the game, it's in preview mode, and we've decided to keep it in
• 11:22
  preview mode until you know, we're just really confident that like that we have
• 11:30
  a like an additional protocol that we're creating. So one of the things that
• 11:33
  I've just kind of caveat this with is we're building games because we're building games
• 11:37
  on chain, we have to actually rebuild a lot of primitives that you get
• 11:41
  for free in the web two world. So something like, you know,
• 11:45
  two players are playing each other and we want to make sure that there there's
• 11:48
  a referee, you know, we have to actually go and build this like
• 11:50
  decentralized referee system to ensure that the matches are fair. Right, So everything
• 11:56
  is like ten times harder and takes like a lot more like engineering like prowess
• 12:01
  in order to actually solve these problems. But that's also the opportunity, right
• 12:05
  if we go and we're actually able to solve scalability for our game, we're
• 12:11
  able to figure out how to do things like decentralized decentralized referee system for player
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  you know, player online player matches. It starts to it starts to actually
• 12:22
  push the stay of the art forward, and it solves these problems not just
• 12:24
  for games, but for other blockchain applications as well. And so that's really
• 12:28
  the thing that's driving you know a lot of the people who work here is
• 12:31
  the ability to kind of really push the boundaries and solve tackle these really hard
• 12:35
  problems. Do you see, but moving outside the game sector soon or do
• 12:41
  you feel like this is primarily going to stay in the game. I you
• 12:43
  know, I see the potential for it. So you know, the example
• 12:48
  here is that Amazon they build Amazon dot Com and they're like, let's just
• 12:52
  focus on Amazon dot Com to business, and the technology is just enabling thing
• 12:54
  that we have to build in order to make the shop work right, the
• 12:58
  website, and so for us, the entirety of my focus is build a
• 13:05
  great game, get a lot of people to play it. And as a
• 13:09
  requirement to actually succeed in that, I have we have to go solve all
• 13:11
  the technological problems. Sure, sure, interesting. Okay, So I was
• 13:16
  you know, you mentioned this earlier and I wanted to jump to a tweet
• 13:20
  here walking Dead. This is a major title that ends up getting exited,
• 13:26
  so galileaid the team off. But this goes back to your point of games
• 13:30
  that are not on chain, they end up with these kind of these deadheads
• 13:33
  that you know, whether you have a lot of players or you've got a
• 13:35
  community built around these, and then the game just goes away. So your
• 13:39
  solution would solve this. Do you have any any thoughts about maybe games that
• 13:46
  could migrate over to something like what you guys are doing right now. Yeah,
• 13:50
  it's it's a great question migration. I mean, putting my engineer hands,
• 13:56
  very challenging. I will say that, like you know, is one
• 14:00
  of the primary pitches for on chain gaming or fully on chain gaming is that
• 14:05
  at they're forever games. Yeah, right. In fact, that was the
• 14:07
  that was the thing that originally led me to start this company. I was
• 14:11
  when I when I saw kind of you know, what happened to Farmville and
• 14:13
  other things. It's just it's just sad for the community, right they it's
• 14:18
  at some point like they've invested in as well. And so you know,
• 14:22
  the whole kind of promise of web three is the centralized ownership, the idea
• 14:26
  that you know, you know, it's no one can rug pull you,
• 14:31
  and so you know, that is one of the promises. The other side
• 14:35
  of it too, and this is this has always been part of gaming,
• 14:37
  is this idea of of modeling, right, of remixing games. You know,
• 14:43
  so really popular games like counter Strike and League of Legends came out of
• 14:50
  other games that you know, service the base and then someone created new game
• 14:54
  mode and then became huge. And so with on change games, it's actually
• 14:58
  possible to go and say I'm going to fork pirate Nation, for example,
• 15:03
  and I'm going to go create an engineation and people can do that permissionlessly because
• 15:05
  it's all on chain, it's all open source, it's all open data.
• 15:09
  I was looking at some of your just the from the token side of things,
• 15:13
  as many of our people always love to kind of attrack these tokens.
• 15:16
  Pirate Nation nears yours, and you guys launched and and this is ironic because
• 15:20
  you've been able to the token has been able to maintain, if not actually
• 15:24
  go up. Man, that's that's crazy. And then market caps also pretty
• 15:28
  much stayed the same. Interesting, Why so you guys went out on coinbase
• 15:31
  first? How did you How did you do that? You know, our
• 15:33
  goal is just to build great products, and so you know, I think
• 15:37
  that you know, whatever happens with the price is just a reflection of you
• 15:41
  know, the sentiment of the player base and what and what's happening in the
• 15:45
  ecosystem and so of which we were just like a single participant and so you
• 15:50
  know, with with you know, any of the exchanges, they were just
• 15:56
  free to make their own decisions. Interest you know, we told them most
• 15:58
  coming and yeah, they like mad, you know, it's there, it's
• 16:02
  their call and the like. It's actually very opaque to us, and I
• 16:04
  think that's like by design. I think that's like good for the industry.
• 16:07
  Honestly, it's just like you know that that they're they're working independalty, you
• 16:14
  know, with the token. I I can't say to like what's happening with
• 16:17
  the price. It's not something that we really pay attention to. But what
• 16:21
  I will say is that, you know, a large there's two things that
• 16:23
  we did that I think are really helping. One is that, uh,
• 16:30
  you know, players have the ability to stake their tokens immediately and as a
• 16:33
  way of like kind of helping you know, secure and and show commitment to
• 16:38
  the proof of play and Pyate Nation network. Right and so right now the
• 16:42
  game itself is it's like semi decentralized, but like all the notes are being
• 16:48
  run in like by a single provider, and so over time it makes sense
• 16:51
  for us to actually make it possible to have for there to be more distribute
• 16:53
  distribution amongst the notes. And the second thing and so like a large percentage
• 16:59
  of people are staking. You had that dashboard up earlier, the Dune dashboard,
• 17:03
  and it shows you the percentage of players staking, and it's like eighty
• 17:06
  percent, which is like an insane number. I like, so eighty percent
• 17:10
  of the people who claimed the Pirate Nation token air drop are now staking or
• 17:15
  close to seventy nine percent, right, And so that means that like,
• 17:21
  you know, there's just like not any supply right in the ecosystem. The
• 17:25
  second thing there is that even if you steak, you can still use the
• 17:30
  token within the game. And so we called the spend from Steak, and
• 17:33
  we think it's a pretty unique innovation because it basically means that people can keep
• 17:36
  their stuff staked, right, help secure the network. But then if they
• 17:40
  decide they want to you know, use that token and like and help you
• 17:47
  know, like purchase items in the game or you know, take gameplay actions
• 17:49
  or whatever it may be, they're able to do that without being panelized with
• 17:53
  this. Now, you guys are not fully launched on this. When will
• 17:56
  this be fully available? Uh so the game the game has been live for
• 18:00
  a year and a half. What we have been doing though is like basically
• 18:03
  making an invite based Yeah, and that's even partly because we need to.
• 18:07
  Oh, I think once we saw the so once we saw the multi chain
• 18:11
  a right, so getting into that, okay, all right, exactly think
• 18:15
  that's reasonable, reasonable because that I hate those kind of games unfortunately that you
• 18:19
  know, only parse out the amount of users that can come on, you
• 18:23
  know, because obviously I like to see if the capacity and and you know,
• 18:26
  just the stress test behind it can be there when you look at multi
• 18:32
  and sorry, Paul, just to see your context here. You know,
• 18:34
  we went from like we fifty x ra user base in like two months,
• 18:41
  so so like you know, it wasn't that we didn't like scale it,
• 18:44
  but like you know, for us, ultimately, like the entire history of
• 18:47
  this company has been hitting a scaling wall than breakdown, hitting our scaling wall,
• 18:52
  breaking it, yeah, and then so running into it exactly. Well,
• 18:56
  I mean you faced some challenges too, because you know, you were
• 18:59
  trying to work on one chain and then you're dealing with cost parameters there that
• 19:03
  you know that just don't work in some cases, which we've seen this across
• 19:06
  a lot of Web three entities. But I think you know, next steps
• 19:11
  obviously will be to open that up to see real scale. If the game
• 19:14
  is as popular as it appears to be, you could see some pretty amazing
• 19:18
  growth here I mean, there hasn't been an Axie Infinity again yet, so
• 19:25
  is there this next era? Are we going to see another explosion like that,
• 19:30
  you know, like an Axieinfinity came onto the Seed back in early twenty
• 19:33
  nineteen. I think it's certainly possible. Sure for us, that next step
• 19:40
  is going to multi chain, which is getting that second chain up and running.
• 19:42
  And just like we went from one database to sixty four databases, we're
• 19:47
  going to do the same thing here with chains. Yeah, gaming is in
• 19:49
  demand and I think this is going to continue to push innovation. So,
• 19:53
  I mean, it's been great having you on. Thank you so much for
• 19:56
  coming in on the show today. We appreciate it. Yeah, well,
• 20:00
  thank you for the opportunity. You bet all right, So listen. If
• 20:03
  you guys want more of these kind of things, the first thing you need
• 20:06
  to do is subscribe to the channel because we do cover a lot of Web
• 20:08
  three projects. We bring a variety of game companies on as well as ceo
• 20:14
  and founders and really dive in deep to this technology because when you look at
• 20:17
  the evolution of where technology is moving, blockchain is one of the critical ones.
• 20:22
  Obviously, what we'll see in the ARVR space AI will play into this,
• 20:25
  and all of this has a financial connection into these tokens and a lot
• 20:30
  of these markets. So that's why you come to the show. Make sure
• 20:32
  and subscribe. If you're not in the Diamond circle, get in on that.
• 20:34
  Follow me out there on X It's at Paul Baron. We'll catch you
• 20:37
  next time right here on tech Path