Latest / The Paul Barron Crypto Show / Next Billion-Dollar Crypto Gaming Token?🔥Edge of Chaos + Metagravity
Transcript
- 0:06Today we'll be doing a breakdown on some projects I think you will like it.
- 0:09Also will kind of give you a little bit of an insight into Web
- 0:12three and where the future is going. Oh that's going to be great.
- 0:15My name is Paul Barre. Welcome back into tech Path. I do want
- 0:17to thank our sponsor today and that is wilder World. If you guys are
- 0:21looking to learn a little bit more about Web three gaming, this is one
- 0:24of those multiplayer games that you could get into and learn a lot about where
- 0:30Web three is going. And I think many people, whether you're an investor,
- 0:32maybe you're a game player itself, just visit wilderworld dot com. They
- 0:36have been able to do some pretty amazing things, including not only race game,
- 0:39but also getting to quite a few more genres as well. So check
- 0:44it out over at wilderworld dot com. Joining me today is Rashid Mansour,
- 0:49who is the CEO of Metagravity. All right, pol yeah, great,
- 0:53thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, so we're going to talk
- 0:55a little bit about obviously multiplayer Metagravity one of the I would say leading projects
- 1:00out there that are kind of going in this direction. I want to go
- 1:03over into first a little bit about where you guys are today in terms of
- 1:07team size. What does the company look like as a whole. Yeah,
- 1:11absolutely so. We founded the company a little over sixteen months ago, closing
- 1:15our seat ground with a number of investors in deep tech gaming and web three.
- 1:21We are about sixty five now, spread across mostly Europe and some in
- 1:26Asia, some in the Americas, but it's mainly europe centric our team,
- 1:33and we've grown quite rapidly sixteen months. Hiring sixty five plus people has been
- 1:38a bit of a challenge, but it's been a really really good ride.
- 1:41Really. I mean my background, I've been focusing on massive concurrency and compute
- 1:47performance and scale, not just in games, but also like even down at
- 1:51the chip level. I was working on massive paralysm in Prosser architectures. I
- 1:55was working on acceleration of neural networks for AI numerical computing and scientific computing problems.
- 2:05And founded another company before Metagraphty called Hadian, where I broke the world
- 2:10record for the largest number of concurrent users in a single game session. That
- 2:14was with the em online Fox in London and in Iceland. We had over
- 2:21ten thousand in a concurrent game session, which is spaceships battling it out.
- 2:25Yeah, there's a visual day of the server side, but the learnings sort
- 2:30of from that kind of go back. I mean, it's really twenty years
- 2:32I've been preoccupied with this problem, and it's a central problem for Web three
- 2:37Today. We can really only build games or simulations with about one hundred players,
- 2:42you know, maybe one hundred and fifty, and that's a hard limit
- 2:45on player accounts. It's also it's a sort of constraint on total compute budget.
- 2:52So it includes things like, in addition, how many AI can you
- 2:54have, how many physics objects can you have? But when you look at
- 2:58the web, the traditional web, we're talking about platforms that can support tens,
- 3:02hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of users in a sort of
- 3:08concurrent platform without artificial walls. In Facebook is not a world is a series
- 3:14of walled gardens. People are free to move around interact in real time at
- 3:17will with anyone. They don't necessarily do that. Not everyone interact with everyone
- 3:22at the same time, but you could if you wanted to, You could
- 3:24reach out to anyone in a virtual world. That's fundamentally not possible. You
- 3:29need to shard your world into small instances, and that's always been the case
- 3:32for games. When we talk about this big, brave new world of Web
- 3:36three, that's a serious limitation for the future. Yeah, I think this
- 3:39is something we've we've been looking at for some time. We've done quite a
- 3:43few interviews on this. I remember when we did an interview with Herman Marula
- 3:46over at Improbable, which also kind of goes in this direction. Explain to
- 3:51me a little bit of what you guys are doing versus say and Improbable.
- 3:54So what we're doing with I mean what Improble has been doing. I was
- 4:00doing with Haiti, and it was applying a techniqueal spatial partitioning to try and
- 4:03scale virtual worlds, and that had a degree of success like the things I
- 4:09did with CCB games, and the scale wey ticket to is sort of the
- 4:13upper bound of sort of the complexity and scale it can really reach with that
- 4:15approach. So what Meta Gravity is doing is really taking those learnings from having
- 4:19built that kind of technology and having pushed it to the limits, but also
- 4:24the learnings of how high performance supercomputing style problems are designed massively concurrent, highly
- 4:30POWERLEL problems are solved and sort of developing a new theory of how to paralyze
- 4:36a virtual world, and how to scale it up, how to improve the
- 4:40performance and improve the cost efficiency of its execution, because all these things are
- 4:44essentially if you can actually afford the metaverse. So really, you know,
- 4:46you can think of what we're doing as now taking those learnings and you know,
- 4:50the successes and the limitations of the past, and then taking the next
- 4:55leap forward. And I'm really really happy to say even in sixteen months in
- 4:58we have some really remarkable technology and we can do things now that would have
- 5:01previously been considered impossible. So a few games have been able to kind of
- 5:05go in this direction. Obviously we're seeing some of your own work there with
- 5:11educ Chaos, but you look at Star Atlas. We've had Michael Wagner on
- 5:15a couple times really kind of talking about this very topic. There's a tweet
- 5:19right there the help of metagravity. Now we're testing a record thirty thousand concurrent
- 5:24players with a minimum on sixty frames per second. So they have an interesting
- 5:29game. Their game has been one that we followed for quite some time,
- 5:31all the way since the last Bull Run really when we started to see a
- 5:34lot of web three games breakout what is their challenge, I would say,
- 5:40for what Star Atlas is trying to do, and obviously some of the things
- 5:44that you guys provide as a solution. Yeah, I mean, that's a
- 5:46great, great sort of framing there, because I meane I sort of encountered
- 5:51Star Atless quite early on, even before I founded Meta Gravity, but I
- 5:56was sort of in the prisis of transitioning out of Haitian and Star Atlas concept
- 6:00sort of popped up on my radar, and having done the work with Eve
- 6:03Online, and you know, obviously having had that history, I found it
- 6:08really interesting. And the way I'd have summarized sort of that vision is there's
- 6:12an Emmy called Dark Age of Camelot back in the day which focused on this
- 6:15sort of three three faction realm versus realm PvP conflict and at the same time,
- 6:24I mean it was setting in a couch of more medieval setting, but
- 6:28from a structure and dynamic standpoint, that three faction system producers a really interesting
- 6:33sort of series of properties in how the work way the players in the world
- 6:36self organized, Like you might have one faction becoming overly powerful and the other
- 6:42two factions might band together to fight against it, and that was sort of
- 6:46proved through the dark Age of Camelot model. Incidentally, I happen to be
- 6:48doing a regular podcast with Mark Jacobs, who is the CEO of that and
- 6:53he designed Darkase of Camelot and Chris Kane called the Biggest Podcast Apple, So
- 6:58you know, we continue to talk about on these design problems. Star Atlest
- 7:01was clearly clearly embracing the learnings of a game like Darcat of Camelot, but
- 7:05also taking it sort of in the Eve Online direction of what if we could
- 7:09build this, you know, this competitive, real time, fully open universe
- 7:15simulation and we're not just talking ships. We're talking you know, actual characters
- 7:19standing on the ground or you know, fighting in a spaceport or a spaceship,
- 7:26all the way up to fleet battles which are shipped to ship. That
- 7:30kind of scale of simulating a synthetic reality is what the future is about.
- 7:36But it's a it's an exciting proposition that has been sort of intractable so far.
- 7:42So I mean, our collaboration with Star Aartlets is really how do we
- 7:45build and help usher forward that sort of technology powered game that really becomes a
- 7:53home and a virtual economy and a virtual society for the future of players all
- 7:58over the world. I think that's super super excs and we're really really excited
- 8:01to be working with Michael log around the team over there and o the really
- 8:05cool stuff they're doing. So that brings me to the other game that seems
- 8:09to have a partnership with you guys, and that is Wilder World, one
- 8:11of our partners. Here's a tweet from them. This was the Domino updates,
- 8:16so pivotal moments now shaping the journey of what they're doing in terms of
- 8:20aligning with multiplayer. When you look at games like Wilder World and maybe really
- 8:26what the future of these kinds of games could mean, especially as we see
- 8:31expansion in Web three, how important is this multiverse, you know, so
- 8:37to speak, for these games' success to be able to Because this is the
- 8:41argument I always look at, do we really have enough critical mass yet to
- 8:45need those kinds of solutions solved because we it's kind of like what we don't
- 8:48know? What we don't know just yet because there's just not enough players out
- 8:52there. What about right now with what Wilder World is doing? If I
- 8:58understand you correctly, where you're coming at it from where I mean, a
- 9:01lot of sort of detractors of the need for scale of created from and they're
- 9:05like, oh, we're sort of getting by with charting people into a hundred
- 9:09play rooms. Do we really need game encounters where you need thousands? Right?
- 9:13And I get I sort of get that argument, but it's it's very
- 9:18focused on the hero and now and the limitations of the possibility. It's like
- 9:22going back two hundred years and speaking to people getting around on horse carriages and
- 9:28asking them to into it the motor car. Right. It's it's a very
- 9:33difficult thing to do, and it's a very difficult thing to imagine that kind
- 9:37of future. I mean, I mean, you know a lot of vcs
- 9:39talk about this stuff as well. But this is sort of in Sequoia's taxonomy
- 9:45of product market fit and the evolution of technology I call this. They've sort
- 9:48of taxonomized the different ways you look at it. There's the stuff that's very
- 9:52deductive and you look at the hero now and you're like, this is going
- 9:54to make something slightly better. But then there's the future vision stuff, which
- 9:58is enable a world that doesn't yet exist, and it does require a degree
- 10:03of your imagination to conceive a fit. Why I think it's important is they're
- 10:07missing a really really important point today. The one hundred player limit doesn't just
- 10:13constrain sort of, oh, you know, the kind of encounters players can
- 10:18have, which can be up to one hundred players. A hundred player limit
- 10:22fundamentally prevents certain game mechanics from even existing. So I can give you some
- 10:26examples. So those who played MMA games, they're probably you know, like
- 10:31World Warcraft, I don't know, age a ConA or even Darker Came a
- 10:33lot of which you talked about, or even Line, I mean even Lines
- 10:37a bit different because it aims to be a sandbox. But most typically they
- 10:43create this facade of a living, breathing virtual world. But when you play
- 10:46them a little bit, you realize that that's not what they are, right,
- 10:50They're not really living, breathing virtual worse, it's just a facade.
- 10:52And you've seen behind the curtains and you've seen the Wizard of Oz. So
- 10:58yeah, the moment you do that, like the illusion breaks away. But
- 11:01why are there facades? Because imagine if you could really exist in this world,
- 11:05like it's a living, breathing world. Imagine you could go build a
- 11:07house somewhere. That sounds innocuous. But if you can build a house somewhere
- 11:13so you can other players, they can build next to you. Now you've
- 11:16got a hamlet that grows into a village, that grows into a town,
- 11:22into a citadel. Right now, you can't handle that. You can't handle
- 11:26that with any any other sort of server technologies existed in the past. So
- 11:31what you need to do as a designer is is prevent that from ever even
- 11:33starting out. You need to completely clamp down on that. So it's no
- 11:37wonder that en members don't allow you to just go build wherever your life.
- 11:41There's no wonder that they don't allow you to get your friends together and go
- 11:45attack another city, because if too many people did that, now you have
- 11:48a scale problem. So really this is about freedom of design and really embracing
- 11:52the intuitions about the real world and bringing them to the virtual. If you
- 11:56can't scale, if your server tech can't adapt, you can't do that.
- 12:01And now, going back to wilder world, what are they really doing?
- 12:03Well, imagine GTA six, but imagine there are players all around that world.
- 12:09They're moving around, they're driving cars, they're doing jobs. They you
- 12:11know they're forming gangs this kind of future. I mean, we can imagine
- 12:18it as gamers. Gamers love these ideas, like this is the stuff they're
- 12:20looking for. But you can't build this unless you are ready to deal with
- 12:26the edge cases when too many players might converge right in a region. You
- 12:31need to allow for these scenarios to make your world interesting. So okay,
- 12:35so I get where you're going with that now, in the sense of being
- 12:39able to build these ecosystems. And obviously these economies also play into this special
- 12:43with web three because it's a different dynamic when you look at you know,
- 12:48just the model in which blockchain gaming works. All right, it's about true
- 12:52player driven economies, right, True player driven economies are not possible because they
- 12:56will self organized. They will have dense locations sparse locations, which you can't
- 13:03predict as a designer ahead of time. So how do you make that possible?
- 13:07Right? You need scaling tech EDU of Chaos. When is this game
- 13:11going to go live? When will this be playable? So this is a
- 13:15I mean EDU Chaos is a full blown virtual world simulation that's medieval, which
- 13:20is interesting because while the world is sort of the present and star outlets at
- 13:24the future, and I sort of see that as a trifector. We were
- 13:28it's already playable to next end. I mean, we we're actually you know,
- 13:31building and bringing to the for the big, large scale battles. That's
- 13:37not what the game is going to be about all the time in the future,
- 13:39but that's the stuff that's going to break the game. And so we're
- 13:41starting there and we're building and testing that. We actually ran in play tests
- 13:46yesterday and we had a pretty good you know showing from our community. So
- 13:50it's already playable, I would say, But when do we intend to launch
- 13:54it as a slice in the early next year at GDC around GDC time that
- 13:58we need to push it out to the the public. How does Dungeons tie
- 14:01into this game? So Dungency sort of a it's a mini game. It's
- 14:07retro and you know, those of us who have grown up with games love
- 14:09that sort of style. It's an imagining what a retro game would be like.
- 14:11What the role it plays is. It's an early way for participants to
- 14:16start to accrue some value in the future edu chaos economy, anything that you
- 14:20earn by playing dungeons. The coins you earn will be something that's available in
- 14:26the future, in the actual edge economy, in the marketplace that allows you
- 14:28to get you started on a footing a little bit above this, so just
- 14:33joining for the first time when the game launches. Speaking of that, have
- 14:35you talked to the Future Verse team when I mean we've had the Future Verse
- 14:39team here on the podcast. Many of people, I think have looked at
- 14:45maybe this being one of the interesting next generation game models that are out there.
- 14:50What are first of all, what do you think of that? And
- 14:54has there been any communication with them? Yes, I'm absolutely we've We've had
- 14:58a number of conversation into the Future Verse team in the past. I can't
- 15:01speak about the specifics of it, but I think what they're doing is really
- 15:05really interesting and the team as a whole, and the ipis they're working on
- 15:09I mean they are they're building a version of the Metaverse, and they're they're
- 15:13starting top down. See. I don't believe that any one company is going
- 15:16to build a metaverse, and I think there's no one experience that's going to
- 15:20cater to all. Much like the Internet. In the early days of the
- 15:22Internet, you had the MSN dot COMSOL dot coms, and we're trying to
- 15:26build their version of a proprietary Internet, and I think any endeavor to do
- 15:30that is futile ultimately. But I think it's about different players from different segments
- 15:35building various edifices that ultimately collectively form the metaverse, the next the three das,
- 15:43or the next generation of the Internet. And I think the stuff the
- 15:45Future Verse team is doing is an important sort of step in that. In
- 15:50that direction, I mean that focusing on this more as directly a metaverse application
- 15:54on like say the Educo Store Atles whild the World, which are essentially games
- 16:00that are also sort of those metaves experiences. But I don't think there's one
- 16:03answer. I think these different approaches are essential for that future. You know,
- 16:07in the early Internet you had the early Amazon dot Com, but you
- 16:11also had GeoCities and you had MySpace at some point, right, So we
- 16:15need as much variability as much of diversity in this new in this new world.
- 16:21Yeah. I would say though, if you think about what Mark Zuckerberg
- 16:23is doing with meta and Horizons, World Horizon, Worlds, et cetera,
- 16:27I mean the growth and the potential for that of trying to lock into maybe
- 16:33one entity out there could could be looked at going that direction. Could meta
- 16:37horizon worlds be using metagravity in the future. I'm just kind of curious of
- 16:42the potential for that because in it itself it also kind of runs into the
- 16:47same issues. Absolutely, I mean, that's definitely very much a potential.
- 16:52I can't comment on any actual conversations on the front, but the way that
- 16:57Metagravity's position, we we see ourselves as building the web server for the next
- 17:03generation of the Internet. We want to be the Apache web server for that
- 17:07next verse. Okay, we think unrail Engine and Unity are like the web
- 17:10browser, the Netscape, Narragetting, the Internet Explorer, but we want to
- 17:14be the web server. And unlike the original web server, which is sort
- 17:17of a straightforward engineering problem, it turns out scaling virtual worlds, it's more
- 17:21of a scientific problem, which is what we've cracked and which is why we've
- 17:23been able to leave from the competition. Almost every major tech company has tried
- 17:27to solve this problem on their own. They even partnered with my previous company
- 17:30because we were further ahead. So this is a very important problem. But
- 17:34our aim is really to be that webs Educatos is different. It's a game,
- 17:37it's an exemplar. It's going to demonstrate the ramifications of the technology.
- 17:42But the metagravity technology itself, it's just that back end, and we want
- 17:47everyone to use that technology, and we think there's a good reason why they
- 17:48will. Yeah, Rashie. So you know, our show obviously talks dies
- 17:53in deep on the tech side, but we also look at the financial connection
- 17:57to what's happening in the cryptosphere out there. What about a token for metagravity?
- 18:03Is there any potential for that in the future. So I may be
- 18:08speaking out of turn a little bit. So there are actually two tokens at
- 18:12the infrastructure level that we have planned, but we can't go into specifics and
- 18:17details. Our long term view is that this new world of virtual society's virtual
- 18:23world's virtual economies as you talked about, can really only come into their own
- 18:29when we have when we remove the need for trust and permissioning. Today that's
- 18:33not the case. Even the Web three virtual world projects that are out there,
- 18:37they're just running on an Amazon service somewhere, and the moment the company
- 18:40behind it disappears, that world is gone. You might have a stub of
- 18:42an our unique idea on the chain on chain but that world is gone and
- 18:47all of the value is gone. We believe that the future is where just
- 18:49as today you can deploy say the backend of a Ethereum app, adapt using
- 18:56Ethereum, just deploying a smart contract, we believe that in the future you
- 18:59should be able to deploy an entire virtual world and have it persist indefinitely.
- 19:04I've been working on very important foundational technologies for that, and Kenization is important
- 19:10for that. So yes, absolutely, guys are taken on the horizon.
- 19:12I think a lot of people that are starting to explore crypto in general.
- 19:17Web three gaming is typically one of the gates and entries into kind of next
- 19:22generation. It's kind of like if you look at traditional investors, they go
- 19:25to Wall Street, they're investing in companies like Nvidia Meta. I think that's
- 19:29what we're seeing now in the crypto side of things, especially around Web three
- 19:33as companies like Mata Gravity and many others within the ecosystem, the Solana ecosystem
- 19:37that are starting to really break down some of these technological barriers, and so
- 19:42we keep our ear to the ground. So Rashid, it's been great having
- 19:45you on learning a little bit more about what you guys are doing. Thanks
- 19:48so much for stopping in. We appreciate it absolutely pleasure. Thanks for having
- 19:52me on, Paul, This is brrect you bet all right. So you
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