ED3N Ventures: What Will Interoperability Look Like for Web3 Games in the Future?
In this panel, Colin Goltra, Global COO of YGG, talks about interoperability and other opportunities for Web3 games in the coming years.
During EthCC week in Paris, France, last July, ED3N Ventures, a leading Web3 venture studio dedicated to building projects that enable the open Metaverse, organized a series of panels to talk about the potential of emerging markets in the Web3 and Metaverse space. The event was co-presented by YGG and Emfarsis.
The second panel, titled “The Future of Web3 Games,” was joined by Renz Chong, the CEO of BreederDAO, Colin Goltra, Global COO of YGG, Nikita Cikaluk, GameFi Writer at Forbes, and Sebastien Borget, COO of The Sandbox and President of the Blockchain Game Alliance. Moderated by Bailey Reutzel, a Partner at Amplified Event Strategy, the panelists discussed the interoperability of Web3 games and the sustainability of Web3 game economies.
The following is a snippet from the panel discussion. Listen to the full panel here.
ED3N Ventures presents | Panel 2: The Future of Web3 Games
Bailey (12:30): One of my favorite things that Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, said on a podcast was the interoperability thing is a bit hard to imagine for him.
Some games could do it, but if you take your first-person shooter or Grand Theft Auto car into Among Us and mow down all the characters, the Among Us players are not going to like that very much. So interoperability only works so far. I'm interested to hear what you all think in terms of porting guns or porting characters over to different platforms.
Goltra (13:26): I actually like the idea that it doesn't have to be a specific item — it could be a status. I like the idea that it's something that manifests as one thing in one digital world and something else in another, but they're kind of spiritually equivalent to one another.
So interoperability doesn't have to be a literal, genre-bending thing that makes it into the same game. It can actually be a badge of status, some sort of broader appearance, or what have you, that manifests in a different way that's native to that game, whereas it's still something you own that becomes this meta-game item.
So, yeah, I agree. You don't want your games ruined by just everything becoming the same game and converging — maybe one game like that would be really cool, but I think it would ruin a lot of these very curated digital experiences if you had just true interoperability.
Renz (14:22): People seem to think that if we're talking about interoperability itself, it has to have the same function within all the games. But if it doesn't make sense, like playing a car in Among Us, it doesn't have to be like a car that's usable by any character. It could be as simple as a display, and that could be the way for us to put it from one game into another.
So there are things that don’t make sense, for sure, that we don't have to force our way into — but that option of having or making assets interoperable. And that's the beauty of blockchain, right? You can choose to create something, and then put it out in a game, even just as a cosmetic. And that would mean a lot to people, because then it would show that they're still a fan of that asset or that item.
And I guess it makes the difference in terms of having that personal touch on all of these assets, because you get the sense of feeling more attached to the asset. Right now, what's happening is that, even though people say that we own our assets, there's still that detachment because we haven't seen how we can really bring these things into some of the games that we’ve moved into. Right now, people seem to think that if I love this game, and I buy items for these games, then it gets stuck there. It doesn't outlive the creators, or it doesn't outlive the game itself.
So, having that ability to port it over to something else in the future is something that's really valuable for me as a purchaser of in-game assets.
You can listen to the full discussion here.
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Check out Goltra, Renz, Sebastien, Nikita, and Bailey’s Twitter to know more about their projects.
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