The Next Billion Podcast: The Influx of Veteran Game Developers Into Web3
Colin Goltra joins Step Finance founder George Harrap in The Next Billion Podcast to discuss the web3 landscape and answer the question “How do we build resilient web3 game economies that last?”
The Next Billion Podcast is an unfiltered dive into the stories of the visionary builders and founders who are not just focused on numbers and nodes but dedicated to shaping the crypto and web3 landscape. Hosted by George Harrap, the founder of Step Finance, the podcast invites listeners on a journey to understand the future of crypto adoption and its various applications across the globe.
In this podcast, George is joined by YGG Global Chief Operating Officer Colin Goltra, a crypto veteran who began exploring Bitcoin as early as 2013 and held crypto leadership roles at Coins.ph, before leading growth and operations for 11 markets as Director of Southeast Asia for Binance. Together, they discuss cross-pollination in the crypto ecosystem between non-crypto native groups — from economists, bankers and technologists, to artists and entrepreneurs, and now gamers — who are joining and contributing to web3. He also shares his insights on building sustainable ecosystems in web3 gaming.
The following is an excerpt from the podcast, where the two discuss the new wave of builders from traditional gaming coming into web3 and applying their decades of experience to refine the industry’s next iteration. Listen to the full recording on YouTube.
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George (20:27): How do we build things that are more resilient and ongoing? Or are games just a circling roadshow that keeps going to the next big thing? Is that just the name of the game? For instance, many games from 10 years ago aren't here now. So, what's the timeline?
Goltra (21:49): Something we've been very encouraged by is, in the play-to-earn era, there were a lot of crypto people that wanted to learn how to make and launch a game, and now, there are a lot of people that have decades of experience in other iterations of the gaming industry coming into web3. So it's not a web3 person trying to get into gaming. It's people that have had experience building several games, scaling them to millions of users, that are coming in. We always like to think that we're pioneering new concepts in crypto, but a lot of times, these concepts exist elsewhere.
The gaming sector has a rich tradition of economy design, user experience, scaling products on a technical basis, and growth marketing. These are all things that the gaming sector has refined through decades, and it truly has its own rich tradition. People from that industry are now coming into web3, instead of the other way around. To me, that's a really encouraging sign in crypto winter.
In terms of building a sustainable economy, traditional gaming — which is still alive and well — has a long tradition of people paying for physical goods and digital goods. Companies have significant ad spend to acquire users. There is an existing economic model there in the billions of dollars of spend in both directions. This suggests that it is possible to convert some of that existing energy into web3-focused activities, because there are a lot of things in web3 — ignoring the kind of boomtown dynamics I just discussed — that are very compelling to a game developer.
If you want to sell a digital mobile good for $5, that's pretty easy on a phone. But if you want to sell a digital good for $5,000 to your number one player, that's impossible. The App Store will block you, the credit card processors block you. There's not a way to own it. You have to spin up your own infrastructure for digital goods ownership.
These are all things that are solved pretty feasibly in a smart contract ecosystem on the blockchain, especially in a Layer 2 ecosystem. But for a game developer, this would involve a very significant spend in infrastructure. Our thesis is that the next wave of web3 games will be built by people that have more traditional and a much higher-scale gaming experience. They will be more thoughtful about economy design and digital good ownership.
Another way to make it sustainable is just to be careful about the inflow. If you're not selling the goods to begin with but you’re starting to give away parts of your economy, and a secondary market forms, that might be fine. But there's this new concept of a “factory NFT,” which you can mint or buy into an ecosystem, and then that's going to give you new digital goods on a regular basis. Now you've almost seeded parts of the gaming economy as the game develops.
There are a lot of new concepts right now, but the encouraging take, as it relates to the sustainability of game economies, is there is a new class of founders and builders coming in. One of the magical things about crypto is it started with a bunch of crazy Austrian people and gold bugs, then the Wall Streeters came, followed by the tech guys and the Valley guys. Now, the gaming guys are coming, and the artists have come. It's this weird, very extensible ecosystem that keeps getting this cross-pollination from other very successful ecosystems. And I think that's happening now in gaming.
You can listen to the full recording on The Next Billion YouTube channel.
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