Venture Games Episode 24 Aron Beierschmitt, Laguna Games
Originally posted on 13 Oct, 2022 on Town Hall Bulletin Forum Channel on Crypto Unicorns Discord Server
Do you mind just diving into your professional background?
⦁ It's very unprofessional. I started a company at 19 back in 2009 I was pretty convinced that mobile games were going to be a big deal.
⦁ I ran that company for four years. We shipped seven iOS and Android games, and had a few successes, but nothing that was ultimately super sustainable.
⦁ After about four and a half years, we shut that company down. I was a little jaded and wanted to get out of mobile games. So I moved away from mobile games.
⦁ I co-founded a healthcare technology start-up called access health, AXS health. Ultimately landed on appointment booking and postoperative telemedicine for orthopedic providers.
⦁ It gave me a very interesting look into the shit show, that's the American healthcare system.
⦁ After about two years there, I get back into games. Ultimately Brett Seyler asked me to join him at Beyond Games in January of 2017 as the GM there.
⦁ The first product that the company had ever launched and ultimately live, operate a game called Battle Strike Force that had Sylvester Stallone as the face of the mobile 4X strategies in the genre. Again, another crazy rollercoaster ride almost got acquired there at the very end that fell through.
⦁ We ended up shutting the company down at the end of 2019.
⦁ Out of the ashes of Beyond Games was founded by myself, co-founder Steven Garcia and the core group of people that kind of followed us from Beyond Games to LG.
⦁ Yes, I would say, a lot of unprofessional entrepreneurial experience.
What were you working on at Laguna games in its earlier days?
⦁ Focused on the 4X strategy genre on mobile, trying to innovate by bringing C-RPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) or hero collection mechanics into the kind of 4X strategy genre at large.
⦁ The first title was called Kingdoms Forever, a mobile MMO. Incorporated a lot of CRPG mechanics on top of 4X strategy tactics. That got us a publishing deal with Warner Brothers and ended up going from paper to prototype on that first game with them in about six months. Then they pivoted us to building the next Game of Thrones title for them and that kind of took us into 2021. Ultimately, we pivoted to website.
⦁ We definitely started down a very different vector. We joke about this because as a team we take on the hardest possible things we can.
⦁ I don't know why we started at Laguna games thinking that we could enter the 4X strategy genre and succeed as a small studio, as mature as that genre had become.
⦁ I think even the pivot to web 3 was us again, taking on some pretty, pretty crazy challenges, but it's really why I love the team. Three things kind of came together in early 2021.
⦁ First, the WB project was kind of becoming oriented towards an acqui-hiring scenario, which wasn't super compelling for the team.
⦁ Second, I had been also trading cryptocurrency since 2017 and had raised a couple of small funds. Doing a lot of active trading strategies. Moved my trading activity in early 2020-2021 to Polygon as a way to escape the high cost of transactions from ETH Mainnet. Polygon felt like a really great ecosystem kind of built on. So having used it myself gave me a lot of confidence in it as a protocol, as a platform.
⦁ The third was just seeing AXIE Infinity rise, like having been very early to mobile gaming. It's very clear that you have these watershed moments and AXIE was a repeat of that pattern again. And those three things coming together really gave me the confidence to try and go and red pill the team to the opportunities in the space, then it took a good four months or so.
⦁ Ultimately, I think everyone became very convinced again after witnessing the madness that AXIE Infinity is having last year.
⦁ Mobile gaming is very red ocean now and 4X strategy was like the bloodiest possible part of that ocean.
⦁ There’s this general desire across the team to get into the wild-wild west and that is absolutely where we're at in Web3 gaming today.
You said you've been investing in the crypto space since like 2017. How did you originally get into it?
⦁ I started January of 2017 being very skeptical of crypto.
⦁ About a year diving in and seeing the 2017 ICO craze happen and all the madness.
⦁ I like to make the point that I didn't have the confidence to invest in the space. Didn't have a lot of money and I didn't have the competence to spend what little money I had until January 2018 bull market season.
⦁ I finally did it and it was a lot of money for me at the time then over the next three or four months crashed out about 85% and I like to make that point during 2018 and 2019 is really when I started to be in the tech.
⦁ Then the COVID crash happened in 2020. I finally was like, oh, I've seen this story before. Right. Now's a good time to buy. And I bought about a month after that, that crash and bought heavily into Ethereum. Largely because I believe the smart contract kind of innovation on top of the base layer that kind of launched me into doing all of these different trading strategies where I was effectively just trying to accumulate more and more Ethereum over time.
⦁ Learning experiences kind of across the board, as far as the gaming element.
⦁ It wasn't really until 2021 for me and beginning to utilize Polygon, that I realized this is a protocol where I think you can actually build a scalable game.
⦁ Of course, none of these protocols are ready for a truly all-on-chain gate.
⦁ Our approach from the beginning has been hybrid.
⦁ It really wasn't until seeing that myself in 2021, that Polygon is certainly still a very good ecosystem to build on that front.
How did you actually get into games? And if you're a gamer today, what games are you playing today?
⦁ The first game I ever fell in love with was Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, WarCraft, Halo, War Hammers, Destiny Call, COD Warzone, and StarCraft.
⦁ I play a lot less strategy and RTS
⦁ I do still play a lot of first-person shooters. Especially on Battle Royale mode.
⦁ If I'm playing a game consistently right now it's COD War Zone and getting back into Destiny Call
Why Crypto Unicorns how did you land on this idea for a game?
⦁ I started to see kind of a pattern or what I thought was a pattern where you're looking at like Crypto Punks or Bored Ape Yacht Club, or me bits or Cyber Kongz or CrypToads or right.
⦁ Then the Unicorn side of things just felt ridiculous enough to like fit in, in that class of projects.
⦁ We landed on an IP that's like very broad and appeals to both men and women.
Don’t you think that this is going to skew a little feminine?
⦁ Look at My Little Pony and Bronies. That IP does skew a little feminine and still has this enormous support from the Bronies. I'm not a My Little Pony fan personally, but I do think we've taken some inspiration from it.
Why Polygon?
⦁ I had to defend this decision so many different times.
⦁ Polygon is based around the Tendermint consensus mechanism and leverages the cosmos SDK.
⦁ Effectively cosmos, which in this internet of blockchains, but instead of trying to compete with Ethereum as another Layer 1, it is being built on top of Ethereum.
⦁ The fact that Polygon was one-to-one compatible with the EVM is very compelling from our perspective.
⦁ What really sealed the deal for me is the optionality that you get when you build on Polygon. Like we have the option over time of moving to an application-specific side chain with our Edge SDK.
⦁ That would be more of a Ronin-style strategy. They're also actively investing heavily in the ZK Roll-Up Sidechains and in particular EVM compatible. It's awesome that Polygon is investing so heavily in trying to kind of lead the way on that.
⦁ And with Vitalik actually giving them shout-outs on some of that research and stuff, it's usually a pretty good indicator that they're on the right path.
⦁ I just look at polygon as having one of the most robust ecosystems in the space right now.
⦁ We've got some great peers in Decentraland games and Crypto Raiders.
⦁ Of course, there have been problems, you know, polygon went down the other day and it hadn't in a long time. You know that was, that's obviously scary. That's like an AWS outage, again, fans of the team fans of what they're doing, sands of the approach and it gives us a lot of optionality and flexibility.
What are some of the scaling challenges that Ethereum has specifically in regards to gaming?
⦁ Ethereum's had a highly competitive block space for a long time. That just means a lot of people submit transactions and those transactions compete to get added into blocks and that has caused gas prices to rise to the point that it's just completely unsustainable.
⦁ A transaction on Ethereum could literally cost tens of dollars for one transaction, which could be a component of the game, you know, versus pennies for a transaction on Polygon.
⦁ On polygon, it was like a hundredth of a penny to submit a transaction.
⦁ The path for Ethereum is to scale via these layer two solutions and Polygon is one of them.
Inspiration for Dark Forest:
⦁ The Dark Forest was definitely inspired by Wolf Game and Wizards & Dragons, which was kind of a predecessor to Wolf Fame.
⦁ Wizards & Dragons is a high-stakes collectible game, almost like where you're wagering pink slips. There was a high risk of loss.
⦁ For example, I minted a Dragon, which stole someone else's wizard or took the collectible card game and that was just really compelling to me.
⦁ Then Wolf Game got exploited. So, we really didn't get to see the sustainability of that economy we did with Wizards and Dragons.
⦁ We're really applying real risk and loss and potential gain.
⦁ What they're missing is a long-term sustainable game loop and economy to plug that mini-game into.
⦁ So that was the direct inspiration for a Dark Forest, obviously in my original.
⦁ Giving players a choice whether to hoard UNIM preparing for game launch or burn for a Shadowcorn Egg.
⦁ We weren't asking people to spend more Ethereum but we are creating a currency. Our utility token, a consumable, whatever commodity, token, whatever you want to call it, had value because people wanted Shadowcorn. So, it was a very cool thing.
⦁ Shout out to Crypto Raiders because their mobs feature absolutely inspired the Shadowcorn system, and we're not going necessarily be in an identical direction, but the idea of giving the players the ability to own the bad guys was just such a cool idea that we want it to do something similar.
⦁ Talking to the team in December, you need a bad guy in all of this. And the discussion of Shadowcorns vs Unicorns just came together in a really cool way.
Games economics:
⦁ Players would need to weigh the risk vs rewards throughout the game-play.
⦁ The idea is there's like an endpoint and it's kind of more of cyclical or seasonal gameplay and I could absolutely see that being a sustainable thing.
⦁ A really good example of this is Dark Forest.
⦁ I ultimately think those styles of games are probably going to only appeal to a subset of players that are riskier and they probably get dwarfed by whatever game experiences end up being more mass market.
⦁ I think we've all oriented around the idea that you can take a lot of good lessons or best practices, I guess, is a better way of putting it from the mobile free to play space and how you manage and sustain a free to play economy over time.
⦁ We've taken a lot of that experience and looked at it when look to apply it when building the design and in particular, the meta systems and economy design for Crypto Unicorns.
⦁ That's really why we landed on the farm simulation as the core loop for the. That gave us a really interesting foundation to build from.
⦁ Crafting system. Needing to utilize Unicorns in the workshop. If I have more land, I can have more workshops going simultaneously, and that whole progression and investment loop that differentiates us in the market.
Sustainability:
⦁ It has to be horizontally and vertically deep economy that allows players to specialize within that economy and forcing players specialize in certain task.
⦁ Then we have the rainbow token marketplace, which kind of acts as that mechanism for trade within the game.
⦁ The release of the neighbourhood’s feature, which is going in a very highly social kind of animal crossing direction.
⦁ These things outside of just mashing buttons or, you know, this, this, this idea of return or extracting value, athletic experience, where I hope people start to come to check in daily and like really play the game and enjoy it with their friends.
⦁ I'm a huge fan of social games, like legitimate social games that really force you to strategize and coordinate with a peer group that naturally leads to enjoyment.
⦁ Crypto Unicorns actually has a quite engaged community.
How do you guys keep your community engaged?
⦁ Of course, this is not like any sort of investment recommendation or anything like that, but the quote-unquote floor price for Unicorns has remained quite healthy, which suggests that the community is probably engaged and they still see value in the NFTs.
⦁ Constant events. Huge shout out to the community management team. I take zero credit for what they and the mods have built there. I mean, very early on, I think we realized we were onto something special.
⦁ People making clay unicorns, making stickers for the discord making gifts. There was a ridiculous movie that had me dropping UNIM everywhere. My profile pics specifically dropping UNIM everywhere. I mean, it's just, it's just crazy.
⦁ It's very clear that the community has fallen in love with it as we have. And I think in a vacuum, we wouldn't have been successful even with that.
⦁ The shadow corn mini-game makes players check in every day and a lot of people would come back into discord and just chill.
⦁ We've got this idea of like emergent gameplay almost kind of feel like we've seen emergent community occur over the last like six months.
⦁ I've been into other discord communities where they're doing a lot of stuff all the time, but it's not tied into anything that's cohesive to their project.
⦁ It's definitely a new way to build and engage a community of players.
⦁ Again, I'm so incredibly proud of what the team has pulled off on that front.
⦁ Then we have the RBW NFT issues where we went into a fire drill and had to change the metadata for those NFTs. Which has become a kind of memorabilia.
⦁ Then we did the drop a second time and it went flawless.
⦁ This is just a perfect example of the phenomenal community of people that we have is they're already making memes about it.
⦁ You got to kind of embrace the mistakes when they happen. You know, move forward.
Where do Crypto Unicorns sort of fall along the spectrum? And why did you take this sort of approach?
⦁ Leaning more toward Web3. We're going to have governance launched by the end of this month and begin the long multi-year process of effectively giving the keys to the kingdom over to the community.
⦁ A lot of traditional gaming companies are approaching this space because they see the monetary headlines. And I see many of them making the mistake of thinking they can just replace IP with an NFT and nobody gives a shit about NFT. If they don't have some ownership and control over the direction of that IP.
⦁ That's why we made the decision to go in the same direction as BAYC. If you have a Unicorn NFT in your wallet, you own the likeness.
⦁ We're very much trying to run fast and hard in this direction. I think most companies will be pretty slow to move in this direction.
⦁ Fully embracing a DAO, a governance token, all of those additional, you know, parameters again, you know, we're, we're running this hard and fast down that web3 culture.
⦁ I hope that allows us to kind of stay ahead of the coming wave.
⦁ I think the traditional industry will be pretty slow to make that transition.
How do you think this gap is going to be bridged from the more traditional gamers to the more web-native games or do you think this sort of bifurcation is going to remain for the foreseeable few?
⦁ Look at like Fortnite and COD Warzone. I've spent a few thousand dollars over two years in that game. Buying skins, the more ridiculous, the better, right? Give me the stupid bunny suit or the Dr. Dre costume or the SCREAM murderer mask. Right? I've got one. It would be so interesting if they dropped those as limited-edition things.
⦁ You start to think about like the provenance of skins and stuff. What if a streamer played with it and then sold it to another player. I may not pay $10,000 for that, but we have already seen it in CS GO, we've seen it in free-to-play.
⦁ There are absolutely people out there who will, and it just seems silly to me to not want to own things. I understand the trepidation that gamers have when they see the headlines, like an NFT going for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I look at that and I'm like, that's like really wealthy crypto people and now wealthy celebrities entering the market, buying the access to that exclusive club because they can afford it.
⦁ And it's a flex and it's the same reason that drives people. Fancy cars around and wear Rolex's and things, right? Like, look around you there. This already exists in the real world. And I think it would be silly to assume that digital ownership is not something that matters. I think people like Gary Vaynerchuk or somebody said it where it's like, you know, you wear a Rolex on your wrist and you flex it to the local group of people.
⦁ You might see throughout a day and you have a board, a, you can flex it to the entire world and there is something, you know, and you, you could say, oh, that's, that's ridiculous and that's insane, but there's something very compelling about that. I also think it's really interesting. And this was frankly, a miss of mine in the early NFT PFP projects because I didn't buy an NFT first NFT I bought, well, I did buy my ENS domain, but the first NFT I actually bought was a Crypto Unicorn.
⦁ It's applicable to crypto unicorns and other games in this space. And just NFT projects, in general, is this idea that I can purchase an asset and I immediately belong.
⦁ We just did a community airdrop and people who had been active and dedicated in our discord. We're all rewarded.
⦁ I'm really proud that we've sold roughly 7 million in primary and NFT sales and we have seen over 24 now almost $25 million in secondary transactions.
⦁ We're going to let the community get the largest slice of the pie and we'll take a smaller slice and grow a much larger pie. I mean, that is kind of my belief.
You've been early to the web3 gaming space, but going forward, what do you want your impact to be? What are some of the changes you wanted to see in this whole web three gaming space, or where do you want this space to end up?
⦁ Impact-wise I want to onboard as many people to the web3 spaces as possible.
⦁ Look at the trends of internet adoption relative to Crypto adoption and it's up only.
⦁ Helped educate through their first decentralized exchange transaction, their first bridge transaction, which is not fun right now.
⦁ I’m happy as just someone who foundationally believes that like web3 is just generally a better way for us to communicate and transact and interact as a society globally.
⦁ My hope is that Crypto Unicorns have an impact on bringing millions, if not tens of millions of people to the space over the next decade, which could be improved user experience.
⦁ Huge shout out to Sequence Wallet (https://twitter.com/0xsequence) by @0xHorizon (https://twitter.com/0xHorizon)
⦁ A lot of the things that are very intimidating and scary about self-custody, I think are super valuable. I know there are a lot of companies like my friends at FORTE (https://www.forte.io/#company) that are pursuing those goals.
⦁ The last big thing is just bridging. Bridging is still scary as shit and prone to exploits and is just generally not great. I mean, I had to bridge millions of dollars from ETH Mainnet to Polygon.
⦁ Wallet infrastructure, bridge infrastructure, those kinds of things I think will give us the most impactful wins for onboarding a lot of new people to the space.
Thank you to @[เย็ดฝรั่ง] terrarekt for this amazing gigantic summary!