Splinterlands and NFTy Arcade AMA: Supporting and Growing Web3 Gaming

Key Highlights

• How NFTy Arcade and Splinterlands was found
• Journey with Splinterlands.
• The take on Web3 gaming
• Genesis behind building the platform
• Why NFTy Arcade and Splinterlands?
• Future plans of NFTy Arcade
• Take on P2E model

How NFTy Arcade and Splinterlands was found

Sandhya: I’m gonna start this AMA session with a question for you, Tyler. And again, it’s nothing to do with NFTy Arcade. It’s on your journey. So I was just reading your LinkedIn profile while I was also checking out NFTy Arcade. I saw that you kind of evolved from being a product manager to running Speedy, an auto rickshaw company in Madagascar where you served as a CEO and then jumped into Web three. I was kind of very curious and fascinated by that journey, so I would like to hear about that. Also, a very funny thing that I also read in your LinkedIn profile is that you learned how to read 19 years back because you wanted to play this game I don’t recall the name of the game, but yeah, some legend of Zelda, I think. Yeah. So I think that there was a gamer in you and that came out. So you read mainly because you wanted to read instructions from that game. So all in all Tylerwe’d like to know about your journey.

Tyler: Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about myself. I’m excited to, be here, and thanks for hosting NFTy Arcade and Splinterlands.We’re, we’re excited to be here, guys. So a little bit about me. I did learn how to read to play Legend of Zelda, when I was very young we had a Nintendo 64, and my dad would play the Legend of Zelda, and I was obsessed. And so I started playing before I was able to read, I’d go around hacking and slashing, and I would ask my dad to read the dialogue for me because I could not understand what was going on. I said, dad, would you please read this for me so I can play this game?. And even he helped me out for a little while. He’d read it for me, but then one day he was fed up.

He said, Tyler, you cannot play this game anymore unless you learn how to read. I’m not doing it anymore. And so I said, fine, challenge accepted, and I learned how to read so that I could play a video game. And that started my journey in video games. So a lifelong gamer over here got into MMO RPGs from a very early age. And you ask yourself, how does that connect with Madagascar and everything? Well it’s quite a fun story, but, as you know, my background is in the product. So I’m perfect to build a digital platform. I’ve already launched products previously, but the interesting thing is that I went from managing products at a real estate company to Madagascar for building an asset financing company.

And this kind of plays a little bit about me and my personal why, why I decided to get into entrepreneurship and why I’ve wanted to create my businesses because I believe that capitalism and business creation are one of the best ways to have positive effects on parts of the developing world. I believe in poverty alleviation through business creation. I spent a significant amount of my life in South America. My wife is from Chile, and I have a very strong desire to go to different parts of the world and build sustainable businesses. And so when I had the opportunity to work on this, on this asset financing company in Madagascar, and hopefully improve the lives of hundreds to thousands of people, I couldn’t say no.

We were packing up our bags, we were gonna go down to Madagascar and live there. And then, the pandemic prevented us from doing so. We couldn’t get a Visa, we couldn’t get down there. And while we were running that company remotely, my co-founder had been exposed to Axie Infinity. And he said we should check out Axie Infinity because our drivers can’t drive. And we were talking about putting the internet in the tuk-tuks and then driving them around to residential areas of Madagascar so that people could have access to the internet for a little while. And we were asking ourselves, well, how are they gonna make money? And so he said, well, I’ve heard of this game, Axie Infinity where people are making money. And so we jumped right in, and that’s when NFTy Arcade started. We wanted people to be able to make money. And so we jumped right in. We heard about Axie Infinity and got involved and subsequently found Splinter Lands, became obsessed with Splinterlands, purchased a lot of Splinterland stuff, and we’ve been, been involved ever since.

Sandhya: Fantastic. Nice to hear about your journey and how you kind of delved into Web three And then NFTy Arcade. Maybe I’ll have Weird Beard also say a few things about how, how you got into Web three and your journey with Splinterlands.

Journey with Splinterlands

Weird Beard: Yeah. So I am a traditional web two gamer. And I came from doing 10 years of television and radio where I was a host and producer for international syndicated radio shows. And I did all kinds of different formats where I did music, I did talk, I did other things. But in the last two and a half years that I worked in radio and television, I did a syndicated radio show that was in over 70 states and countries across the world that covered eSports and video games. And so I worked for a company that purchased a professional Overwatch, team, the Houston Outlaws, where you have to purchase your, like, entrance into the league. So they wanted a media arm to be able to support that. So they brought us on and we did that for a couple of years.

And then I chose to go full-time into video gaming. Uh, it’s something that I had done for a very long time. I have a deep experience in covering web two gaming from the media side of it, not only what makes publishers tick, but what makes gamers interested and how you build communities, and how you speak to people who consider themselves gamers more than anything else and it just, it made sense to join Splinterlands because Splinterlands was on the edge of what Web three was and also able to connect with Web two gamers because it wasn’t only falling into the pitfalls that a lot of Web three projects do which is, they didn’t focus only on Tokenomics. They had an underlying game that made it fun, uh, entertaining, and accessible to people like me who maybe aren’t big web three people. And I’ve been doing the eSports tournament side of Splinterlands for the past year in change now. And I’m excited about some of the growth that we’re able to see in the future because it’s going to allow us to capitalize on being a market leader for Web three gaming.

The take on Web3 gaming

Sandhya: Thank you so much. Fantastic. So I was just wondering, you’ve been in Web two and Web three, and so how do you kind of compare, and contrast the experience and as a gamer, do you care if it’s web two, web three, um, and how do you kind of decide?

Weird Beard: Well, I mean that’s the big sticky wicket that you kind of deal with most of the time when coming into this space is that a lot of people get it wrong because they think it’s either or. It’s either you have this good tokenomics or you have a really good game underneath it. And I think the most successful projects try to marry both of them. Web three gaming cannot be the thing that you sell players on. If you sell players only on how much money they can make or what their ROI is, like you know, hey, if you get in now you can get scholars and you can do money, money, money. Those are not people who are gonna be there in a year. But at the same time, if you are totally focused on tokenomics and only talking about asset price, or if you only focus on the game side of it, and you never talk about asset price, you never talk about, what’s the unique selling point of your game compared to the other games that exist out there, you don’t differentiate yourself and stand out.

So I think that the issue that a lot of Web three games have in the space is that they see themselves as a defined project that’s cloaked in a game. And if you’re going to truly be successful, I believe in my heart of hearts, that you need to be a game, meaning that you need to be fun, you need to be approachable, you need to be keeping yourself to the standards of what the gaming industry is today. And you can cloak being a game and hide Defi and Web three tactics and thought processes underneath it. And you see that in Splinterlands because it’s easy to talk to people about, like hey, you know, Pokemon Cards, and you can own a Pokemon card and trade it or play with it, or do whatever you want with that specific card, and that card has value.

Well, Splinterlands is a digital NFT game where each card is its own NFT, it makes crossing that bridge easy. I think where a lot of Web Three hits a snag is when they move into gaming which doesn’t necessarily have a one-to-one direct representation of what web three principles are. And they sort of just make a game and tack web three principles to it without a clear understanding of why they’re doing it other than that people can make money playing the game, which sounds like a very good selling point, but I honestly in practice, do not think that saying, “Hey, you can make lots of money. Playing this game” is a very good selling point to gamers.

Genesis behind building the platform

Sandhya: Got it. So I’m gonna jump into asking a question about NFTy Arcade, Tyler what was the genesis of building this platform and why do you think people need platforms like yours?

Tyler: Yeah, so the interesting thing about our business is we always intended to build a platform for what we call digital property management. So my co-founder and I have a very strong conviction that the future of ownership is digital. Everything from your identity to your labor, to your consumer products, will have, will be represented as unique digital property. We very strongly believe that, and we strongly believe that there’s a lot of value that comes out of that. I can buy, I can sell, I can rent, I can monitor my portfolio of digital property. That’s why we built the NFTy arcade the way we did. First, we started with a guild, just like a lot of people did, and we intended to cash flow the production of this platform with a guild. And so the idea was to provide this digital property management platform.

And obviously, we know what happened with a lot of guilds, and we converted our ecosystem into borrowers for our platform, which was pretty cool. And so essentially what we did is we said, Hey,what is the biggest problem that we can solve in the Splinterlands ecosystem to kick off this digital property management system; and we felt that you know, there were already platforms like Peak Monsters doing buying and selling and doing renting. And we thought how do we solve a problem for the Splinterland ecosystem? How do we provide value so that we can acquire users and we can build a business? And how do we provide value to this ecosystem? So we decided on what we call reward share, that was our first step at providing value to the ecosystem.

And so we built the reward share platform, and obviously, it’s been pretty successful and we’re very excited about the implications that it has for the ecosystem. And this is the first stop, the idea is to build a full suite of services for digital property management so that you don’t have to go to 15 places to interact with your digital property. You can do it seamlessly in one place. And the idea is that this boosts up gaming ecosystems because games wanna focus on building games. And Web three games particularly, I’m sure Weird Beard could speak to this, are in, an especially difficult circumstance because not only do they sometimes have to provide their infrastructure, they then have to build their own game. So they’re competing with web two games that already have very solid distribution mechanisms, very solid infrastructure in place, and they have to build their onboarding infrastructure.

They have to build their own web three infrastructure behind their game so that they can then build their game. And one of the reasons we chose Splinterlands is because, number one, they’re a phenomenal team to work with. They’re very driven. They’re very passionate about this digital property ownership. And they’ve done a phenomenal job of tempering their need to build infrastructure with building a great game. And we hope that we can make it easier for games like Splinterlands so that we can provide value to their ecosystem that they now do not have to build themselves.

Why NFTy Arcade and Splinterlands?

Sandhya: Awesome. This question goes to Weird Beard. So you chose of going with NFTy Arcade and, and I’m hearing great things about, you know both the platform as well as the game. So tell us about your take on the platform and the reason for partnering.

Weird Beard: Not only is it good for partners, but also really solves the largest issue facing Web three games and becoming sustainable in long-term burns as opposed to short turn in burns where players skyrocket and then leave within, you know, a couple of weeks to a month. It’s just so critically important because in today’s day and age, with the accessibility of games through Steam, epic Games Library, and hitch.io, there are a million places you can go for gaming. It’s the same as Netflix, it’s the same as Hulu. It’s the same as finding any other content that you’re gonna consume. We’re playing a game that’s all about, how can we maximize the amount of attention and also how much effort are people gonna put into it. And it’s the same thing as, uh, you know, starting a new Netflix series.

You watch that first episode and it’s confusing and it’s messy, and you don’t get it and you forget the main character’s name. You’re never gonna watch another episode again, ever, ever, no matter how many times it shows up in your recommended feed. It’s the same with gaming and especially Web three gaming. And you also have to cover Web two gamers that don’t understand anything about Web three tokenomics and wallets and tokens, etc. There are just so many things that you have to cover and it’s very extensive and it’s the number one reason for churn and burns in web three gaming spaces.

It is just players not knowing what’s happening and never being able to form an emotional connection and not staying there. So I think NFTy Arcade does not only a good job of exposing those players to like, ‘Hey, here’s some things that you don’t know, but we’re gonna get you caught up on ahead of time’. But also creating that community that makes games stick is hard. It’s freaking hard to do. And I think NFTy Arcade does a good job of being able to like,’ Hey, maybe you don’t stick to a particular games community, but if you stick to the NFTy Arcade community, it’s still gonna keep you in the orbit of those games that, may take a little time to be able to grow on you. So I, I think onboarding new players is worth its weight in gold, and uh, NFTy Arcade is the gold standard for that.

Future plans of NFTy Arcade

Sandhya: Fantastic. Fantastic. On that note, uh, Tyler what are some of the games that the community or gamers can expect to be on your platform after Splinterlands?

Tyler: So we’re excited about the other games that Splinterlands is coming out with. So Splinterlands is gonna be providing a Tower Defense game, and they’re gonna be providing Genesis League Goals.

Weird Beard: Genesis league is the overall platform, if hopefully in the future there ever is something other than football on there.

So the team at Splinterlands is providing two additional games, a Tower defense game, and a sports trading card game called Genesis League goals. So we are extremely excited to support those games on our platform as well.

Take on P2E model

Sandhya: Fantastic. Fantastic. Now, the other thing Tyler that came to mind was as we know that the P2E model is kind of moving towards play for fun, how do you think that would if at all, affect NFT Arcade and how are you adapting to this change?

Tyler: Yeah, fantastic question. So number one, I’m a little bit of a contrarian when it comes to playing to earn. I grew up playing Roone scape in World of Warcraft, and if you would dub any web two-game “play to earn”, you could do it with those games because there was sustainable value extraction. There are sustainable economies, people selling things for real-world money. So I’m not a believer that play to earn, you know, is

“dead” like what everybody says. I am a believer that we’re still waiting to see emerging ecosystems build solid and sustainable ecosystems of players engaging in this e-commerce and these ecosystems like Roone scape or World of Warcraft. But ultimately, at the end of the day that’s my ideological side, right? But when it comes to NFTy Arcade, it doesn’t matter the nature of the ecosystem because whatever the ecosystem is, if you own digital property, there’s gonna be mechanisms you’re gonna wanna know. The three pillars that undergird NFTy Arcade are the following: transparency, flexibility, and convenience. Number one, I want to know what I have in the ecosystem. I wanna know what my digital property is, what it can do, and what it’s worth. Transparency. I want a flexible range of actions. I don’t wanna just buy and sell. I wanna be able to rent, I wanna be able to interact with my property. I wanna visualize.