John Linden: Making NFT Games Mainstream
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Episode Summary
NFT games have been gaining major momentum in the web3/metaverse conversation. The fundamentals of NFT games is that the ownership model of game assets are user owned and transactions are encoded on the blockchain. This creates a utility value for NFTs where it can actually live and be traded within environments where it brings tangible value to people, rather than just being say a jpeg piece of digital art that’s hard to show off.
The magic of NFT games shows through the economic opportunities that it creates for people. Imagine you buy a character that ends up appreciating greatly in value because of its rarity or capabilities. As an NFT asset, you can sell that character to another player, or sell it on an open marketplace like OpenSea, and earn real world currency.
John Linden, CEO of Mythical, is playing a critical role in enabling this mechanism to happen at scale. As a seasoned game developer, he felt that there needed to be a better solution for players to have ownership of gaming assets given how much they spend and how much of that value gets lost. While making gaming assets into NFTs felt obvious, what isn’t obvious is all of the gaming native considerations necessary to make the experience positive for users. In this episode, we walk through some of these key mechanisms.
The role of scarcity
By making everything in a game limited edition (whether that’s quantity of time based), or having a fixed set of assets available, it encourages interesting social dynamics and behaviors on the platform. By making assets as NFTs, users can control what happens with these limited assets. For example, an owner of a set of rare items might decide to actually eliminate one of them to increase the value of the other items.
Needs of Gaming NFT marketplaces versus general NFT marketplaces
People often forget the high gas fees that are associated with NFT transactions, which is getting close to $30/transaction. While this fee makes sense for a purchase of a $100K piece of digital artwork, most assets within games tend to be far lower in cost. Just think of a weapon or a new skin that might cost $10-30, it would be unjustifiable to pay $30 in transaction fees to make the purchase or trade. Mythical is creating a solution for that by creating a private blockchain (or ‘side chain’) that uses proof of authority from a trusted group of game developers and studios so that there are no external gas fees for in-game transactions. At the same time, if you do want to sell an asset off platform, you are welcome to anytime.
Importance of a stable economy and utility tokens
The economy is a critical part of a game economy and stability of the economy is necessary for a sustainable game. Just like living in a country with a destabilized currency, it makes life very difficult when the cost of bread changes day to day. This similarly applies for games which means that for NFT assets to be sustainable in a game economy, it needs to be pegged to a predictable currency. Furthermore, game assets need to act as utility tokens rather than securities to not run into regulation issues. This is a key part of Mythical’s education and guiding process for developers to get into NFT games.
About the Guest
John Linden is the CEO of Mythical, a next-generation game technology studio creating universal economies driven by player ownership of NFTs with utility. Prior to Mythical, John was the President of Seismic Games (acquired by Niantic Labs), developer of Marvel Strike Force and Magic the Gathering: Valor’s Reach. Prior to Seismic Games, he was a Studio Head at Activision Blizzard on the Call of Duty and Skylanders franchises.
Before entering the games industry, John was the Co-Founder / CTO at Adknowledge and at OpenX and built his own startups, Planet Alumni (acquired by Reunion.com) and Litmus Media (acquired by Think Partnership).
Show Notes
[5:50] What are NFT games and how do they make games better for people?
[13:10] Understanding collectables culture
[16:10] Economic engine behind NFT games
[18:00] How to have zero gas fees
[23:15] Developer interest in building game economies on the blockchain
[25:50] Focusing on assets over tokens
[29:10] How can NFT games live on the Apple Store?
[31:10] New roles and jobs that NFT games can create
[36:55] Why are NFT games becoming mainstream now?