🎙 107 - What's Real About Crypto Gaming | Ryan Wyatt

and i think obviously games are going to be the biggest funnel for onboarding people into the space welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the opportunity this is ryan sean adams i'm here with david hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless great episode on crypto gaming today what's real about crypto gaming and what's not we have an ex youtube executive who's

joining us this is the guy that's responsible for some of youtube's biggest gaming partnerships over the last eight years ryan wyatt we talk about six things you want to listen for number one why there's a brain drain from web 2 to web 3 and how that's impacting gaming as well number two why crypto gaming is for whales right now and why that's okay number three why the nft haters actually have a point number four what the big game studios are doing today in crypto number five

how a new generation of content creators are about to propagate crypto games number six how gaming solves crypto's pr issues david this is a great episode look 3 billion gamers in the world this is crypto's next marketplace crypto games in real life are becoming like or gaming in real life are becoming like one in the same thing both of these things are sort of fusing together and this was a great episode another in a line of episodes that's exploring this topic on bankless what were some of your

thoughts ryan seems to be one of those guys that's always on the frontier uh and well i guess that's also true for you ryan but this is this is wyatt other ryan who joined uh youtube when the the world of gaming content was very very nascent and he takes us through that story that earlier phase of the internet where people didn't really appreciate how big gaming content was about to be and now he's uh jumping on board polygon studios which is the the studio arm of

polygon focusing on well right now gaming but perhaps later gaming content because first you need to make the game so you can have the content later and in taking that that those lessons learned of being on the frontier of gaming content in the web 2 world clearly ryan always has an itch that he needs to scratch which is always being on the frontier of something so taking these web 2 skills and bringing them into web 3 to teach us all how you grow out a gaming ecosystem when it's done on different rails super practical episode

great plain speak advice and thoughts and in fact some unique thoughts that i don't think we've ever heard coming from ryan wyatt in this episode today so make sure you guys listen to the full thing uh from the outset also make sure to listen to the sponsors that made this episode possible we've got some awesome tools for you coming right up we'll get to the conversation with ryan just a moment but here are the sponsors that made this episode possible living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys not your keys not your crypto that's why so many in the

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thankless nation we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest this is ryan wyatt he left his role as former head of gaming at youtube to join polygon studios as their ceo not too long ago about about a month or so ago polygon studios if you're not familiar with the studios it's just a division of the polygon ethereum scalability and layer 2 technology that you know and love uh we wanted to have him on ever since we heard about his exodus from youtube to polygon from web 2 to web 3.

ryan wyatt welcome to bankless and also welcome to crypto man how's it going yeah i appreciate the warm welcome it's going uh it's going well so far i'm excited and very happy to be in here and uh jumping in full time into the space what made you join us crazies like why'd you do this you all you guys are all crazy i think maybe i thought of myself as crazy as well and that's why i did it um yeah it's a good question so you know last year um somebody came up to me was like hey you know blockchain gaming you know it's

starting to happen and this thing's pretty interesting and as the head of gaming at youtube was like this is like a complete blind spot you know i took a lot of pride in knowing the gaming industry well as part of my you know my role and so it was like oh okay um can you elaborate on that and so just started having more conversations particularly with people in venture right and how allocation was starting to go towards blockchain games you were starting to see pretty prominent talent leaving some of the established studios to come into the space and so it really just started as i need to learn about it right like i

don't want to have this blind spot of this emerging category within gaming and let me tell you uh i think like the red pill thing is a very real thing because uh i i think of the whole space is like a great page turner of a book and you just can't stop and so as i spent more time learning and and meeting people in the space it became very difficult for me to not want to do it uh you know as a full-time thing that's the very short the short part of it was there a particular aha moment where you realize like oh i gotta be in crypto

or was it something slow and incremental i think it was more slow and incremental but it does like the aha moment kind of shows itself as part of that right um you know i really started to look at i think nft's definitely you know and as controversial as that is definitely started to be like okay you know i was already personally spending more time fascinated by how covet had accelerated kind of people spending time in let's say digital worlds metaverse gaming whatever you want to call it right you could see it very much in the numbers um you could see it along with gen z that both found you know gaming as their

number one form of entertainment and and also very interestingly enough gaming is their number one form of like social and community these are different trends than even millennials who obviously were a big part of the gaming industry's growth and so this this idea of just spending more time in digital environments and what comes with that what's needed in that what will be asked of that is really probably the aha moment and you know i think centralization really doesn't and can't offer that in the same way that decentralization can and i think that was probably the real moment where i was like okay this this becomes really interesting to

me tell us a little bit for those that aren't familiar with um what you did at youtube and like kind of the youtube gaming division uh obviously it sounds like it's some marriage between content that's being produced and also uh the gaming industry but tell us a little bit about that and some of the experience and skills you're carrying with you to crypto yeah um so my whole background has been in the creator economy really um i started and played esports competitively i was an esports commentator in college um i came out and started working with

you know major league gaming and machinima both you know very focused on gaming video watching other people play which you know sounds obvious now today because of how big the market is a lot of people you know 12 13 years ago on this subject were like i don't know that people are really going to want to watch other people play video games it seems like very counter-intuitive people that want to play video games will just play why would they ever watch people play i think that resonated with a lot of people too because if you ever had a brother growing up or a friend you always wanted the controller like you didn't want to share in this so um i i

was like look i i don't know if i agree with that i think it's pretty interesting and i think there are other people out there like me that will find it interesting as well so all of my time had been spent in that um i went to youtube almost eight years ago because they they didn't have a gaming division right and so they saw like okay gaming is going to be this big thing it already is big they had seen you know amazon acquired twitch like things were starting to get bigger and so susan wojcicki who's the ceo of youtube google started her garage she came in as the ceo of youtube and was like look we need

to really need to focus and have a gaming effort i had written a lot of emails while at machinima to youtube about all the things their shortcomings about what they should be doing and so they were like let's you know let's go have lunch with the guy that thinks he knows everything and talk about gaming that lunch turned into you know 14 interviews and then later i came on as the the head of gaming at youtube i was 27 years old at the time but there was no which was interesting i mean i definitely had imposter syndrome for a little bit there because i i was actually in over my head for a little bit there um but there was no background

of anybody that had creator economy experience right then it's so it's so nascent at this time so you know much like there's a lot of similarities in web three right and all i spent over all these years it's like yes gaming content it's like what is gaming on youtube it's the vertical and everything that's kind of responsible for it what products the creators and game publishers do what licensing deals are you doing how do you support game developers that care about that ecosystem both from their owned and operated content as well as the ugc of the ecosystem how do you take care of creators of big and torso you know of all sizes put programs in place

processes in place all of that so how that carries over into web 3 is you look at polygon studios and really what is the studio teams going to be responsible for well you have all these developers that are building a polygon some of them need a little bit more handholding more white glove you know than others you want to be of service to the technology from a developer standpoint so you obviously have this great you know stack to build on you don't always need somebody but think of polygon studios it's what google play can do for the developer ecosystem that builds on it you know i think there's a lot that we can provide and support

but setting up that internal infrastructure to support you know the developer ecosystem is going to be really critical a lot of that has some eerily similar things to what i did at youtube and was able to do successfully so i'm hoping that i can bring that over you know to the organization what's really funny i know your departure from youtube made big waves in you know crypto media and also uh web 2 media and what's really interesting to me when i hear that story is like it's the same pattern all right so like you know eight years ago when you started at youtube or when you started doing uh you

know live streaming announcing for games people thought that was crazy yeah i'm sure like your parents were like wait ryan what you're doing what i mean sorry that's that's a career and nfts i feel like are at the same place right now it's like okay well you're buying and flipping jpegs what is is that real like now this is a this is a bubble this is a meme it's all gonna go away and now here you are at in a very nascent point in the industry where it's proven itself early product market fit fit but it's just getting fired up and now you're

joining like the the youtube the google of the crypto scene in this in this jump over to polygon do you see those parallels there is this just like the second act for you and you're playing the same thing i i think um almost identical everything you just said is like was my entire thought process and why i made the jump over here a lot of it what is what went into the decision making on why polygon as well but yeah i see it all and i think um you know on a personal level um i was so proud of like what we all collectively did with the gaming vertical and and it's like the you know one of the biggest ones at youtube and it's in such

a great place now and i um i still have this like fire and spirit to be a builder and you know as things get bigger and bigger you know you you build less and less right um and that's great right that's that's a reflection of success as part of it um but i have a huge fire still within side of me to build and so that and i didn't know where to take that kind of direction and energy right i had i've had this for a while and was trying to figure out what next and so you couple that with this like massive intrigue and what blockchain development can be you know not only

just for the games industry but overall for tech and then this desire to want to keep building um it it really kind of came together and then you know for those that know uh sandeep he has a lot of chip on his shoulder and a lot of fire and so i think there was a personality match that occurred as well and so there was a variety of things but i absolutely saw the parallels ryan and i think that is what encouraged me to jump and uh you know not really think twice about it if i'm honest we definitely want to get into the conversation of crypto gaming because that's not only a conversation that the

crypto industry is having but i mean the the whole broader web 2 and gaming and outside of crypto they're having the same kind of conversation about like they kind of see the crypto tidal wave coming they don't know how so that's going to be like basically the bulk of this podcast but right i want to touch on a little bit more of your transition right before we get there and so you you talked about when you were at youtube you were like head of content like it's all content focused user generated content how do you go out the gaming gaming content ecosystem for youtube but then when you describe your job at your

current job at polygon it seemed to be a lot more developer relations a little bit more technical focus a little bit more business development uh can you talk about just like uh what your day-to-day ins and outs are at polygon and how you're helping grow out the polygon ecosystem and also is content still relevant too it's a good question so i think like um at youtube it was really more of a general manager role so i kind of covered a lot although product wouldn't sit necessarily under me i think it was all like you're weighing in on all those things how you're prioritizing products how you are working with developers what

product partnerships you're doing with them so that kind of did touch all of my wheelhouse it out it's your point though on the polygon side i don't they're really the the content and creator economy part is not at the bulk of it i'm sure it's going to have a you know that will have a place in all of this world but uh it is highly developer focused so look i think um at the end of the day like really what you're trying to do is architect the same thing it's you have a lot of people that are responsible for your success those people being developers and creators on youtube being prominently or predominantly developers on polygon and

you have to set up uh an infrastructure internally to make sure that they are properly and adequately supported because i think long term you know in a couple of years out you're gonna have all the this optionality across the text based on how you want to build is going to be huge and i really actually don't know that you're materially delineating between each one of those service offerings in the future and so as you think about the decision-making tree of which where you want to build so much of like people and who you work with and who you partner with will be much more of an emphasis than just the tech stack and and that's why i'm like i think we need to start

right now in building a world-class team so that people are just like i want to work with polygon because i know when i work with polygon i've got great tech and i love that studios team because that's who we're actually partnering with that's what's going to ensure after we build and integrate that they're going to ensure for long-term success and so i'm just very fixated on creating a similar infrastructure like we did with youtube gaming to support creators and developers you're just this time around it's just it's it's largely developers but i do think you're going to start to see creators that are going to want to build projects on polygon as well into the future um so i'm excited

for that time and place where we'll be adequately supporting them as well yeah this just seems like an order of operations uh conversation like we can't have content until we have the games that's right so we have to enable we have to enable the developers to make the games and then later at when that ecosystem gets its uh you know the ball starts rolling downhill then perhaps maybe it comes time to to build out the content ecosystem later yeah and that'll be like that's gonna be a critical point too because you're right it is an order of operations conversation because you're really like think about how much gaming accelerated because twitch and

youtube right and how much earned media that comes from that opportunity right um so the same thing will happen because these big games will inevitably come out right now you know a lot of the games they're great it's very rudimentary because games take a long time to make and so you're kind of getting like the mvp of games out right now today but like if you can see the pipeline of what's about to be deployed over the next couple of years and the innovation that's happening there and the talent that's happening there um these are going to just be games people play they're not

going to have this this obsession of if it's on chain nfts all the stuff that we are kind of focusing on now really is going to follow the wayside for a majority of the the gaming population and they're just going to find that wow this is a really cool game and as part of that i'm connecting my account and i'm buying these digital items and they're not going to be thinking like oh is this an nft or not or what is it right they're just here's the on-ramps to pay you know i'm transferring fiat into a token that's actually already exists today in a centralized environment and so i think like that's where i started to get

interested that we spend a lot of time in debate about nfts and what gamers think about it it's not going to matter in a couple of years because it's just going to be a great game coupled with you know a free and thriving economy that allows for more complexity in the game environment which is exciting oh we're going to dig more into that right yeah lots of unpack there ryan yeah a lot to unpack yeah so okay so uh you one last thing while we're talking because the other thing that uh i i thought of immediately when i ran the headline ryan wyatt's you know joining polygon uh leaving leaving his position at youtube was this oh wow this is the

tidal wave of the next exodus of talent from web 2 to web 3. we've seen this happen in the past with emerging technologies i'm curious how how right is that is is this part of are you seeing a lot of web 2 builders web 2 talent uh starting to come into uh into web 3 and is this a trickle or is is this a flood this kind of brain drain is is what's happening here i think time will tell um you know i i i

i think that you'll see a lot of people coming over for the same reasons that i kind of outline i don't know how you spend time learning about this technology and self-identify as a builder and not want to come over right that's the thing and i think it ultimately comes down to that you know brain drain web 2 web 3 talent like whatever you know that's a little bit of hyperbole but these people in web 2 and in big tech right now are looking at this and saying this is pretty damn interesting thus kicking off a trigger of wanting to learn and spend time to

you know listen to your podcast and starting to watch videos and pay attention right and then to my point like you kind of become enamored with it and so i think it becomes very difficult to not make the transition and when it makes a little bit more clear sense of you know where these individuals belong then i think you will start to see a tidal wave of it um there's there will definitely this will be a year i think which will be pivotal and known as i don't know if exodus may be too strong but this will be the year that everyone points at this is the first wave of where we saw people that aren't crypto

native like you two i'm sure would identify as start to come into our space um i i fee you know at least i feel that that's going to be the case and uh you know i think polygon is going to contribute to that as well so ryan that tidal wave wouldn't happen if there wasn't something real here and so we want to identify in the show what is actually real about crypto gaming so make the pitch for us why will games be made better because of crypto because of web 3 like what does web 3 have to offer gaming

i think there's a lot of um we deal in absolutes in this conversation too often and that's what i take a little bit of issue with that and i have a little bit more of a measured approach i don't think crypto gaming is is necessary for all gaming or blockchain gaming i look at it as a subsection of three billion gamers and even if you say look it's going to create game experiences and we can talk about that but at a macro level it's going to create unique game experiences that 10 of the total addressable market of gamers will get into so you have 300 million gamers that want to come over the thing

that i think is really interesting about what's going to happen is when you couple a really great game with like i just say a free economy we can get into play to earn and all this but just these like free market in this sense of ownership with a really great game you're going to have people that you know are going to be really interested in participating in it what that's going to do is look at the free-to-play model which i'm in that was everybody had a bunch of criticism about that you know would have been in that but anyway heavily reliant on people with money and people with time what i think that ten percent of the

type of people that are going to get into blockchain gaming are the ones that love a really good game and love participating in a free economy which that is going to be wales for lack of a better term they're going to pivot over into these blockchain game experiences that is going to put a lot of pressure on the free to play business model because you are now losing spenders that are completely rely like that are very reliant on keeping the free-to-play economy going this is then going to create a lot of dialogue so it's like 10 of the player base but how much of the revenue base particularly with how many digital transactions are happening and driving

that revenue is actually going to come over into this space liquidity digital ownership you know like i'm a big fan of valor i played all the time i've only spent probably you know i put like 500 bucks into it if valor was on blockchain and i had liquidity and all this and governance i'm probably spending orders of magnitude more to be honest with you and so yeah not everybody's in that same place not everybody wants to have that kind of like some people just want to play games not worry about that that's why i don't think it's going to service everybody and again if it's still only if 90 of people are playing off chain that's fine but the revenue is going to come over and i think that is going to

create a lot of pressure on aaa uh to think about it differently um and then start to get into those questions where you hear good topics of well look between sql and centralized databases we can kind of recreate some of this and have like faux blockchain kind of uh product offering but i think this is what's going to happen and and this will cause a huge shift in the space over the next let's say three to five years um but i i don't deal with it as much in absolutes as what i think a lot of the conversation publicly you know the discourse around it seems to be so what

i just heard you say is that this isn't going to be like crypto gaming isn't going to replace non-crypto gaming it's not like every single game in the world is just going to uh magically become a crypto game uh it's going to be instead an evolution and an alternative to uh games and i think what you just said is emphasis on uh people that integrate economics with their games like the with the free to play movement those free-to-play games are kind of like economic games in the sense that like you can take your money you can take your value and that can enhance the game

and some people are just more conducive to that style of game than others and crypto gaming might infiltrate that type of game more than it would the rest of the gaming industry uh which is fair that's a fair assessment yeah i think that's right you know look and then with inside of blockchain gaming you have you have you know it's like you can start to talk to well who's play to earn really you know uh targeted at what audience is going to participate in that you get into the some people just want to play for fun but yeah in the the general spirit of it i think that's that's uh that's right what's really interesting about this

idea and i've i've never heard it articulated uh quite this way but i think there's um there's a kind of something rings true about the way you just said it which is actually the whales are going to be the first uh adoption market for this it's it's almost reminds me of kind of the um the axi infinity sort of model where you have whales that are sort of the you know uh the curator uh class the the capital class and then you have workers

which are you know um people who are like grinding in the games and uh it's better than the economic alternatives in their local market so they're happy to do it provides a lot of opportunity for them to do it it's that kind of model which is very interesting because um that's uh i suppose an unaddressed market in in typical uh gaming and your idea is that like once the whales we were talking about an exodus from web 2 to web 3 earlier but an exodus of whales

in gaming could actually provide the capital fundamentals and the revenue fundamentals for this market so it's almost like the criticism of um you know these games are kind of just just for whales i i almost hear what you you're saying is like okay well let's lean into that maybe that's going to be the first market it's not going to be the the last market certainly but why don't why don't we embrace it in the 1980s cell phones were big bricks and only the wealthy could afford them but then the technology improved is this kind of what you're saying yeah it's funny it seems like look that is the

free-to-play model right and and that has been explicitly so it's it literally is as simple as people with money and people with time now you need a great game there's obviously it's higher level of complexity of that and so yeah i think anytime you have like a free economy people are going to be in a free marketplace and and then are allowing that in a player ecosystem it's going to attract first and foremost whales but i think at the end of the day you just have to let like the product speak for itself you make a really great on-chain game nobody's going to be talking about the the fact that it's a blockchain game

or not it's a great game and it's just part of the experience and if you think of um i really do think we overthink a lot of this even in the conversation if you really look at like going back to league of legends is a great example right you know what's the what is the onboarding experience well it's just a great game so i want to play it first there okay now i have taken my mastercard and i bought a thousand riot points for 69.99 now i have a thousand riot points it's obviously fixed price relative to the dollar to the riot point but the that like what is going to really change there you know as uh as wallets get better you know as

bridging gets better that's gonna be your experience right you're like oh i'm just taking fiat into a token and that token buys this now i actually can do more with that token because i can liquidate it i have governance over it so it's to me i'm like it's just look at it as product features and get outside of this you know on chain off chain thing and what what you're really talking about the end of the day is blockchain enables really cool newer product features that are are differentiated than the experiences that they are today um and that's kind of i i think in the most

simplistic terms that's how i think about it and because of that it opens up things like an axia infinity it opens up things like play to earn you know like it it does you know it's part of that what do you what do you say to somebody ryan who hears that and says like you're just saying it's you know it's kind of similar to the game experience that we have today what about somebody who retorts and says okay well ryan wyatt why blockchain then we already have this you know why blockchain and this idea of faux blockchains that that you mentioned

earlier um they're kind of like well we don't need that to do what you're talking about we can just build on a centralized database and call the thing nfts and so they go down a path you know talking about blockchain and nfts as more a meme than substance it's kind of like we already have that show me the new features what are the new features here yeah i i kind of look at that as like it's slightly like disingenuous um because nobody's really doing it right so the argument is like okay right you know you can use the diablo 3 auction house which everybody

likes to go back to is the argument it's like okay yeah diablo 3 is a great game the action house absolutely destroyed that game was a tip you know because it's already hard to make a game you add a like this free open marketplace and economy to it it does make it very difficult balancing the game that's already difficult and so people have stayed away from that but just be like what else really exists there's not great examples counter strike is a perfect example of a game i love that you should be able to do this you don't know the scarcity of items there's an implied scarcity based off of the loot that you get and the rules that you get you can sell those items but it stays

within the steam ecosystem so for me i look at the argument i'm like fine you know i don't care it goes back to i don't really care how you do it right but it's not being done and so i'm going to embrace the technology where it is the fundamental spirit of the technology to enable these behaviors right and so just because you use the argument that you are technically capable of doing it off-chain but you're really not doing it you know i i really don't care right so i look at this space as like no no not only do we want to do it we want to take it as far

as we possibly can go with it by doing that and embracing the culture and spirit of this entire movement and industry and tech and however you want to classify it then this is going to enable all these experiences down the road so a lot of people are talking too much of what it looks like here and now but i think it's the future of like what what can come from enabling these ecosystems and actually like pioneering them um it opens up all kinds of doors too like it opens up its own class of creator economy using the counter-strike example again what if you could have some of the most prominent digital artists drop

skins of the ak-47 skin and counter-strike all of a sudden you have now democratized game development within counter-strike the gun mechanics work the same for everybody it's not like you know paying to win it's just i love this artist he did a pack of a thousand ten thousand skins of counter-strike scenes i can mint that and own it and all of a sudden you have this whole new class of digital artists that can plug in any game they want because they're just simply doing cosmetics of items and instead of like the jpeg money monkey you've got now the board ak-47 right and i can use that in counter-strike um so i