About the AW DAY
Hosted by AW Research & ARPA Network
This informal gathering is hosted by AW Research & ARPA for creators and enthusiasts of the autonomous worlds and on-chain games.
This is an opportunity to gain firsthand insights into fully on chain games, extended AW narratives, and the creators behind them.
We have invited these incredible builders from the AW/FOCG to join our panel session on exploring Autonomous Worlds.
The recap will be divided into 4 parts, including Fireside chat, FOCG in AW, Tooling & Infra and WorldBuilding.
Moderator:
Moderator: Damian From CheDAO
Panel Guest:
Matt Van From PirateNation
David amor From Playmint
Ruslan Varets From Mithraeum
Morris Hsieh From PrimodiumSyora From PixeLAW
Panel Guest Introduction
Damian: Why not just do a lot of simple introduction about who you are and what you working on?
Sylve: Hi everyone.I'm Sylve. Cofounder of BriqNFT and cofounder of Dojo
David amor: I'm David.I'm co founder of Playmint. We do fully on chain game.
Ruslan Varets: Hi, I'm Ruslan. I'm one of the founders of Mithraeum. It's a fully on chain game.we already have some tournaments, some tests.
Morris Hsieh: Hello everybody.My name is Morris.I'm one of the co founders of Primodium. It's on testnet now.
Ronan: Nice to meet you all.I am Ronan from Etherplay.
Syora: Hi, I'm Syora. I'm cofounder of PixeLAW. PixelAW is running on Dojo and it is a playground rather than fully on chain game.
Panel Question one
Damian: Alright then I wanna ask questions related to money when we talk about games especially David and Ronan came from the traditional gaming industry and when we talk about games we talk about daily active users, average revenue per user, how much we acquire customer and how much we make for our customer. So is there going to be a business model in fully on chain game. I feel like not many people are talking about monetization. But we have to survive and it's a question worth discussing.
Sylve: There was a tweet by a user that said, oh, when you're exploring the autonomous world shouldn't think about money and we had a discussion about it. My take on this would be the only thing tried into business on blockchain is to deploy your own token or sell your NFTs.
David amor: I think that's a reality. We can't just rely on investment forever. At some point we need to make money. But I do think that it's not the right time to say, we're going to put a game and monetize it. What's our customer acquisition cost? What is profit? I think instead we need to focus on what new things can we build to attract gamers what we do to duplicate.And then we can monetize.
Morris Hsieh: I've mentioned this a few times at different events, but my fundamental principle for putting anything on the blockchain is that decentralized consensus inherently adds real value. Take Bitcoin, for example. If it were just running on my computer, claiming I have a certain amount wouldn't be trustworthy. But on a decentralized network where no single entity can alter its value and it adheres to specific rules, people start to see real value in it. This isn't just about Bitcoin's fluctuating price; it's about how blockchain technology can assign real value to digital numbers. When you apply this to a fully on chain game, every in-game element, be it resources, units, or buildings, gains real value. This approach allows for the creation of an entire economy from scratch, with monetization following naturally, much like real-world economies. And if you successfully build a robust game economy on-chain, monetization becomes straightforward.
Ronan: I think another way to think of it is that you actually building easily a world where you are not the only one building it. And so you don't want to think big single entity that will get everything, you want everyone is getting funds. And so I think composability is actually one element that can solve this. So we can see in the loot ecosystem where things are being beyond so that he was the one who are there so that he can probably because there was no game there. But I think you can imagine this autonomous world to actually be wanting the vehicle dealing together with the other joint.
Syora: In my opinion, creating autonomous world is similar to creating the hardness. I think the hardness does not have business model. So we don't need to think about business models now.
Matt Van: I think we're still experimenting. Almost every element in the system can be financialized. It can be just pretty creative and has different business models. So I don't know, but I think we'll find out.
Ruslan Varets: I recommend not introducing overly complex and unique business models into the already intricate world of blockchain games. It's important to keep things simple and user-friendly, as many players are still grappling with the basics of blockchain technology. We should focus on creating a player base for the autonomous world, targeting players who may not be immediately familiar with blockchain aspects. Therefore, enhancing user experience is crucial, and unexpectedly charging players mid-game is not the right approach. Keeping it straightforward and accessible is the key.
Panel Question two
Damian: What's your definition of an autonomous world?
Ronan: I'm hesitant to dive into too many specifics since we're still exploring the possibilities. However, two key aspects stand out: permissionlessness and persistence. The concept of permissionlessness ensures that no barriers exist for anyone wishing to join at any point. Persistence is crucial for continuity. These two principles enable other desirable properties, such as compatibility. If a system isn't persistent, anything built on top of it will be affected by its limited lifespan. These principles are fundamental to what we're trying to achieve .
Sylve: I think the way I could summarize the position is for game to be autonomous, it is mandatory for it to be permissionless and unstoppable. But I wouldn't say that if the contract is upgradeable and if there's governance, it's not autonomous.
Ronan: I think it's actually very important to know. So it's an equivalent. You have to consider part of the gameplay and you cannot separate the two. And so my point is like, if you are making a game about token and then it's a game about token. So if you want the game to be autonomous, you can't have preventability.
David amor: We all agree this not particularly well defined, but I was in a conversation yesterday with somebody that reminded me that whole market is coming and everybody is gonna jump onto this term and whether they're making autonomous worlds on. So I feel like we have a fine narrow window to figure out what it is until a bunch of people come along and take it from us.
Morris Hsieh: My view is that it doesn't matter and I don't care I'm just building an unchanging and you can define it whatever you want but the idea of permissionlessness is in there.
Syora: There are two distinct perspectives as I see it. The narrower one is a philosophical view. People often say my project is more autonomous, but I disagree because there's no truly autonomous world now. Defining what constitutes the most is challenging. However, we can discuss this on certain properties and differences between on chain game and autonomous World.
Ruslan Varets: In my opinion, it's a set of rules practice with physics that can be utilized to build something on top of it. What is supposed to be if it can be changed and narrowed with or it's not a stable foundation.
Matt van: I don't believe it has to be permissionless to be Autonomous World. I think there's definitely a spectrum and I also gonna go back to the properties I think we're starting to see properties that we would classify as aw.
Panel Question three
Damian: If fully on-chain games and autonomous worlds become popular, who will be the target audience?
Matt van: I think everyone here we're dealing with early adopted versions and, for a lot of these games, are targeting other developers to some extent. So you can see classic early adopters that are more technical. I will say that demand is we just popped out a waitlist that got 500,000 sign on it and so there are people interested in fully on chain games we definitely cannot scale to that at the moment the current blockchain infrastructure will not be handled.
David amor: We're building an autonomous world as well as on-chain games. We're trying to do things that haven't existed in the world before and that's exciting.I'd like to think that we can draw people to onchain game as they never see before.
Morris Hsieh: So far, Primodium averages about 200 daily active users, mainly early adopters interested in the technology behind our games. Our audience on Twitter and Discord is relatively small, but that's okay. Most of our followers are genuinely interested in the space, and our game's factory-building genre helps diversify our audience. However, it's mostly people who are already interested in this field. I also want to address the perception of gold farmers in crypto games. They often get a bad rap because previous crypto games focused mainly on token farming, which didn't add real value to the game. In contrast, Bitcoin miners, while economically motivated, contribute to building and maintaining the network. A well-designed game economy can balance profit-making with overall player experience, ensuring that even if most players are economically driven, they don't harm the game's sustainability. It's important to recognize that we're creating a new type of game on a new platform, and traditional gaming strategies might not apply. We might see new types of players emerge in this space. For Primodium, our focus isn't just on a large player base but on maintaining a sustainable, engaging environment for whoever joins.
Syora: In my opinion, if our autonomous world can make a truly interesting and fun experience, I think that web 2 gamers is coming to our space.
Panel Question four
Damian: Oh, so let's ask some easier questions. Don't be so serious. Now, what's everyone's favorite game, and which game inspired you in what you're building today?
Morris Hsieh: I played a lot of Minecraft. The Minecraft fan is all crypto integrations, which was our previous project boffee is somewhere in the crowd.Then our current game is inspired primarily from a game called Tribal Wars. It's an old one, but I a lot in that game I enjoy it so we're trying to make this version of it a lot.
Sylve: Lego.
Ruslan Varets: So we initially tried to build a forest game without the MMO components so I was referring to the heroes of magic civilization channel like the this kind of games but then we move to the understanding that it's an MMO therefore like cross MMO so I would say warframe probably my favorite game in regards to the social aspect of it so I would suggest anyone so I will be looking at it.
Matt van: So I could answer a favorite game with a different answer every time you got to the question. But today I feel like probably natural selection is the game that I wanna highlight as a game is just like absolutely mind blowing and relates to this space. The reason why I say this is because Half-Life, as a game, led to the development of its engine for consoles, spawning hundreds of mods. I consider that era, often referred to as the 'golden era of modding’. Natural Selection took a 3D engine and layered an RTS on top, creating a gameplay experience where you're playing a sort of rock-paper-scissors in front of other team members, coordinating actions within the game. This inspires me a lot in this space because we're creating something totally new, something I hadn't fully grasped before, and it brings back really fond memories.Syora:For pixel of art. We are inspired by art pieces.Ronan:Now I think my game I think two 2 types on ours. One is a local multiplayer, which is the same screen shared, always fun but of course I'm saying the main iteration is a tactical communications and strategy type, which I enjoy playing a lot.
Panel Question five:
Damian: We all play the different on chain games if we have to learn from another fully on chain game, what is that and which game?
Ronan: For me where I think many expression was actually tons of kind like constant searching, where is like both other reports basically. Syora: So I really like a building configuration of playmint. The composability is the key for both AW and FOCG, building configuration can make users to create and compose without programming knowledge, that’s important. David amor: Fully on-chain games like a year ago, people say,this can be a lot of UX issues. It's gonna be hardly coding. I would say PirateNation would make sure but now don't play that game and you see that UX problems has been solved.
Sylve:For me, it would be Dark Forest. One thing we often forgot about Dark Forest is the use of proofs for anonymity. The funny thing is they're executing a lot of the game off chain. And it's funny that we use it as the landmark thing for on chain games.So I think there's like the pendant on the swinging back and forth is to put nothing on the blockchain to absolutely everything on the blockchain. I think you should just use proofs everywhere you can because I don't believe in permissionlessness and neutralization.I think we haven't really taking all the lessons that we can from dark forest and I don't think we're gonna be executing a lot of things on chain and I think everyone's gonna Screw me now.Ruslan Varets: My inspiration largely comes from Dark Forest. While it may not be the perfect example of a fully on-chain game, it has provided a lot of inspiration. Dark Forest is session-based, which, in my opinion, is the best use case for an on-chain game. They've conducted extensive research and developed numerous solutions.
Morris Hsieh I'm a fan of Small Brains, especially his recent game Drawtech. He handles the financial aspects of games effectively. The key takeaway from his approach is his ability to quickly turn games into complete, market-ready products. This is important because many on-chain games are not fully productized, making them inaccessible or difficult to engage with. My advice for developers is to focus on creating a complete product that users can immediately play and learn from. This approach not only accelerates learning but also allows users to identify and fix issues, which I believe is a valuable strategy.