Extensible Games
The promise of blockchain games and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is extensible games. Imagine if developers could build new worlds/games/experiences on top of Fortnite and you could take your character, your weapons, your vehicles, etc with you into those new worlds/games/experiences. That is what I mean by extensible games.
We are seeing the beginnings of that in blockchain games now. There are many game experiences that third-party developers have built on top of Cryptokitties (built by our portfolio company Dapper Labs).
And now Dapper Labs is pushing this idea even further by turning their CheezeWizards game over to the community.
The idea is pretty simple actually. This summer gamers will be competing to win the first CheezeWizards battle royale. But after that ends, the players will still have their Wizards because they are NFTs. The Wizards are like Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other cryptotoken. They can be stored in a wallet and used again and again in new games.
So Dapper Labs has released all of the CheezeWizards IP under an NFT license and is inviting developers to build new game experiences for all of these Wizards that are now out there.
And they launched the CheezeWizards Hackathon yesterday with over $15,000 in prizes for the winning game experiences.
I will be judging this hackathon along with a number of other crypto investors and I am excited to see the gaming experiences that developers build on top of CheezeWizards.
Comments (Archived):
My Water Wizard is ready for the battle.Close to 5,000 wizards have been summoned š https://www.cheezewizards.c…
Are you a gamer?Ever been?
Here and there . Will be on this one.
So no. It is a totally different world.My strong suggestion is step outside of the blockchain world and understand the gamers perspective.Sit for a few hours and get drunk with someone who has done this for a decade or longer, played or built.Listen to the new NPR podcast where they go deep into games and talk with people who have been building Fortnite for a decade.Get gamers not VCs on these hackathon juries.I want to be wrong about my view on this as I really like the CK team and obsessed with the applications of NFTsI know that CryptoKitties thinks I am wrong about as I spoke to management.But I think i’m right on this one or at least my gut tells me so.CW is interesting, i’m in and playing but this feels like gamification of finance, not gaming with a back channel.They are no where the same.btw–buddies at InfoGrammes from way back are doing a blockchain incubator for their audience. They know and feel in their bones what the gaming influence is.
This was 100% the driving idea/thoughts behind my Crypto Game Objects project ( https://cryptogameobjects.com/ )…yet another idea I really love, but just haven’t had the time or focus to really finish or push (I was working on it — and explaining the concepts — as part of my drip campaign but since I ended that experiment, it’s also sat unfinished and dormant [sadly]).
Dude, you desperately need an angel to fund all of your ideas to give you a team to evolve all of these projects – so that your passion, ambition, and creativity (which in part stems from difficulty focusing) can be harnessed, leveraged to its full potential.
Heh thanks – I actually only have a couple of things going on at any give time…it prob. seems like a lot, but really they all stem from just one or two small adjustments to the way I’m looking at something else.I was doing a bunch of these little ideas/projects as part of my drip experiment (because I needed something, hopefully interesting, to talk about in each post)…but since I closed that down, I’m really down to just two things: Veritonic and Share Game Tape.One (Veritonic) is an actual startup with funding, a growing team, and doing lots of interesting and challenging work…the other (Share Game Tape) is a passion/side project that I’ve been iterating on in one form or another for almost 10 years now (and I hope to just keep as a great side business for the foreseeable future).Anything else I dabble in is generally to learn or try something specific (and of course I have to kick it up a notch by always trying to make it a real thing)…but not really intended to be anything real or big (at least at the moment). Luckily I generally have the personal funds/skills/flexability to do these things without having to spend too much of anyone else’s resources (but hey — I wouldn’t be opposed to donations!). š
Ha, just let me heal this pain first, get my projects off the ground and scaling, and I’ll see what I can do about money for you. :)Veritonic sounds interesting, Share Game Tape is a good play too… š
Curious if thereās value in musical artists using the Veritonic platform as an R&D tool prior to broader dissemination of their work? The music biz today has challenges for a variety of reasons. The low cost of entry on track production and distribution has lead to an over abundance of product, w/ many discovery and curation challenges. 1M plays on Spotify, for example, is garbage. Can musical artists use this technology to explore/test different arrangements? Can the platform serve as predictive measure of success/failure? In the old days record labels relied on A&R and station program directors as gatekeepers. None of that exists today, but there seemingly is limited data tools for creative development.
In theory yes – but it’s cost-prohibitive to them right now (and not at all what our feature set/focus has been so far).As it turns out, we don’t focus that much on ‘music’ at all really (though it is often one of the components of the audio we help test and put data behind)…but in our case it’s almost always custom, made-for-commercial use music (that won’t go out to the general public unless it’s used in some form of an ad).The companies like Spotify, Pandora, iHeart, SoundCloud and such actually do have data science teams working on some of the problems you mention (focused on discoverability, playlist generation, recommendations)…but almost all are from the ‘consumer’ view point (more so than the artist, though some are starting to do more for the artists).I think we are in a transition phase between the old model and a more data-driven model as it relates to audio and the creative process as a whole…so really there’s a lot of opportunity and potential everywhere you look these days (if you’re looking to bring data and analysis to the game) š
Thanks, Kevin. Iām an old ad guy so I do grasp what youāre doing. Music scoring in advertisingāunless itās overscale rights to a well known, highly commercial trackāgenerally speaking is a significantly small part of a production budget. Curious if agency producers are embracing what youāre doing, as they tend not to be particularly sophisticated (or data oriented), though the learning curve prob has shifted since my agency days? I do recall one session for an HBO commercial where we hired (the late) Dr. John. He said to the CD in his well known raspy voice, āI think I know what youāre looking for,ā and then got behind the piano and banged out a stellar track in 2 minutes flat.
So basically an open sourced Fortnite?I have a Wizard and CryptoKitties and my roots are deep in gaming communities with a core unshakeable belief in the transformation power of NFTs.But while I believe that long term NFTs will be a revolutionary disrupting force and market, the step for NFTs in gaming (as in energy btw) is evolutionary at first. We need to build on the core behavior of gamers (not game theory) and the unstoppable dynamics of game communities.This seems obvious to me somehow.We need experiments based on the realization that the value chain and the drive for gain in this realm is based on stories not dollars. And that value in NFTs derives completely differently than a currency.Always always start with why we can’t stop playing games.This is about behavior and personal obsession and value and FUN, not at all economics.My 2 cents.
Cats. Now cheese. Maybe it’s mice next?It’s a powerful concept to be able to make a character, or one’s identity, portable.Reminds me of a while ago for Ebay, Craigslist, etc, the concept of what if you could break out your reputation so it could “survive” and be used across platforms.To do this, we need something to become a breakaway success, to the point where major platforms’ providing its option of use is demanded. Making a fun and cute app suite might well be the way to nail that.
I trust Cheeze Whiz is a sponsor/investor??
This feels like the moment the motion picture camera was invented, and Oscar was not even a glint in someone’s eye. New technology demands new imagination.
CONTRIBUTORS:there is great effort, time, resources and funding being forced through the VC ecosystem to support games for the children of the wealthy or people with similar interests in games or pass times.Is there a monetary interest by VC’s in creating low income housing which the Government already provides funding which reimburses developers, landlords, etc. (Section 8, etc)?We are aware of MetaProp, the New York-based tech accelerator and venture capital fund doing great work in this area. Google’s very small 50 Million in the Bay area. (Just offsetting the noise up there)Community Development Venture Capital (CDVC) CDVC.. But Nationally?A serious question!Captain Obvious!#UNEQUIVOCALLYUNAPOLOGETICALLYINDEPENDENT
Really wish I understood what is happening here. It feels like this is advanced stuff for folks who have been gaming for a while, not curious people who really have never been into gaming. Is that true?
Fred, how do you feel about extensible being āa thingā when Apple and Google clearly do not want any game items being payable to crypto currencies.
Fred doesn’t really engage or respond to people on here anymore.
Hmm. What makes you say that?https://disqus.com/by/fredw…
I didn’t really get it far enough yet to open source it…but I prob. *should* spend a weekend just doing that…it’s going on the TODO list. Thanks! š