Gods Unchained VP Interview: Blockchain Games Will Take Off Soon

Daniel: Yes, Gods Unchained has NFT cards, enabling players to trade them amongst each other on the blockchain. We also have cards that are meant for new users. They're more for people to begin to learn the game and begin to find how they like to play it.

Daniel: Yes. Gods Unchained started about four years ago, and it's been through the ups and downs. I think, unfortunately for the industry, we’ve had a lot of projects in games that were purely speculative and didn’t offer anything to their users. We survived the downfall of that, but a lot of these games and projects didn't. We're still chugging along releasing content for players. 

With that being said, we don't speculatively pump NFTs as our business model. Our business model is the game. We want players to buy cards from us when we release new expansions. We want them to buy into  a new premium game mode to enjoy that content. That keeps the business going through the ups and downs of the crypto and NFT market.

Daniel: So Competitive Card Game in general is more niche, especially when it comes to how hardcore they get. Magic The Gathering, for example, is very-very hardcore. Hearthstone is a bit more casual, and then you get Marvel Snap that is much more casual. We probably fall in between Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. After all, it’s not an easy game to learn and master, it is made for more hardcore players who dedicate many hours to a game. We do, however, have a very active gamer base, and we're one of the biggest blockchain games specifically. 

Daniel: So, when it first started out, they brought in a game director from Magic The Gathering, Chris Clay. He’s still with us. They really wanted to make a game that appeals to high fantasy, but can also tap into this idea of unchaining your game in the way that the moment it begins, paying, even if it's just parts of it, it's out of our control.

If someone wants to build a specialized marketplace for a specific God in the game, and that's all they do, they can do it. It’s out of our control. That's something we need to embrace as we build on the blockchain and allow parts of the game to go into the hands of the community and the ecosystem. And that'll actually be really healthy for the game. 

Let’s compare it with CS:GO, the biggest game with trading. We have third-party CS:GO stores that Steam absolutely hates. So, there’s always this consistent effort of not wanting people to cash out. We don't like these third-party games, but we can't give them a marketplace and we can't really do anything about them.

Whereas we ask our community what else do you guys need? Or what would help on our tech stack to give a better offering to the users, and then we don't build their own marketplace. So there is no Gods Unchained marketplace. There's an immutable MVP version of a marketplace that we don't really work on anymore. 

It was more of a proof of concept. We allow these other marketplaces to build, as well as we have our open APIs, which we allow our partners to pull in information from the game and share with users which decks are winning the most? What are the costs of a deck if you want to try death but you don't want to spend more than $10. It'll give you a bunch of decks that are actually doing pretty well for death. 

All in all, this element of building an ecosystem together with others is really-really powerful.

Also, we noticed that our players tend to gravitate toward one or two domains, and increase really cool head-to-head clashes. The whole idea is that there’s this whole universe with six guys kind of managing things. But they're not the greatest threat out there, there's a whole lot more that no one’s seeing. We will be developing the story in really big ways in the coming months.

Daniel: I can't give away too many spoilers, but one thing I've told the community is the universe of Gods Unchained is much bigger than we think it is. 

We also have some really cool things that we'll be putting out that will help bring that to life, not just within this game.

Daniel: Mostly in the US and Europe, which aligns very well with the themes of our game. We're talking about high fantasy, and it is very much in vogue with Western developed countries. Less so with Eastern countries. We need very big shifts in our art style and our business model to appeal to more Eastern players.

Daniel: I have a long history working in traditional gaming. There's a big split between Western game audiences and Eastern game audiences, both in terms of the art style in the games, as well as the mechanics. 

Normally things that would be very welcome, say, in Japan, or Korea or China, in terms of systems to get new equipment, or new characters in a game, which can be very-very aggressive, would be seen as overly predatory in Western markets. 

Daniel: No, not violence. It's very much about the art style, which tends to be more anime, cartoonish, very bright colors, very flashy.

In the West, they actually like grimy or darker themes in the games. Also in the East they like Gacha monetization systems, which essentially very much randomize purchases. It’s very common not to know what you’re getting. It's a lot harder to get away with that with the Western audience.

Daniel: If it'll be the Eastern versus Western aspect, those are kind of the main areas. If we look at audiences who like to play blockchain games versus playing traditional games, I think it's not so much a division versus a realization of what we see in game. 

What we find really interesting with blockchain games is that the levels of ownership in the game and connection people feel are significantly higher than traditional games. That’s saying a lot. I’ve worked with a big game like World of Warcraft that has lifelong, hardcore players. Having moved from traditional games into the blockchain space, I’ve noticed that players really feel like owners in the game. 

There’s emotional attachment and they have a collection they don’t want to sell. They want to see it grow in value and feel very proud. Some NFT items, for example.

As you communicate with the community, you also need to treat them as if they were shareholders in the company and want to know what you’re working on. 

Indie games from web2 games are somewhat similar in this respect and are so much closer to their communities than big studios are. They talk regularly and have multiple channels, always share ideas, and take feedback.

The big studios will maybe have a community manager that creates a report, for example, once a month and they may release a quarterly dev diary for the users. There’s very little two-way communication. 

When I came in, I saw a different approach: hey, we need to actually treat these folks as if we're an indie studio, and are at their mercy. As a result, there’s a lot of collaboration between us and the community. 

Daniel: I'd say that these games always come to mind: Hades and Vampire Survivor. These games achieved success way beyond what most people expected. All thanks to this consistent feedback loop that they built actually helped them make the perfect game that their community was looking for. And it really paid dividends for them.

Daniel: Yes. I used to work at Activision Blizzard and Call of Duty and all the Blizzard titles. When you compare them to an indie studio, they're very out of touch. 

The big exception I can say, which is probably game of the year, is Baldur's Gate with Larian Studios. But they were in early access for I think, really two to three years. Back then, it was all about consistently intaking community feedback week-on-week and making improvements to the game. 

Whereas big studios usually have either very complicated surveys or strong individuals that can make the calls based on their creative expertise, for example.

Meanwhile, the indie studios approach making a game that people really-really want to play. I feel like that approach is more successful than this idea of going into our studio to build something ‘amazing’, and then ‘everyone's going to want to buy it.’ I think that if building together with the community, you end up with a much better experience for them.

Daniel: Yeah, but I’ll say something a little more spicy. I don't think ownership matters, the way that blockchain purists look at it.

Rather, what does it mean to the user emotionally? And the health of their collections? 

When I look at ownership in a web 3 game, it doesn’t initially really have to be on the blockchain. Yet, when players grow these collections, and more partners build on top of the same chain, it’ll allow them to compare collections, trade, and lend with one another. That is when they realize that “I can do so much more than just have this in my account.”

I think that's the power of when we talk about ownership. Ownership for the sake of ownership doesn't mean anything to gamers.

Daniel: I would say a lot of those challenges came early on in the last Bull Run, let's say when folks are looking at energy consumption of Bitcoin, a lot of crypto elements. Immutables moved on to ZKVM, and ZKVM is a solution that can handle a tonne. 

The cool thing is it actually pushed us to develop new products internally, to manage a lot of the load on the overall system. One thing that we've recently released is what we call gas-free for gamers. Charging  gas for transactions is absolutely ridiculous, and it's something we've always pushed really hard internally to make sure you cannot charge a game or variable fees just because other people are using the network.

It is very much kind of like a prototype blockchain engineer approach to a solution. A terrible solution. So, we build the tech and the tools to be able to provide that. So, the possibility of a network getting congested or things like that, won't be a problem for games built on Immutable.

Daniel: I am really-really interested in seeing the ecosystems that grow around the games to take a middle successful game to like astronomical highs. I think the ability to have so many fans feel on top of the game, things that elevate the experience for others using the blockchain because it just makes it so much easier, it something that improves the chances of a game becoming a hit.

Daniel: I don’t want to give the traditional answer of no good games available. I think that's obvious. It’s not a secret that good games take time to be built. I think we only began to see experienced game developers enter the space, probably, about two years ago. A game takes longer than two years to build. Unless it's like a hyper casual mobile game.

The studios I worked at, and with, have developers with decades of experience. They worked with amazing games and have made some of them for the blockchain now. And I think within the next 12 months, we're going to see a lot of these really great games launch.

A lot of them will fail I think because there are complexities of building a blockchain-based game regarding its economy, how players interact with it, and that sense of ownership that traditional game developers do not know yet. What we’re trying to do at Immutable is to skip that step for ourselves and for our partners, so that we kind of get to phase three, offering a really strong ownership economy for this game. 

Daniel: I came from Blizzard, and I can tell you that it took us 10 years to launch Diablo 4. Overwatch 2 took us eight years to launch. Blizzard is definitely a very slow studio. Some games, like mobile games, probably gets a soft launch within two-three years. Then you build a test and iterate and see what players like and get their feedback. Baldur’s Gate I believe took six years and a couple of 100 million dollars. 

The range is huge and really depends on the type of game you're making, the type of money you have, and your discipline to get it to the finish line.

Daniel: Given the games that we’re working on with our partners, I think we'll see some good launches in the next 12 months. We'll get a hit on some of them, with the game becoming part of the mainstream. Again, development already, and so it'll be in three and year four of this cycle, and that’s when we are going to start seeing good games launch.

Daniel: So, outside of Gods Unchained, which we’re still actively developing, we have Guild of Guardians, it is an Idle Squad RPG for mobile. It is incredibly fun. It’s definitely one of those couch games where you're on your phone, double screening. It's very hard to put down. 

We’ve had about 600 people come into play, and we got a lot of data, a lot of feedback and things are looking phenomenal in terms of engagement for the game. 

Early next year, we'll be releasing more information about the next step. And I think it has a big chance of success. 

We also have three partner games that we're working on. They’ll likely be available early next year. They range from a tactical tabletop type game to a giant mech shooter.