From Idle Games to In-Game Economies

Recorded remotely.

Hodl Up: Remember how we first started this?

Hodl Up: Yeah, with Web3 games. It was December, I think, and you came to me and said you had this idea.

Hodl Up: I didn't even have the idea. I just said, let's start the podcast. And then we started the podcast.

Hodl Up: And I'm kind of surprised, because with everything we do, we get super excited at first and then we just wing it and drop it. But I think this is the first thing we've literally just kept going with, because we enjoy it.

Hodl Up: I enjoy yapping. I enjoy talking. I never enjoyed cameras, though, so it's kind of weird, but still. In that first episode, we talked about two Web3 games I was in contact with.

Hodl Up: That was the second episode. I just ignore the pilot altogether. It's just us yapping.

Hodl Up: Never ignore the foundation. But fine, ignore it.

Hodl Up: So you don't watch it every night before you go to sleep?

Hodl Up: No, I watch Rick and Morty. But do you remember the Web3 games?

Hodl Up: Of course I remember. And the reason I go back to that episode a lot is that it was the first time a Web3 company supported us, and it felt nice. It was literally the first company that said, "Yeah, we're going to support these guys." We had only about 100 or 200 followers. We didn't really have a community; we'd just started. That was Voya Games, with their game from Angry Dynomites. And today our guest is the co-founder of Voya Games, Oliver. Personally, I love what this guy did even before crypto, because he was massive even before crypto. His startup sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Hodl Up: We're going to get into all that in just a bit. I'm super excited as well, and I have a lot I want to ask him. So without further ado, let's hop on the call.

Hodl Up: Hello, hello, Oliver!

Oliver: Hey! Good to be here again.

Hodl Up: Perfect. Angry Dynomites was the first project we talked about, in our episode back in February, I think, and now we have you right here, live, with a lot of questions. But before we get into the technical things, the game itself and the project, we want to know more about you: what you did before crypto, how you joined crypto, everything.

Oliver: Okay, then I'll start from the beginning. Hi everyone, my name is Ollie, or Revo, as I'm called on my Twitter handle. I used to be a gamer. Since I was small I was always fascinated by computers and games. I played a lot of Counter-Strike, a lot of strategy games and MMOs, and later switched to mobile gaming. Then at some point some friends approached me and asked if I wanted to develop games. I could never have imagined developing games myself, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity. None of us had any experience in game development, but we had a lot of passion for it. We developed a super complicated game that never actually made it to release. It totally failed. Then we decided to build a very simple game, called Idle Miner Tycoon, an idle, free-to-play mobile game, with Kolibri Games. We basically started in a student apartment and released the game, and it worked out pretty well. We generated our first revenue, hired our first people from that revenue, and grew very fast: from a few people in a student apartment to an office in Berlin with almost 90 people after three years. Then we grew further and were acquired by Ubisoft in 2020. I left the company in 2021 to do new things, or at least relax a bit first, but it didn't take long before I wanted to start something new. I was always interested in cryptography, and especially cryptocurrencies. During my studies I was already looking into Bitcoin and bought a little here and there, unfortunately not enough, but I think that's a lot of people's story. After I left Kolibri Games, I picked it up again, especially Ethereum's move from proof of work to proof of stake, which had been announced back then. I found that super interesting and went down the rabbit hole. I read a lot of crypto white papers, went really deep and did some DeFi stuff, but ultimately ended up in gaming again. Everyone was talking about Axie Infinity and how it was booming, so I wanted to try it too. It took me two hours to set up the game and buy the Axies, and then I only played for a few hours before I stopped. But because the game was on-chain, at least the Axies and the tokens, the scholarship models were a big thing back then. So I also started a few scholarships with people from the Philippines, and it was very eye-opening for me, because it broke the boundaries of a single game into an all-new world where you play on a whole different level. That got me super excited, and I tried all the other Web3 games that were popular back then. But I always felt two things were missing. The first was the setup and user experience. I come from a world where you need to convince a player to play your game within five seconds, and nobody will spend two hours setting it up. That was the first thing I wanted to do differently. The second was to see how we can innovate on gameplay mechanics with Web3 in mind: build a game from the ground up with Web3 in mind, but make it high-quality and fun, so users keep playing for a long time. That's how I started Voya Games. We're developing the Angry Dynomites IP, with our first title, Craft World. We were on testnet for more than a year, and then released on Ronin mainnet recently, at the end of July. I'll pause here.

Hodl Up: Let me just say that I love idle games. Many years ago I heard a developer say that what makes games good is how difficult and challenging they are. And I thought, why should that always be the point? Why can't I have a game where I can just unwind at the end of the day without being stressed by the game itself? So I absolutely love idle games, and I really support what you've built in the past and what you're building now. I want to ask about the transition from Web2 to Web3. How was it, thinking about user behavior? There are so many metrics you can look at, and I believe they differ between Web2 and Web3 games, because in Web3 games you also have to look at how players use the in-game assets. How different was the approach you had to take compared to your Web2 background?

Oliver: It's actually quite different. First, compared to the global gaming market, Web3 is still a niche audience. We don't have billions of players in Web3. But the players who are there are very valuable in a lot of ways. First, they're super engaged in the games. I'd never seen anything like it before I played my first Web3 game: how the community interacts, writes on Discord and so on. Second, they're way more willing to spend and put money into the game. That's also very interesting. For some reason, when I buy an NFT for a couple of hundred, I sometimes don't really think twice about it, but when I'm playing a Web2 free-to-play mobile game and it's $10, I think, should I actually buy this? I'm not sure what it is; I have to figure that out myself. But at least the spending behavior is very different. And then of course there's the whole economy around it. Everything is public, and more or less everything is tradable and exchangeable. You can send it to all your friends and so on. A lot of the restrictions that help in Web2 game development aren't there anymore, which on one hand is a blessing, because you can offer players so many new things, but on the other hand brings a lot of challenges for game developers: making an economy that's not too limited but still controllable and sustainable, which of course is the holy grail of a free economy. Those are the things you need to keep in mind and really focus on when starting a Web3 gaming company. The other thing is not getting distracted, and having some resilience. The space is still comparatively early. The tech is getting better, of course, but there are still issues with user experience, developer experience and so on. So have the resilience to push through and think about how it will look a few years from now. And don't get bogged down by hype. There have been many hypes: Telegram games popping up, AI agents popping up and so on. When you chase hype, most of the time you're too late, and it's not something sustainable to build. I'd rather think from first principles about how you envision the future of Web3 and really double down on building that.

Hodl Up: I think hype is the biggest issue with crypto right now, because although the industry has matured quite a lot, speculation and hype are the biggest driving force behind most launches, products, protocols and Web3 games as well, in my opinion. I want to touch on what you said about Axie Infinity, because back in 2021, when it was a big thing, I also tried to get in, but the entry barrier was high. I applied for some scholarships people were hosting, with Google Forms, nothing official from Axie Infinity itself, and I couldn't get one. From then to today, we've matured, especially with Web3 games. Take Craft World: you have everything on-chain, and I think all of the resources are exchangeable for Dynocoin, which is live now if I'm not mistaken. But as you said, we're still early. The technology is still maturing, and the user experience has to get better if we want to reach more people, especially normies coming from well-established games. If I play GTA, League of Legends or Counter-Strike and come looking for something of similar value in Web3, it's really hard to find, because the technology just doesn't allow it yet. But what you've been building is really amazing, and I'm not saying that just because you're here with us today. I keep telling my friends that one of the few Web3 games that actually does it right is yours. How did you manage the in-game economy? Did you hire people for it? How did you balance it and give a good experience while keeping it manageable?

Oliver: The thing with Web3 gaming in particular is that there are no real blueprints. There are some best practices here and there, but you basically need to think from the ground up, because a lot of people tried things and most of them sadly failed. We need to experiment more and find out how things work, and that's what we did. For me it was always important to experiment as fast as possible. We released our game on testnet after a few months of development to gather feedback as quickly as possible: to see how the economy turned out, what the issues were on the user experience side, and how we could do better. And of course we have very smart people on the team. We're still a very small team, 10 people, but very hands-on in figuring these things out. We have a game designer who focuses more or less only on balancing, and we have very good engineers. Personally, I think the game looks very cool, with its retro pixel-art style and a more modern touch. So we basically went in, tried things, often failed, tried to make them better, and invested in a lot of tools and technology to make it as seamless as possible, especially onboarding. It was always clear to us that we can't make users set up a wallet on their own. Even if they want to, it's super hard to do. So we invested a lot in smart wallet and account abstraction technology, and I think by now we have a very decent system that makes it super easy for players to get into Web3.

Hodl Up: I fully agree with you, especially about not getting baited by hype. I can speak for myself: in 2021 I played Web3 games because I was sold the idea that I could make money while playing, not because I wanted to play the games themselves. I like your approach of making a fun-first game, where the revenue side and whatever you can monetize or earn is a byproduct. People should play the game because they like it. And I've seen so many companies and Web3 games, especially in the last 12 months, move to Solana, for example, not because they believe the chain offers something others don't, but because they were led by the idea that since Solana has more liquidity, they'll earn more revenue. That brings me to my next question: why Ronin? I'm sure you've been asked this a lot.

Oliver: Of course, but I'm very happy to answer it. We put a lot of effort into choosing our new home base. We were on testnet for over a year before that, but we didn't want to stay there too long, because on mainnet a lot changes again and we didn't want to be isolated too long. We took our time and looked at all the major chains. For us the community aspect was always very important. Tech isn't negligible, but it's becoming more and more of a commodity. So we looked at what the communities on the chains look like and how the chain's partners could help us bring the community into our game. Ronin has been around for a long time. It started with Axie Infinity, which I think was already around in 2018, so they've had almost seven years to build up a community, which most newer chains definitely don't have, and they have a very loyal community base. People stayed even after the big hack in 2022, when around $600 million was drained. They also don't have direct on-chain airdrop incentives, which a lot of other chains still have, and we've seen in the past that a lot of users leave after the airdrop. Our interactions with the Ronin team, and with some of the game founders I talked to on Ronin, were also very positive and very professional. The way they think about community building, and about incentivizing the community sustainably and for the long term, is something I hadn't seen before, and I'm very happy to be part of it now. The last thing we value a lot is being in a community that values experimentation and innovation. I think the most interesting games in Web3 are still on Ronin, and being part of this ecosystem lets us connect with those developers faster and more easily. So there were a lot of green checkmarks for Ronin, and we decided to launch there.

Hodl Up: I think Ronin is the gaming chain right now; they're focused on it. In my opinion, as long as they keep building, they'll stay the leading gaming scene. I love Solana, I love Ethereum, I love most chains. I'm not the guy who picks teams. If I were a developer or founder, I'd build wherever I could. But I think the more time-tested a project, chain or platform is, the better, especially for a startup, and in my opinion every Web3 game is still a startup. What are your expansion plans in terms of games? When we last talked, a few months back, you mentioned trying to build a whole ecosystem around Angry Dynomites, starting from Craft World. Could you fill us in?

Oliver: We want to establish what we call a truly player-owned economy. In Craft World we have a lot of resources, as you hinted earlier. With the recent event we're running, I think we now have 35 or more resources on-chain, each as an ERC-20 token, all tradable through the Katana DEX, the main DEX on Ronin, but also in-game, because we let you execute Katana DEX trades in the game itself so you don't need to leave it. We want to enable deep DeFi integrations in the game and gamify them. We actually 10x'd the number of on-chain trades on Ronin once we launched, from about 100,000 weekly trades to up to a million, I think, and we consumed about 50 to 60% of all gas fees on Ronin. So we really want to double down on this and make DeFi a very integral part of the player economy. Then there's the interoperability side. Right now we're running an event with one of the meme communities on Ronin, Ronke, and we're integrating their token as a core resource in our game, from which you can craft many other resources. We did a very deep IP integration as well, and the community loves it and is super engaged. There's a huge prize pool funded by the community itself, almost $10,000 in the pot now, I think. So it's very cool to have this interoperability, and we want to take it a step further: not just integrating tokens from other projects, but making every token in this ecosystem part of all the other games in the ecosystem. For example, you could use steel from Craft World to build a sword in another game. In that game you fight monsters and collect loot, gold for example, which you can then use in Craft World to forge jewelry or anything else. This can go on endlessly, and it creates an ecosystem of games connected not just by the same infrastructure but by economic principles. You really have to think: do I buy this from someone else or play the game? Do I sell something to buy more resources from the other game? All of it is owned by the players. We just provide the platform. All the liquidity for the trading pools is provided by players. We don't interfere, and we don't mint any resources out of thin air. Everything comes from the players themselves, and they decide the prices and how it all works together. We already have two other game experiences: one is about to launch, and one was in the past but we'll reuse it in the future. Before we went live on Ronin, we ran what I'd call, and I hate this term but it's easier to explain, a play-to-airdrop campaign, where you could complete quests in Craft World to earn crystals and then use them in Project Voyager, as we called it. It was more of a real game than just a play-to-airdrop system. You could use your crystals to upgrade one of your engineers to build a rocket ship, buy chests and all kinds of other things, so we already call it a game of its own. In that game you could already use resources from Craft World, like steel and wood, to upgrade your equipment. That's the very first interaction in this player-owned economy: two games connected through resources. And what's lining up next is what we call Dynogotchi, a Tamagotchi-style game where you feed your Tamagotchi. The Tamagotchi will be an AI agent with its own presence on Twitter and its own wallet. You send it resources, it consumes them and generates a shitcoin. The Tamagotchi then decides itself who to distribute it to, and that coin can be used again in Craft World, for example as fertilizer to plant crops. This can go on endlessly. And we don't want to be the developer of all these game experiences. We also want to see how other developers can pick up some of the resources, and how we can support them to help build this reality.

Hodl Up: Hearing you talk about this, my inner child is very satisfied on a lot of levels, because when you think about the most successful games in history... Atis plays Minecraft a lot, and I was thinking about why Minecraft was so successful. One of the main reasons is that the possibilities are basically endless. And adding in-game economies opens up so many possibilities, so many new dimensions for people to experiment with. It's not just a game at the end of the day. It's a whole different layer: maybe a bit more complex, but super interesting at the same time. I can't wait to see it all come to fruition. Atis asked you about expansion; now I want to ask about expansion of the IP beyond the game. There have been games that saw a lot of success because they made a movie, a TV show, comics or whatever. Is that an area where you see potential for growth, and could it onboard more normies into your ecosystem?

Oliver: We already have a bunch of merch that we give out from time to time to the community, to our most loyal users, and we do physical events every year and a half or so, where a lot of merch is given out too. The community really loves it, which I think is already a good sign. Our long-term goal is to build out the Angry Dynomites brand. We think it has its own character and style, and personally I always have fun thinking about the story and lore around it. We'll definitely build that out further. But right now we're really focused on the game itself, and we want to ship more features soon now that we're live on mainnet, which took a lot of effort in the past months. Now we can go back to shipping new features, and that's what we're doubling down on. But long term, yes, we really want to build out this brand.

Hodl Up: Here's an idea, an unsolicited one.

Oliver: Of course.

Hodl Up: Since Craft World and the NFTs are pixelated, you could partner with Lego: have the game, the NFTs and the characters as a collection. Maybe you could exchange your Craft World resources for Lego blocks, or have random Lego collections with a QR code inside that you can redeem for an NFT or something. I'm just thinking out loud.

Oliver: No, the cool thing about Web3 is that it has so many possibilities, and I also have so many ideas running through my head. You can only work on so many. But I think tying physical assets to digital assets is very interesting and can be applied very well to video games too. So there are a lot of possibilities.

Hodl Up: What's one feature the community should know about right now? I'm trying to extract alpha from you in every way possible, if you're allowed to tell us.

Oliver: We have different stages in the game, which we call eras. We had Era 1 and Era 2, and we announced Era 3 some time ago. We haven't had much time to work on it yet. We implemented some of it, but the main parts aren't there yet, because we had to pause for the mainnet launch. Now I'm working on Era 3.1, a feature set we'll develop over the next couple of months. One of the first things, and that's the alpha for now, is a grid-based player base. Right now you have a few very static buildings in your base that you use to do certain things, like trading. We want to change it into a grid, so you can place your buildings freely, add or remove them, and expand the base over time. At the beginning the space will be limited, and as you level up you'll get more space. That will be the foundation for introducing a lot of new buildings that add to Craft World's meta game, plus more decorative items so you can flex your player base to others, especially masterpieces. Right now we give in-game avatars to high-ranking players, but we could also give out cosmetic items or statues for the player base. That's what we're exploring right now, and there's a lot more coming with Era 3.1 that will be revealed in a few weeks.

Hodl Up: That sounds super exciting. I want your take on something that bugs me a lot, because I'm at a point in my life where I find it very difficult to explain to non-Web3 people what I do. They ask me about crypto, and all they know is Bitcoin. Thinking about the gaming industry, and Web3 games especially: is it difficult to pitch what you build to traditional devs? I saw you recently won an award, which might have made things easier, but in general, is it super difficult to explain to them why these in-game economies, and what you're trying to build, are essential to revitalizing the Web3 gaming industry?

Oliver: Of course. It's something new that hasn't been built before, so it's hard to find other examples that tie into the same thing. I always approach it not from the crypto perspective, but from the potential of what we talked about: this player-owned economy. We've built a light paper on the player-owned economy and how we envision it in the future, and I think the first three paragraphs don't mention blockchain at all. We want to excite people about the possibilities and what we can do, and only later explain how blockchain is the perfect technology to make it happen. I think that makes things a bit easier, because some people just stop listening once they hear "crypto" or "Web3." Starting from the vision definitely helps. On the other end, we also built the game so you don't need any Web3 knowledge. You click a link or download the app, you're in the game instantly and you start playing. Part of our mission is to teach people Web3 through games. We think everything is easier when you have fun with it, and you're more willing to stay and go through the learning experience if you're having fun. So we want to hook players into a great game loop and then slowly introduce them to the Web3 features, like trading and liquidity pools. We've already had multiple people in the community, probably more than I know of, who saw an ad on Facebook, came to our game, had fun, and then noticed there were some Web3 mechanics in there. We still make it easy for them; as I said, we invested a lot in smart wallet technology, so they can use these Web3 features without needing to know how to set up a wallet. But often they get very curious. There's one person I always refer to, Katan, huge shout-out to him. He went to our Discord, and the community explained what Web3 is about, how to set up a wallet on his own, how to trade and how to buy one of our NFTs. By now he's probably our most engaged, loyal community member. He's one of the biggest holders of our NFTs, and now he's also buying into the other NFTs and projects we partner with. That's exactly the experience we want to replicate more often, and I think that's how we can get the mass market more excited about Web3.

Hodl Up: I think that was one of the best examples you could have picked to show how Web3 can onboard normies, people who aren't in Web3 right now, in the traditional sense of every industry. Now, to wrap it up: think of yourself as just a gamer, not a co-founder or a Craft World insider. Why should you, or a friend of yours, play Craft World right now? What are the best things about the game, and maybe some things you don't like at the moment but will focus on in the future?

Oliver: It's easy. You get in and you can start playing. I think the core loop is very fun: you get hooked on starting your mines and factories, upgrading them and producing more resources. It's a very engaging, hooking core loop. Then there's the community aspect: you work together with the community on buildings, and you see that you're not alone, that you're part of something. And personally, as a gamer, I like the strategic options. Making all the resources tradable offers so many ways to play the game. I can speculate on certain price movements inside the economy. I can specialize in one thing or another. That's part of the beauty of Web3: just by having these things on-chain, it gives you so many more opportunities, and that's something I enjoy a lot. What we definitely need to improve is the long-term fun of the game. As I said, we have a very good core loop, and we invested a lot in onboarding and trading, and everything is smooth, but we haven't invested as much in the meta game, where you can build out more things around it. That's what we're doing now, with the player base coming soon and all the other Era 3.1 features we're planning. From the ideas we have, I think once Era 3.1 becomes reality, it will be a whole different game, and a lot more fun in the very long term.

Hodl Up: Perfect. Thank you again, Oliver. It was amazing having you today, and the discussion was super insightful. I think this was one of our episodes with the most alpha. We wish you an amazing day ahead and look forward to having you again sometime.

Oliver: Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. Bye-bye!

Hodl Up: That was a really fun episode.

Hodl Up: It was amazing. We always say that, but I'm super thankful for Oliver as a human being. I'm not talking about the game right now; let's focus on Oliver. He was the first one to actually support our episodes. The pilot was okay, we had all those technical difficulties, but then we dropped the Web3 games episode and he was all in: quote-tweeted, commented, watched the whole thing, texted me. That's the kind of support Web3 projects should give other Web3 projects.

Hodl Up: And I'm also excited about Craft World. He just gave us some alpha, and I wonder if they'll make it like Clash of Clans, where you can attack other villages, because they have this whole lore in the game: the meteor destroyed all life on Earth, and the dinosaurs are trying to rekindle life and so on. What if at Era 5, since they're at 3.1 now, a full-blown war breaks out? Angry Dynomites with dynamite. If that happens, people will say we had a lot of alpha. And if they listen to this and say, "Okay, we're doing that," I want compensation. Like 20% of the tokens or something.

Hodl Up: What about a cheeseburger? Would you be satisfied with that?

Hodl Up: Everything works, man. Okay guys, make sure to check out the game. I was playing it even before mainnet last year, and I'm playing it now as well. It's really fun, probably one of the best idle games on the market right now. Not just in Web3: in the whole iOS App Store and Google Play. It's amazing. We love you, and see you in the next one.