Building The Future Show - Radio / TV / Podcast

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Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show. Today we have Jacob C ETH. He's the founder at Hyperplay. He's also an advisor at Metamask, Mantle and game seven. Jacob, welcome to the show.

Jacob C, Eth: Thank you so much for having me, Kevin.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the show. I think what you guys are doing at Hyperplay is actually really innovative and cool and very timely for kind of what's happening in the gaming tech space right now. But maybe before we get into all that, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah, I grew up in Texas, living in the suburbs of Houston. Actually. A lot of prominent web, three people actually came from the friend group or extended the schools that were around. But yeah, I grew up kind of as a really influenced by the early Internet. And I was actually in junior high and high school. I worked one of the earliest bitcoin, not bitcoin, bittorrent trackers.

Kevin Horek: Oh, interesting.

Jacob C, Eth: So to me, like, the Internet was supposed to be this crazy thing where information was free and it made society more free and it was the public town square. And like the Internet when I was a kid, I'm, you know, I'm in my mid thirties, it was weird and it was fun and strange and there were new use cases for the Internet every week. And, you know, and then I got a little bit older and the Internet didn't look like that anymore. And so that, I think it had a pretty profound impact on me and a lot of the people I grew up with, those sort of things.

Kevin Horek: No, that's, yeah, it's interesting. I relate to that. I have the same kind of similar experience. I'm a little bit older than you, I'm almost 41, so. But yes, I get that kind of early on. It was a way different time, but very cool. So you went to university. What did you take and why?

Jacob C, Eth: Well, I am a proud college dropout.

Kevin Horek: Okay, interesting.

Jacob C, Eth: I mean, I studied computer information systems, but I found that my time, it was like, so I had taken a job as a software engineer at a small software shop, and it was like, oh, I could stay here and generate debt for the rest of my life, or I have the job that I'm going to get after I get out of college already, and I could just go do that and make sense. I think it's worked out fine for me. I have a lot of friends who also went through the whole program, and they have, you know, they got saddled with so much debt. And in many instances, like, I mean, I'd say, like, if you're working in tech, like, a lot of the degrees don't even convert to 100%. Yeah, it's not true for everybody.

Jacob C, Eth: College has a place for certain people and certain things, but I think that it's become so expensive and doesn't convert to careers in the ways that people, you know, that it used to. And so I think for a lot of people, it becomes like a predatory relationship.

Kevin Horek: No. Yeah, well, I don't have a degree either. I've been to post secondary and taken other programs, but I don't have a degree. And I've been in this industry for, you know, 20, almost 30 years. So, like, yeah, I 100% relate. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. It's just I know a ton of people that have been very successful that have went and not went and everywhere in between. Right. And I've known people that have went and been not successful, and I know people that have never went to school and weren't successful either. So it's kind of what you make of it, right?

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah.

Kevin Horek: And you have to be self taught. Right. I think in a lot of cases to stay relevant in tech.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah, totally. That's totally true.

Kevin Horek: So, okay, so maybe walk us through the rest of your career up until hyperplay, and then let's dive into that. Yeah.

Jacob C, Eth: So I, in the really early days of bitcoin, I, you know, as a young Internet radical, I, I had read, you know, a really obscure article about the relationship between anonymous and bitcoin. Sure. And it had just kind of lit up my imagination and I got into, like, very briefly. I think I mined, like, a single bitcoin, and it was like a, you know, it was an obscure interest of mine. And, you know, I did some early dabbling with bitcoin and in the early days of it, but it was never something I saw in the way that I didn't believe it was going to, like, fundamentally change the world. I thought it was, like, really cool and interesting, and then I ended up working for, I was CTO of a real estate marketplace.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Jacob C, Eth: Interesting that it was an early stage startup, and I read the Ethereum white paper in 2015, and I encountered one of the early projects that was being built on Ethereum, and it just blew up my brain. Like, it was like I. It was like I had seen nuclear physics for the first time, and I was obsessed. So I had joined the real estate startup in 20 12, 20 13. And it was a very successful business, and still is a very successful business. We did a complex transaction in 2017 that split it into a software business and a real estate business and got acquired by Berkshire Hathaway.

Kevin Horek: And, oh, congrats, man, that's huge.

Jacob C, Eth: Thank you. I would say by 2017, though, or even late 2016, I had decided that my heart wasn't in it, and I wanted to get it to a place of an exit because I was so into Ethereum. It was like I had discovered another world. And all of a sudden, the Internet wasn't a monopoly of five corporations. It was going to be all of these decentralized applications. It was going to change the incentive layer of the Internet to not be something that was based purely on advertising. And instead, we could have commerce and self custody of assets and ownership of the protocols and platforms that people use by the people who use them. And that just lit up my imagination that we could build a better world, and that this was the economic layer and the economic system of the Internet itself.

Jacob C, Eth: And that was. That was so exciting to me. And so I. So I left in 2018, I left Berkshire Hathaway after doing that transition. And then I went and joined Consensus, which was for people that don't know, consensys at the time, was a venture production studio that was built to create the first decentralized applications on Ethereum. And there were hundreds of projects that came out of consensys.

Kevin Horek: That's cool.

Jacob C, Eth: Most of which failed, and then a few of them were wildly successful. And so I joined Metamask, and I was lead of operations for Metamask. I worked on its growth strategy. How do we grow among developers? How do we grow among users? And how do we monetize it? Because at the time that I joined Metamask, Vitalik, who's founder of Ethereum, for anyone not familiar, had given a speech that was about how do we monetize open source public goods that have no chance of having a sustainable business model. A lot of his theories had been around grants and different things like that. We instead created a new business model, which was what metamask uses today, which was essentially everything to do with how a user interacts with dapps should be completely free.

Jacob C, Eth: We don't take fees from the user going and interacting with a decentralized application. We're not going to add fees to those things. But what we can do is we can offer optional services that enrich the experience. In the wallet. We aggregated on ramping, then we aggregated token swaps, then we aggregated bridging between blockchains. We charged fees for those, but they were completely optional and consensual for the user. And that proved to be probably the most profitable business model in the decentralized web.

Kevin Horek: Very cool.

Jacob C, Eth: And it enabled us to support.

Kevin Horek: I.

Jacob C, Eth: Mean, today I think there's over 70,000 decentralized applications with more than 100 maus. And those open permissionless APIs enabled metamask to connect to all of them. And so it was something that really empowered developers, it empowered the users. It wasn't making a walled garden of, these are the five or ten things you're allowed to do. This is the whole Internet, and your assets can be carried with you across the whole Internet. And were super, super excited to do that.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. No, I think it's awesome. I think most people these days have heard of Metamask. It's huge. Probably one of the top wallets, if not the top wallet. Is that fair to say?

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah. And then in 2022, I had the itch that, well, I had seen the data in Metamask, that about half of the users in their massive user base had a gaming use case and their history. Sure. And so that was pretty extraordinary information for me. And yet the user experience around web three gaming was, well, it's zero.

Kevin Horek: Let'S be honest.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah. So I realized that there were some major problems around the wallet interaction with games that I wanted to solve. There were other problems with really, the distribution of the software, because effectively, Apple, Steam, Google, all of those platforms, to varying degrees, essentially prohibit web three products from having good user experiences. They actually have policies that prohibit it. I'm happy to talk about that more later. But basically, this was a realization for me that there needed to be new distribution platforms and there needed to better user experience around web three. And also, I like to be in the startup world, and I wanted my own thing.

Jacob C, Eth: So I worked with the Metamask team, and with their blessing, I formed a product that was based on Metamask outside of Consensys, and incubated it inside of a Dao called game seven, which was a Dao that incubates early stage gaming startups. It was a really great place to build it and gave us lots of resources and introductions to investors. And then last summer in 2023, we officially spun out of the game Seven Dao. Although we have a deep partnership and relationship to game seven still. But we raised 12 million.

Kevin Horek: Oh, wow. Congrats, man. That's huge.

Jacob C, Eth: Thank you.

Kevin Horek: Especially in this landscape in the middle.

Jacob C, Eth: Of the FTX bloodbath.

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Jacob C, Eth: Wow. We raised 12 million at a 109 million valuation. So it was a. I couldn't be more honored, honestly.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, fair enough. I don't blame you. That that's huge, man. Like, people can't raise that amount of money in good times, never mind like, arguably one of the worst times in tech. Right? So good on you, man. That's awesome. Congrats.

Jacob C, Eth: So we've got about 65 games in the store today. And then we. So ours hyperplays a game store. We have about 65 games in our game store. We also aggregate the entire Epic games store.

Kevin Horek: Very cool.

Jacob C, Eth: So you can play fortnite Elden ring Valorant like any of those huge titles. Yes. And we do things to enrich your web two content with NFTs and web three incentives and things like that. So we want to be a place that's accessible for the traditional gamer and that improves the experience for web three natives as well.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. So what does that mean for the gamer that maybe doesn't understand what web two, web three all this stuff is? They just want to play their games.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah. Yeah. So for us, we do two things. We make it possible for the assets that you earn inside the game. Like you earn skins or you earn characters or any of those things which are nfTs, or maybe they're tokens. You can carry those in your wallet, which is in our overlay. So you might be familiar with the steam overlay. You have chat windows, notifications, achievements. It's even got a browser window in it. Now we have an overlay too, but our overlay has web three features in it. So you've got all of your assets that you've earned in these games are in that overlay. And you can carry that overlay between games because it's really easy to carry the assets between games. That means that game developers can start implementing the assets from other games in their own game.

Kevin Horek: That's cool.

Jacob C, Eth: This promotes cross pollination, interoperability. Just a range of the use cases that web three is supposed to be about are actually possible. To me, web three isn't about a bunch of profile pictures that there's 10,000 of them, and you speculate on swapping them with other. That's fine. That's great for those people. But for me, I want to promote interoperable reputation, self custody of assets. I want there to be player ownership and community empowerment, where the people who play the games become the owners of the gaming protocols themselves. I think that there is some really amazing things that we can do with this technology, and I hope that we can help elevate the sites of those who are in web three to really take advantage of those much more profound value propositions.

Kevin Horek: No. Very cool, man. So how did you land some of these big games and gaming studios? Because that's the hard part of what you're trying to do, right?

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah, I mean, so we. I mean, I would say most of the web, three games that have. That we have. We actually didn't even have a biz dev team until. What is this? This is Thursday, so it's been ten days.

Kevin Horek: Oh, wow. Okay.

Jacob C, Eth: So most of the games came to us.

Kevin Horek: Oh, wow.

Jacob C, Eth: And so we had a lot of inbound excitement about our product. There were some other supposed, like, web three game stores on the market, but most of them are pretty. They're pretty. Like, they don't do a lot. Like, they don't even have differential updates for the software. They're mainly like, some of them have old tokens that date back many years. And so we needed to create a reputable distribution platform that really solves a bunch of problems around the user experience. And that wasn't just like a shilly store for buying tokens. And then there's a link to download a game or something. Real game distribution software. So we did that. We had the support of the Metamask team as well, which helped to promote our launch. And were the partner around gaming, so were able to do some really great things together.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. So walk us through. I'm new to hyperplay. Like, I go to the website. Walk me through. From going there and actually using the platform and how it kind of works. You quickly covered it, but I want to dive a little bit deeper into that.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah, so it's a windows, macOS, Linux, or steam deck game store. You can install on all four of those operating systems.

Kevin Horek: Very cool.

Jacob C, Eth: When you launch the application, you'll see our store, which is the hyperplay store, and the 65 or so games that are in our store. You'll also find the Epic Games store, which you can find its entire library. We've got GOG and there's another very big traditional game store that's coming very soon. I can't name it yet, but it's coming soon as well and there will be even more of those. So we want to be the best app for accessing games and we want to aggregate every game store that's out there and then enrich it with web three elements where it makes sense.

Jacob C, Eth: So when you install the app pretty soon you're going to be able to connect your steam account even and you'll be able to access your historical gaming reputation, your achievements and those sort of things and represent those in a web three way. There's some other really cool stuff, but I'm probably already teasing more than I should. So you can do all that. We also make it possible. Let's say you're a Mac gamer or you have a Steam deck or Linux. Some people are familiar with Steam deck. It's actually a Linux device. It uses a library called Proton to allow you to play Windows games on a Steam deck. We actually use that same proton library as well as crossover and wine to make it possible to play Windows games on Mac and Windows games on Linux.

Jacob C, Eth: And not just in Steam but the entire library of the Epic Games store. You can pretty much play inside of our app.

Kevin Horek: That's huge actually. Yeah, that's a big deal.

Jacob C, Eth: Totally. And actually my co founder is actually the founder of heroic Games. He originally made it as a hobby.

Kevin Horek: That's amazing.

Jacob C, Eth: He wanted to play the Epic GameStore games on his Linux computer and so he made it to solve his own problem and then he and I connected and we had the vision of well this is actually, it's not just useful for Linux people, this is actually like the best game launcher in App Store. So we had a vision to turn it into a much larger web three product and to bring so many more use cases and features into it. And so we started hyperplay together.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. So I'm curious. I think what you're building is actually really timely because I think most people these days have heard about the epic Apple battle and then the EU kind of stepped in and is making Apple open up iOS and iPadOS more. And let's be honest, it's just a matter of time I think in my opinion, before it comes to other parts of the world. And there's going to be ways to get around it and you'll be able to get it kind of anywhere on the planet I think pretty quickly. But what are your thoughts around where we're at? Because it seems like you guys are well positioned in this space just based on what's happening, even outside of what you guys are trying to do.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah. So that battle, it's pretty egregious because it's not just the 30% transaction fees. Totally. Apple and Steam, they have these 30% transaction fees, but it's also that they mandate certain user experiences that are not in favor of the user or the developer. And they want all of the transactions to route through their APIs. They want in web three. It's particularly bad because they don't want to allow any of the apps to transact without routing it through the Apple App Store. But you actually physically can't route a smart contract transaction through their APIs. They're incompatible. It's not how blockchains work effectively. It's prohibited to. It's effectively prohibited to actually build web three in game transactions in any of these stores. And even Google Play, they got props recently for allowing NFT transactions.

Jacob C, Eth: All that they allow you to do is to pay for an initial NFT mint using Google Pay in game actual transactions, which can be many different types of things. Not even not financial transactions that have to do with minting a player battle pass or importing your reputation from one game into another. That's the kind of stuff that blockchains enable, and you're effectively not allowed to do it in their platforms. We needed a store model, a distribution model that is compatible with the game developer, and that doesn't make us antagonistic and parasitic to the player and developer community. And so we have a game store that doesn't try to take transactions from the in game activity. We instead use that same model that I had worked on for Metamask, which is optional convenience services.

Jacob C, Eth: In that on ramping, token swaps, bridging that range of web three features which are important operations that people do with web three assets. We essentially do the same thing. This completely changes the relationship of the platform to the game developer, because we're not trying to tax them, we're not trying to do listing fees, we're not trying to. We just don't have a parasitic relationship to the game developer like Apple and Steam do. And because our incentives are aligned with the game developer, our incentives are get as many games as possible, make the developers as happy as possible, and get them to send their users to us as their favorite game store.

Kevin Horek: Which is how it should be.

Jacob C, Eth: Yes, that's what the market incentives could be. Except these are monopolies that go around bullying and robbing game developers and pushing microtransactions. I mean, Apple makes more from their gaming. I think very few people realize that the vast majority of Apple's revenue actually comes from their parasitic relationship to game developers. It's their number one revenue source, more than the sale of iPhones, more than any of that. So this is a huge industry and we think that freeing the game developer, freeing the player and empowering them will start a new golden age for gaming. I think a lot of gamers also have had fear that NFTs represent a new form of pay to win free to play microtransactions, like we got with gacha games on mobile.

Jacob C, Eth: And there are definitely a handful of developers that have done things that are in that category or things that are just outright scams. And I think that those things are reprehensible and awful and I don't want anything to do with them. But I do think that web three offers more sustainable business models for games themselves and that a lot of the beloved ips that players care so much about can actually be more sustainably produced and have more content through the web three business model. And so the way I explain this to people is in the traditional model, like where games were $60 and the player would buy it's $60, and then the game developer would have to take a huge risk on whether or not this game was going to be successful. Maybe it would succeed, maybe it would flop.

Jacob C, Eth: And so many games couldn't be produced because of the amount of risk to produce the game. And then, so then this mobile gacha world came, and the pay to win games and those made lots of money by exploiting players that were willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. And then at the end of it, they have nothing to show for it. And the web three business model, it's different. Like the game developer creates a game and adds some content to it. And the transactions that happen within the game's economy, the game developer makes revenue from those on an ongoing basis. So the incentive of the game developer isn't drop a game, abandon it, and then make another game. And then your beloved IP that you've been trying to get new games to come out for that ip for ten years.

Jacob C, Eth: I used to lead a fam community for a beloved JRPG. It's called Suikoden. I was part of the Suikoden revival movement. We led a decade long campaign to save the series and it was a grind and we actually succeeded. They're remastering it, they're spiritual successors now, but for the most part, a lot of these ips, they never see the light of day again. And the incentives of web three are, if their transactions are happening in the game, the more content there is in the game, the more transactions there are. The incentives of the developer are to continually expand this game world and to make more and more rich content wherever the users are and wherever they're enjoying these games. And so this creates a new synergistic relationship between the game development studio and the player.

Jacob C, Eth: And it can be the beginning of, you know, much richer game worlds that are invested in for decades and that persist. And at the end of it, if you don't want to play the game anymore, you can sell the assets that you paid for to other players who do want them. You didn't just waste your time like you have real assets that you own and that are yours. And the developer, you know, is able to produce revenue from those transactional activities. It's in my opinion, a much better long term business model for gaming. We do have to supersede the scammers and we have to supersede the Ponzi stuff, but I think that we will.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, well, I think in any industry, especially in the early days, you're going to get that and then even as it matures, you're going to get that, right? So, you know, just because maybe some of this stuff got a bad reputation kind of out of the gate. Well, that's happened with everything really. And I think people just don't focus on that. It's like, well, that happened with whatever Pat pica technology in the past. It's like that. People are scamming that too. And they're still scamming technology from 20 years ago. So it's not really any different. Right. It's just whatever gets media hype is what people are talking about. Right. And trying to even talk to like my non technical friends about like, nfts, they're just like, well, it's just like a picture.

Kevin Horek: It's like maybe today, but they don't understand what it could be or where it, or where some people have already taken it. Right. And I think that's the big misconception of what's happening with a lot of these digital assets and web three. So I want to get your thoughts on where are we at and maybe do you want to break down some of those myths and kind of what's happening and what you see because you're in the trenches, you have some really big companies backing you and working with you. So like where are we at with these things?

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah, I think that if we. A good analogy is like the late nineties and the Internet for you, young un's private. So there was a lot of, in that time period, you can go and watch videos of nerds who are a lot like me going and, like, going to grandmother's houses and explaining to them modems and TCP IP protocol. And it was really strange. The ways that people talked were strange, the ways that people, like, watch a news broadcast about the terms that people used for the Internet. They were all really bizarre and technical and nerdy, obscure niches. Everything is. There were all kinds of insults about like, well, that's just on the Internet. As if the Internet wasn't part of the real world and it was.

Jacob C, Eth: And then at the same time, in the stock market, there was this explosion of use case startups claiming they were going to build all of these use cases that were actually impossible to build in the late nineties. So the Internet infrastructure had not matured to the point where it was going to have a good user experience, or where there were enough users, or where there were like, the capacity to build all the things that people promised that they were going to build. Famously, pets.com dot. It was going to bring all your pet food to you. It was this huge overblown stock. It was impossible to build what they were claiming in the late nineties. But you know what? I have had a chewy subscription. It works. It's actually a great product. Chewy is literally pets.com dot.

Jacob C, Eth: And it is today, and it's a very successful business.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. So.

Jacob C, Eth: I think that we'll have a lot of very similar things where we have a lot of early use cases. And there's a range of problems today for blockchains. Block space, or the cost of posting a transaction on a blockchain is dramatically decreasing in price. So it's becoming much cheaper because people are doing these different innovations that make these more scalable. And so as the blockchains become more scalable, and as block space becomes cheaper, security becomes better, then more use cases become possible. And that's part of it. There's also user experience problems around onboarding, around wallets, around surfacing. What you're doing. Like, one of the challenges in web three is that you're interacting with a smart contract, and that smart contract has logic in it that says when you use this smart contract, these are the things that happen.

Jacob C, Eth: And some of those smart contracts contain scams within them. Wallets have the difficult problem of rendering the details of the smart contract to the user in a way that's easily human, readable, and accessible to the user in making what the smart contracts do known to the user. And so all of that's becoming better, it's becoming safer, it's becoming more scalable, and as that happens, more use cases become possible. I do think that this time period right now is an early adopter time period where you have the same kinds of people that the early Internet attracted, are attracted to this. And each wave, the types of things that people do, have become much more interesting and much more sophisticated.

Jacob C, Eth: And I think that composable smart contracts for gaming are going to radically change gaming, where we'll have different games that share the same smart contracts and the state is shared between the games. There's some early examples of this. There's a really simple game today called Defi Kingdoms. And it has in the game's smart contracts, there's experience points and stamina for all of your characters. And when you consume stamina, experience points are dished out, as well as some other incentives and rewards and stuff as you play the game. But there are at least, I think it's like five third party games that were built not by the original game studio, that all hook into those original smart contracts for a completely different game type. And they charge those other games, charge in game transactions for what you.

Jacob C, Eth: For things that you buy or do in that game. But it's essentially using your characters and your state from the origin game, which is like a compounding of mods. Like, I grew up playing Dota, I grew up playing a number of different mods. The mods always used assets from the origin game, but they didn't have a way to share state or to feed back into the origin game. And this is like, if game a is successful and I'm building Game B, I can build another game world that extends Game A, which is really cool players from gaming. And it makes like the economics of the modding community more beneficial to the origin game. There's so much that's possible here, and we're really just scratching the surface today.

Kevin Horek: No, that's really cool. So if I'm a game studio, how do I actually go about leveraging hyperplay?

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah. So we have a form on our site, just a submit a game that'll set up a call with our team to talk about listing. We have a developer portal where you add your game, you add all the information about your listing. It goes through a security review similar to any sort of App Store. We also have developer Docs if you want to take advantage of our wallet features and allow the user to carry their wallet into your game, you can find all that in our developer documentation. We work really closely with each game team and we take developer relations and supporting the developer community really centrally. So we have some game studios that are really web three native and that fully understand all this stuff.

Jacob C, Eth: And we have others that maybe they made great games in Web two and they're trying to enter this space and we do a lot to help those teams as well.

Kevin Horek: Okay, very cool. So this is probably like, it's probably a range, but how long does it actually take to implement the platform into my current game or a game I'm building? Is it like days, weeks, months? Walk us through that.

Jacob C, Eth: So if you just want to list an existing game, and it's not required that it be a Webster game, if you just want to list in our store, it takes however many days to get a call scheduled with us, which is two or three days, and then we do an initial onboarding and you'll submit your game to the store. It takes, I don't know, 30 minutes to create the store listing goes through a security review, which is typically three to five business days on the first submission and then one business day on each game update, and then it's live in hyperplay. If you wanted to take advantage of our wallet features, it's very similar for anyone that's in web three. If you've ever integrated a website with a wallet like Metamask, it's basically identical to that.

Jacob C, Eth: So probably takes 30 minutes to implement some sort of a transactional use case or something. It's quite simple. If you're doing really advanced things, then you have lots of transactions in your game. You can use the wallet for all kinds of things and obviously the sky's limit and it'll take you longer, but it's however you want to build your.

Kevin Horek: Game, so it's very quick. Like within a couple of weeks you can be in the store up and running and obviously you can add stuff as you go. No, that's awesome. So I want to dive a little bit into is there other features either from the game side or like the game studio side or the user side that we haven't covered today that you'd like to cover?

Jacob C, Eth: I think we talked about the cross platform compatibility. We talked about being able to carry your wallet across all the games and we talked about distribution.

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Jacob C, Eth: The other stuff that we're working on is reputation and incentives and things with achievements. We're going to have a lot to announce about that in about a month. So I guess this might broadcast a little bit later. So I'll just say in March.

Kevin Horek: Okay, very cool.

Jacob C, Eth: So there will be a lot to talk about there, but we want to do a lot of things with mods, we want to do a lot of things with reputation. We want to create social layers and all those sort of things. So we're a very young startup. We've existed for less than a year from our launch date. So we'll be building lots of really cool things.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. So for people that are maybe looking to get into the tech space or the web three space, what advice do you give to them? Because tech's not looking great lately. I'm just curious to get your space, and especially because you succeeded in a terrible market.

Jacob C, Eth: I think that people have had a tendency to just replicate use cases that already existed and what exists today, it's still very early. And so for people that want to enter this space, I think it's really important to learn about the technology and what's possible and to try to value it's everything that's possible with it and to represent that and to really double down onto it. I think it's also really important to build on a feedback loop with your community and to. It's okay to focus on a niche. I watched an interview recently of Bezos talking about Amazon serving the weird niche of people that want books from the Internet, or the weird niche of people later who wanted kindles. And like now it's a super mass adopted business. But in the early days, it was a really strange niche of people. And interesting.

Jacob C, Eth: I don't think it's necessary to try to appeal to people that hate web three or something. I don't really care. Good on you. There's a huge market of people who believe in web three gaming and who are really excited about it. And we build for those people and we listen to that community and we focus on their needs. As the tech becomes more accessible and more mature, it's going to appeal to the laggard type of audience that doesn't get it. But I mean, that's actually one of the famous things that Satoshi, when he was founding bitcoin, said. He said, I'm sorry if you don't understand. I just don't have time to explain it to you. This is what it is.

Jacob C, Eth: And he might have sounded like he's not listening to people at the time, but he saw something that made a lot of sense and that he believed was the future and he doubled down on the people who really believed in that future and built for those people and we do the same.

Kevin Horek: No, that makes sense. I also think there's a lot of people that, to your point, like, don't understand, which is fine, whatever, it doesn't matter. But they're already using a bunch of web three stuff and they don't even know it. Like, they probably interact with a bunch of blockchain stuff. You know, if they've used your platform, they're using web. Like, there's a lot of people have already been using this stuff. And I have always argued because, like, everybody's like, oh, bitcoin and cryptocurrency is garbage. It's like, do you have a Starbucks card? Because it's basically a digital currency. It's like, have you. You can use it in Canada, America, Mexico, Europe. It just figures it out. That's a digital currency. Whether you like it or not. You've been using, you know, call it whatever, but like, so I just always find it funny.

Kevin Horek: It's like, well, you've already been using it, so maybe you don't understand, but it's just funny to me. So, yeah, whatever. Yeah, I agree. I think that makes a lot of sense. So I'm curious. Like, you've obviously been in the space, but is there any other advice that you would give to people that do understand and maybe are having a hard time actually coming up with an idea for something because it's. That can be really challenging in itself.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah, I mean, the use cases for games that we're seeing are also evolving. Like, in the early days, the games all looked like, buy an NFT on some website and then you can use it in this game. And it was a pretty lame use case, candidly. And there was very little actual value proposition. And I think a lot of the gamers who would maybe be inclined towards being excited about this type of game saw that and we're pretty uninspired by it. So I would say, like, go and try to learn about some of the use cases of some of the most interesting games and what they're doing. So we have a range of games like shrapnel is coming out, games like Midnight Society, dead drop. Those are, they're extraction shooters.

Jacob C, Eth: So there's high stakes outcomes where you're trying to get this super rare item that also has a blockchain representation out of the arena and your items are at risk so there's some famous videos of people playing dead drop, where streamers are playing with some high value asset and they get sniped and somebody's looting the bag and trying to steal their nfts or something. Like there's some really wild use cases that people have done, or just the interoperability between games or just, I think it's really important that people learn about those mechanisms and what some of the most interesting games are doing. Or like there was a game, it was a real time strategy game called Dark Forest that used zero knowledge proofs for a provably fair fog of war in a persistent rts world where no one could see the whole map.

Jacob C, Eth: They're like three month long seasons where you're trying to conquer all the planets and there's just really cool stuff like that. And I recommend people to really try to innovate with the technology, learn about the technology. If you're a studio and you want to do this, hire people that know about the technology and that can help you really double down on its value proposition or come talk to us. We'd love to help. We'd love to hear you out and we'd love to help people build in this space.

Kevin Horek: Very cool, man. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, but how about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about hyperplay yourself and any other links you want to mention.

Jacob C, Eth: Yeah, so you can download hyperplay at Hyperplay XYz. You can also follow us on Twitter, hyperplaygaming. We've got a discord we might dabble into Farcaster, this new ethereum based social network.

Kevin Horek: Interesting.

Jacob C, Eth: And yeah, we'd love to talk to you as well.

Kevin Horek: Perfect, man. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day.

Jacob C, Eth: You as well. Kevin, thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Horek: Thank you. Okay, bye.

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