Game Space to launch a dozen games by mid 2023, says investor Livio Weng

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Game Space, a Sin­ga­pore-based start­up that pro­vides emerg­ing blockchain tech­nol­o­gy to games, will be launch­ing more than a dozen titles before the mid­dle of 2023, accord­ing to Liv­io Weng, an investor in the company.

Weng, who is the for­mer CEO of cryp­to exchange Huo­bi Glob­al, told Forkast that its first major launch, an updat­ed ver­sion of the game Bless Glob­al, would take place by November. 

Bless Glob­al bills itself as the world’s first triple‑A lev­el blockchain game, an infor­mal clas­si­fi­ca­tion usu­al­ly refer­ring to games with large pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing bud­gets. In this game, props can be mint­ed as non-fun­gi­ble tokens (NFTs) and trad­ed between wallets.

Forkast’s Ning­wei Qin spoke with Weng and Michael Cameron, the cofounder and CEO of Game Space, about the future of their com­pa­ny and of GameFi.

Qin: What is Game Space doing now?

Liv­io Weng: The com­pa­ny now pro­vides game com­pa­nies with an SDK por­tal for access­ing the blockchain net­work, and we help game com­pa­nies with­out Web3 expe­ri­ence to build Game­Fi func­tions into their games. The game will have an NFT mar­ket­place, a built-in wal­let for trad­ing, and an oper­at­ing sys­tem to sup­port the issuance and trad­ing of NFTs.

Qin: Why do games need blockchain?

Micheal Cameron: Basi­cal­ly, what we’re see­ing at the moment for Game­Fi are more decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi) ele­ments and less high-qual­i­ty games, and the shelf life of many cur­rent blockchain games is not long. 

But look at the Web2 games that have been around for ten [years] or even decades, which usu­al­ly focus on game­play and high-qual­i­ty inter­ac­tions. These should be the ele­ments that keep the Game­Fi going on. 

I think we have to trans­form, not just focus on the finan­cial mod­el, but also achieve a great game that peo­ple can love and enjoy for a long time. Game Space will aim at focus­ing on triple‑A games to catch up with the trend.

When we think about games, five to 10 years from now, user con­trol of game assets is almost a nor­mal thing, and game com­pa­nies that don’t jump on this train fast enough will become obsolete.

Weng: As we found, a lot of game com­pa­nies are inter­est­ed in Game­Fi but are on the side­lines at the moment, because the dif­fi­cul­ties that Axie Infin­i­ty and StepN have encoun­tered make them hesitant.

The rea­son for the stag­na­tion of these ear­ly blockchain games, I call it the Game­Fi 1.0 era.  One is that we’re amid a bear mar­ket. Anoth­er is that the design of the games is prob­lem­at­ic. They focus on earn­ing too much rather than the play part. 

In fact, I would say these games are pyra­mid schemes pack­aged in the game. The play­ers who enter the game ear­li­er are earn­ing mon­ey from the peo­ple who enter the game lat­er. And the peo­ple who enter the game at the end share no mon­ey. As for the game itself, it is not so playable.

There is a say­ing in the indus­try that in the era of Game­Fi 1.0, it is one Axie Infin­i­ty and two thou­sand of Axie Infinity’s copy­cats. In earn­ings-ori­ent­ed games, the Axie Infin­i­ty can be pop­u­lar for half a year, while the sec­ond game can only last for a month and the third game can only hold for a week. The life cycle of the game is get­ting short­er and shorter.

We see that explor­ing blockchain is a trend that Chi­nese gam­ing com­pa­nies have start­ed doing. For exam­ple, Gen­shin Impact, even though it is already such a top game, it is still try­ing to devel­op in the direc­tion of blockchain.

Many Chi­nese game com­pa­nies are try­ing to devel­op blockchain tech­nol­o­gy. For exam­ple, Bless Global’s pub­lish­er, Long­tu Game, used to be a famous Chi­nese game com­pa­ny. But lat­er some green­er game com­pa­nies sur­passed it, and Long­tu hopes to rise again. 

It has a strong moti­va­tion to find a way to over­take in cor­ners. There are a lot of Chi­nese game com­pa­nies in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion. We’re nego­ti­at­ing with some of them to work together.

What I want to say is that in the future, with the entry of some large-scale games, more lead­ing game com­pa­nies will enter Web3. 

Qin: How did your col­lab­o­ra­tion start?

Cameron: Liv­io orig­i­nal­ly joined Game Space as a con­sul­tant, but then he invest­ed in Game Space. Our past com­mon work expe­ri­ence helped us under­stand how to make NFTs acces­si­ble to Web 2 users, and now what we did was we kind of spun off what we were focused on iBox, which is like board­ing Web2 users into Web3 through dif­fer­ent channels. 

Web2 com­pa­nies like our part­ner­ship with Steam (a glob­al video game dis­tri­b­u­tion plat­form) that we just did recent­ly onboard­ing steam users into Web3 mak­ing the signup process very easy to under­stand and to join rather than just throw­ing pri­vate address­es into Web2 spaces.

We also have two oth­er founders who came from iBox and Huo­bi as well. 

Weng: In the last year, to avoid pol­i­cy risks [China’s cryp­to ban], Huo­bi decid­ed to either shut down or sell its NFT mar­ket­place iBox, which had main­land Chi­nese investors. Final­ly, we sold iBox to an exter­nal com­pa­ny in Octo­ber and Novem­ber last year.

I brought up iBox and did the ear­ly con­struc­tion and resourc­ing. Before sell­ing we had grown the iBox to the largest NFT mar­ket­place in Chi­na. It’s a pity to sell it. 

But we still kept part of the iBox team. This year, as we saw that Game­fi would have a big­ger prospect, with the lead­er­ship of Michael, some col­leagues from Huo­bi and iBox who are inter­est­ed in gam­ing came over and we formed a new team to work on it.

Qin: What is the com­po­si­tion of Game Space’s team mem­bers now?

Weng: The entire Game Space team con­sists of three parts: One is from Huo­bi, the oth­er is from iBox and the oth­er is a pro­fes­sion­al team focused on pub­lic chains. Our on-chain secu­ri­ty mea­sures are all led by pro­fes­sion­al pub­lic chain teams.

Qin: Has Huo­bi invest­ed in Game Space?

Weng: Yes, the investors are Huo­bi Ven­tures and some vet­er­ans of Huobi.

Qin: How many peo­ple does the com­pa­ny have now?

Weng: More than 30 people.

Qin: How does Game Space work with game companies?

Cameron: We screen the games to port to blockchain seri­ous­ly as we don’t want to be a provider of bad games. Oth­er­wise, we’re part­ly to blame, and it hurts our reputation.

In terms of screen­ing games, we need to con­sid­er aspects such as the user bases, and the pro­por­tion of dai­ly active users. We have an oper­a­tions team inside that will play the game, and val­i­date whether or not the game is quality. 

Weng: Game Space will use a score sheet to rate the game’s playa­bil­i­ty, art, and genre. In terms of game genre, MMORPG games with a growth sys­tem are more suit­able than MOBA [mul­ti­play­er online bat­tle are­na, like League of Leg­ends] or SLG games [sim­u­la­tion game, like Clash of Clans].

The qual­i­ty of the game’s graph­ics is also very important.

Game­Fi requires the game to have a very bal­anced numer­i­cal set­up. The numer­ic refers to the strengths and weak­ness­es of char­ac­ters and props in a game. They must be rel­a­tive­ly bal­anced, and no one char­ac­ter or prop can dom­i­nate. If the numer­i­cal set­up is not so bal­anced, the flaw will be zoomed in GameFi.

In addi­tion, the tokens and NFTs in the game need to have a large enough con­sump­tion, so as not to cause an over­sup­ply in a short time and cause the price plunge.

Qin: What coun­tries will be more inter­est­ed in blockchain games?

Cameron: With the game of fight and the play-to-earn mod­el, we’ve got coun­tries like Indone­sia, the Philip­pines, India, and Thai­land. These coun­tries def­i­nite­ly have a huge adop­tion rate.

The PFPs (Pro­file Pic­tures, dig­i­tal art pieces trad­ed on blockchains, like Cryp­to Punk or Bored Ape Yacht Club) are pre­ferred by coun­tries like the US, Chi­na, and Japan at the moment. And that’s some­thing that we focus a lot of our atten­tion on.

Weng: A con­sid­er­able part of the exist­ing blockchain games are pro­duced by Chi­nese teams. They just hand­ed over the pub­lish­ing work to over­seas teams. In fact, the blockchain games launched by cryp­to exchanges this year are actu­al­ly from the teams in Guangzhou, Shen­zhen, Bei­jing and Chengdu. 

In recent years, there have been a lot of Chi­nese com­pa­nies devel­op­ing busi­ness over­seas. One rea­son is that Chi­na has sig­nif­i­cant restric­tions on the pub­li­ca­tion of games, which forces com­pa­nies to devel­op in over­seas countries. 

[In Chi­na, the Nation­al Press and Pub­li­ca­tion Admin­is­tra­tion con­trols the pub­li­ca­tion of games. The admin­is­tra­tion had twice sus­pend­ed approval of new game releas­es in 2018 and 2021, which result­ed in the insol­ven­cy of many game companies.]

Chi­nese game prac­ti­tion­ers are very hard­work­ing and habit­u­al­ly work 996 [China’s over­time cul­ture, refer­ring to start­ing work at 9 am and fin­ish­ing at 9 pm, work­ing six days a week]. This is true for sev­er­al game com­pa­nies we work with.

The teams in Chi­na have a huge advan­tage in game devel­op­ment speed, which is dif­fi­cult to replace by oth­er coun­tries. In fact, the export capac­i­ty of China’s games can account for 60% to 70% of glob­al game exports. This may sub­vert the impres­sion of most peo­ple. Most of our cus­tomers are still Chi­nese game com­pa­nies, which is why we set up offices in Chi­na. But we don’t work direct­ly with users in China.

Inter­views have been trans­lat­ed, con­densed, and light­ly edited.

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