This Medium article is a post-mortem of the AMA event held on May 24th. Oasys team invited Mr. Gabby Dizon, one of our co-founders, to hear directly from Gabby as well as core members including Ryo and Daiki about where this exciting strategic partnership between Oasys and YGG stands.
May 24th 10:00PM JST / Twitter Space
Speakers:
- Gabby Dizon, Co-Founder of YGG, Yield Guild Games & Co-Founder of Oasys
- Ryo Matsubara, Representative Director of Oasys
- Daiki Moriyama, Communication Director of Oasys
- D, Head of Game Alliance of Oasys (Moderator)
D: Hello everyone and thanks for joining us today for the second AMA event of Oasys. My name is D, Head of Game Alliance at Oasys team and I will be moderating the event today. I’m here with Gabby Dizon, Co-Founder of YGG, Yield Guild Games as well as Co-Founder of Oasys, Ryo Matsubara, Representative Director of Oasys and Daiki Moriyama, Communication Director of Oasys joining me today.
Hi Gabby, Ryo, and Daiki. Thanks for joining me today.
First, shall we casually start with a brief introduction about yourself? Let’s start with Gabby, then Ryo, then Daiki.
Gabby: My name is Gabby Dizon and I’m from the Philippines. I’ve been in the game industry since 2003, discovered Eth and smart contract in 2017. I’ve been in NFT since 2018 and started YGG from 2020.
Ryo: I’m Ryo Matsubara, Director of Oasys PTE LTD, which is incorporated in Singapore. I was previously working at a company called “doublejump.tokyo”, a publisher of one of the first blockchain games, My Crypto Heroes, and before that I was with a company called “gumi Cryptos”, a Japanese mobile game company which also runs its own crypto fund. Before that I was a consultant at Accenture. That’s my career background.
Daiki: Hi everyone. My name is Daiki, and I am in charge of whatever I could do for this amazing project. Until recently, I was the CEO of a crypto startup that utilizes tokens as an incentive to solve social problems, but I joined Oasys because I was convinced that Oasys’ technology would greatly advance the crypto ecosystem. Great to be here.
D: Thank you very much. Personally, I’m very honored to be with Gabby tonight and I really appreciate you for making yourself available.
During the session today, we will be discussing several topics, through which we could share our visions and some stories to help our community members understand more about Oasys and this time with YGG as well! YGG is one of the strategic partners of Oasys and we are designing various collaborative strategies to make this strategic tie work with the fullest potential.
We have two sessions for tonight. First we will go through rather basic topics to discuss strategic vision and collaborations between Oasys and YGG with direct comments from tonight’s speakers and we can go through selected community questions together.
So as we go into more detailed discussions, let’s start by introducing YGG and Oasys. Maybe Gabby you can start by briefly introducing YGG and some latest updates? Then, Ryo can briefly introduce Oasys after you.
Brief introduction of YGG and Oasys
Gabby: Brief background on YGG, or Yield Guild Games, a decentralized gaming guild acquiring non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that generate rewards from active play in blockchain games. We started as a P2E guild in 2020. YGG’s mission is to onboard millions of players around the world to the “play-to-earn” revolution that brings the benefits of blockchain technology to those who need them the most. When Axie Infinity came out, I noticed that there were a lot of people in the Philippines who were playing the game during the lockdown, playing to earn some money via earning SLP or breeding Axies. But they didn’t have access to the NFTs to be able to play, so we started up what is now known as scholarship program, amassing a lot of NFTs and lending them out so that people who want to play NFT-based games can have access to them even if they can’t afford to play. As of May 2022, the YGG network has over 30,000 scholars present in 28+ countries, and is also building out a network of hyperlocal regional subDAOs. We’ve invested in assets of over 40 games. A lot of these games haven’t been released yet. For example, we have land in Sandbox, cars in Rave Racing, ships, comets, planets, and lots of different things in different games. Basically we want to make the virtual worlds’ economies accessible and gather communities around to play them so these splitters and web3 games are what we are focusing on. Think of YGG as a community layer on top. Having a guild, YGG, will make games available to anyone around the world.
D: Great. It’s exciting to have YGG on-boarded onto the Oasys ecosystem. Then Ryo, would you like to go through what Oasys is all about?
Ryo: Oasys is a blockchain designed specifically for gaming and for the mainstream adoption of blockchain games. Oasys blockchain has two layers: Hub Layer (Layer 1) and Verse Layer (Layer 2). Hub Layer is a POS EMV-compatible blockchain and Verse Layer is a content layer where companies, Verse-Builders, build their respective “Verses” with original contents and brands as they like. Verse Layer currently uses a roll-up solution. Verse Layer provides strong UI/UX through charging zero gas fee for users and instant transaction speed, which we strongly believe are minimum requirements for mainstream adoption of blockchain games. We are also supported and backed by strong partners like Sega, Bandai Namco, etc., which you can check out at our Whitepaper. Please don’t forget to have a look at our Whitepaper! (Oasys Whitepaper: https://docs.oasys.games/docs/whitepaper/intro)
D: Thank you very much. I can see where the mutual motivation to partner with each other could come from already but let’s touch upon that topic slightly later and first I might have to ask Gabby about the rationale on why he decided to become one of the co-founding members of Oasys.
Gabby: Yeah, so first of all, I met three of the members from the double jump team back in 2018. It was while I was attending Non Fungible Tokyo. It was just really great to see all of the progress the team had made on My Crypto Heroes, which was basically the top blockchain game back then. So when I heard that Ryo and the team were making Oasys, I was really very excited to come on-board, especially knowing that it would be the gateway for a lot of traditional Japanese game companies and IP to enter the blockchain. In addition, for developers, there will always be trade-offs in choosing the right blockchain to build on and each one is focused on solving different challenges and optimizing certain features. Oasys is focused on improving user experience for gamers through scalability while also reducing environmental impact. The Oasys Team has great technical expertise and a team of advisors with deep roots in the gaming space.
D: Thank you indeed. I also agree that it is crucial to have the right features and designs that could serve the specific needs for blockchain games resulting in the maximized level of user experience.
Then we can move onto the next topic. It’s about the vision of the strategic partnership between YGG and Oasys, which I think many of our community members are keen to find out.
Gabby: Sure, so first of all, we are honored to be one of the first validators for Oasys as a community that really supports the blockchain gaming space. We want to support by being a validator. Running a validator is an important role, and demonstrates our aligned interests to support the blockchain gaming ecosystem. The role of the OASYS blockchain validators is to secure and verify the transactions of the P2E games built on the chain. So it’s a huge huge honor for us to do so. And yeah, we want to be a partner if there are any games that Oasys wants to bring out to the rest of the world. YGG wants to be the guild to help take us there.
YGG also welcomes the opportunity to support infrastructure and tech innovation in web 3.0 that will support the ecosystem. We’re excited about the Oasys blockchain as it will support various Japan-based P2E games coming to market, and provides a secure and more environmentally friendly blockchain alternative for games.
D: Thank you. Oasys team is indeed excited to welcome further collaboration with YGG through our partnership!
Daiki, would you like to also comment more from Oasys side?
Daiki: Yes, sure. Oasys ecosystem comprises 3 types of stakeholders: 1) Players/users, 2) Developers, and 3) Investors. Some might overlap and some might not, but we believe players and users are the most important driving force to further grow and nurture the ecosystem. We believe that YGG could play an important role in bringing in new users and game players, who are crypto-native and game experts, joining the Oasys ecosystem.
D: Thank you both. Maybe I would like to dig slightly deeper into Gabby’s vision on gaming blockchain. Could you share your vision on gaming-focused blockchain and its implication to YGG community?
Gabby: Well, yeah that’s kind of a big topic but let me try to take a stab at it. As blockchain gaming matures, we’re going to see that a lot more people are going to spend their time in virtual worlds and basically build their digital assets. This is about the ownership of digital assets, whether you’re earning some tokens, getting some NFT’s, earning enough to buy Ethereum, or basically building your assets and your wealth in virtual worlds. This is what happened to me starting early, playing Axie and other games in 2018 to 2020. Although the games were kind of very basic back then in 2018 I was able to collect a lot of assets and the value of these has increased by a lot. Even now, as we’re entering a more quiet period in the market, there are a lot of really great products that are in development, and we expect that the virtual worlds that are coming online are just going to get better and better and people will be doing all sorts of work and jobs in these games. Whether you’re a fighter, a crafter, a blacksmith, a content creator or in e-sports teams, we expect people to find their creative jobs in games and virtual worlds and I think this will be where a lot of player communities will be spending their time to earn value in the future.
We see Oasys as the gateway to blockchain for major Japanese IP, which is something we want to support as Japan has always been a world leader in gaming and its cultural influence has had a huge impact in shaping the industry as we know it today.
Gaming is the best use case the world has ever seen for blockchain and I believe we will see 10 million wallets interacting with blockchain games before the end of this year. We’re keen to support infra and tech in the space that will create seamless user experiences for players, especially as we continue to onboard new users into web3.
Ryo: As I mentioned before, we are backed by strong Japanese IP holders like Sega, Bandai and Namco. They have a very strong presence in the world of video games. Our vision is that such strong IPs will certainly work in the world of on-line gaming and on mobile, and thus on blockchain gaming as well. In addition, I must mention that the important consumer base of the gaming industry within the age range of 20s and 30s grew up watching Japanese manga, and the brand power that our key partners have will play a key role in onboarding even non-crypto native users with the power of IP.
Three years ago My Crypto Heroes was the top blockchain game, but at that time, the peak DAU was 20,000 DAU at that time, then three years later, Axie Infinity has 2,000,000 DAU at the peak. So that becomes 100 times. This is 100x growth in three years. So in the next three years, we are expecting one more 100 times growth in the near future of the blockchain games. That means blockchain games will be bigger than the existing gaming companies because if it is going to be 100 times growth that will be like you know large DAU of the PlayStation and Nintendo switch too. So in the rich and growing industry, we’d like to put our presence in this industry. So every time like mobile gaming, console gaming and online mobile gaming in the early stage of them, Japanese ideas are very much effective every time. Also in the blockchain games after the early stage of the mainstream adoption, the guild will be very much important rather than IPs after the early stage from the mid-stage I think. That’s kind of my vision.
D: Thank you so much for sharing valuable insights.
Then, let’s move onto Q&A session. We’ve got many participants who participated in our Gleam event and left their questions. We will be covering some of the selected questions with tonight’s speakers.
Now let’s move onto the community questions:
#1 What aspects of the game do you plan to focus on in order to keep the game going for a long time?
Daiki: Blockchain game industry is still in a very young and fragile stage. We are seeing lots of experiments and challenges. Existing blockchain games are still very small in size compared to the conventional gaming industry.
As Ryo also mentioned, this tells us that every blockchain game should not compete to win market share within the current market, but to take the entire market growth into consideration.
We still need to explore which blockchain game is good and sustainable, therefore we think “variety” is more important than focusing on a specific area at this early stage.
This will also link to our primary mission to onboard mass gamers to blockchain by attracting a wider user base from the traditional web2 world.
#2 Do you think more game companies will join crypto games?
Gabby: So I was actually at the game developers conference in San Francisco last March and I had so many meetings with game developers and companies that really wanted to move to web3 or create web3 games. The common sentiment is that all of the fun, creativity and free-to-play were gone. It’s all around optimization now and the new open design space is in Web 3. So I do believe there are a lot of talents coming in, of course, and there are still a lot of hurdles to navigate. There’s some fan backlash on games and NFTs and I think it would be hard to port over existing IPs instantly. I think it will be a challenge to explain to the fans of these games basically why there are NFTs for those IPs. But I think this will eventually be overcome. We’ve seen this before with the advent of mobile free-to-play.
And yeah, people can get used to and once they see the unique value that different forms of gameplay bring, enabled by new technology; then people eventually will get around to it.
Ryo: Yes, my answer is 100% yes. As Gabby mentioned the GDC, Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which used to be a non-crypto conference, I observed about 30% of the booths were web 3, or crypto. Another example is us Oasys. As you know, Bandai, Namco, Sega are in, from Japan, and Ubisoft and Netmarble are in, from other countries too, so we’re the proof.
#3 Although we must appreciate all projects and games that will partner with Oasys, can you specifically share with us or give us a hint of the games or projects that you are most excited for?
Daiki: That is indeed a reasonable question. Although we cannot disclose much, we can make sure, first of all, that the team is working day and night to onboard great games and we are seeing many developers and companies onboarding our ecosystem. If I could hint, one thing that we are working on is that you guys will be able to play one title from one of the biggest gaming companies, which is planned to be released next spring. Stay bullish and excited!
#4 What are the strengths of the oasys and YGG partnership? Please let me know if there are any strengths in terms of security.
Gabby: Oasys is opening up their blockchain ecosystem to the gaming community. The Oasys L1ad L2 architecture allows game devs to build highly usable and eco-friendly L2s for games, which in turn provides for better UX experiences.
We’re conscious that infrastructure and scalability are major obstacles in web3 adoption — the gaming devs we work with and the player community we support can benefit from tech that enables low-friction/seamless gameplay.
So the way to think about YGG is that we are the distribution layer for web3 and NFT based games, especially with our entire network with YGG present not only in Southeast Asia, but also in India, Latin America, Brazil also in Japan and other parts of the world. If any game partners with YGG then we can spread it out basically to the rest of the world. We’re building a new kind of community-based distribution. For people who want to play blockchain-based and NFT-based games that’s what we’re here for.
Ryo: We are hoping to see the YGG community onboard the Oasys ecosystem as new users and players. Oasys provides content that those players can enjoy.
As Gabby mentioned, community is one of the most important aspects of blockchain games. That’s why we would like to welcome the YGG community into the Oasys ecosystem. YGG is the strongest gaming community/guild and Oasys is backed by the strong gaming companies. Wouldn’t this be the best combination?
As per our road to mainstream adoption of blockchain games, we believe there are steps like strong IPs in the initial stage to attract attention, then guild & community becomes more important for sustainability, but we definitely need both from the very beginning.
D: Yeah, I totally agree.
#5 What are your thoughts on the future of blockchain games?
Gabby: That is another big question! I would say that the space itself is still very wide open. We have a lot of people that are experimenting with the space we have. Some of the world’s most talented game developers.
Web 3 developers as well as economists trying to figure out how to make sustainable virtual world economies that people wanna be part of. And the amount of really talented games that we’re gonna see come out in the next two years is going to be astounding. Also I think it’s a great time to experiment to see what works to see how blockchain tokens and NFTs can uniquely enable asset ownership for players and see what kind of gameplay that can give people and how to give them lasting value. Millions of players finding their future jobs in the metaverse. Digital Asset Ownership and having a stake in game economies gives players new incentivizing participation in different ways. So yeah, the games are just going to get better.
Daiki: I like the simple definition of a game as “game is something you play”. With this definition, I don’t think of anything in your life that is not a game. I believe that blockchain is an incentive technology that makes each person a stakeholder of the “play”. So, we assume every daily action can be defined as a blockchain game in the future once it connects to a wallet. Apparently, earning something by doing something is much better than just doing, as it incentivizes more people to participate in the game, if we take one more step further. So we will see many activities that comprise our daily lives including sleeping, eating, talking, and learning to earn something, which can be categorized as a blockchain game, making the definition itself broader and wider, which in the end by concept, connects to Metaverse.
#6 There are big hit games such as Mario and Dragon Quest in Japan. In the blockchain game industry, what do you think is necessary for Japanese game companies to play an active role?
Ryo: OK so there’s two points actually. One point is someone like a large game company needs to take a role to lead the others. Companies like double jump.tokyo are consulting and helping large game companies. Actually double jump.tokyo brought Square Enix into the web3 world but it took two years persuading them, so that means we need patience. Keep talking to them, and believe in web3. Traditional game giants have their own restrictions with regards to their own IPs but we are seeing changing perception towards expanding their business footprints into blockchain. We are engaging with a number of Japanese game companies (and of course global game companies) and we need to constantly educate what blockchain is all about since most game developers feel skeptical about the technology itself mostly due to lack of deep understanding.
The second point is they need the model case of the success as a big traditional game company, not only the crypto native game company. Korean gaming giants like Netmarble come to us. Korean game companies are way more aggressive and faster. It is important to build the first success case, which in my opinion, Koreans have higher chances. If Koreans succeed, Japanese will also follow, then education and bridging continues, eventually creating a huge network effect.
#7 Many projects have problems with UI / UX and this one turns off new users. How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
Ryo: OK, we can say there are two perspectives as we analyze this issue. One is a blockchain itself, so that’s the point that we are trying to solve with our architecture, Hub Layer plus Verse Layer, which enables free gas for users and instant transactions. That’s the minimum requirement for mainstream adoptions.
The second aspect is Dapps including the infrastructure applications like marketplaces, explorers and wallets. We would like to welcome them into our ecosystem and we can be a bridge that connects traditional game companies into blockchain.
We are engaging and collaborating with builders to define the best UX for blockchain for games and games themselves. This is done under one purpose, which is to optimize everything for blockchain games. That’s what we are building and UX improvement is the most important aspect for mainstream adoptions.
D: Yeah I totally agree so it’s all about blockchain Dapps as well as all the related infrastructure that players need to have to actually play the game in a seamless manner.
Ryo: Yes, plus actually while the traditional gaming companies talk to web3 native companies so they also learn what the best web3 UX is.
#8 When and with whom did you come up with the Oasys project?
Ryo: OK, let me briefly go through my career journey. As I mentioned before, I was previously working at double jump Tokyo, Gumi cryptos and also a mobile gaming company and a blockchain gaming company.
As I engaged with various companies who were keen to build blockchain games, I realized that there is a common necessity for a blockchain optimized for games. Then we gathered a group of the people including a co-founder and engineer and the business experts from double jump, My Crypto Heroes and Crypto Spells who shared the vision and started building.
Also the timing was right because we’ve seen more and more people started using blockchain networks making normal blockchain become even harder to cope with the massive transaction volume that users generated by playing blockchain games. With more users, more developers were joining the race, including game developers.
Also, with the introduction of the various layer 2 solutions in 2021, we were fully convinced that we can use those latest developments to materialize our design ideas.
#9 What does Gabby want to do through Oasys? How does YGG commit to Oasys?
Gabby: Yeah definitely. Two things. One is that we want to make the games developed on top of Oasys available to our community that is playing these games. The second is for the developers that are building an Oasys. We want to give the full level of partnership treatment of YGG by becoming a validator to working with our asset acquisition team.
Our community is constantly doing AMAs. All of the marketing and the distribution across Southeast Asia, India, Latin America and the rest of the world. We want to do our best to really help make the games that are developed on the Oayis as successful as possible.
#10 Could you share with us about your team members and what their role in contributing to Oasys Game’s success?
Daiki: Currently many of our members live in Japan, and I honestly can’t think of a better team to work with.
- Nobu-san: CEO and Co-Founder of double jump.tokyo, in charge of blockchain technologies and development efforts
- Tamaya-san: Advisor, Founder of double jump.tokyo
- Ryo: Game/IP acquisitions and partnership
- Daiki (myself): Overall organizational management, Business Strategy, PR/Branding
- D: Today’s moderator, and the expert in Tokenomics, leading Game Alliance and Community Development
- and many more, other valuable talents who are aggressively building Oasys ecosystem
D: Alright. This will be the end of today’s AMA questions. Before we wrap up, Ryo, would you like to make an announcement regarding NFT.NYC?
Ryo: Yes, announcement. Oasys team is attending NFT.NYC in New York City starting from June 20, so let’s meet in-person in New York City!
D: Alright, so if you are a builder, game devs or player blockchain enthusiasts, come stop by our booth (with double jump.tokyo) and connect with us. We will be there for the whole event and we look forward to meeting you all. OK, let’s wrap up tonight’s session and again, Gabby, thank you very much for coming over and joining us. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you all!
Oasys team highly appreciates the community for participating in the AMA. We are planning more community events going forward as well as more AMA sessions with various figures within the Oasys ecosystem. We are proud to have such an enthusiastic community like ours and please stay tuned for exciting announcements we will be making, as we build and grow the Oasys ecosystem.
About Oasys
Led by a team of blockchain experts and joining forces with the biggest gaming company names to serve as the initial validators, Oasys is revolutionizing the gaming industry with its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) based eco-friendly blockchain. With a focus on creating an eco-system for gamers and developers to distribute and develop blockchain-based games, Oasys solves the problems game developers used to face when building games on the blockchain. The trifecta approach of the fastest network powered by the gaming community, a scalable network powered by AAA game developers and the blockchain offering the best user experience with fast transactions and free gas fees for users, readies participants to enter the Oasys and play.
Source: Oasys PTE. LTD.
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