Today, we explore what it takes to build the next big video game franchise powered by user-generated games. It's a daunting task as Epic Games paid roughly $320 million to creators in the past year in order to incentivize creators to build new experiences on its platform. That's enough money to develop and market a new AAA franchise every year.
However, that hasn't discouraged start-up studios like Build a Rocket Boy and OCP from diving headfirst into the space. Build a Rocket Boy recently closed a $110 million Series D round and OCP a $16.25 million Series A.
Our host, David Taylor, sat down with Sergiy Galyonkin, Senior Vice President of Publishing at Build a Rocket Boy, and Mike Atamas, Co-founder and CEO of Omni Creator Products, to discuss their companies’ approaches and what each of them learned from their previous experiences working on Fortnite.
We’d also like to thank Heroic Labs for making this episode possible! Thousands of studios have trusted Heroic Labs to help them focus on their games and not worry about gametech or scaling for success. To learn more and reach out, make sure to visit https://heroiclabs.com/?utm_source=Naavik&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Podcast .
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
David: Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, David Taylor, and today we're exploring what it takes to build the next big video game franchise powered by user generated games. One of the things we know going into the conversation is that funding a thriving UGC ecosystem is expensive. Epic Games, for example, paid roughly 320 million dollars to creators in the last year to incentivize them to build experiences on their platform.
Thanks That's enough money to fund a new triple a franchise every year. It's a daunting task, but that hasn't discouraged startup studios like Build a Rocket Boy and Omni creator products and their investors from diving in headfirst into the space, build a rocket boy, close 110 million series D round and OCP is 16.25 million series.
Today I'm joined by leaders from each of these companies who also happen to be Epic Games alumni, Sergiy Galyonkin, the Senior Vice President of Publishing at Build a Rocket Boy and Mike Atamas, co founder and CEO of Omni Creator Products. Welcome to the show guys.
Mike: Thanks for having us.
David: Thank you. So first let's jump into just how you got here today. I think the audience would love to know a bit about your background and maybe we start with Mike.
Mike: Yeah, sure. So I guess I got gaming with my mother's milk. My Mom used to hold me in her lap as a child trying to beat my dad's top score in Qbert.
So I guess I was destined to end up in gaming. I started my career as a lawyer and doing wall street law at a, at a big firm. I asked the way I wound up to Epic and gaming most directly when I got admitted to law school, I reached out to Epic's general counsel. He was the sole lawyer there at the time.
And I said, Hey, I love Epic. I love all your games. I just got admitted to law school. Will you have lunch with me and just tell me about being a lawyer? And he said, yes. And the first thing he told me when we sat down at lunches, don't go to law school, you still have time to anything else. I ignored his advice and then six or seven years after that, he hired me as the second lawyer at Epic.
And then I was in the game industry, eventually moved away from the legal side to the business side, and then in March of 21 quit along with my co founder and brother to start our own company.
David: That's amazing. So reflecting on that that decision, was it a good decision to go to law school or how do you feel about it now?
Mike: I would still play it out the exact same way, but I've given the same advice to every aspiring lawyer who has asked me for advice on going to law school. None of them have listened to me.
David: All right. It's I guess I'm a little confused as to what the right decision is. Maybe there is no right decision.
Mike: It's go and then complain about it for the rest of your life.
David: Yeah. That's, yeah, I think that's what the takeaway is. Awesome. How about you Sergiy?
Sergiy: If we're going back as when I started playing video games it was, Funny, my godmother used to work for like a restricted access Soviet era computer center, where you have to have like permissions and clearance to enter.
But I was a kid, so she would take me on into that stuff that process, probably some, I don't know, like super secure information and I would just play video games there. They had some cool stuff. They didn't have Tetris yet because Tetris was not developed, but they had I think Lordrunner and they had Kingdom Euphoria, which was my favorite.
It was one of the first strategy game I played, which was purely texts. And you essentially assign how much grain you spend on different things. And I get, got hooked and I want to make video games. Which was funny at the moment, because back then all programmers for women and all engineers were men.
And I was like, I want to be a programmer. And everybody like, okay, good. What was to be a programmer is going to be cute, but that has changed. And I joined Epic. I worked for board gaming for a while. I also created Steam spy and Epic was some people at Epic used to spy a lot. And they talked about it to me and at some point they invited me to talk to a team and I liked what Epic was doing. I was excited about Fortnite. So I joined the team and worked at Epic until recently and I left Epic in September 23.
David: That's awesome. You might've received a question from me like a couple of weeks ago, as I was perusing steam spy and trying to get some data for my own work.
And I'm just realizing now that you're the same, Sergiy as the one on steam. If
Sergiy: I did not answer, sorry about that. I was on location. I just came back yesterday. I was in Japan for two weeks.
David: On behalf of all business people in most studios, thank you for creating that resource for us. It makes projecting revenue a lot easier. So I guess maybe we can start off by diving right into the meat of the conversation. You guys both worked at Epic. Did you both work on Fortnite?
Mike: Yeah, we're both on the Fortnite credits.
David: Awesome.
Mike: So yeah,
David: So these two know each other already. That is another thing that I learned today.
I'm, I've already learned so much, but so I'm curious, having had that experience. What led to you coming out of that experience and saying, Oh, we should build a UTC game. Was it, is there a market opportunity you're seeing? Is there something that you think that they could do better that you think there's an opportunity to pursue?
I'm just curious to hear your, each of your thought process on it.
Sergiy: No, you left earlier, but I think we both were unhappy with the way Epic handles certain things with, in regards to UGC and Fortnite. And I think Mike realized them sooner. So he left before I did.
Mike: So when I just think about my own journey as a kid playing games I think one of the games that had the biggest impact on me was StarCraft and StarCraft came with a level editor.
And a lot of the StarCraft campaign was built in that level editor and I found myself, I had this moment of realization that I'm spending more time in the level editor than in StarCraft itself. I didn't have to go read tutorials. I didn't have to ask someone for help. It was such a natural extension of play.
That I started creating as if I was playing and when I've spoken to a lot of people, they've had the exact same experience and there's a bunch of open source games around the time. I got addicted to net hack. Net hack is obviously open source. I started changing the code mostly because I suck at net hack and I wanted to make it easier.
And I realized that the way I had enjoyed most games and the way most of the games we. That are generational games like Skyrim, Civilization. They're really heavily modded and the mods make them better. And it was that act of modding of taking something that is already built that you understand and reconfiguring that felt super powerful.
And when I just looked at the market, there weren't that many people that were saying, this is the workflow that we want to enable. This fan fiction for games where you have a product that you know, and you love, and you have a way to modify it, to take it as a starting point and maybe change a little bit, or maybe change it so much that it turns into, league of legends from Starcraft.
There wasn't anyone doing that. What people were trying to accomplish was a very different type of UGC, which is, Hey, we have these professional. General purpose editors, and we're going to make simpler versions of those general purpose editors for people who aren't sophisticated enough to use the full fledged unreal or unity or Godot as a very different type of creation that really inspired me and inspired a lot of people that I talked to about how to make games.
That's what we wanted to enable Epic was working on UEFN, which is an amazing tool, but it's directly competing with Roblox, not. The sort of creation that we were really passionate about that inspired us as kids. And we saw an interesting gap in the market to do something we had always loved.
David: Got it. So I'm really focusing on the mod aspect of building into a building into the existing experience versus having a separate experience that is leveraging pre provided tool.
Mike: I think if you just think about how people naturally express creativity, If they're not a professional wants a blank slate because they want as little Intermediation between their creative ideas and the finished product because they're professional they've done this many times You think about a kid wants to do fan fiction, right?
How many kids have read harry potter and then said i'm going to write my own fantasy novel about wizards in my own world Very few but almost every kid that's read That's right, Harry Potter has done some form of Harry Potter fan fiction. They've, wrote a short story about characters or they've done some interesting painting of characters in Harry Potter in a new way.
That's how you create naturally. You take something, love and you start tweaking it. It can be a minor tweak that you just do for the love of creation, or it can turn it to something that is its own standalone product, right? Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan fiction. And over time, it turned into its own standalone, standalone product.
In many ways, Star Wars was fan fiction for, curse our films and Westerns, right? So it's just this very accessible, natural way of creation that I think is fundamental to how we enjoy entertainment and express that joy as humans. And it was just remarkable to me that no one in the market was saying, Wait, there's this natural process that you could do in every other media, except for games.
David: Super interesting. Sergiy, anything to add in terms of, the opportunity that you saw?
Sergiy: It's interesting because the way I approach things is also colored by my experience, but my experience was slightly different than Mike's. So I started programming uh, I mean, it was like Programming over calculators and stuff like that, but actual real experience for programming I got was from a computer called the Tic Spectrum and the Tic Spectrum came with basic built in.
So you load into basic, essentially development environment. And even before you could. Play games. You had an ability to code games in that actually have a one was expecting. Yeah. And I, the ease of coding, the ability to just start making stuff was what I attracted me to a game development and what allowed me to actually make games because like then magazines would publish, listings of programs that you could just type in on the other spectrum and you would make and you type it in.
It runs and then you start picking stuff and it felt natural and you could improve. You could take a simple, program that you took from a magazine that was like maybe 200 lines long and you could develop into something more complex and it could be like even a commercial product at some point.
And I think what we don't have right now is we're missing that ease of starting part for a lot of people. Game development seems to, seems too intimidating. Like you're starting up and one approach is as Mike said, is to start modding existing games. And I think it's absolutely valid approach.
And a lot of people start like that. I did mod games myself. I created levels for Lazy Lazy Squad, for example. But another approach is just to start making stuff in an accessible environment that does require you to watch, hundreds of tutorial videos and I'm a game developer. I have.
Games that I coded, right? And I look at Unity or Unreal Engine tutorials, and they are really intimidating for somebody like me, and I can't imagine how hard it is for somebody who's I had no experience on server, just trying to start, just trying to develop. And I think one big part that our ecosystems are missing is ability to take other people's stuff and reuse it.
I think the big foundational piece for me when I started recording was I had all those tutorials and I had all those programs that were ready to use and I could just modify them and learn from just tweaking stuff around. What happens if I change the number here? What happens if I rearrange lines here?
What does it do? And that part you cannot do right now in, in in, in existing environments. You can still buy assets on the marketplace, but you have to be sophisticated enough to even know that there's an unrelated marketplace to begin with, right? And I think that's why people naturally lean to modding because modding is like that.
You could easily learn easier from other people by going modding, but it's, it shouldn't be the only way for people to learn to code and to make video games.
David: Yeah, I feel like there's an interesting philosophical question here, which is the sort of having ownership over what you make, and this is something that you see come up over and over again with Roblox and Fortnite is, people basically seeing what's successful and recreating it.
And and then making something slightly different and, and benefiting from the knowledge of I I know there's demand for this. I think what that clearly shows is yes, there is demand for people to work off of what's already been successful and incrementally improve it.
But I do think that, and maybe we can come back to this when we talk more about the creator ecosystem part. Is. How do you protect ownership? How do you incentivize people to be innovative without depriving them of the ownership when, someone else comes and copies what they're doing and we're in builds on top of that.
So I think maybe we come back to that in a second. The other thing that I think is interesting is that Fortnite was a very accessible creator experience initially, right? It was, you could build maps. Using your Xbox controller, your PlayStation controller. And so I'm curious, do you guys have a perspective on the direction that it's taken, which has become much more, it's become more technical in nature in order to be able to make the experiences that we're seeing today.
Mike: So I was a big fan of Fortnite creative, obviously. And I'm now only looking as an outsider because I left Epic before UEFN is released to me. UEFN is a better Roblox, right? It's directly targeting the same sort of creators that would go on Roblox and giving them better tools, higher fidelity. Which is there's a big class of people who want that who aren't quite ready to use unreal, who aren't quite ready to use unity, who want something in between and it can serve their needs.
It's a very different class of creators that, that we want to target. I think our approach closer to saying, what if you built fortnight, creative built fortnight within it, and then when someone went to go develop. They could actually just see all of Fortnite and Fortnite creative and manipulate it using those same accessible tools.
And of course, your Fortnite creative layer would have to be a little bit more powerful because it needs to be powerful enough to build all of Fortnite. That's essentially the approach we're taking. So I think in terms of their competition with Roblox, I think they're set up to win in the long term.
It's fundamentally a better product with higher fidelity. It looks better. The games play better, but it's a very different approach that I think the gap in the market for creators who. Don't want to work in a system like Roblox. They want a different way to express creativity.
Sergiy: Yeah. I always make, I think Epic Fortnight's UFN kind of suffers from a case of where they have two identities.
On one hand, the UFN is clearly targeted at people. That are more experienced developers. So it's part of it is Roblox audience. Part of it, I think, is existing a little Asian audience. So to be successful in EFN ecosystem, you essentially forced to be a game developer, like a full time game developer.
You have to start a studio and do all the grown up stuff, right? On the other hand, the business model is not exactly great for that. It's not what studios are usually used to. It's the business model is more tailored towards. Entry level creators, right? People that are in there for fun.
So I think that is a bit of an issue and I'm like, because I was on the monetization side of things at Epic and no, I'm not a big boy. I am not a huge fan of engagement based payouts for Fortnite. I think they're detrimental to the success of the ecosystem, but I think the tool set that you found is powerful.
And I think again, once they figure out what they The target audiences for that tool, I think is going to be great.
Mike: And I was just to double down on that. I think you're seeing a lot of using people. Behave in ways that are similar to what a professional studio would. So I'm seeing lots of people on Twitter say, Hey, I'm open for commissions.
If you need this done in UEFN and you're not sophisticated enough, reach out to me. So they are building that ecosystem of these sort of like pro supers, the sort of people who would have the fancy DSLR cameras, but weren't professional photographers, they're building out that ecosystem and those people are going to make really interesting games in the longterm.
And if I had to bet. On them versus Roblox, I think long term UEFN will probably dominate over Roblox, but it's a very separate audience of creators that they're trying to serve. And I think what Build a Rocket Boy and we are trying to hit.
David: Yeah. So it sounds like you guys are targeting more casual audience a more fan driven audience, perhaps folks who are less invested in making a living out of this and really more interested in having fun and being part of a community.
Mike: I would nuance that a little bit. I think the distinction is. The way we want them the way we're asking them to express creativity So I think if when you're working in something like roblox You are asked to express your creativity the way a professional does It's not a question of technical skill.
It's a question of the creative process The sort of people who want to be who work in roblox. They want to build an entire world from scratch They want to make everything bespoke by them. That's not what most people You the most natural creative behaviors. You're playing tag with friends in the schoolyard and you have a custom set of tag rules where you have house rules for your Dungeons and Dragons games, right?
You are taking an existing set of things that is well understood and you're recombining it in very unexpected ways. And by the way, this is how innovation in gaming happens. Look at Battle Royale. Battle Royale is you take a shooter, you add a ring of death. Look at how mobile has happened. Mobile is basically an RTS where you restrict movement down lanes and you change the economy.
Those sort of tweaks are what drives gaming innovation, but they happen through a very different creative process. People who are technically sophisticated will do quite well in our creative tool set. We have a scripting layer. You can open it up. You can change the code for the main game.
If you want, it's all accessible to the players. The thing is we don't force you to build everything from scratch. We say just. Take the world as is take as much of it as you want or as little as you want and then express your creativity on Top of that start remixing that I think is the key fundamental difference.
Sergiy: Yeah, I do is Mike I think At everywhere and boulder walking boy. We're taking it up one step further So I absolutely agree that most people do not make stuff from scratch and do not expect to make stuff from scratch like if you're shooting a movie and You create some sets, right? And you create, recreate some things, but you're not expected to make every car from scratch.
You're not supposed to create, set up your own outfit production for all the dresses for everybody to wear and all of that. Even if it's a sci fi movie, obviously a lot of stuff you have to do from scratch, but not everything and you often reuse things from other movie sets, you reuse stuff from other movies, you reuse stuff that being developed for other purposes.
And I think the power of our tool set in particular is we allow people to share and reuse other people's creations. We call the system stamps. And what it does is in essence is that anything you make, it could be an, a game item. It could be a character. It could be a game mechanic, for example. So you create a really cool weapon selection system, or you create a really cool character fighter system where you have a fighting thing and you could stamp it which.
Essentially place it on a into a library and anyone can access it. You can decide, you can say it's only for France. You can decide it's public, but we want people to make as much stuff public as possible. And if you make it public, anyone can access it and anyone can use it. So it means that when you're creating something cool and you want to do your own tag game, you can do it.
You don't have to start from scratch. We'll say I want to create a tag game. I don't care about the level much. I will just go on into a library that is shared and I will look at all the levels that could be used for tag that were created by other people. And I might find a tag level that was made by Mike and Mike make it made this level for a shooting game.
But I'm just going to take his level and maybe rearrange some stuff in his level and make it a part of my game. And then I want a tag mechanic, and maybe somebody already made a tag mechanic that is similar to what I want, but not exactly what I want. I will grab that tag mechanic as a stamp, I will place it at my level, I will tweak it a little bit to make it fit my needs.
And now I have a combination of things that were made by other people that I combined in a new way. And it's what people do anyway in other ecosystems. So it's like Most games reuse mechanics from other games. Most games reuse ideas from other games. It's just, they have to be recreated from scratch. And that takes a lot of time.
And if you have engineers making yet another version of Battle Royale from scratch, you have a lot of man hours being put into creating the same thing, essentially. Just from scratch in our case, because I can reuse other stuff, we believe the speed of iteration could be much faster because you don't have to recreate all this stuff.
And also you remove an issue of. People, they're sitting clones and derivative games as a people's student stuff. And you've heard this a lot of around Fortnite specifically lately because it'd be people DMCA in each other. And I'm not both loyal and like Mike. So I don't know, how legal.
What was it that thing that was going on with Fortnite, but in our case, it's built into the system. So if we take Mike's level and use it in my creation, Mike's is getting credited as a co creator on my thing. So it's gonna be well, it's a game made by Sergiy with contributions from Mike. And if I ever decide to make money from my game, Mike will get a portion of revenue from things I'm trying to make.
So I think it would allow people to collaborate with each other without necessarily going through the motions of setting up a true collaboration. Like my example, Mike gave you, when somebody is open for commissions at Epic in Epic ecosystem in Fortnite, or somebody is open to commission robots. You have to manage those people.
You have to find the best person to do the work. You have to talk to that person, which is fine. It's part of the job if you're a professional game developer. But if you're just a hobbyist. You don't want to manage people. You don't want to look for the best contractor and then manage them and then give them feedback and all of that.
You just want to go and grab stuff that maybe was made by somebody. And if you have somebody who is great at making characters, they would be just making characters and placing them as stamps and hoping that other people will reuse them and then they would, if they are in for the money, they would own personal revenue from all the other games that reuse the characters.
If they're in there just for fun. That's fine as well. They get the likes, they get social recognition, they, they get their profile elevated because they created so many things that have been used by other people and played by many other people. And I think it's a natural extension of how people cooperate.
We just try to remove what is essentially a non fun part of it. It's just the part where you have to. Recreate things and the part where you have to manage things instead of just building stuff, right? We want people to focus on building new stuff instead of rebuilding all the other old stuff that was done.
Mike: So actually that's a it's a very interesting. It's a very interesting approach and it's very philosophically similar to what we're doing. So we've We don't have a concept of stamps. We call them myths and for us every piece of content is Placed in a myth And each myth is atomic and dynamic. And so they're atomic because they're like apps on your phone.
You can load an arbitrary combination of them and they'll technically work together. The resulting gameplay could be stupid, right? There's no way to protect from that. It could be really fun. It could be really stupid. That's the person combining them to decide. And the myth can hold an arbitrary. Set of information, character definitions, and their quest scripts, map definitions, and their dynamic, meaning you can load them in and out while the servers running and while you're playing, and we've stuck to that data structure for our own 1st party game.
So everything we make. Is in one of these myths, everything your creator makes is in one of these myths, and it means that if you're a creator, you could say, hey, I want to take this and this from the main game, combine it with this and this that I made. I know I'm collaborating with Bob. I'm going to grab one of his myths and you've just slapped them together and it'll work.
It'll work out of the box with no additional technical assistance. What we think is really cool about that is going to open up new ways to create. So if you're not, maybe you just don't want to go and make your own stuff. Maybe you're essentially a really good DJ. You're really good at picking out pieces that other people made and assembling them in a way that is really amazing.
You can do that with no technical skills. You're just. Making a playlist essentially so it opens up new ways for people to collaborate new ways for people to create I think it's really exciting
David: Super interesting. I want to make sure that we have time to go through all you know, all of the things we're going to cover today.
So You know just to level set on where we're at. I think what we're going to cover is The sort of three different components that go into or four different components that go into, a UGC ecosystem, obviously there's the players, there's the creators, there's the tooling, and then there's the monetization aspect.
I think there's a lot of questions that emerge when you're thinking about the role or the economics of deciding whether or not to use stamps or myths, like you guys are talking about. I'm we'll get more into that in a sec. Just, but just to start, like players are the, the engine of every UGC ecosystem without players, there's no reason for creators to come in and make things.
So I'm curious how, what's your strategy for attracting that initial audience? How do you see being able to pull players away in this hyper competitive market of gaming?
Mike: I think the only way to do it, if you're launching a new UGC ecosystem is to go game first. I don't think people will come just for slightly better tools.
In the end, slightly better tools will win, but you want to track that initial audience. For us, you cannot separate. Creation from play, if you're playing the game, you necessarily have access to the creator toolkit, which we call creator lab and you switch over to it with 1 button.
So the initial the critical initial audience comes from the game and we were. We were very thoughtful, and hopefully we were correct, our early data says we are, of picking a genre that is hot now, it's in the zeitgeist, it'll attract a critical mass of players that'll engage and retain with the game, and then we'll both turn into early creators and developers.
The customers for our first generation of creators,
David: This might be a good time to take us through the full player experience. Tell us what is the genre? What are the themes? What are they playing? And how they convert to?
Mike: Yeah. So for the main game that we're building, we're the code name is project frontier.
It's a light survival action RPG. It's multiplying session based, right? You can think of it as hell divers meets Valheim. And, you come in, you play with your friends if you enjoy it and you realize, Hey, I did this quest, I think I could do it better. I think I have a better spin on it.
And you just hit the create a lab button. You go in and you can start manipulating that quest, change around what you want. You play it with your friends and you say, Oh, this was fun. Let's try changing this other quest. We can turn it into a storyline. And before you know it, you now have your own game built out of it.
That could turn into a wholly independent genre. Or you just stay making fun modes to play with your friends. That I think is going to be the journey for most people. They come in for the game. Realize that, Hey, this is basically. A Lego castle that's been prebuilt for me, but I have access to the Lego blocks.
I can change what I want. I can change the drawbridge. I can change these towers or let me just smash the whole thing and I'll turn it into an elephant. We think that's going to be the fundamental journey. And once that flywheel gets going, you'll have people who come in specifically to create because they see the power of the tools.
They see there's an audience that they can create for, and they just dive in for that.
David: Awesome. How about you, Sergiy?
Sergiy: I agree that it's going to be difficult to attract people just by the better tools. We've seen it happen, actually. We've seen it with Roblox. But it's a slow process and it's a long process.
It only took 20 years. Yeah. I think you should still focus on that. You should still focus on attracting creators because players Who's going to play it, who's going to spend money, what creators are, who's going to create stuff for players to come to. So I think that part should not be discarded.
Yes, the main game is important. We are working on a AAA main game. It's It's not what you'd expect from a a game like ours, and it's a separate product, but you'd be able to access parts of it and you'd be able to modify parts of it inside of everywhere. We're not announcing it yet. The name is out there, it's called Mind's Eye, but we are not talking about it much, so I don't want to just spoil the announcement.
David: Okay, that's fine. But maybe share us more about the player experience, if you're able to, of how You see players coming in for the main game and then trickling into the creator side of things.
Sergiy: For us, it's going to be slightly different because I think people will be coming into everywhere to play with to play the stuff and engage with stuff that was created by creators based on that other main game or based on the original creation that they just made in everywhere and I think it's going to be Most similar to Roblox and it's similar to Fortnite.
So in Fortnite, the creative community and the games skewed towards Fortnite practice mode, essentially. So you have the box wars, you have the last circle modes, and if you remove all of them, Fortnite creative is, doesn't have that. much else to offer because it's so much, it's so skewed by the main game and by what they offer.
I think Roblox is a much more balanced and thriving experience because Roblox offers a lot more things for a lot more players, even though it took them obviously 20 years to get there. So I think, and my hope is that everyone's going to be more like that. So even though you will come in and you'll play versions of Mind's Eye and game modes based on Mind's Eye, I hope that players will come and find more things.
To enjoy than just essentially modifications of the main game. We do have some most developed by us, by our team that are completely separate and we do have some WGC creators making stuff for everyone as well. So even right now, if you go to join builders beta, which is not designed for players at all, like it's purely for builders.
But we do have some. 20 something game modes in everywhere already that you could access it. I know they're mostly for builders to learn from. They're not for players to play. So I think for an ecosystem like that, it's for us, it's important. It's important to have a diversity of experiences. All of it, obviously you will have some experiences that are more popular than others.
Like it happens with Roblox. It happens for sporting games, happens with steam, but you can say people are coming to steam Just for Counter Strike or for DOTA, right? Same with Roblox. People are not coming to Roblox specifically to play like a Sonic recreation or the toilet wars or bad wars or something like that.
People are coming to Roblox because Roblox has a bit of everything. And I think for us, it's important that an ecosystem can offer Things to a lot of people. That's why it's called everywhere.
David: So it sounds like it's it's independent from the triple a game that you guys are building.
Sergiy: You would—
David: Go.
Sergiy: It's connected.
David: Yeah. Do you? So I guess going back to the original question though, like, how do you plan on Getting that initial player base into the game. What's the sort of from a go to market strategy perspective? How are you getting players in?
Sergiy: We are focusing on builders first right now. So we're trying to get the tool set that is good enough for the list to be able to quickly iterate and quickly develop in the ecosystem.
And. We are focusing on builders from underserved communities. So it's not just us trying to grab people from Fortnite and Roblox ecosystems because as you mentioned, people building in Fortnite and Roblox are making money. We are focusing a lot on people from Minecraft community, from The Sims, from other similar creative places.
And we are building a situation. We're not trying to go out with a big bang. We're not trying to get 100 million players into the game immediately. We're trying to slow it down to get smaller audiences in first, focus on certain game modes and audiences first, and then expand from that.
So if we can build really cool experiences for people that. So let's say playing Sims for the live simulation experience. If we can build experiences for that audience first, and we can expand from there, I think we can succeed. We are. Unlike AAA games, as a live service product, we are not under pressure to immediately deliver huge numbers because if you're coming out as a AAA game, the box product, it's 60, 70.
You have to sell a lot of copies in the first month and you have to deliver full experience in the first month. I think for us, it's more important to have an experience that retains players. At this stage, then the experience that extracts play is necessary, right? We want to make sure that whoever joins everywhere right now is having a fun time and is likely to retain before actually going out and spending marketing money on acquiring more users.
David: Excellent. So make sure that you have content within everywhere through working with existing creators and then. Then spend, marketing dollars once you have that critical mass of content
Sergiy: and once we have critical mass of content and more importantly, once we have retention numbers that will, I think the one is to have, a hundred million people join the game.
Play one game more than it's fun and leave immediately after that because it's just a lot of good marketing money and It's much harder to reacquire users to an existing ecosystem than to acquire them and keep them in the game in the first place
David: Yeah, makes sense. So you hinted at this a little bit though one of the scarcest resources in UGC is creative talent and Sergiy, you you said it already you're looking at Minecraft and Sims creators so watch out Microsoft and EA. I'm curious.
Sergiy: My point was about Minecraft and Sims is that we're not exclusively targeting Roblox and Fortnite. We are looking at the broader ecosystem, so everyone needs to watch like in mods for other games.
David: Yeah. Makes sense. So Mike, would you agree with that? Like that perspective that, there are my perspective and sounds like Sergiy's perspective of there is a fixed number of creators out in the world that platforms are competing over.
You essentially need to win creators to come to your aid, or do you believe that you can grow the total pie of creators?
Mike: I don't think creators are as scarce as the common wisdom suggests. I think the sort of creators who can work in existing workflows and tool sets, that's scarce, that's a fixed resource and it's very much a red ocean fighting there.
I think there's a large number of creators that are not served by existing tool sets. It just, it doesn't work for them. And I think just opening it up to them. It's opening up a tool set that can work the way these people want to express creativity will expand the pool of creators. They won't be, they will not be your first creators just because you have to grow that audience.
But that's the blue ocean where most of the interesting creativity will come from. So I think in the beginning to attract creators, you need to go after the scarce. Creator resource, the existing creator community that knows that, Hey, I'm a creator, I make stuff in gaming. And the only way to do that is to solve real problems for them.
Just, we basically, as soon as we could, we had real creators from existing ecosystems working alongside us in the products and we would constantly ask them, are we solving day to day pain points that you have in another ecosystem? What are your biggest pain points? What are we not solving yet?
And are. Or trying to hit that, but if you're just fighting over those resources, it's going to be a over that scarce group of creators that we have today. It's a very difficult thing to win. There's just not that many people that can take a tool that's similar to a unity or an unreal engine and make something interesting in it.
So you have to expand the pool of creators and that's long term. Our goal.
Sergiy: I want to say I absolutely agree with Mike. I think you can never have a, you can never expect a hundred percent conversion from a consumers to creatives just because some consumers want to consume and not always you want to write a story, even though you everybody can write and read now, but not everyone is a writer, right?
But everybody tweets or writes emails or does some, like create creative work at a time and that can be used. And I think. The accessibility of tools is super important. Remember the rock music explosion, like in the sixties and it happened to your combination of technological factors. We learned how to make instruments cheaper.
So rock guitars was suddenly more accessible to, a middle class person and they could be a gift for a kid instead of like an investment, like a music instrument used to before. And then we had multi track recording. So we could actually record that music and spread it out and mix it. And it allowed.
Rock music to become a thing and like music to become, and I think that is democratic and not just limited to composers that are funded by, money, right? So it applies to the music and I think game development is already quite democratic, but I think it could be, we could, It could be more done to make it more accessible to everyone.
And again, you don't have to create a full game. And I think that's a common thing between what Mike is saying and I am saying. You don't have to create a full game. You can express your creativity in game design by just Taking other people's stuff and remixing our existing modules and then that would be fun.
Like you don't have other, as a game developer, you have to create a 20 to 30 hours experience that is highly polished because you want to sell it for 60k or 60 because you want to You know, be able to make a living as a video game creator, as somebody who's making just stuff for fun. You don't have to do that.
It's the difference between tick tock and movie making, right? If you want to make a movie, that's going to be in a movie, it just has to be two hours. It has to have a high budget, has to have stars attached to it because otherwise people will not pay 10 and the movies will not show you a movie. But as a Tik Tok creator, you can make a something that is like 10 seconds and it's going to be fine.
A lot of people will watch it.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sergiy: And I think everywhere, compared to classic game developers, it's like TikTok to YouTube to movies.
David: Yeah, I guess if I was going to play Devil's Advocate, it's that TikTok, you just press a button and put the camera in front of your face, whereas At the end of the day, game development, whether it's as a creator or as a professional is still complex.
You need to think about game mechanics and placing objects in an environment. So there's still a degree of friction. I feel like we see that to some degree in the number of experiences that were created on Fortnite. I think last time I checked, there were, 25, 000 creators for a player base of, we saw a hundred million MAUs when, at its peak, it's probably dropped considerably since then.
But, Roblox is 1 percent of of players are creators. So there is a, there is definitely. A, um, it's not as frictionless, I'll say, no matter what.
Sergiy: And even with TikTok, it's not as frictionless as well. But going back to TikTok example, if you're a good dancer and you want to, show your dance moves to the world before TikTok, you had no chance of doing that, right?
With TikTok, you just set up a camera and you still have to have the skills to be able to dance or to be able to sing or to be able to talk about stuff, but all the other stuff. Is done for you. So you have the distribution covered, you have the filming covered with the modern mobile phones or modern cameras.
You don't have to do any of that stuff because it's all streamlined and easy. So you can, you still have to have, you still have to be creative. You still have to have something to say or show to the world, but all the other parts more streamlined and I think for gaming, I think it could be said as well, like you might have great game design ideas, but because you don't have a team to implement this ideas, or you don't know how to code, or you don't know how to create new characters, you can't express it.
And in an ecosystem that allows you to more, you could come to Skyrim and you could express some of your game design ideas, but you still have to. Know how to use a Skyrim mod tools and they're not that easy. If you come to everywhere, our hope is that you could express your game design ideas by interacting with our tools and I hope that you'll be able to express your character design ideas or level design ideas as well easier.
We are not solving all of that at the same time, but we are taking, one step at a time until, us We as an industry, not just as BARP, as an industry, we solved that and we made creation more accessible. I think Steam was a really important step because Steam made distribution accessible to everyone, right?
Before that, there was no chance for an indie company to ever be successful because you had to go and sign a deal with Best Buys and Walmarts of the world for people to be able to access your game, right? So Steam streamlined that significantly. Then you had Unreal Engine and Unity that made the processes of creating good looking games much easier, but not, we can do better that's what I'm saying.
Mike: I think the key point is what is the minimum quantum of interesting creation? The real innovation of Tik TOK and YouTube wasn't that they magically simplified the process of, Hey, I've, I'm now making a sitcom. They just said, no, a 32nd video is a totally valid form. A video creation, a three minute video is a totally valid form of video creation.
You still have to know how to work a camera. You still have to have a lighting setup. You still have to do your audio, but when you're doing that for 30 seconds, it's orders of magnitude easier than doing it for 30 minutes. With a bunch of actors in a studio environment and the same thing can happen in games.
It's already happening in some things. If you look at mod IO, for example, you look at the number of mods for totally accurate battle simulator. There's an enormous number of mods because they've very clearly defined. This is what the minimum quantum of creation is. You can pull this lever in this lever, go to town and it's suddenly super accessible to everyone.
So that's a big, a big focus for us was. Really shrinking down. What is the smallest quantum of creations you can do that is meaningful that you can share with other people, because that's ultimately what makes creation a really easy, you change just the thing you care about, take the rest for granted and go.
Sergiy: Yeah. Yeah. And I agree with Mike. I think it's a little bit sad about having a system built for you where you just tweak stuff. Like what, imagine if you had a, Mario game, but you play as a Goomba, right? It's probably not a good idea to have a 60 game based on that, but it could be a fun 30 second, a one minute experience, that somebody could build if they had access to the source code and all the models from the Mario, from a Mario game.
Imagine a Dune game and there's like a bunch of them coming out, but you play as a sandworm. Again, probably not worse a full 60 game, but it could be fun for five minutes. And it's something you can actually, this part, you can actually build it right now. We have a, somebody made a sandworm like creature, and if you just attach a player controller to it and you have a sandworm game, that's it.
David: Yeah, so it sounds so. So we're talking about sort of the change in form factor in terms of what constitutes like a consumer, a consumable piece of content in games. And this sort of brings up the question of discovery. So I'm curious, could you guys describe from a player perspective? What is the discovery experience?
How do I engage with a more like a smaller consumable piece of content? As a player in each of your games,
Mike: I think there have been attempts to make tick tock for games where you have a a stream and you just swipe up and down, but games just aren't.
David: I think High Pipe does that
Mike: Games just aren't consumed in that format.
Games are consumed within a larger context. So I think it's hard to make something meaningful when you're swiping up and down. I think the problem space is relatively constrained. And you basically have two options and we're trying to do both. The first is if people make stand alone experiences, they need a Netflix like discovery queue where you can search something or you get recommendations.
But these are stand alone experiences, I think the alternative and the thing that gets you the closest to having a tick tock style feed in gaming is Because everything is assembled in the form of myths and the myths are can be arbitrarily composed with each other. If you made a cool quest, there's nothing stopping us from saying, okay, next week's battle pass weekly challenges.
You have to do David's quest. It's a single tick box on our back end. It loads in. It's great for us because we get fresh content that we didn't have to build ourselves. But it's also great for you because you get the best discovery you can possibly get. You're now in, in front of every single player who plays the main game.
And if they interact with your thing on the match and screen, we could tell him, Hey, you played David's game. If you enjoyed it, check out his other creations. That's the best discovery you can do. And if you think about the ideal ecosystem is going to combine the sort of breadth of games on Roblox with the sort of things you're seeing in UEFN.
Because all of those practice modes, they're actually fun. There are a lot of fun that what they suffer from is their isolated practice modes. They exist outside of a context. If someone could build a cool little challenge that could then go into the fortnight main game, that would be amazing, right? So they ultimately for discovery, you have to do.
Both you have to allow people to pump content into your main product that is going to see the most foot traffic and you have to allow them to put standalone experiences into something like a Netflix queue—
David: But just sorry, just to play devil's advocate on this if you had 100, 000 creators who are all making pieces of content you can't possibly put 100, 000 creators worth of content into your main game.
At best you could probably put like 50 pieces of content. And so I'm just wondering for the 89, 000 or whatever, I'm terrible at math other creators who are not in, in the game, like what's there, what, how do they get?
Mike: There's going to be a large portion of creators that already have their own following and they don't need or want.
Discovery assistance, and or they're building purely standalone experiences, so so not every creator will want it. There'll be a smaller group that that does build something at the quality bar. They can go into the main experience that will jive. With the main experience, it will be a much smaller group, but you're thinking about it with the.
Kind of platform restrictions we have today, where there's more work to do to include it than just a person reviewing it to make sure. Yes, this meets relevant standards. Let's put it in the queue. The way we've architected the system. It's a single. to include a piece of content into the experience. They don't have to be there for a week.
They don't have to be there for a month. That could be here's today's daily or today. We've got five dailies that'll randomly come in. One will be from David. One will be from Sergiy. The other three are from Randall's and they can get shuffled very quickly. And so it turns into a review and it's, it turns into a manual review problem, which we can.
Down the road, automate and use some fancy machine learning to help speed it up, but there's absolutely no problem in pumping a ton of content. It there's no reason we can't have five in one game. If you have a three kilometer by three kilometer map and you have five people who built really cool villages, there's no reason you can't put all five in the map.
David: Is it going to be all, so is it all first party games that are. You're plugging content into, or is it going to be similar to what Fortnite and Roblox are? More like Fortnite of 100, 000 different iterations of the primary game each that can have custom pieces of content.
Mike: So, the architecture supports both, right? So we can arbitrarily pull stuff into our game. Creators can arbitrarily remix things if they choose, right? So all of the, we're building everything in. In our own tool set. So everything we have access to creators will have access to right. So if you become a very big, sophisticated creator, you can set up your own battle pass.
You can pull in other creators content the same way we pull it in. It's accessible to you as well. So every single piece that. We have access to every creator and player has access to as well. So we're hoping what we're hoping the long run, the steady state is we have our 1st party game, which is going to be large and will be a good discovery platform.
We'll have a bunch of. Long tail of creator content, which has usage, but it's not blowing up. And then you'll have several big games that replicate the sort of behavior that we show where they serve as discovery springboards for other creators. And they're like the league of legends that.
Never left warcraft 3
David: Segiy, anything to add?
Sergiy: Our approach is slightly different I think there's multiple amenities for people to discover games and we just need to cover everything It's obviously menu based discovery what mike mentioned this netflix Type of discovery where you have stuff that is popular and you have stuff that is basically Just to you based on the stuff you play is also social discovery Things that your friends have played or playing right now that, you don't necessarily want to play this game.
You want to play a game with Mike, not necessarily. It doesn't really matter what you're going to play. You just want to play with your friends. This is an important part that needs to be counted as well. We'll also have what's called an endemic discovery. Because you can set up portals anywhere into any game from any game.
We hope that first of all, we have our own spaces in everywhere social spaces and our game space where we will use to promote a content from creators, but also creators can promote and can place portals into experiences from into the other experience or experiences from the friends or the creative they respect, we actually develop an assistant that allow people to link.
The games that would allow them to share some variables and resources between them. So you could have a game that is developed by multiple people and expanded by multiple people, even though everyone is responsible for their own piece of of the game. And I think that would be helpful to the Indie Discovery as well.
And I imagine if you had, and we've seen this with Indie game developers on non Steam, where they share characters, but imagine they could share progression. Imagine they could share some other cool things between games. I think that would help them a lot. And there's also. External discovery, which I think is underappreciated.
And I think it's a big driver. So the Ability to easily link out into experience from from the game that anyone from outside the ecosystem could just jump in, I think is really important and it's been a big part of Roblox discovery success. The fact that you could just send the link to a Roblox game to your friend and your friend could just jump in by clicking the link, I think is important.
And that's the system that we hope to have. It's. Fortnite doesn't have it but that's a platform thing. They had to be compliant with Xbox and PlayStation and they essentially hamstrung the mobile and PC versions to have the same experience. We didn't have to do that. I think it's absolutely fine if some platforms do not support some features, then it's absolutely fine.
But I think if you're on PC or you're on mobile and you see a link to an everywhere game, you should be able to click it and just jump in.
Mike: It's funny, sorry. Cause I remember. You and I complaining about this to each other back in the day. And so 1 of the 1 of the 1st things we did was also solve the same deep linking problem.
Sergiy: Yeah, it's just such a natural thing, right? To have it's so annoying that. Sometimes games do not have it.
David: That makes sense. And so it sounds like you're both looking from a player perspective, the discovery experience in game is, this sort of Netflix turnstile experience.
Easier said than done, I would say, when we look at Epic's ability to highlight targeted experiences to players based off of their gameplay behavior, it's. Appears to be quite constrained. I'm curious. Do you guys have a perspective on what the difficulties are?
Mike: Yeah, look in any sort of discovery like that. It operates under a power law, right? And so you will have a few that eat everything. That's not the primary discovery experience we want. We want the primary discovery experience to be described. You come in and you play and you interact with something in the main game that is made by UGC creator.
And you just get told, Hey, this thing that you did, you had fun with, was made by David. Go check out his other work. That's the way to actually expose things. This is why TikTok discovery is so powerful, right? They give you things they think will be relevant to you in a way that there's very natural for you to engage with.
You don't go searching stuff on TikTok. You just. Go and enjoy. That's what we're trying to replicate as the first class citizen. I think you have to provide that menu based Netflix style discovery because you'll hear a word of mouth. Oh, go play this game. I need to be able to search it up. That's not a good way to find games that you'll enjoy.
Sergiy: Yeah I agree. I think end dynamic discovery where you essentially discover stuff while you play the game is more important than menu based discovery. But you have to have new base discovery. Menu based discovery in, in games is limited because essentially all you have, Netflix has the algorithm, they had it open sourced, you can look it up, but essentially it's a variation of cames clustering, pretty much.
And cames clustering is limited by number of by the data that you have and by the cluster that you belong to.
David: Wait, can you say that again? I, I. When does that mean?
Sergiy: It means that you you divide people into groups, clusters based on the affinity and they causes to each other. So if you have people playing strategy games and you have people playing mobile, playing say RPG games, they belong to different clusters, but you will have people that play both strategy games and RPG games, and they will have their own cluster.
And then you have somebody who's playing strategy games and RPG games, but also plays Barbie games, for example, and they're going to be in their own cluster, but it's going to be so tidy. That once they get into this class, they get locked in and there's not much content that can be recommended to them.
There's also amount of content that people consume in video games is smaller compared to what they consume in the movies because you watch multiple movies because movies are only like two hours long or an episode of the show is maybe 30 minutes to 45 minutes. An average game is 50 hours long.
So there's only so many games you're going to play. So there's difficulty in that. Especially that is more apparent on steam and seems like it is much better than it used to be, but it's still a bit of an issue. And so that's why you can't just rely on recommendation engine. Because recognition engine is going to be based on information you have about the consumer And that information is limited by the amount of protection they have in the ecosystem So you have to make it endemic and you have to make it social and by social I mean You Playing with your friends, but also somebody on Twitter you like shared a link to experience that you could play and you just jump in and play because not necessarily because you like that experience, but because, you trust that person's opinion.
So if you could, if every time somebody recommended you a video game on steam, you could just jump in and play. That'd be awesome. But steam is not afraid of free to play marketplace team is a paid marketplace, which, that's a reasonable decision. That's a choice. But I think having the power of just being able to try experiences, which would be extremely powerful.
And that, I think what powers Roblox a lot, you could just buy anything in Roblox. By clicking link and playing it immediately and then decide if you want to spend money in it. I think
Mike: I think the other important nuance here is it takes you much longer to decide whether you'll like a game than whether you'll like a video.
I think as, as important as the Netflix recommendation algorithm is in the menu, the video start playing. And so you can just. See in 10 seconds. Am I going to this movie or not? And you can just click go. You can't really do that with games. You need at least 30 minutes to figure out. Am I going to this game long term?
And so you just can't get that in a menu based discovery mode.
David: I'd say on Roblox, it's a little bit shorter. I've seen some of these. Decay curves of players. It's 10 percent dropout in the first 30 seconds.
Mike: Nine year olds, they have 10 percent short attention span
David: Generation.
Sergiy: It's easier to get in, but it's also easier to get out, which is the point.
So that's not necessarily bad. If you have an ecosystem where people jump from experience to experience until they find what they're like, it's like switching the channels. You don't, if you surfing the channels before you find something that you want to watch. All the stuff that you just click through doesn't count.
Yes, you click through one channel to the second channel until you find what you want to watch. It doesn't mean that you disengage with those channels that you saw through, right?
David: Yeah. So we're running a little long, so I want to skip over to to monetization a bit and just understand what is the business model that you guys have and how does that sort of.
Connect to the creator ecosystem.
Mike: So I'll reserve the right to change my mind at a later point. Because we haven't publicly stated what our monetization is. So I'll do it for the first time here. Our long term monetization plans is the experiences, the free to play. Experience. Once we get out of early access, we'll transition to, to free to play.
We will control the platform wide cosmetic economy. So if you want a particular outfit that works everywhere. It only comes from us, and we'll have a battle pass and monetization for the first party game, and the creators get everything else, right? So they can essentially do the roblox style economy.
They get paid in the same virtual currency that players pay with, which they can then cash out to Fiat. And because we have the 1st party game and our own cosmetic economy, we're hoping to be able to take a much lower cut than roblox. Does and leave a lot more for the creators. That's our long term model.
David: Nice. Sort of a hybrid approach of both Fortnite and Roblox.
Sergiy: So we aren't talking about our position much right now because we're early in the journey.
David: You're series D and Mike is series A and he was willing to talk about it.
Mike: It's the benefit of being CEO. Who's going to yell at me? Exactly. All right. There you go.
Sergiy: Nice. Somebody's going to yell at me. Just I want to approach it slowly. The thing is we trust creators to make informed decisions about how the best to monetize the experiences. So we don't want to have any kind of engagement based payouts. When people to be able to decide this is also the things I want to charge for in my experience.
And that's how I'm going to make money. And we also want to. I will like a usual, an average checker system just split some money into buckets. One is a bucket for the creator and another one is a bucket for the platform. We want to split it into three buckets. So it's going to be a bucket for the original creator bucket for the platform and the bucket for all the creators that contributed to that particular experience.
So if you're. Making a experience, a video game inside of everywhere. And you use a bunch of stamps. It's going to be a bucket that is fixed as a portion of revenue. That's going to go to everyone else. The idea is that you don't have to worry about using ever using other stamps or about a budget for using other people's creations.
Take as many as you want. It's always a budget allocated for that. You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about anything. You just make the best experience you can, and we will portion the revenue to everybody who contributed to your experience.
Mike: I think Sergiy brought up a very Important point, which is creators know how to monetize stuff and they're much more experimental with it than we can be.
We did some monetization experiments and we were surprised by what we saw. So what people were the most excited to monetize about was, hey, make me a custom character. In your game or hey, this portion of the level. Can you redesign it for the obstacle course to be like this? I will pay you for it.
That did incredibly well. So as much as possible, we want to leave it to the creators to figure out what and how they want to charge for it. We just view our responsibility as providing the payment rails and making sure there's no money laundering and scams.
Sergiy: That's important. We have to move into compliance, for example.
So in our case, We would not allow random basematization because gacha boxes are regulated in multiple countries. But other than compliance, I think creators should be able to do what they feel is right for their games.
David: That would be a big departure from Roblox. There's many random randomized rewards in Roblox.
Mike: Don't tell the regulators. They're going to go after a bunch of 13 year olds soon.
David: Cool. Just wrapping up what are the key milestones that you guys are looking at in the next year? What or longer, like what sort of on the horizon that you're really working towards?
Mike: So we just, we wrapped up a big playtest in June.
We were testing out the core pillars of our flywheel. We're very happy we saw all the data we wanted across both play, creation, and the ability for creators to monetize. So now that we've we've confirmed our approach, we've confirmed that it works, and The core pillars are in place. It's about adding in more game content, polishing it, and then polishing up the tools so that they can be broadly exposed.
We're hoping to hit early access at the end of next year or the first half of 26. So it'll be heads down grinding until then.
Sergiy: We just launched a builder's beta about a month ago, where we gave access to our tool set to select builders. We have to sign up on the wait list to be able to access it. We will stay in builder's beta for a foreseeable future until we are confident that builders, creators can Create competing experiences in everywhere.
And once we are confident that it's the case, we will slowly and gradually open it up to the players in stages. We don't think that we would go with one single launch and it was a big bang. Like I said, we want to slow burn. We want to gradually grow the ecosystem because there's a big risk in my opinion, in attracting too many players.
into a free to play game and just burning through that because you can't you can't retain them. I think it's more important than that people are having fun and retaining than it is to have multiple, many people in the game.
David: Any predictions for when the public will be able to first access?
Sergiy: If you're smart, like sneaky enough, you could probably, get in right now and just pretend to be a builder.
But no, I don't want to give any time. It's really easy. It all depends on where we feel the builders beta in the stage where we can open up.
David: And then just in terms of being able to track your guys progress over time, what's the best way for people to follow you?
Mike: Probably the easiest is to follow me on Twitter.
I'm trying to be better about posting updates about what we're doing. So it's very easy. It's at Mike Atamas.
Sergiy: Yeah. We have TikTok and Twitter and Instagram accounts. So everywhere game. It's all there and we have a really good if you're a builder, we have a really good discord. If you go to everywhere.
game there's going to be a link to it Right now it's primarily for builders. Again it's mostly for people that just trying to build stuff. So if you're a builder, just, feel free to join discord and feel free to join the builder's beta. If you're not a builder, just follow us on social and we'll tell you when we are ready for you.
David: Yeah, and don't email Sergiy directly because he will not respond. I know from firsthand experience
Just pulling your leg. Thanks so much guys for joining all this super interesting conversation And i'll be following you guys all along the way excited to see how you do.
Mike: Thanks for having us
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