EXPLORING WEB3 003
matthew thwaites - guild manager @bigtime
Watch: Youtube
Welcome back to another episode of Exploring Web3, the podcast that explores the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain from a unique perspective. In today's episode, we dive into the fascinating world of crypto gaming as we speak with a Guild Manager from the award-winning game, Big Time. Discover how they got involved in the gaming industry, the challenges they face in balancing player desires and game limitations, and the role of microeconomics in understanding the crypto and NFT markets. We also explore the power of influencer marketing, the importance of community in game development, and get a glimpse into the future of gaming. So get ready to level up your knowledge and join us as we delve into the intricacies of working for an award-winning crypto game.
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timestamps
[00:02:01] Amazing story of early years and high school.
[00:04:38] Teaching in Uganda and Kenya, traveling, college.
[00:08:49] Econometrics, machine learning, AI, microeconomics important.
[00:10:33] Long career in military with impressive experiences.
[00:16:24] Crypto, NFTs, blockchain, tech, marketing, data-driven job.
[00:20:11] Luck, connections, hard work, relationships in career.
[00:24:30] Constant updates and future plans amidst limitations.
[00:26:35] Game sales boost future development, playable now.
[00:30:59] Marketing role: facilitate feedback, bug reporting, player behavior.
[00:35:38] Gameplay is important, but community matters more.
[00:39:48] Slow word-of-mouth growth, big-time players key.
[00:42:13] Influencer marketing is expensive, limited in reach.
[00:44:52] Different levels of intimacy in content consumption
[00:51:15] Gaming platform aims to bridge web 2 and web 3.
[00:54:52] Exciting idea to focus on college esports.
transcript
Devin
How's it going, everyone? It's Devin Host of the Orcdao podcast. I have with me today Matt from Big Time. We're going to be going into his story, and his journey is how he got a job in Web Three. Really looking forward to it and we can get started. So, Matt, I'd love for you to speak a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Matthew
First of all, thank you so much for having me here. I am the guild manager with Big Time. What that means is I work with kind of ambassadors and communities that want to play the video game together, and then some of that is outreach. Some of that is just also being a point of contact for people who are playing the game and have some questions about how the game works or future stuff or marketplace stuff, and I try and be their main point of contact.
Devin
And for anyone not familiar with Big Time, can you give a little bit of background on that?
Matthew
Absolutely. Big Time is a multiplayer RPG style game. Think of it like a blend between World of Warcraft and Diablo. You're essentially set in a large overworld that's pretty extensive. And then scattered throughout that are these purple gates that lead into these procedurally generated dungeons. You run through the dungeons, you can solo them, you can have up to six people. Then occasionally cosmetic NFTs will drop in order to customize your character. One of the future features is you're actually going to be able to craft and make your own cosmetics as well. We have that integrated with a marketplace that people can use.
Devin
That's amazing. And we're going to get into Big Time and kind of the day to day as you see it now, really soon. But oftentimes the way we like to get started is from the beginning, Matt. So if you'd be okay with it, I'd love for you to get started with maybe a story in your, I guess, early years or an early development that helps us get a sense for who you are. So a question that I often ask is, weird as it sounds, who were you in high school? And maybe that will kind of bring us into kind of the steps that you've taken to get where you are today.
Matthew
This is going to be good. It's going to be like a comprehensive history. So I went to high school in Vermont. I would say I was kind of a nerdier individual in high school. I was on the cross country and track teams. I really just did that because I am very unathletic and poorly coordinated. I did that basically all four years and then took a year off after high school before I went to college.
Devin
That's awesome. Okay. Cross country was never something I've been good at, so props to you. You say it's unathletic, but I think the endurance that you've built through that is definitely something that takes athleticism and at the very least, perseverance.
Matthew
Yeah, it's one of those sports that kind of most directly rewards, I think, like, hard work, because the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. And there's kind of less in the way of tactics or being reliant on a coach to put you into the game in order to give you an opportunity. So it's pretty objective in that regard. But the downside is if you watch me, like, try and dribble a basketball or hit a baseball, it's like pretty rough, but it's been good. All right. Luckily, I have not had to pursue a professional career in either one of those sports, so it served me well so far.
Devin
I'm pretty much the same way. My background wasn't in cross country, it was in baseball. But I think we both if we were on the basketball court, we would be equally as not so cool to look at.
Matthew
Good. Well, hopefully we never have to cross paths on that one. Otherwise it'll take a long time.
Devin
Exactly. Okay. Well, Matt, but now that we kind of got a sense there, maybe we can go into it. So you were in Vermont, you graduated high school. You said you took a year off before we got to college. In the context that we're trying to really get the most influential pieces from where you were then to where you are now, I'd love for you to tell me about the next few years.
Matthew
So the year after high school, I was doing some teaching and doing some occupational therapy stuff in some IDP camps in Uganda and Kenya. And then I was over there for about eleven months, did a couple of months of traveling towards the end. But it was a good experience being like 18 years old, kind of out in a relatively new part of the world exploring and then just being with very kind of different cultures is a pretty unique perspective compared to where I had kind of spent most of my time growing up in the northeast of the US. And then at the end of that year, around the summertime, I kind of came back, had I got a summer job and then went off to college and did college for four years. I was an econ major and then again did cross country and track at the college level and then joined the army after that.
Devin
That's a great story this far, but I think I have two questions just to I couldn't resist. One is you took a trip, traveled abroad, I believe Uganda. And the other countries you mentioned were.
Matthew
North Africa, Kenya It was mostly in East Africa. It was Uganda for about seven straight months and then Kenya for about three months. We were setting up a school there in one of the slums and then traveled a bit to Tanzania, did Kilimanjaro, did Ethiopia for a little bit, got super sick. That was awesome. And then I think I came back in around July or so of man, I think that was 2009.
Devin
Would you recommend anyone around your age to kind of take that year off or at least put themselves in experience where they can go travel abroad and get new things?
Matthew
Yeah, I mean, each person is going to be a little bit different, but overall, I think it was super helpful for me. I was definitely looking for a bit more of kind of guidance and direction, especially after college, and I think kind of helped me figure out more about what was kind of more existentially important to me because I was able to kind of finally start living and doing things on my own. It's definitely not for everybody. Like, if I had kids, I'd probably be pretty nervous to kind of send them off to random parts of the world I had not been to and completely on their own. So it can be pretty concerning as a parent. So if you can't do that or you don't do it, I totally understand that one as well.
Devin
Right on. And then the second thing was I always have a habit of when people talk about their college experience and what they studied, oftentimes the easy thing to point out is always like, is what you studied what you're doing now? That's always what people ask. Maybe you can tune in on that. And then I have a follow up.
Matthew
No short answer, but no, not at all. I did econ and polySi. The kind of most relevant thing of what I learned in school was in college that I still apply today are things like econometrics and some microeconomic theory. I use that a little bit when I talk about things with big time in terms of how we market and how the game is built and how we kind of understand scarcity across a variety of items. But especially my I was in the army for nine years after college. I didn't really use any of those things that I learned in college, but they don't really teach, like, military tactics at most universities. So I had to do something a little bit different.
Devin
I can't imagine. And then the second thing that's a follow on to that question is oftentimes more than not. Even though most of the time what people get their degree in doesn't translate to the job they're doing now, they often have a few hints, a few gems that they learned in that degree that actually carry over. Even though when you look at them on paper, they seem non related. So it sounds like one of those things where econometrics are there anything else that kind of shined through that you learned there that you would pose was great for what you're doing now.
Matthew
I think econometrics, as we just discussed, understanding how to model human behavior or kind of any problems, I think the econometrics is a pretty basic framework for people who don't know what econometrics is. That's what we used to call machine learning back in the day, with some minor differences with regards to holdout datas and explanatory variables. It's basically the same techniques and obviously it's progressed pretty rapidly since then. That has been obviously pretty defining over the last few months especially. But really over the last eight or so years, it's been pretty informative of everything we do. We use AI inside of big time. Machine learning is obviously a huge component of AI. I think the next best thing is microecond, and understanding how that works I think, is very important for putting a lot of stuff in context with crypto markets. NFT markets really just kind of scarce things in general when you think about in game items like big Time and how users kind of ascribe value to them based on Rarity and how the Rarity and the price of that item on things like a marketplace is correlated with things like the supply of buyers in the market. A lot of that can be explained by just classic kind of microeconomic theory, so I use that still pretty frequently.
Devin
That's awesome. And moving into the next chapter, you said post college was service in the military. So I guess, first of all, thank you for your service. I come from a military family, even though I wasn't in the military myself. So it's awesome. But yeah, I'd love to hear about what you took away from that experience and what's most memorable there.
Matthew
It was a long career. It's kind of hard to narrow down to, I think, one single moment. So I was in North Carolina in the 82nd for a while. I did about two and a half years back at Fort Bending. I was in the Ranger regiment there, and then another about three years in First Calvary Division. So some pretty awesome units with some pretty incredible history. Overall, I would say that there's been a dozen or so people I've met that have been pretty impressive, pretty kind of life changing for me. One of the cool things was I had always wanted to join the army. I really looked up to soldiers in the military in general. And so it was kind of cool. Like as a kid, I was kind of like living out my dream as an adult and working with people who I truly regarded as heroes. And many of them are just that. So I think overall, that's kind of my main takeaway from my time in the military is some people are out there just doing some incredible things and they're never going to be not going to hear about them in the news, but they're doing stuff that really makes the world a better place.
Devin
That's amazing. I think that's a good thing to move forward with. One thing I would ask, similar to the college question that ties it back in, was what was something that you learned from the military, if any, that you can take with you today and what you do now?
Matthew
I think the army puts an incredible amount of value on teamwork, collaboration and leadership. Leadership is really a two way street if you can't really be a good leader, if you can't be a good follower as well. As I transitioned out of the army, my first kind of job with Big Time was I was an intern for three months, working part time. And I ostensibly reported to a kid who was 17 years old, super smart, super talented, but he was about half as he's about half my age. There was a good dose of humility that comes with that because I was learning from him like crazy. And I tried to apply some of the things I learned in the military side to working at big Time, because even though I was on a technical level, I think a little bit behind everybody. Just being a good teammate, or at least doing my best to be a good teammate went pretty far towards contributing to Big Time.
Devin
I love that. And I would say along those lines, being a good teammate. Something else I would throw in there is just being optimistic, always asking, be proactive and what else you could do just to help others if they're strung with things. Those are kind of core skills that aren't necessarily taught in school, but when you're in a team setting like the military or for me, it was like sports and other things. It's kind of just something that's just baked in to who you are, but it shines through whenever you're on. There is a vision that everyone is moving towards.
Matthew
Yeah, it's been brought up because I'm now again a student. Like, how do you teach some of these kind of core leadership or teamwork things? Because as this world, I feel, becomes increasingly technical, increasing focus kind of generally on Stem, how do you teach these other skills of how people work together? Because as you kind of go deeper down the academic path of getting more technically proficient things, you tend to sacrifice the working in groups. So it's something I don't think the school setting is ever going to be able to teach in the classroom. And so how you go about learning those truly important kind of life skills is unique. I think sports do a great job of it and I know the military did a lot for me on that too.
Devin
That's great. Cool. And moving on, I guess we could say I'd like kind of just like to pose it to you. Is there any point in here before we get to Big Time that you think really stood out between the military and Big Time? It sounds like there might have actually been a very small gap between when you got out of the military and when you started joining Big Time, but would love your input there.
Matthew
They actually overlapped as the kind of tail end of my time in the army. I started working at Big Time in my free time, so kind of finished work it's around six or six or so at night, 07:00 or so, and then would start working for Big Time until kind of later on in the evening. And very often it would be like up around like four or five or something like that and then start working on Big Time stuff that kind of coordinates a little bit better with people who are based out of Asia. So, yeah, they overlapped. I think the main kind of team turning point for me was I realized how important AI machine learning was going to become and how transformative that was going to be. And I wanted to get more technical on that. So I took a bunch of online programming courses. I did a specialization through the University of Michigan Online and Data Science and got a little bit more proficient. And then I think some of that kind of translated over to Big Time.
Devin
Awesome. And then for those who need a refresher, big Time is effectively an RPG that's a dungeon crawler. But I would say most notably, what makes it stand out from other games that are similar is that it's on the blockchain. It is a web three game. So not only did you know post military or even as you were ending it, AI, and machine learning is where you wanted to go by getting involved with Big Time. I'm assuming by association you were also an advocate for blockchain. So just because I'm curious, did you learn about that through your own research when you were in the military or maybe post after you got out? Or was that actually a common conversation that people were having? Like, just knowing a little bit more there for my own personal curiosities would be awesome.
Matthew
Yeah, it was 2021. So Crypto and NFTs were kind of in the news all the time. I can't remember the first time I heard about an NFT, but it was probably in the context of why can't I just screenshot that thing that just sold for $50 million or something like that? So the blockchain part I thought was kind of very interesting. I just think I remember in college I took a macroeconom course, I think, and it touches on currency and about how we value currency. And I remember thinking to myself, I was like, why do you even bother talking about this? This is so dumb. Nobody's going to invent a currency, man, I beat my own words like ten years later. I was like, oh man. Like Bitcoin and Ethereum were pretty regular on the front page of the news. I liked the tech part of it. That was ostensibly the biggest part is I wanted to get into tech. That was kind of where I wanted to move longer term, posted on some kind of alumni network boards, and then found out this connection to Big Time. One of the things that's core about marketing is it's very data driven, at least it is, I think in more kind of software or mobile or game related businesses, you really need to know what customers value and then you work to kind of provide that for them. And there's this great integration with data and a lot of that overlaps with data science and machine learning. And so it was a part time opportunity. I had never worked at a Big Time or excuse me, not worked in a gaming sector in my life before. And I was like, you know what, this is great. Like a part time opportunity, learned something completely new and then ran with it. And obviously I just passed my one year mark at Big Time, so it's been a good experiment.
Devin
That's awesome. And I love that term you used, experiment. I was probably going to ask this later, but we'll just go into it since you mentioned it. How important do you think that approach that you did, knowing where the puck is going to aka AI, machine learning, crypto and taking experiments on getting involved in the community or at least in maybe taking a job that you without that mindset may have not taken, how important is that?
Matthew
I think it's super important blockchain is go back like four years ago, nobody had any experience in blockchain. There's a lot more programs out there that will teach you how to write that in that language and be more proficient in it. But if there wasn't a substantial body of people who were ready to jump into the unknown and figure it out and move it towards an end state that they didn't know what it was going to look like, then it wouldn't have progressed to the state that it's at today. I really do believe that a lot of the technological underpinnings of blockchain can drastically disrupt a lot of industries we probably previously thought were untouchable or unchangeable. That's exciting. That's the very exciting part. And there's a ton of very smart people working in this space.
Devin
Totally agree. And so now I think we can get into Big Time if you're okay with it. Right on. I know you have a lot to say about it and we want to take our time to explain everything that you do. But yeah, now you found your way into Big Time. Is it an interesting story talking about how you went from, I'm assuming, an unpaid member of the community to an intern to where you are now?
Matthew
I don't find much of what I do in life to be super interesting.
Devin
In the context of someone who is looking to follow in your footsteps or perhaps getting a role similar to yours.
Matthew
It's a good man crazy that somebody would kind of look at this and be like, oh wow, I want to be like Matt or fall that same career. I think what is important is there's a degree of luck, I think, to anything. Right. Like, I knew some people who knew some people who knew some people that worked at Big Time. That was a big part of it. It wasn't just merit based, but one of the things that allowed me to kind of transform from being just an intern to continuing to work at big time and taking over things like the guild lead, I think was just kind of like genuine hard work and then having a good relationship, both with the customers we spoke with and then also with the people at Big Time. Being able to speak both of their languages and kind of find that common ground I think is super important. It's hard, right? Players want some things, the game is going to be able to do some of those things and they also want to do their own things. How do you find that kind of middle ground? In a cooperative discussion is very challenging, particularly as things like exogenous things like FTX or dropping crypto prices changed a lot of the incentives behind why people started or still play Big Time. So that's been challenging. I think figuring out how to work those two aspects helped me both in the military and then also helps it Big Time too.
Devin
Completely agree. What I found is the way that I think about this in my mind is like consumer facing and internal facing. Whenever you're within a company, the organization, and how strict or contingent what you're doing is held to a certain standard, whether it be goals on a quarterly basis or maybe goals in the amount of users that your product has. It's a different type of environment than how you talk to customers, what they like to be, whether it's how you talk to them, but also how optimistic you are and how almost in a service minded way you can respond to them, whether it's with questions or anything. So totally agree with that and think whether it's learning in the military or through your own experience, it's something that everyone should learn and it's a valuable skill.
Matthew
It's hard. Yeah. One of the idiosyncratic things about games is that gamers have very strong opinions, or at least a good subset of them. And there's a lot more gamers than there are people at Big Time or developers in general. So you're never going to be able to do everything that all those gamers want. Additionally, gamers tend to project their previous experiences onto the current game that they're playing. They're like, oh wow, when Fortnite I could do this and wow, I could do this. Why don't we do that in Big Time? But that's not really how the creative process works. You want to build something different. We don't want to make Valerint 2.0 or Grand Theft Auto 5.5, we want to make Big Time and it's going to be different. It needs to look a little bit different. And there's 400,000 people in our discord who all have kind of different recommendations. So it's hard to blend those two. And when we go in a certain direction, I think because we have that good dialogue with our community and community leaders, they buy more into the process of why we do certain things. And that's been important. I think it's been one of the driving things, I think, behind Big Time success over the last, over the last year or so.
Devin
That's awesome. And again, personal curiosity here, I'd love to ask this. What you mentioned, there was a balance between helping your community feel like they have an influence in where your project is going and also sticking to your own goals that you're set forth, that you've set forth at the Big Time team. There is the communication aspect and then there is the actual ability to help them understand that they have some type of influence, whether it's a large or a small amount. Is that also channeling into that being a mediator communication skill that you talked about or is that a different thing?
Matthew
100% since we launched our Alpha in April of 2022, we've done, I think, five or six patches and each one of those has added more content. It's rebalanced things, added new features. And so people are like, well, I recommended this, why don't we do this? For example, I hear pretty often, why don't we have player versus player right now? Or massive online battles. And part is just like, hey, we have to kind of get the core game out first before we do these other add ons. We have this one to six person party model right now and we do think we're going to end up moving towards PvP next. And I do want to release it on Xbox and Steam and PlayStation and have a mobile variant. Some of it just takes time. But when we do these AMAs or discussions with the community, we kind of explain like, this is why we're going with this right now. This is the kind of overarching vision. Then we're going to add on these other things in the future. But just keep in mind we've got 60 people between the artists and developers who are working all around the clock to get out that new content every four to six weeks like we have been. But there's just a lot more players than there are developers, so we can't always keep pace with that. So we just prioritize things.
Devin
Exactly. Running a crypto project myself, totally understand how it's crazy. It's a good thing and a bad thing in that whenever you have token holders or NFT holders or people that play your game, if there is an investment, they're way more bought into the project and those updates are something that they look forward to. Sometimes it can stir up some emotions. So I know exactly what you're dealing with. I'm sure with a game, we're not a game, but you being a game. The emotions that I felt are probably amplified whenever it's something that they do recreationally for hours, sometimes a day, if not more.
Matthew
Agreed. People have bought some stuff inside the game and that's always going to give you kind of more skin in the game in the future of the development. But one of the things I think it is notable about big time is even though we've done these sales in the past, we actually already have a game which I think goes really far. Like people can play it right now and if you've bought kind of our land equivalent of an NFT, which we call Space, then you can play the game already. So that goes really stinking far with a lot of people. It's not just fundraising for some game with some timeline that's going to be four or five years in the future. It's like you can actually see it. You can actually do it right now. You can still find some stuff and post it on the marketplace if that's what you're looking for. And we've got a huge player base then community group that you can reach out to and play with. I think they're pretty high quality group individuals, so I think that goes really far in the grand scheme of things. If we've got something people can play and enjoy.
Devin
And it is I've tried it before, it's definitely fun. So playing it with others or with the further developments that you guys are working on, really excited to see where you go.
Matthew
Yeah, it is exciting. Like, watching this game come out from Alpha to where it is today and where I know it's going to go is like watching something grow up. I was looking at some of the graphics of where we were at about twelve months ago when we had these private demos of what the game looked like. It was very rudimentary compared to what it is right now. There was basically only one dungeon layout. It was just like the icy, rocky terrain and the graphics were quite a bit detuned. The enemies were much more simplistic. And man, the artists and the developers have done so much since then. And then it's pretty exciting to imagine about a year from now where more stuff is going to keep coming out. It's also like our model is not Launch and forget, it's launch and then continue to kind of iterate over pretty regular periods to make sure that content keeps staying fresh and people have new stuff to enjoy.
Devin
With that, I wanted to switch gears a little bit more, Matt, into what your normal day to day role is. So I believe you mentioned your role as a guild partner. Am I saying that correctly?
Matthew
Guild manager?
Devin
Yeah, guild manager. So what in Big Time would be a guild manager role?
Matthew
It's a good question because what I first want to before I answer that, I need to say what a guild is in Big Time.
Devin
Okay.
Matthew
A guild is not like a guild you would have seen in Axie Infinity. It's a little bit closer to a guild you would have seen in World of Warcraft for people who played that Horde or alliance. I really think of a guild as it's a group of people you'd like to play big time with and that's about it. Whether or not you have NFTs or you're into crypto or you play Big Time or it's one of many games that you play, it's just people who play the game together and so they can be small. Some of them are like ten people, some of them are thousands of people. As a kind of day to day. I generally answer kind of emails, discord messages, telegram messages in the morning from about seven to eight, and then I'm at class or in school from about 830 until about 05:00 each day. And then right around 5530 I tune back in the big time. And I'm generally working till around ten or 11:00 at night. But throughout there it's a mixture of working with the kind of current player base and some modest amounts of reach out. And then there's some technical backside stuff I do with analytics and onboarding and developing some new products. That we're going to be rolling out for things like the ambassador system or the guild stats page, how we kind of track how guilds are performing and stuff. So that's kind of the general blend of the day.
Devin
That's awesome. And you did mention that you do have your hands in more than one thing, so wearing multiple hats as most startups do, in regards to what Big Time is building for guilds and other more community based products, it sounds like you definitely have some influence and are definitely someone who can provide a lot of value there. But would you say a majority of your time is spent just engaging with the community and specifically guilds on any feedback they may have or just anything that may come about?
Matthew
Yeah, it's one of the challenging parts about being in the marketing role is I don't develop the game, I don't build the game, I don't code for the game. And so I can point those communities generally towards our forums, in our discord areas where they can post the feedback or if they find a bug. We have a reporting system just trying to facilitate the systems we've already put in place. For example, we have a discord where there's several channels where players can report bugs and it creates a ticket. And our developers and QA teams look at that thing all day. They're like vultures above that thing. Anytime something goes in, they go in there, they kind of review the evidence, they try and replicate it, and then if they can replicate it, then they fix it. If they can't replicate it, then they generally do a little bit more interaction with the person who submitted the complaint to see if we can get it figured out, then we try and fix it. I can't fix a lot of those problems myself, so I just trying to manage those channels. But one of the things I do contribute generally to the team is who plays the game and how do they play it and why do they play it? Because I am so forward with the guilds and the player bases. I can see from user and player behavior, this is what people like, this is what they don't like. This is how they grow. These people coming in from Ads, are they coming in because their friend told them about it? They they trying it because they saw a streamer doing it. That really helps us kind of set the condition for once we hit the full launch of their game and we want to keep growing, like how we're going to open up the floodgates to everybody.
Devin
That's awesome. So effectively quantitative and qualitative feedback, right? So quantitatively, they may submit a bug report or you may be able to see where people came from. But qualitative these one on one conversations that you're having very often are going to be very impactful in the decision you guys make as you're developing what the game is now to, I'm assuming, a more global, I guess, like public launch or the next phase of what Big Time is doing at the very least.
Matthew
Yeah, I heard a funny joke today from a person who was lecturing on business strategy and they said, 20% of your customers generate 150% of your profits. And I was like, it takes you like a few seconds to realize the joke. And I was like, that's pretty funny. There's some people it's a blockchain game, right? Some people just bought huge amounts of space and NFTs and they are heavily invested in the game. And you have some other players in the game who are kind of more like your traditional scholars. They're there to find NFTs and then sell them on the marketplace because they kind of like the earning perspective of it. Now, we are not a play to earn game, but I know there's people out there who do that. You have to find a balance. You can't have an entire player base of scholars that just kind of keep extracting. That's a narrative I think we all gave up on collectively, in 2021. We want to be more of a traditional type game where people play it because it is sincerely fun and the earning perspective, if there is one, is going to come as a result of it's an ancillary reason of why they would ever play it. Right. It's not the main reason. It's just like, oh, that's another kind of unique feature, big time, similar to Way CSGO and Diablo. I think it was Diablo Three with their marketplace work too. That's probably more what we're going to look like in the future, but with our own big time flavor to it.
Devin
100% agree. And while we're on this topic, maybe we can go into it a little further. Yeah, I think the future of Web Three is definitely not what the play to earn cycle really was. It's not something where you can look at almost what I like to call like perpetual motion machines, where the ability to earn in an economy allows you that economy to be sustainable. It's not something that actually proved to be something that was worth doing and those that followed after. From what I've seen and from what most projects are putting forth, the glue that holds everything together is the game has to be fun. If a game is built with intention, and it's fun, and the user base actually can look to it as valuable beyond what you may or may not be able to earn in it, I think that is the foundation in which these blockchain capabilities can actually rise to be something that we all want to see. But that is stage one. I'm loving to hear your opinion.
Matthew
I agree. I view the fun part of a game slightly differently. I view it as it's the entrance to the party. If you don't have a fun game, you're not going to go. You're not going to even get off the ground. But I don't think the gameplay is the main reason why people play a game particularly big time, which is very social. I would say that the gameplay is at best, 51% of the reason why somebody would play big time. Think the rest of that is the community and people you can play with. And there are parallels to this. For example, I get targeted ads for RuneScape all the time. I have never played that game. That game, on almost every level, is way worse than any one of several hundreds or thousands of games that are out today from graphics or gameplay or customizability, whatever it is. But people still there's like 200,000 people a day playing RuneScape. And so it's not just the quality of the game. There's like the social aspect of it too, that keeps people coming in. That's something we're still trying to define in big time. I think I know what it's going to look like more in the future. It's going to be a very social game. You're going to have friends, you're going to be able to run and grind and it's kind of a less stressful type game, like an FPS. I think it's kind of more of a relaxed type game, but I think that appeals to a ton of people. But I think that community part is an understated thing that needed to be built into games if they want to really compete with the things that are on the front page of Steam or the Epic Store.
Devin
I agree with you. What I would say here is what you mentioned was people are definitely something that's impactful for a game and the social aspect in which you can enjoy this experience with someone else is going to propel it into, I don't know, the billboards, the high charts, one of the best games on Steam. The only thing I would add there, or maybe amend, is there's different tents to these social aspects of a game? There could be like you mentioned MMO, where you're making friends, you're building guilds, you're hanging out, you have community events, you have like raid night, you have times where you just kind of hang out. But another social component is not even social in a sense. It's strictly competitive. What about chess players or maybe League of Legends players who just solo queue? They're just trying to enhance themselves and that thrill of someone being on the other side of the table and competing against them is a social aspect in a sense, but it is always at the core of it. Other people, I think.
Matthew
Yeah. I wouldn't say it's a blind spot for me, but I am very new to it and how to understand it. The one thing I can confidently say about the way we'll build communities in big time and facilitate it is it's going to be different from everything else that's out there right now. It'll have some similarities with some other things, but we're going to do our own thing. It's going to be unique in that regard. It's part of the way where we kind of slow rolled out that feature of the game, how guild affiliation and in game friends lists and chats and stuff like that will come out. But it needs to be different. We don't want to just go out there and replicate another game that's already out there and successful. We'll never even get off the start line if we do that. We always need to position ourselves that we're doing something unique. Big part of that uniqueness is we can do things that traditional web two games cannot because we have that interaction with the marketplace and the ability to mint things onto or onto a blockchain or burn them back in. It's very unique that we need to kind of like lean more into.
Devin
That's. Awesome. While we're on this topic, is there anything that you think you guys as a Web Three game are doing very well in the space, in attracting new users? Whether it's maybe a certain part about your game or something that you've really been focusing on lately that you've seen a lot of progress in, I love to kind of ask that man without giving away all the secrets.
Matthew
The main thing that we're going to lean a lot more into is like slower word of mouth rate of growth. And I say slower because anytime it's like conversations happening between people, it's going to be a different it's just going to look like a different growth model. But what we've noticed is if you have a friend who plays big time or a streamer or a community leader, maybe they've got a discord with a couple hundred people in it. If that leader plays big time, then your chance of playing big time goes way up. And if that leader plays day to day, then your chance of playing big time, day to day goes way up. As opposed to, let's say if you run a Facebook or a Twitter ad, very few people will convert from that. And especially if there's NFT or blockchain anywhere in there that's going to be really hard to get your traditional gamers from Halo or whatever it is, to convert in. That is not getting you off the ground anywhere. So I think we're going to lean a lot more into this word of mouth growth because the results from that have been pretty outstanding. It's hard, it's very hard to kind of do those individual conversations, but I think it gives you a much healthier user base over the long run.
Devin
Yeah, that's so interesting because what you just explained to me, I've heard said in a totally different sphere and where I heard it was actually networking. When you're trying to build friends that could help you in further business relations or whatever it may be, maybe you just want to have fun things to do every weekend. The advice that I got was don't go for the spokes on the wheel, go for the hub. So the person in the middle who is someone who if you can make really great friends with, had a lot of connections themselves and that done multiple times, is how you really build a good network. What you're saying is there are these champions, I guess you could say that play games with a lot of other people, and if you could figure out how to get these champions to join your game, they could potentially, if done correctly, bring an entire cluster of other gamers along with them for the ride. And that really kind of took back to the spokes on the wheel versus the hub of the wheel analogy. So I think that's pretty awesome.
Matthew
I love that analogy you just used. It's super appropriate. There is a limit to what we've noticed. And if you think of influencer marketing, it's pretty challenging from a business side. I think it's almost too expensive at this point. You could have PewDiePie play your game. He only plays games for a lot, a lot of money. There was people who were I was seeing the amount that they were charging for a tweet over the summer. It was a hilarious list that was kind of circulating around. I was like, well that guy is charging half a million bucks for it. That's unbelievable. So you got to write it yourself too. That tends to not pay off super well. I don't think they really pay for themselves that way anymore. Whereas a game, it's so intimate between a modest streamer or influencer and their community. Whereas if somebody's got a million followers, that influencer can name a handful of their followers but not nearly all of them. And they may try out something that that influencer tells them to do, but that's not going to keep them coming back 30 days, 60 days or 90 days later. That's smaller influencer is. The downside is that there's a lot more people that way. So you got to do a lot more kind of manual outreach which some games are just kind of not willing to do.
Devin
It's definitely a long tail approach. Yeah, if done correctly, I think is going to be a lot more manual. It doesn't scale and that's what makes it sustainable. Do you hear that story a million times with technology also?
Matthew
Yeah. One of the upsides about the Big Time team is we're willing to try anything. Experimentation is kind of free flowing. Thought is good. As long as it is supported by data, then we can kind of do more with it. So this is our current strategy. But if in a few months from now we're like man, that didn't work at all, then we are going to try something else. And we've done that in the past. Right. One of the things I think you see broadly with gaming right now is particularly with web three gaming is there's a movement broadly away from Twitter and much more towards YouTube and Twitch because the people on Twitter it doesn't take advantage of the visual medium all that well. With games, which is so important and traditional gamers are more on Twitch. That's really where they learn about new games. That's where you kind of make things people aware. You can convert them over and then ideally if they like the game, then they'll continue to stream it and then bring in more people too. So you're seeing a larger movement away from Twitter as the main medium for promoting web three style games towards kind of more traditional areas.
Devin
I completely agree with that in how I see it. It's kind of like there are levels of intimacy that a follower can have with content. I think at the very lowest level of intimacy, it's just like a few sentences in a tweet. And maybe above that it's like an Instagram reel or a TikTok or a YouTube short. And then above that is maybe like a curated five to ten minute YouTube video which actually allows you to get maybe what a game is about, how to play it. You can see yourself actually doing these things and if you'd like to, but maybe on top of that it would be like a YouTube livestream or a twitch live stream where it's an hour long ordeal where you can actually see the ins and outs of someone playing it almost like you're just over their shoulder. And I think that is the type of relationship that people need. What I've also seen is hopefully, fingers crossed, Twitter Blue should allow functionality for more longer form videos to actually be posted on Twitter. So maybe we'll see how that goes. I think I've seen an upwards of, like, five to ten minute videos. But, yeah, if it can be similar to long form content like YouTube, maybe there's a chance for Crypto to kind of stay on Twitter. Because I know the Crypto Foundation, not the gamers, but like, the Djens and the D five summer people and even the ICO Craze, that was all on Twitter. So if we can make use of the platform, if it gets any better, I think maybe that would also be a good thing for us.
Matthew
On the flip side is how those social media outlets are broadly moving more towards gaming. I remember seeing a couple of months ago, I think I got an ad for Netflix Gaming. I was like, what is this? Wow, gaming is so big. There was an article that somebody leaked, I can't remember who it was a couple of days ago. But they're like, oh, there's a word of Amazon coming out with a crypto and gaming solution. And I thought that was I was like, makes sense. There's a lot of people who want to get involved with it. Gaming is still so big by revenue. It's still twice as big as music and film combined. So it's out there. And it's interesting that Twitter is one of those as well. They need to be more of a visual medium. It's still probably the best way to kind of get something to go viral. It's still the fastest way to disseminate information, but it's pretty awful right now for taking advantage of something visual or something live. You almost think that Twitter spaces should be able to do something like a twitch live stream, but you can't do it. Is it kind of outside the realm of technical possibility? Absolutely not. They could probably do it and I think we will see some more stuff like that to support gaming here in the not too distant future.
Devin
Exactly. And what I've often seen is the turnout for a twitch live stream or like an Instagram live is always a lot higher than a twitch space. So what I love to see in a Twitter space is the ability to actually have a camera on Face. I think it's just kind of human nature that if faces were being seen in a conversation, it would actually attract more attention and keep people's attention more. So I've been super interested in how much a total following someone has on Twitter and then how many people actually with the amount of announcement you give, how much actually turn out. So I think that's interesting. I want to get to kind of the next stage here where we talk about, okay, if someone wanted to follow in your footsteps, get a role in Web Three or however you've seen it could go into that, what would you recommend? So maybe we could start there. I don't know the best way to ask this question, but maybe the easiest way is if you had someone that was aspirational about Web Three, maybe a blockchain advocate and thought that there was an intersection between gaming and what they love about blockchain. What would you recommend that they get started in or what would you recommend that they do? Perhaps to get a job?
Matthew
I recommend they either get more training or degree or something like that. In computer science, if you have the technical background, I think a lot of that will follow from that. The marketing, the business development is all going to be built on that technical ability. A mixture of computer science and then ultimately analytics that comes from that is going to make you kind of the Swiss Army knife that anybody is going to want to hire and work with, because you can do so much with that. You can market, you can create, you can develop. And then if you maintain this awareness of the general industry that you want to move into, then you can start to realize that there are inefficiencies or unmet needs that you can build with something. But if you have that technical ability, it's so stinking hard, but if you have it, then you can go so far with it, and that's just once you have that background or feel comfortable doing it, then I think that's the easiest way to get involved with Web Three.
Devin
That's awesome. So in a nutshell, hard skills trump all, I think is the message for you, Matt.
Matthew
Yeah, I think that's if you had to pin me down and say one thing, I'd say hard skills number two is a desire to do it. It's right up there because if you have hard skills but you're like, this is all terrible, I don't want to do any of this, then you're going to go make something else. Between those two things. You could pretty much, I think, make anything happen inside of Web three right now.
Devin
Cool. Right on.
Matthew
Yeah.
Devin
I maybe want like, to turn it over. Matt, is there anything that we've talked about or that you had on your mind while we were discussing that you think is important to chat about?
Matthew
Because you guys are building stuff too. I love to hear about how you guys are seeing best practices for growth as well. I somewhat pontificated on how I think Big time can grow via word of mouth, but I realized that would get rotten vegetables thrown at me in various parts of the world or the Internet if I were to say, like, hey, we're not just going to run a bunch of targeted ads. So I'm always interested to hear kind of the flip side of what people think of that.
Devin
Yeah. So I think this goes back to that first, I guess conversation that we had when we chatted about what is this social aspect of gaming and how it allows growth. The one that you gravitated around was the kind of hang out with your friends, meet new people, and socialize. The thing that I guess attracted me to gaming was this competitive aspect, the ability to see your own improvement and by extension, have greater and greater levels of competition. That is what we're trying to go down at Rainmaker. Not sure if this is going to be cut out or cut into the pod, but it doesn't matter either way, I can still share with you what we're working on are tools that really focus around challenging others. So we're trying, much like you, to have more of a Web Two approach and then introduce the Web Three components. So we're actually building a tool that allows you to challenge others to certain in game activities. The first game we're building this integration for is actually League of Legends. It's not a Web Three game, but the tool would actually allow you to challenge someone else to a one week challenge to see who can get the most kills and assists, who can actually do the best in whatever position they play. Not sure if you're familiar with League, but it's a MOBA. So there's lanes, there's a top lane, a mid lane, a bottom lane. So let's say who can do the best when they queue for mid lane. This week, those types of in game challenges would actually be read by the Riot or the League of Legends API. And we'd be able to, once they connect their account, set up these challenges, record the data, and then see who the winner is. Whether it's light hearted competitiveness, just with your friends, or very intense competitive. Competitiveness because you're trying to measure progress as an esports team is what we're trying to build around because we think if we can get it right, it is something that people can get value out of. Our go to market is actually a little bit different than everyone else is doing in the space. We're actually using college esports teams. So our private beta actually launched this week and we're going to market with 25 division one universities here in the states and they're getting to use our product. We're sponsoring the first couple of challenges, and then that's actually we're hoping, getting us to a stage where after enough feedback and after enough iterations from talking to these colleges and what they need, we're at a product that is a little bit better for the more global market. And then we can go with a public launch that we give all of our token holders and then, by extension, everyone else. But right now we're really in that improving state where we're trying to make sure we have a polished product that everyone loves. And then after we have something like that, then we can add in web three elements, like, okay, now you can bet on these challenges. Now there's prize pools for these challenges. Now there's tournaments that you could sponsor. And then we can go beyond games that aren't just League of Legends. That's really what we're doing at Rainmaker. And that, in a conceptual basis, was made so that we can build a bridge between web two gamers and web three gamers. Our technology as it was previously was strictly for web three gamers and the trend in which web three gamers enter the space is directly correlated with the bitcoin price. So if that goes up, we're getting more people on our side every day. If that goes down, there's a literal vacuum because people's attention are being pointed in other directions.
Matthew
Yeah, no, that sounds familiar. I really love that you're starting with the college esports teams. That's a huge influential market. There way to find I think, the kind of focal modes in the space and then build something with that. I really like the idea. I didn't even realize that you guys are building it off of an API. That makes a lot more kind of evidence sense there. That's super cool that League of Legends offers that. I know we have a couple of veterans on our team who are on the League of Legends onboarding so that's anytime that there's kind of a development with that, it's exciting to hear the kind of origin stories of that with the big time guys.
Devin
And what I was going to say is what's very interesting is in our own way we've had our own ideas, we've had similar ideas on acquisition because we thought of these clusters like I called them or the people in the middle of the bicycle wheel as what we call them as club organizers. So they're usually the people who are the head of the esports team, maybe the captain of the league team, and they're the one that actually pitch this to the rest of their team and get those first challenges started and we've had a lot of success with that.
Matthew
That's awesome. I feel like whatever. People they end up converting, I think are going to be super committed to the project. So that's awesome. Best of luck to you guys.
Devin
Right on. And maybe in closing, Matt, any shout outs, any big events that's going on with Big Time or any closing thoughts that you wanted to give the audience?
Matthew
The main thing, I think, is to highlight the big time. One game of the year. Last night at the web, three gamer awards. Yeah. So there was the Poker Starter Game awards in December, and then there was the Web three gamer game awards in Miami last night. So we won Game of the Year for both of those. So I would be remiss if I didn't kind of congratulate the developers and the artists that kind of helped put together Big Time over the last almost three years. They've done an incredible job. They built something beautiful and it's going to be very exciting to see what it finally looks like when we hit Global launch and beyond.
Devin
That is amazing. I'm going to be honest, a little embarrassed to say, but I did not know that. So congrats to you guys.
Matthew
All good. Thank you so much.
Devin
Closing thoughts you'd love to give with our audience. Anyone interested whether what age they are in getting a job in Web Three or potentially just finding a job that's right for them.
Matthew
If you stay hungry with it and you have the technical skills, you're going to find a job, I think faster than you think. That's cool. Try and keep it simple, but I think that's the main takeaway.
Devin
Anything else you want to shout out? You want to out your own social media or anything like that?
Matthew
No. Just check out Big Time. Play big time on Twitter and then big Time studios on Twitch.
Devin
Cool. Matt, always a pleasure.
