The game industry is in the midst of a grand experiment to change the way people pay for, own and derive value from the games they play, and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin is at the center of it.
Lin’s past company, Twitch, helped reinvent the way people consumed games and made careers off them. The video game streaming platform became a breeding pool of online communities paying to watch other people play games, and breakout stars earned millions directly from their fanbases.
His new venture, Metatheory, a video game development firm working on games that incorporate NFTs and other Web3 elements, also explores the idea of reworking how players extract value from the games they play, financial and otherwise.
The company recently raised a $24 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, a VC firm leaning heavily into all things crypto and Web3.
The idea behind Web3 is to create a new version of the internet based around decentralization, where communities of strangers get together and collectively build things in the digital world with no clear hierarchy. This can be difficult, however, when making something as complex as a video game, which needs a great deal of coordination and effort to get the product to launch.
“We could have just made a normal game, but we really do believe in the future of blockchain tech for games and the ownership model,” Lin said. “How you architect a game that then can evolve over time with community inputs was really fascinating to us. And then if you are an early adopter, you can gain value over time and can grow with us.”
Metatheory is currently developing a game called Duskbreakers, a sprawling sci-fi franchise about outer space cyborgs that will unfold across webcomics, NFT art and video games that will allow players to potentially earn cryptocurrency of some real world value as they play.
The game, scheduled to launch in Q3 of this year, will allow players to buy in by purchasing an NFT of a character with cryptocurrency, which will ostensibly give the owner the intellectual property rights of the character to be used in almost any way.
NFTs are unique tokens stored on the blockchain that act as a proof of ownership of digital goods. However, IP laws are murky in this space and the transfer of ownership of trading an NFT does not hold legal sway in court like a copyright.
Duskbreaker NFTs currently being traded on the NFT marketplace OpenSea have a floor price of 0.3 ETH, which is currently worth over $550.
“What does it mean, now, if we have an ownership model, where we give up some control of IP? That is very confusing to think through,” he said. “And so there's a lot of curiosity, a little bit of, you know, careful adoption.”
Lin says his company will allow owners of Duskbreaker to do anything they want with the IP like create a TV show or comic or use it as their online avatar, so long as it is not connected to harassment, bullying, racism or pornography.
“It's very similar actually to the constant gray area that comes with online content with Twitch and YouTube and so on,” Lin said. “But for us, there are some lines that are very hard drawn, but I don’t think there is a best practice yet.
Lin hopes that the user experience of playing blockchain-based games will become more streamlined as currently it is a cumbersome process just to start playing many of the titles at the moment.
Players have to buy cryptocurrency from a third-party exchange, set up a wallet, then buy the NFT itself possibly from another party even before downloading the game itself. This means the market for such games currently is relegated to passionate cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
Ideally, Web3 games will eventually work more like free-to-play mobile games where players just download the app and begin playing then eventually begin to spend money later, he says.
But to get anywhere near mass adoption, the games have to be fun first.
“For many reasons, it’s not the greatest user experience right now. A lot of the games you see today, not the fault of the founders, they're just crypto DeFi networks with simplistic graphical layers on top, not super well thought through or terribly interesting systems design. But a lot of legit game makers that are very experienced have shifted into the space.”
Like most Web3 companies, Metatheory does not have a headquarters, but Lin is based in San Francisco.
