Welcome back to the Games From The Block podcast. Today, George Tsagkarakis interviews Simon Kertonegoro, CEO of MyMetaverse.
Find below the summary of the interview, to learn more, listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or watch it on Youtube. You can also leave a voice message by following this link!
Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Simon, CEO of MyMetaverse. Right now, we’re putting the finishing touches on myMeta MMO. We’re going to be launching that on the 31st of March. And we’re also launching a whole bunch of new features to MyMetaverse.io.
We’re adding a withdrawal system, the economic system, credit card payments, and the Mint On-Demand system.
How did the idea of my metaverse come up?
I started working on my own little Minecraft project back in 2018. I was still working at Enjin at the time. One thing that I learned was that I’m integrating blockchain into the games is just the first problem.
The actual technical integration is just one layer of the problem. The more complicated and never-ending side of the problem is how you build game mechanics.
How do you design the games to be fun with a sustainable economy so that NFTS doesn’t make the user experience too complicated? When the user experience in a game becomes too complex, the immersion breaks, and we play games to feel good.
I want to make the onboarding experience easier for developers and the user experience better for players.
The current iteration is pretty good, but Minecraft in itself is not a very scalable platform. So we’ve decided to build our own games and make sure that we could show other developers how to adopt NFTS, and hopefully, they use MyMetaverse to do it.
What’s the vision of my metaverse?
So my metaverse is a metaverse explorer: an App store and a games library for NFT experiences. So on the surface, as a player, you can jump on there and have a look at all of the games available. It runs a fully custodial wallet, so players don’t have to learn what a seed phrase is and what a private key is.
Yet they can start playing games and let the NFTS drop into their account, like immediately. Kind of like how Coinbase and Binance work. Y
And then, of course, you withdraw it once you realize how important it is to have a fully decentralized non-custodial wallet at your fingertips. So MyMetaverse has both. It has an account where we can drop the items and has a withdraw button where you can move the items to your non-custodial wallet.
So it’s the best of both worlds. And, for us, it’s to take on board like mainstream users into the ecosystem. On top of that, developers can easily plug these tools in. And they have all of this full tech stack available to them, including out-of-the-box game mechanics.
Developers can plug in our API, use all of those tools, and have a lot of the hard work done. So the vision is that we onboard a bunch of developers and new users into the ecosystem, and once they’re there, we can start to experience the interoperability of games and being able to move through multiple games and have the same assets playable in multiple games and also have quests that run through multiple games as well.
How many people are working full-time at MyMetaverse?
So we probably have about 15 full-time staff and 15 part-time, give or take. All of us care about great results. We’re all just working together, pushing forward, trying to innovate. We’re doing things that have never been done before.
It takes some experimentation and that’s why we’ve been working for so many years to try to get everything right. What we’re building is what people want. Over the next few months, you’re going to see a lot of good news coming.
How many games are there going to be?
So MyMetaverse is a platform that any game developer can adopt. So, of course, we hope to see hundreds and thousands of games on there one day.
We’re building our games first, so we’ve already made and launched MyMeta Minecraft. We’re also working on my MyMeta GTA.
This is where we integrate the tech stack into Minecraft and GTA library, create our own servers and integrate the tech stack into them.
We’ve also built a custom-developed game called my Meta MMO, and it’s just looking incredible.
It’s going to have NFT land plots. It will have meta beings that can be bred together, kind of like Axie Infinity. Breed your axies together, and then the children take on the parents’ traits. Beings are fully 3D with trillions of unique characteristics that could breed them a trillion times and still never come up with the same meta beam.
How will these games share the same economy to an extent?
So my MyMeta Minecraft and my MyMeta MMO will share a lot of the same assets, NFTS. There will be many NFTS that can be usable in both. Minecraft has already adopted heaps of the Enjin multiverse tokens, for example, and my MyMeta MMO will adopt them.
MyMeta GTA, though, will have a straightforward NFT integration. Right now, we only have the Meta Citizen NFT integrated, and that’s a fantastic NFT that levels up and changes personality as you play with it.
We intend to integrate another thing into GTA, NFT Ramparts. So you can buy a land plot, own a house in GTA, customize the home, and invite friends over. The GTA mechanics will be pretty straightforward. You know, GTA is already a huge game. GTA role play is already super popular.
Talk to us about MyMeta MMO. What kind of game is this going to be?
MyMetta MMO is like an MMO Metaverse experience. There will be up to 20, maybe more different worlds. You’re going to be able to move through those different worlds. So one world will be like the medieval world. Another world will be like a sci-fi world.
We can keep spinning up new worlds as time goes on and we’re going to integrate a multiverse story through all of those worlds, every single one of those worlds will have NFT plots that players can then purchase and then build nfts upon.
And each of those worlds will have infinity dungeons that generate a new dungeon. Every single time we play, they’re going to have quests, lots of resources to farm so you can build your NFT plot.
So people are going to be having fun running around the world, and on the way, they’re going to be able to see all of the cool things that you can do with your player plots. So, you know, you might run by a really interesting shop and then run in and buy some NFT and this kind of thing. I think that’s the biggest problem with most metaverse experiences right now.
It’s going to have some like ability to create little games on there. Kind of like Sandbox does. And we definitely want to have like lots of events and really cool partnerships and that kind of stuff like Decentraland does. So we’ve taken inspiration from a lot of different places, kind of looked at what what works and what doesn’t and yeah, just trying to just try to chart a path forward for how people should be building on the building metaverse now and into the future.
When can we expect the first version of my MyMeta MMO to arrive?
We’re launching that on the 31st of this month. So it’s a few days away. The early access will be available to governors of MyMeta NFT holders. Owners will be able to provide feedback on game design worldbuilding community rules. They’ll have early access to all of our best content, like my MyMeta MMO and MyMeta GTA.
What kind of game is MyMeta Arcade, and when should we expect the release?
My Metta Arcade is purely in research mode right now. So what we’re thinking is we want to have many game experiences. Like squid games, these different little mini-games happen one after the other. It’s kind of like a party.
Do you believe Minecraft users have an interest in play-to-earn economies?
Yeah, we already have a Minecraft NFT server. As far as whether or not Minecraft users are interested in p2e economies, I think most gamers, when they hear the word play-to-earn, are very skeptical because they’re like, wait for a second, I can play games for free, and I can earn money?
So how does that work? Does the developer pay me to play games? And that’s a very reasonable question. I don’t know if the Minecraft world is interested, and I don’t know if the gaming world is interested. Yet I think the crypto world is very, very interested.
The NFT world is very interested. But I’m not sure that the mainstream has caught on to it. There’s a lot of skepticism, skepticism in the space. And we need to educate people further.
I have to admit I’m a fan of GTA and excited to see MyMeta GTA. Is this going to role-play with NFTS? Are we going to see a play-to-earn economy in there?
MyMeta GTA is already integrated with the blockchain through MyMetaverse, and we’ve already integrated the Meta Citizen NFT. So this is an NFT that changes personality based on your actions in the game.
So I have an NFT, its name is S.K. that’s my pseudonym, that’s my character, that’s my digital identity. As I play in the game, my NFT is augmenting itself. It’s becoming more sociopathic every time I play, and then I go and play another game, and then people will be like, why are you such a sociopath?
I’m like, I’ve been playing lots of GTA, so that’s already integrated, and that expands the role-playing experience even more because I have an identity, an NFT identity to players, and that is my better citizen, and that is all tied into the GTA story as well.
Are we going to see a play-to-earn economy in there? Absolutely not. It’s never going to happen.
Do you think play-to-earn economies are sustainable?
I think what is sustainable is that people make games to sell virtual items for the games. When a developer makes a game, and they sell a virtual item, the sale of that virtual item goes 100% of that sell. Currently, in the past in the traditional gaming space, 100% of that sale goes to the developer.
They use that to pay their team. They use that to grow their business. They use that for marketing. They use that to make the next game even better. So that is obviously not the best outcome for players because players get absolutely nothing but fun in return.
So I believe that the next stage of this is with NFT integration. Developers can sell items, players can own items, and then players can trade with each other. I believe that if that’s done right, it will expand the fun because people will not be paying developers 100% of the money for everything that they use. They will be paying the developer sometimes. They’ll be paying other players sometimes, and then the developer will get a small cut.
Even if you’re giving out a cryptocurrency, and you’re just printing more of that cryptocurrency to pay players, you’re creating inflation.
Haven’t we seen what happens when you create inflation? The price of the currency tanks. So play-to-earn economies are only sustainable if some people play, some earn, and some spend. There needs to be people spending for people to earn, and that’s what it is for me.
Anything you can share regarding MyMeta Tokenomics?
We don’t have any coin, but we do want to do a token eventually.
The thing about us is we don’t want to fundraise at all. We haven’t used any funding. We’ve been developing ourselves for four years just off our own money and of our own sweat equity, not getting paid so basically no one will ever be able to say that MyMetaverse took money from anyone, no V.C.s, no crowdfunding, no nothing our tokens were never used to fund our projects.
We might have a token one day. Likely that token will be on for free in exchange for playing our games, this kind of thing. But we actually need to build out our games first. We need to understand how the games can bring as much value as possible.
The biggest mistake that NFT game developers make is that they build a really shitty game and then give out a bunch of free money. Everyone can make money by playing this game, and then everyone plays the game to make money instead of having fun. That creates the most obvious bubble because the minute the economy inflates, the token starts going down in value. People stop playing the game because they’re only playing the game for the token. The token is now losing value. People are going to stop playing the game.
How do you feel about Efinity? Could it disrupt the NFT and games market?
Yeah. So, in my opinion, Efinity is the perfect NFT blockchain. It’s the only perfect NFT blockchain. The reason is that it’s been specifically designed from the ground up to house the NFT mechanics work on the blockchain.
Suppose you think about Etherium on the core blockchain. In that case, it houses the Ethereum Virtual Machine, imagine all of these cogs spinning just to run this EVM, and then on that EVM, you have DEFI, which huge transactions are being processed through it. That puts more weight on the virtual machine, which puts more weight on the base blockchain, making everything run slower.
So that’s the most inefficient way you could run an NFT blockchain
On Efinity, transactions will be a fraction of a cent, there’s no big EVM, and then there’s no DeFi to slow down the blockchain and have transaction fees skyrocketing. Also, Efinity is governed by decentralized governance, so everyone in the community that holds EFI will be able to vote on what they want to see next.
Are you using any of Enjin’s SDK or the Minecraft plug in?
We took our engine Minecraft plugin, and we ripped it apart because it’s fully open-source, and we completely redeveloped it for our purposes. Then we’re also using Enjin’s SeaShop SDK and the Java SDK, and then we’re also using Enjin’s platform with the API that’s underneath that as well. So we’ve integrated all of that into my metaverse.
Then we’ve created our API that talks to our games. And then we’ve also created our own SeaShop SDK and our own Java SDK to to run the game mechanics in Minecraft and in Unity. And then we’re going to make those SDK is available to developers that want to adopt Enjin via through MyMetaverse.
Anything you’d like to say to our audience?
Yeah, you know, we love working with the community. We’re very collaborative. Make sure to come down to MyMetaverse.io and then click on the Discord name the telegram link, join our communities, give us some feedback about the experiences that we’re providing, especially in my MyMeta MMO that’s going to be the biggest game we ould ever do because we own it.
We can do whatever we want in that. So we’re going to be innovating like crazy in there. We can’t wait to hear your feedback about it and your ideas for it. So we hope to see you there. Have a great day.