Los Angeles-headquartered Snail Games has become the leader in MMORPG and sandbox survival space, with titles like Age of Wushu and ARK: Survival Evolved. Now Shi Hai, Founder and CEO, sees growing opportunities in Metaverse and Web3. Hai joined Dean Takahashi, senior writer at VentureBeat, to talk about the exciting future that companies expect to see.
Snail Games has made that leap before, Hai said, as the first company to explore 3D online gaming. In 2002, they saw themselves as architects in virtual worlds, and now they are focusing their visions on the metaverse.
“Many others, from our perspective, are more concerned with devices, what kind of technology Web3 uses, and how to provide the best possible user experience around digital assets,” he explains. . “As we enter the age of the metaverse and Web3, what worries Snail Games and us is where the ownership rights should belong, or who should own them.”
Web3 is an opportunity to create a favorable environment for content creators, to attract more creators and users. The content creators are how the owners of the platform evolved, but the content does not belong to the creators. It can disappear at any hour.
“While we’ve been developing digital assets for over 20 years, I’m very happy with the feeling of those content creators, because I’m a very experienced gamer,” Hai said. “That’s why I happen to these interior makers when they lose the interior they spend a lot of time and effort on.”
In addition, there is something about content monetization, one of the benefits that blockchain brings to the Web3 table. In the company’s ARK forum, many users contributed to the content, not receiving the payment they needed to market the platform. The Web3 platform has the potential to solve these problems.
How to preserve the ownership of digital assets for content creators, and who exactly owns the digital assets, are the two most important questions to be resolved, according to Hai, and the NFTs about the puzzle. Despite the poor reputation of NFTs, he sees it as a trend that will succeed in reaching its potential. At a recent NFT conference, Hai has a front-row seat in the kind of excitement that NFTs will inspire users and customers.
“What amazes me is that different companies and different industries are doing all sorts of experiments in this new industry and this new trend,” he said. “They all want to know what users really think about digital assets and what kind of value they can make for users.”
The company has ambitious goals for its metaverse. Not only does it have its own game engine, available for both mobile and PC platforms, but they can integrate their 20 years of game development expertise into this engine to offer creators in such a large environment as possible, where they can make mods of their own. The framework is similar to Ready Player One, he said.
“In this metaverse project, every character and DLT in ARK will be transferred to a planet,” he explains. “On this planet, users have their own unique game, and they can even create and publish their own digital assets and cryptocurrencies.”
Each planet will represent a game form and an IP game, he said. On this planet, many digital assets belong to the content makers, but some of them may belong to other companies or even Snail Games. They are still working on how they can implement the transfer of digital assets between different planets.
The company’s long history with MMOs means it has the tools and technology to create the kind of user interaction and community interaction required by metaverse projects. They also master issues like cheaters and server issues.
“Technically, Snail is ready,” he said. “Our solution going forward is, what if the Snail was gone one day? Will our metaverse still exist even without Snail? Who are these digital assets that interior creators would have created without Snail? »
The NFT Argument
The basic idea of tools being sold and sold between players has always existed, Hai points out, whether it’s forbidden behind -the -scenes sales, buying from the game’s digital store, or exchanging between players. within the game. This market demand needs to be interpreted by NFTs.
But in the community, many people believe that strengthening the idea of owning digital assets will make more players visible to the game developer, but Hai thinks the metaverse will provide the exact opposite experience. .
Players are attracted to platforms where they have access to mods and create content; the problem is that they don’t have an open platform and their property rights are still very much in the air.
“The problem with digital assets today is not the work of creation, but there is not much protection for retaining ownership of digital assets,” he said. “That’s the big problem in the digital asset industry, and that’s what we’re trying to solve.”
To capture the entire conversation, don’t miss the video on demand.