In an exclusive interview with Cryptonews Podcast, Amitt Mahajan, the founder of Pirate Nation and creator of Pirate Nation, discussed the evolution of gaming from Web2 to Web3, the challenges and opportunities in blockchain gaming, and his vision for the industry’s future.
Mahajan, a veteran in the gaming industry with an impressive track record, including co-creating FarmVille, shared insights on building viral games, the importance of community in Web3 gaming, and the technical innovations driving the next generation of blockchain-based games.
From his extensive experience in Web2 and Web3 gaming, Mahajan offered a unique perspective on the transition to blockchain-based games and the potential for lasting.
The Power of Permanence in Blockchain Gaming
A profound realization of the short-lasting nature of digital creations drove Mahajan’s journey into blockchain gaming.
He reflected on FarmVille’s shutdown in 2020, which erased years of player progress and creativity.
This event sparked his interest in blockchain technology as a solution for creating truly lasting digital experiences. “When I started Proof of Play, the initial impetus was this idea that the blockchain is essentially forever,” Mahajan explained.
“If you want something to last forever, where do you actually put it? … If I were to make a bet today that I could create something that’s going to last 1000 years into the future, I’d put it on chain.”
This concept of permanence is at the core of Proof of Play’s mission. Mahajan claimed that creating fully on-chain games gives players true ownership of their in-game achievements and creations, ensuring that their digital legacies can endure far beyond the lifespan of any single company or platform.
There’s confusion why onchain games matter. Here’s why:
Onchain games are forever games that can’t be shut down because the company that made it disappears or decides it’s not profitable to run anymore.
They are games truly owned and sustained by the community & players
— Amitt Mahajan (@amittm) April 9, 2024
Mahajan drew parallels between blockchain-based digital assets and traditional art forms, noting that NFTs represent a new form of digital art history. He said,
“The reason a punk, for example, has value is because it’s the first type of this permanent art. It’s like the equivalent of digital caveman drawings.”
The implications of this permanence extend beyond just asset ownership. Mahajan also envisions a future in which player actions and game histories are recorded on-chain, which directly creates a rich base of player stories and experiences that can be preserved and utilized across different games and platforms.
Prioritizing Fun in Web3 Gaming
I asked the team for this drop
Building onchain is still in its infancy and we’ve benefitted immensely from the clever uses of blockspace discovered by these projects
It’s reminiscent of early 2D and 3D gfx dev / the era of .plans
Def worth checking out the tech behind these https://t.co/4D5ffv8ZQR
— Amitt Mahajan (@amittm) May 9, 2024
While blockchain technology offers exciting possibilities for gaming, Mahajan touched on the critical importance of prioritizing fun and player engagement above all else.
He argued that many Web3 games have fallen into the trap of focusing too heavily on tokenomics and incentives rather than creating genuinely enjoyable experiences. Mahajan stated,
“We lead with fun first. Everything we do is fun first. [….] Our guiding metric there is retention, is how many people are coming back after one day, seven days, 30 days, 60 days, et cetera.”
Mahajan cautioned against relying too heavily on token incentives to drive player engagement. He noted that such strategies often lead to inflated and unsustainable user metrics.
He compared the early days of ride-sharing apps, where artificially inflated usage numbers masked underlying sustainability issues. Mahajan said,
“I’m of the belief that almost all the retention numbers in Web3 games with incentives are essentially false. […] It’s like Uber’s ridership numbers. Sure, when they were giving away free rides, the ridership numbers were huge. But they were also burning through billions of dollars of VC cash.”
Instead of focusing on short-term incentives, Mahajan advocates for an approach that first creates compelling gameplay with blockchain elements seamlessly integrated into the background.
He believes the ultimate goal should be to create games where players don’t even realize they interact with blockchain technology.
The Evolution of Game Development in Web3
Mahajan shared insights on how the development process for Web3 games differs from traditional game development, particularly in terms of community involvement and iterative design.
He highlighted the importance of rapid iteration and responsiveness to player feedback in the fast-moving world of blockchain gaming.
“The creation of our game is a dialogue between us and our community,” Mahajan explained.
“It’s possible for us to lose the plot. It’s easy for us to just not respond quick enough to ignore what our community is saying, not change our minds.”
This emphasis on community engagement and rapid iteration has led Proof of Play to adopt a development strategy prioritizing frequent updates and close communication with players.
Mahajan noted that the team has made over 80 updates to Pirate Nation in the 18 months since its launch, continuously refining the game based on player feedback and performance metrics.
Mahajan also discussed the unique challenges of balancing a blockchain-based game economy, where changes can have irreversible effects.
“The amount of effort we’ve put into economy design is just unlike anything we ever did with Web2, because there’s no recourse. If we mess up and all of a sudden there’s a huge amount of inflation and some item or whatever, we can’t unwind that, we can’t take that away.”
Notably, Mahajan envisions a future where the blockchain enables greater community involvement in game creation and modding.
“Because we’re fully on chain, everything, all the game code, all the game data is available to other builders. So they can take our game, they can fork it, they can remix it, they can mod it, they can do whatever they want with it.”
Technical Innovations: The Only Way Forward
Mahajan discussed several technical innovations that Proof of Play is implementing to address common challenges in blockchain gaming, including high transaction costs and complex user experiences.
He highlighted the development of the Apex chain and plans for multi-chain scaling to accommodate growing player demand.
“We’re doing 45 megagas per second. That’s a lot. That’s more than every L1 and L2 combined,” Mahajan revealed, discussing the high transaction volume on their custom blockchain.
“We’re building this thing called the multi-chain, which is we’re launching more than one blockchain… The idea is that we can keep launching new chains to increase capacity the same way that in Web2, we just launched new databases and new web servers in order to support more players playing the game.”
Mahajan also addressed common objections to blockchain gaming, such as high transaction costs and complex user experiences.
He explained how Proof of Play is working to solve these issues through innovations like gasless transaction relaying and seamless wallet creation.
Looking to the future, Mahajan predicted a shift towards more mobile-friendly blockchain games and a greater emphasis on hiding the complexity of blockchain technology from end users.
He also expressed excitement about the potential for community-driven game development and modding, which on-chain game data and code could enable that, and also AI’s potential impact on the blockchain gaming ecosystem.
“We’re no longer building tools for humans. We’re building tools for robots,” he stated, suggesting that AI agents could soon become major participants in blockchain ecosystems.
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That’s not all. In this interview, Amitt Mahajan also discussed:
- His experiences co-creating FarmVille and the lessons learned from its massive success
- The importance of “dev cycle speed” in evaluating Web3 projects and teams
- Challenges and opportunities in bringing AAA-quality games to the blockchain
- The potential for AI agents to become major participants in blockchain ecosystems
- The role of streaming and spectator experiences in modern game design
- His vision for democratizing game development through on-chain tools and data
You can watch the full podcast episode here.
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About Amitt Mahajan
Amitt Mahajan is the founder of Proof of Play, the creators of Pirate Nation, a fully on-chain free-to-play pirate-themed role-playing game (RPG).
Prior to founding Proof of Play, Amitt was the founder and CTO of MyMiniLife (acquired by Zynga), founder and CEO of Toro (acquired by Google), and the co-founder and CTO of Rare Bits, an NFT marketplace launched in 2018 the same week as OpenSea.
While at Zynga, he co-created the game FarmVille (300M players, $1B+ in revenue) and served as the CTO of Zynga Japan. Before his entrepreneurial work, Mahajan was an engineer at Epic Games on the Unreal Engine and Gears of War.