Mysten Labs Game Product Director: How does Sui asset ownership make the game experience better?

Recently, we interviewed Bill Allred, director of game product at **Mysten Labs, to discuss why Sui is very suitable for games.

He shared his thoughts on Sui's key innovations, which help developers bring the games they imagined to reality, and the value they bring to game developers.

The following is the content of this interview:

**Q1、****Can you talk about the characteristics of certain games that are particularly attractive to players? **

**A:**Game designers often refer to a framework called Bartle's Taxonomy. This paper was published many years ago and it describes four player types. This is a great starting point for thinking about what makes a game fun, or what draws players to play it. These four player types are achievers, explorers, socializers and a fourth category called killers in the paper. The name killer is a bit too aggressive, so people sometimes call it a competitive.

** Achievers are primarily motivated by progression, competing with themselves and the game world in order to earn achievements and level up their characters. Explorers are primarily motivated by exploring the game world, so they spend a lot of time wanting to explore all that the game has to offer. They gravitate toward open-world games, or games that don't have a set path and are more open-ended. Social is more about interacting with other players, and many casual games fall into this category, but you'll also see some competitive games with social coordination fall into this category. The last category is those who just want to win, they want to beat other players. **

Obviously, games and players are complex, so no game or player fits exactly into any of these four categories. But most games, especially those with large audiences, have various modes or gameplay that accommodate these different player types and have clever ways for the different player types to interact with each other.

**Q2、****What are the benefits and challenges of applying blockchain technology to games? Does it help improve the ability to design these four characters? **

**A: I don't think infrastructure is specific to a certain role, infrastructure is actually applicable to products such as games. **The earliest form of gaming was when people bought physical game cartridges from stores. They'll play the game, and when they've had enough, they can trade game cartridges with friends or consign them at the store for a partial refund to buy a new game. After consuming all the game content, you can also use the game to make money. This is a part of the game and an important part of the social experience as a player.

**The gaming industry then gradually shifted to digital downloads and free-to-play. **We usually talk about free-to-play on mobile, but free-to-play has actually been around for a long time. It's not just a business model, it's a distribution model. This model lets players try the game and then charges when they want to consume more content, which is a good model for digital content distribution. As a result, free-to-play has become the dominant gaming business model over the past few years. Game companies provide games for free, and then provide specific digital assets and experiences within the game for a fee.

**Other things being equal, the digital assets you own are better than the ones you don't own. **This is actually pretty simple, in my opinion. I got my start in the gaming industry at Zynga. We've observed people having a really fun time playing simple casual games, buying digital assets to express their personality, interact with friends, and enhance their gaming experience when they choose a game structure. But every game has a life cycle. When the game lifecycle is over, players don't really have anything to justify their efforts, and they can't keep the digital assets they've earned. I think blockchain infrastructure is just an evolution of the free to play business model. It takes the same model of providing digital content for free and charges for other digital content, and improves on it by adding the benefits of property rights and asset ownership.

For developers, I think there are potential benefits as well. Any game that reaches a certain level of economic activity creates its own gray market. The in-game asset market is a market that developers have no direct control over. **Blockchain can allow developers to participate in economic activities that occur outside of the games they themselves create. This is an interesting way for developers to redefine the exchange of value between them and players. **

**Q3、****Are there any other features you would like to highlight to improve user experience and/or developer experience? **

A: If the development of the blockchain is divided into several major stages, Sui can be called the next-generation blockchain. **Bitcoin invented the concept of digital currency. Before Bitcoin, there were various problems in sending money online. **Bitcoin's basic innovation is to solve the double spend problem and other core cryptography problems, which is an amazing invention! Ethereum came along, popularizing the concept of "how good would it be if software programs could hold money just like users do"? **So, if Bitcoin allows users to hold money, then Ethereum popularizes smart contracts, allowing programs to hold money. **This opens up a whole new world of blockchain applications. And for Sui, the concept is "if assets are the main primitive of a blockchain, what happens if you build a blockchain that prioritizes not just currency or accounts, but assets themselves?"

We have seen the exchange of digital assets become a major use case for blockchains, however these chains were not designed for non-fungible assets. **Sui was designed from the ground up to prioritize the exchange of assets. In Sui, everything is object-oriented. It is built for modern applications such as games with complex assets and multi-level relationships. In Sui, an object can own other objects. **Say you're playing a game that has a hero character that has an inventory with other digital assets that belong to the character. Sui can accurately model these data hierarchies, which other blockchains have not yet been able to do. As such, it provides an opportunity for developers to express the applications they want to build without bypassing the fundamental limitations of the blockchain.

**Q4、****What do you think the market thinks of Web3 games? What is the future direction of development? **

A: I think great games are great games, no matter what infrastructure they're built on. When you pick up your phone and open your favorite game, you don't think about whether the game is hosted on AWS or Google Cloud. For players, it really shouldn't make a difference, and historically it never has. Therefore, I would not distinguish Web3 games from games built on other infrastructures. All I care about is making a great entertainment experience in the gaming category. **And, I think the scenario we're in right now, and where we're going in the future, is that some of the best game development talent is coming into the field. **Game developers who have built amazingly large-scale games on other platforms choose to build games on blockchain infrastructure for their own reasons, because they see the ability to give players what they want ability to experience.

I think there have indeed been a few false starts in the Web3 gaming world, showing how over-financialized games are. ** Players don't come to the game to work, players come to the game to escape reality, to immerse themselves in another world, to be a different character. It comes down to entertainment that competes with other forms of entertainment. **So, what really matters is building great games, and the infrastructure is just an enabling technology to deliver that experience.

**Q5、****Will the player’s behavior or psychology change in Web3 games, especially when there are assets in the game? **

A: This is one of the assumptions that blockchain infrastructure makes games better. For mobile developers in particular, the past few years have been facing real difficulties because of some fundamental changes in ad tracking technology for mobile platforms. These changes do hamper their ability to target eligible players. For many free-to-play mobile games, user acquisition has become unaffordable. One benefit of blockchain for players is to give them a stronger sense of ownership, potentially leading to higher engagement and/or longer retention. From a developer perspective, this affects your business model. It increases the lifetime value of players, thereby changing the economic model of user engagement.

**The core assumption is that players engage differently with assets they actually own, which become an extension of their more authentic selves in the game world. This changes their behavior and changes the very nature of the experience of participating in the game. **It feels more like a community that you own and belong to rather than just a tourist.

**Q6、****Blockchain infrastructure has many new concepts, such as opening wallets or signing transactions, which may become barriers for new users to enter. How does Sui help developers build a game that can serve users who just want to play a great game without having to deal with the technical details of Web3? **

A: Sui's design allows for a new onboarding flow for Web3 applications. From creating wallets with social logins (e.g. using a Google ID or Facebook ID), all the way to very simple sponsorship transactions that allow one account to pay for gas on behalf of another. For example, a developer could sponsor the first few transactions for a user and allow the user to potentially skip tedious processes such as KYC on exchanges and converting fiat to game tokens. Some of us have been through this process and know how difficult it can be. **Sui provides tools for developers to abstract away complexity for users. **

**Q7、****For games on Sui, what is your long-term vision? **

**A: My long-term vision is for every player in the world to have digital assets held securely on Sui. **