Solutions to Problems in Blockchain Gaming: Meet Magnus Söderberg, the CEO of Triolith Games

TIM HALDORSSON

We are talking about solutions to the Current Problems in Blockchain Gaming with Magnus Söderberg, the CEO of Triolith Games.

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Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background in the Gaming industry?

As the title says my name is Magnus and I'm the founder of Triolith Games. I’ve been a gamer since I was about 8 years old but my interest for the gaming industry started when I was an intern at Mindark who developed the world's first Play 2 Earn game (that did not use blockchain) called Entropia Universe.

After that I decided to study to become a game designer and did that for 3 years at the University of Skövde. I then started my first company with a few friends from the University and developed a few mobile games of which MEGATROID got featured on the first spot on Google Play.

When that didn’t quite work out I’ve worked as a consultant for a few companies developing mobile games.

But back in 2017 I wanted to get back to running my own company so I started Triolith Games. And at the same time I listened to Robby Yung from Animoca brands at the Pocket Gamer Connects conference in Helsinki, and due to my experience from playing Entropia Universe I immediately understood the benefits of blockchain and NFT’s for games.

I started to do some research on the Web3 gaming industry and identified several issues that needed to be addressed and that’s how the idea of our platform The Genesis Engine came about.

What are some of the challenges facing the blockchain gaming industry today?

There are several challenges in the industry. The industry is still fragmented. You have someone developing SDK’s for different game engines, but then you have a wallet in another place, marketplace at another website, games you have to find at the developers webpage and community is also spread out.

A lot of the benefits of Web3 gaming is that they say you own your assets, but according to me this is not completely true. This does of course depend on what you mean by ownership, but in my view what you own is the receipt of the purchase of the asset.

But if the game gets shut down, the asset they claim that you own is also very likely to be removed as it’s on a server provided by the game developer and you are left with a receipt.

Another issue is if you look at what the gamers say, there are still a lot of scams happening. A game developer says they are going to develop a game and they fund it through a token launch and then take the money and cancel the game, or just run off with the funding.

Many developers also haven’t quite understood how to balance a Play 2 Earn game economy and have in some cases totally crashed their own games in-game economy. Another potential issue depending on the game design is that they run the risk of creating a lottery, which could lead to potential problems with legislation in certain countries.

A lot of discussion is also about decentralization, and while that is really important most gamers won’t care one bit about it and just want things to work and play a fun game.

Yet another issue we have seen a lot of is that most games have been created by blockchain companies and not really by game developers, which is why a lot of them have failed. This is however changing as more game developers are looking for ways to incorporate Web3 in their games.

The last issue is that most chains can’t handle all types of games, this does of course depend on the design of the game. I usually take the Entropia Universe as an example. Entropia Universe is a niche game.

From the numbers I last saw they have roughly 1M accounts and I estimate that they have about 60k daily active users. But since everything you do in the game basically affects the economy, they have over 33M transactions per day!

Now if you scale this to a few games with 100M accounts and a few million daily active users per game you start to see the scaling needed.

Of course not all games will need this scale and it’s very dependent on how the game is built and the game design and how the games utilise the blockchain.

How are Triolith Games solving the problems in the Blockchain Gaming ecosystem?

What our platform The Genesis Engine does is to bring the ecosystem into one place so developers and gamers don’t have to use several different tools and websites. We will provide tools and SDK’s for all the popular chains, as well as making it easy for game developers to create their own tokens and NFT’s.

We provide them with a storefront to show off their game, a community and reviews from the gamers. We provide them with pre-made and easily editable smart-contracts. But probably the most interesting feature will be the game economy management system we are also building.

That system will make it possible for game developers to easily manage their games economies.

For the gamers we provide them with an easy to use platform to find good games, talk about them and a simple way to purchase and manage their assets. We will also provide them with an internal wallet that is easy to use, but if they do want to be more advanced they will have the option to use our or another external wallet that is supported.

To combat the scams happening in the industry all companies have to be fully transparent of who owns the company and have to be properly registered. We will also check their game economy design and smart contracts to make sure the economy will work and limit the risk for hacks.

In the long run we are planning to develop our own L1 chain, this is to solve the issue of actual true asset ownership while maintaining both scalability, security and decentralisation. We have at least in theory, a viable solution for how to solve this problem. However this is a massive project that will require quite a lot of funding.

What is the current state of the blockchain gaming market, and what trends are you seeing in terms of adoption and growth?

I think the current state is pretty good, gaming has been the sector that has managed to do better in the current bear market than many others and it’s still growing. New games are released and being developed and while the funding has gone down a lot, it’s still the sector in the entire blockchain industry that has gone down the least.

The trends I see is that there is more infrastructure being built which is good, more competition is a good thing. Regulations are on their way, which hopefully turns out to be a good thing.

More and more game companies are also looking at Web3 and how it can be used. Sadly a few bigger players did a few missteps in how they implemented it that hurt the industry a bit among the gamers and made them think it’s all a scheme to take more money from them.

But we just need to educate them that Web3 can actually be a positive thing for gamers.

What are the 3 main tips you would give to a new blockchain gaming company starting today?

Do not try to push cryptos and NFT’s into a Web2 game, you are very likely going to fail. You need to design the game from scratch to make it work as a Web3 game.

To not create a lottery, you need to design a loot system that is based on skill and that is not random. It should still look random however as to try and combat users taking advantage of the system. Entropia Universe is a great example of this, it looks very random but is in fact based on skill and understanding of the system.

I also wrote my Bachelor thesis on how such a system could be designed which can be found on my Linkedin Profile. (It’s in Swedish but you can use ChatGpt or Google to translate)

My last tip is one I give to all new gaming startups. Do not wait to market your game, you need to start planning and doing marketing at the beginning of the development, and also do proper market research before actually developing the game.

If there is no market or interest in that type of game you are developing you are shooting yourself in the foot even before you start!

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