Optic Gaming (the book) & the “Fwiz” CEO of Polygon.
Gaming is hotly tipped by many to provide the next mass onboarding for Web3 so can it realise this potential and why? I dig back, read a book and learn some eSports history before sharing my thoughts…
Smashed through this book this week, and it was pretty good. Didn’t know much about the sub culture of eSport / gaming and this filled some of that gap. I’m sure there is a broad community and wide array of games out there now but this book specifically focusses on the infancy of the online & competitive gaming scene and is from a COD (Call of Duty) perspective circa 2009–16. It starts off with the creation of the Optic Gaming team and records how they helped pioneer the space with sniper vBlogs. Following on from there they built an engaged fandom and followed on with a pro team that they hoped could challenge for the biggest accolades and prizes on the growing pro gaming circuit. It’s a decent and enjoyable read and I love diving into sub cultures and learning how a now mature domain became.
Stars of the book include Hecotr “H3CZ” Rodriguez the co-founder who bet everything on this, Matt “NaDeSHoT” Haag apparently the biggest eSports personality on earth, “Scump”, “bigTymeR”, “OpticJ”, “MiDNiTe” and “Fwiz”. Content creators, pro gamers and pioneers all in their own right, the book provides a nice walk through of their contributions to the Optic Gaming teams growth, the good the bad and the ugly of the scene and how they used social media to build a fanbase called the “Green Wall” that eclipsed them all. I especially admired the honesty of the accounts which illustrated the challenges faced by those who reached the top and the cut throat reality and pressures of the trying to make and maintain the level of being the best.
What got me digging here was Ryan “Fwiz” Wyatt. I was over at NFT NYC keynote talks in the summer and Ryan the now CEO of Polygon talked about his time leading the YouTube gaming division and how Polygon’s focus is to build the technology for a new wave of blockchain gaming and triple-A experiences. Exciting ambitions. From a Polygon perspective, doubling down on gaming & placing Ryan an OG of the gaming space seems a perfect fit. Turns out he was also an early member of the Optic Gaming family, an early eSports commentator and has experienced the entirety of the eGaming rise. Totally agreed when Ryan talked about NFTs as “real disruptors” and how expectations can be impatient. I see technology and social media as being responsible for reprogramming people into unrealistic impatience (instant gratification), it took a 30 years to get to Web2 so why is there immediate expectation to see a mature Web3? It clearly doesn’t work like that! He went on to talk about the creator economy and how gamers started utilising YouTube to earn and how Web3 will further develop this space and create broader opportunities. Ryan and the team area dreaming big and believe Web3 gaming can improve engagement.
…and I actually think the gaming industry is going to be the big funnel to onboarding a billion people into crypto.
Ryan Wyatt
It’s really interesting how the the mention of blockchain and NFTs has been received negatively within the gaming industry this year. The big gaming companies have criticised and debunked whilst apparently behind the scenes are claimed to be doing R&D. From a consumer standpoint the negativity also seems also to be true. Given the upside of owning your own in game achievements and having the ability to buy, sell and have interoperability versus earning rewards in walled gardens which are disposed of when the games shelf life expires, it seemed like a no brainer to me that this was a good thing! The advantages are there for the consumer, is it just early and new ideas take time to embed and to be understood, gamers are as much resistant to change as everybody else!
With companies like Playstation recently announcing they are providing digital collectibles (albeit centralised ones for now) does this signal recognition of legitimacy and value? It’s hard to see the difference between a current in game asset and their take on centralised digital collectible from an ownership and utility perspective but from a consumer perspective it seems to be a pivot towards showcasing digital collectibles and a nod from Sony that they are something worth exploring. Gaming studios are beginning to take notice of the future of digital owned gaming assets with the successes from Web3 GameFi and Polygon’s ambitions to push the frontiers of gaming and supplying the foundations for gaming developers to build the next wave of games, triple-A ones! With Apple’s embrace of Web3 and NFT technology and its offer to take a 30% cut in app sales it’s a pretty interesting time to consider where this Web2 — Web3 landscape will land regarding in regards to technology adoption, education (how agnostic the experience becomes) and decentralisation.
With carbon neutral and scaling questions being solved the shift towards sustainable rich blockchain experiences is fast approaching. Polygon believe they can help gaming developers deliver tripe-A on chain gaming experiences that can compete with centralised titles. The hope is this can transform the existing blockchain GameFi model back towards an enjoyment model whilst adding ownership and utility benefits into the gaming ecosystem to give long term value back to the players for time spent further engaging them. And this all neatly lays the foundations for rich, immersive, performant experiences which are essential steps towards realisation of the “The Metaverse”.
Optic Gaming is a decent read 👌.
