Peter Huang: From Adobe to Egretia, restart with technology
By ITerduo 耳朵财经
Peter Huang, the founder of Egretia, is an entrepreneur and a veteran in the game industry. He founded 1D, a music community that uses Flash technology to allow users to sing and play games together. It happened before people knew about online games. However, the market was not ready for this type of community.
In 2010, Peter joined Adobe as a platform technology manager and was responsible for Flash technology promotion and monetization over online traffic. At that time, there were a number of teams working on H5 technology using PCs; however, because different browsers were not compatible, all of the teams had a hard time. Later on, in 2011, Peter came across Bitcoin. In 2014, Peter joined Egret Technology as a co-founder, and devoted himself into the H5 industry.
At the end of 2017, Peter utilized both H5 and blockchain technology to start the Egretia project. Technology-wise, Egretia partners with Egret Technology to bring 200,000 developers and 1 billion HTML5 terminals to the blockchain world.
As a veteran in the Internet industry, Peter thinks the adoption of new technology needs to go through a long process. Before, in the H5 sector, people were forcing users to use this technology, and this kind of pushy behavior did not promote the real development of this technology. Today, after four years of evolution, Facebook, WeChat, QQ, and other prominent social media platforms all offer H5 game support. The HTML5 industry has finally taken off.
Restart with the technology
Egretia embraces the blockchain industry with Peter Huang and his team, and the technology from its partner Egret Technology.
Egret Technology obtained funding from Shunwei Capital, Shenzhen Venture Capital, and Matrix Partners. In 2014, the game “Catch the Crazy Cat,” which was developed using Egret engine, set fire on WeChat. It was shared more than 200 million times within a day, which resulted in WeChat coming up with new rules and regulations.
The Egret team gradually improved the idea that Peter had while working for Adobe, a skeletal animation tool called Dragon Bones. Last year at the Geneva Conference, Dragon Bones was set as the mobile animation standard of International Telecommunication Union. According to Peter, there are more than 16,000 Dragon Bones tutorial videos produced by users all over the world on YouTube.
Blockchain is a brand-new industry; most blockchain game projects start from scratch. However, when Egretia started to work on the H5 blockchain game platform, it began with previously accumulated technology.
The year that the Egretia project started was the year that H5 mini-games soared. Peter expressed that, despite what people said in previous years, it is more appropriate to regard 2017 as the first year of H5 mini-games.
At the end of 2017, Facebook Messenger, which had more than 1 billion daily active users, started to develop casual mini-games and quickly launched in-app advertising and payment. “This is a repeat of the history of social web games on mobile devices,” Peter said, “It was like the Happy Farm game in the past.”
Immediately afterward, WeChat released a mini-game platform. Currently, there are more than 600 games on this platform; half of which are based on the Egret engine, and almost 40% of the games on Facebook Messenger are based on Egret engine.
When it comes to the development progress of the public H5 game blockchain, the Egret test chain will be released shortly. Peter believes that there are many problems to consider when developing a public game blockchain. From the test chain, to launching a stable blockchain, it takes at least a year to test and improve it. According to the roadmap, Egretia will release workflow based on ERC20 in June, which will be world’s first public blockchain that publishes a complete workflow.
The public game blockchain needs a distribution center and wallet
Because of the game’s social attributes, paid props, and other settings, the public game blockchain will also carry these elements accordingly. In addition to developing a public blockchain, Peter thinks that the blockchain game industry also needs game distribution centers and wallets.
Although distribution centers sound like they are against the decentralized concept of the blockchain, however, the distribution centers here are like communities. Users can interact with each other, explore, and share fun games. These centers are not like application stores, like the Apple Store. The social part of blockchain communities are in line with games and is very suitable for the promotion of games.
When there are sufficient applications of the public blockchain, and adequate users, there will be a need for advertisement. The need can be satisfied using Egretia’s tokens. The token mechanism facilitates the integration of transactions and is suitable for circulation. This model has already been implemented by some peers; the game distribution center is very valuable.
When it comes to public blockchain and games, the wallet is an essential part of dealing with the bottleneck situation about user payment methods. The attributes of the wallet make it naturally suitable for being a distribution center.
Peter expressed that, Egretia wanted to try its best to let tokens circulate among gamers, developers, channels, and advertisers. This ecology cannot be accomplished by one company; it needs the whole industry to work together. Egretia will always be open-minded about collaboration and share no effort to promote the development of the industry.
If what was mentioned above can be achieved, the tool engine platform will be firmly linked with developers in the process of development, publication, and promotion.
Before the electronic game era, the most-played games are decentralized games.
“When we don’t have electronic games to play, the most-played games are decentralized games.” told by Peter.
When friends play games together, a “consensus” is reached about the rules and almost never changes. It is unlike the electronic game era, where operators organize events and set the rules.
In Peter’s view, social relationships have always been one of the critical factors that can make a game a hit. In the blockchain industry, future popular blockchain games must be based on users’ social relationships and have open-ended rules.
The traditional game world is still an inflationary world. Even if gamers play a lot to complete missions, someone could beat these hard-working players easily just by spending a lot of money, and this doesn’t seem like a fair world.
In addition, the nature of the blockchain itself also changes the design of the economic model in the game. For example, if the game operator creates ten special props, what will happen after the ten props are sold? It would work better if users can set the rules about creating a particular prop and charge a transaction fee, just like there is an expense to circulate CryptoKitties. Besides that, the operators can give out unique awards, and can also organize game events and charge admission fees.
From prospects of the game itself, developers, and the industry, there will be a lot of new opportunities.
When talking about how the Ethereum network was jammed up because people rushed to buy CryptoKitties, Peter thinks that people should not focus too much on the current situation of the blockchain industry. At any time, there will be games that belong to this particular era, before electronic games were developed, there were games like jump rope and ping pong. In the age of the 2G mobile network, people could not play 4G network games.
Blockchain gives everyone a lot of room for imagination. Many business models are excellent, but it always takes a while to put the technology into practical use, and this requires everyone to explore. The game industry belongs to the virtual economy, relatively speaking, tokenizing the game industry will face less resistance. However, when it comes to projects that are related to the real economy, there will be more resistance.
The last missionary in the world for Flash
Speaking of the declining Flash technology, Peter recalled that the time between 2010 and 2014 was the most prosperous time for this technology. Since then, Flash has begun to decline. When talking about the reasons that Flash lost popularity, Peter believes that when Flash was popular, it was installed more than 1.4 billion times, but Flash barely made any money, which indicates that there were problems with the business model.
Two key factors of the Internet are traffic and users. Flash didn’t successfully convert its traffic into users. The traffic that did not turn into users was like the stars of the sky, which looked pretty but was not relevant.
Today, Flash is also running some experimental projects in China. Flash updates will be bundled with Flash assistants and Flash will control the distribution of unauthorized copies. Peter is also moving these projects forward.
Peter felt sorry about Flash, and he called himself “the last missionary in the world for Flash”.
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