TEAMMATE #2: discover the career path of Olivier, associate & PlayTiX CTO (chief technology officer)

Olivier was one of the first adventurers to join the PlayTiX project as an associate. As a blockchain specialist, Olivier brings to our team all the technical and organizational skills needed to create the best ethical and enjoyable gaming platform. Find out more about his background and his job as a consultant. We’ll talk about blockchain, NFTs and our video game platform.

Hello Olivier, can you tell us more about your background?

Olivier: Passionate about design and cars since my childhood, I chose to follow my dreams to become a car designer. Unfortunately, once I graduated in automotive design in England, the crisis of 2008 started and no more jobs were available. So, I turned to another profession that I loved too: development.

In the 90s, I discovered the great world of the Web! I realized that I could talk to other people and share my passion for graphic art with them. One thing led to another, I started creating my first online site and gained confidence in my skills. When I realized that development was something I could do and liked, I decided to continue developing websites and to work as a freelancer in order to finance my studies. At the beginning, I did not have solid bases, since I had no academic background in this field, but I was lucky enough to pursue my career with a company that helped me and supported me in my project. This field, which was unknown to me a few years before, became a passion. Since then, I never thought of coming back to automotive design.

With the skills I had acquired in France in telecommunications, I was able to go abroad. Now, it has been almost 10 years that I am a web developer in finance. I mainly do consulting, which means that I help my clients to develop web solutions such as trading, reporting, or risk analysis applications. I live in New York and I work mainly for financial institutions and investment funds on Wall Street. This is my main job in addition to being associated with PlayTiX.

Interesting! How did you discover PlayTiX and why did you join this project as an associate?

Olivier: I met William and Jerome, the founders of PlayTiX, via my wife’s family. They talked about their ambition to start their startup towards the end of 2019 and were looking for advice on building a technical team. Here I am! It was quite natural for me to offer them my help, especially since I already had previous experiences in the world of development, blockchain and cryptocurrencies. I was able to advise them and connect them with trusted people who have the relevant skills to move the project forward. We then worked together to create the first prototype and it was fun. That’s why I wanted to continue the adventure with them, and that’s how we became partners. I help them outside my job as a consultant.

Why PlayTiX? I believe in this project! The incorporation of blockchain technology in the platform is something I particularly like, as well as the business creation phase which I find really interesting. The ethical side is also a big plus that deserves to be highlighted. The scope of PlayTiX’s activities corresponds to the skills I have acquired in the last few years. So, I joined this adventure to share my experience in a field that interests me.

I also enjoy playing video games. I used to be a great World of Warcraft player! My playing time can be counted in the thousands of hours. I had fun developing my characters and crafting items to face stronger and stronger enemies. The social aspect was also very cool as I met other people in the community who became my friends. The games I’ve played the most in the last few years have been tarot, angry birds, and candy crush, even though I still managed to find time to play Counter Strike or Quake 3.

What’s interesting is that PlayTiX’s solution is a response to a thought I had at the time. When I stopped playing, I realized that my playtime represented a lot of lost hours. I lost all the value I had created over the years on the games. I would have been interested in a solution like the one developed by PlayTiX. Thanks to this technology, I could have been able to take my character out of the game, integrate it into the blockchain and why not resell it with all its items. This would have been an opportunity to make a financial profit and to be rewarded for all the hours I spent improving my characters.

What is your role at PlayTiX?

Olivier: I have two main roles at PlayTiX. Firstly, as CTO I bring my technical and organizational skills, as well as my project and team management skills as a consultant. One of my missions is to have a global vision of our processes and technological choices in order to guarantee the company’s sustainability. I also make sure that we acquire the right skills within the company and that our teams continue to train and progress. Finally, I try to make sure that everyone finds their place in the company and feels good about it.

I also have a role as a developer in charge of the development of the PlayTiX cloud services platform which will allow video game developers to integrate their creations into the blockchain. I am present at each step of the development, from the formalization of the needs to the delivery of the product through the development itself. This means that I work closely with the platform team.

You are currently working as a web developer in a consulting company in New York. If you had to define 3 fundamental words to succeed in this job, which ones would you choose?

Olivier: In the development world I would say that passion is more than necessary. Developing is very technical and you are often challenged by new things. If you are not passionate about what you do, you can quickly be tempted to give up. That’s why you have to be persistent and face difficulties! You have to be self-motivated, go beyond what you know, and talk to other people to find the most appropriate solution. When you work with technologies as recent and advanced as blockchain, for example, you have to tell yourself that there is always room for improvement. This profession is evolving every day, so you have to be motivated to find new solutions and overcome difficulties. Passion is important because it is what makes us get up in the morning and it is what drives us to do better.

Considering the speed at which digital technology and its uses are developing, we must always be curious and eager to learn. The pitfall here is to think that we already know enough and that there is no need to learn more. This is when you start to stagnate. For this activity, you have to know how to question yourself continuously.

Finally, I would say that the collaborative aspect and teamwork are essential. On your own, you can’t accomplish much! We need each other to evolve. Sharing knowledge and skills is essential to achieve a common goal. And it’s kind of fun to exchange ideas. It boosts creativity, doesn’t it?

What is the thing that brings you the greatest satisfaction in your work?

Olivier: What I like the most about my job is being challenged and working in a team. It’s quite fun to find and use all the resources needed to solve new complex problems and move towards a common goal. What brings me the most satisfaction is to look back on the work I did and be proud I was able to move forward and successfully overcome challenges.

What are the biggest challenges?

Olivier: Apart from the technical issues we face as pioneers in a new field using new technologies, the biggest challenge at PlayTiX is to create a company with both its own identity and culture. You have to succeed in bringing all of your employees to a common goal and move forward together with the same vision. When the company is composed of several teams that work on different activities, how do you ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal? The mission and values must be understood and accepted by all employees. When the corporate culture is implicit and unwritten, the larger the team gets, the more diluted the message becomes. This usually causes human and organizational problems. That’s why as a startup, there is a need to anticipate these problems, refine our message, and communicate regularly.

At PlayTiX, we are still in the early stages. The company culture is starting to be created, but there is a lot of work to be done to evolve the mission and values. In the meantime, everyone needs to give their best and operate by example by treating others as you would like to be treated, creating a safe environment in which everyone can express themselves and develop, and being the guarantor of the company’s values.

Today blockchain and NFTs are exploding and offering new possibilities for video games. What is your point of view on the use of blockchain in gaming?

Olivier: I see blockchain and smart contracts in the same way as the Internet in the 90s. At that time, we didn’t consider all the possibilities that were going to be offered to us (e-commerce sites, applications, social networks, games, video streaming, administration, taxes…). We didn’t really know what to do with this web. Today, the internet is part of our daily life and is the first interface people use.

I see blockchain in the same way. We are only at the beginning of this technology. We understand how it works, how we can store information on it, but new levels of complexity will continue to be added to the basic technology. We will continue to discover new uses as we develop it. At the moment, we are at 15–40 transactions per second, in 20 years we will surely be at several million transactions per second. The possibilities are endless! I find it exciting to see that we are witnessing the development of new technology. For the moment, we are just scratching the surface but we will quickly see the emergence of new relevant services using blockchain as well as the exponential appearance of new uses.

Regarding video games, blockchain can bring other dimensions than storage or value exchange. For example, this could be: creating a user profile that could be used in several video games. If the user wants to retrieve the items, he will be able to do so and store them in his wallet and if he doesn’t like the game, he will be able to unlink his account and prevent the publisher from accessing his data. The blockchain offers the power to decide when we give access to our data and when we take it away. There are other uses to be discovered, but the goal is to create services that work and then discover new ones. We’re in a phase of experimentation.

I’m convinced that ownership is something that blockchain offers which can revolutionize the way we play. It’s still a message we’re learning to convey, but I think gamers who have played a lot of video games and decide to stop playing are feeling that sense of having lost something. When you put so much time into a game, it can be quite frustrating to find that, in the end, this time is lost. For a gamer who has spent thousands of hours on WoW, it may seem easier to see the benefits of blockchain. The blockchain is a way to take the intrinsic value out of the game, externalize it and transfer it to a universe that the player owns completely. Then, he is free to exchange this value with other people in this ecosystem. The blockchain brings freedom to players. It is also possible to imagine being able to use items of the same type in many different games and to be able to link different publishers together to create a collective virtual universe and a whole new ecosystem.

You are working on blockchain, can you explain in more detail how it will be integrated into our games?

Olivier: Yes, of course! First of all, even if blockchain seems simple at first glance, it is a relatively new and complex technology that is quite slow and expensive. It is directly related to the cost of the cryptocurrency used to operate on the blockchain. This is a barrier to adoption. For video games, it’s the same. There are on-chain video games that exist only on a blockchain. However, to understand and make the best use of these games, you need to know a minimum of the technology, create a specific wallet, understand the transfer fees, etc.

What the PlayTiX solution brings is that it abstracts all of this and reduces the access gap for gamers and game publishers by giving them all the keys. The platform will be very easy to use. A programmable interface will be set up to avoid publishers having to understand how to use the blockchain. Our solution brings what we call abstraction layers to accelerate transfers and reduce their cost. In this way, we create an easy-to-use package that makes blockchain easier to use, faster, and less expensive.

Now, we can face another issue, video game creators may say: “Why would I want to make it easier for our users to extract value from the game when I want them to continue playing our games? That can be a problem. But if we turn that problem around: if a game publisher connects to a platform that already has millions of items present, then they don’t need to create new items and can say, “Here! I see this avatar, I would like to implement it in one of my games. “ So, there is the possibility to create your own game while using other items from another ecosystem. This can encourage publishers to create video games on our platform and by a snowball effect, the more items on it, the more collaborations there and the more games created. We can imagine new interactions between games, and that could be very fun.

You are used to complex databases, what are the advantages of using blockchain vs. a classic item database?

Olivier: These are not the same use cases!

Traditional databases focus on their ability to store a large amount of information. Thanks to them, we can make queries to find this information in the fastest way possible. Performance is crucial.

Then come the durability issues, where the majority of databases guarantee data replication on several different servers, as copies, in order to avoid the definitive information loss during the dysfunction of a server. Unfortunately, replication cannot be instantaneous and in some cases, the loss of information is almost inevitable, although limited.

Finally, a database is rarely public and shared, the information stored in it is often private because it is related to the business or regulated, and only authorized systems can access it. We say that the management is centralized.

In contrast, blockchain is an open system where the information stored is public and accessible to all. The network is open and anyone can join it by connecting their own server (or node). By bringing a node, one can participate in the validation of writing operations (or transactions) on the blockchain, which usually allows obtaining compensation in the form of the associated cryptocurrency. The advantage of this system is that each participant in the blockchain has a copy of the recorded data (transaction history) and that all these copies guarantee that no node can be falsified. The blockchain offers permanent storage of data (it is impossible to erase a transaction) and is extremely secure.

The downside is that transactions are slow (a handful per second for the entire blockchain), as all nodes must reach a consensus in order to validate a block of transactions, and extremely expensive, as a large amount of cryptocurrency must be spent on execution costs (GAS). The cost even increases with the complexity of the operation and the final storage used.

Finally, the blockchain only offers a storage solution, it does not allow to execute queries, these must be done in a tool called an “indexer” which tracks the operations performed on the blockchain and records them… in a classic database.

To put it simply, a traditional database is cheap, fast, but firm to use, and the blockchain is open, public, but slow and expensive.

That’s why PlayTiX uses a combination of blockchain and databases for its services on the gaming platform.

All transactions that do not need to be public and that need to be done at a lower cost and very quickly will be done in a classic database. From the moment there will be a business need (needs that will come from video game creators) to share information publicly with “the rest of the world”, then we will go through the blockchain.

For example, a player may decide to create a free account for a video game and use free items. These items may not belong to the player at first (that’s up to the game creator). They could be created in our database because the storage cost is low and the creation is fast. However, these items cannot be traded with other users or transferred to the user’s wallet to be used later.

When the player decides to take ownership of the item, in order to resell it or use it in another game, the item can become an NFT and will be publicly visible on the blockchain.

What are the games that made the biggest impression on you? Why?

Olivier:

• WoW: It’s a game that I loved and spent many hours on. Everything is incredible in this game, the economy of the game, the magnificent universe, the depth of the quests, the complexity of the bosses, the music, the graphics. It’s a piece of art I enjoyed playing a lot.
• Counter Strike: I spent most of my time on this game as a semi-pro. It was the first online game I played. I had the chance to create teams, play as a team, and be part of a great community!
• Quake III: I love this kind of game. Everyone plays with a different skin, but all the characters have the same speed, life points, and characteristics. There is a limited number of weapons. To win, you have to learn the map and time the items that appear on the map. This is a game based on reflexes and skills. You have to anticipate to win because it is a very fast game. Anyone can learn the basics in an hour, but to get to the top level and master all the mechanics you need thousands of hours.

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Writter : Tatiana TIAO VANNITHA, community manager