Saga Innovator Program Presents: Dayton Mills, CEO of Branch.gg

Last week, Saga Innovator Program featured Dayton Mills, CEO and founder of Branch.gg in a special fireside chat with Rebecca Liao, CEO of Saga. Topics covered included the nature of Web3 gaming and how it represents a paradigm shift from Web2. Branch.gg is a collection of founders, artists, hackers, and gamers, some of whom are dropouts that made fortunes building massive Minecraft servers instead of doing homework. Their most recent fund-raising round is composed of some of the top firms in the space such as Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital, DeFiance Capital and Coinbase. Angel investors such as Naval Ravikant from AngelList, Ryan Wyatt at Polygon and Jon Lai from a16z are a part of their cap-table as well.

To hear the interview, listen to the Twitter Space here.

Highlights From The Saga <> Branch.gg Fireside Chat

The interview went into great detail around Dayton’s background and history leading up to founding Branch.gg. Here are a few highlights:

Multichain In Games

“The holy grail is for people to play a game and not have to care about the underlying infrastructure at all. Everyone wants to plug into several different kinds of chains. How do you think about it at Branch?” — Rebecca Liao

“A lot of P2E projects launch on other chains as a means of “ponzi-nomics.” They need to go on a chain to get liquidity for the people on the last chain. They need to jump from one chain to another chain to another to keep their model going. I have been very clear that you are never going to know what chain this is on. For me, my goal is that the chain doesn’t matter.” — Dayton Mills

The Three Types of Web3 Game User

“In the Minecraft servers we used to run, someone will come in and spend several hundred dollars and get beefed up (become a Chad player). It goes in one of two ways: Either the community is appreciative because the server is getting funded to stay up and running. Or they are upset. We intend to build a system which allows for those NFT players who don’t actually play the game in a way that supports the ecosystem.”

You have three types of gamers:

• NFT owners who don’t care about the game and just want to hold (invest)
• The Play To Earn owner who just want to grind tokens, doesn’t care about the game
• Casual gamers who might not even have heard about Web3 (or might even hate it)

“How do you build an ecosystem that supports those three playstyles?”

• NFT Investors: You can buy and hold islands and the owner can passively earn income on them from other players chopping down trees and collecting resources on their island then selling them.
• Play To Earn grinder: Form a guild, organize a timber industry where they can grind to chop down trees and then sell the items player to player. It is an opt-in. Another user is paying and trading for the items.
• Casual gamers: Can buy the wood from the grinders in the marketplace and then they can have fun building structures in the game.

This creates a balanced system where everyone is happy. Each play style incentivizes and supports the other.

Why Gamers Have A Negative Reaction To Web3 (And What To Do About It)

“You’re a gamer, you love playing games and you hate having to pay $0.99 for some item in the game. Then you see some announcement about an item that costs $100,000. That is a threat because it means you can no longer afford to play the game.”

Minecraft Banning NFTs

“If you look today at what they are doing by banning NFTs, is that they are going against what made them what they are today. Minecraft wouldn’t be what it is without the massive community that modded it and added multiplayer services. Imagine if you went the opposite direction and incentivized people to do it [mod the game].”

About Branch and the Saga Innovator Program

Saga is building Web3 infrastructure solutions to enable developers to build applications with their own dedicated blockspace. Dedicated blockspace ensures high throughput, no dependencies on other applications using Saga, easy upgradability and congestion relief. In addition, gas fees for infrastructure remain predictable and are by default hidden from the end user, allowing developers to use any token or currency for their applications. The automated deployment of dedicated blockspace will be secured via interchain security by the same set of validators that underlie the Saga mainnet.

Branch has raised a $12.5 million seed round to build a play-to-earn game that keeps the crypto out of sight. As Branch co-founder Dayton Mills put it, the game will be “Animal Crossing meets Minecraft with a bit of Runescape … I can’t think of anything similar in the play-to-earn space because most play-to-earn games require you to buy an NFT upfront to play them. But in our world, it’s very much designed so that you may not ever even know what an NFT is.”

Get Connected

Learn more about Branch, visit their website or join their discord here. Follow them on Twitter.

To learn more about Saga’s approach to blockchain gaming, click here. Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord.