GenoPets, Building Web3 Games and Community with Co-founder Jay Chang

Before we jump in , I just want to talk to you a little bit about the background of why we started the show . I started my first podcast in I think it was whenever the pandemic started I can't remember quite what year .

I was like how do I do that ? Now , that's when my first show started , which is called Follow White Rabbit . It's grown into something that's more important than that for me . Number one , it became this way for me to educate my friends and family about what I do . They have no clue what I do or why it's important . It's called the index .

This is kind of going somewhere . It's called the index because it's the index of people . I believe that people are worth knowing . Telling their stories is something that's important to me . Our tag line is people worth knowing . You're definitely one of those people , especially in gaming , pioneering how to build a blockchain-based game with GenoPets .

It's the why behind why I do this . I really do enjoy knowing the people that are building these innovative tools and companies . I've started to realize it's actually maybe even bigger than the space that we're in now . I've got all these ideas for these verticals that I could index now or that other people could index underneath our bread .

My side hobby thing that I've been in crypto for a number of years 2016 , 2017 , remember the first wave One of my side hobbies things that I'd always done is food Instagram . Ironically , wearing this Instagram shirt right now , I've interviewed just about 500 chefs around the world for an Instagram .

Rather than just post pictures of food porn , which is what most of food Instagram was , I wrote bios and stories of the chef behind the knife it was called and why people wanted to know or care about the person who is making this food and why this restaurant is so cool that I really like . I'm all with you on telling the stars of people behind the thing .

As much as I tried to step away , like it was always one of those things that , like I put so much into this community and this technology that I couldn't really leave . My co-founders , ben and Albert , were good friends of mine from actually before .

They had one of the largest projects on the EOS there's a health data marketplace and they had been circling around sort of how to reinvent that project in a more consumer friendly way , something that they could hit at the same goals of what we were building before , but maybe in a way that that would better resonate with people .

If you think of a marketplace health data marketplace everyone talks about data sovereignty and can I monetize my health data , or can I monetize any data on blockchain and remove the intermediaries ? That product was connecting researchers with individuals so that you could , in the aggregate , make money off of your health data when it was used for research .

Obviously , there's a lot more to it , but the short answer , what we realized , was the amount of money that you may make , ironically very similar to play to earn games . The amount of money that you may make from doing this action in the aggregate was never really going to be the main motivator for you to want to use the product .

But if we could make it fun and something rewarding that you enjoyed , maybe that could be your motivation and any amount of money or crypto earnings or gains that you got , separate from that , would be icing on the cake . We kind of got into play to earn games for that reason . Obviously , play to earn was the thing in 21, .

Very early after Axie's initial success , we started looking at this as an interesting way for people to want to learn Web 3 or engage with Web 3 for something other than financial gain . Crypto has always very much been how much money can I put in and how much money can I get out , and games looked to us like a reason why people may want to learn Web 3 .

For the fun of it or see some benefits from it outside of what are my gains . So we took that as our founding principle for how we designed GeoPets the game . At a high level . It's a move to play game . You walk around every day . You get steps .

You're doing it anyway with your Apple Watch or your Google Fit or your Fitbit , but the dopamine loop for GeoPets actually starts at the end of the day , after you've gotten those steps .

And the steps you take every day , whether you went on a run or you just walked around in your house , are converted to energy that you can use to level up and customize and evolve and battle with and do all these things with your GeoPet .

That essentially turns into an avatar that grows and progresses as you do something that you probably know you should do like stay active , but oftentimes lack the motivation to do so . So GeoPets started to serve as your daily reminder of how much you walked that day a small reward , not an on-chain reward , not even a financial reward .

Your GeoPet , evolving and growing and dancing , became that reward for your day's activity . So that's kind of where we sit today and what the game is . It's very simple . It's a mobile app . You download it , you get started . Actually , the mobile app itself has no crypto , no wallets , no mention of NFTs .

It's just a fun game to play and we have 120,000 players playing today , 56% D30 retention . People love the game , game for the game and of course it is a Web3 game . In fact our contracts on Solana are typically top three most active contracts . But the Web3 set of our game is actually a small sliver of the overall game experience .

But it's that economic side of the game , it's the crafting creation , it's the inventory of all the items in the game that you'll want to trade and sell amongst players . Most RPGs if you've played one certainly have this sort of economic loop .

So we designed an economic loop game around Web3 and a pet care , health , fitness activity game that everyone in the world will want to play . That's kind of what we're sitting today on the Web3 and Web2 sides of the way our ecosystem operates .

But everyone moves every day and the vast majority of people know that they probably should move a little bit more , but oftentimes lack the motivation to do so . So we say genopets became a habit for people . That reinforces something you know you should do but oftentimes lack the motivation .

So that's what's fun about it and where we started to see the overlap and certainly you know getting a lot of great feedback from our community on sort of the direction we're headed there the economy and the way we , you know , put a lot of this together .

From the beginning , I think , especially if you looked at a lot of the 21 narratives around play to earn games it was all about how are you going to make a sustainable game fly economy ? And you know this can't just be based on earn token and dump it , because that's just not going to be a viable business model .

How does the studio make money in that scenario ? How do players make money . You know , is it just a Ponzi where you were a way to people that got in early and everyone else gets rubbed To an extent , like that is definitely what we've seen from the vast majority of play to earn games that have seen any amount of success ?

Our approach from the beginning was always and it sounds harsh when I say it but to separate the Web 2 and Web 3 in our game . A lot of people talk about Web 2.5 , but I don't think that's really a thing .

We are a Web 2 game that anybody , including my mom and little sister , can play , where they get a pet that walks around and evolves , and we have a Web 3 game that's very economy-based . You have to buy NFTs , you have to know Web 3, . You participate in an economy to create game items that are purchasable by the Web 2 player base .

So in every game there's power-ups and new wings for a Gino pet and all the in-game items that players in the mobile app typically buy from a publisher directly who sells you things for dollars in the game .

The way our game is designed and our in-app purchase launch our marketplace launch in the mobile app is actually our next big milestone this summer is all the items in the game that the mobile player base desires are created by Web 3 players .

They mint a new pair of wings or a new power-up or a new food or toy item that the player base in the mobile app will demand . And that's actually where the sustainable earn comes from . Is the earn isn't just how much token you can get and sell .

And if I go to calculators about this online that people in the community have created where if you make an item in Gino pets and try and sell it , does that actually net more profitability than just selling token ? And of course token prices are volatile and things are always changing .

But that's sort of half of the fun of an economy game is understanding all the different levers . You can pull the ways you can play that side of the game to essentially be a merchant , very much to the Amazon ecosystem where there are buyers and sellers on Amazon . There are buyers and sellers in Gino pets .

The vast majority of the player base , actually more than 80% of our player base , is mobile , just living in the mobile app , walking every day , checking out their Gino pet , feeling very fulfilled by that , and when they want to buy a new pair of wings or an upgrade to make their Gino pet cooler , faster , stronger .

They are essentially going to purchase a Web 3 item that a Web 3 player is minting to sell because they are playing to earn in a play-to-earn style game . What's fundamentally different here is where the earn came from . The earn is not just token , as I've said . The earn is the facilitation of this marketplace .

And somehow there's some backend stuff happening that they don't even know about Not like backend wizardry , secret sauce , magic .

So we facilitate the Web 2 to Web 3 for the average player . Part of that is grounded in this hypothesis that Web 3 matters most to users at the point of sale or transaction . If you're just on the buy side and I want to change my pet to blue , do I need a wallet or do I need to understand crypto ?

I just want to buy this item that makes my pet blue . If you ever wanted to mint your game progress and the mobile app out to chain and sell it and become a merchant , that's an option for players and we have a Gino vs Portal and this all happens on our website .

The website GinoPetsme is where the Web 3 side of the game operates and the Web2 side is again just this mobile app .

So we will have the ability to move between the two , the idea being that learning Web3 or doing the Web3 side of this is really only important at the point of sale , of transaction , and you get a super engaged player base that's there for the right reasons on both sides . That's kind of where we see this hypothesis going .

So to directly answer your question , you mint things in our crafting game using our native tokens . You buy things in the mobile app using dollars . The GenoPress platform essentially facilitates that on the back end .

It's kind of amazing because you're leveraging the dynamics of gaming communities to do that . There are always power users and the power users typically are the ones that the people just entering into the space flock to to learn from .

That's been my experience in games like StarCraft I'm trying to think of like this multiplayer games like these massive things like Star Atlas . But before Star Atlas there's like the Web 2 versions when they have like guilds and communities and stuff . And StarCraft is the one that I'm most familiar with because you did have guilds .

If you got really deep into it , you were like into like chat rooms and stuff like that , and you started at zero with like no knowledge , and then all of a sudden you got sucked into one of these groups and then you got further and further down the pipe until you were also like kind of an expert , and I think that's the path that happens here too , like

you start getting obsessed with geno pets but you're not in the Web 3 space , You're not in , you're not a merchant yet .

And then you figure out like , oh , I can buy this thing and upgrade my character and you connect with somebody else that way , and then all of a sudden they teach you like , oh well , if you want to do that , you know , check this out . It's this Web 3 use case . They might not even might not even talk about it that way .

But if you go to the website geno petsme and you can like , mint this thing , and now you can take all these points you've been earning and actually monetize them and this is like how you make money here . And I think for the near term it'll still be like it'll always be a smaller subset of the community that does that .

But the pile will grow over time on both sides until at some point , like a lot of people are doing it . You know .

I could certainly stand up a dropship store and start selling things on Amazon right now , but like I just don't want to , I like to buy things . There are other ways that I make money in my life .

The game is , you know , very early but certainly has some promising metrics relative to most of our peers in this space and we're quite excited , kind of , to see where that's going . But in the long run I hope to see that this sort of model is the way that most games end up getting created in Web3 .

You need to have an economy aspect of the game , but you also just need to have a game that people actually want to play . And I think that's where everyone's always said , like , the secret to Web3 games is to make them fun .

You sure make them fun , but actually the second part of that secret is to identify the motivations of different types of players and build them an ecosystem for that , so that there absolutely is a play to earn side of this game and we don't hide the play to earn word Like it's not . The play to earn is bad .

It's bad when everybody in your game wants to play to earn , because then nobody can earn . So that's that's kind of the motivating piece here , and where I think this may evolve is like you have to embrace that .

But you also have to embrace the fact that you need people that just want to play your game and love your game and are excited to spend money in the game , which , again , I'm a consumer of mobile games or video games , maybe a little bit less than I certainly was in my past , but as a kid I was dumping money into games all day long because that's just

what you like to do . You're okay to spend money for content and time . That's just . That's just how it works .

Like I was never a DeFi person , like I was never actively really excited about the trading side of crypto as much as I was . Blockchain as a technology and the ability to transfer value in a new way that you know hopefully facilitated benefits in a lot of different ways to different communities . No-transcript .

We've seen crypto or Web 3 or blockchain have actual use cases , potentially actual use cases across every vertical at this point healthcare games , etc . So to me , that was always what was most exciting about Web 3 in general is this fundamental opportunity for a debris shaped technology period . That said , I'm also not the best engineer .

I'm not really an engineer at all . I'm decently technologically savvy . That's why I got into crypto , actually as a product marketer I've been a product manager for most of my career but certainly didn't have the chops to do that on the blockchain side of things .

So I ended up really focusing much more on the marketing side of Web 3 and then doubling down on community . Because what I realized very early on in Web 3 was and this is what's so starkly different about building a game in Web 3 versus building a traditional game is you're doing it in the open with your community .

You're communicating on a daily basis with those that care most about your game A lot of player feedback , community feedback , very much driving decision making in every step of what we do . So to me , that's actually what makes me show up every day is I know you have 180,000 people on a Discord server that are really excited for what we do .

Every day they show up . We want to show up to make this vision come true that everyone's really excited for and has been supporting and building with us from the start .

What that's done certainly has given us a lot of data for player motivation , both certainly from just being active in the server , but also just looking at player behavior and the way engagement has turned out in the game , and we're really doubling down on the signals that we're seeing from the player base .

Two major ones One is we've not spent many on marketing this far . Everyone who's joined the game wholly organic or referred in by a friend , and referrals of course . Big piece of the industry or big piece of the growth , big piece of any product's adoption curve , is identifying . Can you get people to just tell their friends they want to play this too ?

Genopets is a very single player game . If you've played it , there's not anything to do in the game with your friends .

To date , there's some sharing features and things that we've released more recently , but the next big roadmap piece actually triggered by that has been competitive play and social play , a reason to play GenoPets with your friends , because if we're already seeing a large portion of our player base really excited to bring their friends in and tell their mom and friends

come play this thing with me I walk around every little couple of my pet is if I give you a reason to want to play with your friends . That's what our hypothesis is anyway . So where we're headed in the next major releases is battles .

So the first version of battles like competitive play , think like step challenges how much are you walking versus how much am I walking ? Can we wager some energy on it together ? Basically something to do with your friends in the game . The first version of battle essentially Everyone's looking forward to turn-based PvP battle .

That's definitely still in the bigger picture roadmap , but we got a lot of the plumbing and basics of a competitive version of gameplay out , aligned very well with the core loop of the game , which is very much walking today . Fitness I kind of shy away from word fitness sometimes because , honestly , I'm not even a fitness person .

I do 10,000 steps a day ish because of my geno pet and maybe I walk a little bit more , but I'm certainly not an athlete . I definitely don't go long runs , but I'll take a walk in the evening because it's nice outside and I know if I'm walking .

I'm walking with my geno pet and that makes it level up a little bit faster and get me some extra energy to do other things in the game . So that's . The next major milestone is fitness battles , step challenges . We call them step battles .

It tracks a lot of different data than just walking , but I could see that being like . You could see how there could very easily be other categories for different people , like different group subsets of the fitness space . Like right now you're just walking , but you could link it to Strava .

I don't know if it would count Strava , like running , as steps , but anyway you could see how you could like use interoperability between different kinds of fitness products to create these battle scenarios .

You don't need a whoop or a wearable device in order to track your steps . You can do so with just your phone . So that's something we'll restart , but absolutely .

Walking is probably like the number one thing that people can do to stay healthy and then sleep , and people do not get good sleep . We're all terrible at that , and it can really change the game for your mental health if you just start sleeping like eight hours a night .

Take care of yourself by taking care of your geno-pad . Maybe that helps us fulfill that base layer hierarchy of needs .

Then , as your geno-pad progresses and it becomes something you want to show off in its higher level , now you start to hit those higher level , mass level hierarchy of needs type needs where you've got something to flex and you've got something of value that you like to show off .

We're very much oriented around that overall well-being journey and tapping into human desire .

Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot if you don't have a frame of perception about games or apps , but your typical app churns 90 plus percent of their users within the first month . They just don't stick around . There's no reason to come back . But geno-pets has started to be a habit .

People just get used to opening the app , checking on their pet , seeing its progress . It reminds you every day how much you walked . My Apple Watch and my WOOP also remind me how much I walked . They do so with a vibration ring close . That sort of thing is great . It's a good step in that direction .

But what we're finding with geno-pets is that the game layer , the dopamine layer , on top of how much you walked every day , is a much stronger motivator than opening my fitness app and seeing how much I walked . So that , for me , is the big thing that we look at .

A lot is retention and how much do , or how long do our players stick around after they find out about their geno-pets ? I've got friends , people , friends of friends or people I would never have imagined .

People have told me straight up I don't work out , I don't walk , I don't think geno-pets is going to be for me the downloaded geno-pets and six months later , they're still banking their steps because they just like to see their pet grow . They're like , yeah , it's a good reminder every day . It's really easy .

At the end of the day , when you're on the couch watching Netflix , you take 30 seconds to check on your geno-pet . You bank your steps , you feed your pet , you take care of it a little bit , you give it a pet so you see hearts come out of its eyes and that's the loop . You just keep doing it . It's interesting .

It's becoming a habit-building app , almost like a Duolingo would be more so than your typical game , which is an interesting approach that we're really excited for to see how that impact starts to grow .

We've been doing this for over half an hour , so Curveball me on that one .

I honestly think for the vast majority of games out there , or just products in general , you probably don't really need crypto , especially if the game publisher is planning on selling you everything primary in the game .

Sure , you get secondary liquidity after the publisher sells you something , but you lost the biggest clip on the upfront buying it directly from the publisher .

One of the things that we're most bullish on as a game and our overall game economy design is this concept of crafting and giving the players the tools to create all the things in the game that the wider players will desire . That's very much a roadblocks or animal crossing .

Even I played a ton of animal crossing over COVID where we made this fundamental decision that our smart contracts don't allow us just to mint more wings and sell them to you . We make wings the same way all the players make wings by burning token to create them .

That fundamentally makes ownership of our assets and being on the economy side of the game substantially more valuable versus if we were to primary sell everything to our player base . Why does it even need to be crypto ? We may as well just do it in dollars . Maybe there's a secondary liquidity market and maybe that's why you need crypto .

Ultimately , I think a big part of this is really empowering the player base to be able to own and create and do all those things . Have some agency in the overall economy of the game , set the price for the items . That's something that I think a lot of games are missing today .

That I hope to see a lot more in the future as sort of played-earned ecosystems or games and what through in general evolve more mature is to find ways to make ownership a little bit more impactful than well it's . It's in my wallet and I can trade it on the marketplace if I want to .