In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Hytopia co-founder Maxwell Holmes (aka Temptranquil) about how the Roblox-with-blockchain platform is building momentum, especially following the launch of its HYBUX token on Base.
BlockchainGamerbiz: Looking at Hytopia over the past few years, it’s been a rollercoaster of highs and lows. How has it been running the company?
Maxwell Holmes: It’s a lot of work, but it’s not for nothing, right? We really love being the team that always has something in the pipeline and always has a plan B. I think we’re known for that. We’ve built a reputation for being that way.
But, personally, I like when the house is on fire. I like operating when everything’s going awry and tomorrow is unknown. It keeps it interesting. especially in an operations role. I’m a creative person. I wasn’t super-academic, but I love running businesses, love building teams, love building products and especially seeing when users get their hands on them for the first time. The monotony is not for me. I need the craziness.
Hytopia has had a really long history. We pivoted multiple times. Often people don’t like pivots because they say ‘I invested in a certain vision and now you’re over there’. But our response is always ‘We would have been gone’. We wouldn’t be here today if we hadn’t made those pivots.
It’s a hard thing to tell our community we’re going in a different direction, one more time. But the people who believe in us were ‘Thank you so much’. We’re going to do them proud at some point. We could have taken the money and ran a long time ago but we’re using every cent to make sure this thing is market-viable. That’s just our thing. That’s just how we are.
How do you think you’ve managed to take your community with you?
I think people see we’ve been extremely consistent. We have the same values through all the different pivots. We don’t do the hype game. Don’t do heavy KOL. We don’t do heavy marketing. We don’t do pump and dump strategies. We don’t try to sell vaporware. We’re always like, ‘Hey guys, the product’s not ready. Sorry, we have nothing for you’.
For some people, that pisses them off. But for other people, they’re like ‘Wow, that’s honorable to say things are taking longer. Software development takes a long time. We’re not about ‘What can we throw at them to keep them happy this month? Then it ends up being a pile of junk. We’re the opposite. We don’t have those short hype-y milestones. There’s actually a product at the end.
Obviously, some people can’t take it and have left. But the people who can take it are still with us. In fact, they’re with us even more so and we owe it to our community. ‘Give back’ is the wrong word, but we want to do them proud. We want to be honorable and live up to our promises. Those promises are making sure our NFTs have the right utility and our token is sustainable and successful. But the thing is sometimes downtime is part of that.
When you started out, the vision was adding crypto to Minecraft, but now it looks like you’re more of a Roblox with added crypto. Is that a fair description?
One of the big things we wanted to solve on the Minecraft side was making modding easier, so we already were focusing on user generated content. But Hytopia is more like Roblox in that there’s no base gameplay. Minecraft has base gameplay. Roblox doesn’t. There’s also a heavier focus on the social aspect of gaming, very mini-game focus, playable, viral, a lot of pop culture and memes references.
We wanted to get on that side of things, and that’s what made us a better comparison to Roblox. However, our blocky style is unique because when you limit the amount of polygons in a 3D model it does a few things. It increases performance on low end devices, makes 3D model creation a lot faster, and it allows game developers to iterate quicker on their game designs because they’re not spending so much time creating assets.
It also taps into an existing network of 3D models that are used for Minecraft, so it’s kind of a match made in heaven to create this blocky universe that resembles Minecraft but also has all the modern, social, highly viral perks of Roblox. That’s where Hytopia meets the two of them.
Are you trying harder to attract players or creators?
Attracting creators is our top priority now. If the game is fun, people will play it. It’s pretty easy to grow a user base in gaming. You just have to make sure you have a fun game. We’ve done a bunch of test marketing strategies – Tiktok and Instagram and YouTube shorts – partner content streamers, all this stuff. We also ran Google ads that show our gameplay content and those have way outperformed all that other stuff.
If a user says ‘that’s a cool game’, they just go and try it, so getting content creators into the platform is a more important focus for us right now, because when we have an array of fun games, our player numbers will just follow. We’re seeing really, really nice growth right now.
Why would someone make games for Hytopia over Roblox?
One thing that’s unique about our platform is we use TypeScript (part of JavaScript) as the coding language, which is the most well-known language in the world. If people want to build games for the first time, they might not know a game engine like Unity or Unreal. Even Roblox has some complexities to it that if you were a general developer, you might not be comfortable with. Our platform will feel a lot more intuitive.
We’re also forward-thinking on AI. We’re not an AI product, but we’re AI-proofing ourselves for the future for when that time comes. We have a model context protocol, AI tools built into the SDK for people that want to use those to do anything from enhanced productivity all the way to vibecoding a game.
Our initial developers were community members that believed in the project. Now we have a second wave of people that are like, ‘Wow, this is a really cool platform. I’m tired of Roblox. I want to try something new’. I think the next step will be established game studios, who think Roblox is over-saturated and move to Hytopia because it makes more sense monetarily.
What does blockchain add to Hytopia?
That’s a totally great question. I think it’s our biggest controversy. We want a balance. You shouldn’t be playing because there’s a financial incentive. You need to use blockchain in a way where it enhances the user experience. So if you’re ever in a position where it’s taking away from the user experience, there’s no reason to use it.
So how do we use blockchain? Number one, it powers our in-game economy. It’s important that gamers have ownership or value in the time spent on platform. When players play a lot of a certain game or achieve things, spend money, it’s all tracked in the token. When they decide they want to take the token out of the ecosystem, they can off-ramp it. That’s the ownership we’re talking about. Not necessarily like this sword is an NFT that you can go sell on OpenSea. That’s not as important as the high level, which is you’re getting something out of your time spent.
Another aspect is investors. We have this web3 audience who are super enthusiastic. They believe in the product, but they’re not users. So how do they fit in the ecosystem when they’re never going to play games and buy in-game cosmetics? We use them to grow the ecosystem. One thing we have planned is an endorsement system whereby they can take tokens and fund the games on the platform. As the games hit certain KPIs, they’ll get a return on that funding, so they become the drivers of the ecosystem without actually being a customer of the product.
In this way, we have the web3 and the investor space and that financial bubble without negatively affecting the users. It’s not ‘Hey kid, buy this crypto token’.
Your current quoted user figures are around 19,000 daily active users and up to 100,000 weeklies, which is a good starting point.
That sounds right. We have some really strong growth. A lot of people are coming, joining the platform, seeing its potential. Maybe there’s not enough games at the moment so we need to upgrade our platform, do better on notifying those users to check back in and things like that. We’ll start bringing that concurrent user number up but there’s been really good traction, really good adoption.
And the best part about it is that growth is 100% organic because there’s no financial incentive on our platform. There’s no play-to-earn. There’s nothing like that. And the marketplace is only live in beta tests. There’s not even the movement of real funds yet. So these are people coming to play the games. These are really good, valuable numbers. I guarantee if we slapped some sort of play-to-earn element based on playtime or something, those numbers would 10x, 50x maybe. But then the data is junk because you’re talking about like armies of people farming and you can’t get real user data, so this is a really good way to kick-off the platform.
And the HYBUX token went live on Base on 14th November?
Exactly. We’re still pretty early and the growth we’re seeing at our early stage is really, really promising. With the token live, people can take USDC, convert it to HYBUX, then use it in the ecosystem to buy and sell items generating secondary royalties to creators. We’re not taking any funds from creators. Initially we’re doing an 85/15 split, so 85% goes to the creator and 15% gets sent back into the staking pool for our NFTs, so there’s a revenue share.
Why did you decide to use your own token, not a stablecoin?
This is one of the biggest things not talked about in web3 right now, especially for gaming. If you’re 14 years old, 13 years old, 12 years old, how do you get crypto into a wallet to spend in a game? Are you going to enter your social security number? Are your parents going to let you use theirs? Horrible friction. It’s a really big problem in web3. So how we use crypto, whether a token, a stablecoin or our own token is a big thing.
The solution we’ve landed on, and I think it’s temporary until those other issues are solved, is a dual marketplace system where the user can choose to use crypto or to use regular fiat. They work in parallel but they never cross over. There’s incentives to use HYBUX. You get a discount on items and you can be rewarded in HYBUX for in-game actions. If a creator wants to pay its players, they can’t do it in cash, only in crypto. All our creators are paid in crypto too, so they have to have exposure to crypto if they want to get paid, even.
But even if players are paying in fiat, it all flows into HYBUX. When a player purchases a $10 sword in game with regular cash, what happens is 85% goes to the creator and 15% is used to buy back HYBUX. That puts pressure on the token indirectly, even though the user is using regular cash. So we have to use that indirect approach until a user – a young user, especially – can comfortably on-ramp into crypto.
Find out more at the Hytopia website.
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