In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Playful Studios’ CEO Paul Bettner and lead game designer Brad Weir about its forthcoming built-for-streaming game Wildcard and how it links into the developer’s web3 streaming platform Thousands.
BlockchainGamer.biz: You’ve been in the games industry for decades, working on games like Age of Empires, co-creating Words With Friends, also working on early VR games, but I don’t think you were a crypto bro, so why did you end up making a blockchain game?
Paul Bettner: At best, I was a crypto skeptic in 2018. I knew what it was. I knew what blockchain was, sort of. I knew what coins were, kind of. But it’s just a technology. It’s like trying to get excited about a database. It needs to do something that makes games better before gamers are going to take it seriously. Mobile did that because mobile gave us games you can play on-the-go. Web3 still has to prove itself that way.
When I first got into it, we were working on Wildcard, as we still are. The focus being that we’re always trying to do something on a new platform, but in this case the new platform wasn’t web3, it was streaming, and it still is. What we are most excited about, as far as what we’re trying to push the boundaries of with Wildcard, is games that are as fun to watch as they are to play, that are built for content creators and fans and spectators and viewers to enjoy. Not just as a competitive game but also as something people would tune into and watch.
It’s been seven years since we started working on this project. In our pursuit to find a technology that lets us build that vision, it turns out blockchain and web3 is a perfect fit. But that’s because the underlying technology is exactly what we needed to create a connected ecosystem of competitors, content creators, communities, and the commerce that we want outside of the game. We want this ecosystem that even if you don’t install the game, even if all you do is tune into watch, or you’re a content creator, you can fully lean in and you don’t necessarily need to install the game to be a part of that community.
So we were looking for technologies that would do this. We started working with Amazon. We started working with Discord. We started trying to push those boundaries but we weren’t really getting what we needed out of that. So we started to build it ourselves. And that’s when we discovered web3 and kind of found this fit.
But to your point, we have this weird disease as a studio that I don’t think other studios have. We’re always drawn to not just building an evergreen game, that is a truly great game, but also finding some way in which that game can push games forward, can push the industry forward, and can find some new emerging part of the industry. That’s why we have this weird career that goes through VR and mobile free-to-play and all those other things.
Brad, as Wildcard’s designer, how has web3 impacted your work?
Brad Weir: Yes, we keep the web3 separate. There’s the game and the ecosystem. They both have their own lanes. The biggest difference with this game is we’re mixing elements from multiple genres. So we’ve had these ebbs and flows, twists and turns to figure out how all these genres play together and how it culminates in this genre we’re calling CCAG (collectible card action game). That’s where the hard stuff comes in. That’s where it’s different. When it’s a first of a kind, there’s different stuff you have to figure out.
PB: It ties to what I was saying. Web3 is an enabling technology for the new things we’re trying to do. Our studio attracts these folks like myself, like Brad, who love working on these frontiers. They’re not satisfied with just doing another shooter or another extraction game, another MOBA, whatever. They’re really interested in pushing those boundaries.
We are going to constantly challenge ourselves to find new frontiers in game design and in how we mix these amazing new technologies into what we’re doing. We’ve attracted and retained a certain set of people who now I’ve been working with, I mean a lot of the core team on Wildcard goes all the way back to Age of Empires. These are people that fell in love with that game, fell in love with pushing those boundaries and I’ve been working with now for almost 30 years.
You raised $46 million but your team is pretty small, 40 people I think?
PB: We’re about 30 full-time people. I don’t necessarily like using that number because there’s probably about 200 developers who have worked on this game. The way that the game industry works these days is small studios like us are able to expand our effort by working with amazing vendors, contractors, other remote studios that help augment our efforts. So even though we’re a fairly small team of 30 full-time people, we’ve worked with up to a couple hundred people in total.
I’ll also say we raised $47 million, 46 and a half, something like that from Paradigm. It was the first time I’d ever met and worked with the folks at Paradigm. They’re amazing. They have been just incredible supporter. They have been laser focused on Wildcard the game. They have never pushed us to adapt any web3 technologies or tokens or anything like that to the game unless we had a really good case for why that was gonna make the game better. I think that’s really rare in this space.
That’s interesting because Paradigm is a hardcore crypto investor so when that investment was announced, I assumed you were making a full-on crypto game.
PB: The thing people don’t know about Paradigm is they are hardcore gamers, like super hardcore gamers. The reason they splashed that big check on Wildcard was literally just because they played the game. That was it. They played the game and they were like, this is easily the most fun, highest potential game we have ever played in web3. And they made their decision based on that.
How has the game’s design changed over the years?
BW: I’m very good at questioning everything. So why is this like this? Why was this decision made? If anything didn’t have a good reason, let’s try to change it. It doesn’t mean changing it for the right or the wrong reasons. We’ve run ourselves in circles a lot of times too, but on the design side, we want to iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate as fast as we can and try everything that there is to try. Then we know we’re making the best decision.
In terms of Wildcard’s game mode, we were like, there are these elements that don’t feel right. So we iterated on it. We tried all these different versions of the game mode and we came around to having goalies. We really liked the goalies, but something still felt off. So then when we boiled down and found out what felt off, we were back to where we had been a year and a half ago, but we had this one new element, the goalies, which changes entirely how the game plays. So the flow of the game is what it was a long time ago, but the goalie makes the mechanics of that flow just better. It took us a year, a year and a half to test all the iterations of what the game mode could be to find out, it was pretty much correct in terms of the flow of the game that we wanted, but we were missing this one element and it took us that time to find that one element. It was a similar situation to go from 1v1 to 2v2. In every test we did, we were asked is there going to be 2v2?
PB: We tracked the feedback over time and we got tired of seeing that at the top of every single feedback form.
BW: We looked at it and we liked the more social aspect of gaming it brought. With 1v1, we were thinking the game needs more social elements and everybody’s asking for 2v2. Maybe this just works? We literally spun it up. We played it. And everyone’s like, yep, there’s no going back now because this is just better.
PB: In my experience, the best processes are ones like Brad was talking about. It’s where the team is relentlessly saying, this is pretty good, but what do people like the least about it and how can we maybe make that the thing they like the most about it. That’s exactly what happened. We were hearing I love this game. I think you have something good but the 1v1 is holding it back.
But it took this champion effort within the team, Brad and several folks, being like we’re tired of hearing this. We’re just going to go stand it up and get it to work and then we’re gonna see if Paul makes it the number one priority. And I did because it was clearly better, it was just so much more fun to play that play. It was clearly the missing ingredient. And it seems obvious in hindsight, but it was a battle internally because it’s effort. It’s a lot of refocusing to rebalance things for 2v2 and shift our primary focus. It was obviously the right decision, but it’s a discovery process. And I think the thing that we try to have set us apart is that we never stop listening to that feedback and asking ourselves that same question.
What’s confusing? What’s annoying? What’s less fun? What got you to feel I’ve played enough for now? What is that thing and can we make it from the worst thing into the best thing about the game?
This team has been doing this all the way back on Age of Empires. It was the exact same thing. I always remember especially the last year of development on every Age of Empires game, because it was the same thing. A year before we shipped the game, we felt maybe we were done. We’d sit down say if I wasn’t a developer on this game, if I was just a random gamer, would I pick playing this game tonight for fun versus some other game?
The year before the game was out, usually the answer was some people said yes, but the rest of the team said, honestly no. I’m going to go back and play Counter-Strike. I’m going to go back and play some other game. And we’re like, we’re not done yet. Until our own team can’t put the game down that they’re working on, we’re not quite there yet.
And we’re in that last year right now for Wildcard. It’s the most crucial time. But we’re definitely getting to the point where people are choosing to play Wildcard in their spare time, even though they worked on it all day long.
What makes Wildcard unique in terms of its gameplay?
PB: When we started working on Wildcard, it was because there was no game that gave us this feeling we thought should exist in a game. I want a game that makes me feel like this amazing creature-summoning champion where it’s fully the fantasy that I have a collection of creatures, I show up in battle, I summon them and I’m fighting alongside them, and it’s this amazing, visceral action game which still takes advantage of deck building. I’m a collector. I’m building my collection of summons over time.
We couldn’t find a game that was like that when we started working on Wildcard. And there’s still not a game like that out there. When I fire up Wildcard, it’s not like anything else in my Steam library. It gives me a different experience, a unique deck builder, action game, and strategy MOBA. I think the reason why there’s no game like this is because it’s wild to try to mash those three genres together. It’s why it’s taken us almost seven years to get this formula right. And there were a couple of years where we were honestly lost in the woods.
We’d have a game where the deck building was really fun, but the action part sucks. Then we’d go in the other direction and it felt like a great action game, but I didn’t care about my cards because I’m just focused on my champion. Finding that balance has been really, really difficult. That’s the reason why there aren’t other games like this right now. Obviously with Brad giving the genre a name, CCAG, I’m hoping this does inspire other developers to see if they want to build games in this formula, because it is a lot of fun.
Now talking about your streaming platform Thousands. You’ve spent the past 7 years creating an entirely new game genre so when did it become clear you were also going to have to build a web3 version of Twitch?
PG: When we started working on this game, there were two things that we were really passionate about. One was building a game that allowed us to go back to our RTS developer roots and take advantage of the experience that we’ve had working on RTS games, working on games like Smite and create a beloved brand new game that if we’re successful, maybe moves the genre forward in the same way that MOBAs did in the same way, that auto battlers have.
Also at that time, the thing I was most fascinated with was this new phenomenon of people watching other people play games. We love working on new design frontiers that challenge us where we’re not just trying to make a great game, we’re trying to do something fundamentally different in terms of how we play and engage with games. And I think this is the next frontier we should go after. There are two reasons.
Watching a game is the most casual, accessible way to enjoy a game, period. This is similar to why we were drawn to making iPhone games in the first place. It was something everyone could get into. You don’t have to install a game on a PC or even on a console. You could play it if you’re a normal person, you own a phone, you play games. I feel the same way about streaming. It is the most casual way to enjoy a game. You don’t even have to pick up a controller. You literally go to a website and watch someone else play the game.
But a lot of the games that are popular on streaming were built before streaming was happening. Games like League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, the designers of those games didn’t get a chance to ask the question, if we knew this game was going to be popular, it was going to go on to be streamed to hundreds of thousands of people, not played, but watched, what would we change about the game design? To me that’s a fascinating question.
At that point, our answer was we’ll go to Amazon and we’ll ask Twitch to build these features for us, or we’ll go to Discord and we’ll get them to build these things for us. And that didn’t work out. But we spent several years trying to get that to happen. To their credit, the Twitch team were very enthusiastic about it, but Amazon’s a big company and they have a bunch of other masters they serve. The Twitch team can’t just do exactly what we want when we want it.
We needed to experiment with some of these things for Wildcard and so we started doing some of those experiments ourselves. And a lot of these things started life as Twitch extensions, Discord plugins, bots. We’ve tried a bunch of different things. And then started running into the limits of what we could do.
Someone on the team said what if we go and try to stand up our own streaming backend. It didn’t start off as let’s go build Twitch. It was just started off as we have these features we want to enable a viewer experience that we can’t build on Twitch. Let’s go and build some of that ourselves. This was a couple of years ago and it snowballed from there.
What happened in 2024 was we started showing what we had been building, it didn’t even have a name, to some other studios, some other friends and colleagues, and we were overwhelmed by the response. People said I would use this for my game. I wish Twitch had these features. If you guys ship this, I would want to bring my own game to this or my own community to this. That was what convinced us eventually at the end of last year to give it a name and to go out there and be, we’re building this thing. We built it for Wildcard, so we’re going to keep focused on that, but if other folks, other developers and communities are interested in this, reach out to us.
And the nice thing is this allowed us seamlessly to put in the web3 stuff. Let me just give you the simplest example of something that Thousands lets us do that we can’t do on Twitch.
We want it to be true that if someone streams Wildcard and their viewers go on to play and install the game themselves, and let’s say they buy a skin or they buy a card pack, all we want is the ability to attribute some of that revenue back to the streamer who helped bring those players to our game. We know from experience working on other games that have been streamed that the users we get that come from a streamer are the most authentically engaged users that we get. It’s so much more effective if we can get someone playing the game who was introduced to it by their favorite streamer compared to us putting an ad on Facebook.
So at the end of the day, this is a user acquisition thing. We have a certain user acquisition budget to get more people to know about Wildcard. We have a choice of where we put those UA dollars. We can put them on Google Ads, on YouTube, on Facebook. What we know is that when we’re able to work with a streamer who is authentically excited, engaged in our game, and then they play the game and they tell their viewers about it, those viewers end up being the highest quality players we could get. They engage, they retain, they monetize really well. So all we wanted was the simple ability to share that revenue back with the content creators who helped bring those viewers. And we cannot do that on Twitch. We cannot do that on Discord. They just do not have the features to enable that.
And this is what a blockchain was made for. Blockchains are ideal at tracking attribution and sharing revenue and monetization across a broad ecosystem. So what we were talking about earlier, what is the ecosystem of Thousands in Wildcard? It’s about doing this, allowing for the attribution of content creation and viewership to lead to the monetization and the sharing of that value back to the content creators that help you tell the world about our games.
If that’s all Thousands did, that alone would make it worthwhile in my opinion, because when we make streamers and content creators more successful for streaming our game, there’ll be more of them that stream our game. It’s a win-win. I don’t understand why this opportunity is being missed by the rest of the industry.
How does Wildcard fit into esports?
BW: There’s a difference between a competitive game and an esport. For an esport, you need consistent tournaments and leagues, an overall championship. It really needs a structure. But there’s also grassroots esports, seasons, leagues, one-off tournaments. There’s a million ways to do it. You don’t want to ever force a game to be an esport. If you try to force a game to be an esport, it generally falls flat on its face. We’ve seen that time and time again. So our focus is about making the game competitive. That doesn’t mean casual people can’t play but that inside the game, you feel the essence of wanting to win. I’m playing to win.
But it’s got the vibe. We’re doing these broadcasts on Thousands with the exhibition series, showcasing communities, having more hardcore tournaments, but that doesn’t mean it’s an esport yet. The community has to say, we want this to be an esport, and the community has to take that first step. They have to put on the tournaments. They have to figure out what it is and then if there’s a point in time where the developers want to pick it up and help out, either support that or then take over and do it themselves, that can happen. But when a developer jumps in from day one it generally does not go well.
PB: We never talk about it internally that we have to do these things to make Wildcard into an esport or to make it possible for it to be esport. I’ve never even heard a phrase like that. Instead, Brad is the one of the best, probably the best Wildcard player right now, and he brings together this group of people, it’s called the Brad’s Bunch, who are also hardcore gamers. Those people will tell you immediately if the game is not allowing them to express their skill. They get frustrated. They’re like, I want to get better, but these features or there’s not really an opportunity for me to get better at playing with my champion, for instance.
For example, we had a feature that would lock up the champion when they were meleeing. It was too frustrating for our highly skilled players because they were saying there’s not much I can do here. I just hit my button and wait for this combo to finish. It’s not fun.
This happens constantly where these high skill players tell us what’s frustrating and where they want us to raise that skill ceiling. All we do is listen to them and follow that. As long as we’re keeping the game accessible to casual players at the same time, there’s almost no limit to how high we can try to raise that skill ceiling for those players who are thinking, if this game ends up being popular, this might be my career.
So what’s the situation with Wildcard playtests?
BW: So Fridays and Saturdays, we’re open for alpha play tests. Go onto Steam, sign up to request access. We’re letting people in every weekend right now, up to a certain amount of people. You should also wishlist us on Steam. Early access is happening sometime over the summer. So that’s where we’re at on the development side, early alpha right now.
And what’s happening with Thousands?
PB: We’ve done our twelfth streamed event on Thousands for Wildcard and I wanted to share some of the data. Firstly, Thousands is becoming its own thing. It’s defining its own personality compared to something like Twitch or Discord. It’s a platform made for the people who have the highest affinity, are the most loyal, the most engaged parts of the community. Whereas on Twitch, it might be all about getting 100,000 viewers, on Thousands it’s really about your most dedicated thousand fans showing up.
So retention, engagement and monetization are far greater than you would see on a platform like Twitch or Discord. Our ARPU, which is average revenue per user, is over a hundred dollars. And these are viewers. These are viewers who are showing up and engaging with features. We have this feature called rallies that lets viewers lean in and predict and cheer for and rally for the team they think is going to win. They can earn points based on that. Then there are referees who show up and watch players rallying and do airdrops and things like that.
The numbers I’m seeing now actually remind me of early Words With Friends numbers. Retention is over 70 percent. That’s the amount of people showing up from event to event and keep showing up. Our payer conversion was 83% in the last event, and that event made $35,000 from one stream. This is what you get when you add good retention, high ARPU and a dedicated audience. It’s incredible. Our game isn’t even out yet and we have streams that are monetizing regularly above $20,000. And like when we do want to level up, it’s a $30,000 stream. This is an incredible thing and we’re still at the very beginning.
So the vision is that Wildcard and Thousands is the place where as a content creator and a community, you can come together and generate way more value than you can on other platforms. And we share that value back to the content creators and the communities who are helping us build that.
But none of this works unless Wildcard has to be a truly great game that people love.
Check out Wildcard here, wishlist it on Steam here and check out Thousands here.
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