Episode 28: How to Create a Winning In-Game Economy With Machinations

Introduction

[00:00:03] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile GameDev Playbook Podcast. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is, and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and in today’s episode, we will be digging deep into some of the tools available to build a great free-to-play game economy. Joining me to discuss that, we have Erno Kiiski from GameRefinery by Vungle. How’s it going?

[00:00:30] Erno Kiiski: Good. How are you, Jon?

[00:00:31] Jon Jordan: Good. Erno is the US chief games analyst at GameRefinery and our special guest. We have two double special guests today. We have Mihai Gheza, who is the CEO, and we have Matthew Morris, who is the head of sales at Machinations. How’s it going, guys?

[00:00:54] Mihai Gheza: Very good. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:55] Matthew Morris: Awesome. Thanks for having us on the show.

What is Machinations?

[00:00:57] Jon Jordan: Good. I think we’re going to go pretty deep into some of the stuff you are now offering people in terms of tools, and it’s going to drop in with some expert commentary as well. I guess the first question obviously is Machinations. What is it? Why should we care? Give us the sales pitch?

[00:01:17] Mihai Gheza: Machinations is a game economy design tool. That’s as short as I can put this, but recently it’s becoming a game economy, health monitoring platform. I could extend upon this and talk for like an hour. Do I get another chance to tell you what Machinations is, or is this it?

[00:01:38] Jon Jordan: It’s going to be a two-minute podcast? No, you going to have plenty of time.

[00:01:42] Matthew Morris: Okay

[00:01:44] Jon Jordan: Do you want to add anything to that, Matthew?

[00:01:46] Matthew Morris: I think one of the challenges we constantly talk to game developers to understand what’s going on in their game economy and actually plan their game economy so that it’s going to be creating the right balance for their players, and create tension, certainly in free to play economies, looking at where the monetization opportunities are, ad placement, all these mechanics that we’ve got available to us as game designers. Machinations become a platform to really quickly see and understand your game economy.

How did it start?

[00:02:19] Jon Jordan: Cool. Good. That’s a good starting point. How did this come about? We’ve had free-to-play games for 20 years, I suppose on PC, free-to-play mobile, been massive pretty much for ten years. Can you give us a bit of the backstory about how you came about with this? I could be totally inexperienced in this field. I’ve not heard of too many of these tools. What’s the backstory, and why do you think you’ve come up with this and other people haven’t?

[00:02:49] Mihai Gheza: Right. I’ll take a step at that. The backstory goes a bit to Adam and Eve when, ten years ago, I was doing live ops and then consulting and contracting on game economy design and monetization, especially in free-to-play mobile. I ended up doing a lot of spreadsheets, and it didn’t take long to figure out that not everybody is too well informed to put it likely on what math to put in that spreadsheet. Looking for a scientific solution, I came across Machinations, and this is the Machinations plug. Machinations was created by our co-founder Joris Dormans at the University of Amsterdam 10 years ago when he published a PhD and the first prototype, built-in flash.

The book, which I still recommend today, it’s called Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design. By peer-review, Machinations started creeping into academia to the point where teachers started teaching it in class all throughout 2013, ’14 to where it’s now present in more than 400 academic institutions and actively taught in class by many top universities on the planet. We started up in 2017, and we’ve been kicking at it ever since.

[00:04:09] Jon Jordan: Excellent. Normally, academic research doesn’t go anywhere into the games field. That’s interesting. You are one of the examples of academic research that has actually gone into the field.

[00:04:21] Mihai Gheza: To your point, Jon, Yes. That was our concern in the beginning. The book was pretty stuffy. There are a few 100 pages to have been read, and while I was taking a stab at it, I’m like, the learning curve needed to be a lot lower, and we’ve constantly been grinding to make it easier for people to pick it up. You don’t have to go through a PhD program to learn Machinations. It actually takes 4.2 hours to learn the basics of the language, and in less than a week, you’re ready to get value out of it.

When students and these whole generations of designers and developers walked out to school, speaking the language and using the tool, they started their own studios, like 70% of our user bases in these, or ended up in AAAs. It actually crept throughout the industry as a flash tool. The traction was there, and the pool has always been there for us to turn this into a proper platform.

What tools do developers use?

[00:05:27] Jon Jordan: Obviously, the platform wasn’t there for a long time. You say 2017 was when you came to market as a productized company with a tool. Even now, I guess you’re not used by most developers. What are people using? Because obviously, we have billions and billions, over $100 billion a year of free-to-play mobile, 80 million. What are people using to try and look after these complex economies?

[00:05:58] Matthew Morris: Actually, it’s really interesting. I’ll talk to game designers and game developers all day, every day. It turns out they use a whole plethora of different approaches. Obviously, there’s the spreadsheet approach. I think most game studios have got some giant spreadsheet that they try and use and try and understand, and different levels of horror stories that people have experienced in managing a spreadsheet like that.

Surprisingly, we often ask people, “How do you manage your game economy and plan the economy?” The number of people who have a slightly embarrassed laugh and look hysterical when we ask them this question. When they go, “We don’t have a process, we don’t have a way of managing it. We Chuck something out there with fingers crossed, and once it’s launched, we realize what’s broken, and we try and fix it.” Actually, there’s a huge number of people where guesswork is their strategy, and they’ll throw something out there with the best guess and then try and fix it and wrangle it back into some control after its launch.

Mihai Gheza: Can I–

[00:07:11] Jon Jordan: Come, yes.

[00:07:12] Mihai Gheza: Just to add to that, the status quo is probably spreadsheets, but that’s not science. That’s not a prediction. You open up your spreadsheet every single time, open it up. It’s going to look exactly the same. You’re not predicting or simulating anything. You’re not looking at the odds. The more advanced, the alternative to this was if you were to do some Python or Visual Basic Scripts in Microsoft Excel, which is a horrible, tedious job, and we’ve only met a handful of studios that have data scientists that can do this and even, so the turnover for that is a lot, a lot slower. It is quite unfortunate that we see gut feeling being the alternative a lot of the time.

[00:07:55] Jon Jordan: Erno, what do you see from your angle around the toolset and how people manage these?

[00:08:02] Erno Kiiski: That’s a good question because, for us in GameRefinery, because we are more high-level stuff or market features of what kind of features or what kind of mechanic different games use or what kind of live events or like more on the actual mechanic side and so on. Then, for example, you mentioned on the economy side, actually going on, “This is our game. This is our economy. This is how it works. This is our monetization points, monetization things,” and so on. You cannot just look at your competitor. “Oh, that’s cool.” They are doing really well, which had a big impact on the revenues. They added this event or whatever. Of course, that’s where we come in. That’s where we help.

I give visibility to the market, but to actually execute it in your game, you need some of these tools you guys have brought out. I also don’t know much of this, or I haven’t even heard about many of these types of tools that go really deep on that thing. I haven’t played around with your tool, but I looked it up quickly, which is really interesting. It’s actually a nice way to visualize your economy and get on top of it.

Learning Machinations

[00:09:19] Jon Jordan: was going to kick back on this. We had a very precise, it takes, maybe this is a joke, I don’t know, maybe falling for it, 4.2 hours to learn, normally people go well it takes about four hours to learn. You said 4.2, so it’s very precise. If it’s like me, a newbie, or Erno who wants to come and create an account and start messing around. What’s the process there? What do we get? Do we get anything to begin with? Is it a tutorial to go through? Because obviously, these things can be. I imagine enormously complex and takes many months to finish, but obviously, you have to start somewhere.

[00:10:00] Matthew Morris: I see, so actually that 4.2, the reason that’s a specific number is we went out to the point where we had 18,000 registered users. We went out, and we surveyed those users to ask them how long it took them. The result came back, as is the mean average of those users. Since then, we’ve created a huge amount of content to help people get up and get running with the platform much quicker. We should probably redo another survey and see if we can improve that at some point. Actually, Machinations, because it went out initially for that peer review process across academia, there are over 400 universities using Machinations to teach game design.

What’s really interesting is when we speak to those professors that are getting people at the very start of their career and trying to teach them the abstract way of thinking to understand game mechanics and game methodologies. One of the things that came back from there is some students will immediately grasp the concept of Machinations and be able to apply that abstract level of thinking to the game design.

When you look at Machinations at its core, it’s a visual system, but there’s no pretty graphics in here. There’s no big star announcement. You’ve just passed the next level. We’re looking at a completely abstracted view of the game model, and most people can quickly grasp that, but it’s not an approach that’s suitable for everybody being able to see a source and a drain and understand the impacts on the game progression system do require that level of abstract thinking. Actually, students that understand can apply that level of thinking pick up the platform very, very quickly. They’re able to start picking up and designing mechanics very quickly. Mihai, what would you add for that?

[00:12:01] Mihai Gheza: Thanks, Matthew. I would add to that like Jon said, the journey that coming from a PhD project to 35,000 users and thousands of studios all across the planet and us getting this learning curve being easier, putting all the videos, all the documentation, all the templates, everything to get you kick-started it. There is, however, going to be a certain type of mindset. Like Matthew said, those with an abstract thinking inclination will get it faster to your point; Jon, this is the mean average of 4.2 hours.

I don’t know where you would sit on the spectrum, but we’ve looked at our personas and everybody with some engineering background or especially developer background, like if you know how to code this, you could call it visual coding; it’s nine symbols and two connectors with the rule set attached to it. Hope that helps through the question.

[00:13:04] Jon Jordan: Would it be something that I don’t know’s lots of different types of game design, I guess some game designers come from this more product QA route, and some come maybe with more engineering background. It’s just something you would expect a game designer to do themselves, or it is IT. Is it something where a game designer would sit with an engineer and do it? How does that work out?

[00:13:27] Mihai Gheza: Right. If you want to narrow it down, it’s game systems designers within analytical thinking, people who would typically master spreadsheets, or less than 5% go about doing Python or Visual Basic Scripts. If you want to extend upon that, it’s designers; it’s not for level design. It’s not for haptics, not for narratives. We’re looking at systems and mechanics, not at aesthetics. Actually, mechanics and dynamics go with the framework; however, I must point out that in its journey of being the de facto and the status quo, which is our mission to become the go-to tool in this industry.

We have seen this niche expand to the point where we have diagram architects, and you have developers who can get into the diagram as a source of truth for what they translate into code. You have analysts; you have producers getting insight from it. Lately, the fascinating thing is that, especially in a new upcoming breed of games, which is web3 games, there I said it, now it’s in the podcast, but in this breed, we have players coming in to check out diagrams. Suddenly, we have players looking at sinks and sources and wanting to understand how economies are designed and operated.

[00:14:54] Jon Jordan: Can we talk a little bit about what the thing looks like? I’ve not built one of these things; when you look at some of these because you go to the website, some people show some of their workings, don’t they? A model where people can show what they’ve been designing. I wonder it’s very basic where you might go; I’m going to be a level one character, I’m going to start the game, and I’m going to basically go through 10 missions, every mission I’m going to earn a currency or something in the game.

Then you see how you’ve been talking about sinks and sources, which are basically in a game, how people do something in the game and gain something in the game, that’s a source. Then a sink is basically a way of spending that, which is normally like levelling up. You get an idea about how that works. On that sort of level, it seems very, very simple, but then a normal free-to-play game is incredibly complicated. I mean, how complicated do these things get? How many? I don’t know what you call them units or interconnections. Also, the biggest one you’ve seen in terms of how big these economies can get.

[00:16:01] Matthew Morris: Actually, I think your description there is absolutely perfect actually because if you go into Machinations, you look at some of the content that our community have created and shared across the platform. Some of those models go to about 3,500 objects, and they are massively complicated, and they’re simulating years worth of gameplay to really understand how different players in a free-to-play economy will progress and what their experience will be like across that time period.

Actually, even a model of 3,500 objects typically looks intimidating when you first open it up, but normally each mechanic or section of it is somewhere between 5 to 10 objects that make up that game mechanic. Although it looks really complex when you see all 3,500 of them when you follow through the flow, and you open up one of these models, and you start digesting it very, very simple to understand how each of those individual game mechanics goes, come together to create the full play journey. That’s really the interesting part of it. Seeing and understanding how each of those mechanics come together to make a very large complex free-to-play game economy system.

How Machinations can help developers

[00:17:19] Jon Jordan: Because you are really, I guess you see the flow, don’t you, everyone who plays a game comes in at the first stage, and they have what they have. Then the scale of it is obviously the scale of the game economy. If something’s been game been in development for two years, then obviously people have gone through all those different stages. It’s actually, I mean, it is not; I guess it is chronological in a way, isn’t it? Are these things chronological in how people progress through?

[00:17:46] Matthew Morris: Yes, absolutely. It’s chronological how people will progress through them. One of the key use cases of Machinations is free-to-play economies. You don’t just design it once you release the game and they walk away from it. These are ongoing development works where developers constantly add more content to keep it relevant to their players. What we then see is once you get the game when it’s a year old, and you’ve got the players that are on day 1, on day 180 have played it since the beginning.

Then you say, “Right, we’re going to introduce a new mechanic,” understanding the impact of that new mechanic or that new content or that new event. What impact is that going to have on all of those different types of economies becomes incredibly critical because you don’t want to release some new content that’s, “Oh, it’s brilliant if you’re in week one,” but actually if you’re a year, that breaks your economy and ruins the play experience for you. Make sure that you can test those changes safely, understand the impact of the changes you are making without doing that in production, you don’t test changes in production; you test them somewhere else; first, we test the code in that way. Having a way to test the game mechanics and the impact on the game economy is critical.

[00:19:08] Jon Jordan: I guess whenever you’re building models, models are being built, there’s always this a particularly, for very complex systems. I guess there is a fear over time that people, because the model is there and you built it, and you can understand it, then people trust the model. How do you stop ending up with a disconnect? How can you check that the model you’re building is actually what the game is? Because I imagine that’s probably quite hard to do unless you’re also building, I don’t know, test systems in the game to see how many resources people have and what lines they follow through the design you’ve put up.

[00:19:52] Matthew Morris: Yes, absolutely. Actually, one of the really interesting things we found is you’re absolutely right; you get to a point where they could potentially be a disconnect between the Machinations simulation and what comes out of production. Actually, what we tend to find is that studios then rely on the Machinations model, which becomes the gold standard of what should be happening in their economy. Then a typical workflow for a free-to-play game would be, they’ve got an existing model of their game economy. They’re looking to add some more content to it.

They’ll test that to see what impact it’ll have on different types of players in Machinations; they’ll then go, “Right, it looks good. It’s not going to break the economy. Everyone’s going to enjoy it.” It then goes to development to actually be developed. The end of that development process. Obviously, it goes to a QA process, but part of that QA process is to make sure that what’s being developed matches the design criteria that was set for it in Machinations, so Machinations becomes a control and a method of making sure that what’s actually come out of development is true to the game design that they want to create.

[00:21:01] Mihai Gheza: To fill in on that, when we set off to do this, I had a personal grudge on GDGs. I say those documents are where game design goes to die. Write 30 pages, nobody reads it gets updated instantly, and we try to stay away from that as much as possible. Now the spreadsheet is maintained as the game evolves, so in between and Machinations follows teams from pre-production through live ops. It includes pre-production, production, soft launch, and live ops and updates.

Most of our user base is in pre-production because I guess if you look at it, for most of the industry only a few titles make it live, and out of those that make it live, few of them will be around for a while. The magic happens, so you start off with maybe 30 nodes, then get to about 300 nodes as your game starts flushing out. We see teams coming back to figure out the initial parameters. Then before launch, they come in and do their stress work and do a bunch of simulations to make sure once you mean thousands or more volume simulations. Let’s just say that accurate prediction. Now, once the game is live, we see teams. I’m sure if we can drop names, but you can check out the logos on our website, but we have this 4X developer, there’s like two dozen people on a diagram before every single update or patch that gets or a live game event where they do whatever scenarios, where they look at all sorts of outcomes that could happen. I’ve personally seen this phenomenon of don’t break the golden goose and anxiety before every single update. You don’t know what will happen, and once you have a game live, something magic happens with the diagram.

You have data before launch, everything is assumptions, and as Erno said, you have assumptions based on maybe your own experience and your other titles. Then you go look at the market. What do other games experience? How is it going on for them? And you make your own informed guesses. Once the game is live, you have telemetry, and when you feedback that telemetry into the diagram, something magical happens because you calibrate it and you have, I don’t want to call it a crystal ball because it’s not going to predict exactly what’s going to happen, but it’s going to give you confidence intervals for all the spread that could happen. You launch with confidence, and you update with confidence.

[00:23:25] Erno Kiiski: That’s actually super, super interesting because also like my personal experience, there are those like you said, don’t break the golden goose type of games and there are these development teams that have these big hit success games, but they are really afraid to create anything new because of that. They are afraid of breaking the game, and then it will go all sideways and so on. Then it stays really stale, and then a player starts to churn because nothing new exciting is happening in the game because they are afraid to do a pick of changes or do a pick of new content. This is like a fail-proofing or having a safer spot to release new stuff and test it out. It’s really, really intriguing.

[00:24:15] Mihai Gheza: Yes, and to your points, Erno, last year we did this exercise. We analyzed a popular brawler that introduced a season pass, and they cannibalized the revenue. Yes. It was pretty popular in the industry, and everybody criticized them and not being cocky, but we could have forecasted that with less than a day’s work. When you look at the charts, and you look at the way they evolve, it’s obvious what incentives players will have, and then it became obvious the pressure that they had to put on pushing out content every single month, so people have the stuff to grind for, with the season pass and so on. Instead, it helps a lot with the golden goose syndrome.

In-game economies in F2P games

[00:25:01] Jon Jordan: When you say that, you mentioned breaking the economy a few times. I guess just to have an idea, I would have an idea that would mean basically the money you are taking in goes down, but what does that actually, I guess, various different solutions, but what does that actually within the tool? What are you picking? What bit of the economy breaking are you picking up? Are you finding that people will accumulate too much in-game soft currency? What does it look like?

[00:25:28] Mihai Gheza: Oh yes. You’re starting to touch upon one of the biggest culprits that have been around since games inflation, that’s probably the most common syndrome, and it’s not probably huge; it’s part of the survey, and that’s what most people are afraid of flooding the economy with whatever you want coins, tokens, just too much of it. People stop losing the incentive to grind, and you get all sorts or actually– Right, so you have inflation, then you have all other pitfalls. It could be some faucets of rare items you drop too many legendaries again, which diminishes the player incentive to go grind.

You could have legendaries that are perhaps being traded on primary markets and web3; actually, they are traded on secondary markets for cash and dropping too little or too many of them. Content planning and figuring out the pace at which you want your players to earn, but this is around the time that I must point out that when we talk about game economies, we don’t necessarily talk only about monetization, so we look at sources and sinks, and you have all the pillars and all the mechanics by which value can get created within your game.

Then you have all the drains and pillars that can consume that, and you want to keep a healthy line. You want to keep that sustainable. That is the keyword. We could talk a lot about what that means, and yes, actually, I’m just going to shut up now because I feel Jon is going to ask another question, and I could talk for a lot of time about this, but it’s balancing the inflow and outflow of value within your game whether that value is monetary. When one of your sources to create value is an in-app purchase or a rewarded video, or a cash injection. That’s a subset of economy monetization.

[00:27:32] Jon Jordan: You have mentioned it, and I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I guess I want to raise it because that is very big free to play game economies for games that have lasted 10 years now, I guess with Clash of Clans and Puzzle & Dragons have a lot of money invested a lot of time invested. We are seeing something slightly different now with web3 or blockchain.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but that to me would seem to be, oh yes, a real challenge for game designers because they’ve had to do this, I guess basically built around enjoyment and people spending money to gain some enjoyment, and you are thinking about how can you keep their enjoyment levels high? Obviously, when real money comes in, which is basically what you’re doing with web3, you’re allowing people to exchange game items for other currency that can be cashed out. That, to me, would seem to square or cube the problem. How are you looking to help developers deal with those issues? Very early, obviously in the market at the moment.

[00:28:36] Matthew Morris: I think you’re actually hit the nail on the head regarding how critical those game economies are in web3 is at least cube that challenge. Actually, one of the big differences is with a web2 of the free-to-play game economy, if you do launch a game and there’s something slightly broken with the economy, you’ve got the opportunity to fix it, and you’ve got the opportunity to change it. With a web3 economy, once you’ve launched it and it’s out there, and players have purchased it with real money, you can’t go back and just go, “Oh no, we’re changing all of that now.” That’s very difficult to do, and it’s going to cause a lot of upset in your community.

The relevance of being able to test and understand your game economy, see how it performs in different launch conditions, see what the results are, becomes absolutely critical. You wouldn’t launch a new business anywhere without planning out your economy or planning out your budget, and in these game economies, the complexity is dramatic. One of the key differences now, when we look at the progression systems for a typical free-to-play game, there’s one progression system that players will go through, but it’s a very isolated, safe environment if you like for that to have happened in. Now, in web3, those progression systems and those economies are linked together with every other player. They’re also impacted by the impact that changes to the cryptocurrency value. If your barrier to entry to get into the game requires you to go out and buy three NFTs to be able to play the game. The cryptocurrency value 10x is suddenly your barrier to entry is just gone from 10 bucks to 200 bucks overnight or even higher. Being able to understand how that impacts your game economy is critical.

[00:30:36] Jon Jordan: Erno, some wise words, I mean, do you think this is one of the reasons may be why free to play game developers are seen to be quite careful about piling into web3. Obviously, we see other industries piling in games, maybe not so much. Is that some of the complexity around these issues, you think?

[00:30:57] Erno Kiiski: Yes.

[00:30:58] Matthew Morris: Yes. Actually– I’m sorry, go ahead.

[00:31:00] Erno Kiiski: Yes, just my opinion on that. For sure, that’s one of the things it’s such a new business model. There are similarities to free-to-play, but it’s still its own thing. Many developers are being careful about it; for example, in terms of when free to play games, there were a couple of ways to do free-to-play monetization. If you look at free-to-play models or free-to-play games, there are such different economies in different types of games, and so on.

In the web3 space, the model is evolving; different economies are evolving in different ways to create those economies are still a so early phase that it’s a really interesting space to follow and where it goes. I would say the early phase is one of the really, especially for bigger companies, not afraid to take risks. I see the big, big hits, or big games in that space, most likely coming from smaller studios than the big traditional free-to-play studios; that’s my assumption, at least.

[00:32:17] Mihai Gheza: Just to add upon that, there’s player hate, there’s a lot of it. It could be rational; it could be irrational. No need to go into that now. There is pressure from communities to go one way or another. Web3 is still in its infancy. If you look at the number of wallets out there, there’s like 3.5 million or something in GameFi. How many billions of players do we have in traditional gaming? Traditional? It’s funny because we call free-to-play traditional. What did we call it a decade ago? With all the hate against free to play, if anyone recalls that?

You have the market, but you also have the anxiety of going into a space that’s way more complex because you’re walled gardens that you have control over. Everyone that’s been through making their first free-to-play game knows that you should have soft and hard currency because you can control the inflow of currency in your economy. That’s like one on one, right, or it used to be because now in web3, you have that. Then you have a market maker, the liquidity pool, an underlying currency, and all of your assets that you expose out there can be traded or swapped against assets from a different game.

We can talk metaverse about the use case of taking one item out of the game and playing and another one, fine. Until that happens, what happens today is that your economy is exposed against another game’s economy. That is daunting, that is horribly frightening for all major developers and publishers who don’t understand this challenge. This challenge that we’re tackling moves ourselves and the entire industry.

Otherwise, my own personal opinion why I think the biggest pitfalls in this space are right now is as easy as, A, the ability of teams to execute. I mean, we talk to a lot of developers and everybody that’s a platform or tool in these industries, it could talk about the experience of the teams that go headfirst into this space not ever have delivered the game in their lives or not ever have dabbled at least into economies.

That’s the number one ability to deliver and second, the ability not to reproduce every mistake we’ve made in free-to-play for the past decade or so. There’s going headfirst into it again like it says easy as if you deconstruct some of these games, and we’re big fans of doing deconstructions at Machinations. We can look at these diagrams as deconstructions, and we did an authorial title sometime in autumn. As Matthew and the team were doing it, we chatted and were on our slack like, “Dude, there are no sinks in this game.” Nothing forgets burns, like what is this? It’s easy. It’s called Ponzinomics. We’re trying to make it a thing of the past.

Closing remarks

[00:35:12] Jon Jordan: Cool, good, good. Well, on that note, I guess that’s the challenge and opportunity. Thank you very much, Mihai and Matthew. Matthew, with your sales, how on earth if people want to find out more, what’s the best place to go? What are the resources? How do they find you?

[00:35:29] Matthew Morris: They can visit our website, my connections to hire. Come and have a chat with us. If you want to know more about what we’re doing in the web3 space. The polite term is getting in line, but we’re reaching capacity on that. We’re creating a waiting list for clients working on web3 titles that want to be able to use machinations in a more in-depth way to get into it. Check out our YouTube channel, the Machinations. YouTube is a great way of understanding how to get started with Machinations to some industry best practices that we’re helping to develop, to make sure that games get launched well and have great, amazing player’s experiences.

[00:36:12] Jon Jordan: Anyone can sign up and start working on their own. That’s right, isn’t it?

[00:36:15] Matthew Morris: It’s free to get started with Machinations. You could sign up for a free community account or a free trial of one of our professional accounts and get stuck on it.

[00:36:26] Mihai Gheza: Just to add, because we have an open community, and since it’s summer, there’s been more than 10,000 creator profiles that you can go check out their creations. There are tens of thousands of diagrams out there. The web3 agenda is honestly because of the attraction we’ve seen in the market, and there are numerous reasons why that happens. However, the Machinations when you first envision that the metaphor is that being able to deconstruct any system on the fly on a steamy shower window. If you can, make an abstract model of it. If you can quantify it, then you can model it, simulate it, and optimize it. Whether it’s DND, a premium free-to-play game, or a web3 game, Machinations has you covered.

[00:37:18] Jon Jordan: Good.

[00:3719] Mihai Gheza: That sounded so salesy.

[00:37:21] Jon Jordan: Two sales pitches there, excellent, thank you very much, Matthew and Mihai, and Erno. Thanks, guys.

[00:37:28] Erno Kiiski: Thank you.

[00:37:29] Mihai Gheza: Thanks for inviting us.

[00:37:30] Matthew Morris: Thanks very much.

[00:37:30] Jon Jordan: Thanks to you for listening or watching, depending on how you’ve consumed the podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Remember, every month, we talk to people in the free-to-play mobile game space. That’s a really dynamic industry, the biggest part of the game space, and plenty of opportunities coming for free to play mobile. Thanks for watching listening; come back next time, and see you then. Bye-bye!