Zynga's Founder Justin Waldron

65,000,000,000 a year is spent on just getting new users into games. So what if there was a way to efficiently allocate some of their marketing budget to another system that could pay the players that? This could be a huge onboarding event for for crypto. Right?

Talk us through that shift and what OverGame protocol offers.

We've enabled communities to launch game ecosystem token for their token. So you can imagine, like, a a Farcoin has great Farcoin games where people can earn a tiny bit of Farcoin. Well, then that spreads more Farcoin holders to more people. The goal of a system where you pay the players would be to say that it's a more effective way of getting people to try the game than paying ads. It's not that they're funding the budget for the game up front. It's not like a publishing deal. They're just building the reward pool that rewards the developer for building the content and the players for playin

Alright. Welcome to another episode. Today, I have with me someone who lives and breathes games and gaming business models. Welcome to the show, Justin.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

So let's start. I want you to give us how your journey has transitioned from Zynga to PACO to Storyiverse and now to open game protocol.

Yeah. Sure. As you mentioned, I've I've just always been on the bleeding edge of sort of new business models and distribution models for games. And if when I started my first company Zynga, actually, me and my cofounders were really just people who were focused on social networks. We came as outsiders into the industry, and we were focused on the technology. Like, social networks are a very powerful technology. How do we take these new APIs and build new experiences? We started to realize along the way that games are very interesting, and we became a games company. So we built a poker game, th

You know, at that time, when the business model changed from, like, games that you only you could play only when you paid for the game to a freemium model, was there a resistance among the gaming community and developers at the time similar to the resistance that we face today for crypto?

Yeah. For sure. I mean, people fear what they don't understand. Right? So there were some game developers and designers who I have a ton of respect for that were from sort of the last generation that built the world's hit games, and they looked at what we were doing. It's just very illegitimate. Right? It seemed like, yes, you're giving away the games for free, but they almost felt like it was somehow deceptive to be asking people to pay money through the game when in reality, people were spending money upfront on their game before they ever even had a chance to play it. And a lot of times peo