Vorto Gaming CEO on Revolutionizing Web3 with Play-to-Earn and NFTs

I think we should go back to 2017 when my childhood friend and I started a blockchain gaming platform, VZ Games. With the launch of smart contract-capable blockchains, we saw that we could create in-game economies built by the players – for the players.

We were tired of investing time and money into virtual worlds and not getting any return on it. We knew that with the help of tokenization and P2P trading, we could allow players to freely exchange their goods with each other and become the market makers of these virtual customized spaces. This completely flipped the model on its head – instead of players working for the game, the game should work for them. We called it a play-to-earn model!

If you look back to the late 60s and early 70s, Neal helped revitalize characters with whom readers had become somewhat disengaged. Through Neal’s power and vision, he truly provided that – Batman is a great example – and gave people a reason to fall in love with comics again.

The narrative has similar elements to our journey in gaming and how we feel about the industry today. We love gaming, but the games we've devoted time to aren't really fulfilling or giving back to us as players anymore. The gaming community is extremely passionate on this point, and they want to get more rewards for their dedication. So we are hoping to do our very own 'Neal Adams project' and create a modern ecosystem and inclusive ecosystem that enables gamers to start enjoying gaming again.

Yes, Vorto Gaming has been awarded 25,000 in NEAR Tokens and an additional $10,000 in cash, as an industry grant to support our move to integrate NFT trading capabilities into our games and, most importantly, to our players. There are an estimated 2.8 billion gamers worldwide, who essentially fuel industry-wide revenues which are expected to reach an estimated $181 B this year. Growth in player numbers and engagement, which the recent pandemic has also likely contributed to, sees more people isolated and looking for connection in digital worlds. The industry as a whole continues to grow at a skyrocketing pace over the next 4-5 years. This is where Vorto Gaming saw the opportunity. We are on a mission to make the game work for the players, and not just the players working for the game – where players are now able to monetize their time and attention to find, craft, and seamlessly create NFT assets of in-game digital items (tokenized).

The NEAR grant helped us to both speed up this development on our end, and also leverage out-of-the-box tools on the protocol and bridges. We see this as a great collaborative move, as it speeds up our go-to-market strategy this season by allowing us to avoid having to develop features already built into the NEAR solution. That way, we can focus on our core gaming needs at this point to support the players and the studios.

For NEAR, I think they recognized the Vorto Gaming vision and marketplace mechanics for gaming, and that was one of the prime reasons they approached us. Kind of creating an industry spotlight or use-case for gaming on the NEAR protocol; showcasing integrative approaches and appeal of 3rd party block-builders like our upcoming gaming NFT marketplace as the Vorto Network. I believe grants really do serve a great purpose of aligning both the Grantor and the Grantee in that sense, as it promotes both sides equally in achieving their end goals. We’ll be able to use that grant in both internal development as well as the valuable support for our upcoming PlayTest this season for the 30,000 users signed up at hashrush.com. It’s the first game to use and create NFTs for the Vorto Network marketplace.

Yes, again the technical robustness on the NEAR protocol helps our developer team to build and iterate faster, for several parts of our model stack. We can trust that the infrastructure works on the NEAR side, as they have flagship integrated projects (enterprise customers) that are live requirements for production rollouts, betas, and various other project build-out stages. So they have developed it for wider community use and not a single game or company IP alone. We can therefore already see it is quite robust, stable, and feature-rich. This means our development team has that robustness as part of our arsenal from day one, and we can build our needs on top. We are able to maintain working mechanics quickly and safely, using sandboxed test chains, and then once ready, deploy on the mainnet. This fits well with our CI/CD (continuous integration & delivery) philosophy, and it also fits very well with our impact scalability strategy on all layers: for the blockchain, marketplace, and the layers of the game. Our users, the players, are and will continue to be global, highly engaging, and generating high-volume transactions that just need to reliably work regardless of peaks or bursts. NEAR's sharding capabilities, along with our micro-strategy approach, very much 'fit perfectly together' in that sense.

But another aspect of selecting NEAR was also not just technical. The capability of their solutions or bridges also comes down to a business model. No doubt, a solution needs technical work to get market adoption. But when the technology is business-prohibitive, like in the case of some blockchain setups, for example, Ethereum; the cost models of running micro and high-volume transactions kind of make the whole business a non-starter. This of course invalidates the discussion of whether or not the tech even works, to begin with, if you can't have both pieces of the puzzle. Thus, NEAR offered us a viable technology and business-economical means to both create the NFT while allowing them to be transacted in line with our planned business models.

We are learning a lot in our beta and will continue with quick iteration in our rollout, but also why it's vital for any model to get a live PLAYER BASE, gather feedback, and let the market tell you the right directions to navigate from there. NEAR helps us with this agility.

Yes, we absolutely believe that the creative members of the game's audience provide something essential to blockchain games. Essentially, this is no different from how people support traditional games by creating fanart and memes, writing fan fiction, cosplaying characters at events, and maintaining fan sites, wikis, and generally showing support, so much more.

As to why they merge, at face value it does look like an unlikely mix. The older book-based communities tend to be more technologically illiterate, and the younger tech communities tend to be seen as harder to approach. However, what we believe is that as it's practically impossible to be disconnected from new technologies, those that struggle with the concepts are under much more pressure to learn. This is where the newer tech communities step in; and while it may be surprising, for the most part, the tech communities are extremely open and will jump at a chance to help push the adoption of the tech that they are most passionate about. So the moment that someone (say a more prominent person from the older book-based community) would show an interest in something like blockchain, they are more likely than not to receive a huge outpouring of support from the community. Once this quality becomes visible, others are more likely to join in, reaching a snowball effect of adoption.

Add that to the fact that both sides know what it is like to be marginalized (after all, until world-changing the term ‘nerd’ was a derogatory term) and you see the willingness of both sides to learn and accept each other; this would further promote the merging of the two seemingly polar opposite communities.

I believe that there can’t be one without the other – Gaming is the foundation of esports, and therefore provides the very essence of its model which has seen incredible success over the past few years, whether that’s audience engagement and viewership figures, events, the launch of teams and franchises, or commercial collaborations with brands.

What Vorto Gaming is trying to do is add the monetization of gaming and make it possible for casual gamers like you and me to earn a living from something we love doing. At the moment that is mostly for esports professionals competing at a competitive level – but hopefully in the future, with the development of the Vorto Network, that will change.

As in-game assets become tradable against a real-world value, players become market makers. In an open economy game, players dictate the value of a limited in-game item, not the developer or publisher anymore. Gamers can play the market and try to acquire items that are more scarce. When I say ‘scarce’ I am not only talking about items that are in limited and set quantities, but also digital goods that are highly sought after in the market, for example, crafting materials. These items can be obtained through gameplay and competitions and then sold for real money on the Vorto Network to other players. As the items are only available for purchase on the Vorto Network Marketplace from other players, that creates a market demand from players who have less time on their hands but more money in their wallets. Players supplying other players and adding money to the pot is the main reason the in-game item has a real-world value and becomes a form of asset or store of value.

Adding in-game item tokenization to the mix provides a layer of security and transparency that is required when your in-game items hold real-world value. As well, utilizing blockchain technology allows the gaming industry to tap into a financial settlement layer that can support the transfer of value between two peers. Of course, blockchain is not the only answer to the security of your assets. It is the owner's responsibility to keep the assets secure as well. You wouldn't keep a priceless painting without extra caution.

We believe blockchain is a foundational technology; it’s more of an enabler. While the use of blockchain and NFTs can be seen to create trust and transparency, the economy relies heavily on things we have engineered directly into the game engine's logic.