The Future of Web 3 Gaming with Oren Langberg

Interview with Oren Langberg, CMO of Monkey League on Web 3 Gaming and the future of Play-to-Earn Game

Ishan Pandey: Hi Oren. Welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind Monkey League?

Oren Langberg: Thanks for having me! My name is Oren Langberg, and I am Head of Marketing & Partnerships at UnCaged Studios and MonkeyLeague. I am a lifelong gamer who has worked in various startups and listed companies over the last 15 years and has been at MonkeyLeague since the beginning.

Titans found our studio from web2 gaming and crypto. They saw early on that web3 represented the future of gaming, and the potential decentralized gaming unlocks. Within the current market, they quickly recognized a large gap for AAA-quality games that were first and foremost fun and that there was a lack of quality sports games. With MonkeyLeague soccer, the first in a franchise of web3 sports games that will leverage the same digital game assets, MonkeyPlayers, several months from launching, the rest is history.

Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a little bit about Monkey League and your vision surrounding the emergence of GameFi 2.0?

Oren Langberg: Imagine you combined the energy, excitement, and competitiveness of soccer with the strategic thinking of Chess. This is MonkeyLeague. A fast, turn-based arcade-style soccer game that’s easy to learn yet hard to master. I like to say think FIFA Street and Chess had a baby.

Build your dream team of MonkeyPlayer NFTs, compete against real players, enter tournaments, and climb the League ranks.

The MonkeyPlayer NFTs come with four core game skills, initial skill levels and max potentials you can improve through match play. So you will be able to level them up, and earn XP, which makes them more powerful in the game and increases in value.

What’s awesome about MonkeyLeague is first, it's the first in a franchise of sports games that will leverage the same game assets, and second, owning a team and playing matches is just one layer in a vast interconnected, multi-role ecosystem that we are building around the games. So whether you want to play matches, own a stadium and land, be a coach, sponsor, tournament organizer, or player scout, there are many ways to play and earn.

As far as GameFi 2.0, we have had a very clear vision from the beginning before this crypto winter made GameFi 2.0 trendy. The future rests on high production value, fun-first gaming with sustainable economies. The current state of play-to-earn with low production value games that use an earning mechanism as the primary incentive for people to play is unscalable and unsustainable. For web3 games to go mainstream, they need to build on the best of web2 games and add well-developed web3 components. All web3 game developers should ask themselves, “If there were no rewards, would I play this game”.

Soul-bound tokens, or non-transferrable status achievements in the form of NFTs, will also have a major role in the future of web3 gaming.

Ishan Pandey: The previous month has seen a sharp price decline followed by a comeback in the crypto markets as a whole. What does that mean for play-to-earn gaming and Web3 gaming companies?

Oren Langberg: Although many solid web3 projects suffered in the worst way from this crypto winter, in the grand scheme, it's advancing the progression of web3. Survivors will need to evolve and adapt. Gone are the days when a few people in their mom’s garage could create a low-quality 2D game and attach a simple earning mechanism and succeed. The future of web3 gaming will be high production value, fun-first gaming with a balanced, skill-based rewards system. Play-to-earn as we know it won’t sustain itself.

Ishan Pandey: Please elaborate on the concept of the soul-bound token system and how the soul-bound token ecosystem work?

Oren Langberg: Sure, we see soul-bound tokens have a huge part in gaming which is why we have, together with Jeremy Paris from Delphi Labs, have mapped out a network or system of earned or achievable soul-bound tokens within the UnCaged ecosystem. Whereas one of our MonkeyPlayer NFTs can be traded or sold on the secondary markets, soul-bound tokens or NFTs will be non-transferable and earned through achievements. These soul-bound tokens then provide additional benefits only available to these holders. For example, within MonkeyLeague, owning a certain amount of teams would provide you a soul-bound token that would bring added benefits, such as a Stadium within the game. A Stadium that you could host matches and earn from. As we get closer, we will release many more details about our SBT system.

Ishan Pandey: Recently, Solana and a number of other blockchain-connected platforms were looking into an apparent attack that appeared to have compromised at least 7,767 digital wallets, the computer programmes used to store traders' crypto tokens. From a regulatory standpoint, what changes are required in the industry to curb future attacks?

Oren Langberg: Certain regulations will help in maturing the industry in many aspects. I think that crypto and blockchain itself are still relatively in their infancy and whether it's security or infrastructure, there are a lot of technological advancements that need to happen, and they are happening each and every day with new startups popping up to provide solutions and technology. What’s great about web3 is that people and communities come together to solve issues and provide solutions.

Ishan Pandey: South Korea is the fourth-largest gaming market and a major adopter of blockchain technology. However, the nation has outlawed play-to-earn (P2E) blockchain games due to the inclusion of cryptocurrencies. According to you, how will this impact the industry at large?

Oren Langberg: There’s definitely a lot of progressions and evolution that needs to happen. I believe as the crypto industry evolves and becomes more mature, it will be more massively adopted and less volatile. More regulations as well will bring more governments around. I also believe that as web3 gaming evolves from play-to-earn to more of fun first, play and Potentially earn, it will be less seen as a high-risk scheme and more as just gaming with a real currency behind it can be earned.

Ishan Pandey: According to you, what next trends are we going to see in the blockchain and gaming space?

Oren Langberg:  We’re definitely going to see more high-quality fun-first gaming, NFTs with more utility that is seen more as digital game assets.

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