From Web2 to Web3 Games: Meet Our Head of BD & Partnerships
We sat down with our Head of BD & Partnerships, Eric Chang to learn about his professional transition from web2 to web3, and his experiences and insights working with web3 gaming projects. Dive in!
Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in web3.
Hi Web3 world! My name is Eric Chang and I lead the BD and Partnerships side of Hemera. My background has always been with traditional web2 B2B SaaS companies, specialized in data analytics and leveraging CRM to manage my customers. Growing up, I was in the prime age of gaming, including, but not limited to, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Counter-Strike, Maplestory, Dota, and League of Legends. My experience in blockchain and crypto was very limited before our company decided to dive into the space.
When I was still in high school, I was playing one of the largest MMOs, Maplestory, on a private server, and in order to get items in the game, they required you to pay in Bitcoin, which I understood was a digital currency, but I never understood the technology behind it. Fast forward to today, I realize how ignorant I was, not only to the fact that I had traded a handful of bitcoin to get some items in the game, but also what it meant to transact with digital currency.
Today, there is a real problem, not just within gaming, but with the concept of ownership of digital assets, but for all intents and purposes, I will use gaming as the core example.
Why did Hemera decide to go into web3 CRM and data analytics?
Hemera started as a web2 influencer marketing and ecommerce platform, called Lifo, providing individual creators, artists, and other talents a way to monetize their own platform without selling their souls to a corporate company to promote their products (half kidding on the soul selling part). Nonetheless, this comes back to the initial problem above of ownership. We wanted to provide these individuals with a way to cater to the following they have built where they don’t need to give up their identity through brand deals that don’t coincide with the content they make. A creator friend of mine brought this to my attention where he doesn’t take any brand deals unless it is on brand with his content, and that can be hard to come by.
We had the amazing opportunity to work with retired NBA star, Metta World Peace, previously known as Ron Artest, to create an NFT project surrounding his basketball league that provided utility from the get-go. A lot of NFT projects launch with just the digital asset and the promise of utility later on, but we wanted to do it differently. I won’t go into this too much, but we launched during the height of NFTs and it did pretty well.
After launching Metta’s project and working with hundreds of NFT projects, we realized there was something missing in the space, and that was simply understanding and managing the community. We heard people using Twitter, Discord, spreadsheets and other third-party apps to try to address this, but it was extremely inefficient. Coming from web2, the founding team here at Hemera has extensive experience within data analytics and customer relationship management tools, and what better way to manage your community than bringing that concept into web3 in an easy to use, all-in-one platform. There is an insurmountable amount of data out there, and we set out to help projects understand it and grab valuable insights from it.
What is your opinion on the current state of gaming and web3?
I’ll keep this simple and to the point. The gaming industry is a 300+ billion dollar industry, and we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to blockchain gaming. There is obviously the challenge of user adoption when it comes to Web3, whether it’s the plain an simple excuse of “I don’t understand blockchain so I don’t want to touch it” or “I don’t know how to create a wallet, so I’ll just stick to my web2 games”.
I think the main challenge here is the educational part of it. In terms of gamer experience, there is little to no difference between playing a web2 or web3 game, aside from the obvious quality of game given web2 studios have been around for decades. As an MMO gamer, I think we all sometimes get that feeling of “Why am I grinding for so long in this game? What is the end game?” For those who played Diablo 3 when it just came out, the auction house was a great example of the potential of item ownership in a game. Sadly, they took it out pretty quickly as a lot of the community complained about including a Pay2Win feature in an ARPG.
The point here is if we can replicate the experience of “account creation” to “wallet creation”, this will move a huge block in itself. The next obstacle we need to solve is the educational part of it. Most people have this preconceived notion that most blockchain games are “play2earn”, where people just play to earn money, which is definitely not the case.
With Diablo4 releasing a few weeks ago, this brings me back to the whole concept of ownership within the game. You play for hours and hours, but can’t monetize the time you’ve spent grinding to find the best items in the game. This, to me, is the easiest problem to solve with incorporating the web3 component, and this is just scratching the surface of introducing blockchain elements into gaming.
What is your outlook on Web3 as a viable technological infrastructure?
This is something I’ve thought about a lot when we first entered the space of NFTs. I was always that pessimistic one in the group asking “Why would I want to pay to own something digitally, it’s just a JPEG.” Although most NFT projects have fallen through the cracks because they did not follow up on their promises, there are real world use cases for blockchain technology.
Gaming aside, there are some extremely powerful stories surrounding crypto helping impoverished countries. As someone who has worked in finance and banking, it’s extremely difficult to transfer money to another country, especially one without a central banking system, AND it also could take months before the money arrives at its destination. This is just one small example. For anyone who is interested in learning more, you can easily find articles about how crypto has changed the lives of people in third-world countries and why it is important that we invest further into adopting blockchain technology.
In closing, my journey in Web3 has been an incredible experience that has opened my eyes to the vast possibilities of blockchain technology. It's quite empowering to see how digital ownership can give creators, artists, and gamers more control not only over their digital assets, but also engage directly with their community and fans. Of course, there are challenges along the way, but it's important for us to bridge the gap and help educate the public of the potential of Web3 - let's embark on this exciting journey together!
Connect with me on my socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/whatthechangy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericwchang/
Telegram: @ericchang44