My Web3 Story

It must have been my programming and tech background that gave me a natural appreciation for blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs.

I remember back in 2014 thinking to myself, “Games used to cost 50 bucks. Then they cost a dollar. Now a lot of them are free.”

“Where do we go from here?” I wondered. “Are we going to get paid to play video games? What will that even look like?” 🤔

A few years later in 2017, I read the Bitcoin and Ethereum papers and that’s when the lightbulb came on for me.

I said, “Oh. My. God. This is the technology that’s going to bring about the next generation of gaming experiences, digital property ownership, and gaming business models!”

I went to tell all my veteran game designer and developer friends about it but I got laughed out of the room with a myriad of comments like, “You’re crazy”, “it’s a fad just like tulips”, and “crypto is primarily used by drug dealers and for laundering money.”

But I could see beyond all that. I could see past the grift and the greed. I spent the next few years researching and pondering how this technology could enhance GAMES!

If I couldn’t find allies in traditional game development, I’d just have to find them in blockchain apps (now called web3).

I met some amazing people in web3 since my entry in 2017, although almost none of them had any real game development experience.

In 2020 and 2021, NFTs took the world by storm and I was all over it. This was the digital ownership piece of the puzzle I’d had in my head for over 3 years.

In 2021 I became intimately familiar with NFTs, from the tech to the teams who were building to the customers. I minted hundreds of NFTs and I could count on one hand the number of mint experiences that didn’t stumble and fall over for one reason or another. It was like the wild west out there!

Where was the customer obsession? Where was the operational excellence? Who was building these things?

I observed it was primarily developers, business, finance, and marketing folks. That makes sense. There weren’t any customer experience experts at the helms of these teams!

After advising several NFT projects and web3 games on how to make excellent customer experiences, I finally decided it was time for me to stop talking about it and go do it myself.

What better way to show the world how to bridge the gap between web2 and web3 gaming than by building games that don’t use “selling”, “earning”, or “making money” as a primary motivation to play?

After all, I had been making award-winning games for decades reaching over a billion players. That part was my bread & butter.

All I have to do now is combine a super fun game experience with everything I’ve learned in blockchain and NFTs over the past 5 years and make something truly awesome.

And that’s why I co-founded Koin Games with an awesome team of multi-decade game industry veterans and entrepreneurs who all share my vision that fun games you can “Play and Own” are the future.

Imagine a world where you could play one of two games. Both games are in the same genre and both are equally fun, but one lets you own your items and one doesn’t. Why would you ever play the one without ownership?

That’s where we’re headed in another 5-10 years. I just want to help us get there faster. 🙏

Here’s what I did on Microsoft Solitaire Collection.