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Articles by Jon Radoff
Two years ago, launching a SaaS required five to ten people and six months of runway before you could write a single line of business logic. Auth, billing, multi-tenancy, admin dashboards — all of it had to be built from scratch or stitched together from a dozen services, each with its own API surface and failure mode. That era is over. The combination of AI coding agents and commodity cloud infrastructure has collapsed the infrastructure tax to near-zero.
Legends of Future Past
Legends of Future Past was one of the earliest commercial text-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), originally offered through Sprintnet, the CompuServe dial-up network, and later the Internet. The game introduced one of the first (if not the first) crafting systems in an MMORPG. Players could harvest resources including ores, herbs, and skins, then use them to make weapons, armor, and enchanted items.
Generative AI and Virtual Worlds
A few days ago, my team won grant prize the LA AI Virtual Worlds hackathon during the a16z Tech Week by creating a roleplaying game in one day. This is the result of me spending the last few years obsessed with accelerating game development.
Exploring the potential of generative AI in games
8 minutes ago venturebeat Beamable’s Jon Radoff, Inworld AI’s Kylan Gibbs, Berkeley Synthetic’s Matt White and Hidden Door’s Hilary Mason sat down at the GamesBeat Summit to talk about generative AI’s potential in games, now and in the future. There’s one thing we can all probably agree on when it comes to AI in games. Anything a human might oversee in a game experience has the potential to overwhelm a human from complexity. The perception of generative AI in games is mostly aimed at work usage.
Generative AI Learning Guide
I've assembled a set of materials to get you up-to-speed on generative AI no matter what level you're currently at. I begin with the highest-level concepts (vision, market trends, business topics), discuss many of the important use cases (games, images, 3D graphics, music, audio, code) and then move onto the material you'll need to know if you want to read the science papers coming out in this domain: The Generative AI Canon is where it is located.
The Generative AI Canon
This article is for people how want to level-up knowledge about state-of-the-art products and research in the field of Generative AI (genAI). Whether you’re just starting to learn about this transformative field—or you’re ready to learn the science and math behind it—this is for you. Unlike other collections, the Generative AI Canon has two important goals: High curation—not a random collection of everything.
The Jobs AI Will Never Replace
It will not replace the deep connection you feel with an old friend. It will not replace your sense of wonder upon learning something new, beholding the splendor of the cosmos. It will not replace the thrill of wrestling the trout from the waters as you stand hip-deep in the rushing river. It will not replace the achievement you feel when standing astride the summit, the mists rolling beneath you like a sea of clouds.
3 disruptive trends in game development in 2023
“Shots on goal” is my main advice to game developers: it’s a hard-won lesson I’ve learned from shipping my own games to millions of players. The more creative iterations you give yourself on a game project, the better your chance to earn an enduring audience. Since I shipped the Beamable Live Ops platform, it’s given me the opportunity to connect with thousands of other game developers. The patterns I’ve seen reinforce that time invested towards creativity and experimentation is critical.
Five Levels of Generative AI for Games
With recent advances in generative AI, there has been a lot of discussion about how it will be used in games, virtual worlds and the metaverse. So far, most of the focus has been on how we can speed up production pipelines, given how capital and labor-intensive many parts of game development are. However, the opportunity for generative AI extends well beyond the production process.
The Work of Art in the Age of Generative AI
We are on the threshold of the most important change in productivity since the harnessing of fire allowed our hominid ancestors to eat better, spend a lot less time chewing, and gather enough nutrients to evolve bigger brains. Now, artificial intelligence is augmenting the power of our brains, and it seems that no field of human endeavor will be unaffected. Transportation and warehousing jobs will largely be replaced by robots and autonomous vehicles.
Human-Machine Storytelling
It all began when with an experiment to get GPTchat to respond in ways that it was often hesitant to. I had heard someone had gotten it to print the current date in code (something GPT claims to be unable to do) so I tried something similar - but with the subject of an AI takeover: Of course, just having the steps for taking over the world inside a JSON object isn't too helpful. What I really needed was something that could work.
Unlocking digital identities, unlocking new ways to play and build
Original: https://future.com/unbundling-digital-identity-unlocks-new-ways-to-play-and-build/ By Jon Radoff Who are you when you are online? As we spend more and more time out there, this question becomes even more important. Web usage has more than doubled in the past decade; for Gen Z, that's even more. The way we spend this time has changed as the early transactional web expanded into a wider range of creative, social and interactive experiences.
Unbundling Digital Identity Unlocks New Ways to Play and Build
Who are you when you’re online? This question is all the more important as we spend more and more of our lives there. In the past decade, online usage has more than doubled; for GenZ, it’s even greater. How we spend that time has also changed as the early, transactional web has expanded to a wider range of experiences that are creative, social, and interactive. As a result, our lives are often defined more by our digital identity than our physical one.
Unbundling Digital Identity Unlocks New Ways to Play and Build
Who are you when you’re online? This question is all the more important as we spend more and more of our lives there. In the past decade, online usage has more than doubled; for GenZ, it’s even greater. How we spend that time has also changed as the early, transactional web has expanded to a wider range of experiences that are creative, social, and interactive. As a result, our lives are often defined more by our digital identity than our physical one.
Eric Seufert and Jon Radoff on scaling games with advertising networks, mobile evolution, ATT and the new "Don Draper" era of online marketing by Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff
Do you want to learn more about scaling customer acquisition for an online product? The lessons here will apply whether you are shipping a game, a metaverse experience or any type of mobile application. Eric Seufert worked at legendary game publishers like Rovio, Wooga, and Digital Chocolate--where he literally wrote the book on Freemium Economics for games.
Composability is the Most Powerful Creative Force in the Universe
Compose, component, combine, compound, composability - all of these words stem from the same common Latin root, com, meaning together. What we can accomplish together is more powerful than any one of us can do alone. That is the subject of this article: composability in the metaverse. I will explain how the real-time internet will harnesses the creative potential in each and every one of us.
Evolution of the Creator Economy
The "creator economy" is about unleashing creativity - enabling anyone to earn a living or build a business around an audience, unconstrained by the high technological barriers that existed in the past.
Building games faster and scaling LiveOps
Presented by Beamable Games were once a product, but now they are a live experience. And while “games as a service” aren’t entirely new, the realities of the market have changed dramatically. First, the market of players has changed. Whereas once players expected frequent crises as games go live and struggled with demand, there are now far more players, and they all expect reliability and stability. Second, it’s become harder to build a live services team.
Metaverse Interoperability, Part 1: Challenges
My intention in this article is to lay out some of the challenges facing interoperability in the metaverse, and open-source my thinking around some of the major domains where interoperability may or may not be desirable. In Part 2 of this series, I’ll deconstruct some of the critiques of interoperability — as well as some of the overly idealistic views of what interoperability can accomplish.
The Metaverse Value-Chain
Trillions of dollars: that’s how much private industry is investing into the metaverse. In this article, I provide a description of the value chain of this market, from the experiences that people seek out to the enabling technologies that make it possible. More importantly, I also provide a prescription — a vision for a future metaverse that is powered by creators and built upon decentralization.
Web3, Interoperability and the Metaverse
For some people, Web3 is the metaverse. To others, it is completely mysterious, bound-up in a lot of crypto systems that seem opaque to newcomers. As I’ve written about in the past, the metaverse is the real-time, activity-based Internet. Real-time activities (like games and videoconferencing) have existed for some time — but like any generational change, the seeds of the future already exist in the present. The metaverse will elevate the sense of the digital self.
Clash of the Metaverse Titans: Microsoft, Meta and Apple
The three incumbents with the most staked on the metaverse are Meta (Facebook), Apple and Microsoft. In this article, I will explain why that’s the case, using the methodology I began in the Value-Chain of the Metaverse. I’ll cover the metaverse technologies they are investing in, along with their differences in business model and network effects, and how this may give us some insight into the future. Apple is the most vertically integrated computer technology company ever created.
Glossary of the Metaverse
I recently published a Metaverse Canon to read-up on many of the topics (experiences, games, blockchain, NFTs, AI, platforms, etc.) that are core to understanding the metaverse. But I realized we also need a core glossary to organize the key topics and relate them to each other — a concept-web. I went through the canon and identified 58 key topics that are critical to bring into your metaverse vocabulary.
The Metaverse Canon: Reading Guide
This is a collection of my favorite articles — including those I’ve written myself and people have found helpful — but many others that have inspired me to think about the convergence of many social and technological trends that will power the metaverse. Image Credit: Susan Q Yin If you’re coming up to speed on the metaverse and you’d like to do a deep dive, then scan over the following article links. And if you have others you’d like me to include, I’d love to hear from you.
Jobs in the Metaverse
The metaverse is unleashing a wave of new economic opportunities for people around the world. This article is about the new forms of employment emerging in this next generation of the Internet.
Blockchains for NFT-powered Games
A number of blockchains either have existing games with non-fungible tokens — or have announced an intention to support games. This article covers the major options. Updated: September 13, 2021. Added Solana and Binance Smart Chain. If you don’t know why you’d want to include an NFT in your game, or if you have questions about how they work, check out Game Economics, Part 2: NFTs and Digital Collectives.
The Metaverse is Real Gamification
Several years back, I wrote a book called Game On. It was about gamification. I tried to help non-game-designers understand what makes games work: that it isn’t just feedback mechanisms like points, leaderboards and badges — which was what most gamification writers were discussing at the time.
The Experiences of the Metaverse
In previous articles I've shared the structure of the metaverse in terms of market dynamics, the companies that occupy the metaverse value chain, and the megatrends that will shape its future. Here I'm going to get down to the nitty-gritty: what are the experiences you can have in the metaverse - now and in the future?
9 Megatrends Shaping the Metaverse
In this article, I identify 9 megatrends — exponential shifts that are already underway on a global scale — and how they will shape the future of the metaverse. Most of the megatrends are a blend of both technology and social change. Here are the megatrends I’ll discuss: By looking at the 9 megatrends here, we are given a chance to “pull back the camera lens” and see a picture of the wider landscape upon which we’re constructing the metaverse.
Game Economics, Part 1: The Attention Economy
Every year there are new forms of fun, new engagement methods, and inventive ways of generating revenue from digital games. Virtually all of these methods share one thing in common: they convert attention to revenue. Photo by Alexandru Zdrobău Whether you’re a game studio considering the business model for a new game, an investor trying to understand the economics of the game business, or a fan who’d like to peek behind the curtain, this series of articles is for you.
The Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The metaverse will be enabled, populated by and supported with artificial intelligence (AI). It will drive all seven technology layers of the metaverse: powering spatial computing, providing scaffolding to creators, and supplying new and sophisticated forms of storytelling. This article will give you a taste of some of these markets, and where we’ll see it soonest. Few people realize how quickly AI is advancing.
Market Map of the Metaverse
In my article on the value-chain of the metaverse, I described the seven layers of the ecosystem. In this article I’m going to focus-in on three of the most important metaverse companies — Unity, Epic Games and Roblox — and describe the commonalities and differences.
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