Decentraland is a 3D virtual world that launched in 2020 and is overseen by the Decentraland Foundation, a non-profit organization. In Decentraland, users can purchase plots of LAND represented as non-fungible tokens and use the virtual spaces to sell products, launch games, experiences, and much more.
In late June, the metaverse hosted the first-ever ‘Decentraland Game Expo,’ where some of the top studios in Web3 gaming came together to network, discuss the state of the industry, and showcase new games.
At Rarity Sniper, we were lucky enough to catch up with Bay Backner, the event’s coordinator, to talk about some of the themes of Decentraland’s Game Expo, as well as the future of Web3 gaming and the metaverse. Check it out.
The following interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
To get started, can you introduce yourself and explain your role at Decentraland?
I’m Bay Backner, and I’m head producer for the Decentraland Foundation. I’m not officially within Decentraland, but I’m the person that produces their events. I used to be a community creator. So, I created MESH Art Fair, which was a virtual art fair based in Decentraland — and from that, I’ve been asked to do more and more of these cool, immersive experiences and events for Decentraland.
And my other role is I’m an assistant professor of emerging tech at Berkely. So, I have the two hats.
Great, tell me about the Decentraland Game Expo. For people who aren’t aware, what is it?
We had four days of the Decentraland Game Expo (June 26-29). There were ten expert interest review panels, twenty-plus free wearables and emotes that people could claim between booths, over 20 games to explore, and 26 Expo booths from different leading Web3 gaming studios.
People like Aavegotchi, K-MON, DeFi Kingdoms, Chibi Clash, and a lot of the leading Decentraland studios are showcasing their games as well. On top of that, we have four immersive games to play that were built by some of the top Decentraland creators.
What were some of the goals of the event?
The vision was to showcase what’s possible in Web3 gaming right now. There’s a lot of noise around Web3 gaming, but even for us as one of the platforms within the ecosystem, we don’t really connect as much as we should….
So for us, it was important to reach out and start making connections with other leading platforms in Web3. It’s such a nascent ecosystem. Last night, we had an amazing panel about cross-game compatibility, and everyone at the leading platforms and studios recognizes that community is so important to all our success. And most of us share the same community.
Web3 gaming has a passionate community that is at the cutting edge of what everyone’s doing. Everyone’s trying out different platforms, and everyone’s positive about going across games. We see this cross-game ecosystem, this interoperability, as the real thing that makes Web3 different. The fact that we can take assets across multiple platforms. All the platforms are talking about this….
So, it felt like a good time to show that in practice, and to have these leading studios start sharing information and building bridges across platforms, environments, and studios.
And it’s been wild. The response has been great, especially from the big communities… It’s been such a boost to the vibe, not just within our own community but also connecting people, not in real life, we’re a completely virtual platform, but —
In real time.
Yes, in real time. People talking, coming together, sharing ideas. That was the goal: to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across different Web3 studios. We’re all reaching for the same angles — player identity, interoperability, true-ownership — so it makes sense for us to come together and showcase that.
Absolutely. It seems that interoperability is such an important factor because, like you said, we have people in Web3 bouncing around between platforms and trying different stuff. So that’s interesting to know that interoperability is a stated goal of Decentraland.
Decentraland has always been this thing that was built on decentralization and user-ownership, from the core of what Decentraland was created to be. It’s always been that we were the first metaverse created and owned by the users, fully decentralized, and fully open-sourced.
Decentraland is in a unique position because it’s not a commercial entity. The Foundation is a non-profit, which means that we can do something like open the platform to different studios and say, “Absolutely. Come in. Use what we’re doing.”
We’re now having ongoing conversations with a lot of the people that came to the Expo and are saying, “Hey, can we do a watch party in Decentraland for our latest release?”
“Yeah, absolutely. Come in.” We can create wearables that work within Decentraland, and that you can export and use in your own environment if it’s VRM compatible. We’re not ring-fencing tech. You can take anything that we’re doing and apply it to something else, or use the platform in any way to promote, create, and monetize in Web3.
I know ‘Game Jam’ was a critical component of the Game Expo. Can you tell our our audience a little bit about it?
The first goal of the Expo was to showcase Web3 interoperability and the best of what’s happening right now in Web3 studios. The second was to provide our own community with an additional incentive to push themselves to build within Decentraland.
So, we provided a prize pool of 40,000 $MANA [at the time of publication about $17,000] for four winning games to create something that could be installed to show what’s possible in Decentraland during the Game Expo.
The brief was Neon Fairground — which is the brief of the whole show. If you wander around Decentraland Game Expo, you see it was created to be like one immersive giant Neon Fairground. And we have the four winning games installed within the plaza.
There is a bumper cars game, a neon hockey game, a construction game called Neon City, and the other is a crazy game where you’re throwing pigs through hoops
Pigs?
Yeah. You’ve basically got a flame-thrower for pigs and you’re throwing them through hoops.
We also wanted to show interoperability between the games, so we installed what we call the ‘Quest’ in the Game Expo. If you complete a level on these games you get a ticket that you can use in a giant Fairground Claw Machine — which actually gives you wearables and NFTs.
What roles have non-fungible tokens played in the event?
It’s been massive. I think about 15 of the 26 booths have NFT wearables to claim. There’s a dispenser, you push a button, and you get airdropped an NFT wearable mainly based on characters within the games.
We have the helmet from The Defamation. I’ve got a beanie cap with the Aavegotchi symbol on it. And on top of that, there’s a Quest each day, where you can get more exclusive wearables from the Expo by visiting booths. We find this is the key excitement points for a lot of the community because it gamifies the Expo. You can jump from booth to booth, almost like a merch race, to find as many wearables as possible.
Also, in a lot of the Decentraland games, users complete quests to get wearables. It’s a value proposition within Decentraland itself: That you can claim wearables and wear them to express your identity, but you can also export that identity and use it in other metaverses using the VRM export.
Decentraland events are often built around the idea of making it fun to get wearables and flex them within the party. There are always big parties or events, and we ask the community to dress up in their NFT wearables for those parties. At the Game Expo, the first party was about neon. The second is about “gamer drip.” It’s a fun way of bringing community together and exploring assets from different games that you can wear and flex within Decentraland itself.
It’s only the third day of the Game Expo, and by the time this piece comes out the Expo will be over. But I know you are recording on YouTube and we can go back and watch the conferences and discussions. Is there any particular talk you can shout out that I can point readers to?
The AI one — the future of AI and Web3 gaming. We have to mention AI. It’s been such a big topic this year. And that was a really fascinating panel because there were three game studios talking about how they’re currently using AI and how they see AI going forward in their development practices in the future.
What’s Decentraland’s overall sense of the metaverse now?
I think we see how important these virtual spaces are becoming, especially for the next generation. Things like Fortnight have become cultural phenomenons. People are seeing this as this third space for gaming, socializing, bringing people together — and that hasn’t changed from the message that we heard three years ago.
It’s just that it’s the same with every hype cycle — you get the hype and then the trough, and meanwhile the tech is evolving. Then suddenly you see this breakthrough of mainstream adoption, and I think we are still before that.
But we can see in Web2 tech just how important these collaborative environments are. And then if you bring in the benefits of Web3 — ownership, interoperability, the fact you can take your identity across multiple games and environments — I think it’s a really compelling trajectory that everyone’s on right now.
Thank you.
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