AAA Gaming Studio on Hedera! Michael Mumbauer of Lithos / King Solomon (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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King Solomon interviews Michael Mumbauer, CEO of Lithos as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So, if you guys are just joining, we have Liithos coming up. You know, some of the real OGs that were instrumental in facilitating development of games like Days Gone and The Last of Us. And if you remember back, you know, Siphon Filter, which was an amazing game that I remember playing when I was a little bit younger, as well as Bountyblok. Today, Liithos is building a AAA gaming experience entitled Asphalt that is also utilizing and leveraging some Hedera services, which is super fantastic to hear about. So, really excited to get these guys up to the stage, and I know they've been collaborating with Bountyblok as well, so definitely interested to talk to both parties. So, give us a couple of minutes, we'll invite the speakers up, and yeah, thank you guys for joining. For sure, you sound good, can hear you perfectly, Michael. How you doing?

Liithos – Michael Mumbauer – Founder & CEO
‍Good, happy Monday, President's Day.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Happy President's Day to everybody. Yeah, so we'll get started here in a couple of minutes. I know we have Bountyblok up, we have you guys up, give us about two minutes here, and we will at this show on the road. Really appreciate both of you guys joining in today. You know how busy everybody is in this space, and now busy all the Liithos team certainly is. And it's great to be able to get a chance to talk to you guys. So, thank you guys so much for joining, and give us about a minute here, we'll get started. Alrighty, so I think we're gonna kick it off, guys. If you guys haven't joined into these spaces before, within Genfinity, in collaboration with HashPack, we've done multitudes of Hedera ecosystem interviews, probably since October of last year, moving these kind of to a more Twitter space initiative where you know the community certainly lives, and then these will still be transcribed, they'll still be pushed out as short, with some unique videos around Snippets from the Twitter spaces as well. But super excited today, should say we do these every Monday at 3 P.M Eastern Time, and a shout out to obviously HashPack, shout out to pre-ipo who is the educator within Genfinity's guide to series 65 which is free for the community, as well as our Lighthouse report is free for the community. Valor, if we can pin something up from pre-ipo and the guide to series 65, and before we hop off a little bit later, we'll talk on that as well. Super excited today to have a team that I've been personally trying to get in touch with for months and months in this space, and I know how busy these guys are, but it's awesome to have Liithos up here, and it's awesome to have a Bountyblok up here as well. I guess I'll open the floor up to Michael at Liithos and if you could give a background of yourself from the gaming industry and a history of, you know, your experience in web 3? That would be awesome to get us kicked off.

Liithos – Michael Mumbauer – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, so thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. Basically, I've been in entertainment for 20-25 years (I lost count). I've been in gaming for most of my career, did a little bit of time in feature film with Sony Image Works, but mostly I'm known for my work at PlayStation. 13 years there, I was the head of a group called the PlayStation Visual Arts, which was, to some degree, like a film co-development in video games. Cinematic character animation, pretty much anything you can think of on the art-related and R&D related to art. So, character animation and also VFX. But before I left, I built a standalone game development team that was there to create and help develop The Last of Us remake. And I also had created the group that is now Sony PlayStation Malaysia. So, I've had a lot of experience building teams. It's kind of my background there. I left in 2020 after The Last of Us 2 shipped. I kind of felt I had reached most of what I wanted to achieve at PlayStation and was very interested in new opportunity areas. Web3 very interested and, you know, just some Fringe explorations of entertainment and how it might connect to web3. So, I wanted to take the experience that I'd had from traditional AAA gaming and PlayStation and bring that experience and narrative-driven gaming with some of the ideas around user-generated content that we have into web3. To kind of be building new things that are kind of drawing new players into the space. I believe wholeheartedly that digital ownership is going to be a very real important part of gaming and just beyond that, you know, I think it's going to be the next generations. I think will be very, very, very important to them. So, I wanted to kind of get into this space and learn and grow and develop along with this kind of brand new gaming and entertainment space that really hasn't entirely found its voice yet within core gaming and this sort of "web2" group. So, hopefully helping to be a hybrid company that can help bring people from traditional PC console gaming into web3.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and it's, I think, it's a really interesting value proposition to provide that much kind of thought leadership from the gaming ecosystem. So, if you look at traditional gaming, I mean, there seems to be a little bit of hesitancy to come over into the web space. But you guys are taking a little bit of a different stance within that by saying, hey, you know, I want to hear about Ashfall, the game, but from my interpretation from reading through everything that you guys have done, you're really looking out and saying, hey, we're definitely, we're building a triple-A gaming experience. It's going to be for gamers, but we want to take people from in the web3 space along for the ride and the journey as we build out this AAA gaming experience. So, can you talk a little bit about, you know, what some of the community initiatives that you guys have facilitated, like, you know, at the beginning, and then tell us about, you know, Asphalt, the gaming experience that you guys are really creating.

Liithos – Michael Mumbauer – Founder & CEO
‍So, sorry, on the first part, can you clarify what parts?

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So, it's you guys, you know, from all the Community Driven initiatives. Because you are obviously building out a triple A gaming experience, right? It's going to be available on, you know, two consoles right now that have been announced, and then obviously PC as well. Talk about kind of the community building because you guys have tackled this in a way where you're basically taking Community along for the ride as you guys built out this experience, whether it be Collectibles or x, y, and z, just building out different things to get people excited about the journey ahead and the building of Ashfall like, if you could give us a little bit of a breakdown about Ashfall, the gaming Eco, or the game that you guys are building.

Liithos – Michael Mumbauer – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah. So, to go back to your first question in terms of bringing people along the way, I, that that was one of the interesting and exciting opportunities on the web three pieces. Very, very different approach, that you typically, again, whether this is right or wrong, this is the exploration in web three that is partially really intriguing and fascinating to be a part of, frankly. In that you know, again, traditional console PC games for the most part don't carry the audience along the way. And part of the reason for that is because, you know, obviously it's a, it takes a lot to get these things out the door, and most of the time, they, you know, you kind of don't want to show how the sausage is made, and there's a question of whether or not people really care about that. What I do think though is interesting is that the web three part of it is it allows us to share early, sort of our ideas and what we're thinking about this IP, and, you know, bring the audience along for the ride as the IP evolves, which it will. And that is, you know, mostly a scary proposition for most things in traditional spaces. I think what I love about web3 is that that's more of an expectation on the web3 side, the expectation is that people want to be a part of the project, they want to see how it's developing, they want to kind of you know, see how it's unfolding and can they help, you know, drive it or whatever, and that's really exciting. So, the reverse of this is again, we're building an IP world and universe, not just a game, where we anticipate, you know, we want to lead all of these things to the game, but what we can do in the meantime is, you know, drive the narrative of the story and build people, you know, bring people along into the world and the characters and explore it in these other areas like comics, collectibles, and you know, this Tik Tok series, which is again just also very experimental but also for me, feels a very natural fit to where we're going with web3. The Michael Lee, is himself a web 3 enthusiast, has his own company called Joystick, which is a web 3 company, and has a huge platform, an entertainer, and it just felt like a really good partnership for us at this stage to explore the IP and create additional value for people coming along on the ride as entertainment. So, purely like, you know, not just us kind of picking okay, well, here's an old traditional kind of console, PC developers coming in and pushing out NFTs that may or may not be, you know, something people care about. The idea is to create the entertainment first and make the NFTs or the digital collectibles or an Italian celebration comics, you know, collectibles with real value, and then open up the utility as we move forward, creating more things along the way to the game, so that that will ultimately help, I think and hope, make the collectibles that we're creating more valuable than just potentially the art that's there. So that's the hope, is that we're just creating more value along the way on the game side. The game is designed for PC console players as a traditional third-person action kind of shooter, right, um, but you know, with a strong narrative hook, so not unlike, you know, not unlike sort of what you see with games, like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, where it's got a campaign that you've fallen in love with, but then you know, you have an open world, competitive online play, and so we take that kind of idea, and look at like, well, where's the maturing of that space for these kind of open world games and, what we see is an opportunity to kind of bring user-generated content into that open-world kind of idea to be able to go in and, you know, create your own weapons, your own vehicles that you participate and use in combat, and just within the game. And so that part will be how we sort of hook the web3 elements and the ownership, and then the idea is that, you know, what we want to do is draw players into web3 through value, through a game that they love, and participation in creations that they love, right. So, we're kind of creating a little bit of our own creator economy ecosystem there, and then the game, when it's off-chain and on-chain, the experience is very, very, I mean, it's the same experience, but the value of assets and ownership is more meaningful on the Hedera side, right, because players then own these assets and then can actually have real value on them, and then also the history of play, like what's happened within who created, you know, these user-generated weapons and vehicles and how they were used in within the game, that history will be built in, which is really interesting.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍No, I think that's fantastic. And you know, a lot of the times, especially in crypto and in web 3, you hear projects talking about building out a game or using gamification for certain aspects, and you can kind of look at the go-to-market time as really short for a lot of these things. It's like a AAA gaming experience. This is more so from me asking a question like, what does it normally take to build out a real AAA game? Because it's got to be years, right? So how do we mitigate the crypto mindset of like, we want everything right now versus what it really takes to build something out that is for gamers, that people are going to enjoy playing and continue to be playing? And what has your experience been so far from the community building aspect with the Hedera ecosystem?

Liithos – Michael Mumbauer – Founder & CEO
‍I mean, the community's been great. And to your point, so the thing is we have two philosophies sort of, you know, at play here, which is a bit of the struggle to kind of be in this space and help emerge victorious amongst gamers because these games do take time if you want good games. And the crypto community, I think we have to sort of be able to move away from the mindset of "I'm just kind of coming in here to collect a couple of things that I can flip out, you know, flip real fast for money," and you know, watch these projects kind of come and go for six months. Like it's not gonna last and mature, and you're not going to draw gamers in unless there's compelling content that is a game that isn't designed just for speculative economics. Like that isn't going to fly with core gamers.