Don Norbury, Head of Studio at Shrapnel, on GameFi and the Trajectory of the Web3 Gaming Industry | Ep. 277

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Don Norbury, Head of Studio at Shrapnel, talks about Shrapnel’s unique story to date, how blockchain can be included as an optional additional element of AAA games, and the future of web3.

About Don Norbury

Don Norbury is Head of Studio at Shrapnel, a AAA first-person extraction shooter with a creator ecosystem that empowers players to own their creations and shape the future of the game. From the genre-defining franchises of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bioshock, Sunset Overdrive, and Crackdown to the sports superstars Madden NFL and NASCAR, Don has redefined creative boundaries across platforms and player experience for more than 16 years. Prior to joining Shrapnel, he held senior positions at companies such as HBO, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts.

Don Norbury gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• The recent launch of GameBridge, an advanced and versatile Web3 game developer platform
• Shrapnel’s unique story to date, the general trajectory of the Web3 industry, and what’s next for the future of gaming
• Don’s experience and gameplay-first approach to game development
• How blockchain can be included as an optional additional element of AAA games
• Shrapnel – a AAA first-person extraction shooter

         

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab. We are Buzzing, as always, and I am super pumped to have the one and only Don Norbury on the show today, head of studio at SHRAPNEL, a AAA first-person extraction shooter with a creator ecosystem that empowers players to own their creations and shape the future of the game. From the genre-defining franchises of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bioshock, Sunset Overdrive, and Crackdown to the sports superstars Madden, NFL, and NASCAR, Don has redefined creative boundaries across platforms and player experience for more than 16 years. Prior to joining SHRAPNEL, he held senior positions at companies such as HBO, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts, also known as EA. What a friggin’ bio. Can’t wait to get into this one. Don, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you?

Don Norbury
Matt, thank you. I’m doing great.

Matt Zahab
Pump to have you on man. That is an absolutely wild bio right there. Someone who has played a multitude of the games that I just read off, and obviously, companies like HBO, Microsoft, and EA, I don’t think anyone on the planet who has an internet connection isn’t aware of those three companies. Super Pump to have you on. Can’t wait to get into this. Let’s go right back to square one before we get into some of the gaming and nitty gritty. A lot of people would absolutely kill, literally kill, to have their feet in your shoes and to have worked on some of these incredible titles, worked with these incredible companies, worked in the gaming industry. Gaming is so frigging big right now. It’s not even funny. People have no clue how big it is and how much time it takes up, how much of our bandwidth it takes up. But before we get into you, present day, and SHRAPNEL and GameBridge, let’s get into little baby Don all the way up to present day, walk me through your childhood, your past. Some of the cool things you worked on, and then we’ll get into why you made the jump from very cushy positions in Web2, taking a massive risk, jumping into Web3. But the floor is yours. Let’s hear it.

Don Norbury
Yeah, I mean, little baby Don grew up in New Jersey actually my family moved to Florida when we were young because my dad wanted to play golf all year round.

Matt Zahab
I love that. I already love your dad. Your dad’s a man.

Don Norbury
Yeah, that was the up and down the East Coast experience. Ended up going to college for computing at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, which was a great like first city, you know, at that point in your life on your own first city experience. Not sure if I’d ever go back to live there. Ended up there for about seven years for a couple of years after graduating, just working there. And then landed my first game industry gig at Electronic Arts Tiberon, EA Tiberon, which of course is the studio that makes Madden at that time made NASCAR, worked on Tiger Woods and NCAA, worked on a title called NFL Head Coach. There was more like franchise management than it was that like, you know, you couldn’t play it. Like you could Madden, you couldn’t kind of like pick a player. So that was a great place to, you know, get my first launch off experience because you’re in a studio that not only is just pumping out hits like annual title after title, but because of that cadence of it, you go through this very compressed production experience. Right? You are guaranteed if you go there in your first couple of years, touching a whole bunch of titles, some of them completely from beginning to end because the design production, like shutting it down, shipping it has to happen in this very specific window. For that, it was great for me. They like head hunted me because I made a like a Neverwinter Nights mod, basically, back in, you know, I’m pretty old. Back in that day, Neverwinter Nights, like the original game, not the MMO that came out, had a great tool set and you could build your own campaign for it. So I did that and it kind of attracted their attention, you know, along with my kind of computing background and that’s what kicked me off in the game industry. And then it was the kind of tour de coasts, I suppose. After that, I went to LucasArts, now it’s called Lucasfilm Games, but LucasArts at the time worked on Star Wars and Indiana Jones and then to Boston where I worked at Irrational Games. I was the like team member number seven or something like that, six maybe, on the team that made Bioshock Infinite. So at the time, most of the studio was doing like DLC or something for the original Bioshock and we were kind of setting the architecture and the project and the team and everything that would eventually become the full, you know, Bioshock Infinite team. Then went back to coast again to Microsoft. So that’s when I ended up in Seattle, Xbox was like global publishing for six years. It was just great. It’s great like altitude change. Had spent so long building products and studios and teams and everything. And when you do publishing, you’re kind of over a large portfolio. You’re involved in the business decisions like having to look at the marketing and the biz dev and pitches and where things fit together. And for a place like Xbox also, like what the platform and company initiatives are and how you can orchestrate them into the titles that you’re making. So there I worked on a ton, you know, like Quantum Break, Ryse: Son of Rome, Age of Empires, like that stuff was a lead for Sunset Overdrive and a lead for Crackdown 3. And then after that went to HBO, where I met all the founders that we eventually created Neon, which is the company that we built in order to make SHRAPNEL. What was HBO we focused on, it was both publishing. So we did like Westworld and Game of Thrones publishing, but it was also R&D, you know, HBO had this pedigree of just like entertainment technology being at the cutting edge of it. And we did a ton, you know, volumetric video, voice synthesis or like how we could use AI and voice fonts to put it in games so that you could more easily, right? Like have strong narratives and just not have to like do VO repeatedly again and again as you change like a script or something. So that sort of stuff we also did a ton of while over there. And I think that background and that kind of like who we are is what led us into blockchain gaming as well. Or like this is the nascent technology. There’s so much opportunity here. You know, this is, I always use the analogy of blockchain to me is like what TCPIP is for the internet. Like it’s this underlying protocol that enables something. Consumers don’t care. They just care about what they can do. They don’t care about TCPIP. They care about using Instagram or something like that, right?

Matt Zahab
They don’t care about the back end, they care about with the front end. What’s it for them? They don’t give a shit what is behind the scenes, what kind of engines in the car. As long as the car’s running and it’s fun to drive, that’s all that matters. That’s all it is.

Don Norbury
That kind of takes us to the present about two years ago. We kicked off SHRAPNEL in earnest as a project and started building the team and the architecture underneath and the game. And of course it’s like looking back, we feel so naive, like that we were so naive at the beginning and it’s become much more sophisticated and mature now on how we do that, you know, from an operational perspective as well as like the shape of the game design and what we’re actually building.

Matt Zahab
Such a good story. I mean heck we could not even talk about SHRAPNEL or GameBridge and probably chat for 10 hours here But we will get into that in a bit, but I do want to talk about your past just a bit more before we get into the Web3 stuff here I would love if you could just take it not a huge deep dive maybe just give a high-level overview on the differences of creating sort of games that have IP from shows like a Game of Thrones or like a Star Wars or Indiana Jones versus a Madden Just a sort of to set the lay the land for the listeners here. I’m a big sports guy I always dabbled played a little bit of the you know the Star Wars and the Game of Thrones not came through once but games like the Star Wars and Indiana Jones But when it came to the sports games, you know, I always played FIFA I always played Madden I always played NHL and it’s pretty much same but different very similar game. You’re adding a couple new things every year. You’re the biggest real changes is who gets traded to what team, right? I feel like you know graphics get a little better sounds get a little more vibrant. But how do you go about creating a game of thrones or a Star Wars. Like that’s wild. I love if you could just walk us through the process of how that happens from like, okay. We’re gonna create this game to actually shipping the game. And I know this is probably a four-hour question, but if you can just tell it into a couple minutes It’ll be lovely.

Don Norbury
Yeah, I’ll do my best. All of them have their own sets of constraints. I was to say, you know, SHRAPNEL is a title where we got to do all the world building and inception on our own.

Matt Zahab
Yeah. You got a blank slate there. Yeah. Which I feel like is like sometimes easier, but sometimes harder, right?

Don Norbury
It can be paralyzing. We have a great set of people. We’re great at it here in terms of going from the blue sky to refining what it’s gonna be. Everyone’s kind of no ego. So we’re great at throwing shitty ideas out, like throwing bad ideas out, having them shot down, finding the next best thing. We’ll do that repeatedly until you have something where everyone can resonate with it. But that is a completely separate problem. To address your original question, it’s different with every license, with every franchise that you’re gonna interact with. So with a Hollywood franchise, you talk about something like Game of Thrones or Westworld, those were very much in development at the same time. So you have a show runner in the case of a show. And if that’s happening at the same time, that’s actually the most difficult example because making creative stuff is hard. And you’re always trying to de-risk everything. There’s so many places it can not happen and not launch along the way that you’re always just in this protection mode. And that applies to not just the show runners, but also the financing around shows. So they’re always trying to protect the show runners and everything from people like us who are gonna come in and make a game that maybe has conflicting storylines or conflicting plot elements. And they’re like, can’t do that. Everything’s gotta fit in the show is the shining example. They’re not always like that, but it’s something you have to be aware of when you’re especially any like Hollywood IP. With Star Wars and Indiana Jones, those were established IPs where the majority of Lucasfilm’s revenue comes from licensing, right? So like they’re used to this entire landscape. It’s a well-oiled machine. And even though nowadays, like the majority of us are licensed to external studios to build something and this was an internal studio, they still treated it relatively the same, which is we’re licensing and that’s internally, you still have to come up with the plot elements, what’s the story gonna be? And then we kind of like verify and validate that that’s okay. It has to pass all those checks, but it’s still like, once you’ve laid out the story and the characters, that’s the main part of what the licensing is gonna care about up front. And then as you move through, it’s sort of just like a check and verification to make sure everyone’s on the same page. But that’s actually the easiest one is because it’s already established and their business model is very much based on licensing anyway. Madden, as he brought up interesting, it was the first game I worked on in 2005. So it was Madden 2006. It’s very interesting because the sport changes too, right? And the NFL license is non-trivial. And I would say the amount of scrutiny and critique that they put on a game like Madden is actually extremely high. So perfect example, because it’s a brand image. It’s a premium brand image. You can have the same thing if you do like Formula One, right? Like there’s hundreds of millions of dollars behind this. They care a lot about the correct tone and the message in the brand. So the perfect example for that first iteration that I did, the first shipped game, horse collar tackles were made illegal that year, right? They banned them because it would injure, yeah, it would injure people’s knees, right? Most people think it was like a neck thing, but it was actually like a leg thing, right? We had to go in and modify the game so that there was no, because you have all these animations that trigger for various reasons to go in and remove horse collar tackles from the game, which is a non-trivial operation, right? You have decades of the game being built. There’s all sorts of code and data. Has some of it’s not named properly. And yeah, so you gotta go through and then the test team has to be like, oh, you missed one or this is causing some bug. And that’s an example of that same level of like ongoing scrutiny and quality. It definitely happens with something like Madden.

Matt Zahab
So cool. Last sort of, you know, old Web2 gaming related question, then we’ll get into Web3 stuff. Nowadays, it’s such a phenomenon for every sports game. I guess even FIFA 2, which is probably the, I assume the most popular sports game on the planet, but you have every single NFL player now, they get asked about the ratings and they go, do you believe that this is fair for your speed, your overall, your tackling, your jumping, your juke. Did the players give a shit back then? Or did we just not see it because of social media? Like, did you have players writing you guys and being like, don’t give your head a shake? Like I’m not an 85. I’m a 91 speed because I love that shit. I think that’s great. I think it’d be so cool to like be yourself in a game.

Don Norbury
Yeah, I would say some players care and some don’t, but they definitely carried back then. I’m glad I was not the person. I knew, you know, it was good friends with the designers that actually had to do that tuning and make those calls. I’m glad I was not that person.

Matt Zahab
That’s so funny. Let’s jump into SHRAPNEL here. And again, I’m going to ask you some more question regards to creating a game, but you guys, and my apologies if I’m incorrect here, but it appears that you guys built this baby from scratch. And again, you guys are all very experienced game builders, developers, not just a couple lads, we’re like, hey, we’re going to make a game. You guys are literally world class. You guys are the best in the biz at this. Walk me through the like day one to shipping, because again, this is I’ve been fortunate to work with a couple companies. Who have shipped and are currently shipping games, more specifically mobile Web3 games. And I was in awe because I come from a marketing and sales background. I’m the guy you can help you, you know, get this in front of eyeballs and ears. But building it, I have no friggin clue what to do. And now I have a little bit of an idea and I am beyond baffled. It is absolute banana lands, the amount of work that goes into it, the size of the team that goes into it, the amount of hours, the iterations. And that’s just on like the building. Then there’s the creative side where it’s like, how does the guy or the gal wake up in the morning? The team of guys and gals wake up and think, we’re going to take this wacky dream like fairy tale story in my head and make this playable and visible and something you can hear. To me, it’s just as someone who’s not on the creative side, more of an athlete on the creative. I always think there’s like, you’re one or the other in life. This is so far in my wheelhouse and I’d love Don, if you could give us the lay of the land and talk about sort of the journey from day one to present day, because that I’m sure it’s absolutely craziness.

Don Norbury
Yeah, I mean, you’re absolutely right. It’s difficult. And we’re in like mid production right now, right? We have about 70 people internally and probably another 70 to 100. They were like external contracts, which is typical shape of the industry right now. That’s actually, you know, I’d consider us a, on the small to medium size studio really. Like, you know, once you get to your grand theft auto land or something like that, you’ve got 250 people internally, maybe more, you know, working on something. So it is, and it’s always a miracle that anything gets made. And it’s very difficult to keep people pointed at the correct North Star. I mean, it’s one of the reasons we have an in-person studio. You can see it historically in the industry during the pandemic, the reason so many games missed or like missed by a lot or just straight up canceled. There are not just inefficiencies, but it just straight up difficulties of getting everyone on the same page when you’re not in person.

Matt Zahab
That’s such a good point, such a good point.

Don Norbury
So, yeah, building a new IP, a new world building, you know, no good of story, nascent technology, new business model, like all of these things come together to increase the complexity of a already quite difficult process. The day one for this type of project, and they’re all different, right? If you look at like a $60 single player game like out of war or something, the creative process is gonna be a little different. The production process is gonna be different. For us, we’re taking much more of a like ship early unfinished early access style of things, get people involved way earlier. We felt it was kind of one of the things that attracted us like culturally on the Web3 side versus what people expect on the Web2. And I would say a lot of the people in that kind of like degen and gamer overlap tend to be more educated about how long good game production process is. So there’s a lot of voices that will come in and be very realistic. They’re like, dude, games take a really long time to make. Like you gotta be patient with the team, you expect like, you know, the impossible things basically from a timeline perspective for them to deliver. So we always appreciate those people who are kind of like doing it at the community level. But at the same time, we try and be as transparent as possible. So from the very beginning, when we kind of laid out at least for this project, we had the idea for a long time about just creator ecosystems. It was a creator ecosystems. And at the same time we thought extraction games were gonna be kind of the next evergreen design space in the same way Battle Royale had provided a construct for a lot of different games leading up to that.

Matt Zahab
Sorry to interrupt here. Can you talk more about extraction games and exactly what they are and why they’re so powerful?

Don Norbury
For sure, you know, there’s a couple pieces and there’s different styles of extraction games. All of them involve having to get stuff out in some way or another, right? Some are a little softer where, example of the Dark Zone from the division. And actually one of our advisors, a guy named Terry Spear who created the division, who’s creative director for the division in Dark Zone. It was part of like in our early stages, how we were doing the game design was very much with him. That is the softest version where you don’t really lose anything, but you kind of go in and you try to get stuff. And if you die before you get it out, you lose just the stuff you’re trying to get out. And then you have the more hardcore version, which is like escape from Tarkov, which is closer to what SHRAPNEL is, where the stuff you bring in is at risk. It’s a lose your loadout game, right? So you’re always thinking about that risk reward that you want to take. Now, granted, we’ve done a lot of design work to say, like we always have the mantra, like we want people bringing in their dopest gear every time. We don’t want you to not want to bring in your stuff because you’re afraid of losing it. And a lot of it has to do with all of the other stuff that’s like much higher value, that’s the stuff that you really care way more about. And that stuff you can’t lose, at least in the like the default game mode, you can’t lose, but the weapons and equipment and everything that you have on your loadout, you can totally lose. That said, you can take it from somebody else as well. And there’s a bunch of high value stuff. Over the course of this session, the value actually increases of the stuff in the session. So you want to incentivize people to stay in longer and longer, but there’s multiple, and some people are gonna just like YOLO to the end. Some people are gonna be very careful. They’re going around the edges. And then we have multiple extraction moments to they’ll be getting out in an earlier extraction. While the wolves go after like later and later game stuff. You know, that’s kind of the like framework and context for at least SHRAPNEL as an extraction game. Is this like come in with your stuff, high stakes, treasure hunting, as you know, the studio pillar that we put against it. That was, you know, the beginnings that we knew we wanted to explore in that space, making a game like that. We knew user creation was also something important to us. And it’s a lot of it because like we’ve all, you know, I’ve been making games. I know you said 16 years at the beginning, I think it’s like 18 now. And we get a close to 20 years in gaming. Our CEO is getting closer to 30 years in gaming. And what a lot of us got our starts, like I was saying, getting hired for Madden, got our starts modding games, like creating our own stuff with tool sets and existing franchises that were out there and allowed us to do it. So we always have this like nostalgia factor against it. And it’s been great to see things like Minecraft, Roblox, you know, the creator mode for Fortnite. So we always wanted to do that. But we wanted like the aged out version. A lot of it’s in the kind of play pen sandbox child space. We’re not making a Sandbox. We’re making a fairly like serious themed, like adult level of, you know, of like fiction and intrigue. We didn’t want it to be a place where anybody can do anything that they want. We wanted to be like an intriguing universe where they could put their brand on it and create stuff that other people could experience. It’s a different shape than like a game like sandbox or something like Roblox, but we knew it was important. So when we came to the blockchain, started getting requests for advisement in blockchain for our game expertise, that’s where we kind of made the connection, started, you know, jumping as far down the rabbit hole as humanly possible. And it took us about six weeks. You know, we were start up at the time so you can dedicate time on the team to kind of go away, make your own conclusions about things, research things. I was very much in the tech side at the time. So it was like baby’s first solidity contract and looking at the landscape, the like technical landscape of what was available, what the L1s were, what the scalability solutions, et cetera, and came back and I was like, this is not if, this is when. And the gaming landscape is not that great right now. It’s especially in the time it’s getting better and better, but at the time we’re like, this is a blue ocean. Like we should take our expertise as game developers, make a really fun game and realize this kind of like vision that we think is the future of legitimate digital ownership, transportability, you know, interoperability and go as far as we can to add all of that additional agency to the digital, you know, assets that people have. And that’s, you know, that analogy of like the TCPIP, like we very quickly saw blockchain as just the thing that enabled these other things that we wanted to do. From that point on, it was kind of your typical like create enough of a design, start like going around pitching and trying to effectively get seed to get the actual company started. And that’s what took us to two years ago.

Matt Zahab
You guys did all this before you got the first fund. For you got the first raise.

Don Norbury
Design perspective. Oh yeah.

Matt Zahab
Wow, I guess I didn’t my apologies. I did my research wrong. I thought this was like idea right away, boom. And then darn, that’s impressive. I mean, I guess with your guys background, I mean, I’m sure it was probably difficult, but I guess with your guys background though, like, you know, that definitely gets you in the door. It must have.

Don Norbury
Yeah, for sure. I mean, our team, we have a very strong team and all the people we’ve hired are really strong too. I think I’ve worked on projects previously with like half the people at the studio and because we’re in-person studio, it was this like perfect personality filter of people who are at a right place in their career. So we ended up with a lot of veterans. Yeah, who are just like, yeah, that sounds like, you know, we were refined enough even though I was saying like, we were pretty naive at the beginning. It was refined enough to attract some very talented people to the studio, which just, it took our aspirations and kept making them higher and higher of what we were gonna do.

Matt Zahab
100%. Don you are on an absolute roll. We got to take a quick break and give a massive shout out to our sponsor of the show that’s PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we’re going to keep buzzing on the one and only SHRAPNEL and we’ll get into GameBridge as well and talk more about AAA games, blockchain games and some of the similarities and some of the things that make games go absolutely parabolic. Nowadays, one of the things that interests me the most is streaming and how you must create a game that is somewhat streamable. And we will get into that as well. But until then, huge shout out to PrimeXBT. We love these guys, longtime friends of cryptonews.com, longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. They offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That will give you 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50. CRYPTONEWS50, all one word, to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Don. Don before we get into GameBridge and a couple other of the super fun things, I want to talk about streaming. It is absolutely blowing up. You have these 12 year olds to 23, 24 year old men and women, boys and girls who are literally making eight figures a year, eight frigging figures. And all they do is stream video games. It’s absolutely wild. I’m 28 years old. I never watched any of this stuff when I was a kid. Obviously now I don’t, but again, I have tuned into all of them. I need to because this is the field I’m in and it would be nonsensical for me to not know what makes the good ones good and what makes the bad ones bad. But it seems like the Gem Zers are absolutely hooked on everything streaming related. Instead of, you know, like you and I, when we were young, playing games or doing whatever at these kids still play games, but they just watch streams all day long, 24/7, walk me through the importance of streaming present day and why it’s so paramount for building a game to have easy streamability options for not just the gamers, but the viewers as well.

Don Norbury
Yeah, I would say it’s not just streaming its social reach period as compared to like traditional media, right? But certainly streaming and the personalities kind of represented therein are a huge, you know, a huge place. Just it’s as much entertainment as anything, right? People find the types of personalities, like taste making that those people have. And then they become like super attracted to that person. And instead of just being a show that they can watch for 30 minutes or an hour or whatever, it’s this like constant connection that they have, you know, a human who has a ton of people following them. It makes perfect sense in the current landscape of like social connectivity. But this is the human video connection that people like look to and rely upon. There’s a kind of air of more genuineness to it as well, right? And especially in the Web3 space, I would say, it’s really important to the point where you almost see, we always feel like traditional celebrities are like a huge red flag in Web3, where it’s like everyone’s skeptical, meaning like, why is he snooping? Right? So they want to see the people they trust and have a connection with. And certainly in Web2, like gaming, it has become the thing. I think the other part for the streaming portion as well is it’s the best way. If you don’t know if you want to play a game or buy a game or whatever, it’s this really easy shortcut. This is how I use it most formally. Like I don’t have standard personalities that I follow from a streaming perspective either. I’m aware of all of them. And we certainly have, and they’ll speak to it in a second, like our approach with streamers. But I will go to people like streaming games to see like real legitimate gameplay. Not just see like commercialized imagery and video. I want to see them playing the boring part and dying. That is the very obvious reason it is the heaviest part of the actual, like not just marketing, but awareness and how you get people into the kind of like social network of a game. Myth is probably our biggest streamer that we’re associated with now that we have a partnership with. He’s a great one, at least in the U.S. because he has a kind of insatiable curiosity. When he’s come to the studio, he actually spend like hours with our designers just sitting in the editor. Like how does this work? How do I tune this? Like why does this feel the way this feels? So it’ll actually like get into the game making side of it as well as just playing and giving feedback. Yeah. So you don’t always see that in streamer and influencer. A lot of times it’s like very transactional. He’s been an absolute delight partnership. But we definitely see our approach of those types of people and the best sorts of personalities to just create awareness and to have people understand who we are and what we’re building. As well as the like micro streamers as well who are like looking to build their audience and have franchises they’re associated with. They represent also a really great opportunity for win-win on both sides of the line. We’re including that in kind of our marketing approach as well. So yeah, we think that mixed with the other kind of social networks is the way to go. Nowadays, it almost feels like your traditional gaming media is following behind. They’re like reporting on streamers or on social as opposed to leading it. Right? The traditional media is a good indicator of how you’re performing on these kind of front-running networks but not really like where you go anymore to try. You’re not like chasing reporters anymore to try and get some sort of article. It’s just going to happen once you get enough momentum.

Matt Zahab
And it’s crazy how lucky you can get to. Like all it takes is like one, you know, I show speed or one of those guys who literally like find your game on whatever gaming platform you’re on and like literally the rest is history. Like you can go from five figures in revenue to seven figures overnight. It is that easy. And again, that’s the power of the internet. It’s crazy.

Don Norbury
And it’s global too, like as important, heavy weighted and popular as it is in the United States and Europe, if you go to the Middle East, they have streamers who have tens of millions of followers, like 30 million followers, right? Like we don’t have anything close to that caliber in kind of the West. So, you know, that’s a more untapped region, I guess in this space, but like the avenue is there to immediately have tens of millions of people who know about your franchise or kind of like buying into it and becoming the players within that ecosystem.

Matt Zahab
Crazy how it works. Let’s get into GameBridge here. You guys recently launched GameBridge, which is an advanced and versatile Web3 game developer platform. So friggin important. So Paramount for, not your guys success, but Paramount for, just Web3 as a whole. We need, you can’t build good shit without having highly talented, motivated world-class people on board. And if they are building things in which, in the fashion that is just a complete nuisance for them, it’s not fun. There’s too much friction and it’s just bullshit city, which is, you know, what it is a lot of the time right now. It ain’t going to work. And that’s why it ain’t working right now. So there’s a lot of incredible companies like you guys who are launching incredible products like GameBridge that allow Web2 developers to come to Web3 and actually move the needle makes shit happen. Was this a no brainer for you and the team? Why did you guys decide to launch this?

Don Norbury
I wouldn’t say it was a no-brainer from the beginning, that it would be something that we formalized the way that we ended up. In hindsight, it was an inevitability, especially with the kind of technical prowess that we have on the blockchain side here. There’s a couple of dimensions I always like to talk about here. One is, Web3 as an industry to us always felt over-weighted on infrastructure and underweighted on product. So for us, we were always 100% focused on product and what’s required to deliver trap, right? And there’s so many infrastructure companies who are building these services, but they aren’t doing it with their own product. So you end up with these tons of infrastructure seeking a very like, you know, a thin layer of products that are actually trying to make something. So we took the, it’s kind of the unreal, Epic made Unreal Engine to make Unreal Tournament. And it was just required to make the product that like we built GameBridge to make SHRAPNEL. And in doing so, kind of formalized an architecture that allowed our game team who know, you know, enough about blockchain to be dangerous, but mostly to themselves and the people around them. But you don’t, you know, they’re not like writing our smart contracts or doing any of the operational side. So our, we call it the Nexus team. It’s effectively our platform team. It’s very much, you know, taking the requirements from the game team and building the platform that’s required to support them. And as a result, built this sort of partnership, agnostic game architecting platform. And it’s, we’re building it for a game. It really the pattern and the architecture that it is could go way beyond games. It’s just, there’s a lot of existing services in the way things are glued together that enable games very easily out of the gate. But the pattern allows you to pick whatever partners you want. And when I say partners, I mean, like what L1 do you want to run your production chain? Or like what, you know, how do you want the actual like chain side and consensus mechanism to work? Who are your wallet solutions, right? Like these sorts of things that everyone has a different set of constraints and partnerships and trade-offs. We built it. So those things are, you can snap in and out. And still the game team can then just focus making game. We need, you know, inventory systems and cataloging and like this style of monetization and how the marketplace works on yada yada. They can just do that in a way that game developers are familiar with. And at that resulted in GameBridge. And we’ve got a number, large number of studios at also different sizes and calibers looking to utilize it. So we’re kind of teaming up those conversations right now. Want to do it at a responsible, like onboard people in a responsible way. Cause it’s, we’re still shipping SHRAPNEL, right? Exactly. You want to have that maturity of the product or else everyone’s going to go through the same pains that we are internally making sure our product works the correct way.

Matt Zahab
Well said. Don, this is an absolute treat. We are getting a little tight for time here. One last thing that I would absolutely love to discuss is, and again, this is a thesis of yours that you’ve discussed in the past, is how blockchain can be included as not so much sort of the forefront in the main piece, but an optional sort of additional element of AAA games, right? Where it’s like you have incredible teams like yours who are still building AAA games, but the blockchain tech isn’t front and center. It’s not, hey guys, come play our blockchain game. It’s come play our kickass almost Web2-ish, not almost Web2-ish, AAA game that looks and feels like a Web2 game that is actually built on blockchain tech. I’d love if you could talk about the importance of that and why that’s needed to enable things like true community participation. Gives it the ownership of course, the interoperability and how it really is the future of gaming as a whole

Don Norbury
Yeah, for sure. And I think really the part that is required is for mass adoption because it’s a thin slice of people that are willing to go through the friction and the trial and error when you have technophile adoption. That’s really what we’re talking about. But that said, GameFi and interoperability, transportability is why we’re doing what we’re doing. So like that part can’t get lost in the process either, right? So even though when you jump into SHRAPNEL, there’s no blockchain familiar terminology, right? We don’t have NFTs, we have whatever they are. We have skins, we have like an M4 or our variation of that like, you know, weapon itemization. Like we have those things and that’s just what they are. They’re not NFTs. I mean, they are in the smart contracts behind scenes, but that’s not like what you see. You don’t need to link a, you know, a self custody wallet. We have custodial wallet behind the account service behind the scenes. It’s handling everything for you in a familiar way that you would in any other game. That said, you can link your non-custodial wallet, your self custody wallet. You can transfer items into that. You can, you know, bridge, you know, whether it’s shrap itself or the items that are on the platform that you own onto other ecosystems. So that capability is still there. And it’s an important part of the cohorts that will come to SHRAPNEL and that are already coming to SHRAPNEL. But if you’re gonna have, you know, a million concurrency, you need like the wider gaming audience to come to the title and not have to feel like they need to learn or know anything that’s not in their, they’re like familiar space. So really it’s like, hey, that thing that you have is actually yours and you can trade it or equip it and you slowly show people the things they can do that they maybe weren’t as familiar with unless they’re like trading on the gray market for Counter-Strike or something like that, right? It’s sort of like showing, just showing them the affordances that they have now. And then they’ll get more deeply, some of them will get more deeply into what it really means to have like blockchain back digital assets, what the other marketplaces are, what other games are like interoperable with SHRAPNEL itemization. So that’s kind of like our approach of how you blend those two crowds. And the other part of that as well is working with other games and platforms to make sure our stuff actually works. Cause that’s a floating tides, like this all boats sort of thing. Whereas if you look at some of the more cynical game developers, like why would I do the work to support like somebody else’s stuff in my title? For me, the answer is obvious, which is it is a acquisition funnel, right? You’re now have a shared community. Like they can take your stuff and go there. It will come from those other platforms into your game because now they have stuff that works everywhere.

Matt Zahab
Don’t get greedy if you think your product is good enough. Just like for a lack of better terms, it’s one big circle jerk. Again, I hate the term, but like it’s one of the best ways to describe it. Everyone scratches each other’s back in a little way. And if your product is good enough, you’re going to be able to take that person’s attention. And that’s all the gaming industry is. We love an attention economy now. If you build a good enough game and Game X Y or Z is willing to share the sense that, hey, I’m going to give you my person and I get your person. And it’s not a matter of, oh, and if they like my game better than yours, they’re only going to play. No, it’s now they can play two different games. And you should feel grateful that, you know, you got to embark on that kind of partnership. I don’t get why people don’t mess with that. It makes no sense to me. It’s so close-minded.

Don Norbury
Traditionally very zero sum approach to it. And I think you look at that, I love the way you’re putting it. It’s exactly the right mindset, which is if your game not good enough, or they just wanna play some other game, they’re gonna do that no matter what. Well, make everything easier and better and more valuable for them, right?

Matt Zahab
Yeah, Don, what an episode, man. I know we barely scratched the surface with the rate you guys are moving at. Gotta have you on for round two and round three, but this has been an absolute treat. Thank you so much for coming on. Really glad that we got to make this happen and would love to meet you in person one day. But until then, please let our listeners know where they can find you and SHRAPNEL online and on socials.

Don Norbury
Yeah, you can find us on the web at shrapnel.com, on Twitter at @playSHRAPNEL. And either of those, you can find our Discord. We have a lively Discord community. And we’re actually selling extraction packs right now that are basically, we’re doing kind of an early access rollout of the game. So they get you into the early access and give you a bunch of stuff, some of it cosmetic, some of it more useful equipment. So we’re launching that basically right now. So there’s a lot going on from now, really, to the end of the year. There’s no better time to take a look at what we’re doing and get involved, be able to get in and shoot people in the face and have a bunch of fun really soon.

Matt Zahab
And what about yourself? You gotta plug yourself here too.

Don Norbury
Oh, I’m @DonNorbury on Twitter. I keep it real simple. You can always, you know, if you’re in the industry, you’re looking for, have a chat around game development or Web3 stuff. You can find me on LinkedIn, same name and same handle.

Matt Zahab
And last thing, bar behind you looks like a pretty speed bar. What’s Don’s go to cocktail?

Don Norbury
Yeah, that’s a great question. Probably the last word is my standard go to. So that’s equal parts, gin, maraschino liqueur, green shark truss and lime juice. That’s like a good…

Matt Zahab
It’s called the last word.

Don Norbury
The last word.

Matt Zahab
I’ve never heard of that. I’m writing this down. Interesting. Okay, good to know.

Don Norbury

Yeah, highly recommended. You know, it’s not complicated. It’s actually each cool proportions of each. So it’s mostly like how good is your lime juice? Like how good the limes that you bought, that’s gonna like define it. But any self respecting bar as well, you can walk into and ask and you’ll know. If they can’t make that, they’re not a self respecting bar.

Matt Zahab
I got a couple good spots in Mexico that I’d go to for a nice drink, not like the local watering hole because I mean, it’s strictly pretty much a beer in Tequila. But we’ll go to the Hyatt and shout out to Hyatt. Love the Hyatt. We’ll go to the Hyatt. They got a great bartender there and I’ll get him to make me one of those. That’s awesome.

Don Norbury
There’s a version that uses mescal, I think instead of gin.

Matt Zahab
I love mescal too. Love that. Don, what an episode. Appreciate you coming on, man. Can’t wait for round two. And, yeah, truly solid, wishing you and the team all the best. Can’t wait to play the game, and we’ll talk soon.

Don Norbury
Thank you, Matt. It was a pleasure being here. I appreciate the invitation introduction.

Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Don Norbury, head of studio at SHRAPNEL, he was dropping knowledge bombs left right and center if you guys are a fan of gaming and I’m sure you are this one was an absolute treat huge shout out to Don and the team for making this happen. Listeners love you guys thank you so much as always if you enjoyed this one and I hope you did please do subscribe it would be in the world to my team and I. Speaking to the team love you guys thank you for everything as always would be lost without you. Justas my amazing sound editor you are the GOAT you know it thank you for everything love you man and the listeners back to you guys again keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy wealthy and happy bye for now and we’ll talk soon.