Steve Curran, CEO of Burn Ghost Games, on Play-to-Earn Gaming, and Why Some Games Go Viral | Ep. 227

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Steve Curran, CEO and Co-Founder of Burn Ghost Games, talks about the future of P2E gaming, the power of casual gaming, and how video games are the biggest use case for Web3.
About Steve Curran
Steve Curran is the CEO and Co-founder of Burn Ghost Games, a Web3 skill-based game platform. Steve is an entrepreneur and creative technologist with extensive experience in developing interactive entertainment and marketing solutions utilizing games, virtual reality, augmented reality, and other emerging media. He has directed award-winning entertainment-based solutions for clients such as Red Bull Records, Sony Entertainment, Warner Brothers, Atlantic Records, Puma, The History Channel, A+E Television, Burger King, Mattel, Animal Planet, and many others.
He is the author of two books on design, including MOTION GRAPHICS Design for Broadcast and Film and CONVERGENCE DESIGN Design for Interactive Television Broadband and Wireless. He was a contributing author to one of the first books on Social Media CONNECTED MARKETING – writing on branded entertainment. He is the CEO and Co-founder of Burn Ghost Games, a Web3 skill-based game platform.
Steve Curran 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
- Why casual gaming is crucial to Web3.
- The future of Play-to-Earn gaming.
- Video games are the biggest use case for Web3.
- Why do some games go viral while others fizzle?
- Why are we so captivated by trivia games?



Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, and I am super pumped to have our guest on the show today, Steve Curran, coming in hot. CEO and Co-Founder of Burn Ghost Games, a Web3 skill based game platform, Steve is an entrepreneur and creative technology just with an extensive experience in the development of interactive entertainment and marketing solutions. Utilizing Games, VR, AR and other emerging media. He has directed award winning entertainment based solutions for clients like Red Bull Records, Sony, Warner Bros. Ever heard of them? Atlantic Records, Puma, The History Channel, A&E, Burger King, Mattel, Animal Planets and many others. This guy also authored two books on design, including Motion Graphics Designed for Broadcast and Film, and Convergence Design for Interactive Television Broadband, and Wireless. Done a whole lot. Pumped to have you on, Steve welcome to the show, my friend.
Steve Curran
Thanks for having me. Excited to talk further.
Matt Zahab
Me too. Pumped to shoot the shit with you. For those who don’t have the pleasure of watching this on YouTube and are I mean, no one really commutes anymore, but whatever you’re doing, whatever chore pastime you’re doing while listening to the pod, Steve has a sick wine artwork behind him that looks like it could be straight out of, like, a Bougie Michelin Star Italian restaurant. That looks like I know what it is.
Steve Curran
It’s probably from the 30s I would guess. I love old stone printed posters from, like the 1900s. And this is one of those big ones that I spent too much money on at one point in my life.
Matt Zahab
I love it. I need a couple of those for the condo. Give a little culture. You know, let’s jump into wine for a sec. I know you and I, before the show, we were talking about wine. Give me your wine story. How’d you get into wine? How’d you become a bit of a connoisseur? And for the rookies out there like me, how do you help someone like me who can at least tell you if it’s a Cab Sauv or a white wine or a Pinot Noir or whatever, but how do you get into it?
Steve Curran
I hardly say I’m a connoisseur. I could fake my way around it, but I’m by no means a connoisseur but I worked my way through college as a bartender. I can certainly converse about booze with the next of them, but by no means a connoisseur.
Matt Zahab
Okay, fair enough. Well, you’ve had a crazy past. Like, again, the brands that I sort of ripped off while giving you the intro, you must have some insane stories. All of our listeners, myself included, we all love stories on the Cryptonews Pod. Do you have any crazy stories from directing many of your award winning entertainment solutions for, like, Red Bull, Sony, Warner Bros, Atlantic, Animal Planet? If you can rip off a couple, we’d love that.
Steve Curran
Yeah, I don’t know about crazy stories other than just to kind of give you some context for it. So I started in a video game business, kind of fell into the video game business from I was an art director in the book publishing business at Random House and then had an opportunity to jump into a similar role for an early video game company in the early 90s. And so I was responsible for packaging and marketing but then got really interested in the content itself because games were clearly going to shape up to be something that was going to go well beyond the 16 colors I was working with that point to the future that we’re at today. Literally, my first job in digital was using 16 colors to try to create simulations of TV game shows. And I thought, oh my god, my four years of art school have just been pissed away on something for children. But you can kind of see the bones of where it was headed with the advent of more powerful game system and computing, that we would talk about the future one day. You’ll see games that are indistinguishable from video, and that’s where we are. But I kind of took that background and for five years, I created probably hundreds of different video games across all genres and gaming platforms through 1995, and then use that background to create a studio that was doing all forms of digital work. In particular, using that game background and creating a small studio that really had the flexibility to work on stuff that first and foremost, we found kind of fun and entertaining ourselves to work on. So for me, I was much more gravitated towards things that felt gamelike or felt humorous and fun, because at the end of the day, I’d much rather work on something like that than a big website where you have 100 stakeholders, and it’s just agony. So for better, for worse, I always gravitated towards these projects that were sort of an experimental budget or something, where a movie studio said, let’s carve out a portion of the budget and try to do something that’s just gorilla and fun and viral and see what happens. We were always tasked with by companies saying, oh. We have this budget, what are some crazy ideas that you have? And so a lot of times we would brainstorm and come back with a dozen or so ideas and they would pick a handful and we would go forward with them. So, yeah, we got into a lot of interesting situations. Like, it’s interesting now that I look at what’s happening with AI and the power and the potential that those technologies have. And I think of this one time for Warner Brothers, we did something for the movie Corpse Bride, and we had like three or four projects we were working on for them, and none of them were supposed to clearly be overt marketing, so they were supposed to really subtly be activities that slowly would onboard you into that this is a viral promotion for the movie. So one thing we did for Corpse Bride, we created a Ouija Board, and then we had kind of it was almost like a chat response that you’d ask it a question type of question, and then it would spell out via the plant chat and the Ouija Board, the answer in a very kind of ghostly, mysterious way. And our plan was to create a database of questions and answers that we assumed people were going to be asking. And we were pretty spot on, but then we made it smarter. The more people asked the questions, the more responsive we made it. And so that it would kind of auto answer based on predictive questions or predictive responses. And then we’d go back in and see how it did. And we got kind of scared and had to jump in and start manipulating it almost not real time, but people would say, is my sick aunt going to die? And would say, probably yes. Things like that you don’t want as part of your marketing campaign. But there was there was a lot of people that were actually convinced that there was I think we did our job well because there was a lot of people convinced that there was human beings on the other side. Because this was an advance of sophisticated chat technologies. There was a lot of people that thought that really there was human beings answering all these questions.
Matt Zahab
You were a little early on chat.
Steve Curran
That’s right. If we had those technologies now, it’d be something a lot more compelling. In general, I’d say a lot of these entertainment companies would give us enough rope to hang ourselves with, trying to create activations that would get it get buzz and attention. We did something our first foray into viral was actually a skincare company that wanted something that would kind of highlight that women don’t want to look they don’t want to look like somebody they’re not. They want to look just like a better version of themselves versus somebody completely different. So to highlight that folly, we took an illustration of the Mona Lisa and created hundreds of permutations on it so that you could click it and progressively alter the look of the Mona Lisa so that by the time you were done, there was, like obnoxious Botox and collagen implants and injections in a boob job. And it would end up looking somewhat horrific. And I think I got it was like my first viral project, and I probably got paid under $10,000 for that. And that got the client like 15 million click throughs. So like, the ROI and that was written up in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and all these places so that was about 2000. And so that showed me that there was an opportunity, and that became the guiding light of everything we did afterwards, which was try to take what, you know, people are trying to do with marketing and advertising, which is get your attention. And most advertising and marketing works by, you know, trying to interrupt the thing you’d rather be doing by distracting you with something else. And so our philosophy was, well, let’s create things you’d rather be doing and make that the marketing piece. So everything we did, we kind of had that litmus test of it’s got to be compelling enough or funny enough or interesting enough or shocking enough to interrupt what you’re doing or not interrupt what you’re doing, but make you want to give it your time versus the more traditional forms of marketing.
Matt Zahab
It’s very true. That’s the Gary Vee motto. Nowadays we live in the attention economy, no longer the economical economy, but I mean, both are true, but story for another day. As an agency owner I mean, people are popping up agencies left, right, and center, more so just marketing specific, not so much game studio development and a lot of the award winning entertainment solutions that you and your team have created. But for the millions of people out there who are about to start an agency and there are millions of them, it’s crazy. Heck, every person I meet now owns a marketing agency. What advice do you have to give them? If we could sort of just distill it down to one or two things, perhaps something non obvious besides the work hard network. Any ingredients to your secret sauce that you wouldn’t mind passing along?
Steve Curran
Yeah, I’d say sometimes I do because I no longer have a service based studio, but sometimes I think about the two takeaways I would say of things that worked and what I would do different this time. I think the thing that we always did that worked was that focus on things that you’re passionate about and that the team loves working on. Because I’ve always thought at the time that it was really evident when you’re working on something that the team doesn’t love working on. You know, whether or not the client is reasonable and responsive and good to work with is sometimes irrelevant because obviously that makes a better experience. But at the end of the day, creative people like to work on things that make them happy to come into work every day and work on. And so you can always kind of see if there was something that we took on because it paid the bills versus something that kind of met our criteria of what felt right for us. And when we were working on those things that just felt like we took them on to pay the bills. Those are the projects that always bites you in the ass, because if you’re not baking in joy at every step of the process, whoever’s on the receiving end of that will sense that. Conversely, anything that I’ve ever worked on that went out there in the world and was received very well. I can remember back to working on it and remembering the joy and the fun and the excitement that people brought to the creative brainstorm and then the pitching process and then the execution. So I’d say, first and foremost, you have to kind of design it around things that especially if you’re building a small tribe of more of a creative boutique model, you’ve really got to design around those things that people love to work on every day. But then secondly, I’d say this is the rub of that. Maybe the flip side of that is that for me, I was always fairly content with a creative boutique style and sized agency because I think there was a comfort zone of where I wanted to operate in terms of managing people and HR and payroll and all that kind of stuff, that I designed a business around my lifestyle and my comfort zone of my threshold of pain. But if you’re looking to build something that’s more scalable, you have to look for business verticals that are more scalable. And a lot of times that means including things like whether it’s ongoing media spends or social contracts or things that you can predict month in and month out, year in and year out, where your revenue is coming from I’d say the challenge for the type of business that I was always running in that area was that you never could really predict what your year was going to look like. It was very hunt and gathering. It was like looking for projects that fill that pipeline. So I think if you’re going to be in the former bucket versus the latter, you got to make sure you have really good new business people or just be putting yourself out there enough so that the people that are looking for that kind of work that you do can find you. And it wasn’t until early on I was trying to do all those things, and that’s a tough thing to do. And it wasn’t until I started really putting myself out there more and making sure that the work we were doing was getting the visibility and award shows and things like that. That’s where the work started to find us.
Matt Zahab
Yeah. Good advice there, Steve, why the move to Web3? And perhaps I’m overstepping here and my apologies are fine, but it seems like you had a pretty darn good thing going and then you want to jump over to Web3.
Steve Curran
Yeah. So it does probably seem sadistic, right? Or masochistic, I guess. Yeah.
Matt Zahab
Well, it’s like, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It seemed like it definitely wasn’t broke.
Steve Curran
So what happens I had an agency for 20 years. I sold as an ad agency in Boston, the agency I loved working at, but the work that I tended to gravitate towards was more experimental in nature, and it always has been. So I guess there’s another piece of advice. I always kind of like to find the blue ocean, the green territory, the new space to operate in where the rules aren’t quite written yet. And it’s not commoditized with so much competition that you can carve out a space of your own. And plus, it just satisfies. I think what I like to do creatively and intellectually, which is work in someplace new, it’s hard to do that in an agency, a larger agency, because they depend on exactly what I was talking about in the latter scenario, which was predictability and recurring revenue. So for me, as somebody who likes to operate in the more experimental side of the space, the natural evolution for me was from I was doing marketing based games and gaming inside of an agency that was a bit more challenging. And I recognized that the next evolution of games and gaming was really AR and VR there’s this natural connection between working in games and working in augmented reality and virtual reality because you’re using the same tools, you’re using the same ability for Wayfinding and UI and UX. And so around 2016, I jumped out of the agency world, and for three years I was a CEO of an augmented reality platform called ROAR, which was a self serve augmented reality model that I still think is a little bit ahead of its time. But it got me really interested in the potential for augmented reality and virtual reality. So around the same time that I started thinking of ideas for this game platform, Burn Ghost, I had started a studio in January 2020 that was doing AR and VR for a wide variety of clients, including Burger King, Tell, Animal Planet and others, doing augmented reality, virtual reality and gaming. And so I was very inspired by the potential of that. But I also recognized that I was headed down this path of once again doing a service based business model, which I’d already done for a good portion of my career, and at the same time was brainstorming with a former client that had a game design at the Game Show Network, Jason Krupp and we would meet early on the pandemic and through the course of 2020 once a week and just talk about like, if we were going to do a game platform now, what would it be and what would it look like? And we kept coming back to a couple ideas, and one in particular was a two set of marketplace where you could not only play games and win prizes, but you could actually put up things that you wanted to essentially sell in a way that feels almost like a raffle where an item could be brought to the platform and a competition could be put together and you could actually realize more revenue selling something that way than you might elsewhere. And so that was a really compelling idea. And then when we started to think about the challenges of delivery and fulfillment, that’s where it started to make sense, where the blockchain was this ideal enabling technology because of the fact that so many of the assets are purely digital. If they’re not digital, they can be tokenized to be digital. And just looking at the logic of it, when you start to think it through for even some of the games that we were considering, like, we always knew that Trivia was going to be our Trojan Horse first game. And when you start to think of Trivia and Games of Knowledge combined with the prize delivery, that’s where there’s a thread where the blockchain makes a lot of sense of that. Because not only can you make something provably fair by showing that the question sets and the delivery are being pulled ahead of time and not adjusted dynamically based on the performance of the player but you can also prove that the prizes exist in a wallet and are going to be delivered and were delivered where you said they were going to be delivered. So a lot of logic to applying that to the blockchain. And then at the same time, there was a lot of interest and excitement in the VC and investment community around companies that were starting up in the space. Almost exactly a year ago is when we closed our Siri seed round with DraftKings Bitcraft and Pillar VC as the as the VCs that put together our Siri seed financing round.
Matt Zahab
DraftKings was in there.
Steve Curran
Yes. The DraftKings has a group called Drive by DraftKings, which is a VC arm of DraftKings. They invest in a wide variety of eSports. I think they just I just saw the announcement they’re doing some professional what is it? Pickle league?
Matt Zahab
Yeah. Pickleball is massive now. Pickleball is huge.
Steve Curran
Fastest growing sport in America or something. And so they’ve been an awesome VC and partner and Pillar in Boston is more of a blockchain based VC as far as they’re concerned with how they interact with us. And they’ve been great. And then Bitcraft our co lead on the gaming side, we couldn’t have asked for better VCs than we got into our Siri seeds. So after that, we were off to the races. Built a really great core team of people that I’ve worked with in the past, including some people that I’ve brought over from some of my previous businesses on the game development side and project management side and content creation creators and marketing people. Not a big team, but really talented team of game developers and marketers. And then expanded that with more creatives on the animation UX UI content creation side of things. So I’m really enjoying once again working on really fun, entertaining stuff and what I love about this space and I guess by this space, I mean the NFT space. And how it relates to the previous experience is that in this NFT space, it’s really kind of fascinating how the compression of the distance between the product and the hype is like nonexistent like the hype that you build, the vibe that you create, the story that you’re telling essentially is a core part of the product that you’re selling. It’s not just a matter of like having this over here and the product over here and there’s this big gulf in between. They’re kind of all wrapped up in the same thing. You’ve got to do what you say you’re going to do. You’ve got to live up to the story you’re telling. But if you do that right, and hopefully we are, then I think the audience responds to that in kind and supports your project, gives you breathing room to innovate and create something that provides exceptional value and utility and a roadmap for the future. So that’s kind of where we’re at. We launched our first tournament a little over a week ago, so we’re getting some great feedback and data on that we’re updating real time to include new games and updates to the current game that address that feedback. And I think the audience is really responding to the fact that we listen and talk to them and bring them in on the decisions.
Matt Zahab
I mean, I love that. You definitely seem fired up about this, Steve, and we’d love to see that. We’re going to take a quick break. When we get back, we’re going to jump into some more Burn Ghost specific stuff and Steve has a not even a hot take, just a really interesting take about trivia games and why us humans are so captivated by them, which I wasn’t really cognizant of until Steve shared this. So before we get into that, got to give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show PrimeXBT. We love PrimeXBT longtime friends of cryptonews.com, they have one of the best robust trading systems 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 always offering innovative products and professional trading solutions and conditions to all of their customers. PrimeXBT is also hooking us up with a massive promo for listeners of the pod. After making your first deposit, 50% that is 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to show with Steve. Steve, you have a great point on this and I’ve listened to your stuff. I’ve read your stuff. This point is absolutely world class. Why are us humans so frigging captivated by Trivia Games why do we love them so much? It gets us going 100 times out of 100. It’s the same kind of game time after time, but we still love it and still play it and it still fires us up. Why is that?
Steve Curran
Well, I think inherently, we’re all narcissists, right? The thing that we’re most interested in is ourselves. Listening to the founders of LinkedIn talk about the early days of LinkedIn, and they said that they thought there was a bug in the data reporting because they’re looking at it and they found that the page that people were spending most time with was their own profile. And they’re like, that can’t be right we’ve provided this social network and most of the time, people are looking at their own profile. They actually built that in as a feature for you to go in and see yourself as the world sees you. So I think trivia is sort of reflective of the same psychcology of even people that say they don’t love rivia. You put a few trivia questions in front of them and if they know the answer, they’re going to bite. Right? They’re going to momentum keeps going. Get that dopamine. If you can’t answer it, you’re sitting on your hands and put Jeopardy on and see who doesn’t shout out answers at the screen. So I think the reason we started with Trivia is that I wouldn’t call it a universal appeal. I think that some people are just like, I’m not good at trivia. But again, even those people I’ve noticed that have allowed us about that also get sucked in and play. But it is certainly a game that we could start with that’s universally familiar. Like there’s really no if we’re going to start with a game as the lead on our platform, certainly made a lot of sense to start with something that didn’t require us educating anybody about the game mechanics or how to play. Everyone kind of intuitively knows what a quiz is and so it also opens up some great possibilities of gathering a knowledge graph about you as an individual and as a player. And we feel like over time, there’s things we could reveal about you on that side of things that potentially there’s even a Web3 story where the more we cultivate this knowledge graph about you and the things you’re interested in or smart about or passionate about that there might be ways for you to get directly rewarded and compensated for those things versus the more typical Web2 style of collecting a profile on someone, and you don’t get any monetization of that or any positive usage of that. We think that there’s a way that there could be a direct kind of Web3 value chain that we could create on top of that. So Trivia, for us, it was a really obvious place that we could start. We also think there’s ways that you can connect with fandom. We sometimes refer to Burn Ghost as fandom rewarded because of the flexibility we have to utilizing prizes and rewards that people are interested in or passionate about, and then over time, applying games or in the form of trivia like questions that you’re smart about because you’re passionate about that prize or that project or that brand or that community, you can directly win relevant prizes for relevant knowledge. And the ability to plug that into a wide variety of communities or plug those prizes and projects and communities into our platform we think makes a lot of sense and has a lot of value.
Matt Zahab
And gaming as a whole, you have a shit ton of experience with games. Something that I find extremely intriguing is the reason behind some games going absolutely batch it crazy viral, while 99% of others just fizzle out. How much of this comes down to luck, how much of this comes down to timing, which I guess is almost synonymous with luck. How much of this comes down to game mechanics type of game? What’s the secret sauce there? How does that all work?
Steve Curran
Yeah, I think a lot of it is timing, luck, and who’s to say why Wordle, for example, broke through. There’s plenty of war games and there’s plenty of puzzle games that have been out there so similar to Forever, that are so similar. The key difference between what they did and it’s such a subtle nuance that when you think about it now, it seems so obvious. But especially at this moment in a pandemic where we’re all looking for ways to reconnect with each other in a water cooler like moment, the Shareable asset was the big difference. The fact that you could go on your feed or go on Twitter or go on anywhere and see what does that mean? And essentially, what that Shareable asset is, it’s a story of your journey from trying to guess it to resolving or failing. And it’s pretty amazing how this little simple infographic is this little shorthand for a player’s journey. And so to me, the game itself is a game that you’ve seen countless of times from Mastermind to many other mechanics, but it’s that Shareable social widget, which was the major breakthrough. The timing of that with the pandemic, I think was yeah.
Matt Zahab
I agree with you, Steve. If if that was even if that was right now, I don’t know if that would have popped off. I’m looking outside my window right now and there’s traffic. I’m mid afternoon on a Monday in Toronto. You know what I mean? This last year it’d be a ghost house, and that was only a year ago. People are back. Most of my friends back in the office minimum three days a week now. So it’s a different world. The other thing with Wordle, huge shout out to Wordle, well done, whoever you creators are. I believe the Times bought them. But nonetheless, the other thing I loved about Wordle is a lot of time there’s friction. And I find friction kills so much in today’s day and age. You got to sign up. You got to make username password or sign up via Google or Facebook or whatever. You could literally pop it up on your phone, pop it up on your web browser, no account needed, and boom, you’re off. And I’m pretty sure it just saved your account via the cookies. Like it didn’t make an account for you, but it at least had your streak. Yeah, that’s right. You already played today, so you can’t it was brilliant. It was so friggin easy.
Steve Curran
I think that was part of goes a long way in the games market. The trend in the games market has been towards these hyper casual games, which are are similarly geared towards people with short attention spans and not a lot of available time. But the problem with mobile apps is that there’s definitely app fatigue. You know, the the hurdle to get someone to download an app is enormous. And so anybody developing a gaming app, or really any kind of app, has to deal with the churn factor of for every person you on board and figure out a way to monetize you’re putting most of that back into reacquiring another user after that one gets bored. The app market is filled with challenges, which is one of the reasons that we didn’t start there. But I think that Wordle broke through because for all those reasons that you indicated, you can kind of get back to it and people are talking about it and you’re reminded to play it because of this asset that shows up in your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed. And just like the thing from Trivia that prompts you to need to be to know it all and go in and show that you also are smart. The same with Wordle if you see someone did it in three tries, the competitive aspect, the nature of most people will cause them to want to jump in and beat.
Matt Zahab
That so true. It’s crazy how it works. Gaming is truly a phenomenon, and I’m sure 100% you’ve seen this graph and the stats, but every single day it becomes more and more powerful. You go on social media now, what are some of the first things if you have a blank slate or open up YouTube on an incognito window? You’re going to get streamers, you’re going to get the ISO speeds, the Aidan Ross’s, the clicks. You’re going to get all these younger boys and girls who are so infatuated by gaming. And then you have the baby boomers in my gen who are just so infatuated by it, whether it’s casual on the fly or whether it’s getting deep into the weeds, the Call of Duties, the FIFAs, the Fortnites, it’s truly crazy to think about it. And then there’s thinking about what you and the team have worked on and are working on with sort of the intersection of AR VR and gaming. How sweet is that going to be when I can throw in a headset and actually be in a legit Spaceship or Formula One car and I know that’s sort of already here, but I mean, when it’s really good and really clean because there’s still a lot of hiccups there, but just so many cool things and I can’t wait to see where this can go on. The future of play to earn, and this is obviously a subject that myself, the listeners, a lot of people in crypto are still very, I guess, concerned is definitely the wrong word, but interested about do you think it’s here to stay? You think we can fix the whole play to earn gaming economy? Of course, games have to be fun and intriguing and viral and have a sense of community. Those are all sort of the pillars of gaming. But on top of that, I’m a believer that if you can throw in some play to earn mechanism where the user can at least get some type of residual income not even income, if the user can just get rewarded for giving his or her time up to this game, I think that’s great. But it can’t be the primary focus. Well, that being said, Steve, where do you sit on the whole future of player and gaming?
Steve Curran
Yeah, I think we’ll see a lot there’s. Obviously this year, I think, and over the course of the next year you’ll see a lot more game companies moving into this space and I think there’s positive and negative things that they’ve learned from watching play to earn mechanics and I think the bottom line is that the game experience has to be first and foremost fun. The play to earn mechanic can’t be the first and foremost motivation. I think that we’ve seen examples where that’s been the case and inevitably that’s just doomed to fail. I think there’ll be more examples of games and game platforms where there’s a better mix of the fun factor and and the earn factor. And hopefully I think Burn Ghost is one of those companies that I feel like we’ve sort of shortened that distance between the ability for someone to play and have fun, but also the ability for them to earn and win is part of the story. So, yeah, I think that we’re hopefully carving out new space with where I think there’s significant opportunity in Web3.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Steve, what’s next for Burn Ghost? What do you guys have on the go? Give me the by the time this episode airs early May, what’s on the docket to sort of close out Q2, and what do you and the team have planned for Q3 and Q4?
Steve Curran
So we just finished an exciting month where we launched our first NFT, which was a Freement Player Pass. That is our Genesis pass that allows the holders into our first real and live beta tournaments. We have our first real and Live beta tournament happening as we speak. And it’s been exciting watching real people win real prizes for real money and giving us great feedback about things that they love and things that they’d love to see improved. I think part of that is along the lines of what we talked about earlier, Trivia is great because it has broad appeal, but it’s also not the end all, be all as far as gaming. And we’ve always known that it was the first of many games. So by May, we’ll have, you know, three or four new games either already live or queued up to go live. We’ll be preparing for our next NFT launch, which is something that we first announced last week at NFT NYC, and that is four different unique game controllers. These are like retro futuristic bastard children of Atari and Nintendo. They look like hybrids of game controllers with TV sets built in with a port for expansion port for games that can be added to alter them over time. And so the concept there is that these game controllers unlock different features and benefits on the Burn Ghost platform. The more you play with them, the more level up in experience points and unlock different game access and competition access and permissions on the platform. So they essentially level up in value for the holder. But what we really like about them is because we have this vision of Burn Ghost being this ultimate Web3 arcade they really kind of capture that the essence of the spirit of nostalgia from if you look at YouTube videos of kids in the 90s getting their first game system or getting some peripheral that they were hoping for their birthday or for Christmas, and they’re just going bananas. That’s we’re trying to tap into is this really nostalgic moment of getting that game unit or game peripheral and something that feels kind of physical and tangible. But in this case, it’s a rare pass that allows you access to different features of the platform. So that’ll be a big thing for us. And look for that around like June, July time frame. And then over the course of the rest of the year, we have other NFT concepts for much later in the year, but a pipeline of new games, tournament mechanics, progressive prize pools, and any way that we can add creates more ability for people to connect socially, for people to win. We want Burn Ghosts to be the ultimate platform for winning and prizing in Web3.
Matt Zahab
Steve that’s incredible. I got to ask the logo is so cool. It’s so classic. I feel like I’ve seen that character from something before. Is that from Pacman?
Steve Curran
It’s funny because the obvious connection is that it looks like the Pacman Ghost, which I think that certainly that’s there because it’d be crazy if you have crazy if you have a company with the name Ghost in the name. Not to allude to that, but it actually wasn’t the name came from my partner Jason and I were sitting around brainstorming about names and all the names we had were sort of felt derivative and obvious, like prize thing and just things that felt kind of on the nose. And so we were comparing our GoDaddy account with domains that we had registered and never done anything with. And I’m like, I call it my graveyard of good intentions. I have things that I pay $8 for every year since 1995, thinking I’m going to do something with that one day.
Matt Zahab
Just chilling, eh?
Steve Curran
And so Jason was reading me the list of his names and he said, Burn Ghost. I said, what’s Burn Ghost? And he said, one day my kid was saying something and I misheard him and I thought he said, Burn Ghost. And the kid said something different like burnt toast or something. So he just thought it was a funny sounding combinations of words. He wouldn’t register ten years ago just because he thought it was a funny sounding combination of words. And as soon as he said it I’ve designed a lot of logos in my career, but it was the first time when he said it, that image kind of popped in my brain of like, wouldn’t it be cool if the bottom of it was reflected in the top of it, like flames and had, like, a dead ghost was kind of funny to me too, with the X eyes. So it kind of struck me as like a visual pun. And so that was the first time that I think I’ve designed a logo in the first attempt and was like, yeah, I think that’s it.
Matt Zahab
I love that. It’s so clean. It’s well done, Steve, what a treat, man. Really appreciate you coming on. Yes, this was truly a lot of fun and pumped to see what you and the team are going to pump out over the next couple of years and decades. I mean, you’ve already done some crazy stuff, shipping at an absolutely insane rate at the moment and I doubt that’s going to slow down anytime soon. Keep on grinding, keep doing your thing. We love to see that. Before you go, please let our listeners know where they can find you and Burn Ghost games online and on socials.
Steve Curran
Awesome. So, yeah, our website is burnghost.com right now it’s still sort of a mysterious presence because you have to have our Genesis pass in order to get access to the game platform. But look for that to open up over the next few weeks and then you can find us on socials. It’s generally @burnghostgames, whether that’s LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. And then my Twitter personally is @Steve_Curran. Not the best Twitter name, but it is what it is.
Matt Zahab
It does the trick. Mine’s @mattzahab so you and I are in the same yacht here. We love it, Steve, thanks so much, man. Really appreciate it and can’t wait to have you on for round two.
Steve Curran
Hope to see you up in Algonquin Park sometime.
Matt Zahab
You got it. I’ll be bringing some extra mosquito repellent for sure.
Steve Curran
Absolutely. All right,
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Steve from Burn Ghost Games. Dropping knowledge bombs left, right and center. Some great stories from back in the day. We jump into casual gaming being crucial to Web3. The future play to earn Web3 gaming. Why some games go viral, why others fizzle, and humans being captivated AF by Trivia Games. We love to see it. Huge shout out to Steve and the team for hooking this one up. You guys enjoyed this one and I truly hope you did. It would mean the world if you could subscribe my team and I would absolutely love that. Speaking of the team, love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. Could not do this without you. You are all the best. Justas, my amazing sound editor, appreciate you. You are the GOAT my man and back to the listeners I love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Keep on growing your bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
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