Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
One Account, One Life: Can This Fix Online Gaming
40 Plays9 days ago
What if you only had one digital life across all games... would you still cheat?
In this episode, we dig into the world of online cheating, digital accountability, and the business of fair play with Andrew Wailes from PlaySafe ID.
What started as a casual gaming session with friends led to a bold idea one that could reshape how studios deal with cheaters and protect their communities.
🔍 Here's what we get into:
The cheating economy is real
Some cheat developers make more money than the games they’re exploiting. We explore the underground networks fueling this industry and why traditional bans aren’t working.
One identity to rule them all
Andrew introduces PlaySafe ID, a system that gives each player a single anonymized identifier across games. It keeps players accountable without exposing their personal info.
Game economies, broken by bots
Cheaters ruin more than just competitive play. They crash in-game markets, devalue rewards, and destroy core gameplay loops. We talk through the impact on long-term retention.
Reddit as the proving ground
A low-budget Reddit campaign helped Andrew validate the idea and attract thousands of pre-registrations before a single studio integration went live.
From kitchens to code
Andrew’s path to gaming wasn’t straight. He went from Michelin-starred pastry chef to founder of a gaming trust and safety platform. He shares the lessons that transferred from fine dining to startup life.
💡 Key takeaways:
- Cheating doesn’t just hurt games, it destroys trust and drives players away
- Accountability doesn’t have to mean giving up privacy
- Studios want to fight back, but they’re outmatched by organized cheating rings
- Solving this problem could unlock stronger communities and more sustainable games
🎯 This episode is for:
- Developers, LiveOps leads, and support teams dealing with bad actors
- VCs and founders looking at trust and safety as the next big frontier
- Players who are sick of losing to cheaters and wondering if anything will change
- Anyone interested in how tech, ethics, and community all collide in online games
This one hits hard. Fair play matters more than ever. Listen now and be part of the change.
🎧 Available wherever you get your podcasts
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Fairness in Online Games
00:00:00
Speaker
Ever wonder why your online game suddenly feels unfair?
Andrew Wales and the Cheating Economy
00:00:04
Speaker
In this episode, I sat down with Andrew Wales, the founder of PlaySafeID, who's on a mission to make cheating in games actually matter.
00:00:11
Speaker
What started as a friendly bet with his buddies turned into a crusade against the billion-dollar cheating economy, complete with fake accounts, bot farms, cartels, and even money laundering.
Challenges of Anti-Cheat Tools
00:00:20
Speaker
We talk about why most anti-cheat tools don't work.
00:00:24
Speaker
How cheating ruins player time and destroys retention. The
Business Impact of Cheating in Games
00:00:28
Speaker
surprisingly huge business behind cheats. And how
PlaySafeID's Digital Identity Approach
00:00:31
Speaker
Playsafe is building one-life digital codes to make players accountable without killing privacy.
00:00:37
Speaker
This one's for game devs, trust and safety teams, and anyone who's tired of bots farming your raid drops. Hit play, follow PlayerDriven, make sure you share this and enjoy the episode.
Andrew's Background and Mission
00:00:51
Speaker
We are joined by Andrew Wales. He is the founder of PlaySafe ID. It's really cool technology. Andrew, tell us a little bit about yourself. Great to be here. Thank you very much. So yeah, my name is Andrew Wales. I'm the CEO of PlaySafe ID. So my background over the last like five, six years is startups in game economics and behavioral analytics.
00:01:09
Speaker
um And yeah, just lifelong love for for the games industry. ah PlaySafe ID, we're an anonymized and random digital identifier for players. So everyone can claim one. They can only ever get the one.
00:01:21
Speaker
It provides accountability. So people who are caught cheating, hacking, botting, being inappropriate to kids, we can actually give them a meaningful penalty and keep them out of games. So it's not just a penalty to their game account.
00:01:32
Speaker
It's penalty to their play safe ID. So meaningful accountability for the first time. I love your your approach of like work hard now and then you can relax. The thing is like you're going to become addicted to this.
00:01:43
Speaker
Well, the challenge I have, right? So when I was 16, I made a bet with myself.
Personal Journey of Andrew Wales
00:01:48
Speaker
um I said to myself, I'm going to just kill myself over the next 16 years. I'm going to sacrifice everything. I'm going to forgo everything. and I'm just going to work as hard as I possibly can.
00:01:57
Speaker
And I'll see where I get to when I'm 32. I always knew I wanted a family, always knew I wanted a wife and kids and you know all that kind of stuff. And what I was hoping was by doing that sacrifice, I'll be in a position that I could have the nice house, have a nice car, have a nice little nest egg, be in a really good position.
00:02:15
Speaker
So I'm 31 now and um you know we've got a nice house. Everything's kind of coming together well. um Yeah, ah it's it's it's the the better has served me well.
00:02:25
Speaker
um Not that it hasn't been hard and painful. It's been really hard and it's been really painful. I've lost so many friends like traveling around the country all of the time, contracts and for work and stuff. um But, you know, you've got to make trade offs.
00:02:38
Speaker
um I'm curious that your mindset change on work through all that stuff once your first born was born. um It's been difficult because obviously having to be the support network for my missus and also help with little one and stuff like that.
00:02:56
Speaker
um That was that was a tough period for sure. um Because it's another massive responsibility. it's ah It's another really big thing to do. But I'm very mission driven and I'm very mission focused and I love gaming. I love the games industry and it's a huge passion of mine. And unfortunately, um it's in a state that I don't like to see it in.
00:03:17
Speaker
um So it's it's been tough. like i've I've still been working very obsessively and I'm very fortunate that I have an incredibly supportive partner who, you know, if I if i miss a dinner because...
00:03:31
Speaker
you know I've got calls and I've got meetings and stuff. She doesn't kick my ass for it. It's really funny, right? If I need to spend a couple of weeks absolutely grinding hard and I'm just invisible to the world, she's like, you've got this, honey, no problem.
00:03:44
Speaker
But if I bring home salted butter instead of unsalted butter, World War III, it's... So she's she's amazing on the big things and then kicks my ass a bit on the little things. so You learn how to juggle these balls. And as you get older, right? Like I used to always tell people, I was a tier one support rep for my first job. And I'd browse Reddit, wherever Reddit was at the day. And I'd learn forums and I'd download all these things. IIRC. I don't know if you ever used that or stuff like that. Yeah.
00:04:12
Speaker
you you fuck around with all this stuff. And then you get older, you get more responsibility. So you start having to take away some stuff from this learning. And now I'm 39, right? It's just like, all right two kids. When am I going to sit down and study? When am I going to sit down and do work? When am I to sit down and play with my kids? When am I going to sleep?
00:04:31
Speaker
Because I'm old now and I can't stay up like I used to. Like, It's like taking from some buckets. And when you have a ah partner that's willing to say, hey, keep taking from this bucket for now, I got this covered. It's such like a sigh of relief. And you both agree on this bigger picture. And I think there's just kind of that mental, we got this together as a team, you know, and it's easier when you're in it with someone because you have that person you can push against.
00:04:56
Speaker
I literally said to my missus last night, um for the record, I absolutely do not have a harder job than you in any way, shape or form. Like, like she she if baby wakes up at like, quarter five in the morning.
00:05:12
Speaker
It's like she's there. Like there's no respite. let off. going to back this conversation up a minute. On our pre-call, first of all, i love what you said. You made this bet with yourself for that when you're 32, you're in this position.
00:05:25
Speaker
On our pre-call, you talked to me about how you made a bet with your your buddies and yes kind of fixing cheating. Apparently I'm a betting man. Two ways this conversation go, we could talk about potentially the gambling addict, Andrew here, who I'm talking to on the phone right now, or the person who's building play safe ideas. Let's go back to that initial bet that one that you made with your your mates here.
00:05:45
Speaker
Let me let me know how it came to be and what was the context. Basically, at a previous company that I was working at, there was just a bit of a slow period. so I found myself just playing some games with mates on downtime and stuff like that.
00:05:58
Speaker
And um we've all been hardcore gamers like our whole lives. like we've We've all known each other for like a decade as well. like we're We're all super tight. And basically, we all just realized pretty much everything that we were playing, like regardless of what game it was or what genre it was, we were just coming across so many cheaters and people that were obviously cheating.
00:06:16
Speaker
And we were just like... fuck me, it never used to be like this. um This is the worst it has ever been. um And my mates know what i do for work. And they were like, hey, you work in like startups and tech and stuff like that.
00:06:31
Speaker
You know, fix this for us. i was just like, all sure. I'll just ah just fix cheating and games. I'll just do that. Just, you know, give me five minutes, guys. No problem. But I really started to think about it. And I was like, I don't see why This can't be solved. like The real problem here is a lack of accountability. The real problem here is it doesn't matter if you're caught cheating. um Gaming's gotten way bigger than anyone ever thought it would. It is absolutely monolithic.
00:06:59
Speaker
um And there's so many reasons why people cheat. you know Games have evolved to be games as a service. They have so many LiveOps functions like Ranked and Leaderboards. ah There's the whole boom of content creators.
00:07:10
Speaker
So you have people that always need to produce engaging content. how you know Are you good enough to always produce engaging content? Are you always playing on your own on your A game or do you need a little bit of help? um you know You need to monetize clips that you're making. You need to be engaging with people to stream, to have your audience.
00:07:26
Speaker
So there's this melting pot of it growing so much, um it being such a popular, cool thing. like in the In the late 90s and early 2000s, it was still a bit of a nerdy thing, especially you know Call of Duty was kind of cool, but pretty much most other games were a little bit nerdy and stuff.
00:07:42
Speaker
Now, nerd culture is the cool thing. so there's this there's this real cultural shift that's happened. There's this real societal shift that's happened. This industry has gone absolutely bananas.
Cheating Tactics and Consequences
00:07:53
Speaker
The playing field has changed. There's so many reasons why people cheat out frustration, out of opportunity, whatever. um So much has been spent into developing anti-cheats, detection models, stuff like that.
00:08:05
Speaker
And they do a great job. The problem is, though, is it just doesn't matter if you're caught cheating because you can just create a new account and come straight back in. I saw a video of a cheater that was being interviewed by a streamer the other day, um literally just the other day.
00:08:18
Speaker
And he was saying that he has a notepad document with a thousand accounts. in there. So if he's caught cheating and his accounts banned, he just copies and pastes the new details in, launches the game, and he's back in within 30 seconds.
00:08:31
Speaker
like that's That's the kind of stuff that's going on here. And this is just a guy that's kind of like, He's not casually cheating, he's cheating quite properly. But then you get people that do this for a job, like real money trading. So they'll cheat to sell items, to get in-game currency and sell it for real money and stuff like that.
00:08:46
Speaker
And there's this whole organization element to it. And I just, i'm I'm waffling a lot here, but I just sat back and I thought, all of this I think could be solved if it mattered if you
One-Life Digital Identity Solution
00:08:56
Speaker
were caught cheating. Like if you had this one life across all games and services, and if you were caught, you faced a meaningful penalty.
00:09:02
Speaker
So you couldn't just create a new account and come back in. You couldn't just keep iterating cheats with with accounts getting banned and then just just keep going, keep going. You couldn't have this unlimited lives. I think that cheating could really be solved. Fair play could be solved. Players could have a much better time and game developers would be able to monetize their players much better from a business perspective. They'd have happier players that retain better, that spend more, all if we could actually do something about cheating. And yeah, the route for that for me was, let's just give them this one life and see how that goes.
00:09:33
Speaker
You said a lot there and I found- Sorry. No, yeah, don't be sorry. just said you know i think it's so cool to hear it like that you know You talked about it with your friends. You were playing a game like most friends do and you say, hey, you've solved this, Andrew. You're you're smart.
00:09:50
Speaker
Curious at the time, kind of what were the roles and jobs that you were doing where they come to you, Andrew, thinking he's a techie guy? like What were you doing? Yeah, no, for sure.
00:10:01
Speaker
um So the role immediately before this, I was one of the VPs at a company doing game economics and doing some cool stuff in that space. And then um that was acquihired. And then I moved to a company that was doing some behavioral analytics, player based behavioral analytics stuff for AbTech.
00:10:21
Speaker
So you were kind You're kind of built to land right here. Hey, I could see how this is impacting the ah the monetization for a game and how it's affecting the attitudes of the players. I need to find a way that I could help both of these audiences. And it comes down to how do you stop the cheater from playing the game?
00:10:40
Speaker
100% and cheater encapsulating bots as well, right? Because one of the things that we saw a lot on the game economics side of things is you'll build a system by which in a perfect world and kind of like this and in a vacuum, it will work perfectly.
00:10:52
Speaker
But then when it hits real players and when it hit bots, bot accounts, and when it hits all of these different scenarios, the whole thing can fall over very quickly. And unfortunately, if you have a very popular game and you have a very intricate economy and you start having bot accounts go in, it diva... Game economics isn't about monetary policy. Game economics is about...
00:11:10
Speaker
valuing a player's time. That's what it actually boils down to. It's about all of the inputs and outputs. It's all about the sinks and the faucets in regards to player time. If I spend my time doing activity X, is it worthwhile? Is it rewarding? And is it fun? And then different activities and different rewards for different play styles and types of player.
00:11:26
Speaker
So let's take mining a Mold of Warcraft, for example, right? um I like crafting in Star Citizen. I like space trucking. I'm i'm i'm all about that life. But if you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bots farming all of the resources and flooding the auction house and the economy, all of a sudden the mechanic, which I would have ordinarily enjoyed going out and farming and mining to create cool items, isn't worth doing because the price has been plummeted so low. So um yeah, not just cheating, but cheating and botting and kind of like all of these mechanics fundamentally break the the fun of player time invested into various activities.
00:12:03
Speaker
I just like, I want to put together terms I've learned over the past few months and kind of where I think this is impacting and I think it's really cool. So I've spoken to a lot of directors in gaming and everyone talks about finding the fun, find that gameplay loop that's fun. And now what you're saying are cheaters are exploiting this gameplay loop. So I, if I am a crafter and I like doing this, I want to come in every day. I just want to keep mining. I want be fair. I want to go to the market and do it.
00:12:27
Speaker
All of a sudden everything's inflated. It sucks because cheaters came and exploited the fun loop And now I don't want to engage anymore as the player. Exactly the same loop, but with a different scenario, right?
00:12:40
Speaker
Let's say that you're a hardcore raider. You love beating the hardest content in the game. There's a really rare item. It has a very low drop chance. You and all of your mates have been doing this for months to try and get this item.
00:12:53
Speaker
It finally drops. It's worth so much money. Huzzah. Except actually there's lots of them on the auction house because again, people are cheating and people are exploiting gameplay mechanics or whatever to be able to to to get this item.
00:13:08
Speaker
So like game developers can build these loops, they can build these mechanics, they
Player Investment and Cheating Disruption
00:13:12
Speaker
can build this like perfect scenario of how they want stuff to work. But if it's fundamentally if the rules are fundamentally fundamentally broken by players, unfortunately it breaks that reward. It it devalues the player's time. So yeah, as as much as it can be simple as mining with ore, it can work with high-value items from hardcore raids, it can work from grinding PvP. You want to get that illustrious title, you want to show off that you're amazing. That takes a huge amount of physical time commitment and effort to put in.
00:13:37
Speaker
um All of a sudden, if you have a bot account that's just farming honorable kills in a battleground or something like that, you're grinding that on a while you're away. Like it it devalues it for other players. It's, um, it's shit is what it is. I don't like it. It's so let's go to the second part of the point that you made earlier was that cheating is a business.
00:13:58
Speaker
And when we had our pre-call, you were telling me about the different kind of makeups of these groups ah that cheat. Can you, for our listeners kind of maybe start high level to explain what we're looking at when we talk about cheating in game and how that kind of breaks down?
00:14:12
Speaker
For sure. So the term that I'll use is cartel, um because that's that's a term that's used fairly frequently in the industry. um Basically, when people think of people who cheat in games, they think of a sweaty little nerd on his computer, you know, just, you know, messing around with some cheats and stuff like that.
00:14:29
Speaker
And there are lots of those. But there's also a much bigger organization at play. And it's split into specialisms, right? So you will have people who just develop cheats. You will have people who then just use some of the the best developed cheats with very sophisticated, expensive setups.
00:14:46
Speaker
So they can be running two computers and they can use something called DMA, Direct Memory Access, to connect the two to make the cheat harder to detect. They'll then play with these cheats to be able to either kill other players, to to boost accounts, to get items that they can sell for in-game currency.
00:15:02
Speaker
Whatever they're using the cheats for, it's generally to monetize it in real-world money. So that could be selling items, it could be selling in-game currency, it could be selling boosted accounts, it could be a whole range of stuff.
00:15:12
Speaker
you the people that make the cheats, you have then the people who like play with the cheats in order to RMT, real money trade. um You also then get people who ah crack accounts. So this could be that they're either um sending out phishing campaigns, they could be socially engineering.
00:15:29
Speaker
There's been some sophisticated um links where people will click a link. that looks legitimate. um And what it'll do is it'll send the link to all of the friends list um and then it'll actually scrape the account details. so So like, and it'll spread like that.
00:15:45
Speaker
They basically harvest these account details and they'll sell them to the people who cheat. So the people who cheat are buying the cheats and they're buying the account details. They're then playing with these burnt accounts, these cracked accounts to um real money trade to make their profit. And if they get caught, they just copy and paste in details. Next one, copy and paste in details. Next one, copy and paste in details. next one Um, and then there's, there's a money laundering side to this as well. There's, there's, there's so many layers to it. So there is this kind of like institutional level of kind of like organized, uh, cheating.
00:16:19
Speaker
Uh, absolutely. And it goes into way more detail. but Yeah, no, that's, ah it's great. And for people that are listening, I want more detail or let us know kind of what are the metrics that are exciting to you? Cause I think it's cool, but I'm curious, do you have any numbers like that you can share, like,
00:16:33
Speaker
Cheating wise, like how much it costs studios or or things like that. So there's one gentleman who shall remain nameless, who works on the anti-cheat side of things for a big game that was having a conversation with the other day.
00:16:47
Speaker
um He said one of the things that really upsets him is the people that make cheats make more money. for selling the cheats on their game than they make on their game. um That was eye opening to me.
00:16:59
Speaker
um Anecdotally, I've heard directors of studios and and senior people um say anywhere between 10 to 30% of people, depending on game and genre and stuff, that's a very wild number, um but are cheating at any given time.
00:17:12
Speaker
That blew my mind as well. um Yeah, and and the big problem is, is these studios and these developers, everybody that I've spoken to has said, we don't want cheating in our
Game Developers vs. Cheating Industry
00:17:22
Speaker
game. Like, there's they they have a real problem, which is, if you talk about the problem, you're admitting there's a problem. And if you don't talk about the problem, players are like, oh, they're not doing anything about it, and they don't know there's a problem. So it's ah it's a lose-lose for studios, but they just don't have enough weapons to actually...
00:17:38
Speaker
you know if you If you've got a team of 20 developers in-house, which is a huge payroll, right working full-time on anti-cheating systems and detection models and keeping your game as clean as possible, for every person you employ, there will be 1,000 external developers with a a vested interest in trying to to beat those systems.
00:18:00
Speaker
And they're going to work twenty four seven They're going to make much more money than your employees there you know from from selling cheats and stuff. It's just this cat and mouse, except the the cat who's the game developer is arthritic and 17 years old.
00:18:13
Speaker
And the mouse is absolutely hench and is more akin to Sonic the Hedgehog. It's ah it's not really a fair fight. You validate the business. And now we go back to Andrew, who's making this bet with his his mates. And when you start thinking about the solution, how do you approach it? How do you start writing down these notes saying, this is what I want to do? kind of I want to understand how we validate this vision.
00:18:37
Speaker
Well, it started off with me just chatting with my mates. And we were just like, why has no one done anything about this? And for hours and hours and hours, as we spoke about this. And basically, what we all came to is, why isn't there a way that you can prove who you are? And then that's tied to you. you know South Korea have a system like this, where you have to basically tie your version of a social security number to your game account.
00:18:59
Speaker
And if you're caught cheating, um especially if you're doing it to monetize, there's even been cases of people being jailed because it's akin to fraud. Right. They take it very, very seriously. There's also another. This is a complete tangent.
00:19:11
Speaker
But me and my mates were talking about how most of the top esports folks are South Korean. And we were like, why why is that the case? And I think it comes from a culture perspective. Like they they have more respect, less tolerance for bullshit, more kind of like a pursuit of perfection in gameplay and stuff like that as well.
00:19:31
Speaker
they have so much less toxicity, they have so much less abuse, they have so much less cheating, hacking, botting, stuff like that. And I think because there's such a higher degree of playing legitimately and trying to excel legitimately, it means that they end up with a higher caliber talent pool.
00:19:44
Speaker
um But that's that's an aside. so um Yeah, we were like, there's this precedent for this, right? Like South Korea has a system like this and the experiment of seeing how that's run is very positive, like it seems.
00:19:57
Speaker
Why isn't there something like that in the West? And what I basically came to was what would it look like if people had to KYC, but done in a way that we don't see or store any of the information that's used.
00:20:08
Speaker
Because in the West, anonymity absolutely has to remain. like People, and me included, I'm not going to tie my passport to any of my game accounts. But I would tie a random anonymized identifier for me that isn't actually my passport or anything. So the game studio doesn't know anything about me. Nobody's any the wiser. No one can trace it back to me.
00:20:30
Speaker
But I can be held accountable. So I was like, okay, that seems like a good system. So I just recorded a really crappy little video of me talking and I just put it on Reddit and i I spent a couple of hundred bucks on some Reddit ads and I was just like, and I put it to some gaming communities and I was like, hey, I'm thinking of making this thing.
00:20:48
Speaker
Tell me, do you think it's a good idea? a terrible idea? Would you use it? Would you hate it? Am I stupid? ah give Give me the honest feedback. And the overwhelming majority was, this is really good. Me and my mates would pay five bucks a month for this, 10 bucks a month for this, 20 bucks a month this.
00:21:03
Speaker
Me and my friends talk about this every single night. Why isn't this a thing? I want this to be in all games. Now, there were lots of really good questions and feedback. What's your data privacy going to be? What's your security going to be? What's your terms of service going to be? How are you going to keep us anonymized? How are you know, actual really good questions.
00:21:19
Speaker
But there were very few people that basically told us to fuck off, um except for a guy called Swamp Jesus, who will live in my head rent-free forever. um Shout out to Swamp Jesus. That's it. Yeah. Reddit checking out right there on brand. um But um yes, um I forgot about Swamp Jesus. I'm curious. Sorry. Like,
00:21:40
Speaker
It blows my mind because, you know, here in the States right now, we're going through this transition where there's certain states that are requiring user identification for adult content on websites. And there's pushback here. And I'm curious, like, I love the technology. I think it's great. And I know it's anonymous, but they still need to upload a picture of their driver's license. I know it's not to you, right? It's through Fido.
00:21:59
Speaker
But like, there's still that, all right, well, I have to do this. And is that a a pain point you're feeling yet or something you think you will feel or you know or you don't think you will?
00:22:10
Speaker
No, it's a great question. um
00:22:14
Speaker
So you have to take a picture of your face and verify your ID to look at porn.
00:22:24
Speaker
Okay, that's use case one. Use case two is you verify yourself with us and then we don't share any of your information to any product or service that you connect it to. So you verify yourself with us once and then any of the adult content wouldn't see your details.
00:22:40
Speaker
Any of the game services wouldn't see your details. i think that's I think there's a wider conversation to this, but I think that's kind of the crux of it, right? is And I feel that.
00:22:52
Speaker
right like I wouldn't want to connect my personally identifiable information and and you know i verify myself to any platform or service outside of that of a financial institution, you know an insurance company, a real world, real thing that matters.
00:23:07
Speaker
And anything that's kind of like... sensitive or that we feel is sensitive if it's traced back to us, we're immediately like, no, because the risk is too high against the the the friction that's being put before me.
00:23:19
Speaker
So I completely understand that friction and and why it's being taken that way from the States. I have been absolutely staggered. Okay. I thought that there were going to be loads of problems with our side of things, right?
00:23:33
Speaker
Are games going to integrate us? Will they even want to have a conversation about it? Are they going to tell us to just fuck off straight out of the gate? Are they actually in on it? Right. Are they actually letting people cheat so that they can make more money? I don't know these things. I'm not an actual game dev at these companies. Who knows? Right.
00:23:48
Speaker
um Is it a case that they they don't care about players, lie, all all of this kind of stuff? Are North American users are going to be more privacy centric and be like, no, we're never going to verify ourselves. Are users in general outside of North America are going to feel the same way?
00:24:04
Speaker
Like there were all of these bits that I was like, so many ways in which this could have fallen down. But We've seen ah north of 5,500 users come and pre-register on our website, they know not even having a live game integration yet. They're like, we want to play Safe ID. And they're telling us the games that they want us to integrate with.
00:24:24
Speaker
We've had two major games come and reach out to us and say, hey, let's talk about what you're doing because we don't have any weapons left to fight this and we want to fight this. And these are two games which, and I can't wait until we announce these,
00:24:37
Speaker
But they're two games that the community would generally have the sentiment they don't care about cheating. So to see that players are willing to KYC, to see that people like the privacy-preserving way that we're doing this, the way that we're preserving anonymity but still retaining accountability, to see that game studios are receptive to actually wanting to solve this problem, I'm so relieved because I was scared, mate.
Scaling PlaySafeID to a Million Users
00:25:01
Speaker
It could have gone the other way. but You bring up a gi great point. It's like...
00:25:05
Speaker
I'm a big Redditor, sounds like you are. And I think Reddit's kind of this hive mind where you just hear something and it's a lot louder on Reddit than anywhere else. And people talk about their hatred of certain things. And like I'm sitting yesterday, i downloaded Tony Hawk 3 and 4 and like,
00:25:21
Speaker
before you could play the game, you just got to scroll through this I agree list. And i'm just sitting there like, oh, I'm just scrolling through this for three minutes, not reading a single word here. And I'm agreeing to something. So clearly people are just going to say, hey, I want to play this game. I don't want cheaters. I'm going to upload what I need to upload. And maybe the 10 people on Reddit who are listening are going to be complaining about it. But the majority of people just want a safe place to play. And will do they'll do what they need to do to be able to play with the people they want to play with.
00:25:49
Speaker
And I think there'll be a tech adoption to this as well. Right. Like we'll have our early adopters who are just like, I hate cheating so much and I love gaming so much. I'll do whatever it takes. And, you know, they'll they'll be our early.
00:26:01
Speaker
And then there's the people who are, you know, a little bit on the fence. If this and we've seen this across, ah you know, I've spent maybe like ten thousand dollars on Reddit ads since we've got funded to run some experiments and to test the marketing stuff.
00:26:12
Speaker
And there are lots of people that are like, if this gets integrated in a couple of the games that I love, I think that I'd sign up for it, but I kind of want to wait and see. Absolutely cool. You then get the people who are not, they don't like it or they don't want it, but no game's going to integrate this because they make money from Chias.
00:26:27
Speaker
Completely cool. Completely understand the mentality. But I'm interested to see what happens to them once we get the integrations. If they're then like, oh, cool. We'll do it. Or if it'll be, oh, now it's this other problem that we're going to fight you in. so um but I think there'll be an adoption where...
00:26:42
Speaker
The hardest part of what I'm trying to do is getting the first million users. right Getting the first million users is going to be a million times harder than going from 49 million to 50 million. like That should happen quite quickly and be relatively effortless.
00:26:56
Speaker
But going from zero to a million is going to be the absolute hardest thing that I do in my life um and the and the whole of my team as well. If we can do that and we can demonstrate that games like this, players have a better time, players retain better, spend more, that they are better customers because of this.
00:27:14
Speaker
Game studios will adopt this like crazy in theory. And um it would just be wonderful to make that impact. But um I think there'll be an adoption curve. We'll see the early adopters that are like, yeah, let's just go. There'll be sort of like ah an early majority who are a bit more tentative, but easier to come in. And then the majority I think we'll need to see the proof in the pudding from the the beginning first.
00:27:34
Speaker
So let's call this chapter three. We came up with the idea. We validated the idea. Now you need to grow to that million number, right? You're starting to build the tools. You have some partnerships in place. You've gotten some funding.
00:27:47
Speaker
Let me know how this process now started ah how do you continue that momentum moving?
00:27:55
Speaker
It's momentum. that's That's the whole thing of what we're doing, right? like If we are able to show that there are an extraordinary volume of players that want this, and we're able to get these integrations live, and they go well, and players are happy for it,
00:28:12
Speaker
These are very sort of like mid-sized games, but very popular, very kind of like staple games within the industry. um That will be quite a signal to the rest of the industry and a much larger games as to the sentiment of players and the opportunity at hand and potentially a new weapon in their arsenal to to keep cheaters, hackers, bots and predators out. We're speaking a lot about cheating, but we are obviously keep predators, people who are inappropriate to children out of games as well.
00:28:37
Speaker
um So there's this, it's it's momentum. It's all momentum. Like we're at the point now that we're going to be able to start talking about these integrations in the next month or six weeks. At the point that we're able to do that, we're able to announce these.
00:28:50
Speaker
It's then on board as many players as we can for the go live day. have a successful integration with them, actually solve this problem from them, be able to case study it because all eyes will be on us at that point industry-wide.
00:29:02
Speaker
We're the bastion for doing something brand new, like ID verification for gaming to keep cheaters and and bad actors out. um This isn't just a use case for is PlaySafe ID good at this. This is a use case for human behavior with the internet and gaming. um it's It's a bigger kind of thing. So I think we'll be very under the microscope.
00:29:20
Speaker
um And if we do a good job, then I think we'll have integrations left, right and center. And with those millions more players and then more integrations and millions of players and more integrations and millions players, there's going to be so many problems that we'll have to deal with. And there's, you know, ah one thing that I've discovered is um when things go badly, you have five problems to fix. And when things go really well, you have 10 problems to fix. So um I'm not saying it's going to be easy. I'm saying it very nonchalantly, but momentum, I think is the answer um and keep the momentum going.
00:29:49
Speaker
How would you, i guess your mindset coming in, would you say you were an entrepreneur? What are some of the learning experiences that hit you hard as someone that's now the founder of their own business? When I was like seven years old, I was down at the local village hall working on cake stands and flower stands, doing that stuff.
00:30:08
Speaker
um i was I was an athlete. um I skied very competitively. um and did that internationally. um i left school at 16 because I was a great student, but I just didn't like academia. I wanted to do something more meaningful, something more fun.
00:30:27
Speaker
um So I went and i trained as a chef. um I did that. i rose the ranks. I flew it up really quickly, ended up doing the Michelin star thing. I was a a pastry chef at Le Gavroche in Mayfair.
00:30:39
Speaker
And then I was a chef de party at Scott's of Mayfair as well. So I did the whole London Michelin star thing. Then um I made some mates when I was in London and they worked in like tech and marketing and they were making triple my money and working a third of my hours. And I was like, I want to have a wife and kids one day. I can't do that being a chef, like as cool as this is.
00:30:56
Speaker
And I was really interested in the stuff that they shared with me. So i applied for an apprenticeship in digital marketing at this company. um i ended up doing an interview process with them. They actually ended up offering me a full time job instead. And I was like, okay, this is amazing.
00:31:11
Speaker
Flew through the ranks there. um I ended up founding a jewelers just as ah as a mess around project. That did quite well. We then came across some supply chain issues. So it's like, okay, i can't scale it to the way that i want to, but that was cool.
00:31:25
Speaker
So now I've always started businesses and started projects and tried stuff. And i've I failed an immense number of times at so many things in my life. It's it's ridiculous.
00:31:37
Speaker
um But it's part of that bet that I made when I was 16. It's like, I'm gonna take the opportunities, i'm gonna take the risks, I'm gonna try the things out and we'll see where we can get to. um And I think that all of those learnings over the last 16 years, whether it was being a chef chef, the work ethic, start work at seven, finish work at 1 a.m., be up in five hours, do it again, do that 14 days in a row for two days off.
00:32:00
Speaker
Like, I remember on the last day of that shift spree, I thought I was dead. Like, I didn't feel like I was walking. I felt like I was like levitating. It was, was exhausted. And I don't recommend this to anyone, by the way, like, my life has been pain. But um there's learnings from all of these things, right? Whether it's the work ethic from being a chef and the the precision and how to work in a team and that everyone matters and everything matters and the smallest detail matters and the smallest thing can unhinge a otherwise perfect service and throw it into the shit. And how do you all come together to overcome that through to all of the digital marketing experience, to the operations experience, the finance experience, to the sales experience. Like um it's put me in a position that I think I have a really good tool set now for being able to be on the big boy stage and
00:32:47
Speaker
you know, build a really good product, understand all of the moving parts very competently and and help force this thing into existence. So, um yeah, I think it's important to always keep in mind that if you're still trying and you're still building new things, those past startups were not failures, right? They were learning experiences where you kind of learn what went well and what didn't go well. And you build on that.
00:33:09
Speaker
It's when you give up that you admit defeat. But if you're still building upon something, right, you keep going, you're taking these skills, you're using them again for later. 100% as long as you're extracting those lessons from it. Like if you're not extracting the lessons and you're you're repeating the same mistakes time and time again, then maybe take ah good, hard, long look.
00:33:27
Speaker
But if you're, you know, you you You lose or you fail because you didn't know something or because something happened and you weren't equipped to deal with it or you didn't see it coming or, you know, whatever.
00:33:38
Speaker
And being able to retrospectively look at and analyze what went wrong. Why wasn't I prepared for this? What was the roadblock here? What was the stumbling? Is it that the universe hates me and woe me?
00:33:49
Speaker
Probably not. It's probably because there was something you just didn't know that happened. And that's OK. Not everyone knows everything. And now you know it. So learn from it. That's yeah maybe not the most gentle advice. but yeah yeah know so I mean, i'm I'm a New Yorker and we always say just be blunt, right? We want to just hear what it is. Don't beat around it. Just be as blunt as possible. and I'm British with a polar opposite, mate. It's yeah right too nice.
00:34:17
Speaker
Tiptoe around everything. Now we're just straight shooters, right? There's not enough time. Just get to the point, go where you need to go. And and I think it's important to collect this feedback, collect these learnings and go from there. What is one misconception about cheating you think that needs to be cleared up in the industry?
Misconceptions on Cheating Benefits
00:34:33
Speaker
Game developers don't like it. Game developers don't want it. Game developers aren't complicit in it. The biggest misconception, the biggest misconception is that game developers make money from it because
00:34:47
Speaker
99% of the time, and that's not a factual number, that's just anecdotally off the top of my head, just if anyone goes to fact check me later. 99% of the time, cheating either happens on free to play accounts that will not monetize and people don't monetize with, in which case there's no money there,
00:35:03
Speaker
Or it's on cracked accounts where they've bought them for cents on the dollar. Like they're not buying full price copies of the game to to carry on playing. So the game developers aren't seeing the money from it. They don't have an incentive to have cheaters in the game. All it does is harm the player base, harm retention and harm the longevity.
00:35:21
Speaker
um Yeah, game developers do not like cheating in games. They just are in this really, really difficult position of what do we do? I think you nailed it by saying it like it harms the player base.
00:35:35
Speaker
It harms the longevity of the game, right? Like they're not monetizing. Yeah. It's great that you have more monthly active users, even if they're not in the game, but they're hurting the game. It's a disease. You want to be able to cut this off to before it just becomes unmanageable and your top, and then your community becomes toxic. And then you're digging out of a much bigger hole than you were before.
00:35:54
Speaker
We always like to say ah kind of inclusivity by design, right? Like, When you're building this stuff out from stage one, stage two, you can plan for this stuff. You can build it out. And it's things that should be top of mind now, right? There's so many live service games. There's so many online games, right? Like this is where you're going to make your money.
00:36:10
Speaker
And you shouldn't go out there just wanting to make money. You should want to be creating these inclusive environments where people are safe, people are protected. They're not getting trolled. They're not getting cheated. They're not getting bullied, right? and And cut those characters out so you can grow organically with good stuff rather than just crap numbers.
00:36:27
Speaker
I think one of the biggest hitting bits for me is the cost to reacquire a churned user is exponentially higher than the cost to acquire that user in the first instance. It's like, if you're going to make a game and you want to make a game that people play and that people love and a game that's successful,
00:36:45
Speaker
There's few things worse than the feeling of blatantly being cheated on in a game because you're just like, fuck this. This is bullshit. Whatever. Right. And if you have that happen one in 100 games, you're probably fine. If you have that happen one in three games, you're probably going to uninstall that game.
00:37:02
Speaker
Right. And it's just it's just it's not a nice feeling as a player and it's not a good spot to be in as a game developer. It's a really hard problem to fight. It's a really hard problem to fight. So I'm just gonna throw kind of random questions at you.
00:37:15
Speaker
shit What is your dream vacation?
00:37:21
Speaker
I would very much like to sit in a hot tub all day, every day for like a week, just completely alone in the woods with nothing but the sounds of birds tweeting. No noise, no distractions, just quiet. That would be but didn't used to be my dream vacation. And then I had a family. and Yeah, that was no and good luck with that.
00:37:43
Speaker
Last game you played. ah i was about to say Apex Legends, but I've currently got Rocket League open running in the background. So that would have been a lie. ah Yeah, Rocket League.
00:37:54
Speaker
What was the game that made you want to get into the gaming industry?
00:38:01
Speaker
Oh, that's such a good question. There is no one game. There's been an accumulation of phenomenal games that left such an impact on me. I was like, my dream would be to work in this space. So Zone of the Enders, Final Fantasy IX and ten um Kingdom Hearts. I mean, you can probably tell I've got Jehute from Zone of the Enders there, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy there.
00:38:21
Speaker
um the early Call of Duties, the early Medal of Honor, just so many. World of Warcraft, ah tens of thousands of hours in WoW um over the last 15 years. I canceled my WoW subscription the other day and they said, I'm sorry to see you go off to 15 years. And I was just like,
00:38:37
Speaker
My wow account is almost old enough to drink. You got to keep it going then. Only six more as different six more years here. And was it three more about you? Three. Three more over here. But um yeah, no one game in particular, just a lot of these stories and characters and worlds. And I grew up in rural Suffolk in the countryside.
00:38:54
Speaker
So bus routes were rubbish and the ability to like travel and stuff was kind of rubbish. So gaming was my it was my entertainment. It was my escape. was my way to chill out. And then when online gaming became a thing. It was my way to you know socialize with lots of people that I would have never have otherwise got to meet. So um no one game, but an accumulation of lots of amazing games.
00:39:13
Speaker
Love it. but and You went to it very well, by the way. You ask good questions. You're very personal. Thank you. know it's just you know It's really all just curiosity, right? I've always been a curious person, how how shit works, for lack of better words, and understanding how it all connects it and when you start learning about the gaming space, you know, when you're younger, you not younger, right? Let's go back five years. I'm sitting like, why does the game take seven years to make? Why are they announcing this game? It takes seven years.
00:39:39
Speaker
It's bullshit, man. They have 500 people working on it. How's it taking that long? And they used to do that in five years with that budget. But then you like start to see the composers composing producers and how everything being made all around the world, all having to connect it. And, and,
00:39:58
Speaker
It's crazy. And now the value that you see in trust and safety and, and, You know, I'm in this whole weird space of mine. Like, all right, well, am am I doing content creation? Am I doing marketing? am I doing this? And there's this kind of ah overlap of how all these things are kind of coming into one on how this is what marketing marketing is. It's how do you get in front of the right audience? The right audience isn't in New York or New Jersey with me, right? My right audience for the game that I'm building might be in Asia. And I never realized that, right? but And I don't think people realize the power of social media and how I can get in front of marketing. Like,
00:40:32
Speaker
I still talk to people that don't want to do marketing on Reddit. I'm just like, you have the type of game that Most people aren't on social media reading this shit. They want to read lore. They want to read this stuff. They're on Reddit.
00:40:44
Speaker
Like put your money on Reddit. They're like no, we're just going to do this stuff and wait for them to start coming and telling their friends. Facebook. not Yeah, right. Facebook. Like everyone's like, why'd you stop posting to Facebook, Greg? Like, cause Facebook is shit. And like, I don't need to advertise to my mom.
00:40:59
Speaker
She's going to watch no matter what. How much do you know about the origin of Rocket League? ah Not a ton. Cool. So Rocket League actually launched originally, I think it was 15 years ago um or to like 10 years ago.
00:41:12
Speaker
And it was called Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars. Really? Yes. And the art style was yeah horrible. It was really, really horrible. It off your tongue though.
00:41:25
Speaker
Terrible name, terrible art style. And basically um there were there was a publisher that came across it and was like, yeah If you like keep all of the mechanics, like the actual like mechanics that you have, the hit reg that you have, the everything.
00:41:41
Speaker
Chef's kiss, perfect. Keep it all. Change the art style, for God's sake, change the name. And they did. And then it exploded. So it's just like, yeah, I just i just kind complete off.
00:41:53
Speaker
no but it is i love it man right like it's this whole world of like especially i love it now because you have so many indie developers that are doing such cool shit but there's a couple of butts and a lot of big butts it's always like oh industry veterans from ea and blah blah blah and blah blah these guys never worked together it's not like i could take the best players from all these sports teams and then go get like a hockey player or a basketball player a baseball player saying oh the greatest from all the sports are going to play and beat you in all these sports. Like, no, like, first of all, their egos are huge. We don't know if they can work together. They don't like, I don't give a fuck who you've been or what you've done before. Like you haven't worked together as a team.
00:42:28
Speaker
So I think a, that's interesting in the indie space. Cause I think they're going to push it, but you don't know what's going to come of it. And if you can find a way to get these voices to be louder or more united or something like that, like there's power in it, but it's so sprawled out. I don't know how I got to this side of the topic. I was, I had anything in mind there. It's just like, <unk>re they're all right there. You just got to read, reposition yourself and we're starting to see that with double a right double a is coming back and they kind of rebranded as triple i or whatever right like it's happening and it's cool to see how community is helping that you see um flare obscure right people are loving flare experience and all these other games and it's like all right like gaming is coming back to what gaming was it's not becoming candy crush being pushed down our throats it's kind of like the old school games are being made again
00:43:11
Speaker
I think what we're going to see is this, yeah, this the resurgence of creative people, people with passion, people that want to make, you know, people forget games aren't just a game that you sit down and play. It's narrative, it's art, it's sound design, it's an immersive world. It's how populated is that world? Are there things to do in it fun? Is the time that I invest worth it for the activities that I'm doing in terms of fun that I receive?
00:43:33
Speaker
It's then the number crunching of the game economics to make sure that that actually works out and is stable. It's the anti-cheat, it's the trust and safety, it's the player experience, it's the customer support, it's the ah people that build the levels, the worlds, it's the optimization of the game. There's so many parts to get this thing together that looks good.
00:43:52
Speaker
And if you just have suits driving it, which is make it good enough and get it out the door so we can sell enough units that we can hit shareholder, you know you know meet our quarterly report that we put together so we look good for shareholders.
00:44:04
Speaker
versus like the Expedition 33 folks. Small team, love making games, made the best... The guy that did the sound for Expedition 33 The CEO of the studio um heard some of his stuff on so SoundCloud and then just messaged him. And it was like, your sound your your sound that you make is great.
00:44:26
Speaker
Do you want to work on this? And he was just like, yeah, that'd be dope. And they just came together. It was just passionate people who love doing what they're doing, coming together with a clear vision of what they were going to do. And they made this great game. But churning out shit for the sake of churning out shit leaves you with shit.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:44:44
Speaker
There's a lot more that Andrew has to share. You can check it out more on playerdriven.io. You can check out PlaySafe in general at playsafeid.com. We'll have links in the Player Driven blog post that talks about Andrew has links to him and his stuff as well.
00:44:59
Speaker
And let us know for those who are listening, have you played a game where cheating just killed the entire vibe where things were just so annoying you couldn't take it anymore? If you have those stories, share it with us and we'll talk about them next time on the episode. Thanks all. Have a great week.