Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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From Fan to Creator: Jaime Schwarz on the IP Economy | Episode 414

 

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What if your game character could earn you royalties? Jaime Schwarz unpacks co-creation, interactive media, and why the next frontier of engagement lives in the IP economy. A must-listen for future-focused creators!

After an award winning 15 years as a copywriter and creative director for NYC agencies, Jaime Schwarz dove into Web3, first by filing the worlds first NFT patent in 2017 and then by founding brand therapy teaching brands to speak for themselves. After co-founding 7 startups from then till 2022, Jaime co-founded the Team Flow Institute using employee intelligence and Parallel Worlds, the first spatial transformation company. With his patent granted he is now also the founder of MRKD.dj ensuring DRRM (digital rights and royalties management) by smart contracting the samples themselves for infinite drops. On the roadmap is MRKD.worlds which expands stories across media using the same name chain as MRKD.dj to ensure interoperability and equitable co-creation across an open spatial web.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob (00:00)
Hey, this is Professor Game where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez. I’m a consultant, coach, and I’m the founder here at Professor Game. And I’m also a professor of gamification and game inspired solutions at IE University, IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University and other places around the world. And before we dive into the interview, you’re struggling.

with engagement in your business and are looking to find out how to make your users stay with you. You will find a free community full of resources, quite useful. You can find it for free in the links below in the description. So, Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game Podcast. And today we have Jamie with us. But Jamie, before we get started, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Jaime Schwarz (00:54)
I mean, I press start button, whether or not I’m ready or not, here we go.

Rob (00:59)
Let’s do this. have Jamie with us today because he has, he’s an award winning 15 years as a copywriter and creative director for New York City agencies. He dove into web three, first by filing the world’s first NFT patent in 2017, and then by founding brand therapy, teaching brands to speak for themselves. And after co-founding seven startups from then until 2022, he co-founded the team flow Institute using employee intelligence in parallel worlds.

the first spatial transformation company. With his patent granted, he is now also the founder of MRKD.DJ, ensuring DRRM digital rights and royalties management by smart contracting the samples themselves for infinite drops. On the roadmap is MRKD.Worlds, which expands stories across media using the same name chain as MRKD.DJ to ensure interoperability and equitable co-creation

across an open and spatial web. Is there anything that we’re missing from that intro, Jamie, that we should let the Engagers know?

Jaime Schwarz (02:08)
I’ll always talk up my wonderfully talented wife, who I just got back from the Emmys with her for, and my amazingly talented children, Miles and Charlie, but professionally, we’re good.

Rob (02:19)
It sounds amazing, amazing. So Jamie, is there like, could you guide us very quickly through, you know, a professional day? What does that look like with you? What would we expect if we were, I don’t know, shadowing you around?

Jaime Schwarz (02:32)
know two days are the same. You might be trapped in the basement like I am here at my house right now, or we might be, well, two days a week. I’m an adjunct professor at City College teaching copywriting and brand strategy. ⁓ And I network like crazy. So I am, you know, at talks in this, we’re not that far from the city in Hastings and Hudson. So I’m in there often doing a lot of pitches, a lot of podcasts. I was just in Brooklyn last week at an amazing

podcast recording studio, Wolf Island. ⁓ And, know, if you’re living this close to the city, it’s, you can’t not, you know, the city directs you. So you’ll just be following along with me as I follow along with the flow of New York.

Rob (03:18)
Amazing, amazing. I was in New York City when I was… the exact number escapes me, eludes me. It might have been seven years old or so and I’ve never actually gone back. I look forward very much to being back on the city, which my wife has never been to. So we were actually very close to going for a wedding, but didn’t happen. So looking forward to doing that in the near future. Now we have a daughter as well. Might be even more exciting.

Jaime Schwarz (03:45)
depends on the place in New York you want to go but yeah.

Rob (03:48)
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely sure. So Jamie, we were talking about many things before wrapping up for actually going into this interview. And one of the things that you mentioned was talking about gamifying co-creation. What do you mean by that? Because I know from all the things that you’re working, it makes sense from your work, but I’d also like to know what does that actually translate into in your work?

Jaime Schwarz (04:03)
⁓ huh.

Well, I mean, given we’re talking about games in general here, gamification is a real, it’s a user experience discipline. And it’s really about user behavior, customer experience. And just within gamification itself, the whole idea is it’s a, it’s a user journey with a funnel. There’s gravity, there’s pull to what you’re supposed to do next. There’s reward. So within the co-creation space, that’s all about collaboration. That’s all about saying,

If somebody does something, how do we gamify the system so that there’s encouragement for those who are normally consumers to be prosumers, producer consumers? I don’t want to just consume what you’re showing me. I want to co-create with you. I want to add on top of it. I think the simplest game you can think about like this is ⁓ Exquisite Corpse. I just draw a little top of a head and I hand the piece on to somebody else who does the eyes and on and on.

And in the end, have this very weird kind of funky ⁓ character that was created by however many number of people are passing the ⁓ blind piece paper around. But it’s a game. That’s gamification right there. And what you end up with is something that we created together. So it really is just about the encouragement of co-creation.

Rob (05:28)
Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. ⁓ Many ideas there to sort of dive into. Is there any particular direction you’d like to dive with that or should we move on to world building?

Jaime Schwarz (05:41)
Well, you’re going to find it in any media. I’ll just say that. Like so in music, you hear collabs and remixes and sampling all the time. ⁓ And in art, I mean, you’re seeing people make something and then remake it, Warhol ⁓ kind of got us going in that direction. And there’s so much since then. But anytime you’re standing on somebody’s shoulders officially, because there’s no such thing as inventing, you’re just putting two old things together, ⁓ that is a collaboration. So whenever there’s credit to be

given whenever there’s influence from creator to co-creator to be made. ⁓ That’s part of this. So whatever direction you want to go in, especially games, ⁓ there’s something for co-creation to be done there.

Rob (06:24)
Co-creation

is a beautiful and immense space in so many ways. I was thinking when you were saying that, you know, you also have the whole, you know, NFTs and all of that and how that actually works. So it got me just curious about how, how are like, co-creation exists, right? Like this is always happening. There’s also a question that we have on fan creation and so on. It’s been there, but…

If it’s already been there and it’s already being successful, as you were saying with musicians, art and so on, what is it about gamifying that process? Like, why would you even do it? Because gamifying, making business is usually an effort, right? It’s usually about doing something more interesting so that more people do it or people actually start to do it. So why did you go down that route?

Jaime Schwarz (07:11)
because the system that’s been created ever since I was ⁓ on my Nintendo, I guess what was on my Super Nintendo at the time, I guess maybe, ⁓ has generally moved in a, in my opinion, the very wrong direction where you have a lot of centralized platforms. ⁓ A very big moment in that would probably be like a Zynga on Facebook and we started to do the whole SaaS thing of a game. And you end up in a centralized system where

gamification is extraction. It’s the system saying how can I keep you in the attention economy or in the freemium economy ⁓ as long as possible. And that’s gamification in terms of ⁓

manipulation rather than a conscious gamification, one where the person who’s playing is actually, you know, getting something out of it for themselves. That’s not to be said that, you know, you can’t spend 200 hours in a game and get everything you want out of it, but ⁓ who are you doing it for? And I think that that’s what we have to make sure we’re correcting when we’re talking about ownership. When you own what you’re playing or the character that you’re playing with or whatever that is, ⁓

It’s designed for you. It’s designed for your benefit. It’s designed with you profiting from your effort.

Rob (08:36)
Interesting, interesting. in that same sense, know, when you talk about this, let’s say I’ve been the latest long game I’ve been playing is The Witcher 3, right? So you talk about world building beyond entertainment, right?

quest progression storytelling mechanics, how do they relate to these shared IP experiences? There’s all this going on, The Witcher was created by the studio a long time ago, even though it’s based on plenty of different myths and things from folklore in general. What does that look like?

Jaime Schwarz (09:16)
⁓ It’s a good place to start is folklore, the Grimm’s fairy tales, that oral tradition, the Odyssey, the Iliad. It’s just, think of it like folk music. Somebody came up with it, we have no idea who. gets, every generation picks it up, makes it their own, and passes it on. We’re stewards of an idea from generation to generation. And sometimes that’s about just passing on a story. ⁓ And sometimes it’s about secrets within a game.

which, you know, like survival tactics that turned into games later on in society. But ⁓ where it is going is the same thing. There’s a pull to that attention economy. How do we keep you in the system? so the system has really encouraged world building.

I may not be able to do much with a comic book, but when that comic book is then turned into a video game, which is then turned into a TV series, which is then has prequel and movie series and then has the video game ⁓ of the, you know, it just keeps going. mean, with Star Wars or whatever, you can think of a million different ones, which is a good example too. Love the Netflix series. So when you’re doing that and you’re in a transmedia environment, it’s immersive ⁓ on the other side.

Not you’re not included. You’re still a consumer, but you have more and more world to experience, more and more story, more and more character development, ⁓ more rabbit holes to go down. You need transmedia in order to do that.

Rob (10:52)
And how does that because one of the things and this I don’t want to get political or you know, economic theories or any of that. Some people would argue that, you you gave the example of Star Wars and I’m actually wearing that t-shirt right now is, you know, actually there’s a concrete example of this. A friend was the other day was saying he was not really excited when Disney purchased the Star Wars franchise in general, right? But then he said like, well, you know, if they did it,

And of course, there’s things that I don’t entirely like completely of what they’ve created because it has a bit of the Disney twist in general. But, but if it means that I’m going to get a lot more of Star Wars, which is something I’m a fan of, then you know, what be it? And of course, of course, they did it with an economic interest. They want to grow the franchise so that they can make more and better money out of it. How does that turn into this, you know, collective co-creation or

that stuff without losing that economic interest that drives something like and I’m just giving this because it’s a big bloated example of this. Does that fit together? What’s your vision on this?

Jaime Schwarz (12:03)
I think actually ⁓ Andor is a great example. It’s just finished up, so it’s a great example to give. ⁓ It’s a side story of a side story. A ⁓ lot of people died getting us these plans, Rogue One. How did that guy become who he was, Andor? ⁓ And you end up with fresher spaces, further and further away from main characters, Mandalorian, the Acolyte, all these different things that are building out in these different directions.

Those are collaborations. ⁓ The creator of Andor went really political in his research. I really recommend the podcast of him talking with a ⁓ revolution historian on Jon Stewart’s weekly show podcast. ⁓ He had to study human nature. There’s a reason why you gain empathy by reading fiction. It’s still human nature. If it’s not, it doesn’t work. ⁓ So we’re extremely human.

in Star Wars, all our actions and our relationships. So when you’re getting into that space, the only difference is it’s still canon because they hired that showrunner. They hired the people themselves and they have the final say with everything. But what’s going on on the other side? There’s fan fiction everywhere for every single show or side project that any, ⁓ I mean, the amount of Clone Wars stuff alone. ⁓

in so many different directions. And that was just in between two episodes, episodes two and three of Star Wars. And that’s a whole nine, eight series, eight year series. It’s crazy. ⁓ I do love how they closed it up too, but we’re still fans. We’re still on one side of it. We’re still consuming. Give us a chance. Like we’re taking that fan fiction. We’re taking it a lot of different directions. Look at all the Canon that was made before Disney bought it. And then they made it non-Canon. Now the stuff that was Canon is now.

It could go two ways. It’s crazy. So where do we go from here? Or, you know, people option books all the time, turn them into movies. The writer of the book has very little say in what the movie’s doing. They’re there and they have, they want to keep you. Look, if you don’t stick to canon, your fans are going to kill you. But ⁓ anytime you’re expanding like that, that’s a collaboration. That’s a co-creation. Two people in two different specializations of media.

working together on the same IP. So what’s the stop the fan fiction side that’s fan fiction is, is high art bootlegging. Right. So if we just say the person who owns the IP can create some rules, but give access to people to do that fan fiction and share in the IP share in the profit together. That’s a benefit for both. can build and build and build. They’ll never make.

anything anywhere near as big as the fan fiction worlds that are out there, why don’t they profit from it? You know, if I’m going from ⁓ Luke to ⁓ the rebellion forming in Rogue One ⁓ to Andor, and then there’s Andor’s sister, I’m far enough away from any canon that I can’t interfere. Give me that sister. I want to do her side story. What happened to her when she was taken? Right? I want to take that out.

We all have to get to that point where I’m gonna get a Stormtrooper, a blank Stormtrooper. And I’m gonna go around multiple worlds and create provenance with this character. then Star Wars, hey, they bought, ⁓ Disney paid $1.5 billion to create Disney World and Fortnite. Why can’t I then bring my character in there and then Disney can host like, all right, let’s see who’s out there. We have an adventure that we need some Stormtroopers to go on. Who wants to audition their character?

and be a part of our little movie. It can keep flowing back and forth. I own my Stormtrooper. It’s licensed from Disney. It’s co-created by us. Why don’t we profit from it together? And we’re seeing that a little bit in places like a, what’s it called? House of Blouse or something. The noun project when they started building that stuff out. As a few years ago, it was just basically saying people who bought NFTs audition your NFT to be a part of our world. And if you are, we’re building a movie.

Rob (16:20)
have to say.

Jaime Schwarz (16:30)
⁓ basically across like eight different fundraising splices. And if you’re part of the movie. Great. You’ll share in the profits with us. pudgy penguins. Great example of that. If you own one of those 8,888 penguins, you’re making money off of your character being sold as a plushie in Walmart. ⁓ if they’re going to be in the movie, they just started a YouTube channel deal. If your character is one of those you’re sharing in the profits. You own, you share.

Rob (16:58)
Interesting, interesting. we are kind of getting into that ownership and motivation and, you know, UKAI has a core drive specifically for ownership and how that motivates people. ⁓ Why do you think ownership, recognition, how do they shift loyalty, retention, motivation, excitement by fans and whatnot, especially when it relates to interactive media, as you were saying before.

Jaime Schwarz (17:25)
Sure. ⁓ Well, interactive is, yeah, the passive consumption, reading a book, watching a movie, you’ve consumed it, you’re done. When you have interaction, the rabbit hole is so much deeper. Yeah. And it’s wonderful for us. I mean, we’re asking to make all this interaction. But ⁓ as we dive in further into that space, ⁓ I’ll get political, but in terms of ⁓ ancient history of politics.

That’s sharecropping. That’s feudalism. If you think about what you did when you were doing Farmville, that’s sharecropping. What are you making? You’re making money for the landowner. Right? And what are you getting for it? The game. We’re selling you fun time. And in return, we get the effort because you’re the product. Remember Facebook, you’re the

if you’re not paying, you are the product. So when you have a freemium model, ⁓ how are we paying? In the feudal system, I didn’t own the land, I just worked the field and it allowed me to have a sustainable life for 30 years before I died or whatever it was. And I just gave all my crops to the lord of the manor. And so what are we doing here in Facebook? It’s Technofutilism, a centralized platform where you own everything.

If you’re interacting and you’re paying to interact, you can call it consumption. Hey, I paid for this game because I want to play the game, but there’s a difference between paying for the game and then playing your game and you’re done versus I didn’t pay for this game. I’m spending as much time as I want in it. So the ads come at me because that’s what’s really going on and that’s techno feudalism. So call it politics if you want, but the point would be as we shift from having a

completely analog society to one that has digital that is slowly swallowing software, swallowing the world. That feudalism is growing more and more into our, whatever you want to say about capitalism, our analog capitalism world and slowly taking it over fully. So if we don’t have ownership in that space, if we don’t allow for our own IP to be owned, and this is the big, rabbit hole, AI, all the AI companies are saying that IP is free for us to grab.

so that you can create non-ownable IP that’s generated from our tokens that you pay for. If we continue to build that system of paying for the compute, but not paying for the source material, and sometimes, hey, open it, I paid New York Times, but the system that’s created, the invisible hand of the market that’s created is still a centralized authority who is providing access to something that we pay for, but the people who are sourcing, they’re not the middleman anymore.

They’ve stolen the IP to resell. So I want to pay Star Wars so I can grab that ⁓ Stormtrooper. And I want to be able to share in that royalty as I earn with it. I don’t want Fortnite to keep Disney and me apart. I want to make sure we’re in an open spatial web where the middlemen are there to add culture and provenance and network.

and people that I’ve never met before, and all those wonderful things that they should be providing that we’ll pay for, but not for the source material. That’s for the owner of the source.

Rob (21:02)
Interesting and getting into that world precisely of AI, know, has to do with world building, you know, what studios are actually able to do. We’re not quite there yet. Even for relatively simpler games, know, AI does some tasks and creates some things. ⁓ Like it lets anyone create to a certain extent, but it is clear now that at this pace, it’ll be able to create more and more ⁓ stuff. ⁓

of studios and IP owners, like what were, in your view, what are they able or interested in doing nowadays?

Jaime Schwarz (21:42)
We’re far, as you said, we’re far enough along that ⁓ world building is understood like the genie from Gemini. Here’s a picture. Here’s a world that you can go five minutes into from a freaking picture or a prompt. You know, so we know where this is headed. How was that world created? What were you referencing? If you’re prompting and saying, I want to create a, I’m just going to keep sticking with Star Wars, it’s easiest. ⁓ You know, a, a, ⁓

A world far, far away in space with a multi-planetary system, put it Star Wars world. ⁓ I’m in that world. They didn’t pay Disney for that. They’re suing now to get paid for that, but the world’s built on something. So you have to say, okay, where’s the source material coming from that you’re creating? Remember, inventing is just putting old things together to create that from. Once you pay for that source material and you have this world, who owns it?

I just want to pay for the compute to allow for that to exist. They’re holding onto the compute to say, yeah, pay us, but just as a service fee, because that’s still our world. Think of board apes, Yugalabs. ⁓ When it was very big and expensive, and Seth Green, ⁓ a famous actor, bought a board ape. He wanted to start a TV show with a bunch of different NFT characters. Somebody stole his board ape from his wallet, and it brought up a really interesting point.

Who owns the eight? Who can still do the show? Cause if the guy just steals the file, does that mean he could take the rights with it? Wait a second. The rights didn’t even go to Seth Green. They’re still with you go labs. What you go labs was saying was we’re giving you an open license where we’re not going to sue you go make whatever you want because we want to grow the world, we’re keeping the rights. So you can profit from it until we want to grab something. So it wasn’t for that person to hold because

sure you can steal something, but where were the rights and do rights get transferred with objects as they should if I’m handing over something where I’m actually signing a contract and of my free will selling something versus getting it stolen. Yeah. Rights have to go with it. Right. So what is, what are those rights? How are they moving with it? How is that transfer happening? We need those receipts in order to be able to have control and transparency around those rights so that

As we’re building, understand who owns what and the motivations are clear because we always just check that TOS. We always just, I accept the term.

Rob (24:14)
Yeah,

terms of service are always.

Jaime Schwarz (24:16)
worse

and worse. You know, go back to music. Spotify just changed their terms to say, we can sub license your music. That’s theft that they got permission from from the user who didn’t read the contract to just we’re taking this. They’re making it too complicated.

Rob (24:32)
If

literally making a living out of whatever you create on any of these platforms, it’s…

Jaime Schwarz (24:39)
I don’t want to living on Spotify, then Taylor Swift.

Rob (24:43)
Exactly, that’s what I was going to say. Like not everybody has even a piece of that, but if that’s a significant part of what you’re making your life on, it’s kind of on you to make sure you read those terms and conditions which are unreasonably long and complicated. I agree.

Jaime Schwarz (25:01)
accept your premise. It’s not on you. If the system’s not built for you to be able to have the capacity to understand, it’s the same thing as why we have in America a right to a lawyer. The system is too complicated for a lay person to be able to defend themselves. You are given a free lawyer as part of your right as a citizen. We have consumer financial protection bureau. You have to write your contracts in English, credit card companies, so we understand.

we’re actually signing up for. You can’t hide hidden fees. What does that mean? It’s that.

It’s not our fault if it’s hidden. It’s not our fault if we don’t understand. It’s not our fault if we also don’t have any options. You know, this is an oligopoly in terms of a lot of ways when we’re talking about specific industries.

Rob (25:45)
Yeah, I know. Like all I mean is, you know, and I’m at fault of this many times. Like it just, you sign into a platform and do you have a reasonable amount of time to read through those things? And depending on what it is, I have read through many of these and I’m not, I’m an engineer. Pretty far from being a lawyer in any capacity, but I do like to have.

Like I can actually give you specific examples. I don’t want to name any specific companies because I honestly don’t remember at this point. But when I was creating this podcast and even years in every now and then, you know, this or that company can say, you know, can, you can just host here for free and you have all these benefits and this and that Spotify was actually Spotify was one of them. And I know they changed this several times over, but especially at the start. And there were other companies that said that when you uploaded there,

I’m not exactly sure how it worked, but to a certain extent, stopped. It either stopped being yours or they had every right to do with it, whatever the heck they wanted. And I decided I would not host on those platforms. I pay a monthly fee. pay, I think it’s $20 at this point every single month to Libsyn, which works pretty well. It’s basic enough. And you know, whatever I create there, I am paying for it to be stored there.

Not forever and ever because if I stop paying, they can just take it down almost immediately. But ⁓ that’s what I’m paying for. Like I know what I’m paying for. And every now and then they came up. was in a few communities for podcasts. was, this platform came up. And I always ask like, did you read what they can do with your stuff? And the owners of the communities who are much bigger podcasts making millions out of their podcasts said, we’re not hosting there. We actually did the research and they have all of these benefits, which are great, but I’m not going to host there. No way.

My content is mine, I make millions out of it, I make nothing. I just had one of my first fully sponsored episodes but I make almost nothing out of it. Still, I’m not very interested in getting my stuff owned by somebody else.

Jaime Schwarz (27:56)
Nobody else is, but what we give up for convenience. ⁓ Exactly.

Rob (28:01)
But

that’s what I mean. What I mean is especially like for going into like say Facebook or Instagram or all that like, well, yeah, you know, I could reasonably, I think at the start I started reading that and every now they change their terms that they let you know because they have to. So I kind of read at least through that. So I have an idea and every now and then it’s like, well, you know, I’m done with this platform. I’m off and that’s it. But I don’t reasonably read absolutely everything. There’s no way to do it. I 100 % agree. If you do that, you have to pretty much…

spend half your life just reading through. ⁓

Jaime Schwarz (28:34)
And that’s the point. It’s not your fault, but it’s also not necessarily the fault of the company either. It’s the system that we’re inside of.

Rob (28:41)
They

have to protect themselves and they have to like when I when I send well when when you Came into the podcast one of the things I do it’s very short very legible It’s literally less than a page, but I tell people like you know you want to be on the podcast great You’re welcome here is a place for you to sign up so that we can schedule this I also want you to agree for me to use this essentially like that’s basically what it says I don’t own what you own but the interview what happens in the interview and me saying that you were on the interview and you’re

image quote unquote. Just actually the image of you being here and saying that you were on the podcast is something that I can do. That is all I’m asking for. Right. Like literally that’s the kind of stuff I do.

Jaime Schwarz (29:21)
You’re ⁓ bringing up very important industry that plays into this as well, which is the name image likeness industry. And ⁓ in this case, the most obvious one are sports video games. So you have a kid who’s in the NCAA and now they’re finally able to make their own money ⁓ because it is a for-profit system that they just weren’t getting exploited from. But then they show up in a video game and he needs…

the he or she needs the lawyers and everything to get the negotiations done right so that their name image likeness is being used in a way that is not exploitative to them. ⁓ And how does that work? And then, you know, now that we’re creating characters, now that these characters can become co-creations and you can option them out to people, where the name image likeness rights of something that is a digital version of you or a digital

⁓ Different versions of characters that you’ve created and only IP for because what’s the difference between a likeness of me and a character that I own the IP for that I created Basically nothing when it comes to their you know, player me character

Rob (30:32)
Yeah. So that was sort of a rabbit hole we went down into for sure. From what we’ve discussed, is there anything that you would say, you know, what’s next when thinking through experiences the way we think through games and how they can engage people, motivate people into taking some actions? We were talking about gamify, co-creation at the start. Like, what do you think is next? What’s coming up in your view?

Jaime Schwarz (31:01)
⁓ I think it’s healthy and good that we’re having bigger conversations in the gaming industry, that the creators behind it ⁓ and the relationships between the people who actually build the games, the people who actually have the IP for the games, the players themselves, the influencers in the space. There’s so many different ⁓ people now involved on different levels here that something like, you know, Gamergate in and of itself was a big thing, but it was also a sign of things to come in terms of

the complicated system of people on different sides of things. So I see that growing. So when you have major labels losing the opportunity to create something truly unique because of their size, as we go through a different technological upswing or downswing of capabilities, and smaller studios, and even honestly, like one person at a time, sometimes creates the most amazing games they don’t need a studio for. Studios have to find their own way forward.

in terms of what’s the next value add, rather than stopping the people below them that are just doing the same things that they can now do that the big studios used to only be able to do. So that’s a nonsensical fight that’s going to continue to happen. ⁓ And at the same time, how much power are the consumers going to have about that? It’s access to the games too. What’s Steam going to do in this space? One that’s about access to the, hey, just make a game.

You know, like Distro Kid for music, Steam is that, know. Anybody who can make something should be able to create that for. And that has to do with that ownership thing again. How much power does a centralized go between middleman centralized platform have in that system? Where all we’re trying to do is say, here’s a creator, here’s a consumer. How do we get that as direct as possible or relationship? And how do we allow for on top of that?

No one person owns an idea. Once it’s out in the world, it’s for everybody, right? But we live in a capitalistic society and the systems within that. So how do we use capitalism for all the good that it can do in terms of that world building, in terms of that co-creation? Because I think it’s a wonderful thing when stories naturally world build, because that’s what a story is. It’s a never ending story. No such thing as the end of a story. There’s just a period.

Rob (33:29)
Cool. I think we’ll leave it with that. But Jamie, is there anything else you’d like to quickly into any final, I don’t know, piece of advice, any final phrase? Where, of course, can we find out more about the stuff that you guys are doing ⁓ before we take off?

Jaime Schwarz (33:44)
⁓ I’d like to introduce ⁓ what I think is going to come after the service economy, which is the IP economy. I think that’s what people should be fighting for, ownership of your own ideas. ⁓ We are living in a world where we went from ⁓ making our own food to making mass production to making services to making ideas. We need more than patents. We need more than copyrights. We need the dollars and cents exchange of ideas in the systems that we make.

So I really want to invite gamers, and especially game developers, to think from that lens as we move forward. Because the more you think about what you can get out of the system, the more you’re just trying to grab a larger slice of a shrinking, not even the same size, a shrinking pie. Grow the pie. How do we grow the pie? That’s it.

Rob (34:37)
Thanks for all those insights, Jamie. And thanks again for being on the podcast, for delivering all of your understanding, your knowledge, all the stuff you’ve experienced. However, Jamie and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game.

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