Byron Chad is a British technologist educated at Oxford, pretty comfortable coding in the weeds or debating protocols. Nowadays, his role is part builder, part translator between gamers, developers, and the on-chain crowd.
Question. Byron, for readers meeting you for the first time, who are you?
Byron Chad: I’m a technologist and a gamer. Thus, I cared a lot about how the games feel and how to make them interesting.
B.C. Interactive means systems react to players and to each other; so your choices ripple, not reset at the next loading screen. Modular, in this case, means games are built from swappable parts, so studios and communities can compose modules without breaking everything. Finally, when we talk about decentralized games, we mean that critical state and ownership don’t live on a single company’s server, everything has open rails so your progress is not hostage to a single login screen.
Q. Why are you pushing back on graphics being the main frontier?
B.C. First of all, because a good game doesn’t need photorealistic graphics: it has to be interesting. A good game has to be engaging, with a solid narrative, and immersive. Thus, the future of gaming is not graphics-based; it is interactive, modular, and decentralized.
B.C. Everything! It changes incentives, tooling… It lets teams pick audited modules and focus on their story. This lets small studios ship faster while using certain infrastructure that used to be available only for AAA budgets. Then, with a good promotion in social media and gaming platforms, they can reach their public accordingly, with a fraction of the budget.
B.C. Portability and agency. If your rare blade or team skin is an asset you actually own, you can trade it or use it across compatible games without begging for API access. If, for any reason, the studio closes its doors, your time and money investments are not lost. And when governance is on-chain or, at least auditable, balance changes and economic tweaks become proposals, aligning designers and die-hard players in the same feedback loop.
B.C. Early, messy, but real enough to matter.
B.C. All three. NPCs should be stateful agents with memory, that would make them feel alive and not vending machines. Tools-wise, AI lowers the cost of content creation, but there is a risk to make it feel stale. Economy-wise, AI can act as market makers, but they must be sandboxed with transparent policies so they don’t distort play. AI should augment human creativity, not replace it.
B.C. Treat creators like first-class partners. If someone creates something new for the game, route a programmable royalty automatically whenever it’s used, without legal gymnastics. A balanced ecosystem should pay small builders weekly, not “maybe” at the next big sale.
B.C. Yes, clients may vary, but the state layer and services can be unified.
B.C. Service-driven, player-aligned models. Battle passes are fine if they are transparent and non-predatory. And, of course, they should be easy to finish if you grind a bit, not only if you stay online for 24 hours straight. More interesting are creator revenue shares, season-based staking of attention, and patronage mechanics where guilds bankroll new modules. The players should exit with value, so loyalty isn’t a sunk-cost fallacy.
B.C. Start with one composable system and expose clean interfaces.
B.C. Let’s frame it this way: you hop into a shard with friends; your identity and inventory follow automatically. A community-made raid uses the studio’s combat module and a fan-build economy, both with transparent updates. An NPC remembers last week’s fiasco and adjusts your tactics. Mid-session, you lend your mount to a newcomer, with a contract that will expire at dawn. When you log off, your guild votes to merge with a rival clan’s crafting module. Nothing you did is trapped in yesterday’s patch notes, and that’s the point.
