Jerome de Tychey is the CEO of Cometh, the president of Ethereum-France, and an associate professor. At the Non Fungible Conference, I enjoyed sitting down with Jerome to talk about his game development studio, his upcoming exploration strategy game Cometh, and how he is building tools to enable Web3 development and helping mainstream game studios transition over to the blockchain.
Jereme is an industry veteran, having been in the crypto space for around a decade; he initially started mining and auditing protocols, founding a nonprofit organization named Assets. During that time, at the young age of 16, Jerome discovered the power of Ethereum, which led him to work for ledger eventually and found his company Cometh:
“I got to work for ledger for a while as their global head for client success on both b2b and b2c. And recently created my own company, a Blockchain game studio called cometh.”
Since its conception, Cometh has seen considerable success, with its last game, a real-time strategy game, released in February 2021:
“We had about 10,000 players in this game and up to 4000 connected simultaneously. So it was super impressive to see the blockchain withstanding all of those players.”
Jerome believes his next game could be even better despite the game’s success: “Our next game will be a card battle game, one vs one. It’s very active and vibrant as a game and has elements and mechanisms from Magic the Gathering.”
Likewise, Jerome and his development teams seek to put the game’s entire engine on the blockchain and innovate on gameplay through Comeths revolutionary card crafting system:
“So the crafting component, it is where I think we have the most innovation at the moment. We plug the grafting to defy protocols. So when you’re crafting, you are depositing liquidity on various protocols and getting your counts as proof of your deposits.”
Of course, a great card game requires a balance between cards to ensure that gameplay is fair:
“Our approach was to let three or four archetypes of decks emerge and then create new cards for those archetypes as time goes on and lots and lots of battle testing. So right now, there are 2000 Alpha testers, and we are going to go from 2000 to 60,000 in the coming weeks slowly, but we wanted to make sure that before we open up the doors to 1000s and 1000s, we are confident that we have those archetypes and they are well balanced,” said Jerome
Alongside the game itself, we also touched on the future of the games industry and how the adoption of NFT gaming by the mainstream may come about. In particular, Jerome mentioned a recent hire of his which demonstrates the interest and gradual adoption of Blockchain:
We just recruited a CMO who is the former CMO of Xbox Live and Microsoft as he believes in crypto believes in, the things that we’re doing, and how we are helping traditional games switch to blockchain while creating a great brand of interesting games that leverage blockchain for their narrative and gameplay.
Continuing, Jerome explained the power of the blockchain to create new gaming experiences that can enable thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, to play together and that the evolution of gaming will require such power, leading to adoption.
Check out Cometh here to start playing the game.
