Jon Radoff is a game industry entrepreneur, author, and investor focused on the intersection of games, platforms, and communities. He is the co-founder and CEO of Beamable, the company behind Beamable Network — a decentralized infrastructure powering live games.
Beamable Network is preparing for its token generation event (TGE) in November 2025, bringing community-owned backend services to the next wave of game developers.
Every live game is one backend outage away from disaster.
It doesn’t matter how fun your game is, how sticky your community is, or how strong your monetization is. If the backend fails, the game dies. Studios know this pain all too well: cloud outages that wipe out sessions, vendors that suddenly vanish, or lock-in pricing that strangles margins just as a title starts to scale.
Centralized backends are fragile. They’ve become the single point of failure in an industry built on persistence and uptime.
We’ve seen this story before
The history of gaming is the history of infrastructure shifts:
- In the early MMO era, studios built everything themselves — costly, brittle, and slow.
- Cloud platforms promised relief, but just swapped one set of dependencies for another.
- Now, with live service games dominating, the stakes are higher: no one can afford downtime, lock-in, or vendor abandonment.
The old way simply won’t scale into the next decade.
Why DePIN, not just “onchain”
The answer isn’t putting games onchain. They don’t need to run there — and they shouldn’t. What needs decentralization is the infrastructure layer itself.
That’s where DePIN comes in.
DePIN transforms backend services into verifiable public goods by distributing compute and networking across a decentralized network, while coordinating it through an onchain order book. Pricing, assignment, reputation, and accountability live onchain, ensuring that no single vendor can flip a switch and take your game offline.
The result is an infrastructure model that is:
- Resilient: No single point of failure.
- Transparent: Developers and players can verify what’s happening in real time.
- Cost-Efficient: Workloads are distributed without vendor markups or lock-in contracts.
- Community-Aligned: The ecosystem that uses the infrastructure is also the one that sustains and governs it.
This is what DePIN has already proven in other domains — from storage to compute. Gaming is the next frontier.
Why it matters for games
Games are no longer products that launch once and fade away. They are communities that live for years, sometimes decades. That requires infrastructure as durable and adaptive as the communities themselves.
DePIN doesn’t force studios to change their game design. It changes the economics and resilience of the backend itself. By aligning incentives across developers, players, and operators, DePIN ensures the services games rely on won’t disappear when they’re needed most.
Studios that embrace this shift early will stop fighting their infrastructure and start building worlds that can endure as long as their communities want them to.
Find out more at the Beamable Network website and read its whitepaper here.
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