Blockchain Gaming for Dummies with Ethan "Crypto Kid" Levy

all right we are live i've been waiting to do this podcast for a long time ethan leave leave uh i always want to say levi it's levy everyone else is levi everybody some reason levi but this is an ethon levy yeah executive producer at network working on your first blockchain game and people know you from before as the king of free to play you've done amazing games uh legendary probably the highlight of them all yeah legendary game of heroes just fantastic economy one of the best uh puzzle rpg games ever and your talks as we stated many times on this podcast are the highlight of any gdc and every gbc welcome back to the podcast thanks thanks for having me it's uh it's a joy to listen to and uh an honor to be here oh my god let's let's let's he's on nothing ethan is saying this because he's next

in line to be the co-host on twig have i told you you look especially small today you look very small he's waiting for adam telfer to slip he's like adam tell her you [ __ ] slip a little bit ethan lee is taking your spot so this podcast we're gonna we're gonna so i'm the neanderthal like the market is moving so fast i'm still in that free-to-play mobile sphere thinking that that's all you know that's that's the the hot dot jazz but the real thing is blockchain game so this episode i'm the dummy and you're going to tell me what's going on and we have a rules of engagement so this is from eric suffered he said i'm misquoting him but basically i'm allowed to mute you at any point if you if you go on a rant about something decentralized yeah it's uh i don't think i will you

should have a bell to ding yeah and then i have to instantly stop using jargon i think i think i have like all kinds of like i have like uh like clapping and drama roles and i'm this is like a this is like a legit podcast like i have all the productions here but i can't anyways well whenever i'm being an ass just make a fart noise okay okay the audience is already like shut the [ __ ] up and start talking about blockchain so let's go i'm gonna ask you questions and because i'm so stupid i'm gonna ask multiple questions about the same thing and then we also have maybe like 20 questions from dof community from the slack channel uh a lot of great questions so thank you everybody for contributing i'm not going to say the names because there's such a long list on the on the crypto channel anyways and i'll i'll do my best i don't i mean i don't this market is big new moving fast and there are people who've been like into blockchain for years and i'm maybe nine nine to 12 months into it so i

think i'm uh uh modern hopefully i get everything right but um you know there's no difference those people who have been long in the business long in a tooth of crypto they don't know [ __ ] about making games you know you know a lot about making good games a lot about running superb live operations on free-to-play games so you are the guy to talk about crypto not these crypto bros who are who only know about crypto but don't know anything about making actually a good game okay now i sound horrible but i'm just being hyperbolic and just yeah trying to i thought aircrest wasn't here today okay by the way eric was supposed to be on this podcast yeah but snagged on like the hour before this so so it's only i'm in the hot seat you're in the hot seat so let's get ethan let's [ __ ] go yeah what does a blockchain mean in the context of gaming and how it is applied yeah so you know i'm not going to go too deep into the technical of blockchain um it's

a decentralized distributed database that processes things trustlessly and something something mining staking nodes trustless decentralized i don't know words words there there are really um three things that i think are super important three or four things that are super important about blockchain as they apply to games one is uh tokens uh these are you know as i'm designing a new game things i'm used to calling currencies some of them are now going to be tokens and what that means is you have to think about them as a physical object it exists it exists in the game the player owns it it sits in their wallet ideally they can transfer it outside of the game sell it to other people on exchanges you don't own it all so you know we're used to soft currency

hard currency imagine if uh your hard currency was an actual token a physical object you'd probably start and and not only that your players if they earned it on event leaderboards could go take it to coinbase or sushi swap and sell it to somebody else and you have no part of that um that that is super interesting and it creates a bunch of different design choices and some games have one token some have multiple you know we're way too early to have a standard um some have uses for tokens that aren't even currencies you know it's it's really interesting but tokens are important they in many places replace what you can use for currencies but there's still some um you know when you're designing a game there might be something where you're like hey i want players to own this on earn this on a leaderboard but i'm not

going to give it away every time they level up because there's a fixed supply of it right there's an actual amount of it in the world so there are there is still a use for you might say like oh my hard currency i'm going to turn into a token but my energy is going to stay something in our traditional database it's not something a player can sell to somebody else got it and then is the token tied to the blockchain yeah so the way it works because there are there's not a blockchain there are many different blockchains right there's kind of ethereum mainnet there are things that happen on the polygon network or solana or flow or a private blockchain right so um axi if i'm not wrong uh they started on mainnet and then moved to their own private wallet and chain ronin so that they could have faster transactions so what that means is that axs the token

exists on when you're playing the game it exists in your wallet on one chain but you can bridge it out to another chain so that's really just what are you talking about right it's um what would be a good analogy um it would be like um oh it would be like there are two different banks my money is in ally deutsche bank yeah whatever and and if i first european bank that pops into mine uh and if i want to send you money from my account to your account i have to pay a wire transfer god i got it got it right so there are two different block chains there are two different databases and you can choose to make them interoperable or you can choose not to so solana can interact with um if okay it's like soul the token

can be used inside of applications built on the solana database it can also be traded in other applications that aren't using salah they're using ethereum mainnet and and plumbing that i don't think it matters okay but to be clear like when i'm making these tokens in my game yeah they have to be tied to an existing blockchain like my tokens are based on ethereum and yeah ethereum is kind of like the currency value and that did that leads to the value of my tokens outside my gate oh no no no it's uh think of the blockchain as the rails that move the currency around oh god i got it the value of the trading value of seoul and the trading value of ethereum are not tied together now what happens i'm i'm a novice crypto token trader so it's just like

the stock market right some days there are up days and some days there are down days and like everything in your portfolio goes up and everything in your portfolio goes down and in general the market to my eye moves together but it's not like um the same way that ea's earnings call doesn't have a direct effect on take two stock price right the trading value of ethereum does not have a direct effect on the trading value of solana what effect does if like let's say what effect has what effect does ethereum's trading value have on a token that is based on ethereum um so on the only effect it has is human behavior focus okay right and and something that is very uh noticeable is that people who were early into ether

early in bitcoin are very rich and they also believe in the system and they don't necessarily want to take all of their money and turn it into fiat currency so a lot of what is happening is you're seeing people take bitcoin wealth or eat wealth or now you know doge wealth or shiba e you know whatever their thing was and instead of transferring all of it to fiat currency they're actually diversifying so they're buying a bunch of different tokens they're buying into a bunch of different nft projects and i i it's my hypothesis that the early adopters a lot of these cryptocurrency games are people who are rich in cryptocurrency and they are so now they're comprised of all the tokens and nfts yeah exactly so like when when the when the price of eth goes up it makes somebody who like just got rich on ether shiba inu they're like well now i've got all these

it's just a coin it's a it's a joke coin it doesn't work do you not know about the greatest trade of all time um i'm assuming it has happened recently and not in history so no okay so uh sometime uh i think last year somebody bought a couple thousand dollars worth of this joke coin shiba inu there was already a show a joke coin called doge yeah it trades for like like i don't even know how many orders of magnitude of ascent so somebody made shiba inu and it trades for even more orders of magnitude of ascent there's just trillions of it in the world and last year somebody uh bought a couple thousand dollars worth it and probably forgot about it and someone who was scanning wallets was like at the current price of shiba inu this walt has over a billion dollars in it they turned a couple thousand dollars into a billion dollars they owned so

much shiba inu that if they sold it all it would ruin the market for you let's move forward before my [ __ ] head explodes there's nonsense yeah like there's three things in the crypto yeah in the blockchain for number one oh we're still on the first question and just to make sure that the uh the the reason why i'm asking this is i'm trying to understand like i i have a game where the tokens are based on let's say ethereum because that's the nicest word that i can pronounce and the value of ethereum in this volatile crypto market has nothing to do with the value of my tokens the value of the tokens in the game are is purely tied to the demand of those tokens in my game yeah yeah i think for the purposes of um this conversation and of making sense of it think about the different block chains as aws azure play fab google cloud services

right like these are infrastructure pieces and it's confusing because the same word is used for the infrastructure as is used for the token that you're familiar with right so like zing farmville's success isn't or like the amount of revenue that people are paying is not dependent on whether they're on zynga's custom architecture or whether they migrated to aws like that stuff is almost entirely hidden from the player it just comes through in friction and in performance and if you're thinking about what does flow do what does solana do what does ethereum do these are all just different systems of piping and then what's confusing is there's also tokens that are named all those things i understand super confusing um okay so there's tokens there's nfts the difference between a token and an nft all tokens are the same

so if you're running um legendary every gem is the same nfts there can be instances of an nft but each one is different so these are what you would use for heroes or i i think you guys are building a first person shooter right third but yes yeah so or you're it does like let's say it's um if you're building a shooter if you had a shooter where players cannot invest in and level up their guns every you know eagle handgun is the same then those can be tokens right because they're all the same and if it's unique then it's nft then it's an nft right because my instance of it can have a higher level and thus different stats than your instance of it right so if you take an a game object like a gun or a hero or a skin and you turn it into an nft instead of a normal database

object what you're allowing a player to do is when they have that in their wallet they can hold on to it as long as they want they can sell it to another player they can gift it to another player they might be able to do that in a date in a marketplace you own they might be able to send it to a marketplace that you don't own and sell it to another player so you might see for instance rory is an upcoming blockchain game they have avatars that they sell and if you want to buy an avatar right now and you didn't get it in their gotcha sale essentially you go to openc which is a a website they don't control a marketplace they don't control and you buy your aurora epf yeah from another so just like like any trading cards like it's it's not owned by but exactly so wait a minute you said the uh what was the game

aurora yeah yeah um you said there was a gotcha sale but that's that's just i'm translating for the free to play gaming audience so there was pfp sale pfps profile pics they're auto generated pieces of art so on august 31st they sold 10 000 pieces of art so and each one was random based on traits so the easiest way for me to think about it is that day they sold 10 000 gotcha packs each with an avatar in it each avatar was unique they sold them for five hundred dollars a pop and they sold out isn't that is it isn't that gambling um no uh well it's so i'm not a lawyer uh you might have guessed my last name both my parents one of my brothers and many of my cousins are lawyers but i am not um and i think that the legal and compliance

piece of this is very tricky it's no way settled it will change many times over the next 10 years but um you know going to a grocery store and buying pokemon cards is not considered gambling um yeah yeah i understand therefore there must there must be some legal way of buying random items that is not gambling so something um i i i could get it it's fine it's fine that was probably the best analogy you could say going to a store buy a pokemon card or in my case when i was a young cat i bought hockey cards oh i bought magic cards and imagine of course superhero trading cards and by bought i mean shoplifted toys r us you shoplifted magic cars from toys r us it's more embarrassing than that i shoplifted dc comic trading cards from toys

and i shoplifted magic cards you are like before by the way for the audience before we started this podcast ethan is like huh looking at this video we look like we're from the same village yes we are brothers from different mothers from the same village with the same [ __ ] ridiculous yeah what kicked you against your jeans nothing [Laughter] we're wired the same [ __ ] truck we're wired oh my god i was 11 by the way so yeah that that crime is is not anymore yeah so it was only 10 years ago yeah that's true it's only 10 years ago so um so okay two things tokens nfps what's the third thing oh my goodness um tokens nfts marketplace marketplace this is what's super important about this is you know if you read my top shot article like

this was the moment when i saw the potential um and it's that these assets are liquid right when you and i were stealing magic cards we got a really good card and we wanted to sell it we had to sell it to somebody else yes there was no you know we couldn't look up a price i can't remember if there were there were probably magazines that priced baseball cards but not magic cards or you had to take it to a trading card shop where an expert would rip you off yeah so we knew these things were valuable you know there was an individual card um i probably bought for a hundred dollars which was a lot you know that was that was a lot of bar mitzvah money to get that to get that 100 legend what was it ali from cairo um but but the information asymmetry right the person who owns the trading card shop knew everything i knew nothing there was no liquidity in the marketplace i opened a top shop pack there is a marketplace where even though i don't know anything about basketball really i

can look up my card and go like oh the floor price of this uh tyler hero card is sixteen hundred dollars right now right and and that to me was the magic moment was like um when when somebody says uh this asset is on the blockchain when you buy it you own it you're like oh that's but it's just a database that sounds weird uh it sounds like some scammy [ __ ] when they say this item is on the blockchain uh when you buy it you own it and you can turn it around and sell it and there are people who want to buy it right now because there's a liquid marketplace like that's the real game changer for me and then the one thing to get into like decentralized and like not really that important but like um these assets can exist inside entirely of a chain and a marketplace an ecosystem that the developer controls

or it can be bridged out to other marketplaces and ecosystems or exchanges so right like i bought uh axs one of the two axi tokens on coinbase i didn't buy it i didn't buy it from sky maven i didn't get it in the game i traded my eth to some random person for um uh axs and now i hold axs in my wallet okay so that's where the decentral like the whole decentralized thing you and i both know how hard it is for a sword for my game to work interoperably with the sword in your game right that is a really difficult problem and that was when i first started looking at blockchain gaming one of the things where i'm like this won't work i'm never going to take a sword from my game and put it in your game right and and i don't think that's the important part of the decentralization at least not yet it's that um

in diablo when the auction house existed you could only buy and sell things on the auction house you can take your horse from zed run and sell it on open c or sell it on wearable or sell it on x y z or transfer it wallet to wallet like there's that's where d like there are a lot of things outside of the developers control and that's where i think the decentralization is important perfect so i'm just going to summarize it so blockchain gaming three things tokens which should be thought about as a currency a physical object in players wallet nfts which means that each nft has to be unique and it has to be sellable in any and all not not all but in any market and finally marketplace you have to have assets that are liquid and the marketplace has to be decentralized it's not one game based marketplace but it's a marketplace that can exist in like there's multiple

marketplaces the so the one the one asterisk i put on that is um not everything that is blockchain is decentralized right not every token earned in a game can be traded on decentralized exchanges not every nft can be sold on marketplaces outside um it's it's more complicated than that why because it's the different the different chains the different databases right it's like just because my game is on chain x doesn't mean that a player can instantly put it on to ethereum main net we have to build if it's a private chain we have to build a bridge that allows things to go it's that wire transfer right okay so um uh uh

blockchain the piping it's all very um all mixed up and it's not clear and decentralized and easy it's actually like a giant spaghetti mess okay got it um [Music] i kind of got it so let's move on um that was the first question yeah that that was honestly the first we only have like 200 more questions anyway uh we're actually you're you're bundling a lot of things together i'm leading some of the questions as we go i want to ask you this this is these are all my questions by the way yeah how in the world does it make sense to pay for a tweet or a picture um whoever bought it it was worth what they paid for for it at the time they paid for it that's that's all i can say so when somebody buys uh a tweet at a subsidies auction um we can make some assumptions

uh that person but that person was probably rich so the amount of money they spent on it was not the same impact as if you or i had done it they probably were doing it to feel good and for some status or maybe because they viewed it rarity is exactly for that like please people yeah so you know i when when i when i first started being a free-to-play consultant and evangelist i would go on stage i would be like spending money in these games makes no sense but people do it anyways and they do it largely because it makes them feel good and so um whoever bought that p that tweet or that picture of the new york times website front page or whatever a crypto punk part of its status um part of it could be investment curiosity boredom like who knows uh people are very mysterious

um okay so there's just no reason but the thing is it's people are predictably irrational in the words yeah but i just don't understand like there's a tweet that i can i mean i can i can take a picture of that tweet and i can do anything like like it's not unique in any sense because the magic cards that we stole uh they were they were our tokens yeah we helped them they were you know you couldn't like nobody could play against me with the same cards unless you had those cards but if somebody has a picture of whatever or a tweet oh my i don't even use it and they they they don't actually even own the thing they own a pointer in a database exactly to the picture that anybody else can exactly like i mean i think that those the people who make those purchases they're probably viewing it as an investment more than anything and so they're placing a bet

and a lot of those bets have paid off some of those bets are not um but that that is what i imagine people are doing it they're either doing it for that or for status yeah the problem i see like the problem is just they just they they don't like what do they own in that i mean this is okay but i mean but most of the fine art in the world bought on auction sits in uh warehouses and freeports i understand most of the the classics and treasures and banksies and picassos they're not on people's walls they're in free ports and wherever like if this isn't new that people are buying these luxury items for reasons other than to show them which is what on paper the point of buying a and we're kind of just making that we're just making the sort of assumption that that with the with the art which is unique piece of art done you know that that is

yeah unique it's a unique physical piece of art and now we're just taking the sleep of like well somebody wrote a tweet and it was really liked and we tweeted yeah and anybody can at any like and not even the person who wrote it now somebody else owns it it makes no sense like like it just makes no sense at all i was with you on the tokens and the nft in the marketplace but now i'm just off bandwagon so let's let's move forward before i yeah before i go crazy um i wanted to ask about the crazy prices paid for different nfts and games uh you mentioned before like just just recently that that a lot of people who made bank on crypto have invested into nfts and invested in different currencies for whether axs is or or so forth is that something that that has increased the prices of of um of these different tokens and and nfts

that that is my hypothesis i don't i don't have proof but my um the story that helps the market make sense to me is a lot of people got rich on different tokens they hold a lot of wealth in those tokens they believe in the crypto future so they don't want to turn everything into fiat and get taxed they want to keep their stuff and tokens so they're probably diversifying putting a bunch of bets out there and seeing what pays off and also supporting projects they like um so i think that the higher the price of bitcoin and eth like the more value somebody has in their wallet the more that splashes onto everything else in the space got it got it so it just raises the whole time trickle down economics but in crypto exactly good old republicans um all right

uh you live in north carolina right south south carolina very is a lovely thing it makes people smile i don't i actually i don't know if we have open carry in my state i'm sure you do i'm not i don't i don't see a lot of guns around i'll say that i'll live and look at any pickup and you'll see a shotgun in the uh in the back window anyways um i know people from the south they're really nice uh they're also strapped any uh so uh what is so when i think about play-doh urn yeah i'm thinking about uh like just thinking of what way blockchain like even before um let's say world of warcraft i would grind for some [ __ ] and i'll be able to get some unique items and i would be able to sell those items in some shady marketplace yes it didn't have that liquid marketplace yeah and that's the black market a great market

exactly that's essentially plato or you would have these you know these uh farms with people are farming for gold and selling it through it and then yeah it kind of got changed by the uh by the developers selling directly to players and then suddenly we got micro transaction and then in the end we have free to play so in that sense we kind of had play to earn but what is the new definition of play yeah i mean i think the important thing is taking something that was a black market or grey market activity and making it sanctioned right like if we if you got caught gold farming or selling accounts you know you it the terms probably said you could get banned and people were banned for that and the developer didn't get a cut so player earn gaming pretty simply people play the game by playing the game they can earn tokens those tokens generally have some in-game use just like any hard currency would

and they probably also have the ability to trade to another player for fiat currency or other crypto tokens or sometimes to stake so it's it's it's on the face of it no different than playing a game and earning hard currency as an operator it's much different right because uh in a free-to-play game i like think about afk arena or they're very generous with their hard currency right just as a free player you can earn 20 you know you can earn uh probably 20 bucks worth a couple times a week and do a 10 pull on the gotcha right in a world where every where i'm not it's not just a number in a database every time i'm giving a player hard currency i actually have a treasury that's filled with hard currency and so i say okay you won the leaderboard of leaderboard today here's 10 000 of this

gem um that has an effect on every other player and everyone who holds the currency because it's real and it exists within the context of the market and so as an operator like you probably um you might have one token in the game that's very tight and one that's very loose one with a fixed supply and one with an inflationary supply right if you look at axi infinity they have one token that's worth like 170 bucks per token something in that range i don't remember exactly and then one token that's like 15 cents and the difference is is that the supply of axs that the developer puts into the system as rewards is very constrained you win it for being one of the top leaderboard players and there's a fixed amount every single player who plays every day it can earn slp the one that trades for

seven to fifteen cents it's an inflationary token they're always minting more of it and the more players there are in the system the more of it they met so play to earn the mechanics for the player the main thing is it takes as i said a black market activity makes it above board sanctioned welcome the developer gets a cut it's part of the design as an operator you stop operating like a dungeon master and have to start thinking of yourself as a central bank and it's something i'm very excited about and also very scared of right so okay so talk about what are you scared about um so i don't know if you've ever pushed a bug to production that takes three days worth of revenue no no never you've never pushed untested config to production and shut the game down for three hours or like

think about all the things that can go wrong with a uh free to play liveops game like um uh new new world right didn't didn't gamers find a bug that allowed them imagine if imagine if they found that bug it was hiding in your server for four and a half years but it didn't allow you to increment a number in a database it let you steal all the money out of the treasury [ __ ] you'd be fine or or just hacking like yeah like the thing is like if the value grows you can your game can get hacked yeah everybody's tokens are taken what do you do your game is dead well you can't everyone you can't take everyone you'd have to hack every wallet oh okay right so that would be you can't i i don't think it's possible to hack every single person's bank account who's got a chase bank account how about central bank

yes that has to that's possible right like somewhere some group of people have the keys to the axiomfinity treasury right so there's like oh in my spare time i'm writing ocean's 11 but they're not stealing physical objects it's a it's a social attack to steal the axi infinity treasury right that's a real thing that can happen they're going to make a virtual honey trap yeah exactly on pornhub so i yeah the the security concerns are magnified because of the real world value it's it's super everything that makes it exciting and like the brand new wild frontier also makes it very frightening damn and how so how do you balance this type of a game like like who can like what are you are

you gonna hire an economist um not to start i'm like an amateur behavioral economist but just but um but you're talking about central banks central bank doesn't mean yeah behavioral economic real economist at the start i mean i'll just tell you how i'm gonna run my team yeah we're eight people right now um we have a lot of operator experience in live ops and there's a lot of operator experience in the company there are people who are better than me at live ops like he day and danielle and mark and tiffany there's a phd level analyst uh yeah who's like they're smart people and we're gonna lean on all that experience and expertise for as long as we can and then if it becomes clear that we need an economist we'll hire an economist right if we need i can see a very real world where we need a professional trader

to tell us how to turn our treasury into revenue right because something people will be doing right they're not standard free to play game uh i buy hard currency from apple apple keeps thirty percent they give you seventy percent and then when i spend the currency in the game it doesn't matter the revenue is there imagine instead i buy my currency from some player in venezuela i evolve a hero so i then give the currency into the central bank so the central bank hasn't booked any fiat currency revenue yet they've just increased their holding of the token and they as the operator have to balance out well i want to make revenue for my company i want to fund my games development and buy more performance marketing and get a

high-end 3d trailer and you know fly the game team out to malta for a week on the beach and all these things there are all these reasons that i want to turn my treasury into money but turning my treasury holdings into money also has effect on the players and on the game economy and so like this is where i could see like wanting a trader or an economist or hopefully we can just figure out some simple rules around anticipated demand and supply but like there's some real tricky questions about how you turn your token holdings as the operator into revenue into recognized fiat currency and it's like i don't know it's really cool it's super different and very um and and and i think my my hope is and probably you know a couple years from now i'll come back on the podcast and talk about what a stupid idiot i was but my hope is that those moments become obvious right yeah so you're just going to ease into it not get on this rocket launch of a

growth of like 600 million raised by round b by series b um so so why do you need blockchain games like like couldn't this exist without blockchain yeah that's a question that comes up a lot and um the most if not all of what is uh done that i've talked about with tokens and nfts in the marketplace and fiat like all that can be done with existing technology excuse me the thing that i think is important is that for whatever reason consumers have trust in blockchain technology and it's not just people who read venture beat and listen to deconstructor of fun and you know have a twitter handle and a cryptocurrency that's the same audience like it's not just them like as i've said as a

as i like to say like my whole crypto journey started because out in a playground in suburban charleston south carolina some other dad started asking me about nba top shot he said [Laughter] y'all have y'all heard about nba topshop y'all my brother-in-law no it's not that bad oh my god um but um normal people i think bitcoin and ethereum and it's been in the news enough for a long enough period of time and enough money interests have put pr and marketing and all sorts of things and there have been enough real world examples that normal people trust the blockchain technology right now i don't think a player in venezuela like an average one of one of the one million dau that axiom finney has do they

understand or care or need to know what the difference is between having a ronin wallet and having a metamask wallet like it doesn't matter to them but they trust in the general concept um or at least they trusted it enough to try it out and then they found that they could play earn a thing sell the thing and pay their rent with it and so that trust is actually i think the most important thing that blockchain brings to the table for game developers none of the technology i mean it's the whole distributed ledger thing is very unique and some people care about a lot and that's a fundamental building block of that trust but just in terms of like everyday users um yes you can do all this stuff with other technologies uh but for whatever reason we've hit a tipping point in trust and that's when i got really interested in blockchain games

and um i wanted to ask like there's there's insane amount of hype around play to earn games and the amount of hype is so disproportionate to the amount of players actually playing these games why is that like even axe infinity according to the uh the rumors um like 85 to 90 percent of the players are in in southeast asia right like it's i see that as a good thing like that to me is an amazing opportunity yeah but i mean imagine having a profitable game with the million players in southeast asia like what's that going to turn into 10 years from now i don't know like i mean if i would have a mobile game that is a free to play with a million players in southeast asia i would be like like what do i do i mean but these guys are super this team is super successful so um but yeah you i think it's a valid question right there is a ton of investor money

and it seems like a relatively small audience i mean a million dau is for axi is nothing to sneeze at um but um i think you know my personal you made facebook games too right didn't you do army attack right yeah you were doing army attack when i was playing dragon age making dragon age legends and like we looked to army attack it was it was an inspirational game for us i like that one quite a lot my games are so like [ __ ] masculine army attack yeah well that's why you're so small um so but i i just gave a presentation internally at network and i made this point in my mind there's there's a straight line continuum i'll call it the free to play plus liveops revolution of games european browser games like ogame

travian i carry him and uh net cafe games like maple story and dungeon fighter online were as far as i know kind of the real genesis of free to play next stage social network games army attack dragon age legends farmville um flip phone feature phone games in japan right like kaiten royale next stage mobile free to play a smartphone free to play that we're all in right now and it's gone past that and finally got in the console right like gta 5 is on its third console generation and keeps selling and keeps generating revenue thanks to gti online and live operations right rainbow six siege is in its sixth year it hasn't there's no rainbow six siege two yeah right so like the free-to-play and liveops tactics that started over 20 years ago in the net cafes and on the

browser have now massively expanded the audience of people who play video games and found their way into what we would call the mainstream or hardcore video game space i think with blockchain we are in a very similar transition it's going to be very long and we're roughly in that army attack dragon age legends phase right like i think axi is farmville it's the moment everyone prefers hi yeah it's like the uh it's like oh my god this looks like crap how is it so successful right and think of how many games companies players successes and failures have been generated since then in free to play and with live operations tactics we're not done yet we're not going to be done until they stop releasing annual releases there's just the game it's just the platform um so my hypothesis why i've like dove headfirst into blockchain is i think

we're at that facebook phase right i think we're at that we're at that moment where everyone's like why i can't why are we in this moment like what why what makes you believe that this is not also the um the like vr was in this moment like i remember when in 2016 vr was like heating up and there were vr studios starting everywhere in san francisco and like oh my god this is the next thing i'm gonna get on the oculus train and then that never left and then instant games in like 2018 similar type of thing why is this different and then there was an ar train right none of those things left the uh left the uh the station yeah i mean like vr and they are like as soon as i can wear spectacles around that let me like project games onto the real world like play tetris in between two skyscrapers of course i'm gonna buy it i think we're just a lot of hardware innovation away from

those things being really mass market and actually like making expanding the audience vr right now makes games better for a section of people who already play video games right it's selling to a subset um whereas we've seen with axi you know those million players in southeast asia and venezuela and brazil like things that in the free-to-play space we currently consider secondary tertiary markets places where we're like we can't advertise there we won't make any money we barely even make any money from the ads we show there are these players worth even the database cost or the operation costs meanwhile there's garina free fire who's like yeah give us every single android player in the entire world we're gonna we're gonna eat all the other um free to play shooter games so like it's it's that audience expansion

a million people a day playing axie who probably would not be otherwise playing a pokemon style game on their phone that's interesting and that's what makes me go like well if i know what happened when farmville was made and how it's progressed over the next 12 years what's going to happen you know the the the article draft i shared with you right my point is like everything right now that we as veteran game developers look at blockchain games and go like it's scammy the tech [ __ ] the art [ __ ] it's not fun it's blah blah blah like everything what about the laws what about accounting like like every single one of those problems is an opportunity and the people who who figure out those opportunities are gonna get rich they're gonna build long lasting games um and so all the i think the investment hype comes from

people with either a similar belief or again like wanting to make that barbell bet like you know if you are a hedge fund or a vc fund and a hundred million dollars isn't a lot of money there are many like 100 million dollars this is a great space to make a bet in a platform or to make 100 bets in different platforms because one of them is going to be a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company okay so basically the hype comes around the uh the possibilities of of as you mentioned that one fella putting 2 000 bucks into it and then becoming you know yeah i think they're what makes it super unique is there that the barbell bets are there for the players and for the early adopters and for the vcs and the entrepreneurs oh barbell but sorry um a barbell bat like if you've read uh the

what uh naseem talib like black swan and anti-fragile i forget which book of his it's from he was a traitor black swan is his most famous book but like the idea that you know the way he invests is he makes a lot of small bets where the amount of money is negligible to him let's just say it's 200 bucks which depending on where you are in the world that can be a lot of money it can be an amount of money you're okay losing if you spend 200 on facebook stock today or general electric stock or microsoft stock 20 years from now if there's no way it's worth 100 times what it is yeah that's like kind of a very traditional bet if you spent 200 on shiba inu today you would get like 20 million shiba inu token there's a huge chance that goes to zero and you lose your um two hundred dollars and there's also a chance that it explodes like a barbell

and you make two hundred thousand dollars like a barbell i don't give a [ __ ] like reference sorry it's i'm drawing i'd have to go back hockey stick but yeah um yeah well it it i think he says barbell because it tops out at a certain point it's been a while someone someone in the audience is listening to this and me like like ethan you [ __ ] idiot like this is funny no i don't think i don't think they would say ethan you [ __ ] idiot yeah i think so sorry what what's unique what i was trying to say what's unique about blockchain gaming is that the opportunity doesn't just for outsize returns that normally exists for the venture capitalists and the founding team and then you know if you're super lucky early team members maybe like super outsized returns right in blockchain gaming

that is possible for players to recognize without there being a public market exit right a player who's early in the right game and is just good at grinding for their play to earn currency could get rich that's my dream for my game but i i get that but the invest the size of the investment is yeah they're large like softbank dropping like 680 yeah so i forgot how much you raised so i think that a lot of um when i listen to the podcast and you bring up these uh investments a lot of times you mention the individual product or game you're like oh mythical just raised 75 million dollars for blancos they didn't ride raise it for blancos they raised it for a platform play that blanco's is the first product on same with the mutable same with sky mavis same with forte or flow right like

dapper labs isn't raising money at a huge valuation because the investors believe only in the power of nba top shot it's because of what the flow platform becomes in success that's what the investors are betting on is these yeah but those are still big bets they're really big nets and there's like this crazy fomo where the bets are just outrageous they're not those 200 bucks you know i don't care if i win or lose because this might make a lot of money they are like i just checked out sky maybe has raised 152 million at a 3 billion valuation yeah right so like how much how much uh money is under management at a16z you know i don't know the answer to that question like their 100 million dollars might be a drop for them it might be a major investment it's all relative okay money's money's imaginary anyways so so let me ask this why aren't the other developers called out for misleading numbers like i'm just i i

don't want to i don't mean to wail on on sky at all like much respect to them um i'm gonna steez sorry um but um they they you know i remember just looking at these these um these um articles that that for example this one axing infinity's 1.2 billion annualized revenue overtakes kenny crush 2020 total revenue yeah this is [ __ ] right well one that wasn't put out by sky mavis no but that was an analyst using publicly available data right so what's interesting about that is that you can estimate sky mavis's run rate any day and as you've pointed out on the podcast before um like you could pick a day where their annual run rate is 1.2 billion and i'm sure that you could pick a day three days later where their annual run rate is

like 600 million so you're like why aren't developers being called out well what central authority's responsibility is it to call out misleading headlines from analysts no one's right like there's no there's no police of this who who would be the caller outer other than the defense okay i'm going to call them out this this was this was in fintech collective right [ __ ] that site yeah yeah it was it was actually from chain debrief so you know like you you run a blog i used to run a blog when i was a consultant and i would make claims publicly about information i had available in order to get clicks to drive leads whoever's writing jackie yeah who's writing for chain debrief is driving clicks to get advertising impressions right like they're not sky mavis this wasn't uh uh an earnings announcement from sky mavis so like uh it's not not their fault someone

wrote this post okay i think what's what's interesting though what's what's interesting is that um there are all these intelligent sources that because of the blockchain you can monitor axis token price how much secondary sales there may like there's a level of data that if these companies are public like everybody has access to the data um that lets you know how they've how they've been doing in terms of inflows to their treasury it doesn't necessarily let you know what outflows from the treasury but it's like okay so you know because there might not be a sensor tower or a game refinery of blockchain gaming because there should be there should be right but i mean there will it won't be a subscription service because everything the data's all there it's all public so so okay well let me turn this around um most of the time when when people are

talking about these pitches from from play to earned companies um there's just this strong vibe of scam yeah why is that um well i mean like let's uh let's be honest there are a lot of scams in the nft space right in the nft and crypto space um and so anyone would be right to be wary and i think anything that uh attracts a lot of money when there's a lot of money sloshing around there are um experienced operators going after it and there are um con men going after it and there are entrepreneurs with a lot of um you know grit going after it and they all look the same and i think the skill of an investor

i mean it could just be luck uh but the skill of an investor is is figuring out who's real and who's not and um you know uh it'll be interesting to know it's just like anything like uh our vcs are the bets on what they invest in and what they pass on actually any better than flipping a coin or you know like that would be a very interesting i would love to do that study and write that paper and just like embed an a16z and flip a coin on every investment decision and see over 20 years if i outperformed the experts and like um if anything i've learned about the stock market is right we will either do the same or i'll do better right like it's like index outperforms everything exactly uh shout out to vanguard yeah vanguard yeah lots lots of uh financial a lot more uh central banking and financial terms than the normal deconstructor of fun

so so yeah in short i think the um being wary of scam artists if you're looking to invest or even looking to play or buy pfps you know it's not easy um to tell uh um who is real and who is a scam and i think that's potentially part of the fun of playing in the wild west type space i think super does it well when he analyzes them because these these blockchain companies because he goes back to the basics like yeah like you know do you know how to make games right like what's the game you know stop this nonsense let's talk crypto afterwards like talk to me about the game and then we can talk about the nft stuff because a lot of these companies don't have that pedigree they don't have that background and sometimes it's just like even you know they might say like oh we you know we played games a lot like i i get it i mean i i like food i've eaten a lot of food but i'm

not pretending that i can open up a restaurant um yeah i think in in that facebook time i'd already been making games for eight or nine years at that point and so me and my team and the studio i was a part of i think we had a general vibe of like we're gonna do this right we're gonna i mean specifically with dragon age legends we said like we're going to build a social network game for gamers and we're going to win that was the totally wrong attitude to bring to the that moment in history yeah that's okay that's a good point and um this time i'm hoping to bring what is a more humble um viewpoint on it i mean if you've been listening to me talk obviously i'm a huge egomaniac so more humble than previously but still egomaniacal but you know my um i know me and my team can build a great game um but in order to win in this

blockchain space it will take more than our existing skills of building a great game we have to figure out what those three-person teams of total neophytes who just raised 20 million dollars in their ico or in their nft initial minting like what are they doing right that we've never done before that's that's to me the challenge of like literally this moment right that's that's that's the discussion it's it's a good point because we often go into a place where like oh like you have to have experience to do something but just going into even my own experience of hiring people like usually the ones with a little bit less experience a little bit more drive i tend to be the uh the best ones and the fast movers and those who are where long in the tooth in their career yeah if they don't have that sort of um you know mindset of of constantly learning and doubting yourself then they're just repeating all the mistakes that they've done before

yeah uh anyways this goes to a different stuff let's go to the questions that came in from the draft universe let's let's start slamming these in um we're an hour in already okay uh from the podcast with sky mavis co it was mentioned that they are building their own tech stack and now build they to build a crypto game that isn't that much need of smart contract developers what tech stacks are out there to build your own marketplace tokens and mint nfts that could work with unity or unreal got it so um as as i said earlier right like the space is so big and so fast moving and i've only been really into it for nine months so i'm not going to get everything i'll just tell you some of the ones that come to mind right um forte is a blockchain game platform that's that's been around for a while has a lot of good game operators at it mythical who's come up on the podcast a

number of times um with their latest fundraising announcement announced other people publishing on their platform and that they're building a platform immutable who's behind guild of guardians and god's unchained has a mutable x that's a whole platform um their immutable access their token they have a immutable platform solana uh polygon flow these are these are the things that come to mind and every one of these has some level of successful projects out there there's a bunch i don't know there are probably new ones all the time so that's what's top of mind um it's uh there there's a lot of options uh for who could be your what's nice is like i remember how horrible it was hiring before aws was really a thing and when every single person was trying to hire the same like 12 flash programmers and i think what's unique about this is

compared again to that social network space is there a lot of people who've actually already like saw the light or beca drank the kool-aid years before me and have been building these platforms for this moment so there's there's a lot of options out there and and plenty i didn't even mention i'm sure but that's okay that's what comes to mind um with so many coins on the market is there a particular one to focus on when developing games um no yeah i mean it's really comes down to your game design and what you are using tokens for right if if you're only using tokens to generate revenue with no ability for people to do credit card chargebacks then all you need is ethereum just just accept ethereum or use you know bitpay or whatever to accept things but like each game is going to have a different design that requires different tokens and you're not going to be using like

this question like ethereum finance smart contract polygon and hive are all different things um if you're building a blockchain game you are probably going to be creating uh one or more of your own tokens that are either native to your game or native to your company depending upon your design and your long-term ambitions okay uh it's crypto games only for a crypto enthusiast aka crypto bros uh are crypto games still too early to be targeted for gamers um we'll find out i mean i would say we're already past that it's purely for crypto enthusiasts right there there are a million people a day playing axi those people have not all been reading crypto forums for six years right yeah but they're like they're playing it just to earn money they're not playing it because they like the game yeah they're playing it because they like the game more than than uh

rice fields yeah i think uh driving a tuk-tuk or being unemployed um or you know running a modern pop shop in a lockdown oh i would i would rather play actually all day than any of those previous ones i i'm not faulting anybody yeah um so to go to my uh i'm kind of like mixing i gave a presentation right before this but like i can't remember if i said it on the podcast or not um there there are two different questions here one are crypto games only for crypto enthusiasts no but i think crypto enthusiasts are a very important part of your market second question are crypto games still too early to be targeted for gamers i'm not sure let's find out okay um is there any best practice to follow make when making a play to earn game or i mean there's like there there there's less than 100 play to earn games that

are playable right now so like we are very very early in what i think is a 20 to 30-year cycle what does the target audience look like what the geos demographics and uh and interest of crypto game players either data or anecdotes would be good to hear well i can tell you anecdotes they're in southeast asia right yeah i um i would suggest there's a very good 20 minute documentary on youtube about axiomfinity it's called play to earn um watch that and i think you'll get um a good idea of what one target market looks like i like think of how big again think of how big the audience expansion of facebook game and feature phone gaming was there's no one target market um any resources or information on how to balance the minting uh economies compared to free-to-play i think it's too early to tell uh but if

i'm successful at all i'm sure i'll write about it for the fine folks at deconstructor fun the sort of thing i like to write about well i feel like there's going to be a segment maybe crypto leavey that would be good well let's workshop that i think we can come up with something sillier yeah i'll figure it out but yeah i'd love to grow so what will be the most common reasons many free to play and other game devs fail when trying to enter this market yeah i i think that the biggest trap that we can all fall into is the kodak trap right we're experienced we know what a real game is we know what good is like there are a lot of reasons that your experience and wisdom can actually be a weapon that that you use against yourself so very typical yeah just just be humble just be humble if someone out there is successful

no matter how stupid you think their white paper is or how bad their art is or whatever whatever you think is going wrong take all those thoughts and put them in a corner and study it until you figure out what they're doing right yes take it into approach that whatever you did before it does not [ __ ] matter to what you're doing right now like you start from ground zero it's only people who have shipped [ __ ] games know that that you can go from a hit to a dud in in a you know in a span of a year yeah so we don't have that magic touch anyway um what are the easy on-ramps for today's dev developers and publishers to dip their toes in the water get their beaks wet start with collectible nfps that have no in-game value yet something else yeah this is a great question um i have to

how to get your beak wet yeah i so i think um i mean i've got three kids under six i don't have a lot of free time and so if i if i did have more free time um i would you know the decentralized aspect of it of some of these projects is really interesting a lot of ink has been spilled about loot project and it's very interesting and very decentralized so if i wanted to tinker around and start to understand things more i would pick one of these projects or communities let's just take loot project to start with that was actually built to be decentralized and expanded by the community a sandbox is another great example i would join their discord community i would learn their tools learn what it takes like if i had more free time i i um have two or three nft extensions of loot

project i would gladly do as free projects right now just to understand more um so that that's the sort of thing i would think about i would think about not i would i would view the space almost as open source or as more ugc and creator possible than others and i would think how can i do a solana hack project this weekend how can i extend loot project or blitmap or something else right like how can i build on something that exists and just like learn about this crazy space and the people who are already here okay let's move on one of the most annoying one is that games don't have enough information inside inside them or okay this is this is sorry not not everybody at the deconstructor of fun slack is a great writer yeah but let's let's take the message out of it so the person is asking not ever not everybody have enough information about the games and there's uh poor

information on uh on the website is always the community that comes up with simple solution for some stuff like reward list event sources and so does okay so the question here is uh there's not enough enough information about the game and it's very complicated or these games and the question about it is does that lack of information have something to do with the legal aspect of it because according to this writer it seems that all economic info is always posted by users not the developers yeah um all right i'm going to interpret this question as best as i can um the community creating resources for developers who do not have enough time or interest or ability to put the information online is not a new and unique problem to watching gaming right generally it's the sign of success right for a game if if i can go find a tier list for a hero battler like that

means there's an engaged community yeah so that's not new and i don't think i don't think we have to i mean i don't think the legal picture is clear enough for anything uh the i i i'm a dev you're a dev we know what it's like to be super busy and you know when there's a hundred things that you want to do and writing a blog post about x or y is just one of them it's not always something you get to you know maybe you're too busy working on that event maybe no one inside your company likes writing who knows yeah okay moving on what platform would be the one that we could trust for nft's games analytics so so essentially what is the sensor tower of blockchain gaming um [Music] i don't know that it exists yet uh we talk

about dapp raider r a lot yeah well sensor tower you should add uh crypto would be yeah that would be pretty good yeah dapp radars uh something that we point to a lot um someone i mean there's just like a lot of stuff there's uh playtorn.net slash blockchain gaming is something someone on the team shared with me today again we're very very early like i don't like this is one of those things this is one of those obvious things what is the next sensor tower for blockchain gaming what is the next play fab for blockchain gaming what is the next x or y if you believe my hypothesis these uh startup ideas are all around you we should start one uh um a lot of a lot of a lot of the hate from mainstream and social media when it comes to crypto nft space is the adverse effects mining

has on the environment would be curious if that topic has an answer the general public would be happy with or is it a conversation crypto games just tried to avoid um some people lean into it right like part of the sales pitch for solana is that it's a more environmentally friendly uh blockchain and like uh you know if if um if a blockchain platform is telling you they're a layer two or layer three solution what they're trying to communicate to you but maybe don't know how to talk normal is we don't waste a lot of energy to do database transactions so a lot of a lot of companies recognize that developers care about this players care about this and have developed solutions that are ahead of where bitcoin is or where ethereum mainnet is i don't know enough about

what's going on in ethereum eventually they'll move from proof of work to proof of stake and that'll dramatically reduce the energy cost so um my personal thought is that um there are already some technologies that have an energy consumption that are no different than using aws or google cloud or whatever um i think that everybody cares about this or like everybody who's that's uh there are some people who don't the the majority of people i know who i talk to who are developing blockchain games or block dapps or investing in the space also care about this nobody wants to burn the world down for the sake of like a yacht or whatever it is you buy with your crazy crypto money and my if my prediction is that the environmental impact um technology

solution will be there but the meme the thought virus that it's horrible for the environment will persist forever it's to it's there's there's no way um to kill that meme and so like i'm not pretending it's not a concern it's a big concern um i want to be on a proof of um stake not a proof of work jane um i value trees and walking in the forest so uh i think if you're being a developer by floors and pick up trucks that's that i'm not an atv guy but uh you know just if you're a developer be part of the solution do your homework use use a environmentally responsible platform solution okay let's let's move on from that yeah uh typically what is the business model for developers to make money what are the different revenue streams in blockchain gaming um

so i think it's again it's too early to know what typical is um but i'll just talk about some of the revenue streams that are available there's primary sales so that's like selling gacha directly to players for the first time um sometimes that's pre-sales before the product is out sometimes that's you know like if you think about nba top shot they essentially do a gotcha sale every couple days or every week um secondary market sales so that's players selling to other players uh generally the player who's the seller keeps you know changes platform platform company company uh but usually the tax on a secondary market sale is usually in the range of ten to one percent i think it's pretty well clustered around five percent so like in the case of axi the players are making the majority of the money but axi is making a lot of money from the secondary market sales

um you can have a blockchain game that has traditional iap within it that's a revenue stream and then there's also um kind of what i call like central banking activities right you can create a token you can sell that token into the market you can sell it to investors you can have game mechanics where players give you tokens that you they purchase from other players and then when you want to turn them into revenue you sell them into the market so there's kind of this whole banking trading aspect to it again to the startups all around us somebody is going to i i don't know what a crypto native rewarded ad solution is all i know is someone is going to figure out what that is they're going to make a lot of money i should probably talk to seaford about that right now um but i'm sure advertising will play a

role so primary secondary iap advertising uh treasury management okay clear and then usually the sales pitch is this like you know i make a sword in the game it's always like every time by the way all the examples are always a [ __ ] rpg i make a sword in the game and then people are selling the sword and then i sell it for 10 bucks and then it changes hands thousand times and i'm taking one dollar out of every transaction it's gonna be like you know a thousand more so that's that's usually the uh the way it's been described to me and it's essentially this [ __ ] flywheel like this is what what what everybody's so excited that you can make one thing and it just keeps on selling and you're just minting money out of that yeah um anyways how easy or difficult it would be to bring these games to mobile um well some i mean some of them are there already right like if

one of the things that got me and many people interested in the space is how ridiculously successful and well distributed axi is as a side loaded android app right so it's already on mobile upland is a game with nfts and tokens on it that you can download on the ios store so um i'm currently not familiar with all the platform challenges and i know that they're going to be more along the way of working with apple and google um but i don't it's it's it's happening right now and the challenges are mostly like user experience challenges and friction and then confl you know complying with whatever the rules the platform holders have so yeah you know i've done i've done two different versions of a real money game um those are challenging to do on the platform but that's mostly like following knowing what the rules are and designing within the rules so

yep um all right um can these games be made in unity unreal yes i'm going to make it in unity right now yeah like look what come on guys it's better think about blockchain the same way you think about aws yeah it's a game like anything can be so let's move on are there any service available that can take take the the load of blockchain developers to load up this question yeah this is this is equivalent to the what blockchain platforms are okay okay yeah again forte immutable mythical solana flow uh engine polygon many more there's a lot and then how important is decentralized governance for crypto games to succeed what does decentralized government does their liquid and the marketplace no no this is like this is its whole own hour um and i'd be really happy to talk well so let's um think about it many many games

in their white paper will talk about how they want to become a dao a decentralized autonomous organization um so it's kind of it's a really long question to answer and the um so to i don't want to explain too much what dao is right now just think of it kind of like you would think of open source think about it like an open source project with a bank account attached to it that's the quickest way to get a mental model of it um many projects talk about dao in their white paper and how they'll be like dao and i do not know yet whether it is require essential uh to the success of a blockchain game or not it's gonna be something that's gonna take a long time to figure out be really interesting i would say that um thinking about how your game can be a dao is something that makes you more crypto native than not and so you as a developer have a personal hypothesis to place around

whether you think being crypto native is important to the success of a project or not all right um i'm gonna jump on to repeat over that yeah that was a weird one descriptive uh no no no okay this is all that we have from the community everything else is kind of like not relevant too deep or just we've kind of answered it in a different way so i just want to finish up by talking about the future yeah what do you think are some of the biggest opportunities and threats yeah um i said threats legislation that's the biggest threat yeah yeah i think um every i've i've brought up countless opportunities um in terms of not only i've been talking mostly about game support services plat you know there's no clear platform winner yet um nor will there be you know it's not

going to be dominated by one platform um very few genre there are very few games and thus very few genres explored right now so i don't think we can make any assumptions about what genre works in blockchain and doesn't basically the if the audience is there any any genre that works in free to play can work in blockchain i think um so yeah legal compliance you know anti-money laundering laws are no joke gambling laws are no joke and wanting to operate um a game in multiple jurisdictions you know running running a game in the united states or canada or india or australia is not as easy as federal laws there are also state by state laws and this is an area where the legal um uh landscape is changing regularly and will change for a long period of time so

i don't like i don't think it's going to get regulated out of business i think that there is a very big danger that um products on the market are currently doing things that will be found or where it will be decided that those things were not legal and then they'll get fined very heavily um so you know i look at the regulation if you if you have the right mindset it's a it's a threat and it's an opportunity right like imagine figuring out how to easily be the company that does all the accounting and tax statements for all the players on all these different games right like the kpmg of blockchain is going to be a publicly traded blue street blue chip like multi-billion dollar company another great business idea can you believe that one head can have so many different startup ideas neither can my wife i mean now i'm

thinking like ethan just dropped that [ __ ] game idea let's let's do uh levy cat cough [ __ ] like you know there's a price waterhouse cooper's why can't you cat coffin cress attorneys yeah i'm stupid is that is that is that a law firm or a detective agency yes it depends on the genre of the movie it's a hustle uh so uh um okay um so there's a question like do you think you know do you think plagiarism will become mainstream we know that yeah i think it will become mainstream yeah the question is do you think it will replace free to play no i i don't think so the same way that free to play did not replace single player games my favorite game that i'm going to play this year is rationing clank on the ps5 boom i love that game i will buy every main line ration clank they do right

the majority of the gaming hours i spend this year will be in afk arena right so free to play did not supplant linear storytelling games and play to earn will not supplant free to play or uh traditional gaming it's just another business model that expands the audience and possibilities and on that note it's almost 11 p.m here in beautiful beautiful finland this dark and cold and rainy there's no open carry and no pickup [Laughter] and no sweet tea how's your biscuit in fried chicken game in helsinki none so that's just not a life worth living exactly very good at smoking you know there's a cave first kft ever actually first kfc ever is opening this year

and they are giving away their own cryptocurrency ethan beautiful stuff i feel like way more prepared you brought a beautiful article that is coming gonna come out i think i'm gonna just publish this in the article at the same time yeah thank you for having me i'm gonna i'm gonna go and sleep on this so awesome there's a lot of fun thank you thank you for for making this dummy at least a little bit smarter and on the behalf of the audience as well thank you so thanks everybody for listening love you guys we appreciate you guys keep the comments coming keep the questions coming and apply to the dof slack group if you have at least five years in the in the industry so there's a lot of no's anyways uh bye

you