Crypto Corner: OpenSea, BlockChain Gaming Monetization & Web3 at GDC - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] hello there listener and welcome to the metacast by navigating we're recording a very special crypto corner today i'm joined by will brooke and sebastian park and uh yeah it's live so if you listen or looked at the previous episode the round table we did we're still at gdc so this is crypto corner gdc version um so we'll talk a bit about gdc um so yeah uh my voice is as you might start hearing i might fall away for a bit that's because um things are loud here and i've had i have had to scream to get myself heard at certain parties and certain events so um apologies in advance for that um so yeah so i'm niko i am an investor at bitcoin adventures and i'm have to be the hosts so i can talk to these awesome dudes here and then we'll introduce yourself yeah yeah uh thanks for having

me guys uh it's great to be here um holland i'll be very quick uh i'm will brooke i lead gaming at open seas so yeah pump to talk all things gaming nfts uh everything else hell yeah hell yeah yeah oh hey i'm i'm sebastian park i'm a co-founder of infinity canvas adventure partner at bitcraft focusing mostly on user-generated gaming web 3 blockchain gaming i mean all the dj's all that all the detail stuff my voice is great because i don't party as hard as nico so i'm good to go dude i was in bed early you know these were dinners you know not even parties um yeah let's kick things off i mean we finally have the chance to have someone on podcast who's uh intimate with what's going on at openc so um it's it's interesting i'm just interested to get like a bit of the the insights that you can share of what's going on inside uh but maybe like as you know people that are listening are mostly involved with games um like what is the you know what does gaming at openc mean and and and what is your like how do you look at

different games and could you share a bit more about that yeah of course so um you know right now uh we sort of we sort of work with or touch every game that is building on the blockchains that we support so you know ethereum polygon clayton um what does it mean uh you know number one uh if you have if you have a game that has nfts on those blockchains like your nfts are probably touching openc people are probably buying and selling and you know sending and all that uh via opencs so um you know that kind of happens like you know for better for worse automatically like you know a lot of traffic is funneled to open c and um it's a great place for users to sort of like get exposed to new content and um you know learn about what's going on uh i think gaming is you know one content vertical of many at openc like most people or a lot of people i think think of it as like art and collectibles and pfps right like that's what that's what sort of you know blew the doors off this ecosystem but uh originally i think myself and definitely

like our founding team was thinking that gaming was what was going to be like that was like going to be the watershed moment because nft is like in a lot of ways at least for some folks like the analogs to to gaming and digital assets and gaming it's very familiar like we grew up with items and we grew up with uh you know characters and avatars and things like that so uh you know now we're seeing uh all kinds of gaming activities sort of happen and proliferate like there's this sort of second wave coming in beyond pfp's beyond art where users are all about like nfts with utility like you know beyond just the jpeg or beyond just you know a lot of the meme content like you know what what can i do with it what what kind of access does it get me can i use it in a virtual space or a virtual world like this this sort of concept like innovating on what an nft is and what kind of utility it gets me like gaming is the sort of ultimate use case for that so for people who don't know like how big is openc is openc

ebay is it southern beast is it literally every single all of the above is it amazon yeah like yeah uh this is this is a good question i mean uh you know in in the nft space right like maybe it is some of those bigger players where you know like that's that's the comp where you know and open c sells everything right so you know just like yeah the everything store which is sort of like the aspiration of you know what amazon has kind of built itself into and you know similar to ebay right you can kind of get a little bit of everything on there so maybe in those senses that's the case but obviously um you know it's kind of a different different cultural ethos or like you know the nft ecosystem is a lot different than you know those where we try to have like a very very close relationship with the community and it's like things move so quickly that uh you know what's popular today may be like not so popular tomorrow or like something new comes in and you see all these like surges of excitement so it's obviously a huge company in terms

of scale and sort of you know users like we're seeing that grow volume of course but um yeah maybe like uh i don't know maybe like i don't know i don't want i don't want to tie us too closely to any of those but yeah uh it's fun can you give us an idea about how big gaming is within open c percentage wise is it half is it way more way way less yeah uh so nft volumes overall last year gaming was something like uh 30 to 40 percent uh which i don't know if people like would guess that but yeah oh they've got a lot lower right right like that's that's a lot it is it is and you know a lot of that is definitely virtual world driven and land sales but speculation yeah exactly uh open c is like is mirrors pretty closely like that that sort of trend so it's actually already a huge part of open seas market share which again i don't think something is something that folks really know too well what's the what's the percentage of total gaming

game five market share that openc has um that's a good question i think it's a hard one to answer because of the sort of multi-chain ecosystem right right um you know especially when you start to bring like layer twos into the mix um you know and different scaling solutions uh i don't know exactly off the top of my head i would i would hazard it's pretty high on ethereum and polygon which we support but um yeah i don't know overall dope yeah cool um i was also wondering um from the volume per project like on average do you have any insights you can give us on like what happens let's say the first two weeks after the initial mint and after like volume wise do you have any insights on that yeah i think i'll give i'll give like a somewhat unsatisfactory answer you know which is like it varies so significantly by by project uh you know there are tens let's let's say like the average project

that has like it's fairly well hyped it has a lot of community interests like it's a good founding team exciting project like there's there's always a lot of energy around the mint moment as we know um you know as we've all probably participated in uh you know you see that you see then an immediate surge of activity afterwards on the secondary markets where you know a lot of folks that couldn't participate in that mint um you know that's their way to to buy in you have the folks that are obviously you know minting to try to you know for more financial reasons maybe then utility when it comes to you know actually playing the game and stuff like that and so you seem to see those folks often cycle out as you know the folks that have more conviction about the longer term game are actually excited about game play um sort of then come in via secondary but then you tend to see it settle down a little bit after that after that first few days um you know unless it's something that you know interest is way over total supply of you know sort of what they brought to market

so i've been i've been thinking a lot about and i've been speaking to a lot of folks here at gdc about this and i'd love to have your takes on this so um it seems like there's a world where games on the blockchain all go in a direction of having a certain game loop with an economy around it where the whole the so the north star of the team that designs the game is going to be maximizing the amount of trading that happens on a secondary market because that's where the revenues are gone from if you look for example at a game like actually infinity they have i think for the moment two two main sources of revenues one is the the trading of axes and the second is the fees that you pay to breed a new axi um and so like what do you think about this do you think this this makes sense is this you know going to be the new business model of gaming within web3 um sebastian yeah i mean it's it seems like a first order versus second order effect right like i mean if you let if you tell people hey the current marketplaces

monetization loop is based on transaction fees then people will design games that are in that mode right like and if you're i mean it's reminiscent of like the first wave of nft gaming or nfts where it's like all the money came from the mint and so you saw oh okay well we're going to charge 0.5 e for the mint and we do a thousand times and got 500 each never rich and then we're good right and and then now it's like oh actually as the meta has shifted to people being like really low point zero zero one point zero one mint costs then now they're like oh we designed this to be traded rapidly so that it's using trading volume as a way to generate liquidity and monetization my expectation is that like at the end of the day it's just a meta play it's not actually a good way to design a game and there are games that are going to be good for it but there are going to be people who figure out newer things right so there are like stake to burn mechanisms there are just burn mechanisms where you hold

enough of the treasury such that if your game actively burns enough of the things that you've created it will increase the value by decreasing supply without any artificial demand being built in like it seems as though it would be a very very bad equilibrium if we only have trading games in blockchain gameplay but don't you think um you know if peer-to-peer training will be key within most blockchain games i mean i think social dynamics are important but i i would be hesitant to say that i mean like if you told me a year ago this is what forward to gameplay i'd imagine we're gonna go through a quarter or two of really heavy development on a very peer-to-peer trading and trading as a social mechanic gameplay style of games but then we'll start seeing other things and it's just

like whoever figures out the next thing and it's just like a race in terms of what the equilibrium is might be like incredibly surprised like i would be like stupidly surprised if this is the nash equilibrium that makes the most sense for everyone okay instead of and then instead of calling it the nash equilibrium that makes sense for everyone maybe the the game mode or the economic model or the blockchain monetization model that accrues the most revenues where the biggest games will actually come out yeah yeah that's probably a better way to describe it than using fancy words and a university degree what do you think of yeah i think uh you know i think it can be like secondary peer-to-peer trading that can be like the model that drives the most revenue it's good for you know which which is which is you know which is great for us and great for you know great for consumers as well i think like but what's what's uh what's nice is that can exist uh in harmony with like you know a version of the current model that that we see today where you know it's all about live service games it's all about new content like you can now

you can continue to have that new content like come in and if you know that content is compelling enough you'll have a secondary market for it but um you know that can represent some incremental revenues for for a publisher or for a developer but um you know you're probably still gonna have that content flywheel because you have to still keep your your users engaged and so you're still gonna have to have new stuff hitting the market and so you know you can almost have the exact same model that you have today but now users can you know get their hands on content and you know trade and you know the value will be driven by you know how cool are the assets and do people want them and you know how limited supply so there's a little more supply and demand dynamics with how you might think about bringing new content to market to maybe try to incentivize that but um i think you'll probably see some games where you know it's more about what new content is coming to keep people excited attention spans are short then you may see some games like you know if if they're more if they're built that way that may be a little more incentivized for like peer-to-peer trading what would you do with for example you know an elden ring

you have those rooms you can equip if those are just sold on open c right like if let's say it wasn't against the tos of of elder ring and that it was a blockchain based game would the majority of revenue that's generated by eldon ring come from the exchange of roons or would it be that they're generating runes consistently so you're already seeing this actually with runes where people are you know obviously like outside of outside of the elden ring ecosystem like you know getting on forums or discord or whatever like finding folks they'll meet up in real life drop off a rune for someone they'll pay cash you know outside the game or venmo you know whatever it is and so this is happening already so yeah the question yeah if you enable this in game um you know how does that change things i think like you know folks that want it bad enough are doing it now so as a developer maybe like you do sort of build that in i think the key is like you gotta be you have to be very this is something folks you know worry about today is like you know pay to play to win right pay to win

excuse me like this has always been like a buzzy term but you have to be so much more careful in this ecosystem um if you're gonna intentionally build those mechanics into your game and for a single player like elden ring doesn't really matter like difficulty also in that game is you know not really like a rational concept um but uh yeah it can be it can be man it's just it's sensitive it's sensitive you know you you you have to you have to balance that sort of thing and it just you add a lot of complexity when you bring in tokens and peer-to-peer trading yes like that it's interesting because it seems just a great market of rune trading if they were taking like a 3.5 like fee it seems it's like a one direction trade like the person just buys the room doesn't then resell the room but in that trade there's probably been like i'd imagine hundreds of thousands of dollars maybe millions of dollars of volume of of like ribbons on elderly because it's like a pain it's a grind i don't want to do it

nico and i have been on the road for multiple weeks no one has time to play this game well you've been on the road for multiple weeks still i'm 50 hours into ellen ring man i know i don't know where i found a diamond have you have you guys been playing yeah yeah i mean not as much as i would like but yes yes dude but i'm getting home my sunday is blocked for time with my wife and and why not both at the same time right that is something i'm working on sir i'm not there yet but uh i'm trying to find some games where you can play it i think it's a highly watchable game you know hang out with my friends at discord and just watch them stream at night get their ass kicked yeah exactly yeah yeah i feel like they'd like to see and watch human suffering and frustration i guess so um you guys have both been you know having a lot of seeing a lot of hotel lobbies over the past few days here at gdc what are kind of your your your learnings you've taken away for for blockchain gaming as a whole by the way like if you read twitter sentiment you would have thought that no one at gdc would have cared about blockchain everyone would have hated it

right and you walk around to any of the hotels or any of the events around the city and everyone even people who i'd like follow on twitter who are actively looking to give a word a better non-word yeah i don't know yeah like like poop poopooing on on blockchain right they're all asking like so what is this how do we do this what is this right make money right right it's super interesting because i haven't seen that kind of zeitgeist movement since free to play which i think has given me a lot more confidence personally that this is actually a proper movement because i remember 10 years ago when like free the fight was taking off people were like ah free to play is awful right like we'll never do that it's like to play to pay to win like will said but then people were like wait actually that's not the case like this is actually a really engaging thing there's so many cool things to see and so i think that's been like the coolest thing i've seen on the floor yeah how are you

yeah gdc has been a ton of fun i think uh the number one thing i've seen is traditional gaming like more interest from traditional gaming players whether that's like the the developers themselves uh the publishers or um developers with that sort of background aaa background mobile background moving into this space and it's super exciting for me because i'm a little wary of the projects that are like you know built building for they see they see the money entering the space and they're building a building to try to be opportunistic and capture that and they're not focused on like gameplay first and when you think about um mass adoption of this sort of technology and like mass onboarding of users into the space like it's it's not rocket science it's gonna be a game that has like a great gameplay loop that's a ton of fun that appeals to a lot of these user archetypes like yeah you know you have people now that play for social reasons people that play to explore to you know achieve that want to win now you have these new archetypes with nfts players that play to collect sometimes

players that do play to you know invest and i think like you're going to need folks with the ability to build for the former those archetypes and you know to be able to then marry with those later archetypes the the collector the investor and like that sort of like combination in harmony is what's going to really like knock the socks off the space and like i think cause it to explode do you have a project do you remember from last year that you're like hopefully it's that by now or you're like yo i remember how bad this project was in 2021 yeah i won't like flame them directly considering they're still you know around they're still around they're still building and they're still selling but yeah it was an early an early project that uh you know classic story the road map you know prom promised a lot and i think i didn't do enough looking under the hood to you know understand like again who's the team that's building it right what's their like you know what's their experience like uh and so yeah i i uh i rode the hype train and uh you know have felt the pain have felt the pain since

um yeah so you know there's there's obviously a lot of uh a lot of memes for for rugs and stuff like that this isn't just wasn't quite a rug it's just uh was his incompetence yeah me not uh not doing my own research yeah yeah always do your own research and i mean you know sebastian and i we like in bitcraft we know very well that the team in the end is everything right um doing good diligence on who the hell is actually telling the story and then having to execute all that stuff is uh risky um cool yeah so will i mean i'm just also interested to learn more about your like how did you end up doing gaming and open c right so how does one end up there do you have like a gaming background are you you know one of those as we call crypto natives yeah um definitely not not a crypto native i think my my crypto and nft journey started in uh in 2020 around the pandemic when i found myself with more time at home and um you know when a lot of people sort of found their way into this space but my background

before that always been a gamer at heart i think you know every every one of those major games over the last 20 years you know i've i feel like i've played and i've i've loved and i've shared with friends so i was a nintendo guy like early on especially super nintendo and into n64 and mario games and super smash brothers were you know my my love language and then you know i moved on to uh you know pc like early stages of counter-strike and you know playing age of empires um you know on to uh halo and then onto you know world of warcraft and you know runescape before that and league of legends when that was peaking as i was you know starting college um so i've always been a massive fan and uh you know lover of of games professionally i moved in more recently i started out as a consultant um at a firm called mckinsey and then uh later uh yeah later it was like what am i doing here i think i built the i built the business like sophistication i needed i knew how to like you know be a

professional in a job and have to make a slide dick yeah you know yeah that's that's the classic consultant skill set right there you know work a little excel and a little powerpoint um yeah and i think i also then came to recognize like the impressive like business that is gaming like the scale of the scale of the ecosystem there's you know all kinds of uh yeah all kinds of interesting opportunities so that was the moment that i decided to take the leap and so uh first off i started out by again moving this consulting background into some some personal consulting with some fortune 500 companies that were interested in gaming coca-cola dick's sporting goods things like that and then eventually made the actual jump into gaming joined ea it was at ea for a few years before uh joining openc and you know joining openc was learned about nfts in the context of gaming saw some folks building and saying hey here's what you can do with an nft in your game here's what actual ownership might mean for you kind of went down the rabbit hole as a lot of us do and you know it's a longer

story as to you know my pitch to open sea sure sure how i landed there but that's kind of what brought me here sick so really a gamer then yes are we are we saying gaming native is that thing though just nerds no just nervous yeah there you go yeah exactly i'm proud to be yeah cool man that's that sounds really cool um what is um for you because you just talked about you know ownership of in-game assets what is kind of you know the next level what like next to that what excites you about this you know i think blockchain technology what it could bring to gaming yeah i think uh you know at its core i talk about i talk about being a gamer um you know the amount of money and time and energy i've sank or sunk into these games um i don't know if it's sank or sunk it's probably sunk uh sunk into these games um yeah it's so significant right like you know you don't want to look at my time played on you know world of warcraft or some of this stuff um and you know that that was a ton of fun and i value that a lot but

my sort of personal like roi or like what what do i have to show from all that time and experience besides maybe some great friends it's not a lot and i think you know if you can enjoy that same sort of like that same sort of experience those same sort of amazing moments where you know you have an opportunity to channel that time into uh earning you have opportunity to channel that time into collecting or you know leveling up your items and like you know that investment that you put in you can then do something with it so you can you know yes you can you know sell it to someone else but you know there's with ugc which obviously like you know you know all about like there's so many opportunities to like if you invest time and you create content and you build an ecosystem that other other people like participating in now you have a way to monetize that you have a way to engage with players in different ways in terms of you know token gating experiences with nfts and things like that there's just all kinds of interesting um you know utility both financial and like

social and community that um different different kinds of experiences that you can build i think you haven't been able to before um next thing i wanted to ask you is um and then both of you guys right we've we've been seeing a lot of different gaming companies you know approach i guess all three of us when and telling their stories um what is like personally i've been making in my head a distinction between web 2.5 gaming companies and with three gaming companies um does that resonate what's what's how do you define that like what's a 2.5 versus the three so for me um you know to the point that will just made i think blockchain technology used for games allows for more than just like turning you know first-person shooter game gun skins into nfts right it is for me web 3 is a mindset shift it is you know turning the game into an economy but also giving your players ownership of

the game and you know like a piece of the pie and for me with three is you know we've done research of this um on this at baycroft and we saw that an average game company at the point of their ipo is 45 owned by the team and 55 owned by investors a typical blockchain gaming company is 15 owned by the team 15 owned by investors and then they have you know rewards for staking rewards for contributors rewards for the communities um you know they have some liquidity tokens held for liquidity and so basically you're as a investor or as a founder you're taking a smaller piece of the pie but you're building a larger pie um and so i've seen quite a lot of companies that i would categorize as web 2.5 and that is you know we're we we're in the web 2 mindset but we do nfts as well and then a few web 3 companies that are like you know we're all in we understand this

we know that you know our players want to have a say you know in our discord we engage with them we let them you know participate in the economy we try to engage them as much as we can we we look inside our our community to people that contribute and we reward them with the tokens um we align incentives um and we we designed the game to be something fun for everyone um so yeah these are things that i've been saying but i'd love to have your thoughts on that as well yeah yeah i think uh there's there's a mix um i think like you know there's this perception that uh you know these like web 2 gaming companies uh they're they're totally demonized at this at this point by the by the gaming audience like any mention of the word nft you know tied to a big gaming brand and you know there's there's a really negative reaction i think i am seeing them want to like activate in this space in an authentic way like they they want to do it right of course they want to make money but i see genuine interest i think you you raised a very good point though where

you know they want to do it in the right way but how much from a mindset perspective are they living in the web through world when they understand more beyond just the digital item that you have today is now an nft and i can capture a secondary world like they want those to be cool content they want it to be you know unique and exciting but um you know not all of them are really have really like gone through that mindset shift yet and i think uh there's definitely a lot of room for growth when it comes to like you know yeah are you building the same thing with nfts or are you building you know a experience that looks a lot different i was talking to a content company yesterday or a couple days ago now i don't know if we reveal what they were recording this but it was during gdc and the person was like so why are you interested in metaphors and they're like so our company missed the internet yeah like i was like wait once again no like like we're really doing well in the 90s and we just missed this whole internet thing it just didn't work out for us and so we're so we have a directive to not

miss like whatever the next internet is and this is it but what's interesting is that it seems impossible for them to have caught the internet right because these things are inherently disruptive these things are inherently changes the dynamic and when nico's what you're saying is hey it's weird where companies are trying to do this but unable to and i think part of it is because when you design a company it's like designing any type of system you design it with your kpis in mind and it's really hard to destruct those kpis if you're not designed to capture it free to play gaming is a great example free to play gaming is defined by massive top-up funnel user acquisition really good mid-funnel retention mechanisms and bottom of funnel monetization right that is the frame of reference that every game is made and if you just immediately try to put that into a ownership model where you give everyone top of funnel ownership of this thing the game just doesn't make money anymore and so what you've really done is disrupted away your revenues and your

company if you do that if you're a free-to-play mobile publisher who does specifically that type of games loop and so i totally think that people want to make sure that they have this nice i certainly think after gdc people wouldn't go home and be like we may be wrong about blockchain we might be wrong about what three and there's gonna be a lot more excitement about it it won't be public it'll just be people working on it and but i i don't really blame people for trying but i do believe that if it actually is disruptive and not just an add-on that we could just put on everything that it will actually will disrupt things and so therefore people just want people to do it yeah and this is this this you know this is a good segue into um talking about like ip and if you have an existing ip portfolio like what ip do you use when you think about like moving to this new space and when when you have that fear of cannibalization of your existing model and when you know you're worried about like disrupting the funnel and all these things yeah it probably means you're gonna go to market with a minimalist

approach in terms of you know how innovative are you really being when it comes to uh you know blockchain and web 3 and nfts versus you know i think you know new ip maybe gives you a little more freedom but comes with the trade-off of you're having to build a new brand and it's in this new space that you know again is a little bit polarizing and you know in a lot of ways it's hard it's hard to understand and hard to onboard so i'm seeing a lot of publishers struggle with like that sort of trade-off it's also funny because i i still think a lot about seven years ago when ar ar geofence gaming became big with pokemon go yeah and i can't help but think that we learned just a lot more about how powerful pokemon is than we did about geofencing or ar and so one of the cool things about blockchain this summer because remember like it's easy in hindsight to say hey vr isn't quite there yet but at the time like i remember gdc 2016 everyone was talking about vr as though

it was like going disrupt everything and people were like yeah like everything's gonna be on vr it's gonna be the craziest thing in the world if you don't have a full-fledged hardware team in croatia that's already building hardware in china you're five years behind the curve despite the fact that no one's really ever five years behind the curve i wonder about that because to your point there are new ips and those ips are going to have the ability to succeed and one of the things that you think about from ventra but also from openc is like you got to be agnostic about which of the ip things do well because you support everyone right they go okay be on our platform we'll support you we'll go from there but on the flip side if you're an individual game developer or if you're a publisher or if you're someone who's like in the web 2 or web one space you're making that leap could destroy your company and that's a hard argument to make to your board yeah so we try this fft thing and destroy their company if we actually look back and look at some companies have to take them out some people who made that type of leap towards pr did in fact destroy their company

because they had a good product came leap to vr the world wasn't ready and then covet happened and so all this like in-person vr stuff that was starting to take trend lines in asia just all died and so it sucks yeah i mean i think like that's why you'll see this very this like crawl walk right where like people just dip their toes into the water which you know maybe doesn't represent the maximum potential of what this could be or what it like will evolve to but um you know that that's totally true and you're right i think like when we think about we we support we support everyone but you know we we partner with with some right open c um like conviction is sort of an important uh component of that like it's not a recipe for success if it's a small team within a publisher like pushing for this and wanting to do it but like the leadership of the company is not aligned or you know at the first mention of you know a consumer or one of their one of their

lifelong users saying oh i don't like this that they then like knee jerk back and so you know there there is a little bit of like you got to meet us in the middle in terms like we you know we're here to we're here to help you and we want to help you guys be successful like it's it's good for us if your you know game explodes and it's good for everyone but like you know you're going to have to lean in and do it the right way do you talk to brands and companies about hey guys just so you know your audience may not be like super enthusiastic about this i i say it now but now they're all they're all aware they've seen that they've seen some of the you know some of the examples and some some of those examples the execution was was uh lacking or i think not thought through well some of some of those examples uh were quite creative like really good content interesting stuff and um you know still had a similar reaction so that's kind of a funny thing there's there's the blanket reaction which is negative right now um so you have to sort of have the

emotional fortitude to push back that if you if you again have alignment if you believe you're building something that like is quality and you know assume that either assume that people will catch up or be willing to take the risk it feels like um and i might be wrong but that's what it appears to me uh like is that the higher up in the hierarchy of large companies the more people are in favor it seems of blockchain technology unless they are like oh you're talking about blockchain okay i'm just going to walk away silently because i don't want to talk about this um you agree yeah they've um you know they've a lot of the higher ups that these companies have been in gaming for a while they've seen to somebody's point earlier they've seen the change in business model over time they've seen premium go to premium plus dlc go to free to play go to live service battle pass they've seen all these transitions and they've seen the consumer sentiment every time even in cases where you know in some ways blockchain technology is a lot more opaque and like the value prop can you

know depending on the the situation can be a little uh a little more confusing but free to play like should you know your game that cost you 60 before is now free and it's you know in in the best cases like still the full game that should be like a huge win for consumers but you saw a lot of backlash and sometimes it was because of opportunistic publishers really you know being greedy but that sort of stuff settles out right there's there's all kinds of opportunistic people in the nft space for sure being greedy and like that stuff i believe will settle out in the same way yeah and that's a really good point too right because if you had a 60 price point game or at the time was probably close to 50 that's a different model right your marketing spend is way ahead of your game launching right like you're marketing for years you're taking on tens of millions of dollars of burn before the project launches and now we see in web 3 especially we see a lot of projects that it's like kickstarter on crack not like there's like a bunch of kickstarter games where they're like oh

we're gonna make the next match the gathering please give us money and they get funded for a couple million dollars because they have a couple cool graphics like and then they hopefully build a game and sometimes not saying any space games it just doesn't deliver seven years out and i think similarly in blockchain that's a little bit like on the crazier side of this where it's like yeah like actually you've done at least a little bit of more of the work you get a lot more money as a result and the money then funnels into ownership in a way that kickstarter didn't that's pretty cool but it's completely different in terms of how we have to think about it relative to everything else because if we if you had a multi-million dollar acquisition model that's targeted towards like a 60 or 17 box game like a big box game in blockchain i actually don't know what those dynamics would look like you'd have to like get venture funding you'd burn through the money and i guess you pay it back with the token launch

or you trade back with open c like i don't know yeah i mean the the funny thing is you know not all games like but a lot of games are you know token gator nft gated like you need to own the nfts to play them and it's funny now it's like gone full circle the buying cost is way higher than 50 or 60 ever was right so this is like an interesting design trade-off around you know how do you let users access your ecosystem you know it's a user acquisition question but it's just it's just funny you know sometimes it's like oh my now it's eight hundred dollars if i want to access this game because it's so hyped that you know that's where the floor price of these nfts are that's actually really funny it's like it's it's like you know to play the sport you have to like it's like to be uh to be a race car driver you have to have a car yeah right so and so that's crazy yeah all right cool well um i think you know short and sweet episode this was great guys thank you for joining me um as with that you know metacast is out we hope uh that you enjoyed it and we look forward to speaking to you in the

next episode nico what's your twitter i'm glad you spelled that one out yeah what what's yours well uh i'm at wj brook w-j-b-r-o-o-k-e yeah i'm at seth park which is really easy all right guys peace out [Music] you