Game Design Innovation Requires Growing Pains - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] there's so many broken things about the world of blockchain games that you say well that's a bug that needs to be fixed but also it's the thing that's sort of interesting about it so sure there's some things that don't quite add up when you write it all down and it doesn't make a lot of sense but that also is the thing that makes it interesting [Music] hello everyone and welcome to the metacast round table by navik and today i'm joined by chicken butterflyer nico that sounds weird co-host i know right what is that about okay first okay we'll tell about this let maria continue her intro because otherwise she's going to lose her train of thought and then i'll explain my chicken

butterfly okay yeah yeah just let me finish this phrase because i'm i am losing it um investor at big craft uh amir kumar co-founder at navic and david amor ceo at playmond okay we did it okay we get like some you know animal uh spirit names or you can see that manu joined our call late and we were hanging out for like 15 minutes before he joined okay so chicken brother no shame so i'm i'm i'm responsible for dinner tonight and the way i like to you're making my chicken [Laughter] okay okay so cooking tip it's it's amazing i got this from the book the food lab which is a fantastic book by the way um anyway so you take a chicken the problem with the chicken is if you get like a whole chicken you can put stuff in there but the problem is that the legs will roast way faster than

the the breast and so that's the problem so what i do is i butterfly my chicken which means you cut out the spine and then you press it flat and so it looks very flat and because it's in that shape then all of the different parts which actually also should cook at different temperatures because they have more or less amount of fat and connective tissue yeah i mean cooking is science my friend and um and then so what i do is so i do that and then i make a kind of brine like a thing and then i rub that underneath the skin not on top of the skin underneath the skin is way better and then i put that chicken on top of vegetable vegetables and then i put the whole thing in the oven and so then you have the fat that renders and then it cooks the vegetables and it's amazing so anyway this is this was the first topic yes riverside like cut nico's video i think just like it's passed on all the details all right games more than entry i know man maybe next week i can like share my butter chicken recipe also

oh i could share my uh liquid meal heal recipe wow yeah it's like if there's a powder in a shaker you put some water in and you shake it did i oh there's a shaking technique oh you have to get the shaking right okay yeah okay yeah curious all right i'm intrigued um so i know before we move on to the first topic i just want to do a shout out that you can subscribe to the navic digest for free and you can get a roundup of all the insights uh this past week we did a deep dive into yugo labs and the future of the universe and app eleven changing its course that was um interesting you can you can go to the navic website and read past articles and now david you have the first topic more more cooking recipes i haven't got a lot to be honest all right yeah let's move on so the first topic is uh ea right uh some interesting set of headlines suggesting that ea are pursuing a sale

of some kind so first service in a publication i hadn't heard of called puck which anyway but it talked quite matter-of-factly taken from four independent sources that ea had almost got over the line um in a merger with nbc universal not quite agreeing something or other toward the end but i mean that really felt like it was about to happen didn't quite um but also that they've been speaking to disney in march so not long ago talking to disney to apple to amazon um and so it seems that some kind of merger or acquisition is on the cards for ea sometime this year which i suppose isn't too much of a surprise it was something i said on this podcast i've been surprised that they haven't been acquired by someone like disney already seems like a good idea but uh feels like that's on the cards for that company um probably makes sense

and i suppose you know um yeah i'm gonna do a little quiz for my other podcast oh no the teacher is back oh the professor is back yeah the professor oh i have to get my hand up in here okay look this is gonna be fun it's a quiz so what do you think is uh i was looking at what ea's biggest franchises are in terms of volumes of uh games sold what do you think is their biggest one first of all fifa come this is easy it's not a quick fight would you say fifa fifa is number one what's number two um [Music] apex legends i mean they've got it's a reminder to me that they actually have some great ip now i guess fifa isn't fever anymore but but nonetheless you know i could go on a longer list and talk about a bunch of game franchises

that you're familiar with my point is that if you're a media company then having a bunch of ip that's really familiar like embedded in the culture of the world or at least the western world is a pretty powerful thing to uh to bring into the fold i suppose one of the things that i thought was interesting there that uh was that uh all of those that i just said nbc universal which is part of comcast um and disney and apple and amazon none of those are games companies there's a and i wonder whether or not it's ea wanting to sort of remain at the helm of the games business maybe andrew wilson is saying hey let me just sure i'd like to be part of something bigger and capitalize on that but um but still we want to be running the game have some autonomy in the games part if that happens um thoughts on that is that sorry is that the main difference between merging

versus being acquired you [Music] maintain control um no i think it in that mbc universal is comcast is 180 billion dollar company and ea is what 36 billion dollars so i mean it's much bigger than ea so you it you know i don't know if it's technically a merger or not but but ultimately one is much bigger than the other are you are you saying david that's one of the reasons it's not it's it doesn't want to be acquired by a games company a games company is that if it gets acquired by non-games company everyone in charge will still be most knowledgeable about games and are not at risk of being replaced or you know or been made redundant is that what you're saying i think there's some ego there i don't know i'm just hypothesizing yes but um why isn't it embracer why isn't it sony why isn't it microsoft um is it a coincidence that all of the

names that have been put forward so far from seems like quite well-informed sources none of those are larger games companies so perhaps yeah yeah do you think um yeah the oh you go money no go for it right menu oh okay um and do you think this is why they didn't renew the fifa license to cut a potential cost and look better for merger acquisition no i don't think so i think that um fever getting greedy also a problem as i just mentioned that fifa isn't is never going to be owned as an ip by ea it's never fifa is always going to be fifa and there's a fifa game but maybe it's um maybe that's more them asking for too much nea not seeing that much value when they don't get to completely only ip they just get to be a

licensee off of that right okay manu you're gonna say yeah i mean even on the on the fifa topic specifically um i haven't like really looked at the specific details of it but i guess there's a difference between or like the specific mechanics of it but i guess there's a difference between you know being able to use like the fifa name in the game name versus being able to like showcase all the different you know the teams and all those attached players those would be like just two separate relationships and i mean ea like fifa specifically the number of years that or the number of iterations that game has gone through i mean it the gameplay is at a point where i feel it's like unparalleled in terms of you know uh just quality of play and if ea is just like able to kind of keep that relationship with those different leagues then you know it like does the fifa name

really matter i think they're planning to call it um yeah fc or something right ea football ea soccer fc football fc something like that um but um but yeah i mean just coming back to this uh you know to the whole major topic yeah i guess the way i saw it and to your point david about you know the ips probably ea at this point is asking itself the question like you know how does it how does it like continue to stay relevant uh in a world where now scale is just becoming super important you know uh embracer buying up all these different developers and you know inching closer and closer towards uh you know uh or like as a competitor to ea the whole activision buyout that happened uh now with microsoft and now you know uh take two also getting zynga um and ea is now thinking about you know how they continue to stay relevant

um consoles like still makes up pc and consoles still makes a majority of their revenues uh mobile is still like a fledgling business i would say like i'm not even sure like how well the whole glue integration is actually going and and yeah i mean i guess maybe that's why like they're also like talking to you know the media companies that actually have all these ips which they can essentially convert into you know or yeah introduce like the games audience to those ips and just convert into like really big games businesses yeah probably both ways i would imagine that a media company could do good things with the sims and i think that ea could do as they have you know good things with uh was licensed so i guess that it makes sense i think for me ea have lost some of its shine full disclosure i was eddie a from 1993

to 2001 in fact i was in the cube um next to when we first started making fifa so fifa 94 i think it was called a soccer at the time so uh i go back away with ea and i think at that time the reason i joined ea because it was doing things ahead of other companies and was really forward thinking it was always on the new trend i remember they were releasing or being involved with the release of 3do which is like an amazing interesting new console that didn't go the distance but the point is they were trying new things and they were later social uh really late to mobile um seemingly the the board didn't really like mobile or looked down on it but as a result they're way way behind and it used the ea used to be completely leader field on that stuff so um i'd like to see a merger that somehow energize his ea in some way if that's possible yeah on the other hand ea was voted uh and i believe these are the employees that vote in game

sorry games industry dot biz best places to work an ea one best place one of the best places to work in the united states at least from that perspective the culture and happiness of their employees seems seems great yeah but sometimes i don't know i treat those surveys with a bit of cynicism just because it's a nice environment to work doesn't mean to say the business is doing great things oh exactly yeah yeah i was just looking at the bright side has done tons of great things in the past so i'm not giving you a hard time but um in a way i think it would be good to be part of a bigger games company to re-energize ea rather than just sort of slipping behind some media conglomerate yeah i think the the other uh the other company i was thinking about like potentially acquiring ea uh

was netflix but then then i realized okay he is probably too big for an acquisition for netflix uh at this point but uh i know bold prediction bold prediction yeah yeah somebody i guess like the i think apple i mean if yeah i was going to say like uh so apple uh bringing out the glasses or ar vr etc i think is fairly clear by now they need a bit of a boost don't they in terms of ability to create engaging content that isn't just linear media so i wonder i don't think it's going to happen by the way but uh apple are a little bit behind in this stuff and maybe they need a bit of a shot in the arm in terms of 3d content for their new glasses the the my one concern with apple was just the just like like a like a fundament like just a difference between um their ethos or their thinking behind how

games should be monetized and that being like diametrically opposite for ea now given like most of its revenue is like live services based versus apple that wants to go you know like doubling down on apple arcade and things like that and and that was like my one like it just wouldn't be like a good you know business model to culture fit i felt uh and that's why i kind of uh struck apple off my list um but so so uh each one of us who do you think is the best bed fellow for what if you are in charge of ea who would you be trying to do a deal with i actually thought the whole nbc universal was like a pretty good choice um just given like all the ips that they have access to but i mean that seems to have fallen through um disney has been trying to like has been like getting into the games

with this out of the game's business and now it's like mostly focused on like licensing out its ips um maybe there's something there uh and maybe that would be my second choice lego lego's bringing more of their game development into lego so disney could be trying to do something similar potentially um gain more from [Music] instead of just licensing but also developing by acquiring it could be yeah as menu says disney come and go in to the games industry i don't really understand why games is such a large entertainment business why why is disney still licensing everything out why does it sort of go all in and then go back all back out again and maybe it needs a bigger play to get going rather than trying to spin up something internally maybe an acquisition size of ea which isn't enormous you know it's a lot smaller than 36 billion dollars for ea and 70 billion

dollars for activision so about about half an activision uh but it would be a good kickstart for to start somebody's interactive or games business uh for someone like disney or nbc um the the weird one i found was amazon though like i don't know why they would be talking like what does amazon have to offer or maybe on prime like maybe they're like original ips over there that amazon could kind of bring to the table but that felt like the weirdest fit well isn't this a content um i've heard on this podcast talk about the the fact that netflix isn't competing with other tv shows it's competing with screen time with anything else so netflix is competing with fortnite for instance and so so the rationale for netflix to get involved with games is like let's let's make sure we have offerings for people that want to play something interactive

so i would the rationale i would say and it seems like amazon and nbc and apple they're all sort of competing for trying to create content um subscription for uh for for people but um so maybe it's something to do with that yeah i mean like i think like all of that does make sense but you know and ea can like bring a lot of value to amazon but like what does amazon bring ea in return and that that's right yeah that's what i kind of like i was kind of hiccuping on that a little bit um maybe they have like some i i haven't looked into it but maybe they have like original ips uh or like significant relevant ones on uh prime but yeah that one just felt off a little bit comparing to like nbc you know amazon found the sweet spot with lost ark because they meant they brought their publishing learnings

and successfully published lost art in the western market i think that that worked very successfully so i'd see them doubling down on that strategy instead of trying to lean into developing more games internally especially with ea being a powerhouse in publishing as well i don't see amazon being able to bring that knowledge and support ea um either way i think an acquisition of some kind of a merger whatever you want to call it potatoes potatoes are it is um is coming through yeah you would think later this year i'd be surprised having tried to have those conversations with four companies that that they're not getting further with it it sounds like a strategic plan for ea to be acquired or merged so you would expect that to happen at some point this year and on the topic of investment we can go to nico's

spicy topic all right so context or the topic is merit circle dao proposal to remove ygg as a seed investor so there's a lot of relevant words there so this the what inspired this is a post so merit circle is a gaming guild gaming guilds um i think the first major gaming guild that you know got uh become became famous was ygg yield guild games and um merit secret circle is another gaming guild and so the goal of a gaming guild is essentially to um within the play to earn or play and earn worlds guilds want to be the um groups of individuals that's together own assets so gaming assets that can then be used by guild members within different games to either just play the game or potentially even earn a return on investments and so you know

at ygg and i think merge circle as well are both very active within axi infinity they own a lot of axes and they rent those out to their scholars as they call it and then the scholars can play the game and then there's a revenue split on the slp that is then the token that the the the players themselves earn by by using the axes so that's what guilds are um merit circle is also is a dao this is a decentralized autonomous organization and it means that there is a token which in this case is the merit circle token that governs a treasury and that also essentially governs the organization and so there are a lot of dow members and contributors and the goal of a dao is to you know allow anyone in the community to make a proposal that can then be put up for a vote um so anyone that owns a merit circle token or any token that is related to a dao can vote on and and so i think that's that's enough context and so um what happened merit circle did their seed raise i think last

year or maybe early this year of i think about 5 million us dollars and ygg which is another guild took part in that seed race so ydg invested 175 000 dollars now merit circle dao members do not consider ygg to be helpful as an investor especially not in contrast to other of the investors that took part in that rounds um and some you know investors that came up in the discussion are maven 11 um they're based in the netherlands and they have mechanism capital and defiance capital and so you know what happened and this is a few weeks ago i think the merit circle people asked the seed investors to tell or at least publicly say what they helped with as a seed investor um and so ygg did not make the cuts compared to the other investors and so now one member of the community not

necessarily like a leadership member but made a proposal to pay ygg back its initial investments and recovered the tokens that were allocated to ygg um the tokens although the merge circle token i think at its top was like 11 or 12 now it's around one dollar so it it it got reduced a lot um is still up 32x compared to um the initial seed investment valuation and so i mean i i think this is absolutely fascinating right so very like in summary right tldr you have a dow which got investment initially before the dao actually before the community was being built and one of these seed investors is is is supposedly not living up to expectations and now there's a proposal to kick them out um so yeah i i think this is interesting um also for full disclosure um i believed in ygd early i you know when the their token went public i i bought some tokens um and then later i joined bitcraft who

is also an investor so i'm involved with ygg i'm a fan of what they do but um i think this is interesting um and um yeah love the dynamics here in general although i'm not i don't necessarily agree with the sentiment but we love your take as well um you know david you recently raised a round how do you think about seed investors that add little value to what happens or investors in general and and what do you think about this this stuff yeah i think uh it's a good spicy topic isn't it it's like people uh washing their dirty laundry in public yeah maybe that's what dales are about and that's the size in the open yeah i think that when you're taking investment historically you'd just be happy to take people's money i think in or at least as was a couple of months ago then then certainly it seemed a lot of things there was more investment money than there was things to invest in and therefore people that were looking to get

investment like me had an amazingly uh situation where we could actually pick who to take money from and the criteria by which you that you might use is who adds value to to who's good to have on speed dial here but there's but there's no real expectation that hey if you don't delet you know if you don't offer value or if you don't do what you said you were going to do then there's some sort of right to apply so and i don't think there is here either i'd be really surprised if in the legal paperwork it says look if you don't help out then we're gonna we're gonna ask you um we're gonna give you your money back but also say that it's 175 000 is that what you said of a five million dollar rate so it's a tiny amount so i think and it's not from the leadership team as far as i can tell merit circle so if anything it feels like a bit of posturing from the um

that someone a community member in merit circle saying why did you don't do anything for us we're better now than they are in fact you can have your tokens back if you want yeah um and it's just throwing them into a bit of shade yeah so yeah yeah and so go ahead maria and there might be soft uh contributions as well having a new company connected to ygg which was at least for me the first guild that i became aware of it almost brings maybe a seal of trust and of interest so even though you can't really quantify the help you did get that marketing boost by being associated with ygg 100 plus the initial capital i mean that in itself is just help right like that 175k even though it might be like a small number but yeah that in itself is like something that you know the value of which can be multiplied that you know um benefits a merit circle for multiple years so

um yeah yeah i i think um well i think i agree i there's one other thing that's not discussed um that i haven't heard yet but i think there's um it's easy in retrospect to say like you didn't help um but there are worlds in which you know if merit circle was in trouble ygg could have helped right but they weren't in trouble so they didn't help there's always this optionality that that happens and then in retrospect like that path wasn't like followed so um you know i think this is relatively short-sighted um and you know i don't think there's any legal basis there's nothing going to happen here it's just you know something interesting and what i like about this is one um people are independent sometimes it's gonna happen it has like moved to the voting stage merit circle like has agreed to like move it to voting okay okay looking at all the looking at like all

the comments yes it's tilting towards a yes well i mean i guess the but the voting is weighted by how much how many tokens you own right so i'm just saying that the number of comments do not necessarily represented the amount of tokens that are going to be put on certain votes that's one i also think that within this this dow i don't think there's a legal base to to give them back their tokens right it just doesn't work that way uh sorry give them back their money and then that's right that's why i got confused like you know if that legal base does not exist then like why would merit circle like agree to move it to voting because i mean if it does turn out as a yes then then that action needs to be taken well i i think this is the interesting part i think there's a lot of signaling here which is is is not bad one i think you know this might be a subtle move for merit circle to position itself like more separate from ygg or or

maybe more as a rival i think um you know i don't think this is necessarily a bad thing i think this might be a wake-up call and and i actually really like that community members are now also kind of involved and can see what's going on with with seed investors um you know is there any other example where one of the community members around the game suddenly is you know angry about the involvement of seed investors um in that company right that doesn't happen and and so i really like that people are actually thinking around these things um although i don't necessarily agree with with the thoughts i think it's good that you know these things are being asked put into question and um maybe it's a wake-up call i don't know yeah there's a um it's something similar to equity when you start a company where when you sit in a room and you're just four people deciding what feels like a fair split of the company now um it's really

hard to work out and i sort of uncomfortable to work out because you have to say how much value that you're going to bring you can't then in three or five years time say oh but you didn't actually give me that much value to the company in fact you know you you quickly snuck into the background and therefore we need to look at that equity again no you know that equity is what felt right at the time and you can't just continually adjust it according to what's happened afterwards that's just not how it works you know that equity is what got you started in the first place and uh you can conjure up all sorts of parallel universes where this and that happened but but you sort of have a commitment i think to stick to what seemed right back when you first talked about it otherwise you're forever adjusting it and according to what's happening on the day i don't know you can you can't think of ownership of projects or companies in that way maybe it is a new way of thinking i'm

very confused on my feelings on all of this by the way i'm exploring the devils the devil's advocate because blockchain and web 3 is meant to disrupt the status quo of how things work and perhaps this is a good thing where it's going to change the commitment and having to stay true to what you agree to when you made an agreement or there was a you know a business proposal or something yeah you have to stick through it and deliver or else you might these consequences might happen maybe that's a good thing there is a structure for that if you if you think that there's important things that a particular party should be doing as part of the investment and it's x y and z then put that into the agreement that says you need to do x y and z that's that's the value that you're bringing as well as the money um yes but if that wasn't stipulated and it was just sort of vague i hope you can support what we do

then that's uh i i understand what you're saying mary i think it would be nice to see things shake up a little bit and how that works but i think there are mechanisms to deal with that somewhat already and actually think that these mechanisms instead of putting it in the agreements can be because i really like how you're thinking maria and i actually think that's you know okay i'm the crypto guy here but blockchain actually might offer a solution for this where one of the concerns why you want to put stuff on paper um is you know you want to make sure that it can't be changed um negatively for you in the future by people that might at that point hold control over the company and stuff like that and so one of the cool things that can happen in in a in a world or in in a blockchain with a dow is that um you could for example code in where you know a bunch so every investor let's say gets a certain amount of tokens and then at the end of every year um there is a slice and then the dao gets to vote on or like there's a proposal made about okay how many tokens go to to all of the

contributors and these contributors could be you know investors but they could also be just you know dow members and core contributors that actually help build up merit circle and then the dow can have a vote on whether that's fair and you know you can you can see um this technology of voting and and people actually having value and contributing value uh being used to more fairly reward people that actually you know help out and and you know um so i think there's there's i think at some point we'll be in a world like that i don't think we'll ever be there completely because there's also another world in which you know you lock tokens and and so where you can put into code what you're gonna do and if you do it the the smart contract automatically grants you your tokens right and in that way everything is automated um i don't think we're ever gonna go towards the world towards a word like that but um i think we can go in that direction where there's less uncertainty um and and more focus on you know people receive actually what they earned and they get rewarded

for the value that they bring yeah i guess yeah my my biggest pro or like some of the bigger pros were yeah first of all you know this is probably like the most public display of a dao in action you know like uh and i really enjoyed like going through all the comments and just seeing like people debate between themselves and you know just learning about new things while they're debating and just like figuring out like how the you know how the machine actually functions but yeah one pro was like just seeing this dow in action um if the vote actually even it doesn't even matter probably what the result of the vote is but you know the organizer's point it does like put a message out from merit circle's perspective that like they have or the community uh they're supporting has a pretty high bar for like partners or you know investors like if you guys if someone is going to be becoming a partner an investor or a seed

investor with merit circle then you better be like you know playing your part and i think that messaging is uh is like super clear out there um the yeah and sorry there was one more point i wanted to make uh so i i've written it but i can't understand my handwriting anymore completely getting back um uh the point was uh yet apart from like sending a message to like potential partners and investors it also sends a message to like the broader ecosystem like says plato and ecosystem and broader dows of you know uh how like how this this thing can function because the whole operational aspect of daoz is still like a big question mark and everyone is trying to like find their footing right and like how to make it function in the best possible manner and like this is probably the most public

display of like one way it could potentially work the one con i felt was um like just questioning whether the sum of the parts of ygg and merit circle would have actually like if the word becomes yes and for some reason you know the partnership was to break would have would it have actually been uh better for the entire play and on blockchain gaming ecosystem if both these entities were together because um one of the one of the key aspects of the partnership was you know the sharing of assets when demand for those assets is uh higher at the end of the day ygg and merit circle are definitely competitors both of them have like around four between four and 5k scholars each i think so they're pretty equal uh like that and then when the demand for these assets is gonna outstrip like um um like potential supply then

like you know sharing of these assets between uh between the entities and creating like a revenue share agreement over there is actually better for the the one entity that actually matters which are those the people who are the scholars you know and now if like these two entities are like yeah because of some community guy who's you know posturing or signaling or whatever like you know there are people in the philippines who are getting affected by by this and uh and that i felt like that was probably like a one potential con which just kind of hits at the root of like why these guilds even exist you know and like the value they actually bring to the ecosystem and um but yeah that that was like one con i thought of that's that just made me think about company culture where you have a company you set your cultural values from the founders

and everyone that you hire everyone that's part of the company has to embody and evangelize those values how do you do that in a dow because even if merit circles said these are all values be part of this community by being token based how can you ensure that everyone who makes a proposal has to make a proposal that takes into consideration how it affects the scholars and does this make any sense i feel like the more decentralized that the i mean it does a decentralized automat autonomous organization and the more decentralized it is the in an ideal scenario and probably the way it's supposed to be implemented is those values uh or like maintaining those values is d risk because it is decentralized the more parties that actually are there are involved in the decision-making process the more the chance that those values are upheld you know and it's not like based on a single person or at least that's how i think about it

but interesting i feel like um daos are essentially a new way for people to work together and we're still figuring so much stuff out that it feels like culture is almost one of the last things that we as humans have figured out when we started working together where it's first get done and then you know get done in like a sustainable way where we all agree and and actually like to work together maybe i'm wrong right but but i feel like from what i've seen in dao's um there's a lot of focus like the culture is almost the the crypto culture where it's all very open very decentralized um you know very open but apart from that i don't i haven't seen much other culture like separate culture like you mentioned maria where you know we focus on on our guild members that's that's key and you know everything should reflect that um this is a good question yeah but ygg has a ton of culture like if you can really feel it i mean i don't know quite how they achieved

that but it certainly feels a certain way so they've been able to achieve it in their dow even though they're fully remote and operate in a different way so it's certainly possible yes but you're right yeah one last point i want to make and this is kind of separate but it's something that they kept pushing on in the proposal um can i mention like can we go on a small small engine maria uh we still have uh money's topic okay is it one minute is it no it's not one minute it's it's longer is it about chicken it's not about chicken um okay let's go let's give it maybe like maybe maybe no this is this is i feel like this is i i'm going to touch upon this in the crypto corner sometime it it merits its own discussion i feel um you should put it in the discord and then there's like bonus content in the discord before anyway so it's it's about so i'll tell you i'll we don't talk about it i'll just you know hint that's what the

subject is so um one of the complaints that is being made is that ygg spins out a lot of subdials so ygg there's uh ndg and there's a bunch of other oy gt subdials which are location specific and so one of the comments or concerns that the people here had is that this dilutes the value of ygg because they're just fundraising and you know or getting more funds and it dilutes the value of of the ygg token um and so you know i'd love to have a conversation about that because i think that's really interesting um but we're not doing that so with this um you know i i give the floor to my new and i'll keep that for for another time crypto corner battle of the dalles you know there's some kind of dow round up yes uh it would be fun it's okay okay for me it's more than a it's more than a doubt thing it's more like it yeah okay well uh a nails company uh first light games partnered with merit circle for blast royale so maybe he could be a good

guest for for that discussion um just before we move on you're very impressed with my way of thinking did you think maria gmi [Laughter] should think about culture first instead of cultural art i think i'm impressed it's i think i'm gonna i'm gonna it's gonna be more rewarding for you at some point when you do like something insane that really really impresses me and you know it right so i'm impressed but i'm not going to tell you maria's gmi yet i'll tell you i'll tell you what it is but here you need to like do the chicken butterfly you know yes i do a great i do a great chicken dance maria tonight you're gonna if you're gonna drink liquid foods sorry you're ngm that's that's what i think about that and the context here is that maria's been fishing for gmi from nico for a little while now hoping to get it he keeps telling me ngmi yeah

yeah that's not the way yeah you'll get there i'm sure you're on the right track play play hard to get with the gm is they'll come oh okay i should be harder to get yep oh yeah money well what do you have to do all right um yeah so last topic of the day um there is an art there's a new article that's been doing the rounds um and it's written by you guys might have to help me with his last name nat eli eliason i think i've been saying elias and why i might be wrong okay that's what i was going to say listen okay yeah and anyway so he is he's been like really blowing up in the you know crypto gaming writing scene at the moment uh a lot of really great thoughts um and just back-to-back you know awesome posts um he's also um an advisor at uh crypto raiders um and

he's assisting them with like game economy and economics um crypto areas in itself is also a really good game so you know um this article he wrote about the current problems in crypto gaming and you know potential solutions and um the title of the article is crypto gaming is broken how do we fix it and coming from you know the advisor of crypto raiders which is uh which is like yeah pretty like a core crypto uh game gaming experience you know so um but yeah just to kind of like summarize uh he didn't really have like a key you know um like thesis like a red line across the whole article he more more kind of like structured it as here are like seven problems that i see in crypto gaming right now and here are like nine solutions that you know we could be thinking about implementing into the future and all these seven problems i'm really glad like you know someone actually wrote it because a lot of these conversations are happening behind the scenes and no one is you know

talking about it publicly and he like in very simple words he was able to just capture a lot of those conversations in text so i would highly recommend the read um i won't go over like all of it but um in general you know i agree with a lot of what he's saying so i thought maybe i could focus on some of the points where i maybe disagreed a little bit uh after giving him all the praise so again i highly recommend the piece but um on the problems uh side of it there were two very interesting points that he made one is nfts set a bad precedent for games and the second is defy set a bad president for games and both of these points are connected to you know um both nfts and d5 um or d5 mechanics like staking or yield farming um because crypto games have like you know

or like a lot of the early crypto games originally from crypto native teams they have like taken a lot of those you know scarcity mechanics from that proper values of nfts uh and also yield farming and staking mechanics that are used in d5 to over to like the game space and they're implementing it in the same way and it's now hurting the game's space more than it's actually helping maybe it like had a little bit of a initial hype and a lot of people were able to make a lot of you know profit on that but uh matt's uh thinking is like we should move away from you know that kind of thinking longer term and um for example not like one of his recommendations to do away with staking completely i guess my only like um i would probably just reframe what he says a little bit uh to more of

i feel like there's still so for example like the nft set a bad president in games his point is you know it's all about like scarcity and you can't like you know create a strong community just by offering you know ten thousand nfts at the start but on the flip side there is actually or it's proven that you know that scarcity can be monetized really well but maybe there's just a better balance in terms of you know how many of those nfts are actually available uh for people to actually get in early so i my takeaway from this wouldn't be like you know we should like like nft set a bad precedent for games it's more that they have set a precedent but you can still kind of use it as design inspiration to kind of build on it and find a better balance because there is definitely value in scarcity but to achieve like you know more adoption early on uh or to uh or to achieve like more adoption early on or to achieve you know um

uh initial funding for your like future plans there is still value in like having that scarcity uh early on so yeah that was like my one point just to like still get inspired from some of those mechanics but maybe maintain a better balance um and yeah the second point and then i'll stop talking but uh on the d5 point um you know he was talking about staking like and you know staking in itself is uh it's a complete ponzi loop uh or yield farming specifically is a complete ponzi loops taking is probably a little bit more better um and um the recommendation is like completely do away with taking but again i would say that you know there are games right now that have actually implemented staking in a way that uh is not really the ponzi loop part of it and they have been able to take inspiration from house taking works but applying it more in a fitting game context so the takeaway i feel shouldn't

be like do away with taking but rather uh it's an opportunity to to embrace the tech and what it enables in terms of a mechanic and then you can kind of like reshape it to kind of fit in a game space so um for example it is entirely possible to like purchase an nft early on and then stake it and then while it is taking it's actually gaining in-game utility that can be like used when the game actually launches for example a character leveling up while it's been staked i mean that's that's like i feel that would still completely work and you get the upside of you know the initial investment for the nfts and like uh the the nft itself will continue to grow in value because in-game utility is actually increasing over time and until the game launches and third the person who actually take the nft retains until the game launches and propagates to like

broader community hey come and check out this game like there's so many upsides of that mechanic so like doing a wave it's taking just felt like off a little bit um but yeah anyway uh i'll stop talking but uh i just generally felt like um though yeah a lot of the problems that he uh identified are definitely problems but um in terms of takeaways i wouldn't be like super harsh about like completely doing away with things but rather using them as a foundation to stand on and like reframing things so that you can use the technology new ways in a gaming context i got a lot to say about this but um as resident dj and i want to hear what nika has to say first all right thanks no i am i think i i generally agree with with my new stakes and not stakes although i would probably frame them differently um i think you know saying nfts set a bad precedent for games and defy set a bad precedence for games

i would frame it like the way i would say it is the way nfts and d5 have been used in games um are sub-optimal and are being over indexed on and so it feels like what he says and and i think everyone agrees right this whole dynamic of 10 000 nfts which i think was spearheaded was this with the bunks i don't even know where that started but it it it started somewhere there right there projects yeah exactly and so it's it's funny how this this number and this range of of between a thousand and and ten thousand is only like the go-to initial mint and and so what i'm the reason why i agree is i feel like um so for me blockchain adds a value layer on top of the internet that's the thing that you'll hear me say much more that i've said a few times already um and this allows game builders to do interesting things right and so for me an example like a

staking mechanism is for me it is you're locking up value um and you're you're committing to not not moving that value for a certain amount of time and so these are all economic primitives that you can play around with and you can build something around um right before this it was hard to have a native value integration into your game which opens up the game immediately to the broader economy right that was pretty hard and now through this blockchain technology it's possible and so for me um we're taking i see too many pitches of of of projects that are looking at what has been done by companies like axi or others and using that as a source of inspiration and so my frustration is i want to see more experimentation i want to see people you know do things that haven't been done and do crazy crazy interesting um experiments and so one example that i'll give you and and this is random that but if you listen to my conversation with the

treasure dao team um i did it a few a few weeks ago they were talking about liquidity pools it's a concept we're not going to go into it we've already discarded discussed it a few times but your position in a liquidity pool is an nft and so they were assigning utility within the game to the nft that represents your stake within the liquidity pool and these are like super interesting like fundamental uses of economic primitives that actually make sense right a liquidity pool is useful it provides liquidity as the name suggests and so my point is i agree with nat i i the way he phrases it might be just clickbaity right but i agree with it right the way things are being done right now is suboptimal and and my point is i agree i think i don't think there should we should do away with staking i think the locking value up for a certain amount of time is a useful primitive something people can use to design around or to design with um but i agree that we're looking too much at what has been done and using that as an inspiration um for new games was that was that an okay answer david

what do you think i'm satisfied with that answer thank you um what i was going to say john from the professor that's right seeing me after for your diploma uh the uh john jordan has this phrase john jordan's a journalist that's been documenting blockchain for a while is it a bug is it a feature which is a lot of things that you look in there's so many broken things about the world of blockchain games that you say well that's a bug that needs to be fixed but also it's the thing that's sort of interesting about it so sure there's some things that don't quite add up when you write it all down and it doesn't make a lot of sense but that also is the thing that makes it interesting why is it that why is it attractive to people why is it interesting why are we talking about it that suggests to me that there's something cool there anna white yes it might not be optimized the other sort of connected point is that um i think in game design i've worked with a lot of game designers i sometimes

when you say i don't think that or you know playing something doesn't feel quite right some designers will take a incremental step to fixing it maria will know what i'm talking about which is like oh we'll adjust this a little bit adjust this a little bit another strategy is to just go too far the other way just go all the way down here and now see what happens and then maybe the answer's somewhere in the middle or maybe it's not maybe we even have to go further but i think that you know what what what's described in that article is a lot of weird new game design ideas that have just pulled video game mechanics uh ideas in a completely different direction and so i wouldn't be too quick to throw the baby out with the bath water it's taken us to a really interesting place yeah there may be a little a few corrections here and there but i think that i i wouldn't be sad about anything in that article i think they're all interesting um game ideas that got us to a new place in the games industry

so i'm not ready to be to pass judgment too heavily on what's come before i i completely agree and my position about companies that are exploring this space they're brave you know they're facing this unknown world being experimental trying to adapt concepts into gaming that exist elsewhere you're going to fail you're going to have to improve and you'll find things that don't work and then find how to make them work and i don't know if the content is amazing i definitely i when i read it i thought wow someone's pulled together all of my different strains of thought and put it in an article that was very interesting to read i don't know if the way if the way it was written was clipbeti or if i don't know nat personally i don't know maybe he was frustrated when when he wrote this i i agree that there are problems but it's not broken we need to understand the root causes and then improve it over time with experimentation like you're saying david it's game design we'll experiment and find

and find what works and what doesn't work and i think that's why i want to comment on a few things that are in the article because i worked at jagex i didn't work specifically on runescape but i have enough knowledge about the player base where i want to refute some of the things that are in the article um do it so for example in the much of the play to earn is at work sorry for my language um it it mentions runescape where in mmos you go and mining for copper and you're just doing clicks and it's boring because you're earning from logging in a few in a sorry every few hours to click a few buttons where the game could just remove all that and unnecessary activity and then focus on the fun stuff players are into this afk style playing and going into the game look at everdale everdale is turning is like the fun stuff yeah everdell is turning this this concept around his head where before you

wanted to maximize player sessions and everdail is trying to maximize check-ins um because there are players who just like we scroll our feeds on twitter on instagram we like that mental break and we just want to go do this physical movement that feels nice and you can be watching your siri or you could be cooking you're open you're you open runescape and you go and do these menial activities and you feel good it's fun so there are different kinds of fun out there and so you can target your game to those player segments um and yeah runescape players are into the clicking uh let me find these there's a there's a lot of gatekeeping about a fun in the games industry i've seen that a lot where people say that's not fun remember when farmville came along and saying well that's not a real game or the wii isn't a real game or whatever yeah and uh i don't know if people are having a fun time with it then it's it's fun yeah there's different don't over analyze it there are different kinds of fun sorry this is my

last point um so within free-to-play game we're not trying to keep the player forever having things to do in the game a lot of the free-to-play game design mechanics come from timers uh from refreshing attempts so you can it creates a style of play where you're expected to leave and not burn out because that's a really important thing about games you don't it's like not for all games you don't want your player to be there for eight hours a day because they'll go through the content and you don't have enough of a content treadmill um they'll get bored they'll get burnt out from the mechanics and so you want to control their experience to go and um and come back and so the no not limiting play i don't think it's entirely true and we've seen that be very successful in free-to-play games where yeah you can have fun you can do earning but you can't play it all the time and this is what makes me really excited about like free-to-play game developers

trying to do games and blockchain and people from different backgrounds merging all of their knowledge yeah well we'll find this together the the one idea that um yeah that really stuck out to me and i feel is probably you know going to be um it's going to be like an ongoing thing with these blockchain economies is this point about uh that he makes about separating the internal and external economies um you're gonna say this and yeah i mean this is uh i think aaron mentioned it in the last uh in the last podcast but um so hello from our consulting team so shout out to ello she actually on a project that we were doing about like three months back uh she actually came up with this idea also herself where she was just like coming from free to play ruth she was just questioning like why the hell does a currency like slp need to be on chain you know like why are you affecting your internal economy by something that is affected by you know market forces outside uh why can't

it be in a world where you have slp off chain it's completely working internally and you have you know axs or your governance token on chain um and that's like the most valuable thing in the game it's used for like the biggest moves that you can make in the game in terms of progression um and it's also used you know utility in terms of governance etc and when so you know i was playing reviewer on that project and when i heard the idea i was like that that actually makes a lot of sense i don't know why it's uh you know not happening like that yeah yeah i have something to say about that and similarly this is a critique of some navic research as well so don't take the start but but i sometimes i think that when you analyze something nico will remember a time we were at an event when the axi navic deconstruction was just released do you remember that which is a very thorough uh uh what do you call it

reverse engineering of the economy of axi and saying hey it doesn't make sense and it's not fun so or something along those lines and nico actually put the question to alex who's sorry it's a great it's a great piece sorry but uh nico put the point to alex uh at sky mavis at this event and he says you don't understand why people are playing it you know he didn't refute anything in the article but he said that's you you don't understand the power of community and i think sometimes when you analyze games you use you're trying to make it add up like some kind of formula and it doesn't work like that it's other things that you can't really rationalize why do people play farmville and cow clicker and all those things why are they interesting you know why do people play it shouldn't be there's nothing sensible about that but there is something that's so i'm i'm i'm uh when i hear about new game ideas like that today clearly popular people like

it then i'm not quick to say that uh they're bad ideas i'm i'm i'm more interested in finding out what it is that's appealing to people i guess there's like a even even in games building there's definitely there's an art portion of it which is the more like you know the more flimsy stuff that you maybe people would like you know um you know uh discard when they hear it for the first time or they don't understand when they get it it's the art portion of it which probably is all the game design but there's definitely the science portion of it also and one if if there were you know game design laws for blockchain games probably one of the laws would be that there's more money uh coming into the system than there is like leaving the system and to achieve that law and economic sustainability i mean you could think about it like scientifically and break it down and this separating the internal and external economies part of it is a step

in that direction i mean if these blockchain games are going to be you know or if they want to be like 16 long-term sustainable economies running for 10 plus years and basically everything that niko wants in this world and so you know then i think there is a portion of it that can be thought about as like a science and and this this specific point i feel is going to be like pretty important um towards those sustainable uh blockchain game economies um but yes uh while axi was there you know you're right like axis definitely like played its role right um why people played it uh the kind of money that they were making uh when it when they were able to make that kind of money uh you know uh that was all uh well and good but now they aren't what is that and and here's the thing they're still playing

right so yes okay i don't know like actually i would like question the whole community thing now like i remember like alex actually uh saying that and he also like commented the same on the linkedin post um but i mean at least like from what i'm seeing in the community like it's i don't think sentiment is really the same anymore a lot of like do you think yeah i don't know i don't know exactly what i i have something to say about the subject but not not with regards to specifically what's happening in the community at axi um but and i feel like this this will probably like this could be its own episode in itself right where we talk about separating the internal and external economies and again like this is something that i i think you know i i i get the idea but i would frame it differently for me the point that he makes is um your game should be fun and and and people should enjoy playing whether the token is worth one fraction of a cent or ten dollars right that's the point that he's making um and i don't think that

that is an issue of internal external economies or or even with the blockchain because there is a thing called a um a stable coin and you know we all know what stable coins are because you listen to last week's episode right so you know and you also know that they're risky okay that's that's that's maybe not the best like thing to bring up right but my point is that there is a way to even keeping your game open or your game economy open to make sure that it's like that there's still like a stable um value um wherever it's generated or absorbed or like however it's designed and so my point is that um you can like my point the way i would phrase this is don't let your game be dependent or make care be careful that the fun of your game is not influenced by a high value high fluctuations in in the value of the token more than you know separate the internal and external economies because there's way around it using the tools that that exist on the blockchain today yeah yeah i think there's definitely

like not one way to do it um the stable coin idea is actually also pretty interesting i think sky viewers also implemented it like that it's it's a idea that i haven't really looked into too much but um i will it makes it makes the ponzinomics very hard so you know it's um i think it's good you know for for sustainable games at least um but yeah anyway highly recommend the other over the time everyone should read it yeah i feel like we do need to bring this topic back i have more going through through my mind as well i'm telling you crypto is so interesting and free to play hey there was supposed to be a limit on crypto topics on these round tables and i think we're breaking that and it's it's two thirds because you and i are already down this was free to play merged with uh crypto i agree i agree a little bit the boundaries looking at the market the boundaries are starting to become fuzzy i agree it's becoming very very hard to

have this very clear-cut distinction between between the two interesting um if you want to join the conversation join us on the navic discord david already you know incentivized nico to have more spicy conversations on discord maybe about chicken maybe not yes yeah and um if you want to have access to all of this research that we've been talking about you can become a member of navic pro and visit the navic website to find out more and yeah we'll see you next week thank you so much for joining that's a very interesting discussion and use and use the code metacast for a ten percent discount that's why we need money one he he he shares the discounts that's reward for listening right till the end of the pocket suffer through this take your time get a metacard [Laughter] we'll see you next week thanks for

joining thank you [Music] you