Panel: Gaming NFTs - Going Beyond the Hype

gaming nfc is going to be on the hype is sort of the headline obviously we're going to cover a bunch of stuff uh within that yes if you have questions i think we have a few questions we can drop in um to the chat that are or drop into the panel that are already in the chat if you have specific questions um there's a good one here about uh adding adding uh nft functions to games already in development we could certainly deal with that sort of stuff so um let's wait for um our panelists to arrive as ever we have a good selection of um panelists in terms of at least their sort of uh their focus of business i can say that because i wasn't involved with getting them at all so whoever whoever organized the panel well done so we'll have a few different perspectives i think on on on the nft and blockchain gaming um world now we let's have a look uh we're

waiting for one more let me let me see if um uh maybe maybe uh pascal is not here yet maybe he's gonna tell me okay i think we have enough to oh there he um so while we're waiting um shall we do some introductions um so if you can just uh talk a little bit about who you are and what you do um that would be fantastic uh india should we start with you hi everyone i'm india i work at a law firm called wigan we're one of the largest entertainment law firms in europe and i specifically work in the video games team and we work with everyone from kind of aaa publishers and developers to indies we also work with streamers and esports teams so lots of video games experience um and prior to that i worked at miniclip which is probably best known for eight ball pool it's the world's largest privately owned gaming website um and in terms of crypto stuff i worked at wirex which is a

cryptocurrency wallet in exchange um so yeah that's me nice to meet you all i i guess instead of saying not investment advice you have to continually say not legal advice i'm not your lawyer i don't know so no legal advice being given just uh opinions um and then sort of seriously do be aware that the sort of crypto laws are very different in different countries take that into consideration um uh jason you you're our you're wearing the vc hat how are how are things hey hey everybody things are good thanks jordan uh john john jordan sorry yeah it's confusing oh my goodness oh my goodness we got that i love that it's recorded so you never can watch that that mistake multiple times yeah so i'm jason i'm one of the founders of convoy ventures we are exclusively focused on gaming um we're in early stage venture funds we manage about 105 million uh currently and uh you know most notably for this conversation uh you know we've been actively investing into this the theme uh this year um and you know one of our

investments is actually infinity uh by some on the board of axi um so that's been a fun fun position to be in and so we can definitely talk about that on on today's call but yeah thrilled to be here with you all and uh you know i'm looking forward to everyone's perspective yeah we had alexander um earlier on the in the afternoon so uh good to get another dose of axi and uh yeah it'd be interesting you guys i'm sorry sorry you're stuck with me he's smarter than i am sorry sorry you guys you got me on this one but i guess it's sort of interesting we had um a bit craft on the previous panel it's been interesting to see some of these uh sort of early stage investors get very into blockchain in you know in quite a short period of time and certainly uh convoys one of those has been very active so good to have you um another we had one of my old bosses commanders now we've got the other one dragon how's it going hi hi hi guys um nice to meet you thanks for having me i'm dragosh one of the co-founders of the operator uh and yeah as you said we had screamed us earlier here i'm just gonna say a few words

about upgrade or maybe not ever before so we are tracking the centralized applications uh we have also launched like different products like on the portfolio tracking site so everybody can see like their nft kind of wallet and like what do they have in the wallets what's the worth and so on like beside tracking dapps uh and uh and writing tons of content about apps and research and so on um i've co-founded the operator with with screamontes back in 2018 uh before that we were working still in the gaming space so yeah we are super close to the to the gaming scene so um yeah i mean looking forward for the panel and uh yeah let's have a good time you may be not a formal early investor in axe infinity but i think you you were you were a you were a uh an early investor in actually nfts i think you put it that way definitely like uh evangelist for sure like since the early days good good okay uh moving on uh mark let's just go

with you can you explain a little bit about what you do at uh friday spelt in a confusing way to make you look that it's that's how you say it you probably like it's ai at the end because it's actually an artificial intelligence-based solution right so it's a voice assistant for gamers uh we started uh creating audio guides for games that really help gamers like you know overcome challenges and all that uh i also play x infinity so i wanted to kind of join up on the bandwagon uh we're also running a guild uh there so it's it's uh it's a lot of fun uh being engaged with the game but on the on the startup side so what we've been up to with friday is audio guys first then we went on to accessibility so now we are making games more inclusive by providing voice control over games and just more recently we started working with streamers dropping like these audio guides in the form of nfts so basically uh they run campaigns and whenever you as a gamer find you know one of the scenes that they you know play through in their own gameplay and you take a screenshot and they

recognize the screenshot it's like fitting then you get an audio guide and ft like some stuff that the streamer said about that exact scene that exact challenge that exact boss for example um in that game uh it's kind of like similar to eternal gg right so uh the guy's interest rates from from marketing coinbase uh but they do streams we do we only do audio so we kind of like clubhouse there uh but yeah sorry it was might have been longer but uh thank you for having me here you know very very good it's just a good example there that nfts aren't aren't you know aren't just simple pixel images aren't even sort of game assets they can be it's quite obviously a massive broad range of what an nfc can actually be and we probably don't don't discuss the range of what nfcs can be um as much as we should um and and and finally we have uh pascal can you explain what you do at wonder hey hey everyone so uh i'm pascal leblanc quite an early adopter in bitcoin uh 2011 and this really got me you know a tech crush and uh led me to a build and sell three businesses in the space so uh mining software run exchange and uh more recently in may uh wonder gaming i

acquired my uh nft engine company so now i'm ahead of nft there wonder gaming is a publicly listed company here in canada that focuses on increasing gamers engagement so basically connecting uh media brands uh media uh influencer networks uh with the gaming uh crowd uh and one of the you know good conversions when it comes to these new uh technological advances is of course nft so uh we're kind of uh we we're running that uh that engine for a non-crypto native folks to uh be able to uh you know be part of the nft the exciting nft space cool good thanks for the introductions let's uh let's kind of kick straight in oh um that dragon so let's kind of kind of start with you i guess because you have a you know you spend a lot of time looking at the data um obviously this year has been a a you know even for the uh sort of crypto space fairly eye-opening sort of levels of growth you've seen from axi and splint lands and things like that i mean

do you think we've sort of reached sort of peak nft in terms of that sort of hype cycle or you know is are we uh is still left as sort of this sort of slightly not properly understood um kind of uh phenomenon have we got are we still ways to go yet um or or are we are we starting to get beyond the hype now or should we be expecting more hype as more sort of products and and brands get involved yeah that that's definitely a good question i think the because we are like here since 2018 and we've seen different waves like since then and that's also super easily visible in in the rankings if you look at like back two or three years ago uh we have different we had different waves uh with uh with gambling with high risk tabs and so on and so on and now uh recently we we have games uh at the start of the year we had just nfts and now we can see that on the operator like based on the visits and based on the traffic like most of users are super interested in games so that that's let's say the latest wave wave

that we've seen so um i think each time the wave is bigger and bigger so we can look at the data and each time like you see bigger volume you see more users joining the space and trying tabs and buying nfts and so on so uh i believe for now like we've seen a super high growth also with not just with games but with uh profile picture nfts and so on and everybody was like uh like formal let's let's buy some let's buy some profile pictures um i think probably some of them will be will will disappear in the next in the next not not two months or in the next next few months um and uh but but the projects that are superb uh that they have utility that they have a strong community and so on i'm sure they will still be here they'll innovate they'll bring bring new new things to the market um as we have seen in the past like you always have like a lot of new projects joining the space during the hype after that like you just have like maybe 20 of

those that are still building and still remaining for the next type um i'm not sure i can't say if that's done for now but i'm sure like next time if it's if it's going to end now it's going to be higher and it's going to be bigger and we'll see more people like it happen historically it's going to happen again i thought i was going to ask that actually and you've reminded me so maybe if anyone wants to jump in does anyone have nfts in there in their social feeds anyone is anyone is anyone doing that i i i have blanco's block party in mind so i'll fess up first anyone else want to want to confess what if they're using nfcs anyone i am i am using it um i don't know if it's a cheat or not so i got a i got a newton's ape um we're like transformed right so okay so i've joined this uh this like nft community club which is i don't know if i'm supposed to like say it out loud here anyway what they do is they have like this common fund where we invest together in nfts right so like blue chip and fft so we like come together so now

we have a leaders fund thing where we own like three types of nfts we have a reference nft a cool cat and and we just recently purchased one of the mutant apes and now i use that even though i only own fraction of it i feel like i could use it so it's like i'm there so i'm like kind of like throwing it out there it's like i don't like or own it per se but i have access to it which is like for me it's similar and just wanna kind of like wrap the whole thing no but that's that's sort of interesting i mean that that is i think when we first looked at the technicals all the aspects of nfc's no one thought that this was going to be going to be a thing and no one thought you were going to have these terrible moral choices about whether you could you could ever have a mutant that you sort of sort of partially own um but i think it's sort of fascinating that that these are that sort of activity is not anything technical you know in in owning it in the energy being out there but it's sort of the what they uh you know what people build around it what the community builds around it and it's sort of very interesting now that if you know probably the worst thing you can do in the crypto world is to have a have have

a nft in your twitter profile that you don't actually own because that would be seen as something called sacrilegious wouldn't they sorry anyone else using uh using nfts in in their social uh feeds i have a custom profile but it contains an axi as well so okay okay yeah do you own the axidos do you own the axiom yes i do that's okay then right um so um i mean pascal i guess i'm guessing could be wrong but i'm guessing you know where you are is you're sort of look you're dealing with companies that sort of want to get into the hot areas hot air is now nfts they probably necessarily don't have a great background knowledge into what these things are but they're sort of wanting to get in there what what are those sort of um [Music] sort of uh conversations you have about you know what they what they should be doing compared to what they probably think they could be doing and how do you sort of balance that because because i guess we're starting to see with around the hype sort of nfc

projects that are clearly should never have been sort of created and sort of been just going onto the market because they can and no one cares less it's a bit embarrassing for everyone so how do you sort of bring make make sure brands are doing the right thing with nfcs so what's interesting is uh a lot of the nft projects right now they they lean their value creation uh on on scarcity and a lot of the crowds that they aim at are you know uh crypto native folks that are used to uh uh you know trading some cryptos owning some cryptos and you know they've had somewhat of a good ride this year in terms of crypto profits to kind of uh you know reinvest in the space but some other figures uh when we're is picturing big brands or big uh big known figures such as john cena that released an ftc a first nft series and kind of did a postmortem of it and saying that you know it wasn't that much of a success for many reasons uh these figures they have different crowds that they appeal to and uh most

of them won't be crypto native right so it won't be kind of those crypto gains uh flowing into so you need other i would say value creation pillars on that stool to make it you know less wobbly uh to make your campaign more success and you need to kind of uh uh reduce as much as possible that crypto learning curves just the fact you know that you're owning uh uh that you have to set up a wallet and then sometimes you know a good example of that is the mlb if they've released an nft series on wax chain but in order to get the watch they need to get by bitcoin then get them in ether then swap them in wax and then buy your nft so it becomes quite a hurdle to these uh i would say you know 40 plus years old people that are you know baseball fan collectors uh but you know it's just not accessible for them so uh one one of the angles that we that we kind of get some success with commercially is that we bring on to uh that kind of baseline uh fiat gateway for acquiring buying selling uh you know

with credit cards with wires uh and also the uh a turnkey kind of custody solution so their nft could be uh you know uh of the of the shelf can be in a crypto insured crypto custodian so that's kind of valuable and the more you think of it let's say you buy a piece of art if you look at it like you know the old way uh you buy a piece of art and you'd want it you want your mona lisa to be you know uh insured right so if if you're the only one having the keys it's kind of a huge risk and a little bit counterproductive for uh you know digital valuables so those are like two i would say uh factors that really move the needle for these uh bigger brands that you know they know they have non-crypto native crowds yeah yeah good point i think insurance is something just in general in blockchain that's gonna gonna get a lot more um uh kind of uh important this is a value where these sort of things goes up i'm gonna sort of take a question that we've got in the q a so if people who are watching uh have questions please put them in but i'm gonna go to

you jason so um obviously you're not a game developer but i'm sure you see thousands of decks a year from game developers and i'm i'm sure as the year has gone on you've seen sort of clear examples of h here's a deck for a game i want to make and here's the last page about nfcs and that should be the last two pages or something like that so um so the question is you know obviously it's always best to have nfts think about nfcs and intuitive from the beginning but if you know game developers are sort of into sort of i don't know prototyping or some sort of production you know is it is it just a terrible thing to just just sort of shoehorn nfcs in there at the current time you know is that just going to be like a disaster for everyone or you know as an investor could there be ways in which you would sort of go well actually that's not you know obviously you've started this game a year ago but nfcs are a big thing people like them it's a good engagement mechanic yeah we could invest in a game that's not being ground up nft sort of created yeah so i think if i'm understanding your question correctly you know if you're looking at you know nft adoption

in existing titles like have we seen that be successful versus you know you know let's say like nft slash crypto native games building from the ground up i would say that you know generally speaking uh 90 plus percent of the projects i look at that are using nfps are using it sort of as a guide for fundraising um and you know that is something that i am vehemently against right you know what what a lot of the gaming community is having to reconcile at this point is that you know when you opened your yourself up to you know speculators which is really what most people own mfts are they're speculators they're not actually buying that product because they enjoy it they're speculating on it um that opens up your economy to a lot of things and those are things that traditionally you know normal game studios called normal legacy game studios or traditional game studios whatever turn you want to use haven't had to deal with at the same extent and so to me generally speaking uh when i look at you

know people trying to cram nfcs in i ask just a very simple question you know what's the primary goal um usually uh if they're dancing around and not giving a clear answer it is fundraising and therefore i would say don't do that that's kind of a cheap mechanic it's going to piss off your community down the road but option two if they say tell me and these are the ones that i get excited about if they say hey look we think this is a community membership kind of like a country club membership into our game it opens and unlocks portals for us to do things new experiences that you know historically weren't possible um and you can transfer that ownership to other players on your own velocity uh in old volition that is something i'm interested in um and that's what i get excited about but truthfully i haven't seen a lot of existing games do it well um i think there's so few doing it well um the vast majority of them out there um you know you're talking about seeing thousands i've seen 150 plato in studios in the last 30 days um it's a it's a massive cache grab it's

also a lot of developers kind of coming in that didn't find success in other genres like mobile um or sorry other platforms like mobile or console or pc and they're like oh this we're gonna find success here um and by the way i forget on the panel who said it like you know most of these games are are being built for kind of like crypto natives uh that's now where i'm not interested in crypto natives i'm interested in gamers you know the population of gamers dwarfs crypto natives about you know thousand hundred thousand x right like you know and that's that's something like we're half the planet um so anyways that's uh probably a more bearish and hotter take than you're expecting on this panel from someone who is finding you know i'm extremely keen on this but i think we're at a really crucial point in gaming right now a lot of people are making a lot of funny mistakes and you're going to piss off a lot of players and so i'm interested to see the 2022 backlash of the 2021 nfc hype cycle um for games yeah i mean even if i can add something yeah go for it if i can

jump in on the on jason uh this point here also one thing that uh you know i've researched and i found interesting is different game genres will have you know the uh different level of potential uh when it comes to adding nfps uh you know like mmos rpg like games that within the game you trade within players they they'll have you know better impact than let's let's think of a you know single-player game you know a kind of their witcher type of game uh so it depends on the genre they'll have the different impacts and i would i would say that you know that that would be kind of a baseline reference to kind of rate the uh the genre and how they're impacted and you know in in just kind of making a first screening for companies that are trying to nfp watch their fundraising that's like where i would start and even i'd publish that on my website they're able to see it um india i guess having said uh not uh

not legal advice give a come to you not some legal advice but some legal opinion i mean uh in in general terms in the blockchain you know when it comes to sort of one of the big debates you know continues to be and has been sort of sort of security tokens and sort of stuff when it comes to nfts are you know are there any sort of things that people you know game developers or who are interested in doing this sort of stuff should be aware of are there obvious you know broad brush things that you think people are maybe overlooking or you know even in terms of uk law yeah where do we stand on nfc are they just digital items or are they some more archaic sort of thing yeah definitely so full disclosure um obviously i'll only be speaking from a uk perspective and this is my own kind of personal opinion rather than any legal advice but from what i understand there's definitely some things that you should be keeping in mind from a legal perspective so nfts they're not specifically regulated in the uk all of the advice at the moment is around crypto assets generally which means

there's loads of uncertainty and whether or not and if any nfts can be caught by any kind of regulations depends on the characteristics or features of that token and the activities it performs but broadly i would say there's probably three main risks for nfts the first one being nfts are you saying being seen as securities tokens and falling into financial services or anti-money launching regulation because you know nfts they're they're so subjective in their value there's lots of room for anonymity so there's massive room for trade-based money laundering big likelihood it's going to be caught by aml regulations and in terms of financial services if an nft is seen as a like a regulated investment like a share or derivative it's going to be subject to licensing requirements um the second legal issue i'd say probably is data protection so lots of jurisdictions grant individuals rights over their data so you can request that your personal data is removed or the to rectify any

inaccuracies in your personal data and say you've got an nft that contains someone else's personal data like it's their their name or their image and they request that you know it's taken down or deleted or corrected but if it's on the blockchain and the blockchains are mutable then that's not possible so there's lots of potential data protection issues with nfts and i guess the third and probably one of the most important things i think is intellectual property issues i think um from what i've seen people aren't really aware of what they're purchasing when they purchase nfts and it obviously it varies from from token to token but you'll expect when you're paying 69 million dollars for people's nft that you get the right to distribute it to copy it to profit from its resale but that's not always the case and usually unless it's expressly assigned you don't get the copyright and stuff and i think people don't realize that all they get is you know sometimes it's just a personal use to look at something or you know make it your avatar on social media you don't get to

control what other people can and can't do with those nfts so those would be the three or four main legal points to consider not getting caught by financial regulations not getting caught by data protection and knowing what you own when you're buying an nft i guess as you point out the the the range of nfcs can be so different from a crypto punk which is basically like a static image i mean probably probably not going to get too caught up in with legal issues that to something that could be you know a moving image that changes over time and reveals new data and has a security has some sort of dividend mechanic built into it you can imagine some people come up with very sophisticated sort of sort of things and there's a yeah we call we call them all nfcs but they're very different sort of um digital um kind of assets uh i mean mark with your sort of stuff again that's a different sort of asset isn't it i mean um you that's being used i guess as a sort of a community engagement um directly community engagement sort of a

asset obviously it's on a blockchain so it must have some sort of value attached to it and the community might start valuing these more but you know i don't know what stage you are in your project but you know have you started to see some of them becoming more valuable in terms of you know i don't know you know kind of crypto value or are they are they really just used as a very sort of utility um sort of a kind of reward yeah that's an interesting question and so as a good startup you're obviously iterating so we're kind of like going through like different versions of the whole thing okay uh we even like we have started adding uh like rarity types or like rarities to to all the like guys right so like only the first couple other people would get like the rare ones that's like maybe like a longer audio file or something that's like like first like we can even like further personalize it so everything is like very interesting in that space where we're building this right now um and then we also wanted to do like you know maybe everybody gets one but it does it like destroys the value on the side of

the streamer obviously it makes them money right so it's like a new revenue source for them to kind of like oh i'm you know doing some streams anyway so i just leave a couple tips and then you know give it to these guys they're gonna like uh an ft it uh tokenize it and then they're just gonna like do theirs you know other people can listen to it so uh what i feel like uh the scarcity aspect is definitely something that makes at least our users move uh for for this to get you know like the audio files of these streamers because it's like you know they have this celebrity effect like i really want to own some of the tips that this guy says right so even though you find the same kind of tips or like you can't really say a lot of like magical things or like different things about like how to defeat bosses it's it's not you know it's like you can read about those but we kind of like wanted to see if you know like if a streamer says it if it's like kind of like maybe even on the personal side like their experience that's being captured and yeah do you want to like go and hunt that down into like a treasure hunt format where you're like okay so i'm going to take the screenshot here and i'm going to get it as an nft and then you know like i can start this other people in the marketplace because

they might want to own it so we are at a very early stage so some of the things that i've just said we are kind of like building right now uh but uh from like already be the testers that we like run this by that was the that was the the feedback that we got i guess this all plays into the the moment we still sort of see nfts like maybe maybe it's me see these things there's very much just a lot of static images or communities are created around them they go for very expensive sort of monetary value but actually you know maybe thinking about the nft hype we're kind of looking too high up here and we should be looking much wider and the fact that sort of nfts become you know just an engagement mechanic for the entire user-generated content community which is you know increasingly big but effectively you know anyone could become a creator anyone can kind of create an nfc at the moment it's expensive with minting and stuff but but you know do you think we should be looking much more um broadly about how nfts are something not that everyone can own but everyone can create i mean dragons you're a creative some sort of

chat music about these things i mean how do you see that sort of nfc economy uh kind of user generated kind of thing not just in games but how do you see that playing do you think that's something we'll all be doing like like our children will do artwork and it'll be an nft and we'll send it to grandma or something like that yeah definitely i mean uh i think gaming and if these are like the they're like super obvious and it's they make sense like by default uh like you don't need to think too much to kind of understand uh the concept um but yeah i mean anything can be can be an fd file and like exactly what what mark explained earlier like you can you can use it and then you can kind of find super interesting use cases in in creating nfds from from different from different i mean it doesn't like we can see like it's not necessarily gaming and i'm kind of going a bit away but we can see like uni swap is and if you find like liquidity positions and that's like a super nice concept again on how and if this could be used we can see ethereum

name service like you can get domains uh as as nfts and and they're like so many so many other use cases uh and kind of looking looking from the creative perspective definitely i mean as you said at the moment on ethereum it's super expensive to create something but if we look at on openc because they have the option of creating those uh gasless nfts i mean they're not really minted on the blockchain but you just have them um on the platform and if someone literally like buys that then it's actually minted on the blockchain uh like you can see that people are just minting like maybe their drawings maybe their paintings like anybody can create an nfv super easily uh and with platforms like polygon or like even wax where like it's super cheap to to uh to maintain if these i think it's gonna become like similarly to going on instagram and posting an image or like like a tic toc like you could do that with nfds i mean why not and i uh i i really think that that's going to be the case and imagine like a

instagram platform like similar to instagram where anything can be an nft and anybody can build a platform that can support those nfts like it like the possibilities are endless when the content is created as an nft i guess the interesting thing there is we kind of assume that that um when these things were created there would be any transaction and the percentage would go back to the creator which is generally the case in the current situation and then then you can kind of see people you can kind of get that whole blockchain thing where you know it may not be famous at the time but the the first the first instagram from some person who 10 years down the line or about instagram but who has 100 million followers that sort of rarity things what kicks back and then it all sort of feeds in um a slightly different question for you actually um jason i'm sorry gonna kind of pigeon pitting you with the kind of a pigeon hole you with the vc thing you know if you're seeing i'm sure you are still seeing decks and stuff investment opportunities that don't involve blockchain because we don't all live in the crazy blockchain world but you know do you think at some point you know it becomes increasingly difficult for

startups in the game space who are not at least thinking about these things um to sort of get funded because i mean it seems like at the moment we have a massive rush of venture money towards blockchain obviously it's so rare and we've had dapper and other things sort of coming up um is is it you know is this is that just the way it's going to be and everyone's gonna have to have a blockchain slide even if you laugh at it and go no yeah no i think i think that you've seen you know this time and time again right like you know seven eight years ago was anything with the word artificial intelligence on it everyone got us super excited about it um you know a couple years back there was like the ugc craze like anything user generated content like anything got funded under the sun i think there was a blockchain hype cycle as well we've gone through winter and now we're back um and so like generally my advice to founders is don't don't chase terms or don't chase terminologies uh you know there's some some investors

posting on you know on twitter hey you know if you have a crypto metaverse in social gaming i'll fund you right now right like that kind of stuff is gonna exist no matter what like everyone's excited about the upside um it's also hard to ignore numbers like we've seen with you know the total trading volume of nfts or the last couple months like any opportunistic investor which you know i am one of them and i'm sure that everyone on this call is personally as well look at those things you can't ignore them right with that said i think just to simplify your life uh get down to a a core value prop of why you're doing something for your community right like you really truly believe that uh deploying nfts in your in your game is gonna enhance you know player value enhanced player retention enhanced player you know i don't know community buy-in do it if you don't think it will don't do it right um i think we're going to get into a spot where you know the players are renegotiating the

contract between studios right now and i think blockchain technology is fueling a lot of that renegotiation which is interesting so hopefully that doesn't answer your question but you know if you're not looking at blockchain don't worry you know there's still three billion gamers and the vast majority of them have nothing to do with blockchain gaming right now but don't worry about it you're okay yeah can i add something yeah yeah so i i really feel like location is saying and like many good game gameplay designers and i just can't find like any like courses or anyone who's like who i can you know say it about like oh you're you're really good at this right so i think even the guys that actually included and grappling if i won't they just figured out as they were going and as they were doing it right so but if you think about it like now that you know like all the slp burnings and everything that they are seeing they are constantly constantly adjusting the economy and i just feel like there has to be a person

maybe in the future and you know even working with some of the next like blockchain gaming startups or companies whose specific job is to design the economy and and i feel like that's gonna be gonna be a new kind of job that that's just gonna pop up and a lot of people are gonna wanna do it because i think it's a lot of fun because obviously we looked at the economy aspect of whatever um even though it's like user generated and we were like okay so it's up to the streamer how much money they want to sell it for etc but it's just you know like how do you burn it is it deflationary like how much is this gonna cost and that then you know like when people go to exchanges and they exchange it to ethan what's that going to look like so i think there's uh there is this aspect that's kind of like missing from a lot of startups at least developers that i've spoke to spoken to about like you really really got to understand the economy man like this is not gonna work without that it's it's it's you gotta do it it's not code it's also coding of course and a lot of developers kind of like hating for this but the economy right now is super important in those games and and that's that's what i feel like it has to be a

focus and in some startups in order to get funded in order to like actually build like a successful game that's based on nfts marx mark's totally right game economy is everything right you know and it comes to looking at you know how you're going to deploy these things and not totally shower and ruin your economy like introducing these variables has made it immensely more complex right and you know this is one of my favorite things about the axi team and why we chose back them was they're very open with their community they're saying hey look we're figuring this out you know step a step b we're adjust as we go and i think that type of transparency resonates really well with their community um you know something that's uh totally slightly slight tangent to this topic uh john is i'm actually curious to see what the other panelists think about this uh which is something that our internal office is kicking around quite a bit is we're seeing a negotiation of players expecting more openness not only from games that they're playing but from their actual economies and if you're seeing the kind of underlines what's

going on with china right now we're finding it very fascinating to see that you know they they keep shutting down and closing and trying to limit their player base and what they can do you know from time spent in games to you know what you can do with your assets in games um just curiously everyone's thoughts on this panel like we know do you think that games and nfts are leading the charge of expecting player bases to not only expect more from their games companies but also their actual national sovereign you know sovereignty they're under right um because i'll tell you i do right and i think that nfc is a is a nightmare to the ccp uh and you know personally i'm a huge fan of that i think you know closed economies always lose um so anyway i would love to throw that that that bomb into this question but i think it's really really topical right now given what we're seeing happen globally if anyone wants to jump in i'm happy to jump in there jumping in there that's pretty interesting um uh

especially your use case of china i spent a good amount of time living there and it definitely shaped born i mean just like watching the tv and you know you'd be talking someone on the news would be talking about tibet and everything just go completely blank and then yeah i think me and many other gamers in the world transparency is key and that's one of the the usbs of blockchain technology isn't it i think you know open economies especially in games this is definitely something that's going to draw people in yeah and i guess it's interesting just even on your sort of um narrower point i mean i do think there is a big sort of geopolitical kind of thing going on with blockchain there will be another kind of conference i suppose but but i think i think what we're seeing with blockchain games you know even if the eas and the activisions aren't going to you know be sort of be kind of publishing nfc games you know next week you know you do kind of kind

of feel that sort of cultural sort of change is clearly gonna impact people so people are gonna i mean that's the interesting kind of a question i suppose where if gamers start to go well i want to own things in my game i don't really care about the blockchain but i want to own things in my game and there's other companies even if they could run in their own private blockchains maybe that's what they have to do it's not not as good as a theorem to us in that sort of space but but the the users will in fact demand that and they want those experiences and if you can't give them well i've you know probably harder to get people off of fifa into so rare but but this is the this is the opportunity for some quite big disruption isn't it i think those communities communities start moving john can i go for it yeah can i add something uh on that question like in my point of view what's uh what's gonna have like the the most impact on the short term like the next kind of a milestone coming for the for the gaming in nft space is how gamers uh when they go and buy stuff how they're gonna look at that purchase because you know right now they go in and they buy these uh you

know these points uh and you know the monetization method right now is kind of these are these skins like these in-game aesthetics so they go in and they buy uh 50 bucks of v-bucks in fortnite and from these v bucks they don't expect to never see the color of that money again and you know they're going to have skins these skins they're going to be somewhat disposable because the relevance window of that particular skin is you know shrinking everlasting shrinking but with nfps what happens is they can look at this and more as a a purchasing in that an asset instead of you know disposing of that money and i think this is going to be a good driver for having these micro transactions be a little less micro you know a average skin is about three dollars usd in fortnight and and uh and uh and league of legends the two number one games so maybe with with that new what i see kind of changing that new gear coming in the machine is that you're gonna be able to expect some you

know uh resale value out of what you're putting and you're more comfortable in buying you know a 100 piece of something if you know it you know someone would buy it for uh 70 bucks because that kind of a disposable uh piece is only 30 and something interesting that we've seen like the first step in that uh is it like the grandfather of that concept is a a friend of mine that started a montreal based company called opskins and it will allow you to resell your in-game aesthetics in counter-strike through the uh the now closed team store exchange uh so that's kind of an interesting you know view in what the future could be uh and i think that's going to be the federal piece in kind of expanding the the the market size of gaming uh it won't be necessarily because there's more gamers are going to be there is that new mechanism will increase the average spent of a gamer uh because of that resale potential i think we're definitely gonna move we're gonna move from sort of uh say sort of spending um how much money

splitting games to how much money is traded in game economies which is quite a sort of fundamental change but uh we are coming to the end we're actually a bit over time anyways but i'll sort of ask all sort of a closing question i mean we started off with you know beyond the hype i mean where do we think um if you could be as soon as possible where do we think nfgs are going let's put a time frame on it we're coming well we've got three months at the end of the year i mean how do you think that's going to progress on on the game side are we are we going to have this this kind of uh i don't know this sort of adoption or everyone's going yeah nfts bring them on are we going to have kickback you know what's the what's the balance between the two um dragons do you want to take us take us over your view the next sort of three months or so yeah i think i mean we've we've already seen like some uh a slowdown in the past weeks i would say um i think it's also like super uh correlated with the uh with the market in general we we have seen like a lot of changes in the like uh crypto prices and so on and i think yeah even if nfds i

think they're like a bit more i mean that's one of the reasons like crypto punks i guess they're like super popular these days and i i really see them as well like as some sort of store of value and that's yeah i mean people have different opinions but um we we can definitely look at the nfts are like they're a bit less uh affected by the the volatility and so on but still uh people are not necessarily that they do not want to buy nfts more but i'm sure they are thinking a bit more when they take decisions uh so yeah i would say it's super closely related to what's gonna happen with the crypto market in general um i think the interest is still high and again we can see that in our traffic as well and so on but people are thinking they are thinking a bit more uh we had this huge influx of nfd projects people were spending left and right and now uh i guess yeah uh i can see a bit of um people are kind of yeah thinking twice before they invest in something so yeah i would say a bit of slow down but it all depends on also how the market

goes i guess you do kind of find out when everyone's flipping it sort of reaches up reaches a bubble bubble pops and then obviously it takes momentum at the market um mark how do you see the next uh three months or so absolutely um so i just recently read a book about like blockchain and where they kind of like figured out like how do you like assess a trend or innovation and what they said is like you compare the current technology to where it's going or what you think is innovative right and you turn it around so like would you consider like if you already had electric cars everywhere would you consider switching to like fossil fuel cars but that that destroyed the planet and stuff like that so obviously there would be a step back right so they did it with like you know bitcoin and blockchain where if you had decentralized everything like would you move to a system there you give your money to banks and then they just like spread out all these kind of things and from my perspective is like if you ever play the game that lets you own your you know items in it and you know you spend money and you have this this way of like trading it afterwards etc you would never go back to a game that's like oh let me just spend ten thousand dollars on this and never see that again

that's you know chocolate chip so just just point it out so i feel like in the next three months there is a lot of awareness going on right now and people like you know like spending on left and right uh i can see that as well uh and that's going to be like you know more like understanding do i really want to invest in this project can i just check out the economy of this of this game for example like oh do they is it deflationary do they also spend money is it dependent on new user growth or do they have like retention mechanics coming in so a lot of people are getting like aware of this so they might not span as much as quick uh so there's gonna be a slowdown from my perspective as well especially if looking at the success baxi um but uh but i'm super i'm bullish on this and i just really hope that this is gonna happen um for everyone good india do you wanna give us your view or any any uh do you think any legal stuff's gonna change probably not in the next three months or so i suppose um no i think the law commission is doing a consultation at the moment and i think it's due to come out at the end of the year so maybe the next couple of months yeah keep your eyes peeled if anyone else is interested in that probably not

um but yeah from this the data i saw i think and it's just again one article saying that the bubble popped around may and mainly the transactions concerning nfts now it's not so much about digital art but more about nfts in the digital metaverse so that's probably where i would see nfts going not in mid the next three to six months but probably the next you know 10 to 20 years towards building that ready player one style digital metaverse and that's probably where i would invest my money if i was looking to invest not investment advice not legal advice you're breaking all the rules now oh god don't don't look to me for investment advice you're terrible at it a good point we got through the pedal without mentioning the metaverse so that was a good you mentioned today i don't think if again if something people if you're interested you know check out the sandbox which is i think no it's not a metaverse but it's the first sort of level of an open sort of uh blockchain uh sort of landscape web where i think interesting stuff's gonna get built so that's sort of a um jason

how do you see it playing out with your investment hat on yeah um [Music] i would say over the next couple months uh you're gonna see the pressure build on these projects that are tracing you know trading north of a billion dollars on nothing more than a trailer yeah i think that is crazy like absolutely insane like the fact that that exists is insane to me um i hope that that doesn't exist because a lot of people are going to lose money on that um and so you know what i think is going to happen i think the market will correct um i think that you will start to see the ones that actually launch real games um based off of this hype and then the revenue numbers won't quite match that what they're trading at today and then they'll come back down to and it's it's sort of unfair to those teams to be honest because it's like you know you know are you supposed to build a game that is worth five billion dollars upon launch i mean that's that's not fair to anybody right like i couldn't do that um so i think you're gonna see prices come down um and trade at something relative to a

normal revenue multiple eventually but i mean i'm really excited for the winners there's gonna be a few winners here and there's been a lot of losers um that'd be my kind of like just in mobile like right when we launched mobile games right it's just me the same thing is it sort of i guess everyone inherently or explicitly say we're the next taxes or everyone's getting priced on there's gonna be a hundred next taxes and clearly there's only gonna be like two sort of equivalent so yeah yeah good good good uh cautious advice there thank you uh and pascal do you wanna close us out with uh with your view yeah for sure uh my view is gonna be you know as a crypto expert more uh crypto with the linda on crypto but also you know somewhat preaching for uh for uh you know the groundwork we're doing at wonder so uh you know currently the way the market is woven and you know all these values they come up uh it's driven by people that you know ramp through bitcoin and ether and kind of go and buy these nfds and currently you know it's out of phase and if we

compare to like that ico bubble that pop same thing it was a phase that people were you know had a lot of disposable crypto gains to put in uh and that was only due because bitcoin was rising because when bitcoin rise like every other crypto so it's just it's just following right now dragon said it's you know it's it's a it's more quiet the market that's because uh bitcoins trading sideways so the fact that you know the only way to get to that market and all these guys they have these crypto gains or crypto losses uh due to bitcoin moving i think you know it's possible there might be a slight correction or a long kind of a longer period of bitcoin kind of being stable and that will kind of trigger once again that that bubble to pop and that's short the short circuit to kind of making nft more robust is to to bring a direct bridge to uh fiat uh two nfts and from the fiat side what's interesting is with the pandemic all these talks they've been kind of off the

roof every real estate investment they've been off the roofs you can you know have mortgages at almost zero so the fiat disposable gains uh are there but there's no kind of a uh you know uh there's no uh plumbing that taps in nft yet uh without being you know a crypto enthusiast so that's something that you know we're we're putting up front and i believe that's kind of uh we'll we'll you know make that that second more solid wave uh between the winners and the losers as jason i lined it so that's that's how i see it it's a lot you know financial and kind of macro and uh right now yeah i think i still think uh bitcoin is skiing even in driving the uh nfd enthusiasm cool good lovely well thank you very much to all our panelists for all their opinions um and uh non non advice in particular uh thanks uh india jason dragos mark and uh pascal obviously find them all on linkedin and twitter and continue the conversation