Panel: Shifting the Balance Will NFTs Disrupt How Games, Brands & Creative Media Interact?

foreign [Music] [Applause] we come to the final uh the final panel of the day or the of the day of the final panel of this uh of this track so uh we have some uh some well-known uh people for the conference uh so uh Kelly do you want to come up comparing good to see Alex I think you've another year chalked off there Alex is good uh Roman and Stefan as well who are on the panel three that is interest Ed in nft and

All That Jazz I'm Kelly Farrow your friendly neighborhood dream destroyer and I'm here with a stellar panel of fantastic dudes who are now going to introduce themselves our um actual discussion is going to be a really revolving solely around nfts so sometimes we're going to get a bit technical we're also going to talk about game development but let's kick off anyway in the spirit of uh blind date with Cilla Black I want you to all introduce yourself tell us who you are where you come from and what you do uh I'm Alex I've been in crypto for 10 years and games for about 30 years um I'm probably most well-known because I did the third highest third highest nft sale last year um but I also do investing around the space so everything from ethereum to seed investor in action infinity and now in AI projects actually like stability.ai uh hi I'm Roman my I'm the gamer

representative I guess here and the game developer so my original background was actually uh being a banker and a strategy consultant and I ended up playing a lot of mobile games spent far too much money on them and ended up having a massive following of people and world number one clan which I was leading for many years and as a result they became friends as a result we thought we were stupid of spending so much money on games as a result we decided we were much more advanced and clever if we built a gaming business we tried to build a gaming business long before crypto the gaming business developed then we learned that not everything is about your game because uh I guess our back end was shut down by a big big company and yeah we then luckily found a few amazing co-founders to try again the co-founders built a small Mobile gaming company called plarion before which has sold for quite a bit of money and they loved what we proposed to do

it's an action RPG with elements of Dungeon Keeper so you don't just kill monsters but you can actually bring your own monsters and content to the world but I can't say more about that and but it's definitely going to be cool and it's VC funded so you'll see more soon about it hi I'm Stefan Collins I'm in crypto since 2017. I'm head of marketing and community at ventley so one of the sponsors of this nft track and venli actually provides all tools game developers need to go to blockchain so you can create real cool experiences and we help you with going to blockchain and all the nft stuff and technical things but we will get into that later in this panel I guess now we're talking about disruption in this space Creative Media sort of nfts generally and the role of destruct disruption because out of goods disruption often comes great Innovation

this past year we've seen an absolute destruction of nft is in fact to the point where people are rebranding nfts as digital Collectibles haha but what I want to get down to the Crux of to start with is you um Stefan because you're our kind of uh track sponsor anyway for this and I think it's important that we give like a little bit of voice to you what is your actual opinion about what's happened in the nft space and the web 3 space to a certain extent in The Wider Marketplace over the course of the past year yeah that's uh quite a good question to start with I guess or we all agree that the NFD technology is quite remarkable that we but we are not using it as we should be like we as insiders understand what an nft is but Outsiders that doesn't understand why we spend a lot of money on just a stupid gpec besides that and and I'm speaking about

21 there was a lot of of nft projects and games coming to the space but solely focusing on this my opinion on on selling out nfts and not on creating real experiences and games so um it put a little bit of bad reputation on on what gaming and web3 gaming is because yeah if you put the money in front rather than the experiences and suddenly bear Market hit it last year people were like 90 down in nft so they have not a lot of stuff to be enthusiastic about but I believe that when you as a game deliver nfts which adds value to your game and and and that that it's not about the monetary system but more about ownership and about the experiences that you will do yeah much better so I think it's it was way too much focus on nft flipping and that's why yeah sentiment went down

and of course if crypto is going down and the value is an ethereum and you have an ape that dropped 50 60 90 yeah that was the bad reputation for for the for the industry so I agree I think it was like mostly a load of old crap but I think we can all agree that nfts do have their place and uh I think that nfts have got a very strong use case inside game development which brings me to remain because what I want to know is why would game developers start to think about nft and web 3 as a sort of vehicle for developing games yeah I spent a lot of time discussing it with my fellow peers and there is uh many reasons why game developers went into nfts a lot of them don't apply today so um it used to be a shortcut to quick and easy funding in a world where Publishers want you to have games with kpis which are already stellar and when you

actually don't need the money anymore so this was this changed with let's say web3 one one and a half two years ago when they all jumped onto the bandwagon so I'm I'm taking these ones now out of the equation and looking at the ones who are still uh fighting the nft fight and fighting the web 3 fight and trying to change things and here again there is uh different camps so there's the camp of the ones who are essentially Unchained full unbelievers so the for them this is a new way of Freedom a new way of building games where essentially you just launch a little thing and then let other people complete it and build it into a massive or not so massive uh fun uh product and for them obviously the use case is very clear it's like an essential building block of what they are building you want nfts you want tokens and this is what allows people the freedom to build upon the system and then later monetize and pay each other it also works when the people are young or don't even have bank accounts so for

them the use case hey you give them something which is valuable so this is their way of money and currency without having access to popular money in currency so it makes a lot of sense for let's say this this group of people then there is the other group um the let's say the old them veteran developers who have made games before who know what Market Mass market products are and they they build just on top of it and use it as another monetization layer so and with that in mind then because nft the big year is 2022. I think a lot of people that are really interested in nfts or experience nfts for the first time probably actually did all right if they weren't buying some crappy old jpeg but for game development Alex let's look at the nft light a little bit deeper as being a bit more of a I don't know the interoperability nature of it that seems to be the thing that has been borne out of the nft over the course of the last few months and where and I know

remain start to talk about it it remains hard to talk about it but where do you think that the nft can take us from an interoperability perspective several years ago I can't remember what year was I did my first pound law talk here John you might know the year I don't even know um and uh it was about nfts but I don't think we had the term nft at the time what's been pretty close yeah um yeah okay we did just about half of the term then uh but I was writing and had a company from two years before uh talking about nfts and making nft projects but we just didn't call them nfts but I wrote a Blog uh on my medium which is citytuner.medium.com I think and you can go back to 2016 I think when I was writing about it and I talked about nfts under another name and I talked about essentially interoperability um but not in the way that people until recently have been talking about it and I know Susan did talk about it being nfc's being used across games nfts are a fantastic marketing tool for Brands and

I still think that's the big deal that's starting to be exploited by the likes of Nike because if you're making a game and you're trying to sell some nfts um you've got all the problems that we've seen like you where's the game uh when when did the price go up what happens if it goes down if you get a lot of angry people plus the game industry currently hate nfts in reality certainly a lot of journalists do and that has an effect on users and so on but if Brands release nfts if Nike release you know they've got obviously their own artifacts Adidas release nfts if they give nfts away when you buy the sneakers or the clothing or go to sports events and then those nfts have power within you know FIFA or whatever your sports game is or Call of Duty or anything else that's the future that I see it's not that games won't have nfcs because I do I do believe in them but I think Brands inter Brands making content and then doing deals sometimes license deals sometimes without permission for other game devs though the content that Brands produce that people own that will have use within game products and other social

media and so on and that's interoperability yeah I completely agree I think that the whole like idea of creating digital waste is as bad as creating waste I'm wearing like a really nice pair of Space Jam sneakers but I think you all remember the Space Jam website which is really cool and in and of itself now but actually it's technically digital ways because it was sitting on a server for 25 years that's not the idea of what it is that we want to do with nfts really we want to be able to pass things like over and move things around right I like digital waste I'm going to say why um because you don't know what waste is until you can look back so in the digital in the in the digital world we can afford to create a lot of stuff and then maybe only one percent of it is personally valid or has Financial value but we don't know what that one percent is going to be so in the physical that matters because we're making stuff we cause we're damaging the environment we're using things in the digital it really doesn't matter so much unless you're Balenciaga and then it doesn't really matter you're just leaving it on a server for the rest of time uh remain

talk to me about uh RPGs because they're quite a closed environment I've seen that Square Enix is starting to get on the sort of nft trained they're starting to look at blockchain as a bit more of a sensible infrastructure for them to be able to do the things they want to do if we come back down to the content itself um how are we going to be able to capture or use web3 structures and Transplant the nature of web3 and blockchain to open up the game a little bit more RPGs have one interesting thing that can create amazing Legends and super valuable things for users you can have people playing them for years and years and then having their precious little object I mean I personally was world number one in the game and I collected planets and these planets became really dear to me and I spent a fortune obtaining them and I would have wished to be able to show those planets to other people except for having them download a certain app and then showing

them off because that's my vanity and bragging thing so RPGs have that you spend a lot of time building something that you really like and it's precious to you and having the ability to basically show it off sharing it putting it out there that's where everybody knows it at least or at least a certain percentage that's where nfts can shine so the ownership on the bragging side of things especially in the RPG worlds and other things you don't need a big economy for that you just need people who's who become great get a great achievement and then I want to have more representation of that outside of the little gaming Cosmos that it's captured in so that's something to think about as I question what do you think about save gaming Publishers and companies moving into this space like I hate to use the term bullish please anyone punch me in the face for using that word but for being bullish in this space what what do you think about like these big Japanese who are famous at RPG by the

way and jrpgs just literally going into this space and saying would will take it thanks what do you think about it well I think they're they are very data driven so they will try it and if the data says it's great they will double down if the data says it's not great they will stop it instantly so um I wouldn't get too excited about it until they have done their first trials but on the other hand it has a lot of power in Collectibles right and digital Collectibles will be a thing and uh in that narrow use case not building big economies ecosystems I think there's a lot of chances it can succeed yeah I really like it and that brings me to venlee because I scratch my head about this when I was at Gamescom when I first met you guys and we were on a panel as well separately and I was interested as to the role at Valley Place why on Earth and this is a disruption question I suppose why on Earth would you go into a space where if you look around the room there's a lot of people here who probably don't

really want nfts inside gaming so I will venle take that really big step and disrupt that entire space and say thank you very much we'll take that uh our CEO of them gave a presentation like an hour ago and we strongly believe that like gaming will bring mainstream people towards raptree and back in the days they developed a lot of applications but they thought that was a big issue in user onboarding or I should say player onboarding in this space here so and that's why I think we could solve this by using like familiar web 2 experiences that people are used to use already and connected to web3 so what we do is actually helping game studios with the player onboarding because you can have a great game you can create a fantastic game but if you're not able or yeah Susan choose is choosing for metamask because she's targeting today more crypto Savvy people but if you create a game for and want to bring mainstream people in you

not focusing only on crypto people so that's why we create a very easy way of user onboarding player onboarding once you're on board it you're an actually less than 10 seconds you have an account and a wallet but I think as a game Studio you shouldn't talk about blockchain because blockchain and all the technology is under the hood and that's where we are we live under the hood we support game studios and at first bring players in and let player play your game and if they like your game and they think that the game you are creating is something they want to be involved they will create an account and when they create an account if you then have the power of creating an account and a wallet and all the assets that lived in your game which actually can live on a blockchain is already in a wallet and you do not don't need to educate them anymore that they need to transfer the NFC to a specific quality and connect all it to their account they should focus on the experience and playing the game and having fun and over time when the industry is more major and we educate them that they can maybe if they don't want to play the game anymore and they put a lot of time in it and

money they maybe can then sell the nft and that's why we have all the Solutions in place to support because we strongly believe that gaming is one of the main drivers to bring people in so yeah it's uh it's tough It's hard because we were at Gamescom last year and there were a lot of but criticism of game studios that I don't believe in nfts and nfts a scam and that is exactly what I explained there's a lot of grab projects money driven nft projects and there aren't a lot of oh there weren't a lot of cool games and 21 and now making a game takes a few years I believe that the new generation of F3 games which is coming soon and we see a developing will will change the narrative in the gaming space and I I think and next year or the year after when we are here again there will be a different sentiment about Webster gaming for sure on that subject what has been what in 2022 was kind of like the best web 3 nft game that you saw

I think it's personal but what I've failed and and I like the guys of cyber Kongs and just to explain they had like a cool nft project and to explain what I meant with what happened to the to the space they had a lot of owners and nft flippers were flipping their nft they released the game which is cool it's the first version of course and they're trying to get feedback but still people Dr the the floor prize of the nft dropped and then you see that it was not about the game it was about the money and I think we should get rid of it so I think the guys of cybercon do cool stuff and of course we all know sandbox and they are working on creative stuff and what the guys of alien world's doing and yeah I'm not bullish I'm bullish on Olivia yeah yeah I I yeah I think there are cool cool stuff going but cyberkunks did a cool job but sadly they were they released the version and like Yeah The Heart of the the nft dropping a space so

yeah and it can kill your game too so planning and and and Community is important but your community should be connected to the emotional part of the game and not about the flipping part and this is I have an example and maybe I I hope I do not offend people but I'm happy what happened yesterday Porsche released their uh nft project it's a big brand so they thought okay we're going to do 7 500 nfts and the Min price will be dot nine one one eat yeah it's 9 11 you know so but they didn't sell out less than 20 percent was sold out why because they used the techniques that a lot of scam projects used in 21 so it explains and it shows me that the industry is becoming more major and they're not going to fall in this strap of just buying an nft and maybe the nft is cool but the utility behind the nft is not what people are waiting for and they learned a lot so you need to be yeah we need to do more and better other and the space and bring a real value to

nft Holders if we want to introduce nft in the games they should have hired us for yeah that's true yeah send them a message now Alex Armstrong if you don't know is a bit of a legend in the games industry and what I want yeah what I want to know is if people are like approaching nft and web3 and blockchain gaming Etc from the for the first time what sort of kpis do they need to think about that I know what it is that you're going to say but for people that are relatively new to it what would you say I don't know what I'm going to say so I don't do kpis it's all too complicated for me um it's old school I want to go back to an arcade or you just put 10p in um if you're a game so if you're a game developer and you're looking at crypto and nfts um I think you have to start out and just ask yourself why and I don't mean that in a negative way I mean like it's got to be a positive response because if you've not got a positive response to that you're just looking for the money and the money is not there in the way it was before as we've just described there was some there definitely was some easy money there probably 12 months ago and 18 months ago that's not there anymore

so you have to ask yourself why before you do any kpi type stuff and then you've got to decide and I think Susan did a good job on this in in the last talk um who are your audience because if you're creating nfts probably but not definitely probably your audience is crypto people and then if it's crypto people then you've got to decide where are these crypto people and who's who actually has got money from those groups people who's going to be a positive audience to me and I've been telling people for years you're basically talking ethereum and maybe one or two other chains don't get tempted by people waving money at you going come to our chain we'll pay you to come on our chain because yeah because you've forgotten what the whole point of nfts is which is you've got this interoperable nature whether it's an interoperably includes having third-party marketplaces that can sell your content like open sea or anyone else that's still interoperability people creating apps like floor to let people look at what they own um and we'll see a lot more of that type of stuff in the future so in reality um you've also you've got to know where your audience is and Target them I'm not

saying you have to use ethereum or an ethereum related chain I'm saying if you're not on there you need a very very good reason to be not on there there are some ones that are worth thinking about so these things are really important that said you can look at a mainstream audience as well but typically I think if you're looking at a mainstream audience you you really have to be an existing brand and have a really really big following onto my Instagram and be you know I'm not saying you have to be as big as Reddit but Reddit have done a phenomenal job of their digital Collectibles because they're just avatars they're cheap they're easy to use there's no mention of nfts but you can essentially convert them to nfts so all these things matter do you have an audience are you going for a crypto audience which chain are you going to be on why are you doing it in the first place and frankly should you wait another year as things mature a lot of technology is maturing thanks to people like benly and so on over the next 12 months we're going to see solutions to a lot of these security issues and all sorts of other problems and usability issues so baby wait can I add something so we are blockchain agnostic and why because we indeed think

that's important we are under the hood and it shouldn't care at the end of the day on what chain the game is and what you do and I hope that from the technology point of view we can fix the problem and interoperability will support this and it's a big woo and probability it's a it's an expensive name today and it's not there yet but it will come this is why we help Studios they they choose maybe for one chain to start with but we help them with different chains we don't know what will be the next best chain for releasing games on blockchain and stuff so that's why we have the blockchain agnostic approach and also device agnostic we don't know mobile gaming platform web gaming all the stuff that this is what what we do and yeah that's what you mean the chain doesn't it doesn't matter for an nft project but for a game under the hood if you have the functionability and you want to do like quick minting in a game or you have Dynamic nfts then of course you need to choose a chain that supports this technology technology wise but at the end of the day yeah I think it's one important Point as well um which again is probably important for you guys and you obviously would have

decided made your decision if you're what platform is your game going to be on what platform you experience with if you're you know IOS and Android you need to understand you know apple and Google's rules for their stores or all the rules in the relevant territory you're going to sell in because there are rules around nfts they're not necessarily positive um if you're on console again Nintendo as far as I know I'm going near them Sony and Microsoft are more open-minded but on Console if you're on wants to go on Steam where we know that steam don't want to do them and epic will be more supportive in the future but there's all these complications about like where you're selling where you want your mainstream audience to be it's not easy to go and do an nft game there's all these decisions to make so these are all additional considerations to think about where again in one or two or three years time maybe Apple will support in like crypto wallets natively maybe they'll be more open to nfts I hope so because there's going to be so much pressure on them but for me it's another reason that you go in with caution and being really really sure about what you're doing I would just say in closing that an nft

is not going to save you a shitty game so work on your game first and then do the nfts after right so I'd love to take some questions from the audience has anybody got any questions for these Legends any questions John you must have like a million no pressure John come up with a question hello I was about to ask the restrictions on the App Store and Android as well you briefly mentioned on that but what do you see in the near future for the games already in the phase of development like is do you think that in other means of distribution channel is an option for the web tree and how should the game suggest approach on this uh my personal view is we need the like the nft and crypto markets to be rather more trustworthy we need wallets to be much easier and ideally embedded into phones which they can be from a technical point of view there's definitely pressure from investors and

large companies to do that um but I can actually understand I don't like it but I can understand the likes of valve pushing away crypto games not just for a reputational point of view but from a regulatory point of view because they don't quite know what's happening with those games people could be using tokens in weird ways we've seen lots of frauds so I think we we genuinely need probably two solid years of settling down and understanding how to do these things better uh before we're going to see platforms starting to embrace them it's going to be at least two years and and there's no in reality there's no scope certainly on on iOS and probably not on Android either for forgetting around these things through other distribution mechanisms but you can of course do browser-based games you can do stuff that your game works with through the web you can do you know down PC downloads all sorts yeah yeah and I also think if you have like a a web-based game where you have an account and and you have stuff in your wallet you can make spin-offs of the game you see like games or making spin-offs and you you log in with the

same social uh connect and you you use and the system knows what nfts you have and they unlock Special Forces and special tools and the mobile game itself but doing transactions and buying nfts within the mobile this is the next step and I follow agree that it will take some time to get to do and we follow up of course with all we can do it technology technology wise is not an issue at all but it's yeah regulation and you know crypto and yeah hi uh thanks for that um you spoke earlier about the use of nfts by Brands which I thought was an interesting concept say so take Nike as an example but if if you look at the world as it is today I suppose Knight could license its IP to produce in in-game skins and it could get multiple revenue streams as a result of that if

if you then take the nft example it would in effect be exchanging multiple revenue streams for a single Revenue Stream So presumably the the cost of that nft would be much higher so do you see the world evolving to a state where nfts are affordable and accessible by the majority of people or do you think that there'll be these highly valuable assets that are only accessible by by a minority the second question there's always going to be whale assets which I know is what you focus on there's always going to be whale assets there's a great to be honest I have no issue with that um and there's going to be lots of free and low-cost stuff so the first question it doesn't mean exchanging their licensing revenue streams they'll still do licensing revenue streams um but what it does is it's essentially it creates almost like a common platform that any application social games anything else can communicate with to see that you own Nike assets and Nike standard license terms will allow people to do certain things within reason but if you want to do more than that there's going to be a licensing deal so it creates a more open

ecosystem to be honest it's a bit of a marketing man's dream or marketing person's dream is um these are specifically for Alex and Roman one of which I know the answer to but uh can Alex talk a little bit about his project that he's working on which I think is super cool and is very nft based and I've just look at Roman's website which basically says nothing at all about what he's doing so I don't know if that's because he's not saying anything about what he's doing okay so if uh Roman might not want to answer the question about exactly what he's doing in more detail but uh if he would that would be fantastic and I think people will be interested in what Alex is doing with um nfts solcast yeah all of it yeah that's too much uh so one of my projects uh is an nft customization project which is basically looking at how nfts so far been very static things so people have tended to Mint five thousand ten thousand sold them and it's the then what problem I've got all these people how do I keep them happy how do I give these nfts utility what do we do

um so myself and a few other people from the game industry actually because we're all game industry people um wants to sort of create a more gamified way of allowing nfts to be more engaging and we just got a very simple route which is um quick allowing artists and Brands and game developers to create customizable nfts from the off the simple explanation for game developers is you we all uh create characters within our games we customize the the hats and the clothing and so on and we're starting to see this within nfts and people doing it with Doodles but it's in a very simple simple way so we're creating a platform called soulcast which allows any artist or brand to be able to create 2D or 3D content make it customizable sell the customizations over a long period of time but all those all that content as long as you wish it to be can be remixed with someone else's content so if you create Badges and skins or give away achievements to your audience then I could put those favorites on a skateboard that's been made by grander or furocious so so the achievements I get in my game are the thick as I've got in my game because

I've earned them by being a top player I can then use them on this other artwork or this other game where these other sneakers in the digital world and it's that kind of trying to create an open remixing environment that we sort of have in the physical world because you can customize all your stuff and put Badges and stuff on backpacks trying to create that in the in the digital world so that's kind of another way to do interoperability as well as add some longer to teach things yeah so I can't say much but we are building a Diablo like action RPG and everybody who played Diablo um was always wondering what's on the other side so we are building a game where you cannot just play and kill monsters in Dungeon but you can actually in a way become who you kill and Infuse their skills into yourself and on the other side you can actually own a dungeon and bring new creatures to life which other people can kill and used to evolve further and just a little bit food for thought because we all we all had the game industry head-on and um I come from the financial services industry originally

and um get out and if you think about it games they have all those virtual currencies already uh these guys in order to create Equity or whatever they need to do bank account verification bank account verification depository transaction system uh then you create a new option which is like rules and contracts and contracts and rules all replaceable by one nft in a smart contract so obviously they're working on that and they will come up with something to increase their fee income to 100 instead of 20 or 15 that I currently have once this happens there will be a huge overlap for other Industries just food and thought it's already happening in Switzerland okay so I think we've come to the end of the panel now I want to thank you all for participating with us in this I want to especially thank these guys have you got any like final closing statements before we go is there anything we need to look out for is there anything that you know remains already said is there anything else that we need to be sort of into or what are we not following apart

from my track this afternoon from two until 6 p.m no I just think if you if you're a game studio and you want to make your first maybe first baby steps into blockchain we have an SDK Alpha released so we are trying to onboard a few games to just to help them with so contact us and we're happy to explain how we can bring you and level up to blockchain gaming [Music] [Applause]