Session: NFT - The 3 Letter Bad Word - Chris Burkett, WAGMI Games

[Music] thank you [Music] so up next I would like to invite Chris Burkett from wagme games who's going to be talking about nft the three letter bad word so please Chris come to the stage all right well ladies and gentlemen I am so excited to share this with you does anyone want to take a guess what this is and you're going to be blown away by this when you find out when you find out what it is it's amazing it's incredible any any guesses this my dear friends is the wiring diagram of my freezer yes it is amazing the the the cold

amazing unbelievable ice cubes that my freezer makes is because of this right here it's awesome nothing not excited by that okay well let's let's try something else who wants to try to guess what this is anybody we have we have a hand go ahead this is the motherboard of a PlayStation 4. the reason your PlayStation 4 is as cool and as exciting and and thrilling as it is is because this piece of Hardware right here give a round of applause for the motherboard of a PlayStation 4 thank you very good I I think we've proved our point right why is nft the three-letter bad word I'm going to tell you the secret right now because nobody cares nobody cares I know it's going to shock you to hear the co-founder of a

transmedia web3 gaming franchise that that literally is named after a crypto acronym wag me right tell you something that like like that or or worse yet what I'm going to tell you now we're not all gonna make it we're not and I'm going to tell you why I'm I'm often on different panels when the topic of web3 Gaming comes up and it usually has the same theme just worded differently all about how to bring Mass adoption into web 3 gaming and and if you haven't had the opportunity uh to hear from someone about what they're doing for the web 3 space what their their web 3 game is all about I want to introduce you to somebody this is 100x d5d Gen I don't know if you've seen him before I just doxed him unfortunately so now you know who he is but that 100x d5d gen now that's that's his name on Twitter and telegram I'm not sure if it's his real name but he's looking for 100 million

dollars worth of VC funds so if there's any VC funds out there I just doxed them for you so now you can trust him since you know who he is now 100x d5d gen just built a game called candy flush which I'm sure he won't be sued over the name but even though he does call it the Candy Crush of crypto but here's 100x d5d gen and I'm gonna I'm gonna go through this fast but here's 100x d5d gen describing it to you as a gamer how cool this game is ready we'll see if you've heard something like this before Candy Crush 1.0 you know the uh the one you're used to playing in the web 2 world it's a it's a popular puzzle game uh where where players match colorful candies to to score points and and progress through levels has nothing to do with blockchain or crypto which is why not yeah I don't really care for it but but Candy Crush 2.0 I want you to just close your eyes and just imagine a world of Candy Crush where possibilities are truly endless in this game players need to use their

crypto wallets to perform transactions for buying altcoins digital currency or stable coins that could be used to to buy gas for minting or to participate in Ico which in our game of course is an initial candy offering right a little play on words there but the game features nfts non-fungible tokens for those of you not in the know and and each level gets unlocked by purchasing a unique collectible with a private key we're going to have proof of work or proof of stake which is going to be used to determine how many points are earned per level will of course have Smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations which are going to manage the the game and and we're actually allowing our whale players I guess they're not really players they don't actually play the game but they've given us money so so we're going to let the whales be allowed to create and Implement tokenomic strategies for the game we think it's only fair I mean they've given us money so you know we're gonna we're gonna do that they bought our Genesis nfts so you know it was one of the utilities we're going to just

kind of let them control it uh we're gonna do more Genesis drops which I guess doesn't really make a whole lot of sense since Genesis means the beginning we've already done that we've already sold that to them but we're going to still do it we're going to offer exclusive nfts while on-train and off-chain transactions would be facilitated through Layer Two uh Solutions and public ledgers zero knowledge proofs could be used to ensure that all transactions are are secure and immutable now that I'm thinking about it the game could actually take place in a metaverse because why not right that'd be cool then we can sell land right and and then the players will use seed phrases and public keys to access their wallets to participate in events players would need to use proof of attendance protocols and and whitelist themselves to gain access but anyway long story short you know it's really just going to be a fun a fun way to learn about the latest developments in blockchain technology uh while enjoying a classic puzzle game that we've all grown to love that sound familiar that's usually what I hear when When

someone tells me about their their web of three game the only acronym of web3 gaming developer should care about is k y c and I don't mean sending in your documents to somebody I mean know your customer right if I'm a game if I'm a game developer who's my customer Gamers right the only acronym a gamer cares about is what f u n they only care about having fun they only care about a fun game does it does a gamer care what the motherboard looks like and their PlayStation 4. no do I care if I if I want cold ice cubes do I care what the wiring diagram of my freezer looks like no right I just want cold ice cubes but why do we as gaming developers in the web 3 space feel like everyone wants to know what's under the hood if you want to talk about Candy Crush for for a minute you know if Candy Crush let me sell to to other users the extra power ups or extra lives that that I have on on days that I can't play I would love

that right are there days I can't play Candy Crush absolutely right but I'll tell you something if someone had told me about a game called Candy Crush where I could sell my in-game assets or uh you know to to other people and it just and didn't just appeal to me as a Casual Gamer it would have gone right over my head I wouldn't have cared wouldn't have wanted to play uh but guess what I've been playing Candy Crush for years and and now that's something I would love to see them implement you know how easy it would be for Candy Crush and I'm not saying Candy Crush needs to do this they seem to have a model that works pretty well they seem to be doing okay but how easy would it be for them to to take a web 3 component and put it into Candy Crush you know somehow I keep getting put into teams on Candy Crush no idea who these people are but I I randomly get put into these these teams and and there's days where I get a message from Candy Crush saying that someone on my team needs a life and it'll say you know Chris king4796 needs an extra life he he uh he ran out of lives he's trying to beat a

level right and and he needs an extra life well you like to give him one well if I'm not playing that day do I care I'll take take it you can take the extra lives right but if you want to get me really excited instead of asking me if I'd like to give them my extra lives that I'm not using why not ask it this way you know Chris king4796 needs an extra life would you like to give him one or would you like to sell them one now would you be saying that to someone who's who just got into Candy Crush no you would not right would you even be saying it if you were a Candy Crush probably not right again they have a model that works but you think of just that tiny little move and all of a sudden boom secondary Marketplace web 3 I can now sell my digital assets my power ups or cookies or stripes or whatever the heck I wanna I want to to sell to other Candy Crush players Candy Crush gets part of the revenue right which is probably from some consumer who wouldn't have bought it on the retail side they never have but they would do it on the secondary

right those players that need those things didn't have to pay those retail prices so now everyone's getting what they want you just proved to me as a gamer that there is power behind owning your in-game assets there's power in nfts the power of being able to own and sell my in-game assets did you say the word nft did you say the word blockchain did you say the word seed phrase or D5 you didn't have to right but you gave me the opportunity to be involved in those things without realizing I was involved in those things at all here's the reality there's there's maybe one or two million web three gamers would you agree who's building in the web three space here there's a number of you okay more than likely and this is probably a high estimate there's there's maybe one or two million web of three gamers and the majority of those web three gamers are who there are actually people who are playing those games because they want uh to earn a few dollars per day grinding you know on a play to earn mechanism that probably isn't sustainable in the first place

right and we've seen we've seen examples of that folks there are three plus billion gamers in the world and there's this difficult middle ground for all of us in this space where where in the web 3 space we tend to just talk so much about the tech and we use these fancy buzzwords like blockchain and nft and and all of these things which is perfect if you're talking about the token or the utility for a token or for nfts but who are you talking to when you're talking about those things you're talking to the speculative investors right which there's a market for but they're not they're your Gamers they're not they're not actually your your customer when it talks when you're talking about a a game and regards to to bringing in billions of Gamers you either have to be willing to change the narrative and that might mean actually changing the game you were originally making you might have had set in stone that you were going to be going down one certain path and all of a sudden now have to change your game you have to build the bridge give web 2 Gamers what they want when did we start calling them web 2

Gamers I don't even know it was when we came up with web3 we started calling them web 2 Gamers but give web 2 Gamers what they want which is a fun exciting addicting game right and walk with them across the bridge when they're ready rather than just pulling them to you making it to where you don't have to talk about nfts and and blockchain Etc but just just give them give them a a crazy addictive game and I and I get it what that means is that you're you're competing with other web 2 games other you know major major gaming Studios other free-to-play games and it's hard and it's expensive but you have to create the bridge for those Gamers to be able to cross you can't just pull them to you and that means there's going to be a lot of games who aren't going to make it there's going to be a lot of games who's whose sole audience is always going to be that one or two million web 3 gamers right no matter how much those companies talk about wanting to bring in Mass adoption that's never going to be Their audience but there will be some standout

games that do it we hope to be one that that figure out that formula to build the bridge to to have the web 3 gaming crowd uh the one that already understands the value of owning your in-game assets they're already in the space right but still that becomes maybe one to three percent of your players the rest are web too right and and remember what we talked about with Candy Crush or or really any game how one tiny simple little move could actually bring all of their users to the web 3 world so that they're not having to just compete with on the web 2 side not by forcing them but by giving them a choice people are people want the choice right giving them the opportunity to find out how they can use these in-game assets that they own differently than they ever have before I was at Heath Denver was anybody in Denver a few of you I was at East Denver a few months a couple months back in March I listened to a talk by Mikko uh matsumura he's a managing partner of a 100 million dollar VC fund GCC and he said something so profound

uh and if you're building in the web 3 space he gave the formula he gave the secret and and uh here's what he said he said who is going who is the best person to sell nfts to a normal person who's going to do it who can sell an nft to a normal person oh I'll tell you who's going to do it it's going to be he said it's going to be free to play game studios free to play because the free to play game studios can sell you something that you didn't even know existed that you didn't even know you wanted that has no real existence in the world and you'll buy it you're going to buy skins you're going to buy swords you're going to buy Shields you're going to buy power-ups and spell cards you're going to buy all this stuff so the players aren't going to buy nfts they're going to buy swords and skins and shields right and then nft is the technology we're not selling nfts we're selling skins and swords and shields right and

he said the reason I'm so confident that people are going to do this that people are going to buy these things is because look around people are already doing it why are we all here the the micro transaction in-game in-game transactions you know for for buying in-game items it's a multi-billion dollar industry people are already doing it they don't know the tech behind it in the web 2 side they don't care about the web the tech behind on the web 2 side they just know what they can do with it right they just know they can buy it I want to mention one more thing that that I think is the the most important thing to remember uh if if you're a web three game developer and that's this who who can tell me what this is just shout it out what mountain is this Everest why in the world am I showing a picture of Mount Everest well between 1921 and 2006 there were 212 deaths on Mount Everest 73 of those deaths what do you think were people going up they were climbing Mount Everest they were coming back down what do you think 73 of the deaths were people coming back

down Mount Everest now now why in the world am I talking about that they died because they were exhausted their adrenaline and and they're maybe years of training was to get up Mount Everest right it was it was to climate and once they reached the top they were just they were exhausted they were exhausted you never hear someone say I'm training to descend down Mount Everest I'm training to climb Mount Everest right well what in the world does this have to do with web 3 games if you're a developer building a web 3 game don't fall into this trap 99 of web 3 games uh set their mission their goal their training their their end game it had nothing to do with onboarding and retaining customers which are your Gamers right it had everything to do with launching their game that's all and the the problem with that is what have we seen in the web three space the majority of of those games have have

died they just they died fast right and and they they reached launch they were done they hadn't planned what to do after they made onboarding so difficult they put up expensive uh onboarding procedures they put up you know buy barriers where you had to buy to get into the game uh expensive entries and they didn't just focus on the three letters that Gamers care about fun right and as much as I hate to say it here's why developers get trapped in this cycle over and over and over because before building their game who is their customer 99.9 of their customer or percent of the time it's the speculative investor right who have basically paid for you to be able to build your game in the first place so a good reason you feel indebted you feel like you have to to give back to to that person you feel like you know that you that you're in debt to them rightly so but what they care about the most is what is the launch of the game

right they're not necessarily Gamers they're the speculative investor and so often the web 3 space we see companies making decisions based on that they don't really know who their real customer is and you know those people like hearing about the web 3 aspects the return on their investment uh and and when the game launches and that doesn't happen right you can tell by the chart how many charts look like Mount Everest you have the peak which is usually the launch of the game and it just it goes down it's the token gradually dies the audience disappears the company pivots and everyone moves on time and time again we keep we keep seeing it and I'll tell you something even wagney games the company I'm a co-founder of originally thought that was the right plan originally we were building not a mobile game not a free-to-play game not a Fiat to to in-game purchases game we were building a browser game where everyone would have to pay something to get into the game and we realized people have done this over and over and over and it has not worked what are we

doing so we we we we did something that that uh you know is usually could be death in the web 3 space for a lot of projects we said a very bad word any guesses what that word is delay we delayed and did that ruffle feathers absolutely absolutely did that cause some people to sell our token and move on to something that they were speculating they might they might make money faster on absolutely but we we realized all of this talk about bringing in Mass adoption getting Gamers to adopt web 3 bringing all this money into the web 3 space it's the wrong Focus right now the web 3 crypto space is is really made up of of the same money just swapping hands back and forth back and forth back and forth right it's going from meme coins to utility tokens meme coins to utility tokens meme coins utility tokens it just kind of keeps swapping back and forth and we realized

if we focus on making it to where people can use Fiat to buy their in-game assets AKA nfts without knowing that they're nfts we give them a custodial wallet in the background it happens instantly they they get their custodial wallet without even realizing there's a custodial wallet happening in the background and we just work on giving them what they want a fun addictive game and free to get into rather than putting up those hurdles now we can get maybe a little bit of money from a lot of the gamers out there rather than charging a lot up front and having maybe a few web 3 Gamers but nobody from the web 2 side right that'll never bring last option if if we if we go about that but if we were to do that if we were to go the free to play round if we were to go to the fiata nft if we were to go to that route and appeal to just the the fun game and go back to that that starting point we can now bring that

money back into the ecosystem we can do buybacks on the chart right there's legalities in regards to burning mechanisms and stuff like that who cares about that we can buy back on the chart all we want using the revenue coming in from the game we can use those tokens for for tournaments and free Wars and and whatever else which obviously appeases the web three person right the speculative investor they like to see that price go up that's all that's that's you know what they're what they're wanting to see but we're bringing in more and more money from the web 2 world and introducing the crowd gradually rather than just yanking them over to us we're we're helping to to build that bridge still helping the web 3 crowd those specular investors be happy because they're able to get what they're into the token itself is going to have some amazing utilities we'll have skill based wagering and and uh in the game as well which which plays into the competitive you know gambling side of of the web 3 sphere uh so a little bit for everybody but it makes it to where the focus of our franchise is on making the game fun making it to

where people want to play want to stay want to come back just making it fun same end result really stronger end result right from the monetary side from a for the ecosystem but making it sustainable does it mean that it might that it might take a little more time to feel ready to reach the top of Mount everesture but it'll make it to where we don't die coming back down right thank you guys very much appreciate it I'm Chris Burkett from wagme games foreign first off I just want to say I really loved your talk and I pretty much agree with everything you said especially somebody's been building for the last couple years in the space as well I have one quick question it's a little snarky I apologize I agree with your complete strategy of pivoting embracing web 2 Fiat but how come you haven't changed the name of the game you're still embracing a web 3 acronym with wagme in the name of the game title and I feel like you're still kind of clinging on

there and it seems like the last holdout that you guys are yeah you know and that and that question comes up you know who knows if that'll ever change in the future you know the reality is you got to know your customer right so right now the majority of our audience the game that's coming out in July it's going to be soft launch in July on major app stores uh but but at the moment right our our audience is the web3 crowd it's it's most of the the specular investor side it's the web three gamers it's it's that that audience so at least at the at the moment you know having that name wag me it's it's so it's very marketable you still have the speculative side right and that that word is that acronym Is So marketable within the space you know and you get celebs and you get you know Elon Musk and you get those kinds of people who who tweet that word out all the time and it really plays into to that narrative so good good question future games we have will will have some different titles for sure very good thank you guys very much appreciate it brilliant thank you Chris

[Music] [Applause] thank you