State of Web3 With Game7

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transactions monthly you too can unlock the potential of borderless transactions to better engage and monetize your Global user base including the unbanked and simplify the way you handle payments start for free at zeid doio integrate with just a few steps and monetize your experiences again that's zebede doio or check out the link in the show notes and with that let's jump into the episode hello and welcome to the novic gaming podcast I'm your host Nick oori we have a great episode for you today our topic is the state of web 3 gaming in the year 2023 we are taking a 30,000 foot view of the ecosystem with as neutral a Viewpoint as possible to evaluate where we are as an industry and where we might be headed longtime listeners will know that we've done similar state of web 3 overviews in the past particularly they've come from a fairly subjective Viewpoint of the individual expert guests that we've had in the show So today we're taking a different approach and we are reviewing the findings of the

first truly comprehensive report that covers the past six years of web 3 gaming using objective and neutral primary research methods the report was compiled by game seven which is a community formed to accelerate the adoption of web3 gaming and the report captured an examined data from almost 2,000 web 3 games over 1,000 funding rounds and almost 200 blockchain ecosystems so this is truly a comprehensive overview of the ecosystem but what can this data tell us about the state of web 3 to answer all of our burning questions and all of your burning questions we've brought one of the primary authors of the report George isas from game seven on the show today George welcome to the Pod thank you so much for having me and we also have of course our very own Devin Becker he's our web three analyst uh and navic Roundtable podcast host to provide additional insights as well Devon welcome back to the Pod thanks for having me all right so with that out of the way let's get right into it um so

let's start with the the obvious question here uh which is tell us a bit more about game seven who you are what are you doing and why did you feel compelled to put together this report yeah absolutely so yeah as you said game seven is a community dedicated to accelerating the adoption of of web pre gaming through a number of initiatives spanning from building products to supporting and deploying Capital through grants and Investments and also engaging in other community Le initiatives including reports like this or great events in the past uh the key driver for us um working on this report was the the lack of um credibly neutral and objective research I mean we've we we've seen some great work I mean including navic you guys have done some great work but usually um reports have either a specific orientation or they want to prove a specific point and not really focus on the data so this time we wanted to first of all index the space start by collecting the very Basics how many games how many companies what are the characteristics of these companies and then try to draw some conclusions not start with a conclusion in your mind and try to find the data to backet in a

sense and of course this was a dynamic process we started with an ambition to just index the ecosystem and then we found out some great uh uh opportunities to deep um to deep deep to dive deeper to specific areas so yeah um again the we want this to be the start for us providing credibly neutral and objective research for The Wider space yeah I absolutely love this report um it was so comprehensive uh it's very clean uh I really encourage anyone for listeners who is interested in web 3 or even has a passing uh uh knowledge of what web 3 might be uh to go and take a look at this report it's freely available um and we'll post a link in the show notes um Devin you've obviously had a chance to digest the report as well um and you obviously spearhead all the web three written analysis for navic what did you think were the most interesting findings of this report before we go into kind of the nitty-gritty and the detail I mean just the amount of people still using uh l1s was like a big deal like obviously there was a lot of people moving over but it was interesting to see how much

activity there still was and the other big thing for me was just Latin America's traction being so low for being such a big part of gaming in general like they're big in Esports they're big in Mobile gaming they're big in like games just apparently not big in making these and I and I maybe I chocked up Wildlife backing out kind of early on after Castle Crush but surprised me to see them just so low down yeah likewise I think it was only about 2% Global uh uh adoption was from ladam and I I was just surprised myself too because all the other regions of the world were fairly well represented and actually this is my next question uh which is as we dive into the report I did want to kind of take that birds ey view of the ecosystem so George why don't you tell us a little bit about where are the regions uh at at the moment today in terms of adoption uh on the developer side but also on where the players are because that might have something to do with ladam adoption as well yeah absolutely so just to clarify the report is cute toward the supply side so we try to analyze the decisions of developers not necessarily adoption metrics or

where the gamers are um overall I mean as we also Pro um summarize in the executive summary um while the US North America remains to be a very critical space a very critical Country For The Wider space we've seen some great attraction from uh the APAC region mainly driven by South Korea this year this isn't a surprise of course if you are familiar with with the gaming space you cannot really expect gaming without Asia both on the gamer and the developer side but um yeah one of the things I enjoy is that this report allow us to not assume but try also to verify using data on the on the player base side again the report stly speing does not talk about Gamers does not talk about adoption we're talking about game developers I think we've seen some great traction on the uh um in the North America side primarily from crypto Enthusiast or people already familiar with the web free and the value prop of this space uh while you have a a great like um volume of people that the um of

Gamers from Asia I mean you you remember with with Vietnam for for axi and for other games so definitely APAC is a place where many people are more than happy to play Not Just speculate or just talk about the proposition of web free gaming uh but this is a great opportunity for us for for our next report we have discussed about this and we want to expand more in the future to not just describe developers but also try to better understand the player base of people already interested in web fre gaming yeah I think you've you've done some work actually looking at uh at the player side so uh Curious to hear your thoughts on on kind of you know there's two sides of the coin obviously there's the developers and we're going to get to funding in a second because that obviously is going to drive where the developers pop up uh but then there's the gamer side too and every region has their own quirks uh Curious to hear your thoughts on on how that kind of two-sided coin of developers on one side Gamers on the other side uh looks like from your perspective yeah it's interesting the crypto space because you've got the the issue of like sometimes developers don't always match up with the players CU South Korea for

example they can't even release those games in their own country So in theory you don't have South Korean players right like because they technically can't play of course you know VPN and all that uh but we do see a lot of developing countries tend to favor these games especially during the early like play to earn phase which is still completely hasn't got away especially in Asia which they still seem to actually embrace it quite a bit so I would imagine like you know on the lam side for example like there there probably is a decent player base it looks like from Latin America it's a little hard to be 100% sure in the space because of wallets and all that stuff and even then a lot of times you know guilds and Scholars kind of structures and you know a lot of that I think does show that the Latin American player base is there they just developer wise it did Build It Up which surprises me because you know with the exchange rates and all that stuff like it seems like a good opportunity for them to make money in crypto if that exchang is favorably to the real and stuff like that I I would think they would jump on it and like like I said Wildlife did it first uh and then kind of you know backed off but player base seems to be like anywhere there's like

hey we see opportunity to make money off this or we're just game enthusiasts like the mix between those two seems pretty diverse obviously you've got countries like Russia and China that have like kind of weirder relationships with crypto but it honestly seems pretty Global I don't think there's like a a country that's like ah no we're not going to play these games it's just spread out quite a bit and and the wallets make it a little harder but I think kyc will start to make this a little clearer over the next few years yeah uh so let's switch gears uh it's obviously related but let's talk about funding because that's one of the big stories over the last certainly the last three years um but even over the last six years of of you know web 3 gaming that's been around um 2021 obviously saw a huge um crypto bull run which of course drove a lot of investment into web3 gaming 2022 first half followed that um but then of course we've we've seen the crypto win to come in um your research found I think 8 billion uh flowing in 2021 across about 300 deals uh into web 3 and then almost 10 billion in 2022 across 500 deals which I'm

presuming most of those happened in the first half so very busy first half of 2023 um what does it look like in 2023 and and uh how have you seen it evolve since crypto winter set in yeah I mean if you look at the chart there's a clear Trend like excitement overe excitement and then some correction of course correlated or driven by macro events beyond the the world of gaming to be fair I think um fundraising arguably remains one of the biggest challenge for game developers today not just for this year even from uh um Q4 or Q3 of 2022 um however we've seen deals I mean yes there's a big correction yes there is a difference but there's definitely still interest and many people many many companies have managed to raise even significant and bigger rounds this is not necessarily driven by data but our feeling after talking of course to many game developers uh for game s like literally every day it's that because of the risk involved investors are more willing to place bets

on game on game developers that they bring some experience already so they might be new to web fre but they are not new in the in the how to build a great game Space um it would be it would be interesting also to capture information moving forward we do expect things to getting better I mean we have many games that many great and well-founded initiatives from very experienced games coming uh let's say to the better phase not just for a fullly release so it would be interesting to to also try to Follow by trend on okay how are we moving forward in the next year um so yeah before we go to Devon George why don't we actually talk about uh the volume of deals done uh in this year in 2023 I think you looked at it through Q3 uh what is the dollar amount and what is the number of deals done compared to the last couple of years that is correct yes so we counted across both uh gaming content and infrastructure a little more than 135 deals uh total approximately 1.5 billion which is again is a big correction but as you can see is is is

far from being nothing is a huge market and definitely shows that investors might be um hesitent but definitely willing to to support great teams centering the space yeah I was actually surprised to see you know 1.5 billion still a lot of money I I thought it would be a lot smaller actually um than that so yes it's a big correction obviously there fewer deals there's less money coming in but it's nonetheless still a fairly sizable amount of dollars shows that there are still investors who had conviction in the web 3 space and obviously there are still plenty of developers who have conviction in entering this Market um even in 2023 even knowing that we are fully this year in a crypto winter Devon your thoughts on the the funding environment based on what you've seen yeah I mean I was doing all the funding tracking as well for the the novic pro previously and for the quarterly report that just came out recently so it it definitely is surprising that you know it's still there it's still spread across some games obviously like as George said it tends to to focus on more experienced uh people that could that could show they could deliver in the past but I think there's a lot of factors here to

consider like you know with the funding being down first off as George said the macro environment like games in general are are still struggling right you have full on mobile companies to be like we're not going to make new games right now like that environment is is very tough at the moment you got layoffs across the board like across the whole industry so like seeing uh this more risky area not getting as much funding is is like kind of a no-brainer plus you've got the the inflation uh situation you've got rate hikes all this stuff borrowing becomes M money becomes much more expensive so that part's not a you know big surprise but I think the other important thing to to consider is like if we haven't had like a huge success since axi and we saw how that turned out like at some point people are gonna be like all right maybe we'll wait for the next kind of you know big wave to come and and I think you know a lot of that money kind of moved a little bit more East but at the same time like as soon as people are excited again you got to imagine that assuming the macro environment is not terrible that they'll come back and you do see like some excitement percolating with like the Bitcoin uh ETF stuff like there's you

know Black Rock getting involved there's people like excited again I don't think we're on like you know kindling right now it's going to go off but I I think there's as you mentioned like still funding happening still games being developed and like a lot of the good games take time so maybe we see a big wave it's just maybe not soon Yeah Yeah we actually so you know listeners don't go anywhere we're actually going to be talking about what the next catalysts are towards the end of the show just to follow up on the on the funding rounds I'm very curious to hear what kinds of deals are happening um I crunched the numbers based on your report uh the average deel size in 2021 was 25 million in 2022 that fell to 17 million and in 2023 through Q3 that's down to 11 million so obviously much smaller deal sizes at least at the average Happening Now obviously these could be skewed heavily if you have mega deals going on so I'm curious to hear in your research uh what kinds of deals are happening are these follow-on rounds from you know uh companies that raised in the past uh are these seed rounds you know smaller rounds that are happening now what are

the the types of deals and What stages are they at at this moment yeah um I think that's a very good question because again a number is a number but does not necessarily bring all the the background you need to so so you can unlock the inside um we don't see many followup rounds no we we're seeing um a great interest into teams that are building for the first time in the web space so they bring some kind of expertise or great IB from the mainstream gaming world and they want to try uh the the web free way um when it comes to um gaming Focus versus cross vertical because uh if you look into the the slide 53 we also triy to split the the funding grounds into two big categories the ones that they're solely focused on blockchain gaming on gaming and the ones that they have some um utility Beyond gaming as well so we're seeing a practically a 50-50 balance between gaming Focus or cross vertical uh rounds um and we also observing like a clear preference to to content so at

least for this year we have a clear preference from investors investing to IP versus to gaming infrastructure yeah that's it was actually an interesting uh section this funny which is why I'm spending so much time here um it was very interesting to see how it's it's really split across the different uh vertical not just pure gaming there's also you know tools and services and I think there was a lot more investment happening in previous quarters that was just pure gaming because of of obviously the strength of Axia um Devon your perspective on on the kinds of deals are happening uh I'm looking at slide 54 actually at the moment um and you know you can really see how the funding has obviously fell off a cliff in Q4 of 2022 not surprising I'm arguably Q3 of 2022 it started happening but you know let's compare Quarters here so Peak Q4 2021 you know literally right smack in the middle of the crypto bll uh about2 billion doar uh invested in that quarter alone uh in Q3 of 2023 so the quarter just gone 160 million so that's that is a big drop um your perspective Devon on

on the kinds of deals of the kinds of teams that are getting getting funded here I mean what do you have to consider is like the different um investors rotating in and out right so like there may have been like a lot more game focused ones for example and you see even some of them shift their focus away from games uh for different reasons sometimes it depends on you know their LPS what their preferences and things like that so like there's like an environment around it not just also like people's preferences but obviously the amount of games like with Promise Too might have be like a little tighter environment here I mean you had big game deals like limit break getting 200 million for example and then they haven't delivered yet right like I mean maybe they will maybe it'll be the most amazing thing ever but so far no one has really like delivered on the big checks and I think that's the situation where we start to go like well okay games are a risk even if even in like the industries where it's like console like you might be like oh hey I'll bet an Xbox game because Xbox is stable still no guarantees at all games can flop like crazy unless they're Call of Duty I guess which they could do no wrong but it's it's a situation where web 3 is

especially risky there and so infrastructure you know has its own risks but it's I think a little more understandable and also I know a lot of the people at these VCS not a lot of game people a lot of these places and I think it's a lot easier for them to understand infrastructure stuff or other business type units that that are a little more clear to them and I think you're going to see that shift continue right because if you're drisking you're going to go to things that you know things that have a longer track record potentially or things that have maybe some more uh proven technology behind them because it's a little more clear what the outcome will look like potentially with the technology that is so true I I'm just casting my mind back to you know Peak Crypt Bull and the kind of Investments that were happening from non-gaming focused investors who were just like oh we should get into web 3 crypto throw money at teams like yeah and it was just it was very clear from anybody who's been in gaming um that this was I don't want to be rude here but dumb money um Chas facing an outcome and it was very clear that these teams

were never going to deliver there was a bunch of crypto Bros who thought they could become game developers overnight magically they may have been very crypto Savvy but they didn't know about games that's part of my French here um and uh I think that's really tightened now I think the teams that are getting funding have track records um the investors that are investing in these teams have track records in gaming not necessarily in in crypto but in gaming specifically um so that brings me nicely on to my next question like what kinds of games are getting funded um and really we're talking genres here uh the level of ambition you know Triple A versus Indie titles um let's start with genres here what kinds of genres are we seeing getting funded in in web 3 at the moment sure I mean so far people seeing this chart they they have like an expression like oh my God I can't believe Sports is that is that popular I mean there there is a disclaimer on the bottom of this chart that s of course they had some major funding grounds like two years ago so obviously this um impacted greatly the category of sports but still I think uh we should not

discount this uh even if even if there are like a fewer funding rounds before this this uh this big amount so beyond Sports I think the metaverse team definitely push the MMO like games to to get traction not this year necessarily but definitely the past two years the the idea of a metaverse the idea of a 3D environment where you not only Wonder around but also interact with your nfts and and a whole world building around that this narrative I think this definitely paid off and lastly RPG games um I think RPG have a conceptual shabil compatibility with the the concept of of web free nfts asset transactions many transactions many complicated logic I think naturally it FS well of course there are great but also tough games to to to make uh but yeah if I could summarize the key themes uh not just for this year but uh for the whole period that would be it yeah has that changed over time I I seem to remember early again going back a couple of years early being two years ago goodness me the crypto moves very fast

um and we have very uh short short memories here but I remember a lot of you know trading card games tcgs getting funded um I feel like that's really dropped off uh obviously so rare got a whole bunch of money back in the day but there haven't really been any other sports focused um web 3 companies it seems very uh almost hits driven to to say the least in terms of what kinds of genres are getting funded Devin your thoughts on on the kind of split between the different genres um and how that's changed over the last couple years yeah some of it's just like uh first off the the early web 3 games were pretty primitive right they were web based transaction based uh anything that was turn-based was going to be the easiest things to implement early on right so the stuff that was turn-based like card games and things like that becomes the easiest to handle in a transactional format you're not trying to do anything real time but as we've like evolved they kind of figured out okay well we don't need to do everything on chain unless it's a fully onchain game we can kind of like uh you know maybe just figure out how the economy ties to it and so they started doing that more and then you start to look at what genres does that

like support and obviously like games that have currencies and economies as part of them start to become a more obvious play MMOs RP RPGs which are kind of one and the same and RPGs honestly have bled into just about every genre uh at this point you know like RPG XP and things like that are just a staple of every game so at that point it's like it seems kind of obvious we haven't seen any huge hits to make it like oh obviously you should do that unless you I guess if you count mere four uh that's actually done pretty well it's uh it is you know an MMO and so there are you know some some indicators that at least Asia is going to go big in that area and I don't expect that to slow down that is just like an area they know and do really well I also expect we could see 4X games you know those are very economy driven as well so a lot of those ones that like make sense where it's just constantly about currencies and economy uh start to become just like big even if you're not involving like crypto currencies just nfts but I think we'll see that Trend as well yeah sorry I wanted to that it's obvious when looking at this

chart that there is no logic behind this you don't see like a clear reason why sports are number one for example and card games are like close to the end I think this is because we don't really optimize for a web free gamer what is a web free gamer are we optimizing for good games regardless of whe whether this web three friendly or not so are we are we just seeing what is popular in the main gaming space and we build this web three no we most likely try to First optimize for web free compatibility and at some point reach and and try to to capture ments that are popular within the game the mainam gaming market so I think as an ecosystem we need to decide are we building good games and we try to feed web for it I would try to optimize for the web free compatibility even if we're missing out on on the interest of existing player base I think this ambiguity explains again the lack of logic when it comes to the split between different genres yeah we're GNA dive into how is web 3 being integrated what does it mean to be a web 3 game in just a second but I just want to come back to the the kinds of games that are are being built and funded at the moment what's the split between you know AAA

and indd and everything in between uh what kinds of bets are being made right now I think you have a slide on the a nice pie chart uh slide in in your presentation and your um research that shows that and I seem to recall that AAA is very a very small part of it mostly it's Indie but tell us more about what what your research found yeah so I mean it's I'm sure in the the past years you you must have heard the expression we're building a AAA web pre game that does a b or c and again that's that's that's a good thing right but I had a feeling personally that through the data and through this research we had the chance to also um get some buting on it that we have a tendency to to to believe that unless something is Triple A it won't be a good game and that like pushes with game developers to say we're building on AAA Alea aleaa if I'm sure if you ask I don't know a more mainstream uh gaming audience where is a triaa many people might say unless you have built a AAA you can't call yourself a aleaa or unless you've raised so many millions unless you have a big publisher unless

you have the secret sauce my point is AAA is complicated it's not just money is not just timing is a mix of different and diverse characteristics so I think we have again a bias towards saying AAA AAA AAA and there are so many games that can be both fun and profitable without being AAA um this report just proposes one methodology and of it's highly subjective it's not like that this is a truth and everything else is wrong but we try practically to understand what what what are the characteristics that could make uh someone coming from the mainstream gaming space to say okay this is a triaa game this game could go and compete with fortnite right now or has the potential to reach at this level even the chance and we find out as expected that close to 1% of the of course the two 200 2,000 games in our database could fit close to the criteria that someone would expect from a gaming studio to have to produce the repl um title and and we also have like 5 to 6% of games that are well funded they are

Way Beyond the Indie status of course but still on paper not close to the what it needs for a AAA game to be made and I've seen that this number makes total sense to a mainstream gaming audience but in the web free native space people saying to us only 1% only 6% we need more so yeah to summarize web free gaming um comprised mainly by Indies or well founded Indies Indies are definitely have support but not necessarily what it takes to call themselves Tria uh and obviously I would like since you both have a highly relevant background I would like to take on this how did you find out this number I I'll take that first yeah I was really surprised this is why I wanted to talk about this I was really surprised because everybody has been saying oh we're building a triaa game for web 3 it's been it's been like this Trope for the last few years and I was actually shocked and I know that this is slightly subjective but I I I appreciate your methodology and it's very clear the methodology by the way is is put in the in the report it's on slide 27 seven seeing that only 1% was actually AAA or

had a chance to be AAA based on the funding size uh which I think uh you had a minimum of $25 million of investment which to me is even low for a triaa game quite frankly um that was the big takeaway for me there are no triaa games in web 3 like even that 1% I think is a little bit generous uh that's not to say that they're not going to get built but as of right now it seems like it's a pretty long shot to see anything in web 3 in the next three years let's say that would actually meet any Gamers criteria of web 3 that was the big takeaway for me um Devin your thoughts yeah first of I appreciated that you guys were transparent about the the the thresholds you used uh because obviously you know if people disagree with it they can understand specifically what numbers you use and if they don't agree with those numbers they can of course you know go about their own methodology but um one thing I thought that was interesting that it kind of in a way uh sort of obus skates uh the actual games themselves may not be necessarily AAA by you know a lot of those standards uh but interestingly like you know there's a lot of people that have

developed AAA games or with AAA level experience building a lot of these games and and there's always a trend with the the cycle of people going through AAA companies and coming out they tend to build something much smaller right they tend to start a new company a smaller company build something up and so I think we see a lot of that especially in the late stage where a lot of these games are maybe double A or less but they're de developed by people with like polish and quality uh at least you know behind them uh so like even if these are just doublea they might be much much higher quality doublea than we'd seen before but it's again it's like you're not you're not rating it off of the people that are making you're rating it off of a lot other standards which are you know fair and objective but uh but at the same time like as you mentioned Nico you're talking about like years out as well like any these that were funded in 2021 if they're a true tripa game you're not going to see them anytime soon right and there might be some in stealth as well that we don't know about but at the same time yeah like I think we're probably ways off and I think doublea are a reasonable thing to hope for but at the same time like it's I think anyone who's using Unreal pretty

much just felt like hey we could slip slip double A on this because unreal 5 looks amazing and I think that just became I think kind of a Trope in itself because unreal five does look amazing I mean like you can't speat that but that doesn't make tripa a yeah even a demo in unal 5 looks like a looks like a triaa game but of course it wouldn't be an actual game um this brings me to a follow-on question actually for both of you here uh are we seeing any Development coming from the larger Studio mostly the largest Studios of the established companies haven't really taken a chance we had Matt wolf from Zinga on the show a couple of episodes ago and he was talking about sugar toown uh but you know other than Zinga and some of the larger Korean uh developers established developers have you seen any other uh especially Western uh uh larger Studios larger companies established companies going into the web 3 Waters or is it mostly startups folks who are excited about the technology starting up new companies raising funding and trying to develop something from scratch sure I

think the answer should be a very clear and optimistic yes yes aleaa gaming Studios uh big players of the traditional gaming space are definitely interested we we've seen this in practice and I think we're crossing the era where blockchain was just a budget item to the R&D Department of of a big company it's more about okay that's realistic something we might consider doing uh in the next year so let's actually try to build I mean many examples we made from Korea I mean we made uh they launched so many games and I was surprised with the number of titles they want to on board in web 3 CCP games Ubisoft Ubisoft was like is part of the blockchain gaming ecosystem until 2019 since 2019 at least I remember like being supportive of FX Infinity being close to Aces we also saw the announcement last week with mutable so again Ubisoft is part of the the space for sure um bam COA and I mean people might stick to specific statements from specific people people saying we're skeptic none of these companies will will go about and say I'm

going to destroy uh my my U my business just to to risk on web free of course that doesn't make sense because these companies have like actual paying customers that have great fun into the games right now without touching anything blockchain related but yeah we've seen many cases where these companies really see web free as the physical evolution of of their core businesses yeah Devon any uh any others that stick out for you um larger I forgot about Ubisoft of course um know it's funny because we talk about Western they were like European so they're kind of on the edge of Western right because they're centered in Paris but uh yeah I mean I wrote a whole thing about this like a little while ago as well for novic as well and like it's evolved a bit since then as well which is you know of course Japan like we talk about South Korea a lot but I think Japan we're not talking about small companies there we're talking about well-known companies to the West obviously Nintendo's not getting involved right but you know uh Konami is you know announced they're getting stuff going uh Square Unix has been experimenting in the space for a while now like symbiogenesis they've

been wanting to like dabble here and there as well as you've got uh other big players like Sega like they didn't want to do it themselves they have double jump doing it but it's off their IP like they all want to like put a toe in the water at this point and Japan is definitely going to try and write it big the the the government is pro nft like I mean that's the exact opposite of South Korea we see how well it does in South Korea so like I think it's pretty inevitable in the east west like I I don't think you can expect anyone but Ubisoft at this point to really get involved I'm honestly surprised Zinga still was able to after the acquisition but at the same time this is a pretty small experiment from them Sugar Town is is not like this isn't the new Zinga it's it's zw3 and you know you you spoke with them as well and so I but again Ubisoft like I feel like people kind of forget the fact that like they funded a couple of games that have been live for a while across the ages has been out for a little while now and been actually doing good at least Lo like regionally in France and then you've got Dy Chronicles that's been out for a long time uh so they they've been funding the space for quite some time and they

announced their own game so like I think they're kind of just you know leading the way right like they like you saw them dabbling in Cloud stuff when no one else wanted to and then now you got xcloud so like eventually it comes around obviously they took a lot of the early hits for everyone else with digits and everything else so like thanks I guess for for uh for for letting you know taking a few shots for us but at the same time like we're not going to see EA get involved unless they buy a smaller company that was already doing doing it so but that's you know that's the West is yeah I I thought it was interesting that Zinga actually was able to get sugar toown through their legal P departments uh you know especially being part of uh you know a much larger and pretty risk averse organization and so when I had Matt wolf on the show uh he wouldn't reveal quite how much uh paperwork and crossing of tees and dotting of eyes they had to do but after we went off record you know hit the hit the stop button uh he revealed to me how how entirely hard like how difficult a

journey it was um like squeezing you know blood from a stone it was to get through their legal department so if they can do it right if they can do it anybody can do it and I do expect as Devon says and I think you're echoing as well George we will see larger and larger organizations more and more established companies at least experiment if not actually do a full-throated Embrace of like we believe in this technology we believe this is a path uh that can be taken and we are going to fund it and do it properly so I think that's exciting um the next question is is is highly related what are we seeing on the on the distribution side I think a lot of the early web 3 games were very much in the browser um and of course mobile wasn't even a possibility back in those days uh now you know with the Epic gamees store opening up uh you know PC becomes more of a possibility mobile uh Apple and Google are a bit more open now these days than they were in the early days what have you SE seen there George in terms of the the the distribution uh

across platforms mobile browser PC anything else console any console games that our web three yeah yeah I'm happy to share some personal experiences on on the lad but I think distribution remains a big challenge SL opportunity for for web three games um on paper as you saw epic games yes more friendly to web three games they've listed close to 70 games so far from three last this time last year um Apple and Google were on paper more friendly of course they Define their own rules uh but yeah again distribution that is native to the to what web fre can offer when it comes to permissionless gaming when it comes to cross CH cross uh game use of assets when it comes to again all the great features that make blockchain a fantastic environment for gaming Innovation is still a big Challenge and that's why for example even game seven we we supported the hyper BL a native launcher that tries to play well with epic to play well with mainstream distribution platforms but also allow blockchain games to um to to use a

distribution platform that really can untap their potential um what what I'm hearing from game developers is that uh yes big players have been friendlier uh to uh to game developers but this comes with restrictions because uh a big player might say yes of course you can list on my platform but you have to do ABC and D for now this is great because the game developer can go to the TT community and say uh guess what we have been listed to to platform X but when looking about commercializing products I think at some point the restrictions of main distribution platforms will be a big challenge to solve you can really have two versions of a game you cannot say the Noto blockchain version a and the super duper blockchain version B Because at some point you'll have to make money you'll have to keep it alive and I think this can become tricky quick comment on consoles I think I remember like in a startup I work many many years ago blockchain startup uh we we we applied to both Sony and Microsoft and even back

then they weren't let's say they never said absolutely no but they said that there's no clear way of how we can retain our power and still make money I'm saying this because right now we don't have any relevant traction when it comes to console games and whoever said so I hope that they working closely with with with Sony or or Microsoft uh but yeah it's something I'm I'm waiting for a day that an actual blockchain game with blockchain integration will be available for console I think this will definitely process 10 years ahead yeah I think slide 19 of of your of your deck you got the the breakdown and I was really interested to see and I'm the numbers don't add up to 100 presumably because of uh of crossplatform but 41% mobile 40% browser 39% PC really interesting how evenly split that is and and maybe that shouldn't surprise us maybe you know that's what de developers do right like they'll go to the platform that they know best or they think works best for them um but uh really interesting to see how evenly split that was I don't know if that was that your reaction to

Deon I I would have still thought that uh um browser based games would still have been number one um but it looks like no it's pretty evenly split now I mean like everyone takes advantage of the opportunities presented to them right like you saw what happened with epic store like allowing a lot and there was a lot of games too that were browser based but then also like would would eventually shift to downloading an executable or even some of the games that like you know I'm not sure if these are how they were counted but there might be some that were just like yeah we're on mobile but you have to download an APK from our website like you know a lot of games have kind of like gone that way where they're like a downloadable because these are you know Android is technically a permissible environment because you can download an APK that does whatever as long as it doesn't need Rude access so a lot of these people can start to experiment on these platforms console's not like that right you can't unless you have like a dev kit uh that that whole Linux thing you know PlayStation used to have I think is kind of dead at this point so there's not really a way to open those up and say download this game unauthorized whereas all those other platforms allow that so that's a big kind of opening I think they could take advantage of but it would be interesting to see like

consoles open up to this but like look how slow they were to freet to play like it was it's just you know it maybe doesn't if it hits with the core Gamers at some point you'll see the shift but until core gamers are super into it like there's not a lot of reason for Microsoft and Sony other than Sony being Japanese and maybe being interested or Microsoft has dabbled a little bit of crypto but I don't think we see that Mobile on the other hand with the way the mobile industry is right now I'm almost surprised it's not bigger already because like you're already having trouble like getting your getting attention for your game and you know user Acquisitions already nightmare but it's like if you could you saw some of the early games just being like well we can bribe people to play our game through crypto and then obviously the crypto stuff doesn't work out but you can be like oh we can bribe you through nfts or whatever and so like it allows a way to diversify that I think eventually people are going to start embracing because I mean look look what happened with the freeo play on mobile in the first place that's kind of where it developed and look what that turned into took over the whole store yeah and I think interesting to see how it's evolved over time 2023 the breakdown is PC 23% again this is all according to the game seven

numbers so I have no insight into these other than slide 20 of the presentation but PC was 23% uh mobile was 40% browser was 37% uh compare that to let's say 2020 uh PC was 38 actually 2019 is probably like that's when maybe the the ball got rolling PC was 53% mobile was only 20% and browser was 27% um so definitely some trends there um but looks like it's more evenly split these days than than it was uh was in the past um okay shifting gears a little bit here I I do want to talk about how are we've said web 3 games web 3 games web 3 games but we haven't actually really defined how is web 3 being integrated into these games is it just nfts are they playable characters uh are these you know battle passes that just give you access Early Access there's a lot of ways of integrating blockchain Technologies um and there's a lot of definitions of web 3 as well out there no no single definition so I'm curious to hear how you guys at game seven looked at you

know uh air quotes here web 3 and what does it actually mean to you what does it mean to be a web three game uh in this report of the 2,000 games how does it break down across the different um different types of T titles yeah I think it's a very valid question because we talk about web free but if I if I talk about like a very um lightweight web free game and a fully onchain game like if you see the back end of those two products it will be like different so again this might not be super relevant to all our our viewers out there but again the use of blockchain we can see this as a spectrum like you can have okay let's put fible and un fungible assets on chain so you may be accepting just payments or your token might be a token or the skins or whatever it is on your on the player inventory can be an asset let's define this as games with their the asset on chain in this in this case both the history of the game the state or the logic Remains the traditional gaming server no implications um then we've seen the

second archetype in a sense of games that they said okay we're going to use blockchain to record history in a way that everyone can accept as a truth so in practice if you win me Nico then there's no way that the game developer will manipulate the data and change the history because the outcome can be recorded on on a public Ledger or maybe the uh the level of your great for can be recorded on as well one could argue okay that's not super important that's not a super important difference but when it comes to the back end it's a whole new Beast like trying to have the a public Ledger as a source of Truth for a game server I think that's significant implications and of course we getting closer to the concept of fully onchain games or autonomous worlds where you have a situation where like as much as it gets it should be on chain um as we saw this represents let's say 5% for me that's even a surprise I would expect something even lower than that but we're talking about games that they try again with a with a quote unquote positively

maximalism approach to use blockchain whenever they can and the whole idea is that you um you can trust blockchain with both your assets with the history of your movements plus the way that the game makes decisions so if you trust the specific smart contract let if we simplify then you trust that you're playing a game that um that all the players can trust and on top of this I mean I feel this um this archetype is not so much about the the permissionless gaming experience that you can build so many great things on top because you don't have a game anymore you have a world with a rule that's it so unless you can build very great things on top the vast majority of G of games of course uh are just using a just I shouldn't say just but they're using uh blockchain just to tokenize both fible and un fible tokens and if you ask me for the ma majority of games this should be enough and this should allow for fantastic games to be made yeah that's that's what I'm seeing as well and hearing uh there are some Intrepid

Pioneers who are going for fully onchain games I actually had uh Amit Mahajan who's the one of the founders of Farmville one of my colleagues at Zinga he's found a company called proof of play they raised a big seed round from uh Andre and Horwitz of course and uh they are building truly fully onchain games and I I literally broke out into a cold sweat as a game developer myself uh with all the the crazy stuff that they need to solve for by building a truly fully onchain uh experience um they have rollups of rollups uh I don't even know how how you could do that uh so is that does that jive with you as well Deon like most of the games have a a just you know to use George's phrase here a fairly lightweight integration where either you have a tokenized economy uh which I think is actually fewer games have that or you have uh you know uh nfts that are either in game assets or uh some kind of battle pass or early entry uh access to the game yeah I mean some of that like a little bit of like backpedaling from what we saw like where everyone was like wanting to tokenize

everything and real realizing crap that like exposes our whole economy that exposes everything maybe we like dial it back a little bit and then we'll start to go forward maybe hopefully a little more like wise to that and you know that's you know even in lot of the Consulting space that's we've advised to a lot of these companies do like hey just baby step into you don't need to like put everything on chain if you don't know what you're doing like that's for Pioneers that's for the people trying to colonize Mars up there like don't don't try and do that try and focus on making a good game and like make this make sense but this reminds me a lot of the early days of like uh you know online play like back when like it was modem based stuff you you had stuff like the x-band modem for Sega Genesis trying to be like online gameplay and it was like expensive and difficult and like eventually you know now it's ubiquitous right like and I feel like onchain games or even onchain activity it's the same kind of thing like it's expensive it's difficult it's like technolog is always shifting and like eventually we get there but right now maybe it's like ah maybe most of our game you know is offline but we occasionally like you could place some over your modem or something and it's

it's same sort of like baby step where the technology you don't want it to interfere with the game too much these are games these aren't necessarily technology products technology products yeah go all in games go in where it makes sense and like that's what people should do this is like actually a sane approach that we should see yeah uh completely agree baby steps don't have to reinvent the wheel all at once um one one thing at a one Innovation at a time I think is is sufficient um okay so uh shifting gears little so one of the biggest issues for any game developer doesn't just have to be web 3 game developers but it's especially acute for web 3 developers is uh distribution and user acquisition uh your report doesn't go massively into this and I'm just curious uh and this is really open to both of you uh what did you see in the 2000 games that you looked at that are web 3 how are they getting to Market how are they actually reaching new users uh whether it be a mobile browser PC your your thoughts on that because that is a huge challenge especially on mobile in the post idfa world but also you know

crypto advertising you know a lot of it's not it's not even allowed in many places in many countries so very curious to hear how are developers getting to Market how are they getting their products in front of actual Gamers yeah I I can share some um some thoughts on this as you said the report does not really specify that or we haven't checked this haven't checked the ways that game developers try to solve this problem but um for our experience is that the selection of chain most likely will also Define your user acquisition strategy um at this moment a chain is something super important for games and arguably for no reason because again you you should play a game because it's fun not because it's supported by Chain a b or c i mean you can be excited about this that that there's nothing bad with that but the whole point should not be that so so far we we we've seen a trend where if the chain you're building is the popular one or has some great market movement then chances are you're gonna have an influx of new users not really caring about your project but they would

like of course I want to try games on chain a BC of course this works the other way so many games that may have fantastic IP and a great team and a great product they might not get attention because they quote unquote pick the wrong chain that is not popular anymore or whatever so I think we we're crossing this era and game developers understand that their IP and and their project should be the protagonist not their chain they're building on so as we try to do this uh this phase of maturity for all of us and understand that chains are close to Commodities because we can always spin another rollup or another chain I think we will see game developers and web free games to try to to to to solve the the very same challenges that any game has to to solve when it comes to user acquisition yeah I just a a personal note here when we started building uh in early 2021 uh we picked salana because salana was pitching itself as the most uh developer friendly fastest cheapest uh game

focused uh chain out there and of course we saw what happened with FTX and they were pretty closely tied there and you know everybody was talking about Salon Salon was and they're still pretty big you you have a a chart and in fact we're going to talk about the blockchain ecosystem in just a second here uh but so many new chains have popped up like arbitrum Nova is one that's popped up a few times I'm hopefully going to have them on the show in in a future episode uh and they weren't even around like I've never heard of them up until you know this year literally so it is really interesting how quickly the space evolves and to your point George about developers shouldn't be picking a chain because it's a cool chain or it's the ne next shiny new thing they should be focusing on their IP they should be focusing on the gameplay and using whatever chain that they're on as a a tool nothing more than that uh that's my personal opinion I'm editorializing here a bit but but I do think that that's probably uh the the approach to to go with Devon your thoughts on that in terms of the user acquisition and distribution problem as it relates to

web three games in particular yeah I mean when it comes to the blockchain thing for example I think almost every single developer really picks the blockchain by who's going to give them money or give them the best support unfortunately at the end of the day it's it's sort of a bribe game that's why you saw like games the funding shows up like oh aable got a bunch of money hey they just announced a bunch of games I wonder why like that's how it works though right like at the end of the day like it's like it's like a publisher model in a way right like you got to get funding from somewhere and I like that's one way to look at it but at the same time I think we also don't have like uh we we've been trying to like we talked about the infrastructure plays earlier as soon as we start getting to kind of a middleware sort of territory where people don't have to care about which blockchain it is as long as it's kind of evm and kind of like does the few things that they expect it to I think people will start to kind of like maybe not care so much but at the same time like we probably do need some of these chains to just kind of like pick another focus and obviously like you know you've got some great stuff in the report that I imagine we'll get to about game Focus versus not but like there's also a trade-off of like uh you want to go to where the people are right like but at

the same time like that's going to be like a blockchain doing all kinds of stuff and you don't really stand out because like if you go to a game specific one like you go to a mutable there's like two three live games at most so you're gonna stand out because there's nothing else to like do on there right so uh but if you go to like polygon like where everyone kind of went like it's it's easy to get on to it's kind of permissionless not as like difficult to try and just throw something on there but at the same time like it's crowded by a ton of like small Indie projects daps doing things like You're competing with that traffic you're paying gas respective to that so like it's kind of a you know chicken and egg problem like you know the App Store kind of thing obviously like you went there because it was popular but now it's too popular same with steam same with everything else right like you want to go where people are but at the same time like at some point that's diminishing returns yeah I mean mobile is a is a red ocean for sure uh whereas web 3 I think a lot of developers are excited by it because it is more of a blue ocean but you still have the same problem of the red ocean if you're a mobile game right so it's kind of sometimes it's it's it's Best of Both Worlds other times it's the worst of Both Worlds uh in many ways um so

talking about chains now we mentioned at the start uh 200 different blockchain ecosystems for lack of a better phrase you have a slide uh on uh number 17 in your presentation blockchain gaming Network industry map and it kind of blows my brain a little bit uh hurts my brain at the very least uh because you've got your general use l1's you got your general use L2 l3s now talking about you got application specific Network Frameworks you have meta protocols uh that's broken down by nonm layer ones evm side chains ethereum main net I mean I won't go through every nomenclature on this slide but this is the kind of thing that developers have to to contend with I'm very curious to hear from you George in particular as you were looking at this as you were looking at all these different chains and presumably coming up with some kind of terminology to to classify these things on on slide 17 uh did you notice any trend uh and how has that changed over time are there any gaming specific

blockchains or blockchain ecosystems out there that clearly stand Head and Shoulders above everything else or is it still totally wide open um could be any winner you know two years from now five years from now who knows if we'll be talking about salana or arbitrum Nova or even ethereum and or mutable what what are you seeing what are the trends who's winning who's losing arguably the most important question for for many people that listen listening to us right now so the the the first takeway is that there are so many change I mean it doesn't matter which metric I'm going to use or which art we have so many chains which means one thing either we have too many chains or we need way more away three games we can explain this because of the investment interest towards building new chains from the past years and I mean this project got funding they start building let's say one two years ago so at some point they will launch and this will explain the huge number of of of chain that even launched this year in 2023 off in bare Market we have more than 80 new networks most of them gaming

focused and don't expect this number to go um less than that next year because we building a chain is not as hard as it used to be uh so many many new people will will try to enter the space when it comes to defining winner I don't see we're going to have winners I don't see there's a future where a single chain or a framework or whatever really can dominate across different characteristics because different games ask for different things if you have a very simple um game with great IP or let's say elements that make the assets valuable you don't really care about DS you care about liquidity if you have a game that needs to be fully on chain and needs to like try to propagate transactions every second to a chain then you need something that is really specialized to your needs my point is there is space for more than one arguably for tens or 20 or 30 successful ecosystems um there are big decisions for game developers when pitching a chain that and and we hope with this report is a good starting point to educate game developers on the tech side

I do understand game developers they might say I don't really need to know all those all those terms about blockchain I just need something to build my game on and I respect that but there are important characteristics do you want to try to have your own environment do you want to share the space with Noisy Neighbor that might also give great liquid to your game do you need speed do you need assurances that this will work no matter what do you need evm do you need svm do you need Kyo VM do you need web assembly again there are so many decisions um the key implication for game devs that that I'm seeing is important and will Define um Traction in the market is whether you need your own space that is protected with trade-offs but you can do it whatever you like with it the concept of an up chain we saw more than 30 up chains launching this year the most popular subcategory of chains or do you need an environment that maybe inherit security from a wider ecosystem so yeah these are two big questions like how important is trust for you and if you would like to really modify your environment if the answer is

yes to any of those two questions you might need to seek for a specialized solution yeah Devin what was your reaction uh to slide 16 slide 17 uh number of games to networks uh to 2023 81 new networks I think if I'm reading the slide correctly uh 223 new games 2.3 sorry 2.8 games per n work I mean that's just silly right like it's like saying we have 81 app stores and you know there's like two games in each it makes no sense right so something's got to give like this this is not sustainable you cannot have this many new networks and this many networks in total with so few games being built per Network so you you say George there are no winners yet and I buy that I think it's constantly evolving but I do think there are plenty of losers or they're going to be plenty of losers right so Devon your thoughts on on seeing slide 16 and slide 17 with just the sheer volume of these these blockchain networks that are focused on games and how few games are actually on

each of these networks on average I mean it's like the the early days of the internet where there was like you there were servers you could get servers places there was you know there that started expanding out to like oh you could get stuff from a server farm and now we have like a couple big cloud players right I feel like it's the same trajectory right you we don't have maybe the big cloud players yet maybe we do and they just end up you know outpacing everyone else but it's the same thing right like there's just a bunch of servers essentially that people happen to have their game on and so of course it's going to be spread out based off the deals they get the trade-offs they make stuff like that what I find even more interesting is like so the first wave of them was all just a reaction to ethereum's too expensive or too slow right like half these were built like a mutable was literally just built as a reaction to that Ronin was built as a reaction to that they they just had games on there and they were like it is we can't do this anymore and they just built their own thing right like we're past that part right we've got plenty of that that technology around in different forms of it you've got the ZK VM stuff coming as well and but then now we've got this other thing where we've got Asia doing a whole bunch of regional networks like it's a global thing but

you've got Regional networks like Clayton and Oasis and we miix that like yeah technically they work globally but these are very regionalized and and so it's just interesting again like do we evolve this to to those to be a bigger more umbrella thing or is it just like hey it makes sense for us to have our customized to the way our like culture or uh you know particular countries work or our regulations because like we might have a huge fragmentation around regulations and kyc stuff like that down the road and it might make sense to still have like some fragmentation by geography even so it's it's as George said this isn't going away uh it's kind of inevitable but you should see hopefully some games pooling in some places I mean it surprised me too I Curious George like where the numbers come from on like how many games per Network because like a mutable in salana had a huge number and like there's not like there's not that many live games so I'm assuming you're like counting games that are announced and like uh planning for it stuff like that because like amable like I said only has like maybe

three live games and so lot has a small handful as well yeah we do count games that that have publicly disclosed their Us game chain after we have validated that they're actually games so we don't test whether this is I mean we do have this information by the way whether they are in development or live but yeah the chart shows just games that on paper building on on specific ecosystems imag I imagine we'll see that number go down then as as you showed the number of games like halting uh development increasing so I imagine you might actually have to revise that number downward on some of those networks as some of those just go n we give up yeah we didn't cover that uh and I didn't have planned questions that but yeah there was there's a great slide actually that shows new games announced and then games that halted production and as you can imagine 2023 uh inverts quite strongly compared to the prior two years uh in terms of the trends there so yeah I think we're going to see that uh change pretty drastically perhaps even as soon as next year uh 2024 I think a lot of companies that raised during the

bull are almost certainly going to run out of money pretty soon um and at that point you're going to start to see a lot of closures and perhaps consolidations um Team consolidations maybe even product consolidations and I think a lot of that's going to shake out quite differently to what these charts are currently showing but interesting to see what the current uh environment looks like I I just want to say it's also part a part of life I mean as we see great games being close to being launched we should expect some some games to also hold operations as well I don't think we should be scared the numbers are not that bad the numbers are good and like the vast majority of game developers survived for now but yeah it would be definitely interesting to see especially as we move towards next year how this will play out and that's a perfect uh segue into my my final question which is going to be for both of you here uh where do you see the market going forward you know this is a great look at what has what has been and is it's a great snapshot in time of 2020 23 through Q3 um but what what does 2024 2025 2026 look like the next five years

look like uh are we through the worst of it now uh or is the worst still to come and what do you think is the Catalyst we mentioned this earlier in the show the word Catalyst I I had exactly that word here planned what is the Catalyst that we need as a as an industry for the next wave of innovation next wave of funding next wave of excitement next wave of infrastructure companies next wave of everything where does that come from in your your mind we'll start with George yeah that's a fantastic question so I think 2024 will be um um a year where we can validate many of our assumptions at the ecosystem level um many great games will launch either an alpha beta or maybe the full release so we will have the chance to not only experience but also see how the market reacts to proper games that they are like developed by well funded teams by teams with great experience and try to learn from them uh a q driver would be for me I mean unlocking the next axi

moment which does not me necessarily redoing play to or whatever but again combining good IP with a great value prob for the all web free part so I think that would be a challenge not just combining R IP but also doing this in a creative way that makes use of blockchain Technology uh a Big Driver also I do expect to be the um ex um IP from existing um AAA gaming Studios I think we will see more people joining and once again the Ubisoft of this world the CCP the the band the Sega do more if this works most likely will make many more people joining and try to experiment more so again it's a it's a year where we're going to learn way more because not we won't assume anymore but we will see a triaa web three games we will see big players testing things we will also see L2 and layer 3es testing their text tack which on paper they have been optimized in many cases for games so yeah it's definitely a very interesting year to to to keep an eye on for for different reasons Devon same question to you I think VR is a pretty

good analog uh you could kind see that same sort of hype cycle wave and it's like if you if you weren't paying attention you might think vr's completely dead but like obviously the quest three just came out for example like it's not dead it's just you know going through that slow period and that slow phase I think we're kind of in the same area to an extent uh with you know web 3 stuff it's obviously like different and like they're very different like styles of platforms and stuff like that both go through the sort of like we've got to evolve technology alongside the game so they could both kind of get to the right point and they're both kind of still going through that growing phase that sort of maturing as the technology tries to get to the point where people are like this isn't a pain in the ass to use and it goes for both of them right like they both have a lot of huge amount of like problems and you remember like the early PC days even people were just like ah I wouldn't use that thing that thing's just a pain to use and like now we're just like I can't live without it same with our phones and everything else and it you it takes a while to become ubiquitous I guess as far as like what gets it to like get everyone you know over the hump sort of thing everyone chases hits like mobile

was like that too like you once there was a big hit like oh Angry Birds oh everyone do 99 Cents everyone do this like or oh we got freeo plays working out like let's all do that it's everyone just chases the big Financial hit uh and so when something just makes a ton of money and is related to web 3 they you'll see more of it like that's that's how it goes that's why axi just kicked off that bull run uh it's it's inevitable especially if the West is funding it we chase after hits big time the east in the meantime we we'll keep building this stuff like you'll just think oh like web 3 is dead and they' be like oh yeah ask getting win in the East or like oh yeah web 3 is in every game like that's how they're already treating it they're already like yeah web 3 is part of every game now like that's just how it's gonna be like unless it's a console game like no it's gonna have it and so like I expect that to be the the norm and like that there's kind of a language in like sort of geographical barrier where people generally don't know what's going on in the East and I found that a lot even when I try and find out myself and I expect that sort of fog to continue and so you'll if you're not looking you'll just think it's probably mostly dead unless you're a listener of this podcast you'll

probably be like ah web 3 I remember that and then until it's back and then it will be called something else and you won't even oh that that's web three okay yeah I think what if there's one take takeaway for me over the last year of talking to folks on this this podcast and folks in the industry it is it's the same thing as with freeo play and interesting game mechanics uh as uh looking looking to the east that is really what we should be doing as if we're a western listener of this this podcast uh using the word Western and Eastern here uh very Loosely the a lot of the Innovative mechanics a lot of the the financial models a lot of the economy design uh a lot of the really interesting mechanics game mechanics they're coming from Korea they're coming from Japan they're coming from that area just like we saw with freeto playay right just like we saw with everybody copying a lot of those Trends I still remember us looking at early zingga when we were going to mobile and we were kind of getting into Mobile like we were just constantly looking to see what was trending in the in the uh Chinese and

Japanese and Korean uh charts to see where the the interesting mechanics were so I think there's a one takeaway here for me over the last year it is web3 is definitely not dead it is obviously on Hiatus and we're going to see something interesting and the most likely place we're going to see it come from this big Financial uh success is almost certainly going to come from an Eastern Market that's my my bold prediction uh probably into the into 2024 I think we might see it in 2024 as as these companies have been working for a while so um all right well this is a fantastic place to to end today um George I just want to say a huge thank you for coming on the on the Pod today enjoyed the conversation everybody who's listening please go and check out the report uh we'll have a link in the show notes uh to the game s report uh it's 61 slides of just pure unadulterated uh data if you're into information and you're into Trends this is the place to go to see what is happening in web 3 what has happened in web 3 and hopefully you listen to this pod and you have an idea of what's going to come in the future um so George thank

you so much thank you so much for having me Nico as as always uh thank you for coming on the Pod uh it's great to have you on to provide your insights as well uh so appreciate appreciate your time thank you and thank you for doing the work that needed to be done uh George absolutely I Echo that this was truly is in my opinion the first and best and deepest look at web 3 um at at a at a 30,000 foot neutral perspective really objective look without any kind of bias or subjective uh analysis going on um so yes thank you for that thank you so much and as always a big thank you to all of our listeners uh we'll be back next week with more interviews more insights and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web 3 so until next time friends stay crypto curious and feel free to send questions guest recommendations and comments to me my email is Niko nov. if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a five-star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov.

or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu and advisory Services again that is w ww. nov. thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode