STEPN: Move-to-Earn or Ponzinomics? - The Metacast by Naavik

over the past many crypto corners i've been like ranting a little bit at the beginning so with this i can i can rant to get bit again so maria i'm taking over your uh your round table just to rant [Music] hello friends welcome to the metacast roundtable by navik and today i'm joined by matt dyan senior product manager ia abba manu kumar co-founder of the great navic nicholas verrick investor at bitcraft and co-host of the metacast and we also have a surprise last minute guest david aymore ceo of playment because there are some cool news to be shared david oh yeah we um yeah our funding round our seed funding round got announced

uh it's quite fun because in a sense some of this stuff happened over the metacast nick and i have been speaking for a while nico you remember by day what's your day job is it running the metacast or is it a part of bitcraft hard to tell sometimes isn't it nonetheless nico and i um i've been talking about been talking about what what i plan to do and i think that's in line with the sort of thing that nico and bitcraft are interested in so yeah they invest they will lead investor in our our seed round with lots of other great vcs 1kx cherry uh play and ethereal who joins sort of a mixture of crypto vcs and uh and game vc's and yeah it's nice to have some gas in the tank and we can focus on building games and nice to be you know have an official reason to be speaking to nico a few times a week there we are we've been talking a lot over the past months oh yeah like

multiple times a week yeah it was amazing it's fun yeah yeah yeah we just got back from a dev connect which is an event in amsterdam that was a lot of fun as well i recommend anybody interested in this space to go there next year maria you'll be there next year man you know i've never seen menu outside of berlin uh he's not even in berlin not even in berlin in cologne in cologne my bad i'm matt you're pretty close to amsterdam you're excused because you're the other side of the atlantic but well i do love amsterdam i've been a few times it's a great city i think we're making things happen i will see you next april and amsterdam each one of you yes by the way so quick quick uh psa i don't know if this is relevant to anyone but there are nfd events in the crypto space and there are dev events in the crypto space you can avoid the nft events you can go to the dev events because there's a huge difference between the two right so i was in ft lisbon a few weeks ago and

that was just you know people as i described it people looking for exit liquidity right come buy my nfts so i can i can buy both and not talk to anyone anymore in my life um and people at amsterdam at devconnect were actually like very excited about this technology building super cool stuff um highly recommend these types of events nice i love the story of the friendship being built and the business as well over the yeah yeah tell us like some more about that like how how did it start how did it end up it sounds like a love story i mean a little bit options to make the movie are available so i you know what a contractual position is netflix netflix keeps calling me david i think um but you know i think that um it is it's quite an interesting way to uh you know i didn't know nico before uh the metacast and of course you know we were interested in the same set of things i think in the sort of crypto world and then you get to figure out whether or not you you're both aligned

in terms of your thinking and what you want to try and do and you know it wasn't i never really thought of it this way in fact i guess you weren't officially part of bitcraft when you started working on a metacart step right niko so we were sort of already aligned before that became available and i had no plans to do funding at that time so just a bit of serendipity over the over the last few months feels like you know three or four months something like that yeah yeah and you know you you say money you said congrats david but it's almost you know in today's world where you know you have an experienced team willing to build on chain games in in web 3. um it's almost more congrats nico because you know there is [Laughter] there's more um there's more capital out there than there are people that know what to do with it um so yeah what a lovely moment yeah no definitely milestone moment for sure i'm very excited with the next game

um because i was reading the article and you are going to build an on-chain trading game full of politics subterfuge and economic opportunity this sounds like a dream d d session for me so i am extremely looking forward to it the designers are having such a good time by building this game at the moment yeah mapping it all out and it's really a game where we set the scene for players rather than a lot of great games which were about set pieces on set pieces that to entertain a player what we're doing really is more setting the scene and letting players entertain themselves and creating situations where you have this political who's doing what factions all that good stuff you know so so like true to the dna of uh loot in a way yeah well it's the sort of evolution of the of our first game equipped um and we're doing it all on chain which is sort of somewhere between amazing and crazy not sure but uh fun place to be it's a it's a great way to spend the working day figuring here now

yeah well congrats playman big craft david nico and thank you as well to all other investors i am extremely happy to know that this game might actually come true with the investment rounds so yeah looking forward to when the game is out sure but you know i'm very cautious before presenting anything to you maria because i was listening to that last podcast and how you gave nil a hard time so i'm going to make sure it's so polished you'll see it the the same day everybody else you know i'm you're not getting any tv version just tell me in advance and then i'll just be extra nice okay we'll see on that bombshell i'm going to run off and make dinner but uh nice to be here for a moment i'll see you care all you cheers david bye bye bye and in other oh my new yeah oh no nothing you said bye i i was just gonna say i actually do like how our intros you know talk about like some good news or like

someone else's game who's actually also part of you know the round table team uh and last week we did anil this week we do it with david so yeah yeah things are moving forward for everybody yeah yeah i'm gonna have some investing to do to uh to keep this up is that what you're telling me yeah hello why not yes so actually on other good news today we're going to try a new format of the round table uh so if you're a listener it would be amazing to hear your feedback at the end of it just so we know if we're going in the right direction um what's good what's not so good for us to improve so thank you in advance if you can send us an email or reach out in other ways and so the list of topics today um a bit of a hotbot of exciting news so ubisoft attracting biointerest meta struggle to recover its market value player playable worlds um doing a race and also talking about steppen with a

great catchy name that nico gave it move to earn or ponzonomics so that will be you get the guess twice um yeah so manu what's next for ubersoft let us know what you've explored yeah yeah i'm excited about like this new format so yeah i guess i'll intro the topic uh this time so basically what happened was um yeah late late last week uh you know bloomberg put out a report that um there was a rumor that you know ubisoft uh is is like a potential buyout target for um a couple of private equity firms um specifically blackstone and kkr of course like uh in the in the shadow of uh the major acquisitions that happen uh over q1 uh this news definitely uh got a lot of people's uh years perked up

uh okay are we going to see like you know the next big major acquisition and and yeah i mean honestly it's um i actually don't think it's uh graduated like from the rumor phase of things uh ubisoft itself has uh has denied any any any uh you know any association with this kind of news but um i mean if it is true um i i guess my opinion on the whole thing is just that i'm probably not that surprised you know just given uh ubisoft's uh performance over the last year um i think um i think aaron covered ubisoft back in july or june last year and you know at that time itself you know again net bookings were down uh about like 20 uh in their latest release again they were down another 17 um the stock has just gotten absolutely crushed uh

since uh since the start of 21 and um and also start of this year um their market cap is basically halved since then a lot of i mean of course there's like the you know broader market macro market trends and whatnot also affecting all of it but i mean ubisoft has just just generally not had a good time i feel um all the delayed launches that they that they you know that they keep announcing um this big employee misconduct scandal that happened um the great uh exodus quote-unquote as you know as everyone calls it that happened uh in the nft space that was like their next you know probably the thing that a lot of people are getting excited about you know when it comes to ubisoft's evolution but the ghost recon nft experiment just made like 700 or something uh granted it's an experiment and such but

i'm sure like they learnt a lot also from it but but yeah in general you know um ubisoft had not really had the best time and yeah when the news came out i kind of also probably want it to happen so that potentially ubisoft can you know see better days in the future uh but but yeah at the moment yeah not very surprising news not uh but also still it's still in a rumor state so yeah i mean let's see do you think uh parallels can be drawn between ubisoft and activision blizzard um probably may maybe just in terms of um the ip portion of it yeah probably they're also like the employee scandal etc but i think um if you just look at it on a company performance perspective i still believe activation blizzard is

on is at a different level versus ubisoft that just has you know a general reputation of just not delivering on you know things that they have said that they will deliver on so um that's just happened like again and again and again and you know it shows in the market reaction uh or the public market reaction so and yeah i mean if they get acquired they'll probably be like another parallel to activating wizard if activision blizzard even does get acquired um yeah but um but yeah yeah but i know it's not it's not like uh yeah not like super like you know deep news at the moment but [Music] one thing i thought was kind of interesting in reading the coverage about this was that the the companies expressing interest supposedly in in acquiring ubisoft were not strategic investors like say microsoft for activision blizzard it was like private equity firms um and

on that topic um i saw a really interesting tweet that i'm going to read a little bit from here from dr serkin toto on twitter so shout out for the great tweet he listed like approximate employee numbers for different game studios uh worldwide and so just to cherry pick a couple here take two about 6 500 globally that excludes zynga which is another 2 000. nintendo 6600 activision blizzard 10 000 ea 11 000 ubisoft 20 300. so i mean like more than double activision blizzard and when you compare that to you know the revenues and the success that they've had and you think about some of the private equity firms that are considering acquiring them supposedly maybe there's some layoffs coming some um you know slimming down of the business i don't know i'm just speculating but basically yeah i mean these i guess these private equity firms are essentially gonna if it happens basically you know polish up the asset

before you know they flip it i guess um but yeah yeah i ain't that good don't forget um ubisoft is french and french or notorious for um all of their um you know they're pretty socialists or at least like us in belgium we look at them as fairly socially um and so i i mean that might be why you know they they maybe they were never they were never able to lay anyone off and so there's just a bunch of people hanging out at the ubisoft offices i'm sure that's not the case but uh yeah it is it is true even comparing with portugal it's very hard to lay off someone in portugal there's a lot of unemployment well recision of oh can i speak english today the word about breaking a contract with someone firing them there you go um yeah it's quite it's quite strict at least way stricter than i know it is in canada and the united states for example yeah yeah cool well yeah max uh max from our

writing team on navic digest he's uh doing a short piece on this also so i think so yeah we're recording on wednesday so it should be coming out this evening um so yeah you can get more details about uh about this topic there more details about the rumors the rumors come from somewhere um yeah so going on to meta struggles to recover market value um so early february meta shares they fell by around 26 so it wiped around 230 billion off of meta's market value and the root cause is that it was the first time that they saw a drop in daily user numbers and today we're recording this on wednesday once the market closes i believe meta is going to release the first quarter report so we need to confirm this i'm going to be talking about news

regarding [Music] some predictions of what the report will contain so i think investors are not expecting to see a great recovery but at least some progress and improvement in the market value and the reported root causes of why meta is struggling its post idfa impacts on their advertising business they're struggling to retain young users which apparently they represent around 97 percent of meta's revenue they're leaving facebook and instagram in droves and joining competitors such as tick tock they have been doing massive funding on their metaverse platform i think they invested around 10 billion in 2021 alone so more than 10 times that they paid to acquire instagram in 2012 and i was also seeing um google uh so alphabet aka google they reported their first quarter earnings and similarly they they grew but it

didn't meet investor expectation and one of the reasons that was communicated is similarly with tick tock as a competitor and they're struggling to monetize the short reels so focusing on the gaming aspect of of this news i i just wonder how how is the metaverse going to become profitable like just looking at the investment that meta is doing in building out this the this metaverse platform they're going to require such a mass user base and we also saw the fees that they're going to to charge creators and and there's a a competitive landscape you know we see companies like epic matt is going to talk about playable worlds so many companies trying to build meta verses so it's not it's not like someone does it once and then they'll have a critical user base coming to them because there's going to be plenty of options out there to explore yeah i'm just curious to see what what

happens throughout the year with with meta does anyone have any takes on facebook i'd like to have your thoughts on their sorry so i saw a lot of backlash on their creator fees that they were charging which were up to forty seven and a half percent i believe um just curious isn't roblox like way more and why is everyone hating so much on this um and yeah just curious to have you like what is it i actually thought roblox was like at 37 or i don't know maybe maybe i'm forgetting is roblox way more than ah okay where's young when you need him yeah we need a while since we got you on yeah i i i don't know um so i i think it's more um yeah i can at least say you know with apple and google play it's 30 percent and then i think steam is also around 30 and then epic games is it's lower and so i think the expectation is that there's already

um a lot of conversations going on about the high fees being charged to developers for example on apple and google play of 30 percent and now um meta just says oh actually we're going to do nearly 50 percent and i think that's going to be can i be can i be advocates of the devil here yeah of course so i just looked up i think you know for roblox it's about they pay out 28 to um to creators that's that's so on average robux based developers um over 28 cents per dollar spent pretty much right um but the thing is that why does roblox get to charge so much is because they provide tooling right so they provide a you know sort of you know tool sets to for people to build games with um i'm assuming that's also meta's plan right um well apple doesn't give you right they give you a like access to a marketplace and users but epic games does if you if you're if you have a deal with them i think you can even access

without um being distributed on their store you have access to the epec online services for example and i think potentially unreal and things like that so then your license and then maybe i'm wrong but tim sweeney is a good guy after all i think i think like david david like put it pretty well in one of the previous podcasts when we talked about this he maybe he said it uh but he said like something that i like facebook is this move by facebook was just tone deaf uh in in like just a regular environment where everyone is talking about reducing the cut from 30 you know facebook comes out with this number and and more importantly in the metaverse environment and in the web 3 environment where the number is and niko can confirm but probably in the single digits they're they're at like you know ten times that uh and india yeah this tone def i mean yeah i agree

with that but i don't know um i don't know so yeah we also don't have like too many details on you know their business model and such plus they do have like access to all the i mean they will be controlling the hardware uh with their vr headsets which would give access to a lot of these metaverse experiences that they're creating i don't know how that fits in but i understand it's a fair point to be devil's advocate on this it is a new a new world and new worlds come with new way new needs to monetize i'm just thinking about them investing 10 billion in one year alone and many more years in investment they have to recoup their money somehow so it's a fair point niko uh and actually titan one question oh one question to actually go back to something you said maria you said like so google also came out with its uh results and um but then you said like they have not been because of tick tock they have not been able to monetize real so like

google has deals where does that exist oh youtube sorry yeah because alphabet owns youtube sorry youtube is google yeah they have these short format videos now right yeah true yeah well tying into the metaverse uh ma playable worlds yeah so the news item that caught my eye this this week was the the round raised by playable worlds which is a game studio that was started by um eric goldberg and raf koster so i've been following them for a little while because i really like ralph coster i think he's really smart he wrote maybe my favorite game design book it's called a theory of fun for my favorite i love it too do you know that okay yeah it's so good it's really good like really cute illustrations but really simple and lays out a lot of the topics yeah it's a great book so highly recommend that um

but anyways he he's a long time they're both longtime industry veterans ralph koster did ultima online among many other projects so he has a lot of experience doing these sort of mmo metaverse type projects in the past so this company playable worlds raised 25 million and i'm quoting here for cloud native sandbox massive multiplayer online game so there's a lot of venture buzzwords there um they raised the money in a round led by cacao games uh and again shout out to our friends at bitcraft for uh recommitment here along with several other investors galaxy interactive there was new investment from lilith games which i thought was interesting and angels um so yes they're making a sandbox mmo but apparently the the big draw here is the tech stack and they've spent a lot of time and money building out a sort of cloud native tech stack that takes advantage of cloud computing to do a lot of really

interesting things they can do more detailed simulations they have smarter ai they can do persistent worlds that are shared um among players so the example they gave and one of the articles i read was that if you chop down a tree it's permanently gone from the world for everybody so there's this sort of persistence across sessions which is really cool and apparently something that is sort of uniquely enabled by cloud computing um so anyways i thought this was fascinating um and then i'll just say one last thing before i kind of open it up to you all is that the the round was led by cacao games right which is an asian um company cacao is like an asian social media uh or like messaging um company i believe and they made a point in one of these articles that they um the the direction that playable worlds is going leans more into an asian gaming style than a western gaming style and i'll just read a quick quote here

um so uh they and what they mean by they is i guess asian gamers or asian customers live in a world where most activity occurs in the messenger layer so again cacao messaging company and gaming is integrated with other things like dating banking ride hailing services so that meant that cacao had an interest in tying the game to the real world so i thought this was fascinating and a lot of those things kind of touch on metaverse concepts bridging the gap between physical and digital and obviously like a really seasoned um founding team so i've been i've been following this company for a little while and i'm i'm really curious to see what they do they haven't released any details about the game itself though it's been all about the tech stack which i think is kind of kind of interesting when you look at other rounds that are raised oh we're going to make this big i don't know competitive fps or we're going to make a sandbox social game where like a lot of the rounds are led with the game and this round is led with the tech and how we're going to

accomplish what we are setting up to do so i thought that was really interesting i think i saw a news article this week that lilith games is now a publisher as well yeah okay yeah so another another asian developer right there lilith i think is a chinese developer right yeah with playable worlds um i think we also like we discussed it once um in one of the previous podcasts um and one thing that like really stood out to me in terms of their approach um which is probably to your point also matter but you know showcasing the tech is um while a lot of these um you know build your own methods platform style companies would really just focus on the tech and the tech is the product and you know kind of creating the tools that people can use to make their ugc experiences or metaphors

experiences playable worlds has this approach of yes we will create the tech but we will also create the game so that people can i mean we need to have the game so that people come here first you know and then they're here and then then we open up the tech for you know either those people to create their own experiences or like you know further on for developers and and things like that and i felt that in itself was like a very smart approach and i mean who better to kind of create that kind of a mmo experience than you know ralph koster himself um but yeah that's one thing that really like stood out to me uh i'd also recommend like checking out uh the playable worlds blogs and rav costas you know um his entries development diary entries yeah exactly yeah that's what it's called uh very very insightful stuff and i mean yeah you can like combine all of those

into its own little book to be honest i was as you were saying i was drawing um some parallels with the conversation we had of epic and lego collaborating for the metaverse and then i think this gives me similar feelings of seeing um you know a name like raph just leading a metaverse it just makes me feel warm and fuzzy and hopeful yeah same that's it that's my comments it's more fuzzy it's certainly warmer and fuzzier than zuckerberg leading yeah metaverse concept yeah cambridge analytical point too i completely mis there was this like meme from his uh from his announcement where he was like um if if you die in real life you die in the meta verse like was that real did he actually say that in the in in the in the facebook like the keynote presentation i hadn't seen that i don't know i i

couldn't i couldn't watch it i don't know i just saw that like floating around on the internet and i was like man there's no way he could have actually said that but all right well my my my takes on this so obviously we were involved i wasn't so it's it's not on the crypto part so i wasn't closely involved um but i've so i'm always very optimistic and hopeful which is why i i do you know the venture capital job um and so you know once uh rav koster wrote like an internal document or like his thoughts on what's being sold as you know the metaverse especially when it comes to crypto um and it was um confronting i'll put it that way so um got some of my hopes and dreams absolutely crushed um but here we are you know investing in payments who's going to be building you know a on-chain game so uh we keep trucking we keep fighting and um but yeah i'm i'm super impressed by everything that uh wrapped

us and um we like to to you know back these these types of entrepreneurs you know who who've been around the block and like who that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside yes maria so i eliquently describes it when they just you know about the idea of them building this type of stuff so yeah yeah well that leads us to stefan move to earn our ponzonomics all rights yes thank you that's what i'm looking forward to are you saying you weren't looking forward to the ones before money no no that is just your interpretation yeah i didn't say anything like that there's no subtext please go ahead so i've been um you know over the past many crypto corners i've been like ranting a little bit at the beginning so with this i can i can rant to get bit again so maria i'm taking over your uh your round table just to rant so a few months ago like a very good friend of mine also in the crypto space um came to me and he's like nico i have to tell you something

stepping man it's the you know i've got these shoes on my phone and then i go for a walk like a 15-minute walk with my dog and i own 50 bucks and i'm like what the hell are you talking about okay so i did some research and um you know my very lame joke is that steppen is just actually infinity with extra steps um so you need to buy the assets you know nft assets that you can then use to earn tokens that you need to generate more of these nft assets that you can then sell to other people who can then use them to and so it continues um the the typical bonzinomic um yeah loop um i can go into move to earn a bit later because i actually have like a positive thing to say about this as well um i'm not only only ranting but um yeah i'd love to have your your thoughts on this um um yeah what do you think about steppen i feel strongly on this thank you for picking me first you walk a lot so you're like give me these shoes i walk a lot yes i do i do i

do walk away so for me to go running it cost me usually 100 pounds for some good running shoes and when i when i heard about stefan someone was saying oh you know i i i think it was not elianson's um analysis of stefan and he was saying that he can earn 300 400 a day and i was immediately captivated because i already walk alone 57 i remember that number it's like 357. wait and you wait so how much do you have to pay for the shoes and then how much do you earn this is my story nico let me tell my story and so i installed this app and then it says activation code and then i go to try to discover what an activation code is and i realize there's this gold rush so you have to invest so much effort in trying to get this activation code and i thought that was it once i had it i'm in i can start earning some money and then i got in and i realized wait

hold on how did you get the activation code oh is that coming up thank you na eliason's uh discord that has a subgroup for stepping she she pulled some strings right okay and yeah then i was ready to get going and i realized oh i have to invest 1 100 pounds just to get one pair of shoe which isn't it has a return on investment of maybe a few months because you have to buy maybe three before you can start getting enough energy to earn money do they make you buy them in pairs or do you buy like an individual shoe and you can imagine the second or fortunately it's in pairs okay yeah i think i'm not very crypto native and i thought i was ready to get into the games and just seeing that price tag for something that sounded so fun and knowing that i can buy with 100 pounds some shoes to go and do exercise i don't

know not not for me the roy seems just very risky oh wait so you're saying that the because you it gets paid back in a few months you told me so that means that's the you know the return on investment is or the you know average annual return is more than 100 and you're like not enough well if the ponzonomics don't crumble that's the thing is it doesn't look sustainable so who who says that in three months time i will gain a profit so so you maria you have a number which is let's say a percentage that's if you earn that's higher than that percentage on the day you would buy it well if it took a week you know to get my money back yeah if it's something reasonable yeah it seems safer yeah it's a big big price tag to invest yeah no i agree um i think there's two things i like here

i'll start with with one i think the um the activation code is smart and good right so i think one of the problems that axi had was there was suddenly this this like unstoppable gold rush of people coming into the game you know playing the game grinding as much as they could um and then you know selling axes to the to next person that also comes in and you get this hyper inflation very very fast and i think you know the energy system was one way to limit that a little bit um and i think you know there's an uh there's a kind of energy system with stepping as well right you can't you know walk in infinitely there's a certain amount you can do per day and and on top of that they also have an activation codes so they limit the amount of people that i can actually start playing the game but then it's actually like within two limits you not only need the activation code but then you also need the capital after that yeah and it gives having one pair of shoe and then the shoes you can buy have different stats and to buy a pair of

shoes that has the best stats to optimize you're leveling up and being able to make other shoes they're actually a lot more expensive to buy nowadays because i think people now know the strategy know what to look for so the market is a bit different than what it was at the start and you get 10 minutes per day with your first your first pair of shoe and i don't the activation code it doubles up as like a little bit of a hype generator similar to like how clubhouse was like in white only i guess is that is that what you like about it it's harder it's way scarcer for me to get on clubhouse because you could invite quite a lot of people i don't know i was just a lot easier to get a code for sorry someone to invite me to clubhouse with trying to find an activation code honestly i would have given up unless i was so keen to find out what it was all about i i don't have the energy to put into trying to go on discord all day long

drop a code copy paste it fast i guess they kind of did their job if you were like that keen also like you know go for it so but yeah well my thoughts are i think um you know this is still not the last time in which we'll see a ponzinomic you know boom and bust cycle right and so what i think um what's smart here is that because of the activation codes they can actually control the inflow of new players into the system so they can actually smooth out that like imagine if they did they wouldn't have had the activation code then you know the the spike would be way more severe and so because of the activation code they have a little bit more control and so i actually don't know what what the the price of of the the shoes is now like is it is it already like going down a bit or is it still just you know to the moon and we keep going up i checked it a few days ago and i felt to the moon and you could get a better price buying with uh i believe solana instead of the bnb coin for binance

okay so today the token went up another 15 over the last month it went up you could see the gst token which is the one you need to repair your shoes and mint and all that go a bit down because i think they're introducing a new token the gm i was going to mention that that bit about repair repairing the shoes um while it is still kind of like a ponzinomics thing like they seem to be more conscious about putting more sinks into the economy to at least keep that at bay a little bit longer while they develop more features and try and balance things out yeah and hat off to their ux of the app to be honest the app is very slick navigates well i don't i'm not really into crypto and so you know i just don't know how to create wallets very well and you just with one click well not one click maybe two or three you would have created a wallet and so

even though i'm not on solano or bnb i just did it on them on the fly and then i'd be able to quite easily buy my first pair of shoes so yeah i was very impressed with that with that flow a deal is listening very closely right now it doesn't work the sky we were very happy what was the second thing you like oh sorry so i you know um yeah that's exactly what i wanted to touch upon um so fundamentally you know i've said this a lot i've looked i look i see a lot of decks right i see a lot of x to earn and um i'm actually quite excited about the concept of move to earn so fundamentally you know whenever i see ex to earn i'm skeptical um you know when people tell me i just earned you know a significant amount of money for 10 minutes a 10 minute walk i get very suspicious one of my the lessons my dad told me was there is no such thing as a free lunch and that is a very useful lesson when you're navigating the dark

and murky waters of web 3 with scams left and right trying to pull you under um and so you know to stay afloat just be very suspicious of anything you know um anyway so um you know there's no such thing as a free lunch there's no easy way to to make money right the money always has to come from somewhere we we saw the same with axi um i think you guys described it as what was it again like an attraction parker or something or a carnival or whatever like there has to be carnival if there's money coming out there has to be money coming coming in somewhere and so we step in for now at least the way it works is you know the money coming in is from new people wanting to you know walk and earn obviously so um but the reason why i'm specifically excited about this move to earn idea is because i actually think that there is tangible real world value being created by incentivizing people to move and i think the way this will potentially play out in the future is with um partnering

with um what's the word i'm looking for insurance oh yeah life insurance company health companies so health insurance that's a word thank you um so you know if i i think there's gonna be a world where you know you will pay less health insurance um if you do these kind of things so right because if you know statistics can show that you know if you let's say do an hour walk every day that will reduce your chance to have a heart attack and diabetes by x percent so you can almost calculate the real world value of you making that so there's actually a real you can already do that so like right there you and vitality has a program um that if if you track your exercise so you just get benefits and you pay less premium and you you can get an iphone and stuff like that yeah exactly and so there is real value being created and so you know this is to come back to our carnival example if

there's people you know taking money out the value that's being created by you know potentially partnering with health insurance companies that would actually be a money faucet into this ecosystem where you know that could actually facilitate people actually earning by by walking just because they're they're decreasing their their cost of life insurance i have to say that like hats off to steppen for their forma i completely agree i run three four times a week and before i reached that turn point i was willing to run seven days a week in order to make money and it's just the power of money is such a great motivator i hope i hope it you know it survives and it's not a ponzonomic because it's quite exciting space i mean i've checked out the website and and so the the team seems very legit um they're also not synonymous um the investors are very legit um i haven't looked too deep into like what their long-term vision is i hope sincerely that you know they're they're looking

into what we just discussed where you know there's additional value being created with what they do um i i it makes me feel like another axiomfinity so they created this this viral loop where people you know get their friends on right they tell everyone like i just went for a walk and i just made x amount of money um they get a ton of people on their system they've done a great job with the onboarding um and you know there's gonna be a lot of angry people at some point right because this stuff just it can't keep going going up this doesn't work like that unfortunately um but then you know when the dust settles down they're gonna have you know thousands hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people that own these these weird shoes right and then maybe they can um they can continue to to build some something sustainable from that um and i kind of see this as almost the the player playbook at this point right where it's you know you create an unsustainable loop that creates a viral effect where people are suddenly printing money out of nowhere and they're like oh my god this is amazing and because people are greedy and sometimes pretty naive they're like everyone's like okay i'm gonna buy some

assets um and then you get millions of people on your platform suddenly you know everything implodes but they still have these assets because they don't want to sell them at a loss and then you actually you know build an experience around these assets that they own and um you suddenly have a very significant player base and didn't because in the end like the company like behind steppen doesn't invest anything in this right they've built this loop and all of the money coming in comes from from players yeah i guess my only question to yeah you're right that this is you know like that that playbook now um create that virality loop at the start uh potentially you know uh use the model that axi has to kind of um yeah hit that growth spike but then not have like the bells and whistles and you know live ops controls for later to kind of balance the economy and yeah my question is like you know how this is like a bad way to put the question but like how early is too late

it's kind of like why when like people launch that early and kind of don't think about future um repercussions of you know what that economy will end up like it it's it'll basically be too late because i think we're also kind of seeing it with axi infinity right now right like they have all these different plans of okay how they're going to be fixing you know the economy but will slp really come back to its you know july 2021 levels where that was really you know the peak and you kind of see it also in free-to-play games like if um you know if you if if you're not like thinking about your economic how your economic design is going to be playing out for like the next two three three years in live operations then at some point it is too late to kind of change like fundamental systems in the game and therefore you end up operating on a lower baseline forever there there is like this opportunity cost

attached with like launching this early and not thinking about you know where like where you will end up so um it uh yeah so that's probably like the one thing that i would feel about steppen or any of these models you know like any axi infinity style model applied to play to earn move to earn eat to earn read to earn learn to earn i don't know whatever to earn you know uh so uh that would be like yeah the one question i have but yeah you hit the point that i was gonna make exactly the opportunity cost if you're spending all your time as a development team fixing a broken economy that means you're not building new features you're not layering in new fun things to do or new systems um so yeah 100 agree and one thing i just wanted to mention briefly like regardless of how successful or unsuccessful stepping is you have to think companies like nike and artifact or adidas are paying attention to what's

happening here right it's like in their wheelhouse um are they gonna do it exactly probably not but they have to be paying attention at least and seeing the opportunity there yeah i use the nike app to to run and they already have a way where you can put your shoes in and it tracks the wear down over time it just reminded me oh yeah just add a little element how much are you earning healthy lifestyle happiness healthy lifestyle priceless does your health insurance get reduced i i could get uh you know what's the clock that i that i watch or something like that there you go oh nice it's amazing not bad yeah i should check back my health insurance apple watch apple watch that's what it is um yeah i want to ask my new question yeah oh wait mind you you mentioned you know axe infinity um by the way plug next week so you're listening to or this

came out on a friday next tuesday my interview with philippa goes live we dive into action topic to you yeah are you guys also talking about the origin a little bit can you like give it like piece of spoiler everything cool too nice i mean he explains it better than i can so he's not gonna do it justice by by trying now right so i'll i'll leave it like with that you just mentioned um you just mentioned that the like will axi or sky mavis be able to increase the slp price to their july highs and so my response to that is like if they don't would that make them a failure like since when is the arbitrary valuation of the markets um at the top of a cycle a a indicator or like i okay so i'm going to make another small rant so a small one one of the problems i see is i'm ranting a lot today so my apologies for that anyway so one of the problems i see today is that you know because

people are greedy right this feels inward 3 like the foundation of every problem um you know they tend to price up out of fomo a lot of assets um that suddenly like shoot up in value and then that top value which is you know as a developer you don't have like actually the axi team the sky mavis team didn't have anything to say about you know the price of slp right they design an economy and then suddenly they see this hyper-fast growth that's because they didn't have any activation codes couldn't do much about um they um so the the the price spikes up for everyone that's like the new normal right people are like okay you can earn i don't know what was the max that people could earn like a um a few dozen bucks a day or something um you can you can earn that a day then that's the new normal and that's the anchor and now everything that's not that is a failure right while in reality not right well if you ask if you ask this guy maybe his team today

um you know or let's say if you asked the sky mavis team 18 months ago like would you be happy to be in the shoes today where this is the amount of users you have this is the price of slp this is how much people are earning i'm pretty sure they'll they'll be they'll be very happy and so my point is that you know a lot of the time we're comparing the success of a game by irrational metrics that were that they didn't have any control over that were you know forced upon them almost by the free market than the greed of people yeah yeah i guess where i was coming from and probably the big difference with stefan is that taxi happened and then steppen came so step in new so you know i mean learning from hindsight is valuable in its in its own self and i think um yeah i mean at the end of the day like you know uh yeah slp hitting whatever high it hit uh that's that's not really the point it's it's just more about um

once that has happened and you know one can kind of theoretically deconstruct why that happen then learnings can be made and then time can be given to you know basically make a better version and not kind of you know make the same mistakes or like step in the same holes again that would then allow these companies to essentially yeah not have that opportunity cost in terms of business upside that they might be losing now or going forward because they are stepping in those same holes and it's not about um it's not about like you know hitting market highs and stuff and of course like you know yeah i mean the market will fluctuate for 100 different reasons but um but yeah it's just about like actually happened you have a model that sounds pretty similar to axi uh you know why or you know where are those learnings kind of getting implemented so like i said that's where i was coming

from activation code devil's advocate now he's seeing axe infinity until it was less successful it was very successful and if even people who are not very familiar with crypto and web 3 it's very likely that they know axion infinity by name and none other because they led they led the movement they got their first they got very well known a lot of press and so i don't know i think if i if i were in the shoes of creators of a new a new product and we knew that we could apply this strategy and then balance it out and you can see like nico was saying they've already done some improvements to have burn and limitation of the spike of growth of of new users they could be trying to use this strategy in a more controlled environment to then give them time to implement the features to come and i you know i can't fault companies for going after human greediness like it's just a

trait and everything that we know about product development is what do humans want um how will they buy and you always want more you know you get you run 5k you want to run 10k you get a salary increase you want the next salary in chris you get love you want more love it's just how we are so yeah again also like i mean no matter like whatever how many hour hindsight examples exist you know there will always be new mistakes to be made uh with any with any game so um i mean yeah nothing is like really perfect at the end of it and yeah i mean also i mean i'll give a big caveat i haven't even like played this step in game so like i'm just you know talking based on whatever you guys said but um but yeah i mean again like it's just about like you're putting those learnings to use you know and if you guys are already kind of saying well it seems like the same maxi infinity point genomics model then

that's already like well why didn't you learn a little bit you know but um i know something that is perfect i also do think like i mean actually infinity is definitely like played its role in this industry and continues to play that role you know like we wouldn't have a crypto corner um segment without that game so yeah but yeah need to evolve also i guess yeah can i make one final you know final final we need to wrap up this episode you just wrap it up is it arrested making sure it's not it's not around actually it's the opposite okay i mean i i think there's a real world where you know even the stepping team looks back and says like we did all the right things even although the fact like what they're doing now might be unsustainable um right i agree that there might be an opportunity cost but it feels i don't know like again i think you know they're they're putting their assets in the

hands or on the feet of people and um those people are just paying the bills right um so yeah these are my final things it's just a lot to get in like being met with that high price it's not accessible you know it's not many people that have 100 100 pounds just laying around to buy some digital shoes to then maybe earn so that's market driven right like i don't know what their mint price was but you know let's say they launch another project step into and then suddenly step in price goes down step and two price goes up like it's you know somewhat driven by market forces yeah but have a free to play allow me to engage and rank up in order to get my first free pair of shoes you just start barefoot yeah exactly get get strong buy a better feet the business opportunity i see here matt is that there's a big opportunity i mean

to bring it back to meta there's no feet in in you know whatever so you got to buy your feet there first exactly i don't know i think we're on to something here if you're playing a land-based a land-based metaverse game where you don't have teleports and you have to walk between land then would that count for a step in oh hopefully that's like a step in integration opportunity into yeah i don't know decentraland yeah i think the business opportunity here for matt is to put your corgi earning these steps so just sell your corgi going on walks add a bunch of phones and we are open for business if there's anyone interested pokemon go goes to stefan all right well we'll wrap up the episode here today if you want to continue the discussion you can find us on navic's discord or around just send us a message and yeah we really hope that you enjoyed

the format today if you could spend one minute sending us an email and letting us know what you thought we'd really appreciate it and we'll see you next week and thank you everyone for joining [Music] you