The Current State of Play-to-Earn - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] gm friends and welcome to the metacast cryptocorner brought to you by navic i'm your host nico rieke and today i'm joined by gabby diezon who's calling from singapore and jeff holmberg who's calling in from connecticut uh today we're going to talk about the state the current state of play to earn and what this means for specifically the bigger yield uh the bigger guilds gaming guilds out there like yield kill games before that some housekeeping if you've read the newsletter the navic newsletter which i highly recommend you might have seen that after one and a half years of weekly metacast episodes i will be stepping down as a host of the crypto corner so the host of these episodes and so we're looking for a new host to um to help out with that so if you are interested in having conversations with some of the brightest minds in the intersection of blockchain and games

like these two people that we have today feel free to reach out at metacast navic.com and we can we can have a conversation about that does that mean that i will stop podcasting no i'll i'll still do this stuff i'll do it under the fog now or the future of gaming down that me and a few others have created started um it is a dao focused on the future of gaming as the name suggests and that's where we are creating a bunch of content around um what interests us in any case let's uh before we start this conversation start with um some intros so gabby you're a big friend of the podcast you've been on a few times but for those of you that don't know you yet could you give us two minutes about yourself thanks nico my name is gabi diezon i grew up in the philippines and i come from game development so i i've been making games since 2003. co-founded the mobile game studio in 2014 found ethereum and smart contracts in 2017

and uh i found nfts when cryptokitties were released later that same year kind of really fell in love with the concept of uh nfts and having uh particularly digital assets that players can own and yeah i've been dabbling in the nft space since then and uh started playing axe infinity and got to start yield guild in 2020 in the middle of d5 summer when during the pandemic a lot of people from my home country in the philippines needed a way to earn money and they found so by by playing axe infinity so what yield guild does is that we we buy assets in different games in the virtual worlds whose assets are nfts on chain and uh they play these games and earn resources inside the game whether they're tokens or nfd so this is called play to earn and we kind of pioneered this concept started 2020 and yeah i've been doing it ever since fantastic how about you jeff

so hey guys my name is jeff holmberg and uh i actually came from the dark side i'm originally a wall street finance guy from merrill lynch and goldman sachs uh working in sma trading i know i know i'll get to the goods eventually went over to a municipal bond investments and you know really fell in love with crypto i think with a lot of people that are listening you know late 2017 early 2018 got my first start in the space where i was the first non-founding higher at openc where i ran partnerships for just about a year i had moved over to run strategy more sell side nfts with ip licensing at uh tara virtua at the time and then uh i had actually a relationship with gabby at open c all the way back in 2018 i used to bother him all the time because there was you know no volume on anything so we had a lot of time to reach out to founders and you know game studios and say hey what's going on what's your launch plunger launch uh so my how things have changed but eventually you know when ygg was birthed i had went to gabby and said listen you

know i really want to get more into the investment asset acquisition side of things but stay in nfts i was like i wish i could just combine the both the best worlds and he's like boy do i have a role for you so um this is where i am now at yield guild games where i lead and head asset acquisition and all of our uh partners with games that we put money into so fascinating so the title of this podcast is the current state of play to earn gabby why don't you give us your thoughts on on that on that uh question sure so let me give a recap later on kicked off in 2021 when oxy pioneered the concept of earning fungible tokens within gameplay so if you had three axes to basically buy into the economy of axi infinity you would play the game and when you won matches you would earn uh the slp token and this

slp token had utility because he had to burn it to have the right to create new axes so that gave it value that meant that you're basically tokenizing somebody's effort in winning a game and using it as a cost for producing new assets now uh this really took off in a 2021 nft summer when yeah jurinko with a lot of people were looking for a job and discovering nfts and um coupled with uh uh like use uh big user growth coupled with the speculation coming from fungible tokens uh in i would say an exchange ecosystem this drove the like the price of slp and in axi and other games to highs that uh were kind of uh exceeded the like what the economy could handle and yeah we we saw a lot of these economies kind of come crashing down a lot of people left uh the axi economy energies overall

so now we're kind of in a quiet blood period um there's uh i would say there's not a lot of spending that's happening in games like axi right now there's actually still some spending happening if you look at uh games like actually there's still actually a trading volume happening but it's nowhere near it was in the highs of of last year um and so it's kind of a quiet period it somewhat mimics the 2018-19 early 2020 where uh there were games being built but there was hardly any volume the biggest difference now is that a lot of money came into the space after axis success and showed other people that this there was actually a market for uh what's happening so now a lot of new companies got forum new games are being built economies are being iterated on both by axi itself with the new version of the game and other uh founders who have experience designing game economies that are trying to improve on the

axi model so that's where we are now as a guild if you ask me where played iron is now i'd say that uh yeah it's in kind of a state of evolution i think that the original premise that you could have virtual economies that could be owned by players is uh is still very legitimate and is something that i believe in hundred percent having those players kind of run those economy produce value and giving that value back to the players rather than giving it either to the developer or to kind of external marketing companies for user acquisitions such as facebook google i believe this is where the future of web3 gaming is headed headed that said i think there's gonna be a lot of evolution and experimentation from the initial product market fit to see where we are and you know everyone's looking for that like sustainable economy with fun gameplay that can keep gamers uh spending and uh being in these

games for years so that's that's currently where we're at the ygd business model is or was you buy nft assets and you have a community that can use or put those nft assets to productive use did that business model change so the uh yeah the original business model was built on top of scholarship or asset lending for uh for yield and then we did revenue share on that yield i guess the biggest difference with us is that even early on even at the height of the summer we didn't really use the yield that was produced for cash flow like we didn't want to take it out of the economy every sop that we earned we actually reinvested it back in the game and we have other models as well so even january 2021 we spun off a sub-dial for an estate of land assets in a game called league of kingdoms which is a strategy game similar to clash of clans

so the gameplay happened um on like very similar uh to clash of clans like clan based gameplay but there was land underneath the gameplay and if there was spending that happened on top of that land then the land owner would get a piece of it so we had an estate and rather than give out or land those land to our user base we spun it off into a separate sub-dial and basically gave uh players ownership and the engagement there has been very high people are governing what is happening within the gameplay coordinating raids governance over what to do with the yield so that's another model that's been with the guild ever since and now it's expanded to a ygg splinter lens which is our second gaming sub-dial so we have the asset rentals not only axi but other games such as fancy birds and cyborg have that and we have these gaming like estate sub-dials where uh there's basically a guild overseeing governance over a bunch of assets great now i'd like to have jeff's

um thoughts as well first of all i'm a gaming vc i invest in games how does your job differ for mine that's an interesting question and you know since we operate as a dao we we of course um have to be careful answering that question as well right uh but you know i view ygg is more of the the middlemen of the industry right we understand that vcs make it for an roi perspective an investment perspective for us when we are making in if we were to use the interim investment just to keep you know parallel activity here we call it asset acquisition here but uh you know when we do make plays into these games right we view a lot of the tokens that we are earning and like gabby said when we cycled slp back into the ecosystem we view it as more as a customer acquisition cost in order to scale the game scale the players and build the player base you know we feel like being the biggest game my three gaming guild in the entire space it is our role it's our job to help build a foundation out of cement

for these games for instance rather than mud and you see you know a lot of other guilds they come in they really have that perspective of uh revenue share yield sharing or percentage splits and there's a lot of extraction even coming from the guild side and you know we feel as we want to build up that player base you know we hear these games come out and say hey we have our first 10 000 players this is a great sign for a web 3 game and you think compared to the gigantics of apex legends and fortnite with millions you know multiples of millions of players i mean this is nothing right web 3 gaming is an infant in the grand spectrum of things but without that foundational support of players that want to stick around or guilds having a responsibility of getting into like c-level deals or asset acquisition with nfts it should be a responsibility for them to help build up the game build up that foundation and build up a much larger player base so that we're able to cycle revenues much better right so we view it as right now as a customer acquisition cost to bring in more players right build up that

foundation obviously have the game blow up you know in in a positive manner so that in the future right we can start getting into the economic side of things where uh you have almost an even amount of players spending in the game then they extract it and right now it's extracted so the way we can be comparable with you guys of course we do want to see roi on returns right and so that we can consistently use that in a customer acquisition cost type of basis and and naturally i mean we do have core members that do need to get paid you know people need to get paid and uh do work for you know internal work for ydg you know especially you know even on the tech development side but the main goal here is to eventually get games into that revenue cycle where the economics are paired nicely where eventually you know new blood fresh money comes in and wants to cycle the money back into the ecosystem with us and at that point in time and this is a theory based you know type of example here niko as well right it's not perfected we know it's not

perfected it hasn't happened yet but over time should that match up then we can think about starting to sell off our tokens as you know depending on what type of roi it's going to be or you know we can even analyze and say should we keep going should we keep building i think that's how we even got here is because we chose to actually keep building an axi even though the roi was right the roi was super high but we wanted to really push it and i think that actually helped with brand reputation as well so kind of hopping all over the map here for your question right and i'm not trying to dance around the question but of course we do you know on our team what's similar to you we do go through a diligence process naturally right we do through go through token economic models we go through game loop um you know cycles we actually currently um you know which is much different than q3 of q4 of last year currently we are trying to focus mainly on current port goes as well as keeping the bar ultra high for new games that come to market but like i said jumping in the mud with with

these founders and actually working hands-on with these token models and game loops uh you know is similar to what you do right i think we want to build up something that's going to win that eventually is going to be sustainable um while also being a slave to more of the general spot you know macro market as well right we are one box in crypto or web 3 as a whole you know alongside infra and d5 etc right so as the general spot market gets battered around like gaming is going to get battered around and um you know we're not there yet where we see any divergence in between like web 3 gaming you know tokens or independent games versus we would for you know like an index on bitcoin or ethereum for instance so um yeah that's that's probably where i think our strengths lie and where our focuses lie right now is really shaping out what could these tokens look like to the future what could the game loops look like for the future to essentially get a more automated uh player base

coming in rather than having to either rely on guilds build up like this gigantic player base in regional areas where there most commonly is going to be more extraction than other areas like the western world like north america when you describe your assessment of what a game and what a game loop and what a game economy will look like in the future am i correct in understanding that you're looking for something that could potentially become almost a new or like its own economy where it's it's deep and complex with multiple players multiple different kinds of assets this is a great question because i want to say yes and no right i think there are certain games out there that can kind of teeter on the definition of being a flash game simplicity right simplicity is key right we've seen that with something like a candy crush on mobile right you know would you call that a very extensive economy i wouldn't right it's simple so you're going to have games like that and then you also have to understand like we need to learn about cultural differences

as well you know when gabby was talking about our sub dials india japan eastern europe right there's things in games that might look stupid to me out west considering like what i see here in america that might be super popular in indonesia right might be super popular in india right and they might be simple so you have to take it with a grain of salt and understand who is his audience i mean who's going to be you know who's building this game who are they building it for who's the audience right and what's the cycle and flow of that right not everything needs to be complex as you know united states fed but there are much larger games more continuing on the triple a side that do have more intense and extensive economies that yes so there's the yes side of your question so it's i'm really in the middle here where it's dependent on that style of game dependent on the structure of game the audience um and where their goals are right not everyone is trying to build the next fortnight people just

want to have some form of simple game maybe a time killer you know something that's easy for entertainment that you can perhaps play even through discord with commands so there's a lot of games that we see that can really fit into that definition and we've learned to really adjust our mindset to say not everything needs to be so complex i agree with that and i also feel you when you say that there's a bunch of super successful games out there that you would never touch um i have this right yes you mentioned that today you spend a lot of time with the companies that you've worked that you've been working with that you've you know acquired assets from um what is that could you give some some practical examples on what that looks like well i don't know if i can break out of stealth with with that you know there there's a couple where we like i said you know i want to keep it pretty big and not give too too much details here i have to be careful with the alpha but um you know we've seen over a thousand games at least since since i've been here right

and you know the kind i say this phrase all the time you see the common denominators in the space of things that are broken the common denominators of things that work uh we just take that experience and sit with these teams because a lot of times you know i think gabby even was kind of leading towards this that some teams will just copy and paste and axi tokenomics right and that just doesn't work you know nico you and i can't build a game and then just copy and paste someone else's economy and say we're good to go right so it's really going through all the game loops understanding the token syncs or even helping them give ideas to implement token syncs for those that don't know what a token sync is think of it as more of a reason to spend your token inside the game ecosystem or platform but um you know understanding where the game loops really intersect with the earnings side of it is what we're very good at i mean we're a play to earn guild you know we've been in web 3 for quite some time we've gamers ourselves so we understand how the market is constantly shifting

what has essentially died off going back from like q3 to q4 and what needs to be built for the long term right i think everyone feels too much pressure to give out to generate yields on their tokens or make sure these earning ratios are just remarkably high unsustainable and use it as more marketing efforts right because they feel that if they are not making their communities happy if they're not keeping pace so to speak with other people that are doing this poor routine then they're going to yell that the game's going to be no good and we're trying to work with them to really build out something and say listen to to really get a game to work to pop it takes years right i think there's a lack of understanding to um just the general public and you know and unfortunately in some cases even investors in web 3 where you're not going to have your game fully built out in one year you're not gonna have that game fully built out with only one million dollars unless it's like you know that simple flash game type thing

right i'm talking more of the larger games so we're trying to keep everybody calm have you know get everyone to have some patience here and really think about this from a zero to one type process like you know let's not plan this game for the next two months of what could work now but let's really build this out and say well what is going to be the game loop like where is the user start and the user end right and then where is the user continuation right we've seen that come through with like battle passes or seasons in typical like web 2 games right or uh future packs and levels i mean go on forever like how they can do expansions but getting them through the the core game loops and the core model of the game is not everyone understands how it can like adjust the web3 ecosystem and how it could really you know people the game developers have wonderful ideas for for game loops but then the token model just doesn't make any sense in it the earnings just doesn't make any sense right the spends don't make any sense so trying to essentially us step in and be that elmer's glue so to speak and piece this

all together with them you know at you know nine o'clock at night in front of the whiteboard brainstorming and letting them know hey guys this hasn't worked before this has worked before um let's experiment with this you know i think uh you know soul bound tokens is a hot topic like you know in in the war room like that's all i'm going to say i'm trying to dance around this question without giving out too much alpha but um yeah i mean the tldr here is just sharing our knowledge with them making sure that they're building for the long term and just as simple as it sounds make it make sense right this podcast is famous for having secret sleep in advance so don't feel bad when you when you lick something it's that's why i said it i did i did my diligence i did my diligence on you and i and i'm not gonna i can't break it i know people will hate me but i will say there there there's some very exciting titles uh being released that are in ygg sporco later this year

they have been publicly announced on our twitter so i'm not going to single anybody out of which ones i think are going to be fan favorites but the alphas out there you just have to dig i just uh am not going to say it that a fairness to everybody guild guild games twitter that's it that's what you need to follow that's it that's it gabby you with yield guild games have one of the largest scholar bases or like you know communities how are you putting them to you like that sounds bad like putting them to use is probably the bad way to put it but how are you working with them how are they involved in what you're doing um how are you they helping the the guild as a whole succeed yeah so i think uh we think of it the other way around how is the guild helping our community members succeed and that's better how we do that is helping the community engage with web 3 and like different virtual economy so most of these are games so that means we

funnel people to games like axi to games like cyborg teach them how uh how to play and they learn how to use crypto at the same time but a lot of the focus and you know a lot of people talk about like how guild models are evolving but this is actually something that we've focused on from the very start i think there's been a lot of focus on the scholarship model and like how many scholars does a guild have because it was kind of an easy number for people to take a look at but even from the very beginning uh the biggest kind of philosophical aspect of what we were doing was that we were helping to upskill our members with skills that were relevant in web 3 that can help them with ownership of assets like ultimately this is what play to earn is like i don't get into like you know twitter definitions of what play to earn is or isn't or what's a better term for us what's really important is that

you uh teach our community members skills we give them access to different virtual economies and they have the opportunity to own digital assets like if you abstract it away that's what it really means it's very different from freelancing for example where you have a skill you get paid for it and it might be a different rate depending on where you are in the world whether in america versus china versus philippines etc it means that i as kind of a citizen of the metaverse or someone who is in the virtual world i do valuable work there and you know i get assets um like at the same rate as anyone else in the world so that's that's a very important part for us so you are going to see us talk a lot about upskilling about different quote-unquote jobs that make up the metaverse whether you're a scholar you're a player you're a streamer you're a moderator and if you look at the different partnerships that we have like learn to earn for example you can see that a lot of what our focus is really giving our community members to

uh the tools to succeed in in the web 3 world a lot of comments and from critics has come from the fact that in order to be able to earn something you need to add value and today if you're playing a game you're supposed to play a game for fun and it's not that self-evident that you actually add value by playing game so what are some examples of the upskilling that you do for your community members that would have or would give them the skills to add value in a more traditional sense yeah so people don't understand that a person playing a game is actually adding value think about free-to-play games game developers are willing to spend a lot of money to acquire a user right a player giving ads on facebook and why are they willing to acquire those users because those users have value so people are playing for fun you don't realize you actually have value by being inside a game especially if it's a

multiplayer game so just because a game is fun doesn't mean you're not doing anything of value and like people don't really think about this because you're thinking of playing games from your own kind of point of view which is i'm playing this for entertainment and if i'm doing something that has value then it's work it's actually very different looking at it from the game developer i'm acquiring users whether i'm marketing taking out billboard pr direct acquisition or paying yield these are all different types of user acquisition and a game that is not sustainable where there are more yields coming out than revenue coming in is no different from a mobile game that's spending more money on facebook ads than it is making in revenue so you have to kind of separate the entertainment value of something from the value of something because these mean different things to the developer and to the player themselves it seemed to me you know we all have we've all seen the the report or the the

youtube video of you know player in i believe it was indonesia um in philippines at philippines yes that was it um where a lot of people actually like didn't have a job were able to make a living by playing games the numbers currently seem to indicate that it's not possible anymore to make it true living playing these games what has that meant for yield guild and the yield guild scholars right so what it's meant is that uh players who were playing the games primarily as a way to earn an income have moved on and have churned from the guild the players who are here because they want to get better at web3 they want to discover games or they're kind of trying to upskill themselves they've stayed with us and they've actually kept engaged even at the time of low of low earnings it probably means that being in the guild is not their primary way of earning income and that's fine i think um like the the notion that playing

games could have been your primary source of income the yield that was being derived there was uh i would say a lot was being driven by people who were buying into the economy on a speculation basis i yeah it's kind of nervous makes me nervous when you see people who are basically grinding and then being able to earn like a month's salary in the philippines which is happening at some time right so there was yield uh being derived there but that yield was coming from a speculation premium that basically comes from the like liquidity and reflectivity of crypto and now that that speculation is currently gone it's probably gonna return again in some time game designers are really thinking of ways to kind of tamp down this like reflectivity and the speculation premium that goes inside the game economy itself and um yeah and i think this got so for for our guild um i would say that the core community is still there the scholars that were relying on it primarily for income have moved on

especially as the world is open up and jobs are available but yeah i think our our core committee is actually as strong as ever i've had a number of conversations with people from sky mavis who talk about axiomfinity as almost an axi nation where people are so identified with axi and everything it stands for that's they'll do anything or they'll play anything that is remotely uh or that is remotely connected to axi do you feel a similar thing around ygg yeah so we have incredible amount of loyalty in in ygg i guess the difference is that uh it's not based on one game but like as a community that is playing different games so a lot of our community members primarily came from axi but uh yeah we've actually have members that are in league of kingdoms who have never played axi for example or are really into splinter lands and very active in governance we also

have a budding uh a group and sub-dial to be formed around illuvium for example but the loyalty it uh kind of accrues back to the guild and we're doing different programs such as the guild guild achievement program the gap uh to kind of reinforce the the level of learning that people can have within the guild over the past year we've seen quite a few evolutions in in what's hot right as you said a lot of teams were like just copy pasting actually infinity economics um we've seen some advanced advancements since then we've had so played earned and play and earn play to own and now it is apparently free to own i still need to brush up on everything that's happening there um jeff you throughout that year have been looking at different games assets to acquire what gets you excited today you know nothing gets me more excited than a passionate founder that thinks for the long term you know i know that sounds very cliche but i think there's a lot of

people that had come to market more as a money chase i think people are coming to the market too quickly without doing their homework and understanding like what really are the nuances with web3 you know especially with onboarding and player base you know it's one thing if you can build an absolutely fantastic game but it's it's another if you're not really understanding the pipeline for client retention user acquisition things of that nature to actually get the bodies in there playing um but i think what makes me excited is you know like i said teams that really think about like the what's next and what could be right and not take the copy and paste ideology or the similar ideas from web 2 and just try and convert them into just like a web 3 style of game right we've seen that multiples of times excuse me but i think those that have put in an effort to understand the homework and try to do token design and try to build out these economies and try to build out

something that's entertaining because we understand that you know if you're coming from web 2 trying to build a game you haven't done any token work before right you haven't you're so focused on what the user acquisition or the client retention was and more of the web 2 style and ideology there and it's completely different here and i think those that just put in that effort and try and that are teachable right and coachable and that can listen and take guidance from people that have been here or follow you know the uh like ygg like our advice on how to get guilds involved in this and how to get guild's you know uh retention rate on on other guilds besides ygg in our subjects right um that's what i really like and i know it sounds simple right and there's a lot more to of course to deciding if we want to partner with a game than that but i i would honestly say that's the most infecting thing is talking to someone who lives this life who is passionate and i think you know using

the phrase would they do this if they had to do it for free and those that answer yes to that question are the ones that i want to back right you can tell very quickly those that are just gamers at heart right and i think there's a big difference between gamers and players right and you can tell those that are gamers at heart that want to build this that want to make it succeed treat it like a baby and they're not really um you know motivated by money first they're motivated by providing a good product to actual players first and that's very difficult for a lot of people to understand but i think from what we've seen lately that's probably the most exciting thing for me for more of a fundamental layer so i speak to quite a lot of founders ones that are still very early stage but also a few that have been around for a couple of years some of them have sold nfts or sold tokens and are now struggling because of that

um what are your thoughts on like what are your recommendations to teams that have sold tokens and that now have tokens that are like priced super low um what do you usually say to these well i think we try not to get games into that situation right there's been several conversations with it's this is this is this is a hard conversation to have with you because i'm trying to be so bland on purpose because there's a lot of things that we're working on that solve these type of problems um especially with a couple of teams but for i mean the first step is to try not to get into that situation number one i think step two as you just mentioned right you know it was play to earn play and earn free to own you know and i think in the market i really when we talk about these common denominators that we mentioned you know 20 minutes ago or whenever it was it's providing value back to your collectors right and understanding you know web 2 gaming really through and through you know you can buy battle passes 10 bucks you know apex legends

you know fifa packs they can range you know of course a couple bucks to you know 25 bucks for instance those were viewed as a quote unquote expensive right to a lot of web 2 players like oh i'm not going to spend 25 bucks or 30 bucks on a pack or a battle pass that's just crazy right and we're over here having the expectations that players should be spending three thousand dollars for a gaming item twenty thousand dollars for a gaming item even three hundred dollars for a gaming item it's very hard to fight between players that want to come into the ecosystem and collectors speculators flippers right it's just a gigantic mess and i think where we've seen with with gabe lately you know with the daikus and just putting them out for free is sometimes you just have to let the market be the market be the market right i think provide value to people by um giving them some free assets i think it's a great customer acquisition idea i think people do rely too much on

front-end sales and either rely on the cash that's being brought in to use for survival now if you didn't do a raise that is a good strategy that you can do that right but i think being able to up the supply and keep it at a very cheap low price so that people can come in and just not feel like it's such a risky investment right and then even that word investment feels dirty when you're talking to gamers right they don't want to make investments they just want to play the damn game and i think being able to come in and having a fluid you know ui ux is very important and i think just you know if you're stuck in this situation to answer your question talk to your community and think about ways that you can provide value is it another free drop is it a a supplement type of nft to the current nft that they might own just give value back to the players while also thinking about ways to bring in new blood into the ecosystem if you're stuck in that rut you're going

to need new money you're going to need new players and you're going to need new spends on that and so you really have to kill two birds with one stone here and think well how can i make the people that are happy that already spent money while coming up with an idea that can bring new money inside the market now this is just you know this is not foolproof i think there's a lot of planning that would need to go into this of course marketing discussions this is just like a more high uh level answer to your question but i think the the solution is hopefully they can work with you know if they don't have vcs or they don't have angels or they don't have partners and it's just your team okay then you know get your whole team together and brainstorm but you know usually there's a reliance on calling up your vc partner or your angel partner or your guild partner wink wink and say guys we're stuck you know we want to come up with an idea to really hit the market again what do you think and i think just put your ego aside and listen to the people that have been through these bear markets listen to the people that have been through like the roller coaster of gaming up and downs and try to follow

the advice right and even talk to your community talk to your community just being very transparent to what's going on being very transparent with what your goals and initiatives are you'll be completely shocked how much love and support you'll get back from your community with that so um but at the end of the day it's it's all about in my in my opinion in this this might shock the world on it but keep things cheap right don't worry about so much revenues on the front end provide that value and just make it nice clean and easy for players to come in because right now it's super clunky and you know we all would love to see 15 20 30 floors on nft assets but at the end of the day it's a uh it's it's very selfish uh from from us from dc's from collectors to think that that is somewhat sustainable and that new money is going to keep coming in at you know 45 grand you know 50 grand in asset and we have to put our egos aside and understand that that normal price of 10

20 even 30 is still expensive to majority percentage of web 2 gamers so no you are not going to solve the equation to get billions of players to cross in that web 2 bridge into web 3 just because your asset hit a 1 8th floor it's actually a very bad thing to be honest with you and i know that's more of a contrarian perspective but um unless it's similar to like something that gabe did where it's like i gave it for free i let them try it let them have it right let the market be the market yeah in general i actually have a somewhat uh different take on this coming from uh free to play and if you come from free to play economies you know that like the paying users are somewhere probably between one to five percent of the population and then the rest are important to the game but they're not the ones that are paying for the experience and what i think this industry and web3 is evolving to is going to be kind of a mix of free to play later on and what

does that mean that means there'll be assets in the game that represent the game economy and honestly some of them might be worth 500 000 some of them might be worth a million dollars gabe was already doing this with machine zone at game of war like they're like there are people who are spending millions of dollars a year most people weren't but some people will and now that he's kind of unleashed in an nfd economy that's not limited to a hundred dollars per uh or in a purchase now you've seen the kind of power of what he's doing with free to own where he drops the nfts and then like people who are willing to pay for them based on what they think they're worth are basically able to buy it and what you're seeing now is kind of early hype based on what people think limit break will do but i mean like you you're pretty sure that he probably already has the game in his back pocket like it might not be completely ready but he wouldn't start tweeting out of nowhere if he didn't have a game ready and i'm really excited to see like what

that will turn out to be i hope so too it always seems to me difficult so i agree with what you said jeff where you know if you want an e a one eighth floor for your game assets one of the problems that i think founders and game devs face is that the you were responsible for the last person or to the last person that bought your assets and so if someone buys one of your assets even if you gave it away for free for like 10 heath or i don't even know what the floor prices of these daikus now um it is very hard like it creates expectations right if someone pays like 30 grand for you for an asset that's going to be used within the game it it they either expect monetary rewards or they expect an unfair utility within the game i like both of which are very hard to build a good game around and so what are your thoughts on that i agree with you i just think the market has been

conditioned to think like that currently and i think in order to break out of that shell it's going to take some time and that's why when we've been talking with teams and thinking don't do that you know if unless you're really ready to provide value for that like gabby said like coming from from that side of the business right let it grow you know there will be people that will pay these very high prices for these items but these games are quite established and matured over the years as we've spoken earlier right and um you know i think when you come out and not it doesn't have to be free right it just needs to be affordable right you know and there is nothing no nothing preferred right i think there's different styles that could work like we were talking about gabe like the free launch it worked it was great right for some that might not work right and i think it depends on who you are and what game you're building but that's probably a different conversation but at the end of the day it's just just make it easy just make it affordable and think about who's going to be playing this right what is your target audience

i think a lot of people miss on that they just conditioned to think like i just want to get into the top 10 of open c that means i'm doing well but it might be all collectors in london that aren't even gamers right so where's the target audience going like who's who's buying this right and this is why i think it's like a good idea to get guilds involved right and this is why a lot of people do come to us because like don't worry about the regents we'll introduce you to our subdials we have regions which feels like almost every country in the world at this point but you know we've expanded in that out and say listen you can get acids into the hands and plant seeds around around earth so to speak for all these player bases keep it affordable or we can rent them out and um you know for for players that are outside of guilds make it feel as fluid as if they're just turning on a web 2 game and i just i just i know i'm just kind of rambling on that but i really want to hammer that into people's heads like make it affordable stop this this conditioning that i'm going to buy something and that you

know because i've seen it happen with punks or apes or essentially some other assets out there in gaming that have gone to 2038 at some point in time stop making it people want to buy this asset because they're thinking about the appreciation and value rather than the actual use case and utility of the item and game for me you know like and i've said this before like i'm a big apex legends player on my free time and if you know there was a special gun that i could use that wasn't super op in the game that i could always for my apex players out there like if i could buy the crater i would pay a thousand dollars for it to have it right but i spend a lot of my time playing the game i s you know have spent years playing that game i mean essentially since day one i think it's it's almost two years and uh maybe longer don't quote me on that but you know i bet my my time value in the game is is gigantic and as gabby said right i am now in their

core player loop right i'm buying the battle pass and buying the spend and so for me to buy that high-end asset is worth it and that's where you start getting these higher prices but just don't do it on the front end you know try to build players like me that will cycle revenue back into the economy have a whole bunch of assets whether that's free or cheap that i can use and deploy to build up my career or you know build up my character or um you know essentially my my identity your persona in the game and then let that appreciate but you're not going to get new blood in like that no way there's a lot of game developers who listen to this why should they want to partner with ygg oh that's how much time you have you know i think i think from from first steps you know just not to be redundant here but being able to work with ygg core and all of our sub dials you are getting player bases right off the bat right you know when you think about our ygg india ola gg and bays in brazil and why you know

japan we have them everywhere southeast asia um being able to have relationships with these subdials you're able to get at least a start and a player base in all these different countries around the world right so you are starting with a certain base level player is that strong enough not not really right i mean we're not buying four million assets you know in in each game you know we're not going to be like the sole player base in the game nor would we want to that would be super op for us but like i said before earlier in the conversation like you are getting the experience and attention from us to work with us where we want this to be built on cement and not a mud like i said and we will work with you with the token econ we will work with you with these game loops like we've been doing and we will introduce you if we need to to all the other guilds vc relationships uh i think it's been a pretty big one lately given in this market there's been several people that have been doing more secondary raises or even bridge raises um i think that's definitely a key value

because we are that middle man like i said in the beginning of conversation in between like theses and you know just being like a guild um but i think that's probably the the highest value prop for us is just the fact that we aren't going to write a check or pick up some assets at you on the back and say we like you good luck is we want to be part of that team you know we want to wear those hats with you we want to bring in more team members to really understand your process and just help you get this off the ground and this is partially the reason why we even slowed down our partnerships into these games is because we want to make sure that we have proper bandwidth and attention for our current workouts right we do understand that not everyone has uh you know immense amount of time on their hands to sit with teams three to five times a week especially if you have over 50 you know four codes to deal with it's impossible but um you know being able to sit with them at least on a reasonable basis and in some cases it can even be

three times a week and make sure that they have our attention and we're giving them the support they need from their long-term vision is just so crucial and um maybe there's other guilds out there that do that maybe i i don't know right i don't know other guilds that are you know really good at working on token econ or game loops and and you know i just don't know we don't really communicate with a lot of other guilds because our ecosystem is the biggest um you know we'll communicate with our sub-dials in place of that so um that's just really where i think our strength lies is that you know we're gonna essentially be in in the boardroom with you you know you're not gonna get rid of us we want to be on that team sit with you and really work on the ideas together and it's okay not everything that we work on together needs to be guild oriented it can be like i said game loop oriented so a lot of options there yeah i think uh ygg has a particular perspective on the market because my background is as a game developer myself so i i know how hard it is to be a game

founder and kind of push a game and get it off the ground and i guess the more philosophical version of what jeff is saying is that what we do as a guild is we try our best to kick-start the network effects of your game in your economy so it's not just the value of the look we bring in users we we bring in players we try to help think through your economy so that it would work great and bringing in the ygg usually means that the game has a certain amount of quality that also attracts other guilds and other gamers in so we want to kind of be that kick-start of the network effect that will eventually help make a games economy successful in the long run and yeah we'll stay there we'll help the like the game teams figure it out we'll kind of work through problems and we'll do our best to make sure that our community is excited to play the game and to really spend a lot of time and eventually money in it if game developers want to get in touch with you how can they find you that's a really

good question uh we get we get inundated from from all different angles because we just spoke about this the other day because we we are that middle man like so we got bc introductions we have a form on our website that people can fill out to get in touch with us but i think the best uh way to get in touch with us is is please don't spam us you know twitter or our personal dms on twitter i think take the high ground and put in some effort to find someone a relationship with us and get yourself out there you know even if it's another game founder um or another vc relationship you know we know a lot of people in the space try and get a personal introduction to us so that those that we know that are we're also comfortable with working with can make that introduction for you and i think that really goes with anything in life right you know it's really who's you you know who do you know and if you're coming into the space and new obviously you know others have an unfair advantage you know over some by coming into space and already knowing people but i just really encourage yourself to to learn more about you know games that are out there learn more about our porcos

it's okay for a founder to hit up another founder and say hey what's your experience with ygg right i just want to talk to you i'd love to meet you and ask them about us and and you know what and see if it's even a right fit for you you know in some cases there are pay to win strategies out there that we're not really big fans of that or that we work with but they do well in some cases and that might not be a direct fit so i think do the diligence on ygg and we encourage it learn more about us ask people about my name and what we've done um and see if it's right fit and then ask for a personal introduction because it just cuts through all the crap that we get a lot of the fluff that we get and we'll pay attention to it we really like looking at you know new decks meeting new founders uh especially those that are innovative and very exciting you know it's it's but it's very difficult you know we are human beings we have a a whole slew of portals that we're currently working with we have getting slammed every day from all directions uh from deal for like i said like vcs online and direct it's very

very hard to manage um but we're doing what i think is a good job at it but try and get to us from more of a personal capacity so that we know that this is someone that is really really interested in working with us did the effort in trying to get in touch with us to you know and learn more about us because i'd like people to basically interview me when they have that conversation with the founder like jeff i know you've worked on this game in this game we really like what you did here we saw that ygg did this and we're interested in maybe tackling you know ndg and launching in india with you know our indian sundown right i'd love to have conversations like that show me that you you have the knowledge and put in the effort because that also shows me i should get excited about you because you understand a lot about me already and understand a lot about the market and it makes me think well if he learned this much about or she learned this much about ygg these people are going to do their homework too to really study you know like user acquisition and customer you

know acquisition so that's the best way fantastic and i i think this counts for most introductions in vc um reach out us reach out as well um if you get on the pitch call with me and first thing you tell me is oh i enjoyed that last podcast you did with that jeff and gabby guys those jeff and gabby dudes um i cannot help but start that love on like liking you so um that's definitely definitely recommended all right fantastic um this was great jeff gabby thank you for your insights you know if you're building a game you've heard you've heard jeff do your research and um from what email jeff email jeff there you go thanks gabby don't email me don't email me find someone to to get an introduction um preferably on like a telegram or something but uh that's that's the best way uh i'm human i'm human

i can only do so much and jeff's a cool guy so he's a lot of friends so you have a lot of people that can intro you so um you should be good um self-proclaimed cool self-proclaimed stuff yeah great yeah thanks nico jeff gabby thank you so much for being here this was great um listener i hope you enjoyed it as much as i did i hope you learned a lot if you're building a game again um keep doing it we love games and we want to see as many games in web 3 as possible be innovative do no um the the axie to economics maybe try something new and um yeah come talk to us alright with that we are out and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode ciao [Music]

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