Web3 Gaming: What Will 2025 Bring?

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by the end of the year 2024 but how about 2025 is web 3 finally going to deliver on its promise to help us make sense of where web 3 is headed I'm thrilled to bring back a very special guest our very own Devon Becker here from novic Devon and I have tackled some deep dive episodes on this topic in the past and whenever he's on the show you know it's going to be insightful so Devon welcome back to the Pod it's been a minute happy New Year how have you been I've been good I've been good it's always great to to be here to talk web 3 with you Nico definitely uh is as quiet as it seems sometimes I think there's always something popping off even in the background here so it's great that is exactly right there's a lot going on under the surface uh you know all the the hypey days the Buzzy days of 2021 2022 maybe at least behind us for now maybe that's a good thing but definitely a lot of stuff happening under the hood and that is exactly where we're going to go under the hood so without further Ado we are going to dive into uh 15 questions give or take uh to get our take Devon's take my take take uh on the

current state of web 3 how regulations could shift where funding is going right now why platforms like telegram epic games store and maybe even entirely new channels that we haven't considered could shape the future of web 3 gaming so let's not waste any time let's Jump Right In so let's start with the obvious question here which is you alluded to a lot of stuff happens happens under the hood and not always out in the open like it was in 2021 when that was kind of D to to be out there um can you give us kind of a high level sense of where we're at here at the end of 2024 start of 2025 and is it fair to say that 2025 does feel like a pretty exciting potentially pivotal year I think so I mean obviously we'll get into some details on on some of the reasons why I think so I I I mean I'm optimistic about every year honestly at the start of the year I'm always like this is going to be the year kind of thing but it's like it is always the year just for different parts of it right like this is a technology this isn't a you know one thing's built and then it's done this isn't just like oh here's the flying car it's it's going to happen in bits and

pieces so I think this year we just continue to build on what we've already done and we've already done so much in web 3 and it's a building thing so it's just no one ever stops building some people just run out of money and have to build something else sometimes just because they pulled a little bit of a rug but it keeps going and I think this year there's a lot of reasons like I said that we'll talk about that I think really make it so that at least we make some good strides this year if not really kind of get to sort of that that touchdown we're hoping for yeah yeah okay well uh maybe we start off with just a couple of highlights for you from 2024 so what were like the big notable items from this past year or so that you feel like they deserve to be called out they stand out above other moments that potentially set us up for success in 2025 I mean the big one that was the stand out one to me was finally seeing like a good quality game come out with Off the Grid um because I'd been waiting for that for a while and I know a lot of the other games that were like really kind of hopeful haven't really delivered yet and we had we had a good number of

releases some of them were pretty decent we we actually started to see things actually come out that weren't just web games and obviously we saw a lot from telegram which maybe that wasn't exactly what we were hoping for but it certainly did something for the space and I think it all moved forward and we certainly saw Bitcoin take off that's for sure like the ETFs for Bitcoin and ethereum I think made a huge difference on sort of setting up hopefully some maybe some of that dry powder maybe not for this year and so I think all those things kind of headed that way and I think uh it also set up possibly some regulatory changes other things we'll hopefully see but probably not for at least a month or two yeah yeah yeah well we're going to touch on all of those things I I think uh I I didn't actually Prime you on that question I would have called out pretty much all the same things that you just uh flagged as well so good thing we're on the same page here um okay so let's dive into the regulatory piece because I think that is the big uh elephant in the room right now you know uh there's going to be a second Trump presidency uh Bitcoin obviously rallied to 100,000 as of recording it's been pretty volatile

between like 90ish and 105 but I think as I checked this morning there was some good inflation numbers some positive economic news volti I'll take it those numbers are volti they are but Bitcoin particularly so like I think it was 93 yesterday and it's back up to 99 today right so um you know moving a lot more than for example like Apple stock which moves like 1.2% on that's a big day so um all that said you know is that now priced in already for 2025 like did we see the big runup the big bull you know kind of rearing its head because we haven't really gone broken past 105 on bitcoin and ethereum actually is a bit lower than it was trading uh at its recent Peaks which was about 4,000 give or take I think it's about 3,400 today um now obviously the prices of various cryptocurrencies doesn't necessarily correlate to anything that's happening web 3 but if we are being honest intellectually honest they do in so far as a lot of the powder that you're referring to the dry powder is hide to

how well crypto does or doesn't do so whether game developers like to admit it or not um you know their fate to a certain degree is tied to to crypto so let's talk about that regulatory environment that is the elephant in the room Donald Trump is coming in he's implied after his initial hey I'm anti crypto he probably didn't know what crypto was now he's got like five different nft Collections and he's got a bunch of sneakers out there and things like that so he's had a bit of a change of heart long intro there but it is important I think to address this headon what does it mean for web 3 to now after four years of a Biden Administration that was fairly antithetical to crypto we are now potentially seeing something that is a very big change of scenery I think the big the big bigger elephant in the room or the elephant Hunter Gensler being gone is the bigger deal right even even if Trump came in and didn't do much himself and Gensler being replaced with someone that's more Pro crypto that's already a huge Chas obviously there are

other people at the SEC right it's not just him but he was certainly the face of it and I don't necessarily anticipate another face coming out and be willing to take as many shots as Gensler did so that already sets it up and then I I don't think that's a day one priority for Trump I think I heard he has like 100 plus executive orders sign probably not one of the immediate priority ones and that's like you know what like five days from now or so like from time of recording so it's definitely like you know not an immediate effect necessarily but I do think like is going in the direction of less regulatory problems hopefully I mean generally Trump has come out has been more like or less about regulations more about busting regulations same with his sort of Undeclared VP at times uh Elon Musk has also been very kind of anti-regulatory very Pro crypto so I think just that whole sort of push has been very in that direction what that what shape they'll actually take though that's a big question mark because they obviously have to push for some level of Regulation right they're not going to go full deregulation so it's like are they going to do the right regulation are

they going to listen to the right people that's we don't really know that right like they they could bring in people but even when he brought in people you know in his previous administration that didn't always go the way he expected either like some people totally acted different than he expected I mean that's same with any politician right so I think we're an environment with a lot of question marks still and obviously that uncertainty right now means people are a little bit excited but also have to be pretty cautious so I don't think we see like immediate increase in like investment or anything like that until that starts to kick it and to your question about it being priced in do think like there is a bit of pricing in already right where it was like this was off the back of ETFs and things like that where it was investment money kind of coming in and I do think that's good for games because that means there's money that's liquid in crypto that the people are in the space willing to payable maybe take crypto and and Co tokens and things like that and sort of interchange less about just straight cash if we see for example like a stablecoin sort of push this year I think that could be a big deal towards that and that's been something that's really been difficult to push and like you know Trump has been very like anti-

like uh you know digital currency for for the um you know Federal Reserve but I think probably Pro stable coin so that could be I think a pretty big development and if we see something around that maybe that's the push we need even without like more regulation around it yeah yeah well I mean reading Trump's mind I think is uh it's a special skill that very few people have I I think everyone wants to do that let's see what actually happens um but uh I mean for what it's worth my my two cents on this is I think we're kind of we saw the enthusiasm for Bitcoin and and ethereum and other cryptos kind of obviously tied very closely together I don't know we're going to see any major price movements on that front until we actually have something concrete happening Beyond just like we think it's going to be good for crypto um and I tend to agree with you I don't know if it's going to change very much in the short term for web 3 in particular because let's not forget we're not just talking about crypto here we're talking about what is it actually mean for web 3 gaming um on that note though I do want to ask a follow-up question which is you know a lot of early web 3 gaming was

driven by these very successful air quotes successful token launches certainly financially for the developers right um token issuances initial coin offerings uh that obviously died down a lot especially with Gensler and the SEC and some of the positions that they were taking um do you see that changing again like the the Ico markets and the token markets have been fairly quiet in terms of I mean they've been happening but they haven't really had the same excitement the buzz the hype the financial pop that they had back in 2021 2022 uh Curious to hear your thoughts on whether that is changing are you hearing from developers they're like okay we're fast tracking our coin offering we're you know pushing for this now that we think there's going to be a more favorable environment I mean I don't think it goes away icos like you said got quieter but that never really that whole mentality never went away this idea that I can come up with an imaginary form of money and get you to invest in it and sort of end around stocks and other like security Investments that unless that really gets stopped stopped that's still going to

keep happening whether it be you know it's scams and rugs hard to say right like you'll get a mixture of that but that idea of like hey you know from the business side I could try and Pitch this and I could try and get investment money from crowdfunding or crowdsourcing or you know retail investment whatever you want to treat it as isn't something that's going to go away and because people are going to take advantage of as long as they can and then from the you know the investor side the the retail or whoever it is people are going to want to go into these things that are futuristic that are exciting that are going to promise all these cool things they could do and you know you have maybe they're just tied to AI this year or tied to whatever new thing I don't think that really goes away it's just a question of it shifting form and there's just there's always money flowing around and it's certainly not like we didn't like somehow burn a bunch of money right we're still kind of a little inflationary even though we'd like to say we're not so that means there's still money floating around and that's going to be put in something and there's still investment money to be made and I think you know there's still games to be invested in even from some of these funds that maybe haven't finished doing it all yet so just like you said it'll probably be quieter unless something

significant shifts and then yeah we could see a big thing like I still like I didn't get just thee just the regulatory part but like South Korea is a huge question mark right now we had the president that was supposed to be very Pro crypto then turned out not to be and then he just they're actually trying to arrest him right now yeah impeaching him and arresting him yeah as far as I know still haven't arrested him yet right I mean as as we're recording this is a Wednesday January 15th like that that literally was in headline news uh yesterday and they like outside his place like trying to arrest him so like I just mean that that could be a shuffle I don't think it immediately swings Pro favor but they've been setting up regulation in South Korea to kind of like better protect investors and better and which is the whole point right like avoid scams better protect people and Al this guy I don't I don't know if we see an immediate shift but like it could be a more favorable environment that's a big deal I think personally because South Korea could be could be pretty big in crypto if they're still into it and who knows what'll happen with these broader environments with like China Russia things like that when we start app poising more sanctions tariffs other things who knows maybe we start to see more money flowing through crypto and

other things that aren't necessarily the normal Financial environments because of all this impact of these elections these changes uh in sort of heads of state that we are continuing to see really into this year especially yeah yeah for you know cryptocurrency just struck me kind of ironic that they're built generally on decentralization especially Bitcoin of course um but more broadly and yet they are still so beholden so to speak um on centralized governments you got got literally individual heads of state like individual human beings around the planet a handful of them um control the Fate essentially uh of of whether crypto or web 3 gaming in general um kind of grows or or deines or we get to the point where you can cash out without a bank then if you get everyone will just take crypto to exchange then we end up in a situation where maybe that's not the same but for right now absolutely yeah absolutely absolutely okay um I'm going to skip a question I had planned on telegram I'm going to come back to that in a second cu we're talking about money and it's giving that we're talking

about money uh let's talk about the funding landscape here um traditional VCS I think we talked a bit about the token launches that is still potentially there I think to your point it's never gone away but it's nowhere near as effective as a fundraising tool as it was back in the early days so if new Studios want to come out there either they got a bootstrap um and we're going to talk about the Indie landscape actually in a second or they need to raise funding right like that's your kind of your two paths forward here um we saw a little I had George isos from game seven they had a very comprehensive report um out towards the end of last year covering the big landscape a lot of it on the funding side of things and they tracked about a 17% increase in 2024 compared to the prior year but of course 23 was like you know 80% down from from the highs of 2021 2022 um and his Insight or game Seven's Insight really was that a lot of investors are coming back there are more rounds but they're much smaller rounds they're smaller bets they're not these big you know Deca millions of dollars

into a seed round kind of situation so what are you seeing what are you hearing um what are you expecting from VC's this coming year in 2025 is there going to be additional investment coming in you see that 177% Rising again are the bets going to be bigger are they going to stay small still your thoughts I mean I think there's definitely a more caution right where it's like okay clearly a lot of those bets didn't deliver anything right they get a lot of because it was investing in a lot of amateurs and so then you you started to see more people that were like experienced game developers for example being involved like go hey I worked at blizzard I worked at Riot whatever so and so uh and that became the thing and some of those are still in the works right some of those maybe delivered some of those maybe didn't but like those take time whereas like the these smaller bets where they're trying to hope that something will will hit big you you see stuff like telegram which you know as you said we'll get to those could be a good Target for like that those kinds of smaller projects for these small bets where it's just like hey this is not like a five-year

development cycle let's just get something out there but I think anyone who's going to who's going to have some big claim to Innovation that excites VCS can still drive the money whether like whether like I said that' be AI or some other new technology we've had a lot of Technology pushes we went from VR to to web 3 to AI like really fast it was almost like a year each and so because of that you know or the metaverse in there as well of course and so because that we're almost getting like a new tech a year that's becoming the big exciting thing and you know whether that be attached to three or not if it is chances are you'll see investment money thrown at it because it's still part of it and AI has definitely been part of that the a agentic I don't even know say it well uh agent-based AI stuff for web 3 is a very interesting proposition in terms of what it brings versus traditional like API integration and things like that so that could be a very interesting vehicle for some investment money especially because it is a way to have sort of AI dealing with financial stuff that could be interesting whether that be games or not games it's hard to say right but that that definitely is a interesting area potentially but as you

said probably smaller checks it's just less or or just more checkpoints more Milestones where they're just like okay we'll give you all this money but only if you like hit this Milestone hit this Milestone just little little better safeguards but there still will be people with loose wallets it's just that's how it is I still see big investment amounts it's just in you know less frequent and a lot more small you know spread out ones as well among smaller bets so they're just changing their betting strategy it seems like but I don't think they stop spending money it's just maybe there's less to go around at the moment yeah it's interesting you bring up VR and the metaverse and I was actually just reading Matthew balls Matthew ball. uh big ginormous 200 and something page report on the gaming industry dropped I think yesterday or the day before I was reading it yesterday and I'm actually still not all the way through it but one of the the big headline grabbing uh slides I saw was you know Facebook meta pumped $85 billion do into their metaverse initiatives and of course Zuck was extremely bullish on that on many many many uh investor calls quarterly

earnings calls over the years or the you know last two three years and over the last year or so we've heard very little from them and not surprisingly because according to Matthew ball they've lost uh $75 billion on that 85 billion so um you know it's and and VR as an entire category is only between one1 and two billion dollar according to him I don't know exactly how he's measuring it you know caveat Supply I'm not a financial anst all that stuff but nonetheless the VR AR and the metav certainly haven't delivered and there was a lot of excitement there was a lot of excitement okay I see you okay those of you who listening are not on the YouTube video the Devon is not entirely sure he agrees with that statement but um okay I'll let me finish my thought though and then I'll I'll have you push back on that no no worries at all um there was excitement from from investors I think less so than there was for web 3 or has been for web 3 um so I'll I'll grant you that but there definitely was excitement and of course you know when somebody is as like Visionary or course here as Zuck is saying like I'm betting on the metaverse I'm essentially betting a good chunk of the company on it um you know

investors tend to listen right Market tends to listen uh and it has not paid out it is not paid off and I don't think it will quite frankly I'll make that promise right here like I was never myself very bullish on it but but now I'm really like it's not going to happen uh I'm prepared to be wrong of course but that's what I'm saying I think with web 3 it's does web 3 stand the risk of being quite similar or are they just fundamentally different like metaverse just needs a lot more investment obviously so like that's an obvious difference between like you can make smaller in web 3 you can do like little hits on telegram kind of stuff like we're going to talk about in a second ind's accounted for the vast majority of titles in the last year or two um partly because they needed to be small because they didn't have the money um but I'm just I'm curious to hear your thoughts on does web 3 have a risk like an existential risk essentially the way VR AR the metaverse type stuff clearly has faced like this existential threat where they essentially go extinct because there's just no no more money there's no more consumer assignment anything like that

is web3 in that category no the reason the reason I'll say no is is first foremost talking about very different types of things in the sense that VR is is primarily a hardware technology there's definitely a software component for sure and that's been part of the problem is the software component as well as the hardware component and that is that can fall on its face because that is a consumer device that requires not just investment in design and development but also manufacturing distribution retail sales all that stuff that is not applied to web 3 at all because web 3 is a technology but more importantly it's a decentralized technology it is it is similar to the Internet it's like if people stopped investing in the internet would that have failed no it probably would have just taken longer because it was still a technology that basically it was based off people using it not necessarily based off people investing in it people invested in it because people were using it but it was kind of that sort of a you know chicken and egg sort of thing over time that that took time to build up I remember all the doomsayer people around the internet and I know we' brought this up around web 3 quite a few times but I

think it's the same thing it is a networking technology that is just works off the back of the internet but also works fundamentally different and I think it's important to acknowledge that even if everyone stopped investing in it and people were just building because they were interested in it it's still push us forward and that's the thing is it's like doesn't have to be money in it for people to build it because it's so decentralized you know people like the you ethereum people all them would still continue to push it Bitcoin would still do its thing doesn't have to make a ton of money obviously the miners would like to make profit but it's just one of those things that I think that sort of makes it a little bit more failure proof but it can definitely lose popular attention it can definitely lose funding in terms of like that technology getting developed you know it takes money to get that to go faster the the VR metaverse problem that you bring up though I think is important to like acknowledge that it it was a failure in the sense that it didn't provide a commercial return that was expected in that sense but it absolutely was needed to push the technology to where it was someone who's been using that stuff

since the very beginning the Oculus Rift stuff who's used VR since before that uh it has taken time and it has made significant improvements over time big improvements but those are easy to ignore when you're like it's not here yet if you're like watching red player one and you're like why am I not there yet yeah you're going to be disappointed you be like it's a failure that like but the idea of the metaverse was too nebulous like that's just that's what it comes down to is it's too vague to like if if people were talking about what Facebook is today back when Zuckerberg was first like coming up with it or whatever they would have sound like that's a weird vague idea that doesn't make sense right like it was just friend St was barely a thing Myspace was barely a thing it was not really a thing yet and it just takes time and I I don't know if we necessarily get to AR before VR for example and metaverse becomes part of that but just like web 3 metaverse is an idea everyone's excited about it's just I don't know if you could just build it right away same with web 3 you can't just force it into existence with money you could build infrastructure you can get people excited about it you could throw money at you can build content but you know

that doesn't that doesn't guarantee that we get there today that being said we've just like VR we've made a huge amount of strides even since 2022 when the funding supposedly all dried up and 2023 was slow and 2024 was slower we've come a long way I think if you really think back the last two years a lot more has happened than we'd like to acknowledge but again just because we're not mainstream everywhere everyone running blockchain on their phones kind of thing that we think oh it it has it just hasn't worked out you know maybe someday we're all early quote unquote so it's it's important have perspective we've been early for many years now so that was that's still a thing I know that oh we're early we're early it was still so early right um I I agree with most of what you said I think the only caveat or not caveat but like the only Nuance I'd like to throw in there a little bit is that yes blockchain technology in theory is decentralized but as we mentioned earlier in practice like a lot of these chains that developers are building on like you're taking a bet as a developer that that chain is going to be around and that chain is being maintained by a centralized organization and a lot of these have raised huge amounts of

funding and they also need to make returns right and at some point their investors are going to run out of patients and they're going to have a business bottle that doesn't work or or does TBD like we haven't se you know a lot of the they're all private so we don't actually know what their financials look like other than whatever is happening on chain so I'm I'm very very curious to hear I mean there was a point I think when I had George on not last year but the previous year from game seven he had a report that said that they were like I forget now it was literally in the hundreds of different chains that were almost all of 80% and were're focused it was in that conversation on that on that episode as well it was wild it's wild right and so like that's just not sustainable you can't have a planet on which there are hundreds of different game chains that developers are supposed to choose from they're not all going to survive that's gonna have a knock on impact on developers that's GNA have a knock on impact on funding so I don't think it's as simple as saying like oh web 3 is it's based on decentralization keep in mind people can Fork those things if people can Fork yeah they can but you know but that that some of them that is Messy as hell that is absolutely die I

mean there's there's a reason like not not all of them are meant to survive and I think this idea that we're going to have a thousand different chains and everyone's gonna be using a thousand different chains with all these Bridges and crazy weird infrastructure stuff it's I mean that's obviously not likely but I think even back to like isps right when you remember when like there was everyone was running an ISP back in the early internet days of dialup and things like that and then AOL thought they could come in and just be like the internet but then it you know just went kind of back to this decentralized sense of isps but then like slowly you had consolidation like Comcast and and Verizon end up controlling like a good majority of it and you end up in a situation where it's like yeah like the isps didn't go away they just got bought up they just got absorbed and maybe we see that with a lot of these changes maybe they get absorbed into bigger funding maybe they get like the technology forked or maybe they just weren't a good fit for what people needed a lot of this is just product Market fit happening in real time in front of us and we could see like do people care about this and I think you know you probably this from the the most recent game seven report a lot of layer twos and layer threes yeah and that's where we're really going to be testing product Market fit do we need all these

obviously layer ones we need but it's like that's the nice thing about like evm and stuff like that if people go hey we're going to develop to a technology that is portable then it doesn't have to be this this huge fail state where same with the internet and isps people go like well that isp's failed but the internet technology still works the same we could use a different ISP I could still dial up and still use my same modem that I bought my us robotics whatever it that sort of thing is important that we have standards that we have protocols that's what keeps it from failing but that's also what keeps the better from existing it seems yeah yeah well that's exactly right I mean are you then saying that uh 2025 is a year when do we need consolidation essentially is what I'm asking do we need consolidation in order for web 3 to realize his potential is it too fragmented still to this point are they just too many experiments that most are doomed to fail we need some kind of standard to coales and that can only really happen through some kind of consolidation whether it be consolidation by default because 80% of them fail because they run out of money and they they never really had a proper use case in the first place or is it

consolidation more meaningfully more um deliberately where you're going to see some of the larger players like immutable potentially or you know others start to kind of gobble up some of the smaller ones and you know uh actual protocols start to emerge I mean you already said it immutable pretty much already was that right they already became that consolidation and polygon pretty much was like all right you know throw our hands in the air we're going to switch to being a protocol thing and so you already saw a taste of that right where you saw okay the bigger fish was like Hey we're better positioned to do this so we're just we're going to take it over and I think maybe that's not we you know that might not be the end of it we might see that multiple times you know Anoka brand seems to have been just sitting on top for a long time so maybe they end up absorbing things it's hard to say right like funding things happen like a lots behind the scenes things happen but I think everything every Market every technology goes through those cycles of like fragmentation experimentation product Market testing like all that stuff to see what works and then you consolidate when s people

start running out of money people need to be able to sort of get things going but they obviously didn't plan correctly and I think maybe we maybe we see that with games it's a little harder to do that with games right it's a little harder to be like okay let's just go ahead and consolidate that game obviously we saw that with embracer right trying to do something similar to that and that went the other way because they overdid it but it's inevitable we'll go through these cycles and it's just always a question of where are we in that cycle not is it going to happen it always happens well I mean that's a nice seg actually my next plan question which is uh talking a little bit about kind of who are the players right now on on the gaming side and again this was in the game seven report uh they tracked the market and they uh analyzed that over 90% of new games um especially last year came from Indie Studios and by they have a definition of Indie but basically in this context it means small let you know for for lack of a better definition um so that kind of to me that leads nicely on from what we just talked about which is in the absence of real consolidation in the ABS you know when

you're building on quicksand when there's all this fragmentation and these experiments going on and you don't really know where the foundation is going to be um it's very hard for AAA Publishers and big VCS with big checks to write uh to back bets that might take you know multiple years to to come to Market we did see it happen in 2021 2022 and it hasn't played out that great for most of those players right not not everyone there's and some of the stories are still to be written um so my my question to you really is and maybe it's more of an observation but it's also a question with over 90% of these games coming from Indie Studios into web 3 is that something you continue to expect to happen in 2025 until this consolidation period this kind of camarin we've had the camarin explosion right now we need you know a meteorite or asteroid or whatever to hit the planet and kind of wipe out you know the species that were not meant to survive and at that point you suddenly have the more kind of evolved species I'm I'm straining this analogy to to all hell here but nonetheless the fun part of analogies

yeah you can strain them however you want so so Devon what do you what do you think about 2025 like is is that going to be more of the same more of these smaller Studios which is why you don't have a lot of Buzz a lot of stories you don't like somebody who raises half a million preed to experiment in web 3 that's not really newsworthy you know if you have like limit break raising 150 million or whatever it is like that is newsworthy right but you haven't seen much of that recently and I don't know if we're going to see it in 2025 what do you think we're in games in general as well as I think many other indust we're seeing huge dr- risking in AAA especially right where it's like just all these aleaa failures it is very risky everyone's just going to fall back on IP that they have drisk things take maybe some small bets here and there and hope to to build some new franchises maybe with sub companies like smaller Studios underneath the bigger Studios similar to what happens in movies and things like that so we're in this situation now where it's like Triple A can't really afford to risk like that so it's not that we couldn't see Triple A you know try and dip their hand in even if it's just uh attaching it to something they already been building so that it's already partially you know

down the road it's more just it's not really worth the risk especially considering gamer backlash things like that that can happen I think telegram kind of showed that like if you could just try and innovate quickly in a small Market that's probably like the the better approach at the moment still until we find some stabilization because we don't have a native platform for web 3 we don't have a place where it makes sense we don't go this consoles for web 3 it's a web 3 console everyone plays web 3 games on it right we don't have like it's not a mobile phone market it's it's not a web page that everyone goes to it's not some destination thing telegram you know kind of tried to do some of that you know we have that also with other like mini games and WeChat and all those other things you know social network stuff like Facebook was originally that and we still are kind of going to that with Messengers so there's this idea of like there are some potential sort of destinations but without that it doesn't even make sense for for triaa games to to be involved right now when they're just trying to get their ducks in a row to even like stay in business I mean you look at someone like Ubisoft who still take took big Swings with with you know Champions

tactics things like that at web 3 despite the fact that they're just houses on fire at the moment and there were still like let's let's do it like let's just keep going let's keep pushing it and obviously just to jump in there like I mean Ubisoft bankruptcy in the news again this week like very I mean two years ago when we were covering two three years ago when I started covering the web 3 space for for NAIC like we were all excited about the fact that like Ubisoft oh there's this great name they have this great pedigree like they have this great IP they're doing web 3 look see guys like that's that's a good thing fast forward two to three years like a lot of that now looks kind of foolish to say like hey it was great because yeah their house is on fire they're talking bankruptcy their big AAA bets have failed in kind of traditional space and their web 3 experiments now look like kind of silly quite frankly ironically partially because they went back and and relied too much on their IP as well at the same time like you know they're just kind of milking their franchises at that point and so it's like they're they're stuck between the two they can't innovate because they can't afford to anymore more and they can't just milk their IPs because they're not doing a great job of that

and so it's yeah they're in a stuck place but I think we see a lot of that and you know like if something's not Call of Duty like does it work you know marvel Rivals even was a huge risk when when it comes to like compared to what H just recently happened with conquer so I think you're gonna see a lot of that like there's no reason for 2025 to be triaa games going let's swing for web 3 I I hope I'm wrong on that that would be awesome to see and maybe there's been some stealth stuff people have been working on I just I think it's just too big of a risk in this market right now whereas what about sorry just to jump on real quick here what about largest studios though so so tripa I I think I buy like I think they're they're big bets rig risks anyway and then you layer in web 3 component you know I think we can all agree that that's probably a bridge too far for most of these guys but what about larger Studios trying to continue to experiment so we talked about Ubisoft not paning out very well Zinga tried to up sugar town we had um their GM on the show that didn't go very great like that didn't last very long even um so you

know Zing is kind of out of the game there that was another example not that long ago couple years ago where a big Studio was taking a bet with web 3 we thought it was like a you know the dawn of a new era Etc didn't pay out there's been a lot of false Stones essentially Nexon Konami Bond Dynam I think all of these guys have to a certain degree experimented with web 3 what are you seeing do you see that there even if they're not AAA bets right even if they're like much smaller kind of under the radar experiments will the larger Studio put web 3 back on the road map or continue to invest in it in even a small fashion or do you see them going back retrenching given the challenges that the gaming industry more broadly has had um retrenching back to what they know best which is just yeah IP and franchises mostly I think if you look at uh mobile development over time like since the you know release of the App Store it it follows a similar path where you had tripa trying to to throw that hat the ring you remember when EA was porting over their games trying to charge 20 bucks for them and just wasn't happening think of all the studios that

have built up success in Mobile didn't start in AAA they started in Mobile like they built up in that space that expertise and that knowledge and that risk that they took you know you talk about the old Angry Birds like roio obviously that wasn't roio's first game but they weren't exactly like triaa Activision Blizzard kind of thing at the time like it was like their 35th game they just kept taking small swings and you know like from the early like I think Java game days on phones and that's that's what we needed people who are experienced developers in the sense that they know how to develop games but they're not big studios in the sense that they have huge risk attached so they could take those risks they could make 35 games before they get their Angry Birds and I think that's those are the kind of people we start to see Studios built on that like what we saw you know with uh where we have like axi Infinity right that whether that company sticks around or not they built themselves on the backs of that sort of being their Angry Birds and so I think we have see a similar thing where it's like I'd love to say you know blizzard could come in or something and just dominate it like they try and do with

many of their their sort of spaces where they come in late but I don't think that's likely I think we see our small companies that ton of them fail because but you know being lower risk they can do that and then some succeed and then eventually when people see the formula when people see this is this is the business model that works they come in but there's no reason for them to do that now as much as I would like them to it's just like let other people sort of find the gold before you start trying to really like do that Oregon Trail out West it's just you're going to die of dentary way too often on the way oh yes good old Pioneer Trail there um okay so uh that brings us nicely to Off the Grid right this is the title that you mentioned it's a title of game seven mentioned George talked about that um and the game seven had it in the report uh a lot of a lot of hats are being hung on this one game right now let's talk so for the listeners who don't necessarily know what Off the Grid is why don't you give kind of a kind of a reasonably detailed description of who's made it when was it released why are we talking about it what makes it good how does it

integrate web 3 elegantly and and in a way that actually makes the game better that it couldn't actually exist without the web 3 components because that's important a lot of people still will be like ah what games don't need web 3 they don't need blockchain stuff like why like we have digital currencies already why do they need to be on chain like blah blah blah right so I want to um kind of get that out there into the open and talk about Off the Grid why it's good and why it matters and what is it doing more importantly um to kind of push the ball forward technology and innovation in gameplay as well forward yeah I mean that as far as like you know kind of where it come from it's there's been a push for a while to try and like really Step Up Battle Royale games try and push extraction Shooters and things like that in the in sort of the marketplace and a lot of them just haven't really worked out and this was more like uh you know was attached to Neil Blom Camp who's you know well known for district nine and a whole bunch of other movies that ironically also didn't end up great bets as much as I love every single one of his movies he also does a lot of really interesting stuff he's willing to push technology forward so he was like you know kind of like a maybe a lower budget James Cameron in

that sense but not with the James Cameron success unfortunately yet but you know it's one of those things where he was able to sort of like bring some some name attachment to it but they also had a lot of good developers developed quality stuff you know also you know brought in actors like shto Copley that he's worked with you know many times from District nine to sort of bring like some status but it was it was that they worked quietly on it with without a lot of hype they built it up and then they put it out there and obviously it wasn't perfect right like it's it's a little clunky it has some serious performance issues I haven't tested in a little while but it was definitely not running super great even on my system like as a decent gaming PC they had you know a bit of work to do but it was definitely a playable game they managed to get some good attention from streamers and stuff like that and the idea is this this this battle royale extraction shooter mixes with some narrative elements trying to kind of hit a lot of bases hopefully not too many but it's a quality game and I think that's the important thing it's like it doesn't have to be perfect but this is a game that's not a rug pole this is a quality game like it's it's a fun game it may not be everyone's C honestly generally I I've yet to find a a straightforward Battle Royale that it

sticks to me but it's still it's super fun game super cool aesthetic the way they do it and the blockchain element they they're trying to find that that sort of Middle Ground where it's like optional but cool around item trading and sort of this ability to sort of earn this currency and uh and crafting and things like that and so they're they're trying to attach like interesting elements to it without making it feel like you're just getting screwed if you don't participate in it but that like it's exciting and worth participating in the the tricky part will be like you know they're trying to push for console release as well this is meant to be like a normal Triple A game just some Early Access they pushed big through uh through epic game store which of course as we know is very friendly to it as opposed to uh steam which we'll see if they managed to get like a steam release to go with that you know when they start to get closer to full release but the fact that they came out without not a bunch of hype but an actual game that was playable that was good that's what got people excited like that that they dropped it it reminds me of like Apex Legends with that dropped it wasn't like a bunch of hype leading up to it it was just like suddenly it was the weekend and and everyone was Apex Legends you're like where the hell dides this even come from I I actually remember that quite

well I was like what the hell I've never heard of Apex Legends and suddenly everyone's playing this damn thing so it was the same thing right they obviously got streamers and things like that to play it and like sort of put it out there but I think that's what excited people that was a delivery of something as opposed to just a promise yeah now bringing up Apex Legends as a as a comp here that's that's a tough comp to follow because as good as Off the Grid is I I I would venture a bet that you know probably a good certainly more than half of our listeners probably haven't even heard of Off the Grid even though our listeners are primarily you know gaming industry professionals and and Executives and and you know folks who work in the space and follow the space very closely um is is that a fair comparison or or is this like hey yeah this is not Apex Legends yet but this is like this is the first step towards establishing real credibility with the web 3 game I think part part of the reason I asked that question I might as well come out and be open B it's not that they're hiding the web three elements but they're also not like pushing them either right yeah and I have mixed

feelings about that and I've had mixed feelings about pushing web three components for a long time like okay on the one hand it's a game like you don't need to talk about like whether it runs on AWS or you know it's on unreal or it's on Unity like nobody cares about that stuff like this here it's a good game on the other hand the web 3 components theoretically supposedly on paper are things that set it apart you know item ownership tradeability um you know all kinds of like tokenized economy things that are theoretically interesting and have been theoretically interesting to game developers for a long time but if you're if you're afraid to say like hey this is a web three game like here's this cool thing and and to your point like Off the Grid has made it kind of optional it's like not you don't have to engage with this I don't know can you walk that fence can you walk that tight RPP without falling off on one side like I don't know if that's yet proven and I don't know if Off the Grid has actually they've proven they can make a quality game that's cool and interesting that has web three elements but is it actually a better game for it

I think that's the big question so do you have to come down on one side of the argument well here's the problem right unless you're making a game about trading things you can't make it the centerpiece and that's the problem is like web 3 is not like a Game feature so much that like it's a technology that it should be transparent to some extent right it should be something that you're you're not excited to see a wallet prompt no one's like I can't wait to authorize this Wallet transaction that's not exciting that's not fun that's not a game if you build a game around that okay yeah there's plenty of financialized like you know defi kingdoms and stuff that's where it's just like Financial transactions made into a game and you can do the same thing with market trading and things like that that that's cool but like it's funny the parallel here when we're talking about like a you know a game that's like trying to just be a successful game we're talking about Apex Legends think about the games that were just before Apex legends that were amazing Titanfall one and two fantastic games just fell in their face just a pure Market timing like doesn't matter how good your game is there's so many factors to play you just have to hope and pray and try and do everything you can to get that game to be successful

Apex Legends could have easily flopped just the same it could have been their like Third Kind of semi flop in a row but it just happened to to hit and they've even struggled with the mobile version things like that it's not been perfect either it's a hard hard market and if you throw web 3 in everyone's face you almost kind of like there's a big anchor around your neck at that point you're you're pretty much guaranteeing turn off so much of your Market that it's it sucks but it's that's the nature of early web through games and that's the problem I've always had is like you want to make web 3 important enough to matter but you want to make it optional enough no one cares like it's this weird like you said this this weird thing to thread because you don't want the web two people mad because that's who you're trying to appeal to but you don't want the web three people to not care because that's also who you're trying to appeal to and you're not necessarily G to find a bridge it's it reminds me of mobile and and PC game players like they just scoff at each other all day long like it's so hard to find a middle ground until like you know you get these like really good like Chinese games like getent impact stuff that are like high quality games but even then like it's so hard to bridge those two audiences sometimes

that they're just different and and maybe we can't find a bridge maybe like the web 3 people play web 3 games and the the you know the web two people play web two games but I think the only way that's going to work is if you just build a really good game and attach optional interesting web 3 to it that goes here's one uses of web 3 that we think is cool if you disagree well don't use it that doesn't necessarily mean that that makes the game more or less successful if they push it more that's almost to make it less successful as much as I would love to see it front and center especially trying to put it on Console I think at this point if they could just make a successful game that has optional web 3 like that's a huge step forward because we don't have that right now all right yeah I I vacillate between between being a web 3 Optimist evangelist I you know I wanted to work I worked in web 3 for years and you know still follow it very closely still early ni I was still early and know and and I keep hearing that as well and then on the on the flip side I'm just like boy like at what point you know you start to live through that you know the old saying of you know Madness is you know

doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results right um yeah we're early at the same time a lot of experiments have been have been uh made and and uh not any of hate off maybe I'm on a slightly more of a downer day today one other days all right but let's talk about something that will hopefully get us excited and and I'm very excited about this and this is like I don't this is one of those wild cards that comes out of you know nowhere and you know you need those kinds of things sometimes and sometimes it's that those are the things that spark right that they're the Catalyst and that is telegram um that that we've had a couple of episodes actually where we've talked to some developers who are working on that folks who follow it uh George from game seven he also flagged it as something that was interesting you flagged it as something that was a big highlight from 2024 and absolutely for me it was the big highlight of 2024 it wasn't about titles it was about distribution and telegram seems like it is this very promising very open new distribution platform that is mostly unregulated unpoliced comes with its

pros and cons but it's kind of feels a little bit like early zingga Facebook like opens this platform to developers and settling their free virality seeing uh you know Plum all these other companies can build huge overnight essential player bases um with relatively modest titles and very small budgets right um telegram feels like one of those moments and they don't come along very often right like they're almost generational and the big question here is can telegram sustain um is it a oh boy here we go Devon okay he's going to be the spoiler here um I'm still excited about that okay so why do you think telegram can't sustain and for context here folks we've had a couple of episodes we'll put some uh links in the show notes but telegram when they opened up we've had titles go to tens of millions of users some of them I think 100 million plus users literally overnight like not overnight but you know over a matter of weeks and that is an opportunity that doesn't come along very often hence exciting Devon is shaking his head here on YouTube and implying that that may not sustain all right let's talk about telegram Deon

what do you think are you still playing Facebook games today no so I I'm just saying there's a time limit I'm saying I don't know that it's necessarily over anytime soon but I do think there's a time limit to it there's there's a huge cap on what you could do with that platform they're not going to suddenly it's not going to be an Xbox in your hand Suddenly It's just it's not that kind of platform it is a very light kind of platform for that sort of thing it is a great way to sort of get people doing stuff but you also got to keep in mind the context you're talking about how like free and open it is once the guy got arrested I think it was in France reversed pretty quickly there's a lot more restrictions happening a lot more cooperation with governments and part of the reason for telegram being so tied into crypto was that sort of not being the case people sort of like having these sort of underground networks and and like these groups and all that stuff on telegram that looseness that sort of hidden away from you know the dark recesses of the internet sort of thing is part of why it led to this point and that has seemed to

reverse so I do think that sort of puts a damper on it a little bit but that being said it's always one of these things where it's like any any opportunities like kindling for web 3 people because it's it's semi financialized it's semi about games that merger of those two gets a lot of different groups excited and there's no reason not to like jump on that stuff when you can but you got to go really quickly and that's another reason why Triple A probably should kind of hang back because it's not it's probably not going to be hype in five years when you finally finish your game if you could build a AAA game on telegram it still probably wouldn't be relevant by the time you released it and that's I mean it's just realistic right it's just like I said you're not still playing Facebook games doesn't mean Facebook games weren't an important part of history and a huge thing at one point like I worked on games that were on Facebook like it was a great thing for a period of time and it's it's that you know even the consoles go through their generations and cycles and move their way out like where's the Sega console right now there is is one right it just everything has time and obviously some stick around longer than others but the idea of a

social network or distribution platform that has some sort of social relevance I think is an exciting idea to push that forward because again we don't have a platform for web 3 and and obviously it needs to be something that's sort of Internet native to really make that work right it can't be like a single player console offline kind of thing anymore it needs to be something that's very connected whether it be on your phone whether it be on your computer but it needs to be something that is very internet native and it's going to have to go after maybe younger audiences um that are excited about that sort of thing like the older audiences you know often just scoff and you know play Elder ring to or something like and and not really care right so I Still Play My Game Boy okay I still have Game Boy do it man like I still got my Virtual Boy over here I I'll rep the thing forever but it you know obviously it has limited time and that's okay like that's what money's for is to kind of boost it while it can work like jump on it while you can and then you know when it's dead it's dead but just don't be late to the party is all I'm saying it's Musical chairs at times oh for sure and uh Simon who was from uh Hey Mighty bear games

thank you um out of Singapore great great guy great team um they were early they're a small Nimble team very internet native been developing games for a long time ready to jump on the opportunity and even he acknowledged that despite launching literally like a month or two after the the telegram store air quotes like it's not already a store but like you know telegram kind of opened up to developers he was already feeling like he was a bit late to the party like which is wild to think that that was somebody who was truly there like almost at the just get shorter and shorter man get so short yeah exactly it's wild but I think the reason I think part of the reason a telegram to me Still Remains interesting is whether or not it becomes an actual platform itself for games I I doubt that also I don't think it's gonna you know necessarily sustain I don't think it's going to um allow for kind of a big Mass market adoption because like who's using telegram like heavily well it's kind of Crypton native you know young men International um you know yes there's a big black market gray Market element to

to that as well um but it's it is a way of Distributing on mobile in a way that you know iOS and and uh you know Apple and Google don't really let you do still to this day so that's what's so intriguing about it to me it's like there is this hunger for developers and consumers to engage in these kinds of experiences and there's still a lot of opportunity there it's not really possible on mobile not in a native way not through the app stores and so this is an opportunity for developers to meet the consumer where they're at which is you know some percentage of them on Telegram and I just wonder is is there a world in which the same way that Facebook as a platform opened up to developers created big companies like Zinga right Zinga no longer makes games for Facebook canvas right but that's where it grew up and then it's now more of a traditional you know mobile game developer right publisher um where am I going with this I guess the question is is telegram a hint at what is to come is there another opportunity like this to get

Distribution on mobile for games that necessarily don't fit naturally into the app stores either through rules or just because your consumers aren't there or is it a is it a truly a flash in the pan this is like it's one of those things there aren't any other messaging platforms or any other opportunities for multi-billion Consumer reach overnight like this telegram is it and it is going to play out how it plays out and then it's going to be dead so which of the two do you think is more likely well keep in mind that even when gaming diet on Facebook all those people that joined Facebook for the game still a lot of them still stuck around right so it still was beneficial to the network and any know still people probably played as long as they could before a lot of them Sunset it I mean we had FarmVille 2 we had all kinds of stuff that tried to kind of hang on for as long as it could it just took a while for it to eventually die off and it was only because mobile managed to take off to sort of take its place a lot of games poured it over and stuff I mean we still have Heyday to this day doing well and it's still not too different from Farmville and many others so it's just you know sometimes a transition but I think the important thing is to kind of consider what you said about sort of ending around app stores right we we tried to do that with HML 5 that was

part of the big deal about oh you know Steve Jobs will kill flash but he'll also make like you know Progressive web apps and HTML 5 stuff like great on mobile so that like I remember you know when he was still alive trying to act like you know don't worry about the App Store it's just one way to get on here like the web stuff will be great you could just like run it on your web browser it'll be cool like we're open to everyone and obviously that didn't turn out to be totally true but that idea like is still kind of you know in a lot of people's minds where they really want to find some way to make that happen maybe it's through epic maybe they're you know they're the ones who are shove it in maybe they're not maybe maybe they even like are doing it like let's say they get fortnite back on and maybe it comes in through some fortnite uh you know creative or something like that where or Roblox or something else where basically it's it's a question what platform it sticks to but it's like clearly we want to get it onto mobile we want to get into people's hands and it's not going to come through the App Store anytime soon so it needs to come through something else telegram was an end around to that the web browser just didn't turn out to be a great way to get that in at least you know as as things have gone so far we've definitely tried there's been web 3 games you know you

look like League of Kingdoms and stuff that was around forever as like a 4X kind of game that was web 3 native that you could play on mobile that was in the App Stores all that stuff was kind of ignored even for a while like I feel like apple didn't even notice that they were like people were they were selling crypto and nfts and stuff in the actual game that was in the App Store but it's that's what we're looking for it's not really about telegram telegram had a distribution Advantage because people didn't have to go download it necessarily they a lot of times already had it already communicated on it they could have viral sort of things go out like similar to what happened with like WeChat games things like that so it you know it may be telegram for a while it may be something else but it's those properties we're looking for can it get around the App Store restrictions does it have some viral distribution channels is it easy for people to sort of go from one click to their Facebook tried that for a while with messenger with their sort of instant gaming Google's tried it with their instant gaming people been trying it for a while it's just it's it's hard I mean if they could if they could shove it in Roblox like you get it right there Roblox kills on mobile and I think if you could if you could get Roblox to become a web three platform

that would it that would be it right there like that would that would win if you could do that without getting in legal trouble well I'm not holding my breath for that anytime soon uh okay yeah I mean I think that's it's it's interesting that dist I mean distribution is the biggest problem I think for all games really for all products like it if anybody has a platform on which they control consumer attention duh they're going to restrict that right and so that's why telegram was so unique and interesting you know kind of and I do think a moment in time even if pav durov like who's notorious for being kind of an oddball and um but very principled I think on his free speech and you know he's obviously very wealthy he doesn't need the money he's not really running telegrams notoriously incredibly lean they have a tiny team of like sub20 people I think um so they don't really have the tools for moderation Etc you know like managing a big platform team anyway um so I I think the opportunity will last for a little bit longer it's just yeah I tend to

agree with you I I think it's not going to sustain forever it'll be curious to see what happens to the developers who do get some success who do reach some of these consumers who do create products that are quite man like about Zinga they're still around right the roio's still around even if maybe Angry Birds too didn't hit what they wanted ex exactly right um but going back to one of the things that Simon said which I thought was quite interesting and perhaps not that surprising is that he was very he was um his uh player base was way different to what he was used to from developing games that were perhaps more for the Western markets right and so he's like you know Nigeria and uh you know other parts of Africa South uh East Asia some parts of Southeast Asia uh Philippines and some parts of Latin America were by far his biggest portions of the user base which again again not that surprising given what we know about Telegram and its kind of global distribution of the user base also much lower end devices is so some of the gameplay has to be much more primitive um much more uh low Fidelity than what

you might otherwise think is the minimum bar these days for for even you know mobile products so curious to hear your thoughts on whether and this doesn't have to be tied directly to Telegram and their user base but what do you see happening with the distribution of web 3 gaming you know obviously famously got started with the Philippines most famously associated with axi infinity and still to this day is perhaps concentrated not so much in Western markets but more in kind of especially southeast Asia um and and Latin America your thoughts absolutely still bullish on on Asia in general I don't think they've given up on web 3 I think they shift their priorities and things like that but I don't think that goes away I think they are more accepting of it than the West will be the West is kind of a fair weather fan when it comes to web 3 which is totally understandable we we we tend to be like that a lot with a lot of different things especially Technologies and that's fine like you know like when it comes in and and it does well Silicon Valley jumps on it and money thrown at it and VCS everywhere and that works for

you know sort of fueling it but I think Asia markets are willing to take their time a bit more and sort of Build It Up where in Asia that ends up like I know that's a broad area and I use that term because it's hard to say where it will kick off like I said with South Korea earlier big question mark despite the fact that they've been one of the biggest developers in web 3 Japan is just slow when it comes to it because they're very careful about their adoption they're trying to build it up they're trying to figure out kind of what it works for what what to do with it which is fine like that's that's their prerogative to do so they' just been very accepting of it in a lot of ways and so I think we still see it slowly build up over there and like maybe maybe we just don't get a lot of exciting things over here maybe we just have to pay attention to there maybe we all have to learn how to speak one of the Asian languages and and deal with like that you know we used to have to import games sometimes to get the really the good stuff and like that's okay it's unfortunate for like a global distribution technology to not really be truly globally distributed especially through language barriers and sort of geolocation stuff and regulations as you

said despite the fact that it's a you know Global thing regulation local regulation definitely matters just ask South Korea specifically that's okay like it's just gonna be one of those things where like it'll be wonky over time right and and that's fine I think we should focus on those things and it's like you know you talk about like the lower end phones and the lower expectations and like telegram games maybe being kind of simple casual games still exist hyper casual is mostly just morphed into casual but like the the game play hasn't really changed much the animations might might look nicer the art might be higher resolution but the gameplay is still like the kind of thing you could have been easily playing on your Game Boy you could have been playing on your Nokia candy bar phone like it just would have been in little blocks instead of nice like Sprites it's just that's how it is and that's fine like that that's why I find it funny when people call markets dead and I like I like to remind them arcades are still around I just went and played arcades the other day I play arcades all the time I have arcades here at home like it it didn't die it just the market shifted and I think you know like the you talk about the Game Boy the virtual boy

there's a whole retro Market that you just buys and sells tons of stuff Nintendo still continues to to the Virtual Console or Nintendo online monetize their old content so I don't expect like it just dies I think telegram could could easily continue to do push games through the rest of 2025 is just is it a hype thing obviously these Ze guys are going very quickly and so like does the hype die down quick probably just because that's kind of the nature of this like this Market in every market now like just everything accelerates and that's you it's just being a realistic perspective but it's not pessimistic it's just like cool let's just adapt to that let's go that's fine that it does that what let's look to the next thing and let's keep moving as Simon's trying to do for example shout out to Simon shout out to Simon all right uh well that's a optimistic thought there I think that uh you know life goes on I think is the the the general consensus here stick around stick around you'll be fine you'll be fine um okay well we're coming up to time so on to the final question here final question on on uh predictions really so what are your hopes and

predictions for 2025 you know just like in a nutshell like okay what do you think's gonna happen what do you Hope's gonna happen what's realistic I mean I think realistically we get some push forward in regulation that I think makes a difference in maybe not huge investment but that we actually start to see some pushes and hopefully some push from the Epic site onto iOS if that happens I think that could be a big deal but I think we also you know get wild card there's always a wild card every year like telegram maybe it was the wild card last year but like there's there's going to be a wild card you just don't know what it is it's like uh say like black swans are rare but not like a particular Black Swan is very rare but black swans themselves are super common are like a rare disease everyone has a seemingly a rare disease just a different one and so it's that kind of thing where you just got to expect that there will be some totally random stuff but I do think the most important prediction is it continues to push forward we will make progress we will be in a different different place at the end of 2025 than we were the end of 2024 it will be pushed forward it will be

more distributed there will be more people prating in web 3 I think that's inevitable I don't think it there's any chance because you can't even just legislate it out to kill it because people could just get in secret networks and do it like I don't think it dies and I think that's the important prediction is it marches forward and whether you're marching with it or just waiting for it to get to his destination you know pick your battles yeah any big titles you think you're looking forward to coming out this upcoming year you know I feel like maybe we get like an Off the Grid kind of one where it's just kind of I mean I knew about Off the Grid and I think a lot of people did but like it was one of those ones that kind of comes out of nowhere I don't think any of the titles that we know about are likely to make a big hit like I think even shrapnel kind of had to like make some serious pivots we saw that even with like uh you know Lum had to kind of scale back like I don't think we see Star Atlas suddenly come out I mean I don't think we even see Star Citizen never come out but it's just I I don't think we see anything like really like that but we might see something that comes out of becomes like a really big hit I just don't think anything I've seen necessarily shows that kind of

potential but I think I I think if you were to ask a whole bunch of VCS off the Record you'd probably find that there is stuff bubbling under the surface that they're making bets on that it is really exciting just no one knows about yet and I'm not saying that because I know that but I do know VCS and I do know that that happens a lot so I would expect that that will be the case some VC back game that's maybe double A that's really that's really cool and Innovative in some way makes a big splash maybe it's short maybe it's not not but I expect that I just don't know what it'll be yep and what about uh final thought on this uh upcoming year what about the the studios that raised huge rounds of funding you know we got Gabe at the limit break you mentioned star Atlas you know there's a mark Otero what's his studio called out of Sacramento yeah that's yeah that's here like I could practically walk there yeah there you go like all these guys have raised ungodly sums of money um and yes they were very ambitious projects and so we would expect them to take time to build but 2025 like that's kind of the window where some you know you'd expect something from most of these if not all of them um what are your thoughts on

some of those Mega rounds that were raised during happier times during more frothy times um that are very ambitious projects that have not yet launched I think we did see delivery in 2024 maybe there was no that what we hoped for we saw we did see Guild Guardians after some pivots finally come out we are seeing shardbound get towards that like we did see Off the Grid finally you know push something out maybe it's not complete maybe it's early access kind of thing this year maybe we don't get a full release but I think we actually saw a good number of games actually come to fruition that being said like I don't see anything that close to it right now like we even need to wait for Off the Grid to really finally hit like a a full release kind of thing it's it's gonna take a while I do the the one I'm really really hoping for though of course is limit breaks because that was such a big bet it would suck to see that go UND delivered and I you know I know people that were involved and that like pushed really hard to try to make that do really well and like I don't know what the current status is I don't know what's going on with it I don't know any details personally but I do know like people really want to push that forward and want to make it work especially Gabe he he certainly is trying to put his

money where his mouth is because his mouth got very big which is great like kind of famous that I I no I think it's great like we need people like that absolutely and I think I just hope we could deliver because I think that could be a huge deal because that was a lot of money put behind it maybe it's you know maybe it's not going to deliver maybe it is but I would like to see something come out because right now there's nothing public right there's not like but he's posted out a lot of cool Tech and smart contracts and stuff like that I would say that they've delivered pushing the tech forward which was part of their you know kind of thing they're trying to do and it's nice that they're Distributing it they're not just holding it back they're really kind of laying the groundwork they're kind of placing the railroad tracks before they actually debut their train but I would love to get a glimpse of the train at this point this year please God put it out because I don't think I don't think it was supposed to take this long that well that that's my ass signing I mean I know it was very ambitious but that's my ass signing too and you know you don't put out a a Super Bowl ad which I think was now what three years ago like I remember watching it actually I was watching I don't watch a lot of football but but I did I do watch the Super Bowl and I remember watching it I was like ah I know I know who that is um so but yeah

that's a long time ago and we haven't had any Super Bowl ads from them since so curious to to see what they you never know Super Bowl hasn't happened this year yet Super Bowl hasn't happened this year yet take swing if he's got something in store like he might have something up his sleeve maybe this that's the big moment maybe that's what we're saying so your prediction is that we're GNA see all web three Super Bowl ads this year that's your he needs to bring he needs to bring Arnold back to and throw him in there and there you go absolutely absolutely Arie um okay great uh so we're at time here so final question as always for our guest and I've asked you this many times but uh you you keep keep coming up with new new titles which is great which is what are three games that you're playing right now or you're really excited about and it don't have to be web3 they can just be whatever it's like really there's not a lot happening web 3 to be like I was gonna say like so if I limit it to that you'd be in trouble but yeah yeah I mean uh I I I obviously joined the uh the Marvel Rivals train just because like you know it's free and it's fun and sort of casual but I unfortunately work T tends to take over and it's it's hard a Path of Exile too was is a great one as

well I think that's these are like you know just quality games like they are triaa games but they're ones that are kind of delivering even if path XL2 was like Early Access I think these ones that are just like from good game developers is what I'll be playing and looking forward to throughout the year like no doubt like it's it's just maybe we won't get as many as we'd like um but I love to all right all right well uh that's the episode so Devon thank you so much um for coming on again hopping on the show I love diving into the web three stuff with you it's always a fun conversation it's always a very uh uh open and honest and I love the fact that you disagree with me on so many things which is good um but you you know despite like the fact that we're not always 100% aligned on everything that we're predicting you always bring a Clarity of thought and uh uh you know experience to the space that can feel very chaotic at times so thanks again for sharing your insights thank you I appreciate it very much always always happy to be on here and I uh I look forward to coming back here again and seeing just just how right or wrong we were uh the next time we talk I know we

need to start doing some of these like uh we do a lot of predicting we don't do a lot of like let's look back and see how I don't want a report card no I know and I feel like the report card would not not necessarily be uh that kind to us I've been to too optimistic at the past let's say the report card probably would not reflect well on that aspect there you there you go um okay but uh also thank you to everyone for listening as always uh thanks for tuning in if you enjoyed this episode feel free to leave us a review or share it with your friend every little bit helps us spread the word and if you have any questions feedback guest recommendations shoot me an email nn. so until next time friends wishing you all happy gaming if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a five-star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website

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