What's Next For Play-To-Earn Gaming Guilds? - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] gm friends and welcome to the metacast brought to you by navic i'm your host nicola or nico for short and today i'm joined by casper from mma gaming and jasper lindquist from animoka brands and as you can see if you're watching this on youtube we have a mixed panel which is the first time so we have like one semi pseudonymous anonymous person and then we have jasper who's here we can see his face and his cool glasses um so the point of today's episode is to discuss what is next for crypto gaming guilds uh i have a bit of an intro for that but before we dive in let's get to know each other a little bit um so you know casper could you start off give us a short intro about yourself whatever what you can say actually by yourself and then about mma gaming and then uh jasper can do the same great so so so yeah i'm casper co-founder of mma gaming um we're gaming

guild and dow and like most web free related guilds we were birthed in the axi era um i think what's interesting and different about our guild and how it came about is it was really um we identified this kind of financialization layer that was placed on top of these games and it was actually a group of you know gaming gaming operations guys and and kind of more defy finance guys coming together and saying hey look how do we optimize this workflow a bit and and you know we had a lot of success with that model up until recently when obviously things have changed and we're gonna we're gonna talk about talk about that so so yeah pleased to be here and discuss the kind of the future of where these guilds are going fantastic great to have you jasper yeah great um well my journey has been a bit longer um or shorter at the same time right so i've i left my my home country which is sweden moved to asia and i've been here

almost uh two decades now different different endeavors and and uh yeah mainly in design fashion and the last thing i did was uh trying to build an eco resort in philippines uh and then covet happened so i kind of like got locked in between um between philippines and china where i was also working and uh yeah so i'm here in hong kong um try to find something else to do uh because i lost what i had so i came into web 3 i learned about it and i found it very interesting and intriguing in terms of like the fundamentals but also the tech behind and everything um and then same thing as as casper learned about axi last summer started a a family guild with my wife she was eight months pregnant so we didn't actually have the time i always had a full-time job to add to that so we didn't actually have time to

race um we were looking at it but every time there was like oh no now the baby's coming out oh and now i have to you know screaming at nights and everything so uh it was a little bit different journey but um in the end i started talking to animo i knew some people in there and they got me uh yeah just on board and all of a sudden i was managing all the different guilds that they have in their portfolio and that's actually been an amazing journey even though the space has changed a lot and i guess that's why we're here today um it's quite fascinating to be part of that and also see where uh where it's steering to the future great so you know maybe let's take a step back and talk about the emergence of guilds so last year we saw the explosion of nft based play to earn games with the rise of axi infinities sorry x infinity where players could earn tokens by owning nfts and using them to play games um and so because of that it was no big

surprise that the demand for these nfts spiked because the money earned by playing was sometimes higher than national median wages especially in southeast asia and south america and so this naturally led to a price increase for these nfts and after which we saw the scholarship model emerge and so in a scholarship model one party actually owns the nfts and rents it out to the scholar um who uses that nft to play an earn and the earnings that the scholar earns would then be split amongst the nft owner and a scholar and so this basically introduced a new business model the nft slash player gaming guild so guilds the idea was that guilds would buy a large amount of nfds recruit a large amount amount of guild members and let the guild members play with these nfts and then they would split the earnings and it sounds like a fantastic idea and so over the past month as 12 months as a web 3 game vc investor i have seen dozens

dozens of pitch decks from different guilds none of them are family guild jasper so i mean maybe you're on to something i don't know but they were all aiming to do the same thing um to you know buy assets so fundraise buy assets and rent them out to their um their scholars or their guild members that would then play and then they would you know earn money from there however we're about a year after the axiboom now in the first months of a crypto bear market and the play and earn or play to earn earnings have gone down the drain and now it seems that most people in the space realize that it won't be that simple to earn money by just playing a game and so this leaves us with the question what is next for these guilds a lot of them have you know raised funding with the promise of you know buying these nft assets and generating revenue from those um but it seems like those revenues have gone down so what do you do now um you know if you have a stable of these nfts what's best to do with them uh how are guilds shifting their business models

and their targets so let's start with casper um gaspar could you please go a bit deeper into mma gaming and what you were doing um initially what the plans were and then how that has evolved over the past months yes sure so like i said the original idea really was to scale out the the scholar model you know and diversify that across various games not just axi so i think during this boom period you had a lot of games kind of built around the similar the similar model of axi kind of with different avatars or different types of nfts uh and like i say our kind of usp there was actually to to optimize a little bit the workflow from you know player earning in-game currency to eventually kind of cashing that out to kind of real-world um currency so like you said that the the kind of interesting thing that's happened here is this original core model uh is only really viable when you've got

a minimum floor on on the in-game currencies such that such as attractive for people to come to come and play so i think you know the majority of this like massive number of players that came in into the space were primarily earners uh for the most part and that kind of demographic that strata of player type now has started to go away um so you know scholar numbers are the aggregate number dropping like farage should definitely like we had a lot of attrition um you know simply because it just wasn't worth their time anymore and you see that across the board and you see that reflected in daus in a lot of these these games as well um but what's kind of interesting then i guess uh from a gaming point of view is although the top level number has dropped down the actual kind of demographic split has changed as well um you know one thing that that we did was we kind of built a a kind of model

for when we're looking these games which ones might be more sustainable which was more interesting and a big part of that was understanding the different types of player that play the game their role in the game and kind of what is appealing within the game for those player types so along the similar vein what we're kind of thinking about now is okay look we've had this reformulation of of the player type you've got these games who want players us as a gaming guild um if we've got a bunch of players um and we're seeing attrition how do we how do we end up with a group that's somehow going to have value and add value to the straight space so i think um you know there's two main things here the first one is as a guild like what kind of players do you want to attract to join the guild um you might think a player is just a player but actually in in the end when you've got a crowded space where there's a lot of guilds with a lot of players who can go and play games and help bootstrap games you really want to have some kind of differentiating factor to say hey look

our player base or our demographic is interesting and can can do this that maybe the players in other guilds can't do or can offer something to the space or to a certain game you know whether that's as kind of content creators uh the user acquisition angle we talked about or or if they're in a particular region and there's a native interest in a certain a certain area so i i think that's what we're doing is we're really looking at okay look we're we're a guild we've got players how do we how do we build a player base that's interesting differentiators and and can add value to the space um and and to games so i think a big part of that you know how do you get good uh interesting unique players to come and play for you part of that is of course you know you've got this huge pool of gamers which are all web free or legacy gaming focused and how do you onboard them um to to crypto gaming

i think we we've talked about this in the past and and for us it's really it's mostly about two things number one is the narrative change um this kind of idea that you have web two games and web three games kind of on the side you you know you really need that to be more like look there are games and some games have uh you know certain technologies which are embedded within them which may or may not make that game more interesting uh more unique more fun um so i think when we can move to a world where people just think of games as games and some have certain technologies and some don't that's going to play a part in in kind of um bringing down this wall or the or this stigma that we see from a lot of legacy gamers and especially when we're trying to recruit people to our guild we see it where they kind of they don't want to touch crypto they think crypto is a scam you know maybe without fully understanding what it means to be a kind of blockchain enabled game so so yeah um

really kind of narrowing down what we've got in terms of the player base and then as operators in the ecosystem um how can we add value to other other players in the ecosystem so you know there's there's a few ways you can go here you can kind of look at this natural um qa where where you know you can have players doing beta testing for games and going in there and saying hey look um let's try and break the game let's try and see what issues there are and what's interesting about that is now you're seeing quite a few little companies and projects sprout up which focus on economic simulation so they look at okay look if you've got 10 000 people coming to farm your token uh you know press enter let's see what will happen to the prices what will happen to your economy if that happens now i think that's great and i think that's important if you're trying to make a kind of token enabled economy to to do some scenario analysis

uh but i also think you need to somehow capture the chaotic nature of uh game players especially in mmos and what can and can't happen so i think there needs to be a kind of empirical human element as well so there is almost certainly um kind of room there to add value that way as operators in a space that's highly nascent so you know like you say maybe a year 18 months tops you know you've had had these games running um that experience although it seems small is kind of more than anyone else in the world has um so you know there's value as kind of advisors consultancy which you see some some guilds doing and there's definitely demand for that um i think some of the conferences i've been to you kind of have a mixed bag of you know development teams who just kind of don't want to be involved but others who are like okay this is interesting maybe this is the next big thing i don't really know anything about

it um you know yeah let's have a chat what does it mean for a game to involve block chain technology and for a game to have nfts and what could that possibly do for my next title um so there's there's a kind of like education that that needs to happen there again coming back to this you know breaking down of the web 3 web 2 divide um i guess the the last thing i'll just touch on quickly because i've talked a lot is uh a lot of guilds are acting as kind of like primary investors in in seed rounds in in series a rounds which which i think is is interesting again so as operators in this space you you obviously have some expertise in terms of you know seeing the ground moving ahead of your eyes um possibly seeing what's what's actually missing in the landscape uh identifying those opportunities and saying hey actually you know there's a there's a market for this product

so i think that's the main advantage you have versus you know someone who's just investing from a kind of like we've got dry powder perspective um you're actually there on the ground and you can see what's missing you know as as mma it's not really like our primary modus operandi um but certainly we've made some investments in those kind of uh infrastructure plays where we've been trying to build something ourselves because there's just nothing on the shelf and actually there's a project there um you know doing that as a standalone entity and it just makes sense for us uh thanks casper so jasper casper touched upon some of the shifts he suggests that guilds could make like you know more focused on contents user acquisition quality assurance um what do you see um you know you speak to quite a lot of guilds either you know through an amoco or just personally um what do you see as you know common business models shifts pivots um and

where do you believe that the most of them will end up or how do you see those um and like how do you see guilds differentiate and and where will most end up yeah i think um what casper did was he he did touch upon a lot of these these things that we i have um i have uh talked about as well with different guilds there are specifically um you know like very early on for example looking at the vc angle i think there was a lot of investments done and some of the guilds that are some of the larger guilds out there specifically they have they have or they had large treasuries and they utilize that with investing into other games and other guilds etc um that that works to a certain extent um but the problem has been there is that since the whole space has has kind of come down uh it's hard for them then to

exit and and get any money out of that and and then you know that probably will be good in three years from now but it's hard for them to utilize that treasury now when they might actually need it going into a beer market and they might need to build and and bootstrap for for we don't know 18 months 36 months um so so that that's that's one of the angles that the guild has taken and i would also argue then are they a guild if they are a vc like they they technically can be both but the focus i would say has never been on the scholars it's been more on the on the the vc side once the money starts rolling in um we have we have guilds um we have an interesting guild over in in the us which which basically focus everything on the investment but they get really great deal flow based on them being a massive uh esports and and streaming

company down in in latin america and so they get a lot better deal flows a lot better deals and they offer those kind of uh services than as as a as a payment and i think that's a great approach because you get the high quality products coming to you um it's been hard obviously i mean everybody was running so fast uh during the the metaverse it's almost like a small bubble right during that bubble last last fall that investments were probably done too fast with not enough dd and we have seen that now in a lot of projects as well so yeah so i don't know right now i think that those guilds are much less active in you you know burning through that treasury they i've heard uh that they're more or less offering advisory which is not bad we need great advisors who understands the space to actually uh

provide you know good wisdom to to these different games that are building or infrastructure what it might be so i think there's still value there um and then the other part definitely services to games whatever those services might be it could be user acquisition it could be marketing it could be game testing all of that is also part of some of the guilds have looked in that direction and some of them are mixing that with with other solutions as well i think everyone the last six months have either pivoted very early or they're still in that transition becoming something where they actually have revenue models but because i think that's what the biggest difference is the only revenue model guilds had back in back in october last year was revenue share and and that that that was that wasn't working so so they they really have a lot of issues now the

very early on almost all guilds and i'm not sure about mma but all guilds that came in through x x-infinity realized it's really hard to do payments it's the biggest headache it's slow it's not automated um so a lot of them built up different tech to solve that that meant that the natural step as a second step would be to have some sort of sas uh company coming out instead so instead of being the guild as a service it's a software as a service so we have a multitude of these larger guilds that did get a lot of funding they built a lot of tools and therefore now launching different tools some of them mostly internally but but still i would say most of them are external tools uh being built over time um and then we have we have guilds like a blockchain space over in in philippines and i think uh peter peter ing was one of the first ones to actually identify that there's there's another a lot of other value

than just getting scholars to to to take some of the scholars money in return uh and and he he kind of built this guild aggregator so he's looking at micro guilds and then guild sizes all the way up to the mega guilds and everything in between and in my case i would say i almost we almost had like 100 scholars so we would be somewhere of a medium-sized guild or small guild however however you want to label it but everybody felt and saw the same things happening but then looking at all of these skills and i told him that he has a unique position because he has first of all connection with a lot of these guilds he has and he has aggregated data out of thousands of guilds that are smaller this is a large uh potential in in you know you can you can put them against each other or you can collaborate with each other and and that way earn from different services and different different things within web3 and he's working on a few projects

around that i think um and then yeah we have the esports angle obviously which i think is it's going to be more of an add-on to another type of service it's not just going to be a guild that is an esports uh company it's more of a it more mostly run more more of a an added feature where utilizing the streamers and the esports team as marketing for for the guild and then ultimately different games and then something like that um so yeah i mean it's it's it's not easy to see where it's going but i think that it's somewhere in between all of this and and um what i what i like to do is i like to zoom out a little bit and think is it is it all about do first of all do we call them guilds when they're no longer a guild and i think that we should stop talking about scholars because that that is not right it should be players or gamers in

that sense i think and then at the same time guilds per se are do they have to be specifically gaming guilds only focusing on gaming or could they be web 3 guilds where they actually offer services on a much higher level and they could offer blue color blue color services and white color services across the board and that way actually help grow the whole entire ecosystem and that's sort of the angle i want to see happening because there is a lot of potential there's a lot of great people out there kovic show that we don't actually have to work in the same office day in and day out we can have amazing people working in in venezuela and and in philippines and in singapore at the same time um so why not utilize that and why not you know capture that opportunity i love that take really love that take it's really interesting um it sounds to me like you're describing guilds as the new web3 native workforce of the internet

where you know there's going to be a ton of small tasks within either games virtual worlds but this could be non-gaming related as well and then you have on the other hand a group a large number of smaller groups of people with specific skill sets and i want to double click on these skill sets later that could potentially fulfill the needs you know of this new internet of this this web tree enabled internet and so to double click on those skill sets right you know traditionally um people get rewarded and revenue gets generated when there's value being created and this value is usually created by people with very specific niche skill sets and you know one of the questions that keep me up at night and it doesn't really keep me up at night but i just can't find the answer to it is what what the hell can gamers actually do that adds any significant value within virtual worlds if they don't have a very specific skill sets like i don't know knowing how to code actually creating something right

and so it seemed to me from the outside and so i'm putting this out there would love to have your feedback on it that most of the guild members that joined these gaming guilds that were like oh you know please rent me an nft i'm going to play a game earn some money with it and then you know 80 percent of that money goes to me and then 20 to the guild or whatever the split is um that these people usually are the ones that are lower skilled right because of the opportunity cost where if they had actually any something better to do because they had a niche very useful skill set they would be earning way more money um and so my question is what do you think about um this and how should like if that is true how do you think guilds will start adjusting or pivoting and will we see like a training component there as well you want me to answer casper you want to go first go ahead just for you um well for the lower skill sets i i do understand what uh what you were coming from and um the way i would kind of i don't know

if that's a great analogy but i would kind of compare it to you know instagram influencers right so you have a huge value in micro influencers as well and it's a smaller take but they all together you actually bring a lot of value to brands because one influencer can do just one thing but you can have a hundred thousand influencers posting liking you know engaging on a whole other level would actually ticks the the algorithms a little bit more than just one so there there could potentially be those kind of things where you can where you could use them as quality and this sounds really wrong but uh skills that are and and okay let's do it this way we go back to x infinity before the scholars we had a lot of bots they did very simple things to earn money for companies and then instead guilds came up and they actually hired people to do the same kind of thing uh so quality bot work

could be done uh as well i think for for the same unskilled workers it takes maybe half an hour per day but they go in and they click and they subscribe and they comment has to be quality it has to be somewhat managed but that has to be managed and educated by the guilds so when you come back to that what you said yes there definitely has to be training from the guilds and i think part of the one of the main things for guilds was not only to to you know spread the love of actually infinity but actually training people and onboarding people into web 3. but then if you go to the next level we also don't like so the communities we have today they came in mainly and i would love to hear casper's view on that as well but the the the gamers that came in for web3 gaming came in to make money they didn't come in because they love these games so it's a completely different type of gamers than you have in in web 2 communities who actually are there for the games that they love so if you want to see it on that level

we might have to replace different communities or add channels into the discords or however we want to want to see it but if we want to get we were sorry what i think about these guilds as more of a workforce i also think that because they already have to acquire more people they also could go to universities and and start working with universities that that have tech development so you you could actually increase because you already have to acquire new people you already have to train people so why not go after those different segments that are really needed in the space because we do need that to make sure that the whole blockchain industry moves forward we don't have enough people as it is so that's sort of where i see there's an angle there will somebody pick it up and do it or is it done in another way perhaps but but within guilds i still think there's a there's a possibility to do so yes what's your take i think i got like two points so first on the side for guilds who are who are really shifting the dial from

low skill scholars to kind of high skill players kind of going from that grind end to the to closer to the esports end i i think the biggest value is really what we've been talking about where you can kind of identify problems with the game loops with the mechanisms um and and i guess this exists already to to a degree as a kind of role in in legacy gaming you know just for example one game we were um seeding seed investors in um we were kind of looking at the the breeding mechanisms and things like that planning how we how we would play the game and actually one of our gaming leads identified there was a bit of a bug because after end cycles you kind of end up with just all one one kind of breed so i think that kind of information needs well well-versed players um to actually come and kind of look as an extra pair of eyes outside the box um so yeah it just comes down to to kind of really narrowing down your player base identifying a demographic that you think

has value uh and going in that direction just to touch on what you were saying i think i think the girls they're going to do best are going to be the ones who actually say okay this is what we're going to do this one area and we're really going to focus you know everything on that rather than this kind of um smasmable of you know we're going to do uh you know qa we're also going to do esports we're also going to do seed investments i think the ones who are going to win are the ones who say early look we're going to toss everything else to the side and this will be this will be our thing this will be our north star this will be our our kind of mission then going back on to to the the kind of big guilds the super girls who have got you know this mass of players and scholars and and what can they do in terms of paper i always thought originally um you know actually why don't you think about this group of players in this big community as a distribution channel but then you take a step back and you think about it well actually most of

this pool are there because they were playing to earn a minimum wage so are they for example gonna go out and spend ten dollars buying a game on steam and you know probably not um so so this is where like that idea may have had legs but because of the demographic of the group um it probably doesn't work as well so like you said you have to look at it more as okay you've got this labor force you can teach them you can upskill them and you can apply them to different creative things which can be as attached or detached to web free gaming as as you like um so yeah i think those are my my main thoughts on that yeah i i just want to touch are you okay i just want to answer quickly on the multi multi approach i think that the main reason we're seeing these i mean they're really smart people in this industry and they're they're taking this approach of trying to do esports and all of these different uh areas and i think they're doing that because

they simply don't know which one is going to work and i think it's kind of just a proof of we are in a space that is is running very quickly there's a lot of development and it's really hard to navigate and i think someone they're just taking a lot of bets at the same time and then hopefully they have yeah you want to be in the right right place to the right yeah yeah i mean it's very difficult it's it's not an easy space to be yeah totally um jasper you you also mentioned that some of the bigger guilds you know are actually developing tools could you elaborate a bit on those what kind of tools are you talking about and who do they serve yeah um there's there's one guild that's building a basically an sdk for games to onboard players for payments for for um i mean also helping with the blockchain integration and for lending i mean i think lending was the biggest thing if we look back six months ago then everybody wanted to build some sort of lending platform uh we have

actually had an immoka a really good company called renft that are working with a lot of these lending tools um they've been building sdks and they've been building platforms and dashboards and all kinds of things but it's all happening in the background so we don't actually see exactly what they're doing um but but they're they're really skilled in that area as well on top of these these skills right so that's that's one angle uh to to have as well and then there are there one guild that's building out almost like a and a package for everything so you have if you're you're a web 2 game you come over you want to do web three this this toolkit is going to solve all your problems no matter which blockchain etc so they have quite a a large grand ambition um to do so but just basically taking care of everything for a game to become more of a of a blockchain um yeah blockchain game um and then on top of that we have

um yeah it's how to say like there's i don't want to say anything that's not good about these companies it's just like the industry moves so quickly so i think that there's been times where some of these entities have developed uh products that quickly are not so useful and and the problem as well for the for the the whole space is that one it moves very quickly but two guilds are a layer on top of web 3 gaming if web 3 gaming is not working then how can they be web 3 guilds right gaming guilds then that's also why we're underneath is the community right yeah 100 that's exactly that's exactly it so you take that away you strip it away so and also to be honest i don't i don't know your numbers at over at mma um i just seen um you know some of the smaller guilds i've been speaking to i

don't know the numbers because nobody's really want to share this with me at our portfolio guilds that actually like how many how many people are actually playing there's obviously a lot less than before how active are the communities there there there is not a lot of engagement so also to bring back guilds guilds 2.0 we have to actually push uh new people in there we have to get them engaged again and how do we how do we get them inspired that's that's going to be another task that that's for the future fascinating discussion um i so personally have been seeing one like a lot of pitch decks from guilds that wanted investment but i've also seen a few games that to me that already have commitments or investments from guilds jasper you've seen quite a few of them could you tell me the what these investments usually looked like um do you see a lot of mostly nft investments do you see token investments a combination of both um what do you see most of the time uh in the beginning i

would say was um it was a lot mainly mixture so i think that you would you have like nfts you would have tokens and you would have um uh also advisory like those are the three that they usually leveraged um going further when everything went a little bit more more shaky it become more and more tokens before before you can continue start to interrupt you what do you mean with advisory so there's you know fungible tokens the nfts and then advisory advisory is from the guild to the to the game game or is the other way to get from the guild to the game uh in terms of you know navigating the landscape because a lot of these games are also because it was such a speculative surrounding you could launch an nftp project and then you said you're going to have a aaa game the next month obviously they didn't know exactly what they were doing they needed some sort of you know help in terms of advising how do we actually build the game or how do we navigate this crypto investment uh you know industry so

all of these things together that there there's there was a need and there's still a lot of need for for for you know cross knowledge i would say and and i uh that was part of what what a lot of the investors offered on top of just cash and what they were like aiming for but but like i said so so going you know further in when i would i don't know exactly but let's say february march it was a lot less nfts a lot more tokens and and then now i think it's it's uh it now is a very different market and i don't know if uh you probably know more of that than me nico as you're sitting there with bitcraft what i've seen is i've seen a lot of pretty terrible games that had zero chance of ever becoming sustainable right you know these play to earn games um like in the in the style of idol games where you know you're you're doing something and then you you generate a resource and you use

that to upgrade your base and then you generate more resources and like it's a continuous loop and it's like an exponential growth um and you know games that expect if they put that like they make that token fungible where one player who has been playing the game for months you know generates 15 billion resources a minute and you know a player that plays the game from the beginning generates you know one resource per minute that that could ever be sustainable or actually work as a game and so i've seen games like this that were funded by some of these guilds because these guilds don't have a lot of experience investing in games because investing in games is not very not very easy because making games is extremely hard and so um you know i'm i'm pretty concerned for the long tail of these guilds right the smaller guilds um that you know because they had limited access to deal flow i had to invest in some of the lower quality games and products out there um what are your guys's thoughts on on this on like the chances of these and you

know we like some spicy take so please feel free to um to to to put it out there that you believe that they're all going to make it or no one of them is going to make it um casper what do you think yeah so um like i said like it's never been our primary model to do to do these kind of investments but where it made sense and we were building things um or had relationships pre-existing we we've done them and it's kind of exactly what you say investing in these things is hard um first of all you know you have to choose the right company but like how do you even do that so we've had to build you know from a team of non-vc people our own kind of due diligence program and how does that look and how does that work which would just be kind of like table stakes for any other investor and then the second problem is of course like how do you get the deal flow how do you compete with all the other um pools of capital out there who have you know much bigger long-term networks um and not kind of end up with this selection bias where you're left with

the the kind of crumbs and like you say they're not great deals at the table so you know i really think that's challenging at least until you've established a strong enough network where you can get that deal flow and actually kind of built in-house some specialists who you know don't just invest on the side right you know i think like um you know throwing some dollars as an angel investment is quite different to doing vc investment as a company um you need a lot of established things which many of these guilds don't don't have in my opinion um so that's my thought on that um i just want to jump back like quickly on the on the the tools actually um that you were talking about jasper um and just to mention a point like we obviously have done similar to what you said like built a lot of internal tools um to help us when we were running that kind of big model um now now that's changing and we also had the idea of how like hey this is great we could we could

kind of like productionize this and then smaller guilds who don't have a dev team um can use it and pay us 25 um but the thing is at least in our case and i think in the majority of cases as well um a lot of those tools were all based around this business model which is now no longer viable or sustainable um so you have you have you know the value of the tools as well as the value of the tokens the nft also degrading significantly um you know so for us we're just gonna say like okay okay that's fine right these tools we built and they served us at a point in time for doing what we were doing um you know now we need to you know change what we're doing and to pivot um and you just have to kind of say look okay we're not going to go down the route of investing time and resources and productionizing this and kind of putting it out there because you know the the market is no longer there for this for this product that's not to say there are tools which are still viable like especially more on the kind of analytics

side and aggregation side of things um so so yeah that's it i i think like basically vc investment is is is very hard i think as a guild you can have an edge in that you're on the ground floor you are operating you can probably see things that that some kind of finance guys in an office can't see um but at the same time that the whole the whole kind of frame and infrastructure around that takes a lot of resource and a lot of expertise to build and to build well jasper what's your thoughts on you know the future of the long tail of smaller guilds as as as investors or no no just like in general um you know my question was you know i i'm trying to get out of you that they're um they're gonna have a very very hard time um that that's my goal but obviously i

can't predict what you're thinking so yeah share your thoughts i can mute myself and you can talk over no uh so i do speak to some of these smaller guilds and i mean yeah it's around the size that we had to be honest i mean in if i speak on a personal level we're we're all completely wrecked um we we put in money we borrowed money from family members and um i mean it's not a huge amount but if you got in in july august it did cost a bit of money to to actually get in um but the way i looked at it because i i did used to live in philippines i i love that country and and i love the culture and the people and for me to to contribute in some way during a crisis um in the end all that money didn't go to like a vc that basically went to all our scholars because that's what was drained out right so i don't i actually don't mind losing that and it also you know we learned a lot from it

it would have been greater if it maybe wasn't my personal savings but that being said it's it's uh you know that's all forgotten now um and we're building for the future and i think a lot of these smaller guilds i told that story just to like a lot of these guilds did that they did exactly the same they were like a couple of friends or something and you know i i found the whole thing fascinating with like trying to figure out the breeding and trying to figure out like what's the next meta here and there like there were so many it was so complex that it was really hard to actually figure out the only thing i figured out earlier was that this is not going to work um but but then we were in i mean and you kind of there there's a stickiness right because as a guild you invested and you have all these people families writing to you sending photos of their family get-togethers and stuff it's not like you can just pull the plug and exit i i couldn't do that and actually i did the same journey with cyborg later on we i i had like i think almost 8x to my my investment but i didn't want to pull it from the the these guys because you know they're

my friends um so so it was it was and and you know it was a similar journey but obviously cyborg was was much more much more managed and and it it went well in the end it's just like it's um it was like part of that journey you jump from one one game to another so i think that a lot of these smaller guilds that's what they did they don't have the insight they don't see everything from a i have a i have a great position because i can see a little bit from above because i see that what the largest players are doing in the games and everything so that that's that's a great chance um but a lot of these small guilds they just i spoke to one guy i think two days ago i just asked him what did he do and he's like i just parked it i mean everything is there the branding the assets the the community is there but it's sleeping and uh if there's even an opportunity would try to wake it back up and i think that's what's happening i think it's not dead they're just in a i don't want to say come on cause that sounds like hibernation but just like hibernation hibernation hibernation yeah

that's the word i was looking for that's it so something like that yeah i think uh to me intuitively that makes a ton of sense it feels like the whole gaming guild model where that's not not necessarily focused on play and earn uh you know it's not all about owning assets and then generating revenue from it but more like you know as we develop more immersive virtual worlds with assets that have you know real tangible value and assets that you know become increasingly rare or in increasingly useful in different ways you know the value of these assets goes up and then you know a single person might not be able to hold them and so you know i can see people coming together to own you know for example a spaceship that they can all use and fly and use to like explore planets and solar systems and stuff and so it intuitively to me makes sense to group people together in a financial way once games get more and more financialized but i also have been you know very vocal about the fact that i think that in the current

iteration of blockchain games games are generally too financialized where it's all about you know trying to make money and um you know for me i i think you know the hibernation strategy actually makes a ton of sense because to me it feels like you know i think that the current iteration of mmos would not work with web3 because of the over financialization um would ruin the player experience so it wouldn't be fun anymore but that doesn't mean that i believe that no game will work with web3 and so i believe that within five to ten years the biggest game in on the planet will be like a massive mmorpg that is going to be blockchain based and it's gonna like mimic the real economy almost um and i think there will be a very real place for guilds to actually like have a purpose and actually have add value as well um and so you know if you have people that are passionate about gaming um and you know you you have some sort of infrastructure of communication and and you know being

able to lend assets etc i think it makes sense to you know put that on hold for a bit see what business model actually sticks and then um you know like get back into it when it makes sense again yeah i think i think yeah i think that's totally uh totally right and totally fair and and probably a lot of people who are pivoting they're ultimately pivoting to more capital light models right so even though they're not totally hibernating they are still keeping dollars on the sidelines to to kind of see okay where where is the best place for me for me to you know to channel this in the future um and it's interesting what you're saying about okay when we get to a stage where we've got this kind of true metaverse whatever that means and people have careers within the metaverse um you can kind of imagine these girls being much more similar to kind of guilds in the real world where you have the you know the plumbing guild right or or you're going to have you know the guy who who you know fixes the engine on the spaceship there's going to be a guild of engineers

there's going to be a guild of um kind of career orientated how these people um live their lives within these these metaverse worlds or live their their time which they they give to these metaverse worlds haram syndicate yeah fantastic all right um i think that's it it's it's a more hopeful note to end this kind of sometimes a bit depressing episode so apologies listener um for that uh where can people find you desperate um i'm on i'm on twitter but not very active i'm i'm i'm just starting off my my uh online game so maybe later in the future but i do i do exist on twitter and uh oh it has lint quest lint quest okay um how about you casper um yeah so i i'm at status casper on on twitter um but you can jump in the mma gaming um discord uh

often in there um yeah come come and take a look have a chat if anything's interesting for you fantastic thank you jesper thank you casper um for being here for sharing your thoughts your ideas um it's an interesting concept i think you know guilds do have a place in the future um i'm curious to see where they go in the short term and especially where they go in the long term all right listener thank you so much for listening if you made it here uh feel free to uh if you did like it give us a thumbs up or five stars wherever you are um subscribe if you haven't already and then navik does some great newsletters so you can subscribe there and we also do some breakdowns very in-depth breakdowns about free to play games but also crypto games um and you can get a navic pro subscription for that as well if you'd like and then yeah with that we're out and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers [Music]

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