Welcome to another episode of Between Two Hoodies.
I think OX5F is on his way up.
I couldn't hear anything until you said I was on my way up.
I never know how to interpret spaces, man.
Just a weird piece of technology that doesn't feel like they're innovating on anymore.
We need spaces to go completely on-chain, right?
Well, we need FarCaster to replace it or something.
Someone just give us some... I don't know.
It seems hard to do because there's so many people in Twitter.
It's the best way to cast the widest net.
Until you have critical mass and people have moved over completely,
I think you're just kind of speaking into a void, right?
You can hope that you build some percentage of the circles that you have on Twitter,
but we are so far off from anything gaining mainstream adoption.
I do sometimes think about how Walmart tweeted about Pudgy Penguins the other day,
and they have 1.3 million followers,
and the tweet got 11,000 views.
That's a pretty poor ratio.
Then you think about over the past 10 years.
Of course, they built up 1.3 million followers,
but now most of those people don't use Twitter anymore.
Sometimes I wonder how much of the space is amplified by ourselves,
or we think the space is bigger than it is,
or the people that use Twitter because all of us use Twitter.
It's just an interesting thing to observe.
We have such a long way to go.
But hey, great to have the Pixel Vault team slash reboot team here,
I think Gfont may be coming as well, if I'm not mistaken.
Odious, I see you in the audience as well.
Just feel free to request and come up here as well.
Let me get you up here as well.
Yeah, I was going to say I shot him a message just in case.
Gfont just about to add you.
It wouldn't be a between three hoodies without an extra hoodie.
I felt one for a second there.
It's always more fun with one more hoodie.
Maybe I should have updated to the actual CryptoPunk hoodie,
It is there in the background.
This is such an amazing, amazing version, though,
and all of the honoraries were pretty incredible, right?
So it is some absolute swag.
We run this every other week or so.
We happen to be part of the FriendTech cabal, if you will.
Early folks were very bullish on FriendTech,
and if nothing else, we built a nice little network of like-minded folks.
So we started kind of engaging in these discussions.
I think it must have been two or three months ago.
It's really what's topical of the day, what's trending.
What's kind of interesting is this whole concept of on-chain
and off-chain gaming seems to be absolutely taking off, right?
So as you look at gaming in general,
it seems to be one of the pervasive use cases
that is absolutely going to take off this cycle.
I mean, I think last cycle people were preparing for it,
but I'm really curious to get into a few areas, right?
Talk a little bit about the present,
but take you back, G-Funk and VGF and others, right?
To the past and then kind of where you're going in the future, right?
Because I think there's an amazing story here
of what you've done and how you've built
and the fact that you stuck with it
and kind of where you see the space evolving, right?
I think that would be awesome.
And I want to start off by congratulating you guys
because I think what you just did with the DAUs and retention
is pretty amazing, right?
So Battle Plan, which is the current game
that's out in the market right now from Reboot, right?
I think at last check they had 1,000 daily actives
and it may have gone up since then.
And they have about 120 minutes of retention, right?
So both amazing numbers in an economy
where people are jumping from one thing to the next
So I want to start with that, right,
as kind of the current lens
because you guys are, you know, you're in a process,
1K is a pretty significant number
and the next leap for you all will be 10K and then 100K.
But what do you see as like the scaling requirements, right?
To get you from 1K to 10K and then to 100K.
Then I want to kind of take us back a little bit
to this whole on-chain, off-chain discussion.
But what do you guys see as like the next hacks here?
Yeah, so I'm pulling up the latest dashboard as we speak.
So we had like a native community base of about 787 players
No marketing, just the OG pixel vault community,
friends of theirs as we were really testing things out.
I mean, this product is the first of its kind in many ways,
heavily on-chain with a very complex sort of
skill-based wagering system to underlie it.
So the game is fun, the economy is fun.
I think there's a lot of potential there.
But in doing that and in being on a newer chain like Nova,
we were encountering some hurdles in scaling,
But we didn't really want to make that broader marketing push
to start onboarding new players until we felt like,
one, the onboard flow was very clear to newcomers
And we quickly learned some things on that front.
But two, if the service was going down,
unless you have a long-term commitment
to the success of the ecosystem as all of our OGs do,
that's a very easy way to lose a user, right?
You only get that one chance at a first impression.
So while we really wanted to blow things up much more quickly
given that we believe we have a very strong and fun,
addictive game beyond just the crypto components,
we were trying to sort of slow-roll the rollout.
Well, a few people in Asia found the game,
shared with their friends, and all of a sudden,
like not much more than a week later,
we're just about at 5,000 players.
Our DAU yesterday, let's see.
Yeah, over 1,000 already today.
Over 1,000 yesterday, 1,100 the day before that.
Our weekly actives so far this week are just about at 3,000.
Last week, we got to 2,039.
And the week before that was only 510.
So you can see we're going pretty exponentially at the moment.
And that's still without any active marketing push.
So we're really loving what we're seeing in terms of retention,
as you mentioned, average play time,
even with this influx of new players is still north of 100 hours,
sorry, not 100 hours, 100 minutes per day.
That's sort of the foundation for it all.
And I think that's been one of the biggest problems in,
quote, unquote, Web 3 gaming is that none of them would be competitive
with a traditional Web 2 game if you took away the tokenomic component.
Of course, this cycle, you've started to see really high quality games
that people actually enjoy.
But I'd say in the 21 cycle, that was very much few and far between.
So it's been good to turn that corner.
And I think that's really the most necessary requirement to see Web 3 gaming succeed,
is we need to step up our game and create games that are broadly appealing
and a big focus of our...
We need to also try to eliminate a lot of the hurdles
from the blockchain perspective.
We have one signature up front.
And then even though each game might have 20 transactions on Nova,
the user doesn't feel any of them.
So I think we're doing a lot of things right now.
Our token, unfortunately, is sort of lagging user adoption.
But I have to believe that as the product goes, so too will the overall ecosystem.
And it'll continue to grow stronger.
And with that, we'll be able to onboard more games.
We already have amazing partners in Chimpers
and some really fun things in store with 90cc.
Of course, we're talking to a lot of other potential partners down the road.
So Roadmap is super full.
And I think there are a lot of things that make this the topic of conversation today,
on-chain versus off-chain, really special.
And I know Chuba is excited to talk a lot about what differentiates us there.
And then I see we pulled Goose up as a speaker.
He's our head of gaming, Chuba head of engineering.
So I know they have a ton of thoughts on the topic.
I mean, price is kind of a trailing indicator, right?
I mean, it always has been.
And of course, everybody is fixated on what the latest token to drop is.
And it's kind of emblematic of the space in a way.
It's not emblematic of fundamentals, but they do catch up.
And so it's awesome to see the KPIs that you are tracking are headed in the right direction
because I think that's super positive for what happens from here.
You look at games like Pixels that has, I think it's over 100K DAUs now.
And I think it's really interesting, right?
Because getting and finding a market segment like Vietnam
and starting to see little pockets of mini economies develop,
I think are the super interesting aspects of decentralized gaming, right?
And on-chain gaming that we don't quite see as much in the West,
but are where the real sort of metas are, right?
So it's kind of amazing that you've already gotten that base without doing any marketing, right?
So I think that's pretty thrilling.
So kind of segueing into on-chain versus off-chain gaming, right?
I know you guys are, you're on Arbitrum, right?
And Arbitrum is the best current layer 2 by far.
And you guys are obviously very focused on on-chain gaming.
So those who are wondering, and I know many of you know what on-chain gaming is,
but having something be on-chain, what that means,
it mainly means that the asset, so it could be the NFT
or actually the game's logic itself are stored on the blockchain, right?
So that's the nuance between on-chain and off-chain.
Off-chain gaming is typically what you call Web 2.5, right, in many ways.
It's typically something that is a traditional game that has a blockchain integrated,
so the backend is integrated, and then you have this pseudo sort of experience.
But then you get to the other end of the spectrum, right?
If you think the left-hand side of the spectrum is fully off-chain, right,
and the right-hand side of the spectrum is fully on-chain,
there's a lot of value in on-chain and a lot of value in the concept that you heard of
called autonomous worlds.
Because if you look at traditional gaming, you know, a lot of folks get rubbed, right,
because people buy assets, they move into these ecosystems,
they're often walled gardens, right?
You don't actually own your own assets.
You own it in that sandbox, right?
But the moment you want to leave, you either have to sell it,
if there's a market for it, which is very challenging,
or, you know, you're just stuck with an asset that, you know,
may be of value in the game, and you're at the game company's discretion
of when they decide to take it down, right?
But the beauty of on-chain gaming, and the eventual state of on-chain gaming,
is that you never can get rubbed, right?
Because these businesses and gaming companies that run on-chain
could last for, I hate to say hundreds of years, but they could, right?
Technologically speaking, they could, because the assets sit and are in permanent record,
and therefore, you know, as long as the chain continues to function,
you know, you have these assets, and you have these gaming layers
that can actually, you know, effectively execute, right?
So I think it's pretty powerful.
But, like, when you guys thought about going on-chain, right, there's,
you know, obviously on layer one, on Ethereum,
it's cost prohibitive in many cases to do that.
So actually doing this on a layer two makes a ton of sense.
But what were the decision criterias that went into wanting to build,
you know, a fully on-chain game?
So I guess let me speak a little bit on kind of my philosophy
on off-chain versus on-chain gaming,
and then a little bit kind of on the broader approach PV is taking with Battle Plan
and kind of how it integrates with Reboot and so forth.
And so kind of largely the way I see it, our biggest priority is to make, like,
Like, we're not looking to compete against kind of a lot of the stuff you see in Web 3.
We're looking to compete with, you know, a lot of the stuff you see on Steam.
So it's kind of a different bar to set.
And, you know, this means that you can't just go and build games like Rocks, Paper, Scissors,
that, yeah, you can fit in an ETH mainnet smart contract
and even have not the craziest gas fees,
but there's kind of a limitation on the fun there.
So with the kind of priority being making fun, making good games,
the second kind of component is, okay, how much of this lives on-chain?
And what do we want to put on-chain and why do we want to put it on-chain?
So a game like Battle Plan might have a very different set of reasons
for being on-chain than, say, like, a decentralized social network
that's more interested in something like censorship resistance or anything else,
whereas in our case, in the case of Reboot,
we kind of were able to extract a very different type of benefit
from putting a lot of the game state on-chain.
And so some examples I can kind of point to you are, for example,
throughout, you know, just one game, you're spitting out 20-plus random numbers potentially.
And so all of these are verifiably random.
Each of these hits the chain, and users can validate that everything is fair
and kind of matches up with exactly what they're expecting it to.
And so that's kind of one component that we use in a whole lot of spots,
and we think kind of randomness is able to make games a lot more fun
than if they were otherwise totally deterministic.
And so kind of beyond that, we have all sorts of little sub-modules,
for example, rating systems which are on-chain,
and this enables other communities to come in and build, for example,
a community leaderboard totally permissionlessly
just using all of that on-chain data.
And of course, kind of the most fun part of the on-chain system
is that the game settlement takes place on-chain.
So as you win games, you earn rewards kind of in real time.
Those hit the chain instantly.
You're able to go and, you know, use those rewards to purchase, you know,
NFTs and other skills and stuff like that,
or you can go and extract them and take them to, you know,
like decentralized exchanges or, you know, kind of various other DeFi protocols
that are available and kind of leverage kind of all the benefits
that you see of crypto both outside and now inside of gaming too.
Yeah, and I'll just weigh in real quick.
So, you know, my experience in games is just like platform after platform
kind of demolishing new kind of game, you know, verticals,
you know, like you see social and mobile and casual download
and, you know, almost always there's like some, you know,
some key player that's willing to, you know,
essentially race everyone to the bottom, kill their competitors
and then become the single source for game distribution
or game kind of access to games.
Like, you know, I don't, I don't even know the name examples that happens,
you know, in every industry where you can get a game essentially
or every kind of vertical that you can think of in gaming,
there's always like a winner.
And so the kind of thesis or the idea, you know,
kind of like the gem nugget that I think we'd like to prove out
or we're trying to prove out is that, you know,
what if we democratize the platformization of gaming
and democratize the monetization, the infrastructure,
the promotion, the marketing by building games
or building game infrastructure and game platform type features
in a completely distributed way.
And so that's, you know, kind of everything that you just mentioned,
like those are all examples of, you know, how that can manifest.
Obviously, it's a work in progress, like no one's ever done that,
no one's ever conceived of why you would do that or with the value of that.
Whereas, you know, with PixelVault and, you know,
any web-free company, you kind of see the value of opening up
and kind of, you know, like I said, democratizing the governance,
democratizing like validation, like infrastructure costs,
And so like all those components make a game ecosystem.
And so the idea behind REBOAT was really,
and games built on REBOAT is to really apply that to, you know,
a kind of full circle gaming ecosystem
and see if we can solve some of the problems that that presents
so that other game companies that are interested in that
and want to take advantage of that are tired of being kind of
essentially exploited by the platforms that they're committing,
they have to commit to to make games.
All those problems are solved and they can essentially just, you know,
make fun games and make money off them so they can make more fun games.
Man, goose eggs, that's a really great point, right?
And I often forget this and I'm sure many people forget this.
You guys are a gaming studio, but you're also an infrastructure player, right?
You're building a massive infrastructure,
decentralized infrastructure on game platform
for other partners to actually build their games as well.
And, you know, when I think about valuation and all that,
you know, I think people view you as being, you know,
battle planned to some extent being the game,
but what they forget is the gaming studio
and they forget the fact that you're building this infrastructure layer.
And maybe spend a little bit of time talking about that.
How are you guys onboarding and bringing other games
and game companies into the ecosystem, right?
Is that more challenging because it's on chain?
You know, obviously we know that that is the absolute right approach, right?
There's no question that, you know,
looking back six years from now, five years from now,
people are going to say, you know,
the guys and gals who did on chain gaming
are the ones who absolutely killed it in the space, right?
It wasn't the I'm halfway in Web 3 and I'm halfway in Web 2, right?
Using all the distribution mechanisms that come from Web 2, blah, blah, blah, right?
But it was the people who committed and actually, you know,
scaled the tech and built the scaffolding.
But as you guys look at that, how is the marketing engine working
And is that, you know, is that a bit of a challenge
because there's like the technology inhibitors that kind of come into play?
What is the perspective there? And what's the bigger vision?
Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit.
I mean, just in terms of the vision and then, you know,
in terms of like the fundamentals and tech, like Chupa's like, you know,
But Sean kind of already mentioned sort of how we're approaching it.
You were quite literally discussing with the fixable investors
Yeah, it is a perfect question.
Like, so there, yeah, I mean, of course, there's kind of this gap
And even in Web 3, you know, the games, a lot of the games that,
you know, companies that are making Web 3, you know,
they don't really, they're not really on chain other than Wolf Game,
which, as you know, like we acquired.
And part of kind of the mission with reboot and with pixel vault is,
you know, we have to launch a game. We got to take those lumps.
We got to run into the problems so that we can come up with solutions
to streamline that process for new devs.
And with battle plan, I would say, you know, we're basically,
I mean, we're still like in the process of solving problems that we
But, you know, we are much older, much wiser about running a game
infrastructure now than we ever have been.
And I expect we are going to learn a lot more as we go forward.
And then we're working with our partners.
So Chimpers being one, obviously the Wolf Game team.
Those are going to be kind of our incubator games and offerings that
will kind of get the first taste of the API, you know,
the reboot API layer, which will include a mixture of on-chain
and off-chain components and, you know,
some tooling that allows quick deployment of, you know,
games of a certain scope.
We'll probably start with smaller, you know,
simpler games or games that sit the battle plan format in terms of,
so for Web3 games, you know, we haven't actually had problems meeting
communities or finding communities that are interested in that.
And so, you know, obviously our motivation,
we only have so much bandwidth. We want to do it right.
We want to lead, you know,
kind of take our best step forward with the first partners.
And then in my background, you know,
I know a lot of game devs and I've kind of been shopping this concept
around and the premise and sort of the numbers that, you know,
you know, the numbers that we're showing in battle plan,
like those are real numbers.
They stand up in the industry almost in any gaming vertical,
like, you know, we made a good game.
And because we made a good game and because it's built in this way,
we're able to demonstrate some interesting forms of monetization in
for interesting forms of pretend like player retention in interesting
forms of like social dynamics that comes by being on chain that from
a Web2 perspective represents like, well,
that's a completely different way to monetize and make use of a gaming
property that I've already developed for another platform.
Because as you know, like, you know,
iPhone, Steam, a lot of traditional Web2 gaming platforms won't touch Web3.
And as a result, games that are built for those platforms by bridging that
gap or, you know, providing a mode that bridges that gap actually opens up
additional forms of revenue that they wouldn't otherwise have access to
through the traditional channels while still maintaining their, you know,
revenue streams to the traditional channels.
So, like I said, I have some partners that we're going to be announcing,
you know, hopefully this year that are from the traditional Web2 space that
are going to be testing integrations with the reboot.
And then, you know, kind of once we have our initial cadre of launch partner
games or kind of like API partner games,
we'll be making the APIs public and, you know,
setting up funds for, you know,
supporting like sponsoring development and all that good stuff.
Well, and Brad, one thing that you had said that I think was kind of worth
highlighting there along the spectrum of kind of like the Web 2.5 to like
truly Web3 native, like, whether it's the asset ownership layer all the way to,
you know, game state, game logic, you know,
a lot of the game being on chain is I do think there are room for both to win.
I don't think this is, you know, a winner takes all sort of sort of thing.
I do think it is both top down and bottom up.
But what I would say there and worth highlighting is some of the truly Web3
native gaming experiences like battle plan, like those provided on reboot,
I think are absolutely like disproportionately sized opportunities
because they are only enabled by being provided on blockchain rails.
This is an experience that you simply cannot get in Web2 gaming.
And I think that's like a core differentiator is like,
here is a style of game that may be akin to or like take, you know,
some tried and true pieces of some other very successful games.
But the full economic loop and things of that nature simply can't happen.
In Web2 and so like those truly Web3 native gaming experiences like when
that that hook catches is like a reason why someone would come to Web3 to play
here rather than, oh, hey, I'm just playing a Web2 game and I might, you know,
earn some points or something on the back end.
It's like, no, here is a very compelling use case and game example of games
as to why people that aren't necessarily in Web3 now would want to come play here.
Yeah, totally makes sense, VGF. I'm curious, right?
So on that on that point, what is the what is the breakthrough that you think needs
to happen in terms of just getting more adoption?
Because I think people realize that, you know, I think you said it well.
It's not an either or, but I think it's going to be both and you're going to have
different sort of doubts and different ends of the spectrum on this.
But like a lot of people are disenfranchised in traditional gaming, right?
I mean, spending 60 bucks for a game and the game absolutely sucking is like the old
model, right? Whereas you have these dynamic games now that you can try before
you sort of really buy an NFT or get into it much more broadly and pervasively,
which kind of democratizes, you know, gameplay in a way, right?
And asset ownership, right?
You have something that actually is a value beyond just you, right?
That could transfer ownership, et cetera, et cetera.
Is there something that you guys see as you like survey both the Web2 side of this
I know you have a ton of experience from your prior gigs, right?
And you've got that entire network that you alluded to.
Is there like a moment, a watershed moment that you think is coming in Web3
gaming that's going to create this massive spillover effect?
Is it like a game? Is it a platform?
You know, what exactly do you think is going to trigger, you know,
what I would call the cascade, right, or the floodgates opening?
Yeah, I mean, for me, I think it is, I mean, it's a mixture of, well,
I think the main thing is it's going to come down to tooling, right?
So in what I've observed over my career, it used to be really hard to just make games.
Like you had to, you know, there was no tools. There was no unity.
There was no unreal engine.
You just had to sit in your basement and like, I don't know, figure shit out.
There was no books. There was nothing. You just had to like pound it out.
And so, you know, the initial, you know, kind of in the infancy of games,
it was just these groups of really smart guys, you know, crazy, crazy guys
that went and figured out hard problems because, you know,
they had these beautiful ideas about, you know, the kind of worlds they wanted to create.
These days, right, the kind of like the bar that you have to cross over to make games
is much, much lower, right? There's so many resources out there, so many engines,
And so what we're seeing in the gaming market is just this huge oversupply of developers,
you know, in oversupply of games. There's so many shitty games out there,
but, you know, kind of, but there's also a lot of good games.
And that's kind of, that goes hand in hand, right?
Because it's an evolutionary market where, because everyone has access to many games,
then there's too many games out, but then the best ones kind of rise to the top
or the ones that, you know, get the largest marketing budget,
and then that's where the platform play comes in, where it's like, okay, now I can filter the games
based on the ones that I stand to profit the most from.
The same is not true in blockchain yet, right? The same, like, I mean, just two years ago,
we were still, you know, essentially like, you know, crazy guys in the basement mode,
and we're not, honestly, not that much further from there.
Like, we're, you know, we're kind of made, we've made great strides in terms of tech
and, you know, infrastructure for blockchain and finding kind of that, you know,
and I think, you know, when it comes to gaming, finding that through path of like,
well, what makes blockchain gaming interesting or unique or, you know,
differentiating from traditional gaming.
I think we're just starting to now see kind of hints of what that looks like.
You know, obviously, you know, we believe a lot in the battle plan,
but there's other games out there that are kind of showing glimmers of like, hey, you know,
that's a game, that's a new kind of fun.
And so I think in the next phase, the real floodgates,
which is what you're talking about, comes when that tooling comes into place
where, you know, we as, you know, kind of the incumbents find a way to lower that bar,
make some of these primitives more accessible so that it really opens up the market
to just good ideas, right?
You know, people that have good ideas and, you know, they're smart enough,
you know, they have access to enough tooling in the games and, you know,
finances and stuff can really manifest their idea pretty quickly as a blockchain game.
And then I think that's when things start to open up.
And I think, you know, part of that is also the existing marketplace for games because it's so flooded.
There's many games that do not get market share, even if they're good or they get market share,
but they can't monetize, right?
The system of fees and platforms makes it prohibitive for someone to, you know,
make money building a game as an indie, whereas, you know,
when the tooling bar, you know, gets low enough and people that have existing games that are good
that are not necessarily performing on another marketplace
can look over at blockchain gaming and be like, hey, you know, I'll try that out.
It's not that hard of an integration.
Let's see if this new vertical, you know, creates some interesting play for a game that I already know is fun.
I think that's where there's almost going to be a cliff in terms of like this,
like you say, this floodgate with like existing games converting
and then new players coming to the space innovating and creating new kinds of concepts.
It's super interesting, right?
So this is perhaps for you and for Gfunk as well.
But, you know, if you were to put reboot in a class of, you know, infrastructure, studio combination of all of those,
would you be like an on-chain version of immutable in a way?
I mean, would that be the analog or perhaps Ronin?
Is that where you eventually want to get?
I mean, the reason I'm asking is, if I think about immutable, there is a distribution layer, obviously.
There's a scaling layer which they partner with Polygon on and they have, you know, the infrastructure tech as well.
How does, how does reboots see themselves, right?
I mean, like, is it a little bit of all of those components that apply to on-chain or, you know,
are you thinking about any particular rail or are you building on all three of those rails kind of independently, right?
Obviously, you're on Arbitrum and you're leveraging a lot of the scale that Arbitrum provides,
but how are you thinking about that, like from a vision perspective?
Well, I'll answer it unless Jon wants to jump in.
Aaron, you can lead, then Chuba throw in some stuff and then I'll maybe drop a little bit of alpha at the end.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, so Sean's given a lot of flexibility in terms of giving us the ability to experiment.
And so, you know, in terms of like how we position PixelVault, how we position reboot, you know,
I think vision wise, like, you know, all whatever, all capital being, you know, available and all time the internet like that,
you know, kind of it's easy to roll things out.
You know, the vision is, you know, reboot becomes its own independent thing, right?
The idea is it's meant to be on-chain. It's meant to be public.
It's meant to be for the people, by the people and, you know, essentially its own entity.
And, you know, that's the direction, you know, all the validation, all the economics, everything on-chain or completely operational as a collective rather than a single entity.
And with kind of the studio side with PixelVault, you know, the idea, at least that I carry around, is that we're really the kind of like the incubator or the like the research department
for this concept of on-chain, like, what the fuck does that mean, an on-chain game? Why is it different? Why is it fun?
What things can we explore that in a traditional gaming environment would be too scary or too hard to go after?
Those are the kinds of titles that PixelVault as a game studio or, you know, kind of incubator of game studios or funder or publisher of games,
the opportunities that I would be excited for is, you know, let's push the bar. Let's show the market what is possible, you know, kind of with this new vision and create opportunities by taking risks that are, you know, formidable to, you know, other companies or other individuals to pave the way for what on-chain gaming can look like.
And so, like, it's it's almost like I come from a research background. And so it's like it's almost like a research department.
But as part of that research that we have to do, we have to build this kind of infrastructure layer first in order to, you know, kind of, you know, ground our research and kind of push that bar forward and, you know, create industry that hasn't existed before.
Love that. Love that tubes. Yeah. So, like, like Aaron had said, a lot of this is skunk works, really proving out the model, figuring out kind of what works like we have kind of alluded to a lot of the on-chain components.
They're there to synergize with the game and make it more fun. So kind of to that end, we're proving out the sustainable rewards thesis kind of very different than what you saw with kind of a lot of these play to earn games over the last couple of years and various other inflationary models.
Like, it's just so it misses the mark so much from what you actually can get when you just take a look at some of these existing Web 2 game economies.
Like, if you look at World of Warcraft or RuneScape or EVE Online or any of these other MMOs, you you really see kind of the potential for for sustainable on-chain economies.
So I'm really excited that we're kind of proving that out and then, you know, working really aggressively on on scaling scaling the system to be able to support kind of, you know, more and more players.
We saw 200 concurrent players yesterday, which, you know, definitely something to get excited about, but it's also a very, very, very small fraction of what we expect to be supporting.
So I'm very kind of excited to continue going in this direction and really, you know, making it so that we can onboard Web 2 players to another game.
And from their perspective, you know, it should feel just like playing another game, but with all these extra benefits.
And to add on that, I mean, obviously, this is all quite difficult.
The community has been stoked to see the progress, but with each move we make, there's there's a counteraction often by the player base, right?
As soon as you as soon as you introduce a real financial incentive to the model, there are always going to be parties working just as hard to find the holes in that model.
And so it's fun. It's frustrating. It's exciting. And it's exactly where we want to be.
And the pixel vault community has very much shown an interest in that since the very origins of the company itself with the burning, the staking, the constant new mechanics that we were at the forefront of the very first mint pass and the dynamics that that's had on the original meta hero collection.
So pixel vault has been, you know, trying to lead the way with each step in each step has certainly not always been correct.
And we've paid the price for some of those choices, but without people willing to take risks and prove out these new models, there is no progress.
And that's also part of why we acquired Wolfgame, right? They were really at the forefront of taking chances with these risk based protocols, right? Risky games.
And that is sort of what's at the heart of the idea of the reboot protocol and the get paid arcade.
So while we started out, I'd say mostly focused on trying to pull people strictly to within the boundaries of this existing protocol that we've developed, our aspirations have continued to grow and perhaps will expand beyond what we've built with the strict dynamics of the protocol.
And I think you may see some acceleration in our capability to incorporate the community into more core functions of the protocol itself sometime soon.
So, you know, Cuba has obviously led with his technical expertise, Aaron, on the gaming side, and I'm always looking at things from the Web3 NFT participant side, right?
You know, how do we prove out the business model that are these on chain assets? You know, how do we allow for value accrual in a way that is keeping it from being a security, but also allowing for real participation and the potential to benefit by virtue of the capital, time, effort, energy, marketing, etc.
That you put into these ecosystems. And so I think you're going to see reboot at the very forefront of what it means to be an active participant and a token holder in economies.
And that's been a big focus of ours over the last few weeks is accelerating that process.
Yeah, I wish there was more time in the day, man. Yeah, we need like, we need like a week for every day, but we'll get there.
I love it, right? Like, you know, I think you said it best. You said risky games. And, you know, when I kind of go back to your evolution, you know, a lot of the way that DeFi emerged and you had this crossover with NFTs.
It harkens to a time that people are familiar with. And I think the Wolfgame acquisition was a masterstroke from that perspective, right? Now, the alpha, I'd love to hear what the alpha is. You haven't shared the alpha yet. Maybe you did.
He was tiptoeing around it, right? Like, he didn't quite come out all the way with the alpha, but I want to hear the alpha.
The alpha was in there. So it has something to do with the expansion of what reboot means and also the more rapid integration of, you know, participants and token holders into the very core services of our offering.
I love it. Okay. I can pull a lot of threads.
I'll leave it vague, but yeah, try and read between the lines as much as you can. I don't want to lead with too much until it's all locked up. Yeah.
It's all good. It's all good. So I got a question for you on Wolfgame, right? Like, so Wolfgame now sits on layer one. So my assumption is that Wolfgame will evolve to be on reboot and therefore in Arbitrum, you know, kind of running on your rails here shortly.
Is that a good expectation or how do you see that converging with the platform itself?
Is Aaron still here? Yeah. Aaron, maybe do you want to lead and then I'll tie up any loose ends on the question?
Yeah. Yeah. So where Wolfgame, even though it's actually not that old of a game, it's got a rich history and rich culture around it.
And so, you know, I've been getting wrapped around it. I see a lot of folks at PixelVault trying to understand the dynamics of it. Their economies, you know, very complex and very interesting.
And there's like, you know, kingpins, you know, there's it's pretty nutty, but exciting. And so, you know, looking forward to like, what does Wolfgame on reboot look like? And, you know, how do we preserve kind of that, you know, amazing culture and like,
give it a place to thrive. But at the same time, like, carrying it forward and making it more appealing to other players and, you know, kind of a larger user base.
You know, there's kind of like a two-stroke plan that we're in the process of. Like, you know, one is we're in design in kind of pre-production of, you know, what we're calling Wolfgame 2, which is sort of what you're alluding to is like a full,
you know, Wolfgame on reboot, you know, what does that look like? How do we make it an appealing game for Web 2 audiences, for Web 3 audiences, for everyone?
And then, you know, that preserves a lot of the token dynamics and a lot of the kind of like vested interest of the existing community. Like, there's a lot of wrongs to solve there, let me just tell you.
And then the other stroke is just, you know, the game itself, you know, it's thriving. We've just been making regular updates to it to kind of bring it up to, you know, let's just say upholding some of the promises that works and the expectations that the community had around the initial launch.
And I think we're making really good progress. Like, we've had, you know, double, you know, we've basically doubled the user activity in just a few months. We've doubled, you know, we've increased the value of all kinds of exciting stuff is happening just on Wolfgame 1.
And then in the near term, kind of as part of that, you know, seasonal concepts that we're using for Wolfgame 1 to make updates, we'll introduce a bridge over some kind of bridge, you know, it's like a gameplay, you know, gamified bridge, if you can imagine,
into assets and a concept of Wolfgame 2 that will start to emerge from there. And so it's, again, it's like a little vague, but we want to be very thoughtful and conscious of how we transition that game because we only want to make it more of what that audience wants and actually bring that to a larger audience,
not make it less or detract from kind of expectations or, you know, kind of what that what that what makes that game for that audience.
Hey, Aaron on that, right? Like, if I look at some of what's happening with you go right now. I mean, they have this very ambitious goal of going out and building an MMORPG and now they're kind of backing off and they're saying, hey, we're going to do another roblox Minecraft style, you know, whatever gaming universe in
in web three, is the future mini games and like battle plan more like battle plan? Or is it going to be, especially as you look at web three, right and on chain? Or is it going to be something like Wolfgame, which is strategic, has multiple facets and components to it? Or is it going to be something really large, really complex?
And the reason I asked this question is I think about like the average DJ in our space, right? They've got the attention span, that's like one 10th of a goldfish. And, you know, when you try to think about where people will go as things start to get more complex, if it's not like highly gamified, if it's not number go up, if it's not, you know, somehow linking them to some kind of a point system, etc.
You know, it probably is going to be very challenging, right? Because they're very unlike traditional gamers from that perspective. And that's kind of why I asked the floodgates aspect, because I think it changes the dynamics of who comes in. But where do you, as you survey, and you've been in the space for a bit now, but do you think it's a bunch of mini games that really grab attention that have a hook that then lead to a loop that, you know, gets more complex in time? Where do you see that evolving?
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, like, so I watched the evolution on the dev side of casual games, into like social games and into mobile games. And then like, you know, in mobile, you know, you can play Fortnite, right?
But that progression was, you know, everything in casual. So casual games, you know, in my mind, it was, you know, pre steam, first types of games that proved out the model of digital distribution of games, like, so they're types of games that came out for download before, you know, when everyone was buying games and Best Buy and Walmart and stuff like that.
And that, you know, that essentially followed the progression that you're describing is like, you know, hey, this is a scary new market.
We're gonna go kind of quick, quick hitters, test the market, use kind of evolutionary principles to sort of find the games that kind of it's all of the studios that I worked with, or, you know, the studio that I ran, it was like portfolio strategies, just you, you try a bunch of crazy stuff.
And you manage a group of titles. And you sort of, you know, you bankroll, you know, future future development and kind of future types of games, based on the performance of that portfolio of games, and because they're lower lift games, it's easy to make a bunch of them.
And so I think, you know, for for us, that is the strategy that I'm recommending that that's exactly how, you know, mobile games first started out like when you when you play the first round of games on the iPhone, it was always like, you know, punch the monkey or the fruit ninja or stuff like that games that are actually really make, but they were testing the waters.
And the companies that did that, and then evolve their offering, a lot of them are the ones that came to dominate that industry because they learned, you know, sort of what's new about that, that space quickly.
They developed a, you know, kind of portfolio of games and a portfolio of, you know, wins and losses to sort of finance, you know, larger and larger projects.
And then, you know, once the groundwork had been done, you know, the kind of bigger players came in or the people that started, you know, became the bigger players like, you know, I'm looking at like Supercell and King and companies like that.
So, you know, I think, you know, your perspective on it makes sense. That's a lot of how I think about it.
You know, I think there's because of the financial aspect.
And, like, there's actually like a lot of a lot of web 3.3 are gamers. It's turned out like people have come out of the woodwork just at pixel volt as being like pro gamers or.
And so that idea gaming and finance and like being a D gen like I don't think there's actually that much of a big difference like your average game player is an optimizer like that's how, you know, I mean, obviously like I think of gamers as people.
But, you know, in when you model someone that's trying to play your game you model them as someone that's trying to get the most for the little the least amount of time, which is essentially what a D 10 is.
And so that mode of thinking and that mode of game design is familiar and I you know it applies to a lot of games, but there's just like the scope of game and the, you know, speed to market, I think will determine.
At least in the short term, sort of the kinds of games that get out there sooner, but then as a as, you know, kind of the space of all, you know, larger games will come into this picture.
I think the really cool thing about reboot right from being a decentralized protocol is that, you know, we as pixel vault get to go and leverage it to kind of build the really fun kind of hitter like heavy hitter quick games that we're working on now.
But there's there's really no limitation for somebody to come in and use all these primitives inside of like you had kind of suggested like an MMO or something like that.
And a lot of these these concepts can go and kind of be just added in as modules into into any game that wants to leverage them and the more of these modules they use kind of the more they'll synergize together and help power this underlying token economy.
So you can kind of think about games like like again, like back to like MMOs like like RuneScape in the arena duels or Yvonne line and like the large scale battles with like hundreds of thousands of dollars in ships crashing into each other between thousands of players.
Like all of these all of these kind of things can can very much so benefit from from things like on chain settlement and rating systems and kind of a whole bunch of the other modules that you kind of already see in battle plan today as well as a lot of the ones that are, you know, kind of.
You can find the alpha in the reboot white paper that maybe not not quite live just yet. So I think that's kind of how I think about a lot of it is that, you know, here here the primitives here. Here's what you need to go and start building fun sustainable token economies around like real skill based games that are fun to play.
And then it's it's up to the developers on how how large scale they want to go with it.
I love that. I love that tubes and Aaron.
Hey, Alex five of any questions from your side. I know I've monopolized a lot of the questions today.
I've enjoyed being a listener for once like this is great. Great to have all of you up here. I think one of the things that was going through my head and I don't think you really talk too much about it and hopefully it's not too much of a distraction from the conversation but you're talking about the on chain gaming and one of the where my head immediately goes is.
Not only how is some of the infrastructure reusable but like could you see a vision where people use some of the assets or some of the parts of the game that you have an extend on top of it like, you know, you think about Roblox or Minecraft or people building stuff on top of that game.
Like, I think some of the on chain, the most interesting and compelling on chain gaming stuff is when you can take assets that you built for your game and someone can build a game on top of it or they can build a business on top of it.
That's where it gets really compelling. And so I'm curious if you've thought about that at all. I'm sure you like you're inherently designing it that way because it's on chain.
But is that something that you see, you know, and I don't know directly who this is at, but do any of you guys see that direction you're going or hoping for or like believing in?
Yeah, I mean, for me, like the the vision of user generated content.
Well, I think of it maybe a little differently than like everything's Roblox.
Like, I don't love that model for a lot of reasons. But, you know, like, what's Twitter, right? It's user generated content. Like, what's Facebook? It's user generated. That's all. It's just like a platform where people, you know, entertain each other.
And games can be that in many different ways, like whether it's like levels, whether it's kind of like memes, whether it's like you're saying like, you know, hey, you can own this, you can own the whatever the license, the creative commons license of this character and the animations and you can use it in a game or you can cameo in another game.
Like some of the, you know, in terms of like the the robot and the Roblox model.
You know, like I said, I don't love that because I think, you know, it greatly limits the sort of range of how interesting of a game you can make or how like, you know, responsive and fun and like, you know, sort of like special built a game can be.
But, you know, the idea, you know, holds. And, you know, a lot of that is like most of the games that I love playing like Diablo or Quake, they're huge modding community, huge aspect of the game that opened up because they opened up the tools to other players.
And I think that is, you know, 100%, you know, the on-chain gaming is additive, like where you can like, you know, hey, I can, you know, take, take some tokens every time someone plays the level I generated or, you know, I earned some tokens anytime someone uses this skin that I created inside of, you know, Fortnite or whatever.
I think that kind of model is exciting. But, you know, and certainly like for our game, that hasn't been the focus yet, just because, you know, everyone's going, everyone's going, like, we're gonna make a metaverse.
You know, we're like, hey, you know, let's, let's see what's in this direction first. And then, you know, if the meta, if the metaverse pans out, you know, nothing about what's going on in there and user generated content.
We're not preventing any of it. And it will be additive to what we're building, but we're hoping to solve, you know, kind of other core problems that we think games and, you know, developers coming into gaming are going to run it first.
Well, in 0x5f, I think to the crux of your question is almost like philosophically when a lot of people talk about interoperability, what they're really referring to is composability.
And kind of touching on something Chuba had mentioned earlier with like these composable primitive layers, especially with relation to like asset ownership and data availability.
You know, some of these community created tools that are leveraging on chain data to be able to dive into different aspects of the game or the meta game or being able to leverage certain modules of reboot.
The skill based matchmaking system, the skill rating system, being able to take some of these modules and fit to the use case.
I think is a lot more aligned with what we'll see pan out rather than this sort of aspirational vision of like one object represented in many different places in the same way.
So I really like kind of that reshaping or reframing of how we leverage a lot of this on chain available data in different ways in different use cases.
To the net value add, rather than what's all this digital data on chain and trying to repurpose it in different ways.
Yeah, that makes tons of sense. It's like one of those things that I think sometimes we underrate or under consider is like the benefit of being on chain is that we all speak the same way.
And like to your point, sometimes it's not necessarily explicitly what you're designing to do or it may or may not be what you're explicitly designing to do to have other people write things to what you have or your assets can be used elsewhere.
Or you let content creators create their own assets on top of it.
But it's super cool and really one of the reasons to bring gaming on chain is the fact that it's composable that you can bring it anywhere that you could take any of the assets or any of the parts of the game or your identity in the game and plug it into another game or that game pulls those things into you.
And it's cool that now we live in a world which hasn't been true for almost two decades where like everyone can speak the same language.
And I think some of the fruits of that labor haven't been made clear yet until we see more people continue to build on top of that type of stuff.
But it's cool, in my opinion, that like you don't explicitly have to do that. It's just inherent to building on chain gaming.
Well, and something like talking a little philosophically and Bharat, you were highlighting, you know, what do I think that unlock is?
I think it's multifaceted. There's not kind of like one three shot avenue that's just like, oh, when we hit this, it's, you know, game on.
But it's like a lot of these different pieces, goose eggs touched on kind of like the infrastructure and the tech side of things, you know, building out the fiat and credit card on board, you know, on ramps, you know, custodial wallets, email account recovery, you know, some of these different components.
But also just from a narrative perspective, like there's still a lot of gamers that don't look so favorably upon, you know, Web3 and NFTs.
And personally, I think that a huge unlock will be that narrative shift around the perception of value accrual and like ability to retain and extract value that these players are putting into these gaming ecosystems.
Because like even looking historically, like we went from buying discs to, you know, add supported to free play to, you know, digital downloads.
Oh, we lost your ex-fiber.
But even now, like when you buy a game, you very rarely, if ever, get to like retain any of that monetization or money that you put into that ecosystem, let alone the amount of effort and kind of like sweat equity that you put in.
You know, when you when you go and tell 10 friends that like this is a great game, I'll climb over a mountain to go and play a great game with my friends.
But I don't necessarily see anything off the backside of that.
So I think Web3 being the lowest friction avenue to players being able to accrue, retain and extract the value that they're contributing to these game economies is an absolutely massive unlock.
Yeah, and I'll add just, I mean, thinking about it a little bit more, like the way that user generated content or contributions to a game ecosystem, like it takes it doesn't actually have to be games.
Like what we've seen is like in Wolf games, there's like 10 different tools for that augment the gameplay of Wolf game in one way or the other and accessing just on chain primitives to do so, like swappers and, you know, kind of, you know,
like other kinds of like ways of manipulating the economy or like viewing leaderboards that, you know, we never built for but because it's on chain is supported.
Or with battle plan, there's these examples of communities that are created around, you know, tips and tricks or like getting affiliate rewards, which is part of the reboot ecosystem, like people are incentivized to generate content through that.
And so the way that, you know, speaking to like kind of just composability, like the way that people can access this game ecosystem because it's on chain opens up and the ways that they can earn value and so actually get incentivized and paid to do so also open up.
Love it, guys. Man, what a what a fascinating conversation. I mean, seriously, very, very fun conversation.
Guys, what are the parting words that you have, right? G-Funk, VGF, tubes, goose eggs. What are the parting words for the audience here? Anything you want to leave with? What's next? Is there a game that's on the horizon that we don't know about?
Yeah, so I've extended into my next call. But let me leave you with some quick parting words. Yeah, I mean, we've already undertaken a seven figure contract working on our punks comic franchise.
We're, you know, well underway on continuing the development of, quote unquote, Wolf Game 1.0, starting the first integrations of Wolf Game 2.0, right? There's this, as you mentioned before, ability to play small games on Wolf Game via the peak, but then also the Valley Game is a more immersive game, but doesn't necessarily require it to work.
It's a lot of time each day. So trying to lean into these multifaceted aspects of gaming where you can be a part of a big game without contributing a ton of time or play these sort of quick hitter style games.
Yeah, I mean, the business development, which is really sort of what I do at Pixel Vault is certainly not slowing anytime soon.
So, you know, I'm just appreciative for everyone that is, has supported us over the years is supporting the early phases of reboot and battle plan, continuing to help us refine and improve the product and, you know, early signs are incredibly positive.
I think we have something awesome on our hands and hope to welcome a whole new cohort of crypto users like, you know, NBA Top Shot did back in 2020, 2021. We need that next product that's going to break through and make sense to the masses.
So hopefully we'll be a part of leading that next wave.
Awesome. That's all I got. I got a drop, but I appreciate you, Barat.
Yeah, thanks, Jifunk. Thanks for coming on, guys. Great, great discussion. Any other parting words, guys, from any of you before we wrap up here?
Yeah, I would just say stay tuned. I mean, you know, this move, this space moves like ridiculously fast. And, you know, Pixel Vault is here for it, you know, every every week, every day is basically, you know, we get a lot done.
And, you know, we, we, you know, kind of stick and move as we go. So, you know, I would just, you know, if we if you haven't heard enough alcohol already, like expect more, you know, you know, anytime.
Let's fucking go, guys. I love it. I love it. It was a great conversation, guys. Really insightful and hopefully, you know, the community felt the same way, but it was awesome.
We'll, we'll have you guys on again. Appreciate you, Barat. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Take care. Bye now.