GM what an interesting time
What an interesting place to be she's so much going on right now. Damn. I'm so glad it's not August of
My god, how much has changed?
It's crazy. I mean like there's there's so much going on
There's so much going on in real life now, you know, some of the topics to talk about today
But like it's just it's sweet. It's a good feeling
I I just I all those times the hardships of that's that the bear
You know the paying off now we we can we can be a little happier a little more upbeat now
It's great. No kidding. No kidding and boy you talk about disruption, right and
You know for for those of you just joining the space, you know
we try to we try to sort of bring up a topic that's very near and dear or relevant right to what's happening at the moment and
You know 0x had a sort of wonder stroke
right if you think about the timeline and you think about what's happening with pal world, right and
Disruption that pal world is driving and you think about all these massive
You know traditional gaming studios that are spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars right on
game development and just how quickly you can disrupt and
Technology being the catalyst for this disruption. It's incredible. But oh
X tell me tell me like give me your perspective right because
Why that has captured, you know the zeitgeist right? What do you feel?
They've done right that so many people have just absolutely failed right for years and years and building
But they've come out and with very little experience
But talk to us talk to us a little bit about what your perspective is
It's crazy. It is crazy that a week ago
No one knew what power world even was and now every group I'm in everywhere on Twitter
everywhere on tick-tock and Instagram, it's powered it's everywhere, right and
Is crazy given how hard it is to build games and
I think we'll kind of walk through and explore like how what does this mean for an FTS?
What's mean for crypto and defi and and game phi in general, but like it is pretty damn cool
Just a lot of the ways that we see disruption with crypto
Being able to turn the tables on defi and finance in general or you know
Where the innovators are building things and moving quick and breaking stuff
We just saw the same thing with games in games is like gaming is the worst
Market to put your money into it's one of the hardest
places to get a return of value
And I don't have the stats in front of me
But they I think you know power world invested a few million bucks eight million dollars seven million dollars or something into their game
And have just like a hundred percent turned into a sensation in
in a few days in really like the past five days
There's a bunch of stuff. I want to talk through with this but like what this is exciting for me is like
Disruption in gaming is what we need to go unlock game phi for
For a decentralized approach to gaming like we need this ability to create
And then turn them into something that is more meaningful
People that want decentralization with their items or people who want to be able to earn things as they go
And like this is an exciting first step. I think that we're witnessing in that i'm curious like what your thoughts have you
What did when did you first learn about it? How did you hear about it? I tell you it was my timeline was flooded, right?
You know screenshots with gameplay loops
And with you know, just going viral, right? I mean just absolutely taking off
And uh, you know, it's so interesting to dive into the details of
These folks that are behind it, right?
Um, just just a few data points to add on to what you just said
Is that none of the devs knew how to code right? I mean think about that think about that folks in the audience, right?
None of the people who created pal world knew how to code right? So they learned on the fly
Um, I guess they bootstrapped it with about 10k
with one platform and realized that that platform
Was too buggy for them to sort of work with so they started with unity and I think they transitioned
Over to unreal, but I think the big element that they played on is this whole idea of monster nostalgia, right?
So if you think about just pokemon and the pokemon franchise at large, I think people just
Have had that experience have grown up with it and they love this whole monster hunting concept. So they took something that was very
Already viral in terms of the culture and then they made something that was very interesting, right?
um and nuanced around it, but like
Some of the process that they went through is just it just blows my mind right and now you you add
and you level the playing field of
You know the hundreds of people that you need in a traditional, you know massive gaming studio
And the amount of time and effort and energy that they need to put in and now all of a sudden you could have
You know two humans ten agents right and think of agents as being these
You know AI software creators, if you will your your co-creators
And all you need is a very innovative loop to go disrupt, right? And that's that's like powerful, right? That's like silicon valley
Starting again, right but in every industry being disrupted, which is kind of crazy
But yeah, man, I mean it's like it's nuts to me to think about what these guys accomplished
I mean and that's why I think it's so exciting
It's like the efficiencies that you potentially unlock through being able to build a game prototype
Learn if you have product market fit with your game because they launched something before and they had another game
And then they kind of pivoted and started this thing and you're like
Like it just if you go back to like the 90s the cost of building software was crazy
It costs so much money to build and implement software and over time we turned into sass businesses in the 2000s and the 2010s
It turned into oh you could just pay monthly for this thing instead of having these consultants come and implement stuff
And what it was is it was just a massive efficiency that happened in the market
And what we're seeing potentially, I mean, maybe maybe this is just a fluke or maybe this is an early signal
but if people can actually go
build meaningful games that people want to play that excite people and capture an audience
You know beyond the days of people kind of just doing indie game dev studio type stuff
We might be able to unlock more of the the like what people want to play and what people are interested in playing and
Allow people to have better experiences with games as opposed to
It's kind of a walled garden in the gaming industry right now
You've got big players who have to spend lots of money to build the games that we play
And that's pretty much what consumes most of the the space
Um, and so like I again, I just think it's cool that
Potentially with uh, you know seven or eight million dollar budget you could go build something
That is polished that has all the tools that they needed with unreal to go
Build something that looks really good and you know, it's it's a little buggy, but it's not too bad
Anyways, like I I just feel like that's the key to us continuing to iterate on gaming but
Eventually iterate and become better at this whole gamefi space and the concept of kind of pulling some of the
Web 3 or decentralization concepts into games because you need that rapid iteration man
Absolutely, right and you think about like you think one of the other sort of big players here, right?
Which should not be forgotten. So you've got you've got the the game devs who are building the games
Of course, they they require infrastructure to be able to scale right?
I mean one of the big challenges pal world is having right now is infrastructure scale, right? Even though they're leveraging cloud servers
That are supposedly infinitely scalable
Right. Um, they still have issues in terms of how perhaps the app is created and perhaps how they can go wide
In terms of just scaling across multiple clusters and nodes
um across the world right because the user base for games is the entire world and um
But you can't forget the distribution channels, right?
So you think about like steam and steam is what made you know
This game actually go viral in a way right because it's the distribution that comes from you know
this product being in the market
Generating buzz and then you know finding end users that actually sort of vibed with the gameplay, etc in the loops, right?
But um, so I think when you start to think about like, you know, kind of linking this back to crypto and what's happening
I think it's becomes a very interesting discussion
You know how platforms are developing, right? So
Um, obviously a lot of layer twos and gaming specific, uh chains that are you know building and innovating?
simplify the process of onboarding, you know, these traditional gaming studios because
Again to your point on walled gardens, right the big issue with many of these
Um, you know gaming companies and traditional sort of games is that these assets live in that game
the game can be pulled by
Or like let's say pokemon comes out tomorrow and and says hey you guys are using characters from my universe
I'm pulling this right i'm i'm gonna have a you know
An ip sort of legal attack on y'all and and do a seasoned assist and this is this game is gone, right?
So this is where the beauty of web3 now starts to come into play, right? Like if we get to a point with on-chain gaming, right?
Where it doesn't matter which centralized entity decides that hey, we're no longer building this game
It doesn't matter because the game lives on in perpetuity, right?
So I think that's where the dynamics start to get very interesting and then of course
User generated content and ownership of assets become a big deal, right? So, you know when you have
a skin or a sword or a character and you develop that character and
You know as long as that game lives on chain
That's never going to get rubbed, right? So I think that beautiful intersection of this disruption, you know
Whatever and then the fact that there is this asset element and scale that you can build through these layer twos
Potentially or even other evm or svm chains, right?
I mean look I don't want to be a ethereum maxi here because there's a whole world of development
That's happening across all ecosystems right now
And I think it's just good for crypto in general
For gaming to be front and center and actually it's kind of interesting to me because there are a couple of my good buddies
In the audience here. So at some point we should bring them up
And for those of you who don't know vgf is one of the principles behind reboot, right?
And um, I think I saw voxel queen earlier and she's one of my indie buddies who's actually bootstrapping her own
capabilities and you know, like uh collections, you know, um kind of as an individual, you know kind of building the space
So there's some very interesting perspectives. I'm sure that we'll have here as we get into the discussion
But what's what's your perspective right this integration?
Especially with this creative disruption that's happening and now these two forces are coming together with you know, ai
Development disruption and now blockchain
How do you how do you feel things are going to evolve right? What's your perspective?
I feel like again, I keep drawing parallels to like the 90s and the 2000s like we're headed in the right track to have
significant innovation in a lot of places
It just feels like if we can continue to improve our development efficiencies our ability to make new
Models and characters or even just like i'm going through this right now, you know being able to
leverage a prompt to say like i'm stuck on thinking about something help me get through this like
It's just incredibly efficient and the more efficiency we get the more innovation that happens
And so as I think about some of these things coming together
And I think about all the crypto builders in the space who
To me are typically on the bleeding edge and typically move very fast and tend to think more about the tech than the product
Like I think there's a lot of really exciting stuff that can happen and and what i'd like to see is, you know
Continuing. I like what what i'm dying to see
Actual example of a game that people like to play that has figured out how to integrate
some sort of creator economy
Some assets being on chain whatever it might be something that doesn't start with web3 though
I want to see something like pow world
Go we have success now as a game
How can we now take all the innovation that's happening take some of the efficiencies and leverage now
The ability to go put some of these assets on the chain
Make a creator economy so that people can go build their own pals and sell them
Or be able to build and sell their own skins like I want to see that and and I think that's like the missing thing to me
Because right now it feels like we're kind of backing our way into that
I think that's hard. I think it's hard to back your way into
Building a game after you raised a bunch of money
It's kind of like, you know making a kickstarter and saying hey i'm gonna go build this amazing video game
Which was super popular in 2012 and 2013 people doing that like crazy and um
And then going and building it and then getting traction. So
As much as i'm like optimistic about all the innovation that's happening and how we're kind of, you know converging
Uh a few really innovative technologies. I still am struggling to see the like application executed properly
But again, maybe this is the first signal that we're starting to get closer to that. I don't know
Yeah, man, i'm totally with you, right?
I think what we have found is a lot of the folks who started building in 2021
Are launching actual playable games right now, right? Which is very bullish in my mind
Because if a lot of those folks had just rubbed and left we would have you know, the space would be decimated, right?
They rebuilt themselves. They focused on kind of execution
And we're starting to see many of those games
Launched right this year and some were in the tail end of last year as well
And I think that's super bullish, right? That means that you know
You know builders who have a strategy and who are executing even through the bear, right?
So that leaves me very bullish, but I think your point is spot on there are still people who are raising a ton of capital
Fortunately, the valuations aren't out of whack, right?
It's not like peak bull valuations where people were raising
You know hundreds of millions of dollars right to go create a game
They're looking at like 20 30 million dollars, which is by the way
Still a lot when you compare it to something like palware, right?
But that means there's more pressure on these builders, which is great
That means they're going to have to think 10 ways, right?
On how am I going to spend?
This war chest to be more effective. How am I going to create the right gaming loops, right?
So how is it going to be easy for people to get started?
How am I going to develop fun hooks to keep them coming back for more?
And how do I keep evolving the game so that you know?
There's a new set of players always coming in and we retain and grow the old players as well, right?
So I think that aspect of it is going to be where the unlock happens, right?
So while I am a little bit bearish on the massive upfront raises
I think because of the royalty situation that we've been in
Everything kind of flipped a little bit and I think we're going to get back to a more grounded sort of perspective
And I think pal world is the perfect grounding entity because nobody can say hey, you know
I need xxx million dollars to go build a game because people are going to laugh at you and say no
Here's 50 bucks to go build something, right? I'm kidding. Of course
But uh, you know, but you you're going to have to be a lot more focused on how you create
And I think that focus is going to create great output, right? Um, at least that's the way I see it
Yeah, i'm curious like do you feel like you've seen an example of like there's so many people trying to build games right now in
Like and you can get excited. It's easy to get excited and say oh that project sounds interesting because
You know, are they creating?
Um, what's a good example a shooter game or something or these people are creating an xyz game like uh,
like I guess like what was the um
There was one called pirate nation. Yeah, she's kind of like farmed though
And like there's a lot of interesting stuff out there. But like have you
Is there a game that you're like damn like I want to play that game and it's web3 based, you know
Like I haven't run into that quite yet. Personally
I think there are a lot of early wave games that I think I would put into that category, right?
Nothing is far enough along where you can say hey, you know, this is a full massive
MMORPG, right that is complete
Code complete and ready for people to sort of adopt it
But I think there are a lot of examples, right and I think uh, you know if you look at what?
You know speaking of reboot and by the way some of the names that I talk about here are companies that i'm
Invested in or an advisor
So, you know keep my bias kind of you know front and center when you when you hear me talk, right?
But and the reason why I know about these is because i'm a little bit more invested in them
and I spent time with the teams, etc, right, but
Reboot's a good example. They had battle plan come out last year and they've had pretty good success in terms of just getting
You know a bunch of players
Um, you know kind of kicking the tires on it, right? So that's one they have a much more ambitious platform plan, right?
Look at tree verse and what lupify has been doing
For the last couple of years, you know, just like gfunk has been doing with the pixel vault and now reboot
But look at tree verse as another analog those guys have been building tree verse, right this massive MMORPG
They're also creating a more viral loop with you know, shorter
You know kind of play loops like with capsule heroes, right?
So that's going to be one of those quick games where you can very you know quickly get in play
You know have an experience and the loop keeps going right and then you have this bigger broader tree verse launch that will happen
So I think there are a lot of examples like that
Pixelmon has a you know, a mini game for kevin, right for the kevin ip franchise if you will
And they're building a much bigger
monster hunting, you know
Pokemon nostalgic game right which is going to be released later on this year. So there are several examples like this that are out there
Where they have like playable prototypes sugar town is doing this by the way with auras as well
They have a couple of you know, very small mini playable games
That they're then building towards this bigger larger, you know franchise in time, right?
So first it's building that attention economy, you know gathering people into the ecosystem
You know rewarding them in the ecosystem somehow and then slowly looking with live ops how you know
These games kind of develop how they scale which parts do people like which parts do people not like?
And oh by the way deprecate things that don't work and then massively scale out the things that do work, right?
So I think people are starting to use good devops principles and live ops principles in terms of how they you know
Look at incremental builds, right?
So I am I am bullish because there are people who are building and by the way
That's a small sample of the great builders who've been building for the last two four years, right? So
But I do see things coming out that are interesting. They take time and I think that time dimension
Is the uh is the part of this equation that I think is going to be flipped now
Which makes things makes things even more exciting
It just means that everybody is going to be on this race to launch
And they're going to keep iterating because they know that their partner right or this other
Entity to the left of them or to the right of them is going to come in and disrupt with much less investment
And with much smaller sort of uh, you know, uh teams with lower inertia
And I think that's going to push everybody forward and challenge everybody to do even better
Yeah, I I think it's definitely a huge positive for the space and I hope to see that and
What you were talking about pixelmon
Which to be clear we both invested in but pixelmon
Would have built our world and it would have worked perfectly with their ip, right? I mean, it's literally what
They're kind of going for it to your point
And they could have it would have been
Could you imagine if pixelmon had?
Not for the sake of my bags just generally
Built pow world and it got that sort of mass adoption, right?
They could have used all the they have all the characters the pixelmon has all the rarities and all the different things
They could have literally built the exact same game and captured the same global audience
That would have been amazing, right? Like that's what we're on the brink potentially of seeing maybe not with pixelmon
Maybe with something else but like I think showing that with
You know a little bit less of a budget and not a triple-a studio if you can go capture
There's a ton of opportunity to help drive and make gamefly a thing make it something that people really value and drive more interest to it
And and so that's what I thought was so cool about playing pow world is you're like
This literally is just you know
There's so many games that we could have had in that have already been in development and web3. They could have been this
but what worked for palmon was the the low cost to build
Focus on fun and yeah, they kind of it's like a vampire attack on pokemon a little bit
But who's not doing that right? Yeah, dude. I mean I this is why I think it's it's a power
Paradigm shifting kind of move almost straight from pow world. I think it's going to make everybody
you know take account right and
People who may have had like two games in production
In parallel are no now going to be looking at how do I get like 10 squads going with 10 games in parallel, right? Because
Is so low then you're overthinking the process to get to the end result, right? Which is which is your point. It's like
The pal world has shown that you don't need big brains
What you need to do is you need to figure out what people want, right?
Number one, and then you need to figure out how you deliver experience that you know, somehow
Resonates right one of the things interesting things from pal world, right again, you know kind of tying this entire loop back
Is the fact that you know, they wanted to build
Pokemon characters, right but they wanted to add guns and why did they add guns because americans like to shoot things
So so just think about that for a second, right? It's like it's just it's kind of very logical
And uh, it's kind of crazy if you think about it too, right?
I mean what people actually want to play and why they want to do certain things and it ties back to culture
And I I think you are right in that
This is just a reckoning point, right? It's um, it's it's going to be
Pretty interesting to see how you know people react
Sense and respond to what just happened and how that changes the velocity and how they deliver value, right?
Nft holders or or whatnot their communities at large
What's your perspective there? Right? Do you think?
You know just creates like a you know, a a vector
You know like a massive sea change of development innovation
That gets spurred on by this or what do you think the outcome is with this? No, I think it takes time
I think it takes time. I think the whole space in game dev which i'm not like to be 100 percent
I'm not like an expert on by any means
But I think you know what we've seen is that even over decades of improvement in game development
It still takes time to be able to make these kind of tooling improvements or
Optimizations and building platforms like unreal like any of the the platforms that exist today. They're still not
Trivial to build on right?
And so I think that this is a first signal
But I think it's still going to take a while to start to see some of these like
You can do these and just focus on the product you're selling as opposed to worrying too much about the technology at hand
And again, this is what we saw in the late 2000s. It was like rapid iteration
You got an app store you've got, you know people building new unicorn, you know, dc-backed startups every day, basically
That would come with a significant efficiency into how people build games and that's what I'm most optimistic for is like
If that does happen, it's just like gonna unlock so much for the entire world of gamers
Um, but today what goes into building that you know, triple a game is you know
Nearly hundreds of millions of dollars of production value with hundreds of people working on it
That you know not the best working conditions from what I understand too
And like again, if we can just improve some of those things
If we can improve the processes and efficiencies then at the end of the day, everyone gets better products
Where I just shifting it a bit like where I think it is interesting to think about
Actually some I don't I haven't verified this but I had read something that said that the devs of pow world had
Some interest in blockchain type stuff or web 3 or decentralization
It could have been fun because a lot of people are flooding pow world right now
And it seems like getting facts about the the guys buying foul world and what they were actually trying to do
Seems to be kind of challenging but
I would be curious and bro. I don't know if you've even played it really yet
We probably understand the concept. It's basically minecraft with pokemon and guns
Like well, I don't I don't even know what it would look like to be honest
I mean maybe content creation and a creator economy
Like where would you add games? Where could you sprinkle game 5 in now?
I'm gonna take a shot, right?
But i'm gonna ask my buddy vgf also to to you know, kind of request time
Because I want to get his perspective being you know, kind of in this in the middle of like developing a reboot, right?
But like yeah, but here so feel free to request vgf. But here here's my simple take right? I think
The web 3 integration. I think it's great to first start with a game
And then I think there are going to be certain aspects of the gaming ecosystem, right?
Whether that's the guns whether it's the characters the skins, right?
And those elements are going to be potentially mintable assets, right?
So I I think what needs to happen is one you need to have
You know, of course zk rollups are going to be a big part of this, right?
Because you're going to have to use a zk evm of some kind so that you can mint you can do this gasless
Because all of these tech things that kind of add complexity from a crypto and a web 3 perspective are things that you know
Gamers don't really care for right?
So passport, you know and wallet integration has to be something that's super seamless, right?
The scalability has to be something that's obviously, you know front and center of everything that uh, you know goes on
So I think there are some of these aspects that you know
Going to need to be integrated in
But I think the harder part is creating the game
I think they have to have some perspective around how these assets will live beyond the game
And this is why the more on-chain it is the better and I go back to that on-chain analog, right?
Perhaps many of these games will eventually become 100% on-chain. I don't know, right?
I think that's a good thing because then that prevents the centralized rugging aspect of a game
Um where somebody can just decide hey
I'm no longer going to invest in this game and therefore it's gone forever, right your assets your skins. Everything are gone
But if you fully create an on-chain game
then you have to think about you know, just how those assets will live in perpetuity and
The fact that uh, you know, you have no central sort of rugging authority there
Hey vgf curious for your perspective. First of all, welcome, man
To the show and i'm curious for your perspective because you guys are doing some very interesting things, right? You're you've got an on-chain game
Um element, which is a big part of this but maybe talk to us kind of to ox5f's last question
And how you you guys are thinking about this, right from a reboot perspective
Jim gents, uh, yeah, I apologize. I missed the tail end of that question as I was coming on to the stage
Uh, is there x remind me of repeating that? Yeah
It was mostly like hey, how will exit how world exists and is an interesting game and people are having fun with it and
And how would you now take that game and turn it into something that is oriented around game five?
Like what are the features that you add? How do you you know, sprinkle decentralization into it?
How do you you know bring normies into the fold of these things?
Like I know we've talked in kind of to barat's point
We talked a little bit about like whoa, you know, there's items and you can have an item place marketplace
but like how do you turn that game into something that
Was web 2 into something that's compelling as web 3 if that makes sense. That's
That's both a fun one and also incredibly challenging that like I don't think has a one-size-fits-all answer for
So like on the topic of like on chain games and I don't want to go on a total rant here
But the what what I believe the space commonly perceives as a quote unquote fully on chain game
Is a bit of a misnomer because like in the world of game development short of
You are interacting with the game in every respect via the contract
You have some sort of interface there
And so some part of that to varying degrees is not on chain
That said I do believe what barat had said of like having more things on chain
Whether it be, you know, the ownership layer game state things of that nature more things on chain more things distributed
uh beyond just the ownership layer
Is of value to both the community and can be leveraged for the game developer like to their benefit
But I I don't think there is
An easy or or frictionless way yet
To kind of pivot from a traditional, you know web 2 game into web 3 just yet
And in my like from my perspective that's a lot to do with
Uh the friction of onboarding
Um, I do think that custodial wallets
Uh wallet abstraction and things like that
Are easing that process quite a bit
But we're just not quote unquote like there yet
Incredible teams working on a variety of custodial wallet solutions, which are incredibly encouraging
Um, I think a lot of uh, like conceptually what wallet abstraction enables
Uh is is kind of like the direction that we're all
We're just not over to that
Yeah, I guess like i'm trying to think of like the thing that I think is probably closest in web 2 gaming today
To web 3 that to like being portable or you know, easily moved to web 3 would be something like csgo skins
Where like csgo skins are like loot box idea
You have skins you can buy and sell them on a marketplace. It's not decentralized. It's all through steam
Like that it seems like the most like pick up move to chain
Um and place back in but yeah, it's like the the onboarding problem of that is actually really fascinating because you're like well
You know of today if you took pow world and it's players today or even csgo and it's players today
Surely less than one percent of them have ever used metamask in their life
Right. Surely less than one percent. Yeah, it's that and so like
Yeah, and so like if you think about it from a funnel problem
Like you might have tons of people that are aware of and know of your product
but your ability to acquire those people because there's this hurdle of jumping over and getting into a wallet and
um, you know setting all of those things up is just stupidly hard and
Yeah, that's that's super interesting that you say that because I guess that they get you you could solve all the problems of having a content creator
Store or having the ability to buy and sell skins
But if you can't get people in the door, then what matters what's it who cares what's in the store?
Well, so for for perspective, maybe I can share a little about how we're approaching this because I do think
It is one avenue to help lead people down that rabbit hole
Uh and and for you know a couple
You know take with a couple grains grains of salt. This is simply our approach. It's yet to be proven, but
I like to think it's a pretty
Darn, good, you know conceptual model
Um is like right now first like in relation to reboot and battle plan
targeting a very d gen web 3 native audience, you know
We're we're presuming some level of capability of interacting with metamask some familiarity with uh different blockchains
We handle a lot of that, you know transferring of networks and stuff like that on the back end. So it's it's pretty seamless
But you do need to have a self-custodied wallet and things like that
custodial wallets and fiat on-ramps and things like that
At least conceptually the idea is that we can onboard a traditional web 2 user
They can hop in and play this new style of game
It's familiar enough in that like it's an auto battler
You know people that are familiar with like auto chests or something along those lines should
Kind of be be familiar with the style of game
But what it enables is this unique gaming experience. That's really only possible
ability to have this almost like
Daily fantasy sports, you know putting something up at risk
inherently more interesting
Um, you really don't have that kind of experience in web 2 in relation to gaming in this way
uh, the closest might be like something like a wager based system like game battles, but
Again, that's that's a very different kind of model there
And and I think when you lead people down that path
of the custodial wallet solutions
Extract or like say they get done playing the game, right?
They just tire of it or they you know decide to move on
winnings, whatever it may be depending on how well they play
they then have that incentive to
Go down, you know go down that path of okay. How do I how do I onboard?
How do I extract my value that i've earned or grinded in this ecosystem and be able to move it out?
And for somebody that's put
Many hours or many dollars depending on their approach
Into a gaming ecosystem that is I think a pretty big carrot on the stick
Uh as to why they would take that time and that effort
To being able to extract that value when they when they choose to do so
I think it's super interesting man. I mean, I think you you nailed you nailed kind of why
user generated content and
The sweat equity as you call it is such an integral part of kind of where games will evolve, right?
It's kind of interesting seeing some of the hybrid models play out right now. I mean
Almost all games will eventually be hybrid till they're
Till you have this cross section of
Games that will be a hundred percent on chain
You know, perhaps they have a different sort of performance profile and perhaps a different scale
But back to the earlier question about cs. Just cs
Ghost skins, right? What's interesting is that there is a marketplace called demarket which is built by mythos foundation, right?
So it is a blockchain entity that actually exists on the polka dot chain where there's the sixth largest marketplace
They're actually doing all of the transactions
But nobody realizes it's happening on the blockchain
So just it's it's weird how all of these things are kind of all of these forces are kind of you know
They're integrated into the stream and people don't even know right so back to wallet abstraction
And simplifying overall experience. I think there are many things that are happening and sometimes on the surface
We don't even see it right, but it's you know, it's built on
Crypto rails it's built on you know, crypto marketplace transactions and so on but super interesting super interesting
Well, i've never heard of demarket and i'm not like a csgo player, but that's pretty cool
I mean and it makes sense. It's kind of like all the real world assets stuff that's going on now, right?
Why can't you have some sort of custodian that holds items and then
You know brokers deals between buyers and sellers it makes total sense
I wonder how you continue to create marketplaces like this that kind of like what steam did
Well is they built a marketplace that everyone installed they became the app store, right?
And like I know that people have kind of tried to do this in web3
But i'm assuming that there is still some intent in doing that
But maybe it makes more sense to just continue down the path of like why wouldn't these games that we're developing now be in?
On steam like you talked about distribution channel earlier. Well steam is a pretty damn good distribution channel
No, you keep going like i'm curious like what?
Doesn't that make sense? Like I I don't
Well, so here's no idea to steam against the steam against it. Yeah. Well, so here's here's like I think an under
Underrated or under talked about
Reason as to why steam became what it is today
Is because they had that banger game like half life
Like you look at the the absolutely like pivotal
Games that have launched on steam
For people to have reason to download and participate in the steam ecosystem
I think that is the key people didn't download steam in the early days
Because they were looking for the marketplace. They were going to play a game
And so I think that is like the missing piece right now is especially in web3. We're seeing a lot of these
Uh, quote unquote web3 native game launchers and launch pads and things of that sort
What we're missing is that reason for people to go there?
Like I will climb mountains and you know
Go to the ends of the earth if i'm trying to play a game with my friends, right?
Like i'll i'll go through whatever hurdles I have to go through if on the other end of that is
Having a really good time with a bunch of my friends
That is seemingly the piece that uh, that web3 is missing right now
Really fun game and and granted, you know, I think that there are a lot of promising games that uh,
As brad had highlighted are now coming to market
but especially in 21 it was
You know a lot of gamified d-fi
These gamified experiences that weren't necessarily game loop centric. It was more like okay
How do I put this pretty semi-fun layer over this farming simulator?
And now we're starting to see more of the focus on gameplay more on the focus on content
uh, and actually dope fun gaming experiences with the value add of blockchain being
Kind of maybe at the forefront but secondary to
Hey, let's just focus on making a fun gaming experience that just so happens to leverage the values of blockchain
Yeah, vgf. Love your answer, man
And I want to I want to double click on a couple things there, right?
So I I think the number one thing as you mentioned is having a fun game, right?
That's the most important thing and you know, we've moved away from the d-fi ponzi farming
kind of game meta which grabbed everybody's attention for
2021 and now they're real games coming out with real assets and you know, potentially very
You know good gaming loops, but like if I think about like back to that steam question, um
Oax that you asked right? I think steam should be a perfectly good distribution channel
I think there's a lot of focus right now in
In web3 to actually recreate all of the different layers of the stack, right? So
There's the infrastructure layer, of course, which is going to be evm or svm, right?
Which is the salona virtual machine quote unquote. It could be anything, right?
Who knows maybe it becomes an mvm a monad virtual machine right down the road
Um, but all of these like hyper paralyzed sort of you know chains
That are purpose-built could become the new de facto layer of gaming, right? Could be an l2
Right, but if you look at the way that people are decomposing the stack, you've got the infrastructure layers, right?
Could be a l2 of some sort. It could be a separate, you know l1
Um, and then you've got this idea of these
You know integration points, right? I think about immutable. I think about ronin right where they're trying to abstract
Wallet, uh wallet complexity, right making it simpler. They're trying to provide gasless transactions, right?
So they're providing better sdks. They're building distribution systems
right, and they're of course using
some combination of zk tech if it's on traditional ethereum to
You know ensure that you know, the state continues to happen on the layer one
But you know a lot of the execution happens on the the gaming chain itself, right? So that whole, you know element is happening
Um, and I think that's going to be important and then you have this group that sits on top of that
Right, or you could actually think of it as being on the bottom of that whichever way
And they are you know, kind of these incubators the launch pads vgf as you mentioned, right?
And they are the ones that are you know, kind of making these early bets on, you know multiple
And helping to support their development which also become a very important part of then layering on and leveraging the technology
I think about beam. I think about some of these other sort of
Companies within web3 that are actually facilitating that right, but they're effectively recreating those same
Layers that exist in web2, but they're trying to do it from a web3 perspective
And and to tie this all back. I think steam
Would be would serve themselves really well if they had integration rails either into immutable or into one of these other elements
So that they're able to support, you know the distributorship of of these games that are coming in, right?
I think it has to happen, right and I think the first foray is going to be
This bridged game concept and the next is going to be, you know, more tighter integration
And then pretty soon nobody's even going to know or care, you know
But they're going to have assets that continue to live and maybe games that continue to persist
vgf or zero x5 f I mean kind of
Your your perspectives on that, right
No, I totally agree I I think
This is where it becomes really interesting to see
I I just feel like we're in the era where we're going to learn a lot about these games and how things
I'm really curious to see what launches in the next six months you made the point earlier of like
Oh, well, you know people have been working for the past two or four years on some of this stuff
And like i'm curious what we see in the next few months or the next six months and
Maybe we're overhyped because of power world and maybe we're overhyped because of this like
Crazy idea that maybe if seven million dollars and a few guys in japan came together and built this game that everyone fell in
There is opportunity there and and maybe some of this stuff starts paying out
Over the next few months like we start to see some of these things and you know
One of one of the things I talked about a couple months ago when things were heating up again is like people have had stuff
That they've been waiting to release
People have been no one wants to release their shit in the bear market
No one wants to say hey, I got this new exciting thing in august 2023 when no one's talking about it
I mean, I guess friend tagged it but that's besides the point
The it's people have had stuff ready to go and are waiting for the opportunity to launch it
And so i'm excited about that too. I I just think we're potentially at a really interesting
A vergence of what's real what is practical and what will actually work for game phi and getting away from the like
Like what happened to 21 with some of the games and game phi stuff that was out there and the like
Effectively the like oh, well, you can earn money and play this game and make tons of money
Like I don't know that that's the sustainable path forward. And so i'm excited to see kind of what the real path forward looks like
I'm with you man. I think the use cases. I think what i'm really bullish about is the fact that pal world
Just showed us that there are two sort of elements, right?
Maybe it's three elements
You know games that have a hook
Attention economy and number go up right are the three things i'll talk about
And that's what makes me bullish in that if you think about crypto and you think about the use cases to this point, right?
Some kind of a user hook and you know, it was d phi for a while, right?
Now you got this big layer of one thing going on with people getting
Restaking and staking points and all that stuff right and staking airdrops and all that stuff
But like gaming is a real use case. It's a really
Strong use case. It's got a lot of power. It's got a lot of draw
In order for crypto to become you know, like
Massively relevant. I think it already is right the bitcoin ETFs have proven that we're no longer
You know a joke in a corner of the universe where more mainstream but
In order for like rapid adoption to happen, right?
If you think that's a good or bad thing, you know, you could be you could argue and I would argue both sides to that point
You know grabs those three elements right and that attention economy and that sort of aspect of monthly active users daily active users
and it could be very transformative in terms of how
Tech just pushes forward and it takes an event like pal world to really get people to sort of think about you know
The zero to one elements of why this could be a massive opportunity and unlock right? That's what that's what gets me really excited
So you you were talking about kind of the use cases there
One thing that really stands out there in my mind and i'll kind of preface this with like
Just the ownership layer being on chain is a value add like that is a good step in the right direction
But in my opinion, it's it's not
Because there are a lot of games coming to market right now in which
They're basically a web2 game with a web3 ownership player
and again, that is that is a value add to the end user and I think that it is a step in the right direction, but I am
on web3 native experiences and dual tracking that with
lowering the barrier of entry and onboarding flow
Again, kind of the the custodial wallet wallet abstraction kind of avenues there
But the web3 native experiences that are only enabled by these stacks being built on blockchain rails
For sake of argument battle plan and reboot come to mind what what parallel is doing with colonies comes to mind
some of these things were like
these distribution mechanisms and these
These gaming experiences couldn't be built
or or function as they do
And to me that is that is a core value out of like why this thing
Needs to not not only has a value add in being web3, but has to be web3
Because it couldn't be built, you know using traditional servers
That path of like that is a pretty compelling use case as to why someone would come and play here
Like I if I want to play this kind of game have this new kind of experience
And in my mind, that's one of the more compelling use cases
speculation and number go up
Uh is it's unlocking these new style of gaming experiences that?
Traditional web2 games simply cannot provide
Do you think there are any technical limitations today that preclude you know some
That would be required to really kind of continue to push the space forward like proto dank sharding or sharding
What's your perspective anything that you know?
Stop of mind where you guys have been like tackling and you're like, ah
this is like this is like a
You know a blocking point right or do you feel like it's all there right? Everything is there
I think we're on the cusp of it's all there
In the in the development of battle plan like what essentially became reboot was
Why like reboot exists because we as
You know pixivolt in the development of battle plan. We're running into all of these challenges of like, okay. Well, how do we handle?
Uh on chain mint mechanics, how do we as a game developer?
uh manage onboarding flow and custodial wallet access and fiat on ramps and like
You could have like as an independent game developer
You feasibly might not be able to afford having an in like an internal team to handle all of these different
kind of blockchain integration aspects
Very hyper specialists that know about all of these things like there's a lot of friction
For a traditional game studio as to why they may not yet
Want to have a blockchain native experience?
And so I think that like we're and granted we're not the only ones trying to tackle some of these problems
There are other exceptional teams that are attacking different facets of that
But I do think that lowering those barriers of entry
Uh easing that friction for both the consumers the players as well as game developers
Uh pushes us all in the direction. I think we want to go
Um, but right now it's it's it's a tall order like I think that's why we're seeing more of these
you know, uh in the kind of
Uh game studios launching blockchain native experiences first
Uh for a while call it, you know, like last year
the aspiration was you know having
Activision blizzard or ubisoft and like some of these really big triple a caliber studios launching blockchain games
And I do think we get there
But they may not be first
Right. We need top down and bottom up
And I think because the bottom up these smaller indie studios are able to
Lean into the tech be web3 native rather than coming from the outside in
Um, we're going to see those kind of pop-offs first
Um, you know, I i'm looking for like what's going to be the the web3 among us
You know the web3 pow world we've seen a couple of these like
Like pivotal gaming experiences that have like crossed over into that that mainstream narrative and great
I'm saying these aren't these aren't web3 native games i'm looking for
What that moment will be for web3, right?
I just don't know that we've
the right mix of the secret sauce
to hit that crossover yet
I got two questions for you, man
So with these new entrants coming in right and you have if you think of every sort of
Web3 gaming entity as kind of this mini startup, right that's incubating as you said
Tech and becoming the forefront of this innovation
Yeah, some are going to become massive studios in their own right? Do you think the others get consolidated and bought out?
That's question number one
I'm gonna actually i'll let you answer question one and i'll ask a good question
So give me a little bit more controversial
execution debt is a real thing that uh
People in web3 conveniently don't like to talk about because it has bagged bagged bias associated to it
like the weight of people's bags
Yeah execution debt is is a very large
Kind of a hurdle to get over when you're talking about mergers and acquisitions
And realistically, there are a lot of the acquisition side of that equation
Where it's not even worth taking a project on for free
because of how much it will cost to
Try to get it back up just to park just to even
like I I think it's really interesting because
you were talking about kind of like the the
Value of you know having these
On-chain experiences and the immutability of on-chain ownership and these kind of things
More bullish on the concept of portability rather than interoperability
Being able to leverage some of these assets
rather than having the same item
represented as that one thing across ecosystems
And so I think that just like traditional gaming we'll see a lot of these
Fail because that's the reality of business
What experiences come out of leveraging some of these on-chain data points these whether it be nft's erc20 is whatever
Kind of like the mashup concept right like you have so much data on chain of
People with nft's people with erc20 is people
Uh across ecosystems and we've yet to kind of see
kind of affectionately called like
Web3 like or web3 retargeting kind of like a
A kind of friendly vampire attack
A value add vampire attack
Where you're you're coming in and providing value for these, you know data points that are already on chain for these
Target users your ideal customers that may have had assets or exposure or participation in these other ecosystems
But you can bring them over by providing value to the assets. They already exist from other ecosystems
I love that. Love that. Oh ex any any follow-ups to that question?
No, I I the thing that I keep going back to I I might change it up a little bit
But the thing that I keep coming back to is we you you and me barat
We were just talking about this in telegram. Like we're not the experts in game dev now. We got vgf up here
We were we were definitely on the like, oh, yeah, dev dev should be it should be easier now, right?
Games can be made so much easier at vgf. I'm curious like
How how off base are we are we using this as like a misnomer here with with um, some of the stuff
We're seeing with power world. Like do you feel like you've seen any of the animation happen yourself in terms of like
You know build quicker or spend less time thinking about the tech stack
Like have you noticed any of that or do you feel any more confident going forward?
Yes and no, I I I think that like conceptually
There are a lot of these tools like the facilitation of ai to help, you know with uh development flows and things like that that
We're just starting to see
like traditional workflows and stuff like that that like
Moving forward. I think it really it becomes a large part of the game development ecosystem rather than
Like oh, there's this weird little game over here. They're all that all their assets are, you know, ai developed or or whatever
Like game development still takes a long time
Like and granted I am not a game designer. I am not a coder. I'm not a developer
I work on the marketing side. It just so happens to be in the game in game development, but
It's it's a lot of man hours no matter how many like ways you cut it
uh, and so I think pow world is
interesting to look at because
otherwise, you know sensational
Game that you know goes on and and completely pops off
uh, and you see that it was developed for a
Fairly, you know small budget in the grand scheme of things when you look at like there's a lot of triple-a games where like
Their entire development budget doesn't even cover like a month's worth of their marketing, you know spend
Um, and so it's it's kind of wild to see that
But i'm more interested on that side of like
What what the mix that got them there was right like it's buggy. It's not polished
Bordering on ip infringement doesn't matter throw it all out the window pokemon with guns
Uh, it's viral and you know, they're off to the races
uh, it's kind of interesting to me because like
I think that there are a lot of a lot of games that we're going to see that
Have some measure of success that that will go on to be pretty fucking cool
Um, but that doesn't mean that they're going to have longevity
And that's where I think like
in a really interesting place because
But if the if it's if it doesn't have a sustainable revenue model
It's the if you know the studio for whatever reason shutters
You still have all of these holders that still have these assets
That they're gonna do what with right?
So yeah, I don't think there's like a perfect answer yet. I think that like there is a lot of
Improvement especially, you know with regards to tooling
But we haven't hit like a crossover inflection point to where it's like as easy as I think a lot of people perceive it to be
Yeah, I think that's part of
Go ahead bro. No, no, you you go you go
I I was just gonna say I think that's part of the issue that you know
A lot of game devs are having right now and the the negative reaction that power is seeing is like people I brought and I are
Like oh look ai makes everything so much easier
You can do all these things now and they think we're we're both mostly talking about the future state of like hey
Maybe this isn't the inflection point yet, but maybe this is the signal that there could be one
And so yeah, I figured that would probably be the answer
especially again given how people are reacting to it right now that the reactions from game devs are like
If you have a job in game dev and you you know make character models every day or you you're in a place
That can be disrupted potentially by ai then that's pretty scary feeling i'm sure
Um, but yeah, I don't think that we're there yet by any means
Um, it's just an interesting thing to think about
What the potential is and how it kind of opens up things moving forward. Um, I think that's what people are really excited about
In a in a market that's pretty inefficient the grand scheme of things
Gonna gonna be interesting to watch. Hey vgf. I've got a alpha question for you, right? So
outside of reboot right outside of your
Where and what are you most bullish bullish on when it comes to gaming and web3?
uh, well, so I mentioned one earlier
And i'm not sure how much of it is hopium slash copium or you know
people clown face emoji on on my part, but
um, i'm really excited by
What parallel was doing uh in like the parallelization of parallel ha um
Of what they're doing in like multi
pathing their development of
Again, kind of these composable layers
Yes, what they've done with
Uh, the tcg is awesome. And I think that that has huge huge crossover bridge type potential
but what they're doing in the development of like
the unreal five assets the
Uh, what they're doing with colonies is particularly interesting. So like that is something that I
They are just shipping shit like
There's a lot of these projects where it's like what the fuck have you done for the last two years and
you look at teams like forgotten runes and you're like
Here's the laundry list of things that they've shipped
Uh, and and they just don't seem to slow down
I'm a first-person shooter like battle royale kind of guy traditionally, uh, so
Excited about uh shrapnel dead drop. I know shrapnel has kind of like
Taken over the conversation particularly on twitter
Um, but dead drop, I think has has a lot of promise and potential especially
uh when we talk about creators as a
Because of the affiliation to dr. Disrespect and his his connections in the the live stream and content creation world
So yeah, I think those are probably like
A highlight of of a couple of my favorites right now
Guys everybody look, I just want to just say this out front up front here
I did not plant vgf vgf just showed up on his own
And for whatever reason there's a good cross section of the things that he's bullish on and my bag
So hey more power to you, man
Uh, I actually have very little bags in all three of those so uh
That I have very little self-interest in in
Declaring that but um, yeah, i'm just bullish on dope teams shipping cool shit
And and I think that the market
reflect those first principles
speculation and number go up
tend to take precedence over
actual shipping of product oftentimes
Those that that that delta gets narrower as we go on
You can never fully remove the speculation
Uh, and I don't think we need to
focusing on product first deliverables
Uh is is a more sustainable thesis to work off of
You know unsustainable, you know hype driven narratives
I love what you just said, right?
So I think all of the groups that you just talked about have really good product market fit and they have
Massive communities right people who are like maniacally
sort of focused fans right who
Just don't get after everything that they put out into the ecosystem, which is very telling right?
And I think that's that's the huge power of web 3.0. So right that we don't really talk a lot about
But it's the ability to be able to you know, create these massive communities that then allow
Success loop if you will as you keep building and executing love it, man. Thanks for that perspective
Oh x any any final questions or thoughts before we start wrapping up here?
again, i'm in the dreamer state clearly, but like
Do you think that there's something that anyone and you don't have to say like it's this project like you just did but
Do you think anyone is working on something that could have that mainstream success that power world just had like literally overnight crazy amount?
I just looked at six days ago. It launched like is there someone that can get that today
Or is that something that realistically no
Not right. We have to like they are such
Like for for sake of arguing like they are such an outlier
Beyond outlier like this is a freak of nature
Like for people that are like oh pow world is bullish for you know pixelmon. No
Like maybe in the slightest degree because of like some some parallel paths or whatever
But like it is style of game, but like no
It's it's not like pow world is a freak of nature
Like this is this is so far beyond and outside of what quote unquote typically happens
Like 99 percent of games that are launched you never hear about
Like there are tens of thousands of games that are launched every month on steam
Like most of them you never hear about that doesn't mean they're not good games
but like for sake of argument
Doesn't have that style of it like I think having that standard of expectation is just unrealistic
If for both the web 2 and web 3 game for all of the aforementioned, you know challenges
Totally and and maybe I maybe I picked the wrong example because yeah, it's a good point
It's like it is a phenomenon itself
But like any type of like breakout, you know, maybe even just 10 percent of pow world like
Breakout game. Yes. Yes. Okay. You you do think we get that
okay, yes, I do think we get there but like
I yeah, I just wanted to throw that out there because i've heard that in conversation in a couple of spaces that i've listened into and
Market that's just how we all are right?
Everyone in the market. Yeah, hopi of totally but like yeah, I do think that we have that
You know that that potential that like pop off
I'll call it that inflection point because I think that once you
Then it it opens up opportunity for a lot of other avenues, right?
Whatever it ends up being that game
Uh, then opens up the the potential and the the opportunity for a lot of other games to enter that conversation
I love that right? I think there are two things though, right? Um while I agree with you
It's very tough to capture lightning in a bottle like pow world has but I do think it's going to make
It's going to force teams to reconsider how they allocate expense, right?
And cost rather right to go create games. I think that's going to be a very positive loop that comes out of this
Because I I think everybody thinks waterfall when it comes to gaming and I think that's a little bit of a challenge
I don't want to simplify there's no physics that allows you to compress time and space, right?
But I think a lot of people do think traditionally in terms of like, you know
Hey, this is going to take me eight months to do and what this does if nothing else
Is it forces everybody to reconsider how they look at timelines and software delivery, right?
And you know game output right and game loops, right?
I think that's going to be very positive
Most definitely and and I think that
What talking about kind of the the content creators as a distribution channel, um
That is going to like how pow world
leveraged content creators and kind of those viral clippable moments
It like couldn't be understated like those those
little shareable moments those kind of like
Laffable like and and oftentimes it's coming like it's the it's the unpolished. It's the bugs
It's the preposterousness of it all that kind of like lends itself to being
Good quality content even if it's highlighting maybe a bug in the game
It it makes for those moments that uh
Again, it goes back to like is it a fun game? Do I want to play it with my friends?
Will I go and spend 30 to play this with my friends?
The answer as we've seen has been resoundingly. Yes in their case
and so I think a lot of teams start looking at
Reallocation of capital and and how they they spend those marketing dollars or development budgets
In ways that we we haven't traditionally seen and I think that the content creation funnel and and leveraging creators
Uh and incentivizing and rewarding them adequately for the value they provide
Uh is something i'm really like really really passionate about because I think that that does
Lend itself to web 3 as well
Makes total sense. I love that
Cool cool. Yeah. Thanks for coming up man
Like this is i'm i'm borat and I are both glad that you you did end up here because this has been a super interesting conversation
Otherwise two guys that only kind of know what they're talking about
I I was laughing with borat and dms because I was like I just came to listen today
But I appreciate the the shout out and you having me up
Always glad to to kind of chime in but yeah
It's one of those things that I think
Everyone is just familiar enough with to you know, hold down a conversation. But when you get into the nitty gritty, uh,
It it is something that like it does have uh advantage to to having participated on like the development side of things
Yeah, totally. Thanks for coming up again. That was awesome. Anything else from you borat? No. No, I I think i'm on set
Ox 5s if you want to wrap up we are good to go
Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks again everyone for joining, you know, we like to keep it tight at you know
one hour 15 minutes a good good pace. Thanks again for
joining vgf and um having fun talking through some of the new topics that we get to cover so
Everyone have a good rest of your day and we'll catch you guys next time. Thanks everybody
Take care. Appreciate you