Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Cool, But Does it Matter? | Press Play #48
Recorded: May 8, 2024 Duration: 1:06:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
are kind of been buying you up as a speaker and i'm not sure if you're getting it if you're not
getting it try to uh request and we'll try and drive you up that way
where to go ruining my music bro i don't have any music i had music everyone else in the chat
saying they can't hear anything i don't know i had music playing the whole time it was a vibe
no one had music fair well we got michael up so he can get started um yeah we'll let people roll in
over time but ladies and gentlemen we are technically officially back i want to say we're
back but george is not here so i can't really uh fully commit to that statement yet but george will
be back next week press play is back um it's been a while i think the last time we did one of these
was maybe something march ish um but we took a break we didn't want to pollute what press play
was with all the tge talk and people asking questions about tokens and things like that we
want to just give it a fair share and now that things have kind of settled i wanted to bring
back your favorite with your gaming conversations um with some of your favorite guests obviously
today we've got a stacked um audience set i'll let everyone introduce themselves very quickly but
first let's start with you mr helix gaspode to the honors i normally just say hello so you can
tell we're out of the flow my whole thing is just saying hello hello gaspode happy to be back
co-hosting even if it isn't with my twin for a change maybe it's my my uh new twin in the form of og
god forbid god forbid uh blast royale over to you hey hey tm everyone this is anil i'm one of the
co-founders of first light games we make blast royale which is a web 3 game we're aiming to turn
billion players from web 3 noobs into pros oh i like that there's a little bit of wordplay there
if you guys know what best royale is uh cooking you'll know why he said noobs um up next robby
definitely someone we're familiar with but i'll let you do the intro as well hi i'm robby um i'm with
animoca brands uh we make all kinds of different games i guess probably most famous for the sandbox
but we make lots of other stuff too a lot of other stuff um as we'll dig a bit deeper as well and
michael over to you hi i'm the ceo of lithos former playstation um and we are working on a few
different games for web 3 basically trying to bring our uh 20 30 years experience of
game development and console pc into the web 3 space we love it and uh super excited to be here
thank you thanks for joining us so like i said stacked um speaker panel but um i want to give
you a bit of context about why we decided to call this space what we ended up calling it which is cool
but doesn't matter um more recently i mean it's been a trend to be honest uh since the inception
of web 3 gaming but more recently we're seeing a lot of let's say new announcements right new
milestones um game studios celebrating x number of downloads um partnerships with esports teams
partnerships with mainstream brands more recently as well we wanted to kind of dig a bit deeper and ask
the burning question which is like cool but does it matter and we talk about you know it mattering
the idea is does it matter to let's say the longevity of that game or the performance or
the success of that game is it just a nothing burger is it you know a smoke screen so we really
wanted to kind of dive a bit deeper we're going to point out a couple of different topics it does
not have to only pertain to those specific topics anything else that comes to mind might throw in
some questions here and there as well michael you said playstation so i might actually poke
a little bit with what happened with hell divers um if you have some context on that as well but i'll start
with the first question the first topic of conversation blockchain gaming makes up 40 percent
of essentially private investments in q1 is that something that matters is it you know just because
it's the new thing and everyone's throwing money at it like what do you guys think about this maybe i'll
start with you robbie from the animoka perspective because we probably do a lot more investing than most
people on this panel sure um i guess i look at that number and think i can't believe people still
spend 60 percent of their money investing in web 2 games because it's been so long since we've done so
um i think it doesn't surprise me at all um i'm glad to see it's becoming that big because obviously you
know joking aside it is very material in terms of investing in gaming but i do think that it also
shows that people are investing in the future of gaming um and i only expect that percentage as a
proportion of gaming investment to grow over time um and you know i'm i'm really pleased to see how
many people are investing in game projects i mean we're we're obviously um very active and have
always been active investing in games but i think i noticed a lot of other web 3 native investors who
may have been focused on infrastructure or defy or other aspects of web 3 also um putting more gaming
uh and content into their portfolios which i think is great
i'm very keen on the fact that more gaming is coming in from a selfish point of view uh i'm looking
for as many games to play as possible so if people are getting funding there'll definitely be more games
coming through so i'm i'm excited to see it as well but going over to we'll head over to you in the
blast royale account do you think that this is because everyone is keen on gaming or do you think
it's just that crypto went up more money came in yeah it's a little bit from column a and a little
bit from column b but i i do agree with uh what robbie's sentiment there is which is that it's
surprised that people are investing in in regular web 2 gaming i think regular gaming has been in
trouble for quite a few years it's really been changed by the difficulties of getting acquisition
and getting new products onto the market there's a lot of existing games companies that have even
stopped making big games per se and kind of concentrating on their existing portfolio i think
it's really interesting for example that supercell are finally going to launch a new game this year and
it's been five years since they last launched the game which was brawl stars which it's a global launch
so that shows you that even for the biggest fish in the ocean it's really difficult to be successful
so why are people coming into web 3 well two years ago it was all based around hype right
everyone saw axes like oh my god look what's happening here what's going to be the next big thing
then it was perceived that like things had failed and it was like a flash in a pan
i think what really surprised me is why didn't people realize that you don't just make a game
overnight it takes time it takes time to learn things takes time to improve not everything's
going to work out the first time it happens like you know you can't just make like an amazing meal
you know that's michelin star in five minutes right you've got to cook those ingredients and make sure
it's good so that's what's kind of happened and i feel like two years later what started to happen is
people have realized that oh okay some of these guys are still around and some of these products
are pretty good and they're actually getting real traction which i think is the most important thing
right when it's actual things happening and actual people sticking around and things are working
and there's something there i think it's definitely helped with crypto markets rallying
that definitely helps but i mean look we're still in the global worldwide recession really
um so you know the markets pumping definitely helps it but the fact that there are some successes
in this kind of space i think is is indicative and you know if you were going to invest in games
it's surely smarter to go into something that has that kind of disruptive opportunity rather than
something that's kind of like a tried and tested race that's kind of already been won like really i
think if you look at their existing games market we've basically seen heavy consolidation we've seen
who the winners are going to be and so there's not really that much space for any new debutants or some
big money to be made there in web 3 anything could happen i mean that's both exciting and
terrifying i'm sure that's why we're all in it um but i think it's amazing there's definitely going
to be some big winners we're already starting to see some um and that's why people want to invest
in it because i think you know if you're part of that kind of vc group where you're looking for big
wins it's definitely a great space to be part of yeah a lot of a lot of great points made there
and for anyone that's curious by the way like where i pulled that stat it's not out of thin air um there's
a great report by drake star that eliza um shared and it's pinned up at the top there if you want to dig
a bit deeper it talks about the global gaming report essentially the entire industry and i want
to move over to you michael and i think you've got a pretty interesting perspective coming from
essentially playstation now being in web 3 gaming how do you view this because obviously you've been
on the other side you're now on this side um you see what the sentiment typically is like and you
know essentially what traditional gaming thinks of web 3 gaming but with this continuous uptrend of
essentially investment pouring into web 3 gaming like what do you think that says about let's say
the industry where we're headed maybe there's a bit more openness maybe the sentiment is changing i
don't know i'm just i'm curious to hear your thoughts and kind of you know your crowd and people you speak
to that might still be in traditional gaming that might be interested or maybe are you know
completely saying you're out of your mind for doing what you're doing now
well i'm definitely out of my mind um web 3 gaming i believe is the future i think web 3 in general i
think it's i think the
sentiment is is really silly it's change um and that's just a human nature thing i don't think it's
any anything else um i definitely jumped in the space it pretty early i've been in it for about two
years pretty early from a perspective of of you know credibility in the in the space for gaming
because uh last year most of the web 2 most of the people that i know were pretty much celebrating
the death of web 3 and when the crypto class crashed and ftx um obviously kind of imploded and set
everything into a uh bear market and was was pretty a pretty rough time and i think what was nice to
see is that the space didn't go away came back roaring stronger and um the traditional console
pc gaming weaknesses are really exposed right now um and so the funny thing is you see a lot of of
people that were like you know last year on linkedin a lot of the business leaders that are
my colleagues that were like this space is just filled with scams and it's you know um there's no
use cases for this and blah blah blah without having done any informative research they're just kind
of spewing what they hear in rumors and whatnot without digging in um and there are really really
good builders yes there are scams but there's scams in anything so the thing is from my perspective what
was nice is now it's showing that well there's a new opportunity a new market there's a major
disruption the major games that were were succeeding um traditionally are now imploding and this honestly
happened in the film business in hollywood in the mid early 2000s when the when films got to 200
million 300 million dollars for effects films the entire vfx industry imploded and so one of the
reasons i i left the traditional core console gaming was one i was a part of that but also i saw it coming
and i couldn't really change it the way i wanted to change it which is we needed to lower costs we needed
to stop the trend of upward development budgets getting to 200 million dollars as a standard or
300 million dollars because once you have one failure um it can be catastrophic when you have
two or three failures it's systemic problem and that's what we're seeing you're seeing a ton of big
blockbuster games that should be succeeding um and they're failing one after the other and so what
happens is because they take so long right it takes five to seven years to make a game and when the
appetite and the consumer choices change um if you aren't able to pivot to those changes you have
a real real problem and so that's what they're seeing right now so there's a panic to invest
in that space because they call it oh it's a hits driven business we don't understand what consumers
want anymore honestly i think that it's it's a it's a cyclical thing like every you know 10 years you can
kind of predict there's going to be some major shift in some kind of change of consumer changes
as a new generation comes up and as this generation is coming up they're extremely crypto friendly
they're extremely technology friendly and they're also the behaviors of the kinds of content they're
consuming is totally different totally different right so they're not consuming it in the same way
we did 10 years ago they're not consuming it completely on consoles and pcs they're spending more
times on tiktok and more time on their phone and on social networks and so those behaviors have to
kind of be monitored and you got to look at where gaming fits into those pieces those spaces those
communities um and so i just find it fascinating i love the space i love the builders in the space i
also love being the underdog it's going from an industry where i knew everything about it to
something where it changes every two days so it's it's uh it's it is terrifying but also a lot of fun
love that answer so i guess i'll give you the the honors of saying so you know huge portion of
global gaming private investment went towards web3 gaming cool does it matter what do you think does it
matter does it indicate anything of course it matters it matters from a perspective of there's a panic
right there's just a straight panic in you know first off it's really a tough business model to be
investing in entertainment you didn't really see um you know again like you don't see very often oh
this 500 million dollar investment in this film company because we know you know film films are are
very very risky right entertainment is risky but then there was this sort of very strange belief from
the vc space that gaming is just because of the numbers right you just literally look at those global
reports you say oh my god every single year add another two billion to the to the top line you
know in terms of how much annual revenue it's generating whatever and it gets everybody excited
but the problem is it's the pareto principle it's the 80 20 rule 20 of the profits 80 of the profits
are coming from 20 of the products so it's really how do you penetrate those major products and and and
and the ones that are winning right the fortnights the robloxes right you know sandbox all of the the
big stuff are really heavy investments and then you have these like strange disruptions coming from
places in the traditional console space that and pc space that nobody understands right they're looking
at power world and they're like wait a second this is like a a a third rate kind of ripoff of a
pokemon game and it's killing it you know with 400 million you know revenue in a couple weeks
and it just confuses people it's like well wait a second legally how can they even do this
and then the other pcc is like well hell divers which was not even a priority title
for for playstation they didn't market the hell out of it wasn't one of their big marquee titles
it was in development for nine years and they probably wrote it off and then they put it on pc as
an experiment and it blew up and i can still i can tell you they still probably are just trying to
figure out what blew it up how it blew up and how they can kind of tweak some of the other titles
to um to adjust to that just how it works but um realistically the market's extremely fickle
and the main differentiator i believe is that just you know that consumer choice is changing
and so you have to surprise and delight humans every so often and when you bring them something
they haven't seen in a while um there's going to be a there you know you can have an overnight
um transformation of people moving a community moving from one to the other um you know again
very strange but related example is you know for the console wars xbox was killing it up until
um and looked like it was going to be dominating until one moment um at e3 and it was 2015 or 2016
i can't remember where um they were trying to
i don't know if it's i thought it was just me but i got a confirmation that's not me uh michael i think
you cut off you were about to tell us a great story about xbox becoming number two now forever
um but let's let's try uh checking in on your mic again can you hear me
no okay let's try someone else felix anil roby you guys good so i think i i was actually going to
follow on what michael was saying because i think you know one of the things that is systemic about
web 2 and web 3 is if you look at you know we we were a mobile free-to-play game studio in web 2 for
years before we we pivoted to web 3 and one of the main things that obsessed us was user acquisition
and user acquisition is both you know what feeds you and and also ultimately what kind of got us
thinking about whether there were alternatives to how we were doing things and how we ended up being
pushed to to investigate blockchain because user acquisition was taking up so much of our budget
and if you look at the web 2 game industry user acquisition um is roughly you know of the 200
billion dollars a year that that gaming produces in revenues um roughly half of that about 100 billion
dollars a year gets spent on user acquisition and that's nuts because it just shows how little
retention there is in the games and platforms that we have because we're constantly spending money
to lure people back into this funnel right um to churn them through the funnel and try to to weed out
a handful of whales that support our game projects um and it's highly inefficient and the worst part of
it is that that 100 billion dollars a year that we spend on user acquisition largely goes to places like
facebook and microsoft and apple and big companies that are not game companies the money gets spent on
stuff and bleeds out of the game industry to other places and they don't spend that money back in the game
industry and that's the worst part so the cool thing about web 3 is when we do user acquisition
and granted user acquisition in web 3 is still a subject of interpretation and debate over what
exactly that even means um but i give you a good example which is you know i've been encouraging our
portfolio companies now for the last couple of years to lean into interoperability because if you can
create utility for other communities pfp communities game communities other web 3 communities they will come
and try your stuff right you give them incentives you give them an airdrop you give them a way to use
their pfps as avatars all of these things have a cost associated because you're still having to produce
some materials but think of it as user acquisition and what happens is if you airdrop people a bunch of
stuff to incentivize them to come and try out your game they will spend that stuff in your game so the money
comes back to you and even if the money doesn't come back to you i guarantee you it stays in web 3
so somebody else in web 3 benefits from that money and so all of the money that we're spending on user
acquisition in web 3 stays in web 3 because as we all know you know once you come into crypto you don't
go back out nobody off ramps it's just not a thing
love that because it's a great segue into my next point uh and my next topic and i just uh
wanted to kind of really focus this one on you anil uh and the blast rail side because i think it's
it's a topic that definitely you'll have a lot to say about um mobile gaming in general right you see
all these big announcements i think not too long ago a couple months ago nfo rival said they hit 3 million
downloads um again a couple of i think days or weeks ago uh imaginary ones with their bubble rangers
game hit 2 million downloads my question to you is is that a big deal when these mobile games that
are building in web 3 talk about millions of downloads especially going back to what robbie
just said about user acquisition and that being a core part of the spend when it comes to building a
game or a game studio is it a big deal what do you think about these milestones or metrics is it just
the you know a flex that you brush off because anyone can do it or is it something that we should
celebrate in the space a lot more seriously wow they're definitely vanity metrics but they do have
their use and it's important to understand what they're there for but first and foremost we have
to understand that crypto in general is an attention-based economy right that's what we're
all battling for how many people are following you in your socials how many people are re-engaging
with the content that you're posting how many people are following where are you in terms of
perception to all these other projects that are out there it's super important and stay relevant
so of course people are going to be you know beating their chests and you know singing from
the rooftops of any good news that they've got it's really important to do that because if you
go quiet i mean it'd be interesting to get kind of robbie's take on this but you know if you're if
you're not making any noise at all then no one's going to know who you are you're going to get the
tumbleweed your project's going to you know vanish into obscurity and it could be the greatest
product that's ever been out there that no one's ever going to try because they don't know about it
ultimately you are bustling for that these numbers do tend to be quite superficial i would say i mean
as you say you know it's like that simpsons quote it goes you know 83 percent of statistics are made
up you know 90 percent of people know that or whatever you know that kind of thing just completely
making things up which is kind of true you can use things to prove anything but i think any kind of
sign of success is a good signal and it is showing that things are happening and things have been
building so i think it is important that companies do that look i would say that in crypto in general
right it's d y o r right do your own research that's the same with any token or coin or whatever that you
want to get involved with that's what you should be doing right that's why we put things like the
white paper out there that's why you come onto spaces like this you try and find things out and do
research but at the same time how many times do people just ape in into some totally crazy meme coin
and they may make a return off it doing the same thing right and that's also part of the game like
sometimes i think is crypto just what would happen if kind of like a bunch of people with short
attention spans got access to like a bloomberg terminal or something like that on the stock market
and making decisions kind of related to that but you can have fun doing it so
yeah that's kind of my take on it i think a lot of time these statistics are superficial
and the thing is i think they're like they're really kind of key stats that you'd want to know
will be difficult because not many people will share them that's the same even in traditional
triple a companies as well right like even if a game is making for example you know a billion dollars
in revenue every year well robbie just pointed out how much was spent on user acquisition like i
remember when uh king was bought by activision blizzard they reported one year that they spent 670
million us dollars on user acquisition in one year alone so that's two million dollars per day
spent as robbie was saying going clearly to mr mark zuckerberg and facebook in trying to make
the game successful it did still make a crazy amount of money the company got bought for six
billions it was successful but still is that as successful as something else uh whereas i know
there was a kind of behind closed doors talk one day with supercell where their ceo ilka showed
what their ebit that was and basically they proved that they had a billion dollar company with less
than 120 employees and that was like wow how on earth do you do that now i don't think they've
managed to sustain it but you know that's like a better metric to maybe look at things so i'm kind
of rambling here but i think that yes they're largely superficial but they are important and
it is important the studios do this i think it's not just mobile studios that do this although i think
it's kind of part of their dna to do things but like i say if you're in a sea where you're battling
with a thousand other products you've got to do your best to stand out and if you weren't doing
that you wouldn't be very good at your job so i think these teams that are doing it are doing the right
thing definitely agree hopefully i've switched mics hopefully i sound better so she was telling
me off but you put out a couple of points i'm always a big kind of fan of mobile i think that
mobile would end up being what goes more mainstream before any of the pc versions for web 3 apparently
i sound worse so obviously this mic didn't fix anything um but to kind of pick up on a couple
of the points this is there's a lot of vanity metrics going on uh i think even outside of
mobile just in twitter in general we see a lot of it someone's helpfully pinned to the top that
there are gamers out there going all the way to level 30 in certain games so you can find some
gamers out there as well and one thing i want to throw in before we do head to michael and see if
we're able to get back is another game that um is kind of trying to push out it wasn't so much
downloads but they've partnered with a company called jambo phones and one of the web 3 games
goes out pre-installed on that phone as it goes out and i'm quite interested to see how that works
and if that's another way of sneaking web 3 games onto people outside of the web 3 bubble but we'll
head over to michael who hopefully has heard any of what we've been talking about but essentially the
question is cool does it matter when mobile games are flexing all these downloads that they're shown
at the moment um oh can you hear me yes we can oh good good yeah sorry um i i you know it's so
fascinating i don't come from mobile i'm i'm exploring the space but and have some advisors as we're
building kind of a um like we're building a two products one for pc and one for mobile but one of
the understanding i have in the mobile market is it's just as challenging if not maybe worse so than
the pc console market and because of the user acquisition costs um like was discussed earlier
the the cost to acquire users is realistically cost prohibitive unless you're one of the existing
players that has a massive fan base like zynga or um scopely that already has a funnel um and even
then it sounds like it's 20 to 30 to acquire a new user so um it's it's it's wild now the numbers i
think i'm sure they do matter um in terms of the stats that these games are playing um but i i think
they're deceptive because of that cost of user acquisition so i think that certain certainly the
bigger projects like monopoly go are are really generating mass amounts of profits um but obviously
it's a it's it's it's for everybody else that's not at that scale i think it's a really tough market
to penetrate um but i do think i do think that mobile is going to be a very interesting market for
crypto web3 gaming um i think it's actually probably going to be one of the key markets that actually
moves the needle for gaming in space because obviously everybody has a phone and that's where we
transact a lot of our crypto so crypto friendly games that are easily plugged into really simple
wallet constructions are going to i think really i think you're going to see a new kind of uh the
next angry birds phenomenon come from a phone via web3
gotcha i was just checking if uh if it's good there on the mic side but
yeah a lot of great points and i think it's good that you know you're an outsider looking in
um from a mobile industry standpoint because it's a fresh perspective and it definitely
i guess gives us more of an insight as well and a wider reach but i'll go back to you now robbie
um you heard the topic i'll let you kind of help us decide as well all these stats all these mobile
games flexing millions of downloads are we you know supposed to celebrate this should we be happy
about it or should we kind of be like okay another one million download whatever i i think honestly
it's it's great people should be proud of and happy about milestones and metrics um and and i think i
agree with anil on this part that is also is about um you know it goes back to this idea of user
acquisition which is very hard in web3 and so getting people's attention through metrics and
statistics or whatever the measurement or your token price there's all kinds of ways of getting
attention just brings people in to come and try your game um and obviously we've had meme coin
season and we've had airdrop farming and we've had all kinds of other different mechanics but
ultimately it's again about getting people in to come and try your product and so i think metrics are
another way to do that because um one of the tools for discovery of course is places like dap radar
where people can use their metrics um you know in a leaderboard um for discovery just as you know
mobile developers have historically used the leaderboards in the app stores
gotcha so we're saying yes it does matter and we should celebrate i'm staying with you though
for this next one because um i don't think anyone else can probably speak to this as much as you but
the third topic um in today's conversation is inspired by rumble kong league's new gatorade
partnership announcement and we wanted to kind of use that as a segue into web 2 web 3 partnerships
or you know mainstream brand partnerships it could be e-sports teams it could be something like a gatorade
does this matter is it a big deal and you know you working with the sandbox for such a long time i think
you definitely have some insight yeah no i think it i think it matters i think it matters and i think
it's great um i think the more that like again it goes back i to i hate to make it sound
unsexy but it's about user acquisition so it's about how do you connect with other communities
that will allow you to build that user acquisition funnel and it's the same reason that for example
when we were a web 2 mobile game studio we licensed other brands to make games like you know a garfield
game or an astro boy game or an ultraman game because those brands carried um brand equity and
existing user bases with them it meant that when people went into the app store and saw a match 3
puzzle game with garfield on it they would probably pick that rather than the one they'd never heard
of because they've heard of garfield and so it was a it was a mechanism for user acquisition
and i think we're seeing the same thing happen in web 3 but we can be much more creative and novel
because we have much cooler tools as to how we do that so now we can actually do online to offline
connections so you can give physical merch with qr codes that link to digital items that are in game
etc like there's all kinds of stuff you can do you can use your digital collectibles as tickets of
admission to live events and so it allows you to lean into creative marketing initiatives to really
cater to your community and i think the exciting thing is that yes those things require a lot of energy
and some expense and a lot of attention but it's also a reflection of the fact that these tools
allow us to create a much more curated experience for a loyal following and that loyal following tends
to be more loyal so retention tends to be much much higher i mean retention in web 3 games in my experience
is unthinkably high from a web 2 perspective you know in web 2 we were happy that we had
you know single digit percentages of seven day retention in a product whereas now you know
we're looking at 60 70 retention at the end of the month it's phenomenal ownership is the best retention
mechanic but at the same time monetization is much higher but the corollary to that is the audiences
tend to be smaller and so i also try to remind our portfolio companies look don't despair over the fact
that you've got 500 000 players or a million players in your game because if 100 of them are
paying users and they're spending tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars you know what matters is the
bottom line and can you pay your payroll not some vanity metric of what your da use are because the way
we measure success in web 3 is different and also i think the jury is still out as to what the best
measurement metrics are so i say actually you know the old-fashioned ones are are probably the best
do you make a profit you know if you're making a profit who cares how many users you have
a couple of points i want to pick up on hopefully this mike's uh better it's the third one so we will
see um i definitely agree with your last point of kind of if you're making profit who kind of cares
and i think this is even outside of our main discussion this is something that a lot of web
3 projects fall into the trap of that they think they're going to go mass market but they are too
niche they're never going to get that many people so if they focused their spend and their kind of
ambitions on who they can reach they could probably still be successful profitable companies but
they're they're going to burn themselves out chasing those big vanity numbers to to go through it
and then you mentioning on the kind of shared trust by bringing a brand in so people can go to
something new but it's got kind of a touchstone for them to go on i think that's a key point that
we've seen and i think that's why i'm more keen on partnerships that end up kind of spanning
outside of web 3 for now because most people in the web 3 bubble already kind of like web 3 stuff
but having a touch point for someone who's just coming in new could be a good way of making them
kind of pick you through all the noise but i'm going to head over to uh blast real as a game that
is this something that you'd have on your roadmap do these outside of web 3 partnerships
matter is it something that you're you'd be excited for man i'm going to sound like robbie's
biggest fanboy in this uh conversation i agree with what he has to say it's all about user
acquisition um and again i think it's about understanding your user base and your customers
and i think something we've definitely noticed especially with our game because our game kind
of tends to appeal to people that i would say are age 18 to 24 is where our biggest demographic is
there are other players of course but it's definitely much uh that's a leading majority that
what is it that people of that demographic like what are their trends and appealing to things like that
is going to get their attention if you look at our game some of the cosmetics we do they're very
deliberately picked and chosen for things that would be interesting to our players you know we
look at what people want in discord what they're asking for we give them what they want and so
similar if you do partnerships and things like that it'll work really well i mean i think right now if
you're aware of it but supercell are doing an amazing one with erling harland so if you don't know
who that is that's one of the best footballers in the world who scores goals like a machine
absolutely incredible numbers and yeah i'm guessing someone's an arsenal fan there fair enough
um but yeah they have a mode at the moment where he's a character inside clash of clans and they're
literally um appealing to their players to attack erling harland and steal his resources from him
and that's a brilliant idea of how to take kind of real life and merge it into reality now what's
going to happen in web 3 i'm probably giving away all our inside trade secrets here but you add that
with a web 3 paradigm on there where there's actual ownership and you're battling for real things that
then have secondary value that you can buy sell trade and there's limited exclusivity it's just
going to work like a thousand percent better than it already is and that's the opportunity we're all
chasing so i think brands are really important i think the one thing that i would say and this might
be the only time that i might upset robbie actually is that i think it is important to get the right
people involved so for example like you know getting paris hilton in your game in my opinion is not the
way to go about it because she's not cool anymore that's not going to work with today's demographic
right you've got to know and in fact if you choose the wrong thing it's actually going to give you a
bad rep because what's going to happen is you're going to feel like yesterday's news so you've got
to get the right people and of course what's also difficult with branding is that you could pick
someone up and then they do something absolutely stupid like if you look at the beef between two
american rappers at the moment well one's canadian to be honest with you but if you pick the wrong one
there who's been accused of doing some pretty dodgy stuff then all of a sudden your branding could go
down the pan and if you've invested millions or you've got some kind of massive campaign going it
can do badly but yeah for us definitely with the kind of style and branding of blast royale because
we're all about like irreverence having fun you know that's the whole point about why we've got a
noob token we're trying to poke fun about it and and you know how be playful in a good way and make
it like a safe space but fun to get involved for sure it's really important to us to work with people
like that who are on brand who get the vibe and see where we're going um but yeah i think it's
going to be a huge part of web 3 i think it's actually going to be like one of the secret
sources that pushes it so um anil i hate you because you call me an arsenal fan and i'm a
man united fan but i love you because that's a perfect segue into what i was gonna um actually ask
michael about because that point about the right partner um i want to play devil's advocate i do agree
with a lot of the stuff you guys obviously talked about but you see this a lot with esports teams
specifically whenever there's like an esports web 3 game announcement it's not always taken
let's say the right way or maybe the best way by the community because there are so many of them
and they never really seem to go anywhere so i'm not going to mention names but you see a lot of these
big esports teams collab with game xyz and it never really like comes to fruition i'm curious
from your perspective michael maybe this is something that games in the past on console
had to go through you know maybe they successfully did it maybe they didn't but what do you think
about these collabs that maybe are not a fit not because the the partner is the wrong partner i mean
an esports team is definitely a better example than a paris hilton for example but maybe the state of
the game is not quite ready yet for an esports team to get in maybe the game's actually not that
competitive like what do you think about these kind of collabs that maybe have fallen out
and have essentially forced the community to now not see them as a great signal but actually maybe a
bad signal essentially well so here's the interesting thing i think and you know again just looking at this
two things right for the web 3 space i agree with robbie that the profits matter because obviously if
you're making a profit off of a few people revenue is revenue profit is profit you can keep your company
going but the problem here in the web 3 space is the audience size is too small too small for people
like streamers right so streamers need to be and and and esports any anybody that's in the marketing
social media space that that's how they earn a living it's the wide it's you have to have a massive reach
there has to be like you know hundreds of thousands of people you can reach not a thousand people and
that doesn't help their personal their collaborations that are their other paying collaborations if they're
seeing like well when they do this stream there's only a hundred people that show up so it's a bit
tricky they'll do it for the money but if it's going to harm their brand they also have to play both sides
of the fence so until there are games that you can jump into web 3 that have audience sizes of you
know mass mass audience sizes that are similar to what these streamers are playing on minecraft and
roblox and call of duty and some of these other big it's going to be a little bit tricky to do collabs
with streamers and and get the success you want i think um i think we have to penetrate to get to get
the real partnerships within esports and streamers we have to have games that have daily active user
accounts that are in the hell divers numbers like i'm not saying it has to be hell divers it's ridiculous
but the thing is you have to have something like that to get their attention guys you're actually
killing me this is probably the smoothest uh conversation flow because that's a good segue into
my next point but before we get there um i want to hear from the audience as well i think so far
we've essentially established that most of them are kind of big deals and you should get excited
about them there are some caveats here and there and yes you should probably figure out who the right
partner is before announcing some kind of big mainstream partnership as a web 3 game but for
the most part seems like these are essentially somewhat big deals and we should kind of care about
them i'm curious to hear your thoughts feel free to drop any comments down below but michael on that
hell divers topic this wasn't actually part of the conversation initially it wasn't intended to be part of
this but because it happened and because it's so fascinating we have to talk about this and i
think you might be just the person to talk about this with um so to give people context hell divers
um was available on pc playable on steam and then sony kind of decided um let's pump our user account
numbers up so it was going to be a requirement that you set up a psn account um in order to continue
playing hell divers doesn't sound like a big deal for someone like me that has like five different
accounts and owns a ps5 and a ps4 and a ps whatever going all the way back to ps1 but for a lot of
people that live in countries where you can't technically have a you know a psn account or maybe
people that are not comfortable potentially sharing some of the information that's required to set up
one um this was an issue and what ended up happening is hell divers 2 got review bombed on steam
um the day the game is definitely great so when you look at the review difference between um i think
on playstation it's like a four star 4.6 out of five or something from like hundreds of thousands
of reviews and you look at steam and it's like mostly negative and all the negative comments are
nothing to do with the gameplay it has absolutely zero to do with the game it's just purely i hate sony
i hate corporate i'm not going to do this i will not fall in line and miraculously enough i don't think
people expected this to happen overnight because it wasn't really that long from the decision
sony actually went back on their decision and said okay guys you know what you don't have to do this
you're not gonna have to make an account kudos you guys win i want to bring this up with you michael
for two reasons one is obviously the playstation background so you might have um some more insight
there but also because you're now in web 3 because we always talk about community and the importance
of community and voicing your opinion and blah blah blah blah like what does that really show you
as someone that decided to make that move and essentially now you're watching corporates like
sony face the wrath of gamers that are just willing to put maybe not their dollars in this case i mean
some ask for refunds but putting you know reviews and putting themselves out there to essentially make
these companies go back on their decisions yeah so i can't really speak on behalf of sony and it's not
really my place to do that right now so i spent a long time there and i understand how the thinking
is um and obviously um it's not just a sony thing it's it's sort of a larger corporation view a
traditional view of how you communicate with the audience um and honestly it's tbd if um you know
there's going to be major shifts to more community engagement in better ways from larger companies i hope
it does happen that was one of the interesting things for me about web 3 was um i do think this
generation is completely different and they need to be included in conversations that affect them
um even as small as what playstation and what sony perceived as well you know they love the game
this is not a big deal it was in the terms and conditions before they purchased it it just wasn't
um a requirement at that time so but i think that the the whole we could call it a fumble or whatever
could have been avoided if they if they kind of had a better funnel for communication to their audiences
there's still a very very tight hold on how they communicate um and not just playstation not just sony
it's major companies that are sort of not having larger voices to the community and then allowing the
community to kind of talk to them a little bit more like we're talking now and saying hey these are the
things that we're thinking on on our major changes um they're kind of here are the reasons we're doing
them we need these we want you know to to bring you into our playstation ecosystem and if they had found
a way to communicate better with the community so the community had an idea it was coming and why it was
coming then honestly the the negative review stuff probably wouldn't happen at all so um i think
that one is just a misstep of misunderstanding of how important it is to communicate um ideas that
they might think is are insignificant but they're major significance not not saying they're not
significant if you can't play the game from a territory that you don't have a psn account that's
a major one i'm sure they knew that um i mean i don't think that was an an oversight but um i'm sure
they didn't also anticipate the gigantic backlash because you know it it didn't from a corporate
perspective it doesn't seem like a big a big deal but um i look at like what elon musk does on the x
account and you know he's constantly talking to the consumers his you know of major decisions telling
you ideas here's what we're thinking some of it just seems probably just for self-serving fun for him
on twitter but other stuff might actually be really decisions he wants to hear and wants the community to
know the tesla fans the tesla fans are massively you know um banded cults and so you know you want
to play to that you want to play that as a strength same as playstation it's a cult right so you got to
go to your cult you got to say hey this is this is what we're doing but what they had is they had
they had tapped into kind of like the partnership idea they tapped into a completely new market of
gamers with helldivers people that probably weren't playing playstation games at all
and so they just probably took that for granted that they they weren't a part of the playstation
cult already so they were just starting to kind of come into it and they they needed to soften the
way they brought them in rather than probably just assuming well they're here now we're going to flip
the switch you're going to sign up and then you'll be in that in that cult and so community is a very
very tricky thing they can turn on you very quickly i've had it with lithos in the last two years you
make one decision they don't like it they don't understand it they turn on you um and it's and it's
it's 10 times the work to turn them back than it is to lose them so um that's the that's the part
that when you learn that once um it's a hard hard lesson so now i've gotten a lot better at at you
know if i'm going to make a major decision or something that doesn't seem like really that big
of a deal to me because i'm totally not seeing it from their perspective um i try to be a little
more communicative and a little more transparent about some of these decisions that um i that will impact
their dollar spends so i don't know if that answers the question that's my perspective no
definitely it definitely does and uh luckily um the community turned it around it's now back to
mostly positive so um i think there was a sense of understanding there robbie over to you because
i think this really just um acts as a testimony really to kind of the ethos behind web3 gaming and
i think people always say you shouldn't build in public you should you know hold back don't show
your community everything don't speak to them all the time but then web3 gaming comes along and it's
like bro every everything in life is a discord server yes just gotta race it is it is and i think
also we've been like games have been a live product for a while now um you know it's been a long time
since a game was something that you you know compiled the code and shipped and then didn't touch
again and it just existed kind of wrapped in in plastic forever um games have been you know driven
by live services for a long time and i think that's the key um to the longevity of games i mean if you
look at the mother of all mmos eve online it's been in operation for 20 years and it's because it's a
live and living organism that is um you know a community first and foremost and the game is what binds
the community and i think we're seeing the same thing happening in web3 where um you know what we
have are we have great games but really we have great communities that are coming together for the
purpose of a game and you know some communities come together for the purpose of a pfp project and
they might have you know live events and other things like the board ap yacht club community for
example um and other communities come together because they like playing games and they like
you know like pixels for example which is a game we invested in and have worked closely with
is a very social game so people like to not just come in there and engage in a farming sim but they
also like to hang out because they can bring in their avatars and and be social so i think games are
kind of third spaces for people and as we build in public we have to take into account what it is that
the community is enjoying doing and the fun part is that we can actually you know beta test on them
live and and we can also you know canvas them for ideas um you know as per the elon example just now
with tesla and so i think part of how you communicate that ongoing process with the community is very
important and as we've learned in web3 communities specifically not keeping them informed does have its
consequences as well 100 percent um i definitely think anil you won't uh argue with these as well
as someone building a game in web3 you'll probably face this uh more than most i'm curious to hear your
thoughts and kind of how things turned out because i again like for me honestly out of all the topics
today this is probably the biggest deal and um like i said i'm not really affected i am uh essentially
playstation consumer i have so many different accounts to me it was like dude everyone's
blowing this out of proportion but the fact that it went that far and it turned the decision around
overnight it wasn't really like a oh you know after a lot of consideration and one month later
we're going to no it was literally like okay everyone's pissed off let's not do this anymore
i'm curious to hear i guess how you guys um see this as well this is one of the most interesting
things for us this has probably been the biggest learning for us in the two years that we've been
developing the game and i think it's really important to get any product to market as soon
as possible to start learning because uh to quote the great mike tyson in 1990 when he lost to buster
douglas everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face and then it all goes wrong and you have
to start learning and and figure out what you've done right or wrong and kind of correct on it
so i think with like any business and the thing is with like web3 games is that you know everyone's
a startup you're still trying to be disruptive and figure out something and generally speaking
what that means is you've got to think of like a problem that hasn't been solved yet and come up to
the solution to the problem because if you do that that's going to give you the edge or that ability to
go exponential and you know really be a big hit and in our opinion the problem that needs solving
is that players and developers are disconnected and we've been seeing signs of this for at least
five years if not a bit longer where you basically get corporate execs who are locked behind boardrooms
who don't really care about games some of them don't even play but they make the business decisions
and then you have gamers who knows what it is and these two things are very disconnected
now when games are kind of booming which they have were doing for about 10 years probably just until
after covid um you know it was easy just games were growing every single year you could basically do
anything and most of the time you're going to make money but as costs have started to go up and
there's been too much choice now it's it's more difficult and i think now companies that have
realized that they've been disrespecting their customers are starting to realize or they're
starting to kind of get a bit of comeuppance in my opinion so i think for us what we've realized is
that i think this is going to be the future and i think this is the biggest thing that web3 is going
to add to gaming i think this more than anything else is going to be the thing that is going to change
the industry and that's this closer communication between players and developers and because you can
actually give them tangible real meaningful things via kind of governance voting etc etc or the
ownership of nfts so they actually have skin in the game so to speak i think that's going to be huge and
i think that's going to be the next thing that goes forward so yeah i mean you look at hell divers
it's very interesting so they had like you know that's the second game they made so the first game
that they made was kind of like a niche hit but it found an audience and that audience really liked
the game they could tell that the developers you know cared about what they were making so they spent
a lot of time really kind of refined their craft and released the second one and the second one blew
up i think twofold but one of the big reasons it blew up is because that first audience got into it and
they told everyone to go and get this game and then it kind of like went big on on twitch and things
like that that's always a big way to kind of populate it but it was a good game and it was a good game
because that first audience helped make it a great game um and then yeah unfortunately it almost got ruined by
some decisions by sony there and so that's what i think can be avoided with web 3 and what some of
the other guys have been saying here on the cast is that like you've got to pay attention to your
customers now you know there is a bit of a challenge because at the same time it's like you know
sometimes your audience will tell you one thing but actually what they're saying is a bit different
to what they mean but i can tell you the blast royale something i find hilarious is every single
update that we've ever released in the first two days that we released that update it will be
considered the worst update that we've ever released every single time and then probably
on day three you get that oh you know it's not that bad actually on day four it's like kind of
like the seven stages of grief or kind of being like alcoholics anonymous sort of thing and then
like a week later it'll be like actually do you know what i think this update is really good
and it kind of keeps going there so you have to kind of point it out or they might say for example
that they dislike something and they're not wrong but it's like what they have a dislike for could be
different so for example oh the game is laggy that's a fair thing but does that mean the controls does
that mean there's ping time something the server thing it could just be the animations maybe the
gameplay there's nothing wrong with it and actually that's a key learning for us is we found that with
a recent update is we changed the animations to make them look a bit flashier but it actually made them
look slower so everyone was like oh dude why is the game so slow and we didn't slow the movement
down at all so like our our lead designer nick was like what are these guys talking about like i haven't
done anything to the movement speed but we were like is it a perception thing and it was right so
these are kind of the closed communications that that's a challenge but i think that's a good
challenge to have and that means that you on the team have to have better understanding of the
thing that you're making an overall ecosystem so i'm rambling a bit but yes i think this is huge
it's going to be the biggest thing going forward and i think the companies that really
understand it and solve it are going to do great i'm going to clean up and i think what's even
better if you're someone who does genuinely like games yourself i think this is amazing for the
industry because the truth is is that kind of customers have been nickled and dined probably for
the last 10 years you know battle passes you know mechanics that are basically incentivizing people
to gamble and things like this and i've put some of these mechanics into games so i understand why
they're done and you know when you've got to look after a business there's a reason sometimes you
have to do that but i think if you could actually make something that's good and it succeeds because
it's good that is more in the spirit of art and entertainment and it would be a better place to be in
but you know big business is always going to try and get a piece of it and it'll be interesting to see
how big business and this kind of close-knit community structure works together but i think that's maybe a few years away
definitely appreciate the the context as well with with some examples um we're getting to the
one hour mark so i really enjoyed this conversation i wish we could go on for hours and hours but we'll
have to wrap things up so um i want to let each of you essentially kind of give us a few final i guess
parting thoughts or maybe where to keep up with whatever you're working on or building uh maybe i'll
stick with you first the neil uh might be the easiest and then we'll move on to robbie and michael yeah
absolutely well look our game is called blast royale you can download and play it right now
play it let us know what you think get involved we're trying to make kick-ass games we're trying
to involve players and give them a voice and make games great again join us on our journey
that's a wild statement maybe it's a great again uh robbie over to you
sorry i don't i don't know how i can i don't know how i can top that but uh no
you can follow us obviously on twitter and that's where you see most of um the updates of
what's going on in our ecosystem um and so definitely you know come and join in and i always
encourage people if you if you're not a gamer and you haven't played web3 games or you are a gamer and
you're new to web3 um just try stuff it doesn't have to be our stuff just try any stuff and get into
it um because there's no better way to learn and find out what you enjoy and what you know what new
features are available especially in web3 that can uh can tickle your fancy so get out there and try
something would be my advice get out there and try something that's what we're going with and michael
over to you lethos what are you guys up to yeah so this was a super interesting conversation if
you're interested in any of the following topics that you know we're covered here which is you know
pc console web3 um the intersections of these things and um you know the also user acquisition
and go-to market strategy so we're kind of at the center of experimenting in all those things
um i actually love this fish out of water feel we created a new ip about a year ago we were working
um we started in the space two years ago on a triple a um ip as the entire market was collapsing and
instead of just trying to carry that forward in a really very very difficult market um we pivoted a
year ago to something a little bit more friendly and something that we could release a little faster
also realizing that web3 patience is not the same as the patience that i come from from pc console
people needs to play something much much faster and the game that we were heading down was not going
to be possible deliver fast so we wanted to put something in the pipeline that could get into
players hands faster and also honestly we knew we had to grow our community bigger so we have a new
project um it's a satire parody project of chat gpt it's a character called rant cpu he's having a
hell of a lot of fun it's a mischievous dennis the menace type character and he has a game called no
one is safe so we'll be debuting that game very soon we have a bunch of really really interesting
stuff we started a tiktok channel which if you don't if you're not familiar with tiktok or don't use
it because you don't see how it connects anything um i was experimenting with that user funnel of saying
well what can we we target audiences we want to engage with our um younger audiences plus older
audiences i know how to make games for older audiences but it's younger audiences so our thesis
is testing these places that they use the younger audiences are seeing those behaviors take that back
into the learnings for the game and then of course there's going to be a mobile game so we think it's
really good place to kind of launch the uh you know into that community as well so we we quickly grew
the tiktok channel from zero to 30 000 in a few months and had um you know about a uh three million
three and a half million engaged um viewers there and then our you know web3 audience and we're trying
to kind of take these micro communities and merge them and all use this data to kind of shape the game
so if you follow the journey um we're doing a lot of experimental stuff hopefully it'll it'll help
um other web3 communities as well beautiful i love that and with that i'll wrap up you can also
find us games gg on tiktok and every other social media platform um if you enjoyed this conversation
uh if you joined in late you can feel free to tune in to the recording or also check it out on all your
favorite podcast platforms it'll be up on spotify apple podcasts i'm always missing something there's
like google there's amazon there's a bunch of stuff but anyways it's out there everywhere um and if you
enjoyed this conversation and you're keen to hear more from future guests we'll be back
every wednesday same time same day ideally with george and gaspo doing their whole twin spiel
um so it'll be maybe a little bit more fun as well uh but thank you guys for joining thanks for
everyone that tuned in until the very end as well um it was lovely having you guys michael and neil
um robbie thanks thanks for all the insight and helping us figure out if all these topics were
big deals or just uh something to not pay too much attention to i think we learned a lot
from all the different perspectives great thank you thanks for tuning in guys see you next week
