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Gamified #120 | Web3 Singleplayer? | Hot Takes
Recorded: June 4, 2025 Duration: 2:04:12Space Recording
Short Summary
The panel discussion delves into the evolving landscape of Web3 gaming, emphasizing the shift towards single-player experiences, strategic partnerships, and the potential for new token launches as developers adapt to changing consumer preferences.
Full Transcription
Thank you. you
Even when I kick it off early ae and trike you guys can't I can't fool you I can't fool you I figured I'd get the the link spread out and do all the stuff
I have to do a little bit early ae also code with the comment
Insane number one also going for that
first record appreciate you guys a ton I'm gonna go silent for just a couple
of minutes here and then we'll get rolling Thank you. so . I'm going to go. I . Thank you. All right.
Two more minutes to go before we kick off.
Thanks, everybody, for being on time.
Man, the panel's filled up.
Great to see everybody.
Got another banger show.
120 episodes, man.
That's just, that's arguably too many.
But I'm still glad to be here.
It's great that you guys keep showing up.
Limbs, I'm going to send you a co-host invite.
We might have overbooked the panel by one today because I had a couple of last-minute confirmations
and wanted to make sure that we had a nice, hot and juicy one.
Hot and juicy one. Gonna make sure we get Kate Irwin up here, Justin Gary, etc.
Going to make sure we get Kate Irwin up here, Justin Gary, et cetera.
Avalanche, if you can accept the co-host invite as well so we can free up one of these panelist spots for our speakers, I would really appreciate that.
We'll make sure we get everybody buttons up and ready to go.
I'm actually, give me 30 seconds and then we'll go ahead and jump into some introductions.
Get this dog and pony show on the road.
dog and pony show on the road koji what are we watching today man what's the movie of the day
Koji, what are we watching today, man? What's the movie of the day?
um well i already watched uh the craft earlier uh but i think tonight i'm gonna go
uh the great movie starring neve campbell my first uh celebrity crush um and then
later tonight i think i'm gonna go into some some Italian horror films. Did your crush come from Scream?
Or was it from that other one, Wild Things?
There was another one?
I mean, both great calls.
But no, Party of Five, man.
Oh, wow.
Party of Five.
Okay.
Okay.
That's like, yeah, that's the early.
That's like their EP.
That's right.
That's right.
I'm like, well, how dare you assume that Koji would get his Hollywood crush from a movie that more than 17 people watched?
No, Party of Five is a TV show, sir.
But I actually met Neve Campbell on the street when she was premiering the Scream remake in Toronto.
And it was the greatest day of my life.
She invited me to the screening and I went
and it was incredible.
Nice, man.
That's fucking awesome.
That is pretty cool. You have achieved many
a boyhood dream with that one moment.
Also,
questionable tastes.
Yeah.
Sam, you know who you need to boot
if you have to. That's my
role.
Thanks, bud. Appreciate Doug always
taking that on the chin. Live from
Turkey, we'll try to be
nice to Doug. He had gum surgery
and so if his
takes are bad, it's because the Novocaine isn't
worn off all the way. Don't worry about that.
Yeah, that's it. It's the Novocaine.
It's the Novocaine. Justin gets it, dude.
Introducing the genius who fuses legal wizardry with digital dynamite,
the mastermind behind Andromeda and the compliance king
who's got more loopholes quaking in fear.
He's the knight of Nintendo, the ace of Andromeda,
the wild card of the courtroom. It's Michael Christine.
Hey, what up, everybody? Happy to be here.
Can't wait to get into it.
GG, it's great to have you.
Kate, I'm sending you an invite.
Get up on the panel so I can introduce you at some point as well.
Up next, he helped define what streaming looks like today,
then left Twitch with a tattoo, a legacy, and a flamethrower full of ideas.
Now he's bringing that same kinetic energy to wildcard
and thousands serving strategy hotter than a rage quit Reddit thread.
It's the titan of Twitch, the baron of budgets,
and the god of glitter.
It's Tony V.
Let's go.
Stoked to be here on Gamified.
Great to have you.
As always, big dog.
Up next, do we have this?
He is here.
He's the true spewing, suit skeskewering ex-poker kingpin
who once turned a card game into a cultural revolution.
Say that five times fast.
But when he saw the game rigged in finance, tech, and policy,
he turned to blockchain.
And that brings us to today.
My angry Acuza girlfriend is almost here,
and it's a shakedown of everything fake in the space.
It's the founder who can't be bought, and he's about to go live.
It's Sengen.
Hey, thanks, Sam. I'm awake and I'm ready to eat some souls today.
Ready to eat some souls and take a nap. My man. I love you, dude. Thanks for waking up as early as you have for many, many, many months now. Appreciate you. Up next, he's a strategic
savant with the conviction of a founder
in the fandom of a Colts fan, which is to say he believes in lost causes.
He simplifies like a saint, swings golf clubs like a demon,
and always has RuneScape open on another tab during meetings.
He's the only guy who will roast your roadmap while queuing up for NHL 25,
and it's our CSO, the chief simplifying officer. It's knock.
No, we don't talk about nhl 25 anymore
sam that's the game that made me realize i am way too old to be playing
ea sports games on a yearly basis those kids are
what was what was the key thing knock what was if you had to boil it down to one thing that made
you feel that way about about it two years ago we're in league play we make it to the top league me and five other guys this year we played eight games couldn't even
fucking score a goal i don't know what happened in the last 24 months but we got annihilated
you didn't know you were in bot lobbies up until up until that moment
up next most bd guys flex slide decks. This guy flexes just literally.
He flexes.
And also metaphorically.
But he's the guy who can explain subnets and make you feel bad for skipping leg day.
It's the bench pressing brand whisperer.
Make way for the strategist with shoulders the size of boulders from AVAX.
It's Mr. Will Spangler.
The one morning I don't lift, you make my intro lift centric just to make me feel a little
bit worse about it.
So thanks for that, Sam.
This is me fat shaming you, Wills.
Get back in the gym.
You're no longer 99.8% muscle.
Up next, from rock walls to the card halls, he's scaling meadows and climbing markets.
The co-founder of parallel and
colony and a collector so committed even his hoodies have lore from web3 esports to sci-fi
sagas the shroud sling and savant built parallel from the ground up while staying grounded in his
style welcome the dry humor demigod of deck builders it's the card sling and cinephile
it's koji what's up man uh thankfully not out of breath this episode i did my workout before i came so
uh just for you sam you told me to bring my my b game and i'm gonna bring that b game
a meaningful upgrade over the d game that we're used to getting from koji i appreciate that thank
you so much he coded your childhood your grandma's favorite game and probably the reason that your
productivity graph looks like a roller coaster.
He made Solitaire sexy and Dungeon Siege spicy, but his next project is a trading card game where Sherlock Holmes and Medusa can go toe-to-toe on the blockchain, where he's turning folklore into firepower with Project O.
He's the deck daddy, the Gandalf of game design.
Pay respects and pull a foil with Kevin Lambert.
Ooh, that was a good one.
Thanks, Sam.
Appreciate all those references.
That was really cool.
And it's great to be here with you fine folks.
Great to have you back as always, brother.
And yeah, three TCG legends on the panel today.
It's a juice.
I should have come up with more TCG topics to honor the occasion here, but I'm sure you
guys have plenty of topics or plenty of takes on all the other things
that we have here today for you.
But up next, before he was building AI agents
for 3D Adventures, he was behind the curtain
at Nintendo, pulling the production levers
of childhood magic.
But he's traded Mario for machine learning,
and now he's the co-founder of Yumio,
trading simulations to feel like soulmates.
It's the composer of Connection,
the designer of tomorrow.
It's Michael O'Connor.
Nice and interesting faux pas there, trading simulations.
Let's trade simulations.
I can roll with that.
Let's do it.
Is this you announcing your new NFT launch, each of which is its own AI?
It's in my new project, TradeSim.
Appreciate you coming on as always, Michael.
I know it's late for you too.
And up next, at just 17 years old,
he wasn't just playing Magic the Gathering.
He was mastering it,
taking home the US National Championship
like it was a side quest,
but that was just his tutorial level.
Since then, he's gone from Pro Tour Champion
to Prolific Designer, building Ascension.
And now his next passion, Soul Forge Fusion.
It's the Shuffler of Systems, the deck-building demigod.
Damn it, I said demigod twice.
It's Justin, Gary.
There could be multiple deck-building demigods.
I'll take it.
I'll take it.
Happy to be here.
Thanks, Justin.
I appreciate that forgiveness.
We're going to do great on this panel with kind-hearted people like you.
I appreciate it.
She's covered console wars and crypto winters with a sentence structure as sharp as her pen,
an MFA-trained creative writer, and the mind behind blockworks The Drop.
She's her favorite reporter's favorite reporter. Before she was documenting Dow drama and token trends,
she was crafting stories in Hollywood and shaping prose at Columbia.
Welcome back to the panel. It's been far too long for the mage of media.
Reporting live from the edge of the internet, it's Kate Irwin.
Hi, thanks for having me back. I'm back because I wrote a very controversial thread.
Great time, you Kate. It's controversial because it's like an interesting opinion, though,
not because you said something completely
idiotic that everybody was upset about.
So I think it's going to be fine. I'm
excited to talk about it. Thanks so much for coming on the
show as Twitter
freaks out on my side of the internet.
Up next, he's the cold-blooded
king of commentary, the gecko with the
gift of gab and the only panelist here
who can win OBD cart and an argument at the
same time. Tiny but terrifying, it's a 2..4 pound typhoon of hot takes slams what is up everyone and kate
we're glad you put the spicy take out there it makes we have like an interesting topic for today
and uh i feel like we've talked about single player on the panel before and now we get a you
know really dissect it and get some different takes from, man, we got a big panel
of big brains today. So excited to get
into it.
Dude, I forgot there's an entire
soundboard. I just accidentally
opened it, and it took me the last
two and a half minutes to figure out how to close it again.
Twitter's a nightmare. This is
ridiculous. Who uses this stuff?
Up next, we
gotta give a huge shout shout out to our amazing sponsors
prepare to ascend to this the peak of innovation with avalanche the official blockchain of gamified
with possibilities as high as the himalayas avalanche allows you to own a digital everest
where your community plants its flag and your own token fuels the climb so whether you're a seasoned
chirper or a curious climber come explore the avalanche possibilities plus you could find us
in london if you were there. It was friggin' incredible.
AVAX Summit was a beast, both there and in Buenos Aires,
along with many of their other favorite folks.
So don't be left at the cold next time.
Make sure you make it out to the next AVAX Summit.
Absolutely banger event.
And of course, Game 7 isn't just your run-of-the-mill developer.
They're architects of growth, building a better landscape for Web3 Gaming,
the official infrastructure of Gamified. They've got this incredible toolkit with summon a super
powered magnet that keeps players hooked plus hyperplay your fast lane into web3 gaming make
it in a breeze to discover and dive into new games shout out to game seven the infrastructure
innovators making it all come together and one more real quick thing if you like this show even
just a little bit uh throughout the show maybe give us five stars on spotify or apple podcast
or anywhere else that you listen to your podcast we're like 10 different things now
it's basically our xp system and we're trying to level up so we'd appreciate it uh but no worries
if you're too busy you know it's cool it's cool we can wait what's the word for call of duty
update filling you premium skins in the weapons menu the latest black ops 6 update has added a
new quote-unquote feature on top of your weapon
selection screen every time you toggle between weapon builds you get to see a new ad for skins
one player said that they wouldn't mind if it was a free-to-play game like war zone but not in a game
that i paid like 70 bucks for so should this be expected uh is this just a natural progression or
have they crossed the line here and what's the word for Activision placing ads above the weapon selection menu in Call of Duty?
I'm actually going to go to my co-host with the most here, Lens, and then I'll go to Tony V.
All right.
My word is Activision because fucking Activision.
I feel like that, like, should we really be that surprised?
I mean, I fucking hate this.
Like, I think it's really shitty.
Um, I, I totally agree with the take on if it was a free to play game, it's like, yeah, that's, you know, as much as it would be annoying, the game was at least free to play, but man, you go out and you buy a new launch game and then you get like additional ads shoved in your face, like super shitty, but also not all that surprising from activision
and even if people complain about it and they get conversions from it you know they're going
to do it over and over and over again yeah the the beginning of the end uh would be my word if
i was allowed to use like infinite hyphens let's go over to tony v then kevin lambert
yeah the the word is old news hyphenated old hyphen news uh this has been going
on for years guys like i got promoted my one of my last years at amazon because i got call of duty
specifically to put an image of the free twitch prime shit that you got in call of duty that year
in the game in the exact same merchandising slot that's being talked about right now and this was
like hazel's nine this was like six years ago seven years ago um that's i saw this and i was like this is just not a this is a this
is not a new thing at all i think that uh and and honestly like i don't i also don't think it's a
terrible thing right like you know say what you want about like and offending your eyes but if
you don't like it don't click on it and if uh i think we talk a lot about like the importance of
live services we just i think last gamified we talked about the importance of importance of live services
and in video games and for all the shitty stuff that they do i'm not up here defending bobby
he's a lizard person but um bobby i'm just kidding if you don't work together let me know
but uh but you know the the call of duty specifically they they do a lot of good
stuff with their money right like they put a decent amount of money into the Veterans Foundation they
support every year.
And the reason that I know that that merchandising slot exists is because
that's how I justified them giving it to us at Amazon when we were working
together.
I played Call of Duty for like a month and I was like, Hey,
you guys advertise this,
this code like charity shit that you guys do all the time.
Can Amazon just like give a bunch of money to that and get that
merchandising slot?
So, you know, I, like I said, I think, I i think it's it's just part of the part of having a live
service game now and people should get used to it and i think call of duty does a better job than
most of pushing pushing their money around in a in a good way dude i love that you happen to just
have a bunch of anecdotes about this type of shit it's always my favorite thing let's go over to
kevin lambert then we're going to knock the word the word is uh intentional i think like it's interesting that the bounds of
monetization are being a b tested in live production now by these games like a mobile
game in development would do it's it's really interesting it's sort of like now live games that we've loved and known for years are becoming monetization experiments.
That's kind of interesting.
It's also kind of expected.
And I think, you know, the community feedback, you know, the outrage versus the, hey, this is okay, is part of their data collection.
You know, they're basically stress testing the community's tolerance
to see what they think about this.
And I think the timing of the ad placement is strategic.
Microtransaction ads being shown during customization moments
are very similar to how cosmetics are pushed
during champion selections and MOBAs and stuff like that. customization moments are very similar to how cosmetics are pushed during like champion
selections and MOBAs and stuff like that. So it's interesting the placement that they chose to put
that. And then I think the last thing I'll say about it is it's probably a reflection of challenges
at these studios. And even with these beloved games games they're feeling pressures to um even premium franchises
like cod gta elden ring are potentially facing internal expectations to get more revenue and so
they're willing to accept mobile style monetization models to push their margins. Oh, God.
I hate the sound
of that, man. The end of days is near
is nigh.
Oh, God. I thought
this is why we just relegated
mobile to its own little category.
Nock, I'm going to you next. What's the
word for these...
Whatever the fuck you would call this.
The word is creativity, as in their lack of it.
Man, if you're gonna shove shit in my face when I'm trying to play COD, at least get
creative with it.
Instead of a kill feed, give me a fucking highlight reel of some ad that you want to
push a skin, something that would have made me better in that game.
There's billboards and cars and graffiti and fucking magazines all over COD maps.
If you're gonna do this shit at least do it
in a creative way it's fucking annoying but at least make it fun that's a great take short and
sweet i love that let's go to koji up next yeah sorry and my take is uh we'll say big time big
hyphen time welcome to the big time boys like video games have pushed
through to to like the pinnacle of of entertainment we you know we saw it with tv which you know cable
wasn't necessarily free but there was fucking ads all over that shit then we saw with home video you
buy a movie and what happens before you watch the movie a whole bunch of previews for other
fucking movies same thing when you go to the movies and now video games are like, fuck it.
Let's just pack in.
I don't care if you're paying for it.
Let's just pack in some more commercials for some more shit.
You know,
like it is just a sign that video games have become the like most premium
form of entertainment.
And they're just trying to get a buck wherever they can.
Pretty soon we're going to have synergies.
We're going to see ads for the TV programming around the video game in the
video game and all that other
bullshit. It's just, you know, this is, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
That's a great take, Koji.
Also a fantastic one from Graslow in the comments,
which reminds me to say guys drop your comments.
I would love to hear your takes on what the word is here,
but Graslow says who's making the AI agent to watch the ads for me so I can
focus on playing the game
let's go over to wills then to justin gary
wills my boy i'm here i'm here i'm cooking while i do this but uh i i think uh my word is capture
as in value capture this is just a further push as we've been seeing with so many
other games where selling a product isn't enough and that's because the way that we're currently
selling these products and the value that they're generating for these large companies either isn't
capturing adequate value that's being provided to the consumer,
or is just trying to, you know, crank everything to 11 to see how much consumers can put up with.
I can't remember if it was in shittification or in sloppification, but both of those words apply here.
It's how bad can we make the things people, how bad can we make the things that people love
until they turn it off?
And that's kind of,
it's what's happening with social media platforms.
As Koji said, it's what happened with TV.
You know, this is just going to keep happening
until there is a major shakeup,
which, you know,
what could potentially shake up gaming in a massive way?
I don't know.
I'll leave it to you guys.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge at the end.
Justin, I'm going to you,
and then we're tagging in Michael O'Connor and Kate Irwin.
Yeah, my word's going to be expectations, right?
Because I think a lot of what comes down here is like
how you choose to monetize your game
and how people react to it
comes down to the expectations that you have set up
and that the environment has set up ahead of time, right? So a lot of people made the comment, well, if this
was free to play, if this was mobile, nobody would have said a word, right? But the expectation
has shifted because this is a high upfront cost premium AAA game that we're not going to do that.
And so whoever jumps that expectation gap and is going to take errors, right? And that's true for
all the stuff we do right you
you're the first one is bringing crypto into a game space people hate i mean i'll tell you as a
personal i took a lot of errors from bringing crypto into a game that was a tabletop game and
came to digital people who are going to do that with ai and who are the first couple people who
used ai art and brought these things in take a lot of hits so the key is like once you start to see
these moves you need to either like do a better job
of setting expectations yourself
or what you're going to see
is the trend will just start moving
and then this stuff becomes more normalized
and then you're not,
nobody's going to talk about it after.
So I always look at these sort of new shifts
and saying everybody gets upset
because it's new,
but really it's all comes down
to the expectations players have.
That's a fantastic way to put it.
I always think too of like, is it enough like when are people
when are when are these big corporations that have ips that people love going to be like okay we've
we've reached the the point i see knock hit me with the thumbs down it's never enough
capitalist knock uh let's go over to michael o'connor then we're tagging in kate
um yeah sign of the times isn't it it? I mean, I think some context is
that they've laid off thousands and thousands of employees
over the past 12 months.
So that's an organization that has done struggles.
They're running all sorts of live service games.
And it's worth remembering that the big IPs
support the small IPs
in those big organizations.
The big IPs are actually what give the opportunity
for those corporations to gamble on smaller IPs
or introduce new IPs.
So that's where they've got to squeeze that juice.
So I'd say it's kind of, it's hardly surprising
that they're looking at different ways.
I don't find it all that shocking or insulting i think it would be a bummer to see um to see kind of
premium games move towards a more like like aggressive free play system um personally
that's not what i kind of want but i think that there's it's natural enough that um you will see more hybrids as like
the whole games industry changes right a quite a revolutionary moment almost with the whole video
games industry so people need to experiment with different business models in order to be able to
make their businesses grow or just to stop the absolute cataclysmic burn that some of them are
facing as well um no overall i don't think it's that insulting or too bad.
Like from, from what I've seen with Activision at the moment, I, I think,
I think it's a good reference to think about when you go into the cinema and you
pay your, I don't know, five bucks or 20 bucks,
wherever you are in the world and you go in and you know, you watch,
you watch some ads and you watch a trailer and then you watch your movie and
you've had that experience.
You don't fucking walk out and whinge about the fact that that Coca-Cola ad really pissed you off.
So I don't think it's that big a deal.
I think that gamers can be, and us all, we can all be quite sensitive towards those changes.
But I think we can look at other aspects of society and business and not be too surprised.
I just want to point out that we did do that with one certain Pepsi ad,
but I get the point, Mike.
It's also true.
The thing I always think about, the most clear example of this
that we can see in real time, like very obviously, to me,
feels like ads coming on NBA jerseys, if anybody watches basketball here,
where they're starting with like just a really small one on the lapel,
and then you look at Formula One and European soccer, it's like literally every inch of these people's bodies is an advertisement.
And then people will buy that jersey and wear a thing that says like Everett's from nipple to nipple across like all of Europe all day.
It's like what they want to sleep in, what they want to be buried in, and they don't even care that it's literally 19 different companies because they've just been desensitized to it i'm going to kate erwin next kate what's the
word for what activision is doing here and what do you think the future where are they going from
here is it only going to get worse yeah it's it's interesting i mean stuff like that's starting to
happen across games that are owned by microsoft from what i'm seeing like i've noticed similar
stuff happening in overwatch where it's okay, now you need a shard
and then you have to pay shards to upgrade the weapon.
And there's like four different levels.
Instead, like before it was super simple.
You just upgrade the weapon with a coin that was free
that you earn in the game by playing it.
And so like the monetization strategies
are definitely getting more aggressive.
I guess Call of Duty claimed that that like load
out menu ad was an error and people are accusing them of lying. I think that's interesting.
But like, yeah, Activision is a part of this like behemoth that is Microsoft. And so I think like,
you know, Microsoft isn't doing super well, at least they don't seem to be um there's like a big contraction going on
across gaming you know hollywood even like tech a little bit like microsoft laid off 6 000 people
last month um and they're laying off even more people now um hundreds more jobs after firing
6 000 last month so yeah and like last year they also laid off thousands of people so i just think
it's interesting like kind of watching microsoft last, like put a huge amount of money into AI
as like their main area of investment. And now we're sort of seeing some of that come home to
roost a little bit. Yeah, I see confirming that the guys from Insider Games called this the inshittification of Call of Duty.
So he's giving a shout out to Will Spangler.
Let's go to the tatted lawyer, then knock for a quick word,
and we're moving on from this one.
Yeah, I think really the only word you can say here is capitalism.
It's the end of an era of you can just buy a game like Expedition 33
and everything's in the game.
You don't have to buy anything in addition to that. I think we're going to see so many premium titles start to
include in-app purchases, in-game purchases, things like that, because at the end of the day,
they're trying to maximize revenue. They are absolutely just trying to see what can the user
base take? What are they going to put up with? Every time, if you've ever noticed, when a new company tests something or an idea like this, it's immediately a mistake after the
entire industry is like, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell? But then a couple months
later, they just implemented fully. What they did with, I think it's like Netflix standard now has
commercials. So you're basically just watching cable TV now.
So I think this is just going to be the starting point for the big boys really, really diving in heavy to get into these ad placements.
And it's just going to get worse as Microsoft's AI starts to integrate with all the various different products from gaming to obviously their computer suite so end of the era uh well i'm ready for it you gotta be ready for it it's just
it's just a natural progression of time like i said
i'm gonna go to knock and then we finally got og on the panel we've been fighting
our way through that one i want to get uh og's taking a koji also raising the hand again knock
over to you yeah i was a little tongue-in- cheek with the first take here, but the real word is obligation.
I think if you're looking at a company and trying to understand why they're doing certain things,
you should start at the three or four biggest stock exchanges in the world. If they're on there,
then board members and decision makers from that company literally have a legal obligation to do
what is in best interest of the shareholders, which is bring in more money to that company literally have a legal obligation to do what is in best interest of the shareholders,
which is bring in more money to that company.
These companies are not laying people off because they are hurting.
They're recording record profits over the course of the last few quarters, a lot of them.
And the reason for the layoffs is actually about capital optimization.
They're trying to increase the P.E. ratio for their companies so that they look better, so that when quarter end comes, Bobby and his boys and everybody like him gets an additional 10, 15, 20 million dollar payout at the end of Blizzards or now the Microsoft, the EAs of the world, the soon-to-be-riot game world will do these things
because they have an obligation to explore how they can make more money from less money in.
This is not new. It's going to continue as long as there are public companies. And this happens
in literally every other industry. We're just now at a point where you have a number of significant
players in the gaming industry who have released titles that have been around for 10 or 15 years,
and they are now being pressured and squeezed to make sure that earnings at the end of each quarter
look really good. And the best way to do that is to cut your costs and to find better ways to
monetize. Yeah, I'm glad that you've brought this up along with somebody else. I can't remember who it was, but I have not run a decabillion-dollar company, so I will digress there. But I've heard that Game Pass has just been an atrocious failure, where they have been hemorrhaging money left and right for multiple years now. to stretch to make it up in other areas uh shame that it's at the the the cost of sort of tainting
one of their most beloved franchises i'm going to try to tag in og og with us i know you're still
struggling with audio uh what's the word for uh call of duty adding these ads inside of the game
yeah i can hear you now uh not really surprised uh i don't know why you called it one of the
most beloved franchises i don't think it's been that for quite some time now.
But yeah, I don't know. It doesn't really...
Look at the numbers, bro.
It doesn't really surprise me at all. And I think Activision's always been headed there anyways.
So until and unless Call of Duty as an IP gets out of Activision's hands, which is not really likely to happen in the next one or two or three installments.
I think this is just the reality of things.
It happened with the Battle Pass.
It happened with the skins.
Now it's happening with this.
Like, not really super surprised.
And I think Nock mentioned it earlier.
earlier riots going down the same path with league of legends you're seeing it a lot more now
Riot's going down the same path with League of Legends.
where they just used to be like very happy to give you free skins and re-rolls and you know
hex tech chests and then they said we're going to take them away then the community got pissed off
and they're like okay maybe we won't take them away so yeah to to nox point i think it's just
what big companies do as they try to grow and grow and make more money um can you fault them for it
i think you can be upset about it but i don't think you can really fault them for it it's like asking someone
to just stop making more money um i think you can you can be upset because they're trying to make
the money off of your back sure but it's like okay just you know it's the same thing with youtube
ads like just you either subscribe to youtube premium or you shut up and watch the ads it's the same thing asking uh activision not to add shitty monetization practices like asking a whale not to swim dude
koji over to you then we're moving on yeah i mean basically we just live in a dystopian hellscape
you know there was a point in time where there was a point in time where you could take a flight
and like there was a bar and a lounge and a second floor where you just like hang out.
And now like they're designing these planes where people have to stand up to be in them.
Like this is what we live in now.
You can buy a social media company and then buy the election if you want.
So like who gives a fuck?
You know, it's like an ad in a game.
That's where the straw that broke the camel's back.
We're already fucked, guys.
We're already fucked.
Just let us play video games and disassociate in peace.
That's all I ask.
I understand you're going to do the rest of it,
but let me click on people's heads in peace over here.
All right, guys, we've got to move on.
Great, great, great thread from Kate Irwin.
I want to get your guys' sentiment score on this one on single-player Web 3 games.
Okay, Shatter line announced last week
that they're moving their focus from online multiplayer to a single player experience
they previously were a single player and a multiplayer experience and for those of you
that don't remember the game had over 25 000 mostly positive steam reviews before it was
i thought it was acquired uh i talked to jonah. Apparently, it was republished by Faraway, which there's some
grayness in there, I understand. But that seems to be coming to an end now. That contract is over,
and now they're being republished again by somebody else or something like that. But that's
largely irrelevant. Kate Irwin had an amazing post that said, quote, stop making multiplayer
crypto games. Stop making crypto battle royales and multiplayer FPS
titles, stop making crypto MMORPGs. Some of this might be out of order, but I'm trying to only say
things that actually were in the thread. She said, unless you're making them all AI controlled bots
or have over $100 million in a plan to market to mainstream gamers and somehow overcome the
longstanding NFTs are bad sentiment, you simply will not be able to compete in this market for long.
Make single-player games with in-game shops where the trading connects to players.
One player lifts their sword from their home in Asia,
and 12 hours later, another player in NA buys it.
GG, easy, unquote.
Love the ending there.
The post has gotten a lot more to it,
so I recommend, Lems, if we can post it up or pin it up for people to read along with us.
They referenced some Web 2 single-player games with economies and elaborated on some of the challenges of multiplayer games in Web 3, such as player liquidity.
But again, asking for people's sentiment score on single-player games in Web 3.
And Kate, I wanted to offer you the floor if you want to clarify anything that I might have messed up there or a thing that you had to respond to a lot in the thread before we go to people or if you just want to hear people's opinions based on that
happy to also go around the hands. I'll go to you first Kate. Thanks Sam yeah and just before we
get started I just want to say like I mostly play multiplayer games so it's not like I don't hate
multiplayer games. I don't think single player games are the only way forward um and i don't think that all multiplayer games
will fail either so um there's a lot of nuance to this and and hopefully folks can understand that
and that not every single take of mine to the nuance is is written there um it's such a long
post and i still didn't get everything into it that's the the brutal reality of Twitter basically everything I write I
delete half of it and then people like why didn't you mention this I'm like
fuck I did I did in my head and I wrote it and then you know for the sake of the
algo I think Tony and Koji both had the hand up first I'm gonna go to Tony that
will go to Cody you know what I'm gonna say Sam, Sam? You know what I'm going to say? And it's show me the money. And I believe that's still true. I think that all of the angst and upsetness and all of the negative feelings that people have around games failing in crypto existed. There's a whole, if you just Google, I'm upset that I kickstarted something that never existed.
You'll find forums and forums filled with people arguing about whether or not funding a Kickstarter was an investment that they could sue over.
Like this is a tale as old as time, right?
And I really think that the answer is, yeah, I think single player games might be the answer.
But I really think the answer is just like make games that make money.
And, you know, I work with a lot of different people in this space.
I talk to a lot of different people.
And I always know I'm in trouble when I'm talking to someone and I say that.
And they're like, yeah, but that's like really hard.
I'm like, yeah, man, like you're in a hit driven business.
You know, it's in a really crowded space.
And so, you know, I really think first the first game that really i've said this
last week too i think that makes a bunch of money and finds the right way to repatriate that money
to its most uh dedicated players uh is going to be the one that that that wins and whether whether
or not that's a diablo torchlight clone where people are playing single player and selling
their sort of a thousand truths to each other or, you know, an always online Minecraft thing that looks like whatever they just launched on Roblox.
Right. Like I think it could take any form. It's really going to be product market fit.
What makes what makes money and the model that involves founders willing to give not some but a bunch of that money back to the people that are that are helping them sustain their business.
Man, I wish I could double click on that.
I don't know if we have time to get into the weeds,
but I would love to sometime.
Tony, I've got some thoughts.
Koji, going to you, what's the sentiment score?
One to 10 here on single player web three games.
I mean, my sentiment score is 10 if you can do it.
I just don't know how one would do it.
And every time Tony says, show me the money,
I want you to, Tony, next time you yell the
next line that Jerry Maguire yells, anyone who knows the movie will know that he will
not do that.
But I think that the problem here is right now we view Web3 and Web3 Gaming and the use
And the use of Web3 in Web3 gaming predominantly as a rewards-based system.
of Web3 in Web3 Gaming predominantly as a rewards-based system.
And it becomes extraordinarily difficult to reward people in single-player games without incentivizing over-farming, right?
Because, like, things like bot control and all this other stuff, like, it gets very hard to issue rewards.
You can do something like Spelunky or whatever.
You have a high-score system, maybe, and then reward the highest scores. But even then, what you want to try and do, well, so far in the Web3 economies is provide
scarcity and then sort of dole out your NFTs or your tokens or whatever based on that scarcity.
But you can't really do that in a single player world, or it's a lot harder to.
Whereas if you're pitting players against each other, it's very clear there are going to be a bunch of losers and a few winners,
very much like poker or whatever, somewhat of a zero-sum scenario,
where, like, the rewards are only going to be to the winning few and not the sort of losing population.
When you're playing a single-player game, it's hard to determine who of those single players are winners and who are losers and so uh i'm a 10 if somebody can
crack the nut on it but like that's i think it's actually much much much harder to like a
you know 100x to try and get a single player uh game to fit into web 3
i know that there was some dispute as well about what actually defines a single player game.
And is this a single player game in Kate's example?
If somebody is able to put a weapon on an online marketplace and then purchase it, does that make it?
There's some lost nuance in here as well that we could go into the weeds and define a little bit.
But I want to go to Michael O'Connor and see how he's seeing this.
Michael, what's your sentiment score on single player games potentially working in web three yeah you kind
of touched on what i was thinking about it like for me i've always thought about trade as a
multiplayer mechanic so if we have a single player game but you're trading with like in a vast open
marketplace that those resources are usable inside of the game,
whether the gameplay itself beyond the trade is multiplayer or not.
I kind of see that as a multiplayer game.
I guess it comes down to semantics.
But here's where I agree.
I agree that, listen, if creating multiplayer games is really hard and
like we speak about activision a moment ago like the costs of live service are extreme um there's
still not really great infrastructure to support uh small medium-sized developers looking to build multiplayer games,
certainly better than it was,
but it's not really great.
It's expensive and it's tough,
and you need a whole additional team alongside your developments team
as your live ops team.
So it's super tough.
Alongside that, the whole crypto aspect
just creates this whole other complication.
It's a sea of complications. So I agree with the sentiment behind alongside that the whole crypto aspect just creates this whole other complications it's
you know it's a sea of complications so i agree with the sentiment behind okay well how can we
simplify this and and make it and and make it all work um because there's definitely too many teams
who went out there and pitched all of these fucking gigantic mmos and um but they were like they were like it was that was always going to be a big ask
um um so yeah listen I think it's cool if people can build um you know very trade-driven economies
but then they're existing inside of more simple play experiences I think that's a good call um
I think it's tough I think Koji pointed out that there's going to be some difficulties with that.
But from a technical perspective, I suppose from a design perspective, it's harder.
But from a technical perspective, it's easier.
So, yeah, I suppose like I kind of I feel a little bit on the fence, I suppose, about this one.
I like the concept of trying to make it as easy as possible to succeed.
But I'm not sure exactly if this is the precise solution to that.
And the last thing I'll say is there can be many winners, right?
There's no one-size-fits-all ingredient for any of this.
Someone can make an amazing fucking, like, purist MMO that can crack through
the same way that someone can build something that's way more stripped back that has like a simple shared
resource economy.
Great take.
Yeah, I can tell that there's so much gray area in here.
It's almost difficult to talk about.
I want to clear a little bit of it up to maybe make it easier just on the
basis of what Kate mentioned here.
So again, multiplayer FPS titles, MMORPGs, Battle Royales
seem to be like the brunt. And she mentioned specifically, unless you have in a hundred
million dollar budget or more. And I was talking about somebody with this a few days ago where it
was like, oh yeah, but off the grid, but MapleStory. And I was like, yeah, but she says like,
if you have a massive fucking budget, you're playing a different game. Like it's feasible
now. I want to go to Justin Gary and then I want to i want to tag in knock yeah so i think that there's a couple things i
want to kind of bring up one the tying into the previous conversation around the call of duty
skins right there as we are working on a very expensive game which by default is what we're
talking about here when you're talking about an mmrpg or an fps the the requirements to succeed
go up.
And that means you have to either monetize better,
you have to have a bigger audience,
you have to do so much more.
And crypto gaming obviously has been struggling
to build its audience.
So I think the argument of saying,
hey, how can we scope down and reduce the cost of production?
Meaning we're going to have a smaller scope game,
like a single player campaign,
to encourage people to come in
and to make it easier
to succeed. Totally reasonable. I think it's just, you know, if my score number here is a 10.
And the question is, how do you make that function in a Web3 world where the things that make Web3
excellent and exciting on its own, which is the fact that we do have some version of community
and the fungibility between our items and I can
get, I can sell and own and do all the things I want to do and, and cross that boundary and make
things exciting and scarce. That's the challenge, right? And I mean, we've dealt with this very
directly with SoulForge Fusion, right? We build a very robust, like algorithmically generated
campaign mode, which is the main way we get people to come into the game. It's solo. You could take
your own objects, play with them, do whatever you you want but then we also filter up to a competitive play thing where
now i have more reason to care and more things that will like kind of get me motivated to go and
like care about specific decks and leveling up and all the things and so i think that there is a it's
a sort of a yes and answer that we classically across the board, all gaming is hard to do.
All gaming, especially high quality AAA games
in that carrier has gotten more expensive over time.
So the solutions have to be either, you know,
monetize better, grow, find better ways to grow
or reduce scope.
And I think single player games are a great way
to reduce scope and give people more of a chance
to build a great game that supports their community.
Fantastic answer there.
I'm going to Nock and then to Kevin Lambert.
Nock, I know you had a lot of thoughts on this one.
Yeah, I mean, I think, like, I largely agree with the sentiment.
And I think Kate is somebody who has a history, especially in FPS games.
I believe it was Overwatch, right, Kate?
But I know that Kate has a history in a lot of these titles.
And I think that gives her a unique perspective in the way that she delivered this.
I think where I maybe disagree a little bit is around the semantics of what a single-player game is.
I largely agree with Mike.
I think that if you are interacting with other players in an economic environment, you are participating in a multiplayer game.
game. And I think by nature, blockchain is multiplayer. Part of the promise of what you're
And I think by nature, blockchain is multiplayer.
building on a blockchain is a network of people who have shared incentives and are aligned to
achieve certain goals. As part of the way that this whole thing operates is because you are
working with other people. The idea that like a single player title will have monetization or an
economy or all of the things that we historically believe
to be important to blockchain titles just does not make sense to me.
And if they do have those things, I think that they're just a different version of multiplayer.
I don't think that multiplayer means PvP.
I don't even think it means cooperation directly with other players.
But I think if you're talking about a large economy, it is a multiplayer ecosystem.
So for me, I agree with what Kate said.
I think if you're a team that is tackling
one of those particular genres,
you're probably not going to have a whole ton of chances
if you don't have the financial firepower to go behind it.
We have seen a couple of teams sort of find some success
with what I'll call like an MMO Lite. We've seen teams like of teams sort of find some success with what I'll call like an
MMO lite. We've seen teams like Gigaverse and On-Chain Heroes and a variety of others. Cambria
have massively successful seasons by, you know, Web3 terms. Will those games succeed for five,
ten years? Maybe not, but I think that they still are successful now. So I think it's incredibly
challenging if you're not doing something
that is a very watered down
or light version of what the genre looks like
in traditional Web 2 gaming.
I don't think you have a whole ton of chances
if you aren't a team that has a bank
that starts with eight,
or that has eight figures in it minimum.
You probably need closer to nine,
like Kate mentioned.
And I think if you are designing economies
in the space,
effectively, economies
can only operate with multi-people cooperation. So this idea that, like, I'll play a story game
and sell an item to LEMS just doesn't make any sense to me. I'd love to be proven wrong,
and I would like to see an example of that work in Web3. Just because I disagree today doesn't
mean that I'll disagree forever. Omar, I know I'm going to get ahead of it because I know that
you're going to mention that. But I just, I don't see it. I agree with
Mike. I think player cooperation in any capacity is by definition multiplayer.
I thought Kate put the hand up during that. Kevin, I'm going to put you on ice for just a second and
make sure that she's able to speak her piece here and then we'll go back to you.
Yeah, I think, I think a lot of this kind of starts at the beginning. It kind of starts at why have so many multiplayer Web3 games failed? Why do so many multiplayer Web3 games have bots?
enough players. There's literally just not enough players for all these multiplayer games that
rely on multiplayer existence in order to exist. I literally cannot play a lot of these games unless
there are 10 other people clicking play at the exact same time. I am located on the west coast
of the US. If all the other players are in Asia and it's like a game that requires low ping,
then we're not even going to get matched in the same server.
And if they put everyone on the same server,
somebody's going to be at a huge disadvantage because they have like 400 MS.
So I think there's also that as well.
Yes, we can argue about the definition of single player versus multiplayer,
but I think games like Animal Crossing,
it's multiplayer optional.
You don't have to go to someone else's island to like buy their
stuff. You can just completely play the game alone. You don't need to like wait for a queue
time. You don't need to wait for other people to decide to play the game. And I think that's
really cool. And I hope that we see more of it because I think it's sustainable. It's a lower
lift. Like a lot of these smaller teams in Web3, like building an economy is so much work with crypto, even more than just a regular Web2 version of the game. So I think there's so much room for like really cool single player experiences that maybe have like multiplayer as an option. And I know like the bare baddies are doing a dress up game. So I'm excited to see that.
That's like something that's not really per se a multiplayer or single player game, but there's just like new experiences that aren't fitting into those existing boxes of like trying to compete with WoW, trying to compete with Call of Duty.
And there are a few exceptions to like that, that budget piece like i think pixels has somehow managed to defy the statistics and
like stay around even though all these other multiplayer games are shutting down like
you know half a dozen last month alone it's it's it's interesting to see
great additional context there uh let's go over to uh now, and then I'm going to tag in the
tatted lawyer. So it's interesting in the context of Web3, right? Why are we building here? What
are we doing? We're playing around with the experience of ownership and all of the digital
property ownership and ownership of pieces of products and games and ecosystems
themselves, right? Otherwise, we wouldn't be building here, right? That's what blockchain,
at least from my perspective, that's why we're building on blockchain and not in a database.
And so, you know, ownership is interesting, because it has different reflections in different
kinds of products in a single player game, like hard single player, like literally there's zero connective tissue to another real human in the game and even in the larger ecosystem, ownership has very little value.
Right. Like it's a you need a social or an economic unlock of some kind. You need social surface area to flex your things. It's like how exciting would it be? Is it to own even your physical things if no one in the world could ever see them?
Right. There's definitely some joy to yourself for having things and recallable memories. And like,
you know, if it wasn't good, then people wouldn't like, you know, collecting things in the Sims.
So I do think there's still a reflection in single player games for ownership,
but it's vastly diminished relative to having social surface area of those things that doesn't mean you have to make
a battle royale or an fps it just means there has to be some social surface area for being able to
have that and it could even live outside of the game itself it could just be like yeah i take my
binder of cards to the local shop and show everybody what I've collected. That's social surface area enough.
And it's not innate to the game, right?
So, you know, I think Kate has a point about, like, dude, the kinds of games in Web 3 that have been thrown out and are failing is definitely a valid observation.
I think they're failing for other reasons, though.
It's not just because they're Battle Royals and FPS
and everybody's doing them.
I mean, heck, we're building another freaking card game,
so what does that say about that?
But I think that, you know,
I think it's largely a motivations problem.
You know, people building things for the wrong reasons
and not showcasing the experience of ownership
in the right way.
That's why those games have failed.
Although also because they don't have tons of players.
But I think if there's a suggestion
that single player Web3 games
are the panacea to the problems,
I am dubious about that.
I want to see that explored,
but I would be worried
without some kind of social service area
for the ownership
and for the experience of ownership.
I don't know that it would resonate as well as Web2 Games do.
Good stuff, Kevin.
Let's go to Tatted, then OG.
Hit me with the all caps.
Tag me in, coach.
So I'm eagerly anticipating that one.
Yeah.
So, you know, without further ado before OG, I really do, my sentiment score is super, super high.
I'm going to give it a 10.
And the reason I'm going to give it a 10, and I've heard a lot of other people, and I agree very, very heavily with Kate on a lot of the points that she made.
But if you look at Pokemon, red and blue version from 1998, if you think about it, that was a single player experience like yes could i then battle
against my friends of course but if my friend had a pokemon that i can't find in pokemon blue
uh and he had pokemon red for example i'm gonna trade with him uh based off the pokemon that he
found so that i could have that pokemon in my game and i can then continue going through the gyms
progressing towards the end of the game so i think my huge problem here is with the single player experience there's
not enough content and what I mean by content I mean like randomized content that you can find
through the game and I can only speak personally uh with the games that we're building but like
with swarms we've tried to make this uh single player experience where the weapons are so
different where all these weapons and armor etc etc., can all be leveled up.
Meaning, with your single-player experience, you need to find these bigger, badder, and better weapons to then make it through the additional maps that are coming up.
Just like you did in Pokemon, you needed to level up your Pokemon and have certain levels to beat the third gym leader, the fourth, etc.
and have certain levels to beat the third gym leader, the fourth, et cetera.
And so I think if the single-player title is created in a way that you actually need
various different items, weapons, armor, et cetera, like depending on whatever the game type is,
to actually progress through that single-player game, then an economy like this can work.
Because if I'm finding different items in my single player run than
you're finding in your single player run, then why can't we create a marketplace economy where
I can trade items back and forth? Like maybe I have this item that you need, you have this item
that I need, but we're never, ever, ever going to play in the same server, same instance, et cetera.
And I think if we start to approach games that way, single player can work extremely
well. And then I do believe any kind of single player like that, that adds in the advent of
co-op play will just essentially pour gasoline all over this. But even without the co-op,
I do think this is a very, very viable game model. And it's something that I do think can
catch on really, really really well because if i found
you know level five sword in this game and you have a level 30 sword that i want we can easily
do a trade uh in the peer-to-peer marketplace that's sweet now i have the sword i'm going to
go back to my own single player save and go use this new sword that i traded with uh with koji
uh to then go dominate all these mobs in this single-player experience.
So I personally think it can work really, really well.
I do think it'll solve the issue of, you know, long queue times, bots in game, et cetera.
And I do think it's something that should be explored a lot more because I am personally tired of the shooter genre dominating Web3 games.
of the shooter genre dominating Web3 games.
And I do think we need to switch
because shooters are the hardest mind share,
market share to break into when you're a new shooter
versus any of the legacy titles like the Call of Duties
and what we've spoken about before.
But that's my take on it.
I love the comp to Pokemon here.
Feels really, really true to sort of the thing that I think she was trying
to highlight and Kate you can correct me if I'm wrong here but the idea that like it's an it's
an experience enhancer and I remember having this experience of like I went to a taekwondo tournament
and somebody traded me the like Gengar that I needed to evolve into the one and I was like
I went home and I literally was like walking on sunshine for the next like
four days.
I was like,
this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.
And I hope that more people can have that kind of experience with,
you know,
blockchain not gives me the thumbs down.
Fuck you knock.
I'm going to OG.
Yeah.
How much did you pay for that Pokemon though?
How much did you buy that off that guy for?
I traded him half of my Capri sun.
I mean,
that's probably why this shit doesn't work, though, right?
Like, unless it's additional, like, levels or something for the game,
like, who, people, like, either people are going to, like,
farm the shit out of it, or it's just not going to work.
I think that's the hardest part about all of it.
Like, I want it to be true, but we just, as highlighted earlier,
we live in a dystopian hellscape, and there's, you know,
not enough altruists out there.
People love collecting stuff that's just theirs.
The Sims is absolutely massive.
I know it's not really a game that guys play, but it's a massive series that there's entire...
People literally make blogs about their Sims.
They track them over eight generations.
There's all these unofficialfficial third party mod sites.
You download like these insane mods that like make your Sims do all kinds of stuff.
Like there's, there's so much like custom content that I think like single player brings in as well.
If you want to like mod your game, like the mod space is massive for single player games.
I agree completely that mods are probably the best players for single player monetization.
I played the shit out of
The Sims. I'll leave it there.
OG, over to you. Oh, I love that.
Ladies and gentlemen,
boys and girls, and Nock,
welcome to my TED Talk.
We're back here again.
Listen, we need
to unpack a couple of things.
So I'm going to try to run through this as fast as possible.
I think the first thing to unpack is definitions.
And two things here.
I don't think a single player game with an online marketplace
does not make the core game loop any less single player.
So if the game is designed to be experienced by a solo player,
but there's an external online marketplace thing going on,
I don't think that actually makes it a multiplayer game,
even though you might treat the multiplayer as like,
oh, it's a different game because I'm trading,
you know, supply, demand, et cetera.
But just to touch on that point,
the second definition, I think,
which I think we tend to forget is what is a Web3 game?
And I think everyone's looking at it
as like a game that has a token,
a game that has NFTs,
a game that has to have a
price go up or down. It has to have a chart on CoinGecko. I don't think people are also viewing
it from the lens of, oh, it's a game that uses the blockchain tech in any way, shape or form,
meaning achievements, right? You could have soulbound achievements in your game and that
would still make it a Web3 game. It wouldn't make you any less of a Web3 game, even though there's
no chart to trade. Maybe there's nothing to try and and be a degen with but i don't think that makes you any less of a three game so just just getting
those out of the way first the second thing we need to talk about i think is the reason why we
need single player games and i i do agree with kate's point but the reason i always talk about
single player games and i argue with knock like three times a week is i think the purpose of
having single player games in the space
is to elevate the quality of the games in the space.
I couldn't care less if the single player game ends up being the best game of all time
or sells millions of copies or has a token that goes to the moon.
Like for me, it's actually just the bar being elevated just a little bit higher.
Because right now, the issue that we have is because everyone's trying to build a multiplayer
game and they're trying to make sure there's you know latency and live service and this this and that
everyone forgets about sound design there's no lore there's no narrative there's no cohesiveness
to the game and i think when you do single player games that gets basically under the lens a lot more
because it becomes all about your story, your voice actors, your
script, the way you design the game environment. It's way less about how quick is the time to kill
in this game or how easy is it to have fun with your friends. And it's a lot more about the actual
core game loop. So for me, it's actually just setting the bar a little bit higher because I
think when we get a single-player game in this space,
everyone looking around is going to start.
I mean, this is what we saw between 2021 and today in 2025, right?
Like a lot of the shit we accepted back in the day,
we accepted because there was nothing better.
And everyone just used to say, oh, it's pretty good for a Web3 game.
TED Talk accepted. That was pretty good.
I want to go to Tony Valkersel here, who I know has some juice. He also is the proud owner of every single Marvel Rivals skin, which I don't even want to do the math on. I'd be embarrassed.
I'm a hoarder.
I'm a digital hoarder.
No, you know, I think that what I was going to say has been Trotten.
And, you know, I was just going to say that Knock had a bad take.
I'm glad I get to say that now.
But for all the reasons that everyone just said, Knock had a bad take.
He had a bad take.
Just because you can sell shit to people doesn't necessarily make it a
multiplayer game.
You know, Tatted Lawyer's pokemon example i think was my favorite but uh but yeah um and also show me the
money show them the money knock you've been working that thumbs down button to the point that i'm
afraid you have carpal tunnel go cook us bro okay no i i'll preface this by saying i actually agree
with a lot of what was just mentioned by Tad, Omar, and Kate.
I think Pokemon is a terrible fucking example because literally the theme song, though, of Pokemon is what?
You have to do what in Pokemon? Catch them all?
You literally cannot do that without another player.
You have to participate in a multiplayer experience in order to complete the main objective of Pokemon. Even
as far back in Gen 1, there are no less than five different instances where you are required
to interact with another player in order to achieve the actual main goal of the game. So I
think Pokemon is a terrible example. All of that said, I do agree with a lot of what was said,
right? There is a lot that can be done with single
player games i mostly nowadays play with the exception of runescape basically only single
player games a bit like i said a couple weeks ago i've been working through the four to five
hour range on game pass playing everything that i can and i'm having a ton of fun with these games
and i agree that things like ownership or collectibles with in-game experiences matter
i played a ton of
sins. I played a bunch of, um, what, what the fuck is the city building in cityscape or whatever
it's called? I like collecting these achievements. And I think that this is an important part of like
your game experience. I can agree with that. I have absolutely no pushback. None of that needs
blockchain to operate. And I think that that is like the crux of this issue for me is when you're
building in blockchain, you're building because the nature of blockchain allows for things like interoperability, allows for things like proper ownership of assets.
It allows with interacting Web2 economies.
In other words, they came here to do something that they didn't believe they could do in
traditional Web2 tech. None of the things that were outlined from a single player perspective
requires blockchain to operate. All of that operates as is today. The idea that games fail because they're
a multiplayer, I think is insane because plenty of games fail, significantly more games fail in
Web2 that are single player. And games are fucking hard to build. Games will fail. The overwhelming
majority of any game that is ever built is going to fail. Players is always the answer. Whether
you're building a single player title or a multiplayer title, the lack of players, i.e. people who are willing to spend and play time and
spend time and money in that game will always be the reason a title fails, regardless of whether
or not you're building a multiplayer title. So I agree. Everything that was mentioned about
single player games, wholeheartedly agree. I think it makes a ton of sense. I like these things. I
like collecting. I like achievements. I like all of that. None of that needs Web3 to exist. I don't know why you
would add an additional layer of complexity to something that is already so difficult to do.
When you're building a game, all of the odds are stacked against you. If you're building a
single player title, to come to Web3, add a layer of difficulty to everything that you're doing,
effectively having to have two different skill sets within to everything that you're doing effectively having to have two
different skill sets within the team that you're building to create the same thing that already
works and functions so well in web 2 every example was a web 2 title why would you do that to yourself
it makes it harder if anything what we're trying to do it and the way that i took it was the spirit
of the message is this don't do things things that are effectively stacking the deck against you.
And to me, coming to Web3, building a game that already worked perfectly fine,
we have a dozen examples of in traditional Web2 gaming,
and then adding an additional layer or two of complexity
and having to deal with the stigma of building a Web3 title
doesn't make any sense to me.
I think that's the opposite of making your life easier.
I saw Kate Irwin put the hand back up. I'm going to cut the line for her. And then I'm going to
Michael Christine, who is also slamming that thumbs down with a rebuttal, I'm sure. Kate,
over to you. I just think what was said could be applied to multiplayer too. I really do.
Like a couple of years ago, around the 2022 era of crypto gaming, a lot of people
were talking about ownership.
And I know like the conversation on ownership has come up already a couple of times during
this space.
But I think like ownership is really subjective.
And it's largely an illusion in a lot of these games because initially, you know, back in
the day of 2022, we're all like interoperability ownership and like sort of like really like putting that on blast is like the reasons
why people should care about crypto games.
And I think it's a lot more complicated.
And I think like the definition of true ownership is a lot more complicated than people want
to admit.
Like if a game studio made a game, made assets for the game and then is letting
you hold them in your wallet and then they shut down the game like i don't know is that really
ownership um other games like off the grid you know you can only trade the items on their marketplace
you can't trade them on open c i think i think i just saw something about that where like there's
no like buy or sell button on open ca. So like is that true ownership?
Not really.
I mean you can argue whatever you want about that.
But I think like the ownership conversation is also a whole other can of worms of like what does that even mean?
Is it even ownership?
Like you could also argue that like yeah me downloading my Sims mods like I have those on my computer and like I have a ripped version of the sims so it's also about like the game itself too and the ownership conversation is really
complicated and interoperability has never been achieved really in in any crypto game ecosystem
because it involves like capitalism sort of getting in the way and like all these all these
games have to partner with each other and then you have to like port the street fighter skins
into overwatch and like that involves you know them participating and so like interoperability is
also like a mess but and like hasn't been achieved so i think like those two pieces are also worth
um unpacking a bit 120 episodes of gamified we're all just so we could get kate erwin live on air
to admit that she has a cracked version of the Sims on her computer.
Get her feds.
Thanks.
Thanks Kate.
I want to give a shout out to Dave Schick in the comments.
He says,
can't listen to this one celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary today.
Those someone please reproduce the spicy take from Koji that he knows is coming.
I wanted to give him a shout out,
Dave.
I'm sure you'll listen to the vault or to the audio on demand on Spotify or
whatever.
A huge shout out.
Thanks for being such a fan of the show. Congrats. 20 years is insane. Back on topic though. I'm going to'll listen to the audio on demand on Spotify or whatever. Huge shout out. Thanks for being such a fan of the show.
Congrats.
20 years is insane.
Back on topic, though, I'm going to the Tatted Lawyer.
Then I'm tagging in OG and then the Little Lizard Legend.
Then we're going to move on from this.
Yeah, I just wanted to actually bring up two points here.
Not going to ask the question, you know, why are you including blockchain in this at all?
This could easily live on the server.
I can actually explain this from a legal perspective.
One of the reasons that blockchain is so important for peer-to-peer trade is that you as the company now
don't have any control over that trade, meaning you can't reverse it. I can't go into your wallet
and take that item out of it. That actually is a huge, huge, huge legal defense to the idea that
you're facilitating the trade of these financial assets or quote-unquote potential financial assets because there's no like clear law on this and
this is actually why so many games you see in their terms of service say you're not allowed
to trade this or trade that trade this for money um that's the reason because there's not really
any clear law one way or the other or the law is very very very, very open to interpretation, if you will, as to if it is or if it's not.
So the blockchain or putting this on the blockchain and taking that control out of the actual service provider,
being the game developer themselves, actually is a layer of legal protection to any of those claims or allegations that could be thrown at you.
allegations that could be thrown at you. And then the second thing I wanted to say here
is we need to kind of look at the gaming space in 2020, 2025 versus any other year before,
because I personally think games are pushed so heavily by content creators and streamers who
stream their live gameplay so much that even if a game is a single player game, it's still
somewhat of a community because I can be playing my single-player game
but have a whole community watching me play.
Or, for example, I could be watching Nox stream
of a single-player game,
see that he has a really, really cool item
that's awesome that I want in my single-player game.
And if there's a marketplace to then go trade for that item,
I'm going to go to the marketplace to trade for that item.
So I think the
the onset of streaming being combined with gaming and the idea that so many people like their single player experience can be so much more than just you individually experiencing this
i think it makes total sense to have a marketplace uh being able to trade peer-to-peer with other
players even if again you never ever play play in the same instance or in the same
actual game together.
So just wanted to bring that point to the table as well.
Love it. OG, then
Lem.
That's why we have a lawyer on the panel, Noc, so he can
tell you why, legally, the blockchain's good
for a single-player game.
Yeah, no, I was just going to say, I think, basically
what Kate said, you can
apply the same logic to pretty much every single Web3 game, whether it's multiplayer or not.
The question, why Web3? I don't think one team in all of Web3 necessarily has the best answer or the right answer for.
You can always argue for or against. You can always say, hey, you're making your life a lot harder by doing parallel in Web3, or you're making your life harder by doing Sparkball in Web3, or doing whatever it is in Web3.
But my point is, we've tried multiplayer so many times.
It hasn't worked yet.
We've never tried single player.
It's not to say that single player is the way to go.
It's saying that we should explore having single
player games for multiple reasons and i think to your point about you know why do this if you can
already do it in web 2 without the complications you can't do certain things as well if you look
at a game like red dead redemption i play it on my playstation 4 for example and then it's in my
psn i've got the trophies it's platinum platinum, whatever. If I go to Steam, let's say, that means nothing, right?
Because the two systems don't recognize each other.
There's no one cohesive, quote unquote, cross-platform integration that says, hey, this person is like cracked.
He's finished this game in this many hours.
You should probably give him early access to that game.
And I think there are doors that we can start opening once you actually look at Web3 as like blockchain integration, not as a fungible token or a non-fungible token or something that has to be trading on, you know, X, Y, Z exchange.
And then to the last point, which was show me the money.
It's a question of greed, to be completely honest, because you look at games like Red Dead Redemption and they've sold 70 million copies.
You look at even more recent games like Black Myth Wokong, they've sold 30 million copies the sims was mentioned earlier and they've got like a stupid
number i think sims 4 alone is at like 30 or 40 million copies none of the games in web 3 have
sold a fraction of these numbers and you're talking about single player like pick it up once
play it for 60 to 80 hours drop it never play it again like i finished black myth wokong in 80 hours
got my platinum trophy deleted the game never played it again. Like I finished Black Myth Wokong in 80 hours, got my platinum trophy, deleted the game,
never played it again, couldn't care less if new updates or whatever comes out.
And I think that's the way it's meant to be experienced.
I don't think you have to just keep milking a game.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has made more money
than any of the Call of Duty titles
if you look at them on a single game-by-game basis.
So any Call of Duty, regardless of if it's Modern Warfare 2,
if it's the new stuff, if it's Warzone, Red Dead Redemption, a single-player game that ends in arguably So any Call of Duty, regardless of if it's Modern Warfare 2, if it's the new stuff,
if it's Warzone,
Red Dead Redemption,
a single-player game
that ends in arguably,
I don't know what,
100 hours tops,
has sold more copies.
So it's a question of greed.
Like, how much money do you want to see?
Is 70 million copies
not good enough for you to say,
hey, maybe this is a good
sustainable business model
and I should make a single-player game?
My friend,
those games that you just mentioned
took eight plus years to make and web
three gaming dollar titles every one of them and web three gaming has not been inevitable for for
close to that long so i i think that like we have to put some things in perspective like yeah it's
possible maybe in the next like 10 15 years we'll see the black myth wukong of web 3 but like it's
not going to happen not even next year or the year after that so i think we like there's some patience it's required i think we did see one one i want to
use the word meaningful probably not meaningful stab at at single player in web three it was the
souls like there was i can't even remember what it's called anymore but somebody tried to make
a souls like here um michael o'connor i see your hand up uh as well i want to make sure we we squeeze you in here uh over to you brother yeah i just think it's also just like let's not
shit the bed here we're we're in kind of like the first phase of funding in like this is a nascent
um industry and uh yeah like there was a crazy overallocation of capital into some bizarre projects with like people who've never built games before.
Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it increases risk.
And as per the games industry, we're currently seeing like a waft of loads of closed projects.
You know, and that's a bummer okay but
you know let's not just say okay it's all like the whole thing's fucked here um it's way too
early to do that in my opinion i think that there's still huge amounts of possibility there's
still a huge amount of well capitalized games coming through some great games as well you know like for i think if you
if if the eve what's the what's the eve online game called is it e frontier or something like
that yeah so like that would be the point if they if those guys who have literally built out
like a ton of incredibly good multiplayer systems before who've got like the total credibility to
be able to jump into an
industry like this who seemingly understand it quite well if those guys were able to come in
and not build especially how well capitalized they are and they weren't able to pull it off
that might be the point where i'd be like oh shit here guys we might need to start rethinking this
a little bit here because you know we've had six seven years at it now we're not seeing a breakthrough
and we've had these amazing capitalized teams you've delivered across all these other industries
but like we're not there yet we're just not there yet and actually we're seeing reasonable amounts
of success not as much as what we expect because we work in crypto and everything is expected just
to moon immediately and players are going to moon immediately but this takes time like games
take time to build and technological innovation takes time to build as well so i think there's a
you know i think it's just a little bit too early to say that like things are fucked you know i i
still remain very hopeful i think there's a lot of clever people building a lot of cool things
i absolutely love that take michael. And I think it speaks to
something underlying, which is I'm super bullish on like Avalon, for instance, because they haven't
pivoted 17 times to my to my knowledge, there's a chance in the background that they've pivoted a
bunch. But from what I can tell, they started out making the product that they are still building.
And there's something to be said about that of like not chasing the 74 things that we thought were good ideas like maybe just have
some vision and like stick to that vision over a long period of time and then you know find out
whenever the the chickens come home to roost or whatever that idiom is uh knock i'm going to you
and then lens and then the tatted dude the hands are flying dude knock over to you all right i'll
say this omar tatted kate you're starting to win me over here a little bit.
I think that there have been some good arguments.
I can't leave you on a positive note,
so I have to shit on a couple of things that were said.
That's just me.
One of the things that we started with this topic was
if you don't have $100 million, go home,
and then literally the only example of single-player that we used were hundred million dollar titles so maybe
if you don't have a hundred mil don't build a single player game either um the other thing
that i wanted to say was literally every example with the exception of uh what tatted just mentioned
about some of the legality of it and i think both kate and omar sort of alluded to this idea of uh forever
achievements this player profile that you can bring from profile to profile i like that i think
we've talked about how things like xbox and steam and psn are incentivized to not work together and
to not share incentives because it creates a sunk cost fallacy of time and effort that you've put
within their ecosystem it's one of the ways that they use to retain you.
I think if you own that, and that's something that you can move from on-chain to, you know,
from one place to another on-chain, I think that's incredible.
I think that that's absolutely a way that you can leverage single-player games to showcase
a player's holistic approach to gaming.
I will also just mention, and I'll leave you with this, every example that you gave about an incredible single-player game
was look at this game, and then you do this with another person.
That's multiplayer.
Juicy. Juicy. Lenz, I'm going to you, then Taddy gets the last word,
and I'm cutting you off like a bunch of drunks at a bar. Jesus.
Yeah, this one has run long.
I loved Michael's take, though,
because that was something I wanted to mention of,
hey, we might not have figured it out yet,
but it is this brand new industry.
Keep trying.
Sure, some of this shit won't work.
It'll be a total flop,
but that's how we learn
and the whole space moves forward.
And then someone might actually crack the code.
And as a big single-player lover,
I hope someone figures out
some interesting things that we can do. The achievements and stuff is player lover, I hope someone figures out some interesting things
that we can do.
You know, the achievements and stuff is neat,
but I hope we can figure out some other neat ways
to have blockchain integration.
But I think like back to like Kate's original point,
the big highlighted problems from my perspective
were all around synchronous multiplayer, right?
Like having the player liquidity,
which, you know, we know is a rough thing in Web3
to have enough people to get into these games and trying to match make servers, you know,
paying all that sort of stuff. And I actually want to see more games like what Fableborn have done.
And I know it's like down to a game design perspective, not every game will work like this.
But like, I feel like there's just a massive hole for games like that, which they are easier with
the cold start problem, because you can manage with less players.
Like they have a whole single player campaign mode you can play, but then they also have
asynchronous multiplayer where you're battling other people's bases, but you're not playing
against them live.
So you don't need to be online at the exact same time as them.
And I feel like that's like a very underexplored area, especially in Web3. And more multiplayer games like that feels like it's a good fit.
And I want to see more of that.
So build more asynchronous multiplayer games, please.
OG is calling.
Knock is saying he's pulling the Straw Man card in the Wolves and Friends chat here.
He says Hollow Knight hates and many, many more examples.
I threw in Slay the Spire as well. I'm going to
Michael Christine and then for real though, you're done.
All of you. Yeah, I
literally just wanted to make one last point
because I keep hearing there's not been any
successful web three or
on-chain game. NICROS.
NICROS has like almost 10 million downloads
and they made $200 million
of revenue last year.
Just wanted to throw that out there before we move on man i hate night crows so much but you're not wrong you're not wrong i
just fucking hated playing that game but you're not wrong uh you know what i don't hate playing
is stuff on avalanche avalanche is the king of gaming chains the official game of game fun
blunden was an epic summit to find out exactly how they're conquering the cold with cutting edge technology
from AI to RWAs
and of course gaming
and their community
that's as frosty as it is for years.
So bundle up,
bring your A game
and craft your very own L1
to service all your
blockchain gaming needs
and giddy up gamers.
Get ready to gallop
into Game 7 Nation.
They've already signed
150 games,
30 million wallets
and they're ready to rumble
with their mega
Metamask partnership.
Come join the digital nation
and get your citizenship
so you can level up your life.
Thanks to Game 7 for being the official infrastructure of Gamified.
Dump Date Mary.
We got a little bit of a fun one.
We're towards the end of the panel here.
Elden Ring is going to be made into a movie.
Clash of Clans getting a Netflix animated series.
And Claire Obscure, the term-based RPG that's been taking over from Ubisoft,
is getting a live-action movie.
Which one you dumping, which one you dating, and which one you marrying?
Koji, I've got to go to the cinephile first.
The only answer is I don't care about the rest of them.
Marry the Elden Ring movie.
Alex Garland is the fucking man.
Everything this guy touches even even the divisive
ones are uh amazing like you know people liked uh ex-mackinaw so there's that watch devs if you
haven't seen devs like that's an example of some good shit but even like the crazy ones that are
on the fence like men he's like throwing for the fences every single swinging for the fences
excuse me every single time and i think this movie is going to be that in spades like if you ask me what the story of elden ring was i'm
like i don't even really know and i don't even really care the game was sick so he can kind of
just like you know carte blanche do whatever the fuck he wants just like some sort of weird eldritch
medieval horror thing and it's going to be great the rest of of them, I'm a little bit dubious on,
but if they can attach some real artists to it,
then maybe I'll change my tune.
So I don't know.
I'll marry Elden Ring.
I'll dump Clash of Clans and I'll date the other one.
I don't even remember what the other one was.
Claire Obscure.
Expedition 33 is how it's known better.
Clash of Clans, I think, is going to have some real Minecraft vibes,
if I had to guess, based on the success of that movie.
It's about to cross up.
If they can chicken jockey the theater, then I'm back in on it, man.
I watched Minecraft, and it was the most mind-numbing bullshit I've ever seen.
But the kids in the movie theater were so excited about it
that I was like, fuck yes, movies are back.
Let's go, dude. I want to hear
from Wills. Then we're talking to Kevin.
I'm going to take
the Clash of Clans movie out the back
and shoot it.
I'm going to saunter
into my wedding with Elden Ring.
I don't even,
I haven't played Claire Obscura yet.
I don't know much about the story.
But it's French, so I'll assume it's got some air of fine themes and larger ideas to it,
which I'm sure would be fun to date for a little bit.
But yeah, that's my ranking.
Great takes.
Yeah, if anybody has played Clash of Cl clans that means you've heard uh hog rider
which is the most annoying voice maybe in the history of video games uh which makes me just
not want to be anywhere near an entire eight hour tv series of it kevin lambert over to you
oh i'm gonna have a hot take on this one koji's probably right about the skill of the director
of the elden ring movie but i I'm still going to hot take it.
So I would dump Elden Ring because I've already died a hundred times in that world and I'm not about to suffer through two more hours of emotional damage on the big screen.
I'll date Clash of Clans. It's going to be fun. It's going to be a romp.
But definitely not marriage material. I'll hang out for the laughs, though.
And I'll marry the Claire Obscura movie.
It's going to be deep, poetic.
The game is awesome.
The story is great, and I'm really excited.
Hopefully they have a good skilled director for it.
But the story is already one of the best, most memorable things about it,
so I could see that translating pretty well to the big screen.
I had a tough time choosing between Elden Ring and that, though, to be honest with you.
But I had to fill out each one.
So I'm going to marry Expedition 33.
Dude, I love it.
Yeah, I had somebody tell me, one of my good friends was like, dude, I played through the
tutorial of Expedition 33, and I was ready to run through a fucking wall.
All I wanted to do was kill that boss, which I have not played, so I have to live
vicariously through them. Michael O'Connor
then to OG.
Yeah, I can't.
Honestly, Alex Garland, everything
he touches is gold.
He was the guy who wrote
Beach as a novel, which was
his kind of breakout.
But I liked
his last as well, which is Civil War.
I don't know if anyone saw that.
It was kind of an interesting kind of like dystopian photography kind of based film.
So, yeah, that was Elden Ring.
Yeah, so we're going to marry there.
I guess I don't really know anything about this.
What's the camera?
Claire Obscure? Is that what it's called yeah claire obscure expedition 33 for some reason that has two names uh like all ubisoft
bullshit but um yeah it's it's three million copies sold uh turn-based rpg that's got a
parry mechanic and apparently an amazing story okay cool so i don't know what the
hell that is but that sounds interesting and um as a result i will date it because
like just open-minded about shit in general um and then then i'm going at the back also
with a couple of guys with a couple of folks here and we're gonna shoot that
you know whatever that bullshit they're going to make for Flash of Clowns.
All right.
Tatted.
Hold on.
I don't want it well, actually, Michael there,
but his last film was a movie called Warfare,
which you should also watch.
I don't want it well, nice. Well, sorry, Michael, go ahead.
No, no.
Oh, good.
I'm on that.
Tatted.
All right.
Yeah. So for this one, got to go with Elden Ring.
Mary, Mary Elden Ring, just because Alex Garland is a genius.
I actually just had my wife watch Ex Machina last week
because of all this AI stuff that's going on.
And I was like, baby, this is what's happening right now.
So yeah, everything he touches turns to gold.
So Mary, that.
Going to date Expedition 33, Claire Obscure.
I think that can be such a beautifully done movie.
And I'm absolutely gonna take Classic Lands
and shoot it in the back with everybody else.
And not because I agree with you all,
just because I think live action TV shows for games
generally tend to do pretty poorly outside of, I guess,
Last of Us more so season one than season two.
So I am pretty bearish on the TV show version of these games,
so I'm going to take that one out back and never speak of it again.
Yeah, shout out to Twisted Metal, one of the biggest wastes of time
I've ever dedicated to something video game related.
Also, with all the Alex Garland love, whenever I was in Toronto with Koji, knowing the movie fanatic that he was,
I said, Koji, let's play a game.
You get to get a sequel of any movie ever, and it's guaranteed to actually be good.
And I forget what his answer was because I'm self-centered, but my answer was Ex Machina.
Because it's there for the taking.
The sequel's like perfectly lobbed up in the air for them to do.
Westworld, bro.
Westworld.
Yeah, I'm not going to jump the bandwagon.
And unless the Elden Ring movie is going to have a real depiction
of how the experience is,
which is basically you rolling
and dodging over and over um i don't think it's going to be representative of the real
elden ring experience so i'll probably um i'll date elden ring um i'm i'm kind of surprised
none of you know the plot line or the story or i've even tried clear obscure it's a really really
good i mean i guess yeah this goes back to the single player versus multiplayer thing you guys are just absolute multiplayer nerds um but there's a really, really good... I mean, I guess, yeah, this goes back to the single-player versus multiplayer thing. You guys are just absolute multiplayer
nerds. But Clare Obscure has a really
good story. Spoiler-free version is
basically there's this
paintress that paints a number, and the number keeps going
down, and if your age is that
number or above, you basically disappear.
And then they send out an expedition,
quote-unquote, to kill
the paintress. And this expedition
that you're playing in is number
33 so that's why it's clear obscure expedition 33 but i think it's a really cool story um so i'd
marry that because i think they can probably make a really sick um version of it and then yeah
clash of plans i can't even be bothered to be honest so definitely kill that damn everybody
is icing one of the most beloved mobile franchises Supercell, it's a Supercell game
knock over to you
needs to stay that way
alright, alright
yes, Alex Garland, fucking incredible
everything that he's ever done is amazing
I'm a huge 28 series fan
so the fact that we're getting two
coming in the next couple years, super exciting
but Elden Ring
I played it, i've even played a
little bit of night rain i don't even know what the fuck it's about and i've put a hundred hours
into the game i would not like that movie it's the type of movie that would win awards it would
be nominated for oscars oscars and i would never understand what the fuck it is so we're dumping it
i don't want to deal with it it's gone sorry alex uh clear obscure obviously is the mary here it is a basic easy to understand
story lady who paints is bad we need to kill that lady so people stop dying it makes perfect sense
the game is fucking incredible the music in that game like i listened to the soundtrack just like
while i'm working it's incredible would be an awesome movie and i'm stupid enough to understand
that uh i can understand a
straightforward story like that so definitely marrying that and of course we're gonna date
the fucking clash ken jong as chicken what are we talking about that would be fucking hilarious of
course i want ken jong as chicken and chris hemsworth as the barbarian king it's not gonna
be a good movie but to koji's point the the theater's going to be chaos. There's going to be fucking popcorn flying everywhere.
That's going to be a lot of fun.
I like it.
I like the divergence there, Noc.
I appreciate you.
Koji with the hand back up.
Yeah, yeah.
For the record, I've started Claire Obscura,
and I do think it's pretty great,
but I think it has the same, we'll say, problem that Last of Us has,
which is like, it's cool, but the video game already did it.
Like, it's so story-driven that I don't need
a retelling of the same story
in a different format. The reason
I like Elden Ring is because it's like, I don't know what
the fuck the story is, so give me an actual story
that I can latch on to. The one thing that
would be sick is Elden Ring in 4D.
Everybody just walks out of there with a fucking concussion.
From all the rolling?
From all the rolling. From all the rolling.
From all the rolling.
All right, we're going to squeeze one more.
We got the final boss topic of the day, game prices in 10 years.
We've grown accustomed to, quote-unquote, launch prices for new games.
But is one-size-fits-all really the best thing here?
We've diverged more and more from that.
I'm seeing 70,
I paid $70 for Doom on Steam,
actually,
and I played it this weekend.
Got like an hour into it.
I was bored out of my fucking mind.
I guess I'm too old for single player experiences.
I don't know what it is.
I want to like it super bad.
I know Claire Obscure Expedition 33 was $40,
I believe.
We've heard Mario Kart's going to be $80.
GTA 6 might have a $100 price tag, we've heard.
Is this the new standard where everyone will kind of set their own price here?
Or are we going to see something go even beyond this, where somebody, you know, maybe GTA comes out, sets the price that a AAA game is $100,
and everybody climbs in the barrel because that's the new highest price price the the ceiling if you will of what they can charge a fallout
creator says people don't want 100 hour games anymore they want excuse me they are a waste of
money and resources according to him most people won't complete the game and see the value in all
the money you spent building it so build shorter games that cost less money. So the question again,
what is the final form that we'll see of game pricing 10 years from now?
What do we expect this to turn into?
Wow.
Lots of hands.
Whenever I look down at the phone again,
I'm going to Tony V then we're tagging in big spang.
Yeah,
I think we're going to see the further division of pricing between small
bite size experiences that are going to be largely free to play or dollars to
play and these monolithic large budget things that are going to frankly cost more than what
a large budget thing looks like now. I think a big part of the dynamic, I don't think,
a big part of the dynamic that exists in the industry
is that for a lot of games,
it's just as hard to make an okay JRPG
as it is to make a good JRPG,
in terms of the costs associated with engineers and art.
And as the tools that we're all working with,
that you're helping Pioneer Sam over at the Farcade become more and more accessible to a broader set of people, the indie games cost $10 to $15 for a reason.
It's because you can, or $20 for a reason, because you're making them with two people.
As it requires fewer and fewer people to make okay experiences, those okay experiences are just not going to command a premium price.
And the things that are awesome, awesome experiences
are going to command a more premium price than they do currently
because the barrier to entry for the thing that is not a movie
is going to continue to get higher and higher
because the expectations are going to get higher and higher.
The only $80 games or $100 games are going to be the Red higher and higher because the expectations are going to get higher and higher. The only $80 games or a hundred dollar games are going to be the red dead
redemptions and whatnot.
And then everything else I think is really going to become an indie game or a
free to play thing that is much less costly to make.
And then that scales over time.
Great stuff from Tony big bang from a back.
What's your take?
my take is a game for every price or a price for every game.
I think that we need to have more – and I think this comes from the gamers as well.
Gamers need to get used to not paying $60 for a game, and I'm a staunch believer in that.
I think that different games have different prices, and that should be reflected in the market value.
But, you know, then you also have, you know, free to play as well, which has kind of come up as this dichotomy between, oh, you're either running free to play or you're a paid game.
as gamers get more used to paying 50 70 60 80 40 you know all of these different kind of prices
for games they'll get they'll get more acclimated to having different expectations of games as as
tony was just saying so i think i i so that that that's my take i think as you know gamer tastes
evolve and as games develop into larger experiences as as well as smaller experiences, people are going to be okay with paying different prices and paying that premium for a larger game and expecting a little off for a smaller game.
I want to go to Koji, then to Michael O'Connor.
Guys, what are we talking about?
We're like, are games going to be more expensive?
This is like an Always Sunny episode, man.
The game discovers inflation you know like i i used to work at a movie theater and uh a ticket for
the movies was like 450 and and now that's like ridiculous you know this is like a back in my day
and it's just gonna happen like the premium games are gonna get more expensive you know gta might
be a hundred dollars and like in 10 years from now it might be 120 or 130 and we'll be like oh well that's just what they fucking cost same with ads and games
you know this all goes back to the dystopian hellscape but but also uh i do agree that like
we are going to see more variants you know like i don't know if people remember when uh uh app the
app store first came out everything in the app store was either free or 99 cents, and that was it. So you made an app and you charged 99 cents for it, or it cost nothing.
And then as the space sort of matured, so did the price variance. I think that as we see a shift
into gaming as the preferred mode of entertainment, and I think it's starting to happen over TV,
over streaming, streaming over movies over
music even people want to play games we're going to see much more varied experiences and yes there
will be some like 40 games there'll be some 60 games but overall it's just going to get more
expensive we're going to see 100 games we're going to see 120 games we're going to in my lifetime for
sure we're going to see 150 games no question and i think that anyone who thinks like uh otherwise is less diluting themselves but also like if that's just the nature of inflation i
don't think it's like necessarily fully predatory i feel like in 10 years either every game is free
to play and then it's just a micro transaction hellscape to use your verbiage or we see like
200 games and i don't think there's much of
it in between personally michael o'connor what say you i see it in between um i think uh yeah
inflation is is a key part of this um you know we spoke a while ago on a previous episode about
what our expectations were on the gta price i I think GTA is a really interesting example because a lot of other gaming companies
are essentially hoping for the price of GTA
to be as high as possible.
So it creates a new benchmark,
pretty much, for AAA prices.
And that even includes, you know,
like AA or indie studios
because that gives them pretty much the air
to lift their prices when margins are pretty much the air to lift air prices
when margins are pretty much desperately needed across the board.
But it is notable to think about how things have changed.
Like if you were just for inflation, the last GTA, GTA 5, I think,
was the cheapest.
It was the cheapest.
So like it was sold for like, I think, was the cheapest. It was the cheapest. So it was sold for, I think, like $60.
But if you adjust for it today, it would be around $80.
But that's in comparison to the first GTA from, I guess, I don't know,
$95 or $96 or something around there,
which if you adjust for inflation is $90.
So it's more expensive.
So yeah, this is just part and
parcel of of consumer price index stuff here so um i think um from my perspective frankly i hope
that they had set a set a high benchmark i think what's likely going to happen with this game as
well with you know games as they move forward is that we are going to see more and more hybrid models.
So the kind of the in-between that you're discussing,
whereby you may have a upfront cost,
but then you've got subscription in there,
and then you've also got kind of in-game spend as well.
So that's how I see it playing out.
I don't see it being a one-size-fits-all
like it kind of used to be.
I think we're going to see a lot of diversity.
But across platforms and across specific kind of verticals,
there will be cohesion that needs to be paid attention by developers.
For the record, GTA 1 came out in 1997 and adjusted for inflation.
It's $100.
There it is.
Boom.
There it is.
Let's hear from OG, who I can't believe is still staying up for us
all the way to dubai and then we'll tag in uh justin gary yeah i think i paid like two dollars
for gta3 back in the day but those were like the the shady playstation one cds that weren't really
official and stuff that doesn't exist anymore um yeah i think i mean you you as the
customer decide the price in the end of the day i think if everyone's happy to pay 100 bucks for
video games then everyone will continue to pay 100 bucks i don't i don't know why we're looking
at gta as like oh they might make it 100 bucks there's already multiple games that are on like
the ps store for 100 i think the the new gundam games like 109 i know the madden ones are always
like obscene amounts like 140 150 depends on the edition that
you get so um how much will gta be i don't know but i think for sure it'll push triple a quote
unquote triple a studios um that wanna sell that experience it's like hey listen you know you paid
this for gta why not pay the same for my game um you know activision obviously uh it'll push them to start charging
triple digits but you know astro bought one game of the year last year it's one of the most fun
games i've played i maybe i put like 50 hours into that i think it was only like 30 or 40
so pick your poison at the end of the day league of legends is like the one game i play the most
and it's free to play marva rivals is free to play so yeah i think you can't really you can't
really decide which way
it's going to go is it better to be free but have a shit ton of micro transactions or is it better
to just be like a hundred dollars and then never charge me anything else good question i'm leaning
on justin gary to answer yeah i mean look a lot so many of the conversations today have revolved
around this like how do you deal with like high, high cost, high risk of making games?
And how do you get that and get the customers to care and pay what you need to keep the game alive?
And I think, honestly, fast forward 10 years, I don't think any of these high-priced games stay the same.
I think the prices are actually going to crash.
I'll take the hot take here.
because what you're going to see is like cost of development going down
because you're going to have, you know,
the tools and AI capabilities of what you can create that what we're now
paying this premium for, which is that AAA,
like visuals and audio experience you're going to be able to do,
you know, in your garage with a small team.
And so when that happens,
what people are charging a premium for stops being worth a premium and the
business models will all collapse around what is like a good longer sustained thing because what we want is a fun game experience and be immersed in
it and i think that this like spike that's happening is one of many reactions to the fact
that the cost of triple-a games has bloated and the ability to acquire an audience has been hard
you know it's gotten more expensive and i think eventually that's all going to collapse in on itself and force like cheaper,
but still high quality games to come out from people who know how to make good games and can
leverage the new tools to do so in a way that lets you do it for not a hundred million dollars,
but for like a hundred thousand dollars.
Koji, I see you throw the thumbs down. I need you to also give me your MVP for the day.
Yeah, sorry. I keep butting in here. But first of all, thumbs down. I you to also give me your mvp for the day yeah sorry i keep butting in here uh
but first of all thumbs down i only because like when have we ever passed the savings on to the
consumer you know like look at covid prices skyrocketed for all this kind of bullshit and
then once covid was over it was like nah we're just gonna keep it high as fuck you know and like
even even you know i'm now like going through a home renovation, right? Like,
the the innovations that we have made in order to like, expedite construction and make things cheaper and faster, etc. is like through through the roof, like in the 50s, people were laying
bricks by hand and all this shit. And now we don't need to do that. And still, the costs are
astronomically more than they used to be, right? So like, I don't think that like, even though
things are going to get faster and better, it's necessarily means that things are going to get cheaper. Right.
The invisible hand of the market is just going to hold people down.
But as far as MVP goes, Oh, go ahead.
Yeah. Sorry, but since you're coming right at me, I got to at least,
I got to at least chat back.
It all depends what the quality of the, what,
what the quality of competition is, right?
If you're in a regulated market like housing, where it's actually regulations and zoning
that cause the problem, you can't go down.
But if you're in a unregulated, highly competitive market like television, like big screen TVs,
the price drops dramatically.
And so I think gaming is a very open, unregulated market with lots of people available to develop and build.
So it's exactly the type of space that would push prices down.
I hope that I'm wrong.
Let me just put it that way.
I hope that I'm wrong.
And you know what?
I'm going to give Justin MVP just because I like his take and I enjoyed being on his podcast before.
And yeah, MVP, Justin.
Yeah, MVP Justin.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
Shout out to Justin and SoulForge Fusion.
Also, one of the things that always pisses me off is the TV example is a great one.
But for some reason, like snack foods are like just twice as expensive as they used to be.
Like to get a bag of Lay's in America is like $7 now.
It's fucking crazy.
And it all happened during COVID whenever food stamps became really...
Just look at bottles of water. Literally fucking
water. Yeah, it's
and so I would imagine that snack foods
is incredibly highly
competitive, but somehow they all unanimously
have either incurred some costs
that I don't understand exist or all
agreed to just fuck up simultaneously.
It's the same company.
That's why it's the same free companies. Yeah, they block people out and you have to pay for us simultaneously. It's the same company. That's why. It's the same three companies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They block people out
and you have to pay for shelf space.
So they're able to block out competition
quite a bit.
Monopoly by distribution.
Interesting.
Okay.
I'm going to Kevin Lambert,
then the Tatted Lawyer.
Yeah.
The inflation,
it's weird that games haven't gone up
per inflation. Really strange. It's probably
fueled by a race to make games cheaper because the success of these $40 and $50 games is really
putting pressure on the 70 plus titles to justify their size. They're like, did this really need to
cost $100? And I think that's going to be, it's just going to be interesting. I mean, people have called for the death of AAA multi-million, you know, double-digit million-dollar game budgets and triple-digit for a long time. I don't think we're ever going to see the death of those games. Like, look at Claire Obscure. Like, they didn't spend $100 million on filler content,
and that's a feature of their go-to-market,
that the game was cheaper because of that,
although they were like six years in development,
so you could argue that.
So I don't know.
I think there's going to be a spectrum.
I do think inflation is going to kick in.
I agree with what Koji said.
I think it was Koji that the people will pay
what the people will pay.
But I don't think,
I don't know if we're going to see $270 games,
but if we do,
it will be because the market is willing to pay that
because the game has something incredible about them
that we're all cool with.
So it'll be a spectrum tldr and i
think that there will be a race as more efficiencies are found through ai and better go to market
better budgets to to push the games to that 40 and 50 dollar range that has been doing well recently
i love it tad it over to you then, Danak.
Yeah, I'm going to say in 10 years, if we go back, let's say 20 years, right, the average video game costs about $49.99.
If you were like me, you'd go to Toys R Us,
and you'd be consistently in your mom's ear being like,
hey, buy me this, buy me this, buy me this. And she'd be like, no.
But I vividly remember, obviously, all of them being about $49.99.
Now, 20 years later, you know, the average game price is about $70 per game.
Obviously, there's the outliers who are the premium, quote unquote, games that are trying to sell for $80, $90, $100.
But I'd say the average cost of a game right now is about $69.99.
That means in 20 years, the average cost went up about $20.
I think we're going to see about the same thing happen in another 10, 15 years as well.
Sure, there's going to absolutely be those outlier games like these idiot publishing CEOs that are like, this is a Fudrupal A game.
And they're going to try to smack on these crazy prices. But I think to a
lot of the different points here, there's going to be so much gaming content flooding every
different platform just because of the ease of creating these games is going to get so much
cheaper and easier, especially with the onset of AI coding. So I don't really see the prices going
up that much. I definitely see them going up and adjusting for inflation. But if in 15 to 20 years, the average price of a game is $99.99, that wouldn't surprise me. But it would surprise me if that was like, you know, double that price or triple that price, just because that doesn't actually match up with the current curve in terms of which or how games are actually becoming more expensive over time.
current curve in terms of which or how games are actually becoming more expensive over time
um so yes definitely the outliers like uh gta for sure that i mean they spent over over the cost to
build the burj khalifa has gone into the development of that game so you know can you say they maybe
deserve to put it that high we don't know we'll see when the game comes out uh but i i personally
would be surprised if it was anywhere over 99.99 in terms of like
around that range and for today my mvp absolutely goes to kate i think she nailed it in almost
not even almost every single one of her responses so kate is for sure my mvp amazing you love to
hear it knock and limbs to finish this up give us your take on this one and also give us your mvp
yeah i'm not gonna lie here sam not much of substance my joke about inflation gone uh my
point about ai gone i'll give you this you're not allowed to launch a hundred dollar game unless
it's the fifth iteration of that game because all we want to do is consume slop so gta 6 we saw
street fighter whatever the fuck it's on call of duty 432 that's okay 100 bucks for those games no problem and i'll give you one piece of information
since you asked the question about potato chips this is some weird knowledge that i have for
whatever reason there's a thing that you should look into called the potato cartel the way that
this works sam is 97 of the entire globe supply of frozen potatoes is owned by three or four companies.
Each of those companies feed data about their potato costs into a machine that totally none of them own.
It's some complete third party, apparently.
And that machine spits out price recommendations to all of them.
And all of those prices happen to be the same thing.
They found a way to fuck us all on potatoes.
That's why a bag of chips costs $7.
So they really have found a way to simultaneously fuck us.
You know, I haven't heard that with potatoes,
but that actually is a thing with light bulbs.
There's a light bulb cartel that does the exact same thing.
Shout out to Veracity or whatever that YouTube channel is that does.
Yeah, I saw mine on Morning Brew and Good Work.
Shout out to YouTube, dude.
What a fucking tool.
Also, shout out to my brother.
15 million subscribers earlier this week.
Fucking animal, dude. Noc, did you give us
your MVP? I did not. I got
lost in the potato thing. Koji, for sure.
Shout out. Lems,
over to you, bud.
Yeah, I just want to
reiterate Will's point
earlier that we need to normalize
variants of games. I always grew up
a PlayStation gamer. I feel like PC gamers on the the steam side you kind of got used to more variable pricing but
like man on the playstation it was always just like new game it costs 60 bucks doesn't matter
what it is it's just like new launch game is 60 bucks and it doesn't set expectations properly
at all because sometimes you get a game that's like it's basically a glorified standalone dlc
and you pay full price for it going into's basically a glorified standalone dlc and you
pay full price for it going into it expecting a full game and then you're like oh this is done
after 12 hours like why the fuck wasn't this like 40 bucks or something like that and i think
normalizing variable pricing based on like you know how much the game costs what what the
expectation is from the players makes way more sense like the clear obscure devs even i saw
like an article where they said people were questioning the quality of the game when they said it was only
going to be 40 or 50 bucks or whatever it was and that it was going to be unfinished or like
it was going to need patches and things like this and then people were like oh this is
like a totally polished game at this price and it was just because they did it on a leaner team
and the tools have been improving. So it's lower costs.
And it's just like,
yeah,
let's normalize having variable pricing for games and not just like,
it's new and I'm launching it.
Therefore it is 60 bucks or,
you know,
whatever it is adjusted for inflation.
And then my MVP for today is going to be Michael.
I always like his,
his optimism on things.
And I'm like,
Hey,
we haven't figured it all out yet.
And we need to try new shit. So Michael
O'Connor, I should say for clarity because we got
two Michaels on the panel today. We sure do.
I'm with you on the variable pricing.
I'm with you on PlayStation
being a little bit fucky there, but
I will say it's way better
than what Nintendo does, which is new
games, 60 bucks, old game,
also 60 bucks forever
in perpetuity, always, no matter what.
I'm going over to OG next if he's still with us.
If he's not asleep, OG, who's your MVP of the day?
My MVP is Noc because I love the fact that regardless of whether or not he agrees with you,
he just needs to have the last laugh even if he ends up going down the path of logical fallacies.
So, yeah, I respect him,
so it has to be nice.
You'll never fucking beat me, OG.
If you try to beat Knock, he just
drags you down into the mud and beats you
with experience. Tony, who's your
MVP of the day?
Easily, my boy
Justin Carey with the hot takes.
I love it, dude. Absolutely crushed today uh justin who's your mvp
you know this was such a great uh chat all around i uh it's i feel weird now because i was gonna
give it to tony because i uh he always makes me freaking laugh every time and uh delivers some
value so that was gonna be my go-to so i'm gonna stick with it even though now it sounds uh he always makes me freaking laugh every time and delivers some value.
So that was going to be my go-to.
So I'm going to stick with it, even though now it sounds reciprocal. That was my final MVP.
A vote for Tony is never a wasted vote, dude.
He's an incredible panelist every time.
Wills, and then to Kevin.
Wills, who's yours?
My vote's gone at OG and hopes he comes back more love the takes yeah dude shame about the
time zones i would love to have og on even more often and kevin lambert who's your
mvp and then we got to get michael o'connor's vote i'm going with tatted on this one for his
lucid take on uh the pricing of games uh over the next short. Kevin, with the recency bias, I don't hate it.
Michael O'Connor, over to you.
It's hard to be on Knopf for that piece of potato trivia.
It's a fucking, I came from left field, so I'm like, wow.
I'm still reeling here.
But, yeah, no, I got to give it to Kate for kind of making an interesting point
and creating that amount of dialogue and coming on and defending the point.
So, yeah, Kate.
That gives us a tie between Justin, Gary, and Kate Irwin.
Kate's dropped down to a listener.
She might be on a meeting or something.
But, Kate, if you want to come up here, I'll split the face time between the two of you to promote what you're working on but
justin gary our mvp of the day uh soul forge fusion get take it away 30 seconds whatever you
want to plug yeah man i will anybody that likes my hot takes i'll first say you can go check out
justingarydesigns.com it's got my sub stack i talk about exactly how to like vibe code as a game
designer and all the different things.
I love that given deep, you can find my podcast with Koji.
And then, yeah, come check out Soul Forge Fusion.
You want to see a single player game that stands on its own and feeds in to a broader community that you can be a part of.
It's Web 2.
It's Web 3.
It's tabletop.
It's all in one.
It's been an awesome project to work on and get to share.
And there's a lot of great TCG creators and enthusiasts.
And so, yeah, come check out the games
and come enjoy the chats.
And I absolutely love this.
That's why I love chatting with Koji here,
like that back and forth
and pushing against my hot takes and hearing yours.
So always happy to engage.
So yeah, thanks for having me.
And for anybody that wants to join
and continue the conversation,
you know how to get in touch with me there.
Amazing stuff.
I love it, Justin.
I have some Soul Forge Fusion packs on my display behind me.
I played a ton whenever Dub was out here.
I actually took them and played the physical version with my friends over Christmas this past Christmas, six months ago.
And we had a blast as well.
Got to play in a tournament not too long ago, too.
I've had a blast.
So thanks so much for making a cool game.
Kate Irwin, also 30 seconds of FaceTime. Over to you. Thanks so much for coming today and also being the focus of one of our topics.
Thanks. Yeah, great discussion. Really good takes from from so many people. Yeah, I write a daily newsletter called The Drop for Blockworks. It covers all things consumer crypto, including games, memes, apps, wallets, all the latest in that space.
And you can go to the little at handles, at the drop NFT, and click on the link in the bio that you can find through my profile.
Absolutely.
Huge respect for Kate and what she does.
Thanks so much for bringing some real journalism to crypto.
Lord knows we need it.
We appreciate you.
Please don't go anywhere. Thank you.
And if you guys want to leave us five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, we're trying to grow
our very own podcast. Also, five star
Justin Garry's while you're at it
if you happen to be doing that. It's basically
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And of course, Avalanche is the official game of Gamified.
It's more than just a blockade chain.
It's a winter wonderland of innovation with $100 million AI-funded partnerships
with gaming giants like Godzilla Games, T1 Esports, solo leveling, and more.
Avalanche is breaking the ice and setting the standard for the future of Web3 gaming.
So, whether you're a seasoned pro or a curious newbie,
come explore the Avalanche of possibilities and discover a world where the snow never melts and the fun never stops.
I'm on some old intros, dude.
I rewrote these.
I rewrote these.
My organization is killing my productivity.
But get ready to rumble with the gatekeepers who are flipping the script and giving the power back to the players.
They're the ones that are turning the metaverse into a melting pot of ideas and a crucible of creativity.
They're the ones that are also empowering players to take control of their digital destinies.
Man, I'm in shambles over here. Game 7, shout out, infrastructure. I love them.
They do great stuff. I appreciate you guys. And millions of plays every day, but only a few build
them. Farcade is slipping the script. No code tools, on-chain publishing, and built-in social
distribution. Your game gets real players, real feedback, and real reach with the Farcade. Plus,
your game gets real players, real feedback, and real reach with the Farcade.
Plus, you can check out our Game Jam with Doodles right now
that we just announced with $5,000 in prizes.
And we have one coming up with one of these special panelists next week,
which we haven't announced yet.
I'm very, very excited about that.
I can't wait to tell you guys more.
But shout out to the Farcade, the official game of Game 5.
And thank you, all of our amazing panelists,
even if you didn't win MVP, Koji Tatted Kevin Michael O'Connor knock OG Tony V Spang absolutely banger
panel also Sinjin has been hanging out in the audience uh I appreciate all you guys it's been
such a great episode we'll be back same time same place 4 p.m eastern next Wednesday and I'm late
for a meeting already so bye-bye now have a great. It was Rob. This is a hellscape.
I should have been MVP. Thank you.
