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Gamified #126 | Honeyland Acquired | Is Gambling Gaming?
Recorded: July 16, 2025 Duration: 0:48:46Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation delves into the evolving landscape of Web3 gaming, highlighting the launch of Gigaverse, the integration of AI in gameplay, and the implications of financialization on traditional gaming values. As partnerships with AVAX emerge and token-based incentives gain traction, the industry faces both growth opportunities and challenges.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hold on. hold up what have i missed and why is avalanche green is it green because number go up
i think that's a problem people are actively trying to solve
dude all all i know is we're seeing the entire fucking Twitter timeline changing to Pudgy PFPs, yet
AVAX isn't doing it.
It's breaking my heart, man.
Give me a Pudgy.
Can we get a live updated Google document to sort this out?
What's up, guys?
What's up, Koji?
Koji, what's the movie, bud?
We're into golf now
as a panel here, so he's watching
The Legend of Bagger Vance.
I see a bunch of emotes. I have no idea what's happening.
Dude, I watched
Velocipastor over the weekend
and it is exactly what you think it is.
It's a pastor that turns into a velociraptor.
Fucking wild.
That's how I know your shit at golf, bro,
because you don't even watch The Legend of Bagger Vance.
Jerry, my taste in movies has nothing to do with my inability to play golf.
How is golf what you took away from what No just said that's what's incredible to me he just
he's obsessed the veloci pastor that's what i want to know more about is the veloci pastor
jerry decided to make golf his entire personality and now we we all have to pay the price for that
yeah dude let's let's just go ahead and not like We know the GameCube sucks. We know Jerry can't hit golf balls.
Let's just freaking leave it there. No more. No, Jerry.
No. I hit
the shit out of golf balls. It's just they end up on the fairway
over. That's super nice, but we're not going to talk about
golf anymore. Somebody make a Tiger Woods video game, you know
Somebody make a Web 3 Tiger Woods game, you fucks
You know, we're talking about golf over here?
Yeah, we're talking about golf
You should watch The Legend of Bagger Vance tonight, Coach
You hit your dealer up and say, I need to watch The Legend of Bagger Vance
That movie's canceled, for one
But I'm more of a tin cup guy anyway.
Alright, listen.
This week, Sam has given me the power to mute you idiots that I disagree with.
So, on your best behavior.
Let's jump into this.
From tournament lobbies to Web3 war rooms, he's the undisputed controller king turned clutch consultant.
Running point for Glitter Cloud Solutions with the same intensity he once brought to every 1v4.
He's the tactician you call when you're launching, he's a little more lethal.
Whether it's Web 3, Web 2, or just web chaos, he turns marketing plans into map control.
From the king of controllers to the concierge of campaigns, it's Dub, and I fucked that word up.
I don't know which word you messed up, but I love you, No love you knock and huge announcement as i always do during these intros i've been on the road traveling the world for four months but your
boy is finally coming home tomorrow and i cannot wait to see if my plants are still alive uh tony
uh i hope you took care of them man huge dude that was still going on holy shit um anyway he's tanked
panels trash takes and still walked out blowing from golden god to from golden fraud to golden
god his redemption arc has more rewrites than a netflix reboot call it charisma call it chaos
just don't call it a comeback it's the radiant renegade himself, Gary Singer. Wow, the radiant renegade.
I have words for the Avalanche Gaming account, though,
because your profile should be green.
Get with the fucking times, man.
Who's on this account?
I don't even see that.
You can speak, Avaxon Gaming.
You're allowed to speak.
As the reigning MVP of all all time here you can say something
no muting jerry whether it's breaking down a subnet stack or repping out a squat rack
he's the beef mode business dev in the iron slinging innovator of avalanche
a keynote presence with the power of a tier 5 tank his biceps are bandwidth incarnate he's the
barbell swinging block building avalanche ace
you've been waiting for. It's Will Spangler. I feel like Nock doing the intros, it's less hype
and more me getting factually informed about how cool I am, which is another level of hype.
Dude, I am using 110% of my brain power to not fuck up these intros. I feel it I feel it the energy comes through knock you're crushing it
You're crushing it and Jerry if you want to talk shit to the gaming on a vax account you go through me, all right?
They they speak when spoken to kind of deal. Okay, it's it's we found out as wills on his other phone
I like to believe that that is absolutely true he wants me game so
addictive it got installed on every office computer in the world and
enshrined in the video game Hall of Fame with Solitaire now he's channeling that
power into something far more weird a blockchain battleground of literally
literary Giants and mythical beasts with project oh it's the Gandalf of game
design Kevin Lambert.
Ooh, I don't know if I want
Noct to read these from now on or if I
prefer Sam. It's going to be a tough one. You guys
will have to battle it out. Thank you. Great to be here.
I prefer Sam. I prefer Sam.
Half
anime protagonist, half legal
executioner, he's the only founder who
treats legalese like a skill tree,
unlocking new clauses, summoning clean terms, and leveling up after every encounter.
A former SEC lawyer turned anime entrepreneur, now building Andromeda, a world where games win and lawsuits lose.
He's the clause casting counselor, the ace of Andromeda, Michael Christine.
Hey, what up everybody?
Knock, I think you're doing great with these.
Don't let anybody bully you.
You got me on your team.
Let's go.
We'll sue everybody who bullies you.
I don't know that I want the Nintendo fanboy on my side.
That's the most lawyer shit I've ever heard.
This guy's threatening lawsuits eight minutes into the show.
Damn right.
Everybody be on your toes today.
Well, we're talking millions juggled like they're flaming bowling pins
budgets that would make a dragon sweat gold and a personality that could ignite a supernova
he's bringing the heat of wild card and thousands now he's gone rogue a marketing maverick with no
leash no limits and a flame thrower for a tongue he's the first round draft pick of platform
domination the mvp of media mayhem. It's Tony V.
Yo! Stoked to be here, guys.
And, Dub, your plants are super dead.
I think we all could have figured that that was the case.
Probably a couple of months ago, too.
Before he was crafting card economies, he was scaling sandstone
and the side-eyeing capitalism from 60 feet up.
He's bartered beasts, bar tabs, and business models.
Now he barters with fate itself through a sci-fi TCG that makes Yu-Gi-Oh look like Uno.
He once played bass in a band and now plays God in a card game.
The only real difference is the budget.
The rock-climbing realist, the architect architect of asymmetry it's the prince of
parallel koji yo what's going on i'm uh i'm starting to feel a little under the weather
so like my brain isn't working properly so i'm gonna be even slower than i normally am but
uh happy to be here sam you're gonna have to add some alliteration for uh you know like uh
i don't know mass i can't even alliterate.
My brain isn't working, man.
I just, I got some golf clubs today.
So when you guys were talking about golf, I was like, oh, I'm in now, baby.
I feel like Koji has entered every episode for the last 126 episodes with,
I'm going to be a little slower than usual today.
And last but not least, he's the cold-blooded king of commentary, the gecko with the gift of gab,
and the only panelist here who could safely hide in your shoe. At 2.4 pounds of pure pundit power, he delivers more punch per pixel than any warm-blooded host alive.
It's a typhoon of tiny takes.
It's Lem.
What up?
Killing it on the intros, Noc.
Don't let anyone tell you you can't do a little alliteration in there.
See, I can't even speak properly.
Okay.
At risk of completely derailing this, I have to mention this because we talked about a lizard.
I'm going to post the video later tonight.
I was on vacation for the last couple of weeks.
We were in Italy.
A literal little lizard was on the wall.
I tried to get it out of the room.
It ran into the fucking AC unit, and the sound it made was horrific.
I think everybody needs to hear it.
You killed my cousin.
Dude, it's fucking traumatic.
Maybe I won't share that, actually.
All right.
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Shout out to AVAX, the kings of the north, and the official chain of Gamified.
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Play, build, Remix. D dump the castles in the cloud because
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credits program plus bestowing soulbound loot to the loyal summon the fellowship is forming and the
final boss is traditional gaming gatekeepers join the fray where your grind gains gravity with Game 7, the official game,
or infra of Gamified. Way too many Gs there. Holy shit. Sam has been trying to scale this podcast,
and it's sort of a co-op campaign, so share with us, share the actual show with a friend or a
founder who you think might benefit from the discussion, and let's see if you can beat this
boss together. It's available anywhere you listen to your podcasts uh all right let's start off with the first topic finally that was an absolute nightmare uh sentiment score is having
an ai agent play a game for you really gaming uh this was sort of prompted by moritz who shared a
screenshot of his ai agent results from running dungeons and gigaverse he talks about making
50 a day and says quote all my runs are fully automated. Only manual work is managing the items,
buying, selling, crafting, et cetera.
The question to the panel is this.
If you're not the one playing the dungeons,
but only doing the management side of things,
is this still gaming?
What's your sentiment score on managing AI agents
to play games for you?
Given that we've got the founder of colony here on the show we're
going to start this with koji i mean on one head i would say yes so like management sims in general
are are a form of gaming so there's no way that like you can you can argue that like managing
people to actually execute a game isn't isn't gaming like look at all the sports sims look at
Even even like mobile games like punch club as an example, right? Like you're training a thing and then it's executing and you see how well your training works on its execution
So that's definitely a game the other side of the coin though
So my sentiment score is just gonna be a five
The other side of the coin is if you're if you start with I'm making x amount of dollars a
day, fuck off. I know thanks to whoever tweeted that. But like, that's not what we're here to do.
If that's what you're here to do. It's not a you're not it's not about gaming anymore. It's
a good job now. Right? And then like, what's what? What are we talking about? So like,
even if it's supposed to be fun, if that's if that's your your end goal, just like day trader
get a job man
yeah you bring up a fair point and one of the things right at the end of the tweet that moritz mentioned was that he sort of left off on this note that web3 gaming is not dead you're just
looking in the wrong places sort of insinuating that this is what web3 gaming should be sam you're
the one who sort of kicked off this tweet and started this whole conversation. I've got a feeling you're opinionated here. Over to you.
Okay, this is gaming, and I wish Sinjin was here so that he could shit on me for my opinions,
because there's this term iGaming, which is essentially like internet gambling,
and it somehow has fallen under the umbrella of gaming.
But this is gaming in the
same sense that like a person who professionally plays poker professionally games for a living
which i i would say they fucking game zero percent they're they're professional doing their job which
is not necessarily gaming in this case so for me the sentiment score is like a two just because
we we've all seen a bunch of these come and go. We
have failed to see even a single one of them have long-term sustainable economies built on the back
of these kinds of processes. And so if you're strictly doing it to make money, it's a race to
zero. That being said, the speed at which people can spin these up is accelerating. And so maybe
there's a world in which we all just get very comfortable with these coming along, being successful for short periods of time, and then absolutely imploding. And we're
just, that's the cycle. That's okay. Right. But I don't feel great about it. I don't want to really
engage with it. That said, to be completely clear, I think what Dith is doing is pretty awesome. And
I think Dith is an incredibly smart individual. But I myself would want to jump off a bridge if I worked for a company
that was just focused on these kinds of Ponzenomic processes
instead of just making things that were really fun.
Sam, does your take come from the position of
as long as it's financialized, you dislike it?
Or do you believe that that is true for all God games?
Things like Black and White 2, etc.
Do you want to play a God game?
Or do you think they all sort of fall under this umbrella,
regardless of whether or not you're earning?
No, I do think that Colony is probably the future
of a lot of more passive styles of gaming.
We're already seeing Idle pop up as a thing
that is more and more of a recurring concept.
So I don't know.
I don't really have a problem with it.
Jerry calls it a second monitor game.
I think, I think that that's kind of okay, but I don't know.
I, I, something about just being like, oh, I'm, I'm playing statistics and I'm going
to pick a thing and this, this is going to happen 36% of the time instead of 33% of the
time.
Like, I don't know, man.
Like, don't we have better shit to do?
That's how I feel.
Dov, do you agree?
God, dude, this is hard.
I mean, like, in the general sense of, like, what everyone's saying,
like, I agree what they are,
but for this specific tweet and use case
and using the platform Fireball.gg on top of gigaverse is
like i feel a bit different about it because i'm actually one of the users that is doing this and i
i use it daily i play it daily i started by just playing gigaverse all the time and it take it used
to take me two hours a day to run through all of my energy and to do all of my dungeons and to play all of that stuff.
And now, since I started using this AI platform, Fireball, to play my dungeons for me, the way I play for about 30 minutes a day. I spend my initial time, like, choosing where to put my experience points,
which items to put on the market,
and which, like, there's four different dungeons
to choose from and go after.
So there's still a lot of, like, player things to do
and, like, things that feel like gaming
that I'm making decisions around.
And I throw in, like, it's just the actual, like,
rock, paper, scissors operations of the dungeon running that the AI is now doing for me and um you know it doesn't feel great that
every time I'm doing it there's like oh you've made five dollars or one dollar or whatever I
agree with that over financialization of it but I do enjoy watching my AI agent play
and being like, oh, cool. It just feels like me playing it still. So I still believe that this
experience specifically is still gaming. And I do want to make sure to point out that this isn't
death and the gigaverse team that are putting this together these are other teams
that have developed ai tools to go on top of the gigaverse experience it started with treasure and
doing it for their little small nfts and i have that one too and it just wasn't as good as the
fireball program so yeah i mean i'm i'm enjoying it as a gamer. I still feel like I'm a gamer. So roast me if you want. But look into the details and play it for yourself before making a final decision on this experience specifically and whatnot.
an unhealthy amount of time playing MMOs
I do sort of
empathize with the idea of like
wanting to have monotonous tasks done
one of the things that sort of burns me out
from RuneScape when I am playing it
pretty frequently is having to do the dailies
and you mentioned I'm playing it for two hours a game
on one hand it's
isn't that just playing the game?
shouldn't you be doing that thing?
on the other hand if I'm trying to progress elsewhere
the last thing I want to do is spend two hours on bullshit dailies.
Tatted, over to you.
Yeah, my sentiment score on this one is about a five.
And the only reason is I think Koji was absolutely right.
There's so many games out there.
I think of like FC football manager and things like that,
where people literally just like to be the coach be the manager etc the way that i see that this
fails however is if everybody else isn't playing like that so if you have a game where there's like
real players controlling their character and then there's an ai controlling their character
i don't really think that can match i don't think that that actually works i also don't really like
the financial aspect of it but that's that's just me as a gamer. I also never liked FC Manager as well. I personally think, and what my company's
actually working on is that AI that plays games with you is going to be the future, not AI game,
AI that plays games for you. So what I mean by that is instead of you being like, all right,
go play the game for me, it's like, hey, we have a co-op game. I don't have a friend who I can play with.
Boom, I'm going to play with my AI companion.
We can talk about it while we're playing, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think AI and gaming is going to be one of the biggest revolutions in terms of a way
to combat loneliness in the world.
But I don't think it's going to really catch on being like, oh, yeah, just go play for
Unless, like I said, everybody in that game is playing in that style because once
you're playing a game and you know that you're playing against bots and not real people sometimes
the game becomes a lot less fun especially if it's any kind of competitive game or anything
like that especially if there's financial aspects into it the game of course is going to devolve it
to everybody using ai because if that's what's going to give you the advantage that's what's
going to give you the advantage i don't know if anybody's ever played Rocket League against the AI, but those AIs are amazing.
So clearly you're going to be at a disadvantage if you're like a normal human player.
So I think a game like that just has to decide what its identity is for this to actually work.
If it's trying to play both sides of the fence, I don't think it could ever work.
You bring up a good point.
I think unlike Colony, which is literally designed to put in inputs and manage AI, I think what Dubb just explained in Fireball.gg is actively giving two inputs for many outputs, which I think in most other games would probably be considered cheating.
Kevin Lambert, what do you think?
First of all, yes, it's gaming.
I'll get to my sentiment score at the end.
You know, Koji's take, if you're doing it for money, F off.
And Sam said something similar. If you're strictly doing it for money, it's a race to zero. This is one of my favorite
topics because it gets into psychology and motivation, which for those of you new here,
I have an article breaking down Web3 gamer personas and their motivations and why they play.
And this touches at the heart of that because why are the people playing these games?
Are they playing it to make money? Are they playing it because it's fun? So let's use it
as an example, World of Warcraft, the auction house, right? Yes, there's a gray market where
you can gold sell to farmers, but let's say you don't do that. And I used to not do that. I used
to play the WoW auction house, and it was really fun to buy and sell
fire resistance potions because I could corner the market for everybody that was going to
go on the Blackwing Lair raid or whatever it was back in those days. And that was fun
for me. I enjoyed doing that. I'm amassing WoW gold, which had zero value to somebody
who doesn't do off market account trading, but it was fun. So my motivation was game-related
for those economic activities. Poker is similar. When you see people who go over to a poker night
and they play a $1 buy-in, they are not playing to make money. They're not like,
I need this to make my rent, bro. My portfolio number go up. They are playing because it's fun to strategize and play the statistics and see if you can
be your friends.
And the $1 real money is just like the stakes that makes it more interesting of a game than
playing for jelly beans.
So they enjoy that.
But I would even argue that those players, their core motivation is for fun, not for
money, you know, until you get up to like, you know, significant, you know, prize pools and things like that. So in this case, when the AI agent plays
for you, what's it doing? Is it playing for you? Or is it earning for you? Because there's a
difference. And I would say that it depends, right? Like Dub mentioned playing in a way that,
you know, he was putting in inputs and the AI was taking away some of the monotony.
But that sounded like, to my radar, genuinely fun for Dub.
So I would say that he is one of the people who are approaching it with a play for fun motivation, even though there might also be a little Vinny in him as well.
So, you know, my sentiment score is like based on a game's ability to find product market fit
and exist at scale for many years and by that metric i think this particular game is probably
a five but there are people who are probably playing it with a fun motivation and to them
it's purely a game and there are people who are playing it for a pure earned motivation to
them it's less so you know unless you want to say it's fun to make money right but that's not a game
that's like a fun job to sam's point earlier so five sentiment it's definitely a game and think
about what your motivation is at the core for why you're doing it love it kevin uh koji i saw that
hand go up and then
the rest of you guys with hands up somebody please give me something that is not a five
i want some spice koji to you yeah so real quick i just want to clarify what i said earlier which
is basically like it's not a comment on this game or how people are playing it i i think that it's
it's you know uh when i was a kid my friend's dad said something that stuck with me, which is there's no such thing as bad words, just bad intentions.
And I think that, like, whether or not this thing is, is, is you can be considered a game or fun is just based on your intentions.
Right. So like the idea that like you are doing this for money or evaluating the efficacy of a game based on how much you can earn is what I take umbrage with.
Right. Like you can't be
like, hey, this game's good because I'm making, you know, $20 a day or something. Like, we're
making toys, you know? The whole point of this is to distract people from their real lives and,
like, let them play with something. Like, literally, we are making toys. And if the toy
that you are playing with is not fun but spits out a dollar every time you smack it,
that's not a fucking toy.
You know? So I just
think that we're
all out of whack in this space. Well, some
people are all out of whack in this space, and we're looking at
things in completely the wrong
way. And until we can adjust
our lens, Web3 Gaming won't
be great.
Anyway. Nice way to end that wills over to you and then jerry yeah i mean i i think that this is kind of touching on like a bunch of things that we've all
been talking about for god knows long so god knows how long so i'll try i'll
try and keep it relatively short i think that obviously like it's a game yes and what's kind
of depressing is i i personally haven't played the game but i did a little bit of research i
looked at gameplay it looks like a fun game it looks like a cool it's got a cool little art style
it's you know got these cool little dungeons what i you know as in in the great words of koji
take umbrage with is the fact that this is helping you not play it and i think that that is something
that should not be encouraged and to nox point you were talking about how you know in in mmos you
know you have to do the mundane stuff that was just built into how the game was supposed to function.
And I feel like so much of what we've been trying to do as an industry is move past that,
or at least we were for a long time, trying to move past those kind of archaic mechanics
that were put into games because, you know, we didn't know any better.
We didn't understand what, you know, what was the best way to route people through these kind of, you know, these toys that we want people to have a
good time with. And now we have that knowledge. And the fact that we still see these kind of
monotonous, repetitive tasks placed into games is not because like in the AAA sections, it's not
because developers are stupid. It's because they're intentionally putting them there.
And when I see those in, when I see Go Gather 500 Berries in my $80 Assassin's Creed game,
I know that they're fucking with me.
I know that they want me to spend eight bucks on the premium currency
because they understand how that works.
And I'm allowed to point them out, call them out for that.
But when an indie game, you know, asks you to do 800 dungeons
and gives you 50 cents on the side and people have to make a tool
to get around that and claim that that is the future of gaming,
I can't really go along with that because that kind of just sounds
like a poorly designed game.
It looks like it's got, you know, a strong audience behind it
and it looks like it's got some potential there.
It looks like it's made with love, and I wish them all the best,
and I hope that they keep innovating on the formula that they have
so that tools like this no longer become necessary,
because that's the goal here is that people are having fun with your games
and not installing 18 different plugins so that they don't have to play it.
So my sentiment score at the moment is going to be a two.
Jerry do you agree? Thank you Wills for giving me the two. This is crazy
sometimes man like do you guys understand that like I'm a hypocrite but
I lead with that it's one of the first things I tell people about myself do you
guys all understand that you're hypocrites and worse than me?
Because at least I accept it.
This is the same panel.
I come on this panel every week and you guys go, Jerry, the game is whatever you want it to be, Jerry.
Jerry, the game sometimes can be filling your Steam library with games that you never play.
Jerry, don't you get it?
Let people have fun the way
they want to have fun. So what have I done? I've gone, maybe I'm the asshole here who's
calling these things not real games. Maybe I should change. So, you know, I changed myself
and then you guys go back to my original position. And I'm like, what the fuck? You guys were all
telling me a few weeks ago that watching AIs play AIs is the new esports, that we're not going to
have fucking Albert Pujols hitting 490 foot home runs anymore. We're going to watch fucking
some large language model that was trained on faker movements for 16 hours a day. You know what
I mean? What are we doing? What are we talking about here? And like, I just don't understand
who you guys think you are, you know, and it's, I'm just a little upset with you is all.
Now, when we look at this, is it gaming?
I don't fucking know anymore.
I don't know which way is up because I would have said no.
But now I'm like, well, they've all told me that I'm wrong for that.
And now they're saying it, you know, so like, is it gaming?
I don't know, right?
But is it Web3 gaming?
I think it might be.
I think it might be because what we've continued to try to do in this industry is fail and
just try to fail forward, right?
And what have people tried to do?
They've tried to take Web2 models or the games that they want to build and like shout out
to IC, he's one of my favorite people in the world.
He posted something on like his GameFessions thing today
where it's like some Web2 guy was bitching about how
he came here to build real games and nobody wants them.
And he's like blaming the industry.
And I'm like, dude, maybe your game just wasn't good enough, right?
And I think that begs a bigger question here,
which is, what do you need to do to be successful in Web3 gaming, or whatever we want to call this?
And it's like, you need to outcompete at the AAA level, which nobody has done yet, and nobody's come close to doing.
Or you need to invent something new that makes people be interested in it, right?
And I think Gigaverse is very well on a path to doing something like that right so i think
is it gaming in the traditional sense no but what do we talk about all the time here is web3 gaming
needs to do something different and innovative and it needs to kind of create new genres and i think
gigaverse is kind of on to something here is it fair to compare this to football manager like i think that's the most unfair comparison in the world and like more it's saying like oh i play by
making decisions like no dude you you you press one button like every three times you play
right you like choose one of eight skills every three times you play it's not a football it's not
a management sim like we we cannot call this game that
when you're playing it on AI level.
When you're playing it, you know,
when you're fishing and you're doing dungeon crawlers,
yeah, it's a little bit of a prediction game
and like a modified dungeon crawler.
But, like, this might be the most gutless wank thing
I ever say, but I'm starting to just believe this
to my core because I just have to accept the facts at some point.
This is DeFi with a wrapper on it, but that's okay.
And some of the best successes in Web3 Gaming so far have been exactly that.
And we need to figure out new ways to take that model that Axie did really well.
We need to take these things that Gigaverse is doing and figure out how do we further this genre?
How do we push this thing forward?
So, you know, I don't know, man.
I'm a little disappointed in all you guys.
Is it gaming?
Like, I don't know.
But is it Web3 gaming?
It absolutely is.
That was an absolute fucking journey, Jerry.
Absolutely love that take.
Tony V, over to you.
And then Dub, I saw that hand go back up
god damn it but you know very it's rare it's rare that you and i agree because your takes are often
so terrible but uh i i do share a lot of perspective that jerry just shared i think that
i'm hearing a lot of boomers speak here and a lot of get off my lawn um and i that just that's that's crazy
town to me um you know i i go back to what i'm always saying shout and show me the money you
know these guys they're creating stuff that people want to go spend money on and and get some sort of
entertainment value out of even if the entertainment value is like i make more money but like i mean
i'm i'm old i'm 40 i'm like real to, I think, all of you are going to channel my fucking Sinjin.
But, like, I remember running macros in Ultima Online and having my character chop wood with two boxes in front of him and a wolf attacking him so that I had two skills.
I think it was lumberjacking and dodging that would go up at the same time.
lumberjacking and dodging that would go up at the same time and i sold the shit out of those
And I sold the shit out of those accounts on eBay.
accounts on ebay and like did i also enjoy stripping my character naked and painting him
white and going and pretending to be an npc in the fort and griefing people while they were fighting
the tribesmen yes i did love doing that uh but i was absolutely when i wasn't doing that uh i was
i was training my lumberjacks and selling them on e. And I think I paid for like, maybe like all of them,
not all of,
but most of my fraternity dues with lumberjack money.
And like,
so like,
you know,
I don't,
I think it's crazy for us to,
to talk shit about,
you know,
what is,
and what isn't.
We're not the gatekeepers of what is entertainment,
what is entertainment.
And like,
I watch the bullshit that my kid plays on Roblox.
And then I play with them.
I'm playing a game called italian
mind rot and it is about as as mind rotty as it fucking sounds uh and it's this little micro
experience that is clearly designed to extract money from roblox roblox players and it's probably
one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences i've had with hazel uh we you know we have a great time
you know laughing at the mildly racist Italian names
that this little kid has named all of these fucking characters
and buying them and putting them in our cages
and stealing them from each other.
But it is very clearly a game that was designed to take money out of my pocket
and put it into the creator of Italian Brain Rots wallet.
And I'm okay with that.
I'm enjoying the experience.
And I just think there's what we're seeing. And I think actually, Charlie, Sam has said this a couple of times, that the universe
of video games is going to continue to get wider, we're going to continue to have more video games
that are created. But I think they're going to be created for a much smaller audience at a time.
And that's okay. Like these micro experiences, I don't want to call micro experiences, but these
curated experiences that are for a very specific experiences, I don't even want to call them micro experiences, but these curated experiences
that are for a very specific audience,
I think they deserve to extract more money
out of that audience
because they're making a thing for that audience.
So, you know, again, Jerry Maguire,
show me the money.
I think we're getting there
and everyone should get off my fucking lawn.
Hold on, hold on.
That's the worst take I've ever heard.
I love you, Tony, but that's horrible, take i've ever heard i love you toady but that's
that's horrible man i'm not the gatekeeper of entertainment so long as people find something
entertaining then that's fine but like to boil it down to capitalism is like the most fucked up
the measure of success as to whether or not something is good is like how much money it
makes is like the most insane thing in the world and just let's like think about capitalism for a
second like if it was up to capitalism,
all we'd have is bookstores
and we would never have any libraries.
You know what I mean?
Like that can't be the only measure
as to whether or not something is good.
It can't.
I don't think, no,
but I think that's the black and white part.
I think what you just said
is the get off my lawn part, right?
Like I'm okay with saying
that there can be other things that are good
and something can be other things that are good and it's and
something can be good and be created specifically to appease or to to appeal to the audience of
people who want to financially extract value from the the entertainment products that they're using
right i think that i'm sure but that doesn't make for a good game that could be a good product i
don't but it doesn't make for a good game i don't be a good product. But it doesn't make for a good game.
But that's where I don't think I agree with that.
If it's an entertainment product,
maybe we don't call it a game.
Maybe we call it an entertainment widget.
But if it gets people to spend money on it to use it,
that's like, I mean, any product person will tell you that's the definition of product market fit.
That's not even me being a fan.
I've got a great widget.
It's called heroin.
Try it out, everybody.
It's a really fun product. By the way, heroin is a great widget. It's called heroin. Try it out every day. It's a really fun product.
By the way, heroin is a great product.
We use it every day.
Heroin is such a good product that it created an epidemic in the United States in a full form.
Yeah, exactly.
Everybody here is on fucking Adderall anyway.
What are we talking about?
Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, it found product market fit.
Now, should it be heavily regulated and taxed?
And that's a whole different crazy conversation that we can have.
But there's no doubt that that's a good product that the people who use want more of.
Oh, God.
I was not expecting to go the heroin route here.
That was real liberal usage of the word we.
But honestly, largely agree with what you had to say there, Tony.
Lenz, over to you.
How do I come in after talking about productizing heroin?
Anyway, I'm going to go on the other end of the spectrum
and go like, this is like a seven or an eight for me.
I'm going to also say I have some bias.
Like I've been playing Gigaverse.
I hold a few NFTs.
I don't hold like a massive bag or anything.
I think while in its current form like what Jerry was saying about football manager yeah it doesn't have the same depth as that at this point but I think it is still analogous to it and it's
where it's going it's like different people will play FIFA that play football manager it's like a
different sort of thing and you come in you play this for me, I wouldn't play gigaverse maybe twice a week
before this bot thing showed up.
And I'm like, Oh, now I can drain my energy every day and I get like more character progression.
But like that money, the tagline that more it's used to is 100% pure base and just use
it because it's crypto Twitter, like saying, Oh, I make $50 a day.
It's like that's pure for engagement.
Because when you go into the comments, he said, Oh, I make $50 a day. It's like, that's pure for engagement. Because when
you go into the comments, he said, Oh, I spent like four ETH on assets. So he's dropped like 10k
to make like $50 a day. This isn't the thing that people are playing is like a job to like,
make a bunch of money. Like I make maybe like, I don't know, I think it's like a dollar or
something out of a run when I do it. But like, for me, I have the fun of like, I want to progress
my character, I want to get my character to max level and progress. And now it but like for me i have the fun of like i want to progress my character i want to get my character to max level and progress and now it's like oh i can use this bot thing and i log in
every day and i do that and i get more loot drops and stuff that rather than playing twice a week
and having slower progression i have faster progression and there is fun around the gameplay
of like yeah my character progression and like how you spend the energy and stuff like that
but then it's like it's not it's not the dollar value that comes out the other end
of it.
Like, I think Jerry had highlighted in the wolves and friends too.
Like, yes, people are also looking at and speculating on things like abstract airdrop,
like, Oh, if I play this, there's like also a chance that's going to work in my favor.
But it's also like leaning into the levers that web three has.
And like, again, that's just like a speculation game but people are not playing this
for a salary i would say and like i i even still run manual runs like you know a few times a week
because i actually enjoy the game but i just get faster progression out of it so i think it is a
management game it doesn't have like the depth of like a football manager versus a fifa have
has met now but i think if you lump it in with like what we've seen is a lot
of these like Ponzi based games, it doesn't fit that category. Like it's been around for like six
months, like a lot of these Ponzi games that are like pure money in money out, like that Bitcoin
that launched on abstract when abstract first launched, that was literally a pure bubble. Like
within two weeks, it was like up, it was down, it was done, move on. Like this has more stickiness because
it is a game and like, they're still adding depth to it all the time. And Dith and his team,
like, like they're working full time on it now. So I'm really interested to see where it goes.
I think the financial layer is interesting, but like it's, if anyone thinks that people are
playing this to like make a salary or like in lieu of a job like it's definitely not that because the
financial gains are not there even if they are like a layer inside it all right i know you've
been waiting patiently defend your game but do so in two minutes so we can move to john and then move
to the next topic yeah yeah i just want to make sure it's like super clear with everyone because
even if after i said it like people are still getting this mixed up. Like Gigaverse, the game itself does not have any AI management playing the game for you or anything like that. It is other companies, other products that have built the AI autonomy that we're arguing about on top of the game.
Yeah, but who cares?
They're allowing them to do it,
which is as good as building it yourself.
Well, and that's what I was saying.
Say it's bad.
If you want to just let me say it.
And I think it is an interesting decision
that Diff is allowing these guys to do it.
I don't know if he's going to continue to do that.
It was fascinating when they came out with phishing
and literally within two days,
Fireball.gg had the automated phishing bot going.
But it is a disadvantage for the players
because nine times out of 10,
I am going to perform better doing these manually over letting the AI bot do it.
So it is not to the benefit of these people doing it.
There is a case there, and to your point, Sam, it is a very interesting decision on Diff and Team for them to allow that.
allow that but it is important to draw the distinction that gigaverse itself the game
itself without all of that is a pure game and has no like automation in there whatsoever
john wrap up the topic for us
all right um where do i begin here first of all some of you guys in this channel sound like these
incel group of gamers that are like all complaining all the time about like, why can't I get my fucking game that I wanted from 20 years ago back? That's what true gaming is like, we are not going to define true gaming in this channel, guys. Like, there's so many types of games, there's so many different kinds of gamers and different kinds of entertainment.
different kinds of gamers and different kinds of entertainment experiences and narratives and
stories and game mechanics get out of it. So of course, some game in which it's all about
getting the best AI bot to control your character all day probably makes a lot of sense. In some
ways, it sounds like the next evolution of idle game mechanics, which frankly, people didn't
think idle games were real games when they first started coming out years ago. But idle games are
a really popular category now because people have some
amount of agency and optimizing their path.
Like idle games are really an optimization game.
Like you have to make the choices that, that yes, are highly automated,
but you want to automate and get through it as fast as you possibly can.
And that's kind of the fun of that game loop.
And people thought, well, who's going to play these kind of games?
Well, it turned out that a lot of the audience for idle games, for example, are hardcore
RPG players that really like to figure out the underlying mechanics and then figure out
how to drive them forward in their favor, but don't want to sit there and like bash
a monster all day like in an MMORPG.
OK, so that's one thought um evan we talk about like
is gigaverse defi with a game who cares like maybe it is like that doesn't make it less of a game
um online was a spreadsheet with it was an economy with a ships wrapper around it so i don't really see a big distinction
there um gigaverse impresses me that they've actually done the piece right that so many game
developers get wrong so i did this in the in the um live stream that i just shared at the top here
with death from gigaverse and so many games just spend so much time
like working and working and working in a vacuum.
They never find out if people even want to play this thing
and they don't have a structure in place
in which they can actually add modules to the game
that extend that core game experience.
What I like about what Dith and crew have done with Gigaverse
is they took that learning, frankly, from indie game development and applied it to a Web3 game, which is get the fucking game out, launch it, get people playing it, even if it's a simplistic gameplay initially, and then start shipping.
Ship the fucking game every week.
That's what game developers have to do.
You have to ship.
If you know ABC was always be closing from the world of selling shit, in games it's always be shipping.
You've got to ship the game.
You've got to try things.
You've got to put features in.
You've got to get people engaging with it.
So I love that there's a game here, and they're not the only ones, but they've done a really good job of creating that velocity
and adding modules and features to this.
And there is a good underlying structure that allows them to keep building around that.
So I like that a lot as well, and I hope that...
And you've pulled up a very different category of thought here which is
you know AI bots fine like why not allow games with AI bots that can recreate interesting
incentives new forms of gameplay and it leans into the composability that's inherent in web
three that we all talk about as being so wonderful well here's a game that actually has composability
as people are building AI bots,
composing into the gameplay.
I think that'll become a game of choosing the best AI bot
for optimizing the pathways that you particularly care about.
So who cares if it's an AI bot controlled idle game
with a DeFi mechanic at its core?
I think it's pretty innovative,
coupled with a lot of velocity for building gameplay.
Way to put a bow on that one, John. I appreciate the...
Oh, did you teleport to another realm, John?
No, I'm here. I just dropped the mic.
Perfect, perfect. Okay, awesome.
So we're going to move on to the next topic.
I want to frame this as is this a hot take?
