Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Gamified #135 | IP Acquired | Pokemon Patents
Recorded: Sept. 17, 2025 Duration: 2:03:09Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the significance of partnerships, recent market trends, and the impact of strategic grants on project growth. Key highlights included Project O's collaboration with Immutable, the implications of the recent rate cut on market sentiment, and the importance of craftsmanship in game development.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello live from Vermont we're in Burlington the hustling bustling city let me know if
you can hear me over all the insane traffic that's going on outside my door.
There's 80-year-olds at a farmer's market.
Incredible stuff.
Knock, how we doing?
You've never had better audio.
I was about to say the same thing, actually.
Also, a heads up, you might hear the insane traffic out my window today because the window's stuck open.
That's unfortunate.
Koji, how are we doing, bud?
Wow, that good.
Koji completely locked in.
If I don't get a fucking update on what movies Koji's watching soon, I'm going to freak out, dude.
I'm going to freak out. What happened to the movie post, Koji?
Dog, he explained what went down with that.
You know what happened.
You do know what happened. Sorry, Sam.
I was peeing, and I didn't think everyone else wanted to hear me pee.
In the shower or not i opted not
to unmute i never in the shower that's a disgusting behavior for scumbags have you
not seen what's been going on with pump fun streaming you thought people didn't want to
hear you pee after seeing what's been going on on crypto twitter over the past five days
i choose not to acknowledge or engage any of that, to be honest.
I just watch my movies.
So you are still watching them.
We just don't get to find out which one
in real time anymore.
Yeah, that's right.
Apparently, it seems like I'm not working hard enough
if I just post about movies.
Can you send them to the group at least?
We have the chat.
We'd like to know.
I could do that.
I will.
I will.
My next one is a movie called High to Low by Akira Kurosawa,
which is also the impetus for this new Spike Lee movie,
which is called Highest to Lowest starring Denzel Washington.
So I'm going to watch High to Low first, then Highest to Lowest, and see how it goes.
All right, guys, I tried my best to spin up some new intros.
I think I got about half of them done.
But you guys have to give me a little bit of leeway
here.
We've been running ragged.
Also, I am wildly sleep deprived, not because I did anything awesome last night, just because
I actually couldn't sleep, which is so much more disappointing than going out and having
a great time and then ruining my day intentionally.
I'm going to try my best.
Bokoji was roasting me already for both a gluten allergy and also not knowing how to
read.
And so I don't expect it to be better results this week.
But I'm going to do my best.
Just be careful, Sam. Don't say that I crash out or else I might lose it.
I'll do my best.
Who knows, though? Who knows?
It's good to know we have a loose cannon that's also good content.
Especially whenever we launch this this pump fun coin
that's inevitably going to happen here all right up first he used to fight fires now he just starts
them in the group chat six five 230 pounds of pure muscle if muscle was made of frozen yogurt left out
in the sun he's the golden god the game cube gatekeeper and the guy will remind you he's more
athletic than you at least twice an episode it's's Jerry Singer. Hey, what's up?
So I'm Utah.
I guess you're in Vermont.
Break out your fucking John LeClaire jerseys.
What?
Does anybody get that?
John LeClaire?
Does anybody know John LeClaire?
Guy mentioned two places and then a name no one's heard.
Standout fucking left winger?
For the fucking
Montreal Canadiens.
Ontario, Alabama,
James Jones.
You got it.
Not a lot of John LeClaire fans over here.
He's a fucking great left wing on the
Philadelphia Flyers for a time there.
We hate the Flyers, dude.
Up next, he was building.
He was raised in rage quits and baptized in broken controllers.
From sporting goods to soulbound NFTs, he's conquered the slopes and shootouts alike.
Every meta tried to break him, but every patch just made him stronger.
The reduction arc is alive and well with Big Dub.
Bro, I was going to warn jerry too because i
too didn't sleep because i was betting all night on hamster racing but um i haven't had my matcha
yet so freaking get your act together jerry and don't freaking speak over people and have some
relevant takes thanks i am excited to have you here uh in Lake, but I will not stay up all night betting on hamster races with you.
So I'm going to set that boundary early and often.
Talk about Salt Lake where John LeClaire won a silver medal in the 2002 Olympics.
Yeah, dude, the Salt Lake that I can't wait to move to, dude.
Next month, baby.
Up next, from floppy disks to blockchain decks,
this wizard's resume reads like a gamer's grimoire.
He coded solitaire into our cultural DNA,
and now he's shuffling lore and liquidity at Coin Conjuring Project O into existence.
It's the pixelated prophet, the king of the cards.
It's Kevin Lambert.
It's Kevin Lambert.
Oh, he's a listener now.
Thank you, Twitter.
Thank you for that incredible technological feat
you've accomplished yet again.
Well done.
It's Kevin Lambert.
Hey, guys, I make Project O, and it's sweet.
Sam likes it a lot.
Kevin, I don't think you sound like that at all.
There we go.
I had to request to speak.
Thanks, X.
I love this platform.
It works so well.
Great to be here.
Do you guys...
I have this abusive relationship
with Hollow Knight Silksong,
and it's just so funny
because I'm, like, screaming
and throwing my controller,
and my wife is like,
are you okay?
And then afterwards,
we make up,
and I'm like,
oh, that boss was so fun.
And she's like,
are you sure you like this game? I'm like, oh, that boss was so fun. And she's like, are you sure you like this game?
I'm like, love it.
Two things.
First off, anytime I do an impression of anyone,
never take it as an insult.
I'm not making it sound stupid on purpose.
I just don't know how to do impressions.
Second thing, nothing makes me more mad
than being terrible at a game,
spending 20 hours trying to
beat it and then seeing what i saw this morning which is speed runner beats it in less than an
hour like an hour and three minutes or something i'm just like fuck this guy like what are we doing
here god damn it up next he's got biceps like battle axes spawn straight from the strongman
circuit he's the deal closing colossus of crypto in the weight room he, he's the deal-closing colossus of crypto. In the weight room, he lifts plates. In the war room, he lifts projects.
And he plays Smash like a savage while he's bringing the world's best games on chain.
He's the bulldog of bull markets.
From AVAX, it's Will Spangler.
So, two things.
I got peer pressured by my friend into buying Borderlands 4 this weekend,
which is a lot of fun despite technical issues
and whatnot. But the good news is that according to Randy Pitchford, I am now a premium gamer
because Borderlands 4 is a premium game for premium gamers only from the CEO himself. So I
will only be addressed as such moving forward. Wow. Will's also confirmed shower peer by evidence,
evidence by his thumbs down to Koji's disgust of people who pee in the
shower.
Oh brother,
I piss everywhere.
One step forward and one step back.
you know,
we're just right where we started.
That's it.
Up next,
these sculpted sandboxes where kids became kings and queens and conjured castles
in the cloud of our collective memory.
From Club Penguin's chilly citadel to galaxies that glow with Disney's stardust, his career
is the constellation of cultural icons.
And when his project faltered, he forged wisdom instead of wounds proving that failure could
be fertile ground for knowledge.
It's the bard of brands and business. It cool chris heatherly hey there how's it going
i'm uh why are you guys not pumping my bags right now did we not have we not been crying
for this fucking rate cut for like months oh i need a rate cut and now and now where's the market what do you guys
what do you got why are we on this even on this we should be buying like bitcoin and ethereum
especially you know um i can't wait to hear why it's a skill issue and like you dumbasses it was
priced in the whole time from somebody who never said it until, you know, after it happened.
Yeah.
Speaking of a skill issue, I've been working on another game for Remix, but I just can't fucking nail it.
It's driving me crazy.
So I wanted to make a, it's not Remix's fault, by the way.
It's my lack of coding skills, kind of poor vibe coding skills.
But what it is, is I wanted to make a Shade Brian Armstrong game,
like Shade the Founder.
But hair is really hard to work with, man.
Yeah, it is.
This is an actual problem in the game development world,
and it's very hard to make any hair that's non-Caucasian male hair.
This is a true story, by the way.
It's the bones.
The bones and the hair are so much harder than people think.
That's a hilarious joke.
I could see the vision, though.
It's like a power washing simulator, but you're shaving his head.
I like it.
Yes.
Yes.
It's a great idea.
That's a fantastic idea.
Personally, the innovation that we're waiting
for at remix that's really going to change the game chris i'm glad you brought this up
jiggle physics okay we're gonna we can get anime girl jiggle physics uh locked in with the vibe
coding yeah i mean the the sydney sweeney bounce house game is going to crush. You have no, dude, it's impossible.
We try.
We spent 48 hours trying to get digital physics work.
None of the video prompts out there that are available can do it or will do it.
So we got work to do.
We've got to pool our resources between SNIB and Remix.
It's the only way.
It's the only way.
It's just like the space race.
You know, this isn't a time for Blue Origin and SpaceX to be competing.
We have to pull our resources to win the race to jiggle physics on the vibe coding.
Anyway, we move on.
Thanks for the shout out, Chris.
I appreciate that.
Once trained in the SEC's Dojo Forge and Founders Fire, he learned to weaponize words and wield
the ball like a long sword.
Now he channels that same fury into Andromeda, where agentic AI companions evolve with you
until you find your AI gaming soulmate.
Welcome back to Lethal Lawyer, the Ace of Andromeda, the Knight of Nintendo, which we're
going to challenge today.
It's Michael Christine.
Hey, what up, everybody?
Happy to be here.
Super happy we saw our first rate cut with three more expected before the end of the
year. So very happy it wasn't a 50 basis rate cut because I actually think the markets would be
dumping uncontrollably right now if that happened. So guys, we've now reached the promised land,
clear skies ahead, hype for the next Bitcoin halving. That cycle is going to go crazy.
Wow. I'm actually super intrigued by the 50 would make us dump the thing. Any 10
seconds on that real quick, Michael? Yes, if you had cut it by 50, it basically signals to everybody
that there is something extremely wrong with the US economy. And that would make everybody,
including myself, feel like I need to get to non-speculative assets because clearly something is broken and now they're panicking.
Fantastic. Quick summary. Love that, man. Great, great work.
We got to get you back on Simplified again.
Up next, he's kicked down corporate castle.
Wait, do we have? No, Sinjin's still asleep.
Oh, no, no. Sinjin, I forgot. He's out this week.
He said he could make it for like 30 minutes.
I was like, bro, you know me.
I yapped during the intros for at least 30 minutes.
There's no reason to show up.
So that's on me.
Love you, Sinjin.
Hope you're having a good week with that.
So let's move on.
He's taken his scaling skills in a strange direction.
Lately, he's been beefing with Jared Leto.
Forget Batman villains and Oscar speeches.
Convinced this is the final boss fight he was born for.
He's the only founder alive who can both build billion-dollar games by day
and start a blood feud with 30 seconds to Mars by night.
It's Koji.
What's up, Sam?
As soon as I heard Jerry Leto, I was like, oh, it's my turn.
I better get to the phone to unmute.
Better stop pissing.
Yeah.
You know, who am I to tell you how to host this show?
But A, I'm sad that there was no Larry David mentioning in Jerry's intro.
I didn't enjoy the impression as much as you did.
If you're going to impersonate Kevin, how is your first thought not,
hey guys, I wrote an article, are you a Spike?
Come on, brother.
Anyway.
Pretty good, Koji.
I'm working on my comedy routine for the after show.
The character is Billy, by the way, not Spike.
Thank you for that correction.
I think that was part of the joke, Koji.
Koji went over their heads, buddy.
Thank you. Thank you. that correction. I think that was part of the joke, Koji. Koji went over their heads, buddy. Thank you.
All right.
This show is becoming an Ouroboros,
or however you say the dragon eating its tail
that you reference all the time, Koji,
where we've only become self-referential.
We're actually not talking about anything
except inside story.
We're all Troy and Abed.
We move on.
He's turned guilds into gold mines, teams into titans,
and then marketplaces into magic.
From RuneScape raids to real-world deals,
he's the emperor of esports, the ruler of RuneScape,
and our chief simplifying officer, Doc.
Man, I went out last night with Koji and Sinjin,
and Sinjin was pouring soju in my beer
and it has done unfathomable things to my fucking head today i feel like my brain is swollen
god bless dude it must just be incredible you you uh dub and jerry just living that
unemployed life man having having the greatest time. I'm so...
Hey, whoa!
Pretty good life.
No defense on my side.
Last but not least, he's the pint-sized
prophet of panel banter,
the reptile who rewrites reality
one hot take at a time, and at 2.4
pounds, he's small enough to sit on your shoulder
but big enough to own the stage. He's the little is legend it's lamb gm what's up yeah being with sinjin in person is just
like a dangerous thing because no one can say no to him you just have to give in like uh the only
easy get away from him pouring soju in your beer is just to not drink outright and say you don't
drink otherwise you are fucked that's what Koji did last night.
And I'm sort of regretting not following along.
Nice moves,
boys.
All right.
Last but not least,
got to give a huge shout out to our amazing sponsors.
Avalanche is the arcade etched in ice cabinets glowing with instant finality.
With season two of their battle pass,
you can step into the dystopian chaos of off the grid,
slide into the side scrolling nostalgia of MapleStory universe,
or enjoy great content on the arena, all powered by Avalanche's L1s.
And if you're ready to build the next great experience,
Helica just teamed up with Avalanche to bring their gaming accelerator to the red chain,
giving your project a chance at $25,000 in credits, analytics,
to chase the high score, and a shot at $125,000 more.
That arcade never closes at Avalanche,
the official chain of Gamified.
And of course, we've got to give a shout out
to the Forge of Fun, the Dungeon of Daydreams,
and the Arena of Accessibility.
Here, vibe coding turns chaos into a content.
Your wildest wins, your half-baked ideas,
your midnight mutterings,
all materialize in playable platforms on Remix.
And when the mobile app launches,
that Coliseum's going to triple in size.
Your games become gladiators in a global feed. So get started today at Remix.gg,
like Chris Heatherly has, by the way, with the official game studio of Gamified.
With that being said, we jump in first with Nintendo. Chad or Chump getting approved
for an extremely broad patent for game mechanics. We know Nintendo, our fans,
is probably the best way to put it,
of litigation. And in recent times, we saw them going after Palworld for its similarities to
Pokemon. But now they've been granted a new U.S. patent for summoning and battling with sub
characters, which seems incredibly broad. A video game IP lawyer says this should not have happened
and quote calls it an embarrassing failure of the U.S.
patent system, unquote.
Should you even be allowed to patent game mechanics?
We talk frequently on here about how, you know, a lot of games are iterative or copies
of one another.
So is this a Chad move for Nintendo defending Pokemon, their largest and most expensive
IP, or a chump move for using patents as a way to bully the competition?
I want to tag in Chris Heatherly first, and then I want to hear from Tad of lawyer.
It's a chump move.
You know, we I'm so I actually have over 30, 30 patents and I have a lot of thoughts on
patents.
It's way too easy to get patents.
You don't even have to. I mean, in this case, they made a game,. You don't even have to.
I mean, in this case, they made a game, but you don't even have to make it.
You know, you don't even have to make the thing.
You just have to write it up and you get that invention for 20 years.
So it's, you know, I stopped filing for patents because I just feel like they get in the way of innovation and it creates a very litigious culture.
However, I think, and I defer to the IP lawyer because he probably read the whole thing, but I consulted my attorney, ChatGPT.
And so one thing is that this patent appears to be only pertaining to Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
So anything prior to Scarlet and Violet doesn't fall within the scope of the patent.
Also, the patent combines four elements.
Player moving in a virtual field. Player performs an operation input to throw an item and cause a sub character
reappear uh if there's an enemy at the location the sub character appears it engages in battle
um and there is automatic versus manual control command switching for the battle of the sub
character and the patent combined has to combine all four of those elements. So it sounds like you can work around the patent.
And I don't believe that this is going to stop Pokemon games from being made.
It was filed in 2023, which was a year after Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
You cannot go back in time and patent things older than a year so i think it's a chump
chump ass move and it's just more nintendo being a big corporation uh but you know but i also think
that um it's it's probably not as damaged i think people are probably overreacting on this one
i wonder if we did step three where i'm supposed to do step two to breach the patent.
Can we just work around it that way, do something nonsensical?
Tatted, you tell me.
So I think it's a super Chad move, but it's also the perspective that you have to look at it.
And the reason I think it's a super Chad move is if you are in a legal battle,
your goal in a legal battle is to win that legal battle
any way possible,
obviously within the bounds of the law.
But your goal is to win that legal battle
in any bounds of the law.
So the fact that they're like,
oh, shoot, maybe our case isn't strong enough
because we're Nintendo
and we have more money than God,
we're going to do this extra thing
and then flex on this company.
I think that's one of the most Chad moves ever.
But at the end of the day, me saying this is also why there's so many jokes about people hating attorneys, because we don't look at the human element or anything.
It is literally all about the win.
So if you're looking at it in the perspective of how does Nintendo win their case and how do they win it in the most effective way possible, this is a great move.
And as an attorney, you applaud it because A, they have the money to do it.
B, they clearly have some kind of connections in the U.S. Patent Attorney Office to push
it through.
But it's one of those like, good job, bravo to the attorneys who were able to set this
up and then submit this as an additional piece of evidence or ammunition, if you will, against the ongoing lawsuit.
So from that perspective, I look at it as such a Chad move, because at the end of the day, if I ever get in a litigation like this, I want my attorneys also doing any move they possibly can play to win me my lawsuit.
Yeah, fair enough on that point i see jerry throwing the
thumbs down let's get a little spice in here listen i love i love tatted lawyer he's one of
my favorite people in the world um but i just you know what happened to to freedom man and what
happened to fucking just letting innovation happen and just competing with each other, dude. But no, no,
it's a very free market take of me, dude.
This is what happened to just competing on the game level and saying like,
let's both make a similar fucking thing.
And you can be Digimon and I can be Pokemon. And like, that's it. You know,
I just like competing in the courtroom. These are, these are,
these are video games, you know, let's not kid ourselves.
We're not, we're, we're changing brief moments in time in people's lives.
We're not functionally changing the world at any one point, right?
We're offering people an escape from reality.
So why don't we just go back to being like, hey, my throw the ball mechanic is better than your throw the ball mechanic.
uh, you're my throw the ball mechanic is better than your throw the ball mechanic and make no
mistake. My, my throw ball yards past any, what of a you could do. Uh, so I don't know, dude. I
just, I don't want to see competition in the courtroom. I want to see it in the fucking,
you know, uh, on the, on the, on the screen or whatever, you know,
on the screen or whatever, you know?
so you're saying you're good at throwing your balls.
So you're saying you're good at throwing your balls.
Yeah.
I am this, this, you know, I think one of the best,
coolest games, right. Ace attorney. Okay.
Very innovative, very brand new, different thing. You know,
what it was, somebody comes and goes like,
it makes a ace defense lawyer. Like, are we going to,
are we going to sue them over that?
Like, let creativity shine, man.
Don't let, you know, lawsuits get in the way of creativity.
Jerry might be good at throwing balls,
but, man, he can't fucking hit one with a golf club to save his life.
Let's go over to Dubu, who's also throwing balls.
Fuck you for moving on from that.
I'll remember that.
There's literally not a golf driver in the world that could help jerry swing right um and the bigger point here
is like that like let let the giant evil corporations take as much as they can take
and get as far as they can good on them for trying like they should go farther like it's
disappointing hearing chris
heatherly describe how far this thing went like i want to see them go for the full shebang let's
see if we can go and retro sue final fantasy for ripping off that shit because they did you know
and and i'm all for these giant conglomerates taking risks and doing everything they can to
protect their moat and make themselves a bigger evil conglomerate,
because that is the free market and the competition I want to see.
I don't want to see Joe Schmo competing with Joe Blow.
I want to see fucking Walmart and someone else going down and battle the fucking fittest, you know, so.
That's where I'm at.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
I don't know what side he's arguing. The rules were laid out, you know so that's where i'm at this is sarcasm or not the rules were laid out you know
you can't get mad at me for playing within the rules that are available to me just because you
can't make all the moves that i'm making doesn't make me the bad guy is what i believe nintendo's
stance is right now yeah i do still want to say despite my my take, Nintendo is forever, henceforth, always a Chad.
So I still think they're Chads.
I didn't play by the rules, Sam.
So I'm amending my statement.
Stand by what I said.
They're still Chads.
Wow.
Wow.
Powerless move.
Let's go over to Spang, who's also throwing the thumbs down.
Chasing the spice.
Spang, over to you.
That was an experiment to see if thumbs down would help me jump the queue,
and it worked
so i've i'm cracking the that's my move i've trademarked it so
you guys are ruining it now gary i got you with the legal representation spay we're coming after
we're back on the same side um no but i i think know, this is one of those things I get, I get really depressed
about how everything is a copy these days and how every game is copying every other game.
I'm like, come on guys, can't we make new games?
And everyone's like, no, people like copied games and we're just going to keep copying
because you know, it may be illegal, but people are doing it so fast that it doesn't even matter.
And, and that's kind of my, my take on this topic is like, sure, okay, they've got this lawsuit now. Who's coming after Pokemon?
Who has even attempted to go after Pokemon at their level, at that AAA level of, you know,
monster collection in the last 20 years? Nobody, nobody has been trying to go after. Mobile games
are doing it and they're going games are doing it. And they're
going to keep doing it. And they're going to keep, you know, pumping out a mobile game that's exactly
the same and has 100 shitty looking Pokemon. And you pay five bucks to get a few extra and then
you leave and they're going to make a billion dollars in three weeks. And then another one's
going to come out before the lawsuit can even hit. And I think while I think it's interesting, like that this was able
to settle, I don't think it's great for the industry at like a precedent level. But I just
don't think it's relevant. I think, you know, your eyes are on the wrong ball here. Instead of, you
know, trying to, you know, broaden the Pokemon moat, why aren't you activating in, you know, trying to, you know, broaden the Pokemon moat. Why aren't you activating in,
you know, why aren't you creating like a Pokemon UGC platform where people can create using your
IP? Like that's the biggest competition against those games is people making their own in these
UGC platforms where you can't litigate it and you can't kind of go out and battle that on the legal
front because it's all happening too fast. So I think it's a chump move just because it it shows i like i agree i agree with tatted that this is a chad move
from the legal team because fuck that's a fun way to earn a paycheck for a few years argue about like
which game had which mechanics and we did it first and just like play a shit ton of pokemon games for
three years to prove your case that's pretty hype um. But I think it's pretty chumpy because it shows a lack of,
what's the word?
A lack of attention to it.
It's a weird thing.
Maybe gumption.
Maybe gumption.
But I think it's just they're not focusing on the right things.
The meta has become thumbs down for Sam's attention,
but Koji always wanted to look ahead
of the meta give me some time right instead he dm'd me and said tag me in coach so koji no
pressure but here you go well hey i'm furious because i feel like dub is stealing my bit
of deadpan sarcasm i can't tell but that there can only be one that that's come on What are we doing here? But I do think Nintendo is a chad for this.
And the American citizens are chumps.
Because the problem isn't that Nintendo filed this patent.
The problem is that it was accepted.
The issue here is the legal system is allowing for this bullshit.
Not that Nintendo is trying to do it.
Because fuck yeah. If you gave me me the opportunity I would try and make I would stamp out
every other card game in existence and try and make parallel monopoly I
probably wouldn't but like let's just imagine that that's what I want to try
and do with our corporation right it's just like be the biggest baddest
motherfucker on the planet of course I want to do that, but there should be systems in place to make sure that competition
still exists, right?
And patents were like the intention here is to allow people to sort of build their ideas.
Like the reason why you can file a patent before you even have the game built is because
like you don't want somebody to steal it while you're building it because you want to make
sure that your product hits the market first or whatever.
That makes sense.
But to be like, no one can ever build this now or iterate on it because we only do this one thing.
Like, I don't want to live in a world where we don't get both Armageddon and Deep Impact.
You know, give me both those movies because I want to watch them both.
I want to see Morgan Freeman as president.
And I want to see fucking what's his name go up on a boulder
See Buscemi and like blow that shit out
Yeah come on what are we doing
But like Nintendo's
Obviously Chad move chumps for the rest of us
This should never have been allowed
And it's absolute bullshit
Why do I have to be a chump dude I didn't ask for this shit
I was just born here dude
Let's go over to kevin lambert
then i'm putting knock in the hot seat of uh final take here dude even pokemon's former lawyer
says that the summon and battle patent will likely not hold up and that its main use is like
chilling competitors under the today's. So I don't know.
Like my perspective is that it's likely unenforceable.
It feels like weaponized ambiguity.
You know, it's just like it's a weak patent that's meant to scare and play the game.
It feels like a system exploit.
And it's like, let me give you guys an analogy. You know how when people are merging onto the freeway and you've got this long merge on, there's tons of traffic and everybody's stopping.
And, you know, there are people that leave the freeway to get into the merge lane to get a few cars ahead.
And that's really annoying.
But everybody does it because if you don't do it, other people are going to do it.
Does that make it good?
Does that make it OK?
So I do agree with Tad that, hey good does that make it okay so i do agree
with tad that hey it's don't hate the player hate the game and it is the game that so they're they're
at legal chad because they're just playing the game but man like i i feel like that the deterrence
play with the ambiguous um uh patent is just it is just bad for the industry in general,
and playing the game doesn't make it right.
I'm pro-fun. Just shit better games, not broader patents.
Yeah, the pro-deterrence with ambiguity play is a very Gary Gensler take, so congratulations, guys.
Shit better games, says Kevin Lambert lambert doc what do you say uh i say chump because the most
exciting thing that nintendo has done around pokemon in the last 25 years is the mental
gymnastics required to file this patent um i read through the patent one i was unaware that
diagrams and patents are basically just a series of etch-a-sketch drawings um it is fucking ridiculous
look into this it like they're drawing like the shape of the back of squirtle's head in like
fucking pen and paper it's wild i didn't realize that's what they look no they have to do that by
the way like you can't you can't give like colored images and things like that like it has to be like
that that's i i was completely unaware and when i was looking at into this topic that threw me for
a loop wasted an additional 25 minutes laughing at that um okay so two things were really
interesting one literally every single mechanic in this patent with the exception of the ball
has existed for 20 years what they're actually filing for is what happens once you summon and
actually throw that ball so in the case of Scarlet and Violet, you could throw Pokeballs that would spawn a summon.
That summon would either follow you, engage in a battle, or wait for you to engage in a battle,
depending on a series of factors within that game.
It's basically the exact same mechanic that exists in League of Legends and, like, Dota with Annie and Tibbers.
Annie is a little character that spawns Tibbers, which is a bear.
Depending on a certain series of things
that are happening in the game,
Tibbers will either attack the enemy,
attack mobs, or give an XP point to Annie.
It's basically the same mechanic that exists
in a ton of different games
where you set a character out
and depending on environmental factors,
how close an enemy gets,
how strong that enemy is,
they'll attack it.
They've thrown the addition of the launching the sphere into this to tie it to Pokemon.
But Kevin Lambert is right on.
The idea behind this patent is not to shut down the summoning mechanic.
It's not to shut down the decision-making tree that is made for when a summon isn't in the game.
decision-making tree that is made for when a summon isn't in the game. It's to deter people
from even wanting to approach this because of the fact that Nintendo has filed a patent that
includes three of these four elements. The ball just ties it to Nintendo. Everything else already
exists. This is a super, super fucking chump move. And I think it's largely brought on by the fact
that Nintendo is super frustrated that the team that they're really going after retroactively for this patent is Palworld. And they've been fighting Palworld in court for the
better part of the last year and a half, almost two years. And they're upset that it is still
going on. So they're putting this in place to help deter anybody else in the future from even
coming close to stepping on toes here. It's a chump move because it already exists and you're trying to patent something
that has existed in games for 25 years.
It's kind of a Chad move for a lot of the reasons
that Christine mentioned and Tad had mentioned
in the sense that it's available to them.
The system allows them to do this,
so why wouldn't you?
But pretending that any of this is new
is fucking ridiculous
because this exact mechanic,
barring the actual pokeball
has existed in dozens of games over the last 20 years my only issue is you said it was uh dota 2
annie and tippers are in league of legends no no i said league and dota and then i gave the
annie example all right that's disgusting we don't we don't we don't we don't do that here
i pat it over to you i think you had the hand up for a last word, then we're moving on.
Yeah, the only thing I wanted to say is I love seeing Koji become a capitalist,
a big diehard capitalist, because as he said,
if he had the ability to crush every single competitor against him, he will.
And to Kevin's point, you are 100% right.
Patents destroy the free fun and growth of the industry. But if I'm Nintendo,
why would I want anyone else in the industry to grow? I'm Nintendo. I only want Nintendo to grow.
I don't give a crap about anybody else. God, dude, I can't. I personally, I just can't wait
to only play one game. You know, I can't wait until Rockstar gets enough money to just sue everybody else into having a monopoly.
It's going to be so fun whenever they have to innovate zero
because there's only one of it.
That's going to be so great.
It's like we're all sheep here and we're like,
yeah, we recognize that there are wolves out there
and wolves got to eat.
And sometimes they got to eat us.
So it's cool.
It's cool.
They're out there.
Respect the game.
Nice work, guys. You're right. I am tasty. You should have some. how to eat us so it's cool it's cool they're out there respect the game nice nice work guys
you're right i am tasty you should have some we move on what's more likely to work out seed phrase
acquires wolf game heavy metal gets acquired by adam weitzman seed phrase announced a couple of
days ago that he's come to an agreement with Pixel Vault to take ownership of Wolf Game. He says the Wolf Game defined the raw spirit of blockchain gaming with high stakes strategy
and resource farming.
And they're planning a partial reset to keep the game familiar for OGs, but fresh and exciting
for newcomers.
And it's going to be on abstract.
On the other side, Heavy Metal just got acquired for the second time.
Far Away previously bought it from Yuga. And then the IP was, again, recently acquired by Adam Weitzman, the same guy who
bought the winning Dookie Dash key from Mongrel for $1.6 million back in 2023. Adam Weitzman also
recently acquired a bunch of Yuga assets, making a splash we talked about on Simplified.
On the announcement, Adam also says thanks to Yga and Faraway for trusting them with the IP.
Garga even quoted this tweet with a post with a video of heavy metals on the other side saying,
heavy metal looking good here.
Wow, such an original tweet.
How do you come up with that?
So they seem to be working together in some capacity.
Which one is more likely to work out?
Wolf game or heavy metal?
And just one quick note, Wolf game tried to relaunch last year on blast
and it had a quick burst of hype and then uh you know ogs and you just use newcomers for
exit liquidity in that circumstance so we'll see what happens this time i'm gonna go to koji first
to continue on my capitalism mark i'm just gonna say heavy metal is gonna work out because i'm
i own some sort of asset there so that's
definitely more exciting but i mean the real answer is like none of the above i i don't know
why any of this kind of matters like we'll see maybe like we're in a world now where you got to
show me the product you know like fucking show me the money and then and then we'll talk otherwise like i don't know uh hearing that you know this company is acquiring this or doing that like
that doesn't excite me make a good game and that might have me because i've seen uh we've all seen
massive companies that that are are known for making great games fail uh so i i can't imagine
that like just getting acquired by somebody.
Like, you know, if Parallel got acquired by Blizzard,
would you be like, oh, now it's going to be the greatest card game of all time?
Like, probably not.
So, like, I can't imagine that this is, like, that big a deal, to be honest.
I'm snoozing on this one, Sam.
If you're snoozing, you're losing.
Dub, they're trying to bait me with the thumbs down
but I'm not biting I'm going to Kevin Lambert
ooh I love Koji's show me
show me the product
and to that end I would give
Wolf Game the 60-40
here because
Wolf Game under C-Praise has
a it's a clearer path
because it comes with creative control. And I believe the heavy metal acquisition is more of a business acquisition. He now owns the IP and he's got to find, I don't even think you get the developers, right? Like the team that has put in the the creative direction it needs, whereas I believe that Seed Phrase probably has an idea of where to take Wolfgame. Not saying it's going to crush, but I think that's got the best chance of show me the product than Heavy Metal does, which is just kind of deep pockets plus like other side adjacency and i think one of
the other things that wolf game has going for it is you know going they're going to abstract right
so abstract l2 um so i think that that has a shot at some front page placement that could
you know give it some nice tailwinds
as far as user acquisition.
So I don't know.
I probably agree with Koji
that neither of them are going to work out.
But if I had to pick one over the other,
I think Wolf Game,
because it's got more chance
of getting the creative side.
Wolf Game also had a game
that people seemingly enjoyed
for a period of time.
I don't think there's a soul on planet Earth
without Bag Bias that enjoyed the heavy metal game,
but I'm not sure.
Don't quote me on that.
Fang, over to you.
I don't know.
I like the idea of what Adam is doing,
this kind of shadowy figure moving in the background,
amassing all of
these assets. I don't know. Obviously, he doesn't have a team. Does he have experience? Maybe.
But, you know, he's probably, it sounds like he's got a vision. It sounds like he's got an idea of
what he wants to do with these things. And I don't know, frankly, I'm kind of excited to see where it
goes. I'm excited to see what he does with all of it.
I hope, you know, Kevin mentioned it might just be a business decision.
I think that would be really lame.
I think he should, you know, do a massive, like, crazy relaunch, you know, put all of these things together.
I mean, he's got, like, Yuga and these IPs in the bag now.
I'm sure he's on a lot of calls these days
on figuring out how these decisions are being made.
And I don't know.
I'm curious to see where that goes.
And that's the main thing that excites me about it.
But I agree with the general sentiment
that, you know, you can only beat a dead horse so much.
And it sounds like both of these games are on their
re-revibes uh which which isn't usually a great sign so i i definitely say you know i i um the uh
the heavy metals i'm a slightly more bullish on just because it might the explosion might be a
little bit bigger you know one of the things that comes to mind for me is how all
you guys are obsessed with collecting Pokemon cards and then none of you play the fucking TCG.
What if Adam is just doing a hilarious thing where he's going to acquire IPs that all these people
are buying assets in and then vault it and literally be like, haha, you dumbasses, but not
tell you about it. Let's go over to Chris Heatherly, see what he thinks.
I mean, I'm not really very bullish on either.
I never thought that heavy metal was that great a game.
I think Wolf Game has a brand, but it's like, you know,
who wants to play the Ponzi scheme for the third time?
So I don't know.
I mean, you know, maybe it's for some people who
have nostalgia for, you know, the Wolfgang era of Web3 gaming, but neither one of these really
excite me that much. Let's go to Knock Knock. Which one do you think is more likely to work out here?
Clearly, like, and very clearly is wolf game um
yeah it's worked before yeah it's been done before that's not a negative i'm hearing positive things
i'm hearing things that work in the space coupled with the fact that it's going to abstract a chain
that has shown appetite for these exact types of products the fact that you can kind of double
farm what's going on with wolf game by hopefully or prospectively earning Abstract XP. It's so clearly Wolfgame. The biggest indicator
that it's Wolfgame here is more about who bought the thing. Seedphrase is a very rich guy who is
very rich, but not so rich that he can make a purchase and light money on fire indefinitely.
He's also somebody who's pretty deeply involved with a bunch of communities in the ecosystem.
He's also somebody who's pretty deeply involved with a bunch of communities in the ecosystem.
Weissman is a guy who is mega rich and a couple million dollars is an absolute fucking rounding error.
And it's probably a purchase that he wanted because he wanted it.
And I have less belief and conviction in that profile than I do in the profile of a guy who is making active investments in a bunch of teams in the space,
I do in the profile of a guy who is making active investments in a bunch of teams in the space,
who talks to founders pretty frequently, who understands the nature of the game that is Wolf
Game and what people want to see out of it, and is bringing it to the chain where all of the Wolf
Game inspired or all of the clones or games that were largely inspired by Wolf Game are currently
having success. It is the easiest layup here. You don't have to be bullish on either of them long term, but Wolf Game is going to make money.
It's almost a guarantee.
Interesting to hear a bunch of people leaning in Wolf Game.
Wonder if anybody has a contrarian take there.
Let's go over to Dub and the Lembs who have been throwing a lot of emojis.
Dub, over to you then, Lembs.
Yeah, dude, I'm going freaking insane here.
You are not serious people.
It's obvious who's in the market and understands like who's the web3 gaming degen and what they're
doing right now based off this take like i bought wolf game shit like immediately after brian de
santo explained all of that stuff and i sold all my heavy metal stuff when i found out this dude
is going to essentially put it in his garage on the freaking shelf. Like the, there's so much, it's, it's so night and day. It's so
clear. Like the, everything that Knox said is all the nitty bitty details that makes me feel that
way. So I'm not going to like reiterate it, but it's, it's a product that works in front of a
speculative community that's active and looking to buy and participate. This is the web three
gaming DGens that are playing right now and they're on abstract and it's it's all the right things while
compared to the heavy metal one where like no one who is for it can even explain why they can say
the game was bad and that that's it like so you know yeah it's just so obvious on this one but dub
garga said heavy metal looks good here i mean it's gotta be that that's gotta mean
right lens but sam i don't know who the that is dude so like you know here we are
dub you talk about being in like the trenches and you don't know who garga is like literally
the co-founder of you i'm in i'm in the right trenches okay that's that's the point here
all right louis vuitton never heard of him more of a gucci guy
uh yeah as nox said it's an easy layup for wolf game like heavy metal like what the hell are they
building like who even knows um like wills are you living in 2021 again or something because
oh he has a nice dream he He's going to build something cool.
He has a vision.
Are we back to just investing on white papers and dreams
and hope that people make good games?
Because that's basically what that is.
As Nox said, this guy has fuck you money.
Weitzman is like a billionaire.
This is nothing to him.
Whereas Wolfgame, yeah, it might be Pondonomics or whatever it is.
But hey, they know how to cater to the Web3 DJs who are here now.
They'll cater to the Web3 natives.
And you're telling me I'm in 2021.
Like, okay, yeah, let's just keep building Ponzinomic games because, you know, that's been building the space right now.
Like, frankly, sorry not to jump in, but come on now.
Yeah, okay. It is like back, back you know both game was big in 21
but at the end of the day there's web3 native games that are still here people like to play
financial pvp with high stakes games abstract is where it's all happening like the chance of
success it feels like an easy layup if you're picking one or the other so like the one that
caters to the audience who's here today and is going to get
reignited or the game that has we were sorry the ip that we have no idea
what it is and as sam said the game like when they launched heavy metal the first time it was like
oh heavy metal like oh and like all this swearing and stuff and then it was like this casual like
cozy sim thing it like the branding was literally the most opposite thing.
It could possibly have been.
And then they handed it to far away,
far away.
Didn't even ship anything with it.
They were just like,
fuck this shit.
Like we don't want it anymore.
And then they handed off to Weitzman who's like a billionaire just to be
like,
Oh yeah,
sure.
I'll buy this shit.
Cause I just got fuck you money.
So the ones who have an idea of what they're building versus the guy who's just got money and is like,
sure, I'll buy this.
I know who I'm back with.
Tad, I want to know what you think here.
I mean, in a perfect world,
how would they manage the heavy metal IP from here?
You can't just re-release the same game nobody liked.
So it's not like he's a studio where he could take that IP
and put it into something else cool. The only the
only way I see that being successful is if they go heavily
on the marketing and marketing it in a completely different
region than the first game was marketed in because if
everybody hated the game, buying it and then re releasing it
generally isn't going to be a way to get a new consumers
unless you're actually exposing the game to a whole different cohort of consumers.
Because as we talked about on the show many times, East versus West mentalities are very different.
Eastern people like games a lot differently than Western people like games.
So if they're able to do that, then, you know, it might have a chance.
But at the end of the day, it's really hard to overcome a bad game that nobody liked.
And at the end of the day, oftentimes if hard to overcome a bad game that nobody liked and at
the end of the day oftentimes if it's a game nobody liked there's a lot of reasons for that
so i have to personally put my weight behind wolves even though i think it's just uh it's
going to do degenerate things it had product market fit in the sense that people did enjoy
it at one time so if it can be refreshed uh put to the deagons it's one of those things like
what is it lawland uh that that game recently that's done like two million in in revenue i i
remember speaking to somebody who's who's pretty close to the team and they told me that two
million in revenue came from around less than a thousand people um so that means you have a thousand
whales willing to spend a bunch of money that means the game can do well that's why i'm going
with wolf game it's really hard for a game that nobody liked uh to then recover it's kind of unless you have a thousand whales willing to spend a bunch of money. That means the game can do well. That's why I'm going with Wolf Game.
It's really, really hard for a game that nobody liked to then recover.
It's kind of, unless you do something drastic, change it drastically,
or have the funds, development team, and ideas to tweak the game to make it better.
And if you don't, it doesn't make any sense to me.
Jerry, what do you think?
You willing to steal, man?
You willing to steal, man man for old Adam Weitzman
in heavy metal back on top I am not because I've seen this happen before Sam I've seen a rich person
who doesn't knows nothing about video games come into video games and his name was Kurt Schilling
he was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox for a period of time every and and he tried to
make a world of warcraft competitor and there's literal books written about how poorly that
experiment went um and uh you know i don't know i think you guys need to put a little bit more
respect on wolf game's name even the people who are bullish wolf game here let's not pretend that
like when blast came out everybody wasn't like all your favorite
blast people were like yo the wolf game's coming over it's going to be the best and then it like
it had its moment in the sun there too right people are like oh you know they pivoted to blast
they're kind of downplaying that it was a thing that people did pay attention to with blast and
abstract is just like a you know it's a's a, the more seasoned, uh, well,
more well put together blast in my opinion. Right. So, uh, I'm all in on wolf game. I'm not going to
be like one of these cowards, Sam, that don't play the game. And you're like, Oh, I'm sleeping
on this one, Sam, much more buying the wolf game success. Uh, and I congratulate them on their
inevitable pivot to Monad or whatever other L2 is pre-launch that they move to in the future.
That is a good question. How many airdrops can we farm with the same Ponzi IP? At what point
does that become one of the most valuable things that you do in Web3? With that being said,
we move on though. I got to give a huge shout out to the best in the business. Avalanche,
the summit of snowbound success and Alpine Arcpine arcade where every transaction is a foothold to reach the summit of web 3 potential
avalanche is the carnival of creation a midway where ai acts as a magician rwas ride the roller
coasters and games like off the great of maple story universe headline helica's gaming accelerator
is just one more attraction with up to 150000 in funding for great gaming projects, plus mentors to level you up in the demo day to Encore for the stars who shine.
With the official chain of Gamified, there's always more opportunity.
And you can call this one the Coliseum of Creativity, the Arcade of Ambition, the Forge of Fun.
It's Remix, the Fast Track Frontier, where coding is casual, games are goofy, and greatness is guaranteed to go viral.
It's the Arcade of Accessibility, the Palace of Play, and the Scrollable Saga,
where publishing is instant and discovery is infinite.
What TikTok did for videos, Remix does for games.
When the app arrives, the ecosystem evolves.
But in the meantime, go to Remix.gg with the official game studio of Gamified.
And gotta give a shout-out to another sponsor, Sarah, who sponsors my life.
She's on her way to Egypt.
She just texted me that she's listening to Gamified. I think that's awesome. I love you, baby.
I miss you already. It's going to be a while until I get to see her again. Between me being in
Vermont and her going to Africa, it's like ships passing in the night, but I hope you get there
safe, sweetheart. Okay, we jump into the next topic. How important is chain selection? There
was an inspired tweet by Adam Fern from Proof of Play. Big fan, by the way. I'm going to summarize it as it was a longer tweet, but he says that chain selection is one
of the most important decisions a team can make. There's one of three reasons, and sometimes
one, or sorry, more than one, is vitally important to the decision you end up making.
Distribution as an access to the users you want to reach, two, tech to fulfill hard requirements, and three,
financial incentives. We also saw some FUD around Project O choosing to build on Immutable. People
kind of like reacted poorly to it initially. Apex defended it, saying the main thing that they asked
for of their chain partner was this number three that Fern outlined, which was financial incentives
in the form of a grant to go and do user acquisition.
He said, quote, how can you guys help us acquire users in and outside of crypto, unquote.
And IMX offered the best help.
And that's why they decided to choose the chain.
I assume that the other two, including, you know, fulfilling the hard tech requirements, had to be there fundamentally.
I assume that's table stakes, but I'm sure Kevin Lambert can clear that up.
So I asked my panel again, in this day and age, in 2025,
when all the tech across the board is getting better and better and better,
how important is chain selection these days?
Does it really matter?
Kevin has the hand up first.
Let's go to him.
Yeah, I actually take the contrarian view here
that chain selection doesn't matter for the majority of games.
The reasoning is because with the exception of a fully on-chain game,
we'll put that aside for a minute, but for traditional games that are just trying to do what games do,
which is get tens of millions or hundreds of millions of players,
chain doesn't, chain doesn't matter. It's plumbing, right? It's just like, does what,
does what CDN you choose matter? It doesn't, right? So I think for the majority of games,
like for the tech side, it, it doesn't matter. You've got a great game loop. You've got a must
have play experience. And when we are staring down those games, guess what? If we're on, If they're on Cardano, we're all going to have Cardano wallets or an abstracted
wallet that links there or whatever. So I don't think that that matters. However, the BD side
definitely does. Here's why I think distribution doesn't really matter anyway, because in the grand scheme of the number of users games need to succeed, the current Web3 chains, the best, the best one we're looking at, I'm not even going to pick a name, just pick your favorite Web2, your Web3 chain, pick the number of users they will be able to bring into that game, a raw number, and it's peanuts compared to the number of users you need
to acquire to succeed in web 2 right it's nothing it's a drop it's a drop in the bucket that said
that's what that's why uh um if it's a fully on chain game it matters more because like how do
you acquire those users well there's no you know how are you going to acquire 10 million of those users in web
2 you're just not so you need the chain to acquire the vinnies and the and the on-chain enthusiasts
but so to go to roll this back to why we chose immutable it was primarily because they had a
shared value system that we do like they saw the interoperability of Web2 and Web3 gaming evolving in the same way we did.
Their team was really good.
We pointed out the...
I made a tweet about this.
You can look it up if you search up Immutable under my tweets.
I did a thread on this with a little more color and detail than Apex's post.
But they acknowledge the if you
guys have used immutable you know that there's some not onboarding some bridging craft and some
the old if you use the old immutable um marketplace and bridge and chain there was all kinds of user
experience problems so like i brought those up when we first started talking to the team
and they were like we know we, we know, we know.
We have some solves, but would you guys be willing to work with us
to make the wallet experience better, the user experience better,
the onboarding experience better?
And I was like, really? Yes.
Like, absolutely.
I have some strong opinions on what we want to see,
which is an invisible chain that players don't even realize is happening.
Meanwhile, they own their stuff.
Like, that's the experience we want.
And they're like, we can do that.
And we want to do that.
And so they were highly willing to acknowledge their kind of past blemishes, if you want
to say that.
And also hear our suggestions.
And they already made changes to their wallet and, you know, to their user experience based
on, you know, some their user experience based on, you know,
some, the product experience that we have. And they committed to matching what we need from
them. That was awesome. And, and they're just, they were so available. So that's really why we
chose them. So it wasn't a grant. It wasn't a sellout. It was mainly because we had a shared
vision of the future of Web3 Gaming, and they were willing to acknowledge where they were falling short of that from our perspective and probably yours too and and make it better
and that was awesome we're like well what more can you ask for in a chain partner you know not
only that but they they are they were offering distribution now is that distribution gonna be
as good as getting on steam no but but it's certainly good for the audience of folks who
are like how do i find a good Web3 game? Where do I look?
Well, they're probably going to go to some of these chains
because we don't have a Web3 platform yet.
So anyways, I'll wrap up by saying
I don't think it matters for most games.
And founders should pay attention to the BD
and the acquisition that they offer and
is that a good fit but what chain they're they're on aren't isn't going to matter much until you get
to aftermarket trading and you you probably don't want all of your assets on an orphaned chain that
nobody's ever heard of if you want a thriving second secondary marketplace ecosystem but my
view of the future is it's not going to matter
because you're going to be able to trade any item on any chain and pay in any token on any other
chain. And it just won't matter. OpenSea is already moving towards that future. So when that happens,
it really will just be a plumbing choice. Wow, Kevin, unintentionally throwing salt in the wounds of the 80 different
projects that claim to be Steam for Web3. I can't believe you would do this to them. Clearly,
they have accomplished so much. They've come so far. Let's go over to Chris Heatherly,
and I want to hear from Jerry. I think it does matter. It depends on the chain, right? I think when you go to a chain like Immutable, where you're required to use their wallet or use their passport wallet, it matters a lot more than when you're choosing to go to a chain like Base, where it's more where, you know, there's fewer kind of required elements that you have to integrate.
fewer kind of required elements that you have to integrate.
You know, I think cost and speed and liquidity are the three primary considerations.
You know, I think that chain exclusives are something you probably will regret because
the chain you want to be on is, you know, today may not be the chain that you wish that you were on tomorrow um you know so
i if i had it to do over again like i would probably favor just you know base or or even
ethereum name mainnet and and just avoid kind of smaller smaller chains unless unless they were
doing something dramatic on the distribution side i think think for the reality is that most of these chain companies
that say they're going to offer distribution
mostly give you access to farmers as opposed to like payers.
So, you know, I don't know.
You know, I certainly think that the exclusive deals that I did
were a detriment and um and held us back um
but I also agree with the comment that like we're very quickly going to be in a world where
things are cross-chain um and this gets abstracted away and that's part of the other reason that I
that I would you know that that I probably would just favor the bigger chains because the smaller the chain,
the more the risk you're taking that on their future, right?
I want to hear next from Jerry,
who I know has experienced directly with Immutable.
Not that this subject is specifically about Immutable,
just using that as sort of a jumping off point
along with some other things,
but used to be at Metalcore
and so sort of has an older world maybe perspective on uh immutable and how they engage with games and in
general jerry in 2025 how you feeling that chains affect the the games built on top of them these
days yeah i i think it's uh very little um unless you're kind of like a top tier game.
You know, I think Fern had the post that you sent to Sam
where he's talking about like you pick them because of money,
distribution or tech, right?
And then I think we could like essentially,
in my humble opinion here, throw tech out the window
because like he does a whole write-up about like Arbitro
and why they chose that.
And then like, because fully on chain, blah, blah, blah.
And it's ended up not working, right? they end up sunsetting the whole thing anyway so
like the the fully on chain games like I I'm back to I think that being a myth I don't think we're
we're there yet so I think um you know anybody who's trying to do something fully on chain I just
I don't know yet maybe if I believe in that so uh I'll throw that out the window and then and then
at that point like the tech becomes a little bit of a detriment, right?
Like in the case of Immutable, who I don't dislike by any means.
But it's telling when the current like Web3 people are all bearish for like what reason?
for like what reason because the tech is actually not that good today and so the people that were
Because the tech is actually not that good today.
excited you know when a project like project doe announces a chain partner and then they go like
oh god i got to figure out this bridge all over again and it takes seven days or whatever and
there's no nfts or whatever you know it's it it's a little bit of a problem at that point right so
whereas you know you can take a game like Wolf Game
who has this like legacy and is known and, you know,
you go to Abstract and Abstract is gonna put them
in front of the right people and it's gonna give them a badge
or whatever they're doing now and it's gonna give them XP
and it's gonna do all these things for them.
And so it helps them solve the like profitability problem,
right?
And you're seeing very good uses or very good success cases of that from the abstract ecosystem right now. But are they
going to do that for everybody? No, right? If you're like that C, D tier game, I don't think
that abstract shows you the same love. You don't get the badge. You don't get the tweet from the
right people or whatever. So I think it matters a lot if you're like one of those bigger games,
because going to like a polygon or something isn't going to move the needle for you as much.
And so like, and then, you know, pick whatever, pick your L2, you know, in that scenario. Sorry
to always shut on polygon. I apologize to the robust polygon team that exists today. And so,
I apologize to the robust Polygon team that exists today.
And so, yeah, I guess to the final point,
kind of to address parts of what Kevin said,
and I'm sure Kevin will have a rebuttal here.
I hope that they listen,
because we've done this show for a long time, Sam.
You've been running this for a long time,
and almost a consistent thing that everybody who's picked Immutable has said.
When somebody goes and says, oh why immutable they go like oh immutable said they're gonna work with us on fixing things they're gonna they're gonna do these things and
like i will say kevin has chops that are a hundred times better than a lot of other people so like
kevin should be listened to here but i think the reason people get scared about a changed voice
like that is because like we've heard that before. And I, I don't see the product being functionally different or like
meaningfully better because of that, you know?
So my hope for any of the immutable people are out there, listen to the
fucking Kevin to the world.
He's a, he's a good Vinny for the rest of us.
Shout out to Vinny.
I want to go to Spain.
Who's also an expert on chains, if you will.
And then we'll, then we'll go to some of these other peasants that might not have the big brain around this topic that you might have, Spang.
Oh, God.
Way to set me up to flop.
But, yeah, frankly, I agree with exactly what people have been saying.
Chains are plumbing, you know.
But at the end of the day,
you know, some people like to piss in the toilet.
Some people like to piss in the shower.
And I think that your infrastructure,
your plumbing should be customizable to your needs.
You know, you should have the ability
to choose where you piss and how you piss
and the currency that that piss uses as gas.
I'm running out of this analogy, so I'm going to stop.
But I think that at the end of the day, it's really, it is a complicated decision.
And, you know, it's funny that, like, we're talking about this now,
because recently the Godzilla team also just dropped a big article on why they chose Avalanche.
team also just dropped a big article on on why they chose avalanche and i found it really
interesting as someone who wasn't around while this decision was being made um to kind of go
through and it was a lot of the similar similar points that that fern highlighted you know i i
like tech is important you know it's it's it's hard it's it's impossible for me to sit here
working at blockchain say the tech doesn't matter because it does.
At the end of the day, and Ed Chang, who used to be head of BD over at Avalanche, I remember
when I was interning here, like, God, three years ago, he said something about his time
at EA.
And when the AWS servers went down and FIFA was unavailable, no one was pissed at AWS.
and FIFA was unavailable, no one was pissed at AWS.
Everyone was pissed at EA because it was their game
and it was their name attached to this dysfunctional product
that wasn't doing the work.
So, you know, you can shit on the tech all you want.
I mean, I know, you know, we're gamers here first and foremost,
but at the end of the day, the tech needs to function
because it's the game that's left holding the bag
at the end of the day.
Yeah. Can I ask you one follow-up question? Please. because it's the game that's left holding the bag at the end of the day.
Can I ask you one follow-up question? Please.
Two follow-up questions.
Are you saying that the plumbing doesn't matter until it does?
Of course.
Okay.
And then are you also saying that AVAX has customizable layer ones
that can help people get the plumbing that they so choose?
God, Jerry, you're a wordsmith today.
Oh, wow.
I don't know how much you're getting paid under the table, Jerry, but very subtle.
It was just impossible to tell.
I did it for you. Thank you guys for sponsoring the show.
But yeah, I mean think i think it is an
important decision but at the end of the day i like i i you know i've been in this space long
enough to see many games you know large projects small projects engage in this decision making
process and like i truly encourage you to like if you are building a game and you are making a
decision really devote the time uh to to diving deep with these teams and figuring out what they're able to do, what they're capable of doing with their tech, how they can work with you on the marketing side.
And that's exactly what it sounds like Kevin and the Project O team have done with IMX and like truly wish you guys all the best.
It sounds like you guys are going to really crush it over there.
you guys are gonna really crush it over there.
But the one thing that I did wanna flag,
and I'll shut up after this,
but the idea of chains being a,
what was the word that was used?
Like deployment partner, you know,
like helping to, you know, like bring users
to the game across, you know, web two and web three,
especially in gaming.
I think that there's this expectation
that chains are publishers.
And I think for a while,
that was a pretty well-held consensus.
I'd say from kind of like 2021 to 2023,
even into the beginnings of last year,
it was like, oh yeah,
you know, chains can function as publishers.
As someone who's, you know, working in this space,
frankly, I think that model isn't effective.
I think that the incentives between chains and games
to function as a publisher while also driving,
like prioritizing the on-chain metric,
which is obviously tagged to a token,
which is what the chain's main goal is to do,
is to pump the value of their token
and provide value to the people who are validating it.
I think that those incentives aren't well aligned.
So I would be, I would be cautious of, uh, you know, partnering people who say
that they are going to, you know, be able to drive massive amounts of units
because the incentives just aren't there.
You don't see AWS, you know, driving a huge amount of users to, to Apex
legends or Google cloud doing that because that's simply not where their focus is.
And I think that it's much more around how do we use the community that we already have?
You know, I think someone was saying that, you know, chains tend to drive a lot of, you know,
farmers and a lot of people who are interested in financial gains to these games.
Precisely because those are the people that are using the De5 protocols that are you know validating nodes those are the people
that are trying to make a bag on the chain though and to an extent those are definitely people that
you need um but at the end of the day chains aren't going to be able to help you too much beyond
native web 3 adoption and that's where i think you know having a traditional publisher is at is also essential and not just relying on a chain so so with
that I'll shut up awesome to get that perspective let's go over to Koji then
we'll hear from Tadden and Doc hey yeah so I'm just going to agree with all sides here.
Basically, the problem is chains matter now.
We're in a world where it matters because
the space isn't big enough.
It should be plumbing,
it should be AWS versus Microsoft Azure or something like that.
But we're not there yet.
We're in a nascent time where we're trying to eke out
whatever advantages we can.
And so like the chains really do matter.
And whether or not there's like chain allegiances
or whatever, I think it's still kind of important
that like you can pull in users from wherever
you might be able to get them.
And whether that just be somebody who holds a lot of a Vax or soul or whatever and so is
more willing to check out your project because it exists on that network what
fine I mean you just you got to get them where you can and so I think like right
now it does matter but if we do this correctly it won't matter and I think
to like you know Spanck's point and the reason, I mean, we're not building on AVAX, but the reason I love AVAX as a team is because I see in the future the choice of chain being like Gateway versus Dell.
The products that they offer are virtually the same, but the reason why Dell was winning over Gateway is because the people and the care involved in those products, like it was about customer service, right?
It's like not just like who has the best tech because like tech can be replicated, but who has the best people in their corner is going to matter more once, you know, things sort of level out in the tech side of things.
things sort of level out in the tech side of things.
So I think that like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to see,
you know, the chains matter less.
And maybe the people who work for the chains or the BD or whatever you want to
call it matter a bit more, but,
but ultimately we're still in a spot where like all whatever edge you can get
really,
really matters because the space we operate in is just that small.
That it is.
Tadi, do you then or not?
Yeah, so I would say the only reason a chain matters in September 2025 is liquidity.
If you're launching a token, the chain matters.
If you're not launching a token, then it's more so, you know, are you launching that
chain because they have a lot of users, because they have have a name recognition because it can help you on a marketing level
maybe if you're not doing any of that that or if none of that's important to you then i don't think
it matters if it's important from a marketing standpoint of course it matters if it's if you're
launching a token of course it matters with liquidity but if those factors aren't important
for you i truly don't believe it matters um It's kind of like what Jerry said earlier.
I think the idea of a fully on-chain game in September 2025 is still a bit of a pipe dream.
And the reason for that is none of the big console players, in all their terms and conditions, they say that that's not allowed.
On all the cloud operators, which would be like Steam, things like that, it's not allowed.
And then on the app stores, it's not allowed.
So if you want to build a game that's completely unchained,
be my guest.
But if you want players to actually use it,
then you have to kind of go in that Web 2.5 type of role
or more so in that direction.
And so does the chain matter?
Again, if you're launching a token, absolutely for liquidity.
If you want the marketing, absolutely. But if those things don chain matter? Again, if you're launching a token, absolutely for liquidity. If you want the marketing, absolutely.
But if those things don't matter to you, then I think it has zero impact on anything that you're doing.
Wow.
Nobody seems to think chain matters at all anymore.
This is bizarre.
Knock over to you.
Yeah, it's just plumbing.
So as long as the water runs runs let's put the fucking lead
pipes back in the walls we'll use the asbestos for insulation make sure you paint the coats of
the walls with lead none of that stuff matters right let's let's run with quarter eight you know
eighth of an inch of astroturf on top of cement and let's explode some more kneecaps in the nfl
like what are we talking about plumbing matters There's a reason why plumbing has been updated because what is used for the plumbing fucking matters.
I think the point that Kevin made here is
there are different ways that things can matter.
And it's not all about who has the fastest chain,
who has the highest throughput,
or who necessarily has the highest TVL or volume on that chain.
But all of those things factor into a decision that you're
making. And if you say that they don't, then you're a fucking idiot. It absolutely should.
As long as there's a sufficient enough threshold for tech, does it work? Does it complete the
needs that I need for it? If it's every, you know, a hundred transactions are being rolled up into
one, great. If you want a thousand transactions per user per day, then you have to make a decision
based on that. If you want customer support, if you want BD support, if you want to make sure that
there's enough of an ecosystem there to support that chain, great. But this idea that because
things will be cross-chain somewhere in the future, that you don't have to make a conscious
decision about what chain you're deploying on is madness. Because for cross-chain to work,
there needs to be cross-chain liquidity. And if you're on a chain that nobody wants to provide liquidity for i can't bridge my eth over there i can't spend
money on that chain because liquidity doesn't exist and if the chain goes down well then
there's a whole other subsect of problems i think that there are five to let's call it eight or nine
chains where as long as you're making a decision that you're going to be deploying on one of those
chains you're probably okay but to say that the chain itself doesn't matter is absolutely asinine
because that's how you have every team in gaming deployed a polygon three years ago because they're
giving money and you know the chain won't really matter there's not a whole lot of tvl but they're
giving us big grants and we're going to go to apply there and then neither the chain work the chain
doesn't work there's no fucking community there there's absolutely no volume there and then neither the chain work the chain doesn't work there's no fucking community there there's absolutely no volume there and then you run into an issue where everybody has to move
and scramble to figure out what does work if you're deploying to a chain you want to deploy
to a chain that meets your needs in the same way that when you're picking between you know your
cloud service providers you want to use something that you feel is reliable and is cost effective
and works for you in the same way that when you're making a decision to deploy on something like, you know, Unreal or Unity, the resources that you have available to
you matter. It's not an arbitrary choice. It's, hey, we have 10 senior Unreal devs. We're going
to deploy on Unreal because that's what we have available to us. These things do matter. They
don't matter as much as they did two or three years ago when you're talking about how do I
deploy an NFT collection or a token to make sure that I can have the best chance of making a ton of money here to sustain the life of my project.
Sure, we've moved well past that.
But chain choice matters.
It absolutely does.
But it matters, and it matters differently to each team. resources you have available, the sort of things that you're looking for, what type of throughput you actually need for that chain, whether or not you're going to have a ton of on-chain assets
that require additional liquidity on that chain or give you a better chance of having liquidity
there. These are all choices that absolutely do matter. And you cannot just put the name of 10
blockchains on a fucking wheel, spin it, and deploy on that chain like a lot of the panelists
here seem to be suggesting. Kevin over to you for the last
word. I actually agree with with Nock there and I wanted to add some color to summarize what I
agree with from Nock the nuance matters right if you if you only need the chain for users to have a thing once every 15 sessions the the gold pipe thing
everywhere in the house with all the pieces and everything isn't that much better i mean you don't
want lead and asbestos but like it matters less in the world where you're going to only be putting
a little bit of water through it you know know, fluid through it. So ultimately it really does matter.
What I did want to say is that Jerry and Chris had a couple of,
maybe not assumptions, but points relative to immutable
that I just wanted to clarify, at least the way we're using them.
Jerry had said something about like,
hey, if you have a chain and it takes seven days to bridge a thing,
that's probably not great, which is true.
I believe the new Immutable ZKEVM
is just a standard layer two
and there's like 45 minutes to bridge a token,
an asset, correct me if I'm wrong there.
But I think it's just the same as most other,
like base and any other layer two.
And then there's services that do those faster.
But the other one was the, it sounds like chris has worked with if it was chris who said this has worked with immutable and they're like hey aren't they going to require your passport
wallet and doesn't that imply that you're going to have to create an account and log in and using
the passport ui and it's got that onboarding u cruft that we're all talking about. And like one of our
one of our core points to the to agree to agree to the terms of the partnership was that, hey,
we need an invisible, seamless, headless Web3 experience so we can't be popping up anything.
And that's what we're working with the team to achieve so even if you play other immutable games
that use their passport wallet and it pops up the immutable passport window that will not be
our experience at all it will be invisible it will be headless it will be seamless you will
not know it is even there um and if we can't have that then we'll be having other conversations but
we're working with them to get that that's's fantastic to hear. I think that's a real, I mean, Passport wallet was easy
for, was easy to use. I don't think that Passport itself was a, was necessarily like such a big
problem, but it's, but it, but, but it's not, but, you know it's like, you can, you can optimize that funnel a lot more. Right.
And, um, passport, I think really, um, in the way that it was working at the time we used it,
um, was more of a problem for like bringing people from the web three side. That's one
thing I realized was like getting EOAs and, you know, all of that. And that flow was like,
not awesome. So, so yeah, great that they're doing that.
Yeah.
I do want to say, too, like, I think there's been a lot of turnover in Immutable.
So I don't know that we're all dealing with the same people over, like, our journeys with them.
I think Immutable's retained a lot of really good talent, but there has been a lot of turnover.
So, you know, the experience could be totally different now.
But, yeah, it's all good things to hear, Kevin, on that front. But 45 minutes for bridging still sucks.
Oh, okay. I thought somebody else was going to chime. We had like three people talking,
and then Jerry just shut that shit down. All right, we move on. Real quick, got to give a
shout out.
Pond in the comments says,
give me approach project always taking.
If it weren't for IMX, it would be privy
plus whatever chain.
From a gamer point of view,
it wouldn't really make much of a difference,
but the small edge that exists
makes IMX a logical choice,
even though at first I also wrinkled my nose LMAO.
I appreciate you, Pond, for weighing in.
Also, the liquidity stuff
that people brought up a few times.
I know it doesn't always feel great to talk about it because we try not to focus on the financial aspects of a lot of these things on this show in particular.
But liquidity is super important for the business side of things.
You've got to make sure you're taking those things into account.
It's time for the final boss of Game Over where panelists aren't allowed to fence it.
If you do, you'll get muted.
Agree or disagree, going on console too early
is a bad idea for your game.
On a previous episode of Gamified,
Neo from Wilderworld mentioned that
when he was talking to an ex-producer of Diablo,
he got some really interesting advice.
They told them not to go on console early
because their iteration and release schedule
will slow them down too much.
If you need to keep iterating, excuse me,
and experimenting
while improving the game, it's easier to stick to PC only and deal with a single platform.
So do you agree or disagree that people should be approaching console and PC at the same time,
or should you choose one and stick with that? Zero hands, Lems, I go to you.
I'll say it makes sense.
If you're still in an early access state,
from what I've heard, the lag time
on dealing with something like PlayStation or Xbox
and getting new builds out,
we see it when you have cross multiple devices,
you're trying to deal with more teams,
more resources for your team trying to deal with,
trying to make sure that it's balanced across,
especially if you have cross-platform play.
It feels like you should probably just wait
until the point when you're ready to be
almost ready to launch your game.
There's not going to be that many updates left
because imagine trying to juggle multiple things.
Teams are already spread thin in Web3,
especially we've got all the blockchain
and all this other bullshit to deal with.
With all that said, to to me it makes a lot of
sense so just saying okay let's get the game to a good place where we can ship updates real quickly
and have something that you can use to do that on like most people using epic now because they are
very blockchain friendly and then at that point when you have you know product market fit or you
feel like you got the game ready then that point you know time to ramp up and get out other things
i feel like it's a part of the reason people talk about console,
it's less exciting now, but 12 months ago,
it was like, oh my God,
they're going to be a Web3 game on console.
And it was this kind of marketing beat,
whereas I feel like some of that magic
has kind of gone at this point.
Dub had the hand up next.
Yeah, dude, hilarious.
I miss those days when that was enough to just say
we're going to
playstation or xbox to pump a token 50 um and like really i if it was my ideal world if i was
to do it i would start for sure on pc with like through steam or epic i'd build until i had like
i'd build towards the launch on console i i still think that makes sense for games of this day and age.
I think just like Steam Next Fest or some big marketing event
coming on console should be this make or break it moment
where you're swinging, taking the swings
and trying to get a bunch of UA
and get a bunch of first-time users into your experience.
And I think to the point that Zed or the feedback the wilder world team
got is like it's easier to just push iterations and build a product while it's on pc and it's
harder to do that while it's on a console and i feel like you're going to lose a lot and turn a
lot of your initial player base as well that you want to be that you want there when the game is actually ready for Live Ops or whatever that launch is. So yeah, I would definitely delay and look at I
Have a good good product before coming to console
Think the best example that we have in web 3 of this is off the grid choosing to go on to Xbox
PC and
PlayStation all at the same time
You have to imagine doing live ops for all of and PlayStation all at the same time.
And you have to imagine doing live ops for all of those different things at the same time has probably stifled their ability to get updates out in a timely manner.
However, that's purely speculation.
Koji, what do you think?
I know you guys are also working on the mobile release, which for, you know, not off the grid,
but obviously, you know, in your case, Project O's case, et cetera,
it's something you also have
to take into account what do you think here uh well i think lem's nailed it man it the thing is
it's like uh you can only handle so many release streams at once and i think that uh forking it
so many times because like it's not just as simple like, you update the code in one place and then just build it on PC, on console, on mobile, whatever.
And then even if you do get it functioning, there's still a bunch of testing on each of them because, you know, a change that works for PC may not work for mobile, may not work for console.
So I think it is a bit of a nightmare scenario.
The one thing I will say, though, is, like, this is a little bit easier if your game's not a live service game.
If your game's a live service game,
then you also have to support the live services on all of those things,
which is also a little bit different, right?
So I do think that, like, going, you know,
trying to do everything at once is you're biting off more than you can chew
for the most part for most teams in Web3 right now because, again, it's all very small,
and we're very much indie developers and not big monoliths or whatever.
Short and sweet. Tadid, what say you?
Yeah, I have to agree with Lemz.
I think it's very, very smart to focus on one kind of singular distribution channel.
However, where the pushback comes in is, let's say you launch your basically finished game or finished game on one distribution channel.
Let's call it mobile or let's call it let's call it even console.
And it's not doing as well.
And then you want to go launch on PC.
I say, absolutely.
Go launch that game on a different distribution channel. If it didn't do well in the and then you want to go launch on PC, I say absolutely go launch that game
on a different distribution channel.
If it didn't do well in the first one,
it could crush it on another one.
And the best example of this is Stellar Blade.
Stellar Blade, when it launched on PlayStation,
was doing very underwhelming numbers.
And then it launched on PC,
and it absolutely became like almost within the week,
a smash hit selling success.
So I do think, yes, when you're initially launching,
very, very important to focus on one lane.
But if the lane's not working, you know,
feel free to switch lanes as fast as you possibly can,
because that could just be the catalyst
that leads to your success.
Spang, I want to hear from you too.
Whenever you guys are bringing games onto a chain,
are you excited whenever they're going to be on all the platforms at the same
time?
Or you go, whoa, slow down there, Sparky.
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, I think it's tricky.
You know, I'm going to take the take of, you know,
like because we're assuming that, you know,
we already have kind of like a built out game here.
I think what people should be doing these days is testing out the game loop first in a UGC platform.
I'd say build on Roblox.
Build on UEFA.
Show that the core game loop and the core intricacies of what you're trying to build has success in
these smaller scale productions or a remix, for example, like build something super small,
super tight, super easy to iterate on and prove success. Show metrics, show that players are
coming back and enjoying the game loop. Because yeah, to your point, Sam, I think, you know, one of the things that we look for
when evaluating partners is like,
what are the metrics here?
Like, have you launched this anywhere?
Where can we see any indication
that this is already going to be a success?
And I think that, you know,
whether that's a small beta test on PC
or launching it as a browser game
to, you know, an impassioned community and getting some metrics around that.
All of that helps.
And as far as kind of launching to PC versus console, yeah,
I think everyone's kind of already made the point.
So, you know, the more that you have a proven base who will go to bat for you
and you know that your players will uh
will be coming back and you can prove that the game will attract uh the easier it is for you
to find success anywhere great points there jerry want to hear from you yeah you should definitely
not be trying to build for all the above at the same time. I don't know when people are going to learn their lessons,
but like Sony can do that, you know, and Microsoft can do that.
All these guys can do stuff like that,
but you guys don't get to play by the same rules, you know,
to hearken back to my lawsuit happy friends here.
You know, when you have more money,
you get to play by different rules and you get to play a different game.
None of you guys have that.
So, you know, I think it's just like kind of outright silly to if people think you should kind of be doing all of them at once i think uh i'm not quite so on the the boat with uh
wills here that you should be testing it in roblox or anything like that. I think you should for sure just build out like a PC client or whatever,
whatever wants to be your native thing,
and then just go validate and see, you know,
what do session times look like and, you know, what do, how,
how do things go and how do things work within the game first?
And then if it looks good, I think you,
you can hire in some outside help and, you know,
get some studios in to help you port things uh you know
just to to give you guys like an example of this and give you some homework if you want to look
i'm gonna i'm gonna do a knock and i'm gonna cherry pick a very niche case of something to
prove my point which would be hogwarts legacy uh you know the the port to switch for that game was
an absolute fucking nightmare and it was a huge bottleneck.
So it's not the easiest thing to take a title
and then just be like, yeah, it's also now on Xbox
and Switch and PlayStation, all that stuff.
There's a lot of work that goes into it
and it's not the easiest thing.
So trying to do that in Sport Live Ops
is pretty fucking crazy.
And I don't think most of the teams here
have the resources for it
chris hatherly and knock yeah i think um especially if you're a small team you have
to focus right um and multi-platform can be distracting you know um it's easier for mobile
um obviously the thing i would just caution to add to what a lot of people are
saying here is when you, the platform, like every platform has its differences in terms of who the
audience is and what kinds of games they like to play, you know, like Google, Android and iOS are
pretty similar, but even then you have a disparity in terms of like spenders versus very ad
driven, you know, players to be kind of, you know,
overly simplistic about it. And so, you know,
like my advice would be pick the audience that you're making the game for,
and then focus on the platform that is closest to that audience
because i like the advice of like try something in remix or try something in roblox is interesting
but but it's not always clear that those learnings are going to be transferable because
you know like in roblox like that's a kid's audience, right? And then if you try to take that over to like, you know, over to console as a standalone game or you want to put it in Steam, like you're talking to a different group of people.
So I just, I think you have to be aware of that and, you know, be very specific about who you're trying to target to make sure that they're a fit with what you're trying to do,
not just that they have the best distribution or whatever.
Knock over to you then to Kevin Lambert.
Yeah, I would go as far as saying
it's probably the first signs of a death knell
from a team who is under-equipped
to handle a launch on all three platforms,
especially if you're building a shooter.
You know, Jerry mentioned the teams like Sony and Activision and these giants can do this.
Most of the time, they don't do it well either.
They have a bunch of issues.
There's a bunch of feature parity issues across different platforms.
Things don't work in a shooter.
The thing we hear at the beginning of every shooter launch is,
well, the aim assist on PlayStation is stronger than the aim assist on Xbox,
and both aim assists are too strong for people who are aiming on mouse and keyboard,
and it's cross-play, so we're all in the same lobby, so we should all be playing the same game.
There's a lot of layers to feature parity that has to be accounted for when you're building on multiple platforms.
You combine that with everything that Chris just said, which is different audiences who have different tendencies,
who want to play different games.
There's a different relationship between early access games
on console and PC.
On PC, it's largely accepted and celebrated.
In console, the only early access game
that I can ever actually remember playing was Fortnite,
and that was in early access for four fucking years,
and when it launched, it was already more polished than most of the games on console anyway so i don't really even count that
i think that there's a lot of things that you have to factor in when you're making that decision
and i think unfortunately like with pretty much everything else in this space a lot of teams and
a lot of people myself included believe that the more surfaces that you were on, the more likely you
were to have a breakout hit, the more likely you were to have success with that game. And what
ended up happening in practice was the more surfaces that you were on or the more chains
that you were on, the more overhead there was for the game, the longer it took for things to happen,
the more money you spend trying to make those things happen. And ultimately, the more likely
you were to die. I think if you're a game who's launching a game in the next little while, make sure that you have the game polished, make
sure things work the way that you want them to work, and then look into doing things like
expanding to platforms like console or mobile or wherever. But I think it's very important that
you're not rushing into that decision, because to Jerry's point, pretty much any team who has ever
launched on Switch has had a launch that is very similar to hogwarts legacy which is the game probably works
good enough on the main console that it was launched on we wanted to get it out onto switch
we've spent absolutely no time optimizing for the complete lack of hardware capabilities on that
product and the game didn't fucking work overwatch on the switch was maybe the worst gaming experience
i've ever had in my entire life.
It literally did not even fucking work.
And that's a byproduct of a team who just wanted to have it out on a console to make sure that you can capture that market.
I think it's dangerous for a lot of teams.
I don't envy devs who have to make a decision about where to launch or when to expand or how to push for a global launch on multiple platforms.
And then figuring out the timing for making sure
that those platforms can interact with each other it's an absolute fucking nightmare but i think one
thing holds true when you're working on a limited budget when you're trying to get the game live
when you're trying to prove out the game and turn on monetization the less the the fewer layers of
complication that you add to the thing that you're trying to do the better off you're probably going
to be for it and i think that there are very few teams equipped for massive
launches on multiple platforms.
Overwatch on the Switch is an atrocity I didn't even knew existed.
So congratulations for the nightmare fuel you just gave me. Thank you.
Let's go over to Kevin Lambert. So the color that I
want to add here is mainly across the different major platforms, the different hardware platforms, console, PC, mobile.
The most important consideration there is actually, and not touched it a little bit, is input.
It's like, hey, I am, you know, touching the screen and dragging my finger around, tap, tap, tap.
Or I've got a console, so I can only move things indirectly by moving my thumb and something's moving around the screen, right?
Like, the whole way that your game operates may feel very different, you know.
In the case of a first-person shooter, it's aim assist.
In the case of a point-and-click game, it's also different.
Like, if you have a mouse, you're you're like able to move that around really quick if you're using a console
controller are you moving a soft cursor are you moving a little selection indicator that goes
tick tick tick tick like you really have to think those through and ask yourself does the input
work for the game on this platform should Does the game experience hold up?
And I think the second factor here,
and most people don't think about this,
is the immersion in the way you play.
So like sitting on the couch with a bag of Cheetos
and playing your favorite console game,
you're very immersed in that experience now imagine playing that when
you're sitting upright in a chair on a desktop like and you're probably picturing like well
in a game streaming scenario yeah it's fine but it's different it plays differently like you're
you're experiencing the the products differently when you're on a console than you are when you're on a PC,
even though you can use a controller on the PC. So you have to ask as a product developer,
like, does the experience hold up? And when you think about going from PC to mobile,
it's just like, dude, if these are average 25 minute games, is that going to work on mobile?
Like, sure, we can get it on the phone. And sure,
we can make the input work. And it's it plays well and feels fine. But like, do people want a 22
minute average game experience on their small screen phone? Probably not, right? That's why
the shorter sessions work. So like, you got to consider all of those things when asking,
should we go to another platform and if the answer is yeah
then totally like we made the choice on project oh like mobile and pc but i would probably call
it mobile first because the session lengths and the accessibility are what you would see in a
mobile game but we know that translates well to pc too. Like you can, yeah, you can put this on a
PC and sit upright and jam it for hours and hours on end because even though the games are short,
the sessions can be as long as you want and still works.
All right, guys, we went through that topic a lot faster than I expected. We're going to throw in
one more along with the MVP voting, okay? Is it worth it or a waste for somebody to hand place every single element in their game so it feels more organic?
There was a post that went super viral, inspired by Silksong's hand-drawn art, an indie dev of a game called Taito.
They kind of misled with the tweet, kind of inferring that they were actually working on Silksksong but they finessed it so that it wasn't completely a lie anyway that is to say uh that they were showing
an example of them hand placing the grass and making every each tile unique versus using
something like tiled if anybody's used that we used it with phaser to make our games in remix
basically you give it a set of like 16 tiles and kind of mixes and matches them in ways so that
it looks a little bit different but eventually you will notice that it repeats the question here is
is this a waste of time where and if it is maybe it's obvious that it's a little bit of a waste of
time to hand place every single thing in the game but then the question becomes where is the line
between craftsmanship and loving what you do and wanting to make sure
that you build something in an absolutely beautiful way but maybe also needing to be
you know efficient i'll give everybody just like one comment on it while they give me their mvp vote
i think it could be a cool way to approach it dub with the hand up first dub what's your take and
who's your mvp yeah i feel like it's it's definitely worth it um it's weird thinking about where where that line
is i guess it's like personal for every project and where they want to like how much effort they
want to put in i think getting rid of monotony and and putting like trees randomly rather than
every five pixels is is definitely going to have a better um. And that's where my mind goes to when thinking about this whole thing.
And for MVP, I was so torn between Koji and Spangler,
but I got to give it to Spang.
The metaphor, we tried a lot of metaphors on this show today,
and I think Spangler really nailed his plumbing metaphor
more than anyone else could hit a metaphor. So best metaphor, valuable player is definitely Spangler really nailed his plumbing metaphor more than anyone else could hit a metaphor.
So best metaphor, valuable player is definitely Spang.
Yeah, Knock really came in from the top rope to solidify that one too.
Nothing like an Iceman to help you out whenever that happens.
Let's go over to Spang on that note.
Spang, who's your MVP?
What's your take on optimizing for efficiency but also optimizing for craft
yeah i think i think it you really have to think
does bang drop for you guys too yeah he's dead yes he did that plumbing failed
that that plumbing dude all right but we'll uh we'll work our way over to Koji in the meantime.
Silk Song.
Am I back? Am I back?
Oh, you probably just heard Silk Song.
That's it. That's the point.
Take us away.
No, I think you need to figure out why your players are there.
Because when you go into one of these narrative, you know, souls-like games,
like when I think of a souls-like game,
I think of a game that I wanna get lost in.
I think of a world that I want to, you know,
evoke emotion from me.
And to do that, you need to have, you know,
that artist touch.
You need to have, you know, the little hidden secrets
that couldn't be put there by anyone who hasn't played,
you know, these kind of games before.
And the kind of things that reward you for exploring and doing the things that you've come to the game to do
and kind of completing that flywheel of enjoyment.
But an alternate example to that is a game like Borderlands, which I've been playing.
And I remember thinking when I was going through the kind of, you know, the campaign,
like, like,
eh, a lot of this stuff just seems kind of put here for no specific reason. And the dialogue's kind of janky. But that doesn't bother me because I'm here to farm bosses and get shiny objects.
And that is the only thing that sustains me when I'm playing this game. The narrative,
the foliage, that's not what I'm here for. I'm here for loot.
I'm here for loops. I'm here for a much more visceral gaming experience. And I think in a
large scale project like that, you can get away with it a little more. I really think it's a
matter of just understanding, you know, what does the player want and why are they here? Because I
think Silksong and hollow knight as well are phenomenal
examples of understanding exactly why the player is there they're there to get immersed they're
there to feel lost and those hand-drawn environments really help with that um my mvp god this was a
banger episode um i'm gonna give it to jerry but one for the alley-oop earlier, which was legendary, and two because he's just been crushing it
the last few weeks, and I love hearing from him.
Nothing makes my skin crawl like a Jerry compliment,
but I'll allow it.
Let's go over to Chris Hetherley.
Chris, who's your MVP, and what's your take on this one?
I'm going to say Spang for that take.
That was a great take on how to think about it.
I think that, look, I mean, great games are about craft,
and polish is what makes a game great, takes a game from good to great.
So, like, the answer is you should always put as much craftsmanship
into your games as you can afford
but i also very much agree with the comment that like why are people here and what what is the
reason if it's about the world then yeah then then then making the world awesome is what is
matters a lot more in a game like that if it's you know about the core mechanic then then maybe it doesn't so i think you know
this is the this is the you know the the the art of making video games is knowing you know when to
make those trade-offs um but you should but i think in general like you always want to put as
much craft into whatever you're doing as you can all All right. I've fully recovered now.
Jerry, I can go.
I can field your take here.
Jerry, who's your MVP?
Yeah, well, just know your mom's going to text you pretty soon
and also agree with Willis.
I would say, yeah, listen, it's kind of gimmicky, I think, that that guy posted that today in September 2025.
But I think there's a world where that matters so much more as everybody continues to use the same LLMs to build the same AI games.
I'm dying on this hill, I've decided.
So there will be a day in the very
short term future where it matters a whole lot to a lot of people. So yeah, that's my
take. It's also like the best marketing thing the guy probably ever did was make this video
and write that tweet out. He probably got more wish lists from this than anything he
did and any, you know, service he used to spam emails to, you know, Twitch streamers for free keys, you know?
So, uh, I don't know.
I guess it worked.
So, uh, my MVP will also be Wills because I think he brought the heat and he's been crushing
And I too think that every individual should get custom plumbing and he works for a company
that offers custom plumbing so shout out
to wills god i love i love some good good piping uh go to you yeah i bet you do
record it clip it yeah um i don't even know what to say to that, really. But I think that it goes back to the whole, like,
I can't remember which rock band it was,
but it's, like, only Red M&M's in the dressing room
that was, like, on their rider, right?
And on its face, it seems, like, frivolous and kind of insane.
But it's, like, look, if they're willing to listen to the red m&m
bit they're probably doing everything else that's on here too and i think the same goes for someone
who's like willing to painstakingly handcraft elements of their game it probably means that
they care a lot about all the other elements it's not just like hey we made everything look
individual but the rest of the game sucks so I think that says a lot about the person making the game for sure.
It's Van Halen.
Oh, there you go. Well, and for that, my MVP is Larry. I mean, Jerry, you know, you are the MVP, sir, this week.
Koji made his mind up as soon as he did the impression again uh an hour and 58 minutes ago he said lock
it lock it in but that was actually a great take on the the m&ms thing uh that's that's been
an anecdote tossed around for for many uh many moons let's go over to talent lawyer and kevin
lambert so yeah i'm gonna take the position that i think the personal test touch and the attention
to detail is quite possibly the most important thing a game can ever
do. Because if you have this like very deep attention to detail, if everything that you do
is for a reason and you're doing it because you're actually pouring your blood, sweat and tears
and hearts, mainly your hearts into this game, then that gets recognized. Like the little tiny
things, and I know everybody here is a gamer,
the little tiny things that you all pick up
when you're playing a game,
this just makes you smile because you're like,
wow, the devs thought of that and they really care.
It is such an out-of-body experience,
in my opinion, for a game or whatever,
like I have that moment.
And I can just sit there and appreciate the time it took for that developer to just add that tiny little element that maybe
95 to 99% of people wouldn't notice, but you notice it yourself. And to me, that's what makes
making games somewhat of an art form, if you will, that you're actually there, like putting your own
personal touch, putting your heart into something, hoping that the audience that you're actually there, like putting your own personal touch, putting your heart into something,
hoping that the audience that you're making it for appreciates it, notices it.
Even if only one person out of a hundred does, like you've done your job.
And so I think it's one of the most important things you could ever do in a game.
And for today, I'm going to give my MVP to Spang.
And it's really only because I loved his uh analogy about peeing in the shower versus
peeing in the toilet so that just won it over for me but uh this question to me is just such a
if you if you pick anything else other than you don't want attention to detail then I don't trust
you doesn't trust us Kevin Lambert over to you who's your mvp and what do you think about
going above and beyond spending maybe too much time on the attention to detail oh man this gets
into what the dna of a game studio is right like if you look at the founders you say where did they
come from and most of them are business and marketing folks so they're really leaning into
that and it shines in the project. And when you see somebody,
when you see a game that goes to this level of detail, you know that there is like, you know, user experience or art folks at the DNA of that studio and it shows all the way through.
It's awesome when you can afford to do this. But I think, you know, there can be some times where
the juice may not be worth
the squeeze, right? Like the best example I can think of where you want hand placement like this
is like secrets and sight lines and things like that. Like you do not want those algorithmically
or, or, you know, tile based placement of those because you're trying to get like an exploratory flow state that feels
good. And it's just it's really hard to nail that in an algorithmic setting. And so you really need
that personal touch. But every blade of grass in a house that you only had to go in there to talk
to a person like, you know, the value is definitely different in a scenario like that.
If you can afford it, it's awesome.
Every single blade of grass, I think, probably goes a little far.
Usually what happens at game studios, like traditional game studios,
is that the designers and the artists ask for that.
And the producers are like,
do we really need the rope swing animation at the victory screen is that gonna move the
is that gonna move the metrics on our game and it really that's a really shitty way to ask because
like you put the designer or the artist in the position like well no that's not but when you
when you take 20 of those little nickels and dimes away from the experience you basically cut a dollar and
then it does add up so i'm of the opinion that you want those little details as much as possible
and then when you and then when you say yes it does matter they go cool we'll just crunch for
six months right and and my mvp i'm gonna give it to tatted because i love having someone in
these panels who doesn't mind to give the other perspective and say like, hey, the corporations actually have a perspective here too.
And it's reasonable and it's good.
And we got to play the same game.
And I just I thought that was a great line today.
Shout out to our capitalistic overlords.
Knock over to you, then.
No Man's Sky
Minecraft, Enter the Gungeon
Deep Rock Galactic
play any of those games, tell me they don't
pay attention to detail, tell me they're not
incredible games, tell me they're not excellent
player experiences, all of which
the primary part of the game
that you interact with, the world that you're
in, the dungeons that you enter
the fucking planets that you land on. The world that you're in, the dungeons that you enter, the fucking planets
that you land on, all of which
are procedurally generated. Meaning
nobody placed anything fucking anywhere
but that doesn't mean that the game
is less for it.
There are plenty of ways to do
things in gaming that don't require you
to painstakingly place
every fucking building and every piece
of artwork.
To Kevin's point, there's a world,
and it's probably the world that should exist,
in which you combine things like procedural tools
to help you build most of the ecosystem
or most of an environment,
and you do things like hand-placed little Easter eggs
here and there to make sure that you can get a game
that is beautiful and well-crafted
and fun for people to explore,
but also doesn't fucking take forever to build.
I'm somebody, and I'm pretty positive that plenty of people play games like this,
that unless I am explicitly playing a story game, a telltale, or, you know, something that is story-focused,
I play with the fucking spacebar.
I don't know the fucking story about anything in 90
of the games because that's not why i'm there i'm there to play the fucking game and i know that it
sucks for people who design the story or put the the items here and there but a lot of people just
want to jump in and play the game you know it's funny that we're having this conversation now
a week after silksong releases and a week after a bunch of indie devs are mad at Silksong for playing and creating a game that is so good, and that pays so much attention to detail, because they can't do it, and they're not going to be able to get their game out because it's too expensive.
And you know what? That's fucking true. You can't do it. Not everybody has the luxury of being able to spend seven years to deliver 40 hours of gameplay. And that doesn't mean that Silksong shouldn't have done it,
because Hollow Knight was one of the best games I've ever played in my entire life.
And by all accounts, it sounds like Silksong is equal, if not better, than that original experience.
But that doesn't mean everybody should do it.
I am firmly on the get the fucking game out.
There are plenty of ways to make a great game,
and it's not entirely reliant
on your ability to place every single piece of grass tatted is my mvp uh but fuck that is wild
i cannot the hand-drawn thing fucking is is another tangent for another day but cuphead did this where
they went on this rant about how we drew everything by hand and every experience is hand-drawn and
while that is objectively true they just reuse the same fucking assets on like 90% of the maps.
Bullshit.
I love that call out.
Lev's over to you, bro.
Fuck me.
Why do I have to go after Knock?
He kind of front ran a lot of my points for it.
Yeah, like you don't need to go to this level.
I think in this case, it's a waste because look how many indie games just don't go anywhere and people are just like using the excuse of Silksong success and it's like pick the unicorn
that did really well and just to try and justify like the the actions of like doing this but you
can show the care in another way even Silksong didn't like hand place everything they hand drew
the stuff and then they said like they placed the stuff and then they vetted it afterwards and like
tweaked things so it felt more organic and it didn't feel like it was like tile based so it's like how would you
actually deliver the game at the end is what matters but man like i think indie devs if they
go follow this idea of just like oh we have to do these like extreme things which cause it take way
longer to make the game and then how many of those indie games make no money in the end it's like
r.i.p you just wasted how many years of your life doing this thing
and then your game wasn't even profitable.
So, yeah, RIP.
My MVP is Noc, you know, emphasized by that last point,
but I want to give a shout-out to Wills for pissing in the shower.
That means our MVP is Big Bang from AVAX.
Congratulations, Wills.
That's 60 seconds of FaceTime.
Take us away, brother.
I just can't wait for all of the inbound.
Like, hey, we heard you like pissing in the shower.
Can we build on AVAX?
I'm sure that's going to be a top 10 funnel.
But, yeah, guys, I mean, you know, Sam does the ad read,
so I'll save the shilling a little bit.
I do want to highlight if you are listening and you are building a game
and you want some help going to market,
please do apply to the Helica Avalanche Accelerator.
We're working super closely with that team to kind of help you get your game ready for market.
We're going to help you with monetization, retention,
all of these kind of like that last sprint stuff uh to really kind of prime some games and that's going to be a three-month
program and then it's going to end with a demo day we're going to show your game to a bunch of vcs
and you know make it super successful um so if you have a game and you want it to be successful
please apply uh but otherwise uh thanks thanks for tuning in everybody and come back next week
love to hear that, Wills.
One clarifying question.
I know that Helico is deep in mobile gaming.
Is this for all games?
Is it open now to the whole spectrum?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is all games.
I mean, I assume not UEF and Roblox at this point,
but primarily games launching on mobile, PC, and consoles as well, if that's
in your roadmap.
But I would listen to the panelists here and definitely reconsider that.
I love it.
And also, if you guys enjoyed this, we're trying to grow as a podcast as well.
Please go give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you ever missed part of
the episode.
We always put it up less than an hour after the show.
Phil, who helps me out with that is an absolute animal he makes sure that they're available super shortly after uh so please do your best and if you want to share it with a friend who can't join us
live i always really appreciate that too also got to give a massive shout out like will said to
avalanche the arctic apex the arena acceleration where assets arrive instantly and the avax token
amplifies every action.
Armed with a $100 million AI arsenal and allied with AAA all-stars like Gunzilla T1 Esports and solo leveling,
this chain is ascending above all adversaries.
Activate their Season 2 of the Battle Pass and ascend the ladder.
Accumulate elevated artifacts.
Shout out to the official chain of Gamified who's also helping you with $150,000 grants via the Helica accelerator that Will's just talked about.
And Remix is the realm where raw ideas race into reality, a sandbox of sparks and scroll-stopping surprises
where creators conjure chaos with nothing more than curiosity.
I also just got news from the team.
We have a very, very, very big announcement coming out tomorrow, which I'm super excited to share with you guys.
Go to Remix.gg and become a game creator today with the official game studio of Gamified. We already have a bunch of games surpassing a million plays,
750,000 users available on four different platforms as a mini app.
It's just been crazy how much we've been able to crank out.
Thanks to the amazing dev team that we have and the two co-founders over there.
Love each and every one of you guys.
Thank you so much for making it this week.
I know Asia is coming up.
I will not be in Asia, so you guys don't have to worry about me moving the time zone that the show takes place.
But it does mean that some of the regulars might get shuffled around while they're doing some traveling.
Love you guys.
Wish I could be out there with you.
I'll be sure to join you next year, but wasn't in the cards for me this time around.
I'll see you all same time, same place next week, 4 p.m. Eastern every Monday and Wednesday.
Big smooches.
