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Gamified #136 | Amitt from Pirate Nation speaks
Recorded: Sept. 24, 2025 Duration: 2:06:16Space Recording
Short Summary
In a candid discussion, Amit from Pirate Nation addressed the challenges of transitioning from a fully on-chain gaming model to a more sustainable approach, announcing the launch of a new mobile game while acknowledging past missteps in communication and community engagement. The conversation highlighted the importance of adapting to market demands and the potential for integrating DeFi elements into gaming.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Koji, you're not in Korea yet?
I was surprised you were able to make it, man.
I thought you were going to be in Asia.
Am I wrong?
All right.
Koji's not in Asia, and he's also not near his microphone all right good to know
jordan how about you man you're just skipping the asia trip no way dude i'm going to singapore on
sunday but at this moment way too busy to have also done the the korea leg so just had to go
half but this is actually going to be my first time in asia ever in my life i am very excited
amazing dude uh yeah first time was last year for me and i ended up
going twice because i did manila and then i also did singapore earlier in the year super super fun
you're gonna have a blast fern just posted what can only be described as one of the most horrifying
images i've ever seen in my entire life if anybody just thought the the food he's eating it was like
literal tentacles still moving around on a plate it's awful dude it made me feel
nauseous like i'm like i can't believe people eat that shit the singin's hitting me with a
heart emoji yeah as opposed to the delicious food of the irish people lens
it's uh very very tasty stuff but you got to make sure you got the sesame seed oil on it
or the technicals will stick to the side of your mouth
and you'll choke on it and die.
You usually have it chopped up.
But the foreigners tend to want to eat it full,
like as a full little squid.
And that's what usually gets you into trouble.
So just chop it up before you put it down.
You know, Sinjin was actually supposed to be cast
as the lead in Old Boy.
And then they ended up going with that after. but that's why he knows what's up.
Amit, is this why you sent Fern instead of going to Asia? Because you were like, I don't want to have a plate full of tentacles?
Basically, yes. I mean, yeah, Adam's an adventurous eater, for sure.
Yeah, no, it's like, I'm actually, I'm headed to Singapore next week.
So I'll be there if anyone's around.
Oh, amazing.
Yeah.
Lots of amazing wolves are going to be out there.
My brother just DJed the Pudgy Party, which I was going to say last night,
but I think it was like 20 minutes ago or something.
I've been seeing a bunch of content hitting.
It's always sad that I don't get to be there whenever he's doing something cool like that.
But jealous of everybody that's over there right now.
Let's go ahead and get into some introductions.
Really, really packed show today with some interesting stuff.
So just to kind of level set, we're obviously going to do the Emit interview or sort of
it's still going to be a panel-based discussion.
I want all my founders and creators and stuff to be able to weigh in.
We also got some questions from the community,
points of clarity that people want.
I'm going to make sure that we keep it really productive.
It should be a welcoming space.
It's been an awesome builder in the space
for quite a long time.
It has an absolutely insane track record
before the show or before Proof of Play
and Pirate Nation and stuff like that.
So we're going to make sure that it's a really great discussion.
Hopefully we all get some clarity and I'm looking forward to it.
But with that being said, let's go ahead and jump into some introductions.
Up first, this man used to fight fires.
Now he starts in the group chat.
6'5", 230 pounds of pure muscle, if muscle was made of frozen yogurt left out in the sun.
He's the golden god of the GameCube, the gatekeeper,
the guy that will remind you that he's more athletic than you at least twice an episode it is jerry singer and consider this uh reminder number one i am more
athletic than um pretty much all of you put together just getting it out early just getting
it out early yeah he's got biceps like battle axes spawn straight from the strongman circuit
he's the deal closing colossus of crypto and And in the weight room, he lifts plates.
In the war room, he lifts projects.
And he plays Smash like a savage once.
Jesus.
And he's bringing the world on chain.
I can't read today.
He's the bulldog of bull markets from AVAX.
It's Will Spangler.
Sorry for butchering that.
It is true.
Once, I did bring the world on chain.
And I hope to do it again someday.
Looking forward to the interview. Very excited.
It's hard to do it twice because once they're on chain, you've got to go interplanetary.
You've got to find a new world to bring.
Up next, he's kicked down corporate castles, crowned himself in chaos, and built gaming networks across Asia
while casually calling half the industry gutless wanks.
Now he's drifting into Web3 like a final boss encounter, steering by angry Yakuza the girlfriend
into traffic cones made of outdated ideas.
It's the rebel ruler, the founder who can't be bought,
the titan of taboo.
It's Sinjin David Jung.
Yo, you know, coming back from States,
I'm jet lagged, so I'm actually going to be coherent today.
So yeah, I'm going to eat some souls.
It's good to have you, man.
Sinjin came to Toronto for like two weeks and then is already back in Asia and up at 4 a.m. for us.
I appreciate you, man.
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.
Now he's shuffling lore and liquidity at Coin Conjuring Project O into existence.
It's the Pixel Prophet, the king of the cards.
It's Kevin Lambert.
Yo, yo.
Happy to be back.
This is that refreshing eye of the storm for me every week.
And I love being here with you guys.
Oh, man, that was a great compliment.
I appreciate that.
Nock was here a second ago i was about
to read his but it seems like he's having some technical difficulties we'll double back up next
he scaled cliff's built billion dollar games and now he's scaling twitter beef with jared leto
by day he's the co-founder of parallel crafting universes out of card packs by night he's
sharpening his mic for a melee on mars about 30 seconds from now. Welcome back to the panel. Jared Letters, Joker.
It's Koji Nagata.
What's going on, guys?
I'm unfortunately quite sick at the moment,
but I'm going to do my best to be my regular,
chippy, positive self for you guys.
I'd expect nothing less.
I'd expect nothing less.
Hope you feel better soon, man.
Up next, the Reply Corp.
He's gamifying the grind, putting XP on every exchange,
and turning discourse into a dungeon run.
He's the sovereign of social side quests.
He is, Jordan Feinstein.
Yo, what's up, everyone?
Just happy to discover that the Stefanina brother did not lose my number.
Haven't been on one of these in quite a while.
Super pumped to be here very ready
to chat about this topic man it's so scary making people regulars because then all of a sudden uh
whenever whenever they don't get the invite it's like now we have now we got now we got problems
you know now now it's fighting words yeah if people can see our dms between us they're totally
full of beefs yeah that's right me and j Jordan just shitting on each other all the time.
Up next, from modding Doom in a Chicago bedroom
to powering a billion digital farms
as the founder of Farmville,
he's built worlds helping shape Gears of War
and working on the Unreal Engine itself.
Founder of Toro, which was acquired by Google,
and now creator of Proof of Play,
which created VRNG and Pirate Nation.
It is the king of the crops, the cultivator of the code from Proof of Play.
We got a mitt.
Thank you so much for having me.
And centering, I guess, the show around what we're up to.
So I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you guys.
Of course, brother. Yeah, great to have you.
I appreciate that you're willing to do it.
I know it's not always the most comfortable, but really excited. And I think that at the end of the day, Gamified is like a news-based panel show. But whenever recently, three or four times we've had different founders kind of naturally come onto the show because we've had a topic about them and they've just organically made their way. And it's created some really interesting discussions whenever they've come up on the panel. We've been able to discuss it. So I'm super
excited. Thanks again, Amit. And last but not least on the panel, we've got the man who didn't
just climb the corporate ladder. He piled, drove it into the pavement. At Twitch, he commanded a
$100 million arsenal and rewired streaming. Now he's turned that firepower into Glitter Cloud
Solutions, torching templates, detonating dullness, and leaving scorched earth strategies in his wake.
He's the incendiary innovator, the hype-hurling heavyweight, the combustible commander of cloud.
It is Tony V.
GMGM, stoked to be here.
Thanks, Amit, for coming.
I think it's going to be a great conversation.
And the gnomes are ready to get rumbled in the jungle.
Yeah, Tony behind the Gnome Wars account.
New client over at Glitter Cloud. Shout out to you
guys. Excited to see what that's all about.
And of course, got to give a shout out to our amazing
co-host. He's the pint-sized
prophet.
Prophet of panel banter.
God, I'm breaking on the inside,
guys. The Red Palad rewrites reality
one hot take at a time. At 2.4
pounds, he's small enough to sit on your shoulder, but big enough
to own the stage.
It's the littlest legend himself.
It's Lambs.
GMGM, you're going to win the award from Koji again this week
for not being able to read the intros and ad reads.
That's right.
Koji gave me the Unable to Consume Gluten Award
for not being able to read my ad reads,
which is hilarious because I also have a gluten allergy.
Shout out to Koji.
And we've got to give massive shout outs to our incredible sponsors.
Avalanche Up First is the arcade etched in ice.
Cabinets glowing with instant finality.
Season 2 of their Battle Pass.
You can step into the dystopian chaos of off-the-grade slide into the side-scrolling
nostalgia of MapleStory Universe or enjoy great content on the arena, all powered by
Avalanche L1s.
And if you're ready to jump into the next great experience,
Helica just teamed up with AVAX to bring their gaming accelerator to the red chain,
giving your projects a chance at $25,000 in credits, analytics,
to chase the high score, and a shot at $125,000 more.
The arcade never closes at Avalanche, the official chain of Gamified.
And of course, got to give a shout out to Remix, the Vibe Coding platform,
turning chaos into content. Your wildest whims, your shout out to Remix, the vibe coding platform, turning chaos
into content. Your wildest whims, your half-baked ideas, your midnight butterings all materialized
as playable platforms on a scrollable TikTok-esque feed of games. The mobile app store now has us
live on iOS, so create today. Your games can become gladiators in the global feed. Search
Remix Games on the iOS app store or click a pinned tweet. We'll put that up in just a sec.
Thanks, Lemz. And check out the official AI studio of Gamified. I know we're all excited to pepper
Amit with some questions, but before we get to that, I thought we would open up with something
that we can all agree on. What's the word? Quickfire. For there being malware in a Steam game.
Over the weekend, we saw a Steam game get exposed for having malware on it in a key logger that
logged passwords and exposed people's private keys so they got their wallet strained i'm gonna actually pass this one to lens
he's been following it a bit more closely than i have uh there's a lot to this story we're gonna
try to keep it succinct that will give everybody a word or two for this one lens over to you
all right i'm gonna try to give you guys the tldr for anyone who missed all this shit over the
weekend because i followed it pretty closely because, of course, I got involved and got hit with it.
But luckily, I didn't get my wallet strained, so there was that part is good.
Game was called Block Blasters. It's a real game that was on Steam.
It was just some shitty-ass platformer, and they'd be reaching out to people, asking to test it.
It basically had malware inside it. It would log your passwords, active Discord sessions, private keys from your wallet,
basically anything they could try private keys from your wallet basically anything
they could try and you know pull from your computer and they would just it was like some
update they had put on the version on steam so they had the real version go up first and then
like an update that went down with this all this shit inside it um well a couple of the wolves got
hit because one guy had his discord compromised after he downloaded it it gave them his discord
session he's dming people going like hey i'm this game. Can you guys go test it for me? So a bunch of us go and download the
game. He didn't even realize people had access to his account until someone was like, Hey,
why are you shilling this scam? He was like, wait, that was me kind of then, you know,
tracked it back. And it was all exposed after this guy was streaming on pump fun. He was like
a cancer patient. He was trying to raise money for his treatment.
And then live on stream, he got drained.
It was pretty fucked up, if anyone saw that.
But this caused basically a whole bunch of open source nerds to take this personally and who did this and how did this happen.
They found it was some shitty vibe-coded app
and it had shitty security.
So they ended up tracking down the server.
They destroyed the server.
They doxed the guy, handed it all over to to the authorities so hopefully that guy gets his life ruined now and
karma comes to bite him in the ass um but also if anyone downloaded the game called block blasters
it's now been removed from steam but it took them long enough to do it if you did download it like
uninstall that shit like clean out any hot wallets you had on that computer like back up your files
and wipe your computer clean because you never know when this stuff can be lurking and come back to bite you in the ass
even if you feel like oh nothing happened yet and they did destroy the servers you can't be too safe
with this stuff like that's what i ended up doing over the weekend was just absolutely scrubbing
everything so yeah we can't really just trust steam anymore is the the lesson here like i let
my pretty good security i I feel like generally,
but totally let my guard down because it was like,
oh, one of the wolves messaging me and being like,
oh, it's just on Steam.
Yeah, sure, I'll download it and check it out
and give them some feedback and talk nothing of it.
So be careful out there.
Yeah, that piece of it seems particularly damning
for the founders.
You know, to this point, we've been able to fully trust
Steam and Epic Games
from at least my external perspective,
but now there's sort of a wrinkle in there
that people are going to be skeptical even of that.
Let's go over to Tony.
Tony, behind the NoMore's account,
what's the word for this one?
It's bullshit.
It's bullshit.
That's the word.
You know, I think that Valve is filled with
some of the coolest, most influential people
that have ever worked in the video games industry.
And I have friends that work there.
But I think it's the way that they handle customer support
and the customer experience is just absolutely bullshit
relative to the amount of money that they make.
They don't have a phone number.
You cannot call Steam.
There's no fucking phone number
for the most profitable business per employee
on the face of the planet.
And that's like criminal. Right. And so, you know, I, I think based on my observation is that
they're all over there just like having a good time, a super flat organization, making a whole
bunch of money and doing whatever they want. And they're, they're less concerned with some of the,
the important elements of the user experience that keep people safe.
And I think that this kind of stuff can like really be damning for a big,
important platform. And I hope that they, they figure that out.
Cause like I said, I do think they've done an incredible,
incredible amount for the industry.
But I do think the way they handle customer support and problems like this is
just absolute bullshit.
That is a fantastic point. Not only can they way they handle customer support and problems like this is just absolute bullshit. That is a fantastic point.
Not only can they not give us customer support, they also can't give us Half-Life 3 despite making like $10 million per soul that fucking works there.
It's ridiculous.
Let's go over to Jerry.
Yeah, look, I think it sucks that, you know, Steam is kind of, you know, let's think slip through the cracks. But like, it's not the first time and it's not going to be the last, you know steam is kind of uh you know let let's think slip through the cracks but like
it's not the first time and it's not going to be the last you know and um yeah i guess i don't
really have a comment on steam i just more of have like a general word of caution is that like
you know we always talk about the upsides of ai and you know how ai is going to be this like 10x
thing well like ai is also going to make like scams look more legit. Right. And I've seen like dozens go around in the last, you know, month. And like, it's just, it's probably easier to get scammed now than it ever has been before, you know.
kind of thing that you have this inherent trust for you know so much of our livelihoods are like
based around this money that exists online somewhere right and uh you know people getting
wrecked could really really set them back in in life and um you know i i just say like
don't trust anything you know because like ai is making it better and you know steam has so
many guardrails that probably are built to prevent
stuff like this and it still got through right so uh you know you can't be too careful and um
you know it's only going to get you know worse and things are going to look you know better and
cleaner and and more believable so yeah that's all i got yeah for the 100 people in my dms asking
me to download their executable file demo of a demo of an alpha of an alpha, this is why, of many reasons, why I will not do that.
Kevin, over to you.
What's the word?
Ooh, man, the word is scary.
I've been talking about Web3 security since 2021, 2022.
2021, 2022, it's a really big deal.
It's a really big deal.
Back when, you know, people were just like,
hey, download my random executable from my website
and try out this awesome Web3 game.
Three years ago, you know, the recommendation I gave was,
if you're going to do that, make sure that it is on a burner machine
or is in a virtual machine where it's sandboxed,
or that at the very least you have zero connections to anything.
Just assume that these games are all going to put malware on your device
and just be like, okay, if that happened, what would be bad?
So you can't allow it to spider through your files and find your passwords,
and you can't have a wallet extension on that device. You just can't do that. And the fact that it's made its way to
Steam is really scary. It just, it just shows that now we have to extend that skepticism to even the
most trusted platforms because they're not doxing the teams that, you know, submit games on there. So but that but that is
the solution, just as you know, if it's, if it's a web, I mean, this if it's a web three game,
it's marketed to web three people, you should assume and I say the same thing, even for our
game, like, right, like, as trusted as I, you know, as we are, I say, Look, if you're going
to download our game, practice good security hygiene when doing it.
It's the same for every game.
When I first downloaded Parallel, I did it on a burner device, right?
It was the same idea, even though it was on the Epic Store, even though it was on their website.
Same thing.
Just to be a thousand percent safe.
It's just the right thing to do.
We should educate people so that when this kind of
stuff happens it doesn't have the impact that it does god man yeah me and lens were talking about
it before the show my my word would have been two computers uh because apparently that's what you
need let's go over to singin what's the word yeah i kind of echo what kevin's saying but it's more
specifically like um i think the word is overhaul.
I think they're going to have to look at like when you're onboarding this team, I think they assume that everyone's going to be a good actor in the sense that I think the major thing that they're looking for, other than I think just basically like registration is your bank account and your routing.
Basically like registration is your bank account and your routing, right?
But if that person doesn't have any intention of actually, you know, taking in funds rather, you know, to set the malware,
their system, like they've said, I think that like for zero day exploits and for certain things,
they can't really protect against that.
They do have their methods to do it.
And for us, our game was never intended to be distributed by Steam or Epic. And
so there is a code signing EV certificate that you need to get. And depending on which grade
you get, it registers more directly with Microsoft that the Windows pings the server and says,
this code signing has been, there's nothing been done further to it but in order to get that code signing there is a fairly extensive
background or like identity check on both the company and the person where it includes a phone
call it includes like not just the business registration, but proof that the business is actually located there,
in-person call, and all the corporate docs, and even like a call and confirmation with your
registry that it's in good standing, that it actually exists, that you are exactly the person
who can be signing for that company. And so STEAM may need to take that next level because then
at the very least, what ends up happening is that if there is something that goes amiss,
that they do really, really know who the actual actor is behind it.
So, you know, I think, you know,
maybe they're going to need to step it up at this point,
especially games that do involve any like crypto or any assets or,
you know, just targeting certain groups.
Totally. Like if Steam wants to stay a trusted platform,
they have to, you know,
stand for curating the content
that's on there away from that stuff.
They sure do.
I want to get through these hands quickly
so we can move on to the next topic.
Real quick, Koji, what's the word here?
Yeah, I'm not going to go on too long.
The word is just sad.
You know, this is why we can't have nice things. Like we literally can't trust anybody anymore. uh koji what's the word here yeah i'm not gonna go on too long the word is just sad um you know
this is why we can't have nice things like you we literally can't trust anybody anymore and
the like i appreciate what everyone's saying and everyone's right uh about the precautions
you need to take but the fact like that we're saying hey you can't even play games on a machine
unless you the machine is dedicated to play games and not attached to anything else personal whatsoever,
is, like, an insane shame, you know?
Like, the idea that if you get burned,
it's, like, not quite your fault,
but there's something you should have done
in order to, like, make it safer for yourself.
And, like, truly, I hate the idea that it's, like,
we're putting the onus on the
victims of of these things anyway yeah it's also just unrealistic for a lot of people to have
two devices right like for the first 24 years of my life or something that would have been crazy
spang i want to hear from you what's the the word? Yeah, I think somebody already said scary, so I'm going to say worrying.
Obviously, it's worrying from a security perspective for the end user.
But I mean, frankly, this is worrying from an adoption standpoint.
Like, this is the biggest news that I've seen Steam and Web3
attached to together in years.
And that's not a good look for us.
That is something that Valve is going to look at and be like,
oh, these games are all scams,
just like everyone has been saying for the last four years.
And hopefully, you know, I think, you know,
we all want Valve to like update their policies,
but I'm, I'm hesitant that that's going to be great for the industry at large. Like what,
what, like, I'm curious what that, that, what that's going to look like, because at the end
of the day, Steam isn't a platform that's optimized for Web3 usage. You know, it's, it's not,
it's not super smooth to use. There's kind of you know preferred wallet logins or connection
routes or ways that you can kind of securely in get engage with web3 directly through the lens
of the platform and i think i think that goes to say that you know maybe you know it might not be
optimal from here on out to be kind of operating as a web3 game on steam until we receive some
three game on steam until we received some clarity because i i i i definitely see a future
where the feedback we get from valve after this incident is fuck off
yeah there's a comment from caesar martinez that says it's more likely that uh steam maybe
heightens their security for games using blockchain i'm actually not sure if there even was
blockchain integration oh yeah i see a comment from lem saying there there wasn't it was just shitty
security that basically allowed somebody to infect this with malware that ended up targeting people
that had wallets installed on the same machine uh real quick let's go to jordan and knock for a
quick word jordan oh i didn't realize my hand up hand was up um i i guess this is more evidence
that i shouldn't open my discord DMs because I never do.
All right, knock over to you.
Yeah, the word is inevitable, as in it was only a matter of time that something like this happened.
It's unfortunate, but like there's a quote that goes around in crypto and it's, you know, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
This is the outcome. Crypto is wildly over-financialized.
Every aspect of this space is about how much money I can get out of that thing for as little
money as possible put into that thing.
And eventually something like this was bound to happen.
It's really unfortunate the way that it played out.
But somebody at MagicEen, when I first joined, within my first week, there was an engineer
on a team that I was on that said this to me and it stuck with me for the last four
years.
If you have money in a hot wallet, no, you don't. And that is the mentality
that you should operate within this space. You should only keep as much money as you are willing
to lose right now in a hot wallet. You should look at things like hardware wallets. Even something
like a centralized exchange is safer than a hot wallet that you have native to your machine.
So for me, this is inevitable.
To Jerry's point, it's probably going to happen again.
It'll get more and more difficult as companies like Steam and Epic learn how to protect users from this sort of thing.
But you should also be very willing and understanding of the fact that if you have money on a hot wallet, no, you don't. You're exposing those funds every time you connect it to literally anything at all. And I think it's a reminder
that, yeah, it's a shame that we have to worry about our funds. It's a shame that we have
to worry about personal information, but that's the reality that we're in. And being upset
about it without protecting yourself is stupidity. So it's unfortunate that this played out the
way that it did, but it's a good reminder to many of us, especially people in the gaming
space, that if you're downloading something and you have a hot wallet those funds are always at risk
yikes man uh real quick we're gonna get to admit in just a second lens with a quick uh security
heads up yeah i'll just say that you know i let my guard down here and i luckily didn't lose money
but i have pretty good practices but this just reminded me, I used to always test games on a virtual machine. A lot of versions of
Windows come with virtual machines ready installed and you can just use them off the bat. There's
also freeware available. Just assume any game you're downloading now, don't trust it just
because it's on a certain app store. You either need a second device or a virtual machine and be
cautious with everything at this point.
And yeah, just reiterate Nock's point, like use a goddamn hardware wallet for anything valuable.
Jerry, over to you.
Yeah, you know, I think we've talked a little bit about like the negativity of it.
And, you know, I do want to say I was like, you know, quite proud of the crypto community as a whole for like rallying around somebody who's like in a pretty shit situation.
You know, and like I haven't always loved people like Becker or whatever, but like seeing people, you know, like that kind of rally around somebody was like, I think a moment, you know, we should all kind of appreciate like EZ.
I think also, you know, threw a bag that way.
And, you know, like EZ is one of the most likable guys in the world and um you know i think it was like it's funny sometimes like we're all kind of ashamed
to be in crypto i think like at times you know it's like a hard thing to talk about to people
you know but um it was a cool moment you know and i think one of the the few times where you
can look at like the crypto community as a whole and you'd be kind of proud of everybody so yeah
i thought that was pretty, pretty dope.
It's not all bad, man. Yeah. I wish we would do more, more charity in the space for a place that's so financialized, man. I wish we could just take like 0.01% of it and, and just throw
it at people doing good. A shout out also to, to leap with donate.gg. We got them hooked up with
make a wish and also with extra life over the weekends to get them listed and start accepting
crypto donations, which is really, really cool. With that said, let's dive into the spicy topic
of the day. Super excited for this one. I think the best way to kick off the Pirate Nation topic
is for us to add as much context as we can to sort of level set for where we're at,
along with some of the reactions. I'm not going to get into the
super spicy ones. I wanted to start with one from the Wolves DAO that we had. He said,
from the beginning, they were very clear that Founder Pirates would be a premium asset.
They put a lot of resources into rewarding those holders, three seasons of massive airdrops,
gameplay advantages, and more. Whenever Founder Pirates felt undervalued, they took steps to fix
it, which pushed the prices higher and higher.
It also said in the Pirate Nation light paper, the founders pirates are the premier asset
in the Pirate Nation proof of play ecosystem.
And then it said it a couple of times.
But with that being said, I also wanted to acknowledge the things that they have done
to date for the Pirate Nation ecosystem or for these Pirate Nation NFTs before this most recent announcement.
So 15% of the Pirate supply at TGE was for early players and founder Pirate holders.
Seasonal rewards airdropped if you staked the NFTs.
Multipliers on booty points for those playing the game, which resulted in a higher Pirate allocation each season, Pirate being the token.
20% on event prizes, 10% off on in-game purchases, proof
of play points via staking.
There's been some questions about whether or not that's still the case.
We can get some clarity from Amit.
So if you've had these NFTs from inception, you've been rewarded on multiple occasions
in multiple ways.
But a lot of heat is around people that have bought the assets on secondary market, or
maybe just the sense in general that they were going to be supported for a longer period of time, and then people feeling like that is no longer
happening. Again, I mean, I have a bunch of questions from the community that I've gathered,
I would love to get just like a statement from you just sort of level setting any clarity you
want to provide to this point. I know you listened to simplified on Monday, which I really appreciated
as well. So if there's anything from that discussion that you just want to get off your chest immediately,
and then we can also maybe give you some of these questions to get further clarity.
But the mic is yours, brother.
Yeah, thanks for having me and giving me the floor.
Yeah, I mean, God, where to begin?
It's been a three-year journey for us, right, that we've been working on this.
for us, right, that we've been working on this.
And, you know, when we first started this game,
you know, we launched these NFTs
because it was actually us just trying to figure out,
like, what do you do if you have an NFT that's dynamic?
So the Founders Pirates originally
were just, like, the characters in the game,
and they were actually the paths
to actually play the game to begin with.
You needed to get one in order to play the game.
And, you know, over time, as we kind of developed the game,
it became kind of the PFP of the community.
It became the center of kind of, you know,
identity within the community.
And, you know, just like almost like a higher class,
almost like a premium tier, premium tier within the game itself. And so I actually think
that a lot of the stuff that we did for founders was kind of like, it was really cool because these
guys were actually, and we really appreciate everyone that's purchased one, has been contributing
to our Discord, has helped us build in public. we really wouldn't be here if it wasn't, you know, we wouldn't have got
as far as we did if it wasn't like for folks actually like engaging and genuinely trying
to contribute to this thing that we're building together.
So let me give a little bit of context around like what happened at the start of this year.
So we did our TGE last year and, you you know we put the statement in the light paper which
was founders pirates of the premier asset of the you know the pirate nation proof of play ecosystem
and below there there's actually a little blurb that kind of explains it um and what we kind of
you know didn't realize and and truly this is like you know one thing i've realized is just like
how incompetent we are at this thing like you, you know, I think if people come out of here, like thinking that we're just incompetent
and not malicious, I consider that a huge win. And so, so basically, I know it's like,
you can't be, you can't be good at everything. So this is definitely our, our, our massive
weakness is my weakness truly as a founder. It's just like controlling narrative in this way.
And so, you know, we put this thing in there and we're like, oh, OK, we're doing the TGE.
We're going to give people a bunch of stuff.
Maybe there's a way to have our cake and eat it, too, and basically allow these things to live next to each other.
But we were thinking about it more as a collectible, as a premium pass, as access to new games.
to new games. It's kind of like you're buying the collector's edition of Diablo or whatever.
It's kind of like you're buying the collector's edition of Diablo or whatever.
But then the narrative switched to, okay, these guys are going to do,
they're going to do another token, they're going to make founders into nodes. And when you don't
set out what things are going to do, people kind of fill in their own narrative for better or worse.
And the expectation kind of grows and it kind of outgrew us, to be honest.
And so at the start of this year, like, you know,
the one other piece of content that's really helpful to understand
is we launched the Pyro Token during the Blur Blast kind of meta, right?
So our original idea was we'll go do a token per game
and then we'll have an ecosystem token that kind of binds everything together so that each in-game economy can have its own kind of currency, use it for play-to-earn activities.
And we'll have some sort of network token that kind of binds all these things together.
I think a few people have actually tried this at this point, right?
And actually got to a point where they, instead of of launching the games themselves they go and they get other platforms
to do it so in january we're like okay it's time for pop let's like let's go do it right
and so um we're like well you know the expectations are really high on the founders pirates but we
think we can resolve it by doing a second token and like basically going doing the pop token
you know at that point being like look you, you got a healthy allocation. We're done.
Like, just like it's over. Right.
And what we found was that when we went and we tried like for literally six
months I was, you know, meeting with exchanges.
We were just like chatting with folks.
We were trying anything we could to figure out how to actually launch the
second token. And there was like no appetite for it.
Basically, you know, one, the gaming meta shift is,
I think everyone here knows,
two is, you know, if you have an existing token out
that's not really driving a ton of volume or performance,
exchanges don't really want to list another one of your tokens.
And so we basically came to this like this head back in like,
I would say July-ish, we're like, okay, shit, this is probably not going to happen.
And then we're like, okay, we need to pivot.
We need to figure out what exactly we can do to resolve some of these things.
Because ultimately, for us, there was a reason the founders fired for a free mint.
And there was a point where we were considering, oh, should we charge for these things?
And that's when we probably could have charged for an NFT mint.
That's when we probably could have charged for an NFT mint.
We ended up just being like, you know,
I don't really want to sell someone something where,
and be a direct party to it where like, you know,
we can't deliver the value.
Cause at the time we were seeing these like other gaming projects where they
were like selling NFTs for like hundreds of dollars.
I'm like,
I don't understand how a game item that you sell up front for a game that's
not launched yet could be worth anything.
Like I just know how often does it games fail? Right.
And so we're like, let's do a free minute. And, um, and so, you know,
for us, it's like, you know,
actually it really does keep us up at night to think that, um, you know,
we are, uh,
people are believing us and we're not able to meet their expectations or more
importantly, we're going to lose some money.
I really don't want that in my head.
One of our values is really high integrity and we really try to live it.
And so hopefully some of our history has shown
and we're going to talk about some things we're going to do going forward too.
But long story short is we basically got to this point
where the token's not going to happen.
On top of that, we've been been operating pirate nation for three years um the game like you know kind of pints peak in november with about 80 000 dau um we hit scaling
issues with the with the chain i know there's some questions around like how does it cost so much
and we can get to that in a minute. But, you know, long story short,
it's just the UN economics don't work.
You know, the bet we made with this scheme specifically
was that if you have an on-chain game,
you can command higher retention, higher LTV,
and that overcomes the cost of potentially running stuff on-chain.
But it's worth it.
And then the longevity of the game comes from the ability
to essentially mod it, add to it, let people fork it, etc.
And we were wrong. It just didn't play out that way.
And that's just like, okay, our original thesis for this was wrong.
We need to shut this down. It's costing us too much money.
We need to cut off the arm in order to save the body.
And so yeah, so we pivoted.
We obviously raised a lot of money.
We have more than enough runway to go work on other things,
but we need a clean break from Pirate Nation.
Now, I think our biggest mistake,
I think there's two that I would highlight.
The first is not resend the narrative sooner on Founders Pirates.
I think that was a big mistake.
And it really just got to, you know,
excessive levels of hype. And honestly, I was just like too naive as a leader to know what to do
about this. I thought if we said something too soon, like, you know, like people would lambast
us for it. I definitely, when we shut the game down, I was like, we need to, we need to actually
like face the music on this because there is no way for us to continue this i just don't i don't feel right about it and so um and
then the second thing is the way we actually did it right the way that we announced it the way that
we came you know the way we talked about it so um so when we were looking at this we're like okay the
pop token is not coming like what do we do for foundersers Pirates, right? Like we have 90 million token in the community bucket,
which is about 9% of the supply, you know,
and that needs to be used not just for this.
It needs to be used for, you know, potential future,
like any form of ecosystem growth.
There's no future token coming.
So this is it.
Like we need to figure out like how to manage this thing
in a way that gives the, you know,
the pirate token actually a chance
of success and then two is like you know it was also we were shutting the game down we did this
plunder event um where people could essentially burn their in-game items and you know get some
token out of it so it was like some way of like you know reconciling the fact that the game was
shutting down and people had spent money on items the game and it was just like we were thinking
you know from our perspective that we were doing kind of something that was going to end up being good for the community.
And what I found continuously as someone who's like thought we were acting good intentions is
that we completely misread the situation. And this is why I think we're like actually truly
incompetent. And I'll say we, but I'll take direct credit for it. You know, is that like, you know,
we just can't simulate like when it comes to this stuff, like, how the community is going to react. And so, you know, I think the, like, kind of the
major failing is just we just didn't engage enough with the community to kind of get more insight
onto how this thing would actually land. I mean, we did a bit, we did end up asking, you know,
hey, like, we're thinking about a burn versus just a claim. And a bunch of folks were for it.
They're like, look, you want to make it a hard decision.
It makes the NFT collection deflationary, which is maybe, you know, something that's good.
And there's like a bunch of game, you know, game things there.
But like, ultimately, what we found is that people have real emotional attachment to these things.
And there's something about like a burn and a claim versus just a straight claim that just like really rubs people the wrong way.
about like a burn and a claim versus just a straight claim that just like really rubs people
the wrong way. And so, um, but in terms of like the $50, that number that's been getting thrown
around, like there's like actually no token to give out. There's 90 million token total. We gave
20 million of it, you know, 22% of it into the, into the founder's pirate. You know, if you're
comparing the all-time high of the NFT to the all-time low of the, of the token, there's like
no way it's ever, the math is ever going to math. And so we're actually open to ideas on how to go from here. And we are going to
do some stuff to try to bridge the divide a bit. But there's nothing else that I can say. I'm just
sorry that our original plan didn't play out as intended. We've really, truly tried. I'm sorry
that we didn't communicate better to our community.
And, you know, I understand why people are angry.
Man, really powerful and appreciate you covering so many of the bases and taking responsibility there. Awesome also to hear that you're like open to suggestions from the community. I'll
kind of open the door if anybody wants to drop suggestions of like where to maybe
go from here but still lots of lots of questions for you see Koji with the
hand up to Koji for anybody that doesn't know founder of parallel super respect
his opinion would love to hear what he has to say yeah so I just want to say
like I don't I don't know all the details so I I don't want to delve into that.
But I think that I just want to highlight a couple of things that were just said.
The idea that the way the game was operating with all the NFTs and everything else, it wasn't working.
It wasn't sustainable.
That's an important point to underline because I think there's a lot of short-sightedness into
this space where people would would rather you ride your pot product into the ground and try and
get like so they can get like a you know a couple more percentage points of value out of whatever
asset that they've purchased rather than the longevity of the project in the company and and
i i understand that like we we like that the community has put money into this
and so that they feel a bit of an ownership there or what have you. And I'm not trying
to diminish that, but I think that at the end of the day, we're operating businesses.
Yes, we're making games, but it's a business. And what we're trying to do, Parallel Included,
And what we're trying to do, parallel included, is to make money and survive.
And if the company is not making money and you're not trending towards survival or success with the things that you are doing, like you have to pivot.
And I think that like anyone who's going to argue against you is just like that.
Like, that's ultimate bag bias.
That's ultimate bag bias.
Now, of course, like, as was stated earlier, like, could you have gone through and done some things better?
Or could you have read The Room or whatever?
Maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think truly I'm just going to err on your side with this one, too.
I don't think you can.
Like, the only thing you can do, you know, let's go back to Lems for a second.
Lems was saying in the last topic, like, just assume that every game is out to steal everything on your computer just assume
that everyone who's holding your stuff is just going to complain about their bags that's the
only way that you can read the room appropriately in my opinion you know and it's like if it's not
uh plus ev for them you're just going to get shit on no matter what so you might as well do the
right thing while getting shit on you know know? And so I think that,
ultimately,
from the sounds of things,
again,
not knowing the details,
I think you guys are doing the right thing.
And,
you know,
I stand with a lot of these decisions because I think that like survival of
your business is,
is sort of more important than,
allowing people to play a game for a couple more months or what have you.
Love that take, Koji. I want to send it back to Amit real quick with a question that we did get
a few different times from the community, and then I'll keep going through some of the hands.
ICO Beast, a friend of the show, he was on Simplified on Monday. He's been a Wolves
Down member for a super long time. Nothing but respect for him.
But it was a little bit odd to some people that he came on.
And then immediately, the team, well, not immediately, but the team did make what turned out to be controversial decision.
And now he's stated that he's moving on.
And people aren't really sure maybe what the intention was whenever you brought him on.
And maybe how much impact he had over that decision.
Any clarity you can provide or is it too touchy?
Oh my God, no, it's not touchy at all.
It's just like, it's like a comedy of just coincidence,
you know, more than anything else.
Like every Fonda here knows,
like if you have like access to exceptional talent,
you fucking jump on it, right?
Like you just fucking jump on it. And it just like happened. We were, we were, you fucking jump on it, right? Like you just fucking jump on it. And
it just like happened. We were, we were, we were, you know, basically working through some of the
stuff and, you know, we got connected to, to ICO and we're like, Hey, like we just found out that,
Hey, there's a chance that we can hire this guy. And we're like, wow. Like, you know, none of us
are really good at crafting. I mean, Fern is much better at this.
And he's probably because of the reps he's done with you guys here.
But we had this chance at hiring this exceptional person, someone who's known within the industry.
And those things are time limited.
People are between jobs.
If you don't jump on it, when you jump on it, you lose the opportunity. And we're like, fuck it.
Let's take the swing, right?
And so we did. And then he came on. then he's like she's like whoa hold up there's a
lot of shit going on here like yeah um you know it's not it's not and by the way none of this is
on him none of it right like this i mean these things were some of these things were set in
motion way before you know we even knew i even knew who he was and so like you know these it's
just crazy and like it, it's just crazy.
And, like, it's funny.
People are like, let me just fill in between the lines a little bit here.
People are like, you called him in to pump the token and pump the NFT and then so you could dump it.
Like, you know, the most insane thing about this is, like, we are like, we have never sold a token at the company.
Like, ever.
We've never sold one of our NFTs. So, if we're rugging, this is like, we're like the worst rug at the company like ever we've never sold one of our nfts so
if we're rugging this is like we're like the worst rug pullers like in history we're like those like
you know it's like the fucking bank robbers you see like you know like those like clips are like
the worst criminal ever it's like we're like one of those right if that's what we're we're accused
of no actually what ended up happening was he came on. Honestly, he was all in on us.
Completely all in. We were happy
to work with him. I really enjoy working with him. I hope
we get a chance to again.
But his name is just
really big in the space.
Someone came with just an incredible offer
that was actually truly life-changing
for him and his family.
He took it. Actually, I was really, really
happy for him. I told him the first thing. I was like i was like congratulations man you should definitely go do that um that sounds
amazing i'm so happy for you you know so there's no bad blood between us you know and just like it
just so happens that you know he came on i think people didn't realize that he was potentially
hireable and then when he announced that he was that he was joining us people like oh like maybe
we can hire him you know and he got an awesome offer and he's
gonna go do it so it was just it was all very coincidental um but it's it's just it's just a
it may be a perfect example of like how narratives are less sudden shaped in this industry because
just there was like no truth to any of the like we're hiring him to kill nfts or any of this stuff
now that's not the case yeah you know i also resonated whenever you
you quoted or i guess referenced the theory that people had developed of like founders pirates
eventually becoming nodes of the proof of like you system and i i just want to tell you i personally
feel bad because when you said that i was like oh fuck like i remember reading that and being like yeah that shit makes sense like maybe i should buy one dude dude honestly so so so you so by the way
so many of our decisions were actually made trying to match the expectations like we didn't have the
idea to do that someone mentioned it and we're like oh well maybe if we ever do a node sale we
can do that right like um like it actually like it was very much like okay like if we ever do a node sale, we can do that. Right. Like, um, like it actually, like it was very much like, okay, like if we can do stuff for people and it's
like not too challenging, kind of in the direction of where we want to go with
the company, then hell yeah, let's do it. You know, like, um, but it just got to
the point where like, we couldn't keep up and it was just, there was like no way
to reconcile the difference.
Yeah. Fantastic clarity there. Okay. Let's go over to Tony, uh, behind the
no mores account tony what's
uh what do you want to contribute yeah i just i wanted to ask uh admit you know when uh well as
you were evaluating you know this decision and and the way that you were bringing it out and
rolling it out uh you know what were the top call it like three things that you guys got in a room
about and like really beat each other up on in terms i mean it sounds like you you deeply you, you deeply thought about how you were going to make this decision and communicate it to your
audience. And so I'm, I'm interested in, in like, what were the key elements of, of that decision
making process? That's a really good question. That's just, we've spent so many, like I've
spent like percentage points of my life on this now. So I think there's a couple things. One is how do we actually set the
narrative very clearly? How do we make sure that this is a clear, this is what's happening,
this is what's going to be? It can't be a half step. It has to be a very clear, this is the
change in narrative. Two was what's considered fair, given that it's kind of like
zero sum. And then what can we do? Like, what's like, what can we do, given that we also need
to think about like, okay, there's like, future things happening. For example, you know, we have
this plunder event drop that's going to happen soon. You know, we have folks that are staking,
like, how does all that stuff resolve? I mean,
the original plan was to have it all resolved into POP. But now it's not the case. And so now
we're like scrambling to figure out like, okay, like, how do we kind of take the remaining kind
of tokens that we have and actually find a way to work, you know, kind of have it go to people
and like a distribution, right? And obviously, everyone's going to end up saying, oh, it should be their particular cohort that benefits.
So it was trying to be like, like somewhat impartial and fair and think
actually about, you know, the stuff.
And then three is, you know, like we knew for the most part that we are,
you know, we have to make this decision and we have to make kind of quickly.
So it was like just the timing of it.
Like, like, what do we do?
Do we wait until, do we do it after the shutdown?
Do we do the shutdown?
Then like kind of wait a bit.
Do we kick it to next year?
You know, like people do that, right?
They kind of kick the can down the road to avoid like the hard conversation.
And so the timing of it was the last bit too.
You know, notice what I did mention was like things like token price or anything like that.
Like, I just think that stuff is, once you start going down that path, you're really just, you know, you're in for a world of pain.
So I think for us, it was mostly just about like, what's the right thing to do?
How do we offboard people?
You know, how do we, you know, give the NFT collection, you know, if there's no future rewards to a chance of standing on its own as a
PFP collection.
It was like that kind of
stuff that really went into it.
Obviously, with hindsight,
it was just like, okay.
I will say one thing.
Koji said this earlier.
He's like,
there is a...
Presume everyone like ROI bags.
We, we had a bit of that mentality and I think it was a bit of a mistake to be honest, knowing
what I know now on the other side of this, right?
Like, um, I think that it's actually a lot more nuanced.
Um, and what I will say is that, is this, I think one people were genuinely attached
to the art and they were like, really like the burn was kind of was kind of like a turning the knife a bit for a lot of people.
And that was actually a big mistake.
Two, is that there's a difference between giving a token out as part of a P2E event, right?
Versus giving it to someone who's minted your original NFT and has basically been in your Discord for three years, right?
I think these are fundamentally different people right and we did not appreciate like the substantive the substantial difference between
these two cohorts of people and that is like the one thing that i'm like okay we need to figure
that out because um you know i think we we got that bit wrong there's the comment from Pirate Master Murdoch, probably the single most
recognizable community member from Pirate Nation. He shared a thread on his thoughts,
which I read yesterday or the day before. And I asked him if there was anything he wanted to ask
you, Amit. And he said, I already talked with him in Discord. He was very active this past week,
spending four to six hours each day talking to the community. Amit is a good guy who's just made a few mistakes.
Glad to hear him weigh in in a positive way.
Let's go over to Nock, and then I want to hear from Sinjin.
As much as I came here, I think that a lot of this boils down to two things.
The first, at least from my perspective, was a mismanagement of expectation, to which Amit
very graciously admitted to pretty much immediately here, right?
There was a disconnect between what the founders were going to look like.
Founders pirates were going to be long term and what would actually be done with them
and what would actually be done with them in the short term as the business makes a pivot.
in the short term as the business makes a pivot.
I think where the overwhelming majority of community backlash here has been,
has been around the communication of those assets and to your point Amit, the lack of or the
inability to sort of curb expectations once you realize that the original vision for what Founders Pirates would
look like would no longer be what the future vision of what they would look like was going
to end up playing out as, right? Once that moment shifted, I think that there perhaps was an
opportunity to kind of curb expectations that was missed. And I think that that led a lot of people
to being really frustrated. But what I said on Monday, I've had a couple of days to
think about it, and I feel more strongly about what I said on Monday, still rings true to me.
And it's that ultimately, as a consumer in this space, part of the expectation and part of the
belief that a lot of people have in this space is that when you're purchasing a fungible token or
you're purchasing an NFT, you are purchasing or taking an ownership stake in
the company that you were buying.
And that is fundamentally at odds with what is actually happening in this space.
So on the flip side of what was effectively some communication mismanagement and perhaps
some community mismanagement on the side of proof of play, I think that there was a fundamental
misunderstanding of a lot of the people who
purchased this asset into the belief that they were investors of proof of play, that they were
purchasing a piece of proof of play. And I think that that is what's led to, at least in the
anecdotal conversations that I've had with people who have had a bunch of pirates was, hey, we
believe that we were buying an asset that would be tied to the success and the growth and the hopefully financial benefit
of the entire proof of play ecosystem, not just Pirate Nation. And I think a lot of people have
learned a lesson this week, which is purchasing a speculative asset means that there is inherent
risk that that number goes to zero. In this case, it didn't. But I think that that is obviously a
very clear statement, but people struggle to grasp.
There's this belief that it can only go up.
And I will say to consumers who purchase this and believe that, you know, proof of play should have continued to do something that was not financially viable in order to make your NFT have a little more life.
I think that this is an opportunity to learn that that's not how any of this stuff works.
And that's not how any team is going to operate ever within this space.
When you're buying an NFT, you're buying a speculative upside of that company.
You're building into the community.
But that goes both ways.
When a decision is made from a company to make a pivot, that's the risk that you are
taking on.
The upside is that they continue to funnel value
into that NFT.
The downside is a company decides that
that no longer makes sense financially
for the health of their overall business
and something like this happens.
I don't think that this is nefarious.
In fact, I'll go to bat and say,
I'm positive that it wasn't,
but I think that there's a learning opportunity
for both sides of the aisle.
For founders and for teams, it's better to get ahead of things as soon as you know that things
are no longer going to go the way that you once communicated they were. Community will continue
to get mad. And the longer that that expectation debt is allowed to grow, I think the bigger it
gets and the harder the fallout will be on the side of the consumers. Companies don't own you
anything at all because you own an NFT.
And I think that that is something
that this week has really struck a chord with me.
It's incredibly important to understand
if you're buying an NFT,
the team that sold you that NFT
is selling you a speculative vehicle.
They are not legally obligated
to provide value to you at all.
Things like this can happen.
It doesn't make them a bad company.
It doesn't make them ruggers.
It makes them business people who are trying to have their business survive. I don't really have a question
for it because he answered most of everything that I was going to say in the opening statement,
but I kind of wanted to double down on this that I think that there's blame on both sides here,
and it feels like most of the blame is being directed only at proof of play,
only a proof of play and i don't think that that's entirely fair
but I don't think that that's entirely fair.
monty in the audience says when things are going well it's quote unquote the premier asset of the
ecosystem whenever they're going badly quote unquote hey it was a freeman this double standard
is funny um i don't know if i may you want to address that and then i'll maybe i'll go to
or i can go to singin and we can maybe i'll lump it together uh yeah i think uh i mean we'll just own the fact
that like i i like i i look back at this often actually it's like if i could point like it was
like a single thing i could point to that that put us into this it was it was putting that into the
white paper um and that was a mistake straight up like it Like, it was a mistake, period. And, yes.
And so I will say that I think Knock Knock is being very charitable here to us,
and I appreciate that.
But honestly, like, you know, I do think, like,
we definitely could have been better with the communication,
and starting with that particular statement.
And, you know, in terms of just like the plan, the pivot,
you know, we did have a plan, to be clear,
to find a way to resolve the stuff
and actually have it like have it resolved in nodes
or pop token or whatever.
And as soon as that became unviable,
we started to figure out how to like kind of unwind it.
And so I think like, you know,
the original thesis just didn't work out
in terms of how these things would play out.
Yeah, great clarity there.
Sinjin, tagging you in, man, what's your read on this?
Any questions or statements for a minute?
Yeah, actually, I thought about this for the last couple of weeks. man what's your your read on this any uh questions or statements for a minute yeah um actually i
thought about this for uh last couple weeks i i am a pirate uh founder of older as well
and i've followed this very closely and murdoch is a pretty strong community member in our own
game as well but uh before i get into that you and Nock, actually, we love to kind of disagree, but, you know, we hold our convictions strongly but loosely at the same time.
And on behalf of all the OG NFT holders, I'm like, fuck you, Nock, yeah, for your take.
Because obviously, yeah, we get it.
It's an investment.
You know, it's highly speculative assets, so on and so forth but uh you know the way it played out i think it
is really different for the og pirate holders um who have been so committed to pirate nation and
i want to say admit that um i have listened to a lot of the amas in the discord and so on and i've never um i want to applaud you for being so articulate um and um really strong
with the statement and and how you've owned it um and i don't mean that in a patronizing way i i
really mean that in in the most positive way as a founder as well um you know the fact of the matter
is i think one issue is and it's you honestly, because of your statements already, you know, you've actually kind But the reality is the way that the OG holders and, um, the industry saw you guys as really
fly bears in the space.
And it was more of a vision.
And why I say that is why I was taken more as a vision was because you guys were so professional.
You guys were like shipping on time.
You were iterating and shipping a new feature every week.
And when everyone else was like really flailing,
you guys were doing great.
Even the play when you launch your token
and everyone was like, oh, this is not going to go anywhere.
And then suddenly it was announced it's on base.
And then boom, it went up.
And everyone's like, fuck.
And every single time,
you guys always
did what was best for the OG holders. Absolutely. And so the authenticity that was shown by the
comms, um, during that time period, um, you know, gave such, um, like a mindset to your OG holders
and then everyone else just piled on.
And I get that.
And, you know, again, you know, the, the,
the thing is I don't think for the majority of your OG holders that anyone
was against the pivot,
they gave you so much of the benefit of the doubt that I've never seen that
in a web three game. Right. um but again on the flip side of that
the feeling of betrayal comes down to what you've already identified was you know when it came down
to your og holders the straw that broke the camel's back was the exchange and the burn
because fundamentally part of and I'll say the vision of what an nft is fully on chain game being
the future so and so forth is that the nft is going to live forever and then there was this
massive attachment to it which you've already mentioned and you know i really applaud you for
that um but again i think this is more of a statement where you know or thoughts is like
you know uh on the one of the discords you're like okay if you don't get it you're a farmer
off we don't want you guys here um i'm I'm, you know, not quoting you directly,
but in some ways, you know, pretty close. Um, and, and I'm the same way, you know,
like fuck off to the farmers. I mean, I don't really promote on crypto Twitter anymore because
for me, they don't really have any value. I think, you know, just the realization,
um, that, you know, whatever anyone can say about whether it's the right business decision or not, it comes down to that, you know, you guys had one of the most premier OG communities in Web3 who were really super devoted.
And I think to some degree are still very devoted.
And that is such a massive company asset. And you can say like,
okay, fine, then whatever, we're going to move on. But the cost of moving on and transitioning
in a certain way and to lose that real asset of your company, that makes me sad. It makes me sad overall um just in that in that sense so i guess uh if i did have a question
would be like are you considering to really engage the og holders as a whole and try to find a
resolution where these assets are worth something i think engaging them for the sake of giving them
more compensation i think it's just yeah that's end, right? It just doesn't make any sense at this point. Or do you think it's a bridge too far and you just simply want to kind of move on and try to find some way to maybe have some sentimental or some other utility value for the entities? And thank you for coming on board. I really appreciate that.
for the entities and uh thank you for coming on board i i really appreciate that oh yeah thank
you thank you for that and for the perspective um yeah i mean literally you know myself matt van
our cto um and others have been in the discord there's a there's a channel called price chat
if you have if you had an nft if you um uh burned an NFT, you have access there.
We're there.
We're engaging.
We're talking about our new products.
We're trying to figure out how to bring people along.
Some people are asking questions.
Let me just talk a little bit about some of the things I think are ambiguously unresolved
at the moment.
One is what happens to staking?
What happens to pop points?
What are we doing with these things?
And the answer is truly, we're figuring it out. One is what happens to staking? What happens to pop points? You know, what are we doing with these things? Right.
And the answer is, is truly we're figuring it out.
Like we were, you know, there, we have like, you know, maybe two or three different options.
There's folks in this chat literally helping us like brainstorm, like, how does this work?
How is it like, how do we, you know, as you know, we go and figure out how, you know,
products are actually working and the company's growing,
that the folks who are part of this community from the start, who are actually engaged with us,
continue to have those kind of opportunities to benefit from that. And so we're figuring it out.
And one thing that is kind of interesting for me is so much of the stuff that I'm talking about right now, I've had to like hold to my chest for like months and months and months,
like almost a year, because, you know, we were towing this very interesting line as
like project creators and like token founders and all this other stuff where, you know,
some of the things we say, one, could get taken out of context, and two, can be perpetual forever liability well after the game is gone, well after the company's even shut down.
Someone can go look at a statement you made on Twitter or set in a space or whatever, and then that can be the administration changes, the regulatory environment changes, and all of a sudden you're being held to it. So we're always towing this line between like, how do we actually be as transparent as
possible, but not like in a way that is going to open us up to potential liability. And that's
made that part really challenging. The one nice thing about this, I guess the silver lining to
all of this is that like, I can actually be just like super direct because it's not, you know,
none of these things are like secret future things that are going to happen. It's just like
the reality on the ground. And we can actually like talk about these things are secret future things that are going to happen. It's just the reality on the ground.
And we can actually talk about these things openly with people.
And so if you want to engage, we would love to have you.
I'm literally, I think someone mentioned, Murdoch mentioned, I was four to six hours over the weekend each day.
I don't know.
I've been really enjoying actually connecting.
I wish I did sooner, to be honest.
I tried outsourcing it for a while to our various uh narrative folks and just it turns out there's no difference than me just being like there's no
real replacement than me just being in there with people and sorting it out and so um yeah but
we're we like we want to figure something out like we really do um I also like if yeah so I'll leave
at that yeah I think that's awesome.
I want to make sure as well at the end of this conversation that we send it back to Amit to talk about the future of the company,
because I know this isn't the end of the road for you guys and super excited to hear about where you're going from here.
Let's tag in Lems and then we'll continue working through some of the hands.
Yeah, I'll just say, well, first of all, disclaimer that I don't have any bag bias in here. I guess maybe that should be an opener. I'll say I respect the pivot, but I guess disappointed with the communication, which you kind of already touched on, that's something where you guys fell short on. and we had a big discussion on in the Wolvesdow discord again from holders, non-holders, what people thought about the whole situation.
And that was the big theme that ran true.
But my question is, is there nothing you guys wanted to sort of preserve
from the community aspect of what had been built over the years?
Or you feel like it's better to just kind of end it and end it where it is here with Pyre Nation
and start with a clean slate with
what's going on with like the pop arcade and what's going on with, you know, the infrastructure
on the VRNG side, or was there no way to sort of roll in some kind of founder benefits into,
you know, everything that's going to come from pop moving forward?
Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I think, um, yes, the answer is, yeah, of course, we would love that more than anything else. I think, you plans, is that we're actually like not,
like our original game, Pirate Nation,
was servicing a Web3 negative audience.
And at this point, like, you know,
at peak, we had about 80,000 DAU.
We've had hundreds of thousands of people play the game.
Like, you know, I'm pretty convinced
that like there is a very clear upper limit
to the addressable market
for just like pure Web3 native games.
And so one of the things that we we realized
is like oh crap so the people that we're making games for now are not necessarily the people that
we need to make games for going forward and that's not saying that that's a reason to like abandon or
like not bring people along but that was just the reality of like oh our customer segment is shifting
um that being said what we found and this is actually true so we have a we have a discord
we have a new game that's unannounced um it's a it's a mobile first game and um with like thin
defi layer so one way to think about where where we where we are and where we're going
is we went completely on chain we're like okay in 2021 web 3 is going to be fucking massive
like everyone's onboarding there's going to be you
know hundreds of millions of daily active users and we just need to be like a notable gaming
company in that space that was like our vision right and then you know the with on-chain gaming
it was for me that was more of just like a passion more than anything else i i like love the idea of
smart contracts and ethereum it's kind of like what got me to this space to begin with back in 2017 um but like so we you know with that with l2s we're like okay we can
actually go and create something really really amazing and and we had the entire thesis i'm not
going to go back into it um but it turns out that thesis was just wrong right and it was not it was
partly wrong because of the the cost of the technology and the per-unit economics of operating a DAU on a chain
versus just a normal AWS server.
But it was also wrong because of the audience expectations
when we launch a game like this.
I think, you know, I will say that, yes,
there are a lot of extractors,
a lot of folks are just focused on ROI, and it kind of corrupts the metrics of your game
and actually how sticky or good your game is.
And so, you know, what we basically realized was that rather than try to bring games to
Web3, we should bring Web3 to games.
And I know that sounds like a nice, like a soundbite, but it basically means start with a mobile game and just build the thinnest
possible layer of,
of on chain this to it.
And so in our case,
that's,
you know,
we're basically building a mobile game.
And the game's called Shiba story go.
It's very,
you know,
it's like a casual RP auto RPG thing.
A bunch of our,
our original members are playing it
but there's a very thin defi layer in there so basically there's a real money marketplace in
there you you don't know you're on chain you don't know which chain it you're not using crypto you're
using dollars that happen to be selling the stables and so essentially what we're doing is
we're trying to take the things that we learned from Pirate Nation in terms of revenue streams and bring those to games that we know have the potential to reach an audience because they're
on app stores, retain properly, and actually have great monetization from the get-go. And then can
we just essentially add these new revenue streams to it in order to increase the LTV?
And so that's where we're going. The game is in test countries right now.
We're just refining the user experience, et cetera.
But that's really working.
And the thing is, if that thesis works,
all of the other stuff that we've been known for,
which is build games to sell infrastructure, et cetera,
we can go sell that marketplace product.
We can sell those stablecoin rails to other people. And I think it's actually a much bigger market
because now we're actually bringing DeFi to everyone else and Web3 to everyone else instead
of trying to bring everyone to Web3, which, you know, we've tried for the last three years,
just doesn't work. But to answer your question, sorry, I'll bring it back around.
To answer your question, we would love nothing more than for our community to come with us
i also understand that people just kind of burned right i think it's like so i'm trying to be as
respectful as possible here and basically be like look like if you want to join us for the journey
like you know and we're we're going to announce some stuff soon but one of the things that we're
doing is we're basically just giving people a bunch of free stuff in our new games and not
everyone's going to want this so people be like you're just like you took my nft and you're giving
me these like you know whatever tokens in these games like i
don't want that to be the the narrative so let me be very clear but if there's a way for us to like
bring people along and make it easier make it so that they're you know they never drink again they
never pay again in any of our games we're like fine with that you know we'd love nothing more
than to do that but we realize that's not for everyone that's for a certain type of person for
those people that do want to join us, we'd love to have you.
That's really interesting, Amit, because a lot of the discussion on Simplified that I've seen on Twitter posts and stuff has been about, and some of the questions we've received too, is like, why not do something else for us within the ecosystem? film and uh my response uh just speculatively was always well they probably didn't want to accrue
even more expectation debt and just kind of keep pivoting to the next thing the next thing the next
thing and creating this never-ending waterfall but it sounds like it's it's been more so out of
almost respect of not wanting to be like hey just look over here we promise it'll be it'll be good
and almost like undermining them or something.
I mean, that's exactly it.
I just don't see a reason.
I mean, I kind of view it the other way,
which is like, you know,
one way to think about this stuff
is people have capital locked up, right?
They have capital and expectation locked up.
And like, you know, if I have true belief
that there is a way to take this and do it, like I'll say that, right? But if I lose belief that, I, if I have true belief that there is a way to take this and do it, like I'll,
I'll say that.
Right.
But if I lose belief that, Hey, there is a way to land, for example, the NFTs into something,
then I owe it to these people to tell them that, right?
Like, it's really important.
It's like, like probably the, you know, you know, there's like no other move I can think
of than be like, Hey, I thought this was going to work out, but just didn't.
And here you should know.
And here's what we're trying to do. And I'm sorry, we didn't do enough.
We're going to try to do a bit more and like, you know,
and see what happens. Right. But I, I feel like you, I owe it to people.
I don't, I don't want to play like a,
like a shell game or something like that, you know?
Yeah. A lot of respect for that. Awesome to get that clarity.
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omit uh jordan i know you've had your hand up for a long time i want to send it over to you
and see what you have to say yeah um i have like some thoughts and then a question. So I am deeply on the side of this conversation of it's your job to keep the company existing, right?
And this is a brand new industry that we are all building in.
And everyone participating knows that an assumption might not prove out true over multiple years.
I've been super skeptical of fully on-chain gaming from the start.
My Web3 game, which I still have not fully, you know, have not delivered, right?
And I dealt with this kind of thing with my own community on pivots.
We literally spun an entire new company out of it and speedrun that this year.
And that thing's going to TGE before Eureka.
So, like, I, you know, I get these kinds of balances.
That can all be true, right? And so you have to make the smartest decision to keep it alive based on things.
And the idea of limping it along when you know it's not working now with the knowledge
that you now have is ridiculous.
People bought these assets and you very happily allowed them. And okay, just to
caveat this too, this is based on my observation, anecdotal evidence, people in your community that
hold your assets that I'm close with and I've spoken with. I've actually, you know, I've had
some fun playing Pirate Nation, but I don't own any of it. These assets were basically positioned
as a piece of the action, right?
Pirate, you know, your company is going to be successful.
People who believe in you are going to own these assets, and they are going to, in some
way, own a piece of that future, right?
So you've drastically changed what you see your plan to be to achieve that prosperous
future.
You, I assume, have a new plan, right? And that new plan
is formed with all of your experience and everything you've learned, and you're forging
it forwards. And that all makes a ton of sense. It seems to me like there was a much better option
here. And yes, it would extend expectation debt, right? But at the same time,
these are expectations that you participated in setting.
And you do, and there is an obligation
to stand by that kind of stuff to people,
even if it's not legal ownership,
even if you don't have to.
And also, as other people have been saying here,
you have something of incredible value with this community.
Even if you think your future is in Web2, dude, like, you know, the Web3 audience will go out there and shill it for you.
Fully Web2, you know, like it's so it is really valuable to not lose it.
And so I just don't really understand why the choice wasn't to say, hey, we've got a brand new plan.
wasn't to say, hey, we've got a grand new plan. It's completely different. We are making
It's completely different.
arrangements and strategies to ensure that however these founders pirates change,
they will continue to, you know, they will hold a similar point position in the new ecosystem.
The floor would dump, people would FUD, there'd be a lot of stuff, but your believers would hold
them and believe
certainly it's better than $50 now or whatever the price is.
Because as you're saying, if you're just raw exchanging them for token, the math has to
math, right?
But there must be a way to attach these to the speculative future value of this future
you're building that I think, from my outside perspective, would have been a stronger path forward.
So I'd love to know why that isn't what you did here.
I mean, I think, keep in mind, this question is being asked with the benefit of hindsight, right?
So basically, where I think we landed on this was that it's, you know, for us, what we found was that we are actually like, I think back to the amount of time we spend essentially building custom features or
integrations or doing game design in order to actually enable the founders pirates to keep
that pole position like we're a startup you know we have limited runway we have to maintain focus
right and that means cutting anything that is distracting our focus and i'm not saying that
engaging with the community is that but servicing the community servicing the asset is that right
so i'll give you an example like empire nation we build a feature and then we build it a second
time because we're like okay we need to go figure out like how do founder pirates get like a benefit
here? We're doing PVP. Okay. Like, you know, we need to make it so that founders pirates don't
have to pay entry fees to PVP. Okay. That's a whole nother set of work. So we're losing like
double digit percentages of time to essentially servicing these things as the premier asset of the ecosystem. Right.
And so for us, that compounds over and over and over, over years.
And we're like, shit, we built all this stuff when we could have built a brand new game
in the same amount of time.
And so, you know, part of it is actually just like a straight business decision of like,
we cannot spend any more time on these things.
And I'm sorry. like straight business decision of like we cannot spend any more time on these things and oh sorry yeah so no no please please finish and i just have like a short follow-up on that yeah yeah i think i know you're gonna go with this it's just is there still a way to like bring
people spiritually along you know and so you know our idea was let's just bring it all down to a single thing which is the the pirate token
let's let's reduce everything down to that you know the team you know is obviously that's part
of our compensation we like deeply care about finding a way to make that work um and and find
a way to just make sure that people have that available to them the other uh the other thing
we had available to us was popPoints, which is a little
bit kind of nebulous. We're trying to figure that out. I think that's probably going to end up being
the way that we end up going forward with this specific thing. And so I'm not ready to announce
what we're doing yet here with founders and that, but we are thinking about that as being the way
to kind of keep that going forward without there being two classes of individuals within the community.
That was the other thing that we were just running into
is we were servicing two customer cohorts all the time.
And so the goal was to kind of unify to one
and then have that one thing be the thing that everyone was kind of behind.
Now, obviously, we loved it.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be up here having this conversation.
But that was
the intention that was the thinking behind it um i hear and agree with like most of exactly what
you were just saying um especially the like you know the amount of time it takes to double build
mechanics every time right when you guys should just be building some good games that make money
um it seems to me that still, you know, like, look,
this is like, this is a speculative nonsense industry, right? And you could even say, hey,
okay, everyone who has founder of Pirates, here's what we're doing. We're going to burn these things.
They're not even going to be Web3 anymore, but you're going to have an account and it's a Web2
thing. And what we're going to do with this is like, okay, so we're going to be building this
infrastructure now, right? And we want a whole bunch of people using it. And these are going
to become an asset that emits that. And it's, you know, becomes like a quasi node. And so basically
that, you know, as our infrastructure succeeds, you're going to own a piece of that, just
something. And then, and then you go build your good games, you go do this, you don't do shit
on that. You don't do work for six months on it, right?
You don't actually, and you keep telling people,
hey, like we know, you know, this is going to take a while.
We need to prioritize the company.
We are coming back to you guys.
They're going to hold asset.
You know, they're going to hold,
they will resume having value at some point.
Just like something instead of the pure conversion
into such a low, you low, hard monetary value.
Jordan, I just want to step in.
I just want to just say, look, he has addressed it.
And I've followed all the Discord chats.
Not the chats particularly, but the things he really has.
And there's a little hindsight here.
And no one can be blamed in Web3 for riding the momentum that the community brings, especially when there's money on the table.
And there is the tit for tat, right?
You ride the momentum.
I don't fully agree with you on that.
No, but whether you agree with me or not, that's the reality.
Every single Web3 game, including myself, has when there's momentum in the market with the community.
momentum in the market with the community and you just let it go because it assists with the
optics for fundraising and and just in general for the positioning and so yeah i mean in hindsight
yeah and and he's already admitted to a lot of things i just don't want to be unfair to beat on
him uh because i'm not trying to be i know i know but like in a retro i don't i don't i don't i don't i don't feel i don't feel being up
i think i don't and i don't i don't really really i'm also i'm happy you disagreeing with singin all
the time really quickly i just want to add something here when parallel first started
taking off and people were buying prime keys for it in an order in order sums of eath i used to go
into our discord and say hey guys like this seems, and I was like not Web3 at all.
I was like, this seems like a lot of money.
Maybe you guys should just like be responsible.
And you know what happened?
They laughed at me.
They all laughed at me and were like,
you're a fucking loser.
So I don't know if there's anything you can do
to like level set up.
Look, maybe I'm like the fucking joke here then
because you all remember last summer
when everyone was farming for golden nuggets
on the timeline, right?
And people were asking me,
dude, make these things the NFTs
that you keep saying that they're gonna be, right?
Like do it, like look at all this demand.
People, 30,000 people collected like 70,000
of these things all over Twitter.
You couldn't escape it.
And I specifically said,
if we let these things mint as NFTs right now't escape it. And I specifically said, if we let
these things mint as NFTs right now, people are going to be selling individual gold nuggets for
10, 20, 50, $60. Easy, right? Because we're auctioning ships off for these. A single nugget
can be the make or break to the next ship. And I said, we have not designed a single thing about
this ecosystem for an individual gold nugget to be worth anything like that. These things are, you know, our eventual currency for the economy.
These things should start at fractions of a cent and grow from there again. So I like literally
didn't mint them because I knew how overvalued they were big. And I guess I should have just
taken the fucking money. Um, I like, yeah, let me just, let me here anyway let me redirect i think john jordan
you made a you made a great point and like and like honestly like i don't feel attacked guys
these are like all fair questions so like definitely like i appreciate them because
allows me to kind of like you know help clarify things right from our perspective so so thank you
for the for the questions um so you know i honestly, you're making a great point, which is just like, I think
we rushed it to some degree, right?
Like, you know, and, um, and, and, you know, we have, you know, we are like trying to figure
out like, okay, how do we preserve people's status and so on?
Um, and we, we had, we did snapshot, you know, at the, you know, at the time of the announcement,
um, we made a huge mistake, I think, that no one's brought up yet,
which is, you know, when the thing went live,
like, people lost access to the holders chat,
and, like, you know, it was switched over to tokens,
and that was just, like, that was just, honestly,
just an operational error on our part.
And, like, you know, now we're, like, going through,
we're, like, looking at who burned and who didn't,
so they still have access to community.
So we are trying to keep, keep note of that stuff.
Um, while at the same time, actually trying to reset expectations of there may not be
future, but you know, there aren't any future benefits planned for these things going forward,
but you know, the status is there and we, it is there.
Right.
And I, and like, I'm like trying to be very, very clear about that.
Um, because it's, it's kind of the whole point of this now that being said like perhaps there was a way to slow play it you know not do it as part of the shutdown you know have a discussion about
the game not working what should we do next and so on like you know that was just like our lack
of grace um my lack of grace yeah i do really respect you saying like you don't want to just lie to
people and kick the can down the road when you know something is going to happen right just to
like allow them to hold for longer like so i i really appreciate that yeah of course and and and
i mean you know people people say like hey like know, the way you handle this is a representation of your values towards the community.
Yes and no.
I think it's two things.
One is, you know, remember, guys, we're like, you know, the community is like maybe like 10% of my day.
Like, you know, we're managing people.
We're building products.
We're looking at cash flow.
We're like looking at, you know, everything else that's going on. And part of, you know, what I'm constantly, if any of my
employees can tell you this, is that like, I'm constantly pushing, you know, pushing us to move
faster and faster and faster and just like do things quicker. And I just made a wrong call here,
you know, which was, we should have actually just taken our time with this, engage people more and not just made it like a, Hey, we need to shut the service down. Like,
let's just, let's handle it all at once. You know, it was very much like a ruthless business
decision when, when it lacked and it lacked a lot of empathy. And I just, I, again, I'm going to
apologize to the community and the way we handle it. Um, because, you know, and, and honestly,
like the last, I'll say this too, the last like two days, I've actually been like connecting with
people a lot more than I have in like the last year in terms of just jumping on calls with folks, telling them what we're up to, just getting to know who they are, et cetera.
And like the one thing that's been incredible is just like the number of just so many, like the thoughtful, like kind problem solving people we have here.
A lot of folks are kind of similar to us.
They're dads.
They're, like, a little bit older.
It's not who I would have expected.
And I think that's really on me for not engaging more sooner.
And so, you know, we're trying to, you know, kind of, you know, rebuild, trust as much
as we can.
I know we've lost a bunch of folks and completely understandable there.
But, you know, I really do, like, value the people here and what they've brought.
And, you know, we're trying to find're trying to find ways to make it right.
I love that.
I mean, I have a little bit of a spicier comment from the audience that I do want to read.
I think there's a lot of sentiment that I've been seeing around.
And so I want to make sure we acknowledge it.
So, Andrew Campbell, appreciate you weighing in.
They say this space has been illuminating.
I think the big disconnect is that these guys were the premier.
Sorry, I want to make sure I say this right.
The disconnect is these dudes were the premier fully on-chain experience or fully on-chain gaming experience.
To many holders, including myself, there was an assumption that that came with the understanding of blockchain ethos. Hearing stuff
like, quote, we didn't understand how much emotional attachment people had to these assets
is, and then an emoji, I think it's like the shocking face is how I'll characterize this emoji.
He says, it's hard to swallow the shift from fully on-chain gaming is forever to just burn
these stupid NFTs from this failed experiment as genuine. It would be okay to say, quote,
we will no longer prioritize providing value to these assets.
Instead, we're shifting to a token-first ecosystem, unquote.
The NFTs can still exist and be part of the future as it changes and grows.
The founders here have been exposed as Web2 types
that are rapidly experimenting and playing the fundraising game.
Nothing blockchain first
about their attitude. Great salesmen, though. Ordinarily, that'd be fine. But knowingly,
but they knowingly built up a blockchain first community. So playing dumb now is asinine.
I see some, or say, knock with a hand. I'll go to, go to Amit. If there's anything you want to
address there, we can also continue to work through the panel, but I wanted to give that to you. Yeah.
Look, I think it's interesting.
If we had just done the claim and not claim and burn,
I think that comment would be completely different, right?
It was just, it was the burn.
That was the issue.
And we actually, we asked for community.
To be honest, I'm not blaming our community,
but we like, we did ask around and we made a bad call.
It's a, some way, one way to think about this and the way we think about just
assets in general on chain is that,
you know,
it's like,
it's basically gamification,
right?
It is a,
you're building a game system,
right?
And we just,
we tuned it the wrong way.
Honestly,
the way that we handled this is we,
we tuned it like a game and not like,
you know,
a set of people that were, you know, like their identities.
And that was the primary disconnect that we had here.
Because if we actually treated this as, oh, these things, these NFTs are people's like identities.
They're their like face into the community.
If they're the representation of their membership into this club, then you end up realizing that Burning is actually really disrespectful.
And so we got that wrong.
We got it wrong.
And so, yeah, I think, you know,
and that was like one of the first things I raised too,
it was just like, fuck,
like if I could change a single thing about the last week,
I would just change that, just make it a claim.
Maybe people wouldn't be happy with the airdrop.
But, you know, at least, you know, we can, you know, keep kind of keep that narrative going.
So the Web 2 doing Web 3, yeah, I'm going to own that 100%, you know.
Like, of course, you know, we're in Web 3, we're in, you know, but I'm not like, I'm not, but I'm not a degen per se.
I love the actual true decentralization of it.
And that's what got me into this business to begin with.
And if you actually look at our history, not just this, but the last two years, there's
this but like kind of last two years there's a bunch of folks you know i'm sure on discord right
a bunch of folks, I'm sure on Discord right now, just railing me.
now just like railing me but like um you know the if you look at our history we frequently get these
calls we've frequently got these calls wrong right and we've had to do like make goods or you know
make ups or do this and we like misread the incentive design or the intention etc and um
and so you know yeah i'm not going to say i'm a web three native guy. I'm not going to own that. And, um, and I think that that has shown in my actions, not excusing them, but like
definitely a, you know, an acknowledgement that that is a weakness of mine is understanding that
mentality. I really appreciate the accountability. Uh, Jerry, I thought you'd throw a thumbs down
at one point. What was that about brother? Yeah. Uh, yeah uh yeah i i do want to do uh what everybody else has done and i want
to preface this with saying omit on this panel i think i've probably spoken highly of the pirate
nation team more than anybody but i'm going to be kind of an asshole here i think you know but i do
want you to know that for like a year and a half i did did sing your praises. But, you know, I think you're,
I think looking at, you know,
what's going on with you guys
and boiling that down to, you know,
people are upset about the asset being burned.
Like, I just think you're dead wrong there.
I think people are upset at, you know,
the kind of perception that you guys are just going like,
throwing your hands up and going like, ah, like, fuck it, guys, we don't know.
So we're just going to sunset it all and move on from it, from like an NFT perspective.
The game I get, Riss, and all these guys, you know, wasted some valuable time talking
about how businesses fail and how games fail and how they need to make money.
Like, we know.
But I think boiling down to people are upset about the identity that they've found with you guys and that going away isn't really the issue here. I think the issue here is that
you guys didn't make an attempt at going, we are building these other games. We are building these
other products. Now, how do we bring those people along to that because you know i think at that point you guys set the dollar price of 50
per nft or whatever but the market would have priced the nfts at whatever they wanted to whatever
markets do if you guys said like we don't really know you know but we'll we're committed to trying
to figure it out you know i mean i think we're just yeah i think some we're committed to trying to figure it out. You know, I mean, I think we're just, yeah, I think we're living in, like, incongruent realities right now.
I think, like, that's not at all the issue.
I think the issue is that, you know, you guys are looked at as one of the premier teams here.
And you guys never asked for that, to be fair.
We put that on you as an industry and as an ecosystem here.
And I do think you guys deserve that title.
But, you know, when those same smart people that we all look at and, you know, we're as an ecosystem here. And I do think you guys deserve that title.
But when those same smart people that we all look at, and we're all web two first, really,
this industry isn't that old, right? So we can give you grace for that. But I think when you guys, it just seems to me like you guys didn't at all listen to people. You're on here with a panel
with 10 people who've been operating
in this industry at a pretty high level, and we've all made mistakes and we've all done things right.
But it's very clear to me that, like, you didn't call people like Sam or Nock or Lems or me who
have, like, been on community side of things and have dealt with issues like this, you know, or
whoever's doing that, you know, for you on your behalf, because, like, dude, you've got a business
front, right? I don't think people expect you to be in discord all day. But you also didn't listen to the person
whose job it is, or they gave you bad information, you know. And so, you know, I think you're speaking
to things that people, you know, it's not the root of the issue. I think people are just,
you know, upset that you guys aren't really trying to find a way to make it work. And that's the
perception that you guys are fighting,
whether you try to or not, you know, only, you know, but you know,
that's what the perception is.
Yeah, no, I appreciate, I appreciate the perspective.
And so I will, you know, I will say that the,
if you talk to like 20 different people, you're going to,
in our community or holders, you're going gonna get 20 different suggestions of what we, what we would do or what we should
have done. And, um, in fact, like, even as you know, we've last week, I'm like, Hey, like,
what would you have changed about this? What we've done, I've actually asked a bunch of our holders,
like directly big ones and small ones and, so on and you know we get like a
bunch of different ideas on what to do and so when i say like you know people are upset about the pfb
not everyone is right like not everyone is but there is a set of people who are right they actually
are they're like actually genuinely upset about it and um and so like for so one for one person
like that's the thing that's like a little bit hard to kind of just, you know, untangle here is that people are upset for different reasons.
And they think we messed up for different reasons. Right.
And so what I'm trying to do a little bit here is to actually before we, you know, decide how to move forward is just get an idea of like, what are all the different kind of constituents and cohorts of people?
And from there, figure out like okay how
can we do and make good you know and and the reality is is like you know and the here's a
great example right like um you know the the new game thing right like if i went there's a set of
people where if i'm like hey like sorry we're not going to support this nft anymore the you know the
pop token's not coming etc but we're going to give you credits in proof of play arcade. Like that would be like a triggering event for those
people. Right. Like, because all they're looking for is, you know, like how are you going to pump
my bags? That's it. Right. And then there's a set of people who are like, oh, like I get that you
sunset the NFTs. It makes sense, but you didn't give me any credits in the arcade like what the hell like i thought at minimum we would get access to the new stuff right and so it's the
reality is is that like you know we're we're gonna do our best to kind of like um you know
like kind of address as many people's things as possible just knowing that we're we're not gonna
be able to address everyone's and that if we look back at our mistake, I think it's slightly more multifaceted than
we just burned, or we just didn't consider the community, or we just didn't keep it going
and kicked it down the road.
Like, these are all, we have four people up here, and they all are giving me different
advice, period, even on this panel, right?
And so the point is this, is like, I do want to say that, look, like, all I can say is
that, one, we're still around, we're still building,
we're incredibly bullish on what we're building. I'm happy to discuss it on another panel on why I think it's important, why other people should try to adopt the strategy we're about to adopt.
And what we've learned also, like I would love to disseminate our learnings from this entire thing.
And the two is that we're engaged with our community. We're showing up every day. We
want to actually bring people along. We do showing up every day. We want to actually bring
people along. We do value people's contributions. We value what people have, you know, done to bring
us, you know, to, to get us to this point. I used to create this expectation that we're the premier
team. Um, I really, that's, that's kind. Um, and, um, and yeah, just like, like we're actually
trying to like with, with positive intent, make this work, you know?
And so I, like, that's like how the note I would love just to make sure if you hear
nothing else in this or that.
Yeah.
And I, I do believe that.
Right.
And I've, I've seen you guys operate for a long enough time to say that, like, I'm confident
that, you know, you guys, that is, you know, the intent.
Um, you know, I think it's probably scary for people to hear, you know, you guys, that is, you know, the intent. You know, I think it's probably scary
for people to hear, you know, when they look at you guys and what you guys are doing, like,
in the future, to hear that, like, you know, ignorance is a defense. And, you know, I don't
know if that was just, like, you know, maybe a different way of saying, like, you're learning as
you go. And I can stomach that, because I think we all are. Right. But, you know, I think to some of the points you made, I do think like, you know, advice
you didn't ask for, but I'll tell it to you as somebody who's who does communications
work and does marketing works and does community work, which, you know, these other founders
will tell you, like, go fuck the community or whatever.
But like they helped get you here.
Right.
You do owe it to those people to do all those things publicly.
Right.
I think you should share your learnings very publicly. I think you should talk about the
mistakes you guys made very publicly. And yeah, you guys are going to eat shit while you do it.
But I do think you guys owe it to, you know, your community and, you know, the ecosystem overall,
you know, a bit. And so that's like my one challenge to you is like, hear what the people
are saying. And, you know, they are going to tell you 20 different things. and you have to kind of discern like what what are they actually upset about and I think
that's why panels like this are great because we we talk about that stuff it's not just like oh I
wanted fucking abstract credits or whatever like we kind of get through the bullshit here but um
you know I yeah I think uh you know all that stuff should be happening and I think you need to like
keep an ear to what the community's saying and you know what the stuff should be happening and i think you need to like keep an
ear to what the community's saying and you know what the ecosystem is saying a bit more because
like it doesn't sound like that was a huge priority for you and you know i i just love like i think
you're a good dude and i've always enjoyed my interactions with you and i think like you will be
very successful in the future if you do those things because like they won't blindside you as
much because like i think like samurai could have told you like dude i wouldn't announce this this
way he's gonna go fucking terribly you know and and i think that might have just been something
you missed or a gap you know so i would just encourage you to keep doing that man because
i do believe in you and i think you know the the pivots you guys are making are overall good but
you know you you gotta you gotta let me just tell you right now i'm gonna take you up on that i have a we have an announcement that we've been drafting the last three days so i'll i'll
draw i'll drop it by you guys yeah for sure one thing i'd like to double click on there is that
if you're only because you like you've talked a lot about like listening to the holders and wanting
to get feedback from the holders kind of double click on what jerry had said there is like you
want insight from the holders but also people who've worked in other communities throughout
the Web3 ecosystem, because people have extensively different experiences and how participants
behave and have encountered different hurdles to overcome.
And I think you're going to get a much broader look at things by tapping people who've worked
in other game studios and other
communities in general, as opposed to a kind of a narrow focused look when you're looking at just
your holders. So you're also going to get a biased outlook versus getting a more unbiased look from
people who might be a little bit removed, but still deeply involved in Web3.
There's still a few hands. We also have Spike joining us on the panel. I want to read a quick
comment from Icy. He says, I really appreciate hearing from Amit on this. I applaud him and
Pirate Nation for facing this head on and acknowledging the missteps. The social contract
in Web3 is really important, and that is what felt disregarded with the winds down. But then
coming on the show and being transparent goes a long way in restoring it. Kevin Lambert, haven't had a chance to hear from you.
I know not because that has had his hand up for a while.
I also want to give Spike a chance.
But we only have 15 minutes left in the show, guys.
So let's go break.
But Kevin, over to you.
Yeah, I've just been quietly listening to all the responses here.
Context, I don't have bags.
I think I had a Founders Pirate, but I played the game. The game was fun. But I don't have bags. I think I had a founder's pirate, but I played the game. Game
was fun, but I don't have huge bags or anything. So just to set the stage, I agree with a lot of
the points that have been made. I'm in the same boat here too. We're all learning. We're all
building. We're going to make mistakes. Some of those mistakes are going to be costly. It's better
if you can make those mistakes before there's like, you know, bags and bag
bias and financial stuff, but that you can't always have that.
And when we ship, there's definitely going to be mistakes similar to this.
I think the one constant here, and it's something that Jerry said, is like the best thing you
can do, in my opinion, as a founder is just work to build the trust of the community.
And that's not always by making the best decisions
that make the numbers go up and go to the right. It's not, and you can't please everybody,
but it is by, you know, some combination of transparency and the perception of like, hey,
even when these guys mess up, they're going to be open about it. They're going to post-mortem it.
They're going to, you know, consult us. We're going to feel heard and listened to and all of that. And you can do
that regardless of what decisions you make, right? Yeah. You don't even have to understand what they
want. You're like, well, we still got to figure it out because they're telling us 20 different
things and we have to sort through all that. But you can like open the forum and let them know that you're present. Like we're trying to do that now.
It's like in chipping, you know, small versions of our game with high amounts of polish just to try to build that trust.
Like we're making all kinds of crazy decisions.
Some of them suck.
Some of them are good.
But by doing that, we're like we're prioritizing trust in our community, I would say.
And so far, that's worked out pretty well.
And when we do inevitably F up, which we will, we're hoping that that emotional withdrawal
will be met with a lot of deposits that we've made in the past.
So TLDR, I think the best you can do is continue what you're doing and just be open with the
community and attempt to build trust in the best way you can, because they are your first customers and they will be your best evangelists going forward.
Spike, I want to tag you in, brother. What's your take on what you've been hearing so far
from the audience? All right, I'm going to speed run and be mindful of time. So I'm coming in,
I'm going to give outside perspectives, not going to reiterate anything that's happened, but to give an alternate decision or choice.
So based on where POP is going, it's very apparent they're not going to be able to provide equity, TLV value to this NFT.
I've seen this happen time and time again.
I'm a backholder, not for any NFT pirates at Reserv right now.
I've had them before.
But for Dimensionals, Sparkball, and a handful of others.
So what's unique and interesting is that this doesn't result as a failure of the community or the project.
But, you know, trying to unset, you know, expectations that have been, been you know bearing on the company as mentioned
every time they had to build something they had to keep two people in mind so given that i i actually
want to get the idea if there is people within the community that see the power of this community
and the value it brings consider selling it even if it's you know yeah let me let me hop in here um
even if it's, you know,
personal not a pirate.
Let me hop in here.
We've actually put it out there that if someone
reputable comes to us with a real proposal,
we'd consider it.
So, let me just
put it right out there.
Let me just give my personal perspective
for a second, not me as CEO of Proof of Play,
just me as Amit having worked on this
for four years.
Right?
I actually deeply
love this collection. I was in
there figuring out
the art with our art director, figuring out what the
traits were when we converted it
from vector to
voxels.
How do we just nail the style?
We had a bunch of different versions that we could have done.
I actually have one of these on my, on my wall in my house, you know, like, as, like, a thing.
Like, this is, like, I actually feel deep emotional connection.
I'm not burning any of my pirates.
I've never sold any of them.
Like, and, I mean, look, my PFP is this, right?
Like, so, like, for me, like, I want to see this thing succeed.
You know, I want to see it succeed.
I'm just split between like being able to, you know, be able to service it versus not
as like the CEO of this company that has to like, you know, manage time and runway and
resource and all that stuff.
But as personally, I would love nothing more than for them for this to succeed.
Right.
So, you know, if you're out there and you've taken over NFT products before, you have a track record, you have a real proposal, you know if you're out there you've taken over nft products before you
you have a track record you have a real proposal you know people can vouch for you like just get
in touch like we'd love to find a way to to kind of make this make this happen if not you know we'll
just keep we'll keep it rolling uh you know we're not gonna we're not doing anything without and we
have a thousand treasury nfts that we've never sold as the company, you know.
And so, like, you know, get in touch.
But, you know, of course, we would love to see that.
I think, like, that would be an incredible outcome from my perspective.
Awesome. Again, my full time. Appreciate you hopping in and giving transparent words.
As a fellow community builder, I definitely see the struggles of everything you guys have
went through. So, nice shout out to you guys. Appreciate that, Spike, a lot, man. Let's go over
to Naka. You've had the hand up for quite a while. What do you want to chime in with?
Yeah, I'll sit in the villain chair to end this for a second. I don't know who made the comment
that you read out earlier, so I'm not going to call them out by name. But
this goes for every founder on the panel.
There are two types of voices that you're going to hear in crypto. The first is when you make a
mistake, you're going to hear the voices of true community members who are upset about the way
that things were communicated. They feel like trust was broken. They believe in the project,
but they're upset about decisions that were being made because they felt like they weren't consulted.
upset about decisions that were being made because they felt like they weren't consulted.
Those voices are worth being heard. And to Amit's, you know, gratitude here, he sounds like
that's something that's been recognized and is in the process of being heard.
Should have come a little bit sooner, but it's being heard now.
The second voice are the types of people who post things like on-chain gaming means it's
going to be forever. And when you shut down the game the asset dies and those types of people are the types of people who fundamentally do not understand what it is
that they are purchasing they're the same types of people who think they're buying equity in the
company they're the same types of people who believe that an nft that is on chain is there
forever unless you burn it what you're buying is a token with a link to a pointer of an image that only exists as long as the company is paying the fees to make sure that that image is hosted there.
So in the case that a company shuts down, which happens more often than not when they go down the path that is unsustainable or unfinancially viable, that image is gone as well.
as well. So this idea that people are upset because on-chain gaming is supposed to be forever
or because they owned a stake in what was going to happen with Proof of Play, my opinion, and I
don't care if that makes me a bad guy, is those people should just not be listened to. That type
of comment to me is what's frustrating and it's what makes, I think, life really difficult for a
lot of people who are founders within the space, because you are fundamentally at odds with half of the people who are participating within your
ecosystem. You should listen to the things that people like Jerry and Jordan and Sinjin brought
up. I don't agree with all of them, but I think that they're based in reality. I think the idea
that you own or owe people some sort of financial upside in perpetuity because they own an NFT is not only
unfeasible, but it's entirely irrational. And I think too many teams have gone down the path of
trying to make that come true and have died. You said something, Amit, that I think is really
important for people to hear. You're here. You're still building. You're still around. You're excited
about the things that you're building. Plenty of people who have gone down the path of trying to make an asset financially rewarding for people
who simply own it have died so continue to be here continue to do what's right for the business
continue to build things learn from the mistake of you know maybe you didn't communicate things
right here and as somebody who had founders pirates who who's lost a lot of money on the decision
i'm upset about the communication i'm not upset about the financial downside and i think you can
safely ignore anybody who is because fundamentally they do not understand what they were purchasing
and that's not your fault on that note i mean uh i'll leave it to you to respond to knock and also
give you the floor to talk about the the future of uh proof of play and anything else that you wanted to make sure was uh understood
by the audience yeah so um yeah i really appreciate that thanks thanks knock for that um i think uh
let me just respond to you really quickly um the forever games thing is very interesting um
so you said something along the lines of someone has to continue to pay in order to keep the NFT image alive, right?
IPFS solves that a little bit, but you still have to pay to pin.
Okay, so one way to think about on-chain gaming and the idea of Forever Games is technically someone else could have spun up an Apex node or a Boss node, right?
And the game would have continued
to operate. So in that way, it's not actually truly centralized to like us operating one server.
But if like someone was willing to go and pay the conduit bill, you know, which was,
you know, 60 grand a month per chain. So just say 120 grand a month for the chains, right?
And people were, I think the last one, someone was asking about how much it costs to run these things, right? So I can put numbers on it, right?
And so, and then you consider that, you know, each chain holds about 70,000 DAU before you hit a
limit. The unit economics just do not work, right? And we didn't know what the limit was until we
hit it. And so, so ultimately, you know, someone's, someone didn't bring that up when we announced
the shutdown. They're like, wait, I thought this was a forever game. I'm like, it is.
But still, someone's got to pay to operate the chain.
With a public chain like Ethereum or Base or whatever, everyone's paying gas for their own operations.
For an L3, an app-specific chain like the one we were running, basically we were sponsoring the gas, but that means that we were paying for the infrastructure on the chain itself.
Now there is a world,
and this is like maybe an optimistic note,
is I don't see a reason why on-chain games
cannot work in the future.
I think they can if you find the right kind of like
LTV to user ratio, right?
There's nothing fundamentally broken about it, right?
Other than it's just a different business
model than like you know normal game server operation and i would love nothing more than
come back on and just like really deep dive on this stuff um because i think there's like some
there's like a lot that we can like reveal we're going to open source our unity client by the way
so like like we want to give back as much as we can to like the broader crypto community like so folks like you know we'll
have like a you know what i think is a pretty professional like unity open source project that
people can learn from and so on um you know i'm happy to share some of the tech we built because
i think it's like substantial it took a lot to actually build a full stack um to actually operate
these things um but we'd i'd love to share the stuff because it's truly the thing that brings me passion.
So in terms of the business,
what we're focused on is actually going...
So I think a bunch of people here
have worked on mobile games before,
and you kind of have an idea of how it works, right?
Like you go to the app store,
you essentially build a game,
you figure out your D1, D7, D30 retention, you figure out LTVs,
then you go and start to buy ads. And you essentially go and see like, okay, I'm making
$2 off a user and I spent $1 for it. So I'm getting $1 profit on my ad spend. And there's
some time that that occurs, right? That has been the case for mobile games for years,
right? At this point, and this mobile games for years, right, at this
point. And this point is pretty stagnant. So fundamentally, what we found, and this is a
thesis I had in 2017. So this is my second crypto company. The first one was an NFT marketplace.
And so I've kind of been around for a minute. And the one thing I truly, truly, truly believe and
have like unwavering conviction in is that the power of secondary
markets to generate significant revenue for the original creators of something, right? And so we
saw that, right? I think we did something like $20 million of volume in the pirate nation secondary
market. And that includes like all assets, right? And so like you end up seeing, and just to be
clear before anyone starts to be like, what happened to the money? Like we like didn't have royalties for a while
because of various marketplaces, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Don't, don't like come trying
to like question us on what happened there. But like, the point is this, is that like, you know,
there, I actually believe that there is a power in, in real money marketplaces. And there's two
major things that happened recently
that actually make this a much more viable prospect,
not just for crypto game, like Web3 games,
but for all applications.
The first is that stablecoin legislation
in the United States has now made it possible
to like easily go and launch stablecoins
and earn yield on them.
The second is that Epic's lawsuit against Apple and Google
has opened up
the ability to do third-party payments within mobile apps. So basically what we've built,
and we actually have this in Pirate Nation, many people haven't seen it, is we built an entirely
frictionless one-click P2P marketplace. And so the only thing that's on chain is the payment settling bit of it.
Everything else is centralized. So what we have is something that someone can go and drop
essentially a fully native, you know, in their UI marketplace where, uh, people can buy and sell
items to each other, even if their game has nothing to do with crypto. The only thing we do is automatically
invisibly provision buyer and seller accounts at the time of purchase. We have built-in on-ramps,
built-in off-ramps. So a person just buying with Apple Pay or Google Pay or credit card or whatever
is instantly on-ramped to a stablecoin. That goes into our payment splitting contract. It gets paid to
the seller. And now all of a sudden we've taken a user that has nothing to do with crypto and we
essentially onboard them in a single click, both the buyer and the seller. And so this is, I think,
the easiest way to on-ramp like millions and millions of people into Web3 and basically bring
the one feature that I think really works to the masses, right?
And so the one other thing I'll mention here is that I started with UA because in a world where
everyone has kind of fixed LTVs for their games, if you come and you essentially increase LTV by
like, you know, 20%, you're breaking the user acquisition marketplace for
mobile games, right? So essentially what you've done is you've brought a gun to a knife fight
for these developers. So once one person adopts it, everyone else will have to. And this was
always the thesis that we had. We're like, well, if Web3 Games works, every company will have to
become a Web3 game developer because they just can't compete on UA.
And so, you know, the original thesis of, oh, like onboard the Web3 users was the way to do it.
But now we're just like, you know what?
Like, let's just take the increased LTV features to existing games.
So we're building a first game.
Like, you know, it's in TestMarkets.
We're going to launch the marketplace there.
We're going to prove out the thesis.
We'll have our own case study.
And if it works, like we're just going to go and sell this to everyone
else, right? And basically bringing DeFi to every application as seamlessly as possible.
So then just on that, one more bit on that, I just realized I'm giving the pitch really fast,
but there's two things that developers get out of this. One is they get secondary market revenue
from this. Two is they earn yield on the stable coins that are essentially deposited and held
within the player's in-game wallets.
Again, players just see dollars,
but the developer is earning whatever 4%
or whatever the stable coin yield is.
So now you have two additional revenue streams
that are essentially helping you boost LTV.
So we say, we've been calling it like a DeFi mullet.
Games in the front, DeFi in the back.
So yeah, that's what we're doing.
First game's coming out
um and yeah uh that's it thanks for having me yeah so cool to hear the thesis there on it and
uh we actually had a topic me and lems on the docket today before we we knew that you were
going to come on of like is on-chain gaming dead or fully on-chain gaming dead just citing uh you know some of what
gigaverse has done and on-chain heroes moving some assets off chain and stuff and it's a really
interesting topic i would love to maybe revisit it uh next week if you're around or maybe the
following week and you can sort of propose this thesis maybe we can chop it up and and see if
um other people agree or disagree at length but if you'd be willing to join us,
I think it'd be really interesting to have your experience.
Dude, I'd love, I'd honestly love nothing more. It's just like, like, hopefully you saw the
difference in passion in my voice. You know, like, I mean, this is stuff I really, I really love. And,
and I really think we're on to something here. Like, I, you know, I just, like, I see no reason
why this wouldn't work right and um
and i'm happy to run people through and give demos whatever like that's and like you know i i want to
like i really really think there's there's something here and if i can get more people
to see it i think that's that's a win especially at a time uh where a lot of people are feeling like
a little bit bearish on web3 gaming uh i think a lot of people are feeling like a little bit bearish on web3 gaming
i think a lot of people are still optimistic about the tech but maybe the industry in its
current state needs to evolve in order to survive but i would love to dig into that and get people
excited about it again so i'll take you up on that and would also love a demo man and i you know we
always do this thing at the end of the episode we we assign an mvp and give that person some face
time i think it's clear that the mvp of today's episode is a myth for, we always do this thing at the end of the episode. We assign an MVP and give that person some face time.
I think it's clear that the MVP of today's episode is Amit for being willing to do this.
Not easy at all, regardless of how nice the panel is or if we're friends in the background or whatever.
Like to come out in public to face tough questions from the audience and from the fellow panelists is extremely difficult.
audience and from the fellow panelists is extremely difficult.
So tons of respect for that.
I know we acknowledge a lot of the shortcomings that you've had, but want to also make sure
that we acknowledge whenever you do things the right way.
And we're super appreciative that you would do it on this show, brother.
With that being said, let me give a shout out to our sponsors one last time.
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Thanks again to our sponsors and again to this amazing panel. I really, I can't tell you as a
show host, as a curator of content and people, to know that I can bring all these people together
and have like a really constructive, sometimes heated discussion. I see quoted a quote tweeted something where I told Koji to go fuck himself,
but then was like, Oh, but we're great friends. It's fine. You know,
it's five minutes later. It's totally cool.
Being able to have that environment week over week,
and it never seems to change is one of the great joys of my life.
And I appreciate everybody that contributes to that on the audience and the
panel on the guests like amid today.
So we can't wait to see you back. Same time, same place.
4 p.m. Eastern next Wednesday. We'll see you guys there.
Jerry also got zero baseball references in today. Zero.
I just want to acknowledge what an achievement that is.
Hit a home run, man. Good job.
