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Gamified #49 | Remixing Games | the Presale Meta
Recorded: Jan. 10, 2024 Duration: 2:03:23Space Recording
Full Transcription
This is like the third or fourth time now that it's been rubbed.
Like, dude, the SEC Twitter and then the CBOE, dude, the CBOE accidentally rugging, and then
now the actual SEC website, 404 error?
Like, I can't believe it.
It's truly mind-blowing to me how many times this has been rubbed.
But yes, almost certainly is legit this time.
So, you know, it's based on what happened yesterday, that obviously that this was kind of pre-prepped and, you know, if they've changed their mind at the last second, you know, it could be showing up in the Bloomberg terminals because it was obviously pre-programmed and prepped up.
But maybe they haven't gotten the approval to actually go for it.
I'll be fucking nuts, man.
Well, I know a securities lawyer, and he was like, I think that they just hit the button too early on the site this time because they would put it out after the markets close at four.
And so when it dropped at 350, I was like, hmm, why is it dropping at 350?
You know what I mean?
That seems like it's not correct.
And so he's like, yeah, probably again, somebody, again, somebody hit the button too early.
Three times, right?
Maybe they're using multiple organizations.
Like, how does this happen?
It's, somebody's got to get fired over this shit, dude.
I mean, it's crazy.
I bet you it's, they've used Elon for the Twitter infrastructure, and that's what's happened.
Oh, slam.
Slam.
Sinjin, don't be talking shit.
We're going to get rugged.
Like, don't be talking bad about Master Elon.
I think it was.
It's inevitable.
We can always blame BitBoy.
Dude, I'm already so glad that Fitch is here and not Koji.
I think Koji's dead to us, right, guys?
Everybody agree?
Koji's dead to us?
Yeah, fuck him, man.
Hate that guy.
He's on, like, an island or something, man.
I'm like, he's probably rug pulled.
He's probably dumped everything.
It's, you know, he's enacted the final plan.
Order 66 has been executed, you know?
I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to see him tomorrow night, so I'm going to withhold my opinion
on whether or not Koji's dead to us until after the event.
Wow.
Yeah, if he buys you dinner, then, well, maybe he's okay, but we'll see about that.
Everybody heard it.
Knock is a traitor, also dead to us, along with Koji.
And on that note, he ran the on-ramps of 11 and sore esports, but beyond the battlefield,
he's masterfully managed Magic Eden, catapulting it to the Cosmos as one of the world's leading
NFT platforms.
A diehard RuneScape Raider, his game in gusto is evident with an obsessive 16,000 Money
Snake defeats.
I got to update this part of the intro.
This is probably at 17,000 now, but it's not all pixelated prowess.
He electrifies every episode of Game of Five, sharing his Sage Insights weekly.
Gather round for the relentless RuneScape Raider, the emperor of esports, the maven of Magic
Eden.
It's Knock, who's now dead to us.
I wish I was kidding when I say I'm currently at the Money Snake, so you'll hear some clicking
in the background, but yeah, we're here.
That's absurd, dude.
There exists a whispered legend of a man who didn't just play the game, he consumed it.
Feasting upon the very souls of his adversaries, it's said that with every triumphant hand
in the world of poker, a part of his opponent's spirit was siphoned, making him grow in power
and in prowess.
This spectral skill set didn't stop at the poker table.
His business alliances with titans like Alibaba only added to his fabled force.
To him, convention was but a word, transformation, his true calling.
So brace yourselves for the soul eater, the haunting hymn of the night, representing my
angry Yakuza girlfriend.
It's the titan of taboo.
It's Senjan.
Oh my god, Sam.
You're really going hot today.
And today is a hot day, so let's get it on.
Did Senjan just proposition me live on air?
I don't know.
We'll find out at GDC.
Why do you guys always take this stuff in the 2024 kind of era?
You guys take it all in the wrong way.
Up next, using AI to architect in Avatar's paradise, he's shaping surreal spaces and fantastic
realms that ricochet between reality and reverie.
Currently picking pioneers for an early alpha, he's handpicking heroes to embark on this exhilarating
expedition.
Brace yourselves as we introduce a juggernaut from the joyous jungles of Nintendo, who is
now juggling a journey into the jubilant world of today, the game.
Welcome back to the panel.
One of my favorites.
It's Michael O'Connor.
Thank you so much, brother.
Great to be here.
Looking forward to diving in with the illustrious guests as usual.
So yeah, cool.
Great panel today.
Amazing panel today.
So great to have you again, Michael.
Up next, battling blazes and bolstering businesses.
Our guests' brilliance bridges both bravery and boardroom bounties.
From the scorching scenes of smoky skyscrapers, showing a shrewd skill set suddenly seen,
it's not just fires he's fought, but fervent fields of financial forays he fortuitously fostered.
Having harnessed hefty heights in Web 2 with revenues rolling royally, he's now navigating
the nuanced nexus of Web 3, weaving wonders with every winning wager.
Of course, it's the mastermind with the Midas touch, representing Meiji.
It's Jerry.
Yo, what's up, Michael?
You're right.
It is a great panel.
You guys are welcome for that.
I love doing Gamified.
It's one of the only places where you get some of these bright and innovative and genius minds
who are also the most disappointing people.
I'm still pissed off about last week and the GameCube hate, you know, but I'm happy to be
here with you guys.
Dude, the GameCube hate was so good last week that I brought back another Nintendo topic.
I can't wait.
I hope it's equally as nostalgic and equally as competitive.
That's the hope.
We'll find out.
And of course, venturing from the vaulted realms of virtual empires to the connected corner
of words with friends, he has architected adventures that have anchored gaming greatness for decades.
Now, this virtuoso voyages through the vibrant vistas of Web 3, unveiling Wildcard, a game
garlanded as the most anticipated MOBA marvel in the metaverse.
Here, a AAA allure meets the alchemy of community-crafted chronicles, promising a paradigm where players'
prowess perpetuates the pulse of the platform.
Ladies and gentlemen, brace for a boundless journey beyond bits and bytes into a world woven
by the will of its warriors.
Welcome back to the panel, the omnipotent overload of omnichannel odysseys.
It's Paul Bettner.
Hello, my friends.
I am here to either fully complete Breaking Fresco's Heart or redeem myself, depending
on what Nintendo games we talk about today and what warped opinions and views he has on
those Nintendo games.
We're going to see what happens, but I'm excited to find out.
Thanks for having me back.
Something tells me both things will be at least partially true there.
I think so.
And of course, up next in the grand arena of game design, where the twin titans of technology
and tradition tussle, emerges a figure who fuses the two with finesse.
It's where the arcane art of card play meets the algorithmic acumen of artificial intelligence.
His crucible of creation crystallizes in parallel, a pantheon where pixelated prowess and peer-to-peer
trade paints a portrait of possibility of power and of unparalleled player participation.
Here, history is not written.
It is woven into the tapestry of transactions, triumph, and trade.
Welcome back to the panel, the crusader of the cards.
How did you say all that, man?
Like, it just keeps somehow getting crazier.
And I'm actually more and more impressed over time that you can actually say all those words
in such a short space.
Um, so yeah, uh, I'm, I'm excited to be here and, uh, we can talk about the, the frustrating
ETF and many other fun topics with, uh, many of my friends today.
Dude, so excited that, uh, Koji is dead to us.
Get ready to meet the shining star of the blockchain gaming world in the, in, an enthusiast beyond
the ordinary bounds with Xset as his anchor.
He's not just a participant, but a celebrated champion crowned the web three gaming content
creator of the year in 2022, he's also backed and broadcasted widely by the formidable Vayner
sports where his skills and strategies are second to none.
Welcome to the panel, the playfully gifted, the Xset sponsored, the Vayner sports sign
future pro of counter-strike two.
It's the buzzworthy, the buoyant, the beacon of blockchain.
It's Bryson.
Every time you do an intro, I'm just like, damn, how do you make these better and better?
I'm, I'm done asking the question, but feels good to be back on another episode of gamified
tons of dope people on the stage with me.
Tons of dope people in the audience, excited to share my thoughts, musings, whether you
love me or hate me, it's going to be fun.
That is the sweet spot, the fine line between love and hate.
Great to have you, man.
And thanks for the kind words.
Appreciate you introducing the digital currency conquistador who started his seller,
seller saga, slinging coins and super lucky slots and skyrocketed to superstardom in the
scintillating sphere of e-sports engine, staging sensational shows like Fortnite World Cup
and Twitch Rivals.
Since 2017, this blockchain behemoth has been blazing trails in Web3, weaving wealth with
wisdom, with SAFT and SAFT during the ICO Inferno.
On top of that, this man is consistently a top 30 parallel player in the world, putting
precision to the madness.
Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves for the shrapnel sure shot, the pinnacle of parallel,
representing shrapnel, it's Alex.
Thank you so much for that introduction, Sam.
Honestly, I feel like I finally made it in the space.
Being on my first Gamified here with all of you, Tony and Dub are out in Las Vegas for
a charity Valorant tournament.
We have Shrapnight, our Fortnite map that just got released.
So much exciting stuff going on in the shrapnel universe.
Excited to dive into it and be here with all the wonderful panelists on Gamified.
Yeah, speaking of people that are dead to us, Saigo, Dub, and Tony, all X'd out, all done.
We're going to be talking about the UAFN map shrapnight that you guys just launched.
I'm really excited for that topic.
It'll be coming up in just a little bit.
And of course, our next guest, charting a course from the corporate citadels of Meryl
Lynch to the dramatic domains of the Actors Studio.
Her journey is a tapestry of tenacity and talent.
A marketer with a magician's flair at Proctor & Gamble.
Crypto's siren song lured her in 2020, where she dove deep, never to resurface the same.
Alongside NeoTokyo's finest, she co-crafted NGMI Lab, a digital divining rod for the crypto
curious, distilling dense data into digestible directives.
As the CMO of Army of Fortune, her saga surges on, steering stories and strategies with the
same spirit she once spun on stage.
So ready your applause for the maven of marketing, the blockchain bard, representing Army of Fortune.
It's Coco.
Hello, hello.
Thank you so much.
Always get pumped listening to you and your wonderful, wonderful introductions.
I mean, it's no surprise that you were Games.GG's content creator of the year, by the way.
Congratulations again.
Yeah, really happy to be here with so many great minds.
And yeah, let's get to it.
Thanks so much, Coco.
Appreciate you coming back.
And of course, last but not least, in the live wire of our show, he's the lighthouse that layers
logic with luminous clarity.
He lends a listening ear and a lifting hand, lobbing in lucid insights that lighten the
load and lead the way.
Let's lob this loyal lieutenant, the low-key luminary, the supportive sage, weighing in
at 2.4 pounds.
It's the Little Lizard legend.
It's Lambs.
GM, GM, everyone.
This is another stack panel today.
Another banger.
I feel like I say that every week, but it feels like it's true every single week.
And screw the Bitcoin ETF.
When are we doing a gamified ETF?
Let's get the gamified ETF going.
Dude, let's go.
That would be so much fun to have an ETF that's like all the games that we love that are proven
to not be bullshit.
That would be amazing.
Put it on the list.
Maybe for gamified episode 52, we'll launch an ETF real quick.
And of course, got to give a shout out to the sponsors.
Brace yourselves for a breathtaking blast into a brand new episode of gamified.
But before we dive into this riveting rendezvous, let's bestow appreciation onto the behemoth
that serves our bedrock.
Avalanche, the official blockchain of gamified.
God, you love to hear it.
In the sprawling and frosty frontier of the blockchain cosmos, where obscurity often trumps
opportunities, Avalanche stands as the almighty architect of innovation.
This towering tech titan tames the treacherous tundra, transmuting the digital ledger into
a pristine crystal cut corridor of clarity.
Every week, there's an avalanche of advancements in their audacious ascent towards a unique and
unparalleled future.
And now, steel yourselves for a sensational spectacle as we turn the spotlight toward our other
sponsor, the titan of tactical triumphs, Shrapnel, the official game of gamified.
This first-person shooter phenom is a high-octane odyssey into the heart of Web 3 warfare.
With Shrapnel, you're not just firing bullets, you're forging a legendary legacy of lethal
skirmishes.
So get ready to sigma jump into a world where every click is the captivating countdown to
cataclysmic chaos.
Navigate to shrapnel.com and enlist with your elite call sign, poised to grenade your way to
glory in this breathtaking battlefront.
We'll also be giving away a Shrapnel operator today.
Some shrapnel extraction packs.
And then we got five bear NFTs from Bullyverse.
Huge shout out to them as well for helping us out.
We got a packed episode today.
So I'm going to ask my panelists, keep it a little bit short and sweet.
And if you want to double back, raise that hand again.
And if we have time on the topic, we'll keep it coming back before we move on.
We're jumping in today with buy or sell.
I want to talk about the pre-sale meta.
It seems like Overworld was the project that really kicked this off and every project since
has been following their lead.
Is this a meta that's here to stay?
Or are we just waiting for a project to pre-sell a bunch of NFTs and then completely shit the
bed?
And then we're going to see that pre-sale meta be completely dead until it's resurrected
by another hype project in the future.
So once again, my question for the panel, buy or sell this pre-sale meta?
I'm going to send it to the co-host with the co-most.
It's LAMS.
All right.
I also buy the pre-sale meta because I think there is a lot of pros to it.
But I will put the caveat that you can't just do it with any project.
There are some projects that you want to see how they go and see how trading happens on
secondary first.
But with something like Overworld, it felt like such a no-brainer.
We knew there was a lot of traction behind the project.
It's a high-quality project that we wanted to back and then didn't have to deal with a gas
war.
I actually had a whitelist spot as well and tried to mint exactly at the minute and failed.
So it was nice to have the pre-sale spot that just got airdropped to my wallet.
Didn't have to worry about gas war, dealing with all that shit at 3 a.m.
So I wish I only had pre-sale spots in that case.
So I'll say buy the pre-sale meta.
Just real quick, I finally had a second to breathe and check the comments.
And the first thing I see is Dove say, I paid 10 bucks for airplane Wi-Fi just to listen
to Sam say I'm dead to everyone.
Paul, I'll send it over to you next.
I totally agree with Lim's.
I think that pre-sale is a good fit for established products, or at least established creators,
established projects.
You know, I don't know that it makes so much sense for brand new, purely hype-driven things.
But especially as a project gains foothold, gains trust with the community, it's a great
way to connect with loyal folks, folks who have been attached to the project since early
You know, it becomes another tool, I think, from a creator's perspective, like the allow
lists.
It's just another tool for those kind of most loyal, most dedicated folks within the community
to be able to get in on something that they believe in and not necessarily have to jostle
in line with the much larger public sale crowd.
So I think it's a great tool, but I think it's a great fit for more established products,
projects that already have that trust.
Fresco, tagging you in.
Yeah, I totally agree with these guys.
I think free sales are really cool because, you know, people, you know, don't like gas
fees and all these things.
I think there's a way to preclude them.
I'm going to lose Paul for a second here.
I hope I win him back later in the episode.
I think the gas wars are kind of like crunch in gaming.
Everybody should have to go through it a little bit.
It builds a little bit of character.
It sucks overall, but, you know, it makes a man out of you or a woman, you know.
And but I think it's really cool because, you know, people can, you know, you don't have
to deal with gas wars.
And I think the part of me that's believes in people wants to say that if a project knows
their pre-sale is not doing super hot, that they might act altruistically and say like,
hey, you know, we shouldn't go through with this.
We can return people's funds a little bit more easily.
The part of me that knows that people suck thinks that they're just going to do whatever
they want to anyway to make money.
So I think I'm like cautiously buying the pre-sale meta.
I think it's good for a lot of reasons.
But I do think as bad actors kind of come in or people who just like are so strapped for
cash that need some sort of liquidity for their business.
I think it opens up doors that might really suck.
And, you know, so I'm cautiously buying.
All right.
I believe Bryson had the hand up next.
Yeah, I don't think this would be a surprise.
I'm kind of selling the pre-sale meta.
And the reason why I'm selling it is because I think that a more logical way to go about
it is when you're trying to get people in the early stages to believe in a project.
Like it might not be selling them something.
Maybe it's just doing like a pre-airdrop or pre-giveaway of your like earliest NFT or
something.
So they feel like they're a part of something without having to like throw a whole bunch
of money in it.
And then you maybe even get some holders that are like interested in that thing for more
than just like the dangling of the carrot that may come in the future.
I do say it is a cool way to like fundraise because I think that being able to crowdfund
can be more effective than VC very early on, especially if you're trying to like build
a project and be able to retain some high level of equity for later VC discussions.
But I'm very much like a fan of the idea that people can create projects in the early stages
or drop their first NFT or token or asset and make it something that's almost like free
to those who are grinding or believe in the project in the earliest days as more of like
a testament of value instead of it being like an actual sale.
I want to send it over to Michael O'Connor from Today the Game.
You buying or selling the pre-sale meta.
And if we get a little bit of alpha, Today the Game's NFT might be coming up.
Is that something you're considering?
Yes, all of that is in consideration.
And yeah, we're going to be launching, you know, we're going to be announcing stuff on
the NFT really soon.
But I don't have a date set yet, but I'm working on it.
And yeah, I'll announce it when we do.
But I'm 100% buying the meta here because for me, you know, one of the great things about
crypto for me is kind of putting power back into people's hands.
And normally with pre-sales or what you might call venture capital, really it gives discounted
investment opportunities to kind of select institutions, you know, who are traditional
VCs, for example.
And I love the idea that we can branch out and give other people opportunities to invest.
And I mean, that's just one side from the investment angle, but actually probably the
thing that I'm really intrigued about it more so is kind of rewarding the community, like
the communities who've been with you with opportunities to kind of essentially invest
on what is pretty much discounts, you know.
So I think that's a really cool thing to do, to be able to reward select members of your
community.
And for that reason, it's a major win.
Now, with that said, of course, like it's right to point out that there can be bad actors
and we've seen loads of them.
But hopefully when, you know, when people have been following your project for such a
long time, they're able to build up trust.
And, you know, people are like listening on Gamified and, you know, they're listening
to all of these projects and what the strategies are behind them, the thinking is behind them
and what the kind of founders think.
And hopefully that solidifies a little bit of trust.
But obviously, no financial advice, of course, but I think it's a great opportunity for people
as well as us creators to kind of solidify our core community.
Really well said.
Great stuff, Michael.
I'll send it over to the emperor of eSports, Nak.
Yeah, I'm going to give the same answer I pretty much give every time we're talking
about mint mechanics.
And I think, of course, it can work and it's definitely something that I buy.
You've seen plenty of successful teams roll out this strategy and have success with the
Mint. I think it's totally viable.
I think where it gets tricky is just like literally every other mint mechanic that exists
in the space.
It is not a copy paste.
It worked for Overworld.
So it's going to work for you mechanic.
And the problem is what happens after you have a team like Overworld who launched the way
that they did 700 other teams go live with the same mechanic.
They execute in the worst way possible.
They have no fucking plan.
They have no rhyme or reason other than Overworld did it.
So it's got to be good and it makes the entire strategy look poor.
And it's part of the reason why you see a team like Overworld do it.
You have one or two months of people doing it like crazy and then it disappears for six
months and then it pops back into the ecosystem like it always does, like it has done since
2020, 2021.
This is something that I buy.
I think it's executed well.
It's an incredible way to give access to early community supporters.
It's a good way to get people into the ecosystem.
People who might not be online for the mint or might otherwise miss it.
It's a good way to support people who have supported you in your journey, but it's a very
highly complicated mint mechanic.
You need to have partners who can actually execute the things.
You don't want to do everything on a spreadsheet.
It is really difficult to perform.
And it's something that 99% of teams should just fucking avoid because you're not going
to do it right.
I buy the pre-sale mechanic, but I will sell on most of the teams who will try to implement
Interesting.
Okay.
I got to give a shout out to Mick Killen in the comments too.
Weird.
He has a different PFP now.
It's tripping me out of it.
He says, I think pre-sales are cool that your early supporters get a benefit for being
early, but selling half a collection in pre-sale and over allocation, the first come first
serve whitelist by 50% isn't the way to go.
I think that might be a little shaded overworld kind of seems like what they did.
Icy Gaming says, honestly, I'm with Bryson selling the pre-sale meta.
It incentivizes speculation and degen behavior, which is all hype driven and leads to overshooting
the mark.
I think games should be straightforward and do what's best for the end gamer.
He also asks, how can I get that shrapnel operator or that Bullyverse NFT by doing exactly
what you're doing, man.
I love it whenever people in the community chime in in the comments.
I'm going to send it over to Fresco next.
He also adds Fresco, Fresco be like more gas is better, which I think is an insult.
Well, somebody hasn't been in the trenches like me.
I want to say one thing, right?
And that's when I think about myself selfishly.
Honestly, I have a lot of shit going on in life, right?
I can't sit and like grind out a whitelist.
I am all for the pre-sale, like just for me and for busy people.
Like how many of us can sit in like eight discords at this point?
The things we were doing in 2021, most of us probably can't do now, right?
So I would happily just buy a pre-sale spot to not have to play the fucking game of NFTs
in 2024.
You know what I mean?
So I'm all about it for that.
So if nobody else hears this, Michael, Paul, Fitch, whoever's on the shrapnel account,
they got a new fucking guy, new intern.
Yeah, sell me pre-sales.
Dude, an intern.
Did you hear the fucking intro I had for him?
His resume is like...
Yeah, I missed his name.
Sorry.
Sorry, guy.
I'll send it over to Fitch from Parallel Next.
Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of ambivalent on pre-sales.
I mean, like I guess I'll buy it because it's like in and of itself not necessarily a bad
thing.
Obviously, to Knox's point, it can be misused in many, many different, you know, applications.
You know what I'm definitely selling though?
Gas wars, right?
Like, that's pretty inexcusable at this point.
There's so many different things that you could be doing instead of gas wars, right?
Like, I understand that you want a click and get it in X amount of time.
You don't need a gas war to do that.
Like, we've already built a system at Parallel that avoids that.
And we're happy to talk to people about that.
And even on chain, there's ways to avoid gas wars.
So that's what I'm definitely selling.
Because if you think about it, you know, if your problem with pre-sales is, you know,
it leads to negative externalities, things that we don't want.
Well, I don't know how raking people over the coals for ETH fees and failed transactions
is a better outcome.
I mean, is that bringing equity to gamers?
I don't think so.
I mean, maybe I'm mistaken and people can correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't
seem like the vision of Web3 is, you know, you spend $300 and you have failed transactions
to try and get something that you wanted when there was a better system and people just
didn't implement it.
So, I mean, you know, I'll sort of tentatively buy pre-sales because I think they're already
bought, but I'm definitely selling gas wars because they're unnecessary.
All right.
I'm going to send it back to Nock for a quick statement before we go to Alex from Shatno.
So, yeah, I think part of the reason why I buy the concept of pre-sales is because so
many of the arguments against it is just, they're just so weak.
It's things like, I don't want to play the speculation game.
Like, what the fuck are we talking about?
The only reason why you're getting involved is because things are speculative.
Even if you look at the top teams in this space, in their current state, you are speculating
on the fact that they're either going to deliver a great game or the game that you already know
to be great, in your opinion, sees mass appeal.
You are speculating on their ability to deliver.
The idea that you would participate in a mint if it was a public mint, but you won't participate
in the mint because they sold some NFTs pre-sale because that's speculative.
Like, what the fuck are you getting involved with in the beginning, like to begin with,
right?
You're there to play the speculative game.
What you're actually complaining about is that you don't spend the time to create,
you know, join communities and create relationships and find ways to get into these pre-sales or
to have access to this sort of thing.
That's what you're complaining about.
You're not complaining about the fact that it's speculative because you're participating
in the mint to begin with.
So I think that there are a lot of real reasons why the pre-sale mechanic might not work for
everybody, but I don't think playing the Web3 game is a valid concern.
All right.
I'm going to give out the first Bullyverse NFT to The Shaolin.
He says the mint meta with gas is prohibitive to either those who know about it or for wasting
gui unnecessarily.
I'm about pre-sales if it's about removing friction and making it seamless.
He says I'm buying pre-sales and selling gas wars.
Thanks for chiming in, Shaolin.
We're going to hook you up with that Bullyverse NFT.
Alex from Shrapnel, over to you.
Yeah.
So it's sneaky chain behind the Shrapnel account.
And exactly Fresco's perspective is why I'm selling pre-sales.
I think a lot of teams do pre-sales really poorly, right?
And I question how many community members are really benefiting from a pre-sale versus is
it the same 20 or 50 alpha groups that are getting shopped pre-sales every time?
And, you know, it's sort of like the same group of individuals putting up capital at
these discounted prices and they're owning like 50% plus of a pre-sale collection.
And it's the same individuals.
And I know because, you know, some of these pre-sales are shopped in the, you know, groups.
So it's like I really wonder if the pre-sale mechanism is actually benefiting community
members like it's intended to.
Fair criticism.
Mr. Wild Paul, giving you the last word before we move on.
I just wanted to share anecdotally, because now I've been able to be in both positions.
It actually reminds me a lot of traditional fundraising.
There's sort of like two different versions of fundraising I've done with institutional
funds, I mean, institutional capital.
There's the kind where you walk into a room and you have a brand new thing that nobody's
seen and you're meeting brand new people that you've never met and they've never met
you and nobody knows anyone and you have to do a pitch and, you know, people are just
and it feels very much like this speculative thing.
Like it doesn't, it doesn't feel like a high value trust-based thing.
It's like, you know, just there's people looking to make money.
They're seeing if they can make money off you.
And like, that's what that's there about.
And then the other kind of that where you're, you're meeting with people you trust who you've
been working with before, maybe you've raised money with them before you've done business
with them before you've gone through a transaction with them before.
And it's a completely different type of relationship and discussion and, you know, feels better
on both sides, not just as the person who's investing, but the person who's also being
invested in the company that's raising the money.
I've now actually experienced both ends of that in Web3 as well.
We had early pre-sale discussions with Wildcard coming right off the paradigm raise.
So it's like we were at least able to get in the room with folks because we had done the
paradigm raise to be like, who are you?
What's this new project?
Do I want a pre-sale, you know, on your NFT that I don't know anything about?
And to be honest, those were low value conversations.
I didn't know any of those folks.
We were new in the Web3 space.
We didn't have that trust, those relationships.
I wouldn't do that again.
But now, recently, having pre-sale discussions again with Wildcard around some things that
we have happening this year.
And these conversations are much better.
It's kind of like Fitch was saying.
These are with folks now that we have met, we've known, we've done work together with them.
They've been part of the work that we've been doing over the last couple of years with
Wildcard.
We built that trust up.
These are much higher value conversations, connections.
And I think it feels better on both sides.
So I just want to say, if you're getting in on a pre-sale, ask yourself which room you're
Are you in the room where nobody knows anybody and it's just a bunch of speculators?
Or are you in that group of people who knows the people that are meeting, who has that alpha,
who has those relationships, has that trust?
I would only participate in the latter.
The former is gambling.
Real quick on what Paul said.
I think your pre-sale qualifications, and also to Knox's point, are where that's the
variable you can adjust.
Is it meritocratic or not, right?
And that's, I think, what a lot of us have been circling the wagons on here.
If it's meritocratic, then great.
And that, again, to Knox's point, that's a lot harder than it sounds like.
You know, because what is meritocratic?
Is it spending money?
Is it viable actions in the game ecosystem?
That's a complex decision that the organization has to make a variety of assessments on.
A lot of work goes into doing it, right?
And so it's not a trivial thing.
But I think that's the real critical thing.
Yeah, to your point, it's not a black and white thing.
It's a variety of factors.
The folks that we're interested in doing pre-sale business with at Wildcard are folks that
have earned our trust through the collaboration where there weren't incentives in place, and
they were just doing great work in the same field we were and trying to sort of raise the
tide that lifts our boats along with theirs.
For instance, the Wolves Dow is a great example.
We have never actually entered into a contract with the Wolves Dow.
We have done a ton of great work alongside them and watched as they've continued to add
value to everything we're doing and to the space in general.
So they get front row seats for those discussions because of that value that they've naturally been
creating.
That's the kind of thing.
And again, you can't put a clear definition on how that happens, but it happens with time
and patience.
One last thing I want to say on this point, the reason that we have to approach this with
balance.
Pre-sale is a mechanic that should fit into, in our, this is my opinion, this is my strong
opinion.
This is something that applies to everyone.
But in our opinion, pre-sale is one of the mechanics in which we should try to get that
value into the hands of our community.
But it's not the only one.
And it shouldn't be the dominant one because it, take it to the extreme, it's, it's a rich
gets richer kind of thing.
And it doesn't tend to include the folks who haven't been in the room, who are interested
in getting involved, who haven't had that opportunity.
So we're always looking to balance that meta with opportunities that involve people that
don't have that chance to be in that room necessarily, but still want to get involved.
And I think at least for us, it's really important to figure out that ideal balance.
I just want to, I just want to explain the word meritocratic for anybody that doesn't
understand it, because there's some people in the comments.
I just learned this word like last year.
So a meritocracy is whenever there's a society where the people that are contribute the most
rise to the top instead of the people, you know, nepotism or people that have the
most money, et cetera, et cetera.
One thing that Wild Paul said that really clicked for me, and I love having founders with
tons of Web2 experience whenever you draw parallels to things that are happening in Web3, because
it's very easy to feel like, oh, this stuff is brand new.
But I hadn't even thought about the fact that you must get pitched stuff all the time as
a venture capitalist in Web2, that you don't know anybody on the team and you don't know
if their experience is real or not.
You don't know if the success that they're speaking to is actually as genuine as they're,
I'm sure, implying at the time.
So it's really cool to hear that experience that you're speaking to, Paul.
Thanks so much for that.
A couple of quick comments that were really great.
Shady Shiba says, pre-sale meta will probably end up being just a popularity contest based
on how much reach the individual has.
We'll see the same people also in pre-sale instead of community supporters.
Dub says, TGI Fresco, unable to handle eight Discord servers while I'm maxed out at 200 and
thriving.
4K3 says, gaming for whitelists and grinding for whitelists shows commitment and allows fair
opportunity for all.
It also protects your community from gas wars.
Icy says, gamified ETF, I'm here for it.
And then dollar sign, Sam.
And Matt says, gamified starts as the ETF gets approved.
Coincidence?
I think not.
I agree, Matt.
I think we had something to do with that.
Thanks, buddy.
We're moving on to what's the word?
Shrapnel's UEFN mode, Shrapknight, was released just yesterday.
For anyone that doesn't know, Shrapnel released a new game mode inside of Fortnite with their
game building tool, UEFN, where you can collect Sigma.
Several projects recently have built out UEFN experiences for their communities.
My question for the panel, is this a vampire attack or a great marketing beat?
And what's the word for Shrapnel doing a UEFN experience?
Mr. Wild Paul got the hand up first.
I, uh, so I don't know exactly what vampire move means in this context, but, but UEFN
is the hottest shit ever.
And it is just incredible.
I, I'm, uh, I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm sort of friends or acquaintances with
Tim over at Epic.
I've been paying attention to the vision that he's had for what Fortnite could become as
not just the Fortnite game, but for, I don't know, for those who either aren't playing Fortnite
or don't have kids that are playing Fortnite right now, go launch it, go check it out.
The Fortnite game that you think you know is a tiny, tiny part of what that experience
is right now.
When you launch it, it's basically Roblox now.
It's a giant catalog, a container of other experiences where things that Epic is building
themselves in partnerships, like the Lego Fortnite thing is sitting alongside creator
made, uh, things.
And, and there was a people.
So the way I do this is I tend to follow the creators I care the most about and look at
their replies.
Cause it's usually where really, really good alpha is, is buried.
And if you go look at Tim Sweetie's account and look at his replies, you can see some of
the conversations he's been having with people where he's actually laying out the roadmap
for unreal six, the engine that's coming.
And it is going to be the everything engine.
He's effectively unifying the traditional game development pipeline that happens in
Unreal together with the Fortnite development UAFN pipeline that we're aware we're, we're
sort of becoming familiar with and turning into a single Uber product that allows a game
developer like shrapnel, like us to not only ship a game into the Fortnite audience via
UAFN and via the Fortnite client, but take that same exact code base, that same exact project.
And if we want to migrate it out into its own app seamlessly without having to build it
in two different places, this is the thing that Roblox can't do, because if you go build
in the Roblox ecosystem, you're locked in that ecosystem.
But because UAFN is built on a general purpose game development engine, the Unreal engine, the
obvious future is, and Tim sees this, is to bring that all together and to create a single
technology where a game developer doesn't have to make a choice.
If they want to, they can ship it into Fortnite and put it in that catalog.
But if they want to, they can also ship it onto Steam and Epic with a flick of a switch
in the program itself.
That's, as you can go look and do the research yourself, that's what Tim, the picture he's
painting for Unreal 6.
So UAFN is the biggest deal.
And I think shrapnel is really smart for sort of planting a flag there and getting in front
of that and sort of getting the experience of what it takes to build a UAFN game, but also
kind of capitalizing on the zeitgeist of this kind of growing ecosystem right now.
Peyton in the comments says, Sam, Stefanina, read this.
You're sexy AF.
I love you.
Sign my chest.
Jesus Christ.
Tony says, Paul Bettner casually dropping that he and Tim Sweeney are best buddies.
What a flex.
Fitz, I sent it over to you, man.
What's the word for UEFN ex shrapnel?
What's the word?
I actually forgot to think of a word.
I will say it's bullish because, you know, to many of the points that Paul said, it's definitely
the future.
I remember the conference where they announced it and I was like, that is awesome.
Like the whole revenue sharing model.
Also, we've said a zeitgeist and meritocratic.
Peyton's head is spinning in circles right now.
He's grabbing a thesaurus as quickly as he can.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's a really smart move.
And it's something like Parallels talked about.
I'm not sure that we'll wind up doing it necessarily, but it's something that, you know,
when it happens, everybody needs to be paying attention and looking at it and saying, how
does this change the way that we're thinking about things, right?
You know, it makes a lot of sense.
And I think in the future, that vision that Paul illustrated, I can certainly see many,
many games instead of sort of going their own route and, you know, doing all this sort
of separate development, building inside of this unified development ecosystem and launch
ecosystem and universe ecosystem.
And putting games out via that distribution method because it's end to end.
And because, you know, you have a built in player base of, you know, millions and millions
of people that are paying attention to, you know, associated products.
So it's really exciting.
I know that Tim is pretty, you know, interested in Web3 as well.
And so, you know, it's interesting to think about how that might integrate with sort of player
owned ecosystems in the future.
I really, I think it's very smart of them to do, you know, to call it a vampire attack,
I guess, technically by the definition of that term, sure.
But I think it's more of like a, let's explore another viable ecosystem and plant flags in many
places.
Because, you know, a vampire attack, I think by the letter of the definition would imply
they're trying to siphon users back to another type of experience from a certain experience
that they're having now.
I think it's more like they're building a plurality of experiences.
So actually, now that I think about it, maybe it's not a vampire attack.
It's more of just, let's set up another base.
Really well said.
I saw the shrapnel account give it a thumbs down whenever you mentioned vampire attack.
So that tells me that it was not the intention.
We'll get to them in just a minute.
Icy says, the word is brilliant.
The UEFN shrapnel map is so good.
Fantastic game loop.
Sigma storms are sick.
Extracting sigma is adrenaline fueled.
Great way to scratch the itch until shrapnel drops early access.
In the Wolves Down tonight, we have our game night that happens every single week.
I'm sure we'll be booting that up.
So I'm really excited to try it out for the first time.
Icy, I'm going to hook you up with that second Bullyverse NFT.
We've got three more plus a shrapnel operator, which I'm really excited about.
I'm going to send it over to Nock.
What's the word for the shrapnel UEFN experience?
I think the word here is progress.
And I would loop in the OK Bears experience as well.
Both maps are very professionally done.
Both of them are excellent gameplay loops.
They are quality, quality, quality products.
I want to make that very clear.
What I'm concerned about, not necessarily with either of those maps in particular, but the recent wave of people creating UEFN maps, is that it feels a lot like the early days of the custom Minecraft servers and custom Minecraft maps.
Where back in like 2015, 2016, every company that had any amount of marketing budget would pay some developer to create some type of experience within Minecraft.
They would do a marketing campaign around that experience.
And then they would just fuck off and let it disappear into the ether.
And that is what I'm worried will happen with a lot of these UEFN maps.
I think it gives, in theory, a way for Web3 devs to have penetration into the Web2 market, get people familiar with your brand, make sure that they understand what shrapnel is or what OK Bear is or what FODE is.
Those are three really well done maps.
But the problem is, where do players come from long term, right?
If most of your marketing efforts are coming from the Web3 audience, that's not a way to build a sustainable ecosystem in that version of that game.
There are very few UEFN maps that games have done in this space that have any retained players over the course of 30, 60, 90 days.
And a lot of it has to do with the fact that almost nobody is working with Fortnite people.
These are people who have tons of experience in the space.
Anybody, this is an open invitation for free.
If you're building one of these maps, hit me up.
I'll connect you with people in the space who actually might be willing to help market and build a brand around the ecosystem that you're creating.
But the problem is, it just becomes a dead piece of content for 90% of the people who will deliver something like this.
That's not to say that's going to happen with shrapnel or OK Bears or with FODE, but it's what happens most of the time.
When you look at the successful Fortnite creative maps or custom game modes, most of that stuff came from people who were actually in the ecosystem and had roots there.
So the first Fortnite box fight map was actually an 11 gaming member who built it.
Most of you who have ever played box fights on Fortnite have probably played on that map.
It's still being used to this day.
The same is true with Zone Wars and a number of other things.
Because when you're building in a platform like Fortnite, you need to have Fortnite natives who can help to push people in the direction of that game.
Otherwise, like Paul said, if you go to the Fortnite homepage right now, it is so fucking confusing that like 99% of the time, I can't even figure out how to start up a game of solos.
If you're expecting your average user to navigate to your UEFN creation, I think you're probably going to waste some money.
So I think it's a step in the right direction.
I think the word is progress to summarize.
I love the map that Shrapnel created.
I think it's fucking excellent.
But a word of caution to everybody who's building something like this, make sure that you've got people in the ecosystem to help push people there.
Otherwise, you're going to spend a bunch of money on a game experience that people will play for two or three weeks, and then it'll just disappear and nobody will remember it.
Great stuff, Noc.
Felix Godoy says the play Shrapnel map in Fortnite is so fun.
You'll love to hear it.
Sinjin, I'm going to give you the last word before we send it over to Shrapnel and move on to the next topic.
Well, I think it's fucking awesome.
And I think why it's so fucking awesome is that they put their time to put in a unique and new game loop to show what they can do.
And that's showing that what their primary game will ultimately be will be so much fucking better than that.
And I love this because also they're showing what it can really do as well as the fact that this is the death meal for all the fucking shitty FPS Web 3 games that you see launched.
And you could say, like, fuck, you could actually do a better job in launching it just in the Fortnite creator, like whatever, editor, than them having their own fucking platform.
But what also Noc said is very true about most of the games will not add up to anything.
And that's the same with Roblox.
So a lot of brands have made clones of hit games and Roblox to try to get community involvement around that over the years.
And that includes super major big brands.
And they've always kind of dropped off.
But I think that's the beautiful thing of it.
It's like it's available, it's there, it's accessible, you take a shot at it.
But, like, is it going to be, you know, something that game studios will use and really be successful at?
And I think that comes down to the very key thing.
It's not really the tools that really make the difference in gaming.
It's really the passion and the kind of approach to be innovative.
And so I think as a stepping stone in terms of expanding the Fortnite ecosystem, I think it's all fantastic, all pluses.
I'm so happy to see that.
And fuck off to all these shitty fucking FPS Web3 clones.
Please fucking go die.
Jesus, coming in.
Alex, buying the shrapnel account.
Anything else we should know about shrapnel before we move on to the next topic?
Yeah, I would say that my word for it is interoperability.
The actual buildings, vehicles, things that you're seeing within the shrapnel map are actually assets that came from shrapnel.
And we're able to do that because we're both built in Unreal.
And so very much like Nox saying, right, eating our own dog food.
I think everyone is familiar that shrapnel is going to have a map editor program as well.
We're going to have shrapnel creator maps.
So this is honestly a pathfinding exercise for us to really learn from Epic, Fortnite, right, the behemoths in the space.
What's working?
What's not working?
Who's actually going to go ahead and create shrapnel maps when we release our creator tools, right, so that we can have a wild card map within shrapnel.
We can have a Yugo Labs map within shrapnel.
Ultimately, we hope that Fortnite comes and builds a shrapnel map as well.
And if you want to learn more about shrapnel, come check out the shrapnel Discord.
We're going to be hosting game nights with Orangey and Cairo with some really fun prizing.
So you can go ahead and feed up on them, hang out with the community, and get some really fun rewards for it.
Got to give a shout out to Phil in the comments.
He says, what's the word?
Interested.
I still haven't played Fortnite, but after seeing things like this, I'm itching more and more to give it a go.
You still haven't played Fortnite, Phil?
That's crazy, dude.
McChillen says, even the Nike.swoosh map was only good for a one-time experience.
It was cool, but then it wasn't worth playing again.
And then AE says, shrapnel.
I think it was a great move.
It was also a great way to expand the reach of shrapnel to Fortnite community and gamers.
Sinjin, the hand went back up.
I'll give you a quick word before we move on.
Yeah, I just wanted to say that we did also try to make a Meiji Fortnite map, but our assets got banned for being X-rated.
So sorry, guys.
It's not going to happen.
Can't be too sexy on Fortnite.
Yeah, that's burned you guys a couple of times, which makes me sad because I think the art is great.
It's Bolt also says, reminds me of whenever projects were branching into NFT world games and maps before Minecraft was banned also.
It's a cool experience for community members and helps spread the word about the project and encourages people to check out what else they're building.
We move on to a similar but different topic that I'm super interested in.
We're calling this one Friend or Foe.
Fan remakes of games have been on fire lately.
Warcraft 2 remade, City of Heroes being remade, Skyblivion, which is a remake of Oblivion with Skyrim's engine being remade.
My question for the panel, should these developers be earning any money for these games as they're being remade?
And should the founders be upset that their IP is being used and they're not earning anything?
There's also an interesting trend while we talk about UEFN with games like Only Up that were wildly successful for a week or two.
Bryson on the panel was absolutely crushing it with Only Up content.
And then we see like a week or two later, people rush out these remakes in UEFN and Roblox with free versions that end up potentially taking a massive chunk of the user base.
There's also, I guess, an argument to be made for maybe it's actually helping them market their new game model.
So I asked the panel, are these remakes friends or foes of the original?
I believe I saw Paul Bettner's hand go up first.
So this is, okay, this is going to be a weird analogy, but this is just like what happened with music and MP3s.
So like there's this thing that's happening that the world has decided that they're going to listen to music digitally.
They're going to listen to it on their computer.
They're going to listen to it on their MP3 players or whatever.
And either the music creators and the producers and the labels can get on board or people are going to steal their shit, right?
And so for a while there, everybody was like, oh, this is the worst thing ever.
Everybody's stealing music.
And Apple was like, I don't actually think people want to steal music.
I think actually we just need to make it really easy for people to get music digitally like they want and like, you know, just put a reasonable price on it.
Turns out that's exactly the case.
This is the way I, what I, what I see when I look at this space of remixed content, we live in a world where, where it's all about the attention economy.
It's all about the democratized creation platforms that allow people to take this amazing IP and turn it into things that they love, that other people want to share.
You can either get on board with that and make it easy for your creators to do that with your IP, with your content.
And guess what?
When you do that, they're probably not going to want to steal it.
They're probably going to want to work with you.
They're probably going to want to rev share with you.
Everybody's going to win.
Or you can be one of these kind of old fashioned litigious companies who's like suing everybody out of existence just for like putting up a video of how much they love your game or your, or your IP.
Like that's, that's never going to make it.
So I think there's actually only one path.
The world has already shown that, that what they want to do is they want the freedom and ability to remix IP and to create fandoms.
And, and, you know, the companies that get on board with that and make that possible and, and profitable for their communities.
Are the ones that succeed and the other ones are going to be left behind.
Really, really well said, Mr. Wild Paul.
Fitch from Parallel, I send it over to you.
Are these guys friends or foes?
Yeah, friends.
Definitely.
I mean, it's similar to the, you know, the Fortnite model with the UEFN where they're having like a revenue share agreement.
And I think that, you know, these, these, you know, game developers need to figure out what that relationship looks like.
Sky Blvian in particular, I'm super excited about.
They've been working on that for years.
They still probably have about two years worth of work left to go.
You know, entirely self-funded, massive, massive project, right?
Like, you know, down to minimal textures, re-skinning the entirety of Oblivion, which is my all-time favorite game.
So super excited for it.
Really, really want to play it.
Doesn't mean that I'm not going to buy everything else, you know, that they put out.
Obviously, I'm going to, but, you know, it, to me, it's like, if the developers of that are getting a cut and the original developers of Oblivion are getting a cut, then everybody wins, right?
And, you know, to Paul's point, it's just about these, these new methods of creation and distribution.
You know, if you look at like YouTube as a social media app, it's genius because everybody else creates your content for you.
And, you know, and social media in general is a good example of that, where it's user-generated content, and that's what pays the platform.
And, you know, as platforms have noticed, they need to pay the people who are creating the content.
So it's always been a mutually beneficial relationship, not necessarily always, you know, completely equal in terms of how that money is being distributed.
But there needs to be some kind of a situation where the original creators of the game and the people who want to make remixes of the game are both sort of taken care of.
And those original creators of the game need to be encouraging that, because I agree with Paul that it's inevitable and it's better for everyone.
So, real quick on the last topic, I saw Dub dropped a comment, says, huge shout-out to NextStudio for making Shrapnight a reality.
And then, of course, we have a pinned tweet.
If you want to check it out, that should have the island code for you to play yourself.
A couple of great comments already.
I see Freeze, one of my favorites, he says, agree with Paul Bettner.
Piracy, especially in gaming, is often a sign of poor pricing and accessibility.
Icy says, I love that Paul Bettner is always forward-thinking and user experience first.
I couldn't agree more.
And then Zack D calls them friends.
If help, it helps bring it back to an IP that might be fading.
Another throwback to Toontown.
There's a community-ran server that looks just like the original.
This excitement could lead to an actual reboot of a newer Toontown, which could be a great experience for us all.
I'm going to send it over to Michael O'Connor from Today the Game.
Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm a big fan of Remix culture, broadly speaking.
You know, it's done a lot for us culturally.
You know, electronic music is built on Remix culture and hip-hop.
So that's, like, pretty kind of pivotal cultural moments that we've all grown up and lived with.
So that's really cool.
And, you know, it's absolutely inevitable that it's going to continue to happen.
Now, what's kind of interesting to me is that, really, we deal with this constant sense of conflict between IP versus Remix culture.
And people have been trying to figure the answer to this out for years, right?
You know, especially with the emergence of the Internet and copyability was increased.
It just became, you know, absolute, like, wildfire.
Back in the day, you used to, you know, copy your tapes or whatever, you know?
But now it's just so easy.
It's so much easier to remix.
It's so much easier to build games, for example, with, you know, Paul mentioned the democratization of games.
And, you know, I think that's all good for the products, broadly speaking.
And it's great to bring people into these communities.
Obviously, you know, I do regard kind of these rebuild games as different to mods.
You know, normally game devs are a lot softer on mods and, you know, really encourage mods.
But there's concerns over the IP when it comes to full rebuilds.
And you do have to be careful.
So, you know, while I'm a fan of this, I also want to caveat it here, just with a little bit of realism.
You have to protect your IP, you know?
Like, businesses have to protect their IP.
I mean, the games business, you have to do that, too.
I've worked at companies that are probably a bit overly aggressive on that.
You know, Nintendo famously is really difficult on this, like, getting streamers to pull down, you know, Nintendo games because they haven't, you know, cited them correctly or whatever.
But on a more kind of just realistic numbers sense, you know, when I was working on a game called Football Manager, a massive franchise,
piracy was having a huge impact on the game, you know, a huge, like, we're talking like multi-million dollars, which was impacting it for the real fans.
There was huge losses happening because of IP breaches, you know?
And we had to put in place things to slow down the cracking of the game.
And that basically increased revenue in the company dramatically, which meant that we could hire more devs and make a better product for people.
So protecting IP, it does matter.
And I'm not into the whole, like, total free-for-all.
Everyone just do whatever they want.
But with that said, I do accept Remix as a beautiful part of the culture that we now live in.
And the last thing I'll say very briefly is that one of the cool things about NFTs is that actually it provides potential solutions to this.
Because, you know, when we talk about Remix culture, one of the things that you just don't know where it came from.
How did it get there?
How many different layers did it go through?
And one of the great things about NFTs is that actually provides provenance and, you know, immutable trackability.
So I think there's some interesting solutions for us in there to tie it all back to crypto.
And Uncle Funk in the comments says, ooh, it's my first time hearing at Mike, Mr. Kite, which is, of course, Michael O'Connor.
He says, tons of wisdom flowing here.
Dude, I love having Michael on the show.
I'm going to send it over to the emperor of esports, Noc.
Yeah, I'm going to say something that might sound fucking crazy on a gaming space, but don't be Nintendo.
I think that's the lesson here.
Nintendo has had a really exciting esports culture that has been built.
In spite of Nintendo's best efforts to snuff it out at every possible situation that they've had the opportunity to do so, including canceling major events with millions of dollars invested the night before the event happens.
I think that that's just like one of the shittiest ways that you can deal with the people who are participating within your ecosystem.
I think I can't believe I'm going to say this either, but look at what Activision Blizzard has done with WoW Classic and Season of Discovery, what Jagex has done with RuneScape Classic.
These are two companies that face very similar problems.
Their legacy game was dying.
People didn't want to play the game anymore.
People started playing private servers of old ports of that game, and they were faced with a choice.
The choice is, do we go after those teams legally, which they did and fucking failed because a million of them popped up.
The minute that you struck one down, it was like fucking servers.
Three more would pop up.
It was crazy how many private servers were happening in those days, and then they ultimately chose to say, hey, there's clearly an appetite for this.
What if we embrace this as a product that is native to the Jagex ecosystem or native to the Blizzard ecosystem?
And to their credit, they did that, and they're now seeing a resurgence in a game, in two games, really, that were dying five or six years ago.
They're starting to explode now because they've embraced what the private server ecosystem was.
I think that when fans take specifically old IP into their hands and want to recreate it or recreate specific experiences, to me, that's like a glaring signal to developers.
There's an appetite for this product.
Let's do something in an official capacity, or let's partner with this team that has done this thing, and let's make sure we all get to eat from this.
We get to deliver something that gamers want to see.
We get to make a shit ton more money off of an IP that we thought maybe was long gone.
I think it's a win-win if you lean into things.
Again, where you get into trouble is when you are a company like Nintendo who strikes down YouTube videos and tournaments and content creation.
It makes it harder and harder for people to want to participate in that ecosystem, and in turn, you tend to get less exposure.
Obviously, this doesn't matter to the biggest gaming company on Earth in Nintendo, but for many other developers, that's a death sentence for you.
Really well said, Noc.
I'm going to go through the rest of the hands, then we're going to move on.
Michael O'Connor got it back up.
I'm super curious to see what you wanted to jump in with again.
Maybe not.
We're going to Fresco.
Yeah.
I think Noc brings up a really great point in World of Warcraft, right?
And yeah, I mean, World of Warcraft literally was doing that.
They were telling people for years that the code for vanilla Warcraft didn't exist anymore, and it did.
But private servers were popping up, and they were huge and robust, right?
And they would shut them down.
But you look at World of Warcraft today, who embraced the remake, and there's at least four versions of Warcraft right now that are existing and doing very, very well and growing.
And the future of retail Warcraft has never looked better.
And I think a lot of that stems from leaning back into, you know, some of the, I think, you know, launching Classic in the middle of a pandemic was the greatest thing Blizzard could have done for their coffers, right?
And I think when you look at a game like City of Heroes that had this, like, really beloved fan base, because they had this robust customization, and for NCSoft to lean into a fan remake of that only helps NCSoft, right?
Because your game and your IP is staying fresh and staying relevant.
And if you're, anybody at NCSoft has a small level of intelligence, they're looking at, you know, behind the curtain of what's going on and seeing how many people are going to go back and play this?
And do we lean back into this IP?
And, you know, for City of Heroes, there was so much potential in that game that, you know, really didn't ever get to see the light of day.
But it's an IP that I think could do really well in a time like 2024, right?
And so I think it's a great move.
I'm super excited to play.
Warcraft 2 was, like, the game that got me into gaming.
So the fact that somebody's remaking that I think is amazing.
And I think there's no reason to lean back into it.
And, you know, if you're NCSoft or if you're any company, you just slap these guys with, like, a profit or a rev share agreement, and you're cashing free checks at that point.
You know, you're essentially licensing the game out.
And, you know, everybody likes free money.
I just want to say I'm on Atiesh server, rather than the Lich King Classic.
Come hang out with me.
Dude, we just had a Wolves Dow channel setting up for Season of Discovery.
Coop from AVAX is giving us all gold to get started.
It's an addiction just priming waiting to happen.
Saigo also says Michael should be penalized for mentioning football manager and unearthing an age-old addiction I have.
BRB while I go sim an entire managerial career in 8th Division England.
I'm going to tag in Knock real quick for the last word.
But real quick, I've got to give a shout-out to everybody in the comments.
It's an absolute party in the comments today.
It's been so much fun reading all of these, and everybody's going back and forth.
There's GIFs flying all around.
People are chiming in with amazing alpha.
I love it so much.
Just a reminder, I'm going to give that shrapnel operator to somebody that's commenting, retweeted the space, gave us a like, all the good stuff.
And I still have three more believers NFTs to give out.
Knock, over to you for the last word.
Yeah, there's just another vein that I think is similar but a little different here.
But it's the ability for third-party devs to create mods and experiences that help to, like, augment your gameplay.
So I'll use WoW and RuneScape as another example.
Both of them were in very long legal battles.
On the RuneScape side, it was with a developer who created an app called RuneLight, which has now become, like, the de facto launcher for RuneScape.
If you play old-school RuneScape, you use RuneLight.
In WoW, there are, like, an ungodly amount of third-party, like, add-ons that you could have to your client.
And both of these companies, for a very long time, fought creators of mods and RuneLight specifically third-party launchers legally.
They then realized, hey, rather than trying to spend all this money and to crush something that there's very clearly a demand for and our players want to see this sort of thing,
let's work with them to figure out how they can build things within our rules and regulations.
And, like we mentioned, if you're playing a game, if you're playing one of those two games right now,
you probably have five or six or ten add-ons that are allowed by Blizzard's rules and regulations.
And if you're playing old-school RuneScape, you're using the RuneLight launcher, not the RuneScape Plastic launcher.
There's just so much that gets added to the depth of the ecosystem when you lean into the people who care enough
to actually build shit for the game that you've created.
Great stuff. Shout out to Noc.
I literally use RuneLight and Questy.
Like, this man is looking at my PC, I think.
By the way, I just wanted to say, if you want to see the best information on this,
if you're really into this particular topic, go look up some of the GDC talks.
These are kind of historical now.
I mean, going back like ten years, that Valve used to give on the power of GDC,
the power of UGC, of user-generated content in their games and embracing your community,
letting them build things.
They have these just seminal talks on this that are so important,
and they've had such success with that.
Valve is one of the highlight companies in this regard, I think.
Sinjin, I see the hand go up.
I'll give you 30 seconds.
I've got to move on.
Well, you know, like, this discussion is really interesting
because this is actually a really bullish case for Web3 gaming.
I'm not saying that Web3 solves this, but in some sense, like, you know,
UGC is even more so stronger when you have these digital assets that are fully owned by the individuals
and what they can do with that in terms of how they personalize it with their brand
and it's still part of, you know, the ecosystem and part of, you know,
the direction of where the community wants to go.
And I think more than anything else, I mean, that's what we need to be looking at,
not just the, you know, consumers as just, you know, players as consumers,
but, like, how are they fundamentally holding this AIP and pushing it forward?
So I think it's a perfect example for Web3.
Thanks for keeping it short and sweet.
Great comment there.
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Couple more quick notes.
I got to give a shout out to Knock, who's always killing it
with the Gamified newsletter.
Absolutely killer stuff.
If you like these topics and you want to hear more,
please, please, please check that out.
He's always adding so much alpha that we can't fit into these panels.
And, of course, I got to shout out to Wolvesdow advisory services
that are coming soon.
We had a crazy meeting super early this morning.
I had to wake up at an ungodly hour.
But it was for an agency that we might be collaborating with.
It's like one of the best in the absolute world.
And I can't wait to potentially be talking about that soon.
And also, Gamified number 52.
Next week we have 50, which is great.
But 52 means we've been doing this for a whole friggin' year.
Every single Wednesday, not missing a single week.
Big shout out to Icy for coming in as a co-host a couple of weeks ago
and continuing that Iron Man streak while I was down for the count.
Huge thank you, bro.
But I want to get your guys' feedback.
Ask us some questions.
We're going to do a really fun, nostalgic episode
where I'm going to bring on a bunch of people that have helped us get here
that have been on a bunch of episodes.
I want to make it just super, super fun.
So make sure you submit those questions.
I might be putting out a Google form or something
where you guys can fill it out and help me out.
I also might be doing like a limited edition,
something, something, redacted, whatever.
We move on, though.
Quick fire.
Ghosts vs. Woats.
My new favorite segment.
This, of course, means greatest of all time
versus worst of all time.
Last week we did consoles.
This time we're doing Nintendo specifically right on cue
because we got Michael O'Connor from Nintendo.
Ex-Nintendo, I should say, which should be amazing.
The question is, what's your favorite Nintendo game of all time?
Or I should say, what's the greatest Nintendo game of all time?
And then what is the worst Nintendo game of all time?
I'm going to list off a few just to jog your memory.
Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Zelda, StarCraft 64,
something that I always mention.
Goldeneye, Excitebike, 1080,
the greatest snowboarding game of all time in my opinion.
Star Fox 64, Bomberman was on Nintendo.
Super Mario, Mario Tennis, Pikmin, Splatoon, Banjo and Kazooie,
the list goes on and on.
I'm going to kick it off real quick.
I don't usually do this.
I'm going to say Mario Kart is the greatest of all time for Nintendo.
And I'm going to say StarCraft 64, as much as I love it,
is the worst game of all time on Nintendo.
Whoever thinks you can put a friggin' RTS on a Nintendo 64 controller
has to be on some kind of overdosage of medication, is all I'll say.
I think Nat got the hand up first.
I'm sending it over to you.
Goats and Woats for Nintendo games.
Yeah, super fucking excited when I saw this topic.
Two goats, Zelda Ocarina of Time,
one of the best games that's ever existed, period.
This is not native to just Nintendo-specific consoles,
but that game was 10 out of 10 good.
The other one is Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver,
the remakes of those original games.
I don't think I've ever logged more time on a handheld system
in my entire life than playing through those.
It's also the only Pokemon game that ever allowed you
to go through 16 badges instead of 8.
I don't know why they canned that, but that was fucking incredible.
For Woats, Michael, I'm going to apologize in advance.
If you've worked on any of these titles,
the first and probably the worst game is Donkey Kong Barrel Blast.
The only good thing that came out of this game
was that kid who's jacked up on Adderall
who beats Elden Ring bosses with the bongos that came with this game.
This game was built in a time where everybody was shipping games
with weird shit to play the game with instead of actual controllers,
and this game was meant to be played on a pair of fucking bongos.
It was ridiculous.
And then there's a long list of really shitty Pokemon games.
Battle Revolution, I don't even remember what this game is about,
but I know that it fucking sucked.
My Pokemon Ranch was literally just like a screensaver
where you would port Pokemon from your DS game onto your Wii U.
I don't know what it was about.
It wasn't even really a game.
Pokemon Dash was a terrible racing game.
Pokemon Rumble U was like a top-down fighter
that didn't make any fucking sense.
It was just chaos.
Pokemon abilities flying everywhere.
And then, like, literally every single version of the Mystery Dungeon series
was complete garbage.
I love Pokemon, but there's, like, a long list of shitty Pokemon games that came out.
I think Wild Paul had the hand up next.
Over to you.
Yeah, damn it.
Knock deep, Moody.
Because he stole it.
Look, I hate saying this.
And by the way, first of all, I can't go to individual games.
I just have to go to franchises.
Because Nintendo, it's just all about the franchises.
And I was going to say, and try to be controversial,
that Pokemon is the worst franchise that Nintendo has,
which is so controversial because it is literally the most valuable IP in the entire world.
Okay?
I love having grown up with Pokemon.
I'm as much of the biggest Pokemon fan as any of you.
But it is the most missed opportunity.
And, look, for me, you guys have probably heard this.
There's a consistent theme.
For me, as a creator, when I see something that has an incredible opportunity,
and then I see a company or a creator or whatever miss that opportunity,
oh, it just hurts me.
It's like a stab in the heart.
Nothing hurts me more personally than when that happens.
And Nintendo has the most incredibly beloved franchise of all time in Pokemon,
and they continue to deliver substandard games on that franchise.
We have to call them out for that.
There are definitely some highlights in Pokemon's history
that are some of the greatest games that we all love.
But consistently, the fact that they don't deliver the most top-tier games.
And we all know what happens is because it's not just Nintendo.
It's Nintendo and the Pokemon company.
It's a very strange, you can go look into this,
it's a very strange economic business relationship
that these two things have with each other.
But we all think Pokemon and Nintendo,
it's actually the Pokemon company through this relationship that they have.
Anyway, go look at that.
But that's, to me, the greatest disappointment, the woat of this.
Especially the pillar, the pinnacle, the tentpole Pokemon games that come out these days.
We're talking about the big ones that have come out in the last couple of years.
They have just been so disappointing compared to what they should have been.
And that leads me to the goats.
And this is the hardest thing because it's always been between Mario and Nintendo.
Again, talking about franchises because, you know, knock, rattle off.
And so did you, Sam.
All the greatest games that have come from Mario as a franchise.
For me, up until literally just last year, it was Mario.
I would have consistently answered this as Mario.
It's got to be Mario.
But the work that Nintendo has done on elevating Zelda
to the absolute epitome of what an adventure game can possibly be
with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom,
I just, somehow, that franchise has taken first place for me.
And then, last thing I want to add, which, I don't know if there's an acronym for this,
something OAT special of all time, most special of all time.
It's one that hasn't been mentioned yet, which is Wave Race.
God bless, can somebody, can Nintendo please bring that franchise back?
I loved Wave Race so much, and I think a modern Wave Race game would fucking kill it.
So, that's, yeah, that's mine.
Dude, Wave Race used to be permanently installed into the wall at the dentist
that I would go to when I was, like, 10 years old.
And so, I have the weirdest mixed feelings about that game.
Super fun, but I'm at the dentist.
But you have traumatic dentist memories associated with Wave Race.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
Tony in the comments says, Tears of the Kingdom has to be unapologetic crypto, man.
That's tough to say.
He says, Super Tecmo Bull, bro.
All others can crash and burn.
And then, NFTcaf says, Ocarina of Time or Pokemon might have to be Pokemon.
I'm sending it over to Michael O'Connor, the man from Nintendo himself.
Wow.
Well, I'm happy to be chatting about this particular topic this week, having listened last week
to the brutal, unwarranted, and nauseating attack on Fresco and the GameCube, which it
still actually hurts me to kind of just even to revisit that time in my memory.
Preach.
Talk to him.
Yeah.
But, yeah.
But, I mean, come on.
Metroid Prime was there on that console.
The GameCube.
Listen, the Wii U was the world console that everyone should have been looking for.
And that was the one that I was working on as well.
So, you know, I was on 3DS and Wii U.
And, you know, on Donkey Kong, that was the first game that they threw me into, actually,
on Tropical Freeze, which is actually a great game.
But, yeah, listen, it's an interesting one, this one.
I mean, I kind of, I go back to SNES, really, as kind of the definitive things that got me
excited about games, broadly speaking.
And Mario Kart, Super Mario World, you know, the emergence of Yoshi and all that kind of
stuff was just so cool back in the day.
So, I still kind of have difficulty just, you know, moving away from all of that.
But I think, you know, the latest Mario Kart, I think the official answer should be Breath
of the Wild, Zelda's Breath of the Wild, because it's just such an incredible masterpiece.
And, like, open-world Nintendo for the first time.
And they just nailed it.
And it was so gorgeous and beautiful.
And it was, you know, they were able to run it on Switch so successfully.
It's just a great, great piece of work.
It's a great piece of art.
But I think, yeah, I think I'm going to just take the latest Mario Kart game.
I think it's Mario Kart 8, which is just so tremendously balanced.
It's just such a perfectly balanced game.
And it enables people to be able to, you know, play at any kind of difficulty and actually
play with each other at any difficulty.
But, you know, the way the items fall just kind of builds this incredible egalitarian structure
for the race.
So that's what I would say on that one.
And I'd say on the woat side, also, it's a game that I also worked on as well, briefly.
And it was so disappointing.
It was Star Fox.
I guess, what was it called?
Star Fox Zero, I think it was, for Wii U.
And the bummer with this game was, you know, Nintendo were trying to pioneer, you know,
like different ways of playing.
Like they'd just done the Wii and the Wii U came out.
And what they were really trying to do was, it was all about like, oh, the future is all
about two screens.
You know, it's about your phone and your TV.
And so they were like, okay, we're going to have two screens.
You're going to be looking at your TV, but you're also going to have a gamepad.
And they built Star Fox under this auspicion.
And it was a big mistake.
And it was actually Miyamoto led the legendary seminal man of Nintendo.
And it was just so hard to control because you had to look down and look up and look down
and look up.
You had like a screen on your controller.
And it was kind of just incredibly hard to navigate, especially at like rapid speed
inside of a flying game.
So that's my, I'm going to give it Mario Kart 8 and I'm going to give the woe to Star Fox Zero.
That was amazing, dude.
I'm so happy that Michael is here today.
The fact that he both butchered the console and the game that he worked on is just, I wish
I could give you all the applause in the world, Michael, for having that kind of self-awareness
and just fantastic takes all the way around.
I'm going to send it to Fresco for the redemption arc after last week.
There's no redemption, dude.
I stand by everything I said.
I've been proven right in the last week, too, with all the people who've come to my defense
after you gutless wanks tried to challenge me.
I guess the same number of people came to my defense.
I'm going to say the greatest is, yeah, Legend of Zelda franchise, I think, is always going
to stand above.
I think Wind Waker doesn't get the love that it deserves.
I think Twilight Princess doesn't get the love it deserves.
Ocarina of Time is hands down, I mean, a treasure.
But to Paul's point, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I have really bad ADD,
and those were the first two games where I'm usually, when I'm playing games, I'm kind
of there, but I'm kind of focused on other things or thinking about stuff.
Those were the first two games where I was fully, in a long time, that I was fully just
immersed and just sunk into and felt like I was lucky to be playing them, right?
Because they're made for ADD people.
It's like, you kind of get bored of the thing you're doing, like, wait, wait, what's that
over there?
Ooh, what's that over there?
It's like, perfect.
Oh, yeah.
And I, that's like, I think I 100%, well, I almost found like all the Koroks in like,
Breath of the Wild, or Tears of the Kingdom, I wasn't quite as hardcore.
But yeah, so Legend of Zelda, and I am a fiend.
I watch like every Nintendo Live thinking, just hoping that like, this is going to be the
one where they say Wind Waker's going to get remade.
This is the one where Twilight Princess is going to come back.
I get my heart broken every time.
It's like the Angels in the offseason.
I'm like, yeah, this is the year we got Albert Pujols, World Series, baby.
And then they're the worst team.
I'm going to say worst, maybe a little controversial, because I know people like this.
I don't really fuck with Pikmin very much.
Never really done it for me.
Oh, man.
The latest one is really good.
I've heard the latest one super good, but I just, I didn't really enjoy like the first
one, so I have never really gone.
The guy looks kind of weird to me, a weirdo looking dude.
And I have a special dislike for the DS.
I thought the, sorry, Michael, I've professed my man crush on you many times before, but the
DS was a little rubbish to me.
Dude, there is so many great comments, and this one's a little bit off topic, but I think
it's amazing.
Icy says, who wants to start a weekly gamified bingo game?
Knock mentioning RuneScape, Sinjin swearing, and Fresco getting bullied.
What else should be on the card?
No, I was redeemed.
Everybody came to my defense in the comments, Paul.
You're not redeemed, dude.
You just said that the DS sucked, so you're going to get a whole new wave.
I was almost there.
I almost had it.
Oh, you were so close.
Blake also says, he tags me and says, that's 100% the same memory I have of Wave Race.
It was at my dentist as well.
That's eerie.
And then Dub says, I'm losing my mind over this Star Fox FUD.
I literally have a Star Fox tattoo.
Oh, down bad on the tattoo front, Dub.
So, Shrapnel, Alex, tagging you in.
I cannot let a GOATS of Nintendo conversation go on without mentioning the FPS daddy that started everything, GoldenEye007.
And then shout out, honorable mention, to the Mario Party franchise.
So many fun times at sleepovers with the homies on that.
And then I'd say for the WOATS, even though I think as a franchise, Smash is obviously one of the premier, Brawl was such a big flop that, you know, when you have titles like your predecessors of Melee and Smash on N64 being, you know, the games that the community chooses to continue to play, even after you've launched Brawl, I think it sort of shows that you really flopped that title and release.
But obviously, the originals were spectacular.
Absolutely.
I'm going to send it over to Nock next.
Sorry, I've been going through my emulators as we were all talking about these games.
I got a couple more that I want to bring up.
Duck Hunt was on the NES.
It was like in like the mid-80s.
It was such a fucking good game.
Specifically, the Duck Hunt that came on the double-sided console.
On one piece, it was Duck Hunt.
On the other, it was Super Mario Bros. 3, I believe.
Wait, wait, Nock.
Are you playing Duck Hunt?
On an emulator without the little orange gun?
Like, what's the point at that stage?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I have it as part of the Super Mario Bros. 3 pack, specifically.
But I used to play it growing up on an NES.
I'm not a psycho.
And it's funny that I mention like all the shitty games with the weird controllers.
And then I bring up Duck Hunt, which was literally just a gun and you would shoot the screen.
A ton of fun.
Blades of Steel.
I think it was released in like 83 or 84.
It was like this really shitty hockey game on NES that me and my brother used to play like for ungodly amounts of time.
It was so good.
And then I think this game was published by Nintendo.
I just remember playing it on a Game Boy Advance, I think, growing up.
It was Fire Emblem Sacred Stones.
One of the best games that I've ever played.
I play it literally every single year during the holiday season.
I play through the entire game again.
It was one of my favorite games of all time.
Definitely recommend.
Download an emulator.
Play it.
Fire Emblem today is really fucking weird.
But back then, great, great series.
And then the other thing that I want to say, especially for like younger people listening to this, and I say that as like somebody who's still pretty young, there was an era, it was like late 90s, early 2000s, when Pokemon would literally just take Pokemon IP and slam it onto like every game that ever existed, ever.
It was like chess, but Pokemon.
It was racing, but Pokemon.
Then it was fighting, but Pokemon.
And it was sports, but Pokemon.
And they all fucking sucked.
In fact, every single one of them was terrible.
I hate to break it to you.
I'm a huge fan.
I play the games all the time.
Pokemon has delivered so many more duds than they have hits.
It's incredible.
Yeah, that's a wild point and very accurate.
Dante in the comments says, worst game of all time has to be Mario missing in time.
I have like a vague recollection of that.
He says it's fucking nonsense.
He says the best game of all time has to be Smash Bros. Melee.
There's not even a close second.
And an honorary mention is one exclusive for N64 called Goemon Great Adventure.
This is an undervalued masterpiece.
That one completely escapes me.
I have no idea.
I'm going to give Dante a Bullyverse NFT, though, for such an elaborate response.
Appreciate that.
I'm sending it to Fitch from Parallel.
Yeah, I mean, the GOAT for me, and I'm actually really surprised that I didn't hear anyone mention this,
was Super Mario 64, the sort of progenitor for modern RPGs.
I mean, that game was amazing, right?
Like, I'm sure we can all hear some of the music in our heads.
Maybe the Shifting Sands level.
Anyone?
I don't really have a worst, but I have a very weird game that I played with my family on N64, and it was Beetle Adventure Racing.
And so you literally had VW Beetles.
Yes, those Beetles.
And you would drive them around and, like, shoot rockets at each other, and basically, you know, it was like Metal Gear, kind of, in a way.
It was really bizarre.
And so not the worst, because I loved it, but objectively, it's probably pretty bad.
But I had some good childhood memories with it.
Absolutely.
Coco, over to you.
Yeah, so, you know, all these conversations made me almost go and buy a Nintendo Switch, like, impulse buy,
because one of the games that people have been talking about for years at me is the Zelda game.
And I've just never had the time to just, because I know, because I also have ADD, and I just know I will lose myself and never come back.
But I just had to shout out to the fact that Nintendo was the reason that my parents let me even have a console,
because, you know, I was, like, in my childhood, I always wanted, you know, the SNES or whichever one it was at the time that was, you know,
my cousins would always let me play on their one, and we wouldn't be able to play at home.
But I begged my parents, and then they eventually considered giving me a Game Boy.
And for some reason, they thought that Game Boy was a, I don't know, a better option, a less addictive option.
But it was the best thing that had to me in my childhood, and I have many great memories playing Mario.
And some of my friends used to bring in some cracked version of games, which had, like, one disc, had, like,
one cartridge, had, like, a hundred different games on it.
And that was just, like, honestly, thanks to Nintendo for bringing that handheld option for kids.
You gotta love it.
Dude, if anybody is bored right now just listening to us, go in the comments.
The amount of nostalgia I'm getting by reading this is overwhelming in the best possible way.
Fresco, I'm sending it back to you.
Yeah, I also had this weird love of Wave Racer.
Not at the dentist.
I just played it at home.
But if you ever want to just feel like you need something in your life, go look up, like, the fan-made remakes of, like,
Wave Racer and what it would look like in Unreal 5, because it's fucking amazing.
Another thing that I want to give credit to when it comes to Nintendo might be, you know,
I don't think people think of this as a Nintendo game, but Tetris and it launching, like, with the GameCube.
At the time, you know, everybody was, like, feverish to play Tetris, which we look at as, like, this, like, whatever game now.
But at the time, I think it came on, like, each original GameCube.
And that was, like, the easiest, most accessible way to play Tetris.
And, you know, I think with that, it created this huge success for the Game Boy.
And, you know, thus sold, you know, one of the best-selling consoles of all time.
Yeah, I was going to say, you were saying Game Boy.
You meant Game Boy.
I meant Game Boy.
You're trying to, like, make the case for Game Boy.
I'm trying to sigh off.
My bad.
Last thing I want to say to Fidget's point, I just played Super Mario 64, like, in the last year.
They have a port on it for the Switch.
Still had a fucking amazing time with it.
And to the Star Fox comment, I think people put, like, Star Fox low and all the versions of Star Fox that came after the original.
Because we all loved the original so fucking much.
And it was so iconic and so good.
And I still do a barrel roll references all the time in my life.
And everything that came from the Star Fox franchise after just always felt like it just didn't live up to, like, what we wanted it to be.
And I think that's why Star Fox has not aged well.
But Star Fox 64 was fucking amazing.
Yeah, facts.
Star Fox 64 was legendary.
And while we're talking Tetris, real quick, I'm just going to say every single version of Tetris that I've ever found on a phone is absolute garbage.
Because they try to do all these things like two-minute rounds and, like, microtransactions to level up and stuff.
I just want endless runner.
You go until it's so fast that you can't keep up with a Tetris.
If anybody knows a mobile version that I can download on a goddamn iPhone, I will be forever in your debt.
Honestly, just get an old Game Boy.
Yeah, facts.
I still know people who are playing it on an old Game Boy.
That might be the only way.
I'm sending it to Mr. Wild Paul and then to Knock and then we're going to move on from this topic.
I just wanted to say that I see what you're doing here, Sam.
With this last couple of Gamifieds, you're trialing your new show, Nintendified, and I'm fully here for it.
I will be there every week for Nintendified, and I think we all will.
So I just wanted to call that.
And also, can I just, I mean, obviously we have this love fest going on.
But dear Lord, has there ever been a company that has created so much joy for so many people and brought us all together in that shared joy?
And we all have different memories.
It's not like we're all pointing to one game.
We're pointing to vastly different experiences that we had with this one company, Nintendo.
And someday I'd like to do, I think, a story time with you all about how that thing that Nintendo has done has truly inspired the journey that Katie and I are on now.
You know, the beginning of my career, and I'm not going to do story time now, but just a micro version.
The beginning of my career was devoted to trying to just do that once, like create a single game that could have that kind of feeling of joy and lifelong attachment that Nintendo games did.
And I got this incredible opportunity to work on Age of Empires and then did it with Words of Friends.
But in both those cases, those companies were sold.
We didn't get to do the Nintendo thing where you go along on that journey with your players for literally decades because you haven't just created a one hit.
You've actually done the thing that I think nobody except Nintendo has done, truly, which is to create a company that can consistently build multiple franchises that create that degree across a variety of different experiences.
That is the true holy grail for a creator.
It's the journey that myself and my wife are on now with the company that is the parent company of Wildcard called Playful.
I'll tell you all the story about it someday, but just an incredible opportunity to share in that joy with you all.
I really appreciate you bringing us together on these Nintendo-ified topics, Sam.
Dude, you're so accurate.
I'd be so down for that story time.
As long as Michael comes back, too, I'll make sure that that space happens.
However, it's not going to be called Nintendo-ified.
It's going to be called Console Wars.
Michael, knock over to you.
Yeah, Paul set me up for a great segue.
I kind of wanted to take it down a notch and say, yeah, Nintendo did all of these great things, but has a company ever missed on the ability for all of those great games to be shared the way Nintendo has?
Their entire life cycle has been, buy our shit, but don't you dare show anybody any of our shit.
It doesn't make sense to me, and it's just so disappointing that we're sitting here having all of these great memories about the games that we played growing up and the games that we still play today.
And it's fucking impossible to see any of this shit on a YouTube or in a live experience or with any third-party vendor, and I feel like it's just such a miss.
And to that note, I'm going to shout out the GameShark for Game Boy.
If you know, you know, but it was the best way to cheat and rip Nintendo off.
Like, Fresco, you seem like you need to get something off your chest.
No, no, that's just, that's, I mean, sometimes Knock says things and I go, like, oh, this guy's such a capitalist.
But then other times he says things, and I'm just like, man, Knock and I had, like, the same childhood.
Also, Sam, I'd love you to co-host my spinoff show of Nintendo-ified called Cubified.
Hey, Knock, I just got to tell you, because, again, but you, you know, I cued it to you, you cued it back to me.
The reality of it is what you're talking about, which is that missed opportunity that Nintendo, unbelievably to this day, continues to just kind of leave that lying on the table.
And there's lots of reasons for this.
They're a Japanese company.
They have a different culture.
They're a hundred-year-old company, you know, et cetera.
That is the core inspiration for what we are doing.
When people would ask me at the beginning of, when we're working on Words of Friends, what are you doing?
And I'm like, I'm just trying to be Nintendo where I know Nintendo won't.
Because they won't make a game for the iPhone because they're so attached to their own hardware.
So I'm just going to go be the Nintendo of the iPhone before they get there.
And that was the actual inspiration for Words of Friends and everything we've done since then.
Like, do you think Nintendo's going to be in Web 3?
So I'm going to go be the Nintendo Web 3 for now.
Is that saying, motivated by Sega?
Sega!
That was amazing.
They do it with Nintendon't.
That's right.
That's what I was doing there.
Thank you for catching that.
I really appreciate it.
That is fucking amazing.
Unapologetic in the comments says, don't forget about Contra and he's linking GIFs.
And it's given me some throwbacks on 8-bit Nintendo.
Absolutely incredible.
Also, Dub joins us from the audience.
Dub, did you want to chime on this briefly before we move on to Dump Date?
Mary, my favorite.
Yeah, I just wanted to emphasize people broke my heart.
I didn't realize I actually requested to even speak in the first place.
I'm taxied right now on the airplane and everyone's looking at me weird.
So I appreciate it.
Thanks for breaking my Star Fox tattoo.
And I guess I need to get it covered at this point.
Maybe a GDC will make that an event.
At the Wolvesdow house, we'll bring the tattoo removal specialist for poor old Dub.
Okay, we move on.
Dump, Date, or Mary.
I think this is one of the best ones that we've had in a while.
I hope it proves to be that.
Big shout out to everybody in the comments that went absolutely ham on the last topic.
I hope you do the same on this one.
We're doing Dump, Date, and Mary.
Augmented reality, virtual reality, and geolocation games.
AR has been gaining a lot of traction.
VR had its time in the shine.
Can it make a comeback?
Will the tech ever get there?
And then geolocation games are popping up.
Even in Web 3, we got Genopets.
Shout out to Jay, a friend of mine.
And of course, the most successful geolocation game, if you're not familiar with too many of them, would be Pokemon Go.
I think Fitch got the hand up first.
Fitch, over to you.
Yeah, I'm going to probably dump geolocation games.
I think Pokemon Go was an amazing sort of phenomenon, but that sector, I just don't know necessarily how many amazing, compelling experiences are implied by my location being tracked by a game.
I'm going to date VR.
I think that VR is really cool, but we're still a ways away from the form factor being where it needs to be.
And then at the end of the day, complete immersion in reality is compelling.
But I'm going to marry AR because I think AR, like blending the real world with, you know, layers on top of it is incredibly compelling.
And I think will create some of, you know, outside of even gaming, some of the most interesting human experiences over the next, you know, 10 to 20 years.
So really, really excited about AR.
VR, also very excited, but slightly less.
So I'm going to, I think just because of some of the more implied restricted nature of it.
So we'll date them.
And then, yeah, we'll dump geolocation.
Appreciate you jumping in first, Lem's my co-host.
I'll send it over to you next.
All right.
I'm going to say VR is still interesting.
I feel like a lot of people think it's just dead and it kind of was like a failed experiment.
And it's going to zero kind of thing.
I feel like it hasn't even had its time to shine yet.
So I'll date VR, though, because it's still, you know, it's still to be determined.
We'll kind of see how it goes out.
AR feels like the best fit for, like, everyday life and just, you know, going about your day.
And you can actually, like, integrate and get some useful benefits out of it.
I feel like it'll be the next evolution of a phone.
So I will marry AR.
I actually like geolocation stuff, too.
I played a lot of Pokemon Go when it first came out.
But I think the other ones are more interesting.
So I'm going to dump geolocation.
I was kind of tempted just to dump VR because I'm pretty sure Fresco is a VR maxi.
And it might be the one thing he likes more than the GameCube.
If I'm remembering right, I might be thinking of someone else.
So I'm pretty sure it's Fresco.
So I'm going to bait you now, Fresco, like, and to tell us why we're all idiots and why we should be marrying VR unless I got the person completely wrong.
Fresco, your rebuttal.
Yeah, I am going to marry VR because VR is fucking incredible.
And I still stand by it.
If you, I think most people don't like VR because they haven't had a great experience with it.
At GDC, we should organize something where we all go to one of those things and play together.
Because I promise you, you guys will all change your mind.
And VR is amazing.
And I think that it's going to have its time in the sun or in the spotlight.
What's the saying?
But, you know, it's going to be there.
It'll be fucking cool one day.
And I, sometimes you marry potential, you know, sometimes they're not there yet, but you see greatness in them.
And I'm going to, this is tough because there's some panelists who have a stake in the game on these things.
I am going to date AR.
I don't, I'm not really excited by it.
Paul has kind of, Paul and I had a great discussion a few weeks back about AR.
And it kind of changed my mind a little bit.
And I think there's going to be some like amazing applications.
I don't want to talk about the game that Paul and I think a friend were working on at one point.
Maybe he can.
But what Paul kind of talked to me about one day, I was like, that's fucking incredible.
And I would love that.
But it feels so far away to me.
And it just doesn't really excite me.
I'm going to, so I'll date that.
Not excited to date, you know, just bored on a Friday.
And then I'm going to dump geolocation games because I don't know.
I'm having fun of genopets though.
I bang my steps on genopets every day, you know, when I go run.
So I like it.
It, you know, I think that those experiences need to be built up on.
There needs to be a layer on top of them other than just like go run around and catch stuff.
Yeah, I'll say, I don't think a lot of people know this, but Niantic is still pumping out geolocation-based games all the time.
Monster Hunter being a big one recently.
I'm going to send it over to Mr. Knock next.
Yeah, it might be a little windy here, but I'm going to dump VR games for the same reason that Fresco's analogy didn't work.
All the parts are there, but it just doesn't quite make sense in that order.
Like, there's something there to VR, but I don't know that it's ever going to be that great.
I'm going to date the geolocation games, but fuck Niantic.
They literally just keep re-skinning Pokemon Go, and it's like, here's Pokemon Go, but Harry Potter, and here's Pokemon Go, but now it's Monster Hunter.
Like, it's just so boring.
I think that there's so much that can be done with that technology, and just nobody is really doing anything super innovative.
Step In and Genopets are two really good games.
I still play Genopets all the time, but I think that there's just so much more to what's going on there.
And then I'm marrying AR, for sure.
AR is so fucking cool.
My cousin, over the Christmas holidays, came over, and he had this, like, toy dinosaur.
He's obsessed with dinosaurs.
And on the dinosaur was, like, this little QR code, and I scanned it, and the fucking dinosaur popped up on my phone, and then, like, on the kitchen table.
And I was, like, enamored.
I was playing with this child's toy for, like, three hours trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.
I just think that there's so much to AR, and I'm definitely super excited to see how that tech continues to develop.
Dude, Icy might be on the single greatest comment run we've ever seen in a single episode of Gamified.
He tags Fresco and says he's going to marry VR because it's the only world in which he can make GameCube a great console.
Michael O'Connor, I'll send it over to you next.
Brilliant.
Listen, Fresco's right again.
GameCube, he was right on.
Talk to him!
He's right on the VR.
Listen, geographic locations shouldn't even be in the mix here.
I don't even know how it made it in.
It's like a feature, you know, whereas VR and AR are these vast, you know, platform opportunities.
So let's just straightaway dump the geographic location stuff.
You know, very limited use cases, I think.
And then we go into an interesting one.
I mean, listen, AR is certainly an interesting bet.
It's the right one to bet on when you're thinking about it right now.
We've got Vision Bro coming out from Apple.
You know, that's going to make a huge splash.
There's really clear use cases for it in terms of, like, you know, social and professional cases and stuff like that.
So, you know, and increasingly there's games.
You know, we've seen a lot of pass-through opportunities coming out on Quest as well.
And pass-through is getting better and better.
So we're seeing more cool AR games.
But I'm only going to date AR because, for me, I'm a VR maxi.
And I'm profoundly interested in the idea of what it's like to be totally immersed in a space and what it's like to create for those spaces.
So to feel a sense of presence and to share that sense of presence with people inside of virtual gamified worlds is just so cool.
It's just so cool.
And to consider the grammar about how we develop games for that and how we can write or rewrite or create rulebooks for, you know, for creators.
Because it's a frontier, you know.
So, you know, I know Paul's worked in this as well.
And, you know, a couple of years ago when I was working on VR stuff, it truly felt like a frontier.
We're like, okay, we've no idea what people want, what's supposed to happen.
Let's figure it out.
We didn't know anything about presence or immersion.
And we all had to write our own rulebooks, which was so exciting.
So VR is this incredible thing.
It's a way for people to connect in profound ways.
As a brief aside, I had this one amazing moment with SteelSix with me when I was in VR chat.
And I went into a cyberpunk garage, which is like some techno club that exists inside of VR chat.
And then someone came up to me called Dust Bunny and was like, hey, you're Michael.
And I was like, what?
And I had this connection with this anime in front of me, which was just a profoundly odd and inspiring kind of position to be in inside of this virtual techno club.
So I'm a big believer in the future of it.
And I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
That's awesome, man.
And I wanted to give a quick shout out to everybody in the comments, 325 comments.
We had a little bit of a lull throughout the holidays.
Thanks for everybody showing up throughout the holidays.
But it's so great to be back and have this amazing gamified energy.
It's so great to have a voice again that works.
And I can scream intros at the top of my lungs again.
Thank you so, so much.
I'm going to give that shrapnel operator to Icy because he's absolutely been fucking killing it.
And then the last two Bullyverse NFTs, I'm going to keep a couple of them and give them out to people that are retweeting the space.
I know we have like 70 retweets.
I'll give everybody 15 more minutes.
And then after the show, I'll reach out to a couple of people to give those out.
Sinjin, I'm going to tag you in, man.
AR, VR, and geolocation-based games.
Dump, date, and marry.
You know, as a former Korean government analyst in the technology ministry, I've had to review a lot of new technologies.
And I'm definitely dumping VR.
Not only have I lost 200K in a fucking seed fucking round on a fucking stupid-ass VR project, VR porn does not float my boat.
And porn is the number one, you know, litmus test for real technology.
And so fuck that.
VR is just not going to happen.
You know why?
Because you can't flip through shit when things get boring.
So it's just garbage.
And number two is I'm going to definitely date AR because AR is going to save marriages.
Can you imagine having your AR goggles on and they're all, like, nice and light and then you're having a threesome with your wife?
But you're not actually having a threesome with your wife because now you have, like, a foursome or a fivesome of these other ladies that are there with you.
And it's going to save a whole bunch of marriages.
Absolutely.
Divorce is going to go way down.
And, you know, she can have, like, a, you know, a fivesome as well on her side.
But, you know, you're having your fivesome on your side and it's just going to be fucking fantastic.
And you guys are the most unimaginative nerds on the planet.
Geolocation, I'm going to marry that because that's the only thing that's going to save humanity.
Because, you know, think about this.
Like, when you have, like, these fitness apps or whatever like that or when they get more creative or even when they're integrated with AR.
So it is somewhat of a feature, right?
But, like, kids actually going outside and, you know, doing physical activity.
And myself as an ex-pro rugby player, you know, when you look at geolocation and that's married a little bit with AR and stuff like that.
I mean, for pro sports and stuff like that and training, I think it's going to be fantastic tracking all that, you know, movement.
And also, I think, even though, like, so many people, especially you nerds here who probably are, like, total incels anyways, you know, haven't done anything outside for the longest time.
You know, I think it's really going to be the only solution to safe humanity.
I love how he calls the audience the incels.
But at the beginning, he was talking about VR porn.
It's like the best.
No, no, no, no.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
It didn't float my boat.
But AR, man, that's going to save everyone's marriage.
Yeah, by the way, I agree.
When these technologies were first hitting, I got my hands on one of the very first Oculus headsets.
And then one of the first conversations I had with my wife was like, okay, so when AR, when this all kind of fully evolves and we're all just wearing the eyeglasses from Apple or whatever, is it okay if I turn you into Scarlett Johansson for part of the day?
And she's like, yeah, as long as I can turn you into Lee Pace.
And I'm like, all right, cool.
We got our agreement then.
Yeah, there you go, man.
It's all about communication and marriage.
Exactly.
Lee Pace, great choice for Katie, by the way.
That's excellent.
No surprise that she would have immaculate taste.
Wild Paul, I'll send it over to you.
Okay, so you got to – okay, first for context, I worked on Lucky's Tale.
This is, again, following the theme earlier, being Nintendo where Nintendo won't.
And we decided, well, Nintendo won't get to the Oculus, won't get to VR as quickly as we can, so let's go be Nintendo there.
And we created a game called Lucky's Tale that actually bundled with the original Oculus.
It's in the box.
It's on the back of the box.
It was incredible.
One of the most successful VR games of all time thanks to that incredible relationship we had with that founding team, Palmer, and those guys that founded and created the Oculus.
So that's been an amazing journey.
But with all that context said, I'm going to dump the shit out of VR.
I've been doing – I've worked in it for many, many years.
And in all ways, it's just worse than what AR and mixed reality is going to be.
I've always known that.
Most people who do the work in the industry have known this for a long time.
And, in fact, you can see it's why headsets like the Apple Vision that's coming out and all the latest versions of Meta are all about trying to approximate the AR experiences that are going to be happening in the future when we have better optics and all technologies advance by adding all these cameras and basically turning a VR headset into an AR headset.
Because what you want, really, is you want the ability to selectively block out and or introduce or reintroduce parts of reality mixed together with that.
That's where the ultimate experiences happen.
And so that leads me to the obvious marriage with AR and MR.
I will speak to what Fresco was saying just briefly, which is as a game developer, it is the technology I have been most excited about, I guess, since I was a kid and read about it in sci-fi books.
But certainly once I started to understand the potential of this and then when I first got my hands on that duct tape prototype that Palmer at Oculus handed me when I visited his office and him and John Carmack here in Texas, the creator of Doom, were working on this together back before this was back before the Kickstarter and everything else.
And I was like, oh, my God, it's here. It's fucking here. And I was like, I have to drop everything and make and make something for this because it's happening.
It's happening. Like we can create experiences that make you feel like you're inside them.
And so I dove headfirst. We started a company. We created those early the early VR game.
And like I said, it wasn't it wasn't what I had fully hoped. It was too easy to make people sick.
We weren't able to to balance full immersion with elements of reality to give you a sense of grounding and to make most people comfortable.
But when that happens, it is going to unlock an entirely new category of games.
And again, this could turn into a whole story time. I'm not going to do it.
But just briefly, the thing that Fresco is talking about, my friend, his name is Graham Devine.
He's the creator of Seventh Guest, if you guys all remember that game.
I just read about him in a book.
He has had. Yeah, he has had the most incredible career.
He was at Ensemble Studios, the lead designer of Age of Empires for a while.
We got to be good friends. He then went on to be the head of games or what they called the Wizard of Games at Magic Leap, if you guys remember that company.
And so for a while there in his career, we were both working on these kind of technologies.
And he was working on trying to work on the very cutting edge of what AR games might be.
Of course, Magic Leap, as the technology in his company, let him down, didn't really deliver on the hardware vision.
But man, some of the things that we were talking about back then, there was this game pitch.
And again, I'm going to try to keep it short.
But I think he called like Your Haunted House.
And this is an example of where if you just imagine what this technology will eventually be.
And I'm talking about where we're all just wearing a pair of glasses.
I don't just mean us nerds and social consensus.
I mean like RYs.
I mean everybody in the world, just like everybody has a smartphone right now.
That technology is coming.
It will be a pair of glasses that is so comfortable, so lightweight.
Everybody's wearing it.
And the moment that happens, it unlocks a new type, a whole new type of experience that as game designers we haven't even been able to think about yet.
And definitely people aren't imagining when they think about what kind of games could be created.
This game that Graham was imagining, like I said, I think it was called Your Haunted House.
And it was just, imagine that you wake up one day, your friend tells you, install this game, it's really fun.
You're like, okay, you install it.
And the game's like, cool, I'll check in later.
You know, you're going to have this experience.
You wake up in the morning, you go to brush your teeth in the mirror, and a fog appears on the mirror with these words that are written by a ghost.
And over the next couple of weeks, you discover that your house, before you bought it, was actually owned by a family, and this terrible murder happened.
And your house is haunted, and you have to help solve that murder.
Over the course of days, you might walk in your kitchen, and you see that there's a taped outline of a dead body on the floor, and the ghost is there wanting to tell you a story about this.
Of course, how this integrates into your daily life, and how you're like, fuck off, I'm in a meeting, stop trying to do it.
You know, like, there's all sorts of things to figure out as game designers, experience designers, but the opportunity to create a game, and this ties into the location-based stuff that we're talking about, all becomes one thing at this point, once this hardware is available.
It's a completely new way to think about creating interactive game experiences.
I'm so excited about it.
I'm waiting for it my entire career, my whole life.
It's coming.
I wish it was here already, but I know it's not.
It's not actually still going to be for a while.
There's just enormous hurdles with the optics and the technology of it, but when it gets here, it's going to change everything.
I love it, Paul.
I see in the comments, again, dump VR, not the world we want to live in.
Date, geo, location-based game.
Seems fun.
Pretty cool concept.
Great use cases.
And he says, merry augmented reality.
It's the future.
He's also legitimately trying to start gamified bingo, which I support and will definitely provide a prize pool for if anybody pulls it together.
So if you want to support that, go to Icy's page and make sure it happens.
Phil also says, I'll date VR.
It doesn't really jump out to me as something that's interesting yet, but it could be cool.
Going to marry augmented reality because it sounds so freaking cool.
And then geo is kind of hard to dump because I like Pokemon Go, but I haven't tried anything else.
I got to say, I'm with Fresco on this one.
I'm marrying virtual reality, maybe because I've had some core experiences throughout my life that have really been amazing.
A couple of years ago, my girlfriend took me to one of those places that's like 5,000 square feet on my birthday.
And you can literally run around with the headset on.
And it was a really cool, like, 45-minute experience.
And then when I was a kid, I had what I'm sure was a terrible, terrible graphical experience.
But it was so awesome to me as, like, an 8-year-old.
And it stuck with me for the rest of my life as, like, one day I'll definitely be able to do this and it won't suck.
And for whatever reason, I've held on to that.
Fresco, your last words.
Yeah, I'm going to say that when people say, explain, like, concepts like your haunted house, right, that sounds amazing.
The reason it can't work is because people like Lem's won't even tell us their fucking first name.
Do you think he's going to wear glasses all day that show where he is and where he's going all the time?
There's so much risk for that that people – none of these weirdos are going to be, like, willingly just letting people track their house.
If I tried to describe to you 20 years ago how much of your life and identity you would have put online and be sitting on this freaking Twitter space telling the world about your favorite video games and what you had for breakfast or whatever, you would have also said the same thing.
So, yeah, let's see.
All right.
Yeah, fair point.
Fair point.
Do we deal with all these people who are, like, undocks and all these things?
I don't know, man.
Second, I think, like, where VR gets really exciting from, like, an experience is, like, sports, right?
Like, can you imagine just having a lightweight headset on and seeing fucking D'Angelo Russell hit a three and then doing the ice in my veins thing from your home?
You don't have to, like, spend $3,000 on Laker tickets.
I also think I love the idea as somebody who used to be an athlete and played baseball in college, all these people who are, like, oh, I could have gone pro.
And we go, like, put a headset on.
See what it's like to hit against Shohei.
You know, could you have gone pro or did you hit 240 in JV and, you know, should stay in your lane a little bit?
And on that note, when the time comes, I'm challenging Nock to one-on-one VR basketball and motherfucking dunk on him like Vince Carter.
Dude, if you try to make Gamified a baseball space one more time, it's, like, four consecutive weeks, dude.
I'm just kidding.
I love you.
Baseball and G-Cube.
That's it.
That's the Presco show.
Real quick, Sam, I got to run.
I got to go to dinner with my mom.
So, love you guys.
You know, this is the best space in this industry, and it's not even close.
I'll see you guys next time.
I love you, Fitch.
Thanks for being 10 times.
Love you, brother.
Koji.
Give a hug to mom.
Nock, over to you.
Yo, I'm so telling Koji on you tomorrow night.
I wanted to say, like, part of my issue with the entire VR thing is just, like, the barrier to entry is still relatively high compared to what you can get for the same price points.
So, one of my really good friends runs most of the North American influencer marketing for Oculus.
I'm not going to dive deeper than that.
But one of the issues that they have is that it seems really cool.
People are really excited about the experiences.
Some of the games are genuinely good.
He always brings an Oculus every time we get together so we can all test the waters a little bit and learn a little bit about what's actually going on.
And there are genuinely cool experiences that you can play.
The problem is when an Oculus costs almost as much as a PS5, you're going to pick the PS5 11 out of 10 times.
And you take it a step further and you look at the thing that Apple's delivering.
I mean, the price point there is, like, $3,000, $4,000.
I just spent, you know, $4,000 on an absolute fucking spaceship of a computer that is going to allow me to, like, I don't know, have the game come out of the fucking screen.
And it's going to be good for the next decade.
And that's, like, entry level for what the product that Apple is creating.
I think when you're looking at, like, financial tradeoffs, the tech for VR still has to come a long way to make it more accessible relative to its competitors.
Because I don't think anybody's doing, like, the mental equation of, like, I have $500.
I'm going to choose an Oculus over a PS5.
I've got $4,000 to spend.
Let's build, like, a massive computer with a 4090 in it or get the Apple, whatever the fuck they're calling it.
Like, I think that that's actually the biggest barrier to VR.
It's not that the experiences aren't good because a lot of them are genuinely fun.
And it's not that there aren't plenty of devs who are trying to make that something that is compelling for people.
The problem is it's just way too expensive for what it is.
I completely agree with that, by the way.
That's what I was talking about.
The barriers there are just too much.
You know, it really has been a little heartbreaking for me because if you think about it, rewind to that time when I, like, just dropped everything.
It was like, I'm going to commit my life to making VR games.
And it was a little bit of a heartbreaking experience.
I remember sitting there and really grappling with the reality of these barriers just not being something that no matter how incredible an experience.
I used to tell people, I'm like, when I was trying to make the case for it, I was like, you know what?
If you create an experience that's so valuable in people's lives, they'll do insane things.
Like, dig a giant fucking $100,000 hole in their backyard and fill it with water.
That's called building a pool because having a pool is so amazing that everybody does it, right?
So talk about barriers, right?
But, like, it turns out that I think it's not about – and you'll still hear people in the industry say, no, no, we just haven't had the, you know, the words with friends moment for Oculus.
And when it happens, then everybody will run out and buy a headset.
And I'm like, no, I think that no matter what, these barriers have to come down, price like you're talking about, NOC, but definitely just accessibility.
You know, I think that we're all willing to accept a $1,000 device that does all the things because we're all holding smartphones right now in our hands that are basically that.
And, you know, in the range, it's like $500 to $1,000.
So we'll accept that kind of thing.
But those barriers of comfort and accessibility, I just – I think no matter what, that's going to hold it back.
But the great thing is technology is inevitable, and those changes are coming, and it will be a device that we can all sort of integrate in our lives seamlessly on a daily basis and convenience.
And when that happens, like we've been talking about, it's going to change everything.
I can't wait.
And we're probably going to be all here talking about it together as we go through that, and that's, you know, AR-ified or whatever in the future.
I can't wait.
And just to remind anybody that's in the audience and isn't here every week or doesn't know Paul Bettner, this is one of the only people on planet Earth that has operated a game that has done well on VR.
So if anybody knows, it's this man.
I really appreciate your thoughtful takes on that.
Knock the hand win up.
I'll give you the last word, and then we're going to wrap this bad boy up.
Yeah, this is just a shout-out to some guy.
His name's Mike.
I see him all the time, and I've been meaning to say this for like a month and a half.
His bio is Real G's move in silence like lasagna.
It makes me laugh every fucking time that I read it.
I'm ashamed to admit that he gets me with it 100% of the time.
But, Mike, I see you all of the time on all of the shows that we do.
We love you.
Keep showing up.
Make me laugh every time you do.
Shout-out to Wheezy F Baby, the goat rapper.
All right.
As we lower our weapons and conclude this exhilarating journey through Gamified, let's unleash a thunderous tribute to the titans that paved the path for us.
Behold, Shrapnel, the official game of Gamified, proudly powered by Avalanche, the official blockchain of Gamified.
In the vast realm of FPSs, Shrapnel stands as the ultimate commander, orchestrating an arsenal of artillery where every tactical endeavor weaves a tale of turmoil and triumph amid the echoing cacophony of explosive shells.
Now it's your turn to embark on an epic expedition to Shrapnel.com.
Suit up in your digital armor.
Load your ledger with coveted loot.
And lock in your coordinates for the next combat conquest.
And as we conclude our exhilarating expedition through Gamified, let's not forget the frosty fortress that underpins our thrilling journey through the future of finance and fun.
It's Avalanche, the official blockchain of Gamified.
Let's unleash a resounding applause for Avalanche, our polar pioneer, fearlessly carving crystalline past through its unwavering strength.
Avalanche empowers us to navigate the digital landscape with the warmth of wisdom and the waves of entertainment.
Take a page out of Avalanche's book, my fellow adventurers.
Stay cool, stay curious, and mark your calendars for next week at the same time and same place.
I want to give a huge, huge, huge shout out to our panel that was absolutely incredible today.
Michael O'Connor with Today the Game.
They've got an NFT coming up.
I've played today two different times, was blown away both times.
Super, super excited and bullish about what they're creating.
Thank you so much, Michael, for lending your experience here today.
It was incredible.
Sinjin, of course, with my angry Yakuza girlfriend.
Always crushing it.
You guys have been out of control lately.
Alex, behind the shrapnel account, so amazing having you for the first time.
Thank you for being cooler than Dubb.
Saigo and Tony all combined into one.
Of course, Wild Paul, the man who has launched more legendary games than I can count on a single hand.
Lem's the co-host with the most.
Appreciate you so much, brother.
Fresco from Meiji as well, always bringing humor, insights, and giving us something to laugh at with your takes on GameCube.
I appreciate that more than you know.
And, of course, Wild Paul, on Friday, you have a playtest for Wild Card, a little tournament that I'm going to be shoutcasting, which I'm really excited for, along with Shady Sheet.
I can't wait.
Yeah, make sure you guys can do that.
Let's see it.
That's going to be amazing.
And, of course, Fitch in parallel, who had to jet a little bit early, and Bryson was also on the panel today.
So, big shout-out to those guys as well.
We will see you guys same time, same place next week.
Big shout-out to everybody in the comments that stuck with us through the entire show.
Love you guys.
See you then.
Wild Card.
Woo, Sinjin, love you.
Woo, Sinjin, love you.
