two rugs and two days on spaces, but we're making this work. We're making this work.
We're in a way for a couple more folks to jump in from the Stardust team. We'll get a little bit of a retweet train going.
All right, I see a T from the start us team. We've got Ed Chang in the house and D from the start us team
We might be waiting for a couple of more speakers here in the meantime. Let's get a quick retweet train going on the spaces. Like I mentioned at the top, we got rigged again. This is what happens when we try to ratio Elon in some of his threads. We get that Twitter retaliation, but it's all good.
We're gonna get started in this minute moment here. Everyone in the spaces, hit me with a quick retweet. Let's get some more folks in here.
We're talking about low code NFTs and building games today with the Stardust team. Super excited for this conversation. We're filling up nicely. Again, let's do some more retweets, get some more people in here.
my hosts, my co-host and my speakers. I'm mute. Let me know if you guys are able to talk. Let's do a quick mic check. Hey, what's up? How's it going? All right, we got a teeth. Yo, yo, got Ed. I'm on an air pod. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, we can hear you. Sweet.
Andy wanted to hit me with a quick mic check.
And anybody wrote a Canon. I think that's you on start us you want to hit me with a quick mic check?
No, I think that's Andy actually canons is on a canons on a plane to continue to hear me. We're not a canons today, but we got we got any in the house that we good
No mullet though. No no less effective. Alright, I see a couple of other people have requested to speak Hex live severe. We'll get you up here at the end of the spaces. Really glad that you
guys are excited to talk, but we'll pull people up on stage as we get close to the end. So let's get another quick retweet train going. We'll start in 30 seconds.
Kyle, if that's you on the Adelaunch main handle, let's get a quick retreat train going, get some more people in here.
Okay, all right, we'll get going and people will share as we go. Like I said, super said, have y'all here? Sorry about technical difficulties. We had we had a we had goon post something funny on an Elon thread a couple of weeks ago and since then Twitter is just not working the same for us. So I'm
I'm not pointing any fingers, I'm not pointing any fingers, but Bluebird and Red Triangle have not been getting along last week, but we're making it work. Alright, we're going to jump in. Like I said, super excited to have the Avalog team and start a team here today. If you guys haven't checked out the news,
Start-ups just expanded support for their platform to Abwant and we're really excited to help a bunch of game devs accelerate building their projects and Today to get us kicked off I want to do a quick intro with the start-up team can can one of you guys jump up here and kind of talk a bit about what Starbus does?
I'll let Andy do it. Andy does it every day. Andy, you want to go?
I guess he might have gotten drug. He's been having this problem. I think we had this the other day. So I'll jump in. My name is Othiv Chief Operating Officer at Stardust. I've been here about a year and a half part of this spent
about eight years at Facebook and help build the games business from the outside. Start-Ust is essentially an office-cation layer for developers to build in a simple rest API like they do across a bunch of different tech platforms instead of having to interact directly with the blockchain.
And for users, you know, through our custodial wallet and just overall end to end solution, we make the onboarding of users onto that, you know, Web 3 experience or crypto experience easier. The thesis is that developers, game developers specifically should have focus really
on the thing that they do best, which is making games and allow technology like start us to deal with the blockchain. And then from a user's perspective, you know, the thing that I always talk about is for what through gaming to really take off, we need that candy crush moment, right, where, you know,
my grandmother on the other side of the world can play candy crush because it's just really easy to onboard. And so from our perspective, the complexities of learning like a meta-mass is not kind of what the masses are going to want, especially as more traditional casual gamers come onto the scene.
And so our focus on that side is really to offescape that whole web three experience. So that's a little bit about start us. You know, we've raised from some really great VC firms like Framework, Michael and Vance are great partners, blockchain, capital, accrual, distributed, global.
And we work with some of the largest, not only web2 publishers like Fulton Point Games, but some of the most exciting web3 publishers or developers like Midnight Society and Block Tackle was making Skate X. And so there's a bunch of other really great friends, but we can't talk about those, but we're really excited to
work with Avalanche, you know, Ed has been fantastic. He's been chasing us down for a year talking about how special this community is and so really excited to finally be a part of it.
And we're super happy to have you. The avalanche community is indeed special. And if you guys have seen some of the recent news, we are absolutely putting our foot on the gas when it comes to the gaming ecosystem. Lots of you and Andy are new to spaces with me.
I'll give you guys this I do like to ask the spicy questions and we're gonna jump in right now The first one is probably one that's on every mind right is why is this text so important and Why or why why or why not should devs be building the stuff in house?
like how how how should they be thinking about you know when and their developments like old issue consider maybe working with a partner like Stargust and when is it appropriate for them to be doing this in house what's your take yeah so you know I think for in terms of like
And so getting in early is really important when we look at some of the developers that we've been working with like in the society and a bunch of others. We've been working with those partners for over 12 months and really being involved as a whole.
Yeah, because my time decision up to the end of your question. I'm like this. This is why developers should build this internally or work with a partner like us. You know, there's a lot of pieces to this, right? I think one of the things that we talk about internally is
We have this thing called boomerang because the tech looks so easy that a lot of developers come in and they're like, you know what? I can build a pretty easy wallet solution. I can build the minting stuff and you know work on that. But one of the things that we learned with tilting point was they actually
They have a spreadsheet. For us to do this at scale, it would cost us about a million dollars a year and a bunch of overhead and a bunch of developers dedicated to it.
to get to where we started 12 months ago. And so the actual dollar perspective, but also from a time perspective, is really, really important. And so,
Hello, can you hear me? It looks like we may have lost lots of out there for a little bit. I'll tell you guys. You want to try seeking again? Yeah, yeah, we lost you first. Yeah, can you guys hear me now?
So the time from a money perspective and a time perspective, the cost that you have, it really makes more sense. The other piece of it is security and compliance.
kind of art thesis which was different than most people's like 12 to 15 months ago is we're an equity-only business we don't have a token we've been working on getting our money transmitter licenses for you know 15 months we have five licenses we have another 10 to 15 by the end of the quarter and the goal is to have like full transmitter regulatory
and compliance framework is really, really important for where we think the industry will go on a state-by-state basis. So, you know, time, money, regulation. Those are the three reasons and compliance. Those are the three or four reasons that we can really help speed up the process.
Andy, I see your hand up. Do you want to add on the battle bit? It's hard to perfect perfection, but I'll just add a little bit of color, flavor to it. On the BD side, I can't tell you how many conversations I have where the CEO or the CTO kind of just like sags or shoulders at the end of the meeting is like, well, I wish we had talked to you six months ago because we
built out a bunch of stuff and we can go to market twice as fast now if we just scrap it and use you. But then further, because earlier is the better, but then sometimes the cool thing about Web3 Dev is that anyone can just get in and start building and do things on blockchain themselves and learn lots of tools out there. So a lot of people can
come to us, already having built some, you know, Web 3, Box Chain aspects to their game. And the cool thing, let's just remember my favorite conversation is because the nice thing about that is they know exactly in depth the problems that we solve. So they might have a token, which is awesome. And I love that games can have that kind of direct to consumer on chain relationship.
And they can continue to flex that muscle and maintain that relationship, that user flow. But then they'll use something like Stardust to go ahead and actually scale things on chain. So they can kind of have two parallel flows of what they've already built, even if it's far down the line, and then use us to go and hit those millions of users and have the focus for those users be the gameplay.
I'm going to throw it over you. You come from Web2 gaming, you've been around the block. You're also talking to game developers every single day. And we've had conversations about how game development cycles are really long as it is. You add in Web3 and you start to layer on more time and more costs. Can you speak to
How what started as building is really important in the conversations you're having, especially with traditional established web2 developers? Yeah, it's an awesome thing. We've been talking for a year plus now. I've spent time with them at their offices. We spend a lot of time with them. We go for meals and everything. I think what's really exciting
is that they attack this like back in as a service from a few different areas, right? So I think the first is when we think about like the UI and UX of a web 3gmat scale, I think what is it? The recent report was like there was maybe a 800,000 gaming wallets like in all of web 3, right? And like
that number is going to increase significantly this year. But, you know, at a baseline, you need to offer at least the same user experience as someone accessing the game from Web2, right? Whether they're downloading on their phone, you know, whether they're downloading the app from Steam or the Epic Game Store, like you need to be able to like hop into the game
and get started right away. Offering this kind of custodial wallet experience is super important. It's a necessity for the games today. The second piece is also just the scale of NFT minting and NFT marketplace that they offer. Other chains that may not be able to scale as well as avalanche.
It's very important that your NFT sales and your drops go really well and they're just going to really unified experience across the board similar to how you think about almost like Unity or Unreal or like, you know, Prisma for Web 2 gaming and I think it feels a really big need in the market.
And then beyond that kind of the team just goes above and beyond with the games like they spend a lot of time on a case by case basis I've seen it myself some of the games that they've talked to our ecosystem even before you know they were officially supporting avalanche so the team is just all about value-ad which like aligns really well with how we think about game
gaming PD as well. We had I literally I want to add so much value I will help change at I will have at change divers. Like that's how much value we want to add to the ecosystem but like all joking aside, one of the key things about our team is is we want to be the nicest most approachable team even if you don't work with us.
We want to leave the relationship in a good way. You might need to work with this in the future, but your interactions with everybody on our team should be A+ because that is the most important thing. We're all figuring this out together and being transparent, being honest, and being great partners is so important to our go-to-market function.
I agree with you. There's never a wrong time to have good vibes. So I'm really glad you guys are approaching it that way. But you mentioned something that I want to double click a little bit into. You said games may need to work with you in the future.
What is something that you guys are seeing that is really driving game devs and kind of come in and work with you? And how are you guys stacking maybe your different solutions of positioning them for game developers at different stage of their development cycle?
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think what we're learning is something that like anybody that's been in gaming for a long time knows is that like different developers want different things because they have different genres of games. They have different economies within the games. They have different game design. And so, you know, the problem is,
products that we're coming out with of the next quarter are really going to attack that and make sure that not only do we have an end-to-end managed platform for some of the largest developers in the space, but we're also building more flexible and custom stuff for
We're going to continue to build
And I think the thing that's really important that Ed highlighted, thank you Ed for highlighting is like the scale piece, right? You know when you look at like what we were able to do with the net society, I don't know if there's any other solutions in the space that are competitive to us, I can say, you know they were able to do that.
to at that time and we've gotten much faster, up to 25,000 NFTs per hour. I think that number is probably two or three Xs that now, based on how we've improved the system. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it. Andy, I don't know if there's anything you want to add. Just to confirm the question was where in the death cycle should people talk to start us?
That's right. Or some of the common needs that you guys are seeing in the market that you're serving. Oh, yeah. So yeah, I think we already talked kind of like where, you know, the answer is anytime, but as far as common needs, Optif did a good cover there. I think another thing that is great about startups is we can take a consultative approach.
a lot of people come into the space or they look in a scale of space and they don't exactly know how or they don't have the chops on either side of Web 2 Web 3 when it comes to like a truly scalable game. And that's one of the awesome things about our team is that we've got a background in you know you name it you know we've got huge players at Facebook and
And then on the blockchain side too. So we take a very consultative approach where we want to be like the first call when you run into problems. We can, we can, you know, answer pretty much any question and help guide you. We are by no means, you know, telling you what to do, but we're happy to be a sounding board and we have a huge client
success team that's very active and there to make sure that you feel taken care of as a game dev. And just on the team point because Andy brought up a great point like on the tech side when you look at like our leadership on the tech side, you know, those are actually people that worked at Zingha and at glue and at EA and at
have built games and have built them for scale. Like Martin who runs our engineering group and Gordon runs product, like both have been in games for a decade. And so there is a level of understanding that when you look at it from that perspective, the products that we're building, we're building it from a game developers perspective.
That's awesome. I'm starting to understand why Ed says such great things about Sartis and why we've been pursuing this partnership for so long. Tech and team are also two of the core values that that ablyent cuts, right? And so I'm really glad that we share in that. So we're talking a bit about team. I want to talk a bit about tech. You guys, you guys say
the word scale a couple times, right? Scale is something that that avalanche is also providing for a lot of game developers. And now that you guys are, I've been part of the ecosystem for a little bit now, talk to me about what, what, what made you guys expand avalanche? Like what were some of the things from a tech perspective that you guys have been keeping your eyes on?
Yeah, I think, you know, the two things that I hear from the ecosystem are definitely, you know, the team, right? I think we talk a lot about that on that, but the scalability and then, you know, the subnet product, you know, I think when we think about developing
that had an app chain thesis early on, like getting to that market first and then having a fully baked product that is fairly easy to implement, I think it's something that developers are pretty excited about. So that's the one big thing that I hear on my side.
Yeah, to expand on that is pretty much the same thought, but just in general kind of started to build on layer 2s because gaming is volume intensive. It's tech intensive and we're going to need that space to be able to operate. And that's why RunLayer choose in the first place and then Avalanche definitely led the charge on, you know, okay.
Let's scale it again, and that's what gaining will need. So I think everyone wants to gravitate towards a space that has an eye towards scaling, and then us at the individual level allows for an individual to scale very easily with the simple API. So it's a very natural synergy. I'm sorry to use that word.
Nice for Sharon. Let's kind of get a little bit zoomed out here. I know that both teams here are super involved in Web Through Gaming and I'm curious what games you guys
have your eyes on right now and we talked a lot about scaling, talked a lot about integrating NFTs, we talked about development excellence, like what are some project teams or games that you guys think are doing that really well?
Yeah, so you know, it would be hard to not talk about Dr. Disrespect and you know, dead drop and you know what that's going to be like as far as a user onboarding perspective because he has that massive Web2 audience so we love the idea that you know if that goes well he's going to bring a ton of people into this
So just in general, we're super excited about that team because they have so much Web2 exposure and they can kind of do a lot for what, you know, I would call setting a good example for what a Web3 game should be at scale. You know, a lot of pop in on top of that. Yeah, no, I like, you know, that's
That team is crazy good. I've worked with Summit for 10 years, built a bunch of really cool gaming companies. They had to bungee guys making the game and then disrespect those. The one thing about them that I thought was really fantastic is their community drops where they give the community
and those people can come in and actually play pieces of the game and give real time feedback. That is really cool. Really excited about Trap No on Avalanche. That team is also fantastic. The game looks really great. A couple other games that I'm really excited about.
pirate nations that's a more casual game. I'm it who built farm bill like you know he helped like really make social gaming a thing and his thesis around Ethereum and just like blockchain in general is like very deep and so I think he's gonna build a casual game that's gonna
on board a ton of people. And then, you know, some lesser known games on our side like pixels and the definitely excited about Skate X because like I love the Tony Hawk games and so having a mobile game that's going to be like Tony Hawk that also is Web 3 by the block tackle team is super exciting. So those are those are a couple of the ones that that I'm pretty excited
about. Hey, as a fellow of Meta OG, it warms my heart to have you mentioned far build. I spent a lot of times collecting pixel cows. So those are those are always good times. And I see you would mute yourself. What games do you have your eyes on right now? Yeah, I think within within our ecosystem, like it's going to be really exciting.
exciting, like this quarter and next, because we're starting to have a lot of these games that we've been working really closely with in our ecosystem, start to launch their betas or actually the full versions. There's a lot of really cool web 2 genre parallels that have a really unique web 3 element, and then I can think about
Fable-born, right? The team there. It's like a mobile title. It's like Clash of Clans, Base Builder, meets like Archer Clash. It's a really fun twist on that. We've got the guys at Polestar who you know very well, Garrison, and you know, it's kind of like this Web 3 RTS style. Of course, we've got Ascenders, like the NMRPG#
Autif mentioned, Shrapnel, we bought Battle for Geostone, which is like a MOBA built in Web 3 with some former pros that are behind it. There's a bunch of others that we haven't announced. We've got like Metados, we've got a bunch of different games that we're excited about.
I probably missed a bunch, but those are some of the top of mine right now as I'm thinking about the roster that we have this year amongst many others. I love it. There's some amazing titles there. I want to flip it back to the Stardust Tech platform right now. We talked a bit about Web2 Developers, developers early in their
cycle, right? And I think, you know, working with a partner like Stardust makes a ton of sense. You're getting in there. You're helping them develop infrastructure and foundation. What about some of these titles that we've just talked about where they're kind of deep in their development cycle? What are some of the things that Stardust is providing these projects? Or where are some ways that Stardust is helping these guys accelerate their development in the#
Yeah, so I mean it really depends on the team and what they're looking to do and what their timelines are. You know, we do everything from like getting into the weeds with like technical integration support to you know, we don't ever get into you know,
know, fundraising games, but we definitely like tried to be kind of a consultative approach, like I said before, on like the business side of the house and account management. So it really kind of depends, but we like I said before, love to do it all, I'd love to hear what Aftiff has to add to that.
Yeah, I think one of the things back to the point that Andy made earlier about being consultative is like, it's really important to understand the business, right? Like, what is that developer trying to accomplish? What's the game? What's the genre? What's the audience that they're going after? How are they thinking about like, tokenomics and FTs?
I think from our perspective, it really varies from developer to developer, but getting in deep and understanding how our technology can actually help accelerate their business on a case-by-case basis, as Andy said earlier, is kind of what really differentiates us. And so when we think about our team and we look
at one of the things that we try to really hammer home and any kind of talk about is like our sales team is never going to be big. We're going to build a lot of process out. Again, you said meta OG, we're going to learn how to service millions of clients with a few people. That is our goal, right? We're going to invest
in the business is really on the client's success site and the solutions engineering site. When we look at the gaps from blockchain to blockchain, the number one thing that we see is that these blockchains do a great job of signing developers up, putting a tweet out, a press release, and then it's really difficult for developers to actually get a hold of those blockchains.
And that's an area that we feel like we can really fill the gap. And that's only going to work if we go really, really deep with each developer. And so that's kind of how we're thinking about like RTECH. I wish there was like a one size fits all, but game developers are so different that have such different needs that it's really important for us to understand their business.
I love that. Go for it. Sorry. No, no. All I was going to say at the end there was that's one of the cool things about being such a high level abstraction. Blot me a backend for these games. Is that anyone can show up to us with any
any idea on any platform and as long as it connects to the internet, we can do something with it on blockchain. So it's very fun to be talking to truly you name it A to Z developers.
Yeah, the other thing is like like nobody's got this figured out like you know, and it's pretty interesting as somebody that spent 10 years in gaming to come into you know a new era of gaming and see a bunch of
of people at like in high-up jobs talking about a bunch of stuff that like we don't we haven't figured this out. The key for everybody is going to be having really that like you know clash of clans candy crush angry birds
where one developer proves it at scale and then other people start following fast. And so that's why it's really important for us to be honest that we are all figuring this out together.
Yeah, totally agree. I think that's the most exciting piece about the Web3 spaces. Not only do we not have the answers, I think a lot of us are still trying to figure out what the problems are. And that provides a lot of surface area for innovation. As we get into the second half of the spaces, if anyone in the
crowd is a developer or building their own project. You love to pull you up here. So feel free to hit that, uh, speak to request button and we'll get you up here to talk to us. The next topic I think I want to zoom out a little bit and you guys mentioned sort of we're so figuring this out. We're so partnering together to
a lot that we don't know. And one topic that I think is on every developer's mind, whether you're building a game or building another protocol or project is when you should be adding additional resources to building something ground up or when you should be looking to partner with an outside
or outside service or outside tech platform. As builders yourself and Ed, as somebody talks with a ton of gaming projects, you guys want to share some insider advice on how game developers and founders can assess whether or not something should be done internally or externally.
I think what we see is that a lot of oftentimes, the Web 3 games specifically we talk to, they raise with a razor-thin room for error padded into their operations. When we look at traditional mass
of web 2 publishers, they've got a lot baked in for these resources and a gating system and all times things don't make it past the early gates and they go back and they rebuild things. But I think for, you know, like I said in web 3, oftentimes these teams are raising on exactly what they need to build, getting everything right off the bat. So I think it depends
on the funding, depends on the vision, depends on the strategy, but oftentimes, some of these things like building out the NFT minting mechanism or the custodial wallets can take a lot more than they think it will and if they can bring in a third party solution like a stardust that helps them a lot and speeds
on that process and gets them focused on what they do best, which is building the game. It makes a lot of sense, right? There's other times that it may make a lot of sense that you might need some custom tooling or some things outside of the box that maybe you do consider bringing that in-house, so it really depends on a case by case basis.
Let's get inside. Start us team or again, if there are any game builders out there that weren't giving your opinion as you guys have been building games, please hit that request button. Yeah, this is one of my favorite kind of topics to talk about with game developers and I hit on this earlier, but if I were building a game, I would build a little bit in-house and then I would use
something like start us to scale. So I kind of the way I describe it is there's like a top of funnel and a bottom of funnel and the top of funnel is all your web 2 gamers free to play. They don't know they don't care. They might hate crypto. But either way they're there to play your game and you never want to get those people you know have them people those people turn away because
they see a Metamask pop-up or something that's right in the beginning of the user flow. And so if you can have a beautiful UX and have great IP, then that's the focus. That's the focus for all these users. And it's fun. And you can get profit off of them and grow your community with them. And all that's great, normal gaming sort of stuff. And then
Meanwhile, though, you can, if you do it correctly, bring those users on a journey of getting into crypto and understanding what NFTs are in blockchain. And that's kind of a where were you moment? Where were you when you learned about what blockchain even is? And you could say it was inside of the XYZ IP. And that's really
really powerful, they'll never forget that journey. So you can take them on that journey and then if you do it correctly, having your own built out Web3 native kind of user flow, maybe tucked away in the back, then you can continue to benefit off of having that direct to consumer blockchain kind of tether. You can always reach out
directly to them, you don't have to go through a start-up to even do that. So if I were building a game, that's one of the beautiful things about this, you can have a parallel flow and bring them, drag them towards you with the crypto aspect of it, but you can keep it tucked away in the back by using start-ups for those users who actually care about the blockchain stuff.
right there. Yeah, that was good insight, Andy. All right, we can't have gaming web 3 spaces without talking about hating NFTs and the whole web 2 long tail gamer crowds. So let's switch gears a little bit. What do we need to do here to get regular gamers to embrace
from the mobile area from the last decade was that 30% or 40% of Android users didn't even know that they were using an Android phone. How many member when mobile gaming came out and everybody was like, "This is terrible, it's not high quality, don't want to do it, mobile gaming
is now a majority of revenue from gaming and most people love that. And so you got to make fun, immersive experiences that people want to come back to. We've been all been playing games through your kids and the only reason we keep playing the game is because we enjoy it. And that is so, so important.
Yeah, good memory more game actually has to be fun and and when we think about the games that are gonna tip the scale here You start us team you guys probably have a really good purview this because you talked a lot of existing native what three developers as well as web two projects are trying to prove
in a Web 3, which side do you think is more traction? You think it's going to be these major publishers like Blizzard and Square Ene Exinga that kind of make this shift? Or do you think it's going to be some studio or publisher that's made to Web 3 that we may not have heard of yet?
I'll let you follow up to me because I can say I'm a thought on it, but I think you have a better logical thought. So my kind of more artistic take on that is it's going to depend on who's paying attention and
when. What I mean is like it'll be beauties in the eye of the beholder. So I think that people who are really paying attention might see a Web 3 native team quote unquote do it. But when we take a step back and like history members of the victors, right, I think that we're going to have
The larger studios are going to have a massive last mover advantage. There's so much like we said before, there's so much that we don't know. There's so much that we don't know what's going to work or if it's going to totally fail. There's all sorts of, we could get into kind of like game loop and what's going to be tokenized discussion. So I think that
But eventually a larger studio is going to come in with a insane last mover advantage with a lot of things figured out already including user acquisition which I think Web 3 gaming in general is kind of sleeping on at the moment and they're going to come in and quote unquote do it. So it depends on
Who is saying that, you know, who did it, I guess is my thought. Maybe, you know, long after it'll be the big developer because they're big. But I think that probably a Web 3 Native and Indie team will be the first to quote unquote do it in the way that we feel is, you know, good.
I want to go back to your question, Garrison, around how do we solve some of the stigma that gamers have towards NFTs and Web 3? I think number one, we move away from calling them NFTs because I don't even know what NFTs necessarily means now. Everything is in NFTs these days. The other thing that we look at
specifically, like mainly within gaming, but also like BFBs and other projects as well as like game developers have the early Web 3 game developers have done themselves a huge service for like the whole market by how they've treated customers and NFTs, right? Like for the early days, it's been let's be honest, like it's been a
way to raise non-delutive funding because they sell an NFT collection way before the game is ready. It's a bunch of money for us to go build stuff, but if they don't deliver on that or they don't add value to that, then people are going to get burned and not want to do it ever again. Now we're starting
to see a lot more of these games that are thinking about the long tail. So it's like, okay, let's follow what's worked in Web 2. Freedom Play games where you don't need a digital collectible to play. You look at Counter Strike, you look at a lot of these games that are very like, these are all cosmetics, right? So if you make it fun and you
make it unique in you build a underlying game beneath that that anybody can play. I think that's the way for us to make NFTs great again, if you will. Oh boy. I like to your last question that Anne
talked about, I agree with Ed by the way, the marketing and the space is getting better, right? And we need to continue to improve that. We have to speak to potential users the way they want to be spoken to, not the way that we think we should speak to them. In terms of who's going to win in Web 3,
There is no question, Garrison, that you have Andy. It's interesting, right? If you look at the history of gaming, typically incumbents have not innovative, right? If you look at the companies from 30, 40 years ago, they're outside of EA in Nintendo, mainly just Nintendo. They're kind of a shell of themselves. But what's interesting about Web 3 is that,
a lot of these incumbents learned from their mistake when mobile came out because they were very dismissive about it and now they are all like kicking the tires on web 3 and I think to Andy's point like they're really going to have that last mover advantage like we obviously are working with tilts and point where we're working with another really large developer and
like they're all kicking the tires. You saw what Voodoo came out with and a bunch of others. And what's exciting is that regardless of who wins, the new Web3 native developers that we all kind of said are some of our favorite games, are the ones that are going to push the innovation and regardless of who wins, we're all going to be better gamers for it, basically.
So what I'm hearing is you guys don't think that we're losing anything as a web three developer community by maybe letting some of these bigger established players enter into the web three gaming space, right? You don't feel like that's a disadvantage for us. It's all in that positive.
Yeah, I mean it's like listen the more you know the more intelligence smart minds that are excited about building really great games to come into the market the more the more likelihood of everybody winning right like this is not a this is not a you only you win if I win
If we all do this right, if all the blockchains execute well, if all the middleware providers execute well, all the game developers build great games and bring on a billions of users, like this industry will do well and we will all have a lot of fun, right? I think it's like every but all all sees have to rise together.
I love the optimism. I'm going to follow that up with a spicy question and then we'll switch gears a little bit again. As we all know, a lot of the traditional game developers in the space have not always been really good actors. We saw the
the challenge with with Star Wars Battlefront where they sold early access and then ever really delivered the product that they wanted. We've seen the whole loot box situation as a way to monetize players and you know get to drive more
revenue for these businesses. How do we make sure that the Blizzard Activisions of the world, like the Titans in the industry don't make those same mistakes or abuse the Webtoon community once they enter into blockchain?
I'll come from like a web to publish your perspective like first of all it EA's defense battlefront started about that end up being a very good game. It's just that whole you know
most downloaded by reddit comment in history just really you know $4,000 for Darth Vader skimmed off the move. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. He was before his time.
I was actually there when that happened, but in terms of your question around how do we defend against the big publishers coming in and not taking advantage of the web through a community? I don't know if that's necessarily the best question to ask right now.
Because I think right now, even in Web3 gaming with our kind of indie and smaller community, we're also defending against bad actors as well. So it's not like we're the Knights in Shining Armor defending the world against evil. I think the other thing to realize is these big publishers are like
If and when they do move in, you know, they're going to be very methodical about doing this right that the major publishers are their top line revenues are in the billions of dollars right and so if they move in they're going to build something I would hope you know for the long
And really kind of put the thought and effort into it to do something big here and we've spoken to other publishers too that we're pretty hot on Web 3 and then you know things like FTX and the bear market and all that stuff happened and they kind of pulled back which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing again because
If you're going to build something in here, you've got to commit the budget, you've got to commit the timeline, the effort, the marketing efforts, and we don't want a drive-by, if you will, of popping your head in the space and then leaving, which is net more negative than just not entering yet.
We're entering in the last 15 minutes of our space. Any game developers or any people from the audience want to jump up and ask a question or give some commentary. Feel free to hit that request button and we'll pull you up. I'd love to switch gears here and talk a bit about the partnership program that we've developed where Avalod
and start us have put together this accelerator program to help gain developers build their projects. And I know that you're super careful about where you spend your time and your money. Can you talk a little bit about why this partnership and accelerator program are so important to the ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, we've talked a lot about why this might
make sense for game developers to leverage technology like StarDest. At the end of the day, there is a cost either way, whether you're hiring the team in-house and building it all up front and then dealing with the headaches around building your own infrastructure. Or you leverage someone like StarDest with a lot of help and support.
But there's a cost to it as well, right? So, you know, the way we think about things is like we want our games to have the best tooling and infrastructure in their hands. How do we make that a more seamless transition to try this out and not, you know, necessarily worry about the costs around that because, you know, we're all pretty mindful about that. So,
So, you know, the accelerated program that we have basically allows us to offer start-ups credits to different games that are building on AdValentry like to use start-ups and you get to leverage all the things that Autif and Andy have talked about in terms of what makes start-ups great, right? NFT and minting infrastructure, custodial wallets, the other tools
they have coming out, you know, their team, um, the Autiful probably give you a phone number so you can call them anytime of the day. Um, but all day every day, all day every day. I'm always accessible. If you want to talk about sports, he's also available. But, um, you know, again, we want to make it as easy as possible to, to, to
these types of tools that we think are kind of best in class and we just think that this accelerator program can help a lot and this is also retroactive too right so we've got games where building who have already built or are thinking about movies to have infrastructure get in touch with us and we can put you in touch with the start us team as well.
And I'd love to have George maybe come up or head of BD who's in the background there and talk a little bit, but think of this really like AWS credits. We want to prove that we add value to you. We'll give you a bunch of start-ups credits to test out the system and prove that Avalanche's our test is amazing and it will help you get going.
That's awesome. All right, I see we've got a couple people who have requested I'm going to pull you guys up one at a time to ask questions. One, you're going to go first. Super great to have you join us when I hit me with a quick mic check. Yo, yo. All right, sir. Flores yours. Thank you so much.
I think the conversation has been great. I'm working with RenfT, we're a rental-based protocol. Also live on Avalanche, we were able to help Castle Crush get their rentals going. I wanted to see what your thoughts are and rentals. We've been talking to a couple of people working with you, StarDust, and because it's a centralized solution, we would have to go through you to enable rentals for them.
Is there kind of just wanted to hear in general like how you think about rentals and again things for the discussion on kind of moving forward and what the reason it's great to see avalanche also appear. Yeah, as ad said, I will get your contact information and we can chat. I think from our perspective, like as we think about building
building out products or features within our system or partnering with other solutions like you. At the end of the day, the mechanisms that are going to increase the LTV of a user and help developers make more money is what we want to build, right, or partner with. And so that is like the core thing.
right? It's like the more money we make them, the more value they see in us and our partner products. So that's how I would think about it. Yeah. And then on the actual kind of rental application logic side of things, there are kind of two schools of thought. There's kind of the on-chain logic. And then there's kind of the
decentralized kind of game logic. And what we do really, really well is allow for game developers to just settle on chain. So we are right right now not a logic layer. We just settle everything on chain. So you could build whatever complex game mechanisms you want, including renting. And you can set up escrow custodial wallets.
etc. And just settle everything on shame for the users. Which is very easy and any game dev, app dev, can do that very quickly, which is the beautiful thing. And then we're also rolling out, but you know, as we on what people to web 3, we have an eye towards kind of catering to the web 3, you know, more and more web 3 natives.
and that's going to look like API calls where you can, as well we're building right now, where we can build or call, with through the API, call a Smart Contract, a specific method in the Smart Contract so you can go build your own renting or interact with another renting protocol on behalf of your users custodial wallets through the API.
And a quick quick like here for you guys if there are partners or gaming projects that are looking to learn more about start us What's the best place for them to get in contact? Well at the top of my profile page there's a
little envelope button which is a DM that's the best place but then the second best place would be to go to our website and there's little form you fill out and we we will take it from there no no no no worries
Yeah, we're all of the DMs are open. I'm just odd to count 31 at everything. So on Twitter, on Telegram, at at starts.gg, feel free to ping us and we'll make sure we routed to the right person. And you will be surprised to Ed's point. How quickly we respond.
All right. And Ed, can you say it one more time for the people in the back if folks want to participate in the accelerator program and access to startups credits, how should they get in touch with your team or with the startup team? Yeah, you can.
You can reach out to me directly any of the other gaming folks that you see hanging out on the gaming on A-Vex, like Twitter handle or any of the start-ass team. We talk very regularly, so reaching one of us will get to the whole group.
Awesome and for those of us who are keeping an eye on the super exciting kind of conference events track for 2023 Start is what where can we find you guys in person? Where are you guys gonna be this year? Yeah, gamer focused events. I think we spent a lot of time at crypto focused events last year
and we want to be where game developers are. So I can tell you we're definitely going to be at dice in Vegas next month. We're going to Pock and Cameron London this weekend. So if you're going to be in London, hit us up. We're doing a dope dinner on Sunday night. We got like 40 people, all great folks, all in Web 3, all games.
We're going to be at dice. We got a couple folks coming out there and then GDC. GDC is our Super Bowl because we're from, you know, in the Bay Area. So we're going to have a meeting space. It's going to have a coffee bar. You can come hang, chat with the team, learn more, and then we throw a big, big, big party. 500 people at spin.
There's going to be another tournament ping pong tournament gaming tournament with a bunch of really cool games Some of them will be from avalanche and other chains where you actually get to start playing these web 3 games and then if you so choose you can be You can come with us to the after party, but I am a dangerous
person at the bar. So you just have to be ready for that. And this might be a bit of events alpha. I don't know if you can share more about this, but I hear there's going to be a really great themed activation at GDC this year that you guys are hosting. Is there anything that you can share about that?
I think the titles of our our our lounge will have meetings will be start as can Tina like the start Star Wars can Tina and then I can't ruin the party because if I do Jared is on here and Jared will kill me so but we're we're
going to do some really really cool stuff and really excited to do that. And then the big other event that I'll call out in the summer will be at the avalanche summit in Barcelona. So we'd love to meet anybody and everybody that will be out there. Yeah, I'm going to say that I'm personally super biased. I'm excited for Barcelona. I'm super
for our summit. But after hearing Jared's plan for GDC and what you guys are doing after the show, that is a very close number two. So if anyone is listening and you guys are going to be out in San Francisco towards the end of March, I highly recommend letting either of our teams know that you're going to be here because there's some really, really
cool stuff that Star Wars team is planning. We've got a few minutes left here. Do we have any other questions in the crowd? Feel free to request to speak if you want to talk to the Star Wars team or talk to the Avalogs gaming team. But at the time that we have left, let's keep it a little bit casual. Ed, what games do you have your
on right now that you're just playing like for yourself. Could be Web 3, could be Web 2. Yeah, you know, I play a lot of casual games because my intention span is pretty shot these days and with the kid and everything. So I play at a lot of Royal Match and Moral Snap and then on the Web 3 side, I actually
actually just applied for the rainy alpha, a card game coming to avalanche. I'm pretty excited about that. And then I know we've got this meta ops 2v2 tournament coming up. And so, you know, that's a first person shooter that is going to be supporting avalanche. And a lot of people are talking smack in my DMs and on
on the Twitter timeline. So I feel like you got to dust off the mouse and see what I still got. If you guys have not registered for this prize pool on MetaObs this weekend, you got to do it. $500 prize pool, there's an APAC based tournament at a Singapore
rainy studios and I have to say it's fucking awesome. So if you haven't tried that, I would absolutely reach out the team to get white listed. That game is super fun. It's like fully built and extremely well balanced and there's also this really awesome Elon Musk character that you can play. I highly recommend it.
What do you have your eye on as far as games? The two that I like pixels online is a game that we work with that's desktop game that's pretty cool and then pirate nations pirate nations is a game again I talked a lot earlier I like builder games so play a little
a lot of those are games, civilizations, age of empires, kind of stuff. And so those are the ones I focus on. And then, you know, I'm an old man, so I like, I like, we're puzzle games too. So those are kind of just web two games on point. I want to see your Rural Score out there. One of these days, we'll, we'll all have to
Well, the hang Andy. What are you playing? I love the idea of talking about playable games. That was something last year that was basically nonexistent. So it's fun to be able to talk about it. I got to give a shout out to life force games. They they're working with us. Awesome team. They're hooked into like ready
player down and all that stuff. But they had a public playable recently and I spent a lot of time trying to get the high score there. So that was a lot of fun. And then again that we're not working with but an awesome team behind it is Kaiju cards. They also had a public playable that was a lot of fun, spent a lot of time doing that as well.
Thanks for sharing. We've got one last speaker up here. Glad, thanks for volunteering to ask a question or share some thoughts for yours, man. Hello. Thank you for letting me speak. I like the topics you are discussing.
on this space. I noticed that you kept collecting ideas of how to motivate and also get game developers to develop new games on Avalanche and how the UX should be similar to the Web 2 games.
So new gamers would feel satisfied with the project, just as on the Web 2 games. I was actually wondering if you plan on getting other already existing games that are well known to
transfer on avalanche so that you have already a big audience taking a look at the avalanche which could get viral and spread across many other gamers instead of developing new games.
Yeah, thanks for the question. It's a great idea. So I think one example of something just like that is we actually partnered with wildlife studios. They have a game called Castle Crush where they've got an existing Web2 player base and they integrate
I think in the near to midterm, that's probably where a lot of this Web 3 player base is going to grow, but I think for the long till it's going to be these
You know, unique, like built from the bottom up, like Web 3 studios that are thinking about it in a really like fresh, innovative way. Like some of the games you talked about today that are really going to kind of drive the long tail and the significant growth of the player base to get to where we all think it can.
I would like to ask if this space will be posted so I can listen to it again because I wasn't at the beginning here.
Absolutely. It will be recorded and posted on all of our channels. So feel free to tune in afterwards as well. Alright, thank you. Alright, I'm going to send us off with a couple minutes left. Get you guys all ready for your next meeting. You recalls or wherever you're going. If you guys were around for the beginning,
We talked a bit about the StarDust Adelaide Partnership. If you're a game developer, make sure to reach out to the Avalops team or to reach out to StarDust directly to find out how you can get involved and use their platform. And if you're an Adelaide game developer, make sure to find out how you can get credits towards working with StarDust
your game. And I really appreciate you guys all for joining today. Aughtif, Andy, Ed, thanks for giving us your time. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and your insights. And we're really looking forward to building games that everyone together. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thanks everybody. One last question. If I'm