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Power of Play 🎮 | Press Play #51
Recorded: May 29, 2024 Duration: 0:56:01Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, industry leaders explored the future of gaming in the Web3 space, highlighting significant project launches like Avalon and Mighty Action Heroes, while addressing the troubling security breaches at Gala Games that threaten the integrity of the ecosystem. The conversation also touched on the growing trend of gaming adoption among Americans, signaling a shift towards mainstream acceptance.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Howdy ho everybody! Hopefully the host will mute his mic again.
Most of hetto my brother, please.
Okay, I've managed to come up here and unmute myself and start speaking.
Apparently we did have some whole music playing no one else heard it i certainly
didn't heard it so i apologize if i interrupted anyone's enjoyment of our lift music i didn't
wasn't aware it was happening on but welcome to another press play this is episode 51 now
that's 51 weeks god that's flown past.
Hosted, as always, by my lovely self, George, and co-hosted by my brother, Gaspode.
Gaspode, say hello.
Hello.
Perfect, exactly how I wanted it to go down.
As always, we are joined by some lovely folks within the space up here as well so we're going to start
off by getting them to all introduce themselves for today's episode which is called power of play
and we're going to head over to sean first sean just tell us a little bit about yourself and the
project you're working with please yeah hello everyone first of all thanks for having us it's
an honor to be here um a bit about me been been making games a long time, been in crypto since 2015,
was an OG Warcraft, Starcraft modder, a ton of games.
Working with AAA for a bit, Electronic Arts, some other places.
Built a few indie game studios, but ultimately started my dream company,
which is Avalon, and we're here to build an AI-powered metaverse-like platformer players,
and people can build their own games and worlds and
experiences and looking to revolutionize gaming and the future of gaming yeah I love that I love
the idea of letting people be able to create something of themselves creating something for
others to create just passing it down so we're all creative eventually I love that next we'll
throw it over to Simon Simon tell us a little bit about yourself and your
project please hey thanks for having me on so yeah i'm simon i've been in the games industry
for 20 years now uh did work at a bunch of big studios before starting my own that was in
2018. mighty bear has been running now yeah for a number of years and we did big projects with
disney we made a game called disney mail mania we did a couple of projects with apple and then we went all in on web 3 in 2021 yeah uh our project's
mighty action heroes so we have a very big announcement coming soon uh alpha uh so yeah
we're gonna talk about mighty action heroes i guess a bit and that's the kind of the battle
rail game inspired by classic action movies and it's kind
of built for dgens as well so there's a heavy element of going head-to-head and wagering against
the channel we found that actually really resonates really well with a financially
motivated web3 audience yeah that's that's us yeah and then you've got the power granny with
her curls in her hair that can body check anybody out the way. That is my favorite character to play in Mighty Action Heroes as well.
And Rudy, I am hoping you are behind the Ember Light account.
So Rudy, can you tell us about yourself and the project?
Hi, everyone. Yes, thanks for having me.
I'm Rudy. I've been making games for about 20 years.
I worked on Club Penguin at Disney and then Call of Duty for six years at Activision
and then World of Warcraft at Blizzard.
And then 2018, when I started looking at blockchain, instantly captivated, founded a company called
Mythical Games, which was a roller coaster, tons of fun, spent four and a half years doing
four and a half years doing that. Now I am with Emberlight. I'm advising for a couple of great
that.
Now I am with Emberlight.
teams like Pixel Links, which is an Animoca subsidiary, and Pudgy Penguins, which I absolutely
love working with. And at Emberlight, our goal is simply to simplify. We're here to simplify
development of Web3 games. We want to make
it easy, create a clear path
for game developers who are interested
in Web3 and
sort of soften out some of those
rough edges when it comes to dealing with technical
complexity, tokenized
economy and monetization
complexity because
those who've been in this space
have realized
that it's a different beast entirely
than what we're used to in games.
Sounds fantastic as well.
And yet another guest up here
with a fantastic backstory and history.
I love it when you guys are all coming up here
and you're naming all the places you've previously worked
and it's all games I've actually played.
So my background is as the player and your guys'
background is the ones that have been creating stuff for me to get to play this whole time.
God, it must be at least 24 years that I've been playing games now, maybe 22. Jeez, we're getting
on. Okay, so we're going to start off with the thing we like to do is we take a look at some of
the articles that we have had throughout the week. Normally they are written by our lovely team and as is always the first article is by the lovely Eliza herself. I know she's out there
listening probably. It looks great as always. I'm not going to do the article justice because I will
only do a quick summary but all the articles will be pinned for people to go and take a deeper look
if you want because my little summary is just so we can
get the talk going but there is some details in there that i think a lot of you if you're into
stats are going to find super interesting and the first one we're taking a look at is around a study
or a survey sorry that took part and suggested that 61 of americans are playing video games. This was a report... Did we lose George or did we lose me
no I think we lost George
yeah
I will do my best
I'll do my best
George impression then
summing summing
Americans identify as gamers definitely see gamer as less
as more of a tag that people are using i think depending on how they worded their questions
there'll also be a cohort of people who are also playing games um i'm thinking maybe more towards
the idle games on mobile but wouldn't badge themselves as gamers. So that 61% in my mind might even be higher.
But 61% of Americans are saying the gamers.
What's your thoughts on that, Simon?
Yes, initially, I'm going to have a lot of spicy cakes today.
I actually think the number has been a fair bit higher.
This is not really news to me.
We've been seeing these
kind of numbers for some years, but I would argue that actually the fact that people still identify
themselves as gamers is actually a bit problematic because people don't describe themselves as like
movie watchers or TV watchers or music listeners. No, it's just something that's assumed because
it's part of the cultural fabric. And so I think we'll have really reached kind of where gaming should be when the term is even kind of not relevant anymore.
I think also it's used a lot to kind of gatekeep, right?
So my mother has been playing Candy Crush 10 years now, right?
Since 2013, 2014 for two, three hours a day.
So that's thousands of hours.
And I think what we define as a game is probably, like you said, it doesn't fully encompass people that play games so uh i'll be happy when we kind of move on from
this term but i think it's a good thing overall and i think we're getting close to that point
i do like the idea of identifying as a music listener too uh i definitely uh definitely
think that it will be a good place when gamers isn't kind of something you kind of preach about
like that because we do struggle especially in this space of true gamers real gamers because
there's always that differentiating between farmers and gamers so gaming is used as like
you mentioned kind of gatekeeping well head over to sean 61 of americans say they're gamers what
do you think yeah you know it's pretty interesting what you said about gatekeeping.
I agree.
I think that we need to move on from that and just accept that, hey, we all play games.
It's a natural part of being.
In fact, young people playing games is something historically humans have done throughout, you know, eons.
It's how we learn.
It's how we grow.
But anyway, you know, what's really interesting about this is in the United States, you know, the most social, most popular social media platform in the world
actually isn't what you think it is. It's not, it's not TikTok for teenagers, you know, per age
demographic, per age demographic. It's not TikTok for teenagers, not Facebook for adults. It's
actually young people playing Roblox. The amount of young people playing Roblox is staggering.
And not only that, but the amount of time they're spending playing Roblox and the amount of young people playing Roblox is staggering. And not only that, but the amount of time they're spending playing Roblox
and the amount of engagement they have in that platform
when you compare the engagement we have in these other social platforms
is actually kind of terrifying.
And what really scares me, and this definitely is coming back to Avalon,
is how do we make this, the ultimate,
what I consider to be social media platform, the metaverse,
good for people.
When you look at how Roblox has orchestrated itself
and how it has
treated its user base, things can look
kind of scary. And that's why I think it's
incredibly important that we decentralize
the future of these extremely
influential gaming platforms and democratize them.
So, yeah, there's my take.
I like the thought of Roblox being kind of missed
when people are considering where people are hanging out.
I know personally,
I don't have children old enough to be on Roblox
and not on it myself.
But I know when I'm hearing other podcasts
talking about stats around Roblox,
the amount of people that spend their whole time socializing within there, I'm hearing other podcasts talking about stats around roadblocks.
The amount of people that spend their whole time socializing within there,
and it's not really seen as gaming.
It's more seen as kind of just hanging out the same way.
Back in my day, you would have done it in a physical place. It is interesting.
And I think that will lead towards kind of what Simon touched on,
that gamer isn't really the tag.
It's just something that everyone's doing.
But I'll head over to Ember Light as well.
Do you have any elderly relatives playing a lot of computer games?
I think I'm the oldest person in my family who plays video games.
You know, I got it at a time where there was no real clear path into the industry.
You know, there was no school you could go to.
You just kind of loved the, you know, you loved video games
and you found a way in.
That was how I got in, you know,
this very different world today when it comes to that.
But, you know, as I think about this question,
I think about two watershed moments for the gaming industry
that really stand out for me.
One is, you know, when mobile happened,
we added a billion gamers um to the to the space and
you know i think simon touched upon this but you know there's certainly a lot of people playing
mobile games who maybe not wouldn't even categorize themselves as gamers right they
they're not they're going well yeah i don't play valorans or i don't play call of duty or apex
legends but you know and so i'm not a gamer but you know meanwhile every you
know every lineup they're in or on the bus you know they're they're noodling around with casual
games on their phones so there's a lot more gamers out there than we think the other watershed moment
was minecraft in my opinion i call it the minecraft generation because this was a um the a group uh
it spawned sort of a group of um players you know the younger generation
who now spend an enormous amount of time in the digital space um you know their identities live
in the digital space you know you show off all the cool gear they get from skins you know fortnite
you know let's that has value to them so their social networks live online in these games to
to sean's point about
Roblox, you know, and so the younger generation growing up are just sort of naturally more adept.
They naturally put more value into the space, into the digital space versus, as you say,
old people. And so, you know, what we have now is this perfect sort of on-ramp for where we're
heading with blockchain and Web3 in terms of sort of ownership and having some kind of control over your online identity.
And I think that is really exciting.
I do like the points you're touching on there and the idea of what it's going to bring when this younger generation then becomes our age.
Because the report does also include that the average age of a gamer is 36 so yet again i am bang average being a 36 year old man as well um and i do like
the idea behind this that you're mentioning these younger guys um they've built their identities
online and they've grown up through that um i assume most of us up here are around the same
age apologies if you're younger than some of us.
But it was more of a niche thing to be in gaming when we were younger.
So we didn't quite put in.
There wasn't as many people putting in as much time as, like you're saying, with Minecraft and Roblox. As I believe Sean mentioned as well, that this is just something that people are more used to.
And it's more accepted as a form of entertainment as well.
And moving from that into our next article,
again, brought to us by, of course,
it's another Eliza article.
All the articles today are likely sponsored
by the writing of Eliza.
And the next one is around casual gaming itself.
And you guys have all touched on it a little bit before already
about how it's kind of gatekeeper
that we see the term real gamer thrown out a lot um it really irks me when people say that
especially if it's games talking negatively about other games because yes we have less players but
our players are real gamers okay doesn't mean anything but the casual gaming scene is seen
as something that is massive and um looking at this report that came from the casual gaming scene is seen as something that is massive and um looking at
this report that came from the casual gaming report by mintel growl and gaming analytics and
tension i've probably murdered all of those names um it reveals that hyper casual gaming dominates
the in-app advertisement holding about 34.4 of the the market share. The main metrics you want to be looking
at here is that videos make up a large portion of the ads they're showing and that iOS has a higher
eCPMS compared to Android and Androids have a more frequent users but iOS retains users better
so iOS is actually offering better returns to the developers.
I guess that might go inside
with having to pay Apple more as well.
But when you're seeing this type of stuff,
what I mainly take away from this
is how the advertisement is working
and how Web3 games could be utilizing this
as some other sort of way to help players
either progress in their game or use the tokens that some of
these games have based their whole web3 presence around so we're going to start over with you sean
um looking at this article what type of things do this make you think about in terms of in ad
advertisement within web3 that we've seen some of but it's not a huge thing so far
yeah so i'm going to talk a little bit more about kind of mobile gaming and advertising
and advertising you see for mobile in general.
I'm not the most knowledgeable here,
but I can say this.
I really don't like kind of what's happened
to a lot of mobile gaming and mobile advertising.
Not all mobile gaming, but a lot of it.
I think there's exceptions to the rule,
but you'll see constantly advertisements for games that frankly aren't even the games. I think there's exceptions to the rule, but you'll see constantly advertisements for games
that frankly aren't even the games.
I think it's pretty standard now.
And then you get into the game and then they've developed,
I would say probably the most sophisticated
gotcha style mechanics of anywhere in the industry.
And they're incredibly effective.
They've been perfecting it for over a decade
and holy crap, are they good at it, right?
This is very high retention rates.
You get in there, you start playing the game.
It's really fun at first. And then you get about four hours in. And hey, if they good at it, right? This is very high retention rates. You get in there, you start playing the game. It's really fun at first,
and then you get about four hours in,
and hey, if you spend a dollar,
you can progress another three hours worth, right?
So you spend a dollar,
and then you get another three hours in,
and it's like, hey, if you spend $10,
you'll get an even further head rate,
and so then you spend $10.
And then all of a sudden, two months go by,
and look, you have the opportunity to spend $3,000
if you actually want to be good at this game, right? And they've really perfected this game loop.
I don't, you know, it's kind of annoys me how effective it is, but it is what it is.
Personally, I would like to see games, you know, I say this somewhat ironically being a Web3
developer, but not really. But I think if I'm going to spend money in an application,
I want it to have value beyond sort of the closed ecosystem I'm inside of, right?
And that's where I think Web3
adds a lot more utility here
than I think Web2 has done,
gotcha sound mechanics have done inside of these games.
So I think there's nothing necessarily wrong with free-to-play
or spending in games, but I want it to be
more meaningful, more valuable
than I'm currently seeing in games. I think there's a lot of opportunity
there for Web3 developers
to look at how effective
these mobile games have been
and getting people to open up their wallets
and getting user adoption in,
and then having more utility for users
by utilizing Web3 principles.
So my take there.
Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point.
I do agree mostly with what you're saying.
One thing I would go with is
I do like the idea of being able to spend money in some of these games as a time saver, because then that money can trickle down to the ones that are willing to put more time in.
And that's how I would like to see the Web3 world working out that the ones that have got money but not time are spending the money to get further in the game.
But then the ones with the time are then receiving that money in return because they are putting the time into the game and i like that kind of loop but you are dead
on correct with they have managed to make this into a sophisticated art of how to get money out
of people in these free games i was watching one the other day and it showed three different prices
to purchase a game and compared to the subscription price that then had this big neon thing around it
basically and it was drawing your attention to subscribe to the subscription price that then had this big neon thing around it basically and it was drawing
your attention to subscribe to the subscription price because it was dramatically lower than just
buying the game but obviously what they're trying to do there is get you to get a subscription
then forget you've got a subscription and eventually you will pay more for the game than
if you had just paid a one-off payment to get into the game as well so yeah you're definitely right
they have managed to make this work and i don't think we'll see it disappear anytime soon. Next, I'm going to throw it over to you, Simon. What type
of things do you think this could imply for how things could be working within games, within Web3
itself? Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to refer back to the original article from Eliza. So I thought
it was actually interesting because it referenced hypercasual specifically.
So hypercasual generally doesn't have,
you know, like payments or very limited.
It tends to be completely ad-based.
And it was talking about how the,
you know, how they said
the dominant kind of platform
for mobile advertising.
But they have kind of a set of unique challenges.
And this is actually a space
that we have some experience in.
So for those of you who are not aware like in 2021 basically meta changed the way that you could
do device targeting and the hyper casual model basically relies on you being able to
acquire users so advertise to users incredibly cheaply and bringing millions of players very
very very quickly and very cheaply and then spamming with ads until they leave
but from the changes that were made,
basically the business model has basically stopped being viable.
So a lot of these businesses are dying off.
So yeah, the cost of user acquisition has gone up
and at the same time, the revenue from these ads has also gone down.
So what I think we're going to start to see
and how this affects Web3 is actually I can see a lot of these platforms
and these developers that have these networks of like instantly accessible hyper
casual games actually moving more towards Web3 and you're probably going to start to see more
of them on Telegram you know like we're going to start moving away from like all the clickers we're
seeing to a lot of these like instant games like hold.io I guess the challenge will be like how do
you how can you have an ad supported business model
with Web3? And I imagine there's going to be some formal revenue share. So maybe people will get
tiny amounts of tokens for watching ads. I actually think it's a very interesting innovation.
But yeah, it's a slightly different take. Yeah, I like the idea you point out there of like a
rev share or a tiny bit of tokens. If you watch the ads, as well as maybe it has some in-game
benefits to yourself as well. Again, I think this kind of comes back to people having time versus people
having money as well and i do like the one point you made there about you then spam them with ads
until they leave in the traditional market because that kind of feels like how it was with some of
those games i would play the amount of times i would just give up because i'm like ah i just
wanted to get through this next part without having to watch an ad about something completely
unrelated well dude you balance the game based you calculate how many ads people willing to sit
through and then people will maximize the amount of advertising revenue per user this is like it's
a it's a very simple mathematical formula but when meta made those changes uh it basically became
unviable so yeah anyway i'll stop no it's it's great it's great up here hearing more about what
the people making all these things have experienced compared to how we see it as a user um so it's
great to see both sides uh so lastly i believe it's over to you, Rudy. Rudy, how do you think this is going to be impacting us in the Web3 space?
Yeah, I, you know, in-app advertising, you know, again, Simon touched upon this,
but, you know, it's been sort of an integral part of hyper-casual gaming.
You know, it's been a major revenue source.
revenue source you know large lucrative business has been built off the back of it um the you know
You know, large lucrative business has been built off the back of it.
as we go into web 3 what's interesting to me is you know i'm certainly curious about the role
in a you know ads will play in terms of monetization in web 3 but what's interesting
to me is that you know because platforms have been you know a little bit resistant or very resistant in some cases
I'm talking about the Steams and the Xboxes
and the Playstations and Nintendos
of the world have been resistant to Web3
it's forced developers
to look
outside of those platforms
launch games outside of those platforms
so the web has been
the browser
has been a place where we've seen a lot of Web3 games be accessible.
And so, you know, it's kind of like we are, you know, being in some ways being forced to, you know, visit, you know, these sort of casual, hyper casual paradigms again, which I think is great.
again, which I think is great. I think there's some real innovation to happen there. One of the
I think there's some real innovation to happen there.
things I've seen that's been interesting on the ad side has been, you know, this idea, again,
of players having control over their identities. And so, you know, I love the idea of scenarios where I, as a consumer of games, you know, I benefit, you know,
by having, being advertised to,
by releasing information about me
that allows the developer to advertise,
you know, do targeted advertising to me.
But it's me who makes, you know,
takes a cut of that rather than it going to meta
or Facebook or whatever, you know,
that I get to participate in the
economies because you're basically selling who i am
i think that's a great point of being able to choose kind of this this has been sold when it's
been sold normally anyway um i'm not getting any lines showing i'm speaking but hopefully you can
keep talking no one's jumped in to tell me otherwise.
But we'll head over to the next article. As mentioned, they are all pinned to the top.
So if you're in the audience and you have any thoughts on what the speakers say,
or you have something you want to pull out from the full article,
don't forget to use that speech bubble in the bottom of the corner,
or just show us some loves with your favorite GIFs.
So heading over to the next article now is to do with
gaming on netflix so for those who don't know netflix now has gaming uh it's saying in the
latest data 81.2 million downloads of netflix games this kind of ties in probably with the
first article of bringing more people into being gamers through other means who maybe wouldn't call themselves gamers.
But Netflix doing games, they've got a lot of audience already in terms of their viewership for their programs.
Do we care? Do we think it's big that Netflix are doing games? Do we think it's going to have much impact?
And we'll head over to Sean first on this one.
Yeah, so it's big. It much impact? And we'll head over to Sean first on this one.
Yeah, so it's big. It's really big.
And this is why.
You know, streaming is the future of gaming.
And the reason is accessibility is king, right?
We talk about casual gaming, like why casual gaming blow up.
And it's simple.
It's because everyone has a computer in their pocket, right?
And you can play a game from that.
But I think where streaming can multiply this significantly is it's not just a computer in your pocket, right? And you can play a game from that. But I think where streaming can multiply
this significantly is it's not just a computer in your pocket. You have access to NASA's supercomputer
on literally any device at any point in time. And this is going to become, I think, more and more
important and more and more viable as this technology improves and as hardware improves
because people don't want to go out and spend $3,000, at least not most people, on a gaming computer, right?
But instead, you can have access to a $10,000 gaming computer
from literally any device.
And so Netflix is kind of starting this.
Now, they're certainly not building the kind of games
I'm talking about right now,
but I think ultimately this is where it's going to go.
I used to work heavily in the VR space,
and I can tell you one of the huge problems with VR
is that it's incredibly compute intensive.
You're running 90 FPS on two different
cameras, right? So you're basically
rendering your game twice.
And cloud rendering is a place where
this could solve a lot of the issues you have
with VR, where you can have high fidelity experiences
on a very lightweight device.
Now, we do need to reduce latency.
Latency is not good enough
yet, but it's going to get a lot better. There's some speed of light limitations there. But I think over the next decade, we're going to see a pretty big transition to streaming for playing games. And maybe Netflix can start being a front runner there.
in that latest news there, especially depending on what type of games
they are kind of putting out.
I know with it being mobile, I think from what I've seen,
I haven't had a chance to dive into many of them.
They've been quite based around content that they were already doing,
so maybe pulling more people into a community that were already there
from the program and doing kind of simple games around how you can explore
that game a little bit further.
Heading over to Simon, netflix what do you think well yeah it's uh it's interesting this came up like netflix launched their service
two and a half years ago so it's been about 30 months since they've had it live
i was looking at the data before coming on um they have something like 500 million global viewers
and they're trumpeting that they've achieved, I think it was 80 odd million downloads.
That's not actually a great return after three years.
That amounts to fewer than 3 million installs per month from 500 million viewers.
It's not great.
And then I dug deeper and it looks like GTA San Andreas is about 20 million of those.
So that's a game that they licensed from Rockstar, which is, I don't want to say how many years,
but I was at university when that game came out and I'm now in my 40s.
So I don't think that's a great endorsement for their efforts right now.
I think it's a struggle, right?
Because they've invested, a number I saw was close to a billion in terms of gaming content,
but there is actually no marquee game on the system, on the service. And like people who like,
you know, people that are Netflix subscribers are not actively downloading the title. So,
I think it was interesting they put this out. Well, another interesting thing they did recently is
they released content on Roblox. So there's like a Netflix kind of themed village. And you could argue that
actually splits mindshare from their proprietary content on their platform, on their service.
And so from the outside, it seems like there's no kind of joined up thinking to the approach
there. There's kind of licensing old games, there's shoving stuff on Roblox, and then
there's like a few kind few random titles on there.
So yeah, I hope they do get it better,
because these services are really good for independent developers.
So we worked on Apple Arcade on two games,
and subscription services are a great way for smaller developers
to get financing for the studio and scale up and get experience shipping.
But it seems that they still haven't quite found their niche um they have access to so many
great ips that i really hope they do do it and so yeah it's still it's been two and a half years
i was going to say it's early days but it's not but uh it's still i guess early for them to kind
of figure out what they're going to do next i know when i've been hearing more about it most
people have been saying that they're attempting to kind of throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
So that might fit with kind of having a little bit of everything going on there.
It's interesting. The number sounds big until you put it towards kind of conversion from their other audiences.
That kind of statistics, a good way of viewing it.
And I like that they also get to be two years in and hiding behind we're
early so it's not not just web3 with the we're early cliche uh but we'll head over to ember light
as well what's your thoughts on netflix so you know i welcome competition when it comes to the
platform space you know undoubtedly we have seen many attempts over over the years uh you know, undoubtedly, we have seen many attempts over the years, you know, to
break into that space.
You know, it's primarily dominated by, you know, varying degrees of walled gardens, like
Xbox and Nintendo and PlayStation.
You know, so, you know, when we see more competition in this space we see more innovation and you know
more breaking down of those walls which i think is really positive for example um you know when
steam came out i was remember i was actually talking to their compliance team and trying to
convince them about to go into web 3 and you know shortly thereafter i apologize if it was my fault
or something i said but they came out and said, no way, it's a Web3.
But, you know, what was it? Epic then immediately came out and said, well, we're going to welcome Web3, right?
So I think competition is really great, but it is an incredibly hard sector to break into.
You know, nobody really talks anymore about those ones that came before like the micro
consoles like the Ouya the Kickstarter ones you know there was there was a whole bunch of those
and then the Stadia came out right like Google was behind this thing and it just kind of fizzled out
and even Epic you know struggles with the store with all their resources and the massive success
they've had with Fortnite you know the anecdotes that i hear and i speak from personal experience is that you know i log in once a week to go get my free
game um but then i go back to steam to play the stuff that i like um so i think it's a very hard
business i think netflix you know again hopefully with all its resources you know i'm i'm i welcome
the competition i think it's very good and healthy and hopefully will help, you know,
create some enough competition where, you know,
they'll see Web3 as a competitive advantage like Epic has.
And that will help us, you know, move the needle forward.
Yeah, I like the idea you're presenting there of that competition is going to be
the thing that drives people forwards.
But the competition needs to be valid enough like you mentioned some of those old school consoles or handhelds or anything
like that that people just don't don't remember because i a they were hard to like ship out and
then b you'd have to convince developers to develop for this thing where they're then going to have a
smaller audience to buy this thing after they've
developed it it was the same issue they had back when the n64 was on cartridge it was allegedly a
pain in the balls to develop for that so that drove people away and then it just ended up having
sony take over because they had the easier place for people to jump in and i think it was simon
that mentioned that streaming
and these sort of subscription models, like what Netflix is doing, is good for new studios that
are starting up because it helps you get in there without having to have as much behind you. I do
like the idea of that. And I am glad you mentioned Google Stadia because I am a big fan of the idea
of like cloud gaming and game streaming. But every time someone comes at me with a new project that's doing it,
I'm like, Google didn't manage to do it,
and they're kind of big boys in the tech world,
so I'd love it to work, but I'm unsure if it will be.
And moving to a different direction from the positivity
and the ideas around being able to play any device from
any other device which is the main part of cloud gaming that i love the sound of is um unfortunately
a security breach so the last article we're going to be touching on today let's check who this one
is from i'm going to guess it was eliza once more um apparently it won't let me see and it is around gala games experiencing a
major exploit where the hacker exploited their smart contract meant minting five billion gala
tokens the hacker sold 600 million tokens for approximately 21 million worth of ethereum
gala games responded by blacklist in the hackers address and collaborating with authorities the incident caused significant financial and rep reparation
oh my god I can't say this word the the word to do with their reputation that
ends in all at the end unfortunately I can see how it's written down I just
can't say it damaged their reputation as well as causing the company to have to
do some other things as well
and looking at this article gala has been through some hard times lately and the hack coming when it
did do we think that is like a final nail in the coffin that's going to be pushing gala down as it
has already started to lose some of its reputation due to the various
suits going on and what is happening with all their games they had promised and the entry points into
some of their games as well i remember seeing some of the mightiest nfts being an absorbent
amount of money just to get in um but what do we think this means for maybe gala itself and
what does it mean bigger for the space in general if
you're someone that's trying to create your own ecosystem and you can be subject to something
like this that could really rock your whole ecosystem itself um I'm going to throw this
over to Rudy you can go first this time sir how do you think this could play out yeah you know It's an unfortunate symptom of Web3.
You know, certainly games, Web2 traditionally has been sort of a high value target for hackers.
You know, it's definitely a constant battle that we deal with when we're making Web2 games. two games um you know i remember there was sort of uh what was it this this this sort of uh item
black market that was shut down a couple of years ago and i was like oh my god you know like web 3
in the headlines again i looked it up and it was like a fifa black market so it wasn't it wasn't
actually web 3 at all so web 2 you know already had that and And Web 3, I think, compounds because now you have assets with real, you know, you have developers deliberately building games with assets that have real world value.
And so that's attracting a whole new crowd.
And I think, unfortunately, that's part of the noise in the space and part of the challenge we have to deal with. And honestly, why I think adoption has been not as optimal as we had hoped.
You know, last year, FTX was in the headlines. We got pictures of SBF in prison with his crew.
And, you know, it sort of gave the Web2 folks, the mainstream folks, a bad taste, right?
Because there's a lot of noise in Web3.
And I think it's unfortunate because there's also a lot of incredible innovation and stuff going on that needs to rise to the top.
As far as Gala goes, you know, I would say that they're part of a cohort of companies that like these monolithic companies that just got a crazy amount of capital, you know,
which I think from one hand was incredibly positive for the space.
It attracted a lot of attention. It drove innovation, lots of conversation.
And, you know, but at the same time,
it's sort of, I start to see them more archaic now, you know,
they came in at a time
when there was nothing really existing
except for a couple of blockchains.
You know, now we have 50, over 50 blockchains.
There's a ton of innovation already there.
And so, you know, these are companies
that try to do everything
and now realizing that's very difficult to do.
And, you know, I don't know
if they're going to stand the test of time because we've got
newer, leaner, smarter teams that are, you know, coming out, learning off the back of
what they've done.
You know, these guys were playing, you know, I'm talking about Gala and those guys are
pioneers in this space and have helped sort of lift things.
But, you know, like I think now the capital is a little smarter. It's not as sort of lift things um but you know like i think now that the capital is a little
smarter it's not as sort of rampant it's forcing constraints forcing people to be smarter about how
they build business and how they you know what they choose to to focus on and i think that's a
really positive next evolution in in the space yeah completely agree with the last part you're
saying there of the idea that some of these
companies that made it big in the earlier days of web 3 in the last bull they managed to raise
all this money but then they were the ones that had to face all the initial problems that a lot
of the teams coming out now have managed to learn from and be able to do things that are i know but
you could say more successful just because they're able to streamline what they
were doing and didn't have to spend as much excess money to get to the place they are now thanks to
stepping on the shoulders of those that managed to go before them and and the further point that
you made towards the start as well around the idea that unfortunately yes because everything
in web3 and web3 gaming then does have the potential to have a financial side added to it.
We already have enough people cheating in games.
My computer is currently blue screen in all the time because of Vanguard protection just to play League of Legends.
And I can't earn any money in League of Legends.
So the idea that there's then games that you can earn money in as well definitely will be attracting people that are into that sort of,
I'm already cheating in regular games. I'll happily cheat in a game to be able to take excess money
out and then like you pointed out the negative is always going to shine through more into the normie
eye into the mainstream media they're very rarely going to be trumpeting hey we managed to raise
this amount of money to create this new train great more likely to say to say, hey, this chain got hacked for all this money.
Good thing you don't do crypto.
Otherwise, your money would have been lost, too, because that's going to go further.
Next, let's throw this over to Simon and pick up on some of your thoughts around this whole situation.
Yeah, I think it's obviously it's a tragic situation for the company and for everyone involved.
I think every founder's worst nightmare, especially in Web3 is, is anything
like this happening, right?
And so I wouldn't be very quick to kind of cast any judgment on them because I
think this can really happen to any company.
Like your employees are essentially always going to be the weakest link, right?
We had the situation with Ronan not that long ago as well.
had the situation with Ronin not that long ago as well.
And yeah, so I don't think it's actually going to affect them that much either.
I have a slightly different taste.
If you look at projects that have been victims of security lapses or whatnot,
everyone from Yuga to Sky Raiders to a bunch of other people,
and they're still going.
I was looking actually, and Gala's got an Fdb of nearly 1.5 billion for the token and over 260 million i think in daily volume
so i think interest in the token is still strong people still believe in the ecosystem and i think
like to rudy's point the amount of money they've raised and the amount that they can leverage their
token i think they should be fine um they have plenty of time to see this out. They've been through lots of
ups and downs with people leaving and other things,
but that's just part of
startup life. We've
had it ourselves. I'm sure Rudy's experience
found us leaving and senior people leaving
as well at different times.
It just seems like the leadership team there has gone through
a really tough time, but
I know that they have a lot of very good people around them
as well, and so I'm sure that eventually they'll find a way to pull through this i actually wouldn't
be that worried for them and it seems that the price has actually held up pretty well i would
have expected a bigger dip so i'm not going to treat this as a buying opportunity but anyway nfa
do your own research but yeah yeah i think one of the largest things in my opinion that is i want to say protecting mainly
because i'm not good with words i guess um gala itself is in our space we often forget that it's
not just gala games right there's the whole other arms they have that a lot of people do put down
and say they're not that great compared to the gaming part but they still exist and they
still create interest around their gala inc ecosystem as well one of the guys i talk to a
lot of there is called jeff and i always forget that it's not just games until i speak to him
and he points out yeah music and films doing this and music's doing that and i'm like oh i forgot
that part yeah i guess it's just one other thing i wanted to call out you know like everyone talks
about the magic of web3 and crypto being that you know you are your own bank and you custody your
own assets and so no custody is a double-edged sword and so i don't think this is going to go
away anytime soon either like i think this is going to continue to be a common occurrence of
projects for the foreseeable future yeah i would definitely agree to that point as well um if i
was to suddenly have a million dollars which i don't guys i know i'm a fantastic creator but i
don't have no million dollars i would trust myself less with custody of that million dollars than i
would someone that's a professional to have custody over it so i can definitely see that as an issue
and when you're creating your own ecosystem
and you're completely responsible for that,
you then get another role you have to play.
You're pushing out games, pushing out music,
pushing out films,
but then also you need to be
the equivalent of your own bank.
So yeah, I can see how that would
bring in issues as well.
And I believe the last person
I need to throw this over to you is Sean.
Sean, what do you think about this whole situation?
Yeah, so firstly, I want to say
it was Eliza that wrote the article. I've been following, just a shout out for Eliza,
been following her for a bit, and she's an incredibly prolific content creator, so shout
out to you. But I don't have a lot to say about Gala specifically, but look, as a founder, I feel
for the other founders in the team over there, this kind of thing is terrible. And as he said,
it was one of the worst things that
can happen to a team. And it can really happen to anyone. But I can talk a bit about the nature of
Web3 and kind of what we're seeing in the space. So the good thing about the technology is, and
the reason we all love it so much is that the technology is king, right? As someone else said,
you are your own bank, right? It's this idea of zero trust. And what's really cool about that is
true authentic digital ownership, true authentic decentralization. But we're seeing a
lot of the dark side of that, right? Like if you get hacked, there isn't a bank or a government or
someone that can say, oh, hey, you know, we're going to get you that money back. Don't worry
about it. No, like you're screwed. And so a lot of people are taking advantage of that, right?
And it's been sort of a systematic problem. And what a lot of people don't realize, this isn't
just like some, you know, black hat hacker sitting in his basement.
A lot of times these are state actors. And in fact, in many cases, a lot of these, a lot of
these hackers are state actors, and they're very complex in the way that they hack companies. I can
tell you, you know, after we raised in 2022, we probably have had over, and I'm sure the other
founders can speak to this, we've had over a thousand phishing attempts. I mean, I can't tell
you how many times I've personally called all of my employees,
but not really me,
asking for login information,
trying to get into our accounts, right?
It's the amount of work and effort that has gone in
and how many fake venture capitalists
have reached out to me wanting to invest
that aren't really even real people, right?
So it's pretty terrifying,
you know, what's been happening in space,
but I think, you know,
we need to build better technologies to protect ourselves.
I mean, even working not myself, but my co-founder, Jeff, he's one of the founders of EverQuest.
Even when they were building EverQuest, they had to build protections into the game that allowed their employees not to be able to hack them because they would do that.
It was pretty regular for someone to go, OK, I'm going to start printing gold or i'm going to start printing items over in this area nobody's going to know about it
um and i'm going to sell all those in the black market it happened constantly back then and so
they had to actually build rules and regulations into the platform that made it so that not even
the founders could hack their game right it was it was like no like if you want to do a thing you
need like three parties to all agree on it um which is i think the kind of thing we need to be
thinking about when we think about
security in the Web3 space. So, again,
wish the team well and hope
that we can see something
just as come out of it, but I think it's unlikely at this point.
Yeah, I love the points you're raising there and the idea
that even in traditional games, you have to
build a way to ensure that
you can't just be printing items off, especially then if you move that ideal to the web
three and there's then financial value attached these items that you could be
creating even as an employee there with a malicious intent and I like we point
out there of the people use it pretending to be you to talk to
employees to get the login details I know around some of the
projects I've been involved in when it's come to TGE. It's then been fake them messaging me on
Telegram trying to get certain information off me but unfortunately they talked me how regular
humans would and not how we actually interact with each other in DMs so I guess our weirdness is
a great level of security that these hackers have not thought of yet.
Okay, so we're coming up to the top of the hour, which means we're going to be finishing off.
But I'd like to give all of you a quick one minute just to give us a little idea of what we should be paying attention to and what you have coming up with your projects itself.
And I'll throw it over to you first, Simon, a quick minute.
What do we need to be expecting from you guys and where should we follow him?
You need to follow Play Mighty Hero.
So that's the Mighty Action Heroes account just here.
And I would love to tell you what's coming next,
but we're going to make a big announcement next week.
So follow the account and turn on notifications.
If I leak it today,
I'm going to get punched in the face
when I go into the office next.
So I'm going to spare myself. But yeah, make sure you follow Play Mighty Hero. it today like i'm gonna get punched in the face uh when i go into the office next so i'm gonna
spare myself uh but yeah make sure you follow play my t hero um it's actually it's a pretty
enormous announcement uh and yeah turn on notifications and we look forward to uh
to seeing you uh join us on this journey that we're about to embark on very soon
it sounds good yes and we don't want you getting beaten up by Big Terry when you go
in, so it's good that you're keeping it under wraps until next week, so everyone make sure
you're paying attention next week for what this is going to be. Next, let's start over to you,
Rudy. Rudy, let us know what's happening with you guys. Yeah, we are building away. We've got a couple of tech products that we are getting out the door this year. We're working with a few incredible game teams that we'll be announcing very soon who are building with us.
We're very excited about this year, you know, especially after the beating we took in 2023.
You know, it's looking like incredible positive momentum for the whole space, which is really great to be a part of.
And we're certainly excited about our future.
So, you know, follow us here on Twitter and, you know, or reach out to me.
I'm on Telegram or here at here um at rudy kotch it's my name uh
happy to uh to chat sounds great and yes i still call this twitter as well i am still not referring
to this as x it just it feels weird and i don't like it. Okay, and finally, let's throw it over to Sean as well.
Sean, just let us know what you guys are getting up to.
Yeah, so again, I would also get punched multiple times
if I say anything specifically.
So you can follow our Twitter or whatever, X account,
at Avalon.
Go on to our questing, avalon.online.quest.
I can say that we have a lot of stuff cooking, a lot of great stuff
going to be dropping later this year. We've been fairly quiet,
but we're starting to pick up steam now.
And I might not have pitched the game very well
in the beginning, so I'm going to very quickly do that.
You know, in short,
games should be easier to make. I've been
making games a long time, and we believe that
people should also own their stuff.
And we're leveraging Unreal Engine 5, as well as
a lot of AI technologies to make it really fun for people to create lots of games. And we're leveraging Unreal Engine 5 as well as a lot of AI technologies
to make it really fun for people to create lots of games.
And then over time, those games interconnected
could look something like a metaverse or oasis.
So look forward to more of that.
We're going to be dropping more content,
other things here soon.
Sounds good as well.
So everybody in the audience,
make sure you check out all three of the projects
from the people we have up here joining me today also we have lost him from the stage but my co-host gaspode also has a series a website and
some other stuff that i honestly um i'm not up to date enough with called what's your game so make
sure you go check out what gaspode is doing as well and now for me to round it out with my monologue, selling ourselves here at Games.gg, the place you need to go for guides, reviews, news.
If you are a triple three NFT holder as well, make sure you're over in our discord in our chat specifically for those guys to find out what benefits you're going to be getting from holding that NFT as well.
at NFT as well. If you have come in late or left early from this space as well, don't forget
that it will be reused as a podcast as well across the four major platforms. As always,
it's a big thank you to everyone that decided to come up here and share some brain wrinkles with
me today. And a huge thanks to everybody out in the audience that comes along listening to us.
I am likely not going to be here next week as I am heading to Good Morning Vietnam so if any of you
are out that way as well make sure you hit us up because I'm going to be the games representative
out there. Until then I hope you all have a fantastic week and play lots of games and I'll
catch you next time. Thank you.
