We're traveling in the Freight Land, come on, man.
and the Freight left on me
I want to give you trail of that photo song to me
I'm Greg Foreman in muscles.
He works here at 6 foot far in the fall of muscles.
I'll step into my language.
He's smiling and giving him a chance to sound good.
He said, I'm coming for you.
I hope my AirPods are plugged in.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
How are you guys all doing today?
We'll be speaking Web3 Gaming with MixMob
as we head into GDC next week.
The topic will be user acquisition
and to go into a subtopic,
it will be onboarding Web2 gamers into Web3
as we are getting closer to games,
launching their open betas, their closed betas,
their alphas and their full releases.
We have an absolute stack panel today.
I see a few people in our panel that are down in listeners.
So as we bring them up, we'll go ahead and do some intros.
I am Nick, the partnership manager over at MixMob.
I'll pass it over to Jorge to do an intro.
Jorge, what is our icebreaker question of the day?
Yo, yo, yo, ah, man, the icebreaker question of the day.
We're about to be at GDC next week.
when I was talking to the Web2 game developers,
I would always ask them, what do you think about Web3?
And then they would look at me with like four different heads.
And I'm like, yeah, you know,
you're in the Web2 game developer world, right?
And he's like, I'm in what?
They're like, I'm just a video game.
I work at the video game company.
And I'm like, oh, I'm like, yeah.
This lingo that we all made in the Web3 space
doesn't only live in the Web3 space.
So again, GDC next week, you need to practice those intros.
Make sure you've got it down, that you say,
hey, we're a video game company
with blockchain technology powering it.
And that's the way I'm gonna intro it.
I'm the marketing lead here at Mix Mob
and then excited to bring on this stack panel.
I see some, ooh, we got Shrapnel.
We got Flight Force, man.
Man, this is gonna be stacked.
I'm excited for these conversations.
I see Yellow Panther out in the crowd as well.
This is gonna bring fire for next week.
As you all know, Mix Mob is hosting
the fucking wildest house next week.
Talk about, well, I won't even go into too much details
because I don't wanna give people FOMO.
man, the shit that we're about to go down with, whoo.
All right, all right, Nick, kick it off
Oh, man, I absolutely love it.
Jorge bringing the energy.
I would like to say if you guys can go ahead
and retweet and like the space that I pinned up here,
get some listeners in here, get people stoked
off of what we'll be talking about, as well as GDC.
I know a lot of people in the panel will also be at GDC.
So I believe that the icebreaker question is your intro.
You're gonna be meeting a lot of people next week.
You're gonna be meeting a lot of web two developers
So let's go ahead and tell us who's behind the account
and tell us a bit about yourself,
but not only yourself, but the game or the project
I'm gonna go ahead and go from my right to my left.
Also shout out to ex co-host for co-hosting this.
I know that they are a silent partner,
so they'll give us a heart.
Awesome, now let's pass it over to Nitro League.
How are we doing and who's behind the account?
Behind the account over here at Nitro League.
I do BD and communications,
and I am super excited for GDC next week.
Although Jorge just gave me a ton of FOMO.
I'm about the mixed mob house,
so, but excited for it to kick off.
I have not perfected my intro yet.
That's something that kind of just got reminded to me
that I really need to work on for GDC this year.
So I will be working on that now
for the rest of this week.
I appreciate that, Jorge.
One more thing to add to my list of to-dos.
But yes, we are Nitro League.
We are live with Mac and PC.
You can find us on Ultra.
You can find us on GameSwift
or you can download the game from our website.
We have multiplayer and single-player races,
and we do a pretty awesome tournament
about once a month that goes a week long
with a lot of awesome projects
and different communities and stuff
from around the ecosystem.
Participate with their own kind of branded car
and something for their community to race and flex with.
But excited for this space and excited for next week.
Excited to connect next week.
Jorge, you're doing your job.
We're bringing you in the FOMO.
You're crushing it over there.
Travis will definitely connect.
Excited to hear more about Nitro League next week.
I'm gonna go ahead and pass it over to fight me.
I believe this is our first time
having you up on the panel.
I'm the manager at Fight Me Project
and I'm really interested in this cozy conversation
that you're having with me this first time I'm here.
And that is the bottom of my head.
Talking about the project we're working on,
we are building our first web3 fighting game, of course.
And talking about Wii, I mean,
Nike is a huge web2, as you used to say.
Yeah, web2, game developer, and folks.
And we are known for our web2 gaming titles
like the Shadow Fight Gaming series,
like Vector and other mobile games.
I think that you are familiar with.
Yeah, I am 100% sure that you played some of our games
because all our games have been installed
more than one billion times worldwide.
And right now, yeah, we are entering into this web3 space
and we are cooking our first game
but I think that it's gonna be not the last one.
And the game is still under construction.
The global game launch is getting on the second quarter
It's gonna be in the late June or in the early July,
And it's pretty awesome, pretty badass game.
It's like a football manager
but you're a manager of your own fighting club.
And every fighter in your collection
is an evolving NFT and of course,
after every evolve, your fighter unlocks some crew,
weapons, some talent, some items
that are gonna be a lot of tournaments, et cetera.
So yeah, I'm really excited about the game
and I'm really excited to spend this evening with you guys.
Yeah, I think you gotta fix wherever you're located.
It sounds pretty bad, by the way.
We kind of understood what you said
but maybe just leave and come back
and get on Wi-Fi or a better signal
because it sounds pretty bad.
But yeah, go for it, Nick.
If you wanna step down and come back, it was a bit choppy.
And then finally, can I ask you really quickly
before you do, who was behind the account?
My name is Archie, Archie.
Let's go Archie, a pleasure to have you.
Hopefully we can get the connection fixed.
Flight Force 4, our buddies over at Flight Force 4.
Who's behind the account?
Will you be at GDC if you are or not?
I still would love to hear your guys' blurb.
Yo, what's happening, Nick?
It's that time of year where I just get FOMO
for every event that's going on.
Like we got GDC, there's so many things that are coming up
and we're in New Zealand.
It's like 2,500 hours to fly anywhere.
It's crazy, but what's up to all of our friends?
Jorge, Michal, Archie, Travis, I'm Sean.
I'm the co-founder of T3 Play,
which is down in the listeners.
We're building a Web3 game that uses NFTs,
ERC721 tokens, ERC20 tokens.
You can earn all sorts of things.
Am I doing this right, Jorge?
Hey, man, you got it, man.
If I was to hire somebody right now for BD partnerships, man,
you're the number one person I would hire.
I'd throw my whole money at you.
No, all right, let's do that again.
We are building a Web3 studio building a shooter game.
Well, we're building multiple games, actually.
Two shooter games and a space cards game as well.
So yeah, check out T3 Play down there in the listeners.
But FF4, that's the account I'm behind right now.
We got a demo out at the moment.
You can download it for free right now and play it.
We got loads of things coming, working on the multiplayer.
So yeah, that's probably a short intro
to what we're building, as simple as I can,
Let's go, Sean, happy to have you.
And I think you missed one thing.
You guys are currently minting, is that correct?
Actually, we finished minting three, four days ago.
So no, had a successful mint
for our second character collection.
But thank you for bringing that up.
Yeah, it was a really fun mint.
I just want to give you a heads up.
It does say you're minting now.
But let's go, Sean, excited to have you over here.
And who are you representing?
We've had you up here a few times,
excited to have you on board again.
Yeah, I'm so happy to be here.
Nice to see you, Jorge, the Shrapnel scene, Jerry.
Mikel, I am co-founder at Sedona.
We are currently in acquisition,
but it's a web through GameWatcher.
I have some news coming, but I cannot share it yet,
but I will be joining a new team soon.
So stay tuned and I will be announcing.
It will be within gaming and I'm super excited about it.
So the reason I am making a last minute trip to GDC
is to meet this team for the first time, IRL.
So super excited to be here,
excited to talk about some gaming and also GDC, hopefully.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
So first off is, if you are joining a new team,
will we all get a token bag?
If not, will we at least get merch?
And if we don't can't get merch, then we're fighting you.
Damn me, bro, I don't know.
We're kind of sad you couldn't drop the alpha,
but it's okay, we'll be paying attention
and we'll be super excited to connect with you next week.
Now over to our friend, Shrapnel,
super excited to have you guys up here,
excited to connect with you next week.
Who do we have behind the account
and tell us a little bit about Shrapnel.
Yes, sir, thank you so much, Nick and Jorge
for the invitation as always.
So excited to be here on this panel
and even more excited for next week at GDC
to meet up with all you find folks.
Shrapnel is also gonna be having a creator house
in partnership with the Wolves Dow folks.
So we should definitely organize some competition going on,
maybe play some mixed mob racing,
maybe get into the sacrifice zone for STX
or just have some fun Nerf War battles.
But I'm really excited to come hang out
and obviously everyone on the panel here
is invited to come through the Shrapnel house.
We're Shrapnel, a AAA first-person extraction shooter
building on the Avalanche blockchain.
We will be at GDC next week
with a lot of our friends here on this panel
doing our own content house
as well as presenting with Avalanche
So if any of you guys are attending,
feel free to come through.
And if you aren't attending,
we are gonna be hosting our STX early access event
during GDC week, Wednesday through Saturday.
So if you aren't able to attend,
you can go ahead and play that online.
And the big alpha drop folks
is we are changing up the leaderboards for this STX.
They are changing to daily leaderboards.
So you do not have to grind the entire STX window
to try to complete for that Shrapnel leaderboard pricing.
So if you just wanna grind on a Saturday or Friday,
what have you, you can try to see where you place.
And I am curious, I'd love to challenge the mixed mob folks,
see how high y'all can place
on one of the days of the leaderboard.
I think that'd be a sick challenge,
but excited to get into it.
Thank you, Jorge and Nick again.
I mean, as long as I can use a controller,
I'm not really a mouse and keyboard kind of player,
but if we got controller plugins, man,
I know Jorge would say he's the best.
I think I got to challenge him in a 1v1 as well.
Yeah, super excited Alex, excited to connect next week.
I'm gonna need some Shrapnel.
I'm the number one Shrapnel player.
Just Shrapnel hasn't ever invited me to play the game.
So what do you want me to do?
I can't tell you guys how good I am.
It's behind the scenes only, you know?
It's only I can know about it.
Well, next week we're gonna find out the truth, Jorge.
All my Luna coin and my FTX coin on it.
We got to get that streamed as well.
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Rams.
Rams, it's a pleasure to have you up here
We'd love to learn more about you
as well as the project you represent.
Thanks Jorge, thanks Nick's mom
for having me here for the first time.
We've announced something very big coinciding with GDC.
Unfortunately, we won't be able to attend GDC in person
because like someone else previously told us
it's sort of like a big way out of home right now.
But we are going big with a couple of big announcements.
Just to give you guys a brief about what Play AI does.
As the name suggests, we help games integrate AI.
So I know it's a big buzzword right now,
but believe me, we have something really good.
A parsley is with IMX, with Beam
and with a couple of other bigger chains out there.
So I would love to talk more about it later in this call
or maybe when once we announce after GDC.
Absolutely Rams, we're excited to have you here.
We'll take your word for it like you told us to.
One thing I do wanna say is you were cutting out a bit
I don't know if it was your connection.
It kind of sounded better at the end.
Just wanted to give you a heads up.
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Mindless now.
Who do we have behind the account?
It's definitely Mindless, usually on the voice
behind the BSC gaming account for technical reasons.
I couldn't hop on the official account and be here,
but you'll know me as the orange tackle
I bounce around the space.
We are a web three gaming media company,
traditionally spawned out of the crypto new space.
So we've decided to start up a new vector
in the business focusing on gaming specifically.
And lots of what I do is just to touch base
with some of the most interesting and engaged founders
building amazing games in the space
to follow you along on that journey.
There's nothing transactional.
We like to help get your product
and what you're doing in front of a consumer
that's interested in the web three gaming space
and hopefully somewhere along that journey
we'll catch some of the tailwinds.
So unfortunately I won't be there at GDC this year.
That was my first time ever bumping
into the shrapnel team long before most folks
But I think most of you guys
will definitely love that experience.
Excited to have you up here again, Mindless.
Sad that we'll miss you next week,
but hopefully we can catch you at future events.
This is Nick behind the account.
How are we doing today, Jerry?
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Yo, yo, I know you're not in B.D. in partnerships
and your intro was, hello?
Yo, oh man, I'm about to go up.
I'm about to buy you a beer next week.
Yeah, no, Nick fudded me, dude.
Nick goes, oh, this person's first time, you know.
Oh, this person's third time.
He goes, hey, hey, Jerry.
So, you know, I just, Nick fudded me, bro.
I apologize, I did not give you the energy.
Tell us more about yourself.
Will we see you next week at GBC?
That's right, there we go, thank you.
Jerry, tell him you are 230 pounds, 610 fucking whole week stacked.
Man, you better tell him.
Nick, you have to fucking face me next week too.
So, just know you must face the repercussions
of what you've done to me.
Yeah, no, Nick, you're a good guy.
Yeah, no, I do B.D. and partnerships
as Jorge eloquently said for a project called
My Angry Acusa Girlfriend.
A lot of you guys know my partner in crime there,
Sinjin, who just yells at everybody.
I'm the measured, responsible voice in the room.
And I do some stuff in the traditional UA space
for a lot of free-to-play mobile games.
Jerry, thank you so much for the intro.
I'm excited to meet you next week.
So, I think you have me on this one.
Oh, man, Jerry, it's a pleasure to have you up here.
Now I'm very excited to meet you next week.
We're gonna go ahead and pass.
I'm really 5'6", by the way.
Now we're a little bit more even now, so it's okay.
We'll bring some boxing gloves.
Jorge, put that on your list.
Jorge turned us into enemies already, dude.
What are you doing? Are you trying to fight me, man?
I was just messing around.
You're talking about boxing gloves.
Yeah, yeah, gamers, you know, man, they get like,
I don't know what it is in Web 3, man.
They took a big game for some reason.
There's no reason to point yet.
Hey, Nick, when you bring your boxing gloves,
you've already said that you need a controller
to be any good, so I fear no one.
You shouldn't fear anyone, man.
I think we might have to just get games in rotation.
Alex, you heard it here first.
Bring a PC, bring a controller.
We're playing shop against each other as well.
All right, to keep it going,
we're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Manav.
Please let me know if I pronounced that incorrectly.
How could you represent and give us the blurb?
Hey, nice to meet you, Nick, for the first time.
Barely any people, you know, people don't get that name.
They say Manav or some random stuff, God knows how,
but you got it right the first time.
So I currently represent Archway.
It is a layer one blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem.
So we are entering the NFT space,
so I'm the head of BD for the NFT ecosystem
how Archway is gonna set their foot
into the Cosmos ecosystem with a banger in NFTs
and just games and how to gamify the entire chain.
We did about $25 million, $30 million
in our first round last year.
And yeah, we're just working hard
to become the best fame in Cosmos.
So nice to meet you all and glad to be here today.
Absolutely a pleasure to have you up here, Manav.
I'm super excited to kick off this topic.
So once again, if you guys are listening,
if you can hear my voice,
please go like and retweet the spaces.
Let's get as many people in here.
Let's get in the mind of some of these games
and try to see if we can extract any alpha, right?
Get in early as Jorge always says we are early.
So let's see what we can extract from these guys.
The topic is user acquisition,
especially with translating web two to web three gamers.
Why I think this is such an important
and interesting topic is because as mentioned before,
a lot of these games are starting to hit the market.
We have shrapnel where they're starting to have play tests,
mix mobs going to open beta here soon.
Nitro League already mentioned how their game is out.
FF4 is mentioning how they're currently in an alpha as well.
So we're clearly at different stages.
So it's very interesting to hear your guys' strategies.
And so this is going to lead me to my first question,
which is what strategies are you guys going to employ
when you guys are ready to go to market
in order to attract these web two gamers?
I think it's simple, right?
I mean, it has to be the game experience.
The game experience will all lead all of this.
If people have fun, if people enjoy the game,
people are not going to care about all the bells
and whistles that the web three space has.
Granted, there's still a lot of bells and whistles
that we have to jump through, but it's a game experience.
Look at everybody having fun right now with shrapnel, right?
It was all over our timelines, right?
It's something that we've all been anticipating.
We knew that it was going to be great.
Again, this will lead it.
As long as the game experience leads it,
the other stuff is just on the background.
As we always say, we're building games.
And so what we have to do is make sure the games are fun.
The web three element is supposed to enhance the experience.
In my honest opinion, it's not supposed
to be the forefront of the product.
We're going to go ahead and pass it over to Nitro League.
Yeah, I agree with what Jorge was saying.
And I think it's important, too,
if you're trying to break into that web two market
and kind of outside of our web three bubble or space here,
market like a traditional game.
You don't need to be blockchain.
You don't need NFTs or web three splashed
all over your site and title and everything else.
It's just you're a game and you're appealing to gamers
and meeting the market where they are.
So I think that's a big thing.
And in hand with that is also publishing your game
So getting on to the Epic Play Store.
If you're a mobile game, getting on iOS and Android Store
and all those other ones where gamers typically are.
And really, like I said, just kind of meet the market
where they're already at.
I love that take Nitro League.
And I'd love to follow up with a question, if you don't mind.
You said to market like a traditional game.
So for people that maybe have never
marketed a traditional game, can you
kind of walk us through what games would normally
Yeah, I mean more in kind of the wording
But also with your overall marketing plan,
getting into some of the gamer magazines,
attending some of the gaming events like GDC
and getting in front of some of those crowds,
leaning on content creators and streamers and the Twitch
streamers that may not be just a web three niche or web
three specific audience that have a more broader audience.
And really just kind of your overall marketing language
and stuff, keeping it familiar.
I know we all have our slang and lingos and kind of code words
But those aren't necessarily as familiar to people
Thank you for sharing that, especially
with the marketing language.
I think that that's a very valid point.
We have to talk like them, right?
We're not in our inner bubble anymore,
especially once we start to onboard the masses.
Thank you for that, Nitro League.
I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Michael.
I think Jorge is 100% right.
And we've been talking about this for how many years now?
Like, how are we going to onboard the web two masses?
And it just hasn't been the right time.
And I think now is the time to really be
having this conversation, because we
are at the point where we have great games
to start presenting to these users that expect more.
I think before, we almost had to leave with web three marketing
as a signal like, hey, this is a friendly audience to us.
They're not going to come in and fud the way web two would.
And we want people testing the game
and helping us develop this game.
But we can't have those same expectations
that web two gamers have while we're in evolving space.
Onboarding, just getting into play a game
has been atrociously hard.
And we're just getting to the point with Magic Link
and some of these other solutions
where it's seamless to get on and play the game.
So I don't fault us for not having made much inroads
But now is the time where we do have to prove it.
So we need to get off Twitter.
I know that, you know, like we can't all be like portal coin
and just spamming our way to the top.
Like this isn't going to work for gaming.
Like we have to get outside of the echo chamber.
You know, Facebook, my son sent me, I tweeted,
He's like, hey, mom, I heard of this really cool game
called Big Time that you should check out.
And I was like, Jacob told me about that like a year ago.
Like you just don't listen to me,
but he came across it in the wild, right?
And he was like, it looks like a cool game.
So we need to explore new channels.
We need to be out there and reaching these kids, right?
Like I'm bringing my 15 year old son
and his best friend to GDC next week.
If anybody can help me smuggle in minors
to the conference, that would be phenomenal.
Like these are the people we need to convert, right?
Like this is the next generation of gamers coming in.
So, you know, like getting those kids passionate
and involved in some of these games early on
and incentivizing them because they're the ones
who are going to spread this like wildfire.
Okay, I absolutely love that take, right?
We're in this for the long haul.
So this is the next generation of gamers.
And that's another thing you touched on too, right?
Is getting off of Twitter.
All gamers don't live on Twitter.
They're on Facebook, they're on Twitch, they're on TikTok.
They're exploring games in different places.
And so we need to be able to breach them, right?
And another thing you touched on was onboarding
I was actually on another space earlier with Jorge.
And the topic was web3gaming and what we should call it
and will it be continued to be called web3gaming.
And one of the biggest points was onboarding, right?
Not shoving web3 into their face,
but just having a fun game
and then having web3 there and ready for them
once they want to discover it themselves.
Mikel, thank you so much for your takes.
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Sean.
Yeah, well, I might have a slightly
more controversial take on this,
but I totally agree with everything everyone said so far.
But I think a lot of games are at a totally different,
in a totally different position
to actually appeal to web2 at the moment.
And you've got to be ready.
Like I think we've seen what happens when you're not ready
and you actually do more damage to the industry than good.
So I think, and I hope for, I guess,
the next 12 to 18 months that the games that do launch
and start trying to appeal to web2 gamers are ready.
And they've got the game player like Jorge said,
the game player's kicking it
and everyone's actually enjoying the game.
So when these web2 gamers do come and play, they enjoy it.
And that's paramount for the next 18 months
because we've seen what happens
when web2 gamers do actually test web3 games and they suck.
And so for us, I guess, personally,
we're sort of staying in our own lane.
We're not ready yet to be appealing to web2 gamers.
And so our focus for the next 12 months or so
And I guess, starting with polygunners is our first game
that will be at that level,
where it is gonna have the fun gameplay,
but again, still very web3 focused.
We're building characters for other web3 communities
so that they can take part in the game.
So that'd be, I guess, a funnel
for while we're building FF4, which is the flagship game.
we'll have that kind of player base
that trusts what was built already
and they see what we're building on the journey.
And then that's when we start opening the gates.
a lot of these games that are a lot further along than us
will have hopefully done a really good job of, you know,
showcasing what web3 games can be.
So this kind of my take for this.
Thank you, Sean, for offering that other perspective.
I think that's a very valid point
of making sure that the game is ready.
Web2 gamers are very picky
and very particular with their games
and they do not hold back.
So it's definitely, you know,
it needs to be an emphasis to make sure the game is ready.
Another thing that you made me think of too, right?
Was you said that your guys' plan was to build in web3
for the next year in terms of your user base.
And I really liked that because what's so awesome
about web3 is we can build in public
and actually ask for feedback
and the community wants to give feedback
and be a part of that journey.
So I'm really excited to see where you guys will be
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to my boy, Jerry.
Jerry, it is now your turn.
Yeah, I wanna highlight a couple of teams
that have done, you know, very well so far, right?
Let's talk about one of the web3 space,
I'm not just saying this because they're here, right?
I'm gonna kind of make fun of them too.
But everybody looked at like them giving away
extraction packs and looking and being like,
oh man, you know, they're giving away $50 things.
They're giving away $100 things, right?
Why were they doing that?
Was it because they're nice?
But they also like to make money.
So they'd probably rather sell those things.
Shrapnel.com and see what they got, right?
But it's a small space, right?
Everybody was getting one for free.
They have a lot of sponsorship deals, right?
And so they were able to capture
the web3 attention economy very easily, right?
Because people were on spaces talking about them.
They were giving away tons of stuff.
You know, in those spaces to people
who were listening and participating,
And that is going to, that's a huge,
what we call a top of funnel, right?
A lot of those people are gonna then go try the game out,
test the game out and see what the experience is like,
And some of those people will inevitably stay
and be along for the ride.
I don't know who strategized that.
It was probably Alex, actually, not Tony.
There's definitely all Alex.
But another one that we should look at
who did a very traditional way,
but it benefited their web3 efforts was Mafia, right?
Now, like I said at the beginning,
I have a lot of experience in free to play mobile, right?
They timed their UA push in, you know,
traditional UA push right around their TGE, right?
and then they have this marketing beat of saying,
we have a million users playing our game.
Now I have the data, right?
Those were very low quality, cheap installs, right?
At targeted at like tier three geos.
But it's very sexy to say
we have a million people playing the game, right?
That pumped the token like crazy,
which meant they could capture
the web3 attention economy.
So I give those two examples to say,
there's a lot of ways to do it.
There's a lot of ways to conquer UA.
If you talk to anybody who's, you know,
a person who plays a lot of mobile games,
my obvious probably not a game that's in their top 10
or, you know, that they're playing right now,
They made everybody happy.
and they got a lot of people into their game
and they did it at a pretty cost-effective way, right?
And everybody was talking about them,
because they timed some things really well,
they're a thought leader as well.
So depending on where you're at, right?
There's a lot of different ways to conquer UA.
I think the important thing is you can't just do one,
For people like who are in soft launch,
yeah, you can focus on web3,
but eventually that's not gonna be enough, right?
So as you exit soft launch,
like the left and right hand
need to be working in conjunction with each other.
Teams that can figure that out
are going to fucking kill it.
And we've already seen that start to happen, right?
Look at those playbooks and start to repeat them
because those are very good playbooks.
Jerry, I absolutely love that take.
Someone needs to clip that.
I love how you used real life examples,
Shrapnel giving away their extraction packs
and building a user base of players that had no risk
that you actually try the game.
And that's what built their foundation
of an amazing community that they tend to have.
they timed their UA push around their TGE
and saying they had 1 million users
that it was able to capture web3 audience as well.
So, Jerry, thank you for that.
Those were amazing takes.
Alex, over to you and let us know.
Well, I wish I could take all the credit,
but it was Tony, the mastermind,
the crazy man, the bearded one.
He came up with the extraction packs
and those are still available and required
for getting early access here.
And Jerry, I actually wanted to dovetail off something
that you mentioned where it is really dependent
on where you are in your product lifecycle
for how you approach user acquisition and marketing.
And so now as we're moving into a playable build
we actually have a game to show off that we think is fun.
So, like you're saying with this attention economy,
how do you capture that attention?
So you see us already sponsoring bigger shows
and some of the larger KOLs influencers,
content creators, whatever.
But at the same time, you need to focus on your community,
the people who are just playing your game
and part of your audience who want to support you.
And so we're doing that as well,
having content creator competitions with our community.
I think we gave away $15,000 or $25,000
so that those players are able to post to their timelines,
clips of them having fun in STX.
And now it isn't so much of like a direct shill.
look at what's going on over here, this party.
Don't you want to take part in it
if you aren't already part of it, if you're a gamer.
And then if you're a web three sort of speculator investor,
you see all these people posting shrapnel on the timeline
or wherever social media, you're like, oh shit,
people are actually playing that game.
Maybe there's something going on over there.
I'm not gonna fud it, not financial advice, things like that.
So I think it's really important
at sort of what phase you're at for that user acquisition.
And I think, for discoverability of what is fun,
content is gonna be king.
And that's where we're moving to for shrapnel
with our GDC house, with our content creator contest
is that we are gonna try to make as much content
around shrapnel to show off how much damn fun
people are having playing our game.
Alex, I must say you guys do an amazing job at content.
I was at Art Basel where you guys
had the content creator house there.
You guys are consistently flying content creators
out to try your game out.
I see shrapnel gameplay everywhere.
I think that you guys have been really great at that.
And to touch on the part of the product, right?
It depends where you are with your product.
I don't think there's a one size fits all.
I totally agree with that, especially with Jerry,
showing two different examples for two different games.
I'm curious, Alex, you guys also did a competition
where you guys created a Fortnite map.
Can we get into the mind of the reasoning
and how that worked out for you guys?
Yes, sir, that's just eating our own dog food
in terms of we're gonna have our own UGC map editor
where we wanna have partners like MixMob come in
and make a MixMob themed map.
So if we're gonna tell people to come do that
for our platform, might as well go to Fortnite
and build a shrapnel map.
So that's where that came from.
And then in general, we're super pro
in terms of interoperability
and just hanging with the community
and giving them things to do outside of STXs and shrapnel.
So last night, for example, or a few nights ago,
we were playing Nifty Island together
on one of the shrapnel themed islands.
So we're really pro about interoperability,
going and exploring other games, other communities,
because we want that same to happen to us.
So if we're not doing what we preach,
how can we expect anyone else to do the same?
Absolutely, I love that, Alex.
Manav, I did see your hand up and then it went down.
Would you like to go or should we pass it over to Rams?
So yeah, I actually wanted to build
upon what Sean was saying regarding
the comfortable folks for games in the web through system.
I do believe that targeting and focusing
of web through users is much more safe
compared to focusing on the web through,
just because yes, our eventual goal
is to be able to build games where web to users
don't even know it's integrated with the blockchain
and they don't need to understand
all that technical stuff, right?
But I feel like we should test it out in our own waters
before we go to the shark infested waters,
if that makes more sense.
But yeah, I like what Sean had said,
I just wanted to build upon that.
It's practically just A-B testing,
seeing what works, what doesn't work,
and then starting to hit the masses.
Manav, thank you so much for that.
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Rams.
Hey, hey, I hope I'm audible right now.
So I just wanted to echo what Alex
previously said in terms of content, right?
Which in my opinion is a cornerstone
of how all these web two games
or your normal games propagate across the whole world.
Like you've seen games like Pal World,
which in an instant it became the number one most streamed
you know, most concurrent players in the world.
Pal World could have very well been a web three game, right?
With the pseudo Pokemons becoming an NFTs,
like you've got hundreds of similar games
It's just that the experience or the gameplay itself,
I mean, till the last cycle in web three
was not mature enough in my opinion.
But right now, people like Shrapnel
or a couple of other, you know,
really great games across different verticals,
like you've got parallel in card games,
you've got, you know, any chess,
which is like, you know, chess focus
with a top content creators and players
like Magnus Carlsen itself even supporting them, right?
So you've got all these very mature,
more gameplay oriented games in web three itself right now.
And it's purely a, you know, play of content
or if you are able to reach out to the masses
through TikTok, through Twitch, through Instagram,
I think if, you know, people are able to crack that,
like how Shrapnel and others are trying to do it,
maybe through competitions or like e-sports kind of models,
that would be the, you know, catalyst
to bring the masses from web two to web three games.
So yeah, that was my two cents here.
Thank you for that, Rams.
I don't think we were matured as games last cycle,
but it's exciting to see where we are this cycle.
And maybe it doesn't mean that, you know,
or this is when we'll bring on the masses,
but at least there's more acceptability
and more discoverability for these games
that players are actually wanting this.
And another thing you touched on is content.
It's actually very interesting to see how content
is also growing and maturing across multiple platforms.
I mean, look at X, you know,
where you can do a lot more content
compared to a couple of years ago.
So it's very interesting to see how games will leverage that.
Thank you for that, Rams.
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Mindless.
I'm going to go on the slightly contrarian perspective.
I wear a helmet for a reason.
I think sometimes perhaps from what I hear,
we seem to patronize the initial audience
that helped some of our teams and projects launch,
which is the Web3 audience.
And sometimes that's because we might not like
the flavor of the speculative fever
and the financialization that comes with it,
but I think we forget this is the Web3 space.
These are financially disruptive technologies.
The whole essence of this
was about economics and financials, right?
So I think if you ignore that a little too much,
you might end up actually doing a little disservice
to the very communities that helped you launch from the get-go.
You built your foundations here for a reason,
because these are very, very strong foundations
that gave you the early liquidity and seed funding
and a very passionate, loyal user base.
And I don't think that should come at the cost
of then later trying to reach out to the Web2 space.
I don't think you should sacrifice one for the other.
And the trick is to balance both, obviously.
And I think going back to the example someone used earlier,
Marvia actually did this, right?
They sold an NFT collection.
They had a really strong community,
a passion that kept them engaged
through that journey of building,
opening the public, three years in fact.
And then finally, when they went to their GA
and traditional marketing channels and outreach and Web2,
they already had a leg up above everybody else in the space.
They had a 30,000, 40,000 active user base
from the Web3 space that they pulled along, right?
Traditional approaches, you'll start from ground zero,
nothing, and it'll take you six to 12 months
to build some sort of traction
before you can finally start going live
with some sort of snippet.
It's that shortcut, I think, that the Web3 space offers.
And I think it's important not to forget that.
So what I'm trying to say is embrace
a little bit of the Web3 narratives, they're important.
And if you launched in the space,
they're probably very important for you
and don't sacrifice them just to try and get 20, 30 times
more users from the Web2 space.
I think that that was a really awesome take.
I don't think I've heard anyone take a take like that
across a lot of spaces I've been.
And 100% correct, we did build in Web3
with the full-blown faith and belief in Web3.
And we just have to make sure that we continue to remember
that it's almost remembering your roots, right?
So thank you for that take, that was amazing.
Someone's got to clip that as well.
So we're gonna go ahead and reset the room really quickly.
I appreciate everyone that participated in that question.
If you guys can go ahead and retweet
and like the pin space above,
get as many people in here
as we have some amazing speakers and amazing projects
that are giving some great insight on user acquisition.
And so this is gonna lead me to my next question.
I know that we're getting close to the top of the hour,
so this potentially could be the last question,
but I'm really excited to hear this.
And you actually just spoke on this, Mindless,
how incentivization and speculation
play such a massive role in the Web3.
And so I'm very curious on your guys' thoughts
on what tech or incentivization models
will best attract Web2 gamers.
What do you think Web2 gamers will care about the most?
Definitely not owning the asset.
What aspect of Web3 gaming
will Web2 players care about the most?
Between the tech and the incentivization models,
blockchain, all of that kind of stuff,
what do you think will attract them the most?
Good, I have a passive view, Sean.
No, sorry, I'll respect the hand system.
So they're not gonna be into the ERC 721s, Jorge.
I think that kind of will be what they're into though,
once they realize, because they grind for assets anyway.
Anything that's rare, anything that stands out in a game
I think that's the main thing
that once they enjoy the gameplay,
that's gonna be appealing,
is that they can earn this asset
that previously maybe didn't have a price,
Now you've got something that potentially
has a monetary value next to it.
yes, people are gonna want that just to have it
but the side effect is that it's worth a lot of money now
and that they can actually trade it.
So I think for Web3 specifically,
that's definitely one thing that I would say
is gonna incentivize them.
And it's also gonna take streaming
and a lot of content creation
for that to get spread around in a positive way
rather than I guess the negative way
that it has been spread in the past.
100%, it's gonna be interesting
to see how content actually plays a role
It's almost like you don't know what you want
until you actually have it.
So it's gonna be interesting
once this is actually the norm in gaming,
how gamers will react to it.
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Mindless.
So this is a difficult one.
I think it's a bit of a trick question too
because it would probably depend on what game,
what genre you're in and that would dictate
what incentives your gamers tend to like, right?
I think often we don't dissect gamers in this way.
It's like, you might do this with consumer goods,
you'll categorize customers with a certain perspective
in the gaming space this exists also
depending on what genre you're in.
But if I was to answer it,
I'd say I would pick something
that's native to the gaming industry
that folks already understand as being an incentive
and it's very easy, it's e-sports.
They call it e-sports, we call it play to earn.
In my opinion, it's essentially the same.
So we're talking about tournament style structures,
rank style structures, leaderboards
with a prize pool at the end.
It's very easy to get teams and players engaged
without talking about any of the fancy bells and whistles
and crypto and NFTs and all that types of stuff
because this is something they understand.
So I think it's a good idea to pick up some fever
in the gaming space and you've got some traditional gamers
looking at what you're building
and maybe some of them will stick around.
Mindless, once again, I love that take, right?
I haven't heard that either.
Play to earn is practically e-sports
and it makes total sense, right?
that was a meta was play to airdrop
where we attached tokens to leaderboards.
Very soon, I almost feel like those are just gonna be called
in-game rewards, in a sense.
You grind the leaderboards and then you get rewarded for it
because that's not something that's done in web two.
Mindless, once again, thank you for that.
Jerry, over to you, my man.
Yeah, love those two thoughts.
So I view my history as a gamer, right?
I played a lot of World of Warcraft,
was very good at that game,
spent way too many hours playing it.
One of the things that I did as a young kid was sell gold, right?
You weren't supposed to do it, I did it, sorry.
But I think, and what does that mean to me now, right?
I think peer-to-peer trading is gonna be something
that people get excited about if teams and games embrace it
because it's happening anyway, right?
So you might as well embrace it a bit.
So if a game hits a critical mass for a genre like an MMO,
peer-to-peer trading, I think,
for people who come from less privileged backgrounds
will be interested in taking their time and selling things.
And we saw that happen with Chinese gold farmers
in World of Warcraft back in the day, right?
They were on every server in huge amounts, right?
But also it gets very interesting for me now
but I'm older than I was then.
I just wanna clarify that for anybody listening,
I'm not old, but I have disposable income now, right?
Instead of grinding for shit myself,
can I just buy something and skip the line
and get to the end experience a little bit faster?
It's very important to me now, right?
I don't have the time I used to.
So I think peer-to-peer trading is very attractive.
The other thing I think is just a slam dunk
for web3 technology is that everybody will love
Having like an exclusive asset
and wildcard is doing this, right?
Having a battle pass that's very exclusive,
that can be traded, you can prove how scarce it is.
we don't talk about that enough in the web3 space, right?
That is going to be huge in time.
So when you have a battle pass that's ultra rare,
there's only a thousand of them or 88 of them
And that gets exclusive rewards
and that gets its own kind of pipeline of rewards.
Like as the game grows and the ecosystems grow out,
I don't know why more teams aren't implementing
like a really cool battle pass feature.
Cause to me that is the most slam dunk thing
I really liked that, Jerry.
The peer-to-peer trading is really exciting too
because you brought it into the mind
of two different gamers, right?
Maybe a less privileged gamer
where this can actually help them
and then a gamer that has disposable income, right?
And they want to just skip the line
or they see a skin that's really cool
that they don't want to grind for it
because they can afford it.
that's actually a very interesting topic
that isn't talked about enough.
I'm actually really interested to pick your brain next week
whenever you have some time.
Just go down the rabbit hole, man,
because you seem to have a lot of good takes and insights.
We're going to go ahead and pass it over to Shrapnel.
We just totally agree with Jerry
and that's really our vision for pushing forward too
is bringing gray and black markets
that are already existing for players
into the light to be officially supported.
So just like Jerry's saying,
if you're selling that Warcraft 3 account
because you grinded so many hours on it,
you're selling in-game currency.
You're trading CSGO skins on the gray market.
Players are already doing these actions.
and what blockchain allows you to do
is give them what they want
in a officially supported platform with security,
immutability and trust in the underlying transactions
that people are giving them
the strap token for the skin they're selling
and they're actually getting the skin
and the strap at the end of the day.
And so I think that's what's really appealing
for the Web 2 audience members
that whatever game it is,
there are these unsupported actions
that are being taken by player bases.
And I think Web 3 allows us as a video game publisher
to say, hey, you guys want to do this.
You want to trade your skins.
You want to have more ownership.
You want to be able to have autonomy over the hours
that you and resources you put into our game.
It's like, okay, hey, let's do it.
Let's make it so that your NFTs dynamically have
level progression on them.
So you hold all your levels within the NFT.
So if you sell it, it has all those levels
and you can start over with a level one
or a lower level one to grind up more.
So, I think what's gonna appeal to the Web 2 users
if done correctly is just making it
so that they can do all of those things
that they were already doing before
just in a more officially supported native experience.
I love what you touched on too
with the player progression attached to these assets, right?
It almost kind of makes me think about
what Jerry was talking about
where you're talking about these two gamers
where imagine the less privileged gamers
grinding these battle passes
or these NFTs leveling them up,
selling them and then redoing it again.
And there's a game loop in there
and there's joy in that as well.
Actually, that sounds pretty exciting.
I mean, if I was 14 and I could do that
for some side income, absolutely.
So I'm really excited to see what you guys have coming
not only this year, but just in the future.
We're gonna go ahead and pass it over to Nitro League.
Oh, I couldn't get my mic off me there for a minute.
Yeah, I think one of the other things
that is a little more exciting about the Web 3 space
is that kind of collaborative interoperable
kind of environment here.
You can play in a tournament in one game
or an event in one game to win something from another game
or a piece from another game.
Having a game piece where it can also act as your avatar
and something like Nifty Island
and hopefully that continues to go and grow
and kind of give more value, not in a monetary sense,
but just in a usability sense
with some of these game pieces and things of the such.
So really excited for that.
And then also the rewards, same kind of thing.
If I enter a tournament on Shrapnel and possibly win
an NFT or game piece or a token or in-game currency
in something like Flight Force IV or some of the stores.
So those kind of plays and ideas I think
and something I'm pretty excited to see
Absolutely, that is actually exciting
You said that it brings more value to games
and I think it absolutely does.
It brings more value outside of their own ecosystem.
So that's really exciting with interoperability.
I know a lot of games are doing it in their own way.
Shrapnel touched on it a bit.
Mixmobs actually integrating some Solana projects
So it's really exciting to see
how these games are using this technology.
Mindless, I saw your hand go up and then down.
Do you wanna take us home?
Yeah, I mean, the two guests probably really nailed it,
but I wanted to go into a little bit
of a nerdy rabbit hole if I have a second.
So some of the earliest proof of work mechanisms
in the digital world were actually in-game.
So you are playing in-game to earn gold in-game.
That's a proof of work mechanism
that's digitally native to an ecosystem or an economy.
The only thing BTC and blockchains fixed
was they added a blockchain layer on top of that.
So this concept is already pretty normal to gamers.
We just gotta somehow extrapolate it
into a way that they understand.
Maybe remove some of the inflationary issues with tokens
like inflating into nothing,
add some sort of difficulty curve to earning gold,
but I think it's definitely obvious one.
Gamers instinctively get it.
I need these tokens as a currency.
It's not illegal for me to do that now.
I thought you were gonna go into a deeper rabbit hole,
but that's a great take to say
that it's something that's already been proven.
We're just adding an extra layer to it,
So I think we're gonna go ahead and close it on that note.
Last second, unless anyone else has anything
if not, we'll go ahead and head out with our outros.
Well, I wanted to thank everybody
that has listened into the audience.
So if you wanna go ahead and listen to it earlier,
I'm so excited to meet a lot of you guys at GDC next week.
I will pass it over to Jorge.
Jorge, do you have any last words for us
before we go ahead and close this out?
Yeah, I mean, turn your notifications on.
We got a content creator house next week.
Bryson, Hustle, Jesus Martinez, Neo Tokyo guys,
me, you, Liam from Love Master Van.
We're about to turn that up in San Francisco next week.
And also the New York Knicks play next week in San Francisco.
So shout out to the Knicks,
making sure that they're out there while I'm out there.
Anyways, if you're in San Fran, hit me up.
I'll give you the address.
We're gonna have like a open bar, open food, open games,
network, you know the whole thing.
Talk the shit, talk that shit that we do here
on these spaces in real life, you know what I'm saying?
All right, catch y'all next week.
Thank you so much, Jorge,
and I wanna go ahead and say thank you
to ex-co-hosts for being our co-hosts.
Thank you to Travis from Nitro League,
Archie from Fight Me, Sean from FF4,
Mikel from Sedona, Alex from Shrap,
Rams from Play AI, Mindless, Jerry from AG, and Manav.
Thank you so much, guys, for being here.
Thank you so much for your insights, your takes.
I definitely learned something,
and that's all I can ask for.
So I'm excited to see you guys next week.
I'm gonna go ahead and close out with a song
you guys can drop down as you please.
Cheers, guys, and we'll see you next week.
Thank you, guys, for joining us.
Thank you, guys, and we'll see you guys next week.