The Motorverse: Cars, Crypto and Web3 Gaming w/ Will Griffiths (Animoca Brands)

Transcript

[Music] hello welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for joining us for another discussion today's guest is Will Griffith general manager of animoca brands motorers animoca Brands is a video game inventure Capital company with a mission to deliver digital property rights to the world's Gamers and internet users one of the most exciting projects in development is the motorers an interoperable ecosystem of car Centric games and experiences this conversation is an

incredibly exciting exploration of the intersection of web 3 and gaming over the next hour you'll hear a master class in everything from the issues with previous attempts at web3 gaming to creating AAA caliber web 3 native games to building Dynamic ecosystems and so much more one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then another note during the following conversation you will hear both will and

I refer to specific car brands these references are purely hypothetical and do not imply Partnerships products or games with these Brands okay and now will Griffiths will thank you so much for joining us on the strange waterer podcast great to be here Rex thanks for having of course of course so I am a big believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that is kind of like a starter can you give us a little bit about who you are how you found this space and like what ultimately d uh brought you to building games yeah sure so I've always

been a a video gamer and a a Lego guy um and so I I went into engineering um and I did an engineering degree in the UK and I popped out of that and ended up working in um I I was working for an oil company for a while for BP and then I went into ethical hacking um I started working for a company called Accenture you've probably heard of consulting company and that was that was really interesting so like breaking Bank security and explaining to people how to fix it and stuff and then I decided I was kind of watching the game Space and I decided to get into the game Space so I ran my own company at the beginning of the App Store um and I had a lot of fun but I was really young and I didn't

really make any money but I met a lot of people and I decided that was the industry that I wanted to work in so then I went and worked for a company called natural motion who make uh video games and I was a producer there on five different games and the last one was in the iPhone 5 keynote which was like loads of fun also like Mega stressful because it was all like new at the beginning of the whole like free-to-play era um and we got bought by Zinger on my last day and I moved to Australia and in Australia I I moved there for family reasons and I got into casinos and online casinos uh as a living not as a kind of you know a hobby um and that was that was like totally like a an

interesting new world where we're taking these principles from games and then applying them to the to the gambling space um I I was part of a growth story of a company called uh bgw so we went from a few sort of handful of us to several hundred people and we made you know quite an interesting foray into the online gambling space in the background I got married and had two kids and then I decided to leave the I was like I kind of work up I was like I'm working because he knows it's not something that I really wanted to to to do with my life so I moved into I moved into crypto and built a with with with a small team here and we built a a a consumer facing fintech app that kind of takes your the Roundup transactions from your credit

card and invests them in a crypto portfolio so that was those are fun I think that company's still going and around about this time we decided to move back to the UK and I started working for a company called Cod Masters who made the Formula 1 games and the rally games and I was in charge of live service there and we built out their live service function so that's like how you monetize after launch and then that company got bought by Electronic Arts and I went into Electronic Arts and I was basically in their strategy team working out how to approach the metaverse and the future of sport and EA Sports and all this kind of stuff so very very interesting but I was in the UK in Oxford and everyone I worked with was in uh California in San Francisco so this was like kind of a weird dynamic

where everyone I worked with was asleep until sort of 4:00 in the afternoon so I did that like we did some really interesting stuff work there for about a year and then I decided that actually I wanted to you know work with people in my own time zone a little bit at least and start I started looking around and I met Robbie young who's the CEO of investment for Anoka Brands and he told me about this ecosystem they had here where they were basically combining uh crypto assets with racing games and racing IP and trying to sort of make sense of that and they had a few games live they bought a few different Studios but they they needed someone to head it up and that's what I've taken um as my role so I've been at Anoka for about 18 months uh and that's the sort of

culmination of the first nine to nine to 10 months was this concept of the merse uh which we launched in February this year at nft Paris so that's sort of my background so yeah it's like a like a V diagram of like you know Consulting uh crypto gambling I don't if you can have a four-way Bend diagram I don't think it works unless you do it in 3D but then also video games and I'm and racing and I'm right in the middle of it awesome man that's super cool and I'm super excited to get to uh like the the crypto aspect of this but before we get there I like would be remiss if I didn't queue in on the specific part of your story and ask you so you you went from from um like you know BP Accenture then

you went into games and then into gambling and so I would love for you to talk about this transition from games into gambling and like I think you know this is a maybe a controversial statement right but like there's something inherently gambling about everything that touches crypto and so um I would love for you to just reflect a little bit on like what are the principles that you brought from gaming into uh gambling what are the things you learned from gambling about gaming and like I would love if we could kind of point this in towards like how does this inform Anoka and um like the Moto GP universe so Anam moka's vision is to build the open metaverse and they're

leveraging web3 technology to do that so it's sort of like the opposite of what U meta set out to do which is like a world Garden to Y uh Chairman's s vision is to make it fair for all and they're able the cool thing about web 3 is it adds this financial layer that you wouldn't have necessarily been able to access easy this transfer of value using fungible tokens or nonf fungible tokens and so when I was when I was working in video games the games were making the transition it was around so 2010 making the transition from the premium model where people just pay a a fixed amount

and then they're able to then play the game as much as they want and that kind of game is designed to just be fun um like that at its cor so there was there was this sort of transition where you have these designers who are like incredibly creative people who are really good at making like nice gameplay Loops where you know um you for example in a first person shooter like the the fun part of the shoot the first person shooter is being able to identify a Target and then rapidly using the controls and some skill zoning on that Target and then the payoff is the the kill um and it's and and so that's that's what you you find a lot of people who really good at that and really understand like the human

psychology around that and then in free-to-play games um that it's it's hard because you you're trying to make money after the point that someone's downloaded the game so they started to insert these these um they're called core Loops where basically you you finish a level you get some reward that reward allows you to upgrade your your kit your car your your guns any whatever and then that makes you better and able to kill more monsters or beat more people in the next level and they're able to insert a monetization step inside that that allow so you can do it just by grinding or you can pay and get ahead and and you know progress faster and then when I moved

into gambling it's it's almost like it's gone that that core looping gambling already exists it's it's in it in its most kind of distilled form just you know it's quite ugly in some ways but it's just taking that um experience making it random so instead of like moving your gun around and shooting somebody you just press a button and then you kind of hope that maybe you win and if you do then you then you get your your monetization element and then you can use that to to go back into it so to me it was like a distillation of that cor Loop in its simplest form with intimate and reward which is inent reward is this thing that's of like a psychological thing if you put a rat in a cage and it keeps pressing a button EV

event and it sometimes gets um something awesome and sometimes it just gets water um that's more interesting to the to the rat because they don't know what they're going to get um than it than it's normally so I kind of observed it from a from a kind of gameplay point of view so when I came into gaming I wanted to make the the gambling experience more fun so my instinct was to like try and introduce skill and try and introduce um something that people would want to play but obviously the the challenge with that is there's always there's already some very well established tropes in the gra in the gambling industry where you know it's a slot machine or Um poker like there's these games everyone knows

them there's not a lot of innovation going on around like the different types they've already kind of Taken shape um so you know I learned a lot doing that and you you become good at optimizing things like user experience and and and that kind of thing um but to me it was a little bit kind of I don't know kind of ethically you know not really aligned with what I what I really believe in you know what I want to add to the world so crypto to me is an an interesting development because it means that you can basically build games that you you're putting money in and to some extent there's a risk when you put the money in but you also have control over the the value of the assets so what do I mean by that I mean

if you buy a car and spend a lot of time working on that car and developing it and taking it to different championships and winning different races and stuff you're kind of building a story around that car so your time starts to have value so it's a sort of he combination of the two it's not easy so the transition from premium games to free-to-play games is a huge quite a long process now free to play is really normal and there's well established ways of monetizing that people are comfortable with and understand and and I think we're seeing slowly that same process being applied to web 3 I I this might be like the right segue to get us into motor GP and like or sorry the merse and what it is but um I guess like the big question for me around gaming in

crypto is like everything you said makes so much sense and like without putting any judgment on this it's kind of like let's take the best parts of gaming which are the interactiveness the like skill based progression the ownership and like the just kind of like emotional attachment and then let's take the best parts of gambling which are like Risk and um like upside and uh I don't know there there's bad size of gambling too let's be clear but the the like perennial question of like how do we do crypto games is like we have items in games and we can make them like nfts or Express ownership or something on somehow but like if these items in games are like at the end of the day they're

just useful in the game like what are what's actually being built here and how is this not just like building a gambling layer on top of like some company's game yeah I think so it's interesting they're definitely parallels with I mean Lads of people say this right but there's there's definitely parallels with freet toop play so there was a period early on in the free-to-play phase right where the App Store had a chart that was like the most popular game and then they had a chart that of games that as in the games that had the most downloads but they had another chart of the games that made the most money like top grossing and so there were a bunch of bunch of different

companies making games and then just selling them and and you know they were the top of that chart and they'd be really pleased with themselves um and they were also the top of the the top grossing charts and then over time like some good examples of free-to-play games or some effective examples of fre to played games started to rise up and then over the course of about 2 or 3 years suddenly the top gring charts had no premium games and they were all free to play so what the result of that was that you had all these Studios that were really good at making premium games and the executives and the studios would have games in motion that were being built and they would say oh hang on a minute there's this freeto playay thing

let's just do that because we'll make those more money and so then you had design teams that were not equipped you know with the kind of economic design and stuff to be able to to change their current game into a free-to-play game so you end up with these really weird bad examples of free-to-play and it got really badly slammed and I think we see that I have seen that in in web 3 too so you know people are like oh well you know they're starting with the technology um and they're trying to like shoe Hornet into a into a game and it doesn't really makes sense so so if you can't just take a a normal game and just make everything nft is job done so that

so what we're trying to do with the merse is something a bit different so we're thinking about what are the what are the core um things that you can do with web 3 that are new tools for for games designers and then what does that what does that mean like what kind of games would we like to make and like what kind of ecosystem would be like to enable um and that's what we're that's where we're coming so we're trying to build it from the ground up so I often describe it as having a tool set available to a design team and then there's like an extra compartment that you've just discovered with these extra Tools in from web 3 and they're just building it in holistically so let me repeat back what you said and tell me if I got the point which is

basically up until what you guys are doing and like the newest latest stuff what crypto games essentially me meant is like let's go find whatever's the top of the chart and figure out a way to slap crypto into it and like maybe we're slapping crypto into it because we think we can derve extra Revenue maybe it's a marketing thing like maybe we don't even know why but our VC told us that crypto's good or something but what you're saying is that that's never going to work because you're essentially asking like Carpenters to go build a something out of glass and what you're saying is that the approach needs to start like with The Primitives at like ground zero and say like this is what web 3 brings to the table now how do we

build around that as opposed to this is what we have in web two how do we graft on web 3 to it yeah exactly and also you know the way that the charts are constructed you know there is there's not a very mature ecosystem so for example there's dap radar and it measures like how many unique active wallets you have and if you have many many unique active wallets then you might be at the top of the D radar chart but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have a recipe for success it just means that you've worked out how to you know gain that particular metric so I think there's there's there's people are still understanding how to attribute value to a wallet for example so what does an active wallet mean does it mean

that somebody I think it's measured it's like somebody connected their wallet and there was a transaction or some kind of smart contract activity associated with that wallet but obviously you and I both know that that doesn't necessarily translate into value so it's about for me it's about thinking long-term like what is it the web 3 can offer that's genuinely different to the maass market um and so for the mtiv US um and I do this test so when I lived in so I've just moved to Australia um when I lived in the UK we got kids in in school and we go to the pub you know with the dads you know every couple of weeks now you know just catch up and complain about

having small kids and um we would talk about you know all different things there loads of different people you know like plumers Engineers like doctors you know KN not not many people in games and so I'd sort of come up with different theories and ideas and then float them you know casually in a pub and see whether people kind of latched onto them and the idea behind that was like is this something that's actually meaningful to you that it's easy to understand and digest and therefore this should have some kind of traction in the Masset maret and for me that is interoperable cars so if I say I don't I wouldn't describe as interoperable cars but I what I would say is um yeah hey guys check it out in

dropable cars but I would say you know you know at the moment if you want to play a racing game you you buy you either buy the game or you download the game for free and then you you probably identify a particular car that you're interested in and then you grind or you pay within that game to get that car or you complete some achievement to get that car and that car is in that W Garden of that of that game um but this is a new paradigm you buy a car like you buy a car in a real world and then you take it to the games and you tell a story and you deepen your connection with uh the thing that you've bought because it's the constant you know it's like you have your little collection of things that you take with you around the world this is this is one

of those things and and so they're like oh cool get it yeah so you just buy it once and then you can use it everywhere love it so to me that that's where this ends um but you can't just click your fingers and make that happen there's a whole load of you know hard work that needs to happen in the middle so okay I apologize I shouldn't have had us dancing around like the high uh like the concepts like we need to just talk about what the motiv verse is in order to continue this conversation so let me just ask you straight up what is the motiv verse and why should I be excited about it so so when I started it Anoka they they basically gave me this um Lego set so there's a token the Rev token a funable token that's been on the market

for a while it's tradeable on various different exchanges and sorry just to be clear this token is not associated with the merse It's associated with uh with what oh no so it is so the Rev token is a a tradeable asset that is owned by Anoka and it's specifically for um it was it was brought into existence for Motorsports and and racing space I thought that maybe was like the share governance token of like Anoka or something but no this is specifically for the merse also to maybe a little context around Anoka Anoka is a uh a company that has this really bold Vision to democratize basically the internet using web 3 um and to that end they've raised lots of money and they they have

a stake in many many many different projects I think there's 450 different projects in the portfolio within that um there are some wholly owned subsidiaries and I look after the subsidiaries that relate to Motorsports and racing okay um and they have multiple different tokens that are assciated with different projects themed in different ways they might be you know pix and shovel type plays or uh more to do with um you know fashion or music um or other types of uh of video games my my area is the racing space so I look I'm looking at a market of people who identify as Motorsports fans or racing Gamers uh and this rep token is intended um for that for that

market but it was it was originally conceived around a couple of games so they had a game with uh Formula 1 um which was really really successful and I think became more successful than anyone thought it would be um got a little bit out of control and they and they closed it down before I joined um but then they had another another game called rev racing which is obviously linked to that token and so what they would what they were asking me to do is to to take this take this token as the kind of store of value and the the um the place where we can grow through the network work effective web 3 and then build an experience around it using multiple different games and and relationships to

help kind of concentrate the demand for the token and under and and create a place where these people can hang out and that's what the mote is so it's a it's essentially um the for Court of the internet that is that is the goal to to basically be a place where when a car company um makes a real world car they pick up the phone to us and they say hey we need to launch a digital version of this and then we um basically mint those cars and then they work in multiple different games and experiences and it's all it's it's designed to bring this community together who are sort of like-minded racing racing uh Gamers Motorsports fans and and we 3

enthusiasts correct me if I'm wrong but I think what you're saying is like the motorers is maybe this like it's not a game it is the layer under all of these games that are going to like pop out that are based around racing or have some sort of car component and the merse is the property layer that expresses these cars and these upgrades and these wins and losses and that kind of thing yeah so imagine so so so it's manifested in a website mode.com uh which we launched you know a few weeks ago and that is is growing slowly into sort of Netflix for cars so there's all these different experiences that you can take a car and or a bike or whatever and and

enjoy and and the top there's a four cour where you can go buy cars and then there's your garage where you can you know check out different cars and upgrade them dude that is so cool and like I think what's exciting about that is the thing I really struggle with with web 3 gaming is like so I I'll admit it like my head has been melted by World of Warcraft for like 15 years um and like there's items in there right and like there's things I really care about because like I earned it literally 10 years ago when I was in high or college I guess but the idea that I would need to express that as property that exists outside the game like it it's hard for me to wrap my head around that like why

why would my like Staff of Wisdom be Rel outside of World of Warcraft but what you're describing here like makes so much sense where like we create car like cars exist as a generic concept we allow people to like own them and buy them and then the next level is like okay but now we need to create experiences where these things that you own are relevant and like do stuff yeah totally I mean this is this is a this comes up a lot right so and I've talked to loads of people you know who I used to work with about it around nfts when like at the beginning when I was you know thinking about getting into the space so I think you're right I think if you have a Staff of Wisdom um that's really cool and maybe another game can figure out how to

make sense of that in their game um but it seems un like because it's a holy fictional world that's been created around like a whole load of different races in this really kind of in know esoteric like awesome experience and that to me maybe that gets solved like in the future um but I don't think that um those kind of items uh are appropriate for interoperability whereas a car to me is you know there's Millions probably hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent making car games that are faithful to exactly how they want people how

people expect cars to behave in the real world right so if I make a game with a portion um I'm doing it for people who like Porsches and the person who comes and plays the game wants that Porsche to feel as much like a real world Porsche as possible so to me uh the car is a is a perfect place to start uh when you think about interoperability because you're there's a set of U metadata around a vehicle that describes exactly how it should behave and it should behave that way everywhere now games have different handling models and and all this kind of stuff but generally speaking you know cars still are they perform relative to one another in the

real world and it's possible to recreate that in video games and it's already been done so what I mean is like if someone says like what's the equ someone said this to me the other day like what's the equivalent of board Apes in in cars we need to come up with the equivalent of board apes and my response was well they already exist you know we already mean there are already you know Lamborghinis Ferraris um you know alpines like these cars are everyone recognizes that their household household names there's um this expectation of um how they're going to perform and like you know the the brand is really well understood and I think that's really helpful because if I make a a a Porsche say we we don't have

Porsche in up in our ecosystem right now but let's say I make a Porsche it's very easy if you need to brief a team to to um deliver an experience that is faithful to Porsche whereas if it's a a Staff of Wisdom I'm like hey put this in your game um this is what it does in World of Warcraft but I guess you know you need to make sense of that against your swords it doesn't work yeah and we don't need to get into this but like it doesn't even make sense for the business standpoint of anyone like if I'm World of Warcraft why would I want people to like leave my ecosystem with like I want them I want to capture them in and if I'm this new game like why would I want them why would I want blizzard to be

able to capture the payment and not like just create my own Staff of Wisdom but I think um so I think that goes back to the last conversation about like grafting web 3 things onto web 2 games just like it literally doesn't make sense um but I really and and sorry to be pantic or sorry to really focus on this but I want to pick a part like why cars are perfect and there's a couple things you said said here so tell me like why what you really believe in is it that cars already exist in the real world and have these like real world connotations and so they like are a better candidate for this kind of thing or is it really about cars are a very interoperable game asset that have

applications across like so many different things that um it makes sense to start as that as like the base asset or maybe a little bit of both definitely both um but there's a third there's a third element here which is that for for really quite a long time already cars in games have been photo realistic because they're less complicated than an octopus or something right so if you make if you make a car and put it in a game and you're using like you know Unity or a real engine it looks like a real car so to me that's really valuable because it's not it's no longer just about the The Gamers so if I let's say I don't play video games but I really like um

Ferraris I can I can look at an asset of a Ferrari on a in a 3D render on a website or in an engine and I can appreciate it and and I sense the value in it and that means that the car brands so you got these aspirational car brands with these amazing cars that are super expensive um and very few people get to even drive on you know um and now this is a new way to like widen their funnel so this is a way for people to experience true ownership of a of a Ferrari or a Porsche or Ford or whatever in a way that they wouldn't necessarily have been able to in the

real world and they can have that because it's interoperable and it's it's moving with them rather than kept in a single wall Garden they can have this experience with it and take it with them as a belonging and show it to their friends on their phone and and deepen their um connection with the car like you you know if you have a car I'm I don't know if you have a car but um you you kind of develop there's stories that you that you have memories that you associate um with a car because it's been with you to different places on a road trip or you know took it for a track day um all this stuff and I'm I'm looking to create that experience but online very cool so let's talk a little

bit about like the layer above the merse like the games and I would love like maybe if you could give us just brief descriptions of the games that are like available now and like less interested in talking about gaml and more interested in talking about the Dynamics that come from this interoperable ecosystem so like how can my actions in one game like have um implications for other games or for like my non-game motor verse world like describe to me a little bit about how you're thinking about creating this like ecosystem that is like constantly cycling and creating value we've got a bunch of games that are live so um depending on like uh how you count them um and whether you

include things in the pipeline um it's it's basically 10 different games um and there is a mixture of their existing web 2 games that have been live that we don't want try and shoot horn web 3 and two and then there are web 3 games that are relatively you know nent you know they've got thousands of users versus millions of users in in our web two games um and then you have we're building now we've just launched this game it's in Early Access talk drift 2 from our studio in Melbourne gree monkey games and that's that's a AAA racing game that can accept pretty much any kind of vehicle it's built in on with engine 5 it's photo realistic it's had

like 400,000 downloads so so that's the direction that we're heading in terms of experience but to make this ecosystem work we need to have the vehicle Brands come on the journey with us we need to have the studios come with us on the journey we need to have the users so the way that I think about it is if so we talked a bit before about like what's the long-term goal Mass Market is easy to understand you buy a car and it works in other games okay but how do we how do we get there we get there by talking to vehicle Brands and having them come aboard with the idea that we're going to basically mint their cars and guarantee that they sell out um to because they work in more than one

game and then they look beautiful and they've got this amazing brand behind them but also we've built this standard that allows other Studios to come in and build games and those cars will now work in their games too and that's really important because what that does is for those Studios it solves for user acquisition so imagine you've got a million people that own that are holders of these car assets and then as a studio I make a game um that supports those assets all of those users are engaged they're interested they've spent money on these cars they obviously like the space and the concept of it they all

receive a notification through the motorers telling them their car now works somewhere else okay they can go drive somewhere new um so we're expecting a lot of those people to come into those those games so that solves for user acquisition which is one of the most challenging things that Studios have to deal with after they make a game there's those of examples of amazing games that nobody knows about or fail because they don't get enough people coming into them coming into them but then we also have the the the way that we're doing the licensing means that we're sold for license ing as well so these that's another thing that these Studios struggle with is that they they want to obviously have all the cars in the game but each of the each of the car

brands requires you know various different lengths of contractual dance and and minimum guarantee payments and stuff in order for them to be allowed to use the assets so it's a very attractive option for these for these external Studios for to come and build against the the mtiv standard and then also all of those different Studios get a cut of the sales of the Central Supply of car so there's a sort of affiliate model so if they let's say we're trying to sell 100,000 uh of a particular model everyone gets to try and sell that Supply so this creates an ecosystem where people get very good at selling cars basically because there's a sort of

competition to sell them so that's so that's why the studios get involved because they get they get um access to these vehicles Les and the users the brands get involved because you know there's lots of examples of brands that have sold car nfts and then people complain there's nothing to do with them and this is a this is a problem and we're solving for that the long-term um use cases that people Mass Market come and buy them and they work everywhere and in the short term we're using our network of web 3 communities across these 450 different projects at Anoka to bring web 3 folk who already understand you know the concept of interoperability and can see the vision

and believe in it to get involved and we invite them to the platform to join and to stake rev and earn um sort of loyalty points effectively um and that in it that drives the adoption um of the that basically drives the market for the sale of the cars but it also uh applies pressure to the Token price and the token price of Rev is really important to us because it's our store of value and it's how we reward our early adopters and it allows us to do things interesting things like we can we can do token swaps with other Motorsports projects and then airdrop tokens from those projects onto our users to and our our stakers to reward

them for taking part and so this growth engine allows us and combined with the the communities from all of the other Anoka uh portfolio companies it allows us to basically Drive the demand for the for the cars get the word out have more and more interesting projects and you know with 10 projects already and more on the way fairly quickly you end up in a situation where there's a huge variety of choice fairly kind of complete portfolio of different Motorsports and racing experiences that be attractive to anyone who's even remotely interested in the space yeah I mean I think the most important thing to queue on to what you just said is specifically about this system allows game studios access

to like actual brand name assets of multinational corporations that have more lawyers than people you've ever met in your life like kind of out of the box and I just the the idea that like I could go get like four of my developer friends and we could spin up a game that is literally at this point now comparable to something like Forza or one of like the AAA game studios CU like look man the technology we're all capable of it like welcome to the future the thing that we're not all capable of is brand deals but that's kind of what you're solving for not necessarily on the consumer level which you are but more importantly you're solving it on like the developer level yeah I mean

it's it's complicated and you know there's there's different vehicle brands have different sort of levels of appetite so you have some who are like really excited about being the first to to be in this space and experiment learn and then there's some who are like we'll just wait and see what happens and join later um but we have managed to secure some really really kind of Keystone type partners that are really like will hopefully lead the way you know often if you look at the trends in the automotive industry you see that you know there's a few different brands that always are always trying new and exciting things and those are the ones that we uh gone after um and you know they're pretty openminded to it I mean I think that

their biggest concerns are around like the misuse of their IP so we have to have a lot of like approval processes and stuff but that's something that we're absorbing on our side um and it's and it's also you know just it's not an ex extra cost it's not like they want to charge per game they they the deal is with the motorers and they take a they take a a revenue share from the sale of the nft cars that's where their upside is in for for the for the brands but also being relevant to the new audience and bringing this new type of ownership it's it's like a if you think about like everyone who wants to own an amazing sports car there a lot of people and then like how many people actually end

up buying one and then there's this extra step in the middle now where you can maybe own a digital one for a few years and then this this is a kind of standard kind of sales technique right um they're probably going to end up in getting selling more real um super cars in the real life yeah and look like if people are skeptical here that like like I I can understand the push back that like okay the distance between a affordable nft and like a multi like quarter million dollar Ferrari is just like so large that like you're kind of talking out of your ass here but I think that's wrong and I think the right way to look at this is like there's a reason that Ferrari's merchandise brand is

bigger than the car and that's because like people really identify with this stuff they care about it they buy stuff they parti ipate with it even if they can't reach like the like huge huge dollar amount level and so like you don't really have to convince me like all of these car companies have spent decades convincing me that this is the right play um just through selling like Mercedes jackets and Porsche keychains and like dot dot dot totally totally and you know like it's an education piece so we spend a lot of time talking to these different brands and you know TR and also they come up with cool ideas too you know like some of them are like well hang on a minute we could actually drive sales in the real world this way so like

maybe that should be part of the deal so like if we if we can send new leads to them and there's people showing up at their Factory in real life like showing their digital car like so there conversations like that like maybe there's a discount or something cool so I want to take us out of brand world and go back to um like the power of interoperability for games and I I want to look at the downsides a little bit so like there's so much awesome about interoperability but like the flip side of that is like let's say that you know Rex Studios comes out with this like brand new game and it's a multiplayer game and like I want it to be like competitive but because will went and bought like the Bugatti superar um like

over in this world and like has all these assets like he can show up to this game and just like completely Dominate and so I guess my question for you is like how do you design games that like take into account the fact that there's progress outside of the games that don't completely break gameplay um well I mean I think in that's another reason that cars are awesome because you you know in the real world this is how it works right like if you if you have a better car you're faster now and that is more expensive but normally it it that doesn't mean that you're not skillful like normally the way that that's handled is you just have different classes of race or you youit you be like oh this race is about um you know Lamborghinis only or this is a like

you're allowed to have any level of modding or you have to have the most base car and it's it's the same car for everyone and then we just see who the best driver is so that's how I think about it I mean like most video games that have cars in allow you to upgrade the cars throughout the game through one way or another so um and and there's an incentive to do that because you want to get better so you're either investing time or money to to get ahead and I think the difference is like you know whether it's genuinely unfair and it's pay to win which is not really what we're you know this concept of pay to win I was going to drive you right there yeah okay so so there's this idea in it comes up a lot like so

imagine when you if you were designing a free-to-play game from scratch you'd be like oh cool I'm going to make this cool game about cars and there's going to be like um this mode where you can pay an extra $100 in your cars like way faster than everyone else is this is not fair or fun um some games have experimented with it and there are like techniques where you have like deep levels of Engagement that open up like so you feel like you've achieved it as a player so everyone like kind of respects you because you you've done that so I I think that it's totally manageable um pay to win is not what this is about this is about having an awesome car which you can take to different places so like if you want to level the playing field in a game you you can do that at a

f of a you like anyone who owns this particular class of car can come and run in this race and any mods won't take effect yeah totally man I think what you're saying is that like it is up to the game designers to develop good games and that has always been the case like whether or not there's like Financial incentives or like pay to win like mechanisms or whatever like it is up to game designers to build good games and like yeah maybe you're changing the Dynamics a little bit by allowing outside assets to come into the game but like design a better game and like the beauty of cars as like where we're like you know building our nucleus on how we're going to solve web 3 gaming is

that like cars have this property that is like about identity and like how people perceive themselves that is like completely divorced from gameplay and so like you can kind of build relationships with customers on that axis while not like really like having to Contour or screw up the gameplay access yeah it's there interesting there's a lot of interesting conversations around how can you so so imagine you really love cars and you own this car and your hobby on the weekend is to go into your garage and like Tinker with it and add add you know whatever cosmetic stuff or change

the performance of the car like how do we create that in our world and there are some really interesting ways that these designers who have been making car games for ages like I was talking about earlier like they've now got this extra like tool set so basically you can you can make design decisions that are kind of permanent decisions in your car that affect like you would you know if you like use an axle grinder to like reduce the weight or something you know what I mean like so there's a there's this there's this thing there and there's also this concept of tuning chips so in car um you there's like this computerized chip that optimizes you know how much fuel is used and all the rest of it and

that's a real like in the real world there's a real skill set around that so longer term I I heard the is not going to be live for a while but one of my goals is to kind of if you understand how cars work in the real world I want you to be able to take them and do that in the motorers and you know be able to optimize things and then maybe you like hash your things so no one knows what you've done on the inside but you're then able to sell this tuning chip to people that means that they they can stick it in their car and it performs differently so it's a whole kind of meta game around that outside of the the games themselves yeah man that's like that is so wild that I don't even know how to address it because like my my

question to you is like okay as a game Studio like can I make not a game but like a tuning shop application that can like maybe like get better results Than People modding at home and like that can be a whole business built on this platform that actually isn't even a game yeah absolutely so the the I mean we think about it often in because we have games and we have this idea that we bring you other games we think about it as you know in the context of video games but it doesn't have to be you could just in theory create really good shop for cars that allows you to do that or it's just very you're all about trying to sell down on the Central Supply you know so I just want it to be

an open ecosystem where multiple different experiences make sense it there's no kind of rules it's like oh this isn't a game therefore we don't want to include it it's like oh this is I want to encourage Innovation and so this is another thing so it's not like it's not intended to be a subscription or anything like that so it's not so Game Pass for example I hope I get this right this is my understanding of Game Pass so like if it's slightly wrong then apologies Microsoft but they you know they they bring games into their subscription they'll pay the games um some sort of fee the range and upfront fee for the game to publish in Game Pass and then depending on how well the game performs in terms of active users and

time spent in that ecosystem they can get extra bonus money each month okay but the the problem in is first of all you need to manage all that data centrally and there's this overhead that's associated with it but also the the two metrics that they focus on the last time I checked were active users and time spent now that seems like a good that that's probably a pretty good approximation but you're kind of forcing the hand of developers and designers so they they're now thinking now how do I get that bonus money I'm going to have to have an appointment mechanic that brings people

back every day so they have many Ates now making a good game doesn't necessarily mean that you that's a good idea so I just want to create this place where now you support the car when this driver turns up in your in your experience it's over to you how are you like what do you want them to do do you want them to come once and spend a million dollars or do you want them to pay nothing for months while they have those are fun and then sell upgrades to them like when they you know when they really meaningful do you want to have your own subscription do you want to just pay people at the front door or make people pay at the front door to get in or do you want to have you know races

that you enter and you can like you know wager and the outcome between you know all these all these models fine awesome and I think that's like the point of crypto is like you create robust systems and you make them permissionless and you let like anyone just like cook you know and like come up with what they want and and like their Vision so totally on board with that I think we have only approximately 10 minutes left here so I want to make sure that we hit the last big things which are one I need to understand like really how the Rev token fits into this um like I want to know as a let's say I just am a gamer who is interested in playing all these games I don't really care about car Collectibles is the Rev token relevant to me let's

say I'm a collector and I don't care about games is the Rev token relevant to me if I'm a developer is the Rev token relevant to me help me unders cribe like what the token is and how it ties together the ecosystem and then just so you know the last question I need to ask you about is tell us a little bit about um the torque drift 2 and like why that is exciting and like why is that something that ultimately the audience as soon as they're done listening needs to go uh start thinking about but first let's talk about the Rev token yeah so the Rev token is uh store of value I talked about it before um and it's also a way that we engage with our community so we've we've just as I mentioned we just relaunched the brand of the mots

and we've got a Discord and everything go check it out um and we're going to start basically allowing people who hold rev token to take part in in votes on directions that we might take the ecosystem so this could be like a crypto thing could be deciding about which brands we go after that kind of stuff so so from a participation point of view that's important we also believe that it will increase in value based on all of the work that we're putting into it so we you that's you know not Financial advice but that's what that's one of the main things that we're all working towards um and so you know it's a good opportunity for people to get in and um and you can if you buy it and stake it inside our ecosystem then we'll reward you with uh points and loyalty and

there's so many different experiences that we uh bringing together so it's not just digital things it's also um you know the in real life we have a relationship with motor GP so we're able to offer VIP experiences with motor GP we work with lots of different tracks and all this kind of stuff so there's a lot there's a there's a lot to there's a lot of stuff um that you can give away off the back of that but for me there's a it's really neat as a way of exchanging value inside ecosystems so like if I'm like if I'm running a part shop I can start taking payment in rev and we've got all this stuff set up so this is really cool um and just generally the the the the price of it helps us as a team so focus on the kind

of the north star of uh you know it's our kind of metric for seeing how the whole thing grows and also we're able to take it to other Partnerships so we have like four or five different people that we're talking to who who have their own token in you know whether it's a Motorsports project or a particular vehicle brand and we're able to do swaps with them so this helps us kind of grow together so that all these people who have taken bets in the web 3 space we can create this of connective Motors is the basically the home of all the Motorsports tokens is what how I think about it so what does success look like well in a few years time obviously we

hope the price has gone up but we'll have lots of different other Motorsports tokens in our Treasury and a lot of connective tissue between all these communities and that's one of the things that web 3 is so good for is that you know everyone talks about Community like in any kind of uh you know any kind of initiative but here when people have some something that they can own Buy sell watch appreciate share with their friends people tend to engage more deeply and so it's a you have this much much more kind of um this richer Community experience basically where people are you know sharing in the upside of the of the project and everyone becomes an evangelist for it

and without the Rev token I mean you could still try attempt this this project but I think it it's the thing that unites us all and you know I I I literally until this moment I have never once heard of a token swap that I thought made sense but like this is it right and it's because it's not like something about the treasuries of the two projects but it is allowing like the Rev token and the ecosystem to like just be an ecosystem and I can totally imagine like let's say I own a Porsche and like I I like this one game that's why I bought the Porsche I only play that but then I find out that through rev staking or maybe just ases a giveaway for owning Porsche or whatever like this other project with this token

like sends me something and I'm like okay interesting like what what's going on here and that's like just something that would never ever happen in web 2 Gaming like the idea I it it is there's no analogy there's no analogy and so um super interested so super interesting how the Rev token like acts as almost like a fiber that knits the community together on the player collector side I'm wondering does that does the Rev token have any implications on the developer side like for example do you let's say require them to stake x amount in order to participate with these nfts or to like link into the merse chain or is there any sort of um way that like

developers are formally engaging with the Rev token yeah absolutely so we with our with our um subsidiary Studios we look to incentivize all of the them with the token because they're you know they're really just part of the team um but yeah like we we're want we're exploring a lot of different models so one of the things you know I said at the beginning is we don't want to try and shoehorn something in like too early so transparently we're doing this um the first interoperable car launch will happen for our ecosystem with this really it's a really awesome brand in the next few months um and that's just very exciting anyway but the whole

there's a whole as we've been through this process with all these different Studios building the this into their games to support it we've started to sort of uncover like we understand the cost of doing that trying to work out what the right model for them to for this to work we're really lucky because we've got these internal Studios so we can be funding them and we can like test it out work out the total value that's available and understanding the challenges around building models for the games so one of so some of the ideas we've got are things like we talked about the affiliate model like if they're generating sales they'll get uh they'll we'll pay them in rev all of the cars are sold in rev centrally um so that's the the if you want to buy one of

these things you got to buy rep to buy them um but then we're thinking like if a studio has built the models for a car we can put that in a in a place where other people can get access to those models to speed up the development on their in their Studios by basically paying the other Studio that did the original asset in rep so there's there's a lot of basically all that kind of stuff is emerging and we're understanding the different requirements and the different kind of fs and flows of when money is needed in the process for development and the kinds of risk that we'd be asking people to take at different points in their development cycle and those that's the kind of devil in the detail but the brilliant news is

is that you know rev is a very easy way for us to like transfer value and as we go the whole kind of Tide should rise with it so a lot of our partners very happy to take payment in rev because they know the the plan yeah yeah yeah you're not it's not like basically a promise an mty promise it's something with real economic value and I think like the real interesting thing to to notice if you're like an entrepreneur or thinking about how to build in this space is like you guys have you know that there needs to be some sort of dynamic between the substrate layer the mote and the game studios but you're not sure what it is and instead of enforcing stuff that might be like prohibitory or like causes people to go run away or

whatever like instead you have this model where you own the first game studios you can experiment with them you can figure out what works like organically and then finally once you figure it out you can turn it to the external partners and say this is how our system works yeah totally um but that doesn't mean we're not talking to external Partners already we are but you know it's it is a work in progress for sure for sure for sure okay last thing let's talk about uh torque drift 2 so like first of all just give us the elevator pitch like what's the game why is it exciting and then um yeah let's pull together all the themes and the big things we talked about to say like how torque drift 2 like really represents this whole new era of I don't even want

to call it gaming anymore it's somewhere between gaming and collecting and and just self-identity yeah uh okay so Tor 2 is like it's really cool so the studio that makes it is run by um Aaron and Billy um over in Melbourne it's called gree monkey games and these guys are they've gone like full full native in the space so it's a it's a game about drift racing but these guys have their own drift cars most of the team enjoys drifting in their spare time so at the weekend they finish like developing and then they go and drive 45 minutes away to this track and spend the weekend drifting so this is so it's being made with passion by these guys and that they're very talented team they they

they're using over engine five which I'm not sure if you're familiar with but it's the of sort of gold standard for graphics this point um and so it looks incredible it's in Early Access which basically means that it's you know it's kind of like a test but an open test so there's lots of people using it we've had about 400,000 people through it and it's the first AAA racing game in web 3 and it's freet to play so you know they're trying to do a lot at the same time so um yeah and they've recently I mean they they've got amazing deals with amazing Brands already um these are not yet interoperable but they're working with Nissan and Honda and Toyota and a few others and I know what their

pipeline is and it's very exciting um and we're starting to we're working with some of the brands exploring them we how we make these things interoperable um and they they've just launched this big update um so essentially now the game has a whole new Mode called freestyle um which is like you know basically it's a playground um where you can once you've learned how to drift you can do all these tricks and stuff there's like different um I think it's called a wall tap where you kind of you go past the wall and you just give it a nudge kind of a relative low speed but wheels are all spinning um it's it's cool there's a lot of content out there

you should go check it out it's on the epic game store it's got a it's got a whole it's got Sim rig support there's um yeah I mean there's not much to dislike about it other than um it's just not it's not completely finished yet I think the full game will be live in Q4 but there's a lot of people having a lot of fun in there and there are so you can buy Web 2 assets in there there which just you know if you want to play it like a normal free-to-play player you can do that but you can also buy nft versions of the cars um and it's and we're slowly into those cars you can buy with rev at a discount and we're slowly work we're kind of picking our way

through how do we make sense the we got this large audience of web two type players and we've got this goal to bring other people in who are buying interoperable cars into the ecosystem so it's about how do we have someone driving around in a web two car and look over and see a web 3 card how do they know that they're looking at that and why is that awesome and I this is a sort of Education uh piece that we're doing well why why do you need to sell like a web 2 version and an nft version why can't it just be like I buy this car and I don't even know what it is on the back end but every single time you're going to issue nft and I'm only going to realize that if I go into the menu to export car uh it's it's a mixture of

different reasons so the web two parts very well understood so it's easy we know we can very predictably generate revenue from that and it's important that these Studios you know we actually want to make money as well and so we we so we so we have that that experience where which is very kind of well understood and that's what the large proportion of people coming into the game experience and then the nft part is more of a kind of education piece so when you go to buy a car you go okay I can buy I can buy this car for like 10 bucks blah blah blah or I can buy nft version of it which is actually tradable and I can own outside of the game and maybe will work in other games in the future and that's quite a that's

quite a big leap for some people and nfts are you know there's definitely um we had a lot of backlash when we launched around having nfts in the game which I understand I mean like it's a totally new thing and nfts like you said um I don't know if it was before we we press record but we're talking about how there are a lot of people people in you know who've had bad experiences in in crypto and you know so that nft is a bit of a a kind of you know bit of a swear word for some people but I totally get that so it's for me it's about you know forget about the technology I we talk people talk about this a lot but it's like I hope in a year's time or maybe two years time people won't be asking

about whether it's an nft or not they just will expect that it works in multiple places it's kind of like saying hey we've made this amazing game on AWS you should check it out like it's it's kind of irrelevant to the to the to the audience no I I think that's a fair point and like maybe in a world without Sam bankman freed or uh a lot of things that have happened in this industry like we're not even having this conversation all you see is the button to buy a car and then that also appears in your motiv verse account and like but yeah people do have allergies to crypto and uh that's just something we have to deal with and honestly it's something that we deserve yeah and I guess I guess the other thing so I fully answer your questions the other thing is around the

um you know why not just have it all in the back end and they can Discover it like as they go through the game and I would really like to to be there and we talk about that a lot but there are there's infrastructure and cost around and gas fees and all this kind of stuff around the stuff so if you do it at scale so if you have 400,000 people come through your game and they all buy these assets and there's these there's this thing going on the background they don't understand that's costing you money and they never leverage it it but it's the good news is it's easy to do like as soon as they get it like we can make it happen so like inside the game we can be like oh oh okay I want to make this an nft cool so off you go and um it's more

like that all right last question to walk us out on so I I'm going to cut myself at the knees here and already say Obviously the answer is both but taking both off the table like in the do you see this more like which way do you see users flowing do you see users saying like holy crap this is like a really cool game like I want to I just want to buy this game cuz it's cool and then oh wow there's nfts and oh wow there's a whole mote and now I'm like go from these AAA games into the mote or do you foresee this more the other way which is people come to the merse people are interested in collecting and then notice like oh my God there's all these different games and different like

venues for me to use these Collectibles I know the answer is both but um if you had to be pinned down to one like how do you really like understand the dynamic um as we like go through the growth phase of both crypto and crypto gaming so I think that you know because we can make these games that we know we know appeal already to the mass Market I don't want to stop doing that because this is you mean this is great and that's what the guys love doing and they're really good at it and it's really fun and it's awesome and it would be wonderful if they all immediately went to the mtiv and got it and it was all brilliant and amazing but one of one of the things that so we organize ourselves um around um like there's a

central team that's building the motivos website doing all the thinking around the economy and you know how we integrate the games into that and then we have the studios and we we all meet together but the studios are working on their games and they have common problems so we work with them and one of the the goals of the studios is to try and try out lots of things in our games to get web two people into web 3 right so this is one of their big things is like if you can if I if you can send people to the motivat we're really really happy like if you can find a way to do that sustainably from your web to audience but that's not to say that I expect a lot of web three native people to come into the motivs itself and then

go the other way because they're coming in for a different reason you know they're coming in because they want to read the story and believe in their vision and stake rev and then the G and then they've got loads of cool games to play while they're while they're at it so it's definitely both I mean for the motiv itself and which is which is you know the big push at the moment are are we're leaning into the web3 communities to to basically bring as many people from those communities because we think they'll understand it better um but those aren't necessarily exactly the same people who are playing these games on Epic store that we're that we're publishing so it's a it's a it's both and I guess as we go we'll be like oh

these guys are now turning into racing Gamers and these racing gamers are turning into people who are interested in the inal ability piece say yeah no man I and like of course the answer is both but like the answer is both in like the most positive way because if we're talking about users finding the games and then being onboarded into crypto like congratulations world we just figured out how to get retail in here and if we're talking about the other way it's we're finding actual applications for all this speculation that we've done over the last 15 years like things that are actually fun and you want to do and are not just about buying the next token and so like it doesn't matter which way you consider the flow like it is like

what this industry needs on both sides cool I'm glad you agree it's it's a it's it's a very interesting project there's a lot of there so multifaceted so you know our biggest challenge actually is just focusing on the right things because there's so many potential ways we could go in different partners so we're very much in a kind of test and learn phase as we go but it's great to get the brand out and have the website live so if I encourage people to go and look at m.com go and check out talk drift to have a look at our the road map on the mot and see what's coming it's there's plenty there plenty in store yeah awesome well you kind of uh got ahead of me a little bit because I normally I would say uh well thank you so much like this has been incredible

can you please tell audience where to find merse and find you so let me rephrase with audience right now push pause go check out merse decom like let's actually put some like visuals and some like feeling into all the things we've been talking about um and then will just man thank you thank you for helping me understand like this promise of web 3 crypto not only like how it's going to happen but why like why would it happen and why is that relevant to both me as a gamer and me as a um cryto person and so uh just man I'm so excited about what you're doing I'm so excited to see what comes next and you kind of sprinkled in like five different Alphas in there so we definitely need to have

you back in the next couple months once those Alphas are ready to bloom and talk through like what's coming for down the pipeline but yeah it's been really fun talking I enjoyed it and I'd be very happy to come back yeah awesome man well I'm looking forward to it and um man thank you and have a good rest of your day thanks man a