Gaming and the Metaverse: Where are we now?

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] how are you my name is Robbie young I'm the CEO of any mocha Brands and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the trends let's see if I can do this without my glasses um some of the trends I'm seeing in the market these days um particularly because we spend a lot of time as investors so I see a lot of companies and hear a lot of interesting ideas quick overview for anybody who's not familiar with us we develop games we have studios around the world and we develop games across a wide variety of different gameplay Styles everything

from casual mobile games to AAA console style games a lot of things obviously because we're focused completely on web 3 a lot of things in the browser as well as client downloadable games some of them that you may be familiar with are things like the sandbox or life beyond or Phantom galaxies arcade Etc but we're also a very active investor in web3 and so this is you know today I'm coming kind of with my investor hat on just to give a little bit of the state of a union of where I see a lot of the trends in web 3 at the moment at this mid-year point so we have over 450 investments in the space broadly distributed between things that are I guess infrastructure

related roughly half the portfolio so things like l1s l2s wallets marketplaces D5 and then the other half is nft culture broadly speaking so the biggest segment of that is gaming but in addition we invest in art and music and fashion and other things that are related to what we consider to be web 3 culture because in a web 3 ecosystem everything has the potential to be interoperable so that's an important part and a kind of a Cornerstone of our investment strategy because we have the ability to add value to incremental investee companies because they have the ability to cooperate and work together with other investee companies so to talk about Trends and Ken did my

job for me so Point number one is AI everywhere so that's all anybody's been talking about for a while and I'm not sure if AI is going to come and take my job or make my job easier or you know depending on who you read but in our industry particularly focused on gaming I think there are some interesting trends so here's something that blockade Labs is doing which is the idea that you can essentially use a simple prompt to quickly generate a highly rendered three-dimensional scene and for game developers and anybody who's creating content for the ideation process this is an incredible Time Saver I mean it's the ability to think okay I have an idea but

what would that look like and boom you can go from prompt to this is exactly what it is going to look like oh but would it be better if it was blue would it be better if there was a train in the middle of it or etc etc and this process you know as opposed to the more traditional you know pen and paper sketching process I think is going to rapidly accelerate our ability to create content for games which is great here's another example a company called Rosebud and they're doing something similar but focused on taking it one step further and this is not so much about highly realistic 3D this is more about all kinds of different gameplay content but again going from simple

prompt all the way through to generating code for your game itself and so this is essentially opening up and making accessible simple game development to anybody who can generate a prompt so that's quite interesting so that's about how we make games and then thinking about how we experience games so this I put those up just because I like Star Wars and they're cool from mid-journey um but more importantly is the is the the picture on the right which is about NPCs so one of the things that we have a studio called clang that we've invested in and they're making an amazing MMO City Builder community building game and one of the things that they've done

which really struck me when I saw it um demoed live is that they're they're animating the end the NPCs with chat GPT so that the NPCs all these little characters non-non-playable characters as you walk through the town and you do your you know MMO city building thing you go to work you go to school you go to the factory you do all those things you know like like The Sims for example um but as you do it all of the other characters around you whether they are other players or not are chatting with each other and they're having conversation and those conversations are meaningful but random and uniquely generated because it's coming from the llm and that's actually really

interesting because as somebody who spent my entire career in the entertainment industry of various types um it changes the form and the feel of the entertainment because it's not just about me operating this character anymore I can stop on the street corner and watch two people get into an argument about crossing the street and it becomes like watching reality television all of a sudden because that experience is unique or I can go and talk to them and interact with them so it changes the nature of the entertainment product in my opinion so I think that's quite interesting middleware I'm not going to talk about much but I have to say on a proportional basis

huge number of pitch decks I mean I see so many middleware businesses at the moment because I think this is a common conception in the marketplace that we've struggled for several years in web 3 to onboard the billions of new users that we always talk about and so as a result there are a lot of people vying to make that onboarding process more simple and also make the development sort of tool stack more accessible to people who are not native blockchain Engineers so a lot of middleware businesses have sprung up and rightly so are getting funded because they're making our lives easier they're making integrating you know Fiat on ramps or payments or wallets or marketplaces easier to do for games for example

so a lot of companies focusing on how do we help game developers integrate web3 rails if they know nothing about blockchain but are interested in putting it into their games but they know how to make games for example um game developers this one's quite exciting to me because these are very seasoned AAA teams so these are the people who often are well known in the game industry for creating content that is um well respected by other game developers let me just leave it at that so everything from Eve online to Summoners War life beyond is our studio full disclosure NFL Rivals is from mythical

but these are teams that are used to have producing the biggest budget content for the most famous studios around the world and they are now in a position to actually start migrating some of their content and focusing their teams on building stuff in web 3. there's been a lot of talk about when are we going to see AAA quality content in web3 I think that's actually I think it's misguided it's great if we can see it but the game industry is actually much much bigger than just AAA content that's actually only one part of the game industry just like you know feature films that you see in the cinema on a big screen as part of the movie industry but I'm sure that you know most

of you in here have probably seen your last movie not on a big screen but on another screen so it's just part of the business but I do think from a mind share standpoint when you think about what's going to bring the traditional web 2 game industry into web3 having some of these companies pave the way and say yeah you know we're going to put our stamp of approval we think this is a good idea and this is where the future is headed for game building I think that's great for our industry and the last subject I want to talk about is interoperability so I think the first major example we saw of this was actually in the sandbox and in season three which was about six

months ago we called that the season of interoperability the reason for that is because we did relation we opened up access for various pfp projects and the idea was how do we reach out to those communities and figure out how to engage with those communities in a meaningful way in the sandbox because we want everybody from web3 to feel welcome in the sandbox but one of the one of the sort of bridges that we wanted to Gap was the idea that people have pfps often two-dimensional pictures that they like that are their personal identity for example in web 3 but you know if we come and ask them to be a 3D pixelated Avatar

in sandbox that's something different so how do we bridge that Gap so we created obviously sandbox style versions of all these pfp collections and this was a very very successful way for us to engage proactively with those communities and make them feel like they had a home and they felt welcome in sandbox and a lot of them came to sandbox as a result of this and so this is an example of something that I've been telling all our portfolio companies for the last nine months you know if your thin on Runway and you're looking for user acquisition and you're trying to figure out how to bootstrap some you know um more excitement revenues user numbers Etc in your business think about collaborating

because that's what web3 is all about think about how you can work with other projects and other communities and create content interoperability because the user acquisition cost is actually very low you're not out there spending money blindly advertising you're essentially appealing directly to communities who will likely be more favorable to your product to begin with because they're already web 3 native and so all you have to do is figure out how you lean into creating a relationship with that community so number one get into the community understand them spend time on Discord hanging out with them see if you think there's a fit in terms of your content type and then invite them in figure out

what that Gateway is and so another example of interoperability is within our Motorsports ecosystem we have something we call the Rev ecosystem so United unified under the Rev token um we now have a wide variety of Motorsports related games and the idea here is that we wanted to create One Umbrella where we can have full content and economic interoperability between games that are all in in the same genre so this started out as a little bit of a passion project because I've always loved you know Automotive games and one of the things I found frustrating is that you often spend a lot of time

modifying your car and you you get very passionate about it and you work very hard on it but then you can only use it in one game and once you have something that you feel is that sort of you know your pfp let's call it of that playable car you'd love to use it in many different places why is it that I can't race you know my Nascar car against a Formula One car against a super bike because they're all siled in their individual games so one of the things we wanted to do was to try to break down those walls between games and so that's what we're doing with the Rev ecosystem so that's basically my highlight today so AI big Trend um thinking about

the onboarding and middleware making onboarding easier thinking about interoperability between content and I think those are really the big the big trends that I'm seeing at the moment so thank you very much [Applause] does anybody have any questions hi um um just a little um interested in one thing you said about the AI creating sideline stories in games that becomes much more real and

everything and they could participate in the sideline story and it becomes a show in itself um would that mean that potentially this side as I we could while playing the game change the essence of the game like let's say we are I don't know like uh um police officer looking for some Clues and then someone is talking on the streets and you become friends and then you want to do car racing or parachuting or something like this and then the game comes becomes completely something else so I think it's about figuring out where you want to put those rails on um the kind of subject matter and topics that you allow those AI models to explore and so you might want to you

know if you have a very specific theme like it's a crime story for example then maybe all of those themes that are discussed and talked about you know you kind of put rails on the prompts um so that they only talk about issues that are related I think also a lot of it is going to be um it's like um it's like a it's like a verbal version of beautiful artwork on the walls it gives you the background but it's not the main plot line if you will it's there to enhance the feeling of reality but really the storyline will still be in the characters that are actually scripted characters because you need to um in in many game genres you need to still very much guide the user on a

particular narrative journey in this case that I described it works particularly well because if you think about a simulated world then a simulated World often is you know 90 background noise because that's part of the environment of the game genre itself so it's particularly well suited to that thank you um one question from a different perspective coming from user experience on a non-game world we learned from the traditional Game World a lot about gamification how to make our user experience better is there something we can learn from web3 uh games in terms of how we enhance our user

experience so I think the earliest data that we have from web3 games that have been out the longest is that ownership matters because ownership solves one of the most classic game operator problems which is retention you know games notoriously especially mobile have miserable retention and in web 3 what you'll notice is that pretty much everything has amazing retention our problem in web 3 is actually getting users in to the user acquisition funnel keeping them there is relatively simple you know compared to traditional games and that's because we have the benefit of ownership once people own assets in

the game they feel a connection to the game and an investment in the game which is different which is I would argue similar to people who've spent many hours in a traditional web 2 game so there's that investment of either time or money and in web 3 because we have such high retention we're able to monetize well but the trick is figuring out how to get them in um great I have a feeling that's all we have time for thank you thank you very much [Applause] [Music] thank you