The Future of Play on Earth

Transcript

hello hi thank you for coming to this talk on the future of play to earn um we have just had a great introduction so i don't think i need to do it all over again but um yeah so we're gonna just go into the inner depths of what it looks like when you have a population of people who are doing whatever tasks you have them doing in this specific situation we have some great video games uh representation up here uh and they're doing these tasks for the outcome of having fun playing the game but also they're making money and they're like in some in some instances a livelihood based off of what they're doing inside of this game so i want to start off there and take it to you um and talk about what does it look like for axia infinity

when you guys have success in a region like the philippines and it's just a direct population that immediately onboarded into this idea of play to earn and how do you how did how did it affect your growth and your uh roadmap in general definitely so our biggest demographic is the philippines by a large margin i think like 40 or so of our web traffic at least where we have some kyc is from the philippines um and southeast asia in general indonesia is number three these are regions where the economic proposition of play to earn really makes a lot of sense right making 20 or 30 usd and four or five hours of game play in these countries that's a lot of money that's more than minimum wage for a

day's work in rural parts of the philippines and then you combine that with the high social media connectivity they have in the philippines there's a high kind of social social order i would say where things spread very quickly people are very plugged in and there's a lot of gamer culture there i i come from the dota 2 space that's where i worked for the last 10 years dota is very popular there and the philippines has a lot of very very try hard competitive gamers so that intersection and plus the help of ygg gabby being there is kind of an evangelist i think that also helped plant some seeds but yeah in these these economies in developing countries where there's a big gap in that global purchase parity in terms of what they can do with their local currency um axi has kind of hacked that

system a little bit because we're purely digital right it doesn't cost anything to move axes around they're infinitely durable and that kind of set up the backbone for our scholarships yeah and i think uh i mean we were all talking backstage so i have i have i was hearing a little bit of what you were saying as well and like how quickly it seems like for both of you both at ember sword but also at axe infinity is like when people on board into the games it does seem to from what uh it looks like they onboard into the world of crypto very quickly and very easily and they're immediately able to kind of see the connections between these nft representations and also value in their lives and yes feel free to speak to that and like what what kind of growth you've seen as you've built out

your platform at ember sword yeah i think you know one of the main reasons we we started this journey at emerson obviously we're building an mmorpg so it takes it takes a little bit longer to get it all done but you know one of the main reasonings behind it was you know we're also coming from a lot of esports and you know mark one of our founders he founded encydia and you know a bunch of other wow gills and was like world champion for two and a half years but one of the things we saw was literally that you know they were facilitating transactions that were totally against the terms of service by the way like selling a single sword for a bloody hundred thousand dollars in wow and two days later you know the people who sold

it got banned right and the people who bought it got banned swords gone forever and i think that's one of those things that is really important to kind of recognize is like online worlds have this intense ingrained value from the effort of the players that are partaking in them and we've kind of walled it off we shouldn't be doing that and i think that's why they're also you know so quickly adopting this notion of hey this is really neat like i can hop on board with this i can own this and now if you know at some point later i want to monetize all this effort i put in i can gamers come from a world where they're used to paying for entertainment right you buy a game and then you're the product you're the one that's putting up

the money and then that time is kind of a sunk cost to return to get some of that value that you've lost by paying up front play to earn switches that model completely on its head or the whole essence of it is to reward players for their attention in the ecosystem as a game developer what do we want the most we want people that care about our game care about improving at the game and care about building a really powerful community yeah so uh i mean to this to this point like gamers identifying with even just like the the format of play to earn and to get these uh value items um i mean simone you're coming from a investor background and i think we were all backstage kind of discussing the

concept of uh average customer cost and how in how in in play to earn it's actually like what is your average customer revenue but the same can be said for freemium gaming as well and so simone i'm like you're investing in crypto projects across the board why does it seem that a lot of the deal flow i see you involved in is gaming companies so yeah the difficult regarding gaming sorry for the voice first of all i lost it at manpool yesterday so it's anyway uh yeah oliver all of our voices are a little bit hoarse after last night and i think you're totally not alone thanks so regarding the deal flow i will say

that it changed a lot during the last months right now we are in the average of 80 of deals that we are seeing every week in gaming but uh i mean we were chatting before that even if it's like 80 of the creep of the of the deals in gaming i don't feel that we are like close to a bubble or something like that because if you think about the gamers the crypto gamers that are right now today in the market they are approximately let's say let's consider as gamer as players for example the axe infinity players daily average users they have 2 million so they just broke 2 million 2 weeks ago that is

0.1 of the entire gaming industry of the entire gamers community so if you if you compare this number for example with the d5 number let's say in the world there are approximately 12 million traders and in the d5 today there are 0.5 of these so it's like the same path but with some delay that you're seeing the gaming and i think like with game 5 at least with axi we're starting to see like the gamification of learning about blockchain and that's really one of the really value propos value propositions we have with axi that is extending beyond the gameplay like we're bringing

new people into the ethereum and blockchain ecosystem and a lot of them are you know they come for the play to earn they stay for the game and then they really stay for the education that comes with understanding defy buying other tokens and getting plugged into the global economy like 50 percent of axey's 2 million daily active users are brand new to blockchain they only learned about blockchain because they were motivated to learn axie and become part of a scholarship or a guild or whatever else so that's uh yeah that's a big deal i don't know if anyone else has figured out how to make blockchain fun for outsiders yeah no no exactly that's it i think you know it it really speaks volumes even when we're doing something like a community land sale that we've got people coming in

and the vast majority of them has never even made a crypto wallet right people you know a lot of times people ask us this question like how many of these people are like you know people speculating on crypto and how many are actual gamers and you know we did a community sale so we actually have the stats and we can tell them like 80 of these people are like gaming guilds multi-gaming guilds folks that actually they're not even playing a blockchain game right now they're playing like albion online and they're migrating their like 5 000 people guild to amber sword once it goes live and so so there's really this appeal to the gaming community that understands that

the value that you're generating now becomes yours and i mean like the simplest example to that is you know obviously we come from the world of warcraft background as one of those things and there you've got like tens of thousands of guild leaders creating awesome experiences for hundreds of people each right and outside of a few youtubers and twitch streamers no one is getting any value back for 40 hours a week of time invested and you just see that these guys immediately get the notion of wow that's really nice like if we make sure that people have an amazing time in this game now in turn there's also a model that works for us and you know and it's fully digital when we're digitally native we're like that already

but bring it on right yeah totally yeah and i think also that display to earn it's a massive marketing instrument that games developers have today because at the end playtorn is based on two elements if we want to summarize like a cool game with a a design economy that works a token economy that works and if you have like only the game without the token economy it means that you are like in the blue ocean and you are competing with all of the others and it's really are extremely hard so competitive if you have only the token and you don't have the game it's gonna be like a mercenary effect so

a lot of gamers initially when their words are going to end it's over but if you have both of them so that is the key of the success and for example uh what we are seeing that it's happening in in the philippines is in my opinion is one of the best revolution that crypto like brought to the world and the possibility to give to people to like earn the same money of the daily rate that they have like 12 dollars for example in philippines just playing like two hours per day with the game is the liveliest unbelievable like revolution that we are going through so that i do want to ask this question

because that's kind of where i was going to steer it with the livelihood side of things where now someone is playing this game and it actually is potentially a part of their livelihood well now we are seeing the earliest forms of nft games with play to earn but we've also already seen like you were talking about the market for gaming and how word it's such a small sliver the market for mobile games has gone like into uh exponential growth in the last like 10 years right and so you're seeing them taking over the the the revenue through freemium gaming so where does where does that leave mobile uh gaming platforms or mobile gaming platforms with nfts like built-in

where do you see the the gaming industry headed do you see that that's something you're interested in for doing like mobile stuff in the philippines a community that's very much on mobile phones yeah i mean i i think you're exactly right that it's a balance of having a good game and also a very functional economy that works for the players it doesn't really work without both sides of the equation that is the essence of play to earn for us though we do really strongly echo that it is a game first ultimately that's what drives the value and we are starting to have that discussion where now with two million daily active users you do have some users that come in purely for the play to earn aspect purely because it's a means for them to earn and what does that mean for the system you know we're still in alpha so we

still have things to deploy we still have things to change we're all taking part in this live experiment so that gets a little scary uh some people seem to think that okay now that you've hit this critical mass uh drop in the bucket from our perspective of what the addressable market is but a lot of people seem to think okay you hit two million active daily active users that means you're not in alpha anymore you're a real game and that means you're immutable you can't change stuff because you have to protect my investment uh and obviously we don't want to ruin anyone's investment but we don't see it that way it's a game first the integrity of the game is number one and if you don't have a game that's fun to play that people care about and care about getting better at then the economy isn't really worth

that much anyway well yeah because you're essentially trading in the currency of attention you're like i don't want to trade like in a negative manner for the currency of your attention and you were talking a little bit about this backstage as well which is like the people that are bought into like uh crypto games that are coming from even like the crypto side of things you get to go back to people who are investors and say like oh i'm going to continue to do this because the people have that are in my community are here for a number of reasons some of them are very monetary but in reality they like my game and so it's it's an interesting um it's an interesting argument to have as opposed to like game designers historically have to have had to capitulate overall i have a question

about ember sword because you guys are making an mmo rpg you mentioned twice now to me that it takes a long time to build a game like that right like a decade is not an unreasonable amount of time to build a full-fledged you know tier one mmo how do you handle that with the speed at which cryptocurrency moves because we move really fast in this space so do you worry about like getting left behind or like the tech that you're building on is it future proof like how do you tackle all that kind of stuff with such drastic timeline differences yeah i think you know we've you know coming coming from a very early start way before the whole crypto winter hit sort of we've had some time to i think think this over and and go through this and buckle down and build you know

rather than looking too much outside and what valuations are looking like so it certainly helped us and i know it helped you guys it actually a lot too i think it's sort of the the fire that purifies what you know what goes on it's seriously hard now if you launch a game and it's really good it's genuinely good you still attract all these mercenaries now because crypto and nfts are popping off so hard i actually think it's such a blessing to be born in a bear market because you get to build this community of people that actually care because the prospects aren't that big yeah exactly i fully agree so i think part of it is community and and building the right community and having the right expectations and you can see like we're building an mmo we've of course made

some choices that help make it more manageable like you know if all of our items were purely focused 100 around utility and collectibles were that etc etc it would be a lot tougher because you you make balancing decisions in mmo and suddenly this nft you bought for who knows what is no longer as valuable anymore you know we know that like literally the largest segment of the whole gaming market is is cosmetics and skins and things like that so we intentionally put the focus there that helped a lot right and beyond that it's also about sort of expectation management and working with your community and showing like you guys have done like you know we're saying we're going into pre-alpha we're going into alpha we're going to be releasing

bits of the world as we go we're going to continue incrementally bringing in functionality and you see when you have that approach to it like sometimes i have to experience playing to people that it's kind of like early access on steroids right it's like you've seen this movement people love it when game developers share and let you experience what it's like to build the product we're doing that but just you know for a much bigger game i think you know that's a little scary but it's also extremely exciting and we're getting lots of great feedback on it and i mean i think that one point really important related to this one is the importance of the dow that the that they are going to have in the future so right

now there are few dollars but are increasing terms of numbers in terms of like number of scholars dramatically every day so it's like booming down and um there are like for example some projects like ygg or other dials coming up that they are going to be really active in the games they are going like too i i see that i was sort of like meet between the uh let's say the e games team and the labor unions you know so something that uh let's say fight for the rights for the scholars but at the same time we want to find a deal with the game to

have a right and affairs and divisions for for the gamers and um the the dao structure that they are going to have right now with the soup dao i think this is really an interesting experiment we are seeing a lot of innovation in the future on this and they will be one of the main stakeholders that you guys i mean are facing over over the time right yeah like everything is community in this space and it's really really great to see that like you know gabby and yield are a really great example but many other gaming guilds too they're getting into this space and they're committing to these games that they believe in the future of and

they believe that you know for their player base that'll generate value and they bring literally hundreds of thousands of players to the table and it's just like one thing we had like we had our community land sale and there was one particular guild that you know that made it in the rankings to buy a city and i remember just you know like just a couple of days ago i got a message from the guy who runs that guild saying like we are celebrating today like the purchase of our city but more importantly the fact that we got a lot of this city allowed us to land two million dollars in additional investment that we'd like to now put like half off towards tokens because we want to have the tokens to start building our economy in the game

as the next stage and that is so amazing when you can see that it starts spinning up this massive economy where everyone is benefiting i think that's that's great um i think we have to wrap this up but i do love that you guys are also like each other's biggest fans like you're both doing gameplays but yeah what have you got to go into your place what have you got um but thank you so much so i mean we're just kicking off the creator economy track so i'm gonna hand it back off but thank you everyone and thank you to all you for being out here as we talk about gaming thank you thank you