Future of Play to Earn | Creator Economy and NFT Summit

[Music] [Applause] [Music] with that we are ready to move on to our next talk and that is going to be a far side chat between gabby and linda linda is going to be interviewing gabby here linda's from scalar capital gabby is the co-founder of the old-field games uh they're going to talk about what the future of plato looks like and how nfts and just gaming is taking over the world so i'll let them do most of most of this intro and talking and without further ado let's welcome gabby and linda on screen hello all right there you can wait awesome thanks for having us um so uh gabby can you just give a brief background on what yield game guild guild games is sure so uh ygg is what we call a play-to-earn gaming guild that means that we are a dow that invests into nft assets of different play-to-earn games meaning games where you have nfd assets that earn some form of tokenized yield these assets are then lent out to our player base the members of the guild and then they play the games and uh earn uh basically earn some form of money that can be ultimately uh swapped out for ether or uh to fiat so uh we we started doing this in axe infinity where we were lending out taxes in what is called a scholarship or a lending program so that people can uh can earn money in the form of slp tokens and converted to fiat most notably in the philippines uh this blew up last year during the early kind of covid uh lockdowns where people were stuck at home and uh couldn't find uh any work um while they were home and they found axi as a way to earn income that was actually multiples better than their local opportunities at that time that's awesome um i i am curious though um you mentioned axi uh there's just been a lot of blockchain games in the past what really appealed to you and your community uh for axi and um why do you think that that's become so popular sure so axia has been around since 2018 and what really changed was when they introduced the form of yield in the form of the slp token so slp is generated when you win matches um inside axi infinity and what gives it value is that there is in-game utility for the token you actually have to use it or burn it as an ingredient when you have to breed two axis to create a new one now you can't buy any axis from the team itself all of the axes that are generated are bred or created by community members who are known as the breeders in the game so for people who are breeding they buy the slp so that they can create a lot of axes and then sell these axes in the marketplace to new players so this is a very interesting kind of crypto economy that you see inside a game where it uses uh blockchain either in the form of nfts for assets or fungible tokens for yield as a way to kind of create an economy around it um and then where have you seen uh like what regions have taken off with uh this kind of work that you're doing it's we've seen it off uh take off all over the world but most notably it's taken off in regions like southeast asia and latin america so in in southeast asia you have countries like philippines thailand indonesia doing really well and in latin america you see countries like venezuela argentina argentina colombia brazil where i guess the income that people are earning here can be at times like much much higher than the local jobs that are available and then um i guess in terms of um i guess what what do you think are like the uh future of play to earn gaming like is it just going to be these like scholarship rentals or do you like what other use cases do you see here right so i think that the future of work is increasingly increasingly going to be in these virtual worlds and online games that are connected uh in their economies to the blockchain somehow so right now we're earning a living online by going to different websites doing some knowledge work but i think increasingly there will be plenty of different jobs that will be available for people in basically video games online worlds and what we call the metaverse economy so at the very basic you may be a scholar or someone who is borrowing assets to play games and then earning some kind of income for that um there are people who are more i would say entrepreneurs like the breeders in axi infinity or land owners in a game like sandbox or league of kingdoms where yeah i basically own land and maybe you're leasing them out to people who are playing the game there's also a lot of people who are doing content creation around these games so streamers the youtubers who have their own followings and what's interesting about this is that play to earn is bringing an additional business model to content creation where you don't necessarily have to be a top creator to be earning money it's really hard to earn money as a top creator unless you really have a lot of viewers but because of the business model play to earn if you're good at the game you can be creating good content and actually making decent amount of money at the same time the other things i'm really excited about are really just the creative jobs that are going to be available in this game so for example you can be a digital fashion designer creating clothing for your avatars it can be the one creating avatars or maybe buildings you may even be a blacksmith inside an rpg creating weapons for other people so i think that the future of work is increasingly tied to the creator economy and really giving people um like access to jobs that are interesting to them and leverage their unique skills that's really cool um and and i know that the play to earn space is growing really quickly um what has been the challenging aspects of kind of growing ygg okay so i guess there's many challenges but interestingly the biggest one has not been technical it's actually been cultural we've been i would say accustomed for the last 30 years to think that playing games are a waste of time and then they don't contribute anything to us and you know i've been joking that moms have been yelling at their kids for so long about like to stop playing games and now these same moms are yelling at their kids to finish the daily quest in axe infinity so that they can get their daily income so having that mind shift we were actually learning really important skills when we were gaming we were doing mastery we're doing pattern recognition when we're playing mmos we're doing things like uh coordination except that uh players weren't getting paid for it because there wasn't a business model for it so now in uh player-owned economies now that people can invest in the assets and earn yield you can actually get paid for this it becomes a legitimate form of job of an income and i think we have a long way to go in kind of convincing people that this is indeed real um and then uh talking about that when i guess whenever you turn something you like to do into a job um and you kind of have to earn an income from it it can kind of make it less fun so how do you strike a balance uh with these games and making it fun while you're still earning an income does that like potentially ruin the experience i know people talk about that potential learning experience for me i think people have kind of thought of fun as something they do outside of work and work is something they do for money that may not be fun if you actually have the opportunity to combine these where you're doing something that you enjoy have it be meaningful work and get paid for it i think it actually aligns person's interest better i think when people think of like playing games for work as not being fun is when maybe they think of their fun as separate from what they do from work got it and then can you also talk about for those that are really interested in play to earn um how they can get started like i know there's a lot of different discords um and there's just a lot of overwhelming information so like what are the some of the resources you recommend yeah sure so uh there is a play to earn documentary that is that was produced by yield guild and axe infinity so you can definitely head out to youtube and uh look for the play to earn documentary we have our discord discord.gigi ygg and when you go into a discord you see a very vibrant community where a little over 60 000 people now that take a look at these different games and then form sub guilds inside our community to play these games together so apart from the players that are playing axe infinity there's also discussion of many other games and then people can gather and play games like league of kingdoms for example or games like splinterland so there's a lot of different um sub-communities that uh that are forming inside ygg and uh if you wanna just uh get uh info there's twitter.com yieldguild or you'll guild.io for our website where you can mint a free badge you just have to pay gas and that makes you a guild member um and then you mentioned league of kingdoms and splinter lands could you describe a little bit about what those games are like and kind of how people play them sure so for league of kingdoms it's a strategy game similar to clash of clans for example the big difference is that players on the land that is that the game is being played on so in the guilds instance we own an estate of 286 pieces of land and the guild builds on top of it and whenever money is spent on top of that land when when players uh basically spend on in-app purchases um a portion of that uh of the money spent goes to the land holders so splinterlands itself is a card game that's been around on the hive blockchain and we actually see a lot of activity and uh there's also a scholarship model where you can lend out cards to other people and they also have a land sale this game has been around for a couple of years and we're seeing really good um retention and engagement activity so i think that the game is actually doing pretty well and then i know that a common criticism of play to earn uh is that like how is this sustainable activity um and and i i personally know that like just uh playing video games growing up there's always like gold farmers and all kinds of things that's right i'm curious to hear your perspective on how this is sustainable activity okay so the the way i see it is that people are increasingly going to invest in assets that are online and on chain in these virtual worlds and economies so when i take a look at a game like axi infinity for example i start comparing it to like a digital nation and it's uh its daily volume is its gdp so now what is in the game that will make people invest in it there must be something that can give them either enjoyment in the game or maybe their assets can increase or maybe they're looking for some form of yield so it's no different basically than a regular economy except you're controlling these inputs and outputs um via the game and then these assets are being transferred to the blockchain basically in the form of nfds for assets or tokens for currency maybe and yeah that means that you have actually like self-contained economies inside these games and as long as there's reason for people to put money inside these economies then it will bring about sustainability um and then i guess what has been the most surprising part for you when starting ygg uh the most surprising part is just the diversity of people who have found um plato earn uh work like we're not just seeing kids who are basically creating guilds and then going on raids inside these games people are yeah using them either as an income supplement or in some cases either as complete income replacements or even as their own businesses from people who are trying to get to college for example to grandparents who are retired and are using this to supplement their pension it's been great to see that there's a lot of people around the world who are now exposed to the crypto economy without one needing to know crypto in the first place and second they actually don't need to have any money in the first place all they need is a skill that billions of people around the world have is like they need to have gaming skill and yeah there's uh so it's incredibly inclusive and we've seen that it has really um included and on-boarded people to the crypto economy who might have never never was been done so um and then like how are people finding out about um like ygg or just play to earn in general like is it just um like word of mouth or how is that happening it's super community-based so the way that play-to-earn has been spreading has not been through traditional you paid user acquisition channels like maybe a facebook or a google it's really been what by what we call a community uh community acquisition so we identify community leaders around the world that are basically good at cultivating communities and we give them access in the form of nfd assets content and our tech platform so that they can create their own play to earn communities or sub guilds around the world and when these communities do well with these games when they earn some money other communities get interested as well and it's proven to be a really really good way for user acquisition without having to pay any like third-party entity um and then also curious about um do you see more traditional gaming companies coming into the space for play to earn um and then if they do so do you think that that's going to change the landscape much or are they going to kind of have to be more crypto native like how do you see that playing out i think it's actually incredibly difficult for the kind of giants of today's world in games to successfully adapt to play to earn a big reason for that is that their current model is doing really well and they may be for example giant companies with that are publicly listed in their uh that have their own shareholders there's a lot of i would say uh regulatory uncertainty in in the world of crypto and nfts um and it's very hard for these companies to embrace play to earn because there's the risk involved of adding a token to their game and how their shareholders their lawyers feel about that what we've been seeing instead is that there's a lot of talent coming from the traditional gaming space in free to play in mmos who are now heading to play to earn and they have uh they have the skills in creating virtual economies and they have to orient them more towards player owned economies where their people are players are basically creating value and selling to each other instead of the publisher or the developer selling items directly to the players but yeah we're seeing a lot of really good talent start new studios right now um and then one thing that i've noticed and and you're definitely more of an expert here so curious your thoughts is um the traditional gaming community can be a little bit toxic sometimes but i've noticed that a lot of the play to earn community they're really like welcoming and helpful towards each other um kind of what have you noticed about the differences between the culture and why do you think that's the case yeah well i think personally part of that has been the unique culture of axi infinity community um the greatest thing about axi is that the the game had always been attached with a very welcoming community people who didn't know anything about crypto or didn't know anything about the game had always been welcome and there's been a core set of kind of really strong community believers that have uh kind of tried to stay true to this culture even as it had scaled up to more than uh a million users but in the greater nft community there's this you know a whole i would say positivity and ethos of helping each other and it's really my favorite thing about play to earn where people are really happy that they're able to invest whatever money they have into excess axes that are they're providing out to people in like countries like the philippines or venezuela where um people there might not have a lot of good choices for uh for local jobs and they it makes them happy to be able to provide these uh kind of uh i guess new form of gig work to people around the world so there's a really strong undercurrent of that and i think it's really crucial to to play to earn even as we scale it up yeah i was actually going to ask that like do you think this is going to be sustainable as more people come into the space and then how do you how are you planning on like helping to maintain that culture yeah so i think that it's going to be a real work in progress there is no guarantee that this kind of culture will uh will really persist as we grow bigger and i think that's actually where guild communities come in um guilds are a collection of people who are bound together and to do something um as a group and that's basically what dows are and we kind of use the guild and now kind of interchangeably in in ygg context and i think it's up to us at uh the founder level of ydg to kind of express our value so that we can attract like-minded people who want to stay in our guild and basically build together with the same set of common values and hopefully that kind of radiates down to the sub-guilds communities we have in different countries around the world even as they tweak and localize basically their culture for each for their own unique communities um and then regarding the guild structure can you talk more about how that looks like internally and um how do you keep up with all those communities it seems like there's so many different sub guilds and different languages and countries like how do you manage that yeah definitely not easy but we we call yield guild a a guild of guilds or a dive down so we're not actually one guild we are um an umbrella or a federation of lots of different player communities and the reason that we set it up this way when we started is that no one really wants to be in a guild of a million people right like it's too big it doesn't feel personal so you want to be in a group of maybe your five friends going on a raid or like maybe even um 100 people who are in your immediate vicinity so yale guild itself is set up into a lot of different sub guilds that are either organized by region by community or around the assets of a particular game and it that makes it feel smaller because you care more about your immediate community and people that you're playing with on a day-to-day basis than anyone else but on top of that yield guild provides the nft assets the capital the tech infrastructure so that we can empower these guilds especially these community leaders who are great at building community cultivating it recruiting players and they don't have to worry about the technology side the capital side and we just help them do what they do best um and then related to that like how do you hire people um as a doubt like how do you go about finding community managers so the great thing about community managers is that they're not employees they're basically their own entrepreneurs who are good at building community and are able to monetize it by working with yield guild so um at first we work with community managers that are already have their own kind of personal access scholarship maybe they uh they have a few dozen or a few hundred axis colors but it's hard for them to scale because uh it takes a lot of capital to uh to create a lot of these axes and we partner with them we basically give them access to our axes and the platform that manages it and we do a revenue split so how how the revenue split works is it's 70 2010 70 of the slp earned goes to the scholar or the player 20 to the community manager and 10 to ygg the guild and as a community manager as some of some of our managers have maybe over 500 scholars of their own it actually adds up quite a bit if you're able to scale how you are leading your community and then i know that 70 20 10 structure um might vary across like outside of ygg and across different um scholarship managers i guess how did that um break down kind of um like why is that breakdown the case and what else have you seen and i know you have thoughts on on some of the different structures we love to hear them yeah so it's really important for us that the player or the scholars actually receive a majority of what they earn i think it's really uh important for the future of this space that we are kind of changing the structure of how people are earning um from a fixed wage for example to where they're being rewarded for for their own upside so that's very important for us and that's why we give the majority to the players and as they go online it means if they're not just having a job anymore they're being compensated for something that matches their ability which which if you do that you're able in uh you're enabling a lot of people around the world to make money basically based on their talents um and then i also had a question around like barriers to entry so i mean it can be really confusing sometimes for people when they're first starting out with wallets and um kind of learning about how to use anything in crypto so um how are you kind of helping to navigate that space and have you seen yeah what are you what are you seeing is like the biggest bearish entry for people yeah that's that's actually a really great question because i mean crypto can be really confusing um and i get i think we aren't there yet in crypto in terms of just really seamless onboarding and this is really where the magic of community comes in so at field guild for example when if you come in as an axis scholar you don't have to know anything about crypto to start with you don't have to know anything and you don't even have to have any money to start with you're given an account you log into that account you start playing games and you uh you start earning slp and during that time you're interacting with the community you're being given content that will tell you like what a crypto wallet is how to play the game and after two weeks when you receive your first payout from slp uh from your revenue share in the game uh you can bet that these players are very motivated to learn how crypto works when it's time to pay out and then do you have any numbers that you can share on um kind of how large play to earn or some numbers from ygg that can put this into perspective for the audience so we are paying out somewhere between one to two million dollars every month right now to our community members so this is the 70 share of slp that they have so we have um around 5000 scholars which is just a little under 10 of our uh community member base um in in the discord but i think just if you think about how many people around the world would want to earn money by playing video games i think we're just like super early we're just getting started um i think that number will ultimately be in the billions of people so while yieldia does under 100 000 members and axi itself the best performing game has a little over one million um daily active users i think yeah we we're just barely getting started yeah that's so tiny compared to traditional games um so uh also curious on the investment side uh because you invest in nft land like what does that process look like for you and the community of how you're deciding to invest in something is there someone managing that process or is it just community driven like how does that process look uh so we do have an internal team that really looks at these games as similar to an early stage vc but instead of investing in equity we actually take a look at assets first so we look at acquiring the nfts that give yield we take a look at how the economy works where is the money coming in how are people getting paid is this sustainable long term uh we like to invest in the nfts and their associated governance tokens and while it is not community driven in the decision making we do have what we call a play to earn council where we get signals from the community on what games interest them so we use the community as kind of scouts to see like what's out there what's interesting and um yeah it's happened several times in that the interest from the community has ended up with us making an investment as well that's really cool and then like i guess what um what really excites you right now um like as you're seeing uh others building and played or like is there anything any trends or anything people should be paying attention to beyond what we've already discussed um there's just an incredible diversity of new games that are coming out from like racing games virtual worlds um there are like full mmos being built there are kind of a strategy game so yeah that's the exciting part in that once all of these worlds get built out there's really like no shortage of choice for you to choose like what kind of adventure you want to be in what part of group you want to take part of and earn an income at the same time um and then so what have you noticed beyond like the earning income piece really resonates with people about joining ygg or kind of the play to earn movement so i think actually um a lot of people aren't motivated by the income alone they they like the um the concept of i'm coming in investing my time and probably some money forming a group with like-minded people and going on these adventures and then getting rewarded for these adventures so it's like going on dnd with your group but the money that you earn is actually real so it's that rather than like a pure like financial transaction it said the community aspect is actually stronger and i think that's what makes it sustainable for any game or a community where if you see people having fun with these games before they start earning serious money i think that game will be more sustainable and then um we saw will talk about uh loot prior to this talk um curious what you think about um how loot and and kind of similar gaming primitives uh are going to impact platon yeah i really love the experimentation around loot i think that the community is trying to figure out like what kind of game experience is really going to be built around that and it's not at the stage yet where ygg can see a game that earns heal that we could invest in but yeah i really love the experimentation behind it and then so uh what comes next for ygg like what are you focused on right now so uh we're doing a lot of uh international scaling we call it the kind of like uber for digital asset strategy where we are going out region per region and creating regional sub-dials with local community managers who are basically know the communities on the ground and while they're like smaller versions of ygg in southeast asia in latin america in india in china and they're kind of configuring um ygg towards the particular taste of each market so they may be playing different games for example slightly different assets different kind of nuances in the community and language and that's how we'll be onboarding millions of people to play to earn very cool um so i wanted to leave time for audience q a uh kartik are you going to be reading those offer yes um linda gave us an awesome chat um we have a lot of questions we have a whole spectrum of things coming in from the chat so there's a whole mix of people who are trying to understand what y2g and fedor earn is and and sort of how nft and gaming sort of makes and then most people already understand the ygg ecosystem and they have more questions about that so i'll try to do a whole spectrum of a lot of these questions maybe just to start off you kind of touched on this a little bit but could you give a slightly bigger overview on sort of uh what your community is right now like who are your users are they students or adults or people with jobs as well as doing this thing for fun like just a little bit more detail around who they are and how they kind of the demographic base is extremely broad and i would say it's worldwide and um from i would say like college age to uh like adults and even like we see people 60 plus like for example my my dad is actually playing axe infinity and using it as a kind of supplement to uh to expansion so it's very broad i think 40 to 50 percent are around southeast asia right now particularly the philippines where they started going viral but um yeah we're seeing a lot of communities go up even in latin america across africa and even in places in u.s or europe where the community base is smaller but a lot of them tend to be more like the asset investor type meaning they're the ones investing in these nft assets and then lend them thing out to the people from around the world well i wanted to um ask on related to that i know you've talked about your son and how he's playing uh so can you talk a little bit more about like how he got into it like how old was he and kind of what was his experience yeah right so my son is 12 years old and he started off playing axe infinity two years ago i actually lent him some axes and he was just playing the game and earning slp um and yeah that's actually how we he started having a crypto portfolio and he used the slp to buy the governance token of axi-xs when it came out last november and also to buy ygg tokens and the guild when when it went public in in july and then does he like what does he think of all of this um like does he understand kind of the broader movement or is it kind of just more um like kids playing games like i'm curious so interestingly for kids like him who have never grown up in a world without internet or even without cryptocurrency like it feels completely normal for them to have digital currency that has value i don't think a lot of kids his age own crypto and but at the same time it's completely normal for them like there's no concept of you know what is a real currency or what is not for him it's just another maybe digital points he's keeping track of but this one is something that he converted to the fiat or the offline money wow um another sort of set of questions are just around understanding how the the now of dao sort of is structured here so you obviously are a big focus there is on axi but i could could you walk us through sort of how you think about adding or supporting more dials or more games and just kind of what that process is like and sort of how you decide what to prioritize well this process is still very much i would say underway but if there are regions being formed or if there's a lot of activity for one particular game we basically create a sub dao under it and we did this for one game league of kingdoms where uh it has actually has its own token yglo k that is owned by the members of that sub-dial and there is governance so we set up a snapshot page for governance and they've passed several proposals for example where the yield that was earned by the land which is uh in dai uh was converted into uh sea dye so that it would earn more yield on top of that and then there was also another proposal passed by um the the sub-dial so that the yield that they um that they earned in the last few months were actually they bought ygg tokens in uh when it went live so it's pretty interesting to see how this collective action in these sub-dials have their own little kind of sub-communities there's like a whole thing i'm trying to in a way stop myself from uh from digging into but but uh we'll see how much we can go and so so one big question that i have for you is obviously you have a community of thousands of people um and not just like members who are on discord or something just active contributors to this let's talk about tooling you're managing this at scale there's so many different pieces here so many different sub communities could you talk to us about how do you think about dow tooling or it's tooling to make your own ecosystem better and sort of what some of the common things are just everything around that will kind of dig into a lot of things from there right so our approach is we want to start simple and then figure out like the mere minimum that we need and kind of just evolve as we go along we don't want to start with a very complicated piece of dow tooling and then kind of have to be stuck with it so that's why we started with snapshot which is super lightweight and actually we just hired a full-time dow manager who who's already done the concept of subdials in um in another protocol and we're trying to see like what does the if uh how does that evolve so all of the all of the assets are run by uh nosis multisig which is like very important part of what we're doing so if you have your gnosis you have the ability to create a token and then you can do snapshot you can basically get started with a sub down and what we're building internally is a way to kind of create a gamer profile for the people who are part of our guild which means we are rewarding nfts that are not transferable to people who are doing certain actions within the guild and the nf the non-transferable nft is a very important primitive in our end because it allows people to kind of prove that they did certain actions and like you can't buy that or trade that off anybody so now you're creating a rich profile of basically achievements that someone has done inside the guild i related to that um there's i think a lot of builders in the audience and what uh feature requests you have for some of the dow tools or things that you think are missing in the tooling space that you'd love to see built yeah that's a very good question i think there's really like no concept yet of like nested dials which is what we're doing um and yeah just the ability to do that and then the asset management is also a very important thing so for example um for guilds to be able to really invest in millions of dollars of assets within games the the lending part is actually really important i have to be able to delegate an asset to another user whether by at the wallet level or at the application level and just trustlessly uh like prove that they're able to use it they have access to it without having being able to run away with that asset so this is actually still i would say the the key missing piece that will allow nft based economies to really grow to potentially trillions of dollars at scale i have to be able to buy a land or then then lease it out to someone and then have rights over that um to be able to lend someone my sword and not be afraid that the person disappears forever so this is one of the key components that is really not been solved yet and does like is the way that you solve it through a new standard or um can you build on the existing standard and kind of um like like iterate from there like how does that work i think the long-term solution is to create a new standard that wraps the nft erc 2721 standard and this adds delegation and permission rights to it i have to be able to for example if someone lends me an nfp i still have to be able to use it in an application context i have to be able to uh do smart contract calls with it but maybe there will be restrictions on what i could do with it for example i can't sell it i can't transfer it to another address it can only go back to the center and maybe i'm streaming a payment to whoever owns it and when i run out of money then the the nft goes back to the original owner so it's still very complex and i think the hard part of creating a new standard would be actually getting everyone to adopt it but it absolutely needs to happen long term got it and then kartik says maybe last question before we move on to the next talk um you obviously started this a couple years ago when there's so much that's happened in the past few months alone um if you could do something differently uh what would you have done if you were to start ygz oh wow so so we actually started ygg less than a year ago it's it's been 10 months only and like just so much happened um in the last 10 months we didn't foresee even as one of the biggest fans of ygg that everything would just begin to take off uh shortly after we uh we founded it i think uh shots i don't have really anything that i wish i do differently but it we have like we've been very fortunate that we actually set up a way to scale this before nfts absolutely exploded and yeah like i have zero regrets there amazing well uh gabby linda thank you so much for that amazing conversation and i hope everybody's questions got answered if you have something else that comes up we'll be able to read those questions to you but really appreciate your time and uh thanks again thank you again linda kartik thanks for having us bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] you