Gaming: Building Web3’s First Mass-Market Apps - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Great. Thanks so much, guys, for uh being here. I know, you know, so the early panel, particularly in a sector that's that's been a bit beaten down and struggled a bit, is is always going to be interesting. We're going to try and make it a bit spicy today. Um my name is Justin Swart.

I work at Bitcraft. We're one of the largest uh gaming funds, particularly focused on the intersection of crypto and gaming, crypto and interactive media. uh globally. We're an early stage investor. Um and I've got the privilege today to try and moderate and and chat with these fine fine gentlemen.

Um I think we're going to just start off with a very brief round of introductions. Um and I want to start with you Yat just a quick intro and also just to set the scene. I you've got a great sort of way of framing why gaming makes sense in the the crypto and the web 3 context. Well, yeah. So, um thank you.

Uh uh first my name is Yat. I'm chairman co-founder of Animoka Brands. We're a company that is both a builder and an investor in the space. Uh we have today over 165 gaming portfolios in web 3. So we certainly hope that's going to work out.

Uh and I think to some extent the sentiment is somewhat reflected in the number of the fact that the seats haven't been filled here. Right? So so it's a little bit of moment but we do believe that and we can talk about that later that web3 gaming will have its big big moment by the end of the year and we can we can come to that a little bit later. U generally speaking though the reason why we're so bullish about web3 gaming is that it is really the most natural path of mass adoption for people um you know are the the youth understand digital currency uh they're basically existing already virtual although the value is in that area if you think about for instance you ask your children what they want for Christmas very likely it's going to be something digital whether it's Robux or Fortnite skins or you know basically the next PlayStation so it's already already existing in a very virtual way it's just now how do we translate that going from web two to web 3. Uh we can talk about that later but that's that's the big opportunity.

There's also one thing to understand which is that the very big there's big difference between Asia and let's call it uh the west right so the west is broadly more negative on this for a number of reasons uh and whereas Asia is much more optimistic and positive around it. So you don't have the same connotations which is also the reason why Asia has pretty much been the center of growth for web 3 gaming for the time being. Yeah, spot on. Um Justin, I'm just going to go to you because you've got this interesting background where you've kind of crossed the chasm uh from web two to web three. Uh could you just give us a bit of an intro and what you saw?

Sure. Yeah. So um uh yeah, my name is Justin. Thanks for having me. Um I've been building games for almost 20 years.

Uh my first company was was Zinga, the social mobile gaming company. Uh built Zinga Poker when I was when I was 19. dropped out of school and we turned it into um the company that really popularized premium and social games um mobile games in the west. And um what was cool about that for me was we were inventing a new business model for games. Basically, what happens if you make a game free and you make it a service instead of a package of good?

And um I've been interested in in web 3 because it unlocks the same opportunity for games again. question is how do we change the business model again for games to make it better for users to make it better for game creators um publishers and the entire ecosystem. So um I personally think we're just at the very early stages of this. There's a lot of experiments that have been tried and and now I'm working on a a new project called open game protocol which sort of aims to coordinate communities and capital together to create a new kind of game ecosystem. Awesome.

Um and then Rahm from your side, you know, Dapper Labs, you've got you built kind of interesting early iteration with Topsh Shot, um showing pretty strong product market fit and sort of inklings of of what we can see, you know, using YAT's kind of view on on moving into a more digital realm and and ownership of these assets. Uh can you give us a bit of a background and and you know, what you've seen since then from Topshot? Sure, absolutely. Uh name is Proh Garagosloo, founder and CEO of Dapper Labs. So NBA Top Shot is one of Dapper's products.

We also run NFL All Day, Disney Pinnacle, and the company started with the with the launch of CryptoKitties back in 2017, which was I think maybe the first real kind of web 3 game. And and our company's thesis has always been that crypto is much more than currency. And and similar to Justin, I believe we're just at the early stages of kind of discovering what exactly that is. Now with all the different tools available at our disposal, how do you give value back to communities? Um, Topshot had a very interesting uh, journey.

You know, initially it started off as purely a digital collecting experience and and you know, kind of billion dollars in transaction volume in its first year. Um, since then we've been very focused on beefing up the the fandom elements, kind of integrating it deeply into the uh, the partners ecosystem. So, if you're a big NBA fan, you do things in the NBA, you get rewarded in Topshot. If you earn status in in Topsh Shot, that gives you access and benefits within the NBA ecosystem. We're running the same playbook with the NFL and also with Disney.

And it's I'm I'm very excited to talk about how you can kind of think about these products in a different way when you're focused on that enduser fan rather than, you know, maybe the the folks that most of us are here, which is the early adopters, the folks that drove Top Shots's early uh momentum. Um, but ultimately it's about kind of building long-term community, building sustainable user experiences and uh and then creating service area for others to build on top. So happy to be here. Okay. Awesome.

So first kind of question for the panel that we're going to get stuck into as I think I was teasing the guys backstage that you know typically at at at these kind of panels particularly on the gaming side you have these very interesting sounding thesis and they make a lot of sense. They're very true and dear to our hearts. I definitely agree with them but the question is that we've kind of heard these every year kind of going by and and the g the sector has clearly had its kind of ups and downs. My question to you guys broadly is what have you changed your mind on in the past sort of three to five years? You mentioned uh Axi Infinity is one of the sort of early examples of of crypto gaming.

There's been a whole lot of games um since then. Uh some of the thesis I think still apply but there's been some learnings throughout that journey. So what have you guys changed your mind on? Uh uh what view did you hold previously and what have you changed your mind on uh in the past 5 years? Open to the floor.

U maybe I'll just start with a couple and then we can have a conversation around it. Right. I mean I think the one of the first uh thesis points was around when we you know we did a lot of game acquisitions of web two companies and moved them into web 3. The assumption being that you can you know web two user will much more naturally adopt sort of a web 3 paradigm because they do feel that they have a sense of ownership of these items. Yeah.

However, as it turned out, uh without sort of a financial literacy rail, which is what happened in places like AXI, there was actually very little incentive for them to do more than just play the game. Uh so the the kind of conversion rate ended up becoming almost similar to what we have in premium, which is a single digit conversion rate from saying, "Oh, okay, I'm going from web 2 to web 3 game." And then um actually I could trade these items and I could do some financial stuff with it. that actually turned out to be a very small conversion rate where people were expecting it to be a much larger conversion rate. that that pathway what we at least we appear to realize is that it needs to come with some kind of financial literacy or an expectation for people to understand why you do it right and I guess we can see some parallels when you think about sort of trading of skins for instance uh that it's not that every person in the game is trading skins it's a subsection small percentage although they trade a large a large volume right um I think the other thing that we um sort of um came to realize was that uh there is also a um I would almost a political view when it comes to sort of games and game design.

Uh and so that's at least you know something we also didn't expect uh which is that we were thought that all gamers are the same in a way you love to play games and whatever but it turned out that you know and this is what we saw between the east and the west. In the west I would argue that most gamers and game designers are generally more socialist minded right they design for equality and they design for structures around this has to be fair whereas in Asia you can pay to play. Yeah, it's like I can pay money to have a better experience and that's okay. In Asia, we have things like VIP gaming. So consequently, this idea of paying for something to have an improved experience is not viewed as negatively.

Uh in fact, it views an opportunity whereas in the west is very much shunned upon which is I guess part of the reason why gamers in the west have been so resistant to it. Right. So these are some of the things that you know there's a lot more but I'll just start off with that from a consumer side before I go to the business side. But please Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that for sure.

For us it's been funible tokens. You know, we started our company based on the sort of thesis that hey, you needed a new kind of crypto asset to create a whole new kind of game experience and obviously we had to invent the nonf fungeible token standard to build cryptokitties. Whereas today now it's it's not it's less that I changed my mind. It's more that we have a kind of regulatory green light to actually experiment with fungeible tokens as consumer products. And and so we we you can imagine new classes of games and applications that are incorporating token incentives, incorporating token um decision-m etc.

And and in some cases, in many cases, a fungeible token sort of whatever people call meme coins or we're talking about app tokens, whatever it might be, might be a better uh um medium for coordination and for user acquisition, for user rewards than NFTTS and then sort of making a nonf fungeible token. We really now take the question of, hey, does this thing need to be uh individually unique? If so, use the NFT standard or does it is it more of a um sort of loyalty uh uh points kind of system in which case you have more design space to sort of experiment with. Um and a couple days ago, the first sort of NFT project, CryptoKitties launched memecoins, Meowcoins technically. Um, and so we're trying to experiment with how do you create sustainable user acquisition incentives, sustainable community, how do you kind of make it so that these products can can reward the communities that add value to them um rather than sort of rewarding an early adopter uh community and then sort of fizzling out in in a sense and you know onto the next kind of game.

So that that's a big part of what what we're experimenting with outside of NBA outside of our licensed IP products. But you can also imagine those things getting folded into okay well how does a major brand or an influencer or or anyone with a community use crypto tokens to manage their community to to give back to their community and to own their community a direct relationship with their community that crisscrosses between different social applications right whether it's Tik Tok Instagram Facebook etc. Um so that's a big focus area of ours next few years. Yeah, let me quickly just push back on uh I get to play devil's advocate because we get these questions all the time and so let me let me push back just on or raise a question on user acquisition using tokens as user acquisition. I think you know Justin you'll probably have a comment on this is that I think they're great behavioral mechanisms to get people to do things but history kind of shows that they've been incredibly expensive for use acquisition.

you could have pumped 10 times as many um use acquisition dollars into the most expensive channels and probably been better off um depending on how you measure it. I think that those were like the early air drops of old, you know, if they treat it pretty much like pseudo equity, it's an expensive thing that you're giving away. How do you think about that in the context of use acquisition for games broadly? Um maybe you've got a response but also I think Justin you've sort of have you know you spend your time in this so maybe you've got a view on this and we've uh we built a product on telegram called uh gems which was one of the earlier games that went viral last summer um and we got to 20 million users and um I think what I've seen is that actually this is a great uh crypto is extremely powerful for user acquisition and I think there are a lot of challenges in keeping the players and um engaging them but I would say a lot of that comes down to thoughtful design around what the product is in the first place. So I think is in my mind um right now when you look at a typical web 2 game developer they're they're putting up money for Facebook ads, right?

And um the question is do you want to raise capital from from Bitcraft and uh just to play devil's advocate a little bit more to to take $2 million from you guys to give a million dollars to Facebook um to buy 300,000 users. Yeah. And um I'll say that we didn't that's cheap by the way. Yeah. Yeah.

And and I'll say that like we our organic spend on on gems was dimminimous. I mean we got 20 million users and we we owe an airdrop to these these players still. Um but I but the way I look at it is um that's actually much more efficient way to finance uh user acquisitions. So, I think the question then becomes, how do you keep these players engaged and retained, which um I I don't think that most projects have done successfully, but but certainly as an attention grabber, there's few other things that are as powerful as as that on the internet, even excluding outside of web 3, you won't find web 2 game developers that are able to get 20 million users into a into a game. Well, 20 million users with that degree of fandom that turn into your evangelists that create content for you that build on top of your platform.

Like, I think I think you get something that you wouldn't otherwise be able to kind of pay for. But but I 100% agree with the point that it's been completely a shell game or a sort of pump and dump game until now, right? And and I'm just saying it's worth experimenting with playing around with that design space, figuring out um how to actually do it sustainably because it's kind of such a powerful uh use case like it's it's almost like digital uranium. It can be used to it can blow up in your face or you can try to harness it and create nuclear uh energy from it. I don't know how popular that is in this part of the world, but but point point being that I think there's um uh there's there's it's it's just scratching the surface, but it's a big enough opportunity that it makes sense to play around with it.

And just like when sort of Topsh Shot and CryptoKitties when you show that business use case, you're going to see half of the next Y cominator class having tokens because they're going to let them break through the noise, reward their communities, out compete their centralized um uh uh community, the competitors and uh and bring something new. Now again, how sustainable that is depends exactly what Justin is saying. What is what role does that play in your in your application and who are you bringing in and then how do you keep them uh engaged? Yeah. So when you think of airdrops, I mean airdrops to us is really the inverse of you know basically flips advertising upside down in the sense that you're you know in our in the gaming industry I mean when you think about the platform fees that are paid to Apple, Facebook, Google, Steam and then you think about the advertising fees basically the platforms take half the take, right?

I mean and that's the crazy thing, right? And how much of that money goes back into the gaming ecosystem? I don't see Apple investing in games. I don't see Facebook investing in games. And how much of that money goes actually back to the gamers as well as some kind of incentive to play a game?

Zero. Right? You give it to an airdrop. Sure. Maybe many of them sell.

Maybe most of them sell. But the percentage of people that reinvest back into the game and try it out is infinitely larger than the kind of money that you spend on those platforms. Well, and and you're paying for advertising, but every second you show advertising to your to your potential customers, you're stealing time and energy from them, too. So advertising is a negative to the the the the uh sort of the public. No.

And I think the the challenge so you know with with Gamy which was actually one of the original Telegram games pre-tokens and then they did launch a token as well. They did rise to about 20 million 20 30 million type users and now they're back down after the launch of the token right around 4 million sort of daily activives. That's still very very good, right? And so when you think about it yes sure you get a whole bunch of people you also get a whole bunch of bots, right? Yeah.

And the way that I look at bots and airdrop farming is a little bit like how click fraud used to be 20 25 years ago, right? In the early days of advertising the industry, advertising industry, you had like, you know, bots all over the world literally just pretending to do clicks so they could basically advertising dollars. That's kind of the stage we're in right now technologically, but we're getting better with reputation layers with systems around to ensure that you're dropping airdrops to the real users, right? So, so we're seeing advancements where say, okay, this is a and we see this a little bit with NFTTS, right? or hey you have a board ape or you have a cryptokitty and you've had it for one or two years I'm going to give you a bigger airdrop.

Why? Because you have a reputation that I want to acquire. So this is open season for user acquisition. Today if we're buying advertising on any of these platforms I first of all don't know who the user is. I'm taking an assumed promise that you're kind of giving me the target but I don't really know who the target is and I'm really just dealing with an algorithm that doesn't is not actually a market.

It's actually dealing with a uh an algorithm that benefits the platform, right? So, so it's completely different. That's why it's just a better system. Yeah. All of this sounds amazing.

Um you're sort of preaching, I think I'm drinking the Kool-Aid, you're preaching to the choir here. Why do traditional We spoke about this backstage, like why do traditional publishers, if all of this is so good, why do they not buy into this? What are they missing? Um let's leave it there and and you could we can talk about like the stuff you're most excited about as well. um broadly to the team.

Yeah. So maybe just quickly on that um before I go to the stuff we're excited about, but maybe very quickly um what we've experienced is that this is generally more of a negative issue in the west than in East. Yeah. So in Asia, you have all the Korean game companies, right? Um we basically and and many of the Japanese like Sega, Square Enix, Nexon, I mean they're all looking at web 3.

Whether they succeeded or not, that's a different question. But they're actually really focused on it and thinking, hey, we we they have a web3 team, they have a blockchain team. Yeah, I mean you know even even issued a very successful token before they did some stuff that you know we don't have to talk about here. Um but um but in the in in the west it's really only Ubisoft um maybe some other ones right that have tried it and they've been punished by it from the market because of the general perception of it. Uh and I think that's basically pushed me away.

Of course the regulatory framework has not been helpful. Um but I think again I think all of this will change and I think this will change not from the big companies. I think this will change for the indie game developers. Yeah. Um indie game developers are royally crushed, right?

The the discovery engines for games does not exist anymore. Um you know, Apple removed basically discovery from a market standpoint. Rankings don't mean anything. Um so that means that if you're an indie game developer, you're kind of screwed. It is literally I think you have a higher chance of of of making money on a memecoin than launching a successful indie game.

I don't have the stats, but that's what it feels like because you could put all your passion and effort into a game and you won't be discovered. So what's the mechanism in which you can find new discovery maybe through airdrops and new marketing channels and that's basically going to be web 3 and typically what you see with innovation it happens usually at the fringe anyway I mean you think about mobile gaming mobile gaming didn't succeed because EA and Activision were like mobile gaming right it was startups in Finland and UK and Asia that sort of created something became really big and that's when the big guys came in and I think the same thing will happen here. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe just quick one for the audience.

How would you define kind of indie gaming? What differentiates an indie game? I mean, an indie game is typically a small studio. Um um can be venturebacked, you know, anywhere from 5 to 25 type u sort of people in the team. Um typically they would not be launching AAA type titles because they don't have the budget for it.

And normally funding can range anywhere from from 1 to $10 million. Um but I would say 1 to three is the sweet spot that we see in indie gaming to kick off. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

From your guys perspective, what's the the apprehension from traditional brands and and and uh corporates? I know sort of you've worked with a couple and there might have been some apprehension in those discussions you've had. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the the IP holder and and the brand perspective and I'd be curious to hear Justin take on, hey, why didn't these big companies see social gaming coming, right? And and create the room for uh Zingo to even kind of uh exist and now become one of the major publishers. And I think from our perspective, we also see a huge difference between the IP holders that are are sort of working with external companies for their digital products versus the game companies that are mostly building their own digital products and have their own sort of uh engineering teams with their own um uh biases and their own uh you know um inertia.

Whereas because the big IP holders, whether it's our existing partners, NBA, NFL, Disney, or others, the con if you go to any sports conference, you will have a digital collectibles panel. It is taken as a as a fed plea. It's going to be guaranteed for sure. People collect things physically, they're going to collect things digitally. People spend on their fandom physically, they're going to spend on their fandom digitally.

And then if they're spending in a digital world, if I'm an IP holder, I want that asset to be open, right? And we're talking about web 3. It's just being open. Open platforms versus closed platforms. Do I want it to live forever inside a gaming company servers or on Facebook or on Snapchat or do I wanted to have this kind of relationship where I own the direct connection with my fan and the fan owns the asset.

I create I license a company to build that asset but I can always license another company to build that asset. And I think the that kind of orientation means that IP holders they understand web 3 is really strong for them. Um, and there's of of course inertia from thirdparty developers, but you just got to show them the business model. And now that there's no regulatory overhang on it, they will chase it. But it is going to be the smaller companies that find that new business model that find that new um design space that that that kind of brings on a new kind of user base and monetizes them in a new way and so and then everybody else kind of copies, you know, at their pace, which is sometimes, you know, slower.

But curious to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think like a lot of game companies start as technology companies and then they eventually turn into media and IP focused companies. And so if you look through the history of a lot of the biggest game companies, they usually start by figuring out some sort of thing that gets them leverage over other companies because they have a deep understanding of some new technology platform. You even see this back with companies uh like like Epic, even Sega was a little bit about figuring out how to um you know get games to work on systems in an unauthorized way. There's or sorry that was Electronic Arts on on Sega.

Um, but there's a story of like many many of the great game companies we look at now were deeply technical companies that then earned the right to become a big company that is mostly a media company. And so, um, like as a broader framework, why don't they understand crypto? Because there is no proven business model for them to apply their IP to and just to come in and have a bunch of who are mostly media executives um, come in and just say this for this, this for this, this for this um, and get what they wanted. And I think um to Roam's credit, Dapper is probably closer to that than anybody else with the sort of top shot model and what you guys were able to do with it. Um but I think they're waiting for it.

So when they've seen signs of success, they come in very hard. But we've had a number of false starts. And so now they're it's like a little bit like the boy who cried wolf, right? They're like, "Wow, Axi was huge and Top Shot was huge and this was huge." And they're kind of waiting in the wings to say, "What is the thing that actually works multiple times in a row so that we can come in and bring our IP to bear?"

and and I don't think they have expertise internally to evaluate like the new design space that crypto allows. They need somebody else to solve that for them and then to come in by acquisition or by partnership. Um and so like more broadly speaking, I think that's that's the biggest reason. Um the appetite's there, you know, we've seen it when we get those those moments where something sparks. So yeah.

Yeah. What was yet? We spoke about it backstage. What are some of that appetite that interesting stuff that liquidity coming to the sector that you're excited about uh in the future? I mean so I mean one thing and I guess this is also something where earlier to your first question about sort of what we changed our mind on um for instance when we first started actually we started to you know working on cryptogitties as a publisher in Asia um um you know with uh with with what became Dapper because actually it was still before Dapper was even formed right uh and uh and in the beginning that narrative was all around you know basically NFTTS and ownership in gaming which is you know the number one reason why blockchain gamers play blockchain games in all the surveys but it wasn't really until DeFi summer came along that we actually came to realize that wait hold on this token thing actually is a more powerful engine and maybe the token is the is a product in and of itself and there's something there and that's kind of when we started leaning into the whole token token ecosystem the funible token ecosystem and the thing that we've gotten to understand is that tokens broadly not just in gaming in web 3 are very much uh indicative of market pricing and market information the same way that we have it in the stock market and in the commodities market, but really when it comes to attention, media and brand.

So, you know, I I became cool with my kids for a moment when I started talking to them about chill guy. That was last year. And yeah, I know nothing about chill. Chill guy the meme. Yeah.

Well, chill, but it's actually a Tik Tok. Yes. So, my kids aren't my my daughter isn't like it's because of the token. My daughter's like, "Oh, you know, chill guy. Okay, kind of cool, right?"

But actually, it was because it was a token that was flying and I was like, "What's this?" Right? Um and actually it turns out that when you look at sort of looking back the tokens that do well are actually not indicators indicators of sort of mass utility specifically to web 3 but they're very much market pricing information what happens in the world. Yes. So we shouldn't be surprised you know if Trump token does well not because of the fact that it's just Trump but because he is something that the whole world is talking about and there's attention space that grabs it.

uh you know when when San token at one point San token was like a $27 billion token you know that was pretty crazy um and uh and of course you know flow and everything had had these big moments what happened Facebook renamed itself to Meta and uh co and so everyone was talking about going virtual the metaverse was the topic and everything else and while Met we still believe very much in the open metaverse the the the when that dropped so did the token prices but not related to utility we have today 7 million daily active players is playing web 3 games which is seven times larger than it was 3 years ago. Right? So there's way more usage in web3 gaming from a utility standpoint. So why is it that web 3 gaming tokens have underperformed which been harder to raise capital for harder to invest and that is because gaming has had a macro negative trend for the last 3 to four years and most people don't realize everyone drew these charts that you know from co gaming is going to go this way. Gaming was flat.

Why was it flat? it was flat because um postco actually people weren't playing more games, right? In the same way that people didn't stop travel. It kind of did the opposite. Second, there weren't a lot of new exciting titles that were coming out, right?

So, no reason to buy new consoles. So, we're still hovering around $200 billion of revenue. Not bad, but not growth. Third, and I think that's the biggest one, uh gaming um the cost of buying a game is roughly the same as it was 1015 years ago. So, while the money printer was basically just printing money, everything was inflated.

Gaming was not. So milk is more expensive, higher less expensive, unmonetized. So on real money terms, gaming companies actually struggled. So what did you see last few years? Layoffs, cost cutting, all that stuff and distribution was broken, Apple taking their their cut, all these things.

So narratively, gaming basically was negative and that bled basically into the entire gaming ecosystem. You know, last year what tokens did really well outside of memecoins? AI tokens. And it wasn't because you had mass AI utility compared to gaming last year. It was again the mimemetic nature and the pricing that comes from tokens.

So why are we super bullish this year about gaming? And so come back to me end of the year and see if I'm right or wrong. Um one there are a couple of macro gaming headwinds that will then also help the entire space including web 3 and specifically fungeible tokens. Um one of them is a launch of a Nintendo Switch 2. Um the Nintendo Switch 2 hasn't launched a new console in about 8 years.

Y it's a big event for you in the gaming industry and they're pushing Mario Kart at a new price 80 for digital for so that's a that's a 30 to 40% increase from pricing today and if they succeed which we think they will it gives license for everyone to increase their games if you look at the history of gaming pricing we didn't go from 20 to 25 to 29 went from 20 to 39 right and we're kind of seeing a similar type of step up um and then Nintendo Switch pre-orders are just like fully backed up in what looks like a very difficult consumer environment around the world. So, and it's a very premium priced console. It is premium priced console $500. Yeah, it's $4.49, but still and and you know, you know, tariffs aside, right?

There's a whole issue of um uh there's this whole potential that gaming will see that increase. And then when someone buys a new console, on average 12 to 15 new games are being sold with a with a console over the lifetime. So again, new revenue, new go with that type of stuff, higher pricing. And the bigger event, if it's not delayed again and again, uh September or maybe October this year is GTA 6. Yeah.

Uh and we're super excited about GTA 6. Uh not, uh just because it's the biggest cultural event. It's everyone's going to talk about it on the gaming side. It's going to drive console sales. Lots of gamers aren't buying new consoles cuz they don't know why.

GTA 6 will be the reason they'll buy the console. Uh and again, pushing the pricing up. Uh, and the other thing that most people may not know that GTA does allow you to run your own servers. And basically, we expect that companies are going to be running crypto rails on top of these servers. And if there's one game where the narrative of crypto tokens, meme coins, uh, and and, uh, and and sort of games can come together, it definitely would be GTA.

What do you quick? What do you mean by running on crypto rails? Like what does that imply for RP servers? Well, for the RP servers, what it implies is that someone who runs their own GTA server can basically launch their own token or maybe use an existing token like in game something will happen and people will abstract that away into or even the items they could do whatever they want because essentially it's it's their own server. And the in the former regulatory framework, the US would have um said, "Hey, that's a security.

You can't do that." But in the current framework, I would imagine that Take 2 would probably just have a less a fair approach. Take a block. Awesome. Do we have one minute?

Um, last couple of question. We'll last question we'll go through very quickly is what is rising in status in the gaming sector and what is falling in status. As an example, our view what's rising in status is limit breaks published app tokens. It's an interesting way for you to include programmability into your in-game economies. Uh, what's lowering in status?

we think are hyper casual games in crypto um and just hyper casual games generally. All the data points to gamers particularly the youth playing much more hardcore and midcore games. Uh yeah, I'm going to skip you for because we had some awesome rising status points there. Uh Rahim, let's go through you. What's rising in status and what's lowering in status?

Uh I'm I'm super excited about the confluence of someone figuring out how to do proper user acquisition for sustainable communities um and composability as in empowering developers to build on top. I think in an age where AI is creating making the cost of new software go down to zero. How do you lean into that and get players to become creators? Get get developers to sort of come in and really bring that promise of interoperability home. That's sort of rising in status.

Falling in status I think is tariffs. We want them to go away so that we can all get back to building. Very good, Justin. Yeah, rising in status. Um, AI and I I would like to get a little bit more particular on that, but um I agree with what Yad said about the the headwinds that we've had in games.

I would add one more, which is um games compete against all other forms of entertainment on your phone. And for a long time, games were filling a vacuum on the phone actually. And um it's been almost 10 years of mobile growth where games were the only really entertaining thing to do on your phone. And social media was an okay second. And I think Tik Tok has now gotten to the point where actually it's competitive um with most casual games.

People find it more entertaining to spine to spend an incremental minute on Tik Tok than uh the average casual game. And one reason for this is it's so timely. And and so when I think about AI and um the impact it can have on games, it's that we've been fighting with two arms behind our back because we can't make content that's um speaking to people about what's happening right now. And I actually think AI is going to solve this problem. So what Tik Tok did for video, AI will do for games.

and then games will be able to get another leg up in in competing against these other apps again. Excellent guys, that's all we have time for. We've gone a bit over. Thank you very much everyone. Please give a round of applause to the wonderful panelists.

Thanks guys.