Gaming DAOs as a New Coordination Layer | Gage Sasquatch, Pat Yiu, and Peter Dager - Nouns Esports

thank all right hey everybody uh my name is Leah Callen Butler um and I'm going to moderate our session today with nouns Esports we're going to be discussing gaming Dows as a new coordination layer um for those of you that haven't met me um my company's called in fasis uh but I also write a regular opinion column for coindesk and sit on the board of the blockchain game Alliance maybe you guys can just quickly introduce yourselves as well before we kick off sure I'll go first hi my name is Peter uh dagger uh I used to be a professional DOTA two player for like 10 years and now I'm helping build out now Z Sports I'm Sasquatch uh in another life I was a Starcraft 2 player and I'm the founder of NZ Sports and Pat you I'm the head of strategy for NZ Sports Sport and previously I was a professional gamer also awesome thanks very succinct well done um so I thought we could kick off uh for anyone here who isn't familiar with the traditional Esports World maybe you could give us a bit of a lay of the land you know what are some of the problems in traditional Esports and how did you find your way into the web 3 space I'm guessing looking to solve some of those problems so um maybe Peter do you want to kick us off there sure so uh Esports is a culture product that's formed around an appetite to figure out who's the best at a particular game so you'll have you know some of your best esport titles are from these games that have been around for decades at this point and that audience is so passionate about it they want to figure out who's the best and an audience forms around that um let's see what are some of the problems um it's hard to monetize a digital product to build you know build out an ecosystem around that culture a lot of it is very publisher owned you know if you compare it to professional sports like nobody owns basketball or football but somebody does own Dota or Counter-Strike which makes it a very complicated relationship to interact and find an equitable middle ground with the Publishers um I got into crypto in 2022 by discovering noun zorts and I saw all these little different nft Collections and groups where you have had uh these communities forming around their love for art essentially and I compared that to an orts team and it it felt very very similar and these ort teams have really struggled to create uh organic fans of their organizations many of the fans of Esports they really just follow the players you when a player goes from Team a to Team B Team a loses 99% of those fans F whereas in an nft collection somebody might you know sell or leave the community but the rest of the community doesn't follow you know they're they're connected to the you know the love of the art and the community and I do think that esport teams need a little bit more of that so I started figuring out how can we get these people to feel better connected to an organization and I don't think that the web 2 esport teams have moved very far forward down that path did you guys want to add anything to that in terms of problems with traditional Esports uh I think one common theme that like every team owner org knows is that like the average spending uh like an Esports fan compared to like a traditional uh sports fan is significantly lower so if you think about like a traditional sports fan they're buying tickets to the stadium they're buying merchandise every year they're buying lots of products around their favorite team whereas like Esports teams that that level of spending is significantly lower and that's always been like a problem that's needed to be solved in orts I also think that one big thing to understand is that in 2015 we received a lot of institutional investment that caused us a spike to 10 to 12x valuations the similar way to a software company but we don't have the re we didn't have the revenues at the time to actually be at those software company valuations um my own background from coming into web 3 and learning about how to do Esports better actually comes from the e community a little known fact is that most of the people who run e Denver actually come out of dream hack which was one of the largest digital festivals in the gaming industry and so when you're at eth Denver you actually see a lot of the the kind of benefits that we had during dream has Inception all the way through it becoming the largest digital festival and we try to keep that same ethos when we're at this event and we're hoping to move that into the Esports industry through down eorts it it does have dream hack Vibes here actually totally we we were actually just talking about that last night especially in that in the room across the hall with like the giant uh squids yeah exactly like very burning mesque yeah all right so I think just before we dive a little bit further into the Esports side uh Dows have certainly had their own challenges um maybe you could explain a little bit about uh you know what are the problems that you've seen with Dows uh and how is n's Esports actually looking to address or overcome some of those issues do you want to take that one or been in nouns since the start so I think I have a unique perspective on Dows at this point um I do think like nouns is kind of an outlier um in the sense that like you know every Dow is different there's a lot of different bylaws some are based on erc20 some are based on nfts which is kind of like what n's primarily innovated um I think one problem with Dows is people assume that everyone is contributing in a dow because there's so many members and members have that agency to be a govern you know a member of governance But ultimately a lot of responsibility Falls on the shoulders of only a few people and it's kind of people who step up to the plate and maybe don't even have like a delegated responsibility but they just see that something needs to be done and yeah there's always just that question of leadership or you know if you're working with a partner who does that partner reach out to in the Dow Community because there's not that figurehead and so just kind of scaling a DA and growing its core Builder group has always just been an interesting Dynamic that um has difficulty playing out across different dows I think that I'll give two examples I think I could talk all day all day about how Dows could be better but I think one of the ones that are really that's really interesting to think about is actually voter atrophy you can do a lot of marketing and get a lot of early members into a dow but what's what happens is this concept of voter atrophy when you don't support your Dow members or your contributors and they don't don't feel like their voices are being heard a lot of times they actually feel like they don't want to be active in in in the bow and so when you look at governance tokens you could have a large portion of people who who aren't actually voting who are aren't actually contributing but they actually are part of the total total token Supply at the same time we also have issues maybe not so much at nouns Esports specifically but we do have an issue kind of widespread across all Dows of high donor bias when you add a financial aspect to Dows but you don't actually look at the solutions of how to include maybe non-financial contributors you end up with the concept of high inner bias where maybe one or two or three whales might control 60% of the vote and so everybody else may be an active contributor but it doesn't really matter in the end when voting occurs yeah and that actually like starts to turn away people from the Dow because they actually you know if you if you're like a New Prospect who maybe wants to join but then you learn that the voting dichotomy really comes down to like one or two voting blocks that's very disheartening because you want to have impact with your vote so i' I've definitely seen that play out across Dows where Wales kind of just ultimately kill traction towards the Dow because that governance element is kind of Stripped Away yeah so can you just spell it out for me you know what what are some of those differences between you know if you're an Esports team managed by a community Dow versus an Esports team managed by a corporate entity like I can imagine it must be Worlds Apart in terms of how they work but could you lay out some of those differences yeah I think um you know when I started noun Esports I had to go to the Dao and convince them that spending money on on like playing or paying players to play video games was like a thing and you know the biggest appeal honestly was that we could immediately have like in-game branding in some of the most popular games just by having really competitive teams um but you know there's just a big social coordination effort that needs to be undertaken to say hey we'd like to do an orts team at the Dow this is why it makes sense you know it endear people to the brand we can bring more Partners into the ecosystem we create new uh fans of the Dao um but it is it is more social coordination and ultimately you know there's you know the leadership of the Esports project but then there's the you know there's people in the Dow who are large voters and you should always be having a dialogue with these people kind of similar to like a sponsor I would I would a traditional sponsor I would say um another big key difference I'd say is just the the transparency element so the Dow is the da is on chain you know you can nothing's hidden on chain you see you see the transactions you can learn exactly how much people are paid if you want to go and like go through ether scan and figure it out so our you know ultimately like our player salaries are public um we're we're comfortable sharing all that information but we leave it to the player discretion just because you know that salary discussion or terms or whatever is always kind of like a sensitive thing but yeah we're just super pro transparency because that comes from the culture instilled by the blockchain technology yeah and I would say like Esports has been very like shrouded in that sense like there's a ton of investment Capital being you know Flo or pumped into the space and I don't think that fans have enough trust like a trusting relationship with the organizations and I think that almost deters them from their willingness to spend like when you buy a jersey you don't know how much of that is going towards supporting your favorite player versus how much is just you know going to the Sea suite and uh the internet and Esports is this new phenomenon where people are capable of having these Incredibly Close uh relationships with people online and yeah it's different than professional sports which a lot of people try to compare it to so like all of our fundraising is done through onchain proposals that get voted on and that is just so fundamentally different from traditional Esports where you know a sponsor might come in but you have you know as a as a fan you have no idea what those terms are whereas with our proposals we just publicly share them because you know they're being voted on on a website anyway anyone can access them so we just it's nice to be able to own it and say hey we're asking for $2 million for this next year to run these Premier Esports teams and F you know fans just appreciate that you know it's a it's a breath of fresh air to be able to actually get into the nitty-gritty of what kind of support their favorite players or teams are getting and I think one of the areas that's really important to understand for NZ Sports is that we're Grant funded right when you go look when you go and look at some of the traditional Esports organizations they've given up chunks of their equity which means that they have investors they have Boards of directors we also have a I mean we have a board of directors pretty much which is a multisig people who have who actually get to choose on signing off on larger spends but when you give up 20% of your company in a seed round you give up another 20% in an a round and you haven't really figured out that product Market fit you're really kind of shifting into kpis that are more vanity metrics um in the last cycle for Esports we noticed that eyeballs were most important total view count total following count kind of what you see in the similar fact of uh what you see in gamei today is that people really want to see transactions they want to see total amounts of following on a Twitter account and they want to see nothing that is has to do with retention and so I think what gamei is happening right now is actually the same issue that Esports did back in 2015 is that we've looked at the wrong kpis the cool thing about NZ Sports is that because we're ground Grant funded and we we're supported for $2.1 million we actually have a large enough budget to really play around with software development and looking at longer term mechanisms that actually help support not only the contributors in our organization but also help with actually bringing in more contributors and helping scale with that through technology I just want to come back to something that you were just talking about uh Gage which was just around Community governance because I feel like in web 3 you know we often celebrate this idea of community governments but it's also sometimes incredibly difficult to do it's it's you know it's not a walk in the park so I was wondering like what are some of the challenges that you've had with trying to coordinate and engage such a big Community yeah Community governance is is an interesting topic for sure and you know ultimately we're not at the St stage yet we we're just letting the entire Community vote on you know what you know what Premier orts teams we're going to pick we still have that kind of core leadership of people with expertise in orts but we do want to just continue to integrate more and more elements of community governance probably the the best example of that right now within NZ Sports is the utilization of prop house and prop house is essentially a way for people to apply for funding for a certain type of theme and in the case of Esports we provide travel sponsorships to upand cominging players and so you know we'll put up a travel sponsorship for a tournament any player can apply who plays that game and then the community gets to vote on who ultimately wins that travel Grant and we really like this because um you know first of all it's it's not us deciding every single decision in noun Z Sports the community actually gets to say hey this is the player that our community should back and when they go and do well the community is just even more excited about it because ultimately they're the ones who chose that player and decided hey this is who's representing us so when they get that Podium placement finish or a high placement finish it's really ex it's much more exciting than um you know just like a traditional model of the of a team participating and I think you know going forward we just want to find ways to continue that relationship where the community is is is making more and more decisions maybe maybe one day it gets to a full Dow element but at the moment we still need to that keep that balance of like leveraging our expertise you know Peter here he's like he's been playing DOTA for over a decade we have a DOTA team it's good to rely on people with that Insider knowledge of like how the industry works and and um yeah there's a balance there and I I'll just add um CU we were talking about fans or I was talking earlier about like fans only following like certain players within certain games you know a lot of people they just have one game that they love and focus on and it's hard to you know if you're or organization decides to leave that game and go elsewhere for a multitude of reasons you might lose that fan forever so when we're doing stuff like prop house where we're enabling people to participate almost in the management of an Esports organization we're attracting a different type of fan who likes that governance model so as we go from game to game to game yeah there might be a game they like more than others but they're sort of in love with the process of being a part of the organization not necessarily just following their favorite players and that's how we want to you know we want to create lifetime fans of our organization not just andan we want to play Both Sides right like we want to have people who follow anoun Esports because we signed their favorite player in their favorite game but we also want to show them that hey you're obviously an Esports fan have you ever like you know thought about playing a more active role on an Esports team hey we're now Esports we enable that yeah and I want to give an example kind of like going back to the eth Denver Community when you come to eth Denver you're obviously here for the hackathon you might want to build you might want to look to get funded but you also might get interested in public goods and you might want to do some social impact you might want to do some art and actually enjoy some of the DJ music that we have or do some offsites and actually host an event in that same kind of concept of example we have gamers in 2024 being much more multifaceted 15 years ago we were hardcore Gamers and we were only interested in being the best we cared about eyeballs and we cared about selling merchandise but right now when you look at NZ Sports not only are we Gamers we are in the Discord server every day actually doing community games we're also building a business and providing opportunities for people who are interested in E Sports actually to jump start their career at the same time we also pull sponsorships and we're also Building Technology so if you're a software engineer and you want to build some technology with us it's very simple to just hop into a contributor call and so I think it's really an evolution of what the gamer profile is we've gone from kind of what 10 years ago was The Stereotype of basement dwelling nerds into people who want to do social impact people who might want to do software engineering who want to build businesses on top of it and it's been really interesting to actually see all those different types of people come into our community purely for their passion for games yeah I just got a follow-up question on that because I thought it was so interesting how you were saying that you found this opportunity to uncover a completely different Market segment that might not have had an interest in orts before or at least it wasn't being you know fully leveraged what does the community look like now cuz it sounds like it's incredibly expansive you got everything from fans and up and cominging players to probably K's and content creators and software developers like what does it look like and and what's your approach to community building in terms of further expanding that ecosystem sure Gage touched on it a little bit but right now we're really focused on Prop house and the best way for us to do this at the moment is through the fighting game Community with individual player travel sponsorships so we actually have a round that's voting right now and another round that's available for proposers and you can also also go to our website and apply to join a voter and essentially you submit your wallet address you tell us a little bit about your background in Esports what games you love to play and then you know we essentially whitelist and then uh like airdrop an nft to that user which Powers them to be a voter on Prop house so right now this year uh you know in the past years we've just been very focused on growing our awareness mostly within web 2 audiences you know getting up there and sharing space with the biggest teams in the world uh but this year we've got a a more a little bit more focus on building our onchain audience helping people create their crypto wallets for the first time and then you know giving them the tokens that allow them to interact within our community so you're really on boarding a lot of noobs as well we do we do lots of on boarding and uh there's you know a couple cheat codes with like prize money and competing at events you know players you know if you just tell them oh you got to create a wallet to participate in governance that's not always super exciting for them uh but if you tell them hey you've got 100 usdc uh waiting for you just make your wallet and we'll send it to you they generally figure it out that's one hell of an incentive and then and then we can start giving them the tokens and then you know hopefully they you know people I'll just say like before you own an nft you don't really understand how you can feel connected to like a you know a JPEG or a digital piece of art but then once you kind of go through it experience be a part of that Community for a little bit you sort of grow a little bit of a connection to that you know to that JPEG and you're like I don't really want to get rid of this thing becomes really like sentimental yeah exactly I think um like in terms of onboarding it's always felt very natural for me to leverage Esports to onboard people into into the nouns community and like you know subsequently the Greater ethereum Community because ultimately the culture of nouns has just been so endearing and positive and when you look at like actually what announc funds and um you know there's just so many public goods or schools in ug you know things like schools in Uganda renovating a skat Park um naming a new species of toad by donating to scientists like there's just a lot of amazing things that you can't really be mad about when you when you think of like why people are traditionally mad about crypto um coming from web 2 It's usually the speculative element that really kind of upsets them they're like you know why would I buy some like weird dog token or some poo poo coin or whatever and uh you know we're not talking about any of that we're talking about doing cool in orts and we're talking about all the other cool stuff that nouns does and none of that is like profit seeking it's just like let's do good things and have positive impact in the world and it's hard to argue with that and say like oh this is some terrible crypto thing so that's it's kind of like a superpower to be affiliated with nouns and to leverage that backbone while on boarding people yes so just a follow-up question to that because I think in our chats before this this actual you know onstage discussion as well I've heard from you guys a lot that making sure that you get that across that this is a non-speculative venture is really important to you but at the same time too you still got to make money somehow and it's got to be a profitable Venture and obviously I think traditional orts has really struggle to monetize as you were saying earlier so how do you balance that pushpull in terms of we're not speculative but we still got to make a buck at the end of the day yeah thankfully like you know within the last like really C year or so like um the friction to get onchain is significantly diminished so you know in the past where you would have to go through a central exchange and have your hot wallet set up and transfer coins and then use those coins to issue transactions now there's things like privy which you can literally sign in with email or Discord or foraster and you know be plugged into a crypto app or um you know just using forecaster itself that there's so many ways to experience onchain activities without leaving the app and and so yeah essentially with the really diminished friction these days it's it's been much easier to onboard people and I think that Trend continues um and I in terms of monetization you know again there's products in crypto that can be created that are non-speculative you know um minting things that are like a time and placement not like buy this because number might go up uh you know that's pretty cool I think people like those kind of momentos and um you can see like what the success of Zora and limited time you know free mints like people go on chain to collect these kind of special moments that are related to their favorite things um you know we can also create like you know greater fan experiences with onchain products so for example participating in prop house is it's a you know being a a member of governance compared to traditional Esports teams that's quite a privilege you know no other team really offers that experience so there's ways to yeah I mean kind of create a you know a financial model around getting involved in governance um getting deeper enrichment in the community um you know there's traditional things we can pursue like Partnerships and um there's plenty of there's plenty of like you know crypto partners that we truly believe in and would want to work with because again they're doing good things in the space that aren't just strictly like number go up kind of speculation and and those are the people or those are the types of Brands we want to help bring new users towards so I think yeah I think there's a very like strong path forward of uniting web 3 and Esports I wanted to add a little bit of a different side of it um Esports has been primarily funded by Publishers wanting to extend the longevity of their game they feel like Esports is a marketing tool that allows that so when they release a game you know they want it to have an orts program to incentivize players to you know see a future for themselves and that can you know turn a game shelf life from a one month hit to a five or 10 year you know long game and then they can essentially you know sell microtransactions of Cosmetics within the game throughout its entire life cycle and that model has you know was very much ingrained into launching a game in like 2014 to 2022 or even today some people are still doing it I think what Publishers realize that in these like very very popular games that those microtransactions Cosmetics are kind of selling themselves just to the player base and Esports may or may not be really like pushing the bar that much forward so a lot of Publishers have really pulled back on Esports and it's kind of created uh some challenges for the industry so we need to and this is like this is pretty much what the fans are willing to spend money on is digital items within the game so what digital items can we create that Esports fans are willing to spend money on you know this is where I think we need to get them on chain and get them to recognize or or to identify these tokens or nfts as things that they care about that they're you know that they feel okay spending money on because the Publishers have kind of yeah they've pulled back quite a lot and I think one of the most important things to think about when it comes to monetization of orts is that in the previous years we've always looked at eyeballs but we've never really looked at what is the spending power of an individual user when you get users on chain you're seeing their spending habits you're figuring out what nfts they hold are they whales are they low Spenders are they on arbitrum are they on base are they actively using a wallet two times a week this data is so useful for actually creating more specific profiles of our of future customers and that helps sponsors finally see what where is that value from understanding the demographic profile of e orts team I think that we're one of the first communities in Esports that's actually taking data Centric Community Building very very seriously and the technology that we build on top of that is super important for it I want to know if my users in Brazil have the money to be able to buy a $35 t-shirt or if it's too expensive for them maybe we drop it down to $25 it's so important to make sure that your future fans actually are able to afford the products that you sell that your sponsors understand what demographics they're hitting and through those through that type of data we're actually able to trct a new range of sponsors that otherwise other teams haven't been able to tap into previously just while always on the topic of value um I wanted to touch on you've got some amazing public goods initiatives that I saw that you've been doing um would love for someone to mention the go-karts thing I'm so in love with this this thing um but on top of that you know how do some of these initiatives actually deliver value back to the Dow as opposed to like just being some kind of Feelgood fluffy thing that you know looks nice just interested to know how you think about that okay so this is I'm I'm not as Crypton native as these guys but one of the things that I love about the Dow or noun Stow or really any token in particular that the ethos of the token is really determined by its holders especially when governance is enabled so if noun Dow likes to fund athletes artists technology and nonprofit stuff like you know the Charities and so forth that's something that they'll continue to vote and spend their money on and that just and then people as those props get approved people then begin to understand this is what noun St is about if I buy a noun you know I'll get to join this community of other people who also like supporting nonprofit activations real like value alignment in terms of what people want to feel a sense of belongingness with yeah can you explain the go-karts thing because it's so cool I love it yeah so uh you know just like nouns we we do try to take a lot of the core values of the culture of nouns and bring that to nouns Esports and that means you know creating a lot of art um doing a lot of like public good work um trying to make the space better um in particular you know we're planning you know we're trying to dabble or not dabble but we're trying to commit more to charitable efforts related to gaming and there's a particular uh group called Gamers Outreach which um ultimately they make moving carts called Gokarts like Gamers Outreach carts for children in hospitals and the carts have like their favorite console in it and a built-in Monitor and they're you know they're specked out with like the right materials so they're like hospital grade and um yeah that just felt like a very aligned uh charity to work with ultimately and so in the future when we're running some events we're going to have you know a charitable component and and hopefully raise money to to produce a bunch of go-karts I think I think they're about 3,500 each so I can almost imagine like a twitch stream with like a like a ticker going up to 3500 and every time it goes up to 3500 it's like oh another gokart yay you know and that I think that's like a very motivating thing for like the Esports Community um and yeah just in general I think we'll always be trying to align ourselves with benefiting the space um you know another example I love to give uh is liquipedia which is you know if you don't know it's kind of the the default Wicky for Esports um and ultimately that was a community resource provided by Team Liquid and it's something that everyone uses it's branded as liquipedia so Team Liquid does get that that kind of you know uh cultural Kickback but it's just a pure public good for the space and I think that nouns can do a lot of similar things um especially in software but also just on you know raising money for a charity through events or initiatives from our players did you want to add something to that yeah so I'm one of the newest members of nze sports and I've been here for about 60 days I would say now as an active contributor and so I think one of the coolest things for me is that I love gaming but I'm also getting a little bit older and I work actively Investments but kind of through learning from Peter learning through Gage I was able to do a couple different projects myself and I'm a multifaceted gamer like I was saying earlier we're building a noun shelter in China right now which is giving us the first time access into talking with the Chinese government about onchain communities and in that specific project we're doing manyi shelters to help cat stray cats in Beijing Shanghai now in changa and expanding over into Indonesia now also has helped us work with the Humane uh Humane Society International and that's something that only came out of the N Sports Community because they onboarded Us in at the same time two weeks ago we got into contact with uh the Disney the next Disney princess Sarah Culbertson of sier Leone who wanted to build water walls in sier Leone in the in the town of bumpe when talk when engaging with her we realize that the biggest problem isn't actually providing Capital into uh building water walls but it's actually what happens in the years after that to maintain those water wells it doesn't matter as much as putting a water well down as as it is to put the2 to $3,000 in every single year to maintain those water wells so that they continuously have water supply and these are things that are storylines that we really get to build within noun eorts that we're helping helping not only bring larger people who have large media presences into the onchain community but then they also become attracted to NZ Sports and gaming in general in the future everybody's going to be a gamer whether you're playing on a mobile phone you're playing on a computer you're on your Vision Pro I think that's one of the biggest beauties that we see in the noun C Sports Community yeah and you mentioned um like what is kind of noun C from that well of course like if we're getting high placements on the podium I think that does like inherently people will look into what nouns is and that kind of trickles back up to the Dow um we never tell our players like hey go tell your audience to buy announ nft but at the end of the day if somebody's a really hardcore fan of what a one of our players is doing or what we're doing they'll you know organically discover that themselves and if they you know if they feel like a noun is right for them maybe they'll join that that broader Dow um but but again like we're kind of we kind of take it like the Red Bull model where we want to be at the place of doing really cool things and executing at a high level but we're not at the end of the day asking our athletes or our community to go out there and tell people to buy these really expensive nfts CU that yeah most people can't afford it know and that's probably going to be the case for the foreseeable future so yeah yeah I really that was one of the things that I loved too when I started looking into it just uh the commitment to social impact and how much that's a real uh core part of the community culture um and even the business strategy I thought that was super interesting um but another thing that I found interesting and this is sorry it's kind of stating the obvious but um I mean you guys all of your orts teams you're all playing web two games and it's really focused on that kind of web 3 governance and ownership but most of the other web 3 Esports teams that I know they're really kind of centering around web 3 games some of them play web 2 games as well but they all play primarily web 3 games and the business model is very different because it's more about kind of acquiring assets or you know earning web three rewards so I just thought maybe could talk to that like a little bit about the significance of being like a web 2 Esports focused group that is being managed in a web three way I think we're all going to want to shoot a little bit of fire some shots over into the gaming industry on this one so I think all three of us have personal opinions everyone talks about gamey and I I came in actually as a guild owner for a game called axi infinity and I've kind of watched this space as not only an investor in the space but also trying out almost every game in the space and I have a hot take here is that gamei isn't actually gamei right now it's actually F games it's Financial tokens that are masking themselves as games and so my thing is here is that Gamers need Gamers like games like if the game is not fun most Gamers aren't going to care about the tokens and we use marketing we use speculation right now in gamei to kind of showcase the profitability of what the token economy is but instead I think what we need to be doing is really thinking about retention I say this over and over and over again is that you can put $100 million into an industry but if you get tens of users back two years from now what have you actually done to make the gaming industry better instead we should really be focusing on kind of inspiring a future G generation of game developers who understand these new areas of the games development industry hyper casual games that can convert using daily like daily gamification mechanisms and maybe let's do less about token raises of $20 tokens four years before a game comes out um I will say that the quality of games have gotten better during the bare Market over the last 2 years but 99% of games in game p they suck and that's the reality of what the gaming Market is in web 3 right now yeah I'm pretty much aligned with that with that opinion I think there hasn't been a AAA game in web 3 yet you know hopefully that's on the way um some games do show some pretty great promise at the moment but K an name drop I I like parallel I like uh I think olivium has promise um but yeah ultimately like they're not there yet and when I'm thinking about showing the noggles the nouns brand to as many people as possible to as many viewers as possible that's that's DOTA that's Counter Strike that's League of Legends that's valerant that's web 2 games and you know those those audiences will show up in you know tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of viewers and um that kind of exposure can't really be matched in web 3 gaming yet I think you know again I think if a AAA game takes off we it'll be there but I also agree with Pat stce that it's it's five games at the moment and if I'm I've played plenty of web 3 games and primarily I'm thinking about the token and like what gets the most Return of the token and like yeah I'm treating it more like you know a way to make money than just having a casual relaxing fun game to play when air drop I'll add like product is you know it's Esports and Esports I mentioned it before but like Esports is a product of a very very passionate Community who has an interest in understanding who's the best or in like formal competition so these games they need to have tons of tons of users to identify a small subset of those users who are actually interested in like a very competitive version of it and then that justifies like an Esports program there's been so many people who have like spent millions of dollars trying to like launch their game with an orts program without really a demand for it and it was just like a huge mistake so we you know I I think we're interested in web 3 games more so this year than ever but when we participate in them it's going to be in like a very exploratory sense of hey maybe we're like beta testing or seeing if this you know having some of our players try out the games and you know see what they think sort of a thing well I don't think that ax Infinity is Esports um I do want to go back into that cuz axi infinity and Sky mavas were one of the market leaders in our last cycle when ax Infinity first came out no when was really playing it and then Co happened and then it became a mechanism for a lot of people who otherwise didn't have the capacity to make money to start becoming parts of guilds and they were playing the game they were farming tokens and it became a storyline that storyline brought in hundreds of thousands of users from across the world and in a Time millions of users across the world right and these people were able to play a game when otherwise they didn't have a job and they were able to make they were actually able to make money and make a full-time living off of that that resulted in documentaries that resulted in Community gaming and also kind of spurred that first generation of gaming projects in web 3 every single game really needs to think about that is like what is the storyline what are the reasons why your players should be involved in your community other than making money and I think that's the most important thing in this cycle is like let's create a community of people who genuinely care about the publisher in the same way where whenever blizzard releases a game or whenever Riot releases a game I've been with them for 10 years and I'm willing to try their game and I want to support them because they they really do care about making sure that the community is happy and that the games are actually fun they're giving me the the buzz thing that we've only got two minutes to go which is really disappointing CU I feel like we could talk for hours on this um but last final question uh I know that NZ Sports has focused a lot on community ownership and governance at the moment is there any other kind of web 3 utility that you think that you might bring in in the future anything on the road map I mean I think one thing that's it's kind of simple but like um I think like digital signatures are already quite popular in games like Counterstrike people could actually like you know valve inherently has like a centralized blockchain called Steam and they sell their own nfts which are you know CS cosmetics and um stickers and stuff and there's you know there are like autograph signatures that you can buy from your favorite players I you know if you think of about things like NFC chps and like you know iyk which is like a company that's doing a lot of NFC integration um you could have like player jerseys where people can collect the digital signature from the NFC chip and um you know actually players might appreciate that cuz I hate signing like a thousand things you know like this is like the 100th thing you've signed the day your hand starts to hurt or whatever um so yeah I think like there's just the the connecting the physical world with uh you know blockchain Integrations I think there's a lot of promise there I know we're almost out of time so I'll just be really quickly I think that with NZ Sports we're going to Showcase some of the technologies that people outside of the industry don't even know about at station Services ZK there's a lot of really really cool technology being built and we're hoping to be like some of the first people who actually get to Showcase that in a consumer ready interface we want to track and understand like who's a valuable member of our community so lots of like proof of attendance and yeah love po yeah exactly like you know should you show up to one of our events we want to be able to give you a token that moralizes that forever and you know maybe we have a a cool offer for you in the future we'll be able to figure out you know who you are this has been absolutely amazing thank you guys uh really fantastic discussion and I'm so looking forward to seeing where you go because uh it really is such a Innovative model that uh is quite unlike anything else in the space at the moment so thank you thank you thank you thanks [Applause] everyone