The Resurgence of Web3 Gaming - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

thanks everyone excited to be here um perhaps we could kick it off with uh with some introductions guys y do you want to start sure my name is Yad I'm chairman and co-founder of animoca Brands we're a company that's probably most known for having made many Investments particularly in the web 3 gaming but we're also an operator like you know the owners of the sandbox moche and a bunch of other uh sort of web three gaming titles um and done over 450 Investments um in the last five or six years yeah hey everyone I'm Michael Wagner co-founder and CEO of aomata that's the studio behind the game Star Atlas uh longtime builders in the space we got our uh launch and debut back in early 2021 we're building a grand strategy space exploration massively multiplayer online game uh really targeting hypers scale with this as well through uh massive numbers of uh user concurrency General ideas you can get out there explore space own all of your ships participate in a new digital economy and uh yeah excited to have the conversation today uh Robby co-founder at immutable uh we're the leading web 3 gaming platform with over 300 well-funded games building on us uh we have a sort of full stack platform to build on uh and the imminent launch of immutable zkm ZK powered uh BL chain uh and we've been building the space since 2017 where we launched the first ever multiplayer onchain game awesome thank you guys um I wanted to kick off kind of reflecting a little on where we're at um this past cycle I mean obviously was the first time crypto gaming as a as a concept sort of really reared its head and you know all of our panelists here today were were a big part of driving that um first sort of venture into the mainstream if you like um uh as I say exciting time lots of games launching this year but yeah wanted to wanted to spend some time just reflecting on what maybe some of the key learnings from last cycle were from that um first sort of um attempt at building some of these games so yeah maybe you could kick us off given you uh have very broad exposure over the across the space with all of your Investments these days uh well that's that's a long list so I'll try to keep it short but I mean first of all I think you know I think all of us are generally much happier in the last three months than were're most of 23 I think that's that's a fair fair thing to say um you know one of the things that seeing right now is that there's still very much an acceleration in a little bit more as the sort of casual games as opposed to sort of the sort of mid to hardcore type of gaming styles for the time being and I think of this a little bit as kind of like the you know the Candy Crush era of web 3 gaming uh meaning that you know when ax Infinity first came out kind of like Angry birs then essentially we're kind of advancing that a little bit into sort of the sort of more casual but still more better mechanics and better knowledge around basically how the systems work this is kind of candy crushy like era and of course we'll advance to sort of I guess the sort of AAA sort of type of gaming that we'll see with star Atlas and so on as well very shortly um but I think you know what we've seen also is that with the launch of many um gaming tokens like you know in our portfolio like in some of other joint portfolios like like pixels uh for instance um what they've done is is that uh when they moved over to Ronin they've basically kicked off these Network effects but what was interesting is that because Ronin had this big number of ax Infinity users uh that were basically looking for new content it actually sort of created this flywheel where the pixel users were able to Leverage The axi users basically powering Ronin right and then what then happened was is that it brought in new users that basically brought news users back into axi and so both pixels which is now the I think the um largest onchain game for the time being I think about 700,000 users for the moment uh and then um axi Infinity basically saw our increase in that as well so we're seeing these Network effects starting to come into play uh and of course we see also a lot of excitement in the space I think one of the things that learnings from 2122 versus where we today is that before it was much more speculative in nature and more financial I guess more people were in it for financial reasons uh and while the utility is increasing I think one of the key learnings we had is that there's still a gaming experience for those who hold the assets but are not Gamers themselves right so so I think in the past a lot of our portfolio and ourselves included we're thinking about how do we bring a web two gamer into web 3 so that was one narrative ative as an active gamer uh and how do we bring a web 3 holder to become a gamer and what we're finding is that actually there may a different type of gamer altogether meaning that if you hold an uh nfts or if you hold a token uh you're still in the game but you're not necessarily a person who's playing the same way as the active gamer right there's almost like a division between a labor class which is the gamer and the capital class which is basically maybe the holder but he's still part of the game and I liken this a little bit to the sort of uh when we went to Mobile gaming you know for those of you who might remember in Mobile gaming actually um all the hardcore Gamers back in the console days did not want to play mobile games right they were all over mobile games saying this is not a good experience whatsoever um but what it actually did was it brought in a lot of casual gamers that never played games before that's how gaming went from 400 million Gamers to literally 3 billion today right and so one of our new thesis is that well there's 3 billion people playing games but there's almost 3 billion people who are not playing games that are online today and growing and that could be that more casual uh that even even more passive than a person who's just playing casual games um because a portion of them then translate but not all of them right so that's kind of one of the thesis changes uh on our side that we found and so integrating the nft and token holders that are more passive in their activity but still being part of the game is uh is one of our let's say um sort of uh new findings MH yeah super interesting the emergence of a new like uh player archetype that's participating around these games in the economy um I mean obviously excited to see more experimentation on that front and where that can happen that's not detrimental to any other player experience and where things don't get too uh you know heavily financialized and driven but well I mean I think one of the things that does to to to cover on that topic one of the things that we see also is that the the adoption from some from Mobile gaming wasn't actually moving Gamers into Mobile right it was basically making games even more more easier to play right this was the mass amriz of gaming because the um gaming before mobile was actually complex you need to have a controller you need have a joystick you need all these things or use your keyboard WD like these were actually not easy for casual gamers to play so my mom wouldn't be able to play those games but then when casual gaming came with mobile it wasn't the fact that it was portable which is what the Game Boy did earlier it was the fact that through a swipe of a finger you could be almost as good as some other gamer and that's what brought in the billion so it sort of Mass amateurz gameplay and so you know what's the next level of that uh and the financial aspect is an involvement meaning that you are sort of you have a stake in the game so you are actually interested in it you are emotionally attached and involved in it but that doesn't mean that you are sort of um um playing it just for the money right it's kind of like you know when you play friend play play poker with your friends in your home it's not about how much money you win it's the fact that there was a stake and that was fun and you might have won a $10 having played for five hours and that was that was good enough interesting um then Michael I wanted to wanted to kick it over to you um you know you guys uh you know unfortunately had exposure quite quite materially on the sort of FTX front um I think you guys have shown massive resilience and and sort of persevering with that and um seems like you guys are you know in a great place now would love would love to hear some of your sort of um yeah key Reflections on that whole experience and uh and how you're thinking about things how you're thinking about carrying those learnings forward yes the number one lesson is don't keep a lot of your treasury on uh FTX right but uh no I I actually would like to pull a little bit on a string that uh from a comment that you made yet and that's around uh really user segmentation and you were talking about uh the financial incentives and and motivation for players to engage in these games and I I think what's really unique and and Powerful about web 3 about blockchain about crypto integration is the simple fact that we're able to uh provide additional benefits Beyond just the gaming experience and there was a really big narrative over the last two years through the bare Market of hey just build a great game right and I think that that is a critical objective for you to have as a studio and as a developer uh ultimately that is going to be your retention mechanism it needs to be an entertainment experience that sucks people into it and and keeps them immersed into that gaming environment but the reason we're doing what we're doing is because uh and building with the technology that we are is that it can get so much bigger than that um and and in terms of Lessons Learned I think one of the big things for us to take away and one of the areas that we've focused on heavily on is on uh sustainable economic architecture so coming up with more complex and more sophisticated economic systems in your game that are not driven exclusively through hyperinflationary token emission uh we've seen that model fail over and over and while that is in fact a great tool or mechanism that you can use to attract Gamers to your or or or rather users to your platform it's not NE necessarily the uh sticking point for those users once they're there they might not be there for the game at all in fact it's it's arguable that they are only there to maximize the amount of value that they can extract from that system and then they will leave as soon as that incentive goes away and so at least for us at Star Atlas our model is driven really more by a peer-to-peer uh producer and consumer based economy so I think the token emissions that's a great tool that people can leverage as a bootstrapping mechanis is M to kick an economy off but uh what's really necessary is creating deep layers of complexity and the ability for players to specialize in various aspects of your game and create markets for themselves so being able to establish a niche within the game that they specialize in and then leverage that to produce either value or convenience for another player um so that's the key thing I think key takeaway for a lot of people that are building now is you know that that system system of Simply hyperin lating your economy is not going to be sustainable it never will be sustainable it might help you raise Capital because your numbers look good but I would think from the investor perspective and standpoint you're probably looking deeply into the team's uh um mechanisms for attracting these users in the first place and if you identify that there's not going to be a long-term path with the users that we've attracted then it becomes less of an attractive investment but secondary to that I think what we're seeing right now too is the uh proliferation of higher quality higher caliber games the AAA games these are products that take years or a decade plus to uh to produce and so you know the earliest stages of web 3 gaming probably kicked off with crypto kites in 2017 maybe a little bit earlier than that and uh especially back at that time there was no discussion or or innovation around bringing mainstream title or what otherwise would be a mainstream title to the blockchain and so uh now that we have a few years uh under the belt I we're starting to see these products come online again star Atlas we've been able to build for the last three years and what's really uh challenging from the perspective of building this type of game is that we are out there generating Revenue we raising money through the sale of assets and so there's an immediate demand that we need to satisfy with respect to uh player engagement we need to deliver something iteratively so that they can actually enjoy the product that they're uh putting their Capital into so I think it is exciting though right now not only for us but a lot of the other big titles that are coming out and and this is a uh you know riseing tide lifts all boats scenario I think one big winner in the space is going to contribute to everyone doing exceptionally well and it's it's going to start bringing that mainstream audience the non- crypto native user into the space and rby um you guys have done a fantastic job of growing market share you know a mutable has become a household name in crypto gaming now um what uh what's your view on this I mean obviously you have a massive sort of portfolio of games that are building with you guys um you know uh a a lot of those are sort of yet to launch but happening in in the not too distant future what are some of the key um key insights that that you guys have gleaned last cycle and that you're advising these teams with yeah there's a few observations I think the first thing is everyone is still massively under estimating how big web 3 gaming is going to be I mean probably not the people on this panel I I think people here have been evangelizing it since uh it basically existed as a category but when you think about gaming Goods they're essentially the largest digital good category that exists there's 240 billion dollars spent on video games every year 150 of that are digital assets and when players spend that value they get a line in a database they can never sell overnight when players have the option to sell that you have brand new monetization mechanisms secondary Market places royalties but you also will take the time of gaming from $150 billion to trillions of dollars because any Market with sufficient primary spot liquidity has secondary financial markets that are in order of magnitude larger than it and gaming is now subsuming everything it is bigger than music movies and TV combined and it's compounding at 10% year onye I think the main thing that's stopped it up until now has been two things infrastructure has not been ready to on board everyday customers if you ask someone to sign up write down 24 seed wordss you are losing 99.99% of your customers finally we're having wallet infrastructure where you can with for example a mutable passport sign them with email uh already in the last week we had uh two games uh launch and we had 100,000 unique sign up in 4 days um so we're seeing the first trickles of this flood start to come through but the second thing is just gaming timelines in previous bull runs the financing Bull Run has been very quickly followed by a shipping Bull Run Andre cronier can ship something in production in 3 weeks uh from financing to to Landing It games take time they take anywhere between two to 5 years uh and they're much more like building a movie than building uh a piece of software that you can ship overnight 2024 from our estimate you'll have nearly 40% of these games being launched there's been nearly 20 billion US invested into games and G gaming Platforms in the last 4 years this is far more than Mobile gaming had in its nent years it's far more than freeto playay or the shift to social gaming you could throw this much money at a toaster and it would have F product Market fit so there are going to be hits it's going to be entirely powerlord driven and you'll have the biggest game having more customers than the rest combined but I also think you'll have a much higher survival threshold than normal gaming because you're going to have communities that can survive on only a million players 5 million players of incredibly High spend and token providing fundraising support for the entire operation um so I think this is the Calm before the storm uh I think even in the next 8 to 12 weeks we have some of the biggest games in the world launching I mean uh Pixelmon tree alivian metal core Guild of Guardians um blast Royale which is 5 million installs I I'm feeling personally extremely excited um and I totally agree with what you said which is it's just that one hit that's going to be the inflection point and you can argue there's been sort of hits of different stages so there's nothing at the stage that will truly be a proof point that web two games suddenly overnight have conviction we've got to build with this model and this is exactly how you build it from an economic perspective um so look I'm mean feeling very very quietly confident I think it's going to be a huge year absolutely um I mean yeah obviously uh you sort of reflected on there it takes time to build these things right realistically all of that funding boom kicked off in 2122 um we're now two three years on from all of that and uh the time has come the cold light of day I think the next 12 18 months there's going to be a lot of a lot of uh exciting project launches um yeah would' love to kick it over to you and um get your perspective on how you're advising some of your portfolios to navigate this space like it or not crypto um does have very Financial sort of undertones to it um you know a lot of these projects are um launching you know obviously things on chain uh oftentimes launching tokens I mean we do have 100 plus games all trying to do this this year um you know there's going to be a lot of sort of new tokens hitting the Market um one might suggest that that's going to be you know quite dilutive and that there's going to be a lot of competition for um you know what for now remains a relatively scarce pool of attention in the grand scheme of where we all agree this is going so yeah I want to talk about the next 12 18 months and how you're advising uh people to navigate that right I mean so first um and related to that advice I guess just to pull a little bit on some strings that were just discussed here I think uh is that when you're building an economic system what soul is needed is is also an investor base but in the classic web 2 model the investor base was a VC but actually in web 3 the investor is your community as well right and I think that's something that is often underestimated by the kind of companies that do web 2.5 and I don't mean that in a negative sense because I always sort of comment around well which side of the web 2.5 are you on are you web 2.4 or are you web 2.

6 right in a sense that are you more web 3 native versus are you more Web Two native and so what we found and what we're advising companies is that if you're trying to be too web too native you may as well just be a web two game yeah because you're basically competing completely against it's kind of like the superpower of web 3 is the financial aspect I mean the blockchain is a fintech revolution and by basically putting gaming on top of a really a finance layer you're creating all these type of network effects in a financial system that no other gaming system had before uh and that you have to take advantage of that if you don't take advantage of that you may as well just make a web2 game and I think traditionally a lot of web2 game designers um struggle with that they they treat the market vola U ility for instance and the fluctuations as a bug because they like things stable and controlled right um they're more like dictators in their games right whereas actually web 3 it's an open market you have to actually flow with the market and you have to sort of sort of work with the Dynamics of that type of open market and so so the the dynamic as we see it as well is that you need to bring a strong base of web three players into your community at least in this era because the web user the true web user is somewhat financially literate so by that we don't mean that he's a Warren Buffet investor but he does think of everything that he does when he buys MTS when he involves in tokens from the lens of an investing lens right and and they create the staying power like an economy if you have an economy with no investors then you don't have someone who's investing in the long term then you basically only have a labor class and the labor class the only thing they do is extract which is okay they provide value to the network but then these tokens when they're issued if they only go to people who simply just do it to make money from a labor standpoint the only thing they will do is sell right uh and and that has a lot to do with the fact that the state of the world is that the majority of the world is not financially literate anyway right like you know everyone in this room has an Investment Portfolio and you get it but the majority of you know maybe even friends and contacts you have which is like over 90% of the world do does not have an Investment Portfolio it does not understand that right and so that's the bridging so the web 3 Dynamic has to be grown from and so with mooch what we've done is we've created basically a way in which web3 users have an ID and basically a system where we can direct web3 users that are web3 native into these various gaming systems like we did with pixels and N Chronicles and other games that basically bring that Nativity and then they just don't just spend more but they also think of it in the long term right so I think that's that's a really important thing we're at an era where you know in web3 gaming um you have really multiple Network effects but the most powerful one is the financial Network effect that's represented through the token and of course the utility and these Network effects combined basically is what a web three game um makes possible and the token itself we also think of to your question dilution represents the network effect of the ecosystem you're putting together right so this again we've never had a time before where you could really sort of participate in the network effects as a whole you could really just participate maybe in the equity of something but the equity is really a subset of it it doesn't partake in the network right you don't buy into an ethereum token because of the profit you get from ethereum that it generates you you buy the tokens because you want to be a member of the network and partake in the network effects of it and so there just like with games there's going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of tokens launched and not all of them will succeed but we do think that they're going to have a higher success than the gaming launches because Financial effects make it more sustainable right so in other words today you can have a game with 100,000 active users on you know web 3 game it might not be a billion dollar game but it will be much more sustainable than putting a game that size on basically uh the app store right so we see we see that effect basically happening as well so but you need the web through user if you don't have the through user in this era uh because the narrative is still very Financial driven then I think you won't succeed in the near term of course when we get to a point where it's more balanced right then I think uh it's a different story but for the next 12 to 18 months you have to embrace the web three Community much more directly in build community around that absolutely I think I agree on a ton of those points I think obviously the sort of um uh Evangelical forces that unlock by giv communities like um Financial upside and these things I think all of these things are an insane growth whe I guess um the part that I sort of mindful of is just you know I again completely agree on the importance of having that web through community at the heart of it I mean we try and invest in companies that are taking some kind of existential bet on the crypto Loop right that's what we think's exciting about this space but um you know we've acknowledged that you know um obviously the sort of like player base the actual audience of this stuff is going to grow and that there's a ton of token launches this year I just want to be mindful of this like low float High fdv mattera because it's all fine you know for now but when the market turns which it always does um I think that a lot of the new players that have been drawn in who don't have experience with the financial side um are you know basically set up for sort of disenchantment when they inevitably have to learn that lesson like everyone else did yeah and I think the the challenge is that if you you know um as mentioned earlier You're Building economic systems so if you don't have much familiarity with economics actually it's really difficult for you to launch a web 3 game so that's I think one of the main lessons here as well which is that you need to understand or at least have a base of Economics uh and you you know whatever Theory you want to apply whatever system you want to apply you know that attracts that kind of Base um uh That Base as well right um but I think the other thing also just just just on on that note is that when you think about sort of these token launches right now airdrop mechanisms uh should not simply be viewed as purely dilutive uh they can be dilutive of course um but they're also meant to be inclusive for the community because they're helping you build the ecosystem like when you think about nfts that are sort of dropping at you know given to the community so to speak the key isn't that you give it for free the key is who you give it to right so in other words if you're rewarding the player base you want to bring in and you are able to direct the player base you want then giving them reward makes them come back to you in a much more loyal way right we spend money on advertising in the gaming industry spends $100 billion do a year spending money on Advertising to bring in players right um whereas if you do an airdrop to those players the incentive is strong but actually you're spending the same kind of money actually more efficiently to the player itself right Apple Google and Facebook receive all that money how much of that money that they receive goes back into the gaming ecosystem scarcely any of it right whereas if you give it as an airdrop to community holders the chances of them putting that money back into your game is significantly higher but the key is are you able to get it to the player that you want right and in 2122 meta basically was just air drops for everyone and everyone was there basically just to extract and then you had these problems but for instance with Mo we were very particular about who we would give these nfts to and it was literally close to Z mint right and today the Flor price is for E partially because the people who gave it to were the ones who were intended to building it right and so it's like no different than when you targeted advertising it's targeted air drop right and in the last three years not just in gaming 21.7 billion of um of value was dropped to users through air drops which you know when you think about that is a massive incentive but also is unheard of right so the players really create these incredible sort of um sort of uh potential um opportunities and then they stay in these communities because they've been rewarded and they become loyal in a different way than simply in web 2 really game loyalty is just based on sort of the time you spend after that and and the social graph um Michael I do want to jump on to you but I thought I'd kick it over to uh to Robbie as well given you have you know this big ecosystem similarly a ton of games out there um yeah what's your view on some of these topics we just discussed the opportunities for web through games well yeah I mean um this whole notion of you know lots of launches lots of tokens the potential dilution effects longer term how you guys view that cuz obviously there's a ton of positives and um yeah would love to would love to get your thoughts the market always goes through phases the things that we focus on at a mutable is number one the games we work with have to be fundamental quality games that you would want to play outside of web 3 and I think that's a really important bar I think web 3 can add a ton of value it can add a ton of monetization but unless you would play that game if it were just a normal web 2 game it's going to be insufficiently high retention to be successful in the long run and that's why every one of I think it's now 330 I think we've sort of been exponentially growing over the last three months games building the platform we literally play test uh we we make sure they have the funding road map to be successful and we make sure these going to be high quality games but the second opportunity I see is uh tokens I I I agree with a lot of your your comments yet and my vision of tokens in the long run is they can replace Performance Marketing spent the real winners in gaming as it grows is Google and Facebook as games are continued to force to have to spend billions of dollars on ads every single year and Performance Marketing games has become completely red ocean you literally have games now in China which are exact carbon clones of clash Royale or another popular game and they Market themselves by having better Performance Marketing optimizations and cheaper inapp transactions than their competitor the equilibrium for this is not a thriving industry where people can innovate it's an industry dominated by who is the best at getting players to click through everyone's experienced Those ads where you see a bait and switch of some fun looking game and it ends up being some crappy thing at the end of The Funnel that's how important this is in the space now we have a model where you can effectively take a proxy for the future value to the game you can give it to people for free for signing up to the game and you can share it as they share it with their friends and we're incredibly bullish on this model of uh using tokens as user acquisition in a profitable and Ras driven way and I think that's really the key thing people need to view tokens not as free inflationary Supply that can be given out to to do hype a lot of the projects optimizing for that are probably shorter term tactical projects but is a real opportunity cost they need to evaluate the return on token spent uh and you know people like Anam Moka do a lot of efforts internally to build up systems where they can help advise those those games on that so I think these are all parts of the industry which don't exist in web 2 but which are now being built out and standardized into playbooks and when those standardized playbooks become easy to use for anyone in web 2 to develop I think that's when you can have a game overnight become incredibly successful in in web 3 so I'm very bullish on uh tokens as as UA and capital financing uh I'm extremely bullish on royalties driven models because finally we can have a business model where the incentives of the Creator are aligned with the incentives of the end player and at the end of the day that's what it comes down to right now we have a model where Magic the Gathering has roughly $20 billion of cards out there in the the world physical cards but every year they can't monetize any of the secondary trading of these physical cards so they're forced to issue 30 $50 million of new cards make all the less cards less valuable by making these more powerful known as power creep and try and monetize it would be a much simpler business model if they could just take 2% of every transaction in perpetuity no matter where they trade and that model is now available to people in web 3 and as soon as Apple realizes this as soon as Gam realized this it's a business model where their job is to grow the ecosystem the gmv and the user base over time not how can I continuously extract more value at the expense of anyone else in a negative or zero some way um so that that's what really like got me into the industry in the first reason I think we're now seeing that uh emerge absolutely Michael anything you wanted to add otherwise I'll I'll kick it over to to our next next sort of topic I have maybe just a a few quick comments and I think this really does come back down to that earlier topic we were discussing user segmentation and so you you have the gamer audience the traditional gamer audience that's obviously who you're targeting longer term but when somebody is launching a token you're targeting directly the trader or Speculator mentality now these are people that are probably trading your tokens because they're looking for some type of profit or return uh however that also captures their interest and perhaps then they become users of your platform or purchasers of nfts or any other assets that you're selling uh across the game now I don't uh particularly feel any concern so to speak from seeing a lot of additional tokens being launched I guess from our perspective as a builder it could be argued that every time somebody launches a token that kind of dilutes the interest or potential user base of star adlist because now there's a different option for them to select um but through the history of crypto and all of the cycles that have naturally occurred through Bitcoin what we've seen with the rise and fall of the price of Bitcoin is that every subsequent cycle there's larger numbers of users that are are still around now a lot of people will give up or quit if their portfolio gets wiped out they leave the ecosystem but we get new people every time as well and I think with these token launches we'll see a similar effect where new people are coming into the space because perhaps they identified or saw or were marketed to Via one of these other projects and again that becomes an opportunity for us to go after that user base as a result of their interest in web 3 in general now what's really powerful and yet you made a comment that I just wanted to touch on uh quickly though which is that there are a number of new monetization strategies that arise because of web 3 and the financial incentive structure is a great way to directly Market to a user without even going through the traditional advertising platforms that are out there uh but what's really incredible and this can't be overstated is in spite of uh in spite of that facet uh we're and the amount of money that is actually coming into products or projects like ours uh we're actually able to create a new paradigm of shared value exchange so it's not just that we're capturing more money from our users you you had touched on community as being the investor into your uh into your product well those same users that are investing capital for the first time ever are now able to realize value retained for themselves Robbie you you made a very similar comment as well and I think that uh not only do we end up having the highest lifetime value of all of our users with larger purchases larger Acquisitions $100,000 or million dollar spaceships in our game where would you ever see that executed in a traditional game I don't think you would I don't think it's possible because it's purely an expense it's a purely a single-sided flow of income or revenue from the user into the gaming platform but as soon as you Empower them to be able to recapture some of that value or produce value within the game uh whether that's through playing through trading or uh in our case again with a lot of fully onchain gaming mechanics and logic we're enabling people to co-create and build alongside of us and create their own integration seamlessly into our platform and now we've essentially recruited a global population of Builders to build with us uh and I think that it's it's completely transformative in the way that people will interact with games and understand the appeal of these types of products in the in the future I mean that just one comment I want to add on this one one of the model of animoca Brands is building in a shared network right and I think you just just reminded me just about the the effect of building an a shared network in web 3 is that all the networks kind of tie to each other because the liquidity is shared like in web 2 you could have a really big game it's great that fortnite has a lot of users nobody else cares because except fortnite because the users don't have a way moving over from one one area to the other and while we don't have interoperability of assets yet which by the way is why I think nft liquidity although it's still over a billion uh every month is not as high yet it's because you don't have the same network effects building just yet because you don't have that interoperability but fungible tokens do have that interoperability and especially when you think about how tvl is moving across all these different chains even though it's not related to gaming per se the fact that that liquidity can move around you know basically to immutable or to Solana or whatever fairly liquid and fluidly means that gaming ecosystems or successes in those uh token ecosystems translate to other token ecosystems as well because you can move money around and which is the first Network effect that we see in web 3 that is fluid it's not the final Network effect it will be much bigger than that but that's something something that we have the ability to do today that we couldn't couldn't do earlier so in that sense I would sort of paraphrase the sort of famous Chinese idiom which is I think you can check many many tokens so let a thousand tokens Bloom and it's fine because more tokens will bring in more users will bring in more Network effects and therefore more liquidity absolutely um no really appreciate all of those insights think it's exciting to uh exciting to consider all this um I uh I do see those numbers of you know in terms of uh launches this year relative to ftvs I think there's already 100 bill of unlocks coming over the next 10 months I mean I know they're not all gaming oh the next 18 months I know they're all they're not all gaming but um going to be super interesting to see how all these Dynamics play out for sure um being mindful of time I wanted to hit on uh for each of you guys like what is top of Mind what's the North Star this cycle what's you know thesis validation for you guys what's top of Mind perhaps I don't know yeah you want to kick us off sure I mean I guess just we brief top of mind to us is how we bring more people from Web Two to web 3 is basically improving their financial literacy we think the key in order to bring much more web through adoption is to actually make users more financially literate which means we think gaming is a key storytelling medium to do that if you think about all the skills that people have learned through gaming you know knowing Pokemon cards or basically you know understanding sort of rules and Magic the Gathering of whichever right those are storytelling tools as humans we exist as you know on stories right and so gaming is that Medium we think and so we can onboard you know the masses onto web 3 in part not just to make it fun but also by teaching them about financial systems and if we can teach our children you know algebra and math we can certainly teach them uh Financial systems and economics I love it Michael I mean it really just comes down to execution for us it's uh we've just spent a couple of years in the trenches building through the bare Market um getting little attention of course you know because one of the biggest uh segments of our audience is that crypto native user right now not really going after the traditional gamer at this point but we've made substantial progress in development uh we have a couple of big releases coming up this year so it's making sure that we nail those ones uh it's making sure that uh as we execute we can continue building and just maximize the opportunity that's available to us today in the current cycle I think it's really critical that we're able to continue producing High revenues as we have um I mean our our product is probably a $400 million production budget in total so we've made substantial progress towards that nearly a quar billion dollars of Revenue over 3 years but uh we still have a ways to go and and uh yeah Now's the Time Robbie uh look last month we won five times more games than we did the previous year and our win rate is across the last 6 months 83% when we compare to competing platforms really the job for us now is 80 of these games going live in the next 6 months how do we make them as successful as possible we've got I think over $50 million of rewards being pointed at the community in the next uh 3 months alone we've got enormous amount of games and and tokens launching and I think the wealth effect and the network effect from those are going to be phenomenal um so please if you're a game in the audience uh come reach out we we've got a ton of stuff behind the scenes that's really exciting amazing well to our esteemed panelists thank you all uh it's been a a super fun conversation and um yeah uh bring on the games exciting times okay thank you