Building the Open Metaverse: The Role of Web3 Gaming - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

hey everyone good morning thank you for joining us um it's a big pleasure to have everyone here on this panel I'd actually always wanted to meet yacht I finally get to do it today um and then joined by uh by other friends that we've known from before so I prepared a couple of questions um to discuss with them we were also having on pretty awesome discussion backstage and um we have the benefit of just um a lot of us have done a lot of before and we can sort of keep it casual and um more interactive uh the the question that I wanted to start with is there has been a lot said in crypto about people that start with infrastructure and then try to find content for it whether it's with grants or Investments but attracting content applications to the chain and then we have the other path which is starting with the product first firing millions of users and then launching the infrastructure on top many would say that in crypto open- Source composable technologies that the technology itself is perhaps not defensible or not special enough to be the most special thing and what special is the community whereas others would look at something like for example what suie has done with paralyzed transactions and all that that goes around the move ecosystem and say hey this is quite new and quite special so I'd love to start with ad and Alex and understand from each of your perspective how do you think about the debate between starting chain first and having to go find your users find your applications versus just building a product that people love and then launching the infrastructure on top and perhaps what you think about the pros and cons of each yeah um good question I don't know if people can hear me um our our view generally is technology actually absolutely does matter so we started with a premise at looking at what was available in ecosystems that existed already and from our vantage point at Facebook we saw there was a lack of real focus on building things of high quality for scale it was great when you had maybe 100 200 300 users but when you want to start dealing with the scale of Facebook billions of users on on a regular basis there's nothing really there for that audience so we built a system that was largely object based so if you're a developer and you build things with object in mind as a anyone writing games it's going to think of objects we built it focused on allowing developers to build really compelling applications from a gaming perspective so we our our vantage point is we build the best technology for developers allow developers to be as expressive as possible and they will come and that's what we've seen I think s is becoming one of the um the goto destinations for the best game developers today in fact some of the top um game Publishers in Korea already publishing onui um we recently launched a sweet play zx1 games console and operating system that allows anybody to run both web 2 and web 3 games on a single platform so our view is really enabling developers to be as broadly distributed as possible using our platform platforms and applications we build but generally we think that's that's that's a point um we aren't a game publisher we don't think we can build the best games but we know developers can build the best possible applications and what we want to do is have the best set of tools to allow devs to be as expressive as possible so that's been our focus by predominantly for S I think from our perspective it kind of depends on the stage of the evolution where we are in the space so broadly speaking when we look at gaming which is the segment that I guess all of us are in here somewhat involved is the demand of the technology comes from the content first right meaning that you know if I if I you know why Nvidia became Nvidia is because people wanted to play games better right and it wasn't the other way around in the sense that Nvidia created wonderful graphic cards and then people said okay let's build a game that can build that application it was kind of the demand came the other way around and I think the problem we're solving in web 3 is ownership right so I think in this case now that I have the ability to own something what technology allows you to do that and I think this is makes it possible for you know Sway and Ronin and others to come in and say actually we have better Solutions around that but the demand comes from the fact that there are Gamers out there wanting to solve a problem in you know this Paradigm which in web3 would be ownership and the benefits of ownership but in other areas would be you know better graphics better entertainment and that drives innovation in fact I find it fascinating that gaming as an industry is the reason why Nvidia came to life and now we have you know this is the the birth of you know GPU you you know mining with uh with asex rigs for Bitcoin and now ai actually really came from a gaming route right and but but again the other thing that I like is that the demand was Whimsical it wasn't a utility it was actually something fun and creative which I think also speaks to us as humans right actually we're driven by these things that are more Whimsical in nature that then drive Innovation forward and then actually create really utility applications so I would say sort of the the human desire is the first thing the human demand is the first thing you want to solve and then the technology will come towards it and Advance it and I think you have a story around that right in terms of starting as a game and then launching a chain right yeah it's it's quite interesting because we have a very different view on I think maybe blockchains and gaming in general it sounds like quite different strategies so I inherently believe that blockchains and tokens are about social coordination and I think that when you look at the technology in isolation it's not really that special for example Bitcoin as a technology you know sure it's solved a lot but the real special thing about Bitcoin is that it managed to gather a community together right so you have all of these people that believe together that this is going to be something great and I think that's really what we believe in in axi and Ronin too because without the axi community there wouldn't be any Ronin like we started out making a game we created this core community of players and then we took those players and we turned them also into a core part of the roning community and from there we wanted to leverage that into becoming a distribution platform and then actually a publisher right so Su might say that they're not a publisher at Sky Mavis we're saying very clearly we will function as a web three game publisher we want to advise the game studios on tokenomics on goto Market uh but one thing that we don't want to do is make the games ourselves we look for specific games in specific niches like uh MMOs in particular which we've seen a lot of success with and from there we want to uh take them to Market with our community of players who we know are Gamers so we try to create a network effect like that and with us I think it's been very successful we see a lot of inbound we can't accept all the games unfortunately I think uh just recently with the forge program which we're launching or announcing actually tomorrow uh we had over 150 applicants of great teams that wanted to build with us but we only accepted six so I think that's like a very high bar to get on roll in for now which is kind of contrarian to the general blockchain belief where everything should be open now I'm excited about what will happen when we open up Ronin uh but there was also challenges about that which then again is tied to technology so I think these things come in tandem it's just our priority will be Community First always uh and from there we will focus on that the technology over time will evolve because for us technology is more of a commodity a tool that we can use to fill in the Gap uh within our community perhaps a a quick followup on the point of the challenges of opening and this more um measured approach to the growth of ecosystem partners for Ronin so far from our perspective um at bit craft it seems like one of the great successes of ronin is that you have been able to point your community and say Here's here's this awesome new game here's pixels and there's going to be something that comes after pixels and you're really able to point them that way we're now moving into a next phase of ronin where we're going to have the forge program and so I kind of think of you know we have axi as what you guys made and it's your first baby and then you have the the original initial Partners to Ronin and now a little bit of uh second tier Junior partnership thing and then at some point maybe it opening up how do you think about your ability to continue pointing the community and having the trust of the community to say hey Ronin says this is awesome let me go here um as you go broader like how do you balance between your ability to be an amazing curator effectively with the amount of content and you know ultimately users that you need to go through the technology and have the kind of activity that will over the long-term Drive valuation yeah so I think about this quite a lot because as you're saying like we don't want to end up in a in a place where the game studios that come and work with Sky Mavis and Rolan feel like they're not being taken care of as much as preferred Partners or the partners who are not uh part of let's say the the forge program so we think the forge program is great because it actually uh opens up more for game studios that maybe didn't fit our mold so one thing that's funny is as the years have progressed our uh kind of um our barrier of Entry is becoming so high that we would have missed out on a game like or on a studio like Sky Mavis because we wouldn't have lived up to our own expectations today so that's why we actually made the forge program so we could lean into more experimental teams that we think would maybe be a good fit with the community but maybe not fit into exactly everything that we think is going to work because the it's such a open space that you know there are many things that can work that we don't know about now moving forward from there let's assume that Roland is fully open tomorrow we have dpos fully open zkm Works anyone can spin up their own chain so the question is actually how do we then distribute users because it's going to be very crowded in this case I actually think that Sky Mavis will play a more important role so then you would have Ronin as kind of like the internet at the bottom which would be permissionless anyone can deploy but curation usually happens at the application layer so if you go to YouTube twitch or whatever there are game or there are streams that are featured even in Steam there are games that are featured so I see Sky Mavis playing the role of a curator and the games that permissionless Deploy on rolin will have a chance to kind of pitch themselves to the Community build up that initial traction and then get picked up by Sky Mavis or other Publishers that want to work on Ronin 2 and from there really uh take them to the next level so very similar to web two publishing except that uh it's kind of Cur focused on the r in ecosystem uh specifically thank you inat a question for you in a similar Direction um when we began deploying our first Fund in crypto in 2021 um Anam Moka was one of the highest signal investors in the space uh you were one of the First Investors in the space and super selective and you know whenever anim Moka was on the cap table was like oh hey like anim Moka is here as you have all grown I think in the last cycle we started seeing you all in a lot of deals and then now we have manoka and there's a fund and there's the studios that you guys are more involved in or projects like um ape chain or sandbox and the ones that perhaps are smaller investors and then the ones that you're just Partners how do you think about the management of this and the conflicts of this like how how does the how did the wires not cross and how can you expand so much while providing a good service to the people that you work with and how while preserving your own reputation right as preeminent investors in the space yeah so first I mean I think the way that we think our philosophy underpinning in web 3 is what we call sharing the network effect because we think of web 3 as because of the permissionless structures at the end of the day the network effects are one that can sort of transfer around so it's a bit different in the web 2 world where the network effects that companies like Facebook or Apple or Google are actually belonging to them and you have to seek permission to enter them which means that you playing a different type of game but we don't think that's really possible in web 3 because ultimately even if you look at Ronin right now it's a curated approach but ronin's long-term success will be opening it up over time and basically the process of decentralization actually is one where third parties start building products because you need to the way to build sustainable scale is to have Network effects that can Compound on each other and any type of system that actually ends up creating restrictions on the network effects will actually limit themselves I I look at the parallel very much like open source code versus closed Source right close Source you can control and manage but at the end you can't compete when millions of developers add value to the code in one form or the other right and that's one of the reasons why ethereum for instance you know yeah it's more expensive it's inefficient it's got all these problems but why is it still where it is today because it has these compound Network effects that people are building on and building scaling Solutions so on and that's kind of how we think of it from the investing lens as well which is why we have over 540 investments in the space um many of them in gaming but we think of this as essentially helping grow that ecosystem space and that's basically how we ensure that we have a stake in the whole ecosystem but on management so that was kind of part of the reason why we launched moche um the mocha ID is a way where we want to empower our community which is much more investor type so meaning you know we have about 1.8 million users but I would say 7 800,000 that are active they're actually more like people who are are investors managers in the space almost like professional in a way and they end up doing governance on AP chain or apoin for instance they get involved in a products and services um and for that they receive reward from basically our token supply for instance right so for instance when we did pixels right the moov community ended up creating utility adding Network effects and adding value to the ecosystem for that they received benefits but they actually helped sort of from a decentralized standpoint create some of the work required because we're not going to be in a position to manage a portfolio of thousands of companies entirely by ourselves that sort of that linear scale growth doesn't work for us but ideally we can actually make you know in a in an ideal future the management of the portfolio and the network effects around that basically one where the community can cooperate with each other and that's why we're also building reputation systems right in other words you know in the same way that you have a reputation as a good VC you could actually build a reputation as a good member in Moe then basically projects will come to you and it becomes almost like a sort of employment Network as in terms of of you know which project can help you his advisory which guy can help me with launching a project that's kind of how we think of that space right um and you know we hope to have thousands of portfolio companies in the future it's frankly is less important for us to be looked at as you know um you know the the the VC that has sort of like some VCS like a6c for instance take very concentrated bets on that um we actually think that's against the ethos of web 3 because when you do that you're by by its nature thinking about monopolies right if you put all your eggs in one ask it well guess what happens right you can only focus on the one thing you only want that one thing to succeed which I don't think fits the nature of web 3 I also think it's incompatible right because of the permissionless nature where Network effects are shared across one example you know if Bitcoin was to become hundreds of thousands of dollars or even something like Solana went from you know $130 to $1,000 um even though people here might not directly benefit because they don't own the token actually the entire ecosystem grows because liquidity can flow through that's an effect that actually doesn't really uh happen in web two but absolutely happens in web 3 thank you um so ad we we started looking at move and suie probably two years ago um one of our guys Ben published uh one of our very first in-house research pieces talking about objectoriented languages the unique affordances for gaming and and and for that kind of product um I'd love to understand from you though like from an ecosystem perspective right like one big ecosystem is just the ecosystem of developers um how many people are comfortable building in your ecosystem so um I'd love to understand from you how you think about the the pro and con or the process of onboarding people onto your language and how do you do that especially when the market is quieter and there's not a lot of net new developers coming in and you have to say hey I know everyone does solidity um and everyone is comfortable with solidity but come here and learn this new thing and before you start um Michael is joining us on stage he is the CEO of star Atlas who have been building um a space exploration game for a long time and I'm happy that he's joining us so I can get to ask him some questions too yeah I'm happy to expand on that first thing I'd say look I vly disagree that technology doesn't matter I actually think technology is Paramount um I can I can exemplify that we have a plethora of games that were previously building on salana previously building on Aptos previously building on various evm related chains that are now choosing to build onu why because they have any smell of success immediately the platform doesn't work so if your focus is a very small subset of crypto rather than a broad Market fine maybe it works but when you want to do anything at scale with real users and real money you cannot use existing platforms that's the first thing so our our Obsession on day one has always been a developer first platform we know how to build developer platforms we know if you build a platform for devs that takes care of their use cases that allows them to achieve business related outcomes you win so we're starting to see that and I think over the next 3 to four months as games start to launch like society which we actually Partners at Amer on you start to see amazing games who are building games that are really taking the concept of ownership to a whole new level these will be the um the Pinnacle or at least the platform by which other games would see how you can interact and create new emerging communities in gaming so for us innovating with move building an object based system allowing developers to on board just simply using email with ZK login that we invented it really allows game um game studios to now onboard users with the least amount of friction I by the way I think wallets are the dumbest thing that ever been created in crypto the idea that people have to download an app before they engage is the dumbest idea ever so this is why Z things like ZK login allowing people to log in by email never worrying about gas because it's sponsored separating a concern between who submits a transaction versus who pays a transaction these are the kind of um Primitives that developers need to build compelling web 2 like experiences I keep saying web 2 has the best ux crypto has a worst ux crypto has a best value prop Web Two doesn't so you have to merge the two which is our goal and I think our goal is really allowing the web 2 and web3 World to merge and you have you get the best of both worlds in that regard so we're seeing a massive amount of adoption in move um platform's only been live for a year we're already number two based nonm chain and mov is more than 6% of all devs in web 3 already in the space of a year and that's because it takes nothing more than 3 to four days to become an expert in building move based applications so maybe if you're right in solidity the mindset will be a bit different because you're thinking of account based systems developers are finding a very natural onboarding experience from for Developers for building on move so we've seen a significant increase I think it was about 114% increase in the last misari report on on devs on on move Alex you look like yeah so I think uh first of all at Ronin we agree developer experience is really really important we try to build that out as well um we have that as a pillar of focus but at the same time What We believe is that it's actually one of the hardest thing in blockchain gaming to solve is the economic problem in terms of game design game development so for example we do not believe in partnering with that many AAA beautiful game studios there are a few that maybe would be an outlier but we are quite vary of that because the development Cycles are so long and the iterations that game studios need to make on the particularly economy design piece is so heavy um I think the higher the devel or the longer the development Cycles are the harder it is for them to iterate and actually to create create better and deeper economic Loops so we care a lot about MMOs and pixels I guess as an example even forgotten runiverse now we have Lumi Terra all of these games are uh yeah I would say fairly easy to add new features to or to create different type of deeper game loops and then you can start looking at okay for example crafting right uh even do comparisons to crude oil in real life I I know Hilmar from CCP loves using this example like okay so you have crude oil what does it take to actually get that into the real world into actually being used right so you have all these steps in between and I think that's really difficult to do as a game developer but the at the end of the day when you start to create these quite complex design Loops it means that at every step of the way you actually create a new job something that someone needs to do inside your game to uh like to be of service for others and I really want to kind of if possible talk a little bit more about what's the potential for blockchain games rather than just kind of be on the development side of it because what I'm very passionate about is kind of building the future of games which actually will enable jobs for hundreds of millions of people and we actually saw that happen to a uh to an extent in axi with SLP and I think that these are the stakes that we are playing for and that's why it's so important to find the right people that have this experience within MMOs in particular I think there's a lot of Chinese developers that have really really deep experience with these economic Loops that will have a bigger chance of success and that's actually what we are focusing on right now at Ronin uh but also trying to do that like is it possible to even do that at for mobile phones for example because that's where you would find the most of the users in Emerging Markets so it's incredibly exciting for me to think about the opportunity space that we are in right now I do want to say something but I think we want to bring Michael off stage Michael it's good because you want to talk about deep games with a lot of economy a lot of opportunities so now we can ask game developer about this St yeah perfect hey hey guys great hey there welcome are you thanks how are you doing man I heard somebody mentioned star Atlas And I thought I would join the conversation um yeah do you want to close out this point yeah so maybe just quickly um I I agree with this I think the one thing that we should also look at I mean I guess my first point is that one of thing that we found in our own experiences with portfolios in our own experiences that when you move a web two gamer to web 3 actually what happens is that um one of the big reasons why it often doesn't convert so well is because they lack financial literacy as in they don't know why they're in web 3 right they like oh I have a wallet great what do I do with this now like I don't know what asset ownership does right so there is an there's a process that isn't purely technological it's an understanding and I think gaming is good at that because we do storytelling and actually we learn through storytelling so I think that's an element and I think what axi did for instance in the Philippines is an example of conversion right these are people who were not even didn't even have bank accounts and then they became became included in the financial ecosystem it created employment but the key point was that they had to become somewhat financially literate which many of the gamers don't think of it that way right so I think the West struggles with that in in many ways more right um and the other thing you know just to close at the point is as we talk deeper about the economic Loops is that there's a new type of gamer that web 3 is bringing in in the same way that when mobile came you know many people don't remember that in 20101 actually the gaming business was was was was was stagnating it wasn't growing at all actually what made it grow was mobile but actually what happened with mobile gaming is it brought a new type of gamer that was more casual and that was actually able to play games in a much more simplistic manner through the swipe of a finger I was suddenly a great gamer whether this was Candy Crush or Angry Birds and as billions of Gamers came into the space which is now about 3 plus billion a percentage of them said oh you know what let me go into console games and try something deeper and actually that's where the conversion happened right so the PlayStation 3 did badly the PlayStation 4 exploded in sales it had nothing to do with Sony it had everything to do with more players coming in right and I think now you know there's about 6 seven billion people that are online but 3 billion do not play games and what we've noticed in web 3 is that those people who are owning assets actually are not necessar the ones who play games so I see it as a new category of gamer a new meta gamer that's coming into the space that's actually growing the entire gaming pie not just specifically us taking Web Two Gamers into web3 but actually a new category of gamer that hadn't really existed before actually just a a quick one we used to say or I guess I said that um the total addressable market for axi is every person in the world now you don't want to say that on Bloomberg because uh obviously normal people will think you're a crazy person uh but for me I actually believe that I think that a blockchain game Done Right will create a new GDP for the world like it's a new way to experience work it's a new way to experience fun it's basically kind of Ready Player one just at first it will be lower Fidelity and then it will be higher and higher and higher and there's actually no limit to how big this can grow it's just bits on a computer but uh visually it can be massive compared to where we are today like it's impossible for us to grow out of the physical uh kind of area that we have here on Earth unless we travel to the stars but in the digital space we can build to our own imagine Nation so that's what excited me perhaps I can jump in and rip on this for a little bit I I had a question for and I apologize for being fashionably late my excuses the F1 road closures but hopefully I can bring a banger or two out here to uh complement the conversation but I think this idea uh that the gentleman were just speaking about is that uh when you introduce in couple real world digital economies with the gaming experience the motivation for an individual to join a game could be significantly different than what we've seen historically um the entertainment product itself I like to think it of as the initial attraction to A A Digital Society so you'll get the gamers in that want to play and want to have fun and they start to build out the population but then you get entrepreneurs that are interested in joining in as well because they see an economic opportunity to perhaps provide a product or a service to those users um I one of the things I think axi did exceptionally well was the scholarship model where you had people that were effectively investing in game assets not with the intention of playing for themselves but providing those to other users who were interested in leveraging the game assets and um for for them it was purely an investment decision-making process can I leverage a Workforce a labor force to produce income for me passively through the assets that I possess um and I think we're going to see that proliferate throughout all web 3 games just because uh or perhaps not all of them but I think largely um uh in particular in Mass multiplayer online games will see it proliferate because you have this expansive Universe this expansive environment and uh ideally you will see opportunities through Niche engagement of the game uh to open up to people all over the world and so uh be between the people that are investing in assets that are playing in games that are looking for social experiences in these worlds um and and I also think that things like concerts and other types of entertainment activations that go on uh will be extremely popular and you could get to your point the entire world population joining a game to go watch a concert not necessarily because they care about the game but because that's where the activation is taking place cool thank you one one thing that we talk a lot about internally and I think to the point of opportunities of of crypto games right Alex is the notion of crypto genre fit we try to think a lot about which game genres work better with certain implementations of crypto and I think that ldrs we've generally gravitated towards the view that if you want deep complex economies you need deep complex games earlier on in crypto I think that we saw a lot of complex economics strapped on simpler games and bit difficult um and so we want to see that depth but at the same time I agree with you that the long lead times are difficult I mean from our side from a capital markets perspective you do a seed round for a game that will take four years when it comes to time to raise the a round depend on the prices of coins like there's just so much variance right um and I think that this is a great point of conversation um to to pull Michael in as well which is how do you think about going into a journey of something that will take four five six years to develop in a market that moves every 5 days how do you think about the risk how have you managed the challenges and you know there's one one theory that is just just ship axi get a bunch of people and we'll figure it out later right and then the other the the is like hey let's take five or six years on Star Atlas and pros and cons of those so wait I I'll before I guess you start with star Atlas and you know the the fiveyear journey I think briefly about axing um as you said the economic Loop it worked but maybe what people or people are judging us based on a very early economic loop I mean we shipped something we didn't know how it would go and then you see extraneous capital or particularly Traders on binance you know start listing or SLP and trading SLP and it basically bootstrapped the entire economy and uh made it artificially high so you end up in a situation where there's a lot of expectation on the ecosystem versus where it actually is from a developed perspective so it was a early stage economic Loop and to your point like we need more we need more of these like small things like you you build a complex system by taking small pieces one step at a time like you cannot try to build everything at once because the complexities and the dependencies will be too massive so you need one step at a time and from there a complexity can occur there is Simplicity there's Beauty in Simplicity that's what I believe in and that's also kind of what we follow at Sky Mavis um but yeah complex systems over time has to be the goal because they enable more Niche jobs inside these ecosystems and when it comes to gaming or game games in particular we believe that all blockchain games are MMOs inherently the second you have an nft in the market that's when the timeline begins that's really when one like uh area or one niche of the community can become basically Kings right so this is one thing that we see sometimes when we merge communities from another chain to Ronan is like you have these like elite players the kings of that community that I've been playing this game and then oh now it's coming into Ronin suddenly you have like these pleb players that somehow needs to like become equal you need to equalize the two communities because if not you get a very unhealthy type of ecosystem not saying that old Rolland you know players or plebs of course but at the beginning you end up in a situation where you have a very unfair Advantage for the people who have played for a longer time and this is basically the same for any sort of particularly Chinese MMO where that has been in the market for so long that it's really difficult to get started so that kind of uh merging of the communities to get everyone on equal ground is something that we are very focused on when we assist our player base to to get started with Ron I do want to raise one quick Point uh which is that uh while that's important to make sure the sort of starting field is somewhat Equitable I think we need to be careful about thinking about it being equal because I think that's the problem about Web Two Gamers going in web 3 because I think of Web Two game designers mostly As quite socialist in their thinking right assets don't have value everyone's the same you can pay as much money as you want we're all the same because it's based on this Merit base which basically web3 is a capitalist system so ownership should get you to some Advantage right and capitalism at its root is not is not about basically sort of it's about Equity but it's not about equality right and I think there is a differential between that and I do think a lot of web 2 game designers get it wrong in web 3 when they don't want to sort of attribute asset because in real life actually ownership of assets does give us an advantage so I think the successful web 3 titles do Embrace capitalism and the principles which by the way includes volatility right I mean capitalism inherently is volatile and I think it's actually not a bug it's a feature some people will argue it's a bug but actually I think inherently it's those changes the dynamism and also the movement of capitalism that gives the incentives for third parties to come in and build these Network effects right because you have money in the system because SLP basically became liquid third parties came in and innovated on things like you know basically the guild systems and whatever that maybe you wouldn't have thought about at the time and then new network effects built and Innovation happens right I mean it's capitalism that is the engine of that type of innov of growth I I think have to be careful here because if not you end up in a in a system that's I mean obviously it's very similar to real life but if you are a person in real life that's struggling uh and you feel like everything is unfair you know capitalism like you cannot get ahead suddenly you start playing a game and oh like here's the same thing all over again I'm getting stomped in this one too like games are oftentimes about Escape fantasy like uh particularly coin Masters or mobile games in particular like people want to win all the time so you really have to at least put them on the journey that they can see some kind of success which is why gamification is great which is why when you play games you feel happy you feel excited because you're taking on this journey that's where we have the advantage of kind of easing players into this kind of mul quality but yeah Equity I would say is just better I I this is the perspective I live in Hong Kong he lives in Norway right please yes you I think Alexander made a a very interesting comment that any web 3 game is essentially in MMO in nature and um to contrast that I would say it would be uh difficult to make an argument for a single player game to incorporate any type of nft or digital asset with real value because who's the counterparty that's willing to purchase that asset if there's no way to you know technically sell that to another person now in the case of ronin though and and since we are talking about the metaverse here the idea of game interoperability is a very prominent topic um are you able to transfer assets or progression or XP systems from one game into another game and what are the restrictions or or barriers on doing so and I think to the extent that there is um a protocol level uh directive which I think is kind of what Ronin is you guys are controlling the games that are getting in at least at Inception uh and I'm sure that's going to open up over time but there's a very tight network of people that are involved in the Ronin Network today and I just have to say we have our lawyer in the crowd here the validators are controlling who's being able it's not me it's not Ronin it's all you I thought but uh anyway um but with respect to the concept of how do you build a game given the volatility of digital assets over a fiveyear or you know perhaps 10year uh timeline in our case I I I think what you have to understand first and foremost is that being involved in the development process is part of the experience for the user right so they get to see behind the curtains they get to influence the way game decisions are made we have an incredible Community I see a couple of guys from apia right over here and um they're out at all of the events and they're communicating with us every single day and we're interacting with them in Discord all of the time taking in feedback and that allows us to ultimately land on the product that we know the the the user and the customer or the community wants because they've told us at every step along the way now this is also very much a crowdfunding process and so as we're building we're taking in Revenue which allows us to continue with the development of the game but I think another thing people have to realize is that the economy itself is also a product it's not just the game I mean it's the coupling of the two of those that really delivers this ultimate value proposition that web 3 brings and so to the extent that you're able to bring out a sophisticated economy that enables people to um produce income for themselves I do think this is critical they can produce revenue for themselves they will be more willing to tolerate the timeline that it might take to bring a full product to Market because they have something to satisfy and Intrigue their interest today and so between those we've done a phenomenal job at Star Atlas as being able to maintain and sustain an economy through really phenomenal times in 2021 but also dealing with the chaos of FTX in 2022 and the Fallout of that in 2023 and I think now we're in a really great position to uh kind of follow up on that as we go into the next leg of of this Market cycle awesome I just want to add one quick Point around you know when you mentioned about sort of the token as a or as a product it's quite important to sort of uh for builders in the space to look at it from that lens because tokens represent essentially the state of your network the volatility is not just the utility it also is a sentiment right it's a way for you to measure the audience it's also to think about the space I think that's an important one and the other way is that when we think about interoperability we don't just think of it in terms of moving assets we actually think of it as sort of reputation interoperability right when you think of it in a web two gaming standpoint if you're really good at fortnite maybe you could have credit at Apex Legends or other type of environments there's a credit and actually this is where airdrops come in where I say hey I want that gamer so I'm going to give you a benefit to come play my game that's actually possible in web 3 where you go directly to the user as opposed to using third party platforms thank you you just have to be careful about bribing users users verses like bringing sustainable real value that that's well they become owners right yeah so we have 30 seconds left I'll wrap us up with a quick round I just want to know what's the last game you uh spent a bunch of time on starting with ad what are you playing sorry I missed the question what game what game are you playing currently um I'm a VR guy so I've always played on ulist population ones my thing V are Michael I bought into the black myth Wukong uh hype I'm playing that right now and then I've been playing a little bit of Off the Grid from the we weite Alex uh three games I guess Age of Empires a little bit uh the ELO 4 and then I play a little bit of squad Busters on my mobile phone yeah so I I mean because my kids play Apex Legends so I do play it although I'm not that good they tend to carry me but the other game that I'm starting to get into is I like chess and so Annie chess is one of the games that we're starting to get into right oh I did play for go riverse also the other day which is on Ronin so that's yeah well I'm on Wukong myself um thank you everyone for your time thank you all for this wonderful conversation for giving me the pleasure of uh moderating it thank you thank you thank you