The Dawn of Web3 Gaming - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

hi everyone welcome to the best panel of today if you guys are interested in crypto gaming or in crypto gaming I think this is a really great panel to listen in on we have Alexander one of the co-founders of axi arguably one of the the games that trailblazed it for a lot of us and as well as Piers from Delphi digital um part of an extremely smart and sharp team of investors and builders so um without further Ado let's kind of get into it the topic is the dawn of web3 gaming I thought it'd be great to start off with a bit of a history um Alex what was it like in 2018 to build in crypto gaming and especially how did it feel to raise in that time yeah I mean it's very difficult I would say um I think we all came into the space very bullish about just nfts in general right we we came from uh you know we we hadn't made any games before but we wanted to make games that used nfts uh because we thought that you know it's ideal for digital identity and you know you can potentially bring your nfts into other games sometime in the future and also build an ecosystem around those game characters but explaining that to the world at that time uh was almost impossible so yeah you know just raising going through those rounds uh quite difficult I think even at one point we had like one month left to live at the end of 2018. um even before our before our token sale so yeah it was a very different environment but oddly enough uh where I see ourselves heading in uh right now is a little bit similar right because if I go specifically into the AXS token sale for example a lot of people at the time that was late 2019 like early 2020s like people didn't believe in tokens at all so kind of came to this uh it had almost gone full circle from 2017 you know full-on Ico all kinds of tokens and then 2018 2019 oh do you really need a token in your ecosystem and I feel like we're getting there again uh this year because we've had so many tokens that really don't have any specific use case or they don't do anything and everyone's just kind of launching something so now it's going back to basics uh like do you need a token when is a good time to launch the token yeah it's a very similar question is that we had even back then in 2018 2019. yeah I mean Delphi was one of the earliest investors in actually kind of believed in you guys before this whole bull run um Piers when you guys invested in axi what was your thesis and has that changed while watching the space and actually evolve yeah so I think um sort of delphi's initial familiarity with axi came from a um interesting enough when when the original sort of Founders dropped out of Wall Street and started the research business the first sort of paid research gig they did was a sort of um landscape of crypto gaming um of all the projects covered 18 months later the only one that you know actually hadn't um only just survived but you know still had a very engaged Community was axi um and so as a result um further down the line actually uh sort of Delphi ended up doing some work around the AXS governance token and sort of building you know relationship with the team through that and so by the time the sort of um you know actual token Rays came around there was a lot of familiarity with the project and sort of the direction of travel um again we'd seen a super engaged community that we're very excited about and the team had played a significant hand in building out that model and and therefore um you know we had a ton of comfort around that and so in terms of how like the thesis has changed I suppose since then um obviously it's been incredible to reflect on uh what a what a sort of powerful Journey it's been fraxy and how it's kind of really obviously um cast light on on sort of how powerful this sector can be um but you know you asked Alex like what was it sort of like back then it was uh you know very much crickets in the crypto gaming space and obviously um 20 20 sorry 2021 was was an incredible year that kind of um sort of I guess redefined sort of expectation I think anyone um that tells you back then that they well Alex might disagree right because there's a sort of unwavering ambition and conviction but anyone who really tells you that they sort of anticipated things happening that big that soon back then is you know you know it was difficult to see um but I think uh yeah having seen it evolved so dramatically and obviously now sky mabis like having a much sort of broader stance in in the market and um not only having paved the way but now sort of um establishing infrastructure to try and support others is is definitely great to see yeah actually kind of riffing off that a little bit when we look back at the original release of the axi classic game uh which really hits the most traction the when we look at the quality of that game it's actually one of the earlier experiments that we had so we after we shipped it to the market we actually pretty quickly realized that this is probably not going to be the game that that takes us mainstream uh just because the quality was not necessarily there we didn't uh live operate it in the way that most normal web 2 games are are live operated but what actually made it work was the underlying community that we had built over two and a half years before the game even launched and then we also had a business model and Innovation with the two token model which really uh kind of boot or turn it into uh growth on overdrive so then again it was less about the game at that point and more about the community and the social fabric that surrounded axi and still does today so what we saw is that axi Infinity kind of became a proxy for not only the card genre itself but also I would say all different genres of games kind of collected into into this one because people really didn't have anything else to play than just axi right so so these games that that like I guess people around the world they have different tastes in games right they want to play FPS games they want to play Forex land games they want to play MMORPGs right so now we're starting to see more of these type of games come come into the market and then potentially like influencers who are playing actually they might actually want to to play different type of games uh for us that's totally fine when we're now releasing axi classic like that's really the the game that we wanted to make for for a long time uh which is you know more similar to Hearthstone or slate Aspire in in in in mechanic wise we're very excited to see that launch uh more globally on App Stores as well so the axi classic game for example was never available on Google Play or even the IOS app store and even then reaching like a 2.7 million daily active users which we have at the peak was very it was interesting to see how far I think tokens can take uh take a product if done so much correctly of course you know you have to be very careful uh about you know the how you tweaks the tokens moving forward but a lot of what we're doing here and I think not only speaking from an axi or Sky Mavis perspective but many different game studios is like we're experimenting and I think we have to be very open about that as well like so what is true product Market fit for example if you have uh token issuance uh that again might give you false signals for example I think right now we have a general idea that people in the in the gaming Market might want to own uh their game items it seems clear but what of course what really found product Market fit was people want to make money online so you know that's no secret don't we all um I I think actually is in a really interesting position like you said um because you're evolving you're constantly experimenting but you're also one of the oldest experiments out there that are still alive and then when you talk about designing your community designing your two token model are there any early decisions that you made that still really affect you today and is there any advice you would give to game Builders who are starting out as well sure yeah so one of the oh you know we have many many learnings uh from the beginning I mean we've been building for four and a half almost five years now uh shipped many different type of games and now you know building an entire ecosystem for uh for our game and also for other game studios in the future I think one of the early learnings that we had is only if you're going to ship a token at least make sure that it makes sense that you know you can actually benefit from the attention that it brings so when we are talking to game studios we have a very specific type of game Studio we're looking for like we want them to be mobile uh focused first we don't want them to have any existing tokens in the market so both fungible tokens and nfts because that actually is a liability from our perspective the second product has shipped the token it means that you have all these expectations from the community that unless handled correctly will turn into a really a disaster down the line of course you know they also need to be experienced Founders and need to be able to take advice but like those are generally the the things that we look for um but that that no token thing is is quite important and probably um what I would advise most Founders to kind of delay the token until the product is ready to to benefit from the attention and then eventually you have uh you have some good uh sinks and balances out and I guess you guys at that I also have similar thoughts totally yeah wouldn't absolutely Echo um that I mean you sort of alluded to earlier on about how um back then everyone was kind of sort of sheepish about um you know tokens and we seem to be entering a period in the market again where there's some hesitance around it not just you know from the sort of regulatory perspective where we've been getting some some sort of pressure but um certainly yeah like our advice at the moment is that um so for one don't sort of underestimate you know the significance of releasing a token and sort of the um I suppose the complexity involved with managing sort of an open economy and um yeah two is is ensuring that all of the sort of anticipated roadmap items in terms of you know the kind of requisite syncs and offsets in the economy actually are ready to go when you think they will be and if there's any you know semblance of Doubt around that it's better to earn the side of caution sort of release slower um there are many ways in which you can uh still promise to reward for that activity without actually releasing it into the economy um you know one approach that you know you guys took at one point even though I'm not sure actually how much knowledge there was around it beforehand is obviously the sort of retroactive airdrop the other approach is sort of um releasing rewards that are effectively like locked in a contract if you like and they almost vest and unlock over time but people can see what they're entitled to should they continue to play and so there are ways to benefit from the effects of a token without actually having it in the wild and potentially causing damage if um again certain aspects of the economy roll out or something like that as sort of a delayed so that's definitely um The Stance we're taking at the moment as well yeah and kind of the last point about talking if you're not too careful you only you will attract the wrong Community right I think we've all seen that uh especially with the pfp kind of 10K hype uh just by I think a lot of people are trying to experiment now with with even giving it giving it away uh but the problem there is if you're not careful with the like rewarding the the wrong people there too it's like your your giveaway is getting bolted right so you actually the the real advice here is that you just have to get your hands dirty do the work yourself talk to the community like literally we spent two years doing unscalable things talking to the real people in our community to make sure that they were there and then that Community is a big part of why when we got on board or when we onboarded Millions is that we could how we could even make it work uh so I would not advise that like having a Discord as the main centerpiece as you start really growing because then again you get metal many like middleman scammers potentially who even try to take the narrative so when I look back I what happened with oxy a lot of the narrative actually shifted from the early the Early community that we had like the one that that Delphi invested in is is like the there wasn't even any token there uh any kind of uh erc20 that people could earn people were just excited about the game that we wanted to build and then eventually as we started releasing the token you see that you get a different type of community that wants to come in and speculate and that's totally fine if you can turn those users from speculators into the real Community but if you're not careful and you grow too fast then suddenly the speculators become the Educators and that's a massive problem because the new community that then is coming after the speculators also become speculators so you really need to pay close attention to to that and I think that's really a unique observation that we had uh with axi yeah so you start started losing control of your narrative and yeah types of people that you brought into the game and I think that's it's a very easy attack Vector for uh for especially mainstream media right because if they come in and see uh that let's for example say that there are you know there are guilds there are good guilds I would say that that try to educate that try to try to build communities and you have uh more or less like the Sixers or in in Ready Player one like the the bad guys kind of uh that are only in it to extract a value from an ecosystem and they go from game to game to game it's very similar to what you would have in defy except liquidity you have people who are farming uh for you and that suddenly can become very aggressive against those people who are in those guilds um so I don't want to call out any names because it doesn't really have any any purpose but just more on a general level I think it's it's something to be aware of from uh from a game developer perspective so if you optimize for guilds or for kind of uh that class of player then you also need to make sure that they are adding value back into your ecosystem in in more of a like I would say unique way so that you can trace it and then reward the right kind of behavior which was always the intention with tokens from our perspective absolutely I'd also add to that narrative point which I think is a great one in terms of who ultimately ends up driving it is like um the pure The Narrative the easier it is for people to do that obviously in the case of you guys right what was going on sort of um in the Philippines during covert was actually really amazing to see right and so when people are able to kind of I guess piggyback off that and sort of like pedal it then um you know only only further contributes to that um and then yeah on the guild front I mean definitely um you know we've centered we've seen a lot of folks evolve towards again um d5s sort of very mercenary in nature if you like going from Project to project and kind of harvesting these things and so that's why again where you can actually tie the full unlock of these in-game rewards to like um much more meaningful sort of like uh gameplay actually and in-game activity then you can try and prohibit some of this stuff but um the playbooks definitely not quite written right and we're still still figuring all this stuff out yeah yeah going off of that you mentioned 10K pfp nfts and narrative and I actually see a lot of game developers starting with an nft collection and my intuition is that it just you're they're still controlling their narrative and it's all about crypto what do you kind of think about games that launch nfts as a strategy before their game actually launches I think it's funny because a lot of pfp collections try to Pivot into game development when they're not game developers and they have no idea how much effort it takes and then suddenly they get evaluations that are tech company wise so to me it's it's uh yeah it doesn't really necessarily make sense I think as a brand like building a brand like a trans IP brand type where you have you have maybe some movies potentially in the future and then you know other game companies building stuff with the IP that does make sense but for that initial Studio to build out those games it's very very difficult um I think there are some guys who might be doing it right like there might be hiring other Studios to build for them I think that makes sense but overall a little bit bearish on on that thesis I think the more utility you generally add to nfts uh the more people expect right so uh from from me I actually prefer investing or buying our assets but don't have any utility uh because I feel like the moment you add more utility it's easier to make a mistake right because let's say that you are issuing a passive type of uh token to the nft holders right okay suddenly now you need to make utility for that passive not erc20 that that's being released and then you own this content treadmill it's very similar to actually being live operating a game only you don't have a game you just have a community and you just have them on Discord so you need to keep entertaining those guys and making more content it's really really difficult so uh yeah more more bullish on just having that not non-utility based nft yeah yeah totally would sort of um suggest that it's not like fundamentally or sort of a good or a bad thing it definitely again depends on sort of proximity to actual tangible deliverable um I'm not really sure I mean obviously the crypto punks and stuff like this kind of 10K pfp convention has emerged but um there's sort of no reason that should be the case I guess it's just the done thing now um but beyond that right like if if you do do these kind of raises um you know it can actually be a very attractive source of capital to developers if done at the right time and afford the community you know sort of upside in the game however that manifests right like um sort of similar to like a Founder's pass or one of these like limited editions you might buy a traditional game and you know you might have Beyond just cosmetics and the typical stuff you might you know it might be a marginal sort of efficiency um or like incremental value add but uh you know the idea is that you actually have actually have sort of material utility and perpetuity throughout that game world so I'm not opposed to the idea I do like it I just think it needs to be um timed properly and you know ideally you uh actually have something not just on the distant Horizon that's playable with them yeah I think I want to touch a little bit on utility and immutability of assets and especially related to to to nfts right so some of the feedback that we're getting is okay axi game characters their nfts uh but we update right we are changing things inside the game uh you know basically one asset can be strong in one day and then potentially be weaker the other day and then people might have especially in the web 3 space they might be like oh well I own this asset does that not mean that I should have like uh should be as strong as it as it was potentially right so from a game developer perspective we try to balance out the economy for the greater good I should say and that is something that we try to communicate outwards all the time but sometimes yeah especially on the web 3 ethos of decentralization uh it gets a little bit uh gets a little bit tricky so what I like to compare it to is similar to Magic the Gathering card uh cards is that you buy the card you still own the card it has utility inside the the season or the the Magic season the standard season that's being played and when it rotates out you might lose that utility I think that is going going to have to be accepted also over time when it comes to to some of these nfts we're actually now testing that out also with the new axi origins game where we have runes and charms that are rotating out each season so that the people are incentivized to buy them for those rewards in that season and then eventually kind of they rotate out and they need to buy new runes and charms which then incentivizes the behavior that we want so more uh more burn of sop yeah I think more spending right yeah being fine with nfts depreciating in value that is like something that the crypto space hasn't really quite uh nailed yet and I think it's difficult because when you're selling nfts or tokens in the beginning to kind of bootstrap funds there's an embedded uh assumption that they should make more money from it even if it's a Founder's past the fact that it is a financialized nft it makes it very it starts it off on the wrong foot um yeah totally I I just said that there's like um I guess there's no world in which whatever approach you take to this is going to appease everyone right there are some people that like the changing matter and like being able to play the market in that respect um you kind of alluded to some of the upcoming changes in the axi economy other other kind of approaches we've seen um like crypto unicorns from Laguna games have made it so that you're effective if you're not continually engaging with your asset then you're like um significantly disadvantaged and so you know it it varies in approach um as I say not everyone's going to be pleased with kind of like every um you know every way each economy is structured but uh I think that's part of the fun of the time we're in right it's like figuring out which models appeal to who and sort of like which genres and sort of implementations make the most sense I think initially when we released some of the rare axi assets which actually Delphi uh uh helped I guess root invest in if you can call it that uh we have some some assets and actually that are incredibly rare there's an origin type of gas and within that class there are some classes called Mystic axes which are uh kind of follow the the triple threat you know principle that we have so they have uh scarcity right there is a set amount maximum amount they have utility inside the game they're supposed to be able to to earn a little bit more or be a little bit stronger and they also have you know they're aesthetically pleasing I think uh for example in the crypto unicorn uh situation where they might remove some of the scarcity aspect to experiment to me that's very interesting um but but not as bullish on on particularly that I think from a crypto uh Native perspective I'm like oh but I like that things are scarce I like holding the the very rare assets because it gives me pleasure for sure time will tell and if you start start messing with rxc collection we'll be pissed off forever exactly yeah I feel like um when people talk about crypto gaming and I hear this a lot in pitches as well people like to point at axi but I feel like they actually miss a lot of how you guys are evolving what do you think people generally miss about axi yeah I kind of touched a little bit on it it's related to the axi classic game that we released early in 2020 so I'm getting a little bit tired that people are judging uh the future of the game on something that we did two and a half years ago uh when there's been significant traction and development since then I mean overall we've built out an entire operating platform uh in the distribution platform which is called the Mavis Hub similar to steam except that it's only focused on blockchain type of games and then particularly on the on the mobile front like we believe that the next billions of uh of players who potentially come from the global South and that they will be onboarded through to crypto through through gaming and that's been the thesis I guess since the since the beginning um but uh when you suddenly become the biggest uh you get a Target on your back and you know it's fine uh we just keep building and we just keep developing and then shipping the game and then we'll see uh I guess what the True Legacy will be in the long term yeah yeah absolutely I'm I have um relatively little patients with people that rock up late and start sort of um you know pointing fingers I think it's uh it takes um like grit and bravery to do things that haven't been done um I think the axi team have been I mean what a you know roller coaster it's been over the last few years like um the fact that uh that everyone's still heads down and there's so much to look forward to in that ecosystem I think should be commended um and yeah to Alex's Point like uh you know it's not like um the team's death to feedback around the economy and the game and stuff like there are a number of sort of um improvements being made on various fronts that uh you know um remedy a lot of those a lot of those issues and uh I think it's again like sort of a learning process for everyone that's interested in this industry I think we've got a long road ahead um you know if it's going to have the impact that we think it will and so uh I think um that kind of energy is not not so welcome yeah I mean we started out believing that the best way to learn something is by doing it that's just how easy it is and so yeah from my uh my patience is very low for uh armchair quarterbacks that come with feedback oh you should just have done this in reality like if you if you look at uh the situation at the time when things were released given the information that a party might have had I'm pretty proud of this the the decisions that that we made and I think we would do most of them uh again of course you know security aspects probably should have focused a little bit more uh on it uh getting out of that one is a pretty pretty big one uh but yeah overall looking back I uh I'm proud of how we've we've handled things so far yeah what would you say are some of the decisions that you might regret or mistakes that you might want to change yeah I mean so of course when you are trying to uh or when you're developing things on the bleeding edge like literally you're you're creating games no one has ever made before you using technology that hasn't been battle tested to to the limits um that you were pushing them then uh trade-offs need to be made looking back at it I wish that we may had been more focused on security of course like I think everyone who's in this room should take a step back and look into their own organizations to try to try to try to visualize what will happen if someone gets compromised like zero trust would be a basic principle that everyone here is following uh and for those who are not that familiar about it basically means that assume that anyone will be compromised at one point sooner or later and that even means yourself so how can you uh move on from that if if you are compromised I think that's one of the uh one of the the biggest learning points that we ever had so focusing on Securities is something that we are have been doing for for you know quite some time now especially because even personally everybody wants to be your own bank but nobody wants to be to have the security of a bank so it's something that's really important um peers as you've been investing in this space do you feel like you've made any mistakes or changed the way you think about the space yeah absolutely um I think that there are a number of things I mean I'll I'll readily admit as well you know like 2021 time when things are all looking very Rosy I I was definitely drinking the Kool-Aid for a while it's easy to uh it's easy to get very enthused at where things are going I think one of the things that I kind of um had hoped I suppose is that in a similar way to how like traditional gaming um became sort of decorrelated to to markets and like um you know if these things if these games are sort of like blowing up in their own right um then they might in some way um be able to kind of insulate themselves from broader market and broader like Market forces that was a sort of like weird thesis I held for some time seeing how that would play out and obviously um so like didn't come true um I think definitely sort of um I don't know one of the things I was definitely excited about was uh just more established traditional IP coming into the space and perhaps seeing um what would like come for that I think um whilst we may still see that in time I think I sort of over anticipated the perceived like imminence of that I guess um so yeah those are some of the things that uh that uh I wish I'd known in retrospect and could have saved some time and energy I think I have a an anecdotal uh comment related to web tube gaming companies so yesterday had a longer conversation with a with a traditional web 2 gaming studio I had been talking to them for some time of course we talked to to many different Studios see if there is an opportunity to to collaborate on IP related stuff or if they're building games inside the the blockchain gaming space and the message was very clear like all blockchain efforts halted indefinitely and uh to me that's very interesting and what it tells me is that this is still early like we still have the opportunity to really influence the future of the internet uh when it comes to when it comes to the games uh and the the products that are being shipped here so I take that as a very bullish sign um and it's kind of following the belief that we had also uh early early in the in the truly in the industry that that it's going to take a long time for these guys to start believing in the business models uh even when they've seen like a breakout use case it's like okay well did it work did it not really work they need to see more and what that means is for you you know for Axiom for everyone else was here is that there is still an opportunity to no matter when you're like even if you're just starting today uh to to potentially influence the the industry and the future of the internet so pretty bullish on that yeah for sure I feel like my intuition is that Bottoms Up IP has a better chance of doing well than top down I think you know games are positive some uh there can be a lot of winners um but just watching the web 3 native teams how Nimble they are and how uh sensitive they are to what's actually happening versus what they want to happen I generally think Bottoms Up IP I'm pretty bullish on like actually yeah the other thing I'd say is like um I guess one thing that uh took me a while to fully acknowledge is just like especially in this crazy marketing industry where everything moves at a million million miles an hour um building games is really hard and takes a long time and like the feedback loops sort of around them are um I don't know I feel like there's a mismatch there for this sector versus what you see in the rest of the market where you you know um can sort of iterate and see those feedback loops so quickly and so um that's yeah that's definitely one thing that I feel like uh many folks in the space need to sort of acknowledge um and try and build some sort of patience around like uh um as I say that sort of feedback loop between idea and you know potential established IP entering the space or whatever or even people building you know their own bottoms up stuff like um it's sort of you know multi-year time frames we need to be looking at this stuff on before we could have any reasonable expectation of like you know sort of delivery on on the promise of these games really green on the the topic of like token economies a lot of games kind of just release their token economy and it's a bit more ecstatic and there's not enough um freedom to change what they've done once they've released a token or nfts and I think it's a space we actually need to be culturally more accepting that these things will change or we can sink them and replace them and airdrop like we could use semi-fungible tokens or just keep using different sets of nfts or introducing them because I think it's almost impossible to launch a game and your token your token economy uh works just from the beginning but that's what we expect and then we keep trying to force that yeah I think it's a lot about communication from the founders of the gaming Studios um and especially because you effectively have different type of communities right so you have and here here is a interesting part when you're Community when you are talking to your community of players the Tome and the information needs to be different than when you're talking to investor based players in a sense and then you also even have Equity investors and token investors what happens there is that you kind of muddle the entire communication so that sometimes when you're talking to you're talking to the wrong people using the wrong terminology and they get super confused because if you want to inform your player base about a change they don't care too much about necessarily the same thing as the real investor base at all so that's something that a lot of people that are in these gaming Studios need to recognize that building communities you really need to isolate like who are the what's the message that I'm sending out who's the target here who needs to know what and why need do they need to know them when do they need to know that and this is something that we spent a lot of time uh thinking about in axi especially when it comes to the up days that we're sending out and just just how we communicate overall and when it comes to changes for nfts and yeah it's actually it's very similar to running a public company way too early on on that topic what would you say are some of the insights you've had into um how to address and engage those different stakeholders like for example our actual players more receptive to like live streams and video updates and are the more investor types more receptive to your you know blog posts you put out um how how have you guys sort of viewed that yeah yeah definitely I think one of the things that we're focusing a lot on for the player base itself is competition right and Esports and leaning into the fact that people who are competing on the leaderboards they can earn rewards so we are rewarding the right kind of behavior inside the game right skills uh gameplay versus what we might have done in the past with SLP and I think we mentioned or mentioned this yesterday is from a game design perspective what we try to reward or we try to find out what kind of behavior Can we reward inside our system with tokens and when you have a game with synchronous battles between players right what happens here is I press the play button and another person around the world also needs to press play we meet each other in the ladder and we battle it out and then the winner gets a reward uh what is good about rewarding that behavior basically you're rewarding player liquidity you're rewarding the fact that when I click play I can find another opponent immediately and that is very important in these uh type of uh kind of battle games because if not you end up with asynchronous battles versus a robot or something else and when you do that you don't get the same level of social um engagement right so when I I'm an ex-competitive gamer when I beat someone five times in a row I want to tell that person on Discord you suck and I think that's a very important social thing to be able to do if you're facing up against a robot or someone else who's predetermined all of his moves it's not as powerful as beating someone in real time being able to emote them in the face and be like yeah this is you know I'm better and that is very you know I think that's some behavior that we want to reward and I think that's sometimes easy to miss inside these crypto systems because they're like oh why are you rewarding SLP is like no it's a part of a bigger system it's a part of the social fabric of the game that we are trying to create which I think is very uh something a little bit of an oversight for for some games so yeah competitive Behavior Competitive Gaming for the player base specifically yeah when it comes to investors because I think peers you are asking about that I've always noticed a con almost like a small conflict of interest selling tokens to investors as well as giving it to Gamers as Builders and investors do you guys have any opinions on that yeah I I'll I'll start a little bit with the with the thesis for the axi Infinity uh shards or the the governance token so it is kind of in the name right actually Infinity shards many shards becomes you know this entire you know big thing and uh the shards in in the axi infinity governance ecosystem basically represent the right to determine the future of the game as it is becoming a decentralized organization sometime in the future now getting to that point is going to be very difficult because you in the beginning you need a ship captain someone to determine the route of the game to keep developing to keep updating it but that is the purpose of the token uh having investors or at an early stage who believe in that vision is very important right because then they can help potentially vote as you are beginning that that dollar Journey uh now it does take a long time a long time to do that we've had some uh feedback from the community that they they wish that we had been Distributing more tokens uh to them it's very tricky if you do it too much then you kind of lose Firepower in the future because every token that you are giving away to the to the player base is effectively marketing to an extent so it should be considered sort of a marketing budget um and if you do it too early you're kind of spending all the uh kind of spending all the the the Firepower that you had so you really need to be strategic about it yeah um I think last question appears what are some things that you want to see in gaming that you haven't really seen yet and you want to see teams experiment more with yeah I think um one of the ideas that we've come across recently that seems uh super interesting and I know you guys have spent some time with them as well um is uh this sort of play-fi model that um no is sort of trying to Pioneer um I guess the the sort of key notion there being like we actually um have a model for implementing crypto around games instead of in them um and for like competitive titles maybe something like sort of Count Strike go or whatever um we can actually massively enhance what's effectively just the sort of Esports infrastructure that exists around these things um and I think that's a really interesting idea whereby you sort of flip the model on its head um players sort of mint their player profiles as nfts um over time those nfts will sort of um the metadata will sort of update and push those nfts so things like kdr like Maps they prefer to play um you know preferred weapon types and things like that um and then you can actually introduce to sort of like unchain tournament brackets where you might have a big sponsor of like a big sort of liquidity pool or prize pool and um the really cool thing about the model they're working on is this um you know notion of introducing permadeath so if you die that energy is actually burnt which is which is pretty cool yeah there's a there's a number of um teams working on sort of I guess Esports infrastructure uh that uses crypto but I think this approach in particular looks really interesting and it opens up like a lot of surface area for um effectively like Community modding in terms of allowing people to build different um I mean in sort of the played by model they're called The Meta games but basically you know different ways to gamble on um uh and and sort of speculate on the activity and kind of the core game Loops so that's definitely a model I'm excited to see come to fruition and and see if you know that really does stick and whether it really can sort of Step Esports monetization up a bit Yeah I think think that's time but to wrap things up thank you guys for your time I think piaz has one of the strongest voices in crypto gaming and Alex Trailblazer so if you guys want to find them after this I'm sure they would love to chat all right thank you [Applause]