And yeah, I will be hosting today's session with rich Cabrera and Siddharth Menon.
Before we get started, I think, Justin, my colleague is about to join and kickstart the festivities, as I'd like to put it. So before we get started, I thought I'll just quickly run you through what we're planning in today's conversation. So quick intros. Rich Cabrera is founder of Ready Player Dow. They are doing a whole host of things. One of the things that they do is the building guild. For web three games, I believe they're also supporting web three gaming projects. You know, we'll dive into that later. And so that when is founder of tagro, he's also the Xerox which is India's largest crypto exchange, and our resident economics expert. So, before we dive into it, I'm just gonna hand it over to Justin, who is going to kind of set the vibe for the day. And you know, then we'll dive into building web three games, you know, investing, playing, you know, all the economic opportunities that web three gaming is bringing to a whole new ecosystem. Alright, Jordan, over to you.
Thanks, Justin. Hey, folks, welcome to today's Twitter spaces powered by tagro I am Jonathan and I'll be one of the hosts alongside Justin who you just heard. While my star sign is Leo, Justin is the one who looks like a tiger like literally, you will mostly hear be whining about the confusion that people often have between the two of us, but it's quite easy to spot the difference you see, and the more jumpy, juvenile and insane one, while Justin on the other hand, is definitely the more seen erudite and intellectual one, and actually looks nothing like his profile picture, by the way, but scratch that we have a very exciting rather captivating discussion lined up with today's speakers, rich Cabrera and Siddharth Menon, we're going to touch upon the nuances of enabling millions to earn through games. Now in my not so humble opinion, rich Ensign, are two of the most qualified folks to speak on this subject. Now to tell you about rich rich is the co founder of ready pair Dow, also known as web three gaming console was building the open Metaverse for one and all. Today, Rich will be talking about the economic opportunities to earn through games. Hi, rich, welcome to Tech grow to the spaces. How are you doing today?
Good, good. Thanks for having me, guys. It's I was gonna say good morning, but I think it's afternoon for a lot of you guys. So
yeah. Yeah, but But it's great to have you here and I'm very excited to hear you. And while we have you on the spaces today, we have Siddharth minute alongside co founder and CEO of tech grow, and also co founder of Xerox, he has a deep experience of building and scaling a crypto exchange and has been involved in web three gaming projects since the year 2018. said hello from tech rotators spaces. How are you feeling in this very moment? How are you?
I'm pretty excited. And thanks so much for coming on? Well, you know, I think it's gonna be really enlightening for a lot of people. You know, who's just very new to the webseries. Space, the gaming space. I keep telling everybody, right in 2018 When I used to go and tell everybody about you know, web three, gaming space is going to be the next big thing. Nobody believed me. And here we are now a lot more interest coming in, and lot more people now talking about it. Good to see that and I hope we keep educating and bring more content for everybody else.
Love this. It was only last week we were talking about building a community in Metaverse, and today we are talking about earning the earning economic opportunities through games. Now, guys Tegra is building a web three games asset marketplace, which brings together gamers investors and traders to create sustainable game economies built by founders with deep experience in crypto and gaming to grow has developed a thesis which will pave the way for sustainability in web three gaming. Now guys, as soon as already spotted, I'm just dying to listen to rich right now. But let's quickly get to Ready Player Dow that is a decentralized autonomous organization committed to harnessing the collective power of play to create equity for all their mission is to even the playing field between the studio and the larger global gaming community by supporting the p2p gaming economy. Now, now, we just about to get down to business and to speak about the code and get the insights out from both our panelists both our speakers today, but before we get started with the serious business of me making millions through games. I thought it'd be only fair if we started with a little bit of fun. Now I've got a rapid fire lined up first hidden rich both now react to heart if your tableau community NGO if you're excited for this segment because I don't even really know if I should be asking these questions that little too fun. Okay. I said since you already know the drill, I'll be kick starting this with you. What I have is I have like five art questions and we'll be doing it quick. And then you know, we will not keep the Tegra community waiting no longer. The first question that I have said for you is, what is the first video game that you ever played?
Well, that is flight simulator. I remember Microsoft Flight Simulator.
My verb What about you, Reg? Which one was the first game that you played?
I think it would have to be the Super Mario Bros on the Super Nintendo. We had. We had a cool setup in our in our basement with the Super Nintendo. And I think that's when I started to fall in love running through the different levels.
Well, pretty cool. I think it's so funny. It's different for all three of us. For me, it's Contra. But, but I think I want to know this rich. Tell me this. What's the game that you can't wait to play in the metaverse, a game that probably hasn't launched in the metaverse yet, but you're really excited to see it play out in the metaverse.
I'll say to them just because I know the team is really well. But Midnight's society is a FPS being developed by Dr. Disrespect in a studio that he started. And then the other one is lifeforce games, which is pretty under the radar. But I know the team very well personally, I think in terms of economic design, they're leaps and bounds ahead. And I think they're, they're building an extremely intriguing ecosystem of games. So it's not just going to be one game. It's going to be like a meta verse of games, right? So those two are very different, but just as exciting.
Who wouldn't want a meta verse of game like that for sure. But I have another question that I have for use it. And as I do that, and as our community pens down the two games that Rich has mentioned, here is what I want to know from you. What object said, Do you misplace or lose the most?
I think you've got to be mindful. And that's it. That's the only thing that
gets Cricket Cricket sleek and smooth. And probably I think the answer for this would be same for quite a lot of us. My question for you is,
what did you do with your first ever web three game earnings?
I think I definitely reinvested them to but to get you know more assets and be more competitive. I think that's what what was like, exciting me is being able to reinvest those assets with that without worrying about not being able to get out of those assets if I needed to, like most web two games,
was that an insight that was just dropped? Stay tuned Tegra community because we'll be back with a key core segment with not just a jumpy gate, but rather someone erudite intellectual and very, very same. Justin will be taking it away from me after I asked my final rapid question. And that is for you said and that is one thing as for you. We all should watch out for in 2023.
I think the adoption of crypto has been amazing. In I've seen that happening since 2015 1618. And now is the where we are going to see more consumer adoption. And I believe games are going to be the gateway industry to start with. So for any any consumer adoption, usually, we have seen people start with games and game industry is just getting right. I'm very bullish about this and really looking forward for not just next year, but also this year.
Damn guys, while one side we're getting insights on the other, what we get to hear is if we are at the cusp of what's going to be a giant leap forward. And with that, let's dive right in to today's discussion. Over to you, Justin.
Hey, Justin, thanks, Dan. rates that really excited to get this conversation started. Let me pick on something that you just said, rich, you know, essentially you reinvested whatever you earn through, you know, a bunch of games and stuff like that, right. They will support supposed to be a little later on in the conversation. But I'd love to understand how you decide, you know, what, what games make sense playing investing in and so on. One of the things that you mentioned is good economy design. And I think you've touched upon Dr. disrespect, also having had, you know, a lot of experience in the gaming ecosystem. So I think these are some of the things to look at. What else do you think is important for him? That's those players to consider.
Yeah, one of the things that I think is important is paying attention to how the economic flow works. We saw, you know, I mentioned I reinvested my original earnings. And that was, you know, over a year, a year ago in x infinity. But we saw that, that economy kind of sizzle out. And I think what we are beginning to see, as you, as you mentioned, economic design. And that's why I really like what like horse games is doing is we need to see token and NF TS tied closer into the core game loops. So not only does, you know, having a token and NF T, for these web, three games, you know, play into effect, but also how they're used. And one of the things that I've been writing out writing about the past few months is if you have to ensure that the token. If it's being rewarded through gameplay, it should also be used and burn through gameplay to ensure stability, or additional stability and economy. Obviously, they will isn't like a perfect solution. But it's step one, right. And that's one of the things that XE and a few of the other games did not do. So that's one of the like, one of the more important pieces that I look for if I'm going to be invested into a game, but as I've said, you know, previously on Twitter and stuff is, look, you can actually enjoy a game, but not enjoy their tokenomics. Right. So there's other games that I like to play, but I probably wouldn't invest in because I have some concerns, right? So those are, those are the kinds of things that like step one, if you're looking to invest in these games, instead of just play them is make sure that you understand how the token flows through the game.
Got it? Got it. I think, you know, I will dive deeper into this later on in the conversation, to get things started off, you know, Ready Player Dow is a guild, but I think you know, you have a lot bigger plan for it. I'd love for you to kind of, you know, get into the nitty gritties of how guilds work and operate. And also, you know, maybe you can touch upon why guilds exist in the ecosystem? While you're at it.
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start with what Ready Player Dow is, and kind of our long goal, and then we'll talk about guilds. But essentially, Ready Player doubt focuses on three pillars, which is community content, and investments, right. So our community consists of our guild and all the gamers that follow us for source of information and a source of games that we've vetted. Right, and that we see as more sustainable and legitimate. Because, you know, we've seen over 200 games so far, and probably only partnered or invested in 10 10% of those maybe 20. Right. So, with that being said, there's a lot of, you know, fish year stuff out there, or stuff that doesn't look right or unsustainable. So we try to position ourselves like that for our community and ensure that if you see us talking about a game, it's, it's generally because we've, we've vetted it as much as we could and see it as you know, a proper web three game that we're excited about. And then the content side of things, you know, we just signed a content creator, we're going to be signing more. The problem is there, there aren't too many, web three games out at the moment, right. So we're going a little bit slower on this vertical. But the idea is to create content, so that our community is knowledgeable around the games that we're investing in that we're playing, and they understand how it works, how the economy works, as well as what's exciting about the game. So like, I was streaming big time, the other day, I was streaming, I dropped some videos on cipher, and a few others. So just games that excite me and I want to show people what they look like, even though they're still in beta. And a lot of people don't know, you know, what the gameplay looks like. So I want to show that to people and we're gonna we're gonna start recruiting a suite of content creators to help us do that as well. And just spread the word of what through gaming. That look, it's just gaming with asset ownership, right. And then finally, the investment side is we're trying to support these games financially and support any infrastructure that is going to help further the web through gaming space. So UX and wallet design and things like that, that are net positives and will make the gamers Life's easier to one minute pause there should dive into guilt.
No, no, no, I think, you know, we got a fair idea of you know how you're thinking about now? Yes, please, please continue on guilt.
Yeah, so as I mentioned with with xe that was they had what I like to call an open economy, which essentially allowed people to come in, play the game, earn token, and then sell that token or extract it right. So a lot of guilds started popping up, because they wanted to take part in that financial aspect, recruit a lot of gamers and then lend assets that they purchased to those gamers so that those gamers can play at a lower entry point. And then they just take a certain percentage of their earnings. So that's, that's like what the model that model was last year. And I think we're going to see that shift a little bit. As some more stable and hybrid economies start to come out, and we see more sustainability and the token designs and T designs, where the gamers will will still be earning NF T's and other resources in game, but it might be closer tied to the actual gameplay. So there might be more requirements or higher requirements for recycling of those assets into the game and the gameplay for you to succeed in that game. So I think there will always be people looking for earnings, but I think it's going to incentivize the gamers themselves and the competitive players more. So we might see less of that model of guilds. And we might see more of making the shift that you know, ready player that was making, in terms of building infrastructure or creating a content esports team, which is which is what we are planning to do as well. And creating a traditional guild or community of gamers that are interested in the game and interested in furthering their progress in that game by teaming up together. So similar to like water or craft guilds, room Runescape and Eve Online, right? You see these gamers, pitch in together, play together, cooperate, to further their direction in said game, and I think we're gonna see a lot more of that, like game specific guilds in the future.
Got it? Got it. So the way you look at it is, guilds are going to have to evolve with the evolving models that most laboratory games started out with. And essentially, y'all aren't just looking for folks who. So my understanding and you know, please do correct me if I'm wrong. Most of the players in a lot of guilds are from time rich economies, such as Vietnam, Philippines, parts of South America, and so on. But what you're saying is that, in the long run you you will see a lot of people who are playing and participating and spending a lot of time. And these are folks, not just you know, the ACU a living, perhaps, but also to kind of band together and have a much richer gaming experience.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the earning is still there, right. So if you become a really competitive player, you're gonna be able to acquire higher level assets that other people are going to want, but maybe they don't have the time to put in so that like earner aspect of top players, people that are contributing a lot of their time and effort into the game, I think we'll still be able to acquire like high level assets that will that'll fetch a fair price on on the market, right. And that's the beauty of web three games. It's like, Look, if I'm grinding, I used to play thanks a lot. So I had this one skin from like, very early season, that when I jump on now, people were like, Yo, that's really cool. That's like a rare asset you can't buy it on, on the like the game marketplace. But I think if it was an NF T, I would have been able to sell it to a lot of people that are interested because it was very rare, because I just used to grind it a lot right. And I think that model is going to exist in a lot of what the games and then obviously if you are playing a lot and and are very good at the game, you'll be able to earn a lot of it tokens, which you can either use to reinvest into your gameplay to help you further yourself even more. Or of course you can become a liquidity provider and sell it to the market. And I'm sure there's going to be other more creative ways to you know, either reinvest is tokens or provide value to the gaming community by being being that liquidity provider as well.
All right, all right. So, do you have anything that you'd like to add on, you know, essentially, each, each game is going to kind of start, you know, like in xe, you have to grind it out for SOP and you know, gamers realize that, hey, I don't really have the time threat. Let me just kind of get someone else to do it. Right. I'd like to understand this from an economic perspective, because in the real world, we see everything moving towards such deficiencies. So right, how do you see this evolving in in gaming says,
Well, I think, one one good observation. Observation is like, in 2018, there were a lot of these crypto games coming up. But they were no, I mean, at least I did not know about, you know, guild economies. Not many. At least, it was not visible then Right, like, so. But, but what has really helped here is, you know, the guild economy is so important, because back then it was very difficult to get adoption into games, it was very difficult to teach them how the game works, it was there was a high friction in terms of, you know, getting people on board. But now, guilds are doing a really fantastic job today. And the kind of contribution that they do towards this ecosystem, is actually training folks identifying, you know, games, and identifying, you know, scholars and teaching them training them. So all that thing is so important, because you're creating a very high quality players. And in a very innovation game place, because most of the games today are too early. And it's very, it's not, it's not tuned to how web two games are, right, I could switch, which probably would just get started. And most of things are very fine tuned how it works. But but because it's web three, you have, you know, your wallets, and all those other connections, everything that you need to do to get started, there's a big, big friction to even get started, right. So it's just made it much more easier. And now they're also involved, right? The kids now are thinking about building better tools, they are now become, they're more of a representative of all the players or the community, to the game studios. And they literally, you know, are like the beta testers who test out the game and say, hey, you know, these are the feedbacks, or these are, what you should change, or the economics are not too, right, because they're the ones who are actually playing multiple games, and one learning from one game, but to another learning from other to another game. And that's how you are building a better, you know, making the change within the whole ecosystem, I think, you know, this is going to be really good, and good to see these kind of, you know, efforts being put together to sort of build a better games ecosystem.
I'm very interested in how you put it so that essentially, the economic opportunities that one could see from here is not just playing the game, but participating on a deeper level in shaping the ecosystem. So essentially, people could kind of become beta testers, and, you know, there's, there's the whole community angle for games, Rex was talking about, you know, content creators, and we didn't see, you know, gaming content, you know, really explored, you know, over the last 10 years, you know, YouTube, Twitch, you know, billion dollar spaces for content streaming, but there's very little happening for content in the factory space. Again, you know, these are economic opportunities that a lot of people don't necessarily talk about when we say that pre gaming, but you know, like you're pointed out, I think it's super interesting. So, I'd like to understand a little bit about, you know, ready player now, rich, tell me a little bit about, you know, how, how do you know, guilds work for years? Right? How do you help them? How does one become part of a guild? And, you know, is it is it possible for your to retain players for your guild? Or is it something that you know, a player can wander across guilds? Tell me a little bit about that.
Yeah, you know, different guilds are gonna have different opportunities. So we don't have any issues with players wandering across guilds. And I think that's going to what's going to happen is, you will see certain guilds focusing on certain games and that's where players want to go For those games, so we try to provide as many opportunities as possible in terms of our partnerships for our scholars, but of course, like I said, there's there's like over 200 games being developed in web three, and we probably aren't going to partner with all of them. So, it's totally understandable if a scholar wants to play a game that we aren't representing or partnered with, to go to another to another Guild, and essentially, what a guild will do is they acquire the assets necessary to play the game, which generally have a financial cost to them, and lend them out to to the gamers. So those gamers are able to come in and use the assets to play the game through some kind of rental mechanism. Sometimes it's developed by the guilt, not just developed by the game itself. But what they can do is instead of, say, paying like $1,000, for this competitive asset for them to play at a higher level than like, the free to play or the entry level, they can go to a guild and, and sign up to be able to, to use that asset. And then what happens is, there's like, there's a assets split. So we, we give 70% of everything that the player earns back to the player, and we just we keep 30%, which has, has essentially been top of market for any guild, pretty much that we've seen around the space, especially at our size. So we think those those are, are fairly generous. So most, I think are giving around 50%. But that's the general like top level. And then also as a guild, you have the community, right? So you're able to strategize with other gamers in the community, you're able to talk through which assets might be better plan for tournaments, if you're gonna participate in them and potentially win those earnings. And with Ready Player doubt, anything that you win in a tournament, you get to keep. So we're pretty generous focused on trying to create the best possible environment for the members of our guild. And essentially, to sign up, you can just go to our ready player now, community discord, and there's, there's directions there for for how to get into the guild, depending on what game that you're looking for.
Alright, so it looks like a lot of times, the kinds of players you attract might depend on the kind of games that you manage to partner with. And, apart from that, I was just, you know, thinking, again, I can't be 100% Certain, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Most factory games require you to buy a certain asset, you know, an NFT to get suckered. And that's usually something that might be a little expensive if there's a lot of demand. And it's, to an extent, you know, acts as a gatekeeper for people to enter into the game. And that's essentially, where actually kind of got the whole guild models going, is my guess. So is it possible that, you know, guilds will have to start evolving, if a lot of games stop having those initial NFT sales and you know, people can start playing for free? What happened to that?
Yeah, you're spot on. And that's kind of why I was mentioning, I think we'll see a lot more of those financially oriented guilds, wind down and some of the ones that are making, you know, other contributing factors to the community into the games are going to be the ones that are are more sustainable. But yeah, you're spot on in terms of how they're formed and why, but a lot of the games that we're talking to, and what I like to see is is more free to play and, and then the entity aspect of it varies depending from from game to game project project. But some of the variations are free to play, but you need an NF T to earn which is the direction the axes going. A few other games are doing free to play and through the gaming you can earn rare cosmetics, which is a little bit more traditional, feels like feels like a you know a reward mechanism. And so you won't have anything different than the regular players. And the third one is like an NF t as a Battle Pass, where you can earn other NF T's so that's like a more traditional like what to you pay for the spot? They'll pass. But it's a free to play game, but you get higher level and cooler cosmetics, skins, etc. through that. And then finally, there's a model where it's free to play, and then you can earn some tokens. But to really be competitive, you have to reinvest those tokens into crafting and upgrading your unit. And that might mean minting into an NFT. And continuously upgrading repairing and, and building up your, your strategy through that reinvestment. So there's a few different models that we're seeing come. But I think like you said, we're going to have to see some strategic shifts and away from the purely financial extractive models of guilds and more to something that provides value to the community and, and the web three games themselves.
I think that was a very interesting breakdown of how you see models evolving. So that do you want to kind of touch upon how you see things evolving in terms of web three models from token perspective, from the role of guilds in the whole ecosystem.
From an on token perspective, you know, we there's already a lot of evolution that is happening there a lot of experiments that are being carried on. This is one economics, if there is one game, which is testing out the economy, and there's another game that is trying out another economy. So one is to even figure out what's the best one. And probably because guilds are always trying out different different games, they probably are the first ones to even identify which one is working really well. But in general, when we talk about web three gaming itself, right, so a lot of assets are now becoming a more of commodity markets. And when we look at the commodity market, these are like the, you know, the the foundation for any, any, any economy to be built on. In just in real life. Also, like if you have seen, we started with the basic commodity markets, or basic resource market that's called and slowly building on to the entire community stacking on top of each other, and later came the currency and everything around it. So, so in general, when when this these, these economies grew, they, they literally grow at a very high pace, in general, you know, the ASEAN and the new new Larian comes in today, we are sort of struggling towards having a more sustainability on it, I guess, you know, you're not Tetro we are sort of working on to work towards building these token on sorry, economic designs, economic fundamentals that's on on how to how to bring the best of, you know, the traditional economy into the gaming economy, and build towards that. And I guess, if if everything works together, everybody is going to play a role, especially in terms of adoption, where I see guilds playing a bigger role, and sort of expanding that market, especially because guilds today have has become very specialized in terms of not just adoption, but also now understand the asset model as well, right. So speculating even in the marketplace.
So, so, they have also evolved Furthermore, so even speculating in the market, how to hold asset how to sell assets, these are very important, you know, understanding to have and I think how gradually evolve, it will become more of a very advanced powerhouse, you're basically playing a bigger role in the gaming ecosystem.
Well, I guess Justin is facing some issues as that's happening. And if that is the case, and if you guys can hear me right now, this only means that fun is about to begin, because I don't necessarily talk about only the essentials or the economic opportunity. But I also see this as a big community opportunity. And when I talk community, I talk questions. Here's what I have a question, raise your hand if you would want to answer this. And the question that I have for the Tegra community right here till the time Justin is back is When and where did you first hear about web three? Let's see if someone raises their hand and get to know when they were able to when they got to know about web three to begin with.
While I, as I scroll down, and as I see my screen, I see very little or actually, wow shortage is here with us who's listening. We see some repeat community members. And wow, as I don't have any response to this, I think when I heard first about web three was last year when I got to know about it from a friend who was actually working on something similar. When did you first hear about web three, Rick?
Yeah, so I was, I've always been falling Ethereum since like 2007. In that's what really intrigued me was the difference between, you know, Bitcoin and Aetherium is the, you know, peer to peer application hosting blockchain, essentially platform. And I don't think we call it web three back then. But in terms of the gaming side, it was it was probably March of 2021, from seeing Alexis Ohanian, making investment into x infinity, who I had been following since he started. Reddit.
Wow. For me, for a person who essentially doesn't follow as much and kind of gets to know about these community spaces, or conversations. It's very enlightening to know, but also on the other. On the other hand, right? You know what, Siddharth actually started, I think, in 2018, on working on blockchain. So said, what about you? What was webseries? Introduction to you? Where did the term come into play? When did you got to know about it?
Yeah, of course, the web three term was coined maybe a year back last year, when everybody started realizing that, you know, what is where we are? And what's the next big thing, and sort of putting a tag to the old that is web two, to web 2.0. You know, I think if you were in the old social era, so we all used to call 2.0. And now tagging this as web 3.0. But from a crypto point of view, I think it was two year 2013 Or somewhere. You know, I had a professor coming into my office and it professor and he spoke about Bitcoin saying, hey, you know, people are paying in Bitcoin, it's something that is that's been mined on the internet and being paid with some something else is not backed by money. And I always felt that, you know, at least at that time, you know, I literally debated with him to say, Hey, how's that? How's that work? And then he taught me the concept of money, you know, what is money? I just kept on it was just there in my head, like, you know, what, something that he said, but I guess over time, it grew. I started doing mining a little bit here, there. And, and was always sort of in connect with this. But I think in 2017, is when we got serious and started working on.
Well, makes actually a lot more sense now. And of course, the terms essentially came late. I agree. But of course, I am a part of that web two, web three gaming ecosystem in talking about that. I do have a question to throw to the time Justin is back. You know, as someone deeply entrenched in the web three gaming ecosystem, what do you think game developers need to rethink when it comes to building more sustainable gameplay? I said, you can take this up.
You know, over over years,
games have evolved, I think, I think rightly put by somebody, no game has evolved in terms of how physics engine works, how visually it works, and there's a lot of technology that has come in how multiplayer it works, many things have evolved within the games right? Today, we are at an era where where the the sort of humanity is also evolving, where we are going to a super nation that is beyond countries to an internet country, right, which is bound without any boundary and the the world economy is changing right there. And now suddenly, to see that games are also adopting to it and you know, which I think having an in game currency or token was so named native in the games way before crypto, right everybody had a currency or token long vibe, even before crypto came in, but now to sort of have a new meaning into it. And to sort of have a newer perspective is is fantastic. And in this whole whole evolution, what needs to be focused on is is basically the economics part I think we are going through that phase where this part the economics part has been you know literally tested experimented out till we get a an economy which which is sustainable economy, which can be scaled within the game and outside the game and and then this open economy that we are all living in.
Yeah, I just, I got kicked out. I'm back again, as co host. And you know, I'm gonna pick on what's it last set, like, you know, I think we're moving towards borderless, you know, moving beyond nations and stuff like that, and, you know, in a way As you know, rich, kickstarting something that brings people from across the world together. I think that's super fascinating. The the power that my guess is that guilds will have over games is going to be a fair amount in the initial days. And so, you know, I just want to touch upon how, you know, guilds who have a lot of players.
How do you think game
developers should work with guilds, not just from a player acquisition point of view, right, but in just shaping the future of web three games, building better gameplay, building better economic systems, etc?
Yeah, so key things that we've done is help them beta test. So we've, we've user scholars to test out the game and try to poke holes and, and give a lot of feedback in terms of like, first iterations of the games as they're being developed out. So one of the great ways that we've been able to help is from an advisory standpoint, so we're also advising and working with a lot of the games that we partner with, giving them feedback and seeing what the what the broader group of gamers are saying and and the issues they're facing, and how to improve them, is actually a very underlooked, underserved utility of guilds that they can provide, right. And then once you start having more competitive players, as well, they can give feedback on the competitive side of it, what eSports could look like, what the comps look like, if if things are overpowered or unbalanced, we can give feedback there as well. So I think in actually you can tie guilds into the development side of things as well, and not just see them as like a community bootstrapping mechanism, which obviously is a huge, huge value add as well. And then the marketing side is encouraging the guild to the gamers in the guild to start streaming and sharing about the games that they enjoy and that they like, obviously, from more organic and natural standpoint, it's that's going to be the best kind of marketing is, you know, peer to peer, word of mouth, type Mark type marketing as well. So just cornering, that excitement around games that they enjoy. I mean, all these things combined, this is going to be a huge value add to the games that they partner with more so than, you know, some of the traditional VCs. And what what they do, and one of the things we're looking to do is partner with marketing, third party marketing teams to help put together some videos and and other resources that can be shared across several platforms such as like, tick tock YouTube, Twitch, Facebook.
Awesome. So guilds are definitely not just, you know, communities of people banding together, but you know, eventually you'll see a possible tech stack being built to kind of organized the system. I'm going to touch upon, you know, I mentioned that I will go deeper into understanding from an investor point of view, you know, how does one evaluate, again? How does one evaluate assets? How do you determine if a game is worth your time and capital? So that I'm going to throw this question to you, and, you know, ask you how you evaluate stuff.
So I think, for me, there are a couple of couple of points right there. One is obviously the game loop is the game loop, sort of accruing value per per stage for the assets that is there. Right. So there will be multiple assets in part of stage. I think one thing that Richard mentioned about the the burning of these assets, and today, right now, most of the assets are just been minted, there's a lot of inflation, but how is the deflation being controlled? And these are like very basic understanding, and also put put together if it's an asset, what's the predictable supply that looks like overtime? Right? Is this is this predictable? Or is it going to be random? Or is it going to be, you know, is there any formula to that? Right, because me as an investor, if I were to put in my money, I want to make sure that there's not too much supply coming tomorrow. Then then I think, overall, of course, you know, the game is lovable, what people are talking about, you know, their reviews on you know, the fun part of it. That's that's something that you know, it's it's more good because without that I think the rest of the things are more just formulas not actually being executed. Yeah, I think, more or less, I think these are these are top line of you know how I would see it. More importantly, again, from a market point of view, if at all, I if I were to size, how much how much funds I would allocate, I will see what's the liquidity that looks like. So it's by design, is it something that can absorb a lot of liquidity? Or where I can exit a lot of liquidity? Right, those kinds of things. I think that's a little more advanced for, but But yeah, that these are things that is very important for as an investor or trader to sort of, you know, look into game and get into it. Okay,
so rich, I was scrolling through your Twitter feed and your tagline and I came across something you mentioned about, you know, the need to solve things on the wallet front. Essentially, if you know the next billion gamers are to be brought on chain. I think this is one of the key things that needs to be solved. Do you want to take a stab at this?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll actually be speaking with the Stardust team in New York City for NCIC, but I really like what they're doing in terms of building a custody wallet that can support NFT crypto assets. And essentially, the reason I why I like this is, is because everyone already has a steam a lot, right? They know how to use these proper end game wallets. And if you're able to build those into the games, and you know, web to gamers coming to play the game don't have to create a meta mask and, you know, save their seed phrase and worry about getting hacked, and not losing it and all this other stuff, but they have a custody wallet managed for them inside the game that has their assets, it's going to create a smoother transition and experience into those, those games. And then the web three native people or once people are looking to sell or move their assets, all they have to do is connect their web three wallet to this custody wallet and transfer the assets over. So it actually just simplifies the management of those assets for people who don't really want to or care to have to deal with all that. And I think that UX, then the user experience, part is extremely, extremely important for onboarding the masses into these type of games. And I think that's going to be the standard. You know, in two years of not having, you know, it's either going to be everybody has a web three wallet, that's going to be a massive improvement on web on meta mask, which is what we have now, which just isn't that great. Or airways going to just use custody wallets from the games that they love and then transfer out if they need to.
Got it. Got it. What do you think are other things that needs to be solved in order to get those next billion gamers on chain?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of education that needs to be done, people are viewing the space as another way for game publishers to extract through NF Ts. And I think that there's a few reasons for that. It's because they kind of had that experience with game publishers in the past like, like Blizzard I don't know if anybody here is here is remembers the Don't you guys will have phones comment that they made, which was pretty toned up that one of their conferences. But, you know, a lot of gamers are seen as game publishers as always trying to find new ways to take money out of their wallet. And the other issue that kind of plays into that is they see a lot of these profile picture projects going for hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of dollars last year. And they're like, Dude, what the heck, I don't want this these like absurd prices to be part of any games that I'm putting money in. So I think that's why it's very important to see a lot of these free to play games come, which we talked about early with these new models. And then allow gamers to see and be educated in the fact that look, it's not about taking your money. It's actually about giving you more empowerment in the game that you enjoy, and you'd love to play in giving you the pure ownership and the freedom to transact of the assets that you have inside that game. Yeah,
I think that makes a lot of sense. So I think you've you've you know, we've had conversations on this, you know, bringing more people on chain. You, you bet by Xerox, you know, India's largest crypto exchange and during that time, you were responsible for educating a lot of people about crypto getting them to You know, buy their first Bitcoin and you know, then explore the rest of the crypto ecosystem. But even then, like, you know, it's it's not it's not something that's very easy, especially in you know, let's say markets like India, where there's a, there's a massive audience of gamers and so on. But how do you go about educating them and starting to bring them on chain? Yes,
I think one of the very important thing is we need to be responsible of how what we are doing right, as an industry. And even if it was your ex, the the biggest the biggest way we sort of wanted to grow ourselves was by educating people and not by, you know, a friend telling other friend to buy something, right. So, for us, what we were trying to do is, is to basically explain the fundamentals of what is the whole crypto thing that is happening? And what are the fundamentals? What is money? What is all these things to just to give a basic of what is what is the revolution that we are all part of right? And then going into deeper into what what Bitcoin is, what
Aetherium is,
how do you evaluate it? What is supply? What is analog supply many other things. So, these are very technical, but we thought it is very important to sort of give it in a very capsule size, so that people are able to understand this, then, of course, you know, when you come to exchange, how you use it, what you should be careful about security and things around that. So there was a very general, you know, learning or an educational program that we did across India. And this was very early ces 2019, if I'm not wrong, and it was one of the biggest, even reaching out to tier three, tier four cities. And I believe something has to be also done for for the gaming industry as well, right. So it is to bring out the true potential of things. There's obviously good and bad, and whenever you have too much good. Also, there's too much bad. So how do you sort of protect people, and the best way to do that is to educate them. And the best way for them to taking advantage is to sort of again, you know, educating them and telling them, you know, how these things work. And it has been like that journey. I think, even even here, what we are doing today, right now is to sort of get a bunch of people who want to learn, and sort of have a perspective from different different people about this industry, rather than just us saying, but everybody else talking about how they see how they have seen it evolve and what they see, and and then learn from everybody else to be part of this.
Got it? Yeah, I think the first thing that you said, you know, stuck with me. I think if you're doing it, we have to do it responsibly. I kind of worked in in the FinTech space. And I've seen, you know, things being done. Not so great by a lot of players out there the same for the crypto space. And I think it's very important given that gains aren't just that possible economic opportunity. I think at the end of the day, we shouldn't forget that the reason people play games is to be entertained. And, you know, if if we were to just stick with the economic opportunities, then, you know, I don't think it's a game anymore. It's all over again. Right. So I think, you know, the responsibility to kind of put it out there, right, build better games, I think, you know, falls falls on the shoulders of all builders out there. Which brings me to a couple of things. We've got a poll app. You know, if you've showed up, go claim yours. I pinned a tweet. There's also you know, we've got a discord community, which is starting to get pretty active with gamers, investors, developers joining over there. And I'm going to pin that in a bit. I also wanted to say that, you know, if you've been on this site for a while, why don't you tweet out, you know, your observations, your learnings, your takeaways from the session with rich and Siddharth. We've, you know, if you do that, and it's a really good one, Siddharth has promised to retweet it to his 100k Plus, followers, maybe maybe, you know, Rich will be kind enough to do the same. I think the more we can spread word about, you know, playing with three games, the opportunities that are there, I think, you know, the better for the entire ecosystem. And with that, you know, I think after a question or two, I will open it up for the community to ask a question. I'm curious as to you know, So who are the builders in the web three gaining space that are really exciting? Rich, I think you already mentioned a few of them. It would be cool if you you know, mentioned some of those projects, some of those builders, and you know, other projects that you're very interested in seeing the evolution of.
Yeah, a few other ones that I mentioned minutes society and Doctor disrespect, I'm I mentioned Lightforce games, who's ran by at Boomer LSG. And at Satsuma. And then cipher is another one that I really like and enjoy. Play big time I mentioned in passing is another game that I'm a fan of that was playing a day. There's there's a few, you know, pretty great teams out there guild of Guardians is another one that's that's been around for a while and been developing for a long time. And it's going to be mobile. For all you mobile gamers out there. But yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to dump too much out here. But those are, those are probably top top of mind that I can remember off the top my head.
Alright, and What projects are you following or, you know, people that you know, that are building some cool stuff.
Gonna like a lot of folks out there, I don't want to sort of, you know, bucket them into good and bad. There's a lot of builders who've been, you know, trying really hard to sort of get it right. From our perspective, we are, we are more of a support for them. We just recently launched a $1 million grant for unknown building games. And we were fortunate enough to sort of meet up with a good game developers, in fact, our team, Robin rancor spoke to almost, I think, maybe I think 50 or 60 applicants out of out of, say, one 121 30 people who applied and there is really some good talent that's out there, we'll be actually building out. And we're just trying to figure out how do we support them, build them and try to, you know, help them grow and nurture and help them grow? So it's still too early to say who is best? And I think that's, that's fine. It's more about, you know, how can we make sure we get the best out of everybody?
Make make sense. I saw that. You know, in case you're wondering, this is with regards to the federal grant, it's a 1 million grant for game devs building in a very good space. I think so that you said that. 120 people who are applied, you're in conversations with a bunch of them. I think, you know, some of the projects have been looking pretty interesting. And we're going to share more details about that. I have, I think one last question. You know, rich, you, you kind of spoke about you recommended a book recently the starfish and the spider by Ori Brafman and Rob, Rod Beckstrom. And he suggested folks who are building you know, in web three, especially those who are working on dollars, they have to read it. Why? What's it about?
Yeah, it's a great book, short summary is it talks about the history of decentralized, decentralized organizations, references a lot of open source, which I came from the open source world previously, I was in tech. And then it talks about why decentralized organizations are, are beneficial and why they're so they're so strong, right? They're community focused. And at the end of the book, it talks about hybrid, decentralized organizations, which is kind of how I run my my Dow, because it becomes a little bit more efficient. You need like, the hint of a little bit of centralization combined with that decentralization. Power of community makes things a little bit easier to manage for a proper organization, but it's a great read. It's about the history of decentralized organizations and and how they've won over historically and how they've been dealt with by centralized organizations.
Thanks, Rich. I'm gonna see if I can get my hands on it. The only question is, well, I can kind of find the attention span. So I am going to take a question from someone in the audience. Govan I've given you the ability to speak if you're still around, ask your question.
Hi guys, I'm OD.
Yes, Govan, Lauren here.
Alright, so I come from a background where I have gone to games for years now I don't know game development company God has given up to do. And secondly, you know, I'm also a part of a group of friends that created all India startups. So I have the experience of creating communities as well. Now, just my question is about what you, you know, touched a bit. So the problem that we faced in web two was like these gaming companies, such as epic, and you know, a lot of them, what they used to do is you play their game, you earn good scores, you do some progress, but you cannot migrate from one, you know, game to another game with the same set of probably like, so web three is supposed to solve this right, that you should be able to use your progress and you know, progress on the top of it. When you migrate from games to games. You touched on a point where you said okay, what you will do is you will buy assets, and you will rent it out to the, you know, guilt that you have. So how can we solve this essentially that, you know, we do not lose the progress when we transfer from one Metaverse to another Metaverse, or from one company that owns a web three game to another company that owns a web three game.
That's my question. Yeah, so this is something I've chatted with a few people about in private but, and also, I think I've tweeted about it a few times. But essentially, what we need is a standardized, standardized metadata, and as well as standardized API formats for the interoperability of NFT assets between games. And you'll see this with a lot of open source projects is where they standardize the ways to approach several problems, and then you can have optional additional data sets built on top of those if needed for your specific project. So what we need for the interoperability of NFT assets is for the broader web three gaming developers to agree on a standard for metadata for the specific game engines that they're building so that we can port those assets from game to game. So that's, that's going to be step one, and I know a few people that are trying to work on this. We just need them all to work on it together, right? And then the other thing is, I think we'll first see, like I mentioned, this Metaverse of games. So you know, we've seen games like GTA and Skyrim, continue to port and build on top of the original game that they have developed. And I think we're going to see things similar to that. And web three games is where someone builds their first game and they build the second and third and start building sort of game Metaverse where you can take your assets between the different games, even though they might be different types of games like you could take your your FPS character into the tower defense game into next one, etc. And I think that's going to be really cool, initial practice of that interoperability. Thank you so much. Thank
you. Thanks for taking my question. Rich. Thanks, Colin. I think that was a very interesting question. Interoperability is, I think, a very exciting thing to talk about. Perhaps, you know, if anyone's got good reading material, to share it with us, you know, tweet it out. I have got an interesting piece that I think y'all should read, published on Novick. You know, I'll send it out after today's conversation. We also have other material who requested to speak as if you've been given stage on mute, ask away.
Okay, I'll see about you. Yes. Can you hear me? Yes.
Great. So my question is more surrounding because I think the primary targeting is happening majorly with casual players are present on mobiles. But if you look at the overall hardcore gamers that are there and Dota Counter Strike, or you know, even FIFA there's an insane amount of backlash, even if you've mentioned crypto or NFT in the subreddits. So, and Ubisoft Of course, tried it with their game and, you know, did not really work out quite well. So is there some sort of, you know, thinking there on how do we kind of make them less aggressive when it comes to NFT Is or just crypto in general? Thanks.
Yeah, I think I think my initial approach was kind of tried to educate them. But I think what ends up happening is you, you wind up just having arguments on Twitter and stuff like that. So in at this point, it's so engrained through a lot of people heads through from, you know, traditional media sources, that MPs are bad, and they kill the economy. And they're, they're scams and all this other stuff, that at this point, I think it'd be better to just see good game is being developed. And I think this is what Dr. Chavez is trying to do is just let's just build a good game. And then we're gonna give you ownership, and then you can decide whether or not you think it's bad or not. Right. So I think step one is like, let's just build good games, let's build them with the benefit of web three. And, and let's try to get those games to the masses. And that's how we're gonna, like hands on is the best way to learn. Right? So let's, let's teach them the best way we can. And that's through building special experiences through gaming.
I just want to add to that, I think, you know, very importantly, right, so change is obviously very difficult. Anything, right? Whether it was our play to or not going from PC to mobile, we could not think about having an experience of playing, say, pub G or fortnight on mobile, probably when Counter Strike was so popular, but probably 10 years back. But again, things Things are changing. Most importantly, I think, very importantly, not all games have to be a bad thing, right? That's very important. It's not an it's not like every game has to have HDR, or some other technology or physics. But this is this is not mandatory. This is a new genre of games, and let it explore the latest start, I believe, I think maybe another one or two years, we will know whether this this makes sense or not. Does it attract more people? Or does it attract, you know, traditional hardcore gamers are probably just going to create a new kind of game, you know, players. So it's just about time, we will know. So in my opinion, again, it's not it's not something that needs to be a discussion that needs to be won. It's a discussion that can keep happening, I will be perpetual. But but it's fine, right? Like, everybody has different opinion. But we don't need to make we don't need to worry about getting everybody here. I think we're just creating something new that might attract a different set of people.
Something that I also don't see is people say, Show, don't tell. Right. And I think I think maybe the moment for for web three games, or just when three in general, is really to stop preaching, and perhaps just start showing, you know, the possibilities. And I think once once you assured possibilities, I think people will make them. So if you're building games out there, I think just focus on building better games, right? Something that, you know, Robbie is in, in over here listening and Robbie, co founder of tech grove. He is also co founder and CEO of super gaming. He's been building games for over a decade. I think, you know, he's shipped over 100 games, something that, you know, the way he puts it, when he talks about building games is, you know, you know, building games that, you know, people love and play, you know, building games that a billion people would love and play. And, and, you know, I'd love to bring him on and and, you know, have his thoughts on on this particular thing of, you know, how do we get more people playing games from the point of view of building richer gameplay? Robbie, I think I've tried to give you speaker access. I don't know if that's happening. But if so, the mic is yours.
Hey, Robbie, are you there?
Can you guys hear me?
Yes, we can hear you.
So I've been listening in intently to what you guys have been talking about for the past? Or, you know, I thought that what Sid was kind of saying that not every game needs to be a web three game is an accurate representation. You know what it is, I do believe that, you know, choosing choosing what kind of genre what kind of audience is really, really important because at the end, you're building for players you're building for that community. And then being very clear in terms of what you're offering up to that community. And whether that community wants it is going to be an integral part of what you're building. When we've kind of looked at each one of our games, we've looked at communities that we've been working with, for in some cases over a decade, to kind of understand right from the early mobile days, I've been looking at working with that community and what we see happening in web three, a lot of things that you're kind of hearing of, you know, and I think Ashish mentioned it, in which he said that he, Ubisoft had this backlash, all of it, I see it from the early mobile game days as well, when we were building for mobile, which is really where I started making games, everybody would laugh and say, who will make a shooter game on a mobile. Today, most shooter games are played more on we have shooter games or have a greater mobile game audience than anywhere else. The same thing is going to be true in web three. Everybody is going to, you know, sort of say laugh at us when we build a few games inside of it. But they're going to join us eventually. And that's kind of been the classic paradigm that we've kind of seen in many in any new industry. I've I've kind of loved and enjoyed making games or different genres, understanding that audience seeing what they are wanting, creating long term value for them versus you know, a shorter, shorter term pitch inside of it. Every game that we've built inside of super gaming has been with this vision of building a game that people play for years. It's something that we continue to do, even with our web three approach. I want to kind of do a quick shout out to our game, it hernia coming out. Rich, if you haven't heard of it, you know, I'm sure that we'll socialize it and talk about it at some point of time. But I also want to call out many projects that I've seen, while just evaluating TIGER grants. You know, we had about 120 applicants Venket spoke to a lot more I spoke to about 3035 companies. And we kind of found there were a lot of creative ways that people were doing things that web two was not, it was not possible to do in web two. It was not like okay, with web two game with a crypto wallet. Not that it was still a game, it was still kind of creating value for all those players playing it. And that's kind of what I wanted to kind of shout out as well.
It reminds me of, you know, I think there's this phrase that's often wrongly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. You then they laugh at you. Yeah, and then you would go.
I remember when I was making masculine as a shooter, everybody laughed at us. They said, we'll play a dual stick shooter on touchscreen phone today. Everybody makes a shooter inside of mobile. We started making one in 2015. We were still learning. But you know, seven years later, I think we could I don't know.
Yeah, and I think yellow building a lot more exciting projects when it comes to that. Yeah.
Not really too ready to share yet but soon.
Awesome. Awesome. So I think we've kind of hit 815. And I think, rich, you know, it's morning where you're at, by the way, where are you at?
Puerto Rico.
Okay, so that's what, like 12 hours behind?
Yeah, it's 10:45am right now.
Oh, okay. All right. All right. That's nice. So I think I think with that, we're gonna wrap it up. I like to thank everyone for dropping by. Rich, I think this was a very interesting conversation. There's definitely a lot of things that I've learned. Essentially, most of these conversations are me trying to figure out the wealth through gaming space. And so I kind of frame questions that I'd love to hear answers to. And before we drop off, you know, rich, you, you've been kind of telling us about the exciting things that real radical adults is building. How do people get involved in who ought to get involved?
Yeah, so you can you can join our community discord, you can also just give us a follow on at ready player now. We just dropped a teaser for something that's coming up about five minutes ago. So, you know, go give us a follow on Twitter, stay in touch. And, you know, there's going to be some exciting announcements and partnerships coming down the line as well as we're going to start ramping up some of our you know, tweets and doodle and write ups on due diligence of some of the games that we're partnering with and try to explain why we like them and why we partner with them. So if you're interested in web three gaming go give us a follow and join our Discord.
Awesome, Rich, I would love to read some of that. Is that available? Is that you're gonna put that out there? Or is it accessible only on your discord community?
We'll probably posting it to Twitter as well.
Okay, awesome. I look forward to that. And see, you know, there's a lot of interesting stuff growing at tagro. Why? Why should people keep a track of what you're doing?
I think we are trying to build a gaming ecosystem with everybody, not just alone, I think everybody is building a gaming ecosystem, we are doing our part of educating everybody about what to look forward to, you know, keep yourself updated. And I think learning is the best way to sort of get into something new. And, you know, that's, that's, that's our, our job to sort of, you know, bring that to everybody else. And the best of everything that we find whatever we find when we learn, we share it with everybody else.
Awesome. All right, folks, thanks a ton before you drop off, remember, you know, tweet a summary of this con with this conversation? And you know, so it's gonna retweet that there's a port claim yours. And don't forget to join the discord community of tech grow and Ready Player Dow? I think, you know, it's very interesting what's happening in this space. And I can tell you a tagro we're doing really exciting stuff. You know, be sure to tune in and ready player. That was really exciting. I love listening into rich, I love following you know, the stuff that he puts out on Twitter. Rich, thanks for the book recommendation was really helpful. Thanks, folks. Have a great evening. Have a great Friday. Have a great weekend, and see all at the next bit
