Animoca has been an unwavering Web3 cheerleader since day one, with a stated goal of leveraging blockchain technologies to “deliver digital property rights to consumers around the world and to help to establish the open metaverse.” The company develops and publishes a broad portfolio of both original and licensed IP, and his its finger in about as many web3 pies as anyone on the planet, through its over 450 investments in some big names, like Yuga Labs, Axie Infinity, Consensys, Magic Eden, OpenSea, Yield Guild Games and so many more. 

One of Animoca’s goals is to build out a holistic ecosystem of digital car ownership, which they are calling the Motorverse. 

To learn more about Animoca and their Motorverse strategy, your host Niko Vuori talks with Will Griffiths, GM of the Motorverse at Animoca Brands. 

The Motorverse: https://motorverse.com/ . You can find Will Griffiths on LinkedIn.

We’d also like to thank Neon for making this episode possible! Neon is a merchant of record with customizable webshops optimized for conversion — and modern APIs that let you use your existing liveops tools — Neon is trusted by some of the biggest names in gaming to help you sell direct without the overhead.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Niko: Hello and welcome to the Naavik gaming podcast. I'm your host, Niko Vuori. Today, we have a great episode for you.

We are talking to one of the earliest and biggest believers, builders, and investors in web3, and that is Animoca Brands. Animoca has been an unwavering web3 cheerleader since day one, with a stated goal of leveraging blockchain technologies to deliver digital property rights to consumers around the world, and to help establish the open better verse the company develops and publishes a broad portfolio of both original and licensed IP, and has its finger in about as many web three pies as anyone on the planet.

Through it's over 450 investments and some big names like you, the lab, sexy infinity consensus, magic Eden, open sea yield, guild games, and so many more. And today we have a great guest, Will Griffiths. He is a general manager at Animoca. I'll let him speak to his background once we're done with the intro, but suffice to say, he's also an extremely experienced veteran of the gaming space with over two decades of hard time served, including an association with one of my favorite.

Game developers, code masters, the creators of arguably the greatest motor racing game of all time, Micro Machines. Sadly he doesn't have any insights. We just discussed that earlier on. But a wonderful title. Nonetheless, he now runs the rev ecosystem. R E V at Animoca, which is the hub for web3 motorsports games.

That's right. Listeners today's episode is all about. The Motorverse. Will, welcome to the pod.

Will: Hey, so good to be here. I've been listening for a long time, genuinely, so it's really, it feels, I'm slightly starstruck yeah, in person.

Niko: I always say, tell guests who've actually ever been on the pod that it all goes downhill from here.

This is the pinnacle. This is a pinnacle. No, I'm kidding. Let's get right into the episode. We always start with the background on our guests, especially ones with such amazing careers, such as yours. Tell us more about who you are and your journey into web3 and Animoca.

Will: Yeah, sure. I ha… how do I start? So I had a lot of interest in how things worked. So I did an engineering degree and then I moved from there into IT consulting, which is pretty boring. And then worked as an ethical hacker, which has a bit more interesting. And then I started I, I noticed the app store.

It turned into a thing. And so I made some apps, so an app where you throw your phone in the air and it captures the way the phone moves and then spins an avatar around on your phone. So I come in the room with Apple and started having conversations with them about that and Realize that this was something that I can perhaps make a living from doing making games So then I went to work for natural motion a video games company that ended up getting bought by zinger and then I moved from the uk to australia And worked for this sort of for family reasons and ended up working for casinos online casinos so I got this sort of blend of casinos and all of the insights from the user experience design of that and crypto and security technology You and games, and then we moved back from Australia to the UK and I joined Codemasters and headed up their live service to it and show like, how do we monetize the Codemasters titles after the point of launch?

Just super interesting. So rolling out analytics, doing all that good stuff. And then after I'd been there for a couple of years, we ended up getting bought by Electronic Arts. I'm sure you're familiar with which was an interesting experience. Yeah, for sure. We used to make a four to one game and a rally game and a bunch of others.

And then we transitioned into EA and I joined the EA strategic growth team. So I was working with them on things like the metaverse and how they think about the future of sport and NFTs and, all this kind of stuff, because they think about that kind of thing all the time. But it was weird because I was in Oxford in the UK and everybody that I was working with was in California, exclusively in Redwood Shores, right next door to where I am, actually, really, it's quite good to see out the window.

It was, there's such a fascinating group of people. It's really cool. We came up with a lot of different concepts and ideas, but after a while, I decided that I wasn't. Probably ready to move to California. So I looked for something a bit more, with at least a few more, a more diverse collection of time zones.

That's how I came to meet Robbie Young. He's the CEO of Investment Animoca. And he has, he had this sort of collection of, I I often refer to as a Lego collection. So he had the this Rev token they bought three different racing studios Grease Monkey Gaze in Melbourne. In games in Leon, and we play media based in Phoenix, Arizona, that are all making racing games, either their own IP or, your motor GP and all this kind of stuff.

And they were looking and they'd had some success with some web three games and they were looking to. Do something. And they were like, there's something here. We need someone to make sense of it. And that's what I've been doing for the last two years.

Niko: Fantastic. And we're going to get right into what you do specifically around the Motorverse.

But I want to talk a little bit more broadly about Animoca brands. You just touched on it briefly there. And even listeners who don't follow web three as closely as you and I do know the name Animoca brands have likely heard of it. And no, it's a big deal. And. Yet there are, there isn't that much known necessarily about exactly what Animoca is doing because it's doing so much.

I think that's really the key here. So why don't you tell us a little bit about Animoca, the kind of overall strategy, how it got into Web3, and what's been going on with the past few years.

Will: Yeah, sure. It's a pretty unusual place. And it's pretty weird and wonderful to match it mirrors the web three world, but so yeah Siri, our founder you may well have seen him do various talks.

He's had a few Ted talks. He's out on the kind of confidence track a lot. And he was running Atomoka as a, I think it was called something else. Maybe it's called Outplay Studios as a mobile game studio back in 2011, they were, they had many different games and it had four or five, maybe if the top 10.

Games on one of the app store charts at that time. So they were doing really well and then he has this experience where I think google or apple banned some of their apps and he realized in that moment that he didn't really have this control over his business and he thought because he was relying on These third party publishers and I think that was a very formative Moment for him, he was like, wow, these guys have got quite a lot of control over what we're doing And so then when crypto kitties in 2017 came around and the game five kind of movement started to kick off that was something that just made perfect sense for him to get into and so that's when he started investing him and his team started investing in things like axie infinity and and that's like the beginning of the whole thing.

And obviously, then that, the story of the growth of crypto the different bull runs and all that. But so this company is, I really liked the way that, yeah, I think it's about it. So it's not a It's quite it's really very wholesome. It's this understanding that this technology can actually empower people and bring fairness back to the world.

And that's what we are trying to do in lots of different ways. So his goal really is to accelerate that process near adoption of web three. And they're achieving that by investing in those with different companies and projects and ideas and teams. And they're really serious about it. We've got I see over 500 different things that we're invested in either wholly owned or majority owned or partially owned or there's a small investment or advisors across the portfolio and it's just like a, it's a very wide attack, like increasing the probability that we're going to find product market fit.

So we have. Music brands, fashion brands there's a lot of games, but there's also, where you pick some shovels and there's probably things that I haven't, there's probably categories that I don't even know about. And the way it manifests is you have, we use a lot of different ways of communicating, obviously Telegram and WhatsApp and email.

So we have this giant slack instance in the middle and all of these different projects are able to share their learnings and their knowledge and collaborate in a way that I genuinely believe is, massively accelerating the way that the kind of pace that we can find how web three fits the mass market.

And that's what that's what we're doing in motorways, trying to.

Niko: Yeah, no, absolutely. And we're going to get into that in just a second. But I did want to touch on kind of the broader approach because it is a really interesting, really fascinating lots of shots on goal. Obviously you're fortunate to have the resources to be able to make all those investments.

And to have all of those attempts on goal, but really fascinating approach with, your own business. IP, licensed IP, your own studios, publishing relationships, et cetera. And of course all the investments. Okay. Before we get onto the motor verse, which we're going to get onto next just high level, what are some of the biggest Animoca games that our listeners should check out if they're interested in just poking around a little bit to see what Animoca is up to?

Will: I'm totally going to show my own games here. But there are others. We have talk drift two is a triple a. Drifting, racing game, with engine five, photorealistic graphics. It's in early access on Epic Game Store. It's already had over 400, 000 downloads. It's made by the studio in Melbourne.

The guys who make it are actual real life drifters. So they, at the weekend they stop working on their computers. And then they get in their cars and drive to the tracks and go drifting. So that's really cool. And it's made with a lot of you can see the passion of the development team in the game when you play and then cosmic royale is our a game that's currently in closed beta But you can get access to it via something called the mock of us, which is one of the projects Americans you can visit the mock of xyz And claim your mock id which is like the precursor to being a member of the community And then that means you can visit the cosmic royale website and cosmic royale is like a blend of mario kart and fall guys You instead of racing around the track three times, it's a point to point race with a bunch of obstacles, and there's 40, it's 40 people at the same time, and there's three rounds with different tracks so you basically knock, people get knocked out, and then there's a winner at the end.

And we're getting a lot of web three players playing out and loving it. But we also will launch that on the Epic store as well in Q4. And that will have hopefully hundreds of thousands of web two players adjacent to these web, we can talk a bit more about that maybe later on, but that's exciting.

And then there's life beyond, which is being built by studio in France, which is not live yet, but super excited about it. It's this big kind of space opera game. But then we also have puzzle games. We recently did a collaboration. I'm going to forget the name of the famous chess player for this game called Annie chess

Niko: that's right.

Will: And then we have a bomber man style game called cosmic bomber. That's also in close beauty. That's getting a lot of traction built by one of our studios in America called N way. There's loads of things going on.

Niko: A lot of stuff happening. All right we're gonna have not links to everything in the show notes, but we'll have links to maybe two or three of the top ones.

So we'll make sure we get the, get those figured out. Okay, so let's move on. Obviously Animoca brands, as you've described is a very large operation with, finger in a lot of pies, like I mentioned in the intro. And so we can't talk about all of it. And so we're going to move on to your baby, which is the motor verse.

So what is the motor verse? And what are your aspirations for it? You've mentioned a couple of titles already, but talk more broadly, not so much about the individual titles, but what's the vision for the motorverse? What do you expect it to become? Hope for it to become over? Yeah, so this is

Will: Yeah, so this is Lego set of bits.

And for me, it's, we spent a couple of years because we had a bunch of different things live already, whether they're web two games or web three games, bringing everything together, thinking about what works long term. And to me, it's about having this tool set of games design mechanics and things, Oh, now we've got cloud computing, we've got streaming and all these things.

Now you can roll out that to say a bit more, and you've got. The Web3 tool sets, you've got tradability, interoperability, things like that. We think that the best value add that we can do in this space is to do the central licensing vehicles. So working with automotive brands, the published cars, a bit like when they make real cars.

In the real world and then people buy those cars and they can work in multiple games and a growing List of games gets added to that roster. So as a user basically you're buying a car, but now there's a buy button now There's a sell button next to the buy button And there's a like when you're in a game if you want to go to another game There's a button says take my car to another game.

So these are the things that we think are better than what's out there right now and But yeah, we went through a lot of different ideas, but this is the one that's easiest to Get across and I think it leverages web3 technology. It just makes sense So you're able to have this relationship with a car like you would in the real world So if you buy a car, it's what we're talking before about commuting, right?

You have there's a relationship that you like with your car. There's a story you tell you go places with it You experience different things in and around it. You got music and all this kind of stuff You know, that is enhanced, obviously, if you're into racing, you'd say you're car's on the track and you're racing around this kind of thing.

We're looking to replicate that experience, but online. So we want people to have, this affinity with cars. So they're not able to wall guard and they don't have to buy a game to experience a particular car or grind through hours of gameplay to get a car or to, or, and then for it to only work in those games.

We want to set it centrally. And we've got a mixture of different tools that enable us the person already in unique position to do that because we have three different game studios we can work on the Data standard that's needed to define a car. So we've worked with multiple car brands and motorsports and our own Studios that have experience obviously in making card games in different engines with different handling models To create this sort of kernel of what defines a car so and now we can also prove out the model all the incentives, like why would a brand get involved?

Why would a game studio and get involved on why would a user get involved? We can do that in a sandbox and then we can bring other people there once we've worked out all the incentive structures. Yeah no, finish your thought, please. So we're finding that one of the things we observed was that a lot of these car brands have released collections of NFCs.

And then they, either they don't sell out or maybe whatever they, maybe they make a bit of money, but it doesn't, there's not enough demand in the market and there's no utility afterwards. So everybody buys on complaints. And so by bringing all of this together in one place, we can concentrate the demand for the assets and also have utility at the point of launch in our games and have growing utility.

So this solves the concerns of the vehicle brands. And they love it because they get these whole, it's a new way of owning one of their cars, right? So it's previously if you had to you might have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to buy a car now You can spend much less and be part of their kind of engagement strategy and then the video game studios love it because the deals we're doing mean that if they build against our standard They get access to those licenses So there's a bit of quality control needed, of course, but this is one of the biggest challenges that small studios have setting out.

So they, what they make these amazing driving games, but they don't, they can't make, they can't use real life cars. And those real life cars are like the stars of the show. Those are like the board apes. You know what I mean? In the car world. So we get the game studios also get user acquisition because if we, if you have a hundred thousand holders and cars and I release the game and then I, all of those holders.

It says, Hey, your car now works in a new game. Come and try it out. And we know these people like racing games and cars already. So we expecting a high level of conversion.

Niko: Yeah. So you touched on a lot of what I was going to ask you as well, but I no that, that was great because you're preempting some of the stuff.

Our listeners will be very well primed as we get into these next questions. But one of the questions I was going to ask you, because one of the talking points that we have here are the terms that, that you and your team have used is digital vehicle culture which was fascinating to me.

I think I know, and I think I understand where you're getting with that. But where my mind went immediately when I read that and saw that I was like, Oh, that's Nike and Adidas. It's your sneaker heads who are very engaged in the real world. They're collecting all the reports. Pairs of shoes and Nike and Adidas.

I think those two in particular have done a really excellent job of converting real life ownership, real life sneaker headdom. I don't know if that's a word, but I've just made it up into a digital affinity as well. And they've experimented a lot. It's not just the NFTs, but it's also just. A digital connections, a community, digital community.

So I am very curious to hear, what are your thoughts on what do you think digital vehicle culture means? Where does it actually take you long term? Obviously cars are way more expensive than shoes are. Even though you can spend a lot of money on a golden pair of Donald Trump sneakers, NFT collection, if you want it to.

But nonetheless, if you're going to own a car, buy a car, The price points are very different. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how do you think that digital vehicle culture concept translates for where my mind immediately goes, which is the sneaker head culture.

Will: Yeah. There's quite a lot.

Here, so we have a lot of ideas, obviously, we're on a bit of a journey. So our first interoperable car will be coming out in the next few months. In fact, we just announced a partnership, we'll talk about that later, but the it's the right way to think about it. So you'll know that even in 10 years ago, if you're looking at a car game on a current gen console, it's photorealistic.

So you're breaking down this barrier very easily. Like I can just be someone who loves cars, maybe I'm not even a gamer and there is now a desirable item for me that I can own and have online. And the other thing we've done is we've done a huge with this big bit of research into the market.

And we found that there's about a billion people who self identify either as racing gamers or motorsports fans around the world petrol heads.

Niko: Okay.

Will: But this is army of people that. Freaking love cars and bikes and tinkering around with them and talking about them and, and we've also spent time at things like Goodwood, if you know what that is.

Like the first Absolutely. Speed, of course, in the UK and

Niko: Yeah. We think of them. I'm a motor fan by the way. I'm a petrolhead. I like my cars. I just went electric though having owned a four liter V eight for the longest time. Naturally aspirated, but yeah, went electric recently.

But yeah, I love cars and I do all the research and I know all the stats and all that. So you're talking to your kind here.

Will: Great. That makes this easy. Absolutely. So with yeah, Goodwood, we love Goodwood. And we think about them a little bit as in real life version of what it is that we're trying to achieve.

So if anyone's listening, he's not. And to give us just celebration of motorsport and fast cars and old cars and new cars and bikes. And they drive them all around and do drifting and race. And it's a really cool vibe at this old stately home in the UK. And you can really, it comes alive.

There's that everyone's interested in everyone else's vehicle. And so we, that for me, it's like a, Perfect place to start a web3 community because there's a lot of people who are like people like minded Everyone's saying hi to each other, and so we think of ourselves as You know setting out to create this community around these assets But it's a little more than that because you have a lot of there's a lot of different conversations going on with different games companies But also car brands so some of the car brands we talk to we talk about, digital twins So if you buy a car in real life Maybe one of the optional extras is to have the same car minted for you for use in games and vice versa like maybe like we've had crazy conversation.

This is not a deal that's been done yet if you own a digital car, like maybe you get like A massive discount at a dealership or there's some sort of in real life event You can attend at the racetrack for racing teams and stuff. So it blurs the lines of You know the real world and the gaming world and the collectibles world But it I think it if done correctly, it's very easy to understand you come in It's like this is a beautiful car.

I recognize it. I love it How do I get my hands on it and have some fun with it and then go tell a story with it?

Niko: Yeah, no I love the vision and I think this is one of the closest that web three gets to that kind of physical digital divide because there is such a preexisting fandom for this.

I'm about to ask you a question about interoperability and one of the biggest criticism, even though I'm a believer in web three, like one of the biggest criticisms I have about interoperability is the fact that. If I have a sword in World of Warcraft, like it doesn't make any, even if I could take that sword into another game, it doesn't make any sense.

Like it's just not that interesting. It's a tool. It's a means to an end. It's not actually the end in and of itself. Whereas with something like sneakers and cars, as we're talking about, those are a means. To an end, like that's the end itself. If I own a beautiful car and I'm going to go show it at Goodwood, like I'm not taking my sword in world of warcraft, showing it off to people, so I think that's what, that's, what's interesting about this. And I think you're you with the motor verse and the car digital, physical. Divide is a perfect use case, but I bring it back to interoperability here because that's still to me, I, you've mentioned it already, the term is still to me is, can I really take my digital Lamborghini and we're going to talk about Lamborghini in a second, later on in this episode can I really take my digital Lamborghini from, one game to another.

And it will work the same. I know you talked about building with standards, but that to me is the biggest challenge. I think with web three, the promise is interoperability, but in practice, it's so difficult because you have to, you have to, the art styles don't work. And the game engines don't work with each other.

And the the stats aren't the same and all that stuff, right? So there's just a lot of challenge, I think, to this interoperability piece, which in theory is great. Yeah. But in practice is very challenging. So I want to hear how you guys are thinking about that. How does, how do you solve that problem of, yes, I could use this in two games now or three games, but I still can't take my digital Lamborghini on any track.

Like I can't go to Goodwood and Nuremberg ring and, Singapore, night track for the formula one and take my car there because. It just doesn't work the same way. Long question, but really getting at a core point.

Will: Yeah, no, no, it's a good one. So the, I don't have an answer for the world of warcrafting.

I think that when I think about that type of interoperability, I think about that game. And I think that there's all of the, there's like a, there's tons of different weapons and they're all carefully balanced. And there's a big constellation. You can there's a choice in a playoff that works in that world, right?

And as soon as you take something out of that and then you walk over here with it and try and use it in another game It makes it and they do it's the most powerful weapon in the game where it's completely pointless and just every time we do It there's a balancing challenge i'd love to see it solved, but I don't have an answer in my head to it but I think cars are different and it's because They have real world stats.

Right. Interesting. Okay. They're not designed like that. They're, there's this is this car model and it's just, unfortunately it's faster than your car, so it is gonna win in this race, or this is this, the handling of this one is particularly good on this type of surface with this kind of setup, right?

So there is a provable stay in the real world. That is the reference point and that's what, brands care about that, do they want their cars to perform relative to other brands in games? It's not just users because they want everyone to know they've got the best car, right? And so if we're, as long as we're faithful to the metadata from the real world, when we recreate the cars in the games, It seems me to be fine.

They're obviously different types of games. We have a carting game So if you to take a high performance comp in a carting game, you're not going to get a high performance car We'll have a cosmetic car that looks like that, otherwise it ruins the game, right? So that's what users expectations are, too if you're playing talk to have two and you have a lamborghini then you would expect it to behave in a certain way it'd be fast on the straights and handle differently.

Around corners to the other cars. And to me is the kind of gold standard. And then you just, you apply that through the, from the kind of SIM side of racing through the kind of arcade side of racing through to, the more casual style, which would be a cosmetic change.

Niko: Yeah.

Will: So that's how I, that's how I think about it.

Niko: Yeah. What's the natural end state for that? Is there a kind of an idealized future where you see, Yeah, obviously you see animocha and motive the motor verse at the heart of it. But what's the natural end state? Obviously we're not going to car manufacturers are not going to stop licensing their cars to other game developers, right?

Whether they're web two or web three or whatever. So curious to hear your thoughts on what is. If everything goes to plan with the motor verse, let's put it that way. If everything goes to plan with the motor verse and your vision of this interoperable future comes to pass what does it look like?

What does that future look like?

Will: The challenge that people, I think often associate with things that interoperability is how are you going to get from A to B? So I think long term, it's the forecourt of the internet, whether it's us, or maybe there's another project that does it, but that's what our vision is.

So if you're a car manufacturer and you're thinking, Hey, we're going to launch this new model Hey, we better call the motor bus, because we're going to publish we've got to publish the card digitally as well. Okay. That's where I want to get to. But then the process for getting there is about just aligning everyone's needs and wants and incentives.

So for the car brands they'll be launching small pack, like small sets and collections of cars and experimenting with demand. And as we grow, we should get more and more people in the motorverse and generate more demand. It's interesting for the car brands too, because you might think that the conversion to the assets.

Would be the overall sales might go down because it might be cannibalized. So this is something that we're really interested in testing, but we believe that the conversion will be much higher because the asset is, it's not a one way. Purchase. So when you think about buying something in a free to play game, it's basically you just spend the money and it's gone.

And then you got to the next level of candy crush. And then, but this is something where there's, because there's a sell button next to the buy button. That it's an easier decision. And perhaps more meaningful. So we're hoping that more people purchase and then as new games joined we were motivated to join and increase this ecosystem More and more players come in and become more aware about the concept of interoperability and It starts to become like table stakes or whatever you want.

Like people are, Hey, this is cool. Hey. And then they start approaching some of the bigger car game companies and say, Hey, why can't I use my X in your game? And hopefully eventually then they end up adopting the standard as well. It doesn't break the web to model. Because that continues, you can still sell Web 2 cars, it's just that the Web 3 cars, or the cars that, the interoperable cars, are more interesting for users, so it's like a deeper level of engagement, you can take it between different experiences and tell a bit of a story with it.

Niko: Yeah, that's a very, that is a very powerful vision. And it is probably the best of what web three has to offer right now in terms of, sorry, I phrased that wrong. Web three offers the best path. For this particular category, I think compared to so many other games and genres that have talked about interoperability and digital ownership and it making sense across different games, but not actually in practice.

So very interesting to see this I, you talked about this earlier, but just the incentives for other developers, it's. User acquisition, it's the access to a larger community of, fellow petrol heads and digital ownership fans. It's the licenses that they would otherwise have to negotiate themselves.

Are you already seeing that happening? Are you seeing developers outside of your own and a mocha brands ecosystem coming to you and saying, Hey, this is really cool. I want to be a part of this

Will: Genuinely yet, we haven't. Although I haven't got anyone over the line yet, but we've got maybe 20 or 30 different conversations happening with different games because there's a lot of games that get somewhere where they have something that's awesome and there's just this little bit that's missing and that's often something that they're looking for funding for.

So licensing or, marketing. And so this is, these are the things that we can offer in return. The other thing, the other benefit that's not included in that list for game studios is. What we're experimenting with at the moment when we do our first few minutes is understanding the Usage of the assets so like the reasons that people purchase the assets like what game they bought it for in the first place Or if that was you know, someone bought an asset and they immediately go and play this game, and we try we thought about coming up with the model for our internal studios to assign revenue generated by the sale of the cars to the studios.

It's quite complex to do without understanding the behavior of users. So instead, this is one of the benefits that we have because we've got these in house studios. We can do this Test where we're covering the integration of these models into the individual games Centrally and then we can sell the assets and watch where everyone goes and what they do with them And then we're going to start basically creating a sort of affiliate model so we can see it from your web2 game You can send people to a center to the central forecourt to buy assets which are interoperable and then you know, if you want you can create your own store in your game, maybe you get more if you do a direct sale, but then we can further incentivize people from the different game studios to try and sell down on the assets that we've published.

And I like that model because it basically means more people. We're going to get really good at selling cars quickly because everyone involved is trying their own way of doing it.

Niko: Yeah, really does open up a lot of opportunities, but as you mentioned, it could get wildly complex. And the very first thought that came into my mind, as a long time gamer myself is arbitrage.

If you can buy a. Car for cheaper in one game, or there's a sale on in some somewhere and you can transport it across. I, again, I don't know the exact details of how you guys are planning on implementing all this stuff, but it gets really complicated really quickly. And as a former, games PM myself, product manager, I the I get cold sweats just thinking about how are you going to Balance that and make sure that you're not open to exploits.

I don't know if that's how you're thinking about it at all, but that's what comes to my mind immediately as I think about this.

Will: No, I definitely have that same thought process. I was a kind of security background, but I think. In my experience, usually, as George was saying for you, there's a, you have these complex systems and yet there's usually a very simple rule that you can apply.

Once you understand the behavior of the users, you can be like, okay, everything is central and the price is set centrally. If you wish to discount, you pay the difference yourself. So it's then a user acquisition. Cost or velocity, so you may choose to do that at your own expense. So it could be a way of people coming into the ecosystem late and driving adoption of their game or, these kinds of things, but I think longer term it's in my mind, it turns out like a Netflix for cars, right?

So there's, you come in. Maybe you've got your garage at the top and you can go in there and flick around visit friends carriages and stuff And then you've got this four four court area where you can go to different showrooms and see cars or maybe there's a live auction Going on people bidding on a car in the secondary market and then beneath that there's this boy There's all these different types of experiences.

You can have you select a vehicle And then off you go.

Niko: Yeah. A wonderful vision. I think a lot of fun and as a car racing, although much more on the casual side, not the hyper realistic side myself I can see where this can go. Okay. So talk about ecosystem. We talked a lot about kind of the vision for what the motorverse can become.

You have a token already, right? That's part of the ecosystem. That's part of the community. The Rev token, R E V tell us more about what it is, what it's How long has it been around? What does it do? What's the value? What's the utility? And what's the vision for the future?

Will: Oh, yeah, we have a token.

That's been really interesting for me because I haven't had a token before, coming from a case background. So there's been a pretty steep learning curve finding out about that. It's called REV. And there are lots of different ways of thinking about these fungible tokens, right? There's all kinds of crazy things happening out there in the market with me and coins and all the rest of it, but for us it's basically a way of for me personally, I like it as a.

It's a kind of north star metric for how the ecosystem is doing. So it's plugged into all of our games. I think lies in as utility in all of our games, whether it's for buying cars or for entering competitions or rewarding people buying upgrades in some of our web free games. So that's all good.

And then, longer term, as the ecosystem grows, I would expect the behavior of the users and the volume of the trading generated by the day to day sinks and faucets in the ecosystem to have a meaningful impact on the The market, to, apply pressure one way or another to the isolate token.

One of the things that's really cool about it that I wouldn't have been able to do without it is that I'm able to do have a different type of partnership. So you can talk to these other studios that are working in web three that have their own tokens or, whether they're on chain or.

And they don't have a token or whatever, and you're able to not just talk about just straight, Hey, we'll pay you to integrate or you need this cash or whatever you can do these token swaps. And you can reach agreements that way. So that's really helpful. And the other thing that we do with it is we can use it to do governance.

We sell a lot of merch in it. We're doing this fractionalized sponsorship thing with major GP, which we can talk about, which is like a sort of adjacent, it's still a motorversity, but it's not a technically, it's not a game. So we use it as whenever there's something that you can buy, we're like, we've put road in there.

And then we also allow people to stake it. Staking is, I think some projects use it

Niko: It's a sort of financial instrument, right? The value of their token. Yes. I was a Web3 developer as well for a couple of years. So yes, I'm and to be fair, though, I'm not sure all of our listeners know what's taking us.

So please do continue and give us the details.

Will: I’ll give you the very short version. So and you can buy these tokens. If you stake them, it's like putting them in a you're locking them up. And often you can get rewards. Sometimes people will give you, if you stake, they tell you what percentage you're going to get back, a bit like a bond.

But for us, the way that I'm thinking about it is it's a way of backing our vision. So we have these relationships with MotoGP. You've got, we're doing these token swaps with other communities. We've got in real life experiences that you can have. We've got t shirts or like jackets for MotoGP or this kind of stuff.

There's lots of ways that we can reward people and we want to do that. But we also think that our vision is really interesting to a lot of people. And we want, what we want is for people who understand Web3 and get where we're going to come in. If they're interested, buy Revan and stake it. And then it helps us and our growth story and helps us get the word out.

And as we grow in theory, when we get all these other projects getting involved. Then the price fresh, the pressure on the price of the market should go up. And what does that mean? And what it means, all of these little teams and people who are helping us and the customers that are getting involved, they can basically become part of our growth story.

And while they're holding it, we'll be asking their opinion about things and getting them to vote and stuff. So it's like a supercharged version of a community, which is what web three is. Thanks. Known for right. So if you have skin in the game and you own something, you're much more likely to care more and engage.

And we see that in our community on Discord.

Niko: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. If I were to summarize, it would be mostly at the moment. It's mostly incentivization for third party teams or third party, like customers, users, players, community members. But over the longterm you, it could potentially, Oh and actual, means of exchange, right?

Buying merch and what have you but longer term, is there a bigger vision for what Rev can become? Or is it just, you've figured it out. It's working right now. And this is the perfect use case for it, which is totally fine. By the way, that doesn't always have to be some universal truth hiding at the end of a 50 year, roadmap that needs to be something special.

Will: No, so we do think of it as a sort of launch pool as well. So we know there's a lot of different motor sports and racing projects out there and we talked to a lot of them and their loads we want them to come and join us. This is the idea of this model where we, everyone has a reason to be there in a kind of scalable decentralized way.

 You don't have to measure the metrics from all the different games every day and then apportion out revenue from a subscription. There's actually a good reason to just come in and be part of it because you're going to benefit. But I with the launch pool, it's basically a way of us showing support for these projects.

So if I go to another Motorsports project and I swap a bunch of my token with theirs and we both lock up our tokens, It means what it shows is my support for them, their involvement with us, and it hopes and basically we can, as we grow, they should grow too, and vice versa. So it puts us all, it's a way of connecting all of us and aligning our incentives.

And that the theory is that will be really a pretty cool way for us to. Lift one another up and make the most of this mode support network.

Niko: A rising tide lifts all boats. So I think I was going to say that, but it's overused, overused. It's a, but everybody knows what it means. Sometimes it's useful just to use those tropes.

Okay. Obviously all of this is on chain. I must confess to our, to you and our listeners. I did not look up these metrics beforehand. I should have, because obviously everything is there, but what are the metrics that you can share about Rev fully diluted value and, what's circulating out there?

What are you guys giving to or no, sorry, I'm using word putting words in your mouth. What kinds of numbers are we talking about here when you're, dealing with developers doing token swaps things like that?

Will: Oh but it all it just massively. I don't want to I wouldn't want to put a number on it because it totally depends on the size of the collaboration and you know What we're trying to achieve.

The token has been In the past being before before I was and I'm open, it's been really very high. And then recently it, before we, we rebooted the ecosystem in March. And it went up and then there's been, there's been some difficulties in the markets as well around then.

And so we've had, so really it's been a very. Interesting journey, listening to all of the different holders of the token from like way back when and speaking to new people who are interested in becoming holders. What my belief is that, with all of the things that we've got planned, we've just announced our relationship with Lamborghini, we have a solid model.

Around how we think about tokenomics and the utility of the token we've got a great marketing team who gets the word out that it will, take care of itself. We have about I'm, just looking at some numbers here. I mean you can go on coin market cap and see the token price I think is right now Around which it's just gone up overnight.

I think because the announcement with lamborghini a little bit. We've got 30 000 unique holders, so that means 30 000 different people have Rev at one point and I still continue to hold it at this time. So we've got a really, that's good to me, just from games analytics, there's a nice.

Or spread of people at a good level of support. We introduced our staking program about two months ago. We've had 24 million tokens staked. So this is good. This is a good start.

Niko: And there'll be more to come. Nice. Nice. Yeah, I'm looking at the numbers right now. So I think your current market cap is about six.

This is crypto we're talking about. So it's going to be highly volatile. So take all of this with everybody listening to take this with a pinch of salt. It's probably going to be totally different by the time you listen to this, but about 6. 5 million market cap at the moment traded about 1. 2 million over the last 24 hours out of a three looks like billion.

Supply about 1. 12 is circulating on the fully deleted market cap applied by implied by that. It's about 16. 6 million. So yeah, real numbers. There's a real numbers and has real value in the sense that, you can offer incentives for sure, or Rev offers incentives in many places. Okay Obviously that's not Axia numbers and you're probably okay with that because actually, of course AXS token and SLP tokens, obviously when they capped out at their peaks were massive.

We're talking billions here. That's probably not what you want, right? You don't want big price spikes. You want something a bit more stable, I presume.

Will: Yeah. I want, I am growing the ecosystem. Yeah. By adding. Rans right and games and uses, and I'm going to do that in a sustainable way.

And I want the token to correlate that. Yeah, that's what I'm expecting. Cause more and more people will know about it and there's more to get excited about as we go. There are other models out there for sure. This is the, what I identify with is this sustainable growth that, I can understand, like I've done this and then I can see this, yes.

Niko: Great. This is, yeah. I'm a game developer. I'm making a game. I'm announcing a game. I've got a partnership. Presumably helps the people in the ecosystem if price goes up on that. Great. That's good news, right? And launches. Okay, great. So talk about launches. I know that the torque drift is something you guys are very excited by.

Have not played it, but I had a look at it. Looks beautiful. Fantastic. Unreal engine five. The graphics are amazing. Obviously you've already got a lot of. Car manufacturers and brands integrated there. You just announced the Lamborghini partnership today. In fact, today's August 8th.

At least in California, I think it's probably August 9th already in Perth. But big news there. So talk to us more about Torque Drift. You mentioned it earlier on and at the start of the episode, but I want to hear more about Torque Drift and, why you guys are just big believers in this game.

Will: First of all, they've got an amazing development team. So I've talked about that before. It's a. I like I've seen lots of different types of teams and these guys, this is what they love. They're really good at it. They're working super hard and you get this extra like level up of creativity, when you're so really passionate about it and you see that.

Reflected when they talk about it and when they Release the updates. They've just they're really ambitious in terms of their scope So they just recreated in their latest update still in early access. They've recreated this part of tokyo called daikoku Which is this area under this sort of spaghetti junction of roads, where, which is really famous for where they do like car meets people meet up in these fancy cars and do do drifting and stuff.

And they showed it to me. Like before it was going live and I was just like playing and I'm like, oh this is cool and then I realized that it's absolutely massive It's like almost it's almost it's got gta vibes like the size of the environment so that They look incredibly faithfully Recreating these places.

And there's tons of new modes coming out But the cool kind of web3 part of it Which we're still working through, is that any asset in the game, or all of the car assets and many of the car assets are available, both as Web 2 3 assets. And we're trying to understand, because we know that we've got a mass audience of players who will come in and play the game because it's beautiful and free to play and really fun.

But we want to take them and try and introduce them to the benefits of web3. But it's not, we don't want to be like, Hey, come and buy an NFT because it's not really, that's not really what it's about. It's more what I was saying before, like next to the buy button, there's a sell button.

And then there's another button that says Hey, want to take your car to another game? these kind of experiments. So we've got a lot of opportunity to try this stuff out and see what works and what resonates with players in terms of functionality, the way we talk about it, price obviously there's gas fees and extra costs of making it and integrating into other games.

But that's, we've got some like different approaches in a different games As to achieve that goal, really, of taking this large audience of people and introducing them to, to web three. And so that's what we're doing in talk to two and then in Cosmic Royale, it's slightly different. So we are creating themed collections of carts.

So Cosmic Royale is this game. It's like a mixture of Mario Kart and Fall Guys. And we're creating collections based on PFP collections and web three IP. Inside the game. So there's currently if you own a mocha, which is one of the PFP fashion for a mock about us, when you come into the game, you see your character that.

It rendered in 3d. So what is you know, currently a two dimensional pfp image pops into 3d and they're driving, carter and we want to replicate that with lots of different collections So we're talking to loads. I don't think I can list them out but lots and lots of different coins and collections to create exclusive Content so that drives their community into this game and there'll be battle between different communities Maybe we theme tracks around collections Well, there goes out onto the epic storm, but then you have a few hundred thousand, hopefully.

Free to play users come into the game and they're driving their carts and they look over and they see this Web3 IP in there. What the heck is that? And so then you go down that rabbit hole and find this Web3 world via this game. Yeah, lots to, those are the game, those are the two big games that we have currently in early access or beta and we're Thinking about how we reach that market

Niko: cross so cross pollination really are testing ideas in both directions in a web 2 to web 3 to web 2 just to, throw you the thing that I'm sure you've heard many times before.

And certainly in, in recent Times is, the idea of bringing a big audience in web two into web three and I know you said, you're not going to do it as bluntly as like, here's an NFC, go and buy it. That's not what we're talking about here at all. And I know that, however, there has been a lot of backlash, just like there was with free to play gaming, free to play mobile back in the day, yes, there's a strong analogy there, but it seems to me that the backlash from web two players when they're introduced to web three elements, especially if not done elegantly, let's put it that way, has been much more potent than the backlash from traditional gamers when free to play was first introduced in the mobile app stores first launch.

So I'm curious to hear, because you have so many games in this space, you probably have a better view of this than almost anybody else. Any other web three developer on the planet. I'd love to hear your thoughts, not just to Torque Drift and your other more recent titles, but the overall ecosystem is it a viable approach to take web two gamers, introduce them to web three elements and hope, even.

That they will, that will, they will adopt.

Will: I think it, okay. So I'm not going to pretend there's no backlash because there is right. There's even on talk to two, there's been, there'd be people coming in and, saying, Hey, what's going on with the NFTs helping. Done, I've worked in a few different industries, waking tech products.

They also did a. In the middle, I worked on a fintech app in crypto, which I didn't mention, but there's a like, I'm a big believer in product market fit. So you need to offer something to somebody that's better than what's there now, or that helps them solve a problem they didn't know they had. Or, and I think just telling somebody that they can buy an NFT is not solving a problem for anyone.

And so that's been done quite a few times. And there's also been. Very expensive NFTs or NFTs that, someone sold and then they never got anything and all this stuff. So then that's associated this technology with like bad vibes. But I genuinely think that if done correctly it's better than it can be better than what people have now.

I tested this because we. We recently moved from the UK to Australia, where I was in the UK, we got kids and I would go to the pub with the other dads. Every, every day, no every day, every month, every day, every month or so. And I would talk to them about it and they, none of them are video games developers.

So I've just, I would test out one line of picture that, Oh, what'd you do? And I would be, Oh, it is and say, basically we're doing, we're making this thing where you can buy a car once and it works in those sort of video games. And I'm like, Oh yeah, that's pretty cool. Yes.

And this is the, that's the way to Web2 users. I think you need to offer them something that's better than what they have now. Yeah, we do have, there is a branding problem with NFTs, but I don't really, the underlying technology is pretty irrelevant to most people. I think there's two categories of.

Niko: Strat categories of strategy where you have,

Will: Yeah, the, you've got this very financially literate group of people who are getting up to speed on web three and that, you can try and create products for them, but those products will never go. In my opinion, we'll never go like really mainstream.

You're not going to hit like this 1 billion metaverse audience. That is that what they're interested in is having a good time going and watching sport and playing racing games, right? They're not interested in taking sort of making investment choices and all this stuff and understanding how wallets work and they don't have any reason to do that.

So I just want to make their experience better.

Niko: Yeah, I, I've thought about this quite a bit myself and at the risk of editorializing a little bit here when I play a game that has any kind of economic component web to game that like, so I pay money for it. I pay my 49 99 or whatever. I buy the game and I put a lot of time into it and I see the value of whether it's a Player in basketball league or a car that I'm leveling up or, a level a hundred, sorceress or whatever.

I actually, I want that. Asset in that game to be static. Like when I, if I dropped the game for a week and I come back, I don't want the, like the value of that digital asset to have drastically changed. It's a little discombobulated cause I'm going there to actually enjoy myself. So one of my theses that I've been noodling on, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and we can cut this entire segment out if it doesn't make any sense.

But one of the things I've been noodling about is. Is that value fluctuation that web three offers, especially with the NFT ownership and a tokenized economy, is that actually the opposite of what gamers are looking for? Not all gamers, but is that not the opposite of what the majority of gamers are looking for when they're seeking out a game and choosing to spend their time in that for entertainment value?

Not for financial speculation. It's not super well formulated that question, but I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on that because that is a big component of what web three is trying to do. They are offering essentially this and even what you're talking about with the motor verse.

I own this car, I have a sell button next to it, but the value of it's going to fluctuate depending on what's going on with the ecosystem. And maybe that's just a step too far for gamers that are looking for entertainment. Anyway, your thoughts on that.

Will: No, I think the last thing that I want to do is to expose people to the market.

You know what I mean? That's not the goal. I think that, that volatility, some people love that, right? There's plenty of people getting stuck into that, but that is not what you go to a video game for, you know? Um, but I also, I think your, In our case, if we think about your car in the real world, like your car, the value of your car does change over time and there was some, it does go down slowly, because you're, wear and tear or whatever but some cars, the value goes up and then I think that the.

There's some really interesting stories that you can tell with cards and I like, this idea of artificial scarcity that is created in video games. You said loads of games, right? Anyway, like before web three, but like also now I'm more of a, one of the things we talk about a lot is artificial scarcity versus genuine rarity.

So like you have. We're going to make a hundred cars and then we'll pay those money for them or we'll just have an open mint of cards and then people can go and tell a story with their cars and customize them and then they become unique from the very moment that you purchase it. Your name is or your what idea or whatever is now attached to it.

So there's like this story associated with it. And I want that to be create a, this sort of deeper market. So you need to find the right person to buy your car. You know what I mean? So it's not buy for 10 cents. Now I will sell for nine cents. Now it's you want to say a car cool.

That's let's go show it to some people and see what they think is worth. So it's like a step. It's it's not like a real time. I'm looking at the chart cell, it's a considered decision. Maybe you meet the talk to the person who's buying it.

Niko: Yeah, no I buy that. And I've, I've heard versions of that. And I've espoused versions of that myself too over the years. Yeah, I think the jury's still out. I think that's the bottom line really is I think the jury is still out. And I think there's just a lot of experimentation that needs to happen.

Across the board, web two developers going to web three developers going into web two and seeing what works. I think the, I think you and I both will agree on this which is shoving an NFT and like saying, buy me to a web three, a web two gamer is not the right approach.

And I know that is a hundred percent not what you're talking about. I know you're taking a very measured and deliberate approach, but that is generally what has been tried. And I think that's where, what the backlash has or some versions of that have been tried, and I think that's where the backlash comes from.

Yeah, very curious to see where that innovation comes from. Where does that little spark come from? It's seven years since CryptoKitties, 2017, 2018, when it reached more. Mass consciousness, obviously super early still, then maybe 2021 is a more fair starting point for the web three careers with axia 2020 2021.

But, we're a few years in now, and we haven't yet seen that big kind of spill over into the mainstream.

Will: I still know where I think it's going to go. For me this is, you're right. It is a series of experiments. So we'll be pushing these things out. And then we're, it's going to come from the players, right?

We're going to hear the community talking about it and be like, Hey guys, you did this. I loved it. It's what, that doesn't work, actually. It's, this is how we want to sell cars or no one wants to sell cars or everyone is all about interoperability or the price is wrong or like, why is this price fluctuating? Stop that from happening, please. And these are things that we can have some measure of control over. It's just get, it's about getting it out. Say, here you go, here's a car that you can buy here and it works here and here. And If you get bored with it, you can sell it.

What do you think? Come let us know how you react to that.

Niko: Yeah, no, and I, and to be fair, to be clear and to be fair I think your thesis around cars, car ownership, I think is probably one of the strongest, if not the strongest thesis around the physical versus digital. Fandom, essentially fandom of cars that does not extend to characters in video games or swords or, digital swords or things like that.

So I do think that this is probably one of the best shots on this goal that there is. So I wish you. All the best because I'm a big believer in experiments and experimentation and moving the game industry in general forward and making the same games over and over again.

Call of. As much as I love call of duty, but call of duty, 79 is just going to be better than call of duty 78. Probably not that much drastically revolutionary or introducing new concepts. And. Rightly so, by the way, don't mess with a good thing when you've got it. Okay.

So we're coming up to time here. In fact, we're over time and I appreciate you taking a few extra minutes, but is there anything else that we've not covered today that you think we should mention?

Will: There's, we could, there's a lot of things happening, but I'll make sure you've got all of the links and stuff to be in the show notes.

So people can go to motoverse. com and check out what's going on. There's we regularly update that. You should follow us on Twitter at the motoverse. Also we just, literally, as you mentioned, we just announced our relationship with Lamborghini, which is really mega exciting for us. It's been really fun working with those guys that watch that space.

No, I think, we've covered a lot. We definitely covered a lot. It's been really interesting. For me as well, I think I've learned a couple of things off of you, so that's good.

Niko: I'm glad to hear that. I definitely learned a lot from you, and I'm always, I love guests that are pushing the boundaries, whether I believe it's going to work or not.

I think yours absolutely has a very big shot. Sometimes we have guests where I'm not so sure it's going to work. But I always appreciate the audacity to try new things and try to move the space forward. Yeah. Thanks so much. We do always end with a question. What three games are you playing at the moment or are you most excited by?

And here you cannot use your own ones. You cannot plug your own ones. Any medium, mobile console, PC, steam, whatever. Board games even.

Will: So I I'm playing a lot of princess match cards with my daughters at the moment. Disney. But that's probably not the one that I'm loving the most. And I'm playing Cocoon on Playstation 5.

I really like that. I like the kind of, that it's, I don't know the game, The Witness,

Niko: I'm not familiar with that one, actually. The Witness, I actually made a note of that. I always I make notes of all the games that our guests bring to the show.

Will: So the guy here, and I'm going to forget his name, the guy who made Braid, then, and smashed it, then he made The Witness.

And The Witness is really cool because there's no localization. So the whole game, Is beautiful and it's got it's full of puzzles and you get looks of halfway through it and you realize that you could Be from anywhere in the world and still having the same experience because there's no writing in the game and the cocoon is Made by the guys who made limbo.

You probably have heard of cocoon, but that is has a similar vibe So it doesn't have a word written in It's just very intuitive and it's actually quite fascinating because the kids will sit with me over there and they can solve the puzzles Too it's this really interesting world in a world logic I like that.

And I'm also playing Alan Wake 2.

Niko: Oh, my Finnish compatriots. Yes that's on my list. Actually, I played Alan Wake 1. I played the shit out of that one. Actually, I'll be honest with you. I haven't played Alan Wake 2. I haven't had a chance yet. But is it scary? Is it scarier than, is it as scary as people say?

Will: It is, scary. Yeah, it is scary. It's a different kind of scary. So the other game I was going to, and the the other game, I've heard it sounds like I play a huge amount. I don't, I probably play three hours a week or something. But there's alien isolation. I tried to play that when it came out.

And I love the alien franchise I'm pleased. I'm excited about the new movie. There's a alien Romulus. I think it's coming out soon. And so I, I played alien isolation when it came out, which I think it was in like 2017 or something, maybe earlier. And I was too scared to play it. So I stopped playing it.

And I recently gone back to it. And I'm like, I'm trying it and I'm like stuck somewhere on this space station. It's really quiet. And my wife's gone to bed and I'm actually this is pretty scary.

But they just do such, it was such a well made game. It's just really cool. So those are the things I'm into in the moment game wise. Fantastic.

Niko: Fantastic. All right. Listen thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure and honor to have you on the show. I've learned a lot. I know our listeners will have learned a lot as well and best of luck with everything you guys are doing, which is a lot, obviously.

Thanks. It's been great to be here. I really enjoyed it. I hope you talk again soon. Yep. Welcome back anytime, by the way. And of course, a big thank you to all of our listeners. We'll be back next week with more interviews, more insights, and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web three and gaming.

So until next time, friends stay crypto curious and feel free to send questions, guest recommendations, and comments to me. My email is [email protected].

If you enjoyed today's episode, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a five-star review. And if you wanna reach out or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you wanna learn more about what Naavik has to offer, make sure to check out our website www.naavik.co there. You can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Naavik Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services.

Again, that is www.naavik.co. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.