Guild of Guardians, Immutable’s second major game after Gods Unchained, is one of the most anticipated web3 games of 2024. The game recently pivoted from a real-time RPG to an auto-battler, and is set for a May 15th global release. Guild of Guardians is one of the first games on Immutable’s new ZK-EVM blockchain, which Naavik covered in the January 24, 2024 episode of the podcast with Immutable founder, Robbie Ferguson.
In the second half of the episode your host, Niko Vuori, and Naavik’s own web3 analyst, Devin Becker, spend some time reflecting on the state of web3 gaming now that a fresh crypto bull run is well underway. What does that mean for web3 games? Has the industry learned any lessons from the 2021-2022 rise and fall? Or is it all just tulip mania all over again?
Check out Devin’s piece on Guild of Guardians at https://naavik.co/digest-updating-web3-2024/ and Niko’s interview with Immutable founder Robbie Ferguson at https://naavik.co/immutables-web3-roadmap-for-2024.
We’d also like to thank Nefta for making this episode possible. Nefta has created an advertising network that pays game publishers higher eCPMs on their iOS opt-out users and drives better results for advertisers. Learn more about how Nefta can boost your results at http://nefta.io/
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 Vouri. We have a great episode for you today. Our topic is one of the most anticipated Web3 games of 2024, Guild of Guardians. They recently announced a pivot from real time RPG to auto battler, and Immutable also released a new white paper offering further insights into this pivot, particularly on the Web3 front.
The game is in soft launch set for a May 15th global release, so we wanted to assess the updated design of Immutable's second game, which is also one of the very first on its new ZK EVM blockchain. And In this episode, we also wanted to take a little pause now that we're already a quarter of the way through the year to evaluate where the Web3 gaming space really is.
With a fresh crypto bull well underway, what does that mean for games, and have we learned any lessons from 2021 2022, or is it just tulip mania all over again? So to dive into all of this, we have Naavik's very on Web3 analyst Devin Becker, who just published an in-depth look at Guild of Guardians, which is a must read for anyone interested.
And I also had Robbie Ferguson, who's the founder of Immutable on the show on the January 24th episode talking about the Immutable roadmap for 2024, which is definitely also worth a listen to get a sense of what one of the biggest ecosystem players is up to. And we'll put a link to both of those in the show notes.
So with that, Devin, welcome back to the pod.
Devin: Thanks. Thanks for having me. Always great to talk to you. Definitely you're staying on top of a lot of this stuff. So it's awesome. All right.
Niko: Right back at you. Right back at you. All right, let's get into it. And let's start just like with the intro, let's start with Guild of Guardians.
Why is it a big deal? What is it? And what are you seeing them doing that's interesting?
Devin: It's a big deal partially because there was only so many games that kind of survived the sort of big boom in 2021, 2022, when everyone got a lot of money and a lot of people just silently burnt out.
And obviously big players like a immutable can't really afford to do that. And they, they've had to sometimes make big refocuses like they did with Gods Unchained, which I think was pretty successful. And so then they had to do the same thing here. Which I think was, is a pretty big deal to have to make a big pivot because the big downside of Web 3 a lot of the time the way it was run is you're getting people invested early.
You're giving a lot of promises, you're putting out these white papers with all these design promises ahead of time. And then, reality hits and you've got to pivot and that's the case here with Guild of Guardians. They've got to make a little bit of a, of an adjustment with people already invested in the game.
Niko: And it's not just a little pivot. We're going from a real-time, RPG to an auto battler, which is a very different type of gameplay. Arguably a different player base entirely. Certainly in web two. There surely is overlap, but it's not like a one-to-one. And so to your point, with all of these players already invested early on into a real-time, RPG, what's the sentiment?
Like what's going on? Why these pivots, why did they feel they needed to do something this major drastic almost in my opinion.
Devin: Yeah, it's definitely, there will be people that are somewhat dissatisfied with this altogether. I mean myself, like I would definitely have much preferred to play a real time.
I'm not really into the auto battler genre, although, there's plenty of RPGs that have auto battling as an option where you can just auto play, especially in Asia markets. So it's like there is room for that sort of transition. However, that being said, like it's definitely a pretty big change.
Just in the game in general, and I think that is going to be a struggle for them to do it. But it was one of those things that was necessary because what basically happened, and of course, they would know the details better than me because I'm going off what they've said publicly, but they basically ran into a situation where it was really not looking realistic for the deadlines that they had to try and put the game out.
Their partner was not really keeping up with what they needed to do to get the game releasable because, they'd add some alphas. They had stuff. Someone working, but it was just clearly not going to hit what they were trying to do. So they had to pick up a new partner. Now, whether it's coincidence or not, but this new partner, mine litter happens to be quite good at making auto battler games.
And this is their forte. It seemed like it also might've been a simplification in terms of trying to get. The real time combat into some sort of mode that they could make work because It's not easy to make something like that Especially what they were trying to do was a squad based system where you were switching characters But also real time and what they were doing was very difficult to achieve reasonably honestly, so they basically just put Pivoted that to be like let's focus on the parts that are essential to web three, which is getting different characters, forming up the party and going through these dungeons.
So they kept that core, but simplified the other parts so that mind loader could basically help them hit those deadlines. And so far they actually are following that roadmap that they gave, which was for a Q Q2 2024 release, which they're on target for right now. And it's a soft launch at the moment in Canada.
So you can. Play it up there.
Niko: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the actual changes. They have NFTs, obviously, and they have a single token economy, the GOG token, G O G. What changes did they make to those? And how do they play nice with the new game mode or the games?
Devin: Play style that they've they've pivoted into, essentially what the overall changes are is to basically focus more on appealing to the web to audience and making the web three is a little more optional.
So they've kept, the stuff that, the way that existed in there as still existing in there just maybe isn't as important or as critical to the gameplay where you're not dependent on having NFTs to be able to play, for example, they're not critical to the game play. They're just better. And we'll see if that ends up working out for them, but they definitely made it a lot more optional.
They also simplified a lot of the economy stuff, which makes sense considering the complexity before and not really anyone figuring out a great game plan for how to run this sort of open economy stuff. So they basically simplified a lot of that down as well to probably make quite a bit more of it not on chain.
Although there's a lot of stuff they say in the white paper, for example, that NFTs this, NFTs that, where they don't really get into detail on what exactly will be there. They leave a lot of stuff vague, like the use of the term resources here and there without really defining what that means.
So they definitely left still a lot open, which given they've already pivoted once, seems like the smart play to be like we're going to have to figure this out as we go. Obviously they have, Some public display with that soft launch Canada, but they did have the one interesting element that they kept, which was trying to go with merging being an important component around crafting and things like that, which, being a resource and economic driven game, it's still going to be part of that.
We'll see how that works out because that's also still not super well defined, but. It's interesting.
Niko: And how do the Web 2 and Web 3 components work together now? I think in your piece for Novik in the Digest you noted that the NFT holders could potentially be overpriced. Powering the web to players on, of course, pay to win is never popular with players in any genre of games.
Doesn't matter if it's a real time RPG or auto battle or anything else. What? What in your view has happened to the web to and web three modes, if you will, and how well do they do they perform? Jive with each other from a player perspective, right?
Devin: They left themselves a little bit of a problem because they sold a bunch of character NFTs first, right?
Where they're like, okay, we sold all these NFTs. We promised that these are going to be super important to playing. They have to have some value, but at the same time, like you said, they can't be totally pay to win. So they had to find a balance where it's like, okay, they're going to be a little bit better.
We're not going to shy away from that. There is a reason to upgrade towards this path. There has to be some reason to justify doing this, but at the same time, like you could still play as a free to play player and participate and you don't have to touch the web three economy, but they're still giving additional benefits to the people that bought those founders level NFT.
So they're going to get additional stuff. Whereas people coming in later, you can basically do what, I think a lot of games will do, which is take your characters in the game and then turn them in NFTs for a price. And. They haven't been super clear on whether or not you're spending, say, for example, tokens to do that, or just holding them or exactly that process in terms of costs, things like that, which I imagine they're actually going to have to adjust over time because you're dealing with a supply that they're going to have to manage of NFTs.
But they also set up a system where there's a reason to burn tokens. heroes and NFTs to get resources back and upgrade your heroes. But they basically designed it to be very similar to most gotcha systems out there, which is, around collecting things and then burning duplicates. But they just have this extra layer of when they become NFTs, then they're a little bit better because of course that costs a little bit more maybe, and they're slightly more exclusive, but there's still reasons to burn the duplicates.
And we'll see how high that goes, but it is definitely going to encourage a little bit of pay to win. Element in the sense that of course, NFTs are more likely to cost real money as opposed to just earning them through gameplay.
Niko: Yeah. And I think that also introduces a potential problem with the major platforms.
If you want to be on mobile, Google, Apple while they're loosening, obviously their rules and maybe loosening isn't quite the right world. They're defining, they're better defining their rules. Let's put it that way. Not loosening. And so it's always going to be a fine line.
With having NFTs and gotcha systems and things like that. What do you see as the path that immutable has here to get to mobile and to be as broad, as a web to game, right? And that, of course, is always the goal. We're going to talk about that in a second, more broadly, but the web to Peace needs to be super accessible and super accessible means it has to be mobile, essentially.
So talk a little bit about that and how are immutable navigating that in your view?
Devin: There's, I think there's two easy ways to approach, two rules, of to approach it with. One is around the gambling sort of laws that, that Google was trying to define. And I imagine those Probably apply to Apple at some point as well.
And so I think it's just good process to follow, which is that basically if you do anything where you're getting a random output, that random output should not be an NFT right then. And so they I think, leave a little bit of wiggle room there by defining exactly why that's the case.
Meaning they don't want something of a dollar value potentially coming out of one of those boxes. Now, if you get something out of a loot box and then you can turn it into an NFT later, you're making a conscious choice, knowing the exact financial value potentially Of that thing when you make that conversion and at that case that's just a transaction that I think everyone's transparent on and then it's not gambling anymore.
So I think that's actually pretty easy to understand application of the rule, which is to say, just make it so that people could turn things that they already know what they are into NFTs. And, but they could still get random things prior to that process. So they're doing that. Of course, you could get your gadget characters and then you could turn them into an NFT later.
And I think that process makes it pretty straightforward. The other thing is making sure people get their cut. Now that's more on Apple side, which if you're making sure Apple gets their cut of things, they're generally not going to complain. And in this case, if you are basically getting or creating heroes through some process that still involves.
Apple getting a cut of that. Now, it's not going to be 100%, right? Because you might be upgrading heroes to NFTs that you didn't purchase in any way. You just turned through gameplay. But that's probably not going to be something that's a big problem. It's more, hey, if you paid to summon a character with the gotcha and you give an Apple a 30 percent cut for that in app purchase, they're not going to care as much that you turn that to an IAP and then that gets traded because it's not, duplicating itself.
There's a breeding system outside of it. Where you're making more is just swapping hands, but they already got their 30 percent on that generation. And I think fair is fair. And obviously Apple could disagree. The reviewers can be random, but I think if you apply those rules where make sure they get their money and make sure people know what they're getting, that's generally what these sort of common sense parts are about.
Niko: Let's talk about the token the GOG token. It's an important part of this particular game. Not every game, of course, has a tokenized economy, the open economy open economies are notoriously hard to control. We talked about it many times on this podcast with various other games as well.
And I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on how this single token model, it's both for utility and for governance. How do you see that? Playing out. And then I have a whole bunch of questions around security and how well having this kind of auto battler, which really is automated gameplay essentially makes it much easier to grind for, or, and to potentially manipulate through bots, token generation, token harvesting, token mining, whatever you want to call it.
So let's talk a little bit about the single token model first, and then we're going to get into the security elements of how this actually works in real life.
Devin: Yeah, definitely. I like, First off, I think the easy answer about the single token model is that I don't see a world in where it makes a lot of sense to have it both act as governance and as a utility token.
That's like that idea of voting with your dollar. Like it's you're just two very different purposes. One, you were trying to use it as some sort of medium of exchange or store of value or whatever. And the other, you're trying to use it as something where you're basically holding a vote with it in it.
There may be ways to like, abstract that out slightly where you're not literally using the tokenet to do it, but there's some other process that involves the token. But again that just looks like you're buying votes essentially. And I've seen that in the past, with many games that did have a governance token, they still were, if you could purchase that token, then you're purchasing a vote.
And that doesn't really make sense. But to be fair, democracy hasn't really been figured out in the real world. So I don't expect video games to figure it out any sooner.
Niko: Dollars do vote technically, right? Citizens United, the, the Supreme court, famous Supreme court said corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on on, on essentially influence, dollars do vote here in this country at least.
But anyway, we digress.
Devin: Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, and that's going to be problematic, right? And they don't really get into that in the white paper. They leave it vague. Like, Yeah, it'll probably be used for some governance, but they leave it there because again, no one's figured that out.
No one's really had a model that really showed how that would work. Some of the models are even just basically treasury claims and not really governance. I the Axie model was essentially similar to that in the first place. But as far as the rest of the utility goes, they're in a weird situation because.
They don't seem to want people to actually really truly spend the token. They just want people to hold it for different reasons, meaning holding it to be able to maybe mint more NFTs or holding it in terms of staking it to get more of the token. So they don't seem to have any like real way to drive people to spend it.
And that's the part that concerns me because in a system like Where you're generating tokens or providing supply over time. Now they have their supply, chart and stuff like that. Obviously they'd plan that ahead of time. This is not like a new token. It's been out, like they've had to deal with this and they already pre planned that.
So they've got this whole curve that they're planning on distributing this over time. But I don't think that I've seen an adequate plan of how they're going to absorb that over time. How that's, even if the game goes gangbusters in terms of people loving it and wanting to spend money on it and do things, they're not really showing away because everything's talking about holding with one weird exception around this sort of.
Web three on the web NFT burning recipe system for other it just sounds like this weird kind of thing that they have is a sort of plan to sort of burn NFTs or get rid of stuff or drive some sort of spending. And I've seen that sort of in late game models where they struggle with supply like many real nations end up like fourth season doing that where they're like.
Asking people to do all these different kinds of burning NFTs to try and reduce the supply because it was out of control. I could see that desperate kind of bonfire move going here, but you'd have to really incentivize people strongly because you have the situation where investors are going to be at some point dumping these tokens onto the market.
And then players are going to be doing the same. And then people that staked and get staking rewards are going to be doing the same. Everyone's dumping them out of the market. Who's going to be scooping those up and where are those going to be going? I don't think it's been adequately answered for me to not be skeptical that this is not a great plan so far.
Niko: Yeah, it sounds risky and it sounds like maybe there haven't been that many lessons learned from these types of single token models from the past. Okay, let's talk about the security. Oh, and actually before we get into the security element you actually looked at the price and obviously caveat this with the fact that obviously the game isn't live yet.
The game isn't broadly distributed yet. So of course there's going to be a downward Pricing pressure, unless you're speculating. I mean, You could argue that it should be going up. In fact, before launch, because the more hype there is, the more people want to buy into it. But tell us a little bit about what you found by when you looked at the pricing moves over time for the GOG token.
Devin: Yeah, like most things that came out, in 2021, 2022, and then like the market just kind of crashed, they pretty much just went down to a sort of idle value where it just sits there around a certain value that may or may not be its true value. It's hard to say, right?
Because we don't really know how to price these things yet. And when it's a game that's not even live yet. What are you trading it based off of? It's just pure speculation. And if there's no speculation happening, the price isn't going to move, which is exactly what happening with most of the tokens out there, because there's no reason for it to move.
People still might be trading it, but it's not going to be heavy. Now, obviously, like it started, getting a little bit of movement around the pivot and the fact that this is impending coming. So I do imagine like we'll start to see a little more volatility in it, whether that be up or down.
I can't say for sure because it Again, they left a lot of stuff vague, and I think, again, that was on purpose, and it's probably smart prudent at this point to be a little bit vague, because that's game design you can't really pre plan everything and expect it to all go according to plan, obviously you want that to be a lot of it happening in the studio level and not in public, but they're in that point where they've already made a lot of public promises they have to keep, at least partially.
And so I imagine at first it might not be too bad for the token. And I'm just totally speculating here and not really, this is no investment advice of any kind, but there may be some positive interest in the token at first, only because the supply is going to be lower right now. Like the full distribution hasn't hit.
People might be thinking, Oh, this game takes off. Like I could take advantage of that with the token. And so you might get some speculation there only because the market right now is very back into speculating on crypto. And so that could definitely lean into that. Obviously there's not a ton of uses for the token yet people.
I'm not sure if people can stake at the moment. I'm not sure if they have those staking live. But if so, people could scoop it up to just stake it all in there, which just means you get a dump later on in a big price crash. But it really depends on how much they have active.
I think when the game goes full launch, how much you could do with this token. They've got to deal with even just launching onto a new blockchain and then dealing with all that migration stuff and I imagine they're hoping for maybe some web to success first for worrying so much about the web three, but they still got a plenty of investment on that web three side, like essentially player investors.
They've got to answer to amongst. Like private investors, they actually took money from.
Niko: Yeah a lot to think about there. The automated gameplay, let's get down to the security aspect here. I had the pixels dot X, Y, Z founder on the pod. I think last episode of the episode, but one. And We spent probably about a third of the episode talking about anti bot detection, fighting bots and whenever you have something that accrues value we know this even from Web 2 games, gold farming and we just talked about the thing of poker before this call and how, there's a great economy around those as well the chips there.
So whenever you've got something that accrues value in games whether it be real value, especially when it's real value. You're gonna have bots, you're gonna have bad actors coming in now, maybe that's not a problem yet, because again, there's not a huge amount of value accruing to this GOG token, but talk to me a little bit about what is your view on having an auto battler type gameplay, which literally lends itself to bots, like it's as if by design and the token itself, right?
Devin: Obviously the sort of idle genre, auto battle genre, whatever you want to call it, it's fairly popular. And that's, they cite a lot of market research in the white paper and things like that to justify the move as being a good one because it's a popular genre.
But of course, as you rightly point out, there's not monetary value to be gained from actually having bots play that. So obviously there can be some, if you're selling accounts, things like that, but that's a lot more difficult to make a bigger business out in this situation.
Depending on how they do the distribution of tokens and the value tokens and things like that definitely could be a problem for them. We definitely saw most of the web the sort of gen one web three games. And I, depending on how we chop those up, but pretty much most of the games we've seen so far, ended up with some, sometimes very significant level of bots playing them.
And it's in, we saw situations where games like Splinterlands tried to go let's just make them good economic participants, things like that. And then, and if you think about it it makes sense where if you're treating a game like labor in some form, Then automation comes in to try and automate labor, which is what we're seeing as a thing going on in the real world outside of games pretty frequently these days, especially with AI.
And so it only makes more sense That would be the problem. And the question that came down a lot of times in 2021, 2022 is what are the players doing of value that justifies them getting something of value? And that was, how are they adding value to the game so that you're giving something for sure?
And obviously there's like, you know, competitive models and things like that. But if this is an auto battler, there's not really like much skill to be had. So it's hard to justify Hey, we're rewarding the most skillful players. They're talking about a model where they're rewarding off leaderboards and stuff.
But if There, there certainly is some skill in terms of selecting the right, the, the right characters and adapting, but considering there's not really a lot stopping you from net decking because there's no real interactivity, people just pick whatever the meta is, and therefore that's their skill.
Unless they're keeping it secret. Pretty much everyone could do it and it's just who could spend the most to actually have those things. Similar to what you see sometimes in high end trading card game stuff where if the meta is expensive, then it's whoever could spend the most to actually have those decks will do the best.
And that's like an unfortunate reality. And then when you tokenize that stuff on top of it, and you're talking about like essentially prize money or something that, has, Monetary value that's going to be very difficult for them to manage because there's no anti bot technology that truly works and there's no reason for there to be as AI is evolving quite quickly and even more reason why it would be very difficult unless you're having AI trying to detect and block other AI than maybe, that sort of work could work out, better than us trying to fight it, but uh, that's You know it's not necessarily a solvable problem, and I do think it's better to just accommodate for it in the economy design, and I don't see that doing like a leaderboard model on an automated game is going to really do that.
The, that was a big problem in one of the earlier experiments that I think was a These experiment, which was like mere four and mere M. They just got overrun by bots, like super bot farms everywhere. And the only way it was sort of manageable for it, for the company was we made, was basically to basically just charge 10 for those bots to be mining like per account, and then just ban them in huge waves and then charge them the 10 again, and it was like this is financially viable for the company, at least because now they're just getting paid to do these bot wave bands and that's not, that's like an old model that goes back to the Something Awful forums for just banning people get the 10 bucks again, but I don't think that helps the player base out and I hope they have another answer for how they're going to distribute these tokens.
Obviously, there's community rewards, which are a little easier to give to humans, I think.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah. As I mentioned the pixel thought XYZ founder, I think a good third of that interview was because they have, they had now have hundreds of thousands of DAU. Tens of thousands of concurrence their token is going up and token go up.
And so whenever you have that situation, you're going to have bad actors. Entering the economy and you're going to have bots automation is going to be happening. And yeah, good luck to these guys. I think if anybody has the resources, I suppose immutable does in the space, but sounds like it's a, it's going to be a potentially uphill battle.
Okay. Why don't we, Oh, before we go into the kind of TLDR, what are your views on the potential success or failure or. Middle of the ground for this game. How big is the market for auto battlers and even in web two and then what sliver of that do you think is going to my, if it's even knowable, it's going to migrate to the web three component.
Devin: Overall, the web three market, they serve as a player base is not. Really that huge for like real like gamers but I think there's this weird mix of like people that are not necessarily gamers that are interested in the space, but the problem is like we estimate a lot of the web3 player base off of a mix of bots and people that are into it for the play to earn and it's not really like gamers game is that they're trying to Get to play the game and gamers is it's actually not that huge of a player base yet But I think it's one of those things where we're like everyone's hoping to convert players but if you think about it like most like new business models don't really replace the old one and like they just extend it a little bit like Arcades are still a business like they're not as great a business as they used to be Arcades are still around, but every one of these business models consoles still exist, like they don't go away.
They just shift in terms of like player base, things like that. Sometimes it's just new people being born that end up playing these things. And so in this case, like you're not going to convert a lot of web two to web three, but you might get some people interested right now. There's like a lot of negativity to overcoming it.
And a lot of it rightfully earned. We just had SBF finally get slapped down. So at least we're getting some public punishment for some of these bad actors. But it's definitely still a problem. And I think it's going to be very hard sell to a lot of people. And I think most of the people are going to be involved in the web three with the people that were already involved in the web three for this game.
And then some of those even might be like, Hey, I don't want to do with an auto battler and just sell it off to someone else. So the question is, can they get enough people excited about it when they're also backing off From making it crucial to the game and that's such a difficult needle to thread because you're like, hey We got to make web 3 matter.
So web 3 matters. We also got to make it not matter So it doesn't matter to these people and it's like how do you make both play races happy? And you could just go the dramatic direction of like on chain games and extremes and this is an niche audience We don't care and I think that works for that.
But like the rest of it is going to be You It's going to be very difficult, and I don't think going to an autobattler necessarily did them any favors in that sense. Because you've already got these people running this bot mentality sometimes in Web 3 anyways. That, it's just going to be them almost like competing with the Web 2 people, in a way that might end up making the Web 2 people Just de demotivated because they're not really interested in the Web3 part, that is outpacing them on the leaderboards or, just like spending to win the way pay to win games sometimes really uh, make the free to play players or the sort of dolphins disinterested in playing because they can't spend that.
Niko: So many of these games that are trying to balance Web 2 and Web 3 you put it nicely there, actually, they need to make Web 3 matter so that Web 3 matters, but at the same time, they need to appeal to a large enough audience, meaning Web 2, because everybody recognizes that this Web 3 player base just is not big enough in and of itself.
There's just aren't enough, people I think who really care about owning NFTs like, digital ownership at this point in time. Maybe that'll change over time. Maybe that'll, there'll be new people, new kids being born into it. Skins and fortnight are a very big business. UGC content is a big business and it's mostly skews younger, right?
But yeah, I think converting that web to audience, I think we've seen enough, we've had enough years of enough shots on goal by enough companies that have had enough funding and enough experience on their teams not succeed with that yet. I'll caveat that with a yet that it is an uphill battle, I think.
Okay. With all of that said, with all of this preamble what is your view, Devin, of how Guild of Guardians what is, what are its chances? Pros and cons?
Devin: So the hard part is if I just completely ignore the Web3 side of things and just focus on the web two side. I think it's tricky in the sense that it's not totally original in a lot of ways.
The core design is not terrible. Like they, they, a squad based auto battler is fine. There's a lot of those, they seem to work okay. They've got a sort of roguelite way of looking at the dungeon and, like essentially procedurally generating content. But the question is what's the hook to really make it interesting when you read the white paper, it just sounds like this blueprint for grinding.
Which, from an economy design, that makes sense. But if that's really what the game comes down to over time, that kind of becomes Not that interesting without an IP tied to it. Like I watched like something like the Street Fighter Duel game, right? That was this gotcha grind fest kind of game.
And, the people that are into Street Fighter are interested in it for a while. But the people, it's not going to sustain as a game that's, fun in and of itself without that IP attached to it. In this case, Guild of Guardians is relatively generic fantasy. And that's not really, That being said, people could still get excited about the game for the Web3 side of things and build up a player base around that sort of play to earn enthusiasm that probably isn't sustainable, but I think some people are hoping that there's a flywheel kind of effect, as they like to call it, which I think is selling it.
Probably a bit more than it usually is, getting that initial sort of network effect going they might be able to do that if we're, we're in a bull market right now and people are excited and, flooding from especially other countries into just jumping into that hopeful play to earn, even if it's not realistic that might help you going.
But that being said, this is not really a super multiplayer game. Provide a lot of network effect to get people playing because it's still semi single player content from what I can tell. There might be some PVP, but that doesn't seem like the core of the game. So I don't know, if they could find like a real, I think a niche audience and grow from there.
They probably have more potential than trying to mass market this. I don't really see, we're not in a place right now where you could just launch a new mobile game and mass market it without a lot of luck and a lot of money. And that's why you see even the companies that know how to do it, stopping releasing games.
They're just like we can't even do it. So it makes you think you could do it because the one advantage is the web three side. And that's the side they're basically semi copping out on to, to compromise for that. So it's a big ask at that point.
Niko: We wish them good luck, and I wish Bobby Ferguson good luck on the January 24th episode, and he is very excited, and he acknowledged actually on that on that show that, they have a lot of titles launching over the next year or two, and he fully expects, most of them to be failures, and failures in a kind of commercial sense and that's games for you but, his hope and I think expectation certainly was for there to be that 20, 10, 20 percent of games that launched that actually will have that.
And he believes there'll be a mass market audience for them. So we wish them luck. And web three certainly needs that at this moment in time. But with that, I do think we need to, so we said at the start, we're going to take a little beat here, a little pause and look at where are we with web three, because we are right smack in the middle of yet another Crypto bull run, right?
And that's what launched web three. Last time around was a big crypto bull run, right? So what have we learned in the interim? And what is what are our expectations for what this crypto bull run is going to do? Are some of the business models that we're seeing emerged this year? Are they any different to what they were in 2021.
Have we learned any lessons? Are we in the middle of another chilipania? Is play to earn actually sustainable? Can you build a real play to earn game? Again, if you listen to the pixels. xyz episode they're very bullish. Very bullish. To bring back that word again from 2021, they're very bullish on play to earn.
And they're leaning into play to earn. They're truly saying we are a play to earn game. We believe we can control Value creation. We believe that the token price can go up essentially indefinitely. Let's see if that holds true, but with that, I want to just Devin and I are just going to talk a little bit about where are we in this market and how do we think this is going to play out differently compared to last time.
So a lot to unpack there. So why don't we start with Devin, just your views, like we're at a That's what launched the last web three wave. Are we going to see the same thing happen this time? And if so, how is it going to be different?
Devin: Like this is what I've been saying during the entire sort of like short winter we had was that basically the Western markets will be interested as soon as there's money to be made.
And that's exactly what happens is we have the ETFs happen. And there was money to be made. And now here we are interested again. I don't know if I'd call this a bull market for games though. Because if we're talking about what really kicked this off was Bitcoin ETFs, that doesn't really have a lot of relevance to games as much as we'd like to outside of, something like Zebedee where there's a tie directly to Bitcoin.
And I don't think Bitcoin ordinals really count for this as something that's really game tied. And so that makes it questionable, obviously. Ethereum goes up with Bitcoin and that's where it starts to impact games. Cause as Ethereum goes up, that's where the games are generally run on in some form or another in a way, like whether there'll be layer twos or tangential stuff or stuff that's similar to it.
And so obviously there's investment coming in. And so that kind of perpetuates that cycle, at least for a while longer, right? Where you're seeing more money come in, but you had a lot of failures in the beginning where there's a lot of people that just silently failed. And then you have some of these games that are just not even.
Released yet getting re upped. They're getting extended investments essentially. And it's is this just a this doubled down on our potential losses, or is it like, we really believe this is going to happen or we have to, for the sake of our company, really believe this is going to happen.
And I think right now I haven't seen any thesis on why this is different or better other than it's different and better this time. And the fact that people are still champion play to earn without really justifying why it's different. Yeah. Is it leaves me pretty skeptical that this is like a long lasting board.
I feel like this is a sort of let's just get money going again and hope for the best. Wishful thinking I'm still bullish on more of the Asian market, not caring so much about this being a money play and more of an actual, like exciting technology and design thing to be the real carrier.
Forward and that this might unfortunately be short lived, but I would, for myself, I would love for this to be, blast indefinitely, but I gotta be realistic. I haven't seen any reason to believe that yet.
Niko: It strikes me that there are maybe three or four buckets of Web three development going on.
So there's your absolute purists who are out. All on chain stuff like they're doing it because they believe that is a type of gameplay that needs to exist and there is a big enough audience. They recognize mostly that it's a relatively small audience, but a big enough audience that's prepared to spend significant amounts of money, real money and for that to be a thing.
So fully on chain games. Then you've got the kind of. The middle group, mostly, and this is where most people, most developers fall is that middle, web 2. 5, where they're trying to straddle the web 2 and web 3. They're trying to be on mobile because that's where the players are on web 2. But then there's this extra value creation from web 3.
Let's see if there are any successful examples of that coming out. And then you've got the rebirth of play to earn, which is no, we truly believe That there is this type of gameplay where I'm grinding for tokens and those tokens will accrue value because there'll be more players and more participants in the ecosystem and the economy coming in than are taking value out.
And those are the three buckets. And then there's this hybrid Asian bucket, I think, which is as you point out, they're really interested in the technology. And they think that technology can actually apply to games, and it's not really called even Web3 so much there it's, it's just a it's a feature, right?
It's a feature or it's a set of technologies that can be applied to game design, but not for financial reasons and not necessarily for tokenization. Would that be a fair assessment of where we are right now? And maybe talk a little bit about each of those buckets in terms of how you see those evolving and who are the interesting players in those three or four buckets.
Devin: Yeah, on the inside of the on chain game sort of thing, I think of it similar to a lot of other emerging technologies that don't really take off as a game platform immediately, like VR, for example, is in weird spiral right where clearly there's potential no one. I think. Like discounts that there's potential.
Some games could be amazing with it. There's really cool things you could do, but clearly the market's not there, the technology, maybe there's something just lacking in terms of getting people to really adopt it. So a lot of it's comfort and sort of technology needing to actually advance enough to make things more comfortable.
And I mean, you, you can see that with Apple's headset, where people are just like, this thing's just too heavy. It's like wearing a helmet all day. Those kinds of problems like are not solved overnight. And thing. There's just a lot of hurdles and problematic things. I think it gets there eventually to some extent, right?
It's a cool technology. I think we know some cool things you could do with it that are amazing. I think some of the stuff like David Amore is talking about Brown, this sort of ideas of composition are fantastic. But I think that's also a little. Futuristic for where we are right now.
It's a little flying car for where it's like, yeah, you could build it, but it's maybe it's not practical yet. But someone's going to do it, right? Someone's got to lay that groundwork. And I think I cheerleader those on chain people all day long. I think that's awesome. I think what they're doing is amazing, but I don't see a commercial reality for that at the moment.
And that's all just cause it's early. And I would love to for it to be otherwise, but even the technology of blockchain itself is early that they're building on and evolving. So expect that to shift. Now, as far as the sort of earned bucket, I think The easy way to look at it is you keep talking about these other people coming in to spend money, right?
It's then, if you could balance that out, that's fine. But if you're just talking about kicking the can to the next player who's gonna earn and kick the can to the next player, that's pretty much a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme at that point, right? Like, That's just, Hoping the next guy will fall for it.
And that's where we ended up with a lot of art NFTs that are falling that the value of this is how much the next sucker will pay. And that's not real value. So if you're looking at it in terms of a two tiered economy, where there's players that are essentially the gold farmers and there's players that are willing to pay for that gold, as long as the bots don't ruin that has some potential for some sustainability, but that demand needs to be there.
People need to be willing to buy that gold. People need to be, willing for that to exist. There was. For example, sub success from the Diablo 3 auction house. Blizzard didn't shut it down because it was a financial failure for them. They shut it down for a variety of other reasons. But, there is like some potential for that to work.
At least short term, right? But you have to have the demand there and that everyone keeps talking about the supply side of like, hey, we'll control how many tokens people get. Yeah, but can you control how many people tokens people buy? That's where the efforts not really being put. I write in ironic because it's we know how to get people to spend money because free to play has been doing it.
I like turning it into a science for the last decade. Decade plus. I think we've got some ideas on how to get people to spend money, but they do it this weird roundabout ways instead of just selling people stuff. And I don't know if that's really a good business model. And so they got to find somebody to make that work.
Niko: If you think about what that model actually is in real life, you're actually you're flipping things on its head, right? You're not actually, you're just starting with the, Hey, you can make money. It was a great New York Times article just last week which was all about how the bull, crypto bull is, has brought back internet cafes in the Philippines where, people are going once again, just like they did during the Axia days in 2020, 2021, and are essentially just grinding for tokens that have some economic value.
And actually pixels dot X, Y, Z, my guests from last week or last episode was mentioned by name in there, and That's what folks are playing. They're playing these games. They're earning tokens and they're cashing them out and there are, there's enough demand because token go up. That you're always going to find those people but you're then going searching.
It's really interesting because you're like, Hey, you can make money. Great. Everybody wants to make money. Of course, that's something that people will do for sure. It doesn't matter how awful the user experience is. If there's money to be made, they're going to go and try and make money. But then they wait, try and figure out like who's going to be buying these tokens other than future speculators.
And I think that's just a really, That's been always in my mind, the biggest problem in the play to earn space. It's, it starts with a financial motive and it then goes in a search. Of the I want to spend on something for the pure joy of spending on that thing because I'm enjoying it. Yeah. That's just how, give me any example in the history of human invention where that has worked out.
I would struggle to think of something like that where you go in with a profit motive and then you try to backfill.
Devin: That's most of tech, right? Yeah. We'll get a ton of investment. We'll figure out how to make money later. So that worked for tech.
Niko: But I would, they start with we will, we want to create it.
We're going to make a product that people will want. They're still starting at the demand side. They're not going to go right. Exactly. Markets are the goal. They want to make a product that like everybody wants so much that eventually it'll start to make money. And here it's, It never starts that way.
It starts with the financial. It starts with like, Hey, I want to be able to make money and I want people to make money, but I'm not going to figure out why they would want to spend on it.
Devin: Just sell stuff to people in the game that allow people to trade it. Like you're actually making less money by asking people to trade your thing than just selling it to people because you're not selling it to people.
The other people are selling it to people. And it's You're actually kneecapping yourself if you haven't figured out how to make sure that's going to work for you long term. And it seems, like you said, pretty backwards. I don't think it's like unsolvable. I just think people are the way I've been putting it lately is I think people look at all these weird obfuscated token systems.
Bonding curves.
Niko: Yeah, as a cheat code for we'll figure out how to make, we'll figure it out at some point. We're going to put a long ass whitepaper. Yeah. Yeah. So no I think that's, and the word tokenomics is making a comeback as well. I've noticed that more and more in, in the pitches that we get for, for guests to come on the podcast Oh, we have the best tokenomics, like we've figured out a formula, please do tell that we're do tell don't keep it a secret.
You give it to all of us. Um, Okay. So I think we, we seem to have a similar view of the play to earn. I'm more than happy to have guests on the show, by the way. And I'm more than happy to always be proven wrong.
Devin: I think we, we both are like, we're like, curious people want to be like, Hey, we're going to make the, here's how it's going to work.
Niko: But so far I have yet to be convinced by any of our guests or by any, anything I've seen that you can make plates or in work. Any, in any other form other than during a crypto bull when all the prices are going up in tandem and everybody thinks they can make money and leave somebody else holding the bag, right?
Devin: I think you can in a pay to win place where that's okay. I think that's why I think Asian markets are a little more suited for this stuff because if pay to win is acceptable in like the player race, it becomes a little more viable, I think, personally.
Niko: Yeah, and why don't we talk about that bucket then?
Because that's and we'll save the web 2. 5 bucket for last. I think I know what you're going to say about that, but let's go. Let's talk a little bit about the Asian book, because I think that is under discussed, certainly on certainly on this podcast. And I do hear from many guests who have Exposure to those markets that the technology is further a lot or the use of the technology is further along, and it's much more accepted, but it's not accepted for the reasons that we typically talk about here, which is either play to earn or, some kind of NFT ownership.
That's the, the holy grail of monetization in a Web two game, right? Which we're again, we'll talk about that in a second. What is differentiating the Asian markets as it relates to blockchain technologies that are being used in Asia?
Devin: I mean, there's definitely still lagging play to earn vibe that came on from the games that were developed earlier on when play to earn was like more of a thing.
And I think that's still considered acceptable in I think knowing that's not going to last forever, like people just write it out and then the game will be on and then whatever. It's a part of the next game. And I found talking to like South Korean developers, during, Cree blockchain week, things like that, that Korea could be like that, where there could just be one hit game for a very short period of time that everyone's playing and then it just gets replaced.
And that's okay there because they have a very kind of different market. Whereas Japan specifically has been very bullish, not on crypto per se, but on NFTs to the one where the government was like, NFTs are going to be great. Which you don't hear from most governments, especially South Korea, which is like, Hey, don't touch crypto and games like they just don't want you to do it.
And so I think Japan has been very pro about that. And obviously they have a lot of other financial issues going on with the government right now that they're trying to deal with. And I think maybe they're hoping that's part of what helps. But that's one of the places where you have the most AAA companies.
Like in the space where they're like willing to experiment willing to try stuff out and see what works and I think they Actually do believe and I think a lot of people are skeptical that the developers are often greedy and I think More often than not developers don't start out greedy unless they're in like jumping into a space where everyone's just greedy already And I think the a lot of times the people that are like developers are like player ownership's really cool Actually mean it like they think player owners really cool or players being able to trades really cool And it was very difficult to deal with that before you know as you saw with the With Blizzard and Diablo and Valve even, I think is a great example because they've had to figure out how to navigate that with their marketplace.
And so Asians are just like, Hey, this is a cool thing. We want players to be able to do this. We think this is going to be fun for the games and interesting. Let's figure out how to make it work. And obviously the experiment in different ways, like the symbiogenesis experiment from Square Enix is very kind of off the wall.
This sort of. Weird Where's Waldo narrative adventure that's, it's very different and experimental. And I think that's where they're not looking at it as a, a Ponzi scheme. How can we make this even harder to understand white paper? It's we're just going to try some stuff and keep building up and figure out what works.
And get there hopefully eventually, but I think focusing on the NFTs is probably the smarter approach because that's thought of for a reason is less about play to earn because the NFTs don't have this simple, fungible monetary value. And I think that it helps a lot in obfuscating that on purpose.
Niko: Okay, so let's talk then about what is Probably the biggest, but certainly in the Western market, certainly the U. S. market, which is this, straddling the web two and web three world. Some people call it web 2. 5. Some people call it play and earn something. We call it play and when there are a lot of euphemisms for what is essentially a somewhat of a financialization of a game, right?
Talk to me a little bit about, have you seen. Any examples, recent examples in particular of people doing it well. Because again it's not that it can't work. It's just that it hasn't worked yet. And I think it's just it'd be interesting to see if somebody cracks the code, who is in your mind closest to cracking that code and what are they doing that's perhaps different to what most others have done, which is we're going to slap some NFTs in there for the whales, and then we're going to have potentially a tokenized economy or some kind of token that's attached to this game for somewhat, some financial speculation.
That's typically if I'm being a bit brutal that's typically how that, that works out in a nutshell for most of these games, just different genres.
Devin: And I think it's difficult to find good examples of using the token. Although we do think for example the mirror games They weren't great games in and of themselves, and that was part of the problem.
I think they did interesting things with the tokens where they made sense, integrated into the economy around being a sort of resource for trading in and out of the game to a specific crafting resource that had a purpose in the game. And I'm talking specifically about MIRM because I wasn't playing beer four back without what first started so I don't know how that changed over time necessarily But brm was designed with this idea of this crafting material can be converted into you know something you could sell on blockchain and then allows whales to also be able to buy that resource without having to mine it themselves and That just helps them and that made some sense, right?
Like I don't think it necessarily executed flawlessly, but the concept wasn't terrible. And the governance token they introduced actually had governance stuff around servers and taking control of servers and things like that. And I, again, not perfect execution, but an interesting idea. And then you look at like the Western market, I think some of the NFL rivals was a perfectly fine model.
It was like, Hey, there's this gotcha stuff. And if. If there's stuff that you have that you want to trade to other people, you can do so and then they can do and then we're actually going to profit a little bit from that. And everyone wins because it's not going to break the game because we haven't designed this to be a system where that matters that much, but it's still honestly still a little pay to win.
Right? Like, Because you're able to buy these sort of things. Players from outside and then bring them in and that can affect your ability to play well. And I have a couple that I bought when the game first came out, like when it was very first launched and I don't know if it was in beta or not, but, and I still get emails all the time about like my NFTs that are on the market.
Cause I put them on the market just to see, and I do see the price going up and down, but it actually, seems to actually sustain at a relatively decent price for stuff that I just got out of the, a few dollar, because they were actually giving NFTs out of The, the gotcha boxes at the beginning, before and, that allowed me to see it in action and it seems to be fine because it's not game breaking.
But again, that's where if pay to, to win is like a little more acceptable than you're allowing outside trading and then the whales can now buy their way to like progress of some kind or winning. And if you're okay with that's fine. Now the other side of it is you could go with just fully cosmetic route and I can just give a quick example of right where that's, it's a closed ecosystem. So it's not quite web three, but it's still basically web three in a, as if it was a isolated blockchain where then, there's just no bridging out. And so people have been training that stuff for a long time.
Niko: That's not to say that work, but that, that works because the game itself is again they start, all these examples are essentially.
With the possible exception of of uh, NFL go from, was it mythical games? And we actually had John Linden on the pod last year, but there's a CSCO in particular is an example of a game that is so good and has such a dedicated player base already that you can essentially have this closed ecosystem on top.
And if they launched their own blockchain, like it probably would work, right? Like they literally could probably do that. I'm just curious, that straddling of the Web two and Web three, where you're deliberately trying to say Hey, we are trying to incorporate these elements instead of first making something amazing and then probably backing into blockchain technologies, backing into digital ownership, backing into potentially some kind of trading or value transfer between players inside the ecosystem because they want to be there in the first place.
That's what I'm getting at here. Like, Have you seen examples of players? That really working in this space so far,
Devin: No, because it's just not a great plan to do it that way. I think at the end of the day, if people are paying money for something and you can't justify the value of that, something that's not a good idea.
If you could be like, yeah, it's worth this because it's like it does this in the game or people want it because of this. That's not just a speculative. Reason that's, it's not a hard answer. Like it's just make it valuable and people will buy it. And I think that's been the history of purchases in games.
That's, it's not that hard, but it is that hard, right? To actually execute on that, but it's not a, it's not a hard concept to understand of just make some value and then sell that value. And in this case, you're involving the player base. The skins example was totally play to earn. I don't, you don't pay for skins in CSGO.
You just get them randomly. I have some that have been just popped out. It was like worth like 30 bucks. Whatever. I just, and then that's for the box. That's not even like opening it yet. But they also found a way to monetize it. That was like, hey, we're going to charge you two bucks for a key.
And therefore we're monetizing the thing that we're giving you for free. And you can sell it back and forth all day long, and we're going to get a marketplace fee. So they enforce royalties on the trading for their skins. So it's again, it was not a hard system. Like you said, they just, they had value and they gave out something as part of that value that didn't break the game.
And obviously they had a whole lot of other legal stuff they dealt with. And I think that was a good precursor to some of the stuff we might have to deal with. If WoE 3 is successful we have a lot of potential. Barriers we have yet to run headlong into that. I think valve pointed to the point where you can't even trade keys anymore.
They shut that down a while ago because it was like, Hey, people are using that for money laundering. So what do you think we're going to see happen? If we have three becomes popular? I think you're going to see that argument quite frequently.
Niko: Yeah. All right. So final parting thoughts here from you.
What do you think is going to happen in 2024 now that the crypto bull is raging? Thank you. Once again, mostly, I think most people attribute it as you yourself put it to Bitcoin ETFs starting trading and so just making it a bit more accessible to get access to crypto at some point, you would presume.
That would settle down, once the kind of markets, calibrate and reach an equilibrium. Obviously there's going to be speculation always. What does that mean for Web3 Gaming, right? Let's assume the Crypto Bowl keeps going throughout this year. What is that going to do for Web3 Gaming?
And are we going to do things differently this time around compared to 2021 where everybody really mostly was just chasing a quick buck, right? That's, if you're going to be brutal about it That's not, I don't think unfair to say your thoughts.
Devin: I think in general, and this is maybe a little bit wishful thinking that VCs are going to be a little bit more due diligence this time and a little bit more thinking how can we make this work?
But at the end of the day, they also aren't necessarily incentivized to do that. To make games successful, they're incentivized for their return, which means like even if that blows up the game, that's still part of their business model. And so it is a little tricky, right? Because I think generally the hope is that they're going to fund good games.
I know those good games will then become successful games. But I think generally, if we're looking at it as token models being Pay for by VCs, the chance of them not being great ideas are pretty high, unfortunately. And I think we might be able to see, some good games potentially get funded this phase.
Just because there will be some people who learned from last time. But so far the indications are that money needs to be spent. And that if someone has an idea that passes enough of a spell test, they'll go with it. And even some reinvesting in games that haven't really proven anything yet. So I'm hopeful that at least one good game comes out of it.
But I think at this point, like I, I'm still not even sure that's going to be the case. Because developing a good game itself is already hard. Doing that on the back of a token based model is about 10 times as hard. I wish everyone the best of luck, and I really, I'm only skeptical because I want to point to the problems to make sure we solve them, not because I think they're unsolvable, but I do think that maybe we're also just running past them, chasing after the buck, and I definitely don't want to see that happen, because I think Web 3 is really cool technology, but also, maybe we can think less about the money and more about what you can do with it, and go towards that more Asian mindset.
Niko: Yeah, and I'm exactly the same. I think I do wish everybody the best of luck. Game development is hard as is and creating any new product is hard. Never mind, games. And innovators who embrace new technologies, we should celebrate them. We should salute them. And I certainly do.
And it sounds like you do as well. But yeah, I think it is fair to point to the challenges that we face as developers. And sometimes maybe those challenges You know, is the juice worth the squeeze kind of thing, at the end of the day that's really what I think we should be asking ourselves is is the juice worth the squeeze for integrating all of these complicated technologies and challenging user experience hurdles that we're introducing because we are, we're introducing more friction essentially through web three.
And so we should always remember that the juice needs to be worth the squeeze. Okay. I always ask our guests and I've already asked you this question but I want to see if you have a different answer what are your favorite three games that you're playing at the moment? And, or. The three games you're, or any games that you're most excited by?
Devin: Yeah, I don't know if I have to start with Web3 games or not. 'cause I definitely did get on the Hell Divers two and the Berio Kick. And I never really truly got sick of Marvel Snap. So that's still constantly in there. And I did really want to get into to Warzone Mobile, but that really just did not click at all.
I did try and the web threes I tried, to get a bit into shrapnel and play some of that stuff, but. It's still pretty early and I think that's the case for a lot of these web3 games where I'm like excited about them for where they're going more than where they are right now which is you know I think shrapnel and metal core and a lot of these games like that I think that look really cool I'm excited for but I also think They're a little ways off right now and middle court seems to be a little closer, but I think the one I'm still the most excited about, and this was the top one in that sort of Web three games.
I was looking forward to, which is the off the grid, which I think they did it in a way that makes me think that they actually have something worth playing. But that being said, I obviously haven't played it hands on, but I am excited about that one. The most busy. I think they showed, It was probably scripted, but still what looked like actually good potential gameplay, and they don't seem to be pushing Web 3 first in it.
They seem to be pushing like, hey, there's all this cool game stuff that we're doing. I don't know if they could pull it off, because it looks pretty ambitious, but I'm hopeful that's gonna be the one I'm, when you ask me this question next, just grinding that.
Niko: Nice. All right. That and I love the fact that you still have optimism for web three and you're excited to try web three games.
I think we all should be. We should all be interested in this industry to see innovation happen. Like I said, and there's definitely innovation happening in this space. There's some chasing the buck, but there's definitely some innovation too. Okay. That is a great place I think to end today. Devin, thank you so much.
For coming on the pod, as always, a real pleasure. And it was a lot of fun talking with you about our unvarnished thoughts about where this industry is headed and what we could potentially expect in 2024. So thank you. Absolutely. And a big thank you as always 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. 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].
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Again, that is www.naavik.co. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.
