In this episode, Brad of Coinpost speaks with Yat Siu of Animoca Brands and Ben Charbit of Darewise to talk about the future of gaming, open metaverse and more.
Read out notes below to learn more
About Ben
- Co-Founder of Darewise which is a subsidiary of Animoca Brands.
- He worked at various positions in Ubisoft.
About Yat
Current state of gaming
- It is something that brought people together from then until now.
- Gaming is one of the largest community experiments and gatherers of any kind.
Web3 Gaming
- Web3 extends the current gaming state in which it provides gamers ownership of assets.
- The western narrative is not yet accepting the Web3 concept in traditional games because of digital capitalism.
- Majority of Americans that are under 30 years old are socialists.
- Asia is aggressive in adopting Web3 in gaming.
- Part of the barriers of entry is the cost.
- People tend to forget the business model and focus on the quality of experience.
- True ownership means having the freedom to move your assets anywhere you want without someone telling you if you can or can’t do it.
Relationship of developers and players
- Web3 changes the classic concept of shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism.
- Stakeholder system will have a primary motivation of enjoying the game than getting profits.
- One of the challenges is dealing with a community of stakeholders.
- It creates an opportunity to build businesses in a fairly different way.
Dangers of linking games to real economies
- The opportunity with Web3 is to bring in people with different agendas that kind of bring in supply and demand together.
- All that Web3 gaming does is it opens up the transaction layer for the world to see.
- Every gamer has already been financialized and they just don’t know it.
- Every person who’s playing for free is actually contributing to the network effect and inducing someone on the other side to actually pay.
Web3 gaming progress
- The way that the money flows, because it’s transparent, is different.
- While we are dealing with a free market, we are also introducing financial systems to a broader community that doesn’t know anything about money.
- The reason why we see a resistance in the west is because their knowledge about money is very misunderstood since it isn’t taught in school.
- Axie Infinity is indirectly saying that volatility is part of their game which still receives criticisms.
Areas of Value
- One of the biggest areas of value in the gaming industry today is the cost of advertising and promotion which in many cases accounts for ⅔ of what a company makes..
- The chances that a gamer receives value for a game they might like to play is much higher than giving that money to Apple or Google that literally just extract and give nothing back.
Custody
- It takes time for most people to self-custody.
- Even in the state of blockchain, decentralization has to occur in many areas.
- One has to look at the leadership or team involved in a project.
- Onchain isn’t fast enough for all of the game’s actions just yet but we’re getting there.
- We need to transition players from Web2 to Web3 but it’s not going to be easy.
What to look for in games
- The team behind the project that will bring the decision making process.
- Look for the history of the team and the entities invested in it.
Overview of Life Beyond
- A new generation of MMORPG that wants to become a gaming metaverse.
- They are building a more advanced system and governance to truly embrace the metaverse experience.
- They are going to deliver a lot of new experiences in 2023 besides the Unreal Engine gameplay that they have already showcased.
Biggest challenges of Web3 Game Developers
- Sustainable game economies.
- Certainty that they wish to apply when they make a product.
- Cultural barrier.
Hiring Economists
- It is ideal to hire economists for game economies.
- Gaming will become a really interesting platform for experiments.
- Games are essentially a simulation.
- Games will probably be operated by DAOs.
What to look forward to
- It is going to be broadly a positive one because the builders and the community are still here.
- Regulations.
- Gaming will bring a lot of users into Web3.
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