On December 19, 2021, at the 8th Old Friends Reunion Metaverse Carnival, we are pleased to have invited Chase Freo, CEO@ OP Games (Moderator), Jesse Johnson, Co-founder@ Aavegotchi, Simon Vieira, Co-founder@ MixMob, Kijun Seo, CEO@ Nine Chronicles (Planetarium) to give us a thoughtful panel discussion!
Overview:
The concept of GameFi on chain with the emerging model of P2E is a delicate juggling act that has been placed under a more intense and focused spotlight recently. There is no one-size-fits-all model, but the insights from our panel on GameFi provide an interesting & unique perspective on the battle between “Play 2 Earn” and “Play 4 Fun”.
The panel went through some thought-provoking ideas：
🔍 The ideal fun-2-earn game?
🔍 The biggest challenge on Web 3 gaming？
🔍 Current stage of play-2-earn?
🔍 Why game developers should move to Web3 and what to explore?
🔍 How these models enable communities？
🔍 Prevailing model in Web3？
We’ve captured the full learnings and takeaways from their words below:
🔍 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Hello, everybody. My name is Chase Freo. I’m the CEO and co-founder of O.P. Games, and I am here with a couple of really notable individuals in the blockchain space. So we are going to talk about designing fun-to-earn games. Our panelists will talk about decentralized web gaming and getting it right from an economic and entertainment standpoint. So I guess like without further ado, let’s go ahead and start with a brief introduction about yourselves, gentlemen. Maybe we can start with Simon.
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me here. We’re excited, and it’s great to be talking about play-to-earn and blockchain games in general. My name is Simon. I’m the CEO of MixMob, where we’re play-to-earn game powered by Solana. We work under one premise. What would we do if AI deleted our culture? So under that premise, what we did is in our Lord. We went underneath, create a resistance movement, grabbed what we could from the culture that was left and created a group to go and fight back the AI that deleted our culture. And our mission is to hack into their vault and take the NFTs out that he took. So that was the premise. Right now we just launch actually our NFT project. We created five thousand masks. So the masks that we created were bits and pieces of culture, and we sold the first 5000 to generate community and start building the game and the awareness that happened yesterday. That’s it for me. I’m excited to be here and looking forward to discussing later.
Jesse Johnson(Aavegotchi)
Everyone, Jesse here from Pixel Craft Studios. We’re building out Aavegotchi, Aavegotchi are NFTs that may at first glance look like your normal profile pic NFT like a PHP or an avatar for your social media, but under the surface there, we’ve gone to great lengths to make them extremely interesting in a technical sense as well, and also for a purpose which is longevity and securing them for the future. So not just the metadata, but that you typically think of like traits, but even the visuals are completely saved on chain. We run on Polygon. So as long as that Polygon network exists, you have complete confidence. These NFTs are here to stay and there is a spectrum there. So it’s really important that when we launched this, we wanted this to be a central premise for Aavegotchi. They are cute, little pixelated ghosts that will live forever on the chain. There’s a lot of other things we’re playing with, but really, what we’re most excited about now is we’ve been around about a year and a half. There have been two generations of Aavegotchis that have been issued so far. They’re called haunts right appropriately, and now they need a place to live. So from the very beginning, when we first issued the original whitepaper, we said there would be a virtual world for them to explore and socialize in. We’re getting very close to realizing that. And that’s going to be the more play-to-earn game that people have been expecting. That’s going to be a browser-based, very accessible experience called the Gotchiverse. And so the Gotchiverse is our take on the metaverse and in Web3 gaming, and that will be launching at the very beginning of 2022 to the open beta will be and that includes play to earn in action and the real deal on Polygon. So that’s where we are in our cycle and we’re super excited about where we’re going.
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
Great to be here and great to be on the panel with you guys. Super excited to discuss free-to-earn games and also blockchain gaming. So I’m Kijun CEO of Planetarium. We got we started our company in 2018 with the goal of fully decentralized games that are open source that powered by the community. So we have our blockchain technology SDK that’s specialized for unity so that unity game developers can make customize mainnet that powers your entire game. Last year, we launched a game called Nine Chronicles, which is one hundred percent open source, full chain RPG. That has a pretty good, solid movement behind us. 40,000 people on Discord channel and we’ve recently hit our all-time view high and what’s interesting about it is that the game itself is a beautiful, two-dimensional RPG made with lots of love from our game team and also our team. But at the same time, the entire thing is open source, so developers and other players can take in a modded build it the way that you want to. We’re also helping out some other teams to cross over to the Web3 world as well. So yeah, with the whole play-to-earn aspect, we are currently hosting a season where close to 500,000 NCG, which are like our base layer token are being given out. That’s worth about a million dollars being distributed over two weeks. So you know some cool opportunities to learn. Super excited to discuss more on this with the panel.
🔍 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Thank you for that introduction. I think we look settled right now that everybody seems to be working on really, really cool projects at the moment. We can’t all wait to see what we got in the next couple of days or weeks or months leading up to the launches. But I guess let’s dive into the topic of the conversation today regarding play-to-earn games in general. We’ve titled the session as designing fun-to-earn games instead of play-to-earn games. I think we’re going to lead into that conversation later. But I guess let me ask any one of you, what is your ideal fun to earn games? I guess let’s call it Simon.
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
Yeah, I can go so it’s a great question because for me, what play to earn and play and earn brings to the table is a new layer of the traditional game. So I come from games. I worked at EA for many years in the FIFA franchise and PokerStars and I started my career actually developing Facebook games. So creating fun games is at its core right, which is what we’re all doing. But this new level of economy and play to earn bringing financial literacy to the table of playing games is a new level. What makes a fun play and earn or play to earn is the combination of skill, this is just my personal opinion, luck and strategy. We add that a little bit of a sprinkle of financial literacy and financial gamification. We have a really good solid base at a high level. That’s what we’re doing at MixMob right now. Just adding those four components. The last thing I’ll say is when you have a game, you want a really big economy in terms of things to do in the game. You’ve got to target what is traditionally the achievers, the creators, the collectors and the socializers. But now you have to also target the financially savvy people that I want to come into your game and just have fun with financial tools. So I think that’s a new level for me.
Jesse Johnson(Aavegotchi)
I’ll just comment on the I like the session title and how it’s it sounds like they should be synonyms, right? Play to earn, fun to earn. But I think the emphasis here that we’re getting at is that it really has to be an enjoyable experience with Web3 and the earning can’t be alone like you’re just really emphasizing the front half of this was just playing and having fun. So when we’ve looked at what we’ve done at Aavegotchi, we’re always saying, how can we gamify it? Which is another way of saying, how can we make this actually enjoyable? So earlier I say how our metaverse is like this play-to-earn game extrinsically but intrinsically. For over a year now, we’ve had the typical Aavegotchi as itself, which we think of as an intrinsic game. So what I mean by that is just like a Tamagotchi that we reference in our name. The NFT itself is fun to play with, and so it’s already a fun-to-earn game by just saying we’re going to provide a very cute interface, very simple feedback mechanisms that give you joy and are relatively casual. It’s like a Tamagotchi. It’s something you do once or twice a day. You interact with your NFT and we’ll incentivize you for doing so. So in our case, it’s like you have your Aavegotchi. It’s proof of attention. You’re proving that you actually said good morning to your NFT that day. That was one of our original ideas because we had a bunch of CryptoKitties and I was like, They just sit in my wallet unless I use them for demonstration purposes or I’m like speculating on OpenSea or something. So for the most part, even with that original, just the NFT itself, it needs to be fun and then you can take that and scale it to full-blown games from there.
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
Yeah. Just one comment, I totally agree with everything that’s been said, and I think one thing to add is it should be designing something on the element of the game that you can earn from could be a bit straightforward. But I think designing fun to spend games are very, that’s really the tricky part because you can’t just have everyone be earning at the same time, someone needs to be also spending and also finding the fun in spending. So how do you incentivize that through social dynamics, through values that you create within your ecosystem? It’s the fun and interesting and part that we are all trying to figure out as an industry. So how do we not only distribute but how do we also get the spending to occur in what new forms, which is what we’re curious to find out for the next years to come?
🔍 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Yeah, I think, leading up to that to that premise in terms of play to earn or fun to earn or in terms of what we’ve titled to the discussion with. Do you guys think that current blockchain games or games on Web3 right now are fun to play?
Or is it or we’ve already hit the balance because it went to games, for example, they’re all about fun. Obviously, it’s all about the entertainment of casual games being time wasters that keep you preoccupied. Right? Or hardcore mid-core games that basically allow you to invest a lot of your time because you enjoy playing it. Do you think we’ve reached that point or do you think that play to earn right now is still in that stage where it’s more about financial incentives?
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
It’s so early, from my perspective, there’s not like a fun game out there just yet on the play to earn space. So I love Axie Infinity and we play it and that’s set the stage for us. I mean, CryptoKitties to Jesse’s point, they started it, I think in a sense. But you couldn’t do anything with your CryptoKitties now, with Axies and with Jesse’s doing, and what we’re all doing is that it’s just gamifying that experience more. But it’s so early, and one of the things that we have noticed is that a lot of the games are turned-based. At least the popular ones and turn-based is good, but it’s not as fun as when you have something that is more tweakable, something that’s more synchronous. So I think the sky’s the limit right now. I think we’re just scratching the surface.
Jesse Johnson (Aavegotchi)
Yeah, I would just jump in and say that’s pretty much my thoughts too. the variety of games is not quite there yet. But if you think about fun and play to earn, you could argue that it is already fun. It’s just not in the way I think you typically mean, which is like the UX of the game is super polished, and instead, it’s this really unique new genre emerging where. I guess we’re all like having fun, we’re definitely having fun in the Aavegotchi community, but it’s like the gameplay in the browser is one piece. Then there are the community meetups, then there’s the voting in a DAO. I’m doing all these different things. I’m trading on NFT marketplace, going back to this idea that you have to have fun spending as well. So we’ve created a really extremely unique we call the bazaar for a reason. It’s like this wild place where you go and throw money and watch it burn. So it’s like all those things put together. It’s definitely can be fun. Axie in a lot of others are achieving that in various degrees. These communities are super tight, super inspiring to each other. But if you just take the one, the obvious like is it an amazing like Triple-A UX type of game? Probably not, but everything is put together. It creates a very interesting new paradigm. Something new for sure.
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
When mobile came along, people were like, hey no one’s going to play games on mobile. It’s got a small screen and you know, you can’t have a controller. I also started gaming during the mobile game and Facebook game age. We were like, Facebook games are no fun. But like millions and millions of people play. We do have a glorified way of treating AAA games with 40 hours plus. I love them, I play them. But there are many different types of games. Hundreds of thousands of games come out every year. I think finding more ways to integrate traditional ways of fun into NFTs and play-to-earn games. But I do think that in many respects, players do find this new ecosystem very fun and very challenging and very interesting, interactive.
🔍 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Fantastic. Yeah, these are really great answers guys. Just because, well, the reason why I ask is that I kept on getting asked every once in a while by a couple of people in terms of Chase, you’re a big advocate of play to earn. But at some point Chase that will become work and we’re still funding that. And I’m like work can be fun, right? And earning something can be fun as well. So like, you guys are right? Definitely. All about what the definition of fun is. A lot of times people tend to compare that gameplay loop that allows people to actually play Web2 games and identify fun around that and now try to actually look for that within Web3 games. Obviously, that’s going to happen at some point in the future.
But there are other things that are in place right now that give us this whole point of having a play-to-earn game, which is aligning financial incentives that allows us to actually benefit more in the game. So I guess leading up to the question, what do you think are the biggest challenges that Web3 gaming are currently facing? I guess to add to that, what can we do to solve that?
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
For me, I would say, like infrastructure and regulations, those are those two things that come up in my mind. One is that infrastructure. We have to figure out how to sell a lot of games just right now use blockchain as a storage layer to transmit NFTs across. And that’s great. Can we do something even more interesting, but how can we do it? Getting developers to be very immersed in understanding this new technology stack and also the stack becoming better to accommodate game developers. It is happening. It is going to slowly happen over the next three to five years, and we’re super bullish on that. That’s also why we are also developing a stack of tools for us and for other developers to build and work on at the same time regulations. When you say, hey, you know where to begin, you have to go buy ether from, for example, Coinbase and then get that to your wallet and then start playing the game you have to do your KYC. Figuring out how to just onboard free players for blockchain gaming. I think that’s going to be an issue that we are all going to solve.
Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Yeah, definitely user onboarding is definitely one of the biggest challenges. Anything else that you guys want to add?
Jesse Johnson(Aavegotchi)
Yeah, I was going to say pretty much it’s those two. The regulations introduce friction, so yeah, I’ll pass on this one to Simon. That’s pretty much what I was going to say.
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
I would love one more. I wish that I was a breakpoint just early this month, Solana Breakpoint. When I went around and ask people about what the biggest challenge was, regardless of the project, it was talent. We’re seeing this right now, we’re all creating content related all about entertainment products, right? When we watch a really great movie, when we play a really great game, it’s the talent, it’s the directors. All of us that make that great content. And right now it’s just starting. So it’s coming, but for us it is one of the biggest challenges too, is we need a wave of great talent. More and more of us to bring to the ecosystem and create great games. That’s one more that I want.
Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Yeah. I think the surge of also play-to-earn gaming companies or gaming companies in general on the web3 has immensely grown to a point where there’s now more of a shortage of human capital versus actual capital itself and that contributed to that as well. But I guess as an industry as a whole, that’s a good problem to have in a way that can be solved eventually. If I may ask, Jesse first. Why do you think game developers should move to Web3? I mean, specifically those that are actually doing games in Web2? What do you think? Why do you think they should actually explore?
Jesse Johnson(Aavegotchi)
Yeah, I think that as individuals, they’re passionate about what they do, then this is something that should naturally appeal to a curious mind, right? It’s like we’ve pushed graphics to their limits. We’ve got online gaming at high speed. What’s the next iteration of gaming and as a whole, what is the next big step? Mobile gaming grew into its own. I think Web3 gaming is the obvious case like play to earn metaverse ownership economy, this kind of ownership, digital economy. This is all the next frontier for games. So if you’re talented and you’re already a great game maker, why wouldn’t you want to be a part of this journey? That’s the story we’ve been pushing to in our own outreach and hiring. I’m sure everyone here is aggressively hiring because like Simon said, there’s a talent shortage. So that’s a big part of what we’re trying to say is be part of something special. A lot of people are initially. We’ve seen some that are like I’m not really sure if this is for me because XYZ there’s a lot of noise. I can’t tell what’s quality, but if they sit down and get to know you and your project and what you’re about more often than not, they’ll get very excited. So we’ve had pretty good success recruiting. I think we’re at a team of about 35 now altogether, and that’s all in the last year and a half. So the core team building out these games is almost all devs and a lot of them come from the traditional gaming space. Now we’ve got a core unit building out the Gotchiverse that comes from Capcom, even ex-World-of-Warcraft guys Blizzard. So they are open to it, and some of them are diving in headfirst. Some are going in with just a toe. But I think it’s the doors wide open and if I was in their position, it’s like a dream come true. They get more creative freedom and they could deliver something that has a significant impact on people that when we tell our play to earn and who’s doing the earning, who do you want to affect in a positive way? Once they get over it, this isn’t just gambling, then they’re pretty much more open-minded to it.
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
Absolutely, yeah, I agree with everything Jesse said, and just we all come from gaming and same from our team. We all come from traditional gaming and one of the things that we always dream about. Even when we were doing Facebook games was the idea of how do you take a digital item? How do you sell it right? Seeing a little bit of this one Warcraft and when I worked at EA there was people who sell their accounts and this was a big problem, things like that. But now it’s like a dream come true. Just my kid spends a lot of money on Fortnite. Like a lot of money. I mean for a game. But his assets are there. He can‘t do anything with those. That’s it. It’s like, bye bye. Now with this new way, if he can take those, sell them in the marketplace. I show him the things that we’re doing with MixMob with the avatars and people trading. Oh man, that is so cool. So it’s a dream come true. Like Jesse said, once people, traditional people in games pass that stigma of blockchain cryptocurrency that they don’t understand, then they’re like, oh my God, this is the future.
🔍 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Yeah, I guess like Jesse touched a really good point there in terms of how developers seem to not sure exactly which ones they could legitimately approach and which ones they aren’t right. I guess that would lead to like my next question about as a player, even as a developer, like how do you sort through the hype and find which ones of these projects are really building? Because right now, like you mentioned, there’s a lot of noise in the crypto space specifically as well in the NFT space, right? Rug pulls and some of which promises a game that after a couple of months or years hasn’t been delivered. So how do you think people could go ahead and really protect themselves from being very into deep a game that probably would scam them at some point in the future?
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
I think the easiest way I think maybe not the best way, but the easiest way is to approach the studios that already have games out or experience out that there’s no rug pull in there. But yeah, obviously you do want to talk to the team for an extensive time. You do want to do your research and maybe even like talk to the actual investor of the project and to be able to find out why you backed the team and where the momentum has from. But I’m not sure. Like when you go approach and ask teams what have you done? Like, what’s the progress? Because they want to hire you, they’re generally very happy to share the progress unless it’s super sensitive or they haven’t done anything.
🔍 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
That’s true. I guess to really add to that. I think whichever part you are in as a player, as a developer, there’s always due diligence a lot of times you have to really make sure that’s why they say do your own research, right? But obviously, as an industry, we are moving into this point where things are maturing, teams are getting stronger. There’s a lot of accountability now as opposed to how it was back then, where it’s just really the Wild West. Like right now, everybody’s putting themselves up there, really trying to make themselves known because that is a good part of how they can build community as well, making sure that the community understands exactly who these people they’re trusting, right? A quick question on my next question for I guess Simon or Jessie, how do Web3 better enable communities because that’s one of those biggest selling points that we always say, right? Like with play to earn, it’s all about the community. But what does it really benefit the community if I am part of a specific play-to-earn project?
Jesse Johnson(Aavegotchi)
The first thing on my mind is just the idea of when you were young and we’re still young guys, but when we were kids, we are like even younger, we probably really wanted to build a game like, actually, we’re all in that career. Some of you have been in it forever. I myself haven’t, and so I always wanted to build a game. I think a lot of people dream of building their own games. They design their own board game at home or whatever and tell stories. Everybody wants to be a part of that kind of process, that creative process or so many people do anyway.
When you have a play-to-earn game, this is not all play-to-earn games are DAOs. But I think the ones that are taking advantage of governance and you ask about community and really bringing in everybody to have impact and influence on the development cycle that’s like really, really unique to this latest trend with web3 gaming. So maybe it’s a little broader. It’s Web3. But yeah, the Aavegotchi DAO has been the highlight of the whole experience because we as the main devs are continually coming up with different communication channels and ways and always refining, but basically letting the community make the major decisions and tell us what to do. We work for them. It’s the arrangement, and it’s been very satisfying. We have one of the most active snapshots in the world, and a lot of that is because they’re not voting on, like most of the snapshot DAOs are voting on stale finance stuff, right? Like we adjust the interest rate by point one basis points. For us, do we want a bad guy villain in the mountains or down here in the Cavern? It’s a very different use case for a DAO, and it actually will probably be a lot more popular and more prevalent than the initial one, which was like, let’s manage financial protocols to get there. So yeah, that would be one thing I’d say is just DAO’s governance and being really hands-on and influencing the game is a very interesting thing that you can’t really do in web2.
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
Absolutely. I agree 100% with what Jesse said. For us, we started about 3 months ago. Here’s a cool thing in traditional games you have to almost work in a silo, and then just like tada here’s your game and then you start building the community, but with this new wave and with what Aavegotchi has done, Kijun has done and Axie. Now we were able to build a community first. And in fact, this is a cool story. We had a challenge with Candy Machine on Solana, on the Solana network, which is the smart contract, and we started talking to the community. This was early when we started creating the community and one person that is like, Hey, you’ve got to talk to this developer. He’s fantastic at Solana. He’s a sol developer here. Put us in a chat. We started talking. The guy was guiding us through the steps. We solve the issue, and that was the developer asking, like the developer, in this case, asking the community to help us. They help us resolve the issue. We managed to push forward. That, to me, is mind-blowing, right? So that doesn’t happen on a traditional game pre-game so that involving the community that early, rewarding the community. we just launched our NFTs and people are buying these NFTs because they believe in the project. So it gives us financial motivation, but it also gives them an incentive also to sell them, maybe sell them for more way for the gain. It’s just a new way of building games in this community first.
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
Yeah, absolutely. So we started our community actually back in last year, 2020 March or February. That was quite before the game itself actually launched the main that. So it was like eight months before launching the main net for Nine Chronicles. They helped us through alpha. They helped us through beta. We had thousands of testers actually just test everything about the game. We had a month-long session where we gave people fake gold on the mainnet and they test everything they wanted. That’s been a pretty incredible journey. And even like the people who bought the tokens like the token price, I mean, not nothing like always about the token price, but who are involved when the token price jumped about 200 times this year, they’ve been able to really like fine make a living.
I’ve received a bunch of messages about how fortunate they were to be involved with the game from the very beginning, and it’s been really incredibly helpful to find people who are passionate about the game. We have a process called Nine Chronicles Improvement Proposals like NCIP. That’s where people can write proposals for like the PvP Arena right now, it sucks, we should fix it this way and write up. Because they’re super passionate and they all, like a lot of people, also want to be game developers, right? So they write really detailed documents and argue it together. Come up with this beautiful 10-page document about how to fix the arena or like the play to earn economy. We talk with our economists and we talk with our game designers and developers to actually bring this into the process. So it’s a full process that’s been running for over six, seven months, and we have really cool people participating in it. And some of them we’re actually hiring half-time full-time. We want to employ a bunch of players next year at least. Right now our community team consists of like 10 to 20 players that spend 10 to like 40 hours per week doing it. We want to hire more of them to build new content. New YouTube streams. One last thing I did want to add is that, yes, since our code is all open source. So we’ve had incredible developers come in like mod and make new additions to the game or fix our network, which has been our really interesting journey. I’m sure we can actually try to put more spotlight on the new creative ways that, like traditionally consumers actually start working on building the game economy and the network together.
🎤 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
Yeah, that’s really cool, though. I mean, in a way like how things just change in Web3 is essentially on the funding side of things, crowdfunding your game via initial NFT offering or initial token offering, or whatever that is that you’re working on and then eventually involving the community as well and the creation of the game or like co-creation. It’s really a powerful thing, especially with the DAO primitives already in place for example, in Ethereum. At some point not just on the co-creation side of things, but also lord building is actually one of those things that can be shared with the community as well, right? Especially if they have, you know, they own some NFT from a specific project that they can actually go ahead and create different types of cannons into that specific storyline.
So I think there’s just the sky’s limit in terms of what we can do with web3 gaming, which before that we can’t in web2. As Simon mentioned, it’s basically working in stealth and then not showing up with the game. So I guess leading up to my last two questions for you guys, do you guys think that play to earn is the best model Web3 can offer right now? And do you think that it will always be the prevailing model in Web3 or will there be more at some point in the future?
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
It’s a good question, I think we’re having this discussion internally and it’s a play on words, but I think play to earn puts a lot of emphasis on the earning side of things. So the flip now that we’re seeing in the industry and internal communications is play and earn. So have fun play and then earn at the same time instead of play to earn, which makes it more of a grind but have fun.
The opposite is, hey, have fun and then earn some money. So I think it’s definitely a good innovation. I mean, the sky’s the limit from here. I can predict so many different or I can see so many different uses. But at this moment, definitely it’s not the future, it’s the present. And one thing that I will add, and I’ll pass the mic. Here’s what’s cool about what we are all building and in Axie Infinity obviously, they have done a really good job at this, which is they are building a universe, they’re building a nation almost with their economy and all of this. And for all of us, we’re doing something similar. Here’s what we are passionate about at MixMob is the idea of bringing culture into play to earn and why culture is the future for us is because when you go, for example, to Paris or New York or Tokyo, Seoul, wherever you go to cities that have a lot of cultures, people are willing to pay higher taxes. People are willing to spend more in this in these cities. So what we’re all doing is we’re building these bits of places of the universe. The Aavegotchi all of this and they all have their own culture. People are going there and if they like the culture they’re willing to spend more and have more time that to me is fascinating. I think that’s the next level, this idea of culture, creation, collaboration.
🎤 Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
That’s like basically creating a digital space where everybody can move around from one place to another with multiple cultures being built depending on the community that you currently have. That’s really fascinating.
Jesse, do you have any thoughts on play to earn? Is play to earn the new shift? Because if you remember back in 2010, I would say free to play was the shift from mobile, right? And that dictated the movement of the game development over the last couple of years, even a decade. Now there’s this disruption play to earn. And do you guys think this will be the prevailing model in the future?
Jesse Johnson (Aavegotchi)
I think the term will probably have not peaked, right? Google searches for play to earn will go higher. So the next 10 years, it may be, like you say, the equivalent of what free-to-play was for the last decade. But it depends because there are competing models or ideas, just like Simon just put forward, that might be a more accurate name of what we’re really aspiring to is play and then earn some bit on the side. But free to play captures it. Also play to earn, but also play to own. So you have this idea of maybe you’re earning tokens, cryptocurrencies, but you could be earning NFTs. But then I think of owning NFTs or metaverse property or other digital assets, so whatever the prevailing term is, it’s all earning at the end of the day and accumulating and building a digital life because at the end of the day, it’s really all this is just different facets of our lives becoming more and more increasingly digital. And so is being reflected now with a way where we can have private property in a digital world. So yeah that includes earning ownership and sharing things like lending mechanisms and stuff, so it’s going to be pretty multidimensional and not just like always Farmville, something like that.
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
I mean, exactly. I think what we all call play to earn is something much more multi-dimensional than that. That’s also why I don’t like to use play to earn a lot because it seems one-dimensional, like there are like a bunch of players playing games to make money. I feel like it’s more of like the revenue stream of the game developer being shared by a game developer and publisher being shared with the people participating. Being able to onboard economy at scale very quickly because of people bootstrapping it from everywhere. I feel like but play to earn is just too catchy, so it’s like the name that will represent the ecosystem for years to come. We can’t replace it or something like, I don’t know, like participate in a creative economy that’s not going to go well.
Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
You never know that could happen. But let’s try it out on SEO and see if that works out like something better than play to earn.
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
I wish someone better, but something more multidimensional. But I think that’s the term we have and very bullish on what it actually enables people to share and participate in the economy that used to be owned by publishers.
Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
In other words, play to earn is there to say, there will be different variations of like how that is applied but a big chunk or a big factor that basically allows a game to be classified as something that’s play to earn that amount of financial incentive that actually trickles down not just to the developers, but also to the players that play the game. And that’s something that we’ve never seen before. Games has always been extractive. And so this time around, it’s a two way street and it’s a much refreshing model that most game developers and players are currently experiencing. I think that at this point, we’ve stretched our conversation far too long. I know that if given the chance, I would probably extend this more for a couple of more questions. But I guess like for the people out there who’s going to start watching this at some point? Simon, how can they reach you if they have any questions about the stuff that you’re building at MixMob? Any last words for the audience?
Simon Vieira (MixMob)
Yeah, absolutely. So you can reach me personally @simonvieira, and my last name is a bit tricky Vieira. I’m on Twitter. I’m on LinkedIn. You can reach me directly. I’m also on Discord, and our project is www.mixmob.io. We’re online, we’re on Discord and we’re on Twitter. So check us out, join the community. We’re just we’re excited to bring this new culture to the table and just restart basically, our game is what if AI deleted our culture, we start from zero, so we’re just excited to build it up.
Jesse Johnson (Aavegotchi)
That’s a super cool concept, by the way. I like that. Thanks. So yeah, you can reach me at [email protected], my Twitter and my online nickname is Golden Cross. But of course, I spell it in a weird way. So there’s no there’s like a lot of vowels missing, so you can follow me on Twitter @gldnXross. So that’s a double entendre there with the old favorite TA back from those days. Our discord is on fire. discord.gg/aavegotchi and the door’s always wide open. So check us out. Follow our Twitter, read our Mediums and hope to see you in the Gotchiverse very, very soon.
Kijun Seo (Nine Chronicles)
So you can find me @kijunseo on Twitter, LinkedIn and for as far as Nine Chronicles and Planetarium, you can search for nine chronicles on Google and get to our discord or get to our Twitter, which is very active and also medium. You can download and play Nine Chronicles is an open-source, fully decentralized game. We don’t run any servers and a bunch of people are playing it, you should join. If you want to join, you should join right now because we have a million-dollar PvP Arena season going on season one right now.
Moderator-Chase Freo (OP Games)
So I’ll join right after this conversation. Exciting. Yeah. But I had so much fun having this conversation with you guys. Obviously fans of your games as well.
Thank you everyone for this really, really insightful conversation and I appreciate the time. That’s it for us. Hopefully, everybody got something out of this conversation. Thank you so much.
🔥 About Us
IOSG Ventures, founded in 2017, is a community-friendly and research-driven early-stage venture firm. We focus on open finance, Web 3.0 and infrastructure for a decentralized economy. As a developer-friendly fund with long-term values, we launch the Kickstarter Program, which offers innovative and courageous developers capital and resources. Since we consistently cooperate with our partners and connect with communities, we work closely with our portfolio projects throughout their journey of entrepreneurship.