How GameFi could onboard billions of users into web3

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm welcome everybody to the web3 academy podcast uh co-host jay here along with uh my brother kai what's going on kai what's up guys if you can see i'm uh i've actually still got my permissionless pass on i'm currently in west palm beach at the permissionless conference and i ducked out a little bit early to uh to get this podcast recording in um and i'm gonna have lots of lots of updates and lots of news for you in in

in coming days from everything going on at permissionless it's wild but i'm glad to be here uh to talk game five yes so on that note today on the podcast we are joined uh by alex cooper uh who is here to talk all about game five with us alex is a leading community over at footprint analytics uh and he's a huge gamer and that was really why we wanted to have alex on the podcast today is you know both kawarai we are not gamers full disclosure um i don't think i've played a video game in a decade to be perfectly honest wow but yeah i know eh yeah guys i'm 37 i'm freaking old but uh you don't have to be young to

play games true it's true it's true well that's our goal we're on board and you today uh yeah yeah there you go that's right so yeah so getting getting alex on the podcast today was all about having a gamer on the podcast somebody who's in that world understands game fight and really can break it down for us because i think we all see game fi as the possibly the biggest onboarding ramp to web 3 and crypto uh you know there's over 2 billion gamers in the world and there's i think i heard recently that there's over a thousand game five projects currently in development uh so there's a lot coming into this space that will hopefully

onboard more people with the web three so really excited to have alex on the podcast today alex i know you also uh buy and sell cars we'll see if we can uh yeah have some fun and share that yeah thanks for having me guys i'm really excited to come here and uh talk about game five um you know i've been with footprint now for about three months helping them out in the community and you know game five's really been my specialty i've done a couple other presentations uh you know blockchain 101 and uh and just in twitter spaces as well so uh and doing workshops so it's been really exciting and um yeah i can't wait to share with you guys and then hopefully i get you guys um listening as well excited about uh game fi and you

know making money the game i mean that's that's the whole point of it so yeah it'd be awesome and uh yeah thanks jay and uh kyle thank you both so awesome awesome yeah stoked to have you here my man uh all right well let's let's just start off from the top like do you do you believe that game fi is going to on board a billion people like what's sort of your current view on what's going on in game five well i i i think honestly uh game fight is going to be the best way to bring people into the whole decentralized blockchain community you mean right i mean i think it's the best way to do it because traditional gamers people like the game and you know if soon as there's something that's fun that's you

don't cost nothing and you actually own your assets that's a big thing too that i think will really uh implement these uh web 2 gamers traditional gamers into the web 3 is the fact that now you know how many people spending money in call of duty right now buying skins you know as soon as the next call of duty comes out what are what are those what's the hundreds of dollars you spend on skins it's nothing it's worthless you can't even bridge them over to the next call of duty right yeah that's kind of insane actually you think about it too if it's another huge one like that legal edge and stuff like that i spent thousands on league of legends skins guys like and what i i can't sell them i can't do anything with it it's all

so it's the fact of the matter is is now when you can start owning these in-game assets you can start bringing them towards other games i mean that's just it brings more fun brings more social aspect and i mean kind of brings a little bit of that flexing competitive aspect as well but you know check out this nft you know or stuff like this so i mean that's i i truly think game five is the way to bring the whole social and really bring the average person into uh wed three alex can you just start by explaining what game phi is this might be a new term for most of our listeners um and i mean i think it sounds somewhat obvious um but i'm sure there's people there who have no idea what this is so can you

just walk us through what is gameplay yeah so like at the at the most simple breakdown what it is is the combination of gaming and decentralized finance put into one right the whole pay-to-earn model you know a lot of you are familiar with d5 you know that it's really popular with staking right staking is huge yield farming stuff like that so a lot of d5 companies realize you can actually implement game features with staking and you know make it more fun for people than just you know checking their balance every day and see how much they yield it right let's make some actions have some um you know interaction with us so that's really what game fi is and it it combines like the concept of the crypto

economy where everything is tokenized and introducing like an open player driven economy right so you know a lot of people you know is especially in dual token games that have a governance token the more of that token that you own the more power you have on voting on what direction you want this game to go right it helps drive the community and it gives the community actually what they want to do so it's really really cool and it's exciting to see kind of where it'll go in the future because it's still very very early um i mean like you guys have heard of like d5 summer right well with all this bear market stuff

going on we haven't even come close to having the game fight summer yet and right there's still like 1 million daily gamers in the game so currently the idea the idea of game fi is basically building games that are on top of blockchains right so they are using web3 tools um to tokenize different aspects of the game and so just some listeners an easy way to think of this is um is uh alex was talking about skins before in call of duty and other games which is basically like um either buying like so like i don't know what you how you describe a skin but basically it's what you wear for your it could be like shields or armor and

things like that uh it could be like the the guns or the things you're using inside the games these are all things that you can earn in games you need to unlock but in the normal games like web 2 games if we'll call them that you don't actually own any of those you just get them in the game and then like that's kind of it they don't get to go into other games and if that game shuts down or whatever like it's that's it it's gone um what web 3 gaming or game phi as you call it is is basically the ability to start earning real world real real assets it's not called real world but real assets inside of these games so your gun is an nft or your your new clothing or your armor is an nft and this can be sold on open marketplaces it

could be ported over to other games and used in other games potentially and then also if you think about other games where you start to win and earn points you could actually tokenize these and now you're actually earning currency or earning some sort of value and that's i think the sort of summary of of gamefly is that a good uh summary of that or is there anything else you would add yeah no i think that's a really really great summary i mean and two another thing that really brings a lot more value of it too with these nfts is for example rarity values right when it comes to your skins and stuff like that who i don't care if i get a legendary skin in call of duty but you know when you when all of a sudden you get this .005 percent rate and now you have a skin that's worth you

know a couple grand that you can actually sell quite easily through the games marketplace i mean it brings more of that excitement levels too it kind of brings that whole value of you know actually defining the difference between something common uncommon epic legendary however you want to describe it too so i think that is another good distinction for uh because you know there's and everything is limitedly minted too for the most part right there's only certain mint of these things so the more people that play the bigger it gets the more valuable and stuff these get so it's it's it's cool yeah a great summary good summary and it makes sense that this was the next step for games i mean games are basically their own like digital economy

right and economies need like they need assets they need currencies right and and they do have them but they're always fake in the web 2 world and now it's like we get to bring these to real life and we say the word metaverse a lot i really think that like the real metaverse is these games like these games because there's as jay said i think billions of people i think it's actually maybe even closer to three billion people playing 2.7 right okay so there's 2.7 billion gamers out there that are playing in these digital economies already um what happens when we say okay now you can play these and you can make money and you can earn and we have real economies in here that can be you can sell those assets for money in the real

world economies right um and that to me is just it's going to be mind-blowing i call it the trojan horse of web3 i think um but uh yeah that to me is very exciting yeah one one thing that comes up for me is um just this question of like is this a good thing right uh you know bringing digital economies to games uh does that does that help us have you know coming back to like the uh you know general purpose of gaming is to have fun and to build community right i think community has been a big part of gaming once i guess in the last decade again i haven't really played a lot of games but anybody i know who does play games has their squad they play with so is this is this good is this a good

thing to bring these digital economies to games alex i'm curious dude what you think you know so it kind of gives you a break to the most important part for early in launch for a game five protocol the most important thing is how their economies are run right so you got to look at how these game fights games are made right because there's a lot of difficult aspects that make it really are a lot of really tough or big aspects that you have to put together into a game right you have to get traditional game developers right because they need to know what they have they're in touch with the web 2 gamers right you have to have a good smart contract developer because you know the contract the whole backbone of

the whole protocol right you want to make sure it's tight and everything's good and then two you've got to have a good economic system right that's like the third one because it's economics is is very very difficult to get right right there's always things that need to be constantly adapting and changing based on variables that like you know based on how many new users are coming how many people are continuing to play that play every day um rental systems all this sort of stuff it's it gets really really tough and so it is a good thing but it's sometimes it gets to the point it's like when you're looking at a

project it's like you know the how can you tell if they're gonna be doomed to fail right or something like that because you know if when these economies would make it so tough and how it's constantly evolving you got to really make sure that the team is really strong strong behind it it'll just it'll you know with um say that there's too much supply not enough it's all goes back to the supply demand you get the token price goes up you know people buy it at four dollars and all of a sudden not enough people are playing it drives it back down to two people lost 50 or 50 of their investment within a month it's and then it just spirals and deaths and dies yeah right and that's not good for anybody i mean right i think we haven't even got

the real world economies figured out yet so as hard as enough it is to figure out the us economy or the global economy now we're trying to do it in these these digital games which yeah as you said brings a lot of complexities complexities to it uh for sure let's sort of just dive into where the state of game fi is at right now because jay said like is this a good thing and i think probably the answer is we don't really know yet because it seems like everything is still experimental um i don't think we yet have our like golden you know star game that's come out that has really nailed it in all levels i would say probably axi is the closest it's definitely the one that like really took off last year um and saw some amazing success but again it's

had its troubles over the last you know year six months whatever it's been so talk just a little bit about the the industry right now of game five and where that's at it's just it is super early right and and now too people are starting to hear about it but it takes a long time to develop a game right it really does take a long time so you know how it is right now people are interested in hearing about it more and more especially you know let's say with stepping step is a huge example of what people have been hearing about run to earn stuff so well now pay to earn's on their mind so they're coming into this industry and you know they're seeing more like the beta we're in the beta stage of game fight right we're seeing all these you know games come out try

their thing die fall out but all these really good games i think they're really in development still and they're in the next probably six months to a year this is when we're going to start seeing these really good quality games starting to come out i think right now that how the state of it is majority of the games that come out they're not fun right they're not really they feel kind of like a grind yeah the art the art isn't that good if i want nfts i don't like if you're hurt what was that uh one uh nft metaverse uh you see those those guys those things

look like absolute dookie [Laughter] so and and people paid a lot of money for that so you know like yeah so as i'm saying we just really gotta trust the vcs because the funding is coming and it's and you know for example like gaia games take a look at gaia games they're huge you know so they're starting to put their funding into these good projects and give it a couple months and i believe it's going to be in a lot better of a state you know there's going to be a lot more education behind it as you know the longer this goes on the more data there is the easier it is to look at the trends whatever seeing what works what doesn't work so

right now how's the current state meh meh all the good games are really expensive to break into right and but i don't think this mess state there's anything wrong with it it's just the natural course of progression right we're starting out we got to test things out every you know there's and don't get me wrong there's some still really great games out there right now like kyle said actually infinity right it's a simple game and it works it does everything right for what it is right you know there's another game splitter lands card game it's ten dollars to play really good game you know so there's still some gems it's just

like you know weeding through the process of finding out and learning you know which ones are obvious scams which ones just are fun and you know which ones will just you know what what kind of ideas and economies are just gonna be doomed to fail so that's kind of my thing meh but two months from now six months from now better okay so are we are we waiting for the like um i think they're called like aaa type games like the high graphic like really good story lines like the call of duty type game that comes to web 3 is that the thing that really makes a change or is it um like what's the thing that makes it

no longer meh well i i truthfully think that's it right it's i mean i talked to my friends right and even though i just talked to you about splinter lines how i think it's a great game i like it they take like one look at and they're like well it's no hearthstone right a good comparison with that because of the quality difference so for web 2 gamers to come to these web threes they need to have that quality of web 2 gaming or it's just like you know most most people that aspect of pay to earn isn't going to sink in right away they don't care what i care about is the first hour with the boys having fun right right so so so clearly we're going to get the

truth from alex on this podcast i love the uh dookie you can swear on the podcast don't worry oh okay don't worry i appreciate that you sensing yourself man that's very polite thank you uh so yeah i think that one thing that comes to mind for me is okay the opportunity here is clearly around play to earn building community around a game and a digital economy where the users have the ownership as opposed to the gaming having the ownership so can you just maybe break like using can we use axia infinity as an example because that's the game yeah and i'll play i'll play the dumb dumb here like i don't i i i i

don't know axe infinity very well i've seen it in the news but i don't know a ton about it so can you break that one down and maybe just use that as an example of how that works in terms of play to earn because i think lots of our listeners have probably heard the term play to earn so the ceo of uh actually finney you know kind of has a really good understanding about the the game fight you know it feels like game five should have three characteristics right the first is rewarding value creation which actually infinity does right people should be rewarded for creating value as they are in the game right you're spending your time there that's a resource yeah right so let's reward our players for spending

time in our game right um what's the second one here the second is co-creation right a game that is a creative partnership between its developers and the community that plays and creates value around it right this is known as community governance so like i mentioned earlier how you have these government tokens you can reward and stake well you also now have uh voting power in the direction that that game goes and that's great for the community right i i i'm sure you guys have all even you jay ten years ago back when you're playing video games you're probably gonna play something you're like this is this sucks you get noob tubed in mw2 what the hell

get this out of my game get this out of here well i'm going to buy or oh i got all these governance tokens now so now i got two percent or whatever two percent more voting power because i hate these freaking noob tubes so whatever right so something like that it's really good for the community you know makes them feel heard right how many times like you just been bitching about something in the game over and over doesn't change right so it's it's nice to give the the community more of a say one-on-one right and then the last thing is the co-ownership right players should own the in-game assets right we're talking about that deeper still it's the gamers should own the games they have invested their time in right

so with these three things that's what actually infinity does they reward you know they gather that community driven uh they listen to their community and the community votes on what they do so what they'll do is right they'll host a voting what do you we have these options for for axi what do you want and you know the people that have those governance tokens that actually invested their time of the game they get to pick and that's awesome right so and then of course the co-ownership right you actually own your axes right and then one day you said wake up in the morning i'm done with axi i'm done i don't know why just no something in my coffee said

no more axis i'm selling her i'm i'm liquidating i'm getting out of here well boom you sell your axes on the marketplace yeah you got your money and now you're gonna go invest in splinterlands or whatever you're gonna do i i don't know whatever you got go buy a bigger cup of coffee [Laughter] now i was actually in the axi infinity ecosystem for a bit so i can actually give a little more um side from from being in it now i wasn't really playing it but i did invest a bit in it and i started hiring um and renting out my axi to to people to play and there's just some things that that i want to bring up from what you just suggested is like one so just for those who don't know axe infinity it's

basically like a pokemon type game where you you own these like three axes you have like a team of them and they fight against other axes and you have like cards for your attacks and things like that it's a very basic looking game kind of like a card game with just very basic looking graphics um and basically if you win games you earn um tokens and then uh and then also you can like play the computer and like play adventure mode and you can earn a little bit tokens in there as well so people some people really liked it and they they like to push that people really like their axes and the characters in it which are nfts and so some people did for sure i think a lot of axey was just people who wanted to earn because it wasn't the funnest game and this is what you're

saying is like fun comes first for the stuff to work out and i think actually really saw that because at the beginning when i first got into it you could earn a lot of money like people were pre like people were making hundreds of dollars a month playing this game and so who did it attract it attracted a lot of people from developing countries right it onboarded like 3.5 billion people or some sorry million people not billion people within like a couple months um and a lot of them are from the philippines we're from argentina we're from brazil we're from africa because they actually made more money playing axey than they did um going to like going to work it was insane a lot of people that were renting out our axes that that we were renting out to them they were literally doing it while they

were at work or they would like quit work to do this it was insane because they were making yeah they were making so much money well but let's respect the hustle let's let's be clear here so much money in their economy in their country yes right so yes like what do you think what were what were they making like 500 a month 200 a month at its peak it was around like 500 us dollars a month sometimes more if they're really good right which like for somebody in the philippines i i don't know this exact stat but i think probably two to three hundred dollars a month u.s is there probably their money yes if they're educated yeah i lived in china for a couple years and the average average chinese person their income is

800 canadian a month right yeah wow so right so there you go yes and and i'm and they work really hard for that 800 a month right so absolutely so the problem was though with this is that it was too many people that just wanted to earn and and what happened was like you said um alex is that you need to even out and balance the ecosystem like you need you need some you need an economist in there that's running the tokens uh and trying to figure out the supply because what happened was so many people came in so fast they were all earning and what happened was the the token got inflated and price just started dropping and dropping and dropping and as it dropped because the game wasn't so fun

a bunch of people just stopped playing right and so it it didn't really even itself out because the token just inflated almost like basically to nothing what is really that kyle what do they call it that's a fomo effect right exactly exactly and and i think and also because of the renting aspect it was a lot of um like people doing what i did which is i i had a few axes and because we were earning so much i was like well why don't i just buy more axes and then i can rent it out for others and split like the the earnings with them um and it was great it was fun but again that created this sort of like ecosystem of a bunch of people just playing to earn and not playing to have fun i think um and so that was the big

downfall of axi they are now doing a lot of things to sort of fix that but what you brought up about the community was really cool because i actually really noticed this and i don't know what this is like in web 2. um but there was a point where they changed some of the attributes of the axes themselves right because they wanted to try to balance the ecosystem a little bit because there were some axes that were like really really good and if you got them it's like you couldn't lose kind of thing so they they changed it but it it basically screwed over anyone who had those good axes because they were selling for so much you'd buy them and all of a sudden one day they called the term was nerf but they just nerfed it and like all of a sudden those axes were

no good so people were complaining and at this point we didn't really have good governance because they hadn't launched the governance token so it was mainly in their discord which i think is the largest discord in the world right now um and it was on twitter and the community really like i don't want to say raged but they they they basically um they came up they spoke up really well they gave a bunch of different ideas on how to fix the game how to change things in a better way and actually did a great job of like listening to their community and involving their community and then like actually literally rebuilding things um based off of some of the suggestions that the community was saying so um at that point they didn't have the governance like to actually vote on it so they kind of did this like

weird voting structure it was like polls on twitter and like polls instead of discord and that um but it was really cool because i think it was because so many people in the game had ownership of these assets they felt like they were owners and they wanted to help solve the game and i don't think that would have happened if it was a web 2 game i think everyone would have just left probably well and two you look at it a nerf hits straight up hits the pocketbook it did exactly that's right all sudden i i spent thousands of dollars on this axi because i want to win i want to make money and then you nerf it now now it's worth half its value so it can be more competitive i don't think a solution is to nerf i think a better solution is to buff existing right right

to build more features more actually or what i feel like you need is this is where it comes back to the game needs to be better because if the game is good enough that people will just pay to play right like and there is a huge there's hundreds of millions maybe bill a billion of those gamers they just want to pay to play they don't even need to play to earn right so you sort of you need the gain to be good enough that you get the pay to play people but then also the economic side is there so there's the opportunity to play to earn at the same time well you know that brings it to another good term um i think i could there be there's gonna be two kind of categories when it comes to game five

and it's really going to be broken down to play and earn where it's got a better balance of fun where the rewards just kind of suck but the rewards you do get you know it might be worth real money right but i'm just using it to buy more skins in the game i'm reinvesting that money right right i'm bringing it back into the economy so you know you don't really earn a lot but you just have more fun but then you get like those grindy games right or the straight up gambling games where it's just like uh the grinding games what would be a grindy game that probably like defy kingdoms d5 kick is pretty grindy um right it's all about staking and coming back or you know there's sun

sunflower lands you know it's or what's another one i looked at recently pizza pizza pizza land or you own a pizza shop it's like cookie clicker you just click an all day steak in your son pops i don't know any of these games yeah i know yeah i am interested in pizza land so but that one it's just like you got a pizza and your chef he makes unlimited pizzas all day but until he gets tired then his pizza uh supply rate just drops so you gotta feed him soda pops whatever something like that but yeah you know it's a game like that you know maybe for the first like day three days yeah it's kind of fun after that you're like

my p i gotta feed my pizza chef man like is it more it's more like i gotta get it done so i can get this money more and then i'm just playing it to have some fun right so i think it's gonna be a big distinction between the two and what's really gonna pop is the one that has the true balance between that pay to earn and that fun right so okay let's let's talk about the future of these of these games like i think right now we said okay the the industry is kind of meh there's not a lot of great games out there not with good graphics that are not that fun a lot of the tokenomics are not really working out so much so well right now they're kind of forcing people to just grind and do things that aren't really what you

want to be doing while you game and a lot of these ecosystems aren't really kind of balanced and working out what have we learned what what what do the games need to do in terms of tokenomics to um or other things maybe if it's not all about tokenomics but what do they need to do to make this ecosystem like balance is there any sort of recommendations you have or things you've seen well i think i think while we did a video on this at footprint um is straight up single token economics is just not a great system for games and the reason it is is because it's proven time and time again that the lifespan is just short i mean don't get me wrong it's the most simple it's the easiest to implement

right but if if like uh let me i can quote out a couple articles here just give me a sec for you guys i'll show you the three different types of single token tokenomics one is input usd output game token uh input game token output game token or input usd output in game asset right so the first one input usd input gain token right value goes up right token goes up right people coming in all of a sudden people want to sell break that brings down the supply right now so there's not as much usd people don't come in there's not enough new users coming in to

push up that supply again it dies boom very very common it's a very simple tokenomic structure but if you don't have that constant supply of new users new people being on boarded it's gonna die really really quick and it's it that's it's the most common one for rug pulls rug pulls use this structure um so and then the usd input token it again it extends it but if there's not more value coming back in to the economy it is it's not sustainable without the transactions of these in-game assets right now you know instead of a token you have assets without trading them selling them buy

more you know it dies so you know with these single that's why games now brings you to the dual token tokenomics right it gives more structure right you have a governance token that gives back to the community that you can stake and get rewards back on apy right based on the staking you know you get users coming in to your lands that you own that you're staking to mine so then you get to share the rewards of this as well right it is more complex but it offers you know more options more skill more things to do interact with and more ways to make money in a safer easier to balanced system right splinter lens for

example splinterlands has uh dec tokens which are their dark energy crystals that's what you get for winning ranked games or when you sell your cards uh you get dec right and then they have sps which is uh well i believe i actually have no idea how to get sps i've looked into it i've tried i have no idea but you use sps you use it i think it's for if people mine on your land you get sps tokens and then the sps then gets back to you can stake it and then you get vouchers back so you could enter tournaments with high prize pools right i was looking at splinter lands

with sps you can there's a 30 000 usd reward for the top person but you had to stake 30 sps tokens to enter right so it's kind of cool little systems like this that kind of help you know it makes it more complex and i'm really i'm i'm not an economist by any way so it's really hard for me to predict how you know or but it shows that it's an easier to governance toke are easier to control through mint and burn it's easier to control through mitt and burn and then it offers more rewards back to the community because they're constantly reinvesting the governance token right they spend the money to get that

governance token and then constantly reinvesting it brings the money back into the game so it helps it helps um helps us so there's always that constant re-entry in case new users come down they got something to dip in so that they can support the other token right the the big thing to to make games work is is somehow not allowing the token to go to zero right like the token has to hold price or go up in price obviously just like anything in web3 and we've talked a bit about tokenomics before of like ethereum for example which does a great job of they issue new tokens right to their validators right now it's miners but it will be validated as we go proof of

stake and so that's inflation and if they just continue to do that eventually the token will go down but what they've done is is they've started the burning of ethereum right so it becomes deflationary and that really allows the price to go continue to go up uh and well even more so when the merge comes and this is same with games and so this is what axiomfinity did as well is they have two tokens they have axs which is their governance token and they have smooth love potion is what it's called slp this is the one that you earn inside the game and but the reason it's called smooth love potion is that you use those tokens and you burn them in order to mate your axes so they can create another axi and so they have this sort of like complex system of your nfts and then these two

different tokens because you use the smoother potion and some of the axs to be able to like mate your uh your axes but that burns it and tries to help the supply now the problem with axi was there's so many people playing and not enough of them were wanting to create other axes that there wasn't enough burns there was way too much minting versus burn and so one of the things they started to do is how can we find more utility in the game that will end up burning more slp right so maybe they're starting to build like a metaverse like a world that you can walk around and you're not always playing which means you're not always earning and so the idea was maybe you're gonna go and i don't know talk to other people or participate in other games that are part of x infinity and in this case you

would burn some of your your slp right and and not earn as much slp so it starts to balance it out um the other thing that they started doing and it goes with what you said is is these tournaments so in the beginning anyone didn't matter how good you were you could get this bunch of slp like it was so easy to get it they started to make the game harder but more they made it more competitive and so the the better players were the ones that could earn more and i don't know if that's what makes sense you think that's the way that it goes is like well to me it makes sense right games are about the right system and we got to reward the good players right right and and the players that are best at the game they're the best at

onboarding new players right when i'm when i'm watching streams of people playing i'm not going to go watch some bronze scrub struggle his way right right through i'm looking at the challenger players watching their master mechanics trying to get that right i don't even even last night i went on twitch and i was like man i'm on a loose streak on splinter lands i'm i'm i'm losing all my elo oh i'm going back to novice what's going on here so i went and i went on twitch and i always seen a guy who was diamond i was like okay what's your meta bud [Laughter] well this is this is a good point and i kind of forgot about this is that there are millions of kids and younger people around the world not just kids actually

there are millions of people that say around the world that that are watching people play games right like this wasn't a thing when i grew up we just didn't have that like the tech wasn't there for that i don't think so no one did that now it's a massive massive industry so you make a good point is this something that i guess this is what games are thinking of us like we want to get on the big screen we want people to be watching your game that's their marketing that's their branding and so they need to reward good players because if you get good people are going to start watching you never even thought about that so for example right now because the max rank i can get because of my power level and splinter lines i get the bronze two all right so i get

seven loot chests they give the players and splinter lines like a diamond they get like 30 000 d or like 30 000 dc and 300 loot boxes right so that's a huge difference between my seven so you know and it's good because if i put my time and i'm constantly reinvesting like i mean i even sold one of my cars and it turned out to be a mistake because it ruined my power level but like but uh yeah i sold one of my cars just to test it out and like you know people bought it in the dec and i got it in a day so it's cool because then two if you get like multiple of a card you can then level up now you have the same card but

level two so now it's worth more bigger power level ah it get me off on a tangent on a splinter lens but so let me ask you something um you're part of footprint uh footprint analytics and this is uh basically a platform which allows us to uh i guess look at any data on the blockchain at all um and so obviously with game phi this becomes very important we talked a lot about we need to understand economics of our of our games right and that's how we balance the game and thus that's how we make a good game if it's unbalanced game goes to and people stop playing what are what is talk a little bit about footprint analytics and just like how um i guess what you guys are

tracking or what we can see on there and that how that helps us sort of understand like in-game tokenomics yeah absolutely um i'll kind of rewrite a little bit and just kind of say what footprint is so footprint is that all-in-one uh analytics platform right so we make it so you guys can come if you wanna make your own analytics you guys can come by and uh do so without any coding any sql query required right because we have the data parsed and ready for you so yeah but when it comes to game 5 actually footprint is the largest game fi analysis platform out there right now mainly due to the fact that we've parsed 15 public chains right now so like compared to our main competitor

they only have seven right so it's and games nowadays aren't just being released on a single chain right you're looking more and more right now d5 kingdoms they were released on harmony chain but now they're releasing their own chain d5 so and you know and so it's really really important to do cross chain analytics when looking at a game fight game right so you know regarding so what we do at footprint regarding what data do we track we're all about using we do address analysis tracking okay so we're able to look at the game we can see that every single address that is interacted with that game and then we can organize it into

different metrics right we're able to look at the new users active users and uh then from there we're actually able to give a new user percentage so this is this is really important and it's good to know too when talking about active users that also includes new users as well so it's really important to put that distinction between the new users and the active users to get that so we track um actually let me just pull up uh let me just pull up a dashboard here so i can look at tell you guys directly what we're looking at it's just so amazing to me the data that is available because of blockchain

right right all of this does not exist if it isn't for blockchain yeah and you know what uh really is uh is just how much data there really is if you went in to just do an sql query just to make a basic curve trading chart you know you're gonna have to look through hundreds if not thousands of lines of code to find those unique or those unique data points that you need to make this that uh make this chart right so it may it's really is quite time consuming to do um here let me just pull up something thank you footprint analytics for making it easier for us all yeah

see star shards star sharks dashboard okay so let's take a look at star star so looking at our dashboard overview here uh we tell us what chain is on so it says bsc chain so we track what chain it's on we have the 24 hour users so people that have played star sharks in the last 24 hour use or last 24 hours they have one million players and one in the last 24 hours or sorry sorry one million new players in the last 24 hours one new and active users okay in the last 24 hours that's good to know a million people are playing that's good news then we take also take a look at how much volume is behind the game uh their total users total transactions total

volumes but what's really really great is we offer unique metrics like user retention rate right so we can take a look at what players started in the first month that the game was released and now we can see if that player is still playing six months from now right and then we can also do it month by month as well so what did they do in april that changed it then all of a sudden now more people are playing from in may than from april what did they change right it's good to look at this see what they're doing and then as well we all we monitor the token mint and burn rate as well so that's good to know because you can kind of see what they're doing what steps

they're taking to you know stabilize their economy to make their economy you know have the long lifespan that game five projects desperately need right so it's good to take a look at all these different unique metrics that we offer as well at footprint which is really really cool is uh we have a cross-chain analysis ranking of all the games on all the chains we've parsed so you're like i don't care what channel okay ethereum avalanche polygon i don't care i just want a good game well you can make a ranking based on 24-hour new users 24-hour active users or new user percentage are based on all

the games on every chain that we parsed so it's good it's good for just looking into seeing you know what's a new game to try out that isn't you know that people are actually playing you know that has has and you know it's actually crazy too about gay fight kind of brings it back you know for um one of the most popular games that has about 13 15 000 new users every day it's actually been around since 2003 it's that second live game um where it's all the social aspect where you own the house and you can go around the sims no it's like the whole vr thing at the whole vr there's like second life where

you go you go in and you have an avatar you create the avatar however you want and you just talk to people and you you know go to their islands and have meet up it's like club penguin but with whatever avatar through vr and that game second live you know they just released this pet feature people are loving it you can have a digital husky super expensive but what you're saying is i mean like ar vr what that does for gaming as well you know we haven't even touched on that there's just so much so much technology all coming in at the same time that's just right and yeah so my point is it kind of broadens your perspective on the

different types of game fight games that are out there right it's not all just gaming you know there's more social aspects you know there's all this there's gambling aspects right so you know it is kind of it's not just you know if they get axe infinity or anything it is quite a diverse and has different little niches within it alex do you know how many uh users there are in total whether that's like i don't know daily active or monthly active or i don't know do you have ever like have interacted with the game but do you have those numbers on um on footprint that we can see just to get an idea of how big this space currently is so um total gamers overall for the 15

change that we've got last uh we got over 7 million in the last 24 hours wow right um total gamers overall so yeah so i actually you know seven million overall in general sorry the last 24 hours my bad so in the last time all the time it makes sense that makes sense yeah right so still very small but like also growing there right now what's cool with that is every user needs to get a web 3 wallet in order to play any of these games and so what this is doing is these are probably people who don't give a about d5 right like they don't even know what that is

or care about that or they probably don't even really understand bitcoin or ethereum or any of that but they do understand games and they understand that they want to make money and so they play these games they got to get a wallet they got to load up their wallet with eth or soul or whatever it is depending what they're playing and they got to interact with these dapps they probably even have to use uniswap or other exchanges like that to get the tokens to play the game maybe they need to use openc so like it's a great tool to just onboard people um into into the space like when we were renting our axes out to um people in the philippines um they all had a metamask wallet they all under had to buy ethereum they all understood all this stuff and i was like

they didn't have bank accounts not one person that i was working with had an actual bank account because they just don't have that structure there but they had a metamask wallet and they they were buying eth and they were earning and i was just like wow this is absolutely mind-blowing actually it's pretty crazy if you look at the percentage of the world that actually doesn't have a bank account right right that's and that's what kind of the whole point of the decentralization is connecting these people into the world of finance that can't do it through traditional means right you know you don't have you don't have any id you can't get a bank account yeah simple as that how so it's really really cool these people uh

they also don't have the incentive to necessarily create a digital wallet i mean i shouldn't say they don't have the incentive they have the incentive but they don't have the on-ramp right now to do that so it comes back to our original you know our theme of today is really you know game fi has the potential to be the largest onboarding ramp to web three two digital wallets and then web three and all that comes with that alex i got a question so we're sitting at what seven million eight million people that are playing web 3 games uh or game phi uh there is what 2.7 billion i think you said actual gamers out there we got a long ways to go and a lot of people you can onboard which is which is exciting

how are the web 2 or like just the the normal traditional game uh gamers right now how are they transitioning into web3 like do they like it are they on board i've i've just seen a lot of things of like i forget who it was ubisoft maybe or something was going to launch nfts in the gaming community like lost their ship for some reason can you talk about what's going on there yeah absolutely and truthfully what it is i think it's just a lack of education right you know when you talk when i tell even my friends about stefan which is a proven game run to earn you're selling me snake oil buddy no such thing you made 40 bucks running no no you didn't and uh oh it's just a scam it's just

gonna fall apart right this is what all my friends are telling me this is what everyone you talk to that is and p it's not the fact that people are struggling actually getting on boarded is they're just struggling i think to take the step to want to do it right right now i think there's so much lack of education within how you know how simple it is i mean at the end of the day it is more work than just buying a video game downloading it and playing it right there's more steps involved there's more work so how could we make these steps easier for people and you know without having the risk of them putting in 50 dollars and they send it to the wrong

chain and then their 50 is gone forever right there's a we got to make people confident and we got to have that education just to get them to do that first step i think once they get that metamask and they put that and they're confident transferring the ethereum or whatever it is into these games um in the you know it they just open up a can of worms for them right it's gonna just be going from there so the biggest thing i right now i think is education for onboarding web 2.

right right and then i was just going to say it's such a better world for them i don't know why they would ever not want this stuff but i get it it's like anytime there's money involved people get nervous and people get a little sketchy over things it's like i mean when you first told your parents or your friends or whoever about bitcoin or eth when you first got into crypto they're always like nah it's a scam whatever and it's just that's just kind of the way people are in the beginning um but yeah i guess it just takes some education for them to understand like wow you can actually own this stuff like that and you know and it doesn't it doesn't help the fact that you know when you're watching the news you don't really hear a lot about the good things that are happening crypto

right you hear about oh usd crash you're 30 million you invested a week ago was worth 30 dollars done right so so you know they're hearing these kind of news and it it doesn't help and you know and kind of the second barrier of entry for web 2 users is especially right now a lot of games that are just coming out like literally just before beta stage haven't even been released yet um you drop like 500 bucks to get their nft right right right so you have to you have to pay to get into the game you can't even play your way no because that's how you own the in-game that's how you kind of bring the value right that's how you get your

assets you got to pay to get in right they're sure there is some free to enter games um but there's not that many and the ones that do it's is the rewards are are kind of negligible right so you get your money by purchasing these nfts because you know in the free to play if you get your free nft or whatever your chances of drop rates for better things are a lot lower you're going to say a battle system you just have junk equipment so you're just gonna get rolled right so you know so you know to really i looked at this uh new game coming out star atlas and they're talking about their ships and what they do is you bring your

ship from planet to planet and then you mine it based on that planets apy and then you can also get tokens by fighting other ships and i'm like looking at their most basic ship and it's like 100 bucks right just just to get just to play get the mining and then i'm looking at what i'd be going against and i'm just like i'm going to get rolled right so you know suspending 80 dollars which you know that's fair that's a fair investment that's what a normal game is nowadays anyways right spending eighty dollars is that what a video game costs now is 80 bucks oh yeah holy holy jeez that's crazy back we just rent them at

blockbuster yeah yeah yeah so like you get this you know you you get this 80 nft and you're just not having no fun because you get rolled by all the boys that dropped 400 bucks but even then it's just like how can i drop 400 bucks on a game that i've like seen the devs play on youtube right right is there are they creating better like how do we fix that we need some sort of onboarding right like we need like it's almost like a lead magnet when you think about it in marketing terms but like we need something that's free or very cheap to get them in to get them playing to get them skilled actually did this while they're doing this with like the launch of axi origin i believe which is it's free and there is no actual nfts or anything but you

get to play the game and so you get to like have some fun and go okay this is great now maybe i'll commit and i'll buy an actual axis this sort of the way to do it is just have a free side of it as well or is there other experiments that are going on well and truthfully um i don't think you know when it comes to the barrier of entry i think we should just skip like there's games that are doing this right now like big time for example um they they just said screw the wallet screw the wall we're gonna do a little kyc but we're gonna make it so that now you can just sign up with a credit card sign up with an email now again it goes against kind of the whole decentralized

aspect of it but if i could sign up to a game without having to get this wallet without having to transfer i just sign up with a credit card and show my id and then get an email it's a really good entry to start right right and to lead magnet and you know the kids that i believe when i was talking to them their kyc was only going to take in effect with players that were doing more than three thousand dollars worth of us dollar transaction and transactions right so the kic wasn't going to affect new users as much because they're only probably going to be spending maybe a couple hundred at a time stuff like that but it just it kind of makes it safer and you know makes it

new users feel better with their money getting it through a credit card right because in case it gets gone or something like that we call them up yeah but in comparison to your wallet and stuff like that so this is a great maybe first step to onboarding people once once like i said once you're kind of getting familiar with the scene right you just get more ravenous with the information kind of eat up want to learn as much as possible and you figure it out right right well it's the same as like when you want to get into crypto you get a coinbase account first right which is where you go to kyc and blah blah blah blah and it's not decentralized and it's not and then when you're like okay now i'm ready you go get your wallet and then you move it off

your exchange and the way you go and i guess you're right gaming doesn't have that first step like crypto does so that i can definitely say that's a good thing for adoption um can you just i don't know maybe this is some alpha if you have it but um we're talking about the future and you said you know we're you kept saying we're maybe two months or six months away from like good games coming out so i assume you have some like actual games that you know when they're releasing or something like what are the good games that you're watching that you think are going to be released soon or like what kind of timelines do we have until like the real good games actually make it involve like one that i'm really like i'm real excuse my cornballer's turn but i'm really bullish on

i'm feeling i'm feeling good about it is i really like big time right so i think the game that's really and okay guys it's all my own opinions okay so just remember that but i really personally think the game that's going to bring people over is going to be you know that diablo style that ruinscape mmorpg where it has that active marketplace already in runescape you know you're getting scammed when you're 11 years old over gold in runescape right is all these economies have already been around and people have been using them and bought farming and stuff like this already so that i think a natural step was might

as well just put you know in a marketplace in there that works with a good economy with an economy behind it with users coming in that that's easy to sell right i want to be able to sell my skin one click boom it's for sale come back in the next day money's in my wallet right something simple that works not huge fees stuff like this to just make a simple mmorpg like wow like i said those games but have a good marketplace style in it that's what's really going to be um onboarding these users because you know if i go through a dungeon 40 minutes every day the same dungeon trying to grind this one piece of legendary

equipment i finally do it i should be able to sell that for some real money right i i put some time into that thing i've i know i memorized his bosses moves 500 battles ago [Laughter] right so what you finally get i think that's going to be really really nice for people right not only is it the flex factor but the minute you're out it's like yeah let's sell it and then you can get something else whatever you want to do right you i want to get usd yeah i so big time is one of those games and they're doing that easy uh in easy adoption with the email credit card if you don't want your wallet but then the the game looks good right that's a huge factor too i don't

want to play some dookie looking game right so um the art looks good and and the combat is kind of fun right you're going around to these different zones not killing monsters just like you wouldn't like say witcher or something like that you know they gave you quest lines so it it's cool and then the loot that those uh you know the enemies drop you can sell it later or equip it and i was already looking at their kind of their in-game marketplace and they're in beta and they're already selling some of their nft armor for like six thousand bucks stuff like that it's really crazy kind of how much money is really into these rare nfts when it comes to game flying stuff

like that the prices in some of these games are pretty crazy i've heard a lot about elluvium is one of the other big ones that's like a triple a style game that's coming out soon and i think the nfts i don't know what they are but it's thousands like it's like it's pretty crazy i think there's just there's a lot of hype around some of these bigger like high quality games that from what i'm told are coming out in the next you know six months to a year kind of thing and so um from everything i'm seeing it looks like game five is soon gonna have its moment and maybe what you said was game five summer uh are you predicting that's this year or is this a next year oh i have no idea we'll see we'll see you'll see if bitcoin keeps dropping

[Laughter] all right so as we as we wrap up here i think um alex uh we we were actually supposed to probably talk more about footprint analytics but we we couldn't get out of the weeds of the games um so is there is there more to footprint analytics that that we should know i mean feel free to take the floor here yeah i mean for games but i know that it can be used for other things too like defy and other things yeah absolutely so it's really really cool i think what the main thing for you uh our listeners here um uh on this podcast at web3 academy is we make it really easy for you to make your own analytics okay if you've been around a graph before

you can come into footprint and you can make your own knowledgeable insights okay and we don't just do game five we have our nft data being released so you can track nft dashboards you can we also do d5 tokens um and then we also really are working on unique metrics as well but our big thing is is if you want analytics and you want to take a look it's free and you can make your charts yourself for free right we have tutorial videos on our youtube channel if you guys get stuck or you know our dev team is really active in our discord so if you run into any issues we'll help you out and and the best part about it is when you make your dashboards it's then shared with

the community so community members can take a look at it you can go in you can duplicate say another community member's charts and then put it on your dashboard and then just edit the information for your dashboard so it's it's really just a simple fast easy tool for you guys to make analytics to view analytics without having to you know filter through thousands of lines of code we you know we make it so that we don't care if you're the you know the head dev at google or you know you're you're just your first time looking at analytics at all you've never seen a graph before we make it so that you can use our product and use it effectively

right obviously if you're more advanced you're still that we still have more advanced tools for you guys but you know if you want to just make a token price chart that you want to monitor you can do it in minutes so that's kind of our thing and we offer what we've done nine nine billion transactions parts we got 519 d5 protocols we've had done over 900 000 smart contracts we've yeah so we uh we got 15 chains which is the most chains parsed so it's really really uh oh dashboards we've had 6 000 community community-made dashboards from our users which is huge that's a lot of analytics guys and then

[Laughter] um and yes and then 48 of the users that go on our website they make charts and that's awesome right because you know i i don't know about you guys too but the first time like you know looking at a chart or wanting to make a chart it kind of it's a little intimidating right it's like where do i start i'm looking at this graph and i'm just drawing blank so we our goal is to make that process easy for you guys help you know where to start we offer templates all this sort of stuff so you guys can easily hop in and start making analytics so that's really kind of what we're about um we also offer uh business services where say you're a dapp developer and you want

to organize your data right there's a lot of data coming out of here we well we offer a service we streamline organize your data so you know it's easily accessible to you for you to look at and uh yeah we have different unique metrics for that as well but yeah what i what i love about it is you know the two themes of composability and interoperability are part of your tool right in the sense that anybody can come in and they can compose and create their own charts and then it's interoperable i can take it over to my dashboard and share and we build upon each other and so before we before we like get to the wrap up here just one question that i have to ask that i struggle to understand and maybe you can explain

this is when we talk about interoperability and this being possible in game fi how would this actually work like if i own an nft in one game am i actually gonna be able to take that into another game like and can i take it into just any game or do they have to be on the same chain like yeah i just this concept blows my mind like what if the graphics are different like i i just can't wrap my head around how you would take an item from one game to another well just picture this uh i don't know if you heard the game like vr life or whatever it's very similar what you do is you just take a scan and you just upload it to the game it just uploads it like that it obviously gets a little bit more

complex when smart contracts are evolved are involved and stuff like this but essentially how the protocol would work guys now i might be wrong i have to get back to you but this is what i believe i believe they get in partnership with a bridging system like a swap okay right that also works with that developer right so this is how they do it they do partnerships right they do partnerships with the other game or the nft project et cetera et cetera and then they work together through the same swap where they can bridge it through this way right right so it's not just natively you can go from one to the other it's like you do need to build some of that into it for it to work okay right and that's that's an issue and that's an issue for

these for these protocols because this is a very very important social aspect of is bringing my nfts from previous games into my new game right there i own them so i should be able to do that i want to show them off to my friends in this game right so the being able to implement you bringing your nfts or your other in-game assets into this to this other metaverse right where you then you now combining metaverses it's very very important for keeping and onboarding new users right right yeah but there's still there's still the basics of uh the game that you can't you can't just bring anything anywhere and so um

what i think that means is what i also think is so exciting about gamefight is there's there's so much business potential in terms of partnerships and collaboration which did not exist in web 2 gaming at all it was all these separate worlds and they were all battling and competing against each other to have the biggest world whereas now and i guess this is why we use the term the metaverse so much is we're going to see more connected worlds so kai any more questions before uh before we wrap up and get to uh that's it for me okay uh let's just do a little uh lightning round questions here for you alex yeah absolutely the first one that i just

thought of this while we were talking because kyle mentioned sweet love potion several times which just makes sense smooth smooth potion i think sweets better name anyways and and and alex you mentioned one a token you said it so fast i didn't even hear it but you mentioned one in the podcast so my question is what's your favorite token name or funniest token name oh i thought one cracked me up i mean this isn't a game five protocol but it's more of this token they do they're there it's called rug radar and their their token name is rug so that one always cracks me up i don't think it's funny um

jeez um oh i don't know why this one the crevadas got one i just like to say it their government's token is cram just cram [Laughter] what was what was splinter land oh they're dec dark energy crystals they're like dark energy crystals yeah i like that one a lot um okay uh favorite person to follow on twitter oh oh oh who have i been loving i i honestly like i like i like following the ceo of finance because you know he loves stirring the pot he loves stirring the pot

second yeah cz by nancy and then andy lang those two partner up together and they just they just sub tweet all these oh i just love stirring the pot it just cracks me up all about a little bit of twitter drama okay uh going back to just a little personal information you said you buy and sell cars either either give us you choose was the last car you bought and sold or what's your favorite car you've ever bought and sold okay the last car i bought sold was i had a cls 500 mercedes and it had a brabus body kit on it it looked mean thing was fresh i sold it go to mexico don't regret it at all the gas prices

right now suck my my favorite car though i had uh i had a 1998 skyline like an r33 uh that thing was sweet right hand drive and everything like that man i gotta say alex you bring up culture for me in a way that not many people do the the lingo and the slang that you use makes me it reminds me how important culture is for movements to grow right you know the way you talk about games i mean the car thing as well is very there's car culture and that's an old culture car's been around forever that's a you know there's hundreds of millions of people around the world who are spending a lot of money on on cars

but gaming culture is also you know such a big culture they're so which is which is why things build and grow you know you get these lingos you get these slangs these hilarious token names it's great i love it um okay uh last question uh game you were you were playing the most right now oh splinterlands i don't know why i'm in love with it i i just grinded out card packs i got no wise because i got one legendary card that's worth five bucks and it got me all fired up okay uh before we do wrap alex any any show you want to give we've talked talked a lot throughout about footprint

and whatnot but if if there's anything else you want to say about footprint or where you can find where do we follow you yeah absolutely so yeah guys if you want to check out our website create account it's free to do so it's just footprint dot network really simple just go create an account you can sign in with your gmail and then that's how you get started into our analytics i would really appreciate if you guys followed our twitter at footprint underscore defy um there you can catch our updates we also give out we also show off cool dashboards made by our communities every day and we talk about uh web3 daily news and it's also my baby i love my twitter account at footprints so please follow that um and and then yeah join our discord uh

it's just a footprint uh dot network and then we and if you have any questions we can help hook you up and get you set up or you can talk with our dev team directly so that's kind of my show i love the twitter i love you guys follow my twitter so please do that uh other than that yeah that's it thank you guys thanks alex it was great to get some insight into into the gaming world uh because i haven't been in that in that world for a long time and that world is very different than when i was in it before so uh it's great to get some insight in there so thank you for for joining us i'm sure the users enjoyed that or our listeners enjoyed that as well yeah no worries thank you guys so much for having me i thank you for

listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you

should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one