Kam Punia: The $POWER of Web3 Mobile Gaming

Transcript

you're now plugged in to the deli podcast hey guys and welcome back to another episode of the deli podcast today I am delighted to introduce you to cam the founder of pixan Studios the studio behind uh Fable born um yeah one of the founders in the Delta Ventures portfolio that we're hugely excited to be backing so cam thank you for coming on yeah always a pleasure good to catch up so I wanted to kick things off with uh just a bit of a personal background on you give people some uh familiarity in terms of what you worked on historically you know you've got a ton of experience in the sort of like traditional game Space so would love to bring people up to speed on that front yeah I was lucky so I I studied games design you know I've always been passionate about gaming since I was six

played on all the major consoles it was a big part of my life growing up and so naturally went and studyed game design and development uh and fell in love with the product side so really thinking about how to build player experiences was fortunate that straight out of University first of all was at kabi where on you know some pretty incredible titles personally as a fan as well the the Metro be Series in Silent Hill and I did that for nearly two years obviously learning a lot from kajima and you know incredible game designers and and teams and then realized there was still a very clear Gap in knowledge mostly on the operational side of how we scaling these

game I started to learn a lot about how to build player Centric games player Centric design but not so much okay we've built a incredible game how does that become played by tens of millions of players around the world and so really wanted to make sure before I found my own company build my own games I'm sure what I got that in my locker in terms of experience and right place right time Konami took over the Yu-Gi-Oh IP Yu-Gi-Oh's probably best known for its anime trading clouds and video games now that you know what over 15 years ago not so much and they were launching media in Europe and right place right

time I was the individual that scaled that entire division for Europe it was a nine figure uh IP and it it allowed me to learn so much because we went from just myself the goal of overtaking you know Pokemon with small IP in in five years and and battling with them across not only the anime video games the toys the licensing you know across the board it allowed me to really understand you know that operational insight into commercially how do we drive results how do we drive player interactions outside of just video games and so the trading cards were completely different division

completely different auding subset same to the anime those that were buying with toys again and so learn a lot over five or six years we we did overtake Pokemon and gross through the move for so it was a really great achievement for myself the entire team but that's obviously a public listed company and so the resources there are you know uh let's say there there's there's a lot to support me uh and that's very different to the the the way that you're working in a startup way you have to be really Scrappy really resilient it's a different type of pressure I say and so the last thing I really want to test myself is you know would I fr under the pressure where you have to make $1 worth

$1,000 and um so I I joined a small startup here in London working on Facebook casual games Ed day looking back retrospectively they were already three years too late as mobile started put started to really proliferate casual gaming and Candy Crush had just launched a few years ago and you have titens like clash of plans launched as well but I was there for two years Studio shut down so it wasn't a a happy ending in that sense but I learned so much and it was a an environment that I thrived in and one that I really prefer and from there you know I from myself personally as a found I I checked all the boxes I wanted to

check that gave me the confidence I'm ready to to start building and had the expertise the network behind me to to found a St be successful that's awesome really really appreciate the color on the initial Journey there would love to understand then you know once you'd made that decision into going and and sort of like founding something what was the process in terms of you know uh assembling The Avengers who were the people that you went to you mentioned you had the network like you got some pretty impressive people on on The Advisory Board and elsewhere so would love to yeah hear a bit more about that yes so I I guess backstory there is I had two co-founders that I wanted to found pixim with but actually the end result is I was a solo founder at the start which I don't recommend both from an operational

perspective that you want co-founders that can cover blind spots that that you would have and then two just from you know mental sanity point of view uh definitely recommend having people on your team that you can uh sound board with when you know when you're high and low so I had two two co-founders but quickly realized their definition of success and what they wanted to achieve was very different to mine uh personal opinion is I'd rather start a studio and found a company where there's a very clear vision and we're all going in the same direction rather than having you know very different ideologies let's say at founder level i' I've seen that

generally never works out well uh and so started pix in by myself but knew I didn't have that operational Insight that could cover some of those blind spots and so reached out to the network that I had and uh like you say we're very very uh blessed let's say to have some incredible people there from n and Allen who were a King near went on to then sell dots in New York for 300 plus million went to then joined Take 2 acquired Zinger as the first deal that he'd ever done for 12 billion and and now is in web free come full circle uh and we've got incredible people that

have been in the industry for 20 plus years have worked for some of the biggest names in gaming both uh web 2 and web 3 we've got those that have taken huge Studios to IPO for a billion plus dollars uh and then we've started to surround ourselves with you know more incredible uh web free native Minds like yourself like the deli team to ensure that not only on the web to in operational side on on building web two products that can scale with web two games but understanding at the intersection how blockchain and crypto fit within those rails uh we've got an incredible Network now and um in in

between that from founding pixie and the leadership team is you know Best in Class everyone has been in the space in different industries from gaming to fintech and so we've got a broad spectrum of knowledge that look at both problems and solutions with a def very different lens but allows to come up with you know a a very clear thesis on how to tackle a market that doesn't have a clear blueprint or a one route to success uh feel like we've got a a really good range of of experience and um advice around us awesome and then yeah would love to give listeners like uh who maybe aren't familiar with Fable

born yet like what is it what was the love what was the vision um yeah talk us through yeah sort of the elevator pitch for fable born and the kind of game genre you're tackling here yeah so faor in its core is a genre blend of action RPG meets strategy based building and a lot of players like to call it think Diablo meets Clash of Clans skewing heavily towards the arpg and why we came up with this type of game is one we've always had success as a studio and as individuals in our our previous careers prior to pixan we've always had success at looking at genres that have maybe become stale haven't seen any Innovation over the last 5 six seven years then deeply

understanding Elder game players in those genres cuz those are players that have still stuck around are still spending playing every single day and understanding what their pain points are and if we can solve them with Innovation that's where like I say we've had our success and so prior to fa born we actually killed five games and and maybe we touch upon that later on but when we did start to build the blueprint for fable born we quickly realized after having spoken to over thousand Clash of Clans and Rise of Kingdom players their pain points particularly with Clash of Clans was on the raiding side because you have to place a unit you know almost

Pixel Perfect to ensure that it's going in the right direction and will attack a specific type of the base defense otherwise you know you're you're pretty much um wrecked rating became really unsatisfying because if you did misplace for whatever reason that unit that unit you can't control you have two two points of control where you place a unit and what unit you take in and so we started to flip that and and decide what about if we gave players complete control and so whether the raid is going well or not it's completely on you you decide what to attack how to attack when to attack the end result is completely determined by the decision you make on

both a macro and micro level during that 3 four minute raid and so we on paper decided that seems like a really good core Loop how does it play as always we prototype very quickly the team had lots of fun and we started to see even with one hero and a couple of Base defense units so the most primitive core we had a fable born we were already raiding and using different sort of Strate strategies to raid and different Base building strategies as well and that meant to us that there's a lot of depth even with a small amount of content a lot of replayability and importantly a lot to learn and master uh and that's when we really green the the

game and started to move into production and was it always going to be a mobile title you were pursuing based upon stuff you've done historically or like yeah talk us through the rationale of going after that as well yeah always mobile I think you and I were you know briefly talking about the gaming Market over the last few years and where it will be going and it's no surprise that mobile takes a line share of both downloads and a revenue over 55% I think of all Gaming revenue is mobile so when we think about proliferating Fable born on our ecosystem and reaching the largest amount of players you know there's only one very clear winner that's mobile not everyone has a high spec gaming PC or a

console but almost everyone I think there's more mobiles and human beings actually in the world a funny stat that I I saw and so almost everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket and therefore a gaming device in their pocket and so mobile was always a clear part of where we're going to build favor born but the team that we'd also assembled and the success that we'd had you know all of us in the leadership team had built games that were mobile Centric midore multiplayer games that was our sweet spot that was our success uh that's where you know we'd back ourselves to repeat it again so you had this sort of early prototype that you

realize you know um in a very restricted version was already unlocking a lot of depth and you guys are really enjoying it like what was the process from realizing like okay we want to we want to run with this and we're excited by it to then also thinking crypto let's try and put aspect to this on chain like what are the things that stood out in terms of M Points it could solve um for you guys as developers yeah I think there's a a few parts both on the product level and then just if we zoom out a little on you know the the the business side and the commercial side of things fundamentally if I start with a latter you know the web two business model certainly is becoming flawed or is flawed the unit economics no longer really stack up I think we see that as a a byproduct of

how many web two teams are unfortunately reducing and letting go of Staff it's really difficult and a big part of that is there's lots of fun games but they're not seeing and retaining or even able to acquire players at scale U UA is no longer efficient idfa was you know one of the nails in M coffin that made um I think certainly for mobile UA um and particularly Performance Marketing less efficient you're throwing dollars at an algorithm that no longer knows if Piers is actually going to spend money if he's going to buy items or if he's going to download and play for free a majority of players would

download and play for free um and so it really became difficult to scale a web two business and so then when we think about that as one of the North Stars how do we acquire and bring in and align players it was very early on actually in 2020 so before you know the I guess the crypto gaming and crypto cycle is a boom uh and web free gaming in 21 we started to discover two communities in particular splinterlands and ax Infinity uh and although that play communities were still right now quite primitive maybe a couple of thousand those few thousand were very very loud

super fans are extremely passionate we we'd call them golden coort players and so these players are evangelists they will stay with you through the highs and you know the very very lows and the network effects that they're going to create are going to be exponential so we started to really trying to understand why are these two games that again were were still primitive in their their own rights as well but why do they have such loyal loud communities that evangelists you know they're creating so much content across so many different social spaces to do that in web 2 in particularly on mobile you know you're probably spending millions of dollars just to get to that

level of uh I guess Network effects that are being created and so we started to really understand that at that time fundal tokens and their token although value was you know almost meaningless at that time it created that sense of ownership uh and I think we talk a lot about you know value and ownership in web free what we probably don't Focus too much on is that the value of owning something it isn't just the monetary value but it's that emotional attachment that it creates between as the developer and the player and what we saw is that these parts of the game that were being given to the community the community really felt like okay I'm not only a player but I'm part

of this I'm helping support the team the developers and we're building it together we're one ecosystem we're one Community it's not Developers and players or Community it's it's it's it's one entity almost and that I think is something that we fell in love with we some of us in the team started to participate in those games we're part of those communities really early on uh and that I think set Us online into really delving into how both onchain economy so fundal and non-fund tokens Can really start to bootstrap tokens and find ver first super fans and then of course there a superior business model and I

think we can probably dive deeper into that but first and foremost it was tackling and disrupting UA you know how do you find those first true super fans that you build alongside absolutely and yeah definitely want to dig into sort of the business model unlocks as well but um for those listing would also love if you can give us like a snapshot overview of like some of the metrics that come out of the ecosystem so far right so you've been running a few of these campaigns but like even before you were turning on any sort of like you know prospective incentives or whatever um I think a lot of the organic installs and feedbacks and feedback that we were seeing was really really impressive so we'd love if you could give an overview of that yeah so we we've been building Fame born for what two plus years now and

we've always focused on the best product will create the largest Network effects allow us to then grow the largest ecosystem and so the first time we ever put faor open into an open Beta was last year in August and we didn't know what to expect because prior to that it was only closed to hold a play test maybe a few hundred people to low few thousand at most and so we opened it up we didn't have too much marketing apart from what we were sharing on our own channels there's no pida there's no you know K's or anything like that it was put the game out see what happens since it's the first open test and within the first 24 hours we had 50,000

players uh our service crashed because we weren't expecting that in the first day we had over 5,000 days of playtime in two weeks uh eventually we peaked at just under 880,000 players and since then we've had a couple of more open Play tests the last one 150,000 players staggeringly over 100,000 days of playtime in 2 weeks which I still ask data guys to triple and quadruple check because it doesn't seem real each player spending at least three hours a day and this is without incentives for the whole two weeks I think that's what's unique about fabor is that there's a short time window where you play and in that live

event that time limited event you're competing for rewards and that's your incentive outside of that you're playing for fun uh and that is really I think encapsulating the the broader reach but also how foodborn is perceived in the market that yes there a really cool incentive uh that will allow us to create Superior Network effects but equally those players are are there coming before and sticking around after because the game is is truly fun and something that they enjoy absolutely no super super cool to hear and uh excited to see excited to see what comes in the in the next few um tests they getting opened up um I'm

curious as well than what you think uh is different about you know leveraging all of your sort of like traditional gaming experience and how you guys have approached it like what do you feel is unique about your sort of culture and approach to community building that and like um obviously product we've touched on is something that clearly holds a lot of aure and as exciting people but um I think you guys have been running a really tight sort of like incentive campaign as well and how you guys have been approaching that so we'd love to to hear from you on that front yeah so I I think Community Building again is you know really important but how you build communities is I I'd say more important and we've seen and we've been able to obviously observe from the sidelines how communities were being built and adopted

uh over last cycle uh and primarily was driven entirely by you know financial gain and incentives and I think that's one level that you can control and one level that you have in your Arsenal but it also means that a line share of those in your community are completely transactional and that's fine but if you're no longer able to serve that motivation I you do XYZ and you get xll back then that players motivation is not no longer being served they're going to leave to another community that can uh and so we obviously wanted to try and attract certainly early on while we're

still building fabor and the game wasn't live wanted to ensure that those players that were there or those users that were there were only interested in the vision the team what we were building the promise of fa were born and obviously the game itself and so for the first I'd say 18 months there's no no no information I'd say even now we're still quite tight lipped for the time being on you know what the web free elements of faor are although we're starting to uh unveil a little a little more we we've always been very focused on first and foremost the product and our Discord had I think 15,000 players and we had

yet to even speak about an nft collection launching or a token and there was really no reason for you to be in our Discord unless you enjoyed what was there which was the game and what we were building and the vision of what we were trying to build and so that has given us great platform and base to uh really scale love all of that um yeah I'm also curious then as well like uh coming from web 2 like what are what are some of the sort of ux frictions that you guys have had to navigate already right because like I know um maybe some more of the sort of like onchain loops and whatever aren't fully online yet but obviously in terms of Dev buildout and stuff you guys are

navigating all those things at the moment would love any like yeah very sck standout things that uh that you guys have had to solve for yeah I I think the the biggest premise is you know just how much education is there and so irregardless of how frictionless you can make on boarding and I think Ronin do this really well and it's one of the reasons why we're building there the Ronin Waypoint you signing with a a social login and you're there but even from there a non- crypto native user there's so much to on board and so much information in front of you and so much data you know every wallet is almost like a spreadsh sheet uh and so irregardless of how you

remove a lot of a friction for you to get to that wallet or for you to display that information uh I I think it's going to still be an uphill battle and so a big part of how we think about ux is almost like an onion peeling away some of a complexity through gamification and so when you start fade Bor the first minute isn't logging into a wallet or it isn't exposing you to the web free rails you're learning about how to raid other players bases and then you start to learn more about how you can upgrade your hero and that's when you'll start to understand about some of your onchain economies some of those onchain

resources that you can start to maybe acquire and I think through layers of complexity you can overcome some of that ux or some of those ux challenges through gamification if it feels like you're you know you're actually studying and you're back at school then I I don't think uh you know any web two player or any web 2 user is going to to jump in on board or certainly not many of them and so we're really trying to gamify and use fav born as the I guess education layer um to try and on board players and like I say first and foremost that speaks to I guess going back to player motivations you that speaks to driving player

interaction uh with their player motivation and most web two players first and foremost don't want to come in and start thinking about crypto and that layer of web free what they want to think about is do I like this game and they'll make that decision in five minutes and so our first focus is ensuring that they do like what they're playing uh before exposing them to a deeper deeper meta layer of a web free layer yeah absolutely um I was also curious then we kind of touched on it earlier but want to go back to it then like in terms of the business model unlock that you guys see here right like in terms of uh Beyond you know solving the UA piece like uh yeah where where was the real

opportunity that you guys saw that sort of made you gravitate towards this yeah so I'd say there's probably three things right obviously the UA part which we touched on I believe the best studios are going to be able to create much larger Network effects and therefore or acquire players at a much lower cost than traditional web 2 there also going word of mouth is going to create a much larger effect as well or be a much larger component of a Studio's marketing mix and driving that word of mouth so that's one area the second is through different incentives models that I believe digital economies and onchain economies will allow us to create and this is a still an unexplored design

space but our belief is that these onchain economies will create stronger alignment between us as a studio and our players uh and I'll bucket players into you know various different segments from those that just want to compete from those that just want to be part of community but those that just want to speculate and those that actually just want to earn and so bucketing all those play together there'll be a much closer alignment and allows to create a much tighter alignment that will create in our opinion longer tale retention allow us to therefore create longer tail LTV and therefore just stack better unit economics it will be cheaper to acquire players they'll stick around longer and

we believe they'll spend more because there's much more alignment and incentives to do so and then third and finally I think the big part is actually just growing The Tam of mobile gaming and so 2009 Mobile gaming was I I think 250 million players players or or gaming as a whole sorry was 250 million players now it's over 3 billion and a large part of that is because of mobile and I always have to look close to home which is my own mom you know 15 years ago we'd never call this 60-year-old woman a gamer but now still daily she will tell me about what level she is on on Candy Crush she still spends more time playing mobile games than I do she spends a lot

more on IAP than I do and so we'd classify that I know King will classify her as a as a gamer uh and so I really believe those conventions and Norms of what we'd classify as a gamer are going to be broken down further uh we saw a sliver of that I believe with aene in the last cycle that there were individuals that were participating in the ecosystem playing transacting that would either that was their first gamified experience and they'd never done it before and so I truly believe that web free is also going to on board hundreds of millions of more players and Emerging Markets are going to be a big driver of

that and that I think again is a huge unlock for any game Studio absolutely so you haven't quite got your uh your mother playing uh Fable born yet is she working out to that she tried she tried and actually on tutorial she like this is too difficult so I think for her she's she's happy with swiping left and right and tapping but uh yeah hopefully we'll on board her at some point oh very good um yeah I wanted to move to to ask a bit about then like how you view sort of liveops then in this new Arena of doing things on chain like um you know I feel like in many ways it makes it harder to do right you're like restricted in in in some ways and

obviously things can have uh big implications and so curious about um yeah how you're confronting that and and how you're carrying historical learnings into navigating that yeah I'd say liveops is almost you know your your cheat card into creating sustainable web free economies so if I rewind a bit game economies are you know always digital economies that's how we see it whether it's web2 or web free that doesn't change what does change is how you maybe need to manage those digital economies obviously with with an open economy things certainly change why we see liveops as you know like I say an integral part of how we will

scale fa bone but also scale the the power ecosystem is liveops in its nature is time limited and so it's built within an integral part of your core Loop of your meta game but you have levers to be able to inflate the economy and then shut it down uh and drain it back out and importantly the teams that do that the best and have those Fe feedback loops and have data on both sides of the types of players participating and then what those players are doing with any assets introduced into the economy those are the ones that in my opinion are going to win and big win big uh and the beauty I think of fable born is we've

already been testing that out and players might not know that but like I said those two we open beaters there's a very small window and time limited events where you can earn or have a potential to earn various different rewards and then that time limited event is turned off and you're playing favor Bor whether it's a campaign it's a PVP but there's no onchain rewards that Loop in itself is like I say allowing us to bring in players create a very clear incentive decide how much we want to inflate the economy and what we want to inflate it with do we want to inflate with our token and nft other onchain

resources even event we can also decide and restrict what types of players come in is it an open event do you have to have a a specific hero leveled up to a specific uh player level own a specific item etc etc so there's so many levels we can control to decide what types of players then enter uh and then what the winning conditions are and so we've now decided okay the reward is going to be let's say our power token who is this power token going to go to uh and so we can decide the criteria of what players need to achieve to be able to do that and then after we shut down that time limited event

there's no more Supply so we know this is the amount of power in favorable now that's circulating are our sinks now draining that out and if they aren't we understand why we can battle test them and improve it for the next live event and if they are if they do we can start to see well what are players using this power token for are they holding are they accumulating are they selling straight away what types of players are accumulating and then what do they spend on what items are triggering more conversions more transactions and so every single event we're just getting smarter and we're getting more and more insights into different types of players and what their actions are uh and like I

say that's possible because liveops is almost a Sandbox we have faor a core game The Meta game the progression layer and then we introduce these time limited events that again still a big part of favor born but have time limited offers time limited rewards uh and importantly it gives us the levers to be able to control like I say the inflationary um pressure on that economy and our ability to drain it out and I'd say that's the biggest lesson we learned from just observing 2021 and 2022 is there some games like AI as well you know that scaled but it was uncontrollable inflation pressure there's no way to turn it

off and so it's just unfortunately a route essentially all the way down once new players started to slow down and new installs started to slow down and liveops like I say give us that control and that ability to be able to manage that and curate that economy much better makes a lot of sense I'm curious what are some of the like kind of um sort of fail safe backup levers that you guys would employ then like um let's say for whatever reason one of the maybe some of the data had been gone slightly Ary and slightly muddled and like um yeah you accidentally sort of triggered too much inflation over X period like what are some of the things you guys uh regard as like sort of the the back stop to that

as well well I think there'll be a a lot of different components and syncs that we can introduce right and so the ability is to say we know Piers is you know he's a tank hero like he's been playing tank Heroes and Ming tank heroes in Fable born for the last 3 weeks and so we realize that actually he's got way too much power than he should have received for whatever reason and so now we're going to give you uh a special offer that says you can get this new tank hero with all his upgraded all his upgraded equipment his armor for this much power and that is exclusive just for this bucket of players that includes you

uh and so we have those levers and I guess that in our Arsenal to be able to in front of you understand what is peer's really interested in what would he like to purchase what has he purchased before and then try and put that again in front of you and let's say outside of time limited offers or hyper personalized offers like that there's also things that we can do within fa Fable born itself so uh a part of what we'll be including is how Power Within hero progression can be used not only on the hero itself uh and what that does to the stats of a hero but how you can also hyper personalize that hero with different equipment and Equipment slots so we can in increase or decrease you

know the cost of these things we can introduce more supply of different nfts if we want to drive a price down or increase a price and and not release any more nfts of this particular let's say Shield outside of a game as well we're going to and we've been working on uh daily quests that are intertwined with fa born so for example achieve five freest star raids in PvP uh achieve uh a 10-minute survival time in Siege survival so objectives that are really driven by engaging in the game uh but allow you to potentially earn rewards but also some of those tasks will require you to to buy and optin so you you'll have a free list of

objectives and then a VIP list I guess of objectives that provide Superior rewards but also require you to to spend and unlock that tier uh of objectives so there's a lot of different levers that will'll have and importantly like I say live Ops gives you time uh and I think that unfortunately the the teams that built and scaled games in in 21 and two they didn't have too much time to be able to react uh to what was going on around them I think one of the big challenges as well uh that's obviously unique to crypto to onchain economies is just like um exogenous demand drivers right like if everyone starts bidding or dumping or

whatever like people that aren't even necessarily playing the game but obviously um appreciate and and admire what you're doing and want to like yeah get behind it like um how do you think about coping with that as well like not only what that can do in terms of potentially adverse stuff adverse effects on what you're trying to achieve with the live ups but also making it attractive right from people that maybe just you know are here to you know own the asset they're like okay this looks like most promising mobile products out there like want to get behind this like um so that sort of double-edge blade of like yeah how do you on the one side manage that exogenous demand and on the other actually entice it right because you also generally speaking want this thing to go up yeah yeah I I think with

what limit break you know they they did an incredible job of releasing uh the new standard um and app tokens I I think is a really interesting new standard and they released a cookbook of so many different ways that you can Implement app tokens uh and create almost different types of asset classes within the game and so you'll have your primary token power that potentially as an asset class you want to like you say incentivize and and allow different types players or users of your ecosystem those that are highly engaged or those that maybe have a lot of dollars and want to be more passive but potentially

ride the upside uh and then you have on a More grandular Level the ability to really start to create a more of a defined framework so it could be this resource that's an onchain asset like gold or or gold resource that you can only use to upgrade your hero you can Define parameters of this will always be the ceiling so the floor price of this asset will always be you know $50 uh and um or Max would always be $50 and it can be lower than that and that allows you like I say to create an environment where players that are deeply engaged they they're not they're not facing let's say an axi Infinity issue

where you're having to drop $2,000 just to start playing the game uh but equally there's a an asset class that allows you as a different type of user to ride the upside or speculate on the upside so I we're already looking into it and I I think most Web Two or web fre games that will scale economies will have different types of asset classes uh and like I say props to the Limit Break team and and releasing app tokens as a a new standard to to help Usher that in yeah absolutely very excited to see how people uh yeah leverage all of that tooling and and see what's unlocked in the coming months um I wanted to talk a little bit about um

yeah like your your plan for 2025 like what does the the journey ahead look like um you know maybe we could touch a little bit on uh you know relatively recently announcing the whole sort of ronin allegiance The Path towards that um what people can expect in the next you know three six months and um yeah would love to hear of uh some of the magic that you're cooking up longer term as well yeah so first and foremost is always is obviously launching category winner that is favor that's always been our first play if we look back the the biggest winners uh and the biggest infra uh and ecosystem winners have on boarded the masses first and foremost by best-in-class product and content play

so epic games with Unreal Engine you know was fortnite and Gears of War prior to that halflife and steam was uh or valve it was halflife before steam uh and even Sky Mavis you know web free uh it was x infinity really creating web free gaming and now Ronin have done a great job in creating this ecosystem and this infr playay that's provided a lot more defensibility for the Ron token itself and so how we look at our infro and ecosystem play is ushering in and onboarding uh millions of players through content and first and foremost it will be favor born is one that we've worked on for some time and looking

forward to everyone being able to play that persistently this year uh I know there's a lot of disgruntled community members when we have to take the service offline and so bringing that live and allowing them to play is is really exciting for us and from there it won't stop and so first party games is like I say a big part of our Focus over the next few months but we building we've been building a a lot of tooling around not only how we scale games but a lot of what we touched about how we identify different types of players how we run liveops how we grow and scale digital economies that tooling is something that we've been using and have been building to be able to scale

organically favorable one to date and looking forward to obviously being able to scale further uh what we want to be able to do is show and leverage that tooling uh and and really decentralize that so third party games can come and build on our ecosystem with our tooling our expertise the INF that we've built to be able to scale favor born uh and the goal is really to start looking at Ronin as our first stop obviously they go permissionless next year I think Ronin are known as probably the best gaming chain players and and tens of thousands of players always talking about roning they have hundreds of

thousands or not millions of uh daily active users across for different types of games but there'll also be changing of how how they start to operate and and support different types of games and so there's an opportunity uh in in my eyes that V best games on Ronin will attract a lot of eyeballs uh both from a capital perspective but also in terms of projects that are wanting to replicate and that's where we want to Leverage The the power EOS system first to scale fa born and then to help and act as a growth layer for new game teams and then beyond games uh later on probably in the the latter half of this year allowing

them to come in and build and scale on Ronin as well so starts with fabor and uh uh like I say allows us to really use that as a springboard to support other game teams and other projects building on Ronin from then on super exciting yeah I'm very curious to see how that manifests and what the uh you know first Chosen Few are to to to come and partake um and then as it relates to like the Fable born uh like Brader roll out more specifically like what what can people expect in terms of timeline to to some some more of that coming online yeah so next season we're going to be announcing fairly soon uh we've got a lot of excitement about what we've been

building uh we're also going to announce uh or have just announced our new nft collection uh we've taken a lot of inspiration from the sky MAV team and what made ax Infinity uh really special and then looked at how we can gamify that uh and really blend that in with what makes Fable born unique in itself and what attracts players to Fable born that asynchronous PVP core Loop of everyone is building and leveling up their Kingdom uh and then raiding other players for resources how we build that and create that gamified loop on an nft collection

layer is one that we're really excited about and we're going to be like I say we've just announced that and we'll be sharing a lot more about that in the coming days and and few weeks uh and then of course following that with season 4 and uh it's going to play a big part in season 4 as well so excited to just see how players in and outside of fav board the game uh interacting with this part of the ecosystem nice yeah very very excited for all of that um kind of wanted to head into a few sort of like closing questions here um I'm curious like what has stood out for you the most thus far like what have been some of the key learnings from the Fay into into crypto uh that perhaps you wish you'd known when when you started

out yeah this there's so many learnings boiling that down to probably one or two is realizing that you know you have different types of users and those users have very different motivations and so you're building almost different products so faor in itself is its own product the power EOS system in itself is its own product and then power as a token is its own product and I'd say when we first jumped into this space in 2020 and started to build within it you know we're quite naive that this is all intertwined and so we start with product

and everything else falls into place but actually there's very like I say different types of users that have very different motivations and just building fail born and thinking about fa born uh and building a great game is that going to serve the player that is speculating that maybe wants to jump in and drop a $100,000 on nfts and then look at how they can passively ride the success of fa born and the power ecosystem that wasn't something we were thinking about four years ago uh we were very much just thinking about building a great game and so uh that's probably the the biggest lesson for us is understanding that

there's multiple different types of user personas and uh the products that we're building although intertwined uh are their own products entirely very interesting yeah seems uh seems like always the challenge to juggle all these things simultaneously but uh yeah excited for the way you guys are approaching it and um yeah looking forward to looking forward to seeing how things evolve this year um I wanted to ask as well what would you regard as the most impactful digital experience you've ever had yeah this is um again hard to boil it down to one so I'll quickly bull it down to to maybe three but first is over a decade ago now K armi we were

prototyping a portable scanner to scan your Yu-Gi-Oh physical cards that you could then own and use in any of the Yu-Gi-Oh video games across then mobile PC and handheld thinking about it then you know that was probably our first foray into thinking uh and trying to execute uh and build out nfts as an ecosystem obviously back then we weren't aware of it unfortunately Konami didn't move forward with that but I remember playing and using that prototype and having my own deck as a physical collection and just also being a collector of the cards and being able to scan them and now use them across the entire Yu-Gi-Oh ecosystem and

the Yu-Gi-Oh slate of games that was transformational for me and um the second probably buying Bitcoin at 2K in 2017 uh and then fumbling generational wealth and selling it at 30k 3 years later had few Bitcoin um but in any case seeing that while riding what like a 15x over a few years was pretty transformational um and then probably earning you know a few thousand dollars from just walking and buying digital shoes in steppen uh again that really hit home on how you can create these new types of

gamified economies uh and seeing how Steen scaled and the types of users that were playing and the types of individuals that were talking about steppen and those Network effects that were created from providing this wealth wealth generation opportunity I'd say those three for different reasons you know it took a lot of lessons from interesting yeah 15x over three years it's just your average morning in the trenches in the Salan but yeah um really cool as well on the on the Yu-Gi-Oh front that's interesting thing I never never come across that um but yeah all very cool um I'm curious as well your favorite video game ever favorite video game is Metal Gear Solid 2 uh and many will probably

say it's not the best metal gear I will die on that Lonely Hill and say it is um but I've just got some incredible memories from the way that I was anticipating uh actually getting it being able to play uh during the holidays spending countless late nights trying to defeat some of the bosses and kajima I think is a mastermind in storytelling so it was one of the first games that I really lost myself in and not just enjoyed but you know was fully immersed so yeah Metal Gear Solid too I love that interesting I haven't haven't ever heard anyone pick that I don't think um have you played many of the newer uh kodim

and stuff like death stranding there's some new on I played death stranding uh and maybe it's me you know my my type of game has changed but I'm time poor now I think everyone is time poor but when I play games I look at do I have 15 20 minutes free in can I jump in play a couple of rounds whatever it may be and jump back out and if it requires me to sit down for 2 hours something I could do 20 years ago no problem but now absolutely it's almost impossible I just can't get into because I will will start uh Elden ring was another one like I'd start a boss battle and I love that type of game but a boss battle would take me

100 100 tries in like four hours and I just can't do that and if you leave that game for five six seven weeks and come back you're you're back at starting point you know you're reing that game and the learning curve is is pretty um pretty crazy yeah I think that's one of the interesting broader Trends right is like uh how your average Gamer does have less and less time and like figuring out ways um the sort of player archetype that has less time but actually drives a lot of the spending games like figuring out ways to engage them and you know K to not just to the like casual 10 20 minutes but like uh you know people that want to spend eight hours a day in it as well all in the same like game figuring out how to juggle all of those things

and be be appealing across the spectrum is something that's quite exciting but uh yeah death stranding rightly uh you know ridiculed as a walking simulator big big time sync on that I'm excited I couldn't say it I couldn't say it but let's say I churned from it for sure yeah exactly I'm excited to see his new thing that he's doing with Microsoft called OD uh it's going to be some allog together new form of media let's see um it will be different whether it'll stick you know uh that's from maybe something to discuss but it will definitely be something that we've not seen before yeah looking forward to that and then yeah lastly wanted to ask what is the most impactful book you've ever read uh I'd say learned optimism and I think as a found as a CEO

and particularly in this space you know when every day you can be coming across obstacle as obstacle you have to be able to intrinsically really have a clear clear driver that's motivating you and whatever that is it's you know completely subjective but having those tools to be able to almost ruthlessly every single day come in with the same enthusiasm despite there's more chances of failure than success but still being almost delusional with that optimism that actually bet we will succeed and Mrs is why we succeed and like I say having that same enthusiasm and optimism every single day I remember reading that book

and it really resonated and this recommend it to everyone lots of really really great insights and uh for any founder or anyone that's you know maybe going through a difficult Journey trying to build something that hasn't been built before uh one that I recommend interesting not come across that before but sounds uh yeah very on brand as you say particularly for crypto the nayay has have been calling everyone delusional since $100 Bitcoin so there we go um cam it's been a pleasure having you on I'm very excited for everything you guys are doing um yeah still think what you guys are working on is one of if not the best mobile products out there so very excited to see what this year holds and uh yeah pleasure to be along for the journey and and learning

from you guys as you navigate this space and uh yeah um for everyone that's listening in like where's the best place for them to follow along with your stuff and keep tabs on the ecosystem yeah Twitter and Discord that's where we're you know I'm active fa team's active uh you'll find uh a lot of sneak peeks Alpha there first and so if F born power what we're building is something that you're interested in our Twitter or Discord perfect cam thank you so much been a pleasure hope to hope to have you on again soon likewise thanks for having me [Music]