If you would like to view the full recording of the live State of Decentraland Games Q2 call, you can find it over on our YouTube channel.
Participants:
- Miles Anthony – Decentral Games, Co-Founder & CEO
- Ryan De Taboada – Decentral Games, COO
- Kel Eleje – Messari, Research Analyst
- Alex Nardi – Messari, Research Analyst
Alex Nardi (01:09): Great, well everyone welcome to our Q2 2022 analyst call with Decentral Games. The Decentral Games founders and leaders of the team there at Decentral Games, we got Miles and Ryan. How are you guys doing Miles, Ryan?
Miles Anthony (01:31): Hey guys thanks for having us.
Ryan Tabaoda (01:33): Yeah thanks for having us here. Definitely doing well.
Alex Nardi (01:35): Glad to hear it. I’m Alex, Alex Nardi a researcher at Messari and
I have my co-host here.
Kel Eleje (01:45): Hi, I’m Kel. I’m also a researcher at Messari and happy to be here.
Alex Nardi (01:51): Yeah so it was a really exciting quarter for a lot of reasons good and bad for all of the crypto industry. But something that we’ve come to understand and expect and especially the two of you have been through a few bull and bear markets. So it’s great to have both of you here to talk the results which the report came out a couple days ago
if everybody hasn’t had a chance to take a look at it we’ll post the link and it’s free for everyone to view. I think we could just kick it off by talking through a few questions we had, we’re showing a few graphics that we had within the report. The first graphic that we…
Kel Eleje (03:00): Alex I think we might have lost you there, are you guys hearing him?
Miles Anthony (03:08): Yeah we might have lost Alex.
Kel Eleje (03:10): All right well we’ll let him sort that out. I’ll take it from here so
the first question, oh…
Alex Nardi (03:18): That was in the report was the Ice Poker Ecosystem and what I really like about this diagram is.
Ryan Tabaoda (03:28): Alex we cannot hear you, you’re breaking up, unfortunately.
Kel Eleje (03:37): Here let me shoot him a quick message real quick.
Ryan Tabaoda (03:40): Yeah no problem.
Kel Eleje (04:02): Well all right so I resent him the link so he should be coming back in
somewhat shortly. Okay well he also had the slides but I’m sure you guys know enough about the ecosystem to answer the questions without, without having the slides up. So
first question we really wanted to ask is there’s been a couple of different token syncs that you guys have implemented to try and address different sources of inflation throughout the protocol so between the Polygon node which you guys have to my understanding turned on a bit of the commission to use that to buy back and burn ICE tokens, between that the wearable activation fees and also using ICE for minting new wearables, which of those three do you guys feel has had the greatest impact so far or the greatest impact that you’ll see going forward?
Ryan Tabaoda (05:12): You wanna take that one, Miles?
Miles Anthony (05:13): Go ahead Ryan, yeah you can take it.
Ryan Tabaoda (05:15): Yeah so while one of these ecosystems is growing you have a lot of new dollars coming in via these mints and so unlike some other projects that have a breeding component say Axie [Infinity] is the prime example where if the burn and earn are out of whack there’s no mechanism to stop the increase in the supply of the NFTs and therefore the token. We actually stopped minting new wearables about three and a half
months ago and focused on once we had capped that emission of tokens how do we bring up both the spending within the ecosystem of ICE and then external components like
advertising deals with partners like Mastercard and Tyson Foods. Switching a lot of the components like secondary sales and activation fees to burn ICE and as you mentioned the Polygon nodes. So I think that actually the largest thing that’s helped us get back into balance has been just having that lever that we could stop minting new items whereas a lot of other protocols just see that continue to inflate and then routing token sources towards, routing revenue sources towards buying and burning ICE. Out of those, advertising has been the largest.
Kel Eleje (06:44): How do you see that progressing because right now you mentioned advertising being the largest. Which honestly, that’s surprising to me in a good way because I feel like the ecosystem of players has only scratched the surface of its potential. So do you see that being big for the protocol in general or how are you thinking about it?
Miles Anthony (07:10): Yeah definitely, so it’s been interesting to see the amount of appetite that, kind of, these large Web2 brands have for targeting Metaverse users. It’s actually something that we didn’t really anticipate being so large quite yet just given the fact that we’re around 6,000 daily active players currently but yeah with the likes of Mastercard and Tyson Foods and several other partners going to be announced soon. They do have this appetite to target the Metaverse user base and given the fact we’re 60% of Decentraland traffic which is the most populated metaverse currently, you know we’re the perfect partner for them to partner with to target these users. So yeah it’s been great to see I think it’ll continue to grow as we scale our user base, absolutely, but really you know all these kind of token burn mechanisms that we’ve implemented over the last quarter you know throughout Q2 essentially are mainly just to, kind of, hold us over and as Ryan said in the meantime stopping minting new wearables, so our supply of NFTs remains constant so that we can really, kind of, roll out these three main initiatives, to establish a much more sustainable ecosystem for Ice Poker. The three of them being, obviously we’ll probably get into each one in more detail on this call, but they’re Ice Poker Flex which is our mobile products, kind of more accessible gameplay you know both from desktop and mobile. Ice Poker SNG which is tournament mode so people actually having to burn ICE to participate in these tournaments so it’s gonna be a net deflationary game mode and then finally Delegation v2 which is essentially moving us from like a play-to-earn (P2E) or play and earn to like a play-to-own (P2O) essentially. Yeah we can definitely dive into more detail on each one of these points but I would say, my point is like all of the token burns that we’ve implemented over Q2 are mainly just to put us in a position so we can deliver on these three items which we think will basically be able to organically drive token burning so then at that point once we reach maturity with these three initiatives going live over the next quarter you know in Q3, we’ll be in a position where we don’t need to allocate all of our protocol revenue, Matic rewards, advertising revenue et cetera to buying and burning ICE. So yeah those mechanisms are kind of strictly you know meant to be temporary as we can establish these kind of more organic and community-led initiatives that burn the tokens without our intervention.
Kel Eleje (09:55): Yeah that’s really interesting because you know, like you said, advertising has been somewhat large. It has a lot of potential to grow and the revenue that you’re getting from it has potential to go to other uses as you introduce, like the next topic we were going to get into is actually going to be the SNG tournament so we can talk about that in a second, but you know it strengthens the case for actual revenue being able to come back to the protocol or the protocol treasury or however you design it. It doesn’t really matter, it’s just that potential actually stands out in an ecosystem where not a lot of games, not a lot of these metaverse protocols really have any even lightly tangible route to getting to that point. But yeah sounds like Ryan you’re about to chime in.
Ryan Tabaoda (10:55): Yeah, I was going to say regarding the delegation v2 piece, that a big problem that a lot of games have, a lot of gaming systems have and that we’ve been working to address as well, is just that if you’re a delegated player or a scholar, you’re playing with an item that someone else owns. We’re then talking about how do we get people who are earning tokens within the ecosystem to spend those tokens on vertical progression on things that make the game more fun. If they don’t have an item or anything else to spend on by definition they’re literally going to only be able to sell the token that they’re that they’re currently earning, so having cheaper entry points like these SNG wearables that we’re talking about that will be literally close to 100 times cheaper than the ones that we have that are all access for the metaverse and then things like emote accessories within the game things that don’t emit tokens but just something they can spend on are going to be really important. It’s really the only way you can get the two things into balance sustainably long term is to have a higher percentage of owners and ensuring that everyone in the ecosystem is able to spend the tokens they’re earning and progress towards ownership.
Alex Nardi (12:17): Yeah, sorry for the technical difficulties but with the whole play-to-own (P2O) philosophy that you guys are trying to push and we’re jumping around a little bit now but since it came up what has been the feedback you’ve received from founders, from play- to-earn (P2E) gamers or for a lack of a better word play to earn gamers and the
community, your community and other communities has there been a lot of uptake or push back, you tell me?
Ryan Tabaoda (12:55): Do you want to take that one Miles?
Miles Anthony (12:56): Yeah sure, so yeah initially a lot of folks in the community were a bit concerned with its impact or potential impact it would have on our daily active users but after many discussions, I think we probably discussed it on three or four of our roundtables which we host every three weeks or so on Twitter Spaces. It’s gotten to a point where I think our community is mostly aligned with the philosophy of play-to-own (P2O) it’s just like going along with the logic of the fact that you know if you don’t own any assets and you’re earning this token it is meant for upgrading those assets, then you don’t really have that much utility other than to just dump it on the on a DEX. So I think yeah that’s kind of the main philosophy behind this kind of this movement from play-to-earn (P2E) to play-to-own (P2O) and yeah I think we’ve seen a few other blockchain games explore this model and I think it will become a lot more popular you know as people explore new narratives within the blockchain gaming space. I think DG (Decentral Games) is in a really lucrative position just given the fact that we did have this native delegation system, a dashboard where you can manage all your NFTs that you own in our ecosystem and rent them out to players. We’re in a very lucrative position to be able to roll out this update to this play-to-earn (P2E) to play-to-own (P2O) structure. So looking forward to getting this live within the next one to two months and it’s going to be really important too because kind of our big push after these three initiatives go live you know in Q3 is Q4 really focused on just onboarding. So user acquisition and retention. So as a result I think having like a very guided player journey from coming
on as like a free player, and by the way we’re going to be implementing like email login so can be someone that’s like has no experience with Web3 or blockchain gaming, come in you know create an account with their email, essentially create a wallet for them just like a Web2 game and then you know slowly be introduced to the benefits of custody and NFT ownership with educational content. So I think that approach really coincides well with a play-to-own (P2O) model as they’re kind of learning and earning and playing they earn kind of the ownership of an asset and then they’re able to earn tokens where they have actual utility for those tokens. So yeah I think you know we’re definitely making some solid progress and hope to be one of the first games to actually go live with the model like this and hopefully inspire others to do so too.
Alex Nardi (15:50): Yeah yeah that’s really interesting, start with the NFT, earn the NFT first before the tokens or really you know gain a piece of ownership before you have to decide whether or not to start, you know, selling these more liquid fungible assets.
Ryan Tabaoda (16:12): Alex, is it possible to present a single slide? Right now folks are just seeing the whole deck.
Alex Nardi (16:20): I’m no longer presenting so Dougie, let’s see Doug can,
Kel Eleje (16:45): Doug were you able to, I think he’s working on it.
Alex Nardi (16:52): So we did kind of hop around so if we go back to the the Sit & Go topic that’s coming out in the next couple weeks right guys so what do you guys want to tell
the audience about Sit & Go, what are you guys most excited about? What is, what are the token dynamics at play?
Miles Anthony (17:18): Yeah definitely, yeah Ryan you want to take this one.
Ryan Tabaoda (17:23): Yeah sure and Dougie if you could pull up the Sit & Go related slides. Essentially like as background when you’re playing ICE poker in the metaverse in what we’re calling challenge mode we have to ensure that you’re playing for a given amount of time because we can’t have people just come in play one hand and end up in the 50th
percentile of earnings because you earn based on how well you did that day but we also need to guarantee that you’ve played roughly 50 plus hands, on average it’s about 70 hands, maybe about an hour and a half at the table people are playing on average. As a result the gameplay is a little tighter than it would be for normal poker and there’s some incentive to chase certain types of hands. So we’ve received the feedback that in order to have a poker game that’s play-and-own (P2O) where people are earning via this challenge mode we have sacrificed something around the core poker gameplay with Sit & Go’s you’re competing with escalating blinds against five other people at the table and so you’re coming in playing for about 45 minutes to an hour in order to earn badges and these badges can be redeemed for things like wearables, emotes, and ICE tokens with different expected values. Where with this mechanism we’re encouraging people to own there’s as well so you spend ICE, burn ICE to shine your wearables we’re calling them shines and those shines are entries to these tournaments which can be played both in the metaverse in Dencentraland but also on our progressive web app (PWA) if you like a website you can also have it on your app home screen on your phone on iOS or the other one.
Alex Nardi (19:32): Android.
Ryan Tabaoda (19:33): Android, yeah, I’m an iOS user as you can probably tell, but in any case we think the game is going to be a lot more fun even in this bear market the ICE wearables trade for about $800 a piece right now so the floors actually held up quite well as we approach about 13,000 ETH in sales there. That’s still a really high barrier to entry to welcome someone in, and the way that we are intending to and trying to incentivize them to come in so if your option is spend $800 on this wearable or enter as a delegated player for a lot of people that access point is just too high. SNG wearables are closer to $12 at the moment because they’re a thousand ICE and ICE is 1.2 cents. So $12 versus $800 is just a dramatic reduction in that barrier and then we want to have ways for people to earn those via free play as well as Miles was discussing and then you might progress towards having an
all-access wearable that emits ICE after playing SNGs for a long period of time. So this is one of many paths that we have in store to onboard people to sort of full ownership but we very much view owning one of these SNG wearables as owning an item as being an NFT owner and we’ll be trying to grow that community as well, so hopefully that answers the question but think of it as a new game mode, a new platform and a new path to ownership.
Alex Nardi (21:06): It does sound great. It sounds like giving the players different options,
you know, directing them to what they want to do and what kind of poker they want to play is always a great option. Doug if you move on to the next screen, we’ll just talk about this which is obviously one of, all of the different token syncs we’ve been talking about. They’ve all been to address this issue that that’s presented and you know token inflation is not new to the ecosystem but it is definitely an issue for a lot of different games and we talked about delegation v2 already but how exactly, how impactful do you think delegation v2 too for example you guys had said that in a different call I believe, that it’s expected to entirely address, turn the token entirely net deflationary and that sounds incredible and that’s the type of thing that we should be chasing you know especially in play-to-earn (P2E) games play-to-own (P2O) games as well. So have you guys, is that based off of some sort of projection, forecast or how exactly does that come in?
Ryan Tabaoda (22:34): Yeah so taking that one, the inflation of the token is really a function of how much is being earned and how much is being burned, so in the past you can see from October to February even as daily active users were increasing exponentially the supply of the ICE token was decreasing so it’s really not a function of the number of players necessarily, it’s a function of the burn and earn that you have at that many players. If that makes sense. So at that point from October through say February roughly you see there we were burning more ICE than was being emitted in spite of DAU’s growing. Now since then we’ve paused mints and we’ve incentivized stacking of wearables which have decreased the emission rate and improved the burn to earn but it’s still below 1:1 so still everyday more tokens are being emitted then are being burned so we’ve just seen the slow climb in the rate there. So that’s definitely the case but in projecting it out we do think that delegation v2 will have an immediate impact, will highly incentivize delegated players to burn ICE, sorry to spend ICE that they’ve earned on their first wearable, whether it’s an SNG wearable or an all-access wearable and the modelling on that is just based on the majority of ICE being burnt being earned by these delegated players and then all of that being sold because they don’t have a way to spend it so we’ve modelled out some numbers around what we expect to be sold, what we expect to be spent and we do think it will make the difference and balance things out but between delegation v2 and these SNGs which will be deflationary as well, we’ll have to see exactly what the impact is but have designed those variables to reach that sort of 1:! and then the DAO will be able to vote on those things as well. So at this point it is just a forecast and we can never promise exactly what the behaviour will be but that’s what we’re targeting.
Alex Nardi (24:56): That’s great if we move onto the next slide, Kel why don’t you take this one question 5.
Kel Eleje (25:02): Yeah so you know as the slide shows we see that 26% of the wallets earning ICE in Q2 actually rented out their wearables. So do you think that’s a good balance, bad balance, how do you think it affects the overall economy and how do you think the different things we’ve been talking about factor into this and change it one way or the other?
Ryan Tabaoda (25:36): Sorry I’m trying to understand this chart, Miles do you get it?
Miles Anthony (25:40): Yes I’m trying to understand it too, so 26% of the wallets earning ICE were owners that rented out their wearables. I think it should be much higher actually.
Alex Nardi (24:56): Okay yeah so it basically shows, we took the number of unique wallets per day earning ICE and then broke it into the proportion that is earning ICE through playing the game and then the percent that has delegated wearables and so that came out to 26%.
Ryan Tabaoda (26:25): Got it so basically, I feel like this might not be, this is definitely not a way we’ve ever thought about the data just because you’re comparing like, 6,000 daily active users (DAUs) of the game some of them are NFT owners and some aren’t and then there’s like 4,000 wearable holders some of those are players, some of those are delegating the wearables, so this is kind of conflating like owners of wearables owning either by. So this stat that you have here is owners earning by any mechanism divided by total wallets earning.
Alex Nardi (27:20): So I see what you’re saying because not all, because it’s only 4,000 wearables and it’s going to be a small percentage right?
Ryan Tabaoda (27:29): 15,000 wearables, 4,000 owners and so yes 80% of them are one to four wearables. We think that’s a great distribution. We really think it’s important that we don’t have these mega guilds who own a huge amount of supply. You know 15,000 wearables and 4,000 owners is about four a piece and that’s a mean so it’s shifted towards the piece but it feels like it should be a bit higher if all those 4,000 are earning divided by like maybe 8,000 or 9,000 in the ecosystem total but rather than, discuss like the exact percentage. I think the point stands that what we’re trying to optimise for is that we want the people playing the game. It’s like if there’s 6,000 daily active users (DAUs) what percent of them own the wearable that they’re playing with. That’s a metric that we’re definitely trying to increase and we think it’s too low right now. So getting to the point that the crux of what this slide is saying, agree with the notion like we should be trying to raise the percentage of people who are earning ICE that have a wearable to spend that ICE on or an avenue for them to spend the ICE on. We want to continue to increase the NFT ownership percentage among players for sure.
Alex Nardi (28:54): Got it yeah that makes sense now. Doug if we move on to the next slide.
So this was actually a really interesting chart that I found interesting that average ICE
earned per daily active user was rising while the hands per daily active user was falling and it sounds like a great option for players right it sounds like they’re making more ICE per hand and i’m just curious like what is driving this dynamic.
Ryan Tabaoda (29:33): Yeah so the two variables driving this are that we have reduced the length of the challenges so by design we’ve made it so that you can complete the challenges
playing fewer hands, just because if it’s February and you’re earning $20 a day playing for
two hours and now you’re earning $6/$7 dollars a day. We thought that it was reasonable to kind of reduce the time target. Which we can do by just saying you need to, this is a real governance proposal, you need to hit two of a kind five times instead of seven times you
need to get one full house instead of two stuff like that and then the ICE earned is a function of wearable stacking. So we had more daily active users back in February & March as we saw on the previous slide but we really heavily incentivized people stacking their
wearables so if you have 15,000 items you could have 15,000 players in theory max but on average we have people stacking now two plus wearables and because they’re stacking them as in playing with multiple. People are earning more ICE so the additional ICE is a
function of people wearing additional items into the game.
Alex Nardi (30:50): Got it. Yeah it sounds like it’s something that rewards people who are kind of doing what was supposed to happen, you know, stacking your wearables, upgrading your wearables, playing with your NFT and then really investing in them.
Ryan Tabaoda (31:08): Yeah absolutely, so by design.
Alex Nardi (31:10): Yeah, Doug let’s move on to the next line here. Kel you could take this one away.
Kel Eleje (31:21): Yeah so we we briefly talked about it in the beginning of the call but, you know, we’ve talked about the Sit & Go on one side of your sort of development roadmap in terms of onboarding players and then we have the ICE poker flex on another side so just curious to hear your thoughts here, so you know why this is an initiative in the first
place? What do you think it’ll do for the ecosystem, so on and so forth?
Miles Anthony (31:50): Yes I can take this one so ICE poker flex has been in development pretty much since the start of the year I would say, more heavily kind of leaned into it in Q2 and it was mainly just spawned out of the desire to scale outside of just Decentraland. You know Decentraland a great option for us for providing metaverse poker but we really wanted to target just anyone anywhere in the world and you know be accessible via smartphone just because a lot of folks in the world don’t have access to a desktop computer. So yeah that’s kind of like the main thinking around ICE poker flex as a platform and so the launch we have next week, which will feature ICE poker flex is actually going to be featuring ICE poker SNG on ICE poker flex. So it will be the Sit & Go flex, kind of like the two projects gonna merge into one launch. So we wanted to launch initially with SNGs on flex because it addresses kind of the main issue that we as well as other games right now are experiencing, which is emissions and so SNG’s by definition is deflationary just given the fact you have to, you know burn tokens to mint a wearable. You can use all existing wearables but then to add shine you have to constantly burn more ICE and so we do expect it to, you know, be highly deflationary just as its own kind of game mode immediately upon launch. So yeah that’s kind of why you know we went forward with this launch strategy and yeah really looking forward to seeing what the community thinks. We’ve had a lot of successful test sessions with our closed alpha group which is around 50 players from the community over the last like month or two and yeah open beta is launching within one to two weeks so looking forward to it.
Kel Eleje (33:57): Yeah so it seems like there’s definitely a focus on your guy’s end on really lowering barriers to entry for users. I feel like that’s been a common theme both here with delegation v2 with Sit & Go and all these different things so I think that’s definitely a good theme in general, you know the more people playing your game the more revenues you can generate and all that different stuff. And you’re lowering barriers to entry really in multiple ways both from like a user experience perspective and from a price perspective and I don’t think you really see both of those very often so I think that’s definitely really good.
Miles Anthony (34:44): Yep 100%, yeah.
Alex Nardi (34:49): Yeah so Doug if you scroll over to the next road map slide yep, and actually before we even go into this about the flex app, the web app, so that’s not an actual app right in the app store that’s directly through whatever browser. It’s a browser-based
app?
Miles Anthony (35:07): Yep so yeah it’ll be launched as a PWA so you can play it in any mobile browser. We wanted to do this to kind of circumvent any app store politics with regards to you know NFTs and crypto and you know allow anyone to just save it to their home screen like as an app regardless of what platform you know they’re using for their
mobile device so we thought that proof of concept with the PWA would be the best way to get it to market as soon as possible and then we do have plans to make a more native mobile app experience following the launch of the PWA.
Alex Nardi (35:44): Sounds great, maybe you could get it on the Solana phone first.
Miles Anthony (35:50): Yeah that’d be awesome.
Alex Nardi (35:55): So looking at this product roadmap, what else are you guys really excited for here there’s a lot on it obviously, the community’s probably really excited to see a lot of these things come into place but you know what’s next? I see that ICE poker, the player levelling system but you tell me, what is going to be really impactful?
Miles Anthony (35:50): Yeah so I mean for Q3 it’s pretty clear like what our focus is you know in those three kinds of pillars that we feel will really put us in a really solid position from the economics perspective, you know and prepare us for growth again. But yeah the thing that I’m you know most excited for I would say, I’m obviously excited for these these three initiatives I spoke with flex, SNG and delegation v2 and by the way delegation v2 we feel is going to have such a profound impact, that we’re on the ecosystem we’re calling it the ICE merge. So but yeah we you know obviously are very excited for those three things but in Q4 as you can see at the top of this page the main theme is onboarding upgrades and ecosystem growth and so we’ve as Ryan stated earlier on the call we stopped minting wearables, just because we wanted to focus on improving the economics in-game and ensuring that they’re more sustainable and so as a result we kind of had to sacrifice growth so that obviously wasn’t great in the short term but we do feel that by doing that we were able to make these modifications and optimizations to our in-game economy that will really prepare us for this next leg of growth, kind of starting in Q4 this year. So yeah really excited for that and it’s basically, it’s going to be entirely based around just building a free-to-play experience that’s easy to onboard, you don’t have to have crypto experience or wallet experience or private key management experience at all. Onboard like you know a simple fun game that’s similar to any Web2 game out there and then slowly kind of educate you know the user into the benefits of Web3 and I think this model I think will be the true unlock for the blockchain gaming space and I think there’s a few games that have been able to successfully do this on you know a decent scale, but none of them have been able to achieve the level of scale that we’ve seen in terms of like DAU on like a popular
mobile you know Web2 game. So yeah I think you know once we’re able to implement these upgrades in Q3 and improve onboarding a bit throughout Q4 I think we’ll be in a really good place to focus on the next massive leg of growth for DG.
Alex Nardi (38:39): That’s great and you know I can’t imagine a better game to really onboard you know so many users other than poker or something so widely distributed as poker, you know, Texas Hold’em for that matter. So yeah it’s really exciting.
Ryan Tabaoda (39:00): Yeah I appreciate it. I mean with the launch of the product we focused a lot on having this delegation experience on having a really fleshed out unity-based of the game development software in the Metaverse 3D experience and you know got that out in October had a lot of success based on it. Got to five you know figure DAUs but it wasn’t by itself the right path to get to millions of users, right, so it’s kind of funny a lot of games in the space are talking about how they have a mobile version but they want to build in the Metaverse over the next few years. We’re going the opposite direction of course building our own native experience within flex and then those people could then be onboarded into the metaverse, we kind of have to think about it like how can you remove as many of these points of friction as possible, it’s already really hard to onboard people into crypto games, like if I’m talking with my friends cousins parents it’s like, all right get Meta Mask it’s already kind of hard, you know set up Polygon, comes natively now. You’re gonna have to hop into Decentraland, don’t just onboard to our game, our ecosystem, which means coming into the Discord to find delegation or buying an NFT but onboard to Decentraland as well. So the step that we’re removing here, the two steps of course are accessibility, so now you don’t have to also onboard onto Decentraland and then I guess you could say price accessibility as well as you mentioned, but going further how do we onboard people onto the game and then onboard them into crypto because still in Q3 in order to participate you’re going to need to be crypto native or onboarded to crypto. So just going step by step, it’s a fun game, play the game, then onboard to crypto, play on mobile, then once you are invested in the ecosystem participating in the community on Discord, it’s much easier to sell to say, come to one of our events in Decentraland we have this DJ playing we have this artist’s work on display. Then once they come in they see the tables there perhaps they want to play in the Metaverse. So that path is a more natural one, more natural progression to ultimately this fully fledged 3D experience.
Alex Nardi (41:24): Yeah that does sound like it would just be a much easier way to onboard than all the steps you described before. Yeah and actually that brings me to another question, do you need a wallet to play on the web app or can you just cash out to a wallet?
Ryan Tabaoda (41:48): You need a wallet because you’ve got to have one to hold an NFT and in terms of like, cashing out. You have to have a wallet to have an account right across the Web3 space, at the moment, so right in order to be earning badges that are tied to something in order to have shine. But in Q4 if you think about this free-to-play experience then no, in order to to earn tokens yes you’ll need a wallet in order to play the game you will need a wallet next quarter.
Miles Anthony (42:19): Yeah but we’ve integrated a wallet provider that you know supports people onboarding just via email so creates the wallet for them as they sign up via email essentially.
Alex Nardi (42:31): Okay cool so for the people who really want the easy button you guys got that.
Miles Anthony (42:35): Yep exactly, exactly.
Kel Eleje (42:38): Just real quick follow-up question on that, how does it work in terms of so like let’s say I login with my email, can I still be rewarded tokens that like maybe I can figure out how to withdraw you know when I graduate into the intermediate level of crypto university if you will and I can actually handle my own wallet like how does that work?
Miles Anthony (43:06): Yeah exactly, like you’ll have you’ll have access to that signing messages and sending transactions from that wallet, so you could technically you know use it to swap, you can use it to, you know, upgrade wearables basically do whatever you want with the tokens that you’re earning in that wallet.
Kel Eleje (43:28): Okay.
Miles Anthony (43:06): Yeah and we’re gonna try to you know obviously for this player journey you know onboarding through email and kind of you know as like a someone that’s not really familiar with Web3 like we gonna really try to make it as easy as possible to like
learn you know the basics and and kind of realise the benefits you know of ownership.
Kel Eleje (43:55): Yeah that makes perfect sense. Sorry, go ahead Alex.
Alex Nardi (43:57): Did you guys mention which was the wallet provider, has that been announced yet or for the email one I haven’t heard of it before?
Miles Anthony (44:07): We’re gonna use Fortmatic for the email one and then we also have wallet connect support but that’s obviously if you have an existing wallet like on Metamask or
another wallet supported by wallet connect, but yeah the email one will be Fortmatic.
Alex Nardi (44:20): Got it cool. Kel I think we have one last question if you want to just take it away.
Kel Eleje (44:30): Yeah so looking forward and we’ve talked a lot about you know the developments that you guys have in mind for the next couple of quarters but on a more macro scale I guess as we look towards you know potentially another bull market, another bull market maybe in specific sub-markets or who knows how it’s gonna, no one knows the answer to those types of questions but as we look to your ecosystem we’ve talked a lot about different types of customer acquisition strategies such as lowering barriers to entry and onboarding mobile users are those really the two main ones that you guys have in mind or are there you know other strategies that you see being beneficial you know as another wave of crypto adoption comes in.
Ryan Tabaoda (45:28): Yeah I’ve taken that one. I’m sure all of us and the people listening people ask like what is the point of NFTs, why should I buy an NFT, what problem is it solving, they point to profile picture projects, which I actually think are valuable and provide a sense of community but people don’t see that as you know solving like a real world tech problem for example there are tons of areas where NFTs and blockchain are solving problems for businesses I won’t enumerate them now, but we really think the biggest unlock as a metaverse game development DAO is that gaming is going to onboard hundreds of millions of people onto crypto because the use case there is just so huge. That people care about the ownership of digital assets, carrying their identity around through things like ENS domains. Items that they can you know flex or use within a game and so yeah we think the big unlock is going to be that the games that allow you to actually own items within them are strictly better than the games that don’t allow for ownership, where when you buy something within the game a skin or a gun or something it’s immediately worth zero it has no resale value. It’ll be a reason for gamers to play one game over another and a reason for gamers who enjoy a game, you’ve got to have a fun game in the first place, to onboard to crypto as we were just describing because perhaps you’re playing and earning tokens in the background but until you actually get familiar with managing your wallet through Fortmatic, Wallet Connect, Metamask etc, you’re not able to let’s say level up, you need to actually have some familiarity to progress through the game. So of course that’s our perspective given that we build games. The gaming will be the major driver of crypto adoption over the next few years, Miles?
Miles Anthony (47:31): Yep, yeah.
Ryan Tabaoda (47:33): We’re on the same page as you would expect.
Ryan Tabaoda (47:36): Yeah, yeah I was on the same page and like just to kind of continue that note we have a very interesting approach to like some of the you know partnered rollouts over the next several months just because we have slightly different economics for some of these partnerships, where you know we can do like you know drops of wearables of SNG wearables to holders of a specific community and onboard them directly into our into our ecosystem and so like we do feel that partnering with these communities is just such a win-win, because you know they obviously have a bunch of of existing community members that are familiar with Web3 also and you know have a reach to those those folks and a comms channel to those folks and, as Ryan said, a highly utility based game ecosystem that is appealing to folks that have these communities that don’t have utility necessarily. So yeah we’re really looking forward to announcing some of these partnerships, getting some custom SNG wearables out in the hands of these communities to onboard them into ICE poker.
Alex Nardi (48:57): That sounds great and I’m looking forward to onboarding myself as well.
Miles Anthony (49:02): We should do a Messari SNG wearable, that would be great!
Kel Eleje (49:07): Oh that’d be huge!
Miles Anthony (49:09): Yeah, yeah!
Ryan Tabaoda (49:10): Do you guys have a mascot or it could be like a hat or a shirt that says Messari on.
Alex Nardi (49:15): We’ll have to think about that one I think our social media head maybe…
Ryan Tabaoda (49:21): Maybe it should be Ryan’s (Selkis) head like on his Twitter profile like with the South Park
Alex Nardi (49:28): Yeah.
Kel Eleje (49:29): Yeah, yeah!
Alex Nardi (49:42): Yeah he is our mascot actually honestly, so he’s a spokesperson for sure.
Ryan Tabaoda (49:49): Oh I know what you mean now, the South Park style head.
Miles Anthony (49:50): Yeah, yeah.
Alex Nardi (49:51): That sounds great.
Miles Anthony (49:52): Yeah he still has it as his profile pic, yeah.
Alex Nardi (49:55): I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon, well thank you guys for jumping in with us and talking about Q2. A lot of exciting things planned ahead for Q3 where should people, come to find more information about Decentral Games and what’s new.
Miles Anthony (50:16): I would say you know we’re pretty active on Twitter, in our Discord and our newsletter. Every Sunday we put out a development update just kind of detailing all the different things that our team has worked on that week, so yep every Sunday, you can find it, you can sign up on our website so yeah.
Alex Nardi (50:36): Yeah that’s something that is really impressive actually is the amount of transparency and communication with your community you know between the roundtable calls and the newsletter every week, that’s that’s something that we hope to see more of from other DAOs and game gaming DAOs as well.
Ryan Tabaoda (51:00): Thank you.
Miles Anthony (51:01): Thanks.
Alex Nardi (51:02): Alright guys well until next time.
Miles Anthony (51:04): Thanks for having us guys!
Ryan Tabaoda (51:05): Take care.
Kel Eleje (51:06): Yeah yeah, thanks guys.
Alex Nardi (51:08): And I’ll just one last thing, Messari Mainnet will be coming up at the end of September and we have actually a $300 discount that will be posted in the chat if anybody is interested to go check that out. Thanks everyone.
