24 – The Next Generation of Gaming – Play To Earn | NFT Deepdive 2/3

Tracey: [00:00:20] Welcome to the crypto curious podcast designed to help you navigate the dynamic world of cryptocurrency. This podcast is here for anyone who is interested in crypto at all. Maybe you've already your toe in the water, or maybe you don't know anything about it, and this is the very beginning. Crypto curious is a place to get started as we cover off all the basics that you need to know. And this week, we want to reward our loyal listeners with some crypto on the bamboo app. But to hear about it, we're being a bit sneaky. You're going to have to stay with us until the very end of this episode and then we'll tell you about it. But for the new listeners, we recommend heading back to the earlier episodes to get your footing. However, if you think you're ready to dive headfirst in, then let's do it today. It's just Craig and I, and we are heading back to episode two of our NFT series. We're going to go deep today on gaming NFTs Craig. So what do we mean by NFT gaming? 

Craig: [00:01:16] Well, this one's a cracker, but I guess, before we kick off, there's a lot of terminology that's probably useful to know. So before we dive in, if you're new to NFTs, check out episode seven. No fungible idea where we go through some of the basics of Web three, the metaverse and digital ownership. If you're familiar with these terms, and let's crack on. So NFT gaming has really revolutionised industry like art, which was last week's series episode series music, which we're doing next, and gaming, which we're talking about today. So with gaming, it's received a lot of attention recently because of playdough own games. Now there's games now which have their own native token, and you can actually play and earn real money. Not a bad way to make money Trace. 

Tracey: [00:02:05] Yeah, playing games. That sounds good. Yeah, but I think before we do dive right into gaming, let's have a little look again at the NFT industry as a whole and just the sheer volume that it represents because it might seem easy to poke fun at people who are paying thousands, sometimes millions of dollars for these digital images of pixelated monkeys eating their toasted sandwiches that can be, you know, easily reproduced online. And, you know, a lot of people saying that there's no real usability here. These are just collectables that are, you know, highly desirable. But as a result of these, NFTs have really risen in popularity. If we look back to 2020, it was under 100 million that was being spent in this space. And if we look back at last year, it was up to 25 billion, which is huge, and the numbers for this year are already, you know, mind boggling. So when we spoke about NFTs last episode, we spoke about the NFTs and looking at these having this usability. And we talked about that through building community and what we were saying. There was basically that having ownership grants you access and rights and different benefits to different type of reward schemes and early releases. And we spoke about getting, you know, I think, access to beers and hoodies and but not just that different type of events and other type of things. Yeah. 

Craig: [00:03:31] And it's for this reason, the NFT and games are a perfect fit because rather than buying a digital type that you can just have as a flex in your wallet, you can now buy the new sword or the new gun on Fortnite, which gives you an advantage over other people, which is again a desirable asset that you can resell, resell for tokens and then move across ecosystems or get into that a little bit more. But I just want to sort of talk about how things work in today's gaming world, where I log in to FIFA or I look into Call of Duty. I may have spent money on the platform before, and that money is stuck in that ecosystem. I can't resell my Call of Duty Gun, I can't resell my FIFA Ultimate Team packs that I've bought. It stays in the game. But now with NFTs, if everything's a non-fungible token and an asset, you can now sell it on the blockchain and move it towards other games when you're sick of the game, you're playing. So it's huge. 

Tracey: [00:04:32] Yeah, it's always people that have spent, you know, years and years playing games like Mario Kart or Halo or World of Warcraft have spent all this money and time and effort. You know, there's a possibility now that you could take that out of that ecosystem and sell it on an NFT marketplace, which is which is pretty, pretty huge. But let's sidestep it away from that gaming kind of rabbit warren and talk about how it's connected via the metaverse, because these two things often come up in the same conversation. So let's explain a little bit, Craig about. Our gaming and the metaverse are sleep together. 

Craig: [00:05:05] Well, that's what the metaverse is trying to be a world where you can trade assets in between different applications within the metaverse and sort of live in this metaverse and do different things. So, you know, we've talked about the fact in the past how there's brands that are buying up these virtual spaces. Inside these metaverse is like Decentraland and sandbox names like Nike, Sony, Gucci, Manchester City. And the reason why they're dropping some serious Dollars on land and stores. And all that is that they can offer the customers a unique experience that can be offered anywhere else. So, for example, Manchester City, they might buy, you know, a stadium within the Metaverse and have this star player talk to their fans live and have a live stream with their fans, which is something that's never been possible before. And you know, the implications of that tickets to see a player talk to the audience can be resold. And you know, that creates a digital economy that is something that's never been done before. 

Tracey: [00:06:09] Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, look, the metaverse is, you know, it boggles my mind. And it really I know we've said it before, but it comes back to that ready player one thing. It really is, you know, Ready Player One. And to some people, it's going to be the way of the future. It really is. And it might seem a little bit far fetched to those who probably have no exposure to the Metaverse yet and really don't understand it. But you know, gaming will probably be that entry point to this shift to kind of the way that it's living, the way that we may be living one day. The future, which is really scary to think about 

Craig: [00:06:40] and might be a good time to actually talk about play to earn that you mentioned earlier. So these metaverse gaming platforms tradable NFT plays enable these NFTs to earn as they play. So I just want to give you guys a sense of like these digital economies that we've spoken about in the past. Like only Axie Infinity has two and a half million daily active users, and the company trades between 30 to 40 million of marketplace trading volume every day. Now, if you think about what people are trading, they're trading the Axie fairies, they're trading the land, the trading, the boost that you can get. 

Tracey: [00:07:16] Where are these people doing this? 

Craig: [00:07:18] On the Philippines, pretty much 50 percent of them are in the Philippines, and it's creating this digital economy where you can speculate, trade, buy and sell assets within the game and turn it into almost like a job or a side hustle. And Axiom fairly are like taking a clip of each, you know, of each transaction. So you can imagine the amount of revenue that axiom in India making of this can. 

Tracey: [00:07:45] You can you can speak to a little bit further away because you actually took the plunge and did that. Didn't you just tell the listeners a little bit more about that? 

Craig: [00:07:51] Yeah. So after our first NFT episode, we touched on this Axie thing and I actually took the liberty to make my own actually take Jacko Capital out cold. And I have a game manager called Joanne, and she manages like five or six players for me while they play. Actually, for me every day and every month, she let me. She lets me know how much power. 

Tracey: [00:08:16] What's asleep. 

Craig: [00:08:17] Sorry, yeah. Smooth Love Potion, which is like the play to earn token. Mm. Which has like 50 percent halved in value. So the economics of even doing this don't really add up. But when I only did it to just test the waters and also the whole gaming industry's worth $180 billion, what's that going to be worth when every game has its own digital economy? 

Tracey: [00:08:40] So actually, we did speak about before, and this is the game that's live now that everyone's playing and it's kind of like little Pokémon battles. That's the caricature is, isn't it? 

Craig: [00:08:50] Pretty much, yeah. So by creating these market forces actually have the ability because as you can imagine, they're making a transaction fee on each trade. They have the ability to give some of this back to the user base in the play to earn way, which is something that's never been done before. 

Tracey: [00:09:07] So what you're saying is we're told another thing to think about is that, you know, as players earn leave the games, you know, the economy can be inflated. So that's something to think about. Look on that. I looked into things and there's another one to look out for and there's a game that kind of tackles that issue a little bit more head on and that's called supremacy. So this is a metaverse. That's a play to earn project that's looking a bit more long term for the economy of players to benefit from supremacy. Economy is built on a project utility token called sups. So it's a fixed supply token that operates in an economy to replicating the typical supply and demands of resources. So there's the flow. There's a unit of account. It's got the scarcity and other important things that go along with it. So all the resources within the game are subject to traditional market forces. And unlike some of the other projects, the value of sups is not directly correlated with the flows of. Subs within the platform, it's a really interesting model. It's worth looking into if you are interested in this kind of thing within the sector, 

Craig: [00:10:08] is it live now? Is a platform live? 

Tracey: [00:10:10] It's not live yet. No, it's in beta at the moment. I know they've got quite an intensive roadmap that I was looking through, and I think they do have some releases planned in the next coming weeks. I'll put something in the show notes below, actually, if anyone's interested in taking another look. 

Craig: [00:10:23] You know, when we did our research this episode, I noticed that a lot of these games are actually early in the beta phase, except actually, of course, even that actually was exposed to a hack actually recently where 600 million was stolen. 

Tracey: [00:10:38] Yeah, that was yesterday. What do you know about it?

Craig: [00:10:40] So 600 million was exploited from Ronan, which is the blockchain that they transact and trade and play on. I don't think they've really figured out why. And you know, this is sort of one of the biggest hacks that I can remember in modern times, but actually is really the only one that's out of by donors operating fully. But, you know, probably should have stayed in beta. But yeah, so we actually are really early on these play to earn games that we're talking about. 

Tracey: [00:11:10] So what else is usable now? 

Craig: [00:11:11] Well, I touched on it before, you know, Sandbox and Decentraland are both very similar concepts where the metaverse is that have land games and you can sort of develop on top of them. They're both built on the Ethereum network, but what can actually happen is made me. Tracy and Blake can get into the Decentraland Metaverse, play a bit of poker, and then I might get sick of Tracey beating me so I can just leave the poker, the poker room and go play something else. Take my assets of what's left of my assets through to another game, which is something that is pretty cool. I mean, back on the play to earn, we've touched on this before, but stylus promises to be a really big game on Solana, and it's pretty much like a Star Wars and a game form where these star ships are selling for like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And these own market forces are within the game where you can buy and sell like weapons, machinery, vehicles. It's not live yet. I think it's going to take a few years, but you know, the graphics from the child look pretty unreal. 

Tracey: [00:12:16] Yeah, I'm a big fan. I think Star Atlas looks awesome, like their Discord group is one of the biggest I've even seen. And there's so many other YouTube channels already dedicated to any snippet of news that pops out just on Star Atlas. So we should have bought that ship when we talked about it a few months ago, do you know? 

Craig: [00:12:34] Oh, well, 

Tracey: [00:12:34] we've also got the long standing CryptoKitties, which was one of the original crypto games that came out that one. You'll hear bits and pieces around again. Really big community there. Cute little kiddies don't know much about the game myself, but again, that's been around for a long time. We also probably could talk about a bunch of other names that, unless you're in the space, wouldn't mean a lot to you, but they're in the top 12 constantly. And and those are names like Battle of Guardians, Guild of Guardian, Splinter Land, so rare, which I've been hearing a lot about so rare recently Alluvium, which I think we've mentioned in the past. And Seibold, we should also mention Gods Unchained, which is a trading card free to play, played a earn model where users can build decks of playing cards to play against each other. It's a bit different to the other ones that we've mentioned because it's kind of think a cross between Pokemon and poker. But you know, instead of cute little critters, they're more scary looking critters. So it's more of a trading card playing game. The Gods Unchained actually has its own marketplace for doing these trading cards, and it's run on the immutable X platform, and this one provides gas for transactions in its own marketplace. And we should probably touch on Immutable X Craig, the fellow Aussie company. 

Craig: [00:13:50] Yes, they're actually, you know, Australia's top growing start up from last year to explain them, you know, you need to think about the traditional gaming. You know, if you build a game, you either build it for PlayStation five or Xbox. So think of Immutable X as like the platform on which these games are built on top of. Now, Axie Infinity game is built on the Ronin chain, which means that transactions on the road and chain a quick. They're fast because they're optimised for the game, and that's the only game that runs on that chain is actually now immutable x aiming to be this, but on top of Ethereum. Now, if you've ever interacted with OpenSea before, which is built on top of Ethereum, you'll probably notice that the gas fees are quite high. Transaction takes a bit of time, and you probably don't want this in a gaming environment because any bit of lag is no good. I mostly blame Lag for my terribleness at cod, but immutable x pretty much aims to be the platform where transactions can settle quickly, cheaply on top of the Ethereum network. So all these games are chosen talking about a bill on top of immutable X and a formidable X can get it wrong. It is like underpinning the next wave of play to earn. They're in a very good position, I think. 

Tracey: [00:15:12] I think they're in a very good position right now after just having raised two hundred million in the capital raising effort. So I'll be watching them very, very closely. But you know, on that, Craig, if we, the regular Joe, want to get involved in this because we think that they are the future of gaming, how can we how can we invest or how can we get involved in what immutable X are up to their token or something? [00:15:36][23.9]

Craig: [00:15:36] They do have a token IMX on most of the major exchanges, so go in and check that out. But I'm not personally invested myself. 

Tracey: [00:15:46] Well, I think let's take a break there, and when we get back, we'll talk about how gaming can be compatible with one another. So we've just given you a big, long list of games that you can go out and have a look at and potentially play, but some of those games are on Solana, some of those games on Ethereum and there will be other blockchains that you'll be playing those games on as well. But what we want to talk about now is what happens when they are cross-chain. What happens when you want to take your NFT to a different blockchain? How does that work? Because it's not very clear right now. So, for example, there is a game out there that I found Craig called blockchain cuties, and this was the first game out there in the market that offers the users the ability to play on various blockchains. So, for example, you could take your little avatar and play your same kind of content on iOS or Neo, Ethereum or Tron. So you're basically going and playing your game on a different marketplace, in a different chain. But this was the only game that allows you to do this so far. 

Craig: [00:16:50] Yeah, I I think it's not very clear how that will work, but I suspect that if you're building a gallon salon or a theory, you probably don't have much incentive to create cross-chain capabilities, like if you're making a game right now, a PlayStation game, do you really want to collaborate with other games on Xbox? Like, probably not. You want to sort of keep that revenue and keep the trading fees on the one chain. But I mean, in saying that, I think the way that it'll work will probably be quite manure from the consumer point of view. So, you know, you might sell your ship on Star Atlas on Solana because you really want to play Alluvium. So you know you sell your ship for Solana on Star Atlas and then you bridge over to the Ethereum chain with either a stablecoin or whatever, and then you manually buy your assets on alluvium on a theorem rather than the game's doing it for you. We're probably a long way from that whole cross-chain experience, I think, because 

Tracey: [00:17:49] what you're saying is that there has because there has been talk out there of these major publishers or big developers that you're talking about, you know, theoretically teaming up and allowing in-game NFTs to work across the different platforms. But like you saying, there's no real incentive for them to do that right now. But in theory, that's the only way that it would happen. 

Craig: [00:18:11] Well, yeah, in theory. But like also, what about what's better? Doing a marriage is going to be their own metaverse and not want to play ball with some of the other chains, like what chain is meta going to be on?

Tracey: [00:18:23] I just don't think it's very clear right now. You know, but I think that's what we're working towards. I guess, you know, games bringing together, you know, all these different types of tribes that will want to work together and, you know, being able to work across these different blockchains. But it's going to take it's going to take time for that to happen. 

Craig: [00:18:39] Yeah, definitely. But I mean, the same principle hasn't changed where, you know, in today's world, in today's games. If I buy a gun or skin on Fortnite, they're stuck in that ecosystem. Even if these new blockchain games aren't cross compatible, there is at least a way to pull your value out. Whether it's manual, whether it's automatic, there's now finally a way for you to sell an asset and then move to a new game or to another game that your mates are playing on that you want to try out. So now there's actually going to be a way to do that, which never been possible before. 

Tracey: [00:19:11] But what an NFT is. Another blockchain concepts bring to games that don't already exist. 

Craig: [00:19:16] I think it's the marketplace and digital economy side of things that doesn't exist currently. Call of Duty Free. They're not incentivised for you to speculate on their assets in-game. They're only want to sell you what they have, and then they take the profit for themselves. They don't give anything back to the user. They only just spend the money on the product to develop. But now, by the second economy, this digital economy enables these games to actually give back to the user. So for example, on I'm passive FIFA player, I might spend money in favour. I'm giving money to favour. But now I can resell my players for real cash. And now if I win games, I might be able to actually win real money that I can take off the platform, which then if that's the case on what resigned chase? 

Tracey: [00:20:02] Oh God, hopefully that doesn't happen because we need you. But look, I guess I guess what we need to remember is that these games and all these gaming services they are owned by, you know, these major platforms. So this may be a while away. You know, who knows where this is going, but it's an interesting space, and I'm sure we're all going to be watching it with very keen eyes. But that almost wraps it up. So whoever's made it to the end, should we tell them about our special code, Craig? 

Craig: [00:20:32] Yes, you made it to the end. You've gone about all these games. We now want to give you guys a bit of a kickstart into your bamboo app with the code curious, which would give you $10 and Etherium. So whack that in your bamboo are curious. It would be your onboarding process to ask you for a promo code. So yeah, it gets started putting your spare change to work with some AIF. What do you think, Trace, one of your favourites, isn't a 

Tracey: [00:20:55] Ethereum all the way, so that is the bamboo code. Curious when signing up for the bamboo app on that? I think we'll leave it there. We love hearing from our listeners and finding out what you want to know about crypto, so please send us an email at podcast at Get Bamboo Dot Io and follow us on social media and make sure you hit the follow button whenever you're listening to us. Like right now so you don't miss an episode and get notified every time we release a new one. We'd also love for you to share this podcast with your family and friends because we know there are a lot of people out there who are very crypto curious. So send them our way. And why don't you copy and paste this episode? You can send this link out to you, mate. That's always been banging on about NFTs. And don't forget, please rain. Review us in your podcast app, but thanks again, so much for listening to us, and hopefully you'll join us next week. Bye for now.

Craig: [00:21:44] See you guys.