IlluviTalks #6 - Tokens, Sponsorships & Interoperability (Boon or Bust) for DeFi Gaming

Should DeFi games take on sponsorships? Will mainstream gamers be turned off by DeFi gaming sponsorship?  Do games need to be interoperable with each other to be truly Web3? Our expert panel of CryptoStache, Grant Haseley and TSG tackle these topics and more!

Follow Our Host & Guests
Andrew Wall (aka Awall) - https://twitter.com/awallcrypto
CryptoStache: https://www.youtube.com/c/CryptoStache
Grant Haseley: https://www.undeadblocks.com/
TSG: https://www.youtube.com/c/TSGIlluvium

ABOUT THE GAME
Illuvium is an exploration looter and collectible autobattler game built on the Ethereum Blockchain, releasing on PC and Mac in 2022. Play and earn in a graphically-rich, vividly-realized sci-fi adventure and conquer the wilderness to help your crash-landed colony flourish.

Race across stunning alien landscapes on your quest to uncover the cause of the cataclysm that shattered Illuvium. Hunt and capture Illuvials, powerful creatures who have ruled the land unchallenged until your arrival. Train and fuse your Illuvials into powerful evolutions. Build your ultimate Illuvial team to take into battles and tournaments in PvE and PvP Arenas. Use your creativity to build unique synergies to outsmart your opponents and progress to the top as become the most legendary Ranger on this planet.

Illuvium’s collectible NFT games feature crypto token assets with functionality and a gaming use case, interoperable across the Illuvium universe and the larger DeFi metaverse. The decentralized NFT collection offers players a user-maintained custody never before possible in mainstream gaming.

#IlluviTalks #DeFiGaming

♊ Terms and Conditions ♊
Content on the official Illuvium website and social media does not constitute financial advice. You are responsible for doing your own research and seeking independent professional advice about your involvement with the Illuvium DAO and any Illuvium products or services. Illuvium products (such as tokens including ILV, sILV2, Land NFTs) and services (Illuvium game) are not financial products and accordingly the Illuvium DAO is not licensed by any regulator. Please be on constant alert for scams. You should read and ensure you understand the terms and conditions available on the official Illuvium website before engaging with the Illuvium DAO or any Illuvium products or services.

🧠 Learn More About Illuvium: https://www.illuvium.io/
🏔️ Explore the IlluviDEX v2: https://illuvidex.illuvium.io/
🎮 Register For BETA Access: https://play.illuvium.io/
🪪 Build Your Personalized Illuvitar: https://www.illuvium.io/illuvitars

Transcript

intro music what's up everybody andrew wall here host and executive producer at eluvium and welcome back to iluva talks this week we're talking tokens sponsorships interoperability defy gaming is this going to be a boon or a bust with each of these items lots of buzzwords lots of people saying you're going to earn so many tokens is that going to be inflationary and destroy your economy or is it going to be good we've got a lot of examples in an all-star panel today as we lead the conversation about the future of gaming who's on that all-star panel well he was on our very first tester pilot episode of louvitalks and because it went so well due 100 percent to this man's charisma we're bringing him back his name is crypto staff what's up buddy yo what is going on you know i'm not gonna necessarily attribute to my charisma but possibly just this mustache right here i mean it it really is like the lightning rod for everything i do i channel all my power through this amazing mustache and i'm incredibly glad to be back with you guys here at elluvium love what's going on and uh ready to talk some mo dude you're clearly channeling power back there to the multiple mission control computer stations you have to have a massive power bill yeah we're this is i'm right now i'm currently at uh seeker agent headquarters this is an undisclosed location here on the west coast this is our command center where we run all of our our daily gaming missions from uh like the one we're gonna be doing after the show and into dead drop we're gonna be doing another dead drop stream so um yeah so a little plug there but in general yes we're we're in we're in our headquarters doing the damn thing uh as always must follow content creator for those interested in metaverse nfts and crypto gaming but the panel doesn't stop there my friends we have grant not gonna screw up your name hasley in the house today awkward pronunciation grant what's up buddy this is the founder of wagyu games and the creator of undead blocks what's up buddy andrew it's always a pleasure thanks for having me on uh really looking forward to talking about interoperability talking about sponsored tournaments there's a lot of juicy stuff on your show today always happy to be hanging with you guys and uh thanks for having me of course and i think he's the most reoccurring person on our expert panel ever in fact he's got so much charisma he's such a just light to be around we ended up hiring him to be our influencer manager can you believe this tfg and the tsg in the house how'd you snake in there to become a core contributor to luvium what'd you do man uh pretty much you saw uh kieran's uh tweet about me being a little pager right that was pretty much it every every moment every opportunity i was trying to just put my name out there help out wherever i could and then did it that many times that they kind of just decided yo let's just bring him on so grateful for that grateful for the opportunity and thanks for having me back on man again you reached out to get me on this episode again and you're right i think third time third time on on a looper talk so excited to see the conversation today you got it okay let's just get straight into our topics let's not waste any more time i want to get into the first topic here which is token earning in d5 games so many games out there have token earning it's you know it became popular in play to earn let's say and in gen one and just to take a look at a couple uh tokenomics models just as an example here and we can kind of use this to kind of set the stage if you will uh for um the discussion that we're doing today but basically um this is god's unchained and one of the like kind of copy-paste if you will tokenomics models in our space as you go through here is you're going to see about 30 this is their white paper 30 percent of the tokens in a lot of these games are allocated to play to earn and so that seems to be the model between 20 to 30 percent and if you take a look at the tokenomics of this may look familiar to one of our panelists here undead blocks you're looking at play to earn fund about 27 with this game and then if you look at games like elluvium roughly less than about about 10 percent of tokens have been allocated to things like in-game rewards eluvian being on the very low end of the spectrum in terms of in-game rewards i meant to have god's unchained tokens here for you to take a look at but there there it is play to earn rewards 34 i'm currently doing that and earning some of those rewards so the reason why i bring these up is is this sustainable like is earning tokens good for d5 games tsg i'm gonna bring it over to you because it seems like giving people money they earn it playing the game sounds good to me is it good for d5 games tsg what do you think uh i think it depends i think it's very interesting right because there's the way i look at it there's two real kind of ways that we can go about this one is the axi way where it's like you earn in-game tokens that you sell to the market and it's just inflationary it's just an unlimited amount um that just automatically is unsustainable i think if we go down that option that's just a non-negotiable none we just don't even look at that the other option is what we're doing with alluvium i think if it's like a cat it's interesting because if it's a capped limited amount of tokens it kind of is cool to start the game in but i also i just don't think it's sustainable i think we're really going to compete with aaa games in web 2. the thing that incentivized and this is something that we had a meeting with kieran a couple of the marketing guys today and i'm obviously not going to go into the details but one of the things that we're discussing about gamers is a lot of gamers play for fun like the core thing is fun not money and as much as we like the idea of ownership and adding that economic kind of value into playing games i think all of that is is fine but the the core thing the the thing that we're really trying to push has to be fun and that doesn't actually mean anything with tokens i think ownership of of assets having a marketplace where you can trade assets i know we're going to talk about it a bit later but interoperability um amongst an ip within an ip i should say these are things that i think add to the value the fun value the fun aspect um compared to just ah play the game and earn tokens um that's just my take on it i think it's cool it's it's a nice little kind of like hook um but i don't think it's the thing that's really going to keep the there um forever it's kind of like the bait if you go fishing it's the bait where you get the nibble um but at the end you're still gonna have to reel them in yourself and and i think the way to reel them in actually and catch the actual um fish in this example is the fun got it that's the hook mr hashley i have to ask you as i take a look at and the undead token breakdown here if we look at the allocation there's 500 million tokens in undead blocks this is the biggest category of token allocation so i really want to know your answer here the player play to earn fund is 27 more than staking rewards more than ecosystem fund more than the team come on team the initial liquidity and private sale you seem and unbelievably based on this design unbelievably bullish on giving people tokens to play stuff so i really got to know what is the thesis behind making that the largest percentage token allocation in a model like this grant what you think well it starts with the private sale in my opinion you see other of some of our other fps competitors which again i use that very lightly i think we're all competing with the same group of people right now we need to expand into web 2 gamers but most fps games are doing 20 to 25 in their pre-sale you can look at shrapnel you can leave even you can look at others um they are taking a much more aggressive approach with their development we only raised the million at half and our seed round for that token uh and that did give us the ability to allocate more of our resources towards the plate to earn fund we also have a deflationary mechanism which is going to in uh it's going to really combat the um unlocks over time especially when we are giving away token as earnings uh and the reason why we're going to be able to do that is because we are rebranding the undead token to wag you token and every game that we make will use this token we really launched undead blocks as a proof of concept what we realized was that people want to collect weapon skins it's interesting you brought up gods another a immutable ex partner and we really want to be gods crossed with cs go where people are able to acquire loot boxes we call them loot coffins and then use those tokens that they are earning from in-game as well as a secondary stable reward currency that we're also going to be allocating and then use those for the fun you know you have to double down on the fun factor that's why we're taking the mario kart cross with call of duty zombies approach creating a game that hasn't been created in web 2 and then we are tripling down on getting those users in mass bringing them in towards a free-to-play model uh earning some of these assets and then using them in the game to create uh more front experiences for themselves without having to necessarily put a strain on that economy i gotta ask you the hard question here and crypto stash i'm gonna get to you in a minute the mind of the mustache is powered up how do you give away 27 of the tokens to players for playing and not significantly diminish the value of the token free money doesn't work right central bank printing money doesn't work every example from seashells on an island with inflating the supply of money to diluting the value of silver and gold coins in the roman empire now to all of our dollary dues around the world and central banks printing them there giving away money and printing money and increasing money supply decreases the value of that money so how do you really combat that and how do you make an economy sustainable when 27 is pre-scripted to be get to be essentially given away earned earned but given away essentially over time so we really don't want to touch that kill to earn fund it's there if we need it but we're going to have so many different ways to generate revenue through those loot boxes loot coffins battle passes people are going to want to acquire this stuff bring them into that sort of free to play model we don't want people to play this game while we don't want them to have to have an nft to play we want to take you know the the car salesman approach where if you want to buy a car you can drive it for free that's why people are going to be able to earn some rewards and it's going to be random it's not something where we are guaranteeing x amount of rewards for x amount of play time we are going to be taking a more targeted marketing approach i could look at the inverse and say we could take some of those funds and allocate it towards a facebook youtube or twitter ad campaign and most people are going to say play to earn gaming nft gaming not really for me right now so it really is more of a boots on the ground approach i do agree with you and we want to have these rewards scale with revenue as we're driving player growth and we're driving so many of these games are in i see so you're saying the tokens don't just go out evenly over time maybe as revenue grows the tokens will proportionately be earned as revenue increases so you're not just dumping a bunch of tokens before there's a lot of economic activity is that the idea correct and so here's an example we've been running these sponsored tournaments every weekend this month we've given away 35 000 just in september alone that's fully sponsored from other web free companies so that doesn't hurt our treasury they give us cash we can pay out our reward currency which is called z bucks and that fund is really just there if we need it we don't want to for example we could do something like we're giving away ten thousand dollars this weekend in our blood boxes which is really our take on mario kart you're gonna hit this box and you don't know what's in it we can use some of the undead token from that and then really put on an aggressive marketing push for free to play that's how i see the kill to earn fund it's not going to be something where you play xyz you get this uh amount of token because it just doesn't work and you're right you're creating an asset out of scratch i mean that's what we've really done with undead token uh is we created a governance token and now we have to give it tangible value whether that's having players vote on the next map or weapons or game modes but also making sure that we can provide um sort of a healthy capitalism approach where if we are generating significant revenue we can go through a token burn or having people burn their tokens for those in-game cosmetics i think that's really going to counteract the inflation you're going to see when we do provide these rewards for some of our free to play players that makes sense really quick we are talking about tokens and earning and all this financial related items nothing that we're saying is financial advice we're talking about video games we're talking about projects this might be a part of your research but we're not telling you to go buy anything even though loot coffins sound incredibly cool by the way we should keep that term this is not financial advice thank you for that in-depth answer i like that it's more nuanced than you just earn a bunch of tokens and it kind of and just increases the supply so crypto go ahead sorry no you go ahead that's why we have an actuary on our staff you know we're looking at every single person that comes in and they earn something as a loss we have to project those losses so we're doing a very good job of tracking the data and say okay how many people are actually withdrawing these earnings and selling them if they so choose and that's going to be important too as well as then we can say okay we're going to put out xyz amount of rewards make it fixed and then our player and our players our community know okay we're giving away this amount it's a much more sustainable approach because we didn't want to a hyperinflate the nfts or b also allow people to manipulate the secondary currency of that gold z bucks because that has what exactly what's happened pigaxi it's happened with axi it's happening with others so uh it really just provides us that opportunity to have a flatter timeline we want this game to be around for decades uh not just you know six months flash in a pan to disappear got it more sustainable that makes sense and so you're putting measures in place to to make that happen stash i gotta ask you we all assume well not we all but let's just say we all assume gamers just want tokens right they want to earn when they play do they really though like does the average mainstream gamer play in playstation and xbox playing their mobile game stash do they want tokens in their video games

well whether they want tokens in their video games or not they already freaking have them every game every major game right now that's played by millions of people most of them have some sort of token now whether it's a cryptographic blockchain based token or just an in-game currency it's pretty much the same thing they they want to work in the same way now whether they have play to earn elements where you can actually er do things in game to earn those tokens that is a different issue that is a different case i think that when you look at you know these models of like v bucks right and how things work in in you know all these popular games every game that's coming out now has their own in-game currency it's a premium currency that you can you know buy in a subscription every month and get a certain amount with maybe some cool you know skins that come with that aka nfts which is what they'll be here pretty soon uh or or you know you can just go buy them separate packages whenever you see something killer on their store that you want to have for you know your look of your character in game and and so you know right now what we're trying to do i think in web 3 is kind of bridge that gap a little bit and really just make it to where these things are that we have more accountability for them right i think having a token inside the game can work but right now we just haven't really found the best combination of it because we don't have a lot of time to like of research we haven't had enough research time into something like this you talk about how much time that we've had to look at well what does you know in-game currency do uh like a premium currency like v-bucks how does that work and how does that affect game play and other aspects and and we've had years already with that right we've had years with like micro transactions in games and in mobile games so uh you know with this kind of this shift in paradigm that we're seeing right now in you know web 3 gaming we've only had like a few years really and really not even that much i mean maybe really honestly a good solid year and a half to two years that i would say of being able to really see how this works but not even at scale and that's one of the biggest problems is we haven't been able to really test these things at a massive scale with a game that really has well-designed tokenomics at a plus players the last time this happened it was a disaster i'm not going to name any names but i'm actually i'm trying to do it uh and so you know infinity infinity infinity yep yeah yeah you know and and so like what grant was saying you know when we look at this just like any other currency for any game regardless of whether it's something you could cash out into a usd or maybe just even spend on their in-game store you know these types of tokenomic problems are rife in the entire gaming industry there's people who just make a traditional web 2 game traditional mainstream game and it ends up going belly up or something or people just stop playing it and migrate out because they just didn't think through the economy and there's just massive inflation right they don't know how to to curtail the inflation of their in-game currency and that can go for a you know a tokenized blockchain based currency as well i think having those sinks is important to build from the very start and if you don't have that and you can't project it out from like what does that look like for a hundred people playing my game what does it look like at a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand a million and ten million if at ten million players and you you don't have projections that don't show that this can be that your your sinks and and your your faucets are going to balance out then you're you're going to end up ruining your economy and i think that's the main thing that we just are not seeing here in in web 3 games is people are not taking the time to really make these projections and make it work we just haven't found the best combination but we're getting there you know like with these next gen of games are coming out like alluvium like you know undead blocks uh gods and chains some of the other ones that have really been through the ringer and have had time in the market we're starting to see you know what what we can do to make that happen you know what we can do to make that happen and i love the idea of two you know earning rewards being something that scales with the game and scales with time uh in in a non-linear fashion right so there's a lot of things i think that we can do it's just we haven't had a lot of time to test them that's where we're at right now but we're gonna get there for sure and i i definitely think in the next three to five years for sure in three years every game will be using nft technology it'll back every skin that you own or you buy and will every game have played earn i don't think we really need to have every game have play to earn but i think that there will be a good solution that we find that is a good balance right we're a people are not taking advantage of the system it's not being fully boughted uh and it's not being inflated away because there's enough sinks in a game to be able to counterbalance it and and there's incentivizations for people to want to burn those tokens because what you're giving them as in-game value is more valuable than cashing the token out itself the entertainment value is more valuable than the cashing out that's that makes sense that that's when you have a truly compelling ip i have a couple thoughts on this and then we're going to move into our next topic number one i think the less tokens you have allocated to uh for earning capacity probably the better because that means that your problem that you have to solve is smaller so if you have a giant pool of tokens that you have to figure out how to responsibly allocate them through earn in games that means that you're going to have to have lots of deflationary mechanics maybe burn mechanics or you'll have to be really careful like with some of the ideas that were shared earlier on how you get those tokens out to folks i think that it's going to be more sustainable over time to have nfts be the earning aspect of your game and have less tokens in the future i think if we've learned any lessons from uh money printing or supply and demand in the past and humanity it doesn't matter if it's digital it doesn't matter if it's on the blockchain it doesn't matter if it's seashells gold silver bitcoin or whatever token for whatever game the more money supply increases the lower the value of the token and as we've seen from the most sophisticated minds in finance in the world from the cbds the central banks the fed professors economists etc no matter how they decide to work those interest rates no matter how they decide to work quantitative easing and stuff like that no matter what happens the money printing just ends up decreasing the value of the money no matter how you work it not even the most brilliant manipulators of money in the entire world right now can solve that problem i don't think we can avoid that in blockchain less earning probably better just my opinion our next topic coming up is brand sponsorships in defy games grant has actually got one of these going so he's got his own experience to share with all of you but before we do check out this sponsorship it's not really a sponsorship it's just a video about a louvitar's watch this and we'll be right back

do you see this guy's reaction right now he cannot believe what he just saw that is a fire trailer man i'm gonna say i i you know i've seen it before but it's really good but i have one question about it what is it got one question possibly you guys could answer this when the louboutins man we've been waiting damn it what's the date wait don't care to stop [ __ ] around and get us it's the community's fault i blame you community worst pr move ever by the way yeah so it's the collections and albums feature that was added on in the recent iip that's moved this down the deadline to get louvitar's out by uh by months so basically we could have launched it with the original product scope but now that they're going to be in albums and collections and then people can earn rewards by putting them in those collections that's a lot of dev time so our dev team's working on that so it's your fault community for asking for more we actually i'm down i'm down for it i'm down for it i'm down here i think the experience is gonna be way better personal opinion i'd rather have a better product yeah his mustache is vibrating wow so much power in that mustache so much power all right perfect so let's move into the next topic brand sponsorships in d5 games so we've got an example here that i want to share with all of you undead blocks is doing one right now so why not ask about you know this this is and i listened to you on a podcast you had a handful of sponsorships from various games you got one going right now hoddle raid i like your branding by the way good copy on these sponsorships but the point being brand sponsorships and gaming have been happening for a long time if it's not undead blocks it's intel extreme masters i used to produce all the esports videos for these uh you know just straight up integrating a brand into esports tournaments as another example and then other examples that folks might be familiar with are bad stories like unskippable ads in nba 2k pissing gamers off so there's a spectrum here to take into account of web3 gaming attempting to do sponsorships successful sponsorships in web 2 gaming like intel extreme masters straight up branding an entire esports tournament and then unsuccessful examples of people just trying to play the freaking video game and some ad playing in their face and they hate the video game and the studio and the depths for it and we'll never forgive them so what is the real deal with sponsorships are they good are they bad are they in between first question right here for for grant should define games take on sponsorships rhetorical question because you've already done it if i said no i mean my god you know we shouldn't they are such an awesome way to generate revenue and so many people you know just kind of piggybacking off our previous conversation they want to know where the earnings come from right we're injecting outside liquidity into our model by giving our player base value in the last three weeks we had we've had over 11 000 unique players playing one of our undead blocks sponsor tournaments we did immutable x we did pokestarter we did blue mint which is going to be a new social platform for web3 games and what we've realized is our portfolio of people our community is worth something to the outside world if you can get 11 000 people in a room who you know are either owning crypto owning an nft or at least open to the idea it's a very unique group of people that you've assembled that aren't bots actual humans butts in the seats and so we can use them and i feel like our community just loves that ability to know where the money's coming from realizing okay if we're making noise if we're contributing and we're also providing value i think that the sponsors are going to continue coming in we're going to be doing a huge halloween bash uh obviously you know october's spooky season's right around the corner and i mean you have to be careful right we don't want to endorse anything that is gambling related we don't want to endorse any obviously um sus uh genres of you know advertisement but i think for the most part what we've been doing is very healthy it's very organic and we're not only giving our community an ability to earn they know where the money's coming from those community members of that other project come in and say this is a damn fun game especially when we have these loot coffins uh you know if we did something with eluvium and maybe we had a cool a louvitar on one of the skins like you better believe some imx fans would really be interested in something like that so alluvium fans so i think there's a lot we can do with it you have to be careful you know the force you to watch an advertisement to play the game that's absolutely [ __ ] you know not financial advice do your own research there but nobody wants that they don't want it if you integrate the i think that's good advice don't don't shove ads in the middle of somebody's gaming experience i think zero gamers like that yeah it's just such a tournament stash wants to object to that hold on are you you're pro advertisements in games maybe mobile game ad supported games you say gamers are not cool with that but it is definitely a subset of gamers you're right on a pc game not cool man on a console game hate it but mobile gamers don't care and you know what to be perfectly honest uh you know a lot of kids don't care too you know when you look at games like uh like a roblox or some of these other like me like you know there's definitely times where like i've seen my daughter playing games like all right gotta watch this stupid video again and do whatever and like she doesn't really care she doesn't it's not you know i mean i'm sure the branding is making some sort of impact but in general there's a large swath of people that don't care those ads are there now it's not everybody but definitely it's a mobile focus thing i i think for sure okay got it i mean you're willing to uh take on those ads maybe because that's the experience you're used to maybe because you're getting it for free similar it's weird to go back and watch tv again i don't know if you guys ever watched these televisions but going back and watching tv again and then the cable and then watching ads all over the place in between your content is just shocking like when i i do youtube premium and i just pay subscriptions on all my content it's so weird to watch advertisements now but for decades i just accepted them as being normal so maybe one is better than the other from a user experience but people are just willing to accept four decades thousands of advertisements being shoved into their brain uh and that's been proven through every medium whether that be print radio tv social media et cetera so you got a really good point there stash i agree with you grant i totally just killed your flow though did you have any further thoughts to share i wouldn't share this because i i want to model our game studio and our franchises after the most successful web 2 organizations and take the national football league that that playing surface has been the same it's in the entire hundred 12 years of the nfl but there are ads packed all around it every single fantasy football app now has advertisements there's advertisements on the jerseys advertisements on the football itself and so those community members of the national football league they don't give a [ __ ] they still watch the product and you can integrate this branding without ruining the gameplay loop and ruining the gameplay experience we want it to flow eventually in our our maps uh we want to have branding from different web 3 partners eventually migrating to web 2 partners like we were on a call with pepsi last month and we pitched them the flaming hot cheeto flamethrower in our game that's just going to nuke zombies and they laughed and they chuckled but that's the way i'm thinking about it we want to have this ip really be uh one you can nft that right they're very interested in um owning that and having a percentage of revenue but i also think it's another way to introduce our fun games to a web to audience you know a web 2 gamer isn't going to know anything about pokestarter gaming but they sure as hell have had a mountain dew so that's really how i'm thinking about it and i encourage other games to take a similar approach i like that so there's other types of sponsorships though not just sponsoring esports events which are kind of a no-brainer and how you can integrate that you can copy the sports model or even the esports model so let's talk about other stuff like hardware software clothing maybe sponsored mission control centers behind them on a green screen stuff like that so stash what are your thoughts on getting brand sponsorships into d5 games in non-tournament ways you know first off let me say i love the way that you guys at under blocks do your sponsorships man i think that out of everybody that we've seen in the industry here in web3 you guys nailed it man and what you just said too with the integration of like you know well how do we do a sponsorship with a brand that goes beyond just like oh here's your logo on the advertisement when you sign up for the tournament having the items in there we see how well that works with fortnite right where you're swinging around your lightsaber or you know what i'm saying you getting different brands so i i love that aspect um you know when we talk about outside of like esports i mean i think that as long as you do it in a way that makes sense then why not i mean like i said i i love being able to see that mashup and when people talk a lot about you know the concept of the metaverse you know i've said you know out of all the things we've seen you know a true metaverse is like something that kind of does a good job of connecting things together right bringing things from different areas and putting them into one and making that a reality and where you know there are some really great ones here in web 3 that i talk about all the time you know fortnite does a really good job of bringing brands in and being able to do that where you're running around with like i said you're you're lightsaber in your you know superman cape outfit and you know you have all these crosstalk brands bringing stuff in yeah and yeah like different theme picks like stuff like that right i think that if done effectively it can be really cool and fun but if done in like a cheesy crappy way like it's just you know you got to watch this video right it doesn't work man it doesn't work so finding that way that is okay that that balance of what your players are going to be okay with what you really what you want to do is you want to find something that excites them having a a hot cheeto flame thrower that kind of excites me man i'm down like that kind of stuff is cool to me and that's a good marketing idea honestly that's what you have to do that would be fun on its own right having a hot cheeto flamethrower regardless of the sponsorship would be fun and so that means it's a good concept and you actually spend some time to think about it right and it goes the distance because then when you think about like how happy are your sponsors going to be with the returns on that because people are excited about they love it it's fun versus like oh yeah yeah we got your logo up there it's cool i'm sure you got some exposure maybe some people sign up to your website or saw your [ __ ] uh but you know being able to say hey here's how many people played this here's how many people got this this skin or the you know nft skin right i think that is a very quantifiable and a lot more exciting to me as a brand partnership for a game than a lot of what we've seen you know i don't want to be playing you know nba 2k and then all of a sudden like you know video pops like that's stupid man come on make something cool like put it in the game there's tons of opportunity to do like you said game jerseys balls all these things can get sponsors if you can do it in a way that makes sense you know i just saw dr disrespect uh you know how has his own character in that game and you know that's a cool way to like pull a brand in and that makes it more exciting versus it just being you know kind of lame got it yeah just being a standard advertisement from like legacy media yeah playing an ad it's done putting it's over yeah you've got to be creative in how you integrate your brand into people's lives you know the the concept i like is like the lifestyle brand concept so personally this is just my opinion like for elluvium i down the road it's my goal to uh or one thing that i want to work on is having an official hardware partner so having a hardware partner for things like mouse maybe keyboard maybe monitors and things you'll be using to play the games maybe even controller skins and things that like directly tie in to your experience playing the actual game 100 things you're going to use to play the game to me that makes sense if we end up being on xbox and playstation having a skinned xbox a skinned playstation it ends up being oculus one day a skinned oculus you you know what i'm trying to say that is a that's a sponsorship or a brand tie-in that makes sense is organic and people i i love those types of sponsorships and when i see brands doing that in mainstream gaming having an overwatch or call of duty skin control or whatever that makes sense that's a smart business move and people want to buy the branded version of those items because they're going to be using it anyway to play the game if you try to shove in your brand in some way that doesn't directly tie into the experience of playing or using your product i think that's when you get into trouble so i brought up mainstream gamers a moment ago but will mainstream gamers be turned off i mean by defy gaming sponsorship so here's what i mean by this they're already turned off by nfts they're already turned off by blockchain they hear it's a scam they think it's destroying planet earth then they show up and then you're getting blasted with freaking dorito ads tsg is this too much is sponsorships too much in defined gaming nah man it's just business like i don't know in my mind i look at it it's just business and it like uh like grant said like like stash said man these web two gamers are watching football like they have sponsorships on on jerseys and stuff and they don't say man i'm out i'm not gonna watch football anymore nba it's all like sponsorships are part of life right it is what it is but i think the way the thing that we think about is how we gonna do this and i think the things that you guys mentioned are very very important and if you're just saying stop your experience this is an advent yeah i mean it doesn't matter if you went to a web 3 or a child or an old person that's going to piss you off whereas if it's done tactfully and i think that's the things like how can we bring value to via sponsorships like like how can you kind of show like something that i think about i think this would be a great sponsorship and we've kind of seen it before with like for example beats by dre headphones or beats they're not by dre anymore right it's an apple thing but beats headphones like let's say there was they had a partnership a sponsorship with la lakers or some nba teams so you could have the beats wrapped in the skin that you want would consumers be against that sponsorship no they'd actually be excited about it because they'd be able to rep the brand that they like beats and then be able to rep the team that they like because that's the sponsorship so i think they were already putting lakers stuff on their head anyway with like a lakers hat or lakers headband or whatever so just another way to show again so i think these type of sponsorships like again for example let's say like it's just about finding out how to actually make things like make sense like the way i think about it even with alluvium or undead blocks anything like that like a tip a tiff and co uh sponsorship how can we do that we know that the tip in blue is like iconic like it's copyrighted so having a skin of that color right like something like that where it doesn't take you out of the game it's not like yo stop this is a sponsorship but if a female is playing and they're really into the tiffany kind of brand they can participate in the game that they love already and actually be participate in the sponsorship in a way where they're like oh this is what i want to do i think that's the best kind of sponsorship and i think finding out things like that like you say andrew about um the hardware again imagine getting like uh i'll keep using the lakers but lake is an eluvian keyboard or something a logitech an alluvium keyboard something like that right where it's like oh man or a razer and whatever it is whatever that brand is having that thing where it's like oh man i like alluvium and i really like razor so having them come together and like kind of putting random things the other way doesn't make sense as well like that kind of where it breaks that that connection where i don't know like yeah alluvium and coca-cola i don't know like that kind of just maybe there's a way to do it look we're not saying no to coca-cola yeah coca-cola money in here bring that coca-cola money yeah but you get what i mean like again it's like where it's like more techno uh technology based gaming based that kind of makes sense but at the same time like i kind of mentioned tiffany what does that have to do with gaming but if it's done well coca-cola bring us that skin where we're open to it but i think that's the thing finding out the way that it makes sense but to answer the question of what two gamers or what just is anyone gonna be against sponsorship no if it's done badly yes but fundamentally no i don't think so so if you're thoughtful in how you put together the sponsorship and it integrates with your brand in a way that makes sense ties into your product and is not disruptive of the experience that you're having that's going to be better than the experience that is disruptive but add value to the consumer as well sorry and that last thing if it could add our use to the consumer i think that's like the perfect situation yep but as stash said some gamers are just willing to take those ads anyway because they're getting a free experience and they're willing to take on that i think over time though as more and more uh as spaces end up developing a bit more the revenue that comes from just blatant smack you over the head ads i think it does decline over time but it does take a while as we saw with uh every other normal paid ad medium really quick yeah go ahead oh hold on final thoughts here genius that's what you got no i was gonna say and this i think there's actually something to be said as well because if you're pumping something out we have that feeling of annoyance and it it creates this barrier between what the advertiser what the ad is advertising and and how we receive it i think there's something to be said about having it passive like again when you're watching football they have the brands around like we saw with the um nfl and nrl thing with elluvium how we had atlas around just having things passively and we're recognizing it subconsciously over time where we're not kind of forced to look at it like it's not um taking us away from the experience but it's kind of there it's kind of there we keep playing it's kind of there it's kind of there i think it conditions us a lot more effectively then you're playing boom stop you're just like yo what's what's going on um that's just another thing that i think as well and a psychological level yep that makes sense and you know you're being taken advantage of or harvested for cash in that type of situation but they're like boom ad like in the super bowl when that ad plays and everybody just gets shoved the ads in their face you know you're getting harvested for cash you might like those ads you might like it but you know you're being harvested for cash it certainly isn't sneaky okay really quick a bunch of you guys have asked us to make an audio version of these shows so you can listen on the go when you're doing a workout when you're grinding for that sweet crypto no problem go to elluvium.buzzsprout.com and we are currently releasing iluva talks and all of our talk shows in an audio format on literally every freaking platform on the entire internet apple spotify everywhere so go to elluvium.buzzsprout.com select your platform and listen to a high quality edited version of this show and our other shows so you don't miss a single moment of genius next topic web 3 gaming interoperability interoperability is one of the worst industry terms i've ever experienced and i've been around for web 2 one two and now three this one's pretty bad it's up there with synergy really stupid word but it means something very important to people that are in this space having multiple games work with each other that ready player one vision that inspirational vision of how games can be this new functionality i have to ask though do games need to be interoperable with each other to be truly web 3 or can they just be a freaking game with a couple nfts in there stash what do you think

i think that okay first off let me address interoperability not the best term but i think that it's a descriptive term and it's not a hard term to remember uh in contrast to nft non-fungible token that is a horrible horrible name for something at least we have the acronym nft whatever but you know when it comes down to interoperability i don't think that a game has to have it but i do think that you know thinking about that as the future is important and that is part of what we're doing here in web 3. if you're not thinking about interoperability in some way shape or form whether you're building a game adapt whatever it is an nft project on whatever chain you choose then you're you're going to be we'll say we're you're going to price yourself out of the future of blockchain right because that's that's essentially where the industry is going we see more and more importance being placed on that in general when it comes to you know these the you know blockchain updates and new chains that are coming right now because there's just so much going on and we get to a point we're like oh these things are siloed siloed siloed and we understand that that is a barrier in many ways it's a barrier to entry for a lot of people i i want to be able to play you know all these cool games but i don't want to have to have a solana wallet an ethereum wallet a matic wallet uh you know a cardona wallet and then the list goes on and on and on right obviously matic ethereum kind of be the same thing same with bse but you understand what i'm saying too many wallets man there's too much so having uh you know interoperability what i call like industry standards is really what it should be called uh is something that we need to have here for games that have blockchain enabled somethings right whether that's nfts play to earn whatever it is verifiability uh that is what drives an industry forward every time that we've been able to settle on an industry standard for something we have we have you know quickly uh you know progressed that particular aspect right same thing with the internet same thing with you know digital formats man i don't know if you guys remember but there was like you know vhs versus betamax and then we've had this fight time and time again dvd versus blu-ray who will win exactly as soon as one wins out it's the whole thing is better it's always better man uh you know except for apple over here just screwing us hardcore can we not just go with the same damn connector for all the like really come on man uh you know usb same thing there's so many great things that have become standards and now it just makes things so much easier to do we need those here with blockchain and it is coming you know it takes some things just it one simple change unity and uh unreal engine five all they got to do is just incorporate that into you know some sort of blockchain you know sdk into their platform and boom every unity game every unreal engine game it now has that compatibility that works in the exact same way it's a standard that we've all agreed upon and then we'll have massive interoperability but that's the problem we have with with blockchains right now too is everyone wants to be the one so they don't want to be interoperable right now they want to try and say we're the one and you've got to be interoperable with us and you know it just hasn't worked and so now we've seen other blockchains kind of rise up to the top or trying to who are focusing on that so i do think it is something you need to take in consideration no matter what you're building but if you're building web 3 you do need to take in consideration is it an absolute must to have no but damn it man when when we get right when we're building that ready player one metaverse where all things are connected it's gonna we're gonna need it so so you know think about it now is it necessary right now probably not for just a really good game but it will be in the next five to ten years guaranteed speaking of what uh platforms trying to be the one i mean meta is probably a great example of that uh and they're not only trying to be the one with their metaverse but they're also trying to go oh god little graphics but uh if you take a look at the hardware that's coming along with it they will have that hardware to go along with the software and so we're gonna see a lot of centralized players try to be the one and they talk about an interoperable metaverse but it is important to clarify like you were stating a moment ago this interoperable metaverse or whatever is all controlled under one centralized entity in this case so that's one type of interoperability where maybe one central player like meta ends up being you know the hub that everyone else has to connect to and then there's like sort of the d5 version of that where maybe different d5 chains or different protocols are interoperable with each other maybe one scenario works out maybe the other one works out i think both will probably end up becoming a reality in some capacity so the question is do mainstream gamers even care if their video games are interoperable and i want to bring up an example here on the screen and then i'm going to kick it over to you uh uh tsg here's a game that was an australian cryptocon next to our booth it was called tcg world i'd never heard of it until this event and i went over there and talked to their guys their investors and their people and they're talking about how their metaverse was going to be interoperable with the sandbox and with all these other metaverses and what have you and but they were also branding themselves as a metaverse so they have a metaverse that is interoperable with other people's metaverses and they just want to play nice and they want to have their game imagine a world where you could just portal from this game into another game etc etc etc so when when mainstream gamers come in here and they google metaverse and they maybe see projects like this question for utsg do they care is this something they actually want or do they just want a good video game uh yeah they just want a good video game honestly like we've had this conversation before uh i think the whole ready player one thing is is a cool idea but honestly if anyone understands development or anything like that it's just so hard almost impossible to do at this point in time it's like one our styles are going to be different two the actual like numbers and statistics and and the data of each like item so what my my car again like we've had this conversation now do i think it was you that said this if a car's top speed is 100 in one game and another game the the top speed of a car is is 50. does that mean like you bring it across and then you just [ __ ] on everyone like is that how does that even it just doesn't make sense you have to rebalance every single asset for every single game every single game and that's insane let's go ask a let's go ask a dev team can you can you just bring over this it's just 100 assets over 100 characters can you just balance this into your game completely different systems completely different functionality you just just make it happen the dev team put that two weeks notice on your desk instantly they're going to say i'm not doing that do that no but that's right now so you're talking about right now and you're right but when we're talking about the next 10 to 30 years you're going to be wrong yes no and i agree with that and i agree with that and the thing 10 to 30 years i like that you set a timeline that's a bit longer what makes me uncomfortable is when people say they're pitching interoperability today as a feature of their product today and honestly i think that's scummy to pitch the idea that your game studio in your product is going to work with other products seamlessly in some sort of meaningful way in l in less than 10 years i think that's irresponsible other than like maybe creating some sort of fancy port essentially for you to click and then go open their launcher maybe but i think it's i think it's um i think it's overselling the product to pitch that and you're kind of pitching the vision of the technology long term rather than your product itself and that makes me uncomfortable uh and it makes me feel like they're making an irresponsible marketing decision in that case tsg please continue yeah now i agree with that because again imagine like imagine we live in a world where we haven't even got an airplane but now we're saying oh but the thing that we're building is gonna take us to the moon it's like yo what are you talking about like it just makes no sense so again uh slash like you say 10 to 30 years i agree with you man i agree in that time frame i agree 100 we're we're probably gonna get there um but like what andrew said if you're a company right now and you're pitching that it just seems unethical in my in my mind it seems unethical um unless you're like again i can't see how you could actually do that but i think well oh yep no no go go finish because i i'm gonna rebuttal that but go ahead and finish the thought yeah it's getting spicy it's getting spicy keep going so so so you're right but there are people who have done this successfully if you guys are familiar with engine they were doing this [ __ ] in 2018 and 2019 and they were doing it successfully now with the problems the ethereum had with scaling and gas fees that totally killed the concept but you know on the limited scale that they were showing as a proof of concept having an sdk that multiple games could use uh that was easy and familiar that allowed you to then you know incorporate these elements and it's not everything so like you said one thing is going to work one way in one game and it's going to work another way in another game and a really great example of that is like um you know there's this in in in the engine universe there was a what they call a multiverse asset so not every asset is in not every nft is a multiverse item right and so uh this epichrome sword was a sword that you could use in a like a small mobile game like forest knight and then if you have the nft you could use that same exact sword in age of rust and it worked and looked different in that game now they didn't support every asset from every game but it was a cool interop ability to be able to take that amt from one game to the next and have it be used in a different way it maybe looks a little bit different and you're right incorporating that into it it does take some work but that is a partnership that is viable and has been done i mean actually running what the first multiverse quest or the first metaverse quest where you actually had to go from uh you know from fighting with five or six different games on the engine platform collect different nft pieces by doing a quest there and at the end you got to then turn all those pieces in for a top prize was actually a really cool thing in a great use case and showcase of what interoperability could do and be right now is it easy no it's not easy and not everyone could do it but it does it did show that it was possible and that there is interest there not a lot of interest clearly but definitely interest from the web 3 community yeah got it let me ask let me let's give grant a chance to weigh in on this so i want to actually you don't get to say nothing man that's yeah you just i just get to listen that you know that shitty game developer just gets to listen yeah he's the one actually making games over here let me ask you bro why are all the game studios skipping the step where they make their own games interoperable and just going straight to why don't we be interoperable with other studios what's up with that it's a mistake it's a mistake and that's why we're building more games under the wagyu umbrella for us it's easier we have weapons right we have characters they're much easier to be more interoperable in between the titles that i'm going to be making with wagyu i don't see many ways to bring a louvitar into a zombie shooter uh it's i think people say things because they are buzzwords you you touched on this early in the show is these buzzwords in this industry i i interoperability is an interesting one i'll give you a couple examples of soft interoperability if you have an undead blocks weapon nft you can go play my path hooligan right now if you have that nft you get a huli with a undead blocks hoodie that's really [ __ ] cool but you know there are no zombies in my pet hooligan and i think so many people are just grasping for straws a lot of them they know that their game is inadequate i've heard kieran talk about this multiple times where pretty much every web 3 game right now would get [ __ ] on by a web 2 game that is you know the vision of it uh you know so many people compare undead blocks to cod zombies and they're right that's why we're taking the more mario kart slash call of duty zombies approach but i think they're grasping at straws with this interoperability and i think uh at the end of the day you're right like you can't even from our perspective we're going to be doing something with shrapnel where we have a weapon skin swap where they have some of our skins in our game we have some of their skins in our game they're on unreal we're on unity so it is going to look a little different and i think you just have to we as an entire collective uh have to scale back the expectations for the interoperability because we all have our dev teams we all have different resource management like you're right i can't go and put you know 2 500 different characters from some random web 3 game immediately into our game who's going to record the voice lines yeah who's going to all these actors that we're going to need for this kind of stuff like it'd be hard enough to get stash into our game and have him you know sit down and record us three minutes of voice lines for undead blocks i think there's a lot there but the deal is done baby deal's done we're going to start selling stashes too i think that's a missed opportunity where each stash could look different in the game but we'll talk about that offline uh there is potential but we have to understand that even for the largest web 2 games in the world this is incredibly difficult i heard now you're going to be able to play uh with gustavo fring in fortnite that's really [ __ ] cool it's going to bring in a ton of breaking bad fans but i'm sure that took lots of haggling lots of negotiating and revenue split from those those v bucks and so we just oh god the lawyers just the lawyers required to bring thanos and destroy that with gamestop dude with the with the amount of lawyers in the the legal premise that we have to just put a tweet out there that says we're going to be on the gamestop marketplace we've already legal team batman yeah yeah but wait until wait until it's a standard right wait till it's built and baked in man there was a time where people were making video games where there was no there was no unity there was no there was an unreal engine man you had to build everything from the ground up standards will make it possible here in the future i'm telling you right now it sucks you're right it's hard but there will be a stand it'll be it'll be like that'll be so easy just boop done i i think going to the whole the conversation of like what do web two games actually one do they care about interoperability like that grand scheme of interrupter really right now today i don't think they care about it but i think what they can understand and they don't care at all because they just never experienced it but i think the first step like what andrew was saying and again what kieran has kind of said and of course i'm biased because obviously i work for olivia but like the whole interoperable blockchain gaming suite right like that kind of makes sense to ibg where it's like right let me use mario party as a thing like we all know the ip we all know the characters of mario party if you owned mario or a doc mario or an american mario whatever outfit it was whatever and then they come out with a mario kart you can bring them on to play the same thing it's all the same ip there's a mario golf a micro tennis and you can bring that same character to your suite of games that's probably the first kind of like step where web 2 games is going to be like oh [ __ ] we can do this that's kind of cool and i can play these games for free i just have my asset and i can play these games that's kind of cool i think that's again like the the grand scheme of ready player one we like the idea is we're three people we're two people i think they're interested but to them they understand it's super far out i think the first step is is the way to go and i think that's what most of us should be really focusing on because if we can like show show web 2 game is a a successful build of that and say yo look at this what build suite of games where you can play all of this with your one like pokemon card and put your pokemon here and here and here like they can grasp that that concept um and once they feel that in like yo [ __ ] this is this is gaming this is what the future of gaming is that's easier for them to to understand in my opinion and andrew i want to just touch on this real quick okay go ahead you're talking about interoperability you're talking about the launcher right like how can you have all the games in one launcher i don't know if you guys have seen but we're in a launcher's arm race here you know we're undead blocks is on elixir it's not going to be on flame we're going to be on ultra we're going all these different launchers the stash talked about this so now you have seven different uh wallets you have potentially 40 different clients you have to download if one of these launchers doesn't really uh supplant you know the the industry standard i think there's just we are so [ __ ] early where we have to just take a step back and just observe and learn so there's a lot there it just needs some more consolidation i don't think consolidation is the worst thing for this industry i think it's right for it and i think we're going to see a lot of it in the next six to 12 months i'm completely honest again watchers arm races always result in the same thing just like we saw in web 2 gaming you have too many launchers or too many streaming services too many cable channels too many whatever media things and guess what a service comes out that aggregates all of them for you gog ever heard of it gog aggregates all the launchers just watch is now starting to drop just watch aggregates all of your streaming services into one uh individual channels route ever heard of a cable bundle yeah they'll sell those to you too and they'll bundle it all up and they'll sell it to you for more here's here's the thing that bothers me about this whole interoperability conversation we're having all of these are marketing gimmicks all anybody's trying to do right now is marketing gimmicks and people are aiming the bar too low they're either aiming too low with marketing gimmicks right now which my one item or my one character or my one skin is going to work in this other game or games that's a marketing gimmick that's very very short term and that's very small or we're aiming way out the road and we're going to say well we're going to have our game be interoperable with this game on this major scale imagine a world where you could go through a portal and you could go into this other game elluvium's trying to go somewhere in between and here's the in-between it's not the individual items and the individual nfts and the individual functionality those short-term little marketing gimmicks everybody's looking at today you need to design your games if you're really going to do interoperable you need to design games to be dependent on each other with that interoperability not just have a few one-off marketing gimmicks you're doing with another game or your own games like in elluvium alluvium zero fuel is needed for the overworld the alluvials you get in the overworld are needed for arena to work the games are developed on a design level to have to be interoperable with each other they have to be interoperable with each other you can play each one individually but they're designed to be played together that's where the whole industry needs to go not thinking of one-off interoperable marketing or item or nft gimmicks to get us to the next stage so i hope to see more game studios thinking like that you're going to partner with another game or make your own games how are the nfts and how is the how are the gameplay loops integrated together from a design standpoint don't just make your games and then figure out how it's going to be interoperable later you need to design interoperability into the fundamental design of the games that's the next step elluvium is the only studio i've seen actually design it into the games not just add it later on sounds like you're moving that direction a little bit yourself grant so i'll give you the first shout out this episode where can people find you show my friend you guys can find me on twitter grant underscore wag you do follow undead blocks as well as wagyu games on twitter and our discord it's always poppin uh people are very excited for this game we've been running free to play and earn tournaments every weekend of september fully sponsored by different web free companies this weekend we have a gift for our weapon nft holders if you want to play you're gonna have to have one this weekend but have no fear we're gonna be doing a huge halloween bash uh to be announced in terms of prize pool and structuring that will be free to play to the public so if you are from the eluvian community check us out happy and proud to be in the imx family with you guys and uh looking forward to being uh staying in touch with all of you guys imx fam indeed stash where can people find you i'm here man look secret headquarters you can't you can't find me that's the whole point no uh so you can find me on youtube.com uh slash crypto stash you know s-t-a-c-e like you see up there uh or twitter love twitter or or on twitch secretagentstash so you guys can uh check out all my game streams i'm streaming every single day putting out videos every single day i just dropped a video of me uh swimming with sharks so it's it's fun just go to the channel subscribe get in there oh my gosh stash goes driving diving with sarge sharks he's not joking go to this man's channel you can subscribe you thought he was just gonna be nfts this man's got sharks look in this video he's burning ten thousand dollars he's crazy he's crazy all right tsj that was good video man i watched that i watched that before this uh that's a good video um yeah honestly you guys i'm sure the people have kind of seen me already in in the libyan community you can find me on discord my youtube channel tsualuvium or twitter um just ping me yeah there you go um i'm pumping out trying to pump out as much content as possible yeah so yeah man anything alluvium anything that you want to talk about just just ping me and discord and i'll say what's up perfect guys you you are an amazing panel i want all of you guys to come back but you already knew that grant i want you back too i liked your perspective i like the attraction building stuff too it makes it fun thank you so much for joining me for eluva talks today every single week same channel same time and if you have guests that you'd like to be on the show please let us know and if you haven't already go to elluvium.io slash louvitars register i know you want to know when sign up right there and you'll get all the notifications when louvitar's is going to drop with albums and collections the improved version thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next episode of louisville talks time for the awkward transition out bye-bye