So going back between there's difference between Web two and Web three from the user
perspective. If the economy is built in a way that makes sense, that's
the I mean, you don't need another reason to play, then there's a
chance that you could get rewarded, you know, not only with a great
game and with a way to spend your time, but actually with some financial
benefits. Whether you're lucky or because you play well or because you played smart,
you know, you found something that nobody else want. This content is
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will be in a description. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto podcast. You're home
for cryptocurrency news and interviews with me. Today's David Johanson, who's the CEO
of Mediking Studios and the creator of block Lords. David, Welcome, He
great, happy to be here and excited to talk about the gaming and what
three in general. David, I'm very interested in Web three gaming and how
blockchain is integrated. This is something I've been trying to read up more on,
so I'm very excited to speak with you to learn about block lords,
how you guys are integrating Web three tech and token into a blockchain into the
gaming environment. Let's start though with your background, where you're from and what's
your professional background. Yeah, so I'm from Sweden and France. Grew up
all over Europe, went to university in the US, studied film, worked
in Hollywood a few years, and ended up in China kind of randomly,
but it was a turn of faiths that ended up working in my favor and
in China got into gaming. So for the last ten years, I've been
making games, which is really the best job and the most challenging job at
the same time. It's quite exciting. But yeah, essentially, in the
beginning of my career, I was helping a lot of Facebook and mobile games
go from the Asian markets to the Western markets and learned a lot about how
to build free to play economies that way. This is right as free to
play was really starting to take off also in the West, and as I
was making games like that, I definitely gravitated towards strategy games. And once
I discovered crypto in twenty seventeen, with my gaming background, it was kind
of a no brainer, and I've been full time Web three gaming since then.
Oh that's awesome. Now you mentioned you got into crypto in twenty seventeen.
What was your first encounter with bitcoin. I'm always fascinated by folks stories,
you know, maybe they heard it from a friend on a forum,
And what was your aha moment? Yeah, yeah, so I definitely had
it in an aha moment, and it's just pretty long process. But I
was introduced to it fully in twenty seventeen summer there and I just left my
job. I just was over that job, and I wanted to start my
own studio, but just getting you know, as especially then like twenty fourteen,
twenty four fifteen, it was a little easier, but twenty seventeen,
indie game financing was kind of kind of dead. And my friend was like,
oh, well you should, you should look into me in ico.
It's like, what's an ico? It's like, oh, it's crypto blockchain.
Bitcoin sounded buzzworthy, you know. I was like, what is that?
And I had heard bitcoin before, but always i think in the concept
of context of a joke, right, never actually looked into it. So
based on what he said of like, oh, and ico is a he
was like, oh, it's like Kickstarter. So I checked it out.
And even by then Kickstarter was kind of dead, right, so not dead,
but it was definitely not what it had been. And I looked into
it, and I think I took a link LinkedIn course on blockchains how they
worked, just studied a lot about bitcoin. I think it took like three
four days of like studying and really learning, and yeah, at some point
it just clicked, like and I think it was some it was some LinkedIn
course and he had like all these blocks and he was like physically putting the
blocks on top of each other and just showing how immutable it all was,
right, And I think that is when it clicked of like okay, this
is this is real money. Like this works because you you send it and
it's out of your wallet, it's in someone else's wallet, all those all
those nodes, all those minors are verifying it. Then it's this self sustaining
network that really supports itself and verifies itself and you can't cheat. Right,
That was the main thing, Like once you send the money, its south,
once you receive the money, it's in. And I think that that
really started it. So that day I bought my first bitcoin. I think
the price was one thousand dollars then so and then saw it go up to
you know, two or three thousand dollars in the next few weeks. So
it was a very good good time to get in. But yeah, after
that there was no going back. Got into get into icos, get into
ethereum, get into smart contracts. Didn't start a company that summer in crypto
because I was just too new to it and I wanted to learn more first,
but started in twenty eighteen, so it was pretty quick after that,
Oh, that's awesome, and now you have this convergence of your gaming background
and cryptoweb three tech slash blockchain. Right, tell us about block Lords and
what makes it unique as far as a game. Yeah, so original idea
back in twenty seventeen is still the same war as it is today, although
it's definitely evolved a lot. And the idea was you start with a hero.
That hero is non chain asset. This was before NFTs were invented,
so of course since then it's become NFTs. So now now they're NFTs.
You fight for resources, you fight for land, you grow out your farm,
you farm for resources, you deck out your hero, you collect several
heroes, and you build out your little army, and then if you become
powerful enough to actually become a lord or lady, you will earn taxes from
players who are farming or fighting or generating wealth in your region. Right.
So the idea was really to take a feudal economy, which and you know,
feudal economies were very decentralized compared to the economies we have today. Right,
So that was also kind of following the ethos of blockchain, was having
these decentralized feudal economies that are governed different ways, butally on Chaine, right,
And so at the core that was the idea. And then in terms
of gameplay mechanics, a lot of inspirations from games like Total War, h
of Empires, Crusader Kings, really taking my favorite medieval strategy games and then
putting them on an MMO economy, which hasn't really been done before. Like
games like Game of War did that in a mobile setting, but not like
as an MMO true MMO setting. So that's that's kind of what we're trying
to do, is the first big MMO strategy game that's awesome and you mentioned
as of Empires, Man, I spent so many hours playing that game.
Yeah, So now I want to make sure that I break this down for
the people who are listening who are new to the concept of blockchain gaming,
web three gaming and so forth, and what are the incentives, what are
the benefits? And you have the great gameplay and as you outline, but
where does the token and the web three tech come into play and how is
that part of the gaming economy. Yeah, so, really with blog floors,
especially because we've been building it over so many years, different iterations of
it over a long time. The main thing has always been what do we
want out of token? As a game developer, what do you users?
One out of token? And what do you know more passive holders one out
of the token? And those are all different things, right, And so
essentially, as a user, you want to use the token as a currency,
right, You want to use it to buy things you need. What
are those things? Well, this could be in game resources. Those can
be in game heroes, those can be power structures, It can be titles,
it can be cosmetics, it can be battle passes, it can be
anything you want. And so essentially a core part for us is to drive
demand for goods inside of the game that the token is then going to be
able to Users are going to be able to use the token to actually get
those goods, right, And that's why it's very important that we do a
lot of testing now because the token hasn't launched obviously, but what we're doing
now is with regular FIA payments, is we're doing a lot of testing.
For example, our battle passes which are launched in season one, which was
a couple of months ago at a ten dollars price point, but with really
a lot of value in it, and over I mean I think it's over
eighty percent of our daily active users actually bought the battle pass, right,
and so I would as a game developer, that means that's a success,
right, because you launch a product and most of your users actually want to
buy that product, and then the core basic use of the token will be
to buy that actually at a discounted rate compared to FIAT. Right, that's
the first That's the first thing, is like, whatever you want to buy
with FIA, you'll actually be able to buy it with the token at a
discount rate. That's the first use. Then within the game itself, the
game, that's right, the token will have utility that nobody else can get.
Right, So you'll have access to special heroes, you'll have access to
special content, and you'll have access to a special resource called influence, and
influence is essentially what you use to get more and more and more powerful within
the game itself. So that's a very big part of it. Then if
we go more into the out of the game sphere and more into the web
three governance sphere, that's where it gets very interesting too. Right, So
what we've introduced in our in are on the website. Now is the governance
mechanic, which we call the provenance and basically every every couple of weeks,
users will be able to vote for narrative elements of the game. So we
had to vote the first vote ever that closed last week, which is what
is the name of the block Loorse Continent, and they voted for Etheria,
right. So there's a few options etherea prospera and a couple more and they
chose Etheria right. And that actually we're going to be weaving that into the
game itself. Uh. And that goes to narrative, but that's also going
to impact other game design and other choices in the future as well. Uh.
And then of course we do have plans for our own Layer two solution
with b lockboards and the Lord's Token will be used to secure and and basically
help verify those transactions as well. Now, I got a lot of questions
here, and I also want to talk about how this is the changing landscape
in the gaming industry and uh and you know, engaging users and giving them
more uh say in the game, more participation and opate. But before we
get there, tell us about the l r D token. Uh, the
tokenomics around it and which blockchain is it on? Is it etherorem So we
haven't fully announced that yet, but yeah, so far from all the options
we've looked at, uh, Ethereum does offer the most liquidity and it's the
it's essentially the best game to so sorry, it's the best chain to maintain
value in the token. That's it. We are a fully cross chain project.
We currently support iMX, and we support Plygon, and we do have
plans to support more chains in the future. So we strongly see that users'
assets should be fully cross chain and that they should be able to bridge their
assets between different chains. But Etheroreum right now is looking like the strongest contender
for the token itself. Yeah, I'm happy to hear that you're gonna have
cross chain functionality because, like you said, you know that's important. People
are, you know, sometimes part of communities behind different tokens. So if
they're into Polygon and other chains, right to have interoperability I think is certainly
needed and certainly part of the future so you can bridge the gap between different
communities. And that's our philosophy. Our philosophy is if you like a certain
asset, or you trust a certain chain, you should be able to bridge
your hero there essentially, Yeah, for sure. Now let's talk about,
you know, the changing gaming landscape and what you're trying to do here with
what cannsidered Web three gaming. How is the or what's the status of the
gaming industry and do you feel there's been a ramp down and interest in games?
But this could be this model could really reinvigorate people to come back into
gaming because there's a strong incentive and rewards because of these tokens. Yeah,
yeah, I mean definitely. If you look at Web two gaming, there's
a lot of issues right now, especially in the last couple of years with
the ad rules changing with Apple and such that essentially caused well it caused most
free to play business models to completely fall apart. And it's pretty interesting in
what we're seeing now is we're seeing way more funding going into Web three games
than we are seeing two words Web two games. So actually there's a lot
of there's a big brain drain happening as well between Web two and Web three,
and so if you look at the advantages, well, the advantages for
the users there are many. Essentially, there is the ability to own your
assets, which gets overlooked at time or gets some shade at times, I
think because it hasn't mattered so much to most users, But there will be
a point where it does matter, and it has mattered to the users who
have been able, you know, to profit or to sell, or to
be able to actually eke out a living from their time spent playing. I'm
not saying that's why people should play games, but for those people who have
been able to pull it off, it has actually meant quite a lot,
and there is a lot of interest from users to be able to do that
because I mean, at the end of the day, like jobs are getting
harder and harder to get, AI is displacing a lot of people. It's
essentially you know, I like this idea of universal gaming income, right,
and I think that's where the world is moving. If you are probably going
to have more chances to earn a living in digital ecosystems in the future than
you are in the real world, right, which is probably a bit sad
for some people, but I strongly that's where we're heading, if we're not
already there. But that doesn't mean it should all be you know, subsidized
by the game developers, right, and that's why for us, and going
back to the token utility for our token specifically the way we built it is
most importantly. I mentioned that you have to create demand, right, So
whatever you give out, you got to give people a reason to spend as
well. That that's a very important part of it. So going back between
the difference between Web two and Web three from the user perspective, if the
economy is built in a way that makes sense, that's the I mean,
you don't need another reason to play, then there's a chance that you could
get rewarded, you know, not only with a great game and with a
way to spend your time, but actually with some financial benefits whether you're lucky
or because you play well or because you played smart. You know, you
you found something that nobody else want. Now, going away from the user
and into the developer, there's also some very clear benefits as a developer to
go to Web three because what we've seen. You know, we went with
an early access version in September and with a closed beta in June last year,
and the amount of users we got, you know, we got about
five thousand users for a closed beta, and now we're up to almost ninety
thousand users for early access retention rate over fifty percent day one. Those numbers
don't exist in Web two game for a game of our stage, you know,
which is still early access, still a bit raw. There's a lot
to fix. The fact that we're able to get almost one hundred thousand users,
the fact that a lot of them are actually playing. I mean,
we're up to almost twenty thousand users daily. Now that's a ton of data,
that's a ton of feedback, that's a ton of ways, and that's
a ton of comments. And then we can also we get tickets, you
know, and we see what the bugs are and we're able to focus in
on the most important bugs. First. The fact that we're able to get
so much support, so much playtime, so much data that we can use
us to improve the game and create better a better game for the future.
It's much much harder to get Web two, and that's kind of a sad
that's kind of a sad fact. Basically, what people see is only the
viral hits, but they don't see all of the millions of games or thousands
of games that don't make yet. And what's really interesting about Web three is
because that incentive is built, then you get that initial player boost that are
going to help you as developer create a better game. So I think it's
kind of a win win scenario. Yeah, I was about to say that
exact thing. It's a win win scenario because look, I love, for
example, h Vampires, right, but if I could have gotten tokens for
just doing something I love and I'm passionate about and I love the game,
that would have been great. It's win when And you know, you brought
up an interesting concept of universal gaming income. And these are some of the
things I've been talking about in addition to UBI and the metaverse and people having
to earn in the metaverse. So do you see gaming I know we're still
nearly stages going more into the metaverse as we have these headsets get more sophisticated,
well, the headset. I'm not so bullish on the headset itself.
I think we're gonna eventually. You know how Asia skipped skipped the credit card
in a way, they just went straight from cash to to mobile phones.
I think that the same is going to happen with VR and AR. There's
going to be something that comes along in five ten years that's just gonna make
the hardware obsolete in a way, you know, or that's just get rid
of that problem I have. I've developed stuff for VR, but I'm not
just a huge fan of it because I think the helmet gets too cumbersome.
But yes, in terms of do I think, excuse me, do I
think that most people are going to make a living out of digital ecosystems in
the future. I definitely think it's already happening, you know, like gen
Zer or Gen Alpha. Now right, I'm a millennial myself, but Gen
Alpha, Uh, you ask them what they want to be. You know,
in our generation, it was it was you know, fireman or president
or or you know, a filmmaker that that was. That was our vibe.
But now it's all content creator, it's esports, start streamer, YouTuber,
uh, you know, game to have probably a few, but it's
it's all shifted and it's I think it's for the better. You know,
a lot of people are scared about it. A lot of people don't like
it, but I think it's it's really quite exciting and I'm really excited about
what you know, Jealfa is going to come with for the products they developed
because they're probably already starting now, and with AI it's so easy, you
know, to get started developing stuff. But essentially they're plugged in, and
the more plugged in you are, the easier it is to create wealth out
of these ecosystems. Now, walk me through a bit of the process,
because I want to make sure folks who are watching and listening understand the future
capabilities of web three gaming. So let's say I'm in the game, I'm
playing, doing my thing. I'm earning tokens right now as a user.
I can take those tokens and reinvest it in the game, buy things and
so forth. But I can also go just go sell those tokens in the
open market and make an income. Is there in the planning in the future
the ability to stake or lend, you know, with DeFi capabilities, So
maybe I just hold those tokens or some of it, and I'm earning some
sort of passive income on it. Yeah, So obviously we're we're very careful
with how we were this because obviously we won't We don't want to guarantee profits
or earnings or anything like that, because at the end of the day,
you are playing a game and that's as game designers, it's really our job
to create the best game possible and to create the healthiest game economy possible,
but then also provide off ramps and opportunities for users to monetize their attention,
monetize their asset if they can. So. I think for us, the
game itself about play the game as much as possible, get as many resources
as possible, use those resources in a smart way, whether it is to
get heroes, or whether it's to steal resources from others, or whether it's
to ally yourself with other players and get as powerful as you want inside of
the game. That's really the core for the game itself. Then, through
air drops, through leaderboard, through certain mechanics, you can also win some
tokens essentially get some tokens that way, but it's never guaranteed, and that's
a very big part of it is you do have to put in a lot
of time, or a lot of skill, or a lot of assets into
the game to actually be able to get access to those. But then yes,
what we've developed is a system where you actually lock your tokens for an
extented period of time to get in game influence and in game power and essentially
that way you can become more powerful. But again, if you become too
powerful, someone else is going to challenge you and try to get what's yours.
So while we're really trying to create an ecosystem where there are winners and
there are losers, and that's a very important part of having a healthy economy,
I win because a problem with a lot of Web three games that came
out in twenty twenty one, not only the way they actually work, but
also in the way they we're marketed is everybody wins. Like you play to
earn, you get profit no matter what. And that's why I'm very careful
about that language because at the end of the day, it doesn't work like
that. Like it does either becomes a ponzi or you need to find a
way so that actually there are revenue streams that go. And so the way
we're trying to do it is you have a lot of free players who come
in, they play the game for free. That's a very important part of
it. You don't have to pay to play, you can play for free.
You can get better and better. If you're really skilled, you will
find ways to earn some tokens inside of the game, or if you have
some assets to deploy, you can actually deploy the game and probably have a
better chance of winning them inside of the game. But then most importantly,
those with a lot can actually subsidize those with not as much to go and
perform actions that are going to benefit those who sponsor them, right. And
then of course they all go to war against each other, and then there
are going to be some losers and some winners, right. And so to
answer your question, it's never going to be a straight line. And any
game that promises, oh it's a straight line, do this, do this,
do this, and then you will earn I would be very cautious with
actually, because it never works out that way. No, I love that
it mimics the real world economy. Like you said, there's winners and losers,
and you can pay people to do things right. So it's interesting.
There's so many layers to there to that, like an entrepreneurial aspect to it,
right, and like running a business or economy and you're paying people.
So that's fascinating. And I'm just exciting excited for the future of how these
things are going to mature and play out. And I was going to impact
itomy and helping people to earn and it's just yeah, I'm just very fascinated
by as as someone who used to play games. Now, what's on your
roadmap? You know, what can we expect in this year? Yeah,
So we just launched our season one, which was quite a success. As
I mentioned, now we're working on our season two, which is launching quite
shortly, within a couple of weeks. After season two, we're going to
launch our dynasty system. Our Dynasty system, you'll be able to take your
heroes, You'll be able to go on missions, you'll be able to duel
against other heroes. Heroes will start dying, which is NFT permit death essentially.
So a lot of NFT games have had the problems where there's like mass
inflation of NFTs and they go on forever. We have had quite a lot
of NFTs being minted by our users. I'm a big believer in dynamic NFTs
that are created by users. But now that we're adding death, we're actually
going to start seeing the other end as well, and users are essentially going
to be incentivized to kill off their heroes. So it's going to be pretty
interesting to see how many of them actually do ad versus how many don't.
And also as we're adding death, what we'll start adding is the ability for
heroes to get married and have babies. So all of that is coming in
Q two, and after that we're going towards Stronghold battles, which are going
to be large scale battles which are also coming this year. So overall,
pretty packed roadmap. And of course our token launch, which is going to
happen this year. I can't say exactly when, but it's definitely in the
pipeline and lots of work being done there. And most importantly, users who
are playing now, who are active, who are really following and up to
speed to what's going on in the community, have chance to get tokens before
it even launches via the in game game drops. That's great, and to
confirm is maybe a silly question. Your available worldwide for the most part,
anyone who has internet connection can participate, right correct. All you need to
do is go on the Epic Game Store and the game is free, so
anybody can download the game and play for free and get started. You just
need a pretty good PC to play. Cool. Let's talk about the crypto
market at large. You know, given your background getting in twenty seventeen,
the big one ETFs have been incredible. The inflows and have been record breaking,
and the price of bigcoin has been rallying. What are your thoughts on
the big one ETF performance. Yeah, I mean, it's it's amazing.
It's great to see. I think everyone in the space is kind of shocked
how fast everything has happened. You know, it's good to see. Also,
obviously, always a warning to newcomer to approach with caution because obviously this
is great and it feels great and everyone's really excited, but it can also
turn quickly, So just a word of caution to everyone who's entering the space.
You know, take your time, learn, don't have too much fomo.
There's always going to be more opportunities. I think that that's important.
But overall, you know, I'm I'm very excited. We've you know,
our team has been in this since twenty eighteen, you know, building full
time, and that you know how hard the bear markets are. These kind
of days when everything is great, that makes up for it. Overall,
you know, we have a lot of things to look forward to. Ef
ETFs are very likely coming. I don't know if it's this year or next
year. I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but that should
be big. And I mean, you know, I'm more on the gaming
side myself, so I'm definitely not a financial analyst or a bank titan.
But I would say this year or next year, we're going to start seeing
games that head into the million monthly active users and that that's that's going to
be the game changer because right now the institutions are going into it and that
that's obviously huge, and that's going to have a lot of impact, especially
on the big assets like bitcoin and eth and others. But you know,
once we start seeing games that are able to create retail adoption out of nowhere
where it didn't exist before, I think that's when things are going to get
really really interesting. Hard question for you, because you are mentioning, you
know, the rise of these gaming gaming communities and active users and so forth.
When do you think the traditional game makers, if you can call them
that, the ones that may call a duty and other games right will start
to pay attention to web three and be like, oh man, we better
get on board here because we're going to miss the train. This This is
obviously the future, When do you think they're going to have that aha moment?
Yeah, well, I think I think they've all already had it.
I mean they're all paying attention to it. You know, they're they're seeing
I mean we have in block flores three investors that are like Web two giants,
you know, like squar En, x FN plus craft On. They're
all in the project and they're all looking at it. I would say right
now, every every every major Web two publisher developer has at least considered or
has a division that's looking into it. Now. Does that mean anythings that
happens, Probably not. You know, most of these companies are public companies.
Public companies have to be very very careful with anything they do, anything
that could be misconstrued or anything that could be seen as affecting the stock price
negatively. Right, So there's just gonna be a lot more caution also in
general, you know, they just don't understand it as well. And if
they don't understand it, they're not going to handle it as well. And
I would say we're going to see more and more experiments. I think ubi
Soft already announced right that they're doing something with iMX. We saw that was
a few months ago, so you've seen U be soft. I mean,
Square Innix is definitely deep in it. I know a few projects that I
probably can't talk about that are in it as well. So you're going to
start seeing it as for a full triple A game or like the million users
game I mentioned, You're probably that's that's going to come natively, I think,
because and once that happens, then the big ones will start doing that.
Does that make sense? The first first, they don't have to happen
kind of from one of you know what, you know, someone like our
team, someone who's like funded by VCS who kind of makes it happen over
the years, you know, and definitely not easy. But then once there's
that proven success that has mainstream appeal, that's when you start seeing everyone else
piling in. And of course, I mean if Steam were to accept the
n FTS today, that would that would change a lot as well, for
sure. Yeah, that's a great point. And it just takes one game
to have a huge success and then the other is gonna be start paying attention.
Game theory will play out, right. Yeah, let's talk a bit
about n f T S because we saw obviously the game integrates n f t
s. But let's talk about NFTs at large. Where we saw it was
more of collectibles in the past cycle, but we're starting to see dynamic dynamic
NFTs, as you mentioned before, the NFTs that unlock utility and benefits and
perks. What is your outlook for the NFT market. Do you see the
next phase and maybe that's a maturation going beyond collectibles but more utility. Yeah,
yeah, I mean you know that that's been my thoughts since the beginning.
You know, we were very early with DeFi NFTs when I started Cescape,
which was a DeFi n FT infrastructure. I would say the market is
moving there. The only problem with dynamic NFTs is because they don't have set
most of them don't have set collection numbers right, it becomes much harder for
speculators to value it right. Like the reason pfps were doing so well twenty
twenty one. I mean, A, there was a lot of liquidity in
the market. I wanted to go to NFTs, but B the pfps were
just so easy to value because you have ten thousand of them. They're all
more or less the same except for some small random stats that don't really matter
because there's no product associated with it, and then you know, you put
celebrities on that pushing it and then they would do well. Right, that
that was kind of the formula and it worked very similar to the ARC twenties
of twenty seventeen. So I think you know what is missing from from dynamic
NFTs or more, you know, more inflationary collections, You could say,
you know something like actually something like what we have. I mean most gaming
NFTs have to be like that because if you say there's only x amount,
then you limit your user based only X amount, right, and that's not
going to work. So it's gonna come down to what makes what's gonna make
what three gaming work? Right? You need like that drive driven gamers demand,
right, And I mean just looking at us our game, we have
the farmers, right, and the farmers are three dollars floor price I think
two to three dollars usually, But then we have the unique heroes and they
have I think floor price of sixteen seventeen thousand right now, so dollars.
So that's that's how it's done, right. It's like you have different types
of NFTs that have different types of values to the gamers. And then really
it is up to the market and the gamers themselves to determine that value.
Yeah, for sure, I'm excited to see this next phase for NFTs,
and I've been talking a lot about it on the podcast and obviously trying to
see what is like another major use case where NFTs can be inserted, whether
it be in the car industry or healthcare, whatever it may be. I
think it's coming, but you know, we have to. Yeah, I
mean, it's literally it's anything like to me, the comparison I made,
you know, is back in twenty twenty one, people saw NFTs as picassos,
right, and every picasta was unique and very expensive and all of that.
But I see it more like a plastic box, like you can put
anything inside of your NFT. It can be something physical. I think d
deepend has some limitations that that it could definitely take off, but I don't
see it quite taking off as the digital realm. But yeah, you could.
It could literally be anything. That's the thing. So any product that
could be interesting, you're going to be able to put it into an NFT
for sure. Now you know, this technology is growing at a rapid pace,
and we're seeing countries around the globe are putting together crypto regulations. The
EU put the MICA regulations, the UK did, there's the US has some
bills in the house. Obviously you're not in the US, but you know,
what are your thoughts on global crypto regulations that are coming. Obviously you
want balance regulations. It protects innovators but also protects consumers. What are your
thoughts? Yeah, I mean regulations needed. It's I mean, it's too
slow happening. We everything, everyone in the space wishes there were clearer regulations
around I mean, you know, looking at regular gaming, fee to play
still doesn't have really solid regulation around it. Social media doesn't have solid regulation
around it. People are taking AI seriously, which is nice, so there's
bound to be some regulation around it. I mean for us as a projects,
not much we can do except follow their rules, you know, so
as as as long as you give us clear rules, will follow them.
But yeah, I would urge every country to take to get take gaming and
web three very seriously and try to put in business friendly and consumer friendly regulations
in place as fast as possible, because the weight is what makes innovation harder
and harder. Yeah. Absolutely, Now you just mentioned AI. I'm curious
if you have any thoughts on the impact of AI with gaming. I don't
know what that looks like or what it could look like, but any thoughts
there. Yeah, I mean it's huge, it's huge. Concept. Art
is essentially now entirely done with mid Journey and the similar tools. Content creation
you know, in scripts for for both for our visuals and for in game
content, all done with AI now. But not when I say all done
with AI generated by a I but then you know, verified and improved by
by humans, which probably won't be needed in a few years. It's funny.
I was telling you my art director five years ago even more, Yeah,
twenty seventeen, I told him this, Yeah, one day I'll be
able to replace you by AI, you know, kind of jokingly, and
he didn't believe. You're, like, that's never going to happen. And
now, I mean, we're at a point where I'm not gonna We're not
going to replace him. But it's it's pretty crazy how fast it's gone,
and it's pretty i mean, obviously it's scary for everyone how it's going to
be in five years, but you know, as a business owner, as
a founder, it is pretty incredible that we're able to be more efficient and
be able to do a lot more. And uh, yeah, I kind
of wish I had that always, you know, but probably as good I
didn't, so I learned how to how to vet it a bit better.
But yeah, for example, in game design, my co founder Nikki,
he's built a full on block coorse game design guru that's helping us with all
of our tables, all of our configurations, a lot of our content,
and we we are looking for ways to add AI directly into the game to
generate content that is a bit challenging and also slow, so we're kind of
trying to find the best way there. But yeah, I think overall it's
a huge benefit to us as a business and to the consumers. And yeah,
pretty excited to see what comes out next, and also pretty excited to
see what products we can create because I think everyone's going to have to do
it to stay competitive. Yeah, it's going to be fascinating. You know.
As you're saying that, I'm thinking of, you know, playing a
game and I have an AI assistant in the game, maybe suggesting strategies and
things like that. But it's you know, it's it's more customizable based on
what's happening because the AI is processing the information faster than I can. I
don't know, but you know, it seems like something might be down in
the road. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Awesome. I got
some wrap up questions here for you, Firsus. If you could create your
own metaverse, what would the theme be? I mean, this is the
theme. I like, you know, medieval medieval warfare that that would definitely
be the theme. So just movie Roman Empire, either Roman Empire, evil
stuff. I figured, I figured, you know, since this is the
theme of the game. Rapid fire questions. Favorite food, fairy food,
I'd say sushi. Favorite musician or band. Let's say Mozart, let's go
classic Nice, favorite movie, favorite movie, Clockwork, Orange, that's a
good movie too. Favorite book, favorite book. I'm gonna say Sidartha.
And when you're not doing anything at BlockWorks, what are you doing for fun?
As a hobby? I like playing the yuke, I like music,
trading crypto Obviously it's a it's a fun one. But yeah, overall,
I'd say walk my dog and be with my wife. Awesome, David.
I am excited for the future updates around block Lords, and I'm gonna have
to start playing this game, and I love the one step of Web three
merging with gaming here. I would love to have you back on in the
future, you know, as things protest. Thank you so much for joining
me. Thank you so much. Happy to beer