Future of NFTs in Web3, Notably in Gaming:
A Twitter Space Conversation with our Guilds
Recently, we had an exciting and profound Twitter Space discussion about the future of NFTs in Web3 with some of our guilds. We consider guilds as the communities of games, which is even more true with blockchain games. So, talking about this with Good Games Guild, Infinity Force, PathDAO, Play It Forward DAO, Real Player DAO, Skill Labs, and UniX Gaming Guild was super fun and highly educational. We really enjoyed this conversation, so we wanted to share a recap.
Please note that the text has been edited for length and clarity.
If you prefer, you can also listen to the Future of NFTs in Web3 Twitter Space here:
Angelic, Jose Martinez
Welcome, everyone. This is going to be a very special Twitter Space. We will be talking about NFTs and Web3 with some of our guilds. We’re really excited. We’ve been running a contest on Twitter where people send us questions, and we’re going to be answering the winners’ questions as well.
First, I would like to ask, how does a blockchain game bring value?
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: First off, blockchain games are video games, and if people enjoy playing them, there’s inherent value right there. If I could have owned my Arcanite Reaper back when I was 16 years old in real life, and its value appreciated, that would have opened up many doors for me from a financial perspective.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: I couldn’t agree more. I played a lot of World of Warcraft, and I also had a Gladiator Mount. For me, it has sentimental value. But this blockchain space also has real value, and this is also an additional aspect that brings it to the table.
Good Games Guild, Wilsen: I think the blockchain is still observing the idea to stay about the economy, but we are still developing the industry right here and giving all it needs to keep it growing. It does give really good value, especially in terms of true ownership and self, and I believe in this industry’s growth in the next few years. I find it interesting.
Skill Labs, Iskander: When I was working on the publishing side and building games, ownership was one of the biggest motivators for gamers. All the game developers were trying to introduce ownership into their games. Web3 gives us another life because it increases ownership. I also would like to add about the value that the game developers can have from that, not only players, because play-to-earn has been in the games for about ten years now. For example, some guilds in World of Warcraft were farming gold and then selling it. Ofcourse it got banned. Developers weren’t receiving anything in that market, but developers are participating in it now. That’s really cool.
Play It Forward DAO, Cholo: One thing I would also add is, apart from the composability and the transferability of NFTs, what’s really been interesting in blockchain gaming is it’s allowed another layer of investment from a game standpoint. Investors essentially can allocate capital towards the player economy. Before, it wasn’t possible, and you either had to invest in a developer or any games infrastructure on Web 2.0. There’s this whole new investment opportunity in guilds where you can get direct exposure to the player economy. This is quite powerful, and how that brings value to more people.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
Had, you’re always talking about how we will bring value to our future gamers. Any comment on this?
Play It Forward DAO, Cholo: I guess adding value from a guild standpoint spans across a number of ways. Of course, we help players access the space by onboarding them and educating them from the standpoint of what a blockchain game is. How is it different from a traditional game? What do they need to get on board, and what do they need to get started? Some of the folks on this call are building tools to help, and every guild approaches it differently.
Another super important thing is how guilds build community. When you bring together thousands of players from different walks of life, there is a lot of holding and a lot of responsibility for the guild to direct that mass of people towards a common goal. That’s super exciting, and every guild has its unique twist on it, which makes it all interesting from a players’ standpoint to pick the guild that fits their needs.
PathDAO, Don Johnson: I would second that the community is really at the forefront. I think of what the guilds are doing not only in lowering the barriers to entry with education or assets but serving as a catalyst to bridge those communities together. At PathDAO, we have gamers from all over the world, and not only are we helping the gamers to get started, but once they’re in the games, that’s the starting point. That’s where you start bringing different communities and cultures together. It’s an amazing thing to see and experience.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: I wanted to say a few words related to the previous question. I think it’s important not to separate blockchain from gaming, as we are in this merge of seeing this new technology coming to gaming, many of us realize that cryptography has been around for tens of years. Then, blockchain technology, as much as it became much more accepted and usable in the last few years, it has been around for a while.
There are things in gaming that make gaming really fun and engaging, and blockchain is just helping us do that in another way. It’s the simplest example, but we have had a chat mechanism forever, right? But then there was encrypted chat, and once we had the encrypted chat, why not have it that way? Because it was just a better way to do things. It didn’t change the specific function of the product. It just added a value that was so obvious and so integrable. Now every chat mechanism in existence has encryption.
In that same sense, I think blockchain gaming is no different than gaming in general. Now we have a way to incorporate all these things that make games fun, and guilds are a massive part of that. Guilds always have been part of gaming in many good games, especially in the MMO space. They incorporated guilds into the game in a way that in the communities, you could have camaraderie, and you could do quests together. It was just more fun playing with friends as much as it was fun to play against groups with your groups and such. Guilds are just as important as they ever were in gaming. Nothing changed, but now we have a way of doing that in a way that enables guilds to be even more engaged and have more ownership.
When I think about guilds, the word that comes to my mind is not even guilds, and I just see them as communities. We want communities in our games.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
That’s an excellent intro for my next question. There are traditional games and blockchain games, and for some reason, they seem to be in a clash. Do you think they can coexist and actually complement each other?
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: I want to answer going off of what Had said because, in our last conversation, we touched on precisely this, and he made such a good point. We used a metaphor where I’m in San Francisco, and right across the Bay Bridge is Oakland. The communities are so close together, but it seems like they’re so far away. If we use that as a metaphor for blockchain gaming and traditional gaming, really, there is such a small distance between the two. I think what you said was that traditional game makers are hesitant to take the plunge because it takes a while to understand how everything works, and they’re busy building the games. So if we end up bridging, putting that Bay Bridge between both worlds, we benefit from the highest quality game makers and those that understand everything to do with decentralized finance and the blockchain end. That’s really what I see the future is holding. It just takes a bit of education on both parts.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: In the traditional gaming space, if a World of Warcraft player goes to, for example, Final Fantasy XIV, there are gatekeepers. They are trying to keep out their rival’s gaming community. This is what we need to eliminate. The same thing is also occurring between traditional games and blockchain games, and I think with proper games and proper projects, we will get rid of that and bring the communities together.
PathDAO, Don Johnson: I think that’s where putting the focus on fun really matters. To bridge that gap, fun has to be at the center of that. There are huge communities on both sides, and I think that if you can connect them through having fun, that’s the way to bring them together. Not looking at it as Web 2.0 versus Web3. People play games because they have fun, and it’s entertaining.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: I think that the simple word fun encapsulates everything we could talk about. People, including us, have been trying to make fun games, and that’s been the main piece for a long time now, and there’s been a lot we found along the way. You know, just what makes a game fun. We can’t just put this aside, right? It just has to be fun at the end of the day, so I totally agree.
Skill Labs, Iskander: I think that’s why this question occurs. Unfortunately, most of the developers in the space are not thinking much about fun, and that’s why we’re excited about partnering with you guys. Once the players get the power, instead of game developers having all the power because nothing in the game belongs to you in classical games. I’m not sure many players will want to play the other way when your achievements, character, or items in the game do not belong to you. For us, it’s a natural next step or transition. The only reason this is questioned is that there are many games right now that are poorly designed, and not many Web 2.0 players will want to play these games.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
Traditional games have microtransactions, and their developers are making good money through it. Do you think that’s going to be something that will make them not want to coexist with blockchain games?
Skill Labs, Iskander: I think they are afraid of that. They can lose their stable source of income, but that’s how innovations work. There will be some believers who will do this, and you are those believers, for example. I believe that when you give power to the players, you get a part of that value created through the community. This can bring much bigger revenues than traditional games.
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that point. I think the people that you know still benefit from that a bit of a predatory monetization scheme within games. They are highly addicting, and I couldn’t tell you how much money I’ve spent on in-game cosmetics throughout my entire life. But I don’t even own any of them. I think that what’s eventually going to happen is this trickling over of all the top and highest quality game makers who were in it at the beginning, who were in it for fun, who will get back to that passion and realize that this is just the next place to go. I also think that’s being reflected in a lot of the investments coming in from VCs and other areas around the world into the space. It’s not necessarily for the sake of profit, so it’s good to see that there’s so much support behind this movement.
Skill Labs, Iskander: I think the community of the Web 2.0 players is ready for that because, in my previous project, I worked with the top 1% of gamers. We worked with around 5000 of them and through them for AAA titles, like the Warzone and others. For them, earning money by playing the games is the biggest dream of their lives because they have this social pressure that they’re just playing the games. And they want to show the community, the society, that being able to earn money by playing the games is a great thing.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: To touch base again with revenue and everything. If you build the proper project, if the community loves your game, you will make revenue. It’s very, very simple, and I think the blockchain gaming space is actually built for that.
PathDAO, Don Johnson: It’s interesting. We’re really at the Golden Age of gaming, an intersection of all these technologies coming together and, obviously, groups. With what’s happening specifically with Web3 and the expansion of the GameFi space, whether that be a move to the play-to-earn section. We’re at this time where Web3 is going to be able to onboard many millions of people that traditional Web 2.0 gaming has not been able to do. I think that it’s an amazing time ahead, and it’s a great space that we’re in.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
Do you guys think that play-to-earn is ruining the fun in gaming?
Skill Labs, Iskander: I’d say that it’s not true. There are games like Lineage 2 and World of Warcraft, really old games, really fun games for a specific audience, and they had a display sharing feature. People were able to earn money by playing these games even though it wasn’t really fun. I think the biggest problem is the developers who went after the hype and tried just to build a play-to-earn game, which in fact, we call animated staking. It’s not about the phenomenon itself; it’s about the maturity of the companies and teams trying to build products in that space, which is growing really fast.
PathDAO, Don Johnson: At PathDAO, whenever we’re looking at projects, it has to be a play and earn, as it goes back again to having fun. If people are there just to earn, when there’s another project that comes along where they can earn more, they’re going to go to that next project. In that sense, both from the gamers’ standpoint and an investment standpoint, we are only looking to deploy with games that are fun. Then, the gamers look at it as playing and earning as opposed to just having to put in the time every day to earn.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: Maybe the term itself — play-to-earn — is something that people connect right now with a negative thing. But if you put it as play and earn, it puts the emphasis on play first, on the game itself, and then the earning part; you can call it the cherry on the top.
Play It Forward DAO, Cholo: The fun filter is actually one of our key criteria. Whenever we decide to come into the game, because as we’ve seen, even in the peaks and troughs of games that have gone through, the hype cycle and the crash, that’s what kept some of our players playing the game that they really enjoyed it. We still have many players who play Axie because they really enjoy it. We’re really looking at the games with a strong fun element, and it makes sure that players will continue to come in and support the game even when it’s in its downturn.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: The funny thing is, we’ve been earning in games for a long time. We’ve always earned gold and points, and we always even earned money in some aspects. Some games had wallets in them. What’s possibly changing here is that now that gold or that money that we were earning in games has some kind of tie to what we might decide is real life, right? Because it can be somehow converted into real money, whatever that is at this point. So what is the function of crypto and blockchain here? In my eyes, all it’s doing is just creating another level of immersion because now, what you earn is something more tangible. In some ways, graphics becoming better and more realistic creates more immersion because it just brings you back to what you know to be real in real life. Then the game becomes more immersive because the graphics are more realistic. I think it’s the same thing with the earning mechanisms and games. Now that you know that this is real money, it makes the game more immersive, which is what we’re excited about. Making the game more immersive because that translates into more fun, right? The part that comes after that, once that becomes the thing, it is immersive, you want to be in that world. The economy will build itself because that’s how money is made. That’s how great economies are built, not by focusing on the money itself, but actually on the product itself, on the mechanism itself. Is it immersive? Is it fun? Once that’s all there, the rest will follow.
Real Player DAO, Jay: We have to say that play-to-earn has ruined the fun of gaming in the past year. Play-to-earn, I think in 2020–2021, has ruined the fun of gaming with games that lived for a very short time. Some players earned some money, and some lost lots. For a long time, no matter the games as well as the chains, including the BSC or Polygon. None of them can support a game to be very advanced. I think in the near future, play-to-earn can be profitable and can be fun. But for now, I think we have to see that play-to-earn has ruined some fun.
Sorry to say that, but in fact, we can see that many players, at least in China, are eager to join play-to-earn. Some of them for profit, some for fun, and the full ownership of the NFTs. I think the numbers are enormous. But right now, we need to admit that play-to-earn games currently are not enough in terms of fun; they don’t feel good.
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: Those are good points, but let’s just remember that the winds are shifting, and we’re already in the middle of it. I think that the space is going to move very, very quickly. From what I’ve seen, speaking with all of our gaming partners who are going to come onto our platform, it is that they are highly focused on the customer, which is the player base. Again what everyone else has been saying is that for a blockchain game to be sustainable, it needs an active and growing player base. The only way to do that is to focus on what the player base is saying and develop a game they love to play and think of earning almost as a side effect of the gaming.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: I agree with both points. It’s just that I think maybe this is an excellent time to realize we’re talking about games in a general context, but there are different kinds of games within the game industry. Just like when mobile phones were introduced into the gaming industry, we suddenly had these new kinds of games. Casual games just took a jump, and it just became a whole new market, and it did its thing, right? So we could possibly see the same thing happen with play-to-earn.
When there are all these people who want to use gaming, like gamification in a sense, to actually make money. That’s fine, but maybe this is a good time to clarify that what we are after doing is to provide a really fun and immersive game that you can also make money with. Somebody else could decide that they’re going to use gamification to create a system for people to make money. That’s not what we are after.
Within gaming, just like when we see new technologies come in, there could be new fractions and new splits, but one thing has remained through over whatever technology was introduced. The most fun and immersive games have certain dynamics and certain usability, and those kinds of players who want to be immersed and want just to have fun with games are expecting the same thing over and over. And there are game theories. One could go crazy and make a career on how to make a game fun, and that’s just not going to necessarily change just because new technology is introduced. But regardless, this whole realm could be split into a new industry, a new genre of gaming that would focus solely on making games and using gamification.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
How is NFT gamification changing the gaming industry?
Real Player DAO, Jay: I think the most important thing about NFT is the full ownership. This is very important because, in the days before the blockchain games, the players had no ownership of the in-game assets. In-game assets were all produced by the company. This is something people care about, especially in the age of gamification. If a game dies, I think the NFTs should still carry some value. If the game dies and the NFT loses all its value, then I don’t think it should be the new style of approaching gaming. This is the most important thing for people to consider when thinking about having NFTs in the game.
Good Games Guild, Wilsen: In my opinion, it will take some time. Maybe a few years or even five to ten years to adopt this new technology and innovation. From the traditional game perspective, they will adopt the NFTs for a highly rare collection first, so they go to the players who really love the game and have been a fan for a long time and have no problem acquiring some high-value assets for the game. The composition is ideal, and they will continue to adopt more mechanisms using the NFT standard contract. In the next few years, I believe we will have more developers employing standard contracts that can be used not only for the Web3 or blockchain games, but developers will also be using it for traditional games to create a better or a different experience for their players.
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: I think interoperability of games is important, and it’s something that’s going to take a very long time to solve. But I see that many games are coming out from gaming studios in the short term. Some of the games that they’re putting out are almost like a marketplace of games where they have ten mini-games or something. Maybe the NFTs in that little microcosm of games can have transferability over into the other games, and so they can keep their value. The tricky part with identity and holding onto something that had value at one time and now no longer has value, but should still be part of what you own because you just spent so much time on it, is how do we transfer that value over into something else that remains tangible? This is a question I don’t know the answer to, but I believe smarter minds are currently working on it, and a solution will present itself in the future. Relatively speaking.
Skill Labs, Iskander: I also think that NFTs were great in preserving the value and interoperability in the past years. For example, I was playing an MMO game, I played it for one year, and I earned a lot of end game items, etc. Then I suddenly see a better game for myself, and I want to play another game, but then I’ll have to start from the beginning because there is no ownership in it. NFTs are enabling the developers to build on each other’s legacy. What if you were a great player in one game and could earn something in World of Warcraft? I think there are a lot of opportunities, and a lot of experiments need to be made to understand how to better use it to the full amount of the value that NFTs can bring.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: I’m really excited about this NFT business because partially, they put the focus back on the game dynamics that I love, which is actually focusing on the character itself, on the objects, and pointing the arrows back to the player. Where when you create things, own things, and have your character, all of it just suddenly has more value. I think what that’s going to do is to drive game design in general towards where it’s already been going.
If you remember back in the day, you chose from 3 characters, and that was your character, and you played it. Then later in gaming or now, you could make some modifications to your character, and then more you know, you go fast forward in the timeline. Now people are expecting to make changes to their avatar, and you want to make these little modifications, so it’s really yours. The ownership feeling, not necessarily just monetary, the feeling of ownership has been coming along, and the use of NFTs is just going to accelerate that, and we’re going to see a lot more of that. We’re going to see a lot more tools that enable people to craft things and enable their characters to be just the way they wanted them to be because it’s theirs. And that’s also another aspect I’m just excited about.
Real Player DAO, Jay: The one important thing we need to know, in my opinion, is that the NFTs change the way we raise funds. Since last year, there has been very serious control on game licensing in China. A lot of small teams, even some middle-sized teams of game developers, cannot get a license to produce a game, and they can not raise sufficient funding to produce a game, but the NFTs offer them a chance. If they are really creative and know how to do things on the blockchain, it will be much easier for them to raise sufficient funding to produce a game. I think this is something NFTs have helped the small game development teams with.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
Do you think gaming NFTs should have higher monetary value because of the in-game utility they provide and the sentimental value they have, as opposed to the NFTs that don’t?
Angelic, Had Erdogan: This ties into what I was saying. What you create in the game and what is really yours is just more valuable to you as a player. That’s just human nature because, just like you said, there’s a sentimental value that goes with that. Once something is more valuable to you, you would be willing to pay more for it yourself, right? So there’s that first piece, and then the second piece is if within the game you build a character that is more enabled than others. Going back to the example of World of Warcraft or any other MMO, when you have a high-level character, you can obviously do more things than a low-level character, and therefore, it would be worth more. So there are two elements there; one is the personal value to you, which immediately translates into something that you would pay more for. Then there’s the second element of it. Once you upgrade your character in ways that other people view as valuable, whether it’s the ability to do more things or the way it looks, yes, of course, it will increase its value, in my opinion.
PathDAO, Don Johnson: I would just add that I think how NFTs are being viewed in terms of utility is evolving very quickly, and we have yet to see. But generally speaking; obviously, not all will survive. The best will evolve, and as in any space, there’ll be a lot of competition.
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: It hearkens back to what we were all talking about regarding play-to-earn versus play and earn and the sentimentality around ownership over something dear to you. We keep using WoW as an example because it’s a revolutionary game. I can remember back in vanilla, I had a recipe as a tailor, and I was the only person on the server who could produce it, and it was so silly because it was just a cosmetic. I would produce an endless amount of the items and put them in the auction house. That was this hilarious passion of mine and made the game really special. But then there is the earning aspect of it if you want to finish all of the end game content and collect NFTs or have an NFT that is very powerful. Other people who are playing the game and approach it more seriously are impressed by it, and it has a lot of value because it’s allowing me to complete different aspects of the game. Then yes, the value will go up. I agree with that sentiment entirely.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: Depending on how you look at it, maybe it is hard to achieve or to get the item. Be it the mount from Mythic Jaina, which is very ultra-hard to get, and it should have value because it’s a great challenge. On top of that, you have sentimental value. Maybe it was the first NFT you’ve ever got; it has personal and emotional value. Then you have other things that are behind a challenge, be it the Gladiator Mount or the Mount from Jaina. I’m using WoW as an example because I am a huge WoW fan. I think it definitely can be one test.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
Do you think that gaming will be the key to the global adoption of the metaverse?
Real Player DAO, Jay: In the media of China, people always doubt the value of PFP (profile picture). That means people cannot understand why the BAYC is worth so much money and how that works. For them, P-BAYC is just a photo. Yet no one doubts the value of a game as long as the game is interesting. As long as GameFi can reach a similar level to other games, no one will doubt the value of a game compared with the PFP. I believe that GameFi could be the most important thing and the earliest thing in the metaverse to be widely adopted.
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: I agree with that quite a bit. There seems to be this split in America between people who don’t understand NFTs but are participating and then people who are using NFTs in some form of utility. The utility aspect in gaming is what sets it apart from the speculative aspect of something like BAYC, and in terms of global adoption, gaming serves as a great gateway. We have 8 billion people in the world, and how many can afford to play video games versus working? We saw play-to-earn emerge in all these countries in Southeast Asia. And for people, many of whom are unbanked or lack access to traditional financial services, this serves as tools to financial freedom as on-ramps and off-ramps that they didn’t have before. In that sense, gaming could lead to global adoption of not only the metaverse but of DeFi and other aspects of Web3 in general.
Skill Labs, Iskander: It’s also important to note that games are a medium. There are many other mediums, but it can be noted that games are becoming one of the most understandable things. The segment of people who played games at least once is growing rapidly. About ten years ago, I worked in a publishing company and published games. The profile of a gamer was some nerd who’s sitting and playing games all the time. Nobody understood that, but now there are 3 billion gamers out there. Soon probably, we won’t have people who did not play a game at all. The oldest games appeared thousands of years ago, which is one of the most natural interactions for people. That’s why games should make it easier for people to transfer to the Web3.
Real Player DAO, Jay: Even compared with SocialFi, GameFi is better. I do not think any SocialFi can compete with Twitter. But in real life, there isn’t an equivalent game. I think GameFi can offer everyone a chance to be a part of it, even if they have no idea what a token is. They can play the game from the start because there is no risk, and it doesn’t need to cost anything. They can borrow NFTs; they can play the game after work. I believe that compared with anything in the metaverse, for many of us, GameFi is the quickest way for people to get started.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: I think it’s good to take a step back from what we are looking at. Because we’re so in it, and there are all these trends happening, we have to realize that we’re looking at a new technology. It’s not just blockchain, but there are a lot of developments happening in the creation of Web3, in the creation of the metaverse. We’re looking at an interactive simulated reality is what we’re trying to create here, and that’s already happening. As soon as there were websites, suddenly, the information exchange became just a one-way street, like watching TV or listening to the radio. Now you could actually interact with it. You could actually direct it, click through it, and then we started evolving from there. There were movies even and still are, where you could choose your ending, etc. It all just became more interactive, where you were more and more immersed.
Now we’re looking at the next level, the ideal level of the metaverse like you see in science fiction books, and where the name comes from, is a world that’s just like ours. But you can actually plug into that world with your avatar, and then you can actually engage in things and do things there. So looking at it from the perspective of what Web3 is, it’s an interactive simulated environment. From there on, when you start taking things into pieces, once again, what better technology is there on the planet than gaming to create an interactive simulated environment? That’s what we need to ask.
I think then the answer becomes obvious that it is gaming. Gaming will be metaverse, and I think gaming will drive what metaverse is. I’m not saying all metaverse will be games, but the technology itself, in my eyes, certainly will come from gaming. Especially a few of the good games could define what metaverse will be, and they will probably merge within that. It’s really exciting times, and I don’t know how long it will take to reach this massive metaverse level.
We have companies like Facebook that completely shifted their direction toward what’s coming. But within that, as far as gaming and the metaverse is concerned, I don’t see them as separate because when I look at the metaverse and forget the big name, it’s basically just trying to create a more realistic interactive simulated environment, kind of like the world we live in. I think gaming is by far ahead of anything else to be creating that, and then, of course, the introduction of these new technologies like blockchain and all that is just enabling it further because what do you need in the world? You need objects, you need interaction, and you need a trading system. To create this trading system, you need a secure way of doing that. Then you need to create objects to trade objects, and what’s a better way of doing this than NFTs? It’s the best we know because it’s encrypted, you can have ownership, and you can exchange it. In some ways, just stepping back beyond the actual naming conventions of all these, it seems very obvious to me that gaming will be the driving factor in the creation of the metaverse.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: I just want to add one thing, the accessibility that gaming will give to the materials. It will be the easiest way to access the metaverse through gaming. And we need to also take that into consideration.
Angelic, Had Erdogan
Before we move on, I want to ask a question because we have so many amazing guilds here. I’d love to hear how you think your guild will enhance the experience in gaming? I know this is beyond the title, but I just can’t help my curiosity. I’d love to hear a little bit about what role guilds will play in Web3, including NFTs or GameFi, and beyond.
PathDAO, Don Johnson: We were talking a lot earlier about community, and I think that as a DAO, it has to stand at the forefront of what we do. It’s been really interesting. We have improvement proposals that the actual community votes on, and seeing how DAOs evolve and interact with the game will be another topic.
What’s interesting is we’re talking about the metaverse and these virtual worlds, but also how it ties back in real life to what we’re doing with that community. This is what leads our project. One thing that sets PathDAO apart is not only our transparency with our app and with our investments; we have an app that is updated weekly, but also how we’re working in real life with our scholars.
We already have live a FinTech-like program where gamers can receive an uncollateralized loan of up to $500 based on their play-an-earn history. These loans are as low as 2%. It’s interesting to see how the gaming world can also affect people in real life.
We’ve had people who have already received these loans who were able to use them to buy all the stuff that they needed to receive a new job or get all the books and pay for their tuition. It’s interesting to see how the connections come back to these people in real life. That’s something that I’m really proud of at PathDAO that we’ve launched.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: What we also can and will provide is proper education to build this space, how to enter, and provide help. For the community to have easy access and learn, educating them properly about all the small details around this space is also a considerable factor that all guilds out there should also strive for.
Play It Forward DAO, Cholo: Our vision is to enable GameFi and gaming as a viable career option. Like PathDAO, we help our scholars figure out how to get their financial house in order. What did they do with the proceeds, and what did they make? We also work with the really good scholars to have them play more than one game for us and multiply their earning potential. At the same time, we provide coaching and career advancement opportunities for our players so they can make a career out of GameFi.
The researchers who analyze games for us are scholars promoted through continuous contribution to the community. Some of our coaches are streamers, and some of our more esports-focused team members were all identified through the funnel that is our scholarship program. For us, that’s one of our key objectives and how we want to make sure anyone coming into the GameFi space is able to find the right outcome for themselves, whether financial or even beyond that from a career standpoint.
Real Player DAO, Jay: In China, we are the most active guild, and I am very confident when we meet with our GameFi partners because we are their option if they want to conduct marketing in China. Due to the problem of language, policy, and even the Internet, there are many problems. There are many gaps between China and the whole world. Yet we cannot ignore the massive community from China.
We offer a way to play the game for people who do not want to buy the NFTs. For people who are rich, we help them choose the right game. I think in the near future, there will be hundreds or even thousands of games, and in that space, I do not think anyone could find the right game. As a guild, we will connect real players to the good games. This is very important for a regular person entering the age of GameFi.
Skill Labs, Iskander: As Skill Labs, what we’re trying to do is actually bring transparency to GameFi. Because there are many questions, but there aren’t that many answers. Which game should I play? How much would I earn? How do I do this and that? We’re building tools for the community. Tools like real-time game analytics with the key economic metrics, game-specific economic metrics, or for games we’re helping to integrate the CRM, where you write just five lines of code, and you have a dashboard or guilds can manage their scholars, and for gamers, we’re trying to give them the ownership of their achievements.
We are monitoring the traction of gamers across the metaverse, including classic games, and we are helping them to prove that to get better deals from guilds or investors.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: We, as guilds, will build the bridge between traditional gaming and blockchain gaming. Be it introducing the esports and everything else around and inside this space, I think we will be the bridge.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
We’re going to continue with our community’s questions in the comments, and the first one comes from Kornilov Kirill. The question is: Could NFTs become a bursting bubble like FTP and Telenet before something more global than the Internet once was? After all, it wasn’t until after the dot-com crash that people witnessed truly meaningful innovation.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: FTP is basically a protocol that runs on TCP IP. Without getting into the technical of it, TCP IP is still a major technology in existence that runs so much of what enables us to talk even right now. In some ways, it’s evolved, but it’s not going away. Some of these things that enable things might evolve and turn into something else. You know, NFT might be called KFT. It’s not necessarily going to change. Once again, the idea is that within the metaverse, we need a way to securely trade items. We need a way to have ownership. We need a way to enable communities like guilds to act in unison. We are mechanisms, and so are all these things, whatever we name them. That’s why I like to take a step back and look at what’s happening in the bigger picture. They might evolve, and their names might change, but I don’t see how they could go away.
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: I don’t want to get too into the weeds with the historical aspect of the dot-com crash, but I know that it involved a massive influx of capital investment into projects that maybe wouldn’t have too much of a use case. People love to compare the acceleration of blockchain technology and Web3 in a similar way to the adoption of the Internet. And while it’s interesting to compare the two, you can’t necessarily draw a direct correlation or say that because this happened in the past, it will happen again. I think it’s two entirely different circumstances and one in which we’ve had over two decades of learning. So much of it came from venture capitalists, where all the money is being invested in projects. You even see that whole industry shifting right now and people being more protective over their investments or investing in things that truly have legs. I can’t see a bubble bursting in the same way that the dot-com crash happened. If we’re affected by the market, by looking at Bitcoin and Ethereum, we’re all used to market cycles, and so that may or may not happen in the same ways that happened before. No one knows, and no one can predict it. I just can’t see this going away or stopping, hitting a wall, and then a couple of years later, it’ll be picked up again.
Skill Labs, Iskander: Even though I agree with Infinity Force, there are some similarities. During the dot-com bubble burst, what happened is there was a huge amount of capital that went to the teams who were there not for the long term but for the quick buck and hype. Unfortunately, that’s what is happening with GameFi as well.
That’s our responsibility as guilds and as a community to know to help it be long term, not short term, and not try to support teams that are there for three months and then they do not want to do anything. The biggest difference is that I see many teams who are there to build great games and to build fun games. The ratio of those teams is growing really fast compared to 3 months ago, and I think we’re in a better position right now than before.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: I should clarify that when I was saying no, I meant the general trend of NFTs going away. I agree there are similarities to the dot-com bubble and the crash. It’s just that there are going to be similarities to the success of that era as well. Amazon was built during those times when everybody else was building stores online, right? And now look at the value of Amazon. It didn’t fail.
Not only didn’t fail, but it also succeeded more than just about any company established within the last 20 years. So it’s not like the technology failed. It’s not like the NFT was the technology of the dot-com. It’s not like the technology failed. There’s been a gold rush, and then there was so much investment into whoever raised their hand and said, hey, we want to make an online store, we want to make a new Web 2.0 technology or whatever. They were saying there was such a rush to that, and out of that, only people who had the long-term vision and only people who created real value succeeded. That ties back into why we’re excited to be doing what we are doing because we’re not in it for the short term. We are in it for the long term because we believe in the technology itself. We believe in what’s happening itself. We’re not trying to pump and dump, and we’re not trying to raise value in the short term and try to triple our money in one week or whatever the current trend is. The actual technology is here to stay, just like Web 2.0 technology was there to stay.
When markets are in this stage when everything is so new, there’s excitement. Everybody raises their hand, and everybody wants to get involved. But at the end of the day, value has to be created, and a really good product has to come out for people to hang on to it in the long run.
Real Player DAO, Jay: In fact, last year, I think GameFi crashed once, so I think in the future, there may be many crashes. But it doesn’t matter as long as we believe in the whole trend.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
Moving to the next question from EvilNintendo: what are the chances of NFT recognition by legal authorities (contracts, ownership documents). Does the NFT have a chance in this direction?
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: Absolutely, I think that the NFTs are obviously, in their infancy. I’ve seen a few analysts map it out on a 10-year trajectory. Right now, we’re in the very early stages where we’re recognizing art and digital assets and music and so forth. It’s only a matter of time before we bridge the gap between non-digital assets and the NFTs. Regulation and recognition by legal authorities will be absolutely necessary, but this is sort of the point of this movement. The shift from traditional paper trails to real-world utilization of the blockchain. I can’t wait to mint my new house as an NFT in a decade.
UniX Gaming Guild, Salih Odobasic: Or to put my NFT down as collateral for a loan.
Real Player DAO, Jay: The problem is that it’s a very important thing to be recognized by the government. I do not think that the question is something that important.
Angelic, Jose Martinez
The last question from the community is from cryptofollower: Do you think that Web3 is a rebranding of crypto and blockchain and NFTs are the most important tool? What are your thoughts about this?
Infinity Force, Sam Welch: I don’t necessarily think it’s branding. If you look at the history of the Internet from if we wanted to talk about in the same terms with Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now Web3, Web3 just represents its next phase. The next phase of the evolution of the Internet will be decentralized and open and use greater utility, and NFTs are a very important tool within that. But we can’t neglect the other business verticals and models that are being disrupted at the same time. Nor can we dismiss all Web 2.0 solutions out there. I think there will be a massive merge between current services that are offered in Web 2.0, which may be stagnant right now, maybe lack product iteration, like they’ve sort of hit a stopping point. Blockchain technology will help open the gates for them. We already see blockchain adoption, at least private blockchain adoption. Some of the largest companies in the world, a lot of Fortune 500 companies, I read a statistic that was somewhere upwards of 30 to 40% so far. So yes, NFTs are a very important tool, especially within places like GameFi, but we can’t exactly just say that it’s going to be the most important tool. I think it’s yet to be fully understood, and this is we’re in this for the long game. Our road map extends for at least decades, so no one can make the right predictions, but I’m sure something even just as special as GameFi will come out in the next few years that will transform the way our industries work.
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Angelic, Jose Martinez: Well, this will be the end of the Twitter Space. I would like to thank all of you for joining and spending the time. It has been super interesting. You are fantastic partners, and we can’t wait to have your guilds in our game. It’s going to be beyond amazing. I also want to thank you for the tokens and the rewards that we have been giving away through the build-up of this event.
Angelic, Had Erdogan: I would say the future of NFTs and Web3 will come out of these conversations. That’s what I know. Nobody knows the exact future, but these conversations are shaping that with people like you guys, and so this is super exciting to me to be talking about all this. So thanks, everyone.
