 So the thesis still remains the same, which I believe that Web3 and blockchain gaming is going to really hyper-accelerate everything in the crypto and digital asset space and to really get into it to talk about what it is, what could potentially happen to bring us in the bull run and what could derail it. I had to bring in some experts because I don't know everything. And on this channel, we've had a couple of different people. First, we had Yatsuan, who was the co-founder of Animoca Brands. We also had Crypto Stash on. He gave us his insights, loved it. And then Kagi and also a gentleman from Classy Crypto. And today I got another special guest. This is Johnny from Hustlepedia to come in and kind of break us down and see what exactly it is that we're talking about as far as Web3 gaming. So Johnny, welcome to the first time for Digital Asset News. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for the invite. Love chatting gaming, the bull case. And obviously, like you said, you got to look at the downsides too, right? And I think we're all trying to figure it out and we'll get into it today. Yeah, because I mean, here's a thing like on my channel, we're a little bit more of the traditional investor. We take a look at, well, Bitcoin is a store of value, digital gold, whatever you want to call it. Ethereum smart contracts, layer 1s, layer 0s, L2s, and then maybe some oracles sprinkled in there. But I'm trying to kind of bring people into a new way of thinking. And that's why I've got you. So I got you for three big questions, Johnny. Let's do it. And the first one, and I'll just read everybody the questions, either the same things that we've been asking, which is, why is blockchain gaming going to leave the next bull run? And of course, the big thing is what are your top plays and how do you see this? And the next one, we'll talk about the individual and the Web 2 gamer, which is, I mean, just as far as investors go, why should we even play these Web 3 games? And why should the Web 2 gamer even really care about this stuff? Because he's already got it all in this nice little package over here in Web 2 gaming. And then the last one is, if we're going to talk about how great this stuff is, let's talk about the downside, because there's too much Hopium going on. Well, not not today, but there's a lot of Hopium sometimes. And I think we should really get to some reality. So Johnny, first things first, why is blockchain gaming going to leave the next bull run? Yeah, so in my opinion, when you look across crypto, a lot of the stuff we mentioned before the show, there's so many projects, why do they even need a token? Why do they need blockchain to achieve their goals? Right? But as far as gaming and the case for owning your collectibles inside of a game to take the NFT word out of it, right? Owning the things that you work for and to monetize your time in a way inside of these games is very valuable. And whenever I speak to people that have no idea that crypto gaming, Web 3 gaming exists in the slightest, they're like, oh, you do crypto, what is your favorite thing heading into the next bull? And I explain gaming and the common person, the no coiner or whatever you want to call it, they can grasp the gaming narrative so easily because everyone's bought a video game, everyone's grinded for a skin, everyone's gotten a camouflage or an attachment for a weapon inside of like a call of duty. And it just makes sense. And every time that life cycle of the game stops, you're looking at this inventory of items that there's just nothing you can do with it unless you go on these black markets to sell it online. And whenever you do that, there's obviously the power of crypto and the power of blockchain technology, the peer to peer, it's completely trusted source, like you're not going to have any middleman in that transaction, like with these black markets. So gaming and monetization of assets in your time just makes so much sense to people who put in hours, sometimes weeks, days of playtime into these games. So blockchain gaming just makes the most sense. And all it takes is a quality product to bring in more users than any DeFi yield, security protocol, whatever niche you would want to look into. Gaming is the one narrative that it goes viral overnight. People see gameplay, they see their favorite streamers playing these games. And all of a sudden they're like, I want to hop in, I want to play. So the mass adoption potential for gaming, as opposed to all these other complicated DeFi smart contracts, liquidity pools, people resonate with gaming much easier than a lot of these other things. So in my opinion, it's the easiest to grasp and everyone plays games, whether it's on your phone, whether you're playing the game of life, right? Everything is a game if you gamify it and you can gamify finance with crypto and there's actually true games in this niche where you can own your assets and really own the time that you put into them because you own your inventory. Yeah. I will say this, you did say one thing and I was like, maybe, and it was a good point. And he said, everybody has grinded. Everybody has gotten a skin or a weapon or something like that for a free to play game. But there's some people that are watching this video like, what? I've never done that in my life. Because you got to understand, like some people are older. And I will say for the older people like myself, I want to take you guys back to the day of like, say like a Sega or Nintendo or even cheese, Louisa and Atari. So you get a cartridge, you have a cartridge and you buy that cartridge and you play that game for so long, you could go to a certain store and you know that store. You can go there and of course you could sell that game. And that was a great thing. And you could actually get some of your money back. So you pay like 50 bucks for a cartridge and you get like five or 10 bucks. Here you go, get out of my, get out of my site, which was amazing to you because at that point you could actually get something back. Then all of a sudden it seems like games went from there to a subscription model and everybody complained and bitched and moaned and everything else. And I got it. And then they, okay, fine. You want a subscription model because sometimes these games just go away. Why don't we go to a free to play model? People are like, now we don't want it. And then all of a sudden now it's free to play. And now all of a sudden people are like, now they're complaining about these digital collectibles and FT is like, how dare you? And it seems like it's a natural progression. So like everybody, I know some of you have not have done these things, but if you take a look at the past where things have gone, it's just a repeat of what's happening and giving power back to the people to actually sell these things. Yeah, I think, I think what you mentioned, like walk, like as a kid walking into the, into the game stop, right? And bringing my game back. And it's kind of the same thing, right? Now the asset had depreciated at that point. If I'm selling Madden 05 and 07 or something like that, right? Obviously you're going to get $5 back for your $60 purchase, but that's a great way to look at it. Like it's basically a tokenization of games, the assets inside the games. And there's protocols that let you sell games on the blockchain, right? So you can take it any which way, whether you own your assets or you just own the products, because, you know, we all understand the way walking into game stop. That's nostalgia for me getting ripped off $3 for my games. Yeah, man. That part will never stop. You're going to get ripped off in game stop or you're going to get ripped off on open sea. One of those two is going to happen. Yeah. So these are the things. So it actually would lead me to our next point. So we know that this is a natural progression. We know that games are going to be huge. And actually games are one of those industry that actually dwarfs the music and the movie industry. But the question is, is for the traditional webtoon gamer right now, and actually the people like you watching this video right now, why the heck should we even play these games? Why should the web to play it moving into the web three? Because I got to tell you, in America, you use that that NFT word. It gets pretty ugly. Absolutely. So we'll talk about my plays at the end, the second part of the last one. That's right. I'll make it more fun to people stick around. So I think why should people play these games? I think it's all part of the maturation of the industry. So you had mentioned some great points that these things evolve over time. In 07, when Farmville, Zynga actually, and they're coming out with a web three game, these players are moving towards these new trends. And in 07, Zynga came out with Farmville on Facebook and everyone was like, this makes no sense. How do they make money? It's free to play. This thing just, I don't know how this business model for a Zynga is going to work to host the server, host the game on Facebook, et cetera. And then down the line, that became one of the most successful initial free to play games that there ever was. So the maturation of these things, games used to cost $60. Now you can play Warzone for free. And you just buy the assets inside the game, the micro transactions. So it's all the maturation of the industry and the part where I come from. So this is where I resonated from gaming and then also being a big fan of crypto since 2017. But I had been gaming since I was five, six, seven years old, right? On these different consoles. And I went through the Xbox 360s, the PS threes, the maturation of the console era to where I was playing on PC, but I was playing eSports. So I was competing against other players across the globe and Call of Duty was the game of my choice for money at the end of the day. So what was I doing? I was trading the time I was putting into these games to compete. And I was, and it's true as for him, I was playing to earn, right? I wanted to earn the $50 cash that I could win in a tournament versus another player. But then when I looked every single year, like I mentioned in the first part, my assets in the game would be crazy. I had all the camos, all the best skins, but I couldn't sell those things. And it felt like every year because Call of Duty come that came out with a new game every single year. It's like, wow, was that a waste of my time? You know what I mean? And you look at the amount of time you played, it's like, oh, that's kind of insane to think about. Like I can't do anything with that. So whenever I learned about web three gaming, it was actually infinity, right? The obviously everyone's entrance into the space, but it just was so easy, right? Oh, those characters, those are my characters, like it's truest form. And like you really start to understand the economics of games and how these things work. And in web two, these activisions and riot games, epic games, they're extracting the customer for those micro transactions because they know the second they sell it, it's valueless. It literally holds zero value in your account at that point. It is a one-sided transaction. Whereas the blockchain gaming side of it, you're going to feel much more empowered is the day you set down a game, because everyone eventually puts down a game. You have to, life gets this way. You have a kid, you're getting married, whatever you go into college, even in like, you know, going from high school to college, you might not have the same amount of time to play video games anymore. So everyone goes through the process of like, I might not use this anymore. So what if you could just get a little bit of dollars or, you know, USDC, whatever you sell it, the denominated currency, what if you could just get a little bit of that back? You're going to feel much more rewarded and vindicated for that rather than looking at your fortnight inventory being like, dang, did I waste four years of my life? Well, not only that, let me ask you a question. I've never asked this, but like, just on a general tone, how much do you think you've spent on, on, let's just say, call a duty for at the peak of what you spent? How much do you think that would be? Would it be like $100? Oh no. A couple thousand dollars or like, you would be embarrassed to even say the actual, or give me a range. Let's just do a range. Of course. So let's just, before warzone was free, because once warzone came out, I shifted to that. It was so fun. So I probably bought 12 years in a row, $60. So there's $720. Okay. So there's almost a thousand by itself, just on the games, but inside the game. Oh God. If you, if you don't want to say this, because you know, like, like you're sitting together like you spent that much money. I've used this before. I will, I will tell you. I haven't tallied the transaction total, but in warzone alone, it came out in 2020, I had 13 pages of 10 transactions each. So I had over 120 transactions in the warzone shop. The least you could spend on each transaction, some were more, some were 20, 40, the least is 10. So 120, 10, 1200 plus the game. I've spent a few thousand dollars inside of Call of Duty. That's for sure. I gotta tell you that's, that's honestly not bad. That was me way worse. Because like, when, when I was shooting it, okay, you know, okay, we'll go with that. But I will say like, this is why I think, why I think gaming will be so big is because people will look at gaming like, what a joke. But then you understand like, like Fortnite was the fastest game to get to a billion dollars. And it was under a year. And it was a free to play game. And there's a reason why it actually works. And then the things that, that like we're doing in the background for like, for like web three in those games, I don't know if it even has to be like a AAA rated game to be the next big breakout. I think just like you talked about, Farmville was enormous on Facebook and a couple of other goofy games that were out there. They made a ton of money because people are like, oh, five bucks here, 10 bucks there. And before you know it, everything adds up. So I can see where these things are going. It's the same thing with these mobile apps these days. When you open up a free to play game, free to play, you get hit with an ad. First thing you see, right? Advertisement pops up that they're making money on that. Then all of a sudden they're like, do you want to upgrade your character? A dollar 99. You double click the side of your phone and it's linked up with your Apple. And all of a sudden, boom, they're making revenue and think of how many people do that. And they don't think anything of it, right? Oh, $2, $2, $2. But it adds up quickly. And these games can monetize so easily. So yeah, absolutely. Not only that, but think about this way. You know what's going to happen when we get to like, not just loot boxes in web three, but if we get to like some kind of the, not play, not pay to play, but like some kind of like, we'll just call it gambling aspect. Oh, it's going to be filthy. I don't know how it's going to work out. It's like CSGO skins, basically. They're rolling the dice every purchase. It could be worth $1. It could be worth six figures. You never know. And that's called a dopamine hit, everybody. Absolutely. So all right. So we got that piece. Before we get to your big place, John, let's talk about this. We're talking about why it's going to be so great. And everybody's like, oh, it sounds reasonable, right? But let's take the opposite side, devil's advocate. What could screw this all up? What could derail everything with blockchain web three game? Couple low hanging fruits, regulation. You know, we don't know how these things play out across jurisdictions. Obviously some games in like Asia, I think they have a little clearer path forward. But the ones here, like if you're in the Western world, at least, it might be a little tricky, like these assets in games, is it gambling? Is it skill based the way that you're earning these things? That'll have to be a little clear. And obviously just these digital asset, the regulations are just very murky in the States. So where we are, you have to consider regulation. But for me, I'm concerned that this industry will just pass over into the same hands that it's been in for decades. So what I mean by that is none of these big studios, we're seeing Zynga do it, but they also started the free to play craze when everyone thought they were crazy. So now they're coming in. They're a big entity building a web three game. But I think we're going to need to see the smash hit successes, you know, these big web three native games that actually prove Axie infinity was a great start, but we need like a triple A solid game, great graphics, great gameplay, multiplayer. You can play with your friends. You see your favorite streamers playing it. And then the big corporations, before they put millions, if not billions into building a web three game, they're going to have to see those successes. So for the short term, we're going to see it in the hands of web three. And we have a lot of opportunity heading into the next bull market to capitalize from both investing and in the participating in the games. I can't wait to have these triple A gaming experiences. But once the model's proven, I'm a little bit afraid that we're just going to see these big giants that have controlled the gaming industry, the activisions, the call of duties, the valorants, the CS goes, etc. They're just going to be like, oh, okay, they're going to turn a switch on in the back end because they're all paying attention. They all see this has legs behind it. But for now, they're making so much money. What's the wolf of making money handle the fist? That's what they're thinking in those Activision back offices. So right now, they're not going to change their business model. But if it becomes something they can't ignore, they just flip the switch, all of a sudden, they're making more money because the players on their marketplaces are trading back and forth and they're getting fees on the second hand sales of these items. They only have one touch point to the customer. So blockchain can really actually milk their profits even more, but they're not going to do it to scare away their audience until it's proven. So I'm afraid that eventually Web 3 is going to... We're going to see the successes here and they'll probably always be around because of the people here appreciate the actual Web 3 driven products. But eventually, I'm afraid it'll go right back into the tyrannical hands that have controlled the gaming industry from a monetization perspective for years. You know what, it's a good point that I never thought about and it makes a lot of sense because the same thing is kind of happening with crypto and digital assets. And you hear about that downfall of what people say like, look, the big institutions are coming and unfortunately the people that don't, they kind of get it, they're going to be selling into those tyrannical hands. And of course, it'll be a consolidation of power and it'll be the same thing over and over again. That's why it's so important that for you watching this video right now, you understand that you are incredibly early. Don't let anybody tell you that you're not, you are. And for you to be able to front and run not just the institutions, but the big corporations that are out there, I think it's something to be behold. And this is one of the few times in history you can actually do that. So congratulations to you to actually being here. And then, Johnny, to wrap this up, now you watching, you can check out Hustlepedia over on Crypto Banter. There's a couple of different ways also on Twitter. And then I've got the Hoop Hustle here, all the different links for it. But Johnny, what do you have as far as your top plays? What do you look at and go, you know what? I think that's going to be the winner or that's going to be a winner. Yeah. I think there's different ways to invest in gaming. So I do want to give kind of a philosophical answer before I give a couple of projects. When I'm looking at gaming, it's much harder to pick a smash hit game out of a hat. If you're a venture capitalist and you were in the web two side and you're like, let me pick the next Fortnite. You know how many web, you know how many web two must have gone broke, trying to do that because Fortnite's still there and it's the giant. And the only incumbents have been Apex Legends and Warzone that have had market share. So two games since then have seen the model actually. Right. And if you're investing in everything that comes your way because you think it's the next Fortnite, that's not going to work. So the way I like to do my web three gaming investing is I want bigger chunks of like the studios and the backend infrastructures that run these protocols. Stuff like Vulkanforged PYR, I think is going to be great for the next bull run. I think immutable X is going to be huge for the next bull run. I think stuff like a Dubs, for example, it's like a eSports platform, D-U-B-B-Z. It is a lower market cap token, but they're really killing it on like the eSports side of things. We talked about eSports in this and how it is so big. So there's different ways to invest. You can invest in the big blockchains that empower these protocols, like an IMX. You can invest in gaming studios like a Vulkanforged or, for example, a Gala. Gala's fell lower on my conviction list because of this lawsuit going on, but we'll see how that hashes out. And then play smaller investments into games because what we saw last bull run is individual games did the best because it was just the speculation of like, oh, I have the next Fortnite of crypto gaming in my hands, right? And everyone kind of like chasing after that type of stuff. So my favorite right now is probably echelon prime. It's the official token of parallel trading card game. It's by far the most popular behind Axie Infinity at this point. And I think that it has a long way to go as far as the game building out. It's in like early alpha stages. So the way I invest larger into the studios and the infrastructure and the reason being is if one game comes out of those big studios that have 10, 20, 50, 100 games, all of a sudden what's going to get traction? The people behind the project as well. So I love investing into the infrastructure and the studios, but then I also will play smaller investments into games because then if you get that smash hit game, you're going to see the returns on that in tenfold. So that smaller investment could materialize into much bigger, but I think the safer way to go about it is just getting your hands on the studios and the people on the back end making this thing churn. Gotcha. Very smart. So again, everybody, we know these phrases, higher risk, higher reward. And sometimes it really just pays off to invest into the picks and shovels. Absolutely. Johnny, you've said it all today. Thank you so much for stopping by. Everybody at home, if you want to check out Hustlpedia, he's hosting, I think you guys do it three times a week now. Three times a week, yep. For a live stream over on Crypto Banser and then also my favorite place, Twitter, because Twitter is the greatest place. Everybody's super nice. No one says anything negative. It's great. You guys should check it out. Unlike the YouTube comments section. Oh, I can't wait for this one. So everybody, so Johnny, again, thanks for stopping by. We appreciate it. Look, everybody, if you like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing. Everybody talk about his time sensitive, all the things that we just said, links will be in the description, but that's it for today. So thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate it and we'll see you on the next one.