 One of the categories of gaming is eSports, which is poised to grow exponentially in India and globally. Now joining me welcoming Mr. Kevin Soltani, the CEO of GIMA Group, USA, who's going to be now sharing an international perspective of an explosive billion-dollar industry of eSports. Thank you Kevin for your available time with us, the station streamers, all yours. We now have Kevin on the screen. Hello everyone. My name is Kevin Soltani. I'm the founder and CEO of GIMA Group, and I'm honored to be here today at the GameOn Online Gaming Summit. It's going to be a good talk today. We're going to be talking about eSports gaming and all things Metaverse. So let's get right into it. First, a little quick intro about myself and what we do in gaming eSports and the Metaverse. GIMA Group is an alternative investment company, mainly focusing on investment and building products within the blockchain industries and gaming and eSports industries. Over the last nine years, we've been working in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. But over the last four years, we've crossed platforms into gaming and eSports and even doing some cool things with the blockchain and gaming as well. We've invested in some amazing eSports companies, and I was the CEO of the second listed London Stock Exchange company for a gaming and eSports company, and sent for Ford as eSports that listed last year on the London Stock Exchange. Currently, we're at our satellite offices here in Los Angeles and in Dubai, where we work mainly on blockchain and gaming projects. And today we're going to get right into it, starting off with the eSports industry. Everybody knows how big it is, the buzzword of 2020 during the pandemic when everybody was locked at home and the streamers took their time to become big and famous. It is exactly that that kept us going, the opportunities to go digital and gamers had nowhere else to turn but online as they normally do. So eSports players and let's define eSports very quickly. eSports is competitive gaming. Once you cross the line from a casual traditional home gamer into a professional setting and start to compete on a worldwide stage is when you can categorize as an eSports player. So as you can see the rise of eSports players, global athletes and revenues has just been climbing. The top chart here shows global players, and the bottom chart shows eSports revenue. So you're looking at the casual and competitive altogether and major hyper growth. As we go into 2023, we can only imagine that the metaverse is going to take this hyper growth into an even faster cycle. So we're hoping that this new digital age of gaming experiences will usher in a fully new, you know, level of adoption from player base, that we're just those traditional gamers. Now we're looking at untraditional gaming that might become competitive, such as blockchain and crypto gaming as you can see here, and Axie infinity and that arena, and all of the play to earn games. Okay, we aren't going to focus on the play to earn games. I'm sure you've heard a lot about those and other sessions we're just going to focus on gaming and eSports experiences within the metaverse. So really quickly, let's look at the history of gaming and eSports right so gaming if competitive gaming is eSports, we all started with the pond in 1972 when Atari introduced pond was just the most casual form of gaming in bars pubs homes, and then the players and started to come out. As we speed up throughout the life cycle of gaming, which is just now taking another uptake upwards. We're seeing introductions of PC, mobile handheld, and up there to the top right I think maybe my picture's covering it up but we have cloud and other tech. And this is where the metaverse is going to take an usher in that next stage of hyper growth. What I think is interesting here to note is that technology has been the outlier in the beginning stage. And as we start to head toward the 2022 region technological advancements in mobile handheld and PCs has taken up larger market shares from arcade and traditional console systems. So in that upper right quadrant that we're seeing added is cloud and other tech, you got to believe that the metaverse in the new adoption rates of people to different metaverses are going to take another leap forward for gaming and gaming revenues. But really quickly, if you look at all the different pieces of gaming and how eSports becomes what it is. It really takes these four quadrants to come together in that middle piece would be the metaverse. So at the top we have virtual worlds and spatial software, you know mainstream going like roadblocks and fortnight some of the games you see there are some of the largest titles in gaming and eSports. Then you have the eCommerce right without payment systems and gateways in the metaverse we cannot survive. Now those upper games like roadblocks fortnight, they all have their own in game economies and currencies, but in the future in metaverse is we're going to need the help of eCommerce platforms such as the stripes the Shopify's to come and be the intermediaries. You can only imagine when Shopify enters gaming and in game assets, what the kind of shopping experience will look like which we'll get into in a little bit. Then you have the decentralized assets such as the cryptos and the decentralized platforms such as zoom. And then you have all things premium social media as we say, the social media that can you can build a career off of and teachable only which discord and even Snapchat. These are the premium social networks that I guess tick tock can be now newly added to because they can create a real network around the players such as twitch is done for gamers. So right there in the middle all coming together is what the metaverse looks like so you can see how what beautiful of an arena it is for gamers and eSports companies to find a home in. We really quickly go back to the metaverse we're walking down the road in the metaverse in the road and 2035. Okay, the year is 2035, you're walking down Manhattan you got a pair of glasses on, you see your friend running across the street toward you. What you see is it's got a fiery hat on his hats on fire, and you look and you say something's not right, but you take your AR glasses off and you see no it's just your friend wearing sweatpants and a shirt, but you put your AR glasses on and you see the fortnight Balenciaga skin that you recently your friend recently just buy and the hats on fire because Balenciaga and fortnight wanted to add a funny little skin characteristic in there, and they made it, you know, totally immersive for that user to be on fire. So this is an experience that gamers have created, like I said fortnight and Balenciaga for years I've been doing business together, and in the future you'll see more of these items and as the AR tech gets available, the gamification of our real world will look something like the story I just said. Digital gaming experiences, it's what esports is all about those arenas with packed crowds and raving fans just like in traditional football basketball baseball or any other sport. Esports made a name for itself off the digital gaming experiences. But if you look at all things digital gaming experiences from the physical to the digital to the fully immersive. And that's something that looks like a streaming platforms, esports tournaments that need to be viewed on a digital platform, not just physically metaverse gaming and that taps into some of the play to earn side as well but metaverse gaming where there's in metaverse games, only native to those metaverses as we've seen be done in Decentraland and sandbox. We can't wait to see what maybe meta and Facebook is going to do and other AAA game companies that are going to come out and create new metaverses, and it's going to come down to those digital gaming experiences. It's going to be gaming centric, but business focused because if you look at something like fortnight, we've had V bucks and fortnight skins for multiple years now, they don't call it cryptocurrencies they don't call it tokens and they don't call them in game digital assets, they just call them in game assets. But now, these new blockchain games crypto games and the metaverse is allowing companies to bring out NFTs and use crypto currencies as a way for their payments and their products. And to round it out you have VR and AR events of digital gaming experiences to in the future we already have VR and headsets but AR is going to be a very big part of the future and I predict it'll be even bigger than VR and more useful. I believe my picture is covering it but you got upper right I wrote UX is greater than UI because I truly believe the user experience will be more important than the user interface. Of course short term we eat with our eyes so we want the interface to be glamorous immaculate and fun and and ever changing however it's going to be the experience that's going to win. We don't have people's attention spans going board too quickly. So I believe that the user experience and what we've seen in the short term user experience is what brands are getting involved with from the gamification of social shopping as you see Nike is doing roadblocks brands like Ralph Lauren are going into the metaverse Balenciaga is with fortnight, although it's not a decentralized gaming platform it is a very metaverse style stylistic approach to the gaming of what Balenciaga has done, and we'll see in a little bit what Gucci's done as well. And Hyundai is just joined in on roadblocks creating what looks like their digital gaming experience and brand partnerships. That's why you see Metas AR experience which this was just for the fashion office experience but I believe this is a truly gamification of our closets in the future. So let's take a quickly look at fashion and gaming as I said but this is more like fashion sports, because Balenciaga has been in fortnight they have skins. We have a time did a physical line of the League of Legends inspired line in 2019 that's a physical line that you can buy bags t shirts and shoes from. And Gucci, this may be just purely into the metaverse but they've gamified their sneaker what they call sneaker garage and you can custom make a Gucci sneaker and your avatar can wear them in the metaverse. And to me this is amazing because true digital ownership is going to happen in gaming too. What would have happened in the world of World of Warcraft 1015 years ago, if we could have kept all those swords and guns and and you know in game assets that took us all that time to accumulate. Well those assets didn't have any value in the game and 1015 years later, they've almost gone up to the you know into the air. So these assets in the future whether they're the skins or the sneakers or the you know the swords. If they are nft and remain in this system digitally, and they live in the blockchain these assets in 1020 years might even appreciate and might have more value, just like the sneakers someone has created, wearing it on their avatar someone might want to be by those, as we've seen in the physical world. This is what true digital ownership looks like. And it's an amazing time to be alive. Your avatar is greater than the human in the next 20 years I believe we will be spending more on our avatar in 2035 than we will on our actual human body. Other than the clothes you want to wear you won't be buying that Gucci purse anymore because you'd rather your avatar view it and more people are seeing your avatar than your physical body anyway. So some of these are some concepts, given by companies at a high level. And this is about meta esports. I've self named this it's a crossover between traditional as a traditional esports and new digital offerings. We've seen 100 thieves do probably the most successful nft drop of any nft drop in the world but it was an esports company, and they did a free drop of their nft chain what you see here of their championship chain on the back of this are the signatures of the five players on the League of Legends team they won the LCS championship and they nft this over 200,000 people and then you see gaming tokens, what you see in Chili's has done OGE sports now has their own fan token, you can go buy a fan token off of the Binance launch pool and invest in your team, invest in its well being invest in its gaming power investments but they are fan token investments the better the team does the better the token does. Now I can't think of a more beautiful conversion of the metaverse and gaming then to go into the metaverse shop at the OGE fan shop in the metaverse with OGE fan tokens. It's amazing time to be alive like I said, and to round it out you're seeing companies like nifty gateway which are massive brands and moon pay and many many others crypto.com sponsoring esports teams and working with them at a very high level. I appreciate your time thank you so much I wanted to keep this basic one on one at the same time give you a full accomplishment of the esports and gaming industry as a pertain to the metaverse. Thank you with this quote by Satya Nadala saying the gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category and entertainment across all platforms today, and we'll play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms. Please do connect with me. Please do stay in touch. It's an honor being with you here today. Thank you to the game on summit looking forward to keeping in touch with all of you. Have a great day.