 And to discuss, we literally have, as we call, the titans from the gaming industry. We have Mr. Bharat Patel, the chairman and director of Yudhis, India's leading game development company. They are in the middle of an IPO as we speak. So that's how big they are. We have Saloni, the founding managing partner from Lumika Adventures. The fund we always wanted as founders. That's a tagline. And they are doing some incredible support for the gaming industry in India. Ishaank, the co-founder and custodian for NDGG, India's number one play-to-one gaming platform. They are building communities across the globe to boost the space. And of course, Piyush, the founder and CEO of Rooter, India's biggest content platform, live streaming platform when it comes to mobile gaming. So can we have a huge round of applause first of all for the amazing panelists, please? Thank you. So I would like to really start from the top with you, Ishaank. You are literally so passionate about decentralizing the gaming business and putting the powers in the hands of the gamers. So much so that you recently removed the whole hierarchy of CXO from NDGG and introduced something as Eldest Council. So we'd love to know from you, how do you see this space? What's your mission and what is Eldest Council? OK, so three questions. I'll try to keep it brief, right? So what are we building? We are building a reputation system for gamers that goes on chain. Why on chain? So that it can remain transparent and it can be available for whoever the user or the gamer wants it to be available to, right? Why are we doing this? Because historically in the gaming value chain, games spend money on third-party platforms. Gamers come to those third-party platforms, spend their time, money, and skill. And in return, the people who benefit from this are those platforms. So Facebook, Google, all of these platforms have been monetizing the data of everyone sitting in this room for ages. And that's how they've become these bear moths, right? So what we wanted to do was we wanted to use the blockchain for giving people the ownership of their data. And in a way that when they are spending their time and their skill inside these games, they actually benefit in return. And those benefits can go back into the game themselves. So we actually have no problem in creating the circular economy, but we wanted people to benefit. And as a result, the front and center of our project becomes a community, right? Because we stand for the gaming community. And when we stand for the gaming community, it was imperative for us internally and externally to drive the mindset that all of us exist for the community. And therefore, we said that we are not here as permanent CXOs or permanent senior managers of a particular company. But instead, we are all building a community where we are dispensable, we are fungible. And over time, we will be replaced by members from the community. So even today, our entire community team has been sourced from the community. Our BD team is from the community. To the extent, our Vectree team is now started coming from the community. And that's why we went with something called elder members council, because elder members are the ones who are going to retire the fastest. And then new people will come and replace us. Interesting. Quite interesting. And if I can come to you, Mr. Bharat, on that note, for this ecosystem to become successful, we need a lot of games, right? And do we have, like you are literally leading and you have a 450 members team in the game development space, how do you see the talent space in this industry? Well, I think the talent, till now, of course, was a challenge for, I think, the past couple of years. But then with the advent of, I would say, the technology which people have been witnessing internationally, I think people have developed the skills. And re-skilling has become a common thing now. So be it in our company, whether we have a very large team of training the people who are which is needed. Apart from that, what I believe is there is an ecosystem which needs to be created right from the university level. Because me and my other colleague, we are on board of studies with many universities, where we tend to develop the course such that the talent which comes out are directly employable. So I think that's not a major challenge as of now. But I think with the technological changes, it needs to be upgraded and re-skilled to some extent, that's for sure. Interesting. And Saloni, from an investment perspective, how do you see this space evolving? Do you see enough adoption on one side? Because that is going to fuel, from an investor perspective, picking up the projects that you want to pump money in. Is there enough adoption that you see? And at the same time, are you seeing interesting innovations from a development cycle from the founder's perspective that really interests you and gives you the belief that, OK, this is going to be the next big thing. I think that's a really great point. I've been investing now in the games industry globally, as well as in India now for over a decade. So seen a lot of cycles of innovation which have come. And I think with Web 3, one has to realize that we have to go back a little bit and go back, let's say, about six, seven, eight years back. When gaming moved from a cottage industry to becoming a $300 billion gorilla, and that was largely propelled by mobile gaming. And the reason why that was the case was mobile gaming transcended barriers. It broke down barriers. You no longer needed very expensive hardware to play games. It expanded the demographic. There was a lot of demographic expansion. Women started playing games. Kids started playing a lot more games before. And it became very accessible, because now on the palm of your hand, you had these incredibly immersive experiences which became accessible. Now with Web 3, if you were to look at it, fundamentally, there are a few contours that make gaming experiences. And that leads to en masse game adoption. The first and foremost is, are they entertainment? Are they being used to propel fun and pleasure? The second most important thing is, is it easy to access? So currently, a lot of Web 3 experiences, which, especially the first cycle of innovation that has happened, were obviously there was a lot of friction there. It required six, seven steps to download a Web 3 game. You required a lot of upfront financial investment anywhere between $700 to $1,000. You then would require a, to get your, you need to understand how a token economy works as a user. You then require validators, and it would take time to get buying and selling and trading of virtual goods. So this created a lot of friction. Everything that was fixed in mobile gaming has now been upturned for Web 3, right? And there is a reason why a Supercell has 100 million daily active users, whereas a Decentraland has a few thousand, right? So until the technology layer becomes invisible, until we are able to fix these, you know, I'd say teething problems for the industry, I'd say Web 3 adoption is a little bit further off than everybody thought it was. Also, you have to understand the first generation of demographic which adopted crypto and Web 3, there was a very peculiar demographic, right? It was the early adopters. It was largely male, largely, you know, driven by philosophical and ideological beliefs, right? The Bitcoin maximalists who thought they were gonna break the tyranny of governments or the Ethereum fans who thought they were going to bring down big banks. And eventually there was the speculators who neither cared, but all they wanted was to make a quick buck. So once that demographic has now started to weed itself out, you've got the builders, you've got people who are looking at it, how to build it more sustainably, I think those become important. Now whether it's going to be as popular as mobile gaming, a lot will have to be fixed, but is there going to be a demographic of gamers who are going to want ownership, who want interoperability, who would like to make money while play games? I think that's a cohort of gamers that will emerge, but you have to think about it this way, right? A lot of people play mobile games, but not everybody becomes an esports athlete, right? So there is a subset of gamers within a larger Venn diagram, I'd say, who would be interested. And I guess these are businesses which are coming up, which are going to be building, and that next generation of what it looks like, we've backed a company which is building a tool and infrastructure strike. The founder was previously building Google Pay in India, so understands how it is to build tool stacks for masses. That's an interesting play for us, but of course, their ability to scale will depend on the ability of the industry to scale. So that's my view. Those are some really interesting points that you have touched upon, and Ishanga, I could notice you were smiling when Saloni was talking about the whole play-to-one concept, and I would love to pick your views on that, but before that, Piyush, if I can request you to come in, there are two things that Saloni are very rightly highlighted. Mobile gaming and fun, I would like to pick up those cues. You, as a router, is like literally India's number one live streaming platform when it comes to mobile gaming. You have, and please correct me if I'm wrong on the number, 70 million installs, 19 million monthly active users, and 1.8 million daily active users. That's huge. So you're already at the top when it comes to the live streaming when it comes to mobile gaming, and that industry works because people enjoy the live streaming. They participate. There is a lot of engagement. It's fun. Do you see the same trend happening in the Web3 side of things as well? What is, or if I can be a little more specific, what is exactly your interest? Already being at the top on the Web2 side of things, what are you looking for from Web3 games? So I think these are very early days for anybody to be at the top and to see things moving up, but to be honest, we have grown over the last 12, 18 months, and that is the result of a lot of active users on our platform, and now that most of the games are active, we are seeing good traction. See, for us, fundamentally, our DNA is to build the best content experience for mobile games in India. That's the way we define our company, our culture, which is that both in terms of the demand side, which is to get as many users as possible, we get about three, four million downloads a month, which is quite good. We are happy with the way retention is happening, so things are gonna move. Same is from the creator perspective. From the day we entered game streaming, we built the easiest streaming tool for people to become creators, and we have seen a lot of trends, we have learned a lot over the last three years, and then we moved to videos, and then we did reels, so there are different content formats and all that, so there's a lot to do in Web2 gaming, and there are few games in India which are popular, which are streamable, which are watchable, which is where there is a limitation of supply, right? In full admission, it's not easy to build a streaming platform right away when there are only two or three or four games which are streamable, and for us, we see that, so there is a lot of hope because there are at least three, four large Indian games which are getting launched later this year. I'm sure all four of them or at least two of them will do well, so that will bring in more content, so more creators and more brands engagement, et cetera. For us, the way we look at Web3 gaming is that, firstly, we come a little couple of steps down the line, the game has to first come, get a certain traction, as Sunni was saying, the ease of play has to be there, people have to understand it, and for us, we believe that in the next five years, it will start to play a very, very important role because of the volume of content that can be generated, and the interest because people have something to take away from the games rather than just giving their time, so people can earn money, people can create currencies or create different assets that can be taken into different games, so there's a lot of hope, and I mean, in the next point, I can talk about how it will affect us, but mostly, we are very hopeful. We, in fact, worked with IndiGG last year briefly to try out few games and build communities over there, and then, of course, there was a different trend that happened in Web 3, so we kind of took a pause, but we fundamentally believe that for Indian gaming market to become big, Web 3 gaming is very important. That's where the volume is gonna come in, and in whatever ways we can, we like to be a part of that particular growth. That's very interesting. Anishan, if I can request you to come in. We talked about the fun elements, the adoption, the platform that is required for the play-to-earn gaming and the blockchain gaming to become successful. There are two groups in the gaming world that kind of label play-to-earn gaming. One group says that it's not game, it's a job, because you are literally working on creating economic models, and you are not focusing a lot on building fun games. You're not giving importance to game logics, you are giving importance to how the player will eventually make money. So anybody who comes to play P2E games, they're eventually coming to make money, and not to have fun. That's one category. The second category is actually sees this as the next wave. This is, we are literally on the first step of the future of gaming, where the gamers get to own their assets, and this is a mean for them to have ownership of the time that they're investing. So how do you see this space? And accordingly, what's your vision towards driving mass adoption in play-to-earn games? So I think I actually agree fully with what Saloni and PO Chef said, right? Because the first category, which is where your objective is to come into a game, extract value from inside the game and move out, I don't think is fundamentally sustainable. Because for games to drive value to older players, they have to extract value from newer players, and at some point that churn stops, which is what we saw with the downfall of the early Axie infinity model, right? The reason the Axie economy crashed was because at one point the influx of money into the game stopped, and therefore the earlier guys were not able to withdraw money from inside the game, right? So in my head, I think bulk of the industry has moved on to the element that there are a few consumer insights, right? From the top, one, gamers don't care about web-to-vectory, gamers care about having fun inside the game, right? I think that's very clear to everyone who is building in the industry. Yes, there are still people who believe that they can come up with economic models which can sustainably drive value to the gamers. I'd be surprised to see something like that scale, at least what we in this room call mass adoption, right? Because anything less than 10 million dollars is not mass adoption for an industry, right? So that's part one. Part two is I think the economic models of gaming around blockchain can lead to interesting things being created. I'll give you certain examples, right? We are right now working with Riot for Valorant, right, in India. Now you would ask that we are a Web3 community why are we working with one of the largest Web2 games? And the angle there is very straightforward, right? Riot believes that their single biggest driver of engagement for Valorant in a large country like India is grassroot tournaments. Now if they work with the traditional agencies, they have to go through various layers. It's a long process when they go out and organize grassroot tournaments. Our community was able to self-organize grassroot tournaments at a scale of about 700 tournaments in less than three weeks across 66 cities in India without anyone being physically present in any of those colleges or any of those cafes, right? Now that's the power of bringing transparency on chain which is who is the tournament organizer? Why are they organizing it? Who is their community member? Are they real human beings or not? Do they have a Valorant ID? All of this information inside the game system on chain together can be clubbed but we are not using anything on chain with Riot because that's not their objective. But that's an example to say that these models where each person who's playing a particular part in the gaming ecosystem can generate value for not just the game but also for their community as a real one, right? And here, the question you would ask is whether that tournament organizer is having fun or is that a job? I think it's a mix of both, right? Because when I was organizing college festivals 15 years ago, I wouldn't call it a job, right? That's the same thing for that tournament organizer who's organizing that thing. But for a platform like Rooter Tomorrow, they might need 5,000 people to audit a particular game content and where they today might reach out to various agencies or tomorrow they can just go to the community platform and see on chain reputation to say whether Ishaank has audited tournaments in the past or not. And if he has, it might be a direct benefit for Rooter where they're eliminating all the middlemen, they're going straight to the community and the community guy is getting benefit by being associated with the tier one platform. So I think in the gaming industry as a whole, you might see the emergence of jobs but inside the game, I think it has to be fun. Interesting, and I think that's a very well placed point and as we can see the interest from the audience we're having a very engaged discussion but in the interest of time, we'll have to jump to one last question and Saloni, I would like you to come in here. There are a lot of young founders in this room today and the people who are gonna watch the stream online later, what is it from an investor perspective that you advise the young founders who are wanting to come and build in this space? What is an investor looking for? To place that bet, okay, I'll invest in you because this is a new space as much as we want so there's not enough pedigree of let's say web three games of course the gaming expertise comes into picture. So what is it that you look for before making a decision, okay, maybe we'll put money here. Yeah, I think because there has been, we've kind of gone through one hype cycle wave of web three funding and now we've seen several companies either not gain traction or implored. Whoever's looking to build in this space has to come with two things. One is a very unique insight of what they're wanting to build and the second is a very comprehensive understanding of the learnings of the first generation and the mistakes of the first generation entrepreneurs made and how not to repeat them, right? As Ishan said, if you are coming in with very complex economic models and assuming that is what's going to drive user adoption I believe those are some assumptions which have now clearly been challenged and also in web three it depends. Are you looking to build content? Are you looking to build tools, tech infrastructure? Are you looking to build platform plays and accordingly you need to tailor your pitch and you need to build a team as per what you're targeting but with respect to let's say even just web three builders, you know I would say they need to take a leaf out of the book of web two builders especially the game builders because they were real masters in understanding the craft of building games, understanding how to engage users, user and game psychology, right? Which I believe the first generation of web three builders didn't really pay much attention to. The second is the core competency of a web three game team needs to now include strong game designers, strong technologists with strong blockchain experience but also strong system thinkers. You know whether it's real world macroeconomists as part of your team which now several global web three companies have started to do because the complexity of a web three economy is far, far deeper than what, especially for rebalancing and level balancing is far more complex than what we've seen in web two. So if you are looking to build web three games I'd say come you know think about all the there's now enough material think about building it from all scopes and all nuances of what is it that you will do differently but also some market research in terms of you know the traction of existing web three games the good thing about web three is everything is transparent so you know how many wallets there are you know how many games are doing well how many even have more than let's say you know a few thousand users so perhaps use that to your advantage before you're pitching web three but also understand that you know this is a fundraising winter.