 So as time moves on, I still believe that the bull run is going to really be overtaken by blockchain and web three gaming. And to that end, we've actually taken a look at a lot of different people who have vast knowledge of that, one of those being Yatsu, the founder of Anamoka brands. We also had my friend crypto stash and he talked about the same things. Then recently we had Kagi talk about what could actually happen and why these things could come through as far as web three. And today, they got my friend who is Classy games classy. Welcome to the show for the very first time. How are you all doing? I'm really hyped to talk all about web three gaming. It's kind of like we've been doing this for two years. It's been like the most slept upon thing with this huge run and then everything fell out and now it's just finally kind of activating. And now is probably the best time to talk about web three gaming. So glad to be here. You know, it's a funny thing because it's a we when we first started talking about this, this was back in like, you know, I remember 2020, 2021, people were talking about like, it's gonna be the big thing. But it really wasn't prime time. And now I see is like these some of these big games are gonna be rolled out in 2024. I think this actually is the right time. We just got over our skis a little bit. And then for everybody that's watching this right now, there's a link in the description to to Classy's YouTube channel. You can check them out. He's got a lot of great stuff, especially and going heavy in the gala. So Classy, what do you think about all that stuff that we just talked about? As far as like 2024 moving forward? Okay, okay, okay. So for actually being 100% serious here, all the moon boys will always say that this is the year. It always happens. It's like 2024 is the year. If it's not 2024, we're heading to 2025. The Binance CEO, CZ keep talking about 2025. A bunch of other people are talking about Bitcoin ETFs. We're not talking about any of that. We're just talking about video games here. And this is very important to talk about because we had Axie infinity. We had, you know, the sky Mavis just is overzealous run that just took over the entire space. And we had Filipinos from all over Venezuelans all over the world just participating in play to earn economies. Of course, that has died down as crypto as a whole has pretty much calmed. But the thing is, I feel like the way web three gaming is structured now is just we're ignoring the whole play to earn. And we're just now deciding, we're just going to make fun games. We're going to make fun games that are utilizing the technology that is already built here to be able to just kind of elevate the experience of the traditional gamer. A big talk that I often have with people in web three gaming is the fact that the freemium model is the ultimate model. Because imagine right now we had games back in maybe 2000 that you had to pay $60 for a console and that was great. You know, people enjoyed their experience, right? They paid whatever it was for it. They returned it. Maybe they rented it from Best Buy. That's a fun little place. I was too young to actually go there. But, you know, we went through that model. It was great and all. And then we had mobile gaming that came out. We had free to play gaming. And when those two things came out, people ridiculed it. They said mobile gaming would never take off that nobody would actually take any of that seriously. Today, possibly debatably is the largest industry in gaming as we know it because it's so easy to access. Free to play gaming was seen as something that was ridiculous. Why would anybody watch advertisements? Why would anybody go ahead and play this game and progress so much slower? I want everything just thrown at me. But guess what? Most people nowadays are so much more comfortable with playing a free to play versus spending $60 on a game. The entry, the barrier is so much more laxed. And I feel like this is kind of the problem with most games and most industries that are kind of emerging where people are just like, there's a lot of friction here. It's hard to get into. It's early. I don't really feel like dealing with it. So most people are a little bit hesitant in regards to just getting into it. Because why would you? Why would the average gamer feel like getting into Web 3 when you still have to make a wallet and you got to figure out your seed phrase and store it over here? But you might lose it. And then you've got to go ahead and yeah, you got to put like a transfer code and a million different. It's complicated, but I will talk about, you know, multiple solutions that people have done. I will talk about kind of where I see the industry going. But that's kind of like a good base to leave it on. That is pretty good. You know what? And that we could show that will be a perfect one for our second question. So this is what I've been asking everybody essentially like this. It goes down to the investor, the individual and the skeptic. And the investor wise, I always talk, I ask this question, why is blockchain gaming going to lead us into the next bull run? And what's your top place? The second one is for the individual and the Web 2 gamer, the one that you were just talking about that, you know, hates things because it's so complicated. Why should they play these Web 3 games? It seems ridiculous. And then the last one is the skeptic. If we're going to talk about the great stuff, well, what could derail that? What could we potentially see as like the big speed bump in the road that derails everything? So the first things first, why is it going to lead us to the next bull run? Because just like you said, those moonboys, they're pretty convincing. Every single year. And they like to yell and say, wow, this is insane. You know, like all kinds of stuff. So for me, in terms of investment potential in the entire space for Web 3 gaming, of course, prices are severely depressed. A lot of models that we had early on in Web 3 gaming were really heavy on teams because guess what? Decentralization in crypto gaming kind of doesn't exist right now. A lot of it is centralized. A lot of it is on treasuries that they're using to go ahead and expand their IPs, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of them have raised tens of, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to go ahead and fund their games. So a lot of it is really heavy on the front and not the heaviest in terms of retail. It's usually not the greatest for retail to go ahead and get into. But the good thing is we've kind of gone through this, right? All those distribution unlocks that were really toxic for the average retail investor. We've kind of gone past a lot of it. These token launches have already happened and a lot of these guys are already depressed. And guess what? They might not have had a product two years ago, but they sure as heck probably have something either live like Gala games or they have something that's coming very soon. Progressive they done. This is a totally different conversation. But for people that are trying to get into actual cryptocurrency investments in the Web 3 gaming space, this is kind of in my strategy. And I feel like Web 3 gaming is literally my most successful field. I killed it on Axie. I killed it on Peg Axie. I killed it on a bunch of different crypto games. And the reason for it is because I did not invest into the crypto game before it came out. I invested either on a pre-sell, right? That kind of makes sense. But I also invested after the fact when the first hype cycles came out and something very important to kind of keep note of is mint burn ratios. Because a lot of these little economies that people keep talking about play to earn or whatever you want to call it, they're really good in the beginning. And they slowly kind of dissipate, you know, the burn just decreases. There's less volume. The minting goes crazy. Those models, you probably want to be in there in the first couple of months at the maximum. If not, you're probably better off having fun. Don't invest into it. Maybe, I don't know, go grab some Taco Bell or something instead of getting into Web 3 gaming. Those models, that's the old model. That's what most of these cryptocurrencies ended up doing. The newer model is revenue share models where they go ahead. They launch, never token they're doing and they just give some of the revenue either for burns. For example, like Gallup is burning a bunch of Gallup and turning them into like a web to equivalent called gems for their mobile games. There's a ton of different ways of going about it. Of course, you've also got to worry about like nodes and unlocks that are still, of course, a thing, but overall, as a Web 3 investor, I want to get into games that are already out. I want to get into games that I know people are going to get addicted, right? It has to be a good product because ultimately good products will end up having good results for you as an investor in terms of, you know, someone that is a Web 2 gamer like myself. I used to literally obsess over Starcraft 2 was masters in that game. When I was like 11, I was challenging League of Legends and I just no life there. Right. I got it into the scene. I played R cage and MMORPG. I love it. People will say it's not the best. I don't care what they say. I love R cage. I'm just going to put it out there and I don't care because people go like, oh, but there's this other MMO and this other MMO. Well, there's always going to be able to agree. They'll never be able to agree. And that's a big thing here when we're talking about this part because Web 2 gamers are very hesitant to change things. It's like humans are reliant on hobby. There's a reason that Counter-Strike Global Offensive is the largest FPS game out there debatably, and they have a gigantic skin market with a bunch of peer to peer trading all over the place. They've got this big gambling problem, which I don't even want to get into because it's very extensive, but people don't care because they enjoy Counter-Strike. They've been playing it since they were 11 years old, and I don't care if the graphics are outdated or if the game isn't the best. I just had fun on it and it's something I can go ahead and play with my friends. And that ultimately is going to be exactly what gets people into Web 3. People are going to go ahead, get into these Web 3 games. They're going to go ahead and play them, activate the Web 3 equivalent. Eventually, if they feel like it, for example, in CSGO, you can go ahead and sell an item on maybe Valve's Steam Marketplace for what is it, a 12% fee or something like that. It's pretty high. Or maybe you can just do an OTC trade, which is over the counter in Crypto for no fees, wouldn't that just be that much better? But you could do that regularly as well, but you can't really actually cash that out unless you do absurd fees or you go through these shady third party marketplaces like BoF where you need to get like some Chinese passport. And you know what I mean? It's complicated in Web 2, but people are fine with it because they're already used to it. It's just what they've done already. People were not fine with three to play gaming. People were not fine with mobile gaming, but over time, as their friends, as other people began to adopt it, they went ahead and said, okay, why not? Let's give it a try. So I think that's what's going to inevitably happen in, you know, Web 3 gaming where some of these more Web 2s games that are just pretty much Web 2 games, like regular games with a little bit of crypto on them on the side, maybe NFTs, right? To go ahead and actually own your assets instead of the game provider just banning it all or forcing you to keep it on a platform without any resale value. They're going to go ahead, let you do it. Maybe it's a great game. Maybe you're playing Call of Duty one day. They release, maybe it's not called an NFT collection. Maybe it's just called digital asset, like digital asset news, right? And they decide to go ahead and release that. You're probably going to be a lot more willing to trade on it. The age of play to earn, the age of Axie Infinity and all that different stuff, that's kind of passed us. And of course, a lot of crypto, it's really early on. When things are really early on, weird things happen. And fortunately for us, we had unsustainable models, but I don't really know of any Web 3 games that are replicating what Axie is doing. We kind of learned and we've kind of moved on from there. So that's my take on Web 2 gamers. In terms of skeptics in general of the industry, it's exactly what I said before. People are just going to have to eventually kind of come to terms with the fact that it's just the next level. We had freemium, right? We have this right now. We have this model where people can play for free. But what if you could play for free and end up making something out of it? Maybe you could sell an NFT and go ahead and roll it over to something else. Or maybe not even. Maybe it's just maybe something like a Lumion where it's like interop or a blockchain technology, which I know it's a big word. I know it's a big word, but all it means, very big word. They have to fix that. But all it means is you can go ahead and use one of your assets from one game and just use it on another one. It's seamless. It's easy. You don't need to do anything complicated and that's that. A lot of the time it is a pain to go ahead and do this in web two games. And most of the time they're just greedy. So they're not going to do it in general. I mean, a new Call of Duty comes out. All those skins are gone. So just imagine a world where you could trade that. Sometimes it doesn't need to be that complicated. Sometimes it's just that little bit step up to make it make sense. So let's say, so real quick, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. A lot to unpack. So let's just go in reverse. So Call of Duty, you have a skin new, a new version comes out. Can you, you just can't bring those over at all? I mean, you bought it on that version, you're screwed out. If they decide to shut down the servers, good luck. Cool thing about crypto is some games, for example, on Gala Last Expedition is going ahead and allowing people to buy servers. So kind of like back in the day when people would run these servers on whatever they're running them in, you could do them nowadays with notes. And that's just another way to decentralize everything. And even if the game shuts down, right? The next battlefield, they decide EA is like, I'm good. I'm not going to do this anymore. It don't matter. The players can go ahead and host servers and you could continue to use whatever assets you had. So it increases the longevity of games. I think it's healthy. Of course, you've got to rationalize the cost of actually running a server. This is true. So that was amazing because you answered all three questions together. Oh, yeah, I never did that. Amazing. So like that was pretty good. So let me break it down because everybody's I'm sure everybody's head spinning. So, OK, the next bull run is going to go like this. And the reason why is because you talk about the gamers are going to actually get used to it because they're used to this process happening right now. And I'll bring you all the way back when I was playing games. It was on a Nintendo, right? Not a super Nintendo, a Nintendo original NES. And you would go and buy the console game and it was like 40 or 50 bucks back then, I might add. And after that, you could go to like some place and you could sell it. Like a game, stop, whatever else. Here's five to ten bucks. Get get the hell out of it. Great. So that's it. Then the gaming went from that and it went to a subscription model. Remember that? And all the gamers were super pissed off. Could like, this is ridiculous, whatever else. And now you will never see me do that. And they did it and they kept going. And then all of a sudden they're like, Hey, where'd this game go? Where'd that game go? Oh, we got rid of it. Well, tough luck. And then that what you talk about classy is that free to play model came out and everybody said the same thing you said. This is stupid. Who's going to play these stupid games? Not going to sit there all these ads. It's ridiculous. And guess what? They went through that. And now we're going through web three and NFTs and like, that's stupid. I'm not going to do that. But it really comes down to, you know what it comes down to? What would be the next question, which is you talked about? Why the web two gamers hate it? And it really comes down to there was this comment in the last one that I had with Kagi. And this guy said, Hey, as a gamer, why would I play these laughable crypto games? No, thanks. You'd rather be buying good gaming stocks than real gamers actually enjoy playing. But it comes down to do you enjoy these games? And that's why I think that you're so big on Gala, right? Because Gala, you've been talking a lot about this. I'm addicted to these games. It's like, okay. If you're a skeptic of mobile gaming in crypto, I wore download champions arena, play it and tell me it doesn't feel like a normal mobile game. Tell me it doesn't feel like any other mobile game out there just with a market and a peer-to-peer marketplace. That's it. That's the only difference that they download champions arena. They will understand that it's just like any other game. You can do it on iOS. You can do it on Android. It's so accessible. They hit over 50,000 gallons in like seven days. Of course, it's not web two metrics, but it's definitely getting there and that's because they're producing results. When we get good games that people want to play, that is when people will understand and he's right. Why would you play this crypto game when I can invest into Nvidia or some other gaming stock? Maybe I want to invest into Blizzard. Good reason for it. Maybe you don't want to invest. Why do you need to invest? You don't need to invest for champions arena and you can still earn minting scrolls to go ahead and mint NFTs and resell them. So maybe you don't need to spend and maybe it's just a step up on that freemium model that everybody's been using up to this day. Perfect. And then before we go on to the next piece, the last piece, your top plays, I know you're big in the Gala. So you got to be, I'm guessing big in the Gala token, but is there anything else that you have your eyes on as far as investing? So no way, Classie, you're hardcore gamer. You're a real gamer. But what other things are like as far as like the investor side of Classie? Oh, geez. I mean, or is there anything that you're like, you know what, it's all this. It's tough. It's tough because I'm very NFT centric. Like every time like spider tanks, for example, I bought like 7000 worth of spider tanks in a single month and I flipped them a month after. And then I was getting to champions arena pretty heavy. I'm really good at flipping. That's all I do because I think a lot of it is writing the momentum waves initially, kind of taking profit on that and then laxing out. Unless you're actually interested in the game. Then at that point, just do whatever you want. There are ecosystems out there other than Gala, obviously hot take. A lot of people will hate me for this, but I think that the rona network actually has a place in this world. I think they have enough money on their treasury to make it happen. Their games are not very good. They're pretty trash. The machines arena needs a lot of work. Let's be honest. I played it and I was raging up the ante because my character kept getting stuck and that's supposed to be a game that is a flagship title on the runa network. I think it has potential though. I think a mutable X with their passports has a ton of potential. They've got gods and chained. They've got wag me, which I've been talking a lot to a ton of different games that are awesome. Eluvium, for example, I believe is on a mutable X as well. I know avalanche is building. They've got shrapnel polygon has an entire gaming studio with the head of YouTube gaming on there, which is insane. Like Ryan White is absolutely killing it. I'm super bullish on polygon. There's myriad, which is a little bit more of a skeptic if you're into indie games and you're into a little bit of the smaller market cap side. There's so many different plays in crypto gaming. I mean, this is an industry that is worth tens of billions of dollars, essentially at this point in like raised capital. I mean, I swear it's so big right now. And it's crazy to think that two years ago it was like, what is it like 50 X bigger than it is today? It's absurd. It's like, how, how is that possible? See, that's just it. And people just think, oh, we're late. We're late. I'm like, you're not late. Everybody left. Yeah. Everybody, everybody's gone. You're not late. You're actually getting in here on the ground floor, quite honestly. And I, it's hard for people to get that because of like, we saw what happened two years ago and everybody says the same thing. Axie, Axie and the play to earn it's dead and da, da, da. So classy. What you're talking about is it's not dead. It's just there's a new model and that's a revenue share model. And especially like when you talked about with Gala games, you said that they were, it's, you know, PC and then Mac, but there's, they're mostly moving towards the mobile side of things. Is that how all the games are now with Gala or are they switching back and forth? I mean, that's the ultimatum. I mean, spider tanks is probably going to end up going mobile. All these games should be mobile. Ultimately, PC gamers might not enjoy, you know, web three gaming, but I'm sure a mobile gamer is going to be a lot more receptive to it. They're not as hardcore. They're a little bit more casual in nature and they're a lot more, you know, willing to play some game that might be a little bit more pay to win than others. I mean, mobile gaming is the most pay to win sector that is even conceivable. Like it's insane how pay to win a mobile gaming is. So, I mean, some of these play to earn models are doing really well right now on mobile gaming because of that fact. So I see mobile gaming as like the first frontier. We tried PC gaming for a little bit, but then we realized that PC gamers are just not really willing to change that quickly. And they like to kind of boycott things for whatever reason. So we'll kind of ignore the PC gamers. We're just going to go ahead and go to mobile, do our thing, get the players. And then one day we'll be back and we'll be like, Oh, do you remember that battlefield game that shut down? Could you imagine like if you just like owned a server and you were able to just keep running that or maybe like Call of Duty, new title comes out, League of Legends skins. Maybe they make a League two, which they're not, obviously. They hate League two. They just keep updating their game. But like, let's imagine a world where there's a marketplace for skins. I'm sure a ton of people would, you know, pay a ton of money for skins. I don't know where I think, well, like 500 or 600 skins on League. I wish I could sell that. But if I want to sell that, I have to go to some third party shady marketplace like player marketplace and then just hope either I don't get scammed or I do it right. And then I'm like breaking the terms of service. You're breaking the terms of you're bringing it to you for no reason. And then you get banned. Yeah, literally. So so, you know what? And it's a funny thing if we're talking about you said the PC Gamer, which is the hardcore gamer. And I'm a PC Gamer. Yeah. Right. And of course, you guys are the ones that are the loudest. But in all honesty, if we if we take a look at it, this person who wrote this comment is probably maybe or maybe not a PC Gamer. But I will tell you that the majority. And this is why I believe in in block gaming Web three gaming is that if you take music, film, film and even books, crazy enough, they're still dwarfed by video games. One hundred and ninety one hundred and out of exactly and out of this. It's not console games. It's not the box piece of games, not the browser games. It's mobile games. It's the games that you just talked about that are all through here. They don't lead us into the next bull run. And I always say like this, I think that these games are the real Trojan horse to get people out of the Web to into Web three, which are the easier games because they're not so hard to set up. And then also the different places that are actually building these triple A games. It's going to take a lot longer. I know that they've got to they're like. They're like the foreman. They're like the construction worker. They're like the person that comes in and goes, you know what? By next month, we'll have this whole house built and you go back next month. What happened? Well, we kind of went a little bit behind, but we'll do it in two months. What the hell happened the first month? So classy. That's very relatable, even on Gala, on every ecosystem on the planet, not even Web three. Let's just talk about Web two. Every game just has the delays these days, I swear. And for example, I remember there was this game called Spore, which it's funny because we've got Will right over here too now. He's the creator of Spore and the Sims and all that great stuff. And Spore was a game that when I saw the alpha trailer, it was gruesome. I mean, there were these little creatures that were super cute. And then you would just like rip them apart. And it was absolutely gory, all kinds of stuff. But the game comes out and it's just the cutest little thing in the world. You've got these little fluffy, little Spore creatures. And then anybody, if you were like a Web three gamer and that actually happened in a full release, they'd be like, they just rugged us. This is awful. How bad are they? Like, that's kind of like the expectation that whatever is here, better stay like this no matter what. It's not how games really function. I mean, how many mobile games even exist? I heard there was like a statistic where it was like, what was it over 1500 games launched every single day? Probably more, like way more. Yeah, I'm very generous in this figure. But like there's so many games coming out and mobile gaming is so large. Like you saw right there, PC is nothing compared. You maybe are looking at this on your computer. But ultimately what gets exposure is what actually matters. The amount of money that somebody dumps into something or invest. That doesn't matter. A lot of people would hate me for this. But I think what's important is that people play the games and they don't expect some sort of investment return immediately or whatever in general. Most people should be playing a game to just have fun. The people that decide to extract should become a minority in every model. There should be models that force you to invest because ultimately you should be playing games for fun. Most people do it. They're not in the mindset of like, I want to make a ton of money off of this. And Web3gaming doesn't have to be like that. It could just be like I said earlier, you've got skins that maybe you want to trade with someone else. Maybe you don't want to wait a ton of time. You know, there's so many restrictions in trading in third-party marketplaces. But KYC and all these different laws, decentralization makes it so much easier. You can instantaneously send things. It's not like back in the day where Ethereum was the only chain anybody ever used and the gas fees were absurd. I mean, I used to pay like, what was it? $150 at some point for a transaction. Probably more for men. 2021? Oh yeah. Yeah, 100%. And nowadays, I mean, I did a gyrate transaction today, which was free. I paid nothing. And there's plenty of blockchains that do that. For example, if you want to talk about, you know, polygons sense, I think it's like a set per transaction. Immutable X, I don't think they even charge you anything, do they? After you bridge it in? Well, if it's anything, it's miniscule. It's, yeah, I don't even notice it, right? And there's plenty of other blockchains at this point that are doing what needs to be done to actually facilitate real crypto transactions in gaming. And that's just not having any gas fees. That's being fast. It took some time to build the infrastructure. I'm not going to lie, but I think we're finally here. I got to tell you, well, Classie, you've said it all today and you've said a lot. This is going to be a lot for people to digest. And so everybody at home, again, if you want to take a look at Classie and follow him on YouTube, he's also got a Twitter account. What I think is linked to his YouTube, I'll link those in the description. But Classie, that was that was great. We're going to have you on again just to see as things progress where we're actually in the space, because the thing you talked about with Gala and mobile and moving there, I can see how that would be. And then especially as far as like, like rev sharing. How perfect would that be? Especially if if you're already being done. Yeah. Yeah. So OK, so let me ask you this before we go. Yeah, rev sharing, which projects are doing that right now? The game I just talked about champions arena is doing 15% revenue share. And some people will be like, why isn't it 80% or 90% gaming companies have to keep the lights on, right? But it's better than 0%. It's that little tiny bit of a step up for people to actually rationalize doing things, and maybe you'll mint an NFT and maybe you'll play arena. Maybe you'll have fun there. And and that's how you kind of play your little Web three games. It doesn't really matter how you end up doing. This is just one of many different models that are going to end up sprouting up, just like MMOs are extremely complicated. I mean, have you seen the average MMORPG economy? That thing goes deep. Everybody specializes in a sub niche of a niche of a niche, and that kind of goes from there. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of different models, but if you wanted to check out kind of how Web three gaming is trying to do it, I think champions arena is a wonderful, you know, example of this. Is their revenue, is it from just the sales of like NFTs or those are the transactions or is it a part of revenue? Is it is it also a part of the revenue that they get from? Because are they already on the web to iOS and Android? So it's like they're going to have ads. That's yeah, and they've had, you know, a lot of sales. Like, I mean, I pay in US dollars. I pay with my Apple pay on my phone, right? So so that's just like any other game, literally. It's except that like you could take a look at Fortnite. The first game to hit a billion dollars. I think it was like six or eight months. Imagine if they had revenue sharing. They go, Hey, you know what? We're going to give you 50% and to bring it back. And then, of course, that's going to bring it in. And then also, if we get some kind of like, let's say that we get a movie deal or a book deal or merchandise deal or something like that. And you also get 50% and you can take the the the Fortnite crypto. What if they even have one like that? Maybe it's not a crypto. Maybe it's just like you own a comic book NFT that you bought. It's kind of like giving retail people like regular investors an ability to be a part of something like, I know Gala, if you want to just get a little bit away from gaming, they have music and you could buy tracks, which give you these little beams that are worth something. So you're just betting on artists growing over time. If you're a fan of an artist or you're a fan of a gaming company, it's very similar in nature. So there's little ways to get in there. But yeah, no, overall, people should just focus on having fun on these games, honestly, because it's just it's the same thing as any other game. You just have ownership. You can go ahead and trade. You can use crypto technology and they'll probably change the name. It's probably not going to call it be called crypto or NFTs in the future. They'll come up with some other name because I think the name is really stupid. But I mean, we'll see where we end up going, right? We'll see where we end up. All right, I will leave it there. That was a great leadoff point. So everybody, follow Classy on YouTube, also on Twitter and Classy again. Thanks for coming on, everybody. If you liked today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing. Everything we talk about is time sensitive, but that's it for today. So for me and Classy, thanks much for stopping by. We appreciate it and see you on the next one.