December 6, 2023 • 48 mins
Roll out the red carpet for Owen O'Donoghue, Chief Revenue Officer at Infinigods, who takes us on a thrilling ride through the evolution of blockchain gaming. His insights, honed from his time at Facebook where he played a vital role in propelling the growth of the gaming business, will leave you amazed and hungry for more. We journey from the boom of CryptoKitties, to the rise of Axie Infinity, and the current generation of web 3 gaming being pioneered by Owen and his team.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to the Crescendo Go To Market podcast.
Today we have Owen, who is thechief revenue officer at
Infinite Gods.
Do you want to give us a quickintroduction to yourself and
Infinite Gods as well?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
For sure.
Great to have you on, sasha.
We appreciate it.
I'm Owen O'Donoghue, spent thelast decades at Facebook as part
of the gaming team, workingwith big gaming companies and,
18 months ago, co-founded ablockchain gaming studio called
(00:32):
Infinite Gods, and really whatwe're trying to do is build fun
games that have mass appeal,particularly on mobile, that
also use some of the best partsof blockchain technology to make
the games more fun and moreenjoyable for players.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
And I think that's what's really interesting about
Infinite Gods is there's a lotof unique mechanisms that I
haven't seen anywhere else inthe Web 3 gaming space.
So I'm curious about your storybecause I know before you got
into the Web 3 gaming space, youwere working at Facebook, right
.
You were leading there.
Essentially, I believe you wereleading gaming at Facebook,
right.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, I was leading the user acquisition or the
advertising side in NorthAmerica and actually Latin
America as well.
It was very small and really Ijoined very early on in Facebook
in 2010 in the European office,and Facebook was trying to
figure out its commercialstrategy at the time.
So, are we selling advertising?
(01:28):
Are we selling subscriptions,gifting?
There was a ton of ideas westarted to see.
We had a platform opened wherepeople could build applications
within Facebook using Flash, andgames like Farmville, texas
Holden, poker, saladomania,candy Crush all these games were
(01:49):
actually operating on Web andproducing pretty good revenue in
terms of payments, but just theamount of like, how much time
people were spending on thosegames compared to the rest of
Facebook for certain players waspretty incredible to see, and
so it was a real driver ofFacebook's early business, and
so I was part of the team thatwas tasked with.
(02:11):
Okay, let's grow this business,let's go and recruit other
developers and let's actuallyhelp them grow their game
through both organic and paidmeans and then help them
monetize as well.
And so that was a rocket shipand actually is still a rocket
ship of a business, and soreally went from zero to quite
(02:31):
big quite fast, you know, duringthat time really saw that trans
again.
I actually had a backgroundwhere I worked actually with the
Microsoft work in Xbox, sothat's a very brief experience
with gaming, but it was reallycrazy to see how, where I
traditionally thought games were, you know, like big fancy,
launch is a really cool game.
(02:51):
A lot of people play it andwhat.
What I was seeing a Facebookwas.
It was almost like it wasessentially almost financial.
It was these free to play gamesget them out there to an
audience, make it free butallowing in game payments, and
then really see what's the valueof players and then continue to
(03:11):
acquire them through digitaladvertising as long as it was
profitable.
And so you would see thesebusinesses really go from zero
to making like 1020 $3040,000run rates and then actually, as
we got into mobile, those gamesstarted to make, you know,
100,000 to almost a milliondollars a day in revenue and it
(03:34):
was the birth in the west offree to play gaming coming at
scale.
And so you know that transitionwas just seeing that was
actually very interesting.
It was real hotbed for startupswhere you did need to be this
big publisher like EA orActivision who had been around
for 20 years with all theseestablished relationships with
(03:57):
distributors and consoles, andthat business has grown, grown.
Facebook's role became more andmore about acquiring players,
both on the paid means, andbecame quite sophisticated, from
being able to just get somebodyto install your game to hey, I
want somebody who has a paymentpattern of this, who has a
(04:19):
purchase behavior of this.
Therefore they're more likelyto be a high value player in my
game and so spent spent 10 yearson that.
That business went fromliterally it was probably about
$5, $6 million a year forFacebook and when I was leaving
it was close to a $5 billionrevenue line for for Facebook
(04:41):
and now meta and it continues tobe probably one of the big
drivers.
But very interesting just to seethat side of gaming, because I
always assumed it was console,it was PC, because that's what I
played.
But actually when I saw overthe last decade was the vast
majority of gamers actually theyswitched to mobile and they
(05:01):
were not like me.
They were.
You know they were, they werethey're female they're older and
so very, very interestingexperience while I was working
there.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
What did a typical like day to day look like in
what you did?
Because you were essentiallyworking with these gaming
companies, I guess your job wasto help them acquire users and
get a ROI so they would spendmore on getting users right.
It's it sounded like kind ofthat sort of enable control on
your end, or what did that looklike?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
yeah, I mean it.
It helps you change a lot.
There's a lot of just going inand finding and doing a lot of
business development to findfolks and you know, first few
years typically would have beengoing into markets in eastern
europe and israel developers whoare actually making further
platforms at the time, like thisis even pre-mobile, and who
(05:52):
make flash games and persuadethem to move over.
But typically your day to daywould be looking at okay, you
know what are you trying to do,what's your target and so it's.
You know, what type of game doyou have, what's the typical
pattern that represents a goodplayer?
So is that lifetime value, sohow much they purchase over the
life?
Or there are other behaviors.
(06:12):
And it's then working with thedeveloper to parse those little
audiences and actually help them.
You know what creatives will goand speak to that audience, how
to target them.
So, beyond just age and geo,are their interests, are their
behaviors.
And that obviously changed alot where at the start you were
(06:33):
saying, hey, use static interest, so what people have said they
like on facebook.
This is like feels like so longago.
Uh, all through to today whereyou're actually going to say,
hey, like, take an audience in amarket really focus on.
They have exhibited these typesof behaviors via sdks and go
(06:55):
after and bid this amount forthem, use these amount of
creatives.
So it's very hands-on.
And then really it's measuringis it so?
And essentially what I kind ofsaid earlier, it's like finance.
It's like your ad campaignshould be returning positively.
So it's kind of like people whoare trading tokens or trading
nfts.
It's like what's your portfolioon this campaign?
(07:15):
Is it actually getting 100return on investment?
So the players are coming inand spending as much as you've
spent on them or more.
Keep spending, keep doublingdown on that.
And then some of the othercampaigns that are not working
can you change things?
Should you just stop, etc.
And so my job is doing that andmanaging the teams that would
(07:36):
do that.
And often, as time went on, itwas less it was.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
It was very much about then building in various
technologies from from facebooknow meta, so various sdks, apis,
various different ways to breakout users, so pretty deep on
the user acquisition front andlots of products that came out
that revolutionized and andreally helped that that's
(08:02):
interesting and it seems like onfacebook gaming especially
because you're working withthese larger spenders and was
such a core part of the businessit seems like there was a a lot
of support given to them,because I remember when I was
running my ad agency facebook,definitely we were more on the
e-commerce is e-commerce andcourses side of things, but we
definitely saw like we were likenot getting much attention from
(08:25):
facebook we were spending likepretty large budgets, while
google would give us like allkinds of beta features and you
know they were.
They feed us pretty well, but itsounds like all the support was
going to gaming, so maybethat's what I, yeah it was funny
.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
They actually so it's funny because they actually
dedicated.
So I was, I was in the europeansales team.
There was like 10 of us, therewas already anybody, and so reva
was covering theenglish-speaking country in
europe, asia, and everyoneafrica, and so it's funny.
When we started to reallymature and, like you know, went
from a small organization to ahuge I mean facebook's a giant
(09:02):
now met as a giant in terms ofemployees we started to.
We broke out gaming as a totallyseparate vertical globally, so
we had like a ania team, a northamerica team, etc.
And e-commerce and autos andeverything was stuck in there.
But gaming was always kept onits own piece because, again,
(09:23):
that the learnings for how everygame scales it became pretty
uniform.
So if it was a mobile game froma chinese developer or an
american developer or orsomebody in the uk, it didn't it
.
The playbook was roughly thesame and so there was a big
economy of scale for forfacebook to to actually do that,
(09:44):
and so that meant you get towork with, really get to work
with all these games that if Ilook at the top 10 on ios, you
know the majority.
Our team would have touched thatone stage so so yeah, pretty
crazy, but I feel you on that,because even today we're
spending money today and useracquisition and even now
(10:04):
facebook's kind of met uschanged a bit where it's very
top-heavy, they focus on any big, big advertisers.
Well, google gives you a ton ofsupport, no matter who you are.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
So just just different ways of operating
businesses yeah, it's uh, it'sdefinitely interesting, and I
think it depends on the verticalas well, because uh yeah, it's.
It's kind of depends on spendvertical etc.
But uh, yeah, moving on, how?
How did you decide toessentially?
Um, where was what was thepoint that you decide?
Okay, I want to check out webthree gaming, I want to build my
(10:31):
own studio, and how did you andyour co-founder demon meet.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
For me personally, uh , I was there 2017 um, and I was
actually in facebook, and so Iwas running a team that focused
very much on new business.
One of the teams I had was verymuch new business, new
developers, and so we focus onall types of gaming, and so
crypto kiddies actually came upas an advertiser this they
wanted to advertise on facebook,and so we allowed them and, um,
(10:58):
we would just start to hey, youknow, typical things what is a
good value of a player?
Look like to you what's?
What's your retention?
We have a lot of benchmarksthat we see, anonymous ones we
can share, and the numbers theywere giving were like insane.
Um, so retention was like 2xwhat we typically would see in
free to play um, and then theand you know what okay, this is
(11:21):
crazy, and then people will betrading um some of the cats in
game as well, and we'd see theseother ridiculous fees and
revenues coming in, and so itwas the first.
It was one of the first timesin a long time that there was
there was a um, a real evolutionon the free to play gaming
model.
That's really important,because free to play is pretty
much 60 70% of gaming in theworld today.
(11:42):
It's just everything, if noteven bigger, and so it was that
that was kind of interesting andcrazy, and then invested, like
everybody did at the time, at abig pollin x account and buying
everything, and then it kind ofwent away.
You know, bear market happened,kind of 2018, 2019.
It's pretty bad.
And then you know, post, youknow, I suppose in late 2020 we
started seeing some real pickupand obviously axi then started
(12:06):
and, um, again, axi's, therevenues they were bringing in
on a monthly basis or just thetotal amount of revenue around
the game for a few months was, Imean we were talking I think it
was the high hundreds ofmillions, if not billions, at
one stage, out of only three orfour million players.
And so again, that was like adata point saying that again is
(12:27):
really unheard of, like like,we've had console gaming.
We know what that works.
We know mobile, even real moneygaming.
I wanted the teams there.
I understood like what thatwould look like, but this is
like totally different.
What's going on here?
This is a new behavior.
And so, um, it kind of bringsme to daemon.
So daemon is what actually oneof my first customers at
facebook so he actually had heleft.
(12:49):
He had a great role at a, at aat a big gaming company, left it
to do his own game, started onfacebook.
I called him up.
I saw the numbers there were.
There were small but likereally promising.
He was building a great game,scaled it like crazy, sold it
actually quite.
He sold it within a year to abig company.
They acquired it, kept him onbecause they wanted to operate
(13:11):
it and he built his.
He built that business, um, Ithink he had like over like a
quarter billion dollars inrevenue, you know, over 25
million downloads supersuccessful.
So I was always in touch withthem and we're always trying to
figure out something to do, andso I, I, you know, we're seeing
this going on.
It's a daemon, it's a look, youknow, and I think this is the
(13:33):
next wave.
I think we need to jump in and,um, we started to look at a lot
of different things that weregoing on in this space, like axi
, um, you know, star atlas,alluvium, you know.
We had a lot of concerns overwhat people were doing, because
we were like, just how are theygoing to sustain this growth in
terms of players, or can theyeven realize making these games
that they're talking about?
(13:54):
And some of the tokenomicslooks kind of crazy.
But we were like it's clearthat if there's real ownership
and the blockchain validatesthat you own certain assets in
game, that that's got tremendousvalue to, has potential to have
tremendous value to real gamersthat they can not only like
trade things, but they can keeptheir experience from game to
game.
They can be rewarded for that.
(14:16):
You know we'd seen a lot ofdifferent problems come up in
mobile gaming.
You know the classic one wasthat you go in a free to play
game and everything you'rebuying it's essentially
consumable.
The developer can just get ridof it whenever, and so you can
invest a lot into a game, a lotof time, a lot of money, and
then you know developer stopsupdating it or you want to move
(14:38):
on to something else that thatwhole investment is gone.
It's something when it's like a20, 30 dollar a game, console
game or a pc game.
So, okay, cool.
But we saw people investingthousands of dollars into some
of these mobile games and if thedeveloper decides to stop, you
know that's it.
And there was some pretty bigexamples that were just very
(14:59):
frustrating from a consumer sideand the mobile side people
building some big city, buildinggames that people spent a lot
on and developers that are notsupporting it anymore.
I said, wow, these people spentyears building and spending
money and now it's gone, and sothe idea that certain things
that experiences could betransferable on chain was very
(15:21):
interesting to us.
And then the second.
The second piece waseverybody's focusing on some
interesting DeFi stuff in gamingand we were like the real
problem we felt in free to playgaming Not the problem with the
opportunity was that you justreally low economic
participation rate, and by thatI mean people who spend money in
(15:42):
games.
You know your typical mobilegames.
If you look at something likeClash of Clans or Hobescapes or
Garden Scapes, maybe one to 2%of the total player base has
actually spent money in that.
Very much the economies favortheir pure demand side.
They very much say, okay, youjust keep grinding away and if
(16:03):
you want to fast forward time,you just spend some money here,
and so that was a almost a setway of operating for 10 years.
I'm like, okay, well, if youstart to look at opening the
economy a bit more and you startto say, if I allow certain
parts of the economy thatplayers can trade amongst
themselves and we kind of seenbits of this in gray markets,
(16:27):
like in World of Warcraft, wetrade things, for example CSGO,
they trade skins it's like ifyou now start to say, hey, parts
of your game economy.
Players can trade them, andthen you say those trades are
validated by a source of truth,which happens to be a blockchain
.
Then our theory was you can geta lot more players involved in
economic participation, not justpeople who want to pay, but
(16:48):
other people who may want toparticipate in being being
sellers in the economy.
And so we thought that was veryinteresting dynamic to
potentially bring into into agames economy.
And could that?
Could that increase the payerrace as we recall us?
That's very much with thedeveloper lens on.
Could that actually introducenew behaviors?
I could introduce new frictionin the game.
(17:09):
Friction is generally good forgames.
So there's a lot of different.
Essentially, it was a lot ofdifferent things that the
technology presented that wewere like, hey, this the data
seems like, even with the crappyexecutions that we're seeing,
that like people are engaging inthis and if we can build a
great game and integrate some ofthose ownership elements, some
(17:32):
of those trading elements,within a just a fun game, then I
think we'll be.
You know, we'll have somethingsuccessful, and so that's that's
obviously what we've beenendeavoring to do?
Speaker 1 (17:43):
That's.
That's really interesting.
What you said aboutparticipation rate, right, like
participation rate being kind ofvery, very low, and then by
introducing some of theseblockchain elements, you're
almost giving a lot of theseplayers, right, let's say, in in
in finning Norwich, which isone of the games, you
essentially get these followersand you can mint them on to the
blockchain, so you'reessentially getting new ways of
(18:04):
people being able to turn these.
You know, basically, in gameitems, they're earning into NFTs
that they can then trade amongthemselves and creating a
secondary economy for that.
Are you worried at all about,let's say, on your side, right,
like you're selling in gameitems?
(18:24):
Are you worried about that,those secondary sales taking
away from primary sales and haveyou done thinking on how how do
you approach that potentialrisk?
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, that was that.
That is the and it's a greatway of putting it like the
secondary economy, because youwant to facilitate that, so it
fit.
Emerge was a great example ofwe went fully that you can.
Just everything is on chain interms of power ups for the game.
One is a scarce set of NFTs,which, by the way, is like
another awesome reason why youbuild a blockchain.
(18:54):
You can really make thingsscarce in game and that's we can
have a whole, like ourconversation on how interesting
that is.
And then we said another itemsare power ups that can be traded
amongst players, and so thewhole economy essentially was
secondary.
What we, what we came to like,what we think the right balance
is, is that it's not the wholeeconomy can be traded by players
(19:14):
, but only certain parts, andthen you can gradually open and
open.
So in our latest game, king ofDestiny, we've got five big
things consumables that peopleneed to be successful at that
game, and one of those is a whatwe call an off chain to on
chain pair.
And so there's four other areasthat people can purchase direct
(19:36):
from the developer or justcontinue to play and earn those
in game rewards and achievementsas they progress through the
game with tournaments, that kindof stuff.
But there is that one elementthat we won't sell, we don't
touch, we don't sell direct.
There's ways to source them ingame and some players will
source more than others, andthen that we have to have a
platform thing, go and actuallytrade them to each other.
(19:56):
They can all be bundled up asas your C721s and transferred to
to other players, and so Ithink that's the interesting
thing.
I think the utopia of a fullyopen game economy right now is
very, very hard.
You haven't seen anybody reallysuccessfully do it.
The other thing is the influenceof where there's a lot of
(20:18):
speculative trading which 99% ofgame fighting is speculation
right now in terms of the assetprices and so on and that can
really upset your game economy.
And so I think having some levelof control at the developer
level I think is actually prettycrucial to make sure the game
is balanced, but you still keepsome of those incentives in
(20:40):
place for players to trade, andso, even even while we've taken
the King of Destiny, it's afeature on the game.
There's one feature, atournament feature, where the
Web 3 elements come in, butthere's a lot of other parts of
the game that will be verytypical Web 2.
And so I suppose you know whereit comes from is looking over
(21:01):
the last few years at what'sbeen successful and got traction
with gamers and there's not toomuch to lean on on the Web 3
side and so there's an elementof kind of dipping our toe in
the water with opening that up.
But if that's successful andlooks like it's good for gamers,
then you can start to open upother parts of your game's
economy to them as well.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And to just give people an overview, what are the
three games in the InfinityGods ecosystem right now?
Speaker 2 (21:27):
We've a more.
We've an Infinity Merge, whichis a web based merge game.
Very addictive, play that withkind of a candy crush, but
you're merging items.
Very competitive game.
That's on web right now.
We're planning on doing amobile version at some stage in
2024, which we think will bewill be a lot of fun.
(21:48):
Our second game is ImmortalSiege.
That's very much in beta rightnow.
It's on web.
It's a terror defense, a terrordefense game.
We actually have trading cardmechanics in there as well,
which we think is was prettyinteresting.
We've a hardcore group ofpeople testing it, which is cool
(22:08):
.
The idea with that game is wewant to go mobile, but we think
we can also go Epic and Steam atsome stage in the future as
well.
We'll probably actually likelygo Epic and Steam first, before
mobile, and then our main titlereally is our mobile first title
, which is King of Destiny.
And so King of Destiny is interms of genre.
It's called Luck Battle, whichis probably very new for a lot
(22:31):
of people.
There's a game about six yearsago launched called Coin Master,
and essentially you play a slotmachine for coins, use those
coins to build a village.
You can then attack otherfriends and steal their coins
from their village and viceversa, and, incredibly, it's a
(22:53):
top 10 iOS game, and there'sbeen a bunch of other similar
games coming out recently,namely Monopoly Go, which you
can't really leave the internetwithout seeing Monopoly Go
advertised, and it's the highestgrossing game today.
It's going to be the highestgrossing game, particularly on
mobile, in 2023 and possiblyacross all platforms, and so our
game is has some similarmechanics, but people can
(23:16):
actually own some of theirpieces in the game.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
People can actually trade some of the in-game
currencies, and we have a fewother things in there that we
think are uniquely different,beyond just Web3, to make it a
better product, and one of themost interesting things that I
think I've heard you guys talkabout is how you know, with
mobile gaming right now you'rehaving essentially competitions
very high Attribution is moredifficult than ever with IDFA
(23:42):
and you know cookies are alsogoing away, so overall it's kind
of getting to be a prettycompetitive niche.
Now, one of the interestingthings I would love your take on
is how does LTV play into whatblockchain enables?
Right?
Because I think one of the bigpieces behind blockchain gaming
(24:03):
is that it can increase LTV withthese new kind of mechanics.
So I would love to get yourtake on that.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Yeah, I mean it's interesting.
We even have an LTV calculationgoing across Web2 and Web3 for
a king of destiny, and sothere's kind of two ways that it
really helps.
One, we believe it's going toincrease the number of people
economically participating inthe game.
So essentially from our pointof view, it's more payers in the
game, and so take that numberfrom, say, 2% to, we think, 3, 4
(24:34):
, 5, 6% is actually prettypossible with these mechanics.
We saw something similar withinFinemerge, our first game,
which is Web only, which istypically much lower
monetization rates.
But we're hitting like 10%monetization rate, which was
crazy high, and so we think justto be more people monetizing.
So that's good.
The second is then yourcalculation is pretty much how
(24:58):
much IAP are they purchasing,how many ads are they watching
in game?
Because we have some in-appadvertising as well.
That's a revenue contributor.
And then you also look atcertain items are actually NFTs
in the game.
They're non-fungible.
So there's obviously primarysales.
If they're resold, there's aroyalty secondary on that as
(25:18):
well.
And then there's obviously thatcurrency that players can trade
amongst themselves, and everytime if you are going to sell
that, you pay a small sellingfee, and so we add those in
there.
So we think we can not justincrease the breadth of payers
but also increase the rate ofmonetization that players have,
(25:39):
because there's essentially morethings for them to do and
participate in.
Now this is very much coming outof developer lens.
I think it's very much lookingat how do you actually, if you
want to be very competitive infree to play in mobile gaming?
It is about, can you get thathigher LTV than the competitor?
Because you get the higher LTV,then you can actually reinvest
(26:01):
that into a better game, intomore users via user acquisition,
etc.
Higher, better developers, etc.
Or more developers, and you canjust get bigger and better
overall.
And so one of our big, ourthesis from our first couple of
games going into mobile is thatwe think we can be very
(26:24):
competitive on the LTV frontwith the top games on the App
Store and it's really like ifyou can get to some sort of
feature parity with them on theweb two side and then introduce
our off-chain to on-chaintrading, then we believe that
gives us that extra 1 or 2% inan LTV side.
If you get that, then you canoutbid them on the ad auctions
(26:46):
and you can actually win marketshare against them, and so
that's the fascinating side ofthat's how we view it.
I think we're not looking okay.
Can we compete with Parallel orsome of the web three spaces?
It's very much focused on wherewe see the majority of the
consumer time and the consumerspend, which is on mobile, and
(27:10):
how do we get a competitive edgein there?
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Yeah, that is fascinating.
That's probably the biggestbenefit blockchain can have to
existing game developers is thatit adds new ways of essentially
optimizing the games for higherLTV, higher monetization rates.
What she said aboutmonetization rates is huge too,
because if you can double that,that's you're pretty much
doubling your revenue per user,right, and your ads now can work
(27:36):
much better.
You can scale them a lot more.
So this is very interesting andI know so far you've mainly
focused on the communitybuilding side, right, so I've
had the communities very active.
I see a lot of the Volstowmembers in there.
You know where.
It definitely is a good vibe inthere and the games are really
(27:56):
fun.
But now it seems like withKings of Destiny, I believe,
you've rolled it out on at leasta few countries on the App
Store.
Are you starting to add in muchmore of a focus on paid UA and
paid acquisition, and what doesthat stack look like in terms of
user acquisition right now?
Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
I'd say, firstly, it's still early, so we've
launched, we're still addingsome pretty major features
coming in over the next twomonths to go in and so probably
around February or cert season,pretty serious user acquisition.
We have been spending primarilyusing Meta and Google and so
we've just been testingdifferent things.
(28:36):
You know, trying to get a readon day one retention that's in
small numbers for certainmarkets was pretty.
Is looking actually when that's40% mark pretty good starting
place, you know.
But but we're we're launched, Ithink, three weeks, so we're
still we're still trying tooptimize that.
We're still getting a lot offeedback on things like various
little bugs.
Things are responding to littlethings that are not working.
(28:58):
Some things are working wellthat we didn't think.
So what we're really intendingto do is is we're broadening out
the testing over the next fewweeks.
So looking at Apple search adsjust to really see what's our
CPI there, what's the, is thereany quality bar that we can look
at?
And then particularly into thead networks like Apple loving,
(29:18):
like Unity as well, and evensome of the ad formats were
beginning to bring out likeplayables.
So this is very deep down therabbit hole of like gaming ads.
But this is typically actuallywhat drives most gamers into
into games.
So, getting into the playablespace, we started working with
the partner to develop someplayables so that allows access
and inventory there, and sowe're really like you know,
(29:39):
right now, if I look at like themain metric, where we have a
certain level within the gamethat players unlock a feature
and our tournament feature, andso we're really tracking, like
our players, how, what's thefunnel looking like to get there
?
Can that be optimized?
Are there channel differences?
We've seen geo differencesalready, but we're not surprised
(30:01):
by that as well.
So, like how our Canadianplayers have operated versus
Philippine players are actuallydramatically different.
We've actually seen purchaserscome in which we're not
optimized for at all and that'sbeen very interesting People
coming in and playing one leveland they just buying some of the
intro packs straight away.
We're seeing some reallyhardcore people stick around
(30:23):
from web to so they'll connectFacebook and they will.
They will be attacking andgoing through the levels all day
long and people doing 20, 25minute session times some days.
We also get a lot of people whoare like just coming playing a
level and churning out and solike we need to do that.
So we're like just over 5000players in in a few weeks.
(30:44):
We have the controls toincrease that up and down
without too much craziness andthe costs are actually pretty
decent, which is great.
We're kind of surprised the youknow probably one thing we
talked before I was worriedabout some of the CPI costs and
so we haven't got to seriousscale, but even when we did push
a few campaigns, we were like,oh, like it's actually well
(31:07):
within what we thought it wouldbe and in some cases, actually
even cheaper.
And so you know, the only thingthat's been probably like where
the user acquisition and thegrowth side has been obviously
Apple and iOS 14.
And so it.
This is just a fact of lifethese days.
(31:28):
So the targeting is actuallyreally good.
When we target on Facebook orGoogle, we are on Google, uac,
google advertising.
We actually do see, you know,good iOS quality players come
through.
But it's there's that data lagof 72 hours.
Do you know how good a campaignreally is or not?
(31:49):
Versus Android, versus anyAndroid campaign?
Were able to like, okay, thiscampaign is crap, just shut it
off.
This was great Double thebudget, more creative.
So let's go.
We've had a few of thosealready, which has been exciting
.
So the only real change is isthat delay be able to make
decisions on any campaign comingfrom Apple.
(32:10):
But there's other optimizationswe're doing there to try and
get that data within 24 hours sowe can make some decisions.
So that's got really deep downthe ad rabbit hole.
But you know, maybe it'ssomething to kind of to comment
on.
You know, we looked at thealternative if we weren't on
mobile.
And how do we drive players atscale, particularly in the Web
(32:33):
three side, and there really isnothing that you're most
successful games Maybe get fivefigures for a very brief period
of time and they reallystruggled to hold on to it.
And the types of players andthe motivations don't
necessarily lend themselves to agreat gaming business.
And personally I'd never seenin my 10 years, and still
(32:54):
haven't, any browser-based gameunless it was connected to a big
platform scale in any sort ofmeaningful way.
And so one of the benefits ofchoosing mobile is very
predictable ways to acquireplayers.
So everybody talks about massadoption in Web 3.
And we need to get there andit's like the platform is at
(33:15):
your starting point.
So if you're on web, only veryhard to get scale, very, very
hard.
Ironically, very hard to getscale without losing your shirt.
In terms of spend, where mobileand even some of the stores
like Epic and Steam, it's a lotmore controllable of how you can
acquire and retain players.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, I mean I agree with that 100%.
There isn't really that largeof a Web 3 gaming user base.
The games I've seen that havegained momentum are actually
appealing to the Web 2 crowd.
So one of our portfoliocompanies, the Bornless they
have, I think at this point a180k Steam wishlist and they've
just been focusing on reallylike girlish style marketing,
(33:56):
reaching out to kind of likenews outlets, getting their
influencers on board, and reallynot focusing on the Web 3 side
at all.
If a Web 3 desktop game wants to, or like a browser game wants
to, really go and acquire userskind of have to focus on the Web
2 side unless they're more oflike a game experience.
If you're focused on game 5,which is like I mean, that's a
(34:18):
great product, right, likepeople enjoy it, right, there's
definitely product market fitthere.
But if you're trying to build agame that scales to millions of
users, I do think that eitheryou're going to have to onboard
Web 2 gamers or you're going tohave to really figure out an
acquisition funnel thatultimately is going to be mobile
based, or if it's on PC, thenSteam or Epic based right, you
(34:39):
can't really do it without that.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
It's exactly that I always struggled when we were
first getting to the space of.
There were certain projectsgetting a lot of attention and
hype and I kind of understandwhy now, but in the back of my
head I was like how the hellwill they acquire players,
steven?
They just could use all thesetokens.
You know what's their CPI goingto be like and it's very boring
(35:02):
.
But it's a very boring topic, Ithink, for things like crypto,
twitter, but it's kind of likethe majority of gaming is.
It's kind of what's your LTVversus your cost of acquiring
them, and that cost can be free,it can be paid, but it's still
a cost you need to go in, and itdoesn't matter if you're
launching a game on PlayStation,you're working that out, or
(35:22):
Android.
It's the same equation.
You ultimately need to getgoing, and so I think it's a
going back to.
It's one of those things thatwe thought we'd differentiate
ourselves on the web tree side.
Was that more of a conservativeapproach?
But you could clearly see, hereis how you get millions of
players and, similar to some ofthe other companies you
(35:45):
mentioned as well, like Bornless, like you're on Steam and you
do some of the right marketing,you can get some players and it
can grow quite nicely on Steamif you've got a great game.
Epic is seems to have a lot ofopportunities similar to that as
well.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, it almost seems like there's two playbooks.
There's one which is like sorry,ok, it almost seems like
there's two playbooks.
So there's one which is PC based, which is much more organic
hype game trailer, lots of newsoutlets and it's basically a ton
of hype, right, and it's hugemarketing budgets and harder to
(36:19):
attribute and measure back.
And then there's other which ismobile gaming, which is very
data driven.
It's very much performancemarketing what's your LTV,
what's your CAC, what's yourconversion rates throughout the
funnel, and it's more map thananything else in terms of the
optimization process and it'slike these are two different
worlds and so you kind of haveto understand which world you're
(36:40):
in.
And sometimes when you seethese studios that are kind of
like trying to be in the middleof both, it's a little bit
disconcerting.
But I think in your guys' caseit's like I can see very clearly
that mobile first seems to belike a very big focus.
And that's also where I'mpersonally very bullish on
InfiniGOTS as a team and as astudio is because I see kind of
(37:02):
the approach of really trying tooptimize and having a
mathematical approach towardsthings.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, very not the sexiest, but it's very efficient
at growing and I think it'svery interesting, like I think
at the Web3, some of the Web3projects, some of the games are
very much going for that realbig hype and it's like I think I
(37:29):
hope you get there.
I really hope you're successful.
Wow, that is so hard.
It's so hard and I think, yourcompetitors, because you're
trying to win market sharing avery limited space.
So if you think about PC gamersor the tiny browser market or
the console market, you've got avery small number of publishers
(37:52):
out there EA, blizzard, etcetera and they will come with
hundreds of millions and hugemarketing teams and they've done
this 20 times and they will goand say, ok, like the big four
or five games on PlayStation andXbox this year.
This is what they are.
And if you're trying to sneakin there or sneak in on the PC
(38:15):
side, you really need to have anamazing game and still get
picked up, but the hit rate isso much lower.
And what I learned of Facebookwas the Matt DeHalliman
ultimately won in the end.
You even saw these like King,and Candy Crush was a great
example.
It was like nobody gave them achance.
(38:35):
They were a skill-based gamefor years, a web-based game.
They decided to do games onFacebook and they decided to go
mobile and they just got theircalculations right simple game
and they got their LTV versusCPI, understood their markets,
their audiences.
And then you've got theActivision's who couldn't do
that saying, ok, now I'll buyyou.
And so it's very interestingand I suppose it's good to see
(38:57):
more web-threat companies.
I wish there was more out thereor we talked about them, because
I think you still see all themajor projects that have NFTs
and you see a lot of foot online.
Like people say oh, there's athread today on an ex aka
Twitter.
Blockchain gaming is dead.
(39:18):
I'm like, well, have you heardof NFL rivals?
I mean, look what Mythical aredoing Complete 180 on their
strategy of being all hype into.
Ok, we'll buy the right NFL,but we'll use performance
marketing and we'll do goodviral mechanics and we'll build
a great execution of blockchainand very successful game.
They're not talked about there.
(39:38):
Upland has been a web-threatsuccess story since 2020, as far
as I'm concerned, on mobile, onweb.
So I think that's thedistortion.
You see is the hype takes up alot of the oxygen in the space,
but you have these othermath-based companies doing
(39:59):
pretty, pretty well and buildinggreat businesses.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
What do you feel like is one piece of infrastructure
that is currently missing in theweb-threat gaming space and, if
you could like, will intoexistence, or just tell the
founders out there hey, go buildthis thing, go raise around and
go build this out.
That's probably the same pointI was going to say.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
I was going to be.
You know, I was going to sayalmost.
It's not really infrastructure,but regulation is needed.
It's a tough one, but just withsome of the token things, I see
I'm like there probably needsto be some oversight or
something there Let everybodyknow who's market making these
tokens, et cetera, and whenthey're dropping off.
But no, the more obvious one, Iwould say, is the less
(40:47):
controversial, sexy one, I think, is Ad Network for Web 3.
And so, because what'sinteresting we have, you know,
currently we have like six,seven hundred thousand wallets
playing Web three games everyday, you know, and so that's
maybe two hundred thousand,three hundred thousand real
people.
(41:07):
So the game fly audience isactually quite small.
But the, the audience whoactually holds Bitcoin or
aetherium or who have touchedsomething, who hold an, a
digital asset, a crypto, cryptoasset, is actually way larger.
So I think I mean they've asked, I've seen interesting
estimates that there's, you know.
You know close to 50 millionpeople have cryptocurrency some
(41:31):
form in the US.
They that might be high, buteven if it's 20 or 30 million,
that's, that's pretty high, butthere's, there's a lot more out
there when it comes to some ofthe bigger pieces, and so I
think you know some way toconnect those folks.
What else do they do Outside ofjust cryptocurrency?
What are their interests?
And some sort of a targeted adnetwork will be pretty big
(41:52):
because, if you think about,while we're targeting gamers, it
helps us.
When they're a gamer and andthey actually understand web 3
or they have some, they havesome understanding because we
don't have to take them througha huge learning path To
understand how trade or whatthey're buying actually happens
to be an unfungible token.
Therefore, you know, you maywant to, you may want to put it
(42:13):
into a secure wallet at somestage.
So actually that's a lot of ourcommunity is those types of
folks.
They're really big gamers butthey understand the technology,
and so I think getting more of aweb 3 ad network is something
that's that's.
That's that's missing.
It's very hard to do withoutowning a lot of content, and so
I really think there's a companyI love and that not that many
(42:35):
people may have heard of is applovin, and they really, you know
they went into the ad networkspace in gaming where it was
basically Facebook and Googlesplit up the whole thing and
they said I'm gonna go to othergames and I'm gonna try and get
inventory from them and they'regonna repackage and sell that
inventory to other gamingcompanies and they created this
amazing flywheel business.
I think somebody needs to.
(42:56):
I think that's a hugeopportunity in the web 3 space
right now.
So we to buy some of thattraffic where we know what three
you know consumers are andStart to repackage it with
better targeting for other web 3companies to to use.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
So there, is a couple of different ad network
startups that I've talked toSlice, hype lab but I don't
think any of them are reallyfocused on the gaming side.
So that's a good, good idea forsure, if you guys are listening
and Okay, that that makes a tonof sense.
And with Apple, and did theystart out buying Inventory or
did they start out as a DSP?
(43:31):
Because I know they have likekind of like this overall they
have a lot of inventory, butthey also are act as a DSP on
top of other inventory.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, they started off as a DSP.
Yeah, they, they.
They had no games at the time,so they had analytics product
and so it's a hey, we'll giveyou free analytics, but give us
a look at some of your inventory.
So we know you've got an adstack and so they.
You know a story.
What they would be very cleveris they pick a subgenre and so
(44:01):
they they want one that I ran itinto.
This is so genre called socialcasino, which is like it's.
It's it's free to play slotsthat you can't win any money.
But people spend seven billiona year in social casino games
but they can never win.
But they picked that categoryand they targeted tier two
Developers, so they weren'treally like the biggest
developers they weren'tmonetizing as well to said, hey,
(44:22):
I Want to show ads to your bestusers, I'll give you 80, 90
dollar CPMs, and they're likesure, and then they're able to
take those players and then sellthat inventory to other soap,
to the top tier social casinoplayers, and they'll pay a lot
more than that to actually reachand acquire those players.
And so they started actuallythat that way, just just kind of
(44:44):
knocking off genre by genre.
And then, obviously, if they'reon analytics product.
They're building up, okay,understanding who these
customers were.
They're understanding a bitmore than so.
They were able to then start tobecome, you know, become a
better DSP, and then theyacquired machine zone and a few
other companies, so then they'reable to supply their own
impressions as well.
(45:04):
But yeah, they started there andjust work their way up where
you know and they say come backto the ad network space.
No matter what technology it is, it's really who owns the, the
underlying content.
And so you know, for them to goin where again, really,
facebook and Google, almost ofthe internet, not only their
(45:25):
sites, but obviously they had,they had their pixels, their
SDKs, pretty much everywhere togo in and to like, squeeze in
and do.
That was super impressive.
And I think, I think in the web3 space you know, you're not
there's no major dominantcontent players in there yes,
apart from Twitter, you couldargue, but they've got no real.
(45:46):
They've got a real interest,but there is probably ways to
understand and break up thoseusers and to understand where
they're at and and and to createthat, create that flywheel.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
It's.
It's fascinating how ad tech is.
It's just starting to take offin web 3 and and it's very basic
at this point- you know it'snot that many users, there's not
that much data.
The publishers are Still likekind of cagey about letting
people essentially run ads ontheir Inventory right, so it's
still kind of in the earlystages.
(46:19):
But I do agree there's a hugeopportunity there where it's
kind of this, all this newinventory that Google and
Facebook, they're not reallytaking part in this ecosystem
yet.
So there's like this window ofopportunity to just come in and
take up all the inventory andjust, you know, build something
interesting and then, yeah,that's, that's all I'll I'll say
on that.
But yeah, I guess do do wrap upthe conversation.
(46:44):
You know, and this has been anincredibly enlightening
conversation, I think definitelyyour your experience with kind
of user acquisition and gaminggrowth it's, it's pretty
mind-blowing.
And To just wrap up, wherewould people go to learn more
about infini gods?
Get involved.
Where should they go?
(47:05):
Yeah, wherever they'recomfortable.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I mean, we're on website is infini.
Gods calm, run Twitter as welland finish odds there, and
obviously we've a Discord at.
This was probably the best ifyou, if you like, using that
platform.
A lot of our team are in there,as you said, a lot of the Wolf
game crew and some of the wolvesthat crew pixel ball.
We have a lot of folks fromthose communities In and around
and they're just Honestly also Imean they're highly intelligent
(47:32):
, I understand what they'redoing Really nice community
members, so they're great ifpeople just want to ask around
there.
Plus, we were on our ownCommunity folks as well.
I would say, if you have, ifyou're in the US, canada.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Australia, here the.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Philippines Download King of Destiny and check out
that game.
I think what we want to beknown for I was in with this
yesterday less and less do wewant to be known for it, since,
in a god's like here, what'sthat game that we're playing?
You know, I think it's gettingout of this height, this pre
launch hype phase, into likejust be known for the game, how
fun it is.
So if people want to, they cango and check out and play at
(48:04):
King of Destiny Awesome.
Yeah, thanks for jumping on.
Cool Thanks, that's great.
Great to be out.
Welcome back to the Crescendo Go To Market podcast.
Today we have Owen, who is thechief revenue officer at
Infinite Gods.
Do you want to give us a quickintroduction to yourself and
Infinite Gods as well?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
For sure.
Great to have you on, sasha.
We appreciate it.
I'm Owen O'Donoghue, spent thelast decades at Facebook as part
of the gaming team, workingwith big gaming companies and,
18 months ago, co-founded ablockchain gaming studio called
(00:32):
Infinite Gods, and really whatwe're trying to do is build fun
games that have mass appeal,particularly on mobile, that
also use some of the best partsof blockchain technology to make
the games more fun and moreenjoyable for players.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
And I think that's what's really interesting about
Infinite Gods is there's a lotof unique mechanisms that I
haven't seen anywhere else inthe Web 3 gaming space.
So I'm curious about your storybecause I know before you got
into the Web 3 gaming space, youwere working at Facebook, right
.
You were leading there.
Essentially, I believe you wereleading gaming at Facebook,
right.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, I was leading the user acquisition or the
advertising side in NorthAmerica and actually Latin
America as well.
It was very small and really Ijoined very early on in Facebook
in 2010 in the European office,and Facebook was trying to
figure out its commercialstrategy at the time.
So, are we selling advertising?
(01:28):
Are we selling subscriptions,gifting?
There was a ton of ideas westarted to see.
We had a platform opened wherepeople could build applications
within Facebook using Flash, andgames like Farmville, texas
Holden, poker, saladomania,candy Crush all these games were
(01:49):
actually operating on Web andproducing pretty good revenue in
terms of payments, but just theamount of like, how much time
people were spending on thosegames compared to the rest of
Facebook for certain players waspretty incredible to see, and
so it was a real driver ofFacebook's early business, and
so I was part of the team thatwas tasked with.
(02:11):
Okay, let's grow this business,let's go and recruit other
developers and let's actuallyhelp them grow their game
through both organic and paidmeans and then help them
monetize as well.
And so that was a rocket shipand actually is still a rocket
ship of a business, and soreally went from zero to quite
(02:31):
big quite fast, you know, duringthat time really saw that trans
again.
I actually had a backgroundwhere I worked actually with the
Microsoft work in Xbox, sothat's a very brief experience
with gaming, but it was reallycrazy to see how, where I
traditionally thought games were, you know, like big fancy,
launch is a really cool game.
(02:51):
A lot of people play it andwhat.
What I was seeing a Facebookwas.
It was almost like it wasessentially almost financial.
It was these free to play gamesget them out there to an
audience, make it free butallowing in game payments, and
then really see what's the valueof players and then continue to
(03:11):
acquire them through digitaladvertising as long as it was
profitable.
And so you would see thesebusinesses really go from zero
to making like 1020 $3040,000run rates and then actually, as
we got into mobile, those gamesstarted to make, you know,
100,000 to almost a milliondollars a day in revenue and it
(03:34):
was the birth in the west offree to play gaming coming at
scale.
And so you know that transitionwas just seeing that was
actually very interesting.
It was real hotbed for startupswhere you did need to be this
big publisher like EA orActivision who had been around
for 20 years with all theseestablished relationships with
(03:57):
distributors and consoles, andthat business has grown, grown.
Facebook's role became more andmore about acquiring players,
both on the paid means, andbecame quite sophisticated, from
being able to just get somebodyto install your game to hey, I
want somebody who has a paymentpattern of this, who has a
(04:19):
purchase behavior of this.
Therefore they're more likelyto be a high value player in my
game and so spent spent 10 yearson that.
That business went fromliterally it was probably about
$5, $6 million a year forFacebook and when I was leaving
it was close to a $5 billionrevenue line for for Facebook
(04:41):
and now meta and it continues tobe probably one of the big
drivers.
But very interesting just to seethat side of gaming, because I
always assumed it was console,it was PC, because that's what I
played.
But actually when I saw overthe last decade was the vast
majority of gamers actually theyswitched to mobile and they
(05:01):
were not like me.
They were.
You know they were, they werethey're female they're older and
so very, very interestingexperience while I was working
there.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
What did a typical like day to day look like in
what you did?
Because you were essentiallyworking with these gaming
companies, I guess your job wasto help them acquire users and
get a ROI so they would spendmore on getting users right.
It's it sounded like kind ofthat sort of enable control on
your end, or what did that looklike?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
yeah, I mean it.
It helps you change a lot.
There's a lot of just going inand finding and doing a lot of
business development to findfolks and you know, first few
years typically would have beengoing into markets in eastern
europe and israel developers whoare actually making further
platforms at the time, like thisis even pre-mobile, and who
(05:52):
make flash games and persuadethem to move over.
But typically your day to daywould be looking at okay, you
know what are you trying to do,what's your target and so it's.
You know, what type of game doyou have, what's the typical
pattern that represents a goodplayer?
So is that lifetime value, sohow much they purchase over the
life?
Or there are other behaviors.
(06:12):
And it's then working with thedeveloper to parse those little
audiences and actually help them.
You know what creatives will goand speak to that audience, how
to target them.
So, beyond just age and geo,are their interests, are their
behaviors.
And that obviously changed alot where at the start you were
(06:33):
saying, hey, use static interest, so what people have said they
like on facebook.
This is like feels like so longago.
Uh, all through to today whereyou're actually going to say,
hey, like, take an audience in amarket really focus on.
They have exhibited these typesof behaviors via sdks and go
(06:55):
after and bid this amount forthem, use these amount of
creatives.
So it's very hands-on.
And then really it's measuringis it so?
And essentially what I kind ofsaid earlier, it's like finance.
It's like your ad campaignshould be returning positively.
So it's kind of like people whoare trading tokens or trading
nfts.
It's like what's your portfolioon this campaign?
(07:15):
Is it actually getting 100return on investment?
So the players are coming inand spending as much as you've
spent on them or more.
Keep spending, keep doublingdown on that.
And then some of the othercampaigns that are not working
can you change things?
Should you just stop, etc.
And so my job is doing that andmanaging the teams that would
(07:36):
do that.
And often, as time went on, itwas less it was.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
It was very much about then building in various
technologies from from facebooknow meta, so various sdks, apis,
various different ways to breakout users, so pretty deep on
the user acquisition front andlots of products that came out
that revolutionized and andreally helped that that's
(08:02):
interesting and it seems like onfacebook gaming especially
because you're working withthese larger spenders and was
such a core part of the businessit seems like there was a a lot
of support given to them,because I remember when I was
running my ad agency facebook,definitely we were more on the
e-commerce is e-commerce andcourses side of things, but we
definitely saw like we were likenot getting much attention from
(08:25):
facebook we were spending likepretty large budgets, while
google would give us like allkinds of beta features and you
know they were.
They feed us pretty well, but itsounds like all the support was
going to gaming, so maybethat's what I, yeah it was funny
.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
They actually so it's funny because they actually
dedicated.
So I was, I was in the europeansales team.
There was like 10 of us, therewas already anybody, and so reva
was covering theenglish-speaking country in
europe, asia, and everyoneafrica, and so it's funny.
When we started to reallymature and, like you know, went
from a small organization to ahuge I mean facebook's a giant
(09:02):
now met as a giant in terms ofemployees we started to.
We broke out gaming as a totallyseparate vertical globally, so
we had like a ania team, a northamerica team, etc.
And e-commerce and autos andeverything was stuck in there.
But gaming was always kept onits own piece because, again,
(09:23):
that the learnings for how everygame scales it became pretty
uniform.
So if it was a mobile game froma chinese developer or an
american developer or orsomebody in the uk, it didn't it
.
The playbook was roughly thesame and so there was a big
economy of scale for forfacebook to to actually do that,
(09:44):
and so that meant you get towork with, really get to work
with all these games that if Ilook at the top 10 on ios, you
know the majority.
Our team would have touched thatone stage so so yeah, pretty
crazy, but I feel you on that,because even today we're
spending money today and useracquisition and even now
(10:04):
facebook's kind of met uschanged a bit where it's very
top-heavy, they focus on any big, big advertisers.
Well, google gives you a ton ofsupport, no matter who you are.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
So just just different ways of operating
businesses yeah, it's uh, it'sdefinitely interesting, and I
think it depends on the verticalas well, because uh yeah, it's.
It's kind of depends on spendvertical etc.
But uh, yeah, moving on, how?
How did you decide toessentially?
Um, where was what was thepoint that you decide?
Okay, I want to check out webthree gaming, I want to build my
(10:31):
own studio, and how did you andyour co-founder demon meet.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
For me personally, uh , I was there 2017 um, and I was
actually in facebook, and so Iwas running a team that focused
very much on new business.
One of the teams I had was verymuch new business, new
developers, and so we focus onall types of gaming, and so
crypto kiddies actually came upas an advertiser this they
wanted to advertise on facebook,and so we allowed them and, um,
(10:58):
we would just start to hey, youknow, typical things what is a
good value of a player?
Look like to you what's?
What's your retention?
We have a lot of benchmarksthat we see, anonymous ones we
can share, and the numbers theywere giving were like insane.
Um, so retention was like 2xwhat we typically would see in
free to play um, and then theand you know what okay, this is
(11:21):
crazy, and then people will betrading um some of the cats in
game as well, and we'd see theseother ridiculous fees and
revenues coming in, and so itwas the first.
It was one of the first timesin a long time that there was
there was a um, a real evolutionon the free to play gaming
model.
That's really important,because free to play is pretty
much 60 70% of gaming in theworld today.
(11:42):
It's just everything, if noteven bigger, and so it was that
that was kind of interesting andcrazy, and then invested, like
everybody did at the time, at abig pollin x account and buying
everything, and then it kind ofwent away.
You know, bear market happened,kind of 2018, 2019.
It's pretty bad.
And then you know, post, youknow, I suppose in late 2020 we
started seeing some real pickupand obviously axi then started
(12:06):
and, um, again, axi's, therevenues they were bringing in
on a monthly basis or just thetotal amount of revenue around
the game for a few months was, Imean we were talking I think it
was the high hundreds ofmillions, if not billions, at
one stage, out of only three orfour million players.
And so again, that was like adata point saying that again is
(12:27):
really unheard of, like like,we've had console gaming.
We know what that works.
We know mobile, even real moneygaming.
I wanted the teams there.
I understood like what thatwould look like, but this is
like totally different.
What's going on here?
This is a new behavior.
And so, um, it kind of bringsme to daemon.
So daemon is what actually oneof my first customers at
facebook so he actually had heleft.
(12:49):
He had a great role at a, at aat a big gaming company, left it
to do his own game, started onfacebook.
I called him up.
I saw the numbers there were.
There were small but likereally promising.
He was building a great game,scaled it like crazy, sold it
actually quite.
He sold it within a year to abig company.
They acquired it, kept him onbecause they wanted to operate
(13:11):
it and he built his.
He built that business, um, Ithink he had like over like a
quarter billion dollars inrevenue, you know, over 25
million downloads supersuccessful.
So I was always in touch withthem and we're always trying to
figure out something to do, andso I, I, you know, we're seeing
this going on.
It's a daemon, it's a look, youknow, and I think this is the
(13:33):
next wave.
I think we need to jump in and,um, we started to look at a lot
of different things that weregoing on in this space, like axi
, um, you know, star atlas,alluvium, you know.
We had a lot of concerns overwhat people were doing, because
we were like, just how are theygoing to sustain this growth in
terms of players, or can theyeven realize making these games
that they're talking about?
(13:54):
And some of the tokenomicslooks kind of crazy.
But we were like it's clearthat if there's real ownership
and the blockchain validatesthat you own certain assets in
game, that that's got tremendousvalue to, has potential to have
tremendous value to real gamersthat they can not only like
trade things, but they can keeptheir experience from game to
game.
They can be rewarded for that.
(14:16):
You know we'd seen a lot ofdifferent problems come up in
mobile gaming.
You know the classic one wasthat you go in a free to play
game and everything you'rebuying it's essentially
consumable.
The developer can just get ridof it whenever, and so you can
invest a lot into a game, a lotof time, a lot of money, and
then you know developer stopsupdating it or you want to move
(14:38):
on to something else that thatwhole investment is gone.
It's something when it's like a20, 30 dollar a game, console
game or a pc game.
So, okay, cool.
But we saw people investingthousands of dollars into some
of these mobile games and if thedeveloper decides to stop, you
know that's it.
And there was some pretty bigexamples that were just very
(14:59):
frustrating from a consumer sideand the mobile side people
building some big city, buildinggames that people spent a lot
on and developers that are notsupporting it anymore.
I said, wow, these people spentyears building and spending
money and now it's gone, and sothe idea that certain things
that experiences could betransferable on chain was very
(15:21):
interesting to us.
And then the second.
The second piece waseverybody's focusing on some
interesting DeFi stuff in gamingand we were like the real
problem we felt in free to playgaming Not the problem with the
opportunity was that you justreally low economic
participation rate, and by thatI mean people who spend money in
(15:42):
games.
You know your typical mobilegames.
If you look at something likeClash of Clans or Hobescapes or
Garden Scapes, maybe one to 2%of the total player base has
actually spent money in that.
Very much the economies favortheir pure demand side.
They very much say, okay, youjust keep grinding away and if
(16:03):
you want to fast forward time,you just spend some money here,
and so that was a almost a setway of operating for 10 years.
I'm like, okay, well, if youstart to look at opening the
economy a bit more and you startto say, if I allow certain
parts of the economy thatplayers can trade amongst
themselves and we kind of seenbits of this in gray markets,
(16:27):
like in World of Warcraft, wetrade things, for example CSGO,
they trade skins it's like ifyou now start to say, hey, parts
of your game economy.
Players can trade them, andthen you say those trades are
validated by a source of truth,which happens to be a blockchain
.
Then our theory was you can geta lot more players involved in
economic participation, not justpeople who want to pay, but
(16:48):
other people who may want toparticipate in being being
sellers in the economy.
And so we thought that was veryinteresting dynamic to
potentially bring into into agames economy.
And could that?
Could that increase the payerrace as we recall us?
That's very much with thedeveloper lens on.
Could that actually introducenew behaviors?
I could introduce new frictionin the game.
(17:09):
Friction is generally good forgames.
So there's a lot of different.
Essentially, it was a lot ofdifferent things that the
technology presented that wewere like, hey, this the data
seems like, even with the crappyexecutions that we're seeing,
that like people are engaging inthis and if we can build a
great game and integrate some ofthose ownership elements, some
(17:32):
of those trading elements,within a just a fun game, then I
think we'll be.
You know, we'll have somethingsuccessful, and so that's that's
obviously what we've beenendeavoring to do?
Speaker 1 (17:43):
That's.
That's really interesting.
What you said aboutparticipation rate, right, like
participation rate being kind ofvery, very low, and then by
introducing some of theseblockchain elements, you're
almost giving a lot of theseplayers, right, let's say, in in
in finning Norwich, which isone of the games, you
essentially get these followersand you can mint them on to the
blockchain, so you'reessentially getting new ways of
(18:04):
people being able to turn these.
You know, basically, in gameitems, they're earning into NFTs
that they can then trade amongthemselves and creating a
secondary economy for that.
Are you worried at all about,let's say, on your side, right,
like you're selling in gameitems?
(18:24):
Are you worried about that,those secondary sales taking
away from primary sales and haveyou done thinking on how how do
you approach that potentialrisk?
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, that was that.
That is the and it's a greatway of putting it like the
secondary economy, because youwant to facilitate that, so it
fit.
Emerge was a great example ofwe went fully that you can.
Just everything is on chain interms of power ups for the game.
One is a scarce set of NFTs,which, by the way, is like
another awesome reason why youbuild a blockchain.
(18:54):
You can really make thingsscarce in game and that's we can
have a whole, like ourconversation on how interesting
that is.
And then we said another itemsare power ups that can be traded
amongst players, and so thewhole economy essentially was
secondary.
What we, what we came to like,what we think the right balance
is, is that it's not the wholeeconomy can be traded by players
(19:14):
, but only certain parts, andthen you can gradually open and
open.
So in our latest game, king ofDestiny, we've got five big
things consumables that peopleneed to be successful at that
game, and one of those is a whatwe call an off chain to on
chain pair.
And so there's four other areasthat people can purchase direct
(19:36):
from the developer or justcontinue to play and earn those
in game rewards and achievementsas they progress through the
game with tournaments, that kindof stuff.
But there is that one elementthat we won't sell, we don't
touch, we don't sell direct.
There's ways to source them ingame and some players will
source more than others, andthen that we have to have a
platform thing, go and actuallytrade them to each other.
(19:56):
They can all be bundled up asas your C721s and transferred to
to other players, and so Ithink that's the interesting
thing.
I think the utopia of a fullyopen game economy right now is
very, very hard.
You haven't seen anybody reallysuccessfully do it.
The other thing is the influenceof where there's a lot of
(20:18):
speculative trading which 99% ofgame fighting is speculation
right now in terms of the assetprices and so on and that can
really upset your game economy.
And so I think having some levelof control at the developer
level I think is actually prettycrucial to make sure the game
is balanced, but you still keepsome of those incentives in
(20:40):
place for players to trade, andso, even even while we've taken
the King of Destiny, it's afeature on the game.
There's one feature, atournament feature, where the
Web 3 elements come in, butthere's a lot of other parts of
the game that will be verytypical Web 2.
And so I suppose you know whereit comes from is looking over
(21:01):
the last few years at what'sbeen successful and got traction
with gamers and there's not toomuch to lean on on the Web 3
side and so there's an elementof kind of dipping our toe in
the water with opening that up.
But if that's successful andlooks like it's good for gamers,
then you can start to open upother parts of your game's
economy to them as well.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And to just give people an overview, what are the
three games in the InfinityGods ecosystem right now?
Speaker 2 (21:27):
We've a more.
We've an Infinity Merge, whichis a web based merge game.
Very addictive, play that withkind of a candy crush, but
you're merging items.
Very competitive game.
That's on web right now.
We're planning on doing amobile version at some stage in
2024, which we think will bewill be a lot of fun.
(21:48):
Our second game is ImmortalSiege.
That's very much in beta rightnow.
It's on web.
It's a terror defense, a terrordefense game.
We actually have trading cardmechanics in there as well,
which we think is was prettyinteresting.
We've a hardcore group ofpeople testing it, which is cool
(22:08):
.
The idea with that game is wewant to go mobile, but we think
we can also go Epic and Steam atsome stage in the future as
well.
We'll probably actually likelygo Epic and Steam first, before
mobile, and then our main titlereally is our mobile first title
, which is King of Destiny.
And so King of Destiny is interms of genre.
It's called Luck Battle, whichis probably very new for a lot
(22:31):
of people.
There's a game about six yearsago launched called Coin Master,
and essentially you play a slotmachine for coins, use those
coins to build a village.
You can then attack otherfriends and steal their coins
from their village and viceversa, and, incredibly, it's a
(22:53):
top 10 iOS game, and there'sbeen a bunch of other similar
games coming out recently,namely Monopoly Go, which you
can't really leave the internetwithout seeing Monopoly Go
advertised, and it's the highestgrossing game today.
It's going to be the highestgrossing game, particularly on
mobile, in 2023 and possiblyacross all platforms, and so our
game is has some similarmechanics, but people can
(23:16):
actually own some of theirpieces in the game.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
People can actually trade some of the in-game
currencies, and we have a fewother things in there that we
think are uniquely different,beyond just Web3, to make it a
better product, and one of themost interesting things that I
think I've heard you guys talkabout is how you know, with
mobile gaming right now you'rehaving essentially competitions
very high Attribution is moredifficult than ever with IDFA
(23:42):
and you know cookies are alsogoing away, so overall it's kind
of getting to be a prettycompetitive niche.
Now, one of the interestingthings I would love your take on
is how does LTV play into whatblockchain enables?
Right?
Because I think one of the bigpieces behind blockchain gaming
(24:03):
is that it can increase LTV withthese new kind of mechanics.
So I would love to get yourtake on that.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Yeah, I mean it's interesting.
We even have an LTV calculationgoing across Web2 and Web3 for
a king of destiny, and sothere's kind of two ways that it
really helps.
One, we believe it's going toincrease the number of people
economically participating inthe game.
So essentially from our pointof view, it's more payers in the
game, and so take that numberfrom, say, 2% to, we think, 3, 4
(24:34):
, 5, 6% is actually prettypossible with these mechanics.
We saw something similar withinFinemerge, our first game,
which is Web only, which istypically much lower
monetization rates.
But we're hitting like 10%monetization rate, which was
crazy high, and so we think justto be more people monetizing.
So that's good.
The second is then yourcalculation is pretty much how
(24:58):
much IAP are they purchasing,how many ads are they watching
in game?
Because we have some in-appadvertising as well.
That's a revenue contributor.
And then you also look atcertain items are actually NFTs
in the game.
They're non-fungible.
So there's obviously primarysales.
If they're resold, there's aroyalty secondary on that as
(25:18):
well.
And then there's obviously thatcurrency that players can trade
amongst themselves, and everytime if you are going to sell
that, you pay a small sellingfee, and so we add those in
there.
So we think we can not justincrease the breadth of payers
but also increase the rate ofmonetization that players have,
(25:39):
because there's essentially morethings for them to do and
participate in.
Now this is very much coming outof developer lens.
I think it's very much lookingat how do you actually, if you
want to be very competitive infree to play in mobile gaming?
It is about, can you get thathigher LTV than the competitor?
Because you get the higher LTV,then you can actually reinvest
(26:01):
that into a better game, intomore users via user acquisition,
etc.
Higher, better developers, etc.
Or more developers, and you canjust get bigger and better
overall.
And so one of our big, ourthesis from our first couple of
games going into mobile is thatwe think we can be very
(26:24):
competitive on the LTV frontwith the top games on the App
Store and it's really like ifyou can get to some sort of
feature parity with them on theweb two side and then introduce
our off-chain to on-chaintrading, then we believe that
gives us that extra 1 or 2% inan LTV side.
If you get that, then you canoutbid them on the ad auctions
(26:46):
and you can actually win marketshare against them, and so
that's the fascinating side ofthat's how we view it.
I think we're not looking okay.
Can we compete with Parallel orsome of the web three spaces?
It's very much focused on wherewe see the majority of the
consumer time and the consumerspend, which is on mobile, and
(27:10):
how do we get a competitive edgein there?
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Yeah, that is fascinating.
That's probably the biggestbenefit blockchain can have to
existing game developers is thatit adds new ways of essentially
optimizing the games for higherLTV, higher monetization rates.
What she said aboutmonetization rates is huge too,
because if you can double that,that's you're pretty much
doubling your revenue per user,right, and your ads now can work
(27:36):
much better.
You can scale them a lot more.
So this is very interesting andI know so far you've mainly
focused on the communitybuilding side, right, so I've
had the communities very active.
I see a lot of the Volstowmembers in there.
You know where.
It definitely is a good vibe inthere and the games are really
(27:56):
fun.
But now it seems like withKings of Destiny, I believe,
you've rolled it out on at leasta few countries on the App
Store.
Are you starting to add in muchmore of a focus on paid UA and
paid acquisition, and what doesthat stack look like in terms of
user acquisition right now?
Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
I'd say, firstly, it's still early, so we've
launched, we're still addingsome pretty major features
coming in over the next twomonths to go in and so probably
around February or cert season,pretty serious user acquisition.
We have been spending primarilyusing Meta and Google and so
we've just been testingdifferent things.
(28:36):
You know, trying to get a readon day one retention that's in
small numbers for certainmarkets was pretty.
Is looking actually when that's40% mark pretty good starting
place, you know.
But but we're we're launched, Ithink, three weeks, so we're
still we're still trying tooptimize that.
We're still getting a lot offeedback on things like various
little bugs.
Things are responding to littlethings that are not working.
(28:58):
Some things are working wellthat we didn't think.
So what we're really intendingto do is is we're broadening out
the testing over the next fewweeks.
So looking at Apple search adsjust to really see what's our
CPI there, what's the, is thereany quality bar that we can look
at?
And then particularly into thead networks like Apple loving,
(29:18):
like Unity as well, and evensome of the ad formats were
beginning to bring out likeplayables.
So this is very deep down therabbit hole of like gaming ads.
But this is typically actuallywhat drives most gamers into
into games.
So, getting into the playablespace, we started working with
the partner to develop someplayables so that allows access
and inventory there, and sowe're really like you know,
(29:39):
right now, if I look at like themain metric, where we have a
certain level within the gamethat players unlock a feature
and our tournament feature, andso we're really tracking, like
our players, how, what's thefunnel looking like to get there
?
Can that be optimized?
Are there channel differences?
We've seen geo differencesalready, but we're not surprised
(30:01):
by that as well.
So, like how our Canadianplayers have operated versus
Philippine players are actuallydramatically different.
We've actually seen purchaserscome in which we're not
optimized for at all and that'sbeen very interesting People
coming in and playing one leveland they just buying some of the
intro packs straight away.
We're seeing some reallyhardcore people stick around
(30:23):
from web to so they'll connectFacebook and they will.
They will be attacking andgoing through the levels all day
long and people doing 20, 25minute session times some days.
We also get a lot of people whoare like just coming playing a
level and churning out and solike we need to do that.
So we're like just over 5000players in in a few weeks.
(30:44):
We have the controls toincrease that up and down
without too much craziness andthe costs are actually pretty
decent, which is great.
We're kind of surprised the youknow probably one thing we
talked before I was worriedabout some of the CPI costs and
so we haven't got to seriousscale, but even when we did push
a few campaigns, we were like,oh, like it's actually well
(31:07):
within what we thought it wouldbe and in some cases, actually
even cheaper.
And so you know, the only thingthat's been probably like where
the user acquisition and thegrowth side has been obviously
Apple and iOS 14.
And so it.
This is just a fact of lifethese days.
(31:28):
So the targeting is actuallyreally good.
When we target on Facebook orGoogle, we are on Google, uac,
google advertising.
We actually do see, you know,good iOS quality players come
through.
But it's there's that data lagof 72 hours.
Do you know how good a campaignreally is or not?
(31:49):
Versus Android, versus anyAndroid campaign?
Were able to like, okay, thiscampaign is crap, just shut it
off.
This was great Double thebudget, more creative.
So let's go.
We've had a few of thosealready, which has been exciting
.
So the only real change is isthat delay be able to make
decisions on any campaign comingfrom Apple.
(32:10):
But there's other optimizationswe're doing there to try and
get that data within 24 hours sowe can make some decisions.
So that's got really deep downthe ad rabbit hole.
But you know, maybe it'ssomething to kind of to comment
on.
You know, we looked at thealternative if we weren't on
mobile.
And how do we drive players atscale, particularly in the Web
(32:33):
three side, and there really isnothing that you're most
successful games Maybe get fivefigures for a very brief period
of time and they reallystruggled to hold on to it.
And the types of players andthe motivations don't
necessarily lend themselves to agreat gaming business.
And personally I'd never seenin my 10 years, and still
(32:54):
haven't, any browser-based gameunless it was connected to a big
platform scale in any sort ofmeaningful way.
And so one of the benefits ofchoosing mobile is very
predictable ways to acquireplayers.
So everybody talks about massadoption in Web 3.
And we need to get there andit's like the platform is at
(33:15):
your starting point.
So if you're on web, only veryhard to get scale, very, very
hard.
Ironically, very hard to getscale without losing your shirt.
In terms of spend, where mobileand even some of the stores
like Epic and Steam, it's a lotmore controllable of how you can
acquire and retain players.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, I mean I agree with that 100%.
There isn't really that largeof a Web 3 gaming user base.
The games I've seen that havegained momentum are actually
appealing to the Web 2 crowd.
So one of our portfoliocompanies, the Bornless they
have, I think at this point a180k Steam wishlist and they've
just been focusing on reallylike girlish style marketing,
(33:56):
reaching out to kind of likenews outlets, getting their
influencers on board, and reallynot focusing on the Web 3 side
at all.
If a Web 3 desktop game wants to, or like a browser game wants
to, really go and acquire userskind of have to focus on the Web
2 side unless they're more oflike a game experience.
If you're focused on game 5,which is like I mean, that's a
(34:18):
great product, right, likepeople enjoy it, right, there's
definitely product market fitthere.
But if you're trying to build agame that scales to millions of
users, I do think that eitheryou're going to have to onboard
Web 2 gamers or you're going tohave to really figure out an
acquisition funnel thatultimately is going to be mobile
based, or if it's on PC, thenSteam or Epic based right, you
(34:39):
can't really do it without that.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
It's exactly that I always struggled when we were
first getting to the space of.
There were certain projectsgetting a lot of attention and
hype and I kind of understandwhy now, but in the back of my
head I was like how the hellwill they acquire players,
steven?
They just could use all thesetokens.
You know what's their CPI goingto be like and it's very boring
(35:02):
.
But it's a very boring topic, Ithink, for things like crypto,
twitter, but it's kind of likethe majority of gaming is.
It's kind of what's your LTVversus your cost of acquiring
them, and that cost can be free,it can be paid, but it's still
a cost you need to go in, and itdoesn't matter if you're
launching a game on PlayStation,you're working that out, or
(35:22):
Android.
It's the same equation.
You ultimately need to getgoing, and so I think it's a
going back to.
It's one of those things thatwe thought we'd differentiate
ourselves on the web tree side.
Was that more of a conservativeapproach?
But you could clearly see, hereis how you get millions of
players and, similar to some ofthe other companies you
(35:45):
mentioned as well, like Bornless, like you're on Steam and you
do some of the right marketing,you can get some players and it
can grow quite nicely on Steamif you've got a great game.
Epic is seems to have a lot ofopportunities similar to that as
well.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, it almost seems like there's two playbooks.
There's one which is like sorry,ok, it almost seems like
there's two playbooks.
So there's one which is PC based, which is much more organic
hype game trailer, lots of newsoutlets and it's basically a ton
of hype, right, and it's hugemarketing budgets and harder to
(36:19):
attribute and measure back.
And then there's other which ismobile gaming, which is very
data driven.
It's very much performancemarketing what's your LTV,
what's your CAC, what's yourconversion rates throughout the
funnel, and it's more map thananything else in terms of the
optimization process and it'slike these are two different
worlds and so you kind of haveto understand which world you're
(36:40):
in.
And sometimes when you seethese studios that are kind of
like trying to be in the middleof both, it's a little bit
disconcerting.
But I think in your guys' caseit's like I can see very clearly
that mobile first seems to belike a very big focus.
And that's also where I'mpersonally very bullish on
InfiniGOTS as a team and as astudio is because I see kind of
(37:02):
the approach of really trying tooptimize and having a
mathematical approach towardsthings.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, very not the sexiest, but it's very efficient
at growing and I think it'svery interesting, like I think
at the Web3, some of the Web3projects, some of the games are
very much going for that realbig hype and it's like I think I
(37:29):
hope you get there.
I really hope you're successful.
Wow, that is so hard.
It's so hard and I think, yourcompetitors, because you're
trying to win market sharing avery limited space.
So if you think about PC gamersor the tiny browser market or
the console market, you've got avery small number of publishers
(37:52):
out there EA, blizzard, etcetera and they will come with
hundreds of millions and hugemarketing teams and they've done
this 20 times and they will goand say, ok, like the big four
or five games on PlayStation andXbox this year.
This is what they are.
And if you're trying to sneakin there or sneak in on the PC
(38:15):
side, you really need to have anamazing game and still get
picked up, but the hit rate isso much lower.
And what I learned of Facebookwas the Matt DeHalliman
ultimately won in the end.
You even saw these like King,and Candy Crush was a great
example.
It was like nobody gave them achance.
(38:35):
They were a skill-based gamefor years, a web-based game.
They decided to do games onFacebook and they decided to go
mobile and they just got theircalculations right simple game
and they got their LTV versusCPI, understood their markets,
their audiences.
And then you've got theActivision's who couldn't do
that saying, ok, now I'll buyyou.
And so it's very interestingand I suppose it's good to see
(38:57):
more web-threat companies.
I wish there was more out thereor we talked about them, because
I think you still see all themajor projects that have NFTs
and you see a lot of foot online.
Like people say oh, there's athread today on an ex aka
Twitter.
Blockchain gaming is dead.
(39:18):
I'm like, well, have you heardof NFL rivals?
I mean, look what Mythical aredoing Complete 180 on their
strategy of being all hype into.
Ok, we'll buy the right NFL,but we'll use performance
marketing and we'll do goodviral mechanics and we'll build
a great execution of blockchainand very successful game.
They're not talked about there.
(39:38):
Upland has been a web-threatsuccess story since 2020, as far
as I'm concerned, on mobile, onweb.
So I think that's thedistortion.
You see is the hype takes up alot of the oxygen in the space,
but you have these othermath-based companies doing
(39:59):
pretty, pretty well and buildinggreat businesses.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
What do you feel like is one piece of infrastructure
that is currently missing in theweb-threat gaming space and, if
you could like, will intoexistence, or just tell the
founders out there hey, go buildthis thing, go raise around and
go build this out.
That's probably the same pointI was going to say.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
I was going to be.
You know, I was going to sayalmost.
It's not really infrastructure,but regulation is needed.
It's a tough one, but just withsome of the token things, I see
I'm like there probably needsto be some oversight or
something there Let everybodyknow who's market making these
tokens, et cetera, and whenthey're dropping off.
But no, the more obvious one, Iwould say, is the less
(40:47):
controversial, sexy one, I think, is Ad Network for Web 3.
And so, because what'sinteresting we have, you know,
currently we have like six,seven hundred thousand wallets
playing Web three games everyday, you know, and so that's
maybe two hundred thousand,three hundred thousand real
people.
(41:07):
So the game fly audience isactually quite small.
But the, the audience whoactually holds Bitcoin or
aetherium or who have touchedsomething, who hold an, a
digital asset, a crypto, cryptoasset, is actually way larger.
So I think I mean they've asked, I've seen interesting
estimates that there's, you know.
You know close to 50 millionpeople have cryptocurrency some
(41:31):
form in the US.
They that might be high, buteven if it's 20 or 30 million,
that's, that's pretty high, butthere's, there's a lot more out
there when it comes to some ofthe bigger pieces, and so I
think you know some way toconnect those folks.
What else do they do Outside ofjust cryptocurrency?
What are their interests?
And some sort of a targeted adnetwork will be pretty big
(41:52):
because, if you think about,while we're targeting gamers, it
helps us.
When they're a gamer and andthey actually understand web 3
or they have some, they havesome understanding because we
don't have to take them througha huge learning path To
understand how trade or whatthey're buying actually happens
to be an unfungible token.
Therefore, you know, you maywant to, you may want to put it
(42:13):
into a secure wallet at somestage.
So actually that's a lot of ourcommunity is those types of
folks.
They're really big gamers butthey understand the technology,
and so I think getting more of aweb 3 ad network is something
that's that's.
That's that's missing.
It's very hard to do withoutowning a lot of content, and so
I really think there's a companyI love and that not that many
(42:35):
people may have heard of is applovin, and they really, you know
they went into the ad networkspace in gaming where it was
basically Facebook and Googlesplit up the whole thing and
they said I'm gonna go to othergames and I'm gonna try and get
inventory from them and they'regonna repackage and sell that
inventory to other gamingcompanies and they created this
amazing flywheel business.
I think somebody needs to.
(42:56):
I think that's a hugeopportunity in the web 3 space
right now.
So we to buy some of thattraffic where we know what three
you know consumers are andStart to repackage it with
better targeting for other web 3companies to to use.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
So there, is a couple of different ad network
startups that I've talked toSlice, hype lab but I don't
think any of them are reallyfocused on the gaming side.
So that's a good, good idea forsure, if you guys are listening
and Okay, that that makes a tonof sense.
And with Apple, and did theystart out buying Inventory or
did they start out as a DSP?
(43:31):
Because I know they have likekind of like this overall they
have a lot of inventory, butthey also are act as a DSP on
top of other inventory.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, they started off as a DSP.
Yeah, they, they.
They had no games at the time,so they had analytics product
and so it's a hey, we'll giveyou free analytics, but give us
a look at some of your inventory.
So we know you've got an adstack and so they.
You know a story.
What they would be very cleveris they pick a subgenre and so
(44:01):
they they want one that I ran itinto.
This is so genre called socialcasino, which is like it's.
It's it's free to play slotsthat you can't win any money.
But people spend seven billiona year in social casino games
but they can never win.
But they picked that categoryand they targeted tier two
Developers, so they weren'treally like the biggest
developers they weren'tmonetizing as well to said, hey,
(44:22):
I Want to show ads to your bestusers, I'll give you 80, 90
dollar CPMs, and they're likesure, and then they're able to
take those players and then sellthat inventory to other soap,
to the top tier social casinoplayers, and they'll pay a lot
more than that to actually reachand acquire those players.
And so they started actuallythat that way, just just kind of
(44:44):
knocking off genre by genre.
And then, obviously, if they'reon analytics product.
They're building up, okay,understanding who these
customers were.
They're understanding a bitmore than so.
They were able to then start tobecome, you know, become a
better DSP, and then theyacquired machine zone and a few
other companies, so then they'reable to supply their own
impressions as well.
(45:04):
But yeah, they started there andjust work their way up where
you know and they say come backto the ad network space.
No matter what technology it is, it's really who owns the, the
underlying content.
And so you know, for them to goin where again, really,
facebook and Google, almost ofthe internet, not only their
(45:25):
sites, but obviously they had,they had their pixels, their
SDKs, pretty much everywhere togo in and to like, squeeze in
and do.
That was super impressive.
And I think, I think in the web3 space you know, you're not
there's no major dominantcontent players in there yes,
apart from Twitter, you couldargue, but they've got no real.
(45:46):
They've got a real interest,but there is probably ways to
understand and break up thoseusers and to understand where
they're at and and and to createthat, create that flywheel.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
It's.
It's fascinating how ad tech is.
It's just starting to take offin web 3 and and it's very basic
at this point- you know it'snot that many users, there's not
that much data.
The publishers are Still likekind of cagey about letting
people essentially run ads ontheir Inventory right, so it's
still kind of in the earlystages.
(46:19):
But I do agree there's a hugeopportunity there where it's
kind of this, all this newinventory that Google and
Facebook, they're not reallytaking part in this ecosystem
yet.
So there's like this window ofopportunity to just come in and
take up all the inventory andjust, you know, build something
interesting and then, yeah,that's, that's all I'll I'll say
on that.
But yeah, I guess do do wrap upthe conversation.
(46:44):
You know, and this has been anincredibly enlightening
conversation, I think definitelyyour your experience with kind
of user acquisition and gaminggrowth it's, it's pretty
mind-blowing.
And To just wrap up, wherewould people go to learn more
about infini gods?
Get involved.
Where should they go?
(47:05):
Yeah, wherever they'recomfortable.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I mean, we're on website is infini.
Gods calm, run Twitter as welland finish odds there, and
obviously we've a Discord at.
This was probably the best ifyou, if you like, using that
platform.
A lot of our team are in there,as you said, a lot of the Wolf
game crew and some of the wolvesthat crew pixel ball.
We have a lot of folks fromthose communities In and around
and they're just Honestly also Imean they're highly intelligent
(47:32):
, I understand what they'redoing Really nice community
members, so they're great ifpeople just want to ask around
there.
Plus, we were on our ownCommunity folks as well.
I would say, if you have, ifyou're in the US, canada.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Australia, here the.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Philippines Download King of Destiny and check out
that game.
I think what we want to beknown for I was in with this
yesterday less and less do wewant to be known for it, since,
in a god's like here, what'sthat game that we're playing?
You know, I think it's gettingout of this height, this pre
launch hype phase, into likejust be known for the game, how
fun it is.
So if people want to, they cango and check out and play at
(48:04):
King of Destiny Awesome.
Yeah, thanks for jumping on.
Cool Thanks, that's great.
Great to be out.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.