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Author:本文主要是由Sofadao的小伙伴扇子同学翻译,一方同学进行部分校对,感谢扇子、一方的付出。
Twitter: @sofadaoxyz
前情提要:此次内容来自2022年9月15日的一期播客访谈,DigiDaigaku创始人Gabriel Leydon和Patrick OShaughnessy探讨了F2P游戏产业现状、PFP类NFT发展进程、未来如何把web2领域十亿用户引入web3,以及目前DigiDaigaku和Limit Break所做的事情。
SofaDAO(@sofadaoxyz)认为此篇播客内容对于理解F2O模式以及DigiDaiguka的玩法有较大帮助,所以把播客内容全部分享出来,全篇中英文共3万多字,SofaDAO将其分为上下两篇发表,上篇主要聊了F2P游戏行业情况和变化、F2O新模式的意义,NFT带来的转变,以及PFP NFT的演变等。由于翻译水平有限,部分中文翻译可能不是百分百精准,如果英文好的小伙伴也可直接读英文部分。
另外,SofaDAO近期将会开放F2O社区,详细内容请关注 @sofadaoxyz 官方Twitter信息。
播客链接:
以下,Enjoy!
[00:01:38] Patrick: My guest today is Gabe Leydon, whose episode last year was one of our most popular ever. Gabe has spent the last 20 years designing video games and is one of the most original thinkers I know. He was the co-founder of Machine Zone, which pioneered free-to-play hits like Mobile Strike and Game of War. Over the past year, he has been in stealth mode building a Web 2.0 meets Web 3.0 video game company called Limit Break, which is founded on a brand new business model that he calls free-to-own. We dive into his vision for the future of gaming, how it could onboard a billion users onto the Ethereum network and why the LTVs of crypto gamers are so far higher than those of their Web 2.0 counterparts. Please enjoy this great conversation with Gabe Leydon.
[00:02:19] Patrick: All right, Gabe, so it's been almost exactly a year since our first conversation, which remains probably our biggest hit of the last year. In the intervening year, you've been building a new business called Limit Break.
[00:02:31] Gabriel: Sorta thanks to you.
[00:02:32] Patrick: Partly thanks to me and I'm an investor in the business. Yeah.
[00:02:35] Gabriel: Not just because of that, because of the episode.
[00:02:38] Patrick: Well I hope I had a small part. But we get to revisit a lot of those ideas because you basically been a learning machine in the year since building probably more actively than anyone else in the Web 3.0 space, which is ironic. So much talk and not much building. But you and the team have done a lot of innovating in that world. I think we need to start with this concept that you've just released to the public called free-to-own,one of the key builders and innovators in the free-to-play mobile video game space. And I think you believe pretty deeply that that era might be sun setting and free-to-own as a concept is the next wave of how games are built and monetized. So I'd love you to give or treat us on free-to-own what it means and why it's exciting to you.
Patrick: 好吧,我希望我有一小部分。 但是我们要重新审视其中的很多想法,因为您在这一年中基本上是一台学习机器,而且在 Web 3.0 领域可能比其他任何人都更积极地构建。具有讽刺意味的是,Web 3.0太多的空谈,却没有什么构建。 但是你和你的团队在Web 3.0做了很多创新。 我认为我们需要从您刚刚向公众发布的F2O这个概念开始,作为F2P游戏领域的主要建设者和创新者之一, 我认为你深信F2P那个时代可能是夕阳西下,F2O作为一个概念将成为游戏如何构建和货币化的下一波浪潮。
因此,我希望您告诉我们F2O意味着什么以及为什么它对您来说令人兴奋。
[00:03:19] Gabriel: Well, it's the next level of free, first of all. I can definitely talk about this subject probably like 30 minutes straight. But first of all, the reason free-to-play took off was because of piracy. They were making PC games and Nexon was tired of getting their games pirated. So they said, "Let's just give our game away free." That was the beginning of free-to-play. And it was attractive to gamers who had to pay up front for a game. That's why they were pirating in the first place because they didn't want to. So they said, "Well look, now I'm going to just try this." So the term free-to-play, what it means is you're free-to-play it. You can play it whenever you want. It doesn't cost you anything to play it. You just download it and play it. That's a big step in distribution, player sentiment. They're very happy that the game is free, but then when they play the game, they start buying items. Essentially, that's what happens. There's items stores, there's virtual currency stores and they have to buy those. So the early criticism of free-to-play was, especially by people who didn't understand it, they said, "Well the game isn't really free because you have to buy upgrades inside the game. So it's not really free." But of course that didn't really matter to anybody. And now vast majority of the business is free-to-play, soon to be all of it.
So the next step in all of that is we have these items in the store that we sell to people in free-to-play. They're all Web 2.0 locked on a server and the developer completely controls them and they decide basically everything about those items. So you have to buy them and then you hope that they remain relevant. So the next step is free-to-own, which is essentially an extension on free-to-play, except we move what's free a step further. It's not just the game that's free now, you can get virtual items that could potentially have value before you even play the game. So we're abstracting the items that everyone's paying for already. So 120 billion a year of items are sold essentially every year on mobile phones. Now we say, okay, not only is the game free, you can download and play it, but before you do it, here's some important items in the game. So now the players have ownership and it's a Web 3.0 item, it's not a Web 2.0 item. So they don't have to pay for the game, they don't have to pay for the item. Now they're incentivized. They're like, "I hope this game does well. I have this item. It's a rare item, it's a provable, one of one item in a game and if this game takes off, maybe other people will want it from me."
And I think the simple explanation of it is that we're taking the free-to-play economy, we're putting that on Web 3.0 and we're giving it out. And the reason why that's so important, and a lot of people in Web 3.0 criticized say, "Well people have done free stuff before." But they didn't brand it right, they didn't call it a category. They're not saying it's the next thing. They just did it. So what I'm trying to do here is say no, this is what's going to replace free-to-play. And how it replaces free-to-play is going to be impossible to just do the same old item store thing moving forward. And the opportunity is, I think I read today, there's only 60,000 daily wallets on Ethereum that own an NFT, that's 60,000 daily users is nothing. As a result, Web 3.0 gaming doesn't look like a thing. It looks fake in a way. You have one big game with Axie and it's big, it's had some issues but they've innovated a ton, but they've got something like 800,000 monthly players. It's respectable. And then the number two game has like 10,000. And the number 10 game has like a hundred. So basically it's not a thing, it's not a real thing.
[00:07:03] Patrick: Web 3.0 gaming is not a thing.
[00:07:04] Gabriel: No, it's not a real thing yet. Not yet. It will be very shortly. And the reason why is because everybody's been saying do this land sale, buy this land sale and the land costs $7,000 because that's what it costs. When the game comes out, it's going to be great. And the player sitting there going, "Gosh, if the game is really big, my land is going to be worth 30 grand or something, right?" They're so excited about it versus just giving it to him for free, getting the exact same effect, the exact same effect, but more with them thinking this is awesome, this could actually be the next big game and I own a piece of this. And as a result, I think we go from 60,000 daily wallets to a billion very fast. Very, very fast.
Gabriel:是的,还没有成气候。 还没有。 很快就会了。 原因是因为每个人都在说做这个土地销售,买这个土地销售,而土地成本是 7,000 美元,因为这就是它的成本。
当游戏出来时,它会很棒。 坐在那里的玩家会说,“天哪,如果游戏真的很大,我的土地价值 3 万什么的,对吧?” 他们对此非常兴奋,相对地,如果免费给他,将获得完全相同的效果,完全相同的效果,但更多的是他们认为这太棒了,这实际上可能是下一个大型游戏,我拥有一块这个。 结果,我认为我们从每天 60,000 个活跃钱包快速增加到 10 亿个。 非常非常快。
We just saw on Reddit, there was a controversy with their NFTs that they just put out. People are like, "Oh, we don't like NFTs." But they gave them for free and it changed the sentiment on Reddit overnight. There's still some people that don't like it, but overall the sentiment changed a ton when they didn't have to pay for it. Free-to-own games are how the world on boards to Ethereum. And once we get those 3 billion gamers on Ethereum, I think the gaming business goes from 200 billion a year to 6 trillion a year. Very quickly.
[00:08:27] Patrick: Why 6 trillion?
[00:08:29] Gabriel: Because I think it's a 30x, mainly because of the unrestricted nature of the payment rail that we're on. I think you and I talked about this before, but everything is throttled by paper money, $20 bills, $50 bills, $100 bills. Products are designed around those bills. 19.99, 49.99, the world designs products around these denominations because of the anchoring that was set. Think about it?When was that anchoring set? 70 years ago? Something like that. A hundred years ago. Who knows? Long time ago. And the dollar is worth 99% less.
[00:09:13] Patrick: There's no $10,000 bill. That would be the equivalent probably.
[00:09:16] Gabriel: Yeah. But people still think in terms of $20 bills. They do. It's very important to have skews at 19.99. Anybody who makes products will tell you that. 99.99. So Ethereum is a huge reset on all of that. Now it's one ETH, one ETH. You see all these people talking about it this way. I say a different way. It's a different way of thinking. Also, the big change, the obvious change, oh, I don't know if it's so obvious actually, is if you go to the app store and you make a game, the biggest in-app purchase you can do is a hundred dollars. And that's limited by Apple. Google also just copied it, said, okay, we can only do a hundred dollars. Yet you see these Bored Apes selling for 2 million.
If you take the average person and you show them an item in a game and you show them a Bored Ape, will they be able to tell a difference? No, they won't. All of that behavior that you're seeing on Ethereum with profile pictures this crazy, like $500,000, $2 million, whatever, all of that behavior is preexisting behavior. None of it is new. It's been around in games forever. People have been spending tremendous amount of money in games forever, more than they've ever spent on a Bored Ape or whatever, a lot more. But they did it through credit cards, they did it through in-app purchases. Ethereum is the equivalent to wire, an instant wiring system except with a different currency with Ethereum. And it allows people to express their behavior, their preexisting behavior in more upfront ways, like what you see with the PFPs.
And I think it's super important to recognize that none of this is new. None of it is new. It's been going on in games for 20 years. I've seen it up close. It's not new. Except now we have the ability to give you ownership of that item, which is super important. And the potential for desire for the item is worldwide. Everybody in the world could want that one item that is provably yours. What does it go to? A billion dollars? A billion dollar NFT? And it's hard to imagine, but what is it 500x more than what we're already seeing. We already saw 70 million NFT. We're at 14x more than what we've already seen with only 60,000 active wallets. Is that really that crazy?
[00:11:41] Patrick: Can you just clearly define the preexisting behavior that you referenced that you've seen before? I want to make sure we fully described the thing being tapped into.
[00:11:49] Gabriel: People are willing to spend a lot of money on virtual items. They're willing to do it. They love it, they like it. They do 120 billion every year on their mobile phone. And if you show someone an NFT and you show them the item they're buying the game, those people won't be able to tell the difference. But if they understood that one was property and one was not, they're going to prefer the property, obviously. And there's a lot of pushback in the gamer community around NFTs. You got to remember that $120 billion is generated probably about 8% of the people who play the games. It's a vast minority. And there's nothing anybody can tell me that would convince me that those people don't want an NFT. Why wouldn't they?
[00:12:32]Patrick: Can you say a little bit about this progression in the world of NFTs from PFPs, which is, we'll just call that the Bored Ape category to what you're calling clubs.
[00:12:40] Gabriel: They were the second version.
[00:12:42]Patrick: CryptoPunks, maybe it was V1.
[00:12:44] Gabriel: Yeah, CryptoPunks would be like a PFP version one, very early NFT. And then version two would be what we just went through, which is a lot of non-technical teams making NFTs and then getting a big audience around them and frankly not knowing what to do.
[00:13:01]Patrick: Having all this capital and just sitting on them.
[00:13:03] Gabriel: And they would just send people stickers and stuff. So they just literally, they would send you a sticker, a t-shirt, a fanny pack and they would say, "You're part of the club, you got the fanny pack, you got the sticker, you're now a part of the club." But just see that as what I would do if I didn't have any engineers either. I would also do that. But I think that phase is going to quickly go away and move into more, this is all software, this all virtual items.
So there's a lot of unique things that you can do online with an NFT if you have a serious engineering team that is building new solutions. And of course all these things are going to plug into games and they'll be interoperable between other games. That'll be what NFTs are mainly for. Moving from one virtual universe to the next. Limit Break is pushing into that. My new company's pushing into that version three, which is constantly updating, always adding new features, creating new technology around the products. That's where I think everything's going. So NFTs are about to get a lot more exciting now too, because it's not just about getting a t-shirt or whatever. You're actually be able to interact with lots of different software with your NFT.
[00:14:17]Patrick: I want to get much deeper into that interactivity and what you've already done with the Digi NFTs. Before we do that, I just want to talk business model a little bit. So as I understand it, obviously one way to do this would be the land sale, you make seven grand a sale, the company makes a seven grand, straightforward.
[00:14:34] Gabriel: No, they make like 70 million in a day.
[00:14:36]Patrick: I mean per though.
[00:14:37] Gabriel: And that's been pretty normal. I think it's actually been the biggest reason why Web 3.0 games haven't took off. Because it was normal to make 50 million in a day or a hundred. And it didn't just happen once. It happened, I don't know, maybe a hundred times. So there's something there. If you can do 50 million in a day, a hundred times in industry with only 60,000 people, really, maybe 100,000 at the peak, there's something there, but it's not going to exactly bring in the masses.
[00:15:09]Patrick: We were talking about one example over text, six months ago or something. And I think my response was like, "This is so fucking dumb." And you were like, "Patrick, how many times do you need to see this before you understand the potential here? It's a tiny number of people with a crazy amount of money?"
[00:15:22]Gabriel: It's not something that happened one time. It's something that happened 100 times.
[00:15:25]Patrick: Yeah. In terms of onboarding a billion people, not 60,000 people, the role of free is critical, but then the business model gets pushed further down. So as I understand it, it is ongoing participation in the transaction volume, the dollar transaction volume for the company.
[00:15:41] Gabriel: So we're building free-to-play games, mobile free-to-play games. We can't do Web 3 on mobile yet. Do you think it'll eventually happen, but not yet. You have to build a bridge, first of all, so you have to build a free-to-play game, high quality, something that you can distribute worldwide, mobile free-to-play game. That's the only way to get scale. And you have to build a specific crypto version of that game to bridge those players over.
[00:16:10]Patrick: In the browser?
[00:16:11]Gabriel: No there's a PC. Axie has two-thirds of their traffic that's on side loaded Android apps. Honestly, I think Android is actually where a lot of the action's going to be, the Android and PC Mac.
[00:16:21] Patrick: All right. So we've got this model where you're building a traditional game that you've obviously spent your career building, traditional mobile, traditional free-to-play. And on the other side, building this set of NFT projects and almost like a game embedded in the NFTs that we'll talk about with Digi. But the business model for Limit Break is twofold then, it sounds like. The first part is traditional free-to-play. The second part is participating in some of the transaction dollar volume or E volume on the trading of the NFTs.
[00:16:49]Gabriel: What's exciting about E is it's programmable. When I work with in-app purchase, Google in-app purchase API, I can't really do anything with it. This is programmable. So we've got a bunch of stuff coming that just hasn't even been done before. We just did something that works with the existing system, but there's no reason not to make new things. So there could be new token types, new business models. This is all programmable stuff.
So it's a mistake to look at Ethereum and say, what it is today is what it's going to be. That's a huge mistake. You can do pretty much whatever you want. It's an imagination problem. And I think that's a lot of the reason why people discredit Web 3 is because one, they don't really know that much about it. Two, they don't consider the program ability of it, what you can change about it. They kind of just think about, "Well, here's what I would do with my existing game. And here's how I would put it on it with the stuff that everybody else does." And that's not right. That's not the right way to think about this at all. It's a lot more exciting than that.