GMS专栏|Robin Robin,为了自由而战的武士

GMS是Gamefi、Metaverse以及Socialfi三个首字母缩写组成,在GMS中你可以看到由web3china到来关于以上三个领域的内容与思考。

GMS is an acronym for Gamefi, Metaverse and Social . In GMS you can see the content and thinking about the above three areas coming from web3china.

The following article is reprinted from Future, an A16z media outlet, and shared by web3china in English and Chinese.

以下文章转载于A16z旗下媒体Future,由web3china以中英文分享。

原文标题:《“Play-to-Earn”Gaming and How Work is Evolving in Web3》

原文链接🔗:

web3china官方推特:

👋Welcome to web3

In today’s episode we’re talking about an emerging model of gaming called play to earn, in which players can make actual money based on how much time and effort they put into a game. Play to earn is also part of broader trends — the changing relationship between players and platforms, new incentives for participants in blockchain-based networks, and the new internet era that is coming to be known as a web3.

在今天的节目中,我们讨论的是一种新兴的游戏模式,叫做玩赚钱,玩家可以根据他们在游戏中投入的时间和精力来赚钱。为赚钱而玩也是更广泛趋势的一部分ーー玩家和平台之间不断变化的关系、区块链网络参与者的新激励措施,以及即将被称为“ web3”的新互联网时代。

The top play-to-earn game is called Axie Infinity, operated by a Vietnam-based company called Sky Mavis. Players of the game acquire unique digital pets called Axies, and battle other teams of Axies. These NFT Axies can be created and sold using the game’s in-game currency, SLP, which can be traded for traditional currency.

这款顶级的赚钱游戏叫做 Axie Infinity,由总部位于越南的 Sky Mavis 公司运营。该游戏的玩家获得独特的数字宠物 Axies,并可以与其他团队的 Axies战斗。这些NFT——Axies可以使用游戏中的货币SLP来创建和出售,SLP可以用发币交易。

Think of it as Pokemon on the blockchain, with a social network built-in, and an actual economy, and even companies built around the game that help players onboard and loan them money to get started playing. The game has made more than $3 billion in total sales since launching in March 2018, with much of its early growth in the Philippines.

可以把它想象成区块链上的口袋妖怪,内置了社交网络,有实际的经济,甚至还有一些公司围绕着这个游戏建立起来,帮助玩家在游戏上玩,并借钱给他们,让他们开始玩。自2018年3月发布以来,这款游戏的总销售额已超过30亿美元,其中很大一部分早期增长来自菲律宾。

(As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as investment advice, please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information.)

(提醒一下,以下任何一条都不能作为投资建议,更多重要信息请见 a16z.com/disclosures。)

Our guests today are Jeff Zirlin, the cofounder of Sky Mavis; Gabby Dizon, the cofounder of Yield Guild Games, a play-to-earn-gaming guild that gives players the resources to start playing; and a16z crypto general partner Arianna Simpson.

我们今天的嘉宾是 Sky Mavis 的联合创始人(Jeff Zirlin)、 Yield Guild Games 的联合创始人(Gabby Dizon) ,以及 a16z crypto general 合伙人(Arianna Simpson)。 Yield Guild Games 是一个通过玩游戏赚钱的游戏协会,为玩家提供开始玩游戏的资源。

They talk to a16z’s Zoran Basich about the larger tech trends that enabled the emergence of play to earn, why and where it caught on first, and the role of community, as well as the challenges, which include onboarding and scalability, and the economic sustainability of this model.

他们与 a16z 的 Zoran Basich 讨论了更大的技术趋势,这些趋势使得游戏的出现得以赚钱,为什么以及在哪里最先流行起来,以及社区的作用,还有挑战,包括入职和可扩展性,以及这种模式的经济可持续性。

Transcript below:

谈话内容如下:

Axie and the beginnings of play-to-earn

关于 AXIE和游戏赚钱的开始 话题

Jeff: This is something that took almost four years to marinate. So, a lot of the original Axie community members and founders were from the CryptoKitty community, where we saw that the production of new NFTs had to be related in some ways to actual work and effort. This would basically prevent hyperinflation. So in the first iteration of the Axie battle system, we had experience points and these experience points could be used to breed Axies. We then had the idea and a lot of our players were requesting that these experience points be tradable tokens. And so, we tokenized them.

Jeff: : 这是花了近四年时间酝酿的事情。因此,Axie社区的许多原始成员和创始人都来自CryptoKitty社区,在那里我们看到,新的NFT的生产必须在某些方面与实际工作和努力相关。这基本上可以防止恶性通货膨胀。因此,在Axie战斗系统的第一次迭代中,我们有经验值,这些经验值可以用来繁殖Axies。然后我们有了一个想法,很多玩家要求这些经验值成为可交易的代币。因此,我们将其代币化。

And then we saw that our players had actually created a liquidity pool on Uniswap, which is a decentralized exchange for these tokens. We then realized that, hey, you can actually calculate an expected hourly wage for playing Axie because there’s guaranteed liquidity in this pool.

然后我们看到,我们的玩家实际上已经在Uniswap上创建了一个流动性池,这是这些代币的一个去中心化的交易所。然后我们意识到,嘿,你实际上可以计算出玩Axie的预期时薪,因为这个池子里有保证的流动性。

So, I think that was really the moment that we saw the potential for it. We put out a post in January of 2020 where we saw that there was this intersection of NFTs and DeFi that was creating something that we then dubbed play-to-earn, and I think that might be the first time that that terminology was used, at least the first time where it was used in a non-speculative way

所以,我认为那是我们看到它的潜力的真正时刻。我们在2020年1月发表了一篇文章,我们看到NFTs和DeFi的交叉点正在创造一些东西,我们当时称之为 "边玩边赚",我认为这可能是第一次使用这个术语,至少是第一次以非投机的方式使用。

Zoran: One key thing to note here is that people have to pay a significant amount of money to get started – they have to download crypto wallets and buy three Axies, which can cost upwards of $1,000, with prices fluctuating. So Gabby, you saw this from the ground in the Philiipines — what did you see in this economic model?

Zoran: 这里需要注意的一个关键问题是,人们必须支付大量的钱才能开始--他们必须下载加密货币钱包,并购买三个Axies,这可能需要1000美元以上,价格会有波动。因此,加比,你在菲利宾的地面上看到了这一点--你在这种经济模式中看到了什么?

Gabby: So I’ve been in the game industry for almost 20 years and actually joined the Axie community in late 2018 as a player. And what I saw last year is that people from my home country in the Philippines had started discovering and playing Axie as a way to kind of escape the economic hardship of the lockdown. And these were people who weren’t crypto enthusiasts. These were regular people that were stuck at home that had no jobs.

Gabby: 我已经在游戏行业工作了近20年,实际上是在2018年底作为玩家加入了Axie社区。而我去年看到的是,来自我家乡菲律宾的人们开始发现并玩Axie,作为一种逃避封锁的经济困境的方式。而这些人并不是加密货币的爱好者。这些人是被困在家里的普通人,没有工作。

So, came upon the idea of a guild as a way to scale the efforts to introduce people to the world of play-to-earn and provide Axies via a scholarship program that would provide access to people around the world, not just from the Philippines, but across Southeast Asia, in India, in Latin America, and other countries to be able to play the game and earn money from it without having to afford the assets upfront.

因此,我萌生了建立一个公会的想法,以此来扩大努力,将人们引入游戏赚钱的世界,并通过奖学金计划提供Axies,让世界各地的人,不仅仅是菲律宾人,还有东南亚、印度、拉丁美洲和其他国家的人,能够玩这个游戏并从中赚钱,而不需要预先负担资产。

And what we do is that we kind of act as a player collective where we invest in a lot of these assets and then form the communities around these different games where people can participate into these networks so that it’s not anymore a hurdle to get into a game like Axie Infinity because I can’t afford three Axies.

我们所做的是,我们作为一个玩家集体,投资大量的这些资产,然后围绕这些不同的游戏形成社区,人们可以参与到这些网络中来,这样就不会因为我买不起三个Axie Infinity这样的游戏而成为一个障碍了。

The conditions for growth — the Philippines and beyond

关于 增长的条件ーー菲律宾及其他国家及地区 话题

Zoran: You touched on the growth in places like the Philippines. What were the conditions that enabled that? Why did that spark catch there? And what does that tell us about building communities in the future?

Zoran:你提到了像菲律宾这样的地方的增长。是什么条件促成了这种增长?为什么那里会有这种火花?这对我们在未来建立社区有什么启示?

Jeff: I think that there are a couple of unique things related to the Philippines. The Philippines loves mobile games. There’s relatively high crypto literacy. It’s a very communal culture where information and trends can spread very quickly. Filipinos have traditionally been early adopters to many social networks and platforms like Facebook. With the Philippines specifically, I think there were a lot of really special circumstances that basically allowed it to break out ahead of the rest of the world, but I do think that it’s only around nine months ahead of the rest of the emerging market economies

Jeff:我认为有几件与菲律宾有关的独特的事情。菲律宾喜欢移动游戏。有相对较高的加密货币认知。这是一种非常公共的文化,信息和趋势可以迅速传播。菲律宾人在传统上是许多社交网络和平台的早期采用者,如Facebook。具体到菲律宾,我认为有很多真正的特殊情况,基本上允许它在世界其他国家之前爆发,但我认为它只比其他新兴市场经济体领先九个月左右。

关于 “边玩边赚”如何反映更广泛的web3趋势 话题

Zoran: So if this model indeed spreads and continues to grow, that suggests there’s something bigger going on here – what is that, what transition are we actually seeing?

Zoran:所以如果这个模型确实传播并继续增长,那就表明这里发生了更大的事情——那是什么,我们实际上看到了什么转变?

Arianna: We think that the people creating the value should be participating in the upside. And that’s really the core belief at the center of what’s happening with web3. People are earning their livelihood on Axie, and so having the ability to not have all the value retained by the platform, but actually, pass it back to the community, the creators, the people who, again, are really responsible for building the value is, I think, an unstoppable movement

Arianna:我们认为创造价值的人应该参与价值的上升。这就是 web3的核心理念。人们在Axie上谋生,所以有能力在平台中获取一定的价值,但实际上,把它传递给社区,创造者,那些真正负责创造价值的人,我认为,这是一个不可阻挡的运动。

Jeff: One of the frameworks that we can think about is, like, okay, who are the middlemen that are getting removed? And how is the value that was being extracted by those middlemen shared with the actual users and stakeholders of the platform? So with Axie, I think what’s happened is that the app stores and the game publishers have been removed from the equation. They traditionally take 50%-plus of the revenue that’s generated by a game. We’ve removed them. We don’t use them. And we’re sharing that value with the people who are actually driving traction for our network, which is the community.

Jeff: 我们可以考虑的一个框架是,谁是被删除的中间商?这些中间商是如何提取价值并与平台的实际用户和利益相关者分享的呢?所以对于 Axie 来说,我认为发生的事情是应用商店和游戏发行商已经被排除在外了。传统上,他们从一个游戏产生的收入中拿走50% 以上。我们没有。我们与那些真正为我们的社区网络提供动力的人们分享这种价值观。

How sustainable is it?

关于 Axie的可持续性如何 话题

Zoran: Okay, people are paying to get in and they are interacting with their characters, and they’re competing, and they’re earning rewards. But help me understand the sustainability of that. How do you think about the underlying economic model here?

佐兰: 人们付费进入,他们与角色互动,他们在竞技,他们在赚取奖励。但请帮助我理解这一点的可持续性。你如何看待这里的基本经济模式?

Jeff: So one of the ways to look at it is right now, Axie is a little bit of a growth-dependent economy, just like any emerging market nation. It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows. But long term, it’s really important for us to have players that are in the economy spending because they think that the game is really fun or that they see ways to trade, like, money for power or respect. And the more Axie becomes like a real social network, a nation, the more opportunities for those types of value exchanges to arise. And we have framed Axie as a social network as well as a game since the early days. And this is becoming more and more true as, you know, we’ve done things like max out our Discord.

Jeff:所以我们现在可以这样看待这个问题,亚洲经济有点依赖增长,就像任何一个新兴市场国家一样。这有点依赖于资本流入。但是从长远来看,让玩家在经济中消费是非常重要的,因为他们认为这个游戏非常有趣,或者他们看到了用金钱交换权力或尊重的方式。而且,Axie越像一个真正的社交网络,一个国家,这些类型的价值交换的机会就越多。从早期开始,我们就把Axie看作是一个社交网络和一个游戏。这一点变得越来越真实,因为你知道,我们已经做了一些事情,比如把我们的Discord扩大。

Zoran: What are the key factors to making play-to-earn sustainable? Like, how do you think about potential ceilings on capital inflows and participation?

Zoran: 什么是让“边赚边玩”可持续发展的关键因素?比如,你如何看待资本流入和参与方面的潜在上限?

Arianna: In many ways, these economies are going to be similar to real-world economies. They’re very complex and I think continuing to manage the capital and token supply and all of the dynamics within these metaverses is going to be a real challenge.

Arianna: 在许多方面,这些经济体将类似于现实世界的经济体。它们非常复杂,我认为继续管理这些元宇宙中的资本和代币供应以及所有动态将是一个真正的挑战。

One of the key things in my mind is making sure that there continue to be different groups of players who are participating for different reasons and deriving different kinds of value. So, people might be there purely because they enjoy playing the game or because they get a lot of personal fulfillment out of coaching others. In many cases, it might be financial. There are a number of different reasons why people might want to be playing the game and engaging in the community. But as long as the players who are putting in additional capital derive other kinds of enjoyment from it, that’s fine. And that’s actually not at all dissimilar to the real-world economy. I might be wealthier and I might pay someone to do something I don’t want to do and somebody might, in exchange, pay me to do something they don’t want to do.

在我的脑海中,关键的事情之一是确保继续有不同的玩家群体出于不同的原因参与并获得不同的价值。因此,人们可能纯粹是因为喜欢玩游戏,或者因为他们从指导他人中获得了很多个人成就感。在许多情况下,这可能是财务问题。有很多不同的原因可以解释为什么人们想要玩这个游戏并参与到社区中来。但是,只要投入额外资金的参与者从中获得其他类型的乐趣,那就没问题。这实际上与现实世界的经济并没有什么不同。我可能更富有,我可能会花钱雇人做我不想做的事情,而作为交换,有人可能会花钱雇我做他们不想做的事情。

And so as long as there continues to be a robust ecosystem of participants who are there for a variety of reasons, I think that really drives things forward.

因此,只要出于各种原因而存在的参与者,所创造的强大生态系统继续存在,我认为这确实会推动事情向前发展。

Zoran: What is the balance between people who are trading within the economy versus taking money out of the economy, like, you know, transferring it to fiat, because people are paying their bills, right? And so they have a decision to make about how much to kind of put back into the system versus take out. What are the trends there? And how does that affect the business model?

Zoran: 你知道,在经济中进行交易的人与从经济中拿钱的人之间的平衡是什么,,你知道,现实生活还有要去面对的,人们也要应付他们生活中的开支。因此,他们要决定继续在生态中投入资金的趋势是什么?这又是如何影响商业模式的?

Jeff: In terms of the capital flows, we see that there are far more funds that are being deposited into our ecosystems than withdrawn. Only 4% of Axies are for sale on the marketplace. So, I think this shows the emotional connection and the fact that people don’t just see this about money. It’s also something that is giving them access to new opportunities, social networks, and is a lot of fun

Jeff: 在资金流动方面,我们看到存入我们系统的资金远远多于撤出的资金。只有4% 的 Axies 在市场上销售。所以,我认为这表明了情感上的联系,事实上,人们并不仅仅看到了金钱。这也是给他们提供新的机会,社交网络的东西,而且很有趣。

So, right now, I think, it’s easier to balance the economy when we’re growing really quickly and.the animal spirits are active. Long term it will be about continuing to make sure that the community is insanely fun to be a part of and the game is insanely fun to play.

所以,现在,我认为,当我们经济增长非常快,而且动物本能非常活跃的时候,经济平衡会更容易。从长远来看,长期而言,我们将继续确保游戏及社区保持活跃及有趣。

The role of community

关于 社区的角色 话题

Zoran: But what is it that keep people feeling as though they’re part of a community? There is some bigger, evangelizing feeling here than just, “Yeah, I’m gonna make a few bucks.” Right?

Zoran:但是,是什么让人们觉得他们是社区的一部分?这里有一些更大的、传教的感觉,而不仅仅是,"是的,我要赚几个钱"。对吗?

Jeff: Sure. I think it boils down to this shared economic alignment, but also cultural alignment. This community has been around since before NFTs were popular and, you know, what everyone in the world was interested in. Right? So, this exploration, I think that’s part of the DNA of the community. And as new entrants come in, they learn about this and they actually have some of the ideals transferred into them as they join. So, I think that’s been really important. And the community is amazing at the education and the onboarding. Eighty percent of our users are coming from referrals.

Jeff: 当然,我认为这可以归结为这种共同的经济一致,但也是文化一致。这个社区在NFTs流行之前就已经存在了,你知道,世界上每个人都对它感兴趣。对吗?因此,这种探索,我认为这是社区的DNA的一部分。随着新加入者的到来,他们了解到这一点,实际上有一些理想随着他们的加入而转移到身上。所以,我认为这真的很重要。社区在教育和入职方面非常出色。我们80%的用户是来自于推荐。

Arianna: I think it just demonstrates the enthusiasm that people have for what’s happening, both in physical space, by the way — the meetups have incredible attendance, people are really organizing themselves on the ground — but also, of course, in the digital realm, so in Axie itself, in the Discord, in the Substacks, etc. So, there’s just a stickiness that comes from people feeling like this community is theirs and they are benefiting from being members of it rather than, you know, having someone extracting value from them.

Arianna:我认为这展示了人们对正在发生的事情的热情,无论是在线下中,Axie的聚会出席人数都令人难以置信,人们真的在现实中组织起来——当然,在数字领域中也是如此,在 Axie 本身,在 Discord,在 Substacks 等等。所以,这种粘性让玩家觉得这个社区是他们的,他们从中受益,而不是有人单纯的从中索取社区的价值。

Zoran: But it seems like there’s kind of a paradox here, right? Because one of the things about legacy systems, whether it’s financial systems or gaming, is that they’re very sticky. It’s hard to move your account from one bank to another or you can’t move your in-game goods from one game to another. And crypto has kind of changed that and it’s made it much more portable. Isn’t it easy for some other game to pop up that is just as appealing and the characters are just as cute and your community might migrate over there?

Zoran:但这里似乎有一种悖论,对吧?因为无论是金融系统还是游戏,持续在系统中活跃的一个特点是它们非常具有粘性。将您的帐户从一家银行转移到另一家银行很困难,或者您无法将您的游戏商品从一种游戏转移到另一种游戏。加密技术改变了这一点,使其更加便携。是不是很容易出现一些其他的游戏,它们同样吸引人,角色同样可爱,而你的社区可能会迁移到那里?

Jeff: What we’ve built is not just the gaming community, it is, in many ways, a nation where people have shared cultural values, there’s overlaps and entertainment, there’s even this lingo or jargon similar to language. We have this very deep economy. So, I think it is much harder with this type of network to uproot a community and transplant them into a new universe where they don’t have a stake in it. We’re seeing people in the real world form Axie communities where you know all the people in your town or your city who plays Axie Infinity. And it has network effects, right? The more people that own Axie tokens, the more people that own Axies, the more people that own land within the universe, the deeper entrenched these economic and social relationships get with each other.

Jeff:我们所建立的不仅仅是游戏社区,在许多方面,它是一个国家,人们有共同的文化价值观及娱乐,甚至有这种类似于语言的行话或术语。我们有这种非常深入的经济环境。因此,我认为这种类型的网络更难将一个社区连根拔起,并将他们移植到一个他们没有利益的新宇宙中。我们看到现实世界中的人们形成了Axie社区,你知道你的城镇或你的城市中所有玩Axie Infinity的人。它有网络效应,对吗?拥有Axie代币的人越多,拥有Axies的人越多,在宇宙中拥有土地的人越多,这些经济和社会关系就越是根深蒂固。

Gabby: Yeah. One of the hallmarks of the shift between web2 to web3 is that the communities are opt-in and they’re incentive-aligned by shared economic ownership, by the kind of traits that lead people to share the same affiliation, the same tribe around maybe certain assets or certain game universe. People stay here because they choose to be here, and they help build the culture of a tribe. There’s a shared economic incentive, there’s a cultural incentive. But if people want to quit that network and leave and join another network, no one is preventing them to do so.

Gabby:是的。从 web2到 web3的转变的一个标志是,社区是自愿加入的,他们拥有共同的经济所有权进行激励,通过某些特征,导致人们分享相同的从属关系,围绕着某些资产或某些游戏世界,分享相同的部落。人们留在这里是因为他们选择留在这里,他们帮助建立一个部落的文化。有共同的经济动机,有文化动机。但是,如果人们想要退出这个网络并加入另一个网络,没有人会阻止他们离开。

Zoran: So speaking of user choices and user behavior, how is that changing? Because YGG is funding players, bringing them into the game, helping them get started, you’ve got a close-up view of this – is there a pattern of behavior, or different modes of participation that are evolving?

Zoran: 那么,说到用户的选择和用户的行为,它是如何变化的?因为YGG正在资助玩家,把他们带入游戏,帮助他们开始,你有一个近距离的视角--是否有一种行为模式,或不同的参与模式正在演变?

Gabby: We see ourselves as a necessary layer to bring people from the real world into the metaverse, especially for those that can’t afford it. But once they’re there and have an income, we actually encourage them to turn people from gamers to investors.

Gabby:我们将自己视为将人们从现实世界带入元宇宙的必要层,特别是对于那些负担不起的人。但是一旦他们到了那里并获得了收入,我们实际上鼓励他们将人们从游戏玩家转变为投资者。

So, the first few cycles of people are earning money via SLP. They sell it for fiat, put food on the table, pay their bills. What we see is that when they’re a few cycles in and they have some excess income, many of them for the first time in their lives, the behavioral patterns actually change. People have more of an investor mindset. And now they think about, “Do I buy Axies for myself and graduate from this program so that the next person can benefit from the Axies that I was using? Do I buy Axies for my family members so that they can start earning money too? Do I buy my first piece of land in Axie Infinity and become a virtual landowner?” And so on and so forth.

因此,前几个周期人们通过 SLP 赚钱。他们卖出换成法币,为生活支付账单。我们看到的是,当他们经历了几个周期,并且他们有了一些额外的收入后,其中许多人在他们的生活中第一次在行为模式实际上发生了改变。人们更倾向于成为投资者的心态参与了。现在他们会想,“我是否为自己购买 Axies 并从YGG中毕业,这样下一个人就可以从我使用过的 Axies 中受益?我是否为我的家庭成员买 Axies,这样他们也可以开始赚钱?我是否会在Axie中买下自己的第一块土地,然后成为一个虚拟的土地所有者?”诸如此类的。

Scalability challenges and Ronin

关于 可扩展性挑战和 Ronin公链 话题

Zoran: Jeff, you mentioned CryptoKitties earlier. That’s the most prominent example before this of a game that really reached some level of mainstream success. And it kind of brought down Ethereum for a while, right? So in terms of growth and scalability, what are the challenges?

Zoran: Jeff, 你之前提到过 CryptoKitties。这是在此之前真正达到某种主流成功水平的游戏的最突出例子。它让以太坊瘫痪了一段时间,对吧?那么在增长和可扩展性方面,有哪些挑战?

Jeff: In our ecosystem we have a lot of small, kind of low-value transactions that are really key to our user base in the emerging markets. And these were things that were basically priced out on Ethereum, where on Ethereum they might be $5 to $15 and obviously we’ve been in a bull market and that’s also coincided with rising gas costs on Ethereum as well. We were at the mercy where the success of the Ethereum ecosystem and all these DeFi applications was actually strangling out our growth, right? It was pricing our users out. We were in a situation where we really needed to migrate the majority of our transactions onto our own infrastructure.

Jeff:在我们的生态系统中,我们有很多小笔交易,这对我们在新兴市场的用户群来说真的很关键。而这些东西在以太坊上基本是覆盖不了gas费的,在以太坊上可能是5到15美元。显然我们一直处于牛市,这也与以太坊的gas费成本上升相吻合。太坊生态系统和这些DeFi应用的成功而导致的gas费暴涨实际上扼杀了我们的增长,对吗?它在给我们的用户定价。我们当时的情况是,我们真的需要将大部分交易迁移到我们自己的公链上。

It’s really this April with the launch of Ronin, which is our Ethereum sidechain, where we added that key piece to the equation, which allowed for our growth. We were around 38,000 daily active users in April before the launch of Ronin. And we just hit 2.4 million daily active users.

今年四月,我们推出了 Ronin,这是我们的以太坊侧链,真正的原因是今年4月推出的Ronin,也就是我们的以太坊侧链,我们在其中加入了这一关键部分,这使得我们得以增长。在推出Ronin之前,我们4月份的日活跃用户约为38000人。而我们刚刚达到240万日活跃用户。

Zoran: What exactly did Ronin, this sidechain, do for you — what did it unlock?

Zoran:这个侧链,到底为你做了什么--它解锁了什么?

Jeff: It allowed for the proliferation of the scholarship model, because there are a lot of transactions that are involved in running a scholarship program. So, breeding Axies, sending Axies to different accounts so that they can be distributed to scholars, claiming in-game rewards, these are all transactions on a blockchain that on Ethereum would cost a lot and, oftentimes, take a while, whereas on Ronin, these have all become very cheap, free up until now, and much faster.

Jeff: 它使得奖学金模型得已更快的扩散,因为有很多交易涉及运行奖学金计划。所以,培育 Axies,将 Axies 发送到不同的账户,以便将它们分发给学者,要求获得游戏内奖励,这些都是区块链上的交易,在以太坊上会花费很多,而且通常需要一段时间,而在 Ronin 上,这些都变得非常便宜,直到现在都是免费的,而且速度更快。

That’s why we call Ronin Ronin. Right? Ronin is the samurai without a master. This was all about taking our destiny into our own hands where we could be the ones that determined our growth path rather than having to be a taker of market conditions and gas prices on Ethereum.

这就是为什么我们叫Ronin Ronin。对吗?Ronin是没有主人的武士。这都是为了把我们的命运掌握在自己手中,我们可以成为决定我们成长道路的人,而不是必须成为市场条件和以太坊的gas费价格过高的受害者。

Arianna: I think that just really tells a critical story. If they hadn’t done that, I think the game would have obviously continued to grow, but been capped in the way that it was before. And so once there was that infrastructure put in place, there was an incredible unlock, which is really visible from the chart.

Arianna: 我认为这只是讲述了一个批判性的故事。如果他们没有这样做,我认为游戏显然会继续增长,但会像以前一样受到限制。因此,一旦该基础设施到位,就会出现令人难以置信的解锁,这在图表中非常明显。

Onboarding into the game

关于 进入游戏 话题

Zoran: And so the other challenge too is onboarding, in terms of the steps required to start playing the game. You have to download multiple wallets and you have to, obviously, pay some money. And on the one hand, that shows how appealing the game is for people that they are willing to take these steps. But on the other hand, you want it to become easier.

Zoran:所以另一个挑战也是入门,就开始玩这个游戏所需的步骤而言。你必须下载钱包,显然,你必须支付一些钱。一方面,这表明这个游戏对于愿意采取这些步骤的人来说是多么有吸引力。但另一方面,你希望它变得更容易。

Jeff: It is still incredibly difficult to get started with Axie. So, a lot of our development roadmap is aimed at reducing these barriers, specifically, for example, right now, if you are interested in Axie and you want to play, you then have to figure out which Axies you actually want to buy. This might involve doing a lot of research on the internet, maybe watching YouTube tutorials. And you’re basically buying characters for a game that you’ve never played before.

Jeff: 开始使用 Axie 仍然非常困难。所以,我们的很多开发路线图都旨在减少这些障碍,具体来说,例如,现在,如果您对 Axie 感兴趣并且想玩,那么您必须弄清楚您真正想购买哪些 Axie。这可能涉及在互联网上进行大量研究,可能是观看 YouTube 教程。而且您基本上是为以前从未玩过的游戏购买角色。

We will be releasing an upgraded battle system. And one of the features of that will be kind of this demo tutorial where everyone will be able to download Axie, get a free team of starter Axies, learn about the game, figure out if they actually love the gameplay, love the community before they have to make any economic decisions. So, we think that that’s going to be a really important stage between awareness and activation.

我们将发布一个升级的战斗系统。其中一个特点是这个演示教程,每个人都能下载Axie,得到一个免费的初始Axies角色团队,了解游戏,在他们不得不做出任何经济决定之前,弄清楚他们是否真的喜欢这个游戏,喜欢这个社区。因此,我们认为,这将是认知Axie和激活用户之间的一个非常重要的阶段。

There are also payment on-ramp and off-ramp frictions that we can work with partners on to also improve that onboarding experience.

我们还可以与合作伙伴合作,解决支付上和支付下的摩擦,以改善游戏体验。

Gabby: And, you know, That’s where the community steps in. And what I love about it is that you’re replacing the middlemen such as Facebook and Google with community-based structures that onboard people into games like Axie, teach them how to play the game, how to earn money, how to use crypto, onboard the wallet. And for me, it’s like web2 reduced people into statistics that it’s just about daily active users. And with web3, with this community-based acquisition growth returning them back into individuals, again, individuals who are like creating content, learning how to play, people who are earning money, and we see all of these stories of people whose lives were profoundly changed by earning money And I think that’s really significant.

Gabby: 而且,你知道,这就是社区介入的地方。我喜欢的是,你正在用基于社区的结构取代Facebook和谷歌等中间商,让人们进入Axie等游戏,教他们如何玩游戏,如何赚钱,如何使用加密货币,登上钱包。对我来说,这就像web2将人们笼统的归纳到到统计数字中成为每日活跃用户的数据。而随着web3,随着这种基于社区而获得的增长,他们又回到了个人。同样,喜欢创造内容、学习如何玩并赚到钱的人,我们看到了所有这些生活深刻的人的故事通过赚钱改变了现状,我认为这真的很重要。

Play-to-earn and the future of work

为赚钱而玩和工作的未来

Zoran: The idea of work is really important here. I mean, so far, it’s players, and people funding those players. But when you squint your eyes a little bit into the future, what kinds of new jobs do you foresee, whether it’s specific jobs or categories of jobs?

Zoran: 工作的想法在这里真的很重要。我的意思是,到目前为止,指的是玩家,以及资助这些玩家的人。但是,当你稍微眯起眼睛看向未来时,你能预见什么样的新工作,无论是具体的工作还是工作的类别?

Jeff: There are many different archetypes of Axie players, right? There are the competitive battlers. There are the collectors. There are the scholarship managers, as well as the scholars who are, you know, primarily kind of farming tokens and selling them within the ecosystem. There are just people who are Axie holders, there are the content creators and the educators. And many players see themselves as more than one.

Jeff: Axie 玩家有很多不同的原型,对吧?有竞争的战士。有收藏家。有奖学金管理者,还有学者,还有只是单纯farming并出售代币获取利益的玩家。还有些只是 Axie 持有者,还有些是内容创作者和教育者。许多玩家认为自己的不止一个。这是一个由玩家组成的庞大的经济体。

I think what we’ll see, within at least the Axie ecosystem, is that the different types of gamers will start to correlate or map to different professions, right? So, there might be someone who specializes in, you know, creating consumables, like a potion maker. Might be like, I don’t know, the version of a pharmacist. You’ll have your gladiator which might be, like, similar to, your athlete. So, we’re starting to see the rise of the competitive Axie players who are able to live off of, you know, winning tournaments and climbing the leaderboard.

我认为我们将看到,至少在 Axie 生态系统中,不同类型的玩家将开始相互关联或映射到不同的职业,对吗?所以,可能有人专门从事制造消耗品,比如药剂师。可能是一个药剂师的版本。你会有你的axie,类似于你的运动员。因此,我们开始看到有竞争力的亚洲玩家的崛起,他们能够靠赢得锦标赛和攀登排行榜生存。

I think that we’ll also see politicians arise in the Axie universe — people who are leading committees, for example, and thinking about the best use of funds, that might be the treasury, that might be the ecosystem, that might be, like, putting forth governance proposals. It might be creating requests for funding for different initiatives. You might have people who are focused on accumulating or harvesting certain materials. And that might be like the version of a farmhand. Right? So, someone who’s going on to Axie land, for example, and harvesting resources. I think that’s, like, an archetype that we’ve seen in the past, but I think has never really truly broken out and I think it’s had its breakout moment with Axie and the rise of YGG and similar institutions.

我认为我们还会看到 Axie 世界中出现政治家——例如,领导委员会的人,并考虑资金的最佳用途,可能是国库,可能是生态系统,可能是,例如,提出治理建议。它可能会为不同的计划创建资金请求。您可能有些人专注于积累或收获某些材料。这可能就像农场工人的版本。对?例如,有人要去 Axie 土地并收获资源。我认为这是我们过去见过的原型,但我认为从未真正爆发过,我认为 Axie 以及 YGG 和类似机构的兴起已经爆发了。

Zoran: We’re hearing a lot about web3 and the metaverse, and other buzzy phrases, all kind of revolving around this idea of more and more of our lives being lived online, in increasingly deep ways. Some of these trends we’re talking about with play-to-earn, do they go beyond games, or even jobs, and just become part of how we live?

Zoran: 我们听到了很多关于web3和metaverse的说法,以及其他一些流行的词语,所有这些都是围绕着我们越来越多的生活在虚拟线上的想法,以越来越深入的方式。我们谈论的这些趋势中,有一些是通过游戏赚钱的,它们是否超越了游戏,甚至是工作,而成为我们生活方式的一部分?

Gabby: Yeah. This intersection between crypto and the creator economy, it’s actually one of the things that excites me the most about the future of work and where people are going in the metaverse. So, when you see these games in virtual worlds, I think it will not be just in games like what we’re seeing now. There will be virtual worlds where people can be, for example, going to the bank, interacting with a DeFi application, and doing what we just think of as work but they’re doing this in these virtual worlds that may look like games, but they’re actually just the interface for doing this type of work in the virtual world. So, I think more and more the blending of work and play will come together and we’ll be using crypto as a means to exchange value, but they may not necessarily be games as we know them today.

Gabby: 是的。加密货币和创造者经济之间的这种交叉,实际上是让我最兴奋的事情之一,关于工作的未来以及人们在元宇宙中的去向。所以,当你在虚拟世界中看到这些游戏时,我认为它不仅仅是我们现在看到的游戏。将会有虚拟世界,例如,人们可以去银行,与 DeFi 应用程序交互,做我们认为看似是工作的事情,,但是它们实际上只是在虚拟世界中进行此类工作的界面。因此,我认为工作和娱乐的融合将越来越多,我们将使用加密货币作为交换价值的手段,但它们可能远不止我们今天所了解的游戏。

Gaming as a pathway to crypto adoption

关于 游戏作为加密技术采用的一种途径 话题

Zoran: And I wonder what you think about crypto adoption overall —there’s still a fair amount of skepticism by a lot of people. What does play-to-earn and gaming, in general, mean for crypto adoption?

Zoran: 我想知道你对加密货币的整体采用有何看法——很多人仍然持相当多的怀疑态度。一般而言,P2E对于加密货币的采用意味着什么?

Arianna: Gaming is going to be a key way in which the next hundreds of millions of users onboard into crypto because, historically, you know, it hasn’t been easy to get involved and the barrier to entry is pretty high, the technical hurdles are fairly high. And it can be a little bit scary. There’s real money at stake. And what games offer is a much friendlier, more approachable onboard. You have these cute digital pets. You can go on and meet other players. We’ve talked about a real sense of community. And so it’s just a much more approachable way to start playing around in the space. And so we see that players might come in through a game and then, you know, once they have a wallet, start to experiment with other web3 products and experiences, and really expand outward from there.

Arianna:游戏将是下一个数以亿计的用户加入加密货币的关键方式,因为从历史上看,你知道,参与其中并不容易,进入门槛相当高,技术障碍相当高。而且它可能有点吓人。这关系到真正的金钱。而游戏所提供的是一个更友好、更平易近人的船上。你有这些可爱的数字宠物。你可以去和其他玩家见面。我们已经谈到了一种真正的社区感。因此,这只是一个更平易近人的方式来开始在这个空间里玩。因此,我们看到,玩家可能会通过游戏进入,然后,你知道,一旦他们有了钱包,就开始尝试其他web3产品和体验,并真正从那里向外扩展。

Zoran: And how much of the crypto will end up being under the hood in the future? Will people kind of be transacting and not even thinking about it as crypto, but, you know, buying things with credit cards? Tell me how you think about that.

Zoran: 未来有多少加密货币最终会成为一种新的方式,不单纯是加密货币?我的意思是,人们是否会像使用信用卡一样,使用加密货币购物?

Jeff: What we need to do as product developers is to make sure that our user base and our prospective users really understand what the benefits of our products are, right? The benefits are derivations of blockchain technology, I don’t think they need to understand, like, how blockchain actually creates these benefits. So, I think when they see a fun, cute game where they can actually earn real value, I think that’s good. That’s sufficient. And I think that’s a strong enough pull. I think that learning how to use blockchain, I think these are more emergent benefits that they might get. Once they get involved, you know, they might kind of fall down the rabbit hole. We love seeing our user base go through that process as well. But I think in terms of the awareness phase, the benefits should be crystal clear. Even though the onboarding is difficult, people and organizations are onboarding by hand the next generation of blockchain users.

Jeff: 作为产品开发人员,我们需要做的是确保我们的用户群和我们的潜在用户真正了解我们产品的好处是什么,对吗?好处是区块链技术的衍生。我认为他们不需要了解区块链实际上是如何创造这些好处的。所以,我认为当他们看到一个有趣、可爱的游戏,他们可以获得真正的价值时,这就足够了。这是一个足够强大的拉力。学习如何使用区块链是他们可能获得的更多前所未有的好处的途径。一旦他们参与进来,你知道,他们可能会掉进兔子洞。我们喜欢看到我们的用户群也经历这个过程。但我认为就意识阶段而言,好处应该非常清楚。尽管参与有些许困难,但大家正在亲手为下一代的区块链用户提供体验机会。

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