John Linden: Inside the NFT game Blankos Block Party

John Linden is CEO of Mythical Games, creators of the pioneering NFT collectible game Blanko’s Block Party. John has a deep background in gaming, leading AAA titles like Call of Duty, and helping develop the Millenium Falcon ride at Disneyland.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. 

Amy: John Linden is CEO of Mythical Games, creators of the pioneering NFT collectible game Blanko's Block Party.

John has a deep background in gaming. Leading AAA titles like Call of Duty and helping develop the Millennium Falcon Ride at Disneyland. Now Blanko's Block Party is a bold experiment in making a game that's both fun to play and takes advantage of NFTs. John is well aware that we're in the early days of blockchain gaming.

John: We also get a lot of, why are all the games not deep right now? Games take a lot, especially if you're going to be bringing out a new IT and a lore and some real deep character development. [00:01:00] So we're still in year one, year two of mobile. And if you think about the games in year one, year two of mobile, it wasn't Sims, right?

It wasn't Supercell, it was Jelly Car, it was Doodle Jump, and they were fun, but they were pretty primitive to what we now see in mobile 10 or 15 years later. 

Amy: Join us as John explains the reasoning that led him to develop Blanko's Block Party and what they're still learning about this new form of online gaming.

Welcome, John, to the Game Thinking Academy. I'm so thrilled to have you here. 

John: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here as well. 

Amy: You just got back from Dice, right? 

John: I did. Yeah. I did a, uh, a talk at Dice, uh, Min Kim, who's a great friend. He actually wanted to take on this whole world of NFTs directly, which is, uh, it's a little bit of a tough audience there.

So it was interesting. So we had a couple of people from the space. We had the representation from the investment community through Andreessen Horowitz. We had some people doing some innovative work around this [00:02:00] crazy world of DAOs and lending and guilds and all that type of stuff. And then apparently admitting the old guy from the industry that has seen both sides of it.

So it went really well. It was really great to have a good talk about what's working and what's not working and what do we need to be doing as an industry thinking through these problems. So it was a great, yeah. 

Amy: What were your personal big takeaways from it? 

John: I think it's interesting. I think there's a lot of interesting innovation that can come from this whole new world.

And I think that's one of the things I love to talk about. Just some of the stuff that I think is really fascinating and why I like it. But I think there's a lot of thought around what the tech can do and what the tech should do. And I think that's a real key piece is that there's some talk about eventually the game could be completely designed by the community and I'm like, Oh, I don't know about that.

There's still a big art to art industry, right? It's if you had a thousand people painting a painting, it's not going to be a Picasso. There's a reason it's a Picasso. There's a particular vision of a creator. So I think it was really going through some of those in terms of what is real, what can you do and what should we do as an industry?

So really, how do we empower this world? How do I [00:03:00] bring stakeholders together? But also how do we make sure we're still driving this amazing industry that we've been building for decades now. 

Amy: So we've been talking about this with a number of our guests, this exact issue. So pin that, cause we are definitely going to go deep.

I think the whole centralization, decentralization, balancing thing is a rabbit hole that could easily take up our whole time. But as a community designer, it's obvious if you look at history, that every viable society tends towards centralization. And we're already seeing that throughout crypto in reality, people get the covers.

So first I want to really start with giving folks a sense of your background, because in the world of crypto NFT gaming, what you're doing is right on the cutting edge. Everybody's got their eyes on it. It's very exciting. One of our students did a teardown of Blanko's. 

John: Okay. 

Amy: That in the ugly, happy to [00:04:00] share that with you.

John: I would love to see that. 

Amy: So tell us at the high level, your background, particularly the pivot points in your career that got you to where you are now, because you have a story career. 

John: I have a weird career for sure. I've actually had kind of two sides of my career. So I started off really early. I started my first company.

I was venture backed at 19 with, uh, again, I'll, uh, it dates me a little bit. I have the greatest show in here, but, uh, 1997, 1998, I was venture backed in what we called it online communities at the time, but now we call it social media. But basically what I did is I created a website when I was in college around connecting friends and connecting the classmates and things like that called and, uh, with venture bags, we raised about 5 million early on, wasn't, I wasn't 21 yet, which was interesting to not be able to go out for a drink, but we had a company growing. 

So that was kind of my first take really saw the early 1.0 of the web, right? We were a top media metrics 50 site in the world at the time. Million and a half users back in 1997, 1998, [00:05:00] we really struggled.

We struggled to make money. There wasn't really an ad community yet and all that. So we kind of pivoted that company. We did two things. We had one was a public facing website called client alumni, which was essentially a Facebook seven years before Facebook came out. But then what we found is what we did is we started productizing that into a SaaS company.

And started licensing that tech directly to the universities. And we ended up selling the public side of the business to, uh, to Richard Rosenblatt, who was later Myspace and those guys and Jeff Tinsley, and they turned it into reunion. com. And then the private side is still around. It's still actually a company.

They powered 900 universities today. So it's nearly, God, it's going on 30 years of that company before too long, but they power 900 universities today. So that was kind of my first venture into the business world and into the tech world. And then after that I got into a lot of ad tech. So I was a co-founder of a company called AdKnowledge.

So we did, again, we called it lookalike marketing back in the day. It's now kind of behavioral marketing that we, we talk about now. So started thinking about problems around that. How are we asserting this new world? We grew that really quickly. Did another startup around click fraud validation. So we saw this whole new industry of [00:06:00] pay per click and a lot of fraud.

So we could solve some problems there. And then joined a company in LA called OpenX, which we did at one of the first call a real time bidding, these online ad exchanges of how do you basically have people bidding on every single ad in real time? And that was a great experience. That was the first half of my career.

And then I went to take a break. I was turned out and I was going to take a year off and I made it about a whole six weeks and my wife's like, you're driving me crazy at home. You need to go do something because you don't sit well at home. And honestly, Activision came calling and they were looking for someone in particular that had entrepreneurial background.

But also really understand some of these new worlds, uh, cloud computing. We were one of the top partners of all of AWS at the time. I was on the customer board of AWS, mobile, second screen, all these crazy new things that were coming about. And they had this Call of Duty studio that was working on some of the more innovative new projects and they wanted me to take over the studio.

So I've been a lifelong gamer and the jump to the chance to get into the game industry and honestly, haven't ever looked back. I just, I've I just love this industry. I love the innovation. I love the [00:07:00] opportunity. So I was Activision for about five years, mostly Call of Duty. So we worked on four Call of Duties as one of the studios on Call of Duty, and then switched over to Skylanders franchise and did a small mobile game, which it was very interesting time in mobile for Activision.

So we hadn't really done much in mobile. Cad this game and then ended up buying King right in the middle of this and suddenly we had a massive mobile presence and I, I wanted to go explore mobile more on my own. So I left there started a mobile company for a couple of years. That's why I joined forces with some other groups that we have been working with called seismic games and we did a big game called Marvel Strike Force, which is big on mobile RPG and which is now owned by Scopely I think it went from Kabam to Aftershock to Fox next to Scopely now, so, or Disney then Scopely.

So it's changed things a lot. We did that game and then basically we worked on a lot of other really fun projects there. We did a voice recognition version of Jeopardy that actually won an Emmy, which was cool. We were working on Magic of Gathering game, which we sold the company before that game came out.

We built the Millennium Falcon ride for Disneyland, which was awesome. So if you've been in the mid big [00:08:00] Millennium Falcon at the new Star Wars Galaxies edge, we built that ride with Epic and Imagineering and then sold that to Niantic. And that was basically, uh, when, when we sold to Niantic, I had this vision of Mythical and then left the deal, didn't stay with the company and started Mythical then in 2018.

Amy: So your entrepreneurial drive is really the through line here. 

John: And I love it. 

Amy: You're taking the edge. 

John: Yes. And that, that really drives me, honestly. What's great too, it's really about taking these ideas of, um, and, and evolving with the industry, trying to stay ahead of it a little bit and see where things are going and see where the big shifts are happening and they build on themselves.

So we did this battlecast game and what's fun about it is these are physical trading cards. You could buy a Toys R Us or whatever. But the real secret to these cards was there's, there is a piece we actually patented at Activision. We printed a hundred million cards that were all unique and that each one has a slightly different pattern on there.

And what we could do is we could use AR to kind of mask the process a little bit, so we had a character moving around, but we were using computer vision in 2014 to basically read that. And we could read [00:09:00] that in 50 milliseconds and tell you exactly what that card was. And there's only one of them in the world.

And we could transfer that to a secure digital asset. And that was really some of the basis I became just so booked around The idea of going from physical to digital and the idea of verified ownership. And what can you do with that? What does that mean to consumers? And that's really what Spark saves on.

Blockchains happen at all same time. That's how we can start piecing stuff together. It's like, wow, there's a very big transformational change about to happen. 

Amy: So you left, you started Mythical with a vision. What was your initial keyword, your initial vision? 

John: But I think it was really two things. One, being in the game industry, there's a couple of problems we saw.

We saw great markets, consumers find value, right? They do. They just do. And I love that about consumers. They'll find value on their own. But that's just the way we work as humans. And what they do is if you don't provide that, they'll find a way. So we saw all these problems with great markets, people selling accounts on eBay and Korean markets were popping up, trading digital assets.

And the problem was, is the game developers hated it because they were shortcutting the economies. They weren't cut into [00:10:00] it. There's fraud. So they're dealing with customer service. There's a lot of problems we're seeing in that space. Simultaneously, we're seeing a new world kind of shift. And I think what we saw is we saw all these new stakeholders getting involved, e-sports and influencers and brands and Marvel wanted to be in Call of Duty and all this stuff, but it was hard to really price the value of their contribution.

So it was really those two concepts together. Yeah. And we started thinking about what if we actually built this so that everybody's in on it. We bring this world together. And I think that's really where we ended up is we started looking at a macro picture. And we said, you know what? There's been two major shifts.

I thought in gaming over the last, besides just beautiful, amazing worlds, people have built and the talent is there. There's been two transformational shifts. I think we saw one was this democratization of game access, free to play. So free to play came out and we suddenly saw this explosion of users in our industry from about a hundred million to 3 billion now, probably going to 4 billion soon.

And because we eliminated this kind of premium price point. And suddenly we had a new world of demographics playing these games. So that was huge [00:11:00] for us. The second one for us was looking at content. So we saw this kind of democratization of content to where now things like Roblox and Minecraft and Sims, which all these amazing games, people were creating content and now we have this world where more content was being produced than one studio could ever do by themselves.

And that I thought was very transformational because what happened was a lot of content, new economies starting to form and so many new stakeholders that are very pivotal to the industry, right? So that was the second shift. And we really think the third ship is going to come and not for every game before a lot of economies.

And I think it'd be different from every game is the democratization of the game economies themselves. How do we bring these stakeholders, whether your game is focused on e-sports or your game is focused on influencers for growth or brands or UGC or players or artists or whatever. How do you bring these stakeholders into these massive virtual worlds?

And that's really, we think is going to be the next transformational shift. And that was what we wanted to tackle as mythical. 

Amy: Let's talk about [00:12:00] how Blanko's Block Party came to life. How you got there. I believe in another interview, you mentioned it started as a demo. 

John: It, yeah, it was really a pretty concept.

Yeah. Yeah. So the story there was a couple of things. One is we said, okay, we are seeing some blockchain stuff happen. And that was the other thing that did happen at the time is as a free to play game maker, you spent, I'll spend $30 or $40 in a game sometimes just to support the studio sometimes to see how it works sometimes because I decided there's a little loop that I like in there, but I was never a whale.

I was never, I didn't have that personality. But we obviously love the whales. That's what made up our economies, right? And, and next thing I saw these CryptoKitties, like CryptoKitties 2D images of cats. And next thing I know, I dropped $600 on these cats and I'm like, what just happened here? That's not my normal behavior.

And I think what was interesting there is we were like, okay, there's, there's something really fundamentally interesting. If you give a, an item that feels tangible, I now, I can destroy my cats, I could trade them, I could sell them, I could, you know, breed them for something new. But I had that power as a consumer.[00:13:00] 

So we loved a lot of these things happening in blockchain, but the games weren't great. They weren't game makers that were building these products. So we wanted to come out and say, okay, if we're going to do this, let's put out something that feels like a game first. We wanted something that people could just play.

And could we bring these concepts of blockchain into a world where That is still a game first and foremost. So we wanted to do a demo. And the idea behind the demo was we went through a bunch of Jamie Jackson, who's my co founder, he's a huge vinyl toy, vinyl toy geek. And I am too. And he's let's go after vinyl toys, because if you think about it, what the, what vinyl toy community does in real life is what we want to do in a digital world to where you have this canvas, right?

You have a 3d canvas. And a lot of times it's blank. And that's where Blanko's came from. It is a blank canvas that artists or brands or any person could come in and hopefully build their own and then resell that to somebody else. So that was the genesis of this idea. And we just started running with it and, and people love the art.

We suck them into this amazing world. And that was what we want to do. So we've, we, it really became, it started off as a [00:14:00] perfect concept. And we were like, you know what? There's actually more gameplay here. We can add on to it. 

Amy: Kind of reminds me structurally of Nintendo land. 

John: A little bit. Yeah, there's definitely, we took a lot of inspirations.

Amy: Now talk to me about the inspirations. By the way, the story is fire. So much good stuff in it. Like just your thinking around. What could we make that's very skinnable and brandable? Just think that up front. That's the way game makers think. 

John: Yeah. We want to think through a lot of challenges, right? We wanted also something very brand safe.

I come from the Call of Duty world, which is not super brand safe necessarily. That's a very specific genre of game. We wanted stuff. So we didn't want killing, but we wanted to have some mechanics around e-sports, right? Okay. We want people to build shooters or build race games or build eventually, hopefully sports games and other things like that.

And so we thought through a lot of Roblox that they're doing. We wanted to age it up a little bit. So we want to put it into a world, but cause we didn't want to invest. We didn't think that was the right demographic for what we were trying to do. So we want to age it up to more of a collector audience.

And then we want to save the space. That was the [00:15:00] original things there. We also wanted a really fun, fairly high fidelity. I wouldn't say we're the highest fidelity game, but we wanted something that felt, it felt good. It's something you could even have on a console or something like that. So that was some of the ideas.

We took some, definitely some cues from like little big planet. That was definitely some cues there. Fall Guys came out actually after we were in the mix there, but there was definitely a little bit of inspiration of what Fall Guys was doing in Mediatonic and those guys. So there's a lot of, we pulled some a lot of different ideas there, but we wanted to keep it true to hopefully a game.

And we wanted these characters also to be able to sit on a shelf with Funko Pops or with, uh, Kid robot and still stand out. And I think we did a pretty good job of keeping a very distinct silhouette that is uniquely Blanko's, but we definitely drew a lot of inspiration from the, from a lot of different pieces.

Amy: And my head is spinning with so many questions I want to ask, but while we're on this topic, I'm going to throw in one of the questions that came in. From our community, because it's such a good one. So one of the decisions that you've made, and obviously this is a moving target, right, you're not done, but one of the interesting decisions in [00:16:00] Blanko's.

Is the way that you present yourself. And so people have their username, but they have a collection of these Blanko's and you can level them up. You can customize them. Customization's a huge part of it. So if you're running around, say in the arena, the main lobby, again, classic game structure, main lobby with small group games that you can spin off and go to else.

So you're in the main lobby. If you run into someone you saw yesterday or a week ago, it's hard to recognize them because visually there's not an emphasis on consistency. They could be, it's really just play this character, play that character. So there's an interesting tension between persistent identity and the structure of look like and be whoever you want.

The same tension, by the way, of course, runs through crypto. But I, I know you must've thought about that. 

John: We have, we have, we [00:17:00] did some tests on it too. And I think what we found awesome, honestly, what was really interesting about Blanko's is we had a very early powerful community and, and the identity for the community was their username.

It was really, it's Chavio. It's these people, these groups that are out there that are. We felt like there was a very strong tie to who the player was. And it was really about them showing off their collection. So we didn't want to base it on, Hey, I have one character. I'm going to go through the whole game with, we wanted to really think about a collection.

And I think what we've seen a lot of it is we've really kept people with their identities, right? Their Twitch names and their gamer tags and all that. And so it's actually worked fairly well for us. We had a friend system very early. People could find each other, but we really wanted it to be about the, the username first.

And, and then it's really whoever you're, whatever you feel like today. It's almost like. Dressing up for the day. What do I feel like today? I wouldn't want to play as today. And I think that was really the idea. I collect a lot of these characters and there's not a, there's not two that are alike necessarily.

And I think that's beautiful about these collections is that I could express a lot of different things. I might have a particular artist. I like my particular brand. I like, [00:18:00] maybe it's just a cool design. I like, but we wanted to give people a lot of opportunity to express who they are at the time. And we're seeing that we see seasonal ones. 

You'll see in the Halloween time, a lot of people are going to switch to the Halloween characters because that's where their mind's at right now. And we think that's great. And I think also the other fun thing too, is just seeing the drill with Sims and all types of like, just having that collection and having all these pieces, you can piece it together.

And we saw one, we were seeing some really fun ones. We saw. A robot yesterday with bunny ears because they, we just sold bunny ears now and they, then you, it's constantly evolving and it's kind of nice because the world continuously shifts. Suddenly, like I said, around the seasonal times, it'll suddenly change to a holiday theme or it'll change to a, right now the year of the tigers.

We have a lot of tiger stuff, anime, anim, uh, emotes that are based on that. And they keep coming back, they're like recyclable, which we like. So yeah, we, it is interesting. You know, there's good and bad there. I think we could have probably branded it a different way, but we felt that was the right direction for this particular.

Amy: That's a great explanation. Just summing up what you said, it's like Gamer Tag First. And there's other games and that, that has some downside for some audiences, maybe the causing [00:19:00] the chasm thing. It's Gamer Tag First is I am my collection. And that's, it's a very coherent approach and nothing, no gate.

John: There's compilers and stuff too. Obviously you have to be a little careful of, we're trying to take out a lot of names. Yeah. The funniest one is we had a, so we had an event coming up and that we were going to do a project with Deadmau5. So Deadmau5 is going to bring his traditional Deadmau5 into the game and all this.

And we, one of our engineers, there's like, Oh my god guys, we have to, somebody's grabbed the name, username Deadmau5, and we're about to do this drop in three weeks. No, that's Deadmau5. It was actually him playing the game. They're like, oh my god, that's actually Deadmau5. And then, he went on Twitch, and he was streaming as Deadmau5.

And you should have seen people were flooding him. In the game, which was good. Now it's good and bad. There's also a lot, especially for streamers. You can, we had, we've had Dream in the game, which he is one of the biggest streamers in the world right now. And he joined the game. We've had Carl Jacobs joined the game.

We've had some amazing Captain Sparkles, who's a big Minecraft and they play as their name. They, there is some challenges there because. [00:20:00] If, if CaptainSparklez is there, or if the ninja had been there back in the Fortnite heyday, everybody's going to try and kill him. So they're, they're going to definitely grief him more.

So that's been a little challenging with it. And we've had some people that'll play under a pseudoname when they're streaming or something like that, because it's just, it's a social experience and people just want to be near you, even if it's digital. I think that's, it's good and bad. So I think we've had to deal with a little of both.

Amy: So Blank-, is Blanko's still officially in beta? 

John: It is. Yeah, it's been a long beta. We're taking a cue out of the Hearthstone playbook. Let's just, let's stay in beta until we hit a billion dollars, and then maybe we'll take it out eventually. Now, honestly, the reason we did it is we're still learning. And that's the key about a game like this is that was really the other, when we said proof of concept, we wanted to see those leverage.

We wanted to see the data. We wanted to see the KPIs that come out of a game like this. And honestly, we've learned a lot. We've had to come up with some new KPIs because some of the things that we saw before are no longer there, right? They're, they're different now. So I think things like that have been, we just had to deal with it.

So it's still embedded for a little bit longer. 

Amy: Can you drill down on that for a minute? That's [00:21:00] fascinating. 

John: Yeah. So a couple of things, what's interesting is, is retention, right? All those games you live and die by retention. And generally what we saw, like a Marvel Strike Force is if you're out, you're out, right? 

If you're no longer in D30, you're out. That is a very true telling KPI of that game. If you're out, you're never coming back. And that's what we've seen in mobile. We're not seeing that as these worlds. And what we're seeing now is that people play the game and then people are still part of the community.

So they'll come back day 45 and they'll suddenly pick it up again and play for a little while. And then they'll leave for a while and come back. So we had to actually do two sets of retention metrics, because one is what are you actually playing the day to day game? And that tells us obviously a lot of things.

Here's the different loops we need to adjust. Here's the things we, here's the fallout. Are people getting stuck in certain areas? The traditional game metrics. We also have kind of this community retention and what we'll see is that it's almost a 4x to where we'll see four times as many people stay in the community and they'll come back for a new drop or they'll come back and play with their friends again a little bit later.

So we started seeing some stuff like that. So we had to watch kind of two sets of [00:22:00] retention data to see, okay, cool. Here's the actual game effects. But a lot of people just want to be in the community. 

Amy: What do you mean by stay in the community? Is there a discord? 

John: We have a huge discord group. We have a lot of people that track all these drops.

These drops are almost like the supreme drops. People line up at 7am to get the new items, you know, before they sell out or whatever. So, there's a lot of people that come back. Here's the most amazing stat that I've seen, and I don't think this will stay with every game that's in this world, but We see 17 percent of all revenue for Blanko's.

They've never played the game once, not one time. And so what does that mean? It's two audiences. We've kind of broken that down. One is there is a speculation audience. Okay. We've seen that anytime you have value and you think you could buy something for 10 and it'll be worth 25 down the road, people will come in and collect.

But people love the IP and people are, and, and honestly, even though I'm not playing the game, they're interacting in the discord, they're on Twitch or they're on Twitter with us. They're in the marketplace. They're buying and selling items in the marketplace. They're trying to create these collections of IP.

And to me, I love that. I love that. [00:23:00] Obviously it's great that we, we make more money, but it's mostly important because how many games can you fully monetize your IP outside of people playing the game? It doesn't happen super often. And I think that's going to be a tremendous opportunity for game developers.

If you build a very intriguing IP that people connect with, you're going to be able to make money just for the love of the IP. And I think that's an important component. And imagine this right now in the mobile world, it is so competitive, right? A 1 percent difference from your CAC to LTV could be the difference in success or not in mobile for mobile free to play.

If you still have 17 percent more revenue coming in for your title, that gives you a lot of leverage on how you can compete and how you can market a game. So those are things that we've learned already. And it's really fun watching it happen. 

Amy: So you said something so important that I want to loop it back to what we opened with, which is this decentralization is king idea.

You said, and I quote, if you build really intriguing IP, it can draw people in and you can do more modernization with it. [00:24:00] When you think about, if you trace back all the examples that you gave, John, when you talk about the Sims. Look at even Roblox and Minecraft and what people have done with it. That wasn't just going from nothing to something wonderful.

There was a core interesting game slash platform. And then in Roblox's case, they built themselves many games. They built all the first ones to get the whole system started. It didn't just come from scratch. And so your insights about collectibles and crypto kitties and just the role of collectibles in gaming and what's going on now with Blanko's, part of, I think the excitement about what you might call collectibles first gaming, what does it mean to build intriguing IP?

Do you have to have good characters and narrative? The loot project is the. Touchstone where a lot of people, including some of the folks at A16Z are like just items and a cool, mysterious founder and magic will [00:25:00] happen. And if you actually track that project, you can see how it's going. But there was so much belief and excitement around that, of course, it was built around a hypie influencer, which is important, but that idea of just have a bunch of collectibles and magically a game will happen versus what you, John, know about gaming.

Look at what you've worked on. So what does it mean to have an intriguing IP and what is your, feel free to vent, but I want to know your opinion and your position, which of course you'll change if new data comes in. What's your opinion about what's like the minimum viable IP approach to have intriguing enough IP that you could build a game around?

The Sims didn't come, the Sims community, the modding community, didn't come out of nowhere. 

John: It did not, and it took a long time to build it up. And I think, so here's the thing I would say. We are very early in this world, right? There are some interesting data points right now. These little PFP projects, the BoardH obviously is probably the most notorious right now.[00:26:00] 

There's something pretty magical about those worlds. They have a very fascinating community that is, that has a high affinity to an art style or to a project. I, so let's give that credit. That's cool. That's happening. It's actually happening more than I would have ever thought. Now, the downside to that, does it have longevity?

We don't know yet. My inclination, and probably yours as well, is that longevity is driven by game design. Well, and value. Exactly. Utility, always things that we put into games. We think very long and hard of what are those loops and how do we keep them coming back? And what is engaging and how do we measure that and make sure we're doing it right?

Because we don't always get it right. None of us get it right all the time. We get, we get some of it right. And you have to adjust. And so I, I think there's still, I love the Andreessen's. Obviously they're one of our investors. I love their view on the space. But the, Hey, throw out a cool IP and get a good initial community.

And you got a billion dollar company. I'm not sure I buy that yet [00:27:00] because I think what you're going to see is a couple of things happen. One, it'll be shiny object of time. Some of them will stick. Some of them will be shiny object. Some of them are honestly. And incentive for making money. So I view the world in terms of this whole play to earn.

We're not calling it play and earn because I'm like, I think there's two models here. There's the earn first models, which is like an Axie infinity, which is it's great. And I'm not, I don't want to throw shade at Axie infinity. I think they're doing some very cool things. There's literally people in third world countries.

They're now being able to pay their bills because, but less though, encouraged. 

Amy: That what? 

John: Yes, exactly. Yeah. True. Yeah. We, when there's all different walks of life and I think people, that's a new opportunity. It's like almost like the gig economy. It's what Uber did too. It's what delivery did. It's, it's what customer service jobs did.

It's a new form of work, which is cool, but to me, there's also a play first, and that's what we're really focused on, is can you bring these concepts into the real, into real game, just so it has to be a game first. But here's what I love. You know, I love that the further [00:28:00] we get into this, we can take a lot of classic gaming tropes that we've seen in the past and gaming mechanics.

And there's a new spin to that, right? Instead of designing for an inflationary economy, like a free to play game, we're designing around scarcity. We're designing around these new, to me, it's just, it's a new paintbrush we have to play with. And I think there's a lot of other amazing benefits, right? You could build a community early.

You can pre sell items so you can get games off the ground. Do you have new revenue streams? Do you have new demographics? We can see a bigger world, but I still think that we like to play first model. We, that's what we're calling it play and earn now rather than play to earn because play to earn usually just means it's a money, it's a monetization model.

And that's cool. That'll work for certain things. We also get a lot of, well, why are all the games not deep right now? Games take a lot, especially if you're going to be bringing out a new IP and a lore and some real deep character development that takes a lot. So we're still in year one, year two of mobile.

And if you think about the games in year one, year two of mobile, it wasn't Sims, right? It wasn't supercell, it was jelly car, [00:29:00] it was doodle jump and they were fun, but they were pretty primitive to what we now see in mobile 10 or 15 years later. And I think that's the phase we're in right now. So yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff.

There's a lot of cool new experiments. I like to say a lot of these are academic still, because even if actually is amazing, but it still feels like an academic experiment, right? It like it's there's a, there's 2 billion locked into that game economy. I guarantee you that's not from gamers. That's from investors.

It's from people that are viewing this as a earning mechanism. And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. That's just not what we're doing.

Amy: Get back, John. The teardown of Blanko's that we did had two points of view. The play to earn point of view and the casual gamer point of view. And we did that because it's so critical to understand player motivation.

John: And I think, I think the other thing we did on that game, which we've gotten a lot of shit for to be super honest with you is like, where's the token? Where's the token? How do I earn tokens and sell these tokens? And to me, this drill, again, is better than I do is it is hard enough to balance a game with a stable virtual currency.[00:30:00] 

Let alone trying to do something that you're trying to balance against an externally fluctuating by the second currency. So we, we've actually stuck more with the NFT side right now and more around digital assets. And yes, you can earn new assets and there's free. You can earn a lot of these for free and sell them and they're actually selling for real money, which is great.

Cause honestly, the other thing you can build in is it doesn't have to just be a quantity scarcity. There's a natural time scarcity built into items, right? One of the most popular things that ever the fortnight when they accounts sell kind of illegally on eBay. Which I know Epic hates the number one that, that sold on eBay.

The reason was is for the marshmallow skin, the DJ marshmallow skin that came out three years ago. Why do they sell that? Because you can't buy it anymore. So time based scarcity is really important. I think a digital assets as well. And I think that if you had the 1982 Zelda character, if you could still show you had that and how you got it and all that would probably be valuable to right now as a digital asset.

So I think, again, there's a lot of things happening here, but we've stayed very focused on let's bring the gaming world into this world. Yeah. Let's not necessarily start over and try and create a [00:31:00] new loop from scratch, because I think there's a lot of problems. And I'm happy to talk about some of the other problems too, but... 

Amy: Yeah, that's such a good point.

So I have five more questions I'm dying to ask you, but I'm going to start asking community questions. I don't know if you can answer this, John. It might be a question for your, uh, game designers about the merge model that you have. Do you know the merge? 

John: Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

Amy: You can take two of your characters and merge them, get a higher level.

John: Oh, yeah. 

Amy: Or those merge them and get the highest level character. That model. 

John: Yep. Exactly. 

Amy: So, yep, jenna's wondering why you did that rather than a character upgrade model was an inventory management. What were the drivers that led you to pick that for your system? 

John: That's a great question. When I say it was a perfect concept, it's still a perfect concept.

And this is one of the things we thought about that model is a Pokemon evolution model. We didn't create that model. Here's what we want to do. We wanted to drive gameplay to see. Can we use gameplay to drive value to a consumer? [00:32:00] Can the only real way or the best way of getting through this is to drive gameplay.

So you actually are earning from playing. And so the idea there was a couple of things. One is we want to take a, an asset we sold. We weren't going to tell anybody that there is a gym rush. We just sold an asset. We sold it. And this was, these are not, these are not like thousand dollar items. These were 10 characters.

We sold them for 30 days. They were not quantity limited and we sold 12,000 of this character. And I think it was the month of September or something like that. So 10,000, 12,000 characters, 10 a piece. Great. So we started off with that and we wanted to say, okay, what if we had two evolutions, like a Pokemon and they are fixed quantity, right?

So now it's like, cool, there's 12 days. And we say we're going to have a fixed quantity of 2000 and then a fixed quantity of 200. So now as a player, I have the opportunity to turn one of my 12,000 potentially the one of 200, but there's a couple twists to that one. They're individually numbered. So the very first person that gets it, it's going to get number one.

And the second person is going to get number two. What does that do on gameplay? What's the effect of that? And then the second [00:33:00] one is we wanted to use some of these scarcity models to say, okay, cool. Okay. Well, as you move from a one to 12,000 into one to 2000, we decided that you had to have two of them.

And again, there's a little bit of a social experiment to see like what happens because we, we did some data on it and said, okay, there was a small amount of number. I think if we had 2000, there's only maybe 400 people that had two of them in their inventory, something like that. I don't quote me on that exactly on the numbers, but it was something like that.

Like, okay. So it was like 20 percent of that next tier already had two of them in their inventory. So we announce it, you have to go find another one. And the only way you can get one is to buy it from another player, because we're not minting any more of these. We're not manufacturing any more of these as mythical.

So one, what happens? Well, you know what happened is the prices before they were 10 and in the marketplace, they were selling for about 15, so about 50 percent markup. And this is before we announced it. The second we announced it, they started going for 30, 40, 50. So suddenly now it's, Oh, that's interesting.

So we suddenly saw this big markup of watching what would happen. And again, we're not, we're, I mean, we are benefiting a little bit because we get a transaction fee off these sales, but we're not selling them for 50. [00:34:00] Players are selling them for 50 to each other. And then what happened is they, they, we said, okay, when you upgrade, if you're going to get one of the 2000, you have to burn both of them.

So both of them are destroyed forever, which basically means now there's no longer 12,000 of the originals. There's now only, I think it was like 6,500 of the originals left after this experiment. And so what happened when we thought, okay, we've seen this game mechanic before, what happens if we put the scarcity of value and again, it's all back to the players.

So what ended up happening is before it was a 10 item originally was 15 item in the open economy. Now it's a 50, 60 item. The one of 2000, I think they go for four or 500. Again, players are getting this, not us. And then the one of 200, I think they go for like 1,600 because there's only 200 of them in the entire world.

So it was really interesting to watch and players loved it. We had a lot of fun with it. We just announced it. Uh, we have, we previewed, there's going to be another one. We haven't shown off what it is yet, but there's a, it's really interesting to, to, to watch these mechanics happen and players love it.

There's game aspects, there's creating value. And again, we, we don't control the prices. We just see what [00:35:00] the players value these at. On their own, it's completely open. So it's fun. It's really interesting to watch these new mechanics. 

Amy: Oh my gosh, sounds utterly fascinating. Adam asks a couple of good questions.

The first is who are your earliest superfans? What are the psychographics of your superfans, your early players? 

John: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, I'll talk about this Polish and we acquired a company called Polish stream in December. And I'll explain exactly why I did that. The two answers to this question, who are the early fans?

Some of them were blockchain people, just like, this is awesome. I can't, you're going to create real utility. We got a lot of, Oh my God, these guys make girl games. So this is going to be exciting. So there was a syndicate of that. There was a syndicate of vinyl toy creators or vinyl toy fans. That was a big one.

And a collector audience early on. But we did have a lot of early people that just love the concept and we, that community is still like incredibly strong. I mean, like the early group that got in, they are dive work still to this day. And we're about to do a major update to the game [00:36:00] next month, which is going to be exciting.

And we have a big roadmap. We're going to show pretty soon what's happening. But like I said, it was, that was the early group. It was a little bit of a mix. A little bit of collectors, a little bit of a blockchain people, a little bit of, Hey, I want to see some utility of where this could go. And then we've really built up a pretty strong gaming group behind it.

So that was really exciting. The other thing we did see though, is we've seen a big shift in the demographics of games, right? This is no longer. This is not your audience is going to go download a hundred gig to play Warzone on a 5,000 PC. This is an audience that wants to be in the 3D world. They want to transact in a 3D world.

They want to socialize in a 3D world. And they come in and out, they come in, they go, they got, they're not necessarily that a lot of times they want to play on a Chromebook. They want to play on a low end PC. They want to play on a Mac. We had a big argument. I'm sure you've had this in the past too. You always have that Mac skew argument in the, in the, in the main, let's say AAA game space, you're always like, do we do Mac?

It's going to be like 50 people because that's what we saw. We see a lot of people playing Mac because it's a different demographic. So [00:37:00] that actually leads to the Polystream acquisition. Why do we buy this company called Polystream? Polystream has a very interesting streaming tech. So If you think of streaming tech, you always go to Google stadia, right?

LA stadia or a guy, Kai back in the day, this team was actually a former guy, Kai team. And what they found on the streaming tech is there's a lot of promise of cloud stream games, right? Oh, I can build these crazy, awesome worlds in the cloud and everybody in the world can play it. You don't have to download anything.

There's been some problems with that model, right? One, to render a game in the cloud, you have to have a GPU per concurrent player. So if I have 20,000 concurrent players, I need 20,000 GPUs in the cloud. So one is very expensive. And frankly, it's not super environmentally friendly because you probably have a GPU in your local machine as well.

Might have to be a super powerful GPU, but you have a GPU. So what these guys did, they hit polystream. Is they basically took their compressing draw call data out of the engine. So they take the engine, like from a hundred or unity or whatever, they look at the draw calls that are going to the GPU, compress that data, throw it to a local thin client, that's maybe five megabytes and then re render that locally, uh, so it's pixel perfect.

So the reason we bought that though, [00:38:00] is that because of these shifting demographics, I, I'm seeing a shift and we'll see more and more of this. Just like we saw in free to play that people want to come in and interact and transact in these 3d worlds. But they don't want to sit there for four hours to download a game.

They don't want to have a high end PC to do it. So we're, we love this idea of Blankus now we're doing a test right now. Blankus is a five gig download in the new version on polystream. It's a five megabyte download. And not only that, but once you download our client, once the next game that uses it, there's no download it's instantaneous.

So if you had a game that was using our same tech, it's instantaneous. And you've already installed Blanko, there's no download at all. It'll just pop up. So the reason we did that is I see a shift in demographics. I think people are going to want to be in these 3D worlds more and more. You hear about Metaverse almost every minute, it seems like these days.

To me, yeah, there's gonna be experiences that are these metaverse like experiences, but they're gonna be different than downloading an unreal engine game. They're gonna wanna run and have instantaneous access into these worlds. So that's what we're seeing. We're seeing a big shift in demographics. I know that's a very long answer.

I'm sorry for that, but I, there's some really big things we're seeing right now that I'm just super [00:39:00] excited. 

Amy: Yes. You actually just answered one of the biggest critiques in the tear down, so that was great information. Okay. Thank you. 

John: I talk about Polystream a lot now because I think the Polystream tech can be used for a lot of stuff.

I hear everybody, I want to go watch a concert in my head. Imagine this, like, Travis, the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite. Awesome, Epic did a beautiful job. Huge event, but you had to have Fortnite. And Fortnite's not a small project. Imagine eventually a world to where I want to go see the Travis Scott, you know, concert.

But I want to have it, I want to be in that world in 20 seconds. Or 15 seconds or eventually instantaneous. That's when things start shifting for us. And so that's where I'm really excited with that tech. 

Amy: Yep. Step by step. So we've got, uh, Ian and Amir and Adam has some follow up questions. I'm going to, we're going to do a quick round here.

Ian has several questions. There, let me ask them, they're all around community, is expressing oneself in a community a fundamental need for users? Is that why people are there expressing themselves in the community? What are your thoughts on that? 

John: I think if you look at every game, there's a little [00:40:00] bit of peacocking in every online presence because you're not there.

It's a virtual representation of you at that second. That's what's beautiful about gaming worlds is it doesn't have to be exactly you. The fact that wouldn't be probably as fun as if everybody was exactly themselves. Which is one of the things I see a challenge with some of the things like that is doing it.

That's just me in a digital form. You want to be a dragon. You want to be a Viking. You want to be whatever you want to be in that world right now. And I think, so I think expression is really important for human behavior in general. So I think that's why games do well, right? Is it's an escape from reality, but it's still you.

So it's underlying still your choice. So I, I love this. I love the idea eventually of having things portable. Yeah. This composability of having things go back and forth, interoperability. I, there's a future for that. I don't, I think it works out.

Amy: But, and one thing, which I think you'll agree with, which is they have to care about and buy into the world to care about expressing themselves there.

Sometimes people want to have something analyzed, like there has to be a need. 

John: Exactly. Exactly. And that you're selling, you're selling a fantasy alternative reality for, for that moment in time. And right now it's probably Elden [00:41:00] Ring for a lot of people. And like it's horizon, it shifts of what's important to you, but it's a lot, it's always about expression.

I want to be. And I wanna look like this, and I wanna go get this set of things, so it's I think expression is just a key component. 

Amy: Question from Ian. How are you thinking about product market fit? Do you feel pressure from your investors to open up and scale? How are you managing that tension? 

John: That's a great question.

Obviously they want us to grow, but I think once we're great and I think we're, we're a really interesting spot and we've been, we've been super fortunate. Like I said, we've really, we've had a lot of things all happen at the right way, which is awesome and the team growth and all that stuff. So we've had a lot of opportunities with the financial side of the world and we've raised nearly 300 million.

And we have. Most of that left, we're in a cool spot in terms of being out. Well, we don't have a lot of those pressures right now. We really are. We have a big vision and there's a lot of stuff we haven't shared yet of where we really go. And, and I think to me, it's, it's about expanding opportunities in the game industry.

And it's a whole new segment. I think that the game industry can control over time. And I think we're also heading to a 3d internet down the road. That's [00:42:00] what the metaverse you would talk about what the metaverse means. It's not Fortnite. It's not Roblox. It's a 3d internet. And I think we are heading there in some fashion.

It won't necessarily replace everything, but they'll, they'll be a big aspect of that. And frankly, And I think that the best industry in the world to control a 3d internet and to build a 3d internet is a game industry. So I think we're heading into some cool stuff, but I think we got some opportunity to really, we're, we're not getting a lot of pressure from our investors just because we are growing nicely and we've done 10X.

We did 10X revenue over the year before this year. We're most likely going to do 10X again over the last year. So we're growing at a good pace and we don't have a lot of pressure and we can really explore some of these new concepts. I don't know if everybody, unfortunately, it's going to get that.

We'll get that opportunity. I think we are pretty, blessed to have been where we are and the team we are and, and the, the efforts we've done. 

Amy: Money in the bank will do that. 

John: Luxury, I guess. 

Amy: So, uh, another question from Adam, do you think you might allow independent artists to design and sell Blanko's?

John: Yeah, actually, we have a lot of independent artists right now. Most of our characters are independent artists and they get a cut of the primary cells and they get a cut of secondary cells for the perpetuity of the object. So they will always get those. [00:43:00] We do have some internal groups as well that, that we brought in some artists.

Cause we, here's the thing. There's certain aspects of a game. You want to give away free items. You want to have the, it's not all about everything's for sale. And that's harder with an independent artist to be like, come and get your shit away from free. So we do have some internal artists that do just amazing work for our party passes and stuff like that.

But most of our drops are third party artists. They're building their own stuff. And we don't really, we don't give them feedback on it. Like we get a bunch of designs from them. We'd say, Hey, we think these three are work. But it's a hundred percent the naming to also that. So we get that a lot. How do you name these characters?

We don't name the characters, the artists name, the characters, but that you'll see that they're the hardest logos on it. Maybe the follow up question there is, will we open it up to everyone? Love to. There's also chaos in that world, right? So we, I'd say right now we try and do all as many independent third party artists as we can.

But it is curated still because we think that's the right way to control, control the narrative a little bit is curation. So it's not full UGC. Okay. Do we see a world where it could be full UGC? Hopefully we can add more and more over time. 

Amy: We have also Amir with a couple [00:44:00] of questions. What are the biggest challenges you face with onboarding users into the crypto NFT world?

And then follow up is, what do you feel about owning NFTs? 

John: Awesome. So I would say that one of our big secret sauces of what we've been able to do and grow, and frankly, a lot of the reasons I think we're able to work with, we're working with a lot of the first parties now, they're very open to working with us and trying to figure this out.

And the reason for that is two things. One, we're from the industry, which helps we've done games together. We've been at GDC together, right? The gaming industry is a relationship industry for sure. But more importantly is we've taken a stance on blockchain that there's 3 billion gamers in the world. They lose their passwords all the time.

It's just a great trait. The gamers have is they lose their passwords, but when they get their passwords reset, all their stuff is still there in the world of web three. If you're going to throw truly into web three from day one, your password is your private key, right? If you lose your private key, you've lost everything you've done.

I think that could [00:45:00] damage the gaming industry in a big way, because it's not all about making money. It's a bow. The experience and playing in these worlds. And so we think a lot about that. So what we've done is we actually have a, our own blockchain tech. We hold the private keys to your account right now.

So we are, we are in custody of those private keys. We get a lot of flack for that too. So you're not really well cares in that aspect. We're not exactly, but here's what we're doing. And Joe's we're like, okay, cool. We'll start with this. If you lose your password, we'll reset it and your stuff still there.

Next step. Okay. Now I want my blank go on main net Ethereum or eventually on salon or whatever. Awesome. So we now have a bridge so I can take one item at a time and move it over to a theory. That's the next phase for us. It's giving players a little bit more freedom. Eventually we'd like to go fully non custodial.

If you want to, if you feel you're responsible and you've proven your education, sure, sign your own transactions, keep your own keys, do that all. We are heading that direction, but we're doing it with extreme caution because. It could be a very negative [00:46:00] experience. If I lost my key or my brother gave my key away or whatever, and I lost all my cars for the racing games I've been playing for the last two years, I'm probably going to have a really terrible experience as a consumer.

So we're protecting gamers at all costs. So that's one thing in terms of onboarding. It's, it's not really a heavy onboarding. It's like signing up for a video games, right? You get a key, you get her, you get a wallet automatically in our chain and you can link an external wallet and try to transfer stuff out.

It's a step process. But going into the game, and I think this is important, going into a game, you should just be in that world. 

Amy: That's amazing. That answers another question that was coming up, which is how did you avoid all the wallets set up in your onboarding flow? Because it's amazing, your onboarding flow, you never have to touch that stuff.

John: Yeah, you never have to touch that. It's tied to a game. And like I said, they're there now. I don't know if you've seen in the marketplace now, I can go link my Metamask account and I can transfer a Blanco over to OpenSea if I want, or I can transfer it to my wallet and I can sell it on OpenSea or Rarible or whatever marketplace is next.

I can go do that. And so that's been the next phase for us. And like I said, we were working to where eventually, yeah, we'll give you your private keys and you can sign your own transactions, [00:47:00] but we're not quite there yet. There's a lot of legality issues. There's a lot of things like Sony and Microsoft, which we've been on great talks with.

Yeah. They're like, no, no freaking way. There's other games that are like, no freaking way we want to do that. There's just the customer service and it's just, it's a disaster. So it is a balance and we're, we have the tech to do that. And we'll, we're, we're experimenting and we'll keep experimenting. And our goal is to bridge the world.

And I think we're going to be successful in doing that. And I think the studios like talking to us about this because we, we can, they, they see that we're serious about protecting users and we're not just, we're not just out to make money on this thing. This is, uh, functionality first and a player's first, uh, 

Amy: I have to ask you John, looking at your career, listening to you talk about what's happening now, giving us this glimpse into the future.

You've really got a track record for moving toward very interesting trends. So what are the, this is a two part question, what are the signals that make you get excited? What are the signals that made you get excited about blockchain and about free to play [00:48:00] and these new things? How can we look through your lens and see what you see?

And then, What's exciting to you that's coming out? That's the second part of the question. 

John: I think for me, I don't know, this is, this is, maybe this haunts my, haunts my mind all the time too, but I, I have a weird thing that I always, things that, problems in spaces bum the crap out of me. And a lot of times it's big stuff.

Hey, Marvel wants to work with your game, but how do you price it? There's new trends happening with influencers and esports. Honestly, one of the things that drives me crazy that I've never understood is that The e-sports and influencer industry drives a lot of our business now, and they're not cut into the game.

And it really, anyway, there's sure is some creator codes for Epic and there's some stuff like that, but they're a big part of our ecosystem and they make money outside of the game. And I find that crazy. And honestly, the other thing is you talk to somebody who's big now, a hundred thieves are fine.

There's some phase plans. Fine. You talk a lot of these e-sports companies, they are not making money. They're struggling to survive yet. They promote our games. So to me, things like that, those types of trends, I'm like, We can do better. We can cut them in. This doesn't, [00:49:00] the first question we first started seeing this, we get this a lot too, is like, why would I want to share money without any other people?

Right. I'm like, because it's an ecosystem play. Now, this is no longer just, I built a game and this is no longer a, I'm a game developer and I have a game publisher and there's a consumer, right? We're not in that world anymore. We're now in a world of, oh, and there's e-sports teams that are promoting and influencers need to be in here and brands want to get involved and artists and musicians want to get paid for their IP and players want to be entrepreneurial.

That's the world we live in now. So we need to treat it like an ecosystem. And then almost over time, I know I'm never supposed to use a gambling term. And I don't mean this in this way, but it's almost like a poker where down the road, you could see a world where players are transacting 100 percent with players.

And we're just taking a rake in the middle for creating this world. And I think that's not a bad thing to think about. So I think you have to, the things I look for are big problems in our industry, trends and tech. That could help solve it. Keeping always keeping the players first. And I think that's so critical is to keep it at a, [00:50:00] don't go too far off the idea.

Like I hear people all the time. We're building the metaverse. And I'm like, no, you're not like anybody says I'm building the metaverse. I think is this is not there. Cause cause what you need to do is build towards that idealistic world. Not just go from zero to a hundred because. One, you have innovators dilemma, you have, you're going to boil the ocean.

You're not going to get anything done, or it's really, how do we have a great industry? We have an amazing industry. People love our worlds. They love being, playing games and having fun. Let's not take that away. Let's enhance that experience. Let's not just take it away and make it a, make it a job. And so I think that's, I think we have to convert from a gaming system into an ecosystem.

And these are the things I think about nonstop probably way too much. But, uh, these are things I love, and how do we do that, and how do you find the right people that can come build that with you? 

Amy: Oh, wow, that's fantastic. By the way, we got a compliment on Blanko's music here in the, uh, 

John: Mike McLaughlin, he's our, he's a, he's formerly, uh, he's, I think he's on the DJ hero team and the Guitar Hero team.

So he's from a rhythm genre of [00:51:00] a group back at Activision back in the day. He is phenomenal. We've also, it's fun. We have some investors like the Chainsmokers and Christina Aguilera. We have some interesting, uh, kind of. Musician investors, and partly, uh, Avery Joe, I think is fascinating about that is the music industry is really thinking about this and they want a bigger intersection with gaming.

And so, yeah, it's funny. He's so good at what he does. That's a lot of fun. But yeah, he has really knocked it out of the park with Blanko's soundtrack. We've actually had people ask to put it on Spotify. 

Amy: Oh, that's a,

John: maybe we'll do it at some point. 

Amy: Is it a live hit? 

John: It's fun. It's just, it's a great, it's a great recognition for the, 

Amy: Coming up that we should get excited about, is there anything that you want to tease for us? Any links, URLs you want to send us to? 

John: I don't know if I have a link or URL quite yet. If you go to, if you go to mythical games, you'll suddenly see it as a games tab now, and you're going to start seeing some new stuff start to appear. So I think we have probably, we're all working with some amazing studios right now. 

There is, there happens to be a car that's hitting right now and you could probably only imagine where we're going with that. But again, I think what's interesting about mythical and what we want to build as a company is we want to partner with studios that [00:52:00] truly are creating utility around these new principles, not just tacking on and trying to sell items.

We want to think about people that take a racing genre or a sports design genre or an RPG genre or whatever they're really good at. And how do we give them a tool set to build better experiences and better gameplay that could use the concepts of ownership. And if we can do that, I think we're winning.

We do. We're I'm very excited. We're going to be announcing probably five to six games soon of great studios around the world that are. Doing amazing, amazingly cool stuff and bringing new, new game design, using this tech to enhance the game experience. And that's what I'm excited about. And we're going to see a lot of that happen.

And I think what's great too, is the further I get into it, a lot of your games, you've made your past that I would love to have had the opportunity to put some of this tech into, because I think, yeah, the Sims content creation. I think that's such a cool experience. Like letting this world. I mean, imagine if Sims, like people could go do stuff, honestly.

There's metaverse type stuff right there. Alone, letting people design and create and be entrepreneurial in these worlds. Give them a tool set to do stuff like that. Now I'm [00:53:00] probably not going to get the Sims right away, but that's, that's a ways off I'm hearing, but we'll see what happens.

Amy: Thank you so much for joining us and spending all this time with us.

Thank you everyone for joining us and for your great questions and have a fabulous weekend, John. 

John: Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks everybody listening in. 

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website getting2alpha.com. That's gettgetting2alpha.com more great resources and podcast [00:54:00] [00:55:00] episodes.