Roll out the red carpet for Owen O'Donoghue, Chief Revenue Officer at Infinigods, who takes us on a thrilling ride through the evolution of blockchain gaming. His insights, honed from his time at Facebook where he played a vital role in propelling the growth of the gaming business, will leave you amazed and hungry for more. We journey from the boom of CryptoKitties, to the rise of Axie Infinity, and the current generation of web 3 gaming being pioneered by Owen and his team.
Roll out the red carpet for Owen O'Donoghue, Chief Revenue Officer at Infinigods, who takes us on a thrilling ride through the evolution of blockchain gaming. His insights, honed from his time at Facebook where he played a vital role in propelling the growth of the gaming business, will leave you amazed and hungry for more. We journey from the boom of CryptoKitties, to the rise of Axie Infinity, and the current generation of web 3 gaming being pioneered by Owen and his team.
Welcome back to the Crescendo Go To Market podcast. Today we have Owen, who is the chief revenue officer at Infinite Gods. Do you want to give us a quick introduction to yourself and Infinite Gods as well?
Speaker 2:For sure. Great to have you on, sasha. We appreciate it. I'm Owen O'Donoghue, spent the last decades at Facebook as part of the gaming team, working with big gaming companies and, 18 months ago, co-founded a blockchain gaming studio called Infinite Gods, and really what we're trying to do is build fun games that have mass appeal, particularly on mobile, that also use some of the best parts of blockchain technology to make the games more fun and more enjoyable for players.
Speaker 1:And I think that's what's really interesting about Infinite Gods is there's a lot of unique mechanisms that I haven't seen anywhere else in the Web 3 gaming space. So I'm curious about your story because I know before you got into the Web 3 gaming space, you were working at Facebook, right. You were leading there. Essentially, I believe you were leading gaming at Facebook, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was leading the user acquisition or the advertising side in North America and actually Latin America as well. It was very small and really I joined very early on in Facebook in 2010 in the European office, and Facebook was trying to figure out its commercial strategy at the time. So, are we selling advertising? Are we selling subscriptions, gifting? There was a ton of ideas we started to see. We had a platform opened where people could build applications within Facebook using Flash, and games like Farmville, texas Holden, poker, saladomania, candy Crush all these games were actually operating on Web and producing pretty good revenue in terms of payments, but just the amount of like, how much time people were spending on those games compared to the rest of Facebook for certain players was pretty incredible to see, and so it was a real driver of Facebook's early business, and so I was part of the team that was tasked with. Okay, let's grow this business, let's go and recruit other developers and let's actually help them grow their game through both organic and paid means and then help them monetize as well. And so that was a rocket ship and actually is still a rocket ship of a business, and so really went from zero to quite big quite fast, you know, during that time really saw that trans again.
Speaker 2:I actually had a background where I worked actually with the Microsoft work in Xbox, so that's a very brief experience with gaming, but it was really crazy to see how, where I traditionally thought games were, you know, like big fancy, launch is a really cool game. A lot of people play it and what. What I was seeing a Facebook was. It was almost like it was essentially almost financial. It was these free to play games get them out there to an audience, make it free but allowing in game payments, and then really see what's the value of players and then continue to acquire them through digital advertising as long as it was profitable. And so you would see these businesses really go from zero to making like 1020 $3040,000 run rates and then actually, as we got into mobile, those games started to make, you know, 100,000 to almost a million dollars a day in revenue and it was the birth in the west of free to play gaming coming at scale.
Speaker 2:And so you know that transition was just seeing that was actually very interesting. It was real hotbed for startups where you did need to be this big publisher like EA or Activision who had been around for 20 years with all these established relationships with distributors and consoles, and that business has grown, grown. Facebook's role became more and more about acquiring players, both on the paid means, and became quite sophisticated, from being able to just get somebody to install your game to hey, I want somebody who has a payment pattern of this, who has a purchase behavior of this. Therefore they're more likely to be a high value player in my game and so spent spent 10 years on that. That business went from literally it was probably about $5, $6 million a year for Facebook and when I was leaving it was close to a $5 billion revenue line for for Facebook and now meta and it continues to be probably one of the big drivers.
Speaker 2:But very interesting just to see that side of gaming, because I always assumed it was console, it was PC, because that's what I played. But actually when I saw over the last decade was the vast majority of gamers actually they switched to mobile and they were not like me. They were.
Speaker 2:You know they were, they were they're female they're older and so very, very interesting experience while I was working there.
Speaker 1:What did a typical like day to day look like in what you did? Because you were essentially working with these gaming companies, I guess your job was to help them acquire users and get a ROI so they would spend more on getting users right. It's it sounded like kind of that sort of enable control on your end, or what did that look like?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean it. It helps you change a lot. There's a lot of just going in and finding and doing a lot of business development to find folks and you know, first few years typically would have been going into markets in eastern europe and israel developers who are actually making further platforms at the time, like this is even pre-mobile, and who make flash games and persuade them to move over. But typically your day to day would be looking at okay, you know what are you trying to do, what's your target and so it's. You know, what type of game do you have, what's the typical pattern that represents a good player? So is that lifetime value, so how much they purchase over the life? Or there are other behaviors. And it's then working with the developer to parse those little audiences and actually help them. You know what creatives will go and speak to that audience, how to target them. So, beyond just age and geo, are their interests, are their behaviors. And that obviously changed a lot where at the start you were saying, hey, use static interest, so what people have said they like on facebook. This is like feels like so long ago. Uh, all through to today where you're actually going to say, hey, like, take an audience in a market really focus on. They have exhibited these types of behaviors via sdks and go after and bid this amount for them, use these amount of creatives. So it's very hands-on.
Speaker 2:And then really it's measuring is it so? And essentially what I kind of said earlier, it's like finance. It's like your ad campaign should be returning positively. So it's kind of like people who are trading tokens or trading nfts. It's like what's your portfolio on this campaign? Is it actually getting 100 return on investment? So the players are coming in and spending as much as you've spent on them or more. Keep spending, keep doubling down on that. And then some of the other campaigns that are not working can you change things? Should you just stop, etc. And so my job is doing that and managing the teams that would do that. And often, as time went on, it was less it was.
Speaker 1:It was very much about then building in various technologies from from facebook now meta, so various sdks, apis, various different ways to break out users, so pretty deep on the user acquisition front and lots of products that came out that revolutionized and and really helped that that's interesting and it seems like on facebook gaming especially because you're working with these larger spenders and was such a core part of the business it seems like there was a a lot of support given to them, because I remember when I was running my ad agency facebook, definitely we were more on the e-commerce is e-commerce and courses side of things, but we definitely saw like we were like not getting much attention from facebook we were spending like pretty large budgets, while google would give us like all kinds of beta features and you know they were.
Speaker 1:They feed us pretty well, but it sounds like all the support was going to gaming, so maybe that's what I, yeah it was funny.
Speaker 2:They actually so it's funny because they actually dedicated. So I was, I was in the european sales team. There was like 10 of us, there was already anybody, and so reva was covering the english-speaking country in europe, asia, and everyone africa, and so it's funny. When we started to really mature and, like you know, went from a small organization to a huge I mean facebook's a giant now met as a giant in terms of employees we started to.
Speaker 2:We broke out gaming as a totally separate vertical globally, so we had like a ania team, a north america team, etc. And e-commerce and autos and everything was stuck in there. But gaming was always kept on its own piece because, again, that the learnings for how every game scales it became pretty uniform. So if it was a mobile game from a chinese developer or an american developer or or somebody in the uk, it didn't it. The playbook was roughly the same and so there was a big economy of scale for for facebook to to actually do that, and so that meant you get to work with, really get to work with all these games that if I look at the top 10 on ios, you know the majority.
Speaker 2:Our team would have touched that one stage so so yeah, pretty crazy, but I feel you on that, because even today we're spending money today and user acquisition and even now facebook's kind of met us changed a bit where it's very top-heavy, they focus on any big, big advertisers. Well, google gives you a ton of support, no matter who you are.
Speaker 1:So just just different ways of operating businesses yeah, it's uh, it's definitely interesting, and I think it depends on the vertical as well, because uh yeah, it's. It's kind of depends on spend vertical etc. But uh, yeah, moving on, how? How did you decide to essentially? Um, where was what was the point that you decide? Okay, I want to check out web three gaming, I want to build my own studio, and how did you and your co-founder demon meet.
Speaker 2:For me personally, uh, I was there 2017 um, and I was actually in facebook, and so I was running a team that focused very much on new business. One of the teams I had was very much new business, new developers, and so we focus on all types of gaming, and so crypto kiddies actually came up as an advertiser this they wanted to advertise on facebook, and so we allowed them and, um, we would just start to hey, you know, typical things what is a good value of a player? Look like to you what's? What's your retention? We have a lot of benchmarks that we see, anonymous ones we can share, and the numbers they were giving were like insane.
Speaker 2:Um, so retention was like 2x what we typically would see in free to play um, and then the and you know what okay, this is crazy, and then people will be trading um some of the cats in game as well, and we'd see these other ridiculous fees and revenues coming in, and so it was the first. It was one of the first times in a long time that there was there was a um, a real evolution on the free to play gaming model. That's really important, because free to play is pretty much 60 70% of gaming in the world today. It's just everything, if not even bigger, and so it was that that was kind of interesting and crazy, and then invested, like everybody did at the time, at a big pollin x account and buying everything, and then it kind of went away.
Speaker 2:You know, bear market happened, kind of 2018, 2019. It's pretty bad. And then you know, post, you know, I suppose in late 2020 we started seeing some real pickup and obviously axi then started and, um, again, axi's, the revenues they were bringing in on a monthly basis or just the total amount of revenue around the game for a few months was, I mean we were talking I think it was the high hundreds of millions, if not billions, at one stage, out of only three or four million players. And so again, that was like a data point saying that again is really unheard of, like like, we've had console gaming. We know what that works. We know mobile, even real money gaming. I wanted the teams there. I understood like what that would look like, but this is like totally different. What's going on here? This is a new behavior. And so, um, it kind of brings me to daemon.
Speaker 2:So daemon is what actually one of my first customers at facebook so he actually had he left. He had a great role at a, at a at a big gaming company, left it to do his own game, started on facebook. I called him up. I saw the numbers there were. There were small but like really promising. He was building a great game, scaled it like crazy, sold it actually quite. He sold it within a year to a big company. They acquired it, kept him on because they wanted to operate it and he built his. He built that business, um, I think he had like over like a quarter billion dollars in revenue, you know, over 25 million downloads super successful. So I was always in touch with them and we're always trying to figure out something to do, and so I, I, you know, we're seeing this going on. It's a daemon, it's a look, you know, and I think this is the next wave. I think we need to jump in and, um, we started to look at a lot of different things that were going on in this space, like axi, um, you know, star atlas, alluvium, you know. We had a lot of concerns over what people were doing, because we were like, just how are they going to sustain this growth in terms of players, or can they even realize making these games that they're talking about? And some of the tokenomics looks kind of crazy. But we were like it's clear that if there's real ownership and the blockchain validates that you own certain assets in game, that that's got tremendous value to, has potential to have tremendous value to real gamers that they can not only like trade things, but they can keep their experience from game to game. They can be rewarded for that.
Speaker 2:You know we'd seen a lot of different problems come up in mobile gaming. You know the classic one was that you go in a free to play game and everything you're buying it's essentially consumable. The developer can just get rid of it whenever, and so you can invest a lot into a game, a lot of time, a lot of money, and then you know developer stops updating it or you want to move on to something else that that whole investment is gone. It's something when it's like a 20, 30 dollar a game, console game or a pc game. So, okay, cool. But we saw people investing thousands of dollars into some of these mobile games and if the developer decides to stop, you know that's it. And there was some pretty big examples that were just very frustrating from a consumer side and the mobile side people building some big city, building games that people spent a lot on and developers that are not supporting it anymore. I said, wow, these people spent years building and spending money and now it's gone, and so the idea that certain things that experiences could be transferable on chain was very interesting to us. And then the second. The second piece was everybody's focusing on some interesting DeFi stuff in gaming and we were like the real problem we felt in free to play gaming Not the problem with the opportunity was that you just really low economic participation rate, and by that I mean people who spend money in games.
Speaker 2:You know your typical mobile games. If you look at something like Clash of Clans or Hobescapes or Garden Scapes, maybe one to 2% of the total player base has actually spent money in that. Very much the economies favor their pure demand side. They very much say, okay, you just keep grinding away and if you want to fast forward time, you just spend some money here, and so that was a almost a set way of operating for 10 years. I'm like, okay, well, if you start to look at opening the economy a bit more and you start to say, if I allow certain parts of the economy that players can trade amongst themselves and we kind of seen bits of this in gray markets, like in World of Warcraft, we trade things, for example CSGO, they trade skins it's like if you now start to say, hey, parts of your game economy. Players can trade them, and then you say those trades are validated by a source of truth, which happens to be a blockchain. Then our theory was you can get a lot more players involved in economic participation, not just people who want to pay, but other people who may want to participate in being being sellers in the economy. And so we thought that was very interesting dynamic to potentially bring into into a games economy.
Speaker 2:And could that? Could that increase the payer race as we recall us? That's very much with the developer lens on. Could that actually introduce new behaviors? I could introduce new friction in the game. Friction is generally good for games. So there's a lot of different. Essentially, it was a lot of different things that the technology presented that we were like, hey, this the data seems like, even with the crappy executions that we're seeing, that like people are engaging in this and if we can build a great game and integrate some of those ownership elements, some of those trading elements, within a just a fun game, then I think we'll be. You know, we'll have something successful, and so that's that's obviously what we've been endeavoring to do?
Speaker 1:That's. That's really interesting. What you said about participation rate, right, like participation rate being kind of very, very low, and then by introducing some of these blockchain elements, you're almost giving a lot of these players, right, let's say, in in in finning Norwich, which is one of the games, you essentially get these followers and you can mint them on to the blockchain, so you're essentially getting new ways of people being able to turn these. You know, basically, in game items, they're earning into NFTs that they can then trade among themselves and creating a secondary economy for that. Are you worried at all about, let's say, on your side, right, like you're selling in game items? Are you worried about that, those secondary sales taking away from primary sales and have you done thinking on how how do you approach that potential risk?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was that. That is the and it's a great way of putting it like the secondary economy, because you want to facilitate that, so it fit. Emerge was a great example of we went fully that you can. Just everything is on chain in terms of power ups for the game. One is a scarce set of NFTs, which, by the way, is like another awesome reason why you build a blockchain. You can really make things scarce in game and that's we can have a whole, like our conversation on how interesting that is. And then we said another items are power ups that can be traded amongst players, and so the whole economy essentially was secondary.
Speaker 2:What we, what we came to like, what we think the right balance is, is that it's not the whole economy can be traded by players, but only certain parts, and then you can gradually open and open. So in our latest game, king of Destiny, we've got five big things consumables that people need to be successful at that game, and one of those is a what we call an off chain to on chain pair. And so there's four other areas that people can purchase direct from the developer or just continue to play and earn those in game rewards and achievements as they progress through the game with tournaments, that kind of stuff. But there is that one element that we won't sell, we don't touch, we don't sell direct. There's ways to source them in game and some players will source more than others, and then that we have to have a platform thing, go and actually trade them to each other. They can all be bundled up as as your C721s and transferred to to other players, and so I think that's the interesting thing.
Speaker 2:I think the utopia of a fully open game economy right now is very, very hard.
Speaker 2:You haven't seen anybody really successfully do it.
Speaker 2:The other thing is the influence of where there's a lot of speculative trading which 99% of game fighting is speculation right now in terms of the asset prices and so on and that can really upset your game economy.
Speaker 2:And so I think having some level of control at the developer level I think is actually pretty crucial to make sure the game is balanced, but you still keep some of those incentives in place for players to trade, and so, even even while we've taken the King of Destiny, it's a feature on the game. There's one feature, a tournament feature, where the Web 3 elements come in, but there's a lot of other parts of the game that will be very typical Web 2. And so I suppose you know where it comes from is looking over the last few years at what's been successful and got traction with gamers and there's not too much to lean on on the Web 3 side and so there's an element of kind of dipping our toe in the water with opening that up. But if that's successful and looks like it's good for gamers, then you can start to open up other parts of your game's economy to them as well.
Speaker 1:And to just give people an overview, what are the three games in the Infinity Gods ecosystem right now?
Speaker 2:We've a more. We've an Infinity Merge, which is a web based merge game. Very addictive, play that with kind of a candy crush, but you're merging items. Very competitive game. That's on web right now. We're planning on doing a mobile version at some stage in 2024, which we think will be will be a lot of fun. Our second game is Immortal Siege. That's very much in beta right now. It's on web. It's a terror defense, a terror defense game. We actually have trading card mechanics in there as well, which we think is was pretty interesting. We've a hardcore group of people testing it, which is cool.
Speaker 2:The idea with that game is we want to go mobile, but we think we can also go Epic and Steam at some stage in the future as well. We'll probably actually likely go Epic and Steam first, before mobile, and then our main title really is our mobile first title, which is King of Destiny. And so King of Destiny is in terms of genre. It's called Luck Battle, which is probably very new for a lot of people.
Speaker 2:There's a game about six years ago launched called Coin Master, and essentially you play a slot machine for coins, use those coins to build a village. You can then attack other friends and steal their coins from their village and vice versa, and, incredibly, it's a top 10 iOS game, and there's been a bunch of other similar games coming out recently, namely Monopoly Go, which you can't really leave the internet without seeing Monopoly Go advertised, and it's the highest grossing game today. It's going to be the highest grossing game, particularly on mobile, in 2023 and possibly across all platforms, and so our game is has some similar mechanics, but people can actually own some of their pieces in the game.
Speaker 1:People can actually trade some of the in-game currencies, and we have a few other things in there that we think are uniquely different, beyond just Web3, to make it a better product, and one of the most interesting things that I think I've heard you guys talk about is how you know, with mobile gaming right now you're having essentially competitions very high Attribution is more difficult than ever with IDFA and you know cookies are also going away, so overall it's kind of getting to be a pretty competitive niche. Now, one of the interesting things I would love your take on is how does LTV play into what blockchain enables? Right? Because I think one of the big pieces behind blockchain gaming is that it can increase LTV with these new kind of mechanics. So I would love to get your take on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's interesting. We even have an LTV calculation going across Web2 and Web3 for a king of destiny, and so there's kind of two ways that it really helps. One, we believe it's going to increase the number of people economically participating in the game. So essentially from our point of view, it's more payers in the game, and so take that number from, say, 2% to, we think, 3, 4, 5, 6% is actually pretty possible with these mechanics. We saw something similar within Finemerge, our first game, which is Web only, which is typically much lower monetization rates. But we're hitting like 10% monetization rate, which was crazy high, and so we think just to be more people monetizing. So that's good. The second is then your calculation is pretty much how much IAP are they purchasing, how many ads are they watching in game? Because we have some in-app advertising as well. That's a revenue contributor. And then you also look at certain items are actually NFTs in the game. They're non-fungible. So there's obviously primary sales. If they're resold, there's a royalty secondary on that as well. And then there's obviously that currency that players can trade amongst themselves, and every time if you are going to sell that, you pay a small selling fee, and so we add those in there. So we think we can not just increase the breadth of payers but also increase the rate of monetization that players have, because there's essentially more things for them to do and participate in.
Speaker 2:Now this is very much coming out of developer lens. I think it's very much looking at how do you actually, if you want to be very competitive in free to play in mobile gaming? It is about, can you get that higher LTV than the competitor? Because you get the higher LTV, then you can actually reinvest that into a better game, into more users via user acquisition, etc. Higher, better developers, etc. Or more developers, and you can just get bigger and better overall.
Speaker 2:And so one of our big, our thesis from our first couple of games going into mobile is that we think we can be very competitive on the LTV front with the top games on the App Store and it's really like if you can get to some sort of feature parity with them on the web two side and then introduce our off-chain to on-chain trading, then we believe that gives us that extra 1 or 2% in an LTV side. If you get that, then you can outbid them on the ad auctions and you can actually win market share against them, and so that's the fascinating side of that's how we view it. I think we're not looking okay. Can we compete with Parallel or some of the web three spaces? It's very much focused on where we see the majority of the consumer time and the consumer spend, which is on mobile, and how do we get a competitive edge in there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is fascinating. That's probably the biggest benefit blockchain can have to existing game developers is that it adds new ways of essentially optimizing the games for higher LTV, higher monetization rates. What she said about monetization rates is huge too, because if you can double that, that's you're pretty much doubling your revenue per user, right, and your ads now can work much better. You can scale them a lot more. So this is very interesting and I know so far you've mainly focused on the community building side, right, so I've had the communities very active. I see a lot of the Volstow members in there. You know where. It definitely is a good vibe in there and the games are really fun. But now it seems like with Kings of Destiny, I believe, you've rolled it out on at least a few countries on the App Store. Are you starting to add in much more of a focus on paid UA and paid acquisition, and what does that stack look like in terms of user acquisition right now? Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 2:I'd say, firstly, it's still early, so we've launched, we're still adding some pretty major features coming in over the next two months to go in and so probably around February or cert season, pretty serious user acquisition. We have been spending primarily using Meta and Google and so we've just been testing different things. You know, trying to get a read on day one retention that's in small numbers for certain markets was pretty. Is looking actually when that's 40% mark pretty good starting place, you know. But but we're we're launched, I think, three weeks, so we're still we're still trying to optimize that.
Speaker 2:We're still getting a lot of feedback on things like various little bugs. Things are responding to little things that are not working. Some things are working well that we didn't think. So what we're really intending to do is is we're broadening out the testing over the next few weeks. So looking at Apple search ads just to really see what's our CPI there, what's the, is there any quality bar that we can look at? And then particularly into the ad networks like Apple loving, like Unity as well, and even some of the ad formats were beginning to bring out like playables.
Speaker 2:So this is very deep down the rabbit hole of like gaming ads. But this is typically actually what drives most gamers into into games. So, getting into the playable space, we started working with the partner to develop some playables so that allows access and inventory there, and so we're really like you know, right now, if I look at like the main metric, where we have a certain level within the game that players unlock a feature and our tournament feature, and so we're really tracking, like our players, how, what's the funnel looking like to get there? Can that be optimized? Are there channel differences? We've seen geo differences already, but we're not surprised by that as well. So, like how our Canadian players have operated versus Philippine players are actually dramatically different. We've actually seen purchasers come in which we're not optimized for at all and that's been very interesting People coming in and playing one level and they just buying some of the intro packs straight away.
Speaker 2:We're seeing some really hardcore people stick around from web to so they'll connect Facebook and they will. They will be attacking and going through the levels all day long and people doing 20, 25 minute session times some days. We also get a lot of people who are like just coming playing a level and churning out and so like we need to do that. So we're like just over 5000 players in in a few weeks. We have the controls to increase that up and down without too much craziness and the costs are actually pretty decent, which is great. We're kind of surprised the you know probably one thing we talked before I was worried about some of the CPI costs and so we haven't got to serious scale, but even when we did push a few campaigns, we were like, oh, like it's actually well within what we thought it would be and in some cases, actually even cheaper. And so you know, the only thing that's been probably like where the user acquisition and the growth side has been obviously Apple and iOS 14. And so it. This is just a fact of life these days. So the targeting is actually really good. When we target on Facebook or Google, we are on Google, uac, google advertising. We actually do see, you know, good iOS quality players come through. But it's there's that data lag of 72 hours. Do you know how good a campaign really is or not? Versus Android, versus any Android campaign? Were able to like, okay, this campaign is crap, just shut it off. This was great Double the budget, more creative. So let's go. We've had a few of those already, which has been exciting. So the only real change is is that delay be able to make decisions on any campaign coming from Apple. But there's other optimizations we're doing there to try and get that data within 24 hours so we can make some decisions. So that's got really deep down the ad rabbit hole. But you know, maybe it's something to kind of to comment on.
Speaker 2:You know, we looked at the alternative if we weren't on mobile. And how do we drive players at scale, particularly in the Web three side, and there really is nothing that you're most successful games Maybe get five figures for a very brief period of time and they really struggled to hold on to it. And the types of players and the motivations don't necessarily lend themselves to a great gaming business. And personally I'd never seen in my 10 years, and still haven't, any browser-based game unless it was connected to a big platform scale in any sort of meaningful way. And so one of the benefits of choosing mobile is very predictable ways to acquire players. So everybody talks about mass adoption in Web 3. And we need to get there and it's like the platform is at your starting point. So if you're on web, only very hard to get scale, very, very hard. Ironically, very hard to get scale without losing your shirt. In terms of spend, where mobile and even some of the stores like Epic and Steam, it's a lot more controllable of how you can acquire and retain players.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I agree with that 100%. There isn't really that large of a Web 3 gaming user base. The games I've seen that have gained momentum are actually appealing to the Web 2 crowd. So one of our portfolio companies, the Bornless they have, I think at this point a 180k Steam wishlist and they've just been focusing on really like girlish style marketing, reaching out to kind of like news outlets, getting their influencers on board, and really not focusing on the Web 3 side at all.
Speaker 1:If a Web 3 desktop game wants to, or like a browser game wants to, really go and acquire users kind of have to focus on the Web 2 side unless they're more of like a game experience. If you're focused on game 5, which is like I mean, that's a great product, right, like people enjoy it, right, there's definitely product market fit there. But if you're trying to build a game that scales to millions of users, I do think that either you're going to have to onboard Web 2 gamers or you're going to have to really figure out an acquisition funnel that ultimately is going to be mobile based, or if it's on PC, then Steam or Epic based right, you can't really do it without that.
Speaker 2:It's exactly that I always struggled when we were first getting to the space of. There were certain projects getting a lot of attention and hype and I kind of understand why now, but in the back of my head I was like how the hell will they acquire players, steven? They just could use all these tokens. You know what's their CPI going to be like and it's very boring. But it's a very boring topic, I think, for things like crypto, twitter, but it's kind of like the majority of gaming is.
Speaker 2:It's kind of what's your LTV versus your cost of acquiring them, and that cost can be free, it can be paid, but it's still a cost you need to go in, and it doesn't matter if you're launching a game on PlayStation, you're working that out, or Android. It's the same equation. You ultimately need to get going, and so I think it's a going back to. It's one of those things that we thought we'd differentiate ourselves on the web tree side. Was that more of a conservative approach? But you could clearly see, here is how you get millions of players and, similar to some of the other companies you mentioned as well, like Bornless, like you're on Steam and you do some of the right marketing, you can get some players and it can grow quite nicely on Steam if you've got a great game. Epic is seems to have a lot of opportunities similar to that as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it almost seems like there's two playbooks.
Speaker 1:There's one which is like sorry, ok, it almost seems like there's two playbooks.
Speaker 1:So there's one which is PC based, which is much more organic hype game trailer, lots of news outlets and it's basically a ton of hype, right, and it's huge marketing budgets and harder to attribute and measure back. And then there's other which is mobile gaming, which is very data driven. It's very much performance marketing what's your LTV, what's your CAC, what's your conversion rates throughout the funnel, and it's more map than anything else in terms of the optimization process and it's like these are two different worlds and so you kind of have to understand which world you're in. And sometimes when you see these studios that are kind of like trying to be in the middle of both, it's a little bit disconcerting. But I think in your guys' case it's like I can see very clearly that mobile first seems to be like a very big focus. And that's also where I'm personally very bullish on InfiniGOTS as a team and as a studio is because I see kind of the approach of really trying to optimize and having a mathematical approach towards things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very not the sexiest, but it's very efficient at growing and I think it's very interesting, like I think at the Web3, some of the Web3 projects, some of the games are very much going for that real big hype and it's like I think I hope you get there. I really hope you're successful. Wow, that is so hard. It's so hard and I think, your competitors, because you're trying to win market sharing a very limited space. So if you think about PC gamers or the tiny browser market or the console market, you've got a very small number of publishers out there EA, blizzard, et cetera and they will come with hundreds of millions and huge marketing teams and they've done this 20 times and they will go and say, ok, like the big four or five games on PlayStation and Xbox this year. This is what they are. And if you're trying to sneak in there or sneak in on the PC side, you really need to have an amazing game and still get picked up, but the hit rate is so much lower. And what I learned of Facebook was the Matt DeHalliman ultimately won in the end. You even saw these like King, and Candy Crush was a great example. It was like nobody gave them a chance. They were a skill-based game for years, a web-based game. They decided to do games on Facebook and they decided to go mobile and they just got their calculations right simple game and they got their LTV versus CPI, understood their markets, their audiences. And then you've got the Activision's who couldn't do that saying, ok, now I'll buy you. And so it's very interesting and I suppose it's good to see more web-threat companies.
Speaker 2:I wish there was more out there or we talked about them, because I think you still see all the major projects that have NFTs and you see a lot of foot online. Like people say oh, there's a thread today on an ex aka Twitter. Blockchain gaming is dead. I'm like, well, have you heard of NFL rivals? I mean, look what Mythical are doing Complete 180 on their strategy of being all hype into. Ok, we'll buy the right NFL, but we'll use performance marketing and we'll do good viral mechanics and we'll build a great execution of blockchain and very successful game. They're not talked about there. Upland has been a web-threat success story since 2020, as far as I'm concerned, on mobile, on web. So I think that's the distortion. You see is the hype takes up a lot of the oxygen in the space, but you have these other math-based companies doing pretty, pretty well and building great businesses.
Speaker 1:What do you feel like is one piece of infrastructure that is currently missing in the web-threat gaming space and, if you could like, will into existence, or just tell the founders out there hey, go build this thing, go raise around and go build this out. That's probably the same point I was going to say.
Speaker 2:I was going to be. You know, I was going to say almost. It's not really infrastructure, but regulation is needed. It's a tough one, but just with some of the token things, I see I'm like there probably needs to be some oversight or something there Let everybody know who's market making these tokens, et cetera, and when they're dropping off.
Speaker 2:But no, the more obvious one, I would say, is the less controversial, sexy one, I think, is Ad Network for Web 3. And so, because what's interesting we have, you know, currently we have like six, seven hundred thousand wallets playing Web three games every day, you know, and so that's maybe two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand real people. So the game fly audience is actually quite small. But the, the audience who actually holds Bitcoin or aetherium or who have touched something, who hold an, a digital asset, a crypto, crypto asset, is actually way larger. So I think I mean they've asked, I've seen interesting estimates that there's, you know. You know close to 50 million people have cryptocurrency some form in the US. They that might be high, but even if it's 20 or 30 million, that's, that's pretty high, but there's, there's a lot more out there when it comes to some of the bigger pieces, and so I think you know some way to connect those folks. What else do they do Outside of just cryptocurrency? What are their interests?
Speaker 2:And some sort of a targeted ad network will be pretty big because, if you think about, while we're targeting gamers, it helps us. When they're a gamer and and they actually understand web 3 or they have some, they have some understanding because we don't have to take them through a huge learning path To understand how trade or what they're buying actually happens to be an unfungible token. Therefore, you know, you may want to, you may want to put it into a secure wallet at some stage. So actually that's a lot of our community is those types of folks. They're really big gamers but they understand the technology, and so I think getting more of a web 3 ad network is something that's that's.
Speaker 2:That's that's missing. It's very hard to do without owning a lot of content, and so I really think there's a company I love and that not that many people may have heard of is app lovin, and they really, you know they went into the ad network space in gaming where it was basically Facebook and Google split up the whole thing and they said I'm gonna go to other games and I'm gonna try and get inventory from them and they're gonna repackage and sell that inventory to other gaming companies and they created this amazing flywheel business. I think somebody needs to. I think that's a huge opportunity in the web 3 space right now. So we to buy some of that traffic where we know what three you know consumers are and Start to repackage it with better targeting for other web 3 companies to to use.
Speaker 1:So there, is a couple of different ad network startups that I've talked to Slice, hype lab but I don't think any of them are really focused on the gaming side. So that's a good, good idea for sure, if you guys are listening and Okay, that that makes a ton of sense. And with Apple, and did they start out buying Inventory or did they start out as a DSP? Because I know they have like kind of like this overall they have a lot of inventory, but they also are act as a DSP on top of other inventory.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they started off as a DSP. Yeah, they, they. They had no games at the time, so they had analytics product and so it's a hey, we'll give you free analytics, but give us a look at some of your inventory. So we know you've got an ad stack and so they. You know a story.
Speaker 2:What they would be very clever is they pick a subgenre and so they they want one that I ran it into. This is so genre called social casino, which is like it's. It's it's free to play slots that you can't win any money. But people spend seven billion a year in social casino games but they can never win. But they picked that category and they targeted tier two Developers, so they weren't really like the biggest developers they weren't monetizing as well to said, hey, I Want to show ads to your best users, I'll give you 80, 90 dollar CPMs, and they're like sure, and then they're able to take those players and then sell that inventory to other soap, to the top tier social casino players, and they'll pay a lot more than that to actually reach and acquire those players. And so they started actually that that way, just just kind of knocking off genre by genre.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, if they're on analytics product. They're building up, okay, understanding who these customers were. They're understanding a bit more than so. They were able to then start to become, you know, become a better DSP, and then they acquired machine zone and a few other companies, so then they're able to supply their own impressions as well.
Speaker 2:But yeah, they started there and just work their way up where you know and they say come back to the ad network space. No matter what technology it is, it's really who owns the, the underlying content. And so you know, for them to go in where again, really, facebook and Google, almost of the internet, not only their sites, but obviously they had, they had their pixels, their SDKs, pretty much everywhere to go in and to like, squeeze in and do. That was super impressive. And I think, I think in the web 3 space you know, you're not there's no major dominant content players in there yes, apart from Twitter, you could argue, but they've got no real. They've got a real interest, but there is probably ways to understand and break up those users and to understand where they're at and and and to create that, create that flywheel.
Speaker 1:It's. It's fascinating how ad tech is. It's just starting to take off in web 3 and and it's very basic at this point- you know it's not that many users, there's not that much data.
Speaker 1:The publishers are Still like kind of cagey about letting people essentially run ads on their Inventory right, so it's still kind of in the early stages. But I do agree there's a huge opportunity there where it's kind of this, all this new inventory that Google and Facebook, they're not really taking part in this ecosystem yet. So there's like this window of opportunity to just come in and take up all the inventory and just, you know, build something interesting and then, yeah, that's, that's all I'll I'll say on that. But yeah, I guess do do wrap up the conversation. You know, and this has been an incredibly enlightening conversation, I think definitely your your experience with kind of user acquisition and gaming growth it's, it's pretty mind-blowing. And To just wrap up, where would people go to learn more about infini gods? Get involved. Where should they go? Yeah, wherever they're comfortable.
Speaker 2:I mean, we're on website is infini. Gods calm, run Twitter as well and finish odds there, and obviously we've a Discord at. This was probably the best if you, if you like, using that platform. A lot of our team are in there, as you said, a lot of the Wolf game crew and some of the wolves that crew pixel ball. We have a lot of folks from those communities In and around and they're just Honestly also I mean they're highly intelligent, I understand what they're doing Really nice community members, so they're great if people just want to ask around there. Plus, we were on our own Community folks as well. I would say, if you have, if you're in the US, canada.
Speaker 1:Australia, here the.
Speaker 2:Philippines Download King of Destiny and check out that game. I think what we want to be known for I was in with this yesterday less and less do we want to be known for it, since, in a god's like here, what's that game that we're playing? You know, I think it's getting out of this height, this pre launch hype phase, into like just be known for the game, how fun it is. So if people want to, they can go and check out and play at King of Destiny Awesome. Yeah, thanks for jumping on. Cool Thanks, that's great. Great to be out.