With the advent of web3 technology, end-users are now more able to have complete control over their own data, overcoming the monopoly by tech giants. What does this mean for the gaming industry and its future? Today, we have Michael Rubinelli of Tyranno Studios and Jean-Charles Gaudechon of OneFootball Labs to help look at what's going on underneath the surface of web3 gaming - what's being built, why they’re being built, and what they are doing at their gaming studios that is disrupting the gaming paradigms.
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Michael Rubinelli Of Tyranno Studios, The Premier Web3 Gaming Studio Building Blockchain Brawlers, Plus Jean-Charles (JC) Gaudechon Of OneFootball Labs, And More...
Stay tuned for this episode and find out how Tyranno is creating incredible blockchain-based gaming experiences that involve some of the most prestigious creators in gaming history, how our guest only fears maybe fear itself, and how OneFootball, as in soccer, is putting fans in the front seat with the blockchain foundation sitting quietly behind the scenes. All this and more on this episode.
Don't forget that we put a gathering together at NFTLA and brought out thousands of the world's most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head over to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, better, and bolder but also just as an intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. We will see you there.
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This episode features Michael Rubinelli, Chief Gaming Officer at Tyranno, a rapidly growing studio that specializes in building best-in-class games, utility-based vIRL NFTs, and multi-chain Web3 products. Michael Rubinelli is a technology and gaming leader with fifteen-plus years of progressive experience in executive leadership, product development, and continued revenue growth and is renowned for his success at top corporations, including Disney, THQ, and Electronic Arts.
Michael has now turned his attention to blockchain games and spends most of his time expanding the Gaming Division of Tyranno Studios. Tyranno is a premier Web3 studio of uncompromising vision and unrivaled experience focused on disrupting the old paradigms of the gaming industry. With a proven track record of delivering wildly successful multi-chain games, tools, services, and digital assets to the mass market, the Tyranno team consists of Web3 pioneers and video game industry veterans responsible for billions of dollars in gross revenue. Michael, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.
I'm not sure what else I would say after that. We're done.
Mic drop.
That's quite an introduction. I feel like you've gone over my whole career, my current steady state, and then my future. It makes my job here very easy.
We had to do something special for you because I don't know how we got into the 170s in terms of episodes without featuring WAX, and now Tyranno is doing the space. This episode is long overdue, especially since we know William Quigley. He's a busy guy and you're a busy guy. I'm excited to dive into what you've been doing. I'm back in the states after a little tour of Asia. It's all about gaming. This is an area of it we want to continue to peel back and look at what's going on underneath the surface, what's being built, why is it being built, and what you're doing at Tyranno's core to that conversation. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me. Here are a couple of points on what you said. First of all, when people learn about the WAX blockchain, and then what was WAX Studio is now Tyranno, people go, "I had no idea. Shame on me for not knowing more." That's our fault. We don't do a great job of PRing. We don't thump our chests and say, "Look at all this money we raised. Look at all these things we do. Cover me," but once you hear the numbers and understand what the user experience is like, you're like, "This is the best thing going." That's one.
Two, from a gaming standpoint, gaming has driven the massive adoption of so many popular trends besides technology and user experience. It's all about gaming or the gamification of something. People love entertainment. That's what games often provide sometimes begrudgingly. When we were at Playdom Corporation, which got bought by Walt Disney, we were driving so much revenue for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg hated gaming but saw this as an opportunity to come in, scrape the currencies that we were collecting, which were fiat at that time, and said, "I can make real money here."
There were so many players playing games like FarmVille, Gardens of Time, and Marvel Avengers Alliance, that became a meaningful piece of business for them for a long period. That led to the advent of free-to-play gaming on mobile devices. You look at all the revenue that comes to Apple. People are like, "It's phone sales." It's actual transactional scrapes or ad dollars tied to gaming initiatives. Gaming drives so many pieces of business for so many different platforms, technologies, and companies. There's a reason why that is. It's not some fad that's going to go away. I'm happy to talk about that.
While I was in Singapore, I met the gentleman that was doing the endgame payment processing for Friendster. It got so prolific and successful that he bought Friendster from Friendster and then sold it to Facebook. That's how Facebook acquired this gaming technology. I met the guy that pulled that off in Asia. I couldn't agree with you more because I hear it straight from the source.
It's incredible. If you look at the size and the growth of the users of the core gamer audience over the years, there are 7.5 or 8 billion people on the planet. In the last figure I saw, there are 3.1 or 3.2 billion gamers. We're encroaching on 40% of the world playing games at some point during their week. That's incredible penetration, "I have five minutes. What can I do? I can level up or beat this boss."
Games bring this little respite to your life that is so welcoming, well-done, and thoughtful. The term gamer used to be looked down upon, "You're a nerd." Now, it's a bit of a badge of pride, "I'm a gamer. I'm proud to be a gamer. I always have been." I'm happy to give back to other gamers in the world and bring my thoughts. Hopefully, they like what we do and see value in it.
Let's dive in there. Tyranno's core conviction here is that players should have full control over the items they purchase in games. For a lot of folks, this is a contrarian perspective. This is regardless of the platform. In a sense, we're talking about interoperability. How did this concept in this venture come to be?
Let's talk about the concept first. The only people who are against it are the publishers and the game developers of the Web2 and console days space because they have this fear of the unknown. They don't know how to embrace this new business model. The scary thing for them is that when you transition from one platform to another or from one business model to the next, those are extinction events for companies. It's a very scary notion.
We were talking about EA a little bit. People at EA get paid well. They live a very comfortable life. If you've ever been to the EA campus on Redwood Shores, it's incredible. It's like going to Disneyland. You're saying to somebody, "I want you to embrace something that may cause you to not perform well. Therefore, you may lose this." They're like, "Slow down a minute. I'm going to keep doing my job and be 5% better over the year. That's enough to stay employed."
There's this whole notion that fear of loss is a great motivator for these people. That's how they think because they're not in the business of taking risks. You need to be in the business of creating the possibilities of greatness. At the core of creating greatness is a risk. You have to embrace that risk. These guys don't want to do that. If you start with the notion that publishers don't know how to build an economic model that gets them more money at the end of the day, they will never do it.
This is the same thing we saw play out in free-to-play mobile gaming. All those companies were all laggers. The innovators in free-to-play mobile were Zynga, Supercell, Scopely, and all these companies like Rovio. Angry Birds wasn't EA-built and designed. It was Rovio. Chillingo was their publisher. EA did the distribution of that because they didn't know how to do that. They didn't know that it would work. They take these defensive positions. They go in until something becomes established.
There are a whole lot of stories I could go into that prove that point. That's the reality. Like in free-to-play when none of the established companies were early adopters, the ones who won were native in the space. Web3 is going to see the same thing. The winners in Web3 are going to be companies that are native to Web3 like Tyranno. We think we're going to win because we are in the business of taking risks. We have the courage of our convictions that we know that we're doing the right things.
When you say, "How do we know this is the way forward?" Ironically, I'll wind the clock back to 1996. That's when we saw digital marketplaces existing. Players went to buy and sell assets from each other. Not to date me, but if you look up ltima Online, there was a house that sold on Ultima Online for $3,000 on eBay. They were completely like, "What?"
It was such an I-can't believe-this-is-happening moment. I had an account. I built this thing and sold it to somebody else who wanted that. They didn't want to spend the time and the currencies. They just wanted what I had. I sold it to them via eBay. The marketplace is tied to the gaming experience. Fast-forward six months later, you look at Diablo 1. It was all RNG. There were 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes. It was worth a ton of money.
To buy that though, you went to eBay and put a bid on something with Stones of Jordan, which is their in-game currency, which was this Plus 1 to All Stats ring. If you had enough of those, you could buy the stats so you would meet them in Diablo. Somewhere in the Diablo world, you would make this exchange. Players have been buying and selling from each other since the mid-'90s.
You look at endgame gold farming in RPGs. It's the same thing. Somebody spent their time going out, mining all this gold or a fungible token back then, and then selling it to somebody else. Why did that happen? It's because to get three million gold in World of Warcraft took eight hours. How much of your time is eight hours worth? The amount I make per hour is worth more than the $9.95 somebody wanted to charge me. I'll pay $10 and get eight hours of my life back. I don't have to focus on the grind. I just focus on playing the game and having fun running, raiding, and all that stuff that people like to do.
It is one of the reasons that currency works in general or even fiat. The idea is, "Why do I work hard at XYZ? It's so in some other place, I can enjoy myself or make my life more efficient or not have to do something I don't like to do." It follows naturally. You talked a lot about being ahead of the curve and different people being resistant to change.
You closely work with WAX blockchain. We see a lot of that being ahead of the curve and predicting things way ahead of what people first saw. Give us some details on the WAX blockchain. What is it? A lot of people know about Ethereum and think of that as a very high-profile chain that's a currency and so forth but WAX has been doing so much for so long and is so established. Tell us more about it.
Ethereum is very well-established and well-known. Vitalik is great and the whole notion of, "I wanted to build a blockchain because they changed a spell in World of Warcraft that nerfed my rogue." For us gamers, he sits at the right hand of the Father. He's great. That's why his profile is so high. He's a wonderful and super smart guy. WAX has been around for quite a while. When they first started building the WAX blockchain, the idea was, "Let's build this blockchain where players can buy and sell NFTs to one another in volume with expeditious times to finality."
As a gamer, I bought something because I lost. I want to win. I buy it, blow the guy's head off, and go on to the next boss. That's the gamer mentality. You have to have something immediate. You've got to be able to do it at scale. It has to be low-cost, super convenient, and high-usability. When William Quigley, the Founder of WAX, started building on the Ethereum blockchain. For about two months, they started doing all this tech skunkworks R&D and said, "This blockchain can't support gaming-style NFTs. It doesn't have the transactional velocity, the time to finality, and any of the things that we know that users want. Let's build WAX on a standard that can serve the gamer."
It was built with games in mind. First and foremost, bar none. WAX has a standard and built the WAX protocol. What you see with WAX is we can do a little over 8,000 transactions a second. The time to finality is less than three minutes. You compare that with the Ethereum Merge 30-minute time to finality. If you get something on WAX, the most you will wait is three minutes. With Ethereum and what they have gone through, it's ten times that long.
We've got a nice tech change coming. That will be about four seconds. By the 15th of January, 2023, we're switching up one of our limiters in that regard. That will be even more responsive, which is great. There are never any charges in terms of gas fees. In terms of transacting, there's a tiny resource cost that the buyer pays. It doesn't cost something to sell necessarily. It's a great system. This sounds all well and good. I throw a lot of numbers, 10,000 or 8,000 transactions a second. A lot of people do that.
You can go to DappRadar, which is a third-party site that matches your transactional volume across all the blockchains. If you look at any given day, it doesn't matter, you will see that on that specific day, the WAX blockchain has done over 50% of every single transaction across every single blockchain forever. It's a third-party site. It's not something that we control. That surprised a lot of people. Some people say, "We can do 60,000 transactions a second." They count the service of a handshake as a transaction.
We're talking about distributed ledger updates to the memory footprint. Depending on what's hot in the market, we do between 18 and 30 million transactions a day. That is between 50% to 54%. Every single transaction on the blockchain is done on the WAX blockchain. It is incredible. That's not us evangelizing. That's us stating what third-party sites have shown. You can take any third-party site as long as they pay for the data to be collected. You will see that we're at the top in that regard.
That's impressive. We're friends with the Bad Crypto Podcast guys. I know that they have been impressed with WAX from day one for some of the reasons that you've shared. One of your latest network activations is Blockchain Brawlers, which sounds like a fun play-to-earn Web3 game with an interesting cast of characters. Can you tell us a little bit more about that game and some of the utility that you've baked into it?
Blockchain Brawlers is interesting. It's the first title that WAX Studios put out. We put it out on the last day of March. It came out. It was a click-mining game like all Web3 games at that point. The problem was we relate to the click-mining party. We knew that we wanted players to accumulate a currency but we knew that we wanted to build a real game. Everything that we do at WAX when you look at our roadmap and how we speak about things, there's always learning at the core, "What do you want to learn? What is your expected outcome?" Everything we do tries to inform the next thing that we do. Blockchain Brawls was a litmus test. We knew people had nostalgic feelings for the '80s to '90s-style wrestlers. Everybody loves Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, The Rock, The Big Show, and all those.
Speaking of wrestling, we had Chris Jericho. He's a huge NFT fan and also a wrestling fan. If you're going to be in the business of bodyslamming people, you've got to be a huge fan. He was on the show. You will have to check that one out.
I was a THQ when we made all the WCW and WWE games. When he made the transition from the NWA to the WWF at that time, that was a huge story. We put Y2J in as he was called. We're fans of his. Wrestling has always been in my blood as a child, as a professional game maker, and now as a Web3 content creator. It lends itself so well because of the personalities. I started doing press for Blockchain Brawls in January 2022. I said, "Day one is going to be the worst experience anybody has in this game because it's very modest."
I built AAA titles my entire life. I knew what we were going to have on day one. I said, "You have to be patient with us because every day is going to be better than the previous." We have delivered on that promise. We went through the mining phase when we had a limited number of tokens. We said, "You've got to buy these and hold them because there's going to be a ton of utility but this is the endgame currency. There's going to be no more after this mining phase."
We have gone from wildly inflationary to wildly deflationary. That tokenomics is like, "You will get 80%. We will keep 20% not to pay the team but to do UA. That's all you're going to get. Here are all the ways that those tokens are going to work in the future in-game. You can use this to craft, sell, upgrade, and compete. You can use it as an entry fee. There are all these ways to use this fungible token."
We said, "Trust us. This is the key point. At the end of the day, we're building an incredible PvP experience that's going to be revolutionary and unique. It's going to be exclusive to us. It's going to be so unbelievably fun. You're going to want to be a part of it." I was saying this to a crowd that was in the middle of about eighteen straight rug pulls from different games, companies, and projects. I'm like, "You've got to trust me." They're like, "We don't know you," but I'm like, "This is me. This is my LinkedIn profile. I'm legit." They're like, "Keep going." I doxxed myself. There's transparency and consistency.
We brought in Richard Garfield who is the designer and the creator of Magic: The Gathering. Richard said, "I've got this card game I've been building for a year. It doesn't have a home. I built it because I'm Richard Garfield. I have engineers and prototypes at my disposal. I love the idea of this. If you think this will work for Blockchain Brawls, you can set up the arrangement. You can have it." It was this weird moment. Richard Garfield who is one of my heroes says to me, "I have this thing that I've been building for a year that nobody knows about that you could have."
Were you talking at the local coffee shop? How did that come to be?
There was a tremendous amount of trepidation, "I don't know about NFTs because of what I've heard. I don't know about Web3 because I've been taught these are predatory practices, scams, and rug pulls. It's environmentally unfriendly." It took a couple of meetings to get him over the hump of what we were all about and to build that trust but once he got it, he's like, "I'm in. How can I help?" I said, "Let's build a game together." He says to me, "What kind of game do you want me to build for you?" I'm like, "You're Richard Garfield."
"Let's roll the dice and see what the probabilities say. We will let it make our choice."
That explains some of these staggering numbers. I need to verify if this is still accurate. Over 341 million in trade volume and an average player earning $14,020 per day or about 3,500 of the games need a Brawler Token. Is that where we're at?
We're better off than that. Here's the trading volume from a token standpoint. We're well over 600 million in token trading volume. The token is very liquid. We trade on every single exchange minus Binance. We're on OKX, KuCoin, Gate, Huobi, and MEXC. I'm sure I'm leaving a bunch out. We're available on every centralized exchange. We're on Alcor as well.
The token trading volume is high. The players who got in early during that mining phase did very well. We said, "Take these assets and transition into what is in esports." Blockchain Brawlers is a platform with many different ways to play and earn currencies. Pick your poison. Do you want to be a crafter and a producer? Do you want to be a PvP player? Do you want to be an aggregator of NFTs?
It's however you want to engage with our site because I look at Blockchain Brawlers as an interactive platform, not so much as a singular game where you could do one thing. You could do a ton of things. That has been part of the appeal. Our current audience is a bunch of investors and gamblers. Let's be clear. Speculators are investors and gamblers. We know that. We have things for them to do that they enjoy.
Here's where we're going with this experience that Richard has helped us build that we're now going live with. It was available to be played for free. It's still in trial mode but you can come in, play, and see what it's all about. That's for the core gamers. That's for the three billion gamers in the world. We say, "Come in and try what we have. This is a better use of your time than other games you're currently playing on your mobile device, your console, or what have you. This is incredibly addictive. It's a fun, thoughtful, deep, and strategic but simple experience." When you have that in your back pocket, you've got something objectively great. Everything else falls into line with that.
Can you tell us about free-to-play? Is that for everyone? How does it exactly work?
For now, it's free to play because we're still in very much a test mode but how it will work for the Web3 players of the world is that you have your wallet. You've mined all these currencies and collected or crafted all these NFTs. In the game itself, you think of Richard Garfield, "It's Magic: The Gathering but with wrestling." It's not. He said a curious comment that I had no appreciation for. He said, "I could build a trading card game for you but if you have three different meta or deck constructs, that's a 12 to 15-month balancing exercise for a 30-card deck."
I said, "I don't have 12 to 15 months. I have six months." He goes, "I don't have time to design the game and then balance it." I never had an appreciation for how long and how hard it was to balance the trading card game well and the balance piece to get all those knobs turned correctly because there are so many different variables that are competing with one another in terms of strengths, nerfs, weaknesses, and OP things.
Many cool people have made games. It's always somebody that you know. They're talented at something else but they have also created a game. It's a fascinating world.
He has a PhD in Mathematics. I will share this with you. When I first read the game design, I was like, "I don't get it. It feels like it's war. Are my cards higher than your cards?" We showed them to each other. You think, "This is so simple. I must be missing something." I was a little bit deflated because I was a big Magic player and had such high hopes. You're 2 to 3 games, and you're like, "This is diabolically evil in terms of its design, balance, and player choice." It hits you like an anvil in a Warner Bros cartoon. You're like, "I get it."
It begs the question of where all this is going from an interoperability perspective. There's a lot of conversation about interoperable metaverses. Part of that means somehow being able to move your objects from one metaverse to another. Gaming, as we have talked about, is the core of all these in-game or digital assets. From a logical perspective, that also means we need interoperability in the world of gaming but not everyone feels that way. You could make an argument. WAX is so successful without interoperability. Why is interoperability part of your vision? I would like to understand that a little bit more.
We should talk about interoperability. I'll agree with you. I don't think people want interoperability. It's not the cure-all or the panacea that people think it is. If it's something fashion-based in a metaverse, I get it but from a gaming standpoint, you get an asset. Let's say that it's the Sword of a Thousand Truths or the mythical item that South Park joked about in that one episode about how the kids played the whole time, got fat, and had health problems. They're searching for the Sword of a Thousand Truths.
Imagine that drop for you. That is designed, tuned, and built for that experience tied to those mobs or those instances in raids in a very narrow way. If you take that into a different game with a different developer or even a similar developer, it's not going to perform the same. It's hard to describe a value to something that moment to moment, scenario to scenario, and paradigm to paradigm is different.
I understand fashion where it's all one way and superficial. Where we see interoperability or how we like to talk about it and think about it is we have a saying called, "Utility on WAX but liquidity anywhere else." We know that people want to own their assets. If they come to us from Ethereum, an EVM, any L2, any side chain, or anything, they're very used to and comfortable transacting on their chain.
You should be able to sell on OpenSea, Rarible, Magic Eden, or anywhere else that you're used to vending the things that you have control over. I can buy a car and trade it at any dealer. It's like, "You only can trade it at a Chevy dealer." I'm like, "I want to trade it at any dealer." You bought it. You have free will. You should be able to sell it wherever you want to sell it.
That's what we're all about. We have built bridges to Ethereum and Binance. We're going to build bridges to every single protocol in the world. People can come to WAX and have a great experience because if you buy something, you get it immediately. It has a utility that matters. It's an enjoyable experience. There are incredible communities.
When you're done or when you want to get value for it, go ahead. It's two clicks to convert it to an Ethereum standard, sell it on OpenSea, and go on about your business. You have that path to fiat that we have done for you in a highly Web2 way because we have a very Web2 mentality in terms of the user interface, onboarding, and offboarding because we know that convenience and intuitive interfaces are going to drive mass adoption. Without them, we're just talking to ourselves.
We speak in a bit of a dialect that most people go, "What are you saying? I want to play a game. I want to want to buy something I want to use." It's like, "You have to set up the wall and understand what the block emissions are. What is your protocol of choice? Are you importing? Are you exporting?" They're like, "I just want to play." That's where we're getting to. That's how we see interoperability.
It's a beautiful strategy. It's so interesting to see how these things work themselves out and what happens. It's a different world than Google, Facebook, and Apple but you see these things happening naturally where they were non-intuitive at first. Google is advertising on Facebook. Facebook is advertising on Google. Apple has the thing that has to be compatible with Windows. People want these things to happen. The businesses are not going to survive that remain too siloed but this is also a different world. When you think about the rebranding topic here, does any of this go into the rebranding? What is the impetus for the rebranding?
A little tiny bit. The interesting thing that we found is that when we met with people. We have strategic conversations all the time with Solana, Polygon, Fractal, Magic Eden, and anybody in the business of Web3 transactions, whether you're a marketplace, a protocol, a Layer 2, a side chain, a centralized exchange, or whatever you are. People were always under the impression because we were WAX Studios that we were bound to exclusively build things only for the WAX blockchain.
"You can't come to Polygon because you build exclusively for the WAX blockchain." Why do you think that? "You're WAX Studios. Aren't you owned by the WAX blockchain?" The WAX blockchain is the internet. It's a ledger. They don't own us. Our founders are the same. The names are the same. We ran into time and time again real confusion about what are we all about.
Once we changed and rebranded, we don't have to get ahead of that argument or that narrative anymore. People are like, "I see your games. I see you've got a wallet. I see you've got a marketplace. Let's have a regular strategic conversation," as opposed to, "I thought you were this." There are no more misgivings around what we're all about.
That makes a lot of sense. That's a cool dinosaur logo and artwork. You've got a lot to work with there.
Do you see the teeth spell out Tyranno?
That is so funny. I see it now that you tell me but I had this stupid joke question, which I didn't ask, but it probably would have fit now. I was going to say, "Is there something significant to the number of teeth?" That was a joke. I see it now. You see it when you know it, and then you can't unsee it. That's cool.
It's funny. We did that huge logo with FedEx. In the E and the X, there's an arrow in there. Amazon shows A to Z. My favorite of all is the Tostitos logo. The two Ts in the middle are people. They're holding chips and dipping them into a bowl. Once you see it, you never unsee it. Logo design and intention were very much at the core of the creation of the Tyranno logo.
I love how those things fall into the radar too though. I had some friends. I remember they were in their late twenties at the time. They said, "Frigid air. Frigidaire. I get it now."
I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into this concept of the future of play-to-earn looking more like play-to-own. We have all seen the challenges with play-to-earn. We will dive into that a little bit more but for now, let's talk about play-to-own. What does that look like? Why is that the future?
Play-to-earn is dead. Anybody involved in a play-to-earn project is going to end up losing everything they put into it at some point. You should divorce yourself from the notion of ever getting anything to come from that because it is built on an unsustainable model. It is predicated on the developer, the publisher, or whoever is able to continue to feed people into their funnel. People need to be able to come in at the entry point. They need to have an appreciation of their assets or token. Those things aren't happening. They haven't been happening for 6 to 8 months and maybe even longer. As soon as you come to grips with how you're on a road to nowhere then, it's okay.
How do you feel, Michael?
It's disappointing as a gamer to have been involved. One of the first things you do when you get into the Web3 space for the first time is, "I'm going to play ten play-to-earn games, get religion around all this, and see how they do and what they do." It was super interesting and terrifying but also, I'm like, "This will be easy because none of these guys know what they're doing. All these projects are terrible. None of them are built by real game developers. This will be simple." It was but it creates a lot of scar tissue for the existing player base, which I have high levels of empathy for. I've lost a bunch of money on these projects. I'm not bitter. I cost up to the cost of doing business. It's all part of my education, so I'm okay with it but I feel bad for the millions of people who got duped. It's too bad.
It's a shame. We're getting back to the basics. One more quick sidebar from Seoul, Korea is that I happened to sit at the table with this very humble gentleman that co-founded the biggest gaming guild in Korea. You immediately think, "That's feeding the monster that died," but this is a guild based on community. They genuinely love gaming. He's a photographer.
They have no labor travesties. They're hanging out and supporting games that they enjoy playing for the right reasons. It's a new guild concept being built around this new play-and-own economy. They own a lot of lands. They love that. If you want to meet this guy, his English is not that strong but he gave it a good shot for the show and practiced. I'm so proud of him. He's a great guy.
I would love to meet him. I do think that there's very much a future for guilds to play in the world of play-to-own and Web3 gaming. I believe that with every fiber of my being. There's no doubt in my mind that those things can peacefully coexist and benefit one another. I can see a world where if you've set up a guild, a guild has a CFO. They're monitoring all of their assets and how are their assets performing, allocating people to do things in different worlds, and creating this whole treasury of items because you never know which games are going to catch fire and what things are going to have value and so on.
I would love to meet this person. I do think there's a future for guilds in the space. If I think that P2E is dead, and I do, and that's a road to nowhere, and I also believe that with every fiber of my being, then why do this? What's the point? The reality of the situation is that there are over 3 billion gamers in the world. We know this. Every study shows it. The amount of money they spent on gaming in 2020, 2021, and 2022 is growing, encroaching, and coming close to $200 billion. In 2021, it was $175 billion or something like that. It's not an insignificant amount of money.
None of those players had anything to show for it, not a single thing other than memories. They couldn't take, "I got this so I took it out of the game and sold it." Your account got blacklisted. You got banned. The developers and publishers of the world aren't set up to run this way but as players, we invest a lot of time, energy, and more importantly, money in games that we love. It's this walled garden that you can't break out of. It's very intentional.
It's Las Vegas. They want to keep you in the casino. It's a car dealer. They want to keep you on the lot because they know as soon as you leave, you're not going to buy that car. There are all these things that they do to keep you trapped inside of this world. It's not predatory but it's how they know to operate the best. It's exactly how business works. What you get is this false paradigm, "I can't quit now. I've got too much money in."
It's very much this poker mentality, "I'm pot committed. I might as well keep going." Web3 allows people to not feel as guilty about spending money on a game because they have an out. It's your asset. You can give it away, trade it, sell it, buy it, speculate on it, and upgrade it. You can do all these things because like in the real world when you buy a physical item, you can do those things too. That model has been proven since the dawn of time.
Let's put three things you mentioned together, car dealerships, NFTs, and physical items. Let's talk about Hot Wheels. You partnered with Mattel to release the NFT Hot Wheels collection and have the collectibles be physically redeemable. We're going to wrap up this segment soon. That's exciting but what's unique about the excitement that people might not realize? It's a big brand. They're established. It's already collectible. What's uniquely interesting for Michael Rubinelli about this? What are you seeing?
That's a collection. It's not a game. I will speak from a consumer perspective. What's interesting to me is it's like any Loot Crate that you would buy. You don't know what's in it. There's this whole moment, "I bought this. I hope I got the legendary and the mythic version of whatever that was." First of all, the NFTs are gorgeous. They're some of the best-produced NFTs I've ever seen. If you're into digital collectibles that are mementos or nostalgic works of art, these things are so unbelievably well-produced.
I have to tip my hat because I'm all about producing incredible assets for my games. What they did on the Hot Wheels side is AAA. It's so unbelievably good. The high fidelity is spectacular. The nice thing is that some of the collection if you get it, can be redeemed for a physical Hot Wheel which is a highly collectible thing put out in very few numbers. We think in our current audience, there are speculators and gamblers. If you look at the value of the Hot Wheels NFTs on eBay that comes from our drops, they're going for hundreds of dollars for a couple of dollars purchase. It's the same with the Funko collection and any collection that we do.
Mattel does it because, first of all, they're trying to learn about NFTs and consumer affinity but it's also nice to see that you've got this provenance or color of the title on every single thing that you've bought and sold. It has real value. Think about applying that to concert tickets, baseball games, or things that are keepsakes for you. Maybe someday, you're like, "I was at the game that so-and-so did the such-and-such. Here's proof of that. I have this digital collectible."
It has provenance but does it have the Carfax record on those particular Hot Wheels?
Give it some time.
That's funny if you did a Carfax NFT.
We loved having Mattel at NFTLA. Thank you for facilitating that.
They're great. They're very forward-thinking. I'll tell you a great story. You will love this. Hasbro and Mattel both came into the WAX world at the same time. We told Hasbro, "You need to communicate to your customers this way about NFTs and their environmental impact." They're like, "We're Hasbro. Don't tell us how to PR anything." I'm not shaming Hasbro but they took this condescending attitude toward us. We had Mattel a week later. We said, "You have to communicate a blockchain and echo friendliness to your audience." They said, "Give us the beats." We gave them the beats.
Their community was like, "Thank you, Mattel, for being so forward-thinking about the one thing that concerns us the most about NFTs. We're honest to God concerned about the future of the environment tied to NFT creation," whereas the Hasbro audience was like, "How dare you, Hasbro? What a terrible thing to do." It was in the same time frame with two different companies taking opposite approaches. The Mattel one was so unbelievably well-received. It built affinity and equity with their audience, whereas the Hasbro audience was effectively like, "Forget it. We don't want any part of this. How dare you?"
Michael, this is so fun. I wish we had the Joe Rogan style where we can talk for three hours. We've got some additional segments. Here's one last question for you. Briefly, is there anything that you want to touch on your roadmap that you're pumped about that we should at least share with our readers before we move?
Blockchain Brawlers is going to go live as a game where you can wage your currency. Blockchain Brawlers is very much like Texas hold'em or the game, GUTS. It's not like Magic: The Gathering. It's very much a card game head-to-head like heads-up poker. That's going to go live at the end of October or early November 2022. We are going to take that core experience and make it an eSport. It's already an eSport. The best player wins. It's not who spends the most wins. We want to take that and scale it globally. We want it to be on TV. We want it to be highly streamable.
If you want to be a pioneer of an early-days eSports game that at its core is super enjoyable and easy to learn but hard to master, there's plenty of room on the bandwagon. We would love to have you. I would tell you without question. I built a lot of gaming communities in my life. This is the best gaming community I've ever been a part of, hands down, bar none. These are the smartest, nicest, and most helpful people in the world.
Eathan, I have this visual in my head of one of the teams having these terrible Hulk Hogan t-shirts. When they win the tournament or when they're about to play their opponent, they rip them off or something like that.
The whole committee runs wild on you, brother.
I love the confidence and passion you have for all of this stuff. It has been a pleasure to talk. We will have to hang out one day. We will go for a long hike and talk about everything. This has been fun. We want to get to know you even better personally, which is why we're going to get to our next segment, which will be fun given your deep roots in history here and all this stuff. It's called Edge Quick Hitters. Edge Quick Hitters are a fun and quick way to get to know you a bit better. There are ten quick questions. We're looking for a short, single-word, or few-word response but we can expand a little bit if we get the urge. Are you ready to rumble?
I am.
What is the first thing you ever remember purchasing in your life?
I don't remember it but it was probably candy.
What's a go-to candy for you? What do you think it was? Snickers?
Back then, it was probably a Marathon bar, which they don't make anymore. Now, it would be a Milky Way Special Dark.
I'll look it up. What is the first thing you ever remember selling in your life?
I don't.
Make up the first thing you remember.
I had a job working at a deli when I was fourteen. I worked the cash register. Maybe it's a deli sandwich or a knish potentially.
Josh, take the next couple. I love a good knish. What is the most recent thing you purchased?
I bought my wife dinner. Does that count?
Yeah. That sounds delicious.
At a restaurant or Uber Eats style?
It's a deli sandwich.
I'm sorry for the divergence. We watched the British Baking Show. It was Mexican week. She goes, "I would love a taco." I'm like, "I'll go to a taqueria." There you go.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
I don't sell anything much to my chagrin. I wish I sold everything. I must have sold something. I'm assuming I sold an NFT to somebody at a low price because I wanted them to have it for cheap. I sold a rarity pack, which was worth probably $15 to $20. I sold it for $1 to show people how to use the in-game vIRL marketplace in Blockchain Brawlers.
That's very generous and educational of you.
I love it. How about this one? What is your most prized position?
I have an original John Madden football from the Sega Genesis in mint condition. I shrink-wrapped the cardboard box of the original John Madden from 1991. It's worth a lot of money. It's locked up somewhere in my house.
I love that game. I'm not playing this season because I'm so addicted to that game.
It's good. When you make Madden, you see things you would have done differently. It drives you crazy, so you stop playing.
Let's all play some John Madden. I'm kidding. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that is currently for sale or you think you could acquire, what would it be?
I would love to buy Hawaii from the US and make it my private set of islands. That would be great. I would buy Riot Games. I would love to buy Riot. They do certain things well and certain things poorly but their heart is in the right place in how they do things. I would love to make them bend to my will by being the owner.
Those are great choices.
I'll go in on that with you. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
My glass is half-full. Always take a positive outlook and give people the benefit of the doubt until they prove they don't deserve it.
It's better that way. You could do the other thing and be a skeptic but it's not as fun.
You will die of a heart attack at 47. Nobody wants to live that kind of life, "I don't trust anyone. I'm insecure. Therefore, I am closed off." I'm like, "Life is too short. Let's go out and have a blast."
Life's too short. Go out and have a blast. Click To Tweet
The next one is if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
Fear of failure. I don't feel like failing as much because the cost of failing is not as high. You want to embrace failure but there's this whole notion of failing or being perceived as a failure that is unhealthy. Failing is very healthy but I know there's this fear. It keeps people on the sidelines. I would love it if people didn't have my similar fear of not taking that risk, getting out there, and seeing what happens.
It's always funny when you get past the fear. You look back and go, "Why was I afraid of that? What was that all about?"
What did you do before joining us on this show?
I had lunch. It's always back to food with me. I don't know what it is. I had three minutes. My wife brought me home a poke bowl from Whole Foods. I scarped it down in record time so I could be here on time.
I know that routine. The last question is this. What are you going to do next after the show?
We have an executive management leadership meeting where we all sync up every Monday at 4:00 our time. That's what I will do. I'll take part in that. There are no committees at this company. It's a series of individual entrepreneurs. We get together on a weekly basis and talk about what's happening in our world. It's helpful and interesting.
Eathan, is this correct? Do you have a bonus question, sir?
There's a bonus question for you. Let's hit it. Is a crypto bear market bad for NFTs?
It's not bad for NFTs. It's good for NFTs because the people that aren't serious are getting out, thank God. Rampant speculation is gone. True believers are going to be the ones that hold the token. The thing though I say a lot that people don't always necessarily understand is that I don't care what Ethereum or Bitcoin is trading at. I care about people being allowed to own their assets. That's important.
I know that people say, "NFT value and appreciation are tied to token stability or appreciation," but to me, that's so far down the line. You first have to start by giving people something they want to own and use. If at some point it goes up or down a price tied to a token or a cryptocurrency, so be it but, first things first, let's let people own anything that they buy in a game. That's such a huge hurdle and a massive win. That is completely divorced from the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum.
It's time to move on to Hot Topics. We have a very special guest. It looks like you have something interesting in common with Michael. We can touch upon that. Our Hot Topic is sponsored by OneFootball. We have Jean-Charles Gaudechon. He's joining us. We're going to call him JC from this point forward. He is the CEO of OneFootball Labs, a joint venture between OneFootball, Web3 champion Animoca Brands, and blockchain investment pioneer Liberty City Ventures, alongside strategic partner Dapper Labs.
It enables clubs, leagues, federations, and players from across the world to release digital assets and fan-centric football experiences based on blockchain technology built on the sports-industry-leading Flow Blockchain via the easy-to-use and secure wallet, Dapper. JC has two decades of experience in the games industry. Prior to his appointment as CEO of OneFootball Labs, he held various roles in the combined total of sixteen years he spent at video game giant Electronic Arts. That's where you overlap.
In his new role as OneFootball Labs' CEO, JC plays a crucial role in growing the business and creating top-quality Web3 products to deliver a new era of football fan consumption. Central to OneFootball Labs' offer is the ability for fans to access unique and affordable digital collectibles, which allow them to own real-life moments of incredible football in perpetuity.
This is an exciting episode. JC, I'm sure you have some thoughts on some of Michael's provocative thinking. Hopefully, you agree on some things and disagree on a few things because what's innovation without that level of discourse? First and foremost, what's going on with OneFootball is pretty awesome. You had Serie A that related to the first market deal related to football of this kind. Unpack that first a little bit and tell us what's going on in your world with our friends at Animoca Brands.
First, thanks for having me. I want a disclaimer. We're talking about soccer here, not football. I want to make sure that when I say football, it's soccer and the old-content sport that is almost a religion for us. Every time I go back to football, it's soccer I'm referring to. Before I go straight into that, I wanted to say that I do resonate with a lot of the stuff that Michael said. I'm a game maker. I'm big a gamer. There's probably not a single reference I didn't catch in what he said, including the Sword of a Thousand Truths.
It's cool to see a lot of fellow game makers coming and making the jump. This is good for everyone, for gaming in general, and hopefully for the Web3 space even though we're coming very humble. God knows I'm coming humble despite the super cool intro. You usually come and have a lot of concepts in mind about how to make a game. You need to put a lot back in question when it comes to blockchain-powered games.
That's my little intro and how I felt about what Michael said. I also believe in a lot of the super high-quality and the AAA production he mentioned, which is great and something important. Hopefully, our digital collectible will impress you too, Michael. I would love to get feedback after the show. We mentioned OneFootball Labs. OneFootball is the biggest digital soccer platform.
Animoca gives us an incredible experience and network. LCV was one of the first venture capital to move into the crypto space. I'm very lucky and surrounded by incredible people. What we did is we indeed released our NFT marketplace. You will see that I usually go back to digital collectibles. We have a bit of a pet peeve around trying to avoid the word NFT because we're trying to lower the barrier. When you talk to a football fan, an NFT doesn't resonate the same way, which is why we try to navigate our way through the language and the crypto language in that case.
We're live for 30 days. It's all still new to us. We launched in early September 2022. Our first drop was the Serie A Italian league. The connection to football allowed us to acquire some major rights. Serie A Italy from Italy was one. There's the Bundesliga in Germany. There are almost 25 to 26 top pro players and a lot more licenses that we have acquired to be able to give digital video moments back to fans. The idea is for them to own a moment or a piece of a game that happened and for them to be able to collect this and then get access to real-life utilities.
To dive deeper into this, it is interesting to try to approach these sports that have a global impact. You do have to touch everyone. There are little old couples sitting on their couch watching the football game who don't give a crap about what the latest tech is. They don't care. They want to do what they enjoy. You are focused on changing the narrative and bringing people closer to the game that they already like, not confusing fans and not mentioning NFTs deeply except in these types of conversations. How do you do all this? How do you access what matters to fans here? What's your approach?
What's important to us is to resonate with the emotion of the sport, the emotion of the fans, and what a sport gives you. We elevate it at the level of religion in some ways. I'm using this word because it is something deep inside without trying to sound a little too emotional despite being French. It's about hitting this. We usually say, "We give football back to the people."
The beautiful thing about Web3, the technology, and the legal frame is it allows people to properly own something and not rent it like the gaming piece that Michael and I or all of us had. It's just a rental. In the World of Warcraft, nothing belongs to you. Here, the beautiful thing is it does. That piece to us is not just in gaming but real soccer. On TV, you can see that wonderful moment that made you jump off your chair or your couch for that matter. That's something you can own.
There's gamification. I'm not coming for gaming for nothing. As you collect these, then we get you into weekly challenges. These challenges are the best saves of the week, the best of all time, and that type of stuff will then allow you to get access to real-life utilities. That's an important piece. That's something that came back a lot in what Michael said. What I feel strongly about also is that it's going to be about value, utilities, and stuff that you give to users, fans, and consumers. It's super important because a lot of shortcuts have been done on that front. A lot of the players or people did not get what they deserved. That's something we still need to solve.
Here, that's the idea. To your point, it's also about getting after people that may not know about the space, frightened about the space, or are not interested in the space. We need to extend to them. We had a double page at La Gazzetta in Italy, which is the main sports newspaper. People could read about this. We had a whole pamphlet, "This is what we bring to you. This is how we can link the digital space to real-life soccer and to someone that's in Torino going and watching their game."
When people realize that you get access to amazing real-life utilities like match tickets, VIP boxes, signed jerseys, and meet-and-greets with their favorite players, it's cool because we're just not inventing something in the digital space. We're bridging two worlds, the crypto world to an extent. We can be in the middle or hopefully connected in all that.
Michael, are you in the normal course of your day? Are you running into people who have been at Electronic Arts like a fellow who worked previously?
The thing you realize being in this business for more than a cup of coffee is that everybody at some point worked at EA. Everybody had their turn. I'm sure there's a Hollywood analog for that. I'm sure there's a music industry analog but in the gaming business, everybody worked at EA at one point. JC raised a vital point early. I get asked this question a lot of times. How are we going to have mass adoption? I say, "It's simple. Don't talk about it being on the blockchain." As soon as you use language like, "You need a wallet. You have to deposit and buy a cryptocurrency and NFTs," people tend to tune out.
The thing that we do is have an experience where you can own all your stuff. It's a great-to-play game. You're like, "I want to do that," but if I said, "As long as you open a WAX wallet, buy these NFTs off a secondary marketplace, and go to a centralized exchange to buy a token," they're like, "Nevermind." You take it a step further. You say, "We don't even call them NFTs." I'll gladly throw that in my playbook. We never mention it although ironically, the title of our game is Blockchain Brawlers. Maybe I speak out of both sides.
It's one of those things where it's the teeth on the dinosaur. Most people might not even notice if you play it. It's interesting. If you think about anything else that people like to own like if I said, "I'm going to sell you this car and give you the title. Check that out. It's all about the title," I expect to have proof of ownership of this item but I'm more excited about the car than the document.
I'm excited to see where this goes, JC. When you call football or soccer a religion, with any other sport, I would argue the accuracy of that and if it's hyperbole but knowing soccer fans, it truly is a religion. You've chosen an interesting area to focus on in terms of building communities on top of communities. That's what we see as the future of this space. You have to have a preexisting community. If you don't, you have to have the skills to put that community together with or without Web3. That's critical to success here. Is there anything else in terms of how you're going to be working with the community in building the space that you wanted to touch on before we close out the segment?
You're spot on, Josh. The community is super important. It's a pretty easy statement. I had the chance to work on the one game Michael didn't mention, EVE Online, in my career. In EVE Online, you have to meet this community. You have to see what this community is, what they stand for, and who they are. It's incredible. Some people would say, "This is probably the first real ownership economy that any video game has ever seen."
A DAO economy or a DAO system is pretty much EVE Online. I was lucky to be close to it and learn a lot from that space. I'm coming in very humble. We started. God knows we have already disappointed our community here or there. This is never easy to do but why the community is even more important to us and for our project is that we need this community to be crypto fans and football fans coming together.
I would go further and say that the community is probably your best tool to go to mass adoption and get people to come to be part of a movement or a group of people, understand, and get educated on what this means. To me, this is becoming so important to even a fan in Torino to not just go and say, "Come and get a collectible on our OneFootball platform. Join our community, get to understand what we do, and make some friends on the way."
"If you're interested and if you realize now that the acquisition, ownership, and collection of our digital collectibles will then get you into incredible football experiences and passion, you will get closer to the sport you love more than ever." To me, that's what's super important about a community in our project. It is in any, to be honest. You mentioned NFTs and the crypto bear market. It's the time to solidify your community, build it, and get it stronger. During difficult times, you usually get closer and get stuck with your community. Make sure they still believe in what you're doing and where you're going.
That will be the way to win. I'm not giving any lessons. We're coming very humble and learning every step of the way. This is going to be such an important aspect of our project offer and keeping that community going. I can go into how we're going to do that but there are also tools and things that already exist. We're not necessarily going to innovate on that front but one thing I can say is thank you to the fans that were part of that community so far that supported us. Come join our Discord community, Aera by OneFootball because it's super important.
What you're up to is very exciting. It must feel great to work on such a big topic of international football. Before we wrap up, let's make sure you give Discord, any other places you want to send people, socials, and websites to find out more and get involved.
Check us out at Aera.OneFootball.com. That's our marketplace. Hopefully, Michael can check it out also and tell me if the production quality is there. I'm pretty proud. This is from former brick-and-mortar game makers to now the new type of games. I would love to get your feedback on it. Come check it out. We're on Discord and Twitter. We have a super cool Twitch event coming soon. We're firing on all cylinders.
That was all spoken like a true perfectionist. You're always looking for input and feedback. That's a good sign. It has been a privilege to have you, JC. You're beaming in there from far away. Thanks for joining us.
I'm good. Thank you so much.
JC, that all sounds awesome. I hear we have a dope giveaway as well related to the current packs that you're doing.
All you are going to have to do is join our Discord, which is Aera by OneFootball, or follow us on Twitter. We will be giving away multiple packs, a goal pack, 5 silver packs, and 100-plus bronze packs for people to get right in on collecting our pretty cool digital collectibles.
We appreciate that generosity. Folks will be able to look for the contest that we will launch. Thanks so much for hanging out with us for a little while. I'm looking forward to whatever is next with what you're up to. Hopefully, we will see you at NFTLA as well.
Thanks so much.
That was a blast. Michael, we have our next segment, which we have been having fun with where we let our guests of the day do a little bit of a shout-out. We checked in with you. You said you might have someone that you would love to call out on the show. Tell us who that is.
Thank you. That person is Graeme Devine. Graeme Devine is a very well-established game designer who made the leap over to Web3 gaming before anybody else of his stature took the plunge. He's building a cool world and narrative. It's a game called Metropolis Origins. I highly encourage everybody to check it out. Not only is it a great game with an incredible noir art style. Graeme is a prince of an individual. He's one of the loveliest people you will meet in the industry. I would like to give a shout-out to him.
I found him on Twitter. His Twitter handle is @zaphodgjd. Check out what Graham is up to in this space. I appreciate you bringing some attention to this fine gentleman.
I love these shout-outs too because it gives readers a chance to discover folks that might not be on their radar. It's always cool. Thanks for that. We're going to wrap up here soon. I know that we do have a giveaway that we're working on with you. We're still working on the details but knowing WAX, you've got all kinds of fun stuff to do with giveaways. We will be cooking up something awesome. People can look out on socials for how to enter and what exactly that entails. We will get to that on socials. Before we wrap, we want to get from you, Michael, where would you like to send people so they could find out more about what you're up to.
There are two places. They take you to the same location but you get into different consumer interfaces. The first one is Play.BCBrawlers.com. If you have a WAX Cloud Wallet, that's how you log into the game. You can start playing the beta or the PVP game I talked about that Richard designed on our platform that has all those other things I also talked about.
If you want to play the PVP game or the card game head-to-head to see what that's like, it's free to try. There are no entry price points and wallets required. You can go to Play-Beta.BCBrawlers.com. It's the game. It's in a browser. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Edge, it doesn't matter. Come on in and play head-to-head. It takes a second for the assets to cache but once you're cached, you're good to go.
Thanks so much, Michael. We had a true blast. We would love to spend some more time with you at some point.
I would love it as well.
We will sign off. We have reached the outer limit officially at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? You can go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, and say something cool. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again, Michael and everyone reading, for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Tyranno
- NFTLA.live
- vIRL
- WAX
- Merge
- DappRadar
- Bad Crypto Podcast
- Blockchain Brawlers
- Chris Jericho - Previous episode
- Magic: The Gathering
- Hot Wheels
- Funko
- Riot Games
- OneFootball
- Animoca Brands
- Liberty City Ventures
- Dapper Labs
- Flow Blockchain
- Serie A
- Bundesliga
- EVE Online
- Aera by OneFootball - Discord
- Aera.OneFootball.com
- Twitter - Aera by OneFootball
- Metropolis Origins
- @zaphodgjd - Twitter
- Play.BCBrawlers.com
- WAX Cloud Wallet
- Play-Beta.BCBrawlers.com
- Spotify - Edge of NFT
- iTunes - Edge of NFT
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