🔈 Speakers

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Guests:

🏯 Sandbox Deconstruction - Article Link

• What is it?
  • Land-based UGC platform
  • Land-owners can build experiences or loan it out for others to build
  • Project deserves massive praise for it’s scope, ambition, and prescience, but is not without its growing pains
• More expensive than you think
  • FDV of all Sandbox tokens is 14B = 1/3 market cap of Roblox
  • Sandbox has 30K MAU, effectively valuing users at 470k / user
  • Unfair to compare new game with one alpha to full playable games, but Sandbox is valued like it has already won the crypto UGC battle
  • Market has pushed heavily towards high valuations for virtual land, but not much thought has been put into the source of intrinsic value for this asset class
• Less decentralized than you think

  • 50% of the land is held by 300 accounts

  • As a UGC platform dependent on creators, centralization of land ownership is not good because it acts as a barrier for creators who have the choice of which platform they use, and may not have the same friction or profit-sharing as Sandbox

    <aside> 💡 “I do agree that land has an interesting place in the metaverse/virtual world → having a place to call your own that you own and create with with is super powerful, but it has to be set up in a broader context....if you’re trying to maximize users, you can’t really prioritize the gatekeepers first, you have to build it in a way that feels very “creators-first”, to really attract users to then make land more valuable.” - Aaron Bush

    </aside>

  • Have seen interesting mechanics around taxing digital land-owners to force efficient land utilization, but have yet to see good examples within crypto-gaming

• On censorship-resistance in UGC platforms:
  • Makes sense to have some degree of censorship to prevent toxicity
  • Sandbox’s parent company Animoca is based in Hong Kong, there is an interesting case that one land-plot is the flag of Taiwan → creates interesting controversy between centralized platform + decentralized ethos / freedom of user

Bold Predictions on Blockchain Metaverse

• Maria: I think bringing too much of reality’s constraints into a game could affect its enjoyment for fun, because people usually play games to forget about reality and experience something vastly different from their day-to-day. Ex: RDR2 - people found boredom in the abundance of mundane “real-life” tasks.
• Aaron: I think the platforms that win will be the ones who lean into abundance more than scarcity. If you want to build a platform with hundreds of millions of users, designing a world around tens of thousands of plots of land probably isn’t the right call, neither is having immediate requirements to own an asset in order to start participating or contributing, and there’s a lot of levers to pull to lower the barriers to entry....platforms that maximize the creative surface area for the most creators, and lower the barriers of entry for the most users will be set up to best scale actual engagement, which what drives actual value.
  • Irony in that projects that lean away from abundance will have an easier time raising because early investors like scarcity
• Jayne: Business models for currrent games haven’t buillt the right balance b/t abundance + scarcity, need someone to be bold enough to build this out to inspire future use-cases.

Women in Gaming

• Historic pattern in industry of community’s being non-inclusive or difficult to navigate for women
  • Many men are shocked to hear about these stories b/c they no longer think it’s an issue
  • Microaggressions are difficult to bring up because they’re not easily provable, need to be speaking with someone who is open-minded and respectful
• How we can get more women into executive positions ?
  • Solved over the years, time will help because more women are entering the gaming industry compared to men
  • Some industries will take even more than others because men have been executives for a long time, e.g. banking
• Web3 as a space has been more inclusive and more supportive: “all ships rise with the sea”
  • With more meritocracy in the decentralized workforce, it doesn’t matter if you’re under-represented, disabled, young; if you can find an audience your value will shine

Future of Dapper Labs

• Thinking about other IP after success of Top Shot, looking at UFC and others
  • Focusing on less frequent drops and more drops around larger events
• More diversity in audience outside of sports and crypto-native, such as gaming
• Seeing community (especially in Discord) as a larger key metric, want to be able to transact easily from social platforms
• Most new players are coming from Discord, “strong correlation between how many people talk about you and how much they buy”