Gaming and Entertainment Turbocharged by Web3
With Andrew Sheppard, Transcend Fund, Genevieve Thiers, Entertainmint, David Nage, Arca
By Alejandro Ballesteros, Venture Investor, Decasonic
Overview
Andrew Sheppard is managing director of Transcend Fund. Andrew has over 20 years of experience building, managing and advising multi-billion dollar consumer businesses. Past leadership roles Andrew has held included stints at Electronic Arts, Gamespot, Kabam and GREE. Andrew serves on the Board of Directors for Nexters and Rakuten Games.
Genevieve Thiers is co-founder and CEO of Entertainmint, a web3 company dedicated to redesigning TV and streaming in Web3. Genevieve Thiers is the founder of Sittercity.com which she sold to Bright Horizons in 2020. Genevieve is dedicated to fixing the imbalance of women in tech and politics. She is co-producer and tech trainer of RUN the Series, now on Amazon Prime, and she also has a crypto podcast by women and for women called Byte Size Crypto.
David Nage is a portfolio manager at Arca, an asset management firm focused on digital asset investing. David is a former Family Office professional and now Portfolio Manager for the newest Arca fund: Endeavor, which focuses on early-stage investments in Gaming, DeFi, and Web 3.0.
During the panel, they painted a roadmap of how games originated and evolved to web3 today, along with sharing current bottlenecks of web3 gaming. If you are not so sure about how gaming in web3 will have huge impacts, you will be convinced by the end.
Minecraft WTF
The panel started with a piece of interesting news: Minecraft just banned Web3 implementation in its game as a whole. “Gaming stratified into three pillars: technology, IP, and audience”, Andrew stated, which Minecraft has all three with large scale and impacts. A walled garden is formed by Minecraft to fully control monetization. As a corporation, they do not want any leaks coming out of their closed ecosystem at all. Andrew suggests that this action by Minecraft actually proved that Web3 will disrupt the gaming space in an unprecedentedly large scale that would create enormous monetization opportunities, terrifying big gaming brands like Minecraft to avoid with full force. Genevieve continued the conversion by providing a lot of Web3 real-life use cases to empower content creators to unleash 100% creativity and increase engagement with audiences.
Pong Console to P2E
Traditional gaming started with the Pong console. Throughout the gaming history, it gradually evolved into downloadable games on the internet like Fortnite without being stopped by blockers like recessions and wars. Blockchain gaming started with Gambit, then CryptoKitties, and finally with P2E NFT games like Axie Infinity. Gaming came a long way. Andrew pointed out that there are different trends in different generations and regions. The key factor is to just start building when you find a market opportunity. At Decasonic, we help builders with our full-stack technical experience to revolutionize blockchain gaming. Genevieve added that IP is a big part of Web3 that helps achieve adoption by creating worlds with citizens that take partial ownership of different IP.
Moreover, Andrew elaborated on the importance of durable token design. Developing burn mechanisms and encouraging token utilization are great ways to improve token design. David also mentioned that off-ramping can make the currency depreciated during inflation, some great ways to improve that are to improve burn mechanisms and to introduce more token features such as XP and power-ups. Non-inflammatory intention and interoperability are important things to be aware of while building the future of Web3 gaming.
Many of our panels stressed on a very important point: Just Start Building. Web3 is still a very new space, a greenfield waiting for pioneers to build out the use cases. At Decasonic, we partner with outlier founders to redefine large markets, especially in gaming and entertainment. Contact us with your idea and let’s build it together!