Tech Turbulence: Bitcoin vs. NFTs, Layoffs and IPOs – Games Growth with Upptic

00:00:00:02 – 00:00:01:10
Xander
Excited for GDC?

00:00:01:12 – 00:00:09:08
Warren
I love Slash Hate GDC. I love it in the moment and then hate the following weeks of my life when I’m just wrecked. But let’s bring it on.

00:00:09:10 – 00:00:16:18
Xander
I hate to be a really big year. I’m personally pretty excited, and maybe because we’re planning another big event and I’m really stoked, but I think this is be the biggest year since COVID by far.

00:00:16:19 – 00:00:33:21
Warren
This is the most hype I’ve heard for a long time. People are excited. It felt like, yeah, we had the sleepy ears of DC during COVID and then last year felt like kind of the awakening and now it’s like everyone is Max caffeinated ready to party, ready to sign deals. And I think it’s going to be a big one this year.

00:00:33:23 – 00:00:50:21
Xander
I mean, just to toot our own horn for a second, which, you know, we love to do on this podcast, I the number of high profile people coming through our happy hours, I’m like, I’m super stoked. We’re doing a couple of Happy hours. One focused on the Web3 space, one focused on the mobile space. It’ll be Tuesday the 19th for Web3 and Wednesday the 20th for mobile.

00:00:51:01 – 00:01:00:07
Xander
So if you are interested in attending these, we have a lot of awesome folks there and chat. So hit us up Mark and get a picture. Invite security on it.

00:01:00:09 – 00:01:02:02
Warren
Hopefully, fingers crossed.

00:01:02:04 – 00:01:12:01
Xander
You’re paying for it. So cool. Let’s talk about some doom and gloom, some overhype. I don’t know where you want to start, Warren.

00:01:12:03 – 00:01:34:10
Warren
Let’s start with Crypto Corner a little round up of everything happening in Web3 and crypto that is relevant to our listeners. While it’s not immediately relevant, Bitcoin doesn’t have a lot to do directly with gaming and likely never will. Bitcoin has gone wild over the last week or so, growing in price to about 20% and getting close to all time highs.

00:01:34:12 – 00:01:58:13
Warren
This is important because we’re seeing, you know, regular people start to pay attention and talk about things related to crypto and what through again, this happens every time number go up. Here we go again. The things powering this, I think a lot of people are aware probably if you listen to show. But like the big catalyst in this move with bitcoin was the approval of the Bitcoin ETFs, which are now getting a lot of buy in from institutional investment.

00:01:58:13 – 00:02:34:01
Warren
So it’s kind of a new form of liquidity that’s coming in to the crypto space that hasn’t been there before, people being able to get Bitcoin to their retirement accounts. So why is this relevant to what we do? It’s new money flowing into the space and we see with every crypto cycle there is a pattern of things start with bitcoin and then go into things like Ethereum and smart contract platforms that power more of the things related to gaming that we think about here and then eventually moves into the more speculative interest in the actual gaming projects and the tokens related to those.

00:02:34:01 – 00:02:55:13
Warren
And a tease, which kind of goes to the other story of the weeks when trend in the markets. If you don’t track these things closely, it might be counterintuitive, but NFT is a segment usually do really badly when the larger crypto tokens are going up and nfts usually thrive in more boring times in the market. It’s just human nature that people want to be participating in whatever is the current thing that’s moving up.

00:02:55:15 – 00:03:20:00
Warren
So the reason I mention this is I think there’s another very important narrative, this kind of going on in the background that’s not driving this too much attention with all the hype around Bitcoin, which is what I call like the war for the future of Nfts. So for anyone that was around for the last crypto hype cycle, one thing that was happening near the end was we got this kind of race to the bottom for NFT royalties.

00:03:20:03 – 00:03:45:01
Warren
Part of the narrative within a few years in general is, Hey, this is really good for creators. You can have these smart contracts that enforce it. Anytime someone trades your asset that the percentage goes back to to the creator of the project, which is all good. But I think what the market adapted to was the enforcement mechanism for these royalties was the marketplaces, so was Opensea and the other NFT trading marketplaces.

00:03:45:03 – 00:04:06:04
Warren
So as Opensea became a big business, we saw competition rise up to opensea, such as Blur. And the way that a lot of these marketplaces competed is, in classic capitalism undercut on pricing. What’s a good way to undercut on pricing? Well, why don’t we remove this revenue? That’s not going to us. Why don’t we just not pay out the creators?

00:04:06:06 – 00:04:31:01
Warren
Because these royalties were not these are enforced at the marketplace level with the smart contracts with Marketplace. So sorry, I’m getting a little on the weeds here, but point being like zooming out as NFT trading got big, new marketplaces emerged, they all started undercutting each other by reducing the royalties paid to creators until basically it got to the bottom and the leading marketplaces became optional to enforce royalties.

00:04:31:01 – 00:04:49:07
Warren
So it became almost like a tip of like, I’m buying this NFT, do I want to pay the Creator or do I just want to keep that money for myself and pay less? And you can kind of guess where that went. So this is one thing that really compounded the fall from grace of the last era of all things and a TS and a few gaming.

00:04:49:09 – 00:05:05:19
Warren
This revenue stream that these are counting on is now pulled out from underneath them. They’re no longer getting secondary royalties and that cuts out a big revenue stream. It killed a lot of projects. So this is kind of an undercurrent that killed the last cycle of the NFT market. That kind of brings us to today. And I want to talk about this.

00:05:05:19 – 00:05:31:20
Warren
So a big announcement over the last few weeks was you Go Labs, which is the team that they’re doing a bunch of stuff, but most notably, they’re the team that owns Sporty Yacht Club Cryptopunks doing a lot of things in what, three gaming and Web 2.5 gaming. They launched a new ethereal marketplace with Magic Eden, who got their start as a large Solana based marketplace and one of the big names that’s a competitor to Opensea in general.

00:05:31:22 – 00:05:58:01
Warren
So this new marketplace launched, and there’s a lot of hype around it because it’s two big names in the space Magic in and you collab slash predates and it launched and the main differentiator is supposed to be everyone. We are a creator focused marketplace. We’re going to enforce royalties for all the collections, like it’s going to be not optional to not pay the creators, and they’re incentivizing it with like rewards that you can earn in there.

00:05:58:02 – 00:06:18:06
Warren
And what’s called diamonds, which is supposed to be coughing you for an airdrop earlier on. And they did another marketing lever to launch, which is they did something called the like NFT Creator Alliance, which was getting a bunch of big collections together and saying like, Hey, we’re in solidarity with this enforcement of royalties. We’re going to take our collections offline anywhere that doesn’t enforce creator royalties.

00:06:18:12 – 00:06:36:09
Warren
So we saw this interview with Google Opps where they basically announced, Hey, we’re actually going to remove Yacht Club from any marketplace that doesn’t enforce creator royalties, not just for us, but for all creators. So they’re basically taking a stand and saying like, Hey, if you don’t give all creators fair share, you can’t have 40 apps on your marketplace.

00:06:36:11 – 00:07:08:14
Warren
So this is another marketing beat happening with the launch of the new messaging marketplace. So this all sounds promising. It launched and nobody cared, sadly. So like I say, part of this is just the narrative right now is around Bitcoin, and that’s what everyone’s paying attention to. But also let’s just take a look at what happened. So the magic in Marketplace launch and the recourse I saw was that it saw about 4% of the total trading volume on its first day of the leading marketplace, which is currently blur.

00:07:08:16 – 00:07:29:23
Warren
And I think this is the teams behind this, but I think kind of speaks to the state of things still in crypto that is still powered largely by speculators and there’s not a lot of appetite to pay out of pocket extra fees for royalties even though people want to see these collections be successful. But it’s sort of like I think everybody wants somebody else to pick up the tab for it.

00:07:29:23 – 00:07:48:03
Warren
So I’m rooting for this marketplace. I really like the initiative by you guys to imagine and supporting, see that there’s no traction. So yeah, that’s kind of what’s going on with the war for Nfts and finding a viable mechanism to keep these projects sustainable. The royalties. But Zander, have you been tracking this at all? Have you even looked at the NFT?

00:07:48:03 – 00:07:51:21
Warren
Is that a writing in your wallet over the last year? What are your thoughts?

00:07:51:23 – 00:08:08:19
Xander
Yeah, there’s a lot of a lot, but a few thoughts. I mean, on the Bitcoin price, that’s fine. You know, broadening out the marketplace for this basically digital gold, they call it, it’s good you can’t hurt the ecosystem. Overall. It seems like there’s a lot of money piling in and I think that’s going to be the story of the coin for the foreseeable future.

00:08:08:21 – 00:08:24:23
Xander
What I saw, which was kind of interesting, is like people are not talking about in a theory ETF, which, you know, I like that a lot better because I hold a theory that a Bitcoin so great, please do that. I’d love to see those. That theory embraces not regarding the NFT market by saying I’m as close to a boomer in Web3 as it possibly gets.

00:08:24:23 – 00:08:36:15
Xander
I, you know, which I know is like sacrosanct in the fucking crypto ecosystems and I don’t know about to put it on my radar today. And what’s the catalyst for someone like me to make a change is my question.

00:08:36:15 – 00:09:05:18
Warren
Yeah, I’ll give you the pitch. The way I understand the value proposition is twofold. One is that if you care about this sector, this is a way that gives better sustainability to the creators of the marketplace. That’s the selfless reason and the selfish reason. The reason is airdrops. So magic even has very heavy handedly alluded to that. These diamonds that you earn through trading on their platform and using their platform over competitors will be rewarded generously.

00:09:05:21 – 00:09:21:17
Warren
Metric never launch their own token. And everyone’s expectation is that the diamonds are basically points that will score you this airdrop. So you get to be the nice guy supporting collections and then you also get free money. That’s my pitched. You were the new machine marketplace.

00:09:21:17 – 00:09:39:18
Xander
So I like I like free money. I hate royalty fees on my transactions on Opensea. I’ve been told that there’s ways of doing it, but like if you go through their sale flow, it’s like not really obvious how you opt out of paying royalty. There’s like a checkboxes that don’t pay royalties, so I pay 5% on my most recent transaction and I made a couple which I paid thousands of dollars or whatever.

00:09:39:23 – 00:09:57:05
Warren
Yeah, they’ve iterated on this a lot over the years and it also depends on the collection too. Some of them have royalties on it. Yeah, but yeah, like a blur is the marketplace, which is probably the one I use the most. You can set the amount of royalties that you want to pay on it. And Opensea has gone back and forth initially like they were making this solely optional.

00:09:57:06 – 00:10:21:00
Warren
Then there was huge blowback. Yeah. Currently there is like I see on board apes. Like they right now have a 1% creator earning, which is like less than they have before, but there’s at least something that’s enforced. Right. And of course the royalties that are enforced is open season royalties. So whenever you make and if you purchase, you pay two kinds of royalties you pay to the platform, which is mandatory, and then you pay to the collection, which is variable and at the discretion of the marketplace.

00:10:21:00 – 00:10:22:15
Warren
Whether they enforce that or not.

00:10:22:17 – 00:10:41:21
Xander
Yeah, conceptual. This sounds great at the high level. There’s a lot of stuff about crypto. Like you create something your friend, your revenue stream, that’s awesome. But if you incentivize, you know, transactions on IT suite, I think the thing we’ll have to see is like, how do you get people to adopt? Right? And it’s like that’s basically a marketing challenge because I mean, the thing is to disrupt an incumbent, you don’t have to be marginally better.

00:10:42:01 – 00:10:58:12
Xander
The general thinking is you could be next better. And so what are they going to do that they have to spend a lot of money marketing it right corridors or they’ve got to produce a product that’s significantly better. End user It’s not obvious to me that there’s a huge advantage and they’ll point your it out anyway, because it’s interesting Gearbox based.

00:10:58:18 – 00:11:10:12
Xander
I’m not sure how weird I am in the Wall Street ecosystem road map for the and I’m like somewhere on the gradient and like I don’t know how much of the ecosystem is where I am versus where someone like you are or someone who’s by a Bitcoin ETF is.

00:11:10:14 – 00:11:26:05
Warren
Yeah, well, as you said, I think some of it is just like marketing and messaging. So like crypto is a very noisy space. I mean, I think in theory there’s very few people that would be against the value proposition of cool, this better supports creators. And by participating in this new marketplace, I’m going to get some kind of airdrop in the future.

00:11:26:09 – 00:11:45:18
Warren
But you have to kind of unpack the differentiator of what this marketplace is and how you participate in that airdrop. Like there’s a lot of disparate pieces of information. So anytime that we’re supporting a web3 gaming project, one thing that we find we have to do a lot that we don’t do and just like traditional games is make content that’s just like explaining how all this crap works.

00:11:45:18 – 00:12:00:16
Warren
Like, here’s how this piece of the puzzle connects to this piece. Okay? This thing that you bought that you own, here’s how you use it in the game. Here’s how it relates to this token that you’re going to earn. We always talk about like the onboarding adoption of just the process you have to go through and all things related to Web3.

00:12:00:18 – 00:12:19:01
Warren
But there’s also just like the general complexity that is your obstacle in understanding a lot of like blockchain based projects and yet the positioning of why people should participate in the magic in the marketplace. I don’t think it’s really been boiled down and marketed out as often as it could be. So that being said, we’re rooting for their success.

00:12:19:01 – 00:12:26:17
Warren
It’s a good thing both for users and for creators, and this is something I’ll be watching closely. Great. What’s next?

00:12:26:17 – 00:12:48:00
Xander
Enter our check in section. We’re checking in on how fuck the game industry is. So I call this doomy gloom, layoff and killing projects. A couple stories just broke recently last year to you. We wanted to sort of touch on these and then there’s a sort of metonymy additive that we’ll touch on. First and foremost, you just announced that there’s a 5% layoff of their workforce as well as they’re going to step away from some apps.

00:12:48:00 – 00:13:07:08
Xander
They’re really like punching out to my piece and paying out of pocket to say, Hey, we’re going to pay for you to walk away from these IP deals, as well as they’re downsizing their office space across the globe. And so they’re going to spend up to 165 million on a restructuring plan across their business. Not a small amount of money to right size your business.

00:13:07:10 – 00:13:27:01
Xander
It’s going to affect the number of workers, about 5% of the workforce. So, you know, years being considered for a long time, sort of an unassailable giant in the games industry. And it’s just wild that, you know, one, the back of Microsoft last week, we’re talking about another major, major company who is cutting huge swaths of the workforce and hungry down for the long haul.

00:13:27:03 – 00:13:45:15
Xander
It’s crazy. It’s a pretty wild to see that all the guys who were historically the winners in the space are now consolidating and downsizing, which is kind of nuts. There’s a few other layers we won’t talk about, and then we can talk about thoughts and analysis. So in the same week, Sony has announced an 8% reduction in its global workforce, around 900 people.

00:13:45:18 – 00:14:07:22
Xander
Sort of quote here playstation’s let in studio which actually naughty dog insomniac really games and fire spray are also affected by reductions as well as Sony’s technology creative and support team and there will be also small reductions at other studios. And as part of this announcement they indicated there’ll be a number of projects that are cool. So we talked about consolidation of Microsoft in the previous weeks.

00:14:08:00 – 00:14:28:05
Xander
Yeah. Now Sony and then a little birdie told me this morning, and this is not been officially announced, but I got a note from a friend saying that Google is announcing a major restructuring as of the morning of Thursday, February 29th. And so this is just crazy because there’s a ton of these major, major tech companies. Many, many folks on gaming were having these serious downsizing.

00:14:28:07 – 00:14:34:10
Xander
And if there’s one other piece of this that we want to talk about, Warren, let’s talk about Apple, what they’re doing and what sort of metanarrative here.

00:14:34:12 – 00:14:55:17
Warren
Yeah. So at first glance, this was like a totally unrelated story that we weren’t even in cover. But I think there’s an important throughline to everything Sanders talking about so well, this hasn’t been formally announced, but it was leaked from insiders that apparently after ten years of like one of the worst kept secrets in tech, Apple is canceling their autonomous vehicle, the Apple car program.

00:14:55:19 – 00:15:14:03
Warren
So this has been a project of much turmoil that it’s been known to be in production for like the last decade. There was over 2000 people working on this project, supposedly at Apple, and they announced internally this week this is a rumor, but I think a pretty well confirmed rumor. Throughout the existence. The car division was rebooted several times.

00:15:14:03 – 00:15:39:09
Warren
They changed leadership multiple times, tons of turnover in that order and a lot of conflict internally about like the future, like what they wanted this platform to be the role of autonomy in it. Supposedly they’ve burned over $10 billion in investment, so at least 2000 person size org ten years of development and essentially nothing to show for it other than your CarPlay.

00:15:39:11 – 00:15:41:12
Xander
Program too, is a crazy thing.

00:15:41:14 – 00:15:48:21
Warren
Knowing Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a completely siloed team that has nothing to do with the car team. Yeah, no, no, we’re the CarPlay team. We don’t. That’s different.

00:15:48:22 – 00:15:49:15
Xander
It’s different.

00:15:49:17 – 00:16:13:07
Warren
I think there’s a few reasons that this is worth calling out. So, you know, as Dan alluded to, we’re just seeing the relentless belt tightening across the titans of tech. We keep saying this like every podcast, but just one in the most brutal times to be working in tech, in gaming and these spaces that we cover. But the other theme here, Apple announced that part of this was a restructuring.

00:16:13:07 – 00:16:18:19
Warren
Some of that team’s going to be reallocated to their air initiatives. That’s a shocker. You know, probably.

00:16:18:19 – 00:16:19:06
Xander
Should throw.

00:16:19:06 – 00:16:38:13
Warren
More resources at air. Yeah, but what is kind of unspoken is that a ton of these people will likely be laid off as well. So add that to the pile up of newly unemployed workers in tech and gaming. It’s just becoming one of the most brutal times to work in what is traditionally been like one of the most safe sectors for your career.

00:16:38:15 – 00:16:59:09
Warren
Yeah. The other reason I think this is notable and I wanted to cover it is good chance I’m wrong about this, but I am a big believer that we’re going to see autonomous vehicles as like the next emerging game platform, like the next space for gaming. I think it’s still a ways off, but the Apple car was one of the initiatives that I thought would be moving towards this.

00:16:59:11 – 00:17:13:02
Warren
Obviously, Tesla already has some amount of gaming in their vehicles, but I’d say it’s still more like novelty at this point because we don’t have full autonomy yet. But yeah. Zander What are you thinking lately about cars as a gaming platform?

00:17:13:04 – 00:17:32:01
Xander
Yeah. So on the Apple topic specifically, everyone knows how hard it is to create a car. Right. Rivian is the other major electric car company people talk about after Tesla a distant second in the U.S. at least. And they have terrible earnings report got slaughtered on their stock down like 50%. Really crazy and there’s allegedly losing like tens of thousands of dollars per car they produce.

00:17:32:03 – 00:17:37:04
Warren
Yeah I think you want mean like $40,000 per year for vehicle lost on cell.

00:17:37:06 – 00:18:00:03
Xander
Hit and you want to go the victory lap had a great ship as you said the natural seat of a car company is dead which I thought was just funny. So we’ll this you know get a little plug in there. But overall, I think the theme that I see that ties all this together is like these are giant companies who basically have and they tax like, well, in the case of Apple and Google, it is tax like status where they basically take a break on a whole ecosystem and they’re just so used to printing money.

00:18:00:05 – 00:18:20:00
Xander
There’s been no need for innovation and efficiency. You know, obviously they do innovate. They build new products, but there’s no startup like hungry mentality and there has it been for basically since the eight crash where these have just been a massive bull run for all these companies since the great energy crisis. And so it’s crazy to see that these companies now are sort of tightening their belts for the first time.

00:18:20:00 – 00:18:47:07
Xander
It’s good. I think this is the natural state of things. This is like if you believe in a capitalist system, if you believe in a market, so but expect it to happen. I think the other thing to call out is like at least for Google and Apple, these companies are still making tons of money. And so growing. And so I think it’s also speaks to the overall power of these institutions that they’re able to take the belts, cut costs, shutter programs, and still just be putting money at a rate that like basically is on match in modern human society outside of like the oil industry.

00:18:47:09 – 00:19:01:09
Xander
You know, it’s a little sad for our friends that we friends and most of these companies who are going to, you know, have to find new jobs. But I think the good news is, I know we’ve had this theory for a while. We’re basically witnessing the birth of the next generation of major game companies. And I think this is all part of that process.

00:19:01:13 – 00:19:18:10
Xander
This is a creative destruction that then these people are going to be free to go off and break the golden handcuffs, which, you know, is the thing that happens. These big companies get paid so much, you lose your desire to go out and work hard and now they’re going to be get on their feet while these people have done fine for themselves and to be able to start working on the next generation of new innovative technologies.

00:19:18:10 – 00:19:24:00
Xander
And I’m it’s sad, but at the same time, it’s like I’m excited it’s going to give us a good opportunity. You know, I was getting so honest with you stuff.

00:19:24:01 – 00:19:48:21
Warren
So dinner, but honestly, like my head’s in a similar space. I tend to be overly optimistic sometimes too, but let’s talk about A.I. more. But I can’t help but think that there’s two colliding narratives happening. One is A.I. allowing nimble teams and individuals to do more and more with leaner and leaner teams. Get building a game building company of any type coding.

00:19:48:23 – 00:20:18:21
Warren
At the same time, we’re seeing the behemoths in gaming in tech recognize where they have float, recognized the least efficient parts of their business. As you know, there’s worse macro conditions. So I think exactly as you said, that’s the optimistic side here. We’re going to see people that now are unshackled, that have tools that have never existed in humanity before and creating new types of business, new types of game with less, being able to leverage their good ideas faster, more effectively than ever before.

00:20:18:23 – 00:20:31:20
Warren
So while it’s really scary time to be working in the sector right now, I think we are potentially on the cusp of a new golden age for what we see small teams innovating with in tech and gaming.

00:20:31:22 – 00:21:00:02
Xander
Yeah, the Segways nicely to our last section, which is a little bit of a random one, but I want to talk about because I do think it is relevant to the tech ecosystem and also does have implications for gaming overall. The forgotten step cousin of the tech industry is finally I’m hearing that is Reddit. Reddit was founded around the same time as Facebook, Twitter and many of these Gen two huge tech companies, and they’re finally finally, supposedly in March 2020 for listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

00:21:00:04 – 00:21:22:20
Xander
So few top line metrics. In 23, they had about 800 million in revenue and about a $90 million loss, but that’s increased 20% year over year. These numbers are a little interesting. They had 73 million daily active users and 267 weekly active users, 100,000 active communities. And I looked it up earlier today. They forum the top ten most visited sites in the world.

00:21:22:22 – 00:21:47:00
Xander
So, I mean, that’s pretty substantial. It’s not clear what they’re going to be listed at, but their last private market valuation was 10 billion and they’re planning on selling 10% of the company during the IPO. One of the really cool things that they’re doing, which I think is actually a testament to their strategy, their ethos and what makes Reddit special compared to a lot of these major social media platforms and tech platforms is they announced a program which is going to let their top Reddit users invest along the traditional underwriters as part of the IPO.

00:21:47:06 – 00:22:12:07
Xander
That’s really cool because what makes it unique is its communities. It’s really community curated, The moderators come from the community and you see rewarding. Giving back to the community is very awesome. Now let these guys like get their like depending on which wins market goes you might get racked you know I don’t really know I’m not a financial analyst but it’s just I like that they’re at least giving people besides the, you know, Jp morgan’s and investment banks of the world the opportunity to get into these these markets.

00:22:12:09 – 00:22:28:15
Xander
So that’s sort of like the table setting. We’ll see how it goes. Curious your thoughts on it. But before we talk about that, I want to talk about one other thing that’s quite interesting, which is that Reddit has made a deal recently with Google where you were saying that $60 million a year to use Reddit data as part of training for their Amazons.

00:22:28:17 – 00:22:44:22
Xander
So this is meaningful because traditionally, like opening this script, Reddit and basically illegally used it, we don’t know if it’s legal or not. The courts are going to figure that out. But they basically made licensing deals saying, hey, Google will pay you $6 million. And for Google, 60 million is like literally nothing. That’s 2 minutes of money. It’s cheap as heck.

00:22:44:22 – 00:23:00:00
Xander
But yeah, so it’s a precedent that you have to pay for data, right? That’s actually really, really good. And so I don’t know how long this deal is. The rumor on this is it’s a short term deal. And let me tell you, that’s a perfect number to ratchet up over time because they have one of the most unique datasets, really a handful of people who have really, truly curious.

00:23:00:02 – 00:23:12:08
Xander
It’s like Twitter has a really unique one, Reddit has one. Google obviously has a crazy amount of unique data sets the precedent that like, Hey, if you’re going to train an AI on our data, you got to pay for it. And so that’s good. So I just got through a lot of things that you What are your thoughts about Reddit?

00:23:12:10 – 00:23:15:18
Xander
What do you invest in? Does this matter for gaming or is this just like some fun thing that we talked about?

00:23:15:18 – 00:23:47:12
Warren
Because Redditors Yeah, I think matters for a few reasons. I feel like Reddit has one of the most powerful and underutilized groups of users. For those of us that are in the growth marketing space, not that they don’t sell their ads, they definitely do. If you took like Reddit’s community and added like Facebook ads or TikTok level or Google ads, level tech and algorithmic buying and performance playing to Reddit community, I mean, that’s solid gold, but they’ve just never invested in prioritized their advertising ecosystem like that.

00:23:47:12 – 00:24:16:09
Warren
So you do tend to see more. I wouldn’t call it dumb money, but less data focused and performance focused buyers on that space are basically leaving out a large part of the ecosystem. And it’s not like teams don’t test it, they just test it and find it underperforms those channels and then move their budget elsewhere. And I do really like the move of them working with Google to sell that data because it’s basically a way that they can at least partially realize the unique value of those users, which I mean, thinking about it, that seems like a very valuable data set to train AI models.

00:24:16:09 – 00:24:41:18
Warren
And I’m no expert, but just being able to learn tendencies of like language patterns of users based on self-guided ified, interest groups, the mind boggling and just additional depth that can provide to an API model. So yeah, Reddit has like an incredible userbase, like I’m a daily Reddit user. Yes. Even though it’s sometimes a dumpster fire, but it does have a very differentiated experience, I think still from any other social media platform, if you just want like deep topical conversations.

00:24:41:23 – 00:24:50:15
Warren
Right. I think it’s a good time for them to IPO. I mean, the market, even though we just talked about how bad it is for job conditions right now, as far as you know, stock market.

00:24:50:21 – 00:24:52:07
Xander
It’s rip roaring, you know.

00:24:52:12 – 00:25:12:19
Warren
Yeah. So I do think it’s a good time. There’s also, I think now another hyped IPO going on to kind of draw on the news out from this. So I think it’ll probably do pretty well. I do like that they’re working with their top community members to even access at that level. Yeah, I don’t know. My main thought for Reddit is like, I love the experience, I love the user base and the content that it has.

00:25:12:19 – 00:25:18:19
Warren
I just want to see them evolve as the ads platform so we can leverage that user base for the games that we work on.

00:25:18:21 – 00:25:35:15
Xander
Yeah, the piece is interesting because like right now they give you contextual targeting, right? And so you choose by interest group. And the reason why they would do that is because, you know, they haven’t gone out and bought and aggregate the data set that someone like Facebook has about their users. Part of it is they just don’t know as much about you.

00:25:35:15 – 00:25:54:07
Xander
And so it’s harder for them to serve you ads. And so they do a basic interest. It’s not crazy to think that they can build a social profile of you over time, though. I mean, they have very, very, very niche Reddit interest that I basically give you a Rolodex of like, here’s who. Okay, you know, And so I got a lot of faith over time that assuming that this is something that you to invest in.

00:25:54:07 – 00:26:08:06
Xander
And to be clear, they have actually continued to invest the ad product quite a bit over the last eight or so years. I mean, I remember when they got spun out of content and I went down to the Reddit building and talked to what’s your opinion? And he was like, Listen, we know that this is an under monetized profit center and we’re working on it.

00:26:08:06 – 00:26:23:01
Xander
We’re hiring as fast as we can. We’re building out an AMP team. We’re, you know, we’re working on it. And Facebook is just has a scale that we don’t have as it’s going to take us a little while. But I mean, you talked about differentiated user experience and how can be a bit of a cesspool, but compared to what I mean, go X, I deleted X my phone yesterday.

00:26:23:01 – 00:26:38:23
Xander
I was like, whether the fuck ever on this platform, it’s just I go in there and I feel bad every time and I like, was you on Defender for like I’m. But at a certain point it’s just like, what am I doing here? I’ll go on my computer if I need to see it, you know, and like people yell at you, You see stuff on Reddit sometimes, but it’s like it’s not the same, just like you’re a terrible person.

00:26:38:23 – 00:26:53:15
Xander
Video The early Facebook was like, You want to freeze, so there’s nothing you can do on Facebook. So I think it’s like one of the better user experiences from like a pseudo social network that we have there. And so I’m excited to see how they do. Cool. Well, that’s it.

00:26:53:17 – 00:27:17:01
Warren
Lots going on as always. Yeah. So once more Zander mentioned up top, we’re going to be co-hosting a couple of events with some friends of ours at GDC coming up in mid to late March 2024. So we’re going to have one event that’s more focused on what, three gaming teams and one a bit more on mobile gaming. So if you are building in either of those sectors coming out with us, we’ll have to meet teams that are building.

00:27:17:01 – 00:27:32:03
Warren
You’ve probably heard or still before, but at Optic we do all things help games grow, We build software that assist with it and we do all the marketing work in the trenches for you to profitably grow your user base. So if you want to come party with us next month or you need help growing your game, you can reach us through our website.

00:27:32:03 – 00:27:37:16
Warren
It’s UPPTIC.com.