The Web2.5 Mullet: Mainstreaming web3 with AppsFlyer and Spindl – Games Growth with Upptic

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:19:07
Unknown
Welcome to the Games Growth podcast. We have a very interesting interview this week. We have Antonio from Spindl and Adam from Essilor. They represent both the preeminent solution for attribution in mobile as well as in Web3, when really just a conversation with them talking about how these two segments of gaming are meeting and will meet in the future.

00:00:19:09 – 00:00:39:00
Unknown
Yeah, this is going to be a divisive episode because you’re either going to care about this topic a lot, and we’re going to do a really deep dive on it. And that specifically, if you’re a team that’s either currently building or considering building at the intersection of like free to play apps and Web3 technology, which is definitely a segment that we are quite bullish on.

00:00:39:02 – 00:01:03:23
Unknown
This is a very important and emerging segment, specifically in gaming. We’re launching a number of games this year that are in these hybrid economies of traditional free to play and unchain Web3 economies, and it is a pain in the ass to measure and do marketing with good data around this. So this partnership that was announced between apps, where it’s been all is specifically for solving this problem, is extremely important to a subset of us.

00:01:03:23 – 00:01:15:23
Unknown
So for those people, I hope you enjoy the episode. Enjoy.

00:01:16:01 – 00:01:29:23
Unknown
They’re using us for all the analytics and everything. They’re firing hundreds of events and us, and they’ve just settle on us as a charting UI for whatever reason. And so they want those events to appear. But it could work either way, or it could be a third option, which is everyone just exports their data and it gets a bit I suspect that’s what it’s going to be.

00:01:30:00 – 00:01:48:07
Unknown
They have like a whole ML backend. Most larger companies are just going to throw it in there. I’d be anyway. But yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Awesome. Yeah. Well I was like, they’re going to say something I don’t want to correlate right now. But welcome to the show everyone. We have two of our favorite and recurring guests joining for a pretty special occasion today, something near and dear to my heart.

00:01:48:07 – 00:02:10:02
Unknown
We are going to be talking about the intersection of measurement and growth marketing for web two and web three, which I affectionately have been trying to sell as the web 2.5 mullet free to play mobile in the front, watching in the back and representing that we have our friend Adam Smart from Apps Fire and we have Antonio Garcia martinez from Spindl.

00:02:10:04 – 00:02:29:06
Unknown
So first of all, welcome to the show. Welcome back. The elite class of repeat guests on the show. And you guys had a, joint announcement about a new integration between the two companies recently. We’ll get into a little background on each company for those new, but maybe just to set the stage, what was this news that was released over the last few weeks?

00:02:29:06 – 00:02:55:09
Unknown
You want to kick it off at Amazon today? Yeah, sure. So I’ve learned Spindl have integrated. We have managed to bring a full coverage of Web3 web 2.5 mullet. As you so eloquently put it, full coverage of analytics for attribution essentially across the two platform. Yeah. Just to add on that, I mean, I like where in your example of web 2.5, in practice it’s like web two point something great.

00:02:55:09 – 00:03:11:07
Unknown
It’s either 2.1 or it’s 2.9. But the point is that it’s not fully 3 or 2. I’m probably jumping ahead a little bit here in the script of like, how does this pairing come together? But to be honest, it was actually inspired by you are an uptick. Yeah. You guys have your great analytics got you’re measuring everything. What is the Unchained revenue column thing.

00:03:11:08 – 00:03:30:11
Unknown
Right. And that’s kind of like the gap. But it’s awesome. As more things start happening on chain, it’s just a whole different recordkeeping system than traditional mobile app install. And on the flip side of it, I was the obvious leader at game attribution. You should just use apps layer for most of your mobile attribution, but then for this unchained part, you can actually get kind of the best of both worlds and combine the two data streams.

00:03:30:12 – 00:03:46:18
Unknown
Awesome. So I think we’re going to get fairly technical in this episode. We’re going to get granular. But before we get really granular, I want to get really, really high level. So 30,000 of you, how’s your segment doing with Adam? So with you how’s mobile going? Mobile’s good. Mobile good. I mean obviously the business side of it is impacted at the moment.

00:03:46:18 – 00:04:08:22
Unknown
Certainly on the gaming side, we’ve seen a ton of redundancies, a ton of problems, let’s say within gaming, within the ecosystem, privacy is obviously on the top of everyone’s minds at the moment, with Privacy Sandbox coming into effect. We’ve just had the first couple of waves of scan in the first couple of iterations of scan that people have had to deal with in practice, but it’s there.

00:04:08:22 – 00:04:29:02
Unknown
It’s it’s moving through awesome. You hear first, it’s there. Scan is still here. It’s there. We’re still working with it. It’s still functional ish. And then Antonio, much more hot topic of the news now Web3 is hot again. We’re back in a bull market. Yes. How’s Web3 ecosystem doing? Yeah. Broadly. I mean, the bull market seems like it’s back again.

00:04:29:02 – 00:04:43:06
Unknown
A lot of excitement. I recently asked one of our VC as you hey, how many of the portfolio companies are launching tokens this year? And the better question is, how many aren’t arches? Yeah, so there’s a lot of excitement there which it gives those games. Are those DApps like a lot more liquidity to do things like user acquisition.

00:04:43:09 – 00:04:58:18
Unknown
It is the second official year web for gaming. We’re heading into the second year of it, but I think you’re going to see a lot more games launching. From our experience, gaming is interesting. If you look at DeFi, by DeFi, I mean decentralized exchanges, you know, all the actions on chain, right? I mean, there’s a little bit off chain for like page views and whatnot.

00:04:58:19 – 00:05:14:02
Unknown
But in gaming, like you said, it’s the mullet, right? Where it’s a fairly conventional normie, mobile casual game. It just so happens you can mint an NFT and trade one, right? Right. And so there’s like two magical events which are important because like, it’s the thing that you own inside the game. And then the question becomes how do you enable that.

00:05:14:02 – 00:05:33:23
Unknown
Right. Like what threes. Everyone says this. That’s kind of cool. But it’s like we’re early. Like the wallet infrastructure on mobile is super early. Speaking of Apple, changes around the App Store and the fees is promising for crypto because it means you can monetize on chain without necessarily going to the App Store. We had an issue with a client who their wallet as a service provider, not naming names didn’t work out really well, so it was hard to write on chain.

00:05:34:05 – 00:05:50:03
Unknown
We’re still going through the growing pains, but you know, I think the excitement is still there. And you’re seeing games like parallel NFT trading game, which is like obviously a trading game like Magic The Gathering. You can NFT it and make it a super popular game. Like those obvious matches are started to happen. Gaming people are very smart about performance marketing.

00:05:50:03 – 00:06:08:11
Unknown
Their level of expectation is what they get out of apps like break, which is a pretty high bar, and then they come to the Web3 side and it’s like, oh, you know, we have these things called duty dashboards, which is a very basic way of like showing data. And so what spin tries to do is fill the gap of like, okay, if you were to build a sort of apps layer like product, but really focusing on the unchained part, what would that look like?

00:06:08:11 – 00:06:32:17
Unknown
How would you get those two gears to mesh? That’s really been the challenge for us for the past year. The investment wave is coming back. You’re saying? I think so, yeah, marketed as Web3 or are they now sort of marketing more as a gaming company, stepping away from Web3 and being more web 2.5, that kind of thing? I don’t know, I, I think broadly, yeah, people aren’t embarrassed of saying crypto or Web3 anymore or if they ever were.

00:06:32:19 – 00:06:54:09
Unknown
I’m not so sure. Specifically within gaming. Yeah, in gaming I see the games themselves at the forefront. I think we’re at the tail end of the era of games being named like crypto this or degeneracy. Watching this like that, that stuff is super cringe and very inside the bubble. So the stronger games that we see in our portfolio right now are just like we’re a game or might be some blockchain stuff if you get far enough in and care about that.

00:06:54:09 – 00:07:19:00
Unknown
And that’s what you really see, you want to use it. Yeah, yeah. And to that point about this kind of being in the second wave of gaming, that’s to me really the big differentiator is there are products now, there are products that you can play and exist on mainstream platforms. I think that’s kind of why we bring you guys together today is depending on where these teams come from, they would come from traditional gaming and it’s their first rodeo and blockchain and a lot to learn their or they’re coming from one of these Web3 native teams.

00:07:19:02 – 00:07:40:02
Unknown
And their source of truth has always been on chain. And they’re new to like these concepts of measurement and attribution. Often they’re first time publishing with Apple and Google in those stores. So both teams have a lot to learn about the other half for these hybrid games. That, at least, is our thesis an uptick that these hybrids are going to be this moment this next year or two of up the leading crop of game makes sense.

00:07:40:04 – 00:08:04:10
Unknown
Yeah. And at least a lot of interesting questions was probably Zander’s next question of like how do you do that? How do you measure across the off chain not to steal your thunder? Zander so, I mean, basically it’s with the pain point that the solution of combining these two address and how does it work? I think suddenly for mobile apps, you have the entire flow of mobile attribution and everything which has been doing for a very long time.

00:08:04:12 – 00:08:34:13
Unknown
You’re running campaigns on whichever network that you choose to run campaigns on. You see the clicks from those campaigns, you see the installs from those campaigns, and they’re all attributed to the specific campaign that the user clicked on. And that’s that’s always bread and butter. That’s what they’ve been doing for a very long time. But now with the blockchain side of stuff, you have the ability to sell the NFTs on the likes of OpenSea, that kind of thing, which I think gives a whole new dynamic to how it’s measured.

00:08:34:13 – 00:08:53:02
Unknown
And, you know, potentially somebody could buy an NFT or buy an asset for a game before they’ve even installed the game, which I’m sure probably happens now. Sure, because most games that I’ve seen have almost started a fundraising round with some of the assets and selling the assets off within the game. Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point, Adam.

00:08:53:02 – 00:09:09:12
Unknown
Right. That like look what two is never going away. Right. And people are going to be buying inventory on regular web Facebook, Google whatever. Like absolutely. We’ll have a healthy booming business for a very long time. But then Web3 introduces weirdnesses that just completely break with the web2 paradigm as we’ve known it. There’s no two ways about it.

00:09:09:12 – 00:09:28:06
Unknown
You’ve got to build like a different way of thinking. What you say is a perfect example, right? In which you’ve got what we call a Web3 event that happened on chain, which is actually the top of funnel event, right? Which is, oh, they meant to the NFT or they got the airdrop on them, by the way. They also clicked on the Facebook ad, which maybe you’re measuring through apps layer, and then the user converts and it’s like, well, so which is it?

00:09:28:08 – 00:09:46:15
Unknown
What do we credit? It would be misattribution to only attribute one or the other side of it, which is why you have to see both. That’s the where in your experience, where would that be attributed to effectively? Is that attributed to OpenSea? Because the user’s gone there. They’ve purchased the NFT from there and then subsequently they’ve installed the game.

00:09:46:17 – 00:09:59:18
Unknown
How did they get to OpenSea? That’s one of the mysteries of the universe, this code community that you created early on, potentially. Right. I mean, the answer, it depends what you ask. What do you look at? And you’re only gonna get the right answer if you look at both of the data is really the hard answer. And it’s not just that.

00:09:59:18 – 00:10:16:11
Unknown
I mean, the other thing to name examples, proof of play did a thing with doing bit, and it was a collaborative thing, by the way. It’s not hostile targeting, but if you had a certain NFT from Proof Play, they would actually drop you something on the boom bedside. Or maybe it was vice versa. Maybe I’m forgetting. But either way, you’ve got a special court of users, which is the people that we targeted this thing to.

00:10:16:12 – 00:10:32:11
Unknown
That’s a function of their outside behavior. And again, in Web2, there’s no analog for that. I wouldn’t be able to tell oh, the user did thing X and app Y, and I’m app Z. So I need to measure. It’s like doesn’t exist right. There doesn’t exist. Again they come at it with the expectation from the web2 world. But you just have to ingest it and present it in a different way.

00:10:32:11 – 00:10:49:01
Unknown
Look, there’s this other kind of final touch point which again came on chain. And in the ideal world and we’ve had this happen. The user doesn’t even know where the data came from. Like they don’t even know if it’s like a mobile event that got fired through fire or if it is an on chain thing. They just see it as a touchpoint, and the identity system kind of keeps it all in sync.

00:10:49:01 – 00:11:01:13
Unknown
And then they just see a funnel and like an all of this magically works on a good day, except that it doesn’t work that way. But like, that’s the idea. And I think that’s the world that games are going to be in. It’s like, yeah, it’s really just an implementation detail that I get it from the app Flier SDK by firing a certain event.

00:11:01:18 – 00:11:16:19
Unknown
Or did the user do the thing on chain and then Spindl and that’s it. It kind of doesn’t matter. At the end of the day. You just see it in the same format. You’re kind of completing the out of app event. Ultimately, if that’s what it is, it’s exactly right. So guys, I think what might be helpful here is maybe present like a use case.

00:11:16:21 – 00:11:39:13
Unknown
And let’s just talk it through like what the marketer experience would be for this use case. So I’m going to pick one of the games that we have in Soft Launch right now that I’m really excited about, which is Guild of Guardians by immutable. It’s a mobile, free to play game. So I have soft launch in Canada and like right now the free to play economy is online transactions passing to apps fire as expected.

00:11:39:13 – 00:11:55:09
Unknown
And then in coming weeks the Web3 economy will flip on as well. And we’ll have those transactions as well. So in this hypothetical situation, mobile free to play with both on chain and traditional free to play economy, maybe. Can you just talk us through okay, I’m a marketer. If I’m working on this game, what do I log into?

00:11:55:11 – 00:12:15:07
Unknown
How do I see the data connected to each other? How am I thinking about results in the use case such as this? And there’s a role that both data sets obviously play in this journey. So we bring the user in two traditional free to play mobile campaign. Yeah. What are they going to see in apps fire. And then Antonio maybe you can chime in with like where Spindl is taking the hand off.

00:12:15:07 – 00:12:36:08
Unknown
If in this use case that we’re using spin up this is really quite simple, you would see effectively all of the campaigns that you’re running, you would see the installs that you’ve had from those campaigns, just like you would on any mobile application. I think the difference here is the integration with Spindlr. At the moment, we don’t have data coming this way from Spindl.

00:12:36:08 – 00:12:55:17
Unknown
So all of the attribution data that we have, we pass through to Spindl and Spindl are then able to show that alongside the out of app events, if you like, just talking to the user journey. So the user comes in through an ad I traditional apps fire attribution occurs. And then to get the complete picture this is now passing through to Spindl.

00:12:55:19 – 00:13:11:10
Unknown
So Antonio now it’s Spindl. You’re inheriting that apps for your data in real time and talk about what comes next. Yeah. So the way you turn this on, if you’re an older client like literally go to your experience, there’s a thing called the partner marketplace which is on the left hand nav. And their apps has basically every partner company that matters.

00:13:11:10 – 00:13:29:07
Unknown
And that took like literally everybody’s name and to Spindl. Spindl appears. If you hit the talk to Spindl I’ll get an email. The other one is configure your spin integration. And basically it’s like a server to a server post back just to use a scary term of art for a second. And what that means is either we send SP, underscore NFT, underscore mint to APS wire.

00:13:29:11 – 00:13:45:16
Unknown
Right. And then that feeds into your app or feet or apps layer AF, underscore app, underscore, install, whatever the event is that happen, the mobile side gets fired into our side like a post back in the same way that you would potentially fire apps events to segment or to app 11 or anybody else in this whole data ecosystem that we’re all part of.

00:13:45:18 – 00:14:08:00
Unknown
And then again, you could see it inside Spindl. You’ll see like, oh, attributed user by ad network according to apps flier because again apps layer does all the mobile side of things. And then on our side you might see oh like here’s the actual on chain revenue by that channel we’re effectively glomming on to the apps flier attribution and saying, oh, by the way, this NFT revenue does correspond to just Facebook.

00:14:08:00 – 00:14:24:09
Unknown
Typical example app flier actually said this user came from Facebook. We said this user generated this much on chain revenue and together you have the full picture, right? That’s how the data comes together. And again, it could be either inside been a dashboard. It could potentially be inside Apps flier. Or if you’re a large gaming studio, it typically goes to your own buy back end.

00:14:24:11 – 00:14:41:12
Unknown
And then you can manage it however you want. There. Great. And on that last point, Antonio, you guys already have like an API available through spend or is that something in progress? If you want to take this merged data flow into their internal BI. Yeah, I mean it’s usually so much data that an API is to have. You usually just like an S3 bucket export.

00:14:41:12 – 00:14:57:13
Unknown
But you got it. We do whatever data exporting you need and very standard ways to do it. And then one last comment you might be wondering like how does it work on the implementation side? It’s very simple. Again, you either have the SDK which almost every game developer does because of course they do. And then in our case we do have a mobile SDK.

00:14:57:15 – 00:15:14:21
Unknown
Or is this very simple. Again this is like the magic of the blockchain vision. All apps like it’s going to need to do is agree on the user ID across the two users. And then you don’t need to. I mean, you can fire events and test if you want, but really all we need to do is sync on an ID, we read the blockchain apps flier, looks at what’s going on on mobile, and again on the back end it kind of magically joins.

00:15:14:21 – 00:15:33:05
Unknown
And then you can see that all the data in regards to buy and that kind of thing, if you’re exporting generally you would export from apps like you’d export from Spindl and then marry the two up within your BI platform. Yeah. Got it. Anthony, I want to kind of double back to that last point about the lack of a need to identify every on chain event.

00:15:33:05 – 00:15:51:18
Unknown
I think that’s quite important because to back up a little bit like our team uptake, we’ve been working at this intersection for a year or more, but we’ve been working with a lot of like duct tape solutions. So like one of our partners is like blockchain. And their main KPI is just the number of on chain transactions driven or the number of daily active wallets.

00:15:51:18 – 00:16:10:09
Unknown
It kind of varies, but it’s all based on on chain data. But we’re scaling them through. There are games, many of which are mobile. And so it’s this weird thing of like historically we’ve had to have the developers map like, hey, when you do the thing in your game that does a blockchain transaction, put in apps via vendor, put in an adjust event, whatever map they’re using.

00:16:10:11 – 00:16:28:09
Unknown
And so we have this hack together solution that’s proxying in the MMP data. And that’s okay. But there’s a few issues with it, one of which is to a Web3 native company that’s not a source of truth. It’s like, well, okay, I understand that the dashboard says that, but our data sources, the blockchain, this isn’t even coming from on chain.

00:16:28:09 – 00:16:51:02
Unknown
This is just coming from inside the game and something that’s mapped there. So it might seem like this topic is like really in the weeds. But I think this is extremely important for like a large segment of the games that are coming to market this year. I often get asked like, who’s your competition? And the reality on desktop, the competition is usually using something like amplitude or Mixpanel, and they literally fire the wallet address when they get it as like a custom event into the front end.

00:16:51:07 – 00:17:06:05
Unknown
And then if they’re really out there, they’ll try to do what we just said, which is like try to reproduce the blockchain like double entry bookkeeping, but then have the client side try to fire events, which, as we all know, is never really fully reliable. And it isn’t the system of record. And then they’ll run like a query on chain and then try to stitch it together.

00:17:06:05 – 00:17:23:13
Unknown
Something like you can sort of build a really rough hack together, but it never really works. And it’s always kind of a mess or like what you said, which is your fire wallet address is like a kid or something like the reality is, if the blockchain is system of record and like you’re actually taking value there, like that is literally how like a lot of user acquisition budgets are literally tokens.

00:17:23:14 – 00:17:36:18
Unknown
Like that is the system record. You need to index a system of record right index things in the system of record native to that ecosystem, if it’s mobile apps or if it’s on chain spend, I’ll run it that way and then make sure that the identity layer joining the two kind of works such that you’re actually looking at reality.

00:17:36:20 – 00:17:59:22
Unknown
I’m really interested how this data gets utilized. So obviously when you have an app install and then your calculating Roas or you’re calculating the lifetime value of the player, that kind of thing. The companies that you work with, incorporating the off chain, if the user goes and purchases it on OpenSea beforehand and then installs, are you incorporating that into their LTV or how does that work?

00:18:00:00 – 00:18:18:07
Unknown
In most projects? We talked to everyone Aspirationally wants to do that. No one is practically set up to do that yet. That’s at least what we see. Yeah, I mean, I think this in turn. So really sorry, is an intern like muddy the waters of LTV when you’re purely looking at user acquisition and the return on user acquisition?

00:18:18:10 – 00:18:37:15
Unknown
Well, I mean, it’s not clear about either, because on iOS you have scarcity. So it’s not like it is anywhere. There’s no where the data is perfect or across PC to desktop, but it’s more egregious in blockchain, right? Because like in theory, the blockchain is a common ledger. Like the data is there, just the data for so poor that it’s hard to actually index it in a way that makes it usable, which again, is Spindls challenge.

00:18:37:17 – 00:19:04:15
Unknown
But yeah, I mean, the short version is this some of the weirdness of web. It just doesn’t exist in Web2. Which is why like what you need a solutions will always be kind of a hack, which is I can see if my user did this other thing, even if I didn’t instrument the site like OpenSea, like we’re not firing pixels or anything on OpenSea, but if the user actually converted to it, we can still see that, you know, similarly, in a slightly more competitive vein, if I see that they’re using a competing app or a competing DeFi protocol or something, I can also see that it never understands those are kind of the ground rules.

00:19:04:17 – 00:19:20:23
Unknown
Also, other interesting things like we work with Waggy, right? Which is a big gaming guild and they work with axi. We measured their downstream lift, which is again a question like I was at Facebook, you can never ask a face for like, what is a lift that we generated for Walmart? It’s like, how would you even answer the question without even like working with them into it?

00:19:21:01 – 00:19:44:06
Unknown
Sorry. Yeah. In this case, in a very what’s called permissionless way, meaning we just go like waggy instruments, it’s own little questing side. It’s a mobile app. And they know like, okay, we drove whatever x percent of Axie Infinity revenue this month and they just know that. And so there’s a lot of new interesting measurement challenges in Web3 that again, you can’t solve in web2 the nature of it, but we’re only just getting to the point of enabling all the cool stuff that you’re talking about.

00:19:44:06 – 00:20:01:04
Unknown
Like, we’re not really there yet. Now for time. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. You mean you talked a little bit about Waggy? What are some of the other core use cases right now that you’re seeing? What are the results so far? You know, it’s funny when I find it’s been a like some games would be like most of the users that obviously games push the entire performance marketing market on, just like counting number of clients.

00:20:01:04 – 00:20:21:00
Unknown
DeFi and finance is actually a big research, I think, as the gaming oriented podcast. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, they’re much more natively on chain. Like we talk about web 2.5. There is no webpage for identifying like everything that matters is on chain because by definition. And so it’s much more pivoted there. Also, they just think about the world in a more what we call it gen or degenerate way, like they just think is Web3 first and web two as an afterthought, which I don’t think is a good thing.

00:20:21:00 – 00:20:38:07
Unknown
Like obviously web two is not going away, to be clear, but they just think about it much more natively like so they’ll do things like AirDrop rewards or NFT ments or referral programs where, you know, if Adam referred me and I generate $1,000 in fees, Adam makes 10% of that, an ongoing bit like there’s all this cool stuff you can do.

00:20:38:13 – 00:20:53:18
Unknown
And so in some ways they’re a little bit more naive about marketing. Like some of them wouldn’t even have known what Roas was before we start talking about it. On the other hand, they’re totally comfortable with coming up with like a CPA or rapture business model and like not even think about CPM or CPC because, like, it just doesn’t compute.

00:20:53:18 – 00:21:08:05
Unknown
Like I don’t even think about that. But again, they’re equipped with like, oh, but we do have a common transaction record we can all agree on. Right. And like they just they natively build it that way. And I think gaming is obviously much more sophisticated about web two marketing. But I think it’s a little slower to adopt, like all the weird features of Web3 that way.

00:21:08:09 – 00:21:29:06
Unknown
Do you think just because of the development time or high quality games and it’s not a two minute thing or a one year thing, or a two year thing to develop a good game takes a good couple of years and we haven’t had that length of time. Yeah, well it’s getting there. But you know, it’s probably that I think finding the right way to natively incorporate the blockchain might separate conversation.

00:21:29:06 – 00:21:43:09
Unknown
But there’s this unchained version of Twitter called Far Pasture. And they launched this feature called frames last Friday, which is a big deal in the crypto world. I don’t know how much I’m so in this world. I don’t even know how much outside people see it. But it’s super cool because it lets you do things in this like Twitter like experience in a very nested way.

00:21:43:09 – 00:22:00:05
Unknown
So you can run another app inside the app. Kind of like what Facebook tried doing with Open Graph ten years ago, which will you probably remember? It’s kind of that feeling, but the blockchain makes a lot easier in the sense that, you know, the blockchain solves identity and payment for you. I mean, not totally, but mostly in a way that it’s difficult in web two to actually stitches together.

00:22:00:07 – 00:22:15:12
Unknown
The cool thing about that, just to finish up the thought is that, like, you get to use the frame without really thinking about it, it all kind of works like I click on the frame and it all kind of works. And like, I don’t even understand fully like what’s going on in blockchain. But it just worked. And I think the challenge of gaming is figure out, like Web3 is, and to succeed.

00:22:15:18 – 00:22:28:19
Unknown
If you enable user to do cool things they can do on web two, and if the user doesn’t even realize they’re on the blockchain, like, I don’t know what happened, but somehow I take this weapon or property in this game and I use it in game B, and it all just kind of works. I don’t know why, but it all does.

00:22:28:22 – 00:22:55:23
Unknown
And I don’t even know what chain I’m on. But I don’t care because the game is cool, right? Like that. You need to that point. Do you think at the moment with some of these or I’m using this as a Q&A session, do you think some of the users have been turned off somewhat by some of the games that have been generated over the last year or so, because of the quantity aspect and the fact that they’re just there to generate revenue for not that had an impact to the potential market to most of the Web3 audience is not a games audience.

00:22:55:23 – 00:23:12:21
Unknown
It’s a different it’s like the Venn diagram of overlap is like almost nonexistent. And that’s like the uptick job is like, how do we push those, like diagrams to overlap in a way that they aren’t today? Are you agree with that? Yeah. We basically have like completely different stuff. If we’re going after the Web3 native segment, we’re after we’re going after gamers.

00:23:12:21 – 00:23:31:00
Unknown
And the way we make ads. I mean, we don’t even make ads when going after what’s true natives, we do more like organic growth hack kind of strategy is working with content creators and things like that for better, for worse. What three narratives is still a completely speculative segment into your question of like turning off gamers? Yeah, if you put that at the forefront.

00:23:31:02 – 00:23:50:01
Unknown
Absolutely. I would expect more often than not net negative based on the bad reputation, the crypto is deserved based on the percentage of bad actors that are being said. What we’re finding is these games where it’s just like, cool game first, just come in, play this fun game. We’re not even going to mention anything about crypto in the ad, in the marketing materials.

00:23:50:01 – 00:24:06:08
Unknown
And then as you come in on your user journey, maybe even in the first week, it could be like as you get deep into the ecosystem that there become options or even find it in the UI at some point, if it’s fact that you could go, I mean, whatever, whatever assets from the game. Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense.

00:24:06:10 – 00:24:20:19
Unknown
You craft a really rare item and you’re presented with an option of, would you like the ability to take this item into the marketplace, trade with other players? Like there’s a lot of more subtle ways we can do this. And that’s what we’re seeing in the more successful games in our portfolio right now is more of that kind of view.

00:24:20:19 – 00:24:39:05
Unknown
So it is coming back more towards the actual content of the game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let Web3 service the game, don’t build the game to service Web3. We had a really interesting conversation with the CEO of how do you and what’s coming out in the next month or so, where they basically took a skin the magic eat in marketplace and put it within their game.

00:24:39:10 – 00:24:58:02
Unknown
And so now you’re actually having like the full blockchain gaming experience from within a mobile app. I think it’s like a really, really interesting sort of hybrid use case. I think mostly people who play that game specifically homeland is like very, very focused on the deejaying crowd. But you can imagine a version of the experience where down the line you’re going, you play mobile game, you’re trading NFTs within mobile game, and you’re not even leaving them mode.

00:24:58:04 – 00:25:20:11
Unknown
I think that’s like a really interesting sort of place where we’re crossing the streams and really getting to the web. 2.5 more can. I wanted to pivot the conversation. So everything so far we’ve talked more from the buyer side of the marketing ecosystem, the teams making the games, the marketers buying the ad inventory. I’d love to get both of your opinions on the current state and opportunities on the supply side.

00:25:20:11 – 00:25:42:21
Unknown
And Web3 is role in that. So Antonio, maybe you can start here. What do you see like some of the early experiments and what opportunities do you think lie as far as like Web3 adding value to the sell side of ad inventory? A man, I wish there was a sell side really, but if we plug into a more I mean the basically side of be it’s slightly snarky, but I mean there basically isn’t one.

00:25:42:21 – 00:25:59:06
Unknown
I mean, there’s a few sort of Web3 ad networks, and I don’t want to call specific names, so they’ll seem like endorsements and they’re kind of okay, but it’s mostly web two ad tech with very Web3 native crypto publishers. I’m like, that’s it. Like it’s not actually Web3 native in the sense like, oh, we’re doing cool things with like, wallets.

00:25:59:06 – 00:26:14:23
Unknown
Like if you were trying to reimagine the Google stack, say, as an exercise and how you would rebuild it on chain, which we’ve run through that exercise many times, almost none of that. I mean, there’s a Sam in the hopper who works very early stage, but it’s like active places. They don’t exist. And in fact, that’s one of the biggest problems in what we work with.

00:26:14:23 – 00:26:31:06
Unknown
A lot of agencies uptake serotonin and few other is and there’s a major publisher problem like there’s a marketing budget there. And like you can segment the audience. I’d spend all I can say, you know, exactly the example. You said, oh, the guy who got the NFT and then covered here and this other thing, here’s an audience, 10,000 people go find like, where’s the go button?

00:26:31:06 – 00:26:48:15
Unknown
There is no go button in Web3 yet. There’s a few solutions like addressable and a few others. But you buy sort of what you inventory with Web3 targeting, kind of like a fully native Web3 ad network. It just unfortunately does not exist yet. And what are you guys seeing on the apps fireside as far as like inbound new ad networks?

00:26:48:15 – 00:27:12:04
Unknown
Like, are you seeing any that are even proclaiming to be either Web3 native or adding value from that web two components, or is it still too early days? Now, honestly, it’s the exactly what Antonio said. We’re not seeing much at all. Anybody that I’ve seen specifically doing user acquisition for blockchain is it seems to be very, very similar to the sort of PC and console marketing at the moment.

00:27:12:06 – 00:27:33:03
Unknown
Everything that I’ve seen, it’s very, sort of almost Wild West throwing some ads out and seeing what happens. It would be nice. Again, I know we’re not talking about PC and console, but it would be nice to start seeing network start. Take these other types of platforms up to see how they can start targeting on those. Well, why don’t we deviate and actually touch on that a little bit?

00:27:33:03 – 00:28:03:00
Unknown
Because I think the for me as a marketer, the ideal vision is Antonio, you refer to this earlier is that it can all kind of be an invisible right. And that I can see autoimmune apps failure. I think already for a while I’ve been trying to solve the pain of cross-platform people going from PC and mobile. And when you start thinking about two different economies with different ledgers and also cross-platform, are we just getting into like, yeah, we need years before we have that kind of completeness of user journey, or if that’s the ideal, is it?

00:28:03:00 – 00:28:22:00
Unknown
Players can play on any platform, make traditional free to play in-app native transactions and Web3. Where are there still known gaps like what is solved by, collaboration like apps from internal today and what is untried ground still to be solved? I mean, from my perspective, the major problem is that we just don’t have enough wallet aware publisher inventory.

00:28:22:00 – 00:28:38:03
Unknown
By wallet aware, I mean you’re aware of what the wallet is for that user. On the mobile side, you’re still just in for problems like signing into a wallet on mobile is just hard. Yeah. Like if you click on a Twitter ad, it goes to like the web kit thing inside Twitter, which of course I logged into. So you copy paste, you open in Chrome, then that opens another eye.

00:28:38:04 – 00:28:53:12
Unknown
It’s horrible. The conversion funnel just dies. And then even leaving that part aside, you just don’t have enough people in either the game or just what the publisher is for, which, you know, the wallet and ideally the wallet is great, right? In the sense that it avoids some of the privacy issues in the web2 side. Everyone knows that it’s public.

00:28:53:18 – 00:29:13:14
Unknown
You can disassociate yourself from the drop. That is very obvious in the wallet. You just stop using wallet or pick another wallet and that’s it. And then all that data is gone. You know it’s gone. There isn’t all this data running around that you don’t know about the app that actually work. So like wallet as a privacy thing is actually, I think super progressive and like a positive thing, but you need to have more of them for the user having the experience.

00:29:13:14 – 00:29:36:18
Unknown
Otherwise it’s very difficult to stitch things together. Yeah, I agree completely. And I think the targeting side of things I think will come when the numbers come. Like with PC and console, we’re at the very beginning of this journey really, and it’s probably back where mobile was sort of seven years ago. The need will come when the numbers start to emerge that people want to start running advertising at scale.

00:29:36:20 – 00:29:53:21
Unknown
That’s still growing at the moment. The need is still growing, but as soon as that starts to get more apparent and more people shouting about it, we’ll start to see that targeting coming in. I’m sure you see consoles really, really interesting segment for us. I mean, it’s a place where I see sort of the most investment from most of the measurement providers.

00:29:53:21 – 00:30:11:21
Unknown
I mean, we talked with game site recently, they’re seeing huge numbers. This, you know, PC was the fastest growing segment in gaming last year, which is crazy. It’s incredible. Yeah. And with the subtle shift to live service or not so subtle shift to live service, we’re starting to see more and more companies wanting to perform user acquisition on PC and console.

00:30:11:21 – 00:30:31:12
Unknown
So it’s a rapidly growing area. Yeah, it’s awesome. Cool. Well, let’s go to a final question. What’s do some wild and bold predictions? Where does this go? Call it one three years from now I think it’s growing. You know, we’ve had the first wave and when you sort of compare it to the.com bubble and stuff, you had the first wave that was all about investment and moneymaking.

00:30:31:14 – 00:30:54:07
Unknown
I mean, every wave is about moneymaking, obviously, but the games get better and better and better. The systems get better and better and better, and the knowledge gets better and better and better from sailing. That’s how everyone learns. And I do foresee over a period of time this becoming more and more and more as larger companies that we’ve heard of a lot about recently are starting to experiment with Web3.

00:30:54:07 – 00:31:14:20
Unknown
I think we will start to see more and more quality games coming through, and as we get more and more quality games, we’ll start to see the investment in the otherside, because those games can retain users, those games can monetize. So we’ll start seeing that cycle moving, and then as soon as that cycle starts moving, we’ll start to see the targeting coming in more.

00:31:14:20 – 00:31:31:19
Unknown
We’ll start to see that everything sort of rising from that point. Yeah. Thank you. I think that’s largely correct. We really did I though is like I mentioned earlier in the context of like forecasts and frames, you need to empower unique experiences you can’t have in web2 with Web3 and then make it such that the user doesn’t even realize they’re on chain, and then they’ll be incentivized to log in the buggy.

00:31:31:19 – 00:31:49:15
Unknown
And normally they won’t even have a self-custody wallet, which is fine. There’s no need for purity here. Once you have that, then the publishers will become more wallet aware, which will start the cycle. But Adam just sent it out, which is then it all just clicks, right? The targeting, the attribution, the payment. Publishers will want to get paid for ads or for user acquisition inside their apps.

00:31:49:21 – 00:32:06:18
Unknown
Like crypto audiences can be very high LTV like some of these NFTs are expensive, right? And if you have a higher LTV, you have a higher calc, which pleases publishers like this should actually work once you’ve got the flywheel spinning, I think you don’t have the consumer in the publisher incentive to be kind of really natively on chain yet, or they’re missing the intro to even do it.

00:32:06:18 – 00:32:24:20
Unknown
Yeah, I think once you have that, things are going to go wash very quickly. I mean, we’re at a point where these two worlds emerging and hence the partnership that we’ve moved into and how we’re doing this, I think it is just this is the start of these two very different worlds merging. And we will start to see this producing fruit at some point.

00:32:24:23 – 00:32:41:09
Unknown
Yeah, I’m waiting for the regular Web3. And I think that’s going to be the really big catalyst. We need some game that’s just going 100%. You have to be there. On that note, Zander, and coming back to kind of Adam’s initial description of the state of mobile, it’s here. Like that’s kind of how I describe it. Twitter, to put it less kindly, it’s stagnant.

00:32:41:13 – 00:33:10:21
Unknown
Like there’s been a real lack of innovation in mobile games. And I think we’re starting to see that in the revenues for the segment overall. Yeah. My prediction is that I think we’re going to see within the next 12 months the first, web 2.5 mobile free to play with Web3 economy with, you know, seven figure mewe hit the market and and this segment of mobile free to play gaming is so hungry for something new to copy that.

00:33:10:21 – 00:33:34:03
Unknown
I think once we have that proof of concept, everyone’s going to pile in and then hopefully the teams says just spend all in apps player and can do the uptake that are investing in this messy period to drive solutions for it. We’ll be able to pave the way for that new crop of games because yeah, just people still copying Clash Royale like it’s like 2016 and we’ve got to move beyond that in game design to capture player attention.

00:33:34:03 – 00:33:53:13
Unknown
And Web3 is one of the toolsets that I think can really facilitate that. Yeah. Pretty awesome. Well, it’s an exciting time. Yeah. Awesome. Well we’re going to wrap it there for now. Thank you both for joining us again Adam. Antonio, if someone wants to get Ahold of each of you, where can they do that for me? LinkedIn’s probably the easiest place, right for me.

00:33:53:13 – 00:34:09:18
Unknown
I’m that guy on Twitter. So Antonio GM or hit us up on our Twitter account as well. Spindl spy India on. So cool. Thanks so much, Anthony to Adam for making the time today. We are personally really excited to kick the tires of this new partnership. See the value you can bring to some of the games here at uptick.

00:34:09:20 – 00:34:26:00
Unknown
Speaking of uptick, we brought the podcast today. Probably already know that here at uptick we do all things to help games grow. And we try to be at the forefront of wherever games are growing. So this is PC, mobile, Web3, web five web six. Wherever games are going, we try to be there helping these teams to scale their games profitably.

00:34:26:00 – 00:34:56:13
Unknown
So if you’re building a cool game, regardless of platform and technology, we’d love to meet you and see how we can help. You can reach us at our website. That’s Upptic.com. Talk soon.