Weekly Kickoff, April 12, 2021
If we create a permissionless metaverse, we will enjoy the most creativity, experiences and economic opportunities for everyone. If this excites you (or confuses you, or worries you), then check out my deep-dive on the subject here: The Permissionless Metaverse.
Quote of the Week
Chinese investors don’t trust the US legal system, and certainly not vice versa, but both will invest in a smart contract on Ethereum
— Balaji Srinivasan on the Tim Ferris show.
Graph of the Week
Mobile gaming grew by 25% last quarter:
Weirdest/Greatest Game I spent time on this week
Have you not tried out AI Dungeon yet? It’s an impressive display of what’s happening with artificial intelligence in general, and GPT-3 in particular. We’re going to see both AI-driven NPCs and storytelling in the future, as well as AI-as-creative-scaffolding for designers.
The following is a text snippet of some of the random stuff I entered and how it worked with what I told it:
Comprehensive Deck on the 2020 M&E landscape
Check out the complete SlideShare deck of covering all facets of the media and entertainment industries (of which games is but one) impressive work by Maxime Eyraud.
Reflections and Observations
There sure was a lot to think about this week:
- Neuralink: I saw a monkey play Pong with its mind.
- Play Ventures raised $135M to invest in games.
- The world finally has a decent brewing game.
- Are we in the simulation or building the first one? Will it be sims all the way down?
- The Mortal Kombat movie looks hella fun.
- E3 will be free and online-only.
- Creating voxels via a neural net that looks at photos is getting better.
- Celebrated the work of Hidden Palace to archive old games.
- Enjoyed Allen Henna’s great writeup comparing most of the current NFT marketplaces (not including the gaming-specific ones like Wax AtomicHub).
- Eric Seufert asks whether Clubhouse growth has reversed and whether they can navigate the next stage.
- The BitcloutPulse Wallet Explore lets you easily see who owns what on Bitclout.
- Authentic Artists wants to leverage AI to help create generative music that creators can bring into their games.
- Atari is splitting into separate blockchain vs. gaming divisions.
- Nexus.gg is making it possible for streamers to sell in-game items from inside the streams.
- Rumors spread of Twitter offering $4B for Clubhouse.
- Path of Exile (which isn’t exactly new) grew 17% last year. Roguelikes ftw!
- Grid Esports raised $10M for their data platform for games (one of the big applications is online wagering).
- Got excited about everything Bioware is doing with the Mass Effect remaster.
- Enjin Coin ($ENJ) started trading on Coinbase.
- The Sandbox, a metaverse where you can own land, NFTs and build games, opened up a marketplace.
- A French videogame streamer used the Avalanche ($AVAX) to mint 300K NFTs for his followers (it’s a proof-of-stake, high-throughput blockchain).
- A Chinese game studio you probably haven’t heard of surpassed $10B in revenue last year.
- Allen Henna shared his views on the NFTs he had collected, and why.
- The WhaleShark NFT portfolio was audited, revealing its top holdings: NBA Top shots (much larger than all the others) along with Makesplace, Gods Unchained, Cryptovoxels, SuperRare, the Sandbox and Joy.world.
- Epic has “lost” (better word might be “invested”) $300M in Epic Store exclusives.
- “People like scarcity — a lot. Owning something scarce makes one feel unique, and signals success and worthiness as a potential mate.” From an article comparing NFTs to David Bowie and the Bowie Bonds.
- Age of Empires IV sounds awesome. Microsoft should now be regarded as much as a videogame company as anything else.
- Kongregate announced that they’ll be doing their own first-party idle games. In the past they had a pretty big hand in titles like Adventure Capitalist.
- Clubhouse says they need another “couple months” to get an Android version out. Will this allow competing products from Discord, Facebook and Twitter to displace them?
- Gary Vaynerchuck schools the world on what the hell an NFT is.
- NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3060, which will deliver 10X the raytracing performance.
- First impressions of the Diablo 2 remaster are encouraging.
- “The true final frontier is Time.” Sounds a bit like the opening monologue to Star Trek Timelines, which I had a hand in. I’m excited that my friend John de Lancie is coming to Star Trek Picard.
Rec Room Party!
On Friday at 6PM ET, we’re celebrating ten weeks of the Game Industry club on Clubhouse in Rec Room. If you haven’t had an opportunity to try Rec Room yet, then give it a try and see for yourself a bit of what the metaverse looks like, and then join us during the party.
To get involved or attend our event, just join the Game Industry Cocktail Hour Discord server and check out the #party-planning channel.
