Metaverse, Gaming, and Web3: Exploring “The Sandbox”

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse.

Sébastien Borget:

Indeed, to make interoperability happen, you need a decentralized database, that is a blockchain that no single party can own, to represent the ownership of the digital asset. And you need open standard formats.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together. Hosted by Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and Marc Petit from Epic Games.

Marc Petit:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to our show, Building the Open Metaverse, the podcast where technologists share their insight on how the community is building the metaverse together. Hello, I'm Marc Petit from Epic Games and my cohost is Patrick Cozzi from Cesium. Patrick. How are you today?

Patrick Cozzi:

Hey, Marc. Hi, everybody. I'm doing great. I'm joining live from Cape May, South Jersey.

Marc Petit:

Oh, nice. In your place. And today, Patrick, we're venturing into new territory. We've been actually waiting to talk about Web3, crypto, NFTs. And personally, I don't know how you feel, but I still have a lot to learn about these new concepts, so I very, very much look forward to the conversation today.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yes, yes. I'm a novice as well.

Marc Petit:

Good, and our guest is an expert in the field. We're so lucky to have somebody at the forefront of the crypto gaming revolution. Please welcome Sébastien Borget to the show. Sebastian, welcome.

Sébastien Borget:

Thank you, Marc. Thank you Patrick. Glad to be here with you today.

Marc Petit:

Sebastian, you co-founded a mobile game studio in 2011 as the CEO with Arthur Madrid. And you released the first title, The Sandbox in 2012. That was 10 years ago. We're going to talk a lot about the Sandbox today, but before we talk about the game, please tell us in your own words, your journey to the metaverse.

Sébastien Borget:

Yes, 10 years flew really by really fast, we always had that intention to use new technology and make it accessible to anyone. And through that, allow players to become creators. Literally, anyone could become a creator of a video game. It started in 2011 by launching The Sandbox back then on mobile on iOS and Android, allowing people just to create 2D pixelated world just by the touch of their finger. And share their creation to an online gallery where other users or the player could discover, play and engage of it.

Sébastien Borget:

It grew into a massive success. Rapidly, we got 40 million installs. Over time, 70 million creations made by the community. But ultimately, we also saw some challenges. One of them was the fact that on the actual platform, Sandbox, was available, we couldn't reward creator for the content they brought to the game beyond just social recognition and featuring their content. There was no way for us to share any of the revenue that their contribution, the time they spent, the content they built led towards the overall game. So that, some point, we were losing our top creators and that became a challenge.

Sébastien Borget:

Towards the 2017 actually, we kept exploring as entrepreneur to new technology. We found more about blockchain and Bitcoin in general. And we found the first crypto game called CryptoKitties with NFTs. That game was pretty simple, but had something unique, the possibility for users to buy those virtual cats, not just only from the developer, but directly on any marketplace. And we found that was interesting and potentially could solve our issue if we just enable anyone to make their own NFTs. And from there, be able to sell their content, their creation as NFTs on the marketplace, through monetizing their content fully and using it with our game maker.

Sébastien Borget:

That's when we typically started to work on a new version of Sandbox, toward beginning of 2018. This time as a full platform on PC, first match after and future mobile as well. 3D multiplayer and leveraging this technology underneath blockchain and NFT. Anyone could make 3D assets, games, and own them, transfer them to other users, monitor them the way they want.

Sébastien Borget:

Today, The Sandbox is being considered one of the leading decentralized metaverse, with this idea of allowing anyone to own their content, owning their identities or digital assets, their currency, play with it. And we've been able to bring over 300 major brands from entertainment, gaming, movie, celebrities, music, artists, et cetera, alongside a thriving ecosystem of thousands of artists and hundreds of studios creating on the platform.

Marc Petit:

Well, that sounds quite impressive and quite a big momentum. And so, it all started with the mobile game studio, right?

Sébastien Borget:

Exactly right. That's our background is in gaming, our heart is in gaming. But definitely, Sandbox is becoming much more than gaming today.

Marc Petit:

Can you speak to the technology foundation? How does it differ from a regular game? What are the kind of stack that you've been using there?

Sébastien Borget:

Absolutely. First, the metaverse in general will always be a technology challenge. What technology allows is really going to be really the limit to the imagination, the limit to the creatives. We're always exploring like how we can push forward those limits. On one side, you have the game engine and the game maker of Sandbox that is built on top of Unity at the moment, which enables to create experiences, games, adventure, story on a no-code approach. Literally, anyone can be a creator within minutes, because there's no specific skills. It's just drag and drop. You put assets, give them behaviors, like an enemy, a platform, a door, et cetera. And you can offer all kind of games already from there.

Sébastien Borget:

But on top of that, there is also all the Web 3.0 components of the Sandbox platform that include a dashboard, a marketplace, a map that are accessible on web and mobile. And also, all the blockchain components, where to enable users to truly own the digital asset we had to deploy something called smart contract over a blockchain that enables to tokenize the content, the 3D assets on this blockchain and hence, allow users who connect with a wallet. In Web 3.0 an account is actually a wallet. And that wallet can actually be used to connect across multiple decentralized applications.

Sébastien Borget:

You as a user, own your data and your identity across those different applications, not only one of the application alone. And we have co-created one of the standard on the Ethereum blockchain called ERC-1155, to facilitate a minting of token at scale, having thousands of game items with a fraction of the cost that we used to take before.

Sébastien Borget:

And we're in a process of migrating to a layer two blockchain, which is Polygon, which is more ecofriendly and efficient. I don't know if I should deep dive into all the aspects, but think of it like it wouldn't consume more energies than sending an email to actually interact with a blockchain like Polygon. And this is becoming one of the mainstream within the sector of the gaming eco.

Patrick Cozzi:

Sebastian, what do you think about the web as a platform, especially with WebAssembly becoming more mature and WebGPU becoming ready to go. Do you think you'll ever deploy on the web?

Sébastien Borget:

We're definitely seeing the open metaverse as this myriad of virtual worlds. Some of them are VR-based. Some of them are web-based. Sandbox choose to be desktop-based because the quality of the three Cs, the characters, the control, and the camera is, as of today, still much better in terms of user experience with a native client on PC, Mac ,or mobile than on web. WebASM and WebGPU, specifically with Unity Engine are not fully supported yet. And we are seeing performance maybe in the range of one third of what they could be. And that is not sufficient we think.

Sébastien Borget:

Users have to install the game client or the game maker to access the metaverse, which is little bit more friction. But the possibilities behind in terms of gameplay interaction, a visual effect, in immersion are much greater. And we believe that it's more important at the moment to wow users with the possibilities that the metaverse is going to use, because it's still too basic what can be achieved on the web based.

Sébastien Borget:

And that might evolve. Technology just five years ago, nobody would be thinking being able to play high quality games or even casual games in browsers. Definitely, that will facilitate access to users if it's web native and renders at the same speed and with same possibility multiplayer-wise and gameplay-wise than native clients.

Marc Petit:

Sebastian, you just used one of our favorite terms, which is open metaverse. Can you put some qualifier? What makes the Sandbox open? What's your definition of the open metaverse?

Sébastien Borget:

Our definition is really this idea that the metaverse is going to be this myriad of virtual worlds, where users can access through an avatar, a free representation of themselves. And through an avatar, they can access, interact, engage with more social, more immersive, more fun, more creative experiences.

Sébastien Borget:

There is really this notion that, unlike what we've seen before with certain virtual world, like Second Life existed, world Warcraft existed, Minecraft, Roblox, and so on, the users are not actually locked into one single platform. Their account, their identity, all the content they created, all the experience they accumulated are actually tokens on the blockchain that they can access through their wallet and transfer from one virtual world to another.

Sébastien Borget:

That means really, users can be free to move from one application to another, transfer their data between users, or even sell them on marketplaces without having to ask the permission from the platform where the content were originally created from. But that's even more than that, the open metaverse.

Sébastien Borget:

It's also the idea that, not only you can take your content outside, but you can use any content from outside into the platform. This is called interoperability, meaning like, assets are not necessarily designed from one game, could be used into another game and gain that extra utility, and then potentially that extra value thanks to that. Typically, for avatars, it's one of the simplest and most natural use cases. The avatar is your identity, represent your character, and you can use accumulate experience across multiple worlds, experiences and much platform and use it. So, you do not lose all the content you accumulated, all the experience you accumulated as you stop playing on one platform, et cetera. The value goes back to the users, rather than being captured only by the platform. And it's even more true in the case of user generated contents. People dedicate hours, days, sometimes years of their life to create amazing thing with content.

Sébastien Borget:

And we want really unleash the creator economy and through the open metaverse, enable it to thrive, create a whole new digital economy and millions of jobs that are not necessarily locked onto one single platform operator, like Web2 currently is. In Sandbox being open goes indeed, like you create content in Sandbox, it can be used outside of Sandbox. You have content outside of Sandbox, it can be displayed, think of figure art, et cetera. But it can also, you take your avatar. Maybe it's just 2D made, like most NFTs are today, and they become 3D playable characters. So, we give a new representation of that same NFT that is a representation of your ownership of an asset, and that representation as your avatar can do so much more things. You can use it to interact with other users, socialize, dance, express yourself. Then you can use a game maker, a no-code software to start creating world, experiences, places where our characters can interact. This is a great example.

Patrick Cozzi:

So, Sebastian, look, we love your passion around interoperability and agree that's going to be a cornerstone of the open metaverse, and it comes up on pretty much every episode. So, I mean, it sounds like today, The Sandbox Game Maker can import and export. And you talked a little bit on the 2D side, I'm curious for 3D assets, are you using any open formats like USD or glTF?

Sébastien Borget:

I think, but I'm really glad that interoperability comes on every of the episode. That means people are really thinking to it. And if they're thinking, there is already a desire to make it happen. So, indeed, to make interoperability happen, you need a decentralized database, that is a blockchain that no single party can own, to represent the ownership of the digital asset. And you need open standard formats, like in 3D five, for example, you have Vox, you have OBG, you have glTF, which are pretty much standard across the overall industry, and then can be used, imported, exported, and represented across multiple worlds. Do I understand USD as like the currency, the US dollar?

Marc Petit:

No. It's that Pixar file format that is being heavily used to represent scenes, called Universal Scene Description. It's one of those emerging standards.

Sébastien Borget:

Okay. Because I need to explore more, indeed.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, yeah. So, you said people can import any content into Game Maker, so what about the economics behind this interoperability? I mean, you say the platform allows people to truly own and monetize their content, so if I make a game in The Sandbox, or let's take an asset, but ultimately my creation is going to be an experience. It's going to be like a fully simulated interactive mini-game. Actually, I played with your Game Maker and it's relatively easy to effectively to do those things. So, how do I move that to another platform? Because for me, my son happens to be on The Sandbox, but my cousin is on Roblox. So, do you see a path, both technically and economically that we could actually move experiences and actions, experiences across platforms when they are Web3 enabled, of course? So, what's the economics behind that?

Sébastien Borget:

Yeah. Let's tackle the two question, maybe separately. What is the economics of adding more utility and interoperability to a digital asset? Let's say you buy a sword in a game. You play for a couple of hours, sometimes more using that sword to give you certain benefits into the one game it was originally created from. But well, at some point, there is no replay ability. You're not going to come back and play again. Or maybe you will lose interest for that sword and use another one, which you see the attributes are better. Well, right now, in most games, you cannot even sell that sword. There's not a single marketplace where you could do so to other users. And well, if there, it's Web2 centralized, so it's only controlled by the developer and you have limited access to the distribution, to which such I said, can be bought and sold.

Sébastien Borget:

In Web3, it could be sold on any market, not only the one from the developer, but also any. Think of it like the EBay, the Craiglist, and so on of the world, focus on digital asset, which give access to more distribution for the content and can also become a user acquisition channel. Because somehow, if a new user discover a great looking sword with certain characteristics, he might be tempted to go and come and play into the game. There's already this possibility. The second aspect I think is also interesting is like, what if that sword actually could, maybe you already consume in the ways utility into that first game, but other games could actually be offering extra utility to those holders of that sword by saying like, "Hey, you already start in a certain level of experience into my game, or that sword turns into a jar or another content into my experience."

Sébastien Borget:

Again, it's a way to drive on the one side, acquiring targeted users based on the NFTs they own. And on the other side for the owners, to gain more utility for their digital asset and potentially more value. Because suddenly, that digital asset is no longer constrained to one game or one environment, but could be used into multiple. In the real world, when I buy a fork, when I buy a book, when I buy shoes, I'm not limited to use that into a very limited spectrum. I can use it just anywhere I want, the way I want. I can resell it where I want, why should it be different into the digital world? I think that's the key underlying idea and that technologies lose. And I hope more and more actors in the space will embrace by using these open standards.

Sébastien Borget:

And I think we're already definitely seeing, being in Sandbox, having those collection of NFTs, most of them profile pictures becoming avatars that can connect socializing to a virtual world. And then use those as a gateway to access special experience, creating a community led world and environment, is already very beneficial to those. And hence, it supports also economic enterprise. Because with NFTs, the digital asset on the blockchain, you have this notion of digital scarcity as well. What happens when a digital asset that is scarce actually has a growing amount of users who want to buy it because it has multiple utility and it's cool to use it across multiple places? While there is a decreasing number of people who want to sell it because they also use it, usually that drives the economics to what the value of that digital asset could increase.

Sébastien Borget:

It's not guaranteed that all digital asset, all NFT will be valuable of some sort, but it opens new possibilities, both creatively and economically that benefit the most to the creator of those assets. Because thanks to the decentralization and the transaction fee on the secondary market, the creator of those digital assets can earn up to 95% or 100% of the revenue from the content they sell, rather than the typical 70 or 50% that we've seen before in the industry.

Marc Petit:

Because if you develop a game, I mean, you are in the digital content. I mean, the analogy is like a restaurant, your business selling food. If people start to bring their own food in your restaurant, you still would want to have... If you bring your bottle of wine to the restaurant, you have a corking fee. So, how does the sharing of value happen in your opinion between the platform, the content that is created, and the experience because as you said, utilities, because I can do something cool with my content. So, the game, the people, the person who did the experience, so how do we share the goodness between the platform, the experience creator, and the content creator in your opinion, what's your vision there?

Sébastien Borget:

I think definitely anyone should benefit. There is really nothing to lose to actually decentralize your content and give ownership to players. We call it player owned economies. It can be on easy assets, can be the whole economy of it. If I'm an experience creator, I define the rules of the games, the game play of the game. And I can define if I want, or I don't want to enable that interoperability. Right now, interoperability, it's still an on demand process, where every developer or experience creator has to build for it, has to work for a new representation, or new utility for the external asset that he wants to integrate. And what's the benefit? There is a trade off. There is a trade off between selling my own content right away. Maybe that can be useful and you will generate a certain amount of revenue.

Sébastien Borget:

And, or, so it's not one of the other, by the way, it's multiple option, and also offering to external holders, which I know because we can see on their wallet that they have certain NFTs, they fit my profile, they own a certain amount of cryptocurrency. All of that is being transparent. I want to attract to my game, so I'm going to offer them utility. It's a lot about also the mindset of giving value to the user, rather than trying to extract value right from the beginning. That also, I think change a lot between an open metaverse and the more traditional virtual world. By utilizing other external content, we're finally avoiding this content treadmill that's been driving for so long, the video game industry as well, and where developers only think like, "I need to sell new content to keep making revenue."

Sébastien Borget:

I don't think that's a sustainable model. It's mostly telling users, "Buy this. Use it one week, one month. And then get rid of it because even myself as a developer, I'm not going to give you more utility of value or use case for it." Whereas if you agree from the beginning that you have scarce digital asset and with the overall Web3 community you want to attract users and increase value for the older assets, you're definitely changing your mindset as well and optimizing for earning through the secondary transaction that they arrive as a percentage of the price that two users are charging with each other’s NFTs.

Sébastien Borget:

And if the price raise, if the value rise, the percentage you earn as a developer also increase. And very often you earn more through the secondary transaction because the value of the item has increased over time through the demand you created through the utility you provided than the initial cost at which you sell. So it's also beneficial for you as a creator to add utility and grow the value of those assets for your users.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah. I think that secondary sales still benefiting the original creators is very attractive. And by the way, that was the first time I've ever heard the phrase content treadmill. And I think that's really great. And that's something that we're hoping the metaverse helps solve by empowering so many creators. So Sébastien, as I said, I'm a total novice in this area. So I want to ask you a 101 question. So I read with Sandbox that the blockchain part happens behind the scenes, powering the play-to-earn potential to earn revenue while having fun. Can you explain to us what play-to-earn means in the various ways that players can make money on your platform?

Sébastien Borget:

Absolutely. And we like to use the terminology “play and earn” those days more than “play-to-earn,” because it's really opening the possibility as rewarding users for their engagement and activities, rather than giving just the only goal of playing to earn and not enjoying and having fun, et cetera. In a case of Sandbox, play and earn actually covers so many different activities because Sandbox is a UGC platform so on one side, you have all the creator economy by spending time and using your skills to create 3D assets or experiences and selling them on the marketplace. You already can earn a revenue through deriving an activity, a revenue from that activity.

Sébastien Borget:

But what's new? And what most players in the world are not yet familiar with is this idea of also now that you are engaging and spending time in games where through your actions; completing quests or being present in a social event, dancing with others, et cetera, you earn rewards, which are tokens on the blockchain, whether they are NFTs or they are actual cryptocurrencies. Those tokens can be traded, can be transferred to users, can be sold on the marketplace. And again, a revenue can be derived.

Sébastien Borget:

So in a way, by spending time, not just being the best player in the world like we've seen before, but just being a regular player, completing your mission on a daily basis or what, you accumulate, you earn that other potential value if you sell them so you can derive that revenue source. And the kind of activities you will see in the play-to-earn in the metaverse will be so diverse. You can attend a virtual concert and earn a reward. You can actually learn. And we are already seeing a lot of education around people using The Sandbox as an educative tool to teach new skills. We're also seeing art galleries, museums, dance clubs, et cetera.

Sébastien Borget:

So I feel in a way it's a great approach to finally also make people realize the time they spent into game, they still can enjoy, they can have fun, et cetera, but it's also considered add value. And why is it valuable? Because you do not want to enter a virtual world which is empty, where there's literally nobody, no other users. So your single presence make that world more compelling already into a multiplayer game. And I feel it's natural that creators reward their users for that presence in the form of NFTs.

Marc Petit:

Well, thank you, Sébastien. I mean, that's fascinating because we look at the current web platform where users are a passive judgment tool. You watch stuff and you say like/dislike. So what I understand here is that we always say the metaverse is going to be a place when you're actively engaged into the world and it's participative. Because the problem with the current platform is people spy on you to try to push advertising that you don't want. So is that rewarding engagement an alternative for the fundamental economics of the platform to make sure that we don't have to do all of the data collection and all of that observation of behaviors to push advertising? Could this be an alternative for the advertising industry?

Sébastien Borget:

We really want to build the metaverse as an experiential place, not a transactional place at first. And that means everyone entering the metaverse and getting experience should think first and foremost that let's be creative. Let's use those new possibilities of technology to build experiences that are not seen before and that are not necessarily always only revenue driven. Because you use that as an ability to engage with your fans, to be closer to them, and to drive value differently as well.

Sébastien Borget:

There is no data collection because there's no... The data is actually owned by the users themselves through their wallet. They own their individual assets. They own their items. They can take that content any time they want outside of the different game they used to play. And we do not want... And again, the underneath approach of “play and earn” is very different. We are no longer in a business model where indeed we only monetize, I don't know, 1%, 3% of the users and we have to find ways to monetize all the rest. And to do that, we have to target them with advertisements. So to target them with advertisements, we have to actually track their behaviors. And so the platform ultimately ends up collecting data to sell that data to advertisers who will try to lure users into downloading your app.

Sébastien Borget:

And hence it's bad for the developers because most of the revenue ends up back into spending on the platform to acquire users. It's bad for the user experience ultimately because frankly speaking, 99% of people do not enjoy watching ads, which are being served to them. And I think there's much better approach and alternative that Web3 and community empowerment have so far shown us.

Marc Petit:

I mean, that makes a lot of sense. So I know The Sandbox also you've been building and selling virtual lands. And I saw people, companies, and even countries buying virtual lands. So how do you explain that and how do you make this sustainable because anybody can create virtual land potentially? So what's the value right there for these people?

Sébastien Borget:

It's a very relevant question. Back to my definition, the metaverse will be a myriad of worlds. Those world will have maybe finite number of land or infinite number of land. So overall consider there will be an infinite number of land that can be created by anybody. So how do you offer value when you are a world like Sandbox with only 166 or 164 lands? And our approach is by driving value for the possibilities that those lands enable you. We see ourself as somehow the virtual maritime, the virtual Paris, virtual Tokyo, Hong Kong, a place, metropolis, where there will be 24/7 entertainment for users who come and enter with their avatar. They can have fun. They can attend a virtual concert, they can learn, they can visit an art gallery, a museum, go to a club. They will find some of their favorite brand and IP. We did not touch so much, but Sandbox has brought already more than 300 big brands, including Adidas, Warner Music, Ubisoft, Walking Dead, Gucci, and numerous others.

Sébastien Borget:

Global brands as well. We're very attached that no matter where you are in the world, there will be a brand that is relevant culturally for you. So we spend a lot of time to attract Japanese brands, Korean brands, the Korean football league, and SM Entertainment, which is one of the leading K-pop labels there, but also more local artists and so on. So by having this combination into a world and suddenly you could become the virtual neighbor of Snoop Dogg or wherever you buy a land within a certain radius where there's always a lot of cool communities, et cetera. It feels like it's going to be a vibrant place where there's always something to do, to discover, and for people to enjoy. And that's mostly what we are trying to achieve here at Sandbox.

Marc Petit:

So you mentioned brands. So why are brands coming to your platform? What do they value?

Sébastien Borget:

So I believe brands are really seeing Sandbox as a creative space, where they can leverage our community and enable owning the land and offering to their community official NFTs, allowing their fans to mix, to remix the content and expand overall the universe. But they also use the possibility of having NFTs, some sort of a ticket that can give access to even more VIP experiences to the order of those virtual tickets and also reward the users for their engagement. And again, back to this idea of “play and earn.” If as a user, I choose to spend time in a land of a brand and I earn NFTs through that, I feel my time is being rewarded for that. And it creates a new, much closer relationship between fans or loyal users and brands. Typically, it was great with music artists, for example, or sport club, but also with gaming brands as well.

Marc Petit:

Can you give us an order of magnitude? The size of your communities? How many people are on the sandbox. What's the audience over there?

Sébastien Borget:

So in March, when we launched the first, the second alpha season and keep in mind that Sandbox is still a platform that is in beta stage, we actually haven't fully launched to the public. We released time-limited events when users can enjoy experiences with avatars. And in March, we had about 350,000 users over the month that come with an avatar, engage and earn rewards, earn token as well, since we distributed over 10 million Sand tokens by then. So I know it's definitely small in comparison to like the numbers we are seeing in traditional mobile and PC game, but we are building progressively that knowhow that education, what true ownership means to them. And I'm very optimistic that we'll keep growing and reach more and more millions of users over time.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, no, you have to start somewhere. I mean, it always takes time, right?

Sébastien Borget:

Yes. And when think Web3, it's actually pretty big. We have more than 2.7, 2.8 million registered wallets while there might be at most something like a hundred million wallets of gamers in blockchain gaming, so that means Sandbox represents a significant part of them already. That's because Sandbox adds value to all the projects into the ecosystem. That's also our project being open. Like how any project having a community can use a virtual world to give extra ways to engage with their community while they still keep building their own core game play, et cetera.

Patrick Cozzi:

So, Sebastian, I was hoping to change gears a little bit. I want to talk about the tech industry's been a wild ride, right? If you look at most of last year, the public market was booming there's a lot of M and A activity, a lot of private investing than more recently. The NASDAQ is in a bear market and crypto hasn't been spared either. So, we're curious if you think we're seeing a crypto crash? What you see ahead for Sandbox and crypto in general.

Sébastien Borget:

Well, blockchain and crypto at the end of the day is technology. And like most of the technology value over the NASDAQ have been, well, seeing a strong correction. So like kind of expected here that like that makes no exception. However, I'm still, I've been building The Sandbox using this blockchain technology already since the end of 2017. Back then there was already what is called this winter in technology where the market overall and the tech value were not that high. And that allows like, we need to see who are the people who are building a project, a game, a platform with a true vision on to provide something disruptive and have that capacity of execution and build it for the right reason, like for really empowering their community and users to other long term objective. Whereas, unfortunately, like in many other industries, like the actors who are like very shortsighted on their objective and are not able to deliver on their promise.

Sébastien Borget:

We've seen those trends, or even in web one on console, et cetera, like there's been project that launched very fast and also like these disappear very fast and it's not good for the end users. It's not uncommon and I believe like over time, because Sandbox was built by a very creative community of users because the tokens and older incentive only came a year or two years after we started building and gathering the community that we have a solid ground here. And people are really motivated by the value proposition of truly owning their creation, being able to interoperate with other communities and create like a very creative space of expression where they interact with other with avatar. That's like real to something very big. That's here to last, hopefully for more than the next 10 years since we just celebrated yesterday or 10 years already.

Marc Petit:

Congratulations. Yes. I agree with you. I mean, those cycles are, they're good. They're going to shake things off and the people really delivering the value will survive and thrive through the those cycles. So Sebastian, that was fantastic. Thank you. I think it really helps, at least me and I hope our folks to understand more about your world of crypto gaming. So, again, we're pretty we're new on the topic. So is there any other topic that we should have discussed today and we did not?

Sébastien Borget:

I think definitely one question that everyone might ask right now, like say, how can I try this? How do I access this? Like the simple answer is like, basically just go to sandbox.game and create your avatar, start playing, start discovering the kind of content, how you discover that culture of openness. Like the fact that all brands come and mix each other and display content, not just from themselves, but from other creators as well, try out the creation tools. We made them as accessible as possible. So like voxel is like digital Legos. You do not need to read the user manual to get started and you can still make very amazing things. Game maker, like you mentioned, Mark, your daughter is already able to use it and I cannot wait to see what she made of it. And we are here to help as a community. We are fantastic creators over all the different usual channel tweets, YouTube, Discord, Twitter and Telegram to support your creativity and hopefully help you launch your own business or ideas and project in the metaverse.

Patrick Cozzi:

Sebastian, just one last question for me, we were curious if there's anyone or any organization you'd like to give a shout out to?

Sébastien Borget:

Actually the president of the blockchain game alliance as well. It's an organization, nonprofit that we started in 2018. It grew from eight members to over 300 members today, including not only the blockchain gaming companies, but also much broader ecosystem of like marketplace investors, and even traditional gaming company like Square Enix, Ubisoft, Atari, and many more. Definitely want to give a shout out and for any developer or anyone just curious about like, how can I start diving in the space,  learning, and find support or discover and like those trends? I invite them to join the Blockchain Game Alliance as we keep educating the overall video game industry towards the possibilities that the technology provides, because at the end of the day, the technology is neutral. Like it's what developers are going to make of it that will prove that the technology is overall beneficial to all the users or it was used with the wrong intention and definitely wasn't useful for them.

Marc Petit:

Merci beaucoup! Thank you so much. It's been highly informative and educative so I'm sure our folks listening will enjoy that episode. So to everybody who's listening, thank you so much. Keep sending us your feedback. Keep telling us what you like, don't like. Hit us on social and again, Sebastian, thanks for being with us today.

Sébastien Borget:

Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Cozzi:

No, I feel like I learned a lot, Sebastian. I think our community is really going to enjoy learning from you in this episode.

Marc Petit:

Thank you, Sebastian, Thank you Patrick, thank you everybody. We'll see you on the next episode of Building the Open Metaverse.