Gaming Guild Accelerator Program Brinc & Animoca Brands

Guild Accelerator Brinc & Animoca Brands

Early last year I joined Animoca Brands as an advisor.? I’d known the co-founder and chairman Yat Siu since the dotcom boom and I loved his mission and vision of Animoca Brands as a company delivering true digital property rights to users globally with a focus on games.

Gamers have an affinity for and experience with digital assets through virtual currencies to purchase virtual goods or virtual assets so it’s a natural entry point.? Plus, it can be argued that, as there are over 3.2 billion gamers (!!), it’s the biggest community on the planet - bigger than Facebook’s user base, bigger than any religion, bigger certainly than any country.?

Gamers and games are a natural entry point for Web3 certainly but just the tip of the iceberg of where Web3 and the metaverse will evolve to.? It will be distinctly different from Web 2.0 and it will be massive. ? If Web 1.0 was Read-only and Web 2.0 is Read/Write, then Web3 has been described as Read/Write/Earn.?

While it’s our mission to deliver true digital property rights to users, our vision is that we work to enable a wide range of stakeholders within the Web3 ecosystem. The Animoca Brands ‘ecosystem thesis’ outlines a vision where we amplify our open digital assets framework, rather than try to reduce it or control it.

We have invested in and operate many blockchain games, multiple metaverses, a wide variety of gaming guilds as well as dozens of other companies in the Web3 ecosystem.??

Gaming guilds are a sweet spot in this multiverse of the metaverse, if you will.? Guilds, at their core, have been described by co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu as onboarding mechanisms for the metaverse.? Yes, ideally Web3 should be decentralized and free users from their yokes as digital serfs from the likes of the digital fiefdoms of Facebook, Google, Steam, Activision Blizzard, etc., etc. (OK, so I got a bit dramatic there, but gaming can be dramatic ??).??

But if that decentralized vision comes, even partially, to fruition, then there will still be a need for a platform to discover, onboard, train, excite and retain players across multiple metaverses and games and we believe that guilds will largely fulfill that need.

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In a nutshell, guilds provide ‘scholarships’ to players, basically loaning them digital assets that these scholars then manage and grow.? This Play-to-Earn paradigm is particularly interesting since so many players who have historically given SO much time and treasure (literally and figuratively) to games can now actively participate in the upside through yielding digital assets.?

When a game was being developed previously the overarching question was: “How do we optimize this so that the players are most engaged while we optimize ? profits for owners and shareholders?”.? Now, the question that successful game developers must ask is: ”How do we create and grow a game and a community where everyone benefits and makes money?”?

Gaming is a BIG business. Like crazy stupid big.? Much bigger than people who don’t game even expect.? Global music biz?? $25 billion a year.? Global entertainment (like movies, TV both in-home and in theatre)?? About $100 billion annually.? But games?? $180 billion a year.

Ka BOOM town.?

Huuuuuge, right?

So where’s all this money going to come from to fuel the growth of Play-to-Earn gaming?

Uhhmmm, it’s already there.? Like on the shore with flowers and gifts to greet the ships as they are docking and ‘discovering’ new land.

Just as William Gibson the cyberpunk pioneering science fiction author famously wrote, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed,” so too I am of the school of thought that, “The gaming revenue is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”??

Like, at all.? Like Neo in the Matrix, gamers are largely in bondage and ignorant of the fact but something in the back of their heads is nagging them to tell them that they need to break free.? THAT is the promise of Play-to-Earn.? As a matter of fact, the wunderkind, Vitalik Buterin, created the layer one blockchain Ethereum explicitly BECAUSE he was nerfed (like when your good gun gets reduced to a harmless Nerf gun which happens often in games) by World of Warcraft https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-warcraft-nerf-nft-vitalik-buterin

Vitalik got red-pilled and touched the mirror and went to the other side and took many of us with him so that he could bring power to the users/gamers.?

These days In App Purchases (IAP) are already over $40 billion so about a quarter of all gaming revs and that’s the smoothest transition to on-chain gaming.?

Sky Mavis (for which Animoca Brands led the seed round in 2019) the Vietnam-based mothership of the breakout game Axie Infinity has been driving much of the game guild growth.? Axie did $3 billion in revenues in 2021 after doing only single digit millions in revenues over its two years of operations before launching its Ronin sidechain which enabled this whole ecosystem to boom by eliminating and reducing Ethereum gas fees.?

There will be dozens of new blockchain games launching in 2022 and hundreds over the coming years.? Alexis Ohanian (Mr. Serena Williams ??, Reddit co-founder and founding partner of Seven Seven Six) said last week in a podcast that "90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time"

"In five years, you will actually value your time properly," he said. "And instead of being harvested for advertisements, or being fleeced for dollars to buy stupid hammers you don't actually own, you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun, but you'll actually earn value and you will be the harvester."

To further back that up? - from our indefatigable Animoca Brands leader: “If you can play for something that is valuable to you, then why would you choose to play in a game where there is no value,” Siu said. “We are not saying traditional games will go away. But we do believe in this thesis that it’s better for the player to play in an environment when you have some ownership.”?

Guilds will enable much of that growth, gluing it all together and coating it with a thick layer of magical blockchain pixie dust enabling everyone to not only take control of their digital assets and participate in the upside, but also IRL to become bulletproof and have the ability to defy gravity and levitate at will.? Or something like that.? But it will be betterer.? It just will.? Trust me.

And, on that note, I’m super pumped to announce that we are now launching the first accelerator for gaming guilds to help grow out the ecosystem further.? We will fund up to $500,000 per burgeoning gaming guild globally.? Then we will remotely help to drive their growth, share best-in-class learnings from our world-class mentors, help to raise further funds and grow their user base and assets.? And teach them to be bulletproof and levitate.??

At least one of those things is not true.

The program is run in conjunction with www.Brinc.io with which Animoca Brands has previously launched the most excellent accelerator, Luna Launchpad, for blockchain startups.

I’ll be proudly heading up the guild accelerator as Entrepreneur-in-Residence focused on Play-to-Earn at Animoca Brands and here’s why I’m so bullish and pumped to help grow out this space.

A Short Primer/History of Guilds

Gaming guilds have been with us since the 1900’s!? Old timey guilds worked from bulky desktops in their log cabins to pan for virtual gold and farm together.? We fired up gas lamps and dial-up modems and rolled up our sleeves like pioneers!? OK, so it was *very* late 1900’s but that soon blossomed in the 21st century when new-fangled esports (competitive gaming) like Team Liquid, FaZe Clan and Cloud9 cropped up.

The gaming guilds of today were spawned out of the hardscrabble times as Covid-19 was raging across the planet.? One pocket of solace and blockchain gaming goodness was the aforementioned Axie Infinity game where many players in the Philippines started earning real money and pooling earnings and spawning communities to optimize earnings and minimize Ethereum gas fees.?

That’s when Gabby Dizon, Yield Guild Games (YGG) founder and CEO (YGG is an Animoca Brands investee) began loaning out Axies in what is now known as ‘scholarships’. Scholars (40-60%), the Guild (10-30%), and Community Managers (10- 20%) all participate in the earnings.? A new business model was born and the rest is history as they say and as I just wrote ??.?

What gets me MOST pumped, however, is the ability to do well while also doing good.? What do I mean by that? This brave new world of digital asset ownership will generate additional trillions to the world economy (was about $97 trillion in 2021).? I truly believe that that will happen.? But set against that growth is where a big portion of that economic benefit will be shared - among the scholars gaming and managing digital assets in the metaverse.

Already in the Philippines, a significant number of citizens were able to move the needle on their quality of life from their in-game earnings.??

Check out this insightful and impactful documentary about this phenomenon https://youtu.be/Yo-BrASMHU4

My family and I became ‘pandemic refugees’ here in Bali, Indonesia after nearly a quarter of a century in China https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/2020-year-review-beijing-bali-back-rich-robinson/.

Bali has been devastated by the lack of tourism and I know Axie scholars here on the island who are able to get the earnings and dignity they need and deserve by smashing Axies a few hours a day.??

I am a big fan of Dr. Kaifu Lee and have had the pleasure to meet him on a few occasions and speak at events with him around his vision for the future of Artificial Intelligence.? He’s an AI thought leader and his book AI Superpowers is a must read.?

The US may be leading the AI race ‘in the lab’, but China is undoubtedly leading the AI race ‘in the wild’.? China is simply better at deploying real world applications for AI at scale.? Dr. Lee has described China as the Saudi Arabia of data as it sits on so much data with its one billion internet users that it can take all the applications in the lab and bring them to life.?

So why am I writing about this? Seems sort of out of left field.? China.? AI.? Machine overlords.?

Except it’s not.? There will be a seismic societal shift in the very near future.? Sooner than we all think, expect or want.? AI and Automation, accelerated greatly by Covid-19 and by the speed of China (I’m about to publish my first book titled At the Speed of China this year, but much more on that another time), will GUT many economies in the coming years and decades.??

Jobs will disappear faster than you can say barista or truck driver or legal clerk, even.? Hundreds of millions of jobs are going bye bye.? What is the timeline? Wish I could say, but by 2030 it will be a much different world and I believe by 2040 unrecognizable.? “OK, so that’s 18 years, Rich, relax.”? Yeah, but 18 years of a gradual and then rapid reordering of society.

My grandparents were immigrants to the US who were born in rural Ireland in the late 1800’s (they married and had kids very late in life).? Back when they were born, their entire life was about agriculture where they grew up and the vast majority of planet earth was the same.? By the time my grandmother passed away in the 90’s, agriculture was so mechanized and optimized that less than 5% of the US workforce was in agriculture yet we were feeding so many more people.

That transition to other jobs that didn’t exist back in the late 1800’s took generations to come about? - jobs like TV announcer or web developer or enterprise software sales rep. But this looming transition won’t have that benefit of time. It’s going to be one generation, maybe a half generation where changes will rock the foundation of how we think about employment.??

I would often speak at events about my experience working in China as an entrepreneur for over 20 years and audiences from around the world would want to dig deeper and learn more and get answers about the onslaught of impending AI and Automation driven societal changes.? They felt that it would be both amazing and horrific in some ways. Exciting but scary and they would ask me: What’ll replace the jobs? What will people do????

I never had a good answer other than that it is quite inevitable and on the whole will be beneficial as nobody laments not laboring the fields anymore.? And there are modern day equivalents as even now with Covid-19 many? are opting not to go back to work at restaurants in the US.

Also, people would continue to do things computers can’t do well.? My sister is a neonatal intensive care nurse in the US.? She can watch one infant and spend around? 20% of her time with that infant in her care and spends the remainder of her shift time on admin and other duties.? But what if AI and Automation could assist and free up her time so that she would only need 10% of her time to do those tasks and she then spent the rest of her shift splitting her time across three different infants.? Giving them attention, eye contact, holding them, etc. Being human.

Great vision, but still doesn’t help give any ideas on where future NEW jobs will come from.? I just never really knew the answer.?

Until last year.

I believe that managing digital assets will be a HUGE new source of jobs and earning power, especially in the developing world.? Play-to-Earn is one area but there will be community managers and ‘blacksmiths’ creating tools and accouterments for players and managers of virtual land and virtual events, etc, etc.? It will grow and morph into many jobs and opportunities that we haven’t even conceived of yet.

That’s what I mean when I say doing well while doing good. There’s a business here.? Yes. But there’s also a mission and the vision of an upside for hundreds of millions of people in places like the Philippines and my homebase of Indonesia, but also across Asia, LatAm, Africa, etc.

Looking forward to working with some of you out there to help grow your guilds and also looking forward to participating in and supporting the growth of Web3 and Play-to-Earn.

Onwards and Upwards!!

Rich Robinson?

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Animoca Brands