YouSaid · the spoken record

Gabriel Leydon

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81
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2021-06-08
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2021-06-08
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  1. “Once you get your business goes in the design phase, you need to really look around and start wondering, do you have the right people there to come up with the next thing? You may not.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And then you got to convince that all the VCs are likable afterwards. That's the challenge. No one will hire me, but I'm likable. Without him, I wouldn't be where I am today. So I like to try to do the same for younger kids, but that guy really changed my life. And he didn't need to. He just did it. So that was the nicest thing. Taking unemployable guy and just kept giving him a job. That's a really great thing.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Oh my gosh, that's easy. Well, look, I'm married. I want to stick to career. I want to stick to career, but you have to bring in the wife and the family and all that. But in my professional life, it would be Aaron Hightower, the guy who I was just a tester who kept getting fired because I was annoying, thought he knew everything. And this guy kept going to new places and kept hiring me over and over and over and over again until he got fired or laid off from every place. I just had to start my own thing. It's a real reason you start a company is because nobody will hire you.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “What we think. That's an example of something that can work in China that doesn't work, but almost everything else translates perfectly. And to be like critical, there hasn't been a lot of real, in my opinion, Chinese game design style really peaked around like 2012. They haven't really done anything new since. So free to play kind of like ran out of ideas really around like 2012. So there hasn't been a lot of like new stuff from anybody. But in general, their design pattern just works better.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Parts of it that don't work in the West, very small parts. Everything else works except for like they do lots of they have item shops with like millions of items that cost like a penny. When people buy stuff they want to feel like they got a lot of stuff. You don't really need to do that in the West. And the other thing that they do that you can't do over here is they're very punitive, extremely punitive, meaning like you'll have a sword and you have to put like five stars in the sword. And each time you put a star in the sword, there's a higher chance that the sword blows up and you lose it. Players will end up spinning like, I don't know, like $10,000 on swords that break. They finally get the one that doesn't blow up. And then everybody's like, whoa, he has five stars and that's crazy. That won't work in the United States. And I can just say that and you know it. Like I just say it and everybody listening to knows that will not work here because you feel like no, I'm not going to stand for that like spending money for something that just breaks randomly. You probably rigged it. So I have to keep spending.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Example is they were the ones that really pushed getting walking out of 3D MMOs, automatic walk. You don't have to play. And if you think about it, it's like what's walking in a game for other than to waste your time. But in the West, it's like, no, it's the experience. And then over there, it's like, what are you talking? Like, I just want to level up and play the game. And that kind of mindset is more successful. That's in more people, essentially. It's a more cut the crap, very, very focused. And you lose a lot of like the art and the feel that Western games bring, but it's easier to add that mindset to their mindset than vice versa. From the economy side, they're much more Chinese MMO, for example, much more emotional, like the Commonwealth thing that it's more of like, I don't think I've ever seen, I've never seen that in another game that fits more how they think about things. Chinese have a very specific style that there's only part”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Chinese are taking over video games for a reason against you in impact. That's the biggest game right now. It's Chinese. Like they're more adapt to the internet age. They don't have the arcade world dragging them down. They don't have any. They don't have street fight. It's like all comes down to like street fighter plaguing the West. Every game has to be about practice and competition and high scores and like stuff like that. The Chinese games don't have this problem. They don't think that way. I think that the Chinese style takes over the world.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Put all your mind, anything that's just like growing like crazy and totally broken, just put all your money there because obviously when it gets fixed, it's going to be better. And there's tons of examples of this. I mean, and there are cases like there's like the MySpace Facebook example, right? They both had the broken but working thing, but MySpace couldn't fix itself fast enough. So that's kind of the bet. But if I didn't know the future, I'd be like, yeah, put all your money in MySpace, right? I mean, it's growing and it's like totally broken all the time. That's where I would look at the risk. I think you kind of have to be an entrepreneur to even understand that, but that's how I look at it. Where's a space that's just totally screwed up and it's still working? That's what you want to be involved in.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Crypto eventually turned into a game too. Like it's obvious, it's kind of got elements like that. But my favorite stuff is go to the websites that look terrible. You ever notice that? You look at this DeFi projects, like the worst looking website you've ever seen. That's a good thing. That's what I want. I want it to look terrible like it's crashing all the time and it's just growing. That's the sign. Because when you clean it up, when you do put the good UI in and you do gamify it, it will be 100x bigger. If you're like 10 years deep and it still looks terrible and still growing like crazy, that's all you need to know. The VC is right that when it does get cleaned up, it's going to be bigger, but that's not what you're looking for. You're actually looking for it being a mess and it's still growing.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “NFTs are important the same way the app store was important meaning that at the beginning of the app store everything was broken it took like three months to get an app app app app app app app app app app approved just crazy stuff it was a real nightmare and it was growing like crazy that's what you want like you want environment that's completely broken there's like a couple spaces still in the innovation phase and crypto is clearly one of them you always hear these vcs who don't know what they're talking about they go you know what crypto needs it needs a good ui oh my god just stop like stop it it's innovative it doesn't need that it's still growing despite that like if we get to the phase where all crypto can do is add ui it's over that's it right so then it's just a matter of like who's got more dau at that point and like it's over right so crypto is a good example of something that's still really deep in an innovation phase it's not everything but”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “There is opportunity for somebody like myself to really express these skills across broader things that people don't expect. And NFTs are going to kind of be like the foundation for that, I think. I'm really interested in investing and thinking about companies around that space because I think it's going to be in everything. Just because they have to. I mean, once again, once somebody else starts making more money than you, because they're doing like you have to do it too. So it's just inevitable. It's just going to take over everything. So I think there's a real opportunity for me to have some leadership in that space. I have an idea for like video game again, the next place where all this stuff is going. So I've maybe put together a team for something like that. But yeah, I think there's a chance for when game designers actually do enter the NFT space, you'll know because they'll just wipe the floor with all this stuff. Like right now, this stuff just looks like eBay or like you have this like entire digital economy and we're making eBay. This is super boring. It's not interesting.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think there's a fear that we know that we can't. So then you're staring at deflation in like a reset, essentially. We've got too much of everything and there's not enough innovation to pay this back. Doesn't exist. So we got to like abandon ship, basically. That's pretty bad. But from my lens, from my point of view, it's like that's why gaming is becoming so important. It's because we don't have the teleport machine. We need one. And, you know, if we had teleport machines, nobody would be playing games.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Guys, like trying to make an airplane, like they're in the middle of nowhere, you know who are these guys? Now we look to the two richest men in the world to solve our most difficult problems. The regular person has no chance in participating in the future of the economy now. The only people have the chance, like, I hope Bill Gates figures out solar panels and the regular people are just kind of looking up to them saying, well, I don't know what to do. I think the reality is like the rich guys, they kind of don't know what to do either. And we got the rockets going. Those are cool. And we're making some incremental innovations. And there's been some really important things like crypto. So it's not hopeless. It's just not what we thought was going to happen. So I think that's the dislocation between the economy and the reality of innovation is that the economy moved way ahead of innovation under false expectations that we would be able to keep innovating at an exponential rate.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “If I make a teleport machine, I don't even make a video game. I don't need to have levels and achievements. It doesn't need to look nice. It doesn't need any of those things. It just is what it is and everybody wants one. That is better. That's the only way to really like have prosperity. And this design slash now gamification is a symptom of our limits of our minds. So instead of doing things in the physical world, we're doing things in the psychological world now. And that's maybe permanent. And I hope that's not true, but more and more of the economy is going into this exploit automation, high frequency trading, that kind of thinking. And it's not rockets to Mars. Like we've gotten to the point where we look at the two richest men, like we used to have the Wright brothers.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think we need AI more than we think. I think that we're at an IQ limit. And the reason why innovation feels like it's slowing down is because we can't do it. We just literally, physically can't do it. And there may be an exit ramp through AI, but it's not exactly clear that we can do that either. I really think that the 60s and 70s futurism is the reason why we're suffering so much today. There was no reason to not print money, to not full-on inflationary mindset and everything, because we were going to live in paradise. We were going to be on the moon. We'll be able to pay all this back. There's no problem. And then financialization happened and gamification of financialization happened because that was easier and it worked. But it's not better like innovation is better. It's clearly better.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, the mind of the consumer, it's just a rare ownable digital object. I think Ethereum will matter, but I'm not 100% sure that it will matter. I'm not 100% sure.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “No, it's a file. NFT is like a concept, but to them it's a file format. I don't know if it's going to go this direction, but I think you could see like a Disney chain and a universal chain. They'll just roll their own NFT platforms because there's just no need. People don't care whether it's Ethereum or not. Top shots kind of proves that. So yeah, I'm not sure it's a crypto product. It's more about crypto blockchains or distributed ledgers kind of enable this stuff.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “He's kind of like broken away from crypto. It's more like a file format. It's like an MP3 to the average person. They just think of it like, oh, it's an NFT”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Going to want to jump off a bridge, basically, because they can't believe that these idiots doing dances on TikToks are making like a hundred million dollars a year. But they're a business with customers and they have products to sell to them. So it's only logical. So in a lot of ways, it's like the people who want to be astronauts is like, hey, get with the times, man. That was the 1960s. That's not where we're going. We're not going outer space. We're going to NFT, NFT TikTok world. I would make a judgment and say that's not necessarily a good thing, but it doesn't mean it's not true. It's totally true. So I'm really excited about it because I think it's going to fundamentally change everything. Digital goods, like the idea that any business can sell speculative or rare digital goods is going to fundamentally change almost every business. And it's a good time to be a game designer, I guess, now, finally.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Maybe even profit off of them because they're speculative and they could go up in value. And if I'm good at managing what I put out there, they will go up in value. I think you're about to see, I say this, I believe it, but it also said, I think we're going to see hundreds of social media billionaires in the next 10 years. Anybody like Gen X and Higher is just going to be like vomiting, you know, disgusted.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “About this, about they always say the Americans do that. What do kids want to be when they grow up? Do they want to be influencers? In the United States, it's like the number one job. I want to be a YouTuber, right? And in China, it's like an astronaut. And they always go, oh, this is the fall of Western civilization. It's like, wait a minute, who the hell wants to be an astronaut? First of all, astronauts are old. Astronauts are kind of ugly. They have to go to school for like a million years and only like four of them go into outer space. It doesn't make any sense. Like, why would anyone want to be an astronaut? And then you look at the influencer guy, thousands of millionaires. They go to all the best parties. They're like 19 years old, right? And pretty soon they're going to be billionaires because they're selling NFTs. And that's just reality. It's like, and I don't know if you like that or not, but the internet enables that. Like I can get a big audience. I can make digital scarce goods and I can sell them to you. And you can.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Think of Ethereum as the world's factory. It may not be Ethereum doesn't win, but it looks like it will, but I see it as the first time it's a virtual factory and it makes virtual objects that I can own and sell. So everybody has access to this factory. And the only thing that stops you from making something interesting is your imagination. So you'll have 8 billion people manufacturing NFTs. Some of them are going to change people's lives. They're going to be amazing. Most of them will be worthless because you can make trillions, infinite number of them, but everyone's going to have a shot at creating digital scarcity like the gaming companies do. And you're going to see more and more blow-like scenarios where he sells his two-year-old album for $11 million with the NFTs and the stuff that he did, which was brilliant. But that's actually going to be common. I was joking.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Gary V's doing this, right? So, like Gary V's got his NFTs, and he says he's V coins, where he says if you buy this NFT, you get to go to 10 of my conferences, and I'll do it an hour on Zoom call. There's nothing stopping him next year from taking that same NFT and saying, oh, actually, I'm going to have that NFT unlock 20 conferences and not one hour Zoom calls, but 10 hour Zoom calls. So does that value of the NFT go up? Yes. Gary Vee really just managing an NFT index at that point? Yes. So I think you'll see these kind of like businesses same way like free to play, organizing themselves around user acquisition and then managing their virtual goods the same way a game company does to try to make them as attractive as possible by carving up their businesses and slicing them up in a way where it makes the nfts attractive”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “The guaranteed longevity, the guaranteed scarcity, it's inevitable that these things become the world's most valuable objects. And I think it's inevitable that every business starts selling them. I also believe that NFTs that connect to centralized services will be where all the money's at, maybe not worth the most in dollar terms like a Beeple is, but definitely where all the revenues generated because I can take my centralized service and reorganize it around that NFT to change the value of the NFT.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's not at all. I read Travis Scott did a performance in Fortnite that generated seventy million dollars. He can't do a concert anywhere in the world where he can generate seventy million dollars. So expect more of that and expect to keep ramping and expect the numbers to look crazier and crazier. When people sold his painting for whatever it was, like 70 million or whatever it was, people said, oh, this is a fad. Real painting is worth more. No, it's not, actually. The digital art is going to be worth more than the real painting because the digital art is instantly tradable. There's a liquid marketplace worldwide. I don't have to pack it or worry about it getting damaged. The digital art, they've got some technical problem solved, but the digital art will never be damaged a thousand years from now. Think about that. Mona Lisa needs an army around it, literally, to protect it. It's inevitable, like the liquidity.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “What's about to happen, they don't see it in their regular life. They don't work in businesses that do this kind of stuff. I think it's inevitable and it'll happen slow and fast, fast in like a video game, but slow everywhere else because there's not enough people that understand this stuff. There really isn't. I mean, there are people who are okay at it and then there are people who are really, really good at it. There's just not enough. There's no school to go to either. It's all experience-based and intuition. So like the world isn't going to turn into a video game overnight because there's just really this is just not enough people to do it. But I do think it is inevitable that everybody starts selling these virtual objects because they can. They can be designed in ways that unlock crazy amounts of profits that are just, I think you could start seeing, I mean, this sounds really extreme, but I think that you'll start seeing more and more businesses adopt loss leader or free-to-play models. The price of coffee could go down because they make more money on the NFT.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So I felt kind of good. It's like, okay, works in other stuff. But when I saw this, I was like, oh my God, is everybody going to be running a live ops team? And the answer is yes, everybody is. Everybody's going to say, get online at noon and buy one of 30 of these things that unlocks like access to the VIP room, the event, the whatever, whatever. And not only that, it's superior to the internet purchase because it's tradable and it's speculative. When people are buying stuff in a free-to-play game, the only thing they get in return is the experience. That's it. If they stop playing the game, that's it. They don't get anything. They just get nothing. But they get the experience and it's good enough. It's good enough to be 80 billion a year, just the experience. So what happens when these things are tradable and speculative and guaranteed rare? I think at 10x's, well, maybe actually more. I think that people are vastly underestimated.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Around these virtual objects are the next iteration of the in app purchase that will invade every single software business there is. Everybody's going to start looking like a gaming company. If you can get an audience together and you can create demand around the virtual object, you now have Ethereum as your security model and you can control whether somebody can buy it from you or not. I see everyone, and it's sort of like this thing that you can't avoid too because all margins, like 100% profit. They're all virtual objects. So I actually see everybody getting into this, even like your local cafe. Everybody's going to be doing this because you can and because it will make a lot of money. And it's going to come down to like going right back. This is what I meant. It's like last year I was feeling like, oh, gosh, you know, all this video game experience. I was applying it to like some friends or whatever.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “My virtual goods. If you want to buy one, you can't buy it from anybody else. You have to buy it from me. And if you try to hack my server, you can't. You just have to buy it from there. There's no other way. We would make items, make new stuff for the game, and they would make millions of dollars in an hour. And the thing that enabled that ultimately was all the security around the item. Like they had to buy it for me. And now we're seeing NFTs where instead of the game developer creating the security around the item, we have Ethereum creating security around the item. So literally everybody on earth now has the same monetization abilities that a video game has. And you're seeing the same results like Blau doing $11 million of MP3s in a few hours. That's what video games do. So this guaranteed scarcity, guaranteed ownership, perfect security or near perfect security at least.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “A clear trajectory from in app purchases to NFTs, where we were the first game on the Apple platform to have in app purchases and a game called Racer Die at the time. And then we made another game called Original Gangsters. That was the first one we made for in-app purchases. It was transformative. It was insane. The idea that people can be in the app, they have their credit card hooked up, and they could just press a button essentially, put in their password, put their thumbprint, look at a camera, and spend one to $100. Totally changed everything when that happened. I mean, our revenue went from like selling apps. It went up 700% overnight as soon as we put in our purchase in the games. It was crazy. As a video game developer, the reason why that works is because I have a centralized economy. I have servers. I have server security. I have a total monopoly.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “My personal obsession has been trying to create the most amount of human interaction as possible on an app. Everything that I've done online has been an app about trying to get the whole world on one screen. That's my goal. I want eight billion people on the same screen at the same time. And then I want to just do crazy stuff with that. Because I think that's like the perfect manifestation of the internet. It's like put everybody on the same screen. We're all connected. So let's all get on the same screen. So it sounds kind of crazy, but to me, it just seems like the logical outcome of the internet is we just all end up on the same screen and looking at the same thing at the same time. That's what I wanted to do is try to create a real-time layer between everybody and make all that work. Very, very hard. But the other thing that I think that's really interesting, kind of like change the topic that you mentioned, I'm really excited about NFTs because I see”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Basically, it got to the point where every single male outside of China saw an ad, two impressions of ours for three years straight every day. We had about 400 people in the marketing team. It was just like there hasn't been anything that's talked that yet in terms of direct marketing at scale. That was definitely the peak. And a lot of it's kind of going away because like Facebook, Apple and all the automation and privacy stuff that's happening. So you can't really replicate it. But it was really, really intense. And then so you have all this like marketing going on. But by the way, that's all integrated in the game design too. When I was there, it was full integration of both of those things. They would actually interact with like the game economy would react to stuff we were doing in marketing. And then you get into automation and AI and it gets really, really crazy. We did take it to new heights that I don't think have been, I don't know if you necessarily need to pass, but they haven't been passed since.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Don't have a 99% chance of failure, which you do in the free to play world. It's probably higher than 99. It really is on the cutting edge of a lot of technologies, but the combination of all of them is just near impossible. So kind of like a thankless business in a lot of ways where you have to do all this innovation, try to build all this stuff, and then nobody cares that you did it. And then it's just like, it's a game at the end of the day. And then it just dies. It gets old and dies or it doesn't work. Machine zone, I really tried to kind of conquer all the different aspects, all of them, really, like really try to embrace it and try to conquer all the real-time aspects, working on every phone, working in every language, marketing, running television in 62 countries and buying every digital ad known to man.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Free to play and performance marketing have a lot of overlap, direct marketing, a lot of overlap, a lot of the successful free-to-play companies where people who came from marketing, not video games, because they had to think about funnels and user acquisition and that kind of stuff. Free to play is really, really complicated. It's another reason why the video game industry at large kind of doesn't like it because it's just so much more complicated. I mean, it's like infinitely more. It's basically the hardest software that you can make. I don't think there's anything harder. You've got graphics and real time and low times and audio and chat rooms and server security and serviceability and performance marketing and live game management and analytics and there's a reason the average game developer only lasts five years in the industry because it's ridiculously hard. It's way harder than anything. Like you go work at Yelp or whatever. It's like a thousand times easier and you get paid more.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “You have to embrace the fact that they like it more than you do and you need to play into that in a really heavy way. And that's pretty tough because you always have this cognitive dissonance going on around making things that you don't really like that they like. I think that's probably the number one, and I think I've gotten pretty good at that over time, but I would say that's the number one thing that I've learned about making software combining a human psychology and software, which is that I don't really understand everybody that's playing the game. And that's okay. But if I can recognize that and say, all right, I don't get it. They like it way more than I do. Let's see what they're doing and like play into it rather than try to get them to like the things that I like. That's an instinct that's really hard to overcome.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Players like the game more than you. They like the game way more than you. That's why I ask that question. Because if you don't like the game and they like the game more than you, then what the hell are you going to make? You're going to make something terrible. Most people who make the game don't like the game they're making. It's just a fact. They're usually kind of surprised with how fanatic the gamers are. They're actually kind of annoyed by it because they work on the same thing for years and are like, oh God, these like people are emailing me and spamming me. And you see like gamer energy is like super intense. And that energy is never matched in the dev studio. The dev studio is not as insane about the game as the players are. So just software in general, and this is not just for games, it's just in general, which is that you need to understand that the people who are interacting with your app like it better than you do. So that's kind of like an out-of-body experience.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Whereas the Americans are kind of stuck with the arcade world, trying to make it work online. So you end up with cosmetics.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I'll tell you why it doesn't work here. It's very simple. The reason why it doesn't work here is because Americans, especially developers, hate that stuff. They don't want to build it. They don't want to make it. They don't like it. They think it's manipulative. They do, like at their core, that's how they feel. So when they see it, they see something going on in China and then they water it down until they feel good about it and then it doesn't work. It happens over and over and over again. The whole like skill cosmetic, that's an American thing, cosmetics. Totally American thing. If you go to Japan, it's all treasure boxes, loot boxes. If you go to Korea, it's loot boxes plus item shops. And if you go to China, it's just like straight item shops. The Chinese way is kind of winning, to be honest. It's just winning because it's just so much more direct. They got games a lot later than everybody else. They got the Korean version of video games, and that is better for the internet, the internet world, that fits better with the internet world.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “That's a side effect of American games. You got to think about how games started and migrated around the world. American games were skill-based in the beginning. Eugene Jarvis, Defender, Robotron, that was what Americans thought of Pong, whatever. They think of it as like a skill. And then the Japanese came around with stories, RPGs. And then the Koreans invented free to play and they combined the Japanese style, but with a more kind of deeper economy because they needed to figure out how to make money off a free game. And then the Chinese adapted the Korean style and amped it up like times 100. If you look at Chinese games, they're like really different than American games. You often hear about Chinese apps that have a game design in them. You always hear this, like, oh, everybody's got to go buy celery on the same day or whatever.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “It was an NFT. Yeah, if it was an NFT, I would be $100 million. If they made a golden shotgun, one of one, and gave it away in a raffle, it would sell for $100 million.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Going to happen after you do it. And not many people can do that, to be honest. They just make what they think is fun and they don't really think about it in terms of like a grander ecosystem and how everything fits together.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Answer to your question, not a very good answer. But there's not that many people that can wrap their head around doing both things at the same time. Making a currency that serves the game's needs and making a currency that serves the player's needs. They usually just think about it like the consumer side, not the printer side. That's hard, actually. That's really hard. It's hard to think about both. There's not that many people that can do that. Where do you go to learn how to do that? It's a lot of this trial and error and you have to have like a point of view. You have to have a really strong point of view. And you have to be able to defend it. That's probably the biggest problem with game design in general is that people have cool ideas, but they can't really defend them. It's honestly like they don't even know why they like them. It's just kind of cool. You have to be able to defend the stuff that you're coming up with, with logical outcomes. You may not be able to predict all the outcomes, but you should have a pretty good idea of what's”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “That's all it is. It's designed to actually make you work. That's the whole purpose of it. So you're using something that's been designed to get you to work, to have constant inflation. The husband and the wife now have to work. The kids are working, like everybody in their mama's working, kind of increased productivity. So the money is designed to increase productivity and lower unemployment. It's not need to be money. It's unemployment tool. It's a productivity tool. It's an innovation tool. So when you make a game, it's the same thing. Do you have your virtual economy and it's there to do something? Like what is it there to do? And a lot of times people just think of it as like you have products. They think of it like a normal kind of like capitalist. Like I have an item. There's an item and it costs this much and whatever. They don't really think about it in terms of what's the purpose of these currencies inside the game anyways. Like we're just making them up. Like what are they supposed to do? So that's a pretty philosophical like.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So, like, when I think about this stuff, I think about the Fed, the US Federal Reserve. In the world, there's only like 10 people on the other side of the table. There's like 8 billion people that take the money. And then there's 10 people that print it. And they're not printing it to give you money. They're printing it because they want an outcome. They're designing an economy. You better believe it. They have goals in mind when they print money. When you take the money, you just think about like your house, your car, your whatever. But they're thinking about like unemployment and productivity. And they're moving money around the market to manipulate the market to get unemployment down, to get productivity up. You have to understand there's like a purpose to making money. It's not just there. It is manipulated. It's a whole reason for it. Money is economic manipulation, at least fiat money.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “When I asked a million dollar car thing, it's like, well, that's real. Like, you get that. You've got limitations in your mind on what's okay and what's not okay, then you're just gonna hamstring yourself with stuff that problems that the real world has that the digital world doesn't have so you can create any scenario you want and it's really a matter of it's all an imagination problem Everything's an imagination problem asking questions around figuring out where imagination breaks That's what I try to figure out when I talk to a game designer is like where does their imagination break down? That's a problem You should be able to approach any situation like, okay, what do I want? What can I make that gives all parties everything that they want because it's entirely imaginary I should be able to and you need to be able to do that”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Get to eat for free. The framing of that is like, oh, well, you know, I really wanted this ham thing, but now I'm feeding everybody, and everybody's like, oh, thank you, right? But really what I did is I bought this thing for myself and these other 20 people got to eat for free, but you just don't tell them that part. Just let the guy enjoy his golden ham and then everybody around him thinking that he paid for dinner. That's what I mean by heroic spending. It's like this combination of extreme like selfishness and some kind of gift to the people around you. Like that's the ideal. And in the digital world, you can do that. In the real world, that's actually hard to do because you're dealing with like physical objects. You're dealing with real things. In the digital world, there's no reason why you can't do that. Everything's fake. The key to video game economics design, which is really hard. And basically nobody is good at it. Like there's like three people in the world that are good at it. The key to it is embracing the fact that it's”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Not that bad, actually, right? Framing matters a lot. Christmas, where all everybody spend their money like 70% of retail money spent on Christmas. That's for other people. It's not for yourself. So the ideal scenario for spending money is something where you personally get tremendous selfish benefit from it. Like it's a completely selfish purchase. It's just for you, really. You really just want it for yourself. But it also comes with this group benefit that everybody else gets and you get to feel really good and they get to thank you and praise you and say, oh, that's really awesome. So like at dinner for 20 isn't necessarily the same thing, right? Because like you may not want to feed everybody there. What the ideal would be like there's something that you want at the dinner that cost $2,000. I don't know. It's like a golden ham or something. And it's like $2,000.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Is really simple. I mean, this can be explained really easily. If you go to a restaurant, this is what I mean by gameification, quote unquote, so-called gamification. It's all very psychological. You're trying to reverse engineer yourself and then turn your internal reflexes into a feature, basically. If you go to a dinner and you're by yourself and the bill is like $2,000, how do you feel?”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “It's so sick. Like, it really is sick. They know what they're doing. They know exactly what's going to happen. And they're looking to the game designers like, well, maybe you'll kind of like distract everybody. Maybe everybody will just be distracted as the whole world collapses around them. It's a really funny. Like every person in AI, every single person AI I've talked to has said that to me. Every single one. They're, oh, we're going to need VR. Like I wish they would be more honest in public about it because they all say it. I think that's what you're seeing. I think this kind of like game design worldwide takeover is partly because the innovators think that's what should happen and also because they don't know what else to do. But I think it comes more from that. And I think if you start looking at people who are playing games or online all the time or whatever, you'll see what I'm saying is true.”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I don't even know what the point of my life was basically. It's like you're working at Target and Dave and Busters and whatever and you're not going to college. What else do you have? That's what I had. And I think that's what made me understand it. It's more of like a reality thing. There's just too much competition and people need environments to excel in. This whole like hyper globalization thing, it just crushes souls because they can't excel. And they know it. They're like, everybody's like, oh, robots are going to replace you and AI is going to replace you and you got to go eat bugs and go live in a box. It's so funny. Like I talk to these AI guys in Silicon Valley. It's so funny. They're all trying to make like God versions of themselves. They always say to the game developers, they go, oh, we need you because what are people going to do when my God AI thing works?”

    2021-06-08 · Invest Like the Best · Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 229] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source