Spencer Tarring on how Gamesta is building guilds for play-to-earn games

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews with spencer taring the ceo of gamestop spencer welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on no problem thanks for having me you're very welcome let's dive deep into blockchain gaming nfts the metaverse world has blown up

0:23blockchain gaming and it is revolutionizing the gaming industry and your team is working on some initiatives that are further revolutionizing uh games and bringing blockchain together i would love for you to kick it off for us with just an overview of what your team has been working on and the solutions that you're driving into the blockchain space yeah sure so um obviously i'm a big uh

0:45crypto and bitcoin believer and i think that obviously blockchain is a very profound technology that's changing changing the world in many ways and it's making these big uh changes in all different types of industries and obviously gaming is an incredible one for it to start to start to touch and it's really revolutionizing the way that games work previously

1:11when people play games they just pay to play then obviously and have the enjoyment of the experience but there's no real way for them to be rewarded for their their time spent in the game now blockchain technology is able the developers are actually able to share the success of their game with their with their gamers you know the value of any game is based off the number of

1:30players or the network of players that are playing it and blockchain technology enables uh two things one to share the success of the game and two uh obviously have uh or can have the uh nfts uh within the game which gives people the right to own digital assets within different games different um metaverses which i think is just it's just very profound um and being a

1:53big bitcoin um believer uh i couldn't help myself but get involved in the industry and that's where gamesters come from um gamester is a guild uh we've raised about 30 million dollars to buy assets and then we have a network of players which we enable give them access to the assets and those assets generate a yield and we obviously yield that money back

2:17to the investors so we're basically connecting investors with with players very interesting and yeah it's great to see the gaming industry finally flipping on its head uh from players sort of you know being the product uh to then actually owning the assets and taking something away from the game and not just spending days or weeks or years even on a game

2:41that you don't really get anything out of and this is an interesting twist with gamestop because you're not just it's not just a game that has nfts you know you have a guild and i'm guessing that you're connecting to different kinds of games and maybe there's a criteria or how do you choose you know what games what assets to be buying and what players from which games

3:03well traditionally um and when i say traditionally i mean game fight has only been around six months so it's been around prominently it's been around for six months and people are buying assets based off uh well based on human emotion based off what they think is going to be good what we're trying to do at gamester is build up data sets to apply ai and ml

3:24to that data and try and make a more informed decision on which assets we think are going to be the best for us to to acquire now it's very early days because there's not that much data and normally when you're applying machine learning to a data set you have these massive sets of data where you can work out millions of different outcomes um using machine learning what we're

3:49focused on right now is basically building those data sets um so it's going to take us a little while but we think that once we've we've done it we're going to have a very valuable set of data that's going to be not just good for us but good for other game other guilds and other gamers that want access to this information um so we're putting a lot of focus on

4:09on data whilst we're building definitely good to know and yeah you're right it is it is early days and it's great to make a guild to be able to purchase assets but they're really it's so early on with the amount of game fi games that actually have nfts or at least that are developed enough to have an entire ecosystem where you can move into so i'm curious a little bit more on

4:33where you're at with with that are you already starting to partner with different game fight games or look into you know what is the best route to take to have a strong foundation with the guild and with the investors and players our approach right now is we have obviously already an operating guild with a thousand axes and a few hundred players and we're using that as a test

4:58bed to try and work out which is the best strategy to take we've raised a significant sum um just under 13 million dollars and i'm not in a rush to deploy those um deploy that into assets i think we are a precipice of the market right now um there's a lot of uh should i say not good projects and not good games out there that i think are not going to be there in the next few

5:26next 12 months you know a lot of folks have been on token devices getting 10 x's 20 x's and forgetting about actually delivering a product um so you know my background is entrepreneurship i've built and started and built and sold many businesses um over the last 20 years and what i'm trying to do with gamester and my other project dope wars is not focused too much on trying to pump

5:50token prices but getting our heads down actually building a product and spending money where it should be spent um because too many people are worried these days about oh what can i get token price right now what can i sell for it right now whereas to build something long-term and sustainable you need to invest time in it and uh that's what we're planning to do

6:12so we've just finished our raise and we're now getting our heads down um getting stuck in with our test bed of axes and we've got a few nfts in other games um but we're just touching the market to see what do we think is to play definitely and i would love to hear you know your thought process on obviously you're talking about axi here they've sort of

6:35made a name and you obviously believe that that's going to stick around you know what criteria do you look at for other game fight games and expanding the portfolio of you know how do we know this is something that we should be putting our money towards for the investors it's a good question it's it's it's hard to know and you obviously can't get every decision right so the

6:57idea is you need to get more decisions right than you get wrong and that's uh you know the basis of any fund uh if you were getting 100 of the decisions right you would be well we wouldn't be talking here today probably would be uh on our own private island somewhere but um what we're trying to do is obviously use the ai and ml stuff to try and just

7:17improve our decision making processes just to give us that edge over other people and what i look for in a in a game um it's difficult to tell because there's so many different games coming out right now so many different ideas a lot of them are said to be kind of ponzi schemes you know like for instance even axios you know they've got to keep growing it

7:36to keep adding more players in to keep the otherwise there's too many axes and there's too many too much slp um so there's that issue i'm very uh bullish on metaverse games i think uh owning assets like land and uh nfts within a game which you which other people want to use and you can build up and make them more valuable within a game for me that that's the the ultimate

8:01game so i like things like when star atlas launches and these kind of space metaverse games i'm i'm very bullish on those um yeah it's exciting times definitely yeah and i agree with that uh even you know we just talked about how game fi is so early on uh but metaverse's you know like decentraland and sandbox have and virtual land there has been around four

8:26years uh so there's a little bit more stability you could say um in that it there's a less chance that it could disappear uh besides compared to a new game fight game because it it has been around and will probably continue to be around well we always say you know weak in crypto is like 10 years isn't it but um so i mean anything that's in existence

8:50once it passes a 20-year mark that's when people expect it to be around forever that's kind of like the the generational expectation of anything you know bitcoin is approaching that soon um obviously the internet has gone past that you know when the internet was first around in you know whenever it was 1990 or whatever people were like oh this is the fad i don't know if it'll

9:08work you know why would i ever even need a website was you know some of the questions people would ask me when i was running my internet business in school and uh obviously it's been proven to stay around and now you can't imagine a world without the internet so um you know my opinion is in fight is you probably won't be able to imagine a game without crypto

9:31so there is a lot of work to be done there's a lot of things to be ironed out there's a lot of chinks to behind out and i think what they're doing with games like axi and star atlas is because of the way crypto works you can raise a lot of the money and funds and leverage up front and then you figure it out later on so you've got to be careful and make sure

9:49you're picking the right projects and i think that leads to why people should invest in guilds and not invest directly themselves because guilt see one get access to the nfts at a better price two we've got operational experience so we kind of know what we're doing and the best way to operate and yield those assets and hopefully we're able to get more

10:10kind of information and experience on what assets we think are right and what assets just buying what is out there kind of emotionally because that looks cool definitely and thank you for that on the investor side that sort of brings more clarity and i was going to ask you about on the player side you know there's so many people that are getting into crypto

10:29but they're also been long-term gamers and they see these play-to-earn games and they then they see the guild and they think you know why should i join the guild as opposed to just trying to play to earn on my own what are the main advantages for the players to join for the players to join a lot of our players are under privileged players from uh vietnam indonesia philippines

10:52that that don't have the capital to be able to buy a lot of these assets so you know even an axi now you need really a thousand dollars to be able to use it something decent in the game so that's out of reach for a lot of players and what's beautiful about these games and about gaming is that the value of any gamer inside um the game is equal so it doesn't matter if that person is

11:15worth a million dollars or worth minus 50 or whatever it doesn't matter that person's time within inside the game is equal and that's why it's a great opportunity to leverage players from you know i hate saying third world countries because i think it's really derogatory but from countries that are not so established and well well off to to the west as we could call it maybe

11:39um so it's a good opportunity to level the playing field within metaverses so you know i'm very bullish on better versus i think the whole world is going to be in a metaverse we might already be in a metavest right now we just don't know so um it's all happening now yeah yeah you're right about the uh underprivileged players in in countries you know when axi first came

12:02out i was hearing about how people that just you know didn't have a good life in in developing countries have changed their life from these games so i'm guessing that the guild is going to help even more than that so that's great to hear um and i also spencer wanted to ask you about uh the token economy inside of the guild do you also have a gamester token that is used

12:28within there and if so how is that used to bring value to everyone in the ecosystem yeah against the tokens called gsg and its main utility is the transfer of value between the different parties in our ecosystem so we have three main parties that's the investors the players and then the management which is basically us so the network goes the investor buys gst

12:52token that gives us asset value we then use that asset value to buy nft assets we loan those assets out to the players the players earn let's say slp the slp is converted back to gsg that gsg is then transferred to investors to management and to the player so it enables that transfer of value between everyone inside the ecosystem there are of course some other cool features that

13:15we're adding like for instance we're actually launching a fair launch auction platform called zinc in about three weeks time uh that's going to be very similar to copper launch but copper launcher on steroids lots extra cool features and backed by us um so you'll be able to use uh gst in some cool ways on that platform uh obviously we have the staking that's

13:36going to be launched as well and there's just there's lots of extra things covered but the main function is that transfer value very cool that's exciting and you mentioned that there's uh quite a few things coming up i'm actually really excited for that launch uh there is that part of the main focus in 2022 or maybe you can just talk about you know what are the big things

13:58that you want to come out for the platform in 2022. um well we took a lot of stick for using copper launch to raise money for our platform and the in the last few days has been quite hectic for us we did a very successful race with close to 13 million dollars very happy about it but many people that were on the ideo or in the private rounds were not so happy

14:20because they didn't see massive didn't see massive um price pumps day one and what i've been trying to kind of explain to people is that you know getting 10x 20x day one is not sustainable or good for any project our project is not about rewarding uh private and ideo investors day one with a big pump we want to spend a year two years building this platform and

14:42delivering value that way and any if you're trying to do anything else it's not it's just not good for the project so i'm very um excited to be able to launch zinc as part of our you know one of the products in our ecosystem i've got a lot of connected projects joining in um i've got one already we're raising fork and rendezverse which is a metaverse for

15:05exhibitions and trade shows that's going to be very cool uh and then i have a vi one called vrcade which we're going to announce in two weeks time and that is a metaverse for arcade machine so you'll go into the arcade you'll see hundreds of arcade machines and they have the licenses for all the games like mortal kombat street fighters those kind of big capcom games

15:27and atari games and that's going to be a very big project because um people love playing these games on arcade and now you can do it in the metaverse and challenge other players and fall back so it's going to be very exciting there's lots going on and i think that the last few months of like really bullish action has caused to create want to get people to spoil

15:49and expecting massive gains really quickly which i don't think is good and two um it's enabled loads of sorry i'm not allowed to say that but loads of projects to be able to raise money which i you know i just don't like you know i've got a background of 20 years of doing business i've always been or most of the time being successful um more times than not and i'm hoping to

16:14apply that to what i'm doing at gamestop yeah i think you're on the right path spencer uh and you're right about the sustainability it's about the long-term vision and as we both know we're so early in game fi and in metaverses in general and i think that there's a long way to go still so we'll keep working for the viewers that are looking to learn about all these updates that you

16:37just talked about about gamestop and about what's coming up what's the best way for them to get involved in the community our main form is on telegram right now so we have quite an active telegram group with i think 15 000 people in there um we also have a discord but that's mainly for players so if you're a player you can go along and get involved in our in our

16:58guild um obviously part of what we're doing with the platform is building a very automated onboarding process and and nft loaning platform i've also been launching an academy so people can learn and get information about gaming and game five so there's a lot of action going on so a lot there's a lot of hard work to be done um and yeah i'm looking forward to

17:19getting my head down in 2022 and i can't believe it's 2022 already keep going uh thank you so much for taking the time spencer to come on i will leave the telegram discord and the website link and anything else that your team needs in the description box below for the viewers all the best with gamestop moving forward and let's definitely follow up in the near future

17:41perfect sounds great thank you very much you