Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Testing session that is done by bi weekly internally and then all of us cannot give our feedback and what we do is we help our partners which is the Kim Don say improve their number one game loop and number two die user gen.
[00:00:18] Speaker C: Right?
[00:00:21] Speaker B: That's the reason why so many high quality games they couldn't really succeed on SEA because they isn't kind of unique selling point like being a casual game. The main purpose is like people want to play number one either the queue time or number two. There's some very very I would say attractive or something that players ourselves will be keen to continuously play for long hours as well.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: We are going to get started so welcome back everyone. Thanks for joining our Twitter space this evening. Again the gamers united with Blockus. I'm Gany, head of gaming for Blockus and I'll be hosting the space today. It's my third time hosting the Twitter space. I'm a game designer from Korea and I worked on gaming space making two MMORPGs at Nexon and one shooter before joining Blockus about a year and a half ago.
Today we have a very special guest, Jason Lim, Director of Gaming at SEI foundation, who has been leading Web3 gaming space in multiple occasions including his previous tenures at Immutable and Tezos. Jason, it's great to have you today. This week we've been working together hand in hand working with supporting game studios, but it's nice to have you on an online space to have an interview with you. Could you also introduce a little bit about yourself and say hello to all the audience.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: So my name is Jason, Director of Gaming from City Development Foundation. Been in the game gaming journey for quite a while right now I used to be a professional esports player, so back in 2005 I actually represent Singapore, played in the world Cyber games. Shortly after I went to work in traditional gaming, working with like Moonton, Rare Games, Tencent and many more. And it was in like I think it's 2017 and 2018 when I first started my webcam journey, joined Forbid initially before moving over to Bybit and then of course you mentioned Immutable, Tezos and right now of course Insect leading the gaming vertical over here.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Starting a career as an esports player is very cool. Could you, would you want to tell us about more of those stories when you are an esports player? How long ago it was and what were the imported games that you played? Era.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so it was over 30 years ago. So 25 was the time where I actually played in World Cyber games and of course before that I played a lot of professional circuit, so I played professionally in Dura before I moved over to starcraft. So that was the old days. It was pretty fun. To be honest, having a competitive, I would say mentality kind of helps to what I have today. And of course in today I still play games. And if people look at my IGN Pro above me, it basically means that if someone is above me in the leaderboard, then of course they are a way better player than me. So it's kind of like taunting players in a sense. So I used to like put very interesting IGN so that people get like taunted before the game start.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: That's amazing. And as an Asian gamer, I have to talk about StarCraft. What was your favorite faction?
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Yeah, so I play Toss Protoss in particular.
So I don't really play cheese strategy, but play more like a macro player. Used to be very fun to play Marco games for long games actually.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: That's super cool. I mean Protos is still a very difficult faction to play compared to Terran or Zerg, but I guess that kind of shows that you are the early pioneers of that faction. And since you were a esports player for those competitive multiplayers, I think it would have naturally led you into the gaming industry.
And then we talked about the esports days and now we know about your web 2 gaming days. But let's talk about your web 3 gaming transition. How did you get into the industry and what led you all the way to join the Shade foundation as a Director of gaming?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: I think when I first joined huawpi, it's more like a leap of faith, to be honest. Like I didn't really know what to expect back in the days. All I know was Web three, it's, it's kind of booming, everybody is talking about it. So I kind of had the opportunity to join them when they were still based in Singapore. I would say it's kind of scary back then because really didn't know what to expect. Nobody really had much thing to say to me in terms of like, I mean, let's be honest, right? Back in the days, how many people can say that they actually work in Web3, right? And when you talk about Web3 back then, not many people actually really know what's going on, what to expect. Is it really regulated? Is it here to stay account stuff?
[00:04:54] Speaker C: And.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: And then over the years had the opportunity to move around, speak to many people. And of course it was last year someone by the name of Sarah, she reached out to me and said, look, I have an opportunity or amazing opportunity to join SEI and basically I took a look at SEI and look at being the fastest parallelized CBN blockchain. Bruce watch potential when I look at it and yeah I decided to move over to SEI from my previous website Telos.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Yes she has been multiple times reported as the fast one of the fastest blockchains in the space and also has been cited multiple times as a very successful on the rank charts blockchain for web3 gaming and I think that kind of success was heavily driven with the Savvy 2 initiative and which was going about 4 fully being parallelized EVM. How has this initiatives and movements have impacted the web 3 gaming and running those industry on the forefront on your perspective?
[00:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah I'll be honest earlier mentioned about say being the fastest blockchain with the fastest time to finality at 400ms. And of course we have the lowest Garcia C Right. So when people talk about finality it basically means latency in gamer terms.
So having transactions being recorded on chain making it irrevisible in the fastest manner actually means a lot not just for the players but also for the developers themselves. Imagine trying to make a transaction when you're playing a game, having you waiting for like a couple of minutes as a player. I will hit account experience but of course we'll say it kind of solves everything over here and developers can then I will say smoothly build a game on SE without any disruption or whatnot. So as people start to scale we start to see people getting more interested in term ecosystem not just because of the technical side as well where we'll start talking about the good things in terms of like how SEI has been helping the projects on say go to market or even like talk about the game loop. And also in terms of like how they can scale.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: I mean especially when we talk about the early days of web3 gaming the latency and the delay was a very critical hurdle for when it comes to designing UX.
And then I guess SEI's initiative on becoming the fastest chain is actually nowadays allowing more and more game data that used to stay on the game server to be transitioned onto the blockchain space. And I guess this is not the only initiative. Nowadays we have a native USCC with the CCTVB2 and how do these integrations improve in game purchases and player rewards especially when it comes to the stablecoin?
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Yeah first and foremost when USDC all this was integrated, right? I mean the first few things we look at is basically solving cross border payments and then having a digital e commerce, solving trade, finances kind of stuff. I think all these are the kind of things that really I would say ease up transactions, simplifying in app payments, basically having that USDC being more accessible to players themselves. So I think this is pretty crucial at the end of the day because stablecoins is what really matters I would say in traditional space as well when it comes to not just gaming, finance or anything.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Everything is linked back to actually stablecoins.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Yes. And the speed coupled with the payments methods like USCC has greatly improved the ux. And now we also have to talk about the sage built in order book web3 gamers trade a lot of items on the marketplace and trading items is just not about web 3. It's also being done on web 2. Oftentimes when it goes comes to third party marketplaces like item mania or playerauption.com how do you think the sales built in order book can actually improve the UX when it comes to play to earn concept or in game markets or NFT trading in general for the Web three gamers?
[00:08:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I like how you bring up Play Auction though. For those who didn't know, Play Auction is basically a site where you're able to trade your digital assets. But of course kind of experience over there though seems safe with a lot of like validation required basically Sellers ourselves, we basically do videos recording of us making the transactions is kind of important, right? Because if we don't, I mean we sellers, we don't really take screenshots or recording of how we sell the items over to the buyers themselves can default payment.
[00:09:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: They can just say hey, I didn't receive it.
[00:09:20] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: And Player Auction himself will then refund the the fees, right, the buyer's fees to the buyers themselves. So having transparency on I think the digital assets on web3 is kind of important here. And of course back to your questions in terms of like sales, building order book Improving NFTs Trading in Game marketplace. I would say right now we don't really have a built in order book per se.
[00:09:41] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: But of course NFT trading mainly happens on Magic Eden right now which is our partner and I know some of our games are actually doing their own in game marketplaces and that's pretty important for them because at the end of the day what's going to happen here is players ourselves, we are going to transact within the game.
[00:09:57] Speaker C: Right?
[00:09:57] Speaker B: The last thing we want is having a disruptive gaming experience. Meaning let's say I want to transact an NFT or Basically make any purchases I need to go to another site which is outside of the application itself. So this is not something that we really recommend and a lot of developers, they are trying to resolve this by building their own in game marketplaces.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Got it, Got it. Yes. So I guess overall SEI is stepping all the components that will enable the fast UX and the conveniency in in order to enable web3 players or web3 gamers in general to be able to trade gaming items and assets in a very safe and transparent manner. And I guess this is the initiative that you are also Spearheading for the SAE's initiative to take over the gaming space.
And we'd love to move on to that, the next topic which is the Web3 Gaming market trends. So let's talk about the overall landscape. So as a director of gaming, what kind of genres do you think will define the next wave of the next successful web3 games?
[00:11:05] Speaker B: So this is a very interesting topic to talk about.
[00:11:08] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: I think first and foremost I would say that isn't really a very specific genre but. But I think what matters the most right now is look at the past games who really succeeded. How many are there? So I think I want to answer this question in this way by saying a lot of high quality games, it's kind of hard to succeed Web3, right? Not because the games doesn't make sense, not because they can't build the game, but rather they first need to look at whether the game is competitive enough in the space. Is it like a blue ocean market, Red Ocean Market? Are VCs interested? A lot of these games tend to kind of especially high quality ones sound like a very big vision in terms of like the potential of the game. But the thing is that they can't build it. Even when they build it they might not be able to market it well because building a game and really going into market is kind of different. So adding back to your question, I would love to say that because I'm an MMORPG player, AAA game count player, I would love to say that quality of the touch games will be the next wave. But I think to be honest it's going to be kind of difficult. So I would say okay or John Row definitely have their own opportunity to succeed. And right now if you look at say majority of the games that really done well are mid core games, hyper casual and casual games. Because if you look at it, the cost to build these games isn't really that big.
[00:12:20] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: And we can then bring the real use case of like virtual integration in the game itself. At ease.
[00:12:25] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: So this is the kind of I would say success that we're looking for in this space in terms of like genre, in terms of quality.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Got it, got it. I mean a lot of casual games are still some of those casual games have a lot of replayability in it, meaning you don't actually get bored. Like how regardless of how many games you actually play, for example, if you play Brawl Stars, it's only a 1 minute match casual feeling of the top down mobile, but you can actually play it for hours because it's so replayable. I guess that kind of casual games are being on onboard onto SEI which nowadays making Sega as a leading gaming chain on the web3space. And let's talk about the, about the sheer number of the success. So we've been told that SEI has been retaining a lot of web3 gamers on chain lately. How does SEI plan to help those studios to keep these players engaged beyond the initial token hype, especially when it's given that a lot of games are casual?
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a very good question.
[00:13:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: So I think one thing I didn't really mention from the start is a lot of the safe folks, including myself, we are humans by default, right. I actually have this nickname as well, kind of like Will Tank plus Carry plus support. I kind of play all kinds of games to be honest. And whenever I play I get it to the top.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: And then I spend a lot of money as well. So what we do is we dive into every single game that's on SEI before or after onboarding them to the ecosystem. What we do is we have this game testing session that is done like bi weekly in the internally and then all of us cannot give our feedback. And what we do is we help our partners, which is the game Don say improve their number one game loop and number two Daisy for example having tutorials, you know what, what are the things that make the game more sticky? What would then trigger him to first, you know, so players themselves the first plan in the game. So these are the kind of things that we often give inputs in terms of like how the game should work so that players will be more inclined to play in the game. That's one. And then beyond that of course understanding the game. We would then advise our partners in terms of how they should market our game, what kind of platform they should look at, the alternative geography and demographic of their players. So which are the market they should look at. And of course we also get Them to pull up like for example their Firebase analytics and we look at all these numbers that they have and then we get them to test the ground to probably put X amount of dollars in this market to see if this marketing really helps them. And then from there if it does well, then we'll get them to double down, dive deeper and stuff like that. If it doesn't work, then of course you will shift.
[00:14:58] Speaker C: Right?
[00:14:59] Speaker B: So there's a lot of things that is done behind the scene that kind of like really value at this product developers as we don't say. And these are the kind of things that.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Got it, got it. So not only you guys provide overall game design wise suggestions, but say team actually incubates the whole from the beginning to the point of launch on the overall product management and on the business modeling side and now we talk about business modeling side. There has been different types of monetization models in web 3 that is very distinct from web 2. For example 1 of the partner studios that was on Twitter space two weeks ago, the Talent Universe, they had a very interesting E tournament modeling where reward pool of the season is actually accrued from the revenue and the sales itself.
So what kind of monetization models do you also see working best when it comes to web3 gaming compared to the traditional models?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: I think monetization models, to be honest, I wouldn't say there is one that is working best comparing to traditional models because what works best in traditional models actually work best in web3 as well. I think the most important thing here is that we shouldn't really be changing the ingredients of what success looks like for gaming. That's the reason why so many high quality games they couldn't really succeed on SEI because that isn't kind of unique selling point for them to basically be successful when comparing to a Web2 game. If there's a Web2 game that's really very similar and it's really very successful, you are basically fighting for the same market piece, right? And that's the reason why a lot of these games couldn't work. So to your question, believe that microtransactions really matters in terms of first getting the players themselves to spend small amount of funds playing a game, buying in game items and then from there pulling them in with bigger purchases as they get hooked to the game, right? And then being able to prompt in game purchases at the right moment is key as well. Like for example if I play a game that requires me to play say for example idle game, right? And I probably need like Spending, I need to spend probably like another 20 hours to upgrade my, maybe my building or my farm to the next level. And 20 hours is a lot of time. So whenever I make a new upgrade, the developers themselves can actually create an in game notification to prompt the player to spend.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: In order to move to the next stage. Right. So do you want to wait for 20 minutes or do you want to progress straight away? Things like that. And then if you were to buy the in app purchase now, you can get more bonus, you can get like discounts and stuff like that. So there's a lot of different kind of habits or should I say consumer behavior that we look at over here. So these are the kind of like monetization models and consumer behavior that really succeed on a kind of level.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Got it. Yes. I mean, free to play also sometimes coupled with a microtransaction is actually the way to go for a lot of casual games or also the games with a lot of progression models embedded in it. And then I guess how carefully or subtly you design that hurdle and progression would make a lot of players get a deeper dive into the microtransaction part. But then again, since the game is a lot of games are now free to play, that does require a certain number of players to be still active on the game on a daily and monthly basis to sustain the revenue pool. And that's where we find a lot of web3 games having challenges in terms of user onboarding. How is say lowering barriers for overall Web2 gamers to transition into Web3 without complex UX such as downloading wallets or trying to have to understand all these blockchain jargons.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: Yeah. So right now say we have these, our SEI wallet feature called say Global Wallet, where players themselves, they're able to lock in using their own social. And a lot of our other games on sei, what they have is, let's say Archer, Hunter, Garden based, all these games, right. When you log into the game, you create an account, a wallet is automatically created for you. So a lot of the players themselves, they don't even know that this is actually web3 game. And then slowly as they progress, they start to receive reward in USDC native game tokens or points at that point in time, again, get to learn more about how the game is like, what is the use case and applications of all these rewards or currency or tokens you want to coin.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: And we actually need to get more exposed to all this kind of stuff because at the end of the day, having all these currencies or whatnot. They're able to use this as in game payment, wagering or whatnot. And this is basically how we break down the barriers step by step by looking at how to onboard the messes mainly from the web 2 side or the web 3. This is something that we are doing reactively and it's kind of giving us the success that we are looking for.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: Right?
[00:19:48] Speaker A: I guess a lot of questions, especially when it comes to UX hurdle is surrounding on the payments and especially making it easier for first timers. First time gamers that join or try out what's called the Web3 game and denim point is going to allow players to freely play the game and then also accrue items or access that has value in it and also be able to freely transact those items which is fully powered by SEI's support to be able to trade items in a very secure and fast manner. And then comes to the hottest topic which is sometimes called play to earn or play to own. Because a lot of web3 gamers do talk about play to earn values which eventually means that I win tournament or I get my hands on a very scarce resource such as a nice sword or nice armor. But then again a lot of players just appreciate the value of just being able to own those items on chain. Where do you actually have a standpoint of view on balancing these ownership versus allowing players to run the transaction of these items so that there's ongoing and sustainable gameplay economics?
[00:21:10] Speaker B: So yeah, I think it's a good question, right. So I think first and foremost we must all understand that different games kind of work differently in terms of gameplay economics. And of course sustaining the gameplay economics is going to be very different for first, different genre, number two, different markets of players as well. So I think this is the key, right? In terms of like when you first market a game to what kind of players you're looking for, I think that's something that is crucial. So of course if you basically market your game to those like people who are interested in airdrops or or earning components, then of course these are the kind of players that you are going to look at. And of course if you market your game into real players themselves or traditional players, they will care more about the gameplay, right? So going back to your question, I think balancing is kind of difficult. And I think before we even look at balancing itself, the developers themselves, they first need to understand how players that they want to really attract and then what kind of gameplay economics makes sense for the gameplay game as well. And then from there they scale, right? So I think what they kind of play here in terms of like our, our role is when we look at developers in play economics, we then let them know what kind of ways they should pivot to and what actually work best for them and give them recommendations, suggestions and whatnot. And at the end of the day the player is theirs can decide what works best for them. But of course we can show them what we have seen that's successful for their own genre and stuff and then for them they can pivot, right? So this is basically how we used to be or how we stand. There isn't really like a specific category or off site that we are really pivoting into. We cannot make it work differently for the different gaming ecosystem. The different game developers that's currently on say mainly because of the genre themselves and how the game basically function. Let me know if that makes sense. That's how we want things to be, right?
[00:22:52] Speaker A: I mean the tokenomics per game varies by every game because every game has a different game design and it has a distinct value accrual point when it comes to those game assets within the game. I guess SEI is making the overall infrastructure very accessible for all the game developers to focus on the game design and development itself. And then as I talked to Jason multiple times about how we can support Web3 game studios that are trying to onboard SEI in general, I just found that so many studios are actually looking forward to be on board SEI and then check out all the features that SEI has been providing as an infrastructure. But I guess every studio can be able to receive that kind of support leads us into certain questions such as selection process when it comes to providing support. So can you share a little bit of a behind the scenes look at how these game studios are evaluated or how they are checked in to become a potential game that could bring in a lot of users and transactions.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: I'll be honest. Like we basically look at look for games that has high competition to succeed, right? So there's a couple of things we look at not mainly on the genre themselves or not even mainly looking at the category or platform that they're building on. I think first and foremost we need to look at whether the game is it a new game or whether is it something that they are trying to build, right? So authorization existing game, right? So if a game is like existing in the market, especially in less listed on a Steam Play store epic games, those kind of games are easier to over to say or being on bother to say because they already have like a proven business case. And on the other side, we also look at a lot of things like the team background. Do they have any experience building games?
Do they have any experience going to market with these games themselves? And when we compare the game titles, who are the competitors, what kind of market is they're looking for? So let me put it this way, right? Example. Someone comes to me today with a mobile game and if you look at Web3, there isn't really a successful mobile game as of current. The reason is not because mobile game is that hard to build, but if you look at the space, the market itself is very, very, I would say competitive. Like for example, if you look at mobile legends itself, it's so dominant in Southeast Asia, and then you look at as legal legends out there as well, that's kind of like dominating the space. So whenever new mobile games come into the space in Web three, right. The first question I ask them is how do we then compete with these plates?
[00:25:23] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: The market that they have is so huge, they have probably spent like billions of dollars into marketing into esports. They're already having a commodity. How do we then compare or compete? Right. So these are kind of things that we always question or we always look at when it comes to like onboarding games or ecosystem. Not saying that we wouldn't welcome them to build, but I think is that we will find it pretty challenging to compete in your space unless there's always there's something that they're trying to resolve, they're trying to disrupt and they can do it based on their experience or financial. So there's a lot of things that we look at because these are the secret sources that we have. But generally on the top, top level, these are the kind of things we look at existing use cases, unique selling point, owner's background and stuff like that.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Right. When it comes to a lot of hardcore games that's on PC, the number of developers that's able to ship those kind of games on PC is very limited. So it's more of a very, could be a very detailed selection process. But then again, like you said, you. Seiye also puts a lot of effort into onboarding a lot of casual games and a lot of these casual games tend to be on mobile. How do you actually go through all these applicants that are trying to launch casual games on mobile? What are the features or the, the unique selling point that they. You really focus on too?
[00:26:42] Speaker B: To clarify, you're asking like, you know, kind of unique selling point I look for in casual Games.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: I would say this like being a casual game, the main purpose is like people want to play number one, either the queue time or number two, there's some very very, I would say, I would say attractive or something that players ourselves will be seen to continuously play for long hours as well.
[00:27:06] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Easy to play as well. So that's something that really matters. So when someone comes to me with a casual game, the first thing I look at is is there a tutorial? Would it be easy to play? Not easy to play. Then I would consider this a casual game.
[00:27:19] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Because people who want to play casual game, they are. How do I put it? Play time or their attention span. For the game itself, the first few minutes tends to provide the highest drop off rate. So if the game themselves can't even like make the player stay for the first five minutes, the chances are your day one retention is going to be extremely low.
[00:27:38] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: So we look at day one, day seven, day 30 retention metrics for all these casual games before we even dive further with them. Of course we look at the average playtime of the players themselves and then we look at Arapu as well.
[00:27:50] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: So these kind of metrics kind of help us evaluate the games to see whether are they the kind of games that we're looking for. So this is kind of crucial.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Right. And then has there been any games, especially on the mobile casual side that has made you feel very surprised because of certain datas are just up that level where AAA games.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So I, I would say triple A game is of course having a higher entry bar entry is going to be kind of challenging. So I wouldn't be comparing like a, a casual game to AAA game because I think first thing is that the game loop itself is different.
[00:28:29] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: AAA games of course having a more intense kind of like budget or requirement really works kind of differently. But going back to your question, I think on SEI there's a couple of casual games that works really well. I think the first one is Hot Spring having an Kawaii puzzle. All these are actually live on mobile right now having millions of downloads, play store and iOS.
So these are the kind of games that we are really kind of fond of. Their metrics are kind of validated. Right. Sometimes people say that in these user bots, but let's be honest, how do you get millions of users to basically bought the downloads on? Please. Google will definitely ban you for doing that. And at the same time who writes a review, who practice review to back 23, 2024, you know, stuff so these are the kind of data that can be fake.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: Right.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Because again, earlier mentioned about Firebase analytics, these are the kind of things we look at for our games as well. And these kind of numbers kind of validates what kind of games or the successful games tenders that we're looking for.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: Got it. The way that you describe how you provide and try to understand all the gaming studios on say it doesn't feel like you guys are just providing grant options for these game studios, it feels like you guys are providing a very step by step and catered approach so that these games can actually ship to the market and then have a very sustainable live operations. How do you guys, could you elaborate more on how SEI gaming team in general supports all these funded studios?
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Basically, dedication, kind of like I would say game testing session that we have, like I mentioned earlier, that matters a lot because being able to play the game, try the game, provide own inputs as a player ourselves really means a lot. I think comparing ourselves to other ecosystem where we don't just onboard the games and then we leave them to vendors for them to succeed on their own. We don't do that.
[00:30:10] Speaker C: Right.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: Kind of have like weekly monthly check in with all these games, understand where they're coming from, why certain things update and we basically have very specific kind of partnership or even connections for them. That's basically what we do. So this is something that we can evaluate as well.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Right. And it seems you guys are connecting a lot of dots surrounding the development and production and live operations for those games. One of the dots that we can also talk about, this thing can discuss about, is the intellectual property IP partnerships. There's a lot of NFT projects and say, as well as the gaming projects, is the SEI teams actively pursuing collaborations between these IPs or are you guys also searching for major IP holders from film, animation or even traditional gaming?
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Yeah, got it. So there's a couple of games that has huge IPs on SE and there's one that is really, really huge. I can't mention a partner name right now, but all I can say is that this partner that we have, they have IPs to Astro Boy, Sunrail, Neopets and many more.
[00:31:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: They haven't announced that they're bidding on sale yet, but they're very excited to have them. So I wouldn't say that we are actively pursuing such collaborations, but we are looking at it. So we generally let our partners decide what IP is that they want to work with and then from there we let them decide.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's very interesting. I'm very curious about that IP that's not disclosable yet, but I'll be very looking forward to the announcement. And then are there also any other major IPs from film industries or animation or traditional gaming in general?
[00:31:53] Speaker B: I wouldn't say traditional gaming, but other industries, yes, for sure. But I wouldn't say that, you know, SEI is the one that's leading all this initiative is mainly the games themselves. They want all these IP to fit in their product.
[00:32:03] Speaker C: Right.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: And I think the biggest question is that why these IPs, how does this IP make sense for them? This is basically how we want our partners themselves to basically drive success for their own project and to see what really makes sense.
[00:32:14] Speaker A: Got it. It's just very fascinating that say is in general there's a lot of blockchains or blockchain ecosystems that also have a competitive model that wanting to be a gaming chain as well. And then we have to move on to the topic. How do we retain these community within the SEI gaming space and how does SEI try to foster that in terms of both on the size of the community and as well as the overall interaction between the community members?
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so good question as well. There's a couple of things we have been doing here. I think first thing is that if you look at what we've done for the past, I think three weeks ago, and of course way before that, we actually organized offline events. Like recently at GM Vietnam, we kind of organized our own Sea Gaming Day. We met Reading. So there's over like 400 people who turn up. And we have 15 of our partners there focusing their games to aid new communities or be existing users that they have on the ecosystem.
[00:33:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: That's something that we have done. And then beyond that, last year we kind of participated in this event called Comic Fiesta. If I'm not wrong, the foot Forward is about 70,000. It's a B2C event.
[00:33:25] Speaker C: Right.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: So this is basically how we help our partners, our games get more interactions or more community through all these events. Of course, beyond that we have our own channel that is dedicated for gaming. It's called Gaming on se where we organize games night and at the same time spaces as well to basically keep the engagement going on. We run like competitions, we run like tournaments. Games themselves, they have been doing it and this is basically how we drive high retention metrics for all the community. And I think most importantly make sure most, if not all the developers that's on say, listen to feedbacks from the community. I guess that's what really important here. The voices of the players themselves is going to be very important. And whenever we see that any pointers or feedbacks are not addressed, you will take the founders or take the team and say hey look, there's this feedback that's going on, right? Do you want to take a look at it? Is it worth looking at it, this kind of stuff? So I would say generally these are the kind of things that we've been doing.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: I guess I can tell that SEI as an ecosystem has not only been ramping up its efforts just as the grant provider, but also as playing more of a publisher functionality or even to a certain sense esports functionalities.
And that is probably the reasons why that SEI has been doing so well in the gaming spaces.
And since we're running out of time, I think I might have to end up with one or two more questions. What is the keyword that you guys that do you want to put up for the rest of this year of.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Year 2025 in the wholesale game ecosystem? I just want to say one thing first. We wouldn't consider ourselves as a gaming chain. I always say that SAY is a general chain where we have like DeFi designs, AI of course gaming that's going on. And I think for the rest of your basically looking for more I would say protects to need to keep you on sea. And we want to make sure that you're able to bring values to not just say, but the industry itself. So we're looking for founders who are able to I would say make a change in the industry or make a change in the space or maybe you saw something digital market themselves. So this is something that we are going to continue pursuing onboarding high quality projects, projects themselves who make sense to help us onboard the users or the masses getting them more exposed to whatever SEA is actually delivering in terms of like tech fundamentals. Earlier we talk about stablecoins, things like that. So this is basically how we are kind of like structuring our success for the rest of the year.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: Thank you for the general direction that SEI as a whole ecosystem is headed towards. Last question that I would like to ask is that will there be any kind of showcases in the coming months in any of the blockchain related conferences, say token 2049 or Korea blockchain week or some or else conferences.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: So looking at the success that we had in GM Vietnam, we are actually looking for the next event to organize this right? Could be kbw, could be token. We haven't really firmed things up yet, but things are in talks. We are in talks with the games themselves to see or even our partners themselves that is also gaming to see which events they are attending and then from there it will all coordinate them to see and permits for them to basically do a showcase. But in the coming weeks Webex sale will be there. We are working with a couple partners as well. So if anybody's in town, feel free to draw us a DM or visit the event at Webex we have a site event as well. There's a lot of things that we can talk about.
Some of our partners will be there, but I wouldn't really call this a showcase, but it's more like partners attending, networking, that kind of stuff. But in terms of real showcasing for what we did some Midsoft or something similar we did at GM Renam, I would say that likely we are doing something at Token but not sure yet. But last year we had something. But this year could be different.
[00:37:14] Speaker C: Right?
[00:37:14] Speaker B: So we will see about it.
[00:37:16] Speaker A: Thank you. I'll be happy to run around the conferences and then drop by say related events and then also say hi to you if you ever come if you happen to also be at those conferences.
Now that was the last question and thank you once again for or Jason for attending tonight's Gamers United with Blockus and sei and then giving your sharing your knowledge and thoughts and vision on how we can continue forward with expanding the Web3 gaming space. Thank you so much and also thank you for all the audience for joining today. Have a good night and then or have a good day if you're in a different time zone and then we'll see you on the next week's ama. Thank you.
[00:38:00] Speaker B: Thanks guys. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
[00:38:02] Speaker C: Bye bye.
