The speculative nature of currencies and games and NFTs and games has sort of led to the average gamer being allergic to it, right? Like you and I were in really deep within this time, so we could filter out a little bit of the noise of maybe what was actually real. But if you were not spending all of your time looking at this space, it did seem like 99% of it was scams and people were pumping and dumping and just really like trying to get rich quick and it's led to this complete, almost allergic reaction from the general public to crypto games. And it's going to be a really big uphill battle for the average consumer to get comfortable with crypto and NFTs.

Yeah, and look, the gamers who hate crypto aren't entirely wrong, right? There is some appalling behavior by these early web three game companies in the midst of the NFT boom. I remember looking at one game company that was formed by some ex-zinga people that had sold tens of millions of dollars worth of virtual land in the form of NFTs for an open world fantasy role playing game that was still in development and is still in development as of this recording after a couple of years. They're essentially using NFT sales as a kind of kickstarter or alternative to venture capital but passing the market risk fully onto speculators and future players. Really dangerous use of the technology in my opinion. The core gamer backlash against crypto actually led Valve to ban web three games and NFTs from Steam in late 2021. Ubisoft, which had jumped on the bandwagon with a hastily conceived NFT gaming project called Quartz in late 2021, ends up backing away in mid 2022 after a combination of outcry by core gamers and the market crash in crypto valuations. A video they released on YouTube announcing that plan garnered something like 96% dislike ratio. Discord, meanwhile, had become an important locus of web three news announcements and community during this period. Literally millions of people were on discord getting information about NFTs and cryptocurrencies. It functioned almost like a Bloomberg information service for crypto. Web three companies were using a number of participants in their official Discord servers as a KPI when they were pitching venture capitalists. They were like, look, we have 30,000 people in our Discord as if that was an attribute of value. In 2021, Discord CEO Jason Citrin put out a humorous tweet indicating that the company was looking into how they might enable or benefit from this cryptocurrency activity, including potentially launching a wallet, which caused a massive blowback from Discord's core gamer audience and caused Jason to withdraw any activity around that potential wallet.