Cryptonews Podcast George Isichos, Core Contributor at Game7, on The State of Web3 Gaming and 2024 Web3 Gaming Trends | Ep. 293

George Isichos, Core Contributor at Game7, on The State of Web3 Gaming and 2024 Web3 Gaming Trends | Ep. 293

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, George Isichos, Core Contributor at Game7, talks about Web3 gaming investments, 2024 gaming outlook, and the constant challenge of gaming distribution.

About George Isichos

George Isichos is a Core Contributor at Game7, recently spearheading Game7’s all-inclusive report on the state of Web3 Gaming for 2023. Before joining Game7, George was a product strategist for R3 and a strategy consultant for PWC.

George Isichos gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

APAC Leads Web3 Game Development, USA Maintains Momentum
Web3 Gaming Investments Defy Post-Correction Slowdown
Despite unfavorable market conditions, Blockchains targeting the gaming sector are on the rise
Blockchain wars in full swing for Web3 Gaming
Distribution remains a strategic challenge for the Web3 Gaming Stack

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab. We are buzzing as always. Still coming in hot from lovely, Mexico, and super pumped to have today’s guest on the show to take a massively deep dive into everything Web3 gaming related. Today we have George Isichos, a Core Contributor at Game7, recently spearheading Game7’s all inclusive report on the state of Web3 gaming for 2023. Folks, if you’ve not read this, you must. It is an absolute treat and a half. It is Alpha City, and George was the creator of this. We will obviously plug this in the show notes, but first we got to continue the intro. Before joining Game7, George was a product strategist for R3, as well as a strategy consultant for PWC, and is now a guru of the Web3 gaming sector. Super pumped to have you on the show, George. Welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing?

George Isichos
Very good. Thanks for having me Matt.

Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you on. We’re praying that the WiFi continues to buzz here. As we all know, I’m still in Mexico, and over the last couple of weeks, I don’t know what’s been going on, but the WiFi turned from mucho bueno to no bueno, and I’m hoping that we can keep the WiFi rails on the track here. It’s been a bit of a grind, but, George, before we get into everything Web3 gaming related, let’s set the table for myself and the listeners. Let us know and hear a little bit about yourself, your past, your whole gig at PWC, obviously working for eight big four consulting firm, what you did there, and then tell us about your jump and foray into the Web3 gaming sector, and then we’ll get into Game7, your report and all the fun stuff. But the floor is yours, my friend. Let’s hear it.

George Isichos
Sure. Yeah. So, a few years back, before my crypto times, I guess, I used to work as a consultant for PWC, primarily working with banks, energy institutions. Around five, six years ago, I had the chance to get into the space of blockchain gaming very early. Of course, it was a tremendously different world back then. Different companies, different cool things, different assumptions, different. Yeah, everything was different. But, yeah, this was definitely a very interesting experience for me, starting early, seeing what works, seeing all the things that we were super excited about and never turned out to be the things we expected in the blockchain world. I started in a startup experience with the Web3 gaming space in 2018. Then I had a pass to the more enterprise corporate world trying to help Wall street understand and make use of blockchain use cases in a more controlled, regulated setting, of course. And close to two years back, I had a fantastic opportunity to join Game7 and join this effort to really support the future of Web3 gaming.

Matt Zahab
I love that. And before we get into the bread and butter of the show, which will be the all inclusive report, give us the laydown on Game7. What exactly did you guys do? You guys are a DAO, if I understand correctly. And you do everything Web3 gaming related, from educating and investing, teaching people about everything. It’s just a sort of a myriad 360 degree company that does everything Web3 gaming related. But give us the elevator pitch and then we’ll get into the report and the current state of Web3 gaming and 2024 Web3 gaming trends.

George Isichos
Absolutely, yes. So, yeah, Game7 is a community comprised of both game developers and gamers that they want to definitely help accelerating the adoption of blockchain technology within gaming. We’re doing this in a number of ways by incubating projects that we do think they have strategic value to the Web3 gaming stack. We do invest and give grants to a number of projects based on different criteria, of course. And we are also engaging in a number of community led initiatives, including events, including the report you just saw, and any other initiatives that we think they might have value based on the feedback of our community.

Matt Zahab
How was Game7 formed? So just a bunch of really high level Web3 gaming gurus and experts who are like, damn, let’s create a DAO and let’s pool all our minds, capital resources together to create this 360 degree company that can really help move the needle. Is that sort of how it all went down?

George Isichos
Yeah, I mean, there are many versions of the story. Of course there are people that started with the idea, okay, there’s something there. Let’s try to rally people around this concept of having an inclusive enough environment for virus initiatives to grow with a clear focus support Web3 gaming close to two years ago, then there was a proposal to important companies and ecosystem stakeholders to support this initiative about Game7. And from that point onwards, Game7 has been a very dynamic thing in a sense, because, yes, the ambition is a DAO, and we definitely try to grow in a way that wears different hats. So we have different incubated projects, we do have the investments that we do. We do have community led initiatives. So, yeah, Game7 is, for me, that’s something I really enjoy. It’s a unique and very diverse community with a clear focus to support Web3 gaming.

Matt Zahab
Let’s jump into a couple trends that we saw for 2023. Obviously I’d love to get into 2024 as well, but walk me through your report, some of the biggest trends you saw from 2023 and just sort of the current state of Web3 gaming as a whole.

George Isichos
Yeah, it’s a great and tough question at the same time, because as you can see from the report, it took us close to 55 60 slides to try to capture a part of the truth in a sense. And there are many things to talk about before we do this, I want to give some context on what the report is all about because yeah, we say instead of Web3 gaming, but there are different reports with a different focus. So this time, for a few reasons, which I’m happy to also analyze a bit, we decided to analyze the decisions of Web3 game developers. So this report does not talk about gamers, does not talk about adoption, does not talk about traction. It’s more about analyzing why game developers took specific decisions and what is attraction between among key parts of the Web3 gaming tech stack. So it does not talk about token prices, it doesn’t talk about active wallets. We do talk about the tech stack of Web3 games and their decisions of Web3 game developers. So yeah, coming back to the original question about trends, I think we can summarize the full picture into a few sentences. Number one would be that the space, despite the sock, the macro sock that the wider crypto space experienced last year, the space is still growing. And as we saw, it only takes, I don’t know, a few weeks of market euphoria to make people again, forget everything and talk about the future. So yeah, the market is definitely still growing. Yes, slower, but definitely growing. There is a very strong focus towards the network layer of the gaming tech stack for a number of reasons. Again, that’s why we saw so many new networks or the popularity of frameworks that allow game developers to deploy their own chains. From an investment perspective, things have been impacted again from the wider macro environment within crypto and beyond. But we have seen investors definitely backing teams with existing experience or with very solid projects. So definitely the market has been super competitive and fundraising was very challenging over the past year. But we saw definitely key investors to back teams with clear focus and often bringing some experience from the Web2 world in the Web3 space. Yeah, on a high level, I would give it to this again, I’m happy to cover all the different parts of the report. Hopefully we will have enough time to talk about all that.

Matt Zahab
George, thank you for that. Much appreciated. Let’s jump into regions. Regions play such a powerful part in all aspects of Web3. I just remember specifically in the good old days of 2021 when everything was absolutely ripping and me over here in north american time, I’d be checking CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap all the other websites way too often and doing my job, having people on the Podcast. And then I’d go to bed and I’d wake up and a terrible habit that no one should ever do is I would check my phone first thing when I wake up and I look at the coins and everything rips. And why? Because that’s China and APAC moving the needle. And that sort of leads me into this question, what regions are really moving the needle when it comes to present day Web3? I understand that APAC still realistically leads the way. USA has maintained momentum, as per your guys report. What else is going on in regards to what different parts of the world are moving the needle in different capacities when it comes to Web3 gaming?

George Isichos
Sure. I mean, we had the chance to really deep dive to get some new insights. We all have feeling about what’s going on. But through this report, we finally had the chance to validate our assumptions. So arguing that the APAC region in Asia overall is a ridiculously important market for gaming is not a surprise. I mean, if you see that the mainstream gaming space, Asia is for many the most important market. But this wasn’t the case for Web3 all the time. I mean, Web3 gaming is like close to five, six years old now. So we have seen a few trends. So let’s start with the US. On a country level, the US remains the biggest market when it comes to hosting most game development teams. So most Web3 games right now, they are located in the US. But over the past two years, we saw a very interesting trend of both. I mean, the APAC region growing and specifically, or let’s say driven primarily from South Korea and Japan. So for me, that’s a very interesting movement, a healthy one as well, for a number of reasons. Number one, traction across APAC usually means more existing game developers and existing giants are not trying to entering and play with Web3 exploring in different ways. That’s number one. Number two, I think having, quote unquote, some competition to the US dominance across Web3. I think that’s also a very interesting development. We’re still very early, so it definitely makes sense to have different perspectives expressed by different growth models of different parts of the world. And not sure how familiar audience might be with traditional game developers. But for example, it’s different to develop a game for the Asian market, for Japan, North Korea, or to be a Nordics game developer trying to develop a game for either Europe or the US. And the difference are cultural, economical when it comes to regulation, these are very important considerations for game developers. So all in all, Asia as a space, as a region, definitely drives most of the new stuff happening across Web3. The US definitely is a strategic market, arguably again the largest country in Web3 gaming. We can see this both when it comes to the number of game development teams, but also the funding that massively went to US based teams. And again, many ways to explain this, but just wanted to put this now to the big picture. We haven’t seen enough traction yet from. Or I mean, it’s unfair to say not enough, but when it comes to EMEA, a few people talk to me about, okay, what’s happening across Europe? Is Europe losing its traction? I think the answer is no. It’s just like we just had a few years where Asia definitely grew faster and this created this difference between the number of game developers hosted in Europe compared to North America and APAC. But yeah, on a high level. Again, APAC definitely the most strategic market for Web3 gaming right now, but the US is the largest single country market.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, no surprise there. Before we get on to the next point, investing any hidden pockets, like is there a specific city in a country, for example, that just has a crazy high pocket of Web3 gamers developers investments? Besides the obvious, like the Hong Kongs or the Dubai’s or the Miami’s, are there any sort of hidden gems out there that are worth noting?

George Isichos
I can answer this based on the database of the report because we don’t track this. I mean, this could be a fantastic idea when we consider doing a revision of the report. In my experience, Vietnam, definitely Philippines, they have fantastic game developer communities. Poland in Europe, since you ask about hidden gems, not the obvious ones in a sense. And of course the Nordics area across Europe, like Finland, Sweden, yes, these are markets that definitely have fantastic talent. Whether we’re going to see something like this translating to new games or new game studios from these areas, that’s another question. But yeah, these are definitely areas with very high quality game developers.

Matt Zahab
Very interesting. Let’s jump into the investing side of things. This is obviously a topic that gets people going like crazy. Web3 gaming sector saw just an absolutely absurd surge in 2021. Since 2018, $19 billion has been funneled into Web3 gaming related projects, which is truly staggering and truly wild. 2022, I guess in h2 in the first half of 2022, if you were fortunate enough to get some funding, that happened for very few teams. And then last half, the latter half of 2022 and the early half of 2023 didn’t fall off a cliff per se, but very, a lot slower and less prominent than the 2021 days. What’s going on right now in the investment sector? I’d love if you could talk about some of the different gaming sectors within the sector as a whole, whether it’s sports, whether it’s MMOS, RPGs, action. Where are investors throwing their money right now? And do you think this trend is going to pick back up in 2024 if we do indeed have a bull market?

George Isichos
Yeah, so fundraising was super competitive last year, driven by a number of things that are not related to Web3 gaming honestly, there were a few models that didn’t never picked up, like the play to earn, which was super exciting in the beginning, and then it was super also challenging for those builders to find a sustainable business model moving forward. But I just want to say mostly this reaction of the market to all those macro events. I don’t think this is a reaction of investors to the prospects of Web3 gaming, but rather the macro environment and the risks related to investing to gaming when parts of the world are moving, literally. So this made the situation super competitive for many teams with often great talent, existing titles, existing user bases, but they still had a rough time raising. What we also saw was that investors, while they weren’t super excited about lacing too many bets or over diversifying, investors were more than happy to support, even in larger rounds, more strategic projects. How can we classify something as strategic? You can consider this either as, let’s say, some very popular IP, or the developer of very popular IP from the Web2 world deciding to do some Web3 experiment, or maybe part of the infrastructure that they have massive potential to power the Web3 gaming tech stack. So in a summary, there was a big correction. Yes, but investors even today are more than happy to support teams that have. They bring some expertise either on the game development or the content front when it comes to new year. I think that’s an interesting question, and a tricky one as well. We will continue to monitor a number of metrics, even in the first quarter. I think we will get a very good sense on the reaction of investors. In my personal experience, investors are more than happy to listen today and more open to discuss, but we haven’t yet seen strong commitment to validate the assumption that this recent positive market activity will lead to, let’s say, another wave of fundraising grounds.

Matt Zahab
George, thank you for that. We have to take a quick break, my friend, and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show, PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we are going to jump into the reality of AAA Web3 games and how there is such a scarcity of them. We are going to jump into the unfavorable market conditions and how blockchains are still targeting the gaming sector, how that’s still on the rise, the distribution, how that remains still a massive challenge and blockchain wars as a whole. But until then, huge shout out to PrimeXBT, longtime friends of the Cryptonews Podcast and longtime sponsors of the cryptonews.com pod and website. We love these guys as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50, which will give you 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50, CRYPTONEWS50 all in word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with George. Let’s jump into sort of the breakdown of Web3 games in regards to how they are classified. Most Web3 games are Indie level and mid sized projects, which makes up 94% of the market, as per your guys report. That is a pretty bananas number. I knew it was high. I didn’t think it would be that high. While AA and AAA titles are incredibly scarce, contributing to only 6% of the market share, how can we move the needle to get more AAA and AA studios on board to create these games? Because at the end of the day, gaming is not 2021 anymore or late 2020 where you had play to earn. Gaming needs to be fun. It’s the sort of the bread and butter of gaming. It’s the main essence of gaming. And in order to create fun games, you need good graphics, you need good storylines, you need talented teams, you need crazy high shoot for the moon visions. And it’s tough for these Indie level and midsize projects to compete with the AA and AAA, big boys and big gals. How do we change this George? And I’d love if you could sort of just take a deep dive into the composition of AAA games versus Indie games.

George Isichos
Yeah, of course. I would like to start by questioning you back. Do you think we really need many AAA? I mean, having, let’s say we have 90% of Web3 games being AAA, then we need a new definition of the even better category. So my point is, I think we have been overly obsessed with definitions for a minute and we forgot about as an ecosystem, why are we developing games in first place? So let me provide some context about the classification framework behind those figures you just shared with us. So first of all, we’re not examining the quality of the experience. I have played many hours of my life games that would be considered ceiling D small, very nice, but they have been absolutely fun for me. So I think we need to make clear that it’s one thing to talk about the production quality, the resources that each team has available that could give a good sense about whether you are AAA or Indie, versus the quality and the fun that eventually gamers can have. So we designed a framework that tried to encompass the realities of the Web3 space, but also being compatible with the assumptions of the Web2 world that bows, one is AAA case. And we realize that in the Web3 space we have this tendency to always say, if you’re not really AAA, then that’s bad. So that’s why we say, yeah, I’m using Unreal engine, so I’m AAA Web3 game. I think that’s not super productive personally. And I think we need to accept that AAA or AA or whatever always will be a top X percent of the market. If you ask leading game developers from the Web2 world, they would say it’s very hard to be AAA gaming studio unless you have already built AAA game in your life. So with all those interesting ideas, we define a framework that while by design it’s biased, everything is biased when it comes to things you don’t calculate. A well accepted methodology. We tried to analyze again what are the resources that the average Web3 game studio has available. And we realized that most of them would fit under the Indie plus, let’s say category of the mainstream space. What does this mean? Is that I think we need to have realistic expectations. There is no point of trying to build the next Fortnight if you don’t have ten years ahead of you, if you don’t have a massive team ready to support you across both development and commercialization. There’s no point of being obsessed about that. So it might make sense to think strategically where blockchain can really offer a unique experience for your gamer base. At the same time, there are definitely cases where we have Web3 native IP. So IP started from scratch as Web3. That has the characteristics of AAA experience Shrapnel. You mentioned about them before. Iluvium, Star Atlas. We have CCP doing a play test right now. We have many, of course, games doing cool things. But yeah, our methodology, I believe, contributed to the fact that we should not be obsessed about acronyms and really focus into where does it make sense. In some cases, graphics fidelity is what it takes to bring gamers in. Some others is the creative combination of gameplay, fun and the power of blockchain through asset ownership or smart contracts, decentralization, compatibility that can really move the needle. It’s not just the use of Unreal Engine 5.2.

Matt Zahab
Very well said there. I love how the Unreal Engine plug as well. A couple more questions then we will wrap up here, my friend. We also need to talk about the different blockchains that are buzzing in the sector right now. Despite the unfavorable market conditions, blockchains that are targeting the gaming sector continue to be on the rise. Obviously, most use L-1 networks with EVM side chains, but I’d love if you can walk us through sort of the breakdown between L-1s L-2s and some sort of more niche L-3s, and how a new breed of blockchain networks are sort of accounting for a much larger share of games that have been built this year.

George Isichos
Absolutely, yes. To our surprise, we saw like a very high number of new networks launching in 2023 and 2022 as well, someone would expect, because of the automatic conditions for the appetite for new chains to go down, but it’s actually the opposite. We can explain this in a number of ways. The simplest one is that most of these teams have been building for years. So obviously, since they’re working on something, they definitely want to bring to the market, despite the fact that NFT or Terra happened to happen in the same year. So we see obviously again, the development progress over the past three, four years to now materialize to new chains. But I think the most important observation from seeing close to 88 or 85 new networks that they focus, they target gaming, use cases to launch in 2023 is the fact that the concept of a chain is close to a commodity. And yeah, people tend to either be excited or give me weird looks when I say that blockchains are commodities. But what it means is that a chain itself is not hard to recreate today. It’s not like 2018 or 2017, where we had three, four, five usable chains and then the rest were like random coins pumping and dumping. Today, launching a chain according to your own needs, to your own environment, to your own game, to your own gaming ecosystem, is not rocket science. What is rocket science is of course offering a great UX that ties to the architecture of your own chain, but also to all the other layers of the text, including the wallet and many other things that can make the experience for gamers great. So what is hard is to optimize for your community. The content. Again, blockchains are commodities, but the content, the ecosystem and the communities you have on top of them are absolutely not. So we saw this in 2023 again, 83 new chains. I can’t see how we’re going to see less than that next year, especially given the rise of popularity of Layer 2, Layer 3 solutions. I want my own roll up. And there are also a popularity of frameworks that allow any game developer to launch their own chain. Like the OPL Stack, the Polygon, CDK, the hyperchains of Arbitrum, Nitro, Cosmos SDK, Avalanche subnets. I can talk about this for the next ten minutes. There are many solutions, many great solutions with different merits. So yeah, creating a chain is not super hard anymore, but finding good use for this chain is what the competition is all about.

Matt Zahab
I love that. So well said there. Another point is distribution. This is something that hits close to home as I’ve been very fortunate to work with a couple of gaming companies and one of the hardest things is distribution, George, and you are obviously well aware of this. Doesn’t matter if you create the best and most fun and addicting game in the whole world. If it doesn’t get out there, you’re hooped. You’re absolutely hooped with a capital H. Distribution is the name of the game in today’s world. To quote Gary Vee, we live in the attention economy and if you can’t get attention and distribution on your game, it’s candidly never going to blow up. You’re never going to make money. One of my favorite stats from your report is that the Epic Game Store has finally embraced Web3 games. There were two games listed in June of 2022 and there are now 69 jokes. Got to love that. There are 69 in October of 2023. We love to see that the number is rising. How does Web3 as a whole, how does the Web3 gaming sector continue to take away some of this market share from Web2 and increase distribution so we can get eyes on great products?

George Isichos
Yeah, I think as you said, distribution is arguably one of the biggest challenges for Web3 game developers, that they might have a fantastic game, a fantastic community, they might have perfected the whole experience, but still you need users and the distribution becomes an ecosystem wide bottleneck. So there are a few drivers in the market right now. Number one is that I think it should be clear that most big players are slightly more optimistic towards Web3 games. That’s why you saw this number with the listings on the Epic Games Store. Of course, this was partially influenced by the decision of Epic Games to be a bit more relaxed when it comes to self publishing, so game developers could go online and submit their own games. That’s something that wasn’t the case in the past. You saw Google play being Google overall, being more open to the idea of NFTs and token side games. They allowed specific use cases and they give clear guidance. We’re going to see how this will play out based on. I mean, I believe in January next month, they will also do a revision of how game developers and app developers overall can make use and refer to cryptocurrencies. We also saw the case with Epic and about the antitrust case and how this might impact the freedom that Google offers to Web3 game developers. But the challenge I’m describing is that even though mainstream distribution platforms are indeed becoming more Web3 friendly, there is an underlying challenge that Web3 game developers cannot really compete by having two versions, one, the real Web3 one and the Web3 minus minus, to fit the needs of either Epic, Google, Apple or whatever. Again, in the short term, this might be a fantastic solution for game developers to access a way for their audience. But I think we need to start imagining what is the future state of distribution for Web3 games. Because as you saw from the report, close to six out of ten games, Web3 games right now are not served by any mainstream distribution platform. So they have two options. They can either do the direct distribution way. I had a website, if you find it, you’re going to play my game. Good luck with that. If you really want to make money as a game developer or to rely on Web3 native distribution, and something that is very interesting also for Game7. That’s why we supported the creation of HyperPlay, which is a native distribution platform that tries to offer all the services you would expect from Steam, from Epic, Google Play and all these platforms, but also designed in a way that is friendly to the concept of a Web3 wallet of transactions. So yeah, I think solving this challenge is interesting and we’re going to see two forces. Number one, the distribution platforms becoming more and more friendly, but then the growth and rise of Web3 native tools. So it would be interesting to see what would prevail and how these two forces will play together in 2024.

Matt Zahab
I love this. George, last question here, mate. You’ve been on an absolute roll. Give me some 2024 predictions. What are we going to see here? Do you have any predictions for games or coins that are going to absolutely pop off? Do you have any macro predictions? Micro predictions? Give us the quick TLDR on the state of Web3 gaming in 2024. What trends that we can look forward to? What predictions do you think will come to fruition?

George Isichos
Yeah, so I can’t really comment on talking prices, but I think we can paint a good picture for our audience about the key developments in the space. So as I said earlier, the concept of a blockchain network will be commoditized, meaning that we will see way more people trying to be creative around their own chains. There are custom versions of that roll ups. And again, roll ups is an umbrella term. It can mean many different things. But yeah, we’re going to see way more innovation and exploration when it comes to creating chains fit for specific purposes. When it comes to scalability, which definitely remains a key challenge across the board for blockchain networks. We’re going to see some interesting developments. Again, we saw the rise of roll ups, Layer 2s, Layer 3s, the initial rise of optimistic solutions. Then now we have interesting developments on the ZK front with Polygon SDK, with zkSync with stagnant as well. We have the rise of data availability networks that they try to practically solve. The cost of having a roll up on top of Ethereum like Celestia, NEAR, Avail. Many other solutions will pop up. So scalability will wear different hats. And that’s a good thing. We’re not betting on just a single technical theme. And if it works, great. If not, then we have a problem. We do have a few options that can really push the space forward. Another observation would be that in 2024 we have the unique opportunity to stop assuming things about Web3 gaming, but actually experiencing it. Because we do have high quality, playable IP from both, let’s say teams that they started from scratch as Web3, like Shrapnel, like Illuvium, like Star Atlas, like my Frog Nations, like sorry, I’m forgetting so many great games, but you get my point. Like teams that they start a few years back to develop from scratch a Web3 game and now we have the chance to see how it plays, to see how mainstream gamers react to it, to see how Web3 gamers react to it, to validate tokenomics, business models, all these assumptions. So far in 2024 we will have the chance to actually see what it works and hopefully work towards solving the rest. And at the same time we are observing many AAA or mainstream players like Ubisoft, like Square Enix, like CCP from even online. Like we made like so many more teams doing actual experiments across different chains. So this is also very interesting to see and observe how the traditional gamers of this IP would react to Ubisoft going Web3 and trying to do things. So yeah, 2024 will be a very interesting year when it comes to token prices. As I said, I can’t really comment, but my point is that sometimes prices are tied to a macro environment that is not gaming related but outside of again, price development, I think 2024 is a fantastic opportunities for all of us to learn and start working towards mainstream adoption for Web3 gaming.

Matt Zahab
George, you absolutely crushed this. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I definitely have some homework to do and this was an absolute treat. My apologies for the WiFi to listeners at home. I’m sure this will turn out great because we have an incredible team helping us but my WiFi was absolutely terrible. There is a storm going on right now and when it rains here it pours and it affects the Internet. So I hope this one was definitely good enough for all you guys and I will be working on that in the near future. George, you crushed this. Thank you so much for coming on my friend. Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Game7 online and on socials?

George Isichos
Sure, yeah. To access the report you can go to our website game7.io to the research section. You can also see previous publications and download this report. The best way to reach out to me and other community members would be our Discord server. Again, many people from our community team and our wider community will be happy to get your feedback about the report. Also future needs you might have either the game developer, as a gamer, as an investor in the space, what are the things that you would like to see studied and analyzed in upcoming reports? So yeah, we definitely welcome this feedback and thank you so much for having me Matt.

Matt Zahab
George, pleasure having you on my friend and can’t wait for round two. Folks what an episode with George, Isichos Core Contributor at Game7 who also spearheaded and launched Game7 all inclusive report on the state of Web3 gaming in 2023. George was absolutely incredible. Was dropping knowledge bombs left, right and center on everything Web3 gaming related. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I speaking to the team. Love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. Justas, my amazing sound editor, you’re the GOAT. Thank you as always. And back to the listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.