Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Manish from IndiGG DAO. Manish has been very instrumental in the growth of IndiGG and these guys are doing a phenomenal work in shaping the gaming ecosystem, not just in India, but all over the world.
This was a very, very interesting conversation, especially for gaming enthusiasts and people who are perhaps very interested in this area and this space from an industry which was perhaps not taken so seriously over the last decade. It has really shaped up to be something that is taken seriously by everyone and from content creators to developers to gamers themselves. This is a very, very interesting conversation and I really cannot wait for you guys to hear this.
I know I say this on every conversation, but I’m just incredibly grateful that these wonderful founders want to speak to me and all of them are building such wonderful things. So I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s just deep dive right in.
Hi Manish, thank you so much for taking out the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? All well, how are you doing? I am doing great. Thank you so much for asking.
So, you know, I’m so glad that we could finally make the time and do this and I would love for you to tell our listeners a little about yourself and your background and how you, you know, got into the gaming industry and became like the founder and custodian of IndiGG DAO. For me, I come from a middle class family in UP. Okay.
Like in my good old days, everybody was told to either become a doctor or engineer. I chose to become an engineer because there was no option which we had. Right.
And then went to traditional engineering MBA path. I don’t have any fancy stories about my childhood, about gaming and how I was a gamer and all that stuff. To me, gaming really happened at Serenity when I joined UTV as the CEO for the New Media in 2009.
And there UTV has a subsidiary called India Games. Vishal is the co-founder of that. And I was on the board representing UTV.
That’s how I for the first time got into gaming. Right. And saw what a gaming studio looks like.
What fascinated me right from the beginning was intuitively that you could really design a game, design a progression, which can really impact the behavior of consumers and make them come back to play the game again and again. Right. And that really kind of excited me a lot about gaming.
And from 2009 to now, that single aspect has kept me in gaming because understanding consumers’ mind and trying to kind of really design a system which can make them have fun, make them have fun individually with their friends, keep coming back to the game is such a humbling experience. Right. And that’s the beauty of gaming, that it combines data, tech, and consumer psychology in such a beautiful mesh and keeps you humble with every new game release.
And so, yes, that’s what I’ve been doing since 2009 till date. Right. There is never a dull day in a gaming company’s life.
And there is never something which you can say is constant in gaming ecosystem. It’s always the only thing which is constant is change. Right.
So, you mentioned that you’re from UP. I was also born in Lucknow. So, I’ve spent a considerable number of years there as well.
So, that is something that we have in common. Tell me a little about what you guys are doing at IndieGD. And how did you… Because, as you said, that this is something, it’s a very dynamic space.
And, you know, that kind of is your push to get up every day and get to it. Because no two days are alike in gaming and in Web3. But, you know, just to give a little background about what your DAO does and how can our listeners perhaps be a part of it or interact with the DAO.
Absolutely. The main thing in last 13 years, which I have seen is gamers are the reasons for all of us to exist. And gamers put their heart, passion, time, everything into playing games.
And because of their time, skill, money, there’s a huge amount of value created by gaming studios, by gaming platforms, by advertising technology companies, by app stores. And I always believe that the person who is the source of this value creation doesn’t really get anything out of it. Unlike any other place, if you are a techie, you will leverage your experience.
And as your experience keeps improving, your salaries will keep happening. Same thing is true for a chartered accountant. Same thing is true for a lawyer.
Same thing is true for a doctor. But that’s not true for a gamer. And that’s something which is non-intuitive.
And when I started reading about blockchain three years back, I said this is one problem statement is that if there was one place which can certify your history is true and history is immutable and it can be transferred, it can be owned by the user and user can use it in any ecosystem that they want to use. That will create huge opportunities for gamers because my IMA degree is a well-recognized degree and everybody knows it. Or my work experience, everybody knows it.
And hence, they value me. But for a gamer, if I can create such a system, it will start creating economic value, a fame loop for the gamers. And that’s what really excited me that after 13 years, if I can create such a system which can bring gamer into right and center of the economic loop and fame loop, I would have really kind of created some system which I’ll be very happy about.
And that’s where the genesis of the whole gaming DAOs are. Gaming DAOs are basically creating decentralized micro-communities around gamers so that gamers can really run those communities, gamers can really govern those communities, they can really earn from collective efforts of the communities. And at IndiGG, we are building such platform called communities platform where different communities can come together and we can make them accessible based on their own reputation, based on their skills to various people who want to leverage their time and skill.
And thus, the gamers can make money. But yeah, as I said, I think this, you know, what you said about the gaming community and the gamers perhaps not getting their due earlier resonates a lot with me. And it’s wonderful that, you know, Web3 and gaming can come to a point where, you know, they’re benefiting, both the ecosystems are getting benefited because of the technology.
So you’ve been in this ecosystem and in this space for like, say, 15 odd years from my understanding. So, you know, what is the kind of transformation that you’ve observed, especially in the Indian gaming ecosystem? And how has that influenced your vision for IndiGG? So if you look at it, India is a very young nation when it comes to gaming. Unlike US or unlike China, Korea, Japan, which have 40, 50, 60 years of gaming history.
And gaming is the dominant format of entertainment. India, truly the gaming era started with the smartphones where the consumers for the first time saw an exciting, entertaining format, which is free. And they started downloading the games in copious amounts.
So it is not a surprise that in last seven years, and especially post-2017 Jio launch, all consumer tech businesses have taken off and gaming has also taken off supremely well. And the testament of that is number of downloads, if you were to take as a parameter, India is number two in the world. So Indians, 500 million plus gamers are playing the game.
And that was unthinkable. If you were to kind of just go 10 years back, that is a big, huge change in terms of time spent, in terms of volume. And plus the moment when the UPI rollout happened and the internet infrastructure improved, a lot of these gamers started playing competitive video games.
And that’s the start of the tournament and esports loop happened in India, which has been amazing. And in terms of viewership of the top games in India, it is absolutely ahead of any other sport except cricket today. That viewership of video games will surpass cricket in next seven, eight, nine years.
So that’s the number of people who are not just playing games, number of people who are competing in video games, people who are watching other people playing video games has really gone through the roof. And that’s a massive change in India, which has happened. The dollar’s value will follow this number of consumers which are doing play, compete and watch in next 10 years.
And that’s what makes the combination of gaming and esports and community is very exciting play. And that’s where IndiGG comes because we want to be a micro community driven publisher, which allows gamers to discover the right games, play them, compete them, earn from those games and then celebrate their own heroes in their own micro communities. Right.
Awesome. So I do think that the very ethos of IndiGG is very, very relevant, I think, and especially because of the numbers in the Indian gaming ecosystem, which are absolutely staggering. Do you see more participation? And this is just out of my own curiosity.
Do you see more participation from mostly metros or is this like well spread out throughout the country? Gaming transcends any geographical boundary or age boundary. It is the most penetrated entertainment format and it has no concentration that it is in top 8 metros or top 12 metros. Wow.
OK. Wonderful. Sorry, just to add on.
For us, we believe this is not a phenomenon which is isolated to India. This phenomenon exists today globally. And like at Kratos, our view is very simple that wherever there are nations which have a higher representation of young population and have a very wide diversity of per capita income, those are the markets where we will continue to give micro communities an opportunity to be on board on this platform.
And the collective power of micro communities is what will generate more income to each community. Wow. OK.
That’s absolutely wonderful. Gaming is not to be taken as a non-serious industry. And I think obviously it’s here to stay, especially with the numbers that it has.
That brings me to my next question. Can you perhaps explain how does your DAO empower gamers and developers? Because obviously it helps users in discovering. But what about developers and people who are actually building these games? So there are two parts of it.
If you look at the developer community globally, like any other model, the large game studios become more larger because of the existing first-party community they have. So they can launch a new game, they can cross-promote a game, they have a lot more data at their disposal. But if you were to look at a mid-to-small game studio or a new game studio which does not have first-party data, their bulk of the money really goes into Facebook or Google with the entire risk of engagement and attention being borne by the game studio and no risk being borne by Google or Facebook.
That creates a huge amount of mortality for the gaming companies and only a few succeed. If you were to kind of flip this model and say that, hey, listen, if you are able to get your first 10,000, 1,000, 5,000 very, very committed gamers through community formation, that community is happening because the economic value is being shared by those first adopters or early adopters. You are really building a community of poor evangelists whose economic benefit is aligned with the economic sustenance of the game studio.
Now that model really allows you to scale without really putting all your money in the hoodie of Facebook or Google. And whatever money you want to give, you can give it in the form of in-game items to the gamers, reward them for their in-game plays. And that’s how the community really gets something which they like to play.
They get certain rewards for their time and skill they put in the game. And game dollar ROI is much better than just getting top of the funnel. And that’s where the game developers’ mortality increases because they are able to build core communities which are truly attached to the game and not just coming by clickbait.
Right, okay. That’s wonderful. So it’s basically developing a micro-community.
A ready-made micro-community is already there for these developers to perhaps tap into. Absolutely. And not just a micro-ready-made community, but curated ready-made community.
Right. This is not just a community that is like there. These are actually folks who are going to be interested in what they’re building.
And that is so difficult, right? And there is so much noise with so many new applications, etc., that keep coming up. And it’s very difficult to establish yourself, find that PMF, get your first thousand users. And with your DAO, that is like right there, within their reach for any developer.
Correct. Absolutely. So for the game developer and gamer, it’s a win-win relationship.
Right. Because your effective consumer acquisition cost is much lower. Money is going to your own gamers, which are incentivized, which if they like the game, they will spend the money back into the game.
So that’s the beautiful circular loop which can be created when you are directly dealing with people who like your game. So how do you go about building this community? What is your secret sauce there? Our secret sauce is very simple. We are a micro-community.
If micro-communities are essence, then communities are always run by some micro-community leaders. Right. And we call them clan chiefs.
Okay. These clan chiefs are telegram group admins or micro-streamers or college kids or cafe owners. Okay.
Now they already have in real life their own communities. Today, those communities are not getting opportunity to earn income. And these clan chiefs are, and hence they also don’t make much money while they are passionate gamers coming together to play or to have fun or to watch parties and anything.
What we are doing is we are saying that these clan chiefs can make a lot of money as a percentage of the total earning of their micro-communities. The larger the micro-community, the more quests they do, the more jobs they do. The community makes money and hence the clan chief makes money.
And that’s the way we are growing our community. We have spent not a single dollar in community building in last seven months. And we have 820,000 community gamers community today.
Wow. So it’s like creating a loop where they are self-motivated enough to perhaps move forward in the tiers and by participating and actively getting more involved. Yeah, that’s the only loop which is possible because if anything is just paid, the community.
So I always like to say one thing, the large influencers have fans, the smaller ones have communities. Right. Yeah, that’s absolutely true.
I think the smaller influencers are, you know, it’s actually the smaller influencers that hold more power as well because the large influencers, you know, you’d probably just sort of view them from the sidelines and perhaps move on. But the smaller influencers, if you’re following somebody that, you know, has a real community and you’re a part of the community, the sense of belonging is so strong that they can actually incentivize you to perhaps take certain actions as well. And that’s a premise, exactly the premise of a micro-community leader because he or she typically knows all the people.
They have already an existing affinity. When they do something, they do it for each other. They don’t do it for third party.
And that’s what made this model far more formidable. Even all of us who are on multiple social platforms, once the group size increases, that doesn’t remain a community. Then it becomes a broadcasting forum.
Yeah, exactly. It’s not that, you know, it doesn’t remain that engaging and you are also perhaps not paying attention so much, right? Absolutely. You end up muting messages.
Exactly. Yeah. So how do you, you know, you mentioned that this is all organic growth and there are these clan leads and they are incentivizing their own set of groups.
So how does one, you know, become perhaps a clan leader and how do you keep them motivated? Like, do you give them face time with the team? Or how does that work? There has to be, even if there is no financial incentive, perhaps, what are the other ways that you’re keeping them, you know, engaged within the ecosystem? So one can come and apply as a clan chief on our site, Indi.gg. And it can be, there is a process of curation of clan chiefs. Okay. Again, that process of curation of clan chief is run by community.
Okay. So that’s a beautiful model that we don’t have a centralized system. It’s a purely decentralized system.
Somebody from community puts up their hand that we will love to be part of clan chief onboarding process. Great. Come and do that.
Now, to your point, in terms of their journey, from the onboarding journey, creating education videos, connecting them to an old clan chief, which can really educate them, which can tell them what needs to happen. It’s a process. Okay.
Second part of the process is, how do you really kind of create your own content to educate your own micro-community for doing certain tasks? And that’s where our team has them, that this is how, these are the steps and this is what you can do. Third piece is, helping them to explain what’s the financial model, how is the benefit going to happen in a simpler manner, which they can communicate to their teams. And then last but not least, different channels on which they have constant getting content on Telegram and WhatsApp, so that they are, A, getting aware of new tasks coming on the platform.
They’re aware of what kind of educational material which is being given out. So that’s how we are really in touch with our community. Oh, that’s brilliant.
I’m sorry. I forgot to mention very, very important and blasphemous thing is Discord. Gamers are on Discord and Discord is a primary channel where engagement, not just educative and this thing, but there is a lot of game nights, there are raid parties, there are ask me anything.
All those things keep happening on a Discord channel. Wow, awesome. So, you know, you have a highly engaged community and it’s an organically built community.
I think there is a case study somewhere. And, you know, if you put that out, I’ll be one of the first people to read it. I think it’s just a trailer for us.
Right. Yeah, obviously. There’s just a start in here.
You guys have miles ahead to go, but this is absolutely brilliant and very exciting as well that, you know, in the day and age of Web3, everything comes down to a community building is mostly seen as something that has like in some way a financial incentive. You know, you guys have taken it a step further and which is a step further in the right direction, which is very commendable. Yeah, yeah.
I think it’s all credit to the gamers passion for shaping the future of the community. Right. So tell me a little about the team, like how large is the team right now? How many people are working on the community side and all the other macro sections of your team? So, see for us, we have come here thus far through pure creating hustle, if you will, on WhatsApps and telegrams and discards, right? What we want to really not do from here is how do we do a product-led growth of building these communities, building these channels, building these micro communities on our own platform, right? How do we really kind of create tools for client chiefs to become successful? How do we create tools for people to really not just come here for economic benefit, but also start building fame loops? So that’s what we are really now looking at a very strong product tech team, which we have around 35, 40 people.
Our team size is 70 plus, including the 11, 12 people we have in Brazil. We expanded in Brazil very recently, a month back after a successful playbook in India. So today, 70 plus people, 35, 40 in product tech.
The community, the core members are maybe around 12 or 15, but it’s the larger community of client chiefs, which is part of the same family. They are the kind of spine of our operation. And that’s where while I’m saying 70 is FTE, but if you were to see how many people, I think we have 3,500 client chiefs, which are really managing everything on ground.
Wow. Awesome. This is brilliant.
You guys recently raised a significant amount as well, you know, in funding, which is supposedly the second largest gaming venture deal in Asia, at least, you know, in the first quarter of 23. So what does this milestone signify for you guys and how do you intend to utilize the money? I think for us, it means that we have more responsibility towards our investors to give them higher returns. I always say when we are making an announcement of the fundraising, Feb team was saying, let’s celebrate.
I’d say it’s not time to celebrate. It’s time to really think on how do we really generate something super meaningful, which can create wealth for community as well as for investors. So for me, fundraisers and insurance gives us a certain amount of latitude to experiment and experiment quickly to reach to a stage where you can create a business which has generated its own free cash flows.
For me, that is important because a business cannot run on investors’ money. It needs to run it from its own operations. Wow.
Yes. And our goal is to reach to that stage sooner than later. Because then only we are building something which is here to stay for the next 100 years.
Otherwise, we are building something on borrowed oxygen. Right. Absolutely.
I think it’s very important to build a sustainable business, no matter what you’re doing. Because ultimately, every business has to be earning money because for how long can you perhaps sustain yourself on this artificial pump of capital via investors or otherwise? Correct. Correct.
So for me, utilization is in building those product tech platforms so that we can really truly be enablers for the micro communities and client chiefs to succeed, to engage, to really create a huge amount of sense of ownership. And I think that’s what we will love to build and not kind of throw people at problem, but throw some kind of solutions driven by tech so that the communities can grow organically across the world in emerging markets or any market which truly, it is going to be global company. It’s not going to be restricted to some geographies because I believe blockchain has no geographies.
Right. Absolutely. No, this is brilliant.
So tell me a little about your business model as well. Like how do you guys make money? So business model is very simple. If you get 100 bucks, you transfer 75% to the community, 25% you retain for the operations of the company.
At today’s scale, at tomorrow’s scale, there could be many other revenue opportunities which may emerge and there could be a SaaS model, there could be a subscription model, there could be a freemium model. But today it’s a more game developers, publishers wanting to pay to the community and we being a facilitator of that and we take certain money from that. Okay.
Awesome. Great. So what is like the next big milestone that you guys are looking forward to? We want to, as I said, in the master’s hierarchy, if you are looking at earning as the first thing, we want to really create 200,000 unique earners but we’re earning at least $5 to $8 on this operation.
That’s something which if you are able to create, then we are creating roughly a one and a half million per month kind of revenue which means $18, $20 million ARR. That’s what we’re looking at. If you were to ask me in numbers, but if I were to kind of put it in form of value creation, I believe, and that’s something which has always kind of guided me is you should always ask question every day in the morning that if this venture were to shut down, will it matter in anybody’s life? Right.
Will somebody miss it? And if somebody is going to miss it, then you have created some value in their life. Right. So to me, that’s the maths part which I told you first and this is the English part and both of them are together important to create value.
Wonderful. So, you know, in terms of your personal aspirations for IndiGG and for the gaming community as a whole, what would they be? Where do you see the growth line perhaps in this remaining part of the year and the coming bull run? I don’t understand this bull run or winter run. For me, if you’re building businesses with first principles, you will be able to do well.
Right. In fact, winter is very good for people like us because we don’t get distraction. We don’t get too many knocks on the door and it is better to keep building.
Yeah, there’s little noise, right? There’s more focus on building and getting like the building a sound business perhaps, getting your foundation. Correct. For me, see the personal goal for me is this is a DAO.
This is a decentralized organization. Today, we are putting the initial building bricks and we want to really iterate and iterate fast to be able to reach to a scale product market fit. The sooner we do it, I want to become dispensable so that the community can start running it.
Yeah, that is a wonderful goal. I think every leader should or at least every, you know, core team member should have that as a goal that, you know, you want to become completely dispensable and at a point where the company is scaling perhaps. Correct.
Absolutely. And I think that’s when you truly build product-led systems rather than individual or personality-led systems. Right.
So in terms of, you know, the gaming ecosystem in say South Asia or just Asia as a whole, how do you see or what do you believe in terms of this new technology like Web3, AI? How do you think the ecosystem specifically in Asia would change with these advent of new technologies, the gaming ecosystem? See, the Asia is a very large geography and has been powerhouse for gaming. Right. If you were to kind of divide Asia into China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Philippines, you would see a very distinct different versus when you divide it into South Asia.
So on a continuum of a gamer’s willingness to pay, you will have highest in Japan to lowest in India, Pakistan. If you were to take another dimension of the quality of games coming out, which have been global hits, again, you would see Korea leading the pack or China leading or Korea leading the pack and then China, Japan, and again, India ecosystem would be somewhere there. Right.
If you were to look at volume of game developers which have started coming, that’s where is the most exciting part because India is a nascent one and now a lot of gaming companies and entrepreneurs are coming and building games, either games for India or building games for globe. And I think the quality of game, successful games coming on globally over next 7, 8, 10 years should change. And that continuum which I spoke about, Korea, China, Vietnam, and we should see India getting added to this cohort of successful companies building globally successful games.
So that’s where we are. In terms of paying capability of the gamers, I think again, India is not in the top, but as the internet and per capita income increases, the discretionary spend on gaming will keep increasing. And given that we are the size of the economy is very big, we will quickly rise up the charts of not in the top grossing countries.
And the whole narrative around Indians don’t pay for gaming is already starting to kind of see some cracks. Yeah. I will see that fully crumbling in next 5, 7 years.
Absolutely. Wow. Gaming has come a long way.
I think that from not being taken seriously and people spending time on games not being taken seriously, now there are YouTubers and content creators who are perhaps exclusively creating content around playing games and reviewing games and they’ve made it like their full-time jobs. It’s been quite an arc. Absolutely.
And all of us know that globally gaming is much bigger than Hollywood plus music. Right. If you want to add the entire gaming, including skill-based real money gaming and the non-real money gaming, in India also it’s bigger than Bollywood.
Right. In terms of time spent, it is second to WhatsApp. And in terms of volume of people who are playing games, I’ve already discussed.
So I think any parameter you pick up, this is the decade which is going to really kind of make very, very huge amount of employment creation, huge amount of exchequer revenue creation, large global IPs coming from India. So I’m very excited about the next 10 years which gaming has to offer to Indian and Indian ecosystem, both from development point of view and consumption point of view. What is your take on the new technology trend? Like earlier, obviously there was all the rage about Web3 and people were talking a lot about that.
And then at some point the tide turned a little bit and now everybody seems to be talking a lot about AI. How do you believe AI will shape the future of gaming or do you think it will have any kind of impact? Are you seeing any AI generated games that are doing well? I think it’s all ugly. But a huge amount of efficiencies and cost and experimentation can happen through AI.
Content generation in terms of landscape generation, in terms of character generation, in terms of customization. So I think a lot of that aspect will be becoming very fast. It used to take months, it will take days or hours.
And that’s where from a AAA game development cycle should crash in my opinion. So that’s one big thing which is going to happen. The second thing in terms of the whole customer support within games would definitely kind of go many, many notches.
The third piece is the marketing side will become hugely enhanced and very integrated. Now that you will have a lot more, especially for the large studios, they have a lot of LLMs at their disposal and they can really use it for personalization within game as well as on the other channels. So I clearly see both efficiencies and revenue generation opportunities.
But from these small and big studios, I think it’s going to be very encouraging because now the quality of art, which you were dependent on either lucking out on a good talent or you were not able to afford that talent. Now, if you are very good in understanding what you need, you’re clear, you will be able to generate very high fidelity, high quality art to make your game look like a global game. I think the biggest benefit should come to the small and medium game developers.
Right. I do agree. I think the more efficiency will be brought about in the process and just the turnaround time will become less because of AI.
How do you, you know, how are you perhaps encouraging younger developers to start building? Like if you had to give advice, say, to the younger developers to start building and look at, you know, building exciting new games, what would be first, what would be your advice to them? Secondly, do you have any kind of resources that you can recommend to them that they can look at before diving in the space? I think my advice to anyone which is deciding to come into gaming that your successful game may be a number 7, number 8, number 9. Right. Yeah. Anything before that is a luck.
So come in with a long time period point of view. Okay. It’s a very tough.
Be patient. Be patient, be at it. Yeah.
But if you want to fail, fail fast. Right. I’ve seen a lot of people really kind of getting stuck and creating content for one-year journey of players or two-year journey of players or 180 days journey.
I think whatever is required for most lovable build which you think your own gamer will like, quickly test it out. So I think that’s one, if you are bootstrapping and if you are not resourceful, quick testings will help you and to kind of reiterate and keep doing it. Yeah.
And most of the gaming companies are typically a bootstrapped 4, 3, 4 member companies coming out of passion. Just be agile in your mindset and thinking. That’s good.
Those are good pieces of advice. I think you need to be a little agile. You need to be patient.
You need to persevere, but you also need to know when to perhaps stop and a pivot. And that is important. Are there any resources that you would like to recommend in terms of books or people to follow that these guys should be looking at? I think there’s enough and more opportunities.
If in any ecosystem, I will strongly suggest go and participate in India Game Developer Conference, which is coming up in November 2nd to 4th. Right. There you will not only be able to meet some fellow entrepreneurs, but you will be able to meet a lot of speakers and a lot of hands-on labs material that will help you.
Awesome. That is again, very actionable piece of advice. So, you know, just to sum this all up, you guys are building something super exciting in this space.
Do you also have like any sort of a program to incubate these side games at a very early stage or help out the entrepreneurs who are trying to get into the gaming industry? So what we have is not a, we have a program which we call testing program. Okay. When a game developer is fairly reasonably open to take feedback, we’ll be very happy to put their game to the community, get them detailed quality feedback.
On various dimensions. And that’s something which will be, which we are encouraging more and more game developers to partner with us. Because again, this is a community driven platform and community is a passionate gamers, which like to play and help other games.
Right. Makes sense. Makes sense.
Awesome. Wonderful. Manish, this has been such a lovely conversation that I almost lost track of time.
I would love to know from you before, you know, we can wrap this up, which are technology trends or trends in the Web3 space that you feel that, you know, are here to stay perhaps. See, I’m very excited about the whole immersive experience. I believe there is no better joy than being a protagonist in a game and then really kind of going through the emotions, going through the actions, going through the, whatever gameplay you’re doing, which is, which has, which has motion.
It is not just, not just a button bashing game. I would, I would love, I believe that’s the, that combined with your asset ownership and reputation ownership is going to be the driver for gaming in next 10 years. Because the more immersive environment you get into with less friction, you will enjoy the game.
Today, when you play a tennis or a squash or a badminton, it’s, it’s, it’s, you’re playing it in game. When you completely have all degrees of freedom and you are inside the game, it’ll be awesome. That when you are wearing something or you are kind of owning certain sword or you are owning certain kind of gun or you are having certain magical superpowers, which you are owning and you can trade it and people can see you in the arena.
I think combination of that is going to be magical. Okay. Yeah.
I think that that is, that is something that I also believe would really be like a precursor to pushing the gaming industry further. This kind of does make me curious. Are you guys as a company looking to build perhaps like a metaverse? Is that a direction that, you know, you guys want to go in? No.
Okay. I believe that there will be, what we are building is a community platform and a metaverse or multiple projects, which are trying to build metaverse will need community and different, different job roles from within the community. And that’s where we will partner with people who are building, whether it’s sandbox or building decentralized or whatever it is.
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.
Thank you so much, Manish, for taking all the time. This has been a wonderful conversation. I wanted to ask you one more question.
This is something that I ask everybody that comes on the show before we wrap this up. If, you know, somebody is, because you made a leap, right? You were originally in web two, then, you know, you’ve kind of come into web three. And if somebody is in your same position and they’re looking to perhaps get into web three, but they are feeling a little unsure, what would be your suggestions to them to start living on blockchain? So my suggestion would be to convert that unsure into a deep conviction.
Ask yourself, why are you excited about blockchain as a technology? And if you think that from first principles, that intuitively is, is a, is a kind of a cost to you. It is something which you really believe and you think you can fundamentally create a movement, then become an entrepreneur in blockchain. Otherwise, with little or shallow conviction, you will remain a tourist.
And we have seen a lot of tourists and going, going back or saying web three is dead in last one year. Great. Yeah, you do need a lot of conviction to actually stick it out here in this space.
That is a wonderfully good advice. So, before we wrap this up, Manish, any parting thoughts, anything that you would like to, you know, share with our listeners? I don’t think I have any parting, parting thought, but I, I always say, just enjoy what you’re doing. And if you’re not enjoying, quit it and find what you enjoy.
Yeah, I think, again, this is like a lot of food for thought. You’re very succinct, but you know, a lot of substance there. And I, I think everybody should follow this.
If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, introspect, reflect, and perhaps find something that you do. Work is a huge part of your life. And there’s no point in really slogging it and doing work that you don’t necessarily enjoy or is not bringing you joy.
Correct. And thankfully, the Indian economy today offers multiple things. Right.
That you can enjoy. It’s not anymore a situation that you are forced in a 12 hour job that you hate. Absolutely.
Wonderful. Thank you so much. Once again, Manish for taking out the time to speak to us and all the best for what you guys are doing to, you know, the gaming space in the subcontinent.
I feel like I’ve always been in awe of, you know, what you guys are building and especially the community. I think is like one of your biggest bigger wins because a lot of people sort of go back to financial incentives and whatnot to build a community. And you guys have gotten it right from day zero.
And that’s wonderful. So more power to you and all the best for your future endeavors. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Those are very encouraging words for the entire community. And we should chat more and stay in touch.
Absolutely, Manish. Let’s do that. Thank you so much.