Because life is a little crazy right now, I thought I’d further the salt and spice with some juicy gossip, think of me as your web3 Kenneth Anger (IYKYK). Let us know what you think?
Ore-Ore-No
Oreo cookies are cheap. Buy some Oreo cookies. That’s the tweet. But seriously, what do you get when you force cheap biscuits and dying platforms together? You get Oreo Cookies in Horizon Worlds VR. You had me at cheap. A variety of cookie-themed but ultimately limited gamified experiences (see Neos) are what’s on offer here and I’m torn on this one. Because what it looks like is that only people who can afford expensive Meta headsets can participate in this bizarre venture, so inclusivity loses in this campaign (yet again). It’s also really troublesome to have some weird Angela Lansbury-meets-Dorothy from the Golden Girls influencer, the legendary phoenix Martha Stewart, to lend some jazzmatazz to whatever the hell it is Oreo and Meta are trying to do. This campaign has a disoriented demographic, it’s completely non-inclusive and it’s confusing. What are they trying to do here? Are they trying to get people to buy more VR headsets or get people to buy more cookies? Answers on a postcard please.
Q: Which usually conservative and tight lipped (and tight-wallet) games CEO loves a bit of ABBA? Who could it be? 🎤
CrAsH n BuRn
Oh dear, this Porsche story just refuses to die. It's gonna keep going for 911 years. Do you see what I did there? Cue the sad trombone because collectors are calling this little drop “clueless” and I couldn’t agree more. Creating a web3 wreck is one of the easiest things you can do as a tech bro, but labouring the point with an ill-thought through campaign and a lacklustre sales strategy takes the cake. It all started with the price point: 0.911ETH—see what they did there? And it all ended with who I am I kidding, this nightmare is never going to end for Porsche. What they hoped for was an innocent enough brand awareness project to celebrate their iconic 911 sports car, you know the one I mean, the one where city boysies from the 80s do their best Howard’s Way pose beside an empty harbour to tell you that this is the best thing that will ever happen to you (and cars) if you buy it. Porsche then created a drop of just 7,500 NFTs for some other reason (in my opinion a 7,500 drop is waaaaay to many NFTs) and the utility, yes, they created utility, allowed the holders to access events and exclusive merchandise. There was also some vague promise that car nutters could help to design Porsche's “future in the virtual world”. I don’t buy it.
The naivety of this particular campaign started with 0.911ETH which equates to something near $1,475 which is a lot of money for an NFT, I mean, if you listened to anybody talking at last week's PGC; no one was prepared to talk about price points, which I found really, really annoying. No, wait, I found it un-Bullish. Some critics suggested that a price point of 0.0911ETH, which is about $145 would have made more sense but the backlash from the Twitterati in the cryptoverse particularly, through phrases such as cash grab and pump-and-dump, which Porsche definitely isn't doing was pearl clutching. They just fucked up. That’s all. And it’s nice to see that a massive organisation has messed up like this on the world stage. Heaven knows that for every Porsche NFT cock-up there are a million worse failures in the crapper. If they had spoken to their end users as they developed their project they would have been in a much better position to understand what the price points would be for the crypto for this really important NFT but instead they just went ahead and outsourced all of their thinking to (I suspect) the third party minters and that’s a real shame. Want to know of a company who has an in-built web3 team with actual experience of minting inside a huge organisation? That would be Unilever.
Overheard at PGC London: “They’ve got about as much chance of being successful at making a web3 game as I have winning at Family Fortunes.” 🏆
The Dreams Of Shillers
This puff piece almost made me choke on my tea this morning. Apparently there are just three high-demand metaverse jobs that your kids should look into. Really? If this is the future, then tiger parents better get a move on, because we might not even be using the term metaverse before this year is out. Showing us the deets through the eyes of (some) people I’ve never heard of doing what seems to be side hustles, I can hardly concur that this is a must-do. I can however agree that everything from game design to computer science is much more relevant to the world of the metaverse than anything these influencers are doing. Let’s try to not put people on pedestals and let’s instead keep it real about the non-glamour of working in this sector. I’ll go first: Pros—New technology, fun people to work with, great collaborations. Cons—No money for innovation (only money for traction), it’s a massive circle jerk of the same idiots peddling the same crap at conferences, it needs game development to survive. Luckily, I’m busy in this space, very busy and though it looks really glamorous in here, it’s actually a lot of hard work.
Heard in Davos: “I can’t go in there [the president of…] smells like ass.” 🍑
Log Line Jam
Is Hollywood that bad that we need to democratise storytelling? Dude, storytelling is already democratised. Even Disney can’t own stories. But some biz, let’s call them StoryCo, somewhere, let’s call it Hollywood, wants to decentralise the telling of stories in movies. StoryCo has raised $6 million in seed funding to realise this week’s dream. What, isn’t taking a page out in Variety magazine enough for me to tell you that this is a bad idea? But is it a bad idea? Well, yes, yes it is. So there's an already good idea in Hollywood orthogonal to this and it’s doing great business thanks: Decentralised finance for filmmaking or production investment. That’s the tweet. Jeez how many times do I need to say this, stop leeching your crap ideas to raise your studios from the dead via the medium of stories. Instead, invest your time and energy into storing, financing and distributing on blockchain. I do not wish to sell my soul to some weird collection of DAOists who finish my sentences and I don’t want to lose my IP for the sake of “sharing is caring”.
Q: Which new (less than 6 months old) metaverse studio is a front for an entirely different kind of business? Wink, wink. 😜
Wake Me Up Inside
A&T Capital released their web3 trends of 2023, and I literally took just one thing away with me. Reports are boring. But seriously, Account Abstraction versus Externally Owned Accounts was the hot topic. As both are “are gaining popularity as they aim to achieve Web2.0-level security and user experience while making different trade-offs.” I say that AA is the way, because EOA provides a deal of limitation for a generation which is becoming more and more reliant on mobile-first technology. Also it’s a great bit of research as I approach the launch of my first wallet, made for the mom test, AA ticks a lot of the Solo Wallet boxes.
Trends in exchanges, transparency and decentralisation and the growing importance of the MEV Market which essentially is “MEV is sometimes referred to as an “invisible tax” that miners can collect from users – essentially, the maximum value a miner can extract from moving around transactions when producing a block on a blockchain network.” Overall this stuff is massively bullish in the middle of a bear market but here we are. And the word bullish can just GTFO. My conclusion is that A&T Capital’s report tells us that web3 is going from strength to strength. No bad thing at all.
“I love it when you host us Kelly, because I feel like your digs at our business models are done with love.”— Anon. 😮
Monkey Tennis Shoes
Nike’s web3 platform is going to reward creators for virtual sneaker designs, so is it really a welcome to the creator economy or is it more about diversifying, outsourcing or democratising design? Since Nike created the dotSWOOSH thingumybob they have, wait no, what I want to say is that since Nike bought RTFKT they want to create more RTFKTs that they don’t have to pay that much for and can instead reward with the gift of sneakers, cold hard ETH [insert your preferred currency here], or money off coupons, probably. So not necessarily the greatest business model in favour of the consumer ever.
I’m being salty, because what I think is cool about this is brand loyalty and connectivity. They have effectively created their own cute walled garden. Technically they shouldn't really need to do this, they have a mighty market share, but like all elitists, it’s better to give non-inclusive dreams than make inclusivity priority #1 with everything you create and develop. They don’t need to do this, but like all creative platforms before them, all your base are belong to them.
Overheard at PGC London: “Did they drop that NCP?” 😂
That's enough Metaverse for this week. I'm off to find a lawyer for all this damn juice.