What will the video games space look like with the blockchain and could gamers actually own digital assets in their games? Crypto Guest Sean Ryan, the CEO of AQUA, a Web3 gaming marketplace, joined Cheddar News to break down how NFTs and other Web3 concepts will transform video games. "It brings ownership to the concept of gaming, which is something gamers have asked for many years now."

Closing Bell

 The Future of Web3 and Blockchain in the Gaming Space

Well speaking of tradable digital assets, our next guest has Web three and Blockchain technology integrated with the gaming space is the next big thing. Aqua, a player focused community marketplace built for Web Three. Gamers says Web three based gaming will surge in the coming years. But what would it look like and how will it interact with legacy gaming giants joining me now, Sean Ryan C of Aqua as Sean, thanks so much for coming on. Let's start with utility here. How is Blockchain technology beneficial when it comes to gaming and pushing this space forward? Blockchain. Thank you, Christine for having me. Blockchain makes gaming better in that it allows players to own the assets as opposed to in the current system of free to play gaming where your assets are stuck within the game. Blockchain gaming means that you can take those assets that you acquired in the game and go sell them on marketplaces like Aqua or other similar marketplaces. So it brings ownership to the concept of gaming, which is something gamers have asked for for many years now, why can Blockchain provide this in a way that something else couldn't because it's a public database accessible to all where those unique digital objects can be registered to that database and then transferred. Otherwise you have a bunch of proprietary databases inside each individual game on IOS, for example on apple or google and they don't interact with the other databases. So this provides the ability to transfer assets buying or selling or trading in a way you just can't do in the current system and that's a huge benefit to gamers. N. F. T. S were super popular just about a year ago sean we've seen them fall out of favor of late even though some are still bullish on the space long term. I'm just curious the use of N. F. T. S when it comes to gaming in the future. Well these are natural. Let's start with the basics that three billion people play games around the world. So even getting a small portion of them to use Blockchain games and N. F. T. S. Makes sense. Second these N. F. T. S have utility meaning you can use them in the game. They're not just for art, you can actually have a better a better game, a better weapon, a better team. And three gaming the early part of gamers are very technologically advanced and so that the right types of people to work with early stage markets when it's a little more complicated than it will be in a few years, no different than free to play. Gaming was 14 years ago when I joined Facebook to lead that business. Who said to win in this space? I mean obviously there are legacy gaming companies. Do you think that they are well positioned? Sean Generally legacy gaming companies take their time to move into new categories and Blockchain gaming is an entirely new category with a whole new set of games to give an example take to an electronic arts recently did multibillion dollar acquisitions in the traditional web to free to play space and that was 12 years after that category had started. So what I think we'll see is the mid tier game companies. The mobile companies move fastest in this space. They play Tikka or some of these really much faster moving companies that are still large but can move more quickly and then later we'll see the larger companies enter the space, interesting so smaller nimbler companies able to pivot better. Are there ones on your radar? Sean that you think are already well suited to capitalize on the sector. It's really early. We love a game called Gods Unchained which is a collectible card game. We think guilt of guardians which is a battler battling game is gonna be great but it's really early you know there's about a million games in the apple app store and there's only about 100 games in the Blockchain system. So what we're seeing in 2023 are hundreds more games coming with a great deal more experienced between those developers. So I'm really excited to see the next set of games? Okay we've talked about all the buzz worthy sectors here. N. F. T. S. Web three gaming. How does the metaverse play into this? Does the metaverse have a role in the future of gaming? Well I built a virtual world slash metaverse 17 years ago and it was a bit too early in those days. So I think metaverse has a place to play and I think facebook and others are doing a great job. I just think it's further out, I think having to have a whole world you walk around in or to put on VR goggles is really exciting, but it's much further out and traditional gaming where you take Blockchain and enable it in classic games, sports games, fighting games. I think that's a much bigger, shorter term opportunity, interesting. Alright, Shawn Ryan C of Aqua, former employee of meta as I heard earlier in the segment, Sean, thank you so much for joining, appreciate it.