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The Future of Gaming DAO or FOGDAO is a decentralized, tokenized community exploring the future of the gaming industry.
Nico Vereecke:
GM friends and welcome to the future of gaming you are listening to our weekly forecast we have myself Nico Vreke and Philip Collins your usual hosts with a special guest Susan Cummings who is the CEO of petaverse and tiny rebel games welcome to the show Susan
Susan Cummings:
Thanks for having me, great to be here.
Nico Vereecke:
The goal today would be to talk a bit about Susan, what she's doing now, a bit about interoperability and then we see where we end up. But before we do that, I want to touch upon one thing. I this morning flew back from Berlin. Yesterday we had our Future of Gaming Berlin event where I saw a bunch of you who told me that you enjoyed these podcasts, which is why we're going to keep making them. And it was a great event. So I'm just after the event, chilling the event, which doesn't make a lot of sense. We don't have a new one planned anyway, but it was really good. If you're listening to this and we hang out in Berlin, it was great. And yeah, it was so much fun that I think we'll find a way to do it again. With that, let's focus on our guest, Susan. Could you, before we dive in, you have a very extensive experience in the gaming space. Could you tell us a bit more about that before we dive in?
Susan Cummings:
half my lifetime now. Yeah, I've been in video games for 25 years, the entirety of it with my partner, Lee, my husband. And I guess we spent the biggest part of that at Take Two, where we both started on the rock star side. and I ended up setting up 2K Games and 2K Sports with Ryan Brandt when he was running Take Two. Basically, Take Two was becoming known for just Grand Theft Auto, or was only known for Grand Theft Auto, and strangely that wasn't enough for Wall Street. So we had about $200 million, if I remember correctly, this was many years ago, to go off and sign new things. And so it was one of the more fun bits of my career, where I got to go to some really talented game developers like Ken Levine and Gearbox. for access and others and say, what do you want to do? We'll fund it, we'll share IP with you. And we built 2K games and bought Sega Sports, which became 2K Sports. And so I was there for, till 2007. My partner was producing on some of the Grand Theft Auto titles and we left. It was not a great place to work at the time. I think Take Two has changed a lot over the years, but we spent about a decade, that's just the two of us doing the projects we wanted to do, which was, you know, it was just great. Maybe we would have done that for the rest of our lives, to be quite honest. We helped Atari, we helped Mojasko, we helped Paramount. And then we stumbled into free to play mobile games because that's all anyone was funding at the time. Sounds kind of familiar to recent years. At the time it was mobile games. And we picked up the rights to Doctor Who and we did a puzzle and dragons style Doctor Who game, which was the first Doctor Who game people actually liked. So that was exciting. And we did that by the seat of our pants. With very little funding. no marketing money, we managed to get 3 million people to play it somehow over the years, and moved the business to the UK, did another Doctor Who game, won an AR grant, got somehow into the world of augmented reality 4 or 5 years ago, before starting Petiverse 2 years ago, and now I have a 26 person team that I run, which seems to have happened in some ways overnight, and in many ways has been a very long journey the last 2 years.
Nico Vereecke:
Awesome. Let's hope that in a couple of years, you don't look back on Petaverse and jumping into the Web3 space and say, or make it sound as like you just did with, I started something in the AR space, which looking back now is like, not the greatest idea. Let's see. So, Petaverse.
Susan Cummings:
But you know, it was R&D and we didn't have to make money. It got us the attention of Apple. It got us the attention of Qualcomm. It got us the attention of Metta. It led to a lot of interesting projects. In many ways, it was the sort of genesis of where we are now. So, and who knows, Apple, about to announce AR Glass, as we think, maybe in June, until all
Nico Vereecke:
Mm-hmm.
Susan Cummings:
of a sudden, AR could become the new flavor of the moment in the world.
Nico Vereecke:
That is true. Also, you totally caught me on my bias there. As you know, Phil and I, we're investors. So for us, if it's not within a certain timeframe, a outsized return success,
Susan Cummings:
I'm sorry.
Nico Vereecke:
then it basically didn't happen. So thank you for correcting me there. So let's talk about Petaverse. What is Petaverse? What should we be thinking about this? I hear the word pets. Before we came on, you already mentioned cats. I'm a bit cat fan, so I'm already a fan. What's going on?
Susan Cummings:
So, Pudderverse, we've been building for over two years now, going on two and a half years. And we've always been, our interest in Web3 was always about digital ownership, the idea that we haven't owned our stuff, we've been renting our stuff for years, how could we own our stuff? And when we set out to create the project, my sort of, my high level to my partner, who's the design half, who actually makes things happen, I have crazy ideas, he actually can make them. And I said to him, how could we, knowing what we know about AR. for example, and how could we make a pet come to life and then be able to bring it everywhere and not have to rely on AR adoption being anytime soon. And we started talking about web three principles and the idea that if we built something grounded in the blockchain, you could have that immortality. You could have something that you would buy and know that you could keep it for as long as you wanted to. But I see this as the fourth generation of digital pets. Generation one was Tamagotchi, and it was about 40 years ago. 83 million people played Tamagotchi's. They were very simple, ground to a device, solo experiences. And then about 10 years later, Nintendogs came out. Still a solo experience, much prettier solo experience. Still confined to a device, confined to an art style, confined to a game. So obsolete, no one's playing with their Nintendogs anymore. Third generation, about 10 years later, Roblox came out with experiences like Adopt Me and Pet Simulator X. Suddenly it's a social experience. Suddenly it's not something that you have to do by yourself. Still tied into the walled garden of roadblocks though. Fourth generation is what we're going for, is how do we untether these things and allow you to take them with you wherever you wanna go and have social experiences and build something with immortality. The wonderful thing about digital is things don't need to die. That's a trapping of the physical world. So how can we create a digital item with true immortality that you could hundreds of years from now, your ancestors could still make use of? That was the premise of what we built.
Nico Vereecke:
And so I own a pets, which is a digital collectible, which is an NFT lives on the blockchain and I can use it within the difference, um, interactive experiences.
Susan Cummings:
That's where we started.
Nico Vereecke:
Okay.
Susan Cummings:
So where we got to, ultimately,
Nico Vereecke:
Okay?
Susan Cummings:
was real. Well, first, a few things. We realized that the Web3 space is challenged right now. Challenged by themselves, to be quite honest. They say they want utility. They really want to speculate and make money. 99% of the world doesn't even know it exists, for the most part, other than maybe the Borde Biak Club. And so what we realized is quite a lot of what we're building is Web2, by design. some of what we need in Web3 just doesn't exist yet. So we always sort of apologetically built this as a Web2 slash Web3 experience because Web2 opens up a lot of possibilities that Web3 doesn't. And so we realized a hybrid approach is best. And so really this is an experience about interoperable digital pets. If you want them to be Web3, that's great. And hopefully eventually everyone will and eventually everyone will want to immortalize it. It's really about interoperability. And what we've come to realize over recent months really is that... the mass market has still not been given a reason to care about Web3, for the most part. All they've seen are scams. And the better way to do this would be to give them onboarding, to ease them into Web3, instead of saying, you want to mint this as an NFT, to show them use cases that make them say, oh, I want to do that. By the way, that makes it an NFT. It's a subtle difference.
Philip Collins:
Yeah, and I think that's something that's interesting too, and I think speaks to your kind of web two gaming background is you view web three truly as that enablement layer. I think you view it very practically, which is something that's been missing a lot over the last 18 months is it's like one, it's binary. You're either traditional or you're web three. And I think
Susan Cummings:
Oh
Philip Collins:
that we've seen that the people that have deep games experience have really made the transition to we're gonna use it where it makes sense and we're gonna increasingly implement it as new tools become available. maybe down the road, you know, it looks like whatever makes sense for the user. And I think that is, that's kind of where we're at in Web3 and there's not quite enough of that mentality yet, but I think it's what's necessary to continue pushing it forward.
Susan Cummings:
And here's what's cool about digital pets is pets are what I call like a sort of grand unifier. Everybody understands pets, right? Regardless of your gender, your economics, your religion, where you live, we all have dogs and cats or other types of pets in our society. So we understand them. And that's why it's such a like $180 billion industry or something like that. I just read physical pets. So I think that perhaps that's why digital pets seem to be always a part of early adoption. As soon as you see an AR headset, there's always a pet on it. As soon as you see VR headsets, same thing. It's why almost every NFT project is based on an animal, I suppose, is we understand animals. They're cool and they're cute and they're wholesome and you don't expect a scam. And so I feel like that's one of the reasons why I expect digital pets to be one of these things that can lead to adoption of all of these, because it's not just one technology, right? Everyone's quick to jump from thing to thing to thing. And... I was already seeing the LinkedIn posts of, Web3 is dead, long live AI. And then if Apple announces their glasses, it'll be a screw AI, now it's about AR and VR. The answer is, it's really about all these things. And it's about how can we create fun, delightful content that rests into technology when it needs to, which was why we always approached it as a hybrid, because it's like what's best for the user, not what's best to take a box on a business planet.
Nico Vereecke:
To add on to the comment that people tend to love pets, there's also this thing where Disney movies that have cute little animals or creatures in them tend to sell way more or way better and any type of game that has a sort of pet-like companion also does way better and so the data does seem to back up this human desire to have little creatures with big eyes and fluffy... characteristics that we can just snuggle with, although, like, even if it is in virtual worlds.
Susan Cummings:
Definitely, yeah.
Nico Vereecke:
How many pets do you have, Susan?
Susan Cummings:
I have
Nico Vereecke:
IRL
Susan Cummings:
two dogs.
Nico Vereecke:
pets.
Susan Cummings:
I have two dogs.
Nico Vereecke:
Nice. Okay. Okay.
Susan Cummings:
Little
Nico Vereecke:
Awesome.
Susan Cummings:
dogs. I've always
Nico Vereecke:
And
Susan Cummings:
had
Nico Vereecke:
then,
Susan Cummings:
dogs.
Nico Vereecke:
okay. Awesome. Cool. Yeah, it's super fascinating. What's the, can I already, you know, enjoy your virtual experiences? Like, can I play with, with pets
Susan Cummings:
Absolutely.
Nico Vereecke:
or not yet?
Susan Cummings:
Right now, if you wanted to, if you have one of our cats, there are about to be four things that you can, well other than, there's a PFP, but in terms of real things. There's the Mimitron, which we launched on Apple and Android, and we launched it on Apple with Metamask integration by the way, and no troubles with Apple. So it's on three platforms, and the Mimitron is meant to allow you to bring your unique one-of-one into the experience and create content for video and social media. and just to play with your pet. And so your cat will jump up on the sofa next to you. It employs LIDAR on the iPhone, so it's really cutting edge in terms of technology. We've launched an integration of Chat GPT that lets you take your pet on a tech space, choose your own adventure, and in different genres. And so you can take your cat through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sort of vibe homage. You can, something like Blade Runner, horror, sci-fi, et cetera. But it's your cat is with you. And it behaves the way its underlying metadata says it should behave and guides you. And things change during the story, if you're nice to your pets or if you take time to stop and pet your cat. They get happier and abilities unlock and so forth. A VR experience is coming this week, so you can now bring new features. You can bring your pet into VR on your Oculus Quest. And the fourth experience is Petiverse Live, which is kind of, I almost forgot, it's my favorite thing, which is how I can bring my pet with me. on any video stream, so anywhere that takes video usually takes OBS as well. You can have your cat on stream and with a whole suite of animations. If you bring it on to Twitch, it's the first sort of integration into Twitch that lets your audience interact with your pet and trigger animations and will be allowing you to even link activities to different animations. So anytime someone subscribes, the cat can all open Sciences. Thank you for subscribing and things like that. So that's the fourth integration. So all of these are features of Petiverse. What we're about to launch is the hub, is Petiverse.com. is our Nintendogs, and you can experience it straight in browser, and maybe that's the only thing you'll ever do, is a web 2 experience, where you adopt a pet and you play with it in browser. But what you can do is also subscribe and bring it into all the things I was just talking about, all these premium experiences. Same pet, it's just your pet in the cloud. So if your pet's hungry, you can feed it in browser, or you can go into AR and feed it, or you can go into VR and feed it. So yeah, so that's the thing, is there's loads of things you can already do with your pet, and we have... more and more of them coming as well, like in the super distant near future, like over the next couple months.
Philip Collins:
And you have a kind of a unique approach to interoperability versus how we traditionally think of it, where within gaming, a lot of the hype has been around. You take this asset to all these different games and it becomes part of your game experience, whereas you're kind of trying to create this ubiquitous item that follows you around life and potentially into games, but this is never meant to be like the primary weapon or character in a third-party game unless somebody takes it there, in which case that's fine. But it feels a lot of ways, you have a little bit more of an... open approach and what I think is actually a more achievable approach than most of the interoperability plays that we've seen and I think you and I have talked about this in the past but I would love to hear just how you think about the future of interoperable assets in general and how that relates to how you've built out Pediverse.
Susan Cummings:
Ah, my favorite topic. Yeah, I totally agree with you that. Well, so on the first level, I think it's an easier approach than avatars. The problem with avatars is, as a game developer, is we have our art style, you know, when we make a game, and I don't want someone else to dictate to me what my art style should be. So I think there's always going to be a challenge in trying to do an interoperable avatar, at least, well, there's our approach, which could make that possible. So what we say is our art style is a suggestion. So underneath each of our NFTs. is, and even our non-NFTs, even these sort of pre-NFTs is the word I'm starting to use. I don't want to mint it yet, I just want to use it. Call that a pre-NFT. They have metadata, and their metadata is a little bit like the LUT NFT project. It's a blueprint. And in many ways it's a suggestion. So our metadata defines personality attributes, like whether it's arrogant or humble, behavioral attributes, like if it's agile or clumsy, D&D morality, chaotic neutral for example, elemental abilities. the inventory of the pet itself, even its memories. It's all sorts of stuff that we can list in this metadata. And we can continue to upgrade that metadata and add new things that we didn't know somebody needed. And so in our minds, the key to interoperability is a few things. There's first of all, the engine itself. We're built on Unity and we plan to support Unreal. So that gets rid of this problem of, you know, every game has different technology. We'll know really most games are built on Unity or Unreal these days. So if you can handle both of those, you cover a huge subset of the market. And then like we say, we have the metadata, but the metadata is stored Firebase off chain. And this is where I was saying, once upon a time, we apologized and said, you know, some of this is web too. But it turns out that's actually really good. If Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo could all agree on a universal save file, that's how we think of metadata. We say it's a source of truth. And so if we build you a pet on Ethereum, we can give you permission to use it anywhere you want to and still have it point to that same off chain metadata as a non-tradable copy. And as far as art style goes, you could make any art style you want. You could use our exact art style, or you could reinterpret it in anime, you could reinterpret it in text, you could reinterpret it in cell shade, whatever you want. And we're already doing this. Some of our features don't have the same capabilities. VR headset can't do the same fidelity as an iPhone, so then we have this lower poly anime art style. And that's a perfect example of what I mean. It's however you want it to look. It's just data. It's just a blueprint. That means that any game out there that wants to add a pet animation system, and so many different MMOs, for example, look at World of Warcraft, like 2,000 pets the last time I looked, probably, that could follow you around, nothing to do with gameplay at all, it's just something cute to follow you around. There's no reason you couldn't have the same thing in Fortnite, I mean, they basically already do, in Minecraft and Roblox. So then you've got the hurdle that it's Web 3, well, now we've just removed that hurdle. Now we've said... If Fortnite wants to bring our pets into Fortnite, we will make that possible without Web3. We can give them API access and we can still bring their pets in. So suddenly you have this interoperable asset and we can ignore the fact that so much of the world hates NFTs right now because it's optional, right? So I think interoperability is immediately possible. We are willing to provide access to our whole tech stack. So everything that we use to build all these experiences, everyone else can use it too. So we make it really simple. If someone wanted to create Stray. as an indie developer, they could take our cat animation system, go to the Unity asset store and go shopping for the rest, and they could create an indie stray experience, or a stray fan experience, you know, some spin-off mods. And so these are the things that are the building blocks of interoperability is open access to tech, not having a closed garden and saying, we built it, now you can use it. Using Unity on Unreal and having reinterpretable, changeable art style, I think, are the main things that are required. and an interest in collaborating, you know? I mean, it's a very Web3 thing. It doesn't come easy to Web2 game companies, the idea of talking about what you're doing and sharing and trying to raise the space for everybody.
Nico Vereecke:
Mm hmm. Digging a bit deeper into that, where do you think most of the experiences that you can use better verse assets in will come from? Do you think it will come from existing games that will allow you to import the assets games that already exist, or do you think it will come from, um, games built from the ground up that will allow you to, you know, also use, use your, your, um, your pet.
Susan Cummings:
I think once upon a time I would have said that the other games, these bigger games, was kind of a north star in the future. Now that we're approaching this in a softer way, I think we have a big opportunity right now to get a Web 2 game team on board with something significant because we've removed that barrier of... It's all about fan feedback, right? If you saw what happened to Ubisoft, they announced helmets on their Web 3 game last year and everyone got pissed off and that was the end of that. and Team17 made an announcement like that and like U-turned within 12 hours. And so everyone's terrified of what the gamers will say about it. And so I do think we have a big opportunity there. I love indie games and indie content though. You know, it took us over a year to create the Mematron while we were building our tech stack. It took us six months maybe to create the VR project because we were able to build on top of what we had with the model and animations and so forth and even spaces. It took us about... two months to build Petiverse Live as a video integration, and it took us about one month to create our chat GPT integration. So we're pretty rapid now. And what I've said to our team is, everything's about rapid iteration right now. We're gonna approach this like a mobile game developer would. Let's get a bunch of stuff out there, different types of features and see what people like and the stuff that people like. We push forward on stuff that they don't, gets pushed aside or we revisit why they didn't like it. And it's all about features. It was really confusing to think about these things all as independent projects. And now the way I think about this is there's probably a huge subset of the space that's just gonna come to FedEarth.com and want their Tamagotchi experiment. They may never subscribe, they may never turn it into an NFT, they're just, you know, they're kind of having a mini-game experience like has existed over the years. But then we can educate them as to what more they could have and, you know, why, for example, they might want to mint it so that they could bring it into Sandbox and Polygon. And so even those ecosystem experiences can be a reason to get someone to mint it, as opposed to having it just be a web-tooth pet.
Nico Vereecke:
What are the incentives for developers to integrate better versus assets in their games?
Susan Cummings:
Well, for one thing, we've spent over 100 grand on animations that we can use across all these experiences, which is interesting because it means, you know, like Petiverse Live, we can vampire assets from everywhere else in the project and continue to release new stuff. So there's, you know, the model rig and animations and all that, there's no small feat. And so that means that for anyone who wants to build a pet game, why start from scratch? Our whole goal with this has been, let's not keep reinventing the wheel now that we have a system. As users onboard. It becomes a install base that they can tap into would be the second thing. And you know, the third thing would be, you know, if you had something like I said like Stray, it's a way of empowering your user base to go off and build other things. It's an additive thing for your users that they know that they can bring between experiences. And I think people really do want interoperability when you talk to gamers. That seems to be the stuff that resonates. And composability, being able to say to your user base, not only can you have a pet, but you can build new things with it. I think that's really the next wave. We finally all got our heads around the fact that ownership is important and interoperability is important, but so is composability. And that's the reason why Roblox is as big as it is and Minecraft is as big as it is, is we give you the tools to build. Then there's all levels of UGC as well. Now think of a Twitch streamer. We've now made it possible. right now today that a Twitch streamer can bring their cat with them on stream and they have sole license to it so they can put it on t-shirts or whatever the host they want to do, have their audience interact with it, but now they can sell stuff to their customers. We can look at facilitating breeding for them so they can breed a Twitch pet and let their audience have the babies of their pets and things like that. There's a whole new market there and that's not even built around making content, that's built around Twitch streaming and your digital persona. I, you know, when I first had my cat, I should have brought it on stream. When I had my cat on stream for the first time two weeks ago, I was like, God, this is what I meant. You know, I keep saying it's not just about games. I was so captivated by having my digital pet on screen and having it pull out its phone, you know, while I was talking and stuff. It's just really fun. And so I imagine in the future, we're all gonna want something like that, whether or not it's a cat or anything. Why wouldn't you, we all spend our time on video meetings now, why wouldn't you want something on screen?
Philip Collins:
And what got you comfortable with the level of commitment to a digital collectible compared to something like a real pet? Because I think that's always been an interesting conversation around how do digital and physical collectibles compare to each other. But you're almost taking that to the extreme here, where it's an emotional attachment to this digital collectible. And so compared to Nico's cat and your dogs, how did you get comfortable with people's ability to really connect with? a digital cat that is, you know, potentially looks more digital or, you know, less like something that could actually exist in the real world.
Susan Cummings:
I see the, not even North Star, Near Star, of where this project is going, is being able to immortalize your pet. One of our investors just lost a pet that he had for nearly 20 years the other day, and the first thing he said to me is, you know the chat GPT stuff you're doing, shouldn't I be able to talk to my pet? How cool would that be if I could immortalize my pet and be able to just have a conversation with it? He's like, anyone who's really ever bonded with a pet knows that. My dog died, I cried for a week. So I think that there's something really powerful there. We can't recreate ourselves in the singularity yet, but we can create something a little bit like our pet. And so my partner always does imagine that someday this is part of the pet insurance policy. When your pet dies, someone shows up at your door with a headset and there's Fido, so to speak. And then your grandkids can play with that too. And it becomes this heirloom that can be passed down. I love the idea of digital heirlooms. And to me, NFTs have always been about. that you don't buy a couch because you want to sell the couch, you buy a couch to sit on the couch, and maybe eventually you sell the couch, but that should not be the point of the purchase. And that's always how I've seen the NFT space.
Philip Collins:
And that's really funny because... When we first met for the first time, I think in 2021, this was a very backwards approach to how everyone thought of things. It was all about trading volume and selling items. And I remember the first time we met, something that I didn't quite wrap my head around was this connection means nobody's going to sell it. So like, how are you going to generate sales volume? And then I think I think like five months later, I was at your talk at GDC and you referenced this investor that thought about
Susan Cummings:
That's a great
Philip Collins:
how
Susan Cummings:
moment.
Philip Collins:
how. the connection's gonna mean that nobody wants to sell it. And I was in the audience and I was like, oh, hey, that's me. And you explained
Susan Cummings:
Hahaha!
Philip Collins:
how you were, how you were invited to go around that. And I think it's really interesting because it is a very different approach than the traditional volume play where you're trying to actually create value in this forever asset by actually adding value to it, by feeding it and doing add-ons versus. just truly transactional pet moves from person A to person B, which is very different, I think even still today, from most of the things we've seen, where interoperability is ultimately to add value and the games that are interoperable have short, useful lives, and eventually you hand it off to somebody else. But in this case, your thesis is people don't have to hand these off, and that emotional connection is not damaging to your top line.
Susan Cummings:
Yeah, exactly. Look, I think part of the problem is that NFTs have been static. You know, this goes back to Web 2 versus Web 3. IPFS is immutable, which isn't great for video games. And so we've needed a Web 3 solution that allows immutability of your metadata so that you can train your path, you can collect things for your path, and so forth. Because, you know, back in the day, I played a lot of MMOs, like EverQuest Beta. And I remember when people started selling their cat their full Rubik's Kite Kid at our characters on eBay and you'd pay more for that than you would for just installing Everquest because someone Committed their time to that and they collected armor for it and they leveled it up and they had gold and whatever else and as NFTs Start to evolve the same way so that you can change this thing and put your mark on it now you can contribute your time and the value can increase. And so now you want to hold on to it because A, hopefully you enjoy it as much that you just don't want to sell it, but B, that time that you put into it has been additive to the thing. And it's lazy design for people to think that the only way that you're going to win is by someone selling it. That just means you haven't created great content. And so our answers to that, in addition to the dynamic nature of these pets, is breeding and being able to create something new and sell it off. So. Just the same way as if you have a, in real life, you don't sell your sires, you create new pets and you sell those off. And we're also gonna be introducing something that we call petaverse points. And petaverse points are a little bit like a token, but they're not a token. But they're a way of incentivizing you in sort of a quest-like way to be participating within the ecosystem and having experiences and fulfilling your pet's needs. But that's yet another way that the value of your NFT is going up. It's almost like your pet's bank account balance. because you're engaging and getting rewarded. And so once again, it's about thinking that doesn't really need to be Web3. That doesn't have to be a fungible token. That can be a soft currency within the system.
Nico Vereecke:
I have two things I want to touch upon. First one is, um, you mentioned your, your assets growing and you know, your bets having its own inventory. Are you using the new ERC 6551 standard for that? Have you heard about that?
Susan Cummings:
I have heard about it. No, we're actually taking a web two approach in the sense that that gets stored, gets listed literally as part of the blueprint of your metadata. The fact that you have that hat will get stored. And so what that means is any experience that you take it into on our end will support it. But if you imagine bringing your pet into the sandbox, they get used to support that aspect of the metadata. Now, what we can also do then is we will facilitate the ability to detach it as well. And so now you could turn those into two NFTs and you could have the cat and you can have the hat from the cat and then you could even sell off just the hat or sell off just the cat and reattach it to something else. A lot of this is possible because of the sort of web 2 underpinnings of how we've treated the architecture of this. Now keep in mind it is web 3. There is on the blockchain there is a the string of data associated with the NFT actually allows us to recreate that pet if anything ever happened to it. So it is immortalized in Ethereum. But we just like the flexibility. that this metadata gives us.
Nico Vereecke:
You should look into the new standard because honestly it sounds like it does exactly what you're doing
Susan Cummings:
It's
Nico Vereecke:
right now.
Susan Cummings:
really new, you know, and absolutely we're always looking for better ways of doing what we're doing. And I did come across a project that was kind of trying to be like web 3 Firebase, but they're very early. And so we've been looking at that as well in terms of how can we make it. If the whole point is that this should outlive us, then we need to make sure we're doing everything we can to. We want this to be a hyper structure in the future. So we need to we're trying to take all the steps we can so that. It's literally true that I'm long gone, but some ancestor has a pet.
Nico Vereecke:
Yeah, I think that approach makes it on a sense, you know, as much as I, I think what 3 does a lot of things right. I think we keep coming back to this point where no one really cares about the technology itself, but what you can do with it. And so you need to make sure that you're using the right technology to make people use it right now. And then I guess, you know, find a way to then migrate it seamlessly to the technology that will allow people to use it in a better, even better way in the future as well. which I think will happen through Web3 Tech.
Susan Cummings:
I know we all get in love with talking about our own technology. I'm the biggest offender of this I did a one of our first Twitter spaces board Elon Musk, you know co-host who with me and interviewed me and he said to me in Telegram afterwards he said what is it? What's a primitive? Like what you talking about? He's like you just you need to simplify this because you know people just want to you know, know how they're that it's Lego They don't want to know how the Lego was built and he was totally right This is once ago and I totally took that on and have ever since trying to make the message simpler, because the average person doesn't know what any of that stuff means, and they don't care.
Nico Vereecke:
Mm-hmm. I agree. I agree. My second question to you was, you know, Phil made the comments that you, in a very polite way by the way, didn't mention him by name when you commented on his thoughts about,
Susan Cummings:
These are my favorite
Nico Vereecke:
you know...
Susan Cummings:
stories though.
Nico Vereecke:
So, you know, how are you making money? I'm going to try and pitch it to you the way I would see it right now, but maybe I'm completely wrong. Um, a pet is a pet and the pet is kind of the base layer of your, like, of what you want and then everything around it is essentially purchasable with a lot of, I don't know, toys and, and clothes maybe, I don't know. Um, and you can add these and then sell these and there's more around, like the transaction happens around it more than on the pet itself. Is that correct?
Susan Cummings:
Yeah, so there's a few different ways of onboarding this year into what we've built. There's the Ethereum pet, which in our minds the people, the earliest adopters who bought an Ethereum pet are the ones who will never pay for anything. They're basically our most avid, loyal, this is the future sort of fans. And so they're in a subset all of themselves, which is awesome. Then we've got... our more mass market approach to this. And we're approaching that a couple ways, one of which I can't really talk about in a podcast in terms of some future things happening this year. But the second thing, which I think is just as compelling, is the people who come to us and they don't wanna buy an NFT, they don't wanna know it's an NFT. And so we've been, we're introducing something that we call, God knows NFTs need another moniker, play to own. I really am not a fan of free NFTs or any of the free NFT projects out there for the most part. I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus, but the whole notion that you give something to someone
Nico Vereecke:
We all
Susan Cummings:
for
Nico Vereecke:
know.
Susan Cummings:
free. Yeah. Look, first of all, I think if you're given something for free, you care about it as much as that. And it becomes purely speculative. I think there are projects out there that are taking their own mints, and so they hype it up and it turns out it's them moving them between accounts. So that's awful. And it just becomes about speculation, not to mention it's free for the first 10,000 people and then everybody else pays a premium. And so I don't think that's a great model. What we're introducing instead is the ability to use your time instead of your money. There are a lot of people who can't afford.158 or something, right? And they don't care about the NFT aspect of it, they just wanted to use it. So for them, they're going to be able to come in and they're going to retain in typical Web2 fashion, and they're going to be able to adopt a pet. And if they're loyal and prove themselves and bond with it, then it's theirs in a Web2 sense. And so in the future, they'll have the opportunity to upgrade that. and subscriptions, typical subscription review, I think is gonna be a really important model as we grow. And so that's really where the focus is. And that's because our, so the core of the experience, pedabrace.com, is basically a Tamagotchi slash Lintendogs experience. But if you wanna do all these other things that we're launching, all these other features of the product that are richer, that's where you can pay a subscription fee.
Nico Vereecke:
Big sense. Okay. Yep.
Philip Collins:
And with the model that you all have built, something that's always interesting in Web3 is just the concept of scarcity. How do you all think about that given you're kind of building these forever assets where scarcity may be valuable in terms of people really caring about passing down a specific digital asset versus just minting more and more over time?
Susan Cummings:
Yeah, look, I think that scarcity will become less and less important. I think that there'll always be a premium to pay for like something that's unique and one of one. And that was certainly where we, you know, started with this. I think that the value of that will start to diminish. So when we let people onboard and earn a pet, they're going to be able to use our editor and actually create a simple pet. They won't be able to create a metallic pet. They won't be able to put the Ethereum logo on it and all of the sort of crazy stuff we've done on Ethereum. But they can create their, you know, their cat in their house. and they'll be able to build that and attach to that. And I don't think that they care quite as much about it being one of one, they care probably more about it looking like their pet. And so I think as that becomes important, as you get to more of a mass market, the scarcity won't be quite as critical as it is right now. And it'll become more about the membership access and your personal enjoyment of this thing that you have. There'll always be a place for it, and there'll always be people who are willing to pay a premium for something that's unique and special and prestigious, you know? But I think we have to support everybody and I think that if we are going to look at free, it has to be a much, much bigger audience before we can think about that.
Philip Collins:
Thanks, Hans.
Susan Cummings:
But I love the idea of being able to earn. I love the idea of being able to earn something and understand the value of it before you decide you want to spend money on it.
Nico Vereecke:
Is there a PETS token? Planned?
Susan Cummings:
There is not,
Nico Vereecke:
Or...
Susan Cummings:
but it's something that we're considering. The points system is, you could call that a testing the waters towards a token. Maybe when the market recovers and if people want it, as ever for me, Web3 is about value attribution and being able to take something out. So if I decided I didn't want my pet anymore, then I should probably be able to sell off my coins that I've earned too. And so I think it's about that. It's about facilitating that. But, you know, I'm
Nico Vereecke:
Yep.
Susan Cummings:
glad we didn't put a bunch of token last year, you know, cause it would be in the toilet. So we've always been encouraged to
Nico Vereecke:
Yes.
Susan Cummings:
be very thoughtful about it. Even, even by our web three investors, we've been encouraged to be very thoughtful about ever launching a token.
Nico Vereecke:
Good. It means you have a good set of investors. Cause I know a bunch of others who are like, token next week, please.
Susan Cummings:
Yeah. Yeah,
Nico Vereecke:
Yes.
Susan Cummings:
exactly. It was a big litmus in this seed round. We definitely cut out a bunch of people who were trying to heavy hand us on the token.
Nico Vereecke:
it's good. So Susan, best case scenario, better verse five years from now. How should, how should we see it? What's, what's the big vision?
Susan Cummings:
Um, mainly that, you know, I would like this to be seen as, like I said, the fourth generation of digital pets in and of itself, regardless of Web3 and everything else. I would love to have created a thriving experience that people will play for years to come and not have to worry about bonding with something and having it go away like they did with Nintendogs. Um, and I truly would love and look, I'm not the only person saying this, like a Tim Sweeney and Epic talking about interoperability and bringing things between worlds. I would love for that to be true. And I would love for us to be. early pioneers in making that happen. Because we've been saying for two and a half years now that this is where it's going. And so I would love to be right. And I would love for a petiverse to really be a foundation for that. Because everything we're talking about isn't limited to pets. The same principles that I'm talking about are just as relevant to bringing a robot with you, bringing a friend with you, bringing a zombie with you, an alien, whatever it is. It's the idea of a sidekick that can be additive to the experience. I would love to see others adapting and even improving on our open standard metadata to make it easier and easier for us all. So the more we all think about data the same way, the more it becomes really easy to take things back and forth between. So it's not that we're altruists, we just simply want to make it really easy for us to move things back and forth because that benefits us too.
Nico Vereecke:
Mm-hmm. If you could... If you could clap your hands and have an instant integration of all of your assets in one virtual world, which one would it be?
Susan Cummings:
Probably Roblox.
Nico Vereecke:
Makes sense. Adopt me. Is that still the number one game there?
Susan Cummings:
number one anymore it's still massive. Eyes is a pet simulator. Yeah, Roblox or Fortnite. Fortnite we need to get on on in real first before we can do that.
Nico Vereecke:
Yeah, makes sense. Good. Awesome. Susan, where can people find you and learn more and keep updated on everything new and in better verse.
Susan Cummings:
Petiverse.com.
Nico Vereecke:
Good. Is that where they subscribe and, you know, I mean,
Susan Cummings:
They
Nico Vereecke:
the
Susan Cummings:
can
Nico Vereecke:
NFTs
Susan Cummings:
go to Puddiverse.com
Nico Vereecke:
and stuff.
Susan Cummings:
and all the socials are through there. On Twitter we're at Puddiverse Network with no O. I wish Elon could make the URL strings longer.
Nico Vereecke:
Hmm. Awesome. Good. Well, Susan, this was amazing. I feel like, um, you know, I really like your take on interoperability. It's it's a refreshing, it's refreshing to have assets that are, you know, in business models that are not built upon. We want you to buy it and then sell it as much as you can. Um, and so that's, that's very refreshing. And, um, yeah, I look forward to seeing, uh, in a year from now where you are. And then post bull run where you are, maybe, I don't know when that pet token is there. So yeah, thank you for joining.
Susan Cummings:
Thank you. Nice to meet you. Well, nice to see you again, I should say. And always great to see you,
Nico Vereecke:
Mm-hmm.
Susan Cummings:
Philip.
Nico Vereecke:
Good. Philip, thank you for joining as usual. Phil woke up early, but you didn't, we didn't really notice, like you're fresh, man.
Susan Cummings:
No,
Nico Vereecke:
I
Susan Cummings:
you're
Nico Vereecke:
think how
Philip Collins:
Honestly,
Nico Vereecke:
you
Susan Cummings:
fine.
Nico Vereecke:
do it.
Philip Collins:
early morning, I usually talk to Nico. I've recorded probably like 75% of these after midnight. And so 7 a.m. feels much better.
Nico Vereecke:
Yeah? You're a morning person like me. I respect it.
Philip Collins:
Sometimes
Nico Vereecke:
Good.
Philip Collins:
the first thing I say after midnight is like me trying to gather my thoughts. So I've definitely kicked some of these off, questionably. Yeah.
Susan Cummings:
I went through a
Nico Vereecke:
Good.
Susan Cummings:
period of everything was either late night for me or early morning for me with my marketing guys in LA. And I'm like, I'm finally starting to feel like a human being again.
Philip Collins:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nico Vereecke:
Mm-hmm. Good. All right. Thank you both listener. Thank you for joining and listening. Um, if you enjoyed, let us know if you're not yet in our discourse, jamming on interoperability, feel free to join. And with that, we are, we are out and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode. Ciao.