Why move a 23-year-old game to blockchain?

2021 our you know next in Korea COO Dehan calls me and says he has been thinking about the evolution of games and evolution of business models that you know game makers like us know we need to research them right and actually did you know that 20 plus years ago all games were either you have to purchase a CD to play or you have to pay a monthly subscriptions to play right and if you stop paying you cannot play anymore And Nexon was the first one to come up with free-to-play model. And imagine imagine it's pretty wild if your cash flow if your revenue entirely depends on monthly subscriptions and one day someone comes up to the port and says let's stop this. Let's make it free. It must be a crazy very very crazy idea. That's what happened. And the thesis was this monthly subscription is acting as a huge hurdles to entries. But when we're looking at people, the early adopters who are willing to pay to play the games monthly subscriptions, we see the huge potential of online games, it's going to be the hands and palms of every single kids in the world if we make it free. And once we make it free, we have we on board billions of people in and let's make a microtransaction model like back then. Now it sounds pretty cliche, but back then it was something revolutionary. No one thought about it and Nexon was the first company to make online games free to play and you know Nexon has this kind of innovative DNA in it and Dehon our current co CEO of Nexon Korea he has been part of all this journey um he told me Maple Stories freeto play free to play usually implies microtransactions but microtransaction means we have to keep on selling new things better things every year and and and the problem of inflations and users asset getting diluted becomes very very serious especially for IPS like Maple Story because it's simply very old it's 23 years old and over the last 23 years every year we make better item we sell better item and over and over again users asset value gets diluted very much and how do we solve it and you know after few months of thinking about it I couldn't find any better way a better way than stop selling it so it was like you Let's make it free to play moments. All right. Um, but the thing is, you know, we have to think about a way where we are not making money by selling items, but we still have to make money, you know, making games. You know, we have a even for make post story and project, we have over 120 people uh working in the team, you know, we have to make a good amount of money to be sustainable. So that's why we were experimenting new and and you know various uh business models and blockchain seemed like a great tool that we can utilize because even if we don't sell we can text people and you know for example if it's a web two game of course you can still text people but usually whatever you text the users with like for example the game coins and everything they don't have any values I mean legally and also it only exists within the game in the silo. I mean, you're not going to text them and play the game, right? You have to, you know, and your team won't be paid to end the game money, right? And that's why blockchain seemed like a super crazy tool to experiment our new thesis thesis where imagine a free-to-play game. We are not selling anything. Everything within the game is you you can you can play and loot the items and do the boss rate. And we already have a proven huge scales of economies that exist in Maple Story. In fact, in web 23 last year, the in-game um tokens and items that were traded was over a billion dollar billion US dollars. Can you imagine? That's the scale of economy. And imagine on top of that if we stop selling anything and everything is amongst the users, they farm it, they earn it, you know, they win it and they trade it. Imagine all this kind of huge economic uh transactions. And because we're not selling anything, we expect to have even bigger pool of users joining you know this is just wild right and imagine we can just like how government do we just text them uh you know a small portion of fees for their economic transactions and our incentives and there and and the gamers incentives are aligned unlike the web 2 games where we have to make money that's our incentive but by doing so we're diluting users asset value you know our incentives are clashing but for us our incentives align I want and you also want these economies to be bigger. I want you to make money because so that I can text you more. It sounds a little bit weird but you know I I think in order for IPs to be sustainable uh over next you know 10 years 20 years we have to have a you know incentive alignment between the game makers and the gamers. And right now with blockchain on boarded to me it's not just about gamers. We have expanded you know audiences token holders the speculators investors and so on. Um and NFD traders that doesn't even play the game. Our IP is diversified. They're enjoyed and experienced in so much more diverse way than we have imagined. I think that's the way towards making our IPs more sustainable. I'm very very excited to see how this evolves next uh 5 10 years.