I haven’t gotten around to recording a video of my H1 2023 Blockchain Gaming Sector Trends presentation. That’s now for next week.
Because — with all due professional consideration — I’ve come as much to beware as enjoy the actuality of “showing my workings” when I present to the fine folks at Hiro Capital, where I’m the blockchain gaming venture specialist, as typically happens twice a year, and which I’ve just spent the past two hours doing.
This is because that while we’ve invested in a couple of blockchain gaming projects to-date — with some possibles also in pipeline — Hiro is very much focused on the nuts-and-bolts of what actually makes a valuable games/tech company.
Innovation and ambition is part of this, of course, but just as blockchain made — and AI now makes — startups more expensive to invest into, they don’t magically make them more longerm profitable and hence actually valuable, which is what VCs should care about.
Equally, I’ve come to expect — and perhaps even enjoy — the discussion that inevitably starts somewhere during my first couple of slides over fundamentals such as what is a blockchain, what is decentralization, does anyone really care, and can millions of players also care?
Surprising as it sounds, having to make those arguments from scratch is — I think — a valuable precursor to the wider discussion that I believe that over the next decade all games will include digital assets which players can trade, with the most valuable generating billions of dollars in annual trading volumes.
After all, CS:GO skin trading — effectively running on Valve’s private ‘blockchain’ — already does this.
But all of this is subsidiary to what we really got excited about today which was our favourite sci-fi books.
For there are many attributes that people working in venture capital can share: raw intellectual ability, curiosity for new information, business nous, various forms of physical optimization, but at Hiro — which after all, is named after Hiro Protagonist from Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash — a lot of us like to read.
So here are some titles we endorsed over dinner, plus some I’ve added (given the opportunity: after all I was once Edge’s book reviewer).
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson
The Terror, Dan Simmons
Hyperion Cantos series, Dan Simmons
The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Ministry For The Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Three-Body Problem trilogy, Liu Cixin
The Ballad of Halo Jones, Alan Moore
Destiny's Children series, Stephen Baxter
Altered Carbon, Richard K Morgan
Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: still reading the classics
Calendar
Alterverse’s Sky City hub closed beta launches — 9th June
Blocklords’ open beta closes — 10th June
Illuvium launches 20,000 NFTs with Gamestop — 12th June
MechaFightClub NFT refund ends - 29th June
Gala’s RPG Eternal Paradox closes its playtest — 28th June
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