Ego

Ecosystem @PixionGames | Building @fableborne. Winning at Win Win. Former research and ventures @Delphi_Digital

Some call me Sonny.

[Ego @Ego_101]

@YanLiberman @redphone Loving the recent content!

[Dith @0xDith]

I've been so busy since returning from the show (yes, follow ups are now in play) that I haven't had time to share any of the takeaways.

For consumer / character franchises / IP:

1. Eyeballs are everything.

Many brands and artists have cute characters, nice story, quality products, etc.. These things are absolutely meaningless if you do not have eyeballs.

Fortunately for us, we have the fastest growing socials in the industry, including the #1 YouTube channel by a long shot (will soon celebrate our first 1M subs).

2. Not all platforms are equal.

Beyond your headline eyeballs, the question becomes: who do the eyeballs belong to? Consumer demographics / spending power / conversion intent matter. And platform matters.

We're always growing our headline, but equally making sure that we're reaching the right audiences.

No shortcuts.

3. On creativity, vibe > science.

It seems a lot of IP gets cooked up in a lab in a very intentional and sweaty manner, with teams overengineering their characters.

We skew in the opposite direction, having created characters we love ourselves and without any expectation or plans that they can later be 'IP'.

There is something very different about the creative process and the way it shines through your characters when it happens organically... The audience can feel it.

Met a few teams who are artistically very talented but can't quite figure out why their character(s) don't resonate. It's because they're too contrived.

4. Seize the day & embrace serendipity.

The growth playbook for new IP leans heavily on luck & serendipity. The trope "the harder you work, the luckier you get" applies here - we created opportunities out of thin air in Vegas because we networked shamelessly at the event, including crashing the "by invitation / meeting only" areas.

Shoot your shot. Create opportunities to be lucky.

5. It's a small world, it's cool to be kind.

It's amazing how few degrees of separation we all actually are from one another. Word travels fast and being a good human, generally kind / helpful to others, goes a long way - in fact it ties directly into pt 4. At the opposite end of the spectrum, when a brand isn't great to work with, word gets around fast.

Closing this out: last week we leveled up 10x in our understanding, plans, industry contacts, and connectivity. It's clearer than ever how much bigger a company we're building than we'd previously thought.

Still very early days and a lot of work to do, but extremely excited for the road ahead.

[Ego @Ego_101]

I don't have a dog in the Pokemon race but most bubbles are driven by one dominant fake identity.

Pokémon is different because several real identities are bidding at once. That is the distinction.
Dotcom: financiers pretended pageviews were destiny.
NFTs: technologists pretended they understood taste. AI shitcoins: retail pretended they were early-stage venture investors.
Pokémon cards: collectors, gamblers, nostalgic adults, players, resellers, crypto degens, and status buyers are all inside the same box.

It is a collectible, a game, a memory, a gambling product, a retail product, a status object, and now a tokenizable real-world asset.

That makes the bubble harder to read. And while I do think we'll see some massive corrections I dont think it will go the way of NFT animal pictures

[GRITCULT @GRITCULT]

https://t.co/Hej21O640J

[Ego @Ego_101]

This looks better than Mortal Kombat 2

[Higgsfield AI 🧩 @higgsfield]

Tomorrow we premiere Hell Grind in Cannes.

It's a first 95-minute AI film, made entirely on Higgsfield.

The budget was under $500K, with $400K going to compute.

The first 25 minutes needed 16,181 generations for 253 shots.

A traditional film would cost from $50M.

Filmmaking is changing.

[Higgsfield AI 🧩 @higgsfield]

Tomorrow we premiere Hell Grind in Cannes.

It's a first 95-minute AI film, made entirely on Higgsfield.

The budget was under $500K, with $400K going to compute.

The first 25 minutes needed 16,181 generations for 253 shots.

A traditional film would cost from $50M.

Filmmaking is changing.

[Peter / 1k(x) @pet3rpan_]

You can bet big on AI without directly investing in it.

A post-AI world and it's second order effects:

Content saturation → live only content
Virtual human-likeness → companionship economy
Post productivity free time → consumer entertainment
Mass unemployment→ future of work and new economies
Algorithmic burnout → human taste and curation as luxury
Knowledge commoditized → skill and apprenticeship ladders
Real time interactive media → personalized media entertainment
Productivity → solopreneur stack and one-person business tooling
Lowered cost of content → new challenger IP entertainment companies
Deepfake everything → verifiable trust and identity & private communities
Solved online productivity → analog social communities & in person events

[Ego @Ego_101]

@Collector_Crypt Simulation confirmed: The wing of the plane conformed with your rebrand.

[Ego @Ego_101]

Every addiction wave creates a recovery economy.

Attention is broken at scale. An entire generation is being rewired toward distraction and away from deep thought.

The brands, tools, and experiences that help people reclaim focus will be some of the most valuable companies built this decade.

The destruction and reconstruction of attention is an investment thesis.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

“TikTok is the fentanyl of social media.”

Jonathan Haidt didn’t mince words on the High Performance podcast. He called it the number one destroyer of attention, focus, and executive function in kids, and by extension, human potential.

He sees students in his class spending six hours a day on it. Not scrolling casually, living there. Skipping homework, skipping friends, just endless algorithm-fed dopamine. The Chinese version keeps kids focused and limited. Ours? It weaponizes micro-pauses to push pro-anorexia content to teenage girls in days. No social graph, just pure brain-hijacking precision.

That hit me hard. We’ve normalized something that’s quietly rewiring an entire generation’s ability to think deeply or sit with discomfort. I’ve gotten stricter at home because of stuff like this - the data is too consistent to ignore.

In a world selling constant distraction as entertainment, protecting real attention might be the ultimate parenting (and self-parenting) battle left.

What’s been your line with TikTok or short-form apps — full ban, strict limits, or something else?

[Ego @Ego_101]

I've been watching RWAs since early last year when Courtyard started putting up numbers. The vaulting/physical infra part of it was what kept me dubious but now that incumbents can see the tech working, I think we see adoption across the board. This is coinciding with increasing stablecoin adoption, younger generations comfort with crypto, collector mania, conversion from memecoins, and investors finally seeing equity as the cake and not the cherry.

[Dith @0xDith]

We are in both an AI supercycle, and a collectibles supercycle.

This is not a coincidence. AI and the character economy sit at opposite ends of the same barbell.

Every dollar spent making intelligence cheaper... makes charizard more expensive.

To elaborate:

AI is a deflationary force on everything that can be copied. Character IP, and the collectibles markets that price it, is the inverse asset: it gets more valuable as copying gets cheaper, because meaning, scarcity, and true collector fandom can't easily be replicated.

The vast majority of teams and brands are undervaluing and underinvesting in their own IP.

We aren't.

That's why Gigaverse is driving a deep deep level of intentionality to the characters & world that form the bedrock of our future ecosystem.

And why we're growing our social channels like crazy, so we can introduce our characters to the world, at scale.

Today we're a game, tomorrow we're an ecosystem of loved characters you can interact with across a growing surface area of meaningful experiences and products.

Few.

[Ego @Ego_101]

@0xDith This is gospel and more relevant now than ever!

[Dupe @Dupe_fi]

Open Beta V2 is now live.
Automated Buy Offers.
Instant Sell for USDC.
Crowdsourced Liquidity for CS2 Items.

[Ego @Ego_101]

@xButko98 This aged nicely

[Ego @Ego_101]

Gaming sector making a comeback in mind and market share.

What a time to be alive.

[Power Protocol @PowerPrtcl]

Meet our new ecosystem partner: @HighRollerROLR

A global iGaming leader with one of the world’s largest casino portfolios.

♠️Over $800M in bets placed
♦️Millions of users
♣️NYSE: $ROLR

Together, we’re unlocking new ways for millions of users to access onchain experiences.

[Ego @Ego_101]

@CryptoGamr @SamSteffanina I think I can see the case for robot sports if the person promoting or building/fine tuning the robot has a larger than life personality

[Ego @Ego_101]

@tcaff_ Amen brother

[Ego @Ego_101]

@inhuman To scale the product? This has to be a rage bait

[Ego @Ego_101]

Gaming is a hits driven business.