Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is a double header; I'm making another video because an article just came out that made me scratch my head a little bit. But upon reflection, given the source, I just come to expect these types of things.
First off, let me show you a little something. This is the article in question; it's about one of my assets. Up here we have "Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson's Studio Releases Its First Game, But It's on Gala Chain." Oh no! In the article, they kind of ramble on, and I guess it's about my companies. They say we don't really know what Charles Hoskinson's position really is; he doesn't have a position within Reflect itself. Who knows? But Hoskinson says he does, and all these things. They wonder why we're building on Gala, and I guess they're going to do some Cardano stuff or whatever.
Well, first off, Decrypt has this habit of interviewing people and trying to focus on a particular message. We want to focus on Voyager, and this is a great collaboration. Voyager is based on Descent, a game I played as a kid, and many of you probably played it as well. There was licensing, and we built it. We worked with Gala Chain on this because they're a great community, a great company, and there are a lot of wonderful people involved. What we wanted to do is start linking together a lot of different game companies. Reflect itself has a portfolio of several games it's working on; some are Cardano native, and some are outside of the Cardano ecosystem in different ecosystems. The hope is to link and unify them all together and create some interoperability between the different game chains and groups, so we can easily navigate users between them and address common problems that exist in the gaming world.
We discussed this with the people from Decrypt, and they wrote a whole article about me and Gala Chain instead of the actual thing we wanted to talk about, which was just the game Voyager. It's a cool, fun game. I mean, Descent was fun, and Voyager is pretty fun too. It's really cool that we have our first video game on the market, and we have a whole catalog coming out.
They did this before. Adriana came with us to Bulgaria for the second anniversary of Cardano, where we talked about the vision of Cardano and all the really cool things. She basically made the entire article about me trying to slay Ethereum, even though the whole point was to discuss governance, scalability, interoperability, and all the research we've done. She even took a picture from my office, which is titled "A Soul in Hell," and made the entire article about that. I'm not sure why they do this and create drama where there is none or some form of controversy.
I'm a board member of Reflect; it's a spinout company. Les Borsai is the CEO; he's the guy who founded Wave and is also one of the GPs at CF Fund. Many of you know it's all one big family; we work together on a pretty regular basis. Les is a big Hollywood guy, and he understands a lot about the creative side. There's a great team there, including Josh Miller, my old EA. You guys remember him; he was my secretary for a long time. He's now the Executive VP at Reflect and handles all the NFT stuff. Reflect is where the NFT initiatives live in our portfolio. They cover metaverse, digital twins, game fi, and all these things. There's a beautiful, amazing platform being built with a lot of great games coming out.
We're really excited about this because it's an example of a cross-chain collaboration where we work with Gala and start building those links. We can bring users and information both ways, and it's good for Cardano. I don't know what the media wants at this point. They write articles about how Cardano is isolated and a ghost chain, and then when we start building relationships with people, they write about how everybody's leaving Cardano. Apparently, I have no affiliation with my own companies; I don't know where they got that quote from, but it's pretty clear.
Something we started, we spun it out because that's what we do as a venture studio, like Midnight, like John O'Connor with RealFi, Sean Ford with Lace, and Jed with the Wyoming stablecoin project. You see a trend here. I don't know, Decrypt, come on, be better. Not everything needs to be dramatic. Not everything needs to be sensationalized.
Maybe we just want to talk about the cool things we've done and created, like Voyager: Voyager Ascension. It's a cool game; it's fun and free to play. Download it, guys; you'll like it. I played Descent when I was a kid on my old 486 computer. You know, loaded it up, and there you go. It was the coolest thing in the world. I had the old joystick, had to take it apart and clean it because it got all gunky. You know you spilled Mountain Dew on it, and it got all sticky. You guys had that too; don’t lie to me. It was connected with the old serial cable that never worked, and you had to reload the drivers all the time. Everybody had that problem with the little red button on the top of the joystick. It was fun; it was a treasured memory we all had.
In the game business, IP is voluminous. There are mountains of old pieces of IP, and the capacity to take old IP, license it, resurrect it, and bring it out is very valuable. Every now and then, you can take something that's dead, like Fallout was, for example. Bethesda acquired it, and what did they do? They created Fallout 3. Now we have a television show many of you are watching, and look how great it is. Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, all this stuff is great.
There are thousands of pieces of IP out there. For example, the guys who worked on the sister of Fallout, called Wasteland, are core developers over at Reflect. There are a lot of old Interplay guys and people from the 80s and 90s CRPG world, and they're just amazing. There's a whole catalog being built, and we're really excited about it. The majority of the catalog is Cardano native, but we need to create some enclaves with other chains. The hope is to create one unified experience where we share users and liquidity. If you buy something on one platform, you have access to the other person's catalog, and everything comes together.
It'll take a little bit of time to get that coalition there, and there's a master strategy we haven't unveiled yet. It's just confusing to me sometimes when I see this. But when you look at the history of the publication, one of the things we need to do—and I don’t have time for it this year—but after governance comes in, we need to create our own media as an industry, a protocol for good decentralized media. Right now, media doesn't have the time to really understand what you're saying and also doesn't have the incentive to say it in a way that's accurate, factual, and objective.
We can complain about CoinDesk or when Decrypt does this, or we can take a step back and say that at the end of the day, it's an incentives problem. There's an incentive for journalists to be rationally ignorant because it takes too long to understand the complexities, and there's an incentive to represent things in a sensationalist way to get clicks and advertisements. Until we attack that problem at its core, we won't return to what media is supposed to be: an objective, fair, and balanced view of reality that allows you to interface with it and, hopefully, if there's enough demand, dig deeper for a more specific view of reality. A protocol for news would be a godsend and the biggest gift this industry could give to all the constitutional republics and democracies around the world.
But anyway, play Voyager: Ascension. You're going to love it; it's going to be a lot of fun. We love you guys over at Gala; thank you so much for the great collaboration. We're really excited to see where that goes. And to the people at Decrypt, keep on being you. Yeah, I'm a soul in hell; you know it. I'm sitting here; I can't even get the flag in my office right. I guess that little gold trim on it means martial law; that's what they tell me. I can't wait to see the follow-up article on this one.
All right, until next time. This was a lot of fun. Please play Voyager. See you guys soon. Cheers!
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