Interesting to see, but I’m afraid the crypto bros who were crazy enough to put their money into an NFT of a bean should have expected some probability of loss. Probably similar odds to Rocket Queen tomorrow night in Race 2 at Maiden.

I had a quick look at a random bean on the NFT market place and there still seems to be some value associated with these beans

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x48355ce6ba377d06335be9499feaf735948484bc/9387

Bean #9387 which originally sold for .385ETH (when a ETH was around $3000 USD) now has an asking price of .09ETH (around USD$295) … it’s currently only fetching bids around $50. At least the price of Ethereum has rebounded to roughly where it was when the initial purchase was made.

The nice thing I have found out here is that every time a bean changes hands it looks like PLY gets paid up to 6.9% for every trade.

@neke86_ @RhinoInvestor

Both interesting points from differing ends of the social justice spectrum. One: compaines have a moral duty to look after the people it has an influence over. The other: people have a duty to educate themselves and the market will do what the market will do.

My problem is not all people have the capacity to protect themselves from the nefarious intentions of the big bad world. As an enlighten society we should protect the vulnerable. The next obvious question is what do we protect people from? Cosmic rays? Donald Trump? NFT's? It starts to become personal pretty quickly.

It does illustrate that investing, at the end of the day, is a personal decision that all of us make.

Please don't get me wrong, I do not care at all about anyone who was stupid enough to put money into NFTs. But I am wary of investing in someone who actively seeks to exploit that because I believe it speaks to their worldview. Specifically we should be wary of that as minority shareholders because it is a glimpse into management thought processes and how they might prioritize future decision-making and dilemmas where you and I, minority shareholders, will be left with no say.

Management were happy to exploit NFT buyers using a brazen caveat emptor, will they do the same to you tomorrow if it suits them? Couldn't the phrase "they are adults, they knew what they were buying" also apply to you, the shareholder?

Well put @neke86_

I did slightly misunderstand you.

From what I can see Gerry Sakkas is a smart guy who is highly incentivised to see Playside's share price continue to grow (I think he owns 20%). Exploiting the minority shareholders eg. misappropiation of assets and opportunities, excessive executive remuneration, refusing to hold meetings etc would not be consistent with this goal. However I have no doubt, underlying all of that, Gerry would look after numero uno if pushed - like most CEO's.

Isn't capitalism just exploitation of everyone outside your company??

@Shapeshifter I agree with you … I guess this is about ethical (ESG) investing and each of us needs to buy companies that we are happy are making the world a better place …

• Some people might not have space in their portfolios for Tobacco, Gambling, Oil, Defence … name the industry as what they do goes against their beliefs.
• Others may apply a different set of parameters to things they consider investable. Sounds like @neke86_ is calling out some personal concerns on the ‘G’ (governance) or maybe ‘S’ (social) side of PLY’s business

I think it’s fair to look at something that is underpinned by Crypto related NFTs and see that as not good for society. Similarly development and distribution of Video Games could be considered bad for society as well (Like the CCP restricts their youth from this sort of thing).

Also, if you don’t have a good feeling about management or how control sits with the company’s major shareholder then that is also a perfectly good reason to choose to invest or not. I know I am never going to be a majority shareholder of anything so or hold all the preferential voting shares so I need to put my faith in management and the major shareholders with board level influence. This seems to me to be one of the hardest things to assess which is why I appreciate the hour we have to get a gut feeling of management via the CEO interviews that @Strawman arranges.

DISC: Held IRL and Strawman (up over 100% and still happy with PLY’s direction, but I can see what a time waste gaming can be … only get to play my PS5 about once a month when my wife is away on business)

FWIW, I don't have any issues with a company selling people NFTs. There are plenty of dumb things people spend their money on. But if the company made promises and has not fulfilled them then that's a whole different story.

Yeah this is my take on it, Beans made claims that they would deliver NFTs that would be backed by a AAA Studio that would have utilisation in an MMO style game playable in 2022.

The screenshot is from the first medium post.

https://medium.com/@beannfts

As @RobW stated the game isn't dead yet, but its now April 2024 and it still appears to still be in an early alpha build with minimal resources allocated and has now morphed into a battle royal with what is looking like very little utilisation of the NFTs. I don't believe there are any malicious motives, but just a matter of resource allocation and once the game is released, I have a feeling it won't be very good at all and will be left to fade away much like World Boss.

I still hold Playside IRL and on Strawman, but my post was mostly to highlight for myself a trend in execution risk that I think is very real and worth watching.

Agree that there are probably about 3000 disgruntled Bean NFT owners out there who's original investment didn't pan out how they hoped.

I personally applaud the decision to deprecate the project as it is clear that its not really commercially viable. I'd also much prefer to see PLY focus on developing some key titles that appeal to 100's of 1000's of people and have the ability to do a whole bunch of in game monetisation over time rather than an up front monetisation for 3000 to 10000 players. I think demonstration of an ability to quickly pivot away from things that aren't working is an important skill for management.

I am sure that PLY were also expecting that a lot of the heavy lifting of the project was also going to be done by someone else (i.e. the Metaverse built by Facebook and all that they had to do was some artwork / 3d objects minted in the NFT). Rightly so, Zuckerberg got a very clear message from the market that they wanted him to focus on exploiting our youth with his existing platforms rather than spending so much money on creating an even more immersive platform to encourage teen suicide ... but I digress.

I think the purchasers also need to have a good hard look at themselves and what they were really expecting out this NFT (I'm sure it was speculative boundless wealth, the ability to hang out with other exclusive people and probably only a very small % of them were ever going to play the game). Instead they now have the privledge of bitching on discord with that same exclusive community. Maybe they should have bought into Bored Ape Yacht club and have the chance to hang out in the club's BATHROOM with the publicists of A-list celebs https://boardroom.tv/bored-ape-nft-celebrity-owners/

For me, the whole discussion here is a reminder that I need to keep a closer eye on the titles that PLY is focusing on and make sure that their metrics are performing as these really represent the upside for the company and share price compared with the WFH which is just there to keep the lights on.

@Bradbury, thanks for keeping us honest, as always.

For what it's worth, I don't think this is as concerning as others. The business, a few months ago, announced what was ultimately a line in the sand moment for them -- would they continue to develop projects which they no longer thought would be beneficial and/or attractive for shareholders or would they continue on down a trajectory that was unlikely to yield any success?

They picked the former. It wasn't popular at the time, it terrified the market but this pivot has seen results improve dramatically -- albeit being a short time since -- and has likely refocused their team on making worthwhile output.

NFTs are no longer worth the resources and time. The hype is not what it once was. That is the nature of gaming, things can change quickly. What is important is management don't continue to guzzle resource into something that is no longer worth the time. @RhinoInvestor for that reason I agree with your view -- things change and ultimately Playside no longer think this project is as important as it once was. If anyone doubts the conduct of management or the ability of this company to execute, I suggest you look at their performance and growth achieved over the last 3-4 years. Gerry has demonstrated, over this time, that he knows what he is doing. It is clear he genuinely gives a shit about both the performance and the brand of the business and will make tough calls as required. This seems like one of those calls.

Ok my last input on this one.(Once again, mostly recording this for myself)

@Rocket6 I agree that the increased discipline in capital allocation is key to Playsides performance going forward and managements focus on this was the reason I continued to allocate to position.

What I see as a slight difference in this scenario is the fact that through the sale of the NFTs they effectively were paid $8m upfront for this project, rather than having to fund the project from the ongoing business funds and hope the title is a success to be able to recoup development costs.

They haven’t axed the project which means a title will be coming out. So even if you halve the NFT sales to $4m for paying the costs associated around NFTs and business ops, based on the slides from the time you were talking about, this falls within the Indie category.

This means that all the “resources” should be available upfront for project completion.

12-18 months - Currently at 25 months

$20-$45 - Free to Play ( or price of NFT)

$2m - $20m - $8m + already (Success)

Anyway that’s all from me on this one. I still have my Playside review to complete so this leads in nicely.