@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.

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??

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.

@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.