Crypto: The Game Companion Podcast, Season 2 Recap With Founder Dylan Abruscato

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For 10 days only, we'll be hitting on the biggest moments, juiciest gossip, and hottest takes from season 2, Anon Island.

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Hi.

Hey, it's the after the final rose episode for Crypto the Game season 2. Recap pod. For anyone who's new here, Crypto: The Game is a massive internet Survivor-style game where everyone buys in to play, votes each other out, uh, while playing a series of challenges over a series of days, and the last person standing wins the pot. We have a winner, and today on the show we're going to talk about the finale of season 2 with its founder, Dylan Abruscato.

It's a great chat. We had so much fun, a great overview on the game, on what's next for Crypto: The Game team, and just a nice look back, a little look back here.

How are you feeling after season 2's ending?

Um, I gave him some notes. I had some notes for him. So sit in and listen on that. But I mean, I had so much fun. It was so fun. I genuinely mean what I said where I, I said this talking to Dylan, but You get used to the amount of inbound that you're getting by the end of 10 days. Yeah, messages. And I've been waking up feeling a little sad that my Telegram doesn't have 400 unread messages. I'm like, so many people wanted to talk to me last week. So, um, getting used to that, having withdrawals, but excited for what's next for them. Love the team. Like, they're such good, cool, smart dudes, and you love to see people who work hard and who are kind and smart. smart and thoughtful win. And that's been so nice to witness.

Totally.

So, um, that's my main takeaway is like, I'll follow them wherever they go next. And I'm happy that we got to be a part of this and we'll see if I play next season, but I'll definitely be here, mic in hand, reporting.

Okay. Thank you first, uh, to Lens, our partners for this little miniseries. Lens is open and decentralized social media. Follow Boys Club on Lens. We're @boysclub. I'm @dina. Natasha is @natasha. And you can mint your Lens profile at lens.xyz. Again, thank you so much to Lens for supporting this podcast. We've had so much fun and it was such an honor to do it.

And we have 2 podcasts, one on this feed that you listen to called Boys Club and another feed called Two Online. Two Online is essentially an auditory For You page. Dina and I both bring a story, a Internet concept, a video, a viral moment that we explain to each other. It's unserious news brought to you by 2 unserious people. Okay, let's get into it.

Okay. We have Dylan Abruscato on the pod today. We're doing a feelings check-in. With Dylan today, post-season finale, Crypt of the Game Season 2. It's done. How are you feeling?

Feeling great. Really, really, really well rested. Uh, I think last time we did a feelings check-in, it was in the middle of Season 1, and my reaction to that was that I was so tired. But, uh, we're, I think, 4 or 5 days after the finale. So, uh, feeling, feeling really good. It was. Honestly, couldn't have gone better in terms of engagement and player feedback and response. Thank you so much for doing the companion podcast. I feel like it really expanded the CTG universe. I have friends that are not in crypto, friends of friends that were following along and I know were anxious to hear kind of how it ended. So honestly, couldn't have gone better and so grateful.

I love it. We had such a good time. It was so fun to report on the daily movement of the players, um, to be in the game and also to be watching the game from that perspective was a great time. Okay. So how'd it end? Tell us season 2 has wrapped. Who won? What's the story? How did it all come to a close?

Yeah. So ultimately, uh, an anonymous player won. So pretty fittingly to the theme of CTG season 2, which was Anon Island. Uh, the winner ultimately was player 733, not someone that, that I think I anticipated. I think if you would've asked me before the season started what would happen, I, I probably would've guessed that a doxxed player would win. But we saw a strategy and, uh, essentially a cause that the entire community rallied behind. So the beauty of this game, and I know you both know this as players, is that the community and all of the previously eliminated players essentially come back on in the finale and vote for the winner. So this is someone that basically everyone wanted to win. It was a landslide. So the night before the finale, I believe a group of people pooled funds and bought the NFT for Player 733, which was a finalist, and all kind of publicly campaigned for a cause to donate the proceeds from the season to the legal defense fund of their friends who are fellow crypto founders and developers. I'm personally not too familiar with who they are or what they're working on, but from what I can tell, it's, it's something that, that basically the entire crypto community is, is really passionate about. And it was very refreshing to see.

So Player 733, did they play the game in any remarkable way? Were their stats compelling in any way other than they were sort of the container that No,

it's a good question. And, and they must have connected their Twitter at some point. Uh, I don't believe it was a player that was, uh, like a team leader or a standout. And the challenge is it seems like it was someone that just kind of like flew under the radar and never got any votes cast against them. And what was nice about this season, and I know we've spoken about it a bunch, was this new kind of deal or no deal, uh, mechanic or twist where players could essentially like sell their spot and cash out at different checkpoints throughout the season. And so I think that was a good thing. season. And this person, Player 33, decided that, that this was their time and they probably didn't think they were gonna win it. So they sold their entry NFT right before the finale to the group of people that, that did the right campaigning essentially to garner the votes from, from all the other, uh, players.

So crazy. As a Survivor watcher, there is such a format to going from getting to the jury and essentially like presenting your case and campaigning for why you should win. And it's really interesting to see how it plays out so differently online versus in person, where when there's, I don't know what it is, maybe 20 people in a Survivor challenge and there's like 17 people then voting for you, or maybe it's less, but like it's small numbers. It feels much more personal and one-to-one. Yeah. And you do have to like present your case and you have to be compelling and like you have to have played a good game. And I think it's pretty rare that who wins is someone that people don't think deserved to win with Survivor. I think it's really interesting to watch how different it is online where there's hive mind is so real. I think for next season, everybody, I think will go in with an idea of how they're going to campaign in the end. Like you almost have to work backwards from like, okay, this is, I want to win. Obviously this is the campaign, the digital campaign that I am going to need to lay in order for that to win. Because especially as I'm curious, I know in a bit we're going to talk about what's next, but. As these games maybe get bigger and bigger, you have to be thinking about essentially what your marketing strategy is to rally people behind you in the end, because it's so much more important when you're dealing with basically trying to rally Twitter followers to one, one cause or one player. So it's, it was interesting to see that play out even more so with this season than I think the previous season.

Yeah, it's, it's one of those things. And, and unlike season 1, we didn't, uh, publicly disclose the number of votes in real time because I think with season 1, a lot of people hopped on, they saw that MFL who ended up winning, was winning by such a wide margin that they all decided to essentially cast their votes for them. But exactly your point, like in Survivor, the, the jury members don't get to, to post why they're voting for who they're voting for and, and kind of like discuss amongst themselves and share their reasoning in real time. And over the course of many hours, you kind of hear the cases and you cast your vote. It's that simple. Um, but I 100% agree. There's no reason why every finalist wasn't actively, like, shouldn't, they all should have been actively campaigning for the jury.

Yeah.

And, and really ultimately just like the best story I think we saw that with season 1 with MFL. It was kind of a heartwarming and wholesome ending. Uh, we saw that with season 2 where it was a, um, uh, essentially like a charitable cause that the entire community decided to rally behind.

There, there was definitely, uh, controversy. I don't know, conversation about

drama,

the ability to drama,

as every good season finale should have.

Yeah. Totally. Like every great reality show. This was definitely, uh,

This is drama. I, I'm sort of zooming in on one particular piece of the conversation, which was around the ability to buy jury votes right up until the end. And that's something that we had been talking about throughout the whole podcast was this idea. And really it was a narrative around the individual player versus the whale who would buy up a bunch of jury votes and then ultimately swing the outcome. results of the finale. One idea that I saw brought up was this idea of time-weighted jury votes. Did you see any of this, chat, where it was basically like—

The longer you make it or hold, the more weight your vote gets.

Which would prevent a scenario like, I don't know if this is exactly what happened in the finale, but where someone could just buy up a bunch of jury NFTs the day of the finale and then sway the vote having had no skin in the game and hadn't been playing the game. And I think it's like trying to solve for that idea of really having meaningful skin in the game and that being what shapes the outcome. I know that that's like kind of complicated and you don't want to make things too overcomplicated, but like, what's, what comes up for you in that?

For sure. I think I'll, 2 things I'll quickly say. One is that, uh, the goal for this is always to have each season be essentially a case study on human behavior. I think season 1 ended up being this David versus Goliath theme where we had a relatively unknown player from rural Japan that didn't speak a word of English beating all these top founders and VCs and essentially influencers from crypto Twitter and taking home the pot. Season 2, we introduced this kind of like NFT-based mechanic where people could buy or sell their spots and their votes. And I honestly just wanted to see what would happen and how it would play out. I knew there was a possibility that a whale could essentially buy the win, um, but I also thought, and we spoke about this last time I was on the pod, that like humanity could win out and, and they could rally behind a cause or a player and beat out the whale. So I think that ended up happening here. I know that, that I don't, I don't think that any of the jury whales like meaningfully won or made money in season 2, which I think is a win for the community. Um,

yeah.

And yeah, the other thing is that And we haven't publicly disclosed this, but we built in basically the ability to make all NFTs non-transferable into the contract. So we could have at any point basically like halted the sales and transfers of jury NFTs, of player NFTs, all of this stuff. But I think I spoke to a bunch of, I guess, mentors and friends in the space and they all kind of unanimously advised us to not interfere with the gameplay. Everyone kind of bought in and signed up for this season knowing that this was the season's dynamic and this is the outcome that could have happened. So if we were to essentially like play God or like, you know, change the rules halfway through unannounced, I think that would have caused more harm than not. So, you know, who knows where we're gonna go with this thing. And I have tons of ideas for new shows and new formats and new seasons, which I'm all really excited about. But I think, like I said, every season will have its own twist and spin. And there's no reason to say that, like, you'll be able to buy and sell jury NFTs in any future season.

I agree. I think with not interfering mid-game, 'cause I think a lot of people like came in with a specific strategy around the NFT component specifically from the beginning. And I could see people getting upset. Um, okay. So let's talk about some stats from the game. I know there's some interesting stuff around the NFTs and the secondary market for those, but would love to hear just from you. Where'd we end up with how people played, how engaged they were at that? That sort of thing.

Yeah. I mean, insane 24/7 engagement, honestly, similar to season 1, which I was not expecting. We had over 100,000 site visits over the 10 days. Uh, 50,000 of those were unique visitors. Obviously with 800 players, I think a lot of that has to do with folks wanting to follow along and watch the new spectator view. And I know I thanked you guys already, but like the podcast and kind of expanding the universe and wanting to follow along and see what happens and pick favorites is Uh, something we definitely saw with tens of thousands of unique visitors to the site. Amongst the players, we saw over 4,000 total hours over the 10 days, which is like—

Oh my God.

So hard to, so hard to comprehend. But yeah, people really treated this like their full-time jobs, which as a founder and game designer, it's like exactly what you want. But, um, you know, I always wanted this to feel as much like a reality show as possible and Via the graphics and the sound effects and, and just like fully immersing all of our players onto this digital island. We saw it. I mean, players from the US and Canada and UK and India and Germany, Netherlands. Uh, it's just like a truly global on-chain reality show. So insane engagement and so grateful.

Really global. The, the voice memos that we got for the finale for folks to make their case, it was, it was incredible. It was people from all over the world and it was, it was so honestly amazing to listen to. And that was actually one of my favorite parts of the whole experience.

I know we're all, you know, fans of the future of the internet and this kind of new internet that we're building, but in no scenario would any of those international players be able to be cast in a traditional television reality show. So we're really like saying goodbye to the kind of passive viewing of reality TV and ushering in this new era of creating something that's massive and participatory and interactive and allowing anyone, whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever language you speak, to, to interact with and engage with and essentially be cast in that reality show on chain.

What was the most surprising thing from season 2?

Yeah, I think,

or like a favorite moment or something that just stood out for you?

Honestly, I think it was the fact that the sponsored challenges were so well received and as engaged as they were with the non-sponsored challenges with season 1. Essentially all 5 challenges this season were branded content on behalf of our sponsors. And it didn't seem like any of the players either noticed or seemed to care. I kind of, you know, have a career in brand partnerships and revenue-generating sponsorships. And my goal with all of those, and especially with this game, is to create branded content that enhances the experience for players and never feels like an ad. So just really thankful and surprised that like that happened and people were essentially spending 4 to 5 hours on all the different Lens platforms and Claiming their handles and collecting posts and exploring everything in the sake of, you know, essentially to win immunity. Um, you had people staring at the PoApp logo for, you know, 5, 6 hours and with PoApp Breaker. And it was just so refreshing to see that the, essentially the ads were, were well integrated and well received.

Drop the, drop the deck for season 3, Dylan. Um, okay. I, I have a note and I'm curious if you will Take it. And if this will be the case for me,

I am wide open to feedback.

I think it needs to be 7 days. I think 10 days.

I saw a tweet that was asking for more days.

That's crazy. That person doesn't have a job. That person does not work. Um, I think that, okay, I'm of two minds about this in my own head.

Yeah.

Because I think there is something to the tenacity that is required to play the game in a way that you would need to play to get to the 10th day and still be there. is part of the challenge. You need to feel like at the end, I've given this everything. I've left everything

on the

court, everything on the court. And you might not get to that type of mental space until you get to, to 10 days. So I can see, like, I know that's part of the, not to keep talking about Survivor, but that's part of Survivor is like, some people are just like, I just want to go home. I don't have like the ambition and like drive and determination that I had when I got on the island day one. Yeah.

Yeah,

like some people don't have, and then the people, the real people who deserve to win are the people who are like, "I will die on this island." Like I'm gonna be here till the end, and like keep that tenacity up the whole time. So I get that, but then there's part of me that's like, "I could play hard for seven days," but then my I it dwindles. I can't keep it up. I'm like, "I gotta get back. I gotta tune back into my life."

Yeah, I agree in the sense that I I never. expected this amount of engagement. I think I said this on, on our first conversation, but I kind of expected people to sign on in the morning, complete a round of whatever the challenge was. Maybe they had an alliance with a friend or a coworker and decide who they're gonna vote for and hop on that night to cast their vote. But this, the fact that it's really ballooned into a 24/7, 10-day all-in reality show, uh, like I never ever anticipated that. So, uh,

I've, I like literally have had Withdrawals the past few days because I don't wake up with like 700 Telegram messages. I'm like, am I, do I have any friends? Like, does anybody love me?

But I will say, and, and we kind of, uh, went into season 1 with, uh, the number of days a bit flexible is that we do ultimately need to whittle the field down from 800 to 1. And if you remove voting periods, it gets harder and harder to do that, or more and more people are going to feel like they got sniped or it was a bloodbath and all these different So there's kind of a, like a natural tension between the game being longer and essentially like keeping the player number high enough that everyone who wants to play can play. Totally.

That

makes sense. So yeah, I think, you know, we, we always try to do a touch grass day each season. We always try to only have it overlap with one weekend, but great feedback. And, you know, I, I, no, honestly, like, I think, I think everyone would benefit from from a shorter season if it's going to, uh, have this much engagement. There's another format for a new show that's unlike Survivor that I'm really excited about that I think will be equally as fun and engaging, but might not require 24/7 commitment. So that could potentially be longer in days, but less, I guess, taxing, uh, overall.

Are you willing to share what this new game format might be?

Yeah, for sure. So similar to how I guess CTG was inspired by Survivor and Hunger Games and Squid Game. This one takes a ton of inspiration from The Amazing Race, which is another one of my favorite shows.

Oh my gosh. Fun.

Yeah. So imagine a world in which you don't vote people off. And it's all essentially skill and time based. So you could still be split into teams or tribes out, out of the gate. And every day has a new challenge. And essentially the bottom X percent of people are just eliminated every night. Similar to Amazing Race. If you're the last person to arrive, you go home. So it would remove the kind of social dynamics of, of deciding who to win, and it would be much more skill-based. But it would also allow us to kind of open up the floodgates and not necessarily cap the number of entries because the reason why, uh, something like CTG is so capped is because it requires so much, I guess, social dynamics. Yeah. And you would never want to have 10,000 people on your tribe to feel like you're just randomly picking off names. So yeah, this is something something I'm really excited about. I think, you know, the, the grand vision for this thing is a live interactive TV network, essentially, where all of the tried and true trad TV formats can be on-chain and massive and participatory and global. And like this Survivor format is, is really just the first one.

Okay. Last question here. Is season 3 coming or are we waiting for the amazing Race on-chain.

Yeah. So I bought CryptoTheRace.com. Nice. Nice. Yeah, I'd say yes. Like the goal is to do it all in parallel. Like I want, just like any other traditional TV network, like your favorite shows will come back for future seasons, but there are also new shows that you might wanna watch or you might wanna play that are gonna come up as well. So we're gonna kind of build season 3 of CTG and season 1 of CTR or whatever we end up calling it kind of in parallel. With the goal of, of creating as many, like I said, live interactive TV shows as possible on-chain.

Wow. Well, if anyone can do it, Dylan, it's you. You are such an inspiring founder and honestly, like, we'll, we'll follow you anywhere. So whatever you want to create next, we're, we're there.

Amazing.

Thank you for creating such a fun experience for us all.

Okay. Bye, Dylan.

Thanks.

Bye.