Podcast conversation: How virtual worlds, vast communities, and traditional entertainment are shaping the $200B Web3 gaming sector, with Mark Aubrey of Catheon Gaming

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In this conversation, we chat with Mark Aubrey – CEO of Catheon Gaming. Prior to this, Mark was Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific (“APAC”) at Activision Blizzard, the leading gaming developer and publisher of entertainment software renowned for creating some of the industry’s most critically acclaimed games, including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. Mark has over 19 years of experience in the entertainment and gaming industry in the APAC region.

Prior to Activision Blizzard, Mark worked a long stint at Warner Bros. Entertainment as the Group Marketing Director, driving synergies and commercial opportunities across groups (Home Entertainment, Theatrical, Television, HBO, Games, Consumer Products and Digital Distribution). Mark graduated with a Bachelor of Business and Marketing from the University of Newcastle.

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Timestamp

• 1’34”: The foundational experiences that started Mark’s career and his thought process

• 4’35”: The definition of a videogame, what is the purpose of it, who is it for, and how is it made?

• 8’43”: The real emotions and feelings behind simulations/renderings of narrative experience

• 10’31”: The business of publishing and Mark’s role of running a portfolio of various gaming titles

• 15’48”: The economics and monetisation benchmarks of traditional games like World of Warcraft

• 19’28”: Mark’s experience of observing the proliferation of Web3 in gaming

• 30’20”: Catheon Gaming, its portfolio, and successes to date

• 33’59”: The implications of geography, different human behaviours, and web3 adoption on gaming

• 38’06”: What the future of gaming holds given the prevailence of NFTs, Blockchain, and crypto?

• 41’13”: Methods to connect with Mark & learn more about Catheon Gaming

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Sneak Peek:

Mark Aubrey:
…for a game like a massive multiplayer role-playing game, they're incredibly complex in-game economies. You will have an in-game economist that basically will be responsible for building out that economy and assuring how it works and that it's all balanced and everything within it, no differently to the way it would be built out in real world economy. So, I mean, they're incredibly complex and they have enabled people outside the game ecosystem with WoW that you mentioned, you have people that were having people farm gold for them in Vietnam or in another sort of world to sort stop, take that grind out and then sell that outside of the game ecosystem. So, yeah, it's an incredibly complex environment. And the more game has become service oriented, that in-game economy or an in-game currency that sits within…

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