[Dive #76] The Wood Elf Wine Experience

BONUS: 📚 Textbooks and 🧱 Roblox

Ahoy folks! Let’s start one of the bonus points before diving into the meat of today’s piece, and we’ll cap it off with another bonus point.

Textbook NFTs?

I have no idea what the textbook world looks like these days, but I imagine a few things have remained true:

• They’re expensive AF

• They’re heavy AF (maybe most have gone digital, so this is irrelevant?)

• Students try to get the cheapest version of the textbook as possible so they can use the money saved for the next party they host or Spring Break trip

That said, I came across this headline yesterday:

Source

Although I’m not particularly…excited about this headline, it’s a great example of how NFTs can be applied across many industries. And Pearson’s reasoning makes a lot of sense.

Similar to artists receiving a portion of secondary sales after the initial sale, empowering creators, businesses like Pearson can do the same (“empowering” themselves lol).

On top of that, textbooks have traditionally been a physical product. Now Pearson will have more datapoints to analyze with wallet addresses, pricing, and transaction activity. Combined with the Pearson+ subscription product at $14.99 launched last year, this gets pretty interesting.

I guess I’ve unintentionally become a textbook industry analyst 😂

BRB, buying some Pearson stock (ticker: PSO). On a separate note their stock has weathered this market quite well (bear markets = focus on education?).

Great business move Pearson, gotta give respect where its due.

The Wood Elf Wine Experience

Yesterday evening was a good evening. A and I did some wedding planning (she also yelled at me because I was scrolling through Opensea at times, I deserved it), and we cracked open a bottle of wine.

It wasn’t any bottle of wine. It was Wood Elf Wine (WEW).

Also, this is why I don’t do Instagram. I take terrible pics, and my selfie angles are horrible. I applaud A for attempting to teach me how to take selfies over the years.

So what is WEW and who’s behind it?

Arjun, an acquaintance I met during my college days, subscribed to my newsletter right when it kicked off (thanks for your support!), and reached out 42 editions in.

A 4-month wine subscription paired with a digital quest? Alright, I’m listening! Having been immersed in the world of NFTs for a year and a half at that point, I was a fan of more interesting use cases with NFTs. As much as I enjoy them, I was getting tired of those animal PFPs.

Check out the WEW website here, pretty cool!

More specifically, this is what the WEW experience provided.

Dang, an in-person event at the conclusion of the season? I personally haven’t seen something like this before. All I’ve done with wine before is sip it while pretending I know what I’m talking about (“wow, this has essence of vaseline and a dash of doorknob”).

Now I can pretend I know what I’m drinking and play a video game? I’m down.

Users can select their character, which also indicates their wine preference (between a mix of reds, whites and rosé).

A and I chose Garrett Tosscobble. Mainly because

• At the bottom of the card it says that he is “The Fool” (me)

• “He would refer to himself as more of a lover than a fighter” (me)

• "He represents the start of a new journey and taking a leap of faith in what is to come” (me)

This halfling is literally me. Arjun, you need to pay me royalties dude.

Plus, look at him, he’s vibin’. What’s not depicted is his hometown burning down but he’s feeling the vibes. I subscribed to WEW, and the wait began.

A couple weeks ago, I started receiving updates from Arjun:

Few things to note:

• It was nice to receive updates from Arjun regarding what to expect and any steps to take before I received my first shipment. If WEW scales, I’m sure it will be optimized.

• The WEW NFTs are on Solana, which makes sense if WEW scales up as well. Easier for WEW to airdrop the NFTs to their customers, no need to worry about expensive gas vs. ETH.

Earlier this week the first bottle arrived!

Above the bottle packaging were some accessories. The customized welcome note and sticker with my name was a nice touch!

At the back of the bottle was a QR Code as the mechanism to start the WEW experience. No other instructions, it’s a mystery game after all.

And so the onboarding began…

Garrett of course! He’s the homie.

Time to verify that I have a WEW NFT and can access the game. After passing the token-gate, there was an overview of the game and experience.

Holy shit. There’s a $1k USD prize? Screw the limited-edition wine bottle. Hell, I’m not going to drink while I play this game. I need to focus.

At this point, A and I had our Google Spreadsheet out and were taking notes like we were preparing for an exam.

After watching the intro video, we began playing the browser based game.

Here’s a sneak peek of the game. It isn’t Fortnite quality and that’s not the point. We’re here to sip wine, have fun, and win $1k.

And after finishing Chapter 1 of the quest, I joined the WEW Discord server to stay up to date and provide some feedback on the experience!

So why a Dive on WEW besides the fact that I know Arjun?

This was fun:

Back when Arjun reached out to me, he specifically wrote:

“Every time I mention NFTs to my friends or family, they give me a look of confusion and disgust, mainly because they just see NFTs as a speculative asset (aka a scam in their eyes) or simply just a picture. I think the best way is not to position it as an NFT and use the NFT as a tool for the community so it focuses more on the utility than the NFT itself.”

I completely agree with this. Everyone that is into NFTs for financial reasons is already in this space. The next wave of new users onboarding onto Web3 will care less about the $, and more about the experience and utility of what NFTs can do. Note that they will care less, it doesn’t mean they won’t care about it at all.

And that’s what he did with WEW. Outside of connecting my Phantom to verify that I had the WEW, I completely forgot about the NFT.

I was having a good time sipping wine and playing a video game.

It’s sorta like if you and your friends/coworkers participate in an escape room. You don’t think, “Who created this escape room? Do they have a lot of experience? Is their definition of hard the same as mine? What do they think about that other Escape Room down the street?”

You just go to have fun and hopefully escape in time! It’s entertainment and NFTs can enable a more entertaining experience.

Or they can be used for textbooks lol 😒

It’s actually good value:

The price of this wine + digital experience was $360. You get 6 bottles of wine, a digital experience, entry to a party in LA (great if you’re local!), and a shot at $1,000. There are some other easter eggs, but 🤐

It ain’t the McDonald’s Dollar Menu, but it’s solid value.

This is a great stay-at-home date night idea or activity with friends! How much does a date night normally cost? Dinner would be $50 to $100 and a movie would be $30 for 2?

This is an early example of a DTC Phygital experience:

I think Arjun is ahead of the curve with this. I expect to see a LOT more of these types of phygital token-gated experiences pop up in the coming months and years. Probably to the point where it’ll be weird if an experience isn’t token-gated. That’d be something, right?

Assuming the numbers look reasonable on WEW’s side, I imagine a smoother, richer, and possibly more interactive experience if there is a Season 2 and beyond.

PS: Arjun was kind enough to provide a free subscription to Season 1 of WEW. He did not expect anything in exchange for it. I’m writing about this because I genuinely find WEW interesting and the experience was fun! I’m looking forward to Chapter 2 and may write about it…if I get that $1k prize 😂

I promise I’m not a money-hungry troll. I find it hilarious pretending that I am one though 👹

Roblox ➡️ Robloxchain

If Roblox ever creates their own blockchain and calls it Robloxchain, you know who came up with it first ✅. I’m available for weddings and parties, you can pay me in crypto.

Update: Just kidding, I just searched ‘Robloxchain’ on Twitter, and learned that there are thousands of punnier people than myself.

Anyway, more big news from big names bringing Web3 to the masses (Facebook had a big announcement with Dapper too. I won’t even link it because everyone’s talking about it already 😤). Seems like Roblox is preparing for the inevitable as well.

Here’s the job listing

What will this lucky engineer be focusing on?

“As a senior engineer you will help Roblox Marketplace to be web3 ready and support billions of items and transactions to happen both on the blockchain and Roblox.”

This is going to get interesting…some themes that come to mind with this marketplace:

• Ownership: Users truly own their assets, a core principle of Web3

• Interoperability: Roblox assets can be bought and sold in their marketplace as well as others. Better yet, what if Roblox assets can also be used in other ecosystems? What if those assets, let’s a leather jacket, is portrayed in different ways according to the metaverse/ecosystem it is being used in? That would seem pretty valuable to me 🤔

• Partnerships: Roblox has been crushing it on this front, working with countless celebrities and brands (Nike, Spotify, Samsung, NFL, Netflix etc). They even have two of their metaverse concerts nominated for the VMA awards. These partnerships become even more valuable for Roblox and the partner when that extends to any ecosystem. Not just Roblox’s captive metaverse.

IMO, this is the general logic that many platforms will consider when it comes to incorporating Web3 and Blockchain capabilities.

And this comes just 2 weeks after Minecraft’s announcement banning NFTs.

They did say ‘generally’ though. Maybe they’ll change their mind sooner than later 😉

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I’ll see you next week. I’m headed to a bachelor party tomorrow, pray for me 💀