China Open To Crypto
Manuel Olumorin
May 29, 2023
GM GM. Welcome to Lootbox, the magnifying glass that helps you find the needle in the haystack of web3 news.
Today’s loot
China may be open to crypto
The future of audio in gaming?
The Sneakies
Tweet of the day
China Opening Up To Crypto
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
At least, that is what it’s starting to look like with China dropping a whitepaper promoting web3. Shock? I know…
The whitepaper titled "Web3 Innovation and Development White Paper (2023)," states that web3 technology is an "inevitable trend for future Internet industry development." High praise from a place that kicked out Bitcoin mining.
So what’s in it?
Unfortunately, we don’t read Chinese, but here’s what we know so far.
The Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission wants to turn Beijing into a global hotspot for digital innovation, and the Chaoyang district is totally on board.
They're putting their money where their mouth is with plans to shell out a whopping 100 million yuan - that's about 14 million US dollars - every year until 2025 to make this dream a reality.
Also, what’s interesting is the timing as Hong Kong implements new rules that have increased interest from crypto exchanges such as Houbi, Gate Group, OKX and BitMEX.
Why this matters
China is the largest gaming market ($40.85 billion and 665 million players in 2020), and crypto exchanges are the major on-ramp for most people. This makes China opening up to web3 and crypto exchanges showing interest in Hong Kong, for now, a big big deal.
If this plays out, we could see a boon for web3 games gaining access to this market and developers in China creating web3 games.
The Future Of Audio Production In Games
Google Research dropped a paper that could be game-changing for audio generation in gaming.
The tool is called Soundstorm.
It takes these things called semantic tokens from AudioLM, kind of like the ingredients for the audio it's going to make, and uses them to create long-form audio.
Now older AudioLMs exist, but SoundStorm trumps them by being just as good, more consistent and way faster.
What it does
Say you are developing a game, and you’ve got voice actors. Typically you need them to record the entire script.
SoundStorm can take 0.5 seconds of voice prompt to whip up 30-second audio from text.
This means you only need the voice actors to record a small subset of the script then you can generate a natural-sounding conversation from the text of your script.
The model can even handle longer audio sequences by creating high-quality, natural-sounding dialogues just by using a transcript with speaker turns and a short audio sample of the speakers' voices.
It does all this by using a bidirectional attention-based Conformer to predict masked audio tokens.
Lootbringer’s take
The combination of this and generative text would be huge in bringing NPCs to unscripted and real-feeling characters within games, maybe even metaverses. 👀 this space.
The Sneakies
Avalon Chief Product Officer Jeffrey Butler believes that the era of developing isolated projects is over, and instead, the goal should be pushing game modding culture and user-created games
Tweet of the Day
Building a game is hard. Here is some inspiration from Nvidia’s CEO to keep you motivated.
Nvidia almost died 3 times in its 30 year history.
CEO Jensen Huang shared these near-death stories at a commencement speech last night.
Here's what he said:
— Peter Yang (@petergyang)
May 28, 2023
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