well well well Welly well here we are again now as you might have noticed I have put this video specifically on my extra Channel because I am not a fan of like being a part of YouTube drama or anything like that like the last time I talked about metzo was about as dramatic as I'd like to get thank you very much um and uh so let's just cut to the quick uh earlier today to my understanding the uh at 2:35 p.m. according to the screenshot I have here metzo has officially closed their door they've taken their ball and gone home it's over it did not make it to its third birthday um so to start off with medzo it's a game that I covered they actually did a couple of AD buys on my uh on some of my videos um one of of the big things about metao was I was actually like I actually did like some consultation for them while they were still getting things going you know doing their Kickstarter um starting to see the hype things like that uh Mike woodell I think is his name or is it waddle I I I'm not I can't I'm not sure I don't we never actually met in person we attempted several times but we never actually made it but we did actually talk a lot on Discord so um I can tell you a fair amount about the early days of metao but when it comes to what's happened recently I am a I am kind of in the dark because after I did that video where I said you know the the with the nice big drama bait title friendship ended with metzo um they basically blocked me on all of their social media which you know fair enough uh can't really fault them for doing that one bit you can't have somebody saying stuff about that like you and continue to entertain them um but here's the thing is Mike and I have actually been talking a lot about like the nfts and all that in private long before I made that video so um but uh yeah metzo has ended and the thing is this kind of comes out of the blue because here's the thing is mezu was doing really well they were like this big Kickstarter success story they started at like just a $10,000 like Kickstarter thing that has since transformed into like one of the biggest Indie card games ever made it um it was absolutely one of the big provocators of the bubble era um it was being sold in Target and Barnes & Noble as recently as like a month ago I I still saw their cards on shelves for ages and now suddenly out of the blue it's over um comes with a bit of a shock because if you're selling at like Target and stuff like that you're you're you're getting in the money it's not like the flood era where there were like a bajillion card games on the Shelf no there's only like pretty much like the big three plus Dragon Ball plus whatever one or two things are lucky enough to get on there um to go from that to bust is you know it's it's concerning um like I said I was uh banished from all of their social media for a long time so a lot of what I'm going to go over is stuff that trickled down through the grape vine as to why this happened because to people who followed metaz more closely apparently this was less of a surprise so the premise uh metzo it is a card game that is based on Cryptids Cryptids the easy way to explain it are like modern-day uh fairy tale creatures things like The Moth Man and Bigfoot um are considered Cryptids I don't know if Godzilla would be considered a Cryptid well Godzilla's technically a fictional character they have been like setting sightings of Godzilla but there have been sightings of Nessie Nessie is considered a crypted um but the idea was that they made like a card game that used like the the throwback like Ken suori watercolor Pokemon art style um to make sort of a game that was kind of charming and it was really quirky because you had cards that actually like involved your surroundings in order to play them like um there were uh oh here's one uh gingerbread man was a card that you could only play during the month of December um but he could be used to heal your Santa CLA card which could also only be played on December back up to full there were uh there were some that involved uh wearing pants there were some that involved like um like whether there whether it was daytime or nighttime um it was designed to be quirky it it it played like a prozd video um and in fact in my review of metzo that was kind of the thing I deliberately made a video that was designed to look like a prozd video I'm I'm willing to admit that that prozd is what gave me the idea um but the crazy part is like 90% of that was actual gameplay um in that thing I did um the only thing that I think was fake was the what was it the PIAA bird um saying that it had like a gave it like a candle it dinner one night um that wasn't really the same uh PIAA bird responds to their the sight of an open flame um but you know it was a quirky like fun idea a lot of a lot of like celebration of Americana the fun of you know Cryptids and stuff like that I've I've I've looked into Cryptids on occasion I like the sense of adventure that comes with them the idea that they're still wonderful things to discover in this world of ours um I like that I think a lot of people gravitated to that but then Rudy got a box Rudy also known as Alpha Investments is this kind of Infamous figure in the trading card game scene scene he is absolutely probably the biggest Catalyst behind um this whole TCG bubble a lot of people say it was Logan Paul Logan Paul I think was just part of it because um Rudy of alpha Investments he like actively goes around and like he he does you know like drama pieces and hit pieces he says oh this game is Dead oh this game is plummeting like um almost to the point where it feel like feels like he's trying to manipulate the market with doing this there's a reason why I make a joke in my player taxonomy page when I introduced the concept of the jimothy the joke was that I was originally going to call him the Rudy H um but that's the thing uh he got he was sent a promotional box similar to the one I was sent um and that's when people started you know like buying up all the first editions and stuff and going nuts and uh Mike and I were in contact before that happened and as that happened and he was talking about you know he was he was feeling anxious about it and my advice to him actually was let it happen um I know that might sound a little awkward coming from me but I don't believe in like that an artist should suffer for their work no if you make something if you try to sell something that you've made there's no shame in wanting to get paid for that honestly it's it's one of the biggest negative stigmas I see about the art world is that you have to suffer for your art heck no if you can make money at something you've made that's awesome that's kind the dream because like it or not we live in a society um so I said yeah let the first edition Let It Go To The Moon let it become something special but follow that up with a sincere product that gets people excited gets them happy is accessible and encourages sort of a neat change in the game Space and for a while that looked like that's what was happening like the very first set was like it released in October and had all sorts of spooky monsters you know it was it was really cool and you know we were like brainstorming ideas like maybe there should be like special t-shirts or buttons that allow people who show up to like apply a condition like you could wear a button that says it's my birthday or you could wear a button that says it's Christmas and for game purposes it counts as that um the terrain cards did that a bit um I think they started doing Special terrain cards the like the special terrain cards that have like abilities Beyond just being terrain were my idea um like one of the things I proposed was actually one called Haunted Hayride which is both a farm but also makes it October um I don't know if they ever made haunted hay ride I they made some special uh some special um terrain some special things like that um but uh medzo is an example of how you can take a good opportunity like the one presented to Mike waddle and drive it into the ground um I actually like I said I've heard most of this through the gra Vine but I do have like a physical list that I wrote down of the things that got involved and let's start with the obvious one the reason that I abandoned metao was because they kept getting involved in crypto stuff um there was a time in the early 2020s especially during the pandemic uh where you could not go five minutes without somebody you know W you know walking Whispering into your ear about cryptocurrency and stuff like that and since meta is a game about Cryptids of course A lot of people are like Cryptids you mean Krypto like there's an exact line from the video I made ages ago um so I actually had no idea who this auki guy was so when Mike mentioned him I didn't really think much of it it's like oh is he like a musician or something you know like like like magic as post Malone um apparently he's also big into crypto uh here's the thing about cryptocurrency the the people who Shi cryptocurrency are notoriously bad bad at managing money we we keep hearing about like the crypto crashes happening just all over the place it is entirely a a system built on smoke I know there's going to be a lot of people in my comments complaining about this and I'm here to tell you they're wrong just look at what happened to like so many like crypto things like they go in value and then they like immediately Flatline um nfts are thing nfts they did some nfts back when it was kind of early um before like the World At Large knew about all of the problems that they cause um and you know Mike talked to me I like wow there's been a lot of negative feedback on these nfts and I'm like well yeah nfts are not a good idea it's recently been revealed like the terrible things they do the fact that they are causing like the computer parts components prices to Skyrocket the fact that they are using tons of electricity um and by the way proof of stake doesn't fix the fact that there's still like a lot lot of like farms and Mills and stuff like that a lot of malware that um turns unsuspecting people's computers into crypto mining facilities um but the thing about what crypto does is you know they they claim that they're going to make a lot of money with nfts and they don't like reinvested into the business they talk about the Lamborghinis they're going to buy and stuff like that and that might come up later um but yeah they are really bad with money what they do is they show up to a company they cause its value to briefly Skyrocket and then they walk away as the whole thing blows up uh it just disintegrates which seems to be a bit of what happened with meao I'll get into that a bit later [Music] um but uh like I said um the video I made where I basically had the public falling out with them where I basically gave them an open letter saying I'm done with you um was when they doubled down on nfts like they made the NFS I thought was like okay this is going to go away but then in the middle of the axi infinity scandal they decided to double down on nfts and that struck me as such a boneheaded move that I backed out completely I sold my collection um I actually had a special arrangement with metao that in exchange for um advertising for them I was given permission to sell my sample product I am not the kind of person who sells sample product the only two times I've done it were with metao which again I had permission to do the only other exception was Flesh and Blood I sold my copy of the eye of affidia that came in the sample booster box they sent me in order to buy a new computer so and as a result they have you know they this poster was permanently on my couch on during the couch era it was permanently behind me um in commemoration of the fact that they had given that to me this is actually like a neat poster they sent it to me with my preview kit but it has this big space down here where you're supposed to write like tournaments and stuff like that like that's how you're supposed to use these posters lgs's you're supposed to laminate them so that you can then write tournament dates on with dry erase marker and when that's over you erase it and write it fresh that's how you're supposed to use these um a lot of people just write on them raw and that always bothers me because then you can't uh erase all the dry erase and turn it into something that you can show off at your store so yeah um messing with crypto was absolutely the biggest mistake um metao made because it brought in the Crypt bro culture which would sort of damage everything else I mean another game speaking of Flesh and Blood a game that came out uh and you know had sort of a similar boom they had like the special cards you could get in the first edition booster packs um they had a lot of hype and they rode that hype but they rode that hype by developing a sustainable business model metao has crashed and burned flesh and blood from what I've heard had last year one of its best years ever like they were doing um they were doing like collaboration special editions with like um with with other big YouTubers I know the the tarian community college did like a big collab with them but they made a sustainable business model and they made a fun game out of it like they actually took like the demo deck size thing and made it its own tournament setting called Blitz I believe um but because they focused on maintaining creating a fun game that everybody could enjoy making a sustainable game they're still around they to my indication have no intention of cancelling anything um I mean they still have their problems with like requiring like legendary equipment to really compete but at least you only need one copy of each of those equipments it it's still a bit bogus that it's hard to compete without the legendary equipment but moving on um so uh one of the ways that these Crypt bro things manifested was just because they had blocked me on all social media accounts doesn't mean that I didn't have an alternative email subscribed to them and like once a week I was getting an email from metzo that was like Hey get hyped for this new thing we got new skateboards and stuff like that they're doing like skateboard decks and all sorts of things like some of the stuff like remember the stuff I proposed before like the buttons and like the t-shirts that could like generate in-game effects they weren't doing that instead they were making like skateboards and special promotional items that had like a Unique Card attached to them heav help you if that card ever becomes competitive and they were they were drilling people on these like they were constantly putting these out and it it seemed exhausting keeping up with medzo sounded like one of the most exhausting things ever but what about the game play I don't know I never really heard about that people weren't really talking about the gameplay with metzo anymore it was all about you know getting hyped for the next product it was consumed product to get hyped for next product made made manifest in ways I haven't seen since since Pokemon um they also made a reserve list that was also a really dumb thing to do that is that is a way that you can say that you're not on the side of the people who actually want to play your games making a reserve list the reserve list uh the term comes from match the Gathering where they made a list of cards they promis to never print anymore and they consider it the worst decision they ever made it is in a minor minor minor part why magic 30th was such an embarrassment um that was dumb nobody was really playing the game at that point I mean I met a couple people who claimed that they were playing but there wasn't like a big scene where people show up week after week after week to play um speaking of though of showing up to play um one of the things I heard is they [ __ ] around with their local game game stores the people who carried the games and did the tournaments and that is something you don't want to do you want to keep local game stores happy because they are one of your biggest sources not not not necessarily of Revenue but they absolutely are of community support and generating interest they're running their they're running your tournaments for you and so you want to treat them well you don't want to be mean to local gam stores medu was mean to local game stores the first one was in order for uh people in order for stores to continue to get metao organized Play support they would have to like buy like what like 1,200 1500 a lot of product like every single month like way more product than you get for a game that's not a member of the big three and you know that was required in order to get organized Play support I did a video about organized play uh a lot of people don't understand that organized play is not something that is generated and sent to stores out of the goodness of the company's Hearts it is usually paid you usually have to buy the organized play kit with the hope that the investment translates into enough sales that you make more money than you otherwise would um if companies do include organized play kits for free there tends to be some kind of strict thing to it like one thing I suggested is if people you know you know I'll buy a case of your starter de you can turn to them and say buy two cases and I'll throw in k for free um it it's purely a method to try to you know to get or to get you know to get games into stores to maybe occasionally use it as a sales sweetener but requiring stores to have minimum purchases to stay subscribed to organized play is just it's just a dick move okay because here's the thing so many people who get engaged in organized play have no idea of the things that go behind the scenes they don't know that the stores are the ones who have to pay the money in order to get these so that there's some sort of like big conditional thing attached to it they think that it's like a oh a cool Neato freebie thing um so here's the thing if it's like oh we're not doing medu tournaments anymore even though people are showing up and everybody's like oh how dare you rather than you know it's like oh they were you know they wouldn't really take the side of the stores if the stores decided to stop carrying organized play over this although that was only one of the things the other one I heard about was cuz here's the thing that makes it so unbelievable that it collapsed just so recently is because they had a sreo tie in sreo is like the second largest brand in the World Behind Pokemon I think they're pasted Star Wars as well um it's kind of a perfect little match you know you have this fun quirky like classic style game and now we have sreo characters in it it made sense to me um they had komaromi who was sort of this spooky character be sort of the headliner for it and I was like you know that makes sense San Rio's kind of big you know they they've for a second I thought I was like oh wow they actually hit it big with something and it turned out to be a disaster first of all like the minimum buy in for the San Rio set was like a $150 like monster box set which on its own wasn't great it it it to my understanding they didn't really have a way to dabble in the sreo set for a long time um it did not sell very well um I think because it was just way too darned expensive uh and people were exhausted from buying stuff because they kept hyping new stuff and putting it out um so I think a lot of it was people were exhausted by it uh they did not use this like amazing license opportunity as a way to get more people into the game this is the kind of thing that you want to put out for an affordable price so that people can be like oh what's this game hey I like these characters what what what game are they attached to that's how you get that's how you leverage that to get more people to play your game uh they didn't do that they charged $150 it did not sell well this was after they sold a bunch to um local game stores for the uh the price to sell at a premium uh that was the expectation was that they would buy these boxes they probably spent like 70 80 on each of these to try to sell them for their SRP of $150 and then undercut them by putting the boxes on ludicrous sale in Black Friday again this is uh this is through the grape vine uh in fact let's double check that real quick uh metzo Black Friday promo pack $30 so they're they're well the booster boxes they're still trying to they're still they're still uh the booster boxes they're still trying to sell them at this higher price point even sreo is trying to sell them directly but they're they're they're kind of struggling but yeah they had uh sreo corom crypted Carnival sales break records but I I've heard the fact that they undercut so many people with that Black Friday sale is why a number is why so many stores just kind of dropped them but here's the thing it says sales break records is that what I'm reading right here um is editor Doc and I clicked that link so it's from a website that is kind of biased in favor of metao metao products you need fast safe reliable oh dear um they're talking about breaking records because the box in the month of December sold 1670 out of a run of 10,000 metao kuromi news that may trigger you oh gag me but yeah um they sold 1, 1670 out of 10,000 boxes so they made 10,000 boxes and they did not even sell through a fifth of them this is this is actually really bad this is not this is not what somebody would consider to be a Triumph by any means when you only sell 20% of your stock when you don't even sell this is one sixth of all of their stock when when that's the best you can do you are in trouble but here's the thing if if they're doing so well if they were doing so well they this was just a few months ago this was October this was you know three four months ago that that's barely any time in in the card game space that is literally they literally went from a Hello Kitty tie in to dead in a single quarter um how do you do that well by having crypto Bros who rather than investing in the company went out and bought Lamborghinis and fancy houses so the first wheel collapse that was brought to my attention after the like forced like paid subscription to LGS stores was all of the artists bailed like all of them uh medzo had about a dozen artists about a baker's dozen of artists uh and illustrators if I recall correctly and you know they make the cards on commission uh what happened was they saw that mezu was making all sorts of money and they said hey could we have some of that money we Illustrated the cards and helped make all this possible um and then medzo said no and that's when the artists walked although this was at a time soon after metzo kind of tipped their hand and realiz and revealed that they were in fact you know they didn't have any money anymore because even though they apparently made $50 million that money was not properly reinvested back into the brand into the artists mistreating artists is a common thing and it's why unions form and it's why people go on strike this is why unions exist people so that talent that are basically the source of uh media lifeblood don't get exploited it's still happens anyway but this is why you know you had like the writer strike and the the SAG after strike which might get a part to Electric Baloo although the strikers might be striking the Union at this point um but yeah the the game was apparently making a lot of money the people were making out like Bandits the artist asked for sumon were told no so they walked um fair enough and I met most of these artists I met a lot of these artists at uh at uh the the New York ComiCon the one I filmed for Nightfall um so pay your artist man if your game is successful uh the illustrators who helped make that happen that should parlay into more work for them that's better paying it's it's really a shame that that that that didn't really happen um although the evidence that they were hemorrhaging money had to do with something that I warned about with uh battle spirit Saga like batt Spirit Saga spent most of their marketing hyping up paid tournaments and like I said paid tournaments are not how you get a game off the ground you have to make an appealing game because 90% of all players don't care about paid tournaments at all um I mean keep in mind that when with Yu-Gi-Oh from my understanding most Yu-Gi-Oh Champions are satisfied by like a bit of Little Caesar's Pizza like the the San Jose tournament I talked about the grand prize was like a jacket and a promo card to my understanding I mean paying players is nice um but you shouldn't be like boasting about how you're pouring Millions into paid tournaments like I said with battle with battle spirit Saga they were doing that rather than building a brand that everybody felt like they were welcome to join appealing just to competitive players is comp is appealing to a microscopic part of your market like I said most of the people who play Pokemon might not even seriously touch like online competitive at all most of them just spend their time playing with Pokemon and going around the world I'm one of those people I got into competitive briefly in X and Y and then never again um but what they did was they were talking about how they were going to put all this money into like paid tournaments and stuff like that and then apparently a tournament called Dark Tower happened and the winner never got paid they never got paid which technically is possible fraud because if you run like a paid competition with a stated cash prize you have to like prove that you have that money beforehand like have it an escrow or something otherwise you run a foul of possible fraud it might be one of the reasons that they're pulling the plug is they might be facing fraud charges over not paying out on this major tournament and these guys had gotten a sreo deal a sreo deal that apparently sold fairly well and they are out of money they're selling their game in Target and Barnes & Noble and they're out of money how do you do that by having a bunch of Crypt Bros mismanage your company for you that's how you do that it's why I said crypto bad I'm saying a similar thing about AI bad because what it does is it alienates your working staff it alienates your players it's like I said and it's it's an attempt to destroy the medium for profit it's it's going to be like uber the moment all of the artists and illustrators are out of a job is the moment AI will cost more than any artist ever did um but yeah that's that's a disaster like I said Dare to Compare to Flesh and Blood rather than trying to run like a constant hype train they they used hype yes they used special cards like the eye of aidia and stuff like that to help sell these booster boxes with like special rare cards and stuff but like I said they parlayed that into a sustainable game because the game itself is still really fun it was a unique concept when it came out it was a slobber knocker simulator you're not summoning minions and hiding behind them for life points you're literally just repeatedly punching your opponent in the face the game that got closest to this was ufs but even they had a very different system for how Flesh and Blood did Flesh and Blood captured this very in the- moment kind Vibe which is what made it so appealing so yeah cautionary tale um can I call this the two-year curse I think I'm going to because it was it was smoke it was held aoft by Smoke by the end of its second year it did not make it to three um the kickstarter boxes were launched in March that is considered the uh the start of it March of 2021 uh March either way it did not make it to three um yeah I think that's really all I have to say on that like I said I'm not the kind of person who like harvests drama which is why I'm putting this video out on like I'm putting this video out on like uh on my side channels because I don't really want to be dragged into that too much but yeah that's really all I have to say about that good night everybody
