I hope you're having a fantastic day. And yeah today we're discussing with
with Fotume. It's super exciting to be honest, because yeah, they are now on Arbitrum and
yeah, we have OGB with us. He's one of the co-founders of Fotume and he's going to share
more about what is Fotume and why he's super exciting for all the football fans like me,
for example. I actually was watching a series yesterday about football, so it was super
exciting to see. But yeah, hey, how are you? Super exciting to have you. Maybe we can start
with some introductions, like my name is Sanak, I'm the manager at the Arbitrum Foundation.
And yeah, what about you? Can you share more about yourself, your role and maybe some fun
fact about you? Awesome, thank you very much Anna. Yes, James
is trying to sort out his technical issues at the moment, but I'm George, I can kick
off with the introductions. I'm one of the co-founders of Fotume and I work across product,
marketing and we've been building Fotume for about three years. It started as a hackathon project,
turned into a sort of accelerator project and then got funding and transformed into a proper
game studio. In terms of a fun fact about myself, I will go boring and keep it very football. I am
a Lincoln City fan and have been all my life and they're in league one of the English leagues,
so you might not have heard of them, but they're on the earth at the moment, which is good.
Nice, that was a great fun fact. Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, for sure it's always
very cool to get to know more about the people who is building the Arbitrum ecosystem and the
Arbitrum ecosystem too. So yeah, maybe we can start explaining what is Fotume and why is it super
exciting? Yeah, definitely. So, Fotume at a simple level is a multiplayer football management game.
So if people in the audience have played games like Football Manager or FIFA Manager mode or even
Top Eleven in the past, it's very similar to those in terms of sort of game mechanics, I would say.
But the way we're trying to improve this game genre is more on a sort of meta level in the
sense of making it a much more multiplayer, social and rewarding gaming experience. Because a lot of
these games that have been built in the past, which are fantastic games, but they're very single
player. So you're playing and managing a football team and doing all the things associated with
doing that, such as choosing tactics, choosing lineups, doing player transfers, upgrading
facilities, signing young players and obviously competing in matches against other people.
But in most games in football management, this is against the computer or against AI. And within
Fotume, you're actually playing every single game against a real person. So you're playing against
another human who's set up their team at some point that day, and then you have a match which
lasts around half an hour where the kind of game plays out. You can make substitutions, do
tactical changes during that game and obviously try and do everything you can to get the win.
And then throughout a season, which lasts around one month, you then finish in a certain position
in your league table against the other teams. And depending on where you finish, you can get
promoted, you can get relegated and you can also win real money prizes as well.
Well, those are many things that you can do there in Fotume. And I'd like to know,
how did Fotume start or where did the idea come from?
Yes, I wish James and Jordan were not having the technical problems because they were the
two original co-founders, but I can give a retelling of the story. But yeah, basically,
James and Jordan actually met at a hackathon, which is being run by a company called Encode
Club. And they started building out Jordan's dream game, which is that multiplayer football
management game. And so James is working on the kind of web free side of it doing the smart
contracts. And Jordan was building this kind of very first iteration of Fotume, which is
a fairly simplistic, but still quite entertaining football simulation. So you would have a lineup
of players, they would play a game and that would produce events in the game, like shots and goals,
and an end result. So it was very core of what this game is in terms of building out a simple
version of the game engine. But that was quite exciting. I was actually working at the company
running the hackathon, and then sort of really liked the game, as did the founder of the hackathon
company. So sort of took Fotume into an accelerator that they also run, and then early stage invested
into the company at the free seed. And then over that time, I sort of became more and more involved
in the company and advising them and trying to help out more on the sort of business side. And
eventually got to the point I was spending more time on Fotume than I was in my actual job and
decided to make the move full time. And James and Jordan sort of accepted me as a co-founder and
went from there, really. Wow, that's super inspiring. And for sure, you are backed
by very big names in the ecosystem, like ENCODE's club accelerator. It's super well known,
and all these other players. I'd like to know, how did you meet James Jordan?
Yeah, it was just through that. So James and Jordan met in a hackathon. I think James is here
now, actually. James, do you hear him? Oh, yeah. Yeah, everything's good. I love how you see this is
great. That's all I can use based on my PC. This is brilliant. You're from your PC? Wow.
Yes. It's new tech. Wow. X is evolving.
Now, yeah, James, exciting to have you here. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, I'm glad to hear
that you could make it into your PC. Maybe you can share a brief intro about yourself.
We already heard about what is Fotium, a little bit about the story. But yeah,
we'd love to hear from you and also maybe your part of the story of how Fotium started.
Yeah, sure thing. So Fotium starts with, I met Jordan, who may have gone a bit
at a hackathon in summer 2020. And it was Jordan's vision for the game. So I joined this hackathon,
and I didn't have any team that I was joining with. And I got connected with Jordan by the
organizer of the hackathon. And that organizer of the hackathon was incidentally how I also
ended up meeting George. And I was often introduced to a few different teams, people
building a few different things. And like a football manager with some on-chain components
was like the most compelling team to join. And then Jordan and I, we worked on this long form
hackathon is about two months long. And I enjoyed, I thought that Jordan's vision was so clear.
And I enjoyed personally working with Jordan so much that I just carried on doing it effectively
as a hobby from our summer 2020 through till summer 2021, from which point it started to take
off as a startup. And then my background is, I self-taught software engineer, I didn't necessarily
get extremely good. I wasn't like an Epic software engineer, but I studied economics management at
university. And I was kind of passionate about the intersection of economics and computer science,
which is what I see because I crypto to represent.
Nice. That's very inspiring. To be honest, to know that Fujima started in a hackathon.
It's super inspirational for the people, I guess, or at least that's how I was feeling back in the
days when I was in two hackathons. Yeah, it was super inspiring to see my friends winning or I was
a hackathon winner too. So yeah, very cool. Very good to see now Fatim is here. Thanks for hackathon
for sure. All the work that you've done and all the people that have helped you and yeah,
very good to see. And yeah, well, I'm wondering more about the game, like how does the game work
and what the community can do there? Maybe we can start with how someone can get started on
Fatim. Let's say we have new people here listening for the first time, Fatim, and they just go to
your X account and then what will be the following steps? Yeah, happy to talk through that. So if
people don't currently own Fatim clubs, we actually do have a playtest coming up very soon that they
can participate in without owning a club. So if you go to Fatim's Twitter and scroll down a bit,
you'll see a tweet about playtest Brazil where they can fill in a simple form. All they need is
a wallet that works on arbitrary testnet and then yeah, in the next few weeks they'll be able to
test Fatim and see what it's like. And if they would like to get properly involved and
kind of purchase a Fatim club, they can do that on OpenSea. We've got links on our Twitter and
Discord there. And by buying that club, you're becoming the owner of a football club, which is
not based on a real world football club. It's completely new IP and you're within your rights
to develop that club and that brand as you see fit. And a lot of Fatim club owners already have
made Twitter accounts and proper personalities around their clubs. I know I can see Newsby John
listening. He's got a whole sort of fictional universe around his club Newsby Birch and people
have really sort of taken to this idea of actually running and owning your own football club. And
then yeah, within the game, that club will get a squad of players at the start of the game,
which have a range of different qualities, positions, different leadership ratings,
all these different things that you have in football management games that you can obviously
balance that squad against. You can then trade players with people, you can buy and sell them.
You also have a youth academy that new young players come into the club and you have the
chance to kind of bring them into your first team and then obviously train them up throughout
their career and play them in matches. And yeah, hopefully use them to get promotions,
to get some big victories against your rivals and win some prize money. So yeah,
there's a lot of different things to do in Fatim and this is sort of what we have for
the start and in future we obviously plan to keep building out the game and adding more features
and more ways to kind of manage your club and get deeper into the world of Fatim. So yeah,
we'll likely be launching soon and then following that there'll be more and more features and more
and more developments throughout the infinite future, which is very exciting. We've got a lot
of cool ideas and a lot of cool ideas suggested by our community from previous play tests that
we're super keen to implement post-launch. Nice, yeah, that's super exciting and so sounds
super fun. And yeah, it's very cool to hear too that youth take as well, like recommendations
or ideas from the community to bring into Fatim and make it happen. So yeah, it's very
cool to see Ann and we have Churro as well that is going to join to the conversation.
He's a big fan of football too, I guess, so he wants to jump in. Fantastic.
Hi Churro, excited to have you here too. We were discussing here about Fatim, we already
heard about their story that it started in a hackathon and now it's this amazing
multiplayer football management game. And yeah, well, I'd like to know more
about why did you choose Arbitrum 1 to launch Fatim on?
Sure, I've been happy to speak to that. So yeah, it's always something since we did our initial
mint of the first 3,000-footing clubs, we did it on our Ethereum mainnet just because
that was the kind of most obvious place for us to do it at the time. And yeah, it's always been,
I think since then, our plan to deploy on a layer two chain. We hadn't decided at that point where
we would deploy, we decided to make the decision a bit closer towards launch. And then yeah, over
the last, I'd say six months to a year, we've been in discussions with different teams across the
space to sort of understand how they're supporting projects, what they can offer and what
the benefits of their chain and their community are. And yeah, personally, I've been quite involved
in the Arbitrum community before we made that decision and kind of really liked the work,
the things that Treasure were doing and the way that the community was growing and just the general
vibe around Arbitrum felt like it was a bit different to some of the other alternatives.
And then I think what really tipped the boat for us was the fantastic support from the Arbitrum
team across everything around connections to supporting on the actual deployments and
migrations and making really helpful introductions across the board. So particularly David from the
off-chain labs team, super supportive. And I think that was something that we felt was really
valuable being a small team in the space, like it's helpful to have people who are actively
batting from your corner. So it was really cool to see that. And yeah, it was a big part in why
we made the decision to move to Arbitrum 1 and obviously things like the speed and the lower
fees definitely helped, but that's obviously something that a lot of chains offer. But
yeah, it was really cool. And now I think a lot of the things like the Arbitrum Foundation grants,
which we recently received and also things like the Arbitrum Dow and the kind of interest recently
and potentially a big gaming proposal is also reasons why. Yeah, it feels like we made the right choice.
Yeah, that's really awesome to hear. And yeah, I mean, super excited to be here. I was supposed
to come here early, but I was having some Twitter issues, but I'm back now. But yeah, I love all
the things you said about Arbitrum 1. And I wanted to follow up a question in terms of like,
on-chain gaming, like in terms of that aspect. So I'm curious, like, what are some
on-chain features that users on Arbitrum will be able to engage in? Is it
mainly, is there certain aspects that are on-chain and off-chain?
It's just curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Yeah, maybe Jordan, is your... Hello, am I live? Yes, we're there.
Oh, yeah. Fantastic. Sorry, guys, I had some, we'll start some Twitter issues. It seems I have to
update in the app. It's all working. Apologies about that. Yeah, sorry, just to introduce myself.
I'm Jordan. I'm for the CTO and co-founder. Yeah, just to answer that question around
what's on-chain and what's off-chain. So we have the Fotium clubs, NFTs that are on-chain,
the Fotium players which are on-chain. And then the Academy Minting, all occurs on-chain,
and the prize distribution. And then most of the rest of the game, which is the
match simulation engine, we have that off-chain. And the users interact with that by making
tactical changes and also the training feature which exists outside of the match simulation
engine. Those are all signed and submit. But the core sort of Academy mechanics club players
tries distribution over on-chain. Yeah, that's really cool to see. And in terms of
gameplay-wise, will you be able to play with other opponents on-chain? Or is that something
currently in development? What are your thoughts on that in terms of multiplayer?
Oh, yes, I can take that. And its core, Fotium, is a multiplayer game. With Fotium, we're trying
to build this parallel to real-world football in a sense. And as part of real-world football,
you're kind of playing against real people. Football is a really competitive world and we
want to replicate some of that competition. So we're playing as other people, playing for prize
money. So the way that the game is structured is that you play a game and it's another
football club owner, another football club manager every single day at least once
during the season. And then there might be other kind of tournaments operating concurrently
and then they'll also be against real people. Yeah, that's so cool. I know it's the rare.
I know they also have a similar game where you put in cards right on a weekly basis and you face an
opponent. But I'm curious, what makes you guys unique to other football platforms that are
structured like this? I think with respect to Sareh specifically, I kind of think about Sareh.
It's like a fan engagement tool on top of the real world of football. Whereas what we're trying
to build is this immersive simulation layer. So we simulate the football matches, as Jordan alluded
to, we simulate football matches. And in other football management games like Football Manager
or Top Eleven, that's kind of like a sophisticated simulation takes place where the decisions that I
make as the manager, be they tactical, be they squad, be they how aggressive or defensive my
team's going to play, those directly affect the match outcome. So on something like Sareh,
obviously I can't actually affect the match outcome myself, I'm just choosing players.
Whereas in Fotium, more than just using players, I can directly affect the outcome of the match.
Right. Yeah, I think another really cool part about this is that
it feels kind of real because like in the competition, right, you can face like promotion
or relegation and can also earn prizes as well. So I think that's really cool to see how you guys
have the promotion, the relegation aspect. I think that's a good, that's a great thing to pick up on.
Because in any other type of game, if you don't, if you're not using Web 3, you can't take advantage
of the fact that promotion and relegation are like so important because they have real stakes.
If I go up, if I go up to the high division or I go down, that impacts for the for the value of
my club. And I ultimately, I want guys to drive value to my club. So I want to compete very,
I want to compete hard for my club. Oh, yeah, for sure. No hundred percent.
And yeah, I feel like when you have that type of, you know, relegation and promotion,
I feel like it just increases the competition overall, because as a club, right, like you
mentioned, you want to make sure that you're playing every week in and out. You want to make
sure your team is performing at the top level so that they can avoid relegation and, you know,
going down to different divisions. So I feel like that's like a really cool, unique feature that you
guys have. Yeah, and I think a lot of it ties into we're trying to make for team like pretty
much the most realistic football management game that has ever existed, because you have ones like
say football manager that is super realistic in terms of the engine and the tactics and the depth
there that kind of rivals the real world. But because it's single player and you're playing
against computers, etc., that you're not really playing against sophisticated actors, whereas in
the real world of football, you have entire companies that are built around these football
teams and they're all obviously acting in the interests of that team. So that's what we wanted
to bring to footy and with this kind of web preside in the benefits it brings across competition and
making the game more rewarding. But it just overall makes it a much more realistic football
experience because everyone is incentivised to do the best thing in the interest of their club.
And that leads to some incredible situations with player transfers and when to put money into the
team and when to kind of try and just secure your place in the current division. So it creates a lot
of different sort of user profiles that can play the game and so many different storylines. So it
sort of brings a sandbox element to the game itself without that being explicitly put into the game
by the developers. Yeah, for sure. Oh, and also, yeah, I also just like looked at the
I'm on the website right now and I just go down and I saw Chris Malling as like an investor. That's
pretty cool. I'll let James speak on that one. Yeah, sure. He's really awesome. I think he's got
his own fund actually called Fork Adventures. I think he's historically invested in mostly
social impact things like vegan lever and vegan soft shoots. I think we were his first consumer
application, consumer product he invested in. And when I spoke with him, I think he was
personally uniquely passionate about, well, uniquely, I think we're all fans of Football Manager.
He was specifically very passionate about Football Manager and he kind of was reminiscing about when
he played that when he was younger. I think he kind of resonated with the vision that we put across.
There's an insane amount of football players that absolutely rinse Football Manager as well,
especially like people that play in the Champions League. I know Ilky Gundigan and
Antoine Griezmann always tweets about it and talk about playing it. But like throughout the
entire footballing pyramid, there's a lot of people that are super interested in it. So it's
definitely something we want to try and kind of bring to the game is bringing those professional
footballers who are actually interested in playing games like this. Because imagine if you're
competing against Chris Smalling in your next game, it's going to enhance that gaming experience
100x for you. Or if it's someone like Antoine Griezmann and you're trying to prepare a team
or live managing it and you see him make a substitution, you're on the other end of the
screen to a world famous football player, which is an incredible experience.
Yeah, I feel like it'd be pretty funny if you guys like put a bounty on them. Like for example,
if you like if you play it against them, and if you won, you unlock some sort of card or
get some sort of award. That'd be pretty funny to see. But yeah, no, I think this like idea
is like really cool. And I'm wondering like in terms of like the go to market,
are you guys heavily focused on Web3 users on Arbitrum? Or is there a go to market plan to
expand outside of Web3 users like traditional players that or people that play like football
managing games? I think at the beginning, I think most of our users are going to be
Web3 natives. I think that's how Fleckout type of product, like that's how Discovery works,
it's mostly within Web3. And it's cool, like the type of game that we're offering
and clearly is going to be super compelling to a lot of folks in football. So in the long term,
like yeah, we'd love to we would love to onboard more Web2 users. I think in the short medium term,
how is like the early community that we've formed, we want to kind of help kind of test and iterate
the game with kind of with our feedback. And if the Web3 community is so strong, they're the
best position to help us give that get that great feedback. Yeah, and as James said, I think it's
like the initial Web3 more native community is definitely easier to obtain, let's say with the
current onboarding, but definitely post launch, we'll be looking towards kind of improving user
onboarding around footy and making it a lot easier for people to get to get on board with
the kind of Web3 side of it as well as getting their their own footing club, and then starting
to play the game. And at that point, we can definitely open the doors to the sort of masses.
And I think that's what a lot of our absolutely investors saw with footy is that it's obviously
in the Web3 space, but is very uniquely positioned to very quickly expand into the much broader
market, given the actual product itself and the mechanics of the product are quite similar to
what already exists in the market. And it's just this kind of metagame outside of the game mechanics
that has been improved upon. Yeah, no, for sure. That makes sense. And I definitely can see you guys
at GDC, the Gaming Developers Conference, like having your own booth, or even, you know, being
a part of our virtual booth, where people would just come in and just play like your game. Like,
I think that'd be pretty sick, like in the future. Yeah, definitely. That would be awesome to see
having people do kind of head to heads and real time substitutions and such.
Yeah, yeah. And I guess in terms of the future, like two to five years from now,
where do you guys see yourselves?
Yeah, I can speak a bit to that. I think, obviously, within football, there's such a huge
market for us to go across. There's like, tens of millions of gamers in football management
gaming each year, and even more in games like FIFA that are obviously interested in similar
game modes like this. And also the product itself, like there's so many features we have on our
backlog and ideas from the community that we want to implement at some point. And it's very
difficult sometimes to prioritize those features for the right now. But there's definitely a huge
amount of kind of ways the product can develop and become even more entertaining and engaging
for the users. But sort of once we get to the point where, I mean, footings, like we've
developed all those features that we think are great, and you're onto this old backlog of things
you're maybe not so excited about, because the game's got most of the kind of cool ideas people
have had in it. There's definitely a couple of directions we could take, one of which is kind of
going in a different direction, but within the football space, so looking at different game modes,
maybe something built on top of Fotium, like a fantasy Fotium. So you pick players from the top
leagues that score your points based on how they perform in that game, a lot of world building
around it as well that we could do. And then the other way is also taking that model of kind of a
competitive, socially rewarding sports management game in football and applying it to another
sport. So you could see it in an NFL style of Fotium or a cricket style of Fotium, or
one I'm quite excited to do would be an F1 style Fotium based game where you have
cars and research engineers that you can improve, and then also drivers, and then choose the race
strategy for that race. So there's a lot of cool ways that you could take this, because fundamentally
all these games are just strategy games. And once you have a good model for that, it feels like it
wouldn't be as difficult as building out the initial game to just port that game to another
sport. But obviously there's a lot of considerations around that that I'm probably glossing over.
Yeah, I feel it with Fotium, there's definitely a place for trying out new things and experimenting,
like seeing what went well with other football managing games, right and applying it to Fotium.
So I think that'd be like really cool to see. And I think the cool part about this is that
you guys can build a community that could grow. And at the same time, both the team and community
can essentially help each other out in terms of figuring out what works best for onboarding new
users, as well as what are some improvements that can be done to make the game more better and
funner, right. So I feel like Fotium is like the best place to do that, because you guys,
you know, have been working hard on this. And yeah, it's gonna be really exciting to see
Likewise, yeah, really excited. Looking forward to it.
Yeah, kind of go back over Georgia's point, it's not like, it's like,
kind of expand vertically within football, you can expand horizontally across sports,
I guess vertically includes like maybe introducing more gameplay mechanics. And then socially,
it's interesting. I know maybe, George, maybe we've touched on this already briefly, but we've had,
oh yeah, so we've had some idea with those like News 3 Birch creating kind of the
content around the Twitter club, well around the Fotium Football Club. I'd love to see
the ways that we can empower the Fotium community to build more and deeper identities around their
football clubs. Like, how much more kind of lore and history can we introduce into the game,
which almost gives more weight to the competition, which is going to happen.
Yeah, I'm extremely excited for that. And yeah, I wonder too, like, if people have
any questions or want to learn more about what you guys are currently working on,
where can they go to ask those questions?
Yeah, so the best place is probably our Discord, which can be found on our Twitter profile,
Link 3. And yeah, I would say join the Discord, follow us on Twitter, all the announcements come
through both of those, as well as we have a newsletter, which we send out every week or two,
which talks about what we've been working on development wise, talks about any upcoming
playtests, such as Paytest Brazil in a couple of weeks, that people can sign up for. And also,
when we go to launch, there'll obviously be a lot of messages around that through all of those
channels. So yeah, I'd say, follow us on Twitter, join the Discord and sign up for the newsletter.
Oh, nice. The playtest is in Brazil, you said?
That's the one it's called, we named the playtests over across World Cup hosts, and we're currently
on Playtest Brazil. So that is the theme for this playtest. We've got some fun graphics,
cooked up with a Brazilian theme, the last one was France, there was a lot of baguettes flying
around. So it's quite fun to give them a little, a little theme for each playtest. This playtest
will actually be focused on testing some of the new features we've been developing over the last
couple of months that will sort of complete the game that we want to go live with.
That's cool. Yeah, one Mexico. Because I know they're hosting the World Cup in
2026, right? Yes. The US and Canada as well, which should be a very fun tournament. Excited for that.
Yeah, that'd be pretty funny. Yeah, I love what you guys are building here. I'm super excited for,
you know, the future of Fudium. So yeah, appreciate you guys for joining us today,
and thank you Ana too. So yeah, wish you guys the best.
Thanks a lot. Cheers, Ana. Cheers to you. Thanks for having us.
Thank you very much. Let's have some.