Hey everyone, this is Tim Behos for today's Cookewin Firesite Chat and we have Jason Bitbender Brink, president of blockchain at College Oneos today. Extremely excited to have this session and welcome and thank you everyone for taking the time. What's up Jason?
had to find a mute button there. Not a whole heck of a lot, man. It's been a incredibly busy day and gotten a lot done, but kind of creeping up on the end of it here, so happy to be here to talk to you guys. Awesome.
Let's dive straight into it then. Let's start off with a high level intro to yourself as well as the project, Gala, for those who might not be so familiar, maybe just give a high level overview.
Let me fire off this tweet here so that everyone can come in and join and then I would be happy to do that.
And I'm working on getting the
our main account to hop in and join as well.
So they will they will probably be along here shortly. Yeah, if you're made account and join us, get them to request also and I'll get them up as a speaker and they can just mute it. That would be best. Yeah. Yeah, so they should be in here in a little bit. But anyway, we'll jump right on into the
The whole introduction thing. So my name is Jason. I've been in the blockchain space for a long fricking time now. And I'm keeping up on 10 years actually. And I am the president of blockchain at Gala Games. We focus on making games that are focused
focusing on fun first and within the Web 3 space. I use the term Web 3, but I kind of don't mean Web 3 because I think that Web 3 and Web 2 are going to collapse together into one concept of just normal games and there will be games where you own
stuff in games where you don't. But that is the beginning basics of who we are. I joined the company just over three years ago as employee number eight. We're almost at 400 now. We've got 50 games in various stages of development and we got
6 different games currently in play tests. These are all double in AAA games. A lot of them with some elements of play and earn built into them. And yeah, we're just going like crazy, man. There's a lot going on. We've been making some massive, massive changes to our ecosystem.
including the Galavv2 migration which you guys were part of. And so very happy to be here talking to you guys about all of this. Yeah, so Jason, so it sounds like you guys have a ton of games you guys are working on and you've been there for three years, right? So what are the maybe
in highlight some of the biggest accomplishments that you guys have made from your perspective as well as what kind of like what is what kind of are these all games with a common thread or are they all separate games? No, these are all separate games. It's not it's not it's not a situation where
sometimes you'll have you know one one a guess we'll call it a little universe that a bunch of different games share part of like you know a Louvium kind of has that going on where they have this one thing and then everything else kind of clusters around that these are all completely separate games that are you know totally different they range from
one we just softwashed the other day called grit which is a battle royale a western battle royale super fun very very fast paced wickedly fun horse ride shootouts which are pretty cool too we've got poker go play which is a
poker application that's coming out. We've got spider tanks, which is a PVP brawler. Champions Arena, turn-based RPG, you know, all the way to the Walking Dead Empire, which is a survival MMORPG, last expedition, survival FPS. These are all their own completely set
separate titles with completely separate IP surrounding them. So very much, you know, their own things. Yeah, so, you know, obviously last year or two years ago, the whole narrative with the blocking gaming was about play to earn. And then that came that all
and now seems like every time I talk to these web 3 gaming companies, it's more about play and earn. And there's kind of a fine balance between, you know, just a web 2 business model, complemented with an ownership or web 3 element to it.
And the narrative is not really about where three, so how are you guys thinking about that for your games? I mean, the way that I personally look at it is I think that one of the most amazing things about the blockchain space is that we have this incredible ability to create entirely new economic models and to test out
different economic theories and sort of see how they work out and innovate from those. I think that the reason that you see a lot of, well, for starters, if your game is played to earn, then it deserves to collapse. If your game, yeah, because the reason that I say
that is that if the entire purpose of your game is to make money, then that is called a job. It's not a game. And so if your game is play and earn, then that's perfectly fine. I think the reason that you're seeing a lot of companies kind of step back from this is that there's a lot of trepidation around
making sure that you get the model right. And most projects out there have one game. And if you fuck up your one game, then you really have problems. The nice thing about having 50 games that we're working on with various partners is that
that we can try out different models. We can see what works, we can refine, and then we can take that refined model and implement it somewhere else so that we can constantly get closer and closer and closer to having fully sustainable long-term balance ecosystem. And I think we're getting really close to that.
So that said, you guys have, you know, 50 or more games you guys are working on at the moment. Talk to us about or talk to me about the like from a from a traction and from
a user perspective is it all even spread out or is there one dominant game that you guys are kind of like your flag group game at the moment? Well it kind of depends on the
And so, you know, I think that's what I'm going to do.
just recently launched grit and we're watching that, you know, it's going really well. Matchmaking only takes, you know, probably five, 10 seconds every time I go in there in a solo match. I'm, you know, matched up and in a game super quickly. So we're, we have a decent number of players
in there and it's growing quite nicely. And the nice thing is we're seeing more and more people that are entering the ecosystem from the web to space, which provides a lot of interesting opportunities because you have a bunch of people who are joining who don't really know anything about
about blockchain and it becomes sort of the role of us and the community to educate and keep everyone sort of informed about how all of this works. It's thought it's quite the journey. So what do you think is the main sort of obstacle for massacred
option for Web 3 gaming, right? Is it just really the user experience, the games are currently not, you know, just quite frankly, not up to standard and not fun enough? Or what do you think is the main obstacle? And how are you guys kind of addressing that? I think that the main obstacle for blockchain gaming in general.
is honestly almost a little bit of a philosophical challenge. I think that
Web2 Gaming is primarily built by a few very large companies that control the narrative. They're the ones that have the advertising dollars to spend and they spend those advertising dollars with Web2 video game publications. Those Web2 video game publications
then because the massive web to publishing companies don't know what to do with blockchain, write a lot of anti-blockchain content. And what's really interesting to us about this is that you can have a game, for example. We have a one game in our ecosystem called Superior.
Superior is insanely fun. It's a third-person shooter where you are dropping into this world and fighting to destroy mutated superheroes. Super fun, right? Very fast pace.
high heart pumping action, good times. And we do launch that in as two separate skews, or we rather we had two betas with two separate skews. One of those skews was a non-
web3version on steam. And then the other one is a web3version on Epic. And what we found was really interesting is that if you go and you look at the comments on the steam page, you have a whole bunch of people
Okay, and again, keep in mind that this is the one-on-steam does not have any NFT or blockchain integration, right? You have all of these people making comments about how stupid and how terrible it is because it's a web3 game and NFTs are dumb and You know there isn't even any
NFTs in that version. So it just kind of goes to show like how heavily the average hardcore gamer dislikes the concept of NFTs, but primarily because that is being skewed and steered
by marketing in the space. I think that's our biggest barrier. On top of the normal blockchain adoption is very difficult. Well, it's hard. Obviously, those things are pain in the ass and those are problems that are being worked on. But I think the philosophical barrier is quite high too.
So right now is more of a PR issue than a, I guess, from your perspective, it's more about the marketing and the philosophical side of things. Not just the marketing. It's more about the general zeitgeist of the time and the gaming
space. I think that very, very soon what's going to happen is you're going to see Web2 game companies realize, you know what, this NFT thing, not such a bad idea. Reddit's got it figured out they're doing stuff with it, they're making money with it. All of these other Web3 companies are doing something.
should probably do something and then they'll start integrating NFTs into their games. They won't call them NFTs by the way and they won't call it blockchain but they will be NFTs and it will be blockchain. What you're going to get is you're going to get a scenario where suddenly overnight
All of the negative press turns around and becomes pro NFT and pro blockchain overnight. Again, they may not say NFT and they may not say blockchain, but that's what they'll be talking about. They'll use other terms. They'll call it distributed ledger, true digital ownership, things like that.
like that, but that's going to be what it is. Got it. And talk to me about the tokenomics side of things. You mentioned that you guys have so many different games. You guys have tokens for each game or is it just one token that sort of connects all these games despite them being sort of separate, separate
We have a couple different tokens that are out there. The primary token for the Gala ecosystem is unsurprisingly Gala. Gala is a token that is the utility
token for the ecosystem that powers our L1 that we're going to be launching here, you know, officially publicly before 2Tarot Blay long. And it is created via a fair launch mechanism that basically mints it to
the nodes that run to support the entire ecosystem. And so, you know, with that as a basic concept, the cool thing about it is that, and this is something that most people don't know, is that the vast majority of the Gala in existence
distance is not held by us at the company. With a lot of projects out there, there's always this massive war chest that the company holds if they're on tokens that they can use for all sorts of stuff. We don't have that. We don't have it because we burnt it.
So last week, last Monday, we burnt 20.9 billion tokens, which was basically almost our entire reserve. So yeah, everything that's out there is in the hands of the community, which is something that I think is really cool.
Awesome. And which games are you most excited for at this current stage? You've been there for several years now. What are you working on that also you've been shared with the audience? Maybe some of the games on the roadmap or other things you guys are are building.
man, there's so many things I'm excited about. I think the game that I'm most excited about and I'm, the other games are going to get so jealous if I keep talking about it is last expedition. Last expedition is a first person shooter PVP,
the game that is absolutely insane, where you drop onto a alien planet and you have to fight your way through that planet to capture a core and take it off.
an extraction game, but it is incredibly fun and incredibly difficult. So that's something that I really, really, really am excited about the full launch of. Some of the other games that I'm really enjoying, we've got some stuff that we've were in the process of
getting out there champions arena. Super super fun turn based RPG. It's coming up on on launch here pretty soon. Eternal paradox also super fun. It's kind of like a 4x turn based RPG as well. Those are both games that I really like.
And then you have games like Miranda's, which is just massive MMORPG that is built unlike any other MMORPG out there. And it's one that I'm super excited about. But again, there's dozens and dozens of games. It is impossible to keep track of all of them.
So circling back to my previous comments about the balance between web 2 and web 3 gaming. In terms of the business model side of things, how do you guys generally make revenue? Is it through these digital asset or NFT?
So the digital assets NFT sales are part of it. The main thing is that we receive a portion of the daily emission. So when new tokens are emitted into the ecosystem, we receive
a chunk of that. And that is a chunk that we, you know, if we need to, we can live on. The long-term goal for us is to build an ecosystem that's fully sustainable. So, you know, in fact, even when we
most purchases are made. Like if you go and you buy an NFT with Gala, most of that Gala's sometimes all of it is actually burnt in that transaction removed from supply. And you know, for us, we
want to build an ecosystem that has long-term sustainability and that can exist long into the future. So it has to have that sort of cyclical inflow and outflow of tokens as it moves forward. So that's basically our business model.
Got it. And I think we have time for maybe a few audience questions. So if you have any questions, just request speaking on did you guys on in the meantime. Blue chip, who are you? Talk too much. Nice, Blue chip. Nice. I'm going to give you a
heart man thanks. Yeah. So in the meantime, maybe you can sort of reiterate or emphasize how you guys are thinking about blockchain gaming and how your strategy is
is different to other blockchain projects because obviously the space is relatively saturated within what three. - So for us, the main thing that I focus on is, and this is,
is not as much of a differentiating factor as it was a year ago, is we make actual games. When we first got into this space, you had tons and tons and tons of people who were making what were essentially financial simulations with stickers on.
So that they, you know, you printed a little bit of money. There was a little bit of chance elements, but it wasn't really a game. And it wasn't really a game play. And so that's the main thing that we have that we started with. You know, going on from there,
We focus primarily on building out community and then bringing web to developers into the web 3 space. This is something that is super important because there's a lot of web to developers out there who make really really really amazing games. But they don't actually.
actually have any sort of web-3 knowledge. And so, you know, for us, focusing on these concepts is something that I think is really, really solid.
because we do have an amazing sort of stable of people working in the company that all come from major publishers. And that gives them the ability to connect with all of these people they've worked with in the past and move forward with them.
Awesome. Okay, so I think we have, oh actually, we have our first speaker on who's already not muted. Awesomeness. Go ahead.
My question is, I would like to know what security measures do you have in place to ensure the total safety of a galaseco system? We have quite a few. I mean, everything from a
We have a very robust bug bounty program that we just launched to, you know, everything that we do is, you know, multi-level audited, everything is locked behind multi-sig, you know, so everything from no-says safes to working with
Unchain and Certic and crap. There's one other auditor that we work with You know, we do things we do things the right way and we take the time and this sometimes pisses people off because you know doing things the right way takes longer than doing things
in a shitty, fast way. But yeah, we take the time to do it right and you know, those are some of the main components of that. In fact, that bug bounty program just launched two days ago, I believe. So you can go to blog.galadagames and check that out. And that's in partnership with Immunify.
Awesome. Okay, so now we have kudos. Go ahead.
Okay, so probably let's let's uh mic issue there. Yeah, probably a mic issue. Let me try one more. One second.
Sorry, this connection is okay awesome AC go ahead Okay, can you hear me? Yep, yep, we can hear you man. Good for it. Okay, so a quick question I've got a personal one and then one about games coming up before like the bull run hits so I was holding my
All of my gala allocation on Kucoin before the snapshot and it's still in v1 I have not received my v2. What do I need to do? When you say still in v1, what do you mean by that? Like it shows that it's there, but it cannot be moved
it cannot be withdrawn, it cannot be exchange, it's just locked, so I'm assuming that's the B1 token. So the way that this typically works with exchanges and the way that it is worked with CooCoin and with everybody else, and I can take this offline with the CooCoin team and see if there's something
stock to be honest, I'm not the one who handles everything with that, so there may be something I'm unaware of. But typically with exchanges, what happens is, we did this with 60 exchanges or something like that, we gave them, we connected with them in advance,
Let them know we were doing this and then collected their wallet addresses. We reached out to Kucoin, Kucoin gave us a series of different addresses that are there their wallets. Then in the first transactions that we did with V2, we minted the V2
to tokens to them. Now, this is one of those interesting things about centralized exchanges. When you're working on a centralized exchange, you send tokens to that exchange and they all get pooled in a few different wallets. And then when you're trading on that exchange and when you have a balance that's being tracked on
that exchange. Typically speaking, that's done. It's a database-backed thing that's happening on Mongo so you can get the high velocity trades. So your balance, let's say you had 100 V1, they would simply go in and change out the contract and now you have 100 V2 and the V1
just doesn't exist anymore. Okay. Whether they have, you know, in terms of like turning on withdrawals and trading and things like that, that's a them thing, but I can definitely have my team reach out to them and see if there's anything that we can help with there. Okay, I just wanted to make sure I just didn't get missed somehow. No, no, no.
every if any wallet that had V1 in it received the updated tokens. And so because you had your tokens on Kucoin, their wallet received those upgraded tokens. Okay. And then the last, I guess the little second part of that would be,
Do y'all have a goal in mind for how many games that you're trying to release before essentially the bull run in 2024 beginning of 2025 hits and say, "I players on network across the network." So I'm going to answer this question.
in two ways. The first is, I don't honestly think that it's going to be that long until we get a bull run. So I don't think it's going to be 2024. I think we're going to have a bull run within the next few months. You're going to start seeing it kick off. And this is just from, you know, and again, hashtag not investment advice hashtag. I could be completely
freaking wrong. Who knows, right? This is crypto. You can never know the future. That said, I'm seeing a lot of the same stuff happening that preceded the last bull run currently happening in the market right now. You know, meme coins. Like last
time it was a dog coins, dog coins were the thing. Now it's meme coins. And you know, typically you get like a little blip and bubble of that that happens before you know, few, few weeks go by and then things start to really pick up again. It is a slightly different situation because
because the economy is pretty significantly shittier than it used to be. So we'll kind of see where that goes. But in terms to answer your question directly, our focus is on quality, not just quantity. So we would love to see
I'd love to see another 5-10 heavy hitting titles out there for people to play. But in terms, and many, many, many players obviously. But I don't see it as being a "Oh, well, if we get 10 games out instead of 5 games, that
that's going to make a difference because gaming is and has always has been a hit driven industry. So you can have an amazing game and if nobody wants to play it then it doesn't work. You can also have a meh game that everyone wants to play and it becomes an absolute smash hit. So it's just a matter
of having the right game out there in the right space at the right time and have people jump into it because they enjoy it. I think games like grit and last expedition and poker go and all of these things all have potentials for that.
Okay, Jason, that unfortunately wraps it up. We don't have time left. Do you have any final thoughts or anything else you'd like to share before we end the spaces? Well, I would like everybody to go ahead and follow me and add GoGalagames, which you guys can see there.
I just want to give some shout outs to RNG crypto and some of the cool people who have been hanging out in here. I scroll through the list of people, lots of community members, and join our discord at gallagames.chat.com and hang out. We look forward to catching up with you guys.
Awesome. Thank you so much again Jason for joining. I appreciate everyone else for taking the time as well to listen and see you guys in the next faces. Thank you guys so much. Peace out.