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Let's talk Gaming #4
Recorded: Nov. 8, 2023 Duration: 1:07:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
There we go. Perfect. All right. Thanks for the early folks that are already tuning in. Give us a minute to invite all the speakers up to the stage. And as soon as that's done, we'll get started.
All right. There we go.
I think we're only missing Josh. Is Josh joining today, Kevin? Ah, there he already is as a listener.
Yeah, we're all in here.
I'll invite him up to the stage as well.
All right. Perfect. That went smooth within a minute. I love it.
All right. Well, I think that being said, we have Coop here as the final speaker joining us tonight.
All right. Always appreciate Coop tuning in as well.
Yeah. I think having said that, hello, everyone.
Welcome to the fourth episode of Let's Talk Gaming brought to you by Mirror Circles Beam and Beam Gamers.
Yeah. I mean, at Let's Talk Gaming, we talk, you guessed it, gaming.
We do those biweekly.
I'm super excited tonight to be accompanied by the folks from Arcade2A to Earn.
Nico first.
We have Anna here joining us from the Mirror Circles side together with myself.
And we have Coop here from Avalanche.
Yeah, we're going to talk a lot about what's hot in Web3 Gaming right now.
I think there's been a lot of news this week that is super exciting to talk about.
We're going to talk a little bit about the role of play to earn in the current cycle, if you will, of Web3 Gaming.
We're going to talk innovation, technical challenges, and player community.
So, yeah, I think that sounds like a mouthful of topics.
It's going to be a packed space.
We'll see how far we get.
But I think that being said, you know, let's just dive right into it.
Anna, how are you doing tonight?
Thank you for joining me as a co-host.
Hey, Marco.
I am so excited to be here.
It's been a hot second since I've been on Spaces.
And, you know, everyone here I'm so lucky to have, you know, have contact with in the past.
Like, and having Neckoverse now as part of Beam is really, really exciting.
And, you know, and JP.
I am super excited about today.
And I see so many beautiful, familiar faces like Graslow in the audience.
And, you know, guys, just a quick reminder.
Make sure that if you have questions, you put them in the bubble and you, you know, retweet the room out so we can get people in here.
We have great minds, much greater than mine in the gaming world.
And I am super excited to get started.
So, yeah, just, you know, just quickly, I, you know, it's, we're in November and, like, starting to get to be the holiday season.
And it's all about gratefulness.
And I just really want to shout out how grateful I am for everyone the Web3 gaming space has given me as a blessing to be surrounded by.
Because I consistently meet people that are amazing and meet people that teach me things and are patient with my non-knowledge of gaming.
And, honestly, my kids love trying out the games.
So, very, very blessed and very lucky.
Happy to be here today.
Love it.
Yeah, thank you for tuning on.
I think that said, I'm going to just go in a random order about introducing the other guests that we have today.
Coop, I'm going to start with you.
I don't think you need too long of an intro anymore.
But can you briefly introduce yourself to the audience today?
Hey, guys.
Yeah, I help run gaming marketing for Ava Labs and the Avalanche Network.
So, yeah, I talk to the Merit Circle guys all the time.
So, they have some of the best games and try to figure out, you know, how we take this to normal people.
Well said.
Short and sweet.
Awesome.
Yeah, I think that with you, Josh Caffin, I'm going to let you introduce yourselves within like one or two minutes.
Please explain what are you building at Arcades to Earn for the ones that I might not be familiar with yet.
I'm going to start with you, Josh.
Hey, guys.
Super glad to be here.
It's funny.
Coop mentions that he talks to the Merit Circle guys a lot, but he doesn't say anything about our flourishing relationship that we have.
But good to see you again, Coop.
So, yeah, my name is Josh.
I go by JP.
I am the CEO and one of the founders of Arcade.
We are a GameFi platform.
You can think of us a little bit like, Kevin likes to say, it's the game of games, right?
We're kind of like, so essentially what we identified early on is that there's kind of two types of gamers.
There's the gamer that really likes to play the economy.
Think of like your stock traders.
People like they look at that as a game, right?
And then you have your gamer that's like the more traditional sense of someone that is you want to sit down and like, you know, pick up the controller and play through the game.
And people get their entertainment out of gaming in different ways.
And Web3 presents us with the opportunity to build a platform like Arcade where users can kind of play that macro game, we call it, you know, the economy of these different opportunities without having to own the NFT from every game or spend hours learning how to master every single title.
People are able to kind of get diversified exposure to the broader gaming industry from one platform.
So that's a little bit about what we're building.
I mean, I want to leave room for Kevin to also say his piece.
You know, everyone on our team kind of has a different way of explaining it uniquely.
So I'll let him touch on it a little bit as well.
But thanks for having me, guys.
Sounds cute.
And welcome.
The game of games.
Go ahead, Kevin.
How are you going to do that intro?
I mean, I'm not.
I'm just going to expand on it a little bit.
But yeah, name's Kevin Ocheson.
You know, come from a very diversified financial background.
And, you know, linked up with these arcade folks a couple of years ago to build.
Yeah.
What is the game of games?
I mean, it's, you know, think about it like a giant Monopoly board.
And, you know, instead of going to, you know, playing, you know, one game that has these different spaces, you know, each space is these different games in our ecosystem.
So, you know, working with the top Web3 games out there and also even, you know, some ways that we can bring in Web2 games onto the platform as well and add almost a Web3 component to them is going to be really cool.
And what I focus on day to day, so I'm part of the founding team, you know, helped with product and strategy.
And what we kind of figured out about halfway through last year is there's some really cool ways for game devs and guilds and stuff to work with our platform.
And so we developed a consulting subsidiary called ACS.
And so what I spend a lot of my time doing is working with other games and ecosystems and infrastructure partners to, you know, help kind of see the bigger picture in Web3 gaming that we're going to talk about here in a little bit.
So, yeah, just a lot of fun over at Arcade and ACS.
We're working with a lot of cool projects and communities like Merit Circle and such.
So, yeah, just really thankful for having us on today.
You're welcome, Coffin, and I appreciate the introduction.
Awesome.
So, yeah, Leo, let go first.
You're up next.
Please introduce yourself and let us know what you're building.
You've got quite an exciting time ahead.
We're going to talk a little bit about that soon.
But, yeah, let's get started at the basics.
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for inviting me here to be with a very cool people in the space.
I would love to talk with anybody that is passionate about gaming and also have their own, you know, unique views about Web3 gaming.
We always love to talk about that.
So, yeah, let me introduce a little bit about myself.
I'm Leo, the founder of NECOVERSE.
And in NECOVERSE, we are building the game.
We are actually running the game City of Grid right now, which just launched a few days ago.
And I'm very happy to be able to partnership with Merit Circle and Beam to be able to expand our game in the future to the Beam networks.
So, probably a quick introduction about City of Grid, because I see a lot of new faces here.
So, City of Grid is a roguelike deck builder game with a very fun mechanics.
At the first glance, the game looks like a slot machine, but it's actually a roguelike deck builder game where you gather resources and build up your deck to be able to earn money from that and fight off the evil mayor, which is the villain inside the games.
So, it's a very fun and quirky game, and we add a little bit of Web3 tokenomics to it to make it more sustainable.
And perhaps we can talk about it later today, but very excited to be here.
Thank you, everyone.
Awesome.
Appreciate the sweet and short introduction as well.
And we're definitely going to dive more into NECOVERSE.
So, plenty to talk about today, once again.
Yeah, I think, yeah.
So, today, what I mentioned was one of the things I would love to start with is the insane amount of news that we saw across the industry throughout this past week, I would say.
Yeah, it's been a hell of a week.
And I would love to just, if you're not that involved in the news or haven't seen all of it yet, I would love to summarize some of it for you.
And there's a couple of things in here that I actually would like to talk about a little bit more.
But, yeah, let's just get started at the beginning.
We have Trial Extreme, one of the games building on Beam.
Their playtest went live.
If you love mobile gaming, if you love racing, then I would say that game is definitely for you.
And if you, besides Trial Extreme, want to play other games, definitely join our Discord server because that's where, as a Beam Gamers, I would say gaming really lives.
And, yeah, to follow that up, we have Coons of Bellatruin.
Coon Wars announced that Electric just got an epic upgrade with 13 new cards.
And I actually had them on the Twitter spaces last week.
They're talking about all the updates that they're shipping on a weekly basis with new cards, new visuals.
And, you know, I actually love their community.
It's super active.
So that was amazing to see.
We have Rumble Arcade, one of the other games building on Beam as well, that released two new characters in their game.
I don't believe they're released yet, but they're about to.
They have teased them.
So that's super exciting.
We have the EVE Lizards and Illuvium Battle Beyond platform that's now live.
I've recently had Andrew and Amosita as a guest on the Twitter space as well.
Actually, the last episode, Let's Talk Gaming 3.
So if you missed that, I'll make sure to pin it in a bit and let you listen to the recording if you're interested.
But, yeah, to stay on the Illuvium side, they've just announced their PvP.
It's launching end of the month in the Epic Store.
I think that's a really cool announcement.
And, actually, Josh, I want to talk a little bit with you about Illuvium because you are running for a council.
Can you maybe explain a little bit in a nutshell to your listeners what is the council for and why did you chose to run for it?
Yeah, thanks.
I'll try to keep it quick here.
But, yeah, so the governance council at Illuvium is essentially a group of five people.
Four are elected representatives, and one is a team member.
It's usually Kieran, the CEO.
And the goal of the IMC or this governance council is to basically represent the interests of the broader DAOs community, you know, the interests of the DAO at large.
And so when voting takes place on certain proposals, it's kind of a little bit like a delegated vote model, right?
The individuals in the community and their tokens don't have a direct DAO vote, but they do elect the representatives that then do vote on those proposals and help move the DAO forward.
So I am currently a member of the IMC for Epoch 8, and it's been a lot of fun really enjoying working with the community and having that connection.
And I'm currently running for re-election for Epoch 9.
So, yeah, if anybody does have staked ILV, you do have to have it staked.
You know, I would love to have your support.
The vote ends in about five hours, so it's a little bit short notice.
But, you know, welcome to DM me if you'd like any more info.
I don't want to take up too much time, but, yeah, I really appreciate anyone's support.
Thanks, Marco.
Yeah, no worries.
Yeah, no worries.
I've also pinned your tweet about Epoch 9.
I hear at the top of the spaces if anyone wants to kind of read through it while we're doing the spaces.
But, yeah, no, it's super exciting.
And I think, yeah, I'm very curious to see who's going to be elected, and I'll definitely be keeping my eyes on it.
And I'll also definitely be playing Illyvium DFT when it gets out.
I'm a big AutoBettler fan, so I'm definitely excited.
I don't know if you were going to talk, I think you were going to talk about this somewhere else, too.
But, yeah, they just announced that they're launching on the Epic Games Store on November 28th.
So anyone will be able to access it.
You know, no wait lists, no barriers, no NFTs needed.
And it really is going to be an incredible milestone.
So keep an eye on that and wish list it on Epic Games Store.
Absolutely.
I think on that note, we have one other game that is an announcement, I would say, that is around the same caliber.
We have Shrapnel.
They've obviously recently had their race of about 20 million, I believe, and they launched the Shrap token today.
It's trading as well as we speak.
Coop, have you been involved in that launch in any way?
I know that, I mean, they're building on Avalanche.
They have their subnet.
How has this whole launch gone for you so far today?
Well, it's pretty low-key, honestly.
I think transparently, we didn't collaborate a whole lot on this token launch.
And, you know, if you look at their Twitter, they're not, you know, blasting all about the token itself.
It's publicly announced some of the exchange partners.
And so it's like, it's more of a muted token launch than I think a lot of people are used to or expect.
And I've been thinking about that a lot today and want to hear people's opinions on it.
But I think that, you know, they have a real product and they're going to rely on that real product.
They just wanted to get the token into people's hands, let it start having some activity before, you know, the game really starts taking off itself.
More than like a, you know, blast off, like tokens out there, going ham, kind of launch.
Yeah, exactly.
I kind of share the same sentiments.
I saw this morning when I woke up that Bybit announced that they're listing the trap token.
And I was curious to see what other communication we'd be seeing around it.
You know, we were able to kind of see my Twitter timeline, Phil Barrie, today.
And I do see you talk about quite a bit, but not to the, you know, amount that I was expecting also from there.
And so that's been an interesting launch, one that I've not seen like that so far.
My thoughts immediately went to maybe this has to do with, you know, the approach that they're taking towards wanting blockchain elements,
but not wanting to push it in people's face.
They might be afraid that they scare off some of the early people that want to try out the game that are not necessarily crypto savvy, maybe.
That's the initial thing that I could think of.
But yeah, George, Kathy, do you have any insights on that?
I mean, you are keeping your eye on the full ecosystem as well.
You're invested in different projects.
How is this launched for you?
I mean, how are you looking at it?
Yeah, so I think that, I think it's pretty impressive what they've been able to do.
And I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that it's a little bit more of a stealth launch.
They did have a few, you know, really great announcements last, yesterday.
And I think that, you know, the more that games let the product speak for itself kind of thing,
I think that players and particularly like in-betweeners in the industry really appreciate that, right?
Like they don't like to have a bunch of, you know, hype buzzwords thrown down.
They like to, you know, I respect them, I guess, for taking more so the approach of,
all right, we have a really awesome, you know, product here.
We're going to let it speak for itself.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
I'm going to see if I can get them on one of the next spaces and just ask them for myself.
I think that might be interesting, but let's see if we can get them on.
I think it would be a really good timing.
Did you message them about this?
Because maybe I'll send a DM and see if anyone's around.
They've been really active.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I would appreciate that.
I actually reached out to them to see if we could get them on today as well.
It was a little bit last minute because I obviously had Arcade Tour and Ennekaverse here today as well.
But I think they're busy with their launch.
So let's see if in two weeks' time they have more space to attend the space.
We'll see.
We'll see.
I appreciate it, Kuk.
Yeah, I think we have a few more news items before I want to dive into today's topics.
We have Merit Circle and Impossible Finance hosting a Beam hackathon with $100,000 prize pool.
So if you are a developer, if you love building, you know, game tooling or dashboards or, you know, anything that you can think of gaming, then definitely check out that hackathon.
I'll make sure to also on this, pin a tweet here at the top of the spaces shortly so that you can find more information.
But it's open to anyone, so if you're interested, definitely check it out.
We'd love to see some Google stuff built on Beam.
And yeah, the final four announcements.
We have Arcade Galaxy building on Beam.
We have Walker World with the new staking hub, Area 6545, launching on the 7th of November.
So that was yesterday.
And we got to talk a little bit with them about that in the last episode as well of High Gamer Meets X, which is a different series that I'll talk about a little bit more shortly.
We have Amino.
The ammo token is live.
And finally, we have Neko first announced to be building on Beam.
And Leo, we also have you as a guest here today.
I think this is the perfect bridge for me to talk a little bit with you.
First of all, you've already gotten to talk quite a bit with Anna.
I think we ourselves haven't spoken that much yet.
So I would love to talk a little bit with you about what motivated you to build on Beam besides also building on the Ethereum network.
Can you shed some light on that?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, when we first started the studio, even a few years ago, we always have visions.
We think that each chain will have its own community and its characteristics.
And to us, it's an entire customer segment or player segment that we would like to bring the game to.
So with this announcement of the partnership between Mirror Circle and Nekoverse, we will be able to deliver the game that we worked so hard to build to the gamer community that you guys have been building for a long time.
And also, we picked it for the first destination of the game, but we are also aware of that not all users are very comfortable with the gas fee on it.
So that's where Beam step in and provide us with a very good chance that can optimize the gas fees for our users.
So I guess it will bring a lot of benefit for our current user as well.
So they can select whether they want to play on ETH or whether they want to play on Beam to save gas fees.
And that's providing options for our players.
So that's the reason that we are very motivated to launch on Beam next.
Very good reason, I would say.
And how has it been for you working with Anna so far?
I know that she's in the space right now, so it might be a little bit scary to talk about it.
But how has communication been so far for you?
I mean, it's awesome.
The team has been very responsive and very helpful, provided us all the information that we need and also replied to all of our message.
So it has been great so far.
That's positive.
How has that been for you, Anna?
It's been really great.
I mean, to be fully transparent, we have our first kickoff meeting next week.
And that's when I get to actually, you know, see them face to face.
They get to see my brown eyes.
And we get to, you know, connect on a deeper level.
And that's kind of the funnest part because up to now, it's like, you know, beginning the onboarding process, getting to know the team, figuring out the things that I need to know that they're doing and communicating it to the ecosystem that we work in to make sure that everyone is aware of what's happening so that they get the support that they need throughout their journey on Beam.
And, you know, it's been really fantastic because the same way he's saying that our team responds, they respond as well.
And when you work with people that love what they're doing, it's obvious in the work they do.
And it's a fun environment to connect with.
And I think that's really what we've been fortunate enough, Marco, that all of the games that we have on Beam are like that.
You know, they're passionate about gaming.
Absolutely.
And they're hyper-involved in, like, the details that sometimes might seem tedious, you know?
Absolutely.
And I think it shows, too.
I mean, it's the same thing when we're hosting those spaces.
When I look in the crowd at the listeners, I very often see people that we work with on the Beam site.
But they're just taking their time on their free evenings after, you know, being on a job the whole day to tune in on those.
And I love to see it.
It feels like a community within a community.
And that's been an absolute pleasure.
And so it's always nice to welcome new studios to the mix, so to speak.
And, yeah, Leo, I want to stay with you, actually, for a little bit.
Because City of Greed launched last week, November 2nd.
First of all, congratulations there as well.
How did the launch go?
And how would you say the user feedback has been so far?
Yeah, I mean, it's just been a crazy week, right?
So we just launched our tokens for less than 10 days ago.
And the launch of the token went very well and even exceeded our expectations.
And then a few days later, we launched the game.
And other than small hiccups, because of the gas spike on that day, everything went well.
And players have been able to join the game and experience it publicly for the first time.
And since the launch, we have also received a lot of feedback to make the games better.
That's the part that I'm very excited about.
Because we have done two test nets, but it's a private community test net.
So when the main net game hit the market and we were able to gather much more feedbacks, we know exactly how we can improve the games and find a product market fit and deliver it to as many people as possible.
So with all the feedbacks from the launch, we are now very focusing on optimizing the game and also building features that players are requesting and need before.
And also, the best thing after the launch is that when players play, they say that the game is very captivating and even addicting, which is the game feel that we want to deliver.
And I could say that in this moment, that the game feel that we've been working on has hit spot on.
So that's what I'm very happy about.
Love it. Love to hear that. That sounds very positive.
So this actually gives me the perfect bridge to talk a little bit about player communities and engagement.
I see we have Spike here requesting the mic.
Spike, I'm going to add you. I'm going to ask one question to Leo before I let you chat.
But then actually, I want you to weigh in on what he says.
So this is a perfect timing, I would say.
So, Leo, building up towards that launch, right?
The launch of CEO Greed.
How have you gone about keeping the community engaged while the game wasn't live yet?
How have you been doing that?
I think that is, well, for us, it has always been important to keep the community in loop with the development progress.
So throughout the course of development of CEO Greed, we did very frequent devlogs.
So I remember we did every two weeks, we released a devlog of what we have done and what we are building towards and what is the issue that we need to fix with the games.
And as soon as possible, we released a test net for players to actually experience the game, right?
So CEO Greed is the kind of game that kind of hooks you on the more you play, because there's a lot of things that you can figure out inside the game and improve your skills and understanding of the game.
So we want to put the game in the hands of our community first.
And from that, we did two test nets before we even went to main nets.
So that's how we think it's the best way to keep the community engaged with what we are actually doing.
Thanks.
Nice.
Yeah, I think, you know, go, ship, and iterate as you go.
I think it's a very wise move to be doing it that way.
Spike, welcome to the Spaces, man.
Do you want to briefly introduce yourself?
And then I actually have a follow-up question on what Leo just talked about for you.
Awesome.
Yeah, thanks for writing me up.
Exciting to learn more about Beam.
I've been following Merit Circle for a long time.
Coop has been talking lots of great things about you guys, you know, working with Avac.
So Super just decided to jump in and learn more.
And you guys are amazing.
You all just, like, literally hit me up.
Hey, you old, do you like Come On?
I'm like, yeah, of course.
I love to surround myself with amazing builders like yourself.
So, yeah, happy to add to the conversation where I can.
I am a Web3 gamer, content creator.
And I also do a lot of cool marketing for games.
So, yeah, if you guys ever need help marketing any of the cool games going on Beam,
like, you know, happy just to give creator insights,
connect to any creators in my network, or even work together.
So, happy to be on stage.
And I see a lot of people I love.
So, good to see you, Nico, Anna.
A lot of people go back.
I've talked to the Neko team.
You know, Professor in the chat always has amazing vibes.
Trey Aloha, Graslow.
Again, so many amazing people in the space.
So, thanks for bringing you on board.
And, again, happy to add to the conversation.
Yeah, no worries.
Thank you for tuning in at such short notice.
I mean, we saw you in the space.
Nico is fastest.
As fast as he is, he just shoots you a message like,
hey, do you want to come on for a bit?
And I love it.
I love to run an open space just like that.
And like I just said, it's perfect timing
because I was going to ask you, as a content creator, right,
you are now kind of in this phase with Web3 Gaming
where you see a lot of games slowly ship early versions of their games.
How has it been for you, you would say, this year
compared to last year in terms of creating content for game studios
and marketing it?
What is the difference and how you're liking it this year?
Yeah.
Was that one for me?
I'm sorry, you cut it for a second.
That one is for you.
Yeah, that one is for us for you.
Yeah.
Dude, the space has been amazing.
Like, literally a year ago,
people couldn't name more than, like, five creators or games.
Like, it was like, oh, Axie, and then we had, like, Undead Blocks.
Shout out to, you know, KG in the chat.
He's one of the team over there.
But yeah, there was just, like, no games.
Like, I couldn't even play anything with friends
outside of a trading card game.
So to see, like, so many amazing developers
slowly build out and grow,
and creators have consistently leveling up content.
But yeah, there's just so much more compelling reasons
to get, you know, gamers involved,
other content creators.
It's just, again, building amazing events
and projects and products that do so.
So I've been overwhelmed and enjoyed
just because, like, I'm a gamer at heart.
I want to make traditional gaming content.
The industry is still very much in its infancy stage,
you know, as things are kind of coming out and growing.
But, like, oh, man, like, you're starting to see games
like shrapnel and off the grid that, like, compete,
you know, with traditional Web 2 games.
So I'm excited to have that layer on top
where, you know, we get to own, you know, our assets.
We get to create UGC.
We get to align incentives in ways
that we've never been able before
and to empower gamers and content creators
and just develop us all like.
It's been great.
I love it.
Do you have any favorite games right now?
Like, ones you're highly anticipating?
I already heard shrapnel.
Oh, man, I'm having some major FOMO.
Today, the shrapnel team invited a handful of creators
to go to their studio in Seattle.
And I'm stuck here in Texas,
but I am super excited for the team
with all the crazy announcements going.
You know, AVAX has been killing it.
You guys have been doing a lot of really cool things as well.
So, yeah, shrapnel is definitely high on my list.
They have an amazing team.
Outside of just having this really cool aspirational game and brand,
they're just so supportive of their community.
And the same kind of vibes I'm getting from you guys right now.
You know, just, like, giving people a platform,
talking, and kind of coming with cool ideas to work together.
Love it, love it.
I'm sure you'll get to play Shrapnel again if you haven't yet very, very soon.
But I'm definitely excited about their launch as well.
And I see we have Sam Stefano here in the crowd as well.
Welcome, man.
I want to give you a shout-out,
because you've been hosting this gamified Twitter spaces for a while now.
And, yeah, absolutely love listening to them.
And I wish you much good luck later tonight.
And if you're listening to this Twitter spaces right now,
and you're free later tonight,
then I would definitely recommend you to tune in on this Twitter spaces as well,
because I bet it's going to be bound to be amazing again.
So, yeah, hi, Sam.
But, yeah, Josh, Kaffin,
I want to ask you guys actually the same thing that I asked Leah.
You know, you're in the midst of building.
You haven't sat still during this whole bear market.
How has it been for you to kind of want to build a community,
get people engaged around or create to earn?
Like, how are you going about that?
Yeah, it's been really interesting,
because our platform, you know, is a game of games.
So we're really dependent on other games, you know, delivering.
But what's been fun this past year,
are just all kind of like the side things that people are doing,
like the side contest, you know, when meme coins come up,
you know, little mini games, things like that.
So I think, you know, it's difficult because, you know,
in the traditional business world, you know,
all that testing and everything like that is done behind the scenes,
and then a company releases a product and people pay for it.
And I think what's really cool about Web3 is that, you know,
the community is partly building the product.
So it's, you know, the trials and tribulations that the community goes through,
I feel like they almost get a sense of what we building the product are going through.
And that really kind of puts us in like the same circle, you know.
So when you're in Telegram or Discord or doing a town hall or whatever,
and you're talking about like, oh, we had to change this or do this,
the community is getting that angst.
And sometimes that kind of like disappoints them.
But I think it's something really to engage with and embrace
because you're getting to be part of those growing pains, you know,
of a game or a platform, you know.
So for us, it's just been, you know, a lot of fun gaming content, you know,
on Twitter kind of talking about how every year X, how everything's being built.
And so, yeah, I think just engaging your community in a way that benefits them
and making it fun so they can really see what's going on.
And then just transparency, you know, if you, you know,
if you sold something, you know, like we haven't sold anything to our community yet.
We don't have an NFT out or anything like that.
But if you have, I think it's just transparency
and letting that community be a part of it.
So whether that's helping to promote the game wherever it's at,
whether it's telling their friends and family about it,
whether it's being a tester,
I think those are all things that some communities, you know.
Did we just lose sound with Kevin?
Sorry, I think I had something coming in there.
Can you hear me okay now?
Yeah, we can hear you now.
Cool.
Perfect.
Yeah, good.
So, yeah, just to wrap that up, I was just going to say, like, you know,
I almost thought about, like, a fun post to do is that, like,
I play Web3 games because I want Web3 games to be successful.
So as someone part of the community of a game, just embrace it.
You know, have fun.
The game may not work perfectly.
It might not have the best graphics yet.
But by you playing it, talking about it, embracing it,
that's just going to show the world that these games
and these platforms are here to stay.
But we are a little bit early to the product being at the level
that most of the world would expect a ship product to be.
But I think that's fun to be a part of that and help these projects grow.
Yeah, I think so, too.
I think if what I'm seeing here in the industry and what I love
is the transparency and communication,
and you get to see inside of the kitchen, so to speak.
So we've been working with so many studios throughout the past two and a half years.
And trust me, when I say I've seen all sorts of stages of game studios,
be it from mere sketches all the way to designing characters and gameplay
and, like, cinematics and whatnot.
And it's the same for tooling, infrastructure, platforms like the ones you're building.
So I think that inside in the kitchen is something that makes also this industry very unique.
It is that we are early, that's sure.
But you also get to mingle and have a say in how those things are shaped.
And to me, that really excites me.
Yeah, I just love this conversation so much because, you know,
being someone that has children who play games,
I would never be able to access a developer, much less a CEO,
and give them an opinion of what I would like the game to have or not have.
And I feel like that's something that we've seen that has definitely changed in Web3 via through spaces
or through access and Discord or, you know, people actually being inherently involved
with the communities for which they're building games.
And that is huge.
Like, I think, you know, it really goes unnoticed to the extent that people
in positions of leadership make themselves available for conversations
that did not exist before, necessarily.
Yeah, I think that's always interesting.
She talks about that.
Like, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, sometimes I'm just amazed sometimes when people reach out to me and they're like,
oh, do you know so-and-so?
And I'm like, oh, yeah, I know Tom.
I knew that.
And they're like, oh, you even know their real name?
And I'm just kind of like, sometimes I have to take like a humble step backwards
because it's not like in other business worlds or even my, you know, my past business life.
Like, I would never know 15 CEOs of leading projects, you know, in the space that I'm in.
So, yeah, I think that's just a testament to, you know, just how much we view
and respect each other's opinion and everything like that.
But, yeah, it's just, you know, I never thought that I would, you know, in my, you know,
in my, you know, Telegram network or whatever, you know, would be full of CEOs and stuff like that.
And it's just really fun, you know, to all work together
because it's really like kind of like one big family all trying to raise this space together.
Yeah.
There we go.
I was muting and unmuting.
I was going to say, at the end of the day, we're all just people, right?
And we're all super excited about what is happening here.
And we're all building, we're all contributing in some way.
And I think that makes why it is so informal, if you will.
It's the same when you go to those meetups, right?
When you walk around there, you know, the first year I went to GDC,
I remember walking around, not seeing a lot of familiar faces
because most people are like Koopis and like I am using NFT profile pictures, right?
So you don't, you're not quite sure, okay, what is the face behind this profile?
And then as you're working closer with studios and you jump on calls
and you get to see each other face-to-face, then, you know,
the next time you're at the conference, you're walking around
and you see all those familiar faces.
And I think for me, that's just one of the really fun things as well,
taking this digital thing that we live,
because we're pretty much always online,
taking that to those meetups and just seeing each other face-to-face,
it really brings things even more to life.
And I absolutely love it.
But, yeah, I want to circle back a little bit to what you were talking about, Kevin,
because you mentioned, right, that the platform right now
might not be where a lot of people are expecting it yet.
I did see Josh put out a tweet recently kind of teasing that, you know,
things are coming up on the Arcade Touring site.
Can you talk a little bit about some timelines maybe, some alpha,
like, what are you working on, and what's next, basically?
I mean, yeah, I'll let JP take this,
just because if someone missteps and says something,
he can't get himself in trouble, but he could get me in trouble,
so I'll let him take this one.
All right, that works.
Yeah, no, we have some pretty exciting stuff right on the horizon.
So earlier, just to kind of provide a little bit of context on our timeline,
so in January of this year, so nearly, you know, 12 months ago at this point,
we released the first version of what we call Project Alpha,
which is essentially a live mainnet test of our mission pool model,
and we did that on Solana first.
And that went well.
We got a lot of really positive feedback and some negative feedback, right?
We were able to take that back and iterate on the product
and make some improvements.
And we are now just about ready to launch what we're calling Project Alpha V2,
and it is going to be live on the AVAX C chain.
And we've decided to pivot a little bit to launch the platform first on Avalanche
because much like you feel, Marco, I'm sure, you know,
we think that AVAX has a very bright future,
and we think it really fits the needs that our product has right now.
So we are doing internal pin testing currently,
and this will be live in private access within the next week.
So at that point, we're going to start to have activations with certain communities
and kind of ease our way into onboarding more and more users.
It's going to be gated access initially.
Like you'll have to have an invite code basically to play around with it,
but it will be on mainnet.
You will have actual mission pools live.
You will be able to take your XRK token and deposit it into a mission pool
and see how the earning potential works and how the exposure of our platform works
and really kind of get your hands on it.
And then we'll have about two months of that testing
where we'll kind of ease people in through the communities.
And I think some alpha might be that we're going to do something with Merit Circle
within the next month or so, and we're going to get some tokens.
And again, we're not selling anything.
These are free tokens.
We're going to get some free tokens into the hands of the Merit Circle community
and let you guys test the product out.
And then we'll have our token generation event and public sale in January.
So that's a little bit about our timeline currently.
And yeah, we're just really excited to be launching on AVAX.
The Solana build that we did, it still exists.
We do have a multi-chain future.
That is as much alpha as I can say in terms of what blockchains will be adding in the future,
but Arcade will be going multi-chain over time.
So first AVAX and then we'll see where it goes from there.
Love it.
I think you've dropped enough timelines, alpha updates there in a very short time period.
And I'm absolutely excited.
And to stay a little bit with you, I mean, where you were just talking a little bit about the mission pools.
I think if you can briefly explain what that is, that might be helpful for the listeners that are not familiar yet with Arcade Tourn.
But I want to ask you, you have invested in different games like Illuvium, Mavia.
There's definitely a bunch of other ones that come from this play-to-earn narrative initially, if you will.
So we've not talked too much about that whole play-to-earn narrative yet.
But I wanted to ask you, just going throughout the past year and until now,
can you talk a little bit about the role that you're planning to take in this narrative?
Like, has it shifted compared to when Arcade Tourn started?
Are you still navigating it the same way with the upcoming mission pools?
How are you going to go about that?
Yeah, really great question.
So I'll start with maybe a kind of an example of what a mission pool is.
A mission pool is essentially a derivative of any in-game activity that can be registered or tracked via blockchain.
So what that means is, you know, let's say that it's 30 days of harvesting land on an other side deed,
or it's, you know, a two-week, you know, competition to harvest the most fuel in Illuvium,
or it's a ship mission in Star Atlas.
It can be any game across any blockchain for really any duration of time.
And as long as there's a start date and an end date, that can be a mission.
So what this means and kind of what it empowers us to do is to create these kind of curated experiences
for our users to get exposure to lots of different blockchain games in really unique ways
without having to learn the intricacies of every single game loop, right?
If you're really bullish on Illuvium, but like you just, you don't like city builders,
you don't want to deal with like Illuvium land yourself, but you really like the arena in Illuvium,
you don't have to like try to do everything, right?
You can be in a mission pool for Illuvium land, and you can participate personally in the arena,
you know, because that's what you enjoy more.
So this allows for our users to not feel like they have to like cut corners
or juggle a dozen different things to have exposure to all the different moving pieces in the gaming industry.
In terms of kind of where we started, so this was a very novel idea for us initially,
and we've expanded upon it, because when we were first talking to venture capital and hedge funds
and people that, you know, maybe have lots of money, but not necessarily lots of time,
we've really got the same feedback from everyone we talked to.
They said, you know, we really want exposure to GameFi, but I don't have 40 hours a week to play games.
Like I can't keep up with 12 different wallets to figure out like, you know,
what I need to be doing in order to earn from this game and like stake this in time
or like harvest this on this date.
It's just crazy, especially for people that aren't full-time in gaming.
Like I'm full-time gaming and I can hardly even keep up, right?
I have a whole research team that helps me keep up with these things.
So we were really set, we set out to solve that problem, right?
To give people a really easy to use interface where they can get exposure on one platform
without all of those hurdles. And so we've built that, right?
But over time, we've learned that gamers come in a lot of different shapes and sizes.
They want a lot of different things.
So we're building tools now that make it possible for gamers to kind of interact with Web3 gaming
and blockchain gaming in a way that they're most comfortable or that they're most interested, right?
We're creating tools so that gamers can operate NFTs on our platform
and do what they love without the financial hurdles.
We're building tools so that game guilds can come to our platform
and scale their business and, you know, onboard new players without the hurdles.
We're building, you know, tools so that NFT collectors
that don't want to have to operate their NFTs can work with Arcade to get those NFTs operated.
So we've branched out over time.
You know, we've been here almost two years
and we've been building the entire time every single day, 12-hour days.
I mean, Kevin can attest that we work around the clock, right?
So we've been, you know, head down building.
And, you know, so we have that.
And then we're even looking at things like, I can give a little alpha leak on this.
I don't want to say too much, but we're stepping into the esports scene as well.
So people that are interested in competitive play that are looking to put their skills to the test
and earn additional rewards because of their expertise.
We're building like a separate product under our Arcade umbrella
that's going to be very deeply in the esports scene.
So I think that was kind of a long-winded response.
I'm sorry, Marco.
So, yeah, we're just, we're really excited with the stuff that we're building.
And, you know, I guess long story short, we set out to solve one problem
and we solved that problem.
We're bringing that product to market
and we're excited to continue to expand and build tools for gamers.
Sounds good.
And I think the timing too is absolutely perfect.
I mean, a little VMPFP is coming up.
You know, the other game modes, you're going to see more traction.
You have Big Time that just launched.
You have Heroes of Mavia that's doing pretty well in their testing phase right now.
There's all those games you're involved with
and that you're looking to do maybe mission pulls with that are so suitable for it.
And I think the timing, you know, hopefully you guys will nail that timing.
Also with the token launch in January, we'll find out.
But I think right now, by the looks of it, you know, gaming-wise,
timing looks very good.
So, yeah, I'm excited to try out the platform when it's there.
Kevin, do you want to weigh in?
Well, I was just going to say, you know, it's the old statement in, like, stock trading.
It's not about timing the market.
It's about time in the market.
So we just want to get launched.
We know that our biggest successes will happen, you know, after our launch.
But, yeah, I mean, with just so many cool things happening in gaming,
with a lot of these games coming online, you know,
we think it's a great time for our platform to go live so people can experience these games
in kind of a safe and measured way.
Because it is a lot to, you know, ask someone to go spend $650 on, you know,
a land plot in a game or something.
But if you can show them, hey, here's how the game works.
Here's how the reward system works.
You know, you've got your community of people on the arcade platform
that are all in that mission pool together.
We think it's going to bring a lot more just capital and eyes to the space.
So, yeah, one of our mantras is kind of arcade is for everyone.
And that's what JP covered there is, you know,
game developers can use this as a marketing platform.
Gamers can use this to increase and diversify their exposure.
You know, investors, it's an easy way to put, you know, capital into the space.
So, yeah, just really excited to partner with everybody and launch this thing.
And as far as the kind of the mantra about, you know, how we look at like NFTs
and the ownership and stuff, it's always been, you know, part of our business model
that Arcade will own some NFTs, you know, in these gaming systems directly.
You know, it's a good, it can be a good use of treasury and for proof of concept.
But our, you know, big plan has always been, you know,
allow big time investors to buy these and support capital in these gaming ecosystems,
but then take those assets and, like JP said, get them into the hands of the actual players
so that kind of everybody benefits from that relationship of, you know,
having good capital come in, but the great players play the game.
Yeah, I'm really just excited to set up a mission pool
and continue to raid Marco in Heroes of Mavia
and make that a mission pool where I can just, you know,
keep destroying your base and paying out to the arcade fam.
So much love, Marco.
But yeah, I'm coming for your base.
You know, go for it, JP.
I literally am about to max my city pearly today or tomorrow.
So there's a little nerd talk there.
I've been playing it quite a bit.
So you actually might be,
you might actually be the perfect mission pool operator then.
So maybe we'll flip the script and you'll actually operate the mission.
It sounds like actually I might have bit off too much that I, you know, too much.
We'll see.
We'll just, we'll just find someone else for him.
We'll just find someone else for him to go attack.
You know, the mission pool will be Marco versus,
and we'll just add in the, so we just find whatever, you know,
content creator gamer thinks they're really awesome.
We'll just make them the target of the mission pool
and we'll, we'll all support Marco going to destroy him.
I think it sounds like a great idea.
I mean, I think Spike is looking a little sus down there.
So I'm just saying, let's see, let's see.
Let's see if Spike beats me or if I beat him.
We'll, we'll find out.
No, I really appreciate it to you weighing in here on,
on what you're building.
I'm absolutely excited once again.
And this gives me a perfect bridge to talk a little bit with you, Leo, as well.
For you, I mean, play to earn has had quite the critique, if you will,
you know, it being unsustainable for it to even be called that by so many people.
You have quite a narrative around, you know, play for fun in combination with play to earn.
How are you tackling this, you know, sentiment of play to earn at NAC offers?
And how are you, you know, aiming to make for a sustainable ecosystem in your game?
Yeah.
Thank you for, for this question.
So we have been in this space for a few years now and, and for, throughout all that time,
we will always looking for, you know, economic angle and, and theories on how to make the game more sustainable.
And with City of Grid, the way we tackle it is that any token syncs we get inside,
inside the game will be go directly to the reward pool for players when they win the game and they earn the rewards.
Right.
So one of the common problems that play to earn usually have is that there's uncontrollable emissions on the token itself.
And then the economy get, getting harder and harder to control over times, which lead to the unsustainability problems.
So with City of Grid, the game runs sustainably by itself and everything will be contributed to, back to the reward pool for maintaining emissions for the players.
And then the revenue we get from the game is actually from a small tax on the token tradings.
And that tax will help us operate the games and build, build it to have more function and features to serve the player over time.
So that's our tax and that's our approach to building a really fun to play games.
And at the same time, have a more sustainable economic angle to it.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
And to, to dive in a little bit deeper on that, right.
When we're thinking player acquisition and that, that, that, you know, play to earn side of things, to play City of Grid, people need land.
Are you intending on like providing a free to play version at some point to like get people become familiar with the game or hooks?
Or are you planning on doing this through content creation?
Like what is your user acquisition strategy?
If you want to share it, of course.
Right, of course, I would love to share about it.
We have been launching the game in stealth for, for the past periods.
And the reason for that is we want to collect player feedbacks and really improve the games to a certain point before we push it out to more and more players.
So with the game, we release, we have all the core functions and the component of the game to make the game viable and the economic works.
Right. And from that, we take the player feedbacks and then design the rest of the meta layers of the games, like the invite friends and the daily login check-ins and also the free to play version that you mentioned.
We just put that, those items into development roadmaps on high priorities so that we can able to attract more users and make the game more accessible for, for the mass audience.
And we are also taking the feedback from the players and the rebalancing to lower the barrier to entry of the game as well.
So next month is going to be a lot of development from City of Grids.
And we'd love to be able to share that with you guys.
Love it.
Kevin, you want to weigh in on what Leo just said?
Yeah, I just wanted to ask a question because this comes up a lot when on our advisory side, we're helping games work through their economics and monetization.
Have you come up with levels of users where your economy kind of hits certain strides?
Like in your own planning, are you like, okay, with 5,000 users, we can obtain this amount of sustainability or whatnot at 10,000, 20,000?
Just trying to get a sense like where you think that, you know, things really start to take off in terms of the game economy with the number of users you have on the platform.
Right.
So I think it varies a lot from games to games.
But for us, since the game, the player running part is NFT-gated, so the more users that join the game and meet land with our tokens, and those tokens get sent to the reward pool.
And the bigger the reward pool will be and the more attractive for other players to also look at there's a lot of reward and join the games.
Of course, the game must be fun to play for people to be able to enjoy it and retain over a long period of time and actually enjoy being there and playing the game.
But also making the reward pool sustainable over time is one of the priorities in order to continue to attract new players.
For your questions, I think it will be a little bit different from the traditional DAU acquisition model where the initial players, they use the token to be able to play and get access to the game.
Inside City of Wheat, we also have a system that we also take form to traditional arcade model where the land have certain lag points in which each time you lose, you have to replenish the lag point again.
So that's one of the revenue stream and one of the sinks come from BTN players to make the game economy more sustainable.
So in short, we try to make the game work on a small number of people and then we're starting to scale that up so that it will be the economic model and the flow of the tokens remain constant over time.
I hope that makes sense.
I kind of rambling a little bit there.
No, it did perfectly because I love the fact that you're taking the balancing into the equation and adding the variability because I think we saw from other play to earn game economies in the past that you really needed a massive amount of new people to come in and provide the exit for the initial rung.
And I think how these game economies do well is, of course, you need new money coming in to pay for things.
But I think if you're building it with your smaller community to start in scaling, I think that's just it's a great way to do it.
So thanks for your response.
Yeah, awesome.
It's a very interesting question.
I mean, the way that we approach it, there's still a lot of things to be experimented with, like how can we best incentivize the players to play and acquire more users.
But it's a very exciting times ahead.
And we always head down, building and listen to community feedbacks because that's where we got the most data from and start scaling from there.
Exactly.
Time will tell.
Feedback will tell.
And iterate as you go.
Yeah.
Keeping my eyes on the clock, Anna, I know that you have to jump off shortly.
I'm also about to slowly wrap up the Twitter spaces.
But do you want to say goodbye to the audience?
Because I do think you have to help off right now.
Yeah, I actually have a meeting for my son's catechism.
But I do want to say thank everybody for tuning in.
This has been absolutely fantastic.
Neckoverse, Leo, I loved what you just answered.
The fact that you're thinking about scalability and not running into the fire thinking that you're going to be able to blow it out with spit.
I think being reasonable and realizing that we're starting off small, but that doesn't mean we're not mighty.
And I absolutely love that.
So, yeah, thank you guys so, so much for, you know, having me on as a co-host today.
It was really fun.
And I am looking forward to next time listening in.
And I miss Ash and her sweet voice.
So, it'll be great to have her back.
Besitos.
Thank you, Anna.
Have a great night.
And, yeah, we'll definitely, hopefully have Ash back with us as a co-host next week.
But, yeah, like I just said, I always love to keep the Twitter spaces around the hour.
I think, honestly, I went through pretty much all the questions I wanted to ask tonight as well.
What a perfect timing, honestly.
And for me, this whole Twitter space is today.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
It's been really fun talking to you, JP, Kevin.
You know, we had Spike on for a bit.
We have Leo.
We had Coop on for a bit.
Honestly, I'm really liking how those different episodes, if you will, have gone so far.
And it's feeling like it's shaping nicely.
But, yeah, I think to round it up, I usually like to ask a little bit of Alva.
Honestly, both of you have already shared so much Alva tonight.
So, I'm just going to ask you, like, do you have any closing words for tonight to share, Josh, before we round it up shortly?
No, just really appreciate you taking the time to bring us on.
It's always a lot of fun to tell our story and to make new connections.
I feel like I always leave these spaces with new contacts and people in my DMs that are excited to network.
So, that's what it's all about.
But, yeah, last plug, I guess, in the pinned tweets, I am running for a Lubium election.
So, if you're new to the space, there's more info there.
Voting ends in about four hours.
So, you know, love to get your support if possible.
Thanks, guys.
No worries.
All right.
By the way, Sam Stavina, if you are still listening, I did invite you just as a speaker.
If you want to talk a little bit about Gamified at the closing minute.
But if you're not here or you're not keen on speaking right now, no issues.
Yeah, Kevin, any last words from you tonight?
Yeah, just a big thank you.
You know, at ACS, we're starting to do our own Twitter space series.
It's tomorrow at 3 Eastern.
We're calling it Trends for right now and just kind of talking about, you know, a lot of different stuff in the space.
Tomorrow, we're going to talk about, you know, NFT technology in gaming.
But I know what, you know, it's not the easiest thing to put a space together and market it well and do it correctly.
So, again, just a big shout out to the Merit Circle team for putting this together and giving us all a platform, you know, to chat with like-minded people.
Lois, and you're building an avalanche now, so we're allies.
I mean, we already kind of were allies, but I guess we're allies.
There we go, yeah.
So, now we're really on the same team.
We're not just like secret allies with all these different like hidden agendas.
Now we're just all on the same team.
Exactly.
No, I love it.
Thanks for coming in tonight.
Leo, any closing words from you tonight?
Yeah.
First of all, thank you for inviting me to the space today.
I get to listen to you guys sharing about your products.
I'm always interested in the product being built in Web3s.
Because not many people realize that the way we have been building games in Web3 is really special.
The developer toolings and the game tooling sector is booming and thriving right now.
And it's really helped the game developers in terms of making their games much more social and much more interactive and interesting without having to spend much time developing those features themselves.
In traditional games, usually we have to develop a lot of features in terms of daily logged in, social, quests, friend systems, all by ourselves.
But in Web3, everything is composable.
And that's the beautiful thing because we can partner up and make the game great together.
So, I'm really excited for being here tonight.
And just one last thing.
Thanks for all the feedbacks from our players in terms of how to lower the barrier to entry to the game and the free-to-play modes.
We have officially put it into Roadmap and in the upcoming weeks, we hope to deliver that to our community.
So, stay tuned for the updates.
Thank you, guys.
Love it.
We'll keep our eyes open.
And, yeah, I think from my end to close off today's Twitter spaces, I really want to thank everyone that tuned in tonight.
Definitely would love some hearts from you for our guests who tuned in tonight.
And I hope that you've really enjoyed listening to what we spoke about.
If you just tuned in, we released the recordings.
We talked a lot about player communities, innovation, technology, project milestones.
So, definitely was quite a bit of all I shared, if I may say so.
So, I would definitely encourage you to listen to the recording if you just tuned in.
And, yeah, I also do, together with Ashley, on the other bi-weeklies, a Twitter series that's going to start from next week called High Gamers Meet X.
JP, Kevin, Leo, I would love to invite both your studios for an episode sometime in the near future to basically do a full one-on-one deep dive on what you're building, what you're working on, you know, all the ins and outs, and really get to know your company, so to speak, and teams.
But, yeah, I would love to talk a bit more about Astrid Spaces.
And I think, yeah, if you tuned in tonight, if you liked it, again, love that you've tuned in.
If you have feedback, feel free to comment it.
And next week, same time, 70 p.m. CET, Central European Time, I'll be doing the first episode of High Gamers Meet X.
And, yeah, we're going to have a really amazing guest.
I think we're going to tweet about the guest on Friday, so I'm not going to just mention it yet.
But, yeah, I hope to see you there.
And I think that being said, thanks again, and have a great day.
Bye, gamers.
Thanks, guys.
Bye.
Bye, everyone. Have a great one.
Have a great day.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
