let me invite some people over
and yeah so we can start the space in a couple more minutes
just a reminder that today we will be giving up two white lists for versus x freemint on polygon
they're having it i think on the 20th of march and it's um yeah pretty cool let me give some
information right now it's a fully customizable on chain avatar and uh it's a guarantee
allocation for the mint so you know that's cool some free stuff
i got your bad boys always trying to get some free stuff for the ultra community so
our host no sorry our guest if he joins will be selecting two two people in the audience at the
end of the twitter space but there i think he's joining from the versus x account one second
let me grant some there he is
okay i think i granted permission now to speak are you there louis louis hello
hey yeah how's it going man you're all right all good thank you thank you so much for joining
and uh welcome welcome to today's twitter space everybody we have louis rice the cmo from versus
x how's it going louis tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at versus x
yeah happy happy to be here um so yeah as as you said uh my name's louis rice cmo and um sort of
business dev uh versus x there's a few of us that wear a couple of hats because you know we're
we're uh technically a still a startup but um but yeah um i've worked with the team since
early 2022 um the the studio itself was founded in 2021 um so the guys had been sort of going for a
year already before i started the team um i've been in the web free space uh since 2017 you find most
people get in around uh i think it's like 2013 2017 or 2021 it's always the ball runs that bring
people in isn't it um and before before i was full time in the web free space um i've been doing a
lot of uh well i was a trained engineer and then got into management operations management
and worked my way up the chain uh like most people in the uk if you want to
try and get on the property ladder which is almost impossible uh you move into management
um you know to to try and get a mortgage um but yeah that's me i'm i'm pretty much
lifelong gamer uh grew up on this super nintendo um i think even though i was trading crypto for
a while it was nft's that really captivated me and made me leap into web free full time um
and the reason is because you know there's real obvious integration into gaming uh you know as a
kid you know using all these memory cards and cartridges and stuff like that and you know
dreaming that one day your memory would carry on to another game in future and then it's like
you know you want to take your items with you as well to then later being more of a competitive
player on pc and um you know trading um pubg and csgo skins and stuff like that and always
you know wanting a a legal way of doing it um because obviously um steam steam isn't a very
friendly way of uh trading skins and stuff like that um so yeah yeah when when nft's first start
again i think um uh top shots was the first sort of nft project i got into um so i got in quite
early like late 2020 um that was the mba one yeah yeah the mba one really really blew up um
like the first i think the first people that got in and got some of the rare ones sort of sold them
for like 60 000 and stuff like that um i got into vv really early as well um on uh if you know
that one it was like they had all the marvel collectibles and stuff um so that was a really
good one as well because they had really really limited nfts at the beginning um and they weren't
selling you know it would take days for some of them to sell out and then as more people came in
you know they were selling for a lot of gems on the marketplace so that was like my first sort of
experience into nfts um but yeah and then yeah made the full-time leap just because you know i
can see and i think a lot of people and this is why they're gaming you know the the game uh
we're having the gaming bull kind of the gaming uh projects led us into this bull and it's because
you know everyone sees it as a really obvious use case for crypto and nfts blockchain you
know transactions and also transparency um and also onboarding people you know a lot of people and
a lot of these big games now as well um like off the grid i have a lot of my friends in
real life friends that are not into crypto but they're getting excited about games now
like off the grid um and i've got a lot of people playing ultimate champions as well like my football
friends and stuff so yeah no it's it's it's a good time to be in uh web free gaming
oh definitely well thank you so much for that uh very thorough introduction of how you arrived to
the so where you are right now and how you started you know in the world of nfts and how
that ties in with your passion for gaming i think i it's funny that you mentioned the
whole top shot thing because i think that was the first time i actually felt fomo for like wanting
to participate and that's where i kind of learned about nfts i i think i missed top shot i couldn't
buy any of them but then i i jumped very quickly to to the football cards i think it was so rare
it's called um so that's where i started actually trading i don't remember which year
this was it was 2018 or 2019 but it was around that time that i got i think more
that i invested a little bit more into nfts and started to get a little bit of a taste of what
this all is about and i remember of course the first struggles of trying to understand what
this little chrome extension with a fox was doing like what was metamask it was that was such a
fun fun concept to wrap my head over it was a little bit weird but um yeah we all we all
are here for a reason and i think we're all also on the space because you know we we we all think
alike regarding you know like gaming and integration with blockchain is the way to go and it's a real
solution for you know for for something that's already been going around for quite some time
which you know is gaming and and the need for people to to sometimes escape a little bit
their realities and have fun and just dive into these new experiences that we're seeing
every day with so many cool games coming out so um one of those cool games of course versus x
uh louis tell us a little bit more about versus x what is it about was this game originally i
think if i'm not mistaken was was it was called different right it was called e-skills and now
they rebranded or give us a little bit of a rundown about the the whole game itself
yeah so this the studio itself is um e-skills games um and yeah it's like i said it was it
was founded before i joined so in 2021 um and a bit of background on the founders is they've
all got a traditional gaming industry experience uh individually over 20 years uh working mainly in
sports titles things like column echo rally uh toka racer uh football manager um and over
the last sort of like 10 years they've been doing a lot more uh golf projects and golf
simulation software and stuff like that for foresight sports as well so the guys have got
a really strong background in gaming and sports um and yeah the studio because it's
skill-based wagering and that's always been the vision for the ecosystem so that's where e-skills
came from um and yeah that was kind of you know the studio itself so the game because they've got
this traditional gaming industry experience they wanted to build like an mvp and get it out there
and then fundraise from there rather than doing like a you know like a what a lot of people
were doing in 2021 where you would do like a pfp project mint out um and then you know promise
a game in two years time because of their traditional experience they they wanted to build
the game first and then you know raise money off at the back of the an actual working product um so
yeah the game originally launched as um e-skills uh and then you know once we close our seed round
we're like right there's this let's now actually brand it properly um and then yeah that's where
the name versus x was born perfect name for sort of like a competitive sports game whenever you
think of two teams playing each other it's always versus you know so um but yeah so we the guys have
been building for a while um some of you guys must have played um the open beta because you
know we've been working with ultra for a long time and we've really appreciated the support
and that's why we've gone the extra mile for the integrations as well because you're one of
the first platforms that we launched our open beta on as well we always got really great feedback
from uh you guys in the community as well so that was awesome um but yeah we got the
you know the the vision has always been the same it's to build an open world sports
ecosystem with a wagering um uh economy uh wagering economies like dean and the other guys
even back in 2021 where we had all these play to earn games that were like ponzi um you know
nomics and also like breeders and all of these games you know i think they could see back then
that they were all kind of doomed and weren't going to last the test of time so i think
they were quite early on to the whole skill-based wagering economy stuff and we're starting to see
a lot of projects now adopt wagering because a wager is a wager it doesn't matter what your
token price is people want to wager five dollars they wager five dollars of your token
and also for sustainability it allows us to take a rake every time two players wager against each
other as well so we're topping up our um you know we're topping up the treasury for
marketing development overheads you know even rewards and stuff um for you know in-game users
and stuff like that so i think they were really kind of ahead of their time with that um and you
know we've been building for ages and now we're finally bringing it to market it just seems like
the perfect market conditions as well which is which is great you couldn't have planned about
sounds sounds like a familiar story building during the day market and now that everything's
starting to align the products and everything seems to be ready to show to the world so
great market conditions i think to launch a great product and so in very very simple words
for the people who are listening and tuning in and have not tried maybe the open beta of the
game you you create your account you log into this game and you have for example an avatar
and you can access different uh mini games we can call them or like different sports games i think
there's like you can play billiards you can play they also golf what other types like give us a
little bit of a brief intro and as to how the actual player experiences once you log into the
game what can you do and yeah how does how does it look like for a player yeah for sure um um i guess
this is a good time as well to mention obviously we announced the other day but you know we've
integrated the ultra login system now as well so uh when you guys download the the next beta when
it launches you'll be able to just log in straight away with your ultra account which is a really
cool touch um but yeah once you log in if you don't have a high roller nft which mint on the
20th then you will be able to create a default avatar um and once you create your avatar you'll
be you know in the hub which is kind of like the epicenter um of the game itself the game will expand
over time so the more active users we have the bigger the open world will get um and the hub
is kind of going to be the central hub um for social um and also marketplaces wardrobe and all
of those sort of things and then you have all of the sort of like sports and partner buildings
around that area and it will grow outwards um but yeah like you said we have at the moment we have
two sports in there we have golf and we have pool we will have karting very soon it'll probably be
q2 um and then by the end of the year we plan to have seven sports um post tg we are also
going to be speaking to other developers and other studios as well by adding other skill-based
games into our ecosystem because we do want to grow out with you know not just sports but also
other skill-based games as well um but yeah right now in the game there are like you said
they're kind of like mini games right where you have like different game modes so you can play
on pool billiards you can play uh combo pool you can play speed pool you can play perfect
par which is my favorite you basically just sink balls until you miss you clear that and then
you break again and then you keep going which is really good for competitive leaderboards
and then you also have pvp modes as well as well as practice uh and then for golf there is three
par three holes which are really nice they're really stunning and the game scales up to 4k as
well um and then you also have um three sort of like arcade games as well for golf you have
shrinking holes you have uh target golf and then you also have yard wide as well um so we will
have full golf pit full golf course uh we are speaking to someone about licensing an in real life
golf course as well so we will have a full golf course and a full golf game eventually
we will also have pvp golf in q2 um which is really exciting um and karting i think karting
straight away will come out the gate with pvp um so you'll be able to race i think up to eight
or 16 players that sounds quite quite entertaining like i would definitely like to
do a nice pvp session uh with the you know with the karting so that's cool yeah i mean single sign
on meaning people that when you log into ultra you'll right away be able to log into your
account that versus x once you of course open the game so that always you know we're always
in favor of delivering more seamless experience and not having to connect here connect there download
this no meta vest no no no we want everything seamless everything integrated and um yeah can
you tell us a little bit about um the vip areas or exclusive events that the ultra community might
have with this uh particular integration we're talking about yeah good good question um so yeah
like i said we're building out the uh the game um we're building outwards uh we're going to have
you know stadiums for all of the different sports and stuff like that um but also we're having sort
of like vip buildings um for you know some of our partners um we announced neo tokyo the other week
we're doing them uh we've built them a vip pool which is token gated so only accessible for
citizens um and then for ultra we're still working on the the the concept art of the vip area
we will be launching that in q2 um i'm just trying to think about what details i can actually say i'll
give away but essentially you guys will be able to you know you'll have like a like a social sort
of hangout experience place which will be we'll work with the uh ultra team to design similar
to how we did with the assets that we teased the other day um and yeah you'll be able to access
sports directly from there as well so if you don't want to sort of like mooch around the rest of the
game you can just kind of hang out in your one confined area if you like um but yeah we we
thought that this is a really good way to sort of um you know really kind of um you know show our
appreciation to our early partners first of all because you know neo tokyo we've been partnered
with them for a long time and they've been very helpful and similar to you guys as well
um but yeah i think post tg as well this will be something that we're probably offered to a
service for other web 2 and web 3 uh brands as well um so that we you know so people can have
sort of like a digital footprint within our ecosystem as well um but yeah really excited
for the the ultra one the um the concept art that i've seen so far is is very cool so
i know the um when the artists start on that we have some really nice teasers to share with everyone
sounds amazing i think i've i've got a couple of sneak peeks in the creative process with
at least the concept art and i can say it's looking pretty cool can't wait to hang out there
in the lounge with the ultra boys and ladies of course and um yeah looks looks like a fun concept
a i love it that you guys are working also with neo tokyo they have you know great networking i'm
sure they can open many doors there for other you know gaming communities and other projects alike
um so basically when people ask uh how deep this integration goes we i think we covered it
it covers uh the single sign-on um possibility where you don't need to create an extra account
to log into the game uh you will we will have these access to the vip areas which is going to
be a custom lounge for each uh for each project that has been with you guys since the beginning
one of those ultra and of course the possibility of doing the the wagering the bets inside the game
with our native token which is uh uos is there anything extra for example that we could see
as this integration evolves or did i cover at least the the main components um i think i'd like
to spend a minute just to talk about the the token integration side of things um but yeah before i do
that um i think we will definitely be doing some stuff uh on the arena side as well um obviously
we've made these bespoke assets um so the the clothing assets the wearables they're you know
branded with ultra branding on it um and we worked with uh you know the team closely to sort of
come up with the design from your concept artwork which was really cool we really loved that um
you know that whole process um and these assets um i'm not 100 sure how they will be distributed
but they'll basically be given to you know the the the community or the community can win them
or earn them and they're fully compatible with our um customizable avatars game which is
really exciting but yeah i think that once we are live uh once the game is live again we
would definitely be doing some collaborations on the arena side of things as well um you know
we want to be able to reward you know the ultra community as much as possible and also encourage
them to you know take part in the game even if they're not interested in the wagering side of
things you know enjoy the game play the free-to-play side of it uh you know play pool with your
friends um you know there will be mobile builds in future as well which obviously won't be
straight from the um the ultra platform but you know at least you can kind of play on the go and
play casually and stuff as well um but yeah the token integration we're really excited about um
and i know that there's still you know a bit of time before we we we get our finalized and live
um but yeah we you know we want the community to have multiple ways to wager inside the game
especially for pvp so we decided to you know add our token our partner tokens to the game
which has gone down really well like everyone's really excited about it it allows us to offer our
partners um a utility for their token that doesn't already exist um and it you know in
future when you're able to sort of um create your own tournaments and competitions in games as well
it gives communities a really good way to stay active even through the bear market
we know a lot of people do game nights and they do like poker nights and stuff like that
so you'll be able to do a golf night pool night you know karting bowling or whatever sports we
have in future and your community will be able to wager with your own token as well which we
think is really nice um and yeah we're really excited about that um and i know that there'd be
you know probably a bigger update and more information about that in the future as well
so sounds amazing i love the the fact that we could integrate you know arena and that it plays a little
bit more of a important role inside um versus x because of course we talk about wagering but
this has a huge esports potential you know talking about leaderboards and maybe making seasons
is there possibilities of doing cross-community competitions for example if the ultra community
wanted to you know take a take a go against the new tokyo community and we could do like a
golf season competition would that work to do it in on versus x yeah i'm actually glad you brought
that up yeah we will be um you know we esports has always been in our minds so we want uh anyone
to be able to create a tournament or a competition or something like that and essentially you know if
there's enough daily active users and people are organized enough or they have communities
essentially people will be able to make you know maybe even a living off of just managing
tournaments and competitions and that's a really good way to support uh you know like start
focusing on esports side of things i would have replays and you know lobbies matchmaking um and
all of that sort of stuff eventually um but yes quite right with we we will enable like token gated
um like tournaments so essentially you could have yeah like just like you said you could have
like a tournament against you know neo tokyo maybe 20 people from each community enter and then you
would do like a podium type thing um we you know i think we pitched a long time ago um because
we work closely with de-golf which is a sub-dial de-gods and they're all golfing fanatics um so
we've sort of done a load of their branded merch and stuff in our game as well so we kind of pitched
to them a long time ago that they could do their own rider cup against like links dal um because
you know they're both really big golf communities so yeah it's really exciting i think there's
there's quite a lot of stuff on our roadmap for web free focused communities and stuff as well
and equally we've got a load of stuff for like web two focused communities as well so i think
especially when the mobile builds already and stuff like that um the free-to-play routes are
going to be really good and like most free-to-play games now we've really thought about how skins will
work inside our game and how sort of like microtransactions around web two users and skins will
work and collectibles and stuff like that as well so yeah it's just just really exciting to um
yeah to work work on a project really where there's just so much innovation like there's
especially with the avatar there's so many things that have caused us headaches and it's because
there's no blueprint for it because it's not really been done before um and it just kind of seems like
every every couple of months you know someone on the team's thinking of something really innovative
that we add to the roadmap so yeah it's really exciting um and it will be a very busy few months
i can relate totally to what to what you said in the last lines especially at ultra i think it's
it's the the cost or the pains of spearheading a technology or doing something that other people
haven't done before so basically you cannot learn from other people's mistakes but you learn from
your own uh but that also presents a great opportunity to to give something to people
that they haven't seen before so and the future looks bright what can i say it sounds really
interesting can't wait to participate and to create some events inside versus x and to see
what uh what this all can look like for our community um cool is there any anything extra
that you would like to maybe mention i don't know regarding the the free mint for example
we will be giving today uh two white lists for this free mint can you give us a little bit of a
brief explanation about what comes with the with the with the mint exactly i know you have this
customizable avatar but how does that customization work does it happen later inside the game or
and do you have to randomize the mint how does it work yeah i would love to um so yeah like like you
said we got this this free mint coming up um and yeah i just want to say like it wasn't um you know
we've been working on the solution this avatar solution for i think seven months or something
like that um so it wasn't always planned to be a free man um and we've been working on it for so
long and the you know obviously we've made pivots and we've changed things along the way
but the plan was always to make um a high roller avatar so high rollers get really powerful utilities
within the ecosystem so similar to when you go to like a casino center then you're at the high
roller table and you know they're waiting when you hand and foot and stuff so we wanted people
to really want to play the game and really want to you know wager or they want to be competitive
or you know even if you just want to you know trade skins and stuff that we want it was really
important for us to give utilities um to maximize that experience in game right um and we're not
talking about uh you know pay to win where your avatar is better than other people so you're going
to win games it's nothing like that it's like reduced rake fees reduced in-game marketplace fees
you know like increased xp earnings that you can you know spend on leveling up your character
and not the attributes themselves but you know you would level up other things um and you'll also
get like a load of other stuff as well um which is you know pop into our discord if you want to
learn more about that because i don't want to list it all off right now but the other really
cool thing that was really important to us about the avatar was making it fully customizable and
chain and having this customizing customizable experience um you know is is is huge and it's not
really been done the way that we're doing it before so we have ran into you know things here
and there where we're like right how do we do this what's the best way to do this what's the
most intuitive way like you're going to get this you know so there's there's no you know like
path to follow for other people um but yeah so essentially you'll mint an avatar on magic eden
you'll get a ticket and then in a week's time or a couple weeks time post tgu you'll take that
to our website and you'll complete your minting experience um and essentially our avatars are
generated from 500 different traits inside unity that our artists have made and they're inside
unity um and basically when you uh mint an avatar obviously pull from those traits and your avatar
you'll get your to like your pfp but you'll also get your 3d rigged model in game as well
and when you mint the avatar you don't just mint the avatar you get all of the clothing that comes
with it they're all their own nfts they're like digital wearables um so if you don't like the hat
or if you don't like the jacket or if you don't like the trousers you can take them off you can
swap them with your friends you can sell them on the secondary market you know and you'll be able
to buy other skins wind skin skin you'll be able to buy other skins or wind skins in game uh you'll
be able to buy them from sort of like the shop we have like a shop refresh every week
um we're going to bring in a lot of our partners as well we're met we you know make merchandise
for them inside the game also gives us a really unique way to work with web2
and sports licensing as well like part of our tokenomics part of our marketing budget
will go towards bringing in real sports licensing into the game because it's really important to us
i think for attacking the web2 markets as well to work with like official licensing um but yeah so
fully customizable and changed so once you update your your avatar your high roller in game it
will update your pfp as well so really cool so you know if you want to support ultra and you want
to buy the ultra helmet which is super cool by the way um you know then you can potentially
win that or unlock it or however it's going to be distributed or buy it from the secondary if you
missed out um and then yeah you can you you can play on your character and then it will update your
pfp as well um so yeah really really cool really fun um and we got lots of other stuff you know
in store for future but like i said we we've been building this for a long time
sorry i got a call there i think i might have rugged a little bit um but yes potentially
a service that we will license out you know to other people in future potentially um but yeah we
is a very limited collection there's only a thousand avatars um and we wanted to do a guaranteed
whitelist which is why we can only give two away today so apologies about the limited supply um
but yeah i hope you know even if you guys don't make the whitelist just come check the project
out come check the avatars out you know um and even if you don't get an avatar or
you know you can't afford the secondary or you're not sure you can still have the whole customizable
experience in game you still create a default avatar um you can still change all your clothes
in game and stuff like that you just won't have the utilities that come with that avatar and you
won't have you know the pfp that updates when you um customize the avatar but but yeah there's
there's also loads of other stuff so again if you guys are interested and you want to learn more
please jump into the discord because that's where most of our information is sounds great Louie and
no need to follow there's two whitelists more than enough it's like almost 10 percent of the listeners
here so it's great always happy to you know be able to share these opportunities and then yeah
thank you so much i think we've covered pretty much everything of the general scope of how this
is going to work on ultra and what is coming for the future for a versus x versus x and it does
sound pretty exciting i can't wait to get my hands on it try it out myself maybe make an avatar or
at least customize one or buy some you know clothing parts later to add to my avatar but
yeah that sounds great and um i do i must warn you though i am pretty good at these mini games
um especially the carding one so if you see uh avatar called patrick in the game just be
be careful tell the tell the guys at nail turkey that they should you know
but yeah um i appreciate everyone for tuning in today as well and um yeah thanks for the
thanks for having us up as well cheers patrick but before you go please the most exciting part
for the community is i always like to give the guests the opportunity to pick two winners so if
you would be so kind just randomly go through the the people listening here and just pick
two random people out of the crowd and those would be the lucky winners that will later
need to dm me and twitter your polygon address so if you would be so kind louis you want me to pick
you can pick one out this is this is a lot of pressure i'm um i'm not gonna lie i know that
there's a big french influence with um with ultra um and my my partner's french as well
so she would she would probably kill me if i didn't take one of the uh look there's an
eiffel tower there you don't get much more french than that someone fabio oh okay great
so we have the first winner we have fabio congratulations and i think i'm going to
uh pick the second one the thing is i know almost everybody here so it might seem almost
unfair and you want to pick the second one just like random okay okay let's go let's go
um let's go white boy go on then that was that was a lot of pressure i wasn't expecting all this
pressure no worries no worries it's part of the spice of these twitter spaces and thank
you so much okay we we have two winners we have fabio and white boy what a lucky week it has
been for white boy congrats man double winning this week and yeah thank you so much louis it's
been great and really enjoyed it and i wish you know all the best in the coming weeks you know
with the mint and the launch of the game cheers thank you very much cheers everyone overall
thank you thank you everybody for joining in have a great day