Web3War X Finceptor AMA

Recorded: Feb. 2, 2024 Duration: 0:58:28

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Snippets

["Jingle Bells"]
Hey everyone, thanks for joining, so just wait a couple of minutes before we start.
Let's just wait for another one minute and then we're starting.
Alright, let's get the ball rolling.
How are we doing? All good Matt, well and team.
Pleasure hosting you, welcome gentlemen. Thanks for having us.
Yeah, absolutely, so let's start off with you guys introducing yourselves to our community. Would that be alright?
Alright, take it away.
Can I go first? Valentin, you want me to go? You go first and then I'll follow you in.
Me first? Yes, thank you Matt.
Hi all, happy Friday, happy to be here, thank you for being hosted.
I'm Valentin, I'm the co-founder here with Matt for Rolling Thunders and also the CTO for the company.
I'm dealing with anything on the technical product side of what we built here in Rolling Thunders,
the gaming company that was incubated by Zilliqa.
I joined Zilliqa about two years ago, I'm coming myself with about two decades plus of experience in software engineering,
business ownership and management, but I think what's most important that in the past close to seven, eight years,
I really forgot how much it is, I've been doing only gaming.
I've been with a big voice from Sledgehammer, that's a studio under Activision that builds Call of Duty.
I have my own gaming studio that went extremely well and in 2022 I ran a nice exit.
And here I am enjoying and doing Wave 3 games with my beloved partner Matt.
Oh, love to hear that. Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead Matt.
Yeah, I'm Matt Dyer, CEO, I've got kind of a dual role.
I'm CEO of Zilliqa, the blockchain, one of the OG's in the space.
I'm sure people have been here around crypto for a long time.
Well, remember Zilliqa, I think, for being the first to market with sharding,
which at the time was a first mover play and it's all about kind of driving, I guess, enterprise adoption.
I think we talked about it that time.
And I guess as we look at what we're building out with Rolling Thunders and Web 3 War,
this is a great example that talks to driving businesses on top of a blockchain that,
I guess, drive value not only for a business, but the value transfer also to the consumers
and the people that are using the technology as well.
It's a really exciting time for me and my role in terms of driving Zilliqa forward,
but importantly for this, it's really been exciting work with Valentin,
who's got a lot of pedigree in the gaming space and his clarity of thought around
what is needed to drive Web 3 gaming forward.
From a Zilliqa standpoint specifically, it was pivotal in incubating this business within Zilliqa
and then spinning it out.
And from my perspective, this is really around how do we get synergies from a business building
on your blockchain and then linking that so that that team can maximise the capability
within the layer one blockchain team.
So that's kind of how my role plays out within this.
Hopefully that gives a bit of background and I'm really excited for this EME.
Yeah, thank you guys. Thank you guys.
I mean, all of the OG's, no one appreciates Zilliqa, of course,
and the Sledgehammer did some really good Call of Duty games.
So seeing this amazing team behind and pushing this AAA title out there
really makes me happy for the Web 3 space overall.
And speaking of the title, could you guys introduce Web 3 War in your own words, perhaps?
I'll try to keep it short, okay?
It's a bet. It's a bet. It's a bet.
It's a multiplayer, first-person shooter, multiplayer-focused,
free-to-play with seasonal content game,
which uses NFTs as skins for customising your in-game assets,
like your guns, your soldiers.
That's what we have now and many other things to come in the next seasons.
That would be a very short title.
Mm-hmm. Okay, a lot of hear that.
So can you also, like you guys did introduce you to yourself,
but can you also give us a little bit of a background on your team that built this game?
I'll start with the developers from Rolling Thunder,
which are only focusing on the game development.
And then I'll pass it to Matt to talk on what we call the blockchain side
and the blockchain middle of what we call in relationship to the gaming side, okay?
So Rolling Thunder has, as a voice, besides me fully hands-on,
as a game director, slash developer, level designer, producer.
Anything is for everything sometimes in the fancy corporate titles that we have.
But the other team, the rest of the team is focusing on pure development.
We have five extremely experienced developers coming from the AAA and AA studios.
They know very well how to make games.
Plus, I have one talented 3D artist and texture that creates all those nice textures
and models that you have seen in the game.
All of these guys come from top-notch studios, like Ubisoft, Activision also,
and several others that at this moment have a big memory problem,
but they knew how to do that.
So the approach that we did in the past years has been exactly like they learned.
They are good at something.
I've put them exactly on exhibiting what they are good at,
doing the right way, I think, in my opinion.
I'll pass it to Matt.
Yeah, it's maybe just worth talking about kind of the bootstraps.
A few people have said, oh, how have you managed to deploy this
and get out so quickly in terms of what's done?
So when I did the exit for my own studio, I didn't sell all the titles.
The company that bought my stuff only cared about the games that I had on the market
and had nine games at that moment.
The rest of the prototypes, a ton of textures, a ton of material, a ton of MVPs,
meaning minimum variable products, games that were just designed
or in a good level of degree of being created, just stood there.
Just stood literally on a hard drive until I've met Matt
and we said, let's make games that works very well on the Zilliqa blockchain.
So this title, Weftrower, comes from that pool of games that were never released.
We did have to upgrade stuff.
We did have to use new shaders to upgrade to the new graphical standards
or a new Unity 3D engine, but that's more on the upgrading side.
Then we worked on the game mechanics, abating to what people are willing to do.
So we had an accelerated go-to-market mechanic just because we had a head start.
Of course, we had other things to develop and to create,
or my insanity to just kick in and say, oh, let's do that
because other games in the space are doing it.
So that would be the kickstart we had by having stuff from the past.
I see, I see.
Yeah, and then just from a Zilliqa standpoint, obviously,
Valentines got access from a shared service approach, really,
to tap into all those steeper brains around the blockchain components,
whether that's tokenization or tokenomic support,
whether that's smart contract development,
whether that's kind of other DeFi capability or understanding that's needed.
So it just allows Valentines and his team really to focus on making it a fun game
to play sprinkled in or added in with the blockchain component when it's kind of necessary.
And from my perspective, what I've kind of witnessed,
it's just allowed a lot smoother execution in terms of where the different teams are focused on.
I think a big challenge in the crypto space or blockchain space is
it's possible to do anything and everything because that is just the nature of programming.
But I think when you've got a clear and defined role in terms of what you need to execute on,
we've started to see kind of a lot more scale and execution based around that.
So that's why I think we've been so successful.
And Valentines, I don't know if you've seen a lot of the updates,
he's kind of the cadence around updates is pretty strong,
which in all honesty, don't often see in the web free space.
I think that's been important.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, go ahead, Valentines.
We have an internal joke in the company all the time that we keep saying and Matt says it to me,
I said to him that probably we should work for DHL or UPS because we keep delivering.
We do that. We keep doing that since the game was in open alpha back in June 2022.
And by the way, we haven't built only a game.
We have also our own platform that resembles team.
We call it the fusion gaming hub.
And we're going to talk a lot about that because that's the foundation,
the core part of our business, of our ecosystem and all the products down there.
So this is just the beginning with the web three more and then the rest will come through that ecosystem.
I was going to ask about that, of course.
But I wanted to ask you guys about the journey of developing web three more, but you did mention it a bit.
I also want to know how did you guys come up with web three skill to earn mechanics?
Like, can you introduce skill to earn to us?
Can you introduce it to those who don't know it yet?
How it's like, how it integrates into the game.
Got it. I had one on this one and then Matt, you can take it over.
In very less words, non-crypto, I'll put it like this.
And no pun intended for any ideas like play to work or whatever is there on the market.
But if you are good, you should be rewarded for how good you are.
As a gamer, not only as a game developer, too many times I've seen myself in the position
where I wasn't rewarded, even if I played so well, but my team wasn't doing that well.
Or I was the one carrying how gamers say.
So this idea came actually from Zirika before I joined the round.
And I said, yeah, damn, why that should be the will to do it?
Because only just to play and learn is not enough.
You are good. You should be rewarded for how good you are.
That's my two cents on how it still started, Matt.
Yeah, I think it's just a genre that we quite like.
Obviously, it actually blew up, didn't it, a few years ago around being in game grinding hard,
but potentially not really enjoying it that much.
And when you talk about value and kind of earning value from what you do,
which a lot of the times what people talk about from a Web3 perspective
in terms of the creators or people doing stuff,
having this concept that if you are good at something
and then you can earn from it and be rewarded for it,
we felt that was quite a natural genre, vertical to play in.
So we kind of looked at that and not just with Web3 War,
we've got some other titles coming in, some different other...
I think you've got... Matt.
All right, sorry. So yeah, so I think it's just whether it's Web3 War
or other games that we're looking to build,
maybe not necessarily what we're going to see from Valentin,
it's really about how can it be a skill to earn model
that rewards people for their ability.
I mean, as a gamer myself, the thing that keeps me coming back to a certain game
is how fun is the gameplay and if I'm good at it.
Because if I'm good at it, then I want to play it more.
It's like a vicious cycle.
And seeing that this is rewarded within this game
only makes me even more hyped up about this.
So I think you guys did a really good intersection
of classic first-person shooter gameplay with the skill to earn mechanics.
But I also want to ask,
how does it also ensure a level playing field for all players?
Let's say there's a noob, as in gamers works.
So will they be also rewarded?
Is it balanced a bit to keep everybody engaged?
Yeah, of course. Of course, of course, of course.
The game, first of all, is free to play.
You have that component that's there all for you.
They don't need to pay anything. They need to do anything, of course.
That's how we build the stuff.
All the stuff will have a component that will be free to play.
And by playing this free to play,
you know what happens directly to you as a gamer.
You improve your skills.
But while you improve your skills,
like we said that so-called addiction to hook you up and play even more,
we rewarded with all kinds of mechanics to progress.
Your profile has, at this moment, 150 levels.
With version 3.0 that goes live at the end of this month-ish,
it will be 200 levels.
So you have a lot of items to unlock in that progression level for your profile.
Then you have a plethora, a huge arsenal of guns,
in the game that you should play and unlock them.
Because maybe you are more on the heavy weaponry,
or maybe you are on the fast and very fast-paced shootout.
We have that.
So once you start playing with your AK-47,
you start unlocking for that specific gun all the attachments.
Once you finish the progression on that gun, boom,
you go to the next gun, the M4,
and then you unlock everything for that, and then you go to the next gun.
But maybe in the meantime, you also play with a pistol or an SMG or a sniper rifle.
Those guns also, per class, progress themselves with their own attachments.
And then we also have, like, if you play Battlefield,
and I feel like you play Battlefield in Call of Duty,
you're going to unlock medals and ribbons.
A ribbon.
Shoot three enemies from 100 meters.
That's a ribbon.
Once you shoot three guys from 100 meters, boom,
you get a ribbon like in Battlefield.
And we have now currently close to 60 ribbons like that.
Again, things for you to reward you and give you more XP points
so you can progress even more in your profile and weapon progression systems.
And even more, we have daily missions
and weekly missions.
Of course, weekly missions are a bit harder to unlock.
We need a bit more of time and more skills, maybe, to unlock them out.
But we have that exactly like in Call of Duty.
You said you played, so you have a lot of stuff to do.
And we went even more.
The moment we launch, we're going to launch now Season 1,
and the Season Pass, or Battle Pass, call it however you want.
In that season, we're going to have to unlock
after you stake our newly launched soon-to-be FPS token,
you're going to be able to unlock 15 NFTs,
15 for your guns.
And then you can go and sell them because in our Fusion Hub,
we have a multi-place with already more than 3,000 NFTs
and more to come.
They're like a huge collection to come with this new launch.
So you have like a ton of stuff to do.
And if you want to tap a bit more in this paid,
let's say paid, but it's not actually paid.
It's more staking.
Like I said, for the Battle Pass, we get these 15 NFTs.
And then we say, hey, let's be nice, guys.
Like we usually are.
Two of these NFTs, no matter if you tap into the full Battle Pass
by staking, are for free.
So in the Season 1, at level 9 and level 17, out of the 25,
you get two free NFTs.
And then you can go on the multi-place and sell them.
That's a gift that we do to people to say, yeah.
And then maybe they buy the full Battle Pass,
they acquire the full Battle Pass,
and they get access to the full list of 16 items
that they can unlock.
Still, there are what we call experience boosts
for your guns, for your profile, and for your season.
So once you unlock them and use them, just like in Call of Duty,
just like in Apex, just like in battle,
actually, so there's something for everyone, like you said.
It's really nice to see a comprehensive,
like all call-to-action items in there.
And on that note, I also want to ask,
we just mentioned FPS token, and of course,
you guys are launching it.
It's a really great ticker name, by the way.
Quite interesting.
Can you guys tell us the utility of FPS tokens?
Because there's a lot, I know.
So I said that you can stake a certain amount of the FPS tokens,
and you get access to the season pass.
That's the very first one you're going to see in the game.
Then if you go in the Fusion, in our platform,
in our hub marketplace, you're going to see NFTs
that are being sold with FPS tokens.
And then you can sell or buy FPS tokens, as I said,
with the FPS token.
Some of them are at this moment with Zill,
because we had the launch back at the end of March last year
with somewhere around like 2,000 NFTs at launch, day one.
When Fusion and the game went live with version 1.0,
we had close to 2,000 NFTs,
all of which you can buy at the moment with Zill tokens.
But now we are adding also the FPS token.
So season pass by staking, NFTs buy and sell,
and the big one actually are the ranked matches.
Ranked matches are the same matches as you used to,
only that comes with a small twist.
Teams, it's a team-based only mechanic.
It needs to be 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4,
and we stop there because more than that,
people with not so strong computer might have issues.
And we say 4v4 is enough.
Other games do the same, so let's stick with that.
And once you pay, but that's not the right word,
once you put down the fee in FPS tokens to get in,
you'll be able, if you win the match, hear me out,
if you win the match, to get 88% of the entire pool
of the fees that have been put on that match.
Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing.
That just gets me psyched up.
I'll let Matt take the stage in a few,
but my favorite card is Black Ops,
and sorry for that, it's not a sledgehammer one.
I'm a bit biased. No problem.
There were card points in there,
and they were like high roller matches.
I used to love that.
I don't know why nobody else continued that,
but it's amazing to see that,
and it's so engaging to play that.
When the stakes are high, you feel the rush,
and you actually earn something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's amazing.
To give you an example of numbers,
and I'll be fast, and then we'll give it to Matt,
so we'll talk about how the ecosystem helps the gaming,
and the gaming helps the ecosystem of Zilliqa.
Let's say we do a 1v1, now let's volunteer,
let's do 1v1, I don't care you made the game,
but let's play 1v1.
You put 10, I put 10.
You win the match, I win nothing,
because I lost.
I need to play more to get more skills, right?
But you go back with 17.6.
That's close to $1.
If the token is at 5 cents,
that's very close to $1 per one match.
Who the hell does the same like us?
So I need to be very caught on this one story, guys,
but not so many are doing this.
We're the player for a one match with almost $1
Do the math and then we'll be like,
holy shit, I can make a lot of money from that.
If you win, if you are good, if you are skilled,
you can earn, right?
And even more.
You know what happens with the money you can earn?
And I'll leave it to Matt to tell you the nice things
we have in the ecosystem of Zilliqa.
A hard act to follow, isn't it?
So just in terms of the ecosystem,
just for people to understand,
Zilliqa also has got some strong partnerships.
We've partnered with Ninjas and Pyjamas,
who are obviously an OG as well in the esports space.
We've done a big acquisition or merger actually
with a Chinese franchise, which is cool.
We've got Mad Lions, who again recently announced a merger
recently, I think in the Middle East,
who kind of owners are Overwatch out in the States
and RRQ, who are an Indonesian esports team
with over 4 million followers.
So from our perspective, being able to leverage
the professional players to play Web3 War,
to then showcase the game on a global footprint
has been really powerful activation and distribution point for us.
So when people talk about what is the value or benefit
of Zilliqa being involved in supporting so closely,
Valentin and the crew can quickly tap into those partnerships
that we've got that's important.
And even the feedback we've had from some of the players
on the teams has been really helpful in terms of kind of tuning up
some of the mechanics in the game, which I think you get to have.
I think Valentin's talked about if you do earn tokens within the game.
I think in Europe, we've got a DeFi neo bank
who allow you to kind of convert Zilliqa type tokens
or base tokens like FPS into Fiat to then buy your pizza
or whatever else you're going to buy in the weekend,
which I think is quite a cool addition.
So you start to think about the financial layers sitting under
or underpinning Web3.
Clearly, we can start to tap into those aspects from rolling thunders
and Web3 War perspective to kind of drive things out.
And yeah, that's cool.
I think Zilliqa itself, we went EVM probably about nine months ago.
We're starting to see money markets come to the fore.
We've got liquid stake and all these other things.
And when you start to think about a token economy
and supporting some of the things that Valentin's building out.
And as we start to see some more traction,
you'd like to think that game developers would look to build on Zilliqa
and then leverage this fusion platform
to kind of start to get their distribution by virtue of the fact
that Valentin's starting to get a lot of gamers on the platform.
So I think for Zilliqa as a whole, this Web3 War content
or kind of game is going to really amplify us as a place to go
to challenge the likes of Avalanche, Polygon, Solana,
who I guess do get a lot of press in terms of some of the titles that they've got.
But I think if we can get something that we're going to or we're already executing
and I think once we unlock this skill to our mechanic
in a couple of weeks post-GGE,
I think we're going to start to see a lot of coverage around what we're building
and how we're kind of rewarding and fun gameplay within the title.
So yeah, that's probably all I'm going to see on this.
Awesome, awesome guys.
I mean, really great to see that the connections Zilliqa has
and the powers Zilliqa has meet up with passionate founders
and passionate game developers to create something that will challenge,
like you said, those other chains.
And I think that since you guys also have a hub for this,
like a scheme kind of hub,
I feel like rolling thunders might be the gaming studio,
the AAA gaming studio that dominates the space.
And this is just the beginning, you know?
And also I want to challenge you to a 2v2 match for PS tokens.
The problem is, Valentin always beats me in a one-to-one.
I think you made one good point there.
I'll let Valentin maybe talk to you a little bit more.
So we've actually got placement of the fusion hub on the Microsoft store.
So when you talk about distribution and reach,
we've put in a lot of work behind the scenes
from just getting copyright stuff down,
getting the right trademarks, getting rightly registered in the right places
to enable that to happen.
You should underestimate the amount of time and effort that's gone into that
to prove that we're a legitimate gaming business.
And the byproduct of that is that, yeah, you can search your Microsoft store,
you can kind of find the fusion hub,
and then you can download and play Web3 War.
So again, a lot of people are sleeping on what we're kind of doing in this space,
but I think quite quickly people are going to start to weaken up.
So yeah, pretty excited about that as well.
For sure.
For sure.
So on that note, like, you also have partnerships with tech giants like Google
and Microsoft.
I mean, of course, that always helps.
And you also have partnerships with e-sports teams.
How does that overall benefit the ecosystem that you guys are building?
Well, I think the main angle on that one is the fact that we get validated, right?
We are the underdogs.
We are the underdogs.
Let me tell you a story.
In 2022, we've been to Game School.
We presented our game.
We had our own booth.
We presented the game.
People came to us.
Super cool.
A lot of people were right.
The next year, last year, I had issues with the fire department
and the regulations at Gamescom because too many people were lining up to play the game.
Don't believe me?
Go on the social media.
See the pictures.
We had more than hundreds of people at the same time waiting in queue to play and try the game.
Just because they heard and understood what skill to earn is,
they didn't care about NFTs.
They didn't care about blockchain.
They said, bro, it's like with my credit card.
I don't even care how the bank does it.
I want to pull the credit card, buy that stuff, get my stuff and get out of the store.
They said, bro, it's the same way.
We just take care of yourself in a very secure way.
So when you earn something, it's all yours.
It's not just a JPEG image.
It's not just a stupid image, a pixel on your screen.
It's actually in your wallet that you own.
So it helps us be validated and to increase the trust.
People are saying, yeah, okay.
And we were among the very lonely guys from the wealthy space with a product.
Delivered, published, and with enough consumers on our network.
At this moment, I have close to 70,000 registered accounts.
Are there anybody to pop up the game and tell me if they don't find others to play with or against?
Because we're starting to have a lot of traction lately.
So it's a lot.
It's a validation.
It's a reason for us to increase and go, right?
Imagine us soon enough, probably this year,
are no hard commitment to do a tournament with a big, nice prize.
And then we get these big esports teams to play the game at the tournament.
Otherwise, how could you tap into playing against these big boys?
Sorry to cut you off.
Yeah, go ahead.
I mean, you just see them on Twitch or on YouTube, on streaming, right?
When an event happens.
But if we make that tournament, then most likely we will.
This game is going towards more competitive side than anything else.
You're going to be able to play with the esports teams, maybe even against them.
And when they play the game and they tell you from a professional gamer perspective,
yeah, this is good.
This is nice.
They even ping us.
Maybe you guys improve the game for this game because the scope doesn't zoom too much
and whatever.
We get this kind of stuff even from the community.
And when we got the big chaps from Google Cloud and Microsoft and with Microsoft,
I can tell you it wasn't easy.
We spent like two months getting all the trademarks.
So we have the rights on the logos of Web3 World, of Rolling Thunder, of the Fusion Hub,
and all the other games to come up.
We then went to Microsoft.
Microsoft said, no, no, no, no, no.
Okay, you did the trademark.
Now you guys need what's called a certification from a company that needs to validate your software
before you send it to us.
And I went to a company called Digicert, and I spent them another two months.
And they went crazy to check all the things we did there.
They said, okay, it's all clear.
No malware, no viruses.
It's all good.
And then all the updates go to them and get validated and assigned.
So you know as a user of my applications that those are legit.
So if you click, right-click it, properties, you're going to see something called digital certificate.
Click that.
And you're going to see Rolling Thunder certified by Digicert and Microsoft.
And then Microsoft validated the company.
They did a background check to meet Matt and our partners.
They did even a due diligence on what we did before and what we tend to do.
Stuff like that.
And then they validated the Fusion Hub.
They said after six months, okay, guys, you're in.
How many did that?
Okay, not so many.
That's why we are very proud to say we are the only, at this moment, web free gaming platform
in the Windows Store.
And we are a partner of Microsoft, by the way.
That is a big statement.
Yep, and a true one.
I'm ready to be challenged.
I can provide any documentation.
Yeah, we need to be upfront, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, first of all, I love how upfront you were to that question.
I truly appreciate how honest that answer was.
I mean, like you mentioned the underdog mentality.
The reason we found it since that there was because of that.
Because we wanted to let people have allocations starting from $1.
Because nobody could access some of the assets that others were able to access.
So underdog mentality is something that is core and near and dear to our hearts.
And seeing that you guys come from that, like when nobody was staying at the line
and then people staying at the line, I think that should be extremely fulfilling.
I think there is no other feeling like that.
Like being undervalued and then overdelivering.
So props to you guys.
And sticking to it is not easy, of course.
But I think the best work comes out of situations like these.
Because there's so much at stake.
There's so much to lose.
And I love how down to earth that answer was.
So thank you, Valentin.
I truly appreciate that.
Always, my friend.
And we are humble.
Don't get me the wrong way.
But we need to be strong and bold on the things that we have achieved in a very small format.
On the way that a triple game, and I shall not name it,
the triple A game of the web free space has tens of millions.
And I still not see a game.
How do you think it makes me feel as a game developer, as a director of the game,
as a co-owner of the business and so on?
And also as a player.
Come on, guys.
It is the guardian game.
You have the money.
You have the part.
What's the problem?
You don't know how.
That's the actual problem.
Let me tell you, all my guys, the whole team, the whole rolling standards,
it's a gamer, everybody.
I think we have hundreds of games in our Steam libraries because we play games.
Me, especially, I play a ton of games.
So I see what's happening in the market.
I even have access to games that are not yet released.
So I don't know what is going to come from the big boys.
So I need to know, right?
How can you make something that you don't know?
You need to learn it.
I need to dive constantly in that.
Of course.
Of course.
I think that some of the problems that gamers have these days with some of these executives
making decisions on games that they do not play and they don't truly understand
and the end product does not satisfy the gamer.
So with your case, that's exactly the opposite.
And I love seeing that.
And I think that makes the entire difference.
If you like it as a gamer, that's what matters, right?
So I also want to ask, like, some of the things that excite gamers the most
and myself most, of course, is making my character my own, you know?
Customizing it.
So I know you did mention that there's a lot of customization in the game,
but can you, like, dive into it?
And also, I know that there will be cross-game skins.
So please do mention that as well.
So customizing your gun is at attachment level.
You have your gun body.
You have a scope.
You have a stock.
You have a magazine.
You have a front grip.
And you have a muzzle.
That's a lot of customization.
We are getting very close to what Call of Duty has at this moment.
So you can customize everything as a whole in respect to how you make them
based on how you play.
Maybe you want to compensate.
Maybe you want to suppress.
Maybe you like a big magazine, but you're going to walk slowly.
So you're being only affected by the way you customize the gun by the attachments,
If you put a big magazine, you're going to walk slowly, of course,
like in Call of Duty, Battlefield, and all the other nice cool games, right?
But we didn't do anything with the skins.
Skins and FTS are just customized.
Like the way they look.
Red, blue, green with a dragon with...
Oh, by the way, you should wait until we launch the new collection skins,
collection and FTS that are going to come up with Season 1.
Amazing skins that we did this time.
So you can customize this kind of elements.
On the soldier, you have stuff that goes on your head,
the way your head looks, for many reasons.
There's also diversity in the game already, by the way.
I forgot to keep saying that.
The way your body, the top side of the body looks, the pants, the boots.
And we even have some old body suits, old body NFT skins.
And again, when you put an NFT skin on your gun or your soldier,
we'll call it operating terribly.
Nothing changes.
It's just the way it looks.
It's just the fashion of it.
You don't run faster.
You don't run faster.
You don't do more damage because that's not fair.
And of course, that in skilled world, we're not going to work.
That would be stupid.
Pay to win.
Who plays that in 2024?
Nobody, right?
And on the second question you said, cross game skin NFTs.
The technology is already there.
Because the day one, we wrote the first line.
I said, let's be smart.
Let's be smart.
You know what problem I had with Call of Duty?
When the new game came out in the franchise, my skins, my achievements,
all that went to hell.
Nothing happened with that.
Thousands of hours and maybe even thousands of dollars went to Valhalla
to help whatever.
So I said, no, no, no, no.
Let's make it smart.
We have our own platform.
Let's be smart that whatever we do as a skin NFTs cross game,
the technology is already there.
Even more, the Fusion Hub as a platform,
under that we have what we call the middleware blockchain
and then comes the blockchain.
It has more security.
It has more flexibility on how we do the things in respect to your tokens,
how we do a lot of logging of things.
So we know for sure something bad happens.
And also how we deal with the NFTs.
So now if you buy a skin for your AK-47 and do licenses,
we have to call it ROK-47,
immediately once you get access to the second game called LZone,
which is also a shooter, but more on the loot shoot extract,
like Escape from Tarkov, DayZ, Rust and so on,
your skin will be there instantly
because I'm going to be sure that the gun is there.
And it's already there.
Under posters, I have the game and it looks so nice.
No spoilers yet. No images.
That's why you have a little sneak peek.
I'll do one for you.
Give me a ping on Twitter next week
and I'll give you access for you to do any screenshot.
Just for you. That's only for you.
It's an early phase. It's more like a sandbox game.
Soon enough, we're going to have a lot of other features in the game
and it's not there.
I don't have the full team allocated to the second game.
I like when I deliver something to have a good degree of quality.
I don't want to be like the day before.
You know that game?
Oh, yeah.
There you go.
There you go.
All right.
And many other games,
which I shall not name from the Web3 space.
I keep promising that they don't deliver.
So, this cost...
They are not DPS though.
Yeah, exactly.
They are not the 18 boys, but we are.
There you go.
That's the thing.
I'm a gamer, first of all.
As I said, I need to play games so I know what the hell I need to do.
Then when I implement them, I keep on...
Not my co-management.
Not in the wrong way.
But I need to know that the things are getting down from a quality level.
I put my hat, then I change my hat.
Then I'm the CTO.
Then I'm the tester.
Then I need to do that just so I know and vote for the quality there.
Hey, you do have bugs.
Everybody has bugs.
It's softer.
It's softer, right?
It happens.
But once the people tell me on Discord, on Twitter,
on whatever communication, with smoke signals,
that there is a bug somewhere, we look into that and we fix it.
That's why we added HDR, high dynamic range graphics in the game.
People said, oh, we don't like blue poly.
I have 40, 90 RTX from Nvidia.
I have HDR.
I want to see graphics.
I want all the pixels in my eyes.
We did that.
I said, wait.
Give me a month or two.
We're going to put HDR system in there.
And we have that.
I love hearing all that.
I'm glad we had the same because I feel like 10 times more connected with the game,
seeing that you guys come from this perspective.
And knowing that if I get a skin that I'm connected with,
personalized, I can get that in the next game as well,
only makes the whole experience even more tailor-made.
But I would feel more valued.
That's what people want, right?
When you play a game, you're not just an asset in there.
And I love seeing that.
I love these answers.
I mean, thank you guys for that.
It's a game for myself.
Appreciate it.
And on that note, I also want to ask you guys,
so I'm curious, a personal question.
Who's the champ in the office?
Who's the guy to beat?
Is that you, Alex?
That's definitely not me.
I have to say that I'm getting well, my friend.
Lately, one of the developers called Benny kicks my ass on a daily basis.
But, you see, we have ranked matches.
I said, okay, now there is a reason for me to play like I did
when I was a bit younger.
So I said, okay, let me show you some tricks.
The old dog knows some tricks that you don't know yet.
It's Benny the man.
I think Benny is the boy.
Benny finished 150 levels twice already.
I was like, Jesus, only by testing and playing with us.
I was like, Jesus, dude.
I was like, stop the guy, put more levels.
That's the reason we actually put more levels.
Don't tell Benny by the way.
This is really good.
I love that answer.
Amazing, amazing, guys.
And let's talk the future, though.
What are the next major milestones in what rewards roadmap?
And how do you envision the game evolving in the next few years?
We don't think about the game as a unit.
We think it as a part of an ecosystem that we want to grow.
Being a part of that means that it needs to go hand-in-hand with the next titles,
at least with the next one, which is also a shooter.
And I can vouch for being a shooter.
I know that really well.
So some parts of that of this game is to go to the other game and back and forth.
So this skin to cross game skins really works perfectly.
But on a more particular way, Web3 were going to go very strong when having seasons.
Now it's in a seasonal phase.
We don't have any more version 1 or 2 or beta or alpha before that.
So seasonal means that once at four months, a season goes live for three.
Then an interseason month, and then another season of three, and so on and so forth.
So basically, per year, we're going to have three seasons and three interseason months.
What a season means for us?
New maps, new guns, maybe new game modes, and new challenges and missions that you can do.
Because by the way, each season comes with its own challenges.
So when you achieve them, you get, again, more experience points for your season progression.
So you get, like, you know, look like, okay, I need to play more because I'm learning more, and I need to play more.
And yeah, so you are being rewarded for being better at playing the game by just playing.
So increasing data, going and improving the graphical engine, the new technologies.
There are a few things that I cannot yet talk.
We don't have yet the signed and fully that.
But we are preparing some new technologies at the whole ecosystem that are going to boost the way games look and feel and act on your machines.
Can't say that yet, what?
So technology-wise, content-wise, and our ecosystem, they need to work hand in hand with the other products.
And we are preparing, again, it's a long technology challenge for us to do what's needed for a tournament-like setup.
You know, when you see all the teams and you see them through all and that, well, that technology is not embedded in the graphical engines in Unreal and Unity.
We are using Unity, by the way.
And we need to work that out because the games are meant to be just games.
Now, if you may want to tap into that things, you need to work them.
Because I want Web 3.0 to become a Web 3.0 challenging, tournament-oriented, competing game, if you want to call it, like PUBG, like Counter Strike, like Call of Duty, and so on.
Because there isn't one, right?
Well, all the others are light years behind us.
So I want to be like that first, not only on the Microsoft Store and all that.
This is what I can tell you in the next year.
I know that for sure.
But after that, of course, adding more and more and more.
Yeah, I think just to jump in there, I think the opportunity, I guess, for guilds to kind of pivot and start playing games like Web 3.0 over the skill to earn mechanism, I think would be quite exciting.
And I think that probably will accelerate the esports type adoption, not just maybe for Web 3.0, but in a wider kind of space in terms of what we're doing would be cool.
I think another thing that we need to focus on or try and kind of grow.
We've done a couple of collaborations already with some community people, like Dr. Death is one quite prominent one in the Zilliqa ecosystem and Polygon ecosystem, where they've done a skin drop into the hub.
So from our perspective, we can start to amplify and get some more collaborations around content, around skins and NFTs would be something I'd be quite excited to see.
Because clearly, if we can start to get a get maybe more some high profile content creation, obviously that would drive more eyeballs to the platform.
And again, it's an opportunity for the creators to start to get into gaming, get access and drive revenue for themselves in terms of what they're doing.
Because clearly it's an NFT, royalties to be made and all that good stuff.
So I think there's a lot to go after. There's a lot of growth potential around what we're building and what we're kind of building out.
And I think it's probably quite a good time to move on Zilliqa and move on Web 3.0 based around this kind of really exciting project that we've currently got here.
Perfect, perfect. Great answers, guys. I mean, I really want to keep the conversation going, but I don't want to take more of your precious time.
We only have 10 minutes left. We'll get to some questions from the community. But first, I also want to ask another personal question.
Did you guys hide any Easter eggs in there? You know how gamers love it?
Of course. Still waiting for them to happen. It's more from an angle of us saying thank you to our wonderful partners, a lot of people that have been around us and made this possible.
But still, there are things that are hidden around. Don't forget, we do have an anti-cheat and anti-hacking tool embedded in the hub and in the game.
So that will not going to work. Well, at least if it works, ping me. I'm really anxious to see that if that happens.
But yeah, short answer. Yeah, we do have Easter eggs around.
Perfect, perfect. So I know you guys kind of answered this, but still, it would be nice to have a direct answer to it.
So Tunche asks, what innovations will they bring to the game to maintain its popularity in the future?
New tech all the time. As we did with the HDR, we're going to go after whatever the graphical drivers were going to bring over.
I have it also. That's for sure already happening. Content-wise, each season, we're going to bring a new theme of the way we present the whole game by itself.
New maps, new guns, new game modes, and new features.
I would like to share everything because the moment I shared back in 2022 for the smoke grenades that we are preparing to do them in color smoke, red, green, yellow, and blue,
a company called Bluehole did in PUBG the same thing.
And I was like, hmm, maybe next time I'm not going to share all the stuff we are really doing because these big boys have more manpower to do them before us.
But I challenge everybody. I challenge everybody.
Going Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 in the Profile Progression screen, go then in the Seasonal Progression screen, and then go in Web 3 World in the same screens.
And then remember that we launched the new UI back in the early summer of last year while Call of Duty was launched in the fall.
Take a look at the UI, at the User Interface. You can read me. Yeah, do that.
Just a couple of things. I think obviously game rewards are an important component.
I think the balance transitions a little bit when people start competing against others and putting up their own FPS because they think there's opportunity there.
So I think that's going to be one that drives behavior. I think at the get go, we'll probably come up with something that, I don't know, maybe to the first month or so, who's the best earner at skill to earn.
There's probably going to be a decent reward incentive going to be built around that to kind of try and drive the growth.
And as we kind of progress and understand what the drivers are to get people to keep coming back, whether that's just from gameplay, whether that's around kind of how we incentivize the reward people is one that we're going to kind of inspect, understand and kind of go out.
So yeah. Okay. Okay. That's a great answer. I mean, of course, like under the hood, there will be, I guess, a lot of like updates coming in, but keeping them quiet before you actually deliver is something, I guess, part of the company culture that you guys have always delivering.
Never like over promising, I guess. And of course, gameplay mechanics and game rewards is something that like that keeps me going back to a game.
So I love me that dopamine. So it's great to see that you guys have both of these aspects covered and will be analyzing it even further to make it even better experience for the gamers.
So love hearing that. I also want to ask, it's a simple question, but Dio asks, what system specifications are required to install or play Web3 War?
I mean, what's the bare minimum that someone can get by?
Well, I'll do it as an analogy. If you manage to play Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 1 from 2019, you can play this game also.
If you need precisely the specs, I beg your gentlemen to go on the W3W.game support system specs and there are details there.
But you need at least a 1080 Ti or from the last test we did with the Season 1 Edition 3.0 that we're going to launch anytime soon.
You need at least a 2080 RTX from Nvidia or an AMD RX 6700. I'm saying only about the video card because the game is intensive on the GPU side.
So you need that. But look, you want to play decent. You need a good internet connection. You need a good CPU also. You need to have an SSD, not a hard drive.
It is not an expensive computer after all that you need to build for this. We have even one of our players recently. I think yesterday he posted his new machine.
I was like, oh, there you go. And he was playing it on a 2K monitor at 160, 100 FPS constant. I was like, there you go, my friend.
When you have settings, by the way, we have in the settings the graphical part where you can go a bit lower if you have some blacks or a drop in FPS in frames per second.
Just drop it a bit. You don't need to see really every everything if you don't have a strong machine. Come on. What do you want? Performos, what are the pixels? You decide.
Performos is, of course, my go-to, especially when considering that there will be ranked matches where I'll be putting my FPS on stage.
So I don't give an F about the graphics at that point. I'd be more about the performance side of things. But I'd love to hear that as well.
Gentlemen, we only have five minutes left, but I don't want to take more of your time. I mean, it's been a pleasure talking with you. I've had a lot of fun in this AMA.
It's been really great getting to know you guys, the brain power and the manpower behind this amazing game. And I can't wait to play it. I can't wait for you guys to go live on Gates.
And I can't wait to do ranked matches. So I thank you again. Yeah, so that's it.
Thank you so much. Yeah. And from our perspective, yeah, thanks for everyone that's tuned in. I've seen a few faces. I've seen another ones as well. So yeah, appreciate the support and everything else.
And yeah, looking forward to getting this skill to our mechanic live and let's see how it performs in the wild. So yeah, have a great weekend, everyone.
All right. Have a great weekend, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for participating.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thanks everyone for being us today and looking forward to next time.