Gunzilla Games: Delivering on the Mainstream Promise

Transcript

you're now plugged in to the deli podcast how is it going everyone I have uh been out of the out of the podcast circuit for a little minute but I um could not be more excited uh to be back today with Vlad the founder and CEO of gonzilla games Vlad is a real force of nature that I've had the pleasure of getting to know much better over the last uh six or seven months and um yeah very excited by everything they're building so Vlad pleasure to have you here um very excited to have you on it's a great pleasure to be invited uh on this interview and thank you pierce thank you for having me here and it's a great pleasure to know you uh thank you absolutely so vlad's been a little under

the weather um but he's persevered to make sure he can make it today um and I'm very excited for all of you guys to hear a little bit more from him so Vlad maybe you could kick it off a little bit and um give us a bit of a a background on you um you know where did you come from uh what have you worked on historically prior to Godzilla sure we'll start with a quick introduction to my story so I started actually I started my career in fintech where I spent around seven years and one of the major achievements which I achieved was the creation of one of the biggest Payment Systems in Europe uh where which I started as a co-founder and technical director uh and after really getting tired of um you know strict Financial restrictions in um running such business

and actually lack of daily excitement I moved to gaming space where I'm already now for almost 10 years and uh probably uh it's worth it's worth mentioning that before starting gonzilla uh I co-founded several other companies in gaming space one of them is the biggest social network uh for gamers which is called plink which has 18 million users with 70% of uh its audience in the based in the US with more than 200,000 monthly paying customers um other companies worth mentioning of course uh the studio which stood behind the creation of Warface which myself and

my business partner Alex which we operated and managed for many years running one of the biggest one of the biggest free-to-play multiplayer Shooters in the world uh which United more than 140 million users worldwide and made more than billion dollars in Revenue also worth mentioning uh The Voice communication uh uh company which provides voice coms tools for triaa game developers and for mobile apps called sonus today and uh this is something everything what I mentioned crafted me to become the Creator and co-founder uh and the showrunner uh of

Godzilla games today amazing so yeah I mean clearly um you know had a large degree of success in in various other business vent um especially in gaming as well like what uh what kind of drove you to it right uh what was what was the initial impetus towards Godzilla um you know I believe you put made a pretty substantial personal investment as well to get this thing off the ground like um yeah would love to learn a little bit more about what you Dr what drove you to it there was a passionate gamer from my childhood and my PC was my best friend when I was a child uh Pierce I think that you spent lots of uh years in front of your PC playing games as well and uh since I started uh since I joined the gaming space I felt myself truly uh

satisfied with what I'm doing daily and um the gonzilla our gonzilla journey with my uh business partners started uh started from Warface and uh the first idea was to create the general idea of the creation of gonzilla games was to create the next big thing in gaming space based on all our proven EXP experience in Warface this is why Warface uh became most of all popular on the Emerging Markets such as CIS region Eastern Europe Brazil turkey and many others and the dream was to make the number one multipler shooter uh for the Western Market and we understood to uh

achieve this aim the new studio which we would open uh and we we came up to this idea at the moment when we at the same moment when we had when we operated in run Warface was to create the studio in Frankfurt Germany where it would be easier to uh relocate best experts from all over the world to work on the new IP and uh on a completely new shooter game so this is how it's uh it has all started uh so this is how it's all started with the dream and understanding what do we need to make the number one multiplayer shooter for Western markets

for worldwide Market because we knew that uh with Warface with um uh first of also worth mentioning that Warface by this moment was a seven years old game which was built on cry engine and uh which utilized pretty old version of this engine and uh for us it was pretty difficult to make a huge step forward in visuals and uh in our vision of the future game design which people um worldwide and so then let's yeah sort of fast forward five years I think there's been almost $100 million invested in development the team's grown from that initial 100 that you guys hired up to over 370 now you guys are delivered a product that you

know I I in my waking and my dreaming life uh can't stop thinking about I'm absolutely hooked on what is Off the Grid what was the idea where are you guys right now of the GD is the next Generation multiplayer bettery shooter uh which is available now on PC Playstation Xbox and next week will be available on Mac and even mobile devices uh and even your smart TVs uh through um cloud gaming uh of the grid is the next Generation shooter which is based on our understanding of the future game design and future interests of Gamers uh Pierce in the beginning you mentioned that uh

that you enjoy that we have already delivered this experience I don't think so yes the game is available uh it's life people millions of users are already enjoying it but uh it's only a beginning of our it's a small piece of our journey of our vision and journey and this is why the current state of of our product is called Early Access and uh as you may heard publicly and heard from me and from other te team members uh we prepared lots of other huge parts of the product which is coming live in couple of months some of them in couple of weeks uh which um I'm most of all waiting for and just wanted to emphasize

that it's a small piece of something what we've been working on so hard for the last five years uh it was pretty difficult to deliver it it took us 5 years and the work of 3 70 full-time working employees across the globe to deliver OTG to our Gamers and our fans we had to establish a significant uh development budget uh I would say it's not significant for triaa games as you may know but uh for uh companies uh which I would say for VAP three gaming space is definitely one of the biggest ones

probably the biggest one and we definitely have the biggest head count uh working on this game uh it was a bumpy road uh but it it everything was worth of it and uh yeah we're proud that people are enjoying uh the first iteration the first part of what we've been crafting so hard for the last years absolutely it's always music to my ears when you emphasize that this is only such a small slice cuz I uh haven't been fully addicted to a video game in some time so even the Early Access even the play test uh it's been a it's been a pleasure to play um and so yeah I mean I guess uh it's just over a month now since launch would love if you can just give us some super high level like

snapshots of like you know what are some of the highlights you know obviously you had the sort of big console launch the big streamer campaign yeah what's really stood out uh from your mind so people can have a flavor of like yeah just the kind of scale that this has hit already in terms of interest and Buzz for people that might not follow gaming as closely sure I will try to uh share some insights about uh some insights and give some information which will be understandable for different types different categories of um viewers so first of all what's important to mention that on 8th of October um a little bit more than a month ago we launched on PlayStation and PC uh our game was available on Xbox uh only for series X users only through

Pioneers program uh and uh this pioneers program on Xbox is called uh Xbox Insider program which unfortunately has 50,000 users cap so uh for the first months uh we uh by today we haven't been able to uh provide the access to OTG to more than 50,000 users on Xbox and we are slowly rolling and out right now by the moment when this interview uh will go live probably it will be already an official information uh but what we can officially state that uh within the first days after the launch of of the grd uh only uh with this limitation on

Xbox millions of users already uh uh already uh started playing Off the Grid so we're expecting a huge uh uh add uh of a huge new user base uh after the launch of Xbox and lots of other other initiatives something else what we're really really proud of that uh as you may know OTG is a completely free-to-play experience where people are paying for extras only if they want to and uh we are proud that uh almost 10% of users within the first days after the lunch

immediately uh subscribed for OTG Pro uh and found it pretty useful and exciting experience them this is what I would like to start with maybe any I love it yeah I I mean I guess yeah um no amazing amazing numbers amazing initial launch I guess also the initial stream of push taking you to like top three on Twitch was pretty exciting number one free to-play game globally on Epic gamees store is pretty exciting um and then yeah I guess we can get into the allstars event which we just recently had as well um shortly but uh I guess to jump into kind of the game in the Creative Vision a little bit maybe you could talk us through like why you chose to tackle Battle Royale um what some of the strongest like key differentiators you took uh like going into it were and

maybe just some commentary on like you know the kind of lack of innovation we've seen in the shoo to genre broadly sure so uh uh we were and myself uh our team and myself we were pretty selective with the genre and uh I would like to start with explaining why why Battle Royale why this genre first of all from our previous experience in gaming space and uh market knowledge the number one thing which kills successful games is lack of new content at and repetitive gameplay what B Royal genre from our standpoint of view and uh I believe that this is something what

keeps and retains uh the biggest user base by the way this is the biggest user base uh this this genre has the biggest user base in multiplayer games genre so we're initially targeted the biggest chunk of multiplayer audience but what keeps it so much retained is lack of repetitive experience the beauty of the genre is that whatever you add a new content or not your each session will be pretty different and you know it very well as a fan of uh baral space uh because nobody knows with which what will be your next weapon what will be your next

what will be your teammates weapon who will be your teammate who will be your opponent who is going to appear where on the map and this is something what right away prolongs uh the stickness of user to the product so I would say this is uh reason number one number two why we chose uh this genre and the third one uh re the reason number three uh I think that there are different type of managers Founders C who are running game development companies I a type of manager who really plays games and uh Bal genre is my favorite game so I was uh you know some people may say that uh it might be a

little bit strategically not wise to make the game for yourself because I'm not a I'm not I do not represent perfectly our target audience but I can proudly say that I was making since the beginning the game of my dreams and uh after playing thousands of hours initially starting with pubg and then moving on to Apex Legends fortnite go of the Duty war zone I think that uh OTG uh is uh the essence of the best experience which I personally collected and our team members collected from other games and uh uh put it and we took this

Essence and put it on Steel roids with our vision what will work for future Battle Royale players for the next 5 to 10 years and of course it's only the beginning because to win to make the next big thing I think as in gaming space as in other uh spaces you need to be able to predict you need to be able to predict what will people love in future not today because keeping in mind how long are the development circles and how much time it takes to incorporate anything you want to add into the game with hundreds of people working on one feature you need to be able to predict uh because if you just uh you know Chase

the today's Trends you will never succeed and I think that this is something what we um what we originally uh where we originally chose the right direction as you know for example our rebirth mode rebirth mode from war zone which is an OTG Cur sorry uh which for uh massive user base uh is called rebirth mode from war zone we initially uh started creating this uh game mode with calling it uh with calling it extraction Royale and after we after we recognize that Call of Duty war zone added it later fortnite added

it then Apex Legends added it we understood that we managed to predict what will be popular and um the idea behind the creation or the creation first of all of these game mode before the full battle royale experience was to uh create a more casual way for gamers to play the game because uh the um the more hardcoree experience is uh the more difficult is to retain these people yeah probably totally and then and then yeah I guess to get specific on some of the um like key like gameplay mechanics that you guys arrived at like talk us through the Cyber liims for example right that's like one of my favorite things about this game

that and the movement I must say and I know that was uh you know one of your Creations one of your ideas maybe you can talk us through where that idea came from and and sort of like yeah why that's become so cool you know it's funny to say I've never I I don't remember if I discussed it with you personally before or uh I I definitely have never shared it personally but uh the first time uh this idea came up to my mind around 8 years ago uh at this moment um we didn't have gonzilla and uh we planned to co-develop this game style with other Studios and I remember how I sent uh the pach deck of this game to Amazon games with exactly it at this moment it was a mix between Battle

Royale and uh just open World experience but it was based on replaceable cyber lims and again the idea was that after playing OverWatch after playing hero Shooters after playing Team Fortress again for thousands of hours as well I thought that Gamers need uh so Gamers need the experience which would avoid repetitiveness so the idea behind the creation of the Cyber lims replaceable cyber lims is that you would never know which hero you will build in the next in the next session so it makes the exper experience completely unpredictable and makes you stay in the game much longer so uh yeah this idea is already 8 years

long I never knew you cannot imagine how many uh challenges we had uh during the delivery process uh to our product of connecting cyber lims I remember that we spent around eight months only on the visual research how to create the art uh representation of connecting Limbs and at this moment we even added plenty of completely different concept artists to create this idea but this is how it started with it started with a desire to create a new experience and now it's represented uh in this feature which is completely different totally no I love that I love the dynamism it drives and one of the things like you know you were

saying when I first started playing as well is to just like jump in try all the different Limbs and like I think you guys have done a really good job of like trying to push you know that all of them are viable depending on your style right and like it allows like right now sure there are ones that are sort of meta but there's like multiple of them right and people will have like different preferences and I yeah I love the the dynamism it gives rise to and as I say like the movement the jetpack being able to get around the map the way you can is something that really really stands out you mentioned taking eight months to kind of nail the um you know uh visual style how it would all work the actual mechanics of having these fim systems that's quite a nice segue into um you

know kind of the sort of creative direction of the project I think one of the things that's incredibly unique is uh you having Neil Blom camp on board um you know is a a director of a ton of sort of cult Sci-Fi movies and most recently Grand Turismo um as well as sort of like Richard Morgan writing the narrative piece who wrote aled carbon and and shalto who works very closely with Neil and has been in all of his films maybe you could talk us through the origin story of that and and how these guys came to be um you know so intimately tied into kind of the creative and artistic direction of this universe you know I'm I I've always been a huge fan of sci-fi genre and of course I think that's everyone in the world who loves this genre knows Neil and knows

his work because it's it has always been uh I would say uh something super different and recognizable his films like elium chappie District 9 I watched hundreds of times at least chappie in the beginning I remember when sorry chappy uh uh District 9 and chappie by the way enjoyed enjoyed it um a lot as well and uh since we started to create OTG I knew that we would be that we wanted to aim to nearby future uh in our own um Creative Vision there was a reason why also monetization wise it was it's much easier to make uh content

applicable to wider audience if you uh use nowadays recognizable assets so for example if you create a future istic Blaster shooting sci-fi rifle it's much more difficult to sell it than a modified AK-47 with different futuristic cables on it this is the reality of the space and uh this is why we chose nearby future and of course there was we couldn't find any better visual representation than aium for our game um except uh of course the exos skelet exoskeleton technology which uh I didn't like for our game from the very

beginning uh because I thought that it was adding too much weight to uh each character and it would make uh robots from characters but we wanted them to be human beings with modified body parts always this is why we started to cover the whole office with different concept art from elium and from District 9 and from chappi for many months and our artists at gonzilla started to create all content I always said Neil boom Cam's films chappie District nism this is our Target this is how the game should look like and six months later uh we our uh Universe Creator and our script writer Richard Morgan who joined

gonzilla by the way since the very beginning since the first days of the creation of gonzilla games uh he by himself without asking me decided to who send the first script and the universe description of OTG to Neil just using his email he uh uh they were not connected before so he just used his email and sent him the script and the universe description and shared that we worked on this game for already almost a year Neil immediately responded uh he was first of all uh as I remember um caught by the by our space elevator on our Earth uh on our um chrop

Island on our version of earth right there we go and uh yeah it was a I remember every day it was a real magic I I I could not imagine that Oscar nominee and my one of my at Le what my favorite sci-fi movie director one of my favorite movie directors of all time decided to work with me and Co co-found gonzilla games and run this company and run this product uh I couldn't imagine and couldn't believe in this um for many months uh in the beginning when Neil joined us but uh there is a very special story which stood behind Neil joined us

because before he officially joined us um he came to our Warface studio uh in ke at this moment uh I was in ke uh we were based in between Frankfurt and Keef at this time and we decided to make a trip to Cher noile and uh we took the major core members of our team Neil rent a bus and went into the most hardcore locations in chair mobile uh and just to explore it and find extra inspiration and I think that this special moment the special day and this place is really unique uh you everyone who watched HBO

uh serious um called chernobil can imagine what happened there what a disaster happened there but it affected the region so much and it became like a parallel world I can talk about it later why but this special moment United Neil our team myself into one creature I think and since that uh moment Neil joined us officially and started uh taking over the uh Universe creation the visual style and today everything what players visually interact with and here by the way all cut scenes weapons characters environments music everything what

players uh no everything uh except game design Neil directs each asset literally creating the name of each weapon uh signs of the the creation of each weapon attack attachment uh so this is his baby as mine and yeah this is how it all started with uh Richard Morgan's email uh so without Richard Neil would not be here yeah it's amazing um it's such a cool yeah story of their involvement and then yeah having uh Neil and and shelto so intimately involved is is really cool to see you know both my yeah headquarter Studio visits have been awesome to to hang out with those guys

spend time with them and see uh yeah the passion that's clearly there I think one thing I'd emphasize from from my perspective as well is that like um as you say it's been a Monumental push getting like the Early Access getting extraction Royale where it is like the amount of that creative Direction that's still to come in the game is something that excites me enormously right obviously it's a a bit of a different Beast to making movies and so I think um yeah I think that the feedback loops might be slightly longer but very excited to see what comes Downstream with that um I wanted to move then into a bit more of like the kind of like business strategy and techn ology behind all this stuff so maybe you could talk like the I think the first most standout thing very obviously right is that this

is the first game with an Unchained footprint to ever be approved on consoles right you guys have absolutely nailed the launch in terms of Optics with the mainstream you know you've had like the buying and the blessing of all the big streamers around this like taking a step back like what Drew you to this originally um and and tell us about like your philosophy and approach to it sure um for us you you called it Onin footprint uh for us uh the main intention to create uh community-driven e to use blockchain let's say to use blockchain in OTG is to create a community-driven economy and there is very deep reason why when we used to run Warface at the first time when first generation of crypto gaming

chains appeared around 5 years ago six years ago maybe seven years ago they started to come to us and offer us to move War Phase economy and put it on chain and at this moment we analyzed uh the potential of putting of making all assets limited and giving the control over the assets to users and we found it pretty pretty promising but the problem was that when you have a product which makes a millions of dollars per month of profits on the established proven economy model mod first of all what you're afraid of most of all is not to

make more money but to lose these profits because it's very difficult extremely difficult to build a sustainable economy model not only for players but for for the developer and this is why we understood to fully utilize all of the advantages of blockchain and making community-driven economy the game should be created from a scratch we knew this and this is why OTG was designed from a scratch to incorporate community-driven economy and there is a reason why because we at the moment when we create any feature limbs uh loadouts narrative everything what we do in the end should lead to higher

conversion rates conversion rates to keep users longer in your product to make them pay more to make them enjoy the game more to invite more friends to stay longer in your product and for us a community-driven economy where we could only build it by using blockchain uh first of all uh affected the long-term retention of users because when each user has an opportunity in each match to find something super valuable probably worth of asset which is worth of thousands of dollars this user will have a extra incentive to play one more night to stay one more hour

um in the session and increase long-term retention rates this is the first reason and the second one lots of people forget the definition of triaa games Pier may I ask you what do you think how do you treat triaa games if the first not the official description but what does it mean for you I think it all stems down to like production budget right and like the scale of these things is the most like obvious uh high level one that most people revolve around you know uh this is probably uh the most common definition which people come up with but I think that this is something what people forget and first of all developers forget because triaa games used to meant that it is going that this product is pushing the boundaries

somewhere in design in art in uh for example for me max pain was pushing the boundaries right crisis was pushing the boundaries Far Cry was pushing the boundaries in art in game design in many other areas but today any game with big budget is a AAA game so we try to innovate and push boundaries everywhere we from the very beginning aim to make the best visuals in Battle Royal genre I know that lots of people will think right now you manage to do this with um but decrease the performance a lot what we're fixing right now and improving the optimization

but uh this new take on the community driving economy we believe it's going to be the next generation of the way how people will monetize their products and increase involvement of their customers in this product and we made a bet on it we truly with our hearts and souls believe that this is what we as Gamers as players would like to have this is why OTG probably is the most consumer oriented game because you cannot buy anything from us any asset any weapon any skin any body part except our monthly subscription which basically provides

you access to increase the earning rate of your currency in- game currency gun tokens and um and provides you access to Unique content which can also be obtained by playing the game and by earning the currency so yeah I mean love all of that I mean I wonder if there's anything you can share with us in terms of um yeah like navigating that console approval process right because obviously there was something about the purity of your vision and the sincerity with which you communicated it that made you guys the first ones to do it obviously as I say bridging that Gap to the big streamers to the mainstream has been a huge ordeal like what would you say was different about what you guys did that has allowed

this to come to fruition you know I would still say that um there there is something what we would like to call our secret sauce and do not share in front of all our opponents right now quite right quite right what I can share sorry for my voice is After All Star Event uh I'm a little bit losing it no I appreciate you being here Vlad but what I can share that the re the most difficult reason this is something what I would like what I can officially State the most important the most difficult reason why gonzilla is the first and I believe in the nearby future will be the only company uh the only uh company which delivered web three game to consoles is that the

development process just to bring your game to PlayStation or exbox is extremely difficult guidelines not even related to web 3 component are crazy difficult and requires um huge resources as internal as external and just just for you to know that uh I don't know our legal um will probably say that I cannot share this but um it takes a huge time just to set up the development process using development kits special Hardware which is uh which need need to be used to create your game for Playstation Xbox

the preparation process to start the development takes at least half a year just to start doing something there on PC you can do whatever you want with your product but when you get uh to uh when you start using Playstation Xbox as a Marketplace for your product this is uh where the all additional time um uh starts to be needed to deliver any new future for people who who have ever developed their products for iOS uh or Android where they where they know that you need to verify each step each feature which which you add with third

party they probably easier understand what does it mean um this is the reason why I think um gonzilla is unique because you need a lot of people and a lot of resources and a lot of experience to Simply Be able to launch it on PlayStation and Xbox plus the gonzilla secret source which we won't share with yeah and then um I get also just like you know uh you know I've heard you before say that you want to make a big push to having like as much data around the economy exist on chain kind of the transparency that comes with the marketplace infrastructure could you could we maybe double click a little bit on kind of your rationale behind all of that and and maybe even just from your perspective as a game and what really

stood out as it relates to that sure so the initial idea was to provide the unprecedent transparency as for our investors as for our community and consumers because how Gamers can believe that their asset is unique and one of the kind and only they own it without seeing the whole picture right without seeing how many specific weapons were ever Meed and who they belong to right this is why everything what happens in OTG is based on chain and is absolutely transparent through our block scner as for our investors as for our community

so we made it transparent for everyone to analyze everything what's happening under the hood of the game let's talk about our investors so as you as you know gonzilla has more than100 million development budget uh and I think what is pretty unique in this story that myself and my business partner co-founder Alex put uh the initial uh development budget for this company for the first two years uh which made the story a bit different at least uh comparing to many other companies so we bootstrapped initially and funded the development for the first two years before we raised any dollar from our investors and step two was to provide a

development budget um for our product um for our product and uh at this step yeah I I cannot of course disclose all the whole uh picture but what I can say that we decided to make the whole economy and everything what's happening monetization wise in OTG completely transparent as for our consumers as for our investors as to our investors so our investors are seeing life every time when players are buying this the subscription every time when they're buying the assets who are they paying the transaction fees who are they paying the royalties so the full

economy is completely transparent for everyone and this is why I believe this is the reason why people believe in it and trust it uh this was the initial take on this I love that um and then yeah I guess also want to touch on um you know crypto is a bit of a double-edged blade right on the one hand the kind of like transparency is amazing that it opens up uh obviously I like this sort like digital property rights actual ownership in these economies is like a huge PLL for lots of people but a lot of people p back around the whole like speculation element like obviously crypto is this hot ball and money that can come in and have like an adverse impact on an economy there's also the capacity for like hoarding and people playing more

complex kind of economic strategies with these different economies and so um maybe you could talk us through how you sort of balance all of this out and ensure that this is you know a best-in-class experience for users and they're not just getting dumped on by someone who's bought up all of the Epic Cals in the game not naming names sure so I think that I can share our philosophy which stands behind it So to avoid speculation which can be made as with first of all with our token the first step which we made is to break the direct connection between the token price and the value of our Assets in OTG so what does it mean if gun token not if when gun token when the price of gun

token may increase to be absolutely um yeah eligible to uh statements uh the the price of in-game Assets in OTG will never Skyrocket because all of the prices in OTG are selected by our community so they select the price in real world currency for example they they believe that they that their unique weapon is worth of $500 and users are paying the price for for for this asset based on the current price uh of our token uh inside of the game which is not directly tied to the

price of the token in uh on which won't be directly tied to the price of our token on the exchanges and on the open market this is what I believe is the number one initiative which um uh which um doesn't emphasize the speculation around your uh token which can uh um decrease the positive experience of your community while we we want our community to speculate around ingame assets we want them to predict which weapons which body skins which body parts W which uh some of them uh

become not available in the next weeks next days which of them will Skyrocket and be will become beloved by the community most of all this is something what other games are already doing in web3 space without making this experience convenient and uh eligible to local um uh local legal rules so for example in Steam you can sell for uh real world currency in game assets but you're using Shady websites and um Shady websites and uh other um non-compliance Solutions which um non-compliance Solutions which uh this Marketplace are

Market places are offering in OTG you can use as uh officially supported uh Market places inside of the game as uh which unfortunately currently do not allow you to withdraw our tokens uh or you can for example for example use third party nft marketplaces like openc which officially supports our token as a payment method and uh where you can directly withdraw your ingame assets from OTG and sell them or buy them and inject them into your account all these features are available uh with just one remark that you need to be the you need to be the owner of OTG Pro subscription

which can be acquired with our gun token by simply playing the game uh by simply playing the game so uh I just to summarize um this experience I think that um our major uh aim was to create the economy not based on crypto market trends so gonzilla games and all the Greet won't benefit directly right away from bull markets but want to lose its value of this component when something is wrong with the market because the value of our token is based not on the hype but based

on the need of our users to uh pay for their experience in our product and we believe this is the only legitimate and proven way to build long-term sustainable economy and business gonzilla is a business it's not a speculative uh uh pump dump story which many people uh no Evol that's what I think people need to realize is a game of this caliber that I believe is going to compete in the big leagues well is competing in the big leagues with the apex's the the war zones the biggest battle Royals on the planet like the idea that you have total insight into the economy's function and like such granularity around transaction types you

know how battle pass subscriptions are trending over time and are obviously fully liquid in the asset that has the entitlement to the to those rev shares is like an insanely attractive setup so yeah totally aligned there one thing yeah sorry for interrupting but I need to do it one more time I just received the message it will be already obvious information but we have just become game of the year on games uh Awards uh games love to hear there we go the games with GG Awards um yeah well very well deserved and uh I'm sure there's plenty more to come um what one of the things I uh wanted to touch on is around like the goto Market strategy and and kind of the philosophy around that because you know building a AAA game is one thing from a

resource perspective and then marketing it is another right these days you can sort of budget 50% of your total budget towards Marketing in the AAA category and so I'd love to learn a bit more about your philosophy behind that um and what you guys are doing differently you know um yeah maybe you could talk us through the initial launch campaign and and also stuff like all stars sure um you know in the very beginning of my career uh building when I started to build consumer products like plink um uh since I started to spend first budgets on acquiring users I always was aiming for the lowest uh price for the user acquisition lowest price per user right this is something what any company is uh looking for probably right but a little bit later on

I understood that there is another very important subject which is called brand awareness and product awareness and this is something what cannot be counted directly right away today you cannot say how it affects your price per install right or you cannot today even say how it will affect the LTV the uh Revenue which which are going to make with your product but this is something what just needs to be done if you're aiming to become the global leader in your industry especially in our genre so something what we're looking today first of all for we're looking for our stickness um rates for our audience such

as retention chor LTV of our users and non-stop working on improving these numbers this is something what uh I believe even fortnite is doing daily this is a continuous non-stop work of forever improving cohorts of your users and improving their experience and make them stay longer pay more and enjoy the product more this is something what I mentioned uh though there are other initiatives as I mentioned which cannot be directly uh um analyzed uh and sorry not directly analyzed but won't make as much results today but long term they will work much more the recent launch uh

much more results so the recent launch of our uh All Stars event this is the clear sign for the whole Market that OTG is here not to only become a casual experience for your um night session but this is the game this is the the product to which many many gamers streamers uh gaming celebrities can make a career in and we're here to create monthly events which will make which will reward people who will decide to build their career as streamers as professional gamers in OTG it's something not special this is something

what we have done what we did with uh Warface many times we also had uh a water a live event live esport tournaments uh all other games are doing this it's not something special what what we have done uh to be absolutely transparent uh we are not doing anything extraordinary for traditional games for web3 space probably yes but not for traditional games we're following their best practices with our own take on this uh of course based on um of course based on uh our experience achieved um achieved before so um I just wanted to share that uh the recent

events the all stars events from our standpoint of view became super successful uh we had more twitch view T TW twitch ters I wanted to say ters yeah it will be a new Godzilla uh metrix ters so we had 140,000 concurrent viewers of our event for five hours uh Peak it at Peak it was 140,000 and it's basically more than we had at the lunch day of our game and uh imagine this event happening several times per month uh in different regions of the world and for gonzilla just to be absolutely transparent it's much more

cheaper to run this event than to run an initial marketing campaign because streamers and our attendees they're fighting for the reward which overall is uh this amount is much smaller than you would pay for uniting all of these people just to stream your game so it's an extra step in decreasing our user acquisition prices and creating long-term commitment for community members and leading streamers uh celebrities from gaming space to associate themsel with this game and continue playing it we're planning to build a tional substantial um viewership daily viewership on Twitch but it

requires uh the creation of long-term incentives for people who are streaming your game besides of enjoying it this is what we're working on right now no I love it um yeah the inaugural All Stars event from early this week was awesome to see um you know had a a bunch of the guys that I've watched in various Pro tournaments around the world there and um everyone seemed to love it I thought the way you guys structured it in terms of the prize pool breakdown and whatnot was was incredibly well done could you maybe just just before we move on also touch on like the daily in-game tournaments as well right because a lot of people who don't have massive audiences uh competing on daily leaderboards uh I don't know whether everyone knows this but there's an eight hour window every day and basically where people rank in those leaderboards

during that period is an entitlement to some portion of a prize pool and it's been amazing from my perspective to see like you know hobbyist D gen players that are like in in the team that I play as a part of Team merciless shout out absolutely crushing the leaderboards at the moment seeing all those guys get so excited about and what that does for engagement and like stimulation um it feels like a bit of a different objective somewhat than the big like flashy Pro event so maybe you could talk us through that one as well sure it's another step in increasing retention rate of our users this is something what also our competitors have for example fortnite has daily cash caps which allows which this tournaments allow users to make to earn cash rewards for simply playing the game this is another initiative which we're Inc which we have

Incorporated ated to increase the stickness of our audience the more they stay the more they pay it's very simple rule and uh this is what we're aiming for nice I uh yeah I'd love to hear all that um and yeah kind of before you head into some of the like uh you know Future Vision around this I wanted to um just hear any Reflections from you like raising you know 100 Mil by whatever typical budget like development budgets from big studios isn't huge but you know taking a step back that's a massive amount of money and obviously comes with it its own challenges maybe there's any thoughts you can share on the Journey of of getting to where you have been from the raise and and kind of development perspective thank you for your question you know this is something what I wanted to hear four years ago honestly when I

when I started this journey if somebody would tell me what to do right I would want to hear this uh most of all you know when I uh so uh when we started to put our money into the company um and as I mentioned gonzilla uh was uh bootstrapped by our own by Founders money for the first two years it was so weird for us to hear about the raises of you know $60 million $70 million $100 million in teams with like 30 people and um you know probably uh lack of uh existing product which makes revenue and stuff like this for us as for

entrepreneurs with successful background of products which are making profits today so we just asked ourself why this companies why would we invest in the company which um uh so much money which uh doesn't um spend it effectively for example on the creation of the product or doesn't have a product right now um years later my um biggest learning what is is that um to make this dream to make the product of this caliber life uh there is the there is one simple rule for everyone which will work long term work

harder sleep less and do more than any other person of course we're different of course one person is a little bit smarter than other people right and they have different background different uh education different life experience Etc but these are all multi duplicators it's not the core thing the core thing is that you need to work harder be committed for H 10% and never give up uh sorry you know I moved a little bit into other area into this question because it's very personal for every entrepreneur you know uh of course gonzilla is not a journey when you know we started we put 20 mil

of our own money and just investors came to us and gave us other $80 million no we had to fought for this it was a war to come to this point and uh to deliver this game with so many challenges with receiving so many Nos and lacks of belief in us but in the end right we achieved this result we delivered what we promised and it's still only a beginning so making it more uh you know uh giving some giving more hints into what is important into this journey I think that there were several people who

believed in Us in the very beginning first of all I would like to mention Republic capital and their team who found us uh in the very beginning and believed in us and uh started to support us years ago when we started to build gonzilla I would like to personally mention uh Christian salivan who uh who first initially uh met us uh on behalf of Republic uh where uh on behalf of Republic investment fund and later on uh many years later since their investment he joined us as a as a team member and uh as one of our investors but the support of the right

people this is what you guys need uh everyone who is looking to build their own product it's all about whom your going to choose to move on with it's all about connecting the dots and uh I mean on the investor side so two main aspects probably of this sorry three main advices what are important for this first one is to work harder than anyone else and then your products will be ahead of your competitors just work harder and make your team members work harder second one decide try to find right people it might be not the biggest money right it not be the not the highest valuation but longterm right

people is everything uh in achieving your uh long-term goals and uh third one of course when you raise funds where to make your dream come true and make your Investor's dream come true put yourself on the side of investors and bring the um the offer for them which would make sense first of all for you something different from the whole market and this is what I think work for gonzilla I love that wise words from Vlad and um yeah that step one I've worked harder I mean you know a lot of people in crypto trading meme coins like to think they're

in the trenches I've seen you in battle mode over the last few months Vlad getting getting near to launch on the streamer push and everything since and it's been a yeah a hell of a testament to to who you are and and your appetite for for doing that and um it's what's given me so much confidence in in gonzilla and obviously in you and in and what's coming uh Downstream all years to come um which I'm enormously excited for and I mean that presents a lovely segue right um the future right what does what is the gonzilla journey to 100 million players look like what are the key kpis that you guys are tracking for the next 12 months um yeah tell us a bit more about the uh the Godzilla domination sure so first of all right now our product is Ono the polishing live phase

we haven't delivered the full amount of content it's a small piece of everything what we uh what we have uh been working on for 5 years for now so uh our number one priority is to polish the product based on and uh prepare it for step two to growth from tens of millions of users to hundreds millions of users by incorporating uh hot fixes and our user based feedback and launching the missing parts of our products such as our community-driven economy our token hasn't been launched yet it will be launched soon uh and it will not only become a uh

it will not only BN uh give it will not only give a birth to our community-driven economy but it will become a home for other gaming Studios which are planning to incorporate Community Driven economies into their products what we are waiting for so much uh so we believe that uh these two steps the launch of uh gzi chain the official launch of our main net and uh uh the uh the final polishing phase of our product which we're aiming to uh complete within the next several months and release the full experience of OTG this is something what uh foils our

rocket right now now before the launch of this rocket to 100 million users user base uh which were uh aiming as a step one in our strategy I love that I love that all step ones of a strategy should start with 100 million players I love it vad I you know can I just make one important note it's not about uh attracting 100 million users it's all about retaining these people and making stay and make them making them stay in rep product for years because what's important for the market because user acquisition prices are only growing your expenses on user on Tik Tok Snapchat on all of the user acquisition channels are

growing every year ltvs are uh and the revenue which you can make from user uh this Revenue doesn't grow if you do not improve your product so to earn more or just earn the same amount of money from each user you need to evolve you need need to evolve every day and become stronger and better because other guys other products other games other crypto projects they're doing this they're they're fighting with you every day whatever you sleep or eat or do not work at this moment somebody else is working on it so um this is what is really crucial uh in this user acquisition Journey you need games are

profitable when they retain users for years if it's not a consumer mobile app with a subscription when people can uh use once pay once and you can easily attract them more of them you need to retain them for years that's that's when you you you can make billions on products like this I love that may maybe just to double click on that a bit like what are some of the key like retention drivers that you're excited around like obviously um you know you've touched on like the narrative pieces coming online the broadening of the um you know to the actual bigger Battle Royale mode like uh again like having the formidable creative Direction you guys have like I'm sure people have seen on Twitter by

now the recent like save democracy skin right of having something fresh that's a bit edgy it's what I love about Godzilla you spoke earlier about not giving up a ton of control to equity investors that allows you guys to do stuff that's pushing the envelope a bit that's actually you know uh sort of non PC and a bit edgy and it's something that feels so fresh in gaming so yeah just curious about what some of the like lower hanging fruit so to speak from your perspective is in terms of driving retention to users that the player base hasn't yet seen so uh you said what you're most of all excited about but you know when you're working with uh retention in the very beginning you're most of all uh in the beginning you're uh looking for problems right not for excitement points

right and uh I would then switch this conversation to something what uh what we found out uh can improve our game a lot and make it grow even faster some learning right so um first of all of course performance is important besides of being creatively creatively one of the best visual experiences in the world it's important to uh in high uh in in in a very competitive game to deliver uh stable 60 plus FPS on consoles uh and 100 plus FPS experience on any spec

for your consumers this is something what drives retention significantly based on our experience and this is um something what um is a pretty important learning from me uh so of course we we knew that uh we're in Early Access and we're still polishing the experience and um uh OTG will only evolve in in in its performance in coming days even not only coming weeks but today audience because of the massive uh offers from other developers uh of other products they are not able to wait they're not they won't stay in your product if you don't have a proper on boarding if you they don't

stay they won't stay in your product if you don't catch them on the hook of excitement from the first seconds they're not watching the introduction the introduction videos about how to play the game you need to take them and make them go through this experience so something what's happening with um with the global consumer audience people are losing attention even faster than previously new generation of Gamers you can call them Tik tokers right they're just browsing and if something doesn't attract their attention within a second they skip it and go to other place this is a new learning so if you do not attract

attention of your user today so 5 years ago you got 30 minutes to do this today you have 2 minutes to attract the attention of your user this is the biggest learning uh and um yeah sorry I went too much into ah and other retention drivers so for of course we already found out that a significant chunk of our audience already participate in our community-driven economy because all our assets which are earned by our community members today by our gamers will be moved to the main net and will already have a real value some of the assets which um we um rewarded our early community members testers for

example participants in Pioneers program months ago almost half year ago they have the value of you know 20 20 30,000 gun thousand gun tokens uh and can be worth of thousands of dollars after the line bunch of our main net right away so uh our community-driven economy is already proven and uh affects the retention rates significantly and um another learning something what I mentioned right is this hook of your audience and their immersion as soon as possible and building their connection with the product um this is this is something

what we found as one of the biggest drivers in the retention so I can tell you for example that um our users who uh make at least one kill one uh one kill one hack extraction and one load out request within 48 hours since the launch of the game first time have 90% retention D1 and 50% retention up sorry 46% retention D7 so uh this is why something what I touched uh the onboarding of our audience and uh

introduction of this audience to uh to um to the game and making this building this hook with users right away since the launch of the game is crucial absolutely makes a lot of sense I mean there's a lot to take in right both from the mechanics perspective with the Cyber liims when you drop into this game the movement systems I think definitely the hex extraction piece we haven't really touched on here but for those that don't know hexes you can loot randomly when you're moving around the environment and you can take them to key locations on the map called extraction sites hence the name extraction Royale and basically you need to defend them for a variable amount of time based upon their Rarity and if you successfully do so you can take the item out of the game decode it and actually Minch the asset onchain for

those of you that don't know that piece to clarify um but yeah no all makes a lot of sense want to head into a few sort of closing questions here that it's been a it's been a pleasure chatting through all this I wanted to ask you straight up um what would you say is the most impactful digital experience you've ever had um you might be um it's I would say that this is something not common today uh it's not hyping but I know the even the name of this game it's a game by the way and uh I remember this day when I got this when I went through this experience it was the day when I bought the first VR headset or Playstation the first generation just when it appeared

if not mistaken my team from plink made me a birthday present many years ago and uh gifted me this made me a gift uh this um uh Playstation uh VR headset M and I remember that I you know immediately explored the whole um uh database of games and it you could barely find anything you know at this moment there was one game which was called uh Batman Arkham VR oh yeah I oh my God I remember it was a game which you could complete within two hours but uh I spent in this um I spent in this game I remember just looking

into this V headset looking at Batmobile uh during the rain for like an hour at night so when my brain felt really felt that I'm in the 3D dimension in other worlds and after an hour I understood that I'm there you know that every person who has ever touched VR knows that it's completely un comfortable to use but this experience was something what I have never experienced in my life before this digital experience and specifically this game even though I tried half life Alex after this and everything else it never you know um affected uh made made such an effect as um Batman

VR uh which was unfortunately only two hours long game yeah but it was amazing I love that though I do think the first time one experiences that like the ease with which your brain does actually surrender to being in a totally different environment and I agree right there's all these ux frictions things are janky it's uncomfortable but like it's actually surprisingly easy to trick the brain into you know thinking you're there and I'm so excited for the experimentation you know Downstream in many years to come obviously we've got those Orion glasses from metan I'm a sucker right I own all of the headsets I buy them every year I got the Apple Vision con but I am it's good fun what do you think about Apple headset I mean I think it's amazing it's such a strong glimpse into what the future's going to hold right like the first time you have

the gays tracking like whatever it is the the dynamic resolution rendering being able to just tap your fingers and click and select something how intuitive it is for the brain to like feel and interact with stuff like that that's what excited me the most um obviously like being able to pull up your laptop in there is cool you know the crazy part about it for me was I had something wrong it wouldn't let me authenticate on my account and so I contacted Apple support and someone appeared in my headset he was able to he was basically he was like diagnosing the issue for me and he goes is that a PC on your desk I was like wait what the you can see through my headset that felt like an invasion of privacy I could have naked much um but that was cool as well just

to see like even that concept of like yeah real time support where they can see what's going on through a headset as well but whatever love the engineering love the headset Big Apple Fanboy I'll always buy whatever they drop so whatever I don't really care um so you kind of touched on Batman but I wanted to ask other than Off the Grid naturally what is your all-time favorite game Half Life 2 oh nice with it uh you know I remember uh so of course the campaign was something mind-blowing I have so I started with Half Life 2 to be clear I remember I played half life F first uh chapter uh of half life but multiplayer mode but I just finished half lifee 2 campaign first and then I spent years in halflife Death Match which was freaking

amazing experience and even today I think it's it's a very uh it's a it's it's a perfect experience for um Competitive Gaming dude I totally agree I last played that like two months ago using the gravity gun I can't remember exact months ago yeah we must give it a go at some point um and then yeah I guess closing also wanted to ask what what the most impactful book you've ever read is good question you know when I uh listen to uh when I watch interviews so listen podcast I sometimes think what I would answer you know I think that during different stage of your life you have different recomend you would give different recommendations right but something what I would what I would say to everyone who

is watching us now right now is that uh the book which is called cold start Problem by which was written by and CH is an amazing goto uh plan how to uh launch any product consumers Orient or not consumer or um business oriented product today or tomorrow perfect book uh highly recommend to watch it Andrew Chen if you if you watch this uh interview thank you so much it helped me a lot to look at something what I own and what I do and analyze it and improve Pro it amazing book amazing there we go there we go well Vlad it's been a a pleasure I'm so

glad we've managed to find the time I know you're uh not in the office you've been feeling a little unwell but I I really appreciate you jumping on all the same it's been an insane amount of excitement in this launch period I'm an excited for many more um I'm pretty sure my wife's going to divorce me at this point because I won't stop wearing these guns top I'm wearing them nonstop um but uh yeah very excited for all things to come with gonzilla and um yeah super excited to be in your corner and uh it's been a pleasure chatting likewise my friends thank you so much thank you for the chat [Music]