Inside Crypto's First Breakout Game: Off The Grid | Theodore Agranat, Gunzilla

Transcript

so the peer-to-peer Marketplace that was put into the game was at the core of the user experience to allow folks to own trade share swap their own assets to us it's not about crypto right per se right not directly about crypto it is about best of breed Technologies in this case blockchain technologies that will enhance the user experience it's all about the gamer and it's all about the gamer experience scale is the blockchain that is simply built different other L1 networks have costly transaction fees clunky user experiences and lack true adoption in Ai and onchain gaming explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.

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one place access thousands of tokens across a ethereum and more than 10 other chains instantly by using Unis swaps wallet today download it today it's available on Chrome IOS and Android hit the link in today's show notes to get started hey everyone just wanted to let you know that mantle is releasing two new assets cm eth and cook these tokens will allow the community to more easily participate in reaking and earn cook rewards in addition to other yields through meth protocol be sure to give at meth protocol follow and X to stay up to-date with the latest news in the ecosystem hey everyone Jason here there's a reason why Ledger is trusted

to secure more than 20% of the world's crypto assets today check out their newest devices The Ledger stacks and The Ledger Flex featuring the world's first secure touch screens take your security seriously hit the link in the show notes of today's episode to check out their latest devices trust me you won't regret it all right everyone welcome back to Empire we are uh we have our first gaming episode in a very long time and that is because uh gonzilla uh Godzilla's game off the grid has basically exploded onto the scene um I think uh the backstory of crypto gaming is a lot of people have been burned by a lot of different projects and I I feel like kind of since I've been in the

space for we launch blockworks 2017 people have just been kind of preaching that crypto and gaming would go together it never really actually has worked um and I do feel like Off the Grid is the first game to have kind of cracked this um I also think you guys I mean I I actually checked out the game and was able to play the game it's an amazing game um so I think that's probably the most important thing um but I think you guys have done some other really Savvy things so yeah we've got Santi here with me and then we've got uh Theo um who's LED all the crypto web three initiatives inside of Godzilla so Theo welcome to the show man thank you so much for having us appreciate it yeah man um all right I've got a bunch of questions there's going to be uh just a heads up

I'm gonna ask some really dumb questions in this episode because I'm not super deep into the gaming world so I'm just gonna ask all of my dumb questions to you and you can you can help me understand what's happening here so maybe the best place to start is tell me the the whole backstory of like gunzilla the Off the Grid game deciding to do crypto like what was the sequencing of that like when did you guys launch what's the backstory of the team like I just want to hear the full download actually absolutely w one thing that I'll preface my statements with is by saying that to us it's not about crypto right per se right not directly about crypto it is about best of breed Technologies in this case blockchain

technologies that will enhance the user experience it's all about the gamer and it's all about the gamer experience so having said that let me dive a little bit into the background Vlad corv Alexander Z and later on also NE blumm are the founders and co-founders of Godzilla games their background spans over a decade now of of gaming experience they were running ktic KF which is the most legendary gaming studio in the world and we're working on IP back then that reached 15 million Gamers and made a huge huge impact on the industry the CTO back then was Timo davidenko who built a cry engine which

was a gold standard for testing gpus and used in Far crying prices and a bunch of other very very talented individuals Vlad Corf had this vision of of asset ownership thoroughly you know early on like years and years before gonzilla was started but the way the publisher relationships worked the Publishers were not receptive to that at all so Alex and Vlad said okay well we're going to do it ourselves and that's how gonzilla was born in 2019 the founders which is incredible founded the initial development all themselves they spent 50 million of their own money from previous business Endeavors which includes by the way plink which is the largest social gamer Network in the world with 18

million users using it making over 100,000 matches per day of Gamers playing with each other they sell funded the company for the first two years got it to a 100 employees on boarded Neil Bloom cemp the legendary award- nominated film director behind such hits as District 9 chappie elium of Matt Damon and last year Grant tourism of Orlando Bloom onboarded him as a co-founder and only then did the first public race everything was from the ground up focused on One Gamer I.E user first and two what are the best technologies that will give the user the absolutely best experience and of course blockchain technology is the core of facilitating

transparency fairness asset ownership traceability trackability Etc so the peer-to-peer maret Marketplace that was put into the game was at the core of the user experience to allow folks to own trade share swap their own Assets Now fast forward you know five years of development later we had our absolutely meteoric launch on the 8th of October of Early Access on PC Playstation Xbox and since then have had over three million streamed hours over 3,300 streamers that streamed us over 98% of them completely

organically okay tell me about the actual so the game's like it's a battle royale right it's like fortnite war zone Apex um I've got uh uh Pierce from from Deli posted a great video of him just uh playing the game so I mean for people who haven't actually seen the game I'd really recommend going to watch uh the game you can watch it on YouTube or ideally you can play it the Santi I don't know if you've seen this the the the game looks amazing it looks I mean it's an incredible looking game Theo can you just tell me I mean maybe I'll just keep running this while you're talking here but absolutely yeah can you just tell tell us about the actual game before talking about the crypto elements for sure again I refer to as blockchain elements on crypto but yeah so the game

itself we call it the Battle Royale 2.0 experience what is the Battle Royale 2.0 experience well first and foremost we're the first Roy game in the world that will have 60 hours of storyline on both sides of the conflict written by none other than Richard Morgan the auor of altered carbon which was turned later on into woodwi a Netflix show by the same name he also wrote a lot of the scripts for Assassin's Creed and a bunch of other world famous games there is no Battle Royale game currently that has a storyline and one of the biggest complaints that traditional shooter players have about why they don't enjoy playing Battle Royale games is that there is no storyline I remember myself anecdotally I used to load in with you

know two my kids and my wife into a fortnite you know full play Squad session and we all had battle passes we all tried completing them I would never finish them because one of the tasks for example would be jump 10 times off of a waterfall even the first time was boring I would never finish my battle passes here we have actual real storyline where you can take on a mission another team can take on the opposite side of the mission and then you kind of battle out the mission all that happens Within the context of 150 person Battle Royale game so that's one two we have unparalleled graphics and realism I know we're getting a little bit you know of push back on the fact that you know you need higher and systems to run this but the

game looks stunning it's been nothing short of phenomenal in terms of how much of visual realism our team has been able to achieve and it's only going to get better from here and out and of course we're also are still working on optimizing for you know lower end systems and last but not least definitely not least we have this very unique limb system that gives people virtually unlimited strategic choices and decision paths right within the same gaming session so whereas other games allow you to select a variety of different weapons or allow you to select at the start of the game a specific you know ability for your character we allow the abilities to be swapped and changed in real time based on what you find on

the island that you land on T drop Island so you could have an arm that's a grappling hook you could have an arm that's a grenade launcher you could have an arm that's an energy shield and collects bullets and and shoots them back at your opponent you could have legs that make you jump really high you could have legs that make you run really fast all of those you can swap on the Fly you can also and these things create the most hilarious and funny videos online you can also shoot somebody's arm off they starting to run away they can't shoot to their right arm anymore and walk over there pick up their arm and swap their arm with your arm you could shoot somebody's legs off and they're crawling away trying to find new legs and we've actually had people crawl away with no legs and eventually find legs

and win the Horseshoe bang so those are the three kind of primary things in addition to a slew of other features that we call kind of the Battle Royale 2.0 experience but yes at the core of it you have you know multiple teams land on an island and battle for the Last Man Standing so core and core through and through a battle royale experience okay walk me through what where blockchain comes into all of this is it about a token is it about the in-game items or nfts uh is it about the marketplace like what walking through yeah what that expence like yeah so there's a lot of stuff coming that we will kind of announce closer to main that launcher

even after M launch but at the core of the experience you are landing on the island with a starter arms starter legs and just a pistol everybody's the same lands the same on the island you then proceed to explore the island and you find various different weapons limbs Etc but what you also find are what we call hexes a is a little cubes that contain items that you can then extract out of the game and then actually own those are fully kind of blockchain track items in the game it's all tied into the lore you you actually need to take this hex to a hex extraction station you need to load

it into that station that data gets sent to the space station where we have our hackers which are the validators math unus is inside the game they then validate the item and you can then if you defend your position for a long enough period of time depending on the Rarity of the hex it to be one minute it could be two minutes and you then actually get to keep that item now you finished your game you have your hex you decode your hex which again is sent to the validators for decoding once you decode the hex that you do have to pay some in game currency for that you can obtain in game you then mint the actual item on chain it then belongs completely to you for you to do with As You Wish including the ability to one add it into

your loadouts now to then call it into your gaming session later on two list it on the marketplace where you can then sell it for iname currency purchase something else that you might need more for iname currency Etc so that's really the core of the blockchain experience that facilitates asset ownership why is why is that so important to the game is it is it crucial to making the game a success is it like a nice to have I'm curious how you guys thought about this internally sure so number one I'd also be curious how much harder it made the development like are the tools ready to go or is it like this massive extra lift

where you need like 20 extra blockchain devs and it's like ah this will probably be worth it one day great question so number one we currently have 360 full-time employees so it's a really really 360 360 fulltime employees that is right um so it's a very very sizable team uh it definitely was a very large lift not only to build out the marketplace but we had to build that our own blockchain because we didn't find anything out there that really was up to the standards that we had the um we ended up going with an avalanche subnet that we highly customized that we built on top of these folks have been super super helpful with the technical support with the marketing support and everything else but we have to basically build our own chain in order for us to be able to use our own token for gas

which was essential to make the user experience very fluid and smooth and transparent and kind of abstract the blockchain components away from you know the gaming experience we had to build our own wallet we to build our own blockchain scan and we have to build our own you in-game asset Marketplace so there's a lot of heavy lifts along the way to allow for the experience to be as seamless as it is right now when you load into the game and interact with all of these components the marketplace is right inside the game for those that haven't seen it right download the game on PlayStation epic games launcher Etc but it's right there within the gaming experience completely completely integrated into the gaming experience

you don't need to leave even go to some separate website or anything else it is also fully integrated into our wallet and so on and so forth but yeah it was a very very big lift to to accomplish that and we absolutely you know had a very very large team or still have a very large team that is focusing on how to make that experience as seamless as possible and as you know removed from the gaming experience as possible so that you don't have any stumbling blocks or any friction and it's really again can't emphasize it enough all about the gamer and making sure that they have a very positive experience why did you you guys choose Avalanche so as I mentioned right they were the only blockchain that allowed us to do the really really crazy things that we wanted to do to enhance

the user experience and it starts at the core with the ability to use your own token for gas so that you don't have to bother the user with all these different tokens like for our experience right you don't have to set up a wallet you do not have to swap any tokens you don't have to onoff ramp any theat all that stuff is abstracted away an avalanche were the only guys that were able to facilitate and again I can't emphasize enough that they've been also absolutely phenomenal with their technical support their marketing support and just kind of cheering us on very very actively who else did you look at who' you who' you consider just curious so yeah getting into details but we basically we looked at everything and not just looked right we actually set up environments in our office and worked with these tools to

test out what is and it's not possible a lot of folks made a bunch of promises we tested it out didn't really work kind of halfway worked Etc Avalanche were the only ones where you know just set this works in a specific way and it worked exactly in that way and so we went went with that decision and then I might add that a lot of folks offered us you know Fair amounts of of Grants and everything else and um we chose the best technology the respective for Grants yeah what um what is the experience like for a user who for a non crypto non-blockchain I know you're calling it blockchain not crypto but for like a non onchain user like do they feel do do you automatically create a wallet for them do you that is correct yep and then do

they have private keys and can they like transfer the assets out of the game if they want to yet like what what does that actually feel like sure so number one very important to keep in mind that all of the blockchain components are completely and entirely optional you never have to interact with any of it if you don't want to but yes on the back end automatically a dedicated wallet gets set up for you where you can hold all of your assets where we hold all of the assets for you now you might have seen early this year in an unprecedented move for you know startup chain open see the native integration of the gunzi chain into their Marketplace so in the future people absolutely after

completing you know necessary uh you know steps and holding a battle pass and active battle pass subscription will be able to take self custody of their item and then do with them as they please you know shared with others Etc including connecting and listing it on the openc marketplace um so the I'd like to before jumping on here obviously the gaming category as you alluded to has been challenged right A lot of people there's been a lot of investments in crypto games there was a lot of hype we've kind of gone through the full you know hype cycle um we had axi and a bunch of others and then you know this sort of we're we're in a trough of disillusionment I I would say that your recent success is been a breath of fresh

air but there's still a lot of skepticism uh a lot of investors either don't believe anymore um maybe the tech in other places is not as robust as what you found in avalanche I'd like to just zoom out a little bit for for people to get a little bit more context um someone like you like what was it that excited you the most about web 3 and how do you see like what was it about web 3 that you it clicked for you to build a game right you guys have a ton of experience like why bother um coming into the space well again there's again several several different issues that I would like to address here number one the biggest problem with games in you know

2021 and a lot of these games that launched that people got very disillusioned with and and lost a lot of money on quite frankly um is the fact that they have these inflationary treasuries right they anticipate that they can just continue pumping out rewards that dilute Supply and that user adoption will outpace inflation and it just never does because number one they're really only targeting crypto natives you know because a regular web 2 gamer would never go through the pain of setting up a wallet 16b pneumonic phrases swapping tokens on offring Fiat you lose them at the first right setting up a wallet part and and and you're done so inflation always outpaced adoption and all of that ended inevitably where

we of course know it all ended which is with you people losing large amounts of money and that category getting a very bad rep not just with INB 3 and within 3 investors but also with traditional Gamers they like it's all a scam and scame blah blah now what did guns a little different right we do not have an inflationary treasury that pumps of rewards there's no farming there's no air drops and there won't be right it's about building a sustainable economy number one and obviously all of that focused just on a amazing experience for the gamer that's really at the core and there haven't been really games yet in web 3 that focused on the gamer first that focused on first launching a

product a real product that people enjoyed that a good product Market fit before launching a token so that's why there is no token launched you know there will be eventually but there's no token launched there's a fully playable game there's a experience that people absolutely love of irrespective of what technology it's built on and that's really what it's about yeah no absolutely I mean it a game by definition is fun and you could argue none of the games that we've seen are games they're defi farming glorified staking gamified staking gamified staking with you know yam farming back in the day was pretty fun but um then

walk us through like again the the thesis for you guys that you see in the opportunity for web 3 because clearly as you alluded to there will be a token eventually talk to us a little bit more about that so there's a bunch of things that we will you know obviously only start start addressing and talking about closer to main net and post midet but for right now really the main value proposition from our perspective of web 3 is the fully trackable and transparent ownership of in-game assets and the ability to take full custody of these assets yourself and do with them as you please I have a very interesting you know anecdotal again use case out of my

own life and that is uh our kids my my my two boys absolutely loved playing fortnite and they would earn a specific skin then load in with their friends into a squad and they would say why can't I allow my friend to wear this unique skin that I was grinding you know in season 3 and now obtained I can't even share it with them for One gaming session so super super simple use case number one number two Second Use case both my boys eventually inevitably stopped playing fortnite they spent thousands of their own hard-earned like summer job cash Etc on in-game items to them their in-game skins were most more important oftentimes even the real world close it was like that the big thing right how you look in game and when they

inevitably stopped playing they came to me and said Dad where's like the sell button like how do I get my money back I'm like what do you mean they're like I spent this money these are my assets so we had a whole thing about what a Ula is and what asset ownership means and what these corporations do currently uh so even in this very very very you know in those two simple use cases web two games do not provide a good and fair and equable experience to The Gamers that are investing a ton of time and in many cases also a ton of money into these assets right that then are lost forever so that really is at the core of why we believe that blockchain technology solves a very very cible problem and that's where we're not just in my humble

opinion revolutionizing web 3 and and and focusing on you know use a first game of first but we're also revolutionizing web too with what the actual experience should be like again anecdotally but we had like this 11-year-old kid show up at an avalanche event and go like oh yeah Off the Grid yeah yeah that's the next fortnite but the more important part of it was wow yeah I can own my own assets there I can own all my in-game items like the next generation will demand that by default from any game that is asking them to invest money and even time into the game they will demand asset ownership that's what we see as the future of weapon two gaming yeah I definitely agree with that

there are there's a contingent that is critical of that saying like Gamers don't care about setting up a wallet they don't care about this and it's just distracting why not just go build a web two game um but your point around ownership of scans and being able to trade that I think where they missed the point is you don't lead with that but it becomes important once they start playing and if it's a feature parody with a fortnite like realistically you are going to play a game that gives you the it's like it's like whip web 3 enhanced features but you don't lead with data ownership you don't lead with it ownership it just becomes a nice it's like a very good to have but you need

get him in first with the game's awesome it's feature par Y and so feature par and making everything that's blockchain completely optional that's it let's walk through a lot of your traction for me that's the most exciting I mean people know I'm very bullish on gaming I've invested in a lot of games from alivium Steep and P on axi seed round even though I really liked it um I've taken a lot of those learnings and I'm sort of like looking at what you guys are doing find it incredibly fascinating um I'd like to understand just ction like what are you seeing from your kpi dashboard like where coming from demographics as much as you're willing to share because I think that will really inform the rest of the conversation sure so a lot of that stuff right uh is still in the

process of being collected because lit just two weeks post Early Access launch uh but what we have seen and obviously everybody can see that speaking again of of of transparency and verifiability what everybody can see on our own blockchain scanner is that we are now at over 8.3 million wallets we were at less than 2.8 you know less than two and a half weeks ago so detraction has been absolutely incredible uh as I mentioned before we've seen you know millions and millions over three million hours streamed we've seen over 3,300 streamers streaming the game uh we see a very very strong you know retention we actually somebody else sent me a message this morning showing us that our trajectory really hasn't changed much even though a

very very major you know Call of Duty game launched yesterday and we're still showing very very similar traction to the day before knock on wood hopefully that stays the same um but um you know we've seen very very very very phenomenal numbers and we are only getting warmed up like a lot of people are telling us hey you're the Pinnacle of success in web three like now it's just about user acquisition Etc and we say that it's not about that for us right we're just getting warmed up the real work begins now we are on our path right to tens of millions and in the future hopefully hundreds of millions of traditional Gamers trying this game that we feel gives you the best Battle Royale experience in the world currently so yeah so so uh for that six incremental

like six million wallets that basically you just have acquired over the last couple weeks do you have a sense of what percentage are are like new to the space or what percentage are coming you are crypto native yeah so the majority of the users um are really coming in on play station obviously some of them might do crypto natives but a very very very large amount is coming in you know we see it in our Discord and saying oh hey I saw you guys on so and so stream and I just jumped in W is a really cool game so we see a lot of traction with mainstream you know audiences that come also in and say somebody says oh but there's nfts and people like I don't care like I don't

have to buy nft so what do I care how they solved you know did technology piece nobody opens up an iPhone app and says oh this is JS react I'm not going to use this app nobody cares what technology stack and app is built on and that's really what we're advocating for right it doesn't matter what the technology is it's seamless in the background if you're having a good time enjoy the game have fun so it's Essen the the from a funnel perspective sounds like PlayStation is pretty key has been for you guys any other channels that have been important for you all free channels are very important to us we seeing great traction on Xbox even though currently we're still in The Insider program we will soon leave The

Insider program The Insider program really maxed out very very quickly um and that just means that you know you have to take a lot of steps and uh it's not you know fully accessible yet to everyone we're getting getting out of insid access very shortly but Xbox is super important for us there's a ton of Xboxes worldwide PlayStation 5 is very important to us but also PC right we are the epic game store and PC is incredibly important to us let us really know you know oh this is more important than that we are on all major platforms and I might add we're the first ever blockchain enabled game to be on consoles right for users that may not have any familiarity older people that are not you just basically if you're playing PlayStation game Xbox or in PC you go to their app store you know in

the console interface you see Godzilla you click it you download it you start playing immediately you don't have to load up a wallet you don't have to any crypto stuff it's it's like if you were to survey maybe the eight million users would you say what percentage of them would you say no about the crypto component so a couple of things number one you search for Off the Grid not for gonzilla you switch for Off the Grid that is the name of the game uh and then in terms of how many know or don't know which shroud world famous streamer mentioned blockchain in our Marketplace on his stream to whatever 50,000 plus users I believe it was Ninja mentioned

you know the serialized Pokemon cards so people are absolutely number one are aware but number two amazingly enough are embracing it because everybody's talking about the fact that this is completely optional who cares what technology is used on the back end to make your user experience amazing so pretty much everyone knows because everyone is talking about it but is talking about it again in the context of number one it's optional number two this is a free to download free to play game number three there's a pay wall number four there's a peer-to-peer in-game marketplace right so yeah and uh talk to us a little bit about the role of streamers here obviously that's uh streaming as a category has been huge for gaming for people that don't know

much about it can you just give us like how important it is and specifically how important it has been for you guys absolutely so there's a couple things that come into play number one our game is incredibly entertaining to watch especially because of the Lim system where you can lose your arm you can lose your leg it's kind of very entertaining to watch that but also because of the massive Dynamic uh gaml that we have with a lot of verticality there a jetpack that you activate it can jump really high can run really fast you jump off a building activate the jet pack jetpack Zoom away you know land literally like fly into a window land make a roll it looks really really entertaining so that's one but two yeah I mean streamers um and streaming specifically is an incredibly popular

category that has grown by leaps and balance over the last couple of years so through streamers you reach a massive massive audience that doesn't really care about some ad on Google or some some ad on TV right they care about what do their Heroes play so obviously to get the fly started to get the word out there that's where we started a lot of not a lot but some people on the fringes were giving us a hard time oh people are only you know playing this game because you're paying them the streamer well no number one how you going to get the word out there right like that's how you get the word up it but number two we had streamers that were sponsored stop their sponsored stream come back half an hour later start up our game again and go

like this is amazing Tim Deton said this is my game and it was not sponsored it was epic we have a top Call of Duty war zone streamer that started his video by saying I'm not sponsored I have never even talked to the devs but checked this amazing game out and proceeded to walk through the whole game and the gaml and everything else so yeah that's very very important to us right to use streamers and their reach to get the fly will started but at the end of the day it is still about having an incredibly entertaining and immersive gaming experience I remember uh talking about like looking at a game one of the more important metrics is a viral coefficient so this is this idea of like you play

and then how much do you spread it organically with your friends and uh it sounds like there's a lot of that here um and which is great to see um and by the way every every you know sort of to to be critical of Off the Grid by paying certain streamers is dismissive like you need to appreciate that every game kind of does it it's like it's just it's just it's a marketing cost so yeah um I'm curious if you could expand a little bit on how you see um like I want to get eventually to how you make money monetization it's obviously free today um I don't know if there's anything on the kpi dashboard any insights that have really surprised you that you find would be relevant to

talk about before we transition more into kind of the company the business model and whatnot sure I guess one thing that we've been really really positively surprised by is the fact that we have people worldwide all in their own accord organizing game nights organizing little tournaments we had in Buenos Iris during the Avalanche Summits that I just attended and spoke at we had way finders GG randomly organized an event that had hundreds of people attending standing in line for hours to get a chance at participating in like this first ever little little mini tournament that they put on that was just incredible to see how passionate people are about the game how they love the game we had some

people streaming for like the first ever 36 hour non-stop streaming off playing Off the Grid we had a guy that literally went off the grid to play off the grid there's this video about this guy going into the Wilderness and playing on a laptop with a little generator it's been incredible to see how much fun right people have of the game we have people saying I actually posted it on my on my Twitter timeline there was a guy that said I played I forgot the exact numbers but thousands of hours of Apex I played thousands of hours of this time in this is the first game in 10 years that brought me back to playing that I'm having incredible fun with with people saying that for the first time ever I'm feeling again the feelings that I had

when I first started gaming I hadn't had these feelings in like a decade that's the most rewarding thing at least for me personally and I know for a very very large portion of our team like that's the most incredible feeling in the world right that you gave somebody this incredibly unique feeling that they hadn't experienced in sometimes decades that's incredibly rewarding as you were saying that I mean I grew up in a time where we organized lamb parties you know we would take our laptops we would hook up you know ethernet cable and like everyone in different rooms and we would play Counter Strike and it was like super glitchy but it was so much fun right we'd stay up all night playing it um it it's really um and by the way I I think it's important to just zoom out a bit like the gaming category as a whole

has been pretty challenged it's it's not just web three games like yeah very few games um like the gaming industry is going through a tough time not just in crypto there are very very few games that have actually made money like the latest one I mean obviously Call of Duty fort fornite World of Warcraft big franchises that have existed for a long time and the only game that has really kind of been a blockbuster recently because I love Harry Potter is like um what is it Hogwarts Legacy yep but obviously you benefited from you had such a captive audience it was a first game har Potter related they recouped I think their entire investment in the first week or two but the engagement is not there um it's a Zelda for instance as well is a pretty tough game to play

of course you benefit from the Nintendo the brand uh you know very nostalgic but um all this to say it's pretty impressive to see you guys when you say I do sympathize a lot of Gamers have just not felt that experience that they felt back in the 90s or in the early 2000s what would you attribute that to I mean obviously there's like very competent developers um there's development tools have just gotten better the graphics keep getting better but what is it about just if you were to like why is it that there haven't been like really good new games coming out I I can give you my opinion which I think is you know uh very you know kind of an accurate assessment not not not to to my

hor but I think it's a very accurate assessment so I'm a huge gamer right I started gaming on the commodor 64 you know in the early 90s and I just absolutely love this category in general but as I've gotten busier had kids and everything else uh to sit there and play single player game no matter how awesome and I love Elden rank I love miyazaki's vision and like the whole universe is just incredibly beautiful I love ghost of sushima but I haven't been able to really play these games too much because I didn't miss my friends I miss playing with my kids I miss playing with my family I miss playing with some work colleagues with friends so the single player category gets you that initial

really really big boost I buy any beautiful single player game but inevitably after a couple of weeks I just stop right so what Off the Grid of course does better in my opinion on several different levels is number one there's so much more lore there's so much more story it is so much more immersive that's like these short films that Neil made that are absolutely fantastic and incredible all the cutscenes all the kind of nuances of what you're experiencing and how it all ties in with with a bigger story are absolutely incredible you just don't get that same experience in other games but then you tie in the ability to experience that with your friends to experience completely unique and new and novel gameplay with your friends that's what I tribute the stickiness to because

all these other gaming projects you know with their huge budgets they keep year after year just reskinning this same experience right and maybe adding a tiny bit of of stuff there and people of course play them because it's like the obligatory thing to do but I think that's where really Off the Grid stands apart you know and head and shoulders Above the Rest is the incredibly immersive experience that you get as a result is this very very rich lore and you get to socialize with your friends so scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different let's face it other L1 networks have costly transaction fees that increase as the network gets busier scale has solved this problem with a gas-free scalable infrastructure where users never pay gas

fees scale was awarded the most active gaming chain in 2023 by coin Gecko and host five of the top 25 games on dap radar you should definitely check out scale I was using it the other day it really is incredible to use that's scale spelled with a K hit the link in the show notes or head on over to scale dospace ecosystem to get started today hey everyone Jason here I wanted to take a second to break down why magic Eden's getting into token trading their team is extremely concerned that crypto is still Consolidated in the hands of a few centralized exchanges who act as Gatekeepers ultimately recreating the trafi space they believe that crypto is still missing an onchain binance and

their aim is to move trading completely onchain fully decentralized they've done $6 billion in nft volume in the last 3 years and have had more than 1.4 million users visit their platform in the past year making them the number one nft platform in the market today they are the ones that can do it stay up to date with magic Eden's journey by giving them a follow on X at Magic Eden Unis swap wallet is designed to easily manage store and swap your crypto all in one place access thousands of tokens across ethereum and 10 plus chains including base arbitrum optimism and more Unis swaps wallet has built in me protection

and zero gas fees with swaps that go through Unis swap X you can also swap with the peace of mind that the code is completely open- source and independently audited download it today it's available on Chrome IOS and Android hey everyone Jason here I'm excited to tell you about meth protocol meth is a permissionless and non-custodial eth liquid staking protocol deployed on ethereum and governed by mantle meth is now the fourth largest LST with $1.3 billion in tvl and uh there are two assets releasing soon in late October and November cm eth and cook and I'm going to tell you all about them cm eth is a liquid reaking token and it will

launch in season 2 allowing users to easily participate in reaking and earn cook rewards cook is the governance token of meth protocol which will allow holders to play a pivotal role in directing the Strategic future of the protocol give meth protocol a follow on X to stay up toate with the latest news in the ecosystem earlier in today's episode I mentioned Ledger latest products the stacks and flex and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them these wallets feature the world's first secure touch screens which don't just simplify your digital transactions but also keep them extremely safe these wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a

secure offline chip you can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps choose the most trusted name in Hardware wallets and take control of your digital Security today at ledger.com or hit the link in the description of today's episode to check out their latest wallets all the more impressive because there have been select obviously success stories and it's mostly in the fast casual category or like you know people have in their commute and their you know the limited time those games obviously they see you see games get the massive scale like $100 million of Revenue month one to but the and this is where I want to go next is the the retention curve is is quite bad and has been forever in

gaming like like Zinga all the games there Angry Birds Candy Crush like you have these boom and busts that are and there's a very select uh less than 1% of the players account for like the vast disproportionate amount of Revenue that's always been a dynamic in the fast casual kind of um you know free-to-play uh games and I think this would be a good segue to just talk a little bit about the retention that you alluded to earlier what you're seeing there and how do you kind of plan to um keep users engaged and then then we talk about how you kind of plan around so I I'll say it basic on some comments that that I've seen online that

really summarize it best even if you're not a big movie fan or a big you know sci-fi fan a group of Neil Bloom Camp fans summarized it best by saying I cannot wait to play inside of a new Bloom Camp movie right so the experience that we give people is that of playing in a movie where they can literally decide the direction that this movie takes and they can really engage with this rich rich low and experience so of course as I said before we're just getting started right we are here with a foundation of content and a foundation of storyline that we're now going to build and expand

this massive massive you know NE Bloom K Universe on top of and that what's going to keep people retained right the story the lore the continued expansions that we will continuously Drive Right season one season to Etc it's a very very long-term view that we take on this building out of this massive universe and its lore and the experience that we want to give people yeah I mean you have I think you mentioned two to 300 employees right 360 but who's counting 300 well no I mean that's impressive that's a that's a village right there uh how do you like what percentage of them are um focused on the developing the lore and keeping that flywheel going uh

like what percentage of the team is is focused on that and um like just give us a sense of that produ process yeah so I don't I don't have exact numbers but of course we have Neil Bloom Kemp and his team that is focused on you know all the visuals and how the whole story kind of develops with Richard Morgan you know that is focused on you know the actual writing of the story we have of course you know our our artists that refine every single little detail of you know there's the little engine and the fire comes out on the slam Fist and all these details that technically are not necessary for the game but give you so much more of an immersive experience you know you haven't uh probably gotten into the details of the game yet but we have uh an arm that allows you to become

invisible and this arm worked beautifully it's great no problems at all but suddenly an update showed up and I literally to collect my jaw off the floor cuz the arm had these incredible animations that kind of kept going back and forth on it like completely from a technical and functional perspective unnecessary but created such an awesome feeling about just putting that arm on and running and you're seeing that animation on the arm or The Little Engine with the little fire you know bursting on the slamfist and then when you use the slam fist the fire goes out and slowly recharges and the Fire gets lit up again so we got artists that are working on the the the crazy eest details that give you the the most incredible immersive experience across

the board everywhere with every single nuance and detail of the game in this context it's also I guess important to add that everything that we that you see in the game has been painstakingly custom designed and developed we went as far as 3D printing a lot of the assets and then scanning them back in again on top of a person because it created more photo realism of the clothing naturally draping over the body and things like that it's been insane to see you know the magic that happens behind the scenes I live in Puerto Rico but I regularly go to the Frankfurt office where our headquarters are it's incredible to see the level of detail and the level of care and love and passion that our team is putting into this so yeah of course uh I want to talk about retention um

think about like what success looks like for you guys say that you fortnite has 650 million registered users a daily active are like 1.1 million so there's like a big big discrepancy um how do you think about that relationship for you guys obviously you alluded to 8 and a half million wallets how many of those are playing like what's the kpi that you most care about is it like daily um daily active players weekly monthly and how do you see that ratio and relationship evolving well so again we are not at a point yet where we have you know statistically relevant reports assembled yet because it's been only two and a half weeks out of Early Access fair enough but in my in my opinion right

what matters most is daily active that then become monthly active that then become yearly active right continue telling a story that makes people come back right that to me is the most meaningful aspect of this right in the longevity of it creating this world and this universe that people just want to spend time in that they want to spend time with their friends in um I'll seg a little bit but I saw during the pandemic my own children Right started you know going from school they went doing the school at home nobody could hang out with anyone all the social experiences started happening for multiplayer games primarily Battle Royale games all of the you know interactions uh and and in Ence social status came from what type of

skins you were able to earn in which season of the game and uh blew my mind when the first ever concert happened inside of a game which was of course marshmallow inside of fortnite and my kids would sit on the couch FaceTiming their friends halfway across the world dancing with their virtual avatars of their virtual skins in front of a virtual stage together with their friends that also dancing the virtual avatars virtual skins while being on FaceTime together and it blew my mind I was like this is how you kind of the future is shaping up to be it doesn't matter what we as as older folks or adults think about this what matters is what the next generation is using this technology for how the next generation is embracing this technology and to meet

them where they're at so coming back to your original question that's where I see you know being you know at at the Pinnacle of success which is providing these types of experiences for years if not decades to come yeah absolutely um I'd be remiss if I didn't ask uh sounds like you know developing this is not cheap uh AAA games are very expensive to produce um as much as you're willing to disclose and share but I think it would be just useful uh just for General context like how uh how long did it take you to do this I think you mentioned like over three years right that you've been kind of cooking uh I'm curious um just the evolution of the company the

cost structure fundraising and kind of how you plan to monetize and you know this this success that you've had sure so number one it's been actually five years of cooking there's a very very famous phrase in our intro that you will see once you install the game uh it's the main kind of game show host lifting his hands say it took a lot of hard work we finally did and so that's really such an appropriate phrase it's one of my favorite phrases out of the game because that's exactly a reflection of how much work it's taking and it took and will continue to take for the team to provide the absolutely best you know kind of Battle Royale 2.0 experienced Gamers uh five years in the making um close to100 million raised

over that time it is absolutely expensive to build a a title of that caliber and that quality and what's morees does that make you one of the uh one of the more well capitalized web 3 games I would think from a gaming perspective absolutely I mean there's been other games that that or other projects I would say that that did some crazy raises but I think from a gaming perspective yeah we're probably one of the best capitalized ones but that's not the most important part the most important part is that as you guys all you know see prove it in the pudding so to speak everything is built already so by the time you know we go main net everything built everyone everyone can

see and touch and and and then experience what the actual experience look like right we we we didn't leave anything on a road mapap for future development everything is built that's one two to get to your very very important question about monetization our really only monetization method is a completely optional $1199 per month battle pass OTG Pro subscription that is our main monetization method we do take a small Commission on marketpl Place transactions but the main monetization is our battle pass subscription what does that battle pass subscription get you number one we have full parody with all other battle passes out there so you get your content pack you get your you

know XP progression that allows you to claim other items as you go for the battle pass and progress on the battle pass but in addition to that it allows you something that no other battle passing but two gaming allows you to do which is to sell the items on the marketplace so that's really the main main feature that we believe will lead to and currently has shown to lead to a much higher conversion rate than a traditional battle pass would lead to but again I repeat it is completely optional so only if you want that content pack only if you want to progress on a battle pass and earn other items only if you want to be able to trade on our peer-to-peer gamer to gamer Marketplace would you purchase that subscription got it so you need the pass

to be able to have ownership and and transact these items not quite you still have ownership you still have ownership right but you cannot transact you cannot right right you got to pay to come into the marketplace you have to pay in order to sell and and in essence monetize your experience yeah got it okay thanks for clarifying that um very good and that goes live that's not currently live now is it it's sort of coming it's it's current live okay in tes it but it is currently live so on PlayStation and on PC you currently can purchase a battle pass subscription and transact on the marketplace and therefore we are one of the only web three forget know web 3

gaming one of the only web 3 games that sorry web three projects that has already revenues yeah so before even mayet is live we already have revenues nice what percentage of uh us users have paid or um these are are subscribing to this daily pass or this pass again I'll repeat to be statistically relevant will wait you know probably 60 to 90 days post Early Access uh to start kind of looking and analyzing and slicing and dicing the data but what I can say is that the conversion is significantly higher than on traditional battle passes that do not give you all these extra unique features that we have nice would you say that that's probably the most important

metric other than daily month weekly monthly and users what else is a company you know in order to continue growing developing bringing our to the market Etc absolutely I mean that is what will fund ongoing development that is what will fund the expansion of our ecosystem which is also important to touch on you know to bring other IP on to our AAA gaming chain called gunzi uh so that is all important for the continued kind of build out of this absolutely yeah on the last segment of this episod let's just transition to that because you alluded to the Token maybe that fits nicely into this kind of ecosystem that you mentioned like what is the role the token eventually and how do you see this ecosystem and other IP coming into the platform absolutely so again I love as as you might have noticed I love

compartmentalizing things so on the token side the token of course will be the gas token for the chain right no questions asked that's kind of its main utility there's some other utilities coming as well that will announce closer Dom main it but its main purpose of course is the gas token in our chain in terms of the ecosystem as I mentioned we've developed the wallet the nft marketplace the block blockchain scanner a companion app a companion game all of these things we will allow other web2 gaming Studios and potentially if you find good ones in web 3 those as well to White Label it's a permissioned chain permissioned ecosystem where we will invite very specific IP that we feel is appropriate for our ecosystem to white

label all these components help onboard them Etc and if you look at it from the perspective of a web 2 gaming studio that wants to kind of dip their toes in in web 3 and get their feet weet you know I call it web 2.1 2.5 and three and I'll explain in a second what I mean by that but if a web 2 gaming studio wants to dip the toes into that where do you think will they go right to some web 3D native chain that has you know blah blah blah thousands of TPS and this much tvl and blah whatever or to a chain that has tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of actual real Gamers that has a game on console that has you know a development team that's gaming native of course to the ladder right and that's where we will start onboarding and

helping traditional you know AAA gaming Studios get the feedb with web3 technology and by those 2.1 2.5 and three what I mean by that is that you know I call it like blockchain light you just convert all of your assets into trackable you know blockchain enabl assets you have an in-game Marketplace but that's about it you know 2.5 you add a a non-custodial wallet or self- custody wallet that the user can then extract these assets to and do with them as they wish and of course full on web three you add a sustainable you know token economy and that's the journey that we can take you know traditional web 2 Studios on uh to have them start embracing web fre technology and their benefits I know we've been cooking for

55 minutes uh like to maybe just I don't know if there's anything else on the the Grand Vision that you want to touch on um I just want more questions the really the really big thing like I said is that this is not just about off the grid even though that is of course a massive massive massive success and we'll continue building that out this is really about the bigger vision of there being a AAA gaming ecosystem the guny ecosystem that will be growing and expanding and bringing on you know cool IP both third party as well as first party over time and that's really the big Vision behind it right and all of these components have to provide this incredible awesome experience to the gamer that is absolutely core of everything yeah Off the Grid the game

gonzilla the platform it's a prove out gun gun gun and then eventually you you will presumably develop internally perhaps another franchise another game and then invite other IP that you think fits with your user base and is aligned and then it's permission so you'll have a little bit more um U curation um rights there curation rights and also make sure that only sustainable economies get launched our chain right make sure that our our Gamers and our community you know has a good experience with the game has a good experience with the economy has a good experience with asset ownership so permission is a very very big part of that do do on on that point do you see more perhaps web three games or um you know traditional

franchises um like what do you think would be in a five years time what percentage of other games that are coming inside what would be web 3 native or kind of web two trying to have a web 3 strategy initially it will be all Web Two you know dipping the toes in web 3 it will take a little while in my humble opinion for web 3 games to really start building differently and and we see some early signs of that but there some definitely some some cool IP cooking and we believe that there's you know uh I believe that there's some projects that can absolutely do that and do that over the next C years but there's not as nearly as much as in the traditional web to space where you know for decades

right it's been about the gamer and the gamer experience so I would say that for right now it's of course much more likely to find incredibly good and engaging web 2 IP than it is to find incredibly good and engaging web 3 IP but that will change we absolutely hope that we will see a change where gaming projects and game developers in web 3 will say holy crap like this is the way to do it and then you know follow follow the path that we blazed yeah no absolutely I think um success and why I became very excited and want to have you on the pot is because I think there's a very credible shot here that you flip the script and you really open people's imagination to oh it it this is why web3 matters the it's it's the ability to the agency it's the ability to transact in

the marketplace and you own the item and from so many people that have come to crypto from the likes of vitalic to so many others that have played our gamers and you get rugged at some point you have the bad experience of having all this xrp investing all this time and then just you know being deplatformed or just not having good experience with your in-game assets and it's really bad you know it sucks absolutely and and maybe I might add the community aspect of it like like streaming is a huge category like it's almost like a like modern-day Gladiators right people just it's an entertainment category in its own right it's uh so that that the viral coefficient of that with crypto

Community elements say crypto is really good to capture attention listen Theodore it's amazing to hear the story we're all rooting for you because I think it's we need more of these proof points to touch normal users and I think the the the early success that you guys have had is incredibly encouraging um of course I'm drinking my Kool because I I believe the gaming can be truly transformed uh but the way we've done it as an industry hasn't been the right approach what you guys are doing and perhaps in other projects I I think is is the right one and it begins and ends with it has to be a beautiful it has to be a very fun game to play and you know everyone that I've talked to loves the game and you know uh really cud us to you guys for building an amazing game

over the last five years and I know it's not easy but um yeah thanks for coming on and sharing the story it was really really amazing thank you so much really really appreciate it and for you know our viewers and listeners please follow us on socials at playoff the Grid on X go to your Playstation Store go to your Epic game store download off thee grid you can find information about how to do that on playoff theeg grid.com the proof is in the pudding is to say try our game and see what we're working on thank you so much for having us it's Friday so you know what I'll be doing over the weekend thank you guys guys hey everyone thanks for watching today's episode just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor scale scale really is one of the best chain

experiences out there today and I've used so many different chains there's a reason they are G so much adoption in both gaming and AI use cases hit the link in the show notes to explore the scale ecosystem [Music]