How Illuvium Will Outplay P2E | Kieran Warwick

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] uh welcome everybody uh we have a very special guest today uh for a number of reasons i've known kieran for a long time he was early on the gaming trend he grew up in a very competitive household having a brother that had also been building into space for quite a bit of time um i first met kieran when he was just about to start uh his project called alluvium and so in this conversation we're going to talk about a number of things obviously the metaverse gaming play to earn um and and just make it a very immersive discussion on that plus elluvium um so i'm really excited to have karen on he's a good friend i'm very involved in livium as everyone

knows and so here we are karen welcome to the show we've been trying to get you on for quite a bit of time i know you're super busy so thank you for making time i know i feel like i've been on every other podcast but yours which definitely needed to be needed to be fixed immediately um but yeah thanks thanks for having me i can't wait to dive deep onto everything that's happened in the last 18 months which has been a lot most people don't appreciate how accessible like founders in crypto are you know in traditional companies you're lucky if you get a question in for one for the founders and most people come into this space and are critical and say no this is like a whale game and it's only run by institutions i'm like what are you talking about you can join the

livium's discord and kieran is there most of the time and you can you have access to him and to me that's pretty wild you know that that just tells you how exciting you know it is to get access to to folks like you um because i know you're really close with the community yeah and it's one thing that i say to every single founder or anyone who's involved in a project that that asked me you know what was that one thing that you did in the beginning that that really helped foster a positive community and it was that myself grant and aaron were all in discord like all the time and kept that going you know the other day i

ended up streaming an hour and a half two hours of the game live and to to me to to us you know grant jumped in after like 30 minutes it was like whoa kieran's streaming i'm gonna jump in and then you've got two founders that are that are in there on this stream like literally a raw thing nothing planned anything like that so so yeah i i think that was one big big thing that we've done and kept doing throughout the the building phase is staying very in touch with the community yeah absolutely i mean some people looking outside in might say you know eluvian which we'll get to in a second what your building is his has not

launched but you've created this very engaged audience in discord and you managed to build a lot of excitement for your game um and you're close to launching but it's been you know over a year now games take a long time to build and develop um but it's pretty impressive that like a protocol like yours a community has built this community of people that are really excited and they feel that they're part of the development of the game would you agree with that like do you think that's like a differentiating factor relative to traditional company building yeah 100 and i i think we even took it another step further in terms of traditional web 3 games that

that we're building in the sense that we prior to our token even existing we airdropped a pre-ilv token to anyone who had joined the discord and anyone from the snx discord that had jumped over and so we had like 10 000 people that that were holding these tokens and the only use for those tokens was to vote on different things that we could improve on or change like a a value or configurable whatever it might be but from the get go and and this was definitely

beaten into me by kane was hand over the power to the community and the network effects of that of of giving you know the the revenue distributions and and like the the governance decisions and all of this stuff a community building it is theoretically better than you know a couple of mines sitting in a room trying to make what everyone else wants without listening to them yeah yeah absolutely i think most people come to space maybe from 2017 agents jump back in now and say why do you need a token like there's not even a game that you can play today and the role of a token just feels like oh this is just speculation like token

go up great people are happy to go down you're you're the villain but like what you're saying is people feel like they're part of there's a sense of ownership that you don't have in traditional games and people are much more vested um versus and there's good and bad to that i guess how do you manage like these people's expectations because people now have a token they want to be heard they want to be listened to and before we get to eluvium and all the components i want to just get your perspective on this because this keeps being like a hot topic in crypto should you have a token what's the role of a token if it's just governance like does it even matter um and in your case like you're obviously trying to build a game like how do you manage like what people can

actually vote on versus what you you guys are trying to just go and build the best game out there so we we absolutely needed a token because of our tokenomics model the the revenue distribution that is inbuilt into the system means that we need people to be staked in the protocol whatever portion you are staked is is the portion that you're going to get out from the in-game fees and so for us there's there's a very real utility it's it's almost like a passive income token where you can sit it there and know you know i'm very similar to buying shares except

instead of getting a dividend quarterly you're getting a dividend weekly obviously on top of that as well you've got all of the governance decisions and again with that you need to know you you need to give equal rights to people based on their token holdings and so again or i should say based on how much they own of the network and in my opinion the best way to do that is to tokenize it but there are plenty of examples where you look at it and you think that definitely doesn't need a token it would be almost as if for folks that are not as familiar with uh with kind of

what we're talking about here revenue staking distributions and all this stuff imagine if you had fortnight and all of a sudden you as a user now had the ability to to participate in i mean fortnite is now a 30 40 i forget the latest round i think 32 billion dollar behemoth it's getting a lot of traction it's as if users now had the ability to to earn based on their contributions right some of those users are creating content are there and they're pulling in for their friends but they're not really benefiting from any of that other than of course the social interactions i guess but it's as if like as if they could have a token and that would allow them to be more engaged and feel like they're actually participating

in in the company building an equity value of a fortnight is that kind of a good framework to think about it or do you see something else yeah there's there's kind of two schools of thought there's the people that don't like get that don't like gaming and it doesn't interest them however they know that gaming is a huge vertical especially in crypto right now and this is their way to tap in and say i can see that it's a great game just because i don't like it doesn't mean it's a bad investment now those people are able to go and buy ilv and stake it on them on uh on our staking platform and as soon as the game

starts or not even the game land revenue uh louboutins revenue which is our pfp project any any of the the revenues that we are generating go back to the stakeholders so you don't even need to play the game or like the game or whatever and you can you can have that stake now where it gets really really interesting what you were talking about is the gamer the guy who actually does want to play the game but he also wants to shape the way that the game works and how the expansions are going to form and all of that kind of stuff and that's when holding the token gives you those rights and and the ability to to join in on that discussion

and that's what makes the community so much different in a web 3 game versus a web 2 game is because you have this sense of it's not you versus the developers if that makes sense which is kind of what it's like in in a lot of games out there in web 2. web 3 it's almost like well we all made this decision to change the the balance of the game like this or add in this this mode or this feature or whatever and so it's less of it's it's more of as a collective we made a bad decision let's fix that which you can do much faster than in a situation where you're in this

echo chamber and you feel like you're delivering exactly what your customers want when in actual fact you started off okay but you slowly started losing customers over time and you weren't listening to them and then you know all things start falling apart that's that's kind of the way that i see it for the two parties before we jump into elluvium um i want to get your your perspective and kind of lay out the state of affairs of of like web3 gaming right because when you not just a little bit of backstory you and i met this was november 2020 we were coming off of d5 summer everyone was kind of disillusioned but this is just like your ponzinomics and all just yield

farming games and i think most people just kind of miss the boat on on axi and what it was doing uh i i passed on the seed round much to my detriment uh and then i met you and i said wait wait a minute if axey um this game that is just a very simple battle not very immersive not a game that i would want to play is getting all this traction then i want i want to see a game apply that same kind of model uh what it started to be called played iron in a more immersive game and i love playing zelda and donkey kong and nintendo type games and that's when i met you and that's why i decided to jump on um and and back you early on what were you seeing back then um that made you

jump because it wasn't that obvious i mean it was in retrospect it is but like back then it was it just felt like it was it was something you were hitting a nerve but it wasn't as like in your face as it is today but what made you decide to finally come out of the woodwork and build uh eluvium it was axi it it literally was axi you know i i was going i was invested in probably 50 60 different random protocols where i was mostly doing yield farming and and whatever and i think i read that axi was potentially going to do their own staking program and so i ended up looking up what is axi you know like how

does a game do do staking or whatever and uh and i started looking into it and i really liked the the fact that you could own your assets it was axie that got me to to look into nfts and and what that could actually do and i i went back like i went down the rabbit hole i started looking into all of the different things uh all all of the different uh token types and and whatever i was looking at this going this they've got so many users but it's a very basic game like what what is going on here and then i worked

out that they allow you to own the assets and what that meant was the people that were grinding with their time and in previous uh previous decades they wouldn't have been able to do anything with that that's a sunk cost that time in this case they were literally going on to this open market and they were selling these things that they were they were creating and it made me think back to world of warcraft guild wars like all of these games that i had sunk so many hours into like i'd like stupid stupid amounts into and i thought imagine if you could go

and sell those things like it would change gaming forever like it it really was so obvious to me when that penny dropped it it just was like okay this like there's nothing else that i want to do apart from make a game but instead of making it you know an indie type game that isn't that fun and just has really good financial mechanics underneath it let's build an incredibly immersive awesome game that's addictive it has replayability all of the things that you love in in mainstream and then let's also from the start integrate the best aspects of web 3 and that's you know why

you see the staking the governance it's completely decentralized and i think that's yeah why why we're in the position that that we are now and why people are so hyped for for it to come out because it's it really we we've tried to make it the first full package of d5 plus gaming yeah i totally agree with you um it feels like not only being having the certainty that you know people are not going to change the rules on you or but also having a digital footprint of everything that you've done um and actually even just flexing to people hey listen i was an early player of call of duty and and sometimes i was

you know just being able to prove to people that has in in and of itself has value right um so anyways no it would be fun to go back um what does it mean uh what does it mean to like to you what does it mean to build a good game it's got from the from the get-go it needs to be entertaining now entertainment can come in many different ways but it's essentially it's got to be fun right it it has to be fun engaging immersive and probably you know probably the most important thing out of all of those things uh is making sure that it has replayability if your game is only [ __ ]

like you might build a fun game right and i'll touch on this later but survival mode for me right now it's a good game and it's got amazing graphics and all that kind of stuff but because it doesn't have the pvp component it loses the replayability for me and so you have to have that total package that's what makes a good game and what makes alluvium um like the grand vision of loom what what makes it a fun game relative to axiory or perhaps others the skill the the competition and the the skill you know you you've got a better your opponent and you know it's it's very much an esports

game it's all about learning and getting better and better and better and as you get the the best part about that is in alluvium as you get better you should theoretically be earning more as you go which isn't necessarily the case you know you get to level 50 in world of warcraft cool you know you've got badges and whatever but there's there's you can't do anything the difference is that you can you can do things in alluvium with those those assets a lot of a lot of traditional games in the gaming industry as a whole like it is their games are probably the businesses that scale the fastest from like zero to 100 million in revenue you

see these games just like take off like crazy but then die off really quickly and it's a question of engagement and people just jump to the next game like candy crush for instance like you sell massive explosion then all of a sudden kind of died off and people move on to the next thing it feels like there's a lot of churn there's a lot of hype there's a lot of churn how do you how do you fix that um in a game like alluvium so there's there's some games which aren't that they're supposed to be that you know there's there's the flappy bird type game where it's super addictive in terms of like you're probably gonna sit there and go you know what i'm not gonna go to work today but is that gonna last seven days in a row where you're missing

work to play flappy bird all the time probably not right but it's not designed to do that it's designed to be a casual mobile game where every now and again you go well i'm going to go and play now alluvium is not meant to be that firstly we're building a universe a suite of games that are all interoperable and all of them are highly immersive all skill based where you you know you you need to constantly be evolving getting better learning the meta of the game and just having another thing to do as well you know building on that having an uh expansion one expansion two a new game where you

can take those assets that you had in you know elluvium and then you might go you know what i want to play it in this second game that's how you keep people in your ecosystem and i feel like we almost have an unfair advantage in web 3 because we can make all of those assets interoperable if it's the same publisher right now yeah absolutely tell us a little bit more about what went into the development of getting to this point we met in november you just had a white paper and then i look at this in a year's time i'm like okay the the biggest thing that we did that i think we do differently

to most crypto projects is we really really utilized the capital formation that that we were able to perform early on we raised like all the way throughout i mean the the precede we use that money to show the seed people hey you know we are a legit project that is building a triple a here then we took that five million and you know you were a part of uh both of those those raises and we we took that five million and said okay now we've got five million bucks to go and show the public that we're actually

going to build a aaa game now you can say whatever you want on podcasts and you know in interviews and whatever but if you don't have the team to back it up if you don't have if you're not showing your your progress as you go along then you're just saying words and so for us it was about actualizing what we were we were saying we were going to do and that meant rapid team expansion there is if you go to web 2 gaming studio and you say hey do you think a studio can build a

triple a game with less than 50 people in the space of three years they will laugh at you they will literally laugh at you and i knew that and and so for me it was a matter of it's not even like can we do this we had to do it we had to grow the team we had to have 15 concept artists we had to have 20 different modelers we've got 10 people in the back end we've got 12 you know like 12 people across marketing and communications now like we are a fully fledged studio and you know for for me that's that's been the difference we we have experts that

have done this before they've been working in aaa studios for the last 15 20 years and they simply have had enough of that old model where the centralized entity owns everything and yeah that's that's that's how it's done i i was going to ask you just that which is every time i i talked to you and this was you know you know it would have been the team kind of doubled there was a time where like the team just kept doubling doubling now you know how many people are are are full-time we're 225 now that's crazy i think that as i look to invest in people i think the role of a founder should be can you hire smarter people can you hire talent it's kind of hard to find really good

talent at web3 for a number of reasons i think the really talented people want to build their own and or trying to find really good talent in this case game developers it's pretty hard too but somehow you managed to do that i think your your brother one of your brothers uh had a lot of experience in in this world um but how have you managed to attract like top top talent in web 2 land to come and join alluvium firstly we we you have to have a good product you know i i really think that you're going to struggle to hire any aaa engineer or artist or whatever with

what we were showing you know back two years ago there needed to be a step up to say okay you you're actually going to have fun building this thing you know because the end of the day making money is great but you know that doesn't motivate everyone the biggest thing for for the hiring was showing people that hey we had a good product but then b using that to cascade it and saying okay well you just came over from a triple a studio go and tell your friends about how amazing it is to work at alluvium you're getting really good pay you've got tokens to come on board which have now appreciated in value massively and it's super chilled it's remote you know it

and and we really feel like we're owners of this thing that concept with a good product is is how you convince someone to to come across yeah i want to get your perspective on play to earn nfts but before we get there um let's say that you should launch now can you support millions of users like how do you think about scalability continues to be an issue in crypto um a lot of these underlying infrastructures it's unclear if they can actually support like mainstream users um how do you think about that um in the context of you're you're trying to build a really immersive game

is the tech gonna be there to support all the interest that you might get so if we ran the game we were initially looking at building the game on top of the theory like that's that's how early we were thinking about this now like people nowadays will be like are you on crack like what are you talking about you can't do that uh and and so we quickly figured out that you know someone traveling and costing them 100 bucks and gas is going to work so we decided to look into different layer 2 solutions which essentially as you know rolls up a whole bunch of transactions over in in this other protocol verifies them and then uh essentially paste them back

onto the ethereum blockchain and because they're doing that in a bulk manner it's way way cheaper we're then able to to pass those savings on to the user and so what it means is there'll be zero minting fees no gas fees or anything like that for the in-game experience and what we're trying to get to is is literally a place where you don't even know that you're playing a web 3 game and that there's nfts and blockchain underlying it it's literally just hey i'm playing this new game transitioning a little bit into kind of the state of the current state of web through gaming

there's this kind of big movement uh called played iron which is a lot of the interest in axi has been these guilds is basically the same that uber kind of like created all these employment opportunities for for people that had a car now anyone that has a pc can go and play axi join a guild and earn decent income back in depends on the price of slp the indian kind of reward token um it's felt like most of the activity in axi is just these people that want to earn um how do you how do you see this economy shaping up like from a user perspective um people can play this battler if you as you win these battles you earn more points um

and then you can use that and cash out and all this stuff um is that the genesis of it how do you there are criticisms on this model which is if people are only doing that that at some point the music stops because you need to have kind of someone in the back end on the other side to kind of support um this uh so how do you as you were thinking about designing this economy like what were some of the things that that you are integrating into alluvium to kind of mitigate these pressures yeah so the first thing is that you have to be able to accept that you're not necessarily going to profit off playing our game you you might likely profit off it

but there's a chance that you won't and that's how we keep the economy sustainable if everyone is pulling money out over and over and over and over again it's very quickly going to go down to zero to sustain that you need to have a fun factor where people are playing your game the value that they're getting out of it is the entertainment and they're willing to pay for that so if someone and i might enter the game right and i'm a pretty decent player i collect a whole bunch of alluvials blah blah blah but i think let's call it 5k into the game i play it for like i normally do most most games i play for two three years i

get over it i move on to something else if at that point i've had the same experience as i usually do when i played web 2 games and you know i might have spent a thousand dollars on skins or whatever it is like that but if i can leave that that game if i can leave alluvium and not leave my five thousand dollars of sunk cost in there and i can go and you know sell a few characters or maybe i can't sell all of them and i'm holding like two or three but if i can leave the ecosystem and recuperate half or 20 or 10 that is a much much better situation

than leaving world of warcraft after you get over that because everything is left behind and that's it now the goal here is to make it as immersive and entertaining as your league of legends and world of warcraft so then the advantage is hey you know that you know whatever you put in you might not get it all back but you're going to get something back if people are looking for those assets now on the other side of it you're going to have people who are literally only looking to to earn and and our game allows that you know you can literally start earning in our game without putting in a single dollar by using the free-to-play version you

can go in you can battle upgrade your your alluvials increase their levels someone's going to be looking on the marketplace and go you know what it's a tier 0 but it's a tier 0 that's level 10 instead of level 1 so i'm willing to pay a little bit more for that and straight away someone has created value out of nothing but you that is not sustainable you know you need to have the guys on the other side that are happy to play for the entertainment value that's such an important point uh because it feels like you know the games that you and i grew up playing like even if i had all the money in the world which i didn't i would still play it

because it it's kind of fun it transports us to you know the real world sometimes can be a difficult place and you're just like yeah i want to play zelda or world of warcraft or call of duty and and connect with my friends it's a very social sport and alluvium is too like you're playing against other people um and and so i always like to remind myself the point that you made is so important which is even if you had all the money in the world and this you weren't earning anything would you still come and show up and play this game because it's so damn cool and i think that's the standard that i think you what i always like think of what you're building like i see this demo gameplay i'm like i want to play this game um and and don't bother me for like you

know months i think that's that that's that's a nice piece of it um how do you think about competition here how do you think about attracting players there are other games that are going to launch in in web 3. do you do you worry about that do you just say or do you not care about it at all do you see maybe integrating with these games like we talk about composability interoperability in this world in these worlds like do you think like elluvium can integrate with axi or amber sword or some of these other games i need competition i i absolutely need competition and i think it's that the thing that

pushes crypto forward at such a fast rate is the fact that without realizing it having everything open source creates inadvertent competition between people because even the people that don't even think about it when you can literally see other people's products being built in front of you internally you look at that and and it it creates this this urgency of okay my my competitors have just done this i need to do this and that's why you see v1 v2 v3 all the amms are you know going nuts on trying to build

the next feature set the next feature set and so even if people don't realize it i i think it's happening just organically in this space purely due to the the open source nature in terms of how we look at it in alluvium same thing like this is a huge huge well firstly it's you know 300 400 million market right now which is plenty plenty big enough for 10 aaa games to to be in this space but we're still early in that like wait until we get five billion people in the crypto space then at that point

we're going to be saying we like i'll be lobbying for other web 2 companies to come in and be like please build something because our rts guys have now left to go play a first person shooter but they're now back in web 2 world because it doesn't exist so yeah i i love competition that's a good point do you think web 2 studios like fortnite will ever come into web 3 and and how would they interact with a game like alluvium yes i do and not because they want to do it it won't that that's not going to to be the catalyst the customer always has the power right it it or should always have the power in the case

of gaming they don't have a choice there hasn't been this this second option of a different style of games that offer you a whole different you know gamut of benefits now the reason it hasn't happened at this point is people are going and playing these games and then they're not having fun and they're coming back to fortnite and they're like well i mean i guess the only fun games are the ones where you can't actually own the assets now enter alluvium they play that and they're like hang on a second these graphics are just as good if not better than fortnite this is just as immersive i've got competition

it's pvp there's millions of players here uh i'll go back to fortnite but the only thing i'm going back to them to do is to say i'm not playing your game until you allow me to sell your assets and that's it and so i think you know 10 years from now they're not going to have a choice and that's why i genuinely genuinely genuinely think we're not going to be calling it game fi or anything it will literally dissolve back into i'm playing a game today that's it absolutely that's such a good point um in terms of um creating ecosystems for other developers to to create expansion packs around alluvium

is that something is that a priority now do you envision many people come in and say hey i want to other perhaps external studios saying hey we want to take this world and build an extension are you seeing that today do you do you see that being a big part of how this kind of virtual world evolves i i to be honest i i used to i and i used to push that narrative and say hey this is an awesome thing and you know it's we're all gonna live in this wonderful world together and you bring your crypto punk in and you can start battling it and it's like when you stop and think about what that actually means it sounds stupid right it sounds a little

bit dumb now are we does that mean we can give people the ability to build in our world we give them an sdk and away they go and can can it be possible yes you know decentraland it exists is the experience what that like that ready player one what people really really think no and the the reason is because if someone wanted to build a new alluvial let's say you'd need like 35 different people touch a single alluvial asset like 35. the the alluvial for everyone for everyone out there is

when you go back to them but the illuvio is the the particular character if you will correct yeah essentially the the pokemon of our pokemon yeah the charmander the the pikachu or whatever of of yeah well it's good to see that like i think it sounds like you're super laser focused on the number the north star really is just the cohesiveness and the experience that it needs to have the highest level of standard as you say people that come to play alluvium hopefully don't think this is like i'm making a trade-off on on compromising on game experience and and fun ability if you will because i'm earning all this stuff no it's like no no it's exactly the same oh and all of a sudden

there's all these benefits oh cool i'm gonna actually stay here and and you solve a lot of the retention issues that games have like that's that's kind of the standard that you're you're holding and you kind of need to own that you can't outsource that really yeah yeah 100 and the way the the best way that i can describe it to people who have never heard of nfts or anything like that like the the thing that resonates most when when i speak to people is when pokemon go came out and everyone started playing and you know grown-ups were playing it because of the nostalgia and whatever and that's why i think it resonates with people imagine if those pokemon that you're going and capturing

you could go and sell so you're on your lunch break and you're like holy [ __ ] there's a pikachu or whatever you capture it and then you go hmm let's just check on the the marketplace actually i caught a holographic pikachu which is even more rare and i look up and i'm like wow i can sell that for 500 bucks you're literally sitting there on your lunch break going to do to do i'm playing a game for the next 30 minutes and you just made 500 bucks like why why even bother going back to work why go back to work that's that's that's one conversation but why go back to the real pokemon where you just kept like it's think about how stupid it's

gonna it's gonna look right if a game like pokemon comes out after and says no no you can't own your assets and there's 10 games where you can own your assets people are going to be like what you can't great you you can own all the assets you want niantek all of them are yours but guess how many customers you have zero yeah it's almost like uh an airline not having like reward points you're like wait a minute why would i fly with this airline like no no [ __ ] way yeah yeah exactly no i totally i it's almost like yeah these things become super obvious once once they they launch um when i first heard your pitch in november and it was like coved it was

dark time you know most people were inside you're like okay well i need a game now um i thought of pokemon and zelda um you uh pokemon i think is an interesting example because i want to get your take on nfts there is a lot of nfts components in alluvium so why don't we start there like tell us a little bit about what how do you integrate nfts into the game why are they so important and and i think you're relating it to pokemon and the collectibility of these characters so i'd love to hear your take on on that so that's that is your token of ownership that can never be taken away from you and the reason that an nft is so powerful is

because of the platforms that accept nfts so in a nfts are interoperable with any protocol that accepts them right and or the the the standard of nft as long as they accept that standard of entity but where it gets advantageous over your your standard game is you can take that nft and inject it into the next game like imagine if you're playing call of duty one right and you're sitting there and you you've got these all these weapons that you bought and skins and stuff like that and then call of duty 2 comes out what do you do

you got to go and either buy all the skins again or collect them again imagine if you could take those weapons and entities that you got five years ago and bring them into call of duty 2. now that is definitely possible and and right now that would be possible and that's exactly what i'm talking about if you capture an alluvial in uh which is our characters in alluvium the main game that might still have value and replayability in a totally different game 10 years on from from now and you no one can ever take that ownership away you're not sitting there going oh what if uh

you know they turn the servers off in world of warcraft do i lose my level 50 no you know so that's what nfts do for me so so say in in the years in two three years time eluvian becomes the most popular widely kind of played web through game there's all these nfts that people have there's going to be other games in the market do you see a world where i can take my alluvial and go and play a totally different game outside of your ecosystem your virtual world where another game might say well it's pretty interesting livium has like millions of players i'm just gonna allow these nfts to be injected into my game as like as a strategy to pull in players from this world into mine

is that do you see that and if so does that concern you right now you'd have to be in collaboration like there's there's no there's no sdk that we've that we've exposed to people where people can start creating a loop like you don't know the standard you don't know the stats that we have on on you know different characters with the abilities for them the animations might not even like you might bring a character in that isn't animated like or only has a few basic animations and it's like hey well we fly in our game so like can you allow that and and that's what i mean about the collaboration it is

possible but effectively they're building your assets right and and so we we actually already have uh done this with with another game where we they asked us they said hey you know arlen is is really really popular can we allow people to take arlen from our game and bring them into this this game it's called galaxy fight club which is all about i think you might actually be in this one well maybe not but it's all about taking interoperable assets into this arena and you go and battle it out i was like oh

okay so let's say we give you the asset you know what like there's not even a starting point of where i can sit there and get like unless they're they they would have to literally recreate the asset now the problem with recreating the asset is it's not that unique nft anymore it's a different one and that's what we did in the case of gfc where we gave them ireland but it had to be built with the attributes for gfc that game so it could actually be played in that game so you know do i see it happening in the future and will there be some crazy standard that that is created that

allows assets to to be ported in and out of games to be honest yes i i do believe it but we're very very far away in my opinion uh i want to touch on something that is very topical but also tends to be um just a broader discussion on the metaverse which is land uh land is an important piece of of eluvium uh people can acquire parcels of land and and um and you know there's an upcoming kind of land sale for people to have further ownership in in this game tell us a little bit about the intuition behind this strategy what does it mean to actually own land in alluvium and how do you see that being a core piece of the experience

originally we saw a bunch of protocols selling land and i thought i want to do that too you know let's let's definitely sell some land now the problem with all of these sales was there was no utility on the left like you couldn't do anything it was just it was just this plot is rare and that is it right like scarcity is great and you know i think it works in the case of crypto punks and whatever as d5 grows you know a billion users there's only ten thousand it's gonna they're gonna continue to to be rare

but it doesn't last that long right especially not when there's a hundred different projects that are all building land you've got to have utility and so that's where alluvium zero came in and aaron and johnny both designed that game it's interconnected with alluvium financially basically so how that works is if you're a landowner you are essentially mining the resources that are required in the main game so it's the the fuel that you use across things like traveling curing shards which are used to capture

the alluvials if you want to craft weapons all of it requires this fuel now the fuel comes from the main game so if you go out and buy yourself a piece of land you can start generating this fuel and when the game is live you'll literally be able to sell that to people who are playing the main game and so what it basically boils down to is about five percent of all of the the in-game transactions will go will be distributed to land holders that makes a lot of sense um can someone just have a financial advantage where

you come in you have all the money in the world you're a whale and you just say hey listen i would just buy all these resources and level up faster than most people is that possible if so does that kind of demoralize is that like demoralizing for users that might not have as much resources uh at the from the get-go or just generally so where it counts in in like pvp ranked battles no we we take all of that out so so we completely balance the game so you you can spend as much as you want but if someone is more skilled than you they're going to beat you right now it's crypto so we had to add in a mode where you could just be a whale we call them leviathans and there's no normalization of stats

you can literally go and purchase a whole bunch of tier fives go in and and start wrecking people and and betting eath and you know all that kind of stuff but again we the reason why it it works and and you know we're not worried about that is someone went out and spent their valuable time trying to capture those tier 5 alluvials that that that person is then buying so that's the the scenario of your person in the philippines who's looking you know out there trying to make a living out of this game right i think one of the things that uh most

people kind of get wrong in in crypto generally is you come from a mentality that scarcity you hear a scarcity 21 million bitcoin you know and people think about like in scarcity driving value but gaming is so different i think and i think everything that we touch on this podcast is usability and making that experience seamless beautiful engaging and i think that's was kind of the reason why i really you were my first game in crypt i i came from just purely just being a d fight dj at pearify was just that was and even i knew your brother i mean i was early investor as well in haven then turned synthetics and was thinking about redesigning kind of kind of reinventing in many ways i think synthetics created

yield farming and staking and and kane's ambitions like yours were not short by any stretch of the imagination being a generalized derivatives platform so uh when i first met you i thought okay this is the division is there and it's always very refreshing to meet someone that says we're not going to make a compromise if crypto is really going to truly succeed is because it's 10x better not on one parameter but on all of them like you know what i mean people don't want to in mainstream people want to use stuff because it's just great and it's familiar as well and i think when you look at the demo in the gameplay it is like a web 2 game right so i think um that's what's most exciting uh about about i think what you're building um but yeah i think that the discussion

around scarcity is important because it i think it's not about scarcity it's about creating just a beautiful experience that drives utility that allows millions and millions of people to come in and play and it's accessible and that ultimately drives the most amount of value not like a randomly generated 10 000 you know jpegs yeah absolutely like i i totally totally agree with you and the best example i can give you of like my own experience of that was when i decided to join the etheles guys they had a cool idea you know the i love the the art of the lizards that they're funny and whatever but i got in there and

it came out of the eluvian discord that's why i was kind of drawn to to these guys and uh i ended up getting in touch with the founding team and i said you know i'm on board and they said can we make a lizard of you and i said yep let's let's do a few founders founders lizards and whatever and you've got one of those and a bunch of other big d5 people but then it just stopped and i kind of was i saw azuki start pumping and i said to the guys i was like like what do we do with like we need to do something like this thing needs to do something and they're like yeah but we're going to fund tournaments whatever

and i'm like i call them vanity nft metrics right like we're going to have a club we're going to give you access we're going to do that like where's my utility and obviously some clubs and stuff can work if they're done well but where is the utility and i don't know we came up with the the you know one version of that which is literally a game fight dao where you hold this lizard and you earn profit from game five investments that the dow makes that's a very simple easy to explain use case and i think you're

100 right that's what's missing in a lot of nft collections a lot of games like what am i actually going to get out of it if there's no entertainment utility then you know it's it's probably not going to last yeah definitely um what is this lizard so like uh is that gonna be a part of elluvium so uh you see that more like as a guild or yeah because i've seen them all over now i mean of course i have one which is amazing and i like them aesthetically but curious so there a group of people that very smartly took our djinn channel which is a channel

inside our discord which is where it's no holds bar it's it's essentially say whatever you want show whatever you want there's not going to be like moderators wouldn't even dare go in there even though there there are a few now and they basically i got too busy and i used to love going to this dj place and i got too busy and i hadn't gone there in a long time and when i did pretty much everyone was gone and what these guys had done is they'd taken the djinn channel and said we want to represent the djinn channel with these lizards and that's going to be our collection and i thought that was brilliant i love that like even though you're essentially

siphoning away my community members or whatever it's brilliant it's an awesome growth hack for them to go you know what we've already got this community let's just pull it out and then attach nfts to it and all of a sudden you know we have this place where people can live and and on top of just being a dj member i now have a symbol to say that i'm a part of it but again that's great and that lasted like six weeks and i was kind of like cool i've got my lizard i posted on twitter a couple of times and it didn't really and then it wasn't until i started thinking there is a diff like i started watching the type of

person that was joining these communities and i was like this is a different customer to alluvium like similar but definitely different and i thought to myself what what if i could tap into that what what if like i'm watching these suzuki i'm watching moon birds i'm watching all these crazy collections have like millions of people of eyeballs on them and i thought what if they've already siphoned it off it's it's over there but what if we could build this thing up give it some utility i always get people pitching me all the time about pre-seed and seed investments half the time i don't even have time to look at it what if we could build this dow

that had elected officials that would essentially vote on whether to invest in it it's going to build up and and with that utility and also the cool aesthetic it's it's going to be a big project then if i can show this big project if i can be that advisor that really really helped to to build it up and and build the framework and whatever hopefully i can say to those people hey by the way i've also got this aaa game over here chances are they're going to be pretty into gaming and and so the idea is that eventually we're starting to tap into these nft collection type

customers and influencers and getting them to start playing alluvium as well that's the end goal yeah well it's super exciting to have seen i've seen it the question that i have for you actually is like what did you what did you originally think when kane approached you and said hey my brother has started a project do you want to have a look at it like and you can be completely honest like because i i have my own opinions of what i would think like what's the chances of it happening that you know but what do you think so i remember i vividly remember this it was like november and kane just pinged me randomly

and i said hey i have this this i have a brother that uh wants to finally build something i'm like wait a minute you have a brother like well you could like take my money and then i said well it's not in d5 it's in gaming but you could see the i said okay if you can build a really immersive game which i related to when i read the white paper when i heard your pitch in the first five minutes i said and i asked you i think is this kind of like world of warcraft like zelda and you're like yeah i'm like and i was seeing what axe he was doing and i said wait a minute if a game like that can get distraction then i can't imagine whatever super immersive game

you know does for the space um and more importantly which touches on a lot of things that you've said which is i can see myself playing this game i didn't see myself playing axi like i was playing axiom yeah well like no like like i mean these axes are cute but look i want i wanted to play it and i look i downloaded the sky mavis client i did all the hoops and this is like in the midst of you farming craziness but then i lost interest and so for me that that was what really connected it i mean i always tell people like for me it's always a team bet like you guys have evolved so much and was it obvious back then absolutely not did i think it was gonna you were gonna get to 200 plus full-time employees and

release the demo you just did and in a year and a half times from now like be where we are today no no but my role is not to kind of predict that it's so hard to predict that i think i'm always constantly surprised by really good founders that i invest in because they just do that they are somehow managed to hire the best people and surpass the initial expectations like it it is crazy to think that like you're gonna get it right from the very beginning in the white paper what it was back then and where you are today is totally different but you just i think i've from my vantage point i just sort of had an intuition that you were going to be someone like kane that was one not going to give up build through a bear market if there if there

is one if there was going to be one and just hire the best people because you grew up in a household that it was that right your other brother which i then learned had been part of like lord of the rings and like i was like okay well which you you actually it's funny i remember telling you this because it was von neumann back then and that eventually turned into grant but i remember i told you in that initial pitch and i was like by the way that's we're not telling anyone but that just shows your character as well like i knew after speaking to you for like 30 minutes i was like this guy isn't going to tell anyone anything you know like he's he's locked that down so yeah in my tongue around that but you

know it's been it's been pretty immersive like people ask me like how do you spend your time and you know i think for me it's just i'd like to be a part of you know i i became very very interested in in gaming to some extent nfts but particularly gaming because i think for the first time like you're able to send someone to and say go go and try it alluvium and to me it for the last 10 years i've kind of struggled to explain to people why you'd want to have bitcoin why you'd want to hold something like ethereum like it's very hard for normal people to see that but it's not hard to see and get people excited about playing illumi whether you like gaming or not totally different like conversation but it makes crypto

relatable yeah and i almost think that this is what takes as mainstream incredibly assuming that you can figure out the scalability things like immutable x or whatever but putting that aside which it will get figured out you know i think humans have a way to like in the last minute figure [ __ ] out like like just somehow we'll have a breakthrough and support millions and millions of users but you see that for the first time you actually credibly see that and you say people are going to want to play this game and it's going to be explosive because then once they're there they start learning about all the components of d5 maybe they don't consciously think about it but that's a hook then they're like oh let's integrate there's all this defy in the back end once you start making and earning money whether you like it or not is just going

to be a part of something you're going to have to learn and what's cool about it is you can earn income and it's more about that that i think is super interesting it's not the d5 is dead in fact d5 really comes to life with a game like alluvium uh and so yeah i think you're just touching on from exactly that's what i see because most people don't like to think about money very few people constantly sit all day and be like where can i optimize my yield farms like what like yeah the games are pretty powerful uh so so it's been amazing i mean i i tell people this is elluvium hopefully this is a objective conversation i want to give people an understanding of how quickly you guys have built what you built i think seeing

it very few projects in crypto you can actually see and feel what they're building it's all kind of like words as you say but not here and i think hopefully people have gotten an appreciation for what you guys are building it's closed i think you know we're going to be playing this soon and in the next 24 hours so uh good luck trying to get a hold of me um ever so uh but yeah i know this has been great man i mean i i think maybe as a last kind of question to you um like where can people get involved are there opportunities to come work develop uh obviously play the game but more so from where can people learn more about what you what's happening under the hood and yeah i mean yeah if you're if you're

watching this and you work at a triple a studio and you've been thinking about coming across we will we would love to have you absolutely there's you know positions across the board we're trying to get eventually up to a studio of a thousand uh core contributors so uh yeah there's there's definitely room but yeah join the join the discord as you said the community is always bustling it's a it's a really fun place to to hang out and you can learn everything you need to about alluvium awesome karen we'll have to do this again soon i know we're going to see each other permissionless maybe we'll have to record something there um but anyway it's super exciting thanks for coming on the plan are we super busy and we'll

we'll have you on soon thanks man thanks man [Music] you