IlluviTalks #2 - NFT Gaming Revolution: Mainstream Gamers, Esports & Tokenomics

Why should competitive gamers even want to come to NFT Gaming?  How is the competitive gaming experience in NFT Gaming going to differ from legacy gaming? What can we do to better communicate with non-crypto natives about this new technology?  Our expert panel of Scoriox, JP (Arcade) and Frobei tackle these topics and more!

EXPERT PANEL & HOST (follow them)
Andrew Wall (aka Awall) - https://twitter.com/awallcrypto
Scoriox - https://youtube.com/c/scoriox + https://twitter.com/kingscoriox
JP (Arcade) -https://arcade2earn.info/
Frobei - https://www.youtube.com/c/FrobeiIlluvium

ABOUT THE GAME
Illuvium is an exploration looter and collectible autobattler game built on the Ethereum Blockchain, releasing on PC and Mac in 2022. Play and earn in a graphically-rich, vividly-realized sci-fi adventure and conquer the wilderness to help your crash-landed colony flourish.

Race across stunning alien landscapes on your quest to uncover the cause of the cataclysm that shattered Illuvium. Hunt and capture Illuvials, powerful creatures who have ruled the land unchallenged until your arrival. Train and fuse your Illuvials into powerful evolutions. Build your ultimate Illuvial team to take into battles and tournaments in PvE and PvP Arenas. Use your creativity to build unique synergies to outsmart your opponents and progress to the top as become the most legendary Ranger on this planet.

Illuvium’s collectible NFT games feature crypto token assets with functionality and a gaming use case, interoperable across the Illuvium universe and the larger DeFi metaverse. The decentralized NFT collection offers players a user-maintained custody never before possible in mainstream gaming.

#IlluviTalks #NFTGaming

♊ Terms and Conditions ♊
Content on the official Illuvium website and social media does not constitute financial advice. You are responsible for doing your own research and seeking independent professional advice about your involvement with the Illuvium DAO and any Illuvium products or services. Illuvium products (such as tokens including ILV, sILV2, Land NFTs) and services (Illuvium game) are not financial products and accordingly the Illuvium DAO is not licensed by any regulator. Please be on constant alert for scams. You should read and ensure you understand the terms and conditions available on the official Illuvium website before engaging with the Illuvium DAO or any Illuvium products or services.

🧠 Learn More About Illuvium: https://www.illuvium.io/
🏔️ Explore the IlluviDEX v2: https://illuvidex.illuvium.io/
🎮 Register For BETA Access: https://play.illuvium.io/
🪪 Build Your Personalized Illuvitar: https://www.illuvium.io/illuvitars

Transcript

done insert stinger here iluvatox is live baby second episode of eluvatox is here and in this one we're going to be talking about some huge topics we've got a stacked panel today how do we get casual gamers in here how do we get competitive gaming going what are the right tokenomics in the nft gaming space and i've got a stacked roster of boys waiting to come in here to share their expertise on all of these topics what do i mean by all of this these are our topics that are here and we've got industry leading people you want to know who these people are you probably already know them our first guest on the episode is scoring if you're not already familiar with scoriax this man right here is a content creator that focuses on tokenomics and nft structures that back game five projects i watched gloriox's content spreadsheet warrior an analyst how are you doing square yachts yeah i'm doing good i'm doing good i just felt like a lot of people wanted to know certain things and i felt like i could help him out and give him just my opinions and my thoughts and i'm glad i've been able to help so unbelievably humble for someone who's so well respected in the community speaking of well-respected jp from arcade is here ceo and founder of arcade and infrastructure platform focused on lowering the barrier to entry in the game fight industry what's up amigo hey guys um super happy to be here looking forward to a great discussion um yeah i have so much respect for the other panelists that are up here today and and you as well andrew so yeah i think it's going to be a great chat but looking forward to it me too and of course we couldn't do competitive gaming without the face of competitive gaming and nft gaming i'll brand him as right now we're talking about froby right here former team fight tactics pro player peak rank in the top 100 europe west now tft andaluvium content creator what's up amigo yeah what's up i'm i'm super happy to be here only people i respect and uh i didn't know i was the face of the competitive eleven so i'm happy to learn that today congratulations you won perfect and it goes without saying all of us we're just talking video games we're just talking game fight industry and nothing we say today is financial advice at all okay we're just sharing our opinion you need to do your own research and maybe watching this iluva talks and listening to it is a part of your research but we are not recommending that you buy any financial products or anything but you guys are obviously smart enough to understand that and if you have not already you need to go right now to elluvium.io slash illuvitars go build a sample luluvitar and sign up for that email list don't know what i'm talking about and and are not hyped yet watch this video

you could watch that video i could watch it a thousand times maybe a billion times maybe i will let's get into casual gaming and we're gonna kick things off with jp here why should casual gamers even want to come into nft gaming at all obviously out there we've seen lots of fud let's say in the industry talking about environmental issues talking about uh various items with hacks and all of this bad news basically about how let's say nfts are destroying our planet uh this headline right here on msnbc is one of my favorites um with all the pop-ups bitcoin nfts and other crypto fads are destroying our planet mainstream gamers are reading this stuff and it's really influencing their opinions also here's another one on protocol to the game industry nfts are already dead dead dead dead so how do we bring in the casual gamers if these are the headlines they're seeing if it's a dead industry that's destroying the planet and your all your assets are going to be hacked why would you ever come over here jp you must have all the answers yeah i don't know about all the answers but no i you know i think that a lot of it stems back to um you know just misinformation that's going out like uh like you said i mean we have these big scary headlines and people are led to believe that you know what they don't understand fully they fear and they think you know uh it's just a bunch of micro transactions you know it's just a way to pad the pockets of of the elite even more in a more creative and new way um but i mean in terms of why should casual gamers want to come here i think it really really boils down to you know giving them back the ownership for something that they're already doing that they already enjoy that they're already passionate about give them back that control and you're not having to you know you're not changing the way that you game right i think that's the important thing for how casual gamers are going to come into the ecosystem is we have to make it comfortable for them so that they don't feel out of their element for coming into the space and getting involved with these different games this is something that i think illuvium is doing really well but you know we have to make it a super easy transition for them we have to educate them give them uh you know really strong resources um that aren't just fear mongering right i think in terms of things like the environmental impact of of game fi and and play player and gaming and stuff of that nature you know i think there is an impact there um and i think that the narrative is it has historically been you know gaming on its own is one big cause of you know all this fear and then maybe crypto on its own is another big cause of it so you combine those two things and now everyone's like we can't touch that but i think that you know really it would benefit game fi to not shy away from those accusations but address the things that actually are concerns and uh work towards solutions right i think web 3 and this whole game fi you know movement is it's an opportunity for us to do things better uh or or at least differently than legacy gaming has done but you know i think just in general andrew i i think we have to make people feel at home we have to make them uh i think the community aspect of it is so important right you want to feel like you're a part of something um and i think you know these web three games that are leading the charge right now are doing a really great job of engaging with their communities they're keeping them involved they're doing things like this right i mean when was the last time you saw a panel like this for like call of duty or like you know halo or you know anything like that like these things just don't happen so you know i think these are the right steps that we do lots of awkward live streams with developers where they're like hey i'm gonna do some jokes and oops uh the game crash they're really really awkward and terrible i guess because they're out of practice with communicating transparently to the audience normally legacy gaming companies have to go through pr teams and have their messages sanitized and they don't get to interact with the public and so they don't get to uh be normal people when they interact with the public it's kind of a shame yeah yeah i mean i think just being genuine right i think that is the main thing that these web 3 games need to be doing is is being transparent being genuine and again i i hate to keep i mean this is an alluvium uh discussion so i guess it is relevant to continue to throw it back to aluminum but this is something that i think alluvium does incredibly well because from day one you guys have led the charge in being transparent right having um you know real gameplay footage from the developers or like you know models that are being uh created you know showing the community that things are actually being done not hiding behind the curtain like legacy games are right and that level of transparency i think instills a lot of trust uh in your community and it makes it easier for people to want to feel like they're a part of something that's really great and so you have to give people that uh that feeling right and make them want to when they wake up in the morning go to the eluvian discord to see what's up you know check in with their friends that are in there look at the leaks right those are the kinds of things that people want to be involved with and you really just don't get that in legacy gaming scoryocks what do you what barriers do you think we need to knock down to capture this elusive mainstream gamer so this guy this you know the call of duty gamer that's playing on xbox on their couch maybe the casual mobile gamer that's playing candy crush or maybe clash of clans this gamer that is maybe much further away from paying attention to elluvium or this space uh than other gamers how do we get this elusive mainstream gamer what are the barriers we need to punch down to get them in here i think how i how i see it is actually relatively simple um i feel like i was around for when free to play started to become a really big deal right with especially with league of legends but things like fortnite and stuff as well where a person could go onto a website click download game and then in like two hours with crappy australian internet or maybe two minutes with some usa internet they could click play and they could get into the game no overhead all they would need is an email i feel like that sort of strategy is what needs to happen moving forward we need to hide all the blockchain as much as we can and just enable anyone to play with just an email i feel like that is the shortest path to success with getting mainstream gamers into a crypto game right and i feel like i looked at some stacks stats a bit earlier today where um binance one of the largest centralized exchanges in the world actually has 13 times more trading volume than uni swap at the moment one of the largest decentralized exchanges in the world and i think that that's really telling that people are willing to offload all that security and other things to a centralized entity to make their life easier and i don't think games are any different to that i think people especially gamers that are afraid of crypto at least um they want to offload everything onto the gaming company as much as they can because they already do i don't see any any reason that's going to change anytime soon obviously i'd like to see it evolve over time but for now that's definitely a big factor for me with getting those people on board into crypto in general

i i can't hear you andrew because i muted my mixer that would be why sorry so how do you think phobia the casual gaming experience in nft gaming is going to differ from legacy gaming so is it better is it worse like scoryax is just talking about how having centralization having ease of onboarding uh people don't care about decentralization other than the types of people that are watching the stream right now are already in here right most people just want an easy experience where it's easy to get in i could just get my money in there i can download quick whatever interface is simple they want the easiest and lowest barrier to entry experience so for the casual gamer are they gonna have a better or worse experience in our space i mean you got meta masks leisures treasures your digital wallet to deal with like does this make gaming more fun or is it making it worse what's your opinion there i mean if we look at how it is right now it's definitely worse and honestly it takes someone a lot of courage and curiosity and resilience to actually start getting into this space i remember i had to spend like two days just to understand what the heck is a wallet and what is it different from my personal wallet from binance's wallet so right now it's very very painful for any casual gamer who wants to try i don't know um for instance got the change which is already available i was going to say eluvian but you need to probably better access first so right now it's completely horrible but let's say like in the future we managed to get this uh onboarding journey very smooth and and seamless for for the casual uh gamer then after i think the nft gaming needs also to offer an experience we can't find anywhere else let's talk about for instance the last massive uh marketing uh buzzword which was augmented reality in 2016 with pokemon go no one really cared about augmented reality the technology itself except of course me as an engineering student and other geeks but the casual game i didn't care really about that makes sense yeah my daughter right now when she goes to play pokemon go isn't like dad can i play some augmented reality like it's just can i play this game and whatever the tech happens to be it happens to be that makes sense the difference though is that the augmented reality managed to create an experience which was never before the the the ability to go outside capture pokemons meeting a lot of strangers having this kind of social game community game where you have to fight or fight together and this is some kind of new experience i believe that nft gaming we need to create a new experience we can't find anywhere else in the gaming industry and then that plus the smooth onboarding journey will create one of the best gaming experience for casual gamers that totally makes sense i mean for me i think that for casual gamers to get in here we need um obviously i've said this before in other interviews we need uh casual gamers to be able to um pay using every fiat and regular payment method from gift cards to credit cards to bank accounts to any payment method to buy games their game the games need to be available not just through individual d5 sites or places like immutable they need to be on steam they need to be on xbox marketplace playstation they need to be on all those hardware and software distribution platforms and most importantly more important than anything that we've talked about here the games need to be as good as if not better than the games they're already playing in legacy gaming it's gaming first it's game play first and as it stands right now 99.9 of the games in the space are not as good as the legacy gaming counterpart period so hopefully hopefully alluvium and other uh folks in this space can solve that issue but i'm just thinking of myself as a casual gamer why would i come over and play some inferior game and step back in time 10 years that makes literally no sense well that's the casual gaming space let's get into competitive gaming i've got some fun statistics for you guys are you ready how many kajillion freaking jillions of dollars do you think that esports makes just throw out your guesses right here revenue per year if you were to guess how much revenue per year scoring offs how many dollars per year globally i think i looked this up but i can't remember um i think it's just over a billion a year just over a billion so your guess is one billion yeah okay jp what's your guess uh i was gonna say about 500 million maybe 600 million okay we'll go with 550 million meet you there in the middle right yeah and then what's your guess on annual esports revenue right now do you include merchandise or not like what's global everything esports what's your guess on how much money esports makes every year 10 billion 10 billion wow i mean if we include everything maybe yeah okay all right well then here's the real numbers according to new zoo esports revenue right now in 2022 is 1.3 billion having uh estimated to have grown i mean obviously this year is not over yet but last year was 1.1 billion and then this year is estimated to be 1.3 billion with a 21 year-over-year growth here's the interesting statistic guys by the time we move into 2025 it'll be 1.8 billion interesting stat right there's also one other thing i want to bring in here just so everybody understands the scope of this space let's look at audience growth from 2021 to 2022 we saw a significant acceleration of 12 for esports viewership i think in part because due to covet lockdowns and then uh as you can see the viewership is now eclipsing half a billion viewers per year um and here's the breakdown that i really want you guys to have a look at occasional viewers versus esports enthusiasts as you can see the occasional viewers uh cohort is growing um even faster than the cohort of people that are hardcore right or or at the same speed so this is a healthy mix so moving into 2025 most viewers barely will be casual viewers in esports and will be up to 640 million people watching esports those are the facts nuzu is the authority on this and for the most part it's pretty accurate so with this space growing so quickly nft gaming is obviously primed to capitalize on there but in order to get this to happen we need competitive gamers to even want to come over at all so as a as the face of esports competitive gaming froby what do we need to do what should competitor game competitive gamers even why would they even want to come over to nft gaming at all yeah i was just making sure my hair was okay because now i feel like i'm i'm the face of something but anyway um so in my opinion in order to for gamers to actually want to become even competitive about the game there are three main conditions uh the first one the game needs to be fun honestly if no one is having fun no one will try to be competitive i mean for the long term it needs to be fun it needs to be designed in a competitive way meaning that actually we can have tournaments with very fair and easy rules to abide you need also to have um another thing that's the second thing that the gamers competitive gamers want to feel but they don't want to admit it is just the community recognition the game needs to have a strong community a community that wants to compete so actually when you win this competition and you are recognized as being the one at the top it feels good and that's that's a lot of players just want to play the game like 10 12 hours a day just for that you have so many players playing league of legends every day without being in a competitive esports uh organization and they still want to just be good at the game so they can actually i don't know show their little badge inside the client to their friends or whatever so this is the second condition community recognition and the third condition is obviously these competitive players need also to make enough money to live correctly and i would even say just like a football sport athlete a football athlete they need to make a good amount of money because staying age 30 depending on the game it's already too late for them because uh you have a lot of games especially for instance fps or csgo you have to be able to react super quick super quick and once you grow old more than 30 i guess for for this uh for this community i'm not saying 30 is too old in life okay but anyway they need to make enough money so they can actually retire in good condition and maybe work in a less tiring job later to make a living so once you have these three steps it's in this order of uh priority if you start with just making money without a good game without the community or a strong community i would say uh yeah cool you make money but the second the game doesn't make you money anymore the game dies and we have this example with x infinity or stepping in another way so i think that these three criteria are the most important and after i would even say competitive players don't really care if it's nft or not actually they are more open-minded than the casual gamer when it comes to nft uh features and and technology so

for in my opinion nft is kinda unrelevant as long as it provides these three things

okay that's interesting how do we get these hardcore gamers in here to try nft games in the first place though jp i'd be curious to know your thoughts about that what's that hook how do you get that league of legends player in here that world of warcraft player that hearthstone player that gamer that hops on their computer plays three to four hours every night then on weekends they're done they're dumping five six seven hours in there only go below that number if they get a girlfriend kind of situation that type of hardcore gamer how do we hook them what's the hook to get them in well first of all i just want to say andrew you're going to let frobie sit there and tell you that your career as a professional gamer is behind you because you're over 30 because i mean that seemed like a low blow to me but i'm going to take it i'm going to take it i look i was a top 100 world of work uh warcraft 3 player i've never said that here on illuvium i was a top player but i was in my early 20s and now i've tried to play warcraft 3. the old the old people got old guy fingers don't work as well fingers huh it's true man the kids these days are better um but yeah i mean in terms of attracting the right players i mean from what i've seen um and i'm not a a professional esports player by any means so um but from what i've seen is that you have to have a high enough skill gap possible that professional players feel like there is runway for them to get really good at it right when we have a game that has you know too much luck or too much you know chance or um you know it's too easy to play and you have to find that right balance right because you want the game to be easy enough to onboard new users and your casual gamers but not so easy that the professionals feel like okay the barrier to to being really good at the game is so low that it's not worth my time right people want to be able to work towards something i think that's why you know in real life sports um you know have professional teams right like if you want to play soccer or football as it's known in most of the world um you know someone that's a high school football player or soccer player and someone that you know plays professionally there's a very high differentiation of the skill and i think you need to see that in games as well and um and again i think this is something that eluvium is doing really well i mean there's a ton of different variables that go into building your deck and your placement i mean one little tile off on the placement on the board is the difference between winning and losing so you really have a lot of room uh to become an expert in something i think that's the kind of thing that attracts uh professional players got it that makes sense scoriax is competitive gaming and in it with nfts integrated do these nfts that are supposedly dead according to the fud we looked at earlier do these nfts actually make competitive gaming better like does that really help with the skill ceiling we're talking about and the ec you know in other aspects i mean froby just said a moment ago well we need to be able to pay esports players maybe these nfts these new nfts we've heard so much about can help with that but how do they really help in competitive gaming don't people just want to play video games that have lots of players have a good competitive scene have that high skill cap where they can dominate and be the hero and get that endorphin rush of crushing people why do you need nfts in there is it making it better or worse what's your opinion um i feel like nft is a really interesting one i think the one big thing that would scare away competitive players is if you use nfts to engage with pay to win aspects um in any sort of game now this is already dangerous in any game that's trying to be competitive but i feel like nfts really lend themselves here if nfts are more an icon of progression rather than pay to win aspects or anything like that it actually enables new entries into the game to not necessarily get a head start but catch up by fronting some cash and i think that's a really that's a really interesting mechanic that shouldn't be like shouldn't be disregarded right so someone can come in they can be like okay so for example with league of legends you need to spend x amount of time hitting level 30 before you can play ranked mode i think they've changed that now but that's how it was when i first got into it so you couldn't even try to be competitive until you spent like and you had to like upgrade your 24 licenses and stuff back in the day and once your quintessences were upgraded then you were viable yeah yeah exactly you had to do all that i feel like the nft aspect and integration into these sorts of competitive games enables people to be like okay i'll take the money i have out of the previous game probably at a massive loss or whatever but they're taking a little bit of their money back from like cs go or something and they're taking that money and they're using that to catch up to everyone else in a game that they choose to be more competitive in now instead so i feel like it's this really great way of unlimiting progression where some someone could take their progression they spent all these years for and essentially pass it on to someone else who now wants to enter that competitive scene

that's interesting i i've got a you know what i'm hoping for competitive and esports here in this nft gaming space is that um maybe not just the nfts but maybe the tokenomics things like revenue distribution uh in the different let's say uh financial mechanics that happen in game fi can help fund competitive and esports tournaments and scene in a way that we have not seen in legacy gaming so in legacy gaming esports is almost entirely reliant on sponsorship revenue and then obviously some merchandise revenue of course the merchandise can come into play and then a very limited number of subscription revenue for different clubs and what have you that's extremely limited revenue and that makes it so that only esports that have a really wide viewership and huge viewership can be viable economically and what this usually results in is legacy gaming companies having to pay out of pocket to fund their esport and actually losing money on that esport along the way and and thinking of it as a marketing initiative something like that i'm hoping that these new financial mechanics and game fight can help solve that and um with the issuance of nfts in game maybe with the issuance of nfts as prizes um with uh these sorts of uh the ability to actually own what you have in the game maybe even vest if people want to etc and earn along the way can add additional economic incentives for people to kind of come up through the ranks as competitive players for organizations to want to be a part of a game or to be involved outside of just harvesting it for views and that's what all these sponsors do right now in esports is they just want to harvest it for views because that's all they can get out of it economically but with other with but with uh you know some projects here in nft gaming you can do more than just harvest it for views you could uh if you wanted to you could invest in the land or the nfts or the token or be a part of revenue distribution or you know get some other financial involvement i'm hoping we maybe we don't see the right model yet and elluvium is trying some new stuff out with tier 5 land and people being able to own stadiums and you know get revenue from that we're trying to innovate in this space in terms of the finances of esports maybe we have the right answer maybe we don't have the right answer but the point is we need something new because esports live and die by having a massive player base and sponsors that are willing to pay for those views and when you're entirely reliant on sponsorship revenue you're on that roller coaster ride of doom essentially and so i'm hoping that nft gaming can be can be a part of that solve speaking of tokenomics we've got the professor of tokenomics the man that wrote the book on tokenomics basically a guy that does videos about tokenomics scoriacs here and we let's talk about this space and how we've evolved in terms of tokenomics obviously axi infinity um is in is infamous now for infinitely printing this is their white paper infinitely printing tokens and essentially driving their token one of their tokens down to zero and so with gen one let's call it games we've learned that some aspects of tokenomics models are they don't work and maybe that's the play and earn aspect maybe that's the infinite printing you know we can analyze that and i'd love to get your opinion scoriax alluvium is not it's like let's call it a gen 2 if you will a tokenomics model that doesn't infinitely print tokens has some new aspects like revenue distribution and let's say has learned some lessons let's say from the previous generations that made mistakes all of this is an evolution right this is the alluvium documentation i want to also make it very clear nothing we're discussing here in tokenomics is financial advice all right we're just analyzing tokenomics and talking about it from a expert panel perspective all right guys but scoriax that kind of in mind us moving from gen 1 nft games to let's say gen 2 nft games what did we learn from gen 1 what worked what didn't work what are those learnings that we can take as an industry moving forward um i think i think the big thing for me is that gen one and in particular actually infinity and things like that they try to predict player behavior right that if anyone's done even a little bit of research into psychology you can't predict anything right like there's just there's so many variables and trying to predict their behavior is always a recipe a recipe for disaster the big one with axes case was infinitely printable um sl smooth love potion tokens um and obviously that was never going to work but but the big factors that actually caused that to fail was they thought they had systems in place for people to burn those tokens but they didn't they actually tried to predict who their players were they tried to predict that this was a person that didn't need the money and then when it eventually turned into their earning five six hundred dollars a day it was no it was like anyone could see that they were going to sell it right so they tried to predict how people were going to use the game and predict and say like oh this is going to be a great esports everyone's going to be collecting all the axes and things like that and those sorts of those sorts of assumptions are probably the large cause for me of kind of why it fell apart now with when you're looking into gen 2 tokenomics here hold on take a pause right there i mean that sounds really familiar to me the the whole idea that humans think that they can control economic systems and that they know best and that they shouldn't let the market take its course or whatever and determine pricing and determined supply and demand that reminds me what you're describing of like governmental controls over fiat currency and over like central banks and the fed and all the stuff we hear in the headlines thinking that they can predict or they're smart enough to understand what's going to happen in the economy and so they can kind of pull the levers of the economy to stabilize it or to control it and to make sure it's healthy it sounds like the game this in this case with axi they've made the same assumption and hasn't that failed 100 of the time in history i'm just saying like literally no currency from the past exists today right they all go out of business so it seems like it's just kind of a lesson humanity cannot learn you cannot meddle with uh economies i mean would you agree with that scoriax or do you think i'm wrong yeah no i definitely think it it's largely because there's so many different kinds of people in the world right i mean even in like american things you have what people call the lower middle and upper class and they all react to every scenario in a completely different way so trying to build something to fit all three scenarios um is just it's really difficult it's not impossible but you instead you need to put i think you need to put guidelines and rails in place so that it can't shift outside of these rails and then start to just let um let the people kind of choose what they need choose their own path but you need it you need to keep a stricter guidelines as you can i think alluvium is doing a lot of these things where there's no breeding mechanics so you're not giving the player the choice if they want to expand the supply and contract the supply themselves and you've got things like a limited token supply so people can't just mint tokens infinitely and things like that so you're putting those rails in place in that v2 economy and then if the players choose to do whatever it shouldn't really self-destruct because there's ways to prevent it that makes sense and with governance the gamers and the players can literally decide democratically if you will what what any economic changes that should be made in the games that they're that they're playing versus let's say the government example i was using you have to you know the fed for example as a citizen you don't get to vote for who is in those positions controlling the economy whereas in this case you get to directly vote on maybe direct economic decisions so you're much closer to those decisions as a gamer who is literally playing the game every day and seeing that maybe something with the in-game economy is broken and you want that to be fixed um i think it's really cool we'll see how this experiment plays out to see whether gamers will make good decisions because it's possible that people will just make impulse decisions obviously that just help them personally and will gamers tank these economies through bad votes in governance we'll find out but that'll be interesting to see how that plays out um let me ask you phobia how can nft games attract gamers without talking about crypto and nfts and using buzz words like web3 and metaverse and all of this you know pfps and all of these acronyms that seem to have three letters how can we attract gamers without talking about all that stuff because it is an underlying technology it is here and it is part of what makes this space different right can we avoid that

i think it it will be something like like the fight club rule never talked about never talk about nft right so i think we will have to apply this role and we have to understand that instead of talking about the technology we should try to show what the value it gives to the players let's not talk about the new fancy technology new buzzword marketing whatever let's just talk about what it brings to the players like like i said earlier with pokemon go yeah we talked a lot about augmented reality but it was never about augmented reality even like this technology was just a small feature in pokemon go that almost everyone would turn off but the real value was we made a game that allows you to explore you know your neighborhood or even travel in other places and and have fun with strangers or your family or your friends outside we're capturing pokemon so i think that we will almost never talk about crypto and until we we get to the point where we have no more choices like okay you captured this i don't know illegal if we take the illusion example you have now the choice to keep it uh or to collect it with others and involve it or you can also sell it and that that value we will say okay this is thanks to crypto but you didn't you didn't even know about that you you just paid you you went into eleven you put your credit card you paid you never saw the crypto before so that's why i think this is the path we have to take in order to make sure that we never talk about crypto but we talk about the value it brings and people will be more curious

okay so focus on the kind of end result that the customer gets the transformation if you will that the gamer the customer gets rather than focusing on the mechanism of getting it so if i were to market mp3s right now a technology that basically put cds tapes records and the radio out of business uh i wouldn't talk about the mp3s i wouldn't talk about the compression technology i wouldn't talk about how you can fit uh a song that used to be 100 megabytes into one that's only three megabytes now nobody cares what you would talk about is do you want to listen to your favorite music yes would you like to have 500 of your favorite songs in a device that's this big yes then go ahead and buy this ipod and you can get that so you're just talking about the end result they're getting and not talking about the tech in between people just want to listen to music conveniently right in that example so with games and i think this leads us into our next question jp you're really good at making things simple and kind of easy for the average person to understand how do we better communicate with non-crypto natives about this technology do we take the afro did we take the fight club approach of never talk about it or do we just skip over do we skip over it and just only talk about the benefits what's that balance like yeah you know i think that at the end of the day the most successful projects are going to be the ones that acknowledge that there's kind of two groups of people or two schools of of thought i guess in in your demographic and on the one hand you have the players right the people that they just want to play they don't want to over complicate it when they get home from work they don't want to have to learn how to install a wallet or whatever they just want to sit on their couch play a game and have fun right so that's one side and then the other side you have people that are kind of like this macro um you know kind of like a meta gamer to where they're playing a different game right and and this is something that brooks brown from norris talks about all the time is that you know they're still playing a game it's just a different game right it's a game of economics and balance and earning revenue and making money and flipping uh this nft and that nft right there's kind of two different schools and i think you have to acknowledge that both sides exist but only with the balance of the other right with going into the game fight space so when it comes to better communicating with non-crypto natives about this technology i think it depends on who you're talking to if you're talking to someone that just wants to be a player then i don't think they should be forced to learn all of the stuff that they don't really care about right they just want to play um and then if you have on the other hand your your meta your macro gamer that really wants to be involved with the economics and you know watching scoriaxes tokenomic videos and you know studying stuff with this creator or that creator to find balance in in the economy then they should have that option and the resources available to them to do that or to go down that road but without forcing either side into the glove of the other right kind of create a path that services each interest without forcing them into something that they don't want to do and i think that's really what it's going to boil down to in terms of communicating with with new players it's going to be what side are they on are they a little bit of both do they just want to play then you know that's kind of step one identify those demographics and then cater content directly to them okay great that's a really good answer guys we are gonna move into q a we've got so many cues it's blowing my mind right now here in chat and some really good questions and we're gonna do we're gonna start out with uh speaking of communication there's a great question here for uh from ricky um how would alluvium be explained in the simple mp3 versus cd example go i'm going to give a crack at this and let me know if you guys would like to give a try it's really hard right to wrap your head around something as complex as eluvium and explain it to somebody in simple terms but i'll do my best you ready maybe i'll botch it i'm going to put you guys on the spot and i'll make you get one of you guys do it if you want or you could not do it all right so here's my attempt are you ready do you remember how fun it was to play pokemon for the first time well imagine if it could be that fun again now that you're an adult you could play with triple a graphics the strategy is way deeper and you can actually literally own all of the pokemon and be able to buy sell and trade them on your own that's alluvium download now something as simple as that i think it would work for communicating what alluvium is to somebody who has played pokemon before do you guys have an attempt on simplifying alluvium into very simple terms anybody want to give it a crack yeah i'll go all right scoriax your turn do you remember when you used to watch yu-gi-oh when you're a kid and you played the cards and the monsters came to life imagine going out into the world capturing your monsters and then putting them on the board and watching them fight each other fight it out that's alluvium so these are like both callback kind of methods of simplifying things call you remember that thing you used to do when you're a kid wouldn't it be great to have be that excited again um those kinds of things anyway any other attempts you guys want otherwise we'll get another questions everybody ask your questions in live chat we will answer your questions in real time you guys want to give it a try or now i was going to go with the scoriac's roots so he took the yugioh route yeah he he gets the credits got it no problem all right here's a question asking about those alluvials will alluvials have cooler specific moves when they're in a waiting state will they fly go underground during moments of attack or just movement on the board so the answer to this is they will be able to fly some will fly some will go underground and uh those underground or flying moves are generally when their omega ability triggers so ram fire for example flies up in the air and then drops a fire rain of fire essentially attack on enemies and then other alluvials like malura will literally go under the ground pop up behind enemies and then do an explosive attack uh so um and do they have any cooler specific moves in their waiting state i don't know i don't know i don't know any character that has a move when they're in a waiting state so i'm not sure about that but that's the answer to that question um go ahead no i was just going to say i think what's really interesting about what eluvium is doing also is the depth of the of the board right when you when you think about a game like alluvium um or you know like uh team fight tactics or whatever it is uh you have to kind of consider how much depth is there in the actual animations on the board and if you kind of if you were to like take a cross-section of the alluvium board i mean you have so many different levels that you know something will fly up this high or something to go underground or like the you know the projectile that uh you know one thing sends might go here or here here right so it's like you have so many different uh it's such an expansive experience that it's it's really enjoyable to watch um and i think that's also gonna be really helpful for the future just because of how um entertaining it'll be to watch like in a stream setting and stuff like that but just wanted to throw that out there got it yeah i hope you're right i mean here's a great question let's get some prices right style guesses here get you guys on the record on official elluvium avenues on this one here we go you're on the record how many players do you expect to come into elluvium six months after it releases publicly robbie i'm putting you on the spot here use that tactical mind what's it gonna be what's the number price is right style if you go you lose okay i don't like to just put random numbers i just know that apparently there were around two million people who subscribe to the newsletter or try to get to the access to private beta so i okay we can expect that during this i mean with this number a lot of just uh different birds who just put different uh multiple times their email so i would say after six months i can expect at least one million players one million total players that have tried it or one million monthly actives that's two different things right yeah that's completely different um what was your question then for me i think i think the question here is total players that have tried it i think after six months would be the question that they're asking total number of downloads is essentially what they mean right um the case i could even go at least two million then two million downloads got it all right jp what's your prices riot style guess how many downloads after six months um i was gonna go with two million so uh froby kind of went in there what's the strategy for prices right do i come in just below you yeah if you bet one dollar then anything if you bet one then anything between one and two million you would win all right i'm gonna bet one then i'm gonna be strategic i know at least i'll be playing so i'll be downloading it one download got it scoring six months later how many downloads um i think that arena had 22 million players after about a month right um i know it's mobile and i feel like that's the biggest hindrance here but i looking at the gameplay leaks and everything um and the amount of crypto people that will be coming in just on their own and also i think it will coincide with the next bull run for bitcoin ethereum and so on and so forth i actually think we could hit maybe 10 million downloads within six months yeah that sounds about right um so uh personally that that's my estimate i think we i think we'd be looking at about 10 to 12 million uh so so that my guess is different than yours i'll say 12 million after six months we also have to take into account ramped up marketing advertising and uh you guys we have like barely done any marketing at all for alluvium at this point and so all of that will be built and deployed who knows if any of us are right millions of players is good except for your guest jp of one that was a bad guess i don't like that i'm eluvium is transparent my friends and i am gonna pull up a great one no game studio would ever pull this up on their screen ever they would never ever do this and i'm going to put it up right now is alluvium play to win or a play to win or maybe you're trying to say pay to win i don't know um i guess you're asking both uh at the same time okay so let's go around the board and uh and answer this question i will answer it last uh but based on what you understand about elluvium's main game in particular and the fact that you can have alluvium zero right and you can buy land and then get resources from your land which you can take into the main game and there's obviously all these purchasing mechanics where you can um you know by purchasing you can take more activities in the game you could even buy uh you know alluvials and all sorts of things off the elevadex is this is this a game where you could just play and do really well do you have to pay where do you kind of feel it sits on the pay to win play to win spectrum let's say of you know i'd be curious to know your opinions on that based on what you know so far starting with scoriax um this one's a really tricky one right because i feel like in its normal state it's not pay to win at all right but you have this thing where in three to five years all the alluvials we see now might be unavailable to catch in the overworld i think the big variable for me is the new alluvials and the new sets that come out if they are similar or feel very similar roles to previous alluvials then i feel like it could not be pay to win i feel like that would be enough the other side of things is hearthstone actually does a dual system with its ranked systems basically where older cards or in this case we talk about alluvials older cards aren't usable in the current ranked mode and then there's a secondary ranked mode where you can use any of the alluvials and things i think as long as you have that dichotomy it's not pay to win at all

you're muted andrew again i muted myself because i drank a soda so eluvium has two different ranked modes planned one to my knowledge if you just own any version of a particular alluvial you'll be able to take that to the highest level balance adjusted into competitive so you could catch like a little dinky atlas and you would get the same power atlas as somebody who paid a billion dollars let's say in competitive and then obviously there will be a different competitive mode where people that have maybe wailed out or want to just show off their collection or show how powerful their collection is in aggregate can go compete with each other there roby what are your thoughts on pay to win versus play to win is there such thing as just doing an entirely free to play economy like this like is that just some kind of pipe dream here um it's for me it all depends on the barrier to entry um how much does it cost let's say in dollars in order to have a pretty decent deck to start with with not necessarily the most powerful alluvials of course but at least to try something go on different regions and try to scale your team by capturing stronger and stronger eluvials like little by little as long as this is a super easy and accessible for the majority i would say this is uh pay too fast so basically you pay just to accelerate this process in order to just rank fast basically just like hearthstone technically speaking but if the barrier to entry is kind of high or uh we feel like there's too much of a difference between someone who never spent money and someone who spent let's say regularly uh i don't know 100 per month then i would say in that case it turns more and more into uh pay to win okay we have to play if we want to win so it's a play to win got it yeah that makes sense and one thing to keep in mind here too is if the game is too expensive let's say for the average gamer to get that viable deck then uh the game studio has to listen to the community like you could literally propose an iip to fix the problem and then vote on it and then it happens right so that's one interesting thing here in legacy gaming uh the executives may withhold power and force you to pay to accelerate uh in order to maximize their profits because their quarterly earnings report is coming up that happens all the time in video game industry there's mandates for executives to accelerate revenue moving into an anticipated weak quarter how do you do that you squeeze your customers for every dollar they have well in this case our shareholders if you will in quotation marks can literally vote changes into the games so it's a very very different situation you're not just some random joe on a shareholder call you can literally vote action directly in jp what are your thoughts here is uh you know is is is is pay to win or pay to accelerate does it have to be the standard moving forward and do you feel that elluvium uh will be friendly for that average player who maybe doesn't want to dump a ton of money in yeah i think the ideal scenario for a game is for there to be that skill gap i mentioned earlier to the point where if you have a team of lower ranked or like less powerful alluvials and you go up against someone that has bought stronger alluvials off of the market so they've paid to kind of advance their position without grinding to earn it is the skill gap does it overlap enough to where the one with the weaker alluvials can still win that fight right and i think that we've seen already just in private beta one just the fact that some of these professional players like froby are smacking like wave 30 every single time or like we've seen some things with um you know i think scoriax has done it a couple times or vetimore where they'll they'll see how far they can get with just stage one alluvials right and i think they've proven that with the right placement and the right strategy you can be competitive or even a winner against alluvials that were kind of you know paid out or you know maybe purchased off the market and the economy that that alluvium is creating makes it possible for the grinders to sell the nfts to the whales that don't want to spend the time and it kind of keeps the whole circle going round and round so i mean i personally think that elluvium has the right approach i don't think anything that is pay to win it's going to be super successful especially when there's real money on the line but i think in this case the skill gap is there to where you know even if you can't afford the nicest alluvials you can still be competitive because you're just a better player

answers to that question around the board thank you for that great question as well um okay let me ask you this other one from chat here and i think this will be our final question and then we will wrap up the episode here's one from chat and i guess we can go around the board and get all your answers modern llama who comments on everything asks why should the average gamer play alluvium over other traditional games what's your number one fundamental reason so obviously all of you guys are bullish on elluvium scoriax and froby obviously you can make content about it what would be your pitch to the average gamer if you were to go over to your buddy's house let's say i don't know and they're just a traditional gamer what would you tell them about elluvium to compel them to be interested in this project starting with frobie i mean for me my average gamer are like professional gamer on tft and when i talk about illusion to them i'm like imagine you have tft with no bugs with aaa graphics with no rng and you make you probably can make more money than what you do in tft and then they can uh usually listen to me very well in with this one sentence um then if you want me to talk about more like the average gamer not the professional players i would say just look at the game just just look at the game if you feel like this is fun if you feel like you wanna try to play this game capture these believe yours then come and if you don't feel like i'm not going to force you because there's no there's no point in trying to force someone to try something right so just look at the graphics look at the videos and that should be enough as an argument to attract people if it's not it means the game is not good enough great great answer jp

i think that what i would tell the average player is just um you know with the elluvium the the first game uh it's hitting a lot of different genres and a lot of different things that players like to do right it has the adventure aspect of exploring this beautiful open world it has the competitive aspect it has the collecting um you know it even has things like crafting or uh with alluvium zero like uh you know like a city builder so i would tell someone like there's there's really something kind of for everyone here and not only that but uh when you're a part of eluvium you're you can really feel like you're a part of something bigger and that you kind of have an impact in the direction things go so eluvium is going to have future games as well if you want an fps in the future then get in the community now make your voice heard have a meaningful impact and and you know grow this brand from within and i think really when you describe it like that um i can't think of really anyone that that couldn't find a home at alluvium jeez you guys are crushing it right now i might you guys might take my job scorias um i follow really similar sentiments to those two um with probably said he's in a lot of the esports arenas but a lot of my friendship circles and things actually circle around um and pokemon's a really weird one because for me i lost touch with it over time quite a bit the big reason for that is everyone um is hacking in their pokemon now for competitive play and things like that and i felt like when i spent 10 15 hours trying to find a pokemon i was trying to get with perfect stats or shiny or whatever it is then it felt really devalued because anyone else could generate that in two minutes right i feel like nfts change that game completely and that's one of the big reasons i'm here so i mean i would just talk to them about yeah definitely how there's something for everyone with the city builder because i know a lot of people love clash of clans and things like that and you've got all the overworld and everything and the future of the mmo and things so i think there is definitely something for everyone and everyone will get something out of it but the the idea that anything that you do in the game is yours and you create that story yourself quite truly whereas in most games you can fake it or break it really easily with hacking and other things the fact that you truly own that story and no one can take that away from you or devalue it themselves um i think is really powerful for me

got it yeah my pitch would be something like this um if you enjoy collecting monsters or creatures uh in any video game and you would like to actually be able to own those monsters or creatures and be able to buy sell and trade them in a game with anyone else then eluvium is going to be your only option take a look at this gameplay like phobia said if you if you think it looks interesting come play i think that's the hook um for me i think the alluvials are the star of the story here when it comes to marketing alluvium if you see those alluvials and they look interesting or inspirational or you kind of you get some feels from them uh when you see them and they want to collect them or they look cool um then i think people are going to want to come in and if they see that aesthetic if they see those alluvials and they don't they aren't inspired by it then they won't come in it's really that simple i think a lot of the time it's like what is the hook i think the alluvials are the hook uh for this game and then the kind of uh side dish if you will is the fact that you can own uh the assets along the way cool i really like that just real quick uh something that just came to mind when you were talking about that andrew um have you guys considered and maybe this is something that's already been discussed but like when you're trying to tap into like the feelings or the emotions of the players um have you guys considered allowing people to name their alluvials and like have has that already been discussed or am i thinking of something new here like where you can have a name for the alluvials in your deck and kind of like grow attachment to them and stuff like that you know i i don't know the answer to that um my assumption is that you would be able to give nicknames to your alluvials yeah and that it would just be that type similar to in pokemon right you can name your pokemon poopyface if you want and but it's a pikachu uh so um to my knowledge uh we would want to do that but the question i think i would be more attached to them if they hadn't if i should name them yeah the question is how do you do that with an nft um i don't know the answer to that right so once it's minted is there some sort of variable where the nft itself is just like the core alluvial with its own attributes but then when you plug it into our games our database knows that it's named blah blah blah i don't know the answer to that so i can ask aaron but the nft part makes it more complex right i've seen lots of nfts with very customizable thing there's a there's a game out at the moment and i won't name it necessarily but it gives a lot of vibes of like mario maker and basically you can go in and you can customize your plot and build your own game level and stuff and then upload it but i think that is more just like a back-end server i don't think that's on the actual nft yeah i don't know let me ask aaron about that that's a great question and yes we should do that so if we hadn't already thought about that hopefully um we can give you a little bit of credit down there i'd be like thanks jp awesome guys let's go around the board here and give you a chance to chill this is your chance skoryax to shill to everyone seriously how can people follow you obviously your insights are fantastic where can people follow you after this if they thought what you had to say today was interesting um yeah just please follow me on youtube um skaraks that's probably where i'm the most i want to be streaming more often on twitch and things as well but i'll probably stream on twitch and youtube always and things like that so definitely follow me on youtube i am also starting something or at least attempting something where i try to give crypto gaming and crypto news updates on tick tock so just go search for skyrockets on tick tock and you can check me out there as well links in the description below on the youtube version of this as well to all of our guests jp where people where can people find you in arcade yeah so for arcade's account it's arcade the number two earn um arcade to earn and that is our twitter you'll find us uh find links to all of our discord and newsletter and everything like that we have uh you know a very uh vibrant community so would love to have anyone else there and then my personal twitter is just uh it's a little bit of play on words with our k with arcade's model it's mission pool um but it's p-o-o-l-e um mission p-o-o-l-e that's my last name um so mission pool on twitter and um and arcade on twitter but yeah and then the the other thing i'll just mention quickly in terms of uh opportunity we do have a special role that we give out on our discord to people that come from events that we do so if you do visit the arcade discord you can find that from our twitter um you just hit us up in gen chat say you came from elluvium's twitch or twitter or whatever the case is um and a mod will give you a special role and that role is going to be airdropped in nft that will be a utility nft for our platform so um encourage everyone to do that if you're not already in our discord but aside from that thank you andrew this has been really fun and it's always a pleasure to speak with you guys dude that's amazing you just offered to drop an nft on on our use in your shoutout very very good join their discord go check it out everybody um thank you very much for that froby yep uh so for me i make educational content on the gameplay of the game of illuvium and tft but tft is another channel so if you want to follow me type robe eluvium on youtube or you can also follow me on twitter i just know that private beta 2 is going to come soon i don't have the date but when that happens i'm going to make a lot a lot of guides about the new features of private beta and then you can learn a bit faster than the other players fantastic that that's the guy that can help you out right there thank you so much for watching luva talks appreciate it if elluvium is the one of the leading game studios in the game 5 space then obviously we want to continue to lead the conversation about our industry and i really appreciate all of you watching today and i'll see you in the next episode adios i'm now going to awkwardly wave for a while