Delivering on the Mainstream Gaming Promise - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

I'm uh very excited to be joined by the from the gonzilla team today for those of you that don't know know me my name is Pier kicks I'm one of the partners at delphy ventures we've been Super Active investing across more than 160 projects in crypto going back to 2019 around 50 or so uh sort of gaming and gaming related infrastructure and um it's been a long journey lots of learnings uh being as committed to this space as we have been but um yeah enormously excited to dig in today with the so perhaps we could have a bit of an intro on on you and uh kind of the journey up to Godzilla absolutely so after having been a seral entrepreneur since 1998 and building over a dozen 19 technology companies I got into investing in the web free space of our family office did over several hundred investments in the space and towards the end of 2021 we found Godzilla and made a very very large bet back then absolutely fell in the love of the team the project the product and initially became an adviser and then as things kind of evolved uh became core team member and now I'm the director of web 3 at Godzilla amazing um so yeah I wanted to kick it off obviously uh people can see some gameplay behind us here but really wanted to give a bit of an overview of kind of the gameplay what you guys are going after in some of the game law absolutely so what we are building or in essence as you can see already practically a finished building is what we call the Battle Royale 2.0 uh game it has very very unique components that no other game in the industry has such as 60 hours of storyline on both sides of the conflict one of the biggest complaints that shooter players have about why you don't play Battle Royale games is that there's no storyline not only did we fix that but it is done and written by none other than Richard Morgan who wrote the book alter carbin and that was turned into no wary Netflix show by the same name so that's one two we have the best graphics in the industry and that's not us saying it it's actual professional Esports players that are in early play test saying that this is the best Battle Royale game they've ever played we have a very very very unique limb system where people have a very very extensive set of strategic decisions that they can make in real time based on what limbs they find you can actually also shoot off these limbs as Pi actually has experienced himself because he's an avid Avid Off the Grid play tester as well um and you could shoot of a limb run over grab it and exchange it if you like that limb better um and a lot of other strategic choices that that that system provides in addition to a myriad of other very very new and Innovative aspects that we added to this what we call Battle Royale 2.0 genre yeah I want to stress that uh I probably got over 7,000 hours playing shooter games throughout my lifetime and over the last few months playing these play tests i' I've amassed like 60 70 hours now and yeah genuinely think this is one of the best games I've ever played and I'm very excited to see what it what it does uh upon release relatively soon um so perhaps we could touch on some of like gonzilla origin story and kind of business history uh you know what was it that led to your conviction in that team who were the team to begin with behind the development and uh yeah give us some more color there absolutely well I'll start with the fact that by the time I found the team they were already 100 full-time employees a playable prototype of the game and two years of development with the founders investing $15 million of their own money into this project i' had never seen anything like this before not in my web 2 investing days nor in my web 3 investing days so that's one two both Alexander Zol and Vlad Corf the two founders of the project and the company have extensive business experience prior to this which includes the building of another shooter that amassed almost 150 million Gamers and made over a billion dollars in Revenue so it was just one of the most unique unique teams that I had ever seen that was building something that is in my and also extremely unique both for web 2 and web 3 gaming in addition to that at that point in time they had already on board Neil Bloom Camp an award- nominated film director that is behind such hits as District 9 chappie El liim of Matt Damon and last year he also directed Grant tourism of Orlando Bloom and as I mentioned you know Richard Morgan and another you know just insane cast of folks that has now grown to over 34 full-time employees after know the additional three years of development amazing um and so yeah for all of our uh you know blockchain of fiction AOS in the crowd maybe we could touch on kind of the Unchained footprint um you know for a game that's this geared towards a mainstream audience how are you guys approaching that what are some of the sort of design philosophy around those pieces absolutely well number one I usually like to lead with the fact that I'm not a huge fan of labels so people label things web 2 people label things web 3 our mission is to provide absolutely the best and most entertaining and most enjoyable experience possible within you know the gaming industry so we take whatever components are the best possible components for making that happen and that yes does include full asset ownership so every single item within the game that the user finds themselves on the island is an item that they can fully own and ex trct on chain in addition to that a very unique aspect of our game is that there is is no company store there's only a peer-to-peer Marketplace the only way to obtain the only two ways to obtain items is either to find them within a gaming session and extract them or to purchase them from another gamer that extracted the item and then listed it on the P2P Marketplace so that's one very very very large aspect in addition to that we also track all of the activity as in battle passes purchases minting of in-game items selling of ingame items it on chain and that is accessible to anyone and everyone through our own blockchain scanner that we developed ourselves as well as the ability to include a very very large uh amount of folks that are only interested in web3 through what we call our validat node ecosystem those are nodes that mint all the in-game items for Off the Grid and in the future will be upgradable to also mint in game items for other games that will be coming into our ecosystem absolutely um no I think it's super exciting could we maybe double click on the extraction mechanic so people have a bit of a clearer overview we're going to show a little clip at the end that gives a bit of a bit of an oversight on it but yeah how does the kind of uh hex extraction work what does that look like within the actual gam playay yeah absolutely so it is part of the lore so it's not just a thing that's bolted on to to the game you are running around an island within a battle royale with 150 other players you loot weapons um Limbs and other such things and occasionally these boxes will also drop what we call a hex you then have to carry that hex to an extraction point in the EXT at the extraction point you have to decode that hex which in essence sends it to all validators up in the space station we have a space elevator concept with a space station and those validators then decode that hex that then allows you to gain those ingame items during the decoding process which is between a minute and 2 minutes long depending on the level and Rarity of the hex you have to actually defend that extraction point or risk losing your in game items to another team absolutely um gives rise to all sorts of fun gameplay uh one of one of the methods is like um having a hex extract as the storm closes in so obviously you can leave it there and in theory no one will be able to take it I've literally went as people Sprint out into the storm to like hack our hex extractions just to mess with us gives gives uh rise to yeah all sorts of fun gameplay um so I wanted to touch on yeah sort of that this concept of the mainstream Bridge like why do you think it is that gonzilla is the finally the one to deliver on this sort of like AAA um gaming promise well there's several components to that number one right from the outside we said that we cannot have any friction so it needs to be and it is free to download free to play Playstation Xbox PC some other yet to be announced platforms and no setup of wallets no token swaps no onoff ramping Fiat everything is built right into your traditional regular gaming experience while taking care of the onchain and blockchain components all seamlessly in the background so that's kind of step one step two of course is to just build something that people want to play just for the sake of playing irrespective of anything else and obviously we took care of both of these items as you were very well know mhm and then yeah maybe we could also touch on uh you know the actual distribution angle because we haven't hit on that and I think that's super important in terms of platforms you know uh yeah maybe you can talk a little bit about that absolutely well first I'm super happy to announce that we will be going from closed North American and European play tests within the next 30 to 60 days to allowing access worldwide so that's a massive massive massive stop for us so we're very very very close to actually having the first mainstream blockchain enabled game ever to launch on Console so that's one two during that launch we will have a massive massive massive campaign I can't get into the details yet of that but you guys will see it very very shortly but a massive campaign is planned around that that includes actual people playing the game sharing the game um and and other things like I said that you guys will see sorry and other things that you guys will see soon yeah yeah absolutely yeah I can't stress that enough guys this is already running completely seamlessly on Console I mean this is the first game with an Unchained footprint to ever do so um you know feedback across the play test across every platform has been insane so far so yeah very excited to see where all of that goes um also very excited to announce that uh yeah Del's making a a very very large Strategic investment in in these guys uh it's going to be our largest gaming bet ever and um yeah very excited to see what the next sort of 30 60 days bring as as we approach the launch timeline here but uh yeah um as as some of us that have been around the industry for for a while um you know it's uh this sort of mythical Beast of a AAA game to be born of crypto has kind of eluded many of us but um yeah I have a total conviction that this is going to be our sort of best shot on goals so very excited to see what comes with that um di I wanted to touch a little bit more on the uh sort of validator setup and what that facilitates in terms of like a longer term vision for the ecosystem um yeah how's that likely to evolve over time absolutely but prior to saying that I also point out that you guys are now the largest node validator 40 gonzilla ecosystem so that's going to be part of the announcement there we go there we go super super exciting for us um so what we have is we have 10,000 nodes that mint in- game items and get paid directly by the gamer for that service these nodes will be fully upgradable through a yet to be announced process to then start minting in game items and get paid for minting in game items for other game that launch on our ecosystem which is the gun Z chain which includes our own non-custodial wallet that we developed and launched and has already been running for almost a year available in IOS and Android stores it includes our blockchain scanner that I touched on before it includes our nft Marketplace that is accessible on desktop as well as within the console environment as well as within our wallet and all these other components that all these games that we'll be bringing onto our chain will be able able to fully white label and then again utilize the validator system to validate transactions and mint ingame items so our vision for this is to allow folks to have fully upgradable nodes that will be minting for any and every game within the ecosystem amazing very excited for that I think we had a short video to play as well that gave a bit of more of a a cinematic overview as well as uh yeah some insight into what that whole hex extraction process looks like so maybe we can get that spun up now absolutely and we'll actually also showcase the ecosystem itself as well and show that it's already all built and ready to go [Music] a [Music] [Applause] [Music] for all right one thing I'll point out is that this is actually all in-game assets rendered by the in-game engine and not just cutscenes yeah I I think think I'd also like to stress it was uh my utter dismay that we weren't allowed to show any gameplay um just yet but to to reemphasize the play test have been live for like three or four months now you can jump in every weekend the servers are open for um you know I think six or seven hours on Friday Saturday Sunday now all this stuff is fully built Fully live we're you know not far from from kind of game launch here so uh that gaml that you saw running at the start as well is like over a year old by now um strongly strongly recommend digging in and and checking out some of this for yourselves um and so the in terms of like countdown to launch what people should do in terms of following for more information now um where should they go absolutely so number one follow us please on X at playoff theeg grid and sign up for our play tests on playoff theeg grid.com at the Pioneer program and thank you so much for your time everyone thank you pierce for the wonderful interview and thanks to the Token 2049 team as well absolutely fantastic