NEXUS Final Round - Battlebound - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

uh hi my name is Chris chrisom I'm a director of growth at battlebound we are a a16z bucked gaming startup um and we are taking on a challenge to build an fully onchain uh RPG Pokemon inspired game for web 3 called anterus uh so well the case is Pokémon started as a game boying game in the '90s nobody expected much and out of the throughout the next 20 years it grew into the $9 billion annual revenue kind of a case so that's kind of insane on its own right but uh well the Pokemon um target audience SK is very young back in the day from 6 to 12 um most of its players have grown up and they expect much more so from the gen they used to know the Nostalgia is there but the rest of the things not so much so the lack of innovation pool Graphics repetitive gameplay uh has left playing for something more and um yeah P world only proved that in web to so there has to be some solution of us introducing even more but lowkey go going into web three kind of aspects that are there but last cycle was not exactly utilizing that kind of a case so um yeah players want just to see new fresh takes and let's just deliver that to them um anour Competitive Edge is being the first freet toplay online creature collecting RPG you can play with friends as you creates there is PVE for the Casual kind of a gameplay there is onchain PVP for the likes of more most of a web three kind of a Solutions where players can bet against each other in a fighting kind of a game so there is there is a solution for both of the ends um yeah Hunter combines the best of Pokemon creature collecting with a free hold on oh yeah uh with a web3 RPG where you can collect breed evolve and own that own the your own Squad of digital reaches called Tanta and uh about the team well the battlebound funding team has been uh has built and scaled the AAA games before from zero to billions in Revenue going into League of Legends team fight tactics Guild of Guild Wars 2 but uh there is also my expertise that comes into the go to market and TG and all of that within crypto um I worked with lto polygon Heroes of Mia only this year uh to launch them into the TG our first web three game Eves has made about 4 mil in revenue and we are here to to make the Anis of division the reality uh yeah there's the trailer of The Life Game players explore anteras and look for Ana to collect after collecting and leveling up your squad of creatures you can enter dungeons with friends and battle of enemies for and collect the loot Ana can be captured by collecting them into counter player crafted teras fuse all items in un including creatur loot actions and achievements are publicly viewable and auditable on the blockchain so as for the infrastructure gasless transactions eliminate friction and support um intent proofs infrastructure that allows the underlying web three architecture to produce onchain proofs for fers ingame actions when catching a minting an Ana so for the other part the marketplace and all of that anteras uses RNG based play to Min system that spontaneously rewards the players in game or on the marketplace with nft so they are not by default there is an SB token component included uh as for the yeah let's let's miss this one like right away let's see minting in action because that's a cool one here's the player he just catched the uh Digby creature within the game he Sayes the opportunity to Min the NF itself he sees the real price from the F from an Marketplace the price that he's about to pay if he is not willing to pay it then he will just get an SBT to have a consistent gaming experience but he he's going to Min then that's the user acquisition gener right The Happening life once that's done the mint is done uh the user will get the creature obviously plus the uh notification of the blockchain actions in the background as for the uh token components there are two tokens but only the battle is the on one that is obtainable on exchanges and it's a governance token done used for staking and all of that but gy is life conversion going from Battle and to offchain ingame currency to retain the compliance with Nintendo shop and other platforms that we want uh to launch the anas on yeah um as for the anex basically it's the key to the Token system that is introducing slipage additional monetization tools all of that to retain the revenue stream coming from different angles instead of asking people for a lot of uh upfront fees for the game because they hated exactly that last time um play swap between currencies frequently generating fees and creating Revenue we are raising 3 mil uh in token warrant Equity all of that but uh yeah there is a QR code for the play test if anyone uh wants to test it out thank you thank you Christian uh over to the judges for questions now yeah I'm I'm curious you're launching 3 million to to launch the game is that for the for the marketing of like or do you have yeah I guess like what's your burn right now and then how much are you putting aside for for marketing go to market marketing mostly and just uh L literally like a 20 30% into get the ensure to ensure the game development is ongoing but the M majority of it to for the go to market user acquisition and um yeah kind of a market dominance because we plan to go into monat we are a part of their cohort uh to dominate the market and onboard other game studios as well and uh to get a second business running basically okay and how do you feel like most because most big games have sort of nine figure marketing budgets or or more do do you think it's going to be tougher to compete with a smaller marketing budget or how do you plan on kind of getting around that like how it will be uh for us to compete with other similar games or yeah how can you compete with the marketing budget of of the bigger games I think our user acquisition flywheel is a bit different plus our team is relatively lean and we think to go that way we get we have um experience with the products done within riot games since probably the first day like the St Studio got established and they also had struggles around um utilizing this their funds for doing into the market because at first they were just a basically a fork copy of daa so there are lessons in there plus I get I guess after 7even years in crypto I have my ways of just knowing the right people I guess to spread the right word and introduce them into the game but also the game itself is relatively I guess cool to play like you can check it out yourself I've played it for 4 hours straight in the play test and um the whole flywheel of having the satisfaction of playing using it is there so we will be utilizing what we have which is like displaying the quality and going into the market with a narrative of we do care about what we do we are not dist disted disconnected with our with our audience and Community basically yeah I'm curious uh the pitch started started off as Pokemon do you have to license any IP from Pokemon not at all uh we just today PW got sued by Nintendo by the way and um that's this is some part of an EOS that we had since the first moment uh anteris got into the development which was like yeah okay we looked into the p and like it looks almost the same when it comes to the design of the creatures not the mechanics of the game because those are different but in our case our creatures are entirely different different Stylistics um as far as I know Pokemon do not own the idea of collecting creatures so we are good there um we've made sure that the game mechanics connect do connect soft soft connect with web three aspects of it so in fact at some point if we grew just enough they might be interested to work with us because they are not working on any web three components and there is more much more companies like epic games Nintendo many more Ubisoft that that try to delve into what web 3 is doing and we'll try to get actual working Frameworks rather than building on their own because they have no idea what they're doing so yeah um is there an element of destroying the nfts or burning them I'm burning them sorry yeah like just like if they if they can get minted in game and then more players come in the price should asically approach zero over time for the value of nfts from like a supply perspective so curious how you combat that yeah so uh we will be introducing those nft collections like let's imagine we'll give away or sell 100 of creatures like on first week of release of a new creature which is relatively small versus the 10,000 nft collections whatnot uh the rest will be put into the game mechanic that players will actually need to play to mine or get the creature out out of the game but after a year or so uh the flywheel will include because we will be introducing different creatures the time like in like characters in League of Legends right after some time we will get the same mechanics like I don't know if you know check nft right they had that Co and mechanic of merging two nfts into one to make something else that's the way not just direct burning because like I just not I'm just not a fan of direct Bing but bik will be used with some of the aspects of the game but not the main driver if you will yeah yeah I think we're out of time but thank you very much thanks guys