Fireside Chat: Santiago Santos & Kieran Warwick - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

foreign [Music] Long Way together through the heart times celebrate you baby [Music] I have to do [Music] foreign thank you all right [Music] okay welcome everyone um so this is a fireside chat with uh Kieran which is actually my first time in meeting him in real life uh he's a good fortune of uh full disclosure I'm an investor in the louvium and uh one of the more exciting projects um so anyways I think um welcome Karen thank you thanks for having me um so what you just saw there was the first trailer of the open world of eluvium right yeah so uh part of the Auto Battle uh part of the Overworld yeah which was probably I think that came out in December yeah so tell us a little bit about your journey of starting eluvium what you want to do there and and what really just sparked the idea yeah so uh Kane as you know came my uh my other brother he started synthetics which is a another crypto protocol he really pushed me to get back into crypto I was investing back in 2016 in ethereum and uh I stumbled upon a game inside of crypto and I was like whoa this this actually allows you to have verifiable ownership of your assets that's that's what Gamers have been wanting for years and years and years if you think World of Warcraft you've got people that that generate all this gold they have nowhere to sell it so they do it on eBay and stuff and I was like this solves everything the only issue was there were no really appealing games to me where I went this is you know this is something I'd play so then we I went to my two other brothers and I said let's let's build a triple A game let's let's do it yeah I wanna I wanna touch on this idea there's been recently a lot of criticism on web3 gaming it's not sustainable it's not fun it's just D5 with a veneer like you know a game of you know D5 gamified finance and Guild farming but that's not really a game you've been really vocal about what you want to build so tell us a little bit more about that yeah so the the issue right now with with game five or crypto games whatever you want to Define it as is they're not built for fun they're built for earning and the earning part of a crypto game needs to be the ancillary part of it right it's it's first and foremost it has to be fun it has to be immersive it has to be addictive it it needs to be replayable to the point where people are streaming it like the type of games that mainstream gamers are used to you know fortnite World of Warcraft that that level of uh of fun yeah how do you compete against the fortnite you need to have a lot of fun a lot of funding which luckily thanks to to you and a bunch of other VCS we we got that and that allows you to build a big team so we've got just under 200 in our team at the moment which is one of the biggest teams in crypto in general just but that's the that's what you need in order to be able to build out a re a proper immersive game that can actually compete with other AAA titles out there yeah and how uh so tell us a little bit about the journey so you launched the private beta a few months ago tell us how that's going private beta 2 is going live today today so talk a little bit about that yeah so uh private beta one that was the first time that we actually demonstrated the products we had a lot of people a lot of naysayers saying the videos that we were showing and whatever were were not real that's not real in-game footage age and stuff like that so private beta1 sort of dispelled all of those myths and people were like wow these these Graphics that that Grant has uh been so adamant about that they're real and they're playable it's uh it's an auto battleer so we're competing with the likes of Team fight tactics and DOTA underlords which are very very big games hundreds of millions of players I would say private beta one was maybe 30 of the way there private beta 2 is probably 60 of the way there so we're not at that AAA level yet but once we go into private beta 3 which has PVP and we can add yield and tournaments and stuff like that I honestly think that at that point we can compete with the likes of League of Legends team fight tactics and what does that roadmap look like so what what's the vision Grand Vision for luvium say and you know two three years time yeah so so we're building an interoperable blockchain game so that's that's what the power of blockchain gives us and so right now we have three AAA games that we're building we've got alluvium zero you've got alluvium Overworld and alluvium Arena and all three of those games are interconnected and you can use the same assets Port them into the other into each game you don't have to play all three at once you can play just one of them if you like but the journey over the next six months is is basically getting those three games polished and ready for launch and then after that that's when we start adding more games into this universe and the key thing is they're all interoperable right we do talk a lot about interoperability and crypto a lot which can be taken to extremes like a lot of things in crypto yeah um but I like to think of the analogy here as Nintendo as a franchise as a game Studio they built you know so many games and then bundle it all together in like Super Smash Brothers yep we had characters from Mario Kart two yeah a bunch of other yep and just so is that a fair characterization of what alluvium is trying to do yes but instead of you needing to buy Super Smash Bros and buy Mario Kart and you need to buy each Nintendo game that comes out in that franchise in alluvium you can use the same asset in every single game so for example we are thinking about Mario Kart was one of my favorite games growing up same with my brothers and uh we are thinking about doing a racing in game like a cartoon racing game you'll be able to take those characters that you capture in the Overworld and literally walk over to the racetrack and put your character in and you'll be driving around with your friends in a Mario Kart Style game and it's still in the same universe the same game and nothing changes yeah uh we're definitely what seems to be a crypto winter now yeah but you you nonetheless keep building um and so how do we go mainstream got it we have to build fun games that's the first thing but the other thing is we gotta we we can't have barriers to entry that's been one of the biggest issues with with the current crypto Market crypto games we need to have uh in our case we've got a non-custodial wallet solution which we're building in which essentially is a fancy way of saying you can play our game without knowing anything about crypto without knowing that you're owning these assets and then whenever you feel ready you can literally click a button and migrate and that will create your own wallet and you'll own those assets and unlike games in the past and mainstream where you know you you got to go to eBay and stuff like that to try and sell your assets it's all dodgy we've literally made a Marketplace for people to sell these assets we we encourage it yeah and I guess like on that point um when can we expect to see that version of eluvium where you you have these two kind of parallel games that'll be on launch on launch not not during the alphas and beta periods that we've got going on now when we do our full launch that's when you'll have that that experience where it's 3.5 billion Gamers there's probably two million web 3 Gamers so the the the funnel for bringing you know the the people through without any of the crypto jargon that has to be there on launch yeah otherwise you just don't get mainstream adoption it's too scary yeah yeah absolutely how do you think about like the fortnights of the world Nintendo's of the world do you ever think that they come in a web three challenge what you're doing or do you envision maybe doing Partnerships with them or integrating them somehow I absolutely think that uh as soon as you give power back to the people in this case the Players let's take Pokemon for example if you're out there and you're or Pokemon go even right you've got these people who are hanging off Bridges trying to capture these rare characters that they don't even own if if there was a game that came out which was similar to Pokemon where you could capture these creatures and own them why would you go back and so that transition and power back to the players is going to be what drives the developers to go okay well at this point now we've got AAA games that we're competing with that allow this that it's such a a better experience we have we have to merge over if we don't we're not going to last I I truly think now this isn't going to happen next year or even in the next few years but 10 to 20 years from now I think every single game will transfer to being blockchain absolutely I want to ask you about hiring developers in the team I mean you get to a team of 200 and a span of a year and a half two years is impressive but um I think would love to understand what kind of people are you hiring uh you know building a game takes a lot of time it's not like you know forking code and doing a D5 protocol I mean as much as I love D5 but I think people the current crypto users don't appreciate building a game takes a a lot of time so how do you I'm curious what kind of developers create it I mean it takes an army to build these games how easy is it for you to convince them to come and join a team like luvium versus going to so yeah we will so we've gone up to experts to be able to build AAA game you realistically need about a thousand people in the studio that's that's that's the first thing the only way to get around that is to literally hire the best of the best that have worked on Games like World of Warcraft we've got guys multiple guys that we poached from Riot and you know these Ubisoft all of these guys Nintendo and we were able to do it luckily at the start grant our art director and my brother he was one of the best modelers in the world and so he was able to use his brand to go out to these people and say look I know it's crypto I know it's crazy but I had to convince Grant at the start that it it wasn't going to be some sort of scam and his brand was going to get so he knew and once he was convinced we're able to get probably our first 20 hires were just like top tier AAA Engineers uh artists we had we even got marketing people that were you know top tier and once we had that base of 20 guys where it's like okay if he was building League of Legends and now he's come over to alluvium there's got to be something there yeah and so it's gotten easier over time but it was one of the harder things and that's why it's so you you see teams that are like we're building a triple A game and we have 20 people because it's not easy to get absolutely convince people yeah I think uh the common denominator is really smart people want to build on hard problems and and you know this is It's really exciting I think gaming is a category is the probably the most fast scaling businesses in the world in the history of and uh I think it's what ticks was mainstream so I know we got a minute left um for everyone out there in the audience like uh if they want to get started they want to play eluvium yep How do they do that so they need to they need to go to the Discord you can go onto the website it's eluvium.io you want to register for the beta there's very limited spots to get in but as I said it's launching private beta 2 is launching today so definitely register register try and get uh try and get in that beta and uh if you're not if you're not in that beta just join the Discord follow along my again Grant leaks everything that we build like literally every piece of art every piece of Animation it's all in the disc one so yeah amazing well uh thanks everyone for listening and uh yeah go check out alluvium thanks guys just