The Metacast by Naavik: Crypto Corner #14 - A Deep Dive into Crypto Raiders

[Music] good morning dear listener and welcome to the 14th crypto corner episode of the metacast by navi i'm your host nicola vega or nico for short and today i'm having a co-host devin becker's here to to back me up and we are talking to nicholas nick captain kicks conoper who's the co-founder of crypto raiders um so today we're talking about crypto raiders we're taking a bit of a deep dive in it uh first let's do some intros before we do i'll i'll introduce myself for the new people so i'm niko i'm hosting the metacast for navic but i'm also an investor at bitcraft ventures where i focus on the crypto gaming stuff which is very exciting and then devin how about you sir yeah devon becker i i'm working actually with a company called lycium that's doing some uh tooling platform stuff to help players better match up with uh nfts and guilds and stuff to be able to play to earn a little bit more efficiently based off

their skill level some cool stuff there nice and then nick fantastic i'm one of the co-founders of crypto raiders uh we're a nft rpg strategy game that's been around since june of last year um been growing and getting a lot of traction and just honestly having the time of my life i i come from a digital advertising background and every day i wake up and say man i'm blessed that i'm i'm able to build a video game every day cool so i mean let's dive in immediately nick tell us a bit about how you ended up starting or joining the team at the crypto raiders what started this this whole thing yeah great question so i i've known about crypto for a long time but like a lot of recent additions to the crypto space i i really dived in heavily after um march 2020 with the whole you know coronavirus thing i think that got a lot of people to to finally jump into the space um and then early last year

january a buddy told me about nfts on nifty gateway and i just absolutely fell in love i'm a i'm a gamer uh for my my whole life and i think a lot of people in the gaming space um it it's just the nfts just clicked instantly for me so i i traded nfts heavily for all of last year um and after a period of time i did a consulting gig for like one or two projects and i kind of saw when you don't see the inside of a project you kind of think like is this even like you don't even think about being able to do one yourself but after consulting for a few projects i was like hey like i could actually build a project with some friends and so a buddy of mine who i is is a gamer friend genius developer um we've been friends for like 15 years i would call him like once a month and pitch him just a different idea for an nft project and he'd be like oh that's cool we'd talk about it for an hour and then you know nothing would happen um and finally around may i called him and this time he had seen enough about

nfts that it started clicking for him too and uh he presented the idea for what is now crypto raiders and um we have a ton of experience playing world of warcraft together runescape path of exile diablo all these kind of rpg strategy games and at the time it was really like axi infinity and zed run were the two big nft games that were actually out there in playable and of course there was like eluvium and parallel at the time that were you know big big raises but didn't have an actual game but we we saw a space for or a niche rather for an rpg strategy game like similar to world of warcraft or runescape and for us as gamers in those like rpg kind of games the nft use case made just complete sense to us even more than most games um we played a lot of counter-strike together and of course you know like you can trade counter-strike skins and all of that so but when you look at rpg strategy games

with the items and the gear and the materials uh the the synergies with nfts like made a lot of sense to us so uh we we launched our project it was a it was a small project out of the gate we actually started at .01 eth believe it or not when eth was down at like the two thousand dollar range um back in back in may june and uh and uh successfully sold out and and ever since then we've just been building growing the team and just shipping all right and so could you give us like a brief overview of how the game works so for for people out there like how should i imagine this um yeah and then maybe after or maybe while you're doing that maybe you can describe the types of assets in the game um because you you talked about nfts what nfts are you talking about uh give us some some color there yeah definitely so so how the game works if you were just to start it from the beginning you'd buy a level one ungeared raider um and you get x number of free dungeon

runs per week and then you can buy dungeon keys and run additional runs per week if you want to um but basically what you're trying to do is level up your character get it better gear and you want to get to the end game where there's more interesting things um happening and so basically what you do is you queue up you go into a dungeon that is is one that you have a good chance of winning based on your skill level so we have like level recommendations um but if you defeat the the uh enemy in the dungeon you'll get a loot drop and it's randomized you could get a common an uncommon a rare and epic um and basically you're grinding through these different dungeons you're trying to get up to max level which like right now it's like level eight or nine and you're trying to get you know the best gear you possibly can once you get up to the top level we have daily duels tournaments which is basically 1v1 pvp where you can compete against other raiders um i think in january the total prize pool for the

month was like 30 grand uh february is 50 grand march we're going up to 100 150 grand so there's there's a real like fun uh end game you know earning you know a fighting mechanism but right now the nft characters are what you can trade we're working on people being able to trade the items themselves uh but right now the items are attached to the player so we see it all the time someone gets a super rare weapon they're able to sell their nft on open c for maybe five ten times what they bought it for because the person buying it wants to take that rare weapon and go into the duels tournaments and and try to you know compete um we also have an interesting mechanic to our game where we have uh nfts that are called mobs and they're the actual enemies that you can face in the dungeons so we have a new dungeon type that's coming out it's sort of similar to slay the spire it's like you know you try to see how deep you can go before

you die um and in that dungeon all of the mob nft enemies they appear as the enemies what's interesting is if you own a mob nft if it defeats the raider you get in earning you get our in-game currency which is aurum so we've now introduced a pretty innovative mechanic where people can not only own the characters in the game but they can own like the playable characters but they also can own the enemies in the game and and potentially earn um from from having a great mob that can just take down raiders left and right so there's that mechanic as well and then we also recently introduced uh farming where after you've run your dungeons for the week you can send your raider and they can go farm materials you can craft those materials into health potions and then bring them back into game and then actually use the health potions in game so we're expanding on on the layers of of nfts and tokens and materials that

are tradable and usable um in the game but at the core level you're basically playing like a diablo or runescape you're trying to level up your character you're trying to get better gear you're trying to get better materials and then you're using that to compete in the end game so right now the end game is is pvp duels we're also working on like multiplayer complex dungeons like world of warcraft where you need 10 or 15 friends to go in and take down a really big boss and then those will be our two pillars at the end game it'll be you know do you want to go pvp do you want to go pve do you want to do both fascinating um what kind of skill expression is there in the game now and how do you want to see that evolve towards the future yeah so right now the the skill expression in the game is is really around uh two components one is figuring out how to gear your character properly and then the second is how to spec your gear properly so as you're leveling up you're getting skill points

and you can put them into strength intelligence agility wisdom charm or luck in each of those have different modifiers some of them will help with damage health crit all of those different things so there's a skill component there as well and then also in the next month we're going to be launching abilities into the game so there's gonna be nine starting abilities and then on top of that we're gonna allow players to specialize into classes and unlock class abilities like if you're a wizard or a knight or a paladin or a druid that's when i think the game gets really interesting and complex because now it's not just about items it's not just about your how you spec out your raider skill wise but then also it's going to be how do you understand how to use your abilities to to play against different people that are spec differently right so you may have a strategy if you're going up against a strength warrior hero you may have a certain ability combination uh

that you think will help you win there versus you may have a completely different um path of decisions if you're going up against a wizard or a rogue et cetera so right now it's really about the strategy of properly building your character and within the next month there will also be a huge strategic um uh you know to to how you uh decision make in combat cool and could you um so as far as as far as i understand currently you have two types of nfts one is the playable characters two is the mobs over time you might have items become nfts as well you talked about aurum if i'm not mistaken which is a token um could you talk more about the different types of tokens you have definitely and there actually is one more nft so one of the things that we do in in our game our team we have the philosophy that we've already made enough capital to build a a great game a lot of other people out there they want to keep launching new nfts that you can mince

here buy land here by this here by that we want all of the additional assets in the game to either be earned or airdropped to people that are staking raiders so the reason why we did was mounts and so we actually airdrop mount to a bunch of players what's cool about mounts is that if you attach a mount to your raider when you're farming these materials you have additional movement speed which allows you to farm quicker so like a normal mount maybe gives you a 50 boost an epic mount gives you 100 boost and then eventually in game mounts will have utility in terms of traveling through the overworld um so that is an additional item that we have but on the token side we have two primary tokens we have raider and we have orum so the easiest way to compare it is that if you know about big nft games like axiomfinity so axi has their governance token which is axs raider is our governance token so they're fairly comparable and then aurum is our in-game

currency that's what you use to do everything in the game that's most similar to slp which is actually infinity's in-game currency so those are our two primary tokens and then we have some additional tokens as well but on the raider side there's two things that you can do with raider one is you can stake raider and if you stay greater raider stakers not only do they get air drops like mounts they also got air dropped the mob nfts but you also receive 50 percent of the in-game orem spend so raider stakers what's interesting is as a player you could buy raider stake it and then earn aurum back that then you can use to play in the game um how do you accumulate rater so eventually you'll be able to accumulate some raider in game but will will make it very selective like you'll have to win a big duels tournament or your guild will have to take down a big boss it won't be everyone earning a

raider but right now you can earn raider by providing liquidity to our liquidity pools and so that's how people are accumulating more raider um aurum we're about a week or two away to start uh making aurum droppable in-game and that will be the first kind of play-to-earn mechanism to come into our game um so aurum you're able to use to recruit new raiders during our recruitment events you're able to use aurum to buy dungeon keys so let's say you're max level but you don't have you're missing one item and you really want to get into duels after you've run your five free uh dungeon runs you can buy dungeon keys with aurum and raid more and more and more um and then you can also use aurum to um uh reset your stats as well there's like a stat key that you can use to reset your stats if you want to respect your character um and then there's some orem fees on the farming side so those are our secondary tokens so right now we have

grimweed eye of the new and then health potions um and so those are those are those are more like utility tokens like they're not supposed to be they're supposed to be used in game um so they're not like primary tokens but that's what you can that's an additional thing you can do with your raider you could go run your dungeons then you can send them off on a quest they can accumulate grim weed eye the newt turn it into health potions which will then soon be able to be ported into game you'll be able to use a health person during a duel or maybe you're struggling to beat a certain dungeon you can pop a health potion and maybe be able to take down that dungeon but we're excited about seeing how that plays out from an economic standpoint just how the community prices these things values these things uses these things um but yeah in summary raider our governance token aurum our utility token and then we have some secondary tokens that are focused around farming and materials you talked about um staking raider and then receiving

50 of the arm that was spent inside the game how does that mechanism work because slp for example um if you own slp you basically own a part of the total treasury but it's not really paid out how does it work in crypto raiders yeah so um basically what we do is like every couple of weeks we look at the run rate of how much aurum is being spent in game across the board so recruitment events uh how how much is spent on dungeons running additional dungeons and then whatever that amount is we cut it in half and then we send that half uh to obviously dripped out daily um to raider stakers but that's all managed by our treasury but then you also have the other mechanism right that you guys did recently the in the tokenomics 2.0 thing uh with olympus pro right where you're doing their protocol liquidity stuff to be able to stake a little bit differently essentially with a something called bonds right yeah so

um uh nat uh is our our tokenomics guy he's he's awesome he built us an amazing tokenomics structure he pretty much has done everything that's on chain solidity from the questing farming tokonomis etc so he's he's doing a transition to a bonds program with us it will happen over a long period of time but basically the easiest way for people that don't know how bonds work basically right now we pay people raider to rent their liquidity basically they can provide lp and then they earn rater over time with bonding we're actually paying them to buy the liquidity from them the important difference is is that at the end of four years the rewards for providing liquidity go away um and then what happens to the liquidity of the tokens with with bonding programs protocols or games like us we're able to essentially buy the liquidity from people so that at the end of four years

even though there's no incentive for people to provide liquidity the treasury will have a ton of liquidity to to keep the game going for decades to come um so we started uh launching that program i think last week it's um and we're just gonna slowly progress you know into it however long it takes uh for the market it could be six months it could be a year it could be two years but basically the long-term goal there is if we're trying to build a game that's gonna you know stand the test of time 10 15 years we need to start owning more of the liquidity um so that when the four years runs out we don't have 50 million liquidity but no reason for people to keep the liquidity uh in the game um and that wouldn't be good for gamers or or people that are you know investing in in in the tokens but it's it's for me it's really interesting how uh the the complexity of of the tokenomics of these games i mean i think that and you all know better than me i think it's hard enough to build a

successful game that that people want to play but then in web 3 you have to balance that with nfts that are retaining value or maybe growing in value and then also a whole tokenomics structure that at the same time you're hoping to retain or everyone's hoping they those appreciate in value as well right so not only do you have to build a great game but you have to build a great game where the nfts retain value and also the tokens retain value so it's an interesting trifecta of things that you know you have to balance out in this space but it's very exciting previously i've tried making the case that's the three most important new jobs in web 3 will be one game economist economists who can like design these kind of economies then community builders and three solidity developers because uh you know you still need to be able to put all of these ideas into code onto the blockchain um it's funny you mentioned that because i said that you know uh web3 games are

going to have almost like a new c-suite role cdo chief defy officer because like it really is so important the decisions that are made there could you could have a great game and you could ruin the game economy with one poor decision in that space you know it's it you can the success of your game can can swing massively just depending on the decisions you make are you considering the game to be play to earn play and earn pay to play like what what is the actual goal in terms of your tokenomics and what you're trying to help the the players achieve by playing it yeah and that's that's a great question i feel like as an industry everyone's trying to you know figure that out to to some extent how i look at it is that right now play to earn has only been validated almost as a function of the growth of the game where where play to earn the earnings are coming from the growth of the game um but as we've seen with axiomfinity once like growth stalls you

need something other than that to really you know keep everything propped up how we're looking at it is that we first of all we think during the growth of the game you know play to earn mechanisms can be very strong but on a multi-year horizon we look at play and i like to call you know play and earn but i don't see a huge difference between that and players just changing one word right earnings still in there um we think that we want to shape earnings so that they're dynamic and skill based um and you know actually infinity does that to an extent right you have to have the right axi team characters and you have to have a good scholar to to win there but like for us for example like we want like a bit like a big earning to come from the first guild that takes down a new pve boss right or we want like the big earnings to come from um uh the the top finisher in march's duels

tournaments um but then we also want earnings to come from the actual economy of the space um meaning like trading uh items or like being like hey grimweed is is way over under price right now i'm gonna buy that in earned which is which is very similar to what i've seen in the traditional space so i played world of warcraft when i was 14 or 15 years old um i i had sold haba hotel furniture on ebay and i got like 350 bucks and i didn't want to level my character to 60 in world of warcraft so i paid like a chinese power leveling firm like 300 bucks to level me from 40 to 60 right and then i geared up the character and grinded on the character and then i ended up selling the character for you know 650 bucks or something like that so back 15 20 you know 15 20 years ago i paid someone for time for them to get my character to a certain level and then i

grinded in the game and then sold it at a premium and i think that's where like the real like earning in a game really should come from is it's a it's a transfer of time just like in real world economies right like okay why should a level a character be worth more than a level one character because the time and money it took to get them to level eight and that's where like i think play to earn long-term value should come from long-term it doesn't logically make sense that if you have a game that's not growing that everybody in the game can all be earning exorbitant amounts of money it just the math doesn't line up so i think that like short term we're looking at you know play and earn like other companies which is as the game grows basically the early adopters of the game can benefit strongly from the growth through the plato earning mechanisms but once you get to a level of growth plateau the conversation i think has to change where it's like it becomes more of like a time function like i'm making money in

this game because of the amount of time that i'm spending in it not just because i'm sitting in the game clicking the easiest dungeon for three hours every day like i'm i'm putting time in it and it's skill based time it's not just sitting at the computer clicking two buttons so i don't have an easy answer you know for for like how it looks long term but like that's kind of our philosophy is that during the growth phase play to earn can really be for everyone but once you get to a certain phase in the game it really needs to boil down to a function of skill a function of time then why is the time uh caged two per week rather than per day for the uh the the five runs because i mean most of the other games you know it's getting it per day and that's kind of norm for like the free to play space going back to the canvas days but you guys are doing it per week why why on a weekly basis that's a great question and actually so the endless dungeon that i mentioned to you that we're launching that has the mobs in it those will be one free per day so that will be you'll be able to

run those free once per day and then you can pay if you want to run more every day but we are with that new dungeon type switching to a switching to a daily model and we may eventually switch the story mode uh dungeons to a daily model as well um we just kind of out of the gate set it as a as a run per week thing that way if someone has a character and they only want to play it on saturday you know they're they're able to just get all of their runs in on one day and they don't feel like they're losing out but then also you have the problem of then people play the game for an hour and then they're doing nothing for a week right so that's why we're experimenting with the endless dungeons with a one free run per day um we'll see how that goes and if it goes very well maybe we switch the story mode to that as well you talked about um wanting to maximize in quotes the amount of time spent playing the game because of your players could you talk a bit about your kpis right now like what are you looking at uh what is important to you what do you analyze

yeah so uh we look at multiple things one is the um like out of the amount of raiders that we have how many are being used every week um i think it's important backing the amount of like paid dungeons um per week and then of course we're tracking the amount of unique wallets that that hold our nft and that's that's kind of our growth so we're looking at like the growth of our player base the revenue generated from our player base and then the activity like the general activity of our player base that makes a lot of sense what is currently the barrier of entry for the game yeah so the barrier would you need to yeah yeah great question so the buried entry of the game currently is do you know how to bridge the polygon step step one because we're over on polygon we're not on mainnet um and then and then number two is the cost to buy a raider and that's been a big point of contention with our community that we've been working through and also with us strategically but our vision is that

a lot of these nft games out there they're they're really a game of 2 000 people playing a game of chicken with a nft that's worth 1.5 ethereum right like like that's not you can't scale to millions of players at that very easily right so for us we want the entry to our game to be similar to as you said everything's free to play now i've been playing halo infinite free to play but usually you'd be used to paying 50 bucks right to get into a new game 50 60 bucks so we want to get the cost of our basic latest generation unleveled raiders down to like 50 bucks then we think the the case to get a lot of new players becomes stronger versus like uh how many gamers out there can just casually drop three thousand dollars to get into a game you know not that many so right now i think our floor is at like 120 bucks so we're getting closer to that level of accessibility but also a couple of weeks ago we launched a pretty uh i love this new feature but

we launched guilds and then we launched a login feature where you can attach your wallet to a login and the interesting thing about that is one like we have players that are like i'm on vacation and i'm on my phone and i can play crypto raiders even though my metamask laptop is 2000 miles away from me because they can just log in and play right and the next step is through guilds you actually can invite your friends to to create an account on our website and they can play your raiders for free um and that's our our biggest like vision is like right now like for growth right now nfc games is you have to understand crypto then you have to understand nfts and then you have to have the budget to be able to afford the nft to get in the game we want our game to be we want that process to be flipped where someone can join the game and start playing before they understand kryptos cryptocurrency before they understand nfts and then as they're playing the

game and having fun and then they get a rare weapon and then their buddy's like dude that weapon's worth a half an ethereum they're probably going to want to learn cryptocurrency and nfts at that point right so i think as an industry that's what we have to solve we have to solve this how do you onboard just normal gamers that want to play a game and have fun and then they can learn cryptocurrency and nfts and understand that whole ecosystem right now it's flipped and i think that's part of the reason why like there's not explosive growth in in most nft games because there's just a lot of barriers of entry for a player to get in so we're trying to tackle that problem as well and how exactly do you plan on doing that sorry i was just in terms of that you guys also have permadeath though so you have a situation where you're you're buying that 50 game right but you could actually lose that game essentially right and so that's that's something that differentiates you guys uh where did that even come from in terms of i mean i i obviously realize you you know burning nfts is an economic decision as

part of it right but you guys also are introducing a risk mechanic to even just playing the game totally so we actually haven't introduced permadeath yet into the game um and it's something that we'll eventually introduce into the game but it's gonna be an optional thing so uh i averaged a casual gamers they will not have to worry about losing their character perma-death will basically be like an optional choice and there will be a risk-reward trade-off so like if you do go into a perma-death dungeon you're going in with the risk of death at the benefit of better items or better gear um and that's why we still haven't implemented it yet because it has to be very carefully done uh because if you make it so that it's too easy to die that's not fun and if and if you make it that it's too hard to die then people are just getting inflated gear with very little risk so we don't have it in the game intentionally right now because it's

very important to to balance properly and also just like you said that is a psychological barrier if everybody had a chance of death that's going to hurt like people aren't going to spend 50 bucks and they think they can just make one mistake and and lose all of their money um so we haven't implemented that we're still we're still figuring out that the best way to do that mm-hmm um so navic did an deep analysis of the axiom economy and and one of the shortcomings in a way was that the axi inflation was out of the control or almost like not fully in control of the the x infinity team or the sky mavis team um as far as as i understand with crypto raiders it's different right you have you are actually the ones who decide when new raiders are being created is that correct yes so um basically when we first started off we had closed recruitment and so we would just open up recruitment like every two months we've recently switched to open

recruitment but with the ability for us to turn it on and off um but since recruitment has a cost there's essentially a balancing level where it doesn't make sense to recruit it's not profitable and so then no one will recruit and uh until like new demand comes in we're having a little bit of contention with that with our with our uh community because same thing is if you inflate the amount of raiders too much then it just suppresses the price of of new characters and if you don't have that growth coming in then you just have a lot of people with depressed prices and they're frustrated we have to balance that with also like trying to make the game affordable to get new players coming in um so basically right now we're we're considering like potentially we could if if the supply is getting too high we could just pause recruitment for another two months and and let the new growth of

the game um uh come into play but the different the the core difference between us and actually infinity is is the items that you get on the character right um and actually infinity like the axe you get is the axe you get although with their like origins release i think they are going to add items and upgrades and all sorts of things um to the characters but like with us we look at like the cost of a character as like uh it should be a function of the items that it has or the level that it has or the you know the the skills that it has acquired in playing and that's where the real value should be embedded like there shouldn't be like real long-term value just or like a lot of value just by recruiting a raider and trying to flip it for 3x right um but once again that is like another example of the complex dynamics of nfts which is like okay how do we how do we get the cost to be affordable to enter the game without pissing off

all of our players which are the reason why we're successful in the first place um and we had a huge debate with the community over the whole weekend because the cost of the nfts are going down which is making the game more affordable but then people are losing out on earnings potential of being able to to flip these characters so it is possible that in the next couple of weeks we say hey okay we're gonna pause recruitment for the you know next few months but our thought process with open recruitment was that you allow the market to kind of naturally reach equilibrium and expand and contract naturally will expand you can't contract the amount of nfts out there but we it's going to be tied to the price of orum though essentially exactly it's like slp helps drive the price of executing so that like in terms of profitability in market and stuff like that it's not just the price of the nft it's the price to breed the nft exactly so if it's 1200 aurum to recruit right now and orem's at

point zero four cents then you're it's like 50 bucks to recruit so if you can recruit for 50 bucks and you can sell it on the market for like 120 well you're you're instantly kind of able to double your money um but if the price of aurum drops it could become even more attractive to recruit if the price of arm really goes up it could be less attractive to recruit so you're right it's not just the nft itself it's the nft paired with the price of the in-game currency that kind of determines the the recruitment strategy does that mean you have a kind of a target price in mind then so you have you have a price of mine for uh paying for a new nft right so you around 50 bucks um or maybe give or take uh does that mean then you have a specific target price of mine for orem as well yeah that's a great question we originally in the game we were like okay we want to try to keep it around 20 cents um it's now at 40 cents so we haven't done a great job of that um we ideally want it in the like 20 to 30 or two to three cent range

the interesting thing is is that if the price of orem goes up then the usd cost to do things in game goes up right so like people that are speculating on aurum they're like oh it doubled it's great on our end we're looking at it we're like okay the cost to get it like to run an extra dungeon just went from 50 cents to a dollar that's not great for the gamers uh themselves so that's one of the reasons why we're introducing like the play to earn mechanisms in the next couple of weeks is because that's going to allow us to help balance the price a little better than like right now we don't have very many tools to balance the price having play to earn in the game will allow us to balance the price of orem essentially there's more buyers there's more demand from orem than there is people trying to sell it and so but not a bad problem to have but getting plate to earn in place will help us balance that out but that is just a really interesting challenge or or problem enough i've actually theorized that we will see more games in

the future that will create their version of slp or their version of aurum as a literal stable coin um i because i think that when you just think about the dynamics of everything having a price that's stable it solves so many problems then you're not worried about oh orem goes up okay that's great for speculators but now recruitment cost has doubled and doing anything in game has now doubled and then conversely if if orim goes down to you know a penny well now recruitment maybe is way too cheap and so then people flood the supply of characters or raiding dungeons is way too cheap so now the value of items goes down right and so like there's this interesting pendulum where it can either way it swings there's a negative consequence and a positive consequence having it stable makes a lot of sense to me it'll be interesting to see what happens in like the next year with new projects i also think some projects may even avoid

an in-game token and and try to just really focus on the nft side of it and making like nfts be the primary value mechanism and maybe you just have like an actual in-game gold like traditional gaming where it's just in game you can't bridge it out you can't trade it uh on the market so i mean this is why i love this space because there's so many problems that don't have clear solutions and it makes it fun and challenging also scary at times you know you're laying in bed at 1 30 in the morning and you're like we need to figure this out or the decisions you make could have a significant financial impact on a bunch of your players so i was literally telling one of my co-founders i'm like this is what it probably feels like to be a publicly traded company you know what i mean where you you can make a decision that everybody on your team believes this is the best decision for everybody in the game over the next two years but you could launch it and people could hate it and your price can go down by 20 instantly and like that's the market

feedback to you now it's like were we wrong or is the market wrong it adds a little bit of a layer of stress that i don't exactly you know love but you know it it it comes with the territory but like a great example was like the bonding program um which we think is great long term for the game right like four years from now do you want the game to own the liquidity that keeps the game functioning or do you want us to have to come up with a new incentive program to keep renting liquidity from other people but the community didn't take it favorably at first now more people were kind of warming up to it but our token went down by 20 after that news like 12 hours just that was the market telling us we don't like this you know what i mean and that's so that's a little yeah and that's stressful because it's like are we right are they right is nobody right like either way token down 20 you're not gonna have a fun day in discord if your tokens down 20 after you launch after you launch an update that dynamic is so interesting to me

because you can essentially have self-fulfilling prophecies where it doesn't even matter if what you're doing is correct as long as everyone believes that it's correct that's the only thing that matters um exactly it for a long period of time eventually like if you go the wrong route then you know something unwinds but you're 100 right like the amount of value in just belief in this space like you can't put a price tag on it and that's part of the reason why we got to the point of success where we're at i mean we raised probably like three hundred thousand dollars in nfts because it was point zero one and eth was only at like two thousand bucks and now our treasury and it was a team of three people now our treasury has five million dollars in it and we have a team of like 25 so we've like we have received success but when you look back at where does the success come from it comes from people joining and believing in us and that's why because if no one believed in us we would not have 5 million on the treasury and our tokens would be close to zero right so you're spot on like i think the

two most important things in this space is is belief in the future and um belief in the future and then uh attention attention is so important in this space because there's so many opportunities for people like you and that's an interesting thing from like a community relations and marketing standpoint because you have to kind of tell people like okay this is what's next like this is what's coming up in the next two three four weeks um you know because if you if a lot of people out there they're just like okay we raised our money and now we're gonna go build for three months and you're not engaging with the community and then next thing you know the belief evaporates and then you have real problems could you give some more examples next to that about what you think you guys did right because you have a good community you have some success that the game is getting traction there's a lot of interaction what were kind of the things that you look back and you say i'm glad we did these things that you know developers can take away when they're you know trying to build a similar game yeah that's a that's a a really really really good question um

i think that one thing that we've done a very good job of is consistent updates and improvements to the game not going long periods of time without adding something into the game we're essentially live shipping right now and i know in a lot of like traditional gaming that's that's usually you you build a game for one year two years three years right and then you launch it like fully polished um and and then you know everyone starts playing it with i i think with a lot of these new games coming on the space like you have to rate like do your initial launch but then you have to like live like the community has to see the progression of the game so like when we first sold out two or three weeks later you could literally walk through a dungeon and just open a loot box and get a basic item it was like that simple right and fast forward six months later now there's six or eight different dungeons on the story mode side there's hundreds of items that you can potentially spec out with there's

now a a skilled tree a component where you're specking you know your stuff differently there's duals now there's the whole farming side of it farming materials um you know we've we've really we've really like progressed the game and the community has seen it and i think that goes back to the belief thing which is that a lot of people have seen the progression we've made in the last six months like anyone out there that's looking to build something like this like my recommendation to you would be and it's not always true like elluvium has has been building for two or three years and they have a ton of success so it's not a requirement but like for us the live shipping model really worked for us because i think it built that loyalty from the community it built the belief from the community i also think that our intentional strategy to make the assets that you continue to add to the game they should not be mint where the treasury is making all the money the

value should be dropped to players in the game or earned by players in the game i think that's something that we'll see a lot more of because that once again embeds belief loyalty but it also it it's it's um instead of extractive from your own ecosystem you're adding value to your ecosystem and i think that's an important component is especially like right now nfts are going crazy there's people doing 10 15 million dollar mints with a fully anonymous team no real road map or what's going to actually so i the the desire to just make more money it can be very tempting but then you have you've extracted value and now you have more assets that you have to create value for and if you're extracting and also trying to create value it doesn't usually work out that well so for example the the mobs uh nfts that we have that people love and very popular we could have minted those and probably made another two million bucks but instead we airdropped them to the community that that two million dollars

is now in the ecosystem instead of in our treasury and us trying to figure out how to create value for it so i think that you'll see more games and we weren't the first ones that come up came up with that there's a lot of projects out there where you do the initial mint and board a bia club perfect example you bought a board ape right you got a boarded kennel club free airdrop and you got a mutant free airdrop right and those things together are worth like 27 ethereum so if you had one ape you got over a hundred thousand dollars in in free air drops but i think that that the dynamic that that creates from the community standpoint and the loyalty standpoint that's part of why board a yacht club is so successful and why those things are valued at those prices is because they're like dropping they're embedding that value into the ecosystem into the community instead of like extracting it yeah very cool um [Music] one of the advantages well there's a few advantages there's a lot of

disadvantages to building a blockchain game there's also a few advantages right one is that you have your whole financial infrastructure there right you didn't have to build a marketplace the marketplace there's open c so they're you know the raiders can be traded um you know same for um trading your tokens um what are some other advantages of the blockchain that you're leveraging within your game i'm thinking uh interoperability or perhaps even composability um how are your thing around thinking around that encrypted writers yeah that's that's a great question um so there's a lot of interest so one one example is um metaverses so a lot of games have natural synergies with metaverses because they're not direct competitors but they're like close enough that there's lots of synergies so we're like worldwide web land or like nft worlds you see them doing a lot of partnerships with with games out there and creating like

synergies there which i think makes a lot of sense uh there's another cool game out there called galaxy fighter club they're essentially like a pvp arena brawler game um but the the characters are actually assets from all sorts of other nft projects that they top in they tap into um i was personally a really big fan of like loot the concept maybe not the actual deliver ability but like the concept that there could be these like shared items that like different games could build on top of or or make some different use cases with the the challenge because you know we we still need to see more real synergy in my opinion than just partnerships like how cool would it be to get an item in crypto raiders and then like take that rare item and you could actually have that item in the main verse right like those kinds of synergies like still aren't there yet then also i think that there's a little bit of a challenge of like creating synergies that aren't like

vampire drains one way or the other right like where like for example how cool would it be if like in crypto raiders you could build your own like dungeons in crypto raiders your own dungeon nfts but then like another game could use those same nfts in their game like to create custom dungeons right um but the challenge i think from project to project is is creating it so it's a win-win synergy and not just like a drain where it's like oh okay like everyone's taking this asset and they're just using it but there's no value coming back to the ecosystem and i think that's like a challenge that we're trying to figure out but we've done some really interesting things like for example we did a uh uh a genesis music drop for our game where basically we worked with a bunch of musicians they created soundtracks for our game the community voted on their favorites and then we auctioned it out 80 of the revenue went back to the musicians so we thought it was kind of

like a noble way to test music nfts and try to help like struggling musicians break into the space but then if you own this genesis soundtrack um when play to earn starts like when that song is played in our game there'll be an earning mechanism if you own the song nft that's an example of like a great synergy right there because like another game could just use our genesis soundtrack for the soundtrack in their game right and that's like that beautiful example of interoperability but that how do you make that other game pay the owner of the nft to use it right so there's like there's i think challenges that still have to be like you know like solved there it's like how do you make it so that other people can build on all these interesting assets but make it so that value can still come back to those same assets if that makes sense do you guys have a policy on licensing then let's say i wanted to go off and build a game using my crypto rates nfts uh what's the art licensing like am i allowed to use the art you know those kinds of policies are the

ones that i think are the most unspoken about or unsolved in terms that do you guys have a policy right now yeah it's a great question i think we're still trying to work the fine prints around the policy we're very open to it and like as you said it could be it could be something as simple as like hey you can use all of our assets to build a game but there's there's a royalty a revenue royalty for using some or all of our assets like in your game the interesting thing about that is then you almost have like a warcraft 2 you remember all of the mods like dota literally came out of being a warcraft 3 sorry came out of being a warcraft 3 mod right like whoever can solve that has the real potential to to create an ecosystem that people build all sorts of other interesting things on top and if the value flows back to the core ecosystem then people that own raider staker or stake their raider they could be earning rewards from other games that are that are using you know the assets so we don't have a a

really full-fledged like licensing program that is something on the docket for our lawyers to help us uh figure out we have a couple of things for them to do first um but like there's a there's another uh interesting game out there it's called forgotten wizards i always push their name but they're kind of taking that approach where instead of being a game they're trying to build a platform where then other people can build games on top of their platform and use all of the assets and build cool experiences so whoever solves that whoever can be the warcraft 3 of web3 is going to have blockbuster success and what's cool is we already have people in our community building mini games on top of our game just because they want to do it and it's fun but we still haven't figured out like the whole licensing because here's a great question for you devon like what what percent royalties should you get if they use mobs your items and your characters right but then also what if someone just wants to use mobs you know what i mean

so the like it has to work both ways where basically they don't want to be paying an exorbitant royalty to just use like a subset of your assets right so there's that's like the challenge is trying to figure out like exactly what you said the the creative common rights the licensing royalties all of that it's my hope at some point that there will be like standardized different licenses and those can be in the metadata so that that's all like kind of explicit with the the once you buy you know you're also buying essentially that license to use it for whatever but i i think obviously the point that you brought up that i think matters most with that is is are you bringing value back to the asset in some way right like so if if maybe i'm say going making a ton of money using your guys's assets but that's still bringing value for what you know however that schemed back to your guys's game back to raider token back to aurum back to players in the game then like that's an okay thing right maybe it's not about royalty so much as how how things are flowing value back

like it's not being a vampire train right exactly all right so what is next for crypto raiders um i'm thinking um how will the game evolve by the end of this year and how where do you see it let's say you know i want to say five years but within crypto you're just five years just too long so maybe three that's a lifetime five years right yeah you gotta times everything but it's like dog years exactly dog years um great question so for me like the the the primary things that that we need to like solve is one in improving the strategic complexity of the game so that's getting abilities in that's going to be getting talent trees in that's going to be getting class specialization in um a big one for me is is the is the pvp the endgame pvp and the endgame pde so right now we only have one slot in there and that's our like 1v1 duels tournaments but like we want like 5v5

pvp modes right where it's like you and a couple of buddies you're on a map so you're not just fighting like pokemon style you're also having to like strategically like move behind barriers or like have your healer tucked in a corner and you're having to move at the end of like every turn and then also on the pve side having these really complex fun dungeon fights where you're going in with a guild of 10 people and you're trying to take down this really hard boss that has three different phases and all sorts of different things happening so i think because i don't think that we're reinventing the wheel we're we're building towards a hybrid between world of warcraft and runescape so like we know where we have to get that that level of complexity and that level of depth um so yeah it's improving the strategic complexity in the game which we're working on uh improving the end game components both pvp and pve and then of course growth um i just right now we have

maybe four to five thousand unique players in the game that's not a success to me that's a great start but if a year from now we don't have over a 000 daily active users then we've failed in my opinion um because there's going to be a very big dumpster of nft games that were great for six months with four or five thousand people but wasn't able to break through to axi or z1 level success so um growth is going to be a very important aspect of this year um but it's really improving the strategic complexity of the game improving the end game content but also bringing in some things that are just fun into the game um so our whole community they're just obsessed with fishing they want an in-game fishing component that's just fun chill like having a good time so like adding in some of those side quests and that's a part of the bigger thing what we're trying to do is like have an actual overworld so right now you just

like load into a dungeon and you fight in the dungeon right there's no town square where you can hang out with 50 other crypto raiders and show off your gear like world of warcraft one of the best things was sitting in ironforge in between like going into dungeons and just hanging out with people with your gear and everything like that so that's a big aspect of the game um that we need to add as well but one of the big components to make that all work is we're porting over to unity right now we're on phaser js so we're basically like a web browser game um and that port to unity should be done by like the end of march but you all have a lot of gaming experience you understand the the the leverage you get with with like tool kits that unity and unreal provide so i think once we've made that poured over at the end of march getting those components in the game getting the overworld the really fun end game content it's going to be a lot easier to implement it makes a lot of sense what part of the and i should have asked this earlier but i'm interested what part of the game is on chain what part

of the game is off chain and how do you see that evolve moving forward yeah great question so from the beginning we made the intentional strategic choice that we want most of the game to live off chain so like for example when you go and run a dungeon you don't need to sign a made a mass transaction to like run the dungeon like you literally click the dungeon you're instantly in right you get an item drop at the end you don't need to sign a transaction to like get the item um so like we look at like the whole game experience or at least most of it we want off chain and then what's on trent chain is all of like the tradable assets so one of the big things that we built a couple of months ago was the orem bridge where you can bridge aurum on chain into the game and that's how people can do dungeon keys like buy dungeon keys and run more dungeons previously it was on chain and you had to like to get additional keys you had to like run a transaction every time you wanted

them now you can just bridge a bunch of orem in the game and just use it like it's gold in any other game and we think that's important for a variety of reasons the primary primary reason being that we want people to be able to join the game without having crypto or nft knowledge and then build that over time that's really hard to do if they have to sign a made a mass transaction for every dungeon that they have to run so we've intentionally made most of the game off chain now the farming stuff that we've done so the grim weed eye of new the potions those are all on chain right now um because after looking at the success that defy kingdoms had and they're basically like i look at like we're we built a game first and then we're trying to do more interesting defy things like defy kingdom built this awesome defy experience and now they're building more of an actual game um and so when we looked at like doing the farming on chain and off chain one of the other reasons was is that our dev our in-game dev team is like maxed out but we have like salinity bandwidth so it also just

made strategic sense to like go to market quicker on on the on-chain side now maybe a year from now two years so now maybe farming and questing is all in game just so it's more synergistic with the game itself but in the short term we thought it was more interesting like from a a farming perspective the d5 perspective where people could be speculating on the prices of grimweed or the prices of potions it made more sense to keep it on chain but the the interesting thing also by making most of the game off chain is we have the potential to have cross chain compatibility or do a do a side chain like ronin did it's a lot easier i think for example if we wanted to launch on avax it's very easy for us to launch our game on avax because like porting the game over like since most of it's off chain that's easy to do we would really just have to get token liquidity on avax um get some of the d5 components on avax and then people could plug right in from avac so by having the game intentionally like a lot of it off chain there's a lot of like benefits

because i look at the the cross chain wars as almost like do you want to launch your game in one country or do you want to like launch your game across the whole world right and i think that's why like axiomfinity made their strategic choice to make their own chain and then they just have to work on cross-chain composibility like can someone get into ronin from avax can they get into ronin from polygon can they get into ronin from ethereum um and then they can tap into that entire market like right now we're just sitting on polygon and the the news over the past couple months from polygon is fantastic like polygon studios recruited the head of youtube or whatever there's a lot of positive signs there but no matter which way you cut it the polygon community is way smaller than the ethereum community right and you know when you're trying to tackle the the big picture grow story um you know i think being off chain does give us some advantages in regards to that though there i noticed uh the thing you mentioned for example about the r moving in in and out of the game that that sort of thing i noticed there's definitely a lot of steps involved in to say buying a key right you just want to

play one more run you end up having to go from some kind of cryptocurrency say ethereum on polygon that you had to on-ramp via fiat in some way which may have in itself incurred fees and then you've got to turn that with vsa sushi swap over to the aurum then you've got to put that into the game then you've got to buy the keys with it then you can do the run and that's a lot of steps just to click play again right um how you guys looking at the idea of on-ramps in in order to be able to like i would just buy a key for x amount of money here's my credit card let me play some more and and i love that you brought that up because that is such an interesting challenge from like if we could just go and do it i'd want to do it right away because that also like goes back to the premise of like getting players in that don't know about cryptocurrency like why couldn't a player just join crypto raiders with their credit card pay 50 bucks for a new character and then buy some dungeon keys right the interesting thing is is that if you let someone buy dungeon keys

or let's say like you let someone buy uh aurum with like uh their credit card but then they bridge that orem out and sell on the market are you now in unregulated exchange because you've allowed someone to exchange usd you know for cryptocurrency right so there's like an interesting dynamic there that like we we have to figure out but i think that there's like a ton of value there like one way you could do it is that you could just lock like usd volume right and not allow like usd stuff to be bridged out so like if someone wants to come in they can buy a character for 50 bucks or whatever they can buy some dungeon keys and all of that jazz but like they can't bridge those assets out of the game unless they already like have aurum in the ecosystem or something like that we haven't fully figured it out but you know what i mean there's there's basically a fiat like ramp and then there's like a crypto ramp and i think if you you can scale both of them up as long as you don't do

like obvious exchanges that like makes it look like okay someone spent 200 in your game and then they bridged out 500 worth of aurum um you know regulators especially united states may not you know like how that looks from an optic standpoint but i'm i'm thinking about that problem on a weekly basis because you're 100 percent right like there's no way that you can cut it and make the crypto side seem like an easy right split your last similar problem where they were like careful about because you could you could use paypal to buy credits so they were like oh well you can't exchange credits for this and this and this because then we start to look more like an exchange so it's definitely a problem more as a as opposed to uh skyweaver which just came out into public beta you could just throw down onto ramp your credit card and then buy usdc on polygon and then and then buy cards in the market so like everyone seems to be taking different approaches if you can use an intermediary that can kind of handle the exchange-y part of it

um and and that's actually really because you could actually on openc you can buy a polygon asset with a credit card because they've already like entered yeah that's literally how i bought my first rating like boonpay into the so i didn't have to on-ramp ethereum stuff like that exact same way right the only problem of course is is like i i went to do it then the fees took off just enough that i'd put more in to pay more fees to be able to actually afford the cryptocurrency literally at one point in time i told someone like i was like the best way to bridge money on polygon is just to like buy three characters with your credit card and then sell two of them and now you have all the money that you need on polygon to like do everything that you need to do but i mean you're spot on and i have to look at those companies that are solving the same problems because that's that's really interesting to to try to figure out but like that that's the key is that the whole crypto space is trying to challenge is like the smooth on-ramp like in an ideal world someone could play around with the game a little bit maybe in a free-to-play mode they decide they want to buy in it's 50 bucks for a

character and they also want 50 bucks of aurum they can buy like a package but that package is like processed through a an actual exchange right and then it kind of like drops in our wallet there i mean that's probably a billion dollar idea whatever exchange platform can figure out like how protocols can like integrate it into their game cool all right um so if you're working on something like this you can reach out to nick you could also reach out to me if you're looking for investment potentially um all right that was it devin nick thanks a lot i mean it's it's yeah i think you're you're great at this so um this hour flew by uh this was great where can people reach you if they want to ask you questions or tell you uh hello reach uh reach me at nick at crypto raiders.gg that would be the the best way to get a hold of me or just hop into crypto raiders discord i'm in there under sophisticated art speculator we can just dm on discord as well name okay i know

all right well um this was it thanks a lot devin nick for your time this was amazing um yeah listener thank you for listening hope you enjoyed and yeah this was the metacast and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers [Music] you