Web3 Mech Combat with MetalCore

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a few months and close beta even sooner than that it is being built by a team of creatives very experienced creatives from lucasfilm Disney Activision among others and our guest today is none other than one of the founders and the CTO of Studio 369 Dan noctis Dan welcome to the Pod hello thanks for having me awesome awesome all right well with that out of the way let's get right into it and one of the questions I always like to ask first uh of our guests is uh what brought you into web 3 tell us a little bit about your background and then your journey down the web 3 Rabbit Hole how deep does it go yeah so I come from very traditional games I started my career working at Midway games in Chicago uh which eventually became WB Games worked on titles such as Mortal Kombat uh strangle hold uh helped out uh epic at a certain point in my career developing Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Engine 4 and so I came from a very traditional background in in U you know hardcore console PC

uh games um and very recently uh within the last 3 years uh joined this company or founded this company with with my other two co-founders um Studio 369 and we started working on a couple of Mech games we worked on a Mech game um called world of mechs for Oculus and uh uh it was a quest to uh VR title and it was super fun and we kind of decided hey we we wanted to make that into a larger scale PC game where we could get like giant scale met combat going uh very much in inspired by games like Titanfall and Planet Side and we wanted to get kind of combined arms infantry tanks aircraft and mechs all in a big Battlefield um so that was kind of the Genesis of this this game Metal core um at the time we were also a work for hire studio so we were helping out a bunch of other different teams with various projects while working on our own IPS um and so we we we did some work for a couple of web web 3 companies like we we

worked on some parallel content some of our artists worked on some of their cards uh we helped advise like Aku on on on their on their project uh we we worked with ultra uh at at a certain point and in developing concepts for some like web 3 economies around their their game designs and uh so that's kind of what piqued our interest in it is a few of these kind of work for higher opportunities that we started uh immersing ourselves a little bit more in bringing that kind of traditional gaming design idea you know into into 3 um and then we had a a funding partner approach us and say hey we really believe in web 3 and we like what your uh what you're doing in terms of your your Mech game and your and your prototypes that that we showed them and they said hey let's make this into a web 3 game um and so that was the Genesis of Medal Court nice well we actually had the parallel guys uh on here one of the founders uh on the on the Pod like I think two or three episodes ago so um yeah it's a small world in web 3 it's a kind of a interwoven web of of of people people who are kind of all know each

other and work with each other so it's really fun to fun to hear okay so uh tell us more about Metal core then um you know what is it what are you doing I mentioned that the the intro we haven't had an episode on Mech combats uh I don't think we've had any episodes on Mech combat for whether it's web 2 or web 3 so I'm super curious to hear uh how does medical work what what is it what is it as a game and uh what are your kind of Ambitions what are you trying to do to stand out um with this with this product cool yeah uh so metal core itself is very much inspired by uh large scale um firstperson shooter games like Planet Side Halo uh games that you know combine infantry combat uh like I said mechs aircrafts tanks we wanted to get that sense of a giant Battlefield with uh you know Battlefront is a huge a huge influence for us too right um so we've always wanted to make that game and um that's what metal core is Right metal core is a combined armed first and third person first person shooter and third person shooter

um with with a ton of super awesome vehicles that you can pilot um it's it's also a a basically threeway three-way territory control uh game so you you when you start the game you join one of three factions which are the the metal punks the gear Breakers and the holy Corporation and uh these the backstory of the game is that uh you know these four Colony ships left for the five Colony ships left for this distant planet in order to col colonize it Thousand-Year Journey um one of them EXP loed and knocked out the other the cryo on the other three on three of the other four uh and so these three developed unable to communicate with one another over a thousand years developed very weird societies trying to survive on their ships landed on the planet and started going to war immediately because they were all like aliens to one another and then the fourth ship which is what you arrive on you know your cryopods open up like a hundred years later and you know after the kind of cooling off process and you look down on the planet and holy crap what's going on on right so that's the backstory of the game um

so at the outset of the game you got to choose one of the factions you got to Ally yourself with you're you're one of a small group of mercenaries who's kind of not necessarily beholden at any one faction but can kind of hop around potentially uh and so we're building a lot of elements of like like political faction Wars into it uh the the guilds which in our game we call baronies um play a huge role in in uh taking territory and holding it and owning territory and obviously U the web three connection of vehicles that you own the characters that you unlock and the you know being able to level them up improve them and and make them super awesome and then potentially uh either rent them out to your or make them available to your to your Baron mates um or sell them if you want to sweet I love the lore actually that's a really fun and by the way the art style is great obviously this is a podcast audio format so we can't show it to you but uh we'll have uh links in the show notes but the art is really really cool um and very high quality I mean looks very AAA uh which I guess is a testament to the fact you've been working on it for three years um let's let's dig in a little bit more on

the web 3 component here U because it sounds like you were working on metal core already um funding partner came along and says hey I like what you guys are doing uh how about some web 3 and so I'm curious to hear how you guys are thinking about the web 3 component um it sounds like it's it's part uh partly to do with the vehicles and you know owning those and renting those out which is obviously an easy connection to make but tell me more about how you guys are thinking about the web 3 components and how deep do those Integrations go how much is is a web 2 game with web 3 elements or is it a web 3 game first and foremost with some web two elements because there's there you could go both ways on this in this space um it I mean the the the kind of web 3 partners that we had uh came to us basically right at the beginning right in the concept phase I mean we we took our world of Mech VR prototype and we and we moved it over to uh or I should say took our our finished World ofx VR game and moved it to PC and about a month later we were in conversations with here's a cool idea

that we have which is blow out this this world of XX game into a this giant game which has become metal core um and and we already were thinking about how do we integrate that with web 3 so from the outset we've we've been planning and designing this to be a web 3 game um I suppose you know at the at the time we were thinking really more like web 2.5 and it's it's a bit of a maybe sliding scale like we might start more like web 2.3 and eventually get to web 2.8 right there's there's there's it's shifted a little bit for from from the outset um so there are definitely web two elements in it and you can play the game as a as a web two free-to-play player and and never engage with with any blockchain elements if that's what you want to do uh and it's all combined so like if you are a web3 player and you're a web2 player you're going to play against each other fight each other um you know be on the same Battlefield um but yeah so the the web three elements started off as being primarily like um focus on nfts right because that was the clearest uh you know most obvious use case for us of

web 3 in games like we know we want you to to we want to have this this really cool collection mechanic sort of like World of Tanks where you just have like endless amounts of vehicles that you want to collect and upgrade and unlock new Loadout slots and so on so forth um and that was a perfect use case for for for nfts for us um we've gone a little bit back and forth over the course of the project on whether or not we wanted to do an Associated fungible token um we started off thinking yes uh we we then maybe backed off from that a little bit over the course of 2022 and early 2023 uh and then have come back around to the idea of doing that so uh so in around mid 2023 we resolved that we were we're going to launch a token for the game um that announcement is going to be coming soon as to what exactly what form that's going to take but the uh the the full web3 uh implementation as it were uh is going to include both nfts and a fungible token that that works as a currency in the game that's exciting do you have anything you can share about

the funable token it sounds like it's still TBD but I'm always very curious to hear about uh the you know the non-fungible side of things and the funable side of things uh kind of working in harmony with each other so anything more you can share uh at this time about how that's going to work yeah um so the the our our main goal is for the token to have as much utility in game as possible mirroring that what you would find of a premium currency in a in a typical free-to-play game so we've pretty much made the the MCG token which is what we're calling it metal Court game token um parallel with the premium token that you would that you would ordinarily find so all of the use cases that we're thinking this is where we would we would ordinarily charge a player with premium currency that would that would uh MCG would be an expenditure there um so that includes things like when you craft a web 2 vehicle and you unlock its class and you level it up and you add certain rare Loadout slots to it or or um upgrade certain certain of its loadouts to like

rarer options uh and you say to yourself hey this is a really powerful vehicle now um I'd like to rent this out or contribute to my Barony or sell it or whatever I want to do uh in order to convert it to an nft it would it will require a certain expenditure of MCG to do that um in addition in order to uh get some of these like really high Rarity things that you can find in the world but are very very difficult to find in the world you can purchase it from the store directly for for MCG right so um with that comes it's it's a fix Supply token so with that comes a massive reward pool that we're making available to our players and so as you play the game and you kind of do these these activities in game uh you can qualify for token rewards on a weekly basis in order to kind of create that cycle gotcha gotcha okay uh and you uh already talked about a little bit about The Crafting component but that's a a planned question I had anyway I think you have a very heavy crafting uh experience in the game I'm curious to

hear more about how that works it sounds like it's pretty core to the overall experience is is you know collecting these parts crafting them into more and more powerful uh weapons and and and machines and vehicles and then converting those at some point potentially you don't have to it sounds like to to an nft so tell me more about The Crafting component and how that works in the game yeah so um so kind of just to set the stage a little bit uh like fictionally um you know you're coming into this world as an as an earther on on the fourth ship you know you have no basis for like understanding what this war is like you're being dropped in and you don't know what's going on you didn't have a bunch of mechs and aircraft of the colony ship because why would you you know nobody planned for there to be a war these things have all been developed since in the hundred years since you since you were asleep right so um so when you land one of the things that you have to do is fight a lot of these things that exist in the world these automatons and these giant Machines of War destroy them and then scan them so that your you know high-tech Fabricators back in your

garage can can craft similar things so part of the crafting process is finding these mechs in the world defeating them with your squadmates or with whatever resources that you have scanning them and then being able to craft those um and massing the resources finding the right pieces the chassis the the power plant the you know the leg servos all the stuff that you you need to craft these things um you know full full progression system on the individual units as well so once you craft a zephyr which is like a light Mech um at first it'll just be a regular zhr but if you want to specialize it into like a scout zepher or an anti-air zepher you can apply this thing called an AI module a scout module to it and once you do that it unlocks a full progression tree for that for that Mech and you're able to level that Mech up unlock better weapons for it unlock better abilities for it movement boosts you know Optical camo for the mech Etc and all of these things will will contribute to the final result which is uh each vehicle will be specialized to exactly your play style that you like and eventually be super

powerful on its own and you you said that web two players web three players are playing against each other uh do do they know I'm always curious to hear H how you intering because you know there's a lot of pitfalls with you know Web Two versus web 3 and people who don't want to engage and who do want to engage there's always the the the issue with you know pay to win if you don't do it right you know you have to balance the the economy appropriately you did mention that some of these rare things can be bought for MCG in the store so talk to me a little bit more about how the web 3 players and the web two players are competing on a you know a Level Playing Field making sure it you know feels fair and that there isn't a like we a weirdness for lack of a better phrase there isn't a weirdness with engaging with the web three components versus you know just being a completely freet to-play web two player who could care less about ownership or whatever because not everyone cares right like obviously it's a yeah it's a it's a big exciting thing and that's why I'm the web host I wouldn't if I wasn't interested in it but um it does come with a lot of pitfalls and I think I'm always curious to hear from Dev Vel opers how are you balancing and thinking

about those pitfalls that can exist when you've got web 2 and web 3 players intermingling in an economy where you know you can buy certain things uh in the web 3 world that you you have to grind for a lot harder in the web two world right so uh first off I'll say that we're very sensitive to the idea of of pay to win and we don't want uh most of the loadout slot upgrades that you get will increase a vehicle's utility or make it so that you're able to tailor it better to your play style but aren't out and out just like exponential stat increases like we don't want it to be like somebody bought a level 100 Mech and just can just kill everybody on the server with that Mech no questions asked right um that is not what we're going for in terms of our of our combat scaling at skill skill level will always out outplay um you know just how much money you've put into the game right um you know a big a big portion of that also comes in the form of cosmetics and and just bragging rights and I have the coolest thing right um one of the big utilities that you get from from paying into the Sy system and and and and

buying uh a web 3 Mech or even a web 2 Mech is not necessarily just that on in a single Mech to Mech battle uh you will be the winner but it's more of an attrition based thing um like when your vehicle is blown up it has to repair it has some repair time so as a web 3 player or like a a cornicle whale or somebody who who would like to pay into the system what you'll get is more opportunities to play at that highest level where you're in the mech to Mech like you know super heavyweight combat uh and then you know if you don't have that and you're playing as a free-to-play player you'll get those opportunities occasionally but you'll just have to wait for the normal repair timers and stuff and and maybe enter more battles as infantry support and then you know take your shots you know once a day or or twice a day with your heavyweight Mech whereas you know the web three player that has a whole a whole garage full of full of them is going to be doing that constantly right um so our our hypothesis is that if we if we break it down like that um where it's more of like kind of tiered fights and your access to

each fight is gated on kind of like a how many time how often you can do it basis that people won't feel like it's it's unfairly paid a win um you know and and also like you know one of the answer to this is join a Barony and uh there will be plenty of people who own nfts and don't play at the highest level and will want to have sealed Pilots that that uh you know that contribute to their Baron success and you know that that's another great way just with with your friends squadmates whatever or your Barony to to get in on the kind of highest level of combat and at the end you know in order to like capture a control point or loot a chest you're everybody's gonna have to get out of their Mech at some point so if you're a highly skilled player you know we're are I can tell you from personal experience that like when somebody's running across the the field in a queen Fran like this giant six-legged spider Mech that's like eight stories tall and you're just like cloaking behind them as a scout and you're waiting until the Pilot hops out

to grab his Loot and you pop him in the head that feels great right like that's like that's awesome so you know it we don't think of it as like it's just purely pay to win because there's a lot of crazy stuff that can happen in this game right a lot of immersive and emergent like viral moments that that we're shooting for uh that aren't that don't boil purely just down to whoever has the biggest Mech is always the Victor yeah yeah that sounds like fun uh okay ye you also have land uh and you're calling it territory in in uh in your game and that I believe that also has an ownership component to it I know it's not launching uh out of the gates I think you we've got it planned for a little further down the road map but uh very curious to hear more about how territory Works what is it when does it launch yeah so uh we're hoping to launch territory at the end of the year um with the kind of what we're calling more of uh kind of the next phase of our open Beta so open Beta is going to be uh end of April early May and then uh end of the Year we're calling I I don't know if

we we have a title for it yet if we're calling it ear Early Access or like open Beta Phase 2 or whatever it is but that will be the territory War component so that will be basically shifting Battlefield across the face of our of our primary continent where um all of these all this fighting takes place right now which we call karani uh it's a giant map it's uh I think like 256 square kilometers of of just bases and and stuff to to capture right now that map is in kind of like a freeze frame of the territory War so it's it none of the bases can actually change hands but in the future when we release a territory War um kind of feature uh those bases will will over the course of every week or every couple weeks of play based on player participation and and and like seasonal fighting and and victories um those bases will change hands and the ownership component comes not with the um not with the territory ownership in that sense like whoever whichever faction owns that territory owns that territory in that in that moment right

it's it's or or you could call it I guess occupying that territory whoever occupies that territory can change at a moment to moment basis um what you would be able to own as a player is the actual real estate in the territory so if you consider like a specific building where players may go to spawn their mechs um you may own that building and then you may change the defenses on the building you might change them from anti-air to anti- vehicle turrets you might change it so uh the vehicle spawner that's down there can spawn medium Mech In addition to light Mech you might even be able to install certain blueprint components there to create public vehicles that everybody web 2 web 3 non- nft owners can pilot as kind of like a kind of a coary to the to the um the kind of a scholarship system that we have quotequote scholarship system we don't have like a scholarship system where you uh like axi would have where these vehicles are actually being um rented out or loaned out to other people

instead we have a our system is oriented around U digital real estate with the with the the the the actual spawners themselves and the baronies so the baronies uh you know if you are an ace pilot and have no resources to buy an NFD join a Barony convince them that you're really good and then that Barony leader might have 10 or 20 high level nfts they will put those nfts in the Barony and and and unlock them for your use alternately you can take those nfts and you can install them in a vehicle spawner and allow anybody in the public to to Pilot those things uh and and give you a share of the rewards that they earn by doing that got it got it okay so share of the rewards that was going to be my kind of follow-up question here is is what is it in it for the owner of these buildings or or territories it sounds like it's a share of the rewards but talk to me more about how how those owners are rewarded uh in a way that is is tangible and meaningful to them in in the in the game yeah so uh we have this uh this system

called marks and um every week you can earn a certain number of marks by by doing things in the game performing uh like finishing daily missions um you know winning PVP battles uh placing really high on the leaderboard whatever it is right so uh the more marks you earn the more you qualify for a larger share of various daily reward pools so or weekly reward pools I should say so there's the kind of basic reward pool then there's the advanced reward pool and the these kind of these pools are all um split up based on how intense of a player you need to be or what type of a player you are like extremely competitive players will be competing for the advanced reward pool there there's reward pools for so for kind of more social organization players so people who are mostly just Barony leaders Barony uh you know commanders uh and are just organizing their players they may get be able to dictate a share of all the people's marks that that are in their Barony and in doing that you can also dictate for for instance if I'm a Barony leader uh and I have like 50

nfts and um I I recruit you know like 20 or 30 players to say hey uh I have all the these 50 nfts and you guys don't have a ton of really high level Vehicles you can join my Barony I'll let you pilot any of my nfts anytime you want they have to go through the same economic cycle where they're destroyed and repaired if you're good if you're bad and you keep blowing up my Mech I might kick you from the baron or I might restrict you to not be able to use that anymore uh but every time you complete one of those daily missions get 10% of the marks that you earn or 20% or whatever the commission rate that you said is and so you as a Barony leader could just own a bunch of nfts and and manage kind of your personnel of like who's doing this who's doing that be kind of like the you know um Charlie and Charlie's Angels right like being like here's here's here's what everybody does here's the missions you should do uh you know you're really good as an air aircraft pilot so I'm going to let you pilot my aircraft you pilot all the mechs you guys just go out and do other daily missions and based on what they do when they're using your nfts or when they're in in their Barony you can set various commission rates for that got it

okay there's a lot of mechanics in this game I I can see how it's been three years three years in the works um uh yeah talk to me a little bit more about the the development uh process here because uh one of the complaints people have about web 3 games is that you know the ones that have come out haven't been really up to the Quality level that you typically expect in web 2 um sounds like you know you guys have been working hard on this for for three years that's getting close to that you know triaa cycle is that your ambition here with this game you know a truly AAA game that can stand up to Titanfall or any of the other kind of big Mech games that have come before yeah I mean certainly we're not working with triaa budgets um you know but but uh so we don't like to call ourselves AAA but we certainly our ambition is that we we release the highest quality game that any web 2 player who doesn't really care anything about web 3 would still be really happy to play um and you know we yeah we're we're coming on three years of

development we're about like two two and a half almost two years two two and 3/4 years of development now and so we've been working on this for a long time and we've laid a really really great foundation for the game uh and we're in that phase now where it feels like every month that we put into it we get just Leaps and Bounds like additional we're really in the kind of like high momentum phase now where we finally have everything really sorted in terms of we know exactly what we're doing we all the core features are done and uh we can really just iterate on adding a ton of great content to the game that's where we're at now so I I think uh you know you mentioned we just launched our our Clos beta phase one um earlier this week uh we're going to be having a closed beta phase two which is going to be at the end of March um which will hopefully open it up to a lot more people um and that that I think you'll you'll see a a market difference between what we have even now and in a month from now uh let's talk about the close bait actually that's a perfect uh little segue into that that what can players do at the moment uh in the closed beta how is that

going to change for the open beta and then how does that compare to the call it the finished product if you will like the you know what percentage of features are currently available what percentage of the the map is open for players what percentage of the uh you know mechs and other machines and vehicles are currently in the game for folks who want to go and try out the the Clos beta and then the open Beta later this month yeah so um about uh I would say about half of them are available right now um some of them are not really realistically achievable in game because they're epic or legendaries that you can't really find in game without without uh either extreme grinding or or you know our plan is that we would we would release these as like major tournament rewards and stuff like that or or just as as limited release you know uh primary sales right for for some of the legendary so so that 50% includes the the fact that there's probably 20 to 30% that really will not be in the game game until we start doing that um so of

the vehicles that are that are just achievable through normal web2 natural play about two-thirds of them are available right now got it okay so pretty pretty fullsome beta if for anybody who's interested in uh in going out there in a pretty representative experience of what the final product will will eventually be yeah fair to say okay great well let's switch gears now let's talk a little bit about technology so um what's your Tech you're the CTO so the perfect person to talk about this I don't always get CTO show and um so let's talk about the tech stack here so uh what are you guys building in and and we'll keep the web three component I know I know you chosen immutable we're going to talk about that separately but talk to me about the tech stack and and how you guys are working on this um this product yeah so uh so the game's built in ui4 um we are contemplating an upgrade to u5 we started building in ui4 because u5 just wasn't ready at the time we started the project uh to ship and we were hoping that we would ship um in 2023 uh and and you know the advice for epic was don't don't plan on shipping a

u4 game a u5 game until 2024 so you know now we're in 20124 so we may switch to u5 we'll see um it is a bit of a of a lift to especially the environment um you know the map itself is going to be a major a major effort to to overhaul for u5 but it's it may be worth it so we're considering that now um but uh yeah besides that uh you know we are uh we're using a mutable as you mentioned uh you know we we're using kind of off-the-shelf middleware for for all of our backend Tech um you know a lot of a lot of stuff on Azure AWS and and play faab and so on so forth um and immutable has been like uh almost like invaluable uh in terms of navigating the web 3 component of this because we are traditional game developers we don't have a a ton of like web 3 uh you know smart contract developers or anything in house right so we have some backend developers who are are used to making simple API calls and that's what aable

lets us do which is which is really cool um so yeah perfect yeah I want to talk more about immutable so we we actually had Robbie Ferguson um on the Pod just a few episodes ago as well I know it's an exciting year that is coming for immutable in 2024 he's he called you guys out specifically he said he's excited um about metalcore um and he also said that there's about a 100 games being launched on immutable quality games uh the next 12 months and of course he acknowledged that not all of them are going to be successful but but uh he is excited that at least a handful of them he thinks will meet that bar and really be something that makes a web 3 game truly stand out at the same level as as web two so that's exciting very exciting um do you think this is the moment that we've been waiting for like is immutable the solution um or one of the solutions for web 3 Mass market adoption H absolutely yeah I mean there there's there's a number of competitors who I think are doing to find job as well but I think immutable is right at that Forefront of providing um you know

providing a service that pretty much anybody can use anybody in games who who has experience developing games with with you know typical Web Two backends um could can use immutable and uh you know they've been great about advising us on how to how to architect our our game how to uh think about you know the web three components and any pitfalls we might have and the great thing about a mutable specifically is that they're all game developers I mean they come from a game developer background and so they understand the problems we Face they are able to help us from an a normal free-to-play economy design standpoint right like they they can they can give us feedback on that front and they and they do um and and they're just like they're really really locked in and engaged with with like what it takes to ship uh a game like a a game at the Quality like level at the Quality Bar of a traditional web 2 game on web 3 it's not just Tech to them right it's it's it's a service that that that needs to work for and and in

my career in games you know I've learned this in working in a bunch of different engines you can't it nothing really works until it's it's in production right and nothing really works until it works the way that the the kind of the developer of the product uh intends it to work in a real production life scenario right and so I think um you know having comp a lot of blockchain providers a lot of blockchain companies that are just developing the tech and expecting you know people to come in and use it uh in their kind of with their Kind of Blue Sky model um it's not it's not as appealing from a game developer pers perspective to to us because it's much it's much better when we know that people on that end are really thinking through a realistic like real world use case for it and thinking through the the actual final product and how it's how it's going to perform in the market yeah I mean game developers you know I'm a game developer myself we just want to develop games we don't want to be solving crazy technical challenges and uh you know figuring out these hard

Integrations and having smart contract developers on staff like you just want to focus on making a a really fun product um so yeah preaching to the choir there so one question I always have is is web 3 onboarding is getting easier but it is notoriously challenging you know with the wallets and the you know the know your customer and all that stuff and again it's getting a lot easier and you know players like immutable plus others of course lots of lots of players out there are trying to solve this problem making it as easy as possible uh to to sign up just like you would with you know in in an inap purchase in you know on on iOS or or Android you know Google play um but uh I want to hear you talk more directly at the the pain points that uh web 3 does introduce and the friction it does introduce friction you can't really get around that uh as easy as you can make it it's still introduces this kind of extra hurdle for players to get through so I want to hear you talk more directly about how are you how are you integrating the web 3 flows into your

your game we've talked about them at the feature level which is like hey you can craft these things and then you can convert it into an nft but how does that actually work in practice what are you expecting players to do in order to get to that web3 ownership piece yeah so great question so the the passport uh Tech that that immutable has is is helping this a ton um you know we we can do a oneclick wallet deployment non-custodial custodial wallet deployment for players um and and have them up and running with a with a passport wallet in in you know 10 seconds right so that in and of itself is a huge in my opinion a huge hurdle that that you can get past right the more pressing thing and that that you really need to to to worry about a little bit more in your game design is uh the potential um hurdles of constant signing requests uh so if if we had a signing request that we needed to make or to to allow player to make uh to sign a transaction every time they wanted to do anything um it would just be it would

just break immersion it would be too much too too much right so painful I know that so this is something that we've really thought about in in our game design and one of the main use cases for MCG so all of the use cases for MCG that are that will require a sighting transaction are U or sighting a transaction will are um more relatively few and far between right so they're not like constant like every 5 minutes you're going to have to sign something um the way we've specifically done that is there's still a a case and an a scenario where we want players to make microtransactions in our game and we want players to be able to spend resources in order to kind of get ahead to to squash timers to get cool stuff right um our our main thesis is that anything that a player may want to do more than once in an hour should be done purely with a web two uh payment flow what that ends up meaning is that instead of direct expenditure of MCG on

all of these microtransactions in the game what we're doing is we're providing a a a conversion path from MCG into a premium currency in game and then the premium currency is the thing that you use to do your your frequent microtransactions so a player an average player is not going to be signing transactions constantly is going to be doing it maybe once a session once a week whatever whenever they want to top up in their in their in-game premium currency which we call shards um using MCG they'll do that once a week and then they'll be able to constantly spend that whenever they want to do whatever they want and then when they're running low they'll do it again similarly you know a player is not going to be upgrading a web2 vehicle to a web 3 vehicle on a on a every five minute basis right this is the sort of thing that's going to happen once a play session if that more than more like once a week maybe once a month so uh that's the sort of thing where we're comfortable saying okay do you want to do you you have to sign this transaction it's going to it's going to

uh require you spending MCG out of your wallet your passport wallet and then you'll get a new nft etc etc um so we're really thinking about how often players are doing these things and restricting any sort of transaction needs to be signed through the wallet to once per hour maximum got it so the analogy would be a casino you walk into a casino you go to the cashier you hand over your $ thousand dollar or however much you can afford to to gamble you get the chips off you go on your Merry way you go play play play maybe you win great now you've got $1,200 you come back to the cashier convert that into US dollars and off you go out of the casino that's kind of the analogy here sure yeah I don't know if I'm I'm that comfortable being compared to casino but they certainly have nailed the ux yeah that's but I mean that's that's the experience really it's like you're converting real real life dollars into a currency that can be used in that environment you know in your case it's it's shards and MC so okay right um uh cool uh the other big issue so that's

the ux for the players of converting into into web 3 versus Web Two And I think that makes total sense and I know immutable being a ton of great work ton of great work on their passport product um and if listeners haven't uh checked it out you should definitely check out the Robbie Ferguson episodes from from a few weeks ago he goes into a lot of detail on the immutable road map going forward and and what's exciting him about the web3 gaming landscape um the other big issue that faces all developers whether they're Web Two or web 3 but it's also especially acute I think in in web 3 is distribution uh how are you thinking about getting your product in front of the right you can make the greatest product in the world the greatest game on the planet but if you can't get it into the the hands of the right people who are going to be excited about playing a Mech combat game um well it's it's it's not going to succeed right so how are you guys thinking about distribution and getting your game in front of the right people where are you going to be available how are you planning on on marketing um does

the web three component help or hinder in your opinion all of that stuff that's that's that's really work so so we're available on EGS uh epic gam store um you know we're working on Steam uh we're trying to see if there's if there's some way we can get out we can release on Steam without without running a follow of their web three restrictions and that might might include something like uh you know you can do everything web 2 free to play in the game but once you need to do any of the web 3 transactions you will pop you out to our website or something along those lines right that there may be a pathway there um but in terms of it seems like what you're asking more is like user acquisition and like how how do we get in front of the right eyeballs and yeah sorry specifically how does the web 3 piece help or or potentially hinder in that because there is a world in which the web 3 piece increases the LTV potential LTV of a customer I mean most gaming user acquisition whether it be on mobile or PC or whatever it's it's a game of C versus LTV right um and many developers I've spoken to have said like hey they

think that the web 3 component even if not every player is going to engage in it has a a potential to significantly potentially increase the LTV of a customer of a player and therefore allows you to do more user acquisition on the ca side of things right that part part of the equation so that's really what I'm getting at here with this question is like how are you guys thinking about the web three component um D driving uh user acquisition helping you uh with that yeah so we see it as uh kind of a a leveling up process of the of the consumer right of the of the the web to customer we really want to draw them in with just a really fun Web Two freetop playay game and just like demonstrate the benefit that they would get from upgrading into a web 3 player um and so uh that that part that portion of it is going to come later right now we are really focusing on web two a web 3 audience because you know a lot of our funding has come from from like uh like web 3 K's and and and investors and

stuff like that and they they have a lot of eyeballs on on the project and they can help us help us get get over that hump right of this kind of core group of players who are really enjoying and playing our game um so in over the next say two to three months we're really just focusing on web 3 that part that you're talking about later where web 3 becomes kind of a benefit to our to our lifetime value for for for each you know each user is probably longer term right it's not it's not a short-term thing uh there is an element of let's just have a fun game let's get let's get users in and demonstrate that this is going to be a fun game whether or not you're you're engaged in web3 and then once we're ready to Market to to directly to web two users and we have that Core group of like that core minimum CCU where anybody who jumps in will come and find a lively environment to play in ETC um it'll be a lot easier to to make that UA spend and then once those users come in like you

said it'll probably be easier to justify uh once we once we run the numbers and figure out does this translate to better better like actual value to these of these users we can potentially justify spending a lot more money on on user acquisition and get a lot more players in um so that'll be something that we're going to be testing in small batches over the summer and later this year perfect okay all right well we we've actually covered a lot of ground today um but we're getting towards the end of our end of our episode here um are do what does your road map look like going forward you've been working on this for three years you mentioned that every month of work you put in you're seeing you know almost exponential improvements you know that's the exciting time when you're getting towards the end of the um of of the project and you're getting ready to you know show it to the world like the hard work that you've been doing what's next on the road map for you guys other than territory we talked about that um yeah what comes in the next 6 12 18 24 months uh for for you guys right so right now we're primarily focusing on our like open game mode which is um is a pvpve like uh open

World sandbox mode we want to focus a little bit more on more structured session based PVP battles as well and kind of working that into the player cycle um we want to add a bunch of narrative and blow out all our missions we've developed this really really cool Dynamic mission system um that everybody internally is super excited about its potential and we're really in the phase of blowing out the cont uh the content and the permutations of that system uh working in potentially some AI as well like AI storytelling um potentially some machine learning that comes with figuring out what player like how to um optimize the intensity curve of players like play uh with the with the mission system um so that's something that we're super excited about uh about exploring um and you know with the release of Gemini Google's Gemini AI uh you know our plan is that all of our missions because our mission are 100% dynamic in the world um that all of them will get

Dynamic briefings from you know Gemini in the in the voice of an actual gear breaker when you're in the game right um which would be super awesome right so uh there's that um and then there's uh you know you mentioned territory wars but a big portion of that is also baronies so Barony support and social support is one of the things that we have kind of superficially right now but we want to add like blow that out and add like a huge Suite of of features for bar leaders to manage their bares and level them up and add progression schemes to that and awesome sounds like a lot um very very ambitious I always like ambitious projects and uh ambitious teams um okay our listeners may want to go and check this out where can they go to uh play either the closed beta if it's possible to get into that still or certainly the open Beta which sounds like would be coming towards the end of March uh we'll put the links in the show but just tell us um where it's going to be yeah open Beta closer to may but uh the right now you there are still potentially some uh spots on our mailing

list if you want to try to shoot for the Clos beta Phase 2 which is going to be end of March which you still need a key for um you can potentially still get a key if you go to our site at metal cor. and you will find some signup links there where you can uh get an email with with a with a key on EGS um and uh yeah learn a lot more about the project um also you can join our our Discord which is at metal core game on our Discord uh which you know hope hopefully we'll have a link for as well um but yeah that's it awesome all right and then uh final question for all of our guests um what three games are you playing right now or are you most excited by and you can't use your own that that doesn't count uh yeah I mean I'm I'm still somewhat obsessed with h balers Gate 3 oh 100% 100% I'm sorry but like every single guest we've had has said balers gate three so I still haven't played it I haven't had the time but yeah thank you for re foring the fact that I got to go go and get that the other the other game

which is which I've just started getting into is Hell divers 2 which is you know very you know in in certain ways similar to our game but I'm I'm having a ton of fun with that it's a super high quality game I love it uh and then you know I I this is you know this is I'm I'm maybe a mark of how old I am but I'm still enjoying mostly like watching competitive DOTA to when I when I have time so that's that's my other advice awesome awesome all right well that is a great place to to end today Dan I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the Pod today it's been an absolute pleasure I've really enjoyed learning about Metal cord and all you guys or planning yeah thanks for having me on and of course a big thank you as always to all of our listeners we'll be back next week with more interviews more insights and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web 3 so until next time friends stay crypto curious and feel free to send questions guest recommendations and comments to me my email is Niko nov. if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app

make sure to like subscribe comment or give a FST star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu wide ranging Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu [Music]