Kieran Warwick on Illuvium’s upcoming NFT-based RPG game

0:15um so hello and great talk from anchorage

1:18uh thank you so much scb-10x uh i'm excited for this discussion on nfts and gaming blockchain gaming industry is one to be watching uh let me start off by introducing myself i am ashton addison host of the crypto coin show on youtube and broadcaster on reuters insider financial network and refinitive tv with our channel growing to almost over 800 interviews

1:43we've had some interesting interviews in the blockchain gaming space and i think not more interesting than this discussion we're having coming up with kieran warwick of elluvium kieran uh great to see you here and uh and welcome thanks for having me ashley really good to be here yeah i'm really excited to dive into elluvium's rpg nft based gaming uh platform that

2:08you're coming out with it really does look like uh from what i've seen so far as one of the most hyped up games of the year that i'm excited for i would love for you to just kick it off for us before we dive into the intricacies of nft and d5 and how that all incorporates with just a a quick snapshot and an overview of eluvium and what makes it stand out as an amazing

2:30game yeah so adam's heart what we're trying to what we're trying to achieve here is building a aaa quality game and the the first of its kind on blockchain and so uh essentially what alluvium is it's an open world rpg it's very similar to the likes of pokemon and then we also couple it with an auto battler

2:57as well so if you're a collector there's something for you if you're into more strategy and battling then there's something for you as well and and we we basically merged the two and uh and that's what uh that's how alluvium was born that's great to hear and yeah i hope uh it looks amazing so i hope it's as addicting as pokemon is and i was on pokemon go for far too long uh

3:23distracting myself from the crypto prices uh so i'm looking forward to that i know there's a trailer out already that that we can see um i would love to hear more about you know you mentioned collectors and and players as well and on the collecting side uh integrating nfts in there maybe you can just give a little background on uh on nfts how that integrates into the game and

3:45how that adds value to the game so nft is in in gaining uh a massive massive breakthrough essentially what it means is that it's it's verifiable on the blockchain you know that it's a unique asset and in in the case of gaming and obviously this this stands across you know videos photos art music anything can be turned

4:13into an nft to to ensure that you know that it's it has that rarity there and and you can identify that but in in our case it's super important because what it actually means is the in-game assets that you have are owned truly by the player so in in a typical example you're playing fortnite and you your son or maybe yourself or whatever

4:40has has gone and spent you know 500 dollars on on skins and they don't actually own those skins right and whether it be skins or or new characters or weapons or whatever it is in in the case of alluvium all of those in-game items are actually owned by the player and whenever you see fit you're able to go on to an open market we've got our our own exchange which

5:08we're releasing which is called the eluvidex and you can play for an hour or you can play for 10 years and at the end of that journey you can always go into that marketplace and sell those assets for crypto that you can then convert into fiat and essentially you're playing a game and you're earning yeah that's pretty exciting especially for you know the people that

5:32work hard to earn great items and be able to monetize off of that and then the people that just want to you know pay to to look cooler to get ahead in the game and just lay some money down for those people that did the hard work uh there's that exchange that can be made uh so yeah that is something that i think's a lot it's going to have increased value um

5:53and i i know that the game is you know it's not lively you guys have been working on it for quite a long time but i want to get a glimpse into you know for those avid gamers the the gaming experience and there's been uh this uh something about blockchain gaming where people compare to traditional video games and they say well you know you're adding in all this great extra

6:15functionality uh nfts d5 functionality but the experience with the graphics may be you know sacrificing uh as a trade-off is that something that that you see and how would you compare it to traditional video game rpg experience yeah absolutely and and i think it's it's it's definitely the first thing that i identified in space in the in nft gaming blockchain space

6:39was the lack of substance with the games and when i talk about substance i mean the graphics quality i mean the back story i mean the characters i mean the law in a aaa game there are typically 200 to 300 people in the studio that are all working over a two to three year period to build this game in some cases that can blow out to you know seven eight

7:06nine years and so to do this properly you need to you literally need to build a triple a studio and we're in the process of doing that we're i think we just got over uh a hundred people that that are now contributing to the dow and you know we've got 50 artists that have all worked in you know either aaa studios or they were freelancing

7:33and and doing exceptional work and that's why you see it in the art and i think a lot of games as well they they were either doing one or the other right they were building it for a mainstream audience or they're building it for a crypto audience we looked at it at the very beginning and we said let's not do that let's merge the two together let's do it properly let's do

7:57it completely decentralized let's give the power back to the people allow them to have the ownership and everything that that we thought as in my brother and i aaron the other co-founder everything that we thought was lacking in mainstream gaming we wanted to add into elluvium from the very get-go and so that's that's kind of what we that's our point of difference you know

8:23people always say to us like wow you've already got 90 people and i'm like that's that we're not comparing ourselves to traditional blockchain games because we don't think there's going to be blockchain games and there's going to be mainstream games we think it's all going to merge together and if we're not if we're not positioning ourselves with these

8:44ubisoft and blizzard and all of these massive massive aaa studios they're simply going to come in and see that play to earn is the future of gaming and you know they're going to wipe us out so we need to be ready for that definitely karen and i think that's a great way to go about it and it sounds like you've had an entrepreneurial journey as well you know just playing games

9:07seeing the struggles and then creating it yourself and i'm curious you you mentioned there you have to be in uh in the ranks with blizzard and these large game owners when as the game comes out have you targeted it to all three of people already in nfts uh people that are in cryptocurrency but but not in nfts and as well just no coiners and people that just want to play great games

9:34yeah it's interesting right if we went out and we tried to to educate the the world on play to earn and nft gaming without as in mainstream people that have nothing to do with crypto no coiners like like you're saying then i don't think we would have had the the level of hype and liftoff that we have to to start off with and so it was it's it's always been a two-pronged

10:00attack first we need to get the attention of the the the people in blockchain who are looking at nft games and are actively playing them and we're on our way to to do that obviously we we we have a lot to go and i think once we get our game demo out that's really going to solidify it for for a lot of people that are speculating on us right now but then well and truly we will be

10:27switching over to to going after mainstream people mainstream gamers who i believe would have come into this space already purely because play to earn is just way way too appealing for developing countries you can literally earn more than your minimum wage and if you if you're going out there and you're laboring all day long or you can sit down and play a video game

10:55chances are you're going to want to play the video game if you're earning as much money and so for for us we we need to i think there's going to be an inflection point that we hit where we're mainstream games and there'll be enough blockchain games that have the same sort of quality that we do that all of these uh mainstream gamers are gonna start converting over

11:20and and so we'll always have the the crypto uh marketing you know activated and we're always looking for more and more people but we're well and truly trying to break down those barriers of oh what is crypto and how does it work and we can go we'll go into that in in a sec when we when we talk about you know ethereum and and the struggles that we've had

11:45in the past but i think we are definitely moving towards a a very very bright future for this new style of gaming definitely and it's very exciting and it's great to hear that your team already has almost 100 people working on it and i know that you're continually expanding the community you mentioned there that they're joining the dao and i don't think a lot of viewers

12:08realize already that eluvium is a you know a dow and you're looking at building this into a fully decentralized game where anybody can contribute and i'd love for you to just explain more about how the dow works in elluvium and the illuminati council sure so essentially uh the way that we've we've set it up is very similar to the synthetics governance in that we

12:36have basically allowed any token holder of ilb to vote in and and we do epochs of uh of three months at a time but we essentially vote in the these this council and at the moment there's there's five of them on it and essentially anyone from the community can write an iip which is a an alluvium improvement uh proposal and basically what that

13:05allow that what that can be is is anything you know we've we've had um already a case of myself writing an iip because again i'm just a core contributor like everyone else in in our dow and so i wrote an iip to say this is what i think our balancer smart pool price should be based on you know this is my rationale you can't just be anyone can propose anything you need to

13:30clearly lay it out and we've got guidelines on how to actually do that but i wrote this iip and it got approved and then delphi which is a very very known vc company who were investors in us lead investors they didn't agree with it and they came with a counter proposal and said a hundred dollars for your blp price is too high we want to drop it down to 50 and even

13:57though my proposal got approved and you know you can call me one of the founders or whatever didn't matter the community agreed we wanted at 50 and so it was and so you know that's just one example but once the game's out i don't think people realize the detail that we've gone to in that someone can actually you know you're sitting there and you're like i love

14:22this game and i have this awesome idea for a character you can literally put in a proposal to say this is the character that i think should be in the next set these are the parameters these are the skills i think it should have these are the affinities the classes whether it's a rogue or a tank or whatever and if the community approves it it's in and then you're literally sitting there

14:46going i just made a character for this game and i you know i don't own it or whatever but i'm a contributor and so that's what it's all about that's really cool and uh it's an interesting uh you know process because as i saw you you have written out guidelines to make sure that it's not just written on a scrap piece of paper so it's clear in the goals that

15:12they're trying to add but then as you mentioned you created an iip and it was rejected and a counterparty came back with a proposal and i saw that you know it's not as easy as having a centralized company just decide uh what is allowed and what's not allowed in the game so do you see how much how much of that is like it it makes it slower for development or uh

15:36there are setbacks and there's cons to having a dow as opposed to having a centralized company as well so i mean look i i've run a few companies uh in the past and and i've been the founder and i'm the one who's calling the shots and all that kind of stuff so personally getting over that first hurdle was a little bit of a challenge but when you when you think about it to be a

16:01completely decentralized game that is that is run by the gamers themselves and the investors it's just too exciting and it's too breakthrough to to to not go into it however though you're right there are challenges and and so we were lucky in that aaron is unbelievable at game design like he's he's just a freaker and so he was able to present a game

16:30design that we had worked on for a few months or or you know six months or whatever it was and that had a very clear guideline of what we wanted to build and you could call that the the core elluvium project what the and essentially if you're joining that community then you're just you're somewhat agreeing with i like that the path i like the path that they've

16:55chosen across every single factor and what we're trying to do with the council is is steer the little things right so we're not saying it's i mean if the council theoretically said hey we want to we want a first-person shooter game completely scrap alluvium theoretically we would have to do it but i think everyone's accepted the the core goal that that we

17:21have and the core game mechanics that we have but these iips and iccps are there for people to propose improvements to what we the core devs have originally come up with and so we're lucky in that we haven't come up against too many crazy things where we've had to derail our development process and deprecate things and all that kind of stuff

17:47so it actually is run quite smoothly and i think that comes down to the fact that it's five people on the council and not you know the 10 000 token holders that we have voting on that definitely well that's great to hear i'm excited to see what the community comes up with when the game launches and they want to add in their ideas and i might

18:13do that myself as well and because i have the capability of that and that's the beautiful thing about dowse and decentralization uh absolutely i'm looking forward to that now i wanted to touch on ethereum uh because you did mention you know there was some struggles at the beginning uh currently the the games being built on ethereum the nfps are on ethereum

18:31maybe you could touch on that decision why ethereum is the best technology for alluvium so as a base layer ethereum it's got the largest amount of core devs it's got the the largest community the most amount of projects are being built on top of it it makes sense for so many different reasons to build on top of ethereum verse another chain the issues that you have

18:58with that are when you're playing a game and t and and particularly a mainstreamer right we're talking about converting these guys over from playing fortnite and and league of legends and all that stuff converting over they're not used to metamask popping up saying hey pay us ten dollars gas you know and now there's a minting fee and now actually you paid your money

19:23but it's going to take 15 minutes for the transactions process on the blockchain it breaks the game completely right and and it makes it almost impossible and that's why we we decided to to move to a layer 2 in immutable x and that allows the zero minting fees there's sub sub second transaction time so everything's going through super fast

19:50and the massive massive one is there's zero gas fees so when you're trying to attempt to get these guys over with that seamless process of things working in the game you're not putting up blocker after blocker after blocker that eventually someone goes ah i'm over this i'm i'm going back to where i'm i feel most comfortable definitely and i'm guessing that you

20:17considered technical barriers to entry for for people that aren't in blockchain uh and try to not overburden them with you know trying to learn the 101 or blockchain they just want to accept uh you know a signature or something on metamask and realize that hey um you there may be uh real money involved in this but you're actually making money as well

20:37if you are planning to earn and and building a reputation building items and nfts and it's it's interesting it's interesting as well because we we actually have a free to play element of the game and so it's which which theoretically blends into still playing to earn because this free to play element is designed to you know right now there's there's a couple of games out

21:06there that have these huge barriers century where it's like 1400 or or 2 grand just to start playing because you need to buy these assets we've gone a different direction and we're basically saying if you put your blood sweat and tears into this game for for hours and hours and hours you can slowly build up the level of your alluvials to get to a point

21:28where you can capture something that does have value and then all of a sudden your hard-earned hours are now paying off and uh and so yeah so so that's that's what we've gone with to really increase the the adoption rate of people coming over from mainstream yeah i think that's a great way of going about it and there's i'm sure there's lots of people that would just love to

21:55try it for free and then you get them hooked uh with either the graphics or the nfts um and i was looking on the marketplaces there already are nfts available and i'm curious on how that worked you know did the eluvium foundation create nfts and release them or with their airdrops and and then they're tradable on the secondary marketplace after or yeah so we decided to it was a little

22:21bit of a marketing exercise i was trying to work out how are we going to partner up with other protocols right because the lowest hanging fruit is that we have you know millions of people that are already utilizing d5 protocols and we had the ability to mint nfts but we didn't one thing that we have been absolutely adamant on is that we aren't going to release a single nft that's

22:49usable in game as in a character nft in-game because too many games go out there and they say hey buy our packs and you get like 20 million dollars in sales and all it encourages is just whales to come in and and buy it up we want to completely fair launch and so with that it's kind of like okay now what do we do you know we don't have that but what we can do

23:16is we can mint nfts we can partner up with and we've partnered up with some huge protocols in douchey synthetics there was barnbridge and a bunch of other really really big protocols and what we've called them is cosplay promo nfts so you can't actually use them in game but if you think about them like almost like the

23:43the uh promo pokemon cards that they used to give out at like the conferences and stuff like that you couldn't actually use them but they now 22 years on or whatever it is are the most rare because you can't actually get it in the game you can't actually buy it in a card pack so these nfts that you're seeing circulating really really cool artwork i believe

24:09that you know once the game's out these things are going to be very very sought after i think that's a great way of going about it and uh i did see that um they were getting bought up like wildfire but i'm also very excited to actually see that the in-character nfts and what's in stock for when the game does come out um and i was reading into the fact that

24:33the players can get revenue from the game uh and through the ilv tokens i'm guessing that's how it's integrated as well and i know you have a two-tier token system with ilv and silv can you talk about the tones uh when the game comes out how does that interact with the game and and how can it be monetized from the player's perspective sure so we we basically have

24:58there's 10 million ilv tokens in circulation and the way that we've we've done it is or the way that we've set it up is when you're staking you earn additional ilv but you also have the option to claim that not as ilv and as s ilv and the the key difference is that silv can be used in game to purchase things and so it's a way

25:28for people who are staking to essentially have some kind of value that they can use immediately because in our uh our ilv the the way that our protocol works with our staking the rewards are locked for a 12-month period so we didn't want people to say like i've got all this style b but i can't use it and it's it's actually super beneficial to the total ecosystem because anytime someone

25:57claims silb it removes one ilb from the the circulating supply essentially so every single person took the we've got three million in in three million ilv and rewards to be issued over the next three years if every single person claimed those as silv our circulating supply at the end of the three years wouldn't be 10 million

26:23it would be 7 million and so obviously less coin circulating theoretically higher price and so that's the way that we've done that and but if you don't want to use silv the in-game currency is e very very simple great thank you so much for that explanation karen and we do only have a few minutes left and i want to touch on this because i'm sure people are curious to know

26:47more about the game launch and you know nothing's ever concrete i know your team's working hard but can you talk about the tentative uh release for the beta where the players can actually get in and start playing the game so the first thing that we're looking to release is the game demo that well and truly has been the thing that people are in certainly in our community are

27:10waiting for and i think there's a lot of people on the fence that are saying like okay the graphics look great and these little animation gifs look great but show us what it actually does and so that's our that's our our main focus right now but ideally we're looking to get the the game in in the pub obviously there's going to be an alpha earlier but the game in public sands by the end

27:35of the year we we want and it'll be an open beta it'll be connected to the blockchain you'll be able to actually own these assets all that kind of stuff but end of the year is what we're gunning for but again it's it's a very very aggressive timeline probably a little bit of inexperience on my side for for going out with such an aggressive date but you know we're building the team and

28:00we've got the right people to to do it so yeah definitely well i'm excited for that and i did see in your discord there's already over 33 000 people uh and i'm guessing that they're already getting involved and there are ways to get involved right now um there are the nfts and is this is it the staking that's live or what are the other ways that the viewers can get involved so we

28:24always are doing giveaways and stuff the cosplays that i was talking about with in partnership with like chain link and sushi and stuff they're always available but to people in our discord so if you if you go in there that's that's where you're going to have the chance to win one of these you know potentially super valuable nfts and we're literally doing them all the

28:46time i think we had like three last week that we were doing so there's there's that and then there's staking so kane our brother he's a little bit crazy and he he was advising us in the beginning and he basically said yield farming yield farming yield farming you've got to give a massive massive amount of distribution through staking and so 30 of our token

29:11can literally be farmed by either an ilv just staking purely ilv as a single asset or ilv slash e and uh and yeah that's that's what's active right now that's what we we also have flash fools in that staking which essentially allows people to stake a partnered asset right net we just finished synthetics and we're just about

29:37to to launch xyz but they're the they're the two things that if you go into our discord you'll see a lot of active people doing that amazing thank you so much for taking the time kieran uh looking forward to seeing the release and all the best thank you so much ashton appreciate it