Jason Brink on gaming and NFTs at Gala Games

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have jason brink the president of blockchain at gala games jason welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here thank you very much happy to be here i'm really excited to dive into the world of blockchain games i feel like

0:21it's one of the hottest niche industries inside of cryptocurrency right now and it's having gamers from around the world are getting interested in based games you know nfts uh play to earn all these different uh kinds of games that are coming out i would love for you to kick us off with just a little bit of information about gala games what they're doing in the blockchain

0:42space and what kind of people are resonating with gal games sure so gala games was founded basically with the the overarching motivation to give people ownership of their in-game assets many of us come from the uh traditional gaming space the uh you know free to play or the just you know normal pay to play buy the game license and and play the game

1:10gaming world and we've never liked the idea that people would put money into a game or put time into a game build something up within that game and then have nothing to take away with them when they're done and so you know that's why gala games was founded our founder and ceo is eric schiermeyer one of the co-founders of zynga we have a whole upper level executive team of people who

1:36are from the traditional gaming world and we're all bringing that to blockchain but i think that one of the things that really differentiates us from from the other quote-unquote blockchain um gaming companies in the space is that we don't think of ourselves as a blockchain gaming company we think of ourselves as a gaming company that makes amazing games and happens to

1:58use blockchains and blockchain is an integral part of our tech stack which is a really really big distinction definitely i completely agree jason and maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit more in terms of sure with gala games you guys have multiple games are these all built in house and and what exactly sure sure have right now so we um you know to to to elaborate on the the

2:24sort of blockchain gaming versus gaming with blockchain uh you know split um most the the blockchain spaces is known for its its creativity for people who are uh you know very fascinated by the the topic itself but um blockchain games have never really been particularly fun to play uh they might be interesting they might be really cool financial experiments

2:52that somebody has put stickers on so that they look cute um but they're not really games in the traditional sense of the word and this is something that we very much wanted to change and so this is sort of the the direction that we brought you know brought to this we do have several games that have been produced and are being produced in-house uh the first game uh that we launched

3:17with and this this game was launched in live before we even had a token uh to use in the game so um we we definitely did it game first uh which i think is an important distinction uh in the space um and that's called townstar it is our our current game that is configured for uh play to earn so you can go and play town star and earn tokens uh you know

3:43eventually as gala chain stan comes up you'll be able to improve some of the things in the game uh that you know make them do different things like that we also have an mmorpg under production uh called mirandis which is going to be pretty epic i'm really looking forward to that i also have relationships with external studios like media based in the

4:08netherlands uh they produced a game called spider tanks which they're bringing to the gala platform which is a brawler slash moba absolutely epic and uh people have been enjoying playing that a great deal and uh we have a lot of different games on the way to the platform right now so it's uh it's pretty cool very cool that is exciting and i did look a little bit through uh townsend

4:35and i'm curious though you mentioned there about the gala chain when the galaxy comes out there's gonna be more functionality what is the gala chain and can you talk about that a little bit sure so right now most of our nfts and our token itself are based on ethereum now ethereum is fantastic for certain things um it is not fantastic for gaming really

4:57and so what we're what we're doing is we're standing up our own main net that will have increased functionality for uh for items in game there really isn't any uh blockchain out there that has been built specifically to address the needs of game developers and so that's what we're doing very cool and i was looking into uh running nodes and that it looks like

5:24i guess this is for gala chain there's going to be a decentralized network where the players are able to contribute to the network or how does that work so right now uh gala gala ecosystem nodes they're founders nodes so there's only 50 000 of them those are currently available they can be purchased from our website at app.galla.games and by operating a node you receive a small

5:50amount of gala right now as part of the daily distribution as well as potentials for nf anytime we have a game and we release a bunch of nfts for that game a certain percentage of those based on the number of nodes that are online go out to the node network and so you could potentially get nfts from the nodes as well

6:19that's amazing yeah that's good to know a lot of these nft drops seem to sell out right away or you know they're very very quickly yeah yeah so that's good to know very quickly and and now you're talking about gala chain distributing the gala coins can you talk a little bit more about the gala coin i'm curious on you know how much is required to stake and you're being distributed

6:44rewards does that run out at a certain time so uh the nodes are not uh proof of stake it's actually a software license so you're not taking coins and locking them in the node um you can purchase that node with gala and then run it uh on your own but there is not a traditional staking component to it um and so it's more like a a delegated authority sort of uh sort of thing and

7:14then that that license um is what gives you that uh authority to contribute to the network as a whole um there is a set emission for gala um that that you know has a normal having attached to it up to a uh a max to a 50 billion coin 50 billion tokens but we're still some ways

7:45off from that right now i think right now and so there's you know just the normal halving schedule going from here on out so there will be there will come a point in time where those nodes um will switch from receiving the gala that is minted every day to receiving transaction fees as they move across as things across the network that's good to know and

8:10you spoke at the beginning about how you're really you know a gaming company first that that's using blockchain you're not too focused on the blockchain uh i'm curious when a new game comes out normally there's a lot of hype around it but there's also a low retention where you know people get bored of the games after a couple weeks or you know and how do

8:32you re-uh claim that interest and make sure that people are still interested in the game for years to come do you have any insight into that i think that there's there's a couple pieces here the first is that um if somebody gets bored of your game within a few days or a couple weeks um you made a boring game and that's i don't know i don't know what to tell

8:56you um so like it's just it's just the reality i mean um you think of the games that you've you've played the most you know over the course of your life um you know i have put hundreds of hours into some games hundreds and hundreds of hours and um they don't get boring i don't have time to play much anymore unfortunately but but that's like a really good game is like that and so

9:21that's that's what we want to make now in the event that you don't have time to play a game any longer okay so for example i used to play tons of uh battlefield uh bfe with my uh my little brother and my brother-in-law we would uh you know hop on we'd play for a few hours almost nightly for a while but every weekend for sure i haven't had time to play that game in months

9:48okay i and and if i could i would love to be able to take all of the skins and all of the guns that i upgraded and all of that and sell those to somebody else but i can't because that's not even possible and so this is this is where the blockchain gaming and the real ownership of your in-game assets comes in because if that were to be based

10:15in the gala ecosystem you would be able to sell it because it's yours you do whatever you want with it and in selling it you would be able to generate you know income for yourself because you're selling something that you that you earned right but at the same time you know there are always secondary market fees that are added on to these sorts of transactions so you could

10:37potentially be you know making money for the company as well to provide some form of long-tail revenue going out into forever for as long as a game is is is there and people want to play it definitely no i think that's a very important difference in that you're able to monetize and you're right i've played games back in the day for hundreds of hours that i really got nothing out of

11:02because i didn't own anything uh after i finished playing the game so i could see that nothing big difference exactly um now i'm curious on where your team is at right now i know you're you were talking about you're building out the mmorpg uh but with townstar you know that's live right now are people able to go play the game and start earning yep yeah yeah absolutely

11:24absolutely um right now we're in the process so we started sort of the light play to earn where you have to have nfts um that are that are your nfts that you place and based on the rarity of your nfts and the fact that you meet a certain you know in-game minimum of of play points essentially you earn something um but the next phase of that is making it so

11:49that it's essentially enabled for everybody so if i own nfts but i can't use them myself i can make them available for other people to use in place in game and then we split the earnings which is um but it also enables just anyone who wants to play to earn to you know play to earn definitely no i think that's a

12:18that's a great functionality being able to share your nfts and eventually you know lend them out earn interest on them maybe um have them appreciate as the game gains in popularity so very cool jason thank you for that sure and now i want to look forward you know maybe we can start with a higher level of what do you see you know the gaming industry looking like 10 years from now

12:42in terms of integration with blockchain and nfts and how predominant will that be um yeah so i think that that one of the things that i've realized in in working with uh our community and the people who play is that once people realize that there is the possibility for um to own their own in-game assets there is really no interest in playing

13:09games where that's not possible so so we get a lot of a lot of pushback um you know if when it comes to like playing a traditional game i mean um i was playing a game not too long ago and and there was a point in the game and it was it was a free-to-play game there was a point in the game where i was going to have to make like a five dollar purchase

13:30uh to to get more you know points to continue building or do whatever and i just had no interest in doing that none and i think that that's something that's going to continue i mean i think that blockchain based ownership of in-game assets is going to become the standard um in the in the fairly near future with everybody everybody you know moving in that

13:53direction very cool and i'd love to hear about what's coming up for gala games i know you mentioned the mmorpg is that one of the main milestones and and what else is happening in the next year that's that's moving the the thing that i think is the most important thing to focus on right now just because it's going to be such a ridiculously awesome event to be at

14:20is galaverse i don't know if you are familiar with this but it is uh coming up it's december 11th to 13th it's at the aria in las vegas if you go to gallaudet games you can buy tickets now it is going to be everything that a normal conference is not okay so it is going to be an absolutely amazing excellent event um you know we we just for example uh the other day i

14:50had an ama with uh sarah buxton one of my co-workers she's uh you know head of operations uh at gala and um she let me know and she actually leaked uh during the ama that imagined dragons was going to be playing at galliverse uh and there's a bunch of other really really awesome stuff so so that is the thing uh and and

15:18i can't make any promises but big announcements have a tendency to happen at events like this um so so you might want to consider uh being there if you want to have the uh the the best chance at getting into some stuff that other people don't know about yet very exciting jason well i'll definitely uh leave the link for that as well in the description box for the video

15:46excellent is there any other ways that you'd like the community to get involved with sure i i would i would invite everyone to join our discord at galagames.chat um we've got a lot of stuff that's going on in the in the discord we're in there pretty constantly i'm actually just getting ready to take a group of 10 new employees into the discord um today and uh introduce them to the

16:14community we have a very very active discord and it's growing very quickly so um yeah i i am definitely i definitely recommend that you do that it is the best way to interface with us amazing well i will leave that link as well for the discord in the description box below all the best jason with everything at gala games moving forward and i'll see you in the game

16:38awesome ashland thank you so much