Wildcard Game Stream: February Town Hall

SHow Notes

It's time for the first big Wildcard update of 2024! Join Co-founders Paul and Katy as we talk about the big things coming up for the Wildcard game and ecosystem this year.

transcript

00:25
Katy’s
02:31

A little under the weather today.
04:12

She is recovering from big sickness and sound.
04:16

I blame dice.
04:17

Oh, yes. She was at the big game conference while I sat home and worked and watched after the kids. And then she brought home horrible sickness.
04:25

But she's getting and powering through a town hall.
04:29

Powering through it.
04:31

Yes.
04:32

Guys, nobody can hear us right now in discord. We're still hearing song sickness. Oh, there we go. I blame.
04:39

Okay, you hear, now there's a mute music button. But if shady can hear me, I don't know if there's anything that we can do because the elevator music is playing for anyone who doesn't have it muted. But, guys, let us know in the discord chat if that continues to be an issue. Okay, cool. All right, so, of course, this is our first town hall of 2024. There has been so many changes since the last one we had. I don't even remember when that was. Now October, I think. So a few months since we've done our last update. So in today's show, we're going to be covering some major updates and upcoming milestones for the two main pillars, the Wildcard project. The first one is the core competitive game that you all know and love and have been play testing.
05:30

And the second is the Web3 ecosystem, which has also changed a lot since our last talk. The team has been deep in development on both fronts, the core game and the Web3 front. And we cannot wait to show you what we've got cooking. So, by the way, for our wild pass holders, all wild pass holders in the audience, we will have a brief public Q and A at the end of this town hall.
05:54

Pass holder only.
05:56

Well, we'll have a brief public one and then.
06:00

I just spoiled it. Yeah.
06:02

Okay, we're going to move over into the Genesis events channel, where we'll host a private Q a just for y'all with Paul and Katy there. So if any questions don't get answered during today's public event, move on over there and we'll answer them there. So that's just for you as a thank you for being our wild pass holders. The next thing there's the agenda slide that I didn't show you randomly. One is rare, y'all, to wildfile holders that are in the audience. So if you have your wildfile claimed and you are in the discord stage right now, your attendance is being recorded. And I'm going to randomly choose from the people that attended and were recorded in attendance to receive that swag to your wildfile wallet.
07:07

Leah is saying that we can't hear you, Ami. Wait. No. Now you're back. Okay, which parts did we hear or not hear? Ami was talking about these amazing tins that we're giving out. So did that come through? Did we get that? Yeah, I'm not watching the chat.


07:24

I can repeat it. Yeah, I'm looking at the slack. I mean, at the discord. Yes. Try again. Okay. Swag giveaway happening. As a thank you for attending the event in discord today. So the giveaway is going to be run for the wild file holders that are in attendance on discord. We get a list of all the wild files that attended and I'm going to choose randomly 50 winners from the list of attendees. Right now, there's about 250 in the audience. I'll choose 50 of those randomly to receive one of these pins. For anyone watching this afterward, we are going to do another giveaway opportunity afterwards for the international folks that aren't able to join us live. We understand it's very early or late for some of you, so don't worry. We'll do a giveaway for you all.
08:11

But we love our international community so we always are thinking of you guys when we do these.
08:15

Yes. Yes.
08:16

Even if you can't be here with us, wake up to good news.
08:22

So let's get to the good stuff. We're going to start off talking about the game and all the new stuff that's going on there. So with that, I'm going to pass it off to Paul and let you show us what's new.
08:42

Update yet? Our biggest town hall yet. We have a packed agenda of things to show you guys, so I'm going to try to move through them pretty quick. Also, if you didn't hear earlier, my lovely, amazing co founder Katy is here with us. Do you want to say hi, Kate? She'sick. She's recovering.
08:57

Hi, guys. I'm going to be a little bit quiet. I will, however, break in if Paul tries to spill things that I am not yet ready for him to spill.
09:06

You guys are familiar. You know the Paul and Katy show. I try to drop all the alpha, Katy tries to stop me. That's what we're all here for. It's great. It's fine. So yes, we are going to start by talking about the amazing updates. So for our playtesters, I think you've seen some of this stuff, but some of it is brand new you haven't seen yet. We're going to start by showing you guys incredible lineup of summons that have. Wait, what? Yeah. Okay, here we go. Sorry. We call this our zoo. This is a glimpse of all the summons that are in the game, plus ones that are in development. And actually, all of these are in play tests.
09:52

This last sprint has been incredibly intense for the team as we've taken a lot of the work we've been doing over the last year and jammed it into the game. Worked really hard to get it live in play test so that we can start play testing with the broad meta of almost 75. I think we're close to 75 full summons, fully playable summons in the game that you can see here. They're amazing. I'm really proud of the team and what they pulled off here.
10:21

All right. I'm just seeing some stuff. I just want to make sure that we're okay.
10:27

We're good.
10:28

Yeah.
10:29

We've had some technical difficulties in the control room today, but I think we're okay.
10:35

All right, good deal.
10:37

So, yeah, let's talk about game mechanics. Okay, so, as you saw from all those summons on the screen, there's a huge variety of different creatures that do different things, as well as new powers and abilities that the champions have in the arena. What ties all this together is a brand new set of amazing game mechanics you can see kind of mentioned here. We've got fire, we've got poisoning, we've got shock, we've got creature duplication, we've got creatures that allow you to summon off sides. We've got this amazing new thing called skill shots that we're playing with.
11:07

And these are basically like, cards that require even more champion skill to aim them precisely because they do things directly where the champion is aiming, and they kind of ignore the normal rules of, like, oh, you can only summon in a lane in specific places, and these kind of let you go straight at doing damage directly. We have a creature called DFA that is basically this giant spike that drops in the ground and does immense damage right where it lands anyway. Yeah, that's incredible. And as it mentions here, these cards are different each time you play them, because as you mix and match those different strategies and synergize with how you play as a champion, you discover all new ways to play.
11:49

And that's the most exciting thing that's happening for me right now, is we're doing play tests weekly, and I am very excited to share that. Those play tests, the attendance of those play tests has been growing every single week. Last year, our average play test attendance was like, I don't know, a dozen, two dozen people, which is actually really good for a pre alpha game and made me really happy to see that at the beginning of this year, were already averaging about 100 people tuning in to each one of our play tests. We did one last week that was 270 people off the hook. Yeah, this is incredible. Even our investors like paradigm, they're like, what are you guys doing? How are you driving these numbers? And I'm like, well, it's really exciting. The game features the Web3 features.
12:32

The fact that we can kind of track everyone's attendance on the wildfire. We could do swag giveaways. There's all sorts of stuff happening. And I love those features coming to life and really resonating with you folks, because, honestly, having almost 300 concurrent people attending a play test for a pre alpha game is kind of a big deal. That's not just a big deal in Web3 numbers. That's starting to be a big deal in web two numbers for a concurrent stream at this scale. So, anyway, really excited. I'm really appreciative for all of you who are showing up. We are going to continue to make that matter even more. And there's a lot of features that we're going to talk about and show you today that are built about that.
13:11

Do you guys want to go back to that group shot one more time?
13:13

Yeah, I really want to show off these summons again so you guys can get a peek of all of them that are showing up here. So let's go back to that. Yeah, let's just take a look at this. Just incredible.
13:24

What? Guys, Taylor, cut.
13:30

What? What's happening?
13:31

Taylor, cut. What is that?
13:40

We're having some technical difficulties.
13:51

Hello?
13:51

What in the world?
13:53

Shoe, shoe.
13:59

Guys, can you. Let's get this back on track.


14:01

Okay.
14:01

We don't have all.
14:04

Are we good? Okay. All right.
14:07

Okay. I'm sorry, guys. Yeah. So not all of these summons are fully under our control yet, but we're taming them. We're getting them handled. Sorry about that interruption, but we're back. No problem.
14:24

Thanks for bearing with us.
14:25

Like I said, the team's working hard to get this all under control, to get all these summons in the game, get them all tamed and ready for your use and gameplay. And those punks especially, have been a little bit problematic. But don't worry, they're going to be in the game soon. You're going to be able to play with them, see the chaos that they cause in the arena. They're actually a lot of fun.
14:45

We're going to change the locks on the production room door.
14:48

Yeah. Okay. So that's just a taste of all the updates that are going into these upcoming builds. We are going to be hosting some design talks. That was actually one of my favorite things that we did last year. Early this year is we brought our game designers, our incredible game designers, Brad, Dan, Steven in together with you guys in a play test to actually talk in depth. That's really what kicked off growing this kind of MVP community of playtesters that is really helping us tune and balance the game right now. We see you. We love you. You guys are our. So we're going to be doing a lot more of that. And there are some more of those design talks coming up soon. Is that right, Ami?
15:25

Yep, that's right. Yeah. So we're going to give you guys a taste of the new game mechanics that are coming in, but there's so much that's new that we could spend the whole town hall on them. So we're going to go through some of them pretty briefly and then we'll see some things pop up on the calendar, the event calendar in the discord. And the design team is going to come in and go a lot deeper with you guys. But let's cut over and we'll play some new gameplay footage with the new summons and new mechanics and then paul on what you're seeing on screen. So, Taylor, if you queue it up.
16:07

I'm on a bit of a delay, so it's probably hard for me to see exactly what we're showing on screen.
16:11

But that's okay as long as let us know.
16:16

Yeah. You guys will be able to check out the things that were just talking about. Combat improvements. So the overall experience of combat as we continue to focus on it, really want it to be world class. Best kind of game feel right. And so things like air attacks are now treated as an ability. They have a cooldown when champions fight each other. We have a clash moment. If you attack at the same time. All these things are just intended to make control of the champion. Just feel really good. We have a lot of improvements to aiming and card throwing, so those have had a facelift too. There's a quick throw animation and aimed throwing state.
16:58

And while aiming, you can also see a preview of the summons and know what lane or enemy that they're going to aggro to, which is really important as a champion. As you're controlling your cards and kind of where you want to summon your creatures. And you can also see when summons have an area of effect that you can see that kind of ahead of time. A big update, big change, big new feature is something we're calling Wildcards. Obvious that we would have a feature in the game called Wildcards themselves. These replace the power ups in the map that were kind of at the bottom lane for you guys who have played or seen play tests. These Wildcards are kind of a key feature. Really excited about it.
17:37

They give players a sense of progression in the match because there's something you can acquire that kind of increase the player's power curve over time. And they're also kind of another area of customization. Each player will choose five Wildcards in the game that they can then get like, they kind of choose that they put them in their deck ahead of time and then those Wildcards are optional things that they can acquire during the match itself. So that's really cool. And then finally, as I mentioned, we have these skillshot cards that brings a whole new level of play. And you'll see these in summons in the video.
18:08

I think there's an example of DFA using a skill shot to kind of launch in the direction where the champion is aiming and doing damage directly where that summon happens, coming straight down on its target and dealing massive damage that kills pretty much any enemy in the game. It's kind of a one shot, but it's very hard to summon to land it. Exactly. It takes a lot of skill and mastery and as you guys know, from the beginning we've been talking about our kind of design mantra for Wildcard is a game that is very easy to learn but takes a lifetime to master.
18:40

That goes all the way back to our work on the age of Empires games where that mantra was the thing that helped guide us on the development of those games and we've carried it forward 20 years all the way to the work we're doing on Wildcard today. And these kind of features like skillshot are example of that, right? It's a place where a really skilled player can just kind of push that skill ceiling higher and get better and better at deploying not just their favorite cards, but exactly onto the battlefield where they can have the most impact. But it's not required. You don't have to put those kind of cards in your deck. You can kind of use more casual cards if you want to. This just provides increased skill capabilities for our players.
19:19

So that's just kind of a taste of all the updates that are going into these upcoming builds. For those of you who have been joining play tests, you've seen that we have been aggressively updating and adding new features new content. This is actually still the beginning. I know you guys heard me say 2024 was going to be the biggest year for Wildcard and there is a lot more coming this year. Really exciting stuff that you can kind of see hinted at. If you rewind this video and go back and look at some of the creatures on that summon page, you kind of maybe get a sense of some things you haven't seen before that we're not quite ready to talk about. But we're teasing there.
19:54

But that stuff is coming up soon and there's just so much more exciting things the team is working on at the moment that will be coming into those upcoming builds. So please keep tuning into play tests. Practically everyone is going to have new things in it and I'm just really excited for that to continue this year.
20:08

Yeah, and speaking of excited things, speaking of exciting news.
20:13

All right, so let's get into some of that. Let's talk about some of the big news and things that are coming. The biggest news today, I think, well, I don't know, you guys will decide what you think is the biggest news, but one of the big news things that we're doing is we are launching our store Steam page and wish listing is going live very soon. I can't wait to welcome new players and fans. I just want you guys to know, for us, this is a big moment because we've been talking about this for a while, right? I know most of you that are here today would self identify as Web3 gamers.
20:44

But starting last year, especially as we showed up to Dreamhack and we started to bring more traditional gamers into this space, and we started to kind of bring those communities together, I think everyone has done a phenomenal job of being very welcoming and kind of reinforcing our message that we're here for the game. We leave with fun first. That's the most important thing about Wildcard. So this is the next big moment. As you guys know, launching a Steam store page becomes the central place where the community can gather around this upcoming game. They can wish list it, they can talk about it on the Steam forums. And I anticipate this is going to continue to bring a lot of new gamers, casual gamers or non Web3 gamers into our community. And I really appreciate you all helping me welcome those folks.
21:32

As you guys know, like we talked about from the beginning, core to the mission of Wildcard is to build a game for millions of people. And we've made a lot of decisions that I'll continue to talk about today that have let us do that, have let us have a game that has these Web3 features, but is also fully compatible with the world of web two games, meaning that we can launch it on Steam, that we can potentially bring it to other platforms in the future that are currently kind of allergic to built in Web3 features in the game. We've figured out how to solve for that problem and allow this game to reach those millions of non Web3 gamers. And like I said, the Steam store page is the first big part of that.
22:15

Okay, so next, I want to talk about some of the strategic partnerships. So in this lead up, and by the way, what the Steam launch means is what it implies is that we are on our way to early access. This is the moment, obviously, for those of you familiar with Steam, you know what early access is. But for those who aren't, early access is the moment where the game goes live. We also call this open beta, and the entire team is just marching towards that goal. That is the most important thing, is that launch. It's kind of the thing you only get to do once, right? And everything has to align. The stars have to align for that to be incredibly successful. That ties into wish lists, everything else.
22:57

And so all of our strategy is about optimizing for the success of that early access launch, which is what the Steam store page starts, that process. So in that lead up to early access, we are also doing a whole bunch of marketing activations and other things that are really intended to kind of like, we've done this before, obviously, we've launched games on Steam. We have a lot of experience with this, and there's sort of this kind of playbook of all the best practices that you do to maximize the success of an independent game launching on Steam. And so we're starting to ramp up that playbook, so to speak, and that includes key strategic partnerships. So you saw, we announced our partnership with the Varsity Esports League, otherwise known as Vessel, in North Carolina.
23:43

This is a high school sports organization who has already been play testing the game. They had a live event last week where they were playing it with a bunch of high school students that were loving the game, giving us a bunch of feedback. There was like a tournament that they ran. You saw the giant checks that people were holding because they won some prizes in that tournament. So this kind of stuff is very important from kind of a grassroots esports perspective. These players give us just key feedback about what they love or don't love about the game and how they see it potentially being something they might want to play from a professional, competitive perspective. And so I'm just really proud of our team forming that partnership. Then you also saw we did an amazing extra life charity showcase that was a huge success.
24:24

We raised over $8,600 for the Children's Miracle Network hospitals. And then we had thousands of views on the live streams with Bruce Green. Kind of funny games doing that. Again, these are just traditional game players and streamers, and these events are just the kickoff, especially that one. It's just the kickoff of this year long relationship and commitment that we have now with extra life, where we're aiming to raise at least $50,000 for charity over the next year. I think we're well on our way to that, having already hit 8600 with just our first event. So coming up next, we're launching our commemorative extra life swag pins. I don't know if we've teased these yet or if you guys have seen this. There's a whole collection. Okay, yeah. This isn't the first time.
25:07

There's a whole collection of swag pins that you can see here on the screen that are all specific to the extra life collaboration and to this charity effort. All the proceeds from these swag pins will go directly to extra life, and you guys will walk away with a great new set of pins for your collection. Okay, so let's see. We've covered game updates, we've covered some of our partnerships and collaborations. Let's talk about Web3. So, kicking this off, I just think it's a great opportunity touch on the vision, like retouch, kind of go back and look at where we've come from, what the vision has been, how a lot of it stayed the same, and how we've continued to build on that vision in Web3.
26:00

You guys have heard me say, going back to the first town hall, I think we did two years ago now that our fundamental goal is to create a truly fun game. Like, that's it. We are here. We're entertainment creators. We're game makers. That's what we're here to deliver. That's always what we'll be here to deliver. That's always what the core value and really everything that we get excited about in Web3 is fundamentally based on us delivering that value. I've believed from the beginning that all these additional things and kind of optional things that Web3 can add into the value of a game and into our connection to a community has to layer around, fundamentally a game that millions of people just want to play for fun. No additional incentives, no speculation, just fun.
26:46

And then when we deliver that, we have this opportunity to use these incredible technologies, blockchain technologies, smart contracts, token based things to really amplify the possibilities of this game. And a couple of years ago, when I said that, I didn't really know what I was talking about, honestly, I was really new into all this, but I had kind of an inclination that there was this possibility in this new set of technologies to unlock a set of things that games couldn't even do before. And now here we are two years later, and we've shipped these incredible features like the wildfile, like swag, and these things that are upcoming, some of which I'm going to talk about today, that are delivering on that.
27:27

But I want to say for those who have joined us recently, it turns out that the vision that we put out there, that even two years ago now, I think it was almost two years ago, is still accurate. And I wanted to point you all to the document, to the thing that we called the wild paper that we put out. I don't remember now somebody could remind me, like, I think it's over a year old, I think. Yeah, maybe two years old. And it's kind of amazing to me that I can point back to that same document, which is still just the version one of that document. We are actually right now working on a massive update to this white paper, to this wild paper that is going to be going live this year. But what's amazing is you can go back and I.
28:11

Please do, I recommend for the folks who haven't checked it out that you go back and check out that wild paper today, that one that we put out a year and a half ago, because it is still the most accurate map of all the things we're building and the vision for what we believe is possible in Web3. And with what Web3 can bring.
28:29

To video games, it's always so funny to actually go back and look at it. I know, because it's like those things, because I'll be like, I swear, we've been talking about this for a while when we finally kind of unlock a certain thing. And if you go back and look at that wild paper, the wildpaper light, as we're calling it, there are those kind of key pieces that we're able to look back and connect to for the things that are coming right now and what we're about to start talking about.
29:02

As Katy mentioned, I want to start talking about some of the new things that are coming to Web3. But right before I did that I just wanted to reinforce. The thing I said a minute ago, which is what's going to happen this year, is we are now addressing two different audiences. We are addressing the Web3 audience, which a lot of the folks here with me today, a lot of you who we've been building a community with for two years now and have an incredible success there, I mean, we have one of the biggest discords. We have just an incredible relationship with the folks who are showing up to play tests, who are in our community.


29:36

And I think my favorite thing about it is, because we have been on this journey now for a couple of years, it's this kind of self reinforcing thing, right? Like at the beginning of that journey, I would be in discord a lot. And Ami and our other folks just like answering questions and telling new people when they come in like, yeah, this is what Wildcard is about. This is the vision. This is where Web3 kind of belongs in this ecosystem. And these days, though, our community, and especially the folks who have been here with us for a while, who have been these kind of loyal folks who've continued to show up, they are our greatest ambassadors now. Right?
30:12

My favorite thing that happens is when somebody new comes in and they ask some question, and especially if it's kind of just coming off some other Web3 project where all they know is maybe speculation or whatever. So they're like, just tell me, what is the thing I need to do here to grind out a token or whatever? And our community is like, okay, I'm glad you're here. That's really exciting. We are going to deliver on all these things that you're excited about in Web3, but we're actually here for the game. We're here for the fun, we're here for the entertainment. And watching the community reinforce that message that we've been sharing from the beginning is my favorite thing. And I just wanted to say that's probably the thing we recognize and appreciate the most.
30:50

And especially when we think about who are the folks in our community that we want to really call out and just kind of elevate. It's always the folks who are helping us reinforce that message and that vision that we have for Wildcard, which is fun first, and Web3 as an optional component that adds this additional value that Web3 users are interested in.
31:11

You hosts, thank you.
31:13

Yes, our hosts, our referees. You guys make everything so much more exciting for us because the reason that we can trust that you will be there in those chats, kind of redirecting.
31:26

People and the reason I'm spending so much time on this and reinforcing it is because we are about to welcome millions of new people into the community over the next twelve months. Okay? It's like I've been down this path before. I know what happens. We launch the Steam page, we start ramping up that marketing campaign. We are going to get hundreds of thousands and millions of people pouring in if we do our job well, which I think our team is going to, because they're amazing. If you think about it, a lot of those people are kind of scared about Web3 right now. They don't know. They've seen negativity around it. They've kind of seen a bunch of other products that call themselves games that were really just there for speculation and for other things.
32:06

And so there's a lot of apprehension at best, or negativity at worst. And so I just need you all to join with me now in welcoming that community as we interact with them, as we're all going to be able to meet with them on the steam forums and on discord. This is where now our job becomes even more important. And you're going to hear me talking to that audience and saying things like don't worry. The Wildcard core game, the one that you think you're going to download and play on Steam, it's not NFT gated. In fact, it doesn't have an aft s in it at all. You can just download the game and play it as a traditional game. And if you're not interested in Web3, you don't have to worry about it.
32:45

If you guys have seen there's a game out there called off the grid that's been doing a pretty good job of this, that's known as a Web3 game, but has really been able to address a much larger web two audience and in fact actually signed a deal with Microsoft, I believe, and announced that they're coming to Xbox. This is an example of what I'm talking about. We know that for Wildcard, what we all want, right, as Web3 users even, which is Wildcard, to reach millions of gamers, we have to do this. Wildcard has to exist in this hybrid world where there's the core game that can be played on traditional platforms that don't have Web3 features or aren't friendly necessarily to native Web3 concepts like NFTs. This is Steam, this is consoles.
33:24

And yet we have never been willing to have that. Let us turn away from Web3. This whole time we've been working towards a vision of bringing those two worlds together, and I think we're achieving that. It's incredible the way the wildfile is going to connect into the Wildcard core game. You're going to see all this stuff. Fact, we're going to demo a little bit of it now. So anyway, very excited for that. Active in our native Web3 community to begin to join me in beginning welcoming millions of new web two gamers that we hope to see. Okay, let's get to the big news. That was a lot of lead up Wildpasses are moving to ETh.
34:02

Some people have speculated that this was happening and have heard me say certain things on Twitter that indicated that were researching the potential of this. Okay, so why? What's taken us so long? Well, first of all, we have from the beginning envisioned that there is this world that were hoping we could reach where we could have certain premium assets and very kind of intended to be high value, valuable, rare, limited things like the wild pass. We wanted those to be where the most liquidity was, where the most users were. But we had this challenge, which is that were building a protocol, which is the wild file and all the things that record the activity engagement from the game that are very high throughput. When everybody shows up to a town hall today, we're recording it on your wildfile. Right.
34:57

That generates a lot of blockchain transactions. That's really expensive. If were trying to do that stuff on ETh alone, we'd be paying a million dollars in gas because, you guys know we pay all the gas for those things because we want to create a seamless user experience. So were kind of stuck. Like, okay, well, we need to be on an l two like Polygon to be able to run this protocol. And so that meant in the past that the assets like the wild file, or, sorry, like the wild pass, had to also exist on that same blockchain. But thanks to the work of the incredible team, over the last several months, we have unlocked the capability of communicating between the protocol on an l two and the assets on l one.
35:37

And that has finally unlocked our ability to do a thing that we've hoped to do from the beginning, which is to migrate the wild passes to Eth l one. So this is coming next month. The month of March is when we're launching this. There will be a seamless, very easy to use migration experience for anyone who has a wildpass. We are designing it so that we can pay for all the gas. Even on ETH and Polygon, there's a couple of tricks to this, right? Because ETH can obviously have high gas prices and there could be times where gas is spiking and such. So we're trying to design an interface where users can have us pay for the gas, but just make sure that we're not getting into gas wars or anything like that when we pull the trigger on this.
36:21

So team is finalizing that process. It's going to be a nice slick, like, you can just kind of pop up the wildfile web page and any wild passes you have, you can trigger the migration and we'll handle all the details for you. And then that will be the wild passes on. So, okay, what else? Oh, yes, of course. We are doing this together with an exciting new partnership that we have with magic Eden. So we've actually been working with Magic Eden since the wild passes launch. Because if you guys remember, that was part of a key partnership that we signed with Magic Eden a while ago. Well, I'm very pleased to announce that we have upgraded and re upped that partnership with Magic Eden.
37:01

And this aligns with, if you guys have seen the big news of Magic Eden launching their ETH marketplace soon, and this migration that we're doing and the future of Wildcard assets on ETH is part of this partnership we have with Magic Eden. I haven't talked about Magic Eden in a while, and I won't go on in a long rant about this, but there's no other team out there, especially in that space that has the real gaming cred that magic Eden does. You guys may have seen some of the founders and the key people on the Magic Eden team are actually also like world class gamers. I think one of the guys that's on their team is like a number one ranked Overwatch player or whatever.
37:40

This has been so important to us because they joined playtests and Wildcard is one of their favorite games and they give us a bunch of feedback. So that relationship is legit. It's not just like business deal. It really is like gamers who love our game and we love their team and so really excited about that. Okay, let's see. I'm sure we'll have questions about all that, by the way, which is why we've.
38:06

We've got. We've got a lot of people have some questions in the chat, which I think is interesting.
38:12

That's why we. Go ahead, Kate.
38:17

One of the things to understand, and we're going to jump into it in just a minute. But there are swag also swag and wildfile protocol, those will not be on east. Those will.
38:29

The way we've been thinking about this. Thank you. Thank you for bringing up that point. The way we've been thinking about this is, and from the beginning, honestly, is there's going to be certain assets that are what we would classify as, like, premium assets, and they're not likely to have a user that owns one of these things. The intention isn't that they're like, trading them high frequency, right? They're not designed for that. They're designed to buy and hold and kind of unlock benefits. That's like the wild pass, right? It's a membership pass. It's a battle pass. It's something you buy and then you use it. And so it's not designed for high frequency trading or high throughput, but things like swag, and especially the protocol on the wildfile itself, are designed for high throughput.
39:14

And therefore for those things, for those assets, those are meant for an l two, like pins swag. We've never intended for those to be like. I mean, there may be some swag in the future that's extremely limited and very precious, and we actually have some really cool things we're working on. So I don't want to say for sure what's going to go where, but just philosophically, the trade offs, I think you all are aware of them, is when we have an asset on Ethel one, there's a lot more liquidity there. There's a lot more money on that blockchain. There's a lot of users. And so generally, assets on Ethel one command higher values just because of the way the market treats them. And then on l two s, as we know, there tends to be like a ratio, right?
40:00

On an L two, the value of an asset is different than the value on an l one. But the trade off is on an l two, you're not paying much gas at all, right? You can buy or sell an NFT on, say, polygon for a few cents, whereas on Ethereum, it might cost 1020, $30. So when we think about what asset belongs where, it's kind of just what we're trying to solve for, right? In the case of swag, we're trying to solve for something that users can trade really easily, that can like, oh, I've got this pin, I'll give you that pin. As well as the needs of the protocol itself, being able to do a lot of blockchain writing and storing data for this kind of stuff.
40:39

So that's why certain things in the Wildcard protocol will always want to be on an l two, but now we have unlocked the capability of having some of the Wildcard assets on L one, which is why we're announcing the migration for the wild pass itself.
40:53

All right, let's move on to one more thing that.
40:57

Speaking of Wildcard assets and collections, the next big Web3 news. Wildlings are on the way. Let's see. Yes. Okay, I'll just lead the way. This is our next ETH collection. So it starts with us migrating the wildpass, and then the next step we're going to take is launching this brand new collection called wildlings. So Wildlings are basically the citizens of the Wildcard universe. These are npcs that live in the universe of Wildcard. They're all uniquely generated. They have names, they have favorite foods, they have all sorts of cool metadata. And this effectively allows you to own your own character in the Wildcard universe. And by the way, there will be wildlings of different types. Okay. The one that we are going to launch with, we are calling fans. And by the way, these names are subject to change.
41:57

We're actually still kind of workshopping some of the names for these. I really love the name wildlings. I kind of love the word fans to describe what these first wildlings are. But what I'm most excited about and what sort of unlocked our. We've actually been working on these things for like a year, more than a year, and finally for us, we figured out what we wanted them to do in the Wildcard universe. That's what unlocked us saying, okay, we're ready to launch these things. So what this first collection is about with wildlings, these fans represent your affiliation with certain parts of the Wildcard universe. So if you're like, I'm the biggest fan of, I don't know, Bolgar or something, maybe that means you should go get some fans that are fans of Bolgar.
42:43

And if you have a couple of those, that's your way of showing the world I'm the biggest Bolgar fan because, look, I've got three of these fans. They have all got.
42:50

But it's not just fans of Bolgar or fictional people that are in the universe, right? Like, you could be a fan of something else.
42:59

That's right. So the initial part of the collection we're working on now are fans of Wildcard itself. So you'll all see them wearing Wildcard merchandise, and like I said, they might have their favorite hat from their favorite summon on or whatever, and that stuff will be in the metadata, too, and will have an impact in the future on how you use these fans. But this also unlocks our ability to have fans that are fans of other things. Like, for instance, you guys who tune into the show gamified, which is a Twitter space that I'm on most every week. I can't wait to launch gamified fans.
43:34

So these would be fans that are not just fans of Wildcard and operate within the Wildcard protocol, but also have some gamified merchandise that they're wearing and are also part of that affiliation with the gamified show and that whole ecosystem. So this lets us start to represent that affiliation that as Web3 users we have, and that allows us to unlock rewards, gameplay and utility related to that affiliation, these assets. And of course there's been PFP collections and avatar collections, and we could have launched one of those before, but I wanted to get to the point where from the moment we launched these, they meant something. They had real utility. And the thing, like I said, that unlocked our understanding and our excitement around this feature is what they do.
44:25

And what they do is they represent that connection, that affiliation and that fandom that you have with a certain part of the Wildcard universe. Or as Katy mentioned, a brand that is in partnership with us. Like, so, you know, who knows? And I'm not going to speak on behalf of gamified, but maybe if you own a gamified fan, they might give you some special benefits if you bring one of those to a gamified show. It's that kind of stuff that I'm excited.
44:49

I'm really excited to be building the wildfile and wild events protocol makes it possible for us to actually reward people for being fans of most things in the world, not just Wildcard as an issue. And part of what we're trying to do here is make sure that we are not limiting this to just beneficial to Wildcard. Because as we've said from the beginning, we want this to be something that can be a lot broader than that.
45:16

Katy actually just dropped some serious alpha there, and I'm usually the one that gets in trouble dropping the.
45:24

So I'm sick. I didn't mean to.
45:26

Okay, well, so let me just speak to that for a second. The reason that wildlings and fans are actually most exciting to us is not because we want people minting a bunch of, I mean, we're going to start here because we have to start here. Like I said, those core fans will be Wildcard fans themselves and will represent affiliation to Wildcard, but the thing we're really excited about in the future is what if you could mint fans from your favorite other organizations? Or what if you guys could actually let people mint fans of your own brands, of your own things that are happening in Web3 and that you guys could receive the value from that. That's how we think about this. We're trying to actually build a platform that creates value for the community.
46:12

And as we talked about from the beginning, we recognize value in the game itself, right? Like we know Wildcard as a game, if we do a good job, can generate a ton of value for the Wildcard company, right? This can be in monetization that happens in the game, the sale of the game, the IP, all these kinds of things. And from the beginning, we've wanted really for our Web3 efforts to generate independent value for our community. And so when we think about wildlings, we actually think about them as an asset for you guys, for our community to be able to take advantage of and grow value with. But again, we're going to do that progressively. It's going to start with a version that comes from us and then it's going to expand and create additional capabilities for you guys.
46:57

Okay, speaking of utility and capabilities for the fans, there's a video I want to show you guys right now that showcases one of the ways in which these fans can actually be used in the game. Some of you guys have experienced some of this stuff already using discord. Now imagine that with these brand new fan nfts and yeah, let's check out that video.
47:19

All right, I'm going to play it. Let me know if you guys have any audio issues because I'm not exactly sure if my sound is going to come through, but let's give it a shot.
47:31

I work as a software engineer here at Wildcard. I've got an exciting new feature to show. Our new fan navigator allows streamers playing Wildcard to view and interact with all of their fans, whether 100 or 100,000. Everyone is included. Fans are assigned to different sections in the arena based on configurable criteria, from the coveted VIP boxy to the nosebleed. Within a section, fans are assigned a seat based on their ranking in the Wildcard leaderboard. Fans with a higher seat score are listed.
48:10

I'm going to pause for a second because I think that the video is a little bit rough going through zoom, so we're going to see if we can play it directly and give you guys a better view.
48:23

Okay. While you guys queue that up, actually, Kate reminded me on chat that there's.
48:29

I was like, dude, I missed some.
48:32

Of the most valuable. Okay, so first of all, from the launch of the Wild Pass back in the day, we told you guys that one of the benefits of the wild Pass is wild Pass holders will be eligible for future airdrops. So I should have said this from the beginning. All wild pass holders will receive a wildling, a fan airdropped per wild pass that they per wild pass holder when it launches. And then, like I mentioned, this is an ETH collection. So this is the beginning, actually, of us being able to fulfill that promise that we kind of made from the beginning, that being a wild pass holder meant that you had access to exclusive opportunities, that your membership had value, that it would lead to discounts and things like that and also lead to rewards as part of that membership benefit.
49:25

And the launch of this collection and the airdrop of these wildlings to our wild pass holders is the first step of us fulfilling that promise. And I'm really excited about that. Otherwise, there will be. What we're designing now is an engage to earn, or an attend to earn, if you want to call it that. I think engage to earn is probably better campaign that will allow users who don't have a wild pass to be able to get their hands on these too. That's what we're working on really hard right now. That's why these aren't launched yet, but they're coming soon, and they will have that protocol from the beginning.
50:00

So the way this video is what you're going to see in this video when we get a chance, they're actually switching it to a different computer I hear on chat so that we can play it for you in a better format that isn't glitchy, but what you'll see in the video is the ability to actually bring these wildlings into a game and have them attend a game as a fan. And that capability is what unlocks this concept that I just mentioned of engaging to earn. It's what allows a user, who isn't necessarily even a competitor down on the field to be able to show up and kind of bring that value live to a game, even if they don't have the game installed.
50:41

Even if it's just them bringing their wallet and showing up on discord to attend a game and participate as a spectator. That's what this feature delivers on. Okay. All right. On that point, I know there's going to be a lot of questions about the specifics of this collection, how it works, what it does when it's coming, et cetera. We have some of those things that we can answer and some of which we're still working on, we're still designing, and there's still more for us to figure out and establish around exactly how the utility and the mechanics of these are going to work.
51:18

But as I said, it starts with this goal that we have of wildlings being usable from day one, having utility from day one, and being a thing that users can actually play with to engage with the game and earn value that way on that point. By the way, the reason we do it this way, because we had this conversation leading and we're like, oh, are people going to be frustrated because we don't have a lot of those details now? And I was like, actually, I want to speak to this specifically. We do it this way on purpose. We did it this way with the wild pass.
51:52

Also, for those of you who remember, which is we actually want to announce that we're working on something like this wildlings collection before we have all those answers, before we figure out those details, because that's the only way for us to do the thing we said that we want to do, which is engage with our community to perfect and refine this thing that we're working on. One of the most challenging things in Web3 is managing expectations. It's just part of what makes working in Web3 difficult compared to the other platforms I've worked on. But for me and Kate and the team, we're up for that challenge. Okay, that's a fun, new challenging thing about this frontier. So let's lean into that. Let's figure out how to best at that.
52:38

And what we've discovered over time is that the way in which we do the best job of that is by collaborating with the community before we launch something. So we have to have this moment where first we announce it so it's not a secret anymore.
52:53

And that kicks off this process of communication, collaboration, feedback with the folks in our community that leads to us when we get, then when we get to the point of launching that thing, we can't be everything to everyone, and I know we can't please 100% of the people, but we're able to get a lot closer to that by doing it this way, by basically announcing a thing and then having that be the beginning of the conversation and discussion with our community about how they want this thing to work, what they're excited about, what they're scared about, what they're like, don't do it this way. Please do it that way. Now we can have that conversation because now you guys know what we're working on, know it's coming soon and I'm look forward to that starting today, right after the town hall.
53:37

We're going to do that Q and A and we're going to be, I'm sure, diving into all these topics, but it's going to be going on for the next several weeks. So if you're not here today, don't worry about it. There will be plenty more opportunities to connect with us directly to talk about Wild Pass, the migration, to talk about the protocol wildfile and to talk about this brand new collection, these wildling fans.


53:57

All right, so we did get the video queued back up, so maybe it's a little bit out of order, but maybe we can wrap up with that and show you guys a lot of you have been reaping the benefits of fan visibility and have been participating with it in the play tests. So we've got a video from one of our developers on the evolution of that. So I'll let the production room kick that off.
54:21

Let's do it.
54:23

Hi, I'm Eric Bostrom. I work as a software engineer here at Wildcard and I've got an exciting new feature to show you. Our new fan Navigator allows streamers playing Wildcard to view and interact with all of their fans, whether 100 or 100,000. Everyone is included. Fans are assigned to different sections in the arena based on configurable criteria, from the coveted vip box seats to the nosebleeds. Within a section, fans are assigned a seat based on their ranking in the Wildcard leaderboard. Fans with a higher seat score are listed at the top of the fans list in a section of the fan Navigator. A specific fan can be searched for or selected from the list of fans in a section. When zoomed in on a fan, we can see the wild passes, swag and recent activity for that fan.
55:23

Fans can emote in discord chat and their emotes will show up in game in real time. Group emotes are larger reactions that fans in a section can work together to trigger by meeting certain conditions, you not only can fans interact with the streamer, but streamers can interact with their fans. A lucky fan can be selected specifically or chosen at random to receive airdrop Swag. Be on the lookout for this new feature in a future playtest.
56:01

Thank you so much. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for that video, Eric. I'm really proud of the work that you've been doing and the team's been doing on this feature. I think Katy and I are just most excited about how this is really bringing that vision that we had from Wildcard to life, which is it all starts with our competitors down on the field, with the incredible performances they put in, with the incredible, the athletes that are showing up to compete in Wildcard arenas. But it doesn't stop there. It's always for us been about creating an experience that includes all the other folks who show up in this vibrant ecosystem. The folks who are showing up as owners, as stakeholders, as team managers, as tournament organizers.
56:52

Got to love the scouts.
56:54

Yes, as scouts, scouting new talent and just all the folks that if we do our job, if we do a really good job of building a great game, we know it spawns an ecosystem that way. And the fact that we're already able to see that happening, that we can have these play tests that have hundreds of excited people tuning in live already and engaging with these features is for me, a dream come true. And it's also just the beginning of what we're going to do here. As you saw, those are some of the latest iterations on those features and there's so much more planned for what engagement and interactivity looks like for people who are showing up, especially when these new wildlings come online. So awesome. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. We did it.
57:37

We're here at 1 hour and two minutes.
57:39

Oh my gosh. That's like the earliest Paul's been late for something ever.
57:44

That was so much.
57:47

We're going to wrap up the public segment today.


57:51

I'm going to get on Discord right.
57:52

Now and we're going to move over to the holder Q-A-I was watching questions. It looks like most of the questions that came in during the show were from holders. So great news. We're going to go over and answer them there. If there are any non holders that have questions, your community team is online like 24/7 just about. So drop them in general chat, drop them in the feedback channel. We'll be looking out for those and we can answer them after the event as well. So we'll get everyone covered. But thank you everyone for tuning in. These town halls are some of the most exciting events that we do. I hope you loved all the announcements today. We'll post the recording and some recap posts in the announcements for anyone that missed it.
58:31

And yeah, we'll do another one of these real soon and a bunch of events in between. Katy, Paul, anything you want to say before we sign off?
58:38

Yes, congratulations to our incredible production team. Despite that little interruption we had with the punks, we got to work on that. But other than that, you guys just killed it. This is the slickest town hall I've been a part of and I'm just really proud of the teams really that are working on this.
58:55

So many teams.
58:56

We have an incredible team that's working on the core game itself. We have an incredible team working on Web3 features and we have our amazing media, marketing and community teams that help us pull together events like this. And we just keep getting the teams just keep getting better at it. I'm just really proud of you all. Thanks. Thank you.
59:15

Yeah, I'll see you guys in the Genesis chat and then I'm going to go sleep for like three days until this.
59:20

You deserve.
59:21

Love you, community.
59:22

Everybody, thank you for joining us today.
59:25

See you. Thanks.