Digital Social Hour - Don't Get Left Behind: The Future of Web 3 Gaming | Majd Hailat & Tanner Matthews DSH #537

Starting point is 00:00:00 Because you don't create a sustainable ecosystem. And our big thing in the games that we like to work with are games that we believe will create a sustainable ecosystem where people will come back and come back and keep that money within that and then that pie will just instantly continue to grow. And essentially the premise of a sustainable ecosystem in a video game is simply that players want to buy the assets

Starting point is 00:00:19 to use them in the game, not to eventually sell them and make a profit. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys, from Toronto, Canada, we got Mej and Tanner here, founders of Altura. Thanks for coming on, guys. Thanks for having us. Yes, let people know what Altura is about. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:00:50 So Altura makes it easy to build Web3 games. We provide a suite of tools and infrastructure that allow game developers, whether small indie game developers or massive AAA studios, to integrate blockchain-backed assets into their games. So game development and crypto development are inherently very different. And, you know, we save these game developers and studios so much time and resources by providing the infrastructure that they need to seamlessly enter the Web3 space. Nice. How do you guys feel about the current state of the gaming market? I just saw an article about how some AAA games are struggling to profit. Have you seen anything like that? So, I mean, this is another amazing use case for crypto.

Starting point is 00:01:36 I believe crypto offers a lot of monetization options and streams for these games to make money. But I have not seen issues about AAA studios having trouble monetizing. I think of all of it might come when you look at just the way that they're making money right now with a lot of like the microtransaction situation in the Web2 space, because that doesn't offer any value to the end user or the person who's actually playing that game. So for example, EA Sports is really bad for it

Starting point is 00:01:57 where you go in and like everything is like a purchasable thing, whether it's a deck of cards or whatever to play like Madden or whatever it is. So when you don't actually offer the value of that person to own that asset over time people are going to get more annoyed with it which may like cause people to revolt and like not be purchasing the in-game assets at the same rate of my transactions that they might have had previously which again opens up great avenues for for web3 and what that offers because you're offering ownership and the ability

Starting point is 00:02:22 if now if i purchase a deck or whatever a pack and then I get in that deck for Madden let's say I get like a super rare like Patrick Mahomes now I actually own that Patrick Mahomes and I can trade to someone else and profit off that versus just having it in the game and it being absolutely useless outside of that right that actual game but to go back to the state of the gaming industry a lot of people don't know this but the gaming industry is one of the largest industries in the world. So it's actually larger than the music and movies industries combined. Dang. It's like double. That's crazy. It's double, yeah. So it's worth about $210 billion. So the gaming industry is absolutely massive and there's so much room for

Starting point is 00:02:56 growth. It's one of the few industries that really catches on early technology trends and really embraces them. So it's always on the cutting edge of processing power, always on the cutting edge of graphics power, always on the cutting edge of AI, VR. And we believe that blockchain is no exception to this and that it's going to eventually make its way into the gaming industry in a way that makes a lot of sense. I'd be curious of what a pie chart would look like

Starting point is 00:03:19 of that gaming $210 billion industry. Fortnite has to be a lot of that, right? I don't know exactly the makeup, but a lot of that right uh i don't know exactly the makeup but a lot of it is microtransactions a lot of it's my actions yeah i'm pretty sure um like in the research that we did just like when we were doing like our tam or whatever for like investment purposes i think the average um for a lot of these large gaming studios is between like 40 and 60 percent microtransactions wow so it's a lot easy because if you think about people don't go to the store and like buy video games the same way that they used to.

Starting point is 00:03:47 Everything's online so you get the game like virtually through like whatever store it is and then the way for them to like continue to make money because they're not making the same amount off the disc price is to have those microtransactions and move the move it away and then you have the free-to-play games like the Fortnites and everything where the only way they are making money is off of like the selling of skins or whatever it is So that's what moves the the onus of everything onto that that end of that makes sense because i've spent thousands on skins and thousands On in-app purchases like clash of clans clash royale. Yeah, and the games are free. Do you ever play counter-strike?

Starting point is 00:04:18 I didn't but the skins go for a lot. I heard huge counter-strike guy. That's it. Tell them you were nice Yeah, um, I used to I have over 3 000 hours. Holy. Yeah, I was a big counter-strike guy that's what tell him you were nice yeah um i used to i have over 3 000 hours holy yeah i was a big counter-strike player uh and uh yeah i used to buy in-game items skins i think i spent like five thousand dollars not a whole lot uh pretty much all the money i made in high school and uh that you know seeing items uh being traded for tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in a virtual game, really kind of engraved into my head that you can fully have digital scalable economies of real value in these digital worlds. And this is a concept that I believe

Starting point is 00:04:55 can very much be extrapolated to a lot of digital experiences. It's a large part of the inspiration for Altura as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Whenever I play Fortnite, it literally says you can't sell your skins in the waiting lobby. There's sites to buy them, but it's like gray market, black market or whatever. Exactly, yeah. So they're not getting any of that money, which is crazy to me.

Starting point is 00:05:14 I wonder why they don't want that. Yeah. To add on to that, as we said, the gaming industry is worth $200 billion and so much of that is from microtransactions. That money is sort of just the money that players are initially spending to buy those assets. And what we know is that free markets expand the kind of market capitalization. It will expand the market of in-game items

Starting point is 00:05:39 to such a large extent. Once you allow players to freely trade these assets, people are much more willing to invest larger sums of money because they know that this item will retain its value to some degree, just like people are more willing to buy watches, expensive watches, because they know that they can sell it on the secondary market. So it inevitably kind of opens up floodgates for more capital to flow into the space. So I think that by opening the world of Web3 to the gaming industry,

Starting point is 00:06:07 or the other way around, opening the gaming industry to the world of Web3, that valuation, $200 billion, I think the gaming industry could be worth a lot more than what it is today. Yeah. Any Web3 games you guys have your eyes on? A lot of the ones that are working with us.

Starting point is 00:06:21 Shout out to a few of them. We have a game called Oxio Origins, which just launched their private beta, and that went really well, and they sold out their collection for that, which is private beta keys, which you had to get a key in order to play the game. A few other space misfits, Nine Lives,

Starting point is 00:06:36 Wagme games, all these games utilize our tools. A lot of them use our entire suite of tools, or just our white-label marketplaces, our APIs, SDKs is our minting platform And it's really cool to see what these games are doing and they're getting so much better Yeah, even since like a year ago to today you had games that like a year ago. It's like a lot of us still concept-based It's like hey, we're selling these collections We're using to kind of fund the

Starting point is 00:06:58 operational side of the business and be able to get through the development and all the in-game mechanics and now seeing these games like actually Go live and being able to play them and they're all like launching their own tokens and doing things and like getting to get through the development and all the in-game mechanics. And now seeing these games like actually go live and being able to play them and they're all like launching their own tokens and doing things and like getting to that point where it's like they're... Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? Well, click the application link below

Starting point is 00:07:15 in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below and here's the episode guys. Creating sustainable ecosystems. It's exciting because like a lot of the times where you've seen kind of what was popular and like last bowl run or like with the first week the first wave of kind of games was that like play to earn where basically you go in you make whatever you make and then you take that money directly out of that ecosystem which is not sustainable at all

Starting point is 00:07:44 because axi crashed right yeah that was the game that was on the tip of my tongue but i can't think And then you take that money directly out of that ecosystem. Which we know is not sustainable. Which is not sustainable at all. Because Axie crashed, right? Yeah. That was the game that was on the tip of my tongue. I couldn't think of it. But it's like, because you don't create a sustainable ecosystem. And our big thing in the games that we like to work with are games that we believe will create a sustainable ecosystem where people will come back and come back and keep that money within that. And then that pie will just instantly continue to grow.

Starting point is 00:08:01 And essentially the premise of a sustainable ecosystem in a video game is simply that players want to want to buy the assets to use them in the game not to eventually sell them and make a profit yeah um and that requires people wanting to actually play the game be immersed in the game and and want to buy assets why do we buy items for fortnite for counter-strike it's because we want to actually use the items uh not because we think that we can click a few buttons on a mouse for an hour and maybe sell those items for more absolutely yeah that's kind of the the type of games that we're going after um and essentially we believe that blockchain is the best framework technical framework to build these free market digital uh digital free markets

Starting point is 00:08:39 for for video games yeah have you heard of big time i invested in that one big time uh yeah i have yeah i think we've talked to them oh yeah a few times yeah yeah i know like our sales has been in like conversation with them yeah that was a fun one i put 100k in and it's it's held up which is surprising for this market honestly i think in both of our opinions gaming is probably the one use case for nfts that actually makes sense because of the use of assets in actual video games where like you have in the first run, you have like pictures

Starting point is 00:09:08 of digital apes and all these things that did really well, but it's like, what's the actual use case for that outside of like a social club or whatever it is

Starting point is 00:09:15 or whatever they're using for and you're seeing that that's not becoming as sustainable as people might have thought, but gaming is something where these assets are sustainable

Starting point is 00:09:21 and they have long-term use. Agreed. Yeah, Bored Apes, last time I checked the price it was like 15 Eph yeah crazy they used to be uh half a million almost yeah it's crazy to see how like that stuff falls yeah i i knew a lot of them would i didn't think bored ape would though i agree i thought it would be a remain a blue chick yeah because i got a mutant and i could have sold it for 80 grand and now it's worth like five yeah i think the acquisition yeah really uh kind of shook up the the community which acquisition i think they were acquired recently

Starting point is 00:09:50 oh they were yeah i'm not 100 sure i'd be speaking out of my can i swear yeah okay i just want to say i wasn't gonna go further because i don't remember the exact details but interesting well acquisitions are a tough thing to to mimic that culture sometimes you know i, look at similar lines, but like FaZe Clan and stuff like that. Yeah. It's like they get acquired or they went public and it's like completely changed the aura of what they were. And now they're going back to ground zero and like FaZe Banks is now the CEO again. Yeah. It's like everything is changing and going back.

Starting point is 00:10:17 He fired everybody? Yeah, he fired the entire, basically the entire team. That's funny. There's 13 left, I think. Yeah, it's crazy. Nuts. How do you guys feel about the crypto market? Does your company rely on that being at a good

Starting point is 00:10:27 price? Yes and no. Fundamentally, no. It's like we're building software and our goal is to scale that software, sell that software. But on the other hand, a large part of Altura is the community aspect of it. So one of the biggest kind of

Starting point is 00:10:43 one big value angle that we offer to these game developers is a social community. Basically a large community of Web3 passionate, Web3 gaming enthusiastic people that we can use to sort of drive attention to these game developers. We do have quite a large presence in the crypto space. We are one of the largest Web3 infrastructure companies

Starting point is 00:11:05 and that allows us to really provide these game developers with some sort of initial attention, initial traction. So I would say that community strength definitely comes and goes with the strength of the crypto industry, but our community very much

Starting point is 00:11:21 knows what we're doing, knows that we're sustainable, knows that we're here for the long term and so we're not really too worried about the sways of the crypto market yeah it's kind of the luck of us having launched a token last bull run and it getting as big as it did i think at its peak it hit close to 500 million dollar market cap yeah last bull run now we're building our way back up and going through and starting from the bottom making sure that everything from a compliance standpoint we're on the right side of everything like we don't want to run into issues like we try to do everything by the book as much as possible starting from the bottom, making sure that everything from a compliance standpoint, we're on the right side of everything. Like we don't want to run into issues. Like we try to do everything by the book as much as possible.

Starting point is 00:11:48 And that's something that I think is going to help us be sustainable as we move into the longterm. Cause we're, we are like a SAS company that does have software and we're selling that software and we also have a token, but we're doing it the right way and not like the sketchy way. And that's like a big thing that we step on with our token. Like a loo is a token.

Starting point is 00:12:02 Yeah. Yeah. Tokens are tough in the U S it's really, it's definitely, it's, it's not easy. They went after every Uo is a token. Yeah. Yeah tokens are tough in the u.s. Yeah, it's definitely it's it's not easy They went after every us exchange except one. Yeah, okay this They went after coinbase actually. Well, who didn't they go after? I don't know he was at my networking about last week, but he said his exchange was the only one out of the four here Oh, I mean, it was a Gemini. No Gemini. They've gone after it what if I said the name you wouldn't even know It's like a small exchange. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:12:25 Yeah. But US just doesn't like crypto, man. I don't know what it is. It's because it's threatening. Yeah, very threatening. It's threatening to their ecosystem and the way that they make money because it's outside of whatever their social norm. Central banking, yeah. Is Canada like that?

Starting point is 00:12:39 What's Canada's take on crypto? It's the same. It's like Ontario's really bad. We're probably as similar to the u.s when it comes to exchanges being worse might be it might be even a little bit worse like other provinces are not as bad like calgary or sorry alberta calgary um and other provinces aren't as serious they can still use a lot of the exchanges in those in those provinces but ontario specifically where we live is it's pretty hardcore on it so it's not federal it's it's

Starting point is 00:13:02 controlled by provinces in canada um yeah there are federal laws, but then each province kind of has its own specific rules. Kind of similar to states. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Wow, that's tough. Yeah, I remember when we had our NFT, we had to launch the coin in like, I forget the island, Cayman or something.

Starting point is 00:13:16 Something like that, just be compliant. Yeah. I didn't want to risk it in the US. Yeah, yeah, don't, don't. Don't do it. End up like SBF out here. Yeah, yeah, don't do that. I mean, you're halfway there.

Starting point is 00:13:25 You got a little bit of curly hair. Oh, man. But you guys survived that Web3 boom because I feel like everyone was getting involved in Web3. Yeah, it was honestly credit to like managed and like the team is capital management. The biggest thing that's helped Altura and our token like Alu survive

Starting point is 00:13:40 has just been our ability to like properly manage cash. Because so many people, when the bear started happening, they didn't stop spending at a rate in which was conducive to the money that they were making in that moment and they didn't foresee like how the future was going to continue to move forward yep and i think managed the altura team that eventually when i came on like we did a very good job of seeing where the market was and scaling operations to what was needed in that moment for sure we took time to build and add on to what was needed in that moment. For sure. We took time to build. To add on to that, I believe the entire team at Altura, especially the founders,

Starting point is 00:14:12 we are incredibly passionate and have a lot of belief in what we're building. And so we found that a lot of companies kind of died out because of a lack of morale, lack of passion. I mean, founders that build a company for the sake of kind of riding the crypto wave, when the bear market comes and there's no sort of light at the end of the tunnel for when the market's going to recover, that's usually when they're going to throw in the towel.

Starting point is 00:14:32 But, you know, since we really deeply believe in our vision and our mission and what we're doing, you know, the bear market didn't really kind of weigh us down as much as, you know, as much as a lot of companies, other companies. Yeah. Yeah. Lack of funds to companies ran out of money. Like you said, because of the spending. And we got to fall back on the fact that we have an actual product.

Starting point is 00:14:53 Like a lot of these like crypto companies, they don't actually have a product. Right. It's just like, they're like a meme token. Even if they pretend not to be, they still kind of are. Most tokens are just. Yeah. And we got to fall back on the fact that we still had gaming partners

Starting point is 00:15:04 and people building on that side and like using our tools so even if like the token wasn't growing at the rate that we wanted it to or it wasn't like continuing to like move forward with us we still were like signing games otherwise like we have over 200 signed games over 50 games like currently building like right in this moment like uh and about to go live so it's it's exciting that's impressive yeah be able to fall back onto that kind of stuff easily most tokens are straight tokens are straight air. I mean if you think about it, they don't have anything. So the fact that you guys have these in-person partnerships with real companies, that's huge. Would you say we're like in a bear still right now or is it considered a bull or something in between? I think we're coming out of a bear, especially with the interest rates coming down,

Starting point is 00:15:42 global economy seems to kind of be starting up again. I think we're about to enter a bull market. I hope so, man. We had a small, like there was like a small bull market. People got like super excited in like, whatever it was like December until like recently. The sole meme coins. Yeah, all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Even like Bitcoin went from a 28K. All time high. Yeah, to like hit a new all-time high, whatever it was, 69 point something K. Did it touch 70K? I don't think so. I think it did. I think it went to 71, right?

Starting point is 00:16:09 Yeah, I think it passed 70. 69 was last year's ATH. Okay, so what's that? Or like last month. Whatever, it passed the last, whatever it was. So like we hit that, but then obviously there's always going to be like small pullbacks. You need to have market corrections or it's unhealthy.

Starting point is 00:16:22 And we didn't have a market correction for so long. And like the exit of this bear run into this bull, like to not have any correction, it just continued to go market corrections or it's unhealthy and we didn't have a market correction for so long and like the exit of this bear under this bowl like to not have any correction it just continued to go up like that's not sustainable absolutely so like a little bit of a pullback now and i think you kind of pull back it's like an elastic and then everything will push forward yeah i hope so how long you guys been in crypto four years okay uh 20 you know late 2018 so you got in at 20kK? Yeah. I mean, I was there when Bitcoin reached the $3.8K during the COVID.

Starting point is 00:16:47 Oh, wow. And you got in at that price point? I would kind of dollar cost average purchase Bitcoin over the last like two, three years. Nice. I only started working in crypto, I guess, just over a year ago now.

Starting point is 00:16:57 I come from like a traditional background. I worked at Deloitte for four years. Damn. That's a big change. I worked in audit and strategic consulting in London. Wow. And then he found me and poached me me and then i came over and we kind of have like been business partners ever since nice having that background in the crypto space is pretty pretty rare i feel like that's why i'm that's why i like compliance because i worked

Starting point is 00:17:16 in audit dude the amount of especially because i worked in audit when like cannabis companies got really big and like the amount of that i've seen from from like auditing cannabis companies and the amount of companies have committed like pretty serious frauds and like the amount of that i've seen from from like auditing cannabis companies and the amount of companies have committed like pretty serious frauds and like finding that fraud and then having to like report that it's scary and like it scares me endlessly so like i'm on i'm on him i'm on everyone about compliance and making sure that we don't get like kicked out of us good to have someone like that in the crypto space yeah really smart hire man so in the cannabis space what were you finding like it was a lot of like, I remember auditing a company that I was speaking with their CFO

Starting point is 00:17:47 and there was like a $500,000 purchase. And I was like, what is this? And like his explanation was our founder, he just like sees things and then he buys them, but he doesn't leave any paper behind it. He just does it. And I'm like, well, that's not a very strong auto response. And then I remember being like i telling my partner at the time i was like this is sketchy like we should look into this and then i

Starting point is 00:18:08 think it was six months later they got booked no way yeah they got arrested like i don't know if he got arrested i think the founder did get arrested i can't say names obviously i'm under certain laws i can't talk but i can talk about the events but i can't talk about the company but they definitely i'm pretty sure the main guy got got booked and that's probably common in the cannabis space because they have the black market deals on the back end yeah it was it was they were sketchy yeah and like i knew them too like they i've seen their products especially when i lived in vancouver yeah like everywhere so is weed legal there yeah it's like all of canada oh i didn't know that yeah okay it was made legal i think 2016 jt did it something like that the

Starting point is 00:18:41 only good thing jt's ever done jT oh Trudeau yeah is he still running yeah he's still there so how long do terms last there as long as they keep getting elected really yeah there's no

Starting point is 00:18:51 there's no length of time that they can't I think how long is one term one term it depends so you can have a majority government

Starting point is 00:18:58 or you can have a minority government yeah so majority is four years minority is two and then you have a re-election but with the recent election so Justin Trudeau you got a majority and then you have a re-election. But with the recent election,

Starting point is 00:19:06 so Justin Trudeau, he got a majority, and then he got a minority, but they did a coalition government, which essentially is like the NDP and them work together to create a coalition. So it's like run longer, and then it ran through. I can't remember if there was an election in between. If he's won three or if he's won two.

Starting point is 00:19:20 I just don't understand how he keeps winning because I've never heard a Canadian talk positively about him. I think we've reached a point in like the social sphere of canada where i think things are going to change and things are going to be different because it's been pushed so far yeah in one direction that things are going to start going the other direction but like we'll see i hope the new guy that comes in if there's a new person like they are crypto friendly more crypto friendly which will be good for us. But it's all said to be seen.

Starting point is 00:19:46 Everyone says they're going to do one thing and then does another thing because everyone has an agenda. Well, they probably have some insane people in there. You're telling them not to legalize crypto stuff. There's a lot of money on the table there. Going back to NFTs, what's your take on these smart NFTs and what exactly are those? So Altura invented the term smart NFTs. Essentially, it's the ability for NFTs to update seamlessly for free and instantaneously. So if you think of traditional NFTs like the Bored Apes, the image is more or less static. It doesn't change.

Starting point is 00:20:17 But for the sake of gaming, that can't be the case. So in the gaming world, items need to be dynamic. Items need to change. For example, you have a car and you go to a mechanic in the game, like Grand Theft Auto, you get upgrades for that car, you expect the actual asset to change. Or for another example is Counter-Strike. There's like a kill counter on the gun. So every time you get another kill, that kind of increments and that's built into the item itself. So smart NFTs is the ability for developers to push updates to these NFTs via our API. And everything's kind of recorded. So it's still very decentralized, but it allows for a lot more dynamicism with these assets.

Starting point is 00:20:56 Got it. How do you guys feel about NFT royalties? It's important for us. And that's a big thing with our marketplace and our white level marketplace is that what we've seen happen with Blur and then OpenSea, moving away from the model of being able to basically monetize on the secondary sales of your assets. We don't believe in that. So it's big for us to allow our partners to be able to choose what their royalty fee is up to a certain percentage, whatever it is, on the assets that they sell either on our white-level marketplace or on our general marketplace. These people, these are the ways that they're either on our white level marketplace or on our general marketplace. It's these people, you're, these are the ways that they're making money a lot of the time.

Starting point is 00:21:29 And to be taking away that is kind of criminal in my opinion. And it's not fair to the people that are actually producing that art or producing that asset for that game. Like they should be able to get their piece. All right. Be something like reasonable, but they should be able to do that. And if they can't do that,

Starting point is 00:21:43 then it creates a very unattractive industry for these people. Cause we want to push this forward and we want to be able to do that and if they can't do that then it creates a very unattractive industry for these people because we want to push this forward and we want to be able to do that and if it's going to you're going to create long-term value off an asset why should you not be able to make your small piece off that as it continues to grow right given the nature of the industry there's no way to completely prevent uh royalty-free marketplaces and like royalty-free transactions um so what we believe at Altura is that the cost, the royalty fee is the cost of convenience. And the way we kind of approach that is users are always going to be able to trade these assets

Starting point is 00:22:15 on royalty-free marketplaces, given that they're on the blockchain and they can be integrated into any marketplace. And we don't believe in trying to stop that. We believe that these are truly free digital assets that players can do whatever they want with. But the way that we want to continue to bring these royalties to the developers is by providing white label marketplaces for the developers and then in-game transactions of these items. So if a player wants to sell their item,

Starting point is 00:22:40 and it's a lot more convenient for them to open up a menu in the game and swap that item, that royalty is going to be enforced there and the player might be more willing to pay that because it's built into the user experience, built into the game, rather than going on to another marketplace, connecting their wallet, especially if the game is on the console,

Starting point is 00:22:55 on the phone, on the actual desktop. And so this makes it such that it's a very fair way to... The royalty is now the cost of convenience and the cost of ease of use and the cost of maintaining user experience and user flow. So that's kind of how we plan to solve it. And this is an approach that we see is actually working very well.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Nice. What's the plan on scaling this thing? I know you got Project Jupiter, grant fund. You guys got some stuff going on there. Yeah, I guess first thing to talk about, probably the grant fund. This is probably the thing we're most excited about that in Project Jupiter.

Starting point is 00:23:24 But the grant fund's cool because probably the thing we're most excited about that in Project Jupiter. But the grant fund's cool because what we're doing is we're actually starting a $1 million gaming grant fund that is going to be voted on by the community. So each month, we're going to have 50K that we're giving away to a game that applies. So games will be able to apply, basically say what their game is, how they're going to use Altura, what the purpose of this money is, blah, blah, blah. Go down the line. And then they'll go into like a voting situation. And then basically for if you own like our token, Alu, one Alu equals one vote. And you'll be able to vote on the game that you think deserves to get that gaming grant from for that month. Got it.

Starting point is 00:23:55 And then they'll be able to have that money and we'll track and see how that game is doing, how they're using Altura and use that to kind of continue to further the gaming experience and the gaming improvement of these games over a long term. Nice. And then Project Jupiter is its own piece entirely. Classified. I don't think we should talk about that. Classified? It is classified. It depends. I think with the rollout time, I don't know if we have enough lead time. We want to make sure that it launches at the correct time. Got it, got it.

Starting point is 00:24:19 Project Jupiter is something that we think is going to reimagine how people play Web3 games entirely. Wow. We're very excited about it. So it might incorporate some VR? No, no. It's more so on the transacting side of things and creating the user experience that, like we said, creates convenience and creates an environment that you don't feel like you're being taken out of the gaming experience, which is kind of what's happening with a lot of these games right now.

Starting point is 00:24:46 In order to play the game, in order to make a transaction, you're taken to a separate browser, you're doing things, and you're not actually completely immersed in that experience. And that's something that we want to make sure that we're pushing towards. Yeah, one of our biggest goals with Altura is to remove as much friction as possible while maintaining the ethos of blockchain and crypto, both on the user side and the developer side. So we very much believe that blockchain is the best technological framework to build

Starting point is 00:25:11 global, scalable, digital free markets. But given that it's such a new technology, there's so much friction in the space. And for us to really kind of take Web3 gaming to the mainstream, we need to eliminate a lot of that friction. So our goal is, you know, Web3 gaming is not going to be a thing. It's going to be gaming. And a lot of sick games are going to have crypto digital assets. Yeah, because that's what's going to make it successful. At the end of the day, although like Web3 gaming is a narrative right now, crypto gaming, however you want to look at it,

Starting point is 00:25:41 at the end of the day, it's no different than the initial, like what was microtransactions back in like 2000, I think it was 2006 or 2007 when the first microtransaction happened. In the game, I think it was for like some sort of armor or whatever. And people hated it. They were like,

Starting point is 00:25:55 what is this? And then by like 2010, the boom of like mobile gaming, microtransactions were absolutely everything. And that's how like some games were making like 80 to 90% of their profit. And now it's like grown into what it is today with like these free-to-play games and such no different than what web3 gaming is going to be right now it's niche and it's different and especially with kind of the the sphere of how people look at crypto

Starting point is 00:26:16 and web3 like it hasn't had its day yet but once it becomes a technology that people can just like plug and play and just becomes part of the game in the background you don't have to actually think about having a wallet or think about like how are you going to get this digital money or do all that and it just becomes completely immersive and part of that experience it's when crypto gaming just becomes gaming and it becomes something that is sustainable and can reach a longer larger audience right i can see that yeah because people hated nfts at first yeah i mean it got so much hate on social media for good reason i don't think they're you know like we don't we think that a lot the the first wave of nfts was very uh deserved a lot of hate but yeah that's not really

Starting point is 00:26:51 what we're going after yeah that's not the market we want to create something that takes an industry forward like we get we feel like we're playing in like the early 2000s of like the dot-com boom yeah that's what we're doing like we're creating the the ways in which people are doing things that are going to be completely different from how they did it before love it and we're part of that we get to like carve out an industry together and it's something that we look forward to every single day that's exciting how do you guys feel about the metaverse because i got a ton of hype and i feel like it died down yeah i think we're honestly i don't know um i can see immersive virtual experiences definitely being a part of the future, but I think it was very much overhyped.

Starting point is 00:27:28 I think people just jumped in the narrative to what it is. So quick. It's like, I think they say with tech, it's the biggest like overhype and bust I've ever seen. Yeah, same. It was crazy. It was fast.

Starting point is 00:27:38 Everyone was talking about it so passionately. Yeah. I mean, how much money did Facebook lose? Yeah, billions, right? Yeah. Sandbox raised a lot. There's a few. Zuck had to grow a beard after that.

Starting point is 00:27:48 He had to say he wasn't an alien. Yeah. And now the Oculus kind of flopped too, I think. The new one. Yeah. I mean, the release of the Apple Vision Pro probably didn't help any of that stuff. Yeah. Well, that flopped too, didn't it?

Starting point is 00:28:01 Did it? I don't know. I don't see anyone that has one. Oh, you have one? Yeah. I mean, I don't use it. exactly yeah it was cool for about a week yeah there were so many youtube videos made for it for like about a week and on like twitter instagram reels yeah but now i don't i don't really see anyone using it i wonder if we're just too ahead or too behind i don't know i mean it's hard to tell if it's uh if it's an actual it's something that's going to

Starting point is 00:28:24 catch on and be a part of our day-to-day use or if it's like a gimmick it's's hard to tell if it's an actual, if it's something that's going to catch on and be a part of our day-to-day use or if it's like a gimmick. It's really hard to tell. Yeah, it's, man, life is cool. Like actually just going outside and touching grass isn't that bad. Oh. So I think that.

Starting point is 00:28:38 It's hard to beat life, right? Yeah. Yeah, I take video games over Oculus for sure. The graphics aren't good. Yeah. It's hard to beat. I think eventually it just takes time. You can't rush it. People try to rush to get the market

Starting point is 00:28:49 because they want to get that first mover advantage. But it has to be the right combination of timing as well as tech being at the right point in history. Absolutely. Anything else you guys want to talk about with Altura? Any upcoming things? Upcoming things. I and the uh the grant fund is two of the biggest things that's upcoming uh exchange listings lots of exchange listings coming up lots of things we're working on obviously like right now i think

Starting point is 00:29:16 our token's doing daily volume between like 13 and 14 million wow um trading on currently i'm not sure it's like 10 centralized exchanges as well as decentralized exchanges. We've got a plethora of more coming out. Lots of things happening. We really love our community. It's the reason that we get to do what we do every single day is because these people have supported us since the beginning and allowed us to be able to be in the position we are now.

Starting point is 00:29:39 So we want to give back. And I mean, I think we're both bad at it from time to time because we are active with the community. Giving dates on things or saying certain things that we kind of get over advantageous because we believe in this product so much and believe in what we're doing. And then you have minor setbacks or not even setbacks, but like, for example, the market pulled back. So you should not release a product in crypto when the market's down because it loses all its attention. For sure. You need to coincide launches and stuff with a more bullish market and so like we had to like re-evaluate our timing on things and that has obviously people are

Starting point is 00:30:09 like oh you said this you said that date but it's like we want to make sure that we're going to get the most value for the things that we're releasing because we don't want things that we think are evolutionary within like the gaming space the web2 gaming space to just fall flat in its face we want to make sure that it gets the audience that it deserves. That makes sense. What's the website for people watching this? We'll link it below. AlturaNFT.com Soon to be Altura.com A-L-T-U-R-A

Starting point is 00:30:30 You popped it? Yeah. We just bought it. That guy must have made a killing. That's a good name. Yeah. We worked on it for like five months. Wow.

Starting point is 00:30:38 To get this deal. And then we finally got it. And I don't know, I think it's going to be over the next 90 days that we get it integrated. But currently we're still AlturaNFT.com You'll always be able to access us through that link like we'll just regret it yeah yeah but we will soon very soon have ultra.com and hopefully also have ultra on twitter love it if you're into gaming guys check them out thanks for coming on thanks

Starting point is 00:30:54 thanks for watching guys as always see you tomorrow bye

Digital Social Hour - Don't Get Left Behind: The Future of Web 3 Gaming | Majd Hailat & Tanner Matthews DSH #537

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