Genopets ($GENE) move to earn NFT game: Play to earn evolved?

Hey guys and welcome back to Vox Mining. Today we got Albert here. He's a really good friend and he's doing some really innovative work on both gaming front and also with NFTs and a little bit of side extra you'll find out in here. Now with Albert, obviously we want to know a little bit about him, but because he's doing something super interesting, super novel, I would say like why don't you just give the audience a little quick intro of what you're doing to bring them up to speed with what's happening. Sure. Great to be here, Michael. So what I'm doing right now is a project called Genopets and it is a game that incentivizes people to move and be active in real life. And we tie that with the play to earn mechanic that is so popular right now and we call this move to earn. Move to earn. Yeah. Move to earn. So we've seen that rise in popularity. All of a sudden this year everyone is, I guess it's because of COVID. Yeah, people are just staying in and just like trading profile photos, you know. And you see that explosion and this is getting mass adoption in Southeast Asia. We've seen that kind of growing. So that kind of play to earn, the kind of making money from video games is starting to become a mainstream kind of mentality. So how are you improving this? Why move to earn? Why go this direction? What's happening? Yeah. So I think the main one right now for play to earn is Axie Infinity, right? And it's been extremely successful and it's shown that it's possible to get, you know, people in the Philippines to earn like a living wage on just by playing games. And, you know, companies like Yield Guild that's like providing scholarships for these people. It's amazing. So one of the things we've identified with play to earn economy is that it requires a net cash inflow. What that means is more people putting in money to play the game than people cashing out of it. Now for Axie Infinity, it's currently done in a way where when players want to come in, they have to buy Axies to start. So as the player base grows, the economy grows, right? But in our opinion, I think we want to also make the economy even more sustainable, which I'm sure Axie Infinity is looking at this as well. But we believe that if you add a gameplay aspect to it where there's a subset of your players that pay just for their own fun and happiness, then the economy will be a lot more sustainable. So we wanted to approach this from a different angle. I think there are a lot of AAA game titles that are being developed on blockchain right now, and we don't want to compete with that. We wanted to create something casual and gamify the fitness community. So people who really enjoy like competing in steps, you know, on Fitbit or, you know, the Strava fanatics who do like cycling or whatever, and want to bring them into this ecosystem as well. And they will be able to participate in the play to earn economy. And some of them won't even really care about the play to earn economy, but it will be a really fun way to gamify their fitness journey and allow them to improve their avatar in the process. And it's kind of interesting, right? Because like, I'm sure we've all heard of Pokemon Go. Yeah. So that's probably one of the first games that used this kind of geolocation and movement. Yeah. Right. And, you know, there's hatching eggs, you can walk around and hatch your eggs. And surprisingly, it's still really popular within certain demographics. So whilst I guess all the kids, they're playing something else right now. Yeah. But like all the aunties in Hong Kong are playing. Yeah. Yeah. Like all the semi-casual guys. So is that taking the same concept, but you're just strapping on this play to earn concept here as well? Yeah. I would say we took a lot of inspiration from Pokemon Go as well as Tamagotchi. And I think underlying all of this is the human psychology of like being able to grow something and like seeing it like improve with actions that you take. Mm-hmm. And on top of that also like the competitiveness of everything, right? Mm-hmm. Like Pokemon Go, a huge part of it, I remember when I started playing it like in 2016, it was like owning gyms, right? Like you'll go to a gym and you see like another team has taken over and you're like, no, no, I want to take over, right? That's when you take your like six cell phones out. Yeah. I mean, that's a huge part of the competition, right? And like somehow as humans, like psychologically we just want to be competitive and there's like a leaderboard and there's like ownership. Like I think that's what a Foursquare used to do back in the day where with like you were the mayor of this coffee shop or whatever and people actually took that seriously. So that's a gameplay element that we really want to tap into to like augment the whole play to earn experience. Right. So you have the movement element and I guess like almost like in Pokemon Go you have the gyms, you take it over and you start earning those coins, right? Yeah. Those like points that you have to buy with real money. Yeah, yeah. Right? So it's like this concept. So they start earning and obviously there's ability to now start cashing out because you're on crypto. You're using Solana, right? Yeah, we're building on Solana. Always been a big believer of layer one scaling and Solana so far has been, you know, what I've seen that's the best in layer one scaling and the community behind it is great. It's still small, but growing. And obviously there's a lot of big names supporting this ecosystem in Silicon Valley and everywhere else. So really excited about Solana. Got it. So I want to just kind of rewind everything back for a sec because you're talking about this kind of play to earn model. It's starting to gain some popularity, but you identify one of the key problems with it, which is the fact that it can only really grow if more and more people play. And at some point, right, sooner or later, you're going to run out of people. Right? That's the biggest issue here. So how are we kind of fixing that ecosystem? How are we kind of making it a little bit more sustainable? So I'm not going to pretend that Axie Infinity isn't the most successful play to earn game right now. And they've really, but I think it's still really early stage, right? So Axie Infinity has shown that play to earn, the play to earn mechanic is extremely, extremely successful in growing the community. So I see it more as like a growth factor. But I'm sure they're also looking at this, and a lot of people have been talking about this, is that they're tied to growth right now because there's no other way for people to pay and have fun. The game itself is fairly fun, but if you want this to be tied to something rather than the growth of your users, then you just basically have to create an in-game economy where people will keep paying for things just for their own enjoyment. And I'm sure many games are trying to figure this out while I'm in the industry. That's like the number one problem that people are trying to solve, right? And our approach is that we want to create an in-game item crafting economy that people can opt into. So we have a free-to-play track. So when people come into our game, they can mint a Genopet for free. It starts out in an infant state, so it's not going to be worth a lot of money. And if they don't want to pay in to buy anything and they want to remain a free player, we take a page out of traditional mobile gaming. They earn XP. XP is not tradable. It's a metadata on your NFT. And they can grind for a long time and then slowly upgrade their pet. If that's something they want to do, we allow them to do that. And they won't be participating in the play-to-earn economy, but they have the option of selling the NFT that they end up building, like their avatar. And maybe they can earn money that way. But if they want to enter in our in-game economy, then they have to buy what we call habitat. It's a house for the pet to live in. And once you have a habitat for your pet to live in, then you start earning what we call key tokens. And with key tokens, you can construct crystals, you can create more habitats, and you can sell it back to other players. So that's the in-game economy that we're building here. And crystals are consumables, so we want to also tie it to activity in the game. So not just the growth of users, but also if people are really enjoying the game experience, they want to upgrade their pet even more, compete with each other more, and grow their pet so they can succeed in competing with each other, then the economy will grow. Okay, so that makes sense. So I mean, the whole idea of these free-to-play games is that you really milk the top percentage. And I think one of the reasons why Axie really works is also because of just how much the top players are willing to pay. I mean, especially with the growth of this NFT space, you know, we have like apes or something. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like it's very clear that crypto users are very willing to pay a lot of money. So what you're saying here is that they can 100% do that. Like the people who want to compete, you know, if you're on a competition track, then, you know, that's a big money sink, right? You got to really throw in the money to do so. And I guess the kind of the people who aren't completely on the competitive side, you know, they can kind of enjoy the fun time as well. They can start earning from the people who are really just throwing down money to compete, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think in most like game economies, that's just how it works. You have your small percentage of whales that's like taking up most of your economy. And I guess the balance really is how do you make sure that the whales have a good time, but at the same time, the people with the normies also have a good experience as well. So I guess that's the... Yeah, so we've thought about that as well. I think for all like competitive matches, we will have different rankings and they will mainly compete within their own ranks. And obviously there will be a global rank, but then there will be a rank within, you know, their own like ability level. So then nobody is left behind because being left behind is a psychological like drag where people just kind of lose interest in the game, right? Yeah, and it's really interesting because I think right now I know a few big time Axie Infinity players and it's almost as if the game is just another DeFi instrument, right? So they put in, they think about it in financial sense, right? I put in like $10,000 and in Axie Infinity, how long do I break even? What's the yield I get on it, right? It's almost like it's just another kind of yield farming. So we expect this to be, you know, a big part of our game as well. It's no escaping that like a huge part of the crypto community thinks about things in this perspective. But also the reason why we have the fitness aspect or like the walking aspect part of it is we want to bring in a different community who just wants to see their fitness journey modeled in some kind of avatar, right? So like when they grow, their avatar grows. And that kind of enjoyment should be able to, well, our hypothesis is that it should allow them to also enjoy the game. And so we can have two communities like coexisting peacefully. I mean, I think that makes sense because I mean, like I said, with Pokemon Go, Walls is probably not the great, like the most popular game right now, but it's kind of constantly being a top 10 for a long time. Yeah, that's kind of the interesting part. It's not like a very quick, you know, like some games, you know, they release, they burn up very, very quickly because a lot of the users, they kind of leave the DAU drops and it's just like, it's gone. It stops becoming popular. I don't know, Pokemon Go has been so impressive. Like last week, a friend of mine missed a meeting or like was late to a meeting because his colleague was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, there's like some like rare Pokemon like right over there in the HSBC building. So she ran over and like caught the Pokemon and they were like super late to their meeting. It still happens. So I guess you're complaining that. OK, so so out of the gameplay aspect, OK, into more of the crypto stuff, what's happening like, you know, for this community? What can they look forward to? What's kind of on the horizon that's coming up? So in about a month to a month and a half or so, we're going to do our first NFT drop. And this is what we will call a Genesis pet NFT drop. So like I said earlier, if you play the game, normally you would mint a pet for free and your pet would be would be in its infant state. But for to reward our early adopters, we're dropping a few thousand very rare genopets as NFTs. So you can like see this as the like, you know, like the so for Solana, like the Degen Ape Academy drop. It's something like that. But we're putting a gaming aspect to it. So like once you get the NFT, you'll be able to get early access to the game. And also like once you get once you're in the game, you start off as your pet starts off as an adult. So that's what we have to look for. This gives you the puberty. The awkward phase, you know. Got it. Okay. So that's coming up. So guys, take a look at that. If you guys are interested, check out Genopets. Check out what all they're building there. And yeah, with that, we'll see Albert very soon. I'll see how it goes. Thank you, Michael. Cheers. All right. Let's do a fist bump. All right. Boom.