The NFT Gaming Podcast: Featuring Mini Royale: Nations (EP07)

Disclaimer: This transcript was auto-generated using AI-powered software.

Jason: 0:01
I’m Jason with The NFT Gaming Podcast. Welcome to this episode and a quick reminder, do your own research. This is not financial advice and enjoy the show.

Jacob: 0:12
I always wondered what NFT gaming would look like. And then one day, I got in

Jason: 0:25
Welcome, to a new way of gaming. One that’s owned by the players.

Jacob: 0:38
Welcome everybody to another episode of The NFT Gaming Podcast presented by Stocktwits and hosted by Duo the NFT card game on Cardano. I’m Jacob, one of the co-founders of Duo and I’m joined by Jason, the CEO and founder of Duo and Jason, how are you feeling about today’s episode?

Jason: 0:54
You know, it’s not often that we get to touch base with games that I’ve found through my own discovery as a gamer on the NFT , uh , wave this new future of gaming. And so I’m pretty excited to dive into this because I found this just naturally exploring the NFT gaming space and then our presenting sponsor Stocktwits actually brought this to our attention as well. So it was a cool little intersection of , uh , NFT gaming and what we’re doing here on the podcast.

Jacob: 1:22
For sure. And this is actually one of the games that I had played previously before I even reached out to them , uh , because that also doesn’t happen very often. So I have some experience playing this game really excited today. We’re gonna be talking to Mini Royale. We’ve got the founder, Alex, and community manager, Grace. Welcome to the show guys.

Alex: 1:39
Thanks for having us.

Grace: 1:41
Hey , thanks guys. Happy to meet here.

Jacob: 1:44
Awesome. Well, we are really excited to hear what you have, but first of all, give us a little bit of an overview as to what’s you’re building , uh , in Mini Royale and , and how that gameplay works.

Alex: 1:54
Yeah, so , uh, yeah, Mini Royale is the first live multiplayer game at Solana . It’s a browser based first person shooter , um, set on top of this like ever evolving social strategy game. So , uh, yeah, right now it’s has over 2 million registered players and we’re just scaling the game, adding tons of new features in from clans to lands, to buildings, to clans as Dows to nations. So there’s a , a ton of stuff. That’s both currently the game and of course upcoming.

Jason: 2:25
So Alex, I am really curious about , uh , your backstory kind of coming into , uh , this entire gaming space because as you’ve described Mini Royale so far, it , it actually brings back some fun notes of , uh, for me battlefield two , where you could actually be playing the first person shooter, but you also had the commander role where you have a little bit more strategy if you don’t want to just run and gun the whole game.

Alex: 2:51
Yep . And I think the reason for that is, you know, we wanted something for everybody. I think crypto has definitely brought a new type of player into the, and that type of player is more of this investor or speculator or mastermind type. Um, and if we only had the shooter experience for them, this is that type of player. Doesn’t typically, you know, grind, shooters, right. All day, they wanna play a more tactical strategic game. And for us that’s our, our land game. So the way the game works is the people that play the land game produce things that the people that play the shooter game need and vice versa. Um, and that’s how our economy just sort of, you know, sort of flows. Um, and yeah, this is , uh , it’s just really exciting to be able to develop a game that reached all types of players from true gamers to this new type of web3 player.

Jacob: 3:41
And tell me a little bit about how you got started building this game. What’s your backstory and how did you , how’d you come to this idea of Mini Royale?

Alex: 3:49
Yeah, I guess I probably have the very atypical backstory in web3 gaming is that I , I come from a gaming background. Um, so I’ve been making Midco games for, for over a decade now. Um, I was, I had secret laughing there, but , uh , I was head of studio at glue mobile , which was a big public gaming company. And then , uh , VP of product at Scopely , which is another big, big private gaming company where I’ve always worked on mid core games from strategy games to character, to character collector RPGs. And when you think about a shooter, right, it’s, it’s a collection game. And when you think about a land game, it’s a strategy game. So my background has always been in making these games that are fun, but have these robust, mid core economies

Jason: 4:33
And Grace, I’m curious to hear a little bit more about what brought you into the community role here at Mini Royale and like, what was, what was the attracting piece that brought you on board into this team?

Grace: 4:46
So my background is traditionally in product management for we , um , websites and apps. And then about over a year ago, I started learning a bit more about Axie Infinity. Um, and that was something that kind of opened up a few doors for, for me. I was very interested in and interested in the whole space that was coming out. I had a lot of friends in that space as well. I was working with , um, with the Guild at that time for a little while. And then I decided to kind of broaden my searches and , and see what else was out there in the space. So I , I knew I wanted to work in a , in a gaming studio. It’s a lot of people’s dreams. Um , but I also wanted to do it in sort of a growth capacity cause that’s sort of what I had naturally done on , on the product side. Um , in addition to the management , um , side of things. So I wrote Alex an email and , um, I read a little bit about far away about Mini Royale. Um, and I, we just kind of chopped it up a little bit. And then I joined the team back in October , um, to start working on some of the, the marketing content community kind of growth aspects of the project. So love every day of it.

Jacob: 5:51
It’s a lot of fun. And I think that’s one of the cool things about this space is that you really get to thrive in community building and community development because the community is so key to these NFT blockchain games, especially in the stage where we are right now. And I know for, for us Axie Infinity was kind of one of those starting points as well, that kind of rung the bell and was like, wait a minute , there’s something here. Like we need to explore this and look at that. And I think it’s really cool to see games like this where you can kind of say, okay, well what did they do and how can we iterate on it, make it better, make it different, make it fun and offer a different experience. So , uh , really, really cool story.

Alex: 6:29
And I think like , whereas I was say , I think , whereas like mobile free to play , like the growth tactic, there was, you know, pure performance marketing and web3, the growth tactic is very much like community and involving the players in the growth of the game. So it’s like community is basically the new form of marketing , um, for, for web3 games.

Grace: 6:50
Yeah. It really goes towards the, the like ethos of, of web3 and, and decentralization and, and blockchain and crypto in general is that you’re having these communities that are, are so diverse. And so , um, like eager to be involved in separate parts of the project as well. So we have a ton of people that , um, are helping with different different aspects in terms of like content creation , um, engagement and , and growth and, and streaming . Um , but I think it really goes hand in hand with sort of what web3 represents in the first place. So people are here, they wanna get involved. They’re, they’re flooding to discord. Um, it’s , it’s really cool to see cuz I’ve , I’ve worked in a , in a , a lot of different kinds of , uh , companies and environments and I’ve never really seen a , a user base or a player base or a community be as engaging as I have seen in the web3 communities.

Jacob: 7:36
It’s really interesting that when you give the power back to the players through ownership and they actually own these game assets, they’re way more invested in the outcome of the game because they own a piece of it and they take ownership and they take pride in that.

Jason: 7:50
Kind of on that note, Alex , uh , I I’d love to get your perspective coming from kind of the traditional game , uh , ecosystem. What does ownership in this kind of new wave of NFT gaming and web3 based gaming? How do you see ownership changing over the next two to five years?

Alex: 8:09
I guess, ownership of assets or how does ownership change game design?

Jason: 8:13
Both.

Alex: 8:14
I mean, I think there will be new types of NFT standards that come out, which will allow like new types of ownership, like NFTs owning. Other NFTs, I think is one like very simple use case that has not been explored yet or standardized. Um, but I think when you think about like, how does ownership affect game design? Like you now have an entirely different economy that has opened up, which is at a very simple level, like peer to peer , right? It’s like when a player owns the assets that they earn from playing the game, they can then decide what to do with them. There might be some other project that allows you to stake those assets and earn their native token. You might lend, you might become a lender of assets. You may become a trader of assets. And this is only speaking about like NFTs, right? Once you unlock the fungible token side of things, I think things become even more interesting. Like when you have NFTs only it’s, it’s very much so like a barter economy, right? It’s like an economy that’s completely predicated on peer to peer trading. I think when you have both NFTs, which are items and fungible tokens, which are the equivalent of like your currencies, I think you start getting like a really, really interesting almost IL style economy, which is why I think that this is the new evolution of games, right? It’s like games already have virtual economies in them. You already have virtual items. You already have virtual currencies. Now you’re actually making these economies closer to a real world economy, which makes these economies much more vibrant. And of course brings in a lot of new players who otherwise just would never be exposed to your game or ecosystem.

Jacob: 9:52
I think you touched on something really interesting from a community perspective, which is that you now have kind of different sects of players that are participating in gameplay for different reasons and NFT games, especially offer a really different variety of types of ways to play the game. So I might only play the game for one single piece of that. Um , and then sell those assets or do something else, or maybe I play for a different reason than my neighbor. Who’s also playing the same game. Grace, I’m curious what you’ve seen in terms of your community’s breakdown and the different types of players that are playing Mini Royale.

Grace: 10:29
Oh man. Yeah. I mean, we, we have all walks of life. We have ex professional or , or semipro um, uh , first person shooter , um, players who have come to come to Mini Royale they’re streaming they’re they’re leading plans. Um, we have people who are brand new to the space , um, who are more traditional kind of like hobbyist FBS players , um, who are kind of learning a little bit more about crypto. We have people who are just here for NFTs and whitelist , um, and are interested in that side of things. Um, we have , um, content creators who come in and, and , and have heard about other other games in the space that are doing pretty well and, and are kind of poking their heads here. We have , um, people that are, are making podcasts and streams and , um, kinda like publishing videos and are here on more of like the social aspects. Um, we’ve got people from other projects that are playing the game for their game nights. It’s, it’s kind of the, the, the whole , uh , spectrum of, of people. But what’s cool about this is that , um, since we are a live game, we have so many more people that are interested in the web through gaming space in general, but don’t really have a good way to kind of jump in and see how all of this works , um, hands on . So we kind of provide a lot of onboarding for people who are , um , interested in, in web3 gaming, but haven’t like found a , a , a good game to , to jump into without needing to buy an NFT, to, to play you . You don’t need an NFT, you don’t need an account to play anywhere . You should have one. But , um, so we’re kind of one of, one of the, the first games that people kind of have a go at and then share with their friends, share with their discord servers. And yeah, so really E everyone you can imagine kind of hanging out.

Alex: 12:10
I think one of the interesting things, I would say one of the other interesting, like archetypes that we’re seeing is like the players that are just like asset holders and they lend these assets to other players. And typically these players are clan leaders , right? So they will say, okay, there’s this quest that needs this specific type specific type of item. I have cornered the market under specific type of item. So I will only give this item to my, to my actual clan members. And then my clan will be the only one that is able to complete this quest. So that’s what I’m saying. There are these economy style players that are a very interesting new type of player that I think web3 attracts these players also happen to be like heavily social and skew more to , towards that like leadership or mastermind role , which typically you don’t see in midcore games until much more of the end game , right? It’s like in world of Warcraft, these would be your clan leaders, masterminding, which types of character classes go on this raid. What types of items, you know, are, should be brought to complete this raid who gets the rewards, you know, once we do win this raid, like who , you know, it’s like the dragon kill point system. Um, so yeah, I think we have been exposed to this new type of end game player much earlier than we would be in like a web two , like free to play world, which is just really, really cool to see.

Jason: 13:33
I think it touches base on a lot of the complex theory crafting that could come with these open economies you play to earn mechanics or the, the NFTM fungible token mixtures, as you said earlier, it’s a , it’s a very complex economy as it continues to grow and develop. And that’s what I love to see is I’m , I’m certainly a mastermind , uh , type player myself. And , uh , I really enjoy that element to things. When we were looking at your game kind of the first time, one of the things that attracted me to it was I could get involved very fast as a browser based game. It’s just open up, start playing to your point, Grace, you don’t even need an account. You can actually just get into the heat of things. What was the core decision in building the game that way, instead of having something more traditional through, you know , uh , some kind of launcher or some kind of downloadable game to desktop or mobile,

Alex: 14:28
Like distribution and ease of onboarding, like, so I can go into a number of reasons why we chose browser. Um , besides that, like obviously, you know, Alan, Google and steam are not the friendliest towards, you know, NFT games or games with fungal tokens. Um, so that was another thing, like not having to worry about platform risk, but then when you even consider just like pure distribution and ease of onboarding, like you just spoke to it, right. You jumped to the game immediately. You weren’t, you know, worrying about all of the complexity associated with, how do I, you know, install a wallet, what is a blockchain? What is Solana ? You know, like , uh , what are, you know , how do, where do I get soul from? Like all of these things are not important until you actually decide for yourself, this game is fun. And I’m interested in, you know, in proceeding forwards. Cause like the , the last thing that we wanted is to prevent a player from experiencing the fun and social parts of the game, just because they need to register an account or they need to figure out how to install a Phantom wallet, right. It just, this is there’s too much complexity in crypto, as it stands today , the one area that we can solve for and reduce complexity in is our game.

Jacob: 15:44
And talk to me a little bit about the decision to even include blockchain in this game. Um, when you started building this, what was the spark that kind of prompted the idea that, oh, wait, maybe this should be a blockchain game. We should utilize NFT assets.

Alex: 15:59
Yeah . So I, I mean, if you talk to anybody at glue back in 2017 , um , I was creating like an uproar around , uh , along with Dennis about introducing like , uh , blockchain or crypto into our games back then, it was as a way for like legitimizing, these gray market economies that were for performing around midcore games, but then the thesis changed , right? The thesis became adding a blockchain element to your game. Both makes your game more social right. And deepens the economy in your games. And that’s just always been our belief, like when an economy is rich and vibrant and players own their assets, the game becomes stickier. Players can, you know, invest more by just have, you know, a much deeper connection to the game and that, you know, again, just, you know, makes the retention fly wheel , go round and round. So yeah, that’s, that’s why we got into it. Like we’re just interested in mid core economies and in open economy is obviously gonna be a lot richer and more robust than a closed economy.

Jason: 17:02
Now, as you guys are approaching kind of this entire space where you’re building these more open rich economies that have this community flywheel, as well as these native assets on the blockchain, how do you think about kind of this expanding area around regulation and how that impacts gaming? Cuz there’s a lot of conversations that are happening around the world and you have players around the world that are experiencing this game, having fun building communities. What are your thoughts about preserving that long term and what do you think needs to happen in the industry for that to , to succeed?

Alex: 17:38
Well, I mean first step I think for everybody dipping their, their toes into crypto is make sure you have a good lawyer because if you don’t do things right from day one, you’re probably gonna be in a lot of trouble. So we’ve solved a lot of things right from day one, because we knew about all of the regulation that comes into everything. Um, we’re also leveraging our partnerships with, you know, people like FTX, right? Where or other partners in the space where they are handling other particularly risky, you know, parts of, you know, the , the crypto ecosystem, whether it’s like buying tokens, KYC , people who buy your initial token, offering all these other types of things. They have a custodial wallet solution. They have another, they have a , they have a number of things that are either out or they’re working on that will just allow us to focus on making the game and, you know, allow other people to focus on making sure that everything else is regulatory sound. Um, so that’s, that’s been like a big thing for us, but uh, yeah. Then, then on the game side of things, right, the best thing that we can do is when we have an NFT or we have a fungible token, making sure that thing is actually usable in game, right? As long as that thing has in game utility, it starts looking a lot less like a security. So that’s why we made the game first. We didn’t create tokens or NFTs with no utility that just are floating in the ether ripe for speculation. We created a game. Then we created NFTs that are immediately usable in the game when we launch our first token, which will be, you know , uh , like this year, that token will immediately be usable in the game. There will already be preexisting functionality for that token because we don’t want speculatory assets in the game. These currencies are actual in-game currencies, right ? These are not for right for speculation. These are to use to participate in our in game economy. So I would suggest for every game maker out there, like make the sinks, make the utility first and then make the token. But I think the meta of making a token and then having that token moon because of speculation is quickly ending.

Jacob: 19:56
Yeah. I think that’s a great advice for people. And I’m very curious since we’ve talked a little bit about the gameplay of Mini Royale , um, I’m very curious about the actual utility of the NFTs in game. What does that look like if I were to purchase a Mini Royale NFT?

Alex: 20:10
Yeah. So we have two types of NFTs , um, and both of them have different use cases in the game. So when you buy an NFT from a premium drop, this is like a drop that would be on one , on one of these like marketplace, launchpads like a Magic Eden . Those we call premium NFTs. Those NFTs are usable in like premium style quests that happen in the game. Um, and they also have these long- holding benefits. So some of these long term holding benefits are things like weapon airdrops, but some of these other holding benefits are battle pass boost , right? If you have five of our premium NFTs, you get a 30% boost on your progression in the battle pass by staking, one of your premium NFTs, you unlock a premium tier of the battle pass. Um, and that’s just our premium NFTs when you, so the NFTs that you earn from playing through the game itself. So when you, you know, earn an item from, or an NFT from playing one of our season quests or a battle pass, or some of other special quests or clan wars or other types of clan events, like those items, we call loot collection NFTs, meaning those are items you earn from actually playing the game. And of course those items are usable in specific quests, but they’re also gonna be usable in , uh , our , our crafting system. Um, so we’re gonna have like a crafting system to, you know, combine a bunch of things together and form a better thing. And then , um, staking your loo collection guns is one of the ways that you, you know, passively take over another player’s land. So I would suggest everybody like read our white paper , it’s whitepaper.miniroyale.io, and all of these systems are covered in that .

Jason: 21:53
And Grace, I’m curious is your perspective leading community. How do you take feedback from NFTs that are valuable integrating this into like very clan specific based items? What does that feedback loop look like as you’re building out a , a robust and vibrant community around these NFTs?

Grace: 22:16
Yeah, I think more importantly, the feedback loop that we prioritize and focus in and is , is the actual game feedback and , and the product itself. So people can always tell us what, which NFTs they love. And what’s, what’s cool is we can see what’s, what’s selling for the most or what has the highest floors on magic eating and on open sea . But what we really zero in on is the feedback that we get from, from the player base. So we have a couple different ways that we, we work with players to improve the game. Um, we have a feature up vote board , uh , where players can go in request features and we evaluate this with our team on a weekly basis and, and make sure that whatever we’re working on, we can try to address some of these things that players have have told us. Um, they want to see, or they want to see fixed. Um, we have an active, like bug reports channel where people can drop in and let us know what’s not working for them. We have a pretty tight knit beta testing program as well. So we will drop , um , access to maps and features before they’ve been launched with this, this group of testers and then get really , uh , deep feedback from them in our support team. So we try to keep the lines of communication, very, very open. We try to communicate constantly on, on what’s been released on what , what goes out. We have a , a news site , um , for our feature up , um , updates and releases. So that’s news. miniroyale .io , but it’s really just about being extremely transparent when things are coming to the best of your ability, right? There’s always the, the issue of, of not being able to communicate on, on deadlines and timelines for certain features. So , so that’s something that is, it’s just part of the dev process and on any product that you work on. But , um, yeah, it’s, it’s a lot of listening. It’s a lot of , um, talking and, and being open about what’s what’s happening and, and what’s coming up.

Alex: 23:58
And then one thing to add, I would say one thing to add is Grace leads all of the AMAs for our HODLers, right. So if you own, oh , Grace, I’ll you touch on that?

Grace: 24:07
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks. So , um, that’s right. So if you own a premium collection NFT from season one or season two, we have a verification tool on our discord server and we have weekly calls with these holders , um , where we go over kind of what the team’s working on, any community updates , uh , things that we, we, we wanna kind of get this close , um, conversation going about. So that’s on a weekly basis. We do a monthly discord call with , with everyone in the server. Um, so we’re about I think 62,000 people at the moment. Um, but the holder group is, is definitely a much more intimate , um, conversation. And so we’re super active in these channels as well, but we get a lot of, of feedback from people who have invested in the project who own these NFTs, who own hundreds of these NFTs, kind of telling us what, what their vision is and , and , and what they see.

Jason: 24:55
Now, I suspect that this actually drives a lot of insight and decision making as a game developer. And you’re building out this game. Do you think that kind of, as we transition into a web3 based community where there’s a lot more ownership, there’s a lot more investment in time and, and resources. Do you think this helps align incentives between gamers and game developers to continue building a game that the community is asking for, instead of, you know, oh, this DLC that you didn’t expect coming, or, you know, X game version 2, 3, 4, or five down the track.

Grace: 25:33
Yeah. I, I think it’s interesting. It’s like gone are the days of, of developing a game in a whole , right? Like everyone can pretty much see, see everything that, that you’re doing. And we release on a, I mean, almost close to like a couple times a week at this point. So , um, it’s, it’s , it’s , it’s an ongoing stream of, of features that are , that are being pushed. But as soon as these things come out where we’re talking about them, we’re announcing them, we’re getting feedback on them pretty much immediately. And because we do take a , I would say a pretty agile approach to game development. It’s, it’s , uh , very quick to get in and to, to kind of tweak things as, as the community has requested. Um, but again, it’s always, it’s gonna be kind of a tug , uh , tug of war of, of what the, the roadmap says and the game dev side and , and what community members want, if more people want something, does that mean that it , that it’s a good feature that it needs to be in the game, if, if , um, holders who hold a ton of, of NFTs, like they specifically want something like, how do you balance out the priorities and who you’re taking feedback from, but yeah, I don’t know , Alex, do you , is there anything you wanna add on that?

Alex: 26:34
I think you covered a lot of it, but I think it’s just that last part, like who do you take feedback from? Because sometimes the things that people are the loudest about are the things that we know, like aren’t high priority right now we can get to them. But , uh, like right now we have bigger fish to fry and some core parts of the game that are not yet built that we know we need to build to make sure that we have the beginning, the middle, and of course, like the end game for all players, cuz I think the worst thing that can happen in any game is a person runs out of something to do. Right. So making sure you have a robust end game is extremely important.

Jacob: 27:13
And I think that this really highlights something that we were talking about even a little bit earlier in the episode, which is the amount of ownership that these players now can have over the game and their desire to really see this grow. I think that’s really unique to the crypto space in general. I’m curious, coming from what we might call a traditional game development , uh , side of things for traditional gamers who aren’t involved in crypto, what should they know going in to a brand new landscape?

Grace: 27:42
Yeah. If the game’s good, they shouldn’t need to know anything, you know? Um, I think that , uh, some of , some of the issues that have come up around the space are, are , um , projects kind of focusing in on the things that the crypto community already knows and already wants and then maybe spending less attention on how do you explain this in a way that makes sense to people who, who don’t right . As Alex , as Alex was mentioning, dunno what a wallet is. Don’t know what Lana is, don’t care about. Any of that who might , um, associate NFTs more with like the , the stigma and , and kind of the negative connotations around that. So I think if you’re, if you’re building a good product, like all of that stuff should be almost in , I mean, I wanna say invisible, but it , it should be something that people aren’t zeroing in and highlighting from, from the get go ,

Alex: 28:26
And it should be a core part of the game too. Right. It shouldn’t feel like it’s layered on, I think that’s another thing that , um, bothers me personally about a lot of the games that are out right now is the crypto part of things . And I think this is the part that offends a lot of the traditional gamers too. It’s like the crypto part of things doesn’t feel necessary. It feels like an additional money making tool or it feels like not thought out like not core to what makes the game actually work. Um, and I think like Grace said, like if the game is fun and the NFTs feel meaningful to making the game work or the fungible tokens actually function like in game currencies, then I think a lot of these like player allergic reactions are gonna start dissipating, but it all starts with like a fun game that actually needs utility from the NFTs and fungible tokens.

Jason: 29:19
Well, it sounds like you guys have cracked the nut to some degree because you have such a large and diverse player base. Can you tell me a little bit about that growth and how you’ve managed that both from a community integration side, but also a technical side , cuz I can imagine that’s a, that’s a big burden.

Alex: 29:36
Yeah. So I mean we have over 2 million registered players. Um, the game, obviously since we, you know, launched our, you know, launched like on, on Solana has definitely grown very quickly. It’s difficult, right? To manage a quickly growing community, especially when you do have multiple different types of player archetypes, you have the people that are here for the game and then you have the people that are here for the, you know, the crypto side or the speculation side. So I think managing all the different types of people is the hardest part. And then of course, building along with the community and making sure they understand like, Hey, this is not a finished product, right? We are releasing this early and often and making sure that you have a say in how this game evolves over time, but along with that comes the mutual understanding or, or sometimes it could be a one sided understanding that , um, the game has bugs. The game is unfinished and there are things that are on our roadmap that will make the game a lot better. So build with us, we’re gonna release things to the beta testing channel. We are going to take your feedback and iterate, but just have the understanding that like we didn’t go into a hole for five years and come out with a AAA game , right. We CA we basically launched immediately and we launched, you know, to show one, the community that we have, something like you do not need to worry about being rued . And two, like we want to make this game with the community. We wanna make sure that what the features that we are prioritizing are the features that are actually meaningful. Um, so yeah, I think balancing all of those things is, is definitely tricky, but I think this is where community comes in and I think where, where Grace comes in.

Grace: 31:17
Yeah, I think there’s so much you can do on the community side as your player base , uh , is growing. And I think it’s important for projects to understand which platforms make sense and to make sure that they have these solid solid systems , um , set up for the, the platforms or , uh , and when I say platform, I mean like, like social media platforms or any, any kind of tools they’re using for communication interaction with the community. So we, we definitely take a kind of a quality over quantity approach and, and are now kind of branching out to more of the, of the discoverability platforms. But it’s, it’s important to kind of know what, what, you’re , what you’re using these for and to make sure that it’s not just , um, you’re trying to get, like, you’re trying to handle too many things at the same time. So we’re strong in discord. Uh , we’re building up a Twitch presence right now. Um , we’re working with some streamers, we’re working with our community. We’re doing giveaways for, for streamers who are starting to play Mini Royale on a consistent basis. Um, we’re kind of trying to prioritize the platforms that make sense for our community. Um , we do have a telegram announcements channel , um , but we don’t necessarily have like a telegram group for conversations. So there’s certain things that make sense for, for certain projects. Um, but yeah, it’s really about making sure that the, the platforms that you are on, you’re solid, you have enough ears, you have a strong mod team. Um, you have a strong feedback system for these things so that when you’re ready to start exploring , um, Reddit and Giffy and, and , and Twitter and Facebook and, and ruder and all of these other kinds of, of platforms , um, that it’s, it’s going to work seamlessly with what the , what you’ve already built in the community.

Jacob: 32:57
I think you guys have a really great mission and , uh , understanding of just this idea of like building slowly and building. Right. And it’s awesome to see the growth already in, in just an infancy stage, not going into the hole for five years and coming out with a AAA title, like you said, but kind of like launching day one with a little bit of a rough product, but Hey, it’s okay. Like, we all understand that this is just an alpha and still seeing that growth. That’s really, really cool. Um, I’m interested in your long term vision as you kind of build this with the community, where do you think this goes and what do you think the Mini Royale looks like in the next few years?

Alex: 33:32
I mean, it looks like what we outlined in the white paper. That’s, that’s the goal, right? I think a lot of projects when they release a white paper, they need to go with the understanding that they probably need to stick to that white paper. Right? So we outlined our vision there, which is creating an amazing shooter set on top of this way control oriented strategy game. And that’s what we’re set out to do, making an amazing game within amazing robust, and of course, balanced and sustainable economy. And then of course opening up different aspects of this economy towards player generating con player generated content. So it could be maps could be modes, but I think like probably still a ways away from that, like at least doing it in a more scalable manner. But I think once we, I think like the crypto side of things will really come into its own, once players are also contributing to the economy , um, with could be, I mean, anything, right? So you’ve seen Minecraft, right? Where players are contributing assets or creating new servers and role playing in all of these things. And I think once you have players contributing to the economy, it just becomes like its own living, breathing thing. Um, and that’s eventually the stage we’d like to get to.

Jason: 34:46
Yeah, I’m getting, I’m getting vibes now of when I used to play Eve online and talk about a time vampire, but what a rich in-game economy and then with their cross , um , console launch of dust 5, 1, 4 , it’s kind the shooter. Um, you had the strategy elements of, of Eve mixing with this first person shooter. And this is a really fascinating long term vision as you guys kind of tap into both of those and bring this rich ecosystem that crosses different kind of , uh , game player archetypes that you’ve talked about.

Alex: 35:19
Yep . And I think like Eves strategy was interesting. I think when they released the shooter, it was probably the question like , who is the shooter for, is it for Eve players or is it for new players? And I think unfortunately became the fact that like Eve players don’t want a shooter, but for us , um, our strategy is can we turn a shooter player into a more like economic type of player? And I think there are enough examples of both products that I haven’t worked on as well, as well as products that I have worked on where we can slowly migrate and evolve a player who initially joins the game for this like fun , Twitch based experience, but then eventually wants to get into the more like deeper economic game as they become deeper in the economy or deeper in the social systems.

Jason: 36:05
So as a team, as you’re building out this game, where are you at in the team growth? I mean, is this still quite a small team or are you continuing to grow every day ?

Alex: 36:14
No, we’re around 60 people. So, I mean, for , for a gaming team, that’s still pretty small , um , compared to other teams that I’ve worked on. Um, but for a web3 team, I think it’s, it’s a , it’s one of the larger ones, at least as it stands today, but there’s plenty of stuff to do. We’re gonna keep growing. I think we, we doubled team size in the past three months. Um, and I think we’ll try to double team size again in the next , um, let’s call it eight to 12 months, but of course doing everything in a measured way so that we can make sure that , uh, we, we continue to make a good product and don’t run into any growing pains along the way, or minimize the growing pains.

Jacob: 36:54
Well, that is a tremendous , uh , growth that you guys have already experienced. And if I’m listening to this and I’m not a member of your community yet, I’d like to get involved in Mini Royale, what would be the , the best next steps for me to take?

Grace: 37:08
Yeah, well, the first step is to play the game so you can play Mini Royale. Um, now at , um , miniroyale .io . Uh , so that’s our game. You can jump into our discord server and chat with our, with our team, with our, with our other players. This is discord.gg/MiniRoyale. You can follow us on Twitter, we’re @MiniNations and we’re, we’re super active on that as well. Um, and yeah, from, from those platforms, you can kind of branch out and see the other, the other tools that we use. You can check out Mini Royale streams on, on Twitch. We have a ton of people playing the game and making some, some pretty awesome commentary on it. Um, so, so we’re, we’re , we’re live there. Um, but yeah, that that’s the best place to get started.

Jacob: 37:49
And I’ll go ahead and link the official links for Mini Royale in the description on this podcast episode for any of you that are listening , uh , where descriptions are available.

Jason: 37:59
Well guys.

Alex: 38:00
Awesome.

Jason: 38:00
Thank you so much for sharing more about the vision of your game and web3 based gaming. Uh , as Mini Royale continues to see , uh , the amazing growth through 2022 , uh , and beyond , uh, I’m excited to get in, get a little deeper into the game because it is so easy and so fast to just get, get playing, right. And , uh, from what I’ve experienced, it’s a lot of fun, even if you’re just bridging some time between other activities in your day. So thank you, Alex. Thank you Grace for your time today. Um , and I just also want to thank our sponsor Stocktwits for connecting us with this amazing team, but also for sponsoring The NFT Gaming Podcast. Be sure if you’ve liked this episode or any of our previous ones to leave us a rating , um , that really helps us as we build the podcast, get good feedback , um, as we continue to grow ourselves. So thank you so much for tuning in and Jacob what’s coming next.

Jacob: 39:00
Yeah, we’ve got some exciting new episodes as we are wrapping up season one. So make sure you come back two weeks from now, we drop biweekly episodes where we continue to interview new games, building all across different blockchains in this new play to earn and NFT gaming movement. So come back there , uh , in two weeks from now to hear the next episode of The NFT Gaming Podcast.