We have seen very interesting things come out of the blockchain gaming industry recently, but very few do it at the scale Guild of Guardians does. This mobile RPG NFT game is already poised to surpass some of the biggest existing projects even before it is launched. Game Director Derek Lau has been instrumental in making this project a success from inception to implementation. He is happy to announce in this episode how things are going for this new, fun way to trade NFTs, which is scheduled to do a soft launch in the second quarter of 2022. Derek joins Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley and Josh Kriger to talk about some of the new features Guild of Guardians is introducing into the blockchain gaming space and what sets it apart from its competitors. He also gives some insights on crypto scams, Bored Ape, and diversity in NFT.
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Derek Lau From Guild Of Guardians—The Next NFT Game Poised To Explode, Plus: NFT Game Developer Scammed, Bored Apes On Twitter, NFTs Drawing Women To Crypto, And More…
This is Derek Lau, Game Director for Guild of Guardians. To get into how NFTs are exploding in games like ours, make sure to check in with Edge Of NFT often and pay close attention.
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Hey there, Edge of NFT curious reader. It’s great to have you here. Stay tuned for a great episode and you’ll learn how a bold new gaming project, Guild of Guardians, is poised to surpass some of the biggest existing projects in NFT gaming before it’s even launched.
You’ll learn why folks are still not close to being bored with the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Plus, you’ll find out what insights our guest, a former Bored Ape owner himself, has on why this community is still growing and changing in fascinating ways. Learn all this and more on this next edition of Edge of NFT. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter at EdgeOfNFT.com to find out more about the latest news and giveaways.
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This episode features Derek Lau, Game Director for Guild of Guardians. Guild of Guardians is a play and earn mobile role-playing game where players turn their gaming passion into NFTs. He has a unique blend of experience in gaming, product and startups with long and sustained exposure to NFT since 2017. The game is published by Immutable and developed by Stepico Games. Immutable is a tech company that leverages blockchain to unlock value and align incentives within the $90 billion video games industry. Derek, welcome to our show.
Thanks for the intro. Good to be here.
It’s super great to have you here with us. We’ve heard a good amount about Guild of Guardians and we’d love to know a little bit more about it. Give some background for our readers. Where did the idea come from? How did you all bring it together?
You guys summed up the idea well. I’ll tell you more about how it started. A few years ago, I joined Immutable, which back then was already a VC-funded startup focusing on making digital worlds real. I came on board and they had a goal of figuring out how to add new NFT games into their platform. We did a series of investigations in terms of how to do that, what game would be a good fit and who we should work with to do that. We ended up settling on the mobile RPG genre for a few reasons. We ended up figuring out that we wanted to build this mobile RPG game called Guild of Guardians. We found a good partner to do that with as well. We’ve been working on this game, building out this team and trying to create something that’s going to be big. Our goal is to create this mainstream game that onboards millions of people into NFTs and crypto.
As a group, do you guys know each other for a long time? How did you come together? Building something like this is a massive undertaking. You don’t take that partnership lightly.
It was a growth over time. Immutable itself as a company had previously released a game and the game is still going, which is a trading card game called Gods Unchained. As a company, we already knew how to release games, some of the challenges involved and some of the learnings involved in doing that. There were a few of us who investigated how to add another game and we ended up partnering with a games development studio that had built many mobile games before. They brought in a lot of the expertise in terms of how to build mobile games. Whereas on our end, we had the expertise on how to design, market and publish some of these games. That’s where Immutable focuses. That’s why we’re more of the publisher and owner of the game. By doing that, we accelerate a lot of that growth as well because it’s not necessarily easy to build something from scratch.
Derek, what are some of the nuances of doing an NFT-related game as opposed to a traditional game? The industry is moving quickly. We’ve seen a lot of games come out and buck the trend of the crypto market overall during that time, which had been relatively sideways. These games are going up. What are the things that go through your mind in terms of creating an NFT game that is different from a traditional game?
There are a few things that are different. The first thing that comes to mind is that traditional games are designed to have a closed economy. They’re designed to not allow anyone to earn or trade anything in the economy. This is part of the design. Those games wouldn’t work if you suddenly added in trading in a lot of instances because it would just break the game. A fundamental principle of these NFT games is that there are NFTs which, by nature, are tradable, provably scarce, etc. The core economy of these games needs to be designed differently. The game design often needs to be unique if you want to make the most out of NFTs and you want to make them a powerful addition to the game to make the game better.
In this case, you got a multiplayer fantasy action role-playing game where players are able to build their dream team of Guardians and compete in the skill to earn an epic tradable reward. It sounds cool. What’s the difference here between a pay-to-win game versus a play-to-earn game? There are nuances here that are important for people to understand.
Taking a step back, we should think about what pay-to-win means. Often in these games, what it means is that one player is able to buy an advantage using often a lot of money. They use that to win over other players, often in PvP so beat up other players. The reason that it’s considered a bad experience is that as a free-to-play player, you’re matched up against this player who’s bought a boatload of stuff and is beating you every match. That’s the reason why it’s called such a negative connotation in the space.
I played Madden Mobile sometimes and it’s less fun if I’m playing with people that aren’t at the same level as me. They’ve done a good job of increasing the abilities of the players over the length of the season. At the beginning of the season, you’re more of a rookie and then, in this season, you’re more of a badass all-star and that does make it a lot more fun. You don’t want a David and Goliath situation is what you’re saying.
Yeah, exactly. When one person is spending a lot of money, their fun is at the expense of others. That’s when you’d be in this pay-to-win situation where you’re spending money and other people are having less fun because of the fact that you spent a lot of money.
It’s like no salary cap in the NBA. If you took that out, it’d be no fun. In all pro sports, it makes your level playing field to some degree.
What we’re trying to counter is this underlying issue. The way we do that in Guild of Guardians is that the game is focused around the social and guild part of the game. There are a few reasons. One, to some degree, is this idea of pay-to-win because you’re working together as a team. It’s more social-focused or co-op competitive as opposed to, as an individual, you’re buying all these things and trying to beat up every other player.
Instead, there’s a situation where if you’re an individual and you do spend a lot of stuff, you probably will be celebrated by a guild because you’re helping out everyone else in that guild that you’re in. At the same time, you’re not necessarily causing anyone else to have a bad experience. A key part of the game as well is we want to make it so that players can specialize. Players can end up having their own role in the game. Regardless if you’re a big spender or if you’re a small spender, you have a role in the game. Regardless if you’re high level or you’re a beginner, you still have a role in the game. That’s what a real economy is. Everyone has a role and that’s what we’re trying to create in the game.
It seems like there is some influence from traditional card games, physical in-person games. Some of the stuff like Wizards of the Coast put together Magic: The Gathering and things like that. That’s influenced gaming a lot in general. Does that play into how you guys structured this thing at all?
A little bit. If you look at some of the games from the 2000s or some of the early MMORPGs that had pseudo-open economies and the fact that they let players trade the digital items and, in the black market, people could trade it for their own money. If you look at games like that, a lot of the open economy design principles have been seen before and most people have forgotten about how they work. These days, games have a different model for you to play.
A lot of the thinking takes some of the learnings of that period as well, the Golden Era there. In terms of Magic: The Gathering specifically, we don’t necessarily take as much influence from a trading card game perspective. Our game is in this fantasy setting. We do take inspiration from things from the overall general world and the Dungeons & Dragons world as well. In our game, people can play not just as humans but also as orcs, elves and things like that.
I want to move it over to the asset side of things. We’re focused on NFTs on the show. How do you empower gamers to own and trade their assets? I know you might connect them with a real-world economy in some way. How does that work?
Our goal is we want to onboard millions of players. The way we do that is the game is free to play and it’s also available on iOS and Android. We want to make it as accessible as possible on mobile, which is the most popular platform. People can start off playing effectively as normal in-game currencies that are not in the blockchain. For example, as you’re playing a game, you’re battling in these dungeons, you defeat the bosses and you earn materials. You might earn crafting materials or you might earn summoning shards and things like that.
What players can then do is they can use these normal in-game soft currencies and pay a small number of tokens as well, which is our hard currency that governs the game to mint these NFTs. People can play the game, get stuff for free and mint these NFTs. That’s how it’s going to work. The NFT is going to be more premium in the game. Not everything in the game is NFT, that is the point I’m trying to make. Once it becomes an NFT, it means that the player earns it, trades it whenever they want, holds it and does all these cool things with it because it becomes this digital asset.
What’s cool there is you have to earn the right to mint NFT by how well you play the game if I’m not mistaken.
Yeah. There’ll be a few different ways to create these NFTs. We like to call them mint. It’s a blockchain term. They’ll involve playing the game. In fact, crafting, which is one of the key mechanics in the game, will involve you having to also play with your guild, with many other players. The only way NFT items in the game are made is through players. It’s by players playing the game, getting crafting materials and working with a guild to craft items.
Hence the name Guild of Guardians. This is cool to learn about. On that same thread, you have a partnership with Sandbox. This is the virtual world where players can build, own and monetize their gaming experiences using NFTs. What in your mind makes the marriage between mobile gaming and NFTs/blockchain appealing?
It does a few things here. The first is that mobile games are huge. It’s twice as big as a PC. It’s growing 3 or 4 times as fast. It’s a popular category. It’s the most accessible form of gaming. That’s one of the main reasons we want to build on it because we want to make it super accessible. You’re asking about the partnership with Sandbox as well.
Guild Of Guardians: Traditional games are designed to have a closed economy. NFTs are tradable by nature, so the core economy of NFT games needs to be designed differently.
We’ve talked about it a few times on the episodes. How does that all tie in?
Ultimately, we’re building the Guild of Guardians mobile game. As developers, that’s what we’re building but that’s not necessarily where the Guild of Guardians universe will end. What we want to do with the power of NFTs is that we can have aligned incentives with the community. We also want to encourage the community to build on top of the game whether that’s content, podcasts, development tools or Metaverse games projects like in Sandbox. This is the general idea we want to push towards and we’ve already seen some steps towards this where our community has started doing a lot of cool things.
The collaboration with Sandbox is a step in that direction where we want to do something with another project that’s not Guild of Guardians but it extends the universe and ultimately, what we want to do is create a win-win situation. More people learn about Sandbox, more people learn about us and get engaged. Hopefully, the community members can start building stuff as well. Maybe they learned a game within Sandbox and they can even monetize and create a business. This is what we want to facilitate. There is all this community-driven content that adds value to the overall ecosystem.
There’s so much momentum behind this. Everybody’s trying to build their guild.
That’s exciting.
I’m trying on the Edge of NFT guild. I like how it sounds.
Go with The Guild of NFT.
We’ve got a naming session here.
Derek, you’re trying to build a community but you’re being rather modest because you have over 140,000 pre-registered players, which is amazing.
It could be 150,000. Let’s be clear.
You sold more than $4.5 million of assets with more to come from my understanding. That’s amazing. You’ve talked about the mechanics at the highest level of this game but let’s sharpen the pencil a little bit more. What do you attribute this type of success to?
We’ve always had a clear strategy, which is that we want to build this game that is absolutely massive. It’s not easy at all. It’s quite difficult. It’s going to take quite a long time but we’re here to build for the long-term and disrupt the industry. At that high-level vision and strategy level, we have a lot of people who have bought into that compared to other projects, which might not have as much capital, might be small or might have small ambitions. We stand out there in terms of what we’re trying to do and also having the team and game to back it up.
Are you open to sharing how much capital has gone into building this game?
We’re well-funded in terms of the game. Those are a couple of things that I can share.
It’s important for people to understand this doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a lot of thought that’s gone into this.
If you think about it, most NFT projects do a sale of NFTs to build the project as fundraising. We’re fortunate in the sense that we don’t need to do that. We’re going to build this project regardless. Any money that we get from selling NFTs is a bonus. On that side, we’re committed to this. That’s on the strategy and vision level.
The other thing in terms of building communities is that we have always tried to take an organic and creative approach. A lot of the NFT space is about how you break out of the noise. There is a lot of noise. There’s so much stuff happening all the time. It’s hard to keep up. That’s a core part of our community-building and marketing strategy. How do we keep people engaged? We’ve done a few interesting things before where we’ve done these events, which have gone almost viral within certain parts of the NFT space. These little experiments and events have led us to massively build our community.
You’re mentioning a little bit already about community building. I wonder if we could dive a little deeper into how you’re going to use the capital you might have raised from successful sales. Maybe undisclosed investments somewhere above $100,000 probably, where those funds might go and maybe even touch upon the five-year vision of Guild of Guardians.
The money ultimately goes back into the game. We’re aiming to soft launch on mobile in early 2022 but that’s not where it ends, that’s where it starts. We’re going to need a lot more capital to take it to the next level. We want to take it from 0 to 1. The first step is getting 100,000 players. The step after that is getting to one million players. The step after that is getting to ten million players.
Each incremental step is a step-change in the project and that’s where it’s going in terms of a lot of capital. I imagine a lot of it will be used to bring in new users. A lot of it’s going to go back to the community to build out in all these things and not just have us developing things but end up having this universe as well. We plan to try to make this thing as big as possible one step at a time. Each step is equally difficult but more and more rewarding.
You mentioned 1 million users, 10 million users. Not to pigeonhole you or anything but do you see a timeline on that in terms of a five-year vision? I don’t know if you’ve had experience in this already so it’s almost like you know the trajectory. You’re going to hit certain milestones by certain dates. What are your thoughts about how quickly this might happen and where things might be in five years?
I can’t put any certainty on the timeline. It always depends on a lot of different things. What I can say is that our goal is to make this as big as possible. As soon as the game gets released, I expect we’ll see a lot of attention because there’s already this big community. We have over 200,000 people in total across different channels. When we first launched, we already had this strong user base. What we plan to do is scale it from there. What we want to do is we want to make it so that the game naturally brings in these new users because other people are hearing about it, they’re seeing their friends play and they completely explode. That’s the goal.
It could be quick but it’s not easy. Ultimately, our goal is we also want the game economy to be huge. There are a few things. Having a lot of players but also having this billion-dollar economy as well within the game. That’s one of our goals as well, which is having $1 billion, $10 billion traded, etc. as these long-time ambitions.
It’s worth putting out a benchmark here that seemed like you guys are prepared to blow by. Alien Worlds had 100,000 players in April 2021 and that’s one of the most popular games in the space. What we’re talking about here is parabolic potential growth right alongside the biggest games in the space.
Derek’s being super modest. This thing is kicking ass already and its trajectory is sick. It’s no joke. That goal, the billion-dollar economy, honestly, for what you’re building may even be the start.
We’re here for the long-term. We’re not going to get everything right at the beginning but we’re in a good spot because we’ve got this good community who are not just big but are positive about the game. We have built this positive community. Everyone helps each other out. When you join Discord, you get welcomed and any question is get answered by the community members. We’ve got all these people who are bought into the vision, believe in what we’re doing and are aligned with us long-term.
You brought up a key point somewhat suddenly, which is, “We don’t have all the right answers yet.” This is a part of the gaming experience and beta testing experience that has changed in the last few years from the old days where you just played a game. Fans play it, they complain and they stop playing it. There’s more of an agile ongoing interaction now between the community in the development studio. Can you talk a little bit more about that? It’s important for people to understand the humanity that goes into the foundational principles with which you’re building this game, interacting with the community and figuring out what goes right and goes wrong. If the wizard doesn’t cast the right spells, you change the spells the wizard can cast.
Traditionally, games have taken the approach where they go into the soft launch and then full launch. These days, a lot of the games are quite metric-driven. Their goal is to get a certain retention level, pay a certain amount in ads and make a certain amount of money per user. That’s the game, they make money and then they buy another one. A lot of the NFT games in general are taking a different approach. Because of the fact that a lot of these projects sell NFTs before the game is out, they’re doing a lot of community building while it’s even in development.
Get the community involved a lot earlier in the process. By doing that, they’re also setting the expectations like, “This thing is still being built.” People are a lot more forgiving in the NFT space in terms of when games go wrong and things like that or if they’re not as polished. Everyone’s super early in the space. There’s a different culture and dynamic there in terms of expectations. That’s something that we try to manage and also be honest to the community about as well.
We set the right expectations would take in terms of what they should expect. They shouldn’t expect the first version of the game to come out to be super polished and final. We’re going to be adding new stuff over time. We’re going to be iterating and changing. Being able to create that community early so that you can then interact with them, set those expectations and bring them along the journey is what we’re beginning to see culturally happening in a lot of these NFT games.
That’s a general lesson in the world of NFTs that we’ve seen with artists and all different aspects of the industry, get it out and create. Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to this industry and how fast it’s moving.
Having that supportive community is a big part of that, giving you the confidence to share early, often and knowing that folks aren’t going to judge you too harshly for it. When you think about others in the space, Derek, if you were giving advice to someone who’s thinking about starting a project like this, what advice would you have for people just getting moving? We’ve talked to so many and we’re having a great conversation with folks about starting a game that incorporates NFTs.
The first one is to think about what game you’re trying to build because there are different avenues you can go down. Not just in terms of the genre of play-sell and things like that, an old platform like mobile PC but also in terms of how you want NFTs to give you an edge in the game. On one spectrum you have a polished normal game and the NFT is one small part of it potentially. On the other hand, it’s fully on the blockchain and the NFT is the whole thing. There are tokens and other things and maybe there’s something in the middle as well.
Guild Of Guardians: Mobile is the most accessible form of gaming. That is the main reason Immutable wants to build the game on it.
Strategically, it’s deciding where you want to play. Whether it’s fully money-focused and you invite people who want to play and make money through the gamble or whether you don’t want money to be involved and you want NFTs to be cosmetics and other things like that. There’s a spectrum of which these creators can choose where they want to play. After that, it depends on the situation they’re in.
Building a game is not easy or cheap necessarily so having the capital to do that is quite important. If they have a smaller team or if you’re an individual then luckily in this space, people are willing to invest in projects that are early stage by buying NFTs. Founders can consider starting with some presale where they’ve got the design polished out, they’ve got the team that’s going to come on board, they’ve got all these things and then they’re just looking to get capital by selling these NFTs before the game is out. From there, it’s about delivering on what you said you’re going to build, which is probably the hardest part.
That’s super helpful advice. You’ve been in the space a long time and you’ve seen it evolve over that period of time. I’m curious what other NFT projects or platforms either existing or are yet to be formed stand out to you as game-changers that will be here in 3, 5, 10 years or more.
I don’t like to comment too much on other projects but there are going to be a series of projects from this generation of NFT projects that are going to be here for a while. For example, there’s a lot of activity happening on the collectible and art space like the profile picture type projects. You’ve got one in your background like Hashmasks, for example.
Do you own a Bored Ape?
I did but then I sold it so I can buy some other stuff. There are going to be clear winners from this. The NFT space has proven that narrative is extremely powerful. That’s the reason why CryptoPunks are popular where they have this powerful narrative. They’re the first. They predated ERC-721s collectibles, etc. Some of the projects which have a strong narrative and also a long-term community are the ones that are going to survive, the community that believes in the long-term. They’re not there to make a quick buck. They’re there because they think that the project is going to be there for 30 years and that’s why they’re part of it. Those are the ones that are almost self-fulfilling. Those are the ones that are more likely to be around for a long time.
Are there any particular aspects of NFTs outside of the gaming use case that is most exciting?
Art and collectibles are other ones. That was the first category to get off to a boom. Bridging NFTs with utility is another one. We’re beginning to see a couple of those projects where you buy NFT and you get different utility whether that’s in real life, physical, digital, access to a club or something like that. That’s going to see a lot as well. On the physical-digital side, there are also probably quite a few unexplored things that can also be done as well.
What are those unexplored things? It sounds juicy. The unknown unknowns.
That’s the idea of connecting digital NFTs to something in the physical world. For example, the Unisocks project is an example of an experiment done there where people could buy this sock NFT and they could burn it in exchange for the physical version. It’s interesting things like this where it combines the two worlds, which is what we’ll see more. They’re also difficult because they have to combine with the real world. There’s more as well.
The real world always makes things difficult.
What’s interesting about Unisocks is that people no longer want to redeem their NFT for the socks because the socks get smelly and get holes in them but the NFT keeps going up in value. Why would you do that trade?
It’s to show off that you could afford to do that.
CryptoPunks is fascinating in the sense that now the talk of the town is fractionalizing these Punks because they’re getting expensive. It’s like a stock split to make these CryptoPunks more assessable to more people. Everyone wants a CryptoPunk. The higher they get in value, the more people want them instead of thinking that value is too high. It’s fascinating. It goes to a lot of the points that you made about building a strong community, which is a theme that we always have heard on the show, you underscored it and we appreciate that. We’d love to get to know you a little bit better as a human being if that’s okay as well.
Let’s do some Edge Quick Hitters. As a reminder, it’s ten questions that we ask you. It’s a fun quick way to get to know you a little bit better. We’re looking for short, single-word or few-word responses but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Ready to jump in?
Sure. Let’s do it.
The NFT space has proven that narrative is extremely powerful. Click To Tweet
He’s caffeinated. He’s ready to go.
I’m finally awake.
Question number one, what’s the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
It would have been some snackable, probably something like that. I’m talking about real life.
It can be anything, the first thing you remember. I’m guessing you have a snack shack at the house. You got a sweet tooth.
I do love lollies.
Question number two, what’s the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
That’s a tough one. Honestly, it would have been something at school, selling Pokemon cards, Magic: The Gathering cards or something like that.
Here’s the real question, did you change the price based on how much of a sucker you thought the other person wants?
I probably didn’t think about it at all. I was a little kid. I wasn’t that smart yet.
Question number three, what’s the latest thing you purchased?
I got a phone so that I could playtest Guild of Guardians on Android.
Question number four, what’s the latest thing you sold?
An NFT. It would have probably been one of the many NFT drops that have come out.
Do you remember specifically? You already sold your Bored Ape so it’s not that.
It would have been one of the profile picture drops that came out. I probably bought and sold some.
Not a Hodler in every sense. You’re flipping some stuff over there. Number five, what’s your most prized possession?
Guild Of Guardians: Cryptocurrency scams have evolved in terms of how good they are. They are getting really creative with this.
I’m not that materialistic. If you talk about more tangible, it would probably be something along the lines of photo-related stuff, photos and videos of old trips or with friends and things like that. That’s more valuable because it brings you back to that time rather than a car or something. It’s something that’s not replaceable.
It does play into the next question. Number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, a service, an experience that’s for sale, what would that be?
If I could buy anything in the world, I’d probably try to do something more impactful, marketable. I’ll think about how I could buy some business or something that would help people around the world long-term.
There are a lot of those for sale or that could be built, that’s for sure. Number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?
Motivation. Motivation powers a lot of things. People can do a lot more if they’re motivated or they won’t want to do anything. Being motivated to do whatever you’re passionate about is super powerful.
On the flip side of that, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
I don’t know how to describe this but being more focused on the now. Always thinking about the future but soaking everything in, relaxing and enjoying the moment. That’s super valuable. It’s something I should do more.
Given the success of Guild of Guardians in this launch, now is a good moment as any to take that in and appreciate it. I know you’ve got a lot left to do. Question nine is a little easier. What did you do before joining us on the show?
I was in bed. I just woke up.
Hitting the snooze button.
We’re on that coffee as well. Question number ten, what are you going to do next after the show is over?
We have an exciting day. We have a new joiner in our team. I’m going to be onboarding them and getting them slowly up to speed with everything that’s going on. That’s exciting.
Is there a cultural/hazing component to the onboarding process?
No. We try to give people time to learn everything and onboard them into the space quite quickly. A key part is getting them up to speed on everything that’s happening.
Derek’s put a positive frame on any possible malicious things that we put in front of them. It seems like too good of a guy.
I try not to be negative.
You’re a good guy, Derek. Don’t fall into our traps.
Thanks for indulging us there. It‘s great to get to know you a little bit better with those questions. That’s it for Edge Quick Hitters. Do we have some hot topics to sink our teeth into?
Yes. Let’s check out what’s on the table here. The first one is from Yahoo! Finance News, NFT Game Developer Scammed Out Of $1M Of NFTs and Ethereum. Derek, I saw you nodding a little bit. Is that something close to your heart in terms of being problematic? Do you know the story?
I don’t know this story specifically. How are they scammed?
Five of the sixteen CryptoPunks were already been sold by the scammer for 149 ETH or almost $400,000 was the deal. This scammer used a pseudo name and sold these sixteen CryptoPunks that he didn’t own.
To catch him, somebody posted a chance to win ten CryptoPunks. That sounds shady out of the gate. This developer, even though he owned all these other ones, should know better but he still clicked through and he was checking out. He thought it was legit and somehow it had generated a MetaMask error or a supposed MetaMask error. We’re all moving fast. He didn’t think about it. He went in, clicked through and he thinks he’s in MetaMask. He drops a seed phrase in there and in seconds, his CryptoPunks are gone, they’re out of there. Shortly thereafter, they were sold. Five of them sold a total of $385,000. It sucks.
Number one, this is not a noob to the crypto space or NFT space. He’s a developer. He knows what’s going on. He made a bad mistake here. I’ve seen some pretty well-crafted notes that are phishing scams or whatever. I’ve come close. I haven’t clicked on them but I’ve almost. They’re good, the language they’re using, the formats they’re using, the way they’re naming the email addresses, everything. This guy got it. It sucks. To me, you’ve got to be careful. As busy as we are, as many freaking tabs that we have open and projects we’re working on, we’ve got to have that awareness in the back of our minds so that we at least pause before revealing any password or clicking through to crazy links or anything like that.
On that note, people have been trying to punk our readers with Edge of NFT with these trades, “Give me one Bitcoin and get 1.5 Bitcoin back.” We’re not asking anybody to send any Bitcoin or Ethereum to anybody else for the record.
That’s the thing, people are posing as us. We’ve hit that level of status.
You guys have made it. That’s how you know you’ve made it.
Have you ever come close to hitting any of these scams, Derek?
Yes. It’s tough and it sucks for anyone to get scammed. It can happen to anyone. I’ve seen a lot of different stuff. I haven’t been scammed myself but I’ve seen the scams evolve in terms of how good they are. In the beginning, it might have been a message in broken English, “Give me one Bitcoin.” Now, people create bots and a Telegram channel with 10,000 people and they get the bot sending all these messages, “Thanks for the Bitcoin. I sent mine. Here’s my transaction of getting it back.” They’re getting creative with this.
I don’t know if you have seen this, there are these dodgy links that people can send. They’ll send you a folder and tell you to download and check out their art but it’s a .exe file. When you click on it, you instantly lose. It looks like an image or something. It’s only going to get more intense because the industry has so much money in it. Unfortunately, it’s up to the user to make sure that they’re being safe because they’re the only person who knows the seed phrase. If I’m a person with a seed phrase, I need to make sure not to give it out or not to download any dodgy files or not to do anything about it. It’s tough.
Thank you for sharing that, too. It’s important to get the word out about some of these things and let people know what’s problematic. Should we move on to the next hot topic here? Let’s hit it. This one is about something that Derek may have little knowledge of. The headline is Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking over Twitter. Half of what’s interesting about this is this is an article in The New Yorker. I remember when Bored Ape first hit the scene. This was a thing where a friend of Josh and I was like, “Have you heard of these Bored Ape things? What’s going on with these? Check this out?” Is it a thing? I thought about getting one but I didn’t. It’s not going away. Derek, you might have gotten bored of your Bored Ape and let it go. It seems like people are latching on to this and they keep going at it. What was the appeal for you of the Bored Ape and why got involved when you did?
Bored Ape came out when every other project was increasing pricing sales where the first 1,000 sold for one amount, the next 1,000 was probably high, etc. These ramped up pricing curbs. This project came out and they said, “We’re not doing any of that. We’re doing a fair launch.” Everything’s the same price. I was like, “This is innovative. Everything’s priced the same.” By doing that, they built this community, which was like, “I like these values. I believe in this community.”
They got a lot of attention that way. It was the first project in a while to have done that. They were the first project to do that. By doing that, they got a lot of early traction. They have some pretty cool art in terms of the Ape as well. People like showing it off. What they do well, which is more nuanced, is that the pictures themselves or the Ape are easy to show off. It’s easy to look at one quickly. A tiny avatar on your screen, you look at it and you can tell whether or not it’s rare based on what traits it has. They do that well.
It’s not cluttered. People like showing off. The main reason why people like NFTs, in general, is because they can then show them off to other people and be part of this club. They’ve done a good job there of building it out. They’ve got a pretty good distribution. Out of the 10,000 Apes, there are 5,000 unique owners or something. My perception is they’ve brought in a lot of newer people into the space as well. They might have gone to NFTs this year, for example or in the last few months and then they’ve joined this club. It built this pretty cool community. They’ve done a good job there.
Guild Of Guardians: Blockchain has in general been traditionally male-dominated, but we’re beginning to see that shift, which is really good.
To expand on that, one of our partners on the show is Bright Moments. They have a real-life NFT gallery in Venice, California. Eathan flew in from Chicago partially to pick up his CryptoVenetians at this gallery. They had a spontaneous Ape meet-up. I was irritated. I didn’t even know about it. We’re members of this now. I’m not an Ape holder at this moment. I didn’t get the memo. They’ve created such a strong community that they’re doing these spontaneous events. To go beyond that, a lot of the Bored Ape holders in LA applied for a grant from the Bored Ape endowment. There’s now an endowment fund for Ape community management. They got $3,000 to throw a special party at Bright Moments.
I came in to touch base with the crew and normally the white walls are painted with graffiti and Apes everywhere. There are Apes on the wall. I go in the backroom and they did a replica of the Bored Ape bathroom with buoys, nets and then a bathroom with all these Apes on the wall. I’m sure this is the beginning of more Bored Ape events to come up at Bright Moments. It was off the hook popular. That’s special when you’re bringing together a community that’s strong virtually that they want to meet each other in real life. People came from all over at least California. California is a pretty big state. Even beyond California to be at this party.
They’ve done a good job there. It’s community-driven. Communities are the ones who create great stuff like this and want to drive a lot of this.
I can already see Derek’s mind wandering towards Guild of Guardians and what he’s going to do with this factoid to make that game more popular.
One of the cool things that are happening with all of these characters that are being created is additional IP, additional storylines that are developing around it. Gary Vee with VeeFriends, he’s talking about building the next Disney on the back of these 268 or so characters he created. It’s happening with Bored Ape too where they’re putting specific ones on different products and creating cartoons. On YouTube, there’s a cartoon. This is stuff we don’t talk about that much but the growth of these characters and the community behind them is an infinite amount of possibilities out there. That’s what I get pumped about.
Full disclosure about our dedication to getting into the Bored Ape realm, even though Josh said we were disappointed and he couldn’t access the event. We had the opportunity and when I was staying there to go to one, we couldn’t hack it.
Weak sauce.
There’ll be more.
We drove by.
We were that tired that we were 20 feet away.
Everybody’s got excuses. It’s all good. What else did we have in here?
The next hot topic is, “NFTs can be a good pathway to draw women into crypto,” says Lavinia Osborne. That’s an interesting observation. I know that when I picked up my CryptoVenetians at Bright Moments, I was struck by the fact that it’s not only broad in terms of the gender of people representative but broad in terms of the age range of people. He’s at least over a 70-year-old friend that I knew from a different world that lived in Venice who got his CryptoVenetians before I did. Not only in terms of gender but in terms of appealing to a broad community, I have to agree with that sentiment that NFTs are making it more accessible, interesting and fun.
Traditionally, the space is quite male-dominated. We’re beginning to see that shift, which is good.
What are you seeing with Guild of Guardians? Is it generally male-dominated? I don’t know if you have any specific figures. Is there any attempt to either market towards a specific niche or make it more accessible? I think about Wii. When they created the Wii, it seemed like they’re trying to say, “What can we do to bring the entire family to play tennis or something?” What demographics do you tend to shoot for with Guild of Guardians?
Traditionally, mobile RPG games tend to target more of a male demographic. In our case, we want to make it appealing for both. We want this also to reflect in the world and the characters and such. We want to make sure that there are characters that appeal to everyone. There are some ones that are nonbinary or something that you can’t identify in the game. We want to make sure that we are being sensitive to this and it appeals to everyone. Although we do expect players to, frankly, be male because of how the demographic of players is.
This isn’t a short-term goal here. Diversity is a long-term goal. It’s one of the steps that we can all do to be inclusive of everyone with this amazing technology and NFTs. Mila Kunis with Stoner Cats, she’s done a great job of showing NFTs are cool to women as well. That project has spun off into animation and all sorts of interesting things. We have one of the founders of LUKSO coming on and they’ve done a collaboration with Chanel.
We had an amazing female founder from DIGITALAX, Emma-Jane McKinnon. Fundamentally, there’s space for everyone when it comes to NFTs in gaming and art. I hope that we do a better job of promoting and supporting those types of projects. As an industry. We have some other great folks coming on that are doing cool things. It’s not about is this a male or a female project? This is cool and can you relate to what’s going on with this project?
Some of the percentages in the article said, “The tech industry is comprised of 34% women.” The blockchain industry is still only about 12%. The NFT space has sub-categories, probably representative there of a similar percentage, which they don’t have specifically. It is interesting. Part of it is getting the word out. Every company we’ve worked with, interacted with or partner with is a company that has an inclusive culture and is important as part of its core values. Everyone probably on this episode that we’ve talked to, which is cool. There are questions around awareness and opportunity in the space. Think across the full spectrum of all the possible skillsets and interests that people can deploy in NFTs. The sky’s the limit when it comes to pretty much anybody that wants to do it from any background.
A lot of it starts with the team as well. Often, people build for themselves as someone who’s building a company or building something that’s for themselves or people like themselves. Diversity about the level is super powerful and valuable. A lot of companies recognize this. We’ll see more in the future.
We’ve checked our stats, as much as you can get genuine stats from places like Spotify and Apple. We sometimes are disappointed that we don’t have a higher female listener base. In hearing the stats that you call that, Jeff, we might have a significant one in comparison to other types of projects. Given that, it’s useful to call out as we do to anyone who’s reading to get involved in the space. There’s a special opportunity for women to get into this space, fill a niche, be a leader, lead others and show them what they’re finding interesting about it. Have a unique position where they can stand out a little bit more from the crowd and do something interesting. It’s another call to action for folks to dive in, get in the sandbox and start playing around with us.
That’s it for hot topics. That’s coming to an end here with the episode. Derek, it’s been great chatting with you, learning more about Guild of Guardians and learning more about you. I have a feeling that the Guild of Guardians is going to be taking a lot of Josh’s time here in the near future. I know his personality. Where can folks go if they want to learn more about the project, yourself and track what’s going on in your world? Where can they learn about you?
The first place to start is probably to check out our website, there’s quite a lot of information there, which is www.GuildOfGuardians.com. We have a white paper on there as well for folks who want to get even deeper into how exactly the game will work, which is important. I encourage anyone who’s interested to follow us on Twitter and also join our Discord group. Discord is where a lot of the community lives. We try to focus on everyone in there. I encourage anyone to get involved, say hi, ask any questions that you might have, etc.
Is it @GuildOfGuardian, where can they follow on Twitter?
Twitter is @GuildOfGuardian.
Derek, you guys are generously going to give our readers one Legendary NFT. We’ll do a contest. Tell us more. What is a Legendary NFT in terms of the Guild of Guardians’ experience?
The core of Guild of Guardians is around these heroes or guardians. You use these heroes to go into dungeons to play with. They’re required by the game. We have these Founder NFTs that we’re selling of different rarity, there’s a rare, epic and legendary. Founder NFTs are what we’re selling. For one of your lucky readers, they’ll be receiving this legendary tier hero which isn’t available anymore. We sold out. We’ll be giving one to you guys to give away at some point.
That’s generous. Thank you so much. I’m sure our readers and your community will appreciate that given that this is sold out.
I should tell them about it.
I’m pumped to go down the freaking Guild of Guardians rabbit hole. That’s cool. We’ve reached the outer limit at the Edge Of NFT. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. Go to iTunes, rate us, say something cool and then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Want to help co-create Edge of NFT with us, got a guest you want to see on the episode, questions for host or guests, an NFT you’d like us to review? Drop us a line at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com or tweet at us @EdgeOfNFT to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to stay tuned for the next episode for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links:
- Guild of Guardians
- Immutable
- Stepico Games
- Gods Unchained
- Wizards of the Coast
- Sandbox
- Alien Worlds
- Hashmasks
- Bored Ape
- CryptoPunks
- Unisocks
- NFT Game Developer Scammed Out Of $1M Of NFTs and Ethereum – Yahoo! Finance article
- MetaMask
- Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking over Twitter – The NewYorker article
- Bright Moments
- CryptoVenetians
- VeeFriends
- Stoner Cats
- LUKSO
- DIGITALAX
- Emma-Jane McKinnon – Past Episode
- Discord – Guild of Guardians
- @GuildOfGuardian – Twitter
- iTunes – Edge Of NFT
- Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com
- @EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
About Derek Lau
Building the next generation of video games where in-game items can be traded for real money. Responsible for the end-to-end development and launch of Guild of Guardians – a mobile RPG where players can turn their gaming passion into assets.
I combine deep expertise in NFTs, blockchain gaming, start-ups, strategy and product.
Immutable is a technology company that leverages blockchain to unlock value and align incentives within the $90bn video games industry. I am responsible for managing the launch and continuous improvement of Guild of Guardians, a title published and owned by Immutable.
So far I have taken the product from concept to implementation. The team has grown from 1 to 20+ and so far achieved over USD$3m in revenue (& more, but confidential).
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