00:59
IT and Taylor, the real setup will also have us all in Discord watching the game stream apparently because we initially do that. It. I'm so proud of y'all. 

04:56
Hey, everyone, and welcome back. This is our first tunnel in a long time, and we are so glad to see all of you here. Thank you for showing up. We got a lot to talk about today, but it's my pleasure to introduce our Co-founders today. Not that they'd ever need to be introduced because they go together like peanut butter and jelly bulldog burlap and. 

05:18
Never mind. 

05:20
While Paul's vast experience changing the world through video games has been stated many times, from Age of Empires to Words with Friends, his experience has gone from PC to console, mobile to VR, and now to Web 3. Wild Kate, not to be outshone by her husband, has been a pivotal player in the film industry for more than 28 productions attributed to her. She brings her understanding, care, and ability to take control and help finesse all those moving parts and get things done. These two together are a powerhouse of creativity, and they have now set their sights on bringing the fun of Sunday Night Football and the World Cup to video games by bringing the fans and competitors into one space together. Take it away, Paul. Let us know what's going on. 

06:05
Hey. Hi, everybody. It's so good to see y'all again. Y'all, give me a thumbs up if you can see me, okay? Yeah. Everybody see me, all right? Yeah, I. Okay. We've got a lot to cover. So many things to talk about, and I'm being forced to go faster than I want to go. You know, guys, I like to talk. I like to take my time, but all these people are going to yell at me if I take too much time on one topic because we have so much to go through. 

06:32
Yeah, that's me. 

06:33
I'm going to yell. That's right. That's Katy. Let's go. So, as always, let's start with the game. You know, I know some of y'all, many of our fans have seen a lot of the new updates, but also because today is a big announcement and we called a lot of people in here, we have a lot of things to show. We wanted to kind of recap a lot of the updates that have been going into the game, that have been going into what we've been calling internally the Ambassador build, which is really like the next big build of Wildcard that we want to show to the world. We have worked really hard this year to improve all aspects of the game. 

07:13
One of those things that we're working on is a tutorial and an onboarding, or as people in the game industry know it, a FatUI, which stands for First Time User Experience. A very important part of making a broadly accessible game that anyone can get into and have fun, especially these days that's not online in the game yet. And so what we built temporarily to help with playtests is kind of just like an onboarding video, like an intro video that was actually recorded by one of our artists, Chris Moffit. You'll hear his voice and it just kind of shows off the new things in the game. It's kind of an introduction to the game if you've never seen it, if you've never played it. So I thought that'd be a good place to start this morning. 

07:54
It also shows off some of the new features that some of you guys may not have seen, the new arena, etc. So let's start with that and then I'm going to kind of go on to highlight some of those key changes for you guys after the video. So that sounds good. Let's go take a look at that. 

08:17
Welcome to this early look at Wildcard, a brand new hybrid action strategy game that blends elements of arena sports, combat, MOBA strategy and collectible deck building. Let's jump right in. In Wildcard, you play as a champion, summoning awesome creatures to battle, pushing across the field together to score the goal. Let's quickly go through the main elements of gameplay so we can get you into your first game. Champions each have unique playstyles. They fight alongside their summons with melee attacks and special abilities. Each champion also has a powerful ultimate that they charge up in different ways. The heart of Wildcard are the summons you collect and bring to battle. Wildcard features dozens of unique summons, each with their own distinctive behaviors. The champion you choose and the summons you collect make up your unique strategy. In Wildcard, we call this your loadout. 

09:21
During the match, the cards in your hand are drawn randomly and cost mana to summon. Mana fills up automatically over time, so make sure you keep summoning. Keep your eyes open for Wildcards. These one-of-a-kind abilities spawn directly from your loadout onto the field and can really swing the battle in your favor. The goal of a Wildcard match is to score points. To score a point, use your summons to push across the field and take down the goalie. Once the goalie is down, the ball is exposed. Use your champion to channel the ball and score. The first player to bank three points is the winner. Now it's your turn. We can't wait to hear what you think of Wildcard. Thanks for playing. 

10:15
All right. Katy's already rushing me through this, but there's some several things I wanted to call out that have changed about the game, especially if you haven't played it in a little while. And I'm just really proud of our team and their relentless pursuit of making this game as fun and high quality as it possibly can be. With some of the work that we've done in the past together, going all the way back to Age of Empires, Halo Wars, Lucky's Tale, we've set a high bar for ourselves. 

10:45
And we know that this part of the process, which I've talked to you guys about before, this Alpha phase of the game, is so important because it's where we really go from a game that's good to something that's so great that you just can't put it down, you know, and we're hoping that Wildcard is one of those games that we're building. A game that people will be playing decades from now. Like they're still playing some of our previous games that we've worked on. The key things. Like our previous games that we've worked on, the key things I wanted to point out that have changed in this build that you guys should be looking for when you get your hands on it. 

11:15
There's been a lot of work on combat, so, you know, I've just been really pushing the team, we've been pushing each other to have the game feel as good as it can. When you put your hands on the controls with the mouse, keyboard, the game controller, it just needs to feel fantastic because it's a game where you're controlling in third person and champion and you know, the actions that you do moment to moment, whether you're meleeing something, you know, throwing a car down onto the field, summoning a creature, attacking another creature, whatever it is, it just needs to feel super punchy, very reactive. You know, it has all these layers that go into making it feel great. So we've been doing a lot on that. We've added a lot of summons to the champions, we've made their targeting easier, etc. 

11:56
There's also a lot of new gameplay effects. You guys may have seen some of those in those video. In the video, the summons have a wide variety and I'm not going to show you some of the new summons in a second. A wide variety of different abilities that you guys probably some. You have seen things like time dilation. I think you've seen knockback, but some new ones like Enrage, Haste, Fire. There's lots of new abilities that are custom to the different houses, custom to different creatures, and really create an interesting strategy as you're deciding what cards are going to be in your deck and what you're going to summon onto the field. Changes your gameplay style entirely. And that's the whole other half of the game is that meta. We've also, as you guys have seen, adjusted the game mode. 

12:39
The sort of sequence of events that happens during a match quite a bit. Our internal philosophy is every game should be dramatic. Every game should have the players and the spectators on the edge of their seat waiting to see what happens next. You know, this is a quality that we all love in our favorite professional sports, that we all watch as spectators. And actually designing for this as a game is tricky, you know, because usually there's. There's sort of like two elements of it, usually designed for a certain type of drama. If you're down on the field actually playing, it's a different kind of experience if you're up in the stands watching. And we want Wildcard to be great in both cases. So we have changed the way scoring works. 

13:16
We introduced a brand new element called goalies that you guys may have seen. These protect the base and actually add a lot of mechanics that I can't get into, but make scoring much more dramatic, more impactful and more fun. And we're still iterating on that. You guys are going to still see some additional changes to scoring coming. We've also added a thing to the game that is the name of the game called Wildcards. We have had a lot of different ideas for what actually a wildcard is in the game of Wildcard. And this is our favorite version. This is a card that you actually add to your loadout. I'll talk about loadouts in a second. 

13:53
And it spawns on the field and provides a dynamic element that changes kind of how the match flows because the players compete over acquiring these wildcards in the middle of the match. And then the Wildcards provide new abilities that grow their, you know, their strategy over the span of a single match. And so it actually creates this kind of progression that happens within a match, which was something that I think the old Bill didn't have enough of. And this adds a lot of that and creates these kind of synergies and dynamic moments that we wanted to have but weren't getting yet and are now in there. Loadouts. I mentioned loadouts is what our word is now for the combination of cards. And abilities that you put together to bring into a match. 

14:36
We're going to be talking a lot more about this in the next several weeks or months because the whole other half of the game I mentioned the meta and the progression elements. These are things like opening packs of cards, building decks, all that good stuff that you guys know and love about games like this that you haven't gotten a chance to put your hands on yet in Wildcard, but are really like the other half of the game. We've been working super hard on that. Those things are coming in the builds that are going to be shipping in the next coming weeks and months, and I'm so excited for you guys to finally get your hands on that. Well, one of the first parts of that you'll see in the build is this loadout. 

15:10
So loadout has 10 summon cards and five Wildcards and a champion and other cosmetics and abilities and all sorts of cool stuff. So just, yeah, take a look at for that. In Playtest, the maps have changed, the events are adjusted so you can now like throw cards in really interesting ways and control the trajectories of it. Lots more. Those are the high level. The other thing I wanted to showcase, though, before we move on to our next big topic, is the incredible new content that we've been pouring into the game that the team has been just doing phenomenal work on. So besides the goalies, besides new champions, we've introduced a new faction, a third faction, Malus. And we have, I think, over 40 unique summons in the game and almost twice that coming online in the next couple months. 

15:59
So I get to see this pipeline of all the incredible summons, champions, arenas, everything else being built, and it's amazing. I wanted to showcase some of those that we love the most right now. So let's take a look. 

16:10
Roll tape. 

16:11
Look at those. It it. 

18:28
The new things. And yes, I did move Paul on because I am so excited about what is coming next. You guys have heard us allude to a lot of different things, but today we're here to announce something that has been kind of part of the vision from the beginning, but weren't really sure where it would show up in the roadmap. We weren't sure exactly how it would figure in, but it is the platform piece that we have talked about. And so Paul is going to tell you a little bit about this particular thing and what we're calling it is Thousands. 

19:08
Yeah, this is why I had to go fast because thousands is. Is. Is really a centerpiece of today's announcement. What we wanted to talk to you guys about for a little while and I'm sure we're going to get a ton of questions about this. I need to do a little storytelling to kind of provide the foundation for why we've built thousands. What thousands is what it's here to do. So some of you guys who follow along closely and like show up with me on every gamified and listen to podcasts I've done, etc. 

19:40
Are not going to be surprised by a lot of this story because I've been doing my best to talk about this and the reasons that I think it's important and why it needs to exist and the passion that we have for it as a team without being able to name it or really wanting to call it out. Because like Katy said, we haven't really been sure where this was going to fit into things. So let me rewind and maybe make some more sense. So as you guys know, we've been working on Wildcard for a while and a pillar of the vision for Wildcard began when we started to get and I started to get very excited about this thing that was starting to happen in gaming that I'd never seen before. You have to rewind quite a while. 

20:24
It was like 2013 or 14 and Justin TV had turned into Twitch TV and were starting to see a significant number of our players playing our game in a new way where they were streaming it to other people who were watching them play the game. And those other people were playing our game by tuning in to watch their favorite pro competitors or favorite streamers or whatever it is play their favorite games maybe while they're at work or whatever it is. And I was just fascinated by it. So I remember this article in 2014 that was about how half of all YouTube views this was back in 2014 were Minecraft. Like literally half of the entire YouTube network was just Minecraft. And I was just mind-boggled by this. Like that's a lot of people watching Minecraft. 

21:14
And we started to dig into this and I just became relentlessly fascinated with it. Our career, Katy and I's especially, has been now defined over the last couple decades by getting a chance to work on these frontiers where video games are expanding and becoming something new and exciting because of some new technology or some new platform. So were early in on Xbox games with Halo wars, were early in on mobile games with Words With Friends and we joined Zynga and sold that company to Zynga. And were. We made one of the first VR games with Lucky's Tale. We've just kind of become, we've kind of fallen in love with this thing that's been happening in gaming now. And. And it kind of goes in cycles, right? But these things that impact video games tend to expand the audience. They tend to have a. 

22:08
An ability to allow games to reach an even broader, more accessible audience around the world. And when I saw this start to happen with people watching games, I was like, there it is. There's the next frontier. Because this is the most casual way that you can possibly enjoy a video game. You're not even picking up a controller. You're just watching someone else play a video game and still enjoying it. When we would talk to people, we would hear, yeah, I play Minecraft a lot. And then we, like, dig into that and they'd be like, well, what I mean is that I watch a bunch of YouTube of Minecraft. But, like, they didn't really. People don't. As players, we don't really create a distinction. To us, that's kind of the same as being in the world of Minecraft. 

22:48
So we started to build this into Wildcard from the beginning because we wanted to just try to answer this question, which is, what would we do as game designers if we knew that the game would be enjoyed in this new way? Because a lot of the games that are popular, like Minecraft, League of Legends on streaming, they were actually built before streaming. I know this is, like, hard to. Takes a lot of rewinding to understand this, but most of these games were designed even Fortnite, really, before anyone recognized the impact that streaming was having. 

23:22
And as designers, as game designers, we just wanted to say, okay, so what would it look like if we’re to build a game that was built for streaming from the beginning, built for people to share it together as players, streamers, fans, spectators, everyone together in one place. So we started working on that, and we started working with Twitch and Amazon and YouTube and other partners to try to help give us new features and functionality on these platforms that we needed to push the boundaries and the frontiers of the integration between games and these streaming platforms. Because immediately we started to envision, like, well, first thing I want is I don't want the people who are tuning in to be invisible. Wouldn't it be cool if they could show up in the experience in the game? 

24:11
Now, for some of you who have been following along this whole time, you know that we've been experimenting with stuff for a while, some of you have already played with these Features you've been able to show up in a Discord with a bot and have your avatar show up in the stand. So these have been things we've been experimenting with, and people have seen these experiments now running for a while. Well, through that process, we started to get kind of frustrated and run into a lot of barriers of things that we wanted to do, and that our vision was for what these two things coming together would mean without being able to deliver on those things, because we couldn't control the features that Twitch were building, or Discord or YouTube. And there are a lot of folks at those companies. 

24:55
They're excited about what we're doing, but those are big companies. They have existing roadmaps, they have existing business models. They're centralized web. Two companies that, you know, they don't move super fast. And, you know, Twitch especially, it was challenging. They went through the Amazon acquisition in that time. Like, there was just a lot of stuff that made it difficult for us to. To move that as quickly as we wanted. So we started working on a prototype, and this was crazy at the time. I remember our team being like, what are we doing? But were like, let's just start experimenting with what it would look like if we controlled parts of this. And that led to some of the work we did on our Discord bots and other things. 

25:35
And then about a year and a half ago, something like that, we started to talk about, okay, but what if we built a platform like this ourselves? And it was kind of hard because, like, you know, internally we're like, wait, we're building this game? And now you're talking about building Twitch too, or Discord or something, like, what? And it was like, just not worry about that. It's just a prototype. We just really need a place where we can experiment with these new ideas, these new concepts, and build fast, quickly. 

26:08
It's really hard not to have all the tools that we needed. And I think one of the things that a lot of groups do is they try to integrate with external parties. And that's great, but if you're trying to build something like this, then you're going to be focused on what can serve your current customer. And were never going to be their first customer, anybody's, because were not an existing enormous game that had all of these people that were coming. 

26:38
It's a little harder to get their attention than like, yeah. 

26:40
So for us, it was about, how are we going to serve Wildcard? What does Wildcard need to be the best way to experience Wildcard how are we going to create the best way to experience Wildcard? And that generally gives you a much better native integration between the game or the content and the experience itself. 

27:02
And then something happened along that journey. We were working on another small game called Creativerse, which is a little game that we did at the very beginning of starting the company that owns Wildcard, which is called Playful. It's kind of a Minecraft-like game on Steam. And that game was just taking off and it was kind of going slow and the streamer showed up and did a let's play for the game over a weekend. And Creativerse, which was a tiny game and it had like 10,000 players or something, I don't know, just really small at the time, suddenly made like $400,000 that weekend. And were like, whoa, what just happened? And then we figured it out, like, oh, look, this German streamer just did a let's play. He's got like a million subscribers. Like, that's amazing. 

27:44
And so that was kind of the first time I had experienced being on the receiving end of as an actual game that got streamed and went viral. For a moment, watching what happened, and we reached out to that streamer and we're like, dude, that was amazing. Thank you, by the way, like, how'd that go for you? You know, like, you must have made a bunch of money on YouTube from the ads and stuff. And he was like, yeah, man, it was great. I made like $3,000. And were like, wow, okay. 

28:14
And that began a journey for me and us trying to understand the relationship, the synergy between us as game developers, these platforms where content is being streamed and the creators who are doing and the communities who are doing this incredible hard work of sharing their passion, usually just as a labor of love with each other for their favorite games, and a lot of them trying to make a business out of it. 

28:40
And you know how excited I get when I think that we're going to be able to like share the wealth. I get a little bit obsessive about a more kind of equal opportunity ability because the idea of somebody else always being the ones to benefit from where your eyeballs are is just gross. So I think for us it's been a, it's been something that we've been kind of looking at for a long time. I didn't come into this part with a lot of experience building games or native integrations, but I am a huge consumer of social media, of different kinds of community apps, of different ways to connect community around Something that they're all excited about, that's kind of my jam. 

29:31
And so for me to start looking at this from that perspective, as well as the perspective of somebody who grew up in Texas and knows, like, how good it can be if you're watching sports and it's actually makes sense to you. But pulling that together and building it from the ground up from the very beginning to make communities and creators much more successful, as opposed to just trying to, you know, generate something that is going to be extracted by everybody else who's not actually working on or experiencing the platform was really exciting. 

30:04
I remember Katy being so excited about that and me initially feeling terrified a little bit because I was like, how do I tell the team that not only are we building Wildcard now, we're building our own Discord because we have to. Because Discord doesn't give us what we need to make communities successful. 

30:23
Hey, now we got some of our people that actually worked with us before on this game that now work at Discord, and they're probably in there going, excuse me. So maybe pull back. And it's not a. 

30:34
Actually, if we're being fair, a lot of the work you see on Discord right now, where they're launching these, like, new games that run in the street stream, that's built by the same people, some of those same people who worked on Wildcard and took this vision through Discord. So I'm not saying that, like, Discord owes us something, but I don't think. I don't think Discord can get - 

30:52
I see you. I'm sorry. 

30:55
Yeah. Juan, we love you. I don't think that Discord can get very mad about us doing our own version of this while they went and did their own version. 

31:02
Hey, they are out there having people build things. If you guys haven't checked out what Discord's doing right now, absolutely should, because it's fantastic. So one of the things, though, that they maybe couldn't was this whole crypto thing, right? Because the backlash has been astounding. 

31:21
They tried. You guys might have seen this, tried NFTs like a year ago, and they. 

31:25
Still have the functionality for it. Just like, you know, there's ways that Twitch can do it, there's ways that all these people can do it. But I think that because we are still, like, kind of owned internally, we don't have a huge partner, we don't have, like, huge funding from a large game publisher, we're able to experiment in ways that are a lot harder for other people. And so we're able to build things from not, I mean, I wouldn't even say it's just crypto native, but we're just able to really play with and utilize and experiment with the things that. 

31:59
Web3, Thousands is 100% crypto native. Every user that signs up for Thousands is wallet enabled. And from day one, like it's just because, I mean, there's several reasons for this, but fundamentally Thousands is a decentralized platform. I don't think that what the world needs is another centralized Web2 social media or community platform. Like I, it's fine, but we have a lot of those and there's a lot of problems with it. And ultimately having the ability for one person or one company to rug a creator or rug a community because they don't like something about them is not the future. I don't believe. 

32:38
And that was the other thing that for me, and I think for Katy, convinced us because we had been doing this initial work in Web3 for Wildcard and when we saw the connection between the philosophy behind Web3 and crypto and what were hoping to achieve with this new thing, this prototype were building, it was like, okay, that this is the answer we've been looking for. This is where crypto belongs in what we're building. 

33:04
Yeah, it's not. I mean, I love you guys and the owning your assets, that's great, but like, there's really only one team that knows how to do a full scale open economy. And like, we're not EVE Online. 

33:19
Yeah, it's the EVE Online guys. 

33:21
Good luck. Right? 

33:24
But anyway, but then like, we're still talking about a year ago or a year and a half ago, then this thing happened early this year, a couple months into this year, where we started to show this prototype that were building internally. And again at this point, we still didn't think of it as like the standalone platform. We thought of it as just like a feature of Wildcard. Like, okay, this will just be like a thing that comes along with Wildcard. It's like a different place where you can stream it and view it and we'll ship that with the game. We were showing off Wildcard and were starting to show off this feature of it and people were like, what is that? Wait, what is that? 

34:01
We'd be like, hey, that's cool. And we really want to play Wildcard. It looks amazing. But we also know that it's not going to be in early access until 2025. But can we use that? 

34:13
Is that Thing something that we could put our game on or we could use for our community. And we started hearing that to an increasing degree. And, you know, for me, as a builder, Katy talks about this all the time. Like, I just can't help myself. When people start showing up and there's something they love about what we're creating, then I just really want to build for those people. Like, I. 

34:37
We do call it like, he gets distracted, but it's distracted in a good way. It's distracted by the people who are showing up and who want something. And you guys will see this. Like, you've seen that after one of these live streams, Paul will get in there and talk to people in our Genesis Holder chat like Discord for like a day and a half, answering questions. And it's not because he feels like he's obligated to. It's because he loves it. Loves nothing more than finding the person who what he's doing is stupid and bringing them along on the journey and hearing why they think what he's doing isn't going to work. And, I mean, nine times out of 10 at the end they're like, I mean, maybe that could work. 

35:18
So I will. 

35:19
All in. 

35:20
So now we're in the kind of the last chapter of that story leading today. And yeah, that's exactly what happened. And honestly, when that thing starts happening and people see a thing we're building that maybe is like some feature off to the side, and they start saying, no, that's a really important thing thing that you guys have here, that's something that can serve not just Wildcard, but maybe the whole world, certainly other communities and other products, and you should think about elevating that and the priority of that. To me, there's this phrase we use in this industry as builders, which is product market fit. And actually that moment, in my experience, is the beginning of the journey of product market fit. Some of you may know this and maybe some of you don't. Discord did not start as a. 

36:08
As a social media or community company. They started as a game company. They were building. Yeah, they were building. I think it was an MMORPG. And. And then they had to create this thing because it's what they needed and they were frustrated there wasn't something. And that thing ended up becoming, you know, what they're known for. I don't know if that's gonna happen here. 

36:27
Well, I would say there's a very key difference there for us. 

36:31
Yeah. Yeah. 

36:31
Which is that the game is not. Is not leaving or going on the sideline? 

36:37
No, no. 

36:38
Well, creation that will be able to be played regardless. 

36:43
The biggest difference, I would say, is that before then, Discord wasn't a game company. I don't think it was. I think it might have been one of their first games and certainly as a company, their kind of first thing. This is very different. We're game builders and we always will be. We have a career of doing that. So the game is always going to come first for us. Like, we can't help ourselves. But also because of the excitement with the people we've shown thousands to, it was time to go public about what were building, give it a name and let people start to use it. Also because this journey of product market fit is about building in the open. 

37:19
It's about shipping things, letting real users enjoy those things, and then see where it goes from there and see what are the priorities, what are the features we need to change and build. So I'm just going to quickly go through the why to recap, and then I want to show you Thousands. We're going to roll to a video that our amazing engineer Eric put together. This is not a trailer by any means. Okay? This is actually a technical internal video to describe Thousands to some of the partners that we're talking to and working with right now, especially on the Web3 side. And so it's, you know, it's not like, got any music or trailer stuff or whatever. It's just a technical presentation of the Thousands platform and what it can do. But I wanted you guys to see that. 

38:09
I wanted you guys to see firsthand what Thousands is, what it, what it does and what's special about it for us now on this journey. And then I'm going to shut up and we're going to roll the video. The why of it is the most important part. The why is because, as Katy said, we need this platform to be able to make communities and creators as successful as they deserve to be when they choose to come on a journey with us to stream our game, to share our game, to form a community around our game that drives tremendous success to Wildcard. And from the beginning of Wildcard being a Web3 product, we're trying to figure out, like, where does it fit in? 

38:55
And I think the sort of philosophy of Web3, which is about sharing in value, as Katy said, this is the thing that unlocks our ability to do that. So let's look at the video, then I can talk and I'm going to. 

39:11
Make him race through the points that he's supposed to be making about the video so that we can move into the part that I'm the most excited about even more than the video so you don't have to hurt. 

39:22
Which is which is to tease it to introduce you guys to the new Thousands team because we have a whole team that's working on this. So. 

39:29
All right, roll tape. 

39:31
Let's take a look. 

39:38
Welcome to Thousands. Let's log in with our Google account. After we log in successfully we see a list of events we can join. A ticket is required to attend this event. I have an access code to get a VIP ticket. We'll use this ticket to enter the event. We are now watching the event stream. On the right-hand side we have our chat bottom where we can toggle between chat and a list of participants in this chat channel. When I activate a chat action, the camera operator will be notified that a certain section of spectators in the arena have triggered fanfare. When the camera operator clicks on the notification, the camera will zoom in on that section of the arena. As you can see, spectators are waving foam fingers while smoke bombs are going off. 

40:35
We also sent a message from the platform to the game to change one of the banner ads in the arena. The banner ad was pulled into the game from an image on the Internet using a URL. Here, green fireworks are launched throughout the stadium. Each fanfare event that the platform sends to the game has configuration that allows us to choose a section of the arena or the entire arena. We can also customize the magnitude and length of the effects. Finally, when I click on the cheer chat action, the lights are dimmed and a wave starts going around the arena. The wave has been configured to go around the arena three times. All of this configuration is driven from the platform. 

41:18
These chat actions are not representative of actual chat actions in the finished product and have only been temporarily configured to show off all of the different types of fanfare that we can activate in the game. Fanfare is triggered based on certain asset packages that are available in the game. Using the system, we can easily configure many different fanfare using our available fanfare types. The exciting feature is that the platform can communicate with the game in real-time. To trigger these fanfare actions, the game can also communicate back to the platform to share event configuration, content, notifications, and match statistics that can be used to create a more interactive experience. Our Fan Navigator allows the camera operator to zoom in on fans in the stands. The fans watching the event on the platform show up with their avatars in the game. 

42:07
Fans are distributed to sections throughout the arena. These sections can be configured to require certain criteria such as platform points or NFTs in your connected wallet. Using the Fan Navigator, the camera operator can zoom on a certain section of the arena or they can zoom in on a specific fan. Fans can send emotes in the chat on the Thousands platform and their avatars in game will emote as well. The fan Navigator can also be used to airdrop an NFT randomly to a lucky fan in the arena. In a certain section of the arena or to a specific fan, an exciting airdrop cinematic sequence plays out for everyone to see as they wait the announcement of the lucky fan who will receive the nft. After the airdrop sequence completes, the NFT is airdropped to the primary connected wallet of the lucky fan. 

43:06
Thank you for watching this sneak peek into the development of the Thousands platform. Our roadmap is jam-packed with exciting new features, so stay tuned for future update announcements. 

43:22
I heard from our team I'm not looking at Discord right now, I'm just looking at you guys and my notes. But I heard from our team that some folks on Discord like some of the things in that video. So I'm glad to hear it. I am so proud of the team and so thrilled to have finally been able to show you guys a peek behind the curtain. 

43:41
I gotta shout out Eric who did that video. But also like the incredible unlock that Eric has been for our team. Like, I am so grateful that he was willing to come join us and take this risk. I mean what an amazing. 

43:59
You have to shout out all the engineers we have. 

44:02
I know Brent. 

44:06
Like the folks are built. 

44:07
It's a secret weapon, man. And I gotta say, the addition of Bill, he came in and he understands how much the engineers are the secret weapon. It's so true of any tech company. Any. 

44:22
You want me to get through these points? 

44:24
Okay, okay. 

44:24
Finish the rest of the Thousands team that people haven't met or then I'll introduce them. Some of these folks you just didn't know yet that they were working with us anyway, so what you guys saw in the video we thousands is an attempt to combine the best parts of Discord with some of the parts of Twitch, some parts of YouTube, even some parts of like Twitter spaces and other things that we love about some of the other social media and community platforms that we've used over the years. My own journey with this for the old people in the room starts back in the BBS days. If any of you guys know what a BBS is, this was pre-Internet. This was Discord before there was Discord running on a computer and my bedroom with a bunch of phone lines calling in. 

45:08
I've been doing this for a long time and it's part of the reason why I'm so passionate about this particular thing myself is because it's actually where my career began was building and running communities in games with South Florida's biggest BBS. The playing fields. Okay, I'll shut up about BBS's now. Thousands is one place for players, creators, communities, collectors and chat to come together. It brings those people into the game, it brings the games to the people. And most importantly, as we've been talking about, it helps everyone who's helping to create that success share in the success that they're creating and the value that they're bringing to the Thousands network. This is the most important part. And I don't just mean creators, I don't just mean pro players, I mean the fans and the community. 

45:55
You guys who are probably geeks of YouTube like me, I mean, just obsessed with our favorite twitch streamers and YouTube celebrities. 

46:04
Are you gonna shout out Doug again? 

46:06
Yeah, Doug. Anyway, he's my family's current favorite YouTube celebrity. Anyway, these cutting-edge creators don't create content by themselves. It's a collaborative effort that involves their community. Chat is as much a part of building the entertainment that is part of a Doug Dug stream as Doug Dug himself is. And they contribute that value and should share in that value as just viewers, as interactive, engaged spectators. And as you guys saw, the features of Thousands makes that happen in real time and allows things like the viewers contributing to the stream and the creators in the game contributing back to the viewers. With Airdrops, this is a, as I mentioned, a wallet connected and crypto-native network from day one. 

46:53
The other crucial thing that this does is it relieves a lot of the frustration that the integration of Discord and bots creates for us as developers and I think for all of us as part of these communities. Bots is an okay solution, but it's a lot of those things that bots provide, we would really prefer that they were built into the platform, built into the product from day one. So a lot less bots, a lot more built in native functionality that is coming directly from these communities that are using Discord today, including ourselves, and are frustrated by those things and are like, I wish there was something better. I wish there was something that was wallet and crypto-enabled from day one. 

47:39
And for us, we wish there was something that made those communities and creators more successful so that they could actually like not have to work a full-time job and then just in their spare time try to run a hundred-thousand-person community. Like it's just not fair, especially when those folks are creating so much value for the products and games and communities that they serve. 

47:59
Okay, so let's talk about those folks then. 

48:01
Yes. 

48:01
I love you. I'm going to turn you off now. Thank you. So one of the things that I get really excited about is the idea of a community being the value that is brought to a network rather than just an individual creator. And that's not to say that the individual creators aren't fantastic, but one of the highest value kind of connections that we have had is with Wolves DAO. And from the very beginning, from the first time that I met anybody from that I was like, they're trying to do something very different in this space and really utilizing kind of blockchain and even, you know, soulbound tokens, things like that in a way that really resonates with what I think the future of video games and of interactive content is, which is social. 

48:50
So when we're recognizing and realizing, hey, this isn't gonna just be a feature of Wildcard, this is gonna be something that is gonna need a team, a group, the first thing I thought of was a couple of these guys from Wolves DAO and I actually from the beginning somebody came to me and said, well, you know, if you were going to say who you thought would be a community lead for this. And I was like, well, I would steal Blake from Champions Ascension and. And then they just made her wish list. 

49:28
She loves to do it. 

49:28
I do, I do. I have a wish list. So I, yeah, I'm a list. So when were coming up with kind of the Thousands team and getting excited about that, there were a couple of people that came to the forefront. One of those was the founder of Wolves DAO, Peyton. Peyton and Blake are the shepherds and beginning of Thousands outreach into the broader community. They are with us to continue creating features for this, to reach out and help move this towards what it's going to be next. And I'm so thrilled to introduce you to them. They understand gaming and community almost better than anyone. They're going to move things forward and we're excited to have them on board. Blake and Peyton. 

50:24
No, we got nicknamed Blayton very early on and it just stuck. And no, first of all, just thank you for even just the opportunity to be a part of thousands tv. I think one of the first things that I even said was the Bettners are just one of my favorite people as just like a married couple, just aspirationally from just like me and my marriage. I just look at them and I just love them. And I reached out to Katy, I think two years ago now, Katy was when I reached out to you on LinkedIn, of all places, Hidden Gem there. And I was like, hey, can I just sit on a call with you? And I was at Azra at the time and I just walked away from that call, just being just completely floored by you. 

51:04
But also just like Paul's pedigree of just professionalism, but also just what he's accomplished with Age of Empires 2, getting that team, putting it over here and then Words With Friends, just like, you know, the. The genre-bender that he is was just like completely floored. And then the second time I was floored was actually at token 2049 and really experiencing Thousands.tv for the first time personally. And it was the first time that probably clicked for me and maybe I would just like to share that story and then we can kind of move on to the game nights. But when it comes to Paul and the way that he put Thousands.tv and I was next to you on the couch and we just saw people coming in and in, really just playing Wildcard. 

51:43
But over the week it ended up just being like, oh, five minutes of Wildcard and then Thousands TV. How can we incorporate this into, like, our specific, like, pipeline? And it also clicks for me as a community builder and also a content creator at the same time. And I didn't even tell this to Paul and Katy, but that was a huge click for me is like, I need this, I need Wolves need this. Like, as a content creator, I need this. Like, you know, in terms of just what Paul said is that Discord Stages or Discord that's just so flawed in terms of gerry-rigging. And I've done it for Wolves. A lot of you guys out there in the audience have done it for your communities. 

52:17
Like, we have to use alphabot, then we have to use Collab Land, and then we have to use a launchpad to be able to mint. And I literally saw all that happen within seconds@token 2049. And it literally got me so excited. Not just from a builder standpoint, which I felt like a lot of people in token 2049 were really there to showcase it. Like, oh, yeah, I want to get it into my game. How can I use this for, you know, Showcasing. But as a creator, I know a lot of people in the audience. I saw Matt, I saw Kobe Streams in there. You guys taking part of this and seeing product market fit from a content creator's perspective, from a community. I see the wardens in here. 

52:52
You know, I see Paladins Dao just like really using this platform in different ways that we've all been waiting for this product for such a long time. That's like native web3. Native web3 app. That is for us, not so much for Discord or Twitter spaces where we have to kind of attach so many things to make it work. This is from the ground up and that's really what we're wanting to showcase and that's what me and Blake are here to do in the coming weeks and months with Thousands TV and then Wildcard as a huge partner and being product led too. 

53:26
And it's just being able to work and see the vision that Wildcard has, like really putting at the end extremes but also at the same time having people come in and play Wildcard, which is the game nights that I'm super excited toss over here to Blake here soon. But like, that's really what we're going to be doing is we're going to be taking Wildcard and Thousands TV and coming to your community and really showcasing what I felt I took in 2049 and I can't wait to show you. And that's why Remy's call to action. Remy's DMs are going to get blown up. I'm sorry, Remy, but we're going to be working very closely with the Wildcard team. I freaking love Shady. I love Remy. We've been relationships wise for two years and so it's also a pleasure just to be community builders along. 

54:09
Community builders come alongside and then learn what Wildcard’s culture is. We don't want that to go away at all and we want to first showcase that to Wildcard. We understand community and we understand that you guys are priority always. And so that's something that I want to do. I'll toss it over to Blake in terms of game nights, maybe some of the specifics there, but thank you, Paul and Katy, for the opportunity. Thousands TV is going to be fricking amazing. Remy and Shady, super excited. But Blake, sorry, I took way too much time, but I love you, buddy. 

54:38
Yeah, I mean, I just want to go back and rewind a little bit to my first story with Wildcard as a whole. So, I mean, I jumped into Wolves DAO, I was doing a lot of research when I first jumped on board. And as we know, back in the. Back in the day, it was rough out there when you were doing research for a lot of these games. It was a lot of just like, mint this, hope for this, pray for that, right? So whenever I got my first, like, look at that very first playtest, like, I was in the very first one. The rawest you could possibly be as far as, like, the game goes. And I was like, Peyton, dude, you got to see this. 

55:14
We found it. 

55:15
And, yeah, this is insane. And Peyton was like, oh, yeah, I'm already writing something up, dude, write me up some more. I'm going to add it to my entire thing. And, like, so I presented this thing to the wolves dial. I was like, dude, this game is going to be insane. I was like. So that was, like, always, like, on my back burner, like, okay, we're always checking in on this one. And through that, I always, like, I developed some relationships with Shady and Ami and Katy and Paul and everybody from the early stages. And I couldn't believe how quickly that grew when I met. Met them in first and, like, face to face at GDC. So GDC was like, really the thing where I understood, like, the passion that went into their product, right? 

55:52
So, I mean, they spoke at Alpha night, and I was just like, guys, like, this is. Oh, my gosh, this can't. It literally can't get any better. So a few months later, they kind of are doing a little bit of outreach, talking about some different things that they're working on, and I get brought into a little bit of a private session and I find out about, like, what this could be. And I was like, oh, my gosh. I told Peyton, like, right away. I was like, dude, if we ever have a chance to work with them, like, they are one of the only ones. And you. I promise you this. Like, I wasn't, like, applying for anything at Champions. I wasn't out there looking. I mean, Katy called it out. 

56:29
Like, they came knocking and I was like, well, I literally said that this is what I wanted. How could I turn this down, right? So, so fast forward a day and I'm like, already like, all right, let's. Let's do this. Let's get it going. And so, I mean, the biggest thing I want to, like, reiterate with my job and, like, what I'm coming in to do is I actually came, like, I don't have, like, a gaming background. I came in through a game audience. Like, you guys. Like, I came in just playing a web3 game, like getting upgraded to mod, upgrade to CM, start taking care of BD, start taking care of QA. Like I just grew and loved more and more and more of this. And I saw two comments in the chat. 

57:08
Kobe, I'm happily crying and Dub standing up clapping like, my job is going to be making sure that happens all the time. I want to get into yall’s communities, I want to get into the creator groups, I want to get into the games. Anybody that's interested in taking this platform to the next level, like something that is actually built from for Web3. Discord's already told us no. Twitch has already told us no. They're not going to be Web3 first here. This is going to be Web3 first. I'm going to come in, we are going to talk about everything you dream wish could happen and we're going to try to make that a reality because that is what we want to do with this product. 

57:44
And I'm just very excited to get in from the ground and build it up with all of you. Shout out to Icy, Caesar, High Mars, Spike. So many of you guys run communities and have these connections that we want to upgrade all of yall’s level. We want you to be able to put on the highest production level. We want you guys to be able to incorporate Web3 natively. We want all that stuff to just happen where you don't even have to think about it. Like, I want to come in and just check all the boxes that you guys need and then hand it to you. Right, like, so that is going to be my biggest role, is coming in showcasing what we have and helping build out the roadmap to be sure that we, you know, like can. 

58:23
Can hit everything that would make your experiences on this platform better. 

58:26
Amazing. So I'm getting messages from our production crew that are like, excuse me, you have no more time left. All right, we're gonna. We're going to. It's blame Paul. We are going to. We're Blake and Peyton or Blayton as we call them. Shammy is Remy and Shady. Blayton and Shammy are going to be in our Discord posting about how you can get involved in game nights, how you can participate in that. There are going to be several other things that are going to come up that we're going to talk about soon. We have our ongoing community playtest, the game nights that Blatant is doing. We are going to keep talking about how we're going to use Thousands TV for Wildcard events coming up before the end of the year. 

59:15
One thing to note, your engagement will be recorded and rewarded as players and fans. 

59:21
Are you gonna let me. I gotta have a few minutes at the end. 

59:24
Oh, my gosh. That's why I'm trying to get through the things that I know have to happen. 

59:28
Okay, good. Okay, thank you. Thank you. 

59:31
Several more enormous announcements are going to come between now and the end of the year. I want you guys to understand that this is. This has been something that we have been working on for quite a while. And so there are things that are going to roll out as is appropriate for us to have those conversations. For now, stay tuned for the way that we are doing game nights, community playtests that are going to be ongoing in our Discord server. And I'll let Paul do his exciting wrap-up. But the questions that you guys are putting into the channel are fantastic. And we're going to come in and answer some questions. But know that if you are a Genesis pass holder, we're going to go directly from here into an AMA with Genesis Passholders in the Genesis chat. So don't miss that. 

01:00:21
And Paul, you may have this long. This long. 

01:00:27
Well, you did cover a lot of it. If you were wondering, I know our lives are busy and you're probably connected to lots of exciting projects. If you were wondering when is the time to shift my attention and energy to Wildcard, Katy just said it's now. Now through the end of the year is when pretty much most of the things that you guys are hoping and dreaming for happening, that especially those have been along this ride with us for two years. Yeah, they're coming. They're happening in the next. Between now and the end of the year. We are working as hard as we can to take all those next steps. And as Katy said, we have this poster that says, I'm sorry, I post this on Twitter. I'm sorry it's taking us a while. We're trying to do it the right way, so. 

01:01:14
And that's how these things are. And this is a step. And then there's many more steps coming pretty rapidly now, like every couple of weeks, kind of just for the next several months. So stay tuned and get involved. Now, there's a couple other points I wanted to make. First of all, I just didn't even know the things that Peyton and Blake or Blayton were going to say. And they just summed it up better than I ever could, especially from the perspective of people who are helping to make communities more successful already. 

01:01:42
Then there's just this magic thing that happens right now that I am most thrilled, that gives me chills to be a part of this, which is when I have been able to be one of these new frontiers in gaming where there's just some incredible new stuff happening and usually there's not a lot of people paying attention right yet, which is part of what creates this opportunity. It's where new stars are born. Like I've told people like Blake and Peyton and Sam and all of our knock, all of our friends, look, man, if we're right about this, and I think we are, this is just going to be like the other things that I have had the incredible blessing to experience, like the birth of mobile gaming, the birth of free to play gaming, etc. 

01:02:25
Those are the moments when the new stars were born and when. And there's this moment coming where the Web2 communities and the big games and the content creators in Web2 start looking over here, like, what's going on over there? Like, who is this streamer I've never heard of on this new platform I've never heard of that suddenly has more viewers than the biggest stream on Twitch or the biggest discord stage? Those moments are coming. I also love that Blake and Peyton both reinforce this message, which is that's the point of thousands. This is being built for you. 

01:02:58
As I mentioned, we had central decision to make that started forming a couple like a year and a half ago now, which was are we going to build this as another centralized company like a part of Wildcard, or are we going to try to do something new that aligns with the philosophy of what we're most passionate? 

01:03:16
Okay, this is part of another announcement. Roll it on back. 

01:03:22
Okay, yeah. All right. Anyway, yes, we will be talking about that, but the point is, as you probably heard us say many times, the thing that we are most passionate about is that we're not building something that just profits off of your work, like a lot of centralized web2 platforms and communities and networks. We are deeply passionate about building this to be something where the value is shared with all the people who are showing up and contributing. 

01:03:52
Sustainable. 

01:03:53
Sustainable is key, is the key thing we know. And this is the most important part because this is really what goes back to the very beginning of when we first started talking about this. That might sound like some kind of altruistic goal, like I'm just trying to make the world a better place. Yes, I am, and I care about that. But you can also look at this through the perspective of just what makes us all more successful. From the very beginning we said, imagine if we made that German streamer I was talking about. Imagine if he made 10 times that or 100 times what he made and. Or we had shared half of the. 

01:04:26
400 percentage of what the value that we got. Or imagine streaming. 

01:04:32
Yes. Imagine if the people who had tuned in to see Creative Earth for the first time could somehow get involved also in the value that they helped bring to that experience. Like how much more time could that person in that community spend doing what they love, which is playing games together and streaming them and tuning in and all that kind of stuff, which would then make our games more successful. Because a lot of those people turn into customers of the game and they monetize in the game. So it's this virtuous cycle that if we're successful at it doesn't just make the communities more successful. It also makes the builders, the developers, the games, the publishers more successful. And we are going to just knock that wall down. We are going to do that together. 

01:05:14
Thousands is going to be our unfair advantage. 

01:05:17
You all are going to help us do this by doing the thing that blatant said, which is telling us what you want and just saying, okay, I wish it did this, I wish it did that. And the way for you guys to be thinking about this now, as the folks are in these communities, these builders who are listening in right now is just. You just got a whole big giant team that's just here to build your perfect Discord for you. Come talk to us and tell us what you want and what you wish this platform had, and we'll see you there. So that's. That's what we have for you today. Thank you for giving us all the time, all of your time. I'm going to see you over in the Genesis Passholder AMA and we love you all. Thanks. 

01:06:06
Okay, Great job. It's all right. 

01:06:34
It's gonna be fire. Oh, yeah.