00:01
It's official. We are live. Hey, App. How's it going? So Paul is on his way back, but if you are here, then you are here for our Celebrity Showdown and AMA with Wildcard co founder Paul Bettner and also BoredElon. So, Bored, thank you so much for being here, for joining us in the discord to do this. So excited. 

00:25
Did, thank you. 

00:26
And just to be clear, Paul is the celebrity? 

00:31
I don't know. You have close to 2 million followers closing in on 2 million followers. I would say you both have I. 

00:40
Didn't help create age of so that's where we're even. 

00:46
But I would love to let me invite Paul back up here. 

00:50
Cool. 

00:51
I think he can come up himself, but I'll invite him all the same. It is his discord. But real quick, just since we have kind of a mix of people here, maybe some who are not familiar with one or both of you, have you guys do a quick introduction of yourself. Bored, I will let you go first since you are our guest today. 

01:13
Sure. International Pseudonym. I go by Bored Elon Musk. I have maintained my secrecy around my identity for almost ten years now on Twitter. But more relevant to this conversation, spent about a decade in the games industry, worked for a very large and well known but beloved Japanese gaming company, learned a lot about the industry and decided to sort of shift my attention of my pseudonym and my character that I've been playing online towards gaming and game ownership around blockchain. So for the last two years or so, I've been an advocate, an educator, a curator of the best games that are out there and are coming soon. So when I see games in production like Wildcard, I definitely want to elevate them and give them the attention they deserve and day to day now, I am co founder of Boredbox. So think of us as kind of a proof collective for gaming. 

02:14
Our goal, our mission is basically to help people discover awesome games. We have a membership, we have a system that we call Boredom that lets people earn points and trade them in for game items. And we just launched a brand new product called Featured Games Pages. And the first game to be featured is Wildcard. So if anybody wants to come check out Boredbox IO. We're selling Genesis Wildpasses. But it's not just a pass. It comes with a whole bundle of cool stuff, like a collectible pin, a poster, boredom Points. And it basically was meant to feel kind of like when a game would be coming out and there'd be limited edition collector sets and it wouldn't just be the game, it would come with a bunch of cool stuff. You could display that's kind of the feeling we wanted to recreate now that sort of stores like GameStop and the idea of buying physical games is going away. 

03:07
We wanted to recreate this idea of how can we make it special? When you preorder a game, or when you want to show that you're a super fan of a game, that's really what it is. So we have 50 of these packs. Ten of them are already gone, and we'll be selling these for the next two weeks or so. And our hope is that we can introduce some new faces to Wildcard and likewise bring some Wildcard fans over to Bored Box. Yeah, thanks for the time today. 

03:34
Love it. And so for anyone listening, I dropped the link in the discord stage chat, so you can follow that if you want to grab one that I think someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that even with all of the goodies at Wildpass is below floor price. So it is at a discount for you all if you go pick up to mention that. 

03:58
It's a pretty sweet deal. If you were planning on getting a Wildpass already, you're getting it basically for a very good price, and it comes with a bunch of stuff. So kind of a no brainer if you're going to get one anyway. 

04:09
Agreed. 

04:10
It is a no brainer. 

04:11
I'm on the fence from buying one myself and I work here. 

04:17
Awesome. 

04:18
And Paul, I know you need no introduction, but just in case anyone's listening in that's not familiar with Paul Bettner wildcard, do you want to do a quick intro yourself? 

04:26
Hi, I'm Paul. My first question is, can you guys hear me okay? Because the fans on this little new amazing laptop are going crazy. Is that okay? Can you hear me? Yes. 

04:35
You're good? 

04:38
Yeah, it's good. This new Razor 16 laptop that I got, it runs Wildcard really good, but it likes to run its fans also. Yeah. My name is Paul. I'm the co founder and co CEO together with Wild Kate, who is our other co CEO, also happens to be my wife. We have been making games for a long time. I have especially been making games for a long time, for almost over 25 years. I started my career, as I think a lot of you guys have heard, working on the Age Vampires franchise, joining that team out here in Dallas. I was there for many years, worked on all of the Age games and also worked on Halo Wars. Left that company after twelve years when the iPhone came out, and I felt the need to go make games for that before anyone thought that was a good idea or thought that was the cool thing to do. 

05:26
Most of my friends and colleagues at Ensemble Studios thought that I was having some kind of cris. But anyway, we did. We started an iPhone game studio. That studio created Words of Friends, which was a huge hit here in the west especially. And then after that, we created this company with the vision, the continued vision continuing vision to build beloved games and IP on the forefront of new technologies and emerging platforms. I mean, I think the experience, especially that we had with Words of Friends certainly gave us an endless fascination and love for building games on these new frontiers like Web Three is right now. But it's even true going back to the Age of Empires games. I think one of the things that I was always most passionate about with those games was trying to reach people that weren't necessarily just traditional core gamers and seeing if we could expand that audience. 

06:23
Which is why part of the reason why Age of Empires is a historical game, why it was bright and colorful and attempted to have a great user experience and be as accessible as possible. And we are continuing that journey today. We feel like Web Three is the next biggest opportunity for video games and especially empowers the vision that we have for Wildcard as an ecosystem that connects together, competitors, but also all the other folks who show up to enjoy games these days. Whether you're tuning in to watch someone on Twitch play a game, whether you're these days owning an NFT from a game or game project, there's all these other fun and exciting ways that people are getting involved with game and game IP. And I think web Three is truly the answer to how that can take off. So anyway, that's a little bit about me and what I'm excited about. 

07:16
And Borge, thanks so much for being here. 

07:19
Oh yeah, thank you. What I gathered from that last part was that you might be building a version of this game for the Vision Pro since you're always ahead of the game when it comes to new technology. So looking forward to playing this in. 

07:32
Three D. You know, not joking, people. 

07:37
Have asked about it. 

07:38
There have been versions of Wildcard that have run on previous VR headsets, if I must drop a little bit of mainly because we really want to experiment with even what that experience was like, tuning in as a spectator or a player and having that kind of perspective on the game. And there's a ton of cool stuff. Yeah, I think so. I think the other thing, if I'm just going to be on a roll of dropping some alpha here for a second, especially as we think about the Wildcard ecosystem. One of the things that got me most excited when we started working on this game in 2017, and were at that point, actually working directly with Oculus on the Lucky's Tale franchise, which was kind of a headline VR game for the launch of their headset. I asked myself, I don't know when it's going to happen and I still don't know whether it's going to be Apple Vision Pro that causes this to take off or not. 

08:35
Or it might be like the next iteration of that or whatever but at some point we're going to all be wearing these pairs of glasses that don't necessarily look like ski goggles, just look like really cool sunglasses and yet allow us to live in the world together with the video game characters and IP that we love. And when I asked myself so if I project forward in the future and I'm an owner of a game company and we have different IP and different games we've worked on and franchises we developed, and then this big revolution happens. With wearable computing and with spatial computing and AR and VR, what kind of game would I wish we had made? And the answer was a game that's all about collecting creatures. So there is a little bit of that worked into the original vision and desire and our kind of interest and passion of working on this kind of collectible creature game. 

09:27
So, yeah, there you go. 

09:28
And that's exactly the future I want. I want to be walking down a forest trail and sort of like shadow of the colossus style, just see a giant in the background and be able to walk towards it and collect it and it's not there yet, but that's what I want. And I do want it to be like just a pair of sunglasses and we're not quite there yet, but someday. 

09:51
I said yesterday I'm proud and grateful of the fact that apple has taken this step. I think it was probably one of the hardest decisions they've ever made internally. But I think the only way that we all get there to that future is if great companies like apple are willing to build and ship products and iterate their way towards that. So I'm very glad to see them finally show up at this party. 

10:12
Yeah, same. I'm going to let other people pay $3,500 for the device for now and wait until a later version. But I agree. 

10:19
Generally you could surely Boredbox needs to buy you one. That's all I'm saying. 

10:25
I don't know if you know this, Paul, but as co founder you have to pay all the bills of your own company's expenses. I think katie is the one who's signing the checks. 

10:40
She would have reminded me of that even before you did if she were here. 

10:44
Yeah. I'm definitely looking forward to it. 

10:46
If you could do me a favor and text me the password for the branch. I know we're not it turns out this reinstallation of steam lost me. The branch password. 

11:01
Is slack. Okay. 

11:05
Discord better then I can just copy paste. 

11:07
Oh, yeah, I'll do that. 

11:09
I'm not a bot. This is the real Paul. I'm asking you for the password. 

11:14
He will DM you for the password. 

11:17
Yeah. I think we're friends on so let's see. 

11:21
We are. Here you go. 

11:24
Thank you. 

11:25
You're very welcome. 

11:26
AMI, is your profile picture an endorsement of the emerald green wildpass implication that it's the best one? 

11:35
It is the best one. Yeah, you heard me say it first? No, I told everyone that when the mint happened, I was going to mint it Wildpass. And then I was fully committed to that first color no matter what. And so green is what I got, although I took the what color are you quiz and I actually got blue. So I suppose if I'm going to endorse, it should be blue. 

12:01
There's this big debate happening in the Bettner household about what color I am. And I mentioned this before, but I'm one of those Harry Potter people who will not take the Sorting Hat because I don't need a stupid hat to tell me that I'm a Gryffindor. I know it's kind of how I feel about the color. Quiz is amazing and it's like the most fun thing for everyone, but I kind of want to pick my own color, and I'm not sure what it is, actually. I thought it was Alabaster, and now maybe I'm not. 

12:30
That test you made, is that based off Myers Briggs or am I crazy? 

12:35
It's based on actually a much more advanced we have been working with this incredible team to do audience research and analysis of the different kinds of players that are showing up in our community already and the kinds of people that play games like Wildcard, et cetera, because we really envision if we can be as successful as we hope that Wildcard can go on to be one of these beloved IPS that can turn into toys that people want to own and films people want to watch and just all sorts of wonderful things that we've had a chance to be a part of in our career thus far. So we dream about that happening for Wildcard, but we know that you don't accidentally get to a world class worldwide popular IP by just guessing at it. It really does take a lot of thought about how to have the IP be accessible to lots of different types of people and lots of different segments of that audience. 

13:30
And so early on in Wildcard, we started working with experts in this field who do analysis and kind of provide advice and counsel and guidance on building IP that can appeal to broad audiences. And part of that research led to this quiz that you guys have all taken the color survey that asked certain questions to help us get a sense of where our audience currently aligns across the different colors and colors represent in the IP, which we haven't been super. I know we've been a little bit vague about. It is very fun and it has a lot of deep thought in it. It's not just as simple as virus breaks, even though obviously the research comes from a similar place. 

14:14
Taken it yet? I dropped the link in Chat. 

14:19
Find out what color you are. 

14:21
Yeah. 

14:23
Making a decision. So I have all eight colors and at a later point, I will commit to one of them. 

14:29
I think having all eight colors is its own color. That's a special kind of person that is independent of single colors. 

14:38
Yeah. It summons Captain Planet and does all sorts of magical things. 

14:43
Indeed. Okay, quick reminder, because I can see that we have a nice handful of viewers on Twitter. Hello, Twitter. I'm not looking at but we are at the end of this event giving away a B 64 Boredbox membership. But that is happening in Discord. So if you are listening in anywhere else and you want to participate in that giveaway, then make sure to head on over to the Wildcard Alliance Discord, join us in the Arena Chat Channel. And we'll do it here in about 30 ish minutes. 

15:19
And we will send a it's an Ethereum NFT, which is our membership, and we'll cover the cost of all that. But you do have to have an Ethereum wallet. 

15:27
Nice. 

15:28
Hopefully you do. 

15:29
Got it. 

15:30
We've taken a similar approach where we don't like to have people spend gas for things that we're trying to give out or provide. And so it's really nice, you guys, to cover the gas of that. We've tried to do the same thing with all of the assets that we put it, or in the case of, like, Wildpass, it's on Maddox. So gas is, like, one penny. 

15:46
Yeah, it's like you don't want to go on the prices right. And win. And then I'm just going to keep making, like, boomer references throughout this. 

15:58
That's all right. Dad jokes, boomer references and Zelda talk is what we're here for. Actually, what we're here for is to see which one of us is better at Wildcard. 

16:07
Oh, yeah. Big mystery. 

16:11
Yes. I'm starting it up now, which means because I'm on this new laptop that it's installing DirectX at the moment, but that usually doesn't take but a minute. So we'll go into that Bored. You were mentioning earlier that this is your, what, third time playing the game? Fourth time. 

16:27
It's my third time. Yeah. So I'm still in the mode of, like, I have to think about what I'm pressing, which means I'm not summoning as quickly as I should be. But bear with me. Play it like 80% of your ability. 

16:41
You have an advantage, because the only version of the game that I've played in, like, literally two months is the crazy chaos build, as we call it, the Broken. Iterative highly different version that our designers are working on day and night right now to experiment with new game modes and maps and all sorts of fun things, which means that I can hardly remember how to play this build, which is from, like, two months ago now. So we're both there at a disadvantage, maybe. 

17:10
Yeah, I mean, if you want to hold your gamepad upside down too, it's fine. All right, you guys let me know when I should hit play to join. 

17:25
Streaming on you. Sorry, go ahead. 

17:28
No, that's okay. Do you want to stream? I'm jumping into spectator, so I can also do that. 

17:36
Hold on 1 second. Let me see if I can there we go. All right, I'm going to start streaming my screen. Hopefully this works good. If it doesn't, I can get an Ethernet cable. Why is Discord saying that? There you go. 

17:51
I had to stop, and now you can start. 

17:53
Okay, thank you. All right, we'll do 1440 resolution. Is that good enough source? I don't think no, source is probably 4K on here. And let's go for smoother video. All right, can you guys see my screen? 

18:08
Yes. 

18:09
All right, we're getting some echo on your info. 

18:13
It's not bad from the game itself or from me, like our voices. Okay. Yeah, it's better when I mute. Let me see if I can I could log in as a different Discord ID, but I don't know how to mute and do that at the same time. All right. What I was thinking that we could do is similar to before. I don't know if we have the time, so AMI, you tell me. But I could give people a little bit of a tour through the game like we normally do. It takes five or ten minutes, and then we could jump in, or we could just jump straight in. You tell me. 

18:51
I would say let's do like, three to five minutes. 

18:55
All right. 

18:57
Yeah. 

18:57
Then I could practice a little bit too. 

19:00
Right? Wildcard is a game about champions, and their creature summons their deck of cards that they bring into the match. These are the two champions that are in this build Bored is going to play as Bulgar because it starts with B. I'm going to play as Locke because I don't know, it has nothing to do with my name, but because he's playing lucky. Each champion has pretty unique different abilities. Boreds with Bulgar is that he can summon his little bear on his shoulder, so he carries around one of his summons with him and doesn't have to use mana to summon that. And then he can also turn into a were bear as his super. And my ability is I can discard cards from my hand and pull new cards in, which is quite powerful. And I also have a time trance, which slows down enemy creatures and speeds up mine. 

19:53
All right, let's go into the game itself. If you want to hit play Bored, we should get matched in. 

20:01
All right, there we go. 

20:03
So today we're using preconstructed decks, which means that just like a normal TCG, the kind of core game loop includes collecting cards and crafting your strategy by choosing which cards you build a deck out of and then bringing that deck into the game. Today, because of the shortened time frame, we're not going to go through the whole cycle of building a deck. So we built decks instead for me and Bored to use, which I think are the same deck. They might not be the same decks. I think we have different creatures, but this has been balanced fairly well, where nobody has said that Locke or his deck or Bulgar or his deck is that much better than the other players. So we'll see what happens. 

20:44
I think one thing people don't always appreciate or know about is just how hard it is to balance a game with so many different characters with different abilities. You think about a game like Smash Brothers and just like, let's make sure that all 60 players are fairly matched against each other, and then people keep exploiting each character and figuring out ways to beat other people. It's a lot of work. 

21:07
I think if I had known what I was signing up for, were signing up for because it has the complex, as you're saying, the game balance complexity of a TCG and all the content required to create all these creatures, and yet in a normal TCG, those are really just cards and 2D art assets. But in wildcard, they are full 3D creatures that come to life and do battle in this arena where that's all happening in real time. And so the complexity of balancing those things and really just actually balancing the overall core loop of competing as your champion, right? And I have these abilities, right? I can teleport like that. I have a ranged attack. I have this ability, which is the time trance thing that you just saw right there. I can do all these things as the champion himself. And then I also have these creatures that you can see on the bottom of my screen that I can cycle. 

22:06
These are coming from my deck, and I can pull my trigger and summon these onto the field. And they all have their unique behaviors. And in earlier versions of this game, we would see players either spend too much time with just their champion or they would not even move, and they would just focus entirely on their deck. And so finding that balance between these two elements of action, gameplay as a champion and strategic gameplay as a card deck builder has really been what we've invested a lot of that time, that play test time, into. 

22:35
Yeah, with this being my third session, I'm still in that mode of memorizing stuff and thinking a little bit about summoning and then actually doing melee combat at the same time. But I feel like you play it five or more times and you start to get it down where you're not thinking as much anymore. 

22:51
Well, yeah, what we've also seen, I mean, again, with all the games that I've had the blessing to work on, especially the strategy games like going back to age vampires is always that phrase. Easy to learn, but could take a lifetime to master. And generally how that manifests in play tests is that you can put the controller in someone's hand and they just start pushing buttons and causing fun things to happen like this, without necessarily knowing what they're doing. Like, oh, cool, look, I made some creatures come to life, and they're moving across, and they're going to do something. And that as you continue to play, you realize, oh, wait, it matters where I summon a creature. Oh, wait, it matters the order in which I summon them. It matters when I build little groups of units that synergize with each other. And every game becomes this discovery process of learning something new. 

23:39
And the end result is hopefully that wildcard players have that feeling of like, oh, let me just play one more game. Let me just try one more game. Those games in our lives that cause us to stay up too late because we're just like, oh, I just want to keep trying. And that's what we're aiming for with wildcard. 

23:57
No, that makes sense. And a lot of that will come. 

23:59
From I'm going to say keep talking about wildcards, but also start playing. 

24:04
All right, I'm ready. 

24:07
Oh, boy. All right, we're going to try to keep talking and playing at the same time. 

24:13
All right. I'm going to let my mana build up here. I could summon an aloe, but instead, I'm going to wait until I get a little more mana, and then I'm going to cause some pain for no. 

24:25
Definitely keep telling me what your strategy is. Verbally. That's helpful. 

24:31
And I'm also going to back it up with an aloe. So now that jams that I sent over to his side of the field is going to be healed, it's going to start doing damage to his goal while he's summoning some watchies in the middle lane, which will do a great job defending, but they're not going to actually put a lot of pressure on me. Oh, yes. Jan's already took a shield down. Nice. That was a good initial push. Let's see if we can keep up that pressure. But also, I'm going to put a watchy on my base to defend. Watchy is our favorite creature right now in the Meta. Everybody is using watchy in every game. Like the most popular. 

25:05
I died soon. 

25:07
Oh, no. Dying is okay, not the end. 

25:13
I got to be mindful about getting health, for sure. 

25:18
As creatures take damage and die, they drop health pickups. So definitely you want to take advantage of that. As you can see, I'm using my range to attack to pick off his little watchies because they can't do much against me, but at the moment and I'll pick up these little health pickups. There we go. All right, that's a nice little push. I better move back to my base and get ready for that. In fact, I'm going to drop a jams on that guy's head. There we go. 

25:42
Is this aloe here just stuck in my side? 

25:46
No, she is defending those puppies is what she thinks her job is right now. 

25:52
I got you. 

25:53
Okay. All right. Your sports have multiplied. I have multiple sports to deal with here. That's not great. Let's start doing some attacking. See if I can keep this push off my base. Yeah. There we go. All right. But you got another way. 

26:07
The scores multiply the further out they are, right? 

26:10
That's right. So they're kind of good to send on that Underlane. Because that Underlane is the longest lane. It tends to give them more time to do that multiplying. 

26:21
What's the max multiplier you've seen with them? 

26:25
We have a screenshot of, like, 100 sports sitting on someone's goal. So it's gotten crazy before, especially in skirmish mode where things don't necessarily die like they should. It's gotten out of control and tanked the frame rate. 

26:42
That's funny. 

26:43
All right, now you got some game happening here in the middle and in the under. Elaine, see if you can keep those guys. In fact, I mentioned sport. I'm going toss the sport down there and let him do his thing while I focus on this battle happening up here. Drop my special Billy. There we go. Good push. There we go. To defend myself. 

27:09
You don't spend much time off sides, right? That's probably not the best. 

27:13
Well, I mean, definitely a key strategy is, like, spend all your mana and then run across the field to support your troops. But don't spend too much time over there because you do not want to sit at Mana Cap because you're just wasting it at that point. 

27:27
That makes sense. The mana definitely regenerates really quickly. 

27:31
Yeah. In the build, I'm playing it's way slower now, so yeah, this build, it's pretty frenetic, but that's always be summoning. Nice. 

27:51
Oh, boy. 

27:52
Can't have three aloes. That's a problem. Okay. Oh, nice ko. Okay, here we go. A jam is coming across. Backed up by three aloes. This is a problem. I might have pushed my advantage a little much. Oh, gosh, man is starved right now. This is bad. Three sports aloe shoot a crew. 

28:20
My character is flashing white or didn't mean to do that. 

28:25
I just pulled off my super, which is going to slow down all of your stuff that's in range in me. Oh, I got Ko. So that didn't work. 

28:33
Okay. I haven't completely embarrassed myself. 

28:35
I'm happy. Nice, dude. This is good. Good push. Come on. 

28:41
I really do love the character designs. Like, I can see these at 3D characters on my shelf. They're just really beautiful. 

28:47
That is what we're aiming for. Kind of like a next generation Pokemon feel is what we're hoping. Man, that was a really good push. You took down one layer of my shield. This guy is frozen, which is helpful. Let's get a watchy out here. Maybe another sport so you can deal with that. Those guys. All right, we're going into overtime. 

29:08
So how do you win in overtime at the moment? 

29:13
I think it reduces the health on the shield, so it just makes it easier to take down the goal to accelerate the end game. 

29:20
Okay, got it. 

29:21
Yeah. The latest game mode iterating with in play test is quite different than this in terms of the objective. We're really experimenting with those kind of mechanics right now. But, man, it's hard to talk and fight at the same time. You're keeping the pressure on now. 

29:38
That was my strategy. 

29:41
Ask questions. Ask questions. 

29:47
Imagine, like, two years. How many characters do you want to reveal per year in the future? Or is there going to be, like, a limit and you just want to cut it off forever? 

29:57
I think we're going to approach it seasonally, like kind of our most favorite TCGs do. 

30:02
Yeah, that makes sense. 

30:03
And we're not exactly sure how many cards are going to be in a full season. The difference between us and a normal TCG is that the player strategy is a combination of the cards in their deck and their champions. So you get this combinatorial thing where we don't need as many creatures to create the same strategic depth as, like, a typical PCG. We're trying to figure it out right now. I don't think we've committed one way or another. I've heard numbers anywhere from 50 to 80, and so I don't know where we're going to end up, but we're experimenting with it now, and we have a pipeline of constant creature development. There's, like, at least 70 in development at the moment on the team. 

30:43
That is a lot. That is a lot. But I think inevitably there's always, like, ten that people start off with that are safe bets that are easier, and then you can get more complex and start to use characters that have massive abilities, but also okay. Didn't expect that. You'd be playing with the gamepad upside down, aren't you? 

31:06
No, but you got to stop asking me questions, bro. I feel like this is why I've not had to deal with before. Answer questions while trying to win it's super hard. 

31:17
I could never be a streamer who plays and talks at the same time. That is so impressive. 

31:22
I have no idea how that even happens, actually. 

31:26
That is why the elite players are just sitting huddled over a computer and not talking. But watching that as an esport isn't always as fun. It's a lot more to me, like, enjoyable to watch a streamer who's talking and screaming while playing, but they're not as good as the professional players are. 

31:43
All right, well, I'm going to try to be a little more focused. We'll see how it goes this time. 

31:48
No problem. 

31:51
Your tactic of asking me hard questions, that's fine. I'm here for it. 

31:59
Who's your favorite civilization in age of Empires, too? 

32:02
No. Not going there. 

32:05
With an explicit detail. 

32:07
Of why you have to stay at least focused on wildcard in the topic. 

32:11
Fair enough. 

32:13
Okay. 

32:14
Would you have rather played as? 

32:16
What's your favorite civilization? I'm going to turn this tactic around on you. What's your favorite civilization in age of Empires? 

32:21
The one where I run away and get help, but then I die anyway. Probably the Britons. Honestly, I like the archery and it's not the most sexy choice, but it works. 

32:33
No. I tend to favor also the sort of civilizations and or creatures and or strats that are sort of obvious that don't require a lot of deep thoughts. Yeah, I feel like Britain's are that way, which is why I always like them too. 

32:49
Okay. I think you learned some tricks here. 

32:52
I learned some tricks. I'm just asking you questions. 

32:55
This is how that's working. Oh, man, this is are you playing. 

32:58
Street Fighter Six right now? 

33:00
Yeah, it seems like it. Oh, like, literally. I thought you meant in this game. No, I'm just terrible at Street Fighter. Absolutely terrible. I was always a tekken guy. That was my jam. But no, I mean, it looks beautiful, so hopefully I'll get to try it out soon. I'm just like if I have any game time right now, it's going into high roll. I have an hour a day max at this point to play games. So I am definitely trying to do one at a time and I have a feeling I'm going to play that for a long time. 

33:34
Yeah, it's the same for me. I did install Street Fighter because my kids really, like, want to play it. But yeah, all my free time is in there already. 

33:45
Street Fighter to me is like calculus of fighting games. Like, it's just a lot of memorization. 

33:51
I love it actually. It just has some of the cleanest rock, paper, scissors of any of that franchise. Although we are playing a lot of Dead or Alive now again too, because I was like I was all the different classics. Once they started getting Street Fighter, I was like, well, let's check these other ones out. And actually the three we gravitated towards is Street Fighter, Dead or Alive? And Samurai showdown. 

34:15
Oh, samurai showdown is amazing. I'm going to throw Virtual Fighter in there as well. 

34:21
Yeah, I haven't installed that one yet. I don't know. I mean, that one is so by the books. I don't know if they'll like it as much, but I remember one time. 

34:30
I went to the Evo Tournament, which is kind of like the International Fighting Game Tournament. And people are insane to the point where I don't know how they're physically doing what they're doing in these. 

34:44
Yeah, we recently had dream hack here in Dallas. That was one of those giant land parties and I didn't get to make it, and I was really sad. I think next time I'm definitely going to go. It looks like super fun I haven't been to one of those, like, classic land parties in forever. 

35:00
Do you think your kids know what a land party is? 

35:03
I mean, they've seen pictures. 

35:07
The grainy pictures taken on an eight millimeter Polaroid. 

35:12
And honestly, it hasn't changed that much over the years. 

35:16
Yeah, the wires going into a machine. It's true. 

35:19
Yeah, that's right. And a bunch of nerds sitting around eating pizza and playing games until all hours of the night in a hotel. 

35:26
A lot of my college downtime was spent in the dorm playing counterstrike and just yelling across the hall. Okay, all right. One, one. Very nice. 

35:35
One to one. One to one. 

35:38
No, this is very hard to talk and play. Okay, here we go. I'm saving up. 

35:46
Focus just a little bit. All right, let's do this. I'll let you deal with that to start with. Normally do that. We're going to see how this works. But you did the same. But see, we tried two different strategies. You tried coming up the middle. 

36:01
Yeah, let's see. 

36:02
I'll just lose some of my champions abilities, wipe these guys out. No problem. You could craig, it's dropping sands on top of that. There we go. All right, back you up by a Shindor. This be great. All right, we got some middle lane battle happening now. 

36:23
Where most of the action is happening typically. 

36:26
Yeah, we've been fighting a lot on the side lane for these past two games. We'll see what happens this game. All right, come on. Need that aloe. There we go. There we go. That's a good push. 

36:37
Oh, no, that's a good push. 

36:39
All right. See, this is where I'm going to go across and support them with my oh, I don't have my super charged up. Damn it. Never mind. I'm going back. Withdraw. Retreat. 

36:48
You think there'll be some characters who flourish in the lower levels at some point. 

36:55
Yeah, that's some of the stuff we're playing with. I mentioned we have 70 creatures in development right now, and part of the design team's real focus is like creating those really interesting systems driven interactions and emerging gameplay, because our favorite feeling is when players can be clever. When players ask that question, I wonder what would happen if I tried. And then they tried, and it works. That's some of the best feeling in a video game. And we really want the card. 

37:22
That was quick. 

37:24
Sorry, I was not going to let it happen. 

37:27
No, nor should you. It would have been an international incident if you lost at your own game. That was good. I got one. My goal. 

37:39
I did not let you in the first round. I just got to say it. You really effectively use the tactic of having a conversation while we're trying to play to your advantage. So that was well played. 

37:48
Notable. Yes. By the way, I'm looking forward to potentially meeting you for the first time in real life later this week at the Three XP conference. 

37:58
I am too. What are you excited about there? What have you heard about that you're looking forward to? Yesterday? I heard about a pool party. So that's happening? I don't know. 

38:07
I don't know if I'm in pool shape yet, but yeah, no, I mean, it's kind of interesting to me. E Three is not happening this year, but there is a summer conference in La that's happening this year for gaming and that's exciting and it's very relevant to our business. 

38:23
I agree. And basically every single person that I have met and known and become a fan of in this Web Three gaming space is showing up there. It's amazing how many people are like, yeah, I'll do it, let's go. And it's the first time this conference has happened, so I'm sure there will be lots of chaos. But the set of things that I've seen lined up, including the competition that are happening on the main esports stage, including Wildcard and other games, I can't wait to see how that goes down. That's going to be I love that. 

38:58
They'Re doing that because I think for a conference these days, for people to show up, you need more than just panels and kind of the typical thing that you could recreate on Twitter spaces. Having an esports arena gives people a really cool activity in addition to other stuff that will be happening. But yeah, I'm pumped to see that. 

39:15
So we've been talking a bunch about Wildcard. I want to ask you more questions about Boredbox. You've explained to me kind of the vision you have behind this. And it just gets me so excited because this space, it has a lot of folks that I think are looking for what Boredbox is aiming to offer, which is kind of more guidance. Kind of like cutting through the signal to noise ratio and helping to guide people towards the actual high quality fun games that people want to play and then providing value to those people who are showing up to do that. And I love it because from my perspective, all that we care about is meeting with the real gamers and creating value there and nothing else. So it's like fully aligned with what I love. 

40:02
No, it's great. When we started the business two years ago, I think were a little early because the whole premise was we want to curate the best games and it was still really early on in the Web Three gaming space. Right. So now I think we're all seeing lots of great games coming to market soon or already out and so we can really thrive. But the real world example is there was something special about going to a GameStop and talking to the guy or girl behind the counter and just getting specific recommendations around here's a game you'd really like as opposed to walking into a flea market where there's 10,000 different games available in the bin and you just have to rummage through and find it. Not to throw shade at Marketplaces, they serve a purpose. But trading is not necessarily the number one activity within games, right? 

40:57
It's playing the game. And so that's really what we built the business around, was to connect people who really want to play video games with video game makers who really want to have the best players. And I think that's kind of what's missing right now. So that's what we've been building and essentially it's a membership for people who love games and want to spend most of their time playing and not searching for them. So to that point, working with you guys has been a really important example. Especially as we launch our new featured games section. We want to make sure we put the spotlight one or a few games at a time. Give them time to have the spotlight to breathe, to really get attention and not try to assault people with like, here's 1000 games on blockchain you can consider because you and I don't have time to play ten games at a time. 

41:49
Right? Maybe we can do one, two or three at a time. You need a filter. And so I'm trying to be that filter. And your job right now is obviously you're building a game and you're doing the marketing and that's cool. I think your team is particularly good at marketing and user acquisition. But most game producers that I've worked with in the past often don't necessarily have that skill set. So if we can be helpful to game studios that are trying to find new players, that's a win for us. 

42:17
That's so important. I think the reason that we have that particular skill set here is just uniquely because of our journey through the game industry. When I was coming out off the Age of Empire's team and we started that mobile iPhone game studio, were in that exact same spot. We didn't know the things that were taking for granted that our publisher had previously provided to us, like things like marketing and user acquisition. It's easy as a developer to take that for granted and be like, we just got to make this really fun game and then it'll all just happen, right? And the reality is that it's usually a partnership between the platform publisher, developer, marketing team, et cetera, that helps the games reach their customers, find their audience and be did. We had to trial by fire, learn that when were building a mobile game studio, we had this early experience working with a company called Ngmoco that actually would fashion themselves very similar, like kind of one of mobile gaming's first sort of curated marketplace publisher companies back when EA and Activision and whatever wouldn't pay any attention to mobile game development yet. 

43:32
And they were able to really establish themselves as that source of high quality games. Initially on mobile and then they ended up selling, like a lot of companies did, aggregating and finding their way all the way up into an EA or Activision, I think at the end of the day through a series of acquisitions. But I think when new platforms happen like this, it's just a really important role that's needed. It's like those people that have already established trust and reputation, helping to guide gamers through this kind of especially in Web Three, a bit scary and full of more danger than maybe a traditional gaming platform. Full of more risks. 

44:17
Handholding. But at the same time, when you think about going back to the point about land parties, if you never had done that before, and someone's like, hey, we got to play this game. You just have to basically install this server on your system and then bring over your machine and then plug this wire into that wire. And then you need to get a modem. If you think back to those days, and for anybody who's old enough to remember those days, there was a lot of handholding that your friends would help you with. And so we kind of want to be those friends. Like, here's how this works, right? Here's how to use a wallet. Here's why this game is great and why it's worth your time. And we're all navigating through that. 

44:56
That's why I'm so excited to be working with you guys, is that's your focus. It's more about leading people to fun and to having a great user experience than it is about just like, here's the thing that we think is going to go up, or here's the thing, you are entirely focused on the other side of that, which is such a breath of share in this space. Honestly, I think it's why we first immediately just magnetized towards each other as we started having those conversations. The other thing that I love about this and working with you guys not to just continue the heat praise. Yeah, it's fine, right? But from the perspective of wildcard's vision, I feel like the Web Two way of doing things was every company and every game is trying to just grab the user and bring them into a walled garden and close the gate and be like, you are now our user. 

45:47
We're going to own you and you're going to be a part of this ecosystem of this game. And the web free model is more like it's just much more open. It's less about building, like little walled towns and more about sort of creating a connected ecosystem and how that manifests in this regard is I've used that word like three times. Sorry. How I think that applies to this relationship is I am excited about finding the unique ways to differentiate the communities that are becoming a part of the wildcard network, so to speak, where instead of us just saying, well, you're either part of Bored's community or you're part of Wildcard's community. I'm more interested in saying you're a part of Bored's community or BoredBoxes community because you love that. Now, how can we make it really fun to be a part of Boredboxes community and also a player of Wildcard? 

46:42
And how can we create unique opportunities that you only receive if you're a part of that community that makes it feel even more special to be a part of that and other Web Three communities that are out there. And I think that's the way we all make it together, rather than trying to be like, well, it's one or the other, which I think was more of a Web two way. 

47:01
Yeah, I think for us it's the norm, not the exception. And in the Web two world, it's been the exception. So when you have these moments in traditional gaming history where Crossplay gets enabled or like this character shows up in this game that was 5% of the time at most, and players absolutely go nuts about it. They love it. But we know on the business side how hard it is now to do that because you have mega corporations that have to protect their IP and sort of their walled garden, as you said. So I get it. Who knows, maybe we'll be so big someday that we're going to act like that too. But for now, we're friendly. And I think ultimately what you're seeing in web Three is the culture is being established as collaborative. There will be friendly competition, of course, but I think just the nature of wanting to participate in each other's communities and share IP or extend your IP into other places is really cool. 

47:55
And fans, players clearly love that. So that gives me hope. And who knows, maybe this will spill over into web Two as well. Maybe you'll see more Cross collaboration and enabling players to have more rights and games as well. 

48:10
I mean, honestly, I want to jump in. I love this discussion and it's absolutely amazing. But we do only have a few minutes left and I want to make sure that I sneak in. The questions that we got asked in. 

48:23
Chat. 

48:27
On what Bord was saying is it's not just something that's nice to have. It's a strategic advantage. It's a thing that we can do as an independent company that those big companies aren't willing or can't do because all their lawyers tell them not to. So it serves us as well as it serves the players, which I love. Okay, AMI, I'm sorry. Thank you. 

48:44
No, that's okay. Okay, so Ved asked a really good question. I think that their question was directed at Wildcard, but I'm going to alter it a little bit because I would love both of your opinions on this in web three in general. But the question is, how will the game Wildcard or how will web three games in general push the boundaries of what's possible in terms of player driven content and emergent gameplay. 

49:10
First one is the player driven content. I think it just fundamentally alters the equation. When the player driven content that you can create as someone who's that content creator, you could end up owning more of that value. You can create that just changes that equation. It supercharges that loop between content creators and the developers and the publishers and the creators of the game when we're willing to use web three technologies to let more of that value find its way back into the hands of the content creators. Ideally, if two games being equal, like two games being the same amount of fun and the same degree of we want to play them as gamers, if one of them has that feature to it, where the content you create is something that you own, that game is going to end up dominating the other one, in my opinion. 

50:05
And so that's, I think, the first. 

50:07
Part of it, yeah, on my end, I'm really interested in seeing leagues emerge. So right now sports teams have owners. You have in certain cases esports, like really rich people who own a particular league or a team. But my future happy place is there's 100 people or 1000 people, they might own a character, they might own a team within a game, and they can make decisions based on it. They can decide how to outfit their character, what skins to use, who to take sponsorships from. So it's a different variation on the content creation point you're making. Paul but for somebody who's a little bit more passive and really wants to be more kind of on the audience side versus the creation side, I think that's a really fun way to have some skin in the game without being a player or a content creator. 

50:53
Dude, I'm so excited to hear you say that because that's sort of the implementation part of the vision that I was describing and it actually is exactly what we're building right now. So I am very excited. 

51:04
Why you got to steal my ideas, Paul? Why you got to steal my ideas? 

51:12
Okay, awesome. And then in the two minutes left, and I think this is going to sound like a marketing question, but it's actually pretty good because again, we're here today because there's a wildcard pack that is for sale right now on the Boredbox store. I'll drop the link. Again, one of the community managers can, but that includes a wildpass and we do get questions from time to time what exactly a wildpass gets you. Paul? Do you want to do a quick recap of what wildpass comes with? 

51:41
So our vision has been and this is really when we finally decided that Wildpass was going to be our first mint. It's because somebody in a meeting said, why don't we just create the ultimate Battle pass that is like a Forever Battle Pass. And as soon as somebody said that, it was like, oh, that's it. That's the thing. And so, of course, since then we've tried to answer all these questions and think deeply about, well, what does that mean? What does a Forever Battle Pass mean, especially in terms of web three. And to me, a Battle pass represents that feeling when you're playing a game and you're like, I really love this game. I love it a lot. I see myself getting involved in this game more, and I'm going to be a part of the community. And so I'm going to go subscribe to this battle pass. 

52:25
Because if I'm going to be playing anyway, and I'm going to be wanting to be part of this community anyway, then owning one of these things is going to increase my opportunity within the game. Typically in other games, it can mean like, when I do a thing, I get a better reward for doing that thing because I have that path. That feeling is exactly what we aim for Wildpass to deliver for our audience. And we've been doing that already in terms of allowing people who have Wildpass to get kind of the front of line of participating in play tests, talking to the team, and now the conversations we have internally, and I wish everybody could be a fly on the wall for this. We don't talk about a single feature in the game without asking ourselves, what does owning a Wildpass add to this feature, to this experience? 

53:11
How can we make this even more special for our Wildpass holders and owners so that Wildpass is delivering on that feeling of, like, man, I'm so glad I bought this. And I own this because I was already having fun in Wildcard, and this feels like this really valuable thing that improves and increases the amount of fun I can have in My. So that's the vision for Wildpass. What that implies, obviously, is that there's a lot of things in the future that we are excited about that we are working on that will be tied to Wildpass ownership. So look forward to that. But hopefully that vision helps people understand the feeling that we want people to have when they think about should I go get a Wildpass or not? 

53:55
Well, you'll make me happy if you let people change their username an infinite amount of times because most games charge for that. So if I could do that with. 

54:01
A Wildpass, sure. 

54:06
Okay. So I did promise who he wants. 

54:09
To be when he grows up and we will definitely help you with that. 

54:12
I promised that I would be respectful. Time. So we are out of time today. For those in the audience, we do have a giveaway. So I will let Paul and Bored close it out, but then stay here and we're going to drop the giveaway. I'll let you guys know how that works, but for now, to make sure that Bored can get anywhere that he needs to be and so can Paul. Thank you guys. Both is there anything, any parting words you would like to say as we close? 

54:42
I really want to thank Bored for giving me a new strategy, which is to distract the opponent with hard questions while they're trying to play. I'm going totally use that strategy now going forward. Thank you for that. Good game. You're very welcome. 

54:53
Good game. I'm very fortunate to have gotten a third practice round and I can't wait to play Wildcard again and eventually beat you consistently. But until then, this has been awesome. Thanks to everybody who learned about BoredBox today. I will say, besides the bundles and packs we're selling on our site, we are giving away five free wildpasses as well. So all you have to do is just create a membership on our site and you could be signed up for that. So no matter what you're comfortable with financially, hopefully you can participate in some way. 

55:27
And I'm so excited about the future of these two communities. That's the thing that gets me most excited when I have the chance to meet another founder like Bored that is really aligned with the kind of vision that we have for what Web three gaming can be in the future. Then I just get so excited about all these ways in which I want to create special and unique opportunities for people who are part of both communities to benefit from the fact that they're part of both communities. So this will not be the last time that you see us working together, and I would highly recommend Bord's a great guy and the things that you're building is amazing. And so if you like Wildcard and you like that, then it's the two great tastes that taste great together and it will be going forward. So thanks again for choosing us also Bored, as your debut premiere partner. 

56:12
Really appreciate that vote. 

56:15
Absolutely. It was an honor. And thanks everybody for having us today. 

56:20
Awesome. Thank you both. This was amazing. Okay, so I'll let everyone jump if they need to, but for those in the audience, we are going to drop our Giveaway now. So if you look over in the channel list for the Wildcard server, there is a channel in Town Square called Giveaways, and Remy is going to drop a Giveaway bot there. It'll only be up for a minute, so hurry. Go click over there. I'll link it in the chat too. Giveaways here. There you go. So you can click that. Looks like the Giveaway bot is now live. It's only up for a minute, so go click the emoji and that will enter you. Once the winner is drawn, I'm just going to verify that they are here in the audience so no one tries to sneak in while that's running. This. Is the Boredbox. 

57:18
The Wildcard pack. So as you can see, it comes with a Wildpass for 0.8 E, and it comes with all these great things. So that's amazing. There's also a bundle that comes with a Boredbox membership, so you earn Bored, and you can use that in the Bored Store, which is pretty cool. But what we're giving away right now is a B 64 membership. So it's an NFT, it's on ethereum, and it allows you to earn Bored, which is the currency on BoredBox. And then you can go into their store and you can use it to buy all sorts of things. Like what have they got right now? Founder pirates. They've got operators in here. Gladiator. All sorts of amazing gaming. So let's see who we got. Hazo. Oh, my gosh. Hazo, congrats. You are the winner of our giveaway. All right, so, Hazo, I will send you a I don't know if we're friends or not yet, but I'll send you a friend request and a message, and I'll get your wallet address. 

58:22
‍I'll send that over to wow, that's blinking a lot. Sorry about that. I'll send that over to Bored Elon and he'll send you the NFT for it. So congrats, guys. Thank you so much for joining us. Again. We're going to close out the stage, but I appreciate you joining for the event. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you have any other questions, want to get to know the game, get to know us. You can always find us in general chat or if you're a Wildpass folder or become one through the BoredBox store. We have a whole genesis area where we all hang out and we do play tests three times a week if you want to get your hands on the game. So I appreciate you all, and we'll see you at the next one.