🎮 Game Breakdown: Life Beyond

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf, Joe Fear. Hey, hey, what's up everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Today I'm actually stepping away from the mic and Mr. Crypto Buffalo is filling in for me as Joe Fear, AKA Kokomo. Joe and Crypto Buffalo interview this founder and CEO of the game Life Beyond, Benjamin Charbet. Now, in this episode, Ben's gonn down how Life beyond works. We're going to talk a little bit about the open economy, the metaverse, tokenomics, everything about the play to earn world and blockchain. Crypto Buff and Joe really, really break it down well with Ben. So I'm going to let them take it away and you're going to really enjoy this discussion. Now, before I do, make sure you're following us on Twitter. I am. Matt, our Wolf on Twitter. Joe is Joe Fear on Twitter and Buffalo is at Crypto Buffalo on Twitter. And one last reminder, make sure you join our Hard Fork Gaming White list. If you go to Hard.

You can join our email list. And by being on that email list we do a ton of giveaways, free NFT giveaways, token giveaways, alpha whitelists, all sorts of cool stuff for those that are interested in NFTs and gaming. It is a list that you're going to want to be on. We've given away thousands and thousands of dollars worth of NFTs and tokens already. So make sure you go to Hardfork GG whitelist and join us in the Hard Fork Gaming Alpha club. And that's about it. I'm just going to hand it right over to Kokomo Joe and Crypto Buffalo. Let's do it.

I'm Benjamin Charbet and the CEO and co founder of Daoise, the game studio behind Life Beyond. We've been working on the project since January 2018.

Awesome. And when you are talking to new people, investors or gamers, break it down real quick. Elevator pitch. How do you explain what Life beyond is to an investor or a gamer?

Lifebound is really the next generation of MMORPGs, if you think of games like World of Warcraft. And what was always amazing with these games is you start to have a first flavor of participating to a digital society. So being a citizen of these societies, but the experience was a little bit limited because there was only one archetype of citizen. Everybody was a hero and, and it kind of limited the the type of interaction that you could have. Now you were still Living in the living, experiencing this in the living and breathing world. You know, you would walk out and you would see pedestrians and farmers and also sort of professions populating this world. Well, what if all of these professionals were actually incarnated by real humans? So still in the game world, but every, every individual being empowered to have a job and participate to the life of this society. Well, this is what life beyond is about. So you're in a game world, it's an mmo, but you don't have to be the hero. You can be the hero, but you can also be the engineer, the farmer, the mason, the architect. And because it runs on the blockchain, while it's obviously powered with true ownership through NFTs, with kind of real life value through the tokenized economy. So in a way it's, we like to say that it's the feeling of the game, but the stakes of reality.

I that man, I've been seeing that trend a lot in Grand Theft Auto. You have people that now are playing in that world and living as individuals and it creates this. Everyone's real, right? There's not bots. Those are actually people being in that role. And it's a very interesting thing that's going on these days.

I could talk for hours about that.

Yeah, well, actually can you talk a little bit about how because Open economy or Open Metaverse, because the play to earn terminology, all that stuff's kind of changing and obviously with the times and maybe talk a little bit about that and how life beyond is kind of like this open metaverse economy concept.

You know, it's interesting because at first when we started joining the Web3 movement, I felt a little bit embarrassed because I was not native from this space. And now the more I think about it, the more I think it's actually one of our biggest Strengths. We are Web2Natives. You know, we're not embarrassed by that anymore. Absolutely. Going all in web three now. But what it means is that we're not play to earn at all. Not that we don't like play to earn or we think it's a bad thing, but just that this is a very different motive, a very different dynamic that we're trying to push. We are a free to play game, but we're free to play games that has NFT and that instead of an in game currency has an ERC20 token. So to me it's like we have the same type of dynamic of free to play, which is about accessibility, really empowering people who want to play and build up wealth in a game world by just their play time, but because of NFTs and tokens in general first, all of this investment can be turned into a value. All of this investment can be turned into whatever you wanted. So you have the choice as an, as an individual rather than having the publisher telling you what you're allowed to do or not. This is your property, so you can do whatever you want. And I think the, and because of all this and because of the economics brought by this, the Web3 business model operations, we don't have to be kind of, you know, leveraging behavioral economics nonstop to get people to, to pay and spend, which is where I'm always, I was always troubled, you know, in the past when I was working as a, as a, as a game designer in the traditional game industry where you were, we were feature creeping power creeping nonstop so that, you know, eventually you would get rid of your asset, you would buy new assets because of course we needed you to keep spending money in the, in the web3 economy. I don't need you to buy stuff from me. What I care about is if you interact with other players because if you guys build, you know, run the economic, the, the economy and perform transaction and do stuff, we of course earn revenue through that. So it becomes a very, very valuable model and everybody is very much aligned and it's much healthier, I think.

Well said, man. I agree. And this is something I'm very curious on with this time right now in the space it sounds like you've worked in traditional gaming. What are your thoughts right now with the play to earn space and the axie economy kind of fallen flat and just the timeline of where are we in this relationship to blockchain gaming and traditional gaming and it's easy to throw.

Tomatoes at Sky Mavis. I think what they've done is remarkable. You know, the how they've paid. They paved the way for this. You know, they managed to. In a country where people did not even have bank accounts, they managed to give them a wallet to give, to get them to have a wallet and be part of a form of a financial system, even though it was a decentralized system. So I have a lot of faith. I'm sure these guys are just going to figure out how to build something more sustainable. It's still very early and so of course we're all learning. And every time I meet someone who tells me he's an expert in Web3 and, and tokenomics and NFT, I kind of laugh because I think it's hard to call Yourself an expert in this. You know, it's so early, so I'm very confident. I'm also thinking that the bear market is in a way an opportunity because for sure, where I think we need to, where I'm very comfortable and I'm part of an amazing group now, Animoca brands who also share very much this identity, this set, the value of, you know, being very realistic, very humble about it. There's, there has been a lot of scam, there has been a lot of Ponzonomics and stuff like that. And so the bar market kind of cleans up the whole thing. So it's good because it's obviously a good time to build, to focus on what you're on the long term, on building sustainable things. And so it's also an opportunity for high quality projects to thrive and to kind of stand out. I'm extremely excited, extremely optimistic. I was in New York last week for NFT NYC and that was insane. That's all, that's, that's how I would summarize it, insane. And I came back so energized, so definitely confident in the. Into what's coming up.

I love how you describe all this stuff, man. This is, and it's perfect. Into what? I'm just kind of saying this. I don't know if it'll make like maybe it'll start something here, but Yacht has this whole open economy, you know, at Animoca. It's like you guys are, I don't know, how are you positioned at Animoca? It seems like you're like the perfect fit for their vision. And Yacht's vision of the open metaverse and property ownership and stuff like that.

It'S, it's, it's very interesting because when you look at the journey of DIYs, we were absolutely not trying to join a big organization. We were not looking to, to sell the company. We were very happy to be independent. But what happened was that we actually got introduced by a great guy who you obviously know, Sebastian Bourget from the Sandbox, who really told us, you know, wow, such a great cultural fit with what Animoca is doing and what we're doing at Sandbox and, and it really was genuinely true. We felt so close from a cultural standpoint and I, I just, I started to read what YAD had published in the past. And I remember even though we had been introduced and I had a me, I was supposed to have a meeting with him a few days after I messaged him, right after reading all this and being like, wow, I'm just blown away by what I was read, what I read. I, to be honest, I was not super educated about Animoca and who YAT was before. And I was like, this is, you know, I felt a little bit like he was saying things on, at a different level, on things that I had been trying to pitch earlier to investors and the ecosystem. We started pitching the metaverse in 2017 at the always, and people were laughing at us and what we were trying to explain through that was. And we didn't get the same level of maturity that he has in terms of the open Metaverse. But what we believe very much was empowering people in terms of value creation, in terms of considering games as nations and starting thinking that people will have a very meaningful existence in these online worlds. And to give them the means to do that means to have a real social, economic existence. So indeed, when we met with the, with them, it actually went really fast and we made this decision to kind of, you know, give, give, give in our independence, but enjoying them. But we also found that we would just be stronger. And to be honest, it was a very kind of also emotional decision that we just wanted to write this together.

That's, that's awesome. Everything. We work with a lot of the Animoca folks over there and know a lot of the other games and projects that are invested with them or, you know, and they say the same exact thing.

So you would be, you know, when I mean, I was working at Ubisoft, I was working with other companies in the past. It's, it's very interesting to see how the cultural fit is such a driver for, in Anima's decision process. And we keep talking about it, we keep talking about it. And also sometimes we share that publicly because we, we kind of speak together, you know, in some Twitter spaces or podcasts, and we kind of share our experience and we really talk a lot about this. So it's not just bs, it's, it's actually a real thing. And, and I think it's probably related also to Web3 for me, is not really about technology. Web3 is more an ideology. And, and so the technology is one thing, but there's a. Definitely a more like a bigger blend of values, opportunities, disruption. That is really interesting. That's been attracting me so hard. And, and, and so it's interesting because it's pretty consistent with how they think, how they operate. It's not just about a business. It's bigger than that.

I'd love to come back to the game Life beyond, there's been a bit of buzz about it. A lot of KOLs in the space like Cagillon Bryson and ourselves here at Hard Fork Gaming have been talking about Life beyond for your community that's watching right now that already know a little bit about the game. Do you have any Alpha or anyone who doesn't know about the game? What's going on right now with Life Beyond?

Yeah, we've been working really hard. So just, just the important thing is that we've been testing this game with our community for a long time. We constantly, we like to do that but it was also taking us. It usually slows you down when you do that. So it has to. You need to have like a real goal in mind. For the past few months, probably the past like eight months, we decided to kind of slow down on that really, you know, keep like kind of keep quiet and work and build. And so we've been really focusing on the gameplay and we're. I'm super excited. Excited because we. We just opened the early access of the open Alpha and we'll open it to every. So regardless of whatever you own, you just need to go on playlive beyond.com, create an account. You can connect your wallet if you want. You don't have to. You don't even need to have a wallet and you can. And you can start playing the game. There's no gateway, it's not gated at all other than signing up. And the. The Alpha will be running for a few months, I think at least probably until the end of September. There are a bunch of stuff coming coming up, additional content, updates. This is also the first up, the first time we're going to be distribute some tokens to the community by playing and completing some missions and participating into a raffle. We can talk about this after. So it's an exciting moment for us. It's a very focused alpha. So we'll have a. Several kind of episodes of this Alpha. Right now it's going to be episode one focusing very much on the action, exploration, adventure gameplay. So you, you go, you go out there in the. With a party of. Well by yourself, with a party of two, three, four players and you can to complete a series of missions. But the game will be way more. The scope is insane. It's way bigger than that and that's what will come in the other Alpha. So this one is really focused for us on kind of validating all the development that we've been doing before. We're doubling down and creating like way More content now.

Very nice. Real quick, what's some other inspirational games that kind of inspired Life Beyond?

So many. Because if you want one way to put. To put it is that Life beyond is kind of like. It's several games built together and that are connecting by a social and economic loop. So we're talking about very fortunate combat action gameplay, but combined with the kind of trinity system of World of Warcraft, you know, with light, because it's a co op PvE game on the action part. So you know, DPS damage, dealer, healer, tank, kind of a trinity mechanics. So that's very much on the. The action gameplay. But you can also think of Stardew Valley for the farming and management gameplay. You can think of Eve Online, obviously for the economic competition, challenges, social relationship. You can think of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies for more exotic gameplay and roles. But that are still important because this is what makes it a living and breathing or a kind of realistic society. So we're taking pieces from kind of inspirations from everywhere. The truth is we're not trying to necessarily to innovate and to build better gameplays for each of them. Where we think the innovation will come is in being able to connect all of these gameplays together and that is what will build the depth of this experience.

And for that one. Did they need an nft? They need to hold an NFT to do the open Alpha, right?

Yeah, if you. To play. So, yeah. And so do you need an NFT only if you want to access the Open Alpha right now. So between the 29th and 6th July. Indeed. You need an apartment key or a Dolos passport. Those are the two NFTs that you can have. The Dolos passport, you get it by burning five apartment keys. We dropped all of these NFTs a bit earlier, a month ago, five weeks ago, basically. So you can find them now on the secondary market on OpenSea very easily because we dropped a lot of them on purpose. That was the idea we really wanted to. That was a testament to this kind of free to play identity that we're carrying. But as soon as the early access is over, so as early as July 6th, you're able to enter regardless of whether or not you own one of them.

Right on. Perfect. Yeah, thanks for clarifying that.

Which is kind of scary, by the way. That's true. We're going to have a lot of people.

How many did you. How many did you give away on the NFT side?

So we gave away over a million NFTs on Polygon. Like shout out to them. It was not a, it was not an easy one but we did it and we didn't break anything which was a little bit scary. So yeah, what happened was we, we basically and I think we published a medium post to kind of explain we wanted to be. We always want to be very transparent about how we do things because we do a lot of mistakes and they're. But they're interesting ones and I think they can help everybody else. We basically had an eligibility period of a week where you could connect when you could connect your your wallet to our website. We ended and we would just take a snapshot at the end of this period and drop and airdrop these NFTs with no gas fee. Everything was. We were taking care of you guys but we ended up with 7 million wallets connected which was obviously at first it feels awesome and then you realize that probably a lot of bots in this thing. So talk took us a bit of time to clean this data to end up, you know what looked like really legit wallets and we, we ended up with a little bit over a million. So we airdropped this million nft. It's, it's really exciting and at the same time now we need to be ready to of course serve this community accordingly.

You know that's crazy. I had. We're both muted but like if you saw our faces we're like.

Had to have been a record or pretty high up there. I don't know for Polygon or in general for a game.

Well I mean at least I could compare with. With other animalcare project and I think we kind of hit a record on that. Not that I'm so obsessed with it, you know that that was not really the goal. That's another great benefit by the way of Web3 economies is that you can totally build a very valuable experience product business without needing constantly to have hundreds of millions of players. And coming from the free to play world, you have no idea how this is exhilarating to think about that. I come from a world where you would spend your life acquiring millions of players who would all churn and just to have a tiny group who would be spending money and that's how your game could sustain. Of course it's very different and so for us it's also a very strong part of our DNA today that we want to have a very committed and engaged community. So we were not obsessed with KPIs and numbers. We know that we're developing set something that can be very appealing and we're this is really our obsession. We cleaned our Discord, for instance, at some point. Even though that was good numbers, we were super happy to see this really high number of Discord members. But we cleaned it to take, you know, to make it safe, to make it more enjoyable, to be there, you know, less being harassed with bots and stuff like that. And so, yeah, I think we show we trimmed it by like 15 or 20,000 people.

I love it. I love the transparency and how you're doing things, man. And you're giving me so many ideas like there's such a service now needed for bot cleaning, you know, like of databases and whitelists and discords and all that.

Yeah, it's wild. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild. And you know, the space is what it is. It's full of opportunity. But you have to be comfortable with the fact that most things are half baked and it's okay. So if you expect very stable and accomplished technologies, you're going to be disappointed all the time. You have to think or figure out things yourself. You can't be really looking for a playbook. The market is changing all the time, the expectations, you know, now it's a bear market. So what you thought would be working three months ago. Absolutely do not work anymore. So it's great for experimentation. I think something that I love. Robbie Young, you know, the CEO of Animoca, always saying is keep your head cool. You keep your head cold. Like it's only 2 or 3 million crypto players right now. No need to brag, you know, no need to, to, to think that we've, that we've all made it. It's. We still have a lot to do. Let's focus on building, let's focus on building quality. This is another very important point for us, which is we want to build just a really fucking awesome game and regard and we want people to come and play it just because it's great and not because it has NFTs. Of course, we're not trying to turn off people who are just interested in participating to these economies in a different fashion without having to play actively because I'm among these people. You know, I love being like, I'm on Discord of a lot of games, but I don't really get to play them because I run a company, I have two kids, they're young, you know, it takes a lot of my, of my time and so I have a hard time really committing in the, in the, like the 3D software. But still I want to be Part of it. I think it's a very interesting space, a lot of opportunity. But there is this reality that it's not always going to be an easy ride in a smooth journey. But that's what I like about it.

I can see our cameras when you swore we're like, yes. Yeah, he's passionate about it.

Well, that's what the space needs too, right?

Exactly.

Fun and a damn good game.

I think we got most stuff. Joe, I don't know if there's anything that you feel like we missed.

Raffle.

Benjamin, I know you mentioned the $1 million raffle. Maybe tee that up because I'm thinking of our audience. They love the Alpha. They're invest but they're also gamers. You know, there's a blend. So if you can kind of describe that.

Yeah, absolutely. So we are planning this is our going to be our first kind of token introduction a little bit before the real deal. There is going to be a raffle at the end of this first episode of the Alpha. So by participating to the Alpha and there, there will be three content packs over the course of these three months, you participate to each of them. You have to accumulate a certain number of points by completing missions. Once you reach I think it's 500 points, you will get a raffle ticket. And the more you participate, if you participate to each of these, each of these content you'll get a mod, a multiplier and eventually you end up with all of these raffle tickets and you participate to a pretty big raffle because we're going to distribute to reward 8,000 players. 8,000 winners will. Will, will split 1 million dollar worth of our ERC20 token. So it's a, it's a really important milestone for us and kind of again, you know, we like to walk the talk and, and so it's a, it's a, it's again this testament to reward players for participating, for engaging with us. So, so I'm very, very happy about it. Very excited. We're going to publish a series of, of papers so that it's very clear people understand. But we have really an awesome community. Join us on Discord. We have our community moderators, our own community managers. Myself, I like to be there very often so come over, ask questions if it's unclear. Super happy to, to. To provide you with, with more insights about it.

Right on.

I got everything man. I think Benjamin, anything from your side that we missed that you want to get out at least by tomorrow?

No, I can't wait to be back guys. I love the. Yeah, I love the energy here. Can't wait to, to keep building with all of you guys. It's a. I think it's something that we, that we never. We probably don't talk enough about and I try to do it individually is we're super. Something that we love about web3 is building with other people. So of course there are the usual suspects right now, you know, and for us it's like the guys from Phantom Galaxy from the Sandbox. And we're trying to. We're definitely going to have a presence and all that, but there are so many other communities that we want to reach out there, out there because of either, you know, the. How their community is and we just want to interact with them. We have a. We own a board ape for instance. And we're definitely going to strengthen our relationship with Yuga in the future. There is a, you know, world of women love what they're doing, love what, you know, what we. I want more. I want to make sure that we do whatever we can to empower women in the game, in the gaming world also as players and as creators, but also as players. So what is really interesting is that we, we can genuinely collaborate, you know, and have a. And, and never be kind of defensive about our own space. And that is what again kind of echoes to this open metaverse thesis of to me, life beyond is just one destination where you will be traveling, you know, and, and kind of navigating between all of these layers from one to the other. And we'll be, and we'll be super happy to. To have people here. So this is really why it's so interesting to, to have an alpha now because we can collect this feedback. I can't wait to you know, keep talking with you guys and, and with the people on Discord and players on, on. On every social media to get this feedback, learn how we can do things better and obviously start empowering the community first. Of course, you know, it's. We're on the blockchain so everybody can start building things in a permissionless way. But we're also going to eventually start opening more of the game store, the source code so that we can have modding happening and people starting to really build like in game content. So so much, so much to more to come and but again with one I think key pillar which is together. So let's do it together.