This Metaverse Will Create Insane Opportunities (Featuring Michael McCarthy)

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Floatshark with your boy, my.

Boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, welcome back to what will be the second to last Hustle and Flowchart episode. Don't worry, don't stress out. We're not quitting podcasting or anything crazy like that. In fact, it's quite the opposite actually. We're actually going to go even bigger with the podcast. There's just going to be a little bit of a rebrand coming, so you can still expect awesome interviews dropping weekly wherever you're listening to the podcast right now. But I'm going to share more details on that in a short follow up episode and I'll break down all the details. It probably sounds more major than it actually is. Today's episode, however, is one that I'm super excited to share with you. Joe and I had the opportunity to sit down with Michael McCarthy, the co founder of Gala Games and the man leading the charge behind one of the games that we're most excited about, Mirandus. We recently did a breakdown video on our YouTube channel of Mirandas and we'll probably dive even deeper on it later because it is one of those really, really exciting Metaverse games that if you're not familiar with it, once you dig into what's coming with it, you'll probably be pretty excited about it. So in this episode, Michael is going to break down what makes Mirandas different and so exciting. We're also going to dive deep into what the future of the Metaverse looks like and how economies could operate. We also dive into the bigger picture of Web3, where Gala Games is taking things and we transition Web2 gamers into Web3. This one is packed with amazing ideas from one of the most influential people in the blockchain gaming space. But before we dive in, I want to shout out to our sponsor, manscaped. Let's be honest, if you're a digital marketer, crypto person, or a gamer, you're likely sitting behind that computer all day long. Your hygiene probably ain't the best. If you're a dude, you've probably got a raccoon growing down there in your shorts right now. That's where manscaped comes in. This is. They've got great products to help you keep them balls nice and tidy. They've also got things like lotions and elixirs to keep it fresh down there. Maybe tmi. But we here at Hard to Fork all use Manscaped products. We keep asking Joe to stop showing us proof, but he Keeps doing it anyway. But I digress. Check out Manscaped for your below the pants grooming needs. And on that note, let's go chat with Michael McCarthy from Gala Games and Mirandus.

My name is Michael McCarthy. I am the game director of Mirandus. I've been making games since the mid-90s, 25 years or so, worked on quite a large number of titles and contributed in different ways. But my love and my passion, I think was definitely in the early days of my development, making a lot of the old school RPGs at Interplay, Black Isle and Troika.

How would you describe Mirandus in your words? Elevator, pitch style? Just to present it to the audience.

Here, I'd say it's a classic fantasy MMO set more in the vein of an EverQuest or a game where there is danger and penalties if you die. So it's a little less about a grind and a little bit more about a large secret world that we're not going to give you a map to. And it's up to the players to explore it and survive.

I did a deep dive and I really sort of nerded out and went down the rabbit hole on Mirandus and. And I think one of the things that really, really excited me the most about Mirandus was the vision of the metaverse that you have with this kind of open economy concept, where we don't even know sort of what sort of businesses might even pop up within the game. So I'd love to hear in your words, what that vision of the metaverse is and how this open economy will all work.

There's different styles of games that you can create and I think getting to work with again, the amazing people at Black Isle and Troika, I learned so much. The most exciting thing, I think, as a developer is to make a game that's a little bit more like setting the stage, more of a sandbox game, if you will, but generating a big world and then letting players come into it and do what they want. It's a bit of a design switch to say we need to make sure that they're doing this and instead say, how are we empowering them to do the things that they would want to do or that would come naturally. In the case of Mirandas, I've heard it called a metaverse quite a bit. And I, I think that's because we, we are not seeding the world with, with cities. This is going to be a place where players come into it. They place towns, they place buildings, everything that you equip, that you aware will be something that another player has crafted. And I feel like, you know, talking with our audience and we were on Discord quite a bit, and we try to stay really close to the people who've been supporting us and love what we're doing. They don't just want a place where you're stabbing a goblin to death. They also want a place that you can kind of hang out and be with your friends, play games. At the tavern we've talked about, you know, could they compose music? Could they be painting or actually creating decorations in the world? But, you know, will there be events where there'll be. While we definitely have a classic fantasy MMO component, I think many people are excited by the idea of just being transported to a fantasy realm where they really get to kind of live, craft, play and adventure with others.

I think it's fascinating, man, and the fact that you said empowering people to do what they would naturally want to do anyway in a game and not grind. So. And I guess how does that work with tokens or, you know, the ability to get rewarded, you know, with the web, three elements. How would that work in the game?

Well, there's an economy, so, you know, a deed, we have many deed owners. A deed is kind of like a stamp that you put out into the wilds, and building owners could come along and on that stamp, there's many kind of locations that they could put a building, like a forge or any other crafting station, an inn or a tavern, and they kind of pay a lease, if you will, to that deed owner because they think it's a good location and they want to put their business there. And if a lot of players are coming through and they're using their business, then the building owners are getting rewarded for what they craft or games that they're hosting at their tavern or anything else that, you know, that might draw people to their buildings and they get rewarded for that. Players themselves, you know, they're out in the world. One of the things that you'll be finding out in the world when you're killing monsters or in chests or in secret locations or something, we're pretty excited. Excited about. You'll be finding materium, and materium is. Is traded right now as an ERC 20, I think, but it is mana. So all magical actions in the world require it. And it is kind of woven through all of the mechanics of the game. So, for instance, if you die, you would come back with an experience penalty normally. But you can apply materium to your resurrection and come back without penalty. So, you know, if you want to cast a spell, you're going to be using materium. If you want to craft something and you don't have all the ingredients, you can use materium. So basically, if you're performing a magical act, you are. You are using materium. And that's woven. That's woven everywhere throughout the world. We've also been making a pretty big push, you know, again, talking to our community. They want everything to be something they potentially could own, be an NFT. So we are going pretty deep on making classes NFTs that you could find out in the world. You know, all of your crafting recipes you would own and control their fates as well. Spells, actions. Like when you're playing an RPG and you get the triple spinning sword attack. Well, wouldn't it be cool if players could own that too? So there's a lot, you know, we're really kind of going deep on player ownership and I think that's a big reason why people are excited about this. Beyond just the adventure component with the.

Tokens and the NFTs, do you see them? Do you guys put a lot of focus in the financial element of them and making sure that they hold their value. So, for example, you're mentioning maybe you can own the spells as an nft. What happens when thousands of players all own that spell? Is there still value in the nft or is the value factor of the NFT something that you guys are putting the focus on?

Well, we can control rarity through, through tuning and how often something drops. When we talk about value, what we, what we talk about internally, you know, as a game development team, is, is value to the player. Meaning this is cool, this is rare. We can guarantee rarity through the token, which is new. Players aren't used to that. We can say there's 10 of them and there are 10 of them. That's really cool. That's a wonderful promise. So we control value inside the game based on the power of that object or how beautiful it might be to decorate your building with. So we can determine how often things drop. We won't flood the world with drops such that things will be super commonplace. Unless you're talking about some of the beginning kind of classes and gear. We really want to get everyone into the game and kind of get you your basic sets of armor and stuff. But, you know, I think things will be more rare as you progress into the world. We don't want there to be a million magic swords. We like the idea of, you know, Excalibur. We like the idea of there being just a few unbelievably powerful, you know, Gandalf staff, kind of things out there in the world that everyone knows about would know by name. And it would be an incredible moment, you know, if somebody walked into the tavern with it on their hilt value to us is really value inside of the game and inside of the ecosystem, you know, kind of the power and prestige that it brings.

And I think that goes back to like, what you mentioned about empowering people to act as they would like to act in a game environment. It seems like there's. Yeah, you're setting the stage in a way in this one world where people can, I guess, act as if they're in a real world, fantasy world, of course, but they can still run a business, go Forge, go do whatever they want to do to earn, really whatever they want to do in the game. And my mind goes to the tech side of this, and with your background in gaming and understanding what it takes to have these massive gameplays all at once, I know you have one world. It's not like a separate thing where everyone's scattered, but they're all in one place. And I'd love you to, love for you to describe that and maybe even some of the tech that goes behind that to pull it off.

You know, we can support multiple servers, you know that we can always shard if we wanted to. And, you know, so normally when you play an mmo, that's the first thing you're greeted with, right? Like, choose your server, choose your location. And they do that so that, you know, you're grouped with people that are automatically speaking the same language generally, and that your latency is very low. So it's, it's with the people who've been following us and been supporting us. You know, they, they, they want one world. They don't want there to be mirandas existing in 10, 20, 30 locations. They like the idea that Mirandas is one world and a world where people of all different backgrounds or ethnicities or cultures can come together and kind of be. So we, we really love that idea and that vision. It is a challenge because you are looking at latency, especially, you know, between locations far away on the globe. You know, you can only go as fast as, as the fiber optics and the, you know, data centers can carry your signal. So there's some tricks that we have to do to, you know, while that latency might exist, you are seeing it on the client side of the application in, in A way that looks like you're all experiencing the same thing at the exact same time, even though there might be a slight delay in reality. And we've also done some things in the combat system too, to account for that latency. This is not a Twitch game. I just don't think Twitch fits something like Mirandas. This is a game where you are more tactile. You know, it's more tactical. You're employing your skills and abilities with your friends, and you need to be able to kind of see and understand your strategy and what the enemies are doing in the environment. And so, you know, with. With death having big penalties and everyone wants this world to be dangerous, you know, if there's no pushback, then it's not an adventure. It's not anything that you can't have heroes if everyone is automatically making it to level 100 and all looks the same and has done the same stuff, you know, so there needs to be a lot of pushback in the world. It needs to be dangerous. That's how we're going to create heroes. One world. The latency is a challenge, but it's kind of what everyone wants and it's what we want. You know, I'd be interested to see if that's what you guys would want too, you know, But I like the idea of being in one world. I've always hated the idea that I'm in this MMO and my friends are in it too, maybe even in the same zone, but I don't see them because they're off in some other server. It just doesn't feel like. It doesn't feel as good to me. I like Eve online, you know, I feel like I'm there with everybody else at the same time.

Yeah. I personally love the idea of it all being one world for all the reasons you. You said if I jump in, I want to be able to go and explore and maybe bump into a friend or something in a certain area. I love that idea. And I'm curious, you know, when I was doing my research, I came across a couple of videos of you playing Valheim with. With somebody else. And here at Hard Fork, that's actually one of our little downtime hobbies is when we find a little bit downtime, we all jump into a sort of shared world in Valheim that we created. But I'm curious, what are some of the games that inspired you? What were some of the games that you've been playing yourself that led you to want to make Mirandus?

I think where all of this comes from is really pencil and paper. D and D adventures from my youth, you know, with my stepbrothers or. It felt like a real adventure. You never knew what was around the next corner. You were with your friends, you know, and if you were playing with people I was playing with, if you died, they'd reach over and they'd tear your paper in half and kick you out of the room. So you, you know, you really cared about the decisions you were making and approached everything with caution. There was a lot of tension. You know, it felt like a true adventure. And then I think if you were to look back in time at Interplay and Black Isle and you know, all of those games. Troika, we were trying to recreate a pencil and paper experience in the computer. Meaning what If I didn't want to attack, I didn't want to walk in and automatically attack somebody. Could I talk my way through it? Was, is there a way a rogue could maybe skip this altogether?

We were trying to create that breadth of choices that paper and pencil gave you. And I think that's the spirit behind it. There's games that are out there that touch little parts of that I love. In Valheim, I'm walking around and I'm stumbling across a dungeon. I'm suddenly, you know, there's a massive troll in the forest. You know, there's. It feels like I'm. I'm more there and I don't know what's going to happen around the next corner. So.

I think really the soul and the spirit of it is those original pencil and paper experiences where you can kind of say and do whatever you want.

I mean, Valheim, you get pretty penalized when you die as well. It's a little different, I know, than what you got going on. Explain. Because you said it's a big deal in Mirandus when you die heroes. How does that look in Mirandus?

The simplest thing we can do is when you die is that, you know you're going to lose experience points. I mean, you know, the, the fiction of it is, is that you're coming back with essentially memory loss. So your body is reconstituting, but you've. You've lost a little bit of something that you were, you know, able to do previously. So, you know, we are kind of a skill based system in mastery. The things that you do more you will get better at. And if you go out there and you just start dying left and right, you know, you'll see that pushback start to push those experience bars. Back and, you know, you might not be able to employ that super cool skill or cast that spell anymore that you used to cast or equip an item that requires a level of mastery. So that's really the pushback that we see. We've talked about time. Maybe you're like locked out of the game and you can't play for a certain period of time, but we've kind of backed away on that. We don't like that too much. We want you to be able to come back and keep going. But there needs to be pushback in the system such that you are walking around and making decisions differently. I bring up EverQuest a lot, or the difference between EverQuest or some of the other MMOs I played like World of Warcraft. If I'm going to die and something is going to push me back in my abilities, I just completely think of that world differently. I don't run, I walk. I listen to the sounds. Oh my God, did I hear something? I'm always thrilled when I see other players or other people around me like, oh my God, thank God I'm not alone here. It really just kind of changes your experience. And then that was the spirit of Mirandus. When I first started thinking about, okay, what would be the game that I would want to play that would excite me and what kind of adventure would that be? I googled the word adventure. I'm like, what is adventure? We say adventure all the time. What is adventure? And adventure inherently means a hazardous something that could be very hazardous, something that is generally dangerous to do. There's a little adventure there. And without that kind of pushback or that danger, there really is no adventure because there's no penalty. You just walk around, you die, you pop back up, nothing happened. You've got to have that pushback that makes you care. So that's kind of how we're thinking of it.

One thing that I learned when I was digging into is that when somebody does die, they can respawn in a graveyard, essentially. But somebody can actually own that graveyard and have financial incentive for owning that graveyard. I'm curious, where is that division between player controlled building up the story versus the, the devs and you guys on the team creating the story? Where is that dividing line between players building it and you guys telling your story?

I don't want us to tell a story. Like I. I want the story to be what the players did in this world.

How they approached it, and how they worked together to survive. You can't do it without each other. You are going to need to, you know, create cities and towns. You are going to need to craft gear and get stronger to take on the forces of evil. So I never look at it like a story we're looking to tell. I look at it like we're creating a land and a world and what the players do with it is going to be just as exciting for us to watch as we're hoping it is for people to play.

Absolutely.

And follow up question to that one too then is how, how deep do you see that sort of economic model going? Like, you know, players can own the land and they can own the, you know, the graveyards on the land and then they, you can own shops and the shops can sell stuff. Like how deep does that rabbit hole go of, you know, potential, you know, metaverse business models within Mirandas?

I'm hoping it's infinitely deep. You know, the, our North Star when we're talking about the development is what would happen in real life. So one thing you can get into when you're making a game or designing a game is you start making up stuff like, oh, we're going to make that up. Oh, it's just a game. Let's make that up, let's make that up, let's make that up. But the truth is, if you take the lens of this is a dangerous fantasy world that people have just, you know, come into, what would they need to do to survive, how would they be able to survive? And what businesses would be required from a, you know, a medieval 1400s, 1500s classic kind of fantasy level of technology and of support services. You know, we have farming, we have cattle. You need to eat, you need to sleep. And we're not making those things really complex or punitive, but they are a part of what you need to do to survive. So anytime we have the opportunity to deepen the power and the relationship of kind of civilization and towns and players and survival, we take that opportunity. I really like how cemeteries work. I think that's a pretty elegant current design. Thought you essentially bind yourself to a cemetery. That's where you'll come back. And if you want to come back without penalty and spend material, then, you know, the cemetery owner would get a piece of that. So, you know, don't think of it as a game. Think of it as I am. If there were a building back in time and you walked into that building and you wanted something, there'd be an exchange, there'd be an economic exchange, and that building would require all of the things necessary to provide that Good. Or that service. So we're kind of standing it up based on what we.

Believe existed back then or what's intuitive to players.

I would say that's incredible. And I keep thinking of you come from traditional gaming as everyone has, I guess, because Web3 has only been around so long. Do you think a game like this could really exist with the vision that you have without it being on Blockchain?

I don't think so, man. I think there's a lot of traditional gamers because the space is so new. There's a lot of traditional gamers that haven't had the experience of owning their own content. And I find myself saying own your own content a lot. But it is, in this day and age, a bit of an esoteric concept to people that haven't had the experience of being in a game, getting something, closing the game down and you getting to control the fate of those items however you see fit. Literally like you bought the toy at the store. When you get home, if you want to give it to your friend, you can. And the developer shouldn't stop you. They should empower you to do that. And I think you're going to see all development moving this way in the future because it's just the right thing to do. It's more fun, it's more interesting. And I think it's just gone on way too long that players don't really own anything. They just sign a end user license agreement when the game first begins, saying, we own everything you have at the end of the day. And if we catch you doing anything with it that we don't approve of, we're kicking you out for all time. Like that's just. We just get used to tapping those. No one reads that crap. But I don't think it's cool. I think it's a step backwards. So I think what Web3 is enabling is getting people what they deserve. The time and the energy and the love that they spend playing your games. Why shouldn't they be able to own their own content at the end of the day and do with it what they please? So I think that Mirandas, this is a blockchain interview we're doing. And there's going to be a lot of crypto and blockchain people that are here and kind of understand what the technology is behind the scenes. But I think over time you're just not going to hear anything about the technology anymore. It's just going to be you're playing games, you'll just expect this to be the way Things function and the tech behind the scenes right now is, is getting, is within the conversation. They're kind of intermingled and it makes things very complex over time. What you're just going to see is incredibly great games and players are going to learn that they're not trapped anymore and they can do what they want with the things that they've worked so hard to acquire. We bring up MMOs a lot of times. You know, when MMOs first came out, you know, I mean, how many people out there who played Ultima Online were sitting there talking about their server structures or the code that was used to facilitate this game? You know, they weren't thinking that way, they were just playing the game. And I think that's what you're going to be seeing in gala products and web3 products over time is that you'll be coming because it's just a great game to play. And then you'll realize kind of the true power behind the scenes is that you're not trapped or shackled. It's yours, it's your stuff, do what you want with it.

That's a good way to put it because we're always chatting with different builders and founders and people like yourself who have a vast experience in gaming. And yeah, there's definitely this disconnect with traditional gamers and obviously web3 gaming. But to your point, it's just got to be integrated. It's technology and makes a lot of sense. Do you think it's education that folks like gamer, or is it like a great game where they just are immersed and they kind of learn and maybe the style of game, is it an MMO like this? Do you think that's that folks are kind of looking after or something more story driven?

I don't know. I think, I mean, I think if the question you're asking is how are more people going to come to this space, you know, from a traditional Web2 space? And I think it's going to happen in quite a few different areas. I don't think there's a silver bullet or one particular.

Strategy to, to help show them. I think what's going to happen is first off, you're going to see private business completely adopt blockchain. It's just an elegant piece of code and it's. You can have a private ledger or a public ledger, but the benefits to private business to me are, are so incredibly straightforward that I think the term blockchain or an NFT right now is a very loaded, funny subject. But the technology of having a Distributed ledger, be it public or private, is very powerful and very useful. So I think you're going to see private, private companies all over adopting it for approvals for supply chains. So it's not going to be this weird thing over there. It's going to be what every modern company is employing to use. I think you're going to see great games coming out and I think people are just going to be coming to play the game, like, oh, cool, I heard that was a cool game. And then they're going to play it, they're going to love it, and then they're going to kind of stumble onto blockchain. I think you're going to be seeing some of that. I do think education is an important, maybe a third vector to this and not education. Like, you don't know what this is, but let me tell you, it's more like. It's just fascinating. It's just absolutely fascinating. I remember when I first started working with Eric and Ray, before we were even rebranded to Gala, first thing they did this is maybe four years ago, they sat me down in office and they're like watching these YouTube videos on how bitcoin works and how. And I had to watch quite a few videos before. Before I got it, before I really understood maybe, you know, or started to have that door open where it's like, oh, my God, wait, if you can do this, what if we did this? What if we did this? What if we did this? There's so many cool things you can do with the technology. So I would. I think it's just going to be everywhere. Everyone is going to be using it. They're probably not even going to know. And it's just going to happen. It's already happening. You know, if you look at wallet adoption, look at blockchain adoption, it works again. It's a great piece of code and everyone's just going to be using it. So I think it'll be everywhere. It's just going to be everywhere. It's already trending that way. And I think in five years, I'd be shocked if it wasn't. I think in 10 years, for sure, it would legitimately be woven into almost every piece of software you're using. That wouldn't shock me.

It's funny because Buff and I, we often bond over the fact that the Rise and Rise of Bitcoin was a documentary that both onboarded us into Web three. And it's like, you just need more people to go and see something like that and have a reaction. Like, we did to, you know, keep that ball rolling. But I'm curious. So we've spent a lot of time talking about Mirandas, but you're also the co founder of GALA as a whole, and I was wondering if you'd be open to kind of talking about the bigger vision of what GALA has in the works and what the sort of big. The big picture of GALA is, I.

Think, for the original spirit of Gala, and I think this is woven into everything that we do, is this concept of decentralization.

Connecting people from all over the world to what. What happens when you turn it over to the people?

That was really the. The question, I think, that we were asking ourselves very early on. Why can't you do this? Why shouldn't somebody be able to own their own stuff? And what happens if we do empower people to own their own content? What. What does that picture look like? You know, we make stuff that has value inside of our games. They're toys you can play with. But how does that change the picture for somebody? Because they own it. They can take it out of our ecosystem. And what does that mean to them, you know, if they trade it for something in the real world? We are just trying to do what's right by the people and connect people all over the world, especially, I think, in developing nations, where I think blockchain is the most exciting. You know, one of the things that we take for granted here, you know, in the US and in other places is we have a banking system that you. You can count on. You know, you take your money, you put it in there, and it's safe. Well, that's not true in many places in the world. You know, you. How do you store generational wealth when you know you have to squirrel it away or hide it in your household? So just having a phone, having access to blockchain gives you essentially a bank account and a safe way to transfer currency or things of value between you and somebody else without a centralized system. So I think it's a bit of a revolution, and I think we at GALA were very excited seeing the trend of what happens when you turn things over to the people. Original Uber is something that, you know, occurs to me. I lived in. I lived in the Bay Area, and I couldn't get home at night. When I would call a cab, no one would show up. No one. You know, if they did show up, I'd tell them I was heading to Oakland and they wouldn't take me. You know, Uber came along, and they always showed up. They were always on time. And you rated them and they rated you. And it was a bit of a kind of turning over a taxi system to the people and see, see what happens. YouTube. YouTube, you know, we. What if everyone could make videos, Everyone could have a TV channel. What if everyone, you know, and yeah, you get a lot of crap along with it too. But the truth is, is that, you know, YouTube is amazing. Like anything you ever want to learn about in this world, there's a video for you to check out and explore. Take for granted that we had that kind of, you know, we didn't have that kind of knowledge 20 years ago. Anything you want to do because they've turned over this system to the people is now there and it's available and everyone can compete to have the coolest and most fun videos. So I think, you know, I think some of the original spirit of Gala was, was just to turn it over to the people because it's the right thing to do and better things happen when it's in the hands of the people instead of a dark central organization telling you what you can do and what you can't. And I think it's freedom. I guess it's just about freedom.

One question I have too is so the first game that actually onboarded me into the world of blockchain gaming was Town Star. That was the first game that I actually ever got in and actually played a game and went holy crap, one of these games is actually playable now. And so that was the first one for me. But one of the struggles I had was I felt like I discovered it almost too late because by that time all the NFTs that really did the cool stuff in the game, they were sort of out of my price range. So I was wondering if maybe we can speak into that a little bit. Is, I know that's a, you know, that's the result of supply and demand, but is, do you guys have any thoughts on how do we keep some of the in game items from getting so inflated that maybe they're unattainable for the normal gamer? So I'm curious where your thoughts lie on that conversation.

I think one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that we want more lower priced items there. We want a grand width. You know, if you want a have some of the craziest stuff in the world, you know, we should have that available. And if you want to just kind of dip your toe in it and give get something cool, you should be able to get that as well. So you know, we, we want to have things that account for, for all different price points. And I think, you know, for a while there, things were getting real pricey. Even on Mirandas, you know, it's like our exemplars are pretty pricey. They're really powerful too, though. They give you some really cool powers in the game and unlock some abilities that are exclusive to, to owning those items. So, you know, we've sold buildings that were very low priced and I, I think it's Gala's goal to have something that, that everyone can get into and engage with. We don't, we don't like it that everything's expensive necessarily. Some things should be and some things, you know, shouldn't be. So we, we want to have that breadth of content and it is something that we talk about quite a bit.

When it comes to the NFTs. You know, the exemplar, like you said with Mirandus, those are required to play the game currently, correct?

Yeah, yeah. You have to have an avatar, if you will, to. To play. And one of the things about.

Blockchain and these are some problems that we're actually solving at Gala. We have our own Gala chain that's pretty powerful. But you need a concept of ownership if you're going to own something. You know, you, you need a wallet. You. You need to have a place where things can be stored and it needs to be yours or claimed if you wanted to claim it. We liked the idea that we wanted to keep the number. The original population of Mirandas, the people who have been there and have supported us. They, if they buy an exemplar, they get to play first. And they also can rent that exemplar out to other players. So, you know, we made 50,000 exemplars, and out of those 50,000, only a thousand of them are elves. And again, this is a blockchain thing that was very fun for us and I think for our players. There are a thousand elves in Mirandus. That's it. You can look at the contract and see there are these thousand elves.

That's cool. You know that feeling in Lord of the Rings, you know, where, oh my God, there's some elves walking in the woods. Holy crap. You know, you can't have that if everyone. If there's just a million elves everywhere. So it's exciting if there's a thousand elves. And it's exciting to me to be in a world where if I saw a group of 10 elves adventuring together, I'd be following them around. I'd be like, oh, My God, check those guys out. They're so cool.

So, you know, we. We made 50,000.

Out of each of those races. They have special powers and hopefully those powers and abilities, you know, we'll be tuning the game to make them really, really important in different scenarios or different zones. And, you know, if we really nail it, what we're trying to do is say that, you know, you'll want a breadth of those abilities if you're going to be adventuring, you'll want to seek out different exemplars to play with because they might have, you know, a power or skill that helps you get through a zone or kind of push deeper into the world.

That's. I love that stuff, man. I mean, yeah. And having the scarcity of the amount of NFTs out there to start seems like a great way to build community and building probably the best kind of world too, because you have people from the beginning with you so excited for that. Do you have any dates or timeline for the, like, a wider, maybe a beta, beta kind of gameplay launch?

So we're going to have another playtest in January.

And that is really a bit of the bow on the foundational tech that we needed to develop. There was some big, tough things, right? Like one world is one of them, another one that we really started looking at. Again, take in real life, if I went to a citadel or if I went to a massive gathering inside, you know, in a fantasy world, how many people would be there? We didn't want 100 people together in a level. We wanted hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And so we're. We've had to build the tech to support that. And that's really been what this year is about. And I think what people are going to see in the next play test is, you know, multiple playable zones and, you know, you will be surrounded by hundreds of people. And that's really cool. It feels absolutely legit. You just see people scouring the environment and you. Makes you believe you're in that world. So that's the next play test. And I guess to catch people up, that is what we do.

We've engaged with our community during the entire development of Mirandus. Even when we were just a PowerPoint presentation or a video, we would still show people how we think and how we work through these problems and what it looks like to make an mmo. So instead of just always showing something unbelievably polished and perfect, you know, which makes a development team go dark for years, we've kind of brought everyone along on the journey. So these little tech tests we do or play tests are actually the community helping us pound on on some of those foundations that we need to build. So that's the next kind of tech test is in January. I would like to have by the end of next year, I want to say, at least 20 square miles or more of world to discover. So I think it'll be a big content push next year to make sure that there's a big world there. And then what's really difficult and starts next year, but it's going to probably take us through next year and into 2024, is blockchain integration. When everything is on your database, in your servers, you know you can kind of change anything you want. With things being on Chain, you really have to make sure that the tuning of the game is really solid. Because if you're minting something on chain and you have a bug and someone gets a million rubies, it's not an oops, we can't delete that from your wallet. You have a million rubies. So we have to be really, really careful about how the game is tuned and how things are, you know, minted. Are they minted on the fly based on player actions? Are we minting them to a zone wallet, which we kind of like the idea of. And then maybe it's a transfer between the zone wallet to the player. So, you know, you have to get that really, really right prior to the game launching. Besides everyone getting to play playtests if they have an exemplar, we are also launching Tavern games. So we are launching, I'm going to say this year, this might be a mega league, but we are working on Tavern games. And I want to empower Tavern owners to start hosting games and having people show up and bet a few stones at the table, if you will, and play with others, hopefully like they will in the final game. So. So we're going to be launching Miranda's Tavern games this year, which I think will be really cool. And we'll just keep extending those games and build whatever people want to do or want to play inside the tavern. And then when the game goes live, you'll be able to access that inside the tavern or maybe even outside of it, kind of in a companion app way is the idea.

Yeah, our favorite sentence always starts with, I probably shouldn't be saying this, but those are always the best sentences when we're on an interview. But, Michael, this has been absolutely amazing. I want to be respectful of your time. So if somebody wants to play Mirandus. When the next play test happens, they need to get an exemplar. Is there. Is there anything that we didn't cover around Mirandus or Gala that maybe you want to get out before we wrap this up, or did we kind of COVID the ground you think we should have covered?

The only thing I would say is that Gala is, I would say, maybe the finest company I've ever worked for. And I think we say Gala Games a lot, but that's not. The vision goes beyond that.

You know, we want movies and we want music, and we want all that stuff because we can start creating through decentralization, a direct line between the people that love your content and each other and the artists that are making them. And I think that's a big part of the mission, too. So, you know, Gala isn't just games. We also have, you know, film, and we also have music that we've kicked off. And they're really exciting, too. And again, it's. They're exciting because there's this industry out there that is sucking people dry and not adding a lot of value. If you took all of the fans of musicians and artists that I like and had them directly contributing to that artist, what would you see? What would they be able to create without the oversight and the tax that a major organization is sapping from them? So, you know, I look at GALA really like a way to connect, give people what they deserve and connect creators with their fans. So that's probably it, man. Viva love Revolution.

Heck, yeah, man. Hey, Michael, I appreciate your time and the fact that you've been so open with us. Where should folks go? Follow? Maybe it's you, Gala Miranda's to get the latest.

Yeah, go to Gala. Go to Gala Games. That's a great place to start. We've got a couple more games going live this year and then a ton more games going live next year. We've got. I think we have 28 games in development. These are all AAA, pretty awesome games. So that's a fun place to start. I think that's a good place to start. You can go to Mirandus Game to learn a little bit more about Mirandas, but I think Gala Games is a great place to start. Or even gala.com, which I'll talk a little bit about. There's some access there to the film and the music as well as the games portion.

Right on. And I thought it would be the last question, but you mentioned that you have so many games in development. Are there a few games that are coming up in the near future here that we should have on our radar.

Spider Tanks is going live here pretty soon. Spider Tanks is really fun, and Dimitri and those guys that are developing it are a great team. That one's really cool. And you should probably check that one out because I think it's the next one to be. To be going live.