Make Money Killing Zombies in this Game!

Your kids are now making money playing video games. And it's a small business. And this is amazing. And they're doing this killing zombies. Tell us about your platform too. People of all ages are getting into this because you can go literally to the website, create a login, and you're playing.

I think that's the coolest part about our ecosystem, is traditional gaming. Like a lot of you parents probably remember going to the store, going to GameStop, going somewhere to buy a game for 60 bucks that immediately is worth $8. Right back to GameStop. If you want to sell it, like, it's just brutal here, you can go play our game for free.

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Main Street Business. We're here with a major influencer and powerhouse in the gaming industry, the Metaverse. The crypto world, it's all colliding. And I'm so excited to have Grant Halsey, executive director of Wagu Games and the newest and hottest game out there called Undead Blocks. And folks, this is all about business. Making money, making money in your retirement accounts, or investing in video games. Can you believe this? So this is going to be amazing. Grants no slouch either. Worked at Goldman, Goldman Sachs, another major bank well versed in finance. And we're going to hear all about the gaming industry and how it can affect you. Grant, thanks for being here.

Mark, appreciate you having me. Definitely excited to talk to your audience. I think there's. You really nailed it on the head. There's a lot colliding at one time. Talk about the metaverse or what we consider the metaverse to be. You know, web3 gaming, crypto gaming. There, there's just a lot that we can go into. So happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well, thank you for being here. Now, everybody be patient. Grant, I, you know, I, I think I tease you that I, I ask, are you speaking English? Because you have. You're in a different world than most of us. So let me ask this question first. Getting everybody on the same page. Can we talk about Play to Earn? Just, let's stick with gaming for a minute. I mean, some of us are used to Call of Duty or Ghost Recon. I'm an old, old guy, you know, Atari and Nintendo and it's, it's evolved in what's the gaming industry knows all about Play to earn. I don't think us average people do. What's that about? What's that mean?

So you can look at Play to Earn games as rewarding your sweat equity or the time that you put into your Favorite title. I'll give you an example from a traditional video game like Call of Duty. If Call of Duty allowed you to earn money per kill or per match, one, that would be Play to Earn. And so Play to Earn has gone through multiple facets, you know, in the last three to five years. I would say the first facet was these, you know, small decentralized yield farming game types where you would acquire an NFT or you acquire an asset and then you auto battle it. You'd battle against another individual, you would earn crypto. And so people could take that crypto, they could stake it, they could sell it, they could do a lot with it. And what we saw was this just wasn't sustainable from our side of, you know, the coin. With Wagyu and with Undead Blocks, we are really the next generation of Play to Earn where people can acquire NFTs, but we're running sponsored events like tournaments and running digital ads in our ecosystem. Lots of different ways to make money playing the video game. But Play to Earn is exactly what it sounds like. You play the video game, you earn money, whether that's through completing challenges, participating in those tournaments, just daily play. There's a lot of different ways you can earn in some of these games.

I love it. Now I want everyone to know too. I had to get some respect from Grant, so I wore my gaming headset, you know, so we could sound super cool, you know, bravo, Tango. That's right, Cooking.

Move in.

We're going in, we're going in. I just love that sound of the headset. All right, so gaming kids can now say, I'm not going to pay to buy this game and go play it. I'm. You want me to come play your game? And it's kind of turned the tables, but it's actually generated a revenue source for both sides of the equation and the currency being crypto. Now bring us to Undead Blocks, this cool game that you've launched in the last. Boy, it's been in the making for several years and now it's, it's out there going nuts.

Yep, it's fully live. We're at 50,000 monthly active players. And these are all individuals that are coming in and they're earning money in some capacity you don't have to pay to play and earn with an Undead Blocks. We're doing a good job of generating revenue through, you know, ads, sponsored tournaments. Think about it this way, Mark. If you have 50,000 people a month that you know are into crypto or into NFTs, I know we can get into that later. What exactly an NFT is, that's a very unique audience that you can go to advertisers and say here, do you want to sell them a crypto product like a ledger for example, where you can store your crypto? We've been doing, you know, partnerships with some of those hardware companies I think. I mean you could also purchase an NFT and it gives you more exclusive access to daily earning as well as some higher end tournaments. But I think what I'm most excited about is the fact that some people are. Lots of people in our ecosystem come to me and they say, Grant, I've been playing Call of Duty for seven, eight hours a day, especially in the summertime. Some of these kids, and now they can come into Undead Blocks and they can actually learn about generating passive income or just actually playing the game. And for a lot of kids, this has actually become a side hustle for them as we're starting to turn over the calendar and they're sitting around instead of just playing Fortnite, hanging around with their friends, they're actually able to generate some revenue for themselves. Pretty cool.

Okay, let's put this again, no offense in English for some of you parents, your kids are gaming athletes, getting a 1099 in cryptocurrency US dollar equivalent for playing video games. And that's a schedule C small business people. Let me repeat that. Your kids are now making money playing video games and it's a small business and this is amazing. And they're doing this killing zombies. Tell us about your platform too. People of all ages are getting into this because you can go literally to the website, create a login and you're playing.

I think that's the coolest part about our ecosystem is traditional gaming. Like a lot of you parents probably remember going to the store, going to GameStop, going somewhere to buy a game for 60 bucks that immediately is worth $8. Right back to GameStop if you want to sell, like it's just brutal here, you can go play our game for free. You can try it out, you can start earning some of the currency and you can start acquiring, you know, Z bucks which you can swap for any crypto of your choice. Like Mark said, you just go to undead blocks.com, give the game a play. Now if you want more gated access, that's where the NFT side comes in. But it is completely defrayed, completely free to play. This is the next generation of gaming where we create the platform and we let the individuals decide the path of the game, but then really just generate outside revenue instead of just taking it from our player base and, and you know, allowing them to actually use the power of their digital identity to make money. And their digital identities are very attractive to some of these advertisers, especially in an up and coming industry like crypto. So it is awesome. If you guys want to give the game a download, it is free to play. Just head over to undeadblocks.com and load up.

Yeah, go kill a zombie. Now here's the fascinating part to me and I came from an economic model of inside these games. Let me see if I do this right just to set the stage for folks. These games have assets. There's guns, knives, weapons, and those are ground will explain to you what's called an nft. Those are an asset and I can buy that asset as an investor for kids to play with. And I, I had a tutorial from Remy Campbell. He's got a website on how to, or a YouTube channel on how to do this. He's my, my young guy that like teaches me these methods. But I can take my retirement account, convert some US dollars to crypto, I guess and then go buy some of these assets in the game and rent them to kids that are playing. Tell us how that works and expand on that for us, if you wouldn't mind.

So if you want to look at a traditional, you know, multifamily setup, right, like you take money, you go acquire a property, you let people live in it, you can cash flow. I know there's a lot more to it, but that's just the simple concept. Exactly. You can look at the Undead Blocks ecosystem the same way and we have professional groups called gaming guilds which do this. They acquire our assets, they are non fungible tokens. Those give you access to special tournaments, special daily earning events, special challenges, and you can essentially rent them out to an individual to play the game. So let's say you're, you have a lot of capital and you know, like a niece or a nephew or four kids down the block that you know are gamers. You can essentially buy the assets, give them the login or a special code and say, hey, play this game for me and farm these rewards. And so the rewards again are coming from sponsors, digital advertisements, et cetera. So it is more of a sustainable model of play to earn. But we're still offering that, that rental capacity. You're seeing this very popular in some of these third world countries. Think Argentina, Bolivia, the Philippines. We have a lot of players over there that are Using this game to generate daily income, which is amazing. Like for us, me and you, $10 a day probably isn't going to cut it. I think for some of these kids in the Philippines, $10 a day is more than they're making at the mall. We know this because they're in our communities telling us that they love these sort of games where they can really monetize and give themselves another way of earning some of that liquidity. But if you are a parent and you have kids that have been playing video games, buy an NFT and let them play it and essentially you are their gun landlord. I know that sounds kind of cheesy, but that's exactly what it is.

I love it.

It's very simple. It's just once you get set up, once the world learns that Web3 isn't so scary, crypto isn't so scary, the world really is the oyster. We can do this because we're Not a traditional web2 or traditional game developer that just continues selling you things for entertainment. It's frustrating for the average consumer to just continue paying, paying, paying for entertainment. This is just a new way of looking at it. And it's, it's, I'm personally very excited to, to be on the forefront of what's, what's happening here.

I love it. Okay, now let, if you could break down in that process now, the NFT piece, what does that mean? And what you've talked about skins and different things in your game. What, what does that mean?

I'm going to make a little pivot for what exactly an NFT is. Me and Mark, big football fans, right? Let's say we wanted to go to Bill's game. That's, I'm from Buffalo, we would have to buy tickets. And that gets you access to that seat in that section, in that stadium on that date at that time.

And there's plenty of tickets available for The Buffalo Bills.

100%. We're definitely getting better. So I would say less than, less than in previous years, but most everything's digital now. So you look at your phone, you get a QR code and boom, that's your ticket to your seat, to your section, to your row. And you can look at NFTs as the same exact thing. It really is just gated access to a community or a piece of artwork. A lot of people say that NFTs are just JPEGs, but really the value of the NFTs is getting that exclusive access to a community. It really is like a virtual country club within Undead Blocks. One of our NFTs gets you access to a special skin which you can use on specific days for different events that you can use to potentially earn money playing the game. It's gated access to this ecosystem and that's all an NFT is, it's just minted on the blockchain. Now there are other NFT projects that give you access to special in person events. They give you discount codes for your favorite stores. Like there's a lot of value that's being created from these NFTs and I really think that peer to peer, business to business NFTs is probably going to be the next bull run, the next gold rush in terms of NFTs. But within our game, the NFT gets you access to a gun or a character like the Mark Kohler tax collector character that we're going to make eventually. And it's just, it's exclusive access to things. That's really all it is.

I love it. Yeah, we were joking about that the other day and I was like, hold it. So you, and this is probably something new to this industry as well is that you can brand and create these characters and weapons and put advertising on them. Sell though, and this non fungible token, it means they're one of a kind of, I mean there's, there's only one Mark Kohler non fungible token. Right. We're all, I love this stuff.

And here's the interesting part about it is, I'll give you an example. GameStop is one of our biggest partners. They're one of the largest game groups in the world. And so we mint, we have minted GameStop assets with their own IP, with their own branding. And so if you went to go buy a GameStop T shirt in real life, you'd have a tough time selling that. I think that's, you know, there's not a lot of liquidity in the market for GameStop T shirts. Some of these very exclusive, you know, limited edition art runs that we're doing from GameStop have been selling like hotcakes where these individuals, they've been playing these games all the time, they really identify with the brand and so now they're able to sell their in game assets. Fortnite. I know a lot of you parents have Fortnite with the V Bucks cards. You buy your son or daughter a V Bucks card, they buy a Fortnite skin. They cannot sell it. It's now attached to their account forever. So there's really no way to recoup any of your investment. It's just a one time transaction for entertainment. That's fine, but that's not how we see the world. That's not how NFT groups and Web3 Gaming sees that. You should be able to sell those assets if you do, if you so choose. And you should be able to make money from playing video games. I see a path where people can earn, you know, some passive income. We're not promising anyone to become millionaires markets, you know, 10, 15 bucks a day for a lot of people. It adds up over time. I think that's really the vibe that we've taken and it's working very well for us.

Well, in that 10 to 15 bucks a day, think of it as, okay, let's put a few numbers on it again, no promises out there. I, I should have wore a hat that says I'm not a financial advisor. Whatever, I know the game.

You're just a kkos lawyer. That's all you are.

So if I was to take my IRA Roth, and we do have clients that have done this, they've taken their Roth ira, I'm right on their tail. I can't wait to get my weapon and my Roth IRA earning money, killing zombies. But the point would be I take my Roth ira, purchase this skin or this weapon and then rent it in the rental program to one of these kids around the world, wherever. And if they're only earning $15 a day, some of these weapons may be just a few hundred dollars. I know. So if I'm sharing in that $15 a day on a $400 asset, hey, that could be a incredible ROI in a cryptocurrency that can convert to US dollars whenever I want and put it back right into my Roth. So what are some rough numbers of buying these weapons and herb skins?

The cheapest weapons go for $150 $200 USD equivalent. They're sold in the crypto called Ethereum because we're on the Ethereum blockchain. The highest end stuff goes for a couple thousand dollars and that's just because it's the most powerful weaponry. But also people want to collect this stuff. They like collecting the OG skins that we minted. They, it's more of a collection for them at that point. But yeah, the cheapest entry point is, you know, 150200 bucks. And like Mark said, it can add up really quickly. You mentioned Remy Campbell. He's going to get mentioned twice on this podcast. He has an undead blocks nft. He finished in second place in our most recent tournament. He earned a thousand Bucks. So if you, if you do very well, like you can't get access to some of these tournaments. If you're a traditional Call of Duty or Fortnite player, if you're not a professional, you can't play for money like this. This is the coolest part about this is these gamers that have been investing their entire lives in gaming now have a real reason to continue playing because they're earning money. And so again, like Mark said, no promises. A lot of it is random when it comes to daily earning, completing challenges. There's a lot more that goes into it, but you know, they can add up very quickly and you can start really cash flowing. Some of these assets, it's pretty cool.

That's cool. So that you, these tournaments, they can be virtual or in a city and, and play with weapons that you provide. You can like in a sense sponsor the tennis shoes of Michael Jordan. I'm going to, I'm going to buy his tennis shoes and get a piece of the action. And it's that same concept, I guess you're helping outfit these players in these games.

Yeah, and we had, we did an in person event in Nashville, Tennessee. We had 2,000 people that attended. Now you had to have an NFT to be able to play in the tournament, but it was literally on Broadway and people there was this, we just put up a sign like gaming tournament. People were coming in, just tourists walking in just to see what was going on. And they saw all the computers of people slaying zombies. You had to kill as many zombies you can in 10 minutes. That's how these things go viral, is, you know, we're not backing away. I think there's a war on crypto in the U.S. i mean, look at the first question they ask you on your tax return is have you traded or have you invested in crypto? Like they very much want to know, like the IRS is coming for this. But we're not running away from it. We're saying, hey, we believe in this technology. We can bring people together. We can bring unite gamers, kids, people around the world that want access to a new way to earn money and do it sustainably and make sure that everyone's having a good time while doing it.

Wow, I got to buy some weapons for Remy to play. If he's getting number two out of 2,000 players, that's pretty sweet. Now let's, let's bring it around here too, because I was just blown away maybe here. In conclusion, I appreciate your time. I know how valuable, valuable your time is with your organization, so many moving parts. The really impressive part is you're changing lives of these kids in these foreign countries that have maybe no other way to make money. And I know there's been really an almost a community outreach process to this. Can tell me your why and what makes you really feel warm and fuzzy when you're hearing about some of these kids and what's going on there?

Well, I'll, I'll give you guys a quick story. When we started Undead Blocks, you know, when we fully launched the game, we had a Venezuelan doctor end up in our community. Somehow, I don't know how he found us, but they found us. And he said that if he could make 30 bucks a day playing Undead Blocks, it's more than he makes operating on kids at the children's hospital in, in his town in Venezuela. I mean, you just, you hear that and you can't even fathom it. It's just, you know, we are so blessed in, you know, America and Europe to really have the opportunity to do what we want. But you know, these people, they all have access to the Internet, but they don't really have access to some of these high end paying jobs where they can really start earning generational wealth for their kids. And with our game, it's, we're really providing that opportunity for, for some of these kids. I'll give you another one. Some of these kids with special needs too here in the United States, you know, they, they, they don't have the capacity or the ability to take on some of these blue or white collar jobs, but they love playing video games. And so, you know, we've been getting letters that are coming in from parents saying, you know, you changed my kid's life. My kid is obsessed with your game. They can't wait to log on every single day and play and hang out with everyone and make money. And they really thank us for it. And you know, some people that were in, you know, prison or in correctional facilities, now they're struggling to find jobs outside of going back to the real world. They can play these games, they can rent these weapons and really get on their feet and start, start earning some, some money and feeling like they're part of a community. It's that community aspect plus the daily earning aspect which is really successful for us. So we're just going to keep the positive momentum coming and hopefully we just keep changing lives around the world.

I love it. Now of course, everyone, you can get to undeadblocks.com to start with the game and start to be introduced to the whole platform and everything it entails. And I guess you, these communities are. There's. We've got to get some links down in there too to Discord. A lot of people don't know what Discord is. There's a whole place to just hang out and talk and collaborate.

I guess we could do a whole nother podcast on digital identity and Discord. Basically, Discord is the world's largest chat room. Know they're not as scary as the old school chat rooms of, you know, five, 10 years ago, but there are so many people that come in here and conversate whether they're from Europe, South America, North America. They're, they're all anonymous and they're all talking about, in our case, undead blocks. So definitely going to put the link below to that. Follow us on YouTube if you guys want to take a look at some gameplay footage and obviously head over to the website undeadblocks.com it's free to make a Wagyu account. It's free to give the game a try. That's all we ask is play it. Let us know what you think and let us know what we can improve and we'll just keep knocking out of the park.

Wow. Gosh, Grant, thank you so much for being with us. We truly appreciate it and wish you the best in your organization and changing lives and, and created another economic model that people just don't even know exists of a billion dollar industry is, is just again on our foot on our doorsteps here. Thank you so much for being with us.

Appreciate it, Mark. And when we make the tax collector character, we'll be sure to share it with your group as well.

Oh man. I'm in. I'm in. Thanks so much.

Cool.