In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Gunzilla Games’ director of web3 Theodore Agranat and Andrew ‘Coop’ Cooper who’s head of marketing for gaming at Avalanche-focused tech outfit Ava Labs.
The subject for discussion is reaction to the launch of Off The Grid on PlayStation5, PC and via the Xbox Insider program, and what happens next?
BlockchainGamer: Can you give us a potted history of your career thus far?
Theodore Agranat: I was a gamer on Commodore 64 in the early 90s. So I’m carbon dating myself here, but a very passionate gamer. Subsequently to that, I turned into a serial entrepreneur, building IT and technology companies for the better part of my life since 1998.
I discovered blockchain technology in 2012 and then joined Gunzilla Games in the latter part of 2021, and now I am working full time as Gunzilla’s director of web3.
What about you Coop?
Andrew Cooper: So I’ve been a digital marketer for 12 years, working at a lot of agencies, helping a variety of clients and ultimately joined crypto full time about three years ago.
I’ve always been working in the Avalanche network, to understand crypto itself, the community, and what’s going on. I saw gaming really growing when I joined and made it a focus three years ago. Now I run marketing for the gaming vertical at Ava Labs.
I’ve also been a lifelong gamer. Some of my first memories were playing games. I think they put me on a computer a little too early, giving me access to Diablo as a child and that has impacted the rest of my life.
TA: That explains a lot, Coop.
Let’s move on to Off The Grid. What’s the reaction been to the launch so far?
TA: Well, thankfully, it hasn’t lit up only crypto Twitter, but it has lit up traditional Twitter as well. I’m very happy because we accomplished the biggest goal that we set out to accomplish, which is to give gamers an immersive, satisfying and exciting experience. Now we have traditional gamers left and right, both large streamers as well as just regular folks, absolutely loving Off The Grid, commenting that this is their favorite new game across any battle royale game.
Our goal was always to compete on the world stage, not to just become the best web3 game in the world, and we’ve been absolutely blown past any of these expectations since launching on the 8th of October.
One of the interesting things is that your focus has always been on the you just want to make a great game. Off The Grid is the first blockchain-enabled game on console, and some of the feedback is from people saying there’s no blockchain in there, there’s no wallets...
TA: That’s right. Our main focus right from the outset was to focus on the user experience. How do we abstract away all of this complicated technology? Most importantly, even though folks in web3 love pounding their chest – and I say that lovingly – this is the fastest TPS and this is the best wallet and this is the best blockchain scanner, etc.
To us, it’s about utilizing the best possible technologies in web3, in web2, and in any other area to provide the best user experience. In our humble opinion, blockchain-enabled asset ownership is at the core and should be at the core of that experience. We firmly believe that in the future, there is not going to be web2 vs web3, that whole argument is going to go away. It’s just going to be about the user experience, and that will absolutely include full asset ownership.
With your marketing hat on Coop, how do you think the marketing campaign, including streamers like Ninja etc, went down?
AC: I feel really good about it and I can’t take credit from Gunzilla, they executed the web2 campaign, but some of the things that I think I’m happy with is how deeply they went within their specific kind of game and focusing their strategy around a launch of that style of game.
They weren’t just guessing what game marketing could look like, they specifically looked at how a battle royale can roll out and gain traction. I think that’s really important. You have to build a social presence quickly because you need three players in every round. The more you have your friends saying, ‘I saw this game being played, do you want to play it with me?’ the more it grows. It seems like it’s been going well from what I can see.
At the moment the game is technically only in early access, is that right?
TA: That’s correct. Currently it’s in early access on PlayStation 5 and on PC. It’s in the pioneer program on Xbox, coming out of that very shortly on Xbox Series X and Series S.
Currently the mode you can play is 3 by 3, but the 2 by 2 and solo modes are coming at some point in the future.
TA: Correct. Currently it’s an extraction reel with 60 players in squads of three players per squad, bouncing for last minute standing while also extracting in-game items through what we call our hexes.
With such a large focus on streamers, where are you moving next in terms of marketing?
TA: Let’s analyze for a second what took place since our launch. Everyone, of course, is talking about the fact that Ninja, Shroud, TimTheTatman, and some other large streamers as well have been streaming. What a lot of people don’t realize is that we didn’t sponsor a ton of streamers, but we had over 3,300 people streaming with over 3 million hours streamed.
Even some of our sponsored streamers came back half an hour later saying that I love this game and gonna keep playing it. TimTheTatman literally said this is my game and just kept streaming. We have Warzone streamers that start the video by saying I’m not sponsored by Gunzilla, but check out how cool this game is.
Now, if we switch to mainstream media, we had Forbes, CNET, and Rolling Stone, completely organically writing articles about us in an insane turn of events. Forbes mentioned crypto and Gunzilla in a positive light. Forbes never talks positively about crypto, but in the context of Gunzilla, actually mentioned crypto in a positive light.
We had traditional streamers realizing the benefits of blockchain technology. Some mentioned that it’s like serialized, verifiable Pokemon cards. Shroud said ‘why spend a couple of million dollars rebuilding Steam when you can just build it all on the blockchain?’ Some people in the traditional web2 area embraced what blockchain technology actually is bringing to the table and realized that this is not some weird voodoo hocus pocus. This is actually really simple stuff like verifiable asset ownership.
Secondly, even after the sponsored campaigns stopped, the wallet growth and the transaction growth did not. Slightly less than three weeks after launch we are sitting at almost nine million wallets. We’re sitting at over 101 million transactions. We saw a big traditional web2 game launch last Friday, Black Ops 6, Call of Duty. Our transaction numbers didn’t drop. Everybody was saying Off The Grid is going to get dropped like hot potato, but that simply hasn’t happened. The numbers are all verifiable. People can go to our blockchain scanner and see what’s going on.
We’ve stayed steady at our daily active users, which are only growing. We stayed steady at roughly three million transactions per day. Wallet numbers are increasing. People are coming back on a regular basis. So it’s been nothing short of phenomenal to see that people want to stay in the game.
It’s also important to point out that this reception and all this enthusiasm is happening despite the product being less than 20% rolled out.
We’ve got our battle royale mode coming, we’ve got rank play, tournaments, custom lobbies, the story mode with the first battle royale game in the history. That will have 60 hours of storyline on both sides of the conflict written by none other than Richard Morgan, who wrote the book Altered Carbon, which was turned into a Netflix show. Yet even without those things, the game loop is so immersive and sticky that people are playing non-stop.
AC: I’ve seen a lot of people focus on the point that you can’t pay these big streamers forever. Well, that’s obvious. Some of it has to come from people enjoying the game, the product, having friends play. Of course that initial push also helped Gunzilla rank really well on discovery platforms, like being the number one game on Epic Games Store. That’s not paid, that’s just something which was achieved through the initial marketing.
Now you’ll see people continuing to roll in organically through that. On the PlayStation Store, Off The Grid was the top downloaded game recently as well. So I think people making that point, it’s valid. You can’t pay streamers forever, but that’s not the plan.
To a very specific point, does everyone who starts playing the game get a wallet set up for them?
TA: Yes, seamlessly in the background. All the necessary tools required are provided for the gamer without the gamer needing to set up a wallet or swap any tokens or do anything else on their end that is usually associated with web3.
In terms of those nine million wallets, that’s not specifically for Off The Grid, but for the Gunz blockchain, on which there are other ways of interacting than Off The Grid, right?
TA: That’s correct. Technically it is for the Gunz blockchain but the majority of these wallets all came after the game launch – I believe we were at like roughly 2.5 million wallets pre October 8th and we are at 8.96 million wallets as of now – so the majority are associated with Off The Grid.
We do have a mobile companion game called Techno Core, that is available on iOS and Android, which people have been playing for a while with a Gunz wallet. People have been interacting with the marketplace which is accessible through that wallet as well, but the majority has absolutely come after 8th October.
You’re saying less than 20% of the game is out now. Is there a roadmap? For some of us who don’t like playing battle royale because we get killed quite easily, when will the campaign mode drop?
TA: Well, so number one, I’ll say self-awareness is the path to mastery. Knowing that you get killed quickly and that you should stick to stories is a good thing. However, we do have an awesome app called the OTG companion app where you can match up with other players in your region with your kill/death ratio. There you can get introduced to the game. Nobody starts out a good battle royale gamer, it takes a while to get used to that.
But to answer your question very specifically, we plan to launch the full game over the next couple of months. Later this year, early next year, it’s not specifically been announced yet, but we are very close to launching the full game.
If you have loaded into the game and looked left and right as the planes are flying before you’re dropping in, you’ve seen fog on both sides obfuscating what’s behind it. That’s the rest of the island that is still yet to open. So it’s not only the other modes that are coming, but it is also the full islands that will be revealed as well. On our website, you’ll actually see an overview of what that island looks like. It’s much larger than the map you currently play on.
Over a year ago, there werer short films using the in-game engine where a lot of background lore and characters were revealed. I guess we expect that in AAA games now.
TA: That’s a great segue into where all of the lore is coming from. So our co-founder is actually Neil Blomkamp, the award nominated, insanely creative genius that created the movies District 9, Chopin, Elysium, and last year also the movie Gran Turismo for Orlando Bloom. He’s behind the whole vision and he’s behind those short films that you’re referencing.
All of those were rendered 100% with the in-game engine, so they’re not just some fancy cutscenes developed in 3D, but it is our in-game assets rendered with our in-game engine.
Looking at Avalanche, it’s gone through a fairly sizable technical upgrade called Avalanche9000. It basically allows projects and games in particular to run their own infrastructure separate from the main blockchain. Why is that important to games like Off The Grid?
AC: What Avalanche does is help builders create their own chain that’s still connected to a broader ecosystem, which makes getting funds around these various chains and apps a lot easier than if they were totally separate. It’s not L2s, as we don’t store all the data in one spot, they’re all their own sovereign chains.
Our belief is that no single blockchain is going to be able to manage the world’s data and that eventually, everyone who wants to use blockchain will benefit from being able to have their own chain that’s connected to this ecosystem.
Avalanche9000 is really around a couple of key upgrades. One of them being the financials of building a chain. So previously they were called subnets because they were sub chains of the Avalanche main network. And essentially, like when Gunzilla got started, you had to stake a lot of AVAX in order to build your own chain. What we found pretty consistently is that puts a high floor of what you need to accomplish in order to have your own chain.
Well-funded teams like Gunzilla are able to make that investment, but we want to make this available to the entire world. The AVAX staking model to get started is, especially for startups, just a little too high. So it’s introducing a new payment method for building a chain, specifically pay as you go, and trying to make it much more accessible for a broad variety of builders.
I think Gunzilla is a great example of what we think is going to be the future of using blockchain, where it is backend technology that enables ownership of your digital assets, but it’s not getting in the way everywhere. That belief is something a lot of our games share, and the Avalanche chain allows them to accomplish that.
There are quite a few games using Avalanche, such as Shrapnel, MapleStory, and also smaller ones like DeFi Kingdoms for example. Being a multi purpose chain, is gaming something you’re pushing more into? Does the success of Off The Grid mean that you can leverage more people into that?
AC: Over time, it’s been a steady march towards getting the entire ecosystem to understand the value of gaming. I think back to PCs and mobile and even the internet and how often games played a part in the broader adoption of those technologies. I think it’s pretty straightforward to look at each of those and say, yeah, gaming had a really good impact on how often and how integrated these technologies were in our daily lives. What we believe at Ava Labs is that gaming will also do the same for blockchain.
It’s a pretty deep belief in the gaming ecosystem now, and I think it’s evolved over time, but examples like Off The Grid are just increasing our confidence.
In terms of the Gunz chain, which is what Off The Grid‘s running on, are you looking for other developers to be able to use that infrastructure as well?
TA: So there’s several aspects to this. Number one, when we originally were looking at different blockchains and looking at different tools, we couldn’t find anything that satisfied our high needs and demands, so we ended up building Gunz on top of a highly customized Avalanche subnet.
We ended up doing the same thing for the Gunz wallet, the blockchain scanner and NFT marketplace, companion app, etc. Then we looked at all of that and said, well, what we have here is a AAA gaming ecosystem.
So post Off The Grid launch, we will absolutely be inviting other AAA IP, whether web2 or web3, to launch on the Gunz chain. It will be permissioned and invite only. We’ll allow them to white label all of our technologies, but more importantly, also make sure that they white label a sustainable economy. That’s the long-term plan.
We’ll be very well positioned to give a home to web2 AAA gaming studios looking at web3 infrastructure with the experience of launching to tens of millions of gamers on console for instance.
AC: That’s part of our goal too. If somebody comes to Avalanche and says, hey, we’re a AAA game studio trying to figure out how to do this, we say, go talk to Gunzilla. They’ve got this for you.
Currently it’s running on testnet. Can you say anything about the mainnet launch and the GUNZ token TGE?
TA: The only thing I can say about that is that we always make sure to do things on a very big scale as you guys have experienced with our early access launch and we like launching things in stealth mode with people kind of being taken by surprise. So we’ll follow a very simple playbook, but we’re not too far off. Everything is in process.
Find out more at the Off The Grid website.
