Twitter Spaces with the DuskBreakers Team — AMA Recap

Date: November 22, 2021

In attendance: members of the founding team, including Kevin Lin, Dave Barthwell, JT Gleason, Adam Bao, Darren Geers, Bernie Su, and Nelson Wang; as well as Discord community moderators Tiffany Dong and CherryCamo

What motivated you to build with NFTs?

Kevin: I’ve known about NFTs for a while now, ever since CryptoKitties. At first I thought it was kind of silly, and I was in the same mindset that a lot of people have today, which is: “can’t you just right click and save it and it’s ‘yours’?”. However, I also played a lot of Magic cards when I was a kid and with those, there are 2 primary and very real values. First, intrinsic value — the cards are playable and certain cards are just super OP and rare, which creates market demand due to scarcity and playability value. People collect the cards to use them in social and tournament play and are willing to buy cards to ensure win conditions. Second, market value — people want collectors items for which the value is determined by natural market demand, informed by rarity, history, quality, and sometimes memes and hype. That is the feeling you get these days with NFTs, but there’s also potential utility which the industry is just recently starting to understand and tap into.

You’re starting to see that in video games, which in our minds is the ultimate gateway for the broader audience to transition into Web3. Since the free-to-play movement, video games have been built around systems and economies that support buying art in the form of in-game items. That art is commonly attached to your character or environment in the form of cosmetics, whether it has any meaningful effect or not. In some cases, the player communities traded these items in a grey market system, often at odds with the game creators’ terms of service or intent. This is a proto version of NFTs without blockchain and all the great things that come along with web3 technology.

Further, for the current manifestation of NFT collections — they are oftentimes not only art and collectors items, but they act as a ticket to a small community centered around a team of initial creators. Think of it as a club or membership to these communities. You get to interact with the founders and original members of that community and actually build together. This creation process is not unlike a normal startup, but at the same time it involves a community of members that can benefit directly as the IP and communities grow stronger. This feeling of influence and involvement in each community means that your feedback and ideas can actually change the course of projects, creating a deeper sense of attachment versus traditional IPs. We are trying to build around a common thesis and philosophy and hope that NFTs can serve as a mechanism to find those initial organic community members who like what we’re up to.

Finally, I’ve always wanted to make games. Twitch was an amazing experience and I was able to meet so many great people in the games industry, people who are trying to build a positive gaming industry. So far in the few months we have been working as a team, I’m excited to be building again with a team of people I trust and love working with. Games are this complex web of story, art, gameplay, and systems design. The experience so far has been difficult indeed, but incredibly rewarding.

What are your most important next priorities? Does your team have enough funds and a strong community to achieve those milestones?

Adam: We are very much starting to build out a strong community. Wherever possible, we’ve avoided using mechanisms that draw in or encourage bot behavior. The community we have right now is great and has been growing organically, with awesome people offering to become community moderators — including Tiff and CherryCamo.

Dave: I can speak to the pieces that I’m most interested in terms of the roadmap and what my most next priorities are. A benefit of the way that we’ve approached this and the strength of our large team is that we’re able to distribute responsibility. It’s not just two guys who somehow hit a home run and don’t know how to run a team. We have the experience in regards to developing content and complex software, working in teams, gaming experience, among others.

From my side, I’m most excited about Phase III (Play), which we will reveal more as we get closer. We are building an interactive gaming experience inside the DuskBreakers universe and we are also building supplement multimedia content influenced by community decisions. The community will be driving the narrative and direction of the content and games themselves. I’ve been a fan of world-building and role-playing games since I was a kid and this project is super exciting for me.

Kevin: I’ll chime in a bit on the funding part and how we’re thinking about general operations. We’ve raised an oversubscribed round from high quality angels. We’re building teams in Chicago, Galveston, TX, and Taipei, Taiwan where there’s amazing talent across all the things a team needs for game development and world creation. These may not be places you traditionally think of as game development hubs, but we wanted to pick places that we personally care about and hope to have measurable local impact as well. We have experienced enough life to realize that great talent is really everywhere in the world, but opportunities and vision may not be as developed.

Bernie: I’d like to add on to what Dave said about the multimedia merge. As some context, there’s a lot of Twitch OGs in the team, which makes me really happy. I’m more of a hybrid, as I just did the Artificial show for Twitch winning their first Emmy. Going into Twitch four years ago, when we started Artificial, I looked at Twitch as a platform for innovation, where you can take storytelling to a different level of using the platform to bring the audience into the show consequentially. What I’m seeing now with working with these guys and getting into the NFT space is another canvas ripe for disruption around interactive storytelling. I see this as a leapfrog opportunity in the work that I do, and I’m really excited to be here.

Adam: One more quick thing to note. For most other NFT projects, they’ll raise funds by selling NFTs to collect ETH. In our case, we’re not distributing these ETH proceeds to our team, but rather reinvesting 100% of it back into the project. We are very much focused on building something cool for the community.

Are VCs investing in your project? How do your NFTs hold value? Why Web 3?

Adam: We’re well capitalized for what we’re looking to build. Regarding our NFTs… well firstly we feel very good about the art we’re coming out with. Geers is a fantastic artist, and you’ve seen some of the artwork already. Therefore, step 1 is artwork which itself holds value. We want this to be a successful collectible. There are 10,000 NFTs, so there’s a limited quantity and hopefully it accrues value over time.

There are also other phases of our project that drive value, including the interactive media side. In our case, it’s not simply an NFT, but NFTs would be relevant to some of the content that we create as well. There’ll be a mix of interactive media, TikTok, anime content, comics, and there are a number of things that are being worked on. I like to think of it as co-creating IPs. For example, some of the coolest game + show interplay today have been built by Riot games (League of Legends, Arcane on Netflix, etc) and of course Blizzard with their vast worlds and beautiful cinematics. You’ve got the game loops, content, characters, and lore. It would be cool to build IP with the community. We’re co-creating IP here with our community.

JT: I’d love to touch on why NFTs and Web3. In traditional gaming companies, the ownership of the actual game objects and stuff have historically been on centralized servers. We’re seeing the world move to a place of distributed ownership. With gaming technology in a distributed ownership space, you have a contract that is out there that is public and known to everybody and you know what it does, and you know what you can do. Therefore, you can have pieces of metadata associated with the actual art of the NFT and use that to power game mechanics. The Web3 approach is interesting, as you don’t just own the art itself, but you own the metadata associated with that art and it can be used in interesting ways inside of a game experience. There’s also the ability for value creation to be passed along, and there are a lot of fascinating and complicated technological problems here.

What is your business model? What does this mean for investors and the project?

Adam: I’m fortunate to have known Jeff Zirlin (aka Jiho, Sky Mavis cofounder) since college days, as we were in the same fraternity pledge class. Very happy for him and Axie success.

He had more time a few years ago ha. When I spoke to him about Axie Infinity for the first time, it was one of the first instances of a crypto project, at least to me, that made a lot of sense. Some of the DeFi stuff was less obvious to me. However, looking at Axie, how do they make money? Well in the case of Sky Mavis, they have a marketplace where you can transact or trade Axies for a fee, which is a straightforward business model. A lot of internet companies and marketplace models do it this way. So in its simplest form, we’ll make money by selling NFTs (primary sales) and take a cut on the secondary sales (via Opensea or other platforms).

Let’s talk more about the lore, the stores, characters, and narrative arc. Can someone share these details at a high level?

Bernie: At a high level, we’re in the distant future and the Earth is rapidly decaying. Humanity never got climate change under control and governments are spiraling into chaos when suddenly a solar event knocks out all power across the planet. People start to notice a dot in the sky, which they find out is a large, dormant alien vessel, dubbed The Dusk, that has appeared stuck in orbit around the planet. Eventually, governments sending shuttles up to The Dusk realize that the spaceship is composed of potentially earth-saving material. The top governments anoint one corporation, DuskTech, to manage all things related to the Dusk. Breakers are the individuals who are chosen by DuskTech to go up and mine this large spaceship for resources in order to improve Earth’s situation. Some Breakers are able to enter ship for mysterious reasons DuskTech hasn’t quite figured out yet, and these breakers who are allowed to enter the ship undergo changes to their bodies — cybernetics and bionics — that improve their condition. AS the story progresses, we learn more about the nature of The Dusk and how human society has reacted to its appearance and its potential to save the planet.

Geers: As far as artwork goes, I have a few great passions but some of them are sci fi, art, cybernetics, cyberpunk, among others. You’ll see a lot of the same recurring themes in my artwork, which is a lot of mechanical pieces, body alterations, and futuristic elements. Coming up with Duskbreakers, I wanted to incorporate the idea that as people enter The Dusk, your body has to adapt in order to survive the harsh climates and extreme environments.

What’s the greatest concern and difficulty you faced today? Is there any part of the changing landscape around crypto that is a concern, or are you all not concerned about that?

Kevin: Diversity. At first I just started reaching out to friends about this project and they happened to all be men. I don’t have any excuse for that. Diversity is something very important to us. We are hiring actively and we want to hire a diverse team and build a diverse community. We have Molly on the team, who is one of our story writers, but that’s just 1 woman out of a team of 12, which shouldn’t be the case. We are going to work on that.

For day-to-day stuff, we constantly think about how to incorporate story, art, and game design. These all inform each other, and then we have to incorporate all the web3 mechanisms as well. But, game design first for now.

Regarding the safety / regulatory aspect, we don’t want our project to be abusive to our player community. The fact is a lot of existing crypto projects are helping redistribute wealth across the world, which is amazing, but there are several projects that are short term scams and fraudulent, i.e. rug pulls, where the people who develop the projects just take the money and disappear. That won’t be us — we’re public and are excited to be building our games and worlds for the long term.

Adam: Regarding the legal side, it’s very important to consider these things given we are a public team. We aren’t an anon team, so we have to be very thoughtful and careful about the things we do and what we say. For example, it’s important to delineate between NFT sales and what might be considered securities. With some other projects, they might guarantee airdrops. Well is this a source of passive income and should it be classified as a security? With things like this, we must be thoughtful about even the language we use. All these things are important and we’re working with lawyers on this.

I think if you take a step back and look at the landscape, there’s a pecking order with what the lawyers and regulators are clamping down on. Firstly, it’s fraudulent protocols taking money in and diverting it elsewhere. There also might be areas where regulators want to send a bit of a message like with Coinbase where they were asked to hold off on the release of their new yield product. They’re going to go after private companies before they launch as much as possible. However, if a company’s already launching and has a large community, then it gets a bit harder to go after them.

All things to be aware of. I think gaming is getting some regulatory attention, but not as much as DeFi. However, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider these issues. We’re paying attention to regulation while maintaining the spirit of innovation and pushing the envelope.

How is the team going to market this?

Kevin: We’re focused on growing organically right now, and we’re fortunate to have a lot of friends who are helping us out. They’re part of the community and so we’re expanding one degree at a time from there. At first for the NFT drop, we’re really focused on building a tight knit community. We are obsessed with ensuring as few bots make it into our community as possible. We focus on building great art and story and gameplay to ensure that people like the project and enjoy being part of the community. Hopefully, then, they continue to promote us to their friends and followers. When the DuskBreaker game comes out (i.e. the full game, not the play-to-mint arcade game), we’ll do more traditional marketing and work with streamers, YouTubers, and other influencers.

How do you want to keep influencers interested? How do you want to keep the community engaged and keep the player base active?

JT: The whole team has thought a lot about this. We’re gained a lot of experience over the years building video games and communities. We’re not going to do an NFT and walk away. We’re going to drop amazing pieces of content to keep everyone excited and continue updating our roadmap and keeping the community updated. I have a strong belief in the team and our ability to deliver great pieces of content.

Kevin: On the influencer question specifically, we hope to get a lot of them involved at the ground level. We hope to get our creator friends involved via voice acting, writing with us, creating characters, and plan to bring them into the story design process, art and animation, and of course our game as well.

How long have you guys been working on this? Where are you guys located? Is there a white paper? Where are you building on? How are you going to mitigate botting? Where do you see this project in 12 months?

Kevin: We started working on Duskbreakers towards the end of September. We have team members in California, Illinois, Texas, and Taipei. Currently, we do not have a white paper complete, but it is in the works. We’re launching the Duskbreakers NFTs on Ethereum, but once we launch the full Web3 game (not the Play-to-Mint mini game), we’ll have to move to an alternative platform.

Dave: Regarding the bots, we are not using bots and are not going to market in a way that promotes botting. We are doing what we can to actively discourage botting of the mint itself through the Play-to-Mint system, which is featured on our Medium post. We are very concerned about having an organic community. We want to have real owners and lots of diversity in terms of ownership. We also want to make sure that people hold the NFT for a very long time. Just for my part as a world builder and someone who’s heavily involved in the game design and creative aspect, I want people who play this game to feel attached to their NFT.

Kev: In 12 months, we’d like to have made significant progress on getting Duskbreakers to a place where it’s a AAA quality game that people are playing on the computer and potentially on mobile and console. We hope to have an animated series and regular content streaming across various platforms like TikTok, Youtube, Twitch.

I think in 12 months, hopefully our community is engaged and having a good time. We also have other games in concept that should be in development then. In addition to this Duskbreakers project, we have a separate fantasy world concept in development, the initial game of which is a reimagined Tamagotchi. Nelson and I will be working on building games with a team in Taipei, and the core Metatheory team will continue to help concept and support. We’re excited to keep building cool experiences for the community, so stay tuned!