MXC AMA Recap Session with Yusuf Goolamabbas from Animoca Brands (TOWER)
Guest: Yusuf Goolamabbas, Group CTO at Animoca Brands
Host: Iris of MXC Exchange
Introduction:
My name is Yusuf Goolamabbas, I am the Group CTO of Animoca Brands, and also the Head of the Growth Marketing team.
I manage relationships with strategic partners like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and provide engineering and marketing guidance to the subsidiaries of Animoca Brands, including TicBits, Pixowl, Gamee, nWay and Quidd.
I strive to bring as much academic knowledge and working experience as possible to my role at Animoca Brands.
Animoca Brands is one of the few notable gaming companies that has taken bold strides into the world of blockchain. We have a broad portfolio of products including the REVV token and SAND token; original games including The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes; and products for popular intellectual properties including Formula 1®, Marvel, WWE, Power Rangers, MotoGP™. Our subsidiary companies include The Sandbox, Quidd, Gamee, nWay, and Lympo.
Our blockchain investments and partnerships include Lucid Sight, Dapper Labs, WAX, Harmony, and Decentraland among many others.
Head over to this link to learn more about TOWER https://www.crazydefenseheroes.com
Follow TOWER on Telegram and Twitter
https://twitter.com/TowerToken
Follow news about Crazy Defense Heroes on its Twitter and Discord
Questions about the project:
Q1.
Iris: What is TOWER? Can you share with us more in details?
Yusuf: TOWER is the basis of an initiative by developer and publisher Animoca Brands to blend traditional Free-to-Play gaming with the Play-to-Earn potential of blockchain gaming.
The TOWER token is a ERC-20 fungible utility token for the Crazy Kings game franchise, which includes Crazy Kings, Crazy Defense Heroes, and an upcoming blockchain based PC game.
The goal of TOWER is to build a system that attempts to maintain balance and equitability in traditional Free-to-Play games while introducing several attractive benefits of blockchain, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), and governance.
Crazy Kings (CK) and its sequel Crazy Defense Heroes (CDH) are successful tower defense games boasting millions of downloads, solid financial results and a number of blockchain-friendly features, including the deck building of a collectible card game and an RPG character/equipment system.
Some highlights of what we are planning for TOWER
Governance: owners of the tokens will be able to fully participate in the governance of the Crazy Kings franchise, including submitting proposals for the games’ direction and voting on those proposals; these are important steps in giving players a true and effective voice in the roadmap of the game
Crypto economy: owners of the tokens will be able to trade them, thus buying and selling the right to influence the development of the game franchise, and even participate in distributed finance (DeFi) initiatives such as staking (details to be determined)
NFTs: assets in Crazy Kings and Crazy Defense Heroes are represented by game cards, which have different power, value, and rarity. Players will use the token to purchase collectible NFTs that correspond to in-game items; the NFTs are planned to have certain functionalities in the new game
NFT minting: owners of the token will be able to mint NFTs that correspond to in-game cards. Players will be able to trade the NFTs
Currency: the token will be accepted as currency within a PC based blockchain native game that will be the newest addition to the Crazy Kings franchise
Tournament entry fees: tournaments are special events that will challenge the skill, strategy, and game assets of players
Tournament prizes: tokens will be distributed as prizes to the victors of competitive multiplayer tournaments, which is a significant step toward full-fledged play-to-earn mechanics.
Q2.
Iris: What triggers you to launch TOWER? What are some of the real-world problems/ pain points that TOWER aims to solve?
Yusuf: In 2019, the video gaming industry famously generated over US$150 billion in revenue (more than the music and film industries combined). Virtual goods were estimated to generate approximately US$50 billion, and are projected to grow to US$189.76 billion within five years (Adroit Market Research, 2019).
Almost everyone who plays video games today buys some form of virtual goods, such as virtual cars, character equipment, and “skins”. Most players think that they own the virtual goods they purchased. But they don’t.
Ownership of the vast majority of virtual goods is merely an illusion that can evaporate in a moment, regardless of the amount of money invested.
That’s because virtual goods are typically provided as a licensed service, and are subject to the terms of service that a publisher has specified for the use of those assets (for example, the assets remain the property of the publisher, and you are not allowed to use them outside of the game where they are provided).
In effect, the games industry is renting virtual goods to players. That’s certainly not ownership.
Property rights are a novel concept in video games, because in-game content is typically provided on a licensing basis. In the traditional gaming model, the in-game assets you “own” are licensed to you by the game publisher or operator, and this license can be revoked for various reasons (e.g., if the game shuts down, or if you break the terms of service). You can use the game assets licensed to you inside the game that they’re from, but that’s typically the extent of your ability to use them.
Blockchain technology enables true digital ownership for in-game assets, conferring to gamers genuine property rights — including the right to use the assets anywhere (not solely in their native game) and the right to make money from them (e.g., by selling them to a third party).
Tokenized game content can be in the form of fungible tokens (usually for in-game currencies) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs, usually for content that is rare or unique, such as a racecar or magic sword). This allows you to (truly) own your in-game assets, and benefit accordingly from that ownership.
Play-to-earn
The play-to-earn business model rewards game players with monetizable rewards when they engage in activity that creates value for the game and its players. In blockchain games, this activity can be in the game or out of the game but still related to it (e.g., providing liquidity on an exchange for the TOWER Token, our fungible token for our tower defense games in the Crazy Kings franchise).
The rewards given to players for such activities are typically in-game assets ranging from fungible tokens (e.g., TOWER) to digital assets that are tokenized on blockchain as Non-fungible tokens (e.g., a car, magic sword, potion, cosmetic item, etc.). These rewards have real value outside of the game, which allows players to convert them into money — such as by selling NFTs on a third party marketplace or selling fungible tokens on an exchange.
Q3.
Iris: What are some of the challenges that TOWER currently faces? How do you aim to solve them?
Yusuf: Combining blockchain and F2P gaming is challenging for various reasons.
The first is the obvious one, which is that blockchain games usually require fairly significant payment that is antithetical to F2P.
The second is that F2P games are inflationary by design: increases in player base and activity lead to decreases in the scarcity and value of in-game assets.
The inflationary model of F2P gaming is intentional because the generation of assets based on player activity rewards and encourages player engagement, provides a level playing field in which all participants have a fair chance, creates opportunities for monetization, and so on.
Blockchain games, on the other hand, are able to limit this inflation because the supply of game assets can be predefined and controlled. For example, our successful game F1® Delta Time uses the REVV ERC-20 fungible token as currency, which has a limited supply and a disclosed schedule specifying how many tokens can be issued over time.
F2P gaming and blockchain gaming approach virtual economies in fundamentally different ways: F2P games are designed to be inflationary in order to generate revenue at the expense of a game’s virtual assets and their scarcity; whereas blockchain games typically seek to generate value for their virtual assets and their scarcity.
The audience who play F2P gaming is also quite different from the blockchain/crypto-savvy community, which is why we plan to provide farming opportunities for TOWER in our F2P game which will encourage our user base.
Q4.
Iris: Are there any exciting news or updates with regards to TOWER that you would like to share with the users?
Yusuf: We are very excited to have TOWER be listed on MXC. Prior to its listing, it was available on Uniswap paired with ETH, REVV, LYM and SUPER
We have run a tournament in Crazy Kings so far and distributed 456,050 TOWER tokens in prizes. This week we are running another tournament in Crazy Kings which is also distributing 456,050 TOWER tokens. We are in the process of designing NFTs from the Crazy Kings franchise to make available for sale which we plan to infuse with DeFI capabilities such as staking, meaning that those NFTs will have the ability to yield TOWER
Iris: Yes! In addition to that — TOWER will get listed on MXC under TOWER/USDT pair. There are deposit and trading contests going-on.
For more info, please refer to: https://support.mxc-exchange.com/hc/en-001/articles/360058703132
Q5.
Iris: If you were to summarize your project in ONE word, what would it be? Why?
Yusuf: Play-to-Earn
Why ?
Technically speaking, play-to-earn is not even a new phenomenon. Recall the gold farming occurring on a large scale in games such as World of Warcraft, in which thousands of low-pay “gold farmers” played the game to earn in-game goods that would be sold to other players for real money. Except, of course, that gold farming was not permitted by game publishers, and that disrupted the economy and balance of the game.
Unlike the old gold farming, today’s play-to-earn trends are very positive: the selling and trading of blockchain game assets is not a violation of a game’s terms of service, blockchain gamers truly own the assets they obtain, and gamers are free to operate independently instead of being forced to grind for an employer under harsh and oppressive conditions.
The play-to-earn trend has existed for many years; the problem was that the play-to-earn of days past stood in an illegal (or, at best, grey) area because it was not permitted by the terms of use of centralized gaming platforms. We’re going to take play-to-earn into the future.
Iris: Play-to-Earn, that sounds intriguing!
Free-Asking Segment
Q1. Smart contracts are vulnerable to bugs, and even recently three big new DeFi projects were victims of this, costing users funds. How efficient and secured is your smart contract, and did you ever audit it via any external party?
Yusuf:
The TOWER smart contract is based on Animoca Brands REVV smart contract which has been audited by Certik. Here is a link to the report
Q2. Has Crazy Defense Heroes or Crazy Kings been featured on the Appstores?
Yusuf:
Yes, It’s been featured many times in various countries Some images I can share from recent features
Q3. Without proper marketing and capital infusion, project dies, how do you convince us you have adequate marketing power and capital to push this project to the top project ?
Yusuf:
TOWER is being developed by Animoca Brands, We have existing projects such as REVV and SAND which work with brand partners such as Formula 1 and MotoGP , Atari, Manchester City. These projects have demonstrated value for their users and introduced interesting concepts such as staking of NFT’s. The REVV ecosystem has been introduced to TOWER via a TOWER prize pool availalbe in a recent Elite Time Trial
https://f1deltatime.medium.com/elite-time-trial-event-segment-and-tower-special-is-here-46669d24d333
TOWER is definitely benefiting from these associations. We’ve also partnered with Elliot Trades SuperFarm with a liquidity pair of SUPER/TOWER on Uniswap
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