This AMA was conducted live via YouTube with our CEO, Pat Tang, using questions submitted by community members at https://www.reddit.com/r/Plair/. We hope to conduct more AMAs as products launch and partners onboard. Stay tuned and be sure to follow us on our social channels:
Twitter — http://www.twitter.com/Plair_Life
Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/Plair
Official Telegram — http://t.me/plair_life
Facebook — http://www.facebook.com/plairlife
Youtube Live — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT9yYmZ4huo
What has been done code- or project wise since the GOLT times a few months ago?
We have begun to work on the revamped PLAIR Platform. Coding has already begun. The schedule will be reflected in the new roadmap that is listed in the Plair white paper.
During the last few months we have been building up our team in Hong Kong and our tech team in Shenzhen while conducting a lengthy trip in the States to talk with potential, new, and current partners. Plair is growing quickly and GOLT, as a project, simply didn’t meet the scope we wanted to achieve with Plair.
The whole eSport industry is valued at $1,5 billion, yet if you sell all tokens in your ICO market cap will be $120mil. This seems rather excessive, what is the justification for this huge market cap right out the gate?
We are focused not just on the eSports industry but the entire gaming industry. The entire gaming industry is around 130 BN dollars. We are also minting enough tokens to last us for years to come. Plair does not plan to sell all of our tokens, rather use them within the Plair Ecosystem. We want to truly evolve the 130 BN dollar gaming industry into a decentralized mecca of fulfillment, empowering the lowest level users to earn a living doing what they love best and that’s gaming.
What are you telling your Private Investors your company will be worth in 5 years?
We don’t make any promises on the value of Plair in the future. Rather our investors are believers in what Plair is and what we do. Our investors see huge potential in Plair. Above all else this is why they have become investors of Plair.
When we were talking with our private investors we specifically looked for candidates that were talking about Plair in the year 2028+. To us, Plair is the future and our private investors see it the same way.
What will be the significance of the token in ecosystem? eSports is a hard area to disrupt what advantages/features that Plair has to disrupt it?
Plair’s Token is crucial to Plair’s ecosystem. Plair is offering gamers and gaming fans to participate in the many features Plair has to offer. All of this centers around the Plair Token. The Plair token is actually a utilization token that is needed for transactions that happen on the blockchain within the Plair Ecosystem. Plair can be used for things such as staking tokens into a match or smart contract, Donating tokens to content creators, Earning tokens as rewards for completing certain tasks such as watching content, providing computing resources, etc. The list goes on an on and more utility will continuously be added as the platform expands. We also get into the token economy in our white paper, so make sure you read it via our website.
Plair has the team, the advisors, and partners to help disrupt the current gaming ecosystem. Plair noticed that currently gaming platforms are very fragmented. You have to play on 1 platform then video stream on another. The experience is not very seamless and most of the time it actually can be somewhat frustrating. Plair set out to create a product where gamers and gaming fans only needed to go to one place to enjoy the best gaming experience possible while earning rewards for doing so.
One of the biggest things Plair is doing that others are not is reward streaming viewership which is not done on Youtube or Twitch.
Any insight as to why the GOLT (pre-Plair) ICO dollar amount that is now required increased from 20 million USD to 30 million USD? Aka, what has changed, in detail, in terms of the business case?
The investment amount has increased since the GOLT days due to how much bigger Plair has become as a platform and the added value our new unannounced partners have fused into our ecosystem. Plair is now 10 times larger than what GOLT was before. We did this while adding a 30% increase in investment.
GOLT used to only be tournaments. Plair has the capacity to take over the entire gaming ecosystem. We want to make sure gamers and gaming fans come and stay in the Plair ecosystem and the initial funding builds us the platform our new partners need to support the millions of future users on Plair.
In your business model, how do you plan to make money and how much are you thinking you can make off a single user?
The first thing Plair wants to do as a platform is to see that our users are taken care of. When we take care of our users Plair, as a business, will thrive. We plan on making money at the beginning by taking transaction fees for every tournament that is created. From there we will bring in sponsorship money with sponsors we have already built a relationship through our traditional eSports backgrounds once we get through Phase 1, which is shown in detail on our white paper.
Phase 2 will bring in streaming and we will be able to make money off the content and money saved through decentralized computing as well as sponsorships for the content itself. Phase 3 will allow the community to build tools and games to run on Plair’s platform and utilize Plair’s token. Plair will announce or development and execution strategy at a later date for Phase 2& 3. Phase 2 and Phase 3 will have an additional white paper written before we begin development of their milestones. This tactic is used to protect pending intellectual property while we work on other solutions.
The lifetime value of a single user has not yet been determined yet as nobody has ever built a platform like Plair. We will build a platform where users will stay put and be able to interact and transact with the Plair token over and over.
In your grand vision of the decentralized cloud, are games actually built on the blockchain or will you just propping up structures for players to play games by publishers like Halo or whatever?
It is both. We fully expect, and are building the tools for, a publishing company and dev team to fully build their games to distribute on Plair in a decentralized fashion. We also want to offer the ability for high performance rigs and server farms to service high-end gaming experience to users on low-end rigs. We will release a later whitepaper to explain this in much more detail in an attempt to protect our pending intellectual property.
I’m a big fan of Boxmining, he’s been involved in gaming and cryptocurrency/blockchain for years. I see he’s an advisor for Plair so what sort of things or what is his involvement in the project?
Boxmining is an integral part of Plair. Boxmining has a heavy gaming background and will be integral in helping Plair build its ecosystem. Boxmining’s experience has, and will, help create the ultimate experience for Plair’s users. Afterall he himself wants to use the platform as well!
Marketing
The main issue I have with your platform is the potential user base. There are a lot of products out there. Do you really have partners to help onboard millions of users? How do you plan to market? Does your agreement with these partners come with a specific figure on added members?
Plair is working with some of the largest gaming partners in the market. We have and are working to build key relationships with partners in every corner of the globe.
NGE is one example of a strong partnership we have already announced. NGE is North America’s largest eSports content, events and broadcasting company. Through our partnership we will be able to potentially onboard millions of North American players alone. NGE is not our only partner capable of bringing in additional millions of unique users. Plair will be a disruptive force and our partners are dead set on making this technology a key part of their future. Plair not only making their business models easier to execute but also more profitable.
Not are you open to, but will you be working with eSports organizations that have global appeal like TSM, Liquid, or even NRG?
Plair is happy to work with any eSports organizations out there and we’ll have a lot to offer them. Plair’s ecosystem is built so that we can except any partnership in gaming. As a matter a fact Plair is already in talks with major eSports organizations across the world as we speak.
How do you tend to attract the leading eSports monopolies like EA Games/FIFA, Activision-Blizzard, RIOT Games, Valve/Steam, etc?
Plair will attract leading sports monopolies through our existing relationships within the traditional eSports world as well as leverage our partners and advisors’ ongoing relationships with these publishers. Our team and network understands this industry to its fullest and we have designed a product, business channel, and ecosystem that empowers these monopolies in ways that vastly improve their product offering.
The gaming market in China is very different than America, why should I trust you to make a global product?
We have partners all over the world. NGE is North America’s largest eSports content provider and our advisors. We have strong advisors on board as well as a world class team to make sure our product is globalized. We already have the network to make it more likely than simply a dream.
Hi Pat. Thanks so much for doing this. What are some of your plans for developing a presence in the US?
It may be hard to see, given our headquarters location, but we have already developed a presence in the United States. When our platform is fully built, there will be little to deny that Plair is a truly global ecosystem supporting the gaming lifestyle.
In telegram, I noticed you mentioned visiting several US cities. Secondly, I’d like to know how you further look to monetize the platform, as I’m not entirely convinced taking a 2% cut on all tournaments hosted on the platform will be enough to sustain adequate growth of the ecosystem. Thank you again for doing this AMA.
Yes, I did a tour of several major U.S. cities to talk with potential, new, and current partners and as a result have drastically increased the reach of the Plair Platform.
2% of the tournament is our base model, in future releases of the Plair platforms whitepapers you will see additional ways to increase revenue generation. We fully expect this 2% to meet our needs in addition to the ICO raise. We will make the bulk of our revenue generation in future phases of the platform.
Competitors
How do you plan to market this to already existing gaming communities, like that of Twitch and others?
We have built some very strong relationships with our partners, advisors, and strategic investors. All of this adds up to a huge ecosystems of user that will be added to Plair. Plair is being built from the ground up and so will its user base.
Out of the players we bring on board for our tournaments we will have plans to transition them into streamers and content providers. As we grow other users from existing game communities and platforms will migrate to Plair through various online and offline marketing methods which include, but not limited to, such things like regional official Plair tournaments. Users will see that Plair will offer more as a platform, and a community, compared to the ones that they may already be on.
In the WP, FirstBlood was mentioned as a competitor who will run into scaling issues in the future due to Ethereum’s supported TPS. From a technical standpoint, it seems that the sole difference in FirstBlood and Plair comes down to chosen blockchain platform, since it seems like many of the mechanics are the same between the two. Is this correct?
First Blood actually does bare some similarity to our tournament platform but beyond that there isn’t much. Plair will provide services and tools that are not offered in First Blood. This includes streaming and community building on the blockchain and forming an ecosystem that will help players, viewers, and devs build their own brand and earn rewards. Plair also has formed strong partnerships with some of the largest entities in the gaming industry.
Most of you know that we are part of VeChain’s ecosystem and through them we have access to their large community. VeChain for us was by far a much better choice than Ethereum.
Why is your whitepaper so similar to Asura coins? Did you leave NEO because of them?
We started writing our whitepaper back in August of 2017 as an eSports tournament platform. Since then we have expanded beyond just eSports tournaments. Honestly when I first heard about Asura coin I told myself, “Who?”. As you can see our whitepaper is quite comprehensive and offers a larger picture than Asura coin.
A little bit of quick history
We actually spoke to NEO back in January during Neo Dev Con and decided at the time they were a better option than Ethereum. Our project evolved since then and we as a team decided that we needed to form a stronger bond with the blockchain protocol we wanted to build on. Plair had several requirements that were not met by NEO namely the cost effectiveness, the development progress, code quality, and the strong bond and partnership we wanted to have with the blockchain protocol.
I met Sunny Lu, the CEO of VeChain a few months ago and during our conversation he was able to offer me an end to end solution and let us know that if we join the VeChain Ecosystem we would be ensuring a long term lasting partnership. So we definitely did not leave NEO because of Asura coin. We chose VeChain because of the stronger developers, partnerships, and ecosystem that VeChain has to offer.
Any FUD that you hear online about us copying is simply false. You can look at our partnerships and advisors as proof that we are stronger than any other gaming ecosystem project out there, including Asura Coin.
How do you intend to conquer a piece of the market share of Twitch and others, with their years of experience and know-how, existing tech, size, etc.? Twitch has over 1,000 employees and has Amazon as its parent company.
We will conquer other companies because we are offering products they don’t offer. We are building a model that supports publishers, leagues, devs, and players more so than just streamers and content providers. One of the biggest problems that Plair is trying to solve is the problem of fragmentation of gaming products out in the market. Twitch only does streaming. We add play + streaming + expansive community tools. We also offer a way for viewers to earn rewards that existing streaming product simply do not offer.
Your publicly traded competitor, HUYA, has a market cap of 9.311B. How can your 30M really disrupt someone of that size?
HUYA is very similar to Twitch. They are big at the moment because there is nothing better on the market. We are THAT something better and our network, which is larger than HUYA in reach and revenue, agrees.
Both Ninja and Nadeshot regret leaving Twitch for MLG.com when they opened their streaming platform because it shrank their community so much. What will you do to attract large name streamers who care about their reach more than any money you could throw at them?
Our streaming community comes from Plair’s players. They are the heart and soul of our community. That is how we are going to start. We plan on turning users within Plair into potential influencers of their own. Ninja and Nadeshot are great personalities and from what we can tell, great people. We would welcome them on our market, but the gaming industry is better served if they choose Plair because we offer a better product for them and their community compared to bribing them to switch. The latter doesn’t serve anyone in a win-win form.
Synergy With VeChain Ecosystem
Will there be any interaction with other ICOs, for example DBET or BitOcean/OceanEX? Perhaps in terms of betting apps or token-economy? If so, in what way?
As we mentioned all projects that are a part of VeChain’s ecosystem will be supported in all ways they can. At this time I can’t mention any potential partnerships that we are working on but don’t worry we will let you, the community, know as soon as we are able to.
VeChain underwent immense due diligence process with our company, so, I know they did the same with theirs. That stamp of approval alone compels us to leverage that joint bond for the betterment of our platform and community. When we committed to VeChain Foundation we also committed to the ecosystem, it just turns out that the ecosystem is being built with true business leaders that can radically improve the Plair platform. VeChain Incubation Team clearly knows how to pick winners.
Will you add gambling and betting in some way, and if so, how will you handle this in countries where this isn’t allowed?
As of right now we want to be able to release a global product. So wagering will be set aside for now. As we move forward of we decide to open wagering, Plair will open it jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Wagering is an added value to the ecosystem we want to develop, it is not its core value and we must establish that core prior to additional integrations.
Will there be any interaction with (digital) gaming asset ICOs, like Enjin or Wax, or will you add this potential feature-economy to Plair someday?
Plair is open to partnerships with any gaming asset that makes sense for Plair. We will definitely be announcing some of the partnerships soon so stay tuned to our social channels.
Sunny Lu hinted on Twitter about Enjin in reply to Boxmining being at E3. What is the connection with Enjin? They have a great project, and if nothing yet, I hope you will be looking to team up with them in the future. They should also move to VeChainThor to align themselves with mainstream adoption.
All I have to say to that is “a big grin.” You guys can interpret that however you like. I am a big fan of their team and their developers are world class.
Other
I assume simulated drone racing would be a possibility on the plair platform.Is there any plans to have things like real life drone racing tournaments on Plair. This could be possibly perceived as not “E sports” by some people, however I feel it’s not that black and white. Red bull for example has some great comps and the competitors often use VR headsets as an interface for example. The audience could also use VR for watching!
Anything is possible with Plair! That is how we want to build our ecosystem open for all gamers and gaming opportunities. Remember Plair is not just simply eSports its gaming.
