AMA Recap: Avalanche Vietnam x Pulsar
On Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022 at 09:00 pm (UTC+7), we hosted a live AMA with Alvaro Martin (CEO), Garrison Yang (CMO) of Pulsar.
A revised transcript is available below:
Before we dive into the questions, please introduce briefly about yourself, your team and some key features of Pulsar.
Alvaro: I’m working in the videogame industry for almost 20 years leading multi-disciplinary teams across the globe, building bespoke technology and tools to enable millions of users play together. When I left King we had 267M active players, so I think web3 gaming has a long way to go in adoption.
Garrison: I’ve been growing consumer tech and gaming companies for the last decade and a half. I was most recently at Meta leading growth for Disruptors and have also worked with studios like Zynga, King Gaming, Blizzard, and more.
About our TEAM: we have a nice combination between AAA developers and mobile developers, one key element in the future of web3 gaming is adoption and ease of use. In that regard the technology of future games should be closer to Mobile: Install and Play. However we believe the quality of the games should be high enough to keep healthy tokenomics and value of tokens.
Next, could you please update some latest news or big events of Pulsar in the coming time?
We’re very excited to announce that we’ll be launching Pulsar to the public this year in mid-October! Over the next eight weeks, we’ll be announcing opportunities for you to join gameplay streaming events, become a beta tester, and mint in-game NFTs ahead of the launch.
1. We will be announcing our Ambassador and Beta programs in the next two weeks
2. We have a major PVE gameplay update that is being launched 8/15 and we will be hosting a gameplay streaming event the week after.
3. Our first NFT Drop, the Mint Pass will be going live at the beginning of September!
1. What is your top priority for 2022? Can you and your team members share a bit about the strategy that PulsarGame will implement in the near future? What makes the team feel confident to win in the long run??
Without a doubt, our top priority for 2022 is getting the public launch of Pulsar live on our subnet. Our goal is to make sure that our community and player base are able to start playing with their NFTs right after the minting events end!
Pulsar’s strategy is straightforward — we are focused on product first and are building a top tier gaming experience so player will engage and retain for the gameplay itself. We do not want to create a boring game that is simply a DeFi protocol skinned like a game. That means that Pulsar focuses on having:
1. Complex, balanced, and most importantly, fun gameplay mechanics
2. Beautifully designed graphics
3. Sustainable economics and a balanced player economy
We have many long term strategies in place but one that we are most excited about is our focus on Free to Play. After the initial launch to the Web3 community, we are building F2P mechanics into the game, which will allow anyone to play without a configuring or owning their own wallet. F2P players will not need to mint NFTs, but they will also be more limited in their ability to mine assets. Players that do own NFTs can ‘lend’ their Land NFTs to F2P and tax users that mine their Land, getting a share of the resources and tokens that are extracted.
Less friction and lower barriers to access is our strategy to bring Pulsar to everyone, and to help grow the ecoystem by bringing more traditional gamers in!
2. Keeping your community and partners content is a key to every platform’s road to success. Please name a few major partnerships and what value they have brought to PulsarGame platform? What is your expected result when growing your community on a larger scale?
We’re proud to have a cap table that is made up of incredible investors and parters in the ecosystem, including Blizzard, Colony, Avalaunch, Avatar, AventuresDAO, BreederDAO, Fief, Firestorm Capital, Dexalot, Keychain Capital, P2E Analytics, Taureon, and Pangolin.
When we selected our partners, we focused on more than just the capital — we wanted partners that were knowledgable about the P2E space, the avalanche ecosystem, and were developing their own innovations.
Partnering with well known DAOs allows us to ensure that we are building for players and creating an ecosystem that allows P2E participants to thrive. Fief, Aventures, BreederDAO, are critical to helping us navigate the player ecosystem.
The expertise and technology of partners like Colony, Avalaunch, Dexalot, and Pangolin allow us to accelerate our project in the Avalanche ecosystem, and we are also very fortunate to have experts in the industry from Firestorm Cap, Keychain Cap, P2E Analytics, and Taureon as investors to advise our team.
3. What are the ways that generates income/revenue to maintain your project and what is its “Revenue Model”? How can it make benefit win-win to both invester and your project ?
We’ve built the game to be a product that is fun, and is inherently be something that people want to play and spend money on. This allows us to ensure that we will consistently have growth through Web2 adoption of Pulsar, allowing us to monetize consistently from an ecosystem anchored in fiat. This revenue stream is stable and less subject to crypto market cycles. With actual revenue streams (instead of inflationary tokenomics), we will never need to use team tokens to raise capital. Our team has decades of successful game development in the Web2 space and we understand how to build sustainable revenue models in gaming.
We designed a single token system because dual token games typically have a second hyper inflationary token that is eventually dumped on the market and collapses in value. Alvaro has experience designing 3 games (without counting Castle Crush) and leading the tech and economic strategy of the game. We plan to grow and balance the player base to be 80% Web2 and 20% Web3, which allows a larger base of Web2 liquidity to absorb the tokens and NFTs generated by the Web3 players. Instead of constantly minting and selling in-game assets, we are going to simply sell starter units and allow players to build out the rest of the economy.
4. Why did you build PulsarGame, what was your motivation to start this project? What is the difference between the PulsarGame project to attract the interest of investors.
We believe there is a fantastic opportunity for games in Web3. There is still a huge gap in the space — most games are built to drive revenue for the project team and there aren’t many companies that are truly focused on building a game that is fun. The inspiration to build are truly fun game and fantastic product is why our team quit their jobs to work on Pulsar. Giving the ownership of the value generated by the game to the final user is something that will change the industry if it’s well done in an honorable and fair way.
For investors — we have the expertise and track record of leading and developing awesome, high qualty games. We have built a unique ecosystem in Pulsar that creates sustainbable, non-inflationary economics. For us, our investors are not only our cap table but also the Web3 players that are buying NFT units and land, because they are going to be the ones generating $PLSR liquidity (instead of simply selling tokens on the open market). These players will be able to sell $PLSR to F2P and Web3 players, along with crafted items like units and boosters. Normally these are assets that are sold by the project team for revenue, but in this case, we are allowing our Web3 players to build the assets in the economy and monetize from their engagement.
5. The utility of the token is one of the factors that gives credibility to a project. So what is the utility and role of the $Pulsar token in the ecosystem? How can users earn more $Pulsar through the incentive program of PulsarGame?
$PLSR is the only token in the game, and insead of having a traditional ICO or token sale, we are embedding $PLSR in the land. In order for there to be liquidity for $PLSR, players need to mine the land NFTs, extract raw $PLSR, and refine it using refinery NFTs. In the game, $PLSR is the primary energy resource and main currency, which means it is scarce and precious.
We control scarcity by controlling the economics and release of land. Since $PLSR is contained in the land and gated by game mechanics, we can control the amount of land available to the userbase to control the availability and scarcity of $PLSR. If our userbase is growing quickly, we can release more land and unlock more $PLSR. If the userbase is growing slowly, we can limit access to minting land. More than 11 global variables and mechanics allow us to balance around the $PLSR liquidity in the market, which allows us to create sustinable tokenomics through gameplay mechanics.
For incentives — Our game is deisnged to be Proof-Of-Engagement, which means the best profits will be earned by people who play the game and craft a gameplay strategy that enables them to succeed in the conomy. This incentivizes our players to engage and become the best players possible. The entire game is designed to reward the people that play the most. Pulsar is not designed to be a idle game or a ‘tap to earn’ game with simple staking and set it and forget it mechanics. Players need to PLAY in order to win and earn!
6. Many games don’t support Mobiles, and that reduces the attraction of many players around the world. Can I play your game on Mobile and on PC?
We go full cross-platform, PC/Mac, iOS/Android.
7. I am curious to know whether you take inspiration from any other games of same gene when developing #Pulsar . Or can you tell me about the motivation behind developing #Pulsar?
uuuh few, Starcraft, Warcraft, C&C, AoE…. I played all of them. About the motivation, well, it’s time to have an MMO based on an RTS is a great challenge and “mining” in RTS seems to be a concept quite compatible with crypto
8. Can you list 1–3 killer features of this project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your project has that you feel most confident about?
Adoption, I’m used to lead big teams that operate with new content every 2 weeks for millions of players, that’s “normal” in free to play. 99% of gamers don’t know even what are the implications of create a wallet or how to use it. It’s key adoption.
Lower as much as possible the entry barrier, USDC, USDT, AVAX, FIAT… and Install and Play experience with no hedache
9. Smart contracts are prone to failure, and many projects fall victim to it, costing user funds and discrediting projects. How reliable and secure are your smart contracts? Did you test it with either party?
We have a premise in tech design: “all players are cheaters, all players has 1000 bots”. If you build around that, being in the worst case scenario, you are always ahead of problems
10. Is there any multiplayer mode to play with my friends? And can I chat with them in game?
YESSS it’s an MMO, so people that buys land, can make join friends or free to play user and earn profit sharing for everything they mine or craft. You’ll be able to create guilds too! :)
11. Can you tell us about your team members? are they qualified and professional in their fields? what are the recruiting qualifications for team members for your extraordinary project?
We are quite OPEN, I’m the CEO and you can see my face, and all team members linkedin and all the projects they’ve worked on like: call of duty, cyberpunk, horizon, ghost of tsushima, etc :)
Additionally to that, I was Tech Director of whole technology and tools at King, when I left King had 267M players, so step-by-step
12. Where we possible to buy the NFT from Project, what NFT Marketplace will you use ? can we buy from opensea or will you have your own NFT marketplace?
end August, and September! please follow the twitter account to not miss free airdrops and stay ahead of the competition. We have our own marketplace but you’ll be able to take ownership of your assets
13. Is the game to free to play, or players will have to purchase Game to begin playing?
Free to Play, forever. However if you want to profit in the game you better stay tuned with the Genesis drop, will never be better pricing for our early community
14. Where are you guys at in the development of your game ? can we find videos or screenshots of how the game will look while playing it ??
pulsar.12rw.io is the best way, follow the Youtube channel. leaks on twitter: @PulsarGame
