Hey guys, it is Monday, the 20th of November, and it is time for Polker’s bi-weekly AMA. We’ll just give it a few minutes to allow people to join. If anyone wants to ask questions live, of course I will be answering them. We’ve also had quite a few questions come through through social media.. I will just mute this now, allow people to join and then we shall get started.
Alright, let’s begin. It’s nice to see a couple of familiar faces and some new ones there so thank you for joining. I hope you all had a nice weekend and your Monday has not been too stressful so far. I’m going to start with the questions that have come through on Telegram. GP, thank you for sending such a large number of questions. Again, they are appreciated so I will do my best to answer what we’ve got here.
So the first question that was asked is just regarding the mobile launch and if we have any updates on that.
When it comes to direct updates, I actually don’t per se. I can say that we have the game in working order so we are still on track. It will be released this quarter. There should be no delays on that. We won’t be pushing it until next year. We’ll try and get some more sneak peeks and previews out over the next week or so you can actually check it on YouTube, have a look at how the gameplay is looking on phones. I’m not going to commit to a specific date at this point in time but like I said, we’re still on track to hit our roadmap on that one. I know you guys have been waiting relatively — and by relatively I mean extremely long — time for this. But we’re very close. We’re at the finish line so we’ll be getting there soon.
Second question here is are there any game modes besides the existing ones on the current game version.
The mobile game is going to be released with the same game mode, so it’s going to be launched with the adventure mode in Play Store. It won’t be launched with the tournament modes live. We’ve been testing them out, just making sure that the interactions with the server between a desktop client and a mobile client are working in unison, and they do. However, we do feel that we don’t want to rush the final on that and push that before the end of the year just to push it. I don’t believe it will be a long wait for the newer features and especially rollouts of future maps. Those are prepared so we’ll be able to increase the level of maps and progression through the adventure mode very quickly. And then hopefully some of the in-depth features regarding tournaments should be coming shortly within the new year as well.
Then anything going on with the token utility.
As of right now, we are really focusing everything on making sure that we have all hands on deck on the Android release. We know we have committed not to doing this as a beta. It is going to be a light release. It’s not going to have all bells and whistles, double functions or anything. However, we don’t want to spread our resources too thin. There has been a lot of focus on the game (sic), which has obviously come at the expense of having to pull resources away from expanding on the token side and token utility. The Poly Network hack,the rectification, and switching to Polygon Network — that was resource heavy, time intensive, and also costly. So I’m glad that that’s all out of the way, however, that does mean that some of the utility stuff has been delayed. There’s no way to whitewash that. That’s a fact. But token utility (sic) will be coming up shortly. They’ve not been forgotten.
Regarding staking, we don’t have direct PKR for PKR staking, but you can stake the LP on the Polygon network via Steer Protocol. For those of you in the DeFi, there’s still a really decent APY on that. I don’t know what it is at this point in time but last time I checked, I believe it was still either 60 or 70%, so it’s still a decent return on your investment for those who are into DeFi and for those who are not, maybe it’s something that you want to explore.It’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely a nice side of blockchain that’s away from the gaming side but still unique in its own way.
Any centralized exchange listing considerations?
So we have a couple that we are in contract with. It won’t be happening this side of 2024 that I can guarantee. So it won’t be happening in this quarter. As the new year comes, I believe that will be something that we will start focusing on more. There’s a lot more focus on utility with the token and with it, obviously, comes the logic of increasing our exposure through exchanges as well. So that would be something to look forward to during the new year. Again, I don’t want to commit to any dates or even quarters on that one but it’s definitely something that we will be exploring a lot closer during 2024.
What is the upcoming roadmap strategy? Has it changed or does it remain the same?
We’re trying to keep it as is. A few things are going to have to change on that. I’m not going to I’m not going to try and spin that in any way. The Android release mobile wise will be Q4 this year. At this point in time, I don’t have any doubts — unless there’s some massive unforeseen catastrophe that happens between now and New Year — that should all be on track. However, when we’re looking at the Apple side of things, we’re looking at iOS and Mac, we are going to have to push that into next year. The biggest reason for this is the Unreal Engine for Mac required. Unreal engine 5 wasn’t a possibility, which is what we had upgraded to. It was a prerequisite to run 5.1, which had just been released and we’d just moved from 4 to 5, which is a massive change. And although the move from 5 to 5.1 wasn’t a massive change, it was big enough that we weren’t able to get there in time really to produce a game that we’d want to push this side of the new year.
I don’t think it will be long in 2024 that we will have both the Mac desktop version and the iOS mobile version out but that’s going to be Q1 next year, not Q4 this year. Otherwise, it seems that we should be on track with everything. Feature-wise, maybe not as many features in the game as we’d have liked. However, the game is going to be a lot faster than it is right now. There’s not a huge amount of things on the frontend that you see differently. However, for us, adding new features in the future, the architecture, and the actual way that the game is built on the back end has changed and is going to be a lot easier for us to scale those development- wise, user base-wise and basically in every way going forward. So I would imagine future development will be able to move at a quicker pace once we’ve got this one out.
Any announcements of anything exciting?
We haven’t got any unexciting announcements to make, which is probably good. I don’t have any sort of exciting announcements to make either. It is nearly Christmas for those of you who celebrate Christmas. And for those of you who don’t, hopefully it’s still a nice time of the year for you too. Not really relative to the company. It’s winter for half of the planet so it’s cold. That’s also not particularly exciting. But we will be giving you the Android game soon, so I know that is expected. It’s not a new announcement but that will be coming. And hopefully that is something that you guys can actually — once you’re able to see it and it’s tangibly there, something you can hold — play. I do believe that’s going to bring a lot of value to us as a company, us as people and for you guys as our community. It is an exciting time for us to be this close to that line and actually pushing that out on the Play Store. The Play Store account is ready. The game is actually uploaded obviously for us to be able to download directly there for testing as well. So we really couldn’t be much closer than where we are on that one. Partnership-wise, I don’t have anything to announce at this point in time. That tends to wind down this time of year so we’ll see. I do imagine that we’ll be getting some nice new ones as the new year rolls closer or as it starts.
And then is the investment round going?
Well, this is a unique question. I do want to just answer honestly as well. We are still in talks actually with multiple VCs on this. The biggest thing that we were getting as feedback and the biggest request that we’ve had on ensuring that the investment round goes to plan is that we are delivering this mobile game. And by this mobile game, I mean the Android version that we are about to put out.
Like everyone is aware, we’ve had the desktop client running without the server. Well, we’ve had the desktop client running, not quite in this current condition but a similar one, since the 2nd of January this year. So it’s almost been over a year and obviously the mobile game has been a long time coming. It’s something we can easily talk about, but it’s a different thing for us to talk about it and for them to be able to actually see it. So we are really looking forward to getting feedback from the game during this quarter and also into the new year once we have the game in their hands. Obviously macroeconomics worldwide are not perfect, but at least in the US side, they do seem to be balancing out and leveling out right now. Without other unforeseen events and of course, people can always change their mind at any given point in time, I do believe that once the mobile game is there, we should be in a much more stable position to sort of close that round and to move forward. So that’s going to be an exciting time for us and obviously give us a lot more room to breathe and also to move forwards as we enter 2024.
Here’s a question from our resident Italian, Salvo. It’s a long question. I will just read it out as it was written. So I would like to ask if you think it is useful to create a limited baseline practice as a welcome bonus for the first hundred to first thousand, say, 10,000 users, but which can only be redeemed through an interaction with a Web3 interface i.e. minimum sending of PKR to the platform. It could be a useful idea for having new users and also useful for the token. In short, some prize will be an NFT or something else.
I completely understand the logic behind this. You can see that you’re looking here to get more utility, not for the gaming side but with a bit of a focus back on the blockchain and on the token side, which is really important. That’s not something that’s been forgotten. Obviously if we did it this way and it’s only redeemable for people who are working directly through the Web3 side as an NFT, that does cut off the non-web3 user-base. However, as an NFT, I would imagine that it’s something that’s more valued to those who are actually on the web3 side anyway. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea. The implementation is not the simplest implementation regarding the coding side so timewise, getting something like that implemented is not something that we could do overnight. However, it’s definitely not something that I would like to write off. I do like the idea of offering something to people who are using the Web3 side to actually communicate with us using the blockchain technology instead of just sort of bypassing it and going direct through Epic or through the store. I do think that there is definitely some merit in us offering something similar to that so I do appreciate that you brought that up. It probably won’t be the exact mechanics that you’ve mentioned but yes, we could definitely offer something whether it is an NFT or price and whether that’s for using, for buying a pass or Spades. But yes, potentially for the first X amount of people who use it as a payment method. That would definitely be a 2024 Q1 implementation but let us brainstorm that one a little bit and see which is the best way to implement it and the most fair way, too. That’s definitely something that we will take into consideration and see if we can find a working iteration of that idea. So, we do appreciate that one, Salvo.
We can see that we do have quite a lot of people actually who joined here live. I know that I’ve probably covered most questions anyway. However, if there is anything you want to ask, this is the time to do it. If you do want to request to speak, request to speak now. No? Well, in that case, as always, feel free to ask questions on Telegram, on Discord, on Twitter. We’ll always answer them then and then if you do want them answered here live on Twitter Spaces — I’m still going to refuse to call it X. Sorry, Elon — I will be here every two weeks on a Monday at exactly 11 AM Eastern time. Just pop your questions through and we collect them up and I’ll answer them live. These are always recorded so you can listen to them whenever you want. Otherwise, I hope you all have a great week and a couple of weeks and we’ll see you back here at the same time, same place in two weeks time.
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