Here we are again, a recap of Monday’s AMA!
Apologies for the sound quality, this will be sorted for next week!
Good Monday and welcome to another Polker AMA! This is Conor speaking. I hope you all had a great weekend. I know that we’ve been very busy here in Polker. Summer is here, and it’s officially spring for a lot of us here in Europe. For everyone in Europe, Happy Spring!
Let’s have a look at what we’ve got. The first question was sent through from a dedicated crew member — Qipapi, all the way from Australia. This question is around the current anti-cheating mechanisms.
Q1: Does the game have an anti-cheating mechanism for collusion among players? There is usually cheating in poker tables where 2–4 players may go to the same table and beat another player since they will get the chips among themselves in real life. I guess since there is no option to transfer chips among players, it is ok for now. But what if one player has multiple accounts or devices to play on the same table? Also, some players may disclose their hands off the table.
Obviously, people can collude within poker and that’s a very well-known thing to happen especially at high-stakes tournaments. People are vetted very carefully to avoid that from happening. And there is a reason for that. We do have some bots, some bot-prevention mechanisms that detect multiple IP logins. That would not stop people from discussing hands outside the game or Discord. The main reason we don’t have overly preventative mechanisms in place is the fact that play chips have no value. So at the very worst, people could collude to remove play chips from another player. They couldn’t distribute them between each other. That’s not possible. So, unless 1 person sets up 4 accounts — which would all need to be on separate computers because it won’t work under the same IP address in separate locations — even then, the only benefit would be the play chips from another player. It wouldn’t really give them a massive advantage. So, we do have systems in place. I wouldn’t say that they are the most robust, unbeatable system. However, they’re definitely more than adequate. We will make sure that if people are consistently breaking the rules we have in place, that they are trying to log in from the IP address on multiple accounts, they will be logged out. We’ll give them warnings. At the same time, it’s not something that really is beneficial for people to be trying to play the game in that manner. So, I do understand it happens in some areas, especially in poker web, where you can cash the chips. If you have 4 players, the players can distribute the ones they’ve taken from the one player. It simply isn’t the case in Polker.
So, I’m not too worried about situations like these. If down the line, it becomes an issue, where people are doing some things and the aforementioned measures aren’t working for whatever reasons, it’s definitely something that we can look at.
Q2: It is often said that we could become among the top 100, but a project, in this case Polker (and at the moment a game project, we don’t know anything else) to reach such an economic power, also including that in the future there may be a mass adoption, can it get there on its own, or inevitably does a project, whether it is Polker, Axie, Sandbox, need investment support from external companies?
This depends. If you’re looking at the game in terms of the company. Or whether you’re looking at $PKR in terms of the token. The companies behind Axie and Sandbox have never been anywhere near the top 100 market cap companies. Their tokens, respectively, have been in the top 100 tokens. $PKR, being the utility token that functions mainly with us, was in the top 300 at one point; has fallen dramatically. I would say, if you look at this with a purely rational perspective, there’s absolutely no sense behind that, right? Back in 2021, we didn’t have a game. At that point, we were at number 300. We haven’t even released the first beta. Now we have a live game, it’s also in Unreal Engine 5, which it wasn’t back then. We have a much stronger company, however the token is much weaker.
Comparing a company’s token market cap to the company’s value is a disingenuous way of looking at things. So, please be careful when trying to look at things that way –where the token is in position, the value of the token, the market cap of the token, respective to other tokens; it’s by no means indicative of the company behind it. Like I said, it’s very hard to sort of connect the two things. They can be related but they can also be very, very separated as well. So, having VC backing on the token and having backing the company is always going to help because they will open doors on both. Firstly, finances — they would have a lot more power to be spending but they also open doors for connections as well, which is something that people often forget. VCs are very connected with each other. They will open doors that you won’t be able to open by yourself or at least get that foot in the door that you wouldn’t be able to get. It’s a much quicker process moving forward with VCs and I think that we want to be doing things both ways — we’ve done a lot by ourselves, and we would definitely be looking down the traditional investment route now that we’re in a much better place to do so.
Q3: When is the new listing and full game release?
I’m not quite sure that this question warrants a response. I am going to do my best to give you one anyway. New listings are going to come when they come. We have confirmed one, we are in talks with two more, and have at least one more in mind. Again, I have been saying this for the last 18 months, it is not the right time to be listing on exchanges. I’m not going to change my mind on that just because Bitcoin has gone up since January. We’re still down 61–62% for the ATH, this is still very much not the end of the bear market. So, we’re keeping an eye on that.
Q4: You have missed the combination of Game launch + CEX listing + Live Burning + Marketing altogether on January 23.
No, we haven’t. We promised the community launch, which happened on January 2nd. The exchange listing was never promised; I aimed to have it then. However, it was a completely disastrous time to even have it so we delayed it. It wasn’t missed. That was a very conscious decision I was very open about. The live burning was always going to go live once we have revenue. I cannot just magically burn revenue tokens before we are actually making money. So, once we have the game out and the revenue coming in, then we can start to do it.
Q5: Can we expect a combination of Game launch + New website + Epic store listing + Live burning contract + Marketing in Q2? CEX listing if possible? If so, are you planning any promotional video altogether to promote launch so community will also be a part of it along with twitch?
For the launch, that was out last Monday. Yes, we will have updates for it. The new website that I’ve been talking about is pkr.io. Yes, that will be going live this week so keep your eyes peeled for that.
Epic Store listing also, the target date I can definitely say it’s going to be Q1 [2024]. Let me just check if they’ve managed to confirm on their side. I know the people at Epic Games, they take their time. But as long as they confirm that it will be before that, which is going to be very soon. But either way, it will be in Q1.
The live burning contract — I don’t quite know what you mean by contract. But like I mentioned, as soon as we do start having revenue coming in, we will start with the burning mechanism. The buyback will be going on as well. However, this doesn’t make sense unless there is a reasonable amount of revenue. There’s no point for us burning a thousand $PKR here and there. I’m not sure in this point in time, but I can’t promise, I really can’t expect it to be in Q2.
The exchange listing, almost certainly, yes it is possible but it most likely won’t be the right time to do it.
Are you planning any promotional videos — that, I can say, a hundred percent yes. We’ve actually already got them pretty much made. They’re really cool. So, we’ll be able to put that out on social media, marketing, on PR, and yes for people to be playing on Twitch. So, that is definitely something that we want to be doing.
Q6: When will you list a new exchange — after Mobile release or after Game on PC? What if market conditions are not good even when the Mobile development is completed? Would you still wait for market conditions to list new CEX or will you depend on your Product?
This is a bit of a strange one. In the end, listing is a very expensive procedure, right? They don’t just post the listing fees. The company that is behind the $PKR token has to pay out the market makers. They have to pay out the teams that would be moderating and making sure that liquidity is available. And that’s for each and every exchange. So, there’s not just a one-off cost, which is a huge amount of money. It can range from $50,000 to $1,000,000 for single listings. Then you have on-going monthly fees. All these things have to be really carefully balanced.
Making that decision in the wrong market time is just burning through cash — which is something we really don’t want to be doing. Making that decision when there is cash coming in, it’s something that makes a lot more sense. It’s not like we’re just like “Nah, we’ll leave it,” It needs a lot of thought and it’s not just something we can ask the community ‘should we do it now?’. This is something that takes a lot of knowledge of how the industry works, how it works on the exchanges, how the corporation accounts and how the liquidity is handled by exchanges and each exchange is very different as well. Working with exchanges in different jurisdictions — these require different pieces of paperwork, legal opinions in securities, and legal opinions on gambling regulations. It’s not as cut and dried as it seems. So, it’s not like, okay, you pay a fee and that’s it; you walk away. There’s constant communication. We’re still communicating with all the exchanges such as MEXC on a daily basis. And, you know, they also update things. Sometimes, they need more from us, sometimes they need more paperwork. When their regulatory policies are changing, they’re moving. We don’t want to be making the wrong decisions. We need to make sure that it is the right one on the game side, on the $PKR token side, before we make any huge leaps] on that.
Is there anything you can already tell us that we do not know yet?
I don’t know if you know the answer to this question or not, but if you don’t, the capital city of Suriname is Paramaribo. If you didn’t know that, then I guess the answer is there. There is not a huge amount ongoing this week but we have a lot going on behind closed doors. But this time, they’re very much remaining behind closed doors. They’re good things — behind a lot of NDAs with various people in various countries right now. I believe they will be fruitful. The amount of time behind that, I can’t give but I do believe we may be able to have some very positive surprise news for you in the coming 6–8 weeks. But no one here would have been expecting for it to be talked about — but there would be an extra cherry on top. And also, if you didn’t know what the capital city of Suriname, now you do.
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I can see we have a few people who have joined us here. That’s the end of the questions that have come through from social media. If anyone does want to ask anything, please request to speak now.
In that case, thank you for logging in. Have a great week, guys! Don’t forget, you can always ask questions on social media — whether that be Telegram, Discord, Twitter, and anywhere you can find us. You can shoot us an email at hello@polker.game; and we can all see you then and there. And you can ask us the questions to be asked next Monday. That’ll be the same place, same time. Thank you all for joining!
If you have not yet joined our Community Launch then download the game now here! Questions? Reach out on Telegram, Twitter, Discord, or contact us by email at hello@polker.game.
