Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are in the world. This is another Polker Monday AMA. What we’ll do is we will give it a while just to see if people are joining to ask questions live. Otherwise, we have quite a lot come through on social media, so we’ll make sure that we get everything answered.
We have questions from our favorite GP. This was a good question, and I can see the logic in it, so I will try and go for it as clearly as possible.
Now that it seems crypto regulation is taking place globally, I still struggle understanding why Spades could not be replaced by PKR in the game. You cannot earn Spades in any way, therefore you are not gambling with them. I guess my struggle is in understanding how it can be illegal or unregulated if Spades cannot be earned nor sold. I think PKR is losing a key use case.
This is a valid question. From a regulatory standpoint, at least for the time being, I can definitely say that you are correct. As it stands, I know that regulation (sic) is moving and changing very fast.
It would be possible to have PKR as the in-game currency but there is a reason that we haven’t done that. It’s not to remove use cases from PKR. You have to zoom out at this point. If you’re buying Spades without a PKR pass, they are 99 to a dollar. So, let’s say they’re 1 cent each. If you’re buying play chips, you bought them for that cost. If you bought them with PKR, say, and you spent $5 worth of PKR and it went up 15%, then you’ve just spent $15 on what was worth $5 . I mean, you could also be lucky, right? And it could drop down.
So, you could spend $5 and it drops 50% and you’ve only got $2.50. The problem with having a volatile token or any non-stable currency is that people don’t want to spend it, especially if they have faith in it that it is going to increase. Why would you spend 50 PKR if there was $50, for example, when you could hold it and within a week you have that volatility, you have the bull run, you have the chances?
So, firstly, it’s unattractive to spend – people have that hesitation. I think you would find that we’d have decreased purchases within the game using that. Then we would’ve massively decreased purchases in the game because it’s also not that simple. For all of us who have been into crypto for a long time and understand the blockchain side, even if it’s just how to use MetaMask, Binance Smart Chain or Ethereum. It comes across very simple to everyone who’s in this community, but it’s also an echo chamber. Most people, when you give them MetaMask and tell them to add this RPC or Binance Smart Chain and then add this token contract, it’s like you’re speaking rocket science – it makes no sense.
So, I think having the ease of access that we’re allowing people who are in the blockchain community, because we are a strong community and a hundred percent we’ll be growing over the years, you can still come in with the blockchain, you can still connect your wallet, you can still use PKR to purchase. We don’t want to remove the blockchain side of that. Absolutely not. We still have the staking going then, but we do want to bring gamers in who are maybe not so familiar with the blockchain side.
Having the Visa MasterCard buy an unstable token to buy your play chips, equip accessories. Imagine if it’s your very first time ever playing and get your visa out and you buy $5 of PKR because you want to buy $5 of play ships and then you go to bed and then in the morning you go to buy chips (sic) and it’s only worth $3 – it’s not a great introduction. So, I completely stand by our choice to have Spades as the in-game currency. I hope that you can see that, and if you do have any further questions, you can always message me on Telegram and I’m happy to answer that personally.
Moving on, we have six questions from Crypto Lord. The first question is, “Can anything be done to maintain or sustain the token price of $PKR?”
Let’s hope the SEC is not listening. The simple answer is yes, it is completely possible. The realistic answer is no, not in any legal way and not in any way that a community would appreciate. At the moment, we are probably somewhere I would imagine where we’re hitting bottom. This is one of those things that will take its time.
PKR is going to be very volatile, especially once prices start moving up. You’re going to see large jumps up, large jumps down. I cannot suggest you invest in it to make money, but I can suggest that you invest in it for a project so you’re not investing as a financial thing. Try not to look at it as that. I know it’s difficult to separate finances because in the end you are paying for it but if you believe in the project, then you can believe in the token. Price-wise, it will go up, it will definitely go down. There will definitely be big movements next year, but I can’t give any financial advice on that.
“Next question is, what is the progress on game launch in percentage?”
This is a question that’s coming up pretty much every week. You may have realized that we have launched a full MVP right now. It is only on Windows. We do have five adventure mode levels, all of the NFTs, the chest, the keys, the scraps, the Spades withdrawals, the equips – everything is fully functional. The game is in complete working order. The play-to- earn model is working. So, at the moment, when you’re saying “when is the launch,” what is the launch? It depends on what you were trying to define it as. We will be adding obviously the STT, cool little features and obviously more adventure mode maps too, a few more little fun features. We have some new graphics that are coming in but it won’t be happening in a huge rush. That’s something I can definitely tell you. I’d say we will be pushing things out the game, but I don’t think there’s going to be a massive launch in the next short time. We’re just going to be adding features and making the game better, listening to the feedback from you guys and growing it from them.
Question three from Crypto Lord was “As a gaming project, how many players or audience are you targeting in what timeline? For example, we’re targeting X amount of players to play the game at the end of 2023 or 2024?
We’ve been talking about this a lot recently. Our target depends on who is looking at financing the project that will determine the speed of this – whether they’re blockchain based, whether they are more traditional when they’re standing out. But the aim is that we will have 1000 playing players daily by the end of next year, could be by the middle, but definitely by the end.
It’s 18 months and at that point we will have all of the platforms out – iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and we’ll be able to have a marketing campaign and actually push people. So, the aim is to have a thousand paying players. I mean, we do have a free to play model, don’t forget, and people paying every day so that’s the goal that we are setting for next year.
Question four from Crypto Lord is “Is it possible to bring famous NFT providers like BAYC, Azuki, Axie Infinity, etc. where poker players compete to win famous NFTs?”
No. To be honest, the answer outright is no. Firstly, we would have to buy them and then if you are competing in a poker tournament and you win them, this is straightaway sweepstakes, and that comes under gambling rules so we would be breaking regulations. We are not regulated as the gambling companies, so we are not allowed to do that. We can bring things like Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is produced by Yuga Labs. You can pay to use that IP.
It could be like a private table that you’d have to hold the Bored Ape Yacht Club to play, and that table could be decorated with Yuga Labs Board Ape Yacht so the actual room, the map, and the table could be personalized for them. That’s something that we can do and we have thought about but having them as rewards is something that we cannot do.
Question five is not a question. Apparently, it’s a personal opinion. “I don’t think $PKR NFT will be useful or valuable even when it’s super rare or limited because there is no built-in community for NFT or the game yet. What are your thoughts on it?”
This comes down to human greed, right? The NFTs – whatever value they have is whatever value that someone is willing to buy them for. If someone wants to pay 5,000, then they’re worth 5,000. But if the next person will only pay 200, then you either hold it and say it’s worth 5,000 or you sell it and it’s suddenly worth 200. The NFTs are made for the game – for the accessories, for the benefits. If I were to look at this from the outside as a different project and give my opinion on it, these are not going to be, as most of the NFTs are not going to be, super valuable earlier.
Obviously, some of the mashups with different accessories are going to be worth a lot. And of course, some of the rarer and definitely ones we’re pushing to the holographic are going to have much more value. But we’re not trying to make some elite collection. We’re trying to make a game. This is not a get rich quick scheme. Yes, you can earn. Yes, you can make money from playing games; you can lose money from playing. It is an experience. I know everyone wants the right line to go up, but the market decides the price on that. I think you’ll find that we will have times in the future where they will definitely be going to have more value than what they’re going to have at some point.
But there may be points where they’re losing value. Again, it’s a volatile asset and it’s less liquid as well. At least with tokens, maybe you lose 1% sometimes. With NFTs, if no one wants to buy because there are only three people selling them or buying them, then you may end up having to sell a lot lower. Try not to look at it too much from a value perspective and try and see it more from the actual benefits that you’re getting from the NFT and also the IP. Remember we have the characters, so it’s like collecting cards. I do believe that there’s going to be value in the future as well, especially once we start producing more games.
And I believe there’s one more question from Crypto Lord,and that is, “Are we in talks or considering partnership with other gaming metaverse projects where our game integrates with their gaming metaverse for poker plays?”
I guess the short answer is yes. We are, we are in some talks with various metaverses, however, we are quite a heavy game, right? It’s like trying to put Fortnite inside a metaverse. It is difficult if we were a six-gigabyte game file popping into a metaverse. I’m not going to say it’s impossible because it’s not but it’s not a high priority. Most of the Metaverse projects that came out in the run 2021 were Unity-based.
There are some really impressive Unreal Metaverse projects on their way now – some being backed by the local councils in Canada. In Toronto, the government is actually funding some of the meta Unreal Metaverse projects there too, so there are going to be some cool things appearing.
Maybe we can’t have the full game in there, but maybe we can have tables or a casino where you go in and it takes you to our game, or you end up leaving that game and it goes to our website, or it opens our game if you’ve got it installed. These sorts of things I think are going to be much easier. I don’t expect to see that in the coming months but it will be something that we are looking into.
And we have a question from Storyteller. “I’m part of many web3 NFT alpha groups such as Neo Tokyo. They host weekly poker tournaments. Is it possible to create such a thing on the upcoming Polker tournament feature?”
Yea and nay. On the current feature, it doesn’t have a private room. So, you click join, and you’ll be in a waiting list. Once the five people are there, you’ll travel to the table. If the table you want to join only has three, you can go and do other things and there is a little notification once the table is ready so you can jump to it. However, at the moment, we don’t have a point where you can set invites and just bring certain people to a table.
So, I do think it would be difficult. What we can do is have maybe weekly tournament days where people are logging on and everyone is joining the tournament modes. We obviously have different stake tables, different stake tournaments, so that is something that I think actually might be fun.
It wouldn’t be exactly the same because you couldn’t pick who was going to be at the table, but you could try and guess who was going to be at which table. We did have the weekend game plays in the past, so I definitely think we could bring tournament day back once the tournament is live as well.
And another question from Storyteller. “Are players free to play games and gamble with money off the platform?”
This is one of those gray areas, right? As everyone knows, people play on Zynga and various other free to play platforms and then they have a Discord channel. They’re just using the platform for fun, and they can gamble. I have to say that you are not allowed to do that, however, obviously I can’t physically stop you. I do see the appeal; I can’t deny it.
When it comes to seeing the final score when the game is over, I think you need to be a bit more precise with what it is you need to see. I believe everything is visible in the history unless someone leaves the table. I do believe that everything should be visible. So, if there is something that you want added to the history, you could just let us know. We can add that as a feature that we will add so people can confirm what happened with the game. There’s no ulterior motive whatsoever but we will do that for you.
And then another message from Storyteller. “Can you tell us about other members of the team such as CEO Min, Co-Founder Hector, and yourself?”
Yes, of course. Let’s start with Min, the CEO of Polker. He is the original brain behind the project. Min is based in the DC area in the US. He’s also an architect and is CEO of 15 years of his own building company – a design and build project there. And he has been CEO of Polker since the company was officially registered in 2018 and he has grown the company from just a concept to where it is now. He has been in the blockchain space since 2017 and is very well-connected, very well understanding and very caring. You will not come across him much, but he is very much involved. He is not a public person, so that’s why you don’t see him so much on social media, but I can guarantee that we speak every day. We work very closely together, and he is very much involved in the project.
Hector is the brain behind the actual game design – that’s where he is most passionate. He also did a lot of the actual game dynamics and how we are actually gamifying the adventure modes and things like this. Hector’s been in the blockchain since 2016. Fun fact about Hector is he can fly an F-16, and he is a member of the US Air Force. I have seen a video of Hector in an F-16. I always spill something in the AMA, normally it’s not personal things, but you always get a surprise. Hector is also based in DC.
I am now based in Cambridge, UK. I have been in the blockchain space since 2016. In 2017, I started working mainly on decentralized finance and real-world assets on smart contract projects, before I moved into the gaming area. I’ve now been working as Managing Director of Polker for a reasonable amount of time. You do see me around quite a lot. Anything that is coming towards this project, other projects, I will always, always do my best just to be honest and open. I’m not the kind of person to lie, so if we don’t have something ready, we don’t have something ready. And if there’s a questionI can’t give you an honest answer to, I won’t give you an answer.
As a trio, we are quite far away. It’s like an eight-hour flight but we are on Google meets and Zoom multiple hours a day.
And we have the Australian here, Qiqapi. “What will be the next Marketing move of the Team for the game?”
Oh, I don’t know whether I want to give this away or not. I always leak something, so I’m going to leak this one. We got the Epic Games approved! We actually decided to list on the 1st of September. I know that that is a bit further away. The game is there – everything is done with Epic. We got to choose the date and we chose that intentionally. There are reasons behind that but I can’t give the full details.
Let’s just say we are in talks with people regarding certain things and the 1st of September date makes these talks a little bit more conducive. So, we will be at Epic Games on the 1st of September. There is a reasonably high chance, but there’s no guarantee on this, that we will have not just Mac on that release, but iOS and Android. I will guarantee Mac, but there is a potential that we will have both iOS and Android as well.
Obviously, for that we do want to do some marketing. Like I said earlier on the player numbers, it depends on who is going to be the lead finances coming in. I know what we will be doing for sure, but there are some people who have more contacts.
Leave it to us. I know that we had a few celebrities interested in giving us a few shouts and things so let’s see. The world is in a bit of a weird place right now and I do not think that’s ever going to change. I’m not going to say we’re going to start heavy marketing right at this point, but we will start doing things for the Epic Games launch on the first of September. Then we will have some quite cool stuff coming after that. I say keep your eyes out, keep your ears out on the AMAs because that’s where I leave all this information.
I see we have quite a lot of people who have joined. I don’t know if anyone has a question. If anything comes up or if you have a question, just ask on Telegram, Discord, Twitter, wherever you want. There’s always someone online to try and answer you. If they can’t answer you at the time, we’ll answer you later, or we can bring it back to the AMA next Monday. Otherwise, have a lovely week and I will be back at the same place, same time. Take care and see you guys at the tables!
