Another week, another AMA — Thanks for the Questions!
Hello, and happy Monday. This is Conor here again from Polker. I hope you have had a good weekend and are looking forward to the week ahead of you. We have quite a few questions here that have come through on social media. So, the first question that we’ve got here is from Andre.
Do you plan to encourage the most dedicated players in any way? Focusing on the indicator of the time spent in the game, it would be quite fair to reward 50–100 of the most dedicated players who devote time to the game from the very beginning. For example, exclusive NFT or PKR pass?)
This is something that we are prioritizing. Monic, our project manager, is very passionate about this. You’ve probably seen in the game that we do have leaderboards for time spent, for chips won, chips lost and various things. We want to make sure that they’re visible in the game too. There will be various badges for people who are holding the top X percent or the top 10 on a monthly and yearly basis and these badges will give benefits, too. Whether it’s going to be an NFT or PKR pass hasn’t been decided, but there will be benefits from being at the top of the leaderboards for various things — time spent in the game, hands won, chips won, etc. We do want to make sure that the leaderboard isn’t just there for you to look at.
Another question here from Burnt Ends. What action has the team taken this week to get more players using the game and what is the current blocker for the game launching?
We haven’t taken any action in the last week to get more players. If you want the honest answer, that’s not something that was the focus of the past week. We are keeping the community that we have, and we are making sure that everyone is happy the referral system is in place. The MVP is live, right? So, we have a full working game out. We have the five levels upgrading and systems are working so there is no direct blocker on the game launching. The only thing we want to make sure of is when we do push out the STT, we are then bringing more people to the game. Focusing on bringing people in now when we are still down a few features doesn’t seem to make sense. Everything has to be at the right time
From Salvo, with the PKR tokens reallocated to PKR Foundation, will there also be a change in the different percentage distribution of tokens in the tokenomics table?
Yes, obviously there is 5% now allocated to the foundation so these will be moved. There will be a change in the distribution. As I mentioned, multiple times, no tokens from the company have been sold and we’re keeping it this way. Selling (sic) would be a completely non-helpful way for us to be moving forward right now. However, reallocation and restructuring not just the tokenomics within Polker but the tokenomics within PKR itself is something that we are passionate about so the token has not been forgotten. There are lots more things coming. The updated white paper is coming live. PKR and Polker are two different things. Yes, there’s a lot in common. Yes, they have a lot of overlays, but PKR is not reliant on Polker and Polker is not reliant on PKR. They are entities that work symbiotically.
There are 10 questions from GP here. Could you update us on the status of the development of the MAC version?
We can package the Mac version and build it right now. That’s a non-issue. We do need an independent launcher, so we are just waiting for Epic Games. The Epic Game Store has taken a vacation right now so we would either have to build ourselves our own dedicated launcher for MAC or we push it through so everything is launched for the Epic Game store and download Mac or Windows directly there. Once we have confirmation exactly on how long it’ll take from them, we will see if it’s worth us having a dedicated Mac installer and launcher or wherever we will just run it all through the Epic Game store. The development is done, it’s just on the actual packaging and release side of that one.
Any game patches coming soon?
Yes, there will be some coming soon that will probably be around the same time as the Epic release ideally. We just need to be sure that we can get it on a good timeline. I just mentioned they are taking an entire pause for 14 days so they are at a skeletal mode so we’ll see how much can be done in that time. We may put some smaller patches out other than that, but nothing major until we have the Epic Games stuff launched.
How is organic adoption going? How many new players have registered in the last month?
For new player registration, I would need to have Epic Games backend up to confirm this. I checked this a few days ago and it has remained steady between 3 and 10 new players a day. The retention rate is around 50% since we’ve launched on Epic Games. Most are playing for more than 30 days so it’s higher than most games. However, we haven’t done the marketing campaign, so we’re not bringing that many people in. I would imagine there’s somewhere between 80 and 100 people but I would need to log in to give you an accurate one on that but it’s between that range.
How many active players are playing daily? And weekly?
Active players daily range is around 15 at the moment. It is really random. We can have days where there are 30 or 40 players and we have days when there are less than that. It seems once it picks up, it stays up. I think people are logging in and if there are players there, they stay. So, it will stay a few days at 40 and then it doesn’t. One day, when it drops a little bit lower, it stays there. I would say on average that over a month that we’re keeping between 30 and 40 as our daily mean but then there are days where it explodes and days where it bottoms out. I would like to see it grow but I do believe that we will need a stronger marketing campaign as we do that.
How many new players have registered from referral codes so far?
If I gave you a number right now, I would have to be making that up. What I will do is get that number for you. I did have it but that was a while ago. I haven’t had it recently. I will let you know that one next week.
Will you change the referral program? If yes, what is the strategy and when will the change occur?
We have already changed it quite significantly. Originally when you referred someone, the person had to make a purchase for you to earn any rewards; that’s completely gone now. It is much easier for you to get rewards from referring people and there are bigger rewards. We’ve included NFTs, a lot more space, same gain currency, so I think the referral program probably won’t be changed. If you actually look at it right now, it’s still quite lucrative, so we’ll probably keep it this way until the player base is increased. Um, and then if anything it will be slowed down. Um, uh, so we will have a
Any news on the Beta NFTs?
They are directly in the queue behind STTs. The second that’s done, we will move on to them.
Any news on the golden team in-game profile badge?
I feel really bad about this as I have thought that this had been done so I will double check with Jesse. I have seen the badge and I have the list of everyone there so I will push to make sure that that’s being done ahead of some of the other priorities.
Question nine from GP. How will you know the MVP is solid enough for a marketing campaign and a bigger adoption round (any other reasons besides Mac development)? How will you measure/are you measuring it?
For it to be really effective in the largest demographic, it’s going to be mobile. We do have a timeline for IOS and Android to be out, but I am not going to give it out on AMA. Giving timelines has not always been the most effective strategy for us. That will obviously be marketing a mobile game as it will bring us people much faster. The current MVP is very good for bringing finances and growing the product, but I do believe that having the mobile will be the sort of turning point in user growth/user acquisition. When we have IOS, Android, Windows and Mac, we can actually really push for adoption.
And question 10 from GP is, I believe some small (but relevant) bugs will be most likely detected when greater mass adoption, how are you planning on tackling them (the bugs)? Could you share your debugging and product refining strategy you are following right now? Will this strategy change? If yes, how?
I think that that’s something we can be open with. I think you can test the game as much as you want, but stress testing it, when it comes to growing a game is a very different thing. Having 50 users or having 5,000 — the scalability checks on that is very difficult. So, we test our servers as much as we can to see how it works. The way we are phasing them would be obviously the same as most software companies would. Every bug is ticketed, filed, allocated to a developer, and with a severity and moved into a ticket queue. These are overseen by Monic, the project manager, and she goes through them one by one until they’re all cleared. Anything that’s more severe will be a different thing.
The game would be put into maintenance mode and that issue would be fixed before the game was released from maintenance mode. The development team is running on an agile project management system. It is a scrum meeting every day and Monic is scrum master. It is very systematic; it is not just random where someone is jumping in and fixing a problem. Everything is organized and structured. I do think we are ready — we have the relevant back-end team, we have a strong front-end team, and we have competent support. I think there will be issues as we scale, but I don’t think we’ll find anything serious.
A big thank you to everyone who has asked those questions. I do still owe the answer regarding how many people have come through within the referral program, but I will get that for you. If you have any other questions, just pop them in our social media channels — Telegram, Discord, Twitter- or send us an email at hello@polker.game. I will be here at the same time, same place next Monday, answering your questions. We’ve got some cool things coming out so have a great week and we’ll speak to all on next Monday.
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
