Life Beyond: Exploring the Future of Gaming and Web3
This episode of the Peer Through Podcast touches on blockchain gaming, building together in web3, the “metaverse” in a broad sense, and how we are all moving into a new layer of human connection and coordination.
Life Beyond is an MMO RPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) created and founded by Ben Charbett and a team of AAA game developers with backgrounds from Ubisoft, Microsoft, and others. The game is set in a vast open world where players can participate in the building of a new society on a planet named Dolos.
Life Beyond leverages Unreal Engine and blockchain to support players’ exploration and social and economic building experiences. The goal of Life Beyond is to create the ultimate socio-tech metaverse, combining social networks, gaming, and Web3 technologies to connect people.
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Transcript of the Podcast Episode (created by AI)
[00:00:04.000] – Speaker 1
All right, and welcome to the Peer Through podcast, where we’re always peering through to what’s next in tech and crypto. And today I am joined by Ben Corbett, who is the creator and founder of Life Beyond. Ben, I will let you take it away. Introduce yourself and give us a high-level overview of what Life Beyond is before we dive into the specifics.
[00:00:24.200] – Speaker 2
Thank you very much, and thank you for having me. I’m very happy, very excited. So I think the good introduction first, not about myself, but about Wise, the game development that I co founded with a group of people. We’re a bunch of AAA game developers from the famous houses out there Ubisoft, Microsoft, among others. A lot of us have actually worked together in the past. I was one of the directors of Assassin’s Creed, as well as working on other famous projects like the division Ghost Recon. So this is really juicy AAA, super big budget production, love doing it. And this is where I met a bunch of my team. Mark, our chief creative officer. Sam, who’s also my co-founder, our CTO was the Linda engineer of the division. Vincent, our chief product, was one of our key marketing executive there back then. So I have a really awesome team right now who shares a similar background. And there is something that we all have in common, is that we’re MIMO natives, all of us. We’ve played these games, so we’re not super young
. In a way. We’re like 40 or close to 40 plus it depends who you talk to.[00:01:52.630] – Speaker 2
Have a lot of fantastic GNZ people in the team, and man, oh, boy, I feel really old, but I enjoy every minute next to them. We’re pretty lucky because we got to really experience all of this generation of MMO games from Ultima Online, EverQuest, Star Wars, and Galaxies Eve Online, obviously. And so that really inspired us when we started working on Life Beyond in early 2018. I was drafting the concept in late 2017, but we really started writing the first letter of code in early 2018. And here we came with this very strong idea of, you know, we were seeing, like social platforms and of course, becoming a very important part of our lives. And what was very interesting to us was that it always felt like we had experienced this for so long when we were part of these communities, either on ICQ IRC in this virtual world, we’re like, okay, so actually we can bring something to the table, which is the meeting point between this social platform and these online games. So how do we take this virtual world, this gaming world, to the next level? And so that’s how we started to give birth to Life Beyond with this idea of building an MMR RPG where you could be whoever you want to.
[00:03:19.540] – Speaker 2
And that really took us on this journey to build a massive, very vast open world, a persistent world, one world shared by every player, where together we are participating to this endeavor called Life Beyond. We’re going on this planet named Dolos to build a new society in a game experience that is combining exploration, social and economic building. This is supported by cutting edge technologies such as Unreal Engine Five, leveraging, of course, blockchain Technologies, NFTs and the RC 20 Token. And this is a very important part because it contributes to the vision and to empowering the community with everything that they are going to create in this world. We can talk about this and we’re going to talk about this, I’m sure. Depth.
[00:04:19.300] – Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. So I guess I just want to clear up for anyone who’s maybe not as much in the gaming space.
[00:04:23.970] – Speaker 2
MMO.
[00:04:24.560] – Speaker 1
It stands for Massive Multiplayer Online, I think. Or massively Multiplayer Online. And then I think what was interesting, what you were saying is these are games, but they’re also social networks. And I thought it was interesting because when I saw kind of your approach and one of the ways you pitch Life Beyond is the ultimate socio-tech metaverse. So I guess I’m assuming the socio-tech is kind of combining the social network with the gaming and then also the Web Three.
[00:04:57.270] – Speaker 2
Yeah, social tech is an interesting concept that we’ve come across a few months ago, actually, when we were kind of searching how to qualify and do for people to connect with it. So the idea of social technology is this idea of leveraging technology to connect people. And we’re definitely already in a world of social tech right now through what we’re doing right now, you and I. But of course, social media, social platforms, and WhatsApp all of these things, contribute to connecting people. And so obviously, when you do a game when you build a game as a designer, there’s always a part of a statement in it. We’re all obviously creative people. We have strong beliefs, and whenever we have the opportunity to push something to deliver a message, we like to do so. And it’s exactly what is also happening through Life Beyond. Life beyond is a platform. It’s a game first, but obviously, it’s a platform because we’re not just writing all the content; we’re basically creating the playground. We’re bringing the game systems, and we are providing a little bit of content so that we can kind of prime the pump. But then it’s totally up to you, the players, the community, to really write how the storyline grows.
[00:06:30.920] – Speaker 2
We’re not here to decide how the story will unfold. This is really in the hands of the players, but it’s solely up to them to go in one direction or another, and the technology is going to be at the center of this decision-making process.
[00:06:50.920] – Speaker 1
Okay, great. You know, I do want to get into, like, a bit of the web three and then some of the tech behind it. But also, can you expand a little bit more on how you envision the players writing the storyline? I guess both from a story perspective of what could you possibly envision happening. And then also, literally, me as a player, once this launches and I sign in, how am I writing the storyline? What am I literally doing?
[00:07:20.500] – Speaker 2
So it’s always a very big challenge to successfully do this because to be able to get there, we obviously need to give you guys a lot of freedom. But at the same time, how do we create a compelling world with a compelling story that people want to participate? And so the first point here was to have a really experienced and senior team who could tackle this challenge because I can tell you, it’s very difficult. Now, how does it work? So there are so many different ways, but the first one is obviously to leave your own story in this world. So who will you be? Mark, in the World of Light Beyond Lifeion, is basically the project of building a society and a society where you define a living, your role through mostly your profession. So what is your role in this society? What are you going to contribute to, and what are you going to be responsible of? And in our modern societies, it’s very often defined by what you do for a living. What is your everyday job or what are your passions and how you are an active member of this society? So, for us, it’s because, of course, it’s a game.
[00:08:48.110] – Speaker 2
And so it starts it has to start with action and gameplay actions. We start with professions. And professions come with ownership of equipment. To be able to perform a job, you need to have the proper equipment, and then you progress in this equipment. So you’re already running your own story. I am Mark and I am a farmer in this area of the world. I acquired this land six months ago, started planting seeding, a few crops, and now I started to harvest and I building this small business and I met with these other people over there. They were on the discord server. And I realized that they’re sure of the same vision of how we could collaborate and start to build like a little corporation of farmers so that when we start negotiating with these guys over there, we can come together as one unique entity. We’re stronger and we have more leverage. And you see how organically you started to write a story. It started with your individual story. But when we start to map all of this together, put all this together, it become a very authentic and believable story. There’s not necessarily drama here, but there might be.
[00:10:16.560] – Speaker 2
And we will, of course, create a world that is not just an empty island with nothing happening, but a world with a lot of things happening, threats coming out, different stages of development of the world, so that beyond what you are creating, there are these external factors that will contribute to making it even more interesting and active.
[00:10:41.700] – Speaker 1
Okay, awesome. Yeah. So that goes well with the name, obviously, life beyond. You mentioned professions, and this is where I kind of want to let’s kind of take the web three approach and the play to earn. We’ve seen a lot of play to earn games. I think kind of the idea of ownership of your assets and just selling your in game assets, it’s pretty covered and basic. So the idea is you just own your assets and you can sell them off to other people who want to play the game. But can you go a little bit deeper because you’re talking about a profession like when you say, I’m a farmer, could this profession also literally pay for my food in real life? Like, could I turn this profession into a job?
[00:11:24.080] – Speaker 2
So I believe it can, but I don’t believe that that should be something that as developers, we should care so much about. I’ve been playing online games, as I told you, for a long time, I was an esport player at the very beginning of esports. So gaming eventually brought me to earn a disposable income. Truth is, it was at the very beginning of it, so I didn’t really get to enjoy the big dollars, but I saw it happening. And we have in the team people who have been running power leveling services or gold farming services. Back then, of course, all of this was happening on the black market, on the gray market, let’s say, in Gibbs like World of Warcraft. So it was hard to build like, a sustainable revenue because the barriers, and the obstacles were so numerous that it was obviously such a challenge to do that. But there was definitely a demand for this. So, yes, I believe that some people will be able to, probably more than we expect, but I think this will only happen in a sustainable way if we design the game completely, regardless of this factor. I think on the opposite, on the flip side, if you put this at the core of your vision, then you end up designing something that by nature, is trying to cater to speculation, to speculators, which is not sustainable.
[00:13:00.300] – Speaker 2
We’ve seen that enough, I think recently, that we need people who are here for the long run, and they might be here for the long run to get a form of yield. But again, this comes with building a wide range of services, of play roles and play styles of skills, so that there is eventually a game where you always need someone else. And how do you interact with that someone else? Either by giving your time or giving your resources, whatever they are.
[00:13:34.140] – Speaker 1
Okay, yeah, that makes total sense. And for me, that’s been the knock, and for many the knock on web three. Gaming is most of them out there. No offense to those games, aren’t fun. That’s why it’s cool to hear that you came from Assassin’s Creed and all these triple A studios. So I personally, I think I agree with you that taking a game first approach is the way to go and then these kind of add ons of play to earn and true ownership. And then another one I want to talk about is you seem like you’re using ERC 20 for decentralized governance. So essentially you have this little society and when you say decentralized governance, do you mean governance within the game or governance about the game in our real world or both?
[00:14:18.440] – Speaker 2
Yeah, both. Absolutely. Again, as I was telling you before we started, I’m obsessed. But I’m not the only one that they always obsessed with the ethos of web three, because I think I’ve seen this, I’ve seen enough of the web two world now, and I’m not sure that this is really working perfectly well. When I see how the value is distributed across the chain and how sometimes imbalance is the relationship between the publisher and the players and even sometimes you have the developer in between. The problem is that I’ve been making games, game as a service sort of web Two way. You’re always obsessed with retention, ARPU or even Rppu average revenue per paying user conversion rate. You start to use a lot of behavioral economics to get there and you sometimes push it even too far. The problem is you’re in this position because you know it’s extremely difficult to create a sustainable business that you’re going to be able to run for years like what World of Workout has managed to do. And I think that this is the case because these worlds have leave absolutely no opportunity to the community or to third party for entrepreneurship and for innovation.
[00:15:51.440] – Speaker 1
Okay?
[00:15:51.930] – Speaker 2
And so if you don’t decentralize your game and obviously the holy ecosystem, then you can’t get there because decentralization really is the only way to perfectly reward network effect creation. If you don’t give the proper incentives for all the stakeholders, all the players, and including the third party developers, who are able to keep adding more value to your own service in a permissionless way, then you don’t get to this point and eventually everybody gets tired of your audience, your community, and you are just suffocating on the content treadmill. So that’s why I think it’s very valuable. There’s a second thing, which is when we were doing web Two games, of course community was already an important part of the process, right? We didn’t start discord servers with Web Three. We’ve had communities in online games for a long time and the relationship with the community was very important. But it was more us pitching to the community, sometimes listening to their feedback and tried to implement this feedback as much as we could. Web Three is about cobuilding code developing and this is radically different and it’s hard for us sometimes to get the grass from it like, yeah, we want to do it.
[00:17:25.490] – Speaker 2
But then we put in motion actions and then we realize they’re still super web too. We’re not really giving the tools to the community to really be able to create. Board debate is the best example of we’re going to create a community. We’re starting with something, but we’re giving you the IP. So now you guys have your property. Go out there, keep building, keep creating. This is also, of course, like beyond is going to be very different. It’s not about just, oh, this is your IP. You have the IP of your avatar and now you can do whatever you want. It’s not so much about this even though that’s part of it, but it will be more about now create in the world and create something that is valuable to you and that eventually I think can become valuable to others and to the community in general.
[00:18:21.220] – Speaker 1
Yeah, most definitely. I want to touch on kind of board ape and animonica brands and other side and get your opinions on that. But first I kind of want to go back to my point and maybe I’ll do a true or false. So do you already have a name for your token or no?
[00:18:37.900] – Speaker 2
We have a name for now, but we haven’t communicated about it.
[00:18:44.220] – Speaker 1
We’ll just say the life beyond token. True or false? The life beyond token will be used to allocate resources to people in the real world to literally develop and code levels, for lack of a better word.
[00:19:02.730] – Speaker 2
Inside of life beyond true. Do you want just me to say true or false or do you want me to expand a little bit?
[00:19:12.010] – Speaker 1
Well, I’ll ask the next true or false and then you can expand a little bit. So my other question to clarify is like true or false, the life beyond token will be used to purchase digital potatoes inside of the life beyond game as well.
[00:19:29.280] – Speaker 2
True and false. So this is where I need to expand.
[00:19:32.420] – Speaker 1
Yeah, go ahead and elaborate.
[00:19:34.400] – Speaker 2
Yeah. So we’re going to be running a dual token system where we have a little bit like an ingame currency, which is for this one has already been communicated about. It’s the dull token and the dolatoken is a token that you can that is really acting as a currency which purpose is 100% to facilitate transactions in the world of life PL. Okay, you’re on the dollars planet. It’s the currency that has been created by the agency that has sent you guys over there. So this is a currency that you use solely on the dollar’s planet. And by definition because it’s a currency, it’s also designed to maintain a form of stability in the economy so we don’t have crazy inflation, crazy price changes. So to buy the digital potato, that’s mostly how you would be doing if you’re doing it in the world of Domos. But and there is another important thing to mention, especially if our webtwo friends who don’t want to have to bother with a wallet and stuff, all this is going to be run in a custodial way.
[00:20:59.800] – Speaker 1
Okay, sorry to cut you off, but could you also like buy dolatoken on an exchange or through a decks or is this all just in game?
[00:21:10.220] – Speaker 2
It will be in game, but the Librium token is the really web three token that this time will provide you with additional utilities mostly related to web three when it comes to minting NFDS, buying NFCs from other players, repairing NFCs, upgrading NFDS, all the staking mechanics that we’re going to introduce. And what is important is that you can change your dull token for your lifeblown token or and vice versa by going to the central bank which is basically an em that we’re going to be running.
[00:21:56.460] – Speaker 1
Got it.
[00:21:57.230] – Speaker 2
Okay, so there is a wet to world, to friendly world I would say, but if you want to enjoy the benefits of decentralization, you’ll be able to through this kind of a peg mechanic that we’re mechanism that we’ll introduce.
[00:22:16.340] – Speaker 1
Okay, that makes sense. So one is kind of like a point system and one is a bit more focused on the real world but they are interchangeable should you want to.
[00:22:24.070] – Speaker 2
Yeah, so the live view on Token is a really RSC 20 token as you can think. The Doe Token from a text standpoint is also an ERC 20 token but will be running on a side chain which is a polygon edge chain that we’re going to be running.
[00:22:42.730] – Speaker 1
Awesome, polygon edge, love it. All right, well, let’s talk about you guys are part of the Animonica ecosystem. So what does that mean in terms of interoperability? What else are you seeing that’s out there that you’re kind of building alongside with and excited for? So I guess first, what’s it like to work with Animonica brands?
[00:23:08.400] – Speaker 2
As you said, we got acquired, we became a subsidiary of Animoka and honestly, really enjoying because we came as this team of traditional developers with a lot of experience building these really big games. But we’re definitely not the most experts on the web three front and Animoki is really obviously bringing a lot of expertise here. The other thing as you mentioned is that there is a great ecosystem, whether it’s sandbox gaming, phantom galaxies, but also all the companies that they are invested in. But the truth is what it’s facilitating. And this is also the reason why we decided to go with Anniversary even though we were not really trying to sell the company back then was because they really believe in this ethos of the open metaphors. And so we never really got any guidance or guidelines from any Mocha to only collaborate and create this interoperability solely with the ecosystem of Animoca mostly, but more to do it in general, to do it because this is where the true value I think lies in Web Three. I also think that just that right now people see interoperability a little bit through a narrow angle, which is, oh, it means I’m moving my avatar from one place to another or I’m moving my gun from this world to the other.
[00:24:52.180] – Speaker 2
Well, I’ve never really seen it this way. For me, interoperability means that there is a form of continuity that I have from one experience to another that can also be through the utility that I can enjoy from one place to another. And this is the type of thing that we’ve already started to work on but also connecting the communities together and creating this sense of hey, we’re not trying to capture you in our world and never let you go away. It’s amazing that you could be part of this community and sometimes be here and then we meet up there and this one because that’s how we want to live our life today. We don’t want to be exclusive to something. It just doesn’t work this way anymore. Sometimes you’re on Snapchat, then you move to TikTok, then you’re on Instagram, then you come back here, then you’re with your friends and they’re at a restaurant. It has to be fluid and we want to do that. We’re trying to do the same thing.
[00:25:58.200] – Speaker 1
That’s incredible. Yeah. And any mocha yeah, I realized I’ve never said that word out loud and for some reason added an extra N in there. But that’s good to know. So what’s your take on other side? Because obviously that’s a Hyped game. But then also maybe give us your take. And then you said you see it more this interoperability as not a narrow lens of just porting your avatar playing as your ape, maybe in both worlds. How do you see an example of you and Other Side kind of meshing.
[00:26:31.180] – Speaker 2
Well, so the first thing is we’re already working on onboarding all the Aborted community into lion. You might have seen there was some videos of gameplay actually with my ape playing around. So that was a lot of fun. What I like is that we can think of it right now, everything we do. We didn’t need the permission of yoga to do it, but what we cared was about bringing value to the Void Ape community. When we launched our first NFT, that was a free AirDrop to, you know, kind of reward our really like early adopters and people wanted to be part of the community. And by the way, we airdropped NFDS to over a million people, so it was pretty big. We also had which was in the form of an apartment key we had a key for that was dedicated like a special key for the ape members. So we so we’ve always tried to create some value. So now the connection with the Other Side, to be honest, we haven’t explored much yet how it would work specifically between the other side and life beyond, but between Borde and life beyond. Absolutely. Like we’re doing with cold cats right now.
[00:28:01.430] – Speaker 2
We’ll do, I’m sure, in the future with World of Women, with Izuki. To me there is one thing, is that this community is really well created. If I look at kind of the metaverse timeline, I think when eventually we’ll look at these first few years, 20 21, 20 22, 20 23, as that was the age of the avatars. So the community kind of started with your digital twin. So if you one of these characters, can become your digital twin. And in a way being in these communities is a form of statement. It means something. They have their own identity and that would make so much sense that you want to be recognized eyes as such when you enter one of these virtual world. So the first thing that we want to do is making sure that all of these communities can have a meaningful place in life beyond, which is tricky because we’re not building just a UGC platform. We’re creating a fictional world so the world comes with its backstory, with the lore. How do you justify that there are apes walking around here and cool cats. Well, we’re working on this and I’m very grateful that again, I have such a fantastic team.
[00:29:25.840] – Speaker 2
Mark, our chief creative officer, who was the game director of Assassin’s Creed Union in Perry’s, game director of Dying Light too. Recently he went all in and he’s like now creating connection with each of these communities and creating them a really meaningful place. Like why are they here? Why do we have these ages? Why do we have these cool cats in this world? What’s the explanation? And then that’s the starting point. And then you can start creating your own story on top of that.
[00:29:56.260] – Speaker 1
That’s incredible. Yeah, I’m really excited to see like beyond and all these more triple A games roll out with web three functionality. Where do you see you said it’s the age of the avatar kind of like 20 22, 20 23, 20 21. What’s the next age in the world?
[00:30:18.940] – Speaker 2
The age of the land. Yeah, we need the world now. It’s great. What I think is amazing is that if you’re into this right now, you can have your own digital twin. You don’t need to. It’s not limited to azuki and voidave that are obviously super premium ones, not always accessible now for most people, but there are still so many other very unique and interesting community. Have a torquey squad for us to love it, love the community and you can be so you can find your own digital. We’re actually also going to release our collection of Genesis avatar so you’ll be able to have a life beyond one. But now that we have this first, this starting point, we need the playground, we need the places where we gather because discord is nice, but I don’t know, I’ve always missed something. There was a massive shift for us, for instance, back then, when they would say, like 25 years ago now, you know, when we were in RC or an ICQ chatting, and then we eventually would meet in, you know, the world of, you know, let’s say, azeroth, you know, and you’re here and you see this guy and you’re talking to him.
[00:31:43.890] – Speaker 2
It’s very different. It’s it feels more real, more authentic. So we need to bring this totally.
[00:31:51.080] – Speaker 1
All right, I’m going to branch this off a little bit. Then you’re talking about it’s the age of the land coming. Thoughts on VR AR and where that’s all going? Or do you see this all as console or computer based?
[00:32:05.980] – Speaker 2
I don’t know. I see I’m a man of beliefs, of convictions. This is the only part I’ve never really been able to make up my mind. I’m very interested with the latest development of the Quest Pro. For instance, for the first time, I started to be triggered a little bit and I got one. And that was kind of my I mean, I had the HTC valve, I forgot the name, the Vipe. I had the Vipe that was the room scale one, super high end. I always had a hard time picturing how this would really be a game changer. I’m super nerdy and geeky. I love any new stuff. So I’m really hoping that eventually it’s going to happen to me. It’s still not super obvious. The reason is also because hopefully people start seeing the metaverse as something else than ready Player one. And I never talk about ready Player one when I’m pitching, because if I say that, people are like, oh, it’s the Dystopian story, and you put the VR goggles because you’re running away from a terrible reality. No, this is not what the metaphors is supposed to be, because we’re in 2023 now, and in our world, we’re already connected on multiple layers to multiple layers.
[00:33:37.330] – Speaker 2
We have the physical layer, obviously, but then there’s your Instagram, there’s your LinkedIn, there are your friends on WhatsApp group? And all of these layers, see, there are super versatile. You move, you go from one to another. Putting a headset on. To me, it really creates this kind of friction. So I understand, of course, the immersion, but there is this friction when at least at the airwaves, with lightbion, we’re really obsessed with bridging the digital reality with the physical one. So if you look at our roadmaps, for instance, if you hold an Agent Zero jacket, there are a lot of IRL utilities. First you’re going to be able to get the physical version of it, but we’re going to throw an insane party this year dedicated for the agency community. There is a lot of happening that’s going to take place there. Like, we want to create this. And when I’m traveling the world now, and especially in 2023, and I’m traveling a lot to. Attend conferences. We’re going to create local, meetups local happening with the local community so we can talk, we can meet, we can be together, and not just in the digital world, but also in the physical world.
[00:34:49.840] – Speaker 1
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I think this is an oversimplification of what you’re saying, but the idea of we already have the metaverse, which probably started with like, a Facebook, and this is a better, more fun UI, and it’s not like you don’t meet up with your Facebook friends or your Instagram friends in real life.
[00:35:08.440] – Speaker 2
And I would even take it further, especially if you talk to Jen’s ears. They have online prints. They have like, Instagram friends and people who they started to follow each other because of a story that someone saw, and then they started to follow, and then they started chatting and they become friends. But they never met each other.
[00:35:31.540] – Speaker 1
Sure.
[00:35:32.100] – Speaker 2
So before with Facebook, it was more like we know each other from the physical world and we connect in the digital world. Right. But for a lot of us, especially for me, it was very true. I had friends, like when I was 15, I met friends in the digital world, and we met eventually in the physical world. We want to participate in creating this. So to me, all of this really goes a little bit against putting a hardware that really makes it kind of that disconnects you with this physical reality.
[00:36:05.460] – Speaker 1
Yeah. No, I’m in agreement. Yeah. VR hasn’t completely caught me because of the hardware friction as well. And then also to plan on the point, I have plenty of discord friends and Instagram friends. I even launched a business with someone I’ve never even met.
[00:36:22.640] – Speaker 2
I love these stories.
[00:36:24.070] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s crazy, but it’s normal. It is crazy when you think about it, but when you’re just doing it.
[00:36:30.980] – Speaker 2
But when I was 15, people would call me a no life for doing this. You remember no life? Like, who uses this word anymore? If you’re the most dedicated members of the border community, then you would qualify them as no life. They’re on Twitter spaces every day. They’re on Twitter all the time on crypto, Twitter. So are they no life? No, of course not. They definitely have a life. It’s just not 100% in the physical world. And there is no more. This kind of a scale of value of whether it’s if it’s digital is not as important as if it was physical. It is exactly as important. Yeah.
[00:37:13.280] – Speaker 1
No, I completely agree. Put your tentacles out there, everywhere. And those no life board a people have been rewarded as such. So it’s definitely interesting. And then yeah, just thinking back, I’m slightly younger than you, but not too much. And I was thinking about when my friend, he was on my space back in the day, and we used to tease him so much because he had friends on MySpace and it was just so weird to us or whatever I was in. But now that’s like such a normal thing, obviously.
[00:37:48.860] – Speaker 2
Yeah, of course, for everything, there are bad sides that we have to be very careful about. So no extreme behavior is good, but there are so many fantastic opportunities coming out of it. I don’t know. I met with some people on Twitter recently and we’re discussing with a few of them to hire them maybe at daywise right now to work with us as a full time employee. And they just started a new career. They were in such a different field before, but they just became so passionate. And what I love is that, well, these people are more interesting to work with now than they’re super skilled marketing folks who’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years. So it’s also a fantastic opportunity in a world that is definitely not a fair world. Your background, your social background, where you were born has such a big impact on where you can land eventually that it’s really interesting to see how now, because everything is also much more accessible to be on Twitter and to be creating content right now. You don’t need a lot of insane equipment and AI is going to make it even easier.
[00:39:07.540] – Speaker 2
So it’s a great I’m super excited even though I have two young kids and I’m absolutely not here, I’m thrilled.
[00:39:16.360] – Speaker 1
Yeah, we could easily go down the AI rabbit hole, but I think that’s probably for another time I’ve gone into some existential crisis and also popped out of them. I think it’s just that we all have to think at a higher level. Maybe like the mixing of the bricks is no longer going to be a job, but the laying of the bricks were going to be architects. I don’t know.
[00:39:36.460] – Speaker 2
Very interesting.
[00:39:37.220] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s a crazy world, but you’ve been talking about like, you’re having parties or you’re going to have parties. You’ve already had a million airdrops. Where can people start participating with your community? What can people do today and what can they do in the nearest future with life beyond?
[00:39:58.080] – Speaker 2
So the game is in development, so of course it’s a massive project. I think it’s probably the biggest project in development right down the space. Even bigger than Star at last when I know the scale of what we’re creating. So of course it’s going to take some time. But if there is absolutely one thing that we never wanted to do was to work behind closed doors for four or five, six years and then push the baby out. The point was, on the opposite, to be super open in the development and start to empower the community as early as possible. So right now you can come on Twitter, of course, which is where we communicate a lot, but we also interact a lot. But Discord is definitely the place where, like, this is super active. We have 25,000 people over there and it’s a really, really active community. We published our roadmap for the year a few days ago. Vince, our chip product, held a town hall with the community on discord last week on Friday and then we shared some materials with our folks Monday or Tuesday. And what is interesting is that what we explained is that basically we’re going to start realizing the social hub of light beyond which is basically a spaceship traveling from earth to Dulles.
[00:41:27.460] – Speaker 2
And this will come very soon and from this point we’re going to start to plug a bunch of experiences where you’re going to be able to start building some very persistent thing, very sustainable. So if you want to start being part of the corporation over guild, start playing and testing the different mechanics, this is going to be able to the whole year. So as soon as we release this social hub, the game will be live in a way. It’s a very tiny part as we are still developing, but we’re going to be running this thing twenty four seven and never turning it off.
[00:42:07.120] – Speaker 1
Okay, amazing. Yeah. I will do my best to try to remember to put links in the description to your discord or Twitter to.
[00:42:13.790] – Speaker 2
Get started or if people yes, great community, great moderate raiders, ambassadors. It’s also very rewarding as a developer rather than working again behind closed door with no feedback, nothing at all, the opportunity to be with the community, we talk. I saw Vincent or chip product, we have a found. There’s a founder section. And yesterday, I think he went and he was like, hey, guys. During the last town hall, you guys started to ask me a question about this and this. Can you tell me more? Because I’d like to understand what you guys had in mind. And then, boom, here you go. And it’s insane to be able to do that, but we are able to do that because the value is distributed. They are owners, they are holders. So of course our interests are aligned and so we can build the best thing rather than guessing what they want and hoping that we’re shooting at the right place. This is really fascinating to me.
[00:43:20.260] – Speaker 1
Yeah, totally agree. I mean one of the great value propositions of web three of NFTs in particular is financially aligning incentives of mass groups of people who have never met before or just not even financially aligning, just incentives in general aligning. All right, well any last thing you want to kind of impart on listeners or thoughts on the future, thoughts on your game? Something to leave us with?
[00:43:49.060] – Speaker 2
Yeah. First the great message I think right now that I like to deliver is as we’re after the end of a really complicated 2022, I think I’m still extremely enthusiastic and super excited about the future. To me what happened last year was actually even more developing and promoting the ethos of decentralization. We need to get there. We need to embrace this more so that we avoid fiascos like the ones we experienced. And it’s really, for me, full of hope and full of opportunities. It’s just the beginning of all this. We haven’t shown 2% of what we are working on, so I really can’t wait to, of course, be sharing more and be building more, be collaborating more with other communities. This is also another great benefit of what we’re doing. So, yeah, super excited about 2023, but again, we can’t do that on our own. So I hope to see a lot of you there. And please, if you join after this podcast, come and give me a shout out or just tag me when you join the discord server so we can talk a little bit about how much you like the podcast and what you guys like about it as well.
[00:45:32.560] – Speaker 2
Obviously, we’re trying to be peaky also about where we talk and to make sure that thank you very much for having us. That was a great opportunity for me.
[00:45:42.480] – Speaker 1
Awesome. Yeah. And thank you so much for the time. And more importantly, thank you so much for kind of spearheading this massive project that is allowed life beyond where we can all further connect and find meaning and purpose. So I really appreciate you building this game and rallying the troops.
[00:46:00.220] – Speaker 2
Thank you.
[00:46:01.030] – Speaker 1
Yeah. Thanks so much, Ben.
[00:46:02.850] – Speaker 2
Have a good day, guys.
