Panzerdogs AMA: Moving to Sui — Transcript

This is a transcript of the audio recording from our Twitter Spaces held on Thursday the 16th of March 2023. In which we discuss our move to the Sui blockchain.

Speakers: Herdjie Zhou (CEO & Co-founder of Lucky Kat Studios); David Kers (Community Manager of Panzerdogs); Hernan Zhou (Co-founder of Lucky Kat Studios & developer); Leslie Lauw (web3 developer).

David: Hey, everyone.

We’re going to talk about our announcement: moving to Sui today. We’re joined by a couple of members from the Lucky Kat Studios team. We have our co-founder Herdjie Zhou, our product manager Daniel, as well as Hernan and Leslie — who are developers. And we also have a couple of community managers in here.

If you’re new here, Panzerdogs is an online 3-versus-3 brawler for desktop PC, iOS and Android. It’s free to play, but we also released a collection of 5555 Panzerdogs and tanks that you can play and earn with. But yeah, let’s talk about the real thing why we’re here. Our move to Sui, and I think it’s best if Herdjie takes it from here.

Herdjie Zhou (Co-founder of Lucky Kat Studios): Thank you for the introduction, David. And yeah, it’s great that you also are speaking to new people in this Spaces. For everyone who’s new. My name is Herdjie. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Lucky Kat. And as you all know, we announced that we are moving Panzerdogs to Sui, and we believe it’s important to address this.

And to let you know why we chose this move to Sui? First of all, our game and NFT collections will be migrated to Sui in the near future. We are a launch partner of Sui. Unfortunately, we cannot announce the date when they’re going to live yet. There is sort of like a date, an internal date. But obviously that can be moved around depending on how testnet will go.

So obviously we started on Solana, which was a great place to kick off our journey into web3, a very exciting journey. We also started building our community. Migrating to Sui is a very significant step for us and making sure that we can become the leading web3 game. We truly believe that we will also evolve our community. All of the decisions we make are with the success of the game in mind. At the end of the day we are all in this together. Our goal is to make sure that we reach mass adoption with Panzerdogs.

I know there’s a couple of questions from the community, but I’ll also address some of the reasons that from our perspective are the most important for switching from Solana to Sui. First of all, we are a launch partner [with Sui], which also means that we were getting a white glove service from the Sui team. That means from the very start, we were already discussing what kind of features we need for our games, including for Panzerdogs, but also for Cosmocadia. And these features are being kept in mind by the Sui team.

They’re building features that we are going to use, which is obviously awesome. To get this kind of service and being in close contact with the team. We have a lot of respect for the team over at Solana they are also great. They have great people over there and they always have communicated well with us. But obviously, with Sui it’s like a next level kind of service that we are getting. And also keeping in mind what kind of features we want from Sui in order to make this game successful. So that’s the first reason.

The second reason is a bit aligned with the previous reason Sui, it’s being built up from the ground up with games in mind since the start and especially mobile gaming. And as you all know, mass adoption will come from mobile games because, you know, there’s a huge audience when it comes to this distribution platform. And it’s so vital and important that we create experiences that are frictionless, which means that the game needs to feel like a web2 experience. Right. So, for example, if you as a user are interacting with a blockchain right now, you have to pay a gas fee, right?

In the case of Sui, for example, from the start they have a cashless wallet where users do not need to interact or you know, there is no actual step where you need to pay up for obtaining anything, like a legendary item. Or if you want to change cosmetics, right, because there’s the possibility of mutating your NFT by changing. Yeah, changing accessories or whatever. And you don’t need to pay up like a gas fee or get a pop-up. The wallet is created automatically on the backend without having to register. And many of these features are actually kept in mind from day zero when they were building out Sui.

We believe that’s the best fit for us as a game studio and what we want to achieve as a game studio when it comes to the web3 games. There’s a lot of challenges when it comes to distribution through the mobile app stores. There are certain issues that come with releasing a game on the App Store. So that’s reason number two.

Then the third reason is, we have a mission to create gameplay first experiences in the metaverse. Having Sui as the base layer gives us so much opportunity and flexibility to have interoperability between our web3 games and even having cross-chain features. With all of that kept in mind we believe that Sui is the best and right fit for us. If you guys have any questions, please, please let us know. All in all we believe Sui is just the right fit for us. We believe that with Sui we can make our games a huge success.

David: Yeah, I completely agree with everything you said there. I really like looking at it from a gameplay first experience. I think we also want to talk a little bit about the current state of our Panzerdogs game.

Hernan: Hi everyone! We’ve been working hard behind the scenes and now the cat is out of the bag we are finally able to share our plans for the game. In the future we will provide a roadmap detailing all of our intended updates, new gameplay systems, new builds and lots of fun content. For the short term we are working on continuing to improve the battle gameplay itself, in addition to providing new maps, new game modes, new tanks, ways to obtain new tanks and our first battle pass. Everybody who owns a Panzerdogs or Cyberdog NFT is able to get this battle pass for free and unlock exclusive rewards — of which we just shared a sneak peek of on Twitter.

The move to Sui has caused some replanning and reprioritising as our team is currently working on migrating our game to Sui as is, before we are able to implement new web3 systems. We intent to take full use of all the tools and opportunities Sui provides. Stuff that we are looking into, but have not locked in yet, include upgrading the stats of individual tank parts, tradeable cosmetics, ways to earn NFTs and currencies through gameplay and zero gas fees. All of this is still a work in progress and we will continue to update you in our Discord and on our other social media channels. We intend to be more transparent going forward and inform you about the goings on in our office, because we want to make the best game possible.

David: Okay, cool! That roadmap should be coming out very soon, we put in a lot of new features there that we’re working on and we’ll keep you updated on this for what we’re doing in the office. I think it’s time to go to the questions from the community. I saw a couple of questions on this court, which we already partly answered, but let’s start with the first one.

This one is from Shayol Gaul: How does moving to an unknown and untested chain help the goal of achieving mass adoption. Solana has many on-ramps for new users and a market leading app like Phantom and marketplaces that makes onboarding very easy along with being available to buy from all mass market CEXs. What does SUI have or is planned to have to help new users?

Leslie: So the question was partly answered earlier. We aim to remove the friction caused by requiring players to use third party or external wallets, marketplaces and pay gas fees. We believe Sui offers a solution to help achieve mass adoption by players who are not familiar with web3 or crypto as a whole. Another thing that Sui provides is their object centric design is really revolutionary and I’ve not seen it in any other blockchain yet.

This basically allows for more gameplay features. For example, the tank parts, they can be literally attached to a tank NFT. So you can basically compose your NFT on chain that I have not seen anywhere before. Also, the developer experience, which is in my opinion better than Solana, and that’s because they’re using the Move language and it has a lot of features that have security in mind.For example, they prevent reentry, they prevent spoof token approvals and the overall structure of the language and writing packages on Sui is great. So those are a few positive examples of Sui.

Herdjie: Yeah. I want to add that the only way to get new users is making sure that you have a great user experience. To get mass adoption means that you have to onboard the web2 people and not so much targeting web3players. First of all, there are not many web three players. Most web3 people are there just to, you know, trade, make a quick buck from trading. Obviously some people are here for the long term, but still from a investing perspective, but when it comes to gameplay, if you want to convince people by having a really fun game and or experience, then it really needs to come from a great, frictionless experience, which we, again, I just mentioned is something that we can definitely strive for. I mean, we can achieve with those features. So again, we need to have a great user experience to get new users in. Obviously, we want to have them also for a long term retention.

You know, one of the important metrics for a game, a mobile game is retention. And obviously, if you don’t have a great experience, then you will have a low retention that people will just churn. So it all comes down to having a great gameplay experience.

David: Thank you for answering that question. Yeah, I totally agree. Having a seamless experience is what we’re aiming for and that would work best with Sui in my mind. We have another question from Shayol Gaul: Can you explain more about the difference between the IDO and the new IEO? And how will that process go?

Herdjie: The difference between IDO and IEO is that with an IDO you’re selling tokens directly to customers, right? It’s centralized. So you don’t need an exchange. Basically, everything is decentralized. You just go directly, you have a direct connection with the people who are buying the tokens. While with an IEO, the tokens are being sold through an exchange.

Right. It’s more centralized. So for example, like the, you know, Okex or Bybit or Coinbase. Binance. So, you know, the term is similar to, you know, to ICO basically Yeah. And then all we can say further is that, you know, due to the legal environment we are in, you will mostly see from other projects as well. Is that, you know, in the ideal, I mean, let’s say, you know, registered projects, projects that that are not anonymous then IEO makes it legally a bit complex to pull off.

I don’t want to get too much into the legal details, but basically, you know, you are as a as, you know, one of the community members, obviously, you are you’re able to get tokens through a centralized exchange that that that’s what’s going to to happen in the future.

David: I’m hoping we have some more questions from the listeners here. If you have a question, just raise your hand and will make the speaker I guess, be.

KevB (community member): Hi guys.

David: How you doing?

KevB: Yeah, good. Good. Thank you for hosting this. And I mean, I’m not a tech guy, but I trust in the team and the ability that you have to make a very good game and that you are actually thinking about the community and the game first. So I’m happy with this move. First of all, my question is, I mean, this has long been considered as one of the most underrated projects on Solana or or in web3 gaming in general.

How do you have any idea of or clue of how Sui will promote this and really, you know, get this get this shared throughout the space so that we can have a very successful launch. That’s my first question. I mean, what activities are they planning in order to make this as successful as possible?

And my other question is, how are you going to combine web2 and web3? I mean, are there going to be like two different games? Because this holds up very well as a normal hyper casual game as well.

Herdjie: Thanks, great, great questions. And I think I can answer those. So I think, first of all, it’s important to note that there are already loads of activities from Sui when it comes to marketing efforts. So if you look at their discord, for example, they have I’ve never seen a discord with over 600,000 members, for example, and it’s still growing a lot. And then we have then we have Twitter, of course, I’m not sure where that’s at. I believe it’s like 300,000 followers on Twitter. So, you know, in that sense they are already sort of pushing the boundaries when it comes to marketing. To be honest I haven’t seen any other chain that has so much following and this kind of hype. We are seeing that as well and when we started with Cosmocadia,because obviously we switched around a little bit when it comes to launching Cosmocadia on different chains.

When we decided to move to Sui, you could definitely feel this. Especially from the community who understands this. What they’re doing very well is that there’s such a demand for it. That’s also how we were able to build up our community for Cosmocadia so fast. Marketing wise Sui is doing a great job and we have complete trust in their capabilities.They already know how to even make it more successful when they’re launching Mainnet. As I mentioned before they are building it from the ground up with people who were in a management team of different app stores and they understand very well that you need mass adoption.

I think in general, it’s so refreshing to see that. Certain problems that everyone will encounter when you create a web3 game for mobile. These problems are being solved from the start. What you’re asking as well as about the difference between web2 and a web3 game.Well, the thing is, that you won’t you won’t notice it’s a web3 game, especially when you have gasless wallets. Because now when anything you do for example. any interaction you do with a blockchain, you need to buy a gas feed, right? You need to buy or you need to, you know, spend some gas fees which stops you. Basically a stop in the experience. With, you know, a gasless wallet in mind is that you don’t have this you don’t have you don’t need this interaction anymore where you create this wall basically for the user.

A lot of features when you load up the game, are actually in the background. You already have this user attached to a wallet. Without even letting them know. But you can just drop the NFT inside that wallet. So in that sense web3 becomes sort of like a web2 experience. That’s actually what we were aiming for. That’s also what we were looking for because we just could unfortunately not reach that ambitious goal we have in mind with Solana. We were very happy with this decision. We are very much looking forward to move forward and releasing in more countries.Hope that answers your question.

KevB: Cool. Thanks. I’m just wondering, like if a non-crypto player just wants to download the game and play and, you know, maybe buy a tank and keep it whatever. And can they do it in a normal wallet or do they have to go through the whole crypto space to, you know, to get the currencies and everything yes.

Herdjie: Yes. The whole idea is that especially with it, with App Stores in mind, that you always need to go through the transaction systems of, of, of the, the store owners. Right? So, you know, in the case of iOS, it’s, it’s, it’s Apple and in the case of Google, it’s Google Play, right? So that is something that we already have in mind.

People can just spend and then they will own this NFT. But I think to be honest, it won’t be called NFT anymore because we think that these terms with these acronyms like NFT tokens, it has a bit of a negative vibe especially after, you know, recent events. So what’s going to happen is that it’s just a new experience right? So maybe, maybe we will call it digital assets instead of NFT. NFT is a bit maybe a too complex term. But the difference is that they really own this, this, this asset.And through gameplay, we will teach the player how this works, which we believe is the right way to teach people how, how this all works.

KevB: Sounds very amazing. And for people and for players that don’t play on mobile, is that like it’s been like up until now, you know, with the wallets and crypto and everything, sort of my basic questions.

Herdjie: I think that’s a fair question. You know, our space is to balance is mobile and you know, we still believe like mass adoption is mobile because you know, that sense like what other medium is there where you can scale up to, you know, millions of millions of players in a matter of a couple of weeks, especially with all this user acquisition channels that you have nowadays, you know, PC or if a console I think console is pretty much impossible because there so many checks before you can even release a game on on these on these platforms. And I think for example, Nintendo or whatever, they are not they’re not they will not be one of the first movers, you know, when it comes to you. Yeah, we have three games on their platform. Right. So I think console is sort of like a no go. And then you have PC where yeah, again like Steam is obviously the biggest distribution channel.

As far as I know is that Steam is not allowing NFTS or digital assets in any kind of form. On their platform. So that leaves us with, for example, epic games. Right? So but in the case of Epic Games, yeah, as far as I know and speaking to, you know, industry friends is that, you know, their distribution capabilities are not that large is not as we wouldn’t call that, you know, mass adoption compared to steam. If you really want to have a great experience on PC. Then you need to distribute your game through Steam, which is kind of hard. And then the next option would be maybe to self distribute and put it on your website, have your own execution file that is possible but I think that that’s a very difficult road. We are still at the mercy of these different distribution platforms and mobile is just the best way.

David: Thank you for your questions, KevB.. I think Steam banned NFTs last year because they were worried a lot of illegal things were going on with it and they didn’t want to put real world value to digital items.

If you do want to discuss our move to Sui or have any questions, just put them in Discord. We’ll be happy to answer them. I want to thank everyone who joined us today in our spaces. If you have never played Panzerdogs before, you can play for free in your browser or download it on the App Store on iOS and Android. Make sure to follow us on Discord and Twitter, to join our awesome community.

David: Thanks everyone.

Herdjie: Thanks, guys. Cheers.

About Panzerdogs

Panzerdogs is a NFT gaming project where users can own each in-game asset and use them to battle against each other in tanks. Play on desktop or mobile (iOS and Android).

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