Jonathan Ovadia brings NFT ownership to Vailiens shooter game

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have jonathan o'vedia the ceo of xlab jonathan welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time no thank you so much ashton i'm a big fan and it's a pleasure to be here today pleasure to have you on the gaming space in blockchain nfts and the metaverses

0:23are blowing up right now and i know your team's working on something really interesting in this space specifically so i would love to kick it off by hearing a little bit more from you about what is xlab what are you working on in the industry and what solutions are you bringing awesome so i'm one of the three founders of xlab xlab is a virtual reality game

0:42development studio we've been working on our signature product called veil vr veil vr started off as a first person competitive shooter and has organically evolved into a first person shooter sandbox experience what that means is the second you get into the game you're dropped off into your virtual home and it's up to the player to decide what they want to do from that point if they

1:06want to invite your friends to their home just to hang out chill play mini games play sports do fitness host events or they can click on play match and then jump into the competitive scene which is team death match shirt and destroy and all those regular fun goodies that a lot of gamers are used to very cool and you know what i've actually had that experience as a former

1:27gamer playing team deathmatch or first person shooter and you're just going to the map and then you just respawn at the beginning and it goes over and over again and you get bored eventually you know you're looking for some customization and i think you know metaverses and being able to integrate different things into the game and as well your own items which i know you're

1:45working on something like that as well is really gonna probably increase the amount of people that want to play and probably the length of time that they're gonna spend on the game as well yeah so talking a little bit about that what ended up happening is we started building out this quote-unquote meta-reverse thing where everyone could own things in

2:05their house and design it any way that they want but what really got me excited is when this whole nft craze came out and i'll be the first to admit that i was a skeptical guy and then i realized i'm 26 years old i'm not going to be a boomer let me really look into it right because you know bitcoin was a boomer thing the internet was a boomer thing all these things that

2:24people keep saying or scams end up taking over our entire lives and we can't live without these things today so i said to myself 26 years old let me take a look into this what is this thing and i started looking under the hood and it got me really excited because i realized all an nft really is it's a form of ownership do you own your digital items on

2:44you know an immutable blockchain that can't be edited or do you think you own your items and the game studio has a centralized server and they decide that you own it and at any moment they can just take it away from you which has happened many times so with that being said i started realizing that this virtual home these virtual spaces we were designing all of the items within

3:04these worlds could be nfts they could be owned instead of in our server on the blockchain why is that important now right it's important because that gives the users actual ability to not only own them but be able to freely transfer them around to other worlds other vr destinations other virtual homes and this concept of interoperability now that got me really excited because as a

3:25gamer i started thinking all the po i never collected pokemon cards i wish i did but i definitely collected pokemon right and they're nowhere to be seen and if they were nfts and instead of being owned on nintendo who knows where i would have owned it on an immutable blockchain i'd probably have tens of millions of dollars of pokemon that i could have sold today and

3:43if i didn't want to sell them because they were sentimental to me i could have at least shown my children hey look your dad had pikachu he had this he had that but i don't have anything to show for it i have 20 years of gaming and i have nothing to show for it so really starting to think about these things got me really excited a few other things that gets me excited about nft

4:01specifically with vr and the metaverse is at the end of the day when people see these headline used pfps they sell for millions of dollars they don't really realize you're not buying a pfp you are but what you're really buying is you're buying into a community you're buying into a club of people that all share similar ideas as you and that's what you're purchasing you're purchasing

4:20a lifelong membership that has value it has liquidity because you can sell it and what made me excited is thinking about actually building out something more than just a discord a telegram a whatsapp group chat which is just it's text right it's so it's so 20 years ago really i used to do that 20 years ago so i started thinking why not build out virtual reality social

4:41spaces that the only way to actually enter is by verifying that you own this nft and that got me really excited so the nft drop that we're doing that actually comes out on tuesday november 30th on metadrop.com we're actually going to be showing it's essentially a proof of concept of what nft technology can mean and be in the metaverse so one it's going to be an

5:04interactable 3d vr asset it's not just going to be a profile picture you're actually going to be able to go touch it play it's called aliens so think pokemon i love pokemon by the way as you can tell so think pokemon but inside of our game you can battle them race and do a bunch of things the second thing is it's gonna serve as a lifelong battle pass that will allow us to actually

5:22airdrop you in-game items that are really yours to forever to own the third is it's going to give you access to something called the vale citadel which is going to be a members club for all the nft community to come in and hang out with friends i went to a spot in nftnyc i waited in line for two hours i didn't get in they were oversubscribed and these are people that had very

5:43expensive jpegs and they still weren't let in i thought it was that night that i said we're going to do this virtual reality space never wait online again if you own nft you're 100 welcome be in your boxers in your house go hang out with your friends it should not be a stressful situation and then the fourth thing is we're really looking to partner with all the other vr studios to be able

6:02to adopt this open borderless metaverse concept so that all of our items can go into their worlds and vice versa we want to give users the freedom to decide where they want to spend their time with the items that they've earned purchased or collected over time definitely yeah great explanation jonathan and you're right about so many people spending 20 years in

6:22gaming and having nothing to show for it you know i can say the same for myself and it if only they had that technology back then that you could keep your assets and be able to sell them earn money on them or just keep them for sentimental value in a place that you know is not going to be destroyed and right now it seems in this part of 2021 the metaverses are blowing

6:44up and people are starting to realize you know along with facebook changing their name to meta and creating the metaverse the decentralized metaverses are growing rapidly your team is working on that but you've also been working on it for a long time and i know you've been a lifelong gamer but specifically with xlab you've been working on this for a long time i'd love for you to talk

7:02about just a little bit of backstory and how you started it and to how long you've been working on it until now it's actually very funny that you just asked me this question i've been asked this question so many times from the outside people think i'm a genius and the truth is it's not true and i openly say this because me myself i idolize so many top level executives

7:23that i finally have been able to get into the room with them and i meet them and i'm like you're just a regular dude and they're like yeah i know and i'm like we're all just regular dudes i actually just made almost like a hundred tweet thread on at x lab inc on twitter i highly recommend you go read it but the short story is i was in school i didn't come for much money my brother

7:44had a music studio indie studio there was no money in it but he'd give me 500 bucks a month to help him out and i did all the business management i'd do all the bookings i'd help with the shows one thing led to another and oculus came out right the first vr headset that my team got they got the development kits for the initial concept was we want to

8:03make vr music video experiences we want people to not only listen to our music but be able to immerse themselves in the artist's vision and we did release in 2017 on steam something called water planet it's an ep by one of our artists and my sister future virgo it came out really well but at the time i would go touring around showing people every single person that put on a vr headset

8:23was blown away how do i get this and then when you tell them oh you get a pc and a rig and all the tech it wasn't that good and very expensive that was a really big barrier to entry i had a thought right facebook bought oculus in 2014 so it wasn't rocket science i had a thought i'm like okay massive company's gonna buy this they're probably gonna

8:42try to make the hardware more affordable i didn't expect it to come as soon as it did but it did so now instead of spending three four thousand dollars and needing to know how to use the pc which by the way i was a console guy i only got into pcs because i needed to learn for vr and it was a big learning hurdle so i'm very well aware of that but now

8:58with the oculus quest 2 for 300 dollars it's cheaper than an iphone it's cheaper than a playstation you can't even get a playstation you want cheaper than x it's one of the most affordable forms of entertainment that really accelerated everything and we just decided to make a game in 2017 because there was no money in the music thing my whole team

9:17were all obsessed with gaming and with the vr music experience it's one of those things that you can only play one time so people would buy it rate it five stars and then refund it after they played the experience i was like we're here but with the multiplayer game as long as you keep putting out content you have something fun it's playable forever so i wanted to build

9:35something where you could play forever and just be immersed in it forever not like a one-time experience and fast forward four years we're coming full circle we're now doing in-game concerts raves festivals because it started off as a vr music experience we ended up building out all the multiplayer net code for the competitive shooter and realized we have

9:53the best damn net code in the industry let's put it back in so we have a plan for 3d scanning artists doing live raves events with like a lot of famous djs and celebrities there's so much cool stuff you can do with this i took a note from fortnite right fortnite started doing these pre-recorded minute experiences with travis scott and ariana grande and i thought to myself awesome

10:13we're in 2021 this should be live and in vr with your friends and not pre-recorded so a lot of ideas they all we're we're you know mosh pit of random ideas but at the end of the day hey what's the world right you can do so many things as long as you have an idea for it so that's kind of what we're our philosophy inside of our vr metaverse and the last thing that i want to add is

10:33we realize that there's so many more ideas that we can think of that sorry there's so much more ideas out there than we can personally think of so we're really focused on building out these creator toolkits and kind of giving an open sandbox where we're saying hey guys we know that we don't know everything you want and we don't have the bandwidth for it if we even did

10:52so here's some tools this is your vr home you have all the basics build whatever you want do whatever you want own your assets this is the future of web 3 and gaming and we're really really excited about that i know it's been six years in development but it takes a long time to make a game definitely no especially one where you're in the game and you're able to

11:14build the game yourself while you're in it and customize it you know there's a lot of functionality that needs to go into that but i know that there's been some success so far already and with what's live and i would love to you know get more of the viewers involved and interested in playing it can you talk about exactly where you're at right now how what are the

11:34requirements for people to start getting into the game yeah all you need is the vr headset we're on steam you join our discord at discord dot gg slash bail vr we're always giving out access keys there or on steam you can just search vail vr and request access and we let people in waves there this sunday we're actually hosting a tournament with

11:56ivrl it's one of the best vre sport leagues it's going to be going live at 1pm eastern on sunday the 28th so we're already getting played by some of the top vr esport players in the world i'm very proud of that the competitive side of the game is pretty rock solid right now we're just gonna start adding more content more guns more levels more things like that but

12:17everything works perfectly thank god i know it sounds crazy but like the fact it works i'm just like yes that's like the big the big milestone the game either works or it doesn't right and now what we're really focusing on in 2022 is just building out all these creator toolkits building out the whole veil social aspect we have a lot of things in store we started

12:35already a little bit where we have like a vail hockey for example they'll club they'll art but there's so much more we want full veil sports we want fullville music and arts right now you can play pre-recorded music from you know other artists like there we want to make it so you can actually have your own virtual reality dj equipment you can actually

12:53make your own music the same way you do on ableton live but inside of our games so there's so much stuff i mean one thing that vc's great you talk about investments they always ask me what's your exit strategy i have so many things that i want to build i have zero intention or plan to exit i really imagine being able to build until the day i die there's just an infinite

13:12amount of things that have to be built in vr so i'm very excited about that we're always live on discord with our community and we're very active always listening to people and just building out really cool things very cool and that's amazing yeah with endless possibilities in vr you can literally just keep building forever yeah that's why you need to give people

13:33a tool so they can also help build because there's no other way definitely you can't do it by yourself very cool jonathan and you mentioned at the beginning of the nft drop i wanted to go back to that and just learn a little bit more so people have to be in the game this is on tuesday what are the requirements how exactly can they get the nfts and is it

13:54something that yeah so you actually don't need to be in the game we're going to be doing it on a website called metadrop.com meta m e t a drop d r o p metadrop.com you just connect your wallet we built out one of the most interesting auction mechanics that has never been done before we're very excited about it that could be a whole hour spiel on it but if

14:16you just go on the website it goes live november 30th midnight so wait november 29th at midnight november 30th tuesday very excited about it i highly recommend you at least take a look because it's gonna be it's gonna be a show we're doing a three-day auction so it's not like most nft drops where i'm always about user experience right and every time i did an nft drop you have

14:38two three minutes if anything you're paying more in gas than you are for the actual nft itself most people that get in are the people that are willing to spend crazy amounts of gas and then they end up flipping it on the secondary market making the people that really want it paying a ton more so we're doing a three-day auction there's no stress there's no gas wars you go in you place

14:57your bid we have a really interesting mechanic where for example we're doing 6000 nfts it's six different breeds a thousand per breed so you can essentially think of it as six simultaneous auctions if you end up bidding on one of these auctions the top thousand bids per auction at the end of the three days will get it and for example if you really want it you

15:18can go throw up 100 bid whatever the thousandth bid is that's what everyone's gonna pay so you can feel confident that if you really want it throw a crazy bid on it you're gonna pay whatever the floor there's no price discrimination here there's no stress three days everybody around the world has some time zone that has access to it and you're not gonna spend a lot of

15:37money on gas because you're just signing and then we're gonna mint them after the auction ends in a very slow manner just so that no one wastes money on gas it's really it's really a big issue one of my buddies the one that actually made the platform he did his nft drop last month raised a crazy amount and had one of the lowest amount of gas fees in the

15:54industry and that was really awesome very excited about being on this platform metadrop.com amazing jonathan and yeah great innovation with the auction it is a huge bother to be paying hundreds of dollars and eliminates a lot of people and gamers from allowing to get it and the people that actually want to get it actually have time especially

16:15with something this cool like the new pokemon i'm actually gonna go take a look at it and see what i like so thank you for that information i will leave that all in the description box below as well and everything about xlab thank you so much for taking the time i'm looking forward to joining you in the game in the metaverse in the future and until then all the best

16:35with the project i appreciate your passion thank you so much