Redefine the Game Publishing Platform, talk to Nicolas and Emmanuel from Ultra team
AMA with Ultra team
How does Ultra achieve blockchain Steam by cooperating with AMD and Ubisoft?
Summary:
No transaction fees, free account creation, easy account recovery, instant transactions, more than 11k TPS, are some of the advantages of Ultra blockchain.
👨Host: Jack Yang, co-founder of Token Damo
👨*2 Guest:
Nicolas Gilot, Co-CEO of Ultra. Nicolas is a serial entrepreneur and strategist who led a $100+ million USD game console project as Xiaobawang’s CSO, generating 1.5x — 3x revenue of multiple game/app projects through his monetization strategy firm (Plants vs. Zombies, High Noon, The Economist, etc.).
Emmanuel Gimenez, Lead Community of Ultra. Emmanuel is an experienced crypto investor working in the blockchain space for the past 5 years in marketing and community management, before that he was into gaming and esports communities organizing tournaments.
⌚️The AMA time
Hongkong Time: 11/24 18:00PM
CET Time: 11/24 11:00AM
Jack: When it comes to gaming platforms, many people will immediately think of a platform that is firmly controlled by a man with glasses and drains countless wallets-STEAM.
The high profitability of game platforms is already a well-known problem. Take traditional mobile game platforms as an example. Generally, platforms will get 50%-70% of benefits from developers, increasing the cost of the game industry.
However, the industry has been unable to do this for a long time. After the emergence of the blockchain, it provided a new sales model for the game platform-a decentralized game sales platform.
Through this mode, the cost of players and developers participating in the game is greatly reduced. Among them, Ultra built on EOSIO is a representative project in this field. To this end, AEX & Token Damo invited the main project leader to come to the community for an AMA on November 24th.
During the one-hour sharing process, the project team gave detailed answers to questions such as the original intention, token distribution, ecological construction, and team cooperation.
The following is a summary of shared content, enjoy~
Q 1: According to relevant information, you came to China with David very early. You have been here for 8 years. What attracted you to China in the first place? During this period of time in China, you and your partners have been engaged in mobile games, PC games, business consulting and other projects. What is the logic of each choice?
Nicolas：I was always passionate about games and that’s also how I met with David, playing Counter-Strike, so after selling our first business which was in the IT, we decided to move to China to develop games as that was the perfect place to be for this.
Mobile games are much cheaper to develop than PC games, so we took a first stab at it with mobile games and developed 3 games over a few months. We then decided to open a PC games studio, which was acquired before the release of the game by Kingsoft. During this period, I developed a monetization strategy company for games, working with large companies to improve the revenue, retention and conversion of their players, working in this field taught me everything I needed to know about the business of games.
We had the opportunity to join a new game console project led by Xiaobawang (in partnership with AMD) after the sales of the PC games studio, offer that we accepted as such opportunities are rare, there’s really only 3 other consoles out there so working on this new one was very exciting.
After 8 years in China, we decided to come back to Europe and start Ultra, bridging all our experiences in the games industry and blockchain (since 2011) to create a revolutionary platform.
Q2: What led you and your team partners to set up the Ultra platform?In the past two years, there has been little news related to Ultra on media platforms, especially domestic media platforms. Can you introduce the main achievements of the project team in the last 2 years?
Nicolas：We started about 3 years ago, built a 60 people team composed of renown industry veterans such as the former CTO of Dell, Time Warner, Hearst, which is our CTO, or the former head of Apple Games unit and Google play games as CSO.
Ultra has now developed a fully working game distribution platform, a blockchain that is ready for mass market. No transaction fees, free account creation, easy account recovery, instant transaction, over 11k TPS, are some of the perks of the Ultra blockchain.
We signed up over 150 game publishers to publisher their content on Ultra and gathered several great partners such as AMD, Ubisoft, Theta, Atari, … which are all supporting Ultra to become the leading platform.
We also signed one of the largest game companies which will operate UItra in China, with over 75 million gamers, they will provide Ultra with all the firepower needed to be successful in the domestic market.
Q3: Traditional game distribution platforms such as Steam can attract developers, game publishers, players and other game ecological stakeholders because they have built service infrastructure such as perfect SDK for the game ecosystem, and the brand flow effect formed after long-term operation.
How do you and your team plan to move gamers, developers, and publishers onto Ultra?
Nicolas: There are many reasons to join Ultra for instance we have less fee than Steam for game devs, and we have unique marketing tools for them to promote their games. Ultra also has a revolutionary SDK that combines all the needs of a game developer (full feature parity with Steam) while offering item management as traditional assets AND blockchain-based assets, offering to the indies and the big studios the opportunity to use NFTs for their games without requiring any blockchain work.
Emmanuel: More info about our SDK: https://medium.com/ultra-io/providing-developers-with-powerful-tools-641cceda2293
Nicolas: On our platform, game developers will be able to configure their virtual assets through a simple interface and define parameters such as the price of each asset depending on where it is sold, the developers’ cut when an asset is resold (opt-in royalties) and many other options that are applied to those NFTs. This is a true revolution for the games industry as it changes the way developers can conceive, market and monetize games. NFTs are opening a new era, which will lead to new gaming experiences that were impossible to create before this technology.
As a gamer, benefits are quite obvious as you will finally truly own your games and items, enabling many new opportunities. It means that you can generate money, or more exactly value, by playing games and participating in the ecosystem, for example by finding powerful tokenized rare Items. You will be able to trade and sell your NFTs in a handy way, thanks to the very secure yet simple Ultra Wallet and since Ultra is an open ecosystem, our advanced NFTs will be promoted and used in various services such as streaming platforms (Theta.tv) and consoles (Atari VCS).
Ultra is making NFT technology very accessible, but at the same time very complete.
Q4: According to relevant reports, the Ultra platform currently has about 60 core members. Can you outline how you organize your team? What is the culture of the Ultra platform? In addition, the project is distributed. What measures has Ultra platform taken to ensure the efficiency of project operation?
Nicolas: Currently we are a bit more than 60 full time team members, most of them are developers, The team is very distributed around the world.
In this type of organization what you need is an efficient way to communicate and regular online calls to insure everything is done properly. Ultra team has a full team dedicated to only organizing the team efforts by subdividing the work into small milestones and given to the right team members.
Ultra is a big family but within it we have multiple smaller groups of developers working in parallel on different tasks. For example we have a backend team, a data team, a blockchain team, a front end team and so on.
This is for us the best way to make sure we are progressing towards our objectives, as you know Ultra is a complex and large project, we are not only building entiere new blockchain mechanisms but also ground breaking users experiences and a very advanced back end for game developers. All of that requires different skill sets from different persons.
Q5: According to data, one billion $UOS were issued on the Ethereum network. UOS token has the functions of platform consumption, promotion and reward, computing power income, and lock-up income, etc. How does the Ultra platform design the token exchange model? What’s the economics behind it?
In addition, some time ago, in an interview, the relevant person in charge of the team said that the Ultra platform would open the channels of alipay and WeChat to pay for UOS. What’s the progress so far?
Emmanuel: UOS is used for every interaction on the Ultra platform, whether it’s buying a game or a tournament entry, trading a NFT or tipping a streamer. But not only. You will also be able to stake UOS to increase your Ultra Power, which is the main resource of our network. The more Ultra Power you have, the more your transactions are prioritized in the queuing mechanism.
UOS is the blood of the platform, you will need it for absolutely everything in the platform even to create NFT, but what we are designing is that you can also use Ultra without owning UOS. For this, we are working with payment providers to offer fiat payments, which is then used to purchase UOS on the background through exchanges partners. Specifically about China we know that it’s impossible to propose something without Alipay or WeChat, this integration will be taken care of by our local partner.
Q6: It is worth noting that 62% of the Core team + Company reserve + Growth + Content acquisition are directly controlled by the team, with a relatively high degree of concentration.
In general, such a high concentration can easily trap a project into centralization. How do you and your team see this? In addition, what are the specific unlocking rules for these four items?
Emmanuel: Well the company indeed owns a good part of the token supply, but it doesn’t lead to concentration of power since the tokens have no right in the governance of the chain (this is taken care by Block producers only).
As an investor I believe you prefer that most of the supply is owned by the company and never spent unless for very good reasons such as making sure the project is attractive. It’s better than having anonymous whales or random VCs, which often don’t care about the long term value of the project but only about short term benefit.
We align our incentives with the token holders, for example our company reserve is only unlocked if we reach 1 million monthly active users. Growth and Content Acquisition are both driven towards the success of Ultra, great content brings more players, which in return need more UOS …
All the details are provided on this blog post :) https://bit.ly/2YNBC8N
Q7: According to relevant materials, Ultra platform has reached cooperation with 150 game development companies and game publishers. Considering that the project hasn’t been in existence for a long time, this is a very good achievement. Why has the Ultra platform been able to make rapid progress? What is the main content of the cooperation with companies such as AMD or Ubisoft?
Nicolas: Currently, one can say that we have three kinds of partnerships.
The first kind is the one which guarantees UOS availability around the globe and will later help us to maintain a consistent and stable flow: the exchanges. So far, we have partnered with KuCoin, Bitfinex, BitMax, Bitrue and Coinone, and now AEX to provide access to UOS.
The second kind is the one which allows us to run and maintain our infrastructure, and to ensure that we deliver the best user experience possible at all times: the Block Producers. So far, we have partnered with EOS Rio, EOS Seoul, EOS Nation, Bitfinex and Ubisoft.
The third kind is about our ecosystem and user growth. We have partnered with AMD to bring millions of users to Ultra through our joint efforts while also collaborating on Ultra’s technology (AMD has >200 million users).
With Theta, we integrate their streaming solution into Ultra, they’re also allowing distribution of our NFTs to Theta’s streamers.
We just announced a new partnership with Atari, which integrates Ultra and our NFT technology into their upcoming game console. It’s a big achievement for us, because it shows that Ultra is not only a standalone platform, but also a technology that can be integrated into many systems.
Q8: Ultra is a side chain developed based on EOS. The test nodes include UBsoft\Bitfinex\EOSNation What are the major development plans in the near future?
Nicolas: Ultra has an EOSIO foundation, but we have heavily forked it to obtain something really unique and vastly different from others EOSIO chains therefore development, testnets benchmarking takes more time than in simple forks we often see in the crypto space. We are right now still heavily testing it with our partners, most block producers such as Ubisoft already started producing blocks, and we are obtaining very convincing results, our blockchain is faster than EOS mainnet, or any EOSIO others chains, while having tons of advantages. Indeed the next major development is the introduction of the Mainnet, which is set to happen very soon, stay tuned about Ultra!
Here are some questions from community users:
Q1.The blockchain in 2020 cannot be separated from decentralized financial DeFi, reshaping a new blockchain pattern. Will Ultra join DeFi mode to create decentralized lending in the game field?
Emmanuel: Yes indeed, that’s why we keep our erc20 and for example we have integrated Uniswap with a liquidity program.
We will continue to do so in the future, on Ethereum but also on Ultra blockchain.
We have many plan to bring the decentralized finance to gaming in the future, for example one could imagine that game studios will be able to raise money thanks to Ultra blockchain technology.
Q2.Blockchain will change the way games are conceived, released and played, and Ultra will redefine new gameplay for game developers, KOLS and players. What are Ultra’s larger visions for blockchain game layout?
Nicolas: We are aiming to bring the large studios and AAA games to use blockchain technology through Ultra, our blockchain and our SDK. Many projects are starting from blockchain to create a game but as former developer, we believe the current studios are in the best position to provide a great experience for players.
Ultra is designed to offer to KOLs, Gamers and Developers new ways to generate revenue, promote their products at a fraction of the cost, and for the players they will be able to benefit from blockchain advantages and truly own their assets, monetize the time spent in their game (selling their character, their items, resell their game, …)
Q3.Ultra team map is blank in China. Is there plan in China? Chance for young people to join your team. You know the gaming market in China is huge.
Nicolas: Yes we do have Chinese in our team, but they move to other countries, we will hire more people in China once we launch there, to interface with our local partner.
Emmanuel: Thanks a lot guys!
If you speak english or can read you can join us on our main group: https://t.me/ultra_io
and follow our announcements here: https://t.me/Ultra_ann
It was a pleasure to be here with you today thanks for organizing it!
AEX Team
AEX: Your Best Asset Guardian
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