Episode 202 – Tanner Larsson
Welcome to another episode of The HERO Show. I am your host Richard Matthews, (@AKATheAlchemist) and you are listening to episode 202 with Tanner Larsson – MECH.GAME: A Raising Standard of NFT’s & Blockchain Gaming.
Tanner Larsson was the CEO of Build Grow Scale, which is one of the biggest and best ecom training companies in the world. Just recently, Tanner stepped down as the CEO of BGS to pursue a crypto-based gaming project called MECH.GAME—a game-ready mechanized 3D NFT’s.
Here’s just a taste of what we talked about today:
What NFT (Non Fungible Token) Does?
The best way to describe NFT or Non-Fungible Token is, if you have a quarter in your hand, I have a quarter in my hand, and we put them on the table, and I mix them up and cover them up. Can you identify your token? The answer is No, because they’re fungible, meaning they’re interchangeable as the same.
NFT is non-fungible token. So what we did was we took that currency, and we wrote, Tanner’s quarter and Richards’s quarter on it. Then we mix them up, do you know which one’s yours? Of course, you do, because it has your serial number on it.
The NFT technology, at the most basic level, is a way to put a serial number on digital stuff. You can use it in insurance, business, applications, art, etc.
MECH.GAME Gameplay
With MECH.GAME you’ll have a hero character that runs around the map that you control. We made the game more fun by building in a strategic element where you have to mine resources in the games to have a little bit of that strategy aspect, those resources are used to build your towers, and repair your towers in the level.
The game is a top-down Tower Defense-style with a hero character as your Mech. All of those, the Mech and the stronghold are the main NFT’s that you own. They’re upgradable, they earn experience, and they have game stats that can be improved, like health, battle, power, energy, all those kinds of things. And when you upgrade them, that reports to the blockchain and stores that data.
Other Topics We Covered on the Show:
- The difference between playing video games and NFT games.
- Tanner also shared the things that they are going to help solve in the marketplace by building MECH.GAME.
- Then, Tanner discussed who are their target gamers for MECH.GAME.
- Next, Tanner talked about MECH.GAME’s gameplay for a new players and an experienced players.
- Tanner shared MECH.GAME’S targeting platform and its target release date.
- We also talked about some of the ways on how the game gain the market share to be a mover and shaker in the space.
- And then, Tanner discussed how would people buy their Mechs.
How To Stay Connected with Tanner Larsson
Want to stay connected with Tanner? Please check out their social profiles below.
- Website: Mech.game
- Facebook: Facebook.com/MECH.GAME.NFT
- Instagram: Instagram.com/mech.game
- Twitter Handle: @MechGameNft
- Youtube Channel: Youtube.com/channel/UCYL56A_Mf3QdEtAxTE2lNpA
With that… let’s go and listen to the full episode…
Automated Transcription
Tanner Larsson 0:00
In the crypto and gaming NFT space. It’s all about interoperability and collaborations. So projects want that because the number one cool buzzword in NFT’s is currently utility. And what utility means is, in a simple form is this NFT that I own, what can it do for me? What does it do? And so if it’s only in the one game, that utility is still good, but it’s much more limited than saying, hey, not only can you play it in the game, you can take it into decentraland, you can take it into other metaverses, you can do these other collaborations. And the other thing is when you start doing those collaborations, you also provide additional utility for other games, tokens, currencies, things like that, that then allow the value to increase in different stuff like that. So there’s a lot of huge opportunities there. But the other side of it, that of crypto gaming, that’s become really cool, and I’m sure you’re aware of is crypto gaming, even these like non game games in the crypto space have pioneered this whole new world of scholars and scholarships. And what that is, is there are people especially third world, second world people that want to play these games, but may not have the money to buy the NFT to play originally, but they need the NFT to play. So what has happened is these guilds have come in and bought the NFT. And then they basically let the player or what they call the scholar, use the NFT in the game. And then in the game, the scholar and the guild split the currency rewards that come out of the game. So it’s basically a leasing system.
Richard Matthews 1:44
Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what, I can fix that, I can help people, I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…
Richard Matthews 2:40
Welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And I have a fun returning guest for us today. I’ve got Tanner Larsson on the line. Tanner are you there?
Tanner Larsson 2:47
Yeah, I’m here.
Richard Matthews 2:49
Awesome. Glad to have you here. So for those of you who listened to Tanner’s episode before. Tanner was the CEO of Build Grow Scale, which is one of probably the biggest and best ecom training companies in the world. And I know you just recently stepped down as the CEO of that company to pursue some other ventures, you want to tell us a little about what’s going on there. And where you’re going next?
Tanner Larsson 3:10
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, BGS is still it still is kind of the premier training and optimization company for ecom brands. But, you know, I’ve been doing ecommerce since 2001. Been kind of a dinosaur in the online space. I’ve done all kinds of things through internet and through internet business. And I’m always got my hands in different things and dabbling in different side projects, different things where I see potential in one area that I have been getting heavier and heavier into for the last several years is crypto, and cryptocurrencies, Blockchain technologies, and things like that. And I started what was originally kind of a passion project when I saw this kind of perfect opportunity for me in space. And it has since grown into something that is becoming very quite big, quite large, quite fast. And I see the potential here and the future here in such a big way that my partner and I talked at BGS. And for me to be able to pursue this the way that I wanted to, I decided to step down as CEO of Build Grow scale, so that I could pursue this venture, you know, full force.
Richard Matthews 4:22
Yeah. I don’t know if this is too early, but it’s Mech.Game is the name of your NFT game that you guys are starting, is that right?
Tanner Larsson 4:31
I kind of was cryptic in that description. I didn’t mean to be cryptic, but yeah, so the project, it’s in the crypto gaming space, which is actually a very new space, but the project itself is called Mech.Game and that’s actually the URL as well, which I was super stoked to get that URL, because it’s just perfect Mech.Game.
Richard Matthews 4:50
That’s really cool.
Tanner Larsson 4:51
And the project is a crypto-based gaming project that leverages NFT technology blockchain ledger, distributed ledger technology as well as defied economics. So there’s a whole bunch of things there that we’re talking about that kind of sound technical and geeky. But the first thing that is to understand when I say NFT, most people eyes glaze over, or they go, oh, you mean those stupid JPEG monkeys and things or whatever. And it’s, oh, look, I copied and pasted a right click and saved I stole your JPEG. I’m like, Yeah, I think that’s stupid, too. But that’s not the reality of the NFT technology. And to be fair, when I’ve been in crypto since 2016, not as a quasi investor, as a very bad investor, I would say, in the early days, learn how to take a large amount of money and make it into a small amount of money. So if you want secrets on that, I can tell you that from as far back as 2016, but I stuck with the space and kept evolving with it and learning more, but when NFT’s first came out, I thought they were stupid too I’m like, look at this. I mean, I love the money that people are making. That’s amazing. But what? Like, what is this? And it wasn’t until I really started understanding the underlying technology of it that I was like, Oh, this has some legs. And in the nutshell, for those of you guys who don’t know, NFT’s, if you look at an NFT anything, what is special about it, it’s not so much the actual NFT Non Fungible Token, it is the fact of what the NFT does. So the best way to describe it is if you take a token, which in cryptocurrency, everything’s called tokens, right? NFT’s are tokens as well. But all tokens normally are fungible. So if we take a quarter, you have a quarter in your hand, I have a quarter in my hand, we call those tokens, and we put them on the table, and I mix them up and cover them up. Can you identify your token? No.
Richard Matthews 6:43
Not really because they’re fungible,
Tanner Larsson 6:46
They’re fungible, meaning they’re interchangeable as the same. So my quarter is the same as your quarter, there’s no difference.
Richard Matthews 6:52
Which is a rule for currency, currency has to be fungible in order to function as currency.
Tanner Larsson 6:58
100%. Now NFT is non fungible token. So now what we did was we took that currency, and we wrote, you know, Tanner’s quarter and Richards quater on it. So we mix them up, do you know which one’s yours? Of course you do, because it has your serial number on it. So NFT technology, at the most basic level is a way to put a serial number, if you will, on a digital or type of anything. So an NFT now has a serial number. So when you start doing that your artwork has serial numbers, you can use it in insurance and business applications and all kinds of stuff.
Richard Matthews 7:35
Yeah, you can use it to tokenize real estate, you can do all sorts of interesting things.
Tanner Larsson 7:39
So many crazy things.
Richard Matthews 7:40
With NFTs and it’s such an interesting space. And the thing that has really been blowing my mind within NFT is looking at like, I think a lot of people right now they’re looking at NFT’s. And they’re thinking, what is the stupid monkey JPEG have to do with the future of the internet? And they’re not looking at what does the underlying technology actually capable of. And when you look at what the underlying technology is actually capable of, what you see is you see that probably within the next 10 years, if it even takes that long, every asset you have in the real world and in the digital world is going to have some sort of NFT tokenization that goes along with it. So you can move and transfer ownership and even do crazy things like right now you and I aren’t in the position financially, maybe if Mech.Game goes really well. We will be, but to like buy one of the big towers like Trump Tower in New York or something like that, we couldn’t buy that. Because you just have to be really, really wealthy to invest in those kinds of things. But they’re talking about NFT technology allows them to actually tokenize the ownership of the real estate. And the same way that you can buy a portion of a company with a stock, you could buy a portion of a big real estate transaction. And all of that it’s like baseline NFT technology, you’re talking about how you can apply that to gaming. So he’s talking about how does that sort of technology apply to a game.
Tanner Larsson 9:01
Absolutely. So that’s where I think in my opinion, everything you just said is 100% True. But in reality that’s like the super adopters, the super nerds, and super geeky guys, I get this and I’m ready to jump in now. For NFT technology to really catch on we got to catch it with something more mainstream, that’s more adaptable and that’s where the gaming aspect comes in a big way. So one of the things about gaming so I consider myself a closet gamer and I say that because I have an obsessive personality and once I find the game that I like everything else goes out the window and my life gets consumed by the game. So I don’t let myself game very often anymore, but I used to a lot back through high school and after that and I played Doom I played World of Warcraft I played all kinds of these different games. Apocalypse is all kinds of games.
Richard Matthews 9:52
I spent a lot of hours playing Legend of Zelda, a couple of years back.
Tanner Larsson 9:56
I did that too, you know, all that stuff, but one of the first games that I got into that was an online game that was big was Diablo two. Now Diablo two. Remember that?
Richard Matthews 10:05
Have you played the resurrected version? My son and I played the resurrected version and both of us have put in untold hours over the last year since they released it.
Tanner Larsson 10:06
I have to play it now. But if you remember back with Diablo two, you would build these characters and you start out as a level zero and you wind up with like a level 80 sorcerers or whatever and you play ungodly amounts of hours to do this, then you get bored or you’re done playing or whatever. And that’s basically it. Say what?
Richard Matthews 10:35
I said I’m currently at level 75 Druid.
Tanner Larsson 10:37
Druid Okay, perfect. Now with that, what we did back then was we’re like, okay, well, what can we do with this, and we decided to try to sell our accounts on eBay. So that was a thing for a while, you’d basically try to sell your character on eBay, but you didn’t sell the character, you gave your logins to your account. And then you would go create a new account and you hope that when you make the transaction that that was like authentic, and people weren’t scamming you, because it was a high trust factor. But it was also illegal by the terms of blizzards and Diablo Two Terms of Service. And then World of Warcraft comes about in the same thing, people are finding rare armor, rare items, things in the game. And there’s this whole like underground marketplace of people trying to sell them for real money.
Richard Matthews 11:20
Yeah, just mainstream. Like if people have watched Big Bang Theory, they have got a couple of episodes in the series where the characters in the TV show are playing a World of Warcraft style game. And they get one of those super rare swords. And there’s like this whole joke where like, they catch the sword, and they’ll stop playing to go sell it on eBay. And then he’s like, I got it, I sold it. And then one of the other guys on the couch is like I bought it.
Tanner Larsson 11:46
So that was what happening and it is happening. And but according to the terms of service of the game, you’re not allowed to do that it’s a real janky operation. And currently, people who play video games play for pure enjoyment, when you stop playing the game, all that time invested, is gone. There’s no value there. So what NFT technology is allowing, and one of the reasons I’m jumping in the big way is, we can now use NFT technology to attach it to your game character, or your game items. And now the character that you play your level 75 Druid is now a piece of digital real estate that you own. And all the upgrades, all the things that happens to your Druid are recorded on the blockchain. And when you want to because you own that it’s like the title to your car, you have a title to your car, you have a title to your level 75 druid, you can go sell that druid to another player on the marketplace. But your druid has armor, he has a staff, he has potions, he has all these different things. All of those things can also be in NFT’s and have a serial number attached to them. So you could sell them as a whole or you could parse them out or when you find stuff you can’t use, you could sell that. And it’s a legal way of transferring it in a very trustless meaning that there’s no trust required in order to make this transaction happen. You put it up for sale on the blockchain, I want to buy it I send you cryptocurrency by clicking the button at the same time the transaction happens and the NFT is sent to me. There’s no way to scam people. And it’s super awesome.
Richard Matthews 13:21
So I want to point something out that’s really cool about that, that I think a lot of people don’t really get where the value is coming from. And so if you back up into like, what’s happening and Ryan Deiss couple years ago said, he’s the head of digital marketer, for those who don’t know, he said that everyone’s in the attention business today, whether you like it or not, you’re in the business of attention. And going forward, that’s really the way marketing is done. It’s all about how you get attention. And what’s interesting is if you look at companies like social media, Facebook, Twitter, any of those, they’re all essentially, we are giving them our attention, and then they’re monetizing that attention in the form of ads. But we don’t get compensated for our attention, because our attention is valuable to the advertisers who want to pay for our attention. And what the NFT gaming space and I think a lot of other entities are doing as they’re going to allow you as the one who has the valuable attention to monetize that attention yourself. So when you take and you put in 450 hours into your Diablo two character, that 450 hours in building that character and getting the stats and doing the stuff for it has a value to it that you can then exchange in the economy, that you can’t do now. So it changes the way games work.
Tanner Larsson 14:37
Correct. And the other side where the value comes from is the players right? A lot of times players want to come into a game they don’t want to start at the level or the beginning, they’re willing to buy or they don’t want to find the rare thing they’re willing to buy it and that’s been proven. If you look at games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, they all have these things where you can buy in game purchases to buy more jewels or buy more whatever to make the game easier for you to play faster. It’s a convenience purchase. And people to the tune of billions and billions of dollars are doing that every single year with no value, no value exchange other than enjoyment. In this case, they’re doing this same thing. But everything that you buy can become more valuable in the game, there by the same players that you’re playing with can then buy your character, you can change, trade exchange, whatever. But it’s all tracked by basically a serial number technology that is completely trustless. And can store the value. So it’s, I can’t say, hey, buy my level 80 and you buy it, and it’s only a level 20, there’s no way to scam the system.
Richard Matthews 15:40
Yeah, it is what it is, because it’s a real asset. You’re essentially being able to do the same kind of things you do in the real world, where it’s like, hey, instead of a digital cup, like, here’s my actual cup, it’s the same kind of transaction, you give me money, I give you my cup, you have my cup. Same thing happens in the digital space, I got levels of any character, I give it to you. It’s the same type of physical exchange because of the way the technology works, which we couldn’t do with digital stuff. Before NFT technology and blockchain stuff existed. What I want to talk a little about, though, is in the NFT gaming space, there’s a lot of stuff that’s happening, you guys are approaching it a little bit differently. And I want to find out why are you guys approaching it that way? And what do you think sort of like the problem is in the marketplace that you guys are going to help solve with the way you guys are building Mech.Game?
Tanner Larsson 16:27
Sure. So there are a couple of different things that are happening. So that’s one of the real reasons I was excited about moving into the gaming space. But the other thing is that, if you talk to any crypto expert in the crypto token space, whether they’re investors, advisors, Blockchain owners, whatever, they’re all saying that the next big boom industry in crypto is going to be crypto gaming. And they’re saying it’s three to five times or bigger than the dot com boom was just in one sector of the crypto space, which is just in gaming. Now, the reason for that is because crypto gaming.
Richard Matthews 17:04
For those of you who don’t know, just traditional gaming is like a $60 billion a year industry.
Tanner Larsson 17:09
Correct, and they are expecting that it will be multiple trillions by 2025.
Richard Matthews 17:15
And again, if you don’t know the space, like when there are big game launches, they are generally bigger and have more money behind them than your big Hollywood launches that you see over the summer blockbusters.
Tanner Larsson 17:26
Very true.
Richard Matthews 17:27
Yeah, so it’s a huge space that if you’re not a gamer, you’re not aware of. But when you’re in like our world, which is gaming and marketing, you sort of pay attention to all that stuff. And you realize that man, some of these big game launches, they just make like the Marvel superhero launches look like, chump change.
Tanner Larsson 17:44
Correct. And one of the reasons crypto gaming is poised to be so big is looking at the gaming population. The people who are in crypto right now are the technically savvy, the technically advanced, they’re typically people that have a little bit more tech savvy, right? To get more mainstream adoption, we’ve got to lower the technical curve, we’ve got to get more of that. And obviously, more and more people are getting into crypto every year. The next big technically competent audience is gamers that have not yet dipped their toe into crypto. So that’s one of the reasons that they’ve been pushing so hard the full gaming.
Richard Matthews 18:18
It’s the next step.
Tanner Larsson 18:19
Correct.
Richard Matthews 18:20
I always tell people, when they’re looking at investing in any crypto, whether it’s gaming or not, I was like, if you want to see who’s gonna win long term, see who makes crypto invisible to grandma. But lets grandma use crypto.
Tanner Larsson 18:32
Correct. Yeah. So Gaming will be the first phase of that. Now, Crypto gaming as a whole is pretty much focused around PDE, which is play to earn. So basically, you play the game and you earn some form of cryptocurrency reward in exchange for playing the game. That’s how most of these games are operating. In traditional gaming, you game for enjoyment. You only play for enjoyment, crypto gaming is incentivized gaming where you get paid to play.
Richard Matthews 18:59
You get paid for your attention?
Tanner Larsson 19:00
Correct. The difference is that in the PDE world, the crypto world, the games can barely be called games because they’re more like defy applications dressed up as a game where you click as an example, you have a horse race, you have two horses, and you’re going to race them, and you click a button that says race my horses, and then two seconds later it says, Oh, congratulations, this horse won. It’s a randomized algorithm. It’s not a game, there’s no skill. What it is, it is gambling packaged up as a game, like a gambling algorithm, an online gambling algorithm. That’s what it is. Now, most games are like that right now. Because it’s early in the space and everything else and you click a button and you win and you get a reward. Okay.
Richard Matthews 19:47
Yeah. Part of the reason for that though, is just like the technical hurdles to actually make a real game. have real entities that are interchangeable, either between the system or between other games it’s huge. And it’s going to take someone who’s really dedicated to building the technology to do that, which sounds like it was where you guys are going?
Tanner Larsson 20:08
Correct. There are still two worlds of gaming, they have not been touched at all. If you go to a gamers forum, a traditional gamers forum, and you mentioned NFT games are PDE games, they basically talk crap and say how horrible they are. And they’re right, because these guys play for the love of gaming. So they’re gonna play a game over on the crypto side, and it’s not fun. Why would they play it?
Richard Matthews 20:31
They are for 450 hour into clicking on the horse.
Tanner Larsson 20:34
Yeah. They’re not real games, they want to play real games. So the opportunity here in the crypto space is for games that are built in the reverse order from crypto, a game that you would actually want to play, even if there was no play to earn rewards. But then you build a real game that’s playable. And then you tie in all this stuff like play to earn rewards defy economics and player owned assets with NFT technology. So players own the character, the player owns the weapons, the shields whatever the other items are that make the game function.
Richard Matthews 21:08
Have you seen a Ready Player One?
Tanner Larsson 21:10
Yeah, I’ve seen part, I actually couldn’t watch the whole thing, I didn’t like it. But I did watch part of it.
Richard Matthews 21:16
So it’s just interesting to me because the world that they built in that movie was essentially all NFT based stuffs. And I always tell people like if you’re confused about how NFT’s work and what it looks like, watch that movie. Because every time that he’s like, I’m gonna go into my thing and plot an item for his digital avatar. It’s all NFT stuff, exactly what you’re talking about here. Play around assets.
Tanner Larsson 21:40
Now the other thing in the gaming space right now is currently in the crypto gaming space. The big thing is, people have been trying to tie NFT’s and crypto together since NFT’s came out. So there are lots of NFT games. But if you look at NFT’s most of them are 2d images, they’re a JPEG, or a png of like a torso of something. And then they say, Oh, this is your character in the game. And they try to build some game. Well, reality says the technical coding says this 2d, jpeg three quarter is not actually your character, because a game character has to be coded in a specific way, using Unity or Unreal or whatever. So they’re not. So they’re saying that you own your game character, but you really don’t, you own a PFP, or an image of what your game character could look like. But typically, these games then build a character that is not also an NFT. So technically, all that happens on your game character, by the simple state of the law, you don’t own it, because it’s not connected and tied together.
Richard Matthews 22:42
You own the JPEG representation of your character, you don’t actually own your character. And it would be like taking a picture of the Mona Lisa, versus actually owning the Mona Lisa.
Tanner Larsson 22:52
Correct. And that’s where we’re at have been at currently, what we’re doing with Mech.Game is, and that’s another reason why you see JPEGs and images. Because NFT’s have been very simple. They’ve been very simple art type of things until now, what we’re doing is the actual NFT that you purchase, is your three dimensional game character. So if you go to Mech.Game and look at it, it is the game character.
Richard Matthews 23:16
Yeah, so it’s the actual code that’s being played in the game.
Tanner Larsson 23:20
So what you see on say, open sea, or bike.io, or whatever, when you go to an NFT marketplace, and you’re viewing your NFT, you’ll see a three dimensional walking around mech, and you can manipulate and do all that that’s the exact one that you use in the game. So you’ll see the exact representation of it, it is the exact one in the game, and out of the game.
Richard Matthews 23:41
So if I can make a comparison real quick, just make sure I’m understanding this properly. World of Warcraft is really huge, everyone has their little characters and their avatars. But at the end of the day, all of the game code is owned by Blizzard. Right? So any of the effort that you’ve put into the game, all of the stats, everything. Blizzard owns all of that what you guys are actually building is whatever I put into the game is actually mine. So I actually own a portion of Mech.Game. And like literally own a portion of the code of the game is mine. Is that right?
Tanner Larsson 24:13
Correct. Yeah, the code that pertains to your character, your assets, your interaction with the game, the overarching game infrastructure like the levels you play, and all of that, that’s owned by the company, of course, but your participation in there, yes, you own that, you own your character. You play the level and you find a new weapon. That weapon is an NFT as well you own that weapon. And you know whether it’s equipped with you or not, it’s stored in your wallet or your inventory basically, and you have access to it. You can then sell it, you can trade it, you can use it, you can destroy it, whatever you want. You own it. And then when you want to leave the game for whatever reason, you can take your stuff and go and then take it somewhere else. The other thing is what this opens up for us is a collaboration with other projects, where you can take your Mech from our game and go play it in another game that we collaborate with or decentraland, you can take your Mech into decentraland and park it in your driveway if your decentraland house. Because the code and the ownership of the NFT allows as long as the other platforms are coded in this in a similar sense, certain types of code were required, you will be able to do that. And there are other projects that are coming out that we’re collaborating with as well, to do exactly that. So you’re basically, in the beef, they’ll be spoofs, right? There’ll be a fun level. So we have one of our collaborations, they’re building a Metaverse game that is with superheroes. And they, we’re going to build a side level that kind of conjoined our games where their superhero can battle one of our max. Now, it has nothing to do with the original, the regular gameplay, just one extra arcade mode type thing that you can add to a project and we can do tons of those other projects.
Richard Matthews 26:02
Do you see more and more of that becoming mainstream in the NFT gaming space that instead of like, because I know everyone’s looking at NFT’s like how do I win in the investing game. And I know that one of the things that I’ve been looking at is, I don’t think there’s going to be a winner, I think the winner is going to be the people who are or the games and the technology that’s going to allow things to have interoperability,
Tanner Larsson 26:26
Agreed.
Richard Matthews 26:27
Right? Where your stuff can be like if I own it, but I can only ever use it in Mech.Game. it’s limited. But if you guys are built in such a way that it’s interoperable, and other people are coming on board, and also building interoperability if I own a really cool Mech.Game mech, and then I can take it over to you know, this is just spitballing, say Pokemon gets into it. And I can take my Mech into the Pokemon world and do a Pokemon battle with my Mech against Charizard kind of thing. That’s where you start getting the really interesting futures for gaming.
Tanner Larsson 26:58
And in the crypto and gaming NFT space. It’s all about interoperability and collaborations. So projects want that because the number one like cool buzzword in NFT’s is currently utility. And what utility means is, in a simple form this NFT that I own, what can it do for me? What does it do? And so if it’s only in the one game, that utility is still good, but it’s much more limited than saying, hey, not only can you play it in the game, you can take it into decentraland, you can take it into other meta verses, you can do these other collaborations. And the other thing is when you start doing those collaborations, you also provide additional utility for other games, tokens, currencies, things like that, that then allow the value to increase in different stuff like that. So there’s a lot of huge opportunity there. But the other side of it, that of crypto gaming, that’s become really cool, and I’m sure you’re aware of is crypto gaming, even these like non game games in the crypto space have pioneered this whole new world of scholars and scholarships. And what that is, is there are people especially third world, second world people that want to play these games, but may not have the money to buy the NFT to play originally, but they need the NFT to play. So what has happened is these guilds have come in and buy the NFT. And then they basically let the player or what they call the scholar, use the NFT in the game. And then in the game, the scholar and the guild split the currency rewards that come out of the game. So it’s basically a leasing system. Right. So in Mech.Game, we’re doing the same concept, you will be able to own your Mech. Now let’s say this is where the whole investment, how do you win an NFT’s thing comes back into play with NF T’s you can buy them, you can sell them, or flip them, right. Or you can hold them, you can play them, there’s different things you can do. But the NF T’s that have the most value and the most long term appreciation opportunities and stuff are the ones that have multiple utilities. So with Mech.Game, you own your game character, like I have people that are buying the Mech’s that don’t want to play the game at all, they just want to rent them out and have it become a passive income stream for them. So I have a Mech, you want to rent it from me, I basically set up all in the system, I can select the percentage that says hey, you’re gonna get 60% for playing the Mech, I’m gonna get 40%. And the system automatically splits those rewards and sends them to each person’s wallet as their earned. But then if you’re underperforming as a player, I can enter the agreement and I can go rent it to somebody else. And then once you’ve earned enough money, you can potentially go buy your own Mech or just keep doing that. Now to think that’s kind of hard to believe it is until you realize that there’s a game called Axie Infinity that kind of pioneered this model. And they have 1.2 million Filipinos that log in every single day to play full time for their living and by full time, it means a couple of three to six hours of playing a day. And they make between 25 and 50 ish dollars or more a day out of their cut. Now these guys do that, and they literally make more money playing a video game, that’s not even a fun game, then they could out their regular job in the Philippines, and that these guys are all scholars that guilds have created that basically bought the NFT’s and then leased them out to the scholars, 1.2 million of them a day are already doing this. And it’s just continuing to grow as other countries are finding out, hey, I can make 30 bucks a day playing a video game, sign me up.
Richard Matthews 30:36
If I’m understanding you correctly, one of the things that you guys are trying to do differently, is you want to make the game aspect, like the actual I’m going to play a game to be something that you would play whether or not you were getting paid to clients.
Tanner Larsson 30:51
Plus the number one priority of what we’re building, because that’s the only thing that is going to attract regular gamers to the space, they’re going to come over and go man, this is a fun game. All right, and then they’re gonna get into it, start playing it, and then they’re gonna start earning crypto rewards and like, dude, I get paid to play this game. Hey, Mom, look, you said I was wasting my life playing video games. Now I’m making money. Right?
Richard Matthews 30:51
I’m pretty sure everyone in our age bracket had our parents tell us at one point when we were teenagers, like you shouldn’t spend as much time playing your video games, because you’re never going to be make a living with it. And here you are literally designing a game.
Tanner Larsson 31:13
Now some people do in response to streaming, but I never did, the vast majority of people don’t but I’m not saying that someone who lives in Alabama, in the middle of America is going to be able to make enough money playing Mech.Game to change their life or live. Not saying that at all. It’s not the point. The point is they’re going to build a game that people want to play for enjoyment, and then also reward them for their time, through rewards. And then they also own the assets that they’re playing, and that they find and everything else. So they can supplement it, either sell it or trade it whatever.
Richard Matthews 31:59
It’s no longer just entertainment. Like your, again, your attention has value, in the new economy for that, and you’re being rewarded for your attention.
Tanner Larsson 32:12
Correct. And the other aspect is, with the blockchain, you’re able to record like, as your person gets better, as your character gets better as you upgrade it, that’s all stored. So when someone comes to buy my Mech that I want to sell or rent it, I can say, look, it’s worth this, because of all of the stuff that’s been done to it, and they can see the upgrade path, they can see that it’s not a base level character, and they can go do I want to go buy a base level character? Or do I want to start at a badass level and jump into the game like a king?
Richard Matthews 32:45
Okay, so tell me a little bit about actual the Mech.Game, like your first version of this? What kind of game is it? What kind of gameplay? Like who’s your sort of target gamer that you’re looking for?
Tanner Larsson 32:57
Perfect. So I didn’t just pick Mech, because I love Mech Warrior. I used to play that a lot. But I approached this opportunity the same way I would approach any business I started doing research and figuring everything out. And one of the areas that I researched when I was looking at game demographics of fluency of spending, things like that, was that the Mech demographic, the robotic gaming Mech fighting, Gungan, Mecca, all those different combinations that all boil down to a mechanized or fighting robot. They’re a massive audience.
Richard Matthews 33:32
There are also Hollywood blockbusters about that audience.
Tanner Larsson 33:35
Yeah, I mean, Pacific Rim, all that stuff, right? There’s a huge audience of gamers that love that kind of gaming. They’re also a fairly frustrated audience in that the only type of games out there for Mech combat are mech verse mech, battle combat, like fighter mech, that’s it, and the general consensus is like, this is great, but what other games could there be?
Richard Matthews 33:58
The video game is equivalent to those little push buttons and they punch each other. That’s the video game equivalent.
Tanner Larsson 34:07
So I saw that, and I was like, okay, well, that’s interesting. And I love Mech. So that’s cool. And then I started looking at other games. I’ve researched a whole bunch of different genres. But another one that caught my eye because I also enjoy it is tower defense. It’s a strategy style game, right? Where you’ve got hordes of enemies coming in trying to attack you, and your job is to defend them by building towers. And so I kind of kept looking at this. This is another audience that’s massively huge. It’s very addictive. They like to stream so they want to share their gameplay.
Richard Matthews 34:39
My current tower defense game that I play with my son is called Baloons TD six. And it’s retarded. It’s literally it’s monkeys. Your towers are monkeys and then balloons come and attack you and they pop the balloons with darts. And then they just go all the way up to like, you got wizard monkeys and super monkeys and whatever you want to do, but the point is is like the market. I didn’t realize it was this huge, but that one game all by itself has a multitude of streamers who make full time six figure incomes just covering that game all by itself. And it’s just it’s a tower defense game with monkeys and darts.
Tanner Larsson 35:15
Yeah. And it’s a goofy one. It’s not even realistic, like a triple a title or anything crazy like that is just a fun little game to play. So that audience that you’re exactly describing, we were looking at, and I was like, Holy crap. And then I did sort of comparing the audience demographics. And I found out that there was a massive overlap between Mechie players and tower defense players, meaning that Mech players are also tower defense players. So that was where we said, hey, what if we could dream up a Mechafide tower defense game, where you have a base, which is also an NFT, that you have to defend, you build towers to defend from the enemy, those are stationary defense towers, air defense, ground defense, all that stuff. And then you also…
Richard Matthews 35:54
Your Mech could be like your hero?
Tanner Larsson 35:55
Yep. And your mech is your hero, you have a hero character that runs around the map that you control, and to add an extra layer to it to make it more fun. Because a lot of tower defense games, you just build towers indiscriminately. And it’s just kind of gets less fun. We are actually building in a strategic element where you have to mine resources in the games, who’s got a little bit of strategy aspect, that those resources are used to build your towers, repair your towers in the level. So if you don’t mine enough, you’re not going to be able to build enough towers plus, the mines are not going to be in the most convenient location behind your defenses, you may have to defend in multiple locations, so that’s where your Mech comes in, being able to run around and do all this kind of stuff. So it’s basically a top down Tower Defense style game with a hero character as your Mech. And all of those, the Mech and the stronghold are the main NFT’s that you own. They’re upgradable, they earn experience, they have game stats that can be improved, like health, battle, power, energy, all those kinds of things. And when you upgrade them, that reports to the blockchain and stores that data.
Richard Matthews 37:02
Yeah, so like I said, in the tower defense game that I’m playing, right, I can upgrade my hero with different animations or different pieces that go with him. You can also unlock like, abilities later on. So you can have stronger abilities to fight bigger, bad guys. So the same kind of thing. Except, the difference is, if I pour real money into this game, it’s just for entertainment. Whereas if I pour money into my Mech hero, and I decide, two years from now, I’m no longer interested in playing this game, for whatever reason, maybe I’ve outgrown it, maybe something happens, I’m just not playing the game anymore, I can actually sell those assets.
Tanner Larsson 37:41
Correct, and what you just said does happen. I mean, if as a gamer, you don’t play the same game forever, very seldom. I mean, steam is a whole market of like indie style games that people play. Most people have, who in this world have 10 to 20 Steam games that they just download play for a little while to get burnout, move around. So the ability for people to transfer, their stored value. Basically, a store of value of all this energy and time I put into this game, and have a way to transfer that to the next game. In this case, it’s by either selling your assets, trading your assets, for the next game you want to play, you now have a way to transfer that stuff without losing it.
Richard Matthews 38:23
Random technical question.
Tanner Larsson 38:24
Yup.
Richard Matthews 38:24
This is if this is interesting, because one of the things that are really important when you pick up a new game, is learning how to play the game. And so you would have like the either tutorial levels or whatever’s going on. If you have a marketplace where I can go in and say like, someone who’s been playing the game for two or three years, and has all this really advanced stuff, and is like really good at the game if I just bought all of his stuff, and I just brand new, how do you guys going to work on managing that sort of experience in the game where someone who’s a new player might be able to come in and purchase high end assets from someone who’s really experienced player? And how does that manage the Gameplay?
Richard Matthews 38:24
Correct, like if you if you’re playing level one of the game, but you have a level 80 character, you all of a sudden now, you’re just trouncing levels and not doing anything good, not becomes more play to win.
Richard Matthews 38:42
Not really learning how to play the game either.
Tanner Larsson 38:45
Correct. So one of the things we’re building into the game itself is a level based difficulty algorithm. So no matter what level of the game you are in, whether you’re in the beginner level are whatever the hardest of beating the level is going to increase to be comparable to whatever your character is.
Richard Matthews 39:40
Yeah, so to put that in another game that people might familiar with Diablo three came out a few years ago, they do that were like, I can play my character. And I’m at level 75, you know, wizard or whatever. And my son wants to start playing and he can join me in a co-op, and it’ll adjust all of his character stats to be able to play with me.
Tanner Larsson 39:40
Correct.
Richard Matthews 39:45
Right? Or if I go and play on his game, it’ll adjust all my stats down to match him so we can Co-op together. And that’s what you’re sort of what you’re talking about the gameplay.
Tanner Larsson 40:01
The thing is we’re building an indie game, not a triple A game. Now triple A game requires 1000s of people on a team and ungodly amounts of money. I’m not Blizzard, I’m not Microsoft, or Sony, or any of these companies. We’re building an indie game. And that’s why we’re building in the crypto space because Indie games are the next phase of crypto AAA studios will come in, but they’re gonna come in, in a couple of years, there’s a lot more that has to happen before they’re convinced that they’re going to jump in a big way. Also, when those triple A games come in, they’re not going to build, they’re just going to acquire and then put their own spin on whatever they acquire. But in our case, our indie game, people are going to play the game faster than we could build updates and new levels and things like that. If they can only play each level once, that’s no fun. But if they can play each level over and over again, but as they play these levels, it actually does get harder, because the game difficulty level is increasing to match their stats, then it’s more fun.
Richard Matthews 41:16
Yeah, absolutely. So with sort of the growth of the game, what platforms are you going to be targeting the game to start off with, are you gonna be targeting mobile platform like iOS, Android, or consoles, or PCs? What’s your first target for releasing the game?
Tanner Larsson 41:34
So our main target for this game is going to be WebGL. We want it to be a browser based game that anybody in the world can play without the need to have a crazy gaming console or whatever. The next phase of that will be mobile specific versions of the game. Of course, WebGL means it can also be played on mobile, but we’ll have a mobile version as well. The reason that we’re going WebGL.
Richard Matthews 41:58
Like the hardware acceleration on a second version, when you go to like Target iOS or something you can make the game faster.
Tanner Larsson 42:04
Correct, we can do a lot more detailed stuff. Now, the cool thing is in the last four to six months, the technology in WebGL has made some major leaps forward. So we’re able to get much better graphics much better performance out of a browser based game. But yeah, ultimately, that’s the first phase, we will start playing it and then we’ll go into mobiles. And then the other aspect is as the game grows and becomes more involved, and a lot more of these other bolt on add ons we want to do, we may have a downloadable client as well, that needs to be incorporated with it. Whereas in the web portion becomes more of a battle net, so to speak.
Richard Matthews 42:04
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Richard Matthews 44:19
The last question I have for you cuz we’re getting on in time here is, one of the things that I think strikes me is really interesting. I’m curious how this is going to bridge the gap between because you’re trying to get more of the mainstream gamers to play. And that’s sort of like the clincher for getting the crypto games to sort of become a thing. And one of the things I’ve noticed is looking at the NFT games like Mech games some of the others that are out there that are trying to do similar types of things is the price of entry is significantly different than say going to pick up a triple A game, like Blizzards World of Warcraft or whatever cost like 60 bucks to play the game. And to get into some of the NFT games, you have to actually purchase the NFT. And those can be orders of magnitude more expensive to get into play the game.
Tanner Larsson 45:08
A few hundred bucks or more.
Richard Matthews 45:10
Yeah, the cost of entry is radically different than the traditional gaming space. And I’m curious, like from a marketing standpoint, how are you guys going to be approaching that? And how does that actually affect how you guys are going to gain the market share to be a mover and shaker in the space?
Tanner Larsson 45:26
Absolutely. So that is a big part of it, one of the sides of it is if they’re willing to buy the NFT in there, and they understand what they’re buying, that they actually own the asset, and that the asset becomes more valuable. That’s one of the mitigating factors that we’ll have to do as an education push. But one of the things that we’re doing as well as we’re going to have a free to play version of the game as well. So the free to play version does not participate in the play to earn economics, if you are a free player, you can earn experience points, but you cannot earn actual crypto rewards okay, because a free player breaks the system, if they get rewards. So the traditional player will be able to buy their Mech often marketplace or wherever they want start playing the game by the Mech in the stronghold, they’re earning the play to earn stuff, the free to play side is where we are going to get people hooked. That’s where they can come in, they can mint and grasp.
Richard Matthews 46:24
The game is actually fun to play.
Tanner Larsson 46:26
Correct, they can mentor gratis mech, gratis means free, right. So it’ll be a very base level Mech, that they can start playing the game, playing all the levels, earning experience points actually leveling up their Mech, now the Gratis Mech that they mint, they own it, it’s actually an NFT. So they can get that for whatever the cost of gas is basically just mint it and it’s yours. So it’s pretty much free, then they can play that Mech, they can upgrade it with the experience and stuff like that by playing the game, just again, like Diablo, they’ll get stat points, they can use a couple stat points, they can upgrade from level one to level 40, all that kind of stuff just by playing. But every level they play, they’re going to have like an in screen just like any other player. At the end of completing the level, you’ll see all your rewards, you’ll see how many enemies you killed, how many towers, you build your score all of that stuff. The Free to Play player will say, Hey, you earned 75 experience points. And then it’ll have another thing because I’m a marketer, it’ll be like, Hey, here’s how much you missed out on and crypto rewards. So it’s going to be this constantly upgraded tally. So it’s like this level, you lost this. But overall, in the time you’ve been playing, you would have earned $700 or whatever it is. So we’re going to basically show.
Richard Matthews 47:37
So you’re going to use the game to educate about the ROI.
Tanner Larsson 47:40
Correct.
Richard Matthews 47:41
That comes from actually owning a portion of the game.
Tanner Larsson 47:44
Yeah, by owning their character. Now. They can kind of character, they can even sell that free NFT if they want to, they could try to sell it on the marketplace. Whether someone wants to buy it or not. It’s a different story. But since they own it, they can sell it.
Richard Matthews 48:01
Are you going to build marketplace access into the game?
Tanner Larsson 48:04
Yes. So we are partnered with Byt.io. They are an NFT marketplace as well, multi chain, there are multiple different blockchains. But they are doing a lot of really cool gaming stuff. But we’ll have our own marketplace within the game that you can use. But all that stuff will also be visible on buy on, open see whatever the incentive to using our internal marketplace is you’ll have more customizable controls, since we don’t control those platforms. Like let’s say, have your Mech and it’s equipped with all kinds of like, let’s say five other cool NFT add ons. That’s basically a bundle, you can’t sell that as a bundle on open sea, you have to sell them individually. On ours, you could sell them as the whole set and someone could buy the whole thing. So they are able to do that within the game.
Richard Matthews 48:56
So my last question for you here, if people are interested in either side of this actually playing the game, or maybe investing in the game, which would mean buying some of the NFT’s that are getting launched? Where can they do that? Where can they find out about that kind of stuff? And the second part of that question is what’s your timeline looks like for actually having the game playable and ready to go?
Tanner Larsson 49:17
Yeah, so the best place to find us is again, just go to Mech.Game, that’s the URL. Go there. All of our socials are listed down the side right there. You can read the white paper up there, you can join the discord. If you want all the itty bitty details and cool stuff and the newest news, you need to join the discord. It’s like Slack for crypto, right? It’s where everybody hangs out. So that’s the best place to find us. Right now we are heading towards our initial launch of the Genesis collection of NFTs, our Genesis collection of characters basically our Mechs, these come with all kinds of additional perks because the people who support the game in the earliest phase uses are basically if you look at it my pre round investment are the one who believed in us from the get go. They’ve got upgraded stats, they’ve got better weapons better this. They get perks in the game, they get higher reward payouts, they get all kinds of stuff. But we’re getting ready to launch that at the end of the month.
Richard Matthews 50:26
End of April?
Tanner Larsson 50:27
Correct?
Richard Matthews 50:28
Okay.
Tanner Larsson 50:30
We’ll have the exact date announced inside the discord shortly, we’re just waiting on a couple of details from some of our partners. But that will be launching. Following that, we’ll have all kinds of cool airdrops of additional cool things. We have the second collection, the base, which is called the stronghold collection, we have the token launching. And then right after that, we have the game launch. And we should have early alpha of the gameplay in the next month and a half for the initial holder to be able to check it out. Public game release will happen after that.
Richard Matthews 51:01
That’s really fascinating. So on that topic of like actually getting into the game and playing it. I’m going to just assume that most of my audience is not super up on crypto. So what do they need to have? Like, on their device or the computer or whatever, to be able to participate in the launch and then actually play the game later. Is there anything special they need to have like a wallet or anything?
Tanner Larsson 51:29
Yeah, so there’s a couple of things normally, traditionally, to be able to play a crypto game or to buy an NFT you need to have cryptocurrency, typically Ethereum you need to own a certain amount of Ethereum equal to whatever value you want to buy. So if you’re gonna buy a $200 NFT, then you need a $200 and some change worth of Ethereum. Ideally, you want that in a Metamask wallet, if you have a coin base or crypto.com or whatever wallet that’s not the same thing that is a wallet on an exchange, you would need a Metamask wallet separately which you create for free and transfer your money into that that’s where 99% of all crypto wallets live is inside of Metamask. From then on the day that we actually launched what you recall a mint in the crypto space MINT you’ll be able to mint your Mech’s meaning that you’ll be able to buy them okay and the instructions for that will be on the website basically click a button that says Connect wallet you click a button that says Mint select the number that you want and then you pay and that’s the way that works. What we’re also going to be doing though with Mech is my audience as much the same as yours. A lot of them want to be involved in crypto but I haven’t taken that leap yet. And also getting their USD into crypto is problematic in terms of just it’s a pain in the butt to learn the first time. So we have a lot of people that are wanting to be able to get involved by a batch of Mech’s, to be honest, most of my audience wants to buy a massive investment they want to buy them flip them after the launch, hold a few for rentals, things like that. They’re not looking necessarily to play the game. There’s a lot of the audience that’s in my Discord. They want to play the game but my traditional business audience like you and me, and like hey, how do I make money off this, okay, I’ll buy six or 10 of your Mechs, I’ll flip four of them ran out six of them, whatever, right? Those guys we’re setting up an opportunity for them to be able to buy with USD with fiat currency. And then they just set up their wallet and after the launch, we will just send them their NFT’s to their wallet.
Richard Matthews 53:33
Yeah, that’s really exciting. I’m planning on buying a couple because I do actually want to play the game I mentioned earlier tower defense is my favorite style of game and it’s the one that I can pour hours and hours of my life into and not realize I’ve done it. So I’m really excited for the launch of your game and it’s really cool to see that you’re doing this so yeah, thank you so much for coming on and sharing sort of what you guys are up to I’ll put the links to the discord and other than the discord Is there any other links I should make sure to get put into the show notes for this?
Tanner Larsson 54:05
Yeah, I’ll give you a batch that will do the YouTube link because you can see all of our past Ask Me Anything calls where people can really kind of learn more of what we’re doing. See the game trailer. So we’ll do YouTube, we’ll do the medium we’ll do the website, and the end the discord, and I’ll just give you all those links.
Richard Matthews 54:20
Awesome. That’s really cool. Now I just curiosity question. One last thing here. How did you put together the team and the talent? Because I’ve seen your game trailers and you guys are building an actual game. Like you’re building gameplay like there’s a lot of stuff that I assume is probably new to you. Because you’ve been in the Ecom space for 20 years. Now you’re doing film and you’re doing game and you’re doing all these other things like this is a vastly different world how was that experience like?
Tanner Larsson 54:49
So it’s definitely a big learning curve every day. The one thing that I have in my repertoire, if you will is 23 years of building businesses and hiring people. And that’s what I did was, I have a great network built up from my other business. And I said, Hey, this is what I’m doing, who do you know? And they connected me with people. And then from there, I connected with other people. And I just started interviewing and hiring. I’m like, okay, I know the basics of what I need. though. I found a guy who used to work for Ubisoft as a game lead, he built Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. And he was a freelancer, and I hired him. And I was like, okay, what else do I need? And I already know video from the business world, but not video production to that level. So I just kind of kept reaching out to my network until I found the right people. And I just started hiring them. That was the one thing that I’m doing different also for most of these projects is they use the NFT sale, as their entire fund to be able to grow the project, hopefully, grow the project. I’ve never built a business like that. I’ve always believed you have to bootstrap and build the business. So I’ve self funded the entire project. And yes, when we sell the NFT collection, that’s going to give me a war chest that I will be able to use to further expand and grow the game at a much faster pace. But we’ve already started like my whole team is on payroll. Like, we just started doing that from the get go. But the answer your question? Yes. It’s been challenging. Yes, it’s a whole new world. But my this skills that I’ve developed in hiring and building teams, is what makes this possible because even with BGS, it wasn’t me, that was the rock star at BGS. It was our people. It was the team’s, it was the infrastructure that we built.
Richard Matthews 56:31
Yeah, so last final question for you. How far out are we from having plushy dolls of our Mech’s?
Tanner Larsson 56:37
I actually did talk to a company about that while I was in Miami, but their minimums are ridiculously high. So it’ll be a while.
Richard Matthews 56:45
It’ll be a while before we can get plushy dolls of our Mechs. Talking of indie games that went really mainstream. Rovio, who created Angry Birds, a lot of their success came from stuff that was outside of the game. The Merchandising, and getting into Hollywood and doing things it was like, there’s the game, but then they did all of the marketing around it.
Tanner Larsson 57:10
Will be able to do it because we own the assets and built the characters themselves, people will be able to get 3d models of their Mech’s, they can be just regular ones that are just 3d printed, they can get some that are hand painted, they can have different levels on a one on one basis. So there’ll be more expensive because they’re one on one if they want to paint it and all of that, but they can get that they can get the merchandise they because I mean, physical products, that’s my world. Like I know how to do that. That’s the one thing I can do, so we’ll definitely have all kinds of cool stuff like that. But we’ve had a lot of requests. I was surprised they want shirts. I wouldn’t have thought people would want to wear their Mech on their chest, but they do. They want to wear their Mech, they want hats, and they want statues.
Richard Matthews 57:55
Like pretty fingurines?
Tanner Larsson 57:58
Like this dude, right? Like Boba Fett, but not a bobblehead.
Richard Matthews 58:04
Yeah, their Mech from their game, which is cool. That’s really awesome. So thank you so much, Tanner, for coming on, and just sharing what you’re up to with my audience. I’m really stoked for your game to launch. Because we’re friends, but also because I’m just really excited to see this happen in this space. And I know over the last couple of years watching this grow, I kept telling my inner circle friends, I was like the games that get to the point where they’re like you actually own the end game assets are the ones that are going to win. So when I saw you launch this stuff and start talking about it, and you were talking about the same thing, and I was like that, that’s really cool that you’re doing that. And then it’s like even extra cool that like, I actually know you, like, it’s cool to see.
Tanner Larsson 58:47
I mean, I can’t wait myself. It’s kind of surreal still, like, I always wanted to build a game because I thought it would just be cool, but I never envisioned that. That’s where I would be. I mean, I went from being a window cleaner to an ecommerce expert to now I’m building a video game like, I would have never drawn that career path for me.
Richard Matthews 59:05
And yet, here we are.
Tanner Larsson 59:07
Here we are, I’m excited. I couldn’t be more excited. I wake up every day, heck, I don’t even sleep. I’m so excited to wake up super early in the morning and just amped to get ready to dive in.
Richard Matthews 59:16
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing what you’re doing. Looking forward to playing the game with you guys shortly. So thanks again for being here.
Tanner Larsson 59:24
Yeah, sure. Thank you.
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