First Gaming Metaverse on Hedera! Earthlings and King Solomon (Part 2)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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King Solomon interviews Earthlings part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity!  Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

In a recent interview, Patrick de Grijs, the CEO and founder of Earthlings.land, spoke about his vision for the metaverse space. According to de Grijs, the challenge that Earthlings.land is looking to overcome is the lack of professional gaming and good design in many existing metaverses. He believes that good design is essential for engaging gameplay and that the two must be in sync to keep players interested.

One aspect of Earthlings.land that de Grijs mentioned is the use of NFTs and play-to-earn features through the use of the STEAM token. Town and village land plots are currently being sold, and the owners of these plots will be able to rent out shops and earn a percentage of the revenue from their town. De Grijs also mentioned the inclusion of elements from the popular game Age of Empires, where players can manage their own town and kingdom.

Overall, de Grijs emphasized the importance of good design and engaging gameplay in the metaverse space, and how Earthlings.land is looking to offer this through its gaming metaverse.

Transcription (07:11-27:30)

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍From a gaming aspect, I watched the first video that you did with H-bar Bull a few months back. Can you talk a little bit about your vision of what's out there in the metaverse space right now? From a marketing aspect, what sets Earthlings apart?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, so what I said is that we saw that with some things missing out there. Excuse me, so one of these things is professional gaming, but not only on the gaming side, but also design wise. Because if you come with a new project or product, there's so many metaverses out there and some of them say that they have this gaming, but if you take out the play-to-earn factor, would you still play, we don't think so. That's where we saw the challenge that we could overcome because we are designers, and we like to think about new concepts. Gameplay is just another concept, of course, but if we set out to do is to build a metaverse, actually a game with the metaverse attached to it. That's why we say gaming metaverse, not metaverse gaming, that is really fun to play. If people can't get engaged with your game, they will lose interest, and it's the game's uniqueness, not the early investors. That's why, and you will see that in the trailer we will show in the second, we really focus on good design. For instance, if you walk in the city, and you don't feel engaged to look or to look around the corner and see what's around the corner. But you're like, "Yeah, well, nice place, but let's get out of here." But you need to be dropped in there and think, "Yeah, I want to see what's more. I want to see what's in the underground. I want to see what's in the glass building." If you can't get that, it doesn't matter if you have fun gameplay because the two have to sync together. Good gameplay starts with good design. That's something that we really focus on. I've got the whole question anyway, so no.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I think I mean, like for me, if I look at the gamification out in this space right now, and even just to witness what occurred over the last cycle, you look at something like Axie Infinity, which hit a multi-billion dollar market cap, but it's literally just as basic as it can possibly get. And that value represents more than all of the AAA gaming studios in the entire world combined. You could tell that there's probably a little bit of oversaturation versus reality there. But being able to actually engage and explore within these metaverses is fantastic. And then adding the gamification aspect, and also NFTs, which have a place within the world that you guys are building, can you talk about that? And then can you expand on the play-to-earn aspects with the STEAM token and how that's all going to mesh together in the universe that you're building?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Let's see if I can stick to the question this time. Yeah, so we have NFTs. Of course, now we're throwing out the first land plots, which are actually towns and villages. It's also land, but towns and villages are going out first. For instance, if you are a mayor in Earthlings.land of your own town, that means that players that will later on board your town because they will own, let's say, a single house plot, and they can onboard it in your town. They can rent a shop from you. For instance, the towns will have two shops that they will get for free, the town owners, and they can choose to use them themselves, the mayor, or have one of the plot owners in their town use it and do something with it. But they will get a little percentage of everything that goes on in their town. So we are also actually showing that we are a metaverse by selling land, of course, but it's just the beginning. And what I want to do is to get a bit of this Age of Empires feeling as well, because with Age of Empires, you have all these errands in your town in your little kingdom, actually. So we're going to do that as well as a town only. You can have a train station if you don't want to buy it, have one of your blood owners buy it, but you will still get some tax from that. You can have a bank, and Leemon Swap is going to handle the banks for us. All these kinds of things, but also you could have a transit like a UTP transatlantic captain. And yeah, I'm not set in stone yet by the way, because I need to talk about that with the team, but things like taxi driver, all these things we like to really incorporate, digital jobs, so to say, really make a big economy, but always thinking from gaming, gaming comes first, because there has to be fun to be in there And if you are earlier, you invest in, uh, you buy lands now. Yeah, you have some advantages, but gamers that will come in the game later will have a lot of advantages too because there's actually the gamers' dilemma. So investors aren't gamers, and gamers aren't investors. So how do you bring these two together? That's what we're trying to do here, solve this whole puzzle. And the gamers will have their own advantages later. We're updating the white paper by the way now, and you'll just have to read it because I'm going to explain it and it's going to be longer. But you're never late to join as a gamer. You will just join the game feeling like you're joining a triple-A game without the need of first buying land or other items. So it's actually a very professional game that you can join. And when they start playing, they will of course start collecting steam and start collecting rare animals that you can have as a sidekick in the game. And as soon as they start collecting all this stuff, at a certain point they will be wondering, "Now what can I do with all this stuff?" And then they will find out, "Hey, you can connect a wallet to this game and you can sell it." This is a way of bringing gamers in without the negative feel that they have with play-to-earn. We prefer to say play and earn. Yeah, yeah, okay. I probably missed what else did I miss from your question.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I always load my questions with like five parts. That's just how my mind works sometimes. I like that actually. You know, not necessarily like play-to-earn, but play and earn I think is awesome because I know one of the big things is you see, at least on a lot of AAA gaming aspects out there right now from the console standpoint is there's always such a stigma around the microtransactions and the micro payments and stuff. And it's like at first, at anything's core, I mean it has to be fun. You have to be able to like I think you mentioned before, you have to be able to engage with the world. You want to be able to, I mean the biggest goal is, people want to stay in what you built. And then you want people to experience it, and then participate in the economy and everything else. And you touched on a little bit, which I think is really interesting: building out an economy in a metaverse. You know, there's going to be multiple facets within that. And you talked about working with Leemon Swap from the banking aspect within your metaverse. Are there any other collaborations that you guys are building out for the metaverse right now, or have you had collaborations in the past? How do you see that moving forward?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Well, I think we already do some exciting things of course with Leemon Swap. We do a lot of talks with HashPack as well, whom we're doing these cross-chain talks with. And I'm looking into what else we can do with cross-chain collaboration. There is something coming up, if I tell that now my team will kill me, so I can't do that yet sorry. But we're really having a nice little feature that we're doing and we will throw it out in the coming weeks. But yeah, we had some nice talks with, for instance, Matt VeeApes from VeChain. I actually bought one now myself as well, and these guys are so, so amazing, so nice. Because I like it when you, I speak to these guys on Zoom as well, and it's just so nice to see these, well, with all the regular dudes like you and me doing these awesome things. So that's nice. We're making some friends as a project there. We had Crypto Dinos who are very friendly, from Cardano, and they brought in Fast Society as well, also from Cardano. And what do they do, Solana’s as well, by the way, they do too. So we're doing all these cross-chain talks, trying to get these family-friendly partners as well, seeing how we can maybe in the future, even integrate them into our game. Because that's a fun thing about gaming metaverse, if you have the metaverse part as well, you have so much more options to do with collaboration. You know, you can give them a head office or whatever, and so things like that. We are still talking about, and we have a very, very nice Twitter talk that I'm trying to organize now. And, well, I'll let you know behind the scenes.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I saw that you guys were doing cross-chain talks on Twitter, and I think that's fantastic. I think that's going to be massively important for the space as a whole, moving forward, because we talk a lot about network of networks, and that's really what's going to get us there. Is bringing in other ecosystems, or other ecosystems, you know, or even Hedera ecosystems, branching out other ecosystems. I mean, I think that's absolutely huge from the roadmap standpoint. I don't know how much you can actually say from the roadmap standpoint. I know Q4 has been really busy for you guys. You guys just did the first drop for your founders, your founders holders. Where do you see it moving forward in Q4? Are there any other, you know, I know you talked about a couple of weeks, any other big announcements in Q4, and then where does that go out into the future as far as like early 2023?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍So we're going to have the towns in the villages. I'm really hoping to get that news out this week. I have got me and my big mouth as I said last week to my community. Yeah, I think we're going to do an announcement this week. And then the team sent me back home, no, no, Patrick, you need to write more about, yeah, so yes, it's a scoop for you as well about the game's plots, because we can't throw this information out if they don't know about that. So then I needed to go back to the writing table and write all that stuff out. So, but I'm hoping to throw out all this information this week, so about the town and village sale that's coming up, and those will be lower in numbers than of course the plots, because they need to fit in all these towns and villages. So, but also in it fits our concepts that we first want to grow a community more, so that we have all these plots divided more over different wallets of course. Roadmap, yeah, I'm getting back there again. So then we're going to throw out the tokens any day now. I'm having some final talks this week about that. We have our upgraded tokenomics, because let's be honest, you can't know anything and I started this, and I did a lot of digging in tokenomics, but no one can really tell you, so turned out my little round pie chart was actually quite good, but we needed some improvements here and there on the back end, and now we really wrote down the whole tokenomics, age by HBAR Joe, a well-known H-bar member in the Discord community. He helped me out a lot, we have a lot of help from the community by the way, we can also in the Discord community. And so we are now ready to also throw out the tokens. Well, I think the announcements will come in, let's keep it safe in a few weeks. I hope sooner, and then from there.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I mean even with the milestones and achievements you guys have been able to accomplish thus far, because I know I think the founders NFT sale was a few months back, and it just seems like you guys have really gained a lot of traction in this space since then. So maybe talk a little bit about where you're at right now, as far as some of the achievements that you guys have had thus far, because I know I don't like talking about you know value or go buy X Y and Z, but just even to watch the floor price of the founders NFT, it's been pretty amazing to watch. And I personally, I personally picked up a founders one, so not financial advice to anybody listening to this, but I was one of those things where I looked down the road and I was like, man, I wish I would have picked up a couple of more.

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍So I wish I did because I don't get any pain. So I said to my wife, I have, why didn't I buy more, because I've got a, I've got some founder cards of course, but I needed to buy some myself as well. But anyway, no financial advice, but indeed, when the floor price kept going up, I was amazed by that as well, of course, but it looks like people just see where we're going. So, what was the question? So, we were a bit behind on the city scenes. Well, we have them finished now and we will show them in this video, of course, but it took us a bit longer and I'm so happy that that's done now because we really had this awesome scenery that we showed in the first clip in the H-bar bull interview. So, we needed to at least have something at least as good as that and it needed to fit the scene as well. We knew what we wanted, so we were already starting to build all these buildings, but we didn't have anyone in our team who could do these textures because doing the textures makes all the difference. Let's just say call it a paint job, and that you know you can do it in so many ways in this 3D world. So, it took me like six to seven weeks longer to find the agency that could do it for us in the standard I wanted. So, that was throwing us back a bit, but we got it now and you're gonna show it. So, I'm happy with that and we're gonna still improve on that because we're gonna still add a lot of these things. But now that we have to tell 100 and I said we're designers, so this is something we focus up on a lot and this is design is everything in gaming. So, now we're going way faster. I'm having underground areas being built, more buildings are being thrown out, and now we can re-detect it and faster as well because we have someone to do that, and actually one of our team members picked it up very well. So, there's a milestone. I think it was for me something very exciting because yeah, that kept me awake at night. Oh, it's, are we gonna get this texture as good as the nature scenes? And we did. So, I think the movie will not disappoint people.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and I've seen it. So, we're definitely going to share it. But before we share that, I would like to give you an opportunity to maybe share some of the links to drive people towards learning more about what you guys are facilitating, whether that be Twitter, the site, where would you like to drive people to so they can learn more about the world that you're building?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍I would say go to Twitter and just scroll all the way down and you can see the whole history. And go to Discord as well, but it's easy to just go to earthlings.land because all the links are there on the page, of course. So, start there, go to Twitter, join our Discord if you want, of course, we have a very fun place. We've got some young gamers in the space as well, and they're amazing. We got some 15-year-olds people in the Discord, and they are so much fun. So, yeah, go there, come join our Discord.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I'm super excited to be sharing this video, but I want to kind of let you lead us into this video. And I will upload it so that everybody can see it after the fact. But I think you talked about the landscape aspect that came out a few months ago, and this is more of the city scene. Yeah, I know you told me, you know, this is actually going to be what's represented whenever people are actually in the world. It's not just a trailer, it's not just X, Y, and Z. So, maybe lead us into this video, and thank you so much, Patrick, for coming on this morning. It's been a pleasure being able to talk to you. I'm sure this will not be the last time that we speak. So, if you want to give us the intro to the city scene, that'd be fantastic.

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I would love to. Yeah, so as you said, and that's a very important thing, the video that you're going to see now is really a scene from the city that you're going to walk in. And we're going to even add to this because animals, avatars, vehicles, we already have vehicles, but we haven't put them in the scene yet. They're just going to complement the whole thing. And we're gonna have amazing things in the city, so which is what you're seeing here now is just a preview of what you can expect, a minimum preview of the quality. But we're hoping to amaze even more because the city alone is good. I'm aiming for like five by five kilometers because what good is to have a tram in your city if you can walk from one end to the other. So, yeah, I'll leave it with that because I'll just keep rambling on, and you press the play button on the video, and hopefully we see each other again in another video. Thanks so much for your time.