Kit Lau from D.G. Pals dropped by to talk to us about their new NFT and gaming platform on Cronos and to take some questions from the community. To celebrate the AMA, five members from our community who took part in the question-and-answer segment at the end were selected to win 1 D.G. Egg!
If you would like more information about D.G. Pals, please visit their website at https://dgpals.io and their Twitter at https://twitter.com/officialdgpals
D.G Pals AMA Interview
TheDev100x: Welcome to the D.G. Pals AMA today with Co-founder Kit Lau! Welcome, we’re glad to have you here today to tell us about D.G Pals!
Kit Lau: Hello everyone, thank you for covering our project. I am Kit, one of the co-founder of D.G.Pals. I am the game and IP development guy. Samson is our funds and business development guy, Jimmy is our business development and marketing guy, Edwin is our blockchain tech guy.
I have spent my entire career (9 years so far) in indie game start-up scene. We are not just a singular studio located in Singapore. Our list of companies are littered mostly around SEA as well as Europe and in the United States. A collective of 250+ members, of which, approximately 50 of us are focusing on D.G.Pals.
In our outfit, we run a few games studios, esports platform, esports team and a couple of media companies that have presence in different countries around the world
TheDev100x: That’s very impressive, and bullish to see established and proven game studios launching on Cronos. Could you tell us about your vision for D.G. Pals?
Kit Lau: The vision for D.G.Pals is to embrace the blockchain technology and attempting to offer a new type of gaming experience unique to web3. What we essentially want D.G.Pals to become is a genuine game platform that provides entertainment to the players, allow players to bond, explore, compete, hangout, and at the same time, collect some NFTs and Tokens. We are not going to justify value of our NFTs with artificial scarcity in our entire D.G.Verse roadmap, we intend to infuse it with so much utilities that the market can decide its worth.
in short, this is our focus:
Gamers > Speculators
Fun > yields
Value of NFTs = Utilities, not artificial scarcity.
TheDev100x: Very cool, that’s something that certainly needed today. Could you tell us about your roadmap?
Kit Lau: On top of that, we are bringing IP crossovers into the D.G.Verse, something that you often see on mobile games and other game series. We are very very excited as we have these talks with some big brands. We are eager to share but we gotta wait for the right timing
Kit Lau: Our games will be inclusive, any genre, any IPs, any indie devs who wish to use our NFTs, we welcome all
Kit Lau: This is D.G.P:Legends, Second game in our series
first game is D.G.P: New World
TheDev100x: Oh wow, awesome!
Kit Lau: one more teaser screenshot as i’m running the game right now
TheDev100x: Oh you’re running it right now? That’s so cool 😋
TheDev100x: So I got a question… Why migrate from BNB Chain to Cronos?
Kit Lau: Long story short, we decided to go on BSC after a preliminary study of ecosystem and support. But when we met with Crypto.com and cronos guys, we realise we were getting way more support and actual tangible help because we are talking to actual people in crypto.com and cronos. As a game maker, having to apply to schemes, filling up forms just to hope to get selected for some support or listing scheme on other platforms can really take time away from building your game. When we interacted with cronos, we felt like we are building this together, we were given guidance, tools, offered connections and many other assistance that pushes the project forward.
Just imagine when you are calling customer support for something, the difference is when a human being picked up the phone or when you go into an automated voice guided system.
I also feel the Cronos roadmap is very far reaching, we are really looking at a 5-8 years plan, unlike most expectations to make a profit within a year, Cronos’ vision is aligned with ours. We are here to stay and here to build an awesome product for years to come
more screenshots =)
TheDev100x: As someone who has personally worked with both I completely understand. Crypto.com/Cronos/ParticleB are excellent at finding talent and fostering it. Most importantly, communicating very well also. With BNB Chain launching about a year earlier than Cronos, do you find the developer tools to be up to par?
Kit Lau: Superb. Infact, we just announced this yesterday;
We are delighted to announce the partnership with @cronos_chain to have the mutual support of integrating Cronos Play’s Gaming SDK! 🙌
— D.G.Pals (@officialdgpals) April 6, 2022
Read more on the partnership at: https://t.co/nloh1J8sEG pic.twitter.com/fPnS56PZQk
We will be supporting the development of the SDK together with Cronos. We run a game incubator ourselves in Singapore. We are aware of the difficulties small indie teams feel when they are curious about web3 but unable to break into it
on top of that, the knowledge transfer of the type of market expectation and players are so different to the point a traditional game maker will need to be educated
the plan is not only to develop tools, but also frameworks for knowledge access and guidance
TheDev100x: Wow. This is really impressive! I saw the news, and read it from a 30,000 ft view, but didn’t really dive deep into the implications.
Kit Lau: building a proper game is hard, if anybody tells you they are shipping a game in 3-6 months from starting up, they are lying to you 😆 hahaha
Kit Lau: there are pre-production, architecture design, art assets, game balancing, database schema to design and implement, frontend development, backend development, ops tooling. So many things
TheDev100x: 😋 So tell me more about the game…. I assume it will be browser based? Will there be mobile versions?
Kit Lau: Browser at launch, apps in the roadmap =) The platform is going to be defined by the games actually. We are not a 1 game NFT project, we are a multiple games multi-genre NFT platform. This includes 3rd party developers original content.
Some games will play better on mobile and on the go, some games might require greater immersion or too large to operate over the browser
TheDev100x: Yeah and an SDK to speed up that process for Cronos is huge!
Cronos is exploding in new user growth and TVL growth, as well as new projects, especially in the NFT space, have been popping up every day, how do you plan to differentiate D.G. Pals from others?
Kit Lau: I have yet to see a game project that allows vastly different usage of the NFTs they release. In our collection of games, you can see the same NFTs acting like a character that is fighting in D.G.P:Legends and acting like a Tower in D.G.P:Adventure (a tower defence game)
we are doing this to show the versatility of our NFTs, the metadata is rich in data that can support any game genres and we are proving it ourselves.
On top of that, we are working with other indie teams to help them develop their own games, they may use our NFTs but they have 100% creative freedom to reinvent the visuals
We are also bring awesome IPs into our D.G.Verse, so players can truly enjoy an online game that is so diversified and doesn’t feel like it is just 1 game title they are subscribing to
We are also launching a D.G.Pals physical tabletop game in June, we will drop some NFTs inside for those board game lovers who manage to pick one up over kickstarter
the IP development plan is vast and rich, we are not just building a blockchain game, we are developing a game IP
Kit Lau: we should be able to announce something either late April or early May
TLDR, Multi-game NFT system, 3-5 game launches per year, same NFTs can be used throughout
We will attempt to cover as many genre the community wishes to see, game development is our forte
For those who are curious, here are some sneak-peeks into the games we are releasing
TheDev100x: Ahh very cool! A couple years back I really wanted the “PlayTable” I believe it was called. When researching your team I could tell you were the real deal, and had no questions about your abilities to launch a product.
Our own company vision is to grow our user base by growing Cronos itself, and our number one challenge in that regard is educating new users, onboarding them to DeFi.
With that said, you could certainly succeed by onboarding established crypto gamers, but to take this to the next level you’d certainly want to attract the “non-gamers”, what are your plans in that regard?
Kit Lau: This is an interesting topic because we found that we are in a good space given our existing track record. With Esports background, game media companies as well as game studios in our portfolio, we are nothing but connected to actual gamers.
We are familiar with advertising to gamers, reaching out to gamers, connecting to gamers.. We have a list of influencers we often work with to cover esports events, game releases and other game related media coverage
This is not exactly a hard to reach market given our set up, but we need to really define real values for these gamers to enter the NFT gaming space. What NFT speculators and Gamers are looking for are very different.
We do not intend to hardsell the platform but we will develop things that will bring them in organically.
TheDev100x: At times, certainly.
In that regard, I am glad you are leaving the price to the free market. So when I was participating in the genesis egg mint I needed to create an account, which I did, and it all went smoothly. Will you have any benefits or rewards for the early adopters? Maybe something for when future NFT drops or modes are released in the future?
If so, do you have any plans you can announce, or any advice?
Kit Lau: right now, if you participate in the genesis sales, every Genesis NFT you managed to mint, secures you 2 additional D.G.Eggs. You can hatch them into NFTs and decide if you want to keep them or trade them in the marketplace.
What we have designed here is that the Early Adopters are literally given the ability to onboard new players that discover the project later.
On top of that, you will be receiving $DGG (our gov token), $OPL (our game token) and other goodies to help you jump start your journey in Panterra
The rates for getting Ultra-rare and Rare NFTs is also much higher than the regular rate during the Genesis period, so thats another perk
TheDev100x: Very cool! Will you have the ability to “friend” others? Or the ability to create “clans”
Kit Lau: Definitely, part and parcel of an online game and a metaverse! I am so excited about this platform, the hangout place is call D.G.P:Plaza, scheduled for late 2022
TheDev100x: Ahhh you guys seem to totally get it. I can’t wait to start using the platform and build out my network.
Do you have any plans in the future as far as economy balancing goes?
Kit Lau: In our other games, we work with numbers in the trillions, our daily active is in hundreds of thousands. Not only is MATH a requirement for all the game designers at our studio, we have engineers who developed monitoring and analytics tools that help us manage our numbers.
Every single game technically has an economy and we have shipped plenty.
The plan moving forward with D.G.Pals is to ensure we check our math twice, monitor the market, apply correction whenever necessary.
TheDev100x: I am glad you are aware of this, because it has been the achilles heal of some projects in the past
Kit Lau: That is what we were told too.
We do not consider ourselves experts in NFT gaming, our advisors, partners as well as guilds and other core pillars are helping us understand the numbers too
Everyone contributes from their respective field because the economy is not just about the game.
Just wanted to leave this here for those that wanted to read about the team, and their competencies, which can be found at https://whitepaper.dgpals.io/
With that out of the way, I saw your extensive list of partners and investors including Crypto.com Capital, what kind of partnerships can we expect in the future from D.G. Pals?
Kit Lau: This is just the beginning of our journey, the current partnerships will contribute to building a strong foundation, the future partnership will focus more on content and utility. We want to bring in IPs who wants to see the potential of their beloved IPs perform on web3, we want to bring in studios who wanna explore web3, we want to enable teams to bring their game content onto web3 and break away from a rather bleak cycle (which is indie game development)
IPs and Game content. We want to make sure these NFTs are not garbage in your wallets. haha
TheDev100x: With the blossoming Cronos smart contract blockchain and the new SDK, the time has never been better to accomplish what you are setting out to do, and partnerships will be key so I can’t wait to hear more!
Kit Lau: we are struggling to hold back announcements too hahahaha.
TheDev100x: As a regular gamer that wants to get involved, what can I do today to begin my journey with D.G. Pals?
Kit Lau: Visit the website, read about the project, join the discord. We genuinely hope you like what you see and that you enjoy the community we have developed so far. We build it on trust and transparency and for gamers. This is something we will always remind ourselves to stick to
If you think this is a game for you, do participate in the genesis sales which is ongoing daily at 9am and 9pm UTC+8 until sold out
so far we have minted 2000+ of our 6000 Genesis NFTs. still plenty more for people to come in
TheDev100x: Oh I definitely will!
Kit Lau: there are some rewards you can read about too in the store page
TheDev100x: 👏 well said! If it’s ok with you lets open up the chat and allow the community to ask some questions?
Kit Lau: lets do it
Community Questions
Community Question #1:
jack Downey: At the moment, all tokens go down in price even with great partnerships, hype, marketing, and working products, etc. So, what the challenges do you have and the plan to make your project strong popular? Are you see it as an opportunity while the current market decline?
Kit Lau: A game should be fun, a game should create lasting impression for a gamer. Very seldom when somebody writes a book with a goal of selling 10,000 copies. We are creators, we create because we want to share something with the world. Game developers, artists and designers are probably one of the easily exploitable professions, our passion drove us to go to art school, take up game design courses and what not. The majority of the projects right now in the NFT space are rushed, unrefined and not structured for long term. The content are somewhat shallow and wouldn’t be one of those games you will remember later on.
I will always remember the first time I defeated Marlboro in Final fantasy
I will always remember my first Lichking Arthas hardmode kill in World of warcraft
I will always remember my squad surviving together in L4D2
That is the potential of games. When a project is designed around a solid game, the tokens and prices will be well supported and the market will see it, it is tangible. Regardless of Covid, the current conflict and other big world event, games are mostly unaffected (check out the stock market). This is one characteristic we can capitalize on if we stay true to building a product that last.
Community Question #2:
Robin Hood: I see the gap between traditional gamers & blockchain gamers is still very large. How does DGPAL bridge this to attract more traditional players to try out new blockchain-based games? What are your plans for expanding project adoption?
Kit Lau: This is THE question for us to tackle. Statistically speaking, the NFT ownership now resides in 0.1% of the crypto holders right now. This means 99.9% of the crypto users are not buying into this idea. Here are some hypothesis
- They do not see the value in NFTs
- They see no use cases for these NFTs other than a speculative product to gamble on
- They are using crypto currencies as a currency instead of an investment vessel
There are plenty more I am sure, but what we want to focus on is that the majority of the NFTs on the market right now are collectables with limited use cases. For mass adoption, we strongly believe games is the engine that will enable that. This is only if a true game product is developed. Not one that is rushed to jump in on the hype. Gamers often look to reviewers and articles about games before buying into them. The concept of the game, the developers, the content is very important to them. And gamers can be very loyal, if your game is good, they will stick around.
Community Question #3:
DEDPool: My question would be by implementing of cronos chain and the only chain that will be use in the project. How will the project will compete will other project which for into cross chain?🥚
Kit Lau: We are exploring this. Infact, from a gamer perspective, wouldnt it be awesome if 10,000 Crofam can fight 10,000 BSC guys in our worlds? From a game developer standpoint, the chain is as good as a distribution platform. When everyone brings in their NFTs into our game servers, we are chain agnostic. The road to true cross chain NFTs remain fuzzy for us right now but we have some ideas on how to implement this in our own area of expertise. I am excited about the prospects.
Community Question #4:
bill: Currently, a lot of people are looking at NFT, Metaverse & Games? What do you think your offering has that will make it stand out?🐶
Kit Lau: The word is loosely used and abused as a buzz word. We do believe that a metaverse isnt something we forcefully create. Players will find their own virtual space to hang out in and do business in when they are comfortable and all. I played world of warcraft since Vanilla days. The 3rd party market for raid carries, gold selling, rare mount farming is rich and doing well. Players are exchanging values in the game (time for money, money for time).
VR’s greatest challenge is physiological limitation and gamers are known to be on games for more than 8 hours daily. We will build tools that enriches the gaming experience, the living in our game world part, we’ll let the players decide for now.
Community Question #5:
RR🐣: @Kit_Lau do drop so golden nuggets what to expect for upcoming land purchase and exciting stuffs we can do with it. HYPE US UP!
Kit Lau: Players will be fighting for domination on a resource rich new found island in Panterra!! We are very excited about this piece of game content. Development has began and we will provide sneakpeeeeeeek from time to time.
TheDev100x: Great thats 5! Congratulations to those that were selected! I wanna thank Kit Lau for stopping by and telling us about D.G. Pals!
Kit Lau: Thank you for having
TheDev100x: No problem! It was a pleasure having you here today! I am going to go ahead and open up the chat! Thanks again, and please stop by and drop some news on us!
