Enter the Neighborhood: AMA with the Team Recap

Last January 11, 2024, the My Neighbor Alice team, comprised of our Chief Product Officer– Riccardo Sibani, Game Director–Steve Haßenpflug, and Technical Director–Viktor Plane, engaged in an insightful live “Enter the Neighborhood: AMA with the Team” session with our community on the MNA Discord. During this session, they addressed some questions from the community, providing valuable insights into our project.

For the benefit of those who may have missed the event or wish to revisit the AMA, we have prepared a Recap video and a detailed transcript below.

Introduction

Jade: Welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us. And we have a really nice call today with the team from My Neighbor Alice. So if you’ve been involved in the community for a while, you probably recognize these names and faces. But today we have, yeah, we have an AMA, we have quite a lot to talk about.

We have quite a lot of prizes today. So there’ll be prizes for people whose questions were pre-submitted and are going to be asked. Then we will have a section where you can ask your questions to the team and we’ll have five questions that are picked and that will be answered and we’ll also have some prizes. And there’s also going to be a reverse AMA.

So we’re gonna uno-reverse it to you and ask you some questions. So pay attention and listen to the end because this is when the, yeah, the reverse questions will come. And it will be stuff that’s spoken about in the AMA. And then finally, there are some prizes for people who have retweeted and joined Discord as well. So quite a lot going on. And yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

So to start with, let’s just have a brief introduction of who was on the panel today. So we have Riccardo, we have Steve and we have Viktor.

Would you mind giving us just a little bit of an intro into who you are, what your role is at My Neighbor Alice, and what your background is as well?

Riccardo: Hello everybody and thank you for joining also. I also want to express my gratitude for everybody joining. I’m Riccardo, I’m a CPO at Alice. And yeah, I think I’ve been in the team that started this. And I actually come from a blockchain background, I suppose blockchain developer. And I had this… dream of creating a game where actually the players were contributing into the economy and into the decisions of the game itself. And that’s how it started. And we got quite some success and traction in the community and that was very humbling. And this pushed us into making Alice really a great game and something that is different from what exists in the Web3 space. So this is a bit about me, although I said a lot about Alice.

Steve: So also, hello from my side. Thank you for taking the time to attend. Also, guten Abend to all the Germans in the chat. Happy to see so many Germans.

So I’m Steve. I’m the Game Director at My Neighbor Alice. Very nice to meet you. I’m German myself. I live in Berlin. I have a funny old German surname. I’ve been in the games industry for almost 13 years now. So you could say my heart is at game design, but I usually have held hybrid roles at game projects and design and product roles mostly because I tend to naturally gravitate to that. And a bit to my background, I have been working on games for over a decade, as I said, on big IPs like Angry Birds, Trolls, XCOM, and worked with a few international companies like NBC Universal, DreamWorks, Take Two and 2K, Rovio, and also been part of a few startups. And yeah, just recently I’ve made the jump to Web3 and blockchain games, and I’m leading the design and general game efforts here at My Neighbor Alice. Making sure that basically Web3 and gaming speak the same language as I call it.

And you all might know My Neighbor Alice, I guess, which is a wholesome live sim, right? Kind to Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley a bit, Social Sandbox, Multiplay MMO, which meets blockchain. And personally, I’m super excited to be on this project because I think we’re doing something very novel, something that hasn’t been done before, I think, which is a fully on-chain game, All on blockchain, which I think is a pretty bold plan. But enough about myself, happy to be here and do the AMA. Thank you for joining everyone.

Viktor: So my name is Viktor, Technical Director of My Neighbor Alice. I’m Swedish. I didn’t see anyone in the chat in Swedish, though. But I can say good afternoon anyways.

My background is a developer, primarily back end and blockchain as well, a lot. But I also have a professional background as a gamer. So, working on My Neighbor Alice is pretty cool for me to be able to combine the two, build a game and then actually play it as well myself. I think what really makes MNA exciting for me is that, yeah, like Steve said, we are really doing something unique here. No one has attempted to build a game at this scale fully on-chain, so there’s no simple answer for how to do things that we can look up on Google or as you do nowadays, you ask AI. We have to innovate and come up with new solutions all the time. And as a tech person, this is really exciting.

Pre-selected Questions

Q1. Many Play2Earn Web3 games have failed due to a poorly designed economy with unsustainable incentives. How does MNA plan to make a sustainable Play2Earn economy to help with player retention?

Steve: Yeah, I’d be happy to answer this. And Viktor and Riccardo, please feel free to join and chime in. But I think the most important thing is that we’re building a fun experience first, right? Because I’ve played many Web3 games myself. And to be really blunt, I think many of them aren’t that fun. There’s a few really fun games, but I think Web2 games still beat Web3 games in terms of fun. And I think that’s something we want to fix, right?

So that’s the first part. But when it comes to the economy and carefully considering and rolling out economy changes, that has an impact on the play-to-earn mechanics. And our, I think, biggest goal is to have players that are really invested in the game and really want to basically build a Neighborhood. So open economies are hard for every project, no matter if it’s Web3 or Web2. So one of our goals, or I would say duties, is to monitor our inflows and outflows of tokens very carefully

So I would say our general approach is to build an economy where players rely on each other for continued success. Right. So we don’t just want to have players or earners that simply play for X amount of time, and then they dump all their assets and cash out. So the progression that you have acquired in your playtime should be something that continues to be in demand within the game. So for example, if you can chop wood really well and you can refine wood really well, there’s probably someone way later on when we continue building the game that has a demand for this wood. So as a woodcutter, you might be able to cut wood much more efficiently than someone else. And these resources are obviously always needed, because those are used to build and produce NFTs, which help others to earn things. And I think that’s my elaborate answer to this.

Riccardo: Yeah, I can add on that because you’re very right and the game needs to be fun and needs to have content. When we started with My Neighbor Alice, we actually had to create the framework in order for this to happen and what we created was based on the assumption that everything had to be on-chain and everything had to be decentralized. So we had two foundations that were NFT collateralization, so actually giving value to the NFT, which I think one of the problems that the market has today, the value of the NFTs are dropping. So by collateralizing them, we can guarantee a minimum value. And this is value that goes to the players instead of My Neighbor Alice because money instead of going into our pockets stays within the NFT and they collateralize, they guarantee the value. And the other is about creating something that is circular. So if I use the wood, the wood is used to create an item and it goes into a circular loop. This avoids things like pyramid schemes or phenomena where if a lot of players join, they actually go into put a lot of money in the bank, but they penalize the early entrant in the game.

So that’s actually the goal that we had. In short, what Web3 has to do is to mimic the real economy. And that is what is missing in Web3 games today. And that’s what we are trying to do by having this set of rules in the game. Then there is a whole aspect that is, how do we make these rules to be bulletproof? And for that we use blockchain. And maybe Viktor can tell a bit more about this actually.

Viktor: Like you both said, economies are really, really difficult, both in Web3, Web2, but also the real world. Countries constantly have to adjust rates in order to fight inflation and inflation. But I think what’s really nice about blockchain is that we can have programmed rules that are fully transparent on the blockchain. All of our adjustments and tunings will be fully visible for those who are interested. No matter if we publish release notes or not. One thing that we made in the last season is the NFT collateralization where you actually get 18% APY by staking.

Yeah, so in Season 3, we introduced the possibility for people to bring $ALICE tokens into the game for the first time. And then we wanted to reward the players who helped us test very early on. So you could actually spend, for example, four $ALICE tokens to craft something, and half of that would be put as collateral into the token. What does this mean? Well, it means that we can give you a yield on all your collateralized tokens that you have crafted. But it also means that these tokens are essentially locked into the item, and then you can destroy the item later if you would want to and reclaim your collateral. So it sort of sets a base or like a base buys for the item because it wouldn’t sell for less than that because then you might as well just destroy it and take the collateral back.

Jade: So it sounds like you guys have really put a lot of thought into this and the $ALICE token isn’t just a token for speculation. It’s really a key part of a very well thought through and kind of multi layered economy. And that’s what’s going to support everything, I suppose.

Viktor: And I think it’s also really interesting pieces for the future as well. When we introduce a DAO mechanic later on, in a country you would have a central bank that would regulate, adjust rates to fight inflation and deflation. But this could actually be a DAO for us and the players can take part and help tune the game. So I think that’s also something that would be interesting to look into to support the economy.

Q2. What is the BETA PHASE? How different is it compared to the ALPHA version? Can we see more use cases of $ALICE during this phase?

Riccardo: Yes, I can start on this. What we are doing now, we are finishing the Alpha phase. And then what we wanted to do in the Alpha phase is showcase the potential of Alice. And I think that if we look at the game, how it was one year ago or one year and a half ago, we did a lot of steps, a lot of improvements. I mean, at the beginning, in the first version, we showed the game, the world.

In the second version we added fishing, in the third version we added farming, and now we have crafting and then we have a full game with a full loop with things to do and an experience. A game where, I mean, I don’t know how many of the people that listen here today are playing the game, but on average a session is 23 minutes and there are more than two sessions per day on average. So it’s a game where people spend a lot of money, a lot of time, sorry. What does it mean?

It means that probably the path that we are taking is interesting. And what we want now is to make sure that this game, My Neighbor Alice, gets into mainnet as soon as possible. As you know, Chromia announced the mainnet this year, and they will release it in the next month, we expect. And our work now is into making sure that everything is ready for being in Mainnet as soon as possible.

And we’re not sure what we will call this phase. I don’t know if it should be called Beta, it should be called anything else. But it’s important that we are all aligned and clear on what our goal is. And our goal is to be on the Mainnet as soon as there is a mainnet on Chromia. Because the moment that we are on mainnet, we’re in a real path of decentralization and we are in a place where your progress would stay. You can, we can onboard more partners. And this is the priority. The priority is to be on mainnet the moment there is one. And this is our goal. This is the phase that we are entering.

Steve: I would say, in a sense, we already entered a new phase. And because I think the biggest change with season 4 now is that we strive to always be live. So everyone who has played in Season 1 to 3 will know that the game wasn’t live all the time. So for us, this is already a big change. So obviously, this has been live since December. So technically, as I would call it, we entered a new phase. I know that naming is a pretty contentious topic.

And everyone assigns, I would say, different values to certain names. For example, certain people have a really strong opinion of what an Alpha is. Some people think a beta should be this thing. Maybe it’s early access. So there’s a lot of things you could call this. I think the really important thing is, for all of us that are working on My Neighbor Alice, is that we’re in active development. We’re live. Players can play the game. We want to make a really, really good game. Players are playing and we’re committed to making one of the best Web3 experiences possible. I think that’s what ultimately matters and I think we will have some internal discussions around what the naming ultimately will be. But yeah, that’s the gist of it.

Viktor: No matter what we call it, we still like the idea of seasons until we go to the mainnet, because it gives a lot of flexibility to experiment with new features. But yeah, like Steve mentioned, the main difference will be that people basically have very little downtime between seasons. So we’re talking, days or a week instead of months, which we have so far. And then what we call that, yeah, that’s a separate discussion, I guess.

Q3. Bots are one of the most thorny issues in all games, including Web3 games. Bots destroy the game’s economy and interfere with the immersion of the game’s atmosphere. How does the My Neighbor Alice team plan to deal with bots?

Viktor: Yeah, maybe I can jump in on this one. I think botting is always an issue in games. And that we run on a public botchains does not make it easier. So we have decided to take a different approach with embracing the bots recorded. So we expect that people will bot and we know that some people will be capable of figuring out how to bot things.

That much we can do to stop that. So when we design features, we always make sure to add the mechanism so that the bots don’t really gain any monetary advantage over a regular player. I think an example of this is, for example, fishing, where there’s a rate limit mechanic where we make sure that the bot can’t spend on fishing. It’s not possible. And this rate limit is similar to how long it would take for a regular player to fish within the game. So if you want to bot fishing, sure, go ahead, but you won’t be any faster than a regular player. And it will cost you the same amount of resources or baits in this case, as it would cost a regular player. So I think the main thing we have to do is to make sure that everything has a cost, try to make it as fair and balanced as regular playing, essentially.

Steve: Yes, and maybe to add a bit to this, I think a good example is if you take regular games without, I think rate limiting is really the key word here. Because consider a regular game and maybe even a regular MMO. I think someone or everyone has played World of Warcraft. So bots exist in these games. Obviously Blizzard does a lot to try to counter those bots. But I think if your heuristics can always only be as good as other players can be, and sometimes what players can do and are willing to do goes into bot territory from experience. And with rate limiting, it’s actually a good thing. And I think you see this in season 4. You can only mine so much wood or stones or whatever. And we want to rate limit in a way that it makes players be able to do those in a day.

But at the same time, it shouldn’t be that much of a chore. And at the same time, a bot shouldn’t have too much advantage. And that’s exactly what Viktor was saying. So imagine you could just mine wood 24/7. Someone will mine wood 24/7. And you could even consider something that’s a bot as players sharing an account. Imagine someone you have like seven different people who use one account. They could still mine wood in succession if you want to. And someone is always actively playing.

And the problem is regular players, normal players, I would say the more average players, they can’t compete with that. So I think it needs to be, exactly as Viktor said, be tackled from a different perspective, which is rate limiting.

Riccardo: Yeah, one thing I totally agree with everyone in what was said, it is about embracing the bots. We don’t have a concept of identity. We are in Web3, we are decentralized and that’s the first thing that we should accept. Our identity is an address and associated, like it generated by a private key and this is the identity that we need. So we should not try to limit bots by having KYC, by having some sort of proof of existence, proof of man, of humanity or other things.

I think that we should accept everything for the concept of identity that we have in the technology that we are using, which is addresses. And then what we have to do is to make sure that the strategy will differentiate the player from a bot. So the strategy that you use in the game, it’s something that needs to be reflected, thought through, that doesn’t give you a specific advantage, but it’s a different preference.

For example, if you prefer to fish or you prefer to farm, that’s a decision that you can make and that makes it different and gives an additional value. What it also means is that as the game will become bigger and more people will join and there will be more possibility for interaction, for, I don’t want to say human interaction, but actually opportunity for collaboration, this will lower the advantage of the bots, because the idea of Alice, one of the pillars that we had, was that it should satisfy the game theory. So collaboration should have a higher advantage than non-collaboration, and collaboration is something that can be achieved by players.

Q4. The expression “Neighbors” is interesting. Are you emphasizing relationships among the inhabitants of the metaverse? What kind of community (relational aesthetics) are you trying to create?

Steve: I’m gonna jump in on this. So the Neighborhood and Neighbors are core to our vision. It’s in the literal name of My Neighbor Alice. And as Riccardo alluded to already, our ultimate vision is that players must and should cooperate on many different layers. So the idea is that you can’t do all the things alone. You can try, of course, and we’re giving players many different opportunities to play the game solo to just get a feel for the world. But ultimately, I think, mainly Alice’s best enjoyed playing together.

For example, engaging with others with trade is something we want to build towards too. And also, that players only have naturally access to certain things when it comes to certain regions. So that there’s an incentive to actually trade for resources. Imagine it’s similar as in the real world.

There are certain resources which don’t exist in a certain nation or even on a certain continent. And nation states and even people and groups, and what I want to call this, need to engage in trade and they need to cooperate to basically build up the world, if that makes sense. So, and if you apply this thinking into our game, imagine someone in Rusty Pikes has a unique resource that’s only found there and your Neighbors in 20 worlds actually need this resource to complete a community project or something similar.

So there’s an incentive to cooperate and engage as neighbors. But the same should apply on many different layers. So even Neighbors in Rusty Pikes and literal Neighbors from lands should have something that incentivizes players to trade.

Riccardo: Yeah, so My Neighbor Alice was born as a neighboring game. So the very first question that we had, that we wanted to answer when we created the game, we were, I take one step back. We were wondering about creating a Web3 game. And at some point, one of the questions was why all the Web3 games are about fighting, winning competition, or they’re not economical. They don’t work from an economic perspective.

And this is the challenge that we took. And the better that we are doing is that collaboration is the way out for a functional economy. And therefore everything is based on neighboring and collaboration, like Steve was saying. And this is really the nice part of Alice, the part that I like, that is about kindness, is about expression, is about showing what you’re doing to other people.

And it’s also about the fact that there is no right or wrong. There is your version of self, and there is what you want to express in the metaverse, in the Lummelunda Archipelago, in your plot. And maybe some people might not be attracted, but they will not try. There is no way and no reason to destroy or to put somebody else down. There is always an incentive into celebrating and accepting the other. And this is the foundation of kindness that we have in the game.

Viktor: I think that’s a really good comment, that there’s no right or wrong, because we are really not building a competitive game, we are building a social game. And I think a Neighbor is a very cute way of making people feel like they are part of something larger, a community. And yeah, conveniently it fits into the title of the game as well.

Q5. Many new games that use Blockchain technology within their systems are emerging daily. How does My Neighbor Alice expect to impose itself in a market that is becoming more and more crowded? Can you still be competitive in this booming area?

Riccardo: I think that something that we will do more in the next month and we did in the last month is to highlight more what is the tech behind this game. I am not sure it’s very clear to most that our game is fully on chain, that we don’t have a server and what does this mean? Because we hear a lot about decentralization, we hear a lot about Web3, but then all your Web3 is owning an NFT, which is an ID of an image that is in somebody else’s server. And this is not the idea of decentralization I have.

The idea of decentralization that I have, it means that if you unplug everything, everything can still work. And this is the idea that we have in Alice. You can unplug all the servers in the world. As long as there is one copy of the blockchain, you can play My Neighbor Alice, and this to me is true ownership. When you have not only the access to the game, you have access to your NFTs, you have ownership of the NFT, you have access to the digital representation of it forever and ever.

And this is something that I think was appreciated with the animals. The animals are the first NFT that we sold. And now in this season, you can now use them to craft. This I think is really the ultimate power of what you’re doing, because from the moment that the software is out, there is nothing that can stop you from crafting items with your animal, for example.

And I know that now we are in a development phase, so things will change and stuff, but the ultimate vision is to give something that responds to this need. And with the mainnet is something that we will do. Now, in comparison with our competition, I think that this is very unique and developing this framework, this technology of fully decentralization, it’s something that took us years, like several years of development is something that I think is unique because we are the only project that is doing this on Chromia and I believe that this is only possible with Chromia.

So I think that in the short future, in the next years, we don’t really have a competition in this particular case and at the same time we want to be inclusive and we want to work with as many projects as possible with as many games as possible. We want to give our technology out. We want to create a real metaverse and we want My Neighbor Alice to lead this transition to a real metaverse where really there is integration between games. And this is something we are also doing with OMA3 where we are taking an active role into shaping and defining standards for Web3.

I’m not sure I want to talk about competitors because I feel that we should all work together and not be competitors. And maybe this sounds a bit like My Neighbor Alice’s feeling of neighboring and collaboration, but I think that if we’re doing this game, we believe in it a bit. We believe that collaboration is better than competing with each other. And that’s what we want to do. We want to integrate with as many Metaverse and Web3 games as possible.

Steve: Yeah, and I want to add a bit to that, because I fully agree with Riccardo. I come from the traditional games industry. And something you see there is a lot of secrecy. You see tons of NDAs, which is a shorthand word for non-disclosure agreements. So you can’t talk about stuff. There’s lots of secrets. And that’s something that’s actually impressed me by My Neighbor Alice and also Chromaway.

I think Web3 in general is much more open than traditional games, the games industry. And this is something akin to open kitchen development. Imagine you’re in some kind of restaurant, and you can see how the chef’s preparing a dish, right? It’s a bit scary, to be honest, as a developer, because obviously everyone will also see all the mistakes that we’re making.

And there’s always strong opinions on how things should be and prepare this dish this way or that way. But it’s also liberating in some sense. And as Riccardo said, I fully agree with that. Of course, we have competition. Every project has competition. But if you take a look at other Web3 games and projects, everyone who’s been following the Web3 space, especially after the crypto winter, I think many, many projects have realized I think the real way to succeed in this space is by working together and not against each other. I think Web3 really truly will benefit from decentralization and true ownership if multiple projects work together. So I also don’t really view other Web3 games as competitors, more as potential partners or cooperators, or even Neighbors.

Jade: That’s very nice. And something else actually that might be worth adding is that within the Chromia system, it’s quite easy to collaborate. So what you guys are saying is not just like a philosophy. It’s part of the technology as well, right? Like it would be quite easy for somebody if they wanted to kind of hold hands, I suppose, with Alice.

Riccardo: Yeah, but this is the whole Web3 mentality that I think is still present and maybe a bit more but that there was back in the days, it was, we are changing the world, we are doing something that is, I really like the metaphor of Steve, an open kitchen. And if I go to a restaurant, I don’t know, do you prefer to see a chef that is not using hygiene standards or do you prefer to not see a chef that is not using hygiene standards? If I can see it, at least I can live. And I think we are doing the things right and we want to show it and we want to give this our food, we want to give it to as many people as possible. And that’s what we want to do when we do partnership. I think that our technology is superior and we want to make this as wide as possible. We want to give this to everyone in order to create real integration.

Viktor: A big advantage as well with Chromia and the originals protocol is that everything is on chain. So the metadata, if you have an axe, for example, that has some attributes, maybe a damage or something, this is fully on chain. And with the Chromia technology, these tokens can be bridged to other games. So other games can interrupt and use the metadata.

This is not possible with an EVM blockchain because the metadata is not stored actually on the blockchain. So I think that’s something really unique as well. And yeah, we would love to collaborate with projects.

Steve: And it’s also very specific. Just one more point from my side towards that. I think that’s something that really drew me to this project because I’ve designed many different games and economies and things like that. And to be honest, many of those haven’t seen the light of day. And I think there’s lots of knowledge that’s being built by tons of creative people all the time. And they will never see the light of day. So having something like game logic on-chain, where other people can actually see, you can actually go ahead and see how fishing actually works.

You don’t have to trust the developer. You can actually verify. And you can also share that game logic with others. So I think that’s something that really has drawn me to Web3 in general, but to My Neighbor Alice and Chromia in a way in general.

Live Questions

Q6. With the emphasis on creativity, community, and innovation in Season 4, how does My Neighbor Alice plan to keep the virtual landscape evolving and surprising the players in the future?

Steve: I personally was very nervous about Season 4 and how it’s being received. And I think reception has been generally quite positive. But thank you also, everyone, for playing. It’s just wonderful to see everyone playing. And also thank you for the question. I think something that we did is to give players more ways to play right now. So for example, we have the animals now. Lots of people had been collecting animals. And now you can actually use them as kind of crafting stations, right? And they also provide a benefit. So that’s really great.

But something that’s missing is, I think, the neighborly interaction that we’ve talked about a lot, right? So right now, obviously, you can visit other players. You can, for example, water their plants. So there’s some interaction, but obviously, you want to deepen the social connection between your Neighbors. So for example, trading resources is something that we’re looking at and how to make it much easier to interact with your neighbors and maybe even request something from them. So for example, maybe you need something to build a certain NFT. And then maybe you have some ways to trade or engage in different means. So these are things that we’re looking at for the next phase and seasons.

Q7. Many projects just like to speak about the long-term vision and mission, but what are your short-term objectives? What is My Neighbor Alice focusing on right now?

Riccardo: So I think the first thing I wanted to say is that we have a roadmap and it’s been progressing well. I think it’s visible every six months. We had consistent updates. We started later than most of the famous crypto projects, crypto games that are around. And I feel now we are ahead, mainly considering that we are doing everything on-chain.

In terms of long-term vision and mission, we want to give power to the players, we want to make this fully on blockchain and we want to really give power to the people that spend the most time in the game, which are the players. In the short term, every six months we release something. We had fishing, we had farming, we have crafting and we had the food cycle that we release now, animals that can craft and so forth. And the next short-term thing is to of course keep improving the game and move into mainnet as soon as possible. That is our goal in the short term.

Q8. We have this APY of 18%, and it will probably be less in the future, how will players get back their previous stake?

Steve: I think we have a pretty novel system where it’s not just about the APY of 18% that you get back. It’s also if you have crafted an Alice NFT in-game. You basically, let’s say the item costs 10 Alice to craft. What you do, you actually lock 50%, so in this case, five $ALICE in the NFT. And what this means is that we guarantee a floor price because ultimately you will be able to burn the same NFT for the locked value that’s in there. So what this does is if you see any NFT projects in OpenSea, the floor price is determined by whatever is willing to pay. And by having something like this, what we call collateral, we ensure a consistent floor price.

This 50% is not necessarily predetermined. It’s just what we’ve chosen right now. But on top of that, you obviously also want to, of the 10 $ALICE that you put in, maybe you want to make some return on that in the future. So obviously, we don’t have these functionalities in-game right now. But you should be able to trade those. And maybe someone is willing to pay even 12 or 20 or 30 $ALICE for that. Because they don’t want to invest all the time that you’ve invested for crafting this NFT. And I think there’s a crucial difference between the staking rewards, collaterals, and the things that you want to sell, or the sell price that you later on want to achieve. I saw many people not really seeing that, so I just wanted to elaborate.

Q9. How low is the barrier in My Neighbor Alice? Do you make the game as simple as possible for non-crypto users to get on board?

Viktor: I think that’s a really, really good question because it’s something that we constantly look into how we can improve. We realized that having a wallet is not that easy to learn and to explain to a more regular gamer, someone who hasn’t worked with crypto before or used it. So one thing that we did, the previous season we launched it, for the possibility to sign up and sign in with your social accounts. So Google, Apple, Twitter, et cetera. And yeah, it’s something that we continuously monitor.

How long does it take to onboard people? So it’s getting better, and we have a lot of plans to simplify it even further, but it’s definitely not yet where we would want it to be. Yes, it is a challenge to introduce regular users to the Web3 world.

Q10. Who is the target audience for this game and what concept would you use to win their heart and minds?

Riccardo: So our target audience is developing over time. And this is normal in any project. At the beginning, for example, if you have a new product, you target the enthusiast that believes in the philosophy behind it. Then as the product develops, you can go more and more wide. Of course, at the beginning, we are targeting Web3 players.

We think that the market is big enough for Web3 players and FT holders and so forth. If we look at the numbers, they are very high already. We are in the order of over the millions and at the same time is a market that is going to increase over and over. In the next years by 2030, we will have 700 million people in the Metaverse and this is a very big number already.

So we want to focus on this, we want to be the leaders in this, we want to show that we have the most advanced game, the game that everybody needs and wants to play. And this is who we are targeting essentially, people that already have a knowledge of crypto. Because in terms of very honestly, in terms of acquisition cost, it goes way lower. We don’t have to teach people to install a wallet, we don’t have to teach people to buy currencies, to bring it in the game, to use transactions, gas and whatnot. So our goal is to give as seamless as possible an experience that in the long term will be easy to use. But what we need to realize is that by being fully on chain, we are a Web3 project and people that will play Alice from now to next year are people that know crypto and or they heard or that they’re curious about crypto. It doesn’t mean that you’re a developer. It doesn’t mean that you’re a young kid. It means that you’re a curious person, a genuine curious person that wants to learn more about what is the future of gaming.

Q11. I think most users are still not aware of blockchain and related projects. So how is your project platform creating awareness about this project for non-crypto users too?

Steve: One of our main, I would say, tenets is to bring blockchain to the masses, right? And there’s many ways we tackle this. One, of course, is to be attracting from a visual side. And I think most of you would agree that we’re pretty, I would say, beautiful game and it’s quite inviting and, you know, we’re very positive and inviting for everyone, but the other thing is also the Web3 industry needs to work together on that because when it comes to the onboarding of things,

I think many people who are not familiar with crypto struggle already with solutions like MetaMask and what is even crypto and how do you do wallet, right, which is not entirely in our hands. Obviously, we’re trying our best to make the onboarding as smooth as possible. But ultimately, I think the Web3 industry together needs to work on making onboarding.

I think everyone who works in web3 would also agree that this is one of the biggest. I would say challenges right now of the space as a whole, the user experience and user interface of web three and how to onboard people that are not familiar with crypto.

Outro

Jade: So thank you, guys. I think this has been a really, really nice AMA. It was great to meet you all. This is clearly a super active and lively community. So it was fun. Thank you for letting me come and join you. And just as a bit of a recap, I guess, the main things that, to me, stand out at least are the collaboration and the decentralization and the kind of Web3 philosophy that’s woven into everything within Alice.

From the way that the economy is designed, to the way that the NFTs can have some value kind of stored within it in case you ever wanted to get that back. The approach to stopping bots, not being about having, you know, gatekeeping KYC things, but about rewarding non-botish pro-social human behavior. And the way that it can continue to evolve and collaborate with other projects and other people, other developers who wanna get involved.

And also how big of a part of this, I suppose, the Chromia blockchain as well, to really take everything to the next level and make it possible to have a game that is actually fully on chain and that is actually decentralized. And like Riccardo said, if you were the only person left in the world, as long as it was running somewhere, you know, you could still play the game. So I think it’s really amazing to see a game that really does the best of blockchain and Web3. That would be my sort of recap.

I don’t know of anything else that you guys want to highlight before we wrap up.

Riccardo: Yes, I would like to thank everybody who joined this AMA. Thank you everyone and thank you everyone who played the game so far. And if you don’t, if you didn’t give it a go, maybe I hope you have fun. And I think it’s good to know a bit more about what we are building. And of course, I want to thank you, Jade, for hosting this AMA. You’ve been amazing in that.

So thank you very much and everyone who is working on the back, all the team, all the Alice team, and everyone who is working on this project. And yeah, and if I can make a joke, just think that if everything works, when the world is destroyed and you are the only person alive, you can still play Alice. And if you’re going to do that as the only person in the world that speaks volume about the game you’re making.

Steve: Awesome. I’m also going to say a few words. So thank you a lot for joining our AMA. I think we got so many questions. I’m a bit overwhelmed. I really want to take a look at what people really want to ask and want to know. Rest assured, I think we want to be much more active in socials this year. So I will try to engage as much as possible with everyone. So thank you for being part of this community. And yeah, just an extra shout out to the community, because I was really surprised how active the chat was with really good questions.

Viktor: Yeah, I really think we have a really awesome community. So thank you all. Thank you everybody. Thank you so much for joining us and for all of the amazing questions. And yeah, I think it seems like there’ll be more of these. So hopefully we’ll see you soon.

Jade: And with that, I think we can start to wrap it up. Thank you, guys. Thanks, everyone. See you in Lummelunda. Bye.

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