The Monetization of Fun | Get Paid for Playing with Bitspawn AMA

This AMA Slogging thread by Akasha Rose, Rhys Boulanger, Justin Roberti, Limarc Ambalina, Nicolas Ng and Jack Boreham occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.

Akasha RoseJul 20, 2021, 8:00 PM

Hackers, Rhys Boulanger of Bitspawn joins us for an AMA. Bitspawn is leveraging esports and blockchain technology to bring new revenue streams to gamers across the planet, disrupting 2.5 billion gamers worldwide
Rhys describes himself as a serial entrepreneur with a background focused on the technology sector. He's got in blockchain, e-commerce, esports and looks to solve problems and disrupt exciting industries.
Please remember to reply in the thread! AMA will be open for 48 hours.

Rhys BoulangerJul 20, 2021, 8:24 PM

Hi All! a pleasure to be here and looking forward to the upcoming AMA!

Justin RobertiJul 20, 2021, 8:41 PM

Rhys Boulanger hello. it seems like mobile and cloud-based networked gaming is becoming a new way for users to meet and socialize -- e.g. birthday parties celebrated on Animal Crossings during lockdown. How is Bitspawn leveraging this phenomenon of ubiquitous gaming and gaming as a new social space online?

Rhys BoulangerJul 20, 2021, 8:54 PM

Justin Roberti Definitely It's been a trend for the past couple of months - I think covid has also put some leverage on this topic! I actually attended a virtual concert last week! - for example, Fortnite is holding a Travis Scott concert this week. Bitspawn's has really narrowed in on the growth of the online gaming sector in the past years and we see a need for additional revenue streams within the sector. Up until now the majority of 2.8 Billion gamers in the world don't really have defined ways to monetize their time spent playing video games. Unless you are a professional player with paid sponsors or have massive streaming following. Bitspawn is giving the masses a new platform that allows gamers both amateur and professional to play the games they love against other players, friends and win crypto.

Akasha RoseJul 20, 2021, 8:48 PM

Hi Rhys Boulanger thanks for joining us here! What makes you so passionate about disruption? Why does disruption motivate you?

Rhys BoulangerJul 20, 2021, 9:01 PM

Akasha Rose I guess you could say I'm a problem solver always have been and always will be. I love playing devils advocate and understanding the bigger picture. Disruption to me means going against the grain and finding solutions to problems and or inefficiencies that exist in a market / niche. What's exciting for me is bringing new ideas to life and letting them progress into something bigger.

Akasha RoseJul 21, 2021, 1:58 AM

Do all of the 2.8 billion online players want to monetize their time? If they don't, is there a segment of these players who do and why do they want to? What benefit is it for people to monetise their time spent playing?

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 3:04 AM

Akasha Rose The think the better question to ask is does this 2.8 Billion audience know that it's even possible to monetize their time spent playing games? Who doesn't want the chance to capitalize or have the chance to win prizes, gift cards and crypto from participating in an activity they are already doing. Bitspawn doesn't require you to change the way you play or who you play with for that! Our "warzone kill race challenge" looks at players that entered into the challenge's 24 hour stats using the http://battle.net API and awards users based on their in game results, we don't delegate who they play with what lobbies they play in or who they play with. We know gamers are competitive - take FPS shooters for example regardless if it's a 5v5 or a 1v1 last man standing wins. Bitspawn give gamers the ability to win real tangible prizes and crypto playing the games they love without changing the way they play the games they love.

Limarc AmbalinaJul 21, 2021, 2:43 AM

Hey Rhys Boulanger I'm super excited to have you here for this AMA. I actually knew about Bitspawn before you even reached out to us.

As a gamer, what you're doing is starting something we've all dreamed of: getting paid to play video games.

If we're going to be playing games anyways, why not get paid for it? It's a win-win situation so the closer you can bring us to realizing that dream the better and you'll have my support along the way for sure.

Don't mean to spam you, but here are a few questions:

Lastly, Do you see this transforming into a pay-per-hour model similar to pay-per-click ads?

The reason I ask that is because I feel like there is a huge market for this. In a similar way to CPM where bloggers get paid per 1000 impressions, I envision a world where gamers get paid per hour of gaming.

Why I think this would work is because similar to the blogging sphere, people might pay for ads to boost a campaign, and game developers might pay for a certain number of hours played, or achievements unlocked to get initial hype around a new game release.

What do you think?

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 5:24 AM

Limarc Ambalina Thanks for all the support! Our entire team is super passionate about what we do, bringing this project to life is a dream in our eyes as well. Great question regarding funding - Bitspawn actively just finished a 6.3M financing round through a private and public token sale. $SPWN our native crypto token is the utility token that users utilize for a variety of different features across the platform (competitions, challenges, etc). Regarding challenge payouts and prize pools - The Bitspawn platform has a lot of features and multiple revenue streams behind the scenes and we will be rolling out some more details in the near future but to give you a quick gist were building some really cool tools focused on a professional player scouting, player analytics and more. Both of these solutions will be carry licensing agreements for organizations. We also have a gaming focused NFT marketplace and a DEFI lending component that gives grassroots gaming communities / organizers access to capital to grow their communities. The funding for prize pools and challenges ultimately are funded through platform transaction fees on the http://bitspawn.gg platform, On top of that we also have direct and pre-established partnerships and advertising agreements with brands and IP's. Brands can actively sponsor events on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Our primary user base right now is everyday gamers, people that don't have a streaming account but maybe follow a notable streamer. We have been working to actively promote our platform partnering with notable streamers and that has been helping with our rampant growth. . We saw a lot of success with Warzone as that was one of the first games we released on the platform, However we also just saw a big uptick in gamers playing FIFA as we have been working with some notable FIFA organizers. I'm sure we have some kids/ grown adults playing games when they are supposed to be working 😆. What can I say the entire working from home change with covid has been great for the gaming / Esports industry.

In regards to revenue models changing, I don't see our platform or model changing to a PPC or PPH model in the immediate future- the revenue models and feature sets we have are proven models and our entire team is really confident in the revenue-generating models we are working with.

Akasha RoseJul 21, 2021, 4:33 AM

Yeah that is the better question. That's one of the hardest questions, too, that we all face in marketing, how do you educate the market to know that they need something they don't even know they need? It comes down to evocatively communicating aspirations, and values effectively which takes skill. What do you love about online gaming? What inspired you to make your whole life focussed around it?

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 6:23 AM

Akasha Rose I couldn't agree more marketing is game in itself and bridging connections between a product and an audience that doesn't know your product exist can be challenging at times. However that's also part of the fun in educating people and trying new marketing methods is not only but fun but also nothing new to our team. The Bitspawn's Co-Founder's have well over a 2 decades of experience within the Digital Marketing realm - On top of that were all gamers, some of us ex-competitive gamers.

The big marketing efforts were actively pushing on include working with streamers, social media influencers, gaming leagues and organizers and more. I've been a gamer since as long as I can remember playing early shooter games like Halo, CS 1.6, CS Source and more.
I also still actively play, we have an internal end of week meeting on Fridays where we do a conference call and just chat about how the week went in various internal departments and we play games while catching up- lately its been warzone. 😁

Video games for me are a social setting, a different medium to communicate and interact with people. I have met some of my best friends online behind a PC or a console, Video games at the end of the day bring people together. Is it Cliché saying "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never work a day in your life." Haha

Akasha RoseJul 21, 2021, 7:24 AM

Yeah I like that. "Marketing is a game."

Akasha RoseJul 21, 2021, 7:24 AM

What are your favourite aspects of Bitspawn? What parts of the system did you like designing most?

Limarc AmbalinaJul 21, 2021, 7:47 AM

Super interesting Rhys! However, I think that the NFT and blockchain components of Bitspawn could confuse gamers looking to try the platform out, especially those who have no knowledge or interest in the blockchain space.

So in simple words, what are the ways that everyday gamers like myself can log on to Bitspawn and start slowly generating income or getting rewards today?

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 4:19 PM

Limarc Ambalina We definitely saw the immediate barriers of entry for the mass gamers initially. The biggest hurdle with NFT's, Blockchain and high tech in its early stages is bridging the gap between good user experience and explaining it to newcomers. Blockchain has definitely had a bad rep in the past as it has never been super user friendly. I have been involved in the space since 2016 and have seen the entire market take some huge strides in the past couple years regarding user accessibility and ease of use. Metamask and browser widgets are becoming more and more popular and with better 3rd party apps comes more adoption. Our approach to the matter is try to build the solution so it's intuitive and easy to use, the NFT components on our site will be housed in the Bitspawn Marketplace, integration with Metamask and other Blockchain wallets will be supported. We also spent a lot of time developing an intuitive and clickable help widget that guides new users through a customer journey.

We want to bridge the gap between Crypto, Blockchain and gaming - irrefutable tournament results on the blockchain, digital currency is the future of money and gaming / globalization in a modern world is social interaction and gaming through the internet.

If you are an everyday gamer and wanted to hop on the platform today to start participating or making money, you could do it in 3 steps.

Step 1 - Head over to http://Bitspawn.gg signup today for an account.
Step 2 - Sync your http://battle.net account with Bitspawn platform in the settings section.
Step 3 - Head over to the challenges tab on our website https://bitspawn.gg/game/codmwbr?tab=challenges join a challenge we have multiples running everyday and than go play warzone.

Once you have joined the match we pull your gameplay stats and your results immediately start logging against the leaderboard.

Nicolas NgJul 21, 2021, 10:27 AM

Hi Rhys Boulanger! Like everyone else here, I find Bitspawn really interesting and took a look at the website. While it covers most of today's biggest games, I noticed that all the games on Bitspawn are competitive games. Is there a possibility of cooperative titles being added to the platform?

Akasha RoseJul 21, 2021, 10:28 AM

That's a really good question. There's a large focus right now on battle style NFT games in crypto I'd like to know what it is about this time in history that makes it so and why battle games appeal to a crypto audience.

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 4:33 PM

Nicolas Ng Great question, Bitspawn is going to be supporting multiple cooperative game titles. We can support challenges for essentially any game and with the ability to pull API data from the game developers we can log that data into leaderboards and run challenges and competition's against the data.

A perfect example is running leaderboards and challenges for cooperative titles. Take "World of Warcraft" for example Bitspawn will be running raid runs, high scores challenges, speed runs, High score challenges, who completed a raid run the fastest etc. The challenges portion of our platform allows us to run incentivized challenges in parallel to the internal game challenges that already exist within the game. The possibilities are really for endless for ways that we can incentivize and provide rewards back to gamers regardless of the game type.

Justin RobertiJul 21, 2021, 1:52 PM

Rhys Boulanger you have a good explanation for the opportunity for the non-streaming, non-pro gamer -- are you making special provisions for pro gamers to have new opportunities?

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 4:41 PM

Justin Roberti We like to think of the Bitspawn platform as a hub for all walks and levels of gaming - meaning we will support anyone that plays games, regardless of skill type, game type. We are primarily catering to the everyday gamer as that's our interim focus but we also are working with Professional gamers and or streamers to organize tournaments and Streamer branded leaderboard's. As a professional streamer you rely on people watching your stream and participating in the content you generate, the Bitspawn platform will have white label support for brands that want to explore new ways to engage with their audience.

An example is your a top 100 streamer, you have thousands of viewers watching you play the games that they already play on a day to day basis. This audience of individuals watching your streaming content also likely play the same game's you play, what if that streamer was able to generate leaderboards and round robin tournaments that allowed his audience to actively participate in a White labeled and "Streamer branded" event.

Streamers want engagement with their audience, what better way than to offer another competition between the streamer and the viewer. Who doesn't want the chance to go heads up against their favorite video game celebrity.

Jack BorehamJul 21, 2021, 3:07 PM

Hi Rhys Boulanger. I love the platform and the idea. As we know, within the gaming industry, professional Esports players can often be bought up by big firms earning little money considering the income they are generating. Do you see your platform as a way to circumvent this and provide professional gamers with a revenue stream that they deserve? Also, how will you go about getting causal gamers onto the platform? Who might be confused by blockchain and NFT or have no clue what it is?

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 4:53 PM

Jack Boreham Thanks for the support, We see ourselves as a tool that can help Esports progress on all forefronts, our player development tools and analytics solution will be able to provide oversight into players stats and could be even be used as a future professional player scouting tool. If we can proactively scout and identify skillful players before they have been recruited we can than use that tool to make recommendations to Professional Esports teams for recruiting. Our goal is to progress Esports across the map, help the professional market grow, offer DEFI lending solutions to the grassroots organizers. Run tournaments and challenges for everyone in the ecosystem and allow individuals to prosper from their abilities on top of playing the games that they already love. We see it as a win win across the board for all participants in the ecosystem.

Were not trying to replace the streaming market we want to co-exist, we love streaming and watching the professional players do what they do best. We just want to provide an alternative revenue stream to the entire market and help grow the entire industry.

Akasha RoseJul 21, 2021, 10:50 PM

Thanks for participating in the AMA Rhys Boulanger. Do you have any closing thoughts and how can people learn more about Bitspawn and get involved?

Rhys BoulangerJul 21, 2021, 10:52 PM

Akasha Rose Thanks to everyone for asking great and detailed questions! Anyone that wants to learn more about the Bitspawn platform can check us out at some of the following links.

Bitspawn Corporate Website —  https://Bitspawn.io
Bitspawn Gaming Platform — https://Bitspawn.gg
Twitter — https://twitter.com/BitspawnGG
Telegram Channel — https://t.me/bitspawnprotocol
Instagram — https://instagram.com/bitspawnprotocol

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