This interview was conducted on Friday, September 6, 2024 on RadioChad (estimated duration of the second part: 40 minutes).
Ben2zeji: I'm going to switch gears and ask about something else. We've seen a lot of buzz on Twitter about the EMA AI, which is part of Ashes of Mankind's lore. But we haven't gotten much information about the overall backstory of the Ashes of Mankind universe. Could you elaborate on this, or at least tell us when we can expect to learn more about the world? We know the game takes place in a citadel, but are there other environments? Will we be introduced to the world right from the start, in the initial gameplay?
Adrien: We're aiming to weave the story organically into the game. Unless it's a PVE game, where players progress through the story by talking to NPCs or reading information on a website, it's not usually very engaging. So, we want players to experience the story as they play. As we release more information, we'll explain more and more. The lore isn't something we'll be focusing on heavily at launch, with a lot of text available immediately. We'll be releasing it gradually. The game takes place in the Citadel. There will eventually be multiple citadels, located in craters on the planet Orthus. These citadels were built by AI to accommodate humans, ahead of their journey. Eventually, players will be able to explore the outside world as well.
Ben2zeji: That’s great. Looking ahead, how do you see the game evolving in the long term? Do you envision Black Ice Studios still supporting Ashes of Mankind in 10, 15, or even 20 years, with continuous development driven by player input?
Chad: He's not going to say no!
Ben2zeji: There are games that are standalone experiences, one-offs with their own stories. Then there are games developed over multiple seasons, with a progressing narrative. A game like AoM, with its depth of gameplay, has potential for DLCs, themed seasons, and so on. How do you see the future of the game?
Adrien: I understand the question. We have a 10-year roadmap, and beyond that, because Ashes of Mankind is a competitive, online PVP game with a strong live-ops element. It's not a one-time release like a solo or story-driven game. We want to ensure players can enjoy it for years to come.
Chad: Okay, cool. If anyone else has any questions, feel free to ask. You won't get this chance to talk to the CEO of Ashes of Mankind every day, or any game CEO for that matter. I have a million questions. Ben2zeji brought up DLCs. How will the game be funded? Will it be free to play, and if so, how will you finance development?
Adrien: The game will be free at launch. Our focus is on live-ops, seasonal content updates, adding new content with every season. We'll be using Battle Passes for monetization, of course. The main focus will be on cosmetics and microtransactions for now, with a small amount of utility items, but we'll be avoiding pay-to-win mechanics.
Ben2zeji: So, the token will play a role, too, correct? It seems it’s part of the future for video games. Will it be a direct source of revenue?
Adrien: The token won't be a direct source of revenue. It's not something I'm focusing on right now, because it always feels like putting money front and center, whereas it's easier to visualize the end goal. We'll be monetizing through cosmetics, Battle Passes, and so on. All of this will be facilitated by the token. Cosmetics can be created by players and creators, using the token. Corporations can also create content with the token. But will we be directly monetizing the token itself? Not necessarily. It's not in our plans. The token is designed to benefit players, while we generate our revenue from other sources.
Chad: You say money isn't at the forefront, but it is a bit, considering half of the game is focused on that.
Adrien: I'm not saying it's not involved. What I'm saying is that the monetization methods involving the token aren’t always easy to visualize, because the token is just a means to an end, for our different types of partners. They might want to create their own cosmetics, as might players and creators. Corporations might create content or conduct research, and for all of this, the token will be used. But the token is just a link in the chain. In the end, the most visible revenue streams will be cosmetics, a little bit of utility items, Battle Passes... relatively traditional methods for us, as developers. And sometimes it’s a bit less traditional when creators are involved, but again, this is a common practice for those familiar with Counter-Strike or Valve's Dota 2.
Chad: Before I give the floor to JBM, I want to build on what Ben2zeji just said. He mentioned the token, and in the Web3 world, there will be land. So, there will be a very strong economic aspect, especially if you want players to monetize their time: a robust economy is essential, otherwise, they’ll lose money. That's a concern, and it's one of the things I wanted to talk about. Players and investors alike are afraid of Web3 games making promises they can't keep. It's happened almost every time. The economic aspect has a lot of potential for people to lose money. It happened with Ultra, where games just vanished after fundraising. How are you ensuring that doesn't happen with AoM?
Adrien: There are some major differences. The first one is that we have a product. That might sound silly, but a lot of Web3 games have seen investments in land and other things go down the drain because there wasn't even a product to begin with. It's hard to monetize anything if there's nothing there. So, the biggest difference is that we have a product. With a product, we can attract players. With players, we have demand. With demand, people will invest in microtransactions and purchases. It's hard to do that without a product. Without a product, there's no demand, and nobody can buy anything because there’s nothing to buy. There’s nothing to monetize.
Chad: That’s clear.
Adrien: The second difference is that when we discussed this with David - I won't go into detail, as we'll be revealing more information in the coming weeks, probably from David himself - our goal was to give value to players. Yes, there’s land in the game, but it's not just about buying maps to show off to your friends and say, "I invested in this game and now I have this cool concept art." A large part of what players will be able to monetize their time on is provided by Black Ice: cosmetics, and everything that creators will create down the line.
Players will be able to find technologies with weapons, armor, and discover cosmetics. We’re providing all of that. It’s a value-add that rarely exists in other games. Often, players buy maps that don’t mean much and they hope to resell them to other players. In our case, a Web3 player’s interest will be to sell their land to a Web2 player, who will have an interest in acquiring it because it will allow them to play the game and experience it the way they want to.
It's a completely different offering, based on supply and demand. It's not like a lot of Web3 games, where everyone is both the supplier and the consumer, and a competitor. Things go in circles, until speculation reaches its peak, and then nobody buys anything anymore because they realize there’s no value behind it. I think a major difference we’ll see in our game, compared to others where NFT collectible cards can reach $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, or even $10,000 sometimes, is that a cosmetic in AoM, depending on its rarity, quality, and so on, will probably sell for a reasonable price between $5 and $100. But what matters to us is the quantity. We might sell things cheaper, but there will be real utility, and therefore real demand from Web2 players because they’ll want to use it in the game. This will automatically generate consistent revenue over the long term.
Chad: You mentioned earlier that a finished product is essential, and I completely agree. It’s a condition that’s not often met in Web3. So, in AoM’s case, does that mean the Citadels portion of the game will be fully released before any Web3 monetization or the Empires portion?
Adrien: The two will happen around the same time. I can’t give you an exact timeline yet, as we’re still working on the plans. I can’t say which will be released first, or if they’ll be released at the same time. But whatever happens, our goal is to ensure that both experiences offer added value to our player base, whether they want to monetize their time or simply enjoy the game. Ultimately, we want to make sure everything benefits our players. Whenever we’re making decisions, our first question is always: How will our players perceive this? Will they like it? Will they enjoy it? Are they accustomed to this? We want to make sure our players come first.
Chad: That makes sense. I’ll give the floor to JBM.
JBM: Hi everyone. Hello Adrien. We can see how you can attract Web3 players to the game, especially with Empires. When we presented the game, we saw various Web3 builds, but how can you make sure you’re not just a Web3 game? How can you avoid becoming a niche game and attract a large number of Web2 players to Citadels? We know that most Web2 players despise anything related to NFTs. If they hear that word, they go crazy. How are you going to overcome this?
Adrien: Pretty simply, it’s a little bit of what I’ve been talking about so far. The first and simplest method to attract a player is to make a good video game that they want to play. When League of Legends hit the market, the media didn’t cover it much. Players weren’t talking about it much, because it was a free-to-play game, and at that time, free-to-play had a terrible reputation. No PC player wanted to play a free-to-play game because it was mainly mobile games with aggressive, pay-to-win monetization.
But when League of Legends came out, all of that changed instantly. Players jumped in, played the game, and that’s all that mattered. They realized they didn’t have to spend money. It’s the same for us. Compared to some of our competitors, where players have to create a wallet, buy the token or get it even if they don’t need it, which makes them wonder what it’s for—none of that exists in our game. When you play the Citadels aspect, you’re playing a pure video game. You create your character, your gear, your loadout, go into the Citadel, fight other players, survive, extract, and then repeat.
It’s a video game. Of course, there’s a marketplace, but what you can buy are cosmetics and technologies. None of it screams NFT! Whether it’s an NFT in the backend or not is irrelevant. It’s the same principle as in Counter-Strike, where players can buy super rare skins at exorbitant prices. I believe the most expensive skin in Counter-Strike sold for $300,000. So the system itself isn’t different. What’s different is the technology. We’re using blockchain technology, but we’re not trying to hide it. I think the main mistake of Web3 games isn’t being Web3 games, it’s communicating about Web3. It's telling a Web2 player: "Come on, because our game is a Web3 game, which means it's the future of video games and therefore you’re going to love it." Players, besides not understanding why it’s the future, have seen 99% of Web3 games that have never been released or have never been quality games. So, they don’t have any faith in it. The fact that players can play our game without a wallet or a token, without being exposed to any of that—this will make it much easier to get them to play Ashes of Mankind.
On top of that, without revealing any partner names, we have partners who, because of our approach, only work with Web2 games. This will create a high level of trust among our player base.
Ben2zeji: Thank you. I wanted to clarify something because I completely understand JBM’s question. As a player, I follow events, whether it's Summer Gaming or the year-end Game of the Year awards in December. We know that these conferences always feature tons of game announcements. I understand that you can’t talk about partners yet, but to attract classic Web2 players, we’re also talking about advertising campaigns to get reach and target millions of potential players. How will you steer the marketing campaign to avoid the term “Web3 game” and gain visibility without scaring people?
Adrien: Because when players watch a Twitch stream of the Citadels experience, they see a video game that plays and feels like other triple-A FPS games backed by partners who only support quality products. And then, without going into details at this point, there will be an influencer aspect, on Twitch, organic... which will be part of our winning strategy. So, Web2 players will see the Citadel. If they're interested in Empires, they can switch over, but they are two different experiences. As a player, I’ll play Citadels on my computer. Then I can use Empires on my browser, phone, or whatever. They are two connected experiences that benefit from each other. But, nothing forces or prevents players from playing both.
Ben2zeji: So, you’re saying that this would be the first game targeting both the lucrative market of Android and iOS players (phone players) and PC or console players, even in the future? Since you have two entities, you’re targeting the entire video game sector?
Adrien: I’m not sure that’s the right way to frame it. It’s not that we’re specifically targeting mobile players. It’s simply that an Empires player will have access from anywhere. Are we aiming to create an experience specifically for mobile players? No. David can elaborate more later, but we have some very interesting and unique things planned for Empires players.
Chad: That’s ambitious, for sure. Before I give the floor to Radlike, I wanted to ask a question about that. When do you think you’ll have a complete, playable version of Citadels ready?
Adrien: The Citadel is already fully playable. We play it internally, at least once a week. The game has been playable for months. The focus now is on adding details and polish, ensuring a smooth, understandable experience for players when they play Ashes of Mankind in the Citadel. We want to make sure our infrastructure can handle it. We did some tests recently and discovered some issues with our matchmaking, which is rare, but it happens. We need to refine it further, making sure these issues don’t become noticeable when players start coming in. In the coming weeks, we’re going to start bringing players to the game. People saw the live gameplay in the AMA, so it's clear that the game is there and playable, but this will also be a chance for us to work with the community, players who support what we’re doing, to help us find bugs. It’s harder to find bugs when you’re only playing with 1,000, 2,000, or 5,000 people.
Chad: Okay, I see. So, the release is pretty close. When I got access to the game on Ultra, I downloaded it, went in, and was a bit surprised because there was nothing! There was just a little bit to show the character, to configure the character…
Adrien: That was just access to the character customizer. We did that for the community because we wanted them to start having fun with a few things. It was only the character customizer. We disabled the game mode for the community in that version.
Chad: Even for the armory, you only put one weapon?!
Adrien: Yes, but we didn’t even plan on putting it in the character customizer at the beginning. We thought it would just be to give people something nice, to see some progress, to check out the graphics. Everything is in real time, though. You have to see it, it’s not easy to tell from a menu. All of that is game graphics. We finally put a weapon in the armory because we figured that players wouldn’t have much to look at when customizing their characters if there were no weapons. We wanted to give them the chance to have a weapon so they could at least pose and experiment. The currently activated portion of the character customizer is only about 5% of the total character customization. And we only have one weapon, whereas in reality there are many weapons, deployables, grenades, and so on.
Chad: Yes, but why didn’t you include more in the demo? When we talk about making the game attractive to hardcore gamers, it’s… If you had released this demo of a AAA game on Steam, people would have gone crazy.
Ben2zeji: It’s the appetizer!
Adrien: Yes, but it's all free, so we don't have… On Steam, we’d have sold the game, and you’d get this. I understand players are a little frustrated.
Chad: But even for free, why… the question I was asking myself is really why…
Adrien: Everything we’re doing ties back to gameplay and marketing. There’s a lot going on. To be honest, we’re not going to give everything away from the start without having the opportunity to reveal it gradually. It would have been like asking Riot Games when the first version of League of Legends came out why they had only included half the champions. We want to ensure players can discover things, but especially that they can discover them inside the game. If we give access to the armory and immediately give access to all weapons and armor, we’ll have less to reveal to our community over time. It’s part of the game for both sides: it’s part of the game for us, and it’s part of the game for players, too, the pleasure of discovering a game gradually, rather than using a cheat code and having access to everything from the start. It would be a shame.
Chad: Yeah. Okay, I agree with that.
Adrien: You can also see the armory in the live AMA, some of our demos, and so on, which I imagine you have access to. So, it’s easy to watch the video and see what’s available. You can see the character customizing and equipping themselves. Everything is live, so it shows that everything is playable and functional. We go into matchmaking, we go into the game, it’s all there. So, you can see that there’s a level of polish in these videos.
Chad: There are tons of questions in the comments. But I’ll save those for later because Rad Like has been waiting for a while…
(to be continued)
