BTS Labs held an AMA with Meta Apes on October 21st. The theme of this AMA is “Meta Apes — A Free-to-play & Win-to-earn MMO Strategy Game”. The guest we had were Krishna Chaitanya, the Social Media Manager of Meta Apes. He introduced that Meta Apes is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which humanity has come to an end and a new era ruled by Apes has begun.
Q1:
BTS Labs: Please give an introduction to Meta Apes.
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): Meta Apes is a free-to-play, win-to-earn MMO strategy game designed for mobile. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which humanity has come to an end and a new era ruled by Apes has begun. Next on the agenda is space domination, and each player will have to work closely with their gang to win the ultimate race to space.
Meta Apes launched at the very end of May, and it is currently available on both Google Play & App Store. Additionally, it is the first gaming application to launch on the BNB Sidechain.
If you’ve played any other games of this genre, you’ll be generally familiar with the core gameplay, which boils down to 4 key components — 1) building, 2) competition, 3) community & 4) exploration.
Q2:
BTS Labs: What’s special about Meta Apes and what are its competitive advantages?
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): Meta Apes is fun to play. It’s strategic, social, and filled with fun graphics and characters. We think there’s something for everyone in Meta Apes. If you’re a traditional Web2 gamer, then you now have an opportunity to earn while playing a fun mobile game. Then if you’re a blockchain gamer who’s primarily looking to play to earn, well, you can still do that, but now with much more interactive & entertaining gameplay.
We have taken the best practices from Web2 gaming, such as high-quality graphics & player experience, ease of use and accessibility, and integrated them with the features and benefits of Web3 which we all love, such as NFTs & tokens, which can be fully owned & controlled by the players themselves.
Moving forward, we believe that there needs to be a greater focus on the quality of the Web3 gaming experience, and Meta Apes delivers that while also allowing the players to earn and own.
Also, Meta Apes has its own blockchain called Ape Chain on the BNB Sidechain. By having our own chain, we are able to achieve much greater customization, higher performance and greater scalability, all with the sound architecture and security of the BNB chain. Ultimately, this allows both the developers (us) and the gamers to have a much better experience by avoiding common issues with blockchain games, such as network congestion.
Q3:
BTS Labs: Tell us about NFT fighters. Do players need NFTs to play Meta Apes?
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): Firstly, Meta Apes is a free-to-play game and there’s no entry fee. It can be played without NFT fighters. You can download it for free on Android or iOS smartphones. This approach helped us build a strong community of ~400k players from around the world.
Holding the NFT fighters generates SHELL in-game tokens. Using SHELL, players can speed up their gaming progress. Furthermore, the NFT fighters come with additional skills & increased power that give them an edge over other players. Non-NFT fighters have 4 skills, whereas the NFT fighters get additional 1–3 skills.
On top of this, they also have some cosmetic effects, such as different backgrounds, lighting, halo & display of the user ID. Soon we will be introducing a fighter pairing system that you can benefit from if you have an NFT fighter.
You can trade Meta Apes NFT fighters on Galler.io and our marketplace.
A detailed guide on how to trade NFT fighters on the Meta Apes marketplace:
https://medium.com/meta-apes/how-to-trade-nft-fighters-on-meta-apes-marketplace-cc5bdb888341
A detailed guide on how to get an NFT fighter on Galler.io: https://medium.com/meta-apes/how-to-get-a-meta-apes-nft-fighter-d8e3584e832b
Q4:
BTS Labs: Please explain the tokenomics
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): Meta Apes started with a two-token model. However, we recently put out a proposal to transform to a single-token model with PEEL being the only token and the community overwhelmingly voted in favour of it.
PEEL is the governance & native gas token of Ape Chain (which is the name of our own chain on BNB Sidechain). PEEL is used for NFT purchases/trades, performance-based rewards (i.e., rewards for top-performing gangs & players), select critical in-game activities (e.g, final upgrade of NFT fighters, etc.), gas fees, staking & in-game validators, and last but not least, governance & voting.
$PEEL IFO took place on PancakeSwap on August 4th, and we raised over 235.17% of our target.
Official contract address of $PEEL: https://bscscan.com/token/0x734548a9e43d2D564600b1B2ed5bE9C2b911c6aB
As we converted to the single-token model, players can now deposit PEEL into the game and use it for in-game purchases, with SHELL packages as a starter.
Let me also assert that SHELL will continue to be an important in-game resource and NFT fighters still generate SHELL. Though the withdrawal of SHELL is not possible anymore, players can deposit their on-chain SHELL into the game.
SHELL is used in a variety of ways in the game, such as upgrading buildings & NFT fighters, accelerating building & researching, as well as buying in-game resources (e.g., iron, food, etc.).
Q5:
BTS Labs: What can we expect from Meta Apes in the near future?
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): The change in Tokenomics is a move towards the sustainable growth of the Meta Apes ecosystem. Over the course of the next few months, we plan to introduce a variety of in-game features that drive additional value for our players, such as the fighter pairing system, NFT collectibles and PEEL staking. As always, we will be sure to communicate with our community constantly and keep you posted on all of the updates so stay tuned!
Free Questions
Q1:
BTS Labs Community: Meta Apes is the first project/game using BNB Sidechain. Why have you chosen it and how have you managed to use this technology?
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): BNB Sidechain is a new developer infrastructure that allows devs to build large-scale applications with much higher throughput and significantly reduced transaction fees. We decided to go this route because by having our own chain (Ape Chain), we are able to achieve much greater customization, higher performance and greater scalability, all with the sound architecture and security of the BNB chain.
Ultimately, this allows both the developers and the gamers to have a much better experience by helping avoid some of the common issues, such as network congestion, which leads to a poor gaming experience. Making sure the players have the best experience possible is our #1 priority & something we’ll continue to work on to achieve long-term success as a community.
This allows us to create a unique architectural and token design where all of the revenue from the ecosystem, including the gas fees, accrue to our token holders. This means all revenue streams, including NFT sales, royalty on secondary NFT sales, and SHELL in-app purchases, will go toward the PEEL DAO, who will then decide how to use that revenue (e.g., burn or buy back PEEL).
In addition to these tangible drivers of PEEL value, there are intangible benefits our token holders will enjoy from the token design. For example, because PEEL is both the governance and the native gas token, players can conveniently use a single currency to transact in the Meta Apes ecosystem.
Q2:
BTS Labs Community: Current games in web3 space lacks the enjoyment and only focuses on play2earn, so they lose the hype very quickly. How are you planning to change that?
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): This is one of the biggest problems we see with Web3 games. Most of the games put the earning part of the With Meta Apes, we are bringing the best of both Web2 and Web3 together. We put the gameplay in priority so that everyone can have fun playing the game. We are building a Web3 game which is balanced with high-quality graphics, and engaging gameplay and also offers decent earnings to the players.
Whatever the players put into our game/community be it time and resources, they get it back through fun and also rewards through in-game items and PEEL. This model makes the Meta Apes ecosystem more sustainable.
Q3:
BTS Labs Community: When cross server play? or competition between players, or some events
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): Competition between players is at the core of Meta Apes’ gameplay. You build, team up with players and compete with other gangs/clans to win. On the new server, Aries, we are running a number of events to promote the Win-to-Earn feature. As a part of this, we are giving away 1 Million PEEL to the winning gangs/clans. We also plan to introduce new events and reward players in the old server.
Cross-server play is on the roadmap. Stay tuned to us on social media to be the first to get to know when the feature is available. In the meantime, join the game, play and win big.
Q4:
BTS Labs Community: Will there be buy back system or token burning in the future? Do you have any Anti-dump mechanism for holders who may want to dump during pump?
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): Yes, there’s a PEEL burn program. The first PEEL quarterly burn program is done on August 29. We burnt ~$290k worth of PEEL tokens (1,670,199 PEEL), which is 50% of our quarterly in-game revenue of ~$580k (USD).
This week, we also ran a community vote seeking feedback from the community on what to with the remaining unburnt quarterly revenue of $290k. The community voted to buy back and burn (still going on) and we will be doing this in the next few days.
Our token schedule was designed considering all these factors. We are proactively managing the supply through these burns and buy back events.
Q5:
BTS Labs Community: You know that security is very important in this field, can you share with us what kind of work you are carrying out for this?
Krishna Chaitanya(Social Media Manger): PEEL smart contract was audited by BEOSIN Blockchain Security in Q3 2022. Feel free to check out the report.
https://metaapesgame.com/audit.pdf
Also, the team is quick to fix any bugs that players encounter and we keep the community informed about the maintenances on our Discord server.
We are always open to feedback from the community. Please do let us know if you encounter any bugs and we will respond and fix them soon.
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