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Revolutionizing Reality: The Digital Overlay Transforming Retail and Gaming with Beau Button
232 Plays2 years ago
Beau Button from Atlas Reality merges digital and physical worlds, creating a metaverse for gamers. Their platform combines virtual goods and real-world retail through a card-linked rewards system, motivating players to shop at physical stores and revolutionizing experiential marketing.
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Transcript
Introduction to Player Engage Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engage podcast, where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keyword Studios and HelpShift. Here is your host, Greg Posner.
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engaged Podcast.
Revolutionizing Retail and Gaming with Beau Button
00:00:18
Speaker
In this episode, we're speaking with Beau Button from Atlas Reality, a trailblazer revolutionizing the retail and gaming industries. Beau introduced us to an innovative platform that merges the digital and physical world, creating a metaverse where players can find, collect, and own virtual goods. What truly stands out is how this technology is breathing new life into brick and mortar retail.
00:00:39
Speaker
By incorporating a patent-pending, cart-linked real-time reward system into their games, Atlas Reality motivates players to shop at physical stores, thereby enhancing the customer experience and redefining marketing. So we're titling this episode, Revolutionizing Reality, the Digital Overlay to Transforming Reality in Gaming.
From Enterprise Software to Gaming Industry
00:00:59
Speaker
So first off, Bo, thank you so much for joining me today. You want to give yourself a quick intro?
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, that was the most succinct, brilliant way I've ever heard our business described. So I'm going to have to lift that from you. But yeah, I'm Bo Button. I'm one of the co-founders of Atlas Reality, formerly Cerberus Interactive. We rebranded. But my background's in tech. Not video games specifically. I've been in this industry about seven years now. But prior to that, just enterprise software. And this is where I find myself, mobile location-based video games.
00:01:30
Speaker
Hey, I love it. And first of all, thanks for that. I'm not going to take all the credit for the intro. I'll give a little bit of credit to chat GPT and great technology. I use chat GPT for job descriptions. And like, when these people get on the actual interviews with me and they talk to me, I'm like, yeah, it's a letdown, isn't it? I'm nowhere near as articulate as that job description or post was.
00:01:52
Speaker
Hey, it's fake it until you make it. And chat GPT is making it a lot easier for everyone there. And it's funny, you said you're not a gamer, which is great, right? Cause not everyone in gaming needs to come from gaming, but do you play any games? Are there any games that excite you on the horizon? It's weird. So I don't identify as a gamer in the traditional sense where I sit in front of a console or a PC and play the games. But if you look behind me, I obviously have games. I have gaming consoles. Um, I like to think that, you know,
00:02:20
Speaker
There's different angles that people can have or different perspectives of any tech, not just gaming or any hobby. I was like, I'm not a competitive sports person, but I will watch it. I have no desire to play it. A lot of people who like football, they'll play football like me. I appreciate the machines. I appreciate the energy that goes into the games and I'm really inquisitive. So my take from games is I just want to know how they work.
00:02:44
Speaker
I have leveraged some of those lessons I've learned on how these old consoles work and what we're doing today at Atlas Reality. But I don't really play a whole lot of games. I think it's pretty sad if I said my favorite game is Excitebike on the Nintendo. And I don't mean like bracing the dirt bikes. I like building the courses. That's all I liked. I remember as a child just going home and building courses. I'd run through it once or twice and say this was great and then I would just forget about it.
00:03:11
Speaker
There is one game that's a modern game called Tear Down. It's available on Steam. I don't know why it resonates with me, but I'm hooked on it. I have a little Steam Deck that I bought for my son, but he's a PC gamer and he said he couldn't figure out the controls, so I started playing with it. But no, I don't play a lot of games.
00:03:28
Speaker
That's fair. In our previous conversation, you mentioned that you're into hardware. And for those of you who aren't watching our stream behind Bow is a bunch of old games in the cabinet. I feel like I see some Genesis, some NES, and on top of that, you have hardware. You have the Jaguar, which we talked about last time. It's a unique system of its time. You got a meta quest. So you really are that hardware person that made a transition into video games. How did you go?
Transition to Gaming and Industry Insights
00:03:53
Speaker
What made that happen? How did you find that calling that way? It's not sexy. There's really the truth is if my current business partner and our CEO Sami Khan would not have reached out to me and said, look,
00:04:08
Speaker
I want to start building video games. Do you want to help me? I would have completely just bypass. I would have never thought of video games. It was not on the horizon for me. I would have stayed in building custom enterprise software for small to mid-sized businesses.
00:04:25
Speaker
Sami is the proverbial marketer, and he has a knack for finding customers. And he basically set up a website, found a bunch of video game development clients, and that's how I got into it. It's like, where's the money? So I did, it was naive of me, but I did think that building games would be more entertaining than building ERPs, CRMs, BPMs, like filling all the enterprise acronyms you can for other people. I was woefully
00:04:53
Speaker
wrong though, you know, even though games are fun, building games for other people is not fun. And hence the reason we pivoted from servers interactive to house reality where we started building our own games. But no, that's how I got into it. It wasn't like I had this lifelong dream of, you know, owning or operating a video game development company. I did dabble with game engines. I was always curious on how games were built, but never really sat down and said, you know what, I'm going to start a company. We're going to build games.
00:05:20
Speaker
I think a lot of people probably start with that mindset. I know myself, I didn't go to school and think about, I want to be a coder, I want to be a coder. I did take a coder class and quickly scared me away thinking, hey, I can't work in video games anymore.
00:05:32
Speaker
with your extensive technology background, right? You've had a number of startups where you worked with or for, where it was tech-based, right, but not gaming. But were there any learnings there? On this show, we like to talk about the customer experience. So anything you've learned about customers and other verticals or other industries that played a role when creating the role of Atlas Games, right? You have Atlas Earth, you have Atlas Reality, you have the racing that's built into it. Yeah, I mean, I've learned a lot.
00:05:59
Speaker
How do I condense that into something useful? I do subscribe for the most part to the customer is right. The customer is always right, but not always. I do find myself as a co-founder, I'm very invested for better or for worse, what the customers are saying about our delivery, our product, our customer service. That's how I learned.
00:06:26
Speaker
So, you know, I am, even though I'm a co-founder, we're a 30 person company. We're not that big, but like I have a lot of friends that are involved in startups that have 12 people and it's like, well, he's the CEO. Why would he ever check his own email? And I'm like, I saw me and I are very hands on to the point where I do manage the discord server. I'm a moderator in our subreddit community, but.
00:06:47
Speaker
I'm listening, I'm everywhere on social media. And people are sometimes shocked when I, like, I'll respond to a question. I'm just bow button on Facebook. They don't know that I'm, you know, part of the business, but I'm in every one of our community groups, which there are about 40 of for pretty much every state, just listening and responding. The bad part of that is I know the truth on like why things work certain ways or why we miss deadlines. And I think I take it a little too personal sometimes.
00:07:16
Speaker
because I know the sweat that the team and the effort that the team put into those things. And when people like, this is a scam, these people should be fired. I'm just like, I wish you could just come here for a day.
00:07:27
Speaker
And I've actually gone as far as to offer and people have actually, you know, responded to this. I said, would any of you like to set up a call, a video call? I'm here. Let's get on the call and let me learn and let me teach you. And it has helped. Sometimes it doesn't help a whole lot, but no, I mean, just I listen, you know, so it's like, you know, a circuit. I've got inputs and then outputs. And I do for better or for worse, leverage social media and like the sentiment in
Community Feedback and Sentiment Analysis
00:07:51
Speaker
the community to just kind of steer the company. Um, not, not like I've unilaterally steered.
00:07:56
Speaker
to influence the areas of the company that i have kind of my my hands in but yeah just i've learned a lot from just listening to people quite frankly i'm not a micromanager that's the other thing that i don't do i i operate off a trust for better or for like everything i do honestly is for better more often than not it's for the better but i've learned and as i continue to evolve my experience i'm learning more and more about you can't trust everybody even though at the surface you feel like you can
00:08:21
Speaker
But yeah, just I trust folks so I stay out of their hair, you know, hire really smart people, really dedicated people and let them do what they do best and not try to like influence them. Unless you know that, hey, I've been down this rabbit hole and you haven't. So I'm going to help you out here guy. You brought up a few interesting points and I want to tap on a few different ones. The first one is that
00:08:41
Speaker
You're saying the user is always right. I get that. I worked in retail. It was a call center. That's what they tell you. But the idea is to collect that feedback from users. And how do you leverage that feedback? And what do you do with it? And then the other side is that you're managing your Discord server. You're managing your Reddit subreddit. You got your game. How are you collecting this feedback? And how do you process it internally? Are there different teams that handle it? Or what do you do once you get that feedback? I wish we had a formal process.
00:09:11
Speaker
I execute my own internal sentiment analysis and determine is this worthy of bringing it to the team. One thing I have learned in the last three years post launch of Atlas Earth is not most of the players aren't looking at the big picture. Quite honestly, they're not aware of what our big picture is because it's not public.
00:09:32
Speaker
So they're thinking very micro and sometimes they'll suggest something that when you read it, you're like, man, that makes a lot of sense. But then you look at like your business objectives. It's like, well, those things are incompatible. But generally I literally just, if it's something I feel like the team needs to address, I'll, I'll bring my partner Samia and we'll talk about it and then we'll task it out. Like if it's something that's a UX thing or a customer service thing, um,
00:09:58
Speaker
No, we don't really have a formal process. We do have a community manager. And I am slowly but surely from my own mental health stepping away from both Discord and Reddit. It's that early stage where I just need to know who our audience is. You know, you're marketing to people, you have an idea of who your what your demographic is going to be. But in that first like zero to six months, I learned a lot about who our actual audience is. We're in the play to earn space. So we're attracting folks who
00:10:26
Speaker
probably aren't only interested in games. You know, these are folks who are genuinely in need of passive income. And we kind of do that, but so, yeah, there's no formal process, but I take it and we get it into the hands of if it's an engineering task, it goes into the sprint planning process, if it's a customer service task. I do manage customer service and it's the reason, you know, you and I, you know, the way that we know each other is through help shift, but,
00:10:53
Speaker
I don't necessarily sit on it for very long. If I feel like it's something that will make a difference, I try to put it into action as fast as possible. It's interesting, you know, I sit kind of on the opposite side of you, right? We're typically selling this technology, but it's interesting to hear that many people don't account for feedback, even when they're launching a game. You tell to them, they're like, oh, we didn't even really think about that. And
00:11:17
Speaker
I would think it would be the number one priority, maybe not the number one priority, but really high up there because, again, I don't believe that the customer is always right, and I know you don't, but we say that, right? But at the same time, if you're not listening to your audience, Reddit's a great place, Discord's a great place, and I think you're probably pulling out at the right time. You have a game, the game is working, you have an audience.
00:11:35
Speaker
Now the toxicity is going to come, you're probably going to want to step back and let the community managers handle the escalated stuff. But it always shocks me that no one's really, not no one, but it shocks me that people aren't listening to that feedback more often or doing something with it. I think it makes sense to probably think of more formal processes to build into that. Yes, it's probably a minor thing to think through, but that's how the game continues to grow, right?
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's most definitely a blessing and a curse, you know, like I said, about macro versus micro, oddly enough, and only oddly, because I'm the person who loves listening to the community, whereas Sami, you know, his his approaches, he's a game designer, he's a user acquisition expert, he does marketing, the way that
00:12:15
Speaker
we're engineering and designing features.
Balancing Game Enjoyment and Business Strategies
00:12:18
Speaker
Yes, we're trying to balance, is it enjoyable? But we're also building a for-profit business. So if you listen to the feedback from the community, they're just, they're gamers. They're not necessarily concerning themselves with monetization, retention, et cetera. You kind of, you get inundated with these people who are, again, just very narrow, like focusing on, well, this is not fun. Why would anybody do this? And then like,
00:12:43
Speaker
Well, the reason we're doing it is because we were able to move the needle that we needed to move to stay viable by 200%. But yeah, I do believe there is a half-life where me as a founder and someone who's in charge of engineering, et cetera, needs to just claw back. It became
00:13:06
Speaker
Like you said, when that toxicity, because it's play to earn, we're not crypto, there's just so many things, like so many headwinds that we're facing because of the type of game that we've built or the platform we've built. But no, if you're building a product and you're not establishing what we refer to like when agile software development sort of became the de facto standard, was a customer feedback loop.
00:13:29
Speaker
If you're not establishing that feedback loop, a short feedback loop, you are doing yourself a disservice. And that's not just about the game or about the product. It's like the usability of the product. So this is very, you know, very heavily leveraged in UX. Build a model, don't write code, build an interactive model, give it to the end users, get feedback. It just saves time. And honestly, we haven't done a great job of that, but we just recently, well, we're in the process of hiring a dedicated UI UX engineer who can help us do that because
00:13:58
Speaker
we've learned once it's in pride, it's relatively rigid. So if we can get that feedback prior to us building it, shipping it, going through QA and all of that, we could save ourselves a lot of time and money.
00:14:09
Speaker
I think a lot of that is, it's not just game related. I think it's any SaaS platform, right? Once you build a SaaS platform, it's hard to pivot once you're there. And if you need to make a change, sometimes it's easiest to just create a whole new system on the side and do a migration. Yeah, it's a pain in the butt, but I mean, at the same time, then you kind of create that narrative that you want to and create that platform that you want. It's just hard. Yeah. And it sounds like it's a no brainer, but like...
00:14:31
Speaker
I've also learned in the last 10 years, there's kind of the only two phases of the business that I'm really experienced with is that guerrilla warfare, just get it out the door. We've got to ship a product. Building software is not hard. Shipping a product, a software product is very hard.
00:14:51
Speaker
I'm learning that the way that we think about designing the product and just basically articulating its requirements during that initial phase is very different than the way you need to do it when you're in that kind of like it's a growth phase sustainability phase.
Challenges in Game Development Sustainability
00:15:08
Speaker
There's a transition and what we haven't perfected even in this venture is that transition from
00:15:13
Speaker
Oh, we got to get it done tomorrow to like, all right. Well, we can't keep doing it that way because quality is suffering. So yeah, it's crazy, man. You, I'm still learning. Obviously I'm 40 years old and I've been doing this for probably 30 years, which is crazy.
00:15:26
Speaker
But every day I'll learn something new about it. I think it's going to make sense. And I don't want to make this really a game focused podcast, but I want to explore the metaverse and Web 3 and everything that's being done. So maybe do you have an elevator pitch that you normally get when you talk about Atlas Earth and how it works and how you have the game? Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, I rarely, if ever,
00:15:49
Speaker
introduce Atlas Earth and mentioned blockchain Web 3 crypto decentralized like we're not that.
Atlas Reality's Web 3.0 Approach Without Blockchain
00:15:56
Speaker
We are heavily inspired by some of the core tenets of what Web 3 promised but failed to deliver not decentralization. We are a standard Web 2 game mobile only right now. So if you think about in Web 3 we went from
00:16:14
Speaker
Web one was access to information and knowledge. Web two was kind of the social web. And then web three, my partner kind of described it as like, people want equity. They want ownership. And it's kind of hard to describe what do they want to own? Well, obviously, every Facebook user would like to own a piece of Facebook. I mean, I wouldn't mind as well. But it's about having skin in the game and kind of owning your data. So, you know, the NFT smart contracts that, you know,
00:16:45
Speaker
That's what I enjoy about the Web3, but all of these other things that have kind of popped up, these pump and dump cryptocurrency scams, et cetera, and these NFT games that aren't games, they're technological show pieces and they're not fun. None of that really inspired us, but what was the inspiration for how our business model works, in essence, was the virtual real estate platforms that were built on chain.
00:17:07
Speaker
I never thought that there would be, why would someone demand a desire of virtual real estate? But it was very obvious that people were looking for this because they were selling millions of dollars of virtual real estate that wasn't anchored or related to the real world. It was a completely fictitious,
00:17:26
Speaker
video game map and the only real reason people were interested in it, at least the only real reason I saw was FOMO, fear of missing out. It's like this speculative, well Atari just built this and Snoop Dogg just built this. Well I want to be his neighbor in this world because I clearly can't afford to be his neighbor in reality.
00:17:45
Speaker
You know, we took some of those things like, well, what's driving people? But we also like we weren't ignorant to the fact that that play to earn mechanic was also very instrumental. People want to earn something. Now, obviously, in these web three games, they're earning a cryptocurrency or a crypto token. And, you know, what that value is like is crazy. You don't know. So we took all of that and said, let's build it on standard web to rails. Let's use fiat and let's build a play to earn game where in essence, it's a revenue sharing opportunity.
00:18:14
Speaker
We're just not a greedy game studio. We make money. You obviously buy things in the game using in-app purchases. You watch ads, or like you had mentioned when you opened the show, we have our Atlas merchant platform, which allows us to actually drive business to brick and mortar, you know, restaurants, gas stations, whatever. And we monetize that very
Revenue Sharing Model in Gaming
00:18:36
Speaker
well. But at the end of the day, the money that the players are actually earning is coming from our revenues. This is not like we have not
00:18:43
Speaker
found some magical way to just mysteriously pull money out of thin air. We're not being greedy about how we basically use our revenues, our profits really. I think that's such a genius thing.
00:18:57
Speaker
You know, I thought about it, and I'm familiar with the Pokémon Go's of the world that get you out of your house, get you moving, right? And it's stuff, but then I saw what you were doing, and you had gift cards with Jamba Juice, you had gift cards to, I think, Starbucks and other retailers out there. It's like, that's genius. Like, I go to these places anyway, right? Why not play the game and actually get real rewards? And I don't know if I'm a believer of the NFT side of things, right? Web 3 is still a concept that's trying to
00:19:23
Speaker
really formalize, I think, and I'm not sure that's the right word to use here. I remember web two coming up right with the social slide, and no one knew what web two was going to be. And then a few months later, you're like, Oh, yeah, web two, it's been here now for a few weeks now, like, Oh, okay, it happens, like, I must have missed it. But I feel like web three is gonna be similar. I'm wondering if you know,
00:19:39
Speaker
Are you looking into anything Web 3 related? Obviously, you're taking bits and pieces of it here and you're not going to say Frankenstein-ing it, but you're making it work, I think, in a better way than it is today. But do you have any predictions or do you believe in this concept of the metaverse and NFT and blockchain or is it things that you just think are fluff right now that people are throwing around as buzzwords? I mean, NFTs are not buzzwords. I'm intimately familiar with authoring smart contracts. I love from a tech perspective.
00:20:10
Speaker
You know, how would I do that with just a standard relational database in a silo, in my own private cloud, like the transparency and the public scrutiny. That's brilliant. If you've got something that demands that level of transparency and, you know, let's say you do need the decentralization aspect of it. I'm less concerned about decentralization as it relates to like governments and foreign, you know, like that doesn't, I'm not a conspiracy theorist and, you know,
00:20:39
Speaker
It is what it is. But from like a software development perspective, distributed computing descent, like those two things make a lot of sense. To answer the question, though, is smart contracts, NFT is not fluff, blockchain is not fluff. It's legitimate. It's just like when a relational database is introduced or a new NoSQL or document database. It's a legitimate technology. It has, you know, you can use it in the wrong way. You can use it in the right way. I mean, we're seeing a little bit of both right now. I'm not convinced that
00:21:07
Speaker
The way that games are being built on the chain right now is the right way. I've seen a few companies that I think are heading in the right way. And I'd like to think that Sami and I and our team are also heading in the right way because we spent probably the last nine months working on
Digital Asset Interoperability
00:21:22
Speaker
and it sounds as a software engineer, as an entrepreneur,
00:21:26
Speaker
I like to just create things, but I've learned and starting and winding down businesses. You do have to protect it. So we've been working with several patent attorneys on patenting, like how we think NFT should be leveraged in.
00:21:39
Speaker
Not just one game in multiple games, like this promise of interoperability is just no one's achieved it. And quite frankly, the approaches that we're seeing are just unsustainable, unrealistic. So Sami and I have kind of come up with a way that I think is going to allow that to work. And we are going to introduce a game, not just as a showcase of how we envision it working, but it's going to be the first of many games that do allow genuine interoperability of digital assets that will be minted on, on change.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, I saw I was browsing your website yesterday, right? And I love how you publish parts of your roadmap here. And one of them was like a mastercard integration. So all of a sudden, it's not me having to sell fiat or Ethereum or whatever to be able to do this, right? I could actually hook up my own my own card. And it's amazing. I feel like you're a gradual entry into web three, even though I know you're saying you're a web two game. And I love that aspect because you're not throwing those words around here. You're making it comfortable to know, hey, I'm playing a game.
00:22:36
Speaker
But all this stuff is still existing, but you don't need to know about it. It's just existing. I think most of the Web3 projects that either failed or failing, or maybe they have some traction, would have found more success if they just would have been quiet about the underlying tech. The only thing I can think of that would have provoked a co-founder to start talking about Web3 is investment.
00:23:03
Speaker
We had some of our investors were like, man, you guys should be targeting Web3. And I'm just like, you've had a glass of the Kool-Aid. Can you tell me why? And they're like, well, it's really easy to raise money in Web3. And it's like, I get it. I think the same reason Sami and I aren't greedy with our profits is the same reason why I wasn't jumping into Web3. It's like,
00:23:25
Speaker
I want to learn more about it. And I did that. I spent four months deep diving. Just got my feet like it was just learned a lot. And I realized, OK, you know, this is something. But I think the way to do this is to just build a good game and then figure out how we can either transition and to be clear, Atlas Earth will probably never be on
User Onboarding in Web3
00:23:44
Speaker
chain. But there will be crypto off ramps in the future. So just like you said, you shop at Starbucks. Well, if you have a Coinbase wallet and you want Ethereum.
00:23:53
Speaker
Well, why cash your money out into your checking account to go buy it? Let me just give you Ethereum. So there will be some dovetails into Web 3 or blockchain in Atlas Earth, but the next game will be 100% on chain. But yeah, it's worked really well for us. The other thing, like the elephant in the room here is onboarding users into Web 3. It's getting easier, but it's still terrible. And what Sami and I have learned from building games, our own two successful games, Atlas Empires and Atlas Earth is
00:24:21
Speaker
first time user experience is everything, everything. If you get people in there and you're spending, you know, XYZ for user acquisition costs, but you lose them, what are you doing? So that first time user experience needs to be as frictionless as possible. So if you look at our first game, Atlas Empires, it has a really long tutorial that's moving things and telling you click here and do this. And it's, it's like a lot of the games in that genre, the,
00:24:46
Speaker
you know, tower defense or, you know, strategy games, clash of clan like games. Whereas Atlas Earth is, we've got a video. It's about 40 seconds. We've got a real person. He's talking real language and you get it and you get in the game and then boom, it's stuck. We gave you what you need to get hooked and it's proven to be very, very successful.
00:25:06
Speaker
that mechanic or that approach. It's an interesting take because I think, again, as a sales engineer, I've been putting more videos out there to my team. People just want to watch short videos. Don't go make a 15-minute video about a demo. Do a short, less than a minute clip on how to do something, and people will eat that up. That makes much more sense. Yeah, it's that short form video.
00:25:30
Speaker
You mentioned user acquisition costs, probably retention. You must monitor all this. Do you use specific tools to be able to capture that data? Do you save it somewhere? How do you ingest all that? In Atlas Empires, we had to build out our own analytical pipeline. We ingested all of our ad spin, all of our ad revenue.
00:25:50
Speaker
All of the kind of performance data that we needed, we used a product called Apache Spark, which is just a big data platform. We actually used a managed version of it from a company called Databricks. But thankfully, the MMPs that we use for tracking user acquisition, user install attribution, they've gotten very intelligent. So we do track all of that.
00:26:14
Speaker
down to the creative, the campaign, the network, we can track lifetime value of cohorts. And we didn't have to write any of that, which I was very thankful for because managing the game, managing the libops and then having to manage all of these analytical things was just, it was a bit much.
00:26:32
Speaker
But yeah, we do use, I'm pretty sure I can say we are an adjust customer. Adjust is a pretty big MMP out there and they've really innovated in the space of revenue tracking. It's all in the dashboard so we can see everything. And Sami's the, he's on the user acquisition and marketing side. I do, I stay out of that. I'm from, I know how to poke around and look at things, but I don't personally concern myself with that.
00:26:58
Speaker
Um, we do synchronize every day and he kind of shares the progress, but that's not my life. Thankfully. Do you, when you, when you look at these data, when you look at this data, right? You have concept of VIPs, right? Do you, do you do any communication with some of your top players? Again, I understand what they're liking, what they're not liking to kind of, again, use that feedback to make decisions or at least think through.
00:27:22
Speaker
No, unfortunately right now we don't actually, we could identify, there's obviously characteristics of a VIP. We know who our whales are because they're on the leaderboards, but we haven't really tailored anything specifically to gather feedback from them.
Community Engagement Strategies
00:27:39
Speaker
I kind of think of our Discord server as our VIPs. These are the diehard, just hardcore gamers.
00:27:49
Speaker
generally more technically inclined better at articulating like why or how a problem came about. But no, not right now. It's probably something that, again, Salmi is going to come up with something in the next couple of months. We've started to do a lot of
00:28:05
Speaker
We built journeys. So there's a lot of automation now as you navigate and progress through the game. Whereas, you know, previously we just get you in the game and then we'd send an email or we'd send a text message or we'd send a push notification. But, um, we're using a platform called one signal that lets us kind of map out, you know, where a player is and what they should see next from a messaging to, to kind of provoke them to do more in the gaming sector. But.
00:28:32
Speaker
No, we haven't really done anything with our VFPs. We're in touch with the President of the United States in the game. He's a YouTube kind of sensation, but that's basically it.
00:28:45
Speaker
Interesting to hear how the different tool sets that we work with. I love OneSignal, being able to push notifications, push messaging to the appropriate people, get the right data from it. It's funny when you start looking at this whole tool set that exists in not just the gaming world, but we focus a lot on gaming, obviously, like adjust something we deal with a lot. OneSignal, there's so many different platforms. It's someone that likes technology, right? It's a fun place to see what can speak to what stories you can tell.
00:29:09
Speaker
Yeah, the interoperability is really what I'm excited about. A lot of these tools are starting to operate in a more open fashion instead of these walled gardens. So the data, like when a player does something in our game, we basically synchronize with one signal. So, you know, if they.
00:29:27
Speaker
Opted into push notifications or SMS About a year ago. We purchased the shortcode so we can directly message at high rates to our customers the open rates SMS or text are way higher than push obviously way higher than email so they're way more effective at getting people into the game at specific times like when we have events, but
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a big fan of One Signal. Their Journey product is a visual, it's a canvas and basically someone like Sami who's reasonably technical, but he's not an engineer. He can go in there and basically design whatever he wants. He doesn't need to come to me and say, hey, when somebody buys their 10th piece of land, I want to send them a push notification or I want to send them an in-app message that directs them to the shop or anything. He can do all of that himself, which is really helpful because it allows him to experiment without kind of
00:30:18
Speaker
distracting the engineering team. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Backing up a minute, right? You manage your Discord server, managing your subreddit. What kind of toll does that take on a human, right? Obviously, there's some good stuff on there, right? You see all the good stuff. But like, what's a day like you're just monitoring the flow, see what's coming. If someone seems pissed off, you go you go work with them. Is there
00:30:39
Speaker
It's a lot of data, right? And how do you handle that? So I'm sitting in front of a Samsung Odyssey Arc. It's I think it's a 57 inch curved monitor. And I've got it broken out into nine individual screens. So there's Discord, there's Reddit. I also use a desktop client for
00:31:00
Speaker
It's hard to describe what it is. It's called RamBox. Basically, it allows you to use web mail or any web application in a way that makes it feel more inherently desktop oriented. But it does take a toll. I'm not going to lie. My attention span, like having all of this information in front of me is useful. But like I mentioned a moment ago, I've had to claw that back. There was about nine months from launch until when we
00:31:29
Speaker
We had traction out the door, which was great. But we were still troubleshooting. We had a lot of performance issues. So I just needed to know what the community was saying so I could be on top of it. But it really did. I can't say it put me into a depressive state, but I also can't say that it didn't.
00:31:48
Speaker
I was going through a phase where I was just like, I know something's wrong, and I can't quite pinpoint what it is. And I'm pretty sure it's the emotional roller coaster that having all this information just thrown at me. I designed the system where it was a push system. So all of these alerts and notifications, I had Discord on my phone, I was just like,
00:32:08
Speaker
Holy hell, I need to take a break from this. And I did. And honestly, my mood, my energy, everything just kind of came back to where it was. And I was like, I would have never thought that could create or manifest itself as a physical health issue, but it certainly did. So yeah, it's not for the faint of heart. I don't necessarily suggest everybody go in there and just own those things. It was important to me to own it, but now I know for the next kind of
00:32:34
Speaker
I guess game rebuild, I'll be involved to a certain point when I start to get that, that sensation. All right, I'll back away from it. If you look back in your history, right, you've been technologists moving to gaming. If you could look back at yourself, Bo, in the last six months to year, would have you done anything different? Would have you approached a problem that you had differently? Would you have made a different decision? Or do you just live with your choices and then pivot from there? That's a good one. I mean,
00:32:59
Speaker
I think most people who are familiar with the technical problems that Atlas Earth had, they probably would suspect I would say, yeah, I bet you would do something very different. To be quite honest with you, we wouldn't be here if I would have gone back and done anything different. I'll never second guess those decisions. I pride myself on delivering. I can't say it's going to be, you know, it's like a pilot.
00:33:24
Speaker
As long as you're landed, like you're good. It's not all going to be smooth, but I guarantee you I'll land it. I've never missed the landing, but it has been, I mean, some of them are rocky, but like perseverance, like people, they lose a lot of faith. I'm not one of those people. Like obviously problems, they're not good. The optics, they're not good, but.
00:33:44
Speaker
You just have to stay, you know, headstrong and say, all right, we're going to work through this. Like this is yet just one more thing. So I just treat all of those things as lessons. You know, I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot from those painful moments where your production environment is literally on fire and Reddit is telling you that you should jump off a cliff. It's like, yeah, some people might buckle under pressure, but I just took that as an opportunity to figure out, well, where did we kind of go wrong?
00:34:09
Speaker
And more often than not, it's not so much that we could have done things differently because, yeah, if we would have started the game development lifecycle and we had a hundred million dollars, I would have hired more engineers. But the fact is, is we didn't have a hundred million dollars in the bank. So I hired the people that I could afford. They passed all of my checks and I interviewed. So I couldn't have done anything different, honestly. So, yeah, I mean, now the next one, I will approach it slightly different.
00:34:38
Speaker
I wouldn't say I would ever go back and change anything. I'm here. As a CTO founder, how do you keep organization of your thoughts? Are you a OneNote user? Are you a drive user? Do you take notes? Do you just keep everything in there and hope that you remember when it's time? Is there a system that you have? I wish there was a system. I'm very capable of keeping a virtual to-do list in my head. It's a very long to-do list.
00:35:09
Speaker
the things that my fiance wants me to do around the house, that my children need me to do. I also have an ex-wife. I've got a mom who needs me. I've got sisters. It's a very long list, but like I said, I always stick
00:35:21
Speaker
I will deliver. I'm only one person, though. I can't operate in parallel. At one point in my life, I thought I could multitask. And I was convinced that you can multitask despite every book you ever read, say, focus on one thing, get it done, move on to the next, do it in serial. The truth is, is you have to do it in serial. There's just no way. I haven't met anybody. I know some people are convinced. But yeah, I use, oddly enough, it's a very simple application. It's called Microsoft To Do.
00:35:51
Speaker
It's not sophisticated. It was actually an acquisition. I forget the name of the company that they acquired, but there's a desktop app, there's a mobile app on Android. And anytime that I think I need to do something that I might, maybe it's not a significant thing that just like stands out. I'll put it in that. But that's as sophisticated as it gets for me. Right now I've got about, there's 27 to-dos on my to-do list. I'll probably not get most of those done in May, but yeah, I do try to clear it out at the end of the month and go through and say,
00:36:20
Speaker
still need to do this because some things I put in there that I realized I didn't need to do that, but I just didn't want to forget. But no, I don't really have a sophisticated process. I probably should start focusing on that because as I get older, it's getting increasingly more difficult. Yeah, I like the concept of the to-do list. I remember when I transitioned from being a customer support agent where I would see how many tickets I closed a day to becoming more of a project manager.
00:36:45
Speaker
At the end of the day, it's like, oh, I got nothing done today. In support, I close 50 tickets a day. Here, I do nothing. But once you have a checkbox or a list, you can start crossing things off or at least start attacking. I feel like you feel more fulfilled inside once you were able to start getting some of that stuff done. I think with the ever-growing list. Yeah, I actually read, well, I say I read, I listened to an audio book that was about using checklists and two-thirds of the audio book
00:37:11
Speaker
was about how doctors and the healthcare industry uses checklist for like surgical procedures. And it really enlightened me on how effective something as simple as a checklist could be, not only to make sure that you don't forget an important step in a surgical procedure, but that closure, just knowing that I've done that, there's like a dopamine hit, like you said, like it's a sense of satisfaction that is,
00:37:40
Speaker
If you don't have it, it's missing and I didn't know I needed it, but I do need it. I love checking things off now. I don't aggressively just go through the to-do list to just get those dopamine hits. There are days, if not sometimes potentially a week or two that go by where I'm just like, I don't feel like knocking anything off the checklist. I need to fix that, but yeah.
00:37:58
Speaker
It's useful. Yeah, we actually, we worked with a company called Odin. I'm not sure if you've used Odin before. It's an add-on for Unity. It's called Odin and Inspector. It basically builds the list directly into Unity. So like if you're an engineer and you need to know what steps I need to do to be able to push this to release it, we'll always show you the same thing over and over again. It's basically an internal checklist and they're super popular. So it's an interesting thing. I'll have to look at that. We're a Unity customer. I love Unity.
00:38:28
Speaker
Yeah, we do have our own project management. We didn't build it. We use a project management application. It's from Microsoft. It's called Azure DevOps. It's like Jira or any Atlassian product. I wish all of these things could speak to one another or if there was just one consistent user interface because I also use an Outlook. When someone tags me in a Word doc, I get a daily feed, but they're all just disconnected.
00:38:57
Speaker
So if we take a look at it again, the last six months, are there any major learnings? Like what would you say was like a light bulb moment that maybe it was more than six months, right? But what was that light bulb moment that went off and say, Hey, this is a nugget. I want to continue to remember use any of that makes sense. This is going to sound obvious. Uh, if anybody who's listening to software engineer, they're going to just mumble under their breath. Um, going back to like the two kind of.
00:39:23
Speaker
approaches to building a bit. Like you have to get the product out the door and then like the team or maybe even like the style of project management that you use to get to market is very different than like the team or management style that you're going to use to like evolve the product and remain viable. But testing, software testing. I'm as an engineering lead, as a person who kind of steers the engineering team, I'm not against not testing extensively.
00:39:53
Speaker
Um, there's books, articles written about testing in production. So like, how do you simulate load? Do you spend four months trying to build out virtual users that perform very differently than organic users? Just to find out that the four months you spent testing your software, like stress testing was just inadequate because the way that players actually played the game was completely
Lessons on Testing and AI in Gaming
00:40:15
Speaker
different. Um, but the lesson I did learn, um, from, from not testing enough was that.
00:40:21
Speaker
You need, regardless, if you have a date that you need to hit, you know, if there's a timed event, like some opportunity in the market that you're like, if I don't get this product launched before this day, we're not gonna make it, or it's just not gonna be useful. And you can't include testing, you know, either from a time perspective or a resource perspective. I could have had more people and I probably could have been able to test more, but we had a fixed number of people and we just didn't have the budget time-wise to test.
00:40:51
Speaker
Um, I learned that lesson the hard way, very, very hard way, especially with a game with this skill. We had no idea how successful it was going to be. Um, but it was very successful, very heavily used. And we ultimately found out that we made some poor architectural decisions. So just focus on testing. And this is something that a lot of engineers juniors don't necessarily, I can't say they don't appreciate it, but like they'll write code and they're like, Oh, QA will ultimately figure out if there's any issues, but like really subscribe to like a
00:41:22
Speaker
a hybrid, not entirely test driven development, but when you're building the product, make sure that everything that you're building, like specifically on the backend is built in such a way that you can test it. So if you have a third party dependency, build your component that consumes it in such a way that you can simulate, well, if that third party is offline, how does my component, it sounds like a no brainer because it is like in the enterprise world, we would have never shipped anything without full test coverage.
00:41:48
Speaker
We were in this startup, guerrilla warfare, get it out the door. And it wasn't that we weren't aware that we weren't testing. It was above board. Hey, we're cutting corners here. But that bit me in the ass, bad. And I'll never do that again. So if someone says we have to hit this June deadline, but we only have four people and I do the math and it says I need seven people, we're going to get seven people or I'm not involved with it. That's it. I'm done. I'm out.
00:42:17
Speaker
testing. Everyone that's listening, remember, always test. Don't test in production, even though it's the easiest way to do it. We're actually seeing a big spike in live ops, I feel like in 2023. I know it's been around for more than years than that, but I feel like live ops helps kind of keep an eye on all these different metrics on what's connecting, what's working, and what's not working. We're seeing more and more companies release different live ops products such I think can help with stuff like that. Yeah, no doubt. I think for us, we didn't put any energy into
00:42:47
Speaker
how our systems would behave if other components that were out of our control went down or performed in less than ideal way. So there's a, I guess you call it like an expression or an approach like graceful degradation. So instead of your software just coming to a screeching halt,
00:43:07
Speaker
Are there ways for you to engineer your services in such a way that if a downstream service does go offline that the game doesn't go offline and players can still do something but maybe an element of the game is down. Amazon has this. I know I've used the Amazon mobile app where it's like I click add the cart and it's like I'm sorry the cart service is unavailable. I'm like well how.
00:43:29
Speaker
Well, I can still browse, but I mean, that's a pretty essential component of an e-commerce engine is the shopping cart, but it did kind of enlighten me a little bit. It's like, I would have never thought about that. If you would have tasked out, you know, 10 years ago, like building e-commerce, it would have been so tightly coupled together, um, that if, if one thing didn't work, none of it will work. But yeah, that's, it's, it's permanently etched in the back. Like when I think about how I'm going to approach the next game that we're building.
00:43:57
Speaker
we're going to spend a lot more time on building highly testable software.
00:44:01
Speaker
Are there any trends in the, uh, industry that are really exciting to you that you can't wait to either get your hands on? I mean, I know you're already dabbling with some of this, right? But, but is there anything else that, whether it be a generated AI or anything like that, that you're looking to, Hey, how can I incorporate this? I guess what excites you? Yeah. So, uh, I'm in love with low code, no code, which is kind of ironic as an engineer, you would think that I would do everything within my control to make sure that the robot overlords don't replace me.
00:44:30
Speaker
But I learned probably about 10, maybe 15 years ago that what excited me the most about software engineering was not software engineering. It's not that I can't wait to sit in front of an IDE or a text editor and write code. What I love is solving problems. And it just so happens that my medium of choice is digital, software. I could go build physical things
00:44:59
Speaker
Um, I'd imagine that the, the satisfaction of building, like if you're a woodworker or a metal worker, it's the same. It's like, are you in love with metal or you love with like the fact that you can build something that's useful. So it was, it was something I've always, you know, in the enterprise space, they use these tools called BPM, business process management. So it's like drag and drop, like when a new customer, you know, send it in voice and, you know,
00:45:25
Speaker
prior to me being introduced to BPMs, we were writing everything from scratch. So when I saw BPMs, I'm thinking, good God, this would have saved me hundreds of hours. But then you look at the cost of a BPM, it's like, wouldn't save me any money, but it would have made my life easier. So low code, no code has evolved and it's at a great place. We have a lot, there's a lot of room for improvement, but the intersection of AI and low code, no code, specifically on like the generative AI,
00:45:54
Speaker
And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert with anything ML, AI, big, like, I know how it works at the most basic level, but I think where I'm really, what I'm really excited about is being able to describe what I need for a boilerplate project in plain English. Instead of having to click and do this and go to GitHub or go to Stack Exchange and
00:46:21
Speaker
Like I'm spending, like if I were to create a mobile app from scratch that needs to be cross platform, I'd argue you're at hundreds of hours of just not wasted time. You know, if you're a consultant, you're getting paid, but it's just yet more things that you have to do that really aren't fun. So, um, I'm keeping track of where the generative AI and the low code, no code or software engineering specific, um, are, are going to intersect because.
00:46:48
Speaker
I think I had mentioned to you when we first started talking, like if you're not super useful now, these tools won't make you super useful. But if you're super useful now, you're going to be a rock star. It's going to be incredible. So like being able to provision, you know,
00:47:05
Speaker
a mobile app in 10-15 minutes by just describing basically, I need a mobile app that uses .NET, C-sharp, cross-platform, you know, Maui that has an RSS reader just in English and have the boilerplate code be generated for you. So then you can go in and add the layer that is unique about what the idea or the app is.
00:47:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's something I'm closely following. I haven't done a whole lot of actual work with it. I do use chat GPT, not for software engineering, but more like just writing things in very articulate ways. But yeah, I'm excited about where that's going.
00:47:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a great point, right? It's not going to make an unsuccessful worker successful. It's someone that can understand how can I layer this on what I do for my daily job to make it better. And everyone I talk to, I say if you're not using either chat GPT or one of those tools on your daily basis to help enhance your work, it's not going to do your work.
00:48:03
Speaker
You're going to fall behind very quickly, right? It makes my emails go from an okay email to a great email. It makes my presentations go from a crummy presentation to a smart, like just tons out there. And yeah, being able to become the composer who can put all this stuff together. I think that's where you're going to succeed if you can start to learn how to use these tools now. I think coding is a great example of it, right? I can't code, but if I type this stuff in, I can elaborate what I want to do. It builds it for me.
00:48:31
Speaker
It's not going to make it successful, but at least I can get started with that, right? It's a starting spot for everything. It's also very useful for learning. The few times I did leverage chat GPT for tech-related stuff, I was, let's say for instance, there's a language that I've been dabbling with. I'm a .NET developer. I program in C-sharp. That's pretty much the only language that if someone asks me,
00:48:54
Speaker
What are you an expert? It's C sharp. I know PHP. I played with Ruby. I played with Python. I can, obviously I can read all of these programming languages, but if you said write a program in this language, I wouldn't even know like, well, what tools do I need to install? I have to go Google it. So I'm trying to learn Rust. It's a language that's very popular nowadays, very lightweight, very safe.
00:49:19
Speaker
And I was like, you know what, let me go ask chat GPT how, how Russ compares or like, how would one who's a C sharp developer, you know, we live in a world in dotnet it's a managed language. So we've got garbage collection. I don't worry about memory and you know, maybe I'm a little spoiled, but it's also that comes with a certain amount of overhead. I think that's a lot of overhead in some instances. So I went to chat GPT and it described to me in a way that made sense to me as a dotnet developer,
00:49:48
Speaker
the way that things work in Rust. And I was like, well, hell, there's no article in the internet that was written that did it that well. So I'm using it as an education tool on the engineering side. I don't necessarily, like you said, wanted to do my work, but I'm learning quicker because it knows all of this and can put those things. Now you do have to fact check it, but thankfully with a code, if it doesn't compile, there's clearly something wrong with it.
00:50:13
Speaker
And for anyone listening, fact check anything chat GPT tells you. Yes. Yes. It may make you sound smarter, but you need to fact check that to make sure that that it's right. Or else you're just going to look like a fool. Yeah. On the flip side, what trends, and I think I might know your answer, are keeping you up at night. Are you nervous about. Oh man. Trends that are keeping me up.
Skepticism About the Metaverse and Real-World Interactions
00:50:37
Speaker
I don't necessarily lose sleep over trends, but I know you threw around that metaverse word.
00:50:43
Speaker
And like this illusion, I'm looking at my Oculus Mediquest Pro, whatever they call it nowadays. I don't see it. And I certainly don't want to contribute to a future where people are at home with their VR goggles instead of going out and interacting with humans in brick and mortar. But I am concerned for society as a whole, like the current generation, if you grow up or growing up with a VR headset or an AR headset, or even take a step back, like,
00:51:14
Speaker
We just had some family in town, and it was brought to my attention that the children born during the pandemic didn't really know how to, they weren't socialized, because a child that was born five years ago, if I wave to them, they get all giggly and smiley, but I've been seeing more babies, and I'm a baby fanatic. I've got three kids, and it's just, it's an odd thing. I love children, and it's like you'd wave to these kids that were,
00:51:40
Speaker
born during this bubble and they just don't know how to respond to it. Like, oh, who's this gross looking old guy kind of deal. But like, you can't, we can't, we can't let go of that. We can't, you know, not, not socialize. So like the metaverse, this illusion where we're going to walk down virtual shopping aisles and go look at virtual goods, just have Amazon ship it straight to me. I don't like it. I don't think that's going to stick. I hope I pray, whatever I need to do a rain dance. I don't want that.
00:52:09
Speaker
Um, I think what we're doing at Atlas reality, which is building that kind of collaboration between, or that what we call that virtuous cycle between the real world and the virtual or the alternate reality, uh, is the way to go. But yeah, the metaverse and, you know, 3d environments, that that's, that's the one thing I'm just like, I don't get it. And maybe I am wrong, but Jen, generally speaking, like historically, when those things don't make sense to me, they don't stay around for very long.
00:52:39
Speaker
So, you know, and some people thought the same thing about Web3 because I was very, if you are a follower of mine on LinkedIn, I was talking a lot of smack about Web3, but I never said it wasn't going to stay as a tech. Blockchain is here. It's a really great tech, but this idea that everything needs to be minted on the blockchain. No, get out of here. Well,
00:53:01
Speaker
Bo, that's all I have for you today. I appreciate you coming on. You had some great stories to tell. For anyone listening, check out Atlas Reality. Check out Atlas Earth. They're all available iOS Play Store. Is there anything else, Bo, you want to share with where people can find you or anything in general? No, don't be shy. I'm a LinkedIn person. I don't post much on any other social network, but yeah, you can add me, follow me. I do share a lot of
00:53:27
Speaker
Lessons learned. I'm talking a lot less about Web3 now and talking about remote work and engineering from afar kind of stuff and building teams. A lot of people ask me, what's the most difficult thing you do as a technologist? And I'm like, hire, hire. Like everything else has been solved, but like no one's really solved the hiring problem. But no, that's it. Thank you for your time. It's been great, man. Yeah. Thank you, Bowman. I hope you have a great rest of your day and thanks for listening.