 Welcome back to enter the ether or the new podcast all about the upcoming third person Boba ethereal clash of souls joining me as Oh, I'm the man goose. But joining me as always is my friend and co-host jelly knees. How you doing jelly? I'm great man goose. Happy to be here. And we have a third person with us this week. Crazy. I wonder who that is. That's UG mud right there who worked on the marketing team. If I'm not crazy. Yes. So mud give us like a general like overview about what you do for UG. Okay, so I do work on marketing. As you mentioned, I also dabble slightly into the community realm of sorts as well. And they're kind of under a whole they kind of go hand in hand usually if we're putting something out for the community. It's generally because of us or lack there of as of recently, but that's okay. So I usually do a lot of we were planning a lot of things coming up and we're going to be planning like all the posts how the information is going to be coming out. The order in which things come out is the main part of it. And then the other flip side community wise. I usually try to answer questions in the discord. I try to interact with the with our community base. Yeah, I also do a little bit of work on the social medias, but other than that, that's about it. And there is a reason we've got mud on this week as you may have already been able to see. We've all three got undying game shirts on jelly has probably the fanciest one. Oh, yes. Black and white. It's incredible. On the top and Iran on the bottom, right? Correct. You can't quite see the bottom. Yeah. Jump up and down a bit like a contrast. So now what we're going to be talking about with marketing is these are not available to everybody. They're not going to be monetizing the game. I don't believe until we've seen a little more of a proof of concept sort of some gameplay. Yeah. So mud, why don't you talk about that a little bit? Why you guys haven't done a Kickstarter yet? Why you haven't done? Why you're not selling these shirts to everybody? Okay. So first off, I want to clarify in the shirts because I am allowed to do that. So these shirts that you have are for us. The black one is employees and partners. Of Undying Games. The shirt that Jelly is wearing is going to be a limited time shirt that we will actually be selling, but later. But it's going to be limited edition, very limited quantities. And it's going to just be like a special promotional shirt. So not everybody will be able to get that forever, but also Jelly has one. So what I'm hearing is that Mangus and I need to place an order for all of them and then scalp them on eBay for $5,000. No, you need to get the bots to buy them so that you don't have to do it. And then you scalp them online for eBay. I'll get my 3080 bot and just transfer it over to be an ethereal shirt bot. There we go. Oh yeah. You don't need Bitcoin. You just need ethereal shirts. But yeah, no, that's what those shirts are going to be. The reason why we haven't done like a crowdfunding yet or anything like that is because we are going to want to do the proof of concept. As you said, we want to show gameplay first before we do any sort of crowdfunding, which we will be having. It's just we have to get to point A before we can do point B. We do have a plan. We do have a progression as on marketing. We do have like phases and stuff that we have planned to go. It's just we need to get there first to in order to do it. Yeah, I think as I've said before, and I'll say it again, if you guys start monetizing before we get some gameplay, then I will be very angry. You'll get the mean goose as I called it. No, no, no, no, no. It sounds like you guys have the correct order plan there. I think everybody wants proof of concept before we do anything. Very true. Even Owen was in the discord today talking about that, that the plan is to definitely show proof of concepts before any kind of monetization, which is nice. Not that it's not nice to see from you, but but also to see from the director of the. Yes, yes. As well, like we're basically on the same stage or in agreement. Yeah. Or is a very important thing, at least for me to see that. Yeah. Now you did mention crowdfunding. Do you guys know what you have kind of have planned Kickstarter and you go go that sort of thing. Yeah, so we have mentioned that we will be probably most likely doing a Kickstarter. We were going to do the Kickstarter for to help get access for our pre alpha phase. So basically keys will be sold there. We will have like different tiers, but I can't tell you like the individual tiers themselves. I'm not allowed. You can't tell us what you get with the different tiers or how much they're going to cost or anything like that. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, we have a basically kind of set in stone. It's not like crazy or anything, but you know, just the usual that you. I mean, the important thing pre alpha access is tied into the Kickstarter is what you said. Correct. Okay. Yep. There'll be two phases of alpha, but yeah, the Kickstarter will get you a key. Good to go. Good to go. So some of the other monetization strategies since we're, we're on that topic all podcast. What kind of things do you guys plan to do to monetize the game because you do need to be able to make it sustainable. And all these people need to get paid, including you, bud. You need to get paid to eventually eventually. But so like loot boxes, which it's on. Oh, that loot boxes not happening. So we, we believe pretty across the board that loot boxes are not the greatest. They basically you pay into them and it's kind of like a chance of you getting what you want. We would rather have you just buy what you want. Like if you want a skin that we've released, go for it. We don't really want you to take smite for instance, we don't want you to like roll into a group of items and then maybe not even get what you're looking for. And you're going to have to spend and spend money on extra roles and everything. We'd rather just have you, have you like what you see, buy what you want. And we're pretty, pretty happy with that. You guys don't want your monetization to be predatory in that it requires. Don't want it to be a lottery. A considerable amount of money in order to get the one thing that we wanted. Right. Is there any consideration already to, for lack of a better way to put it, skin pricings or cosmetic pricings for the game? Yes and no, they're not solidified, but they're definitely obviously talked about. We have to. It is, it is our department. The skin pricings aren't solidified, but there will be skins coming out with the alpha phases. Every myth will have a skin. So that is a plus. So yeah, that would be great. So that's good information though. So I know that you guys aren't planning to roll out all of the myths. Immediately as soon as the alpha starts to roll out in phases, but the myth that do roll out those will have alternate skins at least one. Yes. Yes. One each. Yes. And well, though for the alpha, is there monetization involved in the alpha? Like will, if I have an account, right? And I'm playing Malaya and I buy, do I need to buy her skin or will I have access to it in the alpha, but won't later? How is that going to work? Do you know? I know the myths themselves are going to be, I believe, free in the alpha. So I don't think you have to buy those as like access. These skins, I don't know if we would for testing purposes. I don't know particularly if we would roll them out free for testing phases and then maybe on like a solid beta or alpha release launch. Or sorry, sorry, a solid beta or like actual release if we would bring up the store and then you would have to buy them then. So I'm not sure if the alpha phases are more of like, you can test them out and then later on, if we do like a beta or release phase if you would have to buy them then. I'm not sure when the store is going up. I just know they're going with the game. And you may not have had this conversation yet. Have you guys talked about potentially doing similar to I know when Valorant released into its kind of open or closed beta. Yeah. If you bought any of the premium currency to buy skins and things, they refunded that with a percentage over 120% of the currency. Yes. It lets people support you but you're rewarding them for that support at the same time. Is that something you guys have considered? We have talked about a lot of different strategies on that end. It also, I don't think we've talked about that one specifically. But we've talked about a lot of different ways to help out with the monetization and whatnot for like rewards for like alpha beta into the future. I've never heard of that. That's a great idea. Yeah, they did that. That was great. I've dropped some money on it. Yeah, I did too. And it was a return on investment for the players but also help you support the development of the game earlier on without feeling like you're just going to lose out on that later. Right, right, right. Yeah, Overwatch, I played since, was it the alpha or just very, very, I think it was just very, very early beta and unlocked so many skins and all this stuff. And then when the game came out, it was just all gone. All gone. This is sad. No, that's why I tried to preface. I'm not sure when the store comes out because I would personally strongly fight if they were going to, say, erase what you unlocked. If you bought something, I would strongly fight that that does not get erased because that would feel terrible. Maybe with any currency that would be fine but like, yeah, definitely purchase something that... Right, yeah, no. What about a battle pass? You guys have thought about battle passes at all? We have. What was it? That sounds like a, yeah, that was a happy sigh attached to that. Yes, while I can't talk about the details on it, we are fleshing it out so it is still in development. We do have a plan for a battle pass. It'll kind of resemble probably the same as other battle passes that you see in games where it's like events and whatever, you know what I mean? But we want that to be available for our testing phases. We are aiming to launch it for our testing phases, but like I said, I can't tell you about it, but while it resembles a typical battle pass, we are going to put our own twist on it, of course. Will there be the free and premium versions of the battle pass like you see a lot of the time or will it just be one premium battle pass? Um, I don't think I can answer that for you. Okay, understandable. I think that covers a lot of my questions, most of my questions I had specifically about monetization for UG. Did you have anything else, Jelly? Not at the moment, I don't think. Okay. I hope I answered them for you guys, okay? You did! Actually, I do have a question, slightly towards monetization but not necessarily at the same time. Okay. Is there a plan to kind of reset accounts in entering different phases? So for instance, if Mangus and I are in the alpha, and when it goes into a, let's say it goes into an open beta, this is just conjecture. Right. Will your accounts be reset to a prior status, basically to even the playing field for everyone going in on that open beta or will it, will we keep the progression we had before? See, I'm not sure about that. I do know if you buy into the alpha, you're in forever. It's like it's a one-time, like between phases it's a one-time thing. But only that, I believe only the alphas you have to actually buy into. I think the beta is free. But anyway, but you won't be charged again to get in, you know what I mean? It won't deny you access between the phases once you're in, you're in. I don't know if we would be resetting. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure on that one. I would have to get back to you. What about the monetization of items? Because in Paragon, like, you didn't have all the items. You had to either stumble upon them through grinding them out or you had to buy the loot boxes for Paragon. Oh, I forgot they did that. Yeah. Oh, God. A lot of people didn't realize how big of a problem that was because, you know, if you play... I think I had too much currency to even have to deal with it. Paragon from pretty early on, so I've always had all the items anyway. But like, I imagine people just coming in and didn't have something or just screwed. There were a lot of mandatory sort of items in Paragon. Are the items going to be available to everyone? Can you answer that at all? I'm pretty sure they're going to be available to everybody. I'm like 90% sure on that. I think if Owen comes with his knife, I'll let you know, but I'm pretty sure. I'm just going to build full tank zero every game. I don't care what anybody tells me. I'll fly around full tank zero doing zero damage. You're going to fly with all that armor. Magic, dude. Yeah, he's got wings. So that's it for just straight up UG questions. I kind of wanted to just talk about monetization in general within the gaming industry since we have a marketing person with us. Okay. I'll pose this question to both you and Jelly. Why do you think, and I have my answer already. I discussed it with McKenshee on his YouTube channel. But why do you think that monetization policies have become so predatory in recent times? I think it's because a lot of, so you either see, like you buy a game up front and then you kind of get some stuff and maybe some DLC later and you buy that. I think I see the most predatory marketing strategies with free games because they have to make money. You know what I mean? Like they're giving you a game for free. That's a product they've spent like a lot on and they have to make that back. Otherwise it's a failed investment. So I think that's probably why a lot of marketing strategies I've seen from other games are so like they need to bring it in. You know what I mean? What about you, Jelly? I would agree absolutely that free games are the biggest culprits of monetization aggression is the way that I always think about it. But it seems like even, I mean we've had several stories recently about games being shipped at a $60 price tag with ads in the middle of the game that are unskippable just as part of the game, which doesn't make any sense. And it seems like it's people, it's the inconvenience. If you're being inconvenienced in any way, I can charge you to get rid of that inconvenience. Go to gank top lane ad. Did you want to gank here? Unfortunately, you have to watch a 30 second ad. Oh gosh. And I think it's purely, I do think several times it's been said that games are getting more expensive to make because they need to look nicer. They take longer. There's a whole bunch of things in there. So I do think the gaming industry needs to price themselves upwards more than they have. We've had a $60 price tag for a while. I'm not saying like skip to a hundred bucks, but I'd be okay with a gradual increase with inflation kind of deal on the gaming industry. If it meant we didn't get such predatory things like loot boxes or everything's a cosmetic or I mean in the case of Valorant, you've got skin lines that are costing you $100 and then an extra $100 on top of that to get upgrades for that skin line. That's insane. Like that just doesn't make any sense for a skin in a video game that's free. For me to spend $200 on one skin line is ridiculous. Yeah, that's the thing with a lot of the free to play games is you end up spending more on them than you would if you would have just purchased the game up front. I think the problem stems from the explosion of the mobile market now because mobile games came out, started to be free and then they but they were using extremely predatory pricing and that because you get it on your phone is just a little dinky thing. You don't even realize you're spending that much money on it. The next thing you know you've dropped $300 on a very cheaply made game just to buy the rubies or the gold or whatever. Just one more roll. Yeah, exactly. They used to have figures that they would bring in millions of dollars a day from people just skipping a level for 99 cents. They were on a tough level so for 99 cents they skip it and they would bring in millions of dollars a day for a game that you just swipe once and that's the game. And they would make the game like that. They would make one level just really hard and then the next few levels would be much easier so that you would ugh. So it's almost like hitting a paywall. Yeah, sort of. Unless you were really good at Candy Crush. I'm a pro. But yeah, I think a lot of the PC gaming companies looked at that, saw how much money was being made in the mobile market and decided to kind of swing that way. And then I'm not saying, I mean you guys are going to be free to play but I'm not saying that you guys are automatically going to have predatory pricing because there's kind of rolling around. Indie companies I think especially need to be free to play anymore to compete in today's market. Right, because people don't want to get eyes on them. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think we have seen a lot of evidence of that in some of the para-zombies in that the early monetization or lack of return sometimes it puts off the community in a lot of ways. Yeah. And it raises the community's expectations too. Like if you... If they want to see basically. Yeah. Which is why it's great that you guys are showing proof of concept before you're charging anyone money. Yes. Mangus and I have had several conversations about that. Oh boy. Just on podcast and off. Yeah. Just about the that if there is monetization beforehand it will come across super, super sleazy. No, yeah. I'm really happy to hear that that's not the method you guys are going with. I agree with that. If anybody tries... If we come to a meeting and somebody's like, hey guys, we have this great idea. I'll be like, no way. Stop it. We're going to implement loot boxes at the beginning of every game where it's just a random hero. You don't even know who you're going to play. You're just going to loot box for your hero and then that's the one you're playing. Congratulations. We've seen that with a lot of games though. I've seen people start asking for money before they've ever done anything with the game or they'll just stream them dicking around in the Unreal Engine and then ask for donations. Well, we had that one Paragon project that... Yeah, a Gora with an H. Yeah. That showed up, asked for money, and then disappeared just as quickly. Yes. Well, they showed up, asked for money, disappeared, came back with a new website, but the only thing that worked on the website was the donation. Oh my goodness. Yeah, crazy. They suck a lot of people in. I don't know bad about that. Oh, that just sounds like a scam. Speaking of websites, I have a question for you, Mud, that you might not be able to answer. Okay. When is the updated website coming out? Can't tell you. I knew that was the answer for that one. I literally check the website like every day and I'm like, is it today? Nope, not today. Today? Not today. Today? No, not today. Man. Man. Okay, Mud. Sorry. With a lot of the micro transactions out there and then you've got premium currency, regular currency, you've got all these different things, when's the trailer coming out? Oh gosh. Why is that at the end? Question. It was like money, money, money video. Almost had her. Very, very smooth. Almost had her. Oh goodness. Whoa. Oh God. I can't answer. So okay, Mud, I have a question for you. This is great. This will cover all our bases, Manga. Oh, okay. What were you prepared to tell us that we haven't asked you about? No, that's it. You asked me questions. Are you sure? What are you doing? You ain't got nothing else? You ain't got nothing else up your sleeve? You didn't tell us about? No, not that I'm aware of. Was there something I'm supposed to talk to you about? You know, she's like looking at like a release date on her screen that like we just can't see. And she's like, no, no, no, no. So silly. I had that memorized. I don't need that on a screen. No, we just wanted to make sure that we got every ounce of information out of you that we could for, for the people listening or watching. No, I think, I think it covered everything. We're not doing loot boxes. We really want you to buy what you want. There's the, the one skin on, on alphas or I'm sorry, on testing phases. So it would be alpha when they get put into the game. And then, you know, Kickstarter gives you alpha access has multiple tiers, but I can't tell you the specifics on it. So yeah, I have notes. I have a couple other questions that you may or may not have the answer to unrelated to marketing, I'm sure. Oh, okay. To an extent, to an extent, how long do you, do you have an idea how long the initial alpha phase will be? It'll be 24 hour runtime or will it be weekend similar to what we're seeing? Oh, okay. I see. So what's the server uptime on that? Um, so that, that depends entirely on how the server performance goes. Um, the, I don't know if we're going to be doing, I think we would be, I can't even, I can't even this speculation. Uh, I think, uh, we would be doing like testing phases. However, I'm not sure how long those specific, the actual testing phases are, but the space between the testing phases, like free alpha into regular alpha per se, that would be entirely reliant on the bugs that the community finds, the fixes we need to do patches, whatever, et cetera. Um, the, the initial, how we're going to be doing it. I'm not sure if it's going to be open 24 seven or just like a weekend thing. Okay. So man goose, do you hear that? That means you have to not break anything. No, no, no, no, no, we want you to break stuff. You need to fix it. If you fall off the map, we need to know. Yeah, we just need to make sure that everybody's reporting everything. Yes, it is. All right. So you guys, is it anything else? Jelly? You got anything else for mud? That's all my questions for now. I think that's all I got. Mud. Anything you want to plug before we go? I mean, I stream on Twitch. Mud X underscore. I'll have that linked in the description below jelly. Uh, team as usual, which TV slash jelly knees, you know, hang out. Uh, but mangoes, something we always forget, and especially because this is going on your YouTube. Um, subscribe to man goose. Oh, get updates on more ethereal stuff. I don't think it's like a subscribe bell. Yeah. Yeah. Like the typical YouTube shills. I hate doing that shit. Also, man goose, what a horrifying thought are you going to leave us with this week? Oh, God. Um, that's going to be all for now for mud jelly knees. And I thank you all for tuning in. You guys have a good one. Man. Go.