We are joined by Niko Vuori, Founder & CEO of Blockstars NFT
Niko is a serial entrepreneur who has been playing games (especially management sims - his favorite is Football Manager) for a lifetime, and has been making games for more than a decade, since the early days of Zynga (where he was the General Manager of FrontierVille and Zynga Poker). After leaving Zynga he co-founded social casino pioneer Rocket Games in 2013 (sold to Penn National Gaming in 2016) and co-founded voice gaming innovator Drive.fm in 2018 (raised $15 million from top-tier investors). He has been a crypto investor & advisor since 2015.
Chris: Blockstars is a music management simulation game. How does it work? How do the Blockstars engage with the management of music and a simulation game?
Niko: Players own Blockstars with various musical talents, and put them together to form bands. Each type of band has different requirements - for example, a band might be as simple as just a single solo vocalist, or as complex as an 8-Blockstar orchestra that requires a variety of musical skills ranging from the piano to the cello and the flute and so on.
In addition to musical skills, each Blockstar has a variety of other talents, each with a unique impact on the game. For example, some Blockstars have strong promotional skills which provides a boost to music sales. Others are really good at songwriting, others at recording in a studio, others at social media. Some have charisma that eventually translates into a high level of fame, meaning that Blockstar and the band they are in can sell out huge concert venues. And so on. There is a huge variety of ways to play the game, depending on what kinds of Blockstars a player has in their collection.
Each Blockstar is completely unique, with its very own upgrade path (some Blockstars are born, i.e. minted, with higher potential than others), and it is up to the player to uncover the personality of the Blockstars through gameplay. We actually base every single Blockstar’s personality on the Myers-Briggs framework, meaning that some Blockstars have better chemistry with other Blockstars - some Blockstars are total divas and impossible to work with, and so they might actually be great as a solo vocalist. Others are super-easy to work with, and therefore might be good in a larger band, with many members.
Ultimately, the goal of the game, like with most management sims, is to make progress by improving the skills of the Blockstars, putting together progressively better bands, producing better and better music, and earning more and more in-game resources, that then allow the player ultimately to own a record label and other virtual real estate.
In our case, because everything is designed from the ground up to be optimized for the blockchain, our game is true Play-to-Earn, allowing players to earn our fungible token through gameplay, which they can then sell on crypto exchanges, or re-invest into the game to earn even more.
Chris: That’s quite different, The NFTs are inspired by block-building toys. How did you guys come up with this idea? Why did you pick the music industry?
Niko: We just love the “Blockstars” name - Rockstars on the Blockchain - and so we kind of had to go with the blocky, voxelated look, right?!
But seriously, we wanted our Blockstars to be really unique and have really high utility not just in our game but across the metaverse. So each Blockstar is a professionally-designed, professionally-rigged and professionally-built super-high-res 3D model, and every owner of a Blockstar actually gets the .fbx file so that they can animate them however they want. That means that every owner of a Blockstar can use them not just as their PFP if they want, but you can actually use Blockstars as your walking, talking, dancing 3D avatar across the entire metaverse.
We picked the music industry because music is universal - every single nation and culture has music. And we want Blockstars to be accessible to everyone globally, so we’re actually launching with 96 unique band genres to ensure there is something for everyone. So if you want to put together a K-Pop band, you can. Or you want a solo dance music DJ, that’s possible. Or maybe polka? Or cowpunk? Or Crunk? Or roots reggae? There are so many possibilities.
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Chris: You have picked the Solana blockchain for Blockstars NFT. What is your rationale behind it?
Niko: Solana is, after an extensive search and evaluation process of the various options out there, the best place at the moment to build games. It is fast, the fees are extremely low and the ecosystem is mature enough to provide the tools and services that a game developer needs to be successful.
The Solana team also shares our team’s thesis, which is that with every new technology revolution and platform, gaming is one of the first and definitely one of the biggest use-cases to emerge. Look at social networks back in the day - huge companies like Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and so on emerged as the biggest companies to build on top of MySpace and then of course Facebook. On the mobile app stores, gaming represents around 80% of the total revenue and value-creation, and the first multi-billion dollar businesses built on mobile platforms were all games, like Supercell and King. Blockchain will be no different - if we want to on-ramp the mass market to blockchain, it has to be super-simple to do, and games are one of the best ways to do this. Because games are fun and people naturally want to play games and gravitate towards them!
Chris: There are 10,000 NFTs dropping soon. When is that? What is the release date?
Niko: Our mint date is on Saturday February 5th, at 8pm UTC.
The mint will be exclusively on Magic Eden.
Chris: What will be the minting cost of each NFT? The gas is sure to be pretty low. How much will that be?
Niko: A big part of the reason why we chose Solana is that gas fees are really low. Ethereum, with its notoriously high gas fees, is fine for non-gaming NFTs that are bought and sold relatively infrequently, but for a game like Blockstars where we anticipate high trading volume, and a lot of other on-chain transactions and activity, we want to ensure that gas fees are low.
Chris: Similarly, how can I mint a Blockstar NFT?
Niko: Get on the whitelist, and be sure to show up 15 minutes before 8pm UTC on Saturday February 5th!
Chris: You have airdrops and giveaways lined up. How does the investor keep himself updated on the latest news at Blockstar?
Niko: We are most active on our Discord and our Twitter. You can also get all our social links from our website - and for those who want even more details than we can get into during this interview, our whitepaper with a huge amount of detail on game design, tokeminocs, the roadmap, our team and so much more, is at whitepaper.blockstars.gg
Chris: Finally, please highlight the key benefits of owning a Blockstar token? What else can one do with their NFT?
Niko: The most engaging part of owning a Blockstar is going to be playing the game to discover their unique talents and the optimal upgrade path. Of course you can use them as your PFP and take the 3D model out to the metaverse - but the real fun and unique part of owning a Blockstar is going to be the gameplay. Developing your Blockstar is going to be a big part of why people will want to hold their tokens - upgrading a Blockstar token through gameplay will result in more utility than the token held on mint day.
