Battle Drones: The Kiwi game developer building a bridgehead to Web3
Battle Drones provides an immersive experience through gaming, comic series, and collectable assets integrated on the Solana Blockchain. Its mission is to tokenise brand assets and strengthen the future of community building and rewarding.
When Battle Drones: Red Rock Resistance debuts on key game platforms in the coming weeks it will satisfy pent-up interest in the game after its demo version attracted 5,000 downloads at a preview festival held by games distribution giant Steam last year.
Players engaging in Battle Drones: Red Rocks Resistance, where hostile military drones prowl the desert landscape, will also receive a 3D playable version of each Battle Drone NFT (non-fungible token) artwork.
Battle Drones, the Auckland-based venture studio co-founded by Ahmad Duais, is also taking the first steps in showcasing how blockchain technology can help online communities tokenise gaming assets and other forms of digital assets.
As the team lines up its game launch, Battle Drones is establishing a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) to give early communities the ability to shape how the brand franchise develops.
Ahmad and his team encourage everyone to get involved in the initial free game and follow on social platforms, where they can gain early access to the DAO and join the community.
“We believe that it would have been amazing for the larger brands such as Marvel, Spiderman and the likes to have allowed their communities to get more involved in the intellectual property trajectory, and that is why we are driven to showcase how blockchain technology is the best community growing and rewarding tool to build the next generation of brands”.
Web3NZ caught up with Ahmad Duais ahead of the launch of Battle Drones: Red Rock Resistance.
What got you interested in the Web3 space?
I was inspired by Bitcoin and began delving into blockchain and peer-to-peer technologies. Travelling a lot when I was younger, I saw the utility the technology has for international remittance and transparent trade, especially in third-world countries where infrastructure is minimal or non-existent.
As a late teen, I really wanted to learn more about this technology so I started going down the route of engineering. I studied mechatronics engineering at the University of Auckland with first-class honours in human-drone control systems. That’s where my passion for drones came from. We then decided to build something that combines cryptocurrency and drones.
After joining many communities and experiencing the rollercoaster ride over the past few years, I noticed that communities are the most essential part of any business and this was more transparent after we initially grew the Battle Drones community across all of our social channels to 100,000 members in 2021 and we began focusing very heavily on just product development.
I believe that if we can tokenise branding elements and incentivise away from just price, we would remove a lot of the toxicity in the space and really start seeing communities getting involved in brands for their IP. This is when I believe we will see blockchain technology become adopted as standard, as there is truly no better infrastructure for global brands that want to incentivise the community and strengthen customer engagement rates throughout the entire journey of the product.
Tell us about your background and how you got involved in the space.
I’ve been in the crypto space for a few years since first learning about it in 2016, and getting involved in cryptocurrency trading. I have had a lot of business experience over the last eight years coming from an entrepreneurial family and learning from mentors who have assisted me through my successful ventures in the retail market during Covid-19 and then scaling a service business to over 200 staff.
But my passion has always been in technology where I have had the opportunity of working on a cryptocurrency neobank and later co-founding a Web3 venture studio focused on Battle Drones and brand tokenisation infrastructure.
What’s the plan for the upcoming launch of the Battle Drones game?
We are about to launch Battle Drones: Red Rock Resistance, a top-down shooter mobile game on iOS, Android and PC. We believe that we've unique IP around these fun, comical drone characters that are hovering around this universe. It's got its own unique story and differentiates itself from any other product out there.
When we released a demo of the game last year at Steam’s Next Fest APAC, where we reached the second to top broadcasted game, with over 65,000 viewers and 5,000 demo activations.
It sounds like a cool game. But Battle Drones appears to be a way to showcase the underlying Web3 infrastructure you are working on.
Our mission as a company is to onboard brands and companies into the Web3 space so that they can tokenise their communities and allow them to have ownership and gain incentives through the brands' growth. Battle Drones for us is an exciting and unique product that has the opportunity to onboard the next million users into Web3.
Because really, what is crypto, right? It's just a bunch of communities out there believing in different projects. We thought, let's tokenise everything with value from the start, including the NFTs, comic series and the different game titles, and create a community-driven product that rewards its holders through brand assets. The more value an individual provides, the more they are rewarded.
How is this different to buying digital assets relating to other video games and entertainment franchises?
In Fortnite and other games, gamers are restricted in their ability to trade in-game assets, making it difficult for peer-to-peer trading and verification of assets. With integration of assets on-chain, users own the assets, which simplifies and secures the trading process. Providing ownership to assets opens a whole new world, with the ability for assets to become interoperable across different games and platforms.
A majority of the code base around Battle Drones is submerged around blockchain utility, with long-term project sustainability in mind.
So you plan to launch a (DAO) Decentralised Autonomous Organisation for Battle Drones?
Yes, we see Battle Drones as a really strong test case for how brands can tokenise and allow the community to have some form of ownership and say in how the project evolves.
We are currently exploring how the future of our DAO structure will exist as the community is scaled past a million users. We would like to have a pool of between 1,000 to 2,000 brand ambassadors, investors and community members in our exclusive DAO prior to us pivoting our current trajectory as a brand, as any fewer is not a large enough test pool.
How do you see the DAO working in practice once it has been launched?
There are a lot of DAO structures out there, some are really great, some are not. When it's purely driven by how many tokens you own, then it's really not the best type of structure. But when it's based on a large number of community members that are engaged in the product and understand the vision, that's really where you see community, and how community can create something amazing as they all have some say.
For Battle Drones it will not just be about how many tokens you own, that’s a small part of it. It’s also about the number of wallets and how active a member is. The last thing we want is one large whale controlling everything. We will ensure that we minimise single users controlling the IP, regardless of how many wallets they may own.
A prime example of this is what happened with the BadgerDAO hack, and how the community created a DAO-type structure to decide how to recoup funds from the treasury and ensure the sustainability of the project without dumping everything at once. Ultimately, it benefited everyone involved. This is what a strong mission-driven community can do to drive projects a long way.
Why did you decide to tokenise Battle Drones on the Solana blockchain?
We've been building on Solana for at least two years. Solana is great because of the community. People are realising that Ethereum and older chains are not scalable due to gas fees and transactional speeds.
We also were early members of the Solana community and the Battle Drones team alongside the current Solana community, are strong believers that Solana is the best for building global-scale products. We really do believe that the community is going to push Solana to keep innovating and pioneer a lot of sectors that will adopt blockchain infrastructure.
We like the utility that Solana has in terms of faster transactions and lower gas fees, which is important for what we are building. We do understand that Solana is not perfect and they need to solve their current outage issues, but at the end of the day, they could just start charging 50 cents per transaction, and it will still be cheaper and more effective than most other leading chains.
What’s the big priority ahead, and how have you funded Battle Drone’s development?
The core focus is to push out the Battle Drones IP as a whole to one million users in the next few years. We internally bootstrapped our way to US$250,000 in funding, and then investors started coming to us. We’ve raised US$1 million from investors, including Solar Eco Fund, Big Brain Holdings, MarketAcross, and GSR.
We have a go-to-market strategy of initially growing Battle Drones from New Zealand and then going globally, as New Zealand is a great test market. We’re looking for partners and community members who want to join us through our journey and believe in the mission of what we are doing, as we believe this is the start of something amazing for all involved.
In essence, we’re a venture studio focused on changing the entertainment industry, allowing new and upcoming brands to benefit from tokenising and engaging with their communities on a whole new level. That’s the bigger goal we hope to achieve through the success of Battle Drones. Article written by Peter Griffin.