Xai has quickly become one of the most high-profile crypto gaming networks. Ex Populus CEO Tobias Batton shared future plans.
Who is Tobias Batton?
Tobias Batton is a 20-year digital product and marketing executive who has founded 3 companies and successfully exited 2. Prior to joining Ex Populus, Batton powered nearly 1 billion app installs for top mobile game publishers with his Signal Zero publishing and loyalty platform. In 2012, he was hired by Emerge Digital Group to build a mobile division, which helped Emerge become one of the fastest growing companies in the United States #8on the Inc. 500). Prior to that, Batton was invited to build Live Matrix, a real-time event tracking system and time search engine, which was later adopted by Facebook and became the basis of Facebook Live.
Barton was also one of the founding leaders of IGN's Indie Open House, helping independent game developers create and publish their games for desktop and consoles. Barton also founded Resistor, which published several popular online and mobile games, including the popular Clan Wars and the cultural phenomenon iGirl. Barton's first company was founded in 2006 to help independent filmmakers digitally publish their films and was acquired in 2008.
He was responsible for millions of dollars in R&D funding and built a digital advertising loss prevention platform while managing multi-million dollar marketing budgets per quarter. As a result, he drove nearly 1 billion installs to top mobile game publishers while preventing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for ad tech companies representing billions of annual market share. He led the development of mobile SSPs, built a mobile promotion platform with 60 million+ users, and was involved in the launch of thousands of games and apps. He was featured on Fox Business Risk and Reward for his work on game promotion. He has also taught the above topics to PhD candidates at Stanford, MIT, and INSEAD. He has a deep understanding of mobile devices, information theory, Shannon entropy, device fingerprinting, and other related concepts.
Barton has designed and published several best-selling mobile and social games. This led to his publication of a game design framework, Variable Dopamine-Wavelength Mapping Theory - a system based on dopamine spikes in the brain that directly applies to the overlap of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Pavlov's Trigger Framework - which has been featured at many conferences and in many articles, including Forbes. He has been featured in Forbes, Fox Business Network, The New York Times, Wired, IGN, Cnet, and VentureBeat.
What’s next for XAI?
Xai, the third-layer gaming network built on Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum, kicked off 2024 in a dramatic way, launching its first 500,000-blockchain-based blockchain to early backers.$XAI Tokens, and later announced that well-known NFT game studio Laguna Games would bring Crypto Unicorns and related games to the network. So what happens next? More games, of course.
Ex Populus is a gaming studio that co-founder and CEO Tobias Batton described as a "lab company serving the Xai Foundation" in an interview with Decrypt's GG. Their games are scheduled to be among the first to enter the Xai ecosystem in the coming months. The first game is called Final Form, a card battle game with NFTs. According to its website, the game will support NFT cards previously released on Solana, connected to Arbitrum via a bridge. Batton said the game is expected to be released in April, but the exact time may change. He said the game is already playable and "entering the polish phase," so the release date should not be too far away. Another game from Ex Populus is LAMOverse, a long-in-development online action game with colorful, cartoon-style environments. With a community based on gaming influencers such as Ninja and Dr.
Combined with Disrespect’s physical LAMO toys, LAMOverse is scheduled to launch after Final Form, and the game studio said it is also already playable and will be officially released on Xai soon.
Batton recalled that Ex Populus spent a lot of time looking for the ideal gaming chain to develop the project, and they considered building on other Ethereum scaling networks such as Polygon or Immutable X. But he said that each chain they tried had some compromises that made the team "less enthusiastic" about investing in these ecosystems.
Eventually, Offchain Labs, the creator of Arbitrum, proposed building a custom gaming chain that would both meet Ex Populus’ needs and provide a home for other studios in the future. And so Xai was born. In this collaboration, Batton said, Ex Populus built the software that drives Sentry Nodes, which early users have purchased to support the Xai network. It also makes games and, like a publisher, helps other studios join Xai and get their games in front of players. Just like Ex Populus will provide services to Laguna Games this year, which plans to migrate its Crypto Unicorns game and related NFTs from Polygon to Xai. Batton said that since the airdrop, he has seen a "huge influx" of other studios who want to participate in Xai, whether developing new games or migrating from existing chains.
In its dual role as a game developer and distribution partner, Batton said Ex Populus is trying to become the Web3 version of Valve. The gaming giant not only operates the popular Steam PC game store, but also develops iconic games such as Half-Life, Portal and Counter-Strike. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, has taken a similar path.
Of course, Ex Populus doesn’t yet have the storied gaming history of these long-time giants, but it also faces the huge challenge of trying to convince traditional gamers that user-owned NFT assets and crypto-driven economies are beneficial. In the past, gamers have generally been less than enthusiastic about such proposals.
Making this process easier is that the Xai Network abstracts the complexity of wallet usage and asset handling for users who don’t want to dive into all the “crypto” stuff. Regular players don’t have to worry about self-custody of NFTs or tokens, and Xai provides a gas-free experience for players.
“We had this crazy idea that if you removed the wallet and all the gas fees, you could experience massive growth,” Batton explained. “The benefit of blockchain is actually being able to trade and own things — all the things we keep hearing about — but there’s a huge friction in between.”
Wallets still exist, but for traditional gamers they are managed on the backend by the Xai team. If you prefer to use your own wallet and self-custody your assets, this option is certainly available for advanced crypto users as well.
“For traditional gamers who may not be familiar with cryptocurrency or have some resistance to it, these games will feel like regular games,” Batton said, adding that there will be wallet management features in the settings. "Then you find out, 'Oh, I have a wallet. I didn't even know that.' So it brings people into the experience in a less stilted way." For Xai, the past few months have been Been very busy. The Sentry Node sale, which lets users invest in supporting the network and receive allocations of XAI tokens, reached approximately $30 million in sales. The subsequent XAI airdrop certainly caused a stir, putting over $150 million worth of tokens (at peak value) into user wallets.
But as Batton describes it, the journey dates back to 2022. In his view, it has been a steady ascent, with the biggest moves yet to come as games start to go live online.
“It was a bottom-up approach — it didn’t happen overnight," he confirmed. "It took months and months or more to build this passion and community and excitement.”
“Having Laguna agree to deploy their games was a big deal because before this news, it was just hype. It was just an empty chain,” Batton added. “But now it’s not an empty chain. It has real games coming.”
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