Interview with NFT Brands: Q&A with Brendan Robb of The Red Village

What it represents. When growing up, whether you collect baseball cards, basketball cards, Pokémon cards, matchbox cars or whatever it is; there is always some value inherent in collecting, and there’s magic in that. For my generation that will never be lost, generations before collected stamps and coins and stuff. They’ve always given value to an object because it’s unique, one of a kind, rare, or hard to get and now obviously the world is buying digital and there’s absolutely no reason the same logic shouldn’t apply. Then there’s the functionality to be able to verify it on the blockchain and ensure they are legitimate. So we were basically sitting around saying “this is cool, this is the future, there is no doubt”. We saw the value in why it would be big, I mean yeah you’ve got your mom being like “but I can just download it”, but as more and more people warm to the idea of NFTs–which by the way are holding their own despite what’s happening to the crypto market right now–I think it’s becoming a cultural renaissance. So that’s where it came from, it was seeing that value and wanting to see how that value would play out. It wasn’t about profile pictures, it was about where the culture would take this. 

 January 2021.

One of the other founders Lucien and I were sitting around watching the Runescape documentary on YouTube, if you haven’t seen it and are a Runescape fan it is awesome to watch! It kind of details the rise and early days of Runescape, which for me and Lucien was a big part of our formative experiences. Playing Runescape, logging on to servers at like 3am in Australia to get busy servers in the U.S. So we’re watching that documentary and at that time we were working in the NFT space; Lucien was doing strategy for a few brands and I was doing creative stuff and communications for a few projects. We said “let’s bring Runescape into the blockchain, no one has done that yet”. The idea snowballed and changed and took on turns and twists along the way, but yeah that’s where it began. We’re all sort of gamers, especially Lucien, and his favorite is Diablo so we kind of modeled it after that.

The big thing really is that we are the first on the blockchain that borrows from a darker genre. There are a lot of bright family friendly P2E games out there, but nothing that we can see that takes this aesthetic and runs with it. I think we are one of the only really polished fighting tournaments on the blockchain that’s ready to go live. I mean I’ve seen some amazing stuff from other projects, but there’s only so much that’s actually going to be on the blockchain in the next 3, 6, even 12 months. Apart from that I think it’s that we’ve developed our own world, our own lore, our own story, all of our own characters. For anyone that follows games, they know the importance of that and having it done really well because that gives you a mode of attachment. It boils down to that, when it comes to our community and uniqueness, we’re looking for people to really connect with and identify with the stuff we’re doing in a way maybe they don’t with other projects. We have a very organic and genuine presence since it’s not about flipping, but playing and learning about this world that we’ve built.

Overall 30-40 people, the founding team is myself, Lucien Dorman (CEO), and Matan Adato (CTO).

Everything! It’s hard from an outside perspective to understand the complexity and all the moving parts. I know even some of our friends have been like “oh I’m gonna start one of these NFT projects, so easy!”, and to some extent we probably had a similar attitude going into it. But we realized the complexity of dealing with a huge amount of moving parts in a space that moves so quickly, a day in this space is like a month somewhere else. Stuff can turn just like that and you have to be really responsive and be able to respond to the community at the same time. In a normal business you don’t have thousands of people in Discord who expect to have answers around the clock, immediately, 24/7, in different time zones. It’s about managing expectations, keeping people interested and engaged. That’s maybe one of the hardest things some projects have issues with when they have timelines for the next 4-5 years, because we don’t know what the space will look like then. Engaging a community for that long is hard, I mean engaging a community for 4-5 days is hard. When you work on the blockchain, stuff is more expensive, takes longer, it’s harder to find people that know how to do it and do it well. Hard is probably an understatement, people probably don’t understand the importance of having a tech team like we do. But to have a full scale development team on the blockchain side… good luck finding one of those to partner with you for the life of the project. There’s no easy aspect to this besides that it is easy because you love it. It doesn’t feel like work, but I would certainly advise someone who is looking to start a project to really really think about it, because you won’t be thinking about anything else for a long time.

 Honestly I don’t think anyone can give you that answer, anyone who says they know for sure is just speculating, because 3-5 years ago no one could have said where we’d be now. There’s a few that made big bets early on and were right, but like where is it gonna be i don’t know. Will it be more dominant than traditional gaming? I don’t know, but there are some big studios coming into the space. Is there scope for it? Yeah absolutely, games make more money than movies and the industry is certainly going to be dominant, you think about Meta and moving into the metaverse more broadly and all that stuff. I mean you’d struggle to find an organization that didn’t at least have or wasn’t working on an NFT strategy or arm or working on capitalizing on their IP with NFTs. So I think it’s hard to say where it’s going to be, I think we’ll have some incredible games and experiences come out in the next few years no doubt. I think even the holdouts you have in traditional gaming will come over because there will be games that match the caliber of those traditional games in 5 years for sure. When everyone is playing in the metaverse and on the blockchain, you’re not going to say no because you’re stubborn or because you don’t understand the concept, you’re just going to come over. Without making too big of a call I think that the next 3-5 years will certainly be about gaming, the next 5-10 we will see that big shift into the Metaverse.

Do your own research. Be prepared to look at a lot of dummies, kiss a lot of toads before you find your prince. In my mind, people like Matty DCL (@DCLBlogger) have really good threads on this sort of stuff. Look for a doxed team (i.e. – their identities have been revealed), that’s a personal preference, there are obviously great projects who don’t have a doxed team and I’m not saying anything against them in any way, but I look for a doxed team now. For me I just really think it’s hard to say I’m going into a business without knowing who is building it. Look for a strong community, one that’s not just talking about floor prices and flipping all the time, but people with longer term visions and who are accepting the way prices will go up and down and are committed. Look for ideas that you genuinely like. In the end if you are looking to get into something that you think is fun and cool, that’s the best thing you can do right? Then worse comes to worse, if things don’t work out you are still in a project that you like and you’ve got NFTs that you like to see. There’s a whole lot of projects that won’t work out, just like any businesses. And there are many that will work out extraordinarily well, I don’t think anyone has a crystal ball to see what those projects are, if they did they’d be rich. Just invest in stuff that you like, with a good team, good roadmap, good partnerships, that have a good name in the space, and are growing their community organically. If you can find one of those projects then that is a diamond in the rough.

We partner with one we think will be super dominant, BYOPills (@ByoPills), we work super closely with them. I think they will have a huge year this year and for the next couple of years. As much as it would seem like shilling, we believe in the projects that we partner with and so I would look at all of them. But BYOPills certainly from a gaming perspective will be massive. I think Zed Run will have a huge year, they’ve done a whole lot of tweaking during the holidays and are really gearing up for a massive 2022. They’re awesome, they know what they’re doing and we’re really excited for them. There’s a bunch of Aussie projects we admire as well, Illuvium and Phantom Galaxies are two in particular.

We can plug the drop on 1/25, our Mystic Drop. The genesis collection released in November, sold out in 11 minutes. Our Mystics are coming on 1/25, presale is on 1/24, whitelist is open now. Put your wallet in on Discord, we are doing a raffle for some spots. Then the game comes out a week later! So if you want to get bloody and see where the future of blockchain is and where we’re heading then come join us in the village! It’s going to be fun and we have a great community so just come and say hi and you will get help!

Twitter: @TheRedVillage

Discord: http://Discord.gg/TheRedVillage

Look out for potential Twitch and Tik Tok accounts for the future!