Show Notes - The Web3 Gamer - Episode 4: Bridging Gamers and Developers with Saif Al Naji of General Meta Network

In this episode of The Web3 Gamer, we welcome Saif Al Naji, CEO of General Meta Network (GMNetwork). Saif dives into the ins and outs of GMNetwork's extensive gaming library and their bespoke blockchain, crafted specifically for the dynamic needs of video games.

We delve into how GMNetwork is on a mission to reshape the gaming industry, empowering both gamers and developers through the transformative power of Web3.

Join us as we explore:

• The unique features of GMNetwork's bespoke blockchain for gaming
• How GMNetwork's extensive gaming library is diversifying gaming experiences
• The vision of GMNetwork to bridge the gap between gamers and developers

Listen in to this insightful conversation and discover the exciting possibilities of Web3 Gaming with Saif Al Naji.

Links to General Meta Network's Socials:

• Twitter
• Discord
• Telegram
• Website

Additionally, here are some links to more information about Dubai's growing Blockchain and Crypto industry.

• Dubai: Launching a Crypto Regulatory Arm to Become a Global Financial Power
• Dubai’s Crypto Industry Welcomes New Licensing Regime Amid Global Regulatory Uncertainty
• Julius Baer heads to Dubai in First Expansion of Crypto Ambitions Beyond Switzerland

Stay tuned for more episodes exploring the latest in Web3 Gaming. Game on! 🎮

Matthew Simone 0:00

Hello Hello friends and gamers. Today I had a really interesting conversation with Saif I'll aji who is the CEO of General meta network. General meta network is a pioneering crypto project set to transform the gaming world with its extensive gaming library and bespoke blockchain designed exclusively for video games with the objective to empower both gamers and developers. They're a relatively new platform. But I had a great discussion around a variety of topics about their platform, why they chose the chain, they did what I think of AI and gaming, especially web three, gaming, and overall just had a good time talking. I also want to know they are based at a Dubai. And if you're not already aware, there's a lot of really interesting things going on in Dubai related to crypto web three blockchain. It's becoming a really interesting hub for this kind of stuff. So I'll post some links in the show notes in case you're interested in reading and learning more about that. I've included all their socials in the show notes. So you would be doing both me and them a huge favor if you want to check them out. My name is Matthew and this is the web three gamer.

You ever wished you had more money struggling to make ends meet? hungry kids bills piling up rents overdue? Oh, gosh, you're just living paycheck to paycheck. You've heard of selling your blood. But if you hurt a cell in your spirit, just keep hacking away. And those big tin pillory things are $200 Easy telling you such a massively untapped market. So sell your spit today to spitty. MacGyver. Yeah, well, first off, I just wanted to thank you all for having me today. Thank you for letting me in on this. I really appreciate it really looking forward to talking to you and your network, we have some questions. So, you know, my background has really just been in a lot of traditional gaming. But I've been investigating and wanting to do a podcast for a long time. And I've been in a few web three projects and a couple NFT projects. So as I was looking at that market, I felt it was very untapped. And it was very difficult for someone like myself, who enjoys podcast content a lot to go find a place where I could find, you know, people talking to people like yourself who are involved in the industry, you know, creating new products, new content, in just like a centralized place. So the main reason I created this podcast was really to give people an opportunity to educate, learn, you know, hear from industry professionals like yourself, really get up to date about things. So I really appreciate you being a part of it taking the time for me.

Saif Al Naji 2:50

Thank you for having me, honestly, I'm looking forward to having this conversation with you about you.

Matthew Simone 2:55

So let's just dive right into it. So what's your background? Where did you? Where did you come from before you in web three? And how did you get into this project?

Saif Al Naji 3:04

Well, I've been in the media industry for close to 10 years. That's where everything kind of started off for me radio, media, music, entertainment events. And I've been in the blockchain and the crypto industry. For a little over five years, we started off by actually doing crypto networking events. And then we shifted into being some sort of like an advisory hub. We've advised a lot of, you know, a lot of up and coming kind of crypto startups out there in the market. We were just waiting for the right time to launch our very own platform. And this was a code for general meta network. And yeah, the idea came about roughly two years ago, it started off with just a one off game. And then it developed to becoming more of like a hub and marketplace, an ecosystem where we can adopt hundreds and 1000s of games from all over the world.

Matthew Simone 4:01

Yeah, and that is a big trend I'm seeing in probably the last year or so I've also only been in, I should say actively involved. I mean, I've known about crypto price since about 2014. But I didn't actively start doing anything with it until 2017 2018. And then really buckling down about three years ago. And I came in as a crypto fan discovered a lot of web through gaming, and obviously the NFT thing that came with it and found it really interesting. But for me, it's funny like I I'm a gamer. To my to my credit, I should say that before I ever gotten to this, I was playing games from the age of five. I'm 30. So I've been playing for 25 years. And so I'm just wondering if this was something where you decided to get into this because you were considering yourself. You're a gamer, you felt maybe there was a market gap where people who are interested in web through gaming wanted an easy access to a platform it was just kind of missing and so this was a niche you wanted to develop you wanted to bring to a community. I'm just kidding. Here's where that you came in and how you got into this.

Saif Al Naji 5:05

I wouldn't really consider myself as like a gamer, like a hardcore gamer, obviously, like every other person out there, I've gone through that phase in the early 90s, early 2000, as as a teenager, of playing all of these games out there, like you know, Sims Age of Empires, Warcraft, counter, strike, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, when developing gentlemen meta network, obviously, being in the crypto space, being in the blockchain industry, we found that this was an untapped market, we do understand the opportunities that are within the web three gaming space. It's, it's, it's a niche that we want it to discover. It's a niche that we truly believe in. And we know that this is going to be the future of gaming, people are slowly shifting from traditional games into into web three gaming. But we're still far from mass adoption. But this is one of the reasons why we carry out live sessions such as this one, we are actually in talks of releasing a series of kind of like educational videos of how you could potentially tap into this market and benefit from it and truly utilizing the technologies that are being implemented in the web three gaming space.

Matthew Simone 6:30

Sure, no, definitely. I would agree with all of that. And so then, I guess, since you're a platform, you know, are there any particular games you you are currently plugging to your audience, or you're currently advertising for? Or is it kind of just on a, on a rolling basis, it depends who's the who's the new player on the platform, or, I don't know, if you have any particular ones, you've partner with it, they've done really well. And so you're always plugging them, you know, every chance you get.

Saif Al Naji 6:54

So so we're less than a month old, right? We've only just kind of gone public with our website with our socials, we're slowly slowly building a user base. And for those who don't know, as General metro network, we are a hub for gamers. But we also have for game developers, you know, in the very near future, once we complete building our blockchain is one we're going to adopt and onboard all of the games that are developing, that are being developed by third party users, probably in the studios out there, who are looking to kind of increase their reach and increase their awareness. And this is where we come in, we provide you with the resources and the solutions to basically raise awareness for your game. But we do have a development team, internally who developed games. And we've just released our very first game, which we're very proud of. It's called mini race. It's a very simple racing game. And this is what we're trying to focus on right now. We don't want to really go with any complicated and high tech game that people would find it hard to understand. We want this process to be seamless, we want to start with a simple game, and slowly slowly build our way up there. But yeah, many races out there. It's live on our website. It's currently free to play for the entire month of June, during the pre sale period, but starting from the first of July, is when you can start using it for play to earn. And then in the next couple of days, we're also releasing our second game that's produced in house. It's called undead riot. It's a zombie shooter game that we're experimenting with. Right now. We want the community we want the gamers to go out there, download these games, test them out, you know, share with us their thoughts, if there's something that we need to kind of, kind of edit or improve. We're here to listen to all of you know, the gamers opinions. At the end of the day, they are spending countless amount of hours on their computers every day playing these games, and they know exactly what's good for the platform.

Matthew Simone 9:05

Sure, definitely. So then can I ask if for your play to earn? Do you have your own tokenomics and token in place? Or are you are you simply doing cash out in other cryptocurrencies or Fiat?

Saif Al Naji 9:18

We definitely have our own token. It's called G M. N. We are as I mentioned earlier, we are during the presale, period. So I'm urging everybody to go out there and just look at the project. And you know, this is something that they find promising that they find interesting. And if they want to use our games for the play to earn mechanisms that we have implemented, please feel free to buy our token right now. Of course, if you buy it right now, it's going to be a lot more affordable than when it launches out there to the public on a on a Dex on the first of July. But yes, we are using our token. And this is the only way using our tokens called GMN to play and earn whether it is our games or any of the other third party games that we're going to be onboarding within the next couple of months, probably beginning of next year.

Matthew Simone 10:09

That's awesome. So that's, that's interesting, too, because you're one of the first platforms I've talked to you that has a development team in place. A lot of them always have, you know, front and back end integration site, things of that nature. But most of them kind of have clients or partners in place where if somebody approached him and said, Hey, I want to develop a game, they're like, well, you're gonna have to go to one of our partners, we don't we don't worry about that. We just do listing we do, um, curation. You know, we do user retention, user acquisition and things of that nature. So that's fascinating. Also, having worked on a few, it sounds like you're in like the casual style gaming, you know, like you said, you're not trying to complicate it too much, having worked on a few casual style games, those do very well, I think, in the crypto space. And it's interesting to see lately, there's been a lot of triple A games coming up and popping up. But I mean, the the people involved with that, and the amount of fundraising you have to get and the teams you have to get to make that happen, I think is just it's a, it's a high barrier for the average, you know, maybe somebody who wants to get into web three wants to create their own gaming project. So I see your platform as being a very much more intermediary way for people who, you know, maybe don't have 2 million and VC funding, but want the help with the development and an end to get lists on a platform for a game for an idea they have, I think it's a really good starting point for a lot of people. Go ahead.

Saif Al Naji 11:29

We're definitely your your middleman between between gamers and game developers, you know, we just connect the dots. But you know, one of the one of the utilities or one of the features, I'll tell your qualities that we have, there's a lot of projects out there that offer what you've just mentioned, right now, it's just simply a marketplace where you come in at a specific fee or share a commission with the marketplace. And they don't get involved with your gameplay with with the with the experiences of the of the users and the gamers. However, with general metro network, having a professional team of hardcore gamers, not only we help you with the financial tools, not only we help you to reach out to a vast and a large community of active gamers who are interested in web three gaming, but also we do advise you, you know, we scan your project, we do our due diligence, and we do advise you on where you should be heading, what you should improve. If you require a certain kind of funding, possibly in the future, you know, we're going to allocate and we're going to be working with with VCs and private investors, who might be interested in actually taking your project to the next level and improve the quality of your game to make it more appealing for the gamers. So we have different outtake pillars on where you could come in. And depending on where your interests are, or where you lack certain specifications within your game. This is where we can we come in and help you out?

Matthew Simone 13:02

Yeah, no, that's a, that is a, that's a great place to be. And I think a lot of people who just have an idea, or they don't understand, you know, end to end development, that's, that's, it's always great to have an advisor no matter what project you're working on, but especially I think it went through gaming, having an advisor is imperative, especially someone who's run, you know, they've done all the end to end or they run successful projects so they can go, here's my pitfalls don't do this. You know, it's just a very important thing. I think every project I've been involved on the advisors have been very helpful. And it's never, it's never telling you what to do. It's always just suggestions that they think are best practices, and I always appreciate that. Exactly. So you all are on x dc chain. What What made you all choose to go on that chain versus you know, Aetherium is obviously a very popular chain for a lot of gaming. A lot of web three games, the majority of them, I would say So what made you want to go with x dc chain?

Saif Al Naji 13:56

That's the question that we get asked quite often to be very honest with you. Obviously, x dc is a relatively new blockchain. And by the way, SCC is a fork from Aetherium. So there's a lot of there's a lot of qualities that we still get funded in theory on blockchain. However, when when you look at our platform, considering it's a gaming platform, where you don't necessarily have to invest a huge amount of money to start playing our play to earn games. If you're if you're investing a total of $10 to play our first game, which is out right now called mini race. The last thing you want is to spend one or $2 on transaction fees, that's 20% of your overall volume. Hence why we have gone with SDC not only because if it's very low, almost almost zero, like I'm talking about 0.00 $0 When it comes to transaction fees, but also it's extremely fast when it comes to conducting transactions. It's even faster than XRP, it's faster than ripple. We're talking about possibly over 20,000 transactions per second, collectively, if you have all the right, you know, all the right tools. So this is, I would say the two main reasons why we have gone with FCC. We've been in talks with them, they have offices in Dubai, actually, their headquarters in Dubai, we've met with the team. They're extremely supportive, they're actually looking at venturing into into the web three in the gaming industry, and hence why we're in very close contact right now we're going to be carrying out some, some kind of like seminars and workshops at their offices in Dubai. So we're very excited to kind of, you know, venture with the SEC family on this journey. And I think it's going to add a lot of value to the gamers. At the end of the day, we are here to empower gamers, we're here to make it an incredible at a profitable experience for the end user.

Matthew Simone 15:58

Yeah, having having messed around with a multitude of different chains. And full disclosure, I'm not, I'm not the biggest fan of Aetherium period. But I understand its its support in the network and why so many people utilize it. But yeah, STC sounds to me, like what Aetherium was planned to be, still hasn't been, unfortunately, cheaper, exactly. And much cheaper, much faster, much more scalable. And yeah, I can see and especially the fact that they're going for web three, and they can still tout that they're, you know, a fork of Aetherium, I can see that going very well and very successfully for them, because it has all the benefits of theory. And with none of the pitfalls it sounds like, which is very, very nice, considering so many people just accept the insanely fluctuating fees with Aetherium as normal for any NFT or game projects they're on. Because they're like, well, that's just the cost of business on Aetherium. And you're like it's not there's there's plenty of other chains, but everybody default to Aetherium, just depending on your development team and the languages they understand. Obviously solidity is one of the oldest ones that people are still working with for smart contracts. So I understand it from that aspect. But yeah, I had never heard of it till we you mentioned it before interview, and I was reading about...