We interviewed Scott Herman from WagmiGame.io, who was just announced as one of the final four contestants in today’s episode of The Next Crypto Gem TV series. The WagmiGame team auditioned for The Next Crypto Gem and was one of the smallest teams in terms of market cap. But they came prepared, and today’s episode proved they did something right as it was announced they will be moving on in the competition.
The Next Crypto Gem TV Series
This shark tank style reality tv show will be putting the projects through a series of challenges while the judges Brian D. Evans, Layah Heilpern, and George Tung watch to decide who will be The Next Crypto Gem.
WAGMI Games and WAGMI Defense
WAGMI Games is a blockchain gaming franchise, and their first game, WAGMI Defense is in beta testing now. A mobile tower defense strategy game, WAGMI Defense is a fast paced, 3 minute game loop mobile app where the first player to destroy the opponent’s main tower wins. All playable game assets are owned by the player and marketplaces like Immutable & Rarible will allow players to trade their in game assets freely.
For WAGMI Defense, they recruited a top AAA graphic studio, Gadgetbot. The company has worked on Transformers4, Jurassic World, Pacific Rim, Apex Legends, Call Of Duty: Black Ops & Borderlands2. “We’re not just a game,” Scott said, “We’re becoming a transmedia franchise. We have a comic book, we have lore, we have backstories to our characters. We’re actually in the middle of doing anime treatment for one of our main characters right now.”
The Team and Industry Experience
Scott Herman grew up as a gamer, In fact most of the team did as well. They boast Brent Pease, former General Manager / Director of Operations at Electronic Arts (EA) and Esteban Gil, with tenured experience in the AAA mobile space and game LiveOps for Apex Legends Mobile. Rumor has it more big names will be announced soon.
Scott Herman’s Background
Many fitness buffs will likely recognize Scott from his fitness YouTube channel. With 3 million subscribers, Scott was actually one of the early pioneers of online fitness content helping millions get in shape from home. He started in a small New York apartment in 2009 and moved on to filming his fitness content at a local gym. People actually looked at him like he was nuts at the time, filming himself working out, but it didn’t phase him. Scott saw the opportunity. He eventually became the first influencer to get a supplement sponsorship with BSN and went on to make fitness DVDs for Lionsgate and produced programs on bodybuilding.com which are still doing well today.
Entry into the Crypto World
About 7 years ago, Scott started a YouTube gaming channel for Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle for fun. He found five other guys to play with and stream and they all started out with around 100 subscribers. After a very short amount of time, Scott grew to over 55k subscribers before he had to move on to other things. However his gaming partners moved into 6 digits. Community building is his passion, and he has proven he has what it takes to bring that excitement to gaming as well.
Scott first met crypto about 3 years ago while out with friends. They were telling him to buy Shiba Inu so he just tossed some money at it and made some INSANE gains, outside the gym this time. “I was like, okay, there’s something going on here, I need to learn more about crypto,” Scott said. He started another YouTube channel called “ScottHermanCrypto” to simply allow his audience to learn along with him. This took off quickly and after learning in the trenches, and joining up with well known names in the industry, he decided gaming and NFTs was one of the best use cases for this tech and started to focus on it.
Scott’s entire scattered experience in content creation, fitness, anime, collecting and gaming all started to fit together. He had a meeting with WAGMI Games who were in the initial stages of development. After his first conversation with the core team, he talked to his business partner, Kostas, and said, “this is the first project we’ve talked to in the last year and a half that has it together.” Scott joined as a Co-Founder the following month.
Wagmi’s Approach to Gaming
Scott said, “the biggest thing in gaming is people want to own their characters. And the biggest flop that we felt happened in the last Bull run is that 99% of the games that were coming out were either massive games that could only be run on a PC, or they were play-to-earn.” WAGMI Games is going mobile for their first title, and focusing on fun over earning with their free-to-play game, WAGMI Defense. “We’re big believers in the idea that gamers do not care about the technology…they just want to play fun games.”
The $WAGMIGAMES token is a 100% in-game utility token, very similar to V-bucks in fortnite. Players can purchase skins/outfits with v-bucks using credit cards in these popular games and what WAGMI Games is doing is similar. They are essentially tucking crypto in the corner. The crypto savvy will still find ways to make money on trading, but the average gamer will be free to just play the game again.
WAGMI Defense will roll out in seasons, and every season will have a battle pass. There are even ways to level-up your common characters, which are NFTs you earn for free while playing, to Rare, Epic and Legendary variants. But, there is no pay for power. The collectible element and in-game clout is where traditional games found the sweet spot, and WAGMI Defense will do the same. That way gamers can have just as much fun playing with a common character as with a legendary which is an important element used widely in popular games.
WAGMI Games has plans for an affiliate program, their comic book collection will lead to war chests in-game, and as of print WAGMI Games is currently holding a founder’s pack mint. The founder’s edition will be one of a kind special edition mint for the OGs that will be marketed in partnership with OpenSea.
We’ll be watching the TV series closely to see how this project fairs, and of course to see who will be crowned as The Next Crypto Gem.
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