The last month was a really intense and productive one for all of the dedicated people working at Ultra. Following our successful public sale, we took the needed time to organize the team and refine our strategy ahead of our next milestones.
The team is focused strongly on development. Every day we strive to make sure the Ultra platform will be what people are waiting for: a complete solution that can compete with the giants of this industry.
We believe that our most important task is the development of a reliable games distribution platform and the results of our recent activity geared toward that goal are presented to you in this community update.
Since our last update, we have spent the majority of our time QA testing and validating our store front and developer center to be sure our beta runs as smoothly as possible. This has led to some changes and additional feature development that greatly improves functionalities of the platform. Currently, we are focusing on the underlying technical layers that allow the front end UI to interact properly with our blockchain.
We know that our community is excited to see our development progress, so we have decided to create exclusive videos of the platform in action, which will be released soon.
Our videos will show the look and feel of the store and how easy it is to navigate through it and at some point, a full walk through of the developer center. Players won’t have access to the dev center, but we think showing this functionality is key to understanding why Ultra is attractive for game developers, and of course how the tokenization of games works in the backend.
The second big focus of development is our EOSIO based blockchain. We are currently finishing the final pieces of code, and preparing to launch the testnet. In conjunction, we’re preparing a detailed blog post about it to give you more insight into how we’re using the blockchain to power our platform.
Of course, in addition to the technical development, we are constantly working to build strong relationships within the games industry. We know developers are frustrated with current options and we’re reaching out to those that are ready for a paradigm shift. With large established companies already promoting this new tech, we have even more credibility to bring to bear.
On a regular basis, we continue to onboard new developers eager to adapt their games to a distribution platform that has unparalleled technical and economic incentives. To achieve this, our team members regularly attend to major events around the globe to connect to various game devs and important companies in the games industry!
These events provide us the opportunity to show our latest builds of the platform and to collect important feedback and suggestions about our product. We also create new contacts, strengthen existing relationships, and increase awareness with different actors in the industry!
Here is a report about what we did in China and Paris.
Many of you asked us what happened at ChinaJoy Expo & Conference. It was an incredibly interesting event for Ultra. Three of our executive members traveled to Shanghai: David Hanson (CEO), Edward Moalem (CSO) and Melissa Brown (Senior Director Developer Relations).
It was a very busy week filled with back to back private meetings with Asian game developers, important talks with our Chinese partners to show them our progress and expectations, and meetings with other partners who also attended the show.
Our partners are very happy to see our progress and are enthusiastic about finding new ways to work together. We were introduced to even more interesting developers and were offered the opportunity to work with large well known brands and IPs to find unique ways to monetize and distribute their games.
Overall, we received great feedback on the functionality of the platform including the following quote from Ritche Corpus, Head of Worldwide Content of AMD!
Obviously, the most important discussions of the show were about the Chinese market. As you know, China is important to us for a number of reasons, including the fact that it’s the largest PC games market in the world. Our partner there has a lot of influence and will bring a significant number of players to our platform.
Thanks to our technology and the way we have designed Ultra, having a strong operator in China will benefit the entire ecosystem. For the first time in this industry, the Chinese market will become accessible to the rest of the world, and it will be easier for Chinese developers to publish their games outside of China! It really is a win-win situation which is also very exciting in how it will change the way games are sold and consumed globally. This partnership is the first of its kind and paves the way to cooperating with more Operators in key markets with specific needs such as Japan and Korea.
Another feedback from the games industry is that Blockchain has a bad reputation in the mainstream games space at the moment because, so far, in our opinion, nobody has used it in a way that genuinely improves the outcome of the product, this has been confirmed in ChinaJoy.
Entertainingly, when we don’t mention blockchain and instead we focus on explaining the functionality it allows, developers and publishers suddenly become excited. Consistently, the feedback we get from anyone actively distributing games in this space is always positive.
In addition, one thing all of our major partners have in common is the instant recognition of why our implementation of this changes the way they (and the rest of the industry) will do business.
What we are learning from that is we can’t convince game devs, influencers or players that Blockchain is the solution they need, we can only build solutions that will serve them well. It really comes back to our mission, making blockchain a frictionless underlying tech.
Paris was the perfect spot for some of our executives to meet, to debrief ChinaJoy and prepare for Gamescom, which is shaping up to be super busy, with more than 60 meetings planned already and more still being scheduled. In Paris, we spent several days discussing and planning go-to-market strategy, additional partnership options, and ongoing features, applications, and outreach.
If you missed us at E3 or ChinaJoy, you still have plenty occasions to meet us in 2019! In a few days our team will go to Gamescom and various other events around the globe. Here are the details:
Cologne Gamescom (August 20–24)
Because of the nature of the show, we will have 4 people attending, Nicolas, David, Edward and Melissa. Again, they will be giving demos, evaluating games, meeting with partners, and continuing to strengthen relationships. Gamescom is unique in that it’s one of the largest business specific shows in the world, with 4 halls dedicated to trade visitors. It allows unprecedented access to consumers as well and will result in valuable insight to support our launch. Because we’re still in closed beta, most meetings will be done privately. For this reason we may not be able to detail who we met and why, but we will most probably do a general report on our social media with as many pictures as we can. If you’re attending Gamescom and want a demo, please email contact@ultra.io and let us know!
Berlin Blockchain Week (August 18–24)
During Gamescom, Emmanuel, our Lead Community Manager, is going to Berlin Blockchain Week to meet some potential crypto partners and to connect to various communities. If you are there, you can contact him on telegram (@emmanuel_ultra), and why not get a sneak peek of the closed beta…
Seattle PAX West (August 30 — September 2)
Attending PAX West this year will be Reb Aste, currently our Executive Admin who is moving into a Biz Dev/Developer Relations role. Because PAX is a consumer show, we decided to send one of the biggest gamers in the company to check it out. Reb has been working with developers directly for several months now and has meetings with several of them set up. In addition, Reb will look for titles in development that are interesting for Ultra Games and will look for games trends and products that we need to be aware of. Again, if you’re attending PAX and want to schedule a meeting, email contact@ultra.io
Seoul Blockchain week (September 27 — October 4)
4 team members of Ultra have already confirmed their presence at the Seoul Blockchain Week. We don’t have anything specific to say about it yet, but we already know that our presence will be important at this event. We hope to share a little more in the Community Update #3 about this important crypto event!
As you can see in this blog post, the team is actively working on multiple sides: development of the platform and the blockchain, travelling to major crypto and game events to evangelize Ultra, building new relationships, and coordinating and strategizing with our existing partners. We are also actively recruiting to expand our team.
About Ultra
Ultra is the first entertainment platform providing all key games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login.
Built around our PC games distribution store, Ultra Games, our platform will provide access to countless centralized and decentralized services: Discover, buy, play and sell your games and in-game items, watch live-streaming feeds, interact with your favorite influencers, participate in contests, compete in tournaments, and much more.
Ultra has been built to provide endless value for players, a fair playing ground for developers, and a whole new world of opportunities for the games industry.
For more information, visit ultra.io and onultra.io and follow along on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Discord.
