Yesterday, we gathered in Discord for a live AMA all about Playtika’s upcoming web3 experience, Reel Owners. Our community joined Eriks Reks, VP of Product at RECUR, and Nimrod Avron, Senior Director of Web3 at Playtika, to ask questions and gain insight into what’s to come with Reel Owners.
Here, we'll recap the AMA and provide updates on their upcoming experience throughout the coming weeks.
We got a sneak peek at how Playtika is thinking about web3, what they’re planning throughout the year, and what the first season of Reel Owners will look like.
The chance to build long-lasting web3 games the right way.
As Nimrod Avron said,
“We’re not doing some game where it’s play to earn, play to win, win to own, or any of those. We're taking games Playtika has that have been available for over 10 years, and we’re bringing them to web3. We’re bringing NFTs inside the games, and they are going to be integrated closely to the games. They make the games better.”
They’re looking to have four games with web3 experiences launched by the end of the year. Those experiences could include any of Playtika’s popular titles from Bingo Blitz, WSOP, June's Journey, Solitaire - Grand Harvest, and more.
The public sale will happen on February 8th. Playtika is giving certain RECUR Pass Holders exclusive, early access to the drop at a discounted price. Eligible Pass Holders will be notified before the drop.
The Playtika team will continue to share more information about the drop in the coming days.
Slot game owners will receive rewards like coins and gems inside of Slotomania, real-life rewards like swag and even event invitations, and more that’s still in discussion among the Playtika team.
Plus, our community had ideas for other rewards and engagement tactics they’d find interesting.
Find the full AMA transcript below.
Thanks, everyone, for joining today. I'm sure more people will trickle in as we go. Today we've got the Playtika and RECUR AMA, which is super exciting. We’ll introduce you to the team over there and hear a little bit more about what's going on. There's been a ton of buzz about it, so this is a chance for our community to ask some questions and learn some things.
So, today we have two people with us. We have Eriks Reks, our VP of Product at RECUR. Y'all have met him before, but we also have a new face around here. We have Nimrod Avron, the Senior Director of Web3 at Playtika. Welcome guys. I'll kick it over to you really quick if you want to give us your name, title, and a little bit about you.
Good to be here. What's up, community? Nice to see you all again.
My name's Eriks Reks. I’m a VP of Product at RECUR, and I’ve been here since July of 2021. So I've seen all kinds of stuff happen in my time here thus far. I’m really focused as of late on this integration with Playtika and have been working very, very closely with Nimrod and team over the past several months getting this experience together for the masses.
I have a background in crypto. I worked at Circle for many, many years, launching a number of different products there. And then, I worked over at an electric utility company on their distributed systems and some of their solar initiatives. Then I came back to web3 towards the end of 2020, beginning of 2021.
I'll pass it on over to Nimrod to introduce himself.
Thanks, Eriks. Great to be here. Thank you, everybody, for having me.
A bit about myself. I’m the Senior Director of Web3 Gaming at Playtika. I’ve been at the company for just under five years. Most of my time here has been in monetization roles for Slotomania, one of Playtika’s leading games, and about seven months ago, I joined the Playtika web3 team.
We started with the goal to get web3 into Playtika, to do web3 gaming right, and make it long-lasting. We searched for a great partner to work with to build our platform. After a lot of searching, we found RECUR. That's about when the Nickelodeon first season was live, and we saw the projects RECUR has, we saw the great community, how engaged you are, and we found ourselves a partner to launch with.
So for the past few months, as Eriks said, we've been working closely. We announced our project last week, and we're very happy to be the first big gaming company to integrate web3 into an existing game.
We’re not doing some game where it’s play to earn, play to win, win to own, or any of those. We're taking games Playtika has that have been available for over 10 years, and we’re bringing them to web3. We’re bringing NFTs inside the games, and they are going to be integrated closely to the games. They make the games better. People owning these assets and completing challenges will get great benefits inside the game.
I'm here to answer any questions you have about the experience. I’ll say upfront because it's definitely going to be asked, the RECUR community, Pass Holders specifically, are going to get great benefits. We're going to have exclusive, early access for RECUR players, with some people getting into pre-sales with discounted drops.
Again, it’s great to be here. Please ask anything. I'll try to answer as best as I can.
I love it. Thanks for all that. You definitely tapped on some things I'm excited about. You talked a little bit about RECUR Pass Holders. We haven't talked much about that yet, so it’s exciting to give the first tease of what's going on there as well.
Can you give us a little background on Playtika? You had talked a little bit about Slotomania, which is obviously a huge game, but that's not the only game in Playtika’s portfolio. Gaming is not new to y'all either. You're really a titan in the industry. So, can you tell us a little bit about the company?
Yes, definitely. Playtika has been around since 2010. Playtika was one of the first companies to introduce social casino freemium games into the world. Over the past 12 to 13 years, Playtika has both built and acquired many titles and currently operates 20 games.
We are the industry masters at what we call live ops, which is when you have great monetization, a great economy, and a greater engaging game design to keep players returning. There aren't a lot of games that have been available for so long where people play their games 20 to 30 minutes a day for over 10 years.
We have titles leading in categories like slots with Slotomania, bingo with Bingo Blitz, poker with WSOP, hidden objects with June's Journey, solitaire with Solitaire - Grand Harvest, and more. And a couple of weeks ago, there was an article about Playtika offering Rovio with a possible purchase for Angry Birds.
It sounds like you're always moving and shaking over there at Playtika. It's incredible what y'all have built. I'm honored to say that we're working with you. With that, I'm ready for the first question to jump in here.
Before we go to the crowd, Eriks, can you give us a little bit of an overview of what Reel Owners is? I know you've been deep in this project, and we're going to bring this to life soon. So, if you can give some information about the release, what's going on, and then maybe a little bit more information on Pass Holder access that we touched on?
Yeah, sure. I'll speak about the RECUR platform because when Nimrod and team came to us, they had this vision for what Reel Owners could be. A lot of what you see on the website and the how it works page and what you'll experience in the first season's challenge was the brainchild from Nimrod and the web3 team at Playtika.
We were really there to listen, understand how they imagined this to work, and incorporate some of the features that we've already built. We also had to build out new integrations. If you've gone over to slotomania.com, you'll see that there's an email signup experience to get an account. We had to figure out how to connect the dots between the Playtika system and the RECUR system.
If you were in the Slotomania app in the last several days and are beyond level five, you would've seen a popup. That brings you over to Reel Owners, and you have an onboarding experience where you receive a starter kit. Then you get linked back to your Slotomania app, and you're connected. This is the first time that we've really done something like this with such a large platform like the Slotomania game.
This is across the website, iOS apps, and Android apps. Those were the initial set of steps we needed to take in order to integrate with Slotomania. We're really excited about this because it will start allowing the Playtika platform to call into certain data to strengthen their in-game integration. We're excited to see that play out from a drop standpoint.
We'll get into some of the details. The first drop will happen in the coming week.
From a Pass Holder standpoint, we built a new feature to create custom allowlists which will allow Nimrod and team to pre-select folks based on user activity or using their own list of users that are important to them on the Slotomania side. We'll use this feature to create a hybrid allowlist, and a number of Pass Holders we'd like to see participate in the first drop will be included in that. So it's sort of a hand selected allowlist.
Awesome. I'm sure we'll get some more information on the drop through a lot of the questions today. So let's kick it off. It looks like Sheena Meaanaa is coming up first.
I'm a bit lost with this whole slot machine thing. I was reading about Slotomania, and I saw that we can build our own slot machine, right?
Yes, that's right.
Yes. And the drops are pictures for our slot machines, so we can build our slot machine, right?
That’s mostly right. We looked at Slotomania’s leading titles—Slotomania has over 160 slots available for players—and took symbols from those machines. Those symbols are what will be available inside the kits that will be available in drops. You need to collect them to build a complete slot game.
Okay. When we have our slot machine, what kind of benefits can we have from it? Is it when we have the slot machine, other people can play it, and we get royalties or something like this, or what can we do with it?
Slotomania is a casual casino game. That means the coins inside the game are just for the game. There's no cashing out like in other games. So once you own a slot machine— and there's a limited number of people who can own a machine—when players play that machine, you’ll get prizes inside Slotomania that reflect the number of people who played your machine. The more players spin your slot machine, the more coins, gems, and other in-game rewards that will be available to you.
Okay. I can’t earn Ethereum or anything for web3, I can only earn in-game currency and stuff for the game. Right?
Yes, that's right.
Okay, good. That was my question. Thank you.
All right, FryDanny, let me go ahead and unmute you. Welcome up.
Hi. I'll make it quick. I like the idea, I think it's great. I'm just wondering, with these machines expiring in a season, will we be looking at these machines returning down the line? Also, as a second question, there's a mention on the site of in real-life rewards. Can you expand on any of that, please?
Yes. So, regarding the first question. The slot games that are built during the season will reward the owners until a specific date a bit after the season. It's not on the day of the final drop but a couple of weeks after that. And yes, they might return in the future, so that's one reason to hold on to a game that you built and not put it on the marketplace. Can you remind me of the second question?
Yeah. On your site, it mentions rewards at the end of the season. There's a picture of a t-shirt and a golden ticket. I'm wondering if you can expand on what these real-world rewards could be?
Yes. We are going to introduce a point system that is attached to the assets. With each asset you own, each challenge you complete, and each drop you participate in, you’ll accumulate points with milestones. The more points you have, the more benefits you're going to receive—both in the Reel Owners platform and in real life. You can get early access to drops or even airdrops and also in real-life rewards like swag and t-shirts, even up to invites to special events for the highly engaged, high-point players. That will be introduced as the seasons progress.
Thank you very much for your time. That sounds great. Cheers.
Thanks, Danny. All right, Docmarley.eth, you're up.
First, I want to say congratulations to the people of Playtika for being one of the first mobile gaming industries to enter the NFT space. Congratulations!
Thank you.
My real question would be: Do you have a specific amount on each item? I know Playtika has millions of users. Will there be a thousand reels or 10,000 reels, or are there a certain amount of slots – types of machine – and will there be social slot gaming? Can we create a social slot game, or is it just like one specific type of gaming?
Each slot will have a specific amount of assets. It's not an infinite amount. Not everybody can participate, and the drops are gonna be over-allocated. There's going to be more people participating than the amount available. But that's what the secondary marketplace is for – for you to buy things that you need or sell things that you don't need.
We're starting the first season for anybody who participated in the onboarding. That was with Crazy Train. The first drop is going to be with Medusa Magic. Looking into future seasons, it's going to be more games per season. We haven't thought about doing it more socially, where you can build together with other people, but I wrote it down. It's a great idea.
Okay. And then, I know you mentioned Rovio earlier in Angry Birds. I know it's early within the partnership, but are you guys looking to create more games aside from Slotomania and bring them to the platform?
I'm gonna put Rovio aside. This isn't done. This is a work in progress.
But definitely, yes. We believe that all of Playtika’s games have very loyal players, and we wanna introduce them to ownership options and introduce web3 into the games.
So, yeah, games of different genres, we're going to onboard them onto the system one by one. Our goal is to have four games by the end of this year.
My last question is: I know they are different projects, but do you guys have any plans to integrate other projects that [RECUR] has? Like say, is there any way that you guys can give out a couple, say Hello Kitty, or Care Bear NFTs, to your customer base?
Eriks, do you wanna take that one?
We haven't really talked about cross-brands, but it's a great idea. What did you mean by ‘give out for rewards’ or what do you envision for that?
Right. So like, maybe the top five [winners of a game] – they already have a RECUR wallet – they could get a Hello Kitty NFT that they could use as a cool PFP. And that has a value of a hundred dollars, because that was the mint price.
So if they're looking at it value-wise, [it] is a hundred bucks free for playing the game.
I'm open to having those conversations. We need to see what's possible. It's a great idea. I think we can talk about cross-brand stuff. It's up to the other brand on the other side, too, but I love the idea.
Awesome. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it, and congratulations again.
Thank you.
All kinds of fun stuff coming out. That was a really interesting question. Now we have Borederoni.
Quick question on partnerships with real-life experiences that could come up. Could Caesars—I believe they're a parent company or big investors of yours—have any tie-in between them and the game?
Caesars Entertainment was a majority owner of Playtika. We have a Caesars Casino slot game with us also the WSOP brand. So yeah, it's a possibility to go into real casinos or provide benefits for them.
So like total rewards? Could that potentially be a portion of the benefits? Because whether it be money or reward comps to be used in casinos, meals, hotel stays, or anything like that, that would give significantly more value than just t-shirts for in-real-life rewards.
I agree. It's too early to say. We also need the Caesars team to put their thoughts into this down the road. But it's a possibility.
Awesome. Thanks, Borederoni. So we touched on it a little bit, but I know we've had some questions from people that can't be here. We talked a little bit about the fact that there will be a marketplace. Can you tell me a little bit about what the marketplace is going to be used for? What can they expect in the app or in the experience?
The marketplace will exist as it has, but it will play a really crucial role in the challenge. You'll get sort of a new version of the marketplace as you look at the challenge experience. In order to build your slot game, you'll need to collect a number of different symbols, and you'll only get so many symbols after the first drop.
By looking at the challenge UI, you'll get a quicker way of accessing symbols that will get you to become able to complete the challenge and get your reward. We're excited to introduce this because it's a quick buy functionality, which we've talked a lot about in the past.
The regular marketplace will run as it has with other experiences, with additional functionality that should make it a bit easier to discover [the] symbols you need. We're really excited for the challenge. It's going to be one of the best.
I’m trying to think of anything else that maybe is worth mentioning about the marketplace. Is there anything that I'm forgetting, Nimrod?
No, I think you touched it all.
It looks like Docmarley.eth forgot one of his questions, so we're giving him a second swing.
As you talked about the marketplace, I thought about this question: Is there a floor price that you are targeting? I know that's a hard question, but is it going to be similar to the price that you charge for kits? Or is it gonna be like a $30, $40, $50 thing?
We haven't finalized the prices for the drop, as Eriks said. We're looking at the drops that are happening next week, and we're going to finalize it this week. There are a lot of announcements coming up in the next few days regarding this drop. We see the marketplace as the place to get the symbols you need to complete your slot.
Awesome. Thanks, Docmarley.eth. We don't have anyone else with hands up right now, but we did have another question in [the] chat. H Man asked if the marketplace will run on in-game currency or if it would run on USD?
It'll run on USD, but I'm glad you brought that up, H Man. It’s something we've talked about quite extensively, and we're looking into how we can make in-game currency possible for future seasons because I think that'd be a really cool addition.
Awesome. It looks like everybody came in with questions primed, ready, and let 'em rip. I know we plan on doing more of these in the future, so it won't be the last time we get a chance to talk to those on our team or at Playtika.
Eriks, Nimrod, thank you so much for taking the time today. Anything last minute that you want to cover before we head out? I think we've covered it all.
Yep. Thank you very much for having me here.
Awesome. Yeah, thanks.
Awesome. Thanks for your time. Looking forward to season one. There will be more information, more announcements, and more everything as it relates to Slotomania in the coming days and weeks. Thank you again to everybody on the AMA and to the community. We'll see all of you here soon. Thanks, everyone.
All right. Cheers. Bye.
After the AMA ended, Nimrod from Playtika stuck around to answer a few more questions from the community in chat.
How do people play our slots since there will be many to play? Will there be a separate lobby in the app for people to play them?
The slots will be available in Slotomania's main floor. Each week, you will get a weekly in-game reward according to the amount of players spinning it and based on the rarity of your slot. We are introducing slots that can be owned slowly so owned slots can be played more than others.
For the people who are unfamiliar with Playtika and strictly came from RECUR, what do you see as a reason for RECUR users to purchase the product?
The main utility for owning symbols and slot games is indeed inside Slotomania. We believe this is one of the best utilities NFTs can bring to games. In addition, as was mentioned in the AMA, we will be adding long-term benefits for owners and builders of slot games. We are providing an exciting experience of kit opening and slot building. More info on [the] rarities of symbols and the chances to get them will be coming up in the following days.
If you want to learn more about Reel Owners, Playtika’s web3 experience Built on RECUR, check out their website or join them in their Reel Owners lounge.
