Stefan Gunnarsson CEO of Solid Clouds

Please welcome Steffen from Solid Clouds. STEFFAN GUNNARSON Hi. Do you hear me? All right. So my name is Stefan Gunnarsson. I'm the CEO and founder of Solid Clouds, a game studio based �� in Reykjavik Iceland founded late In 2013, Solid Clouds is producing a strategy game called Starborn. Right. It's not gonna be very technical, so it's just my story a little bit, and of course the concept. So my own career in strategy games began around 25 years ago with board games like Risk and Access and Allies. But I quickly wanted to play with more players from ages three to six that the board games accommodated. So soon thereafter, I started managing a play-by-mail strategy game called Austerlitz. I'm not talking about email, I'm talking about physical mail. In each game of Austerlitz, 16 human opponents were matched together in a one-year epic battle. This was my first MMO strategy experience, and it was awesome. On the computer, I was playing single-player forex games like Civilization, Master of Orion, and European Universalis. These games were fantastic and introduced me to these intricate maps that afforded exploration, resource exploitation, and empire expansion. But I quickly found myself drawn to a multiplayer setting, so I migrated to MMO RTS games like Travian, Good Game Empire, and Tribe Wars. So MMO just means Massively Multiplayer Online. RTS is real-time strategy games. All right. All right. So after playing these games for almost two decades, always waiting for someone to unite the two experiences, but the science of forex games and MMO RTS games has remained apart. In 2010, I got fed up, fed up with waiting, and decided to do this myself. To prepare for the project, I first earned a degree in computer science, and then founded Solid Clouds. So if you look at the problem, we have these wonderful immersive single-player forex games that let the players explore their map, exploit their lands, expand their empires, and exterminate the polements. On the, yeah, this is why they're called forex games. But they are designed to be single-player, not multiplayer, and certainly not massively multiplayer. On the other hand, you have these massively multiplayer, real-time strategy games who execute strategic play perfectly for thousands of human opponents. But they are stuck with superficial maps. It goes to a single function of creating distances between players. There's no real exploration, not many natural resources to exploit, and no real sense of empire growth. But they are online, they do allow you to battle other players, and they are massively multiplayer. In 2004, Blizzard released their legendary game, World of Warcraft. The game remains today still as one of the most successful games of all time. What Blizzard did with WoW was to take the deep, meaningful single-player experiences of RPG games like Navigator Nights and their own Diablo and inject them into the massively multiplayer world. And inject them into the massively multiplayer platforms pioneered by EverQuest and Ultima Online. And that is what we are doing with StarCore. We are taking the deep, meaningful experiences of 4X games and injecting it into the multiplayer platform. And we have the team to do it. This is us. Among us, we have Oscar Ion Oskjorsson, StarCore's art director. He has over 17 years of industry experience as the lead concept artist and later as the art director of EVE Online. And Trakjot Oskjorsson, who is actually sitting right there, is StarCore's producer and co-designer, also of CCP fame, and also with over 17 years of industry experience. But those who don't know EVE Online or CCP, they are very famous for the very strong community and are still going strong 13 years after the release. Now, let's take a look at what we are working on. So there's no sound. There's no sound. There might be people. There's no sound. No, no. Let's see. games is quite healthy. A good example of the MMO RTS site is the company Plarium. Plarium, who exclusively deal in MMO RTS games, claim more than 250 million registered users. On the other side we have Civilization 5, which has sold over 10 million units on Steam alone and that's not counting DLCs. And these games breed passionate communities. The strategy game experts at Paradox have a community of nearly 5 million users interacting with around 1 million users on a monthly basis via social media and forums. Now looking at the horizon, what we see is virtual reality and speculations abound of what kind of games actually fit the VR experience. We believe strategy games are especially well suited. They're in a tranquil setting, players can easily issue commands and lose themselves in a wondrous exploration of detailed living maps. The bird's eye view will never feel more real nor authentic than in this setting. Now that being said, Starboard is a cross-platform solution with a top-down approach. We will make the most immersive version of the game first and then move down to mobile and even browser. But our game will be VR-Ratty next year, hopefully among the first first strategy games in that sphere. Thank you.