Selcuk Atli, CEO of Bunch, joins Cheddar News to discuss the mobile chat app joining the metaverse. 

Between Bells

Gaming Platform Bunch Joins the Metaverse 

and between those bad guys and chatter news bunches a group video chat app for games with millions of downloads. But now bunch to point out how is your new home in the metaverse after making huge strides within its growth within the last couple of years, the platform now marking this evolution into the metaverse with a fresh take all will make it accessible for their users as well. So joining us now to talk about this is sell chuck Atlee ceo of bunch sell chuck good to have you here, thanks so much for joining us now. The bunch developer platform essentially allows you to integrate voice and video chat into the games for free but now that you guys are in the metaverse, what does the user experience look like? And is it still free here? Yeah, so we have like two components of our business right? There's one is we help integrate our experience into multi player games but our primary business is giving people a chat application that lets them meet up with their friends and their community and move between their favorite games together. Right? And the first version of our application has been in the app store for a few years. It has garnered significant growth through the pandemic but we've been heads down building the next version over the past year which pretty much does the same thing right? Like what bunch does is it lets people get together when they're physically apart and play their favorite games as if they're sitting next to each other. What we do with now is instead of just being a video chat application, it is a true metaverse, It is a game that launches other games, right? So we can meet up on bunch and push a button and jump into any of your favorite games while you're able to still voice on video chat. Okay, so a game almost within the game, is that gonna be how bunch is going to separate maybe from roadblocks or Discord or all these other platforms here when it comes to gaming in the metaverse? Yeah, I mean our thesis is that we're building an integrated and open ended metaverse. What I mean by that is a lot of people when they say metaverse, they think a RVR or Blockchain technology. Well, these are relevant building blocks for the metaverse. We believe we should define metaverse around the utility that it provides to users, right? And the utility that metaverse does is we're building these digital spaces that lets us get together when we're physically apart and move from experience to experience together. And obviously uh that's why metaverse isn't some future technology, hundreds of millions of people already play roadblocks and Minecraft on ford back today with their friends where they explore these digital worlds together. But while roadblocks and similar games are really cool, they're siloed experience, right? We can meet your friends and roadblocks and moved from roadblocks game to a roadblocks game, but you can't meet on roadblocks and play Fortnite, right? It is a closed experience while it's really fun and again, based on the same definition of these digital spaces where we're able to move from experience to experience together applications like the previous version of bunch or discord our metaphor Supplications to right? Because we can meet on Discord and placed on Fortnite and place them among us and play some Minecraft. So the unique thing about these kinds of materials applications is that they're open ended, right? So you can basically meet on Discord and go to an application that was not really made for Discord. But the different thing about Discord than roadblocks is that shared present civilian players happening in the form of voice chat, text chat and video chat. Right? These are these are not like a game like experiences in digital worlds. What we're really doing with bunch 2.0 is think like roadblocks meets discord where um it's a digital world where you have an average power, you get to explore these rooms and spaces with your friends. Kind of like a game like experience. But it also it's not siloed right? You can just jump from bunch into any of your favorites. So it's an open ended experience more similar to this for you. Um I'm curious Cell trick was a difficult sort of integrating for the metaphors, taking this gaming platform and integrating it to sort of the next level where there are a lot of challenges. Doing something like that. It was interesting because a lot of the experiences that we built, we haven't seen before right? Because a lot of metalist applications are developed as like final destinations, right? So like our view of the metaverse is basically all these digital islands get to move with mean, and there's some really cool islands out there like Fortnite and roadblocks and there's some emerging players in the Blockchain space, like sandbox in the Central and while these spaces are really cool, they're really designed for high fidelity experience, that's more immersive and that they're designed to keep you in there, right? We had a different approach. We're like, hey, we want to create a really fun and likely to experience that lets you have a lot of fun with your friends and can hang out in the bunch room all day with your friends and listen to music and play games. But also we didn't didn't want to get in the way of you wanting to play among us or Minecraft with your friends. So we wanted to be as lightweight as a mobile application that you might want to use the chat with your friends, but we wanted to create something as immersive and fun as roadblocks. So that was letting the challenge and um we've been using the application over the past couple of months with some early users and we've been having a lot of fun with it. So I think we're on to something that's good that the reaction to it has been good so far right now, it's just invite only to be able to do this. Are you planning on keeping it that way or is there going to be a larger role out here for more people to get involved in this? Yeah, we're slowly going to roll it out over the next few months. So if folks in the audience wanna have early access to it, you can go to do a bunch of words on twitter and follow us. We're right now slowly building out our audience of early access holders through discord. So if you follow us on twitter well, probably gets generally access to our discord through which You can have access to sell truck. I feel like we've only been talking about the metaverse maybe for the last few months here when Mark Zuckerberg sort of opened our eyes to it. You got you guys were created in 2017, was this always sort of the natural progression that you thought your company was going to go was to this was to the metaverse. Great. Like I'll take you back to the definition that we made of the metaphors, right? So essentially metaphors, while a lot of people say it's a RVR or Blockchain at the end of the day, it's basically let's create virtual experiences that bring us together one or physically apart and let's have real time experiences together, right? This is a kind of a social network that's more different than like a messaging application where I send something and then you send something to communicate over the course of between days. So building this real time social network that brings us together when we're physically apart has always been the product and the vision of the company, we just haven't been calling it metaverse. But basically with facebook changing and expanding the meta and a lot of other companies like the concept of metaverse isn't really new, right? The global boxes are very not a new company. Fortnite is not is not a new experience bunch has been around this court has been around I think there's more consensus of calling these digital experiences that we get to experience in real time metaverse and that's wait wait okay. Really really quickly, really quickly. But if you guys weren't calling it metaphors, what were you guys calling it? We're calling a bunch. Okay. And I think we just basically have like a shared terminology of what we're doing. Finally listen, I'm I'm into it's such a pleasure to have you here cell trick at least the ceo bunch. Such a pleasure to have you here sell trick. Thank you