The Mega Star Atlas Town Hall Recap – July 3, 2024

The 43rd Star Atlas Town Hall, dubbed the “Mega Town Hall” was a two and half hour affair that featured a host of significant project updates from CEO Michael Wagner and key members of the Star Atlas development team. As usual, Wagner was joined in host duties by the Star Atlas Community Team; Santi, Dom, and Jose.

This Town Hall was sponsored by Kirtland Signature Water

If you’re looking for the Never Alone code, it’s: town hall

The Town Hall packed a ton into an almost three hour timeframe.  As an overview, these were some of the key updates announced during the event:

• Crew Card and Crew Pack Updates
• Project Rosegarden
• Project Galia
• Fleet Command
• 2024 Q2 Economic Report
• Marketplace and Starcom Improvements
• Lending and Rentals
• DAO Re-Release

Let’s take a dive in more depth!

Upcoming Star Atlas Events and Roadshows

Michael took the floor to open with what the remaining calendar year looks like for the Star Atlas team regarding live events.

Already announced, the Star Atlas team will be at Rare.Evo  in Las Vegas, Nevada from Aug 15-17th. Santi, Miguel, and Michael will all be in attendance with a floor booth and gaming stations at featuring Shaga’s cloud streaming gaming.  There will also be a community meetup in Las Vegas during the same time frame. If you live in the US, be sure to check out this event.

Michael also mentioned that he would be attending Bitcoin Nashville, another high profile crypto event. Michael and team will also be attending YGG’s annual conference in the Philippines as well.

For the finale event of the year, Michael and the Star Atlas team will head to Singapore for Solana Breakpoint 2024 in September. More coverage on Star Atlas’ plans for Solana Breakpoint below.

New Hires

Michael was also excited to announce a total of 19 full and part time new hires to the team. Michael noted that they have been focused on scaling slowly and strategically since beginning of the year. The full time hires include Blake and Dane for level design, Morton a concept designer,  Jim a Senior Game Designer, and Lucas & Tylo whom are full stack engineers.

Kelly was hired as Director of Security Engineering ensuing the security of Star Atlas products. Daniel, a game architect and engineer was also hired. Alexander, a Creative Designer for marketing and cinematic production was brought aboard in advance of Star Atlas’ marketing push for later this year.

Lastly, Dan Park was brought back aboard the team to continue development and work on the Star Atlas DAO

8 short term concept artists were hired to work on crew cards and as concept artists.

Economic Updates w/ Gareth

Following Michael’s introduction, Gareth took the floor to discuss an overview of the Q2 Star Atlas economic report.

Key metrics Gareth highlighted was a 6.24% growth in the Star Atlas GDP from Q1 to Q2 of 2024. If the Star Atlas GDP continues on this trajectory, the Star Atlas GDP is projected to reach an annual GDP of $34 million dollars.

Gareth briefly discussed the transition from the legacy RFR redemption system to the Loyalty Point system and how the transition has provided a more stable and predictable daily emission curve for $ATLAS. Gareth noted that there was a 300% growth in player participation between the two systems.

The Star Atlas Economic updates will be covered monthly.  Tomorrow’s update will delve deeper into the analytics of the most recent quarterly report.

Build Program/Developers

In a big win to Star Atlas community developers, Star Atlas will begin to offer free RPC calls to developers and third party products. Available via the Star Atlas build program, developers can apply via form for management rights under the program.  An upcoming developer hour event will dive deeper into how the process will work.

Solana Breakpoint 2024

Solana Breakpoint, the largest annual Solana conference, will take place in Singapore this year with a large Star Atlas presence planned for the event. The event will showcase a number of new Star Atlas features capped by a 15 minute keynote presentation from Michael Wagner.

The event will focus on gameplay and cinematics with Michael saying that they are, “Going way bigger” this year. Solana Breakpoint will be hosted at the SunTech convention center.

Star Atlas is an Anchor Sponsor for the event with a prime display location on the 4th floor of the event hall.

Star Atlas Summit

Star Atlas Summit

In conjunction with Solana Breakpoint, Michael announced the first ever Star Atlas conference to be held adjacent to the main Solana Breakpoint event.  The event will be a full day dedicated to Star Atlas with an open invite to community members and guilds.

Dubbed the Star Atlas Summit, attendees do not require a ticket purchase for entry to the Star Atlas Summit.  A seperate ticket is still required for Solana Breakpoint.

The Star Atlas Summit will feature 8 hours of Star Atlas panels from team members, community members, and IP builders.  Co-Founder Danny will be conducting a fireside chat, along with other key Star Atlas team members in attendance.

The Star Atlas summit will feature a Surge tournament for prizes. Surge is the name of the Star Atlas Third-Person Shooter gameplay mode.

The event will also feature booths for DACs and IP projects to showcase themselves.

Star Atlas Summit will feature the first Star Atlas hack-a-thon with a ceremony for top projects. For the hack-a-thon, only new feature developments or advancement of current projects will be considered.  Sponsored through the Ogrika line of ships, the hack-a-thon will launch in the near future and conclude at the Star Atlas Summit with a ceremony.

The Star Atlas Summit will take place on September 21st.

Crew Packs and Crew Cards

Midway through the town hall, the team provided an updated on the most highly anticipated next release from Star Atlas. Michael stated that Crew Packs were the newest asset class being introduced by Automata into the game and quite possibly the last.

Crews will have different traits and rarities and will serve a variety of functions including as avatars in UE5 and SAGE crafting crew. Exhaustive details will be provided in two Atlas Brews from now.

So Wen Crew Packs?

Unfortunately, the team did not have an announcement date for the release of Crew Packs. The team has decided to delay the launch of the crews for consideration of current market conditions and marketing timing.

The team is orchestrating a considerable marketing push and believes that Crew Packs have the ability to reach out to a bunch of different groups and stake holders.

Michael added that an added benefit to the delay is that all species, factions, and art will be available at launch which would be “very soon”.

Airdrop and Sale Date

While the team did not announce the release date, they did walk through the order of sale, snapshot, and airdrop dates.  Two days before crew packs go on sale, the snapshot will take place across all Star Atlas applications wherever player’s ships are stored.

The follow day, players will receive their crew pack airdrops and component bundles for the ships they own as previously advertised. Lastly, on the day of the sale, players will be able to open their crew packs individually or en masse.

For opening, the team has developed an optimal user experience for auto depositing crew into SAGE upon opening. Players will have the opportunity to auto-deposit their crew on opening.

Michael took the opportunity to clarify how ships, in light of crew and components, have and will always be priced. “Ship prices are a function of their economic productivity model”. People who own ships now are receiving the bonus of crews and components. In the future, players will have to purchase ships, at their pricing model, in addition to crew and components.

New Faction Leader Crew

Leader Crew Packs

To round out crew updates, the team is rolling out additional incentive campaign for crew packs. Singular Faction leaders will be released alongside crew packs.  To obtain a Faction leader, players will need to collect 5 rarities from common and legendary within their faction.

Once complete, players will redeem their set for a raffle ticket eligible for a Faction leader drawing.

Owning the Faction Leader Crew Card will grant the player access to that factions unique Faction Leader ship and Tier 5 land habitat.  Access will last for one year at which point the faction leader will swap to a new player via an unknown mechanic. The player will retain a copy of the faction leader but lose access to the unique spaces.

Lastly, CSS offices will be available to high PVP holders to use as political offices.

Roadmap Updates

Breaking into the second half of the Star Atlas town hall, the team announced significant changes to the current roadmap with a shift in near term focus towards more emphasis on updates that will have a significant impact on company operations.

Michael stated that the changes place a strong emphasis on new user acquisition to the UE5 product environments and the plan is to have a strong feature showcase for Breakpoint.

Michael iterated that the development focus would be on replay able or repeatable gameplay loops, focusing on Surge and Fleet Command developments to bring Star Atlas to a more mainstream audience.

With that, Michael announced that they are deprecating R2.2 as a stand alone release and are transitioning the road map into Pre-Season and Season 0 releases. Pre-Season content is expected to launch initially around Solana Breakpoint.

Season 0 will launch sometime in 2025 and very likely continue into 2026.  Full public access will being with Season 0 with full combat racing and ship configuration.

Pre-Season Releases

Pre-Season Release will focus heavily on Surge with smaller maps, different environments, and different game modes to enable faster play and PVP games. New game modes expecting to come online in Pre-Season is Team Deathmatch, Gun Game, and VIP, and SWAT. The pivot to Surge was based on positive player feedback.

While Fleet Command was announced previously during Solana Crossroads, the team is heavily focused on establishing feature parity in Fleet Command.  Michael noted that the eliminating of the legacy Sage 3D was owed to the fact that it was built in PlayCanvas, which was unable to achieve feature parity with SAGE.

Star Atlas hopes that the pivot to Fleet Command in UE5 will make the economic modes of the game more accessible to users from both accessibility and playability standpoints.

Ultimately, the entire strategy of Star Atlas in the second half of 2024 is building out feature sets that will attract user growth and retention.

Project Rosegarden

Star Atlas veterans will remember the secretive code name for the Oni CSS as Project Rosegarden. In the near future the Oni CSS will open up as a Social Hub for players and a land system auction will take place within the Oni CSS.

Partnership deals will be available alongside some other itemized additions.

Basic ant-cheat software will be rolled out followed by more advanced detection systems.

Pre-season will feature a full physics upgrade for flight transitions.

Pets and pet slots for characters will also be available.

Marketplace and StarCom updates

Developer Brett announced several infrastructure updates for this year. Expect Marketplace V3 in Q4 this year.

V3 will feature historical data with charts and single escrow wallets that allow bidding on multiple items at once.

Bundles or bulk discounts will be a feature for players to buy and sell aggregate items.

Enhanced credit card integrations will also be available for easier onboarding.

Starcomm V2

Starcomm upgrade faces a potential deployments soon. These upgrades should reduce transaction speeds from 2-3 seconds to 150 milliseconds!

The update will be rolled out to the Star Atlas portal first and SAGE last.

Project Galia – Montage

The team feature a heavy video showcasing Project Galia – the Star Atlas as envisioned in persistent open world that is enabled by meta-gravity. Players will be able to explore Galia with seamless transitions from planetary flight to deep space travel featuring combat, PVP, missions, and quests.

Ship Lending and Rentals 

Star Atlas is rolling out a partnership later this year to enable Star Atlas lending. The enabling of the Star Atlas lending system will provide opportunities for small players to participate without the capital outlay.

The team is also tossing around the idea of ship financing where players can pay over time for a ship and use game earning to pay the asset off.

The team expects large interest from investor mentality to purchase ships and place on the market for passive income.

Surprisingly, the rental process technology is technically active in Sage with front end under current development.  Once front end is built, the feature will launch.

DAO

Lastly, the biggest news of the event was the announcement of a new hybridized DAO system launching this next Monday.,

This new DAO system will take place both on and off chain and was a proto-solution developed by the Star Atlas team due to the overt complexity of the old system. Players will still vote with POLIS and PVP on chain, however the majority of discussion and discourse will take place in new Governance channels within the Star Atlas Discord.

Next Monday, July 8th, the new DAO version with launch and a 48 hour period of review will begin. Wednesday players will vote for the implementation of PIPs set forth by the team to establish this new DAO structure.

Dan Park and Michael were keen to note that not all decisions around the game will be eligible for voting at this stage. For now, PIPs will center around the utilization of DAO funds for the enhancement of the Star Atlas community and project as a whole.

The four PIPs up for proposal are

PIP 1 – Groundwork for how proposals work and how DAO operates

PIP 2 – Ratification of the Star Atlas Foundation

PIP 3 – Establishment of Star Atlas Council elections, the process by which Star Atlas council is formed.

the council will feature 5 members initially that manage the governance process.  The will assist with the drafting of PIPs, reviewing of PIPs by the community and have an active role in governance.  The PIP will help define rules on how council operates.  Lastly, elections will take place in the coming weeks.

PIP 4 – Establish an ecosystem fund allowing community members to submit proposals for DAO funded initiatives into community project development.