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I think video games were a natural part of childhood for my generation. I was definitely blessed to grow up playing with my friends online and for a few years they really did shape my youth.
During that time, my family was living in the lowest income bracket above being homeless. Mom was a bit too sick to work, she has Crohn's disease and a bunch of other health problems and was a single parent with three kids, living in public housing and getting government support. But I see struggle as relative, because we are blessed to live in Australia. There are people who have had it much harder. When I grew up I realized that my mom really put in the work to make sure that we didn't realize how tough things were.
A really pivotal point in my younger years was in geography class in grade 11. Generally, I had been a class clown; I got Cs and maybe the odd B, but I loved sport. Then, something switched in around grade 10 or 11. I really wanted to focus because I had ambitions to be a fighter pilot in the military. I took up chemistry, physics and geography, which were prerequisites to get into pilot training.
I had a friend who was advanced in geography, so I asked if I could have her grade 11 paper to read. I decided to take that paper, change the name and hand it in. We had the same teacher, but she got an A+ and I got a B-. At that point I felt like I had a name for myself and academic success was just not going to happen for me. I decided then to go into an industry where I could create my own results, which was sales. That turned out to be a door-knocking sales job selling charity.
Trying to get money from people for nothing in return is exceptionally difficult. I was walking 15km a day and worked on a commission only salary. We'd get out there at 8am and knock on doors until 6pm, and if you didn't sell anything, you'd worked all day for nothing. I was 17 but I just had to keep knocking and develop mental fortitude to the point where rejection didn't really mean much. I think that was really important for me and became the foundation for everything I have done since.
A year later I dove into telesales which was far easier, people just hang up on you! I made some money and then went into timeshare sales. That was the worst decision of my life—I didn't sell a thing!
But during that time, I had been exposed to cryptocurrencies through social media and friends and made my first crypto coin purchase. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), or cryptocurrencies, were really taking off and I began to recognize that I was asking questions and no one was answering for an hour, or even a day.
I realized there was an opportunity to create a cryptocurrency customer service company, and I did. My company would accept ICO tokens instead of payment with the idea that the tokens would eventually be worth something. But startups often fail, and many times we wouldn't get anything in return for six months' work.
Then non-fungible tokens (NFTs) came along and I was exposed to a game called F1 Delta Time, which in a roundabout way, introduced me to Ken Pham and Steve Ngyuen. Ken had sent me a direct message on Discord and looking back, I was so close to not replying. Turns out it was the right choice to respond, because Ken had an idea for a cryptocurrency video game, so he, Steve and I jumped on a few calls and started theorizing what we were building. We just bootstrapped it together from April to October 2021, before we launched the game, Pegaxy.
When someone plays Pegaxy, they can either purchase a horse, a Pega, and race it or rent a Pega and race it online within the game. The Pega who place in the top three in each race win cryptocurrency tokens. We use the Polygon Blockchain and our tokens are called Pegaxy Stone and Vigorous. Vigorous can only be earned through racing and you can also sell that token on the cryptocurrency market for U.S. dollars.
Some people will own a lot of horses and then rent them out to people who will play for them and they will split the profits. You can rent a horse without paying anything, but the profit split is up to the owner. There are also players who collect rare Pega, and people who build guilds, where they breed as many Pega as possible and bring people inside the guild, then everyone earns together and shares the profits. In a traditional game you would win in-game tokens but that doesn't really mean anything. This translates into real dollars.
In a traditional video game, once you have hit certain achievements people might want to purchase items or characters, or sell their account. If someone wanted to buy my account I would have to trust that they were going to send me money, and they would have to trust that I was going to give them an email and a password. This platform allows users to have a trusted medium of exchange, where we don't need to trust each other. I can put items on a marketplace, someone can purchase them and I will receive cryptocurrency tokens. So initially, you don't need anything to play, other than a cryptocurrency wallet. Market changes can affect everything. Even at the moment, we are in a dip but there hasn't been a lack of interest from players. The reality is that if there is interest in the game, there is always going to be money coming in, even if the coin value is down.
Over the lifetime of the game, there has been around $180,000,000 in peer-to-peer Pega sales volume on our marketplace and we take a 3 percent fee from the marketplace. So we have made around $5,400,000 but we really need to reinvest that into the game.
I pay myself AUD$3,000 a month because my reward comes from the fact that we have a team allocation of Pegaxy Stone tokens. If I build a solid game, those tokens will be rewarding in the future. It's not logical for me to be rich in four months. We also have 80 staff and the game is barely finished.
I'm 25 now and although I am seeing some success, there have been a lot of failures. I think that's more so the point. Everything seems smooth sailing when you get there; the rejection and failure is what people don't see. But I know every single minute of what it took to get here; being in the trenches and making sacrifices. I have never drunk alcohol and I don't party. I have been with my "Mrs" for nine years, I call her my wife even though we haven't married. We sacrificed a lot in our younger years to get here.
She has been in and out of the businesses but she's more artistic and relaxed. She loves painting and piano, so being in the trenches doesn't really suit her all that much. She's been supportive but obviously it's not easy going from being broke, to even more broke and then finally coming into money.
I don't talk about money too much with my mom, but I see her all the time and she recognizes when things are good. I think she's definitely proud and just happy that she has well-rounded sons.
I don't know what could happen in the future, I'm just living it. But it's fun and I think you have to be grateful. That's the most important thing because the businesses could go to cr**. That's just life.
I don't think I will ever stop building. I made quite a lot of money in the first crypto boom in 2018, and the money is great. But the best way to look at it is to think: How much can you travel and holiday without a reason? You can't do that forever. So, I would rather build and go to the Philippines and Vietnam because we have staff there. I live in the "now." I obviously have enormous goals of making a ton of money, but the reality is, happiness is the main one. I would rather build my lifestyle around something I like so I can do it forever.
Corey Wilton is the CMO and co-founder of Pegaxy. You can find out more at pegaxy.io or follow on Twitter @PegaxyOfficial.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
As told to Jenny Haward.
