We met up with CEO and Co-Founder of Aether Trading Card Game, Jens Peeters, to get to know the man behind this up-and-coming Web3 project. A lifelong gamer, by the time he was 15 he played as a multi-rank one in the top 0.1% of World of Warcraft. At the time, gaming wasn’t really something you could make a career out of, so he went the marketing route. But roles flipped fast and Jens eventually found himself as an esports celebrity manager working with various pro-gamers and brands.
With the rise of crypto, Jens really wanted to see something similar to Pokemon go in the web3 space, so he decided to do it himself with what eventually evolved into Aether Trading Card game. “We are very experienced in CGI. So, the first thing we did was basically release a Computer-Generated Content (CGI) teaser, and that immediately went viral. We had like 5 million views on Facebook,” Jens said. Their discord was flooded, and VCs flocked to their door in 2021.
The bear hit, but they kept building the Pokemon go style game on the blockchain. The market just wasn’t ready for it though, so they shifted focus to what is now the Cards of Eternity, and Aether Trading Card Game. They also now have exclusive rights to The Wheel of Time, the bestselling novel series by Robert Jordan, a multi-billion dollar franchise. The Wheel of Time has enchanted over 100M fans worldwide with its rich tapestry of mythology and magic, spanning 15 books over 23 years. “The goal actually, with Aether games itself, was to build a transmedia studio where we built stories, but also build games for that,” Jens said.
Aether Saga is what Jens refers to as a Franchise. They have a proof of concept on YouTube and a small mini-series that is a mix between Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Wheel of Time. It is high dark fantasy all in CGI. The original game is built within the Aether franchise. Moving forward, they will be taking the 2,700 creatures and 3,000 years of lore from The Wheel of Time and putting all of it into the game. Eventually multiple IPs will come together in the game. And each expansion, each IP has its own storylines as well that users play through. So, it’s not just a set of new cards within that ip, it’s much more than that.
Aether Trading Card Game is currently on the Epic Games Store, Ultra, HyperPlay and later this year Cards of Eternity will be released on Steam. The full release will be together with The Wheel of Time Ip with additional story and co-op modes as well. Using the on-chain assets like NFTs and tokens are optional, and this free-to-play game is meant to attract a larger audience than just the web3 crowd. If users want to trade an asset, they will need to convert it to an NFT. This is where the $AEG token comes in. They use 4337 account abstraction wallets so every single account that the game has itself is a wallet by default. This lets them tap into the audience that follows The Wheel of Time without the need for crypto experience.
The full release of the game will be early 2025 and an enormous amount of content will be released along with it. The token was launched in March 2024, and staking is now live. The community staked over 1M $AEG tokens within the first week. To learn more follow @aethergamesinc on X.
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