EVE On-line studio CCP Video games has introduced that it’s engaged on a brand new triple-A game set within the EVE universe, and I’m very sorry to say that it’s a blockchain game.
“Since its inception, CCP Video games’ imaginative and prescient has been to create digital worlds extra significant than actual life,” CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson stated at projectawakening.io. “Now, with developments made inside blockchain, we will forge a brand new universe deeply imbued with our experience in participant company and autonomy, empowering gamers to have interaction in new methods.”
The announcement is de facto concerning the funding for the undertaking, fairly than the game itself: CCP bought $40 million in improvement funding from Andreessen Horowitz, a enterprise capital agency based by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. CCP did say, nevertheless, that the undertaking will “leverage smart-contract blockchain know-how, specializing in persistence, composability and really open third-party improvement to create a brand new relationship between digital worlds and gamers.”
I am truthfully unsure what that is speculated to imply, and sadly the Andreessen Horowitz announcement is not any extra informative.
“This new AAA title will mix CCP’s 25 years of game design expertise with the newest in blockchain know-how to allow a brand new frontier in participant company and autonomy, and also will be set inside the EVE Universe,” it stated.
“Collectively, we share the assumption that participant possession and governance inside an open platform could be a key source of enjoyable that serves to amplify nice gameplay and charming game design.”
There’s one fascinating be aware in there: Andreessen Horowitz stated CCP “has already made nice progress in product improvement and we’ve been very impressed by the playtests to this point.” It is extra than simply empty guarantees and different folks’s cash being thrown round, in different phrases.
Nonetheless, I’ve questions. Regardless of bulletins like this one, blockchain-based game improvement appears stagnant, maybe as a result of so few builders are literally focused on it. GDC’s annual developer survey discovered that solely 12% of respondents have been in favor of utilizing blockchain tech in video games, in comparison with 56% opposed. Worse, I’ve by no means seen anybody clarify what a blockchain-based game goes to perform for gamers that typical know-how can’t. And there is been actual pushback in opposition to blockchain and NFTs in videogames, though I am beginning to suppose our declaration that they have been bullied out of mainstream video games may need been a bit untimely.
The response to Pétursson’s tweet from crypto lovers and blockchain builders is predictably constructive, but it surely’s considerably extra blended from different quarters:
Going to throw up pic.twitter.com/hPcNvi3qvRMarch 21, 2023
Talking for myself, I do not see the purpose of throwing round meaningless buzzwords to hype a game that, for all intents and functions, doesn’t exist past a funding announcement. However that is the way it at all times appears to be with blockchain game bulletins: We hear concerning the cash, however not the video games. In fact, there is no assure that this undertaking will ever see the sunshine of day anyway, as CCP appears to have bother making something that is not EVE On-line.
Pétursson has beforehand expressed some enthusiasm for the “untapped potential” of blockchain know-how, but additionally acknowledging that there is “a whole lot of work wanted” earlier than it is prepared for use in video games like EVE On-line. He said explicitly in 2022 that “we now have no plans so as to add blockchain know-how into EVE On-line’s world server Tranquillity for the foreseeable future,” including that “for us, NFT stands for ‘Not for Tranquility’.”