The Sims creator Will Wright is working on a blockchain game about owning land and selling goods with crypto.
Wright’s next game is called VoxVerse, and he’s been talking to Axios about his vision for the game, which sounds like a complex and confusing management game. It’s described as a game where players live on a massive cube, where they can own land, and create ‘attractions’ as well as mine for resources.
The article references that Wright sees the game as having a tiered monetization model, admitting that that will include a number of rich virtual landowners who invest with crypto, a middle group of creatives who can make things for the rich players, and then a huge number of free-to-play players who can hang out in the world.
Wright says while the game isn’t focused on getting a lot of whales who will spend excessive amounts of money in-game, the title will still potentially need them to succeed. He said: “I'm much more interested in attracting a million free-to-play players than, you know, 10,000 rich whales, although we could use those rich whales.”
VoxVerse is being made by Gallium Studios, which received $25 million from NFT and crypto gaming bankrollers Gala Games. Gala would like VoxVerse to incorporate its Vox characters, which are collectible NFTs. Despite this, Wright contradicts that saying, “I don't really want to be in the business of selling NFTs.”
The game also incorporates something called “shape grammar”. This is an item creation tool that lets you begin with a starting object and tweak it to ‘patent’ and sell on the blockchain to make cryptocurrency.
While the game has elements of Wright’s The Sims, it seems like a confusing mess of systems all built to prop up cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. That’s even before you wrestle with the problematic environmental and ethical concerns of blockchain gaming and NFTs. Maybe Wright can find something of value in blockchain gaming, which has not found success in the mainstream yet, but one would think the project will have a lot of moral considerations to clear first.
Back in the world of The Sims, EA has recently been sharing a look at The Sims 5, though we shouldn't expect it for a few years.
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