With $40 million of investment
EVE Onlinedevelopers CCP Games are working on a new game set within the EVE universe. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it will use blockchain technology, after CCP received $40 million (around £32.7 million) from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
The project, which is calledProject Awakening, will “leverage smart-contract blockchain technology, focusing on persistence, composability and truly open third-party development to create a new relationship between virtual worlds and players.” Whatever that means.
“Since its inception, CCP Games’ vision has been to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life,” writes CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson in the announcement. “Now, with advancements made within blockchain, we can forge a new universe deeply imbued with our expertise in player agency and autonomy, empowering players to engage in new ways.”
The blockchain, and in particular NFTs, have been a focus of video game investment for the past 12-18 months. Every announcement has thus far been met with derision, often fromvideo game developers themselves, and many developers and publishers have since toned down their enthusiasm.
I admire the way that CCP have continued to support and expand EVE Online, both nurturing the ways in which it is weird and attempting to make it graspable for more people. I also admire their willingness to experiment on new projects publicly, even if those ideas too often feel like bandwagon chasing. The blockchain is a dumb waste of time however and it’s no surprise that theEVE Online Redditis post after post of people dunking on it.
