Will Wright explains VoxVerse. Image: Gala Games/Gallium
Hall of fame game designer Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims) is making a blockchain video game for the masses, not for NFT shoppers, he tells Axios.
Why it matters: Wright is the biggest name in the controversial blockchain gaming sector, in which there’s an abundance of investment and player skepticism.
What they’re saying: “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,” Wright tells Axios, using common industry terminology for people who spend an inordinate amount of money on a game or the NFTs that just might be tied to it.
Details: Wright’s project is called VoxVerse. It is a virtual world set on a massive cube, where players should be able to own land, create attractions, mine for resources and socialize (release date TBD).
- He envisions a game that will attract three groups of people: a small number of rich virtual landowners, paying for plots with crypto; a middle group of creative players who’ll be tapped by the landowners to make stuff (and share any sale proceeds from what they make), and a mass of free-to-play folks who’ll hang out and play in the world.
- In a faint echo of the Sims, the game will incorporate systems of fame and trust as well as basic character needs such as energy or hunger.
- The most Wright-style touch may be “shape grammar,” which he calls “kind of an evolutionary system” for item creation that lets users repeatedly click on and transform a starter object (car, coffee cup, etc.) to tweak it, make it their own, even “patent” it via the blockchain for revenue-generating reuse.
Between the lines: Design for VoxVerse is happening at Gallium Games, a blockchain-focused startup co-founded by Wright and Carmen Sandiego co-creator Lauren Elliott, who first shipped a game with Wright in 1984.
- Actual production of the game is happening at Unity.
- And the project is being…
