In addition to leading work on SimCity and the original Sims, legendary game creator Will Wright has been relatively quiet since the release of 2008’s Spore. However, by 2022 he had returned to work on VOXVerse.
You may interact with other players while you mine resources, construct structures, and trade goods. The characters are all short and stocky since they are made out of voxels. You’ll also be able to buy and own property, and I believe you know where this is heading from here.
This is exactly the kind of initiative that ought to have been launched in May of 2021 and then discreetly canceled a year later when the bottom fell out of the market.
It’s built on the blockchain, licenses are being thrown at it, the term “metaverse” is being used, and the general design seems like it was created with the sole intention of impressing the type of men that sit at the board table of a Web3 firm.
Oh, and it’s also boosting NFTs’ marketability. Design work for the game took place at Gallium Games, a blockchain gaming studio co-founded by Wright and Carmen Sandiego co-creator Lauren Elliott; however, the “Vox” characters at the project’s core are not original creations but rather part of a preexisting line of NFTs that also features licensed tie-ins from properties like Trolls and The Walking Dead.
Gala Games, a blockchain company, is selling VOX characters and has invested $25 million in the VOXVerse ecosystem.
Wright says in an interview with Axios, “I don’t really want to be in the business of selling NFTs,” suggesting that he isn’t fully invested in the token economy. Instead, he is interested in the blockchain because “I want to have safe transactions for content producers.”
Stephen Totilo of Axios notes, however, that co-founder Elliott amiably intervened during this section of the conversation to point out that “certain components of the VoxVerse project technically are NFTs.”
Maybe Wright can add some of his magic to the mix, and the playable portions, like the relationship system, will be fun to experiment with. To be honest, it actually depresses me to listen to him recite these empty bullet points about blockchain gaming and see the game in action.