Legendary game designer Will Wright, who led the development not only Sim City but the original Sims Plus, they haven’t made a really big video game since 2008 spore. He’s back in 2022, though, working on something called VOXVerse.
It’s a social game where you mine things, build things, and talk to people. And everyone is a little voxel-dependent character squatting. There will also be properties to buy and own, and I think you can see where this is going.
The project ticks every box of something that should have been announced in May 2021 and then quietly shelved 12 months later The donkey fell from the market. It’s on the blockchain, throws licenses at it, uses the word “metaverse” and its overall design looks like something pitched just to impress the guys sitting at the Web3 Startup board table.
Oh, and it also helps sell NFTs. The game was designed by Galllium Games, a studio focused on blockchain games (founded by Wright and Carmen Sandiego Lauren Elliott), but the “Vox” characters at the heart of the project are not new ones, It’s an existing line of NFTs, which includes additional links licensed from things like Trolls And the the walking Dead. Vox characters are sold by crypto company Gala Games, which has spent $25 million in financing VOXVerse.
In interview Axios Wright distances himself a bit from the NFT side of things, saying “I don’t really want to be in the business of selling NFTs” and that his main interest in blockchain is “I want to have secure transactions for content creators”. Axios Stephen Totilo Add Although during this part of the interview, co-founder Elliott sympathetically intervened that technically some aspects of the VoxVerse project are NFTs.
You can watch the game in action, and hear Wright talk about how it works, below.
Look, maybe Wright can get some magic on the project and some of the interoperable parts – like the relationship system – would be interesting. But I don’t know, man, hearing him repeat all these blank spots for blockchain games, and looking at the game in action, the whole thing really pisses me off.
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