crypto news – EVE Online Creator CCP Raises $40M to Create Web3 EVE Game

EVE Online, a massively multiplayer on-line function-taking part in recreation (MMORPG) in outer house, boasts some of the hardcore, engaged audiences in gaming. And immediately, developer CCP Games introduced that it has raised cash to broaden the EVE universe with a brand new Web3 recreation.

CCP revealed immediately that it has raised $40 million in financing in a spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz to develop what it’s calling “a new AAA title utilizing blockchain technology, set within the EVE universe.” The $40 million spherical additionally included participation from BITKRAFT, Nexon, Kingsway Capital, HASHED, amongst different traders.

The URL of the announcement web site suggests a “Project Awakening” identify for the initiative.

In a press launch, the corporate defined that the brand new EVE recreation will characteristic on-chain techniques, with an emphasis on “persistence, composability and truly open third-party development to create a new relationship between virtual worlds and players.”

“Since its inception, CCP Games’ vision has been to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life,” mentioned CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, in an 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.”

EVE Online is celebrating 20 years of existence this 12 months and has cultivated a die-arduous viewers of gamers which have shaped factions inside its sci-fi world. The recreation has yielded an annual conference in Iceland, an array of spinoff video games, and even books documenting historic in-recreation battles between its contentious rival crews.

While that is CCP’s first transfer into Web3 gaming, Pétursson has lengthy been within the potential for blockchain to revolutionize ideas like consumer possession and open economies within the gaming world.

But he’s been real looking about it.

In 2020, Pétursson instructed Decrypt that he thought the addressable marketplace for blockchain video games was too small on the time for CCP to make any strikes. He additionally famous the complexities round dealing with crypto, and mentioned that it might be 5 to 10 years earlier than a blockchain recreation had the potential to be a real “killer app.”

“I’m not sure necessarily that it will be a tipping point,” he said in 2020. “But you could foresee a time where there’s a killer app, where you just really have to get involved regardless of whether you need to figure something out, and that pulls in a wave of people and kind of starts an avalanche.”

CCP Games isn’t the one main conventional recreation maker to enter the Web3 world.

Assassin’s Creed writer Ubisoft has been experimenting and investing within the house for years, for instance, whereas Final Fantasy creator Square Enix is actively growing NFT video games—such because the upcoming Symbiogenesis on Ethereum scaling community, Polygon.