More Money Down the Drain: CCP raises $40m for AAA blockchain game in EVE Online universe

[Zzero]

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ccp-raises-40m-for-aaa-blockchain-game-in-eve-online-universe

CCP Games has raised $40 million in its latest financing round, and will be dedicating these funds to the development of a new blockchain-based title.

Investment in the Icelandic games firm was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with contributions from Makers Fund, Bitkraft, Kingsway Capital, Nexon, Hashed and more.

The company said the funding will allow it to build upon the research and development's explorations of blockchain and web3 gaming, enabling the development of a full-scale AAA title set in the Eve Online universe.

CCP said the new game will remain separate from current projects, including the core Eve Online game.

There are few other details to share are this stage, including which blockchain the studio plans to build on, but CCP said the game's key systems will be "developed on-chain" and the project will "[focus] 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," said CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. "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.

"This financing has marked an exciting frontier in our studio history as we begin our third decade of virtual world operations. We are humbled by the confidence from our partners in the development of this new title."

For those who haven't followed the company, this will be the third shooter to be bolted on to Eve. Well, assuming thats what they end up doing anyway, which seems likely based on the company's past history. The previous two attempts having been quietly disastrous failures with long dev cycles followed by little player interest (Dust also really fucked over the main Eve experience due to engine co-development.) They also had a "good" VR game about five years ago which reviewed well but failed to move units, with the team later being laid off since they weren't core to CCP's moneymaking.

Can someone explain to me how blockchain is supposed to help a game have unique assets anyway? Its an online game, you can keep unique assets on your own internal servers just as easily and, indeed, do just that for Eve with old accounts keeping their in-game history decades after they go inactive.