Is the gaming multiverse world of Ready Player One at hand? That’s the big claim coming from the makers of Enjin Coin, a new kind of cryptocurrency.
The developers of six blockchain games have banded together in a syndicate to create a decentralized gaming multiverse by utilizing the blockchain to allow players to own assets that can be used across multiple games. The developers are all using Enjin Coin, a cryptocurrency created in the past year.
These games don’t have tons of players yet, and maybe they aren’t going to set the world on fire, but the developers are trying to pioneer technologies that take advantage of the transparency and security of blockchain, which is the foundation for cryptocurrencies. It’s not so different from a plan advanced by High Fidelity.
Age of Rust, 9Lives Arena, CryptoFights, War of Crypto, Bitcoin Hodler, and Forest Knight are using Enjin Coin’s blockchain development platform to integrate gaming assets stored on the Ethereum blockchain and have committed to creating the first ever gaming multiverse. That means their worlds, characters, and items will be connected.
Players who own assets in these games can use them across the “multiverse.” That is, they can use them in multiple games, enabling developers to cross-promote while offering their players a unique inter-universe experience.
Age of Rust creators SpacePirate Games started the alliance when it announced its intent to use the Enjin Coin as a multiverse platform, sent out a tweet on August 14, saying “Decentralized player-owned game items supported by other games is the next evolution in gaming. It’s the ‘Ready Player One’ type of universe; we’re working with other games to start it.”
Since then, five more game studios announced adoption of the multiverse, which will allow players to find and use selected items in all participating games.
In theoretical physics, a multiverse is a hypothetical collection of universes, including the one that we see around us. The various universes within the multiverse are often referred to as “parallel” or “alternative” universes. Ready Player One, a 2018 blockbuster movie that grossed half a billion dollars, popularized the concept of the gaming multiverse with its depiction of the Oasis, or a collection of gaming landscapes.
The key difference is that while Ready Player One’s Oasis is owned by a single person, the multiverse growing on the blockchain is completely decentralized and is developing organically through collaboration and innovation. Though all of the games in the multiverse are using Enjin Coin’s platform to create and integrate their blockchain assets, the multiverse is not governed or controlled by a single entity.
Any game developer can create blockchain assets or integrate those that already exist, however, Enjin’s platform enables developers to do so without any prior knowledge of or experience with blockchain development, Enjin said.
Enjin said players will soon be able to own an entire collection of multiverse assets to take with them from game to game. Eventually, developers will also be able to collaborate and enable players to level up in multiple games simultaneously, using the blockchain a developer can allow character interactions in other games to affect the character’s status in their own.
Enjin said the full range of possibilities is yet to be explored, from finding assets in games that can be used in others, to creating an intertwining set of missions and objectives that weave universes together.
Enjin is offering its blockchain development platform to early adopters for free. Enjin Coin first started building the blockchain development platform in June 2017 and gained crowdfunding through an ICO a few months later.
With CryptoFights and Forest Knight slated for release in late 2018, Enjin Coin has enabled the frictionless integration of multiverse assets into games by creating a comprehensive suite of blockchain development and support software, all in just over a year’s time.
Enjin Coin’s Unity Plugin is currently being used by early adopters and has been submitted to the Unity Asset Store, which will put it within the reach of 4.5 million developers. Enjin has also create its own Enjin Smart Wallet, a multi-token cryptocurrency wallet for storing, managing, and protecting game assets.
Enjin will also release the EnjinX blockchain explorer, which will act as an encyclopedia for the blockchain, enabling players to verify the data attached to their items and developers to seamlessly import asset data into their games.
All items minted using Enjin’s development platform are backed by a nominal amount of Enjin Coin (ENJ) to certify their authenticity. This means all a developer needs to create and adopt multiverse assets using the Blockchain SDK by Enjin is a small amount of ENJ.
