Peter Molyneux Announces Game Using NFTs
Peter Molyneux, the maker of the Fable games, among other things, is working on a game that uses NFTs. In this “blockchain business simulator,” players can build a business by owning “Land NFTs,” Molyneux reports.
Molyneux promises that everything in the game world is made by the players themselves. “From the homes your employees live in and the watering holes and gardens to entertain them, to the facilities to make their lives easier and the products your company is built on.” There are “thousands of parts” to do things with to create, says the maker. It should then become possible to sell the homemade creations via the blockchain to earn real money.
The game, called Legacy, works with ‘LegacyCoins’, the cryptocurrency with which players can trade. This coin is on the Ethereum blockchain and conforms to the “tried and trusted ERC-20 token standard” according to Molyneux.
With LegacyCoins, “owners of an in-game corporate organization” can buy Legacy Keys, Molyneux explains. These can be lent to other players who also want to start a business in Legacy. By doing so, they become “business partners” and share a percentage of their earned LegacyCoins in exchange for the keys. In addition, players can purchase exclusive ‘Game Item NFTs’ with the cryptocurrency. Nfts, or non-fungible tokens, are digital items with their own serial number that are registered in the blockchain. It is possible to show who owned each item, which ensures that each item is ‘unique’. It is not known exactly how this all works in Legacy.
According to Molyneux, LegacyCoins can be earned in addition to buying for real money by winning “competitive events”: “Players must push their production capabilities to the limit to use their imagination and creativity to design the best products and most unique cities, while recording them against the rest.” According to Molyneux, ‘great prizes’ can be won with this, but that will not be discussed further.
Recent projects
Whether Legacy will become something remains to be seen. Peter Molyneux has led successful gaming franchises such as Fable and Black & White in the past. He is also the self-proclaimed ‘creator of the godgame genre’, with titles in his portfolio such as Dungeon Keeper and Populous. In recent years, however, his projects have been less successful.
In 2012, he left Microsoft after working on a poorly received Fable project for the Microsoft Kinect. He started his own studio 22cans and released the ‘social experiment’ Curiosity the same year. In this mobile ‘game’, players had to tap a giant cube until each cube was gone. Whoever touched the last block was promised a ‘life-changing’ reward.
The winner would become an ‘almighty god’ in a new god game from Molyneux called Godus and get a share of the game’s revenue. The game had a winner after half a year, but after a while the contact between 22cans and the player faded. According to Molyneux, this was because whoever had to keep in touch with the winner left the company and no one was appointed as a replacement.
Godus came out in 2014 and was not a success. The game is still available for purchase on Steam as an early access title to this day. The 2016 sequel Godus Wars is also still in early access. So far, the studio has not released a single full game.