With so many metaverse platforms emerging almost daily, a project needs to truly stand out. Not only that, but it needs to feel achievable and accessible to all. This is exactly what RIFT-AR will be according to founders, Adam Wavy, Lofi Michael and Karo Kaylani. In order to be accessible, RIFT-AR will be built using the AR technology already used in your mobile phones, much like when playing games such as Pokemon Go.
When the app becomes available, it will allow users to see an augmented reality metaverse layered over our reality. Users will be able to purchase locations across the world and upload digital assets from crypto wallets. This could mean that businesses will be able to apply AR features to their store signage, creating a sci-fi world seen only through the screen of your phone, but hopefully through AR glasses in the future.
We sat down with Co-Founder Adam Wavy to explore RIFT-AR in more detail.
GMW3 – Can you tell us a little bit about how RIFT-AR came to you and why you are so passionate about integrating the metaverse with our reality?
Adam Wavy – Michael and I both grew up in small towns – we’re both curious people & our surroundings never really fulfilled our need to experience new things. There was no option to alter our surroundings at such a young age. Augmented reality is a missing link granting access to anyone with a vision to begin building a world they dream to live in.
We examined the current state of the internet and how we interact with it. The idea of building another marketplace seemed dull. We began to examine areas all the major tech companies are building and were most intrigued with VR/AR.
GMW3 – What’s the ultimate goal for RIFT-AR? Where do you start on a project like this?
Adam Wavy – Michael has experience working in an experimental technologies lab that gave him access to a lot of these tools – we both agreed VR is really cool, but it seems like a short term play. In order to participate in VR you have to wear a headset that isolates you from reality. We’d been living in isolation for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and humanity needs technology to support connection with one another and their communities; a seamless bond between reality and digital worlds is the ethos of RIFT, we aren’t giving up on reality – we want to enhance it digitally.
GMW3 – It seems like AR is a natural evolution from QR codes…
Adam Wavy – I used to work with large brands producing experiential activations – we began plugging QR codes into our events and saw a large attraction to exclusive experience through technology – as we build RIFT, leveraging your phone’s capabilities to access augmented reality – I’m reminded of the early stages of onboarding people to using their camera to scan QR codes.
GMW3 – As RIFT-AR isn’t publicly available as yet, can you tell us a little of what to expect?
Adam Wavy – Our beta is an augmented reality app that allows you to view, purchase & build a digital layer over reality through the lens of your phone a lot like Pokémon Go. Our platform will be using Polygon’s blockchain to transact and store information.
We wanted to create an even playing field and pondered ways to make this platform as accessible as possible – high price points seem to be holding Gen Z back from participating in web3 and metaverse projects. Utilizing Polygon’s low transaction fees and leveraging capabilities your phone already possesses is our approach to making the metaverse accessible for new and younger generations.
RIFT will serve more as a foundation for the Metaverse, opening opportunities for collaboration – more so than a pre-constructed world for you to play in. We want builders, artists, dreamers etc, to focus on creating their “big idea”- they can plug their vision into the world. Notion being, creators stay creating – RIFT can handle the technology part.
GMW3 – Have there been any major challenges or pitfalls within development?
Adam Wavy – The biggest piece of the puzzle that’s taken the most time for development is how to map the world accurately in a decentralized manner. Our CTO Lofi Michael found the perfect solution- we are using “geohashes”- a public spatial data structure that assigns land coordinates and ranges, a unique code.
Utilizing geohashes allows for RIFT’s persistent land reference to be extremely accurate when mapping the world, while leveraging a developed system that doesn’t rely on mutable data (like street names).
Another note, we are very early and building in public – which opened the door to grow our founding team with Karo Kaylani. She helped organically boost our discord and sell out of our whitelist within 24 hours. It’s tricky seeing larger projects use influencers to boast big numbers while we remain in a lane to build organically and slow for the long term play.
GMW3 – Can you depict how you see this metaverse developing? How will the aesthetic be created?
Adam Wavy – Initially, we were taking a lot of inspiration from the early 80s graffiti movement in New York – thinking artists can display their art all over cities and be competitive about “coming up” with cool art placements in their city in a legal manner.
However, we found real estate developers were flocking to our project quicker than artists. We are opening the entire world up to be sold at a low price point and built on. We will put lots of effort in connecting creators with developers to begin construction of a beautiful digital layer not dominated by advertising.
As an example, we’re launching our “Creative Hubs Program” across the world partnering with creatives to build community spaces to inspire connection & creativity. We are modelling a lot of the Creative Hubs Program similar to the early stages of Wynwood Miami’s development.
GMW3 – Do you feel the public will be more attracted by augmented reality, as opposed to virtual reality?
Adam Wavy – AR is the long term play for sure. It is imperative we build the Metaverse with direct relationship to our surroundings. With the rapid decline in climate change, it seems a VR Metaverse is humanity throwing in the towel on our planet. We are building RIFT leveraging AR to help improve the way we build cities and support meaningful interaction with communities as well as being a platform that plugs into the new devices that will be coming out in the next 2-5 years.
GMW3 – How does RIFT-AR stand out among the many other metaverse projects coming soon?
Adam Wavy – There are some beautiful metaverse projects that currently exist, some of which I’ll be personally investing in. Competition is natural and helps the entire movement progress. We’re the only project I’ve seen sharing a vision of digital expansion being seamless with city development. Which is the most important bit of building in this space, in my opinion. The first skyscraper was built in Chicago in 1855 which forever changed the landscape of how we build cities and improve citizen interaction with our cities. We are building RIFT-AR with the same ethos.
RIFT-AR, even in these early stages, seems very promising. Many companies, including Niantic Labs, creators of Pokemon Go, believe AR is the way to go. It’s much more affordable for consumers, as they’ve mostly got a smartphone already and businesses have begun exploring unique ways to capture the attention of users through AR games. This metaverse concept may be more appealing to the larger society due to its limited impact on everyday life plus the lack of a potentially bulky VR headset.
RIFT-AR is currently attracting investors with a view to launch very soon.
Each week we will be taking a look at some of the upcoming videogames, demos and unique experiences available through Oculus App Lab for the Meta Quest headsets. Many of these videogames come in varying states of completion, so each title is subject to change.
This week we’re testing our cognitive function, swinging through the air and building racetracks.
Upgrade VR
Remember when every platform was bringing out a Brain Training game or app? That feels a bit dated when it comes to VR platforms, but the use of motion controls and freedom of movement opens up that formula. With Upgrade VR, you won’t really be exercising too much of the old great matter, though it’ll nudge you occasionally. This app tests your coordination, concentration, reaction and memory.
This is achieved through various mini-games, which start off very simply. Reaction, for example, fires balls towards you from portals. If it’s a green ball, you use the green coloured hand, if it’s blue, then it’s the other hand. At first, the balls move through the air slowly, over time they speed up and introduce balls that must be avoided. In memory, you’ll be shown strings of 3D models and must remember the order they appeared and place them in the correct spots.
All of this adds up scores, which depict your cognition ability. This all takes place within a sci-fi environment which feels pulled straight from a Hollywood movie. Everything is clean and well designed, there are no errors in the motion controls, it can be played standing or sitting and when you come back to the games in order to break your high score, it feels tremendous.
Grabble
Straight out of the gate, I have to say, the soundtrack to Grabble absolutely slaps (do people still say ‘slaps’?). The music has this great futuristic, funk feel which goes really well with the action. What’s the action? Well, I guess you could say this is a Spider-Man simulator. You have a grappling hook in each hand and they must be used to move through the air, between blocks.
The game ends if you fall into the infinite void below, which seems to happen quite a lot. You see, when grappling, the player moves very quickly. Often before the blocks even get a chance to spawn in. Thankfully, also attached to your hands, are boosters which can help propel you in particular directions saving you from danger, or even slowing your speed a little.
Grabble is pretty ‘bare bones’ currently, but the basis is there for a bigger and better experience. Plus, who doesn’t love swinging through the air on grapple hooks?
Racemaker VR
Full disclosure – I pride myself at being able to play pretty much all VR games without feeling ill. Racemaker VR broke me, however.
Before we get to that, let me first recommend the game, because it’s kind of brilliant. You start in front of a gridded table with a toolbox of racetrack sections in your hand. The goal is to create a fun and frantic racetrack using curves, tunnels, speed boosts, jumps and straight sections of track.
Aside from some moments where the track pieces sometimes don’t snap together easily, building a track is engaging and enjoyable. You can make it as simple as you like or create a complex track of inclines and bridges constantly running at high speed. Once the track is complete, it’s time to race, and here is where I almost threw up my lunch.
Getting behind the wheel of the car is, at first, very smooth. Almost too smooth. Taking the corners felt like my view was overshooting my brain and stomach, cresting the bumpy track was like being thrown into a washing machine and when I hit a speed boost to jump through the air, I felt like I left my stomach behind on the track. Now, you might fare better than I. So, I would never not recommend the game, but be aware that the actual racing might cause some stomach upset.
Bitcoin Miner is a much older game than one would think by looking on the App Store. It was developed over four years ago by a small team who saw the latest bullrush on Bitcoin and saw an opportunity to create a game about mining for cryptocurrency. We spoke to Paul West of Fumb Games about the Bitcoin Miner journey: “We’d already created a similar game called Zombie Labs, where you dug zombies out of the ground. We thought, okay, what would be cool is if we made a Bitcoin version of this”
In Bitcoin Miner, it’s your job to make as much money as possible, in the usual idle clicker way of purchasing new tools and upgrades. What starts as an underground bunker with one chap mining for Shiba Inu, becomes an empire where up to ten coins are being mined, including meme coins like Doge and powerhouses such as Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, four years ago, things were very different and crypto wasn’t in regular conversation yet. “We went to launch it and we couldn’t” Paul laughs, “Google and Facebook, which were the main marketing channels for app promotion said ‘absolutely no, you cannot promote cryptocurrency-related products’ and of course, we replied that nothing in the game is real, it’s just the artwork which looks like crypto.”
So, the game stalled because Fumb Games couldn’t promote it to new players. The game that exists today is very similar to the one created over four years ago, however now that society is becoming more comfortable with crypto the game is seeing another big push with one new addition. Now you can earn actual crypto while you play.
“We were approached by Zebedee, who are the Bitcoin payment provider, saying they’d like to work with us.” As you play Bitcoin Miner you can earn Satoshi which is a fraction of a Bitcoin, and when we say a fraction we mean it, a Satoshi is 0.000001 BTC. These Satoshi appear occasionally from your miners, along with other tappable power-ups, and once tapped they get banked in a holding area until you withdraw them to your Zebedee wallet.
I’ve been playing the game since its launch a few weeks ago and I’ve banked 609 SATS, or $0.17. You’re never going to get rich, but that’s not the point. This is just a game, with the blockchain and crypto elements sown within. Paul is proud of what the game is doing, because to him, the gameplay came first, “we gave the game a bit of a facelift after Zebedee got in touch – those miner sprites are my original art from years ago! – now we’re the first Bitcoin mining simulation that actually pays you Bitcoin.”
The Satoshis will never really amount to much, even if you’re hammering the game constantly. I’ve found myself a little addicted to watching my miners unearth coins, in the same way I got hooked on other idle clickers or, as Paul calls them, “enterprise games.”
It’s the ideal game for five-minute breaks during the day; you open the game, upgrade some miners or open new mining sites, you can tap the green arrows which pump the coin price up, or there’s a purple split arrow which duplicates the coin. There are treasure chests which give pieces of coins that, when assembled, upgrade the value of your coins, and watching ads can reward bonuses.
You might ask where these Satoshi come from, which is why we asked Paul: “it comes directly from our revenue, going back to the community. We want this to be ‘if we win, then you win.’” The game does feature advertisements, which Paul knows can be a contentious point to players, but he hopes they understand that the interstitial ads are creating the revenue supplying the Bitcoin.
It’s all about making money, in the same way your idle theme park or bakery game is. Except here, you can see actual money being paid out. “It’s like the cherry on the top” says Paul, “the game comes first, the Satoshi is simply a bonus.” Bitcoin Miner can be seen as a proof of concept to other developers, but it should also be seen as a great example of developing alongside Web3, rather than in reaction to it.
“Web3 friction points are everywhere,” says Paul as we discuss how his game can help others learn about cryptocurrency mining and blockchain, “we think this is a frictionless way to learn, you can go from knowing nothing about Bitcoin, to earning it within 3-4 minutes.” Bitcoin Miner makes everything very simple, even setting up a Zebedee wallet is a breeze.
“There are a lot of games out there that are Web3, but there are so many hoops to jump through; setting up a wallet, buying an NFT or staking tokens in the game” Paul is talking about the general Web3 gaming scene, which makes it difficult for everyday gamers to jump in and try new games. With so many upcoming games, there’s little to see and play, “they’re speculative products, right? They’re investments that people are making.”
Bitcoin Miner is anything but speculative. The gameplay may have been seen many times over, underneath various facades. That’s no bad thing, it won’t be for everyone, but for those who lean towards idle clickers or those interested in how crypto works, it’s an ideal clicker. A stand out comment from Paul is one to end on: “you’re not playing to earn, you’re playing and earning” and this seems to be a path that many developers should follow if they’re to appeal to ‘Web2 gamers’.
Despite painting, in reality, being reliant on tactility, VR developers keep trying their hands at creating the perfect art app. With every art-based app, it’s increasingly difficult to produce a masterpiece, but Painting VR gets pretty close.
Not that this new entry to the market does much differently – there’s a canvas, plenty of paint colours and mediums to try out. If you fancy being a graffiti artist, there are sprays and fat drippy markers, if building up layers of paint is more your bag, then there are a variety of brushes to slap on big, splotchy brushstrokes.
The paint, whether dolloped with a brush or slathered with a roller, has a great feeling of fluidity. Everything drips and runs with the application of water, or more paint. Mixing colours is a simple affair, but also plays into experimentation. Usually, I’d be mixing paint on a palette, which can be done, but after messing around with open cans of paint, I found you can simply pour one into the other, gradually changing the hue. It’s a simple pleasure.
As is becoming the norm, the canvas can be accompanied by a web browser, positioned to the side. Here you can follow your favourite artists on YouTube or a website. This feature may be common but it never stops being a great addition, allowing for proper learning or step-by-step guides.
While Painting VR strives on authenticity, it does fall down in studio customisation – there’s no quick and handy way to change canvas size, nor the size of your tools. Also, the canvas is situated within an indoor skate park, yet you cannot break away from the canvas to paint random walls, so this seems a little pointless.
Of course, your success with Painting VR is only as good as your skills, but this app supplies enough materials and easy shortcuts to achieve that. Being able to pick up brushes from a distance means it’s easy to paint while sitting, and the ability to move through the studio space with the left stick allows for proper manoeuvrability.
The difficulty Painting VR or any other painting app has is the moment the brush, or any other tool, touches the canvas. The motion controls will nearly always cause a bad brushstroke or a daub of unwanted paint and it’s here where Painting VR needs an ‘undo’ action – far too many of my projects were ruined by overly sensitive motion controls.
‘Fun’ is a very simple word to describe a game or app. It’s a bit too simple, but here, it fits. Painting VR is just simple fun. It doesn’t feature all the bells and whistles of other apps, but the devs are focusing on enjoyment. Want to throw your paint at the canvas, then do it. Attach your paintbrushes to a drill and swirl your art, then go for it. This is painting as you remember it from your childhood.
It feels as if any painting app is going to suffer a markdown in a review because it will never compare to creating in reality, however, Painting VR gets the closest, despite a lack of customisation options. Why? Because the paint acts like paint, rather than a disjointed liquid which creates a disconnect between you, the tool and the canvas. If you’re looking for perfection, it’s still in the distance, but for something that feels genuine, and honestly, great fun to experiment with, give Painting VR a try.
Crowdfunding — a process that involves the generation of funds for a business or project idea from a group of supporters, as opposed to one or two giant investors — has a history that dates back as far as the late 90s. However, within the last decade, crowdfunding has become a popular way for charities, startups and researchers to democratise fundraising via the internet. When crowdfunding projects are successful, new projects are given the opportunity to launch. Notable examples of popular crowdfunding platforms include Kickstarter, SeedInvest Technology, Mightycause, GoFundMe, Indiegogo and Patreon.
However, the traditional model of crowdfunding is still, in many ways, deeply flawed. Many platforms subject users and creators to steep processing fees, which take away from total amounts of generated funds. Success rates also vary between platforms — according to Kickstarter’s statistics, 78% of campaigns that raise 20% of their goal will see themselves become fully funded — whereas 11% of recorded projects will often finish without seeing a single penny. According to another study, a reported 22.9% of all traditional crowdfunding operations — which is fewer than a quarter — actually end up being successful.
Tokenised crowdfunding, which is fully operated on blockchain technology, is becoming a preferred strategy for companies, communities, entrepreneurs, researchers and other entities to collectively raise capital for a particular cause — whether it be for charity, gaming, scientific research or other objectives. This is largely due to the various advantages it entails through decentralisation — such as greater transparency, better security and faster transactions. DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) are also now playing a vital role in this ecosystem, offering new ways for groups to execute agreed-upon decisions using smart contracts.
Here, we’ve put together a guide on the benefits of crowdfunding with tokens — including a rundown on the most popular types of token standards and models currently used for crowdfunding, highlights of how blockchain technology is improving traditional funding processes and examples of industries that are seeing their reliance on funding made easier by DAOs, NFTs and other Web3 technologies.
Popular token standards and fundraising models
The popularity of crowdfunding with tokens has been largely attributed to the Ethereum blockchain — particularly due to the ease that Ethereum provides in the creation of new coins. Serving as the foundation for an open-source software platform, the Ethereum blockchain allows programmers to create and distribute peer-to-peer programs (dApps).
ERC-20 tokens — a special type of smart contract — are crypto-based assets that have been constructed for crowdfunding strategies on top of the Ethereum network. ERC-20 is the token standard of the Ethereum blockchain and it has become the most popular in the crypto world, accumulating 70% of the total tokens in use. As such, this makes it both the easiest token to find and the most attractive to investors.
Some of the primary factors that differentiate ERC-20 tokens from their competitors include:
The simple deployment process associated with the Ethereum blockchain, which makes the tokens easy to understand
Their design: the ERC-20 token standard is made to address major issues with a wide number of handled tokens
Thanks to its widespread appeal and popularity amongst investors, it is the first widely-used specification for standardising Ethereum tokens
In more recent years, we’ve also seen the emergence of the ERC-721 Token Standard — also more commonly known as the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) standard. Unlike ERC-20 tokens, which are fungible, the ERC-721 standard introduces a token that is unique and non-fungible — serving as a digital certificate that is encrypted and verifiable on the Ethereum blockchain.
Now a highly popular technology trend, an increasing number of companies have started looking to NFTs as a way to raise funds. The technology allows for the authenticated transfer of ownership of a unique asset on the blockchain, making them valuable through their scarcity and novelty. The adaptability of NFTs has also made them useful for leveraging in cases of fundraising — as not only can just about anything can be made into an NFT, but additional utility can also be attached to increase their value.
Let’s also take a look at some of the two popular fundraising models that make use of tokens:
Initial Coin Offering (ICO)
The most well-known option for the launch of new tokens, Initial Coin Offering (or ICO) is a method used by businesses and startups to raise investments by issuing cryptocurrency. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are similar to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in the traditional market. However, unlike the harsh regulatory processes associated with filing a traditional IPO, ICOs allow companies to fund their development and raise capital with the use of tokens.
Rather than selling equity with an IPO or turning to alternative funding methods, businesses can instead build their own blockchain and issue their own tokens. Investors can then purchase said tokens on the company’s platform, allowing them to buy into their products or services. Also, rather than giving buyers traditional equity (ownership shares of a business), the tokens — which usually (though not always) follow the ERC-20 standard and function on the Ethereum blockchain — are sold as having future utility on the blockchain that they fund.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO)
Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (or DAO) is the term used to describe a group of people who form an organisation without the presence of a central authority dictating any of the rules and regulations. Instead, DAOs are governed by a smart contract — which defines the group’s rules and holds the organisation’s treasury. Once the contract goes live on the Ethereum blockchain, the rules cannot be changed unless the community votes.
Each DAO will have a different goal — whether it be a single purpose or part of a bigger project. At its core, a DAO is a community formed around a singular idea that each member believes is worth investing in.
Those who want to participate in a DAO will also need to have a “native” token for their designated project. For example, the AssangeDAO fundraising campaign (which has been raised to help WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange’s legal defence) utilises the “Justice” token. In other cases, DAOs can run more like members-only clubs — where members must buy an NFT to access the community.
The power that each person holds in a DAO is also largely dependent on the number of tokens they own. In the case that a funding campaign is successful, the price of the token increases — meaning that members can even make money from joining these types of crowdfunding campaigns.
Both investors and crypto communities believe that DAOs are the “next big trend” in crypto crowdfunding — even billionaire Mark Cuban has called them “the ultimate combination of capitalism and progressivism.”
How does blockchain improve crowdfunding processes?
Blockchain is steadily changing the game for raising capital, allowing project owners to enable funding at more competitive rates. Due to the elimination of intermediaries, projects can be executed more quickly and access to low-cost funds is much easier to reach. Also, due to Ethereum’s open-ended, smart contract protocol, developers are able to create new derivative tokens and platforms with greater ease and security.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits offered by tokenisation in the crowdfunding landscape — especially when compared to more traditional models:
Smart contracts
Smart contracts allow participants to identify both ends of a transaction, therefore decreasing the probability of fraud. Also, given that they don’t require intermediaries, smart contracts are much faster than typical fund transfers — making them highly useful in cases where tight deadlines must be met.
Blockchain technology is also helpful in building more transparent communication between two parties — for instance, in a DAO, contracts are highly visible, verifiable and publicly auditable — meaning that every member can understand how their organisation operates at every step.
Cost-efficiency
When it comes to popular crowdfunding platforms, users and creators are often at the mercy of standard fees and payment processing fees. Kickstarter, which we’ll again use as an example, charges a 5% standard fee and a processing fee of 3% to 5 % to US-based users. GoFundMe, another popular crowdfunding platform for charity causes and individual creators, deducts 2.2% + $0.30 USD per donation as a standardised transaction fee.
Conversely, the decentralised nature of blockchain is a huge asset in making crowdfunding more cost-efficient. Given that intermediaries or third parties are eliminated from financial transactions, crowdfunding is made much more affordable.
Startups are often burdened with a lack of costs — an issue that can prevent new companies from being able to form their own marketing departments or hire the right staff to raise capital. Conversely, crowdfunding with tokens presents a way for startups to become employee-owned companies — a process that can allow them to turn their tokens into internal currency and form a decentralised community without experiencing losses.
Better transparency and security
Unlike seed funding projects — which are often highly secretive throughout their funding trajectory — blockchain technology is comparatively more transparent. When an organisation decides to file an IPO in the traditional market, only a small amount of information becomes available in the public domain. However, crowdfunding with tokens offers a more transparent system, where every transaction can be stored and made visible on the blockchain using smart contracts.
Blockchain also offers an extra layer of security. With tokenised crowdfunding, smart contracts can transfer funds to a company only when a milestone has been designated, eliminating the possibility of fraud. After funding an initiative, investors are usually provided with tokens — giving them a form of ownership that can also thwart fraudulent creators.
Greater accessibility
IPOs in the traditional market come with several regulations — but the good thing about crypto tokens is that they can be sold globally and are equated to the sale of digital keys. Also, while only 3% of the US adult population meets the $1 million net worth required to invest in an IPO, there are no restrictions in ICO or other tokenised fundraising models — anyone can purchase tokens, regardless of their net worth.
Crypto tokens can also be sold globally to all investors — meaning that anyone can participate in crowdfunding initiatives, regardless of their geographic location.
Which sectors are transforming through tokenisation and DAOs?
When it comes to participatory investing via crowdfunding platforms, one of the biggest drivers of this model’s success is that it has eliminated the requirement for any type of investor to gain approval from big corporations. Put simply, this has made investing more accessible to everyone.
It’s also given a platform to investors or companies that were previously barred from the investment industry. This, in turn, has empowered contributors that are much more diverse and representative of our greater society. Within the last decade, we’ve seen a massive proliferation in funding opportunities for varying types of companies, causes and communities across the globe.
While crypto crowdfunding follows this same logic, it also comes with additional benefits — such as fairer, more democratic reward systems and solutions that are far more secure and profitable. Diversity is good for business — and by avoiding the big gatekeepers, DAOs and NFT projects have started fostering a limitless range of ideas and innovations.
Let’s now take a look at some examples of where tokens, DAOs and other forms of Web3 technology are changing various industry landscapes.
Community
At its core, crowdfunding is a community-driven effort — making it ideally aligned with blockchain and decentralised ledger technologies. The peer-to-peer framework that comes with blockchain technology enables the development of community-based platforms — which are, in many ways, a win-win situation for everyone involved.
Crowdfunding has also shown us the propensity with which communities can collectively raise large sums in short periods of time. In 2017, the ICO fundraising model gained significant traction when Filecoin, a blockchain-based data storage network, raised more than $257 million in tokens within a mere 30 minutes. In the same year, decentralised open-source blockchain Tezos raised roughly $156 million in tokens from an online crowd sale.
Mirror.xyz, a decentralised publishing platform, is a notable example of a tokenised crowdfunding model that is leveraging NFT technology — in this case, to help writers monetise their work. To raise funds, writers can turn their work into NFTs — which can then be sold to auctions or publications. This model also allows writers to crowdfund their projects, where readers can get a cut of a story’s profits once it reaches completion. Decentralised music streaming platform Audius has also been widely praised by industry professionals for allowing musicians to crowdfund their albums or album art through the sale of NFTs.
DAOs have also emerged as a disruptive force in the blockchain ecosystem, displaying how governance can be community-driven and managed through permissionless smart contracts. Within the last year, DAOs have become an increasingly popular way for communities to fund a myriad of objectives.
Juicebox, which has been dubbed a “decentralised Kickstarter”, is a rising crowdfunding platform that allows DAO projects to raise funding from communities — all with the power of public smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Juicebox’s goal is to transform the traditional crowdfunding model, making the process of building a treasury and issuing tokens to a community for a decentralised project much easier. Even Kickstarter has recently announced that it will be building a blockchain-based version of its platform to compete with the rising number of DAOs, opting to utilise the Celo token (due to its “carbon negative blockchain platform”).
While ConstitutionDAO didn’t achieve its goal of purchasing a copy of the U.S. Constitution, what’s notable is that the group was able to accomplish what it did solely based on the community’s contributions (and all without the backing of a larger marketing team or growth director). The rules established by the group also enabled members to receive a refund of their investment.
Another example of innovative crowdfunding we can observe is the DoGood Crypto project, which was founded by Randy McEwen — a philanthropic pastor with over 30 years of experience in non-profit and charitable organisations. With DoGood, McEwen’s goal is to utilise a deflationary token (called the Do Token) and launch a community of “do-gooders”, all while also functioning as both a DAO and a crowdfunding platform.
Following the biblical principle of having “all things in common”, the DAO includes a voluntary tax system on all buy and sell orders of the group’s native token. 70% of the Do Token’s taxes automatically go back to the community, where it is distributed to all token holders proportional to their previous amounts — while 18% of taxes are allocated towards the platform’s charity fund. Also, members looking to donate funds simply just need to participate in the platform’s DAO and vote for charitable causes.
In all, these models are currently showcasing the potential for communities to donate towards causes in a more affordable, convenient and hassle-free way — utilising inventive tokenomics and taxenomics to leverage easier crowdfunding. Due to their evident success thus far, it is likely that we will see more crowdfunding efforts transpire through DAOs over time.
Venture capital (VC) funding
As we continue to see the growth of DeFi, NFTs and tokens, a growing list of venture-backed startups are looking to leverage DAOs with different types of blockchain dependencies across the corporate landscape. This is helping founders dodge regulatory barriers, instead allowing them to rely on the power of smart contracts and tokens.
While the concept of democratising capital is obviously not new, this decentralised approach to funding is enabling more groups to raise funds without needing to rely on the approval of a large VC. This concept alone is already making DAOs a highly effective alternative to VC firms.
Syndicate DAO, a decentralised investment protocol, is one such example of a group that is looking to streamline capital and make the process of pooling money and investing in a project remarkably easy. Syndicate creates investment DAO templates for anyone to use to form investment clubs — a concept that essentially allows DAOs to be created within minutes with the use of an Ethereum wallet.
“At the end of the day, DAOs are a collective technology as opposed to an individual one,” Will Papper, co-founder of Syndicate, recently told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “DAOs are kind of the next evolution of the corporation because they encode both voice and exit into their foundations.”
SushiSwap, which is both a DAO and a decentralised exchange, is an example of a group that recently brought the traditional VC funding model to the battleground. With around 60,000 token holders, SushiSwap was selected by VCs hoping to invest in the project. However, with no centralised entity in place, this led to the first (and likely not the last) time that VCs needed to win over a vast crypto community.
It also appears that early investors in the space are already cropping up. Layer3, a crypto startup offering tools to DAOs, recently closed a seed funding round of $2.5 million — an effort which was led by a team of traditional venture capitalists and angel investors. Some VCs have even recently become DAOs, such as Stacker Ventures.
In all, Web3 technology is allowing for trusted transactions to take place without the need to trust those involved — while DAOs are also allowing startups to raise money without the need for third parties. As DAOs become more popular and more VCs look towards a more decentralised future, it’s widely believed that they will offer the most significant change in how venture capital (VC) funds operate in Web3.
Ali Yahya, GP of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (or a16z) has commented on the sheer power behind the DAO concept: “The fact that a DAO is just a software that can be spun up with the click of a button … but can catalyse thousands or tens of thousands of people — eventually we expect millions of people or larger numbers — that all put together capital and put together ideas to work together for some common goal … we see that as almost the purest vision of what Web3 and crypto are all about.”
Gaming
One of the most conventional forms of fundraising through the purchase of tokens or NFTs can be seen within the Web3 videogame industry. Many developers and publishers are expanding their business models into this new form of financial backing. Where we would have seen, in the Web2 era of the internet, a developer may establish a Kickstarter or similar crowdfunding project, this always created a ‘middle-man’ to whom fees must be paid.
With the advent of blockchain technology, we can now see games being launched directly to the public using a similar briefing method but then financed by the selling of tokens or NFTs (which can be used in-game), which ensures all funds reach the creating team, often transcending currency exchanges due to the use of cryptocurrency.
Of course, this system offers a level of risk to the consumer – you must first believe in the project, but more importantly, you must believe in the creator and their intentions. If a developer abandoned their Kickstarter project, there was a chance you could recoup your investment, however, with tokens and NFTs, that investment is a lot more unstable.
Many Web3 games have begun in this way. Everything from DeFi Kingdoms to Aavegotchi began life with community members rallying around an idea for a game, buying and staking tokens, which become liquid assets for the developers to use to build the game and pay overheads. Once the game then launches, the holding of tokens or NFTs bestows exclusive in-game items, skills or characters to the player.
If we focus on DeFi Kingdoms, we can see how players and users invested in the game. DeFi Kingdoms was formally announced on Medium, September 3rd 2021 – though it had been playable for a few months prior – with the document stating “DeFi Kingdoms is a game, a DEX, a liquidity pool opportunity, a market of rare utility-driven NFTs”. Over the following months, the development team began updating the potential player base regularly, detailing how the game was being made and what gameplay mechanics would be implemented.
It didn’t take long for the community to rally around the game’s concept and begin investing in $JEWEL, the game’s native governance token. You can see that as the game began ramping up production in the tail-end of 2021 and the game gained more traction online, the purchase of $JEWEL went crazy, reaching a peak price of $22.33USD on 5th January 2022.
Charting the rise and fall of $JEWEL
These tokens further benefit the players by enrolling them into a DAO, where community members can vote on upcoming additions to the game, or have a say in the direct development. While it’s clear to see the benefits of fundraising and community support through tokens in the entertainment industry, this method of community backing is now entering into further industries.
Further funding
Funding operates differently across all industries and, as we’ve been exploring here, the advent of Web3 technologies is vastly shifting the investment landscape. In one particular industry, the reliance on funding is paramount to momentum, yet it seems archaically stuck in the past. Whenever a scientific research group wants to create and analyse, they must write a proposal, which then moves through authoritative channels to seek the finances.
Often these proposals are given funding through government grants which are backed by the taxes paid by society. With so many research topics, so many governing bodies and only so much money, a bottleneck is created. Not just a bottleneck, in the US this also becomes a monopoly for pharmaceutical firms looking to turn a profit.
Important research passes through several stages to reach public consumption:
Many times, these research breakthroughs won’t even reach manufacturing stages if profit-driven companies see no margin for business. Researchers will provide the same proposal and proof of concept, though rather than passing through trials and then onto the public, the discoveries and improvements will languish in a gulf researchers colloquially call the ‘valley of death’. Projects that happen to fall into the valley will likely never see the light of day simply because there is no profit in the improvements or patents, and this happens frequently to universities across the world.
Not only do many of these patents fall through the cracks, or in the worst case scenarios, pass, but gouge the public for prescription costs; the proposals which never even receive funding end up wasting the time of researchers. A recent study showed that out of 3570 proposals reviewed by The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia, only 21% were funded. It’s estimated that, in Australia, researchers spent an average of 34 days working on a proposal. For a total of 3727 proposals, researchers spent a combined 550 years working on these documents, which translates to AU$66million in wages.
Much of that time and money is wasted, without the public even knowing that the research is being conducted.
Can VitaDAO solve or improve this situation?
As with other industries, blockchain technology is shaking up progress through the use of tokens and the establishment of DAOs. For those unaware of what a DAO is or can be, a DAO is a distributed governance system which is formed of like-minded community members. The DAOs rules and regulations are voted on through the holding of community tokens and all decisions are actualised by smart contracts, then recorded and stored on a blockchain.
A fraction of the scientific community are beginning to push towards funding through community tokens, establishing a DAO. This movement is currently named DeSci, though as with all Web3 concepts it could change to encompass arts, history and other humanities, removing the ‘sci’. A great example of this new DAO structure is seen with VitaDAO.
VitaDAO is aiming to create a shift in ownership of patents and innovation from the large pharmaceutical corporations, to communities of researchers and patients. This is being achieved by using their own token $VITA, which community members purchase and stake in the DAO in order to take part in governance voting.
Charting the growth spikes of $VITA
As you can see, the $VITA token pricing allows DAO membership accessible to many. Although it should always be noted that the more tokens you hold, the more votes you have to sway decisions.
Anyone can join VitaDAO and governance operates simply; proposals are made and funded by the finances within the DAO. This happens after passing the proposal through a committee of leading researchers, ensuring productivity and benefits from the proposed results. Once the proposal is made, the community votes on whether funding is released. Moving past this phase, any intellectual property or patents are owned by the DAO, developing a growing portfolio.
VitaDAO operation flow
Community is key
The community token powers everything within VitaDAO. Many of those working within the DAO or similar DeSci structures are large proponents of focusing on those who will end up using the patents when it reaches the public. An example often given is with insulin; Molecule marketplace – imagine an OpenSea but for open research projects requiring funding – is one such example. They say, in their Medium blog post, “Imagine a new insulin treatment funded, governed, and owned by diabetics.”
This example underlines everything within DeSci currently – an urgency to shift the power dynamics and extend the ‘creator economy’ so important to the age of Web3.
It all works simply; after visiting the VitaDAO website, you can connect your wallet and review a proposal. Once the proposal is open, you’ll read a summary, followed by a much more in-depth look at the ‘problem’, ‘opportunities’ and even ‘risks’ of the research. As long as you hold $VITA in your wallet, you can then vote For, Against, or Abstain from voting.
The beauty of using tokens on the blockchain is the full transparency of each proposal, plus the voting itself. Everything is laid out for all, from wallet addresses to how they voted individually. It even shows how much $VITA is held by each member of the DAO.
An example of the voting procedure for VitaDAO
Of course, not all projects fly through funding, though browsing the proposals, it seems all but one was passed in the history of the DAO. Constructs like VitaDAO show that not only do members of the scientific community want to take back control from those clutching the purse strings, but they also want to collaborate and work together more efficiently, something which is paramount to any DAO entering the market.
Away from VitaDAO, many academics are turning to token-based community funding in the hope of removing the bureaucracy and lengthy time it takes to craft proposals. Chris Ferrie decided to venture out on his own in order to raise funds for research into quantum systems and quantum engineered devices.
Ferrie took it upon himself to create his own token, $QUANTUM, which raised funds in Ethereum. Structured just like a Kickstarter project, Ferrie aimed to reach 3ETH (the total currently sits at 4.47ETH) which would be used to hire a research student who would work with him on the tasks. Ferrie was transparent with his goals stating that once the research was complete, the IP would be minted on the Zora network as an NFT, thereby making the research fully available to the public.
In Ferrie’s own words, he sees these opportunities as a ‘meta-experiment’ and poses the question, “What if research — that is often funded by the public anyway — was truly owned by the public?” He goes on to list his reasoning behind the experiment, citing “Funding bodies are large bureaucracies with archaic and opaque rules and selection procedures.” And also, “there are no places to request small grants for this kind of research.“
IP-NFTs
Let’s rotate back around to the above mentioned Molecule. Molecule is aiming to be an “open bazaar” creating a “system that could radically increase the diversity of treatments, and lower costs and time to market.” As with VitaDAO, Molecule aims to fully decentralise scientific breakthroughs, allowing for varied ownership. This is done via IP-NFTs, or Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Tokens.
In a first proof of concept, the first biopharma IP-NFT was transferred to VitaDAO to fund novel longevity therapeutics at the University of Copenhagen. It was purchased for the equivalent of $325,000 and included full legal IP.
The blockchain contract for the first biopharma IP-NFT
How does this work? The IP information is stored within the NFT contract itself. Using technology from Nevermined, the data is tokenised and locked away. Only upon purchasing can this information be utilised by the buying party. The reason for tokenising this data is to be able to fully liquidate the IP and place a monetary value on it, which could never be done previously when corporations were supplying funding. This value then becomes the liquid funding, usually paid by a DeSci DAO.
This also allows, through smart contracts, for the inventor of the patent or data to be rewarded with royalties if the IP-NFT is ever sold on.
A GIANT leap for decentralized research was made today
For the first time, real-world biopharma research and IP was transferred and funded on-chain as an NFT via @Molecule_to@Nevermined_io@vita_dao
A DAO now owns IP and funds biotech research at a leading lab…
Another major worry, inherent across the internet during its Web1 and Web2 phases, is the idea of permanence. So much of what has been written on the internet is subject to change or is easily editable by authors, or bad actors. As DeSci users enter into a new era of funding and public accessibility to data, a more secure and precise version of the internet could be the key to bringing everything together.
Enter, Arweave, a Web3 protocol attempting to establish an internet which would be forever permanent and resistant to editing, their colloquial term is ‘permaweb’. Why is this important? Well, Arweave is committed to upholding two central points; firstly, their protocol is hosted on the computers of everyday people, rather than in central servers. This means that if one computer goes down, the content is backed up elsewhere and delivered to the user. Why would people host this content? Well, money, of course. Miners would function as data hosts and be rewarded with funds from the stake holding community.
Secondly, due to blockchain security, the websites and apps being hosted cannot be edited or tampered with, because, much like with NFTs and crypto, fraudulent blocks won’t be processed. This benefits society directly because there’s less chance of spreading misinformation, but also, there could be little to no censorship as the content is hosted independently.
Arweave, much like VitaDAO and the Quantum project, is powered by community and businesses investing in their community token. In this case, $WIKI.
Summary
The changes to fundraising, when switched to blockchain enterprise, are vast. Not only are steep processing fees avoided – particularly if the blockchain used is built on Proof on Stake, where gas fees can be heavily reduced – but there’s more opportunity to give creator support or community control.
Financial backing has been radically overhauled in the era of Web3; supporters can join a DAO, where they can vote on upcoming changes to a variety of projects, such as music, art, movie-making or even scientific research. NFTs can be used as tokenised memberships or direct fundraising for charities using smart contracts.
Even the way cryptocurrency operates benefits fundraising projects by acting as a digital token currency which is unaffected by traditional fiat currency exchanges. This is just the beginning; as crypto and blockchains evolve over time, as well as the programming of smart contracts, we will likely see even more dynamic ways to show financial support where it’s needed.
The NFT project, Good Cactus Frens, is coming up on the horizon. Launching in summer 2022, the project aims to mint 771 which will come with certain utilities, including mental health support for the holder. However, the primary goal of the project is to raise funds for charitable trust, Charity Water. Charity Water is a non-profit organisation that helps provide clean water to communities throughout the world.
To date, Charity Water has established 91,414 water projects, serving over 14 million people in 29 countries. Established by John Shevchenko Mongeau and Mahendra Canaguy, Good Cactus Frens hope to extend that reach through the use of community funding via an NFT collection. The collection will showcase a cactus, the oddly humanoid plant which of course stores water. The cacti will come with many traits based on randomisation.
We sat down with John, Mahendra, and designer Julia Sidlovska to discuss the project, the scope of fundraising and the future of NFTs.
Charity Water supports communities across the world; each dot is a new source of clean water.
GMW3 – The NFT ecosystem currently suffers a lot of negativity, is it a daunting place to launch a new project?
JOHN – The first thing you said is, “there’s a lot of negativity associated” or there’s a little too much financial gain. “I want to flip this” to make money is enticing and you become very drawn into it. Some people think “oh my god, this is going to change my life”, but it’s kind of empty and you quickly see that.
We thought there should be something good that comes out of this, what about some actual semi-tangible utility and value? Let’s prove to the world that you could do good stuff with NFTs.
MAHENDRA – We thought, there’s so much potential and so many options; NFTs generate so much money that I think it’s a bit unfair to keep everything for ourselves and when we can donate.
GMW3 – Do you feel that NFTs with utility have an opportunity to teach people they can be more than a PFP?
JULIA – I believe NFTs are a fun and innovative way to solve real-life problems. For example, artists would have struggled to sell their art in real life, as it’d be hard to get noticed. Whereas with the current technology and NFTs, it’s become a lot easier and it definitely gave art a whole breath of fresh air.
As with GCF, we are solving even bigger issues, which is the lack of clean water, plus we bring mental health awareness. Our NFTs would not just be something that saves you time donating to charity – our collectors will get a lovely cactus as a way of saying thank you and as a memory as well. So for this project, NFTs serve as an element that will hopefully get more people to do something good for others and get something good for themselves in return like, one on one mental health counselling.
JOHN – I think the fact that we are going to create a real life impact and give people direct access to clean water is going be a big part of the educational bond. Showing that if you own a Good Cactus Fren you’ll get access to free one on one mental health support, too. It’s to show that this is more than an image, but it’s also a kind of passive key to unlock so many benefits.
JULIA – I think NFTs will be split into two camps. One is the utility and material value NFTs and the other is art. In that sense they will remain simple pictures, although saying the latter would probably be offensive for the artist, haha.
GMW3 – Can you tell our readers how you came to choose Charity Water as the project receiving support from your community?
JOHN – Well, at first we thought about trees and replanting, but we quickly discovered the Woodies project. Then I realised that I have a bit of a connection at Charity Water, from some previous fund-raising. So, we got on a call with their blockchain team and the partnerships team. They were in full support right away. Our goal is to become an official partner over time.
In rough numbers, if we raise 100ETH from the mint, that’s around 12,500 people who will have clean water for 20 years.
GMW3 – Given the environmental impact of the Ethereum network, why did you choose torelease GCF there, rather than on Solana or Tezos, for example? Was it due to the number of ETH users?
JOHN – Very, very good question. To be honest, at first, we were going to use Solana. In our minds, that was a no brainer, because of gas prices and the reduced environmental impact. But, the more we thought about it, you kind of alluded to it, it’s such a big market in the ETH world. Back in December, when we were planning this project we didn’t know that OpenSea would soon be signing more environmentally friendly networks.
MAHENDRA – I personally really like Solana, I buy a lot of NFTs from the Solana blockchain. And yeah, I’m pretty happy with those. But yeah, using ETH is great for the visibility of the project.
JOHN – We’re going to make sure that we knock down our NFT footprint. We’re looking at using Aerial as a solution to offset the whatever energy consumption there is with Good Cactus Frens, but you can only action that once you mint because you need the blockchain contract to identify transactions.
GMW3 – How did you settle on using the cactus as the star of your first project?
JOHN – we didn’t want to go with animals, as in, one that was not used yet. We thought about plants next and thought ‘oh, what about a cactus?’ Plus it also looks like it has a good human side.
MAHENDRA – Also cacti contain a lot of water and are often not using it. So that’s kind of nice. It’s a cute easter egg, like, a cactus has plenty of water it doesn’t need, so let’s give it out to others.
JOHN – And the cactus is actually perfect. We did some investigating and it’s a symbol of strength, resilience, community and motherhood. It felt fitting. Plus, when I worked with Charity Water previously, we saw footage of people carrying these huge jugs of water to their village, and it’s always mothers and little girls. So, the cactus checked several boxes.
GMW3 – Can you tell us a bit more about the designs and traits of the Cactus Frens?
JULIA – As for inspirations, GCF has references to various tv shows like breaking bad, or friends. We get the whole team to brainstorm on the traits so that we have a diverse variety of them. We definitely get inspired from other big projects as well. At the end of the day, we’re still a PFP project so have to match the standards.
We have an amazing artist onboard, who created this style that I think suits GCF and its mission perfectly. At this stage, we have almost all traits ready, but we’ll consult with our community to make sure we include all traits they want.
MAHENDRA – The Good Cactus Frens will be randomly generated based on the traits we’ve carefully selected, but we’re going to have some unique characters as well. We have maybe 10 or 15 that are going to be hand-drawn. These will be completely unique rather than having any traits or be randomly generated.
GMW3 – What does the future look like beyond Good Cactus Frens?
JOHN – Our goal is to have this be the first of many good oriented projects, social impact projects, charity oriented projects, and the vision is that we can maybe all go full time into this space.
MAHENDRA – The dream goal would be to build a studio, where we have the name and the brand. Then the idea would be to continue creating good social impact projects, because if this one works, why would we stop here?
GMW3 – Do you see your future community operating much like a DAO?
JOHN – We’re not coming out promising the world, we think ‘let’s keep this simple’, so that it’s digestible. And we will continue to build a team from our community – at first, it was just four co-founders, but now I think we have five or six volunteers who came out of nowhere, they reached out on LinkedIn, Twitter because they love the project.
We want to work closely with the community; we will also have shark tanks for our Frens where they can come to us with suggestions like, ‘Hey, I have like an amazing idea for a charity’. It could be a charity or it might be that maybe the person wanted to create something new, for example, we saw a project where people created glass glasses with recycled plastic. Anything that has a good impact is welcome.
Good Cactus Frens launches 7/7/2022 at 1pm EST. The initial wave of 771 NFTs will be followed by a second wave which will collect 7,000 additional NFTs. Each Cactus Fren will directly benefit those who need an urgent link to clean water, as well as open up a mental health support network for the NFT holder. You can find the Good Cactus Frens on TWITTER, as well as DISCORD.
Each week we will be taking a look at some of the upcoming videogames, demos and unique experiences available through Oculus App Lab for the Meta Quest headsets. Many of these videogames come in varying states of completion, so each title is subject to change.
This week we’re shooting some hoops, untangling wires and… running away from babies?!
Blacktop Hoops
I feel like basketball games, or games which have a basketball mini-game, are a dime a dozen. It’s an easy sport to replicate in VR, although it’s difficult to get it right. So, those that feel like playing the sport for real are more of a rarity. Enter Blacktop Hoops, probably the best basketball game I’ve played in VR, hands down.
In order to get a sports game right, everything needs to feel natural – you need to forget you’re in VR, holding motion controls. With just a few buttons, Blacktop Hoops transports you into a pick-up game in a one on one game. The ball feels intuitive; pretend to dribble the ball and it bounces to the ground and back to your hand; bounce it on a diagonal towards your off-hand and you’ll perform a crossover dribble.
When you want to shoot, simply pull the trigger and use your off-hand to steady the shot. Once you let go, the ball soars cleanly, there’s no awkward physics, it makes you feel like you can shoot threes all day. There’s even a jump button to dunk or set up a fadeaway throw. My only issue is with movement. Using the thumbstick to move feels like wading through jelly at times, which often gives the AI an advantage. Even on the easiest setting, I was finding myself turned around looking for the ball while my opponent was swishing the hoop.
It’s only in alpha at the moment and it’s completely free, so it’s worth downloading to stay in the practice mode and feel like Steph Curry for a while.
Cable Salad
Weird name, right? It’s easily explained if you’ve ever seen film footage of old telephone centres, where receptionists would pull out random wires and shove them into random holes in order to connect a call. That’s Cable Salad in an elevator pitch. You stand in front of a socket and must plug in the right cable to send a message to a person on the screen. The only issue is, the cables trail over, under and roundabout, so it’s like solving a maze.
You get points for connecting the right person and the mazes get harder and harder. It’s a pretty simple concept, really. Oddly, in between rounds of playing telephone, you get to grab a toy dart gun and shoot some holographic floating targets. I’m not sure why, but it’s still good fun to be had.
It might all be very simple – though the cable mazes can get deceptively tough – but the game takes place in a kind of workshop which is wonderfully animated and realised. There are sparking robot arms, junk cluttering the shelving and a general sense of mild chaos. I’d love to see this fleshed out with a story.
Baby Tag
Okay, stick with me on this one. Remember that scene in Trainspotting where Renton is desperately trying to kick heroin and he sees the scary baby crawling across the ceiling? Yeah, well, someone put that into a game. Kind of.
Baby Tag does exactly what it says in the name; you play as a baby in a nursery and have to avoid being tagged by other babies. You use the motion controls to crawl or slide across the floor, but weirdly, you can also climb sheer surfaces by tapping the grip buttons. Personally, I began to treat this game like a survival horror, instead of the cute mini-game it’s meant to be.
Dashing away from rampaging babies covered in green slime, which I believe represents the germs that most kids carry, is frankly terrifying. Looking around the room, as the babies charge towards you is worse than staring down hordes of zombies in Left 4 Dead! It certainly spurred me on to avoid being tagged.
Sadly, there’s not much game here, but if you want a laugh, or to be frightened like a 1990’s drug addict, give it a shot.
Each week we will be taking a look at some of the upcoming videogames, demos and unique experiences available through Oculus App Lab for the Meta Quest headsets. Many of these videogames come in varying states of completion, so each title is subject to change.
This week we’re crossing the cosmos, blasting hundreds of bullets and playing at cacti in wartime.
Star Stuff: A Way for the Universe to Know Itself
Yes, I know, the title is quite a mouthful. Now, I’ve played a lot of meditative titles on the Quest recently. The ability to transcend our reality to find a crumb of serotonin is appealing to most, but aside from TRIPP’s Quest app, many of the so-called ‘calming’ experiences do little more than place you in a static environment and pipe in some free YouTube soothing music.
Star Stuff opens with a quote from Carl Sagan, focusing on our place in the universe. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of my place in the grand scheme of things, I feel pretty insignificant. All of this wonderful and mysterious energy pulsing around us can have a calming effect, however. Precisely because it’s all so much bigger than us. So when Star Stuff plonked me into a starfield from the Milky Way and began to play soulful music, I actually felt calmer.
Then I realised what the app actually wants you to do. Because I was sitting down, I didn’t realise it at first, but hundreds of stars, moons, and small planets, were leaking from where my body was positioned. I ran my hand through the particles, watched as they flew out and away from me, drifted and danced. Before I knew it, ten minutes had passed and I was waving my arms like a born again spiritualist. Did I feel more at peace? I actually did. Will I ‘play’ it again? Maybe, I’ll definitely recommend that people take a few minutes and experience it.
GUNSdemo
As with the previous entry in this roundup, there are lots of games and apps which achieve what’s done here; in this instance, allow you to shoot a variety of weapons. Now, there’s not a great amount of guns here; some pistols, a shotgun and an assault rifle, but gosh, the animations and models are just fantastic.
I think what GUNSdemo did, which made me take notice, is make everything feel like it has weight and heft. The Assault Rifle feels large and slightly cumbersome, it kicks back with every bullet fired, the sharp metallic sound of dropping and reloading a magazine feels slick. The pistols have a great animation when using the off-hand to pull back the slide before firing, similarly to the shotgun which reloads by pulling back the slide as an empty shell flies out.
The area in which you test these guns is limited currently; a type of old farm with a few targets, but hopefully, the developer expands this over time. There’s so much attention to detail that it can’t be ignored. For example, many games I’ve played in VR which allow you to look down a rifle scope make it too clunky, or the image in the sight is muddy. Here however it’s beautifully crisp and seems to compensate for the motion controls, meaning shooting isn’t a chore. I only hope this stretches out into a full game release or is buffed with more guns, targets and environments.
Cactus Cowboy – Plants At War
Plants at War opens with a skit of a kid (cactus) being asked by his grandpa (cactus) “are ya winning son?” In true meme fashion. It cracks a wry smile, the kid (cactus) is annoyed the latest shooter isn’t available in VR, which spins into a story about how grandpa (cactus) fought in ‘the war’ and we take his role. After a short cutscene and tutorial, we’re thrown into a D-Day style beach landing, where worm-like bugs are attempting to wipe out the cacti people.
As the boat approaches the beach, the credits roll through the sky above and the developers suggest Plants at War is “a game of questionable quality”, a bit of a misdirect, because the game is actually remarkably good. What might stymie the game however is its timing; many of the accents are Eastern European, the visuals within the cutscene feel eerily close to current conflicts, which is life repeating itself. At points I felt a little uncomfortable with the action, despite the brilliant gun handling, animations and the scale of the world created.
Of course, any game depicting war will feel awkward in the current political climate. Cactus Cowboy – Plants At War tries to make itself as silly as possible, which goes some way to easing that concern. Underneath all the jokes and oddball moments is a very solid shooter which relies on the kinds of gunplay seen in the aforementioned GUNSdemo; everything feels like it has purpose and the mechanics of each gun makes for seriously involved play.
Loading and cocking a gun feels, for lack of a better fitting word, ‘cool’. Like, ‘Matrix in 1999 cool.’ The difficulty spikes (cactus pun) a little unfairly at times and there were moments I found myself wandering around a battlefield unsure how to interact with things like mortars, but when the game is a simple ‘run and gun’ shooter, it’s bags of fun.
It seems like there are so many companies currently vying for metaverse supremacy. Between small startups and gaming mega-corporations, there surely won’t be space for everyone at this table. Believe the hype or not, the metaverse is a promising opportunity for all; for the everyday user, a unique chance to connect socially and experience entertainment in ways only previously imagined. For brands and businesses, a personalised experience to rival previous incarnations of the internet.
Among all the companies laying foundations for the metaverse, surely none can rival Epic Games. Over the past few years, Epic has been acquiring other industry leaders, with one goal in mind, slowly crafting their portfolio in order to build their vision of the metaverse. It’s hard and a little foolish to ignore what Epic are building, given their current profile and many recent announcements.
Formally Potomac Systems (1991-1992), then Epic MegaGames Inc (1992 – 1999), Epic Games have established themselves as a core part of the videogame landscape. Currently headed by original founder, Tim Sweeney, Epic Games are responsible for more than just the games they’ve made.
Nowadays, Epic is known as the developer behind smash-hit battle royale Fortnite, a game with over 350 million dedicated players – a game known to pioneer, join people together and even break the internet. Fortnite began creating and breaking records from its initial release in July 2017, but before taking over the battle royale genre, Epic Games were known for the seminal Gears of War series, Bulletstorm, Robo Recall, Shadow Complex and, of course, Unreal.
Unreal was one of Tim Sweeny’s first games, working closely with Steve Polge and Cliff Bleszinski. The game became a sell-out hit, a shooter in the vein of DOOM and Wolfenstein. More than that, Unreal birthed the Unreal Engine. First seen in 1998, the core programming engine on which the game was built became a must for game developers and, beyond games, TV and movie studios.
Since then, the Unreal engine has gone through several iterations, becoming faster, more powerful and more versatile. So popular is the Unreal Engine, that the Wikipedia page for ‘games which use Unreal Engine’ feels seemingly endless. In April of 2022 Epic Games finally unveiled and released Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the software. As ever, it was released for free via GitHub.
Epic has established itself as a company which helps developers, as they waive their royalties for games made with Unreal until the developer reaches $1 million USD in revenue. The Unreal Engine is so versatile it can create desktop PC games, console titles, mobile must-plays and even virtual reality experiences. It seems the possibilities are endless, it has become the ideal industry tool and it is perfect for constructing a persistent online metaverse.
Continuing with Bloomberg, Sweeney believes: “It’s kind of a race to get to a billion users, whoever brings on a billion users first, would be the presumed leader in setting the standards.” Given that elsewhere Sweeney has gone on record as saying he believes that Fortnite is more than a videogame, “it’s a platform for entertainment” one could assume he already believes that Epic has established the groundwork of the metaverse. And, given that Fortnite already sees more than 350 million users, they’re not far off that magical “one billion” number.
We can’t, however, forget some of Sweeney’s other comments about the metaverse; such as “The metaverse is like the internet. No one company can own it.” And how companies like Apple and Microsoft are creating “walled gardens” where users are hemmed in by centralisation and rules dictated by the overseeing company.
At this point, it’s difficult to say whether Epic games, should they establish a successful metaverse first, would hand over the reins to the users and fully decentralise the platform. But before that even becomes a question, Epic first needs to build the metaverse and looking at the many acquisitions which have taken place over the past couple of years, they’re in the perfect position to do so.
Fortnite
It would be remiss to discuss Epic Games’ metaverse plans without directly examining Fortnite. Nobody, not even Epic Games, thought that Fortnite would be the hit it became. The battle royale which now boasts over 350 million players, started as a side game to a PvE (Player Vs Environment) title. Taking cues from PlayUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Fortnite instantly captured the attention of gamers and streamers worldwide, due to its more accessible visuals and the addition of creating builds and bases on the fly.
Now, after years of dominating the gaming space, Fortnite has evolved beyond being ‘just another shooter’. Fortnite is now a platform for entertainment, which just happens to be a battle royale shooter. In the past couple of years, Fortnite has played host to Star Wars, Marvel comics takeovers, musical concerts, art galleries, short film festivals, and collaborations with fashion brands like Balenciaga and Nike.
Users utilise the digital V-Bucks currency to buy skins so they can look like tennis players or soccer superstars; they can buy passes which unlock comic book heroes. Millions of players turn up every season for live, interactive events which further an ongoing storyline spanning not just the game, but real-world crossovers.
Fortnite Valuable Statistics – supplied by Levvel.com
By 2018, Fortnite had amassed 125 million players, this count then doubled by 2019. Player count now stands at 350 million.
Fortnite brought in $5.1 billion in revenue in 2020 alone.
The US player base currently takes up 27.52% of all active players, with Brazil taking second place with 8.08% and the UK taking 5%.
The Marvel comics Galactus crossover event of Season Five saw 15.3 million concurrent users take part.
Over the past year (2021-2022) Fortnite has held the top spot of the most-watched videogame on streaming platform, Twitch (supplied by Sullygnome.com)
In 2020, 77% of players bought V-Bucks in-game to spend on the Item Store.
SuperAwesome
Before the acquisition, SuperAwesome had positioned itself as a way to keep kids safe while they’re online. Their infrastructure platform helped more than 300 companies – including Disney, Hasbro and LEGO – bring their products safely to children. SuperAwesome became the leading ad platform for brands to reach younger audiences. According to the SupserAwesome landing page, its technology helped reach over “half a billion under-16s across North America, Europe, LATAM and APAC.”
The focus was to bring children online and give them the platform everyone else had but within a safe environment. Of course, this plays into Epic Games’ primary audience, as many of the millions of Fortnite players are under the age of sixteen. Utilising SuperAwesome’s technology also gives creators and developers an opportunity to monetise their creations and experiences on the future metaverse platform.
SuperAwesome’s most recent focus fell on the metaverse and how they could aid companies in safely onboarding kids into an online world where they could socialise, play and discover. Epic hasn’t disclosed anything about what SuperAwesome will do now they find themselves under the Epic umbrella, but we can have an educated guess. In an interview with GamesBeat, Epic’s Todd Rowe said: “If you think about the internet, it was fundamentally designed by adults for adults, now we have an internet with … kids under 16.”
Rowe continues: “The ecosystem has been building out with more and more privacy laws for children, Epic is very focused on privacy with everything that they do. Epic has no plans to put ads into Fortnite.” It’s unlikely that we’ll see the tools used to establish changes within Fortnite beyond keeping kids safe during large-scale interactive events, but these monetisation tools will now, in theory, be available to any developer using Unreal Engine, which could very well be the building blocks of the metaverse.
Sketchfab
In July 2021, Epic Games acquired New York-based Sketchfab. Sketchfab is still operating as a separate brand, however, the purchase significantly bolsters the assets and tools available to Unreal Engine users. The Sketchfab marketplace offers creators a way to create and build 3D assets to be sold to other creators for everything from game creation, to movie making.
While there wasn’t much of a shakeup after the Epic buyout, users of Sketchfab did see a drop in subscription prices, and store fees dropped from 30% to just 12%. But why did Epic swoop in on this young startup? Sketchfab founder and CEO, Alban Denoyel said in the announcement: “joining Epic will enable us to accelerate the development of Sketchfab and our powerful online toolset.”
Most important was the last line of Denoyal’s announcement: “We are proud to work alongside Epic to build the metaverse and enable creators to take their work even further.” Establishing any part of the visual interface in the metaverse will require a lot of 3D models and what do Sketchfab have by the million? 3D models; but, more importantly, a catalogue of creators building them.
Harmonix
Even if you have no idea who Harmonix are, there’s a very strong chance you have played one of their games. Particularly if you took part in the ‘plastic peripheral’ era of gaming, which saw us all strumming on guitar controllers across the world. Harmonix created the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises which brought the idea of playing instruments to the gaming sphere. If you saw footage from these games, you’ll have noticed that they verged on the spectacular; creating venues, 3D bandmates and pyrotechnic displays to rival Coachella.
In the announcement post from the Harmonix blog dated 23rd November 2021, the company stated “we have aspired to redefine what a music game can be.” Up until very recently, Harmonix has carried on supporting their games; Rock Band keeps getting DLC tracks, FUSER and Rivals have been getting frequent updates and events, and they will continue to do so. You’ll notice that Epic rarely pulls the creators away from their creations.
But, once again, that word crept into the announcement with: “Now we’ll be working with Epic to once again challenge expectations as we bring our unique musical gaming experience to the metaverse.”
Epic are already well known for its music experiences within Fortnite, hosting a variety of acts including Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, Tones and I and Marshmallow. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Harmonix will aid Epic not only in staging these events, creating arenas and assets for the musical acts, but they could also bring a new level of interactivity.
Previously users have only been able to run, jump and perform scripted emotes during the performances, but with Harmonix’ expertise, we could see millions of users playing along to the songs using their controllers. These concerts have not only interested the pre-installed user base of Fortnite but each event has the potential to bring on new users who are fans of the musical act. Apply this to the metaverse and you have a gateway for potentially billions of users who want to attend a concert from the comfort of home.
Houseparty
A much older acquisition – well, old in terms of the recent buying spree – was Houseparty. Houseparty was a video-based app which allowed for easier video communication. Much like Zoom and Skype, Houseparty saw a boom in users during the Covid-19 pandemic as everyone stayed home. Houseparty was particularly popular due to its focus on friends and family; if a user was showing as online, they were free to video call. It was reminiscent of AIM and MSN chatrooms from the late-90s boom.
Epic Games bought Houseparty for $35 million in the hope that their expertise and technology could be applied to Fortnite, and “across the Epic Games family”. The Houseparty team got to work on bringing new features to Fortnite and left the old app and community behind. As reported by The Washington Post in September 2021, Houseparty closed its app announcing the team will work on “creating new ways to have meaningful and authentic social interactions at metaverse scale”.
While Houseparty did continue ‘Fortnite support’ for a time and users could pair their gameplay with the app to video chat their teammates, the function was soon shut down. However, given that communication is so integral to a metaverse platform, the Houseparty team are primed to create interesting and safe ways for users to stay in touch in this new world.
Digital Life
We can’t forget the tools Epic Games are publishing, often for free, which will enable creators to build the metaverse. It’s not just the extensive suite within Unreal Engine 5, but the tools developed internally and with teams from past acquisitions.
After buying out Capturing Reality, a company who developed photogrammatic software, Epic Games released its RealityScan app; this app is a free program which allows any smartphone to transform digital images into fully-rendered 3D models. The app was a collaboration between the team from Capturing Reality and Quixel, both now working under the Epic umbrella. Currently, in a limited beta, RealityScan is “yielding 3D scans with unparalleled accuracy and mesh quality at speeds many times faster than competing software.”
Then we have MetaHuman, which launched recently and had the internet abuzz, with many loading up the software to try it out. Perhaps the strongest tool outside of Unreal Engine 5, MetaHuman is a free cloud-based app which allows anyone to create photorealistic digital humans. If it sounds a bit ‘uncanny valley’ that’s because it is; but it’s a radically powerful tool for any would-be metaverse creator.
The key to this tool is the ability to import the MetaHuman data into Unreal Engine 5 creating anything from videogames to short films. MetaHuman couldn’t exist without companies which Epic Games has acquired over the years; the work of both 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, this app can unleash the potential of any creator. What can’t be stressed enough is that Epic Games publishes this software for free, further enabling bedroom creators of the future – those with the imagination to create something spectacular.
On April 7th 2022, Epic Games and the LEGO Group announced the biggest metaverse news yet. The pair will be partnering to create a “metaverse, safe and fun for children and families” teaming up to “build an immersive, creatively inspiring and engaging experience”. Doesn’t give too much away, does it? But let’s look at this partnership plainly.
On the one hand, we have the LEGO Group, a toy synonymous with building from the imagination and implementing media brands, like gaming giant Nintendo, through new build sets. Then we have Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, a game about building and battling in an ever-evolving world, often featuring massive brand partnerships with the likes of Disney. Match made in heaven, right?
Details are understandably thin on the ground, but if we look at the official announcement blog post, we can leverage some information as to how this metaverse project might play out. Niels B Christiansen, CEO of the LEGO Group said, “Kids enjoy playing in digital and physical worlds and move seamlessly between the two.”
The LEGO Group has already tried to capitalise on this idea once before, with the short-lived LEGO Dimensions videogame. The series allowed players to explore the worlds of Batman, Doctor Who, The Simpsons, and more, by placing real-world LEGO figurines on a portal which brought them to life in-game.
Could we be looking at a similar implementation within the metaverse project? LEGO isn’t going to move ‘digital only’ and they could utilise QR codes or codes inside boxes of LEGO to add characters into their metaverse or even, into Fortnite.
Tim Sweeney was rather cryptic with his words on the partnership saying: “The LEGO Group has captivated the imagination of children and adults through creative play for nearly a century…” The focus here must be on the history of the LEGO Group. Further on in the announcement we see a mention of ensuring “this next iteration of the internet is designed from the outset with the wellbeing of kids in mind.”
This, of course, loops back around to SuperAwesome and their goals within Epic Games; to create a safe, online space for children to use. An admirable goal and one which should be paramount moving forward. However, let’s not overlook the money on the table and both the revenue and opportunities which can come from these two powerhouses working together. These are companies who regularly collaborate with Disney, Marvel, DC Comics, Adidas, Harry Potter, even Swedish furniture labyrinth IKEA.
The possibilities for collaborations are, like the imagination, endless.
Epic Game Store
The Epic Game Store hasn’t been around for long. It launched on 6th December 2018 as a platform to rival Steam, which has been servicing PC gamers for years. It took some time to establish Epic Game Store as a genuine alternative, Epic utilised exclusive game launches, as well as offering weekly free games in order to create user accounts – when Epic offered Star Wars Battlefront 2 for free in January 2021, over 19 million people logged in to obtain a copy, crashing the servers.
Much like in other aspects of their business, Epic has attempted to position itself as a leader who cares about creators and the community. Much like the revenue shares for those using Unreal Engine or listing 3D assets on Sketchfab, the commission percentages were internally scrutinised. The Epic Games Store uses revenue guarantees for developers should their game underperform on release.
For most sales, Epic takes a 12% share of the revenue generated, with the rest going directly to the developer. However, for any game using the Unreal Engine, Epic forgoes the 5% revenue-based fee for those games. After other fees and services, Epic’s profitability is around 5% of gross revenue.
Why does all this matter? Because Epic is attempting, with these rules and the above acquisitions, to establish a creator-based economy and appeal to, or lure, developers of varying sizes over to the Epic Games team. Any metaverse will require users to create content for others, whether they’re professional or bedroom creators. By establishing these friendlier creators’ revenue percentages, Epic is more likely to bring in those who will build everything from player avatars to fully interactive experiences.
Investments
At this point, it’s worth pulling up some financial details. Epic Games is owned by Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate, Tencent. Tencent is currently one of the largest games developers and publishers in the world; they’ve held a 40% stake in Epic Games since 2012, while CEO Tim Sweeney holds the remaining 60%. In 2020, Epic managed to generate $5.1 billion while raising $1 billion through a funding round in April 2021 and a further $2 billion in April 2022. This values the company at roughly $31.5 billion.
More important than the monetary amounts however are the companies investing, as this gives us a good indication of their intent. For example, the latest round of investments saw both Sony and Kirkbi (the owners of the LEGO Group) invest $1 billion dollars each, specifically to “build the future of digital entertainment”.
In the blog post update, which detailed the newest investment figures, Epic Games noted: “Today Epic Games announced a $2 billion round of funding to advance the company’s vision to build the metaverse and support its continued growth.” While we can speculate and pose thoughts about the acquisitions, this blog post calls out the investment as metaverse funding. Of course, with the secrecy of Epic Games, we won’t know for some time how the money will be used, but it shows that not only are Epic going ‘all in’ but so are Sony.
It should be noted that in the April 2021 investment round, Sony only put $200 million in, with the sentiment still being focused on the metaverse. As Tim Sweeney remarked at the time: “We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse.”
Think back to Mark Zuckerberg changing the Facebook company name to Meta, which positioned the company as an industry leader for the metaverse concept. This happened in October 2021, yet Epic Games’ CEO was announcing his plans six months prior. While the world looked at Zuckerberg and Meta, they forgot to keep an eye on Sweeney and what he’s already built.
While Sweeney was gung-ho with his views on the metaverse after the initial Sony investment, the term wasn’t mentioned directly by Sony; Kenichiro Yoshida, chairman, president and CEO of Sony Group Corporation said at the time: “Epic continues to deliver revolutionary experiences through their array of cutting edge technologies that support creators in gaming and across the digital entertainment industry… I strongly believe that this aligns with our purpose to fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology.”
Despite the many investments and the positive steps forward in creating a stable foundation for metaverse plans, Tencent’s stock – where Epic Games find itself – is at a major low right now. There could be many reasons behind this slump, but a key factor to monitor is the current sweep of crackdowns against the internet industry within China.
Chinese internet censorship is among the most comprehensive in the world. Both Twitter and Facebook have been banned in China since 2009, so the idea of an open internet platform, constructed by a key player from Tencent’s portfolio could be counter to Beijing’s views. As explored by TechCrunch in November 2021, Tencent commented Beijing is: “not fundamentally averse to the development of metaverse,” as long as the user experience is “provided under the regulatory framework.”
From an earnings call by Tencent in November 2021, CEO Pony Ma said: “Anything that makes the virtual world more real and the real world richer with virtual experiences can become part of the metaverse.” It seems the view will be a slow build, utilising the technology available, but the positive growth in the stock market may only come when those regulatory measures for the metaverse have been put in place.
Journey’s End
If you were to open an Epic account today with a view to play Fortnite, once you’ve entered the Fortnite lobby/menu, you would find a metaverse seedling. In one corner, there are user-created game types, in another, more user-created content in the form of worlds which can be explored. If we take a look over the history of the battle royale game, taking in the past year, we can see collaborations with artists, social justice charities, movie production companies, comic book creators, musicians and sports stars.
Fortnite’s overarching storyline occasionally leaks out into comic books from Marvel and DC, bringing the two mediums closer than ever; while toy manufacturers design action figures based around the game’s most popular skins. Sometimes the lobby advertises a band or DJ who will be performing within an interactive space and the item shop, which trades in digital currency V-Bucks, advertises skins to make your character stand out or look like your favourite celebrity.
Yes, Tim Sweeney and Epic Games are forgetting his comments about ‘walled gardens’ considering Fortnite is a centralised product with its own currency, but there’s no doubting the scope of this already established metaverse aspiration. When taking the Epic Games acquisitions into account, the building blocks are being laid constantly; there are plans to protect kids who want to explore the metaverse or create new content; there’s a huge catalogue of 3D assets for people to use; the video and chat communication is fully fleshed out; on top of this, creeping into every aspect, is the Unreal Engine.
It’s also worth noting that Epic Games has spent the past two years breaking down barriers within gaming’s infrastructure – if it weren’t for Fortnite, the idea of cross-platform play and cross-platform progression would be stuck in the past. Before Epic Games pushed and urged Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, there was little cooperation between the platforms. Now, however, if you buy a skin for Fortnite on your Xbox, it’s also on your Switch and PC versions of the game. This action can be viewed as the first small steps towards that decentralisation the metaverse so desperately needs.
There is still a long way to go, of course, but the blueprint, and more importantly, the funds and infrastructure are there. Epic has all the tools they need to forge ahead and create the metaverse foundations, leaving others to build upwards. We’ve already seen how Fortnite established a platform for community creators to craft new and exciting experiences; these same builders will be the ones to flesh out the metaverse by adding character and flair.
While Epic’s rivals are dipping their toes in the muddy waters of the metaverse and making waves for the wrong reasons, Epic Games has dived in, got back out, built a boat and is mapping uncharted seas. The race to one billion users is on, and Epic has a hell of a head start.
Each week we will be taking a look at some of the upcoming videogames, demos and unique experiences available through Oculus App Lab for the Meta Quest headsets. Many of these videogames come in varying states of completion, so each title is subject to change.
This week we’re getting involved with some proof of concepts featuring magic, nightmares and God-like abilities.
Fantasy Arena
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t think a MOBA would work in virtual reality (VR). Ultimately, it shouldn’t. A genre that is usually viewed from a top-down or isometric camera, has been adapted so that the player takes a first-person view of a headline hero.
Here, in Fantasy Arena, you’re equipped with a magic staff and a squad of soldiers. As the genre dictates, you march on, capturing strategic points along a path until you reach the enemy spawn point. Playing as a magic character, you can fire off energy bolts or sticky goo which damages or traps the enemy respectively. Better than that, a vast Area of Effect (AoE) attack can rain down lightning and decimate any bad guys within the circle.
Now, before you go running off to download Fantasy Arena, and you should, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is very much a work in progress. The environments are bare with only a few buildings and there is no variation in the enemies. Taken as a proof of concept, it shows that a MOBA can work very well in VR as it puts you into the shoes of the heroes. With two maps available, Fantasy Arena showcases its potential very well.
The Client VR
A much chunkier demo comes from The Client VR and is perhaps the most interesting title this week. You play as a disembodied pair of hands that can wield a form of magic. You have a magic wand and a crystal ball and these must be used to solve environmental puzzles.
You play as a guardian of sorts, watching over people trapped within a nightmare. The aim is to guide the dreamer from point A to point B – point B just happens to be a nice cosy bed where they will enjoy a better night’s sleep. The path to decent slumber is made dangerous due to horrible little demons who will attack the dreamer, plus a maze-like environment to hold them up. You use the wand to blast the demons or distract them, while the crystal ball opens gates and moves aspects of the maze.
There’s a sense of late-90s puzzler to The Client VR in its gameplay, but also its quirky aesthetic. This is a major highlight for me because the game then stands out from so many other titles available in VR. It’s bizarre in places, oddly funny, and while the puzzles may not be overly taxing, the game stretches itself out by challenging you to complete each level with certain requirements.
On the whole, the design of The Client VR is lovely – spooky and surreal while being outlandish in a seemingly Japanese presentation. I found myself taking off the headset and wanting to put it straight back on to play some more.
Project Demigod
Project Demigod feels like a sandbox playground. You start in a lab of some kind, where you will learn how to use weapons and abilities before spawning into the main playing area, with or without AI enemies. In this area you’ll find moving targets, crumbling buildings, and giant platforms – it’s a violent version of Total Wipeout!
Where this demo comes alive, is in how it makes you feel. There’s a lot of inspiration taken from comic book superpowers. Each hand can take on a different ability for some mixing and matching. For example, at one point I had a web-shooter on my right hand and a pillar of flame in my left. This allowed me to swing through the obstacles, let go of the web, and then hover in mid-air by angling the flame downwards.
Once my feet hit the ground again, I spawned in some goons to fight and switched my abilities for more combat-focused powers. Now I had a sword in one hand and an energy blaster on the other and I was laying out the bad guys left and right.
For anyone looking for some depth, you won’t really find it here. As a sandbox experience, however, it will spark joy, for sure. The physics are great, the abilities are varied and give a real sense of power. In essence, this is a superpower simulator, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. I only hope the game that sprawls out of this manages to capture this sense of fun.
