The First ‘Ready Player One’-Style Gaming Multiverse is Forming on ...

EXCITING NEWS BY ENJIN TEAM

A syndicate of six game development studios has banded together to create the world’s first decentralized gaming multiverse by utilizing the blockchain to allow players to own assets that can be used across multiple games.

Age of Rust, 9Lives Arena, CryptoFights, War of Crypto, Bitcoin Hodler, and Forest Knight are all utilizing Enjin Coin’s blockchain development platform to integrate gaming assets stored on the Ethereum blockchain and have committed to creating the first ever gaming multiverse. Players who own these cutting-edge multiverse assets will be able to find and use them in multiple games, enabling developers to cross-promote while offering their players a completely unique inter-universe experience.

Age of Rust creators SpacePirate Games, the first to announce their intent to utilize Enjin Coin as a multiverse platform, sent out a tweet on August 14:

“Decentralized player-owned game items supported by other games is the next evolution in gaming. It's the ‘ready player one’ type of universe & we're working with other games to start it. ERC-1155 with Hive account@enjin makes this dream a reality. #blockchaingames #enjin.”

Since then, five more games announced adoption of the multiverse, which will allow players to find and use selected items in all participating games.

In theoretical physics, a multiverse is a hypothetical collection of universes, including the one that we see around us. The various universes within the multiverse are often referred to as “parallel” or “alternative” universes. Ready Player One, a 2018 blockbuster movie that grossed half a billion dollars, popularized the concept of the gaming multiverse with its depiction of the “OASIS," a sprawling collection of gaming landscapes that citizens of the world use to escape the daily struggles of living in a dystopian future. In the OASIS, players can move seamlessly through parallel gaming universes while taking their avatar, items, weapons, and currency with them.

The key difference is that while Ready Player One’s Oasis is owned by a single person, the multiverse growing on the blockchain is completely decentralized and is developing organically through collaboration and innovation. Though all of the games in the multiverse are using Enjin Coin’s platform to create and integrate their blockchain assets, the multiverse is not governed or controlled by a single entity. Any game developer can create blockchain assets or integrate those that already exist, however, Enjin’s platform enables developers to do so without any prior knowledge of or experience with blockchain development.

Players will soon be able to own an entire collection of multiverse assets to take with them from game to game. Eventually, developers will also be able to collaborate and enable players to level up in multiple games simultaneously, using the blockchain a developer can allow character interactions in other games to affect the character’s status in their own. The full range of possibilities is yet to be explored, from finding assets in games that can be used in others, to creating an intertwining set of missions and objectives that weave universes together.

Previous projects that have attempted to take on the mammoth task of creating the multiverse have been unsuccessful. Most notably, Multiverse Inc., which was founded by a group of Netscape veterans and had James Cameron on their advisory panel, rose to spectacular heights, signing up 10,000 game developers to their platform by 2008. The company began production of the platform in 2004 and ceased operations seven years later, citing lack of revenue as the reason for closing its doors in 2011, leaving 10,000 game developers to find new platforms.

Interestingly, Multiverse earned revenue through a profit-sharing model which allotted them 10% of adopting games’ profits, whereas Enjin is offering their blockchain development platform to early adopters for free. Enjin Coin first started building the blockchain development platform in June 2017 and gained crowdfunding through an ICO a few months later. With CryptoFights and Forest Knight slated for release in late 2018, Enjin Coin has enabled the frictionless integration of multiverse assets into games by creating a comprehensive suite of blockchain development and support software—all in just over a year’s time.

Aptly titled “Blockchain SDK by Enjin" (software development kit), Enjin Coin’s Unity Plugin is currently being used by early adopters and has been submitted to the Unity Asset Store, which will put it within the reach of 4.5 million developers. Through this partnership, Unity will promote “Blockchain SDK by Enjin" and host it on the front page of their Asset Store.

Enjin has also released the Enjin Smart Wallet, a secure multi-token cryptocurrency wallet design to store, manage, and protect gaming assets. Widely considered the world's most advanced cryptocurrency wallet, the Enjin Smart Wallet is more secure than the majority of banking and finance apps. Enjin will also release the EnjinX blockchain explorer, which will act as an encyclopedia for the blockchain, enabling players to verify the data attached to their items and developers to seamlessly import asset data into their games.

All items minted using Enjin’s development platform are backed by a nominal amount of Enjin Coin (ENJ) to certify their authenticity. This means all a developer needs to create and adopt multiverse assets using the Blockchain SDK by Enjin is a small amount of ENJ.

To celebrate the birth of the gaming multiverse, Enjin will also be hosting a ‘Ready Player One’-style scavenger hunt, giving players the chance to track down, find, and win items backed by millions of ENJ."