Corpse and splash damage make a game, without NFTs
The boys
Shroud
While it’s tempting to roll your eyes when you hear about a content creator trying to jump into video game development, and we’ve seen some examples of this not working out so well in the past, this time around seems a little more promising than usual.
There are actually a couple of streamers, Shroud and Sacriel, although there are two things needed for their new game, Project Astrid, beyond how these projects might normally work:
1) They work with an established, talented studio, Splash Damage
2) There are no NFTs in the game
The second point of course refers to Dr. Disrespect’s Deaddrop, his mining shooter made with an entirely new team that requires NFTs for “founder” entry, and he has publicly considered the idea of mining $100,000 blockchain items as a sort of entertainment. Deaddrop has a new Snapshot vertical section out today that I’ll be looking into, but the web3 integration has given me pause from the start.
None of that from Shroud, Sacriel and Splash Damage, as Splash Damage themselves confirmed by replying to a tweet I made about this. No NFTs.
Who is Splash Damage? They have been around since 2001 and had an era where they worked on a bunch of Xbox games like Gears 4 and 5 and Halo: MCC. They also did Brink back in 2011, but we’re not talking about that. Recently they made the surprisingly good Outcasters, a title that died when Google Stadia collapsed. So who knows. They are experienced, they have done a good job, we will see how this goes.
The announcement video for Project Astrid is…pretty vague. It’s going to be a AAA survival shooter, and the idea is that streamers like Sacriel and Shroud will be able to help create something that streamers will want to stream and their audience will want to play. Survival shooters have been all the rage on Twitch for years now because of the innate excitement and wild antics found in them.
But this all seems to be very early stages. There’s no pre-alpha test footage, not even concept art, just the guys and the team talking about the game they want to make. Because there’s an actual established studio involved here and this isn’t some sort of web3 game, it’s something I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on more than I otherwise would have. We’ll see where it goes from here, but it could be a while before we get a meaningful update.
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