Million on Mars raises $3.5 million for blockchain-based space sim

Million on Mars has raised $3.5 million to power its blockchain-based space simulation about how humanity could one day colonize the Red Planet.

Erik Bethke, CEO of Million on Mars, is unsurprisingly a Mars geek. He really hopes that one day Mars will have a population of one million people, and his game is about simulating how such a thing could happen.

“The game is about what it takes to settle Mars,” Bethke said in an interview with GamesBeat. “The key concept assumes that SpaceX or Rocket Lab or another space company provides affordable rockets and the price of travel in the solar system falls, which we expect, to be quite affordable. What would you bring to Mars? How would you go about making up?”

In the hardcore crafting game, players start with 40-acre plots of land and craft their way to financial independence on Mars. Now, after a significant year of weekly content and cross-promotions with other Web3 titles, including a remarkable and ground-breaking cross-chain cross-promotion with the popular title Sunflower Land, the company has raised a seed round to continue expanding its universe.

Founded in 2020, the Austin, Texas-based company is also looking to show how running a blockchain game can be a legitimate business built with care by a team of veteran game creators. Unlike many Web3 game companies that raise money well in advance of making a game, Million on Mars has been live crafting and trading for more than six months, with parts of the game going live as early as late 2021.

“I am extremely proud of our live operations and execution with the overall stability of our project, NFTs and tokens – and was one of the earliest to anchor on the play-and-own model and never play to earn, ” Bethke said. “We have a lot of exciting plans to expand on Million on Mars this year, as well as (reveal) a second title.”

The game has 14,000 daily active users, excluding bots, Bethke said. That’s a small amount in the grand scheme of things, but Bethke said there are no robots and a lot of human gameplay like other massively multiplayer online games. He also believes that the game has the most stable utility of a Web3 game on any blockchain, as people are there to play, not trade tokens to make money.

“We’re happy that we have a rabid fan base,” he said.

Origin

Bethke got serious about creating the title more than 20 years ago. He worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Galileo Cassini missions, and he earned a PhD in space science in the 1990s.

But it was a depressing time to work there, as the space shuttle program crashed and there was no company like SpaceX at the time. He dropped out of the PhD program and thought about creating games that simulated his dream of getting humanity to Mars.

“I thought if I can learn how to make good games, maybe I can inspire some people and get excited about a positive future,” he said. This is my dream studio and my dream game. I’ve been working my whole life since I left the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 28 years ago to make a game where people build their settlement on Mars. There are virtually unlimited resources in the solar system, let’s expand into the solar system and treat Earth like a precious wild garden! Every day I get to work with an incredibly talented team, and our passionate player base really feels like an extension of the team.”

He added, “I moved to South Korea in 2003 to create GoPets and to understand free-to-play and microtransactions from the source, and today I see Web3 technology powering one-world MMOs with the purest transparency and player ownership – something I’ve been passionate about throughout my career as a game developer I’m humbled by the support of GSG and Widus, and they share the same vision and passion to deliver amazing gaming experiences to both Web2 and Web3 audiences – and ultimately we stop talking about blockchain, Web3, P2E and so on – just good games with strong ownership and rationally shared finances for the players who deliver most of the value in a single-world MMO.”

After working in games for a while, Bethke took three years off to sail with his family and homeschool his boys, who are now 21 and 17. His younger son showed him Factorio in 2016 while they were on the boat. And Bethke believed that was the way he should approach craftsmanship in a city-building simulation.

Keeping it real

Bethke has been very focused on making the game realistic.

“Our players have to learn about the seven-year process where you take atmospheric carbon dioxide from Mars, you condense it down, zap it, and take the carbon out of it and mix it in with the hydrogen you got from electrolyzing the water that makes methane.” he said. “It leads to raw material and fertilizer chains.”

Bethke collaborated with a number of scientists to understand planetary science.

“The name of the company Million on Mars comes from a comment that someone asked Elon Musk years ago about how many people would be needed for Mars to be financially independent from Earth. He said maybe a million people, Bethke said.

As for the real prospect of settling on Mars, Bethke said, “It’s my life’s passion. So I could go on about this forever. When I was on that sailing trip it was true. You basically fix your boat in exotic locations. And I think a lot about what it was like to settle Mars.”

To get started, he said we should drop lots of greenhouse structures on Mars well before human colonists will need them.

“I’m excited about the more mundane things like getting a very, very reliable toilet on Mars,” he said. “The dust on Martian soil has perchlorates at a concentration 10,000 times our tolerance. It will disrupt your thyroid function and you just start to fall apart as a human being. And so we’re going to need a really, really smart series of airlocks and scrubbers and micro-droplet acoustic stings. But interestingly enough, there are a lot of bacteria that love to eat perchlorates.”

The game has around 70 playable buildings and thousands of crafting recipes and hundreds of items.

Gets money

The money will help the game add more systems and virtual environments on Mars. The game can be played on both the Solana and Wax blockchains.

Great South Gate and Widus Partners led the round. Players harvest resources, craft goods, trade with each other both in-game and on-chain, build up the settlement, form settlements and go on epic quests across the planet. Bethke started the company with co-founder Keri Waters.

“We have worked together with Keri and Erik through 2022, and we are impressed by their continuous
execution, and commitment to building a real business first,” Dan Whang, CEO of Great South Gate Ventures, said in a statement. “Through these dynamic times in the crypto space, the Million on Mars team delivered big with the Martizens expansion, and we’re excited to see their roadmap expand to the rest of the solar system and beyond in 2023.”

Jonathan Lee, partner at Widus Partners, said in a statement, “”We believe that the Million on Mars team, with its pedigree of creating games for all audiences, has what it takes to drive web3 games into the mainstream for players both in the west and in the east, and finally to run the platform for play, build and own.”

Solana Labs also invested. Million on Mars has 25 people around the globe, and the developers have worked on games such as Starfleet: Command, GoPets, Mafia Wars and FarmVille. The company is remote at first, and it has team members in places like the Philippines and Ukraine.

The company hasn’t released its revenue figures, but the company has been selling build packs and other non-fungible tokens (NFTs) every week for the past six months. The recurring income has made the company’s cash flow positive and profitable, said Bethke. The company has pre-sold thousands of its Martizen characters on the Wax blockchain and the Fractal marketplace on the Solana blockchain.

As for Web3, Bethke believes players should own what they buy. When a company shuts down a game, he feels it is an act of violence against players and a violation of their rights.

“I feel very strongly that the players should own their assets,” he said.

Regarding the distrust that was sown by crypto scams and the failure of FTX, Bethke believes that burning all the garbage in the industry is a good thing.

“There are far too many blanket sweeps and fraudulent things in the blockchain space,” he said. “So many teams are getting funding that shouldn’t have been getting funding. Clearing out the junk projects is very helpful.”

Meanwhile, Bethke said Million on Mars is working on a new unannounced title. He hopes to announce it this year.