Hall of fame game designer Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims) is making a blockchain video game for the masses, not for NFT shoppers, he tells Axios.

Why it matters: Wright is the biggest name in the controversial blockchain gaming sector, in which there's an abundance of investment and player skepticism.

What they’re saying: “I'm much more interested in attracting a million free-to-play players than, you know, 10,000 rich whales, although we could use those rich whales,” Wright tells Axios, using common industry terminology for people who spend an inordinate amount of money on a game or the NFTs that just might be tied to it.

Details: Wright’s project is called VoxVerse. It is a virtual world set on a massive cube, where players should be able to own land, create attractions, mine for resources and socialize (release date TBD).

• He envisions a game that will attract three groups of people: a small number of rich virtual landowners, paying for plots with crypto; a middle group of creative players who’ll be tapped by the landowners to make stuff (and share any sale proceeds from what they make), and a mass of free-to-play folks who’ll hang out and play in the world.
• In a faint echo of the Sims, the game will incorporate systems of fame and trust as well as basic character needs such as energy or hunger.
• The most Wright-style touch may be “shape grammar,” which he calls “kind of an evolutionary system” for item creation that lets users repeatedly click on and transform a starter object (car, coffee cup, etc.) to tweak it, make it their own, even “patent” it via the blockchain for revenue-generating reuse.

Between the lines: Design for VoxVerse is happening at Gallium Games, a blockchain-focused startup co-founded by Wright and Carmen Sandiego co-creator Lauren Elliott, who first shipped a game with Wright in 1984.

• Actual production of the game is happening at Unity.
• And the project is being orchestrated by crypto gaming boosters Gala Games, which has spent over $25 million funding the effort.
• Gala wants Wright’s game to help popularize its Vox characters, which are digital collectibles, or NFTs. The most recent Vox offered by Gala, based on Trolls characters from Dreamworks, went on sale last week for .888 ETH (about $1,300) and will guarantee early dibs on land in VoxVerse.

“I don't really want to be in the business of selling NFTs,” Wright said, emphasizing that his interest is in blockchain’s ability to allow for secure transactions between players.

• In a call with Axios, Elliot amiably interjected that some aspects of the VoxVerse project technically are NFTs, but noted Wright is very focused on game design.
• Wright likens blockchain to plumbing or some other underlying tech. “I don’t care how you do it,” he said. “I want to have secure transactions for content creators.”

The big picture: Crypto gaming is in search of a sustained hit, with reports of low player populations and the collapse of former darling Axie Infinity fanning criticism from traditional gamers that blockchain and NFTs are an unnecessary nuisance for games.

• But boosters say it’s simply early days, and the money keeps coming in. More than $1 billion — some 40% of all gaming deals — was invested in blockchain games in Q3, according to deal trackers Drake Star.

Netflix is “very seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering” to stream games to TVs and PCs to its subscribers, the company's VP of gaming, Mike Verdu, said at a TechCrunch event this week.

Why it matters: The other shoe is finally dropping. This — not Netflix’s current mobile game offering — is what had the rest of the games industry quaking when the streaming behemoth first started talking about games.

• Verdu didn’t share many details but said the company would start small.
• “The hope is, over time, that it just becomes this very natural way to play games wherever you are,” Verdu said.

Between the lines: Cloud gaming involves running a game on a remote server and streaming the video and audio of the game back to the player, while their commands on a controller or touch screen are streamed back to the server.

• With fast enough connections, it can resemble playing a game on a console or PC, and it’s a tech and business dream pursued by OnLive (folded in 2015), Google Stadia (winding down in 2023), Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox and Amazon Luna.
• Verdu described Stadia’s tech as a success but noted that “it had some issues with a business model.”

Yes, but there are formidable bandwidth and server challenges facing a Netflix cloud gaming business.

State of play: Netflix has purchased three game studios in the past year and opened two, including a newly announced one in Southern California led by veteran PlayStation and Activision Blizzard producer Chacko Sonny.

• The company says it has released 35 games, with 55 more coming, including 14 internally developed games.
• Netflix is aiming for half of its games to tie into its shows, and the other half a mix of original work and external deals.

Microsoft’s emphatic 33-page pushback against the U.K.’s competition regulator regarding its $70 billion bid for Activision frames the nearly $2 trillion tech giant as a third-place gaming underdog, pushing for innovation.

Why it matters: A skeptical U.K. could scuttle the whole deal.

• But Microsoft argues that Sony would not be grievously harmed even if it pulled Activison’s Call of Duty from PlayStation — which it maintains would be bad business if it did.
• Microsoft chides the regulator for mentioning rival Sony 57 times and “consumers” just 10 times in its explanation for why it deemed the potential acquisition worthy of a second phase of investigation.

The filing also includes some choice details.

• The assertion that Sony’s current deal for Call of Duty involves keeping the series off Game Pass for “a number of years” — something a Sony rep tells Axios was decided upon by Activision independently.
• A note that Microsoft wants to make a cross-platform game store that could even compete on mobile with Apple and Google’s shops.
• An acknowledgement that its cloud gaming business is “immature,” and that Xbox Cloud Gaming users are far less active than Xbox console players,

🤔 A misinformation researcher says the Trump-supporting far-right movement learned to achieve real political gains by copying the online harassment and meme strategies of intolerant gamers from the Gamergate movement, Axios’ Ina Fried reports.

👩🏻‍💻 Video game testers at Activision’s Blizzard Albany studio have received authorization from the National Labor Relations Board to hold a vote to unionize on Nov. 18, The Washington Post reports.

💰 Japanese game developers at the producer level earned an average yearly income of 6.8 million yen (about $45,000), according to a study of pay data from 2019, the most recent year available, by industry analyst Serkan Toto.

🎮 Original Bayonetta actor Hellena Taylor, in the news since the weekend after calling for a boycott of the series’ next release, was offered $15,000 to reprise the role, more than the $4,000 she cited in her viral plea, according to Bloomberg (and corroborated by an Axios source). Taylor denied the report.

⬆️ Roblox said that its number of daily active users reached 57.8 million for September a 23% increase from a year before.

🌫 Konami has announced a batch of new games in its Silent Hill horror franchise, including a PC/PS5 Silent Hill 2 remake and a live, interactive narrative project from GenVid, Behaviour and JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot Games.

🛠 EA’s next Sims game, codenamed Project Rene, is a few years from release, the company said, while offering a glimpse.

Friday, Oct. 21

• Batman: Gotham Knights (PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, New Tales from the Borderlands (PC, consoles), and Persona 5 Royal (Xbox, PC, Switch, already on PlayStation) are released.

Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 22 and 23

• For esports fans, we recommend a skim of Juked's calendar for the weekend’s events.

Monday, Oct. 24

• A quiet day.

Tuesday, Oct. 25

• Victoria 3 (PC) is released.

Wednesday, Oct. 26

• Quiet again.

Thursday, Oct. 27

• The Sega Genesis Mini 2, Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PC, already on PlayStation), Frog Detective 3 (PC), Star Ocean: The Divine Force (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) and Citizen Sleeper: Episode Refuge (PC, Switch, Xbox) are released.
• Ubisoft reports quarterly earnings.

Friday, Oct. 28

• Bayonetta 3 (Switch), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), Factorio (Switch, already on PC), Resident Evil Village — Cloud (Switch), Resident Evil Village: Re:Verse (PC, console), Resident Evil Village: Winters’ Expansion (PC, console) and Stitch (Apple Arcade) are released.

I've been disappointed with the newest DC comics superhero adventure, Gotham Knights (6 hours played on PS5), a game that asks players to do far too many in-game chores to get to the good stuff.

• The WB Montreal production lets players pick from four Bat-heroes who have survived the death of Batman, then take them on nightly patrols that involve an inordinate amount of generic crime-busting.
• Punch enough crooks, break up enough heists and you'll unlock access to unique missions that advance various plots involving signature Bat-villains. Some actions can even impact the next night's patrols. But the player's choices are too narrow, the consequences too vague to be satisfying.

I had a better time when a random person showed up in my game and we played co-op, patrolling the night together.

Desire to play more: 50%. I'm curious where the story goes, and I have found that some of the grind eventually unlocks player convenience features — like the option to glide through the sky — that make the game more enjoyable.