Hey, remember PlayerUnknown? As in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or PUBG to your friends? Yes, well Brendan Greene, aka PlayerUnknown, has provided details about his latest game project, codenamed “Artemis”, which aims to be an open-source virtual environment the size of the Earth that will support hundreds of thousands of players who can create or play whatever they want to .
However, here’s the trick. Greene also wants users to monetize what they create, essentially turning all user-generated content into NFTs. In an interview with Nathan Brown on the Hit points newsletter, says Greene: “We are building a digital place that must have an economy and systems must be at work. And I think you should be able to get value from a digital place; it should be like the internet, where you can do things that make money.”
In the same interview, Greene emphasized that he wants the whole of Artemis to remain an open-source piece of technology, saying, “It’s for everyone, right? It shouldn’t be controlled by us in the end. cooperate, but it is something that anyone can connect to, and everyone can host a piece of themselves.”
Let’s put the whole NFT thing aside for a moment and talk about how Greene plans to make a world this big. The engine that powers Artemis, called Melba, is being developed in-house at Greene’s development studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. Since Artemis’ goal is to have a huge procedurally generated world, it’s understandable that no current game engine could handle this task. Built primarily for scalability, Melba was designed to build a world using AI that would normally require a team of artists.
About a year ago, PlayerUnknown Productions showed a 30-second teaser for: Prologue, a game intended to serve as a technical demo that demonstrates Melba’s capabilities.
On paper, Artemis’ goals are incredibly ambitious, and while I like the idea of users being compensated for their contributions, I can’t help but feel an equal sense of dread and wonder when I think of who’s going to moderate a marketplace of such an impressive size. If our synopsis has piqued your interest, you can visit the PlayerUnknown Productions website to learn more about Artemis, Prologueand Melba.
