Brendan Greene, the millionaire modder who designed the battle royale game PUBG: Battlegrounds, wants his studio’s next game to be a “metaworld,” though he says he’s wary of using the term. The project is called “Artemis” (at least for now) and you won’t see it any time soon. This is because the studio is still working on the technology behind it all and plans to release two other games before then. This means it will be 10-15 years before it actually comes out.
Greene describes Artemis as an internet-like platform where users create and share things, but doesn’t say specifically what those things might be. He doesn’t know how his user-driven “multiverse of worlds” will be moderated, how it will prevent copyright infringement, or how the idea differs from, say, Roblox. Despite this, he is “full of self-confidence”.
“I’m hesitant to talk about it because it’s just a sullied word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don’t think anyone else has done it. I think they’re all creating IP bubbles that may talk to each other at some point in the future, maybe if we’re lucky, but it’s not the Metaverse. You see, the Metaverse is the 3D internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all running on the same protocol, like HTTP is a website, and that’s what I’m trying to do with Artemis.
What Artemis will actually look like and what players (users?) will actually do in this realm isn’t discussed in any specific way, other than to say that it might be a bit like Star Trek’s Holodeck or Minecraft’s Survival Mode. He also says that his studio PlayerUnknown Productions can build it using the world-class technology they are creating for the upcoming survival game Prologue: Go Wayback, which for now appears to be an aesthetically realistic orienteering game with hunger, thirst and all the usual survival games. However, according to Greene, Artemis itself will take many years to premiere. And even if it does come to lightweight, it may take some time to gain traction.
“In the beginning, the internet was empty and it was just a way to share data. I look at it the same way. It will probably be empty for the first few years, but then you will eventually start to see the possibilities of what you can do with this kind of world generator, which will be like a multiverse of worlds.
Greene expands on her thoughts in the interview, but the gist is this: Artemis still has a lot of substantial, fuzzy ideas. My instinctive reaction to millionaires chasing the metaverse is furious, frothing-at-the-mouth skepticism. Both mentioned inspirations (Holodeck and Minecraft) are separated by a certain technical gap. And the player-driven creativity that Greene describes already exists in other games, such as Roblox, which seeks to protect children from harm.
Meanwhile, Fortnite has given players the tools to create their own creations using the Unreal editor. For Fortnite and other studios are creating similar games as a platform, such as Everywhere, the upcoming create-your-own-mini-game machine from Build A Rocket Boy, itself described in somewhat grandiose terms and looking like something that’s basically like Dreams on PlayStation with more multiplayer options. Perhaps these are the types of games Greene calls “IP bubbles,” but it’s unclear how PlayerUnknown’s Metagrounds will differ from them.
Artemis – let’s be forthright – is unlikely to be as revolutionary as the Internet, to which Greene repeatedly compares it. I’m wary of calling the metaverse the holy grail of the tech world, mainly because many top figures in gaming and tech seem to hear the words “holy grail” and think, “that’s a cool thing that we can definitely achieve if we pump enough money into it That’s !” Which isn’t quite the original meaning of the phrase. However, calling the metaworld the “holy grail” implies that it is primarily a universally desired thing. And I’m not sure that’s true. Many people just want play a video game.
Greene talks more about all of Artemis’ capabilities in the interview, so it’s worth reading if you want to understand his thought process and some of the other questions that arise from his deliberations. When asked how such a world-of-worlds would be moderated, he replies, “we’ll have to figure that out,” and admits that “it’s important to get it right.” When asked if Artemis will operate NFTs, he replies that he won’t anyway previous report claiming that this is what will happen.
For now, Artemis remains a non-existent dream of unproven value. Whatever it turns out to be, it could be fun. It could even attract hundreds of thousands of Plunkbat players. But will he get the millions Greene dreams of? Will this be the second 3D Internet? I’m not so sure about that.
