The Metaverse Begins! Hoard Creates a Shared Experience Between Games

In May Hoard’s CEO, Slawomir Bubel, demonstrated the first ever example of cross-game interoperability using Ethereum and Plasma. He show how collecting puzzle pieces in My Memory of Us unlocked a secret level in Plasma Dog. As these types of virtual experiences evolve, we’ll begin to see the emergence of the metaverse: Ready Player One in real life!

• Co-Ownership — with Hoard, it is possible to create provably scarce items — you can prove there are only 100 Swords of Camelot, for example. When items become scarce, players may join together to take co-ownership of them. A player could purchase the deed to half of an item in one game to gain partial ownership of it in another. This castle belongs to no man! It belongs to the clan!
• Permanent Death — when virtual assets are “burned” on Ethereum, they are destroyed forever. Risky gameplay may cause items to break down over time and eventually be destroyed — a bronze shield can only withstand so many battles against a fire-breathing dragon, after all! If these items can be shared between games, then they would be destroyed everywhere; not just in one game. Furthermore, the permanent death of a character may take all their character-owned items with them.
• Shared Items — game studios produce titles across various genres. Sometimes an item in one game doesn’t fit the same theme of a second. For example, a farmer’s pitchfork would be useless in a space battle! To make sense of this, items could re-render to appear as their appropriate counterpart for the new game: that pitchfork in now a lightsaber!

• Shared States—items are not the only thing that can be shared between games. There are various states that players unlock which can be shared between titles. Achievements are one thing. But so are environments. For example — if a player unlocks the wrath of the gods in a major title, they may see the skies change in all their other games. That’s one angry deity!
• Companion Apps — when titles generate a significant amount of public data, players may demand this information become accessible in novel and easy-to-digest ways. Imagine a Summer Olympics game where tons player high scores, records, and tournaments are constantly in progress and being updated. A small indie game may consolidate all these scores and begin including them in the storyline of their game — maybe a Summer Olympian begins playing the indie game and when they pick up the newspaper they see their high score was just beaten!

There are so many ways games can begin to interoperate. Cross-gameplay will become a new and fun experience. And as players gain more and more exposure to it, they will start to demand it in bigger and bigger titles. Games without interoperability will feel as isolated and antiquated as multiplayer games without online gameplay. The exciting thing is, though, interoperability won’t just be for multiplayer games; they can include single players, as well. Hoard is here to create the metaverse across all types of games!