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Brendan Greene, the modder-turned-millionaire who designed battle royale game PUBG: Battlegrounds, wants to make his studio’s next game a “metaverse”, although he says he’s wary of using the term. The project is called “Artemis” (at least for now) and you won’t be seeing it any time soon. That’s because the studio is still working on the tech behind it all, and plans to release two other games before it. Meaning it’ll 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-led “multiverse of worlds” will be moderated, or how it will prevent copyright infringement, or what makes this idea distinct from, say, Roblox. He is nonetheless “full of confidence”.
“[Yes], it’s a big vision,” he told IGN in a recent interview, “but I’ve got a good team of industry professionals and they don’t think it’s that crazy.
“I hesitate to talk about this, because it’s just such a dirty word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don’t think anyone else is. I think everyone’s building IP bubbles that might talk to each other at some stage in the future, maybe if we’re lucky, but it’s not the metaverse. See, the Metaverse is a 3D internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all operating on the same protocol, like HTTP. So a world is a page, and that’s what I’m trying to do with Artemis.”
What Artemis will actually look like, and what players (users?) will actually do within that realm isn’t talked about in concrete terms, except to say it might be a bit like Star Trek‘s Holodeck or Minecraft’s survival mode. He also says his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, may build it with the world-generation technology they’re creating for their upcoming survival game Prologue: Go Wayback, which so far seems an aesthetically realistic orienteer ’em up with hunger, thirst, and all the usual survival game go-tos. Artemis itself, however, is years away from release, according to Greene. And even when it does come out, it’s possible it’ll take time to gain traction.
“The internet was empty when it first started, and it was just the way of sharing data, and I look at this the same. This is probably going to be empty for the first few years, but then eventually you’ll start to see the possibility of what you can do with this kind of world generator that it’s like a multiverse of worlds.”
Greene expands on his thoughts in the interview but the gist is this: Artemis is still a lot of big, cloudy ideas. My gut reaction to millionaires chasing the metaverse is rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth skepticism. The two mentioned inspirations (the Holodeck and Minecraft) have something of a chasm between them in technical terms. And the player-led creativity Greene describes already exists in other games such as Roblox, which struggles just to keep its audience of children protected from harm.
In the meantime, Fortnite has given players tools to make their own creations with the Unreal Editor For Fortnite and other studios are building similar games-as-a-platform, such as Everywhere, an upcoming make-your-own-minigame machine by Build A Rocket Boy, itself described in somewhat grandiose terms for what looks to be essentially Dreams for the PlayStation with more multiplayer options. It might be exactly these types of games that Greene thinks of as “IP bubbles”, but it’s not clear what will make PlayerUnknown’s Metagrounds different from these.
Artemis is also – let’s face it – unlikely to be as revolutionary as the internet, the thing Greene repeatedly compares it to. I’m wary of calling the metaverse the holy grail of the tech world, mainly because many head honchos in games and technology seem to hear the words “holy grail” and think: “cool thing we can definitely achieve if we pump enough money into it!” Which is not quite the original meaning of the phrase. But also calling the metaverse a “holy grail” implies it is a universally desirable thing in the first place. And I’m not sure that’s true. Many people just want to play a video game.
Greene does talk more about all the possibilities for Artemis in the interview, so it’s worth reading if you want to understand his reasoning and get a sense for some of the other questions that arise from his ponderings. When asked how such a world-of-worlds would be moderated, he says: “we’re going to have to figure it out” and acknowledges it is “important to get right”. When asked if Artemis will use NFTs, he says it won’t, despite a previous report claiming this would be the case.
For now, Artemis remains a non-extant dream of unproven value. Whatever it turns out to be might be fun. It might even get the hundreds of thousands of players of Plunkbat. But will it get the millions Greene is fantasising about? Will it be a second 3D internet? I’m not so sure.