ArcheWorld coming soon.
ArcheAge is a game whose legacy includes a publisher being sued into bankruptcy, fraud, lying to customers, incompetence, corruption, and a series of servers whose economies were ruined by a combination of bots, RMT, dupes, exploits, and other user malfeasance. Given everything that has gone on around this game, I suppose it only makes sense that XLGames would want to turn it into an NFT game.
The idea of XLGames announcing an NFT game is almost laughable when you think about it. We’ve seen repeated attempts by developers over the last year to announce diving into NFTs and for the most part they’ve been forced to backtrack after overwhelming and frankly deserved backlash on social media. The only exception to this is Ubisoft, a company for whom the backlash over NFTs in Breakpoint is almost secondary to the exodus of employees due to rampant abuse by management, several lawsuits, and faltering sales of their big franchises.
One could also look to the fact that XLGames, should ArcheWorld come to fruition, can’t legally sell the game in their own country. NFT games were banned in South Korea. They also can’t put the game on Steam, cutting out a platform with the biggest PC market share, nor will the game be allowed on the upcoming Steam Deck handheld.
ArcheAge fared about as well as a large pepperoni deep dish pizza tossed into a pen of starving hogs, and that’s with a developer and publishing partners that occasionally cared enough to patch up exploits and ban gold farmers. Now that XLGames is directly building incentives for criminal elements to exploit ArcheWorld’s economy, and offering them direct cash incentives to do so, you can pretty much bet that the game is going to be actively worthless for the average player. Want to play the game? Good luck getting through the army of bots farming resources, the economy crushing exploits, and the duplication bugs inflating the currency past the point where a reasonable person can progress through the game and actually have fun.
The premise of ArcheWorld feels like a concession of defeat by XLGames to the very parties that ruined ArcheAge. It’s like they’ve taken the attitude of if you can’t beat them, might as well try to get a cut of their revenue. It’s a dirty move by a dirty developer, and I have my severe doubts that it’s going to pay off. Especially as more countries look to ban blockchain games.
But what do I know? I have a paper calendar.
MMO Fallout 