KEY POINTS

  • Kieran and Aaron Warwick are developing Illuvium, a blockchain-based game that aims to implement decentralized finance infrastructure in game design
  • The game plans to utilize NFT's and a DAO that would allow players to decide the game's balance
  • Illuvium is in early development, with a demo coming in March at the absolute earliest

Picture the video game Pokemon. Players collect Pokemon, trade them, make them fight each other for sport.

What’s missing from this equation?

If you ask Kieran and Aaron Warwick, developers of the game Illuvium, the answer is blockchain.

The Warwick brothers have been developing their game since September, a cross between Pokemon’s collect-em-all RPG style and the popular auto-battler genre. More important are the experimental decentralized finance elements of the project, which aims to be a proof of concept for game development that doesn’t rely so heavily on a central publisher or studio.

“One of the most frustrating experiences as a gamer is feeling like a consumer of a game rather than a participant, and while many game studios have improved on this over the last few years by handing more control to their communities there is no way to have the level of community ownership that we are going to provide in the traditional gaming world,” Kerian Warwick told Cointelegraph.

Illuvium hopes to use a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), to govern the rules and updates of the game. DAOs are employed in decentralized finance to democratize corporate decision-making, but in-game development they could theoretically allow a player to decide on its own balance changes.

The Warwick brothers also plan to use a number of NFTs, essentially currencies or items specific to the game’s platform, to implement decentralized finance infrastructure in-game, building on the tactics of the NFT card game Gods Unchained.

Illuvium has a long way to go before release, with the 15-man development team requiring at least through March to put out even a demo. The promise of a transparent and equitable game platform, however, could go a long way in an industry increasingly beset by labor abuses, accusations of corporate misconduct and releases riddled with bugs and microtransactions.

“We believe mainstream gamers will see the opportunity migrating to permissionless platforms where they can truly own the entire game,” the brothers told Cointelegraph.

Pokemon