Space Nation, a budding transmedia franchise, has “soft launched” its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Space Nation Online as it eyes up the goal of becoming the next Star Wars. The developers believe that the newly released game, built on blockchain, will be the centerpiece to its expanding sci-fi IP.

Space Nation Online will spend 12 weeks in this soft-launched phase as the team limits player access and stabilizes the in-game economy. Once this is complete, the game—built on Ethereum scaling network Immutable zkEVM—will be set up for a global launch that will attempt to bring in a wider Web2 audience.

The MMO will serve as the core experience in the broader Space Nation franchise, which has a series of animated shorts, spinoff games, and a TV series in the works. While the sci-fi IP has its sights set on becoming the next Star Wars, the game looks to improve on the classic MMORPG World of Warcraft by implementing a web3 powered economy.

Space Nation co-founder and CEO Jerome Wu previously worked as a senior project manager at Blizzard Entertainment in charge of World of Warcraft’s operations in China. From this, he believes to have identified what makes games in this genre tick—and where to improve them.

During his time at Blizzard, he noticed that players would complain that World of Warcraft felt like a job as they performed monotonous tasks for hours to grind the ranks. Space Nation Online’s economy aims to improve on this by making these tasks have a high return on investment, while the more fun and compelling tasks have much lower returns.

This means that players can choose to play the game like any other MMORPG, albeit with more rewards for the monotonous resource gathering, or simply buy these resources off players in order to focus on the most fun parts of the game.

“[Some people] just want to become the guild leader, lead their team to success, and try to become the conqueror of the galaxy. Those people just play for fun,” Wu told Decrypt. “But there are lots of people wanting to do play-to-earn.”

For example, miners may spend hours gathering minerals that they can sell to other people who need them to create weapons and ships. In return, the miner will receive the in-game currency CHR that can be exchanged for fiat at any time—meaning users can engage in play-to-earn without directly interacting with Web3 tech.

“MMORPGs are a virtual society. There's different types of players, different types of people,” Wu explained. “There's a division of labor, and players will be free to choose what positions they want to be in.”

The team aims to create a virtual economy worth billions of dollars, similar to World of Warcraft and Fantasy Westward Journey, a Chinese MMORPG that helped inspire Space Nation Online’s economic model. But Wu believes that its crypto elements will make it more efficient. 

“There will be a Web3 MMORPG game that will achieve a virtual economy at this level or even bigger,” Wu told Decrypt. “I believe this is very important for future human society, for the future gaming industry. Because the metaverse will come eventually, and [building] a virtual economy inside a real virtual society will be super special.”

This will all accumulate into an intergalactic battle within the evolving Space Nation universe. Player-organized guilds will compete to occupy planets in the quest to become the dominant force in the galaxy. Wu explained that previous guild battles, during the game’s closed betas, have already seen 200 ships fighting each other—but he expects these battles to only get more epic with the soft launch.

Set in the Telikos Cluster, a distant galaxy, Space Nation tells the tale of humanity taking refuge after the solar system was obliterated by aliens. The MMORPG picks up from here as players battle one another, enemy factions, and countless aliens as they attempt to colonize the galaxy in the hopes of restarting civilization. 

While the team is “laser focused” on the MMORPG, the other experiences are on the back burner. But a number of animated shorts have already been released—starring Zoey, one of Decrypt’s favorite characters from our earlier playtest—and a screenplay for a prequel TV show is in the works by Roland Emmerich, who’s known for directing the films “Stargate,” “2012,” and “Independence Day.” This is the start of the quest to turn Space Nation into a household name.

“When the U.S. and the Soviet Union started [the Space Race during] the Cold War, there were a lot of sci-fi IPs appearing,” Wu said. “Now with Elon [Musk’s SpaceX] and Blue Origin, with all these rockets and satellites, there unfortunately hasn’t been a new [big sci-fi opera] IP. So I think this is a great opportunity for us.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward