Imagine if an MMO developer decided to rake up every NFT and blockchain buzzword and system, then pigeonholed and sewed them together to make the video game version of a chimera crafted from gibberish. That’s effectively what Cornucopias’ The Island wants to become: a self-described “blockchain based play-to-earn, build-to-earn, and learn-to-earn MMORPG game where players can own land and other NFT-based assets that are tradeable in a peer-to-peer manner, all hosted in a fun and expanding metaverse.”
The press release for the game – a literal 38-page whitepaper – describes an MMO with various themed play-to-earn zones like a Wild West area, samurai age area, and farm life area, each with a variety of minigames that reward digital assets, meaning players can choose the overall theme for their own digital sweatshop, like being allowed to put a tiny Chia Pet inside of a corporate cubicle. The more “creative” sort of player can craft blueprints of things like house furnishings that can be bought by other players, crafted, and then minted into an NFT, which can then be sold to others or used in virtual housing.
The game further makes plain its desire to get rich as fast as possible by marketing itself as a platform for “traditional and ecommerce companies to sell and promote their real-world brands, goods, and services, to a hard to reach audience they have potentially never had access to before.”
The Island is purportedly releasing on PC, mobile devices, and console at an unspecified launch date and is being developed on Unreal Engine 5, but the first token sale was last week and supposedly already sold out. As always, we urge our readers not to participate in these systems even on the off-chance that this game actually does get made, and certainly not before. If you’re on the fence, just read up on the founders of the game and note resumes loaded with crypto jargon, not MMORPG development.
