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Gala Games has partnered with Unity Technologies in a $20 million professional services deal to deliver on an ambitious metaverse project involving Sim City creator Will Wright.
Under the deal, Unity will use its development and real-time 3D platform expertise for VOXverse, the metaverse for Gala Games‘ VOX Collectible Series, which encompasses multiple games.
Gala is a Web3 gaming and entertainment company that is publishing a lot of games funded through sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and its GALA token. It has been able to fund big budget games this way, and it has drawn seasoned game developers like Wright.
About 1.3 million players have been supporting Gala Games, and a total of 28 games are now in development, said Jason “BitBender” Brink, president of blockchain at Gala, in a press event.
“We gave a little peek behind the curtain on VoxVerse,” Brink said. “There’s some cool stuff coming that we’ve done with Vox recently.”
The company did a drop of adventure packs for Vox fans. And it will launch VOX Souls at the end of the month, which will determine what kind of character you play in the VOXverse. VOX Idle, a text-based game, is liked an old adventure game and it will be playable on Discord in July.
Gala Games built its blockchain ecosystem on the Gala Games token (GALA), which was created on the ERC-20 standard for the Ethereum blockchain, and it also works with the Binance Smart Chain. Through the token, players can invest in their game assets, like Spider Tanks, and own them. They can resell them as well. Their tokens also give them the right to vote on the future direction of the game’s development.
Gala Games raises funds for its developers and its own purposes through selling NFTs that are used in the games. It pays for its blockchain processing costs — the computing nodes that verify things like the NFT ownership — by giving tokens to those who run the nodes.
The deal will bring Unity’s Accelerate Solutions expertise in studio to support Gala’s development of the VOXverse — a living, breathing virtual world that the company said will be interoperable, immersive and ever-evolving.
“We’re humbled by the confidence the Unity team has in what we’re building,” said James Olden, chief strategy officer of Gala Games, in a statement. “We’re confident Will Wright’s vision for VOXverse will chart a course that will completely change how people think of ‘metaverses’ and lead the entire gaming industry to legitimizing web3 technologies for entertainment.”
The Unity team will add to Gala’s internal team behind Mirandus and Gallium, the studio of The Sims creator Will Wright, to create a deeply social metaverse. All told, Gala Games itself has more than 400 people.
Gala Games has teamed up with The Sims designer Will Wright and his team at Gallium Studios to create a unique VOX world that goes beyond the metaverse– powered by NFT memory and featuring continually growing and evolving characters.
The VOXverse will bring Wright’s design sensibilities where players set their own goals to the blockchain, with NFT avatars that carry memories and characteristics from all their gaming experiences into one cohesive digital experience.
“Our team is adept at collaborating with partners to identify their key challenges and help them craft elegant, effective solutions that span AR, VR, robotics and mixed reality environments,” said Ryan Peterson, vice president of accelerate solutions at Unity, in a statement. “We’re proud to have the chance to help Gala advance Will’s vision for a new, interactive style of gameplay.”
In VOXverse, every avatar has unique personalities and encounters, which dynamically change over time as a result of their in-game experiences. Players can build social influence, compete in factions, participate in world-building, own land in several dimensions, explore different terrains, and portal into Gala’s other live games. It kind of looks like a blockchain version of Minecraft.
With areas of the virtual city dedicated to VOX’s growing series of IP partners, including fantasy MMORPG Mirandus and AMC’s The Walking Dead, the world will continue to expand and reflect each serialized VOX drop. VOXverse represents the ambition, scale and confidence of Gala. Further plans for the future of Gala’s VOX entertainment vision will be announced at Galaverse, which returns on June 6 – 8 in Malta.
Gala Games made the announcement at its Galaverse event in Malta. This week, it also announced that it is publishing three more blockchain games: Champions Arena, FreeStyle Football 2 and The Forever Winter. And it also revealed that it is making a Battlestar Galactica blockchain game. In the game, the player’s mission is to retake one of the 12 homeworlds of humanity from the Cylons.
“We’ve been working on the Battlestar Galactica blockchain game for quite a long time with our friends at NBC Universal and finally are able to tell tell the world about it,” Brink said.
And it said the Wild West shootout game Grit will be available on the Epic Games Store. Champions Arena is scheduled to release in 2023 for mobile devices and PC.
Music and film
Gala also unveiled its new brand vision to reinforce its focus on using the power of Web3 to offer more involvement for fans. Gala is now the new parent company of the Gala entertainment properties for Gala Games, Gala Music and the newly launched Gala Film to unite its “Watch/Listen/Play to Earn” approach.
Gala Film will offer fans a true sense of ownership in the content they love. The platform opens up possibilities such as voting on script choices or casting or allowing fans to actively participate in the content they consume from their favorite IPs and talent. Gala Films has several upcoming projects in the pipeline including a Vox feature film (yet to be named).
“These three verticals of games, film, and music, are all deeply intertwined. And what we want to do, as the globally respected leader in this space for Web3 entertainment is to bring these more closely together so that they can all leverage one another to create better experiences for the end users,” Brink said. “And film is an important part of that and it ties in beautifully with music and games.”
Gala just wrapped up its second month-long reward event called May Mayhem. Gala gave away over $4 million in GALA tokens and NFT rewards to the fans and node holders for simplifying playing Town Star, Spider Tanks, Town Crush, and referring players to the Gala Games platform. Around 600 people attended the Malta event.
“We see Galaverse as a great way to give back to our community,” Brink said.
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