A live-action TV series based on the “Space Nation” Web3 game is in development with Hollywood director Roland Emmerich and producer Marco Weber leading the project. According to an exclusive report from Variety, the duo intends to explore the game’s history, lore, and setting through a live-action series, but they’re not developing it for a network or streaming site.
Instead, the report indicates Emmerich and Weber are pursuing non-traditional distribution methods. “We want to take an approach that fits into the overall philosophy of what we’re doing with the game,” Weber said in an interview with Variety. “Our goal is to be able to finance a significant portion of the budget ourselves through our own economy and our own token.”
Space Nation is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game where players take on the role of starship captains. It’s Web3-enabled and built on blockchain technology. This will purportedly allow players to participate in a token-based economy featuring non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that can be bought, sold, and traded in-game.
The company developing the game, Space Nation Inc., was founded by Emmerich and Weber alongside Jerome Wu, a former senior project manager at Blizzard-Activision, and game developer Tony Tang. Emmerich is an award-winning film director whose credits include Independence Day and its sequel as well as blockbusters such as 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and Godzilla (1998).
The project, which received $50 million in early funding, was envisioned as a “transmedia” platform from its onset. So far, the company has produced animated shorts featuring in-game character “Zoey” and the game has “soft launched” out of beta. It’s currently available for download on PC.
With its Hollywood and gaming industry clout, $50 million funding, and ambitious roadmap, Space Nation has become one of the more distinguished products in the Web3 games space, but the implementation of NFTs into MMOs has, so far, proven a tough sell to mainstream gamers.
The “space opera” gaming genre that Space Nation appears to be operating in is currently dominated by games such as Eve Online and, to a certain extent, No Man’s Sky. There’s also Eve Frontier, a game set in the same universe as Eve Online and featuring an experimental blockchain-based economy purported to allow players to roll their own cryptocurrencies.
