Note: In the spirit of transparency you should know that I am currently under an NDA in regards to this specific game development and the knowledge I may or may not have regarding any details about the game itself. As such I will not be commenting directly or revealing anything I may or may not know about the game itself. Anything I say below is purely reaction to the recent announcement.
Yesterday CCP announced it had secured funding for a new round of development for Project Awakening. I first became aware of this back in the Fall of last year, I don't remember exactly when - but I've known about it for some time now. (This is me assuming these are the same things without any specific knowledge that they are indeed the same things. I know this is frustrating, but technically speaking this could be something else entirely.)
The PR release for this round of funding used the word "blockchain" a lot and that has caused no end to speculation and harsh feedback from the community at large. We all have very strong feelings when it comes to Crypto/Web3/Blockchain technologies and their record of failure across many platforms. I share those concerns. I could easily spend a thousand words talking about the negative connotations and impact that these have caused across the world and not have enough room to finish my thoughts.
Instead let's back up and talk about something more basic - capitalism. CCP cannot survive simply on the back of their core business, which is an almost 20 year old game called Eve Online. As much as we'd all love for the entire corporation to focus on our much beloved sandbox, that simply isn't reasonable or realistic. And we are all aware of the long litany of additional titles that CCP has released or worked on over the past two decades, so no reason to harp on that track record. And yet, still they continue to try. This is what they must do, there is no question or concern about this, they have to keep trying and developing additional titles in order to survive as a company. This is basic capitalism. So getting angry about them developing new games is rather silly and misplaced.
Secondly I think most people do not understand the impact that RMT/Scams play in Eve Online and the negative impact they have not only on game play, but resources allocated to managing them within CCP. All I have to go on here is direct conversations I've had outside of the above, but I can start to put two and two together here. Eve's basic structure was developed over two decades ago and a lot has changed since then. I can easily extrapolate a scenario where an internal currency exchange system within a gaming platform could potentially be constructed that would mitigate those concerns and create a system that is built upon a more modern technology backbone. If this is the actual case or not is unknown, but I suspect it has something to do with it.
Ultimately my feeling is we should continue to wait and see until we have more information. Right now all we have to go on is this brief press release, some funds, and a funder. There isn't any meat on the bone yet. What is it exactly and how does it work, and most importantly, why does it use blockchain technology? We just don't know.
Although I suspect, now that the cat is out of the bag, we may be learning more here in the coming months.
Until then, we still have Eve Online.