We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.
-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview
This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously. But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything. That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.
Just wake up already
Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least. From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.
All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote. And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post. I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.
Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package. Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.
You want to be the boss? Then harden the fuck up. Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra. Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant? I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.
You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you? Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top. But you’re wrong! It all ties together.
Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow. And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.
Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.
I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.
What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening. But there it is in that quote. Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.
Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden. There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.
We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.
Local was delayed in null sec
That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.
Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019
The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.
All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.
But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.
So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.
There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.
But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.
Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years. I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.
We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.
-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview
This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously. But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything. That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.
Just wake up already
Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least. From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.
All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote. And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post. I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.
Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package. Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.
You want to be the boss? Then harden the fuck up. Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra. Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant? I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.
You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you? Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top. But you’re wrong! It all ties together.
Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow. And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.
Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.
I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.
What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening. But there it is in that quote. Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.
Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden. There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.
We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.
Local was delayed in null sec
That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.
Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019
The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.
All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.
But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.
So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.
There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.
But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.
Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years. I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.
We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.
-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview
This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously. But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything. That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.
Just wake up already
Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least. From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.
All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote. And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post. I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.
Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package. Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.
You want to be the boss? Then harden the fuck up. Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra. Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant? I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.
You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you? Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top. But you’re wrong! It all ties together.
Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow. And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.
Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.
I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.
What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening. But there it is in that quote. Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.
Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden. There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.
We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.
Local was delayed in null sec
That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.
Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019
The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.
All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.
But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.
So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.
There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.
But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.
Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years. I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.
Crypto crook Avi Eisenberg is off to jail after being convicted on various charges of fraud and market manipulation over shenanigans run on the decentralized exchange Mango Markets.
Eisenberg is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29 and is facing "a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on the commodities fraud count and the commodities manipulation count, and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the wire fraud count," the DOJ said.
The post Crypto influencer convicted in $110m scam appeared first on Boing Boing.
I have generally kept my mouth shut about Camelot Unchained since I got most of my money back just four years ago… I had gone in with a bigger pledge than I generally do on these campaigns based on the misguided belief that Mark Jacobs would know how to size this sort of thing… because I didn’t want to become “that guy” who is constantly complaining about some title they won’t ever play. If I want those types I can find them over on Reddit.
Camelot Unchained: Delivering nothing since 2013
So I have not mentioned the game, save for inclusion in my annual predictions where it never fails to earn me a few easy points every year by failing to ship bascially anything.
But there were always going to be a few eventualities that would garner a post from me. Some major event, like actually giving access to backers, announcing yet another title, or shutting down shop would make it worth the effort, noting a milestone and the distance from the actual promised date and all that as a warning to those who might consider backing an MMO on Kickstarter.
You should not back MMOs on Kickstarter, in case that was not clear. That is my opinion on the topic.
Yesterday there was a bit of a news update. As the headline indicates, Mark Jacobs, through a press release covered by a number of sites (some linked below, because interviews don’t go his way these days), has said that there will be some sort of early access for Camelot Unchained in 2025, though given more than a decade of missed targets and excuses, I find that hard to give to give that statement any weight. I will predict right now that it won’t happen in 2025 and, if it does ship, even in some limited early access mode, I will post about it and note that I was wrong. I do not expect to be wrong.
Anyway, the fact that Mark is making another ship date claim or that their second game, Final Stand: Ragnarok has been up on Steam for early access since October 2021… where it has six reviews and so little play time that it doesn’t even register on Steam Charts, so it really seemed woth pissing backers off for a title that is essentially a tech demo… wouldn’t have prompted me to post. Even the transparent attempt to hide the failure of Final Stand: Ragnarok by claiming it has really been in “first access” and not “early access” is about par for the course for the company.
Even Mark going on about the Unchained Engine, which has been previously speculated about as the real project that his company has been working on, is just more of the same empty talk that would only be worth me mentioning on an especially slow news day. I could write about a dozen other things, why would I waste my time promoting that BS?
No, it was one little tidbit in the middle of that PC Gamer story that piqued my interest. Among the backers who have invested in City State Entertainment, now changing its name to Unchained Entertainment, is Andreesen Horowitz, or a16z.
You may remeber a16z from such past tales such as Marc Andreesen’s techno optimist screed where he is a big baby about possibly being held to account for his actions (everybody loves personal responsibility until it applies to them I guess), being behind the exploitive pump and dump scam that was Axie Infinity, and the backing of CCP’s Project Awakening, where a16z has promised to fund them with up to $40 million to make a cryto blockchain version of EVE Online. Garbage on top of garbage.
All of the other stuff in that press releae faded into the background once I saw they were involved. I mean, the Camelot Unchained team writes dev updates every month and promises are made and broken on a regular basis and words out of the mouth of Mark Jacobs lack substance for me until they are backed up with actual tangible action for backers.
But16z being involved… well, they are all in on crypto and blockchain and being the rent seeking slumlords of a future internet of absolute shit, so that simply has to be a red flag at some level.
Their involvement does not mean that Camelot Unchained will now launch with some underlying crypto, blockchain, NFT, pay to earn bullshit mechanic built into it. [Edit: Mark Jacobs put out a backer email that said it would not though, again, he is overdrawn writing checks on credibility at this point.]
And, of course, not everything a16z touches turns to garbage, but when you get those shitheels involved, the question does necessarily come up. You lay down with dogs you wake up with fleas, as they say.
So I am adding to the events that would cause me to post about Camelot Unchained. The new trigger event, after “actually ships” and “goes out of business” will be the announcement that Mark Jacobs has completely sold out and gone down the Lord British path to complete irrelevence by embracing all that crypto blockchain bullshit.
Related posts, which vary from not cutting an slack and bringing up the long history of the game (Massively OP) to gullible belief in everything Mark wrote (VentureBeat), some of which couldn’t resist sarcasm or apologetic quotes in the headlines:
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