EMPIRES Opens Registrations, Betting on Solving the Economic Problem of Web3 Games

Almost all crypto games from the last cycle made pretty much the same promise: play, and you will earn. In practice, most produced economies where the only real demand came from the next speculator, and when new buyers stopped arriving, the tokens, and the games, tended to collapse with them.

Black Ice Studios opens registrations for EMPIRES, a browser-playable strategy MMO, on a different premise: an in-game economy with a real client. The equipment and cosmetics that players craft in EMPIRES are consumed by players of the studio's sister game, CITADELS, a soon-to-be-released AAA extraction shooter, so the demand is expected to come from those who need equipment to survive a raid, not from traders betting on a token's rise.

A Corporate War on a Dead World

EMPIRES puts players in the shoes of Freelancers on Ortus, a crater-marked world ruled by an authoritarian corporate alliance called the Consortium. Players claim territories on a hexagonal sector map, send autonomous vehicles to prospect for Unbiquadium, the resource on which everyone relies, and build forges and fabricators that turn raw materials into weapons, armor, machines, and valuable cosmetics. They can form player-owned Corporations, pool treasuries, and engage in what the studio calls a supply chain war: every finished item is at the end of a production chain that a competitor can cut. The design allows for different temperaments: prospectors and industrialists, corporate leaders governing from an Excel spreadsheet, traders profiting from others' wars, with Corporations cooperating internally while fighting each other for land and resources.

The Economy Has a Client

At the heart of the design is the junction between the two games. In CITADELS, players land on hostile maps, loot gear and equipment, and try to escape before being killed, losing everything they were carrying if they fail. This constant flow of equipment is what EMPIRES is designed to supply: EMPIRES players sell production permits, equipment, and cosmetics that CITADELS players buy and use. The studio refers to this cycle internally as a "real economy," in stark contrast to the speculative markets that defined the previous wave of crypto gaming.

"The last wave failed because the only buyer was the next buyer," said Adrien David, CEO of Black Ice Studios and former lead producer on Space Engineers. "We have integrated demand into the games themselves. The equipment and cosmetics you craft in EMPIRES are used by real players fighting to survive in CITADELS --- and all the technical aspect is underneath, out of the way."

A Blockchain You’re Not Supposed to Notice

For a title partly aimed at crypto-native players, EMPIRES makes significant efforts to hide its infrastructure. Registration takes just one click; players can opt for a custodial wallet and play in any browser without ever encountering gas fees or secret phrases --- an approach the studio calls "Web3 Invisible." Beneath the surface, important actions are settled on-chain; land prospecting and research results rely on verifiable randomness, so outcomes can be audited rather than just trusted; and Corporations function as on-chain entities with their own treasuries and governance votes. The economy revolves around Unbiquadium, an in-game resource, as well as $ASH, a governance token.

What’s Still to Prove

Several of the most ambitious elements remain on the roadmap rather than in the current version. The studio says it plans to implement zero-knowledge mechanics like "fog of war" to enable private and competitive PvP, and that it intends to anchor an increasing share of the economy's reserves in real assets over time --- both presented as future works. And the base stake of the model is, by design, unproven: the economy of EMPIRES only works if CITADELS attracts enough players to generate real demand. Tying the fortunes of the two games also doubles the studio's exposure --- if the shooter disappoints, the "real economy" of the strategy game finds itself without its client. Black Ice bets that its reputation exceeds the threshold; its team includes developers credited on titles such as Call of Duty, Halo, Rainbow Six: Siege, Cyberpunk, and ARK.

Registrations for the first playable version of EMPIRES are open now at playempires.com, with early access at playempires.com/sales; CITADELS can be added to the wishlist on Steam ahead of its own launch. Whether the bet of the two games pays off will take a live economy to confirm --- but it’s a more concrete response to the demand problem of Web3 games than most of the last waves have managed to offer.