A Message from our Founder

A case for virtuous games

I am an avid gamer. I have played thousands of games in my lifetime. I have played games that I felt calm and relaxed and in higher spirits afterwards, and I have played games that I left with an angry, frustrated, or darker soul. I have always wondered why game development is so detached from having a moral purpose. Is it too hard to develop games that are super fun and at the same time morally uplifting? As a developer, I figured out it actually is. 

It is much easier to develop the next run-of-the-mill shooter game with no storyline or moral purpose than to create a fun game with a deep storyline that promotes compassion and empathy. It is much easier to create a horror game playing on fears than a peace-promoting game embracing kindness, self-worth, and diversity. Fixing that problem is our mission. That’s our challenge. It is to bring fun and morality together in gaming. It is possible to create game metaverses that are massive, are fun to explore and play, are beautiful, have humorous characters, and have well-thought-out and meaningful stories. It’s just not the easiest path, but accomplishing something important has never been easy.

A case for the impact of blockchain and NFT games

Blockchain has emerged to become the source of many innovations. It is breaking the rules of the established industries and disrupting them as many find their comfort in staying in denial and failing to understand the emerging opportunities. It is as exciting and impactful as the emergence of the internet in its early days, and it will change life the way we know it, sooner than we imagine it. 

But the blockchain could mean many different things to different people. To us, it is a tool for putting the power back in the hands of the little guy instead of giant monopolizing organizations; it is about removing the intermediaries and fostering the creativity; it is about better access to financial resources for the underprivileged; it is a shift in the balance of wealth-creation from the ones who control the resources towards the ones who work hard to build. Case in point, NFTs are an extraordinary use-case for how blockchain could do all of that.   

NFTs, sitting on top of the smart contracts innovations, have established an opportunity for creators to truly own their digital or digitized creations and benefit from owning them in the long run; decentralization as it should be. They will foster long-term collaborations between different creators to build something and benefit from their share of contribution enforced by smart contracts. Accordingly, they will boost creativity and creation and will put the power back in the creator’s hands. 

NFTs have also boosted hope for one of the old dreams of gamers; to make money by playing games, earning a living from doing what they love. While they have been somewhat successful attempts to make this dream a reality in the past, they have been limited in scope and far from mainstream. NFTs allow the gamers to truly own the in-game items they obtain by playing games. These collected in-game items can be kept inside the game and used to progress the game, but can also be transferred to the gamers’ wallets outside of the game, used in other games, showcased to friends, and traded in various NFT marketplaces. So, the hard-earned items inside the games will become more transferrable and tradable than today; a step forward for the dream of financial independence by playing games. 

We believe NFTs are a great innovation that can be utilized for good in different dimensions, and they have been shouting to be used properly in a virtuous NFT games metaverse, so we have been listening to them :).

A case for a virtuous NFT games metaverse

So, we took the challenge. After developing a few smaller games, we started to work on our groundbreaking virtuous NFT games metaverse, World of Mazes. Now, when we started this project a few years ago, we didn’t know that it will become a groundbreaking NFT games metaverse; all we knew was that we wanted to create a super innovative and super fun game metaverse that would align well with our virtuous gaming philosophy, non-violent gaming with positive impact; the kind of game we will be proud to have created. We also knew a few other details such as the overall metaverse theme, storyline, etc :). And last but not least, we believed we could do this because we had an amazing team. 

As we worked on the World of Mazes metaverse (initially called a universe), the emerging industries evolved, and we did too. We initially developed the game for low-end VR headsets such as Gear VR and later Oculus Go. Today, Oculus Go is a VR headset with a tiny market that is going away. We did a limited release of the game in 2018, and we received mixed feedback. The feedback showed us that the game had potential, but it had a lot that needed to be fixed and added. We made the changes and did another limited release for Oculus Go in December 2019. This time we received a lot of positive feedback from raving fans that loved the game. We had amazing ratings and reviews from people who believed this was finally the first real game on the Oculus Go platform, or they couldn’t sleep at night thinking about the game, or were absorbed in the story itching to learn what comes next, or simply loved the game so very much.

So that was a defining moment for us, a real indicator that we not only had a worthwhile mission, but that the game’s core had huge appeal and demand. The rest was bringing the metaverse to the right platforms at the right time. From Dec 2019 to now, we have gone through many iterations to bring the game metaverse to non-VR platforms such as smartphones and PC as well as high-end VR platforms, working on the game mechanics proper for each platform, innovating on the NFT side and integrating them with the core gameplay and story, expanding the metaverse with more games and stories, and revealing more of the story and backstory in the initial release (one of the most requested items). The game has been tested by hundreds of testers so far, and we are counting down the days to get to the initial release. Stay tuned!