Almost every crypto game in the last cycle made pretty much the same promise: play, and you will win. 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 EMPIRESa strategy MMO playable in a browser, with a different twist: an in-game economy with a real client. The gear and cosmetics that players craft in EMPIRES are consumed by players of the studio’s sister game, CITADELSa triple-A mining shooter coming soon, so demand is expected to come from people who need gear to survive a raid, not 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 scarred crater 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 everyone relies on, and build forges and fabricators that transform raw materials into weapons, armor, machines and valuable cosmetics. They can form Player-Owned Corporations, pool treasuries, and conduct what the studio calls a supply chain war : each finished object is at the end of a production line that a competitor can cut. The design leaves room for different temperaments: prospectors and industrialists, corporate leaders governing from an Excel spreadsheet, traders profiting from the war of others, with Corporations cooperating internally while fighting among themselves for land and resources.
The economy has a customer
The heart of the design is the connection between the two games. In CITADELS, players land on hostile maps, loot loot and equipment, and attempt to escape before being killed, losing everything they were carrying if they fail. This constant flow of gear is what EMPIRES is designed to supply: EMPIRES players sell production permits, gear, and cosmetics that CITADELS players buy and use. The studio internally refers to this cycle as the “real economy,” in marked 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 DavidCEO of Black Ice Studios and former lead producer on Space Engineers. “We built the request into the games themselves. The gear and cosmetics you craft in EMPIRES are used by real players fighting to survive in CITADELS — and all the technical stuff is underneath, out of the way.”
A blockchain you’re not supposed to notice
For a title partly aimed at crypto-native players, EMPIRES goes to great lengths to conceal 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 passphrases — an approach the studio calls “Invisible Web3.” Beneath the surface, important actions are settled on-chain; land survey and research results are based on verifiable randomness, so that results can be audited rather than simply trusted; and Corporations operate 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 remains to be proven
Several of the most ambitious elements remain on the roadmap rather than in the current version. The studio says it plans zero-knowledge mechanics like “fog of war” to enable private, 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 work. And the basic premise of the model is, by design, unproven: the economy of EMPIRES only works if CITADELS attracts enough players to generate real demand. Linking 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 customer. Black Ice is betting its reputation crosses the line; 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 on playempires.comwith early access on playempires.com/sales ; CITADELS can be added to wishlist on Steam before its own launch. Whether the two-game gamble pays off will take a live economy to confirm — but it’s a more concrete answer to the demand problem for Web3 games than most of the last few waves have managed to deliver.
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