Before we knew what Blankos Block Party was, we had some nice things to say about it.
Blanks Block Party(opens in new tab), a sort of Roblox-like creation game powered by everyone’s favorite tech snake oil, Web3, and the blockchain, has been released yesterday on the Epic Store.
First, an acknowledgment: Blankos Block Party was featured at The PC Gaming Show in 2020, when the notion of blockchain-based gaming was still in its infancy, as opposed to its current scammy, speculative, recovering-from-the-recent-crypto-crash adolescence.
At the time, our writeup(opens in a new tab) enclosed recurring motifs of what was to come. In that sense, it follows the same logic as collecting physical designer toys “That year, PC Gamer,techylivo published a story. We should’ve just handled it better.
Blanks definitely does have some appealing fundamentals. After all, Roblox is a megahit with some great thoughts: what if someone invented something related and yet didn’t look, you know, like that? The “Social Multiplayer Party Game” has a robust-looking level editor that reminds me of Fortnite Creative or Little Big Planet and could foster a similar environment of user creativity under the right circumstances.
Blanks has seemed to be a pleasant and charming multiplayer playground, but I find it hard to see it as anything other than another example of a highly negative gaming trend, one from which heretofore bullish Ubisoft has recently distanced itself (opens in new tab). A quick YouTube search of the game’s name produces no examples of cool community projects, but rather a slew of guides on how to earn profit while playing it.
Steam has taken a serious line against blockchain games, while the Epic Store has left the door open for NFTs (opens in a new tab). Time will tell as to if Epic will take advantage of some Web3 megahits. According to WorthPlaying, Blankos developer Mythical Games claimed one million player accounts besides December 2021, but its existence on YouTube and Twitch would seem to be pretty light, only with 41 concurrent viewers on the latter platform at the time of writing.
But maybe my skepticism is misdirected, especially even though Blankos has such truly outstanding apps as the Minny B(opens in new tab) winged horse skin created in collaboration with Burberry. It also costs $900, which is a good price.
