Star Trek Enters The Blockchain Universe In Crypto Space Commander
CSC is a space exploration MMO game currently in development for PC & Mobile, and available in early access on Steam.
Players can explore an open universe in their owned and customized spaceships, mine stellar bodies for ore, and fight pirates or other players for loot. Loot that can be sold or crafted into tradeable crypto assets. The game has a Play-to-Own economy and asset management powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
Ships can even be destroyed completely in lawless PVP systems known as Fringe Space. Now with Star Trek adding some high-value
The game mostly went under the radar with just a few developer gameplay videos by Lucid Sight dating back to 2018 and no mention of the Star Trek collaboration until recently.
Now Star Trek announces an auction of six exclusive minted ships for CSC, starting with U.S.S Enterprise on August 29th. Each ship will start at a $200,000, 1000 in Ethereum.
It looks like you can get a bargain depending on the price of ETH over the coming days.
During the Divergence Alpha Event us common folk can buy some Star Trek Crates with a chance to get rare modules and even a chance to score a 'limited insurance' version of one of the six ships. I presume these can be destroyed whereas the 'unlimited insurance', exclusive ships can not.
You can sign up for free to claim your account name, buy crates, and of course join the auction!
CSC Teaser Trailer
Although we haven't seen the Enterprise or any Star Trek in action yet, and the trailer (from 2018) is getting a bit outdated, the game looks fairly polished in the latest developer stream / playthrough, showing some NPC hunting and space exploration in a 2+ hours stream. I'm excited about an open universe blockchain game that can perhaps rival EVE online. It looks like they are going for a slightly more 'cartoony', lower polygons / more colors, look. The game might port easier to more devices that way, and I think players are okay with this style of graphics as long as the gameplay is good (i.e Fortnite).
Is there more Star Trek lore coming to CSC?
So far they have only announced the addition of the iconic ships; and there are some interesting articles on the Star Trek site introducing blockchain technology.
"While the Trek universe does not explicitly reference blockchain technology in its lore, a race as distrustful as the Ferengi might have adopted a distributed self-validating and trustless system to conduct business among peers. This system of govern-less transactions is one of the strongest use cases for blockchain in support of a banking or transaction system. Blockchain technology could also be the early formation of a unimatrix Collective of the Borg..."
Players have already created a Ferengi Alliance, and the currency Gold-Placed Latnium (GPL) (the official Ferengi currency in Star Trek lore) for CSC while alpha testing the game; and this was probably how Star Trek got the idea to enter the Blockchain universe through CSC.
I'm wondering how exclusive the ships will be. If someone loses an uninsured Enterprise or Voyager, is it gone forever? Or can it be mined/salvaged by other players? What are the GPU / mining requirements? Questions like this will hopefully be answered soon.
Are the ships now officially ECR-721 tokens? Will we never see them in another game ever again?
Would Captain Picard Approve the auction of his ship?
You can buy Crypto Space Commander for $9.99 on Steam. It's in early access so it might have some bugs and downtime. I don't usually recommend early access games and I think they are often bold sales. We have seen sales of super expensive ships in other sci-fi games like Star Citizen which has been under development since 2013 and has failed to meet many deadlines to deliver things they've promised.
At least CSC has not been going overboard with promises. I think they've made a clever move attaching the iconic Star Trek ships to a proof-of-rarity blockchain system. It doesn't cost them much to create these six ECR-721 contracts. The value will depend on if people actually buy them. I excited to see what the 3D models of the ships will look like, and what features they will have.
Do you think the ships will sell? How high will the bids go?
We're in an interesting time with several emerging blockchains and DApps, decentralized apps that are looking to replace the established, centralized structure of internet; and 'altcoins', following in the footsteps of the popular Bitcoin to change the structure of finance. There are social networks with their own currencies, and several released and up-coming blockchain games with exclusive crypto assets. It's become a popular way for indie and smaller developer teams to crowdfund a project.
I'm hoping the market won't become too saturated by low-effort games and browser games. It does look a bit like Star Trek jumped on-board the bandwagon, joining the first blockchain game with a Trek player fan base to sell some crypto swag at very bold, high prices. But hopefully, maybe they will show strong support for this project and help turn it into something great. I think it can be good for the world of games and blockchains.
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