Hytopia is a massive multiplayer metaverse gaming ecosystem formerly known as NFT Worlds. The Hytopia Worlds NFT collection consist of 10,000 virtual landscapes minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Creators can utilize and monetize these virtual lands by building games, events, and hangouts with powerful tools.
The metaverse project aims to challenge Minecraft and overtake their position by offering smoother user experiences, decentralized economies, and putting more power into the hands of content creators. Currently development of Hytopia is in internal beta testing stages and expected to release in Q4 2023 for open beta testing.
Pre-registration for Hytopia is now live!
Microsoft deplatformed NFT Worlds from Minecraft
NFT Worlds minted and sold out 10,000 virtual lands within 8 hours in October 2021. The NFT bull market was in full swing and NFT Worlds was able to capture a lot of attention with their plans on Minecraft servers.
During the peak NFT Worlds managed to attract 100,000 gamers to their Minecraft servers before being banned by Microsoft. Parent company of Minecraft, Mojang Studios, announced they ban any NFT integrations on all of its servers. In a surprise move, NFT Worlds later decided to take on the challenge and create their own decentralized version of Minecraft.
What is Hytopia now?
A lot has changed in recent times for Hytopia. They briefly rebranded to Topia to further distinguish themselves from their old branding. Only to rebrand again weeks later into Hytopia because they didn’t have the Topia domain. A small inconvenience, but Hytopia is ready to leave that behind and focus on development.
The main difference in our opinion is that Hytopia empowers gamers to actually own almost everything they create. In the web3 gaming space a lot of assets you have inside games are truly owned by you, and can be sold or traded on decentralized marketplaces. Whereas in Minecraft today, you don’t really own anything, can’t sell anything, and can be deplatformed at any given time for any reason.
Large gaming corporations continuously drain their player base without giving a financial return. Although this is fine, as fun games also reward in just having fun and experiencing immersive gameplay, monetization can and should be revolutionized. Even Elon Musk understands this with his recent move on X, formerly known as Twitter. He’s pushing heavily on rewarding content creators with shared ad revenue if they gain a lot of impressions on their content. Hytopia will work in a similar fashion, where popular games launched on Hytopia by creators, can earn in various ways while the company itself is only taking a small percentage fee of every transaction.
Benefits of blockchain elements
The open virtual world is now being build on top of their L2 chain. What is the problem with centralized platforms such as Minecraft? Hytopia states that Minecraft has left their content creators and players unheard and underserved for decades. A lack of monetization for content creators and server owners is one point of critique. By implementing blockchain powered in-game assets in the form of NFTs, players have more ownership over their content. New economies will grow as NFTs can be traded on decentralized NFT marketplaces as well as their own in-game marketplace.
Hytopia features a game engine & platform, focused systems for creators to monetize, unified ecosystems and social tools for players, and feedback driven development. It could be a winning formula to reach thousands of creators and millions of active players.
Backward play compatibility
Quite an interesting feature will be the backward compatibility with existing Minecraft servers. This might become a powerful and popular way to lure people into their ecosystem, away from Minecraft. But why would players want to use their Minecraft servers on a competitors platform? They claim to provide smoother frame rates, enhanced visual graphics, modern user interfaces and a better overall user experience. In addition, Minecraft players can instantly benefit from the Hytopia ecosystem and web3 monetization. On top of that Hytopia will always be free to play, whether you play on your smartphone, desktop, or tablet.
The HYTOPIA Marketplace
The marketplace will function as both an in-browser, in-game and mobile app system. Sign into your HYTOPIA player account anywhere (mobile, browser, game, etc) to access the marketplace anytime.
The Hytopia marketplace will feature the following:
- Buy/sell items, content, lootboxes as a player
- As a creator, create your own items collection for your world, sell individual items, bundle some of them into lootboxes, or sell bundles with prefixed sets of guaranteed items. You control quantity, scarcity, price, etc.
- Full secondary royalties support for creators of content
- – Fiat onramp (As a player, whip out your credit card to purchase token to buy content/items/etc)
- price history
- It will be powered by Hytopia’s own deployed implementation to the HYTOPIA chain of OpenSea’s Seaport protocol (MIT Licensed)
What are Hytopia Worlds?
Interesting to know is that all 10,000 Hytopia Worlds were minted for free by NFT collectors around the world on October 5th, 2021. They are digital collectibles and there will never be more created. Every Hytopia World gives the owner the possibility to develop monetized experiences on Hytopia. This can be in the form of multiplayer games, hangouts, and other creative use cases. Games developed by Hytopia World owners will be publicly discoverable and can be played by all Hytopia gamers. Those who don’t intend to develop something on their world can rent their world to other developers. Since the entry to get your hands on a Hytopia World is fairly high (about 1.3 ETH or $2300 at the time of writing), renting is a viable solution benefiting both sides of the ‘trade’.
This does not mean smaller players can’t build for free on Hytopia at all. For personal, private, or developmental purposes owning a Hytopia World is not required. The main difference is lack of public discoverability and no access to monetization systems. Monetization comes with a leap of benefits, as it allows developers to sell in-game cosmetics on the Hytopia marketplace. This could be loot boxes, NPC vendors, individual items, avatar collections, and more. Internal economies will be driven by $TOPIA, a cryptocurrency created for Hytopia.
Staking of Hytopia Worlds
Through Hytopia’s World Manager, land owners can stake their Hytopia Worlds. Staking lands is a popular way for web3 games to distribute tokens to early community members, as well as investors who joined later on. Valeria Games is another example where staking lands is already implemented, rewarding land owners with tokens and other in-game NFT collectibles.
Those who stake their Hytopia World receive $TOPIA tokens on a daily basis, and claiming is available at any time. Renting works a bit different, as you will need to set a security deposit, monthly rental costs, and a minimum and maximum available term. Renters can browse the marketplace listing to find the Hytopia World that fits their needs and budget the most. $TOPIA tokens can be traded on decentralized marketplaces, where you can exchange the tokens for other currencies. And vice versa.
The Hytopia Chain
Hytopia launched their own dedicated and environmentally sustainable blockchain. It’s a variant of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that allows for state management and incorporation of smart contracts. Only pre-approved entities can deploy custom smart contracts on Hytopia’s chain. This is making it more centralized as a semi-permissioned blockchain, but is needed for various reasons to protect and monetize the Hytopia ecosystem and users. Bad actors could potentially launch harmful smart contracts otherwise.
MetaFab powering Web3 games
MetaFab is the game engine that they are utilizing, and originates from the same founders. MetaFab is a free, end-to-end, self-serve solution for developers of games and gamified applications looking to to integrate blockchain infrastructure. Similar to how Hytopia is the decentralized version of Mincecraft. MetaFab is the alternative and competitor to Unreal Engine, that lacks support of most blockchain elements. Unreal Engine is very well known from the creators of Fortnite, and used by the game creators behind massive titles as Grand Theft Auto, League of Legends, The Last Of Us, and Assasin’s Creed.
So what makes Metafab different? It enables Hytopia and other game developers to implement any blockchain element this wish, all while having complete Unreal Engine and Unity SDKs readily available. Games can generate player wallets automatically and support external wallets such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, and WalletConnect. It supports ERC20 (cryptocurrency tokens) and ERC1155 (NFTs such as digital collectibles and items). Contract ownership can be transfered, there is interoperability between games, and a lot more to explore.
