When the Game Awards begin announcing the trinkets and marketing tomorrow night, you’ll be able to view the entire collective from within the official “metaverse experience” in the game-making platform. Core. Launching on Monday, it’s called Axial Tilt, and what I’ve played with it before the in-game live event is trash. This is exactly what I’d expect from the ongoing “metaverse” gold rush: marketing wrapped up in a bad video game.
A press release from The Game Awards describes Axial Tilt as “an interactive world that serves as a metaverse hub for shows and events hosted by Geoff Keighley.” I would describe it as a lousy game where you run around grinding resource nodes for materials to power up for better crushing and crafting powercells to do… something? You can also play mini-games like The Floor Is Lava version which is too slow to work. I’m thinking about Nike’s Official Roblox Game.
Live events will come as the Game Awards draw closer. Axial Tilt will host a virtual red carpet before the show, you’ll be able to watch them on the in-game cinema, you can win skins by guessing the winner, and a party after with “guest DJs” special” will end at night. But for now, it’s hogging World Of Warcraft mining and a crafting system so miserable it lets you pay to skip six hours of real-time waiting to pull out a powercell.
“I’m always looking for exciting new ways to bring the Games Awards to new audiences,” said division leader Geoff Keighley. “The emergence of new metaverse platforms like Core, and the social experiences they support around live events, provide a great opportunity to give fans a new way of interacting. to enjoy the show. And considering it’s a show about interactive entertainment, it feels like a perfect fit.”
It really feels like a perfect fit, though not in his way. The Games Awards are a ludicrous exercise that makes it difficult for video games to receive the same mainstream recognition as movies, and somehow it is thought that the way to achieve this is by showing ads. The prizes are bad (as are all prizes not given by us, obvs). It seemed like a perfect fit for The Game Awards to kick off a shallow and boring experience inside one of those platforms muttering about the “metaverse” while trying to chase Roblox success.
When companies like Epic game and Facebook talked about the “metaverse,” what they hoped would be an advertising and sales platform under their control. They presented it as a utopian vision, but it was not for our benefit.
Axial Tilt was made by a team that included Chad Mustard, brother of Epic Games creative director Donald Mustard. Epic has invested millions of dollars in Core and it is also built on top of their Unreal Engine. And Donald will be giving away a trophy at The Game Awards, so I’m guessing he’s also giving away a trophy inside the Core. A big connection mess.
Anyway. The Game Awards kicks off at 5pm Pacific on Thursday the 9th, which is 1am on Friday for us here in the UK. Just like inside the Core, you’ll be able to Watch them on YouTube, Twitch, and half a dozen other streaming platforms. The perfunctory prizes aside, the show delivers big news and big trailers for the big games.
