PUBG Creator Krafton Unveils ‘Overdare’ NFT Game With AI Creation Tools

South Korean game studio Krafton, maker of the popular battle royale shooter PUBG, announced Thursday that its upcoming NFT-driven metaverse game project will be called Overdare—and offered a first look at the creation-centric platform.

Previously known as Project Migaloo, Overdare will soft-launch in December and fully release sometime between January and July 2024, Krafton said in a statement. The company has created its own blockchain, Settlus, for the game. 

Overdare appears to be a Roblox-like mobile game platform built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 that will offer creators generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help gamers craft their own shooter games, role-playing games (RPGs), and action RPGs, to name a few. The social game platform will also let users create custom avatars and chat with each other.

The first official teaser trailer above suggests an open-world platform that lets users build games and environments using AI tools, play the wide array of user-generated games, attend virtual concerts, customize their avatars, and more.

Earlier this year, Krafton announced the project as a joint venture between the studio and Naver Z, an augmented reality (AR) tech firm. Krafton still holds an 85% stake in the project, while Naver Z holds the remaining 15%. 

Overdare plans to offer players what it calls a “create-to-earn” game economy, where gamers can buy and sell in-game digital assets as NFTs. The game will use NFTs because such crypto tokens will offer “transparency and secure transactions,” according to a statement.

Krafton and Naver Z are using the recently revealed Settlus blockchain for Overdare’s economy, which will allow gamers to earn funds in Coinbase and Circle’s U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, USDC. Settlus will use Cosmos to facilitate USDC payments, as first announced last week during a Korea Blockchain Week event.

The Settlus Twitter account lists it as a blockchain created by Krafton and calls it “the future of the creator economy.”

In a Medium blog post, Krafton’s Settlus wrote that it plans to introduce an “NFT licensing system,” but did not elaborate on what exactly that will entail. It also said that it’s currently working to address potential issues with Overdare’s planned NFT economy, such as potentially offering optional NFTs instead of obligatory ones, addressing item scarcity or a lack thereof, and addressing problems with volatile token prices that can lead to “a negative experience” for gamers and creators.

It’s currently unclear whether Settlus will also offer its own token at a later date. Representatives for Krafton did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on the status of Settlus and whether it will issue a new token or exclusively use USDC.

Stablecoins like USDC are often chosen by crypto firms and traders because their value is far less volatile than cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Instead, stablecoins are intended to remain pegged to the U.S. Dollar.