A new console aimed at ‘Web 3 gaming’ has been announced and immediately met with resistance from some players.
Web 3 company Polium claims its ‘Polium One’ system will be “the world’s first multi-chain gaming console” that will be capable of running games built on different blockchains.
“The console will be powerful enough to run high-performance games and will be easy to use for a traditional gamer who doesn’t understand Web 3,” Polium claims.
The console, which Polium says will be released in Q3 2024, will only be able to be pre-ordered by players who buy a ‘Polium Pass’, an NFT on the Ethereum network of which 10,000 will be minted.
According to Polium, the console’s controller will include a fingerprint scanner for security, and a ‘wallet’ button to give players quick access to the console’s multi-chain wallet designed for “trading, swapping, staking and receiving cryptocurrency”.
Despite Polium’s admission that only four people are working on the hardware, it also claims that the console will be capable of 8K HDR at 120fps and ray tracing.
The announcement has been met with much criticism and scepticism from a number of players who are, at best, not yet convinced on the merits of blockchain gaming, and at worst believe it to be a scam.
Some have also pointed out that the console’s logo appears to be an upside-down take on the GameCube logo.
“It looks familiar but GameCube has a G and the cube represents their name,” the company replied on Twitter. “Our cube represents blockchain and the P stands for Polium.”
Not even the newly-established Polium Discord server, which appeared to launch with no moderation, has been free of criticism.
In the Discord’s ‘scam alert’ channel, presumably set up to let users report potential NFT scams, a number of users simply replied “this entire project”.