After DrDisrespect revolutionised Twitch streaming, the shooter genre was to follow. But the unveiling of his game gets little backlash.
DrDisrespect continues to enjoy great success as a streamer, despite being banned from Twitch – after all, the high-quality production of his live broadcasts, which involve a complete team including a director, is still considered revolutionary to this day.
After streaming, he now wants to revolutionise the shooter genre: In late 2021, the doc announced that he had formed his own development studio called Midnight Society to create the next big AAA multiplayer shooter.
Seven months later Project Moon
has now been officially unveiled, but instead of gales of enthusiasm, there is bewilderment.
This is how DrDisrespect’s shooter is supposed to be
First of all, the key data on Project Moon: As Midnight Society announced in a (blog entry) the game is to be a vertical PvPvE extraction shooter
that has the player numbers of a Battle Royale.
The bottom line is that you can expect a match-based first-person shooter with 60 to 100 players, where you fight for loot, encounter real players and AI enemies, and have to exit the map via an exit. That sounds to us like Escape from Tarkov with more players per game.
However, it is not yet clear what is meant by vertical here – possibly it is about climbing the tower from the following screenshot to get to an extraction point:
Concerned Business Practices
While the game idea hits the current zeitgeist and fits the next big shooter trend, the rest of the announcement seems rather questionable. Project Moon is to be developed transparently, which is extremely commendable at first.
In practice, however, fans are supposed to pay 50 euros for a Founders Pass so that they can play a very early and extremely unfinished version of the game and then give their feedback. If you want to be mean, you can also say that you should pay to do the work of the QA testers.
Every six weeks there should be a new snapshot version. However, it remains to be seen whether this is enough time to implement any significant innovations. The first test phase is supposed to include a shooting range and an assault rifle – phew.
The streamer’s cheeky promise that Project Moon is already supposed to look better than any Call of Duty engine game should probably have been saved:
In addition, the vexed topic of NFTs and blockchain hovers over all of this: The Founder Passes are sold as NFTs and as (Kotaku) reports, many employees of the development studio have a cryptocurrency past on their CV.
While there are currently no signs that the game itself will be laced with crypto stuff, it’s quite possible that DrDisrespect and his team haven’t laid all their cards on the table yet in order to avoid negative headlines – after all, industry giants like Ubisoft have already gotten their noses bloodied with their NFT plans.
