Mark Zuckerberg may love the metaverse, but here’s one upcoming web3 game he may not be too happy about. The Rabbit Hole features characters that are “posed to defend Web3 from the corporate overlord, Metazuckbot.”
Metazuckbot runs the in-game ZuckCorp, where the thuggish but cute bunny protagonists from the My Pet Hooligan NFT collection were previously imprisoned and forced to mine Karrot. Now free, they roam the city alongside the villain’s former slaves, ZuckBots, which were also released as an NFT collection earlier this week.
The game is the product of indie animation technology company AMGI Studios, which has received funding from the likes of Yield Guild Games, Emfarsis, Delphi Digital and Bitkraft Ventures. Its 50-strong team includes developers with experience working on Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, as well as artists and animators from Pixar and Disney.
“We’re always exploring what makes us laugh and what we would like to see in a game. With the Zuckbot-related lore, it was mainly inspired from the fact that big corporations are mining our data and making the users the prey for them to profit off of. We were basically tapping into the ethos of what we see happening around us,” said COO and producer Luke Paglia.
The NFT launch came the same day as Meta's dismal Q3 earnings announcement. Shares tanked following reports of a $9.4 billion loss for the year to date for Reality Labs, Meta’s metaverse department.
While Zuckerberg believes his investment in the metaverse will pay dividends in the long term, he’s having trouble convincing people — including at his own company. A poll of Meta employees in May found only 58% understood the company’s metaverse strategy.
Maybe Metazuckbot will have more metaverse success. The Rabbit Hole is slated for release in Q4 2022 or Q1 2023 on the Epic Games Store.
