Futureverse, a metaverse and AI company, has announced a partnership with the creators of Ready Player One to build The Readyverse—an interoperable metaverse based on the acclaimed 2011 novel and 2018 film.

Readyverse Studios, which will drive the creation of the new metaverse, brings Ernest Cline—the author who created RPO—and film producer Dan Farah together with Futureverse co-founders Shara Senderoff and Aaron McDonald.

In its first major rights deal, Readyverse Studios has partnered with Warner Bros. Discovery to bring RPO IP to the metaverse, with the Readyverse planned to launch sometime in 2024.

Readyverse Studios also holds the exclusive right to bring any future IP created by Cline to web3 and will soon announce additional brands and franchises that have joined Readyverse.

In Cline’s groundbreaking novel, the hero, Wade Watts, unlocks a series of puzzles and challenges to gain control over the OASIS, a metaverse where people conduct more and more of their daily lives. The novel advocates a decentralized metaverse accessible to all—not a walled garden, gatekept and controlled by a corporation. The team says that Readyverse Studios will build a metaverse that aligns with these values.

“Readyverse Studios is laying the groundwork to bring the promise of the open metaverse depicted in Cline’s Ready Player One novel and the blockbuster film adaptation into a tangible reality; a multi-world, multi-IP, interoperable open metaverse experience for mass consumers,” Futureverse posted on X. “The Readyverse will champion the principles of the open metaverse, which are provable digital ownership, community-owned infrastructure, decentralization, security, and interoperability,” they wrote.

The Readyverse will run on Futureverse’s chosen tech stack, including The Root Network, a gaming and metaverse-focused public blockchain. The Root Network is its own L1 blockchain, with a native token, $ROOT, that is tradeable (either natively or as a wrapped ERC-20) on a number of exchanges. The network is designed to be especially useful for gaming and metaverse applications, with the ability to pay fees in any token (or pay them for your application’s users), an inbuilt asset registry for interoperable assets, and AI support.

The entertainment press has heralded the partnership between seasoned metaverse experts and experienced cinematic IP owners—an interesting shift from the 2023 popular perspective that “the metaverse is dead.”

“We really see the opportunity for big IP to have additional revenue streams—additional opportunities for engagement in a way that is easy for them to build,” Shara Senderoff told The Hollywood Reporter. “We knew that it would require coming together with Hollywood and holding hands in order to bridge these big and more old-school forms of entertainment with the new form of technology that would be really opportunistic for everyone,” she said.

Source: nftnow.com