Cryptocurrency and gaming have frequent crossover points, often to the frustration of those interested in just getting on with playing solid games. However, every now and again though someone tries to force a connection in a much deeper way.
Sometimes that’s clearly copyright infringing NFTs like fake Pokémon cards, and sometimes it’s much worse. The Polium One console definitely fits into the latter category. This is a crypto and Web3.0 focused game console that’s been announced to widespread mockery and confusion.
This is what it is and why it’s become a laughing stock so quickly.
Polium One Console
The Polium One (Nintendium due to logo similarities) console was announced a few days ago. It bills itself as the world’s first Web3.0 gaming console, and ‘next-gen’ Whatever that means from a box that most closely resembled Ouya style micro-console. It is a crowdfunding campaign disguised as a pre-order system, hoping to raise money for a project that nobody wants. On top of that, it’s probably one that is never going to exist anyway.
Web3.0 has become an overused buzzword, it generally refers to the increasing integration of blockchain technology with the rest of the internet. In the context of a gaming console, that means having access to crypto funds while gaming.
Hypothetically, you could view your balance of crypto as you’re playing rounds of a game! If you really need that for some reason. Outside of different ways to pay for things, the benefit of integration in the console isn’t really apparent.
The Polium One console was announced with a pre-order system hoped to raise funds for the completion of the project. The general Web3.0 console idea aside, this was a disastrous reveal. The project gave very little information on what it even was.
What is the Polium One?
The Polium One Console is planned as a micro-console style device. It connects up with simple cables and comes with a controller resembling a Dualshock. The mockups show it playing some NFT games, most of which are yet to actually be released. Although, it doesn’t seem to have any confirmation of any games available at launch. It would also host a marketplace for NFTs and a crypto wallet.
The console made some big promises, specifically that it was going to include the following features:
4K Ultra HD
Ray tracing
120 FPS
8K
HDR
TouchID
Some of these are ridiculous just off the bat. TouchID for a start is a technology that is proprietary to Apple and not a generic term. (To the credit of whoever bothered uploading this, that has now been changed to the vague term ‘scanner’). This was apparently to prevent anyone who picked up your controller from spending cryptocurrency. Basically, a solution to a problem that the Polium One alone created.
It’s one feature (a crypto button) necessitates more features to solve the many problems it causes.
In terms of specs and how it’ll actually run, none of that is decided yet. Nothing was actually said about the console that is going to be manufactured or what exactly it is beyond crypto gaming box.
Dodgy Roadmap
The project seemed to have nothing decided ahead of time. The specs aren’t decided yet, or anything else about how it’ll actually work. instead, that will all be decided by ‘the community’.
You could be generous and assume this is an attempt at a collaborative process with backers. However, given the unrealistically short times given for development, the more cynical option is that they just couldn’t be bothered to think up fake specs.
The project timeline for the Polium One sums up the slapdash approach to pitching the console.
Polium
More time is apparently being spent on what they did before unveiling the console than on actually figuring out what goes inside of a generic black box. This is particularly heinous given the low quality of what they produced so far.
They managed to promise tech they have no way of delivering, failed to even come up with an excuse for this console being needed, and stole a logo. The last point might be one of the most bizarre. The logo for the project is basically the iconic GameCube start-up screen. If it took this many years to get this far, it doesn’t bode well for the final project.
Funding and ‘Pre-Orders’
The Polium One seems like a recipe for a project that will never appear. The mock-ups provided are generic, no games are really discussed, and no hard promises are made.
Even the method of crowdfunding the project is horribly sketchy. Rather than go through any known crowdfunding websites, they opted to directly sell pre-orders in the form of NFTs. The Polium Pass can be minted as an NFT. Once it’s released, you can get the console for free with the NFT. Platformers like Kickstarter offer a more secure way to fund something like this. However, it seems even those platforms that make few promises of delivery from creators were too much for the Polium One.
Is Polium a Scam?
The easiest assumption to draw from all of this would probably be that the Polium One is never going to deliver on anything. The makers can sell these NFTs. Then have very little commitment to actually attempt to finish what they started. You bought an NFT, and the world of NFT is full of promises of ‘games’ and ‘metaverses’ and other Web3.0 features that don’t get delivered. For every ApeFest or NFT game that gets actively supported, there are hundreds of projects that sell an initial batch of NFT then leave or shut down and leave the tokens worthless.
The discord community for Polium currently has less than a thousand members, and it’s hard to say how many of these are legitimate customers. It’s easy enough to look in simply to see what level of mess for an imaginary console exists within. The subreddit has two members.
The Polium One definitely feels like a scam. At least it was a pretty entertaining scam in how brazen promises are. In any case, the console seems far too ambitious in some ways and vague in others to actually deliver a project that pleases customers. This probably won’t be the last time someone tries to add a crypto button to a plug-in-and-play games console though.
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