Open Today on Steam: Resonite, a Fully Crowdfunded Metaverse Platform from Former Lead Dev of Neos

Resonite is a new free-to-play metaverse platform launching on Steam today, and it has a fairly wild history. It's lead developed by Frooxius, who up until very recently, was lead developer of Neos, another platform with extremely impressive features and content. But after reports that there was a sharp disagreement about integrating cryptocurrency into Neos, Frooxius departed, launched a new Patreon, and began to work on Resonite.

"[Crypto integration] was part of it," Frooxius confirmed to me recently, "but not the sole (or even the main) reason, it was more of an catalyst/symptom."

His Patreon for Resonite already has 2000+ subscribers paying him over $26,000/month, a strong user community that have mostly (completely) followed him from Neos. (Like I always say, community, not cryptocurrency, is what makes a metaverse matter.)

"I hope they'll enjoy the new platform and that the community will grow in a healthy way and build a lot of cool things and help us grow Resonite for a long time into the future," he tells me. That's echoed in the platform's new name:

"We thought it's a cool sounding name and it plays of the concept of people 'resonating' with each other and with concepts. It's something I'd often see when people from various backgrounds get together and they start creating. Their ideas, creativity and personalities end up 'resonating' and they end up making lots of really cool things.

"I like to call it 'creative resonance'. The other aspect is that the name is also easy to trademark and not used for any other major project or company, so we felt that it was a good pick as it would stand out.

And to correct an assumption at least I had, Resonite is playable as a PC game without a VR rig:

"Yes, all the same major features are there, most systems are designed to be agnostic to whether you play in VR or in desktop," Frooxius tells me. "There are some natural limitations in desktop of course though – you can't freely position your arms and head for example as you can do in VR, so depending on the content/scenario, some interactions can be difficult or not possible."

While Resonite comes with a default heads and hands avatar, the avatars enable imported content. To judge by early user pics, it's a fully, fundamentally, furry, furry frontier.