Tainted Studios, a studio founded by triple-A game makers and Web3 trailblazers, unveiled its first title, V.O.I.D., a grimdark, team-based horde survival game that reimagines gameplay intensity and evolves game distribution economics.
Set in a collapsing world overrun by what’s being called ‘The Void’, V.O.I.D. is a player-versus-environment game that challenges players to survive wave-based horrors in brutal 3vAI matches where item mastery, team synergy, and precise execution determine who lives—and who vanishes into the abyss.
Think Left 4 Dead meets Diablo, with deeply tragic champions, strategic item builds, and high-stakes PvE boss fights, said Daniel Paez, CEO of Painted Studios, in an interview with GamesBeat.
But Tainted Studios is also redefining how games reach players. V.O.I.D. will be distributed
through tokenized licenses, enabling fans, creators, and communities to become part of the ecosystem—reselling, trading, and owning the game distribution itself. This model bypasses traditional platforms, making the community not just participants, but stakeholders in the game’s success.
“We’re building the kind of dark, high-stakes gameplay we always wanted to play, and handing the keys to the players from day one,” Paez said.
The game features six unwilling champions with corrupted powers from the primordial realms, trapped together and fighting for survival in Urzula’s Bastion—a dynamic map where enemy waves, lane themes, and loot evolve with each run. V.O.I.D. is currently in development and is expected to launch a Founder’s Edition pre-sale in the near future.
Players, streamers, and creators are encouraged to join V.O.I.D. early to help shape its world, mechanics, and experience.
Co-founders Paez and Montgomery Guilhaus have extensive backgrounds which includes Blizzard and Activision titles such as Call of Duty, Diablo, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft, as well as deep experience in blockchain games such as Bigtime, Gods Unchained, and Guild of Guardians.
Paez previously managed games for Immutable such as Gods Unchained. He left a year ago and joined a consulting firm for Web3 games and wanted to focus on making the next iteration of blockchain games. Since then, he worked on a half-dozen games and advised the game makers.
“We need to do a better job at opening up our own walled garden of knowledge on what we’ve learned and what we’re seeing across our different clients and projects,” Paez said. “Collectively, we’ve worked on at least 20 games within the blockchain space, from big ones to small ones. We have some pretty interesting takeaways from a lot of the conversations we’ve been having.”
Lessons from years of Web3
Beyond talking about the game, I talked to Paez about the state of the Web3 game industry. Paez believes that innovation in blockchain games plateaued 2.5 years ago.
“What we’ve seen are a lot of studios, like 99% of them, copy-pasting what a previous studio had done, and then saying, ‘We’re going to make it sustainable.’ Typically, when we’re brought in, it’s because an investor starts freaking out that they’re messing up,” Paez said. “That’s typically when these students reach out to us. And so for us, one thing we’ve been pushing harder is going back to first principles and learning that, ‘Hey, this is the reality of what every single blockchain game is doing today.'”
Those companies have to solve fundraising, which works pretty well in blockchain because investors get liquidity in the form of tokens when they invest. The other is “players paying players to play.”
He noted that he doesn’t mince words.
“That’s pretty much what nearly every single blockchain game does. And everything has been iterating off of that for the last 2.5 years in one form or the other, and so that’s an area that we’ve been pushing to move out from,” he said.
He said the blockchain purists believe “Players will love to get paid to play a game they love, and they love to get things that they can trade within the game. Something we always work on with our studios is this idea of understanding their target audiences.”
Small Web3 audiences with a lot of money
He noted that, from Axie Infinity onward, there has always been a cohort of Web3 players in the world that love to get paid to play. It’s maybe about 2.5 million players. They drive interesting volume that attracts speculators.
Every single blockchain game that’s launching is attacking this small audience, Paez said.
“It’s very lucrative, but small,” he said. “We’ve come to the point where we’re telling both sides of the camp. Go after these guys or decide not to, right? It’s like there’s a fork in the road. Don’t go down the middle route. And so that’s something we’ve been helping a lot of studios navigate.”
Crypto money still pours into some of these games. But they should not be mistaken for the mass market. With these high-end players, the task is liquidity trying to front-run liquidity, Paez said. Players are the crypto gaming whales.
“These segments exists, and you can tap into them,” he said.
But those players don’t last forever, and they may move on to other games.
Zombie Web3 companies
Meanwhile, one advantage of taking a game to the blockchain is “precisely this ability for anyone to build around your IP or assets.”
With Gods Unchained, Immutable didn’t need to rely on its own marketplace, which can be a nightmare to manage.
“That’s just a huge headache. You don’t have to worry about it anymore” if you farm it out.
“I think the ability to decentralize who can build on top of what you are building is a powerful element. But I think what we’re seeing is a lot of projects are wanting to own that as well, and that’s where we’re asking, ‘Then why make it onchain.’ You can, you can have players pay in crypto and not have any of this onchain.”
Paez said that Web3 gaming has a lot of companies who raised funds in the early 2020s and have become what he calls “zombie companies,” reminiscent of zombie banks in Japan after the markets there crashed.
“They have giant balance sheets because they launched tokens at the right time, but they have no products. They have no users. Internally, their operations are a bit of a mess, and what we’re seeing is a lot of these companies are trying to figure out treasury management,” Paez said. “They are becoming mini hedge funds using their own balance sheet. Everyone’s got a gaming chain these days. I think we’re moving to this era where money in crypto isn’t as easy to get as it was before. Now you have zombie companies who have locked up a lot of the money that was available without anything to show it.”
Where are the Web3 gaming successes?
I asked where the Web3 gaming successes are. There have been some hits on Telegram, and some long-term survivors like Wildcard Alliance and Off the Grid. About 93% of Web3 gaming tokens have collapsed in price. But what are the survivors that are the ones who are left?
“This is about how we define success. Like what’s the free cash flow you have generated?” he said. “A lot of what matters is timing. It’s breaking through the noise at the right time that matters more than anything else in crypto games today. Some launched tokens at the right time. They raised a lot of money at the right time. Now they have really big balance sheets that are generating most of their revenue from staking rewards and yield.”
Pixels is one of the companies that earned a lot of money from players, but it also has a lot of revenues coming from treasury investments.
“You shouldn’t look to the zombie companies to see what the future of blockchain could be in games. I think we need to be looking at the small studios that today, given money is no longer easy, or having to innovate tremendously on top of what their model is and take big risks,” Paez said.
The zombie companies can manage cash, but if they focus only on that, they will lose their players, he said. And that’s where Paez decided to develop his own game.
The path to V.O.I.D.
“It’s my first independent game. We decided to take a very different approach to blockchain. So the game itself is PvE teams of three, played from an isometric view. You take your three champions and try to survive against enemies in a micro battle,” he said. “It’s a lot less Diablo and a lot more like hordes and hordes of enemies. It’s like squads of enemies coming toward you, and it requires a lot more teamwork.”
It’s a dark fantasy. The company has launched its own Discord channel, and it is creating its own community.
“It’s not for your Roblox player. And the whole idea here is, ‘Survive until the end.’ If you’re lucky, some of the bosses will drop items like a raid and MMO, and you can extract the items if you survive and win,” he said. “The blockchain element to this is, ‘The game license is the token. One token gives you the game license. So it’s as if I went on Steam and I bought a copy of a game that’s actually an ERC-20 token, and I can play it. And when I’m done, I can trade it if I want.”
Paez said many games fail at distribution and monetization — the live operations that happen after the game is launched. This is why good publishers are useful, he said. Paez said his company is changing it so anyone can be the distributor of the game. That’s where the company hopes to get V.O.I.D. off the ground in the right way.
“At Blizzard, we knew that word of mouth, from friend to friend, was the best way to sell a game,” he said. “You can get fans to be super incentivized to push your game because they can sell it themselves.”
The company is reaching out to content creators who can learn how to play the game and start lining up their content. Tainted Studios is in production, and it is seeking community feedback on the game design.
“The community starts growing and then you start getting really good feedback,” he said. “We’re working on our assets. We’re building all the foundational systems. There’s an NFT component for some of the equipment, but nothing major. It’s all about getting that core community in there. Most importantly, some of the content creators and the whales. “
