It does, however, hold a stake in the other token. POLIS allows holders to have jurisdictional ownership over parts of the StarAtlas world.
Players with POLIS will be able to restrict some activities, lay down new laws, and even impose taxes and tolls on other players. StarAtlas stresses, however, that POLIS “represents voting rights, not dictatorial ownership.” Players would need to collaborate in order to create these rules and levies.
The idea is to avoid the kind of centralization that led a 16-year-old Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, to see “what horrors centralized services can bring.”
After three years of happily playing World of Warcraft, Blizzard removed the damage component from its warlock's Siphon Life spell. A decentralized governance open to holders of POLIS is less likely to lay down rules that harm gameplay.
The first phase of POLIS distribution will see 20 percent of the governance token made available in a “Galactic Asset Offering.” Decision-making will remain centralized for the first two or three years of game development but POLIS will later be generated only but the staking of ATLAS.
In other words, the more committed players are to the game, and the more they invest in it, the more influence they’ll have over its development.
For people wondering what a blockchain-based metaverse is then, the answer is that it’s a world, or even a universe, with its own economy and a democratic governance structure powered by its most committed residents.