A new first/third-person shooter game has landed on Steam Greenlight called Blood Bank. Despite the uninspired name and low-budget graphics, the game has a very interesting concept working for it: you can earn (or lose) real money while playing Blood Bank.

The concept is as follows: you purchase credits for real money. You earn or lose credits when you get kills or die, after joining a competitive server. The higher tier competitive servers you join the more credits you earn/lose per kill.

And yes, there will be free, non-competitive servers available for casual players.

I can already imagine a boatload of Call of Duty fanboys lining up to get in on the game and brag about their K/D ratio and how much bank they make on the game. I can also imagine Activision/Blizzard’s head honcho Bobby Kotick cursing loudly in his office, saying “Why didn’t I think of that?!”

You can see the game in action below, as well as the states in North America that will allow for competitive play for monetary value.

Mechanically, the game looks workable. The death animations, shooting animations and reactions are passably decent.

The PS2-level graphics are forgivable if the gameplay lives up to being fun.

The title is built on the Unity 3D game engine, so it will feature large maps and – if the game manages to get enough support – there are plans for vehicular support down the line.

Given Blood Bank‘s competitive monetary incentives, the team wants to take care with how spawning works so players won’t be abused by the system. They state in the description on the Greenlight page…

“We will try to implement team spawn rooms, which spawn the player outside of the map, and allows them to teleport to certain spawn points in the map. This help protect players from spawn camping, and helps players utilize spawn-points to gain a tactical advantage on larger battlefields.“

They also have plans to implement wall penetration, bullet drop, squeaky doors, and peeking around corners or from behind cover.

I have to be honest: I can’t imagine this working out quite as well as some may hope. I like what the team wants to achieve and they seem to have a decent working prototype on hand, but it just seems ripe for some form of exploitation, either with those attempting to bypass VAC bans, or those trying to circumvent the game rules to boost their kill/death ratio.

Nevertheless, beyond the competitive currency being a prime reason to play, the developers also want to implement Steam Workshop support and allow for weapons, apparel, maps and items to be made available once the game officially launches (and assuming they get greenlit).

I’m not entirely won over with the monetary aspects of the game, but I’ll reserve judgment until I see it in action. If you think this is a game with a good idea resting on its shoulders, you can upvote and favorite the game by paying a visit to the Greenlight page.