Opera GX Village

Submission 5,921

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About

Opera GX Village is a housing development project built in the Pyrenees Mountains in Andorra specifically for gamers and streamers who live the gamer lifestyle by Opera Norway, the company behind the Opera and Opera GX web browsers. The housing development was announced in April 2022 along with a contest to spend a weekend at a prototype Opera GX house in the Principality of Andorra.

Origin

In 2019, the team behind the Opera web browser released the Opera GX browser,^[12] a web browser built specifically with gamers in mind, featuring things like CPU, RAM and Network limiters with a focus on making streaming as seamless as possible. On April 11th, 2022, the @operagxofficial Twitter^[1] account posted a photoshop of a "for sale" sign reading "coming soon Opera GX," captioned, "Ever wondered what a dream home built just for gamers would look like? #OperaGXVillage," gaining over 690 likes in a week (shown below).

On April 12th, the Opera GX YouTube^[2] channel posted a promotional video announcing Opera GX Village. The video begins with a shot of the Pyrenees mountains, the proposed site for the village, then shows the interior of a home built for gamers, featuring neon lighting, gamer chairs instead of regular chairs and an arcade machine in one corner. The narrator, Dan Johnson, describes Opera GX Village as "the first housing development being designed just for professional gamers." He explains how it's a gated community, how the homes are fully furnished with "top of the line setups in every room," "more LEDs than an e-sports final" and "in-room food delivery." He then says, "best of all, you'll be living in the lap of luxury by enjoying some of the lowest taxes in the world." The trailer advertises "pre-construction homes starting at one Bitcoin," suggesting you can use cryptocurrency to pay for a home. The video ends by announcing a virtual tour of the facility on their website^[4] and a contest to win a trip to a prototype Opera GX home, asking participants to tweet at their account, "@operagxofficial" and use the hashtag "#OperaGXVillage" to tell them why they would make a good first resident to enter. The video gained over 1.2 million views in a week. The video was also posted to Twitter,^[3] gaining over 42,000 views and 600 likes in the same span of time. The contest closes on April 24th.

Spread

The contest inspired numerous entries over the following week as users described why they would be the perfect first resident at Opera GX Village in tweets,^[5]^[6] some under the comment section of the promotional video (examples shown below).

Some Twitter^[7]^[8]^[9] users also shared memes about Opera GX Village, often in tweets where they also describe why they should be permitted as its first resident or tweets mocking the concept of the village (examples shown below). The village was reported on by a variety of websites^[10]^[11] that week.