NFT games

[Don]

So I signed up for some random new game in Com2US umbrella that's going to be selling NFTs and on the blockchain technology. Anybody doing anything related to it? As far as I can tell it's a new get rich quick scheme but they hope to throw some fancy words like 'blockchain' and see if people will end up spending lots of money for the same old stuff you'd normally find in a game. As far as I can tell the idea is that these things are supposed to permeance, because people sure normally spend a ton of money on other games expecting to lose everything after 3 months. This isn't like say I got a Google Drive which I think is pretty permanent because I don't expect Google to go out of business anytime soon. This is like you signing up for any random game that looks like it might flop in 3 months but because it's on blockchain it's err, more permanent than other games that flop after 3 months.

To be fair I'm just hoping the actual game might accidentally be good and not too worried about the NFT stuff but I guess it's the new craze in trying to scam people out of their money. I heard even Square Enix is doing stuff there. I have a hard time seeing this actually working, though, and not because people are smart, but that as a whole the gaming industry is pretty good at scamming your money so it's hard to imagine significant breakthrough especially if not supported by a good game. I mean, I went to the chat and it went something like this: "If a company X sells a sword of +20 power for $100 normally that'd be bad, but if it's a NFT sword of +20 power on a blockchain I think that totally sounds legit." Now, I know there are people dumb enough to fall for something like this because it's got some buzzwords, but still, I'd argue that if you could get away with selling a sword of +20 power for $100 normally every game would've done that already, and just because there's a few guys dumb enough to buy it after you slap the word blockchain on it doesn't make a difference. It's not like there aren't targeted sales to gullible buyers and plenty of games sell power straight up successfully.

[Julius Seeker]

I think the big issue with NFTs at the moment are that most of the people pushing them are marketing them like Avon or Tupperware for men. And sellers are using suspiciously positive emotions and confidence to sell them in the same way a used car salesman or an MLM seller tries to bait and hook people into their scam. So it kind of gives the whole concept of NFTs a bit of a stink.

But IMO, the idea of having unique digital items is interesting for art creators in particular. They also get royalties on additional sales of their art.


Gaming

For gaming, Peter Molyneux is already onboard and making tens of millions on his NFT gaming initiative - he’s selling digital land deeds and item deeds which have a physical representation in his game - I believe.

I’m not sure the extent of what can be done with games. Perhaps create an artificial scarcity of digital ownership? Kind of like the artificial scarcity of physical editions of games that have infinite sales potential in the digital space. I mean, technically I’m already in on physical games - I have basically every RPG ever released in physical form for Genesis, SNES, and Playstation - some of them (like Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, and Suikoden 2) are worth ridiculous amounts despite having cheap digital and rerelease alternatives.

One thing I would LOVE is if I had versions of all my old digital games that could be used on recent platforms without having to worry about no access due to license deal changes. Like, rather than being licensed for the platform, it’s licensed as a digital item that can be used for all time, rather than having to repurchase it, or worse, have no access to it. Of course, digital games require a method to play, which opens up the can of worms of “should platforms be required to allow emulator software? If so, would it be limited to previous platforms by them - ie, only Nintendo consoles on Nintendo systems, including virtual console platforms - or is it everything goes?” However it happens, I think anything would be better than what we have today for creators, licensors, and owners. OK, that might be a bit too crazy.

There’s also the term “metaverse” thrown around. I’ve not heard it properly explained because I think no one knows what it actually means yet. But my guess is digital items that have a purpose in all their future games and that can be bought/sold outside the marketplaces of the actual games. Think of it like a one of a kind Amiibo, except digital. For example, Zero Bahamut materia. You can use it in any and all of Square’s future games within their metaverse, or you can just display it for sale on eBay. I could be completely off with the speculation.

I don’t think anyone really knows what’s happening in the future, and the reason for the fear is simply because it’s something different. There’s definitely a degree of envy for people who enjoy digital collectables as well. I’m looking at it with interest and optimism in what’s to come.

[Don]

There's nothing preventing you from having say 1 million unique land deeds before there was NFT. Just because there is no blockchain doesn't mean people somehow stop trusting the value of uniqueness. Blockchain is just a fancy way of saying 'we wasted a lot of space and energy storing this stuff redundantly', but you trust your bank to store your information correctly before there was NFT, so why should it make a difference? Okay, maybe a small company doesn't have the resources to make a robust and secure system, but then you wouldn't trust that company to do its own blockchain either.

You always could have your unique sword in a game that nobody else could have, as long as the company is willing to go along with it. And if not, just because there is only one NFT for 'uber sword of awesomeness' doesn't mean the can't just roll out 'another uber sword of awesomeness' that's the same or better. I don't see how the inclusion of NFT lets you do things you couldn't do before and it sure looks like people just use it as a buzzword. By the way, just because you got some NFT stored somewhere doesn't mean it's somehow indestructible. The replication stuff costs a lot of money in terms of energy and someone's got to pay for it, and if people stop paying for it then the blockchain goes down too. That's why there's even talk about how blockchain and NFT contributes to global warming because it's using up a lot of energy to do all these transactions, which is a cost someone's got to absorb to keep it running.

I'm sure this will work fine if they have a solid game where this is applicable, though I think there's really no motivation for implementing a fairly costly and unproven technology. There's nothing stopping any game from selling limited, unique items. There was a game called Landmark where you go buy charters for deeds to build your stuff like 10 years ago and as far as I can tell the land you buy is definitely yours. The game never went anywhere because there was no interest, and if the game shuts down it doesn't matter if this land you bought is totally unique. There are games like Project Entropia where you buy like expensive unique stuff and that existed before NFTs too.

[Don]

Did some more research on this and it seems like the current NFT stuff goes like this. There's usually some item that's required to play or at least without it, you'd basically be next to nothing. This item is obtained by NFT thing + other stuff to create another NFT thing. The original NFT is not consumed and has a few charges it can be used in this process, and then you can sell/rent this item to your next victim for like 90% of whatever they made plus $, or maybe some large amount of in game resources if that guy has no money.

Problem is that this system is actually far inferior to just selling gold in World of Warcraft. If you have a game where there's some common resource that's valuable (gold) that's tradeable, people are already willing to pay a lot of money for it. The secondary market in a game is probably very profitable, but I guess companies don't want to mess with it because there's logistical and legal ramifications. However just because you put the word NFT on it doesn't mean those problems go away. Plenty of games, generally MMORPG, handled transaction with items worth hundreds or more just fine even if it's kind of a roundabout way (e.g. my uber item for 150 of your 1 month tokens or 3 trillion gold which can be used to buy 150 1 month tokens).

[Julius Seeker]

Seems talk of NFT gaming has mostly stopped because none of the gaming corporations seem to know how to do it, and the backlash is hurting their brand.

Peter Molyneux seems to be the only one who knows how to make good money on this - $57 millions. The others that followed seemed to be out of luck. Ubisoft only made $400 on their NFT Ghost Recon game. That’s right, not four hundred million, or four hundred thousand, but four hundred dollars - as in, not even enough money to buy a single Switch OLED on EBay right now.

Still, 57 million isn’t a huge amount for a company like Ubisoft or Square who likely won’t even greenlight a game unless they believe the bare minimum revenue it would make would be around that amount in their mobile/PC divisions.

[Don]

Some of the successful NFT ventures seem to be led by guys who are already pretty famous and you can argue whatever they did probably isn't going to flop hard, and there's always the hype factor that's got to be worth something.

I'm sure NFT will work if you put it on top of an already successful game but an already successful game generally has no reason to take the risk. There's really no reason to throw in a NFT in say a Zelda game and expect massive improvements in sales or profit, and the downside is quite considerable. So you end up with just fringe games trying to make a buck and that's not going to go well.

I think the problem is that NFT in theory lends some permeance to in game objects, but an object in game is only as permanent as the game is. It kind of doesn't matter if your $1000 item of power is stored in the blockchain if the game flops. Even if the game doesn't shut down, if it becomes unpopular then your $1000 of stuff can quickly become basically worthless. Besides, it's not like people didn't try to sell accounts way before NFT existed, and there have always been games that allow a fair amount of trading. You can think of a game you bought on Steam as some kind of NFT since there's some unique transaction that says you bought this game and own the digital rights to it. The reason why this works for Steam is because we think Steam is probably going to stick around for a long time and even if they somehow go down there should be enough time to find alternatives and you probably don't care if some of your really old games don't exist anywhere and just goes away forever.

Diablo 3 had a real money auction house. It didn't flop because it didn't use NFTs. It just wasn't implemented well because the game was designed to make you want to buy stuff out of it so Blizzard can make money off the transaction fees and people saw through that and boycotted it. Yes, games might not be super smart as a group of people, but if it's that easy to make a ton of money for doing nothing, someone would've already tried that first. You don't have to wait for NFTs to exist to rip people off. About the only thing you get is that NFT is a cool new buzzword so there's always some FOMO but even buzzwords can only go so far if you don't have anything to back it up. Even if you're only trying to rip people off you got to at least pretend you got a valuable game behind it. The NFT games all look like complete garbage and they just figure people will buy it because it's NFT.