Historic sale of a Gala Games Fantasy MMORPG in-game NFT item for US$800K

They'll run out of money before they attract enough whales to survive, because I don't see anything resembling a fun game here. It's like Minecraft, if you were farming for meaningless loot boxes all day.

Just read some of these insane quotes:

"The game will also have 1,000 farm bots which can mine a token, like a Bitcoin miner. You can buy a loot box, assemble the parts to make a farm bot, and set them loose mining. Or you can just buy a farm bot preassembled at an expensive price.

Then you can mine the currency and provide them to other players in the game, either by giving it away or selling it.

“It’s a way to compensate people who really believe in us in the beginning,” Schiermeyer said. “That’s how we’re structuring the blockchain. The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it. So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”

https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/10/zynga-cofounder-creates-b...

> There is a small-but-non-trivial segment of gamers that are willing to spend huge amounts of money for in-game privileges.

> There is a similar, somewhat-overlapping segment of gamers willing to spend huge amounts of time on a game

These assertions come with a huge asterisk. The game isn't even released yet, which makes the behavior even more aberrant.

> the upcoming fantasy MMORPG game Mirandus

> 3. Asia is driving the leading edge of game monetization now, and that leading edge is gacha games (lootbox mechanics/disguised digital slot machines).

There's nothing leading edge about this. Both western and eastern video game companies have been doing this for more than a decade.

An infamous example is EA, who have been sucking the fun out of their games with this for ages. Bonus points to them for slapping these mechanics on paid games which they sell en-masse by exploiting franchises popular with mass-market consumers, then extracting additional money using the sunk cost fallacy.

It looks to me like its in the same vein as Pokemon Cards, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, etc. Very few people actually "play". They just collect for the sake of collecting, and they buy out of fear of missing out on exclusives.

It isn't a model that appeals to everyone, but it appeals really well to some whales, hence it exists.

The creator was ex-Zynga, so of course it's largely built around a whale-first monetization strategy. Even more dangerously, it's inside of a game that appears to be largely vaporware, and has no high-profile company to give weight to the virtual items. At least you know Blizzard or Epic will be around for a while, these people could be bankrupt tomorrow and all you'd own is a worthless (and expensive) Ethereum transaction.

I'd also bet that this "sale" is an inside job, given that the virtual nonsense was purchased by another scammy blockchain gaming company via "Polyient Games Unity Tokens", and the $800K is based on the market cap of some obscure, illiquid token.

"and which are only accessible within that game" - this isn't correct. The concept of public blockchain allows these NFTs to be used anywhere that also uses that blockchain. They have mentioned this in another article on their ecosystem. https://gogalagames.medium.com/the-gala-games-node-ecosystem...

I recently tried out a game backed by a block chain. I had uninstalled it quite quickly because it was taking dozens of seconds to load a level because my previous actions had to be saved to the block chain. Maybe they picked a poor implementation of block chain to go with, but sacrificing performance for any of the benefits of being on a block chain is not a trade off I see worth while in games in general. Players care about loading screens far more than they care about their items being on a block chain rather than a database.

The point of the blockchain is to attract 200% more moron VCs and 150% more lazy bloggers. It’s an essential part of the business model.

This is true of anything "on the chain." The world can just decide to not care what the chain says.

I would argue games are the only place where this situation is reasonable as the gamers desire self enforcement (or there is no game).

In other situations with DRM (which is what the chain if being used for, DRM) it's trying to force the user to stop themselves. Here the community can police itself.

You're right that trusting a closed source game to stay up is crazy, but people "buy" digital goods all the time. That situation is not unique.

Non-Fungible Token. Which is the name of the protocol standard, and the abbreviation has evolved into a colloquialism in the art/game/collector world that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the protocol standard.

But it is referring to unique collectibles. The blockchain protocol aspect improves on the pricing and provenance of the asset, as one can prove when it was created (before or after another similar one, for proof of the original creation), and the exact amount paid for it at that time, to better illuminate prior market value. The art world has had trouble with all of this for millenia including in the present.

Sounds like whale-catching mobile games on a much bigger scale; Create a fake world with a bunch of fake restrictions, line up a bunch of bored computer nerds, get them to feel superior over one another by demonstrating their wealth with the purchase of expensive bits and bytes.

The cryptocurrency talk is just the mumbo jumbo to catch the idiots. It’s like those alternative healthcare practitioners who sprinkle in the words “study” and “research” to make their quackery sound legit to the unsuspecting.

I'll try, but I'm not a fan, so I may get it wrong and/or fail to disguise my (negative) feelings.

Imagine an MMORPG that uses a blockchain economy not only for currency transactions but also for secure storage of items. Today, we take for granted the 'vault' space offered in games, but by storing items and currency both on the blockchain, new opportunities for in-app purchase become available that players will surely enjoy interacting with.

In this article, a 'bank' is sold for $800,000 USD, and the purchaser of that 'bank' will, presumably, get a fractional share of the revenue from all 'vault this item' paid transactions. Since payment can occur either using in-game currency and/or real money transactions, and presuming they get a blockchain currency listed on Coinbase, the owner of the castle will be able to cash out their revenue stream into their real world bank account.

I'm probably missing some subtle aspect of the specifics here, but that's what I took away from it. I assume the creator of the game is hoping that the SEC will not realize that this is an $800,000 investment in a public offering of stock in their still-vaporware game. I also assume that by taking advantage of the Coinbase tax-paperwork infrastructure, the game's operators will attempt to have no legal obligation to register as a financial institution, or otherwise owe any regulatory debt.

You may find value in reading the novel 'REAMDE' as it spends some amount of time walking through the implications of a world where you can earn real money using virtual gameplay.

A bit of an overview of the game here:

https://egamers.io/this-new-mmorpg-sells-5-citadels-for-1-36...