The push back from gamers has been non-stop and intense. I don't get it. They are willing to buy digital assets which can't be resold on an open market. They are not willing to buy digital assets that can.
It's kind of bonkers.
At any point the game maker can say "V1 assets aren't supported in V2". Or they can flood the market with "rare" items. Or they'll buy an item which was "stolen" and have it unilaterally revoked. Or... the list goes on.
There's also zero possibility of cross-game use. If ID releases the BFG9000 for free, is Skyrim going to let you shoot that at dragons?
But, here's the thing, don't listen to me. Listen to your (potential) customers. If they're all telling you that they don't want to buy what you're selling then take that as a sign.
As a game buyer, that sounds like doubling the number of companies who need to be paid and whose business decisions or failure will break things, add additional fees, etc. “Our incredible journey” is another way to say “you’re going to get server errors if you try to use your purchases”.
As a game developer, that sounds like I still have to do almost all of the work but now I’m locking in payments and giving up some control of my business to another party whose interests only partially correlate with mine or my partner developers’.
In both cases, there doesn’t seem to be enough value to support a sustainable business. Any two game developers are going to need to collaborate to share anything between games, and there’s a really upper bound on how much money they’ll pay before cutting out the middleman starts to look really compelling. Similarly, many gamers don’t like pay to win and won’t pay anything for cosmetic items so you’re chasing the percentage of people who both do and are willing to pay more upfront and more later despite not even knowing what future games would offer that option or how much they’ll charge.
If you want to succeed with this scheme then ultimately you need to produce your own games. And those will have to be games that people actually enjoy playing, not just grinding for worthless coins.
Or, even worse: why would a game publisher share some of the revenue for in-game purchases with customers who have lost interest in the game and are selling off their items?
I don’t want to think of my shirt as a sellable asset.
People do not want to think of the things they buy as sellable assets. It’s just a shirt. Just let me buy it. I give zero fucks about your choice of backend data storage.
Furthermore skin resale markets and skin gambling (the two tend to be connected) mean we're roping young gamers into gambling and gambling-adjacent stuff at a young age before their brains are mature enough to handle it. It's disgusting.
As a game developer, also, it just doesn't make sense. Giving skins resale value means that now I can never revise them or patch them out of the game, no matter the reason. Even worse, it cuts the value of each skin I sell because now a player who quits can unload all their skins first which means I earn less revenue off new players.
If you were an actual game developer yourself, this would be obvious to you.
>The push back from gamers has been non-stop and intense. I don't get it.
It's quite obvious why, so you should get it, but I'm afraid you never will, if your income depends on not getting it, and you prefer to ignore all the wise and precious "non-stop and intense push back from gamers" you're getting, and dispariage your reluctant potential customers as "bonkers", because you think you know better than they do when it comes to them spending their money on your NFT scams to line your pockets at their expense.
If you were an actual game player yourself, this would be obvious to you.
But if you were either, then it would be easy for you to understand the totally justified contempt that both game developers and game players have for all the crypto-bros who have invaded the game industry with their Web 3.0 bullshit, who have absolutely no idea what it's like to develop or play a game, who just want to push their NFT get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and rug pulls, and see game developers and players as suckers to be exploited.
It's been more than a year since "Line Goes Up" and Christopher Natsuume's videos came out. Please don't tell me you haven't heard of them or been able to find enough time in your busy schedule of shilling NFTs to watch them. Nobody believes what you're shilling any more. Time to stop. Please stop pretending you don't know the gig is up.
Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
>If someone pitches you on a "great" Web3 project, ask them if it requires buying or selling crypto to do what they say it does.
Let me explain Blockchain gaming and Play-to-Earn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKzup7XDyq8
>NFTs are a pure scam. Blockchain gaming is a pyramid scheme. Play-to-Earn is not only a scam, it's deeply immoral.
Using NFTs to own ingame objects: Also pretty much a scam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IYjsWBbmKI
>In this video, I'd like to clarify and further explain: Using NFTs to own ingame objects is an unnecessarily inefficient byproduct of a larger scam.
Sources and Further Reading recommended by Folding Issues:
https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/11/nfts-crypto-...
https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-absurd.html
https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-sa...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/who-goes-crypto...
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1478017698676228099?s=20
https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/cryptocurrency-is-garbage-s...
https://marker.medium.com/fintech-is-a-scam-a-listicle-in-ei...
https://naavik.co/deep-dives/axie-infinity/#axie-decon=
https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-future-is-useless-expensi...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-weren...
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/baseless-nft-hype-hits-a-cresc...
https://www.technollama.co.uk/platform-is-law-the-cautionary...
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/02/12/libra-shrugg...
I could understand if the aversion was around the impacts of monetising play on the culture, but many of these games already have high volume third party resale markets for digital assets so I feel like that shit has sailed?
For what it’s worth, I have watched Line Goes Up and thought it was a good and fair analysis of the NFT market.
What options? What advantages are there? Better for who, the scammers pulling the rug?
Keep in mind, the oft-repeated promise of being able to move assets from one game to another is a bald faced lie, and that's pretty obvious to developers and even players, just not crypto bros and NFT shills who have never developed or played games, apparently.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Buying an NFT MTX is not just a fee, not just a fee fee, but like a fee fee fee.
Micro-transactions in general are gross. NFT backed micro-transactions are not more or less gross, but they're still gross by association./