About NFTs…
Oh, NFTs! What marvelous wonders they are going to bring! And what controversy! Ubisoft announces them, then the players complain, then Ubisoft says the players don’t understand them! And now Team 17 jumps onboard! The good old Worms sees its name dragged into the mud too to just be cancelled 24h later! Damn…
Well I’m tired of it already, even my aunt asked me about it… You have gotten me to write about it. Look what you’ve done!
I’m not even going to bother to explain what is an NFT, do your research. But I’ll tell you what it isn’t: Magic.
These are some very real facts:
- A digital product that is verifiably owned by someone doesn’t magically mean it can be used anywhere. Each game or system would need to support it, and they won’t because it’s an impossible task to support everything.
- Having players ‘owning’ things and keeping them game after game is a much worse business than having them constantly buying similar things each new game. This is the current business model, by the way, and it’s also somehow environmentally friendly as digital throwaway products don’t produce as much waste as let’s say, your phone.
- Ownership over digital products was a problem already solved long ago with a much simpler solution now present everywhere. You ‘own’ your Steam games as long as you ‘own’ your account. You ‘own’ your Google Play account. You ‘own’ your Fortnite costumes. For years they have been black markets for people to buy, sell and bet on their Counter Strike skins without the need of NFTs. If Epic ever had wanted to support your Fortnite costumes in other games, they could have. Just by using the account system that they already have in place! Mind-blowing, right?
- Yes, if Epic or Steam decides to shut down their servers they would be ‘stripping’ you from your ‘ownership’, however is an ownership that can only exist inside their platforms, so what would be the point of ‘owning’ the right to use something that you can’t use? The blockchain may be more robust bringing a de-centralized registry, so the information doesn’t reside in company owned servers, and instead is held across multiple computers. But that doesn’t solve the issue that without their platform they don’t mean anything. And those computers can also be shut down, messed with, abandoned with time. They can be as well owned by the company that sells you the NFTs, and if they do their homework, they’ll be! So nothing really changes with NFTs.
- For something to be sold, someone needs to be interested in buying it. If you only want to buy an NFT to sell it afterwards for more money, ask yourself why someone else would want to buy it. If it’s the same reason, you have yourself a very broken system.
- Scarcity in digital products is not real. Everything is made of 1s and 0s that can be copied. Content can be generated automatically. How ‘owning’ a digital asset that can be generated by the millions in milliseconds suddenly has any value besides pointless speculation? Blows my mind.
So why using NFTs? Well, I can only speculate why someone would be so careless to decide to implement NFTs in their game (at least with the use they are doing at the moment), but these are some plausible reasons:
- NFTs is the buzzword! It brought you here. It attracts VC investors that bring loads of money. If Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon are talking about it, it means business!
- There are conventions about NFTs and crypto and other horrible things like that, and they may want to be a part of them! Their other CEO friends are talking about it and saying that they are missing out! Look at all this pile of cash!
- Thinking about it properly, NFTs bring yet another opportunity to deceive the consumers into buying things they don’t need, exploiting the usual psychological biases such as scarcity, fear of missing out, peer-pressure, etc. and abusing terms that people love like ‘ownership’, ‘value’, ‘investment’. There is more money to be made.
There is nothing else. NFTs don’t bring anything new to the table, it’s not a groundbreaking technology. It all really distills down into one single thing: Greed.
So, no, you don’t need to worry. “No corporate BS” is in the front of my website for some reason. Like many others resistant heroes, here there is a developer that won’t fall into the spell of the quick cash-grab and greedy idiocy of the NFTs. I also don’t feel like researching and implementing blockchain technology for something that I can do in 10 seconds by storing a variable in the savegame file… Oh yeah, it won’t be ‘safe’, it can be hacked, you do you! After all, it’s your computer or phone to do as you please!
F❤️❤️k NFTs.
F❤️❤️k the companies that promote them.
Love everything else.
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