NFT Gaming Hell

This post might be somewhat controversial in this space, but I feel it needs to be addressed. Blockchain technology and NFT's don't necessarily lead us to the Promised Land, especially from the perspective of gamers.

We're all nerds here, let's be honest. The reason why we're the early birds in the land of cryptocurrencies, decentralized blockchain technology, NFT's and WEB 3.0 is that we're all spending way too much time behind a digital computer screen. Well, maybe not too much, that's relative and should be judged on an individual level. But we do spend a lot of time here, that's for sure; you're here again, after all, reading this article. Now don't click away immediately, please, for I think you'll want to read this even if what I'm about to say will go against all the hype you've come to internalize about the NFT craze and "the metaverse." Maybe I see something you don't. Maybe I'm too old to appreciate fully the advantages blockchains and NFT's can bring to online and digital entertainment, but this old geezer sees a lot of possible negatives as well.

I'm a gamer, not as avid as I used to be, but I still enjoy playing the occasional racing game or a few hours of Diablo 3 with some of my friends. I'm old enough to have seen gaming develop from Pong on the original Atari 2600, to Space Harrier in the arcades to the 3D rendered virtual worlds of modern PC gaming titles. And boy, has that been a fast, wild ride; we've come so far in so little time! I've also had the pleasure and privilege to combine gaming and writing, two of the many passions I have, into a daily job; from 1998 to 2007 I was a gaming journalist and game reviewer for the Dutch versions of PC Gamer and PC Zone. I was sent out to the L.A. Convention Center to cover E3 and interviewed some of the gaming legends like ID software's John Romero and Jordan Mechner of Prince of Persia fame. This is the background against which I see the gaming industry go in a downward spiral, for reasons I'm about to share.

I grew up in a time when video games were released as finished products. Yeah, isn't that a quaint idea: you went to the shop, paid for the game once, and you took it home to have fun. The brick-and-mortar shops that sold these games are all but extinct now, and only reach The News when their (GameStop's) stock is traded to unseen highs in a Reddit-induced craze on the Robinhood trading app. That's all changed now; just like everything else in our capitalist world, games are now just vehicles to extract as much dollars from us gamers, while putting the least amount of effort into making the actual games. First there were the finished products, then came the shareware titles, like Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom, where you could play the first chapter for free and had to pay a little money for the subsequent chapters. Then the first computer games with an actual in-game economy started to appear, many of them "free to play," but "pay to win"; my son was addicted to RuneScape for a while and spent much of his allowance on in-game items to skip hours upon hours of "grinding" to find those same items. I remember him complaining about the "rich kids" he played against, who always had the best armor and weapons, simply because they had the money to pay for them...

Nowadays these money-suckers aren't even free to play anymore: you download a full price triple-A title from Steam, only to see that in order to have the full experience, you need to download and pay for DLC's, season-passes and exclusive in--game items such as skins, gear, vehicles and weapons. This makes me so angry sometimes; the audacity to sell an unfinished product, the bottomless greed behind it all. And I'm sorry to have to say it, but the advent and adoption of blockchain technology by triple-A game developers and publishers will make this so much worse...

On January 1, 2022, the president of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda, one of the world's largest and best known entertainment companies, published a new year letter in which he revealed his plans for the future of gaming and the incorporation of blockchain technology and the transition to "play to earn" gaming. What it all boils down to is that these multi-billion companies are going to transform gamers into workers. Yes, according to Square Enix, gamers will buy their products, play them, and make the company a lot of money while they make a little money for themselves on the side as well. Gaming will become low wage labor, with people gaming, not for just fun, but in the hope of making money. To fully grasp what I mean, I'll quote some of the letter here and link the entire thing as well:

I would like to begin by wishing everyone a Happy New Year.

The metaverse was a hot topic in 2021, inspiring a lively global conversation first about what the metaverse is and then about what sort of business opportunities it presents. Against this backdrop, Facebook changed its name in October to Meta, serving as evidence that the concept is not a mere buzzword but here to stay. The metaverse garnered so much attention that 2021 was dubbed the “Metaverse Year”

I attribute this in large part to advances in extended reality (XR) technology, the increasing prevalence of the cloud and 5G, more sophisticated blockchain technology, and other technological evolutions that have taken place in a variety of fields over the past several years. That is because these advances are giving rise to services that fall under the metaverse umbrella. The metaverse will likely see a meaningful transition to a business phase in 2022, with a wide range of services appearing on the scene. As this abstract concept begins to take concrete shape in the form of product and service offerings, I am hoping that it will bring about changes that have a more substantial impact on our business as well.

Another term that gained quick currency in 2021 was “NFT” or “non-fungible token.” The advent of NFTs using blockchain technology significantly increased the liquidity of digital goods, enabling the trading of a variety of such goods at high prices and sparking conversations the world over. I see 2021 not only as “Metaverse: Year One,” but also as “NFTs: Year One” given that it was a year in which NFTs were met with a great deal of enthusiasm by a rapidly expanding user base. However, we do observe examples here and there of overheated trading in NFT-based digital goods with somewhat speculative overtones, regardless of the observed value of the content provided This, obviously, is not an ideal situation, but I expect to see an eventual right-sizing in digital goods deals as they become more commonplace among the general public, with the value of each available content corrected to their true estimated worth, and I look for them to become as familiar as dealings in physical goods.
_{source: Square Enix}

If we do a little bit of free association, and combine the above statements with gaming companies' proven track-record of publishing increasingly unfinished games in which consumers need to buy DLC's and add-ons, it's clear what they intend to thrust upon us. This is what it'll look like: they publish a game with a built-in blockchain economy, allowing gamers to design their own in-game NFT's such as skins or weapons, as well as finding or earning pre-built NFT's, and trade these among themselves. The underlying smart contracts will make sure the gamers, who have become creators as well, get some of the proceeds while most will go to the game publisher. The president of Square Enix makes this abundantly clear in his letter: "I realize that some people who 'play to have fun' and who currently form the majority of players have voiced their reservations toward these new trends, and understandably so. However, I believe that there will be a certain number of people whose motivation is to 'play to contribute,' by which I mean to help make the game more exciting." There you have it: "play to contribute," instead of just "play to have fun." It's not that players haven't been able to create their own content, just look at all the indie-games developed on famous game-engines like the Quake or Unreal engines. It's just that the publishers never got to see one cent of these enthusiasts' efforts; they want that to! Like I said: gamers will become low wage laborers.

This, my friends, is pure evil, next-level-greed ad far as I'm concerned. Read the entire letter; it's quite transparent and easy to see that the priority isn't making games more fun, but to extract as much money from the consumers as humanly possible. The entire idea of "The Metaverse" could have been wonderful, but in a world where profits override every other consideration, be it our mental health, the environment or economic justice, it'll be used to transform our leisure time into a money-making business. NFT's can have such positive effects if they're applied in the right way; musicians could release their songs with a smart contract that ensures they get a cut of every sale, second-hand sale and so on, cutting out the greedy middle-man, the publishers. That's wonderful. But the nonsense I see now, with "Bored Apes," "Cyber Punks," and the thousands of derivatives thereof, that's just a quick money-grab and I truly don't understand how people fall for it. That's just the beginning of the abuse of NFT's and blockchain economies though; Square Enix's letter and the embrace of these technologies by the traditional money-grubbing corporations, with Facebook at the forefront, is the real horror...

Okay, end of rant; it's been too long already. If you've made it this far, you have my gratitude and respect; thank you for listening to an old man complain about the devolving of one of his life-long passions. And let this be a reminder that we need to keep fighting against the powers that be, or we'll lose the dream of a truly decentralized future. Thanks again, keep healthy, and I hope you find a good indie-game that you can play, as a complete product.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!