GB 'Doc' Burford posted:

all an NFT is this: a link, a url, on the internet, that points you to your spot on a ledger and the copy of the image that resides there and says “yeah this is the owner.” You can sell the link to someone else.

The Verge posted:

There are a lot of upfront costs: Rest of World estimates that it currently costs around $1,500 to buy into the game. (I haven’t yet made the leap myself.) In the Philippines, companies are now loaning out Axies to other players in exchange for 30 percent of their earnings.

RPATDO_LAMD posted:

This is news to me. Axie infinity runs on a "private blockchain"? Then what's the point of using a blockchain at all? They could have just made a normal-rear end videogame with a centralized database and it would have worked the same, other than its ability to attract leagues of credulous speculators to buy all its poo poo.

ultrafilter posted:

BrianRx posted:

Why didn't these companies go all in on hats in the last decade if selling imaginary video game objects is the wave of the future? There was a huge market for goobers who wanted to spend thousands of dollars on a render of a knife with a camouflage hilt in the 2010s. This is just a more complicated and fragile way of doing exactly the same thing. What am I missing?

Barudak posted:

There is literally 0 benefit to NFTs for videogames that could not be better handled by a centralized database, or to my amusement with the ubisoft stuff, is handled by a central database but we pretend the NFT does something other than help waste the earths limited resources

Yosuke Matsuda posted:

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
<Note part removed>
Lastly is blockchain games. Be they single-player or online games, games have traditionally involved a unidirectional flow whereby creators such as ourselves provide a game to the consumers that play them. By contrast, blockchain games, which have emerged from their infancy and are at this very moment entering a growth phase, are built upon the premise of a token economy and therefore hold the potential to enable self-sustaining game growth. The driver that most enables such self-sustaining game growth is diversity, both in how people engage with interactive content like games, and in their motivations for doing so. Advances in token economies will likely add further momentum to this trend of diversification. I see the “play to earn” concept that has people so excited as a prime example of this.

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. Traditional gaming has offered no explicit incentive to this latter group of people, who were motivated strictly by such inconsistent personal feelings as goodwill and volunteer spirit. This fact is not unrelated to the limitations of existing UGC (user-generated content). UGC has been brought into being solely because of individuals’ desire for self-expression and not because any explicit incentive existed to reward them for their creative efforts. I see this as one reason that there haven’t been as many major game-changing content that were user generated as one would expect.

However, with advances in token economies, users will be provided with explicit incentives, thereby resulting not only in greater consistency in their motivation, but also creating a tangible upside to their creative efforts. I believe that this will lead to more people devoting themselves to such efforts and to greater possibilities of games growing in exciting ways. From having fun to earning to contributing, a wide variety of motivations will inspire people to engage with games and connect with one another. It is blockchain-based tokens that will enable this. By designing viable token economies into our games, we will enable self-sustaining game growth. It is precisely this sort of ecosystem that lies at the heart of what I refer to as “decentralized gaming,” and I hope that this becomes a major trend in gaming going forward. If we refer to the one-way relationship where game players and game providers are linked by games that are finished products as “centralized gaming” to contrast it with decentralized gaming, then incorporating decentralized games into our portfolio in addition to centralized games will be a major strategic theme for us starting in 2022. The basic and elemental technologies to enable blockchain games already exist, and there has been an increase in the societal literacy and acceptance of crypto assets in the past few years. We will keep a close eye on societal shifts in this space while listening to the many groups of users that populate it, and ramp up our efforts to develop a business accordingly, with an eye to potentially issuing our own tokens in the future.

Our lifestyles have changed, and we are learning to coexist with COVID-19. Against that backdrop, I believe that the new technologies and concepts that I have discussed and the changes that they bring to our business environment will provide us with numerous opportunities to enrich people’s lives through digital entertainment, which is at the core of our business. This at the same time means that we are seeing the beginnings of further leaps forward for our business. We remain committed to creating, developing, and providing world-class content, and we will contribute to the happiness of society and its people by offering new forms of excitement.

I wish you all the best for 2022.

Yosuke Matsuda
President and Representative Director,
SQUARE ENIX HOLDINGS CO., LTD.

Alexis Ohanian posted:

"In five years, you will actually value your time properly," he said. "And instead of being harvested for advertisements, or being fleeced for dollars to buy stupid hammers you don't actually own, you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun, but you'll actually earn value and you will be the harvester."

Barudak posted:

If I wanted to invest in a game in development, isnt that what Fig was for?

Finder posted:

Gamer feedback to the Ubisoft Quartz and Digits launch has been generally negative. What has the feedback told you about the prospects of mainstream NFT success?
Nicolas Pouard: Well, it was a reaction we were expecting. We know it's not an easy concept to grasp. But Quartz is really just a first step that should lead to something bigger. Something that will be more easily understood by our players. That's the way we think about it and why we will keep experimenting. We will keep releasing features and services around this first initiative. And our belief is that, piece by piece, the puzzle will be revealed and understood by our players. We hope they will better understand the value we offer them.

Well, let's talk about making sense of it. What do you think is the big positive that gamers are missing about what NFTs like Digits can offer them?
NP: I think gamers don't get what a digital secondary market can bring to them. For now, because of the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe it's first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculation. But what we [at Ubisoft] are seeing first is the end game. The end game is about giving players the opportunity to resell their items once they're finished with them or they're finished playing the game itself.

So, it's really, for them. It's really beneficial. But they don't get it for now.

Also, this is part of a paradigm shift in gaming. Moving from one economic system to another is not easy to handle. There is a lot of habits you need to go against and a lot of your ingrained mindset you have to shift. It takes time. We know that.

Yanis Varoufakis posted:

Do I think that NFTs have subversive potential? Let’s see. In a digital environment, NFTs are like all other commodities. They reflect the triumph of exchange value (with which capitalism trounced experiential or use value) within a metaverse (Valve-like or Zuckerberg-style). In that sense, NFTs offer nothing new within digital worlds, except perhaps that they turbocharge the ideology of capitalism (exchange value rules supreme). In the analogue world, NFTs have value only to the extent that bragging rights offer utility to those who care for them. Even though in so doing, they force outfits like Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which used to monopolise the trade in bragging rights) to change their ways, NFTs in no way subverts the structure of property rights creating and underpinning the oligarchy’s exorbitant power over the many.

So, no, I see little radical potential from NFTs. Having said that, a good, future, liberal techno-communist society may find ways of using them as part of a broad network of technologies helping us keep records of our identities, property, etc.

Philman posted:

is that the guy with the csgo gun skin gambling website that never actually paid out?

NYT posted:

Many employees showed their enthusiasm using heart emojis. But in one private chat for engineers, which was reviewed by The Times, one employee wrote: “Who is the elephant in the room who is going to ask how all of it works? Not it.”

Original_Z posted:

Yeah, about that...

https://decrypt.co/92142/gamestop-immutable-x-tokens-dump-ethereum-nft

Well, seemed to work out for them!

VGC posted:

NFT and blockchain have become a popular trend among corporations. What’s Platinum’s interest, if any?

Inaba: We haven’t really been thinking about that. I understand it’s a hot topic right now and it’s really starting to gain momentum, but the way that it’s gained momentum has been focused on profitability for the company, but with no positive impact on the creators or the users in any sense. So that’s frustrating to see happening.

The people who are trying to promote NFTs and partner with gaming companies, their conversations seem extremely one-sided. ‘Hey, you’re going to make money!’ But how does it benefit the user or the creator? If I want to spend my time on something, I want it to benefit making good games.

As content gets more and more digital, I do think that NFT as a concept will gain more importance, but I think that the early adopters are just seeing it as a way to profit as much as possible. That’s not something I’m interested in being part of, to be honest.

Were you surprised to see Konami get involved in NFTs so quickly?

Kamiya: Not really. If it smells like money, Konami’s going to be there in a heartbeat!

Honestly, I have zero interest in this subject. I think what Inaba-san just said really resonated with me because I consider myself a user at heart, more than a businessman. It doesn’t have any benefit for users at the moment. In the future, if it’s expanded in a way that has a positive side for users, then maybe I’ll start to be interested in what they do with it. But I’m not seeing that at the moment.

quote:

It wouldn’t be until the modern crypto movement began accelerating in the last few years, with the popularization of NFTs and more recently the hype around the metaverse, that the concept of investing in virtual land would go from inexplicable to the next big gaming gold rush. In that context, Somnium is just one of a growing number of metaverse platforms that have been making headlines of late because of the mind-boggling amounts of money pouring in. Others include SoftBank-funded The Sandbox, Decentraland and Cryptovoxels, forming what you could think of as a “Big Four” in the metaverse real estate market.

Behind these platforms, all of which have big aspirations to create a decentralized future for the internet, there are scores of companies that are treating this like the internet’s new American frontier, ripe for the taking so long as you buy the right land at the right time for the right price. Over $500 million in real estate was sold on metaverse platforms in 2021, CNBC reported, and prices have soared by as much as 500% in recent months.

Companies like Republic Realm, which just this week received a $60 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and spun off a new real estate arm, and Tokens.com are spending millions on artificially scarce parcels of virtual land. These firms, like real-world developers, have ambitions to build luxury virtual condos for the tech savvy and ultrarich and invest in commercial spaces for brand activations, shopping centers and entertainment venues, all inside competing metaverse platforms that are potentially years, if not decades, away from mainstream adoption. Though it’s made of code, the land is not limitless, as Decentraland, Somnium and others restrict the supply.

“Imagine if you came to New York when it was farmland, and you had the option to get a block of SoHo,” Michael Gord, a co-founder of the virtual real estate firm The Metaverse Group, told The New York Times last fall. “If someone wants to buy a block of real estate in SoHo today, it’s priceless, it’s not on the market. That same experience is going to happen in the metaverse.” Gord, whose company is a subsidiary of Tokens.com, is bullish on Decentraland, predicting it could one day become “the most populated city on Earth, and also perhaps the most desirable real estate on Earth,” he told Motherboard last month.

quote:

Whenever you read these breathless media reports of a "boom" or a "gold rush", my advice is to immediately check how many actual people these platforms are attracting in terms of monthly active and/or peak concurrent users. Because on those metrics, this "Big Four" is actually quite small:

• Somnium Space's peak user concurrency on Steam over the last year was... 16 people total.
  
• Decentraland, as its co-founder told me recently, has about 300,000 monthly active users... but a peak concurrency of 2,500. (I.E. most of its monthly user base does not log in very often.)
  
• The Sandbox recently reported a monthly active userbase of just 30,000 monthly active users.
  
• Crytovoxel's homepage reports that its most visited Popular Parcel attracted monthly total visits... below 25,000 for the entire month, with most other parcels attracting far less visits. Since total unique users are likely to be much less than that of total visits, Cryptovoxel probably has a monthly active user base in the low five figures at most.
  

Media reports of a "metaverse real estate boom" rarely mention the user numbers of these platforms, probably because their paltry usage rates pretty much demolish their thesis. It's not a boom if it only attracts greater and greater speculation, but no growing market of consumers to capitalize on that investment. And it's irresponsible for reporters to only report how much cryptocurrency is being invested into these platforms, and not the looming danger of low user activity.

Tombot posted:

The fact that they are still threatening to put it into more games is disturbing, but I made the descision to never buy any more of their games a while ago so it shouldn't effect me.
Edit: now that I think about it, the amount of power needed to keep those stupid blockchain servers going is probably going to destroy any profit made from this, and the fact they need to keep them going forever to make any of these NFT's "Legitimate" means they really have to go double or nothing with this.