Angry Gamers Have Scared Some Game Companies Away From NFTs (nytimes.com) 72
"In recent months, at least half a dozen game studios have revealed plans to add NFTs to their games or said they were considering doing so," reports the New York Times.
Then they were confronted by gamers like 18-year-old Christian Lantz, who for years has played GSC Game World's first-person shooter game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Mr. Lantz was incensed. He joined thousands of fans on Twitter and Reddit who raged against NFTs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s sequel. The game maker, they said, was simply looking to squeeze more money out of its players. The backlash was so intense that GSC quickly reversed itself and abandoned its NFT plan.
"The studio was abusing its popularity," Mr. Lantz, who lives in Ontario, said. "It's so obviously being done for profit instead of just creating a beautiful game...."
[C]lashes over crypto have increasingly erupted between users and major game studios like Ubisoft, Square Enix and Zynga. In many of the encounters, the gamers have prevailed — at least for now.... Players said they see the moves as a blatant cash grab. "I just hate that they keep finding ways to nickel-and-dime us in whatever way they can," said Matt Kee, 22, a gamer who took to Twitter in anger this month after Square Enix, which produces one of his favorite games, Kingdom Hearts, said it was pushing into NFTs. "I don't see anywhere mentioning how that benefits the gamer, how that improves gameplay. It's always about, 'How can I make money off this?'"
Much of their resentment is rooted in the encroachment of micro transactions in video games. Over the years, game makers have found more ways to profit from users by making them pay to upgrade characters or enhance their level of play inside the games. Even if people had already paid $60 or more for a game upfront, they were asked to fork over more money for digital items like clothing or weapons for characters.... Merritt K, a game streamer and editor at Fanbyte, a games industry site, said gamers' antagonism toward the companies has built up over the last decade partly because of the growing number of micro transactions. So when game makers introduced NFTs as an additional element to buy and sell, she said, players were "primed to call this stuff out. We've been here before."
That has led to bursts of gamer outrage, which have rattled the game companies. In December, Sega Sammy, the maker of the Sonic the Hedgehog game, expressed reservations about its NFT and crypto plans after "negative reactions" from users. Ubisoft, which makes titles like Assassin's Creed, said that it had misjudged how unhappy its customers would be after announcing an NFT program last month. A YouTube video about the move was disliked by more than 90 percent of viewers. "Maybe we under-evaluated how strong the backlash could have been," said Nicolas Pouard, a Ubisoft vice president who heads the French company's new blockchain initiative.
Game companies said their NFT plans were not motivated by profit. Instead, they said, NFTs give fans something fun to collect and a new way for them to make money by selling the assets. "It really is all about community," said Matt Wolf, an executive at the mobile game maker Zynga, who is leading a foray into blockchain games. "We believe in giving people the opportunity to play to earn."
The article also rounds up examples of game companies it says have "come out against crypto."
Then they were confronted by gamers like 18-year-old Christian Lantz, who for years has played GSC Game World's first-person shooter game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Mr. Lantz was incensed. He joined thousands of fans on Twitter and Reddit who raged against NFTs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s sequel. The game maker, they said, was simply looking to squeeze more money out of its players. The backlash was so intense that GSC quickly reversed itself and abandoned its NFT plan.
"The studio was abusing its popularity," Mr. Lantz, who lives in Ontario, said. "It's so obviously being done for profit instead of just creating a beautiful game...."
[C]lashes over crypto have increasingly erupted between users and major game studios like Ubisoft, Square Enix and Zynga. In many of the encounters, the gamers have prevailed — at least for now.... Players said they see the moves as a blatant cash grab. "I just hate that they keep finding ways to nickel-and-dime us in whatever way they can," said Matt Kee, 22, a gamer who took to Twitter in anger this month after Square Enix, which produces one of his favorite games, Kingdom Hearts, said it was pushing into NFTs. "I don't see anywhere mentioning how that benefits the gamer, how that improves gameplay. It's always about, 'How can I make money off this?'"
Much of their resentment is rooted in the encroachment of micro transactions in video games. Over the years, game makers have found more ways to profit from users by making them pay to upgrade characters or enhance their level of play inside the games. Even if people had already paid $60 or more for a game upfront, they were asked to fork over more money for digital items like clothing or weapons for characters.... Merritt K, a game streamer and editor at Fanbyte, a games industry site, said gamers' antagonism toward the companies has built up over the last decade partly because of the growing number of micro transactions. So when game makers introduced NFTs as an additional element to buy and sell, she said, players were "primed to call this stuff out. We've been here before."
That has led to bursts of gamer outrage, which have rattled the game companies. In December, Sega Sammy, the maker of the Sonic the Hedgehog game, expressed reservations about its NFT and crypto plans after "negative reactions" from users. Ubisoft, which makes titles like Assassin's Creed, said that it had misjudged how unhappy its customers would be after announcing an NFT program last month. A YouTube video about the move was disliked by more than 90 percent of viewers. "Maybe we under-evaluated how strong the backlash could have been," said Nicolas Pouard, a Ubisoft vice president who heads the French company's new blockchain initiative.
Game companies said their NFT plans were not motivated by profit. Instead, they said, NFTs give fans something fun to collect and a new way for them to make money by selling the assets. "It really is all about community," said Matt Wolf, an executive at the mobile game maker Zynga, who is leading a foray into blockchain games. "We believe in giving people the opportunity to play to earn."
The article also rounds up examples of game companies it says have "come out against crypto."
- "Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft's Xbox, told Axios in November that some games centered on earning money through NFTs appeared 'exploitative' and he would avoid putting them in the Xbox store."
- "Valve, which owns the online game store Steam, also updated its rules last fall to prohibit blockchain games that allow cryptocurrencies or NFTs to be exchanged...."
- "Tim Sweeney, the chief executive of Epic Games, the maker of the game Fortnite, said his company would steer clear of NFTs in its own games because the industry is riddled with 'an intractable mix of scams.' (Epic will still allow developers to sell blockchain games in its online store.)"
- The blowback has affected more than just game studios. Discord, the messaging platform popular with gamers, backtracked in November after users threatened to cancel their paid subscriptions over a crypto initiative."
Zynga (Score:5, Insightful)
an executive at the mobile game maker Zynga, who is leading a foray into blockchain games. "We believe in giving people the opportunity to play to earn."
If Zynga wants it, then it must be bad for gaming.
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Just like EA is with Battlefield 2042. The game was led in much hype from DICE and the fanbase who were going to get the best ever Battlefied!! but EA/DICE decided they knew better and decided with these season passes and Cammo upgrades for better income from the players.
Many player paid out $100+ dollars for this game pre-launch and many more after launch then came the slew of bugs and missing features and then finding out the paid season pass content is still months away.
Many are unhappy and Reddit is fil
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I usually know I'm done with a game when I spend more time on their forums than in the game itself.
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Just like them all (Score:3, Informative)
Just like...
...every game maker.
The thing is, while I understand people's frustration, the reality is that it's our (the players') fault for accepting the "free to play" slash microtransaction model of game playing. Remember when "free to play" was a dirty word? How people railed against it, laughed at it, and only a few games pushed through with it? Mostly those childish farm simulations. Kids grow up, though, and like the Pokemon cards and games that parents hated, but where Pokemon is still beloved by a generati
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Its not just games. Go to the app store on your phone and try to find an app that isn't free but with ads. I would (and do when its available) GLADLY pay a few dollars for an app rather than deal with ads popping up on my phone (often for free to play games ironically), but it's sometimes hard to even find a paid offering.
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There are a ton of games that either do ads, or they have some crazy-high subscription, like $9.99 a week. Or the game requires throwing money at it in a typical P2W model. Mobile gaming tanked after IAP became a thing in Android and iOS. Games went from paying a few bucks for something that was well done, to buying something where it was engineered to be impossible to play without throwing large sums of money at it. Because of the whole P2W model, coupled with all the ads, mobile gaming is pretty much
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NFT is basically showing who's the greediest game companies and people on the planet
Who's willing to sacrifice the actual quality of the thing for some extra bucks.
Interesting reactions (Score:3)
You can clearly see that some studios are actually at least partially listening to their customers. Then you get those like Sqaure Enix where their CEO Yoksuke Matsuda seems to be genuinely perplexed as to why people play games to have fun and then just snubs with the majority of his customers in favour of pushing out something unwanted so they can milk the few customers who don't play games for fun for more money.
At least that's my understanding:
“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.”
Re:Interesting reactions (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll try again soon enough, and gamers will eventually roll over once they're too fatigued to care anymore.
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Newer gamers who don't know anything else are conditioned to accept it as the normal state, because the alternative where games are mostly made to be fun is diminishing (maybe not fair to call them suckers at this point).
As time goes on their wallets will be more influential than those of older gamers who might reject these practices because they were conditioned differently by home entertainment stuff, where you didn't have to "Insert Coin
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A time where you bought (at least somewhat) finished games and then owned them. Games that you could run independently on the computer of console that you owned, without an internet connection and constantly phoning home, because they were designed to work in an isolated fashion without the need of micro-transactions.
I hardly play any games any more
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Things may improve. We may see a split from the AAA games which require the latest and greatest console, monthly subscriptions, pay-to-earn cryptocurrency, lots of purchases for DLC, weapons, loot packs, and other stuff, versus indie games from GOG or even Steam that run on PC hardware. There is definitely a market niche for good games that might not be at the top of the AAA charts. Stuff like Among Us comes to mind as something that is popular, but doesn't require a huge outlay of cash.
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I well remember the outrage when Half Life 2 was the first game that required online activation and a Steam account in order to play single-player content. It was sharply criticized as a ploy to advertise Steam but it's fairly normal now.
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Look at Bethesda's painful journey from "Horse Armor" to the Creators Club, where you get paid mods, which are then officially accepted by them.
Not to forget Fallout 76 which initially received tons of crap from gamers, but is now rated Mostly Positive on Steam. There they just cut out the middle man of mod creators and just went straight back to "Horse Armor".
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Not to forget Fallout 76 which initially received tons of crap from gamers, but is now rated Mostly Positive on Steam.
Well in a partial defence of Fallout 76, they did fix a lot of problems. I mean a *LOT* of problems. Changed game mechanics, added content (one of the biggest complaints about Fallout 76 was that it was barren) and it costs only a tiny fraction of what it did 3 years ago. Also with time there's a perception change in games. If we go through years of pitch meetings being told about the grand new MMORPG coming out and when it drops and lacks most of the RPG elements then people get upset. 3 years of reality h
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Well, maybe. Still not giving Fallout 76 a chance.
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Oh neither am I, fuck Bethesda, there's plenty of actual fun and more original games out there that don't amount to an attempted cash grab.
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This guy seriously said something _this_ extremely stupid? Impressive.
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People have been contributing since the first games that were able to be modded and the first MMO type games (MUDs). All without NFTs.
In the case of the latter it's usually an overlap of both having fun and contributing.
For example when I played Ultima Online in the late 90's I remember people who roleplayed as a bard, which you could hire for ingame money, telling a story through a song at guild meetings. I presume they had fun doing so, while contributing to the game and experience of
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Patch it is.. (Score:1)
GOOD (Score:5, Insightful)
That is all.
NFTs are a waste of resources, to supply a service nobody asked for, and which provide no actual value, except to create very expensive artificial scarcity out of a thing that is naturally non-scarce.
The sooner it dies in the burning dumpster fire it has set for itself, the better off the world will be.
(and on a personal note, I am disgusted by the degree of "throw the planet under the bus for a maybe-kinda-if-we-get-in-early-we-can-make-money-by-shafting-everyone-else pyramid scheme that NFTs represent, and even more disgusted by how many businesses are eager to get into that scheme. It indicates, blatantly, that they dont have anyone else's interests in mind.)
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Beat me to it.
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(and on a personal note, I am disgusted by the degree of "throw the planet under the bus for a maybe-kinda-if-we-get-in-early-we-can-make-money-by-shafting-everyone-else pyramid scheme that NFTs represent, and even more disgusted by how many businesses are eager to get into that scheme. It indicates, blatantly, that they dont have anyone else's interests in mind.)
That's not far removed from the way things worked before NFTs were invented.
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(and on a personal note, I am disgusted by the degree of "throw the planet under the bus for a maybe-kinda-if-we-get-in-early-we-can-make-money-by-shafting-everyone-else pyramid scheme that NFTs represent, and even more disgusted by how many businesses are eager to get into that scheme. It indicates, blatantly, that they dont have anyone else's interests in mind.)
That's not far removed from the way things worked before NFTs were invented.
Is that supposed do be some kind of excuse for them to do it now? If so, you have seriously misundersood the whole concept of "we have only one planet Earth".
Also, the old pyramid schemes I know of didn't burn electricity and spew greenhouse gases as a means to enrich the people at the top of the pyramid. They merely scammed gullible people into paying them via social engineering and empty promises of great riches. So this new level of pyramid schemes are more disgusting than their predecessors.
A deck of cards (Score:2)
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Re:GOOD (Score:5, Interesting)
NFTs are just a way of authenticating ownership of something on a publically auditable ledger.
That's the way it works in theory.
In practice, you can make as many NFTs as you want for a thing, and there's no way to know which one corresponds to actual ownership.
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NFTs are just a way of authenticating ownership of something on a publically auditable ledger.
That's the way it works in theory.
In practice, you can make as many NFTs as you want for a thing, and there's no way to know which one corresponds to actual ownership.
Yep. I prefer to call the so-called "Non-Fungible" Tokens, SFTs, Surprisingly Fungible Tokens.
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What people are going to encounter, and we may see some changes in copyright or IP law, is that owning a NFT for an image doesn't mean one owns the image's copyright... and it might be that owning a NFT without a license can be classified as infringement. It is only a matter of time before the lawyers start having a field day with NFTs on both sides. There already have been DMCA notices from NFT holders to copyright owners, and stuff like this means a ton of court cases which will set precedent in the nex
Re: GOOD (Score:3)
You're not entirety wrong, but you're either ignorantly or deliberately missing the point that (afaik) any and every mechanism that allows a gaming company to implement artificial scarcity has then been used to paywall ever-more of games' content that was formerly available in game.
There are certainly already a host of examples, from good (where the things aren't gameplay-meaningful) to bad (p2w). NFTs don't substantially increase that ability, no, but you can hardly argue that the in game store hasn't gen
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but also means acting like NFTs are some great evil just demonstrates you can't differentiate between the technology and a couple of stupid uses of the technology.
There's no benefit to a technology that exists only for the purpose of existing while being powered by a woefully inefficient scheme which we have done better in the past.
Blockchain despite all of its promises (including NFTs which derive from it) have yet to solve a single problem. Thus far every application of it including currencies, NFTs, logistics or whatever have been solved in better and more efficient ways with what came before. NFTs are the answer to a question no one ever asked, and not a good ans
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society continues to function perfectly normally and more efficiently on the concept of trust (relying on a central authority for documenting ownership)
Blockchain enthusiasts are like the early Internet "freedom fighters" ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore, 1990-ish). They think that they can bypass the government/large evil corporations by using a blockchain to buy things or record contracts or whatever, while overlooking their reliance on the government/large evil corporations to provide the telecommunication services which are the foundation of their whole system.
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Not quite. Actually it's even worse than you think. Yes blockchain enthusiasts effectively say you can route around the government just like the early freedom fighters, that's a thing which actually works. However.
1. In doing so they build up a reliance on another party (exchanges) who invariably are not covered by the same consumer protection laws, and then they get fucked.
2. They fundamentally haven't given a reason as to *WHY* you would want to route around a government. Censorship is bad and routing aro
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No. NFTs do not in any way authenticate ownership. They only show that some particular wallet address "paid" for a note field in a transaction. Whatever blockchain that transaction occurred on has zero legal authority over anything. No copyrights are assigned, no physical ownership changes, there's not even a guarantee that the same digital artifact wasn't sold on multiple blockchains or modified imperceptibly such
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But why do they have to be attached to cryptocurrency? What does mining provide to that ledger? Why can't the system just be SETI@Home and just distributes a GUID upon request that gets assigned to a "wallet" and is recorded on the chain with basic details of what the GUID represents? Even without the underlying crypto (which I assume is also the only reason people are pushing this MLM), NFTs in games sound dumb because even while you might transfer ownership (which can be done without NFTs) you can't trans
Re:GOOD (Score:5, Interesting)
NFTs can make it more attractive for artists to release stuff in the virtual world, and make their works more attractive for prospective buyers. A famous couturier can make a bespoke outfit for someone in Second Life (or whatever we got going these days); the outfit could be copied by others, but the virtual environment will label the original as genuine (using the NFT as proof), and perhaps even label the others as knock-offs. And if the NFT lives independently of the virtual environment, the person can take the outfit into other environments and show that it's genuine. Does all of that really matter in the grand scheme of things? It matters enough to a lot of people who are willing to pay for a specially commissioned work of art, with a guarantee that there are no copies (or at least the copies being recognizable as such). People pay a lot for branded apparel, and even more for limited edition items. Personally I don't care much for brands; if something looks good and if the quality is good, then it's good enough for me. But I'm not going to defraud anyone by buying a knock-off. In the virtual world, NFTs can help with that.
They don't have to be resource-hungry, as long as you park them on a blockchain with a small environmental footprint. Though I fully agree that 99% of all current NFT transactions out there are quick money grabs or money laundering schemes, or at best stupid rich people trying to flex.
Re:GOOD (Score:5, Informative)
They don't have to be resource-hungry, as long as you park them on a blockchain with a small environmental footprint.
Show us such a blockchain likely to be around long enough for meaningful persistence of those NFTs.
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A couple of the mainstream blockchains aim to move to proof of stake, which will help a great deal with the environmental impact.
Yes, and I encourage them to do that since we simply can't permit them to do proof of work at this point, but the fact is that proof of stake is inferior to proof of work when it comes to protecting the interests of everyone but the primary stake holder. The problem inherent to proof of stake is that whoever has the most stake in its value has the most to gain by gaming the system. They also have the most to lose, but criminals never think they're going to get caught, and never weigh the risks to others eve
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With the trillions of dollars in cryptocurrency, those ledgers likely will outlast our civilization, as they are going to be stored in some advanced medium somehow.
Storage is meaningless if you're not doing anything with the data. They might well write it out to some advanced storage medium which will outlast our civilization, but data is meaningless without computation.
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NFTs sound interesting, but if one removes the sizzle from the steak, it just means that someone is buying a signed Web URL which may or may not be around in the future. I much rather have a CD or a boxed set from a band I really like than some blockchain entry going to a wallet. Stuff breaks, passwords get lost, private keys become unreadable, and 20-30 years from now, there is a good chance the NFT will be useless, while a CD will likely still be on a shelf with the artwork.
The exception might be a sign
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NFTs have their uses
Name one. You lose points automatically for any use you name which doesn't already have a perfectly functioning alternative (e.g. legal deeds of ownership).
Somehow the concept of owning something has worked for hundreds of years before blockchain became a thing, and it seems to do the job not only well, but more efficiently than blockchain application du jour.
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If you are certain that your digital assets will never leave the current virtual environment they are in, then you are better off tracking them in that environment itself. That's how things are usually taking care of at the moment. B
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Lost points. Good work. An NFT isn't required simply because something is "digital". Quite the opposite. The NFT itself still points to something very much physical which would equally and more efficiently be handled with a classic deed of ownership.
The "but on the internet" meme should have died with patent applications in the 90s.
If you are certain that your digital assets will never leave the current virtual environment they are in, then you are better off tracking them in that environment itself.
No, that is not a given at all. In fact there are plenty of arguments against that (e.g. attack vectors affecting both assets and ownership equally).
Speaking of books and movies, and maybe the /. community will hate me as much as the publishers for suggesting this, but you could use blockchain technology to implement DRM that would be tied directly to ownership.
And do what? The fundamental
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An NFT is similar to the artist's signature on the print. Is that a bad thing? Not according to collectors or to the artists who can use it to make a bit more off their work.
The value of the signed print though is in the "proof of work", knowing that there are a limited number of signed prints because the artist only has so much time to sign them.
The "proof of work" involved in NFT art though is a different thing - just CPU cycles burning endlessly to do whatever. There's no inherent additional cost for duplication in the way that traditional art works. So it doesn't really feel like an equivalent scenario to me.
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Re: GOOD (Score:2)
Now if only (Score:2)
Now if only angry slashdotters could scare slashdot away from endless crypto bullshit
That won't happen until (Score:3)
the parent company [bizx.com] isn't directly tied to a dubious crypto "business".
Young men, growing up. (Score:5, Informative)
... 18-year-old Christian Lantz ... said ... "It's so obviously being done for profit instead of just creating a beautiful game...."
Matt Kee, 22 ... "It's always about, 'How can I make money off this?'"
Welcome to adulthood. Now you might understand why the older set is sometimes cranky.
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NFTs explained. (Score:3)
https://media.discordapp.net/a... [discordapp.net]
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A missed opportunity (Score:2)
Certainly these people saw Ready Player One! ? How else do you expect to have digital assets like exclusive mecha or Chuck Taylors that can be used anywhere in the coming "metaverse"? Even if we don't get there, having fungible digital assets (of a sort) would be amazing compared to the "walled garden" approach to assets that exist in persistent online games of the current age.
I'm not sure the "revolt" isn't paid advertising (Score:2)
>"It's so obviously being done for profit instead of just creating a beautiful game...."
Right. Right, kid. Game developers don't need to eat or to live anywhere. They work for free, purely for the joy of it. Why, companies give away free time on massive cloud networks just so you can sit there in the nude with a case of Mtn Dew calling everyone who beats you a child-molesting ethnic cheater of questionable parentage. They do this for the good of humanity and out of the kindness of their hearts!
I'm not su
Re: I'm not sure the "revolt" isn't paid advertisi (Score:2)
From the gamer's standpoint this should not be a huge problem unless it takes away from the playability of the game, more so than has already been agreed to by the free to play model.
It might even be one of the less stupid current uses of NFTs.
As for the profit motive, we're going to continue seeing stuff like this. With FTP games they do have to recoup their development and hosting costs, not to mention that companies do exist to make a profit and not just to recoup costs. And maybe selling in-game item
opportunity? (Score:2)
""It really is all about community," said Matt Wolf, an executive at the mobile game maker Zynga, who is leading a foray into blockchain games. "We believe in giving people the opportunity to play to earn.""
They can spin this all they want, but no one plays games to collect and sell NFTs. At best this will turn into a bunch of bots mining NFTs like people did with World of Warcraft back in the day.
Community? Sure... (Score:2)
How many games where in-game assets are actually resellable? what would the players make by selling the assets? In-g
Ask Blizzard (Score:2)
They should ask Blizzard how that real money auction house idea went.
In it for the Money (Score:2)
Were I a stockholder in a game development company (and... *checks his portfolio*... yes - yes I am) I would want to know they're looking at this whole space. Some individuals might be in it "for the love of the game", but I'm not. Maximize my investment please.
I grew up in the "here's $50-$60 for your entire game" paradigm and I do miss it. For that sum I usually got 35-60 hours of fun. It was a very straightforward transaction. Now it's wide open. You can spend pennies per hour, or vastly more in tiny chu
Yep (Score:2)
Rick Sanchez (Score:2)
Wow, companies listen to their customers (Score:1)
We should have more of this.