LogFAQs > #961635935

STEROLIZER posted...

Say you happen to play Fortnite against a twitch streamer of modest following. That twitch streamer like your character's outfit, and comments on it -- his viewers also comment on it. One of his viewers is a rich guy who brokers a deal to purchase it from you, and then transfers it to the Metaverse, and now his Meta Avatar wears your Fortnite skin while its browsing Wikipedia.

Alternatively, they hit the PrintScreen button, pay a graphic designer $100 to replicate it for them, and get the same effect for a fraction of the cost.

STEROLIZER posted...

Yea, that scenario is highly unlikely, but the point is...no matter how unlikely it is now opportunity that exists when previously it didn't. So, yea, NFTs do the same thing but provide more opportunity to the gamer...so why the f*** not, eh?

Because when games are designed around players being able to purchase in-game bonuses, they tend to suck for people that don't spend the extra money. This is true whether we're talking about loot boxes, traditional microtransactions, or official RMT. The extent to which that is true varies by game. CS:GO's tradable items are pretty much all cosmetic (to my knowledge), and in both CS:GO and TF2's case, you get more than enough items (cosmetic or otherwise) dropping through normal play to have a good time, even if you'll have to resign yourself to never having the rarest cosmetic stuff if you don't want to buy it. DotA 2 similarly just has cosmetic stuff (plus the occasional extra minigames for those that purchase battle passes), with the rarest and most interesting stuff paywalled, but the game's quite enjoyable without that. Diablo 3, on the other hand, actively sabotaged its loot system to promote RMAH usage, and the whole game suffered tremendously as a result.

As much as publishers trot out the "it's optional!" excuse whenever people criticize them for greedy monetization schemes, they don't actually want it to be optional. They do everything in their power to encourage players to fork over extra money, stopping just short of making it actually mandatory because that would be bad PR. Any NFT integration is going to be no different. You'll get people defending it because they're clinging to get-rich-quick fantasies (*cough*), but ultimately, NFT's implementation is going to be done in a manner that pushes players that want to play for free (or not even free, since they already spent $70 on the game) into spending extra money. That makes for an objectively worse game for non-whales.

If you doubt this, just look at the letter Squenix's president wrote: He spends a great deal of it expressing thinly-veiled disdain for people that just want to buy a game from a game developer and play it for fun. These people don't like that paradigm, because it leaves control over that sweet, juicy revenue stream in the hands of players that are making the decision to play entirely on their own. The term "play to earn" is telling of what they want: They want players working for them. They want players to use their leisure time to make money for the companies not because they like the idea of playing the games, but because they feel compelled or obligated to. That is going to make for worse games. That's going to get even worse when the NFT bubble inevitably bursts and companies outright stop supporting the infrastructure, leaving countless players with nothing to show for the work they thought would be profitable for them and a terrible game that might not even run at that point.