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Penny Arcade - Comic - Thumbs Down
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Thumbs Down
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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"There's more companies making games now than ever before in history" or whatnot.
NFT?
No
Fuckin'
Thanks
If that's it, what is the actual proposed use of NFTs here? You build up a character, then sell it using an NFT to someone for lots of real-world money? Isn't that what people do already?
Two reasons, the first being pretty obvious: pay-to-win is the death's kiss for a game. It's like selling aimbots to people. You'd be left with a piece of garbage, in the end. Or the person you managed to hoodwink into buying it would be.
The second reason is just how shaky the concept of ownership-by-NFT is. The NFT isn't actually necessary to transfer the ownership of the character. You just give them the credentials to the account. If you wanted to transfer the character but not give them your whole account, you'd need the cooperation of the game developer. And if you have that, you don't need environmentally unfriendly NFTs. They just set an owner id from one value to another and now you own it.
To add to the MarioKart analogy, the NFT is a piece of paper. You had to cut down an entire tree just to make that piece of paper. On it is the words "I own Mario." The paper is not a legal contract, and giving someone the paper doesn't actually give them Mario. It just gives them the piece of paper that says they have Mario. You have to arrange some other way to actually give them your Mario that you've built up.
Basically, you summed it up in your post: "Isn't that what people do already?" The answer is, of course, yes (for some games like WoW). NFT adds nothing to that existing process other than environmental damage and the ability to get scammed.
As the very article that Jerry linked to already says,
Edit: Corrected "pay for play" to "pay-to-win."
My bad, it was a little obscure and not a direct quote
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/08/17
For a good explanation on why NFTs are a scam, this Twitter thread is solid:
"Yes, it's worthless, but you get the proof that you OWN something worthless" like you almost got it dude.
It's inaccurate because you're not going to have Mario. You're going to have Yellow Toad. Yellow Toad has terrible stats and never wins races except every now and then when the game matches you against kids or maybe bots, out of pity. You spent two hundred and fifty dollars on the kart equivalent of blind bags and the best thing you got was Yellow Toad, and at the rate you're winning you can maybe hope for one more bag every two weeks.
Maybe if you were a real payer and dropped five thousand dollars on the game there'd be a chance you'd have Mario. But as it is now you have spent two hundred and fifty dollars on a game you do not now and may never actually enjoy.