Activision Blizzard King, the result of mergers between three previously independent (and hugely successful in their own right!) companies

Well, his point was that the CEO was being given reasonable, even somewhat modest, compensation - but he really isn’t, because his official (annual) compensation doesn’t include his enormous extant ownership stake in the company that generates income. Lars is on the list because of his ownership stake, but they’re…

“Do any of them need the money?”

So... NFTs are environmentally destructive and a total scam, i.e. just entirely terrible right now, but Kotaku is biased for focusing on the reality and not talking about some hypothetical future uses that might never happen? (And which may not actually even be possible?)

I’m wondering how much money they actually made, in between the team they needed to set up to create this venture and minting costs. Whatever it was, the actual revenue is absolutely peanuts, for a company with billions in dollars in profits - even if the NFTs sell again, for a substantial price, their cut will still…

Oh, you’re just a troll, ok.

“the average salary of a game developer is $101.6K”

Yeah, the list is weird because I’m not sure they’re being consistent, but also because they’re comparing apples and oranges, basically - but assuming everyone on the list is all apples. I.e. comparing someone who got brought on as a CEO and is being regularly paid with obscene amounts of money/stock/whatever, versus…

“a 2nd generation NFT built with AI and high-functioning utility that provides you an ownership to a unique voice in the Metaverse.” The idea is that an artist creates a recording, someone buys it, and that someone can then use it for “in-game chats, zoom calls, YouTube & Tiktok,”

Uh, actually, his relatively low pay looks like it’s because he really, really doesn’t need the money, and his pay is more symbolic than anything:

“From what I understand you can encode data in NFTs.”

Yes, indeed, the idea of game objects that work in other games isn’t logically impossible - as you say, a (small) consortium of developers can agree on a standard of how the game code for items would work and how NFTs would correspond to particular game objects (not that the NFT itself would help do any of that) and…

“Pretty much everything Crypto bros claim NFTs make possible in gaming we’ve had the technology to do for years.”

I think maybe he’s alluding to an issue that’s key to any kind of game doing real-money transactions - you have to convince players that the game is worth spending money in (or time and effort, in the case of volunteers making content). His hope is that with NFTs, it won’t matter if anyone actually cares about the…

Leaving aside what a dumb and awful worldview his idea of gaming involves, NFTs don’t actually do anything to fulfill the (vague) business vision he’s describing. These gaming executives are so hot to jump on the NFT bandwagon, but none of them seem to have a clue how it will actually work for them.

For NFTs in general, no - they’re mostly scams and/or money laundering vehicles, and only sometimes work as pyramid schemes. (Even in the “legit” marketplaces, there’s so much “wash trading” i.e. people selling their NFTs to themselves to inflate the sell price, for them to work as pyramid schemes.) For games, that’s…

I just make the distinction that the discussion around NFTs says, implicitly or explicitly (and totally incorrectly), that there’s an ownership relationship between the file and NFT, and that causes people to misinterpret the link in the NFT, but the NFT itself says no such thing.

You have a receipt that says you own the thing at the end of the link, that’s it.

...that file can be deleted and now all you have is your proof that you own...nothing. Of course, depending on the fine print...

“Is Blizzard supposed to be responsible for everything their employees choose to do online?”