I’m not sure how many people really are paying exorbitant prices (there’s a lot of people “selling” themselves their NFTs to inflate the apparent value), but I suspect the people spending the most (relative to what they can afford) are individuals who think they’re real investments. I suspect companies that buy NFTs…

The specific flavor of con-man known as the “snake oil salesman” has always had a lot of overlap with cult leaders (of all sorts)...

Yeah, exactly - the seller’s only costs are whatever they initially paid for it (assuming they didn’t mint it themselves) and the market fees for their bogus sales. So technically they still do need a bigger fool, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear - the fool is the one who buys the thing at any price.

I’m assuming the appeal for publishers is specifically about NFT marketplaces/contracts where the creator gets a cut of all subsequent sales. I also think they’re counting on game item NFTs being sold for orders of magnitude more than they otherwise would be.  I do think reality is going to be colliding hard with…

“but at least those people have to pay Christie’s/Sotheby’s etc. a % each time they engage in this manipulation.”

“still dubious af that it would even work on multiple games from one publisher if they don’t use the same character models”

“Once the publishers actually learn from the devs how this isn’t remotely feasible”

“It’s called pump and dump and it’s certainly not new.”

“I’m really not into being a gamer during the NFT craze of 2023-2028.”

“it has the potential to increase the average amount exchanged during a microtransaction”

It is. The specific problem is that the way they’re going to make money (if it works the way they hope it will) is that suckers will pay many times more for exactly the kinds of things publishers are selling now, if they wrap it in an NFT. No company needs that kind of cynical opportunism. But I suspect many of these…

Also, I think a lot of people are getting into crypto because they’re they’re looking for a get-rich quick scheme and are desperate - in many countries wages have been stagnant for decades, there aren’t paths to upward economic mobility, investments have low returns at the moment... they’re more willing to take the…

It’s pretty telling that everyone talking about how NFTs will “solve problems” in games aren’t themselves game developers (and have no idea what they’re talking about), whereas the people in the industry (e.g. CEOs) pushing for NFTs in gaming have no coherent vision for how they’d specifically work, they just see them…

You don’t just sell things once, though. The whole scheme relies on selling things on to someone else. It relies on there being a bigger sucker willing to pay more money for the thing you already spent (too much) money on, inflating the value of the holdings of those who got in first. This is why a lot of NFT owners…

I figure the people “interested” either a) are ignorant but curious (and once they find out about NFT/crypto, they’ll recoil in horror), or b) don’t care what it is, they just see it as a means of making (more) money. I’m really, really hoping it’s more (a) at this point, but some of the big publishers have made it…

Yeah, I found that quite disturbing. I can only hope that those people are “interested” in the sense that they don’t know anything about it, and upon being educated will realize NFTs serve no technical purpose and none of it will benefit their games at all. However, I fear some people will realize that - and then…

“It’s only a bad move for a company if they’re on the bottom.”

“Not having enough time can be a problem but it does tend to at least result in a shipped product”

you’d think that being bought out by MSoft would smooth a lot of the problems that saw longer dev cycles for these comparatively small projects

four years now just buying up everything under the sun and what exactly do they have to show for it?