One of my friends from California asked me to review this video in Discord today. I asked him if I could just judge the entire 30 minute video by the title, because I easily could have. Even in retrospect.
NFTs are a pure scam. Blockchain gaming is a pyramid scheme. Play-to-Earn is not only a scam, it's deeply immoral.
Spoken like someone who owns zero crypto in general.
So what are this guy's credentials?
I've been developing video games for 25 years.
Wow, he must really know his shit, right?
WRONG!
Just like an economist who's been an economist for 25 years and says Bitcoin is going to zero, a game developer who's been in the industry for 25 years is going to get it exactly wrong 99% of the time when it comes to NFTs and Play-To-Earn. This so-called "expertise" is not only a signal that the person has absolutely no idea what they are talking about, but also has the pre-conditioning infused in them that makes them guess even more wrong than someone with absolutely no idea about how any of this works.
On with the show!
I think this is going to do irreparable damage to the industry... and it's time for someone to say "no".
That is laughable.
So you think if you can convince enough people to stand up and say 'no' to crypto and NFTs and play-to-earn that magically development will halt? This combined with the fact that later in the video he claims that all these things will be gone in two years and play-to-earn is just a passing fad... all comically laughable scenarios that will never happen.
Say what you will about the integrity of crypto/NFT/play-to-earn, but to think you can actually stop it from happening with a YouTube video? Really? Are you high? Or just suffering from delusions of persecution and grandeur? Seriously though.
First ten minutes is a rant about interoperability.
The point he begins with is his weakest argument, so he does not start off strong. He talks a bit about World of Warcraft and artificial scarcity and how he's built economies and how he knows all about this stuff. Yeah, sure bud, you got all the answers.
In the end he makes the ridiculous claim that the main purpose with NFTs is interoperability. The this example, people are worried that Blizzard would shut down their WOW servers and all the digital value stored on those servers would be deleted... ah he was so close to grasping the point here.
The real point is that with a community controlled environment, the players own their accounts/data and they can't be censored and they know the servers will never be taken down because there are dozens of them up and running 24/7. Does he mention any of this? No.
Interoperability? What?
Rather than talk about the importance of community ownership and open-source development... he talks about bringing NFTs from one game... into another game... for ten minutes. Like, I know people have talked about this stuff in theory, but no one is even trying to do this, and even if they did it's just a little side bonus, not the entire point of NFTs. Why is this the focus point for the first ten minutes? Is it because the argument is weak and he doesn't actually know what he is talking about? The answer is a resounding, 'yes'.
Is it unfair that someone from one game could bring their NFTs into another game and dilute the new game's economy? Yeah... it would be. Again, this is a problem that doesn't even exist. Is it a problem when I try to bring my world of Warcraft sword with +10 attack to all undead into a kids game with zero battle mechanics? Yeah... because again, he's inventing problems and scenarios that don't actually exist in reality. Seriously though this guy has been to too many crypto conventions where people are just talking out their ass the entire time.
Every play-to-earn game is Axie Infinity (duh!)
If you don't agree then clearly you're an idiot!
Play-to-earn is immoral.
By focusing on the broken mechanics of a single shitty game, this guy conflates Axie Infinity with every other play-to-earn game that will ever exist in the history of mankind. How am I supposed to take that sentiment seriously? Of course there are scams. Of course there is VC money pumping and dumping everything in all directions. We don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is ignorance and blind rejection at its finest.
Smooth Love Potions (SLP) are akin to loan sharking.
Yes, that is accurate.
And also totally irrelevant. The focus-fire on Axie here really shows a completely limited scope in terms of global perspective on the issue. Play-To-Earn means play to earn. If you can play the game... and then earn money playing the game... then it's play to earn. That is the only requirement of play-to-earn. Again, none of these problems actually exist on a fundamental core level.
Rather, what he is doing is assuming that ALL play to earn games are shitty loan-sharking applications that build no actual value. Why would someone assume that this is how it has to be? It's a maddening argument.
Play to Earn games are not an opportunity for developing nations.
Again... wrong.
If you offer everyone in the world $500 a month to play a game, and some of those people couldn't find a job and $500 a month is actually good pay, then it doesn't matter how little value the game is building or how boring the grind is. An opportunity is an opportunity. Plain and simple: person couldn't get a job; now they are their own boss and they are happy with the outcome. The other arguments are totally irrelevant (although interesting and insightful at times).
The grind has to be boring on purpose in order to have value.
Again... totally false.
And also not any different than non crypto games like World of Warcraft. Anyone who played WOW knows all about "Chinese Gold Farmers" and the slightly racist connotation of that phrase. Grinding gold was a chore, so people in America were willing to pay for it and outsource it to other countries. This is not an issue that only affects crypto games, making the argument against crypto totally irrelevant, once again.
In addition, the premise itself is absurd.
To say that the grind has to be not-fun to make it worth value is ridiculous. This is why I'm excited for Ragnarok. I think playing the game will be fun. Playing the game will provide XP tokens. People are going to buy those XP tokens, not because they think playing the game is boring, but because they want to progress further and level up their cards more.
In addition, they need to rank up to earn prizes at the end of the year. So, which part of this grind isn't fun? Again, the argument is nonsensical and only applies to Axie Infinity as the archetype for all play-to-earn games. A foolish notion indeed.
This argument also completely ignores the fact that people who are better at the game might get a bigger reward while farming. The competition aspect is completely ignored, because again this person can't even fathom a blockchain game that isn't shit. The lack of vision here is truly disturbing.
What this guy Chris Natsuume (wow that's a bad ass Japanese name) fails to understand is that the grind doesn't have to be not-fun. The grind simply has to be less-fun than the end-game, or the end-game has to be competitive in such a way that buying extra is worth not playing the game 16 hours a day. I feel like that should be obvious, but I guess not. It's also possible that even someone who plays 16 hours a day still feels incentivized to buy more. Again, this should be obvious given supply and demand mechanics combined with competitive factors and future speculation.
Also, how many people actually want to play a game 16 hours a day?
Doesn't matter how fun the game is, that's pure addiction. If someone can make more money at their job than they would playing the game, buying in-game resources makes a lot of sense, especially because those resources are now player owned and can be resold without corporate intervention. Is any of this mentioned in the video? No, of course not. The idea of community ownership is completely ignored when making every argument.
This video makes me unemployable, but I don't care. [Speaking my truth makes it worth it.]
Wow, bro, get off the cross already.
This statement is HILARIOUSLY ironic... because the play-to-earn systems we are building here trend in the direction of community ownership and being our own boss. This guy is just so engrained in the legacy system that he couldn't even imagine what it was like to be his own boss. Legendary.
Mark my words, this dude will end up working for a blockchain community once he is unequivocally proven wrong and realizes he can make ten times more money working on a project that isn't corporate bullshit.
That VC money though.
- There is VC money everywhere in crypto.
- There are centralized dev teams that unilaterally control the games.
- That's not how it's supposed to be, but that's how it is now.
- To assume this will always be the case is a foolish error.
- Crypto doesn't need VCs, these protocols are self-funding.
- Crypto doesn't need dev teams, these protocols are self-governing.
The issue of governance and control is a big one. This is why I always tell people to buy Bitcoin. It doesn't matter if Bitcoin distribution is centralized to a bunch of big whales. Why? Because Bitcoin whales don't actually have any control over Bitcoin governance. It doesn't matter how many tokens you own within a POW system. The actual people in charge are the developers and the miners. And the system is intrinsically designed to be dependable and change very little over time. Feature not bug.
Why bring up Bitcoin?
Because the chance that this guy owns any is basically zero, which is a very telling situation. If someone doesn't know why Bitcoin has value, how are they going to know why gaming NFTs and play-to-earn has value? That's an extra level of complexity, so obviously he's not going to get it at all. Combine that with his "experience" building corporate powerhouse games, and his understanding of this emergent ecosystem is even more befuddled.
Conclusion
I knew my friend was wasting 30 minutes of my time, but he tricked me by saying I could turn it into a blog post. He was right. I lose.
I basically knew exactly which mistakes this guy was going to make just by reading the title of the video. Like clockwork, all these people completely ignore the importance of community ownership and development, while focusing on the scams and flawed iterations of the prototype models.
Watching this video was like watching someone say cars will never become a thing because they get stuck in the mud, and horses are obviously superior, and if you disagree you are an idiot. He's already decided that debate is not allowed and he is 100% correct in his assessment. Seriously, his video will not age well, but also it won't matter much because the blockchain will employ him anyway without judgement ten years down the road. Blockchain does not hold a grudge, and neither should we.
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Return from Game Dev Who Owns Zero Crypto Lectures Us On NFT Scam. to edicted's Web3 Blog
