This is a long read that I'm saving for later, but some of you might be interested in this interview with Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister who also worked for Valve at one point on their in-game digital economies.
Saw a tweet that they just recorded a new episode of Play Watch Listen with Troy discussing the tweets and the whole thing, so should be up tomorrow. Should be interesting.
NFTs in gaming are like the world's dumbest version of Pass The Parcel. Whoever is left holding the NFT when the servers are shut off, loses.
A lot of the NFT racket only really makes sense from the perspective of its advocates believing truly they will make all the money because ‘new technology’ and then having to make up reasons for why the technology is actually needed / useful after the fact.
The thing that gives me solace is that the wider online community consistently and definitively calls NFTs out as the shameless, useless grift that they are.
I mean it annoys me but I get how people of twitter can be so ignorant of game development that they think you can just transplant assets in different games and engines.
When your whole company is based off of that ignorance then that's some next level grifting.
Good god that is some woeful spiel, rich people are so terrified at missing on the next big thing they are throwing mud all over the place hoping something sticks. Loads of people will lap this up as well its bonkers.
I bet Netflix still wanna adapt it though.
From looking at the tweets of Troy Baker and the company he's partnering with, it seems like they'll use AI to take voice actors work so you can essentially make your character say anything in the voice actor's voice, and the voice actor then gets royalties from the NFT too.
So Troy Baker, who pretty much voices everyone anyway, can sell his voices/performances out to companies who then don't need to hire actual voice actors. In particular, if they can't afford Troy Baker's actual VO fee, they can just get an AI NFT of him which he gets royalties of, instead of hiring a lesser-known VO performer.
For a man who prides his performance and acting so much, he's obviously never heard an AI try to replicate actual dialogue/speech.
Edit: Holy sh*t, this is from the company's website....
The Lore
On Ethyear 0, the Sun, which has supported and nurtured life on Earth for millennia, imploded and scorched the entirety of Milky Way with its fiery touches. Luckily, we had built colonies in other galaxies before our homeland was burnt to crisp.
Eons passed, and homo survivalis, or "Terrans", as we had come to be known, had lost the ability to not only speak, but produce any form of nonverbal noise from our windpipe. Laughter was gone in our lives. We had to guess how frustrated or sad someone was from their facial expression only. This was all due to the fact that we had become overly reliant on vision, consuming only images, gifs, and texts.
Abundance of visual display, from personal electronics to embedded screens in our eyes, led us to mistakenly construe audio an inefficient way of conveying and gathering information, which ultimately led to our vocal cords deteriorating completely over centuries. The same fate occurred in all races of humans across different universes.
Then on Ethyear 8,888 a group of 100 ethereal beings by the name of Alpha Centum, or "Centums", started appearing in various places.
They were omnipotent cosmic energies, spiritual beings that flowed from one galaxy to another beyond temporal or spatial limitations. They each possessed one authentic voice that demanded such respect and awe, as the world had long forgotten what “a real voice” was.
The Centums summoned 1,000 Cosmic Architects, or "Architects", to obey their beckonings: they were charged with creating new, and revitalizing old, planets, and to manage which Terrans were deserving of a voice of their own.
In return, Architects were awarded voices generated from mixing two pure Centum voices, while Terrans were given voices that were bred randomly from a multitude of voices. No one knew why Centums were here - but everyone knew that this was our only chance at recovering what made us, and our ancestors, truly human.
I can only pray and hope that it was an AI who wrote that garbage and not an actual human being...
If you read the companies spiel it's very obvious they are jumping on NFT and haven't a clue what they are doing and no plan going forward other than to get shareholder funding and then probably **** off with the investor money. And then there's the 'promise' to move to a more environmentally friendly model which every NFT criminal organisation promises while knowingly not being able to deliver on it.
One of the worst cases of a self-cancellation I've seen.
It'd be tragic if it wasn't so stupid.
No wonder he was missing from the episode of Play Watch Listen where they talk about how pointless and rubbish NFTs are in games
Et tu, Baker?
"You can hate. Or you can create."
I choose hate.
A pox on NFTs and all things cryptocurrencies.
🙄
I know the environmental aspect gets brought up a lot and I understand thats a big issue.
But putting it aside. Is this just not the same sort of c*nts that ruined comics in the 90's with over speculating their value and in the end forced us to endure a whole bunch of rubbish because the industry thought every shiny comic issue could be worth millions in the future?
You can talk about the potential of NFTS for ensuring that someone can claim ownership over something but
Frankly it just feels like the same sh*tty speculation bullsh*t we get everywhere else just trying to hip with the kids.
It won’t go to Wikipedia though. It’s going to a social network thing Jimmy Wales set up called WT.Social.
“The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed in an email to Slate that its board of directors requested that Wales not earmark the funds for the foundation to make clear that this was Wales’ personal venture and not a Wikipedia-endorsed fundraising initiative.”
It also caused a huge debate in the Wiki community itself, mainly over the argument that an NFT is a fundamental betrayal of Wikipedia’s core ethos.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/jimmy-wales-birth-of-wikipedia-nft-auction.html
It depends on what is in the contract. Some NFTs will bring with it full copyright and publishing permissions others will simple be a proof of ownership but without the ability to sell or even display it and the artist would hold the publishing rights.
When you make the NFT you set the terms. Then someone that wants to buy it on those terms can. Simply and without a hitch ge cost of getting copyright lawyers involved.
Wikipedia just sold there first edit as an NFT. It went to auction at Christy's and they got 750k. That money will be used to keep Wikipedia going.
Something is only worth as much as someone else is willing to pay for it. The people who created the concept of NFTs and are propogating them have created the hype/value of NFTs. People are buying the concept/privilege/rights of owning something, as opposed to actually owning something.
Let's not also forget how exploitative things like this can be, especially in gaming. The whole CS:GO Lotto thing comes to mind in particular. Games introducing NFTs, to me, could see an introduction of similar means of exploitation. Lootboxes on steroids.
Your example of buying the rights to a song versus just buying that song via Itunes/Spotify is an interesting one, because buying an NFT does not confer any rights to you. You've got exactly the same rights to use it as someone that right clicked it, i.e. none, apart from the right to tell people that you "own" it. You can't license it commercially, you can't put it in an advert, etc.
I really don't see what NFTs do that can't already replicated with a piece of paper and current copyright law. It really is a technology looking for a solution.
Why do you need to prove which is the original? With physical media, sure, but not with digital. Artists should ensure they hold copyright over the art/song so that it can't be used or profited on without their permission, but the concept of ownership over a digital file in a public space is ridiculous.
NFTs have created the concept of ownership of digital files, in order to justify the existence of NFTs. You're not buying a product, you're buying a receipt. Even if you can prove a digital file is the original, why does that matter? Again, physical media, sure. But a digital file? So what? If I can rightclick the image and save it, I have an exact copy. That doesn't work with physical items, they're completely incomparable.
Again, NFTs have created the concept of ownership of digital files in order to justify NFTs.
Digital media can be infinitely replicated by its very nature. The concept of the ‘original’ file becomes meaningless. Adding a digital blockchain signature that affords no legal rights does not change that. It’s manufacturing an awkward non-solution that’s inherently contradictory to the nature of the medium, grounded in a deeply, regressively capitalist view of art and technology.
Besides, the whole central problem with blockchain is that it insists on placing ‘ownership’ - and, by extent, financial worth - on the file. That is fundamentally and dramatically at odds with the utopian ideal of a free, democratic internet that blockchain advocates purport to support. It’s all about trading and money - a very particular, narrow-minded and unequal perspective of artistic and technological freedom.
This is an excellent analysis that gets at the fundamental contradictions of Web3 in a way I cannot at: https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/
That is literally the reason NFTs exist.
You can get an expert to look at a copy of the mona Lisa and say it is fake. You can't do that with most digital art because it can be copied exactly 1 to 1.
So how else do you show that it is the original?
A copied JPG or MP3 is functionally identical to the the original. A digital or even physical copy of the Mona Lisa isn’t. That is the fundamental flaw at the heart of the NFT: physical and digital art are fundamentally different things.
As for the final paragraph, that’s the utopian ideal that has so far not been borne out by crypto. In fact, quite the opposite has come to pass: the creation of a *new* elite, with the wealth disproportionately distributed to a tiny amount of people and the emergence of new financial speculation markets. I do think cryptocurrency has some benefit in providing a more secure platform for, say, rights activists in authoritarian states who need to operate outside the traditional financial channels. That’s a minority use case so far. And NFTs are more worthless again.
You can right-click and save an Avatar. You can also take a photo of the Mona Lisa and hang it in your house and laugh at da Vinci for being a stupid painterbro.
The art world is a weird one built on hype. But art is subjective. If someone wants to buy a painting that is a red blob they can. If they want to pay €2 or €2million for it who am i to stop them.
I'm not arguing that NFTs in gaming is a good or bad idea. But I see no reason why it shouldn't be a thing.
I think funding via NFTs is short-sighted at the moment. The short term ability to pay for the spiralling development costs and stay independent is going to lead to long term legal battles down the line.
What happens when you want to shut down your online only game and everyone that owns that NFT is no longer able to access it, will you have to give them a way to access it forever. What happens if they "own it" and no longer want it in your game? Can they force you to pull it? What if there is a bug and it doesn't render properly. Will you have to maintain it for years to come?
It will get messy.
There is a tiny section of the NFT market that is in a silly bubble. Much like the .com and the video game bubbles in the past they will pop but the underlying technology will stay the course.
Crypto on the other hand offers a lifeline for so many of the worlds poor that have historically been kept out of the financial system. People that live a comfortable existence in countries with stable economies forget that most of the world doesn't have access to a bank account. Countries are held hostage to the dollar. Economies are destroyed to make the wealthy elite a few extra billion.
At least Netflix, Spotify et al serve a quantifiable purpose and "need" for modern living; no more than old school broadcasting caused surges in the national grid when kettles were turned on nationwide during ad-breaks. It's just a cost of the standard of living we have.
NFTs are pointless grifts adding no demonstrable benefit except those coining it from the gullible. Just brainfarts of crypto-bros lost in their own hype, answering questions nobody asked while crucifying the environment as they go. My wife is an illustrator, and of her limited vantage, and the art community she swims, neither have either need or enthusiasm for NFTs as some protector of their rights. They're usually happy if they just get paid 🙂
NFTs are exponentially more power-hungry than any other form of modern media distribution. We’ll wait til Etherium actually makes their long promised, oft delayed change to proof of stake - for now, it’s an environmental catastrophe on a mass scale. And yes, data centres are bad too - but again traditional internet protocols are exponentially more efficient than current blockchain technology.
Even putting aside the environmental concern, there’s nothing badly needed about NFTs. There’s probably a small amount of digital artists and collectors who would benefit from it. But for the most part it wraps up art in horrifying layers of post-capitalist speculation and financial chaos. It creates so many problems - from scams to crypto bubbles. It’s a hyper-libertarian take on art ownership that encompasses all kinds of nasty ****, from money laundering to straight up Ponzi schemes. And yes, the traditional art market is heinous in so many ways too. We’re now just creating a grim digital version of it. For the vast majority of people invested in NFTs, it’s not about a pure belief in its capacity to support digital artists - it’s about trying to make as much money as possible by being an early investor in a new technology. Its advocates use the language of dismantling problematic existing systems (and in a limited set of circumstances with cryptocurrency there’s some legitimacy to the argument), but in reality it’s just creating problematic new systems instead of actually addressing the many class and structural problems of modern society.
I have yet to see a single example of how any of this will benefit video games as a medium or art form, beyond making a quick buck for companies willing to cash in on the crypto cultists.
And you can still right click and save a cryptobro’s hilariously ugly and garish procedural monkey avatar :)
