Drawing the line at NFT Games?
I originally wanted to start this post with a list of changes in the games industry, changes to games, how they are developed, released, and played, and explain how they made gaming worse over the last 25 years. I decided against it. If you do not understand how day-1 patches, on-disc DLC, microtransactions, invasive DRM, and the absence of LAN/offline play have made games worse over time, I don’t know what to tell you. The same economic pressures that made AAA games more expensive to fund and soul-crushing to work on also those games less fun to play. In order to squeeze as much money as possible out of games, game design has been tainted by monetisation, and monetisation takes every opportunity to take the fun out of games and hide it behind a paywall.
Even existing games are not safe from this. You used to be able to play Rocket League on Linux, but now you can’t.
Not all games have become FarmVille, but games becoming more like FarmVille - not fun, but a tedious grind - has been normalised. A large part of the hype around NFTs is just a re-branding of existing monetisation schemes.
This poses a significant problem when I look at the criticisms of “NFT games“. Almost none of the drawbacks of NFT games are new. They are same the things we have seen for years, but now they are on the blockchain. The blockchain is almost always an afterthought, and the developer’s servers are the actual authority on game state. Most NFT games could easily “patch out“ all the blockchain and smart contracts with an update, leaving the gameplay side intact.
Some games have already showed us that the game code takes precedence over NFTs, and have removed tokens - so much for provable, unassailable owenership of digital goods! Games could even selectively blacklist some NFTs and not others.
Taking the blockchain out of a tedious NFT game like Axie Infinity would leave a FarmVille style game, with all the microtransactions that make the game not fun still intact, and all the digital goods stored on directly game servers.
Conversely, adding blockchain technology to an existing AAA game will not automatically make the game design worse, what makes it worse is pay-to-win mechanics, a degraded standard experience intended to make the player reach for the wallet to alleviate pain and boredom by paying his way out, advertising DLC you are “missing out on“ if you play the main game without it, and so on. Storing those on the blockchain will not degrade the game. Having in-app purchases at all is the problem.
Theoretically, backing in-game inventory with NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain could allow players to trade items outside of the game, but in practice, this only makes sense if the items are worth real money. There is no reason to trade items between players of different games any more than I have a reason to add playable bored ape characters to my next game jam game and limit them to NFT holders - which is to say the reasons are hype and novelty, because I can, and maybe it would be fun to implement. It definitely wouldn’t be fun to play.
Theoretically, you could even have trading card games where individual cards are stored on the block chain, and you could trade them outside the game. Again, the block chain does not really enable anything truly new, it would just be the data storage for card ownership. It would probably make people who buy card NFTs as investments mad if they were nerfed or superseded by stronger cards. You could also just make a game where everybody has all the cards, and building a deck is the main focus, or you could make a draft mode, or you could design your game so playing your cards right within a match is more important than deck building, or you could allow mods and custom cards. Collectible card games already have monetisation strategies that exert negative influence on game design, NFTs or not.
Tradeable items sold for real money with the game developer’s blessing have already existed in the Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House (RMAH), and continue to exist in Eve Online. Why did Diablo 3 fail where Eve succeeded? I think it’s because Diablo 3 had an un-fun game design, with too much emphasis on grinding and not enough on game play, whereas Eve has varied and interesting gameplay. Interestingly, blizzard later re-designed Diablo 3 and took out the RMAH, and only then could they re-design the game, re-balance drop rates, and create a sensible in-game economy. Backing tradeable items with NFTs would introduce the same problems the RMAH had, but
Of course, the negative environmental externalities of a blockchain are much worse, and transactions may take a long time to finalise. But that would be giving the NFT hype too much credit. Most “adding NFTs to games” schemes do not use the blockchain all that much. It’s just hype. It would be inefficient if every rare item dropped in a hack-and-slash game was committed to an eternal public ledger, and since this is all hype, AAA games that want to have “NFTs“ as just another bullet point next to “crafting”, “progression mechanics”, and “open word” would probably just mint five hundred custom texture packs and auction them off, instead of tying their core game loop to the Ethereum blockchain.
Most of the problems of “NFT“ games are already present in non-blockchain games. Most of the cool applications of blockchain tech in games were already possible, and nobody built them.
None of the above is new. There is a new type of game, like Axie Infinity, which I will call financialised games. Those present themselves as an investment opportunity, a new line of work, or a financial instrument. They are trying to create their own version of the World of Warcraft gold farming industry or the Eve Online space ship market out of whole cloth. They are trying to establish their in-game currency as an investment.
The driving idea behind financialised NFT games like Axie Infinity is not just storing your Mii or your Blue Eyes White Dragon on the block chain. It’s creating a new fungible (yes, fungible), sellable token that is “backed” by wasted time in the same way bitcoin is “backed“ by wasted electricity. Instead of the price of electricity, this token can be mined for the minimum wage.
I don’t think I have to explain to game designers why it doesn’t work like this, but in case you work in finance are the kind of guy who gives other people unsolicited stock advice at cocktail parties, here is the problem: Gold farming in World of Warcraft was profitable because the game was a slow grind, and Blizzard got paid by the month, and they made it so you couldn’t just grind the game in one sitting, so people who wanted to do high-level raids with their friends had to commit a lot of time every week to keep up, or they paid people to farm gold and level their characters. The value of gold in-game was so high because there was cool content behind the grind, and there were people in there who played the game for fun.
The same goes for Eve Online. It has a large player base of dedicated players who play it for fun, and to socialise with other Eve players. They hang out on forums and in chat rooms to strategise.
Play-to-earn games on the other hand are not marketed as places to hang out with your friends or rich worlds full of cool stuff to discover, with weeks worth of story content. They are marketed as opportunities to earn money. Nobody even pretends that they are fun to play for more than a couple of hours. If they were, they could charge money up-front, like regular games. Instead they pay players who otherwise couldn’t be bothered to play the game on their free time, because the game is not fun. And the game can’t be fun, or that would drive up the supply of in-game currency. Game design again suffers from monetisation, but in the case of play-to-earn games, it suffers more. That means the value of in-game money cannot be driven by people who want to get ahead in the game for fun, only by people who see it as an investment opportunity.
And then what? Who will you sell your in-game currency to? Other people who hate playing it?
Play-To-Earn game currencies are a bad investment opportunity because they do not have good fundamentals. They don’t have fundamentals at all.
