Why Do Gamers Hate NFTs?
The Gamer Camp: “We Hate NFTs”
This verge article says that there are two fandoms, the gamers and the music listeners. There has been a lot of backlash for gaming companies to do the same thing that Long Island Iced Tea did, by pivoting to blockchain. However this time, it is with the NFT integration, and the gamers are not happy with it. Oftentimes the game developers will retract the NFT integration and apologize.
Fans have been outraged, and have turned good ideas into dust, as if nobody wants to play the NFT version of the game, they won’t make any sales of the game. It has happened to Worms, Valorant, VoiceVerse and many other games have announced it and then retracted the statement after outraged fans. The fans are upset that they shelled out over $60 on a game to then do microtransactions and purchase expensive in-game items so they can play the game. Gamers are worried that the money will be the main motivator, not skill set or time played in-game to unlock something.
Take this scenario, Gamer A and Gamer B, Gamer A has played a game for 500+ hours and has unlocked the final unlockable character. Gamer B has played the game for 5 hours and decides to buy the final unlockable character that is an NFT, but its market price is 50 ETH.
Moral to the scenario is that dedicated gamers don’t want rich ‘noobs’ to beat the game with money and not beat the game by playing it. They have to work hard to beat the game.
NFTs are usually just a receipt pointing to art that is hosted elsewhere, so there is a chance for the receipt to point to nothing (SIMBA is different with the storage on metadata, however).
The issue at hand is putting an NFT into a game does not make it more fun to play, but it makes it more expensive. Along with being too expensive, gamers are concerned about it being bad for the environment, full of scams, and so on.
Has there been any success in traditional gaming companies launching NFTs? The short answer is no. “There is one new technology The Game Awards won’t be chasing, however. ‘We’re not doing any NFT stuff,’ Keighley said.” The top 40–50 gaming companies have been discouraged from announcing any NFT integration, but there may be something up their sleeve. Upon more research, I looked for the Apple of the gaming industry, that pushes the envelope and makes it stick. Just as Apple removed the aux/3.5mm/headphone jack, Ubisoft has incorporated NFTs into one of its games. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, a Ubisoft game, is integrating NFTs by using their program Ubisoft Quartz. Quartz is a four year venture into blockchain technology and the companies own endeavor into the metaverse.
Along with Ubisoft, Grand Theft Auto 6, an upcoming game in the GTA franchise, has announced the integration of NFTs. But fans on reddit are not pleased with the ideas. By the time GTA 6 comes out, which won’t be for a few years, fans believe the NFT fad will be over.
The Music Camp: “We Love NFTs”
Live entertainment has always been a more collectible space as opposed to gaming. Many buy memorabilia when going to a concert or show, maybe in the future a digital item. NFTs are created and sold a lot of the time as an investment. Just like you could buy limited concert merchandise and sell it second hand for profit.
It all started with 50 Cent selling his album for BTC in 2014, but now the concept of purchasing albums as NFTs is more widespread with the startup Royal. The issue is that most of the record labels gobble up the profits and the artists are not paid fairly. So Royal and other counterparts, cut out the middleman (IE the record label) and sell the music directly to the fans/listeners as an NFT.
NFTs are in a weird place right now as most are just an investment and don’t have a practical use case. With the addition of music NFTs, there are more use cases such as a festival pass, digital art, or adding pressure to the record labels.
TL;DR
NFTs are not well liked in the gamer community as they don’t make the game more fun to play, but only more expensive.
NFTs are well liked in the music community as they allow the artist to get a bigger piece of the profit and there are more practical use cases, such as tickets and collectibles.
