In the first week of the Year of the Tiger, when the capital market turned its attention to Sony and Meta, a group of small and medium-sized game teams and ordinary players in Europe and the United States pointed the spearhead in another direction - NFT. In their view, NFT is undoubtedly a "threat" more closely related to their own interests than "great consolidation" and "great plunge".
After Ubisoft, SE, and Capcom have successively launched NFT-related plans, this important economic form of the metaverse seems to be making great strides on a promising road. However, as this wave of resistance intensified, the dazzling light emitted by the NFT on the outlet seemed to have suddenly dimmed a few points.
A sharp confrontation caused by a project
The story begins with team17, the British developer of the Worms series, announcing an NFT initiative called MetaWorms on Feb. 1. It is a turn-based strategy game first released in 1994 where players control a set of worms and battle other players' worms against different weapons. Due to its humorous style and fun gameplay, the game has been innovating for more than two decades, from 2D to 3D, with more than 20 different derivatives.
However, from the label of "turn-based strategy", you should be able to think that the volume of this game can only be regarded as a "casual mini-game" at best in the context of today's AAA masterpieces. This is theoretically also very suitable for the current NFT game - after all, most NFT games are currently only at the level of web games in terms of gameplay.
However, it is this seemingly reasonable casual game NFT project that has set off a huge anti-NFT wave.
On the day of the official announcement, a game studio called Aggro Crab fired the first shot against NFTs. The studio tweeted a statement strongly opposing Team17's NFT initiative and announcing the suspension of its partnership with the company. The studio argues that NFTs cannot achieve a "friendly (game) environment or (good for the game)", and even uses the "national curse" F*** fiercely.
Surprisingly, the spontaneous statement received 108,000 likes from netizens, and the studio's official fans were even less than 40,000.
Immediately after, two more game companies, Ghost Town and Playtonic, also publicly promised never to set foot in NFTs, also receiving tens of thousands of likes. The former is the developer of the well-known casual game "Hustle Kitchen".
Pressure from players and peers eventually overwhelmed Team17, which quickly "surrendered" on Feb. 2, announcing on Twitter that it was abandoning its NFT program. The announcement received 23,000 likes, but many players still aggressively asked, "Why did you have the idea of NFT planning in the first place?" ”
Even more surprisingly, team 17's lights-speed capitulation did not end this anti-NFT wave. On February 6, itch.io, a foreign independent game platform, publicly stated on Twitter that "NFT is a scam." The blunt "official Tuijun" also said that F*** all companies that support both creators and NFTs.
According to the standards of this official, the Ubisoft, SE, and Capcom mentioned at the beginning may all become the objects of their country's scolding and greetings.
The real economic logic behind NFTs
For the anger of ordinary players, one superficial reason is that NFTs have a relatively close relationship with mining fever, and mining fever is the main reason why these players cannot buy graphics cards. If you analyze it a little more deeply, the matter of "making money with the game" itself is somewhat contrary to the original intention of the game, and the need to "work" in the game for this is even more unacceptable to many players at the psychological level.
But if you want to analyze why small and medium-sized game teams are so hostile to NFTs, GameLook believes that it is necessary to dig deep into the economic logic behind it.
In order to stabilize the global financial order after World War II, the Western world established the Bretton Woods system. Under this system, the dollar is directly linked to gold, and people can use the dollar with peace of mind because they know that they can exchange the dollar for the equivalent gold at any time. However, with the end of this system, the world's currencies have entered the era of credit money, behind which the national credit of various countries is supporting the value of the currency. If a government collapses, the country's currency is naturally worthless.
Blockchain and NFTs do the opposite, in order to avoid this credit crisis risk, a decentralized design is adopted, and all credit verification processes are placed on every terminal accessing the blockchain. This seemingly beautiful mechanism faces a real problem in practice: how to make users accept the creditless endorsement fact brought about by decentralization?
Therefore, the current business operation of various NFT platforms is still inseparable from the goodwill endorsement of large companies. For an ordinary creator or consumer, the NFT platform endorsed by a large company is obviously more "reliable" than the platform that lacks institutional endorsement. Therefore, in the eyes of many small and medium-sized game teams, the enthusiasm of large companies for NFTs is just another level of enclosure. Just as everyone knows that Zuckerberg bet on Meta because the supremacy of Apple and Google in the smartphone era is difficult to shake, and the next generation of computing platform represented by the metacosm is the next opportunity that Meta is really eager to seize.
The current attitude of "vested interests" can more or less support this view. For example, Steam explicitly prohibits NFT and blockchain games from being listed, and Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's Xbox who has just spent a lot of money to win Activision Blizzard, also believes that NFT games are currently "more exploitative than entertaining."
In contrast, most of the game giants who are keen on NFT are companies that do not currently have a platform voice, and the NFT platform is more like a "cornucopia" for them at this stage. itch.io who want F*** companies to say bluntly that these companies "only care about their own profits and the business opportunities that are more important than anything."
EA has received Ubisoft's head iron, but Asian manufacturers have gained a lot
On December 8 last year, Ubisoft launched its own NFT platform Ubisoft Quartz among major manufacturers, where players can purchase NFT items that can be used in Ubisoft's games. For the sake of testing, the platform is tentatively designed to be launched in nine countries, including the United States, Canada, and France, and NFT items can only be used in the PC version of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.
However, this small-scale test has also caused a tidal wave of resistance from players. Its YouTube promotional video received more than 20,000 bad reviews in less than a week, and only more than 1,000 positive reviews. Due to too many bad reviews, Ubisoft even had to hide the promotional video.
In terms of sales, the Ubisoft quartz platform is also dismal, with less than 1% of the total number of NFT items sold within a month of launch. Players have proven with practical actions that this kind of "in-game purchase in disguise" is not welcome.
However, the harsh reality did not deter Ubisoft, and the relevant person in charge of the company still made it clear in a recent interview with the media that the NFT secondary market is good for players, but they are not yet clear.
In contrast, Ubisoft's "colleague" EA on the NFT issue has a vague trend of "defection". On the Feb. 1 earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who had called the NFT "the future of the industry," said that while he still believes "collectability will continue to be an important part of the experience the gaming industry provides players," "it remains to be seen whether it needs to be part of the NFT blockchain."
Interestingly, while European and American manufacturers and players are in full swing, Ubisoft and EA's Asian counterparts seem to have found a good fit between NFTs and games - mobile games.
In June last year, SE announced the launch of the "Asset Million King Arthur" digital collection, an NFT product with the "Million King Arthur" IP as the selling point twice sold out twice. The street fighter digital collection launched by Capcom earlier was also sold out in one day. Japanese players who have always had a strong desire to collect came across the NFT collection, and sure enough, they were not soft.
In late January, GameLook also reported that ByteDance's Mu Hitomi Technology sold out at the speed of light in 2 minutes in overseas markets based on its star MOBA game "Endless Showdown". It seems that compared to hardcore PC games, mobile games that originally contain "paid draw" elements are easier for players to accept NFT elements.
epilogue
If you think of the real world as a game called Earth OL, then every struggling worker is actually a player who makes money in the game. And as mentioned at the beginning of this article, NFTs, as an important economic form in the metaverse, will inevitably become a way to generate income for workers in the virtual world.
Still, to be truly accepted by players and practitioners, NFTs still have a lot of real-world problems to solve. This is not only a problem for European and American manufacturers, but also a common challenge facing all NFT supporters.
It is not difficult to see from the testing of Asian manufacturers in this field that NFTs themselves are not demons. Finding the right entry point and guiding it to gradually standardize and refine, GameLook believes that it is only a matter of time before NFTs are recognized by the market.
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