Interesting Vice article on crypto/blockchain/NFTs in video games:
Some quotes:
Waypoint has spoken with developers at Electronic Arts, Zynga, Behaviour Interactive, Ubisoft, and others. Each of these companies is either actively using or considering crypto in its games. Across the board, developers Waypoint talked to described internal turmoil and disapproval over what’s seen as dollar signs guiding executive-level decisions that seem to add little to the already wildly popular medium, and if anything, present a threat to how and why games are currently made.
“The business guys love NFTs because they look like a big pile of money for very little work, and that’s exactly how they want to live their life,” said another developer at a major video game publisher who, until recently, was actively courting NFT projects and pitching them internally. “But I’ll tell you on the dev side, nobody wants to fucking do them—aggressively.”
This developer, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, noted the crypto-related pitches coming through had one thing in common: they were one-sided about the benefits of crypto.
“There was no attempt to make a potentially balanced [take],” they continued. “Here’s some potential drawbacks: everybody fucking hates it.”
“What they’re saying is they want to change what a game is,” said one developer. “A game is no longer about having fun. A game is now about making money. The dirty secret of gaming is that a lot of what you’re doing in gaming is just killing time to have fun. And that’s okay, but if you were going to monetize it, the actual monetary value of you playing a video game is like three cents an hour.”