Fair criticism, but one that is only relevant in the first place because of freemium. Prior to that business model, there was no such thing as a company continuing to provide regular, ongoing support to a 7 year old game of the non-subscription variety.
I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)
> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Permanent ownership of what? If the game servers shut down or you get banned[1] for some reason your permanent ownership is meaningless. Also how are NFTs different than the existing systems like the Steam marketplace in terms of functionality?
[1] Oh yeah, NFTs require you to have an online account for the game. I would argue my unlocks in SSBM are much more permanent than any game NFT because there's no account for Nintendo to ban that could cause me to lose access to them.
Thanks for the clarification. I haven't followed the NFT hype much but the one game startup founder I know who talks about it had ideas for permanent ownership in some kind of ... hand-waves metaverse.
Personally I view games as art that's closer to food than a painting: ephemeral, may disappear after being consumed.
Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019.
Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention.
> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can see will not work as advertised.
That's only regular if you ignore the 8 years of no updates between patch 1.16.1 in January 2009 to 1.18 in 2017. The same year they released Remastered to sell people. They've since also added cosmetics in skins and voice announcers: https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/family/starcraft-remastered
Similarly Warcraft 3 had a 5 year gap between 1.26b in 2011 and 1.27a in 2016, which was probably about when they started development for Reforged, announced in 2018.
Even ignoring the patches after the gaps, that's still 1998 to 2009 and 2003 to 2011, so both much larger time spans than the parent poster's claim that nobody ever does that.
Starcraft is the exception rather than the rule. If you take a random sample of 20 year old games I'd wager that in the vast majority of samples none of them will have received updates in the last 15 years.
Adding to that list, most valve games (even half life 1 from 1996) still getting updates today, and indie game terraria released in 2011 which got big content updates over a decade.
If we are going to mention Terraria, we should also talk about Minecraft. I purchased it in 2009 and I'm still getting new content on a regular basis today. It's true that they have a subscription offering through Realms at this point, but it's entirely optional.
> there was no such thing as a company continuing to provide regular, ongoing support to a 7 year old game of the non-subscription variety.
Minecraft still gets significant updates.
> I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
I think a lot of these companies have found that it's the opposite—that games make 90% of their revenue in year 1 because nobody continues working on them. If you keep working on it, however, you can continue to get sales, because the more you work on it, the better the game becomes, and so people buy it just to see what everyone else is talking about.
Minecraft also has a marketplace, and a "Realms" subscription, and you can purchase it on different platforms if you want to play like that so there's plenty of ways to keep revenue coming
Wounded pride and a ton of money for a small company like that. They got enough money to comfortably run the company for at least a couple years if not the entire time since launch until now. The wikipedia page sticks it right along-side other highly successful AAA launches around the same time because it was that "successful" despite being an absolute mess of a game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky#Sales
I don't trust AAA studios, or any game studio for that matter, to implement NFTs in a responsible and ethical manner.
Ubisoft has announced NFT integration via their own platform. However, unlike an actual "I can do what I want with this" token, it may as well be a database entry in the company network: https://quartz.ubisoft.com/welcome/
I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.
It doesn't help that most things NFT-related are scams, hype bait, etc.
They can create digital scarcity of in-game items using a centralised server. Any NFT linked to an in-game item will be just as worthless when the servers are eventually shut down. And they don't want players buying and selling items, they want to take a cut every time a player buys something.
You're never going to be taking your Fortnite skins into FIFA or your Gran Turismo cars into Mario Kart. Ain't going to happen for a multitude of reasons.
(And if one publisher/developer does something like that as a gimmick, allow importing items into a specific another game, they could do that with a centralised database too)
> I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.
Agree totally. NFTs for games make quite literally no sense. You are buying an asset or whatever from a central authority (the developer/publisher) that only exists or makes any sense within their game/platform/ecosystem. What value could a token bring there? The only value add I could see is that your ability to buy and sell the asset is now out of the hands of the publisher... except it isn't since they still control access to the asset and can therefor constrain your use of it in any way they see fit.
This is really a problem with most of the NFT related ideas floating around. Once a central authority is involved your token ceases being meaningful and just becomes, like you said, an ID in a database somewhere.
> Fair criticism, but one that is only relevant in the first place because of freemium. Prior to that business model, there was no such thing as a company continuing to provide regular, ongoing support to a 7 year old game of the non-subscription variety.
Plenty of games get regular patches and updates (Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition being one I recently played) and back in the day, games would release paid expansions. No reason that Rocket League couldn't sell a map pack, for example. Sure, its a similar idea as freemium (pay for more content), but at least the expansions used to be sizable packs with lots of content. Old school expansions, as well as expansions like those of The Witcher 3 or the FROM Software games (which are often lauded as better than the base game), that cost about 1/4 the price of the base game for a decent content boost extend the life of the game, provide the developer with continued income and feel a lot less scammy than fremium games do.
I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)