What really baffles me is that any time a gaming company talks about incorporating NFTs, the community backlash is universal.
Normally, the answer to "Why do companies do X when people hate X so much?" is "because it's still profitable", but certainly they're not profiting off of NFTs enough to pay the salaries of the team that run the initiative, right?
NFTs offer new paths to addiction mechanisms, related to ownership, trading, and investing (all sorts of logical fallacies and mind traps to fall into). Essentially AAA lootboxes are addictive/"juicy" enough to be illegal on a casino floor, new mechanics to add on to that would be adored by publishers(I'm not exaggerating here).
The end game will look something like a FPS shooter where guns have random stats as an NFT inventory. With a battlepass style mechanic with lootboxes for those guns. Where max stat guns are truly rare. And the max stats a gun can have will slowly rise as the season goes on. Some mechanics to juice it up like requiring killed players to watch the kill cam, that has the gun+stats displayed predominantly. And rigging matchmaking so people suspected of being able to spend more are in unfavorable matches (to encourage buyin upgrades) , and people who have recently spent in favorable matches (to ensure they get extra dopamine hits after a spend).
A feature NFTs can have is the publisher taking a cut of all trades. In this case truly rare max stats mean whales will buy them up at whale like prices. Slowly rising max prices to get those whales to cycle up to a new weapon (selling off their old and getting a new. Meaning more transaction cuts/fees).
It seems every 5 minutes there's a new story of someone who made millions selling ownership of a link to a PNG(Or whatever format they use these days).
It seems like people who like crypto have lots of money.
I kinda hate NFTs... but then again I don't do any investing at all beyond a few bucks in Betterment.
Crypto is so investing centric at the moment I would imagine it attracts lots of rich people, even if everyone else bates it.
Naturally, the only thing holding back the D&D character sheet market is the fact that they're not stored in an immutable ledger with the actual game gated behind provable ownership of the character sheet.
This sounds like Pathfinder Society but somehow lamer. I went to one session of it with a friend and it was so bizarre. There was almost no role playing it just went straight into combat. The parties are just whoever shows up that day to play, it seemed like most people there didn't know each other. So there was no real backstory or cohesion in the groups. In the end after you go through a canned combat encounter you get assigned some loot and exp and call it a day. Your character is tracked in a central database online so you can drop in with other groups in another city and play with the same character.
I get why it would appeal to some people. Some folks have the itch for playing a TTRPG but don't want the commitment of a consistent group. The town I was in had a huge military presence which is the prime demographic for something like that. But to me it felt weird and soulless. They managed to take all of the role playing out of RPGs.
And now someone sees that bad experience and goes "... let's put it on the blockchain." Big oft.
The rulebooks and expansions have just been coming in at a very slow pace, and they still have poor balance that requires the DM to fix everything themselves.
It’s admittedly not something that most players have to think about, but WotC just seems incapable of making good design decisions.
What really baffles me is that any time a gaming company talks about incorporating NFTs, the community backlash is universal.
Normally, the answer to "Why do companies do X when people hate X so much?" is "because it's still profitable", but certainly they're not profiting off of NFTs enough to pay the salaries of the team that run the initiative, right?