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What started with a handful of small fly-by-night startups and obvious scams has grown to encompass a large part of the news so with so many companies and names announcing projects or otherwise integrating NFTs or Blockchain technology into their projects I thought it might be good to have a thread to consolidate news and assorted posting of what seems poised to be the latest trend in Tech and Gaming for the foreseeable future. What is an NFT? From this great Medium piece from the creator of indie game Adios: GB 'Doc' Burford posted:all an NFT is this: a link, a url, on the internet, that points you to your spot on a ledger and the copy of the image that resides there and says “yeah this is the owner.” You can sell the link to someone else. Who are we talking about? Pretty much everyone: Ubisoft, Kickstarter , EA Games, hell even Will Wright and Peter Molyneux just to name a few. I'm not gonna make a long intro I think people are pretty well acquainted at this point so post your funniest rug pulls or hottest buzzword press release.
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Dec 18, 2021 02:29
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It's so maddening because it's a climate-destroying scam and I wish people would stop buying into it.
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Dec 18, 2021 02:35
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It's really exciting to be alive during the birth of such a new, exciting, and transformative technology. This must've been how Europeans felt when they discovered the Americas, or what Buzz Aldrin felt when he stepped foot on the moon.
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Dec 18, 2021 02:41
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[The contents of this post reserved as 1of 3,000 limited edition NFT drops]
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Dec 18, 2021 02:49
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I can't see what NFTs could possibly have to offer that isn't already in place within games. These are the places where digital scarcity can exist, and you can do it without hooking in to unstable and bizarre spaces. Investors love the idea of anything related to THE BLOCKCHAIN because of the potential value cryptocurrencies can balloon to, even though they're of very limited use outside of crime.
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Dec 18, 2021 03:10
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Hub Cat posted:What is an NFT? It's very important to understand that the NFT--the part that you own--is the link, not the thing it points at.
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Dec 18, 2021 03:12
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Just dropping a few news articles here. This one's about STALKER 2, where the developers announced an NFT to become a "metahuman" in the game and then quickly rescinded the announcement due to backlash. https://www.ign.com/articles/stalker-2-nfts-response This one's about Ubisoft's announcement of their Quartz NFT platform. A French trade union has described the Quartz platform as "a useless, costly, ecologically mortifying tech." https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...ying-technology Certainly exciting times to be a gamer! Well, maybe not exciting, but I digress.
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Dec 18, 2021 03:24
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If I'm playing game with NFTs and I see somebody with NFT gear, I will do all that I can to grief that person. I hope that a lot of other people will do the same thing.
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Dec 18, 2021 03:24
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a good summary of why this dumb poo poo is everywhere right nowScruffpuff posted:
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Dec 18, 2021 03:29
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ultrafilter posted:It's very important to understand that the NFT--the part that you own--is the link, not the thing it points at. Yes. The godawful NFT “art” you see sometimes, like Bored Apes and Lazy Lions and the like, is the result of attempting to solve this problem by having a computer generate “art” based on the NFT itself. The computer uses the NFT as a seed to randomly select the features of the image. However, while this strategy does strengthen one’s claim of ownership over thr image by creating an undeniable link between it and the thing they actually own, it does nothing to solve the problem of anyone being able to reproduce the image infinitely without the owner’s permission, or the problem of the owner of the NFT not owning the server hosting the thing the NFT is pointing to and thus having no ability to ensure its continued existence. In short, an NFT can act as proof of ownership of a digital image, but this does not confer any of the benefits of actually owning a real thing. It’s like buying a painting from a museum, but you’re not allowed to remove the painting from display and everyone else is allowed to make as many perfect copies of it as they want. You only have those rights for the receipt. I think. Owning the NFT for an in-game item does not have the reproducibility problem, but it still has the issue that the thing you own is not the item, but a string of characters that says an item hosted on someone else’s server is yours. Once the owner of the server stops making a profit off it, they will shut it down, and then you will own nothing but an NFT pointing to nothing. TL;DR If you see a token, and you try to funge it, and you can’t, that is what an NFT is. Ariong fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 18, 2021 03:36
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I saw this breakdown of why web3 is dumb even aside from all of the (very serious, very real) climate/energy concerns: https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1471672348772233218 Basically, it's a wildly inefficient way to do the things that proponents claim it was made for. crypto specifically is a really obvious scam because it functions roughly like a pyramid scheme, where the people who are in at the start might make money if they convince enough people to join, but inevitably the people who join after a certain (very early) point are gonna be throwing their money down a well or a Well 3.0, as it were edit: also, Opensea, one of the major NFT marketplaces, is actively loving over artists by not allowing them to make copyright claims without revealing their identity to the people who buy NFTs of their work without their consent, because they do not actually care about artists or art, they care about making money off of transactions https://twitter.com/NFTtheft/status/1471640210588852227 DC Murderverse fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 18, 2021 03:36
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Good News: Ubi Quartz has been tepid so far with very little trading, but to be fair hasn't moved beyond giving away garbage. Bad News: The Play to Earn side is pretty grim How Axie Infinity is turning gaming on its head The Verge posted:There are a lot of upfront costs: Rest of World estimates that it currently costs around $1,500 to buy into the game. (I haven’t yet made the leap myself.) In the Philippines, companies are now loaning out Axies to other players in exchange for 30 percent of their earnings. Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 18, 2021 06:34
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https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459207090023669764?s=20 This is news to me. Axie infinity runs on a "private blockchain"? Then what's the point of using a blockchain at all? They could have just made a normal-rear end videogame with a centralized database and it would have worked the same, other than its ability to attract leagues of credulous speculators to buy all its poo poo.
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Dec 18, 2021 07:34
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:Then what's the point of using a blockchain at all? RPATDO_LAMD posted:its ability to attract leagues of credulous speculators to buy all its poo poo.
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Dec 18, 2021 15:49
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Dec 18, 2021 16:13
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:This is news to me. Axie infinity runs on a "private blockchain"? Then what's the point of using a blockchain at all? They could have just made a normal-rear end videogame with a centralized database and it would have worked the same, other than its ability to attract leagues of credulous speculators to buy all its poo poo. Axie infinity uses a sidechain called Ronin and they have their own exchange Katana. Like most Crypto based games they recognized it's too expensive and inefficient to run off of Ethereum so they touch it as little as possible  . It is as you said essentially a regular database but overcomplicated.For the rest well Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 18, 2021 17:28
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All this poo poo is a bastardization of videogames. I wanna go back.
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Dec 18, 2021 18:17
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Wait, what is the use case for crypto in videogames? Is the idea that you can document the purchase of unique items in the game and possibly trade/sell them to others as NFTs? How is that different from hats in TF2 or skins in CS? Where do coins come in?
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Dec 19, 2021 02:36
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The difference is this way the money laundering is built directly into the item economy instead of having to be built alongside it.
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Dec 19, 2021 06:55
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The only difference is that “NFT” is a hot buzzword that gets investors and upper management excited. In terms of what can be done on the gameplay side, there’s no difference from how TF2 hats currently work.
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Dec 19, 2021 07:01
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Why didn't these companies go all in on hats in the last decade if selling imaginary video game objects is the wave of the future? There was a huge market for goobers who wanted to spend thousands of dollars on a render of a knife with a camouflage hilt in the 2010s. This is just a more complicated and fragile way of doing exactly the same thing. What am I missing?
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Dec 19, 2021 10:28
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BrianRx posted:Why didn't these companies go all in on hats in the last decade if selling imaginary video game objects is the wave of the future? There was a huge market for goobers who wanted to spend thousands of dollars on a render of a knife with a camouflage hilt in the 2010s. This is just a more complicated and fragile way of doing exactly the same thing. What am I missing? Because Valve already owner the hats and there was no investor storytime of how people could get in the ground floor with them. There is literally 0 benefit to NFTs for videogames that could not be better handled by a centralized database, or to my amusement with the ubisoft stuff, is handled by a central database but we pretend the NFT does something other than help waste the earths limited resources
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Dec 19, 2021 11:10
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Barudak posted:Because Valve already owner the hats and there was no investor storytime of how people could get in the ground floor with them. I'm pretty sure every game NFT thing is paired with some kind of centralized database, because none of that NFT blockchain magic actually does anything unless it can point at a server with real functionality built into it. Of course, once the company stops seeing profits and pulls the plug on the server, the NFT is now pointing at dead, empty space.
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Dec 19, 2021 11:25
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BrianRx posted:Why didn't these companies go all in on hats in the last decade if selling imaginary video game objects is the wave of the future? There was a huge market for goobers who wanted to spend thousands of dollars on a render of a knife with a camouflage hilt in the 2010s. This is just a more complicated and fragile way of doing exactly the same thing. What am I missing? Have you seen the price of Fortnite or CoD skins? They absolutely have, but now they have a fancy term the marketers can use to swindle people instead of just banking on the novelty of playing as Spider-Man in Fortnite or Bruce Willis in CoD. Ubi’s had plenty too.
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Dec 19, 2021 12:38
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It's insanely loving stupid. On the latest Bombcast Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb mentioned that he'd popped over to the Game Awards preshow festivities to meet developers and journos for the first time in a few years, and apparently the current mood in independent publishing is that investors won't even take calls if the game pitch doesn't have "a crypto hook". Just a bunch of idiots chasing the latest hot fad.
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Dec 19, 2021 13:37
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BrianRx posted:Why didn't these companies go all in on hats in the last decade if selling imaginary video game objects is the wave of the future? There was a huge market for goobers who wanted to spend thousands of dollars on a render of a knife with a camouflage hilt in the 2010s. This is just a more complicated and fragile way of doing exactly the same thing. What am I missing? Serious answer, there wasn't a marketing push. Valve quietly made money and didn't invite anyone else to the party. What's happening now is people trying to draw in capital because otherwise, the music stops, and the bubble collapses Investors and C-levels are seeing how Axie is going and saying "I want some of that!" and there are others right there waiting to take their money. Barudak posted:There is literally 0 benefit to NFTs for videogames that could not be better handled by a centralized database, or to my amusement with the ubisoft stuff, is handled by a central database but we pretend the NFT does something other than help waste the earths limited resources (for people that don't feel like digging RON operates on "Proof of Authority" which is validation by nodes handpicked by Axie's creator Sky Mavis) Edit: Not that actually using the blockchain would be better 
Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 18:38
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I miss grown ups. I don't like that the kids who ate glue in elementary school have control of world-changing amounts of "money".
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Dec 19, 2021 20:54
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Yeah GrownUps was a pretty good film, probably the last great Sandler film
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Dec 19, 2021 22:59
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So apparently Quartz (Ubisofts NFT program) has sold all of 15 things for 400 total dollars total all sales summed up since launching. Which is good because its in line with the other "NFT market is real right?" Outcomes from hollywood trying to get in on it are doing which hopefully helps convince bean counters theres only money in it if you're willing to run a scam.
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Dec 20, 2021 07:47
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Ghost Recon Breakpoint is the only UBISoft game right now to have NFT, but is it even actually any good? The game itself, NFTs are a scam of course. I dont know a single person who plays it and I never heard anything positive about it at release. Did it get better in the two years its been out? For a game that was a commercial flop, I am surprised Ubisoft is rolling out NFT on this title specifically.
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Dec 20, 2021 07:56
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I said come in! posted:For a game that was a commercial flop, I am surprised Ubisoft is rolling out NFT on this title specifically. I dunno, that makes sense: if you've already seen this be a huge amount of backlash for some other folks maybe you don't test it on anything that might actually take damage if it's a disaster.
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Dec 20, 2021 08:31
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To keep them rare or whatever you apparently need 600 hours or something insane in the game to qualify for purchase but again, if they know that about you they don't need the nft
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Dec 20, 2021 08:53
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So what's the consensus on how to pronounce NFTs? "nifties"? "N-feets"?
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Dec 20, 2021 09:56
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Trickyblackjack posted:So what's the consensus on how to pronounce NFTs? "nifties"? "N-feets"? I'm partial to "Scams" myself
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Dec 20, 2021 10:14
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So, looking at NFT's from an intellectual property law perspective, one could argue that NFT's are a way to prove ownership of intellectual property over an artwork. For example, let's say you're a digital artist selling smut commissions online. Under a lot of legal systems, the artist keeps the intellectual property rights (eg they can stop unauthorized third parties from altering the image, profiting off of it, resharing it etC. without their permission) but you can legally "sell" the intellectual property rights (for example, the person commissioning the art piece) so they can use it for whatever they feel like (eg, using it on their company website, for advertising, etc.) One of the issues in litigation is the burden of proof: it's not too problematic in fight between parties A and B themselves (the purchaser can point to the contract by which they bought the IP) but things get messier when, for example, the original artist (or an agent claiming to represent them) tries to get a third party (eg a hosting website) to remove content that was allegedly uploaded without permission. The third party has no real way of knowing who sold their IP to whom. My understanding is that NFT's could be used as a public registry to prove that ownership has been transferred from party A to party B, so that when party B goes to court they can point at an NFT (similar to how you can go to a notary and prove, on the basis of a public registry, that you own a piece of real estate or a security on some assets or whatever) However my understanding is also that, in practice, the NFTs you can buy online are not actually sold alongside the intellectual property rights, so the artist keeps the rights to do as they please with the image? I feel like theoretically NFTs linked to images could be used in an interesting way (increase legal certainty in fringe cases which might be useful like with copyright litigation and proving who is owner of an image) but techbros aren't actually doing that? Deltasquid fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 11:37
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NFTs aren't linked to intellectual property rights in any way. I could sell an NFT of your avatar, or the top 10 images on deviantart right now, or the Mona Lisa. I could even sell 50 NFTs of each of those things. In fact, actual artists are angry about NFTs because random crypto bros are making and selling NFTs of their art without their permission.
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Dec 20, 2021 11:55
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Deltasquid posted:So, looking at NFT's from an intellectual property law perspective, one could argue that NFT's are a way to prove ownership of intellectual property over an artwork.
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Dec 20, 2021 12:05
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Deltasquid posted:So, looking at NFT's from an intellectual property law perspective, one could argue that NFT's are a way to prove ownership of intellectual property over an artwork. I actually worked with some people who were involved in a project adjacent to this topic. Basically they were building a system/framework dealing with semi-automatically exchanging digital data (usually industrial in nature) in a legally meaningful way. E.g. the software of Company A fetches some some customer data from Company B when it needs to, but only under the condition that company A doesn't use it for their own marketing and deletes it after six months, and there's a legally binding record of all of that happening. Long story short, it's an immensely complex system, a multitude of authorization procedures and certificates at every step of the way. To date I don't think anybody actually successfully deployed an instance of this system, simply because it involves so much overhead that it's not really worth it compared to sticking to old-fashioned "manual" contracts. Now, NFTs approach this topic and just... don't do any of that. At all. They only give you a sort-of trustworthy digital ledger of transactions, and even that could be touchy considering the possibility of a 51% attack. The actual tricky part is and has always been actually connecting these journal entries to something. How do you prove that the first person to create an NFT actually has the rights to the thing it describes? How do you properly enumerate those rights that owning an NFT gives you, and make sure they're not being exceeded? NFTs just don't bother. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 12:26
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Ghostlight posted:you've described a sales contract, except now it costs sixteen windfarms because jingle jangle. Replace "sales contract", with X, and you have a general purpose description of the entire block chain ecosystem.
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Dec 20, 2021 12:32
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Ghostlight posted:you've described a sales contract, except now it costs sixteen windfarms because jingle jangle. I mean obviously, but I'm thinknig more along the lines of notarial deeds or registrations of pledges to make them enforceable vis-a-vis third parties. It would probably require some sort of public registry though (or, alternatively, if we wanted to have this, some government would already have created a public registry that doesn't require NFTs to function) but organised privately (I'm not American but I understand American real estate conveyance is not registered with a public notary but by private companies?)
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Dec 20, 2021 12:46
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