Keep NFT out of FF14

[Haruka_R]

But why would somebody pay 1K for a silly digital picture?
I can understand people paying quite a lot for a real picture drawn or painted on canvas by a famous person but to be paying the same for just something digital?

Bragging rights I guess. Just to say that they have it.

[ashmoden]

I feel so strongly about this topic i actually came to the forums for the first time.

i will not support a game that has NTF's in it. They are a scam and companies/people pushing them ought to be ashamed of themselves. it's your game i get that; however, if NTF's are put into the game that will be the very last month you get a single dime of my money.

Just thought you might like to hear from an actual customer and not one of the corporate shills trying to pretend we want this.

[Kakure]

SE has plans for NFT's that much is clear. NFT are just digital containers. They can contain, art, documents, etc. If Sony made every item in the Mogstore an NFT how would your gameplay be negatively impacted? It wouldn't. You would just see someone running around in an outfit like you do today. NFT's stay on the blockchain not SE's severs. They cannot be taken from you once purchased. SE, if they wanted to could enable interactivity with other games using NFT's or allow users to create items for sale with their approval.

All you would see is people running around with different outfits. There is an association amongst gamers that NFT's are somehow inherently bad or greedy. They are simply digital containers. What most people are doing is putting the fear that they will be exploited on NFT's instead of with the company's business practices. An untrustworthy shady company will always be just that. NFT's have nothing to do with it.

I was going to respond to this part of your claim yesterday but then got distracted and logged off. I find this whole "NFTs are just containers" line of argumentation deeply disingenuous or, at best, extraordinarily naive. It is just talking around what's actually happening and the reasons players are actually upset.

Let's be very clear here: This is not motion capture or VR or ray tracing. No one actually believes that Matsuda (or any game dev or game company executive anywhere) learned about blockchain technology and thought "How fantastic! Distributed external ledger technology will let us create awesome new heretofore impossible experiences for gamers!" That's utter nonsense. What actually happened is that they read news stories about people mortgaging their homes to purchase little digital certificates associated with public domain clipart of rocks and dollar signs popped out of their eyes and they started salivating on themselves while thinking "This is what the plebs are spending their money on these days?! How do we get in on this?!"

The corporate embrace of NFTs in the gaming in the space has absolutely nothing with improving the quality of games. Nothing. It is a technology in desperate search of an application because that technology is associated with rampant speculative investment and gaming companies want to figure out how they can exploit it for their own profits. You cannot separate the technology ("simply digital containers") from the association with grotesquely overheated speculative investment and engineered scarcity because that is the entire reason we are having this conversation. That is the only part they care about and that is the part the rest of us find nauseating. When game publishers talk about NFTs, they are not talking about digital container technology. They might use words that describe a kind of digital ledger, but what they are actually talking about is mass sums of money changing hands in an orgy of speculative investing.

NFTs of digital art are stupid and worthless. But NFTs in gaming spaces are even dumber and more wasteful. Having your name on the digital certificate associated with a YouTube video actually gives you something you didn't have before, even if what it gives you (effectively a certificate of ownership saying that you own a certificate of ownership that also has the name of a thing you very much do not own on it) is worthless. But I already own my game character's items to the full extent possible within the confines of the game. No one needs an NFT of their item to trade it or equip it or feel secure that it is actually theirs, just like no one needs an NFT of their car. You have the keys. You have the title and registration. It is parked outside your home. Having an NFT of a physical object you legally own is literally worthless in every conceivable sense. Gamers have gotten by this long without NFTs of their stuff because gaming NFTs add nothing and do nothing -- they have no value whatsoever.

When pressed on the utility of NFTs, what you came up was effectively "they let the company take a cut out of stuff you can do just fine without NFTs and someday maybe they could be used to trade items between games." Not only could you easily just copy items between games without NFTs (which is... actually just flatly better than "taking them" from game to game), but this just does not speak to anything that is even remotely possible anywhere in gaming at any point in the foreseeable future. Aside from inventing a reason to jump on the NFT bandwagon, why would a company even want to let me move my sword from Diablo to FFXIV or vice versa? Would my experience in a new game be better if I could import my ultra-powerful Borderlands gun at level one and one-shot everything through the whole game? In the current gaming ecosystem, real cross-game items (not just moving items between a pair of low-quality companion games built on that particular gimmick) just aren't feasible in any real way and I would argue that almost no one who really thinks about it, least of all the devs who painstakingly balance their games, would find it an especially desirable one in almost any circumstance. If this is the big argument in favor of NFTs in the gaming space, color me unimpressed.

Maybe I'll come around to the idea of gaming NFTs if someday Square uses this technology to let us trade items seamlessly between our FFXXIX, FFXXIII Online, and Kingdom Hearts 6 Final Ultra VR 4.2 characters. Until that time, I will continue to think of gaming NFTs as greedy and inherently bad because what game publishers mean when they talk about NFTs is greedy and inherently bad. You are the only person here talking about value-neutral digital container technology. When the game publishers you are defending talk about NFTs, it is because they see a new way to cash in on the insanity they observe in the digital art space either by introducing artificial item scarcity or finding a new way to justify taking a cut of player-to-player transactions they were previously shut out of or -- and I believe this is probably the primary driver of corporate hype about gaming NFTs -- simply by hoping that whatever noxious combination of speculative greed and mass stupidity that has led to the explosive growth of video/JPEG NFTs manifests here and people who are too dumb or poorly informed to know better go "Ooh! NFT guns! I know someone who bought a car reselling NFTs! I better get in on the ground floor!"

[Elodie_Einsbern]

Maybe I'll come around to the idea of gaming NFTs if someday Square uses this technology to let us trade items seamlessly between our FFXXIX, FFXXIII Online, and Kingdom Hearts 6 Final Ultra VR 4.2 characters. Until that time, I will continue to think of gaming NFTs as greedy and inherently bad because what game publishers mean when they talk about NFTs is greedy and inherently bad. You are the only person here talking about value-neutral digital container technology. When the game publishers you are defending talk about NFTs, it is because they see a new way to cash in on the insanity they observe in the digital art space either by introducing artificial item scarcity or finding a new way to justify taking a cut of player-to-player transactions they were previously shut out of or -- and I believe this is probably the primary driver of corporate hype about gaming NFTs -- simply by hoping that whatever noxious combination of speculative greed and mass stupidity that has led to the explosive growth of video/JPEG NFTs manifests here and people who are too dumb or poorly informed to know better go "Ooh! NFT guns! I know someone who bought a car reselling NFTs! I better get in on the ground floor!"

The thing is, they would never need to attach an NFT to an item to allow us to bring them between games they own. Its complete and total overkill. Thats why I just find it so baffling that people like Mysticp try and say other wise. We know the real reason they want them, they want to profiteer off having it in gaming. Because outside of that, they hold no value in being turned into NFT's. A total waste of time and resources for literally no benefit.

[Listrella]

I don't know what NFTs are and frankly I don't wanna know, all I'm going to do is just continue enjoying the game and ignore anything to do with the NFTs whatever they are.

[Miiu]

Since it is being brought up again.
You won't own shit if you buy the NFT of a game item. If it is an online game once the game server go down you won't have access to the item in question anymore.
If it is a single player game you don't have any more ownership over the item than you already had when you bought the game. As long as no online server is required you can play this game with said item to your hearts content.

Also you won't have any rights over the actual 3d model of the item. It would still be illegal for you to extract the model from the game files and sell it online.

As someone who works in the industry I have a really hard time finding the though of items across games neat or anything new that wasn't already possible before NFTs. We've already games where when you had save data of an older title in the franchise you'd unlock items that referenced those games for decades now.
But just to break it down a bit unless we're staying within the same franchise and same game engine and game type porting of random items between games is not feasible. Because the developers would need to basically account for every possible item to be applicable to their game no matter if it makes sense or not.

Not only from an aesthetic point it wouldn't look great to have ff14 armor pieces in I dunno the newest mario game. Which has a completely different artstyle.
Then you have gameplay differences. Let's port over cod guns to the next animal crossing or Hollow knight game.

I am aware that I am choosing very weird examples here. But that is to make a point on the vast differences of artstyles and gameplay. But sure let's stay within the same franchise. How about items from Mass Effect 1 in the upcoming Mass Effect.
This will use a completely different game engine. Besides the model and texture looking outdated in terms of graphical fidelity you'll have incompatible shaders that would need to be redone. Also the character rigs will be different. So it wouldn't just end with creating a new shader and importing the textures you'd also need to make the item work with the new way for character rigs are being handled. Then we'd also take proportions of characters into account. Not every armor piece accessory fits every other character.

There are so many different problems that would pop up that there is no way this promise of "porting over your bought items to other games" is realistic. And as said before if a developer wants this to be a thing. They can do that with obviously hand picked items that the players might have earned via achievements or bough in their microtransactions store.
None of this needs blockchain technology. If you need proof. Steam Marketplace has been doing something very similar for decades now way before the invention of NFTs.

[Arzalis]

Since it is being brought up again.
You won't own shit if you buy the NFT of a game item. If it is an online game once the game server go down you won't have access to the item in question anymore.

Lot of people don't understand this part.

At the end of the day, it's entirely up to the software to interpret what some NFT actually means and does. If the servers go down, you have a token that says you "own" a thing but no actual thing.

It'd be like having the deed to a house or land that doesn't exist anymore. You have a piece of paper. Congrats.

[Shibi]

i will not support a game that has NTF's in it...snip...Just thought you might like to hear from an actual customer and not one of the corporate shills trying to pretend we want this.

I don't think they are corporate shills, it's more likely they are "Crypto Bros" trying to find more suckers for their ponzi schemes.

[Miiu]

Lot of people don't understand this part.

At the end of the day, it's entirely up to the software to interpret what some NFT actually means and does. If the servers go down, you have a token that says you "own" a thing but no actual thing.

It'd be like having the deed to a house or land that doesn't exist anymore. You have a piece of paper. Congrats.

Correct and then in this case we have all the trademark and copyright laws on top. That is a can of worms I wouldn't wanna have to touch.

[Nitelancer]

Steam doesn't allow NFT games. If they added NFT, that would mean SE would have to remove FFXIV from Steam which they will never do.