Square Enix and Crypto

[Bobby66]

Crypto is cool, it is just a new gold rush, why hate on it so much? Leave my profits alone! I was able to pay back my student loans in 3 years with crypto.

[Kakure]

Crypto is cool, it is just a new gold rush, why hate on it so much? Leave my profits alone! I was able to pay back my student loans in 3 years with crypto.

If you want to invest your money in speculative assets to resell to other speculators (or someone who needs to pay off a ransomware gang or international heroin smugglers), have at it.

NFTs are a laughably ridiculous scam that we do not want in our games. They add no value to games. Period. Game companies clearly see NFTs as the next big way to separate players from their money. SE is not the only company doing this (or talking about doing it), and it is imperative that all gamers everywhere make clear that we will not tolerate it.

It is not exactly clear what FFXIV NFTs would look like, and much of Matsuda's letter was a borderline-meaningless word salad of techbro idiotspeak ("Leveraging cloud technologies is extremely effective... as a catalyst for creating new forms of excitement that expand upon the content development capabilities for which we are known."). Maybe the ownership history of every plot of land could be recorded on the blockchain for no one to ever go look at. Maybe they would layer a "token economy" over the regular gil economy like WoW did. But, you know, with blockchain. For some reason. The point is that there's no good answer to the question. Whatever SE's "blockchain gaming" might look like, it is axiomatically worse than what we have already.

Keep working on the language recognition and AI modeling stuff. That's great. Try out cloud-based gaming. Sure. Whatever. But keep this NFT/blockchain trash away from our games.

[Bobby66]

If you want to invest your money in speculative assets to resell to other speculators (or someone who needs to pay off a ransomware gang or international heroin smugglers), have at it.

NFTs are a laughably ridiculous scam that we do not want in our games. They add no value to games. Period. Game companies clearly see NFTs as the next big way to separate players from their money. SE is not the only company doing this (or talking about doing it), and it is imperative that all gamers everywhere make clear that we will not tolerate it.

It is not exactly clear what FFXIV NFTs would look like, and much of Matsuda's letter was a borderline-meaningless word salad of techbro idiotspeak ("Leveraging cloud technologies is extremely effective... as a catalyst for creating new forms of excitement that expand upon the content development capabilities for which we are known."). Maybe the ownership history of every plot of land could be recorded on the blockchain for no one to ever go look at. Maybe they would layer a "token economy" over the regular gil economy like WoW did. But, you know, with blockchain. For some reason. The point is that there's no good answer to the question. Whatever SE's "blockchain gaming" might look like, it is axiomatically worse than what we have already.

Keep working on the language recognition and AI modeling stuff. That's great. Try out cloud-based gaming. Sure. Whatever. But keep this NFT/blockchain trash away from our games.

Can you really expect a company to leave profits on the table? To me this just seems like a new form of micro transactions we lost that battle and now blockchain/nft are the new battlefield. I for one am interested in seeing what they do, as everyone knows when it comes to investing you only put in what you are comfortable with losing, I am not sure why people call it a scam common sense is all you need to protect yourself. I for one am interested in seeing what they do with it.

[Enla]

Can you really expect a company to leave profits on the table? To me this just seems like a new form of micro transactions we lost that battle and now blockchain/nft are the new battlefield. I for one am interested in seeing what they do, as everyone knows when it comes to investing you only put in what you are comfortable with losing, I am not sure why people call it a scam common sense is all you need to protect yourself. I for one am interested in seeing what they do with it.

Google "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble" for insight on why many people are accurately calling this a scam. NFTs are literally just a repeat of that whole nonsense - except this time you only own a link to an image. At least with Beanie Babies you owned a physical object. Likewise it's pretty clearly just a new generation of money laundering for the rich, to say nothing of it's environmental impact. The second serious regulation is put in place (like the IRS ruling at any Crypto transaction over 10k needs to be reported) the bubble is going to burst and it's not people like SE's CEO who are going to be left holding the bag but the rest of us.

[Risvertasashi]

Google "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble" for insight on why many people are accurately calling this a scam. NFTs are literally just a repeat of that whole nonsense - except this time you only own a link to an image. At least with Beanie Babies you owned a physical object. Likewise it's pretty clearly just a new generation of money laundering for the rich, to say nothing of it's environmental impact. The second serious regulation is put in place (like the IRS ruling at any Crypto transaction over 10k needs to be reported) the bubble is going to burst and it's not people like SE's CEO who are going to be left holding the bag but the rest of us.

My favorite analogy is the "name a star" registries that are meaningless.

But it gets better. Some of the NFT games have already removed the blockchain element. Making them even more alike to those registries. They really are worthless crap exploiting FOMO with artificial scarcity.

[dapperfaffer]

Can you really expect a company to leave profits on the table? To me this just seems like a new form of micro transactions we lost that battle and now blockchain/nft are the new battlefield. I for one am interested in seeing what they do, as everyone knows when it comes to investing you only put in what you are comfortable with losing, I am not sure why people call it a scam common sense is all you need to protect yourself. I for one am interested in seeing what they do with it.

Because its not a new micro transaction. You wouldn't actually purchase anything with NFTs that would be owned by a company like SE, you would be purchasing a license that would grant you access to whatever the NFT is tied to for that value, which would determine the price of the thing you actually want to buy.
An example would be buying something from the mog shop for 15$. That is a hard value item allotment that can only change at the discretion of the mog shop.
What an NFT would do is determine the price of the item based on the value of the NFT. If the NFT isn't worth anything that 15$ item could range from 15$ up to lets say 30$, because the value of the NFT is low. So in order for the price of the NFT to increase you have to invest more by buying more NFTs in order for the price to come down, but that devalues that cost of the NFT so the mog station would then buy back the value of the NFT at a lower cost to increase scarcity and drive the value of the NFT back up, which is what you would do by having to spend the NFT that you bought at a higher price. So you end up paying more to support the NFTs value, while the value of the NFT is controlled by SE, who buy it back for less than what you spent/invested.
So when it comes to video games you have to remember you don't own any of the digital product sitting on your hard drive, and even if you buy hard copies all you did was spend money on whatever packaging it came in. The digital rights management of video games, in this instance FFXIV, is an applied access license that you have to purchase a license to use.

There are already games in the "Metaverse" that use NFTs and a majority of them have a negative return of higher than the initial value invested, and for some its up to 250%. NFTs are just another way for companies to artificially gate the "content" they produce with another paywall and license structure so that you have to give them more money.

[Bobby66]

Because its not a new micro transaction. You wouldn't actually purchase anything with NFTs that would be owned by a company like SE, you would be purchasing a license that would grant you access to whatever the NFT is tied to for that value, which would determine the price of the thing you actually want to buy.
An example would be buying something from the mog shop for 15$. That is a hard value item allotment that can only change at the discretion of the mog shop.
What an NFT would do is determine the price of the item based on the value of the NFT. If the NFT isn't worth anything that 15$ item could range from 15$ up to lets say 30$, because the value of the NFT is low. So in order for the price of the NFT to increase you have to invest more by buying more NFTs in order for the price to come down, but that devalues that cost of the NFT so the mog station would then buy back the value of the NFT at a lower cost to increase scarcity and drive the value of the NFT back up, which is what you would do by having to spend the NFT that you bought at a higher price. So you end up paying more to support the NFTs value, while the value of the NFT is controlled by SE, who buy it back for less than what you spent/invested.
So when it comes to video games you have to remember you don't own any of the digital product sitting on your hard drive, and even if you buy hard copies all you did was spend money on whatever packaging it came in. The digital rights management of video games, in this instance FFXIV, is an applied access license that you have to purchase a license to use.

There are already games in the "Metaverse" that use NFTs and a majority of them have a negative return of higher than the initial value invested, and for some its up to 250%. NFTs are just another way for companies to artificially gate the "content" they produce with another paywall and license structure so that you have to give them more money.

By micro transactions I simply mean another way for a company to get more money from a consumer. That is all NFT's are just a means for a company to get more money from players, it is a personal choice one has to make if they wish to engage in such a practice. NFT's it is just another means produce profits for a company so where exactly is the problem with that? If it nets profits why fault a company for following a trend that produces money for next to nothing? In the end the value is based around what someone is willing to pay for it. SE is smart to leverage their IP into the NFT market space, many people will buy into not understanding what they are doing and that is not the fault of SE, but the person that is doing something they know nothing about.

Google "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble" for insight on why many people are accurately calling this a scam. NFTs are literally just a repeat of that whole nonsense - except this time you only own a link to an image. At least with Beanie Babies you owned a physical object. Likewise it's pretty clearly just a new generation of money laundering for the rich, to say nothing of it's environmental impact. The second serious regulation is put in place (like the IRS ruling at any Crypto transaction over 10k needs to be reported) the bubble is going to burst and it's not people like SE's CEO who are going to be left holding the bag but the rest of us.

Sure it used for money laundering, but NFT's has been profitable for many as has crypto. That is the case with any bubble if you do not cash out at the right time you are left with your d##k out. Sure for many it is fueled by a general FOMO by many on lookers, but crypto and NFT's are not meant to ones sole investment, nor should one get into NFT's for the sake of collecting, you should treat it more like day trading those holding are the suckers and will be left hanging in the wind and that is on them.

In short calling it a scam or getting upset with SE to play on the ignorance of their fan base is laughable. They are not our friends, we are just $ to them that is all.

[Kakure]

Can you really expect a company to leave profits on the table? To me this just seems like a new form of micro transactions we lost that battle and now blockchain/nft are the new battlefield. I for one am interested in seeing what they do, as everyone knows when it comes to investing you only put in what you are comfortable with losing, I am not sure why people call it a scam common sense is all you need to protect yourself. I for one am interested in seeing what they do with it.

NFTs are a scam because they have no value. Literally none.

Let's say you go out and kill the evil Troll King ten times a day for two years to acquire the vanishingly rare Sword of Fiery Awesomeness +4. Once it finally drops, you have the rarest and most powerful sword in the game. Congratulations! So what good does that do you? Well, you can use it to kill more things faster and get more loot. You can wear it around town and show it off. You can sell it to someone else for in-game money/items or maybe for real-world money.

Now let's imagine that your Sword of Fiery Awesomeness +4 is an NFT. In what way is it better? Is it more prestigious? Can you do more stuff with it? Can you take it into a different game and use it there? Do you have some kind of legal right that exempts your new sword from all the EULA boilerplate about everything in the game belonging to AwfulGameCorp and you having no legal recourse if they ban you, lose your stuff, or shut down the game?

The fact that your sword is now an NFT is of exactly zero real value. It adds nothing at all. And that's because none of this is driven by a desire to make games better. It is driven by the desire to cash in on the latest tech buzzword-y bandwagon by shoehorning some irrelevant technology into their games.

You say you are interested to see what they might do with NFTs or blockchain. What might that be? I challenge you to come up with a single way that they might improve this game via blockchain or NFTs. Anything at all. What could they conceivably do to make the game better through NFTs or blockchain technology that they could not otherwise do?

I am not going to give my money over to a phone scammer or televangelist, but that doesn't mean I think they should be given free rein to scam others without recourse. That is doubly true if their scams have direct consequences for me and the things I enjoy (I don't know about you, but I'm not super thrilled to hear the president of a game company talk about their efforts to attract the vast untapped pool of potential players who are not incentivized to play games built for "people who 'play to have fun.'")

I am not going to cancel my sub because the president of SE released a letter gushing about the potential of NFT gaming, but I am going to make clear that I think it's disgusting and I hope that the collective blowback from outraged players is enough to get them to rethink this stupidity.

[Bobby66]

NFTs are a scam because they have no value. Literally none.

Let's say you go out and kill the evil Troll King ten times a day for two years to acquire the vanishingly rare Sword of Fiery Awesomeness +4. Once it finally drops, you have the rarest and most powerful sword in the game. Congratulations! So what good does that do you? Well, you can use it to kill more things faster and get more loot. You can wear it around town and show it off. You can sell it to someone else for in-game money/items or maybe for real-world money.

Now let's imagine that your Sword of Fiery Awesomeness +4 is an NFT. In what way is it better? Is it more prestigious? Can you do more stuff with it? Can you take it into a different game and use it there? Do you have some kind of legal right that exempts your new sword from all the EULA boilerplate about everything in the game belonging to AwfulGameCorp and you having no legal recourse if they ban you, lose your stuff, or shut down the game?

The fact that your sword is now an NFT is of exactly zero real value. It adds nothing at all. And that's because none of this is driven by a desire to make games better. It is driven by the desire to cash in on the latest tech buzzword-y bandwagon by shoehorning some irrelevant technology into their games.

You say you are interested to see what they might do with NFTs or blockchain. What might that be? I challenge you to come up with a single way that they might improve this game via blockchain or NFTs. Anything at all. What could they conceivably do to make the game better through NFTs or blockchain technology that they could not otherwise do?

I am not going to give my money over to a phone scammer or televangelist, but that doesn't mean I think they should be given free rein to scam others without recourse. That is doubly true if their scams have direct consequences for me and the things I enjoy (I don't know about you, but I'm not super thrilled to hear the president of a game company talk about their efforts to attract the vast untapped pool of potential players who are not incentivized to play games built for "people who 'play to have fun.'")

I am not going to cancel my sub because the president of SE released a letter gushing about the potential of NFT gaming, but I am going to make clear that I think it's disgusting and I hope that the collective blowback from outraged players is enough to get them to rethink this stupidity.

Value is based around what people are willing to pay for it. I have made a decent chunk of change selling NFT's people will pay if they feel it has value.

I just do not think it is my place to question what one feels has value or not.

[ovIm]

Value is based around what people are willing to pay for it. I have made a decent chunk of change selling NFT's people will pay if they feel it has value.

Yes, but as Kakure challenged you to, can you provide any example how NFT technology would actually improve this game? "Making real Money" and turning a game we play to relax into some sort of job with financial incentives is not exactly a good use case that makes the game aspect of this game better.