Keep NFT out of FF14

[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!"